The Internet Monk Archives

Losing The War

The problem with going to war is that there is a very real chance you may lose.

It was August 14, 1945 in the United States, but due to the International Date Line, it was already August 15 in Japan. The Japanese Empire was reeling. The United States had just obliterated two major cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the 6th and the 9th using weapons of hitherto unimagined destructive power. In addition, the mighty Red Army of the Soviet Union, flush with victory in the largest and most brutal land campaign in human history, had just occupied the Japanese client state of Manchuria and was poised to invade the home islands.

The Emperor Hirohito, god-king of the Japanese Empire, deciding that his subjects had suffered enough at the hands of the warlords who had hijacked his government in his name, declared over the radio his intentions to surrender to the Allied powers on the basis of the Potsdam Declaration. This was the famous Gyokuon-hōsō, “Jewel Voice Broadcast.” For most Japanese, it was the first time they had ever heard the God-Emperor’s voice, and he was announcing the defeat of Japan and her absolute surrender. The impact of this event on the Japanese psyche cannot be overstated. It was as if Frodo and Sam had been slain by the Nazgul on the slopes of Mount Doom and the One Ring been slipped onto the finger of the Dark Lord. It was as if the body of Christ had been found and paraded through the streets of Jerusalem.

I can imagine that if you were one of the Christian ministries or individual believers who had decided that the maintenance of the definition of marriage to exclude members of the same sex was a hill you needed to die on, or worse, force others to die on, you may have felt something of what the Japanese felt on that August day 68 years ago.

Continue reading “Losing The War”

Missions 101: or How to Be More Like a Soldier of an Oppressive Imperialist Nation

My all-time favorite Bible character (yes, yes, excluding Jesus) is the centurion whose story is told in Luke 7. I don’t know much about him, yet I’ve loved him to the point of tears since I was a child. I suspect that one reason is that he, like me, was an expatriate. Both of us spent years away from home, in a foreign culture, representing a richer, more powerful nation and surrounded by people who had every reason to resent us. (Just for background, I grew up in Bangladesh, Germany, Greece, and South Africa as the child of a US diplomat, and I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia and a missionary in Kyrgyzstan as an adult.) I reread his story recently and realized that he is an example not only of faith, as is often cited, but also of cross-cultural interaction. All of us citizens of wealthy nations would do well to imitate him.

Mostly we’re directed to St. Paul to learn about cross-cultural outreach, and I don’t want to detract from him at all. Paul understood how and when to strip away the cultural trappings surrounding the new faith and how and when to adapt the faith to the culture. An elderly devout Jew told me once that if it weren’t for Paul, there would be no Christianity, only another sect of Judaism. I think he was right; Paul showed the early church how to become the universal Body of Christ that God promised to Abraham centuries earlier. But still, Paul did not have to learn another language in order to be a missionary, as far as we can tell. He traveled frequently from place to place but never left the Roman Empire of which he was a citizen. Outside of Palestine he was a minority, which gave him an immediate connection with other minorities. In many ways he was more in the position of, say, a Hispanic American missionary traveling within the United States.

But members of the majority race from wealthy Western countries – especially the US – who work overseas are more like the centurion. They face the immediate resentment of the people who surround them. In English-speaking West Africa, for instance, I was often followed by young men who would hiss “CIA!” at me. (In the francophone countries the insult was “Mafia!” instead – different movies, I guess.) Central Asians just emerging from communism called me to my face an Imperialist, a cannibal, and even “Shaitan,” or Satan. Romans in Palestine faced the same automatic hatred, and they, like we, had the same choices of how to respond. I don’t think anyone responded better than our centurion. Let me pick apart the obvious to extract some principles.

Continue reading “Missions 101: or How to Be More Like a Soldier of an Oppressive Imperialist Nation”

Life and Death in the Promised Land

I was leaving without a qualm
without a single backward glance.
The face of the South that I had known
was hostile and forbidding,
and yet out of all the conflicts
and the curses…
the tension and the terror,
I had somehow gotten the idea that life could be different…
I was now running more away
from something than toward something….
My mood was:
I’ve got to get away;
I can’t stay here.

