Remember last Wednesday, when we all rallied around and lifted our unified voice in defiance to politicians that were trying to pass bills that would restrict internet freedom and innovation? We were trying to tell the government they shouldn’t have the power to unilaterally–and at their own whim and discretion–take down entire websites because of the sole actions of their users.

Remember how within the day of our protest, congressional websites were going down from all the traffic and sponsors of the bills were jumping ship? It was beautiful, wasn’t it?

And then we woke up the next morning to this.

Less than 24-hours after the largest internet protest in history, news broke that the largest file-sharing site in the world, Megaupload, had been seized by U.S. Government officials and it’s founders and owners were being arrested and charged with piracy and copyright infringement.

[NOTE: If you don't have much time to spare, I would strongly recommend not reading the rest of my post and instead reading these analyses done by the Cato Institute and Glenn Greenwald. They are both excellent in explaining the subtleties of the issue and convincing in their outline of its dangerous precedents.]

A few thoughts:

1- Our first response could be: Well, good. That just goes to show you that SOPA and PIPA were unnecessary all along. And we’d be right to say this, although we shouldn’t necessarily be happy to say this. Why? Read on…

2- The main problem we should have with this is not that the government took down a site, but with the lack of due process. This case was almost as if the government said (as Glenn Greenwald said in the above-linked article): “Congratulations, citizens, on your cute little “democracy” victory in denying us the power to shut down websites without a trial: we’re now going to shut down one of your most popular websites without a trial.“

The government is telling us that they have the right to remove and and censor our otherwise protected speech from the public domain without having to prove it is wrong beforehand. Most people believe that copyrighted content that is being distributed in an infringing way should be illegal and removed from the internet. It should just have to follow the legal process. The Cato Institute (a policy research organization), said this well on their Justice blog (linked above also):

Now, if the people behind Megaupload are, in fact, guilty of criminal activity—and the indictment certainly looks damning—the government will have the opportunity to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt before a jury, which will also get to hear any exculpatory facts or arguments the defendants are able to offer. It can be a slow process, but it’s also how we’re supposed to do things in the United States: we don’t just issue orders branding people or sites as “rogues,” we convict them.

3- Because of the lack of due process and careful consideration, millions of other, absolutely legal, and otherwise protected uploaded speech and files were seized along with the rest of the site. If you’re trying to catch a drug dealer, and have to seize some of his property for your case, you don’t end up confiscating the property of all of his neighbors as well just because he sold drugs in there. That would be a clear over-reach of governmental authority. There’s a dangerous precedent being set in this case.

4- Don’t fool yourselves. The events of last week were not a case of The People defeating The Corporations. This was, as my favorite political commentator Dan Carlin pointed out in his most recent podcast episode, The Media Corporations against The People and The Tech Companies. In other words, if we didn’t have Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia lobbying hard against this, it would have passed no matter what sort of uproar we made. Heck, it took Wikipedia going dark for a day before most people even knew what was going on! This was not Democracy in action. It was the usual open-air political corruption we face daily, only the American people’s interest just happened to line up with the interest of one of the sides.

5- There’s a growing trend in Washington in how the federal government is getting more and more power, at the expense of our influence as citizens. As outlined in Bruce Ackerman’s “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic”:

The federal government will want to do something it has never done in its existence. They will go to their lawyers and say “come up with an elegant new interpretation of law by which I could do this”. They come up with said interpretation and write it up in beautiful and complicated legal briefs (such as John Yoo’s famous “Torture Memos”–about which I’ve written before) and then start exercising that power freely. If the American people ever make a stink about this (or even find out about it in the first place), it takes years before it might get to the Supreme Court, by which time this power exercised by the Executive is so commonplace and so engrained in how the “system” just “works”, the Supreme Court often refuses to take the case, or sides with the administration.

At times, the administration or Congress attempts to pass a law later on that will only then give a legal justification for this new power that the Executive has been exercising this whole time. This is usually the time these topics get some media attention and people get all ruffled up. But at this point in the game it’s too late, and with no other corporations lobbying in line with our interests, the bill’s get passed and we move on, having lost a little more faith in our process.

This happened with the National Defense Authorization Act a few weeks ago. We had already, for a while before the bill was signed into law, been indefinitely detaining people, fighting our “war” in many nations outside Afghanistan and Iraq, and assassinating American citizens the President deemed fit to die. The fanfare it got was anticlimactic. It was only codifying already-common practice!

