iCrucified

Posts Tagged ‘Book’

Our family started a new devotional book a few weeks ago. This one is a year of readings from collected works by Phillip Yancey called Grace Notes: Daily Readings with a Fellow Pilgrim. I like it; a lot. I really enjoy the thought provoking writing style of Yancey and this collection of readings brings the best of many of his books to our kitchen table stimulating some great discussions. You can check out a chapter yourself from this site.

Yesterday we read an excerpt from the book, I Was Just Wondering, titled “Imagine There’s No Heaven.” I still haven’t been able to get it out of my head and decided to share it here.

Imagine There’s No Heaven

Anthropologists report that every human society discovered believed in an afterlife. I started wondering what a society might look like if it did not believe in an afterlife. I let my imagination run, and came up with the following conclusions. For the sake of a convenient label (and with apologies to Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon), I’ll call my mythical society the backward-spelled Acirema.

Aciremans value youth above all else. Since for them nothing exists beyond life on earth, youth represents hope. As a result, anything preserving the illusion of youthfulness flourishes. Sports is a national obsession. Magazine covers present wrinkle-free faces and gorgeous bodies.

Naturally, Aciremans do not value old age, for elderly people offer a distasteful reminder of the end of life. The Acireman health industry thus promotes cures for baldness, skin creams, cosmetic surgery, and other elaborate means to mask the effects of aging, the prelude to death. In especially callous parts of Acirema, citizens even confine the elderly to their own housing, isolated from the general populace.

Acirema emphasizes “image” rather than “substance.” Such practices as dieting, exercise, and body-building, for example, have attained the status of pagan worship rites. A well-formed body visibly demonstrates achievement in this world, whereas nebulous inner qualities — compassion, self-sacrifice, humility —merit little praise. As an unfortunate side-effect, a disabled or disfigured person has great difficulty competing in Acirema.

Acireman religion focuses exclusively on how one fares in the here and now, for there is no reward system after death. Those Aciremans who still believe in a deity look for God’s approval in terms of good health and prosperity on earth. At one time, Acireman priests pursued what they called “evangelism,” but now they devote most of their energy to improving the welfare of fellow citizens

Aciremans spend billions to maintain elderly bodies on life-support systems, while they permit, even encourage, the abortion of fetuses. This is not as paradoxical as it seems, for Aciremans believe that human life begins at birth and ends at death.

Just thinking about such a society gives me the creeps. I sure am glad I live in the good ol’ U.S.A., where, as George Gallup assures us, the vast majority of the population believes in an afterlife.

   Send article as PDF to

In preparation for the Renovare’ conference in San Antonio next Sunday, I’m reading Eugene Peterson’s Jesus Way: A Conversation on the ways that Jesus is the Way. As with everything I’ve read from Eugene Peterson, I love this book. This is the third book of the Spiritual Theology Series which includes other titles; Eat this Book, Christ Plays in 10,000 Places, and the latest…Tell it Slant.

The Jesus Way has beaten me up a bit with some of the thoughts that have been stirred in me. I’m still pondering them and letting the Spirit speak to me about some of the areas where I am guilty of trying to “shape” the Jesus Way into the jeff way. I hate it when I do that. I hate it even more when the Holy Spirit brings it to my attention…sigh.

I read a section that really stirred my soul today and I felt affirmed in my own calling. This following excerpt is from Chapter Five of the Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson. Here he is speaking about the role of a Prophet and using the life of Elijah as a comparison example (pps 119-120):

The task of a prophet is to say the name God correctly, accurately and locally -Yahweh, God alive, God personal, God present. Here. Now. Elijah did that-magnificently. But there is more to the way of a prophet than God. There is also the neighbor.

One of the bad habits that we pick up early in our lives is separating things and people into secular and sacred. We assume that the secular is what we are more or less in charge of: our jobs, our time, our money, our opinions, our entertainment, our government, our house and land, our social relations. The sacred is what God has charge of: worship and the Bible, heaven and hell, church and prayers. We then contrive to set aside a sacred place for God, designed, we say, to honor God but really intended to keep God in his place, leaving us free to have the final say in everything else that goes on outside that space.

Prophets will have none of this. They hold that everything, absolutely everything, takes place on sacred ground. God has something to say about every aspect of our lives, the way we feel and act in the so-called privacy of our hearts and homes, the way we make our money and the way we spend it, the politics we embrace, the wars we fight, the catastrophes we endure, the people we hurt and the people we help. Nothing is hid from the scrutiny of God; nothing is exempt from the rule of God; nothing esc apes the purposes of Gd. The ground is holy; people are holy; words are holy: Holy, holy, holy.

Prophets make it difficult for us to evade God or make detours around God after we leave church or temple or synagogue. Prophets insist on receiving God and dealing with God in every nook and cranny of life. As it turns out, in most of those nooks and crannies there are neighbors. For the prophet, God is as real as the next-door neighbor; the neighbor is as real as God. The neighbor, in fact, gets equal – well, maybe not quite equal, but equally serious – billing with God. Elijah brings the same unrelenting intensity to the cause of Naboth as to Yahweh.

Praise God for His gift of the prophet to His people.

