Very Fond of Each One of Us

I just finished reading The Shack by William P. Young for the second time.  I found the story more compelling and the theology even richer this go around.  I didn't have a child when I first read the book, but now that my daughter Ashlyn is around the same age of the tragic girl Missy, I had to work hard to not empathize too much with the protagonist, Mack.  I can't imagine what it must be like to experience that kind of loss.  But we all know that someone somewhere suffers immensely every single day.  One of the big issues raised in the book is how people of faith come to grips with the tragedies and injustices of life.  Where is God in natural disasters?  Why does he sometimes intervene in the face of human evil, whereas other times he restrains himself?  A lot of other theological issues get analyzed in the course of the narrative, but I'll let you read it (or reread it) yourself.  One thing that stands out more than anything else in the book is that we have a God who is very fond of each one of us.  We were made for  relationship with this God and one day, though not always evident from our point of view, the seemingly senseless stuff of our world will finally make sense.  Amen. - Shay   

40

Forty is a very Biblical number.  It rained 40 days and 40 nights during the flood.  The children of Israel spent 40 years wandering around the wilderness.  David reigned as King for 40 years.  After his baptism, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wild to fast for 40 days before he began his ministry.  Usually, 40 was representative of the complete and total time an event lasted, whether or not it was literally and exactly 40 days or years. 

Our family has 40 days left in Ireland.  For us it is literally 40 days until we complete the entirety of our sojourn on this little green isle.  A lot can happen in 40 years or even 40 days.  Lord, make it rain, but not literally! - Shay

Get Real

On Thursday evenings, a number of Dubs (and wannabe Dubs...I am one) have been getting together in a local coffee shop to read and discuss the first epistle of John.  In this beautiful, spiraling prose that borders on poetry, the author keeps stressing that faith in Jesus Christ is grounded in the reality of God's Son taking on a real flesh and blood body in the man Yeshua of Nazareth.  The writer of this epistle is battling an early form of Gnosticism which denied certain, if not all aspects of the incarnation.  This ancient heresy claimed that true spirituality is found through non-material means, most explicitly realized in a special form of knowledge (gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, hence the term Gnosticism).  This teaching was elitist and led to divisions in the Christian community.  It's emphasis on the ethereal had the tendency to disengage its practitioners from the realities of life in one extreme direction, while allowing unhindered moral license in another (if the material world doesn't count then what one does with one's body is inconsequential).  Neither of these two extremes properly expressed the ethos of the Christian faith and by denying the foundational tenets of life in Jesus, the Gnostics had cut themselves off from the very source of true spirituality.  John rightly described them as "antichrists".

I've heard that there are a few Gnostic churches springing up in our modern world.  I find this disturbing, but not surprising.  Over the past few years I've met a number of people who embrace neo-gnostic philosophies when it comes to spirituality.  But I also think our present world is in danger of disengaging from reality as much, if not more than the ancient gnostics in other areas of life.  For instance, how often do people miss out on meaningful conversation and relationship with the person(s) sitting right in front of them?  It's not uncommon to walk down the busy city streets in Dublin and pass dozens of people who are glued to their smartphones while (sort of) navigating other pedestrians and traffic.  Many of the cars these people are dodging have drivers who are just as preoccupied with their mobile devises.  As dangerous as this may be from a purely physical perspective, it poses even more social and spiritual risks to our society.  The Matrix was prophetic, but instead of people being unaware that they're "plugged in", many are simply voluntarily signing up for a life of (virtual) reality.  But I can't keep from thinking that this (un)real life isn't as rich and fulfilling as it could be.

First John provides some answers for us I believe.  The theme of the entire letter is summed up in 4:7-12, "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.  God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us."

