A "Shy" baptism

Note how God sneaks in a word for Shy during the prayer time...at 1:40, Tarzan's cellphone rings to the tune of "I Want to) Walk in the Light."

Perfect!
As is the Spiritaneous post-baptism dance you see at the end:

The Seven Signs: part 2

(Note the previous post:

The Seven Signs: part 1),

and for those dying to hear the song "Signs" by the Five Man Electrical Band, video is included!

We had a great time today exploring the second sign of John,
but first we reviewed the concept of "signs"in John,
noting they are all about their sign-ificance and sign-ature place in the gospel.

I make the case that the whole gospel is embedded in what John calls the "first"sign (water into wine at Cana). They way the word "first" works in Greek is not necessarily to feature first as in "first of a series," but "first in order of importance,or maybe best translated "only," not first."

This becomes clear in Matthew 6:33, famously translated and put to song and memory as"Seek (ye) FIRST the Kingdom of G0od...all all these things will be added to you."

But that translation doesn't add up, and does not compute with the context.

Notice we rea not told to seek the "other things "second" and "third," In fact, it's clear in context we are not to seek them AT ALL...they are given to us as a by product of seeking the ONE THING (=the ONLY thing), first (that is, foremost)....or EXCLUSIVELY.

"The Kingdom of God is not the first item on our priority list,"Joel Green says (in a great little book), "it IS our priority list."

So in a sense the first sign is the only one we need.

And the other signs are all commentary on;differing angles and windows on it.

Study it well.

Yet the other six signs are also a key part of the puzzle-picture John has embedded in the book for us.

We compared the seven signs to the Burma shave signs (read upon these here, here,and a postmodern version of them here ), where each sign is part of a series, and the last one is the punchline, revelation,or climax.

This is true in John's case as well. The definitive seventh sign is the raising of Lazarus.

Which is the same as the first sign of wine.

We noted that is common to connect the first sign of John to the first plague of Exodus
(water into wine vs. water into blood) and the last sign of John with the last plague of Exodus (death of the firstborn vs.death of Lazarus)..... the Old Covenant plagues are undone in the new.

In a way parallel to Pentecost reversing Tower of Babel, the signs of Jesus in John reverse the curse of the plagues.

The Greek word for sign John uses is σημεῖον / semeoin (Nowadays we talk about studying semiotics...People (semioticians) like Leonard Sweet (and our former 3d webmaster, Chris McDonald) have reminded us how crucial semoitics is to our day and age).

We often think "We are not supposed to ask for signs."
True, the synoptics cast a negative spin on following signs and not Jesus. But John uses sign in a very different and sign-ificant way. The signs are revealers of who Jesus is, and a summons/challnge to enter them and find deeper faith and meaning. Jesus even chews out those who followed him just because he fed them., and not because of the signs (John 6:26).

The whole point of signs is that they are moments when heaven and earth intersect with each other. (That’s what the Jews believed happened in the Temple.) The point is not that they are stories which couldn’t have happened in real life, but which point away from earth to a heavenly reality.
– N.T. Wright John for Everyone, 21.

We talked today about the fact that the word "mission" or"misionary" appears nowhere in the Bible..

Huh?

In fact, contrary to what we often hear, the church does not have a mission..

It's the mission that has a church!

Or as Len has..better..said: "It is not the Church of God that has a mission in the world — it is the God of mission who has a Church in the world."

Mission is so fundamenhtal and inextricable to who we are..that it is assumed.

Len posted a wonderful series "Do you think missiology precedes ecclesiology, or it is the other way round?"

More on that here.

And froma great book, "Delighting in the Trinity":

The word 'mission' comes originally from the doctrine of the Trinity. The word mission comes from the Latin word mission which means 'to send.' It was the word Christians used to talk about the sending of the Son and the Spirit into the world. Only in the sixteenh century did Christians start using the term to describe sending people to spread the gospel.

The mission of the church has its roots in the missionary character of the triune God. God is not only God in himself (the 'immanent Trinity), he is also God-for-us (the economic Trinity..)

We experience the Trinity through the sending of the Son and Spirit..the Trinitarian community is not exclusive.
-Delighting in the Trinity

(More posts on the Trinity here.)

