The Village EXTREME!
In The Village Church tradition of "not being of the world, but being in the world" [at least I think that's how the tradition goes, it might be the other way around] in the form of dress and music but at the same time appearing to go to great lengths to "appeal" to the 20-something crowd, I think we should introduce EXTREME! Evangelism. I think EXTREME! Evangelism has massive tatoo-sporting, body piercing, Red-Bull drinking, X-Games participating, backwards-hat-wearing appeal. And along with EXTREME! prayer, not that every-day, old-fashioned, like-your-dad-prayed prayer, I mean EXTREME! prayer, we should see people you-know-what slappin' the greeters to get in the door.
Now, I have no idea what EXTREME! Evangelism implies any more that I understand what EXTREME! Carwash means on the sign in front of the "carwash" near the Vista Ridge Mall. I suspect it is the 20-something equivalent to "New and Improved" which applies to every product ever marketed in the Solar System . . . which is to say it is completely and totally meaningless.
If by now you are getting the impression that I have an EXTREME! problem with 20-somethings simply because I have mentioned them 2 or 3 times (depending on your philosophical stance on self-reference), then YOU are the one with a problem with 20-somethings, not me. I am an overweight, balding middle-age white person, which on the demographic scale of EXTREME! popularity and social desirability ranks just below germ and I am OK with that. We overweight, balding middle-age white persons have had our day running the universe and are more than willing (somewhat) to turn over responsibility to anyone who wants it.
Further, I think we should define EXTREME! Jesus who doesn't just turn over tables and throw out money changers. Dawg! He's you-know-what slappin' 'em and livin' large. He's a backwards hat wearin' dude! Knockin' back a brewski and talkin' to the ho's at the well . . . I'm running out of steam with this, largely because it's a horrible idea.
But, hey! I'm starting my EXTREME! blog as soon as I get my new EXTREME! laptop that I will attach to my EXTREME! network which uses EXTREME! bandwidth and costs me EXTREME! dollars for which I am going into EXTREME! debt and will require an EXTREME! amount of EXTREME! prayer and EXTREME! forgiveness because of the swear words I will likely use when I get the EXTREME! bill from Verizon.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Cycle of Insanity
Music at The Village: Redux
I also like:
Alice in Chains: "Rooster"
LSAT All Over Again
So . . . I sat in a 500-seat auditorium at the University of Missouri campus on a Saturday morning when I could have been doing 10,000 other things (Ok, maybe 2 other things: smoking dope or sleeping) and struggled with an odd test which included these comments at the beginning of each section. "Answer each of the questions in a way that is consistent with and does not contradict previous or subsequent answers. None of the questions presuppose any knowledge of the law." . . . or something like that. And to the best of my recollection, two of the problems went like:
1. A woman gets into a cab carrying a very expensive vase and she says to the cab driver "be careful you dolt. This is an expensive vase and I will hold you responsible for it if you drive crazily and cause it to break through your horrible driving, and we are participants in an LSAT question." And the cab driver says "I am not responsible for your expensive vase which you are carrying openly without any visible form of protection and whether or not we are participants in an LSAT question is irrelevant, and as to the quality of my driving vis a vis the safety of your vase, the two notions are unrelated." The cab drives away and, naturally, the vase gets shattered during transport.
2. A person gets into a cab in New York City and mentions nothing about being in a hurry or having a specific destination. The cab driver simply drives away and stops at a red light about 50 meters from where the disinterested passenger enetered the cab. At the red light, a person enters the cab with a machete and acts in a manner which indicates to the disinterested passenger and the cab driver that their lives are in grave danger ("What other kind of danger is there?" asks Jerk Nicholson -- no, that isn't a mispelling). The cab driver flings open his door and leaps from the cab to safety, though arguably, being in New York City, he was safer in the cab with a passenger wielding a machete in a menacing way.
RE 1: Is the cab driver responsible financially for the vase? The lady clearly stated that she would hold him responsible, and he didn't say "get out" and even though he told her "no, I'm not responsible" he didn't refuse to drive her to her unstated destination, but the vase was not in a protective case and there is no indication that the lady placed in safely on the seat or unsafely on the floor. So can we assume she was holding it, thereby absolving the cab driver of responsibility? By driving away does the cab driver tacitly accept responsibility? By not getting out of the cab when the driver says "I'm not responsible" does the woman accept the "contract" with the cab driver to transport her and her vase without obligation to pay for the vase if it is shattered?
