HOLY FIRE BLOG

• ISSUE: Affairs are two people, each “turned in on oneself” using the other. No love there, but surely a lot of law squeezing between the sheets, right there in bed with them. Just ask the Guv or his Argentine girlfriend. They both were guilty as hell.

• UPDATE: "…moral lapses of Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina will damage the GOP brand in the South. Sanford, who is married with four sons, had been a strong public advocate of ‘family values,’ but he has been making headlines because of his admitted affair with his Argentine mistress, Maria Belen Chapur."

• UPDATE: "South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has cleared his schedule this week to take a personal trip with his wife, three weeks after announcing his extramarital affair with an Argentine woman, his office announced Wednesday."

You have heard of Governor Mark Sanford? He’s back.

For a day or so Michael Jackson’s death grabbed the headlines; then his funeral drowned-out Sanford again. But sequentially, like an unending soap on daytime TV, squeezed between Jackson’s death, his memorial, and debate about where to plant his body, the story of Sanford’s affair with an Argentine mistress has long enough legs to jump from South Carolina where Sanford is governor to California where in Los Angeles Jackson reigns as king in his death as he never did in life. But intermittently, Sanford resurrects: several lead stories in a couple of days, see above, and here.

More than mere tabloid sex keeps the story alive.

Sanford had already admitted to adultery, five liaisons, in fact; he apologized to everyone, but insisted he would stay in office. He cited ancient Israel’s King David as reason for doing so. You know Bathsheba and all that? Of course, David had Bathsheba but one time, not five; but then he did do away with the lady’s husband.

Perhaps Sanford now owning up to several more than just five trysts with his lover is his way of keeping up with David. Then, too, he says he’s crossed the line with other ladies, as well.

But how did David get in the mix? Here emerges the drama turning cheap tabloid trash into a dynamo for the political press. Pundits smell more than a little hypocrisy from a sitting governor whose rise to Republican stardom began with winning a congressional seat way back in 1994. That’s when the ‘family values’ revolution engineered by Newt Gingrich threw the House of Representatives into wide-open, holier-than-thou, back-to-the-family Republican arms. Back then, Freshman Congressman Sanford was as holier as they come.

Now, the odor of two-faced legalism that exempts the politician from rules made for the public wafts through this whole affair like stink from my long-dead-dad’s Limburger cheese. Like a bumbling clown with a fan at a funeral, Sanford’s inept efforts to cool the affair keep the smell of something rotten hidden in the casket floating around the room.

Continue reading "Integrity of the Gospel: Guv’nor, Meet the Glory" »

Posted by paul at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple years back, theologian Scot McKnight in a CT article described the so-called emerging church as "one of the most controversial and misunderstood movements today." Then he cited writers Aaron Gibbs and Ryan Bolger who define emerging churches as "…communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures."

Even taking into account practices they describe as essential to these communities, one finds little variation from what the church—every church—should be. So where does the emerging come in? Why emerge rather than just be? It all sounds rather uppity and judgmental, like, "We’re the ‘should be’ getting away from the dregs we leave behind."

McKnight also observes lightly, "It is said that emerging Christians… drink like Southern Baptists—meaning, to adapt some words from Mark Twain, they are teetotalers when it is judicious…[but] evangelize and theologize like the Reformed—meaning they rarely evangelize, yet theologize all the time."

And this clue may help unravel the enigma that so-called emerging churches are yet today: they are closer to Mark Twain than McKnight imagines. Indeed, beyond fitting Twain‘s quip, like Twain they cannot escape the tug of the birth canal, the tie to what birthed them squalling, bawling, and bloodied into an upside down world. If they are at all the church, they cannot escape being the church. However emerged they may think themselves to be they are not really.

Let me explain.

First, Twain, too, was an emerging believer in his own ‘gospel’ who never quite made it—to the fully emergent side of his faith, I mean. He remained always tied to what he desperately wanted to run away from.

