A Christian Worldview from Silicon Valley

There was a time when baseball had its own season, and so did football and basketball and hockey. Recently all of those overlapped, and all four of those team sports were playing real games at the same time. Like selling Christmas stuff in October, that’s just wrong.

The end-of-the-year holidays in the U.S. used to be more separated—we would finish with one before we started the next. Back then, Halloween came clearly before Thanksgiving, which came clearly before Christmas. This year I saw Christmas decorations, including artificial trees, for sale before Halloween. Thanksgiving, I fear, may get squeezed out all together.

I suppose that makes sense, because the retailers (except grocers) don’t get much revenue from Thanksgiving, so the earlier they can start selling for Christmas, the more revenue they have an opportunity to make.

One thing that hasn’t changed about holidays, though, is that different Christians view them in various, and often conflicting, ways.

The two most important holidays on the Christian calendar, at least from my perspective, are Easter and Christmas. I want to celebrate the resurrection of my Lord, and I also find it desirable to celebrate his birth. Even the world celebrates them both, although the world gives more emphasis to Christmas–especially the whole gold, frankincense, and a shiny new Lexus thing.

There are not a few Christians, however, who perhaps lose much of the joy and opportunity (more…)

On my way to Bible study this morning I heard the news that an atheist group at the University of Texas in San Antonio was giving porn to anyone who would give them a “holy text,” including Bibles, copies of the Qur’an, and perhaps other books of a similar nature.

I thought about flying down to San Antonio to see if I could turn in my 9th edition The Macintosh Bible, but I suspect only the Mac faithful would think of it as a holy text.

Turns out this started back in 2005, and that year it made a big media splash, with Tucker Carlson of MSNBC both reporting on the story and debating a bit with the then president of Atheist Agenda, Thomas Jackson.

This year it seems that several folks took umbrage at this little annual parlor trick, from feminist groups to Muslims to Christians, and protests  and protesters made their presence known in the area. That made the news, and there wasn’t much else happening today, so this tempest in a teapot story made it all the way from Texas to my radio in California.

The best suggestion I’ve heard about how to respond came from Keith Mitchell, one of the elders at PACC, who said we ought to trade Bibles for porn. No doubt someone somewhere in the country, perhaps even in Texas, is already doing that.

But what I found most curious is that people would willingly give up light to receive darkness. Most people, it seems to me, are trying to find their way out of the dark, not descend more deeply into it. Of course my perspective may be skewed by the fact that I’m a preacher, but don’t you find it the same?

In the 2005 interview with Mr. Carlson, Mr. Jackson said they thought of it as “…trading something that’s very, very bad [a Bible] for something that’s only moderately bad [pornographic material].” Apparently even his goal was to move people toward more light, but if so this really is a case of the blind leading the blind, about which Jesus said, “And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

When that happens, we’ll be here with a rope, ready to pull them both out into the daylight.

(Disclaimer: this post, like all of our posts, is the work and opinion of the author, not the church.)

Since this blog is about Worldview, I’m compelled to say that in my view, the world has become far less attractive in the past few years.

Not on God’s part, of course, because he is the ultimate artist, but mankind has uglied the place up, and one of the chief contributors to this blight on the beauty surrounding us is Toyota, whose Prius spoils the landscape seemingly everywhere.

My wife, whose aesthetic senses are very well developed through decades of international travel to evaluate temporary living environments (also known as hotels), can barely stand to look at the things. But because she lives in an area where people have the weird idea that driving a Prius is a good thing, she is forced to look at them over and over.

Last Friday we were driving home from dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant when she noted three of the offenders in a short space. “Yes,” I said, “there are a lot of them around.” We were less than two blocks from our house at the time, and she said, “I’ll bet we’ll see 10 of them before we get home.”

“Impossible!” I said. And we immediately started counting. (more…)

Summer is here, and the kids are out of school. Yay. Oh, the bliss.

Yesterday, I planned to stay home and get things done around the house. Let the kids OD on Star Trek reruns for a change. But toward the end of the day, my 12-year-old son got an attack of the whines. “Let’s get out of the house. I need to get out of the house and go DO something!” Oh really?