   Send article as PDF to

Part 3: The Incarnational Life: God’s “No” -continued

I picked up my reading from Part Three of So Beautiful with chapter twelve and it seemed it started in a “clap of thunder” and “full sprint.” The Incarnation is “to live in the world, but not of the world.” My reading began with a heart examination:

“Or here’s another Jesus Metaphor-Faith is the ‘saltness’ that brings every food to life and makes it pleasurable. How salty is your life? How salt-of-the-earth is your church? Or has your salt turned to basalt?

I especially appreciated the call to memory of the prophet Jeremiah’s words to the exiled peoples of Jerusalem as they were being carried away captive to Babylon; “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters.” In other words, become a part of that community. (p.180)

“Incarnants are cheerful pessimists: We see the world as it is, and as it could be, while enjoying the world as it is, and as it could be.” Len Sweet (p.183)

This chapter is extremely thought-provoking. Culmination of the MRI model (missional, relational, incarnational) is in this final part of the book, So Beautiful. It is a call to action and I have found it very difficult to stay focused on the words without my mind wandering…interacting, and considering how my routines and attitudes might change in order to be more malleable and useful in the advancing of God’s Kingdom. I want to be a builder and beautifier of the Bride that is Christ’s…His Church.

This Incarnational section borrows the structure of part two, rephrasing and representing the “idea” of incarnation over, and over, and over, and over, and over again…living in-not of; becoming part of culture, but not losing identity In Christ. Metaphors, analogies, and various other illustrations flood the pages appealing to the senses and learning style of almost any reader. The inclusion of so much diversity and description in mission stands as a clarion call to Be the Church; almost begging the rhetorical question “what else is there to do in life; or what is life really all about?” This is it: allowing permission to the Spirit of the Living God to live in and through us in order to redeem, reconcile and restore all of creation. This, to me, is incarnation.

A secondary and very critical point underscored time and time again is the “not a formula and no templates allowed” directive. We must be fluid… “liquid” -living water. What works as an embodiment of Christ to the world in which you have been planted may not (and probably will not work) in a different culture and context. As I was reading this part of the book, another book came to mind that I have been enjoying this year, Ancient Christian Devotional. An excerpt I read just a few days ago from that book illustrated in a very beautiful and thoughtful way this “liquidity” of person and mission. Hear the following words from Cyril of Jerusalem:

“One and the same rain comes down on all the world, yet it becomes white in the lily, red in the rose, purple in the violets and the hyacinths, different and many-colored in manifold species. Thus it is one in the palm tree and another in the vine, and all in all things, though it is uniform and does not vary in itself. For the rain does not change, coming down now as one thing and now as another, but it adapts itself to the thing receiving it and becomes what is suitable to each. Similarly the Holy Spirit, being One and of one nature and indivisible, imparts to each one his grace ‘according as he will.’ The dry tree when watered brings forth shoots. So too does the soul in sin, once made worthy through repentance of the grace of the Holy Spirit, flower into justice.” (Catachesis 14.12)

In the end, we are gardeners. Actually, in the beginning, along the way, and in the end…we are gardeners. Gardeners are what we are created to be. Isn’t it amazing how many parables and illustrations are used in the Bible and elsewhere to describe our relationship with our Creator? It amazes me and it makes me take notice. I will close this portion of my book discussion with a few final quotes and a plan to wrap up this review by the close of the weekend. Consider the divine gardener metaphors as you read these closing comments from So Beautiful…

“He who seeks the Bird of Paradise must put down a little seed.” -African saying.

“No matter who you encounter in life, Jesus has preceded you and prepared the way for whatever you are to accomplish. But the soil must receive the seed, or there will be no harvest. The seed must be planted into soil. You can’t get crops out of rocks. ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,’ Jesus said, ‘it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ We must die to self to rise and bear ‘much fruit’ in the grace and love of God. And the smallest of seeds can become the greatest of shrubs and bear the greatest fruit: ‘The kingdom of God…is like a mustard seed.’” Len Sweet (p.211)

…i Crucified – yep.

   Send article as PDF to

Wild Goose Chase (pt. 1)

I received my copies of Mark Batterson’s  Wild Goose Chase a few days ago. My schedule prevents me from reading it through in just a couple of sittings, so I plan to post a multi-part review in order to be as comprehensive and “fresh” as I possibly can with my opinion and reflections of the book.

First impressions: I was fearful after just the first couple pages that this was going to be another “Great Adventure” book in the same flavor of Sacred Romance, Waking the Dead, or Your God is too Safe. Don’t get me wrong, those are all great books (and I love the authors), but out of the blocks I was beginning to think “oh no…I’ve chased this goose before.” My thinking changed very quickly although the first couple of chapters were familiar territory for me. The theme of “Yawning Angels” and “Goose Bumps” (chapters one and two) involves boredom, complacency, apathy (maybe), and passion…God-sized passion. I don’t want to put out anything that would be construed as a spoiler in my review, so I’ll try not to get too detailed especially since I recommend you reading it in its entirety for yourself. Also, be advised that Mark is posting excerpts on his blog where you can download these for your own “taste tests.” Anyway, back to my review… Read the rest of this entry »

   Send article as PDF to