RE 2: The cab driver leapt to safety leaving the passenger in a dangerous situation. Was the cab driver wrong to do that? Does "saving his own skin" override the negative connotation of "leaving the passenger to fend for himself"? Is the cab driver responsible for the safety of a passenger with respect to a non-driving, non-cab-ride related danger? Even in Manhattan? Does the cab driver tacitly accept responsibility for the safety a passenger in all regards once the passenger enters his cab? Does the passenger have the same responsibility for the cab driver's safety that the cab driver has for the passenger's safety? Assuming of course you believe that the cab driver has responsibility for the passenger. Do we as individuals have a responsiblity toward one another in a situation of danger or is the concept "every man for himself" a valid perspective in this world?
Oh, and quit trying to decipher this question from your own supposed "knowledge of the law". The question actually has nothing to do with the law. You are probably bogged down with tying to figure out who was wrong and who was right and if you are . . . you are a dope . . . because the premise to these questions said that the "answer" didn't presuppose any knowledge of the law, only that YOUR ANSWER MUST BE CONSISTENT AND NOT CONTRADICTORY WITH RESPECT TO PREVIOUS AND SUBSEQUENT ANSWERS. Sorry I was shouting, an F-15 was flying overhead and I was afraid you couldn't hear me. Clearly, if you are a cab driver, you have an opinion which is probably different from an opinion held by a woman plagued with shattered expensive vase syndrome derived from having ridden in New York cabs driven by third world illegal aliens who cannot speak English and in all likelyhood hate you. And just as clearly, if you have ever entered a cab carrying a machete that you just purchased at S*A*M*S sold to you by a very rude cashier leaving you with an awful buying experience, but nonetheless enabling you to chop at vegetation to clear a campsite for your boy scout campout only to have a cab driver leap from your cab for no apparent reason, you have a different perspective.
The point of the LSAT seemed to be that the concept of right and wrong are irrelevant when it comes to the law, something that every law show on television has hammered into our conscious over the last 50 years. What is relevant is to ensure that your decisions as as supreme court justice are not overturned because you are predisposed to dislike women carrying expensive vases. The point also seemed to me to be that it is OK that right and wrong are irrelevant provided you are consistent in your decision makeing and opinion forming . . . with one caveat: you must be in honest pursuit of the truth. Thus in the long run the truth will take care of itself.
That doesn't seem to be the case with God or the Bible. I am told that God doesn't change His mind. But my own "honest pursuit of the truth" seems to indicate that He does, but it doesn't lessen my opinion of Him. Yet the cogniscenti are rhetorically asking me "Where, hereritical scumbag?" and the places where He seems to me to be changing His mind are explained like "No, He just appears to be changing His mind. Actually, He knew how it was going to turn out and He was just teaching Adam, Abraham, Jonah, David a lesson" and off we go into a futile metaphysical discussion about the exercise of free will and the human inability to know all things.
If in my "honest pursuit of the truth" the Bible reveals to me that incest is OK and I belive in the Gospel with all my heart, will I be in different standing with God from someone who belives that incest is wrong and also believes in the Gospel with all his heart? Do you think the cogniscenti hold that it is fundamentally impossible to belive in the Gospel and also hold other beliefs about the Bible which in their view are wrong? (By 'cogniscenti' I am referring to people who honestly believe that the beliefs they hold came to them through the honest pursuit of the truth but your truth which you came to by your own honest pursuit of the truth is wrong.)
For example (since I am fairly certain that up to now I have made little if any sense), I once wrote to "the church" that perhaps the Second Coming of Christ would occur to each of us at our death and judging from the response from "the church" you'd have thought I suggested that Jesus was actually Gotama or had 9 heads or couldn't hit a low inside curve. No, reply email author, I honestly read the "multiple references in scripture proving your point" in the reply email which indicated just how wrong and misguided I was . . . and it wasn't nearly as obvious to me that I was wrong as was your clear intention to prove me so.
I was once told that "the main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things" by a wise individual who was trying to head off a challenge which I was not mature enough in my walk with Christ to enter into. I get it that to interpret the Bible in such a way as to satisfy us intellectually or twist the meaning of scripture to suit the way we want to see God is wrong. Really. I get it. But I am extremely uncomfortable when I am told that "this is the way it is" when that definition comes from man . . . any man. Ahhhh, the sweet paradox of Evangelical Christianity.
