Milestone Church Blogspot

Warning…this is a pretty long post full of random, ethereal ideas:

What do the sun and rotisserie chicken have in common?

From psalm 19…the first six verses, an amazing picture of the planets, the sun and the earth, it explains this very-important question.

It uses the metaphor of God as the sun, while other worldviews have made the sun a god, the Judeo-Christian worldview sees it differently. That David writes from the perspective that the sun is apparently revolving around the earth is totally okay with me, because what other perspective could he have had at the time. It certainly appears to me that the earth is the center of the universe because it certainly appears that the sun is revolving around us…when in reality, with the bigger perspective, the earth is actually revolving around the sun.

(I will never forget the time that I first realized this was the case. I’m pretty sure they told me in school, but I certainly was not paying attention. I was backpacking as a teenager and spent my first night in a sleeping bag under the stars under a full moon in the High Sierras. I found myself waking up every few hours to the sound of some forest creature, finding that the big, bright, full moon had actually moved to a different place. Each time I woke up, I realized that the moon was moving, just like the sun moved, but I was always asleep in my comfy suburban home and never took the time to watch the moon rise and fall over the earth. Such are the shortcomings of a sheltered, suburban childhood).

Back to the sun…when, if you think of this for more than a minute, is quite a remarkable picture of how we relate to God. The psalm refers to the heavens emanating to the earth like a voice, and there is no place where this voice cannot be heard. Kind of like the sun that warms the earth and there is no place that the sun cannot be felt.

The sun/God metaphor is really strong and I am pretty sure there have been volumes written about it. And a reminder, in the Genesis creation poem, the sun and moon are referred to as “greater light” and “lesser light.” It’s a little harder to turn an adjective (rather than a noun) into an idol.

Why do people love to be warmed by its rays? Why is it that if you get too much of it you will get a sunburn and it will eventually kill you (remember Moses and his first brush with the Kavod, the bare, raw presence of God). That the sun is so powerful that if you don’t relate to it with proper perspective it can be very dangerous…but if the sun did not exist then everything we know of would completely stop existing.

That He truly is the center of the universe and we are not.

That He does not revolve around us, but we revolve around Him…but this fact is not readily apparent, and the converse is our daily experience, speaks to me that his nature is that of a loving father who, in a very deep and passionate and romantic way loves to create a world that is all about his children. Yes, it is very easy for children to think that the world revolves around them and it takes older generations of people coming together and reminding the children that it is not all about us.

Amazing, also that the planets that revolve around the sun are round and that they actually revolve. Think if this were not true, if the earth did not revolve then only one side of it would be warm. I would imagine that the sunny side would get completely baked and fried and super hot and dry. The dark side would be incredibly cold and frozen. I would imagine that there would possibly be a very thin line in the middle somewhere (with the poles on the equatorial lines, which would actually have a north/south equator…weird) than might be inhabitable. Imagine this incredibly unbalanced, extreme world in which two overwhelming forces, extreme heat and extreme cold were the polarizing events that created catastrophic conflict every day. I don’t think this kind of earth could support life as we know it.

This is a very weird view of the earth of course…but it’s kind of like the view that the institutional church has had of the earth for centuries. That there is a God who is very hot and very cold and He really shines on the good people but is really mad at the bad people, and there is a very thin, very narrow place where the few chosen can eek out an existence until it all gets destroyed.

I think the day has come that we, the church, abandon this type of thinking and take another look at reality. That the sun/God is at the middle and the round earth revolves around it so that it can warm itself evenly (kind of like rotisserie chicken on a spit, literally). That God warms the earth with his presence in a revolving fashion, and yes sometimes there are seasons when the sun is actually closer to the earth and it is warmer (we call this summer) and other times when the earth is tilted a bit and the sun is a bit further away and things are a lot colder (we call this winter). But just as the seasons come and go, sometimes God’s felt presence comes and goes. This rhythm is all part of the design and we are best suited if we understand the design and just cooperate with it.