It's often been said"God only has one son..and he was a missionary". But all who are in Jesus are in the Trinity, and thus inevitanly sent,missioned co-missioned and commissioned.

Jesus was sent into the world as a sign of God, and we are sent by the Spirit as a sign of Jesus.

It's semiotics , baby.. read the signs.

We rea the signs, as Isiah says.

And we are sent signs.

We spent some time comparing the first and second (Healing of the nobleman's son, John 4:39-54) signs as John has gone out of his way to link them ..
they are the only two signs he has enumerated for us, and they are interlinked and hyperlinked in multiplex ways.

We noted several fascinating relationships between the first two signs, as we:

The first was in a Jewish setting, the second gentile.

The first was a miracle while Jesus was present, the second while he was absent.

The first involved ordinary people, the second nobility.

We pause here to suggest part of the sign-ificance of the signs is to remind us that Jesus came for Jew and gentile, poor and rich...that is for all...

Both the first two signs are followed by folks becoming believers...hmm.



Both were in Cana after a return from Judea..

We notice an intriguing similarity in both signs in that Jesus seed reluctant to perform signs but when pressed and pressured by a persistent person ( Mary in the first, the nobleman in the second), he relented and repented. (Be sure to check out the Brother Andrew book we mentioned,"And God Changed His Mind") Of course part of the reason is as Leon Morris has "Once he performs a a sign, he is on the the road to the cross." It wasn't technically his time yet, but he cannot not respond to persistevering, bold, chutzpah, hutzpah and faith.
Chronos seems to become kairos when we pray like Mary and the nobleman.

We have been following our UK brother Tony Maude's sermons and blogs ..as he is a few weeks ahead of us in his own series on seven signs :

We might think of the signs in John's gospel as signs of the kingdom. In turning water into wine, Jesus shows us the abundance of the kingdom of God. He shows us its joy. He shows us its richness. He shows us that God's kingdom is much, much better than the best that our earthly kingdoms can provide.

In this second sign we see the power of God's kingdom – power to give life and to heal our sicknesses. But we see much more than that. We see the response that we should make when God's kingdom breaks into our world. We are invited to respond with faith, to take Jesus at his word:

"... these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." (John 20:30-31) In this way, we enter into the kingdom of God, become part of it and receive a treasure of immeasurable worth.

Tony Maude

Tony covered lots of helpful ground that we didn't have time to, particularly about the meaning of the second sign and its connection to Samaria..read his whole post (excerpted below) ponder it and post him a comment here.

Oh, two promises I made. First, the video from the George Stroumboulopoulos (the Oprah of Canada) show.
Maybe The Shack was written just so author Paul Young could go on TV to tell Stroumboulopoulos what God thinks about him! See the amazing moment at 12:20ff:



Secondly,I also promised to follow up from two weeks ago, and link you to this next story.

It's found on page 234 of "Floods Upon The Dry Ground,"one of my texts for my upcoming Church History class at the Bible College(join us as an auditor, course website here):

"(It happened) nduring the annual Muslim pilgrimmage to Mecca in 1991, when a number of Nigerian Muslim mullahs were praying inside the Grand Mosque, the holiest place in all Islam. Suddenly, 'Jesus appeared to them and declared he was God.' {George Otis quote}.The Mullahs were converted to Jesus.

George Otis and the Sentinel Group and its "Transformations" videos are the most accessible sources for keeping updated on this amazing season we live in..

Related: bee sure to read this story (click)" from "Stories from the Front Lines"..it has to do with a n ine year old girl raised Lazarus -like from the dead (How's that for a sign?)

We spent the rest of the morning praying for physical (and other types of healing).

Stay tuned for the updates...Post them below..

It's a sign.

Famous failures

The Seven Signs: part 1

picture credit

I am excited about our new series on the 7 Signs of John's gospel; Sunday we introduced the first: water into wine.

I will aim to actually post some follow-up afterthoughts each week. The audio will be on the podcast box; right hand side of page.