The same happened (to a certain extent) with these SOPA and PIPA bills. The seizure of Megaupload was a stark reminder that the government already claims this right and has already exercised it hundreds of times. They didn’t need the law.

6- And on one last, pessimistic note: the essence of these bills will get passed. They will not die. “Shelving” them keeps them around for another day when we’re not looking. It would have been better were they voted on and did not pass than if they were tucked away like they have been. They will get added to the end of a random bill for something unrelated. They will be added as an amendment to a different law at the last second. They will be a rider to some budgetary line item that’s passed.

But one way or another, unless (a) dramatic campaign finance reform is passed, removing the “money factor” from this issue, or (b) nearly every congressman currently in office gets voted out, we will live under the basic provisions of this law within the next two or three years.

1- I really wish the entire idea of teleprompters would die a quick, painful death. I would much rather get back to the days when Presidents wrote out their speeches and had sheets in front of them during the speech that they were speaking from, rather than reading from.

2- I’ve got to admit it, Mitch Daniels did pretty darn good in his response. It was a very refreshing change in style from Paul Ryan and (oh my god) Michele Bachmann last year. It still had a definite ideological twinge, and still sounded more like a stockholders meeting where the executive must, under any circumstance, talk about how good their company is and how weak their competition is, no matter the results or numbers. But in the end, it was far more thoughtful and intelligent than anything else the Republicans have put out in the past few years, even if it was completely devoid of real, genuine suggestions on moving forward on anything.

3- The media is already painting this as a speech primarily about wealth disparity. First, he talked about a lot more than just that, and secondly, he proposed nothing more radical than letting temporary tax cuts expire for them. Wow.

4- Speaking of Mitch Daniels and wealth disparity… Did anyone notice Daniels’ proposal for Social Security? Let rich people continue to pay into it, but then not let them receive benefits “they do not need”, but instead use that money to pay full benefits to the middle class. Sounds to me like a backwards way of doing the same thing Obama’s trying to do. Uh-oh. Does Daniels’ party know that he supports “wealth distribution”? Hang the Socialist!

5- Obama still doesn’t get the manufacturing sector. The President himself can’t create markets where there are none. You can’t boost our own exports through protectionist American economic policies. And he’s going to set up a commission to investigate “unfair trade practices” by other countries? And what sort of practices does he deem unfair? Well, he mentioned other countries who don’t compete fairly because of how subsidized their products are, thereby making their products so much cheaper than ours. Please, somebody tell Obama that we have ruined the Mexican economy through our heavy subsidies of the American corn and construction industries (therefore inviting their trained workers to try and immigrate illegally to do the only work they know how to do). He really should read the amazing book “Make It In America” by Andrew Liveris. Also, I’ve written a couple of pieces on this in the past [Part 1, Part 2].

6- I hate how there was no mention of civil liberties or the recent National Defense Authorization Act (giving the President full authority to indefinitely detain even American citizens at his own discretion, without due process or pressing charges, wherever there is a defined battlefield. Oh. And the NDAA also defined the battleground in the “War on Terror”. According to the legislation, the entire world–American soil included by implication–is the official battlefield.). This has made me a one-issue voter this year (a full explanation and defense of this will arrive in the next couple of days).

7- As far as the accomplishments he listed, most of what Obama said in the speech was political half-truths and big stretches (you can easily eliminate over 500 government regulations depending on how wide you put your scope and how meaningless and already un-enforced they are–hardly something to prattle about. Also, he  bragged that his Health Care bill was a “reform” of [read: "give-away" to] the private sector).

8- As far as proposals go, I really liked what Obama had to say and propose (but I did last year as well, and…well, see point 7 again). The Education stuff was encouraging (though not far enough), the private/public partnerships were reasonably presented, and he threw enough bones out there to Republicans they really should have been more happy than they were. Speaking of….

9- I really can’t stand Republicans (Boehner) who will not clap or seemed please when Obama does and says things that are clearly give-aways to them and things they’ve been asking for for years.

