planned-obsolescence obsolete?

I was cheering inside (okay, maybe even whispering an amen or two) as I listened to this piece on NPR today.  (Got especially fired up over the bit about ownership; go get ‘em, Mr. Jalopy!)  Here’s the teaser:

On a basic level, the [maker] movement is about reusing and repairing objects, rather than discarding them to buy more. On a deeper level, it’s also a philosophical idea about what ownership really is.“If you’re not able to open and replace the batteries in your iPod or replace the fuel sender switch on your Chevy truck, you don’t really own it,” Mr. Jalopy argues. “The terms of ownership are still dictated by the company that assembled it and glued the iPod shut so that you couldn’t get into it.”

Mr. Jalopy, helped codify these ideas in 2005 with the Maker’s Bill of Rights. The list of 17 directives includes: “If it snaps shut, it shall snap open” and “Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.”

–NPR, California’s Maker Age

Can I get a witness?

just one of wright’s many great intros in recent days:

SECOND NAZARENE
  There is also the miracle of the daughter of Jairus.
FIRST NAZARENE
  Yea, that is sure. No man can gainsay it.
HERODIAS
  Those men are mad. They have looked too long on the moon. Command them to be silent.
HEROD
  What is this miracle of the daughter of Jairus?
FIRST NAZARENE
  The daughter of Jairus was dead. This Man raised her from the dead.
HEROD
  How! He raises people from the dead?
FIRST NAZARENE
  Yea, sire; He raiseth the dead.
HEROD
  I do not wish Him to do that. I forbid Him to do that. I suffer no man to raise the dead. This Man must be found and told that I forbid Him to raise the dead. Where is this Man at present?
SECOND NAZARENE
  He is in every place, my lord, but it is hard to find Him.

–Oscar Wilde, Solome, as sited in NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope

we’re so lucky to have

Chris & Tammi Jehle (& The Hope Center) … residing in KC.  I finally had the chance to listen (again) to a couple of sessions Chris taught to our faith-community this past April.  I highly recommend them to anyone interested in learning more about the poor & vulnerable in our city (and how deeply God loves them).  I hope & sometimes even pray that I will begin to love this demographic with more sincerity.

n.t. wright is blowing my mind

And transforming my Mother’s Day graveside visit.  Just a sample from my latest read, Surprised by Hope:

I hope that those who take seriously the argument of this present book will examine the current practice of the church, from its official liturgies to all the unofficial bits and pieces that surround them, and try to discover fresh ways of expressing, embodying, and teaching what the New Testament actually teaches [about death, resurrection, & heaven] rather than the mangled, half-understood, and vaguely held theories and opinions we are meeting [in our world].  Frankly, what we have at the moment isn’t, as the old liturgies used to say, “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead” but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end … What we say about death and resurrection gives shape and color to everything else.  If we are not careful, we will offer merely a “hope” that is no longer a surprise, no longer able to transform lives and communities in the present, no longer generated by the resurrection of Jesus himself and looking forward to the promised new heavens and new earth …

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.  The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because we don’t know when it will arrive and partly because at present we have only images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising, still.  And the intermediate hope–the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day–are always surprising because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but there’s nothing much we can do about them.  And we are wrong.  Our task in the present … is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second. 

what do you think?

I’ve just spent another zany day in church-world.  Which is to say, the “world” of being a pastor.  (Something I try not to fess-up to very often.)  As such, I’ve been thinking about who God’s people might be & do, and how we might organize who we are and what we do …

Here’s the latest philosophical statement I wrote … and hate.  (But feel trapped into using because, hey, who’s saying anything better, in a way that fits our community?)

Philosophical Approach to Mission– As God has demonstrated through His progressive work of redemption in history and His specific revelation in Scripture, God can and sometimes does reveal Himself directly to humanity in a single memorable event or moment.  However, God’s typical pattern is to make Himself known to humanity over time through His chosen people, giving us many ways to hear, learn, and respond.[1]

When praying and laboring for the Gospel in a community, a city … or among a culture or ethnic group, we believe that a congregational, collective effort best reflects God’s intention for His people.  Though individual work and isolated initiatives may, at times, seem more efficient or productive, we believe them to be, ultimately, inadequate.  Only durable Kingdom partnership, through the collaboration of local church congregations, permits God’s people to be both a sign and foretaste of the Gospel they also labor for and bear witness to.

---

[1] I am indebted to Tim Keller & Phil Butler for pointing me to the Biblical concept that spiritual transformation is most normative as a process—not an event.  (Keller, Tim, Born of the Gospel, sermon at www.sermons.redeemer.com and Butler, Phil, Well-Connected.  www.connectedbook.net.)

he is risen

Indeed.

it’s holy week and i see bones, but i believe and minister (no matter what) by telling the basic story

“…There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise right now that you won’t give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices. There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing—God, kingdom, gospel—we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.” 

That, or something very much like that, is what I understand the church to say to the people whom it ordains to be its pastors.

–Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles

it’s holy week and i see bones, but i believe and minister (no matter what)

“…One more thing: we are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want you to vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know that you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it …”

–Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles

it’s holy week and i see bones, but i believe and minister

” …We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don’t trust ourselves—our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know that we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and that there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of word and sacrament, in the middle of this world’s life. Minister with word and sacrament to us in all the different parts and stages of our lives—in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn’t the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: word and sacrament …”

–Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles

the heavenly minded who did (in fact) some earthly good

In commemoration of Black History Month …

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were those who thought most of the next.  The apostles themselves, who set out on foot to convert the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.  It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one.  Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in.”  Aim at earth and you with get neither.

–C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity