Signs and Wonders

Les Beauchamp is back in the house at Bethel this week. He has been a Spiritual Emphasis Week speaker four times over the past twenty years, and it just so happens that they have coincided perfectly with the times that I have been a part of the community. I'm not entirely certain of this, but I think that I have been to every one of the chapels he's spoken at (which would be 29 of them counting today's). There's something about him...



I convinced my son Casey to come with me tonight to see the service. On the way there I told him that it felt to me like it must have felt in the Bible days when John the Baptist was around (I won't go so far as to compare him to Jesus) when some father said to his son, "you've got to see this crazy preacher out by the river. Let's go out and see what happens."



I guess part of the draw is that the supernatural follows Les around. He used this phrase tonight that comes from Celtic Christianity: thin. "Thin" was used to describe places where the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is very thin--where the two pass over into each other. It's not the kooky TV preacher kind of stuff; but you get the sense that it is authentic Holy Spirit activity that we too rarely experience.



Everyone wants a sign. We'd all like to see a show. I guess there's some connection to my previous posts here. What role does the Spirit play today? I live in a pretty rational world.

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign

The good Dr. Haas took some exception to my recent post on coincidences as signs of God. He left a series of posts on my Facebook page into which this blog dumps (found here if you have access). I take it that the gist of his concern is that interpreting circumstances as messages from God is an inherently private action, and so removes the controls of a believing community centered on the Word of God and opens the door to all kinds of wacky things which are immune to falsification.

I continue to wonder, though, whether the kinds of experiences I alluded to have some legitimate place in the life of faith. Remember first of all that it's a pretty rare occurrence in my life that something dramatic like this happens (in a life approaching four decades, I'm still counting them on fingers (with several leftover)). Next, most of these incidents were not remarkable in their immediate contexts (with the exception of the radio song I mentioned), but have become more so as larger stories of my life unfolded. The historian will have fun with this, I'm sure: they are the interpreted "facts" (and I'm not sure there are any other kind) around which I've made sense out of some of the things that have happened to me and the choices that I've made. I'll continue to contend that my faith has a role to play in this. I believe in, trust in, and am committed to (these three attitudes classically constituting faith) seeing the hand of God at work in my life. This is always easier in retrospect and (I'm willing to concede) in community.

You'll not catch me claiming infallibility with such things, but I think it defensible that God does work through circumstances and impinge on the natural order of things. I think we can learn to hear his voice (though we need to be careful here not to think God just dictates to us what we should do in certain situations--thus rendering free will superfluous). These are components of my faith in the kind of being that God is.

Such a topic could hardly be treated with integrity without appeal to the Five Man Electrical Band classic:

"Whoaaaa signs, signs, everywhere a sign;
Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind.
Do this, don't do that. Can't you read the signs?

Play ball!

There is still snow in piles in northern Indiana, but they're playing baseball in Japan. My family and I arose at 6am local time today to see the season opener for Major League Baseball which featured my beloved Red Sox beating the Oakland A's in extra innings in the Tokyo Dome. Evidently this is part of some marketing scheme to bring in more international dollars to MLB.

I have to admit that it seems a bit early for baseball to be going entering the official season. And I haven't decided yet how devoted of a fan I'm going to be this summer (though I'm not sure that we are always the agents of such decisions... more often we find ourselves engaged at various levels apart from any intentional choice). On the one hand, I won't be administrating any more this summer (which means I won't have to put on long pants every day and go to work), so there should be some time to devote to sport. But on the other hand, a writing deadline looms pretty large at the end of the summer, and there's not much of a margin for tomfoolery.

I'm also anxious to see how the whole world-champions-twice-in-four-years thing fits with being a Red Sox fan. Winning the World Series once was the incredible and unbelievable climax to the collective suffering of generations. But now it's almost old hat. The DNA of Red Sox Nation is changing. I haven't decided yet if I like it. It makes me feel pretentious... almost like a Yankee fan.

See you tomorrow morning at 6am for game two.