10- Lastly, I think our blind worship and lust over the military is disgusting and something we should be ashamed of. There’s a reason why those in the military have given more monetary contributions to Ron Paul than every other Presidential candidate (Republican and Democrat) combined: he wants to bring them home, and not use them for more injustice, unconstitutional wars, failed interventionist policies, and robbing of citizens of their constitutional civil liberties. To use the military as a mere tool to assert your own twisted image of “power” and “influence” and “American superiority” in the world is something to be mourned, not given a standing ovation. Until the military is actually defending the Constitution more than the President’s policies, they should not have our undying affection and support.

BONUS: One thing Obama was definitely right about: none of us think Washington is going to get anything done this year.

What did you think of the speech?

[image from whitehouse.gov]

UPDATE: I wrote a follow-up piece to this protest that might be worth your time if you care about this issue.

As many people know (especially in the circles that read this blog), today is the official “blackout day” for many sites in protest of two proposed bills before Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). They are each supposed to be attempts to address the problems of piracy and copyright infringement on the web.

First, let’s be clear. Most of the people opposing these bills are not trying to protect piracy and illegal activities. These are problems, to be sure. Those opposing these bills are merely saying that there are much better and much more specific ways to do this. The bills, as currently written are so broad in their scope and definitions, that most any website, and most every individual who currently casually uses the internet will at some point be guilty of the felonies spoken to in this bill. I am not exaggerating. I am not talking in extremes to scare people. (It almost makes one think the bills were intentionally written that way. They are also weighed down with a lot of political corruption.)

This is serious. Why?

Supporters of the bill are painting those that oppose it as merely reacting to the general idea of the bills rather than the “substance” of them. This is false. You may have heard that that the sponsors of the bill recently struck the “DNS blocking” provisions from the bills. This is not even close to the scariest part of the legislation. It is the very substance of it that is the scariest. I would really beg each of you to read the following few articles to get educated on the specifics of these bills, what’s wrong with them, and what to do something about it.

• Why SOPA is dangerous | Mashable (a walk-through the specific legalize and implications of SOPA)
• Why We’ve Censored Wired.com | Wired.com (a very general reasoning behind being against the bills)
• A SOPA/PIPA Blackout Explainer | Wired.com (a very specific and easy-to-understand explanation of the bills and why they’re harmful)
• House takes Senate’s bad Internet censorship bill tries making it worse | ars technica
• Other Resources: Watch a Video, See an Infographic, Read quotes from experts

What to do?

Sign Petitions

• Google Petition
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation Petition
• American Censorship | SOPA Strike

Write your Representatives in Congress

If you go to the Wikipedia (English) homepage, for just today, you’ll see it’s blacked out in protest of the bills. If you input your zip code, you can find your representatives in Congress and convenient links to email or call them. Below, you will find the email I wrote to my Representatives and Senators (my senators’ emails are currently down due to heavy traffic. I’m hoping that’s a good sign). Feel free to use it as a template if you like. If you get this when Wikipedia’s tool is not available, you can also find your representatives at the House website and the Senate website. Please act!

I am writing this email concerning the [PIPA (in the Senate) OR SOPA (in the House)] bill currently being considered in Congress. I am writing in full opposition to it, hoping that you might work to keep this bill from becoming law. I understand that it will be brought up for amendments later this month, but from what I have read of the bill itself, and commentary on it, it seems to be so poorly written that it is beyond repair. I would ask that a new law be constructed from the ground up with the feedback of both Media and Technology companies to better address the issues of piracy and copyright infringement. There are better ways to do this. This is not it.

Perhaps you already have no intention of voting for this bill should it ever come to a vote on the floor. As your constituent, I would humbly ask that you not merely hold this opinion (if you do) but that you might actively work against this bill coming to the floor at all.

I’ve never in my life written an email or made a call to a politician for the sake of legislation. This is largely because I have always been skeptical that it would make a difference–that the lobbyists and corporations would always drown out my voice. But with the well-being of of our liberty (yes, even liberty to do things that may offend or bother us) at stake, I pray that you and your fellow representatives show me that there is still integrity in our system, that people’s voices can still be heard, and that our right to freely gather and express (whether on the streets or on the internet) still matter to those sitting in the halls of D.C.

Thank you for your time and consideration in these efforts.

–[YOUR NAME]

And so, I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads-up that my political self is rousing from his hibernation, and I tell you what–he’s more passionate and (this is new!) clear-headed about what he thinks and why.

