Common Grounds Online

Duke Kwon, Summer Spirituality

Duke Kwon is an associate pastor at Grace DC, a PCA church in Washington, DC.
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I wonder if the summertime is when we’re at our most human. Life’s obligations—including work, groceries, diapers, and bills—carry on as usual. But during these longer, warmer days, at least more so than other times of the year, we give ourselves permission to acknowledge, even celebrate, our human limits. We “vacate” our schedules for extended periods of rest and recreation. We travel, allowing colleagues to cover for us or function without us—an event that liberates us from the illusion of indispensability. We dust off our old tennis rackets, seeking to master that elusive backhand. We dust off our imaginations, making and mastering fresh summer reading lists. Awakened from our fluorescent light-induced slumber, we play under the sun as giddy admirers of God’s creation. We are never more like our children—as delighted as they are in a popsicle or the chance to run through the sprinklers. And Jesus had a few glowing things to say about those little ones.

 One of the hardest things to learn is the art of settling into our own skin. We’ve never been good at it. Wasn’t it the prospect of a life without limits and needs—“You shall be like God,” cooed the serpent—that so charmed Adam and Eve? The promise turned out to be a fraud, but the appetite for what it offered rages on. Most of the year we willingly, if tragically, subject ourselves to a mode of life that is superhuman—indeed, grotesquely inhuman—where the need for “rest” is resisted as an emblem of weakness, where leisure is nudged towards life’s margins, where creativity and imagination, two great “birthmarks” of God’s image-bearers, are rubbed out.

 But grace begins to re-humanize us. The God who created us also provides a Better Adam—“You shall be a Man,” pledged the Father with the Son before time began—and refurbishes us in the likeness of the truly human one. This process entails learning to embrace being deeply dependent, body and soul, upon the restorative grace of Jesus. It means understanding that we are creatures designed for leisure, creativity, and rest. Wonderfully self-insufficient. Gloriously human.

 The summer seems to reconnect us with this reality—this identity—like nothing else. We become strangely free to be what we normally resist. To be sure, the ultimate key to this re-humanizing project is God’s Son, not summer. But it does give us a temporary taste of what could be. Must it come to an end with the shortening of the days? What would life be like if we extended this holy seasonal impulse into the winter and beyond? Who knows? We might find ourselves becoming profoundly more human, tennis racket in hand.

Melissa Kurtz, What It Means To Be Human

In the dark recesses of the night, I sometimes lie awake and contemplate questions which turn inside my head.  “What it means to be human” is at the forefront of my most recent pondering.  This question is a hot topic among various disciplines and I have decided to explore this question in my own study of bioethics over the next several years.  I find this particular question probing amidst the backdrop of advancing technology in fields such as science and medicine.  “What can be done with regard to humans?” is quickly being followed by, “What should be done with humans?”  The answers, in short, are myriad. 

As a Christian who is preparing to give a reasoned response to these questions, I am excited about the intellectual aspect of my journey.  I marvel over the fact that loving God includes engaging one’s mind.  But even at this juncture, before the tasks surrounding my studies begin, I understand that the exploration of what it means to be human occurs while living alongside humanity.  No matter how technologically advanced our world may become, I cannot escape the fact that people are at the heart of what it means to be human.  My upcoming intellectual pursuits are important, yet they serve to inform my living among particular individuals.  At the same time, there are certain individuals who will color my approach to the question of what it means to be human.  The two are inextricably linked. 

Nicole Nomou, Legal Ethics: A New Lawyer's Thoughts

Lawyer: Ms. Martinez, you just testified that the bank robber was wearing a Texas 

Rangers hat, didn’t you?

Martinez: Yes.

Lawyer: And you also said that one of the two bank robbers dropped his hat when you

chased him out of the bank, isn’t that right?

Martinez: That’s correct.

Lawyer: Ms. Martinez, the hat left there that day was a Texas Rangers hat, wasn’t it?

Martinez: Yes.

Lawyer: No further questions.

I knew I had won my case the moment Martinez answered “yes” to that final question. Nowhere in the facts before me was there ever a mention that the hat left at the scene was a Texas Rangers ball cap. I didn’t actually care whether it was. I just needed the witness to say it was so. As I prepared the defense case for my client on trial for bank robbery, I strategized about the most misleading and suggestive way I could phrase the questions just so I could get a “yes” out of this witness. And with these three craftily worded questions, I had led this witness into giving me what I wanted. The trial ended with a hung jury and my client was free and clear. Victory.