We talked Sunday about the uniqueness of John's gospel, when compared with the synoptics (Matt, Mark and Luke). It seems that anytime four people are in a room, three may have affinities, but the fourth may be on a different page altogether (maybe the John of the Beatles is an example..or me in my birth family (or married family) of four. One way John is different in that he is a deep theologian/philosopher and a mystic-heart. He rearranges..sometimes radically...the Jesus material. Here he is literally"on another page altogether." We found this Sunday in that all three synoptics place Jesus' "temple tantrum" towards the end of Jesus'public ministry; while John intentionally framejacks it, and drops it at the beginning of his book.

Right after the first "sign." On purpose. Folks shared some thematic reasons this might be.

This paragraph below is lifted from the Wikipedia article on John; it is helpful, but the last sentence is bunk/basura/skubala (I may edit it, and see if it my edited get edited. For a response to this kind of "all or nothing scholarship , see "'Interrupting Jesus,' Interrupted")

Seven Signs

This section recounts Jesus' public ministry.^[2] It consists of seven miracles or "signs," interspersed with long dialogues and discourses, including several "I am" sayings.^[3] The miracles culminate with his most potent, raising Lazarus from the dead.^[3] In John, it is this last miracle, and not the temple incident, that prompts the authorities to have Jesus executed.^[3] Jesus' discourses identify him with symbols of major significance, "the bread of life" (John 6:35), "the light of the world" (John 8:12), "the door of the sheep" (John 10:7), "the good shepherd" (John 10:11), "the resurrection and the life" (John 11:25), "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), and "the real vine" (John 15:1).^[3] Critical scholars think that these claims represent the Christian community's faith in Jesus' divine authority but doubt that the historical Jesus actually made these sweeping claims.^[3] The teachings of Jesus are so different in John from those found in the synoptic gospels, that since the 1800s scholars have understood that only one of the two traditions could be authentic, and they have unanimously chosen the synoptics as the source for the teachings of historical Jesus.^[11]
-link

If you want John's "number," it's 777.
His gospel is embedded with seven signs, seven "I am" statements, and seven narratives. This kind of structural analysis can be overdone; but here it would seem vital to John's purpose and theme...especially the signs and "I am"s:

Seven Signs:

1. Turning water into wine (2:1-12)

2. Healing the noblewoman's son (4:46-54)

3. Healing the man at Bethesda (5:1-47)

4. Feeding the 5000 (6:1-4)

5. Walking on Water (6:15-21)

6. Healing the Blind Man (9:1-41)

7. Raising of Lazarus (11:1-57)

Seven "I AM" Statements:

1. I AM the Bread of Life (6:35)

2. I AM the Light of the World (8:12)

3. Before Abraham was, I AM (8:58)

4. I AM the Good Shepherd (10:11)

5. I AM the Resurrection and the Life (11:25)

6. I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life (14:6)

7. I AM the True Vine (15:1)

What's intriguing is the signs are found in the first half of the gospel (The word 'sign" is used dozens of times in the first half, and only once in the second half (and then, only to summarize the purpose of the signs..20:30-31). The seven "I am" statements, and the seven narratives rea more evenly distributed throughout John's work of art. This is so obvious that noted scholar has called John 1-12 "The Book of Signs," an chapters 13-21 "the Book of Glory":

The first of these is a series of sign-miracles, coupled with discourses, which reveal to us something of who Jesus is. The second is an extended treatment of Christ’s death and resurrection, together with his final teachings related to the topic of his death and the glory which should follow.
link

.

NT Wright helps us grasp John's vantage point:

I feel about John like I feel about my wife; I love her very much, but I wouldn't claim to understand her. I didn't get the job.

In style, emphasis, structure — in all the things that make a book what it is — John stands out from the rest. With Paul we are in the seminar room: we are e are arguing the thing out, looking up references, taking notes, and then being pushed out into the world to preach the gospel to the nations. Matthew takes us into the synagoguewhere the people of God are learning to recognize Jesus as their King, their Emmanuel. Mark, as we shall see, writes a little handbook on discipleship, Luke presents Jesus to the cultured Greek world of his day. John, by contrast, takes us up the mountain, and says quietly: 'Look — from here, on a clear day you can see for ever.' We beheld his glory..'

