“The business of the church is to tell and embody a story." Lesslie Newbigin
I (ahem…Thomas) just added a plug-in that lets me run surveys embedded in my blog. So each week as we get songs suggested to us for the American Idols series, I’ll post them here for people to vote on. We’ll vote on one or two live in worship.
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The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Audio Book (read by Robert Whitfield)
February 27, 2010
© Tom Arthur
Rating: 10 out of 10
This is the best audio book I have ever listened to. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce is a masterfully imaginative reflection upon heaven and hell. Second, the reader, Robert Whitfield, is absolutely enthralling. Let me begin with the later.
I have never before listened to such a creative portrayal of a novel brought to life in an audio book. Whitfield makes each and every character in The Great Divorce jump off the page, or out of your speakers. Every character has a different voice and Whitfield even convincingly pulls off all the different female characters. He moves from a Scottish brogue to an Irish accent and back to an English inflection seemingly effortlessly. His voice was like ear candy. I have never before looked up a reader to see what other audio books he has read. I plan to listen to several of them, especially the novels.
Now to the content of The Great Divorce. The idea of The Great Divorce is a simple one: a bus departs daily from hell to heaven. Those who are in hell may ride it any time they want. What they find in heaven isn’t quite what they expect. Each person from hell meets someone in heaven whom they knew in their life. These past acquaintances, friends, or family members attempt to help them adjust to heaven. Most of those from hell like hell better, and decide to go back. Their reasons for doing so are manifold, and it is here that the reader sees Lewis’ genius as an observer of human nature.
Most people in hell don’t want to give something up to stay in heaven. The character of what they find in heaven is magnitudes better than what they find in hell, but they have become so familiar with their own flaws that put them in hell that they are loath to give them up. Those characteristics and values have become so much a part of their identity that they seem lost without them. Take for example the theologian who likes the idea of God more than God, Godself. Or the mother whose son died and prefers “loving” her son by grieving rather than loving her son by giving him up. Or the crooked manager who thinks he was a good and decent person when he really was not. Maybe one of the most tragic is the husband who always plays the martyr to his wife and isn’t willing to give up the grudges that he holds against her.
There are, of course, moments when those who are visiting heaven have a break through. One such man has a lizard on his shoulder that is hurting him. He meets an angel who offers to kill it. After much debate, the man finally allows the angel to kill the lizard. It is cast to the ground and arises as a great stallion. The man then rides the stallion off into deeper heaven. We are told that in heaven the fleshly passions are driven by the person rather than the person driven by fleshly desire.
In the preface Lewis claims that this book is not a theological work about heaven and hell, but I think Lewis is selling himself short. Certainly the details are all a work of Lewis’ imagination, but the basic premise that heaven is a place some people will choose not to like seems biblical to me. The emphasis of our culture is toward a universalist desire when it comes to heaven. We don’t want anyone in hell, but what makes us think that someone who didn’t like God when he or she was alive will like God any more when met face to face? I suspect what they find will terrify them. In this sense, they choose hell over heaven. The Great Divorce helps us wrap our minds around a conception of heaven and hell that is both realistic in its judgment of humanity and at the same time compassionate. Between Lewis’ notion of heaven and hell and our culture’s exists a great divorce.
Note:
While living in Petoskey, I helped found the annual Northern Michigan C.S. Lewis Festival. This festival began as a month-long collaborative event between the arts, education, and faith communities. While its focus has remained in the fall, the festival has since my days leading it expanded to host events year-round. A trip to Narnia and the North is well worth it.
Currently Reading/Listening:
Misquoting Jesus (audio book) by Bart Ehrman
Playing the Enemy (audio book) by John Carlin
American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists by John H. Wigger
An Introduction to Pastoral Care by Charles V. Gerkin
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
I’ve been reading the obituaries this week. I have been deeply struck by them. So many people die so young. I’m reminded of my own mortality. Several years ago while I was living in Petoskey, another man named Tom Arthur died and many people commented to me about having a double take when seeing his obituary in the paper.
