Tomorrow’s the last day of classes for the week at uCalgary, so we’ve cancelled all our regular activities, and will instead be holding irregular activities. We’re meeting for lunch at the iconic Peters’ Drive-In on Thursday, followed by urban wanderings as we quest for the perfect dessert. If you’re in, meet us at Peters’ at 12:30 pm (directions here). Let me know if you need a ride and I’ll do my best to hook you up.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, give eyeball.fm a try. You can listen full versions of just about any song, plus you get artist info, lyrics, and anything else you’d ever want to know about, oh, say, Elliot Brood. You can upload your library from iTunes or Last.fm to make it accessible from anywhere you’re connected, and it works as a great springboard to discover new music or build your own station. Best of all it’s free and legal (well, however legal youtube is).
It’s my friend Ryan’s new startup, but I would think it was cool even if he wasn’t my friend, because it’s just that cool. But I wouldn’t if he was my enemy. Then I wouldn’t at all.
Many of the Christian ministries at uCalgary are partnering together with the Free Thinkers to hold a debate next semester along the lines of Is it rational to believe in God? We want to do some creative, engaging, experiential followup, and we have some serious space booked in Mac Hall the week following the event, so here’s the question: what do we do? Send me your most creative followup ideas and I’ll pass them along to the party planners. I’m all for setting up an argument clinic, but so far nobody else is convinced.
I’m an immigrant! I can’t tell you how happy I am that the title of this post is not Greetings from Montana. Thanks to everyone for your prayers and for the emails, IMs, tweets, facebooks, phone calls, and myriad other forms of communication I received. It was really encouraging to know that most of you actually wanted me to make it back in. There are times when I find clear evidence of God’s provision because I’ve made it through despite things being incredibly hard, and there are other times when I find God in things having gone so surprisingly well. Though the whole long process of changing my immigration status has been the former, last night’s border crossing was definitely the latter, and I am grateful for God’s answering our prayers so graciously.
On an expatriotic note, let me say that I find myself in good company. I can’t count the number of immigrants and children of immigrants I’ve known in my years in Canada. This nation may have had more quiet success with multiculturalism than any other nation in the world, and that is certainly something to be proud of. Bringing disparate peoples together into community and harmony is at the very heart of God, and one of my favourite things about living here has certainly been regularly rubbing shoulders with people from all over the world. I’m grateful I get to be one of them.
Hailing from the great State of Colorado (go Avs!), I have lived in Alberta (go Flames!) for many moons: however many moons there are in 5 years and 2 months. I have resided here under various temporary legal statuses, first as a student and then as a worker. All this comes to an end tonight, when I will make a cannonball run to the border to present my final documents along with the permanent resident visa stamped into my passport, and either return to Canada an immigrant, or become an unintentional resident of Montana, which is how I assume they get a large part of their population. Once Regent professor Eugene Peterson tried this years ago, and has been a Montana retiree ever since. If you pray, please do pray for me. If you don’t pray, you should pray, so please do pray for me. This is an important step for my family and I. We trust that the God who brought all of Israel across the Egyptian border can get me back over this one.
If you’re up for a 4:00 pm roadtrip, a stamp in your passport, and the magic that is Coutts fading into Sweetgrass, let me know, ’cause I wouldn’t mind some company on the drive.
There’s a university ministry tie in here, so hang in ’til the end…
Sunday’s u2ube concert was as good as I’d hoped, even from the receiving end of youtube. Lots of cool moments, small sermons, and social justice, but my favourite moment of the evening was when Bono sang Amazing Grace as the intro to Where the Streets Have no Name, increasing the focus of what is already a song of worship and mystery. Cool moment or not, it would be easy to blow it out of proportion simply because it was sung by a superstar before a worldwide audience, and equally easy to dismiss it out of hand as insignificant and ineffectual. How much do the words of a frontman really change things once the concert’s over?
