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This is what passes for a church service in America

Pastor gets into motorcycle crash during church service
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS KOKOMO, Ind.

A pastor in Indiana decided to bring out a dirt bike during a church service to demonstrate the concept of unity.

Now he's demonstrating the concept of healing. Jeff Harlow, the senior pastor at Crossroads Community Church, broke his wrist when he lost control of the motorcycle at the start of Sunday's second service. He ended up driving off a 1.5-metre platform and into the vacant first row of seats.

He's now recovering from surgery on the wrist.

His wife, Becky, says the pastor is OK but "his pride was bruised."

Becky Harlow said her husband had recently attended a motorcycle race in Buchanan, Michigan.

"He had this idea that he would bring this bike out onstage and show people how the rider would become one with the bike," she told the Kokomo Tribune. "He was going to just sit on it and drive it out. He was just walking the dirt bike out onstage and somehow it got away from him. It was not intended."

No one else was hurt.

Jeff Harlow had performed the demonstration at earlier services Saturday night and Sunday morning without incident.

I guess this is the latest stunt to attract new members. This YouTube video is from a separate incident:

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Random

Another Biblical Horizons conference is history. It was a great week. A nice balance of topics for lectures. Good singing and worship. A large crowd of attendees, too. I gave four lectures on Colossians, mostly concentrating on the epochal change that took place in world history and the ordering of human life as a result of "the circumcision of Christ" (=his death on the cross). As usual, the interaction between lecturers helped me gather some loose ends together. I'll try to post something on this a little later this or next week.

The week before I left for the BH conference I began to read William P. Young's The Shack. The first thing to say about this novel is that it's not great literature. It's not even good literature. Actually, it's not very well written at all. I found it tedious to read. The story itself starts out okay. There's enough there to keep you reading. But then the protagonist gets to the shack. At that point the whole thing becomes worse than ridiculous. I have to be honest. I couldn't read any more after the revelation of the Trinity as a big black woman (the Father), a Jewish man (the Son), and a petite young Asian woman (the Spirit). At one point the main character asks, "Which on one of you is God?" They all answer at once, "I am." Give me a break. The whole thing is just plain goofy after that. Not to sound too elitist, but if this is the kind of "theological novel" that millions of American Christians love, then Christian culture in this country is in serious trouble. Well, of course, we already knew that, didn't we? If you want more information on this latest American Christian smoltzy novel, check out the World Magazine review. Read The Shack if you want. But you may end up screaming and throwing the book at the wall about a third of the way through.

I tried cuil.com, the latest challenge to Google. Not bad. A bit slow for me. But whoever wants to dethrone Google is gonna have to do a whole lot better than this.

I finally got around to listening to this podcast on Radical Orthodoxy. I've read a lot of the RO books and articles, and I appreciate a lot of what they are saying, especially their critique of modernity (after AD 1300!). This CBC Radio podcast is helpful. David Cayley interviews Catherine Pickstock and John Milbank, so we get summaries of RO in their own words. There are, of course, serious problems with the positive theology of Milbank and the RO theologians. This podcast doesn't really deal with those problems. This is just a nice, succinct summary of the RO project.

Come Closer, My Dear

This was captured at the Turkey Creek nature trail in Niceville, Florida. If you look closely at the head, you'll see a faux female face. It's pretty spooky. This image isn't as sharp as it could be. I only had my 18-200mm with me. I left my macro lens at home. Bummer.

Human Crystal Factory

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Today's Image

Oh, I'm supposed to tell you that the new banner image of the fence and barbed wire was taken by my son Jeffrey. Good work!

IR Rocket

Image of the Day.I'm trying to figure out how to use this IR filter (R72). Post-processing is challenging.

A Brief Hiatus

I'll probably be pretty spotty with my blogging for the next week. I'm in Niceville, Florida, at the annual Biblical Horizons conference. My son and I just got into our motel room an hour or so ago.

Saturday evening my wallet was stolen from my car outside of my house. I had heard that kids (?) rifled through cars on the weekend in the neighborhood. The police have warned everyone many times. I try to make sure my car is locked. And I usually park it in the driveway where it is covered by the floodlight. But I must have forgotten to lock it Saturday evening. And I left my wallet inside. Not good. When I opened the car on Sunday morning, all the compartments were open and I knew exactly what had happened. No wallet. Nothing else was missing. Nothing else was touched as far as I can tell. Just the wallet. When I came back from church in the morning Jeffrey and I headed out with a flashlight and a crowbar to check the sewers. Sure enough, we found it in the 4th one we opened. They drove about a block and tossed it. My cash, driver's license, and most of my credit cards were gone, of course. But I did recover two credit cards and all the receipts that I stored in it. What a mess. The officer that took my report told me that they had processed dozens of similar reports from Crestwood and Sunset Hills that morning.