John does not describe the transfiguration, as the other Gospels do;in a sense, John's whole story is about the transfiguration. He invites us to be still and know; to look again into the human face of Jesus of Nazareth..with our awe and bewilderment reaching its height, to the point where we realize that the face is most recognizable when it wears the crown of thorns...When John says, 'We beheld his glory', he is thinking supremely of the cross...

I want here to explore three out of the dozens of strands which go to make up this extraordinary tapestry. The first one is all about signposts. John is a canny writer; he gets us to do half the work. In one of the early scenes in the Gospel, a passage much beloved of preachers at weddings, he tells the story of the wedding at Cana, and of Jesus changing the water into wine. John's comment, at the end of the story, hooks into the prologue, and at the same time points us forwards into a sequence of signposts.



...John starts off as though he's writing a new Genesis, a new creation story. And so he is. He is talking us through the seven signs of the new creation...
-NT Wright,link

Elsewhere, Wright says:

The whole point of signs is that they are moments when heaven and earth intersect with each other. (That’s what the Jews believed happened in the Temple.) The point is not that they are stories which couldn’t have happened in real life, but which point away from earth to a heavenly reality.
– N.T. Wright John for Everyone, 21.

We talked quite a bit about running out of wine at a wedding was a huge problem in tht biblical culture. Jesus's "frivolous"miracle really kept the family from shame and restored their honor.
Some helpful background info on this is in the Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John,
and The Bible Background Commentary, two vital resources, both readable online.

Some other fascinating, but sometimes farfetched, resources for grasping the symbolism and strucure are "The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center" and "Mystical Christianity: A Psychological Commentary on the Gospel of John"

Oh, here is the section from "The Brothers Karamazov" where the Cana wedding scripture is read at the priest's funeral.




Bonus: I found that Tony Maude in the UK is a few weeks ahead of us in his series on the seven signs, and he too has been posting us he goes. His post on the first sign is here.

God's last cigarette..he's late again

The Fray, "You Found Me"

You Found Me - The Fray

I found God
On the corner of First and Amistad
Where the west
Was all but won
All alone
Smoking his last cigarette
I said, "Where you been?"
He said, "Ask anything".

Where were you
When everything was falling apart?
All my days
Were spent by the telephone
It never rang
And all I needed was a call
It never came
To the corner of First and Amistad

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lyin' on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why'd you have to wait?
Where were you? Where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me

In the end
Everyone ends up alone
Losing her
The only one who's ever known
Who I am
Who I'm not, who I wanna be
No way to know
How long she will be next to me
[ The Fray Lyrics are found on www.songlyrics.com ]

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lyin' on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why'd you have to wait?
Where were you? Where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me

Early morning
The city breaks
I've been callin'
For years and years and years and years
And you never left me no messages
Ya never send me no letters
You got some kinda nerve
Taking all my world

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lyin' on the floor
Where were you? Where were you?
Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lyin' on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why'd you have to wait?
Where were you? Where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me
Why'd you have to wait?
To find me, to find me

keeping old models.. and blowing them up.

It's about keeping old models..


and blowing them up.

Kingdom adventure

Hey all. Please pray about joining us for this Kingdom adventure this Saturday. Read Rhonda Thomas's note below (read more of their recent story at her blog), see address at bottom of page, and let me know, so we have some idea of a head (AND PIZZA) count:


Ok first of all this is a very hard thing for me to do, I almost never ask for help. As most of you know my husband spent the past year in the hospital, actually admitted 20 times. We were pretty sure at one point he wasn't going to make it. But praise God we found a doctor at Stanford who figured out what was wrong and three days before Thanksgiving he had surgery {a tracheotomy, allowing him to breathe} and he is on the road to being well.

As I'm sure you can imagine our lives were spent in crisis mode quite often and it took all my husband had in him just to stay employed and provide for his family. Something he did an incredible job of! But everything else took a back seat and we are seeing that the work ahead of us is overwhelming, if not impossible to do by ourselves. We have had many many offers of help but haven't really been able to see clearly what we needed help with as we have just been focusing on learning to live this new life we have now and adjusting to the medical challenges and regaining health and strength.