Further, Twain certainly fits McKnight‘s analogies cited above. On the one hand, while not a Baptist, he drank like one: abstaining when judicious just long enough to win the hand of his beloved Olivia ‘Livy’ Langdon. Twain affirms in a letter, "I shall do no act which…Livy might be pained to hear of—I shall seek the society of the good—I shall be a Christian…" He followed this with another note assuring Livy‘s mother he would "never taste wine or spirits upon any occasion whatsoever; I am orderly, and my conduct is above reproach in a worldly sense; and finally, I now claim that I am a Christian."

A Twain scholar sees in these two letters "a type of spiritual progression; the first indicates a desire to become a Christian, the second contains a declaration of faith…considering the yearning for faith…and his lifelong fascination with biblical themes, it seems likely that this struggle for faith was at least partially genuine."

Even so, the same scholar observes, "this flirtation with orthodoxy was short-lived…shortly after the marriage, some of the piety did disappear, and Twain did begin to slip away from whatever doctrinal orthodoxy he may have attained."

Twain wears the emergent Baptist shoes rather nicely.

On the other hand, Twain writes, "I was brought up a Presbyterian…I was sprinkled in infancy…. It affords none of the emoluments of the Regular Church – simply confers honorable rank upon the recipient and the right to be punished as a Presbyterian hereafter…"

Continue reading "Mark Twain‘s Adam: the Proto-Emergent Un-Emerged" »

Posted by paul at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You’ve heard of magic lanterns, and missional communities have been a hot topic for quite awhile. But what does one have to do with the other?

Not much, unless someone makes a deliberate connection.

Or unless Joe and Melissa Johnson of Watching Theology, found on Steve Brown, Etc., reminds us quite unintentionally that they might have quite a bit in common; and in reminding us, offer a graphic lesson in how to do church for the church that really wants to be Jesus’ church—which is, by the way, a missional community.

However, such lessons were not the intent, as far as I can tell, of Watching Theology in their review of Winter Light, a film by the noted Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), who made a career of convinving us God was gone—away on business, as Tom Waits sings. The review was just the first thoughtful piece in an ongoing "Silence of God" series that film, theology, and philosophy buffs should check out. Even so, if you make a ripple in the pond you have to accept disturbing a leaf floating by as a consequence. And if that leaf floats a little sideways anyway…

Well, they made the ripple; this leaf has been disturbed and hopes to disturb you, the reader of this post, in turn. Indeed, I hope to disturb you with the connection between magic lanterns and missional communities.

Ingmar Bergman’s film career began with the former because it may have been missing the latter. And I am willing to bet Bergman is not the first nor the last whose career trajectory, indeed whose life path has been shaped—for good or bad—by what was not there at the beginning.

A vacuum attracts debris indiscriminately. Our mission as the church of Jesus is to be there in the place of the vacuum to deflect the debris, when possible, while always filling space-time with what really makes things go…

Continue reading "Of Magic Lanterns and Missional Communities" »

Posted by paul at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As a kid, having been weaned on a literalist Pentecostal hermeneutic applied to the KJV, I used to marvel at how people could remain unbelievers in spite of how literally, clearly, and tangibly biblical prophecy was being fulfilled before our very eyes.

Nahum, for example—Mom used to insist—prophesied the automobile; and now here were millions of them running around: "The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings" (Nahum 2:4). Mom quoted that verse more than one time turning chariots into Chevrolets, torches into headlights, and lightning into beams of light streaming from them; all to charge up a kid’s commitment to Jesus by reminding me that we were "in the end times."

Moses, too, got into the act. There was his warning against women wearing men’s clothing; and now here they are doing it, Grandma used to lament, scowling at women in slacks or jeans. "God foresaw it would come to this—a sign of the end for sure," she preached, quoting Deuteronomy 22:5 straight from the King James: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God."

She would then declare stoutly that we were so far into the end times that she would still be alive for the Rapture—she was near 70 at the time—and would meet "Daddy" (her pet name for Grandpa who had died years before) in the air along with Jesus, and so we would not have to worry about a funeral for her.

And I knew for sure she was right because even if Leave it to Beaver’s Mrs. Clever wore a dress with heels to cook and clean, I knew our neighbor lady wore Levis not just to cook and clean but out in public watering flowers and going to grocery store, for heaven’s sake!