Today, I planned a day of errands, mostly to get the same son prepared for his backpacking trip next week. We were away from home for hours as we attempted to get Boy Scout medical forms signed by doctors; purchase hiking pants, neoprene socks, freeze-dried dinners, walking sticks, and duct tape from a variety of shops; sign up for swim lessons at the desired pool; have a Chipotle’s lunch to revive our flagging energy; squeeze in a haircut for my daughter; and reward everyone with a stop at the library and the pizza shop.

Guess who had this to say at several points along the way: “Let’s please go home. I just wanna go hooooome.”

Even when we get what we wish for, it’s rarely what we truly want. There’s always something more, better, different, and just slightly out of reach that would make us perfectly happy — right?

Along with several thousand other Christians, I spent much of last week in one of America’s most beautiful places, Malibu, California.

I was there for the annual Pepperdine Bible Lectures, a week-long series of classes, talks, singing, meetings and fellowship that is both amazing in its scope and glorious in its setting. There is content, too, but I’ll write about that in another post.

From the cafeteria patio at Pepperdine, I had a more than 200-degree panoramic view of the deep blue Pacific ocean, I was comfortable in shorts every day and every evening, and the skies were constantly clear.

But did that serve to clear my mind or cloud it? Enjoying a warm breakfast while overlooking the ocean is relaxing and inspiring, but does it make for better thinking, or does it create a warped perspective? How much — and how — does where we are impact our worldview?

Christians generally regard trust in God as a good thing.  Even U.S. currency says “In God We Trust”, reminding us to depend on eternal rather than earthly treasures.

But how much do we really trust Him?

Our ladies’ Bible class recently studied Acts chapter 1:

23So they proposed two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. 24Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen 25to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” 26Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.

In our Sunday class, Lewis observed that we worry less about driving a car than flying in an airliner even though airline travel is proven to be safer, largely because in a car we feel more in control.  Are we as Christian decision-makers relying too much on human abilities:  researching the facts, weighing pros and cons, asking others’ opinions, going with our gut feelings?

Maybe we’re really a bunch of control freaks fooling ourselves about trusting in God.  Maybe those who cast lots are on to something the rest of us have no clue about.

I’m not saying we should ask God what we should wear each day, but we could look to Him far more often than we do.

Jeremiah 17:7  
”But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him.

What difference would it make if we trusted Him more?

In his review of a book titled On The Side of The Angels, Paul Starr wrote this opening paragraph:

Partisanship is resurgent in America, and hardly anyone likes it. To say that American politics has become polarized along party lines is tantamount, for most people, to acknowledging that something has gone wrong with the country. And, indeed, the differences between Republicans and Democrats are less easily bridged than in the past: the two parties now stand for different worldviews, not just different policy positions.

Is there really a Republican worldview and a Democratic worldview? If so, I wonder what they look like. The book Professor Starr (Princeton University) was reviewing is about partisan politics, and it is the contention of the book that America has become more partisan in the last few decades, to the detriment of the country.

Whether or not that is true, I find it interesting that we can — or at least someone can — identify a worldview for Republicans and one for Democrats. And the reason it interests me is that it causes me to ask this question: Could they do the same for Christians?

Often times the answer is no, because while differences between the two major political parties may be “less easily bridged than in the past,” many Christians seem to be working hard to see that differences between Christianity and the world are more easily bridged than in the past. It is Christians, I contend, and not those “of the world,” who are trying to blur the differences. And that neither honors the commitment of Christianity nor helps the world.

Partisanship may be a bad thing for the political system in America — in fact if members of any political party care more about their agenda than they do about the country, they will be poor servants of the country. But the error on the side of Christianity, I contend, is that its members have not been partisan enough.

The great Samuel Johnson famously said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

I wonder how Dr. Johnson would have characterized the several million people who publish various thoughts on the Internet under what are called “blogs” and pass them off as writing? Are they writing for money, are they blockheads, or are they perhaps writing for some other reason?

All of the above are true. Some write blogs for money, some for fame, and some write because they can’t help but write. None of those make the writing good, except in this way: if someone has a gift, a facility, a talent for writing and uses it, even in writing a blog, that is good because the gift is being used. The worst way to treat a gift is to fail to use it. No one has to convince Barack Obama of that.

