Weekly Meanderings, 15 February 2014

Last updated on: February 15, 2014 at 12:06 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 15 February 2014 2014-02-13T19:00:03-06:00 Scot McKnight

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My, Lego ads tell a story:

So what did Rachel Giordano have to say about the LEGO news van when it pulled up to her medical office in Seattle via Amazon and UPS? First things first: she told me what it was like to be a child model for the Ford Agency in New York City, posing for print ads and performing in commercials. On the day she went into the studio to make the 1981 LEGO ad, she was given a set of original LEGOs and an hour to play with them and make her own creation—it is what you see in the ad. (And those were her own clothes—the comfy jeans and blue striped t-shirt and sneakers without a hint of pink that she wore in off the street.)

The news van kit struck her as really quite different. She does not have children, so the change in LEGOs represented by the Friends line was startling: “In 1981,” explains Giordano, “LEGOs were ‘Universal Building Sets’ and that’s exactly what they were…for boys and girls. Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package. In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”

Flat-out beautiful:

Our task as a church is to heal the broken places that resulted from the fall and show the world God’s intentions.

One of these broken places is the equity and dignity between men and women.

Our task is to be the best of citizens; it is a part of the Christian world view that leads to equality of all individuals… and to the opportunity to fulfill God’s call on our lives. The secular culture has it right when it comes to opportunity. Christianity’s reticence comes from not doing the harder work of holistic exegesis on the few passages that have consistently determined our stances. This is not a slippery slope; it is getting in line with God’s initial design and standing against the power structures of sexism. The issue, as I see it in 1Timothy is competence and character… just as it should be for men. Eldership needs to be carefully defined; teachers need to be properly vetted. But according to Paul race, class, and gender are not to be issues.

Where are the germs? Cleveland Clinic’s slideshow is revealing.

An act of grace on my part, I admit. Loved this story of our arch rivals’ manager, Mike Matheny:

DP | Mike, you are in this position now: you’re a Christian, and you have players who are not Christians. You have staff and people you work with who aren’t Christians. How do you go about your life as a Christian man in those relationships?

MM | First, my faith has been clear and open. Every year at spring training I explain to my guys I stand for certain things as a follower of Christ. But you’re never going to hear me preach this at you or hold you to any sort of moral obligations that I try to hold for myself.

That opens a door so when they ask me a question, they know the foundation of the majority of my answers. It opens some great opportunities. There are eyes on me non-stop, and important conversations pop-up. We talk a lot more about life than we talk about baseball. We’re together so much that we have an opportunity to go through life together. I believe that’s one of my main jobs. Part of that is being available when those questions of faith come up.

But once again, I don’t believe my job is to force feed these guys anything. So I give them their space. But those opportunities come because life happens. I think people see these jerseys on these guys, and they think they’re superhuman and above some of the trials and issues that come to people. They’re not.

Roman traditions, not all of them well known today.

The “centre” of British evangelicalism is… Andrew Wilson:

Because the new centre of British evangelicalism is Holy Trinity Brompton.

Here’s how it works. People become Christians on Alpha, which usually introduces them not just to the gospel, but also to a particular form of middle-class, charismatic, non-confessional, low church, generic evangelicalism (which is increasingly representative of the sorts of churches they will find in their area, whether they are Anglican or not, including mine). If they’re young, they go to Soul Survivor (teenagers) or Momentum (students and 20s), led by fellow Anglican, charismatic, non-confessional, low church, generic evangelical Mike Pilavachi. If they’re not, they go on HTB’s marriage course, recently trailered enthusiastically by theGuardian, or perhaps their parenting course. If they’re involved in worship leading, they connect with Worship Central somehow, either through a conference or through their online resources, and this gradually influences their corporate singing times in an HTB-ish direction (partly because several of the UK’s leading Christian songwriters are based there). If they want to go deeper in prayer, they link up with Pete Greig’s 24-7 prayer, now also based there. If they want to go deeper in the scriptures, they can download the hugely popular Bible in One Year app for free, and use that. If they’re involved in leadership, of any sort, they can go to the Leadership Conference at the Albert Hall, where they will hear from Cardinals and Archbishops, business leaders and former Prime Ministers, as well as Megachurch pastors of the Warren/Hybels sort. If they feel called to lead a church themselves, they can get trained at rapidly growing St Mellitus College – recently the subject of an extremely positive op-ed in the Telegraph – and then go church planting. I doubt there’s a church in the world whose programmes, conferences and courses are more widespread than HTB’s.