So what do we need? Well....we have rented a dumpster and we are hoping to rally our friends to come help out on Saturday May 2nd from 10 am till it's done. We need the back and front yard cleaned up and hauled off! We could easily fill the dumpster and lots of trash bags. We don't have a lot of yard tools so if you have some you don't mind sharing that would be great!

We will provide pizza and plenty to drink and some of the biggest hugs you could ever imagine {Brandon has become a master at hugs!}. If this is something you think you could help with please message me here or call .. Our family would be eternally thankful and my husband will sleep better knowing he does not have as much responsibility and an just rest. Did I say that man amazes me? We are very blessed!

Thank you all my loved ones for all your blessings and support!!!

Love Rhonda~





4397 N Van Dyke Ave
just NE of Ashlan and West

MAP

the subtitles will help..a must see

shred on guitar on every song

David Crowder Band video for worship teams:

Jack wants to shred on guitar on every song:

"How to Fit in at any church"

Seniors Choir Does Hip Hop

"Lost Moments in Church History" amazing videos

"Lost Moments in Church History"
Episode #1: My Church is Better
:



"Lost Moments in Church History"
Episode #2: Preaching the Gospel:



"Lost Moments in Church History"
Episode #3: The Church Service/We Need a Building:


Episode #4:
Don't Argue with a Pastor's Wife:


Episode #5: Vacation Bible School:


Episode #6: Church Attendance:

Dennis

I found this 1990 pic of Dennis headed into a women's room in San Francisco.
(long story, has something to do with taking a former rock star turned evangelist to SF for the first time).

Note you can click the photo to blow it up really big, and prove it's not photoshopped; to print is for a really cool wall poster; and to check out the very stylish 1990 shorts.

Just wanted to make Dennis laugh today,
and to get the rest if you connected to the website for Dennis and Katie's son, Jerry, so you can pray for this family in light of Jerry's accident.
We are having what Dennis calls
"an old fashioned prayer meeting over there."
Please join us.

St Rich on ex-exile

In this clip, the late great
(this was one of his last concerts...note how much he talks about dying here)
Rich Mullins
(see the documentary on his life here)
speaks to issues we are speaking to recently on Sundays
(coming OUT OF exile, Scripture prooftexting, the honesty of Psalms)
in a hilarious and prophetic clip:



Continued here

Trivia question: probably only Keltic Ken knows this:
Rich's drummer the last several years was the amazing
(wish he could play the drums!!)Aaron Smith,
for many years with the 77s ( a band we talk a lot about; a band who can "Pray Naked")
and..
(here's the trivia):
as a kid was drummer for the hit "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" by the Temptations.

you add the caption

spiritual formation questions

No, I don't smoke..but this IS the church ashtray.

Last year, Len interviewed me ...and some others...about spiritual formation.

For you localites..We'll be looking at this topic soon in my leadership class...and likely on Sundays.

For what it's worth, here is my interview..
but how about YOU ...anyone here...answer some of Len's questions...I'd enjoy that.

• what is spiritual formation to you?
• how have your views evolved in the last ten years or so?
• what do you personally practice to be formed.. personally .. communally?
• what further practices attract you, might you eventually add?

Talk on these below in the comments section, or link us to your own post.

bench outside the box

"By planting the flag outside the walls and boundaries of the church, so to speak, the church discovers itself by rallying to it---this is mission."

-Hirsch, "The Forgotten Ways," p 236

This beautiful park bench;
and the house behind it,
is the highlight of our neighborhood.

Actually, the saints who live in the house behind the bench are the highlight of the neighborhood,
which is precisely the point.

Those Third Day saints who have been to our house and hood will recognize it; the family visited us last Resurrection Day to share the mom's prophetic art.

Which the bench also is.

The bench was placed on the prominent corner lot as a prophetic act/blessing/gift/gatekeeper/mission to the neighborhood. I have seen high-schoolers (clean-cut as well as gangster-looking), and senior citizens sitting on it; taking a break on their walk home; and journey through life.

Even though my family and I walk by it almost daily, I consider it almost too sacred to sit in.

