New Pictures

Mom and Dad,

here are some new pictures from 3-26.

P.S. if you are looking for a gift idea, he still does not have an Albert Pujols onesie

The unsung hero

I don’t really know how to understand God’s providence, but sometimes I believe God sends us the right person at the right time.

Lindsay had a fairly good labor on a number of accounts. Roy was only 6 pounds 9 ounces vs. 8+. She didn’t have to have a caesarian section. Though she was in labor for a long time, we commented throughout the day about how time seemed to be flying. The epidural worked well. I would say after she got it at about 1:00 she didn’t feel much till about 6:00.

However, at about 8:00 p.m. I noticed that she was turned away from me and fairly quite. We had a room full of visitors, and so I didn’t notice at first, but eventually I got up and went around the bed to discover a few small tears running down her face. For my male readers, I’ll inform you that an epidural helps with the contractions, but doesn’t do much to ease the pain that is associated with actually delivering the baby. At this point I found myself begin to freeze.

Some say hell is burning in fire and being in darkness. Some say it is separation from God. I would like to add that it is watching someone you love suffer and not being able to do anything about it.

You know that moment in Top Gun at the end of the movie when Ice-Man is in trouble and Maverick is sent up to help him? There is a critical moment when Maverick gets up there and with shaky confidence pulls out of the fight to contemplate if he wants to be involved. He says to himself with his ex-copilot Goose’s dog tags in hand, “talk to me Goose, talk to me.” That moment snaps Maverick out of his funk. I had that moment and my sister-in-law Lisa, was my Goose.

In my own valley of the shadow, my two-time child bearing, ex-army medic sister-in-law, came to my aide and began coaching Lindsay in her breathing and offering necessary moral support. I watched, learned, and quickly joined her. I joined Ice-Man and we won the fight.

Thank you Lissa.

toys???

Dear Fisher Price,

Making some of our purchases this last year I though you were overpriced on a lot of things. However, tonight when a very tired us put Roy in his swing and it took…well, I began to rethink my accusation.



Roy the burrito



6 pound 5 ounce Roy drowning a new born outfit

Home Sweet Home!!!

thanks to everybody for all your prayers and support. We are finally home. Mommy is sore and tired, but healthy. Roy is hungry and tired, but healthy, and I'm the guy and nobody really cares how the guy is doing:) JK

I've got a lot to say about these last couple of days and will try unpack some thoughts as well as post a few pictures, but for now I'm going to make dinner.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Introducing......

The fabulous, Roy Clemensssssss CARNEY!!!!!!!!!!
Born: March 20, 2007
TOB: 8:40pm, Hillcrest Hospital
Waco, Texas
Weight: 6lbs. 9oz. Length: 19.5in

Roy has entered the building...













"Hey World! Take this!"











Mom's doing great for those of you wondering.....











It's O-F-F-I-C-I-A-L











"Dig my lid, dawg! Keeps my skull warm, dawg."











"He looks just like me...I think...right?"











SO Handsome!

Dear Roy

Dear Roy,

I write to you on eve before you are born. I suppose I should say something profound like “I am who I am,” or “I came to give my life as a ransom for many,” but I’m not God, just your dad.

I did think I would share this with you though. This has been one of the hardest things for me to learn, that is trusting God with my money. I’ve gotten pretty good about writing my monthly tithe check, and we support a compassion kid. But to tell you the truth Roy, sometimes it feels mechanical, like another bill. I can’t say it has ever been really difficult, because as long as I’ve been alive I’ve always had enough and so was never in between a rock and a hard place when it came to giving. Close, but not real close.

I don’t mind giving. I don’t think I do it grudgingly, but I don’t think I do it cheerfully either. I think I just do it, and by the grace of God I’ve always had something to give. I need to work on this Roy. So one of my prayers for you is that you will experience the joy of giving and that it will plague your life.

Let me give you an example of how God takes care of us. Tonight your mom and I went looking for a changing table for you. It is the last thing that we didn’t have for you. It’s not a necessity, but still nice to have. So we went to Toys’r’us and no luck. Then to the baby Depot and no luck. Our last stop to Big Lots to check out a discounted table that your mom found earlier today.