(Attached to this post, you can see a picture of my inner “political animal”. He’s been around for a while now. Thanks, Dad.)

So expect a shift in the content of this blog. Yes, there will still be plenty of pastoral and theological musings, but you’ll also see an increasing number of political posts on this site in the coming weeks and months (hey, maybe I can try and start writing for Patrol Magazine again!).

I feel like I’m  finally settling into a cohesive and articulate (and defensible) set of beliefs concerning politics-influenced-by-faith: where we’re off the mark, we’re we need to be, and how to get there. So, expect some ideological posts on that stuff, but also expect some commentary on the unfolding politics as they move forward toward November.

For the sake of full disclosure, and to get you all thinking/reading/listening until some of these writings go up, here is a list of my biggest political influences (and relevant links). Now, let me say up front, it’s not that I agree with these folks/writings on all (or even most) things. They’re just the first things I go to first for their thoughts, and they’ve incredibly shaped my thinking on all things political:

People

• Dan Carlin
• Glenn Greenwald
• Jon Stewart
• Derek Webb (Yes, the musician. Read his lyrics.)
• N.T. Wright

Writings/Ideas

• The Economist
• Corporatism (The “third-way” between absolute free-market capitalism and socialism. It’s Catholic in its roots. It’s the economic system in Germany. This article by Lew Daly for Democracy Journal is one of the best summaries of it [here's a PDF])
• Rerum Novarum [Here's a summary] (Catholic beliefs on Labor and Economics)
• Distributism (Catholic economic thought)
• Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church
• Make it in America by Andrew Liveris (AMAZING BOOK!)
• The World is Flat (Just this book. Overall, I think Thomas Friedman’s pretty silly)

And lastly, I’m currently supporting Ron Paul for President and would consider myself closest to a Libertarian. These things will be fleshed out/defended in posts to come. You can also check out my other posts on politics I’ve written in the near past. Let the discussions begin!

_____________

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2011, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Crunchy numbers

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 21,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 8 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

In 2011, there were 88 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 388 posts. There were 129 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 58mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was March 8th with 240 views. The most popular post that day was Welcome to the new blog design!.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, prodigalpaul.com, wordpress.com, and, reformandrevive.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for crazyhomesex, anathallo hymns, rdio vs pandora, wedding scripture, and the old guitarist.

Who were they?

Your most commented on post in 2011 was Pain, Suffering, & the Story of God

These were your 5 most active commenters:

1.   v02468 13 comments
2.   Whit Wilson 12 comments
3.   Lore 12 comments
4.   Andrew Vogel 8 comments
5.   stevewolf918 6 comments

Attractions in 2011

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2011.

Welcome to the new blog design! March 2011
2 comments

The Best Wedding Scripture Reading Ever (Marriage Blessings, Andrew & Laura!) October 2010
1 comment

Free Anathallo Hymns Album January 2009
8 comments

“Crazy Home Sex” September 2011

Of Liturgy, Communion, and Relationship July 2010
4 comments

Some of your most popular posts were written before 2011. Your writing has staying power!

The stark actuality of Christ’s humanity, his flesh and blood and bone, guarantees to us that we have God among us. If that humanity were in any sense unreal, God would be unreal for us in him. The full measure of Christ’s humanity is the full measure of God’s reality for us, God’s actuality to us, in fact the measure of God’s love for us. If Christ is not man, then God has not reached us, but has stopped short of our humanity – then God does not love us to the uttermost, for his love has stopped short of coming all the way to where we are, and becoming one of us in order to save us. But Christ’s humanity means that God’s love is now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, really one of us and with us.

– T.F. Torrance, Incarnation, 185

A good friend posted this on Facebook, and I just had to post it. It connects very well to a few of the Advent posts I did recently (namely the ones on Evolution, our Fallenness, doubting God’s “liking” of us, and how he makes us most human).

I’ve never actually read Torrance before, but I’ve heard a lot about him from people that were, at the time, reading his work. From what I understand, though, he is a theologian whose mind is brilliant and pen is beautiful–a combination sorely lacking in the Christian world today. I also hear that he is a theologian to which I would feel a certain affinity, so I look forward to reading more of him.