I think it was the scientist Copernicus who originally discovered this solar fact, that the sun was the center of the universe. Amazing the institutional church at the time excommunicated him and damned him to hell for discovering what God had designed. Amazing that it was so incredibly horrible to believe that we revolve around God and not the other way around.

No wonder they called it the Dark Ages.

Greg…

As I enter back into the real world, post-family-vacation, I have a promise to make to myself. I promise to stay on vacation.

There is the post-vacation afterglow that is one part lament that it is over and the other part lament you have to be responsible again. Vacations are a pretty amazing thing that the Hebrews figured out about three thousand years ago (Example: every time there was a new moon they threw a party). There is something deeply spiritual about the cycle of work and rest and something that gets really jacked up about us when this cycle gets disrupted.

Part of the post-vacation afterglow I bask in is all about perspective. Deadlines don’t seem to be as important, small details just don’t matter as much, my house seems really nice and America is a great place to live. There is something about me that is changed. But the frustrating part of this cycle is that is seems to be lost all-too quickly, so I cry out to stay on vacation.

Another concept I have been chewing on about the cycle of vacations is this: What makes a vacation a vacation is a prolonged season of work. If all we ever did was vacation (which has become the American dream) then it would be our jobs to…vacation. And a vacation wouldn’t be a vacation, but a job. I have even met people like this who have the means to live on perpetual vacation, and very few of them even like themselves let alone the life they live.

Like salt without pepper, like day without night, like evil without good, the cycle of work and rest is a God-designed way to live, which consistently changes us to be a people of rest and peace.

Too often we find ourselves on the race for the American dream which causes us to lose perspective on the cycle of rest and recreation. The word recreation is an interesting one. Notice if you separate the two roots, Re (do it again) and Creation (to create) you have the process of being formed all over again.

True to our Western nature, we worship the vacation and work our whole lives to live in a perpetual state of vacation (how many retirement fund commercials do you see on tv?), only to get there and find that we are irrelevant. The most healthy retired people I know are busier than the working people I know, and most of them aren’t on perpetual vacation, there are making a difference in other people’s lives but aren’t getting paid for it.

It’s the yin to the yang, the peanut butter to the jelly, the zig to the zag, it’s how God created us to live…rhythms of work and play and rest.

Go with it.

Greg

I am, with the patient help of Cody Johnson, trying to pimp out the blog a little…he’s equipped me with the technology of doing some pretty basic stuff, lets just see if I can pull it off

As a test, here’s a link from Our local riding crew

And a test picture of myself riding at Northstar with uncle Bobo and my middle son Cody

trying to do it again…I even got text below the picture…now I wonder if I can do videos?

Say what you want about Microsoft, they just make stuff that works for those of us born before 1970!!

Test Post through Windows Live Writer.