Before we made it there though we went to Barnes and Noble, so that I could buy you a birthday present. I didn’t think it was a good idea because I’m tight on the budget and being the guy who worries about the budget, which you will eventually come to learn, I didn’t have the money allocated for your present. But I figured you are only born once so I broke down and bought you “The Giving Tree.” The deep existential significance of which you will learn at a later date.

On to Big Lots.

In the back of the store on the bottom shelf sat your changing table. The box was opened and we had to dig to find all the pieces. Your mother told me to bargain for a deal. The box listed the table at $35. This was good because I allocated a cheap $40 in my mind for your last minute table shopping. Apprehensively I asked for the manager to bargain for a cheap price on an already discounted table. She made her way to the back of the store and much to my surprise looked at it for a minute and said…”how about $15.” Being a guy I slyly responded, “Yeah, I guess we could do fifteen.” In my head though I was immediately thinking about how I purchased your present and a changing table for under the price I had originally allocated for the table alone. This might be telling of how nerdy I am, but this is the sort of thing I get excited about…saving money.

Roy, there are several ways to understand this story. Some might call it luck. Some call it fate. We like to think of it as grace. No I don’t think that God went ahead of us and convinced the lady to mark down the price. And no I don’t think that because we give. God gives to us. That actually isn’t grace at all. I do think that God provides for us and that giving is important. I can’t draw the lines of cause and effect because they aren’t in the bible, but I do think both are important and I hope you find joy in both God’s provision and in personal giving.

see you tomorrow,
love dad

Are you ready?

There are two questions I find particularly annoying these days. One is, “how is your wife?” Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m not interested in her well being or in you being concerned about her well being, but it’s just that, it is only one of two questions people ask me. And to tell you the truth, most of the time I don’t really know how she is doing. Today I can report that she is bored. She is bored because she is on Spring Break and spends all day at home watching T.V. and resting. Her ankles aren’t swollen, and she looks fantastic for a 39+ weeker. So I report that she is doing well, but she is bored.

And for the other question…”are you ready?” Am I ready? Is Josh Carney ready to be a dad? Well, the best answer I have for people is that I’m as ready as I was when I got married. What would constitute being ready?

In sports if a team loses a game, the coach will say something like, “we just weren’t mentally prepared, we weren’t ready for our game tonight.” Apparently the team made too many mistakes or didn’t do enough right consistently to win the game. We would say that they weren’t prepared.

How do you get ready to be a dad? It strikes me that a lot of the same will be true. I will make mistakes, I will often feel that I did not do enough right consistently. I envision in about two weeks, feeling deprived of sleep and telling myself I’m not ready. I see down the road when Roy is 12 and starts asking questions about sex…I won’t be ready for that either. And someday he will leave for college or maybe just leave…and I won’t be ready. But I will do all those things. And I will do them as best as I can. I’m not going to worry about those moments, just do my best to be Josh Carney when they happen.

So yes I’m ready. To get ready, I decided with my wife nine months ago that we wanted to try and have a child and to get ready I’ve committed loving Roy as best as I know how. That is how I’ve gotten ready. So, yes I’m ready.

citizen of heaven

I don't know how you grew up, but inadvertently I grew up with the Tim LaHaye eschatology. it is the sort of eschatology that pays no attention to the corruptible now, but rather chops history up into dispensations so that we can disregard ethics for today. Of particular interest to me lately is how this ties to our care for creation. This is just some of the thoughts that will probably end up in my paper.

Philippians 3:20-4:1

20But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21He will transform the body of our humiliation so that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. 1Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

For N.T. Wright the most important issue to clarify is the nature of citizenship in this text. Typically this text has been read with the hermeneutic that envisions a time in the future when Christians will return and live there (heaven) forever. Against Philo and the popular notion of Hellenistic Christianity, Paul has is mind a Hebrew meaning. Wright makes a pair of points, the first of which is of great interest here. He suggests that the model Paul is operating on here has two levels and the first is anthropological. We are not souls trapped in bodies that existed prior to being born and that are longing to be released so that we may go home. Wright argues that Paul is suggesting that our bodies will be transformed, not abandoned. This point is made more explicitly in I Corinthians 15, and the language here of “humiliation” to “glory” is akin to “corruptible” “incorruptible”. Wright asks, “What lies beneath this? A theology of creation very different from that of Philo. The final phrase of phrase 21 echoes Psalm 8:6, just as in I Corinthians 15:27-8” . Wright continues by fleshing out the pragmatic ramifications for this understanding of the text. Note his explicit allusion of its application to created order itself.