Being in Pennsylvania, I meet lots of people that either consider themselves Mennonite, or at least were raised that way. One of the most well-known aspects of Mennonite belief is their unwavering commitment to pacifism (or, as a commenter corrected me below, the Mennonite “doctrine of nonresistance”). Hanging out with one of my new raised-Mennonite friends the other evening, she showed me (with pride) the above picture that has hung in one of their family’s houses for a long time. It struck me as beautiful as well, especially the second quote. Here it is, nicely typed out for optimal readability and convenience:

“It is our fixed principle rather than take up Arms to defend our King, our Country, or our Selves, to suffer all that is dear to be rent from us, even Life itself, and this we think not out of Contempt to Authority, but that herein we act agreeable to what we think is the Mind and Will of our Lord Jesus.”

–Thirteen Mennonite Ministers of Pennsylvania, May 15, 1755

The specifics of “the doctrine of nonresistance” are still murky to me as it pertains to the power of the State vs. the power of the individual, and what are the limits of the State’s “power of the sword” (and whether Paul writes that as merely descriptive of how State’s function in the world or if he is laying out a theological prescription of their God-given duties, rights, and responsibilities). (I’ve written before about that Scripture and it’s implications for governmental power [PART1] [PART 2])

But even though these specifics remain unclear to me, the sentiment in this picture resonates with me deeply and strikes me as far more “Christian” than the modern three-way marriage of Church, State, and Military and the seeming fetishness with which so many evangelicals worship our military (and politics in general).

The fact that more churches set aside special time and entire services to “bow the knee” on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, and not do the same on Martin Luther King Day (for example), is both very sad and very telling of where the modern evangelical church’s priorities and allegiances lie.

I’ll be honest with you: except for understanding “blessed are the peacemakers” to mean something very different than what was probably in the mind of Jesus when he said that, and maintaining a particular interpretation (that is one among several valid interpretations) of Romans 13, I can really see no New Testament case for Christian’s blind support of military use or engagement in armed conflicts (or admittedly, self-defense).

Yes, there are practical, pragmatic, and philosophical justifications for governmental/personal force that are very rational, make a lot of sense, and have been the only system we’ve known since the dawn of human conflict. But as soon as I think of these things, I’m reminded that this is why Paul says that the Gospel is the “foolishness of God”.

If the implications of your idea of the Gospel don’t (at least) at times seem imprudent, unwise, unreasonable, illogical, and impossible to imagine living out or following through on, then I fear that your idea of the Gospel is not the Bible’s idea of the Gospel.

I remember as a freshman in college sitting at Red Robin (a burger chain in the South) with some old friends of mine from high school that had gone off to Liberty University. They were preparing to move to a super-poor neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina to live communally and make (amazing) music and serve the poor and hurting around them there. I remember one of them coming to me and telling me,

“Hey Paul, let me ask you something. Say you have a wife and kids someday, and all of them are Christians. One night, a murderer breaks into your house. He is standing over your wife and kids ready to kill them. Remember: they are Christians; they will go to Heaven. This man is not a Christian. You have a gun.

Do you kill him? What does it mean to ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ there? What do you think Jesus would do if he had the gun? What did he do when faced with the violence and injustice in the world? How did he conquer it?”

I’ve never forgotten him saying this, nor the intensity with which he said it. It’s sort of haunted me ever since. This sort of talk was new to my Southern Baptist ears and sounded like heresy (the hushed tones in which he said it didn’t help, either. After all, he was the son of the Executive Pastor of our church).

For just a moment, forget what “freedom” or “right” you may think you have in that situation (God-given or otherwise). Is the call of the Christian first and foremost to “exercise their rights and freedoms” or is it to love?

What is most loving in that situation?

I’m still trying to figure it all out.

As time has gone on, I’ve seen this conversation seep more and more into my thinking, first as I thought about Torture (and what Catholics said about it) and, more recently, the Death Penalty (another follow-up post here).

Like I said, I have no idea what this looks like at the State level or what this would mean for my voting or the responsibilities of a Christian in office in light of this (although I’ve tried to think through some of it before). All I know is that something seems incredibly wrong with the way things are now and incredibly true about that quote above.

And so, at least where I’m at right now, I’ll throw my chips in with the Mennonites.

What do you think? How would you answer my friend’s hypothetical? What/Who has been most influential in getting your thinking to where it is today?