Cody’s Alaskan vacation - Dillingham from the air

Why do you go to school? Any parent who has kids in school might understand my plight.  The goal is to motivate our offspring to learn and develop their potential so they can be all God has created them to be, right?   I ask this of my sons on a regular basis.  As their father I have this inherent need to remind them why they go to school.  They love to mess with me and will often answer with something like…”To meet hot girls?; So I can play football?;  To get away from my parents all day?”   Nice try hotshot.  In my quest to help them understand the big picture I found myself resorting to a psychology of achievement without even realizing I am falling into the trap of a competitive world. I confess that I have often resorted to training my sons that the reason they go to school is to get good grades.  To get good grades so they can get into a good college so they can be a success.  A noble task indeed.  But have I misdirected them by falling into the trap of a grade driven world in which our children are rewarded by being good at getting good grades, all the while missing the point of learning and being transformed into great thinkers?  Yes it is possible that while caught up in the task of getting good grades they might accidentally learn some things.  No this is not an indictment against the public school system and the concept of letter-grading for achievement.  You’ve got to have standards with an objective beginning and end. The question then is how do I, as a parent, handle this process, as the one who is ultimately responsible for my children’s education (not the state by the way).  Yes, I will insist that my children achieve the highest levels possible, but is their success the goal, or is their success a fruit of a highly developed person?  When one of my sons chooses to read the Cliff’s notes of a Steinbeck novel, instead of experiencing the life-changing process of the brilliance of the novel he will still probably get an A grade, but might completely miss the point. Then it occurred to me, that often in my life I have been like a compulsory student who tries to get good grades but misses the point of education.  Too often, I think that religious institutions have presented faith as a classroom, complete with report cards, and God as a task-master, quick to flunk us out of class.  Too often the Bible is viewed as a rule book to be dissected and reduced to the lowest form of rote obedience…kind of like Cliffs notes.  We might get an A in religious living, but miss the whole point of living a life in relationship with an wonderful, limitless, and  benevolent unseen spiritual being.   C. Baxter Kruger in his most recent work, The Great Dance puts it this way:  “One of the biggest failures of Western Christianity is replacing Adoption with Justification.”  This has far-reaching consequences with our relationship with God.  If our goal in life is simply to be Justified before God, then won’t we naturally cut corners just to be in that place, and by so doing, miss out on the wonderful process of the spiritual dance of walking in the fullness of a relationship with our loving creator?  If we embrace this concept of Adoption…that God adopts us like children through Christ…into his family and as sons and daughters then all things change. Greg 

My computer is slow… It’s about a four year old off-brand laptop with biking stickers on the back, a super-glued screen, and duct tape on the electrical cord.  My colleagues dog me relentlessly about my computer, make fun of me because of my ancient technology.  But I like my computer and I’ve affectionately named it the “Millennium Falcon” after Hans Solo’s Star Wars space ship.  I admit that I am emotionally attached to the Falcon, kind of like how men get attached to a favorite pair of underwear. One morning I grew increasingly impatient with the Falcon and its grumpy moods when she was particularly slow to start up.  I decided to do the thing I would never normally do;  delete some programs.  I admit that I am far too busy to delete programs from my computer, or that I just don’t have a value for it, because to me a computer is not a toy but a tool. Yes, I do have all kinds of crazy programs on this computer (that I am currently using to type this blog) that I don’t need.  Most of these programs were loaded by one of my three sons.  The most recent and very large program was one that translated every language on the planet into every other language on the planet, just to see if it could be done…and I wondered why my computer was slow. As I sat and went over the programs and deleted the unnecessary ones, it occurred to me, that us people are much like computers.  As we go through the journey of life we accumulate programs that seem to clog our database, that slow down the information processing cycle.  Programs that filter our thinking and response but we don’t even know it.  It also occurred to me that what we need at times is a break from the routine, the hurry, the to-do lists, the hurriedness of life to do one very important thing;  delete programs. The programs in our souls that jam up the microprocessor of our heart are many and varied.  From painful childhood memories to relational hurts to career disappointments.  Many people suffer from an inherited pointless world view that leaves them with no real hope or purpose.  Others suffer from years of religious thinking that is mean-spirited and exclusive and reduces people to “sinners” and elevates others to “saints” but simply divides and alienates the two party’s one from the other. I’ve heard it said before that the key to learning is to first unlearn what you know. I would encourage you to take some time and consider what programs are loaded on your hard drive, then, ask a friend, ask your spouse, ask God what programs need to be deleted.   I know, this is much easier said than done.  Many of us have identified problems in ourselves and have made tremendous efforts to change ourselves, only to find we don’t have the power to change at all.  Certainly, any life change is clearly not an event but a process.  We ultimately do not have the power or the will to change the things in ourselves that are unhealthy and any of this process, I believe, is a gift from God, who is really excited about us engaging in this very difficult process.   

Greg

Welcome to the Milestone Blog.  Coming soon, enjoy the thoughts, analysis, humor, joy and other posts all between fun and serious from Pastor Greg, Joe and other members of the church leadership.