circular thoughts

Going green...

I recently completed a seminary course at Fuller called Christian Ethics.  My final paper for this course was called The Christian's Care of Creation.  In this paper, I addressed some of the issues Christians often face when it comes to our care for creation.  If you would like to read it, click on the title and you will be taken to the paper in pdf format.

My conclusion can be summed up as follows:

I now understand that my pursuit of God's kingdom and his righteousness and justice must include a pursuit of both the redemption of humans and the reconciliation of the rest of creation.

So that was my conclusion, but how am I fleshing this out?  Well, for starters, we are using the mower you see above.  I have also been riding my bicycle, when it isn't so stinking hot.  I'm praying/thinking about buying a scooter.  We are truly trying to purchase less stuff and when we do go to the store, we don't use a bag to put our stuff in unless we have too much stuff or even take a bag with us.

That's about it so far.  What are some other ways to go green?  What do you do? 

Thoughts on Christendom, by Frost and Hirsch...

We must admit that Christendom, particularly its ecclesiological and its missiological manifestations, amounts to something of a failed experiment.  To reiterate, by the term Christendom, we are referring to a period in history when the church assumed influence by its connection to temporal, secular power.  Its high watermark occurred in the Middle Ages and continued beyond the Reformation well into the 1700s.  Since the emergence of the Enlightenment it has been in decline, disappearing in the latter part of the twentieth century.  It is time to move on and find a new mode of understanding and engagement with surrounding contexts.  We can no longer afford our historical sentimentality, even addiction, to the past.  Christendom is not the biblical mode of the church.  It was/is merely one way in which the church has conceived of itself.  In enshrining it as the sole form of the church, we have made it into an idol that has captivated our imaginations and enslaved us to a historical-cultural expression of the church.  We have not answered the challenges of our time precisely because we refuse to let go of the idol.  This must change!  The answer to the problem of mission in the West requires something far more radical than reworking a dated and untenable model.  It will require that we adopt something that looks far mare like the early church in terms of its conception of the church (ecclesiology) and its core task in the world (missiology).

From The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, page 15.

More from Dr. King...

American Christians, I must say to you what I wrote to the Roman Christians years ago: "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."  You have a duel citizenry.  You live both in time and eternity.  Your highest loyalty is to God, and not to the mores or the folkways, the state or the nation, or any man-made institution.  If any earthly institution or custom conflicts with God's will, it is your Christian duty to oppose it.  You must never allow the transitory, evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.  In a time when men are surrendering the high values of the faith you must cling to them, and despite the pressure of an alien generation preserve them for children yet unborn.  You must be willing to challenge unjust mores, to champion unpopular causes, and to buck the status quo.  You are called to be the salt of the earth.  You are to be the light of the world.  You are to be that vitally active leaven in the lump of the nation.

- from Strength to Love, by Martin Luther King, Jr. (pages 138 & 139)  This sermon was written as an imaginary Pauline epistle to the American church...

A word from Dr. King...

Every true Christian is a citizen of two worlds, the world of time and the world of eternity.  We are, paradoxically, in the world and yet not of the world.  To the Philippian Christians, Paul wrote, "We are a colony of heaven."  They understood what he meant, for their city of Philippi was a Roman colony.  When Rome wished to Romanize a province, she established a small colony of people who lived by Roman law and Roman customs and who, though in another country, held fast to their Roman allegiance.  This powerful, creative minority spread the gospel of Roman culture.  Although the analogy is imperfect - the Roman settlers lived within a framework of injustice and exploitation, that is, colonialism - the Apostle does point to the responsibility of Christians to imbue an unchristian world with the ideals of a higher and more noble order.  Living in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity.  As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed.

- from Strength to Love, by Martin Luther King, Jr. (page 22)

Donkey Heads for Dinner...

I once heard an incredible sermon by my friend John Willis Zumwalt, who is the founder of Heart of God Ministries.  Zumwalt used the 6th and 7th chapters of 2 Kings to present an incredible allegory of the current relationship between the church in America and the unreached peoples of the world.  What follows is my meager attempt to share a little of what Zumwalt shared.

The setting is Samaria, which was the capital of the Kingdom of Israel.  The Arameans had laid siege to Samaria.  This is where the story begins.

Some time later, Ben-Hadad king of Aram mobilized his entire army and marched up and laid siege to Samaria.  There was a great famine in the city; the siege lasted so long that a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels of silver, and a quarter of a cab of seed pods for five shekels.  2 Kings 6:24-25

These two verses describe a very desperate situation.  Have you ever had an urge to eat a donkey’s head?  I have eaten donkey before and I would not suggest it as a regular part of one’s daily diet.  I can’t imagine what donkey head tastes like.  It gets worse.  Do you know what the “quarter of a cab of seed pods” was?  Try dove’s dung.  These folks were hungry.  They were in bad shape.  The siege had lasted so long that donkey’s head and dove’s dung is all that was left to eat.