I once offered up the idea -- after having had a dream about just how incredibly wonderful the Bible is and how timeless is its value -- that it was written necessarily in a way such that different people IN HONEST PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH (sorry, a lorry with a fouled exhaust just passed by) would interpret it differently. And I was told "No. That's wrong. There's one way and only one way." I don't say this to condemn the idiot jerk-face rat-rot individual who said this to me, provided of course his intention and motivation for telling me that I was not only wrong but silly was rooted in his deep and sincere desire that my wretched soul be saved and not that his intellectual superiority be challenged by some ignorant lay person.
Pride? Of course. So answer this question smarty pants: A policeman enters a 7-11 and sees a man with a gun pointed directly at the face of a young, female cashier. The gunman is agitated and jumpy and CLEARLY about to pull the trigger of a very, very large caliber handgun. Unseen, the policeman draws his weapon and aims it at the man and suddenly realizes that he now has a bead on the no good scoundrel who "slept" with his wife. If he hesitates, pauses to ponder the philosophical quandry he now finds himself in, the innocent clerk dies: If he pulls the trigger, is he acting on the law and thereby serving justice, or "settling a personal score" in an act of raw vengeance? What difference does it make to the clerk, to the gunman?
If you really, really, really see no quandry, I'd like to talk to you. And wounding him non-fatally isn't an option.
I shall conclude this incoherant, meaningless ramble with a mathematical definition of God: God is the only entity that is not sujbect to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
I also like:
Alice in Chains: "Rooster"
LSAT All Over Again
So . . . I sat in a 500-seat auditorium at the University of Missouri campus on a Saturday morning when I could have been doing 10,000 other things (Ok, maybe 2 other things: smoking dope or sleeping) and struggled with an odd test which included these comments at the beginning of each section. "Answer each of the questions in a way that is consistent with and does not contradict previous or subsequent answers. None of the questions presuppose any knowledge of the law." . . . or something like that. And to the best of my recollection, two of the problems went like:
1. A woman gets into a cab carrying a very expensive vase and she says to the cab driver "be careful you dolt. This is an expensive vase and I will hold you responsible for it if you drive crazily and cause it to break through your horrible driving, and we are participants in an LSAT question." And the cab driver says "I am not responsible for your expensive vase which you are carrying openly without any visible form of protection and whether or not we are participants in an LSAT question is irrelevant, and as to the quality of my driving vis a vis the safety of your vase, the two notions are unrelated." The cab drives away and, naturally, the vase gets shattered during transport.
2. A person gets into a cab in New York City and mentions nothing about being in a hurry or having a specific destination. The cab driver simply drives away and stops at a red light about 50 meters from where the disinterested passenger enetered the cab. At the red light, a person enters the cab with a machete and acts in a manner which indicates to the disinterested passenger and the cab driver that their lives are in grave danger ("What other kind of danger is there?" asks Jerk Nicholson -- no, that isn't a mispelling). The cab driver flings open his door and leaps from the cab to safety, though arguably, being in New York City, he was safer in the cab with a passenger wielding a machete in a menacing way.
RE 1: Is the cab driver responsible financially for the vase? The lady clearly stated that she would hold him responsible, and he didn't say "get out" and even though he told her "no, I'm not responsible" he didn't refuse to drive her to her unstated destination, but the vase was not in a protective case and there is no indication that the lady placed in safely on the seat or unsafely on the floor. So can we assume she was holding it, thereby absolving the cab driver of responsibility? By driving away does the cab driver tacitly accept responsibility? By not getting out of the cab when the driver says "I'm not responsible" does the woman accept the "contract" with the cab driver to transport her and her vase without obligation to pay for the vase if it is shattered?
RE 2: The cab driver leapt to safety leaving the passenger in a dangerous situation. Was the cab driver wrong to do that? Does "saving his own skin" override the negative connotation of "leaving the passenger to fend for himself"? Is the cab driver responsible for the safety of a passenger with respect to a non-driving, non-cab-ride related danger? Even in Manhattan? Does the cab driver tacitly accept responsibility for the safety a passenger in all regards once the passenger enters his cab? Does the passenger have the same responsibility for the cab driver's safety that the cab driver has for the passenger's safety? Assuming of course you believe that the cab driver has responsibility for the passenger. Do we as individuals have a responsiblity toward one another in a situation of danger or is the concept "every man for himself" a valid perspective in this world?