It happened, however, that even before Grandma died and we had a funeral in spite of end time prophecies, there came the time when I noticed a chink in my literalist armor. It was not what the Bible said but what it was silent about that made the dent. Dad rolled his own smokes and was roundly condemned in the literalist circle where we fellowshipped yet I could find nary a word in Scripture prophesying this scourge of tobacco that had come upon the earth. How could God have overlooked an item of such import to the literalists and yet made these other matters so clear?

Thinking thusly, when someone pointed out later that in the Revelation John prophesied the coming of satellites (Revelation 8:13; 14:6-9), I nodded and with a throat-clearing, "Ahem," excused my self from the conversation.

In fact, by the time Sputnik came along I was marveling at literalist prophecy in a different sort of way...

Continue reading "Of Pirates and Prophecy" »

Posted by paul at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Prophets live loud but not long," someone observed, perhaps remembering what Jesus said about people who "build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous."

"You testify against yourselves," Jesus declared acerbically, "that you are the descendents of those who murdered the prophets" (Mathew 23:29-31).

In a day of popularized religion it is hard to get one’s mind around a prophet, let alone a prophet who was "stoned…sawed in two…[or] put to death by the sword" (Hebrews 11:17). It requires even greater mental morphing to grasp that popularized religion did them in.

We mean by "popularized religion," the true faith of God made market-ready for the masses, replacing a call to conversion with an invitation to be comfortable, conviction with compatibility. We mean the religion, for example, of the biblical King Jeroboam (see 1 Kings 12 and13), sold to the people as the easy way to get to God.

"It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem," Jeroboam suggested skillfully, stroking a natural bent for ease. "So here are your gods," he offered, pioneering seeker-friendly religion by replacing Israel’s Jehovah with gods so much closer, convenient, affirming, and inclusive.

He even authenticated these new gods: "These are the gods who brought you up out of Egypt," he assured everyone, thereby laying the dubious cornerstone for all seeker-friendly religion to come (see 1 Kings 12:28).

The point is, people won’t settle for being snookered, no matter the ease and convenience: genuine makes the sale, as every guy selling Rolex watches and Cartier jewelry out of the back seat of his car knows. Perception is performance—people will buy if you can just convince them it is real; that it actually came from China matters not a wit if they can just feel it is real and that they got it for a song.

Who has time to run down pedigrees anyway? Authenticating the thing should be as easy as getting it, wearing it, and sharing it. And what better way is there to authenticate anything than having a popular, super-star hero say, "Yep! This is the real deal!" "So Jeroboam said so, and a great many people believed him. After all; he was the guy who had listened to the people when Judah’s King Rehoboam would not; he was the guy who took the complaints, wants and wishes of the people to heart when Rehoboam had not; so he was the guy near and dear to everyone’s heart, whom everyone loved: "Hail, fellow, well met!" the people shouted in acclaim, as it were; the idiom translates into "We trust you because you are that swell fellow with the great big smile who never met anyone who wasn’t a friend!"

If we can believe anyone, we can…

Continue reading "Prophets, Popularity, and Politics" »

Posted by paul at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of many childhood memories, the most vivid include memories of family mealtimes. In part, this is because of shear size: “family” included Mom, Dad, two older sisters, a dozen and a half foster kids, and me – twenty-three, to be exact, at its largest. We shrunk after that as new theories in Foster Care required sending some of the guys off to a boy’s ranch, rudely breaking up our resident baseball and football teams.

But even then, as for the mealtimes, intimate dinners they weren’t – they were far more like church potlucks where you have to fill your plate in haste before everything good is gone.

Yet more memorable than the hustle and bustle of the elbows you had to dodge as arms and hands reached from platters, to plates, to mouths, was mother’s homemade bread. It didn’t matter much to me whether the meal was chicken, pot roast, spaghetti or soup – or whether I got my fair share of any of that – as long as I got plenty of Momma’s bread.

To me, her bread was synonymous with wellbeing – give me thick slices of that bread with butter and a bowl of beans and I was in heaven!

Heavenly bread, indeed it was. And for this reason I took that bread very seriously. Bread, you see, was not only a central feature of mealtime, but a central feature of church time; to me bread was heaven, well, seven days a week…

Continue reading "Momma’s Bread" »

Posted by paul at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)