[Which means he has to define “centre,” which he does well, with more than a clever discussion of Tom Wright:]

So here’s what I mean by the “centre” of British evangelicalism. I don’t mean the “centre” as in the centre of a wheel, whereby all spokes flow in and out of HTB. There are sizeable pockets of evangelicalism, especially in the black church and in more confessionally wired and Reformed-leaning circles, in which Alpha isn’t used and the rest of HTB’s courses and conferences makes very little impact. I mean “centre” as in the centre circle of a football pitch: the reasonably large, obvious bit in the middle, as far away from all extremes as you can get, from which it is possible to influence most of the game, and which, if you want to play with everyone else, you have to interact with on a regular basis. In that sense, I think, HTB is clearly in the centre, and far more central than any other institutions or individuals I’m aware of. (While Tom Wright, probably the most influential individual in the British church, affects the way huge numbers of British Christians think about scripture, he has far less impact on their practice – corporate worship, church planting, prayer, church leadership, evangelism, and so on – than HTB. If you wanted to push the football field analogy, he’s more like the fourth official: the one everyone looks to after they’ve made their decisions, to see what he thinks they should have done).

They’ll be some disagreements here, but here’s a great slideshow on the Best Athletes in College History.

DNA of American Indians:

The DNA of a baby boy who was buried in Montana 12,600 years ago has been recovered, and it provides new indications of the ancient roots of today’s American Indians and other native peoples of the Americas.

It’s the oldest genome ever recovered from the New World. Artifacts found with the body show the boy was part of the Clovis culture, which existed in North America from about 13,000 years ago to about 12,600 years ago and is named for an archaeological site near Clovis, N.M.

The boy’s genome showed his people were direct ancestors of many of today’s native peoples in the Americas, researchers said. He was more closely related to those in Central and South America than to those in Canada. The reason for that difference isn’t clear, scientists said.

The researchers said they had no Native American DNA from the United States available for comparison, but they assume the results would be similar, with some Native Americans being direct descendants and others also closely related.

The DNA also indicates the boy’s ancestors came from Asia, supporting the standard idea of ancient migration to the Americas by way of a land bridge that disappeared long ago.

Oft ignored in the West, the Ukrainian church has emerging concerns:

In the early 1980s, the man who would become the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church practiced Christianity in what was known as the “underground church.”

For Ukrainian Catholics, whose nation was the largest satellite under the former Soviet Union, life with the absence of their church lasted more than four decades. Many priests, members of the church and its supporters were sent to Siberia and imprisoned or killed. Fearing the staunch nationalism of Ukrainian Catholics, Soviet leaders understood that church leaders would not turn on their own parishioners or succumb to Soviet policies.

Now, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk is walking in the footsteps of his predecessors. His church, which has a membership of 5 million and is an arm of the Roman Catholic Church, is firmly standing for the sovereignty of Ukraine and to mitigate the pressure of Russia’s influence in their nation’s political affairs.

Speaking exclusively with TheBlaze last week after attending the National Prayer Breakfast and meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, the 43-year-old Shevchuk spoke of his nation’s fragile future and what he was asking of the Obama administration.

