Don’t Call it a Comeback

My life outside of this blog has been particularly active of late.  It is for this reason that one of the two people who read this blog recently asked me, “Where have you been?”  In response, I merely offer that I have been everywhere…but here.  As this blog is about my reading (or my sometimes lack thereof) not my life, I will withhold the commentary about where God has taken me over the past few months.  Suffice to say it is a good place, a place to which I have been led and I am very glad for it.  My new life (and it is a new life) is starting to find its groove and I think I may have some time now to devote to the chronicle of my reading journey.

What have I been reading in these silent months here at the melikereadgood blog?  That’s an easy one.  Since finishing Lewis’ That Hideous Surprise, I have read four books.

The Three Kings by Gene Edwards
This is a quick little book from the early 80s about the life of David.  You may consider it biblical   fiction in that it retains the biblical narrative of the Davidic story with certain artistic liberties taken.  The book centers around the relationship between David and King Saul and the later relationship between King David and Absalom   It is certainly not a heavy read, but I enjoyed it.  One of the interesting questions the book calls us to consider is, “What do you do when someone throws a spear at you?”  That question is timeless.  As I think back on the book, the words “modern melodrama” come to mind (point of fact, a dramatized version was also released after publication for churches to use in their drama ministries).  It gave me new and fresh things to ponder about one of my personal favorite Old Testament characters.  It is worth your time.

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen
Nouwen’s studied, yet contemplative take on the parable of the prodigal was a pure joy to read. Using the framework of Rembrandt’s magnificent painting of the same name, Nouwen delves deep into his own life and calls the reader to do the same.  I would like to blog in-depth about how this book impacted me spiritually at a later time but for now, I will only say this book earns its moniker as one of the great modern christian classics of devotional literature.  I will read it again and perhaps soon.  I also have a new bucket list item – a pilgrimage to the State Heritage Museum in St. Petersburg to see Rembrandt’s tremendous piece of artistic brilliance with my own eyes.

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat
Astute readers will remember my gushing praise for a book I read last year called A Stone of Hope which I labeled “the best surprise” of my 2012 reading journey.  Douthat’s tight, well-written, and scholarly look at the American religious landscape as we know it today may well be this year’s “best surprise”.  The book is worth the price of admission for his detailed look at the  prosperity gospel teaching and the god within theology that has made its way into far too many corners of the religious fabric of our culture.  Douthat posits that the current religious zeitgeist in America is a direct result of a decades-long move away from orthodox Christianity.  He meticulously shows how America is a much stronger place when good orthodoxy is at the center of our pluralistic religious scene.  He ends the book with a clarion call back to historic Christian orthodoxy (not just an Americanized  version).  It was a great book that I encourage everyone to read, no matter whether you are a believer or a seeker or an agnostic or a presbyterian (just kidding).

Cancer Ward by Alexander Soltzhenitsyn
This one has been on my radar for quite a long time.  I finally got around to reading it in the past few weeks.  I am about 80% finished and I am loving it.  My only previous encounter with Alexander was a few years ago when I read The Gulag Archipelago.  I had to drag my way through that one.  This one is much easier and much more engaging.  Set in a cancer ward in the earlier part of the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn explores the human condition as his characters face humanity’s greatest plague – cancer – in each of their own particular ways.  As is usually the case with these Russians, there is the wonderful unforced meshing of the religious and the secular aspects of life that I really enjoy.  There’s community because we all live in community (whether we believe we do or not).  It’s grim because cancer is grim.  There’s hope because there is always hope.  But, how can there be hope with a terminal illness?  Ah, there is a question worth considering.  I have risen and fallen with each character as they attempt in various ways to assimilate their death sentence into their minds, hearts and lives.  I am almost finished but I can already give this book an unqualified recommendation to all.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
I would love to tell you that I read this book because I am working on a thesis about how the current pop culture interest in zombies informs our collective understanding of life, death, and the afterlife.  I wish I were that cool.  The reality is that I was looking for something to amuse (the archaic definition of “diverting the attention of so as to deceive”) me and this happened to be on the front page of whatever screen I was looking at at the time.  The only thing I have to say is, “It worked.”

Vacation Bible School

The following was from a piece of writing I did a few years ago during our church’s Vacation Bible School. It is VBS time again at our church and I was reminded of it as we made our way through the camp this year.  I thought I would share it on my blog. Hope you like it!

Interesting Side Note:  I was reading the Seven Storey Mountain for the first time during this episode.  I have read it twice more since then culminating in last month’s read which you can read about here.

The theme of our VBS this year was “God is with you wherever you go.” What a great theme for a bible school! We had fun, we sang songs, we talked about service to God and man, we played games, and we studied bible characters. It was a wonderful time with a great group of kids. It was a week of pointing kids towards Jesus. Those kids just about wore me out, but it was a good kind of tired, the kind that you are glad for.

