There’s a lot in Philippians 3:4b – 14 (the text for Sunday) that will not be in the sermon.

That’s actually the way things are every week, truth be told.

This week’s “leftovers” are particularly intriguing, though.

First of all, there is an extended play on words that’s a bit off-color. Paul begins the passage with a comment about ‘putting confidence in the flesh.’ Now, we could theologize about that just fine and explain a lot about the difference between physicality and spirituality…

…except that “flesh” can be a euphemism for “the male member.” Thus, “If anyone has reasons to put confidence in the FLESH, I have more: circumcised on the 8th day…” sounds a lot funnier. It also demonstrates Paul cracking a joke to explain how worthwhile the Philippian church’s maneuvering was.

I could say more, but I’ll leave it at that.

Second of all, Paul uses an inappropriate word. That’s the word in v. 8 that the NIV & NRSV translate “rubbish” and the KJV translates “dung.”

Those translations are very probably too soft. Try “crap” at least, or even more probably “s–t”, to get the force of what he actually says. “But even more than that, I think everything’s a loss compared to knowing Jesus Christ my Lord, for whom I have lost all things, and I think it all worth s–t, so that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my righteousness based on The Law, but based on faith in Christ…”

Given my audience, I’m not going to bring that up either.

Third, there’s the whole economic thing. Everything that is to Paul’s PROFIT he now considers LOSS for the sake of Christ. “gain Christ” could be “PROFIT Christ”. Everything we profit we now must consider loss for the sake of Christ. Making a profit on anything is worthless compared to kinowing Jesus Christ. All our labor is wasted unless it’s labor that helps us profit Christ.

Now, that third one will be in there somehow… but not as directly.

I find these quite funny.

Comments?

What does this have to say about our scriptures?

Scio paucos qui plerumque hunc situm legunt Latinam posse legere; tamen puto mihi necesse esse celebrare linguam ut eam non obliuiscar.

Hic dies uersatus sum in discipulentia cum aut 3 aut 4 comitatibus discipulorum Jesu.

Multa et bona omnes discimus.

Gratias agimus tibi, O Domini Di nostri!

Ministry takes many forms. Every task can be ministry.

Nevertheless, for me to really do what I need to do to lead, ministry is being with people.

It is not sitting in a room all by myself thinking deep thoughts. Granted, I must do that to continue to deepen my connection with God. However, if that’s all I do, we’ve got a problem.

These days I’ve been spending more ministry time out of my office than in it. Some of that time has been outside, running around. That’s been good. Really good.

If I stay in my office all the time just working on the computer, I go nuts.

If I stay in the church building all the time just working by myself, I go equally nuts.

Both of those things really drain me.

But when I’m with people and we’re talking about discipleship and doing things that act that discipleship out… now, those things energize me. I’m tired when I’m done, but energized.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

How often do we make distinctions between “faith in Christ� for redemption and “discipleship� for sanctification? or what we embrace for salvation and what we choose to do as a part of following Christ? As if the two are separable realms. This is hooey, I say.

From McKnight, again.

Amen, Bro!

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I pray thou shalt beget difficult teenagers, O ye breaker of the commandments!

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May you be plagued with gnats, flies and locusts, O thou wayward winebibber!

Let us define racism as an ideology of superiority in which a person, due to a biological or physiological or cultural condition, which are tagged as inherent to the person, is systemically considered inferior, leading both to ideas and policies of exclusion.

Quote from Scot McKnight.

The phrase “ideology of superiority” is key. This just keeps coming up and coming up. Everywhere I turn, it seems, I see this in the scriptures. One of the reasons that the Gospel is “The Good News of the Victory of God” is because Jesus is in the process of dismantling all of our ideologies of superiority. And he will not be done until he has dismantled them all.

Thus we see in the Gospel no possible way to hold on to any – let me say that again – any of our ideologies of superiority. There is no room for any of them at the Table of the Lord. There is no room for any of them as we live as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Therefore, we must question the “Christian-ness” of any organization inasmuch as it supports an ideology of superiority. And that does affect most of us.

