Category: Notes Anthology

Front Porches
Jane Jacobs who, in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, argued that it was the mark of healthy urban life to have “eyes on the street.” Porches were crucial half-way places between the insides of the homes and the street, where residents of the homes could watch the street and where people from the street could fraternize with residents. Blocks in which no one sat out on porches to talk to passers-by and to watch what was happening were desolate and often dangerous. Blocks with lots of porch-sitters were friendly. If you were on a porch and saw someone you knew, you could call them up onto the steps or the porch and talk and even offer them a glass of lemonade or sweet tea on a hot day before they went on their way. Porches were the key to a vibrant neighborhood. 
Timothy Keller

“I Will Spit You Out of My Mouth”: The Real Lukewarm Christians

Posted on 4.05.2023

When I was growing up, Revelation 3.15-16 was a frequently used text for hellfire and brimstone sermons:

“I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

This text was used to challenge our spiritual commitment. “Lukewarm” Christians weren’t invested, weren’t 100% bought in. “Lukewarm” Christians weren’t rebels or hostile to God, they weren’t cold, but they were slackers. They skipped church. They didn’t give. Etc. Etc. Consequently, Revelation 3.15-16 would be regularly pulled out to whip these lazy, uncommitted Christians into shape. 

And yet, that’s not what Revelation 3.15-16 is talking about. Whenever this text was preached, no one ever read past Verse 16. Because if you do, the vision of the “lukewarm” Christian becomes clear, and it’s not the vision I grew up hearing about. I was told the issue was a lack of spiritual effort, that I needed to try harder. But according to the text, a lack of effort is not what make a believer “lukewarm”:

“I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see.”

What makes a “lukewarm” Christian isn’t a lack of effort or investment. What makes a “lukewarm” Christians is a lack of humility. The issue isn’t laziness. The issue is a failure to recognize and embrace our need and dependency. The issue is saying “I need nothing.”

What makes you a “hot” Christian, therefore, isn’t more work, strain, and effort. What makes you “hot” is recognizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked. What makes you “hot” is the realization that you need medicine for your eyes and for someone to cover your shame. The Christians who step into this neediness, as broken people in need of grace, are the ones who are truly “on fire” for the Lord. By contrast, those who stand before the Lord declaring “I need nothing,” as prideful and self-righteous, will be the ones he will spit out of his mouth.
Richard Beck

Questions we need to be asking 

How do you convict a person of sin if they strongly believe that morality is socially constructed and that we get to define for ourselves what is right or wrong?
How do you motivate a person to care about the Christian message if they believe that there is no afterlife at all and that the only happiness that can be grasped is material, this-world pleasure and comfort?
How do you speak to someone about salvation if they do not believe in a personal God, but only in a spiritual life force permeating everything?
How do you respond to the listeners who are alarmed that you are not allowing people to express and define themselves and that therefore your message is spiritually abusive and exploitative?
Timothy Keller

Nashville

Scripture would call me to lament. I don’t do it well. Lament seems far too passive, but it doesn’t need to be. Lament recognizes powerlessness, but it also marshalls what few reserves we actually have. The paradox of lament is that only God can repair the savage brokenness of our society. And God has given us his Spirit to be the change we want to see. I am simultaneously powerless and empowered when I declare, “The world is a broken place.”

Scot McKnight

At the Table

At the Table we are bound to the past, the Exodus generation. At the Table we have communion with Jesus in the struggle for faith. At the Table we are escorted into the very presence of God. The book of Revelation ends with that promise. We are seated at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, our tears are washed away by the God who hears our cries, and God makes his home with us.

What “happens” at the Table is a microcosm of the entire Story of God. Those who feast at this Table share with those in the past, share in the present, and share in the future.

We are in God’s Time at the table.

Bobby Valentine

Old graveyards

If you ever tour an old graveyard, one of the things that might surprise you is the number of children who are buried next to their parents. We’ve come a long way in protecting our children. We protect them from disease and unclean water, but we can’t protect them from everything.
(unknown)

Patriotism 

you probably saw the Wall Street Journal/NORC poll that came out this week. It found that the share of Americans who say patriotism is very important to them has dropped to 38 percent from 70 percent since 1998. The share who say religion is very important has dropped to 39 percent from 62 percent. The share who say community involvement is very important has dropped to 27 percent from 47 percent. The share who say having children is very important has dropped to 30 percent from 59 percent.