In November, President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign an economic agreement with the European Union and instead agree to a $15 billion loan and lower gas prices from Russia sent millions of Ukrainians into the streets and set off the three-month-long protests still underway. The fear of Russian influence for Ukrainians runs deep, and many families tell stories of what life was like under former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, when more than 400,000 Ukrainians were sent to Siberia, Shevchuk said.

The big concern of the Ukrainian people is that it could be possible, in this moment, [to have] some sort of restoration of the former Soviet Union,” warned Shevchuk, who speaks nine languages including English.

The crisis is not only a matter for Ukraine, he said. If Russia succeeds in developing stronger ties, drawing Ukraine further from the Western world, “not only Europe but the whole world could be on the edge of [a] new Cold War.”

Lasers, cockpits and the law:

(CNN) — Pulsating light bursts into the cockpit of a plane thousands of feet in the air, filling it with seething brightness, and blinding the pilot and copilot. What sounds like a cheap reenactment in a hokey UFO reality show has become everyday reality in the United States. Laser attacks on aircraft occur an average of 11 times a day, the Federal Aviation Administration says. Powerful handheld lasers are affordable and widespread, and some people are making sport of shining them up into passing aircraft. The trend seems to be catching on….

The FBI wants them to stop and is offering reward money for tips leading to the pranksters. And it’s making some arrests. Though it takes work to track down the source of the laser, it can be done with a helicopter, a dispatcher and squad cars. The FBI has posted YouTube video of one such bust. It has detained mostly teenage boys and men in their 30s, who face a possible five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. And the FBI is not the only one posting a bounty on them. For the next two months, 11 U.S. cities and San Juan, Puerto Rico, are offering up to $10,000 for information leading to arrests. Attacks are particularly common in New York and Los Angeles, and they often obstruct the work of the targeted pilots.

Derek Vreeland on Cyprian’s treasures:

The value in listening to voices from the past, like Cyprian, is first and foremost to learn. What were the points of emphasis in this church, at this time in history, in this geographical location? What am I missing in how I teach and train new disciples in my day? What issues were Christians then facing 1700 years ago? How is it similar or different to what we are facing now? Learning from the ancients is an acknowledgment that we living in the present day do not have it all figured out. I was surprised to note how many of these instructions (precepts) seemed so applicable today. Here, for example, are some that stood out to me:

# 26 That it is of small account to be baptized and to receive the Eucharist, unless one profits by it both in deeds and works.
(It seems like their church struggled with people “going through the motions” of worship and not necessarily living it out just like ours.)

# 32 Of the benefit of virginity and of sexual restraint.
(I continue to say sexual ethics may be the most difficult part of Christian discipleship in our generation. Maybe we are not alone in the struggle of leading people to rethink/reform their sexuality in the light of Christ.)

#35 That God is patient for this end, that we may repent of our sin and be reformed.
(The patience of God, the necessity of repentance, and the centrality of Christian formation…all dominate themes in how I do discipleship.)

#39 That the example of living is given to us in Christ.
(The essence of Christian discipleship is we follow Jesus by doing what he does. We find our life in his life. The Spirit is at work reforming us so our life looks like his life.)

#49 That even our enemies are to be loved.
(“Enemy-love” which is the cornerstone of Christian nonviolence was carried on in the church two centuries after Christ. Jesus loved his enemies from the cross, choosing not to retaliate. We are to do the same.)

# 58 That no one should be made sad by death, since in living is labor and peril, in dying peace and the certainty of resurrection.
(No reference to “going to heaven” and “avoiding hell” anywhere in Cyprian’s instructions. The great hope after death is the expectation of bodily resurrection.)

#84 That the beard must not be plucked.
(Ok, so some of the instructions seem rather cultural than deeply theological…although I am pro-beard!)

#94 That the Eucharist is to be received with fear and honor.
(The only worship-related or sacramental elements mentioned by Cyprian are baptism and communion. Here holy communion was held in high esteem.)

# 100 That the grace of God ought to be gratuitous.
(We cannot say enough about grace. This line would make a great T-shirt by the way.)

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