Reading the obituaries has got me thinking about what I would hope my own obituary said. I thought I’d take a crack at writing it myself. This isn’t necessarily what I think is true about me right now, but rather what I hope would be true about me by the time I die (hopefully later rather than sooner!). Because obituaries are expensive, I’ve tried to keep this short. What would you want your obituary to say? Write your own and leave it in the comments.
Tom Arthur
Tom was a friend of God. This showed itself in his friendship with the poor and the poor in spirit. He lived simply so that he might give more away. He shared what he owned. He lived by faith rather than fear. When he felt God was calling him to something, he pursued it even if it scared him. He sought to live by one simple principle: entire devotion to God. Tom was not perfect but he pursued ever increasing holiness. He was humble enough to ask for forgiveness regularly, both from God, from his family, and from those around him whom he had wronged.
Tom is survived by a large spiritual family. God used him to bring many to love God with everything they’ve got. He was a means of grace in people’s lives helping them to see and live into their own calling and vocation. While many will miss him, Tom was able to mentor new leaders who have aptly stepped into leadership roles in the communities he helped create.
Share on FacebookDuring this series on American Idols, we’ve invited everyone to suggest songs about the theme for the week for us to vote on. Below (in no particular order) are the songs that were suggested this past Sunday for next Sunday’s theme, violence. We asked people to submit song suggestions that were not obviously pro-violence or anti-violence. We were looking for songs that were in the gray area to make the voting a little more complicated. Songs with one or more asterisk showed up one or more times. Come this Sunday and see which song(s) we’ve picked. Then vote!
Hero of War by Rise Against
Whatever by Our Lady Peace
Freak on a Leash by Korn
It’s a Hard Knock Life by Jay-Z
Highway to Hell
Theme from the Godfather
Titanic theme song
CSI theme song
Headstrong by Trapt*
Slim Shady by Eminem
Another One Bites the Dust**
I Shot the Sheriff**
Gunpowder N Lead by Miranda Lambert
Goodbye Earl by Dixie Chicks
Concrete Angel by Martina McBride*
Alyssa Lies by Trace Adkins
Thunder Rolls by Garth Brooks
Papa Loved Mama by Garth Brooks
CSI Miami Theme Song by The Who
Eminem songs
Fifty Cent songs
Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash
Mack the Knife
Welcome to the Jungle by Guns-n-Roses
Let the Bodies Hit the Floor by Papa Roach
Where is the Love by Justin Timberlake
Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio
Dirty Deeds by AC/DC*
Face Down by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
DMX
I Gotta Say it was a Good Day by Ice Cube
Kung Fu Fighting
I Want to be Bad by Willa Ford
We Will Rock You by Queen
Pop Evil
Red Rag Top by Tim McGraw
Paper Planes by MIA
Soldier by Phil Driscoll
The Best I Can by Queensryehe
Paparazzi by Lady GaGa
Next Theme: Security (fear and power)
Share on FacebookThis past week in my opening sermon for the American Idols series, I tackled our culture’s fascination with beauty, particularly as women receive the brunt of it. Here are a couple of links that will help you explore further the impact that Photoshop has had on our images of beauty.
Metropolitan Magazine (a spoof) thanks to Girlpower
Fillipa Hamilton and Ralph Lauren thanks to ABC.com (check out the other “photo editing flubs”)
Photoshop of Horrors thanks to Jezebel.com
Dove Evolution video – A remarkable short video about the evolution of a real woman into a billboard ad:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
Or check out the original website by Dove for several other similar videos.
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American Idols – Fame
Genesis 3
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
February 21, 2010
Note to reader: This is a manuscript and not a transcript. While I prepare a manuscript, I don’t preach from it. All the major points are here, but there are bound to be some small differences from the sermon as it was preached live. Also, expect some “bonus” material that wasn’t in the live sermon.