These trends are partly driven by you, young adults under 30. Only 23 percent of you said that patriotism is very important or that having children is very important.

David Brooks

Church Attendance

During the pandemic, a shift happened among Americans in general and particularly among Americans with evangelical beliefs in reference to attending church, according to the State of Theology study. In early 2020, 58% of Americans said worshiping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church. By 2022, that number jumped to 66%. Among Americans with evangelical beliefs, the percentage increased from 39% in 2020 to 54% in 2022.

Julie Roys Report

Telling the Truth

My belief is that when you’re telling the truth, you’re close to God. If you say to God, “I am exhausted and depressed beyond words, and I don’t like You at all right now, and I recoil from most people who believe in You,” that might be the most honest thing you’ve ever said. If you told me you had said to God, “It is all hopeless, and I don’t have a clue if You exist, but I could use a hand,” it would almost bring tears to my eyes, tears of pride in you, for the courage it takes to get real—really real. It would make me want to sit next to you at the dinner table.  

So prayer is our sometimes real selves trying to communicate with the Real, with Truth, with the Light.

Anne Lamott

It is NOT what it is

I am always trying to find ways to explain how I think and see the world differently than I did years ago. As I sat waiting for an orientation class at to begin, the television was tuned to an educational channel and the program was a GED preparation math class. The teacher was trying to explain math concepts. He explained that a number, for example the number 5, is more than just a 5. You could say that 5 is 5 and that what it is. But in reality 5 is infinitely more than just 5. Five is not only 5 it is 2.5×2 = 15/5 = 37-32 = 6-1 = 7.4389 – 2.4389 = ad infinitum . Yes, they are all 5 but 5 is more than just 5. I can’t explain all the math concepts in the illustration but for me it was a great way to illustrate how my thinking and ultimately my view of the world have changed. My former way of thinking was when I saw 5, it was 5 and that was what it was. Somewhere along the line I realized that not only is 5 … 5, it is 2.5×2 and 15/5 and much more. Things I viewed so narrowly, I now realize have endless possibilities in how they are seen and understood. Creation reflects the infinite nature of the Creator.

Posted in 2008

Infallible text vs infallible interpretation

From my Evangelical Covenant upbringing, I absorbed the belief I still hold: the Holy Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, are the word of God and the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct. “In all we believe, do, and say,” explained the Covenant’s resource paper on the Bible (2008), “we place ourselves under the authority of God’s written word and seek its direction.”

But it’s Scripture that’s our perfect rule, not any person’s, group’s, or institution’s interpretation of Scripture. As the resource paper’s authors immediately added: “Scripture itself is our compass, not formulations about Scripture or about its inspiration.” 

Indeed, they warned that the record of misreadings in Christian history is cause for humility in our own reading of the Bible. It should cause us to pause before we make authoritative statements about a particular interpretation of a passage—especially if it is an interpretation on which Christians authentically disagree. 

Simply put: we sometimes get it wrong. When reading faithfully, we will often find the Bible challenging the way we live rather than affirming it.

 Chris Gehrz

https://chrisgehrz.substack.com/p/the-bible-has-authority

Celebrity 

…celebrity is social power without proximity. It’s the ability to shape hearts and minds from the distance of the stage and screen. In that distance creeps all sorts of temptations: the evade accountability, to avoid difficult conversations with the people who actually know you and are invested in your spiritual and mental health, to create a false persona, to start thinking you can get away with things that others can’t because you’re just that big and important.

Katelyn Beatty

Knowing

When the ego invests itself in its knowing, it is convinced that it has the whole picture. At that point, growth stops. The journey stops. Nothing new is going to happen to us after that point. The term we’re using here, “beginner’s mind,” comes from Buddhism. For Buddhists, it seems to refer to an urgent need to remain open, forever a student. A beginner’s mind always says, “I’m a learner. I’ve got more to learn.” It has to do with humility before reality, and never assuming that I understand. If there are fifty thousand levels of the mystery, maybe I’m at level forty-five. Maybe there’s more that needs to show itself to me. Can you imagine what a different world it would be if we all lived with that kind of humility?