The president-elect of the United States seems to have a gift for marketing and public relations, especially when it comes to marketing himself. It is far from clear to me that he has a gift for leading, a gift for making tough choices, a gift for grace, or even a gift for change, because all of those things get swallowed up in the marketing.

President-elect Obama has now created a web site dedicated to — you guessed it — more marketing and p.r. for President-elect Obama. He’s already started campaigning for his second term (in fact he started doing so publicly in his speech on election night) and I’m confident we’ll continue to see that (and more) on a regular basis for the next two months or so. By that time he’ll have to actually start doing the job of President and stop campaigning for a while, and I fear it will be a shock to his system.

So I’m just a little concerned: I want Obama to be an excellent president, and I’m praying for that. And I want him to use his gifts in ways that honor God. But it seems to me that his best gift — self promotion –  is not a gift with which that is easily done.

In the sense of foretelling the future, I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. Eli Stone can’t say that, but I can.

There have been times, though, when I have — and I know this sounds very strange — “known” what was going to happen in the future. Call it insight, call it deductive reasoning, call it a hallucination, or call it a lucky guess, but I have known. You might even call what I have known “prophecy,” but I stick with my earlier statement about neither nor the son of.

Was Minister Louis Farrakhan acting as a prophet when he called Barack Obama “the Messiah?” To be fair, his statement might have meant that Jesus (the Messiah) was speaking through Obama. The proof he offered for his outrageous statement, in either case, was that young people were listening to Obama. Young people also listen to rap music, Shrek, and Big Bird, but I digress.

My point is that I foretold Obama’s ascendancy to the Oval Office years and years ago, probably during the 1996 DNC. (I used to live in Illinois, and the boy made a splash when Carol Moseley Braun was the first African-American woman to win a senate seat and he was credited with helping her do so.) Had I been a betting man, I would have known to call Ladbroke’s and get down 10 quid on Obama to win. Then on January 21, 2009, I could have retired. Instead, I’ll be continuing to work and pay taxes, only now I’ll probably pay more of them.

Obama himself is prophecying a “changed” future. That’s pretty easy — there is a new sheriff in town, so change seems likely — but what is tough is figuring out where the change will occur. One place that might happen is within Obama himself.

In fact I’d predict that, except that I am not a prophet.

Keith loves his shirts, especially the ratty, comfy ones. I’ve given up suggesting he throw them out or convert them to rags because he just says no, or, when pushed, “I prefer not.” I can’t fire his speaking coaches, Nancy Reagan and Bartleby the Scrivener. And I can’t just throw his stuff away without permission; I have my own integrity to maintain. What to do? I’m hoping a new strategy, admittedly passive aggressive, works: I leave the shirts hanging in the garage, where they stay in perpetuity, and he doesn’t see them because they are not in his closet. (Not gone, just “missing.”)

So today I put my plan in action. I went through our laundry limbo, the place where shirts are hung up upon their removal from the dryer. Instead of grabbing the whole lot to put away, I inspected each specimen for ragged collars and cuffs to leave behind. Mwoohahaha: I am woman, hear me roar.

Two men’s shirts stood out from the others. One, with a collar so frayed that only an outer layer of fabric remained attached, had been a $35 LL B–n catalog purchase for Keith’s birthday. It had shown significant signs of wear within a few months of acquisition (though two other Oxford shirts of exactly the same model and vintage still look great after a couple years’ wear). The other shirt, a Ralph Lauren Polo long-sleeved button-up, had been given to me 25 years ago, by my friend Patti Strawn, who scored it working an on-campus special sale; it still looks pristine.

I would have guessed that both of these shirts were high quality, but I would have been wrong. The costlier one was a complete waste of money (well, except that Keith really, really, really liked it), and the freebie would have been well worth the high retail value.

If you don’t have experience with fill-in-the-blank, it can be hard to judge what is treasure and what is trash. You’ll see what I mean at any garage sale. Sometimes you just have to hang out with something for a while before it becomes apparent what is what. But when you figure it out, for heaven’s sake — no, for your own sake — take out the trash!

Jesus had his own way of figuring out what had worth. As he put it,

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (NIV)