It all begins and ends in God - it all begins and ends in love.  How is God love?  In his very being, he exists in loving relationship: Father, Son, and Spirit.  We as humanity are made in his image - made for loving relationship.  God so loved us that despite our sin and brokenness, he entered into the mess of human reality.  He not only made us in his image, he took on our image in the real life man, Jesus of Nazareth.  Those who embrace this Jesus and choose to live life through him have the opportunity to not only receive the love of God, but to pour that love out to others.  This requires us to live and engage with life the way that Jesus did - to get down and dirty; to get real.  It's not easy.  Sometimes it would be nicer to escape to the various worlds floating out there in cyberspace.  But just as true life wasn't found in the ethereal world of the Gnostics, but in the tangible day to day encounters of people expressing love for one another in action, so the abundant life promised by Jesus, I believe, more often is manifested in our day to day encounters with real people and (un-virtual) reality than through the online world.  I pray Christ's body will embrace the opportunity to offer an alternative lifestyle to the world around us.  Let's get real! - Shay

Presence

In exactly 7 weeks from today our family will be boarding a plane bound for home.  I didn't begin to actively keep up with the amount of time we have left in Ireland until a few weeks ago.  Now it's hard not to think about it.  I've always tried to be fully present wherever I'm at, but at the same time, I've always been a dreamer with a heavy dose of hope and optimism thrown in for good measure. 

Not only am I beginning to imagine a future back home in the States, the past few weeks have provided  me with the opportunity to look back on our time in Ireland.  I've had the opportunity to do a lot of reflection lately.  It's been said that we live our lives going forward, but we understand them looking backwards.  I think there's a lot of truth in that and in fact, I think we are far more prepared for the future when we have a good perspective on the past.

So over the next 7 weeks as I engage with people in Bible study, theological reflection, and in communal worship, I'll be balancing the past, present, and future.  I am so thankful that we have a God who is fully present to us in all three of those arenas. - Shay 

Walking Around the City

It's been a long wet winter, but suddenly Spring has sprung in Dublin over the last couple of weeks.  In my free time I've been walking around the city (and beyond), soaking up the sun.  I don't think its an accident that Easter/Passover happens each year as winter dies and summer draws ever-so-nearer.  The in-between time is simply gorgeous; full of hope, life, and dreams about the future.  About ten days ago I was due in Dundrum for a Bible study at 7:30, so I decided to walk from Raheny, rather than take the car or public transport.  I walked most of the way back too, nearly 20 miles total, and I would have walked 500 more if I had had the light and a slightly stronger right knee (my old school injuries sometimes come back to haunt me).  We have less than 75 days left in Dublin, but I plan to make the most of them in the meantime.  Here are some reflections from my walk the other day.

This Glorious Spring Day 

With the sun moving briskly towards its apex in the sky, I saunter down, the Howth road into town,
     taking a long-cut through the park to the Clontarf coast;
Near St. Anne's and the sea.
With glorious solar beams shining radiant rays - radiating smiles on faces, walking to and from 
     places.
A fair view through Fairview, a cut through Connally to the docks;
Descending on the city centre and then over to the canal.
Two Polish lads sipping Tyskie by the calm running water.
The leaves on the trees trying to bud - striving, yearning to bloom, churning towards eruption;
Not long to come.
Spring is bursting with life, oozing fertility.
The sun burning down on the well-worn path,
My feet treking to the cadence, to the beat of the music in my ears;
The wandering of my mind,
Not knowing what I'm searching for, not sure of what I'll find.  
Round the bend to Ranelagh, then down to Dundrum.
The Dublin Mountains inching ever closer with each foot, with each step taken.
I'm soaking up the sun - addicted to its rays like so much coffee, so much caffeine coursing through 
     my veins.
I don't want to stop - don't want to reign in my emotions;
Don't  want to put a full stop or a comma or a semi-colon on this glorious Spring day - 
Don't let it fade, don't let it go away... 
                                                                       - Shay 


  

 