Richard Rohr 

Common Sense

Recently I was asked to help the manager of an apartment complex to revise and update the Rules and Regulations by which both owners and renters must abide. As I was talking with the complex manager about the details, he suggested some additions to which I responded “But aren’t those common sense?” He rightly responded “There no such thing as common sense anymore.” I couldn’t argue with that.

On what do I blame this loss of common sense? I blame American individualism—as strongly promoted by the mass media, social media, popular culture. “To yourself be true.” “Be yourself.” “Don’t fit in; stand out.” Advertising: “You deserve [everything]….” “No limits.”

The problem, as I see it, is that a society cannot survive long without SOME sense of common sense, of right and wrong. Not everything can be legislated nor should it be. A society must be a community to survive. And a community must have some consensus about what constitutes “good” and “bad” behaviors. In America today the one dominating “common sense” consensus is individual freedom, self-realization and fulfillment, being happy on one’s own terms, NOT being a community. We are, I think, the most individualistic society that ever existed. And that is a problem. I can foresee the demise of America as a nation state sometime in the future, not from forces outside our borders but by slow disintegration of any sense of unifying common sense from within. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2023/03/whatever-happened-to-common-sense/

Asbury Revival

Ross Douthat put his finger on the problem of assessing a phenomenon such as Asbury. How do modern people conditioned to live by empirical data use those same skills to evaluate something that defies the five senses? In the study of religion, Douthat wrote, secular academics “emphasize the deep structural forces shaping practice and belief — the effects of industrialization or the scientific revolution, suburbanization or the birth control pill.” In contrast, theologians inclined to believe in spiritual phenomena “emphasize theological debates and evangelization strategies.” Neither intellectual approach, he concluded, can determine whether “the mystical has suddenly arrived.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/what-the-history-of-evangelicalism-tells-us-about-the-asbury-phenomenon

Nostalgia 

Author Marguerite Yourcenar called nostalgia “that melancholy residue of desire.” The melancholia of nostalgia is both an ache and a filter. The yearning for a curated version of the past tends to strain out all of the unpleasant bits. 

While it can be comforting to flip through a highlight reel of the nicest bits of your once upon a time, nostalgia has a shadow side to it. Nostalgia’s melancholia can become a hothouse environment that is a perfect breeding ground for fear and bitterness. Our unfiltered present can never compete with an idealized past. And nostalgia’s rose-colored glasses give us a vision of the future that is unable to see anything the dark certainty that what is to come will steal, kill, and destroy all that was once good. Nostalgia can become noxious.

Psychiatrist Dr. Gordon Livingston called nostalgia an enemy of hope, and I believe that is why nostalgia is a barren imitation of the biblical call to remember. Nostalgia limits my view of my teen years to bell bottoms, blue mascara, and a lot of Led Zeppelin. Remembering gives a necessary context for my life as it intersects with God’s redemptive work in and around me. Nostalgia doesn’t have space for my teen drug and alcohol use, promiscuity, and suicidal ideation, and it shrink-wraps the power of God who rescued me during those dark years into a cheerful little package I can hold in my hand like a souvenir of my bad old good ol’ days. 

Pastor Bruce Hillman wrote, “Nostalgia is often a technique for dealing with grief; it is a mechanism of narration that seeks to re-story the past as a way of dealing with the present. Like a drug, it gives a powerful escape from the responsibilities and struggles of the present moment. But it hinders the development of resilience.” Nostalgia suffocates our growth and stunts our hope. Forgetting the former days isn’t the antidote to noxious nostalgia. 

God never called us to Make Yesterday Great Again. But he does call us to remember. 

Remembering equips us to be fully present in our lives, able to draw on resources of God’s wisdom and strength, and able to make meaning out of our lived experience. 

https://www.fathommag.com/stories/noxious-nostalgia

Looking Back

“[T]here’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the negro race into our theaters, our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.“
Strom Thurmond – Dixiecrat Presidential Convention, Birmingham, 1948

A candidate for the Presidency of the United States said those words in his acceptance speech! Thurmond made this speech when he thought America was great, but a plot was afoot!