I have long loved U2, mostly for their sound and lyric, but also because they blur so well the boundary between sacred and profane. I always knew I liked what they did, knew that I would take it over anything Hillsong ever put out, knew that it was different somehow than the country singer dropping in a song about Jesus or the Christian rock band offering up Jesus filled parodies of whatever’s the top iTunes download. I just didn’t have a good way to express what it was I liked about their style so much until a couple years ago when I picked up U2 Live from Chicago on the cheap at an HMV sale. At the end of that concert the band sings Yahweh, which is the Hebrew name for God in an etymologically interesting sort of way, and they invite thousands of fans to join them in crying out His name.
Then they sing 40. U2’s rendition of the 40th Psalm, it’s a standard concert closer, with a forward looking, kingdom oriented refrain: how long to sing this song? Again, thousands sing along, waving their glowing cell phones in the air (lighters are so passé), and they keep right on singing the refrain after Bono and The Edge have left the stage. They might even be worshipping.
This brings us back to our initial question: does this matter? Is it good? Let’s assume that most of these people are not followers of Jesus, and many of them barely even know who Yahweh is. Should they be calling out to Him if it’s nothing more than joining in the moment at a rock concert? Again, I liked it, but at the same time, I was bothered by it. Who else can get that many people at a rock concert crying out to Yahweh? But were they treating Him too lightly? It bugged me for days before I figured out what was going on; it’s parable.
The disciples asked Jesus once why He told so many stories, and His answer was not one we might give. It wasn’t to communicate with greater clarity; rather, it was to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah by keeping those who hear and see from understanding and finding salvation. Now, there are enough passages about God’s love for the world, confirmed by the death and resurrection of His Son, that we can be certain that He wanted these people to believe, yet there He went, telling story after story for the express purpose of befuddling. And this is exactly what Bono and the boys from Dublin are doing. That’s why we love it and hate it. It’s parable. To those with ears to hear and eyes to see, as Jesus put it, the stories He told had incredible value and opened their eyes to see God at work in the overlap between heaven and earth. All who were seeking would find, but to those who weren’t, it was just a good story. If you follow Jesus, if Yahweh is the God you serve, if you are watching, waiting, and working for the Kingdom, then these songs are moments of intense worship. If not, then they’re simply good rock songs.
We’ve been spending a lot of time at bsmucalgary this semester finding answers, learning theology, honing our spiritual disciplines, and even preparing to dialogue with people of different faiths. These things are good and beneficial, and I’m glad we’re doing them. But we must remember in the midst of all this that the Son of God Himself did not think that giving people all the answers was going to get the job done, and I’m pretty sure He had a few more of them than we do. We can’t be so naive as to think that merely passing out answers and winning arguments will change lives. People need parable, mystery, enticement, and invitation. They need to be inspired and set free to explore, and sometimes the plain simple answer is the antithesis to people finding God. So how do we tell parables at the U of C? What song do we sing?
Congratulations to my good friends the Reverend Garth and Mrs. Cara Plamping on his ordination! I managed to snap a photo immediately after, while their haloes were still on, and you can see how pleased they both are. It was a great service followed by equally great food (followed by more food). Very cool to see all the support they had from close friends and family, who are undoubtedly the hardest people to convince that you’re ministry material. I’m convinced, and was glad to be there to see their public commitment to Christian ministry, and to join with the rest of the church in affirming their call. Pray for them as they embark on their new role.
U2, live in concert, streamed for free to the world (well, the parts with ubiquitous computers and fast internet connections), this Sunday at 9:30 pm Calgary time. You’ll be as close as the guys in the cheap seats, but you won’t have to pay for parking.
(ht: garth plamping)
The crew from bsmucalgary are all invited to our place tonight, 24 October, for a pumpkin carving party. We’ll have carving utensils, plenty of goodies to eat, hot apple cider, movies to watch when the carving’s over, the finest people, and everything you generally need for a great pumpkin carving party except for pumpkins. That’s right, it’s BYOP. Fortunately, there’s a grocer across the street with tubs of them in front of the store. The fun starts at 7:00 pm. If you need directions or help with a ride, click email me at the top of the page and drop me a line.