Peace, Friends
What do you worship? That’s a question we may not ask ourselves, but the way we live our lives provides an answer. What most fully captures your attention and imagination? Money…power…sex? Through this series that we’re beginning we’ll be exploring six different idols that capture the attention and imagination of our American culture. This series, like the last, Unpleasantville, will use the stories in the book of Genesis. Today we begin with fame. Let’s start with the scripture passage from Genesis chapter three.
Genesis 3 (NLT)
1 Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the creatures the LORD God had made. “Really?” he asked the woman. “Did God really say you must not eat any of the fruit in the garden?” 2 “Of course we may eat it,” the woman told him. 3 “It’s only the fruit from the tree at the center of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God says we must not eat it or even touch it, or we will die.” 4 “You won’t die!” the serpent hissed.
5 “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil.” 6 The woman was convinced. The fruit looked so fresh and delicious, and it would make her so wise! So she ate some of the fruit. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her. Then he ate it, too.
7 At that moment, their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they strung fig leaves together around their hips to cover themselves.
8 Toward evening they heard the LORD God walking about in the garden, so they hid themselves among the trees. 9 The LORD God called to Adam, “Where are you?” 10 He replied, “I heard you, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.” 11 “Who told you that you were naked?” the LORD God asked. “Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?” 12 “Yes,” Adam admitted, “but it was the woman you gave me who brought me the fruit, and I ate it.” 13 Then the LORD God asked the woman, “How could you do such a thing?” “The serpent tricked me,” she replied. “That’s why I ate it.” 14 So the LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this, you will be punished.
You are singled out
from all the domestic and wild animals of the whole earth to be cursed.
You will grovel in the dust as long as you live,
crawling along on your belly.
15 From now on, you and the woman will be enemies,
and your offspring and her offspring will be enemies.
He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
16 Then he said to the woman,
“You will bear children with intense pain and suffering.
And though your desire will be for your husband,
he will be your master.”
17 And to Adam he said,
“Because you listened to your wife
and ate the fruit I told you not to eat,
I have placed a curse on the ground.
All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.
18 It will grow thorns and thistles for you,
though you will eat of its grains.
19 All your life you will sweat to produce food,
until your dying day.
Then you will return to the ground from which you came.
For you were made from dust,
and to the dust you will return.”
20 Then Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all people everywhere. 21 And the LORD God made clothing from animal skins for Adam and his wife.
22 Then the LORD God said, “The people have become as we are, knowing everything, both good and evil. What if they eat the fruit of the tree of life? Then they will live forever!” 23 So the LORD God banished Adam and his wife from the Garden of Eden, and he sent Adam out to cultivate the ground from which he had been made. 24 After banishing them from the garden, the LORD God stationed mighty angelic beings to the east of Eden. And a flaming sword flashed back and forth, guarding the way to the tree of life.
This is God’s story for us today. Thank you, God.
“Fame?” you may be wondering. Andy Warhol said that everyone in the future would have their fifteen minutes of fame, but how do you get fame out of this story? Were Adam and Eve looking for fame? No, probably not, but there are three themes that pop up in this story that in our culture add up to fame: knowledge, immortality, and beauty. Add these three up in America and you’ve got fame. Let’s take a look at each one.
Knowledge
In Genesis 3:5 we read about the serpent tempting Eve saying, “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil.” Knowing. There is a kind of infinite knowledge we seek in America. It is a desire to know and experience everything first hand. We are not content to rest in others’ knowledge. We want to experience the knowing ourselves. It is a function of our western individualism. We are a Wikipedia generation.
Take media for example. According to a University of California study, the average U.S. household consumes 3.6 zettabytes of information a year (TV, video games, internet, etc.). One zettabyte is one billion terabytes or “the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.” We consume a massive amount of information and knowledge!