Today's wise advice from Jeff: Lock your car at night and take your wallet inside!

This Looks Like My Kind of Book

President Bush

Is Bush really a "total failure"? That's what Speaker Pelosi said yesterday. I know that everyone on the left would have us think so. But is it true? Will his presidency be judged by history as a failure? The economy has been quite good for the last 8 years. It's still not bad. Unemployment is low. We've had steady growth. He cut taxes. And what does he have to do with high gas prices right now? Bush has appointed good Supreme Court Judges. The war in Iraq has turned out to be better than most thought it could ever be. I get the impression that EU leaders respect him, even if EU people have bought into the way he has been caricatured by our press both here and abroad.

All this presidential-election-year rhetoric is really getting old. On every front. And the Media's doom-and-gloom reporting is going to drive the economy down even more before the election. It's so predictable. It happens every four years. Why don't we just have the election next week so everything can get back to normal. I don't want to have to listen to four more months of childish, irresponsible political rhetoric.

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Stuff

Got a lot going on this week. Yesterday our presbytery met for our quarterly stated meeting. We had 4 men to examine for ordination. My committee did the bulk of the work leading up to the meeting. But it takes a couple of hours or more to conduct a floor exam for so many men. They all passed. One of them was our new Assistant Pastor, Joshua Anderson. He did very well. There was some fireworks about his paedocommunion exception to the Westminster Standards. But it turned out to be just a few people. The vote to sustain his exam was loud and strong with only two people voting against it.

This week I'm busing working on my lectures for the Biblical Horizon's conference. The conference begins next Monday, July 21st. I've been attending and speaking at the BH conferences for over 15 years. It's a great time. Not your typical conference. Mostly a time of sharing new insights and learning the Bible from colleagues and friends.

This year I will be lecturing on Paul's letter to the Colossians. Right now I need to get back to work. . .

I said I need to get back to work! There ain't nothing more to read.

Today's Image

Another raptor from the World Bird Sanctuary at Lone Elk Park just west of St. Louis on highway 44. I think this is a Tawny Eagle.

Real Smart

http://view.break.com/534959 - Watch more free videos

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Why I Don't Have an iPhone

From now on I'm going to put ratings (G, PG, PG-13, and R) on these videos. This one is PG for a bit of language.

How to Get Broke by Buying an iPhone

Unbelievable Ballgirl Catch

No Beer, No Civilization

Absolutely! Muslim cultures be. . . well, you know.

Here's what George Will has to say:

Perhaps, like many sensible citizens, you read Investor's Business Daily for its sturdy common sense in defending free markets and other rational arrangements. If so, you too may have been startled recently by an astonishing statement on that newspaper's front page. It was in a report on the intention of the world's second-largest brewer, Belgium's InBev, to buy control of the third-largest, Anheuser-Busch, for $46.3 billion. The story asserted: "The [alcoholic beverage] industry's continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer."

"Non what"? Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and, later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had -- what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors -- by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol."

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world's population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

But that is a potential stew of racial or ethnic sensitivities that we need not stir in this correction of Investor's Business Daily. Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.

So let there be no more loose talk -- especially not now, with summer arriving -- about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had -- what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors -- by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol."

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world's population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

But that is a potential stew of racial or ethnic sensitivities that we need not stir in this correction of Investor's Business Daily. Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.

So let there be no more loose talk -- especially not now, with summer arriving -- about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.

Duck in the Mulch

This mama wood duck is sitting on her eggs right under our front window! She dug a hole in the mulch and laid about 8 eggs. This is now the second batch she's working on.

Learning from the PharmCo Ads

Try Me

I captured this image Sunday afternoon at Lone Elk Park just west of St. Louis. My wife wanted to go for a ride that afternoon, and I'm glad I threw my camera in the back seat. For those who care. . . Nikon D300 with 18-200mm Nikkor, f5.6, 1/90 sec, ISO 320, handheld with fill flash (+0.7 EV).

More Good Stuff

Now Comes the Good Stuff - Image of the Week

This image was captured Friday evening at the Webster Groves Community Days. This one is not the same as the one I posted yesterday. I took over 50 images at this one spot. It took me a while to figure out exactly where to get what I wanted. When I finally got there, I camped out until I got the image I was looking for. There's a little photoshop magic here, but not as much as you might think. Nikon D300, w/ 12-24mm Nikkor at 12mm, f11, 1.5 secs, ISO 200, w/tripod.

You can see a few of my other captures that night here. But I haven't processed them all yet.

Avoid Every Occurrence

Luke tells the story of Jesus eating in the house of Simon the Pharisee in Luke 7:36-50. However the prostitute was able to avoid the bouncer at Simon's front door, once inside she makes a beeline for Jesus. While Jesus is reclining at table, with his legs and feet stretched out behind him, the woman begins to do what she came to do. She "brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with ointment" (Luke 7:37,38).

