Bandits No More

August 28, 2008

Some Thoughts on Politics

Filed under: Politics — rheyduck @ 8:49 pm

This week the Democrats are going at it; next week the Republicans get their turn. When I think of individuals involved in politics, regardless of their affiliations, I can usually think of somethign positive about them. On the other hand, I can usually think of something negative they’ve said or done. I suppose that’s why I wouldn’t do very well at either convention. I know too much about both groups to allow me to get very excited about either.

Yesterday I was part of a group hearing from our new county judge. He told us that though he is identified with a particular political party, he finds both that his convictions do not match perfectly with that party, and that much of what that (and the other) part claims to stand for has no bearing on county business. If that is the case – and it seems natural that it would, since the major parties are mostly concerned with national issues – why must we continue to have partisan elections on the local level? I can think of a couple of reasons.

The first reason is somewhat cynical. For many, activity in local politics can be a stepping stone to higher office. If you want to run for the state legislature or for congress, it sure looks like you need major party affiliation to make it. By proving yourself on the lower (local) level, you demonstrate to the Powers Above that you would make a decent candidate for their party.

The second reason to have partisan elections is that their are different philosophies or outlooks when it comes to local issues. The difficulty, of course, is that these differences may not match up in any way with either the Democrats or the Republicans. It might also be that there are more than two identifiable philosophies. As long as we’re a two party system, however, we think (except thinking doesn’t seem to have much to do with it) there must only be two ways. What if we had a completely different set of parties that worked on the local level, parties that had no determinate relation to the national parties?

August 9, 2008

Joining the Big Story

Filed under: Charles Taylor,Dave Schmelzer,Metanarratives,Spirituality,Theology — rheyduck @ 10:05 pm

One of the books I’m reading now (having a short attention span, I usually read several at a time) is Dave Schmelzer’s Not the Religious Type: Confessions of a Turncoat Atheist. On p. 105 Schmelzer says,

This [he's been talking about how a person who desperately needs God is not bored with what he's doing] does back to the hero’s journey, wouldn’t you think? Either there really is more going on around us than we think or there isn’t. And either we really have a central role to in that larger conflict or we don’t. And if it’s all true, either we say yes to that role or we turn it down and request new experiences or insights to alleviate our boredom.

That resonates on a few levels.

First, I’m continually praying for my children to experience this.

Second, it fits nicely with this Sunday’s sermon. I’ll be dealing with Mordecai’s words to Esther: “Perhaps it is for just such a time as this that you have come to be Queen.”

Finally, it makes me think of one of the other books I’m currently reading (a book much longer and slower reading than Schmelzer), Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Taylor describes one feature of the modern age as our propensity to see depths as inside us, not outside us in the world. Schmelzer’s sense of a bigger story that we may or may not enter is hard for us to fathom when we think all depth to life comes from inside us, either through self-exploration or self-expression. Jesus came not just do do something in the depths of my being, or to free me for self-expression. Jesus came to invite me – to invite us – to become participants in his story.

August 8, 2008

Need Prayer?

Filed under: Ministry,Prayer — rheyduck @ 2:46 am

As one not attending Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit this year, I’m trying to learn from folks who are. Here’s Rob Wegner’s quote from Gary Haugen that grabbed me:

“The first place that reveals your currently level of safety is prayer. Mother Theresa said, ‘I can’t imagine going thirty minutes in my work without prayer.’ Can you go thirty minutes in your life’s work without prayer? If you can, perhaps it’s time for a new life’s work. Or finding a new way to do your life’s work.”

I play it safe way too much.

August 7, 2008

Vision for the Christian Life

Filed under: Salvation,Spirituality — rheyduck @ 8:57 pm


Where do you go to find your vision for the Christian life, where do you look to find your picture of what it looks like to live as a follower of Jesus?

If Christianity were only – or primarily – about going to heaven when we die, the logical place to look might be the insurance industry. We get our policy, and while hoping we never have to use it, know it is there if the unexpected and unwanted happens. But most of the time our policy just sits in our files.

Since this enterprise we call Christianity is much more than that, however, we need to look somewhere else. Here are four places to consider:

The most obvious place people have looked over the years is the Bible. We look to the life of Jesus as an example of what it means to live a life pleasing to God. We also read the Apostle Paul telling his people to follow his example as he follows Christ’s example. Since he was personally acquainted with many of the recipients of his letters, they would be able to see his lifestyle first hand, something they couldn’t do with Jesus.

But just as Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, might be culturally distant from a Gentile Christian in Greece or Rome, Paul the traveling evangelist seems a world away from us. If we follow his approach, however, we can find pictures of a life dedicated to Jesus in the biographies and autobiographies of Christ followers in intervening years. For example, I’ve found great inspiration in the lives of people like Martin Luther, John Wesley, Brother Andrew and Hudson Taylor.

Are old timers the only examples we can look to? Not at all. As we hunger to know more of Christ and to be more faithful to him, it is to our advantage to watch for people around us who are more mature in the faith (or so it seems to us) than we are, so we can learn from them. While we submit to Jesus’ example, we can find powerful illustrations of how to live it out in the lives of some of the people we see on Sunday morning.

A final place to consider is quite different. Some of the hymns we sing are hymns of praise – they speak words about God or give thanks to God. Others, however, include aspirations to or descriptions of life with Jesus.

“I want a principle within of watchful godly care.”

For some of us, such a principle within us is a current reality, for others it remains an aspiration. Or,

“No condemnation, now I dread. Jesus and all in Him is mine, and clothed in righteousness divine, bold I approach the eternal throne and claim the crown through Christ my own.”

We can read  this in Romans 8, but what happens when we sing it with Charles Wesley and imagine it as our current reality?But as we sing the hymns – and pay attention to what we’re saying as we sing – we can find elements of a powerful vision for the Christian life.

August 2, 2008

Small Town Living

Filed under: Culture,Diversity — rheyduck @ 2:09 am

I just ran across this Chesterton quote at Alexander Pruss’s blog:

Chesterton says, “It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery… A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.”

Having moved here from Houston, I see the truth of what G.K. says here. In small town life we encounter and live out every day life with all kinds of people. I think this is one of the things my son was getting at when he expressed discomfort at his college orientation, “There’s just not the diversity we have in Pittsburg,” As G.K. would note, the irony is that it is the large polis or cosmopolitan institution (the modern American university) that prides itself on being diverse. Taken as a whole, sure they are. But in day to day experience it’s mighty easy to find a critical mass of friends and companions who are just like you.

It’s not just that I know more people, but that I know more kinds of people, and associate with them day to day. In a small town I know the folks at places I shop – often the people who work there and other customers. One of the factors in some articulations of secularization theory has been that as we relate to people in only one setting, one kind of relationship, secularization is one of the results. Small towns resist secularization (some of the time), not just because they’re uneducated “hicks” (the ones around here sure aren’t), but because they experience a different kind of depth to life, unable to segregate themselves from others as easily.

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