Here’s the lyric:

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
A hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, “Give your money to the poor,”
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave

Jesus was a man, a carpenter by hand
His followers true and brave
One dirty little coward called Judas Iscariot
Has laid Jesus Christ in His Grave

He went to the preacher, He went to the sheriff
He told them all the same
“Sell all of your jewelry and give it to the poor,”
And they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.

When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

And the people held their breath when they heard about his death
Everybody wondered why
It was the big landlord and the soldiers that they hired
To nail Jesus Christ in the sky

This song was written in New York City
Of rich man, preacher, and slave
If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.

I suppose some might say that this is how you would expect a leftist folk-singer to characterize Jesus. But what’s wrong with it? Guthrie seems to capture what Jesus said in his earthly ministry quite well.

Seriously; I just thought these were thought-provoking. From Proverbs 28:

5 Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand all things

9 He who turns away his ear from listening to the law, even his prayer is an abomination.

11 The rich man is wise in his own eyes, but the poor who has understanding sees through him.

Today i pondered over a new factor about the “busyness crisis” of the 21st century. I heard a sermon this morning on the importance of rest in a frenzied world and it hit me that the reason people aren’t resting is because they aren’t sure what brings meaning. It’s as if people are uncertain if it’s the most important to build an intimate family life, participate in a community to strengthen oneself, develop career that will leave one’s footprint on the world, or discover quirky hobbies that will add depth to a personality.

Basically, i think everybody is having an identity crisis, nothing new. What is new is that i want to start thinking more about how much time should be spent doing what in our lives from a Christian/biblical perspective. It seems like the Bible talks a lot about work bringing meaning (although i can’t think of any particular verses right now, does anybody have any?)

However, the Bible also condemns wealth, selfishness and non-reflectiveness. does this mean cut-throat, travelling-CEO jobs are out for the Christian population? What about kids signed up to be child actors that also profess to love Jesus? Intuitively I want to say that being “in the world” means Christians can do whatever the heck they want with their life, as long as it follows a basic moral code (fidelity, honesty, etc), but I also have this feeling that a lot of us spend our time as schizophrenic meaning seekers just like the rest of the world.

What if all of our schedules just stopped and suddenly we had to face and sustain our relationships with God and those closest to us?

I think those relationships would take on a level of depth a whole lot deeper than they are.

On the other hand, I don’t think “doing stuff” is bad. I just think we live in a “doing” centred society and have no clue how to just “be”. I know I feel a certain amount of panic anytime I have a “hole” in my schedule for a couple hours. I can’t image Jesus freaking out this much! I think I need a monastic trip for a jolt of reality sometime soon.

A week ago I finished reading Raj Patel’s new book, Stuffed and Starved, and can say without a doubt that it was a huge eye opener.

I’m not a math kinda guy, so a lot of the economic things he said were lost on me, but I definitely understood enough to see that the international food system right now is in no way a just one.

At his website, he gives a condensed list of some suggestions he has for action, one of which I want to highlight here:

2. Eat locally and seasonally.
You can find resources on eating locally and seasonally here - but the joy of it is that eating locally and seasonally happens most easily and healthily by growing the food oneself. Nothing tastes like a homegrown tomato. Why not google your local allotments and gardening centres to see what resources they can offer?

Now, I don’t have the money or the time at the moment to start growing all my own food, but I have been trying to take this point to heart. Frankly, I have no right not to, given the enormous amount of suffering the international trade of food is causing people. Eating locally is a necessary first step. Ignorance is really no excuse; with little effort I was able to find a cookbook with seasonal and local recipes for a reasonable price. It isn’t that difficult to do.

I have to say, forcing myself to drink and eat less pre-prepared food (including my much beloved coffee) has made me realize how much sub-standard food we actually consume. Patel has an interesting quote related to this on the site I just mentioned:

As Marco Flavio Marinucci says at his Cook Here and Now website,

Evolution gave us the gift of having to eat frequently: Let’s not treat it as a chore. I believe that when we devote attention to what we do, we feel more satisfied and satiated by it. Each meal gets my full and undivided attention. Choosing the best ingredients from what’s in season locally, preparing the dishes from scratch as often as time allows, and keeping in mind who’s sharing them – it’s all gastronomical foreplay that creates the emotional build-up released in a delightful meal.

Now, if Marinucci has enough awareness to realize that the joy of eating is something he has to be grateful for, even though he thinks that joy was given to him by a series of purposeless events, shouldn’t Christians be doing even better? Should we not be even more grateful, and even more focused on preparing and eating food in a way that recognizes the great many varieties of food and the gift of artistic talent that God has given to us?

Solomon once wisely wrote:

Go then, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already approved your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun; for this is your reward in life and in your toil in which you have laboured under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9:7-9)

I think we need to consider this more, as 21st century Christians; the greatest earthly gifts in life are the simplest: shelter, drink, love, food. Let’s not squander them, nor abuse them through negligence.