Lois Westerlund, I Have Been Thinking About Judgment

I have been thinking about judgment, since last Sunday’s sermon on the 8th chapter of Amos.  The pastor is preaching through the book, and it is not pleasant. Amos’s visions of impending judgment are bitter, horrific, appalling.

I don’t enjoy unrelieved doom and gloom. I don’t really want to listen to this. This preaching doesn’t seem balanced, it’s not the way we preach today. And yet, I find myself pondering why so much, so very much, of the canon, talks about judgment!  Whether it’s the curses vs. the blessings described in Deuteronomy, or the grim pictures of starvation, plague, and heaped-up bodies of the prophets, or the apocalyptic terrors of the book of Revelations! God must not only think we need to hear it, but that we need to hear it again and again.  It violates all marriage manuals—God describes himself as the spouse of Israel, but seemingly keeps on, and on, even when it falls on deaf ears.  And, it seems, we must not only read it, we must visualize it, in the disturbing, ghastly, images of the prophets’ poetry.

And, I argue inwardly, God is love.  The major story of the Bible is Love finding a way to get lost, rebellious children back again. Isn’t that what preaching should focus on?  I can't help but wonder, do we really need this? 

I think of the Puritans, and that last Puritan (or first evangelical), Jonathan Edwards.  They seem to never tire of talking about judgment; for them it was front and center.  Yet, at the same time, there is in Edwards such a sweetness—his mark, for many of us, is his insight into what it means to have an embracing affection for Christ, a “going out of the soul”, not just orthodox belief.  The distinguishing mark of the Christian is his affection for his Savior.  This affection shapes his life, spills over in love of others whom His Savior loves.  Is it possible that we cannot grasp the sheer glory of our salvation without knowing the judgment that we are delivered from, in all its devastating, brutal, ugliness? 

Puzzling over this, I think again of the visions in Amos.  It occurs to me that they are organic—the basket of “summer fruit” that Amos sees is, in a case of Hebrew wordplay, also the “end.” God has told them for the last time.  Judgment has arrived.  They will starve, they will die, they will be captured and exiled from the land. The disasters described are indeed the “fruit” of their choices.  When sin has conceived, it brings forth death, says James.  It is an alien thought in today’s pastoral climate—the cartoon doomsayer waving his sign is passé.  We are eager to tell hurting people, plagued with shame and guilt, of God’s unconditional love. And that welcome message is a blessed Biblical truth.

Yet, I wonder whether our sense of failure has more to do with being disappointed with ourselves or our lives than with disappointing God.  At bottom, we have a hard time not believing that we are really pretty good and deserve affirmation, not judgment. We have a problem believing God’s judgment of us is just.  (Oddly, we don’t seem to have the same problem when we judge others.) Part of its justice is, ironically, that we, like Israel, have been deaf when God has spoken. It seems we do need to hear about judgment again, and again, and again. (God evidently thinks so.)  And be shown pictures, to keep it from being abstract.  Pictures disturb  us.  They revolt  us.

Only then, confronted with what judgment looks like, feels like, smells like, we turn with tears of gratitude to Jesus, filled with inexpressible joy that “justified by faith, we have peace with God.”  Yet we do so with the sober realization of the bitter judgments that fell on Another, a volunteer victim.

I’d welcome others’ thoughts on this.

"Compelled to Culturing," Esther L. Meek

Reading postmodern philosophers Jean Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault reminds me that our on-the-street understanding of knowledge effectively eclipses its normative dimension. These philosophers call us back to this biblical insight.

It’s still broadly presumed that facts and values belong to distinct and opposing categories, for example. Students still show up at college already programmed with the default setting that knowledge is passively registered information. People take this default setting to church and Bible studies, too. We think that AFTER we get the information, only then do we apply it. Hear the implicit divorce between theoria and praxis?

Had we been more savvy (to quote my favorite pirate) about knowledge, we might not have thought the postmoderns were obliterating truth when they rightly named its normative dimension. All knowledge is embedded in prescriptive rules that constitute a language game, says Lyotard. (“Knock, knock!” I say; you say…See?) Sentences should be seen as moves in a game; you never should be, or should leave your hearer, or your world, in the same place at the end of the move. Foucault recommends an awareness of good kind of power/knowledge (two sides of a coin) that is like blood traversing the earthy veins of the human world (my analogy).