"the Messiah here is the truly human being, the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creation, now set in authority over the rest of the created order. There is no need to escape from the created order; the Messiah is its lord. Nor is there any need to escape from earth to heaven; instead, the Messiah will come from heaven to earth, to rescue his people not by snatching them away from earthy but by transforming their bodies. Paul does not here develop the wider context for this, that of transforming renewal of creation itself; but when he does just that in Romans 8 he merely fills in the details of the present lightning sketch rather than adding anything that alters its shape and content. It is because of this continuity between the present and of the future that the practical conclusion of Paul’s argument here, exactly as in 1 Corinthians 15:58, is focused not on waiting for a different life altogether but on “standing firm in the lord.” (4:1)."

Resurrection of the Son of God, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 231.

Wright makes several pertinent points. Here I’ll just consider two. First, his comment that Paul does not develop the wider context for this, that of transforming renewal of creation itself, implies that this is same narrative substructure under girding the Romans 8 eschatology and thus the ecological implications are found here as well. Secondly, Wright speaks of continuity between the present and future. This is a critical point to be noted and one that when overlooked produces the sort of faulty eschatology that understands “citizens of heaven” to mean something like “ignore the present order because we will end up in a future heaven anyhow”. This sort of think has disastrous pragmatic implications for care of God’s creation.

Dear new daylight savings time,

I got up about ten minutes ago to get ready for work. It is dark out. I find the new you depressing. You are like December without the anticipation of the 25th.

Carney

why do you think global warming is a hoax?

These are the notes I took from the film “Jesus Camp” that I intend to use for my ecology/reconciliation paper. My question comes at the end of the dialogue.

Levi 12 years old. Home schooled. Parents interested in teaching him things like creation over evolution. A.G. background. Preaches. Evangelical dream boy. Shows cover of science book “exploring creation: with physical science”

Levi’s Mom: one popular thing to do in American politics is to note that the summers in the United States over the past few years have been very warm. As a result global warming must be real. What’s wrong with this reasoning? (A curious and sarcastic) “hmm…”

Levi: It’s only gone up 0.6 degrees. (Mother shaking her head in approval)

Levi’s Mom: yeah it’s not really a big problem is it?

Levi: Nope…I don’t think that it’s going to hurt us.

Levi’s Mom: It’s…It’s a huge political issue—global warming is and that’s why it is important for you to understand…(Levi interrupts)

Levi interrupts: is evolution too?

Levi’s mom: um…not really

Levi again interrupts: creationism?

Levi’s mom: um…it’s becoming one now…what if you had to go to a school where the teacher said, ‘creationism is stupid, and you are stupid if you believe in it.’

Levi: I think they should…wait a minute

Levi’s mother: or what if you had to go to a school where your teacher said evolution is stupid and you are stupid if you believe in it

Levi: I wouldn’t mind that.

Levi’s Mother: you wouldn’t mind it…if you look at creationism you realize it’s the only answer to all the question

Levi: that’s exactly what dad said

Levi’s mom: um hum…it’s the only possible answer to all the questions (eyebrows now raised in a matter of fact expression)

(Later with a smile on the face)
Levi’s mother: Did you get to the part that says science doesn’t really prove anything. It’s really interesting when you look at it like that…(a devious smile that almost looks like she has just uncovered some monumental truth.)

Later again Levi: I think Galileo made the right choice by giving up science for Christ.

75% of home schooled kids are evangelical Christians

For those of you who may have political convictions that lean right, I was wondering if you could tell me why by and large the person typified by Levi and his mother has it out for the environmental campaign. It has become more difficult to stereotype the person who is against environment. In an interview on 60 minutes about a year ago, Ted Haggard, who all of you should know now, was interviewed as the president of the National Associations of Evangelicals. In the interview when questioned about how Evangelicals may have had it wrong, Haggard replied that more attention needed to be given to environmental affairs. All of that to acknowledge that there has been a swing in Evangelicals concerning the environment.

Still my friend Morrow included a quote from James Dobson, which I don’t know how recent it was but it reads,

“"More importantly, we have observed that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."