From Peter Leithart:

“What do we have when we have the Spirit? We have everything. This is no exaggeration. He is the sevenfold Spirit who works through the seven days of creation, and throughout the week of history. He is the Gift from the Father and the Son, the Gift above all gifts, the Gift containing all other gifts. All the treasures of God, hidden away in the depths of God from before the foundation of the world, become ours through the Spirit of Pentecost. At Pentecost, God gives us God Himself: What more can we ask? At Pentecost, we receive the seven Spirits of God: How can we possibly say enough about the Spirit? …”

See also his comments about the vanishing of Pentecost:

“Pentecost is culturally invisible. There are no Whitsunday sales at the department stores, no gift-exchanges around lighted trees, no jolly elf, no crèches, no heart-warming Hollywood holiday films with Jimmy Stewart, no Bing Crosby crooning about rushing mighty winds. There are no eggs or bunnies either, no jelly beans or chocolate.

Unfortunately, many churches follow suit, ignoring the Spirit. We dress our kids up as shepherds, as Mary and Joseph, for the annual Christmas pageant. We put them in armor to be Roman soldiers at the open tomb. But I’ve never seen a kid with a flaming head and speaking in tongues in a Sunday School play. Mother’s Day is more likely to be acknowledged in many American churches than Pentecost.

Historically, the church has shown deeper biblical wisdom. The church year begins with the advent of the Son, and it climaxes with the Advent of the Spirit. The church has known that without Pentecost, Advent and Christmas and Good Friday and Easter don’t mean much. …”

A Russell Peters classic:

“[...] what does that tell you about God?”

Well, it doesn’t tell me much about God, but I love that quote (bonus points to anyone who knows that it came from Fight Club). What it does make me think about is our idols of God, about which it might say a great deal. I’ve been thinking about this because the Derrida post I made a couple of days ago and the ensuing comments. To what extent do we try to make God either a replacement for, or an extension of, our human fathers? In what ways does this help or hinder us?

Perhaps this all sounds like clever psychology, but I bring this up because I have a feeling that, if many of us are brutally honest, this is something that we might see in our own understandings of God. Or not. What do you think?

I moved last year and I’m sort of now narrowing down what ideas I have for where I ought to go to church permanently. I’m just curious though, given that there are all manner of denominations and styles of church within a city like Toronto, how would you go about picking a church in a new location?

As a process it seems like a bad mix between a social science project, buying a car and going on a date.

Is there a better way?

A relevant post from Triablogue on the subject.

I should mention: I’m highly sympathetic to the argument there, and in fact, given his argument from Proverbs 5, I think I might have spoken too lightly in my comments in Dan’s post. I think it’s definitely an open possibility that even the OT prohibited engaging in polygamy. In which case, I would have to say, if polygamy is permissible at all, it is only permissible in the sense I raised in my comment to Dan in his previous post: it is permissible to remain in it if you have already been polygamously married.

I’ve sort of been keeping up with the recent debate over homosexuality started by this post on CoG. Does God abhor homosexuality? And if so, what should a Christian in 2008 do about that (if anything)? I’ve been thinking about this, and the rallying cry of those activists engaged in this debated on a political level is “one man, one woman” or something to that effect. There are sometimes dark whispers that the gays are going to open the door for the polygamists. Most Christians (at least those I know) would oppose polygamy, and I would agree with them on that matter. The social consequences of polygamy tend be that girls are forced to marry young and the young men are driven out of the community so the paedophiliac old geezers can have some more 13 year-olds for themselves.

But is it unbiblical? Consider

• Genesis 2:24 says that a man will leave his parents to be united with his wife as “one flesh” but it doesn’t explicitly prohibit further unions.
• David, said to be a man after God’s own heart, was definitely a polygamist, as was his son, Solomon who built the temple. The same was true for other kings of Israel and Judah.
• Deuteronomy includes rules for handling succession in the case of multiple wives. Clearly this was a common enough occurrence that a ruling needed to be made on the matter.
• The pastoral epistles in the NT say that elders or deacons should be husbands of “but one wife” which makes monogamy a requirement for church leaders, but, more pointedly seems to implicitly admit that there were polygamists in the early church.
• Deuteronomy 17:17says not to take too many wives, but doesn’t give us a number.
• Leviticus 18:18 says not to take two sisters as wives, but thats about it.
• Mark 10 may look like a ban, but seems to focus on divorce more than marriage.

So why are we against polygamy now? I imagine that for a number social and cultural reasons it fell out of favour and became frowned upon. The meanings of Genesis 2:24 and the pastoral epistles were tweaked and/or amplified. As I say though, this is a good thing. But it is an innovation that the Bible does not record in any obvious fashion such as “No one should ever commit polygamy.”

We seem to have been capable of prohibiting something that the Bible was prepared to, at the very least, tolerate. Is this better or worse than tolerating something the Bible prohibits?