I have secretly longed for a great blog about beards: a blog of impeccable aesthetic, that would review manly bristle with all the qualities of literary criticism, all the while maintaining a tongue-in-cheek humour and links to appropriate xkcd comics. If this is a longing you share, then I give you, my bewhiskered friend, the beard revue. If you’re not convinced, read on for a snippet which ought to be enough to get you drooling on your mustache for more.
Meticulously kerned for a justified alignment with pristine balance, Hinrichs has managed to cultivate one of the rarest beards of all: the graphic design beard.
The graphic design beard may not be all that rare, but consider the strengths of Hinrichs’ immaculate plumage. The exacting alignment of each follicle; the length visually adjusted for a smooth contour; a complete understanding and appreciation for beardage to include a hint of character. That character, of course, is the shadowy, grey crevasse on his lower left jaw (about 4:30 on the above picture). This subtle display is not only aesthetically pleasing, it also adds element of humor on an otherwise earnest canvas. From beard·revue | Kit Hinrichs 9.4
You can’t learn more about Jeremiah than this and get a free lunch. Jeremiah was God’s prophet to prepare Israel for the coming exile, and he had some surprising and upsetting things to say about cities, culture, and transformation. It got him fairly well abused. Westside Kings has a unique take on city and culture as well, so this ought to be fun. If you’re around and not in class, swing by.
Turkey butt!
Happy Thanksgiving!
With the help of Pete, Luke, and John, and under the managerial supervision of Crystal, the big blue tent came down Thursday, and is no more. We had pitched our tent on campus to take part in Debt City, joining in our SU’s protest of rising student debt. Jesus had some great things to say about debt and forgiveness, so we held TheThing@ThePlace in there. Swapping our normal fare for strudel, muffins, and cold Pop-Tarts, we roughed it and meditated on the Lord’s prayer; especially the line forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
We had no trouble getting all our crew in there because it was stinkin’ huge! It dwarfed every other tent on the lawn, and held up like a fortress through wind and snow that blew many others over. We weren’t the only people who noticed. John and Pete, who slept in it, were awakened in the middle of the night by two drunk students standing right outside and bellowing with a bit of a slur, That’s a huge tent. It’s sooo big.
It was good to be involved in the life of the campus, and to join with other clubs in promoting something that’s good for students and the rest of Canada. I hope that we’ll be able to join in things like this even more in the months and semesters to come. I’ve heard that it’s a good idea. For now, I’m just glad to have made it through a whole week without any slips of the tongue.
Thanks to Dave for lending us the tent.
In honour of the Thanksgiving long weekend, I’ve updated the banner with an autumnal photo I took just outside of the Olympic Oval, with the classic bike-chained-to-a-tree, so that you know this is a university campus. After days of cold and snow, it may seem too late to post a Fall banner, but this autumnophile hasn’t give up hope for a few more leafy days.
Google Maps now does street view in Canada, making it easier for weirdos to digitally stalk us, government spooks to plan exit routes before a shady rendezvous, and the rest of us to entertain ourselves. While this is probably a foreboding sign of the end of the world as we’ve known it, my only reaction is still, Hey, that’s my house!
It’s the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end for Theology Cafe. That is, the beginning was last week, and we began with eschatology (the end). Last week was a lot of fun, not because of my brilliant teaching, but because we have such a great crew of hard thinkers and budding scholars.
There’s no substitute for being there, so I’m not going to try to cover everything, but here are a few of the major points we covered, listed without any explanations. If you have some questions about the reasons behind these, leave a comment or track me down.
- The Bible tells one congruent story, with the promise being that, because of Jesus, we will ultimately arrive at where we would have arrived if there had been no fall. In the end the world is restored, justice is done, the Holy City comes down from Heaven, and God dwells with His people. We were always meant to move from garden to city.
- Our hope is not that we “go to heaven when we die,” but that we will be resurrected to live again, forever, on a restored earth. The promise of a disembodied heaven is never once in the scriptures, and it does nothing to answer the evil in the world with hope.
- In our thinking, we must maintain both continuity and discontinuity between the present Kingdom and the one that is to come. That is, what we do in His service now is a part of God’s Kingdom, but we wait for it to break into the world in its fullness.