By all accounts, these actions have the appearance of sexual impropriety. But I'll let Joel Green explain: "Within her cutlural context—and all the more given her apparent reputation as a prostitute—her actions on the whole would have been regarded (at least by men) as erotic. Letting her hair down in this setting would have been on par with appearing topless in public, for example. She would have appeared to be fondling Jesus' feet, like a prostitute or slave girl accustomed to providing sexual favors" (The Gospel of Luke, p. 310).

Why didn't Jesus' shoo her off? He could have withdrawn his feet and asked the woman to come back at a more appropriate time. After all, Pharisees and presumably influential men from the city were dining with Simon and Jesus. These were people Jesus hoped "to reach" and so it would have been advantageous for him to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Doesn't the Bible say that we are to "avoid every appearance of evil"?

Well, actually it doesn't say that. Paul warns in 1 Thessalonians 5:22, "avoid every occurrence of evil," or maybe, "everywhere evil appears, avoid it!" There's nothing in that passage about avoiding what appears to be evil. Rather, it's about avoiding evil "when and where it appears." The ESV avoids the word "appearance" altogether and translates it, "Abstain from every form of evil."

Even so, surely Jesus could have talked to the woman and convinced her to show her appreciation at some other time and in some other way so that her actions would not have caused such offense to Simon and his guests. But because he didn't, Simon puts the worst sort of interpretation on Jesus' acquiescence to the woman's handling of his feet. He is offended. He says to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would have known what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner" (v. 39).

I'm not going to explain Jesus' parable and rebuke to Simon. You can read that. It's well known. My point here is that Jesus refused to cater to Simon the Pharisee. He wasn't going to play his game. He didn't care what Simon thought. Jesus would not allow the Pharisees to set his agenda for him, to dictate what he could and could not do in his ministry. He didn't care how they might have interpreted his ministry. They could play the flute all day, but Jesus wasn't going to dance (Luke 7:32).

There's a huge lesson here for the church as the extension of Jesus' ministry on earth (Acts 1:1). I'll let you figure out what it is.

Close Encounter

Oh yeah, it's the Fourth of July. Time for some fun with light! My son and I walked around the Webster Groves festival last night with two cameras and a tripod. We captured some keepers. Go here to see more images with better resolution. I'll be putting them up as I get time to process them.

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Justifying God

Luke interjects a highly significant comment in the middle of Jesus' discourse about John the Baptizer. Right after Jesus commends John to the crowd as the greatest prophet in the history of world (his doubts about Jesus notwithstanding), Luke says this:

When all the people heard this, and the tax collectors too, they justified God, having been baptized with the baptism of John, but the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him.

There's a lot of things I could say about this comment. But for now notice how Luke describes the people's response to Jesus' words. They "justified God" (Greek: edikaiosan ton theon).

What are the implications of this statement? First, the people declare God "just" or "righteous" (Greek: dike) when they hear Jesus commend John even though John expressed some doubts about Jesus. Those that had been baptized by John recognized this as a vindication/justification of John's ministry.

Second, by declaring God "righteous" the people are extolling God's faithfulness. To say that God is "righteous" means that he is faithful to his promises and covenant. It's not first of all a scary thing, as in God's absolute moral perfection over against our sin. Rather, it's about God being true to his purposes. In fact, the parallel comment with reference to the Pharisees has them "rejecting the purpose of God for themselves." So to "justify God" means that one aligns oneself with the purposes of God. If one has been baptized, then one is a member of those who "justify God" and submit to his purpose and plan.

Third, that Luke should be concerned with the "justification of God" should not be surprising to us. Remember, Doctor Luke is the apostle Paul’s assistant. He writes this Gospel account to ground Paul’s teaching ministry about Jesus. Justifying God is a major theme in Paul's ministry. God must be "justified" to the Jews and Gentiles alike so that they can align themselves by faith with the present purpose of God in Christ.

Remember the theme of Paul's great letter to the Romans. It's not primarily about our justification. The letter is about "the justification of God." The letter starts off with Paul giving the theme: The righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel (1:17). Paul does not mean "righteousness from God," but rather, he is going to explain how the history of God's work in Jesus manifests God's own righteousness. In other words, God has been faithful and true to his covenant. The coming and work of Jesus is proof. That's the theme Romans. The righteousness of God. It shouldn't surprise us, then, that Dr. Luke has the same concerns. Through Jesus God's work of grace to Jews and Gentiles alike proves his "righteousness." Those who are baptized and join the new community of Jesus' disciples thereby align themselves with the purpose of God and justify God publicly.