Oh, and quit trying to decipher this question from your own supposed "knowledge of the law". The question actually has nothing to do with the law. You are probably bogged down with tying to figure out who was wrong and who was right and if you are . . . you are a dope . . . because the premise to these questions said that the "answer" didn't presuppose any knowledge of the law, only that YOUR ANSWER MUST BE CONSISTENT AND NOT CONTRADICTORY WITH RESPECT TO PREVIOUS AND SUBSEQUENT ANSWERS. Sorry I was shouting, an F-15 was flying overhead and I was afraid you couldn't hear me. Clearly, if you are a cab driver, you have an opinion which is probably different from an opinion held by a woman plagued with shattered expensive vase syndrome derived from having ridden in New York cabs driven by third world illegal aliens who cannot speak English and in all likelyhood hate you. And just as clearly, if you have ever entered a cab carrying a machete that you just purchased at S*A*M*S sold to you by a very rude cashier leaving you with an awful buying experience, but nonetheless enabling you to chop at vegetation to clear a campsite for your boy scout campout only to have a cab driver leap from your cab for no apparent reason, you have a different perspective.
The point of the LSAT seemed to be that the concept of right and wrong are irrelevant when it comes to the law, something that every law show on television has hammered into our conscious over the last 50 years. What is relevant is to ensure that your decisions as as supreme court justice are not overturned because you are predisposed to dislike women carrying expensive vases. The point also seemed to me to be that it is OK that right and wrong are irrelevant provided you are consistent in your decision makeing and opinion forming . . . with one caveat: you must be in honest pursuit of the truth. Thus in the long run the truth will take care of itself.
That doesn't seem to be the case with God or the Bible. I am told that God doesn't change His mind. But my own "honest pursuit of the truth" seems to indicate that He does, but it doesn't lessen my opinion of Him. Yet the cogniscenti are rhetorically asking me "Where, hereritical scumbag?" and the places where He seems to me to be changing His mind are explained like "No, He just appears to be changing His mind. Actually, He knew how it was going to turn out and He was just teaching Adam, Abraham, Jonah, David a lesson" and off we go into a futile metaphysical discussion about the exercise of free will and the human inability to know all things.
If in my "honest pursuit of the truth" the Bible reveals to me that incest is OK and I belive in the Gospel with all my heart, will I be in different standing with God from someone who belives that incest is wrong and also believes in the Gospel with all his heart? Do you think the cogniscenti hold that it is fundamentally impossible to belive in the Gospel and also hold other beliefs about the Bible which in their view are wrong? (By 'cogniscenti' I am referring to people who honestly believe that the beliefs they hold came to them through the honest pursuit of the truth but your truth which you came to by your own honest pursuit of the truth is wrong.)
For example (since I am fairly certain that up to now I have made little if any sense), I once wrote to "the church" that perhaps the Second Coming of Christ would occur to each of us at our death and judging from the response from "the church" you'd have thought I suggested that Jesus was actually Gotama or had 9 heads or couldn't hit a low inside curve. No, reply email author, I honestly read the "multiple references in scripture proving your point" in the reply email which indicated just how wrong and misguided I was . . . and it wasn't nearly as obvious to me that I was wrong as was your clear intention to prove me so.
I was once told that "the main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things" by a wise individual who was trying to head off a challenge which I was not mature enough in my walk with Christ to enter into. I get it that to interpret the Bible in such a way as to satisfy us intellectually or twist the meaning of scripture to suit the way we want to see God is wrong. Really. I get it. But I am extremely uncomfortable when I am told that "this is the way it is" when that definition comes from man . . . any man. Ahhhh, the sweet paradox of Evangelical Christianity.
I once offered up the idea -- after having had a dream about just how incredibly wonderful the Bible is and how timeless is its value -- that it was written necessarily in a way such that different people IN HONEST PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH (sorry, a lorry with a fouled exhaust just passed by) would interpret it differently. And I was told "No. That's wrong. There's one way and only one way." I don't say this to condemn the idiot jerk-face rat-rot individual who said this to me, provided of course his intention and motivation for telling me that I was not only wrong but silly was rooted in his deep and sincere desire that my wretched soul be saved and not that his intellectual superiority be challenged by some ignorant lay person.