– Richard Wright, Black Boy

* * *

There are other worlds, other entire universes, right next door to where we live.

I was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1956. On Oak Park’s eastern edge, Austin Blvd. runs north and south, dividing the suburb from the Chicago neighborhood of Austin. My mother grew up in Austin, and when I was a boy my grandparents still lived there. But in the late 1960’s they relocated across Austin Blvd. to an area they considered better and safer. They were part of the “white flight” that led many Chicagoans to leave changing neighborhoods that were being filled by an influx of African-Americans moving in from the South.

Many years later, in the 1980’s, I returned to Austin. While attending Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, we became acquainted with Pastor Raleigh Washington, who had partnered with Glen Kehrein of Circle Urban Ministries to found Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church in my grandparents’ old Austin neighborhood.

The church website sketches the situation in Austin at that time:

Rock Church’s story is about ordinary people committed to a vision and mission of community outreach, racial reconciliation, missions, discipleship, and partnering with like-minded organizations. Its community focus is the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. In 1983, when Pastor Raleigh Washington founded Rock Church, Austin had already morphed from a predominately White neighborhood to one whose primary residents were Black. The social, educational, and economic pillars had declined. Most of the doctors, lawyers, businesses, and churches had moved to the suburbs. Few institutions remained to provide social structure within the community; unemployment rose to 40 percent and the high school dropout rate increased to 70 percent.

We went to some services at Rock Church, heard Pastor Washington speak on numerous occasions, had Mrs. Washington in our home to speak to the Trinity wives group, and invited the congregation’s dynamic gospel choir to sing at our little church in Waukegan. These experiences became, for this white, privileged suburban young man, an important eye-opener to the realities of race, poverty, urban life, and the need for social justice.

In recent years, I have discovered more fully how my life has touched, ever so lightly and tangentially, on one of the greatest exodus stories in modern history. I have served as a hospice chaplain in Indianapolis for the past nine years. My work takes me into many different neighborhoods and homes in the city, and has provided me with my first real opportunities to interact intimately with African-American families on their turf.

(And yes, today in a northern city like Indianapolis, their turf remains different from that of the white community. Consider, for example, this article about continuing practices with regard to racial discrimination in the housing market.)

Indianapolis has not always been a friendly place in which to live for blacks; it was even home to the national headquarters for the KKK in the mid-20th century. A woman in one of my churches was shocked to find a Klan outfit when they cleaned out her mother’s attic after her death. Nevertheless, this city was one to which many from the South came in what has come to be known as “The Great Migration.”

From 1915 through the early 1970’s, a remarkable emigration movement took place from south to north in the United States, as southern blacks uprooted and fled to cities all across the North, including Indianapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee here in the Midwest. Prompted by job opportunities in the North during and after the world wars and tired of being oppressed and harassed under the South’s Jim Crow laws, they came like a flood, by the hundreds of thousands each decade. More than six million blacks eventually relocated — more than in the Gold Rush or Dust Bowl migrations west — leading to significant changes not only in individual lives but also in U.S. society as a whole.

Isabel Wilkerson describes this mass exodus in her magnificent chronicle, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

Continue reading “Life and Death in the Promised Land”

The Homily

In the same way one shepherd seeks after, cares for, and watches over his scattered flock, so will I be the guardian of My sheep. I will be their Rescuer! No matter where they have scattered, I will go to find them. I will bring them back from the places where they were scattered on that dark and cloudy day (Ezekiel 34:12, The Voice).

“For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10, NASB).

I remember the service clearly, though it happened nearly 35 years ago. I was home in Ohio from college and, as was my custom, was in church on that Wednesday night. I knew there was a lot of turmoil in the church; the dreaded words “church split” were being whispered loudly by those in the know. The pastor, a spiritual dictator if there ever was one, had made edicts that were to be followed if you wanted to avoid being called a heretic. It was really getting ugly, but never more than on that Wednesday night.

The pastor stood in the pulpit and said, “I want everyone who is with me, who recognizes that God has given me spiritual authority over this church, to come forward now.” I hesitated but a minute; in that church, even to hesitate was to question authority and be a candidate for shunning. Seriously. So I walked forward with others from the youth group I had grown up in. We stood, youth and adults, at the front of the church.

