Entertainment and the Church

Entertainment values are very hard to quarantine.  They invade religion.  They are attracting an audience.  They are attracting clients.  How do you attract a client to a church?  You attract people who have been conditioned by decades of entertainment ... by entertaining them.
One of the things that the mega-church movement has been doing to attract its thousands of congregants is to devise the service of worship as entertainment through music, light shows, cappuccino carts and all these things.  The congregants will feel that they are at a rock concert and the religion is thrown in as an extra.
Entertainment is pervasive in every aspect of our lives and it drives our lives.  Entertainment is such a dominant force it tends to marginalize anything that's not entertaining.
The media create expectations for us and how our lives ought to proceed.  We live within those expectations.  And we are the first generation that is able to start to live within its illusions.

- Neal Gabler, author of Life: the Movie.

Exodus & Wilderness

"In the end, it was a lot easier for God to get Israel out of Egypt than it was to get Egypt out of Israel.
The Passover and Exodus was about getting God's people out of Egypt.  The 40 years in the desert was about getting Egypt out of God's people."

- Pastor Alan Burrow

For All Thy Saints in Warfare: An All Saints' Day Hymn

We don't generally pay much attention to All Saints' Day in the contemporary Protestant Church.  But that wasn't always the case.  Here is a great hymn for that occasion from the Glory to God: Presbyterian Hymnal written by Anglican hymn writer Horatio Bolton Nelson in 1864.  It is set to Vaughan Williams' beautiful King's Lynn.


1 For all Thy Saints in warfare,
for all your saints at rest,
Your holy name, O Jesus,
forevermore be blessed!
For those passed on before us,
we sing our praise anew
and, walking in their footsteps,
would live our lives for You.

2 We praise you for the Baptist,
forerunner of the Word,
our true Elijah, making
a highway for the Lord.
The last and greatest prophet,
he saw the dawning ray
of light that grows in splendor
until the perfect day.

3 All praise, O Lord, for Andrew,
the first to welcome You,
whose witness to his brother
named you Messiah true.
May we, with hearts kept open
to You throughout the year
proclaim to friend and neighbor
your advent ever near.

4 For Magdalene we praise you,
steadfast at cross and tomb.
Your “Mary!” in the garden
dispelled her tears and gloom.
Apostle to the apostles,
she ran to spread the word.
Send us to shout the good news
that we have seen the Lord!

5 We pray for saints we know not,
for saints still yet to be,
for grace to bear true witness
and serve You faithfully,
till all the ransomed number
who stand before the throne
ascribe all power and glory
and praise to God alone.

The Scope of Reformational Thinking

"We need to find 21st Century answers to 1st century questions, not 19th century answers to 16th century questions."

N.T. Wright

As we Protestants anticipate Reformation Sunday next week, this is a very helpful caution.  

Please don't think I [or Wright] am discounting Church history or historical theology or the Protestant Reformation.  Most definitely not!  This is simply a pointed exhortation addressing a very specific tendency among tidy-minded Reformed types in the Church today.  This is our temptation.

Why did the Reformers do what they did?  
Because they were like the men of Issachar who understood their times and what Israel should do.  
They went back to Scripture alone and held loosely to historical precedence where they felt the two clashed.  

Today, our temptation is to regard Reformational Confessions as semi-inerrant.
We are in danger of quoting the Reformers instead of following their example; to honor the letter and disregard the spirit of the Reformation.

But rather, we ought always to go and learn what these words mean:  Semper Reformanda.

The Power of Presuppositions

"Education is a series of religious acts partly because the power of assumption is so great. Assumptions are even more powerful than assertions because they bypass a persons critical faculty and thereby create prejudice. Government education assumes God to be irrelevant to the educational process when, in fact, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7). Such false assumptions by the government schools can then be combined with arguments that prove the truth of what is false. These false assumptions are particularly beguiling because they appeal to one of our worst instincts - the desire to be fashionable or at least to avoid being associated with the unfashionable or unpopular." 

- Herbert Schlossberg,  (Idols for Destruction, 1983, p. 210)

The above quotation was found in Randy Booth's chapter "Family and Education" in The Church-Friendly Family, edited by Uri Brito.  In about a dozen pages, Pastor Booth articulates the best content summary of Christian Education that I have ever heard or read in my life.  I cannot recommend it to you highly enough.

So many kindly old ladies ask in exasperation, "How could anyone look at the hummingbird in flight or the sun setting over the ocean, or the elegant double helix of a DNA strand and not recognize God's glory on display?"

Dante's Moral Imagination

"Dante does something very, very interesting and - to the limit of my ability to judge such things - something deeply true and wise in his characterization of the deepest level of Hell.
I have in my day seen three different discotheques named "Dante's Inferno".  To name a discotheque "Dante's Inferno" you are, I presume, counting on the notion of heat; transgressive sexuality; wild, hot stuff.  There is a kind of glamour in evil: "bad boys"  I've heard it said that the world of men is divided into husbands and lovers.  The husbands are dull and good, and the lovers are bad and sexy.  Rock stars for my entire lifetime have been cashing in on this motif.
Dante is having none of it.  For him, evil is not glamorous.  If I may be permitted such an observation, Milton gets into a fair amount of interpretative trouble because his Satan is so glamorous.  No one ever said that Dante's Satan is the real hero of The Comedia.  And there's good reason for that.  We only see him in one canto and he can't talk.  He is however very good at drooling.
This is de-glamorizing evil.  And evil is de-glamorized in another way, because the deepest level of Dante's Hell is not fire.  It's ice; cold, motionless, dark, near-absolute zero, frigidity; nothingness.  There's nothing cool - nothing cool - about Dante's Satan...
[Just as at Babel] what thwarts human presumption is a kind of anti-intellect, anti-intelligibility.  So what stands at the center of Hell is gigantic idiocy; literally gigantic, drooling idiocy.  And the punishment here is cold and ice."

- Dr Timothy Schutt, Dante Scholar  

Jesus, our Eden; Jesus, our Babel

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  

- Philippians 2
                     
Having just finished a week of intensive study from Genesis, I can't help but see that here in this oft-debated kenosis passage, Paul is alluding back to our earliest history as a people - the points where we got it wrong our Lord Jesus got it right.

The sin of Adam wasn't simply stealing the King's food [although it was that], it was a power grab.