Tag: literal

An Inmate’s Mission (dispatches from Prison Ministry)

FCI schuylkillAs some of you know, I’m ministering at the Federal Prison: FCI Schuylkill. 

1,330 male inmates. Our class has 31.

I gain so many insights from my brothers there. So, it seems a terrible waste not to share some of them here.

We just finished up on lesson on Finding Your Mission.

We talked about what Jesus’ mission was. We talked about our own missions.

Some of them hadn’t thought of the concept and surely didn’t like it apply to them behind bars.

… if you are in prison, it’s really high time you find your mission…

But, that’s true for all of us. 

I’m learning right along with them. The pressure is higher to learn lessons to help and heal you when you live behind bars, but the lessons themselves tend to be quite the same.

So far, the ground is fertile and the spiritual thirst is fervent!

The hearts of the those who choose to come on Monday’s is “the good soil”!

(If it was half of this at church the world WOULD be on fire with it!)

MISSION for inmates?

In reading the verse that is essentially Jesus’ mission statement (and also a prophecy from Isaiah) I realized that I have the same mission. It came into sharp focus.

“I’m setting literal captives free with the Good News.”

Jesus came, taught, brought and lived the Good News, died, rose, and then…left.

He didn’t stay where everyone would surely try to force him to be king (or pope, or whatever). Everyone still wanted to be free of the Romans. Except for a few of his students and friends and a few family members, everyone would be missing the point.

The Jews were captives of the Romans. That didn’t change when Jesus was here or after he left.

The Kingdom of God doesn’t free you in that way.

The invitation was (and is) to be free from the captivity of sin and death and the mindsets that keep us imprisoned (or in the case of my brothers…it puts you in an actual prison).

The Good News was and is the hope, the reality, the plan fulfilled: that God came to reconcile us to him, forgive us, and make things right. Little by little we carry it out and remake the world.

Little by little we provide the impact of authentic justice in the world.

It starts, for me, in jail along side my brothers. As these men transform, so will their world and the world, at large.

What a joy it was to tell my brothers that they are truly missionaries with a genuine mission behind the bars!

They are light in a dark place.

No time is wasted.

They are NOT just doing their time; The are making up for wasting it.

Their mission has begun, and no one can stop it. Once you’ve been set free, you are free indeed!

Jesus is our model and so is his mission.

Are you doing time too? Or are you on your mission?

Luke 4:14 

Then Jesus returned to Galilee, filled with the Holy Spirit’s power. Reports about him spread quickly through the whole region.

15 He taught regularly in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.

16 When he came to the village of Nazareth, his boyhood home, he went as usual to the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read the Scriptures.

17 The scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where this was written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,     for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,     that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, 19     and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.[f]”

20 He rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the attendant, and sat down. All eyes in the synagogue looked at him intently.

21 Then he began to speak to them. “The Scripture you’ve just heard has been fulfilled this very day!”

If you can help us, we need it. Badly. Monday nights 6-8:30. Let me know!

If you can’t volunteer, here’s another way you can help!

Scripture as literal: Genesis 1

As promised, I’m sharing some of my current class on Evil (and the Justice of God) here at the blog.

The sound system, or lack of one, was poor in class, so I wanted to make this available to my class and the rest of you.

 

Tell me what you think.

 

Heaven is For Real, but is it as silly as they say?

On the recent topic of Heaven (and soon, Hell) here at the old blog, I must bring up the baffling and sappy rendering of the heaven that we hear about quite a bit in conservative North American Protestantism.

If a boy nearly dies, and then tells you details about heaven exactly as you have taught him, what’s next? I’ll tell you what, a best seller (for people who need a spiritual vitamin B12 shot for their excruciatingly literal translations of biblical passages, and who pay no mind to historical context, linguistic idioms, let alone Hebrew and Greek).

Now, I realize young children tell silly stories. That’s part of their job. The trouble comes when the stories get massaged and coupled with a near-death tragedy to elicit a faith response from the more gullible among us. I do want to think the Burpos are on the up-and-up, but something stinks.

I heard Pastor Burpo and his little boy on a television program. What a cute kid. Some of the story seemed amazing, if not miraculous, but I got a bad whiff of something when Colton (really his dad) detailed heaven as, well, super lame.