Perhaps my favorite thing that happened this week occurred in a very small, out of the way corner of the children’s building and involved the smallest children present at Vacation Bible School. Our challenge for the day was to GO TELL and our Bible story focused on the the women coming back from the tomb and telling everyone that Jesus was alive.

After the opening rally, I had a break so I went to my office to read a new book I started (a great book called The Seven Storey Mountain). In the hallway adjacent to my office, I could hear the pre-K group getting ready to come down the hall. The ground below shuttered as if a great herd of stallions were about to break out upon it. And boy did they! They came careening down the hallway and with all the strength that their tiny bodies could muster they exclaimed, “Jesus is not dead. Jesus is alive!” My whole office shook with fervor of their gospel as did my heart. They repeated their message over and over as they made their way down the hall and out of the building.

It was a very poignant moment. Out of love, pure and undefiled love, they sought to share the gospel story to anyone and everyone with whom they came into contact. It did not occur to them that what they were doing might be politically incorrrect. They had no understanding of such a thing. Their abstract little minds could not imagine it to be so. Neither was it merely a good idea or a metaphysical concept they were declaring. This was no watered down or half-hearted Word they proclaimed. It was truth! And with the kind of faith that all of us should have, and the power of the very Spirit of God in them of which they know only enough to trust completely, they spoke boldly the truth of the gospel. Jesus is alive!

The greatest moment of VBS at my church was in a hallway adjacent to my office with hardly anyone else around. The loud and living Word of truth echoed throughout the cinderblock walls and the glossy tiled floors. It reverberated into my cold heart and there something amazing happened, the gaze of my soul was drawn back to my Savior. Can you imagine?  A bunch of three year olds tore through the church and at the same time, they tore through my heart and I was changed. Amazing.

Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. – Matthew 18:4

Consider Jesus – Ash Wedensday

Got this from James M. Kushiner over at Touchstone Magazine.  Here are some good thoughts from our Orthodox brethren on this Ash Wednesday:

Thou only art immortal, who hast created and fashioned man: but we are mortal, formed from the earth, and to this same earth shall we return, as Thou hast commanded when Thou madest me, saying: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” There shall all we mortals go, and for our funeral dirge we sing” Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Why does man deceive himself and boast? Why does he trouble himself in vain? For he is earth, and so to the earth he will return. Why does the dust not reflect that it is formed from clay, and cast out as rottenness and corruption? Yet though we men are clay, why do we cling so closely to the earth? For if we are Christ’s kindred, should we not run to HIm, leaving all this mortal and fleeting life, and seeking the life incorruptible, which is Christ Himself, the illumination of our souls?

Thou hast formed Adam with Thine hand, O Saviour, and set him on the border between incorruption and mortality; Thou hast made him share in life through grace, freeing him from corruption and translating him to the life that he enjoyed at first….

Christ is risen, releasing from bondage Adam the first-formed man and destroying the power of hell. Be of good courage, all ye dead, for death is slain and hell despoiled; the crucified and risen Christ is King. He has given incorruption to our flesh; He raises us and grants us resurrection, and He counts worthy of His joy and glory all who, with a faith that wavers not, have trusted fervently in Him.

When the Organization becomes the Institution

I am currently reading Alfred Edersheim’s epic The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. It is one of the most important modern references in existence of Jesus’ life and the Jewish culture that proceeded and encompassed his earthly ministry, or at least that’s what some people say (like these guys.)   It is terribly hard for me to read and more importantly to understand.  I think I need to read two or three other, lesser books before I can really understand all that is going on in this one, but I digress.  Thankfully, I am reading it in community with three other men who are helping me to keep going and giving me fresh insight that I otherwise would not grasp.  This grand tome has been referenced often in much of my other reading and study and I am glad to be finally exploring its riches.

The first “book” (80 or so pages) deals with the Jewish dispersion from Babylon and the emerging culture within the larger Jewish community.  Specifically, there is much information there regarding the rise of Rabbinicism in the eastern dispersion and the influence of the Hellenistic culture upon the western dispersion.  Are you asleep yet?  Edersheim traces how these emergent traditions form in the intertestament period and bear upon the Jewish people among whom will be born a Savior, Jesus the Messiah, decades later.  This rise of Rabbincism is particularly interesting to note, because it is this Rabbinicism of the east that Jesus will come face to face with in the personages of the Pharisees and the Saducees and their institutional structure.

The nature of this Rabbinicism of which Edersheim writes goes much deeper than a mere systematic hierarchy of Jewish teachers and teaching.  Their influence and understandings grow to become the de facto religion among the Eastern dispersion, often placed in higher authority than the Scriptures themselves.  From this development comes an exhaustive list of moral authority, going far beyond the scope and intent of the Old Testament resulting in a seismic shift in the way the Jewish faith is perceived to be lived out.  The “do’s” of their faith become the “don’ts” of Rabbincal authority.  In many ways, this moral authority of the Rabbis comes to replace the methods by which the Jewish people were to relate to God.  The organization of the Jewish faith becomes an Institution of Rabbincism.