The king of media these days may just be the internet. Sarah and I don’t even have a TV. Just a computer. I was unable to find how much storage capacity the internet currently holds, but I did find the weight of the amount of information traveling across the internet. According to Discovery Magazine, all those little ones and zeros behind all that information traveling across the internet are made up of electrons, and each of those electrons weighs something. When you add up all those electrons the massive amount of knowledge and information passing through the internet ends up weighing only 0.2 millionths of an ounce! That is “roughly the same as the smallest possible sand grain, one measuring just two-thousandths of an inch across.” So what does all that information really add up to? Not much. I’m reminded of a passage from Ecclesiastes which says, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (12:12). I have that verse printed on all my bookmarks to remind me that knowledge without God doesn’t weigh much.
There isn’t anything wrong with knowledge. Faith often seeks understanding. We’re talking about priorities and proportions. Idols are often good things taken disproportionately. To dethrone this idol in your life, consider this week fasting from media. Turn off the TV. Turn off the computer. Turn off the radio. Sit in an information silence this week.
Immortality
The serpent continues tempting Eve by contradicting God and saying, “You won’t die” (Genesis 3:4). Our culture is always looking for the causes of death so we can escape death. Do you know what the number one cause of death is? Car accidents? Heart disease? Cancer? No. None of these is the number one cause of death. The number one cause of death is birth. If you are born, you will die. My dad likes to say, “There are only two things you have to do in life, die and pay taxes.” You can’t escape death. It will come some day.
Last week’s Time magazine had a cover story titled “The Science of Living Longer.” It’s something we all want to do, live longer. In 2007 we spent $2.24 trillion on health care (New York Times Economics Blog). That’s 16.2% of our GDP (Gross Domestic Product) or $7,421 a person. We also spend $5 billion a year on vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements (CNN Money Magazine).
Then there’s our weight loss industry. We spend $35 billion a year trying to lose weight, and still somehow amidst all this we’ve got a childhood obesity epidemic on our hands. Once again, there’s nothing wrong with health care, vitamins, and trying to lose weight. I myself have a covenant with my pants. I will never leave them nor forsake them. That means that when they’re too tight, instead of buying new pants, I lose some weight. This covenant ends up costing me less over the long-haul (I eat less, and I spend less on clothes!).
The question here is one of proportion and priority. The body is a temple of God’s Spirit, but don’t make it into an idol. To resist this idol worship of wanting to live forever, this week consider remembering your mortality by reading the obituaries or visiting a graveyard. One day you too will show up in one of these places. One day you too will die.
Beauty
Beauty is funny thing. It is one of the classic virtues. The problem with beauty in our culture is that we have set a standard of personal beauty that most of us cannot achieve. Our standard of beauty gets mixed in with our idol worship of immortality by focusing on youthful beauty. We all want to be young in the way that we look. And even the young want to look like someone else. We are ashamed of how we actually look. This isn’t something new. Once Adam and Eve eat the fruit we read that, “At that moment, their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness” (Genesis 3:7). Their nakedness, the beauty of their bodies, hadn’t been a problem before, but now having gained the knowledge that sin provides, they were ashamed of the beauty that God had made.
Women certainly take the brunt of this in our culture. There are tons of things floating around on the internet that show how images of women get Photoshopped into a certain kind of mold. Maybe one of the best is a Girlpower website that features a magazine cover called Metropolitan. The magazine cover looks like any women’s fashion magazine that you could pick up in the checkout line of the grocery store, except that this magazine cover lets you see what the girl on the cover looked like before her body was cut and trimmed and painted.
One of the subtle ways that images like 
this affect us has to do with our teeth. On this magazine cover you see the young woman with a set of bright white teeth with no gaps, but when you toggle the image to see what her teeth looked like before they were modified by Photoshop, you realize that like the rest of ours her teeth are yellow and like the rest of ours between them there are gaps.