“Now, turn around and look at those still in their pews,” said the preacher. We did. There sat but a handful of men and women, but they were men and women I had always looked up to. Two were elders. One was the manager of the Christian bookstore where I worked. “These are now to be avoided. Don’t talk to them. Don’t associate with them. They are Ichabod, meaning ‘the glory has departed.’ If you associate with them, you, too, will be Ichabod.”

Continue reading “The Homily”

Saturday Ramblings 8.10.13

Hot enough for you, iMonks? I’m thinking football. Why football in August? Two reasons. It’s hot here in Tulsa, and football means cooler weather. Well, ok, not until halfway through the season, but still. The other reason? My Cincinnati Reds are in the fast lane cruising toward Sucksville, so it is about time for me to have my heart broken (once again) by the Cincinnati Bengals. Sigh … We will have more to say (well, sing) about football at the conclusion of our weekly stroll through the world of the weird, something we like to call Saturday Ramblings.

Not all denominations are shrinking. The Assemblies of God are actually growing. But they are not speaking in tongues as much as they once did. Do the two have anything to do with one another?

That bastion of Greek Orthodoxy, Salt Lake City, is going to have to do without for the time being. Seems the Orthodox church there was hurting for money, so they had to reduce the salaries of their three priests by 40%. That didn’t set well with Metropolitan Isaiah, their Denver-based leader, ordered them to no longer conduct services, including baptisms and weddings. WWJD? Discuss.

Here’s one service I wish I could have been at. Marilynne Robinson can preach as well as she can write. (You can read the whole sermon here.)

Continue reading “Saturday Ramblings 8.10.13”

Reconsider Jesus – An Ode to Michael Spencer

For the past number of Fridays we have been presenting excerpts from Michael Spencer’s upcoming book: Reconsider Jesus – A fresh look at Jesus from the Gospel of Mark. This week, one of our editors of the project, Scott Lenke, introduces himself, and tells us what drew him to Michael Spencer and this project. Scott blogs at Prodigal Thought. It was his consistently excellent writing, along with my interaction with him at Internet Monk (along with other places) that led me to ask him to become part of this project.

Ode to Michael Spencer
By Scott Lencke

It was the summer of 2008. I was winding down my ministry work in the U.S., all in preparation for our move to Brussels, Belgium, to pastor a small, international church. It was also at this point that I took up the practice of blogging. I’ve always wanted to be a writer of some sort, and blogging seemed to be the thing for the 21^st century. So I started my own meager blog and, subsequently, went looking for other blogs that I could enjoy and with which I could interact.

Not too long into my exploration of the blogosphere, I came across the site of this preacher guy known as the Internet Monk. His name was Michael Spencer and his contributions began to peak my interest. At the time, I was somewhat of a reformed-Calvinist, charismatic who viewed the arena of systematics as the highest level of theological engagement. And while some of the other blogs I frequented fell into the precise and tidy parameters of Grudem-esque systematic theology (especially that of the reformed-Calvinist camp), this Internet Monk guy was a bit different. He wasn’t so nice and orderly. He was like John the Baptist making that well-known call of: Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. I also began noting the sub-heading of his blog: Dispatches from the Post-Evangelical Wilderness.

Intriguing, to say the least. But I was regularly drawn in.

You see, Michael Spencer wasn’t too greatly taken by normal, American evangelicalism. He wanted something a bit deeper, a bit more historic, a bit more authentic. Michael’s call was that we continually reconsider the status quo of evangelicalism. I found myself longing for very similar things as well. And, of course, who could forget the legendary series posted in early 2009: The Coming Evangelical Collapse. This, no doubt, left the evangelical blogging-world reeling.

This was the Michael Spencer I came to know – unsatisfied with many of our expressions regarding Jesus, the kingdom, the church and much more. Again, his plea was that we reconsider our most fundamental ideas, especially regarding Jesus.

And, so, having been asked to assist in the editing and collation of decades of Michael’s teachings, writings and articles on Jesus as presented in the Gospel of Mark, I knew this would be a worthy project to participate in. Not only for the Internet Monk community that has continued since Michael’s passing in April 2010, but for others that might one day have the opportunity to engage with his stirring call to Reconsider Jesus.