Do you see the allegory here?  Just as the people of Samaria were suffering from lack of good food due to a siege on their city, the unreached peoples of today are suffering from a lack of good spiritual food because they are under spiritual siege.  The Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Animists of the world today are being fed spiritual garbage.  It is all they have because they do not have access to good spiritual food, the Truth of Jesus Christ.  There is a spiritual famine.  They are hungry and they are eating all they have access to.

Let me stop here to talk a little about the difference between the unreached peoples of the world and lost people in the United States.  The difference is access.  Access is defined as follows:  the ability or right to approach, enter, exit, communicate with, or make use of.  The key word in this definition is ability. People in the United States have the ability to find out about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, either by seeking it themselves or by others approaching them.  When I drive to the post office every day, which is less than two miles from my house, I pass by no less than six churches.  The unreached peoples of the world do not have this kind of access.  The level of access between the two groups is as different as black and white; as night and day.  Of course, this doesn’t excuse us from sharing with every person we know and encounter on a daily basis.  However, they do have the ability to seek out and find the Truth and the ability to make choices to seek it out or not to do so.  The unreached peoples of the world do not have such a luxury.  The only choice they have is bad spiritual food. 

The story of what happened in Samaria gets worse as you read on in chapter 6.  I will spare you the gruesome details of what happened next, but know that desperate people do desperate things.  The same is true of the unreached peoples today.  They are seeking to fill their spiritual hunger in the only way they know how and through the only spiritual food they have access to.  It is truly a desperate situation.  I can say this because I have seen it.

I have seen hundreds of Hindus going from idol to idol and temple to temple in Durbar Square in Kathmandu, Nepal and all over India.  I have seen Buddhist worshipers kowtowing to various representations of the Buddha in China and Thailand.  I have seen thousands of Muslims making their way to daily prayer in countless mosques in China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kashmir, Palestine, Turkey, India, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Eritrea, Tunisia, Bangladesh and the Maldives.  I have only seen a small picture of how desperate the situation truly is.  However, I have seen enough to know that the situation is desperate.  But does it have to be?  Let’s read on and see what happened in chapter 7.

Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate.  They said to each other, “Why stay here until we die?  If we say, ‘We’ll go into the city’ – the famine is there, and we will die.  And if we stay here, we will die.  So let’s go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender.  If they spare us, we live; if they kill us, then we die.”  At dusk they got up and went to the camp of the Arameans.  When they reached the edge of the camp, not a man was there, for the Lord had caused the Arameans to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a great army, so that they said to one another, “Look, the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to attack us!”  So they got up and fled in the dusk and abandoned their tents and their horses and donkeys.  They left the camp as it was and ran for their lives.  The men who had leprosy reached the edge of the camp and entered one of the tents.  They ate and drank, and carried away silver, gold and clothes, and went off and hid them.  They returned and entered another tent and took some things from it and hid them also.  Then they said to each other, “We’re not doing right.  This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves.  If we wait until daylight, punishment will overtake us.  Let’s go at once and report this to the royal palace.”  2 Kings 7:3-9

The four lepers, outsiders, were sitting at the city gate.  At some point they began to realize that there was a choice to be made.  They could stay where they were and die, they could go into the city and die or they could approach the enemy camp and either die or be spared.  They decided to approach the camp.  What they discovered was that the Lord had confused the enemy and the camp was empty.  There was food in the camp.  They had access to food, good food!  Do you see the connection between the four lepers and the church in the United States?  We have access to good spiritual food.  Spiritual food in abundance and free.  And yet, what are the vast majorities of us doing with what we have?  Are we not reacting just as the four lepers did?  Do you remember what they did?

“They ate and drank, and carried away silver, gold and clothes, and went off and hid them.  They returned and entered another tent and took some things from it and hid them also.”

Is the American church guilty of this?  Are we hoarding all of the food for ourselves?  How many Bible studies do we do?  How many concerts do we have?  How many inward focused ministries do we have?  How much of what we do is for ourselves?  Not that any of these things are bad or wrong, but do you see what I mean?  Is God pleased with the American church’s use of the resources He has blessed us with?  Are we doing enough with the much we have been given?  If not, is it too late? 

The lepers came to their senses.  They realized what they were doing.  They understood that they were not doing right and that there would be great punishment for withholding what they had access to.  The four lepers made the decision to report back to Samaria with the good news.  The siege was over!  Food was available!  God had done it!  All the four lepers had to do was take the good news to those who didn’t know about it.

Friends, there are over 2 billion people in the world today who have absolutely no access to the Truth of Jesus Christ.  Their situation is desperate!  We have the Good News!  We must take it to them!  We must take it to them now!  Not to do so is just possibly one of the greatest sins we will have to answer for when we meet our Creator.  Let’s take the banquet God has blessed us with to those who are eating donkey’s heads for dinner!

Until ALL Have Heard,

Eric