This might not seem like much of a big deal, but I went to one of the big department stores this week and took a look in the toothpaste aisle. I actually bought one of each kind of toothpaste that they sold (I’m going to donate all this toothpaste to Compassion Closet), and put them in bags based on which ones have whitening agents in them. I ended up with three bags of whitening toothpaste and about a half a bag of non-whitening toothpaste! This whitening toothpaste seems to me to be a fairly recent phenomenon. What has happened, I think, is that we have seen Photoshopped images of people with pearly white teeth so often now that we think our teeth must be just as white. The standard for what we are to look like is no longer real people but a created image. Life imitates art. We have lost the creature.
It might seem like the color of your teeth is a small thing to pick on. Certainly it is. The problem is that it is just the tip of the iceberg. What happens when this same impulse to make a person look like a picture ends up going so far as Ralph Lauren took it in a recent photo shoot of model Filippa Hamilton. They altered her waist to the point of absurdity. She may have the proportions now of a Barbie doll, but if women try to emulate this look in the same way that we try to make our teeth look white, we’re going to have some seriously ill, both physically and psychologically, women.
Or take the case of skin bleaching. Many of my black friends talk about skin bleaching techniques they or their family or friends have used to try to make their skin lighter because “white is beautiful and black is not” according to the standards of our culture. There are many of these kinds of product out there. The safety of some of them is questionable.
While women experience the brunt of this idol in our culture, men are not immune to it. There is a relatively recent push for men toward what is referred to as “manscaping.” This pressure to shave various parts of the body is coming from images men see in advertisements and movies. A major razor company has a whole section of their website devoted to this practice with pithy little sayings about why it’s important for men to shave various body parts such as their armpits saying, “An empty stable smells better than a full one.”
We may have begun looking for fame but what we’ve ended up with is shame. We are ashamed at how we look rather than content to be diverse reflections of the image of God. To fight against this idol in our culture, consider this week trying to find the beauty in each person by seeing people with God’s eyes and as creatures made in the image of God.
Humility
As I said earlier, all of this is really a question of proportion. Knowledge, health, and beauty are all at their fundamental essence good things that God has created, but our culture takes them and expands them out of appropriate proportion. We seek infinite knowledge, immortality, and a youthful beauty that lasts forever. I’d suggest that an antidote to all this is the practice of humility.
Going back to the story we read that the serpent says, “You won’t die!…God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5, NLT). We want to be more than we are. We want to be like God.
The problem is that we were already created not just in the image of God but also in God’s likeness. We can’t do anything to be made like God. Only God gives that gift. Fame in our culture is a desire to be like God by what we do. Rather than seek after this idol, let us first seek after God who is the only one who can give such gifts. This is not about what we can do. It is about what God can do.
May it be true in our lives by the power of God, whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Note:
For further reflection on the role of photoshop and images of beauty, check out this post.
Sarah and I are hooked on Lost. The only problem is that we’re not sure whether we trust the creators of the show to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. There are so many layers upon layers, loose ends, and unresolved questions that we wonder how in the world they are going to bring it all together by the end of this sixth season, the last season. I was reading about this in Entertainment Weekly. Damon Lindelof, one of the executive producers said, “All we can say is, Be patient…You’ve come with us this far. Maybe we haven’t earned your trust, but whether you like it or not, you’re in the car and we’re driving. You have to basically trust us not to go off the road.” That’s really the big question, isn’t it? Do we trust the creators to end the story well?
The parallels between this dynamic of watching Lost and living the story of creation that we find ourselves in every day are powerful. Can we trust the creator of this story? How will the creator bring about a good and meaningful solution to all the layers up on layers of this world, the dilemmas, the questions, the injustices, and the pain and suffering? Can this creator keep the car on the road? It seems impossible, even more impossible than wrapping up all the lose ends of Lost.