Face to Face

The face is not only our primary presentation to the world, and our primary means of relationship, it is also, somehow, that which is most definitively identified with our existence as persons. Developmental psychologists say that the face-to-face gazing of mother and child in the act of nursing is an essential building block in the development of personality and the ability to relate to others.

I cannot see the face of another without looking at them. To see your face, I must reveal my face. That face-to-face encounter is pretty much the deepest and oldest experience we have as human beings (first experienced with our mother in nursing). For the whole of our lives, our faces are the primary points of experience and reaction. We cannot truly know the other without encountering them face-to-face.

Psychologists describe the bonding between mother and child in nursing (and face-to-face) as communion:

Identification begins as a visual process, but quickly becomes an internal imagery process, encompassing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic scenes. It is that universal scene of communion between mother and infant, accomplished through facial gazing in the midst of holding and rocking during breast or bottle feedings, that creates the infant’s sense of oceanic oneness or union. (Psychology of Shame, Kaufman, pg 31)

Fr Stephen Freeman
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2023/03/24/to-see-him-face-to-face/

Remembering

Remembering is a function of a relationship. When we remember Jesus through wine and bread shared together at the table, we are invited to experience it as though we are sitting with him at the final meal he shared with his friends. The Bible doesn’t invite us to recall a set of data points about Jesus when we come to the communion table but to participate with him who is Immanuel, God with us here and now. 
(unknown)

Loving Conversations
My Conversation Matters posts have precipitated some serious opportunity for self-examination.
I have been deeply impressed with the importance of loving conversations and concluded they should be recognized and adopted as a spiritual discipline. That is all good, except for the realization I’m not very good at loving conversations. Reasonably decent at conversation, it’s the loving part that’s a challenge.
That became apparent, earlier this week, as I attempted to have a conversation with Ann . It was very discouraging to fail to employ insights I have been sharing in my posts.
The good news is that experience reinforced my conclusion that loving conversations should be a spiritual discipline.
My failure revealed an absence of — love, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control — all qualities necessary for loving conversation and most importantly, fruits of the Spirit. The practice of loving conversations requires the “Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives“.
Lots to think about.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Politics & Religion
Tony Campolo, always ready to offer a one-liner: “Putting religion and politics together is like mixing ice cream with horse manure. It doesn’t hurt the horse manure; it ruins the ice cream.”  

Church
When the church becomes preoccupied with defending itself to the world, it eventually becomes incoherent. The only way to be a church is to speak the peculiar language of peace, of forgiveness, of repentance and resurrection.
christianitytoday

Piety

Sometimes I observe people so diligently trying to orchestrate whatever state of prayer they’re in that they become peevish about it. They don’t dare to move or let their minds be stirred for fear of jeopardizing the slightest degree of devotion or delight. It makes me realize how little they understand of the path to union. They think the whole thing is about rapture.
But no, friends, no! What the Beloved wants from us is action. What he wants is that if one of your friends is sick, you take care of her. Don’t worry about interrupting your devotional practice. Have compassion. If she is in pain, you feel it, too. If necessary, you fast so that she can eat. This is not a matter of indulging an individual, you do it because you know it is your Beloved’s desire. This is true union with his will. What he wants is for you to be much happier hearing someone else praised than you would be to receive a compliment yourself. If you have humility, this is easy. It is a great thing to be glad when your friends’ virtues are celebrated. 
Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle

Others
What you hate in others is usually what you hate most in yourself. The people who drive you crazy do so because they reflect back at you the worst aspects of yourself that you have either tried to deny or overcome.
Mark Manson

Ambush
I wonder if the only way that conversion, enlightenment, and transformation ever happen is by a kind of divine ambush. We have to be caught off guard. As long as we are in control, we are going to keep trying to steer the ship by our previous experience of being in charge. The only way we will let ourselves be ambushed is by trusting the “Ambusher,” and learning to trust that the darkness of intimacy will lead to depth, safety, freedom, and love.
Richard Rohr

Duty
Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life. As long as we show lines of division between duty and pleasure in the world of the spirit, we will remain far from God and from His joy. 
ThomasMerton

