Sunday May 23rd, Happy Pentecost!

Happy Pentecost!

Today we celebrate one of the most important events in the entire Christian calendar.  The feast of Pentecost is just as important as Christmas and Easter.  Every year around Christmas, you see articles ‘dis-proving’ the virgin birth.  Every Easter, someone writes about how the crucifixion was cosmic child abuse and the resurrection is a myth.  Do you know what horrendous thing the unbelievers think about Pentecost?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!  Do you know why?  Because they don’t care.  In fact, if you are visiting today, you only really know what’s going on if you grew up in church.

If Pentecost is as important to the Christian faith as we say, why does our culture not think to even give Pentecost enough credit to try and discredit it?  Because it’s weird, and they don’t understand it.  We can understand the birth of a savior.  We can understand the death of a martyr.  We can understand resurrection as a principle.  For some reason, we cannot understand what it is we celebrate on Pentecost.

Why can’t our culture understand what happens on Pentecost?  For the simple reason that when we think of the term “The Holy Spirit” we tend to think of it in a way that is absolutely alien to that of the world of the First Century Church.

Read Full Post »

Individualism’s Not the Problem, Community’s Not the Solution

An excerpt from one of my favorite magazines

The Communitarian Story
“The communitarian story goes something like this: The Enlightenment brought us radical free agency and contractualism, both of which emerge out of a grandiose vision of the individual as autonomous and supreme, like Lady Liberty perched alone on Liberty Island, exalted. Yet this proud vision has merely yielded the “disengaged self.” (1) In our day, this disengaged self probably lives in the suburbs, surrounds his house with a tall fence, has Gap and Banana Republic charge cards in his wallet, sends an annual check to Green Peace in exchange for a newsletter, and possesses several friends who look just like him ethically and economically. If this stock character of ours is a Christian, we’ll assume those checks find their way instead to the nearby (within thirty miles) megachurch. We’ll note that he’s basically indifferent toward the denizens of downtown slums. And we’ll shake our heads and wring our hands with dismay when every song on his praise-song soundtrack focuses on his own relationship with Jesus and the afterlife…”

The Real Problem? We Hate Authority…
“The problem with the modern self is not merely that it’s “unrelated.” It’s rebellious. Not just disengaged, but defiant. Not just independent, but insubordinate. Where Yahweh, the maker of heaven and earth, described himself to Moses as the self-defining, predicate-less “I am” (ego sum in the Vulgate), the ground of all reality, Descartes’ method effectively shoved Yahweh aside, making his existence (and God’s!) a predicate of his own thinking mind (cogito ergo sum). He established a philosophical method for asserting that we are like God, knowing good from evil. Descartes’ move, like Adam’s, did not merely break a relationship; it broke God’s law or Word. The implications are not merely personal, but judicial. It’s not just a friend who is cast off; it’s a Lord and Judge. The philosophical methods we associate with modernity and postmodernity, in a sense, whisper the same line whispered by the snake in the Garden (Gen. 3:5). What the shift from pre-modernity to modernity signified, really, was that this satanic whisper gained a moral and philosophical credibility in the so-called Christian West (even if it had always been believed and practiced). In other words, the Enlightenment did not bring us radical free agency and contractualism. Genesis 3 did. The Enlightenment legitimized it.”

Read Full Post »