The Prodigal Change

A sad but gripping reality of all time is that more people than are expected spend their lives accepting apparent reality. They repel that which is new, different and uncommon. They spend their life looking for a certain kind of scripted living. In pursuit of a scripted life, they lose track of life itself because life is always hiding in the shadows, in the dark and ugly fumes of daily clouds; clouds that form and sometimes never seem to break. - Clouds of the new, the different, and the unknown. The unscripted.

In pursuit of scripted living we are writing life’s script itself. For the script of life is written in past tense. What we have gone through becomes the fountain pen that scribbles the marks of history for others to read. Therefore we read and understand. That life as it has been lived cannot be lived again but improved; that no two lives can be lived in exactly the same way. So even in the knowledge of history, from which all wisdom flows, we still have to add to the script. And we should.

Similarity is the mother of competition. Yet we always want to live life the way it has always been. Therefore we loose creativity. For creativity comes from the spontaneous, the uncommon trails of the daredevils. And yes we have been taught not to dare the devil. Not to try the impossible because impossibility is beyond reach. We should be doctors, lawyers, accountants, and more recently, computer scientists. But what do we do with the other half of life? How do we deal with the evolution of the mind, which consistently repels routine and seeks out new ways to do the same old job?

We embrace change! We welcome home the long-lost prodigal son. Change.

Sacred Selfishness

The calling of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost began to produce what 1 Peter calls a “race, priesthood, nation, and people” (1 Peter 2:9-10), a worldwide multicultural fellowship of witnesses. The people of God, in all their cultural diversity, may be understood as a universal community of communities. The particular church community is, in an essential sense, an expression of the universal church. Thus specialization and segmentation advocated for by denominationalism compromises this universal personality of the church.

In his high priestly prayer, Jesus set out the purpose of the church as the community of communities:

“I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in me through their word; that they may all be one; even as you, father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. The glory which you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as we are one; I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that you sent me, and loved them, even as you have loved me.” (John 17:20-23)

This prayer is a central New Testament passage defining the purpose and relatedness of the church. It teaches us that the dimensional connectedness of the church is not merely a matter of institutional unity, good public relations, or effective growth strategies. The oneness spoken of here is a matter of obedience to the Lord of the church, obedience that centers on his mission, “so that the world may know that you have sent me.”

The church is not only a community of communities, but it does share in the Trinitarian relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.One of the ways the communal and commissioned church of the tri-une God repositions itself as a divinely communal entity is through the Lord’s Supper. This communal nature of the church removes the emphasis from the organization and places it on the collective relationality of its members. The church as an organization must serve the purposes of the tri-une God within the body.

Thus the mission of the church goes beyond self-preservation to becoming an instrument for building community. The church’s goal is not serving the organization’s own ethics and purposes, but leading the organization to fulfill a more universal purpose as a representative servant of God on earth. The church works for the ultimate order of manifesting the glory of God, of becoming a people of God, of serving the purposes of God, and of fulfilling the plan of God.

A community-centered people of God must orient their desires not towards their personal good feelings but towards the broader category of the will of God on earth.

Building the Ark: Baruch Spinoza Vs. Noah No-last-name

Naturalistic pantheist Baruch Spinoza would be upset with Noah. Oh God himself. Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin is considered one of the great rationalists of all time. Spinoza believed (and many of his followers still do) that the Universe, although unconscious and irresponsible as a whole, behaves as a single, interrelated, and solely natural substance. Accordingly, Nature is seen as being what religions call "God" only in a non-traditional, impersonal sense, where the terms Nature and God are synonymous.

Spinoza’s ideology has no room left for a God that splits from creation and acts on his own “be”-half. How can the other half claim to be the whole? Does God need marriage counseling? The two shall become one flesh, you know? I support Spinoza in every form and shape. I believe that what destroys nature cannot be one with it. Either God is an independent contractor who does not care about the total organization, or he is just foreign matter that does not subscribe to the laws of nature. Either way, looking through Spinoza’s glasses, God cannot be one with nature.

If God is not one with nature, the so-called Acts of God cannot be one with nature either- unless such destruction has the ability to give life. The destruction of nature by nature is a difficult subject. I am talking about trees falling in thunderstorms and small species dying from man-made global warming.

God gets even more divisive when he hands Noah the Flood Survival Handbook. First Noah is saving just a handful of living things, but even more divisive than that, Noah is not commanded to take plants with him in the ark (Read Genesis 7 and 8).
God, Noah, the surviving animals, the dying animals, the dying plants. Where is Spinoza’s oneness in the flood story? And who is picking his nose after the floods? Not God. Even after hundreds of days, the dove is able to find life in the plants. And when surviving animals and humanity exit the ark, life comes back to normal.