The writer of Hebrews says, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (12:2, NIV). I’ve recently found this image of Jesus as the author and perfecter of our faith to be a very compelling. Lesslie Newbigin, a British evangelist to India and intellectual founder of the Missional movement, liked to say, “If the biblical story is true, the kind of certainty proper to a human begin will be one which rests on the fidelity of God, not upon the competence of the human knower. It will be a kind of certainty which is inseparable from gratitude and trust” (Proper Confidence, 28). I’ll be grateful if the creators of Lost come even close to wrapping up this amazing show in a satisfying way, but the trust I put in God is even greater because of who I’m trusting. After all, we’re in the car and we’re not the ones driving.
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Christ the Lord Out of Egypt by Anne Rice
Audio Book
February 18, 2010
Tom Arthur
Rating: 8 out of 10
After reading Anne Rice’s spiritual memoir Called out of Darkness, I was intrigued to read her novels about Jesus. Rice takes on a huge challenge: writing first person from the perspective of Jesus, Christ the Lord. What was she thinking?!
Despite the challenges, Rice does a pretty impressive job of pulling off the whole thing. The primary conflict driving the plot is Jesus’ own growing knowledge and understanding of his unique birth and history. We hear Jesus’ own internal thoughts as he gains pieces of the puzzle and begins putting them together to make a coherent picture and narrative. On this level of story telling, Rice excels, but she takes it a step further by drawing upon a vast amount of research on who Jesus would have been growing up first in Egypt and then in Israel as a Jewish boy. Like her other novels, the historical details are immaculate.
The most intriguing aspect of Jesus’ Jewishness is that swirling around him is a mass of political turmoil and revolution. Jesus sees first hand Roman soldiers kill Jewish civilians as they attempt to put down revolutionary riots in the temple courts of Jerusalem. Jesus also experiences Jewish revolutionaries who steal from Jewish civilians in Nazareth to fund their marauding bands, and he witnesses the Roman mass execution of these revolutionaries by means of crosses lining the roads around Nazareth.
While Rice does not say where she is going with all this, I suspect that she is building a case for the radical nature of Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies. It would be easy to see a young Jewish boy growing up in these circumstances either becoming cynical and nihilistic or joining in the revolutionary fervor, but Jesus is destined to do neither of these things. Rather, he will command his followers to turn the other cheek and love even those who persecute you. That’s a new kind of revolution.
Currently Reading/Listening:
Misquoting Jesus (audio book) by Bart Ehrman
The Great Divorce (audio book) by C.S. Lewis
American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists by John H. Wigger
An Introduction to Pastoral Care by Charles V. Gerkin
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Community Gardening by Ellen Kirby and Elizabeth Peters
Last week I got in the mail one of those advertisement packets for the latest program for your church. It’s a 30 day program based on a New York Times bestselling book. It comes with lots of resources like DVDs, small group curriculum, media, sermon outlines, the whole nine yards. Sounds great doesn’t it? This is generally the kind of thing most churches are looking for to keep things going at their church. The packet even includes endorsements from some of the most well known pastors in America.
All of this looked pretty good until I noticed the subtitle of the book: “Thirty Days to…” You fill in the blank. Ahrgh! When did Christian books start lying? When did they start over hyping what they could deliver? A more realistic subtitle would be: “Thirty days to begin understanding…” But that wouldn’t really sell would it? Who wants to invest thirty days to just begin? We want it all in thirty days, not just the beginning.
John Wesley in his sermon on The Nature of Enthusiasm (“fanaticism”) says, “A third very common sort of enthusiasm…is that of those who think to attain the end without using the means, by the immediate power of God.” This kind of thirty-days-to promise falls into this kind of enthusiasm or fanaticism. We don’t have the patience or the humility to put the hard work into attaining the end that God desires for us, even when God has given us the means to that end. We want it right now. We want it with as little investment on our part as possible.
I didn’t read this book so I can’t tell you that its a total dud. Being married to an author myself, I know that often times authors aren’t even in charge of their titles and subtitles. These kinds of decisions sometimes get taken over by the marketing department rather than the editorial department, but it would be a good step toward God if the Christian publishing industry went back to telling the truth in their titles even if it meant fewer sales. Truth telling is, or course, pretty important to we Christians.
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