Which Kingdom Will You Choose?

At a pep rally in Alabama, some Mexican kids were sitting in the front seats, and other students started chanting, “Mexicans to the back!”

At a local church in Alabama, a woman commented that because she is Hispanic some people don’t want to pass the peace with her anymore at church. (This American Life, Act One: Alien Experiment)

Both of these situations are infuriating, hateful and cruel.

But the most despicable is the scene in the church, when people united by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ choose to let the kingdoms of this world, with its own laws and distorted sense of fairness and love, divide Christ’s kingdom.

We are given a choice, every day, to choose which kingdom we will grant our allegiance to.

Which kingdom will you choose?

On Veterans and Violence

Today is Veteran’s Day.

It’s also the day that the movie The Immortals comes out.

Our culture craves the decadence of violence. Violence is celebrated and vindicated. It is the way things are done. In film, Westerns and action film genres have at times lapsed into a celebration of violence as opposed to showing the real and present darkness that invades the lives of those who are caught in the cycle of violence.

For every Saving Private Ryan or Brothers, movies that are violent but do not glorify the violence (these movies, at their best, make you abhor what war does to people), there are countless cheap thrills movies that perpetuate violence as a solution.

On Veteran’s Day, Christians should support those who have seen the horrors of combat. Throughout Church history, there has been a large contingent of Christians that are pacifist, and some that allow for just wars. It is insightful to see though, that even in a just war, if a Christian killed someone in combat or self-protection, he would have to do a lengthy penance of fasting and prayer. Killing, even when justified, even when necessary, is something that Holy Spirit has shown us to be deeply unsettling, dark and evil.

There is no violence like The Immortals. There is only violence that leads to insomnia, PTSD, broken marriages, broken families, homelessness, drug use and suicide.

On this Veteran’s Day, it is good that we look to those who have been touched by violence and offer them the healing of Christ. For he is the life and light that will bring healing and wholeness to those places of the soul that have been scarred by the horrors of violence.

The Turning Over of Traditional Tables

Speaking to a professor at Liberty University, Frederica Mathewes-Green was surprised to find out that the professor and some of the young people at Liberty were going to a Celtic liturgical service at a local Baptist church (link; relevant conversation starts at the 28:50 mark). The professor related that the baby-boomers wanted the contemporary worship—with guitars and drums—while the young people of the church were willing to go to the 7:30am service on Sunday morning for a traditional Celtic service. Even more, these young Baptists were asking for intercession and litany.

Recently, in the 50th issue of RELEVANT, many of the faith trends the magazine summarized in coverage of their publishing history dealt with a return to liturgy, ancient-future worship and spiritual disciplines. There has been a huge surge in liturgical interest among young people like myself that Christian media has really picked up on.

The Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers see this as a “trend.” It’s something that young people are into, like Arcade Fire, Invisible Children, social justice or Tom’s Shoes. In part, it’s seen as “cool” or “hip.” They see a return to liturgy as a turning over of traditional evangelical or low-church Protestant tables. It’s a way to stick it to the man or not be part of the status quo.

I do agree that this liturgical, ancient-future worship movement is a turning over of traditional tables. But, this turning over of tables is not a spilling over of  a century’s worth of low-church Protestantism as the table is flipped over. Instead, this movement is a return to the center. It’s a journey back home. It’s a realization that almost 2,000 years of vibrant Christian worship had been totally eclipsed and stuck in closets or the histories found in dusty theological books.

This movement of my generation is a turning over of traditional tables: but we’re not flipping them over and sticking it to our parent’s and grandparent’s generation. We’re righting the tables. We’re dusting them off and putting the chairs back under it.

Liturgy isn’t cool. It holds no cultural currency or hipster value. Liturgy isn’t valuable. It’s old enough to be in the public domain, which means you can’t make any money off of it. Liturgy isn’t special. It’s not something that is canonical or God breathed.

Instead, let me say that liturgy is true and peculiar. It is the oral tradition of a peculiar people that, while changing over several hundred years, has been solely focused on instilling spiritual disciplines and practices in a worshiping people of God so that they can be God’s mission and see his kingdom come. Is there no greater reason than that to right the table?

