thanksgiving...well, kinda

so I'm trusting that everyone had a great thanksgiving. mine was great, as I have so many things to give thanks for. a few specific things I became thankful for just today, though:

1) Corvettes. my uncle has a '67-68ish (sorry I forgot) Corvette. after we ate and were all just sitting around (I think I was asleep/watching the Green Bay/Detroit game, he goes "Kent, you wanna take the 'vette for a drive?" wow--what a question, so I took it for a drive with my cousin Lesley, then got back and realized I didn't wanna stop yet, so I talked my mom into getting in so I could do it all over again. awesomeness.

2) Weiner dogs. these little guys are truly the joys of life. I know a lot of people who will swear against weiner dogs, and I just don't know how. maggie, my cousin's new pet, simply lit up my world. and that, my friends, is probably the most masculine thing I will ever say on this blog.

I am especially thankful for my family this thanksgiving. I know that sounds weird, but it is because yesterday I attended a receiving friends for a friend of mine, Kenny Plumley, who took his own life on Monday. I can't imagine the pain his family must be going through. I do want to say that all of our prayers and thoughts go out to Kenny's family. I know a lot of them are searching for answers right now, and I don't have them, but I know Someone does. God bless you guys.

all the traveling today also lent itself to a lot of podcast-listening. on the way to Charlotte today I listened to donald miller speak on Paul and the "incarnational gospel." this led me to realizing how thankful I am for Paul. Paul is often considered, other than Jesus, one of the most passionate missionaries in history. and reading his stuff helps me out a lot when I'm trying to figure out how in the world to go about sharing Christ with people. not only did he not give a rip about being persecuted for something he believed in, but insisted on being very Christlike in the way he presented the gospel. one example is the way he approached the church in Athens in Acts 17.

for those of you not familiar with this particular story, Paul basically is encouraged to travel to Athens in the hope that he will tone down his act a little bit and quit being arrested and stuff so much. now just judging from what you've heard about Paul, do you think it worked? exactly. it took Paul about an hour before he was bursting at the seems to tell somebody else about Christ. while he was in the synagogue, he saw the many false idols that the Athenians were worshipping. this bothered Paul, but not in the way that it would bother a lot of Christians today. in this type of situation today, many believers would probably feel the urge to confront these people confrontationally and ensure that we told them just exactly how wrong they were for worshipping false gods. Paul sees something different. he sees the many different gods, and then sees one altar dedicated to "an unknown god." so instead of telling these people how dumb they are for worshipping all these statues (which is probably what we would do), Paul says:

"Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. I even found an altar with this inscription: 'TO AN UNKOWN GOD'. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you"

Paul then proceeds to tell them about who this 'unknown God' is! imagine that! in a situation where we would lean into these people to tell them how ridiculous their religion is (I am specifically thinking of the way I have heard many Christians respond to Buddhism), Paul compliments them! He thinks it is on many levels beautiful that these Athenians long for something spiritual, so he tells them about Christ!

there are a few reasons, I think, that this idea strikes a lot of Christians as crazy. one is the idea of a Christian culture that we have created. miller uses the example of the Scopes monkey trial in the 1920s. in a lot of ways, after that trial, a lot of Christians were offended. the idea that America would take Christianity to court was pretty blasphemous (sp?) to a lot of people. and from that day on, you begin to see a lot of this idea of separating Christian culture from the world's culture. it wasn't always like that. it was in the five or ten years following this case that you saw a ton of Christian schools popping up all over the place. you began to see this attitude of "well, if they aren't going to do things the way WE say, we'll start our own thing. then eventually, when we get big enough and strong enough, they'll be starved out and come crawling back to us for help." this "survival of the fittest" attitude, miller points out, is kind of hilarious considering that the Scopes monkey trial was, in many ways, Christians vs. Darwin.

but as much as we would like to say that we don't do this as Christians, it is pretty obvious that we do. for example, how many ministries in the church to you see targeting single parents? common sense would tell you that these type of ministries would be important, since over half of U.S. households are those of single parents, right? I would argue that many churches don't though, simply because someone being a single parent would imply that they might have either had a child out of wedlock, or are divorced--both things that are simply frowned upon by the church. this idea of simply not reaching out to these people is very Western in origin, and more importantly, unbiblical. something tells me that if Jesus had no problem hanging out with a woman who had had five husbands and was currently living with a guy who wasn't her husband, he would also have no problem hanging out with a single mom.

anyway, I realized through listening to this podcasts that I am just as guilty as anyone of doing this, and that there is no excuse for it. it's so easy for some reason for me to help out a homeless guy who is on drugs, and then turn around and refuse to connect with a guy who seems like he might be gay because I don't agree with it, and that is stupid. if I am telling people about the Great Physician, I should present him as just that. in a lot of ways, us trying to starve out people who are in the margins of life is a lot a nurse who runs tests on a patient who thinks he might have cancer, and coming back into the room saying, "well the tests came back positive for cancer. you're in pretty bad shape. and here's the thing--the doctor here really hates cancer. so if you don't mind we'd rather you just go ahead and leave now, and don't come back. good luck with your cancer, but the doctor here only wants to help you once you have helped yourself first. thanks. bye." as ridiculous as that sounds, that's what so many churches do to people who are lost. the lost come to a church, in hopes that that church can help them find what they're longing for and the church says, "okay that's great, but we really don't help [insert adjective of choice] people here until they've straightened that up. come back when you're not [adjective of choice] anymore." let's show people Christ's love, and then partner with him to do the healing. all of us are broken. it makes no sense for one broken person to say to another "you need to get to my level of brokenness first before God can help you."

let us be the remedy...