Even though this time can be tough for some (my grandfather died a year ago tomorrow), I do hope and pray that we are all able to have at least one good laugh this year and see the smile of at least one person we love and that we know loves us. And eat good food. And drink good drink. And listen to bad, cheesy music. (On a side-note: the picture above is a picture of the wall-hanging that went up in my house every year as I grew up. And now I have it. I love it.)

Don’t worry, this isn’t really a whole other post. This Advent season has been an especially fruitful time for my writing (as my Facebook Wall obviously shows). I want to thank everyone that has been telling me how helpful these posts were–or even those that just told me they were reading them in the first place!. I can’t tell you how much it affects me, sticks with me, and encourages me. But anyway, I just wanted to write this post so I could put up all these posts in one place for you easy reading pleasure, should you so desire. Happy Advent!

Advent, Evolution, & Absolution | The implications of Advent on the natural world and how Jesus figures into creation’s history, both past and future. (P.S.: I’ll be writing up a follow-up to this about how Jesus is the climax of evolution. Stay tuned.)

our failed function, God’s full faithfulness | God created and gave a function to his people for how they were to interact with the world around them. They fail and so God advents to fulfill this on their behalf. We look at environmentalism, miracles, and heaven.

What Christ did not taste, Christ did not redeem. | Advent is not just about God coming to die for us, but God coming to live among us. We are saved not just by his death, but also this life.

The Formation of God | Jesus did not just come to change things, but to be changed by things. We talked about how and why this is.

The Holy Sacrament of Advent | One of the most beautiful things about Advent is the hope it can give us about how we finite, material creatures can relate deeply with the Divine. (BONUS: I also wrote up a follow-up post to this about the history of the various views on Communion and how God meets us in it.)

There is No One Like You (Adv, Days 23/24; HelloGoodBye 09/10) by David Schrott | A guest post about how Advent gives hope in the midst of pain and suffering.

God loves me. But does he like me? | These were by far may favorite and most personal posts I put up in this whole series. Part 1: I really want to actually be inherently pleasing to God. Part 2: How Advent gives me hope that I can.

What is the True Gospel of Advent? (hint: it’s not your salvation) | The Advent happened for a much bigger reason than just to get you out of Hell.

BONUS: Free Awesome Advent Mixtape | Download it. Share it. Love it.

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them!”
–Revelation 12:11-12

 On this Christmas Eve, I just wanted to quickly point out one little thing that we often miss about both the Advent and the Gospel. Look at those verses again. What is the “good news” that the “loud voice” is proclaiming and worshipping God for? What has now “come” or, as it would say in Latin, “advented”? You’ll notice that of all the things that have come and advented with Jesus, “salvation” is only one of many things listed. Further, notice that the rest of the things in that list or heavily skewed towards one particular theme: Kingship.

I’m currently reading The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight (from which I posted a relevant quote yesterday. You also can see my Kindle highlights from the book). His basic premise is that the evangelical church has not been about the gospel, but has instead been about the “Plan of Salvation”, which is only part of the gospel. As he goes on to say, by itself this is not the gospel. The gospel is not ”I’m bad, and Jesus came and died for my sins.” Here are some quotes:

It may strike you as uncommonly odd for me to make this claim, but I’m going to say it anyway: this Plan of Salvation is not the gospel. The Plan of Salvation emerges from the Story of Israel/Bible and from the Story of Jesus, but the plan and the gospel are not the same big idea.

…not only have we reduced the robust view of salvation to [just] four or five points; we are also asking the Plan of Salvation to do something it was never intended to do. The Plan of Salvation, to put this crudely, isn’t discipleship or justice or obedience. The Plan of Salvation leads to one thing and to one thing only: salvation. Justification leads to a declaration by God that we are in the right, that we are in the people of God; it doesn’t lead inexorably to a life of justice or goodness or loving-kindness. If it did, all Christians would be more just and more filled with goodness and drenched in love.

I am convinced that because we think the gospel is the Plan of Salvation, and because we preach the Plan of Salvation as the gospel, we are not actually preaching the gospel.

The kingdom vision of Jesus isn’t simply or even directly about the Plan of Salvation, though the kingdom vision entails or implies or involves the Plan of Salvation, and without the Plan of Salvation the kingdom doesn’t work.

I think this is exactly right.