Pride? Of course. So answer this question smarty pants: A policeman enters a 7-11 and sees a man with a gun pointed directly at the face of a young, female cashier. The gunman is agitated and jumpy and CLEARLY about to pull the trigger of a very, very large caliber handgun. Unseen, the policeman draws his weapon and aims it at the man and suddenly realizes that he now has a bead on the no good scoundrel who "slept" with his wife. If he hesitates, pauses to ponder the philosophical quandry he now finds himself in, the innocent clerk dies: If he pulls the trigger, is he acting on the law and thereby serving justice, or "settling a personal score" in an act of raw vengeance? What difference does it make to the clerk, to the gunman?
If you really, really, really see no quandry, I'd like to talk to you. And wounding him non-fatally isn't an option.
I shall conclude this incoherant, meaningless ramble with a mathematical definition of God: God is the only entity that is not sujbect to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Down But Not Out
Music At The Village
I like:
I like:
- Cream: Crossroads (live at the Fillmore version from the "Wheels of Fire" double album), easily Eric Clapton's greatest guitar solo
- Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Chile
- Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D minor (the one "Rollerball" ruined)
- In Living Color: Cult of Personality
- The Who: Behind Blue Eyes
- Beethoven: Moonlight Sonata
- Debussy: Clarie de Lune
So, if the Village could work these tunes into the worship service it would be nice. It would also demonstrate fairness and equity, and it would take a step (albeit small) toward tearing down the walls of ageism currently under construction at the Village.
Continuity and Confusion
I'm still reeling from the dizzying display of disparate diatribe delivered during yesterday's service. First we get a dose of the Mendonzas and their spectacular devotion, courage and conviction as it plays out in missional living. Holy cow! Yet another thing I can never live up to in a billion skillion dillion years. Why is it that the Village is all about beating me down to build me up? Wait a minute . . . I'm struggling to recall the "build me up" phase. But after the bold challenge tacitly offered through the video to see if any of us low-life scum-buckets can top what the Mendonzas are doing for God, we get another challenge: "They couldn't do it in the late 1800's and they failed again in the 1960's. So, church, let's give it a go here in 2009 and see if we can get to heaven through deeds!" Whaaa?
And as if that's not confusing enough, this edict is laid out: "Don't go next door and try and save your neighbor." Hmmm. Just when I think I am about to figure this "evangelism" thing out, we take off in a totally unexpected direction. And I completely missed the point of the thing about the oil above the door and that whole business. Besides, I thought that was a Jewish Passover sort of thing. Were we talking about Passover? Who knows?! The way Matt's all over the map on the weekends, perhaps we were doing some sort of experiment in Jewish orthodoxy and I missed his trademark under-the-breath annoucement about the transition . . . Whatever.
Elder Vote
I have a confession to make about the vote for the elders: I don't know a couple of them and I voted for them anyway. I mean, I know Massengale, and Patterson and Whitehead . . . go to Baby Dolls or Million Dollar and those guys will always buy a round. They're good people. But some of the others? OK, so I see Brad Miller in the foyer from time to time picking pockets and Steve Hardin stops by the nursery occasionally in a politically motivated, metaphorical "baby kissing" endeavor (By the way, I have worked in the nursery without pay seeking only to serve the Lord for the last few years during the 5:00pm Saturday evening service about a 25 minute drive from my home in Carrollton, a sacrifice I am only to glad to make though it pales by comparison to the cinematic parade of celebrities shown during the "Cannes Film Festival of Saints at The Village" ). But the others? For all I know they are Hitler Reincarnate or Madeline Murray O'Hare (I suppose that would be "Reincarnate" as well. Wait . . . were any of them women?) or some Hellenist plant. But you are pushing me off the point. How am I supposed to get to know these people? I mean, they are like Supreme Court Justices; they will be "appointed" (Oh, right! We "voted" for them. Does anyone remember selecting them to run? Were YOU asked?) and they will be there forever. And what's our recourse? What? "Write their name down if you DON'T want them elected?" How un-American is that? Isn't that anti-thetical to the American Political System and the whole notion of a "Write-In Vote?".
Just where the Heck is this church headed?
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