People get around on their huge wings. Okay, I hope that’s not how it works. Boobs have been bad enough. The proverbial pearly gates make an appearance. The word “wicked trite” comes to mind, but maybe I’m just too cynical. A blue-eyed Jesus wears a purple sash over his white robe, and rides a giantic rainbow colored horse. Okay, bad wardrobe, and how could the genuine biblical Jesus from the ancient Semitic region possibly possess a double recessive gene for blue eyes? (And don’t say, because both Mary and the Holy Spirit had blue eyes, ’cause I’m not buying it.)

I don’t think Jesus rolls like that. But, I give the kid credit: An elephantine rainbow horse is pretty cool. Of course, I would have to know if it pooped rainbow too. That’s awfully critical info. God (the Father) has a body and sits on the throne, with Gabriel serving as a kind of right hand angel man on his left side, in a smaller throne…as we might expect, right? It all sounds like a bad Star Trek episode. Well, sort of.

Reader reviews often complain that only 3 pages of the book speaks of heaven in any details. But the book has done well. Very well. It spent 52 weeks on the bestseller list, and the family has since produced a children’s picture book, and you guessed it, and movie rights have been purchased by Sony. Pretty sweet deal!

Possible movie title: “Heaven is for Reel: One Boy’s Near-death experience as re-told by his literalistic dad”

When the parents are asked about authenticity, their answers center on referring to the hope the story brings. This begs the question, is the point of the book to create hope in a plenty of people already know what they want heaven to be, instead of a faithful depiction of God (who, by the way, is non corporeal) and the Bible? (Which would be far more confusing.) Both can’t be true.

If you want to read a copy for yourself, and decide, here it is.

But, I offer you some thoughtful reflection on the the topic from arguably the foremost New Testament scholar alive today.

What Rapture? How American End-Times Invention subverts…

Mass chaos as Christians are sucked into the sky.

Loud and sustained sounds used to send me into shutters with shivers up my spine. Once in a while they still do, especially if they resemble a brass instrument. Since I live near a firehouse, my overall sensitivity has decreased. How odd…Why the fright, you may ask?

Two words:

Trumpet Blasts

(signaling the Rapture)

The 1980s Mark IV series of fundamentalist apocalypse films are to blame.
The titles are as follows:
1. A Thief in the Night
2. A Distant Thunder
3. Image of the Beast
4. Prodigal Planet

Have you seen any of them? $99 will buy you all 4 here. Horrible stuff.

In more recent times, the Christian mega hit book series by Tim LaHaye, and subsequent movie trilogy based on his books Left Behind, claims to portray the Biblical predicts in the so-called Last Times.

All three movies will cost you just under $20 here. The extra bonus, if you grew up in the 1980s, is seeing teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron acting again.

(I really thought I’d married him one day. In middle school, I wrote him 2 fan letters and everything. Pffft, his LOSS!)

 

Here’s the real problem:

What many, if not most, of us don’t realize is how recent and uniquely North American this pseudo-theology is. It’s popular just in North Amercia, and hardly heard of nor accepted elsewhere in Christianity, globally, let alone historically.

Here is a quick rundown of it. It’s recent doctrinal misappropriation: The Rapture and Second Coming stuff. (Spoiler Alert: It started “coming to life” rather recently…in the 1700s).

I deeply appreciate NT Wright’s comments called Farewell to the Rapture. It’s a short read.

He shows how Paul’s language colorfully used social, religious, and political metaphors of the particular time. Rapture advocates have wildly attributed his intriguing language to extremely specific and literal occurrences and world events–present and future.

Regarding eschatology (the study of end times), Wright says,

“Understanding what will happen [in the future] requires a far more sophisticated cosmology than the one in which “heaven” is somewhere up there in our universe, rather than in a different dimension, a different space-time, altogether.”

Basically, this invention which is American-flavored End-Times theological subverts God’s current work of redemption in us. It obscures God’s nature, as well, and what God is “up to.”

The Harold Camping rapture nonsense brings this misunderstanding into glaring and ghastly light. How were his followers helped by his understanding of God? What will they do now that they haven’t raptured? Sad.

Even the attempts to map out the book of Revelation on any sort of timeline are terribly misguided. The book reads like an acid trip. Revelation barely made it into the Biblical canon. Martin Luther, who wanted the Bible in the hands of all Christian laity, said it should be included in the canon, but only if it was never used as teaching material.

Nevertheless, I’m quite fond of the Revelation 22:17. It sums it all up for me! For more encouragement, try my friend Ed’s related post here.

How do you view the Book of Revelation?

The prime focus for believers should be the event and meaning of the cross, then and forever. It should be about how this truth of God’s work and grace becomes incarnational reality in our everyday lives. Let it never be degraded to who will get sucked into the sky one day, and when.

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