So to those of you who would consider yourselves this type of conservative, my question is why. Why take this stance? My research for my paper has shown me that this is a Christian issue. So maybe my question is this. Political rhetoric aside, is there not Biblical warrant for us to be ecologically concerned? If so why not take these issues of global warming more serious? Is it money? God knows we’ve blown money on worse fake problems!

Who's in and Who's out?

I have a certain propensity to want to know who is in the kingdom of God and who is not. I don’t know where this comes from. Well…maybe I do. You see in the type of Christianity I was raised with, there were good deeds, which didn’t get you into heaven, and then there were good deeds that were a consequence of your faith in Jesus. The former was meaningless and the latter was meaningful. I like to think about this in terms of epistemology and ontology. You can do ontology, but if it doesn’t have the right epistemology associated with it, it was deemed worthless.

Consequently a critical tenet to the Christianity I grew up with, was that you didn’t get to heaven by being a good person. This was important because it gave us something to start our proselytizing with. The problem with me these day is that though we have our John 14:6’s the verse that my growing up brand of Christianity puts on banners and never lets you forget about, we also have and I think a substantial amount more of the gospel given to verses like Matthew 7:21. Here the issues seems to be that those who think they have correct epistemic notions about Christ, haven’t done will of the Father, what we might take to be correct ontology.

So who is in and who is out?

$1,000,000 night for a mere 13 bucks

This morning I woke up and made my way to the kitchen to pour myself a bowl of cereal. When I got there I discovered that my wife and set out two steaks to defrost…tonight’s dinner. I got an idea. I asked here if she wanted to go out to eat and enjoy a dollar theatre movie. She enthusiastically responded yes and I put the steaks away. I thought this might be a good idea for a pair of reasons. 1. Frequent readers will note that we are celebrating a lot of lasts, so I thought this cold be our last non-Roy date. 2. I took my 3rd of three midterms today and needed an academic break. A night free form school if you will.

All was well until I passed by a fellow student at Truett who asked me if I would be there tonight. “Tonight, I thought to myself…what is tonight,” and then the light bulb went on. I had my Generous Orthodoxy group at Church tonight. I debated for a while. On the one hand I really love our community groups, but on the other I really thought it was important that my wife and I enjoyed our date. So at about 4:30 I called Jon Mark and asked if it would be okay if I ducked out for the evening to which he graciously responded with a supportive yes. Thanks Holly and Jon Mark.

As it turns out Tuesday is a great night for a cheap date. We began our night by intending to enjoy the Pei Wei restaurant. We got there only to take note of the long line standing outside the door. Consequently we opted for Rosa’s where we each got a soft drink and a plate of three tacos, rice, and beans for roughly $5 a piece. We ran into Janine Jackson’s sister Lindsey and her boyfriend Ben and they joined us treated us with some fine company.

Next we made our way to the dollar theatre which only charges a mere fifty cents on Tuesdays for all shows all times brining out date night total to $11. After our movie, “Night at the Museum,” we drove over to Wooded Acres to enjoy $1 scoop ice-cream night at Baskin and Robins. I got a turtle cheesecake scoop on a cake cone and Lindsay got Everybody’s Favorite Candy Bar in a cup. This brought our total to $13.

It was a perfect evening. Now it is 9:48 and I will retire to my bed and enjoy a great nights sleep. And I think to myself, I’m like Tom Scavo, for you Desperate Housewife fans, I’m the guy who has it all.

reasons I don't follow Christ

Dear Jesus,

I’ve been thinking about why it is hard for me to follow you. Why I am reluctant to join in Molmann’s solidarity, Brueggemann’s prophetic imagination or Volf’s self-donation. I know these are excuses, but at least I’m being honest.

1. You didn’t need health insurance. Either one of two things seems to be true about your life. You could just heal yourself not with a couple of vitamin C’s, but rather with a quick “be healed.” Or you had some good reason for enduring the pain and knew it wasn’t time to call down the help of 1,000 angels. You didn’t have to allocate 300 Caesar coins a month for health insurance. That’s more money for the poor.

2. You didn’t need groceries. If you got hungry, you could just steel a sucker from a baby and make 5,000 suckers out of that one sucker. Or you could just throw a net into the Brazos and pull in 1,000 fish. You never worried about making it down to H.E.B. that’s another way to save money and give to the poor.

