Winning film awards

Director Nathan Clarke is the founder of Fourth Line Films and his recent documentary Wrestling For Jesus is winning awards at film festivals all around the country.  I’m not a wrestling fan so for me considering it a ministry for Jesus is odd and a little unsettling.  However, Clarke seems good at inviting us into something that is quite different from what most of us experience.  I’m intrigued. Wrestling for Jesus is the story of man from rural South Carolina who started a professional wrestling league and how his passion and vision for it are tested when his life begins to falter.  Other films by Clarke include “Family” a story of young gang members in Central American prisons and “Neighbors” the story of two men in Nigeria caught in a community wide conflict. 

It just so happens Clarke is a Christian but I love how he asserts that “Christian” is a bad adjective for art.  He says, “I have no fear of judgment by my Christian peers.  I actually feel more fear about judgment from the secular world that this is just another piece of Christian propaganda.  Ultimately I wanted to create a piece of art that would be taken at face value, that would be judged because it’s a piece of art, not because a Christian created it or didn’t create it.  I believe God has made us to create things — that is what I want to do.  What I want is for people to watch the movie  and talk about that, not talk about me.  I just want to create something that causes people to stop, think and maybe consider their life a little more deeply.”

Keep up the good work Nathan Clarke!

Christmas Love and Logic

“The idea that God, if there is a force of logic and love in the universe, would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty…a child…I thought: Wow! Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. God incarnate. There it was. I was sitting there… tears streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of God picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.” [Bono: in conversation, NY: Riverhead Bks, 2005].

How many lives can you live?

Spoken-word poet Sarah Kay tells how when she was little she wanted to be a princess ballerina astronaut but soon learned she would never be all three.  We have only one life to live — however through the power of story Sarah asserts we can experience many different lives.  I heard someone recently ask, “Where are the poets today?”  Well, here is one and I think she is quite good.

Season of giving?

The holiday season is often refered to as the “season of giving.”  But is it? I’m not just talking about giving to ourselves, friends and families, gifts we most likely don’t need – but giving to those who are truly desperate, marginalized, forgotten, abused or hungry?

Sometimes our response to the idea of generosity is “I’d like to give but right now I [we] don’t have enough money or resources to spare and until we’re doing better financially – we can’t be expected to be generous to others – we just can’t do it.”

Yet as Christians, the Apostle Paul calls us to “carry each other’s burdens and in this way fulfill the law of Christ.”

The famous preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards responded to this mentality with the following comments….

“In many cases, we may, by the rules of the gospel, be obliged to give to others when we cannot do it without suffering ourselves…If our neighbor’s difficulties and necessities be much greater than our own, and we see that he is not like to be otherwise relieved, we should be willing to suffer with him, and to take part of his burden on ourselves; else how is that rule of bearing one another’s burdens fulfilled?

If we are never obliged to relieve others’ burdens, but when we can do it without burdening ourselves, then how do we bear our neighbor’s burdens, when we bear no burden at all?” [Jonathan Edwards, Christian Charity, The Works of Jonathan Edwards]

With this in mind, can we say this is truly the “season of giving” or “carrying other’s burdens?”

the irony of communication

In our age on of over-communication [email, texting, facebooking, etc.] it is sadly ironic how good communication remains hard to achieve. Expressing thoughts, ideas and feelings through messages launched without needing to look into the eyes of another person leaves something to be desired. Hitting the “send” button may not always be the best decision.

A good friend of mine recently wrote a blog entry about this topic. You can read it on her website.  It’s entiled “Dear Google – Can you make us more relationally responsible people?”

Quite a view

We recently stood on top of Mount Nebo and looked out over the plains of Moab, Dead Sea, Jordan river and the land of Israel.  It was the same view Moses had when he “climbed Mount Nebo from the plains Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land —Then the Lord said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.” [Deut 34:1-4]

Mt Nebo 2011 Ray, Margie, Victoria and Sophia

I’ve wondered similar things about…

The Chairs That No One Sits In

You see them on porches and on the lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.

The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning -
it passes the time to wonder which.

I give up

Although I’ve been avoiding it for a while now, I suppose the time has finally arrived for me to, reluctantly I must admit, read Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins. My rebellious nature more often than not refuses to get caught up in the frenzied trends and hot topics of Christian sub-culture. Whenever there is a big what to do about some book, movie, church or Christian leader, I tend to wait until all the blustering is over — then consider the issue objectively while the rest of the crowd moves on to the next new thing.
Unable to isolate myself from all the ecclesiastical chatter, I’ve come to realize this much about the book. Some readers applaud Bell’s writing as an attempt to stir up critical thinking and discussion on the theology of hell. Some welcome and embrace what they believe to be his Universalist position [everyone goes to heaven]. Others condemn him a heretic who denies a clear and particularly important biblical doctrine. Who is right and who is wrong? Is Bell saying what many are accusing him of?
As I prepare to cross the proverbial Rubicon and crack open its pages, two “if” questions loom heavy in my mind.
If…Bell is proposing a Universalist position, why is that? What has he read, uncovered or finally understood about the nature of God, the teaching of Jesus and the Scriptures overall that nearly 2,000 years of Church history and critical exegetical thinking have missed? The matter is not simply about love but also about truth. Love without truth never wins.
If… in spite of what Bell and others may or may not say about it, you and I believe Hell is a reality — how does that reality influence our daily attitudes and actions? Could it be that some who are the strongest proponents of Hell’s reality fail to live as if it is a reality? Is it possible the only time Hell has a practical impact on even the most theologically orthodox and conservative Christians is when its existence gets challenged?
I don’t know exactly what Rob Bell thinks or what he has written but I know how many Christians have responded. Once I’m done reading I can then enter into the dialogue or whatever is left of it. But one way or another, I’m committed to the admonition of the Apostle Paul who said, “Let your conversation be always full of grace.”

grace

by Mo Bella Russo

Because of his love and grace, God takes the empty canvas of our lives and creates beautiful things.  These paintings were created in the few minutes we discussed this on Sunday.  The song “Beautiful Things”by Gungor was featured while our artist was at work.

by Mo Bella Russo

All this reminds me of the Apostle Paul’s words, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation;  the old is gone, the new has come!”

Two Poems

One of the books I’m currently reading is Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins. With the death of a friend this week and the memorial service today, I can’t help but think about several of his poems that reflect on the brevity of life. Here are two of them.

Memento Mori

It doesn’t take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.

Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

Even the Church of St. Anne will do,
as structure I just noticed in a magazine–
built in 1722 of sandstone and limestone in the city of Cork.

And the realization that no one
who ever breasted the waters of time
Has figured out a way to avoid dying

always pulls me up by the reins and settles me down
by a roadside, grateful for the sweet weeds
and the mouthfuls of colorful wildflowers.

So many reminders of my mortality
here, there, and elsewhere, visible at every hour
pretty much everything I can think of except you,

sign over the door of this bar in Cocoa Beach
proclaiming that it was established–
though established does not sound right–1996.

As Usual

After we have parted, the boats
will continue to leave the harbor at dawn.
The salmon will struggle up to the pools,
one month following the other on the wall.

The magnolia will flower,
and the bee, the noble bee –
I saw one earlier on my walk–
will shoulder his way into the bud.