Colbert takes on Xmas

more about "Colbert takes on Xmas", posted with vodpod

My boys will be home for Christmas

It will be a year this Christmas since we have seen our two boys. Their flights are booked, and we are getting ready!!!! Gosh, we miss them so much. In all ways they make us proud. It has been our blessing never to have been alienated from them or experience the trauma of an adolescent period of rebellion. We have been blessedly spared those heartaches.

Of course, we know they are really coming home to eat!!!! I have checked my home equity line of credit to make sure we can sustain provisions for the couple of weeks they will be here. Sharon is trying to build up energy reserves for the constant demand of their holiday eating. You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it.

We are thankful Ben has been spared the fires of southern CA. It was really bad this summer. he was on 15 minute notice to evacuate. The fires now are about 30 minutes away. He can see the smoke. I just don’t get people living in these fire alleys. What are they thinking? Of course, taxpayers pick up the tab for lower interest loans.

Beware of a religion without “holdfasts”

Some comments from a sermon by CH Spurgeon.

Beware of a religion without holdfasts. But if I get a grip upon a doctrine they call me a bigot. Let them do so. Bigotry is a hateful thing, and yet that which is now abused as bigotry is a great virtue, and greatly needed in these frivolous times. I have been inclined lately to start a new denomination, and call it “the Church of the Bigoted.”

Everybody is getting to be so oily, so plastic, so untrue, that we need a race of hardshells to teach us how to believe. Those old-fashioned people who in former ages believed something and thought the opposite of it to be false, were truer folk, than the present timeservers.

I should like to ask the divines of the broad school whether any doctrine is worth a man’s dying for it. They would have to reply, “Well, of course, if a man had to go to the stake or change his opinions, the proper way would be to state them with much diffidence, and to be extremely respectful to the opposite school.”

But suppose he is required to deny the truth?

“Well, there is much to be said on each side, and probably the negative may have a measure of truth in it as well as the positive. At any rate, it cannot be a prudent thing to incur the odium of being burned, and so it might be preferable to leave the matter an open question for the time being.”

Yes, and as these gentlemen always find it unpleasant to be unpopular, they soften down the hard threatenings of Scripture as to the world to come, and put a color upon every doctrine to which worldly-wise men object.

The teachers of doubt are very doubtful teachers. A man must have something to hold to, or he will neither bless himself nor others.

Bring all the ships into the pool; but do not moor or anchor one of them; let each one be free! Wait you for a stormy night, and they will dash against each other, and great mischief will come of this freedom. Perfect love and charity will not come through our being all unmoored, but by each having his proper moorings and keeping to them in the name of God. You must have something to hold to.

Heard NT Wright last night

A group from our church went into boston to hear NT Wright at Park St Church. Went in on the T (train), got some pizza at Faneuil Hall, and headed on over to the church on the Boston Commons. It was Park Street’s fourth service of the day and the place was still relatively full. Mostly college kids. This church has done a wonderful job of renewal and aggressive outreach. It’s not easy for churches in the city to remain vital and full.

They left plenty of room for NT Wright to speak – praise the Lord. It would have been a shame to have invited him from all the way across the Atlantic and then filled up the service with ‘business as usual.’

I found delight in Wright’s references to the world of history, thought and philosophy. It’s not too often that one hears of Epicurean world views, Derrida, Plato and Latin phrases in a sermon. During he question and answer time it made me to want to ask a question about Aristotle. You don’t get to talk too often about this in church. He definitely stayed away from the typical evangelical formulas of three points, a story for each point and a schmaltzy finale. My mind was engaged. Those familiar with his work would have been delighted had he engaged a bit more about the more controversial of his views, particularly his view of justification. And I would have loved to hear him talk more about the crisis of unbelief in Anglicanism in England and the US.

Wright is one of the few evangelical leaders who could appear on the Colbert Report and do a little back and forth. I can’t imagine John Piper doing this. And, mentioning John Piper, he will also be a guest preacher at Park St during their bicentennial year. How different a preacher he is. In our morning service we played a video highlighting Piper’s teaching on the prosperity gospel, about a 5 minute clip. Piper goes for the jugular. He engages me, though I cannot keep up with his constant intensity. It seems at times too imbalanced to me, too unsustainable for real health. He is a Janis Joplin of preachers, with a rawness (not incivility) that can create a fundamentalist version of the hot head. It feels good in the moment but can deplete rather than be restorative.

It was good to be with Coasters in another worship service, out of our normal loop.