If God had never graced us with the gift of Michael Spencer, there would have been some kind of hole within the American evangelical world. There are others that carry a similar heart to the Internet Monk, but not the exact same. His was always unique, carrying the heart of a prophet, shepherd and evangelist. And even 3+ years after his passing, his voice is still heard crying like that of John the Baptist: Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.

There is still need of preparation. Even more, our paths require straightening. But Michael has played his part, and continues to play his part, until our Lord does come to fully and finally restore all things.

——————————————————————————
If you would like to be contacted when Michael Spencer’s book is available for purchase, drop us a note at michaelspencersnewbook@gmail.com.

Another Look: Some Thoughts on “Community”

This post was first published in August, 2010.

Today, I heard an interesting interview on the NPR program, Fresh Air with Todd S. Purdum, national editor of Vanity Fair, who has written a piece in the latest edition called, “Washington: We Have a Problem”.

For this article, Purdum spent a day at the White House with the president and his top aides, learning about the incredible challenges of governing in an age when “the modern-day presidency would be unrecognizable to previous chief executives — “thanks to the enormous bureaucracy, congressional paralysis, systematic corruption and disintegrating media.”

This post is not about that. Save your political points for another time, OK?

Today, I’m writing about something Purdum said in his interview about Congress, and how things have changed historically with regard to relationships between the members. Congress functions differently today, partly because the nature of the human connections between the members has changed.

Here’s part of what Todd Purdum said:

Several things are strikingly different. Fifty years ago or so, Congress met for six to nine months a year, and when it was in session, it met mostly five days a week. Most members brought their families to live in the Washington area, and their kids went to school here and they knew each other and socialized with each other on the weekends. Quite frequently members drove home to their districts together at the end of the session to save money in a carpool. There was also no air conditioning, so people weren’t holed up in their individual offices the way they are now.

That really began to change in the 1970s and then accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. And when Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House in 1995, he urged members to keep their families back so they would have to go home every weekend if possible. That’s a necessity for campaigning and fundraising. But it has the effect of meaning members don’t really know each other. They haven’t spoken to each other in human ways. So it’s a lot easier to be nasty and say nasty things about someone you don’t know than to say nasty things about someone who you go to church with or see in the supermarket. or whose wife is friends with your wife or husband, and that’s something that’s, culturally, quite different.

A lot of younger members now live in their offices and take showers in the House gym. They don’t rent, even apartments, here. I talked to a friend of mine who works for a senior member from a Sunbelt state. He’s been in Congress for eight years. And my friend said that this member doesn’t really know anybody except the fellow Republicans in his home state delegation, and his neighbors on either side of his office building, but that, in terms of broad acquaintanceship with members of the House, he doesn’t really have any, and he’s been there for eight years.

Community in a Technological Age

The subject of community is huge in conversations about the church today. Perhaps these remarks about Congressional relationships can help us see why it is such a challenge in today’s environment.

What struck me in Purdum’s observations is the relationship between technology and the loss of human contact. It seems possible that the more we choose the efficiencies that new technologies afford us, the more separated we can become from one another.

For example, because members of Congress can so easily communicate and travel in efficient and cost effective ways over long distances these days, they don’t have to bring their families to Washington, settle down, or spend time with their fellow members as they were forced to do before. They are able to live in an insulated world of work, pursuing their own agendas and “taking care of business” while in the capitol, and then easily, almost magically be translated into a different world where they can see their families and go out on the stump in their home districts.

They can keep these worlds separate and work efficiently and productively across both worlds because of the technology available to them. Collegiality, on the other hand, is not immediately productive, and so it has become optional to the task at hand. Members of Congress need not speak to or relate to their colleagues in “human ways;” it’s all about getting results.

Life in today’s world, more than ever before, is about this — getting things done, controlling our environment so that we can create the results we want. As Os Guinness has written,

What counts in the rationalized world is efficiency, predictability, quantifiability, productivity, the substitution of technology for the human, and-from first to last-control over uncertainty.

The first thing that must be said about true community in the world we live in today — the kind of fellowship that the NT describes — the kind of relational unity and partnership in Christ that fulfills the “one another” instructions of the epistles — is this:

It may require that we take some steps away from and out of the secularized patterns of modern life that our technologies have produced.