Linc Ashby, Melchizedek's Moment

He bursts onto the scene, literally out of nowhere.  Then he vanishes – poof – into thin air.  Donald Miller says, “You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic.”  Miller tells a story to illustrate his point.  “I have a friend,” he writes, “who criticizes certain Christian writers for embracing what he calls ‘mysticism’… I asked him if he believed in the Trinity.  He said he did.  I asked him if he believed that the Trinity represented three separate persons who are also one.  He said he did.  I asked him if that would be considered a mystical idea.  He just stood there thinking.” 

When I think about Melchizedek, I just stand here thinking.  Who is this guy? 

Bill Wilder, The view from Old Morocco

It’s beautiful now in Old Morocco. Autumn hasn’t yet reached its peak, but it soon will. Already the slopes visible from my house are a patchwork of reds and yellows. There isn’t much left of those slopes. Once the height of the Himalayas, they’ve been worn down and uplifted and eroded to the big shaggy hills we call mountains around here. They’re still big enough to fill the skyline behind my house, though. Still big enough to fill my eyes and my heart and my imagination.

Gary Peil, Flat Tires and State Troopers

Last week I was driving from Memphis to Nashville on I-40 to attend a pastor’s meeting. I was scheduled to give the morning devotional, and I was running a few minutes late. About an hour and a half into the three hour drive I came across what I thought was a very rough patch of the road. The car started to shake and make a very loud noise. I quickly realized that it was not a problem with the road; it was a problem with my car. I had a flat tire.

Esther L. Meek, God Loves Stuff

Protestant Christianity has taken the brunt of the devastating winds of Western philosophy. Every corner you turn, it seems, there is damage. The difference between

New Orleans

and Protestant Christianity is that in

New Orleans

the damage is noticed. In Protestant Christianity, sometimes it isn’t. Some sincere Christians don’t see, for example, how the street-level fallout of Western thought has so often been inappropriately mixed in to our understanding of Scripture, in a way that castrates Scripture’s claims.[1]

Take, for example, the way a lot of people view stuff. “Stuff” (a most respectable philosophical term!) is what you feel, smell, hear, and your eyes light on. Now think for a minute of most people’s mental associations about the word, “spiritual.” Most people think it means, “immaterial.” That shows that people have a “default” that sets stuff and spirituality in opposition. People sometimes disbelieve that it could be spiritual to delight in stuff, or that God loves stuff. Such people feel that delighting in stuff can only be idolatry, or sub-par discipleship.

True, we know Genesis 1, Psalm 104, Colossians 1, John 1, Luke 24, and Matthew 19:28—familiar passages which proclaim God’s creating and sustaining all things for the sheer delight of it, the Lord’s incarnation and resurrection for the sake of the renewal of all things. But something blocks our gut-level living out of the Christian life from coming into accord with these transforming actualities. What we tend to live out is the maxim that God doesn’t care about stuff and we shouldn’t either. And when we do care about stuff, we just assume we are back-slidden and vain, or downright idolatrous.

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[1] Please do not take me as advocating a rejection of being Western or of being Protestant or of studying philosophy; I am advocating desperately needed biblical reform.

Linc Ashby, Bildad and Reformed Theology

It occurred to me a few days ago as I was reading through the book of Job that Bildad’s response to his suffering friend sounds eerily close to something a person in the reformed tradition, someone like myself, might say - and the reason I use the word “eerily” will become evident soon enough - “dominion and awe belong to God; he establishes order in the heights of heaven.  Can his forces be numbered?  On whom does his light not rise?  How then can a mortal be righteous before God?  How can one born of a woman be pure?  If even the moon is not bright and the stars are not pure in his eyes, how much less a mortal, who is but a maggot - a human being, who is only a worm!” 

Job’s response to this precise and purely pristine promulgation of doctrine is bitingly sarcastic - “How you have helped the powerless!  How you have saved the arm that is feeble!  What advice you have offered to one without wisdom!  And what great insight you have displayed!  Who has helped you utter these words?  And whose spirit spoke from your mouth?”  When I consider what may have been the tone of Job’s voice I imagine Adam Sandler on one of his emotionally rising tirades.  “Bildad, shut the %$*& up!"