Folks stop for a smoke, a prayer, to people-watch, to drink gin...

The Tongan and I once were pretty sure we caught some angels sitting on it one Sunday morning.

It is a Godsend.

It is surely the most prayed-over bench in our city.

Maybe even the most blessed pew in town.

It might even be the postmodern version of Finney's "anxious bench."
"Tear the curtain down; Pull the altar to the ground.." as St. Mike Roe and the 77s once prayed in a church..uhm bar I was visiting...2:20ff in this clip.

Of course the bench has to be screwed into the ground; the original bench was stolen.

But that didn't deter the mission, or the gatekeeping family.

This is church "as God wants it"; planting the flag outside the walls. Not as a gimmick; not as a sneaky, cheesy, sexy evangelistic strategy to get those butts into pews.

But to get those butts blessed, even if they never enter a "church building."

Which they already have...

PS The mom of the house asked the ginsters to kindly take their empty gin bottle with them as they left...that's not an unreasonable rule for a church that plants its flag and bench outside the boundaries and box.

PPS. Of course this is the same family who did THIS with their house at Eastertime.

PPPS. Some of you are savvy enough to figure out where this holy site is, and go to Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth and see who's sitting in it now.

"When the sun beats down and I lie on the bench...."

-Genesis, "I Know What I Like" ...4:45ff below

a young moviemaker lives at our house

Avril, Bono, God and the poor be with you all

(posted on dave's blog a few months ago)

I am wanting to unlearn everything I've learned about church and pastoring.

These are great days to experiment with such a task; and our church family are wonderfully

open and open source.

Sunday's message was themed around the theme of "God with us."

I was hoping there were connections in Scripture to "God with us" and

"The poor will always be with you."

But because I am learning not to overplan/produce a sermon anymore...(as if we even do "sermons"! They are more...gee, what word fits? Someone has suggested "habitats"), I didn't get the connections until I got in community.

Gee, that isn't supposed to happen; it supposed to be the one "professional" who prays and studies all week so they can deliver the ultimate answers as a monolgue/lecture...maybe with three points (power points) and a poem..

Yeah, right.

Maybe this "new" model of so-called (in both senses of the term) unwashed "laypeople" actually having something to contribute is worth pursuing! Maybe Helmut Baby was right: "the church is our pastor" (see this).

So going into the day, i had a few notes, a few Scriptures, and a few videos ready and on standby.

It is delightful and terrifying to be spiritually clueless and literally cueless about what God will say through the Spirit and Bride as the gathering emerges.

A young woman who had grown up in a churched family, but wandered, wondered and prayed aloud once:

"I don't know who You are;

but I'm with You."

I don't know how many churches have played the music video for Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You".

Probably not too many, as the refrain is:

"It's a damn cold night/
Trying to figure out this life...

I don't know who You are,

but I'm with You."

"

But damn, we just had to play it. It was stunning to see
how quickly our folks (Jeannie lead the way!!)caught the God-hunger in this song
("Isn't anyone trying to find me??"). Explore this song more here on our forum; and huge thanks to RevKev for turning me onto the song. Yes, I admit that I cheated by uppercasing the "Y" in the "you" in her lyrics, but that's how I hear it.

It turned out to be a great wikiday; as we collaboratively listed some scriptures that included the phrase or thought "with you".

We warmed up by collecting ways we use "with you" in everyday ways.

If I am "with" someone, it means we are an item., for example. If I say "I'm with Scott Jones" at reastaurant, it means he's paying my bill.
"I'm with you" can mean "I'm tracking with you" or "I agree with you."

Of course if a clerk or phone rep says "I'll be with you shortly," you may or may not believe it.

"I am with you in spirit," etc

Of course we noted that Jesus's very name, Immanuel, has "with you" embedded right in it.
We caught the paradoxes:

Sometimes the "with you" presence of God seems to save you from trouble (Acts 18:9-10), and sometimes save you in the trouble
(Isaiah 43:2).
Ken remembered that Mary was promised that the baby would be named "God with us," but then the very angel split (Luke 1:38)

Guess God cant live with or without you.