- In their teachings on the end, the scriptures follow a trajectory that moves from prophetic to apocalyptic. As the prophets grew more frustrated with the kings’ inability and/or unwillingness to bring justice, they looked increasingly forward to a day when God would send a Messiah who would finally bring justice and set things right. They began to look for a kingdom to break in from outside, along with a day of judgment followed by resurrection. The apocalyptic writers, just like John’s apocalypse, wrote to reveal what was going on behind the scenes as we wait for that day. Jesus was born into the apocalyptic tradition, and in His death and resurrection, fulfilled the hopes and expectations not only of Israel, but of the human heart.
Homework
Tomorrow we’re sipping tea and exploring the mysteries of Christology. Our homework is the two passages that best describe the essence and nature of the incarnate Christ.
I’m expecting that our conversation will go a bit better than this:
(ht: unsystematic thoughts)
We’re meeting today at 5:00 at the Chaplains Centre in Mac Hall to sojourn together across Calgary on what is now an annual pilgrimage to A Device to Root out Evil, a metal and glass sculpture of an upside down church, stuck into the ground by it’s steeple. We’ll talk about what it means, pray and meditate, and have some random adventures, though maybe not of the giant Lenin variety.
Here’s why I think it’s worth the pilgrimage:
- By turning the church upside down, it becomes active. A right-side-up church might be seen as a fortress: a bastion against the onslaught of the world’s evil. An upside down church is no such thing; rather it becomes a device to root out evil.
- Mission comes with a price. The church that shapes itself first and foremost around mission will pay that price, and often that price is the disintegration of establishment positions of cultural privilege: a consequent clearly illustrated here.
- God has been working His will in the church by turning it on its head ever since Saul of Tarsus persecuted the first Christians out of Jerusalem. This flies in the face of staid and sensible Christianity, and rejects the institutionalism to which it clings. So does Revelation 1-3.
- Have the church’s efforts been futile? Yes and no. If you’re looking for us to usher in the kingdom gradually and progressively via hard work and activism to engender social change, then we’ve not done so well, because the world’s not all that much better. If, however, you see all our hard work, prayers, and sacrifice as a part of the future Kingdom that will one day break in on the world, then we’ve better success to report. The focus is on what it is doing, not what it has built.
- This reminds me of the sort of thing that Jesus would do, reversing expectations, offending the overly religious, and making us see that what God is doing in the world may not be what we expected.
- Let’s face it: it is an original and creative use of the pointiest part of the church building. You’ve got to like that.
To journey without being changed is to be a nomad.
To change without journeying is to be a chameleon.
To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.
our patron, St. Arbucks
We kick off Theology Cafe today at 2:00, which is my fancy way of saying that we’re meeting in front of Tim’s in Mac Hall to discuss matters of a spiritual nature. We’ll be kicking things off university style, by reading the syllabus and letting out early. Well, sort of. After some light banter about what theology is, why it matters, and how to do it, I’ll introduce the six main divisions of systematic theology, which are:
- theology- doctrine of God
- christology- doctrine of Christ
- pneumatology- doctrine of the Holy Spirit
- anthropology- doctrine of humanity
- ecclesiology- doctrine of church
- eschatology- doctrine of last things
Then I want to hear from you: what you think you know and what you want to know (if you can’t make the hangout, comment away).
Your assigned reading (the first day of class!? man, this course is going to be rough), is to read the following passage, and show up next week with some well formulated thoughts on what the Christian hope is, and what God’s telos (purpose) is for the world.
After a week of reconnecting with some of our favourite people, followed by the pleasant insanity of clubs week, TT@TP is back into full swing starting tomorrow. Do you like waffles? Then join us for brunch, connecting, and that odd blend of silly and significant conversation which has become our trademark, 10:00 am, in the Council Chambers in Mac Hall. If you’re waffling about coming, watch this and see whether you aren’t in the mood for brunch.
The ever entertaining Erwin McManus, has started a 4 week series on some of the basics of being and making disciples. What to do with the Bible just hit iTunes, and talks on prayer, following Jesus, and church will follow the next three Sundays. Click on over and give it a listen. Don’t worry, U2 will still be on your iPod when it’s over.