This is a picture that observant religious historians may have seen before.  The farther we move away from actual involvement with the Divine, the more likely we are to place our faith and trust in the machinations of the Institution.  We see it throughout the Old Testament.  So many times, the people began to rebel against God as their lives become centered around the structures of their religion, instead of the relationship with their God.  This is especially true the farther you move away from Mt. Sinai and the actual giving of the law.  Edersheim traces this type of development in the intertestament period.  As the people begin to assimilate themselves with the countries and cultures around them, they fall deeply into this Rabbinicism.  The Roman church will suffer from this malady at key points in their history, necessitating the need for a great Reformation.  The structure of the faith organization becomes the Institution by which all should order their lives.

This is why the Pharisees and the Saducess are so violently opposed to message of Jesus and why many in the modern church refuse to build a theology of life around the Sermon on the Mount.  Like the Jews of old, we seek to replace our relationship with God with the trappings of religion, wrongly assuming that deliverance can be found there instead of in Him.  When our modern church society collectively “hangs it hat” on a few pillars of the Institution just like the Jews and the Roman church did, we replace the life-giving spiritual disciplines of the Christian life with a life-sucking list of moral authority.  Instead of an emphasis on prayer, the Word, solitude, worship, etc., we talk piously of the evils of money and homosexuality and woman preachers.  Jesus invades the world to tell us that there is no replacement for an actual relationship with God.  He speaks it.  He lives by it.  He dies to show its truth.  He rises again by its very power.  He lives on in our lives to guide the way for us to live.

There is no deliverance in any institution.  There is only faith in the One to Whom the institutions of this world bow down.  He is the God of the universe, Father of the Christ.  It is He to Whom Jesus points the way.  The organization of the church, its leaders, and its adherents should seek to do the same.  I pray that we will.

The Center of the Universe

The ancient church believed that the earth was the center of the universe.  What if they were right?

Oh, I don’t mean that the earth is physically located in the center of the universe, or even the solar system.  Of course, it is not.  From what I understand, scientists think the earth is located near the outermost part of one of the many spokes of the the Milky Way galaxy.  Earth is not located anywhere near the center of anything celestially speaking.  Scientists tell us the universe is expanding out and doesn’t revolve around anything.  Galaxies are coalesced around super massive black holes, whose gravity fields are so enormous, they can encapsulate thousands of star systems.  These individual systems are also ruled by gravity, where all this material (planets, asteroids, comets, etc.) orbits around the central star.  Our own solar system works this way.  Planet earth is merely the third rock from the sun in a celestial sense.

But there is another, more important meaning by which I wonder if the earth might be the center of the universe.

Origin stories and understandings have always been beyond us.  I think that is why they are there.  They show us that one needs more than observable phenomena to explain the origins of the universe and that is the inherent flaw of scientific theory concerning the origins of the universe or the species.  Scientific explanations are bound to observable phenomena.  In science, the process of a thing should help to explain its original genesis.  That is all fine and good as long as you are able to observe ALL of the phenomena, but of course, we cannot do that.  More specifically, we cannot be sure that we are doing that.  Consider the vastness of space or the smallness of the sub-atomic particle.  We have yet to crack the surface of knowledge concerning either one, though we have made great strides.  While we can certainly entertain theories regarding what we know of the universe, scientists are inherently limited in their genesis explanations by their own rules.

In his book, Who Made the Moon?: A Father Explores How Faith and Science Agree, Sigmund Brouwer gives a pretty compelling argument for the centrality of the earth in the vastness of the cosmos.  He reasons that man is the crowning achievement of the universe.  Mankind’s uniqueness in the universe and his conscious capacity mark him as such.  He argues that scientifically, man should not be and yet is.  I’ve read other scientists who would take umbrage with his methodology, but his argument is sound, not because it is scientifically plausible (I can’t really speak to that,) but because it is philosophically correct.

Life itself points the way to the answers science fails to give us, a real life full of sorrow and joy, of pain and pleasure, of hope and despair.  The fact that we exist as such beings and that we know what such things are gives us a clue to the reality of the universe.  The fact that we are here speaks volumes louder than any mere tutorial on how we might have gotten here.  We are more than this crude matter and we know it!  Therefore, the answers to the origins of the universe must go beyond any rudimentary examination, (and due to our limitations, our observations cannot be anything but rudimentary.)  If science cannot adequately answer this question, then why should we live our lives in the expectation that it must?

I would argue that maybe the earth is the center of the universe, because we are here and because we know it.