The true good news is that the King has come as the fulfillment of the story and the promises of Israel and has freed us from our greatest enemies that had infected his good creation: sin, death, and its personification in “the accuser”. He has established his own good and rightful rule and reign in this world. And as his agents in this world, we are meant to be heralds and stewards of this Kingdom, ushering in the future fulfillment into the present.

The good news of Advent? Jesus is the Kingdom of God that has come; he was the first “agent” of God to come into this world and show us how humanity is meant to be lived under the reign of the King.

So come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.

[This is Part 2. Read Part 1 here.]

My church has been doing a series called “The Other Christmas Stories” where we’ve been going through other texts in the Bible that comment on and meditate upon the event of Advent. The first message was preached on that quintessential Advent text, John 1. The preaching on these verses really struck me:

But as many as received him, to them he gave power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
– John 1:12-13

The sermon went on to remind us that in these verses is a promise that the Advent did not happen in order to make us into something we are not, but rather to give us the power to become who we most truly are (children of God). Now, I want to be clear. I grew up in Church hearing that phrase “be who you are” (and hearing it in music), and in certain seasons that thought has been helpful to me, but I’m not quite trying to express the same sentiment.

Usually this idea is trying to say, more accurately, “be who you have now been saved to be” or “be who Jesus has changed you to be” or “be like Jesus, whose identity is yours”. In other words, the logic goes that you were originally one way, then Jesus “saved” you, and now you are able to be something else (a holy, loved Christian), now that you are Christ’s.

What this sermon got me thinking about–and what has helped me so deeply–was that Jesus did not come to make us “new” per se, but to make us most truly who we actually have been all along; to bring about the rule and reign of the King under whose authority we are most free to become–not something else, but–who we are apart from the self-disfuguring effects of sin.

And so this encouraged me by letting me see that as I am growing and changing as a Christian, this is not me becoming “Christ-like” as we usually think of it. It’s not that I am growing “upward” towards becoming more like this amazing “super”-human that always seems to be out of my reach.

No, in Advent, we see that God is not “above us” demanding I be like Him, but he has come down and taken on humanity as it was meant to and can be lived. And so to be “Christ-like” is, essentially, to be more human, not less.

And so as I grow in obedience and holiness, I’m not simply acting out Jesus’ righteousness in my own life (as it has sometimes been articulated). I am actually doing things as the freed, truly human person that I am. I am actually freely doing these things. I am actually doing things that please God! I am actually his child whom He likes and enjoys! Just as part of my favorite quote says:

God does not ‘tolerate’ me. God loves me.

To be “Christ-like”, then, is to be the fully human person whose self is fully infused with the divine, and then live in light of this. As I said in another Advent post, this process is not one of becoming “super-natural”, but rather leaving our “sub-natural” ways and being freed to live most “naturally” in the Kingdom of the World as God has intended.

This means that God loves and likes us as we live and move and breathe and screw up under the gracious and loving rule of His Kingdom. He delights in us. He does not see right past us or through us. He respects us with the dignity owed to the highest of creation–those made in his image.

I’ve begun to finally feel those opening words of that amazing Christmas song:

O Holy Night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till he appeared and the soul felt it’s worth.

And so begins the slow travail of pressing these truths all the more into my heart and life. These intellectual ponderings have encouraged me so deeply, though much work remains to have the rest of me believe it and live in light of it.

But God has come, and God has spoken, to help me with this. And so I will leave you with these verses that stirred me so much in light of these things. They were posted at the bottom of a very dear new friend’s blog (that you should read):

You can hassle me continually with your prayers, clamoring for attention night and day, and I will always be there because I love you. You can scream in my face in fear and frustration and I will rock you in my arms until you rest. You may even soil me with the filth of your sin and I will still cherish you, I will still see your perfection and declare relentlessly to the angels around that you, my child, are mine. I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with loving-kindness…I will take great delight in you, I will quiet you with my love, I will rejoice over you with singing…you are mine.
–Jer 31:3, Zeph 3:17, Is 43:1

I love that so much. This is our God. This is our Lord and King. This is Advent. And so…

A thrill of hope; the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks, a new and glorious morn.
Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angel voices!

O night divine, the night when Christ was born;
O night, O Holy Night, O night divine!
O night, O Holy Night, O night divine!

Happy Advent Eve.

[image credit: Jen Huber, "Untitled" 2010. I've written about her before.]