Continue reading “Another Look: Some Thoughts on “Community””

The Big Rip

One of the only benefits of having a one hour, one-way commute is that I get to download a lot of stuff off the Internet and listen to it during the drive. It is a great way to catch up on your “reading,” if you loosen your definition of reading enough. Of course, I listen to a lot of Orthodox stuff, and evangelical stuff if it is astringent enough and not irritating. I have also traced the history of Rome from its founding to the abdication of Romulus Augustulus in 476, as well the history of China from the Shang Dynasty to the present. Since I love fantasy literature, I have also followed Ransom to Malacandra and Perelandra, Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom, and Roland Deschaine almost to the Dark Tower (I’m still in Algo Ciento).

One of my favorite podcasts is a podcast on physics, cosmology, and quantum phenomena. Since I don’t understand the amount of scientific rigor necessary to develop an experiment which would prove one theory over against another, all of the podcasts in this series affect me pretty much like the audiobooks of fantasy literature. They are certainly every bit as fantastic, as wonderful. One physics podcast that struck me forcibly dealt with the ultimate fate of the Universe, the opposite of the Big Bang, which the participating physicists called the Big Rip. Since I am certain to get the science wrong, I will allow the curious to download and listen to the podcast on their own.

The physicists claim that in order to make their cosmological equations work, they had to posit a certain type of energy that hithertofore had not been detected by any measuring instrument. The physicists called this ‘phantom energy’, and explained that it was stronger than the other forces keeping the universe together. Because of this ‘phantom energy’, the expansion of the Universe, which should be slowing if it is merely a result of the Big Bang, is actually picking up speed.

Thus, in a finite amount of time, which the participating physicists estimate to be about 20 billion years from now (in a model where the Universe is assumed to be 13 billion years old), the galaxies currently at the edges of perceivable space will “wink out”. They will disappear over a sort of an even horizon where by not only will we know nothing about them, but we will not be able to know anything about them. These galaxies will have ceased to exist for us.

Continue reading “The Big Rip”

My Early, Influential Albums

Today, I will share with you some of the formative music that shaped my life.

To start, let me place myself: I was born in 1956, so that means I missed the fifties and didn’t become a teenager until the end of the sixties. Elvis was not my idol as a young boy, and though I listened to the Beatles — saw them on Ed Sullivan, watched their cartoon show, heard their songs on the radio — I didn’t really start to appreciate them until near the end of their career. Sgt. Pepper, The White Album, and Abbey Road were the formative Beatles’ albums for me, and these later records enabled me to go back and listen to their earlier music with more passionate ears.

My childhood took place pre-FM radio.

I listened to as much pop music of the mid-sixties as I could — I was an American Bandstand/Hullabaloo/Shindig/Where the Action Is kid who fell in love with the idea of rock music and bands. After school most days I listened to the Top Ten Countdown on WLS radio in Chicago where Larry Lujack was king, and I collected the station’s “Silver Dollar Surveys” of the top tunes from the record store.

I don’t remember the details, but I do recall my mom taking me to the store and helping me pick out my first LP record album to play on my little portable record player. It was The Best of The Kingston Trio (1962).

This was a formative collection for me because it introduced me to folk music. I was not old enough to appreciate traditional American folk music or the more political strains of people like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. I missed out on the beatniks and the Greenwich Village scene, along with the poets, storytellers, and songwriters that have since become muses to me.

The Kingston Trio was a sanitized, popularized version of these more protest-oriented, bohemian folk groups and songwriters. These were the clean-cut, collegiate folk singers. Nevertheless, it was from them I first heard “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and other deeply thoughtful songs that questioned authority, opposed racism, and expressed cynicism concerning the military-industrial complex. The Kingston Trio introduced me to the acoustic guitar and the folk melodies and harmonies that have been the baseline of my contemporary musical tastes to this day.