The Poetry of Faith

I don't see life in black and white, that would be too dull.  I prefer to see life and all its complexities in a hundred shades of various colors; in different hues and tints.  It's far richer and warmer that way - brimming with hope and possibility.  But some of the colors are angry and some are depressing.  Some are so frustratingly difficult we may struggle to even identify them.  Due to the Scandinavian blood pulsing through my veins, in many areas of life I would prefer things to be neat and tidy.  But similar to the pictures Ashlyn brings home from school, life's colors run over the lines and the marks are rough and jagged - like so much modern art.  Faith doesn't remove one from all of life's chaos and contradictions, it engages life in the midst of all the mess.  Faith is much more like poetry than prose.  I began sketching the ideas for the following while sitting in a hospital in Germany back in November.

The Poetry of Faith

The poetry of faith...
Asking the inconvenient questions.
Not settling for the all-too-obvious answers,
Because not everything happens for a reason.
If it all made perfect sense, where would the sense of wonder be?
Is to lose that which you never knew still a loss?
For some things in life there should never be a season.
There's a place where free-will, love, and evil collide - 
...it's messy. 
  
 - Shay

      

Baptism: A Believer's Response to the Gospel

Some friends and I gathered at O'Neill's in Dublin last night for our weekly chat about faith and life and how those things intersect (and sometimes collide).  Last night's discussion centered on the topic of Christian baptism.  There are a variety of positions, theories, theologies, etc. regarding all things Christian and baptism is no exception.  Because we're living on the backside of 2,000 years of church history, there's a lot of confusion about this topic.  The easiest way to cut through the confusion is to go back to the earliest sources of information, namely the New Testament itself.  The scriptural witness of baptism, its mode and its meaning is quite extensive.  Here are a few examples of baptismal teaching:  

Matt 3:13-17 & 28:16-20; John 3:1-18; Acts 2:29-47 & 22:6-21; Rom 6:1-14; 1 Cor 12:12-13; Gal 3:23-4:7; Eph 2:1-10, 4:1-5:27; Col 2:8-3:17; Titus 3:3-8; 1 Pet 3:13-22.

But any discussion of Christian baptism obviously begins with Christ himself.  Without the Son of God humbly incarnating himself in the man Jesus, living a complete and faithful life in full obedience to God the Father, dying an undeserved, yet completely effective (to deal with the sins of the world) death on the cross, and then through the power of the Spirit defeating death by rising to new bodily life on the third day, any talk about baptism is meaningless.  But the man Jesus was and is the Son of God, died and rose again, so a discussion of the meaning of Christian baptism is worthwhile indeed. 

The reason that Christian baptism is a worthwhile discussion is because from the earliest days of the church, baptism was the normative way in which individuals, and often, groups of people responded to the proclamation of the gospel.  It was never perceived as a work to be done nor as something that merited anything on behalf of the one submitting to it, but rather was seen as the means by which one accepts God’s gracious gift of the forgiveness of sins and the indwelling of his Holy Spirit.  It was the moment when one began the new life of Christian discipleship and it was the point in time when that individual was added to Christ’s body, the church, the new Israel, the people of God.  One might say that we are saved by grace through faith and that this process begins at baptism.  It certainly doesn’t end there.  It ends (or begins again in a radically new way) in the new creation when God brings all things to completion and makes all things new. 

God is a gracious God.  He graciously forgives his children for their sins and so it is reasonable to assume that he also forgives us for our doctrinal misunderstandings as well.  Due to 2,000 years of sometimes poor baptismal (as well as other doctrinal) teaching, many sincere believers are genuinely confused about the meaning of and the importance of believer's baptism.  When Paul reminds his readers about faith, hope, and love, he’s quick to remind them that the greatest of these is love.  This is important for us to remember, because in the modern Christian world there are many areas in which sincere believers have honest disagreements and in a variety of ways we all have massive misunderstandings.  As we seek to better understand our faith, thank God for his grace along the way.  And as we come to a greater awareness of God’s will, may he grant us all the humility to submit to his word in our lives. - Shay