The Writer’s Life

My essay “The Writer’s Life” was published last week in The Curator. An excerpt:

I had been to a Borders for the first time in high school, surveyed all the books, and pondered the obviousness of the situation: if there were so many books of poor quality, of dubious claims, of frivolous titles and rows of books I found no interest in, it would not be that hard at all to get a book of my own up onto the shelves. Surely there was a place for my own creation, and it wouldn’t even be that hard.

There is also a great piece on mockumentaries, “Meta-Mocks,” by Dylan Peterson, in this weekly edition.

The Other Journal’s Mediation Blog

The Other Journal has started a new blog called Mediation, which will foster dialogue at the intersection of faith and culture. I have the privilege of being chosen as a contributor to Mediation, and will be posting regularly. My first post is entitled “Edible Sculpture: Cake Boss and Mortality in Food Art.” In it, I  discuss Francis Schaeffer’s definition of art and the reality TV show Cake Boss.

For an introduction to the Mediation blog you can read Brett Potter’s introduction: “On Mediation.”

Is Yoga Safe for Christians?

One of the exercises I have begun to cherish is yoga. After sitting at a desk all day, my back or shoulders may be tight, and the stretches I learned in middle school gym class don’t really cut it. So, when we bought a Wii Fit I started doing the yoga to stretch several times a week and it has helped tremendously with my sore and tight spots, as well as getting me more in tune with how my body is connected.

This unfortunately, in the eyes of Al Mohler, makes me a wishy-washy Christian on a road to pagan-Christian syncretism:

“Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a “post-Christian, spiritually polyglot” reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?” (The Subtle Body: Should Christians Practice Yoga?”

Mohler is saying yoga is unsafe for a Christian’s spirituality, which I find off base for my own yoga exercises, which consist of a video game and a balance board. No chanting. No meditation or emptying of the mind. Just stretching that works better than simply touching your toes and rolling my neck around like I did in gym class.  However, Mohler reminds me that this view of the physicality of yoga is wrong: “There is nothing wrong with physical exercise, and yoga positions in themselves are not the main issue. But these positions are teaching postures with a spiritual purpose.” Mohler, is pointing out that the physical exercise in yoga is spiritual, even when I am just exercising. This point I simply don’t understand. Exercise can be harmful or helpful to our spiritual life, depending on our relationship to our body image and eating habits, but using yoga for exercise in and of itself is not sinful.

There is a gymnasium on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary campus, where Mohler is president. It consists of various weight machines and benches, as well as saunas, treadmills, free weights and other exercise machines.  This is not a Christian method of exercising. We got all those saunas and free weights from the Greeks and Romans. You know, those pagans who worshiped multiple deities and burned Christians on the stake. Those people. So how can we accept one pagan method of exercise over another? We can’t, and we shouldn’t, for this is exercise. Just as when I lift weights I am not buying into Greco-Roman mystery religions or gnosticism, I am not participating in Hindu religious practice when I do yoga. I am just exercising.

Now some Christian adherents to yoga should take heed to the warning that Mohler gives concerning the spiritual components that may be included in yoga classes. Just as we don’t exercise to purge the body in a gnostic fashion, we should not participate in another religion’s spiritual practices. But, we should not stray from the physical as Mohler suggests. Mohler argues “Christians are not called…to see the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine.” What Mohler is saying is not Christian Instead, his view of the physical is leaning towards gnosticism. A Christian understanding of the body is that it is the image of God. God formed humanity out of the dust of the earth: very physical stuff. We are connected to God through the combination of our spirituality and physicality—the two cannot be separated. Jesus himself connected to God and knew God through his physical body, and his act of redemption for us was death and resurrection in the flesh. And when Jesus comes again, the kingdom and the resurrection will be both a physical and spiritual reality.

So is yoga safe for Christians? If it is treated as exercise, certainly so. But like anything, if it becomes something that leads us away from the kingdom of God, then it is not good. Turning anything other than Christ’s gospel into a religion is to go astray, and that applies to exercise as well as to shopping, gardening, sex, or work. In reality, what is truly unsafe for the Christian is the dichotomy between physical and spiritual that Mohler espouses, to not allow our physical bodies to participate in the worship of God. Let us pray every day that God not only renews our minds, but that he also establishes the works of our hands, the physical work we accomplish each day with our physical bodies as an act of worship before God, as we look to him who came in the flesh for us.