Resurrection musings

Another Easter is in the history books. It is probably a little anti-climactic to discuss Easter after the fact (kind of like the Easter egg hunt that took place on Bethel's campus today). But I've never claimed to be ahead of the curve.

The resurrection of the body is an interesting topic to plumb. We quite often assume that it is the actual physical body itself that becomes re-animated at the resurrection. Certainly in the instance of Jesus's resurrection, there was no more body in the tomb (note the empty burial cloth in the photo).

We want there to be a connection between our physical bodies now and the resurrected bodies that are to come. Must there be? If not, then Jesus's "body" could have still been in the tomb when he was resurrected. But it gets complicated when we deal with others.

What about the resurrection of those who have been dead for thousands of years? There aren't many particles of their bodies left to animate. And a question that some Christians have given serious consideration to is: what if a guy fell overboard into the sea and was eaten by a fish; thus his body was incorporated into the fish's. Then someone else caught the fish and ate it, thus incorporating that flesh into his. At the resurrection, whose flesh will go to which resurrected person??

It seems to me that there is some sort of continuity. For instance, at the Transfiguration Jesus's regular body was transformed into the glorious one (the soma pneumatika?). It's not like his regular flesh was there too. But how do you maintain a continuity like that when all the material particles have disintegrated from the body?

VP No More

One of the nice things about taking six months off from blogging is that you have a lot of topics waiting in the wings to be blogged. One of the categories I'll be interspersing here is "Catch up on my life" Probably the most momentous thing that has transpired during this time period is my decision to step down from my administrative post at Bethel. At the close of this academic year, I'll no longer be the Vice President for Academic Services.

I still have some major reflecting to do on this move. Coming to the decision was tortuous, but even if nothing else good comes from it, it was a worthwhile process because I heard from God. I suspect that most of us have times fairly frequently when there is a nudge or quiet word in our lives that provides direction. But I have a list that I can count on my fingers of the times when there was something more dramatic in the way of divine communication. I've never been one to hear audible voices or see skywriting; but God has worked powerfully and unmistakeably (at least to my lights) through circumstances--like the time that I asked if I was going to marry the girl I was dating and God "answered" through the song on the radio. This time it was through the timing of a telephone call. Perhaps I'll speak to it again in the future.

For now, I'll reflect a bit more on coincidences. There is a concept that has some traction from the Intelligent Design movement called "specified complexity". Essentially it is an event that has a very low probability of happening (complexity) AND shows unmistakable signs of intelligence (specified). When I lived in Illinois, the license plates had three letters then three numbers to them (unless you ordered a custom one--which was free in IL at that time but I chose not to do for aesthetic reasons). The one that we got was RCF 337. Getting that specific license number has a probability of 1 in 17,576,000. That's pretty rare, but I when we got it in the mail I didn't respond with, "Wow, can you believe we got that one??!!" However, if I had gotten JBS 711, which has exactly the same probability of appearing on an Illinois license plate, I would have been incredibly shocked and I doubt if you could have convinced me that something wasn't fishy somewhere (because that happens to be my initials and birth date).

In the same way, many of the "God things" that have happened to me had incredibly low probabilities as well as having the unmistakeable mark of someone standing behind them. I'm aware of the possibility that they could have just been random; but I choose to view those events as purposeful (and would argue that it is the better explanation of the facts to do so). I think that being committed to viewing the world in such a way is at least part of what it means to have religious faith.

It's all about me

I'm back from a half-year blogging hiatus. I have enjoyed the break and feel that all jobs should come with six-month vacations. I'm a little nervous, to be honest. I've fallen out of rhythm. I feel like I don't what's going on out there in the blogodrome. I wonder if anyone will come back after my desertion.

An unrelated story:
For a year in Sierra Leone I taught five boys all subjects that 7th and 8th graders are supposed to learn. One day I got so frustrated with the egocentrism that permeated their conversations, that I banned the use of all first-person pronouns and kept score on the board for any violations of the rule. One kid kept using them on purpose and it made me angry.