And yes, we did show that very U2 video at the prayer meeting before the gathering...
noting that the fluid lyrics seem at times Jesus speaking to us, sometimes us speaking to Jesus. We caught the overwhelmed Bono (having just buried his father, and playing to his hometown crowd of 80, 000) at 4:13ff moving into his spontaneous/Spiritaneous prophetic Bonglosealallia (see the comments on this post) utterance.

No wonder bassist Adam Clatyon (at the time not yet officially a Christian) said of this song:

"You don't expect to hear it on the radio...maybe in a church." (p, 66, "Into the Heart").

Well, we did it "in a church," and here it is:

.

We also were caught in awe of Jesus' wanting to be "with us" before sending us out into ministry (Mark :13-q4 ), let alone God dancing and singing over the sheer joy of being "with us." (Zeph 3:16-17)

But also we keynoted that being with God, and God with us, is not a passive hanging out.

The withness of God seems in part predicated that we are in motion and on mission.
The very great Commission promised the "With you" will be with us as/if we go and make disciples of all nations." Lo, indeed. (Matt 28:18-20)

But what nailed us is the connection and conjunction of

"I will always be with you".

and

"The poor will always be with you."

Those words (Matt 26:11) of Jesus about the poor have been used as cop out and opt out. You know, "Jesus himself said there will always be poor people, so there is no need to help them...much.
Let alone any possibility of actually ending extreme and unnecessary poverty.

Yada, yada. Yeah, and it will be a "damn cold night" in hell before that spin is proven to be what Jesus had in mind, He was actually quoting Deut. 15. The context there is the opposite:

"You need not have any poor among you... But they will always be among you...so help them"

Wow, is the church ever adept at framejacking Jesus and hijacking Scripture.

Sparks and Shekinah flew as we began to corporately connect the dots.



Only then did I remember and quote Bono's sermon:

"God is with us if we are with the poor."

Then I had someone bring Amos 5:14 into the mix; the only Scripture with a condition on the "with-us-ness" of God. Wouldn't every believer love to know that there is apparently one thing we can do that will cause the Omnipresent ever with us Imamnuel to...in a sense...not be with us?



"The Lord will be with you, if...

you do good and not evil," the Scripture read.

I actually didn't recall , but was guessing/hoping that the context and definition of "being good" in that passage had something to do with helping the poor. I wanted a prooftext; and because I am a recovering pastor, I pressed in fake confidence; having Scott read deeper into the passage until he found the word "poor."

Thank God it was there.

Read it and weep.

Or hear it and weep in Bono's sermon.

Video of both versions of his messages are posted below; first the National Prayer Breakfast:

"God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places. (

stuff. Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor."
complete manuscript)

But that was a pretty white crowd, so Bono's delivery was a bit understated.

Watch the version he preached at the NAACP, especially the last minute when we have

black-style church at its best.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. 'If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become
an shirt

This is true religion. True religion will not let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom. “Love thy neighbor” is not a piece of advice, it’s a command. And that means in the global village we’re going to have to start loving a whole lot more people, that’s what that means. That’s right. “His truth is marching on.” ..Because where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die.

... whatever thoughts we have about God, who He is, or even if God exists, most will agree that God has a special place for the poor. The poor are where God lives. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is where the opportunity is lost and lives are shattered. God is with the mother who has infected her child with a virus that will take both their lives. God is under the rubble in the cries we hear during wartime. God, my friends is with
the poor. And God is with us if we are with them.

Link to manuscript

Unless we buy the "new phyics" that Mike Roe satirizes so well in his brilliant song by that name..
that will preach!

The Lord be with you.

Ex-Exilers and the New Ex-odus

Greetings XXilers.

Especially those plugged into our Thursday series on Genesis,

and our                                               Sunday series     on exile..

I really recommend the new Rob Bell and Don Golden book,

 "Jesus Came to Save Christians:A Manifesto for the Church in Exile ."

A couple chapters are free online here
http://zondervan.com/media/samples/pdf/0310275024_samptxt.pdf

Ben Witherington's  review is here;  Tad DeLay's is here

See also the 

"New Exodus" perspective here  (see all six short pages); audio of Bell's  6/25/06 sermon here