Lord have mercy!

If you embrace a kingdom vision of the gospel itself, racism is nothing short of disgusting.

From Scot McKnight

Well… I have to agree. The fact is that we can’t understand the Gospel without the Kingdom. And if, as we have seen, the Gospel is “the Good News of the Victory of God”, then the Kingdom is the only real way to engage the Gospel. And the Kingdom has no room for racism.

The Kingdom is the place where all nations join in real, full life where work is not frustrated but bears fruit rather than thorns and thistles.

And all work is done to the Glory of God.

This reminds me of the sermon this Sunday:

Following Jesus radically in a world of violence, weapons of war, racism, fractured relationships and economic injustice presents a tough challenge. Going against the cultural norms, and not being seduced by the greed, sel�shness, apathy and injustice of the day means that we are in the ‘discipleship resistance movement’ with Jesus.

(John U’Ren)

via Signposts

Mondays are long days.

They begin early and end late after an exhausting previous day.

Monday Nights are Board Meeting Nights.

Everyone knows that I get headaches at meetings. (or if they didn’t they’ll know now)

Mondays are the day of preparation for the rest of the week.

The Whys of Worship #3

As we dig into the deeper meaning of the worship service, the inevitable question arises: “What stuff belongs in a worship service, and what stuff doesn’t?� When we talk about the structure, what information goes in the structure?

The ancient Christians had a saying that “the way you worship reflects what you believe.� In other words, how we worship describes our true beliefs, even if we are not conscious of our beliefs.

If this statement is true (and it has not been challenged), then the content of the worship service is “the things we believe about the God we intend to worship.� We “rehearse� the Great Story of God every week – from beginning to end. The Great Story is the story that begins with God creating the world and ends with God re-creating the world. In between we hear about Adam’s Sin, Israel, King David, the Prophets and, most importantly, Jesus Christ.

Worship, then, tells this Story each week, from beginning to end. One of the ways we celebrate this Story each week is by talking about how we are a part of it – what God has done in our lives and what he is doing in the lives of others around us.

Therefore, when we ask the question as to “what belongs in worship,� we discover that “the Great Story of God and our participation in it� is the basic answer. Thus, if something does not fit in that basic definition, it does not belong in the worship service. We worship a God who has no worthy rivals.

Sermon 25 September 2005
19 Pentecost Proper 21, Year A
Philippians 2:1 – 14

“Completing the Joy”

As children, we would play at being heroes all the time. We would attribute “super-powers� to ourselves. Sticks would become swords, and of course, light sabers. We would pretend to be like the people we’d heard about in stories our parents read to us or that we saw in the movies.

Early on when I was in college, my mother unearthed Darth Vader while planting a bush in the back yard. You see, she placed the bush in the spot where the sandbox was when we were children. We used to play in that sandbox for hours on end – building all sorts of sand structures and telling imaginative stories that involved our Star Wars action figures battling it out to the death.

Oftentimes, we would attribute special “super-powers� to our action figures. These characters would die in extreme ways. Darth Vader, in particular, was the victim of these extreme deaths. At four inches tall, he was bigger than all the other action figures, who couldn’t beat him outright. So he would die by landslide.

There he lay, for nearly 10 years, until exhumed by the gardening project.
(more…)

Similar to the topic of asking the right questions is the topic of “Measuring the Right Data.”

One of the debates I’ve had with a few folks is the fact that I have resisted posting the attendance at First Baptist’s Worship Services.

Over and over again, experience and reasearch have shown that worship attendance is not a very good indicator of congregational health. It is, in fact, a bad indicator of involvement. People can attend a church service and be quite passive and uninvolved. On the other hand, others attend rarely but are integral to the life of the community.

That’s because there’s a big difference between a convocation and a community.