3. People just gave you donkeys to ride and the state of Jerusalem didn’t require insurance on donkeys. That’s more money to give to the poor.

4. Though Dan Brown was riveting in his writing, I have a felling you didn’t marry Mary Magdalene. If someone broke into my house, I’d love to turn the other cheek if I had the guts, but I’m afraid I’d fear for the life of my child and wife. I’d probably try and hit them in the legs with a baseball bat.

These are just some of my thoughts. Help my lack of faithfulness unto obedience.

Carney

the political landscape of spiritual institutions

Dear people who think Truett is liberal,

Truett is part of the south and when your neighbors are Southwestern and DTS the proverbial Jerry Fallwell and Pat Buchanan, then yes we are liberal.

But in the larger scope of things, namely the more realistic and national scope of things we are far from liberal. In fact we are probably more like John McCain, with a propensity to draw a few socially liberal, yet conservative Rudy Giulianis.

We find ourselves strange bedfellows with certain folk and even work on stuff with the Joe Lieberman’s (the Fuller, Duke, Denver types if you will) every once in a while bringing people like E.P. Sanders to lecture because we think we can learn from people who don’t believe exactly like us, but we are still moderate to conservative.

Liberal I’ll have you know is out east. And if you’ve ever realized that there is more to the United States then the south, you’ll see schools like Vanderabilt the proverbial Hillary Clintons, and Harvard divinity school your proverbial Noam Chomsky. These institutions consider us grossly dogmatic and fundamental. And you well they don’t consider you legit educational institutions.

For a helpful discussion on the relative nature of a fundamentalist see Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief. Just look up “Son of a Bitch” in the index and you’ll find the page.

Your moderately conservative future mega church pastor

Carney

Embrace that I really rather exclude

“God does not abandon the godless to their evil but gives the divine self for them in order to receive them into divine communion through atonement, so also should we—whoever our enemies and whoever we may be.” Miroslav Volf--Exclusion and Embrace p. 23

Can I be honest? I’ve been reading a good deal about a brand of Christianity that I did not necessarily grow up with. It is the brand found in Jurgen Moltmann, Walter Wink, John Howard Yoder, Volf and even Brian McLaren. This is a difficult brand that I don’t want to wear. It is too hard.

It is the brand that notes the miracles and sayings of Jesus, but always keeps them at bay and subservient to the more urgent theme of his faithfulness unto death. This is hard, and in my heart of hearts, I read about Volf’s system and I just want to be one of the godless. They are given grace and that would just be easier. But, by the grace of God, the self in me has not successfully extinguished the voice of the Spirit, even with all the wiles of my white Western life begging to do so, I experience God’s voice calling me to conform to the cruciform character of Christ… and I want so badly to ignore it. But this, the life that ignores the voice, as it turns out is not a life that is worth living.

learning

Today I had the privilege of attending a lecture given by one E.P. Sanders. Sanders is a Methodist who is probably closer to being an agnostic. He has a Ph.D. in New Testament studies with specific interest in Christian history. Sanders is undoubtedly one of the more renown scholars alive today, made all the more poignant by his Professor Emeritus status at the prestigious Duke University.

Sanders lectured on Christianity, Judaism, and Humanism. The lecture was pretty good. I made several mental notes and walked away with a few things to chew on. In short he suggested that the top down system of government (Judaism’s contribution) and the bottom up system of government (Hellenism’s contribution) shared humanistic ethics in common. Yet these two systems promoted competing ideological governmental systems that produced wars throughout the centuries. His example: note the middle ages. The solution to all this, Sander’s says, is that Locke and others mined these two systems for the humanistic ethics and saved us from the religious wars that peaked right before the enlightenment. Hence we got the beautiful world of democracy, and the privatization of religion. A place where competing ideals could co-exist. Bono would have loved it. (at this point if you disagree or are angry, please save your comments…this is not the point of the post)

What struck me about the lecture was this. There are many ways to learn, but the way I learn best is not an environment like this one. Maybe more notable though is who I learn from. With all due respect, Sanders is fairly solidified in what he believes, as I would guess most of us are by his age. He has systematic ways of understanding the world and where he sees a problem he applies what he knows as best he can to filter and understand the problem. Though his answer may not be perfect, it is coherent given the data he has. And yet I find that I learn more through the honest questions that come up in my community groups from believers at all different phases of their God journey. I hear the sincerity in their voices and all the sudden I find myself wondering some of the same questions, be they elementary. They share their stories and their context gives the questions all the more meaning. As the semester continues the pieces of their individual narratives come together and by the end of the semester we find that our community is in the midst of it’s own story of mutual learning. It is here that I find some of my most precious theological gems from the most unlikely of characters.