Here is the play list from The Best of the Kingston Trio:

1. Tom Dooley
2. Bad Man’s Blunder
3. The Tijuana Jail
4. A Worried Man
5. Everglades
6. Ally Ally Oxen Free
7. Lemon Tree
8. Jane, Jane, Jane
9. El Matador
10. Reverend Mr. Black
11. Desert Pete
12. Where Have All the Flowers Gone
13. M.T.A.
14. Greenback Dollar
15. Blowin’ In the Wind

Mom approved of my choice, but I am not so sure she enjoyed hearing her eight year-old boy running around singing, “And I don’t give a damn about a greenback-a dollar…”

Continue reading “My Early, Influential Albums”

Negotiating the Mess

This is a report from the front lines. The battle. The church. The mess.

On the one hand, I have had a wonderful summer filling in during my pastor’s sabbatical. Sundays, in particular, have been refreshing, as I have led worship, preached, distributed the Sacrament, and shared small talk with the saints around coffee and donuts on bright Lord’s Day mornings..

But as I reflect on that, Sundays have always been wonderful for me. Sundays have been regular moments of peace in the midst of the war. Hearing the Scriptures, singing the hymns and praise songs, joining together in prayer, and coming to the Lord’s Table has always proved to be a “thin place” for me. Not that God always “shows up” in some dramatic way like Jesus did on the Mount of Transfiguration. As I have said here before, Sunday worship with the church has been like “Sunday dinner” to me over the years. That one meal when you could count on most of the clan being there with no agenda other than being together, away from the week’s demands, to enjoy the week’s best meal, to share the week’s happenings within the context of family and friends.

Then comes Monday.

Eugene Peterson is one of the wise people who has clarified for me what pastoral ministry is about “between Sundays” —

But after the sun goes down on Sunday, the clarity diffuses. From Monday through Saturday, an unaccountably unruly people track mud through the holy places, leaving a mess. The order of worship gives way to the disorder of argument and doubt, bodies in pain and emotions in confusion, misbehaving children and misdirected parents. I don’t know what am doing half the time. I am put in situations for which I am not adequate. I find myself attempting tasks for which I have neither aptitude nor inclination. The vision of myself as pastor, so clear in Lord’s Day worship, is now blurred and distorted as it is reflected back from the eyes of people who view me as pawn to their egos. The affirmations I experience in Sunday greetings are now precarious in the slippery mud of put-down and fault-finding.

– The Contemplative Pastor

So I find myself slogging through the mud again — the wet and messy wilderness of daily faith among the people of God and their neighbors. And, right on cue, I discover that the most pressing danger out there does not come from enemy attacks, well-hidden snipers, or artillery barrages. No, the enemy’s onslaughts don’t do half the damage that we do to ourselves through our failures, big and small, to love one another.

The fact that we can “do church” on Sundays is no indication that we have a clue about what it means to “be church” in daily life and relationships.

This is not a blame game. I am as clueless as anyone else.

pdale_mud Just as in most of life, we do fine and things go smoothly until there is a crisis, a disagreement, a conflict.

Then we don’t know what to do with our anger, our hurt, our disappointment.

If we somehow work up enough self-control to guard our tongues, we burn with resentment and frustration.

When we can’t contain our words, we speak unwisely and uncharitably, little realizing the damage we are doing.

We don’t listen well.

We lick our wounds and snarl when someone tries to approach us to tend them.

When it might be good to speak, we find ourselves intimidated into silence.

We lose trust and gain suspicion.

We cannot begin to put a good spin on the words and actions of others, and if someone does speak up in their defense, we scoff and refuse to give them any benefit of the doubt.

[This, by the way, is why I need a Sunday worship service that is more than about “getting high” on Jesus or being challenged to be “radical” for him. I need a service each week that has confession and absolution, in which we sing “Kyrie Eleison”, that reenacts and proclaims the Gospel of forgiveness and new creation, in which someone hands me bread and wine and says, “Christ, given for you”.]

I’m sure someone will read my description of the “mess” that church is and say, “That’s not my church, thank God!” I won’t argue with you, but will simply say, “Give thanks for this season of respite and peace.” Enjoy it. Savor it. Don’t waste it.

But don’t fool yourself into thinking you can lay down enough pavement to keep the rain from turning your path into a muddy mess at least once in awhile. At some point, it’s bound to get ugly.

Then what will you do?