Attendance, Buildings and Cash have been called the ABCs of American Ministry. They also have been PROVEN REPEATEDLY to be absolutely abysmal indicators of the community’s spiritual maturity and development as followers of Jesus Christ. These ABCs are very weak correlations (if they correlate at all, and it seems they don’t) with spiritual maturity, congregational health and true formation in Christlikeness.

Remember John 6:

Jesus tells the vast crowds that unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood they will not have life. Most of them leave. He ends up with just the Twelve. And they tell him they have no buildings or financial resources at their disposal – they have given up everything.

And yet somehow, that all indicated more maturity and faithfulness to Jesus than all the crowds, money and buildings on the planet.

We must measure the right data if we hope to have any true indication of our true health.

And then we must accept the findings.

The discussion that has been occuring here and on Grant’s blog and at the Pub on the issues related to Genesis remind me of one of the things Dr. Sharp used to tell me:

The questions frame the answers.

In other words, the questions create the context for the answers. If you ask a question, you determine the nature of the answer by the question itself.

To give an example:

The question, “Why did God allow that to happen?” assumes (1) that God had something to do with “that” (2) that God participated by permitting something to happen that otherwise would not have happened (3) that we can know the answer to “why” in a way that will be sensible to us.

Thus, it seems that true wisdom knows how to ask the right questions.

That is at the crux of the foregoing discussion.

My “Mega-Paper” from seminary is now online. All 72 pages and 245 footnotes. It lost most of its formatting in the transition, so it’s available both as streight text here and the original PDF here.

The Abstract follows:

The lack of a strong evangelical ecclesiology within evangelical campus ministry has led to significant confusion among evangelical students and competition and miscommunication among different campus ministries. Furthermore, it has led to identity crises for various ministries as to whether they may properly be called “churches� or not.

This paper examines the various ecclesiologies at work among the campus ministries at the University of Illinois as a microcosm for evangelical ecclesiology as a whole. Home to the Urbana Missions Conference, the University of Illinois has long had strong evangelical campus ministries, now having around twenty significant evangelical organizations. It embodies the length and breadth of the evangelical tradition, therefore serving as the ideal example of evangelical ecclesiology in both its current problems and its possible solutions.

To accomplish this task, this paper examines the contemporary ecclesiologies at work in these ministries. Then, it examines historical ecclesiologies ranging from Clement of Rome and the ancient church, through the Reformation, up to the present day. From that point, a dialogue is created between contemporary campus ministry and the historical tradition(s) of the church. Several issues problematic to a strong contemporary ecclesiology emerge from this discussion, and the paper concludes with a proposal for ecclesiological theology and practice for our present day in light of the research and in light of the theologies of the Trinity, Christology and Pneumatology.

This was originally self-published and distributed in January 2004.

Steve Taylor offers these thoughts on the Emerging Church:

In Genesis 2 – “adam” is invited to name creation. The desire to name the emerging church could thus be part of our God-given ability to use language to describe and understand. While “adamâ€? named creation, yet no companion was found. “Adamâ€? remained incomplete. A certain humility is therefore intrinsic to naming. To name is not an act of limitation, but an act of partiality, part of a search for completeness.

We seem reluctant to name the emerging church. Perhaps our naming yet lacks an alphabet. We need some A, B, C’s before we can spell the word. So in a spirit of Genesis 2, and in partiality;

A = artistic, and so the emerging values the creative, the visual, the non-rational as essential to communication and being.
B = blogging, and so the emerging tell stories and learns from the stories of others. We listen, we ask, we grow through the wires of the internet

C = culturally sensitive, atune to the rationalising tendencies of modernity, we speak of a new landscape, a new missionary terrain in which God wants to be enfleshed as the Body of Christ
C= community loving, and so we thirst for deep, honest, emotional, vulnerable relationships with God and each other.
D=DJing, and so we are re:mixing God in a postmodern world, learning to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land
E=experiential, and so we create worship that engages the senses (more…)