This is a strange juxtaposition, and yet a powerful one that testifies to the creative activity of the Spirit in the life of the church today.

**this is not to take away from E.P. Sanders. Perhaps he could write the same thing about his own community. He just happens to be the guinea pig that helps this post makes its point.

change can do you good

I come to you tonight from our newly acquired rocker. It is the rocker that Lindsay and I will spend countless hours rocking our baby boy on. I look up and I see Roy’s new shelves, his bouncer, bassinet, almost finished crib, and toys that he won’t be able to play with for at least six months. I am thankful. I’m thankful for all the people that gave selflessly to help us get to this point in so many ways.

Lindsay and I first encountered the thought that follows on the eve of Valentines Day. At some point in the evening it came to our attention that this might be our last date ever as Josh and Lindsay. Soon it will be Josh, Lindsay and Roy. It’s weird for me to not put the “and” between our names and instead a comma followed by Lindsay’s name and then the “and.” And who? And a third person. And our baby boy.

The two of us will become the three of us. Lindsay and I are spending the last moments of what has been an eight almost nine year run of just the two of us. We started dating between our sophomore and junior years of high school. We went to different schools and broke up for a little over a year. We stayed friends during that year and so I think that math goes something like this. Three and a half years of dating, one and a half years of being broken up, one year of being engaged and two almost three years of being married. We’ve made all kinds of wonderful memories. Some of them hard, some of them easy, but all of them good.

And now we are enjoying these last moments of just the two of us. And can I confess that I’m sad. Now here I must be clear. I couldn’t be more excited about baby Roy coming in a few days. He was planned and we are blessed and already cherishing and thankful for him. But this…this is a good sad. It’s like the sad I felt when I said goodbye to my house, land, and lake the week after we got married and ready to move down here. It was a crescendo moment for me. I didn’t cry saying goodbye to any of my family. I didn’t cry saying goodbye to my friends, but I did cry in the foyer of my house as I knew I was leaving for the last time. O sure I’ve been back, but it was a moment that solidified a change. A change that I had chosen and was ready to celebrate, but a change still and change is always hard. I said goodbye to more than just my house in that moment. I said goodbye to my specific orientation towards a million memories. No longer would I reach back to those moments as feeling like that was just yesterday, just a couple of years ago…no I knew that, that chapter had to be ended. That feeling hurts a little and that is how I feel tonight. I’m getting ready to say goodbye to Lindsay and me. Just Lindsay and me.

It is sometimes difficult for me to know what to do with these feelings. One of the most healing things for me at Kyle’s funeral was when Burt led us in the responsive prayer. In an incredible way, in the midst of sorrow, the prayer cultivated a deep sense of gratitude in all of us towards God for all the things that collectively beamed the brilliance of the person Kyle Lake.

And so that is how I end tonight. With a prayer in my heart that celebrates all the things that have been so perfect about these last 8-9 years and in response the chorus of a thousand memories respond to each one of these things with, “we give thanks.”

If I had a million dollars

I don’t know if everyone dreams about winning the lottery from time to time, but I do. I occasionally buy a ticket and I don’t win. I believe that I don’t win for two reasons. I believe that I don’t win because of the incredibly poor odds that everyone has when they buy a ticket. More importantly I think God keeps the money out of my hands because I couldn’t handle it.

In reading McLaren’s book the Secret Message of Jesus, it strikes me that there is at least two (probably more that I can’t see) reasons why Jesus tells us to do things. I should give to the poor. That verse is that straightforward. 1. I should give to the poor because giving to the poor is a good kingdom thing. We can see the kingdom beauty when worried parents are able to feed their children and pay the monthly mortgage because they were given money. That is the literal and obvious beauty. 2. I should give to the poor because it heals me. McLaren writes, “Money, it turns out, is a cruel taskmaster; when you serve money, soon you will resent God for interfering with your humming, expanding economic kingdom.” We (I) need to be delivered from love of money.