Death rate & Conversation 
In perhaps the most revealing of all the health-related studies, a group of subjects who had contracted malignant melanoma received traditional treatment and then were divided into two groups. One group met weekly for only six weeks; the other did not. Facilitators taught the first group of recovering patients specific communication skills. After meeting only six times and then dispersing for five years, the subjects who learned how to express themselves effectively had a higher survival rate—only 9 percent succumbed as opposed to almost 30 percent in the untrained group.3 Think about the implications of this study. Just a modest improvement in the ability to talk and connect with others corresponded to a two-thirds decrease in the death rate. This study is just one sample of how the way you talk or don’t talk can dramatically affect your health. Mountains of research suggest that the negative feelings we hold in and the emotional pain we suffer as we stumble our way through unhealthy conversations slowly eat away at our health. In some cases, the impact of failed conversations leads to minor problems. In others, it results in disaster. In all cases, failed conversations never make us happier, healthier, or better off.
Crucial Conversations

Community and Intimacy with God
Dietrich Bonhoeffer—in his book on community, Life Together, suggested that sometimes the psychological energy from being with a group of people can displace true trust in God for many. He suggested that we must learn to be alone with God, which is different from loneliness, for us to become whole and to not confuse the energies of friendship and community with intimacy with God.

From fame to honor
The remedy for shame is not becoming famous. It is not even being affirmed. It is being incorporated into a community with new, different, and better standards for honor. It’s a community where weakness is not excluded but valued; where honor-seeking and “boasting” of all kinds are repudiated; where servants are raised up to sit at the table with those they once served; where even the ultimate dishonor of the cross is transformed into glory, the ultimate participation in honor. To use the powerful biblical metaphor, the gospel offers adoption—a new status as “sons,” to use the intentionally gendered, high-status word of Romans 8—to both men and women, now members of the family of the firstborn Son.
Andy Crouch

ABSOLUTE TRUTH

In full disclosure, I believe there is absolute truth. I know some will breath a sigh of relief and a few will wince. 

The subject of absolute truth is a trigger in post-modern culture. The following quote helps frame the issue:

Whatever happened to the truth?! In our world, the idea of ultimate truth — something that is true at all times in all places and has relevance for our lives — is about as extinct as the dinosaur. In fact, nearly three out of four Americans say there is no such thing as ultimate, or absolute, truth. And the numbers don’t look much better among those who claim to follow Jesus.
In a society where ultimate truth is treated like a fairy tale, an outdated idea or even an insult to human intelligence, the motto of the day becomes, “WHATEVER!” Believe whatever you want. Do whatever seems best to you. Live for whatever brings you pleasure, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. And of course, be tolerant. Don’t try to tell anyone that their whatever is wrong.

https://www.focusonthefamily.com/church/absolute-truth/

Ironically, everyone believes in Absolute truth.  
When someone says, “There is no such thing as absolute truth,” that person is actually making a statement that he or she believes to be absolutely true. Contradictory, isn’t it? 
Christianity has come to be defined largely its commitment to culture wars, battling assaults on absolute truth. The opposition’s absolute belief that there is no absolute truth is a Maginot Line. This is a frightening proposition. When one believes they possess absolute truth, any action can be justified to protect truth. Therein lies the basis for concluding that absolute truth is a root cause of division. Logic will not permit any compromise. If A is absolutely true, then B is absolutely false. The conflict has evolved into trench warfare

Mutually assured destruction is not imminent, Christianity has adopted the secular ethos of “whatever”. It’s a lot easier to to declare …”whatever, believe whatever you want”… especially since their ultimate reward is eternal hell. “Whatever” is not a solution, it it is a diversion, it is the political equivalent of “love the sinner, hate the sin”. The truth is, when either side’s absolute truth is threatened they will be a fight to the death. Truth matters and is worth fighting for.

Mutually assured destruction may not be imminent for our society, but it is a present reality for families and churches. On a personal level, absolute truth is nitroglycerin, mishandle it and family, friends, spiritual bonds can be destroyed. 

The challenge for me, a believer in absolute truth, is how to properly handle Absolute Truth. 

STILL ON THE JOURNEY