So who is this God who can give and destroy life? And how can he be one with nature if he holds nature’s existence in his hands.

Sorry Spinoza but I am not following.

Come With Me Along the Sweet Path of Doubt.

They kept coming. For forty days; a constant flow like the oozing of an old wound. Their weight lifted it off the ground and gave it free float. Everything in it was safe. And the more they came the better it floated.

But something beyond it was not happy. Thousands were perishing in them. The floods that saved the boat and the people in it were now destroying everyone outside it. The savior had become the killer. Like a double-edged sword was the flood that Noah had been warned about and was smart enough to complete the project without fear or doubt.

A righteous man he was. But the trials of the flood demanded more than righteousness. They demanded obedience and faith. Obedience was needed to do everything according to God’s design. Faith was necessary to believe that this gigantic boat would one day be put to use. The latter was probably harder. No one in the history of floods had seen anything of that magnitude. How would water cover the surface of the earth? How could water submerge the hill, subdue mountains, and completely gulp every living thing on the face of the earth? It was an impossible imagination. People dismissed it as the illogical madness of an old man’s wish. But Noah never thought of himself as a six hundred year old grey haired man whose sense of reality had been impaired by the passing of years. He believed. And he was saved.

The danger in our time is not found in the lack of evidence that something will not happen but in the doubt that it will.

If the Population Goes Bad, Kill It!

Is Genesis 6 outrageous? I don’t think so. Truthful? Certainly. God is fed up with people. Too much contamination. The sons of God are mixing with the daughters of men. There is no differentiation. People are living the way they want- no regard for God and what he wants. God is losing it. He is running out of patience. His heart starts pounding. His skin turns red. The veins on his throat start tightening. He is chocking on anger and regret.

Finally he breaks down. “Noah, let me tell you something. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of sick people”. Human kind has become too evil for me . I am done with man. I am going to wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth- men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air- for I am grieved that I have made them”. Now those are some tough words from God. I don’t want to be around when God gets that mad.

But this was not the last time God had lost it and wanted to destroy the very people he had created. He did it again with Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. And this time he wasn’t planning to tell anybody about it. But being God as He is, he could not keep a secret from his beloved Abraham. So he told him: “Abraham, I don’t want to hide from you what I am about to do to Sodom and Gomorrah. The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous. I will go down and see what they are up to. If what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me, I will see what I can do”. Abraham was different from Noah though. He pleaded with God and God listened. But Abraham’s bargaining power was less than the mess Sodom and Gomorrah had put themselves into. So God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

God did it again, or He wanted to, in Exodus 32. The people make a golden calf and they start worshiping it in the place of God. God burns with anger and makes plans to destroy each one of them. This time it was Moses pleading. It worked. God changed his mind.


How can we explain this kind of behavior where each time the population goes bad God talks of destruction?

If the Population Goes Bad, Kill It!

Is Genesis 6 outrageous? I don’t think so. Truthful? Certainly. God is fed up with people. Too much contamination. The sons of God are mixing with the daughters of men. There is no differentiation. People are living the way they want- no regard for God and what he wants. God is losing it. He is running out of patience. His heart starts pounding. His skin turns red. The veins on his throat start tightening. He is chocking on anger and regret.

Finally he breaks down. “Adam, let me tell you something. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of sick people”. Human kind has become too evil for me . I am done with man. I am going to wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth- men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air- for I am grieved that I have made them”. Now those are some tough words from God. I don’t want to be around when God gets that mad.

But this was not the last time God had lost it and wanted to destroy the very people he had created. He did it again with Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. And this time he wasn’t planning to tell anybody about it. But being God as He is, he could not keep a secret from his beloved Abraham. So he told him: “Abraham, I don’t want to hide from you what I am about to do to Sodom and Gomorrah. The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous. I will go down and see what they are up to. If what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me, I will see what I can do”. Abraham was different from Adam though. He pleaded with God and God listened. But Abraham’s bargaining power was less than the mess Sodom and Gomorrah had put themselves into. So God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

God did it again, or He wanted to, in Exodus 32. The people make a golden calf and they start worshiping it in the place of God. God burns with anger and makes plans to destroy each one of them. This time it was Moses pleading. It worked. God changed his mind.


How can we explain this kind of behavior where each time the population goes bad God talks of destruction?