Let me brag though. I’ve gotten better. I used to dream about buying lake houses and owning a Jaguar. I’ve heard enough Gideon Tsang to let some of those things go. If I won the lottery…at least I think I would give most of it away. I’d be like Jesus, and invest my money in all kinds of good kingdom things…as my friend Lanny says, “do some Bono shit.” I’d only keep $1,000,000. Who could blame me? After all there are plenty of passages that talk about being a good steward. I could put the last $1,000,000 in a high return account and always have money so that I could use my time for good kingdom activities.

And yet there are those passages that are altogether too costly. At the end of Mark 12, Jesus is observing people throwing their money into the money jar. This type of jar was extra loud when the rich people dropped their large sums of money. Everyone could hear the clanking. Then the poor widow comes up to the jar to drop her money. Her coins are so few and so light that they are barely noticeable. And yet Jesus sums his disciples and tells us, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”(43-44)

Dr. Gloer tells me that this is one case where the English doesn’t do the text justice. It should read something like, “has put in her whole life.” Which is interesting because in one of Jesus’ last comments in the public setting we see the metaphor…the coming sacrifice that will require his whole life.

What this text tells me is that the last $1,000,000 I’d keep to be a good steward is precisely the million that would destroy me. It would teach me never to trust, and it would render me like the ones dropping in the large sums of money to hear it clank. Giving her two small coins the lady probably helped someone in some small way, but what she really did was demonstrate that she pledged her entire existence to the kingdom and that money had no power over her.

This is a hard word.

Grrr....

The only way the whole thing could have been any cheesier is if Meredith would have been awoken from her deep slumber by a kiss from Prince Derrick, and the camera would have ended with the seven dwarfs (led by Doc of course) rejoicing.

a new problem

Some of you may have remembered my post some time ago about evolution and God’s breathing of his spirit on humans at an opportune time. You might have also remembered my good friend Tom called me on my understanding of microevolution and what turns out to be adaptation.

I had a question I meant to ask him and never did, but did get a chance to run by the good people at upsilon beta chi today. I was wondering how this complex part of microevolution or any evolution worked. Let’s say that some people move north and consequently need to develop the characteristic of hairiness in order to be warm and survive. My question was, “how is that the human body can figure out something like I’m going to need to be hairy to survive here and consequently communicate that to it’s DNA in order to change that feature in the offspring and over time change the feature of non-hairiness to hairiness?”

As the good people of from the world of biology patiently explained to me…that is not how it works. Survival of the fittest. It turns out I should have paid more attention in 7th grade biology. For the minority of you who don’t know, it works more like this. Say 100 people move north. What happens is that the 13 hairiest people survive as a consequence of already possessing the necessary feature. When the other 87 die, they must get married by default and have offspring that posses the combined trait of hairiness and hairiness to become a little more hairiness.

For those of you really educated in this stuff, I apologize for my gross oversimplification, but I need to put it a way I can understand it.

I was okay with the formula…God creates through evolution. If God created in a more “poof” and it appears fashion we tend to be o.k. with that because I think we think it matches the form of sovereignty and power we preconceive God to posses. But to say that God creates over time, through evolution seems a little more counterintuitive. Funny question arise like, “Well did God need a trial and error period to figure stuff out?” Enter my good friend Singleton who is sure to remind me about God’s relationship to time. And in the least, I must concede that the Bible communicates that 1000 years is a day to God. So maybe to God the evolution thing seems more like our preferred “poof” thing.

So here is the problem. If the new version of evolution is true, I think God seems a bit more crass. What I mean is this. The whole of the revealed salvation history throughout the Biblical narrative seems to be about grace and often about God’s identifying with the lowly, weak and poor. Take care of the Widow. Leave the extra wheat in the field. The year of Jubilee. Be like a child. The woman at the well. Blessed are the poor. Even if some of it seems impossibly idealistic to us it remains prescriptive from the almighty. So why the exception with evolution? Why if this the best way to do things, does the process champion the supreme? Those who are genetically predisposed to do well?

My wife who is always thinking in a more creative fashion suggested that it might be the mercy of God to design the process precisely the way God did. Perhaps it is mercy to the would be offspring who would be born without the necessary features for survival. I thought that was interesting.

What do you all think?