ken wilson online

Been uneasy about hell for years now. But something coming clear. Softening or weakening the teaching on hell isn’t the long term answer. It’s completely understandable that it’s happening as it’s a response to a real abuse of the teaching (often terrifying the very people God means to comfort and comforting the very people God means to terrify.) But the fact is, Jesus is the figure in the Bible most closely associated with hell. Before he hits the scene, it’s the foggiest, the murkiest thing. But that’s the key. Jesus alone can be trusted with this. The teaching on hell is something we’ve abstracted; that is, taken out of context, removed from it’s intensely personal connection with Jesus. We’ve plucked it up like a piece of fruit and put it in our 12 point statements of faith, where it’s been separated from his voice; and there, it’s rotted. Jesus spoke on hell through angry tears. He spoke in the context, always I think, of defending the poor and oppressed, warning their oppressors of hell.
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It’s been nearly two months now of meditating my way through the psalms in a more daily-disciplined way. Man, what took me so long? I’ve made my way through psalm 18, so far. But this post isn’t about a particular meditation so much as a reflection on how much we’ve been missing it when it comes to engaging the Bible. Jesus and those of his generation must have mainly engaged the Bible through times of meditation. They didn’t scarf down the bible through reading long stretches of it at a time. They couldn’t have, not having their own copies. The Bible they had was the Bible they heard from each other and the Bible they had committed to memory, itself a form of meditation. Which brings me, to my point: it’s time that we moved beyond the severe limitations of the words “conservative” and “liberal” as descriptors for the way we approach the bible.
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As a younger believing pray-er I got it into my skull that sensory input during prayer was somehow verboten. Even though I read the Bible through my eyes, uttered words that I could hear with my ears, nevertheless, somehow the use of the senses was restricted, or so I assumed. But life beats you up, and it either softens or hardens you, and either way it tends to wear you out, until you’re ready to loose your grip on some unexamined assumptions. So several years ago, I began to “cheat” in prayer by using my senses more intentionally. Lighting a candle, and, looking at the flame. Playing some background music that lifted my heart or calmed my nerves. Don’t make fun of me, but I found a bar of soap with myrhh and some of the other biblical oils in it. And kept it nearby for prayer. Because we’re permitted to be human while praying.
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I like talking to young pastors because I feel no need to dance around and be overly pastoral.  I can be blunt, because there’s too much at stake not to be. There are too many pastors I’ve known who haven’t faced things head on, haven’t had someone talking blunt to them.   For example seminaries will take your money, but how often does anyone say, “You can come out of seminary THOUSANDS of dollars in debt.  Have you thought about what impact that will have on your capacity to serve in a church?”   But that’s not what this post is about. This one’s about a little agreement every pastor should have with his/her spouse or if single, a trusted friend.
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Amy egged me on, so here’s more. The brain is where the God action is; if the body is the temple the brain is the holy of holies. The part of the brain that causes so much stress, burn-out, pre-occupation, is the overdeveloped fear-fight-flight response of the autonomic system, the amygdala, and associated structures. It’s the warning-alert system key to survival, so it’s been super-charged, but it goes overboard often. Hands get cold, heart rate increases, blood pressure rises. So much of our “ruminating” our overthinking is a response to this part of the brain doing it’s job too well. You get the nasty email from the co-worker on Friday at 5:30 and it sets you off, and you write and re-write your response to that email all weekend long in your head.
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Beside me for lo these many years. Is a believer. This past Monday, her birthday, we were on our way to the airport to go to the Vineyard national board meetings. It had been a harried and hurried morning, having discovered the kitchen sink pipes were frozen. So I’m under the kitchen sink with a hair dryer as we’re getting later and later off to the airport. Plus which it’s my day off, which I hadn’t had in a long while, and traveling to board meetings on my day off wasn’t putting me in a California frame of mind. So characteristically, as we’re late, and approaching the airport Nancy prays, “Lord, help us get to our plane on time, help us with the parking and the security lines….” and this lands upon my foul mood and I join the inner scoundrel chorus singing, “There is no God” or least not one who cares about us making our plane.
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Talking to experienced blogger Garret who suggested I distinguish between”praying brain” blog entries and  “lectio” entries.  Makes perfect sense.

On the praying brain: I love reading science, especially on the emerging understanding of what is happening in the brain during prayer, especially of the mystical variety.  Prayer is something everyone does but few people understand or have a vocabulary for what’s going on when we pray.  Much prayer is experienced by the person praying as a kind of pious anxiety: a mulling over one’s problems or the problems of those for whom we are praying with a vague sense of aiming the mulling in God’s direction.
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Facts:

1. Coal burning power plants release mercury particles into the atmosphere with well documented health effects given the fact that mercury (the stuff in thermometers) is a poison.

2. We have the technology to burn coal cleaner, but it costs more to do so.

3. We tend to want the cheap energy of coal burning power plants without the mercury poisoning, but we’re less concerned about the poisoning effects of mercury if it affects someone else.

4. People with the means to keep coal burning power plants out of their neighborhood, tend to exercise that power.

4. Poor people don’t have much money. Money is power. So they have more coal burning power plants in their neighborhoods. And they and their kids and their unborn babies tend to suffer more harm as a result.

5. If people with power had more coal burning power plants in their own neighborhoods, they would be more likely to insist that we all spend a little more money to build clean power plants.

Am I missing something, or shouldn’t we all insist that no more dirty power plants be built? And that we spend money to clean up the ones that are spewing the mercury over poor people?   Whose children suffer memory loss and greater learning disabilities with all the mercury wrecking havoc in their brains?  One in six children are born at risk of this,  according to the EPA, and most of them are poor kids who can’t move away from the flipping power plants.  Excuse me, I got a little annoyed there.

Advice to young pastors (or what I wish I would have heard when I was one; or advice I wish I would have listened to!): many pastors I know (myself included) were drawn to the job by the prospect of speaking–thinking we might be good at it, wanting to do it. Pastors do like the sound of their own voice. Much of the training and mentoring that pastors receive has to do with doing it well. And the leading part of pastoring does require learning to be assertive. So those drawn to the job are often those comfortable asserting themselves. I hope so at least, because leading does require asserting. But, and it’s a big one:
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Listened to Lauren Winner lecturing Monday night. It’s a lovely thing how God speaks to us–straight into us, me that is–through another. My ears heard such speakings from Lauren: that time is meant to be inhabited rather than spent. (As God himself is meant to be inhabited rather than used.) And that to pray the psalms is to enter the prayer life of Jesus.
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