This quote came on one of the e-lists I am a part of. It is going in the sermon for Sunday. Possibly as the intro?

from: 'Dying Church - Living God', by Chuck Meyers pg. 37-39

Sometime in the early 1970s, the president of AT&T called all his managers into a large room for an emergency meeting. Attendance was mandatory. Speculation ran high as to what announcement would be made. Perhaps a breakthrough in technology. Perhaps a downsizing. Perhaps ...... They could tell by the grim look on his face that something extremely serious was about to be revealed. When all were seated, the president went to the podium and said, "The telephone as you know it no longer exists." Muffled giggles rippled through the room. What game was this? They all knew he was wrong. They had used phones that morning. He continued: "Anyone who does not believe that state-ment can leave this room right now and pick up your final paycheck on the way out of the building." Sober silence prevailed. No one left. They all just stared. "Your job today is to invent one."

He broke the group up into small teams and they spent the rest of the time coming up with a new phone. Some people wanted one with no cord...... in the car, or to carry around.... to know when another call was coming in.......to be able to forward calls to another number, to see the person on the other end, to send other kinds of messages on it. About 60 items that distinguished the telephone they invented. Many are now the features that we take for granted, from call-waiting to individual digital phones, and the list has not yet completed.

In the same manner, at the beginning of the third mil-lennium, we come to church one morning for the Sunday service and, much to our shocked dismay, we find a vacant lot with a little note tacked on a piece of tattered plaster out front. It is written in Hebrew and it is the same note left on every vacant lot of every former church building in the world, from cathedral to clapboard. Translated, it says, "The church you have always known no longer exists; it is gone - walls, pews, altar, and assumptions." The tomb is empty. "How can this be?" we ask in abject puzzlement. In the background, we hear God's laughter saying, "Given the world the way it is, given the devastating problems and the incredible possibilities opening up for the first time in history, given what you now know to be true in the world, the real question is, 'How can it NOT be?' " Then God looks us right in the eye and says, "Make a new one."

I figure I will have a "toolkit" with me to help build the church. Included will be some actual tools (hammer, saw, pliers etc) and a Bible and a copy of The United Church Manual and a copy of the church mailing list. Which of these would be the most useful in building the "House of GOd"? Here's a hint. The sermon title is The House of Flesh.

Will They Even Notice?

Much less act on it?

Who and what you ask? Facebook and threats of being hauled into Federal Court in Canada.

On cbc.ca today one reads:

Facebook shares its users' personal information with developers who create games and quizzes in a way that breaches Canadian privacy law, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found.

Privacy concerns about Facebook are nothing new. ANd the general reaction of the creators has been "trust us". Now, if they don't act on these concerns the PRivacy commissioner has the authority to haul them before Canada's Federal court. But of course FB is not a Canadian company. SO, as often with the 'net, the question is whose laws apply? Can a Canadian court enforce changes to the system?

10 Days late...

10 days ago was my 4th blogiversary!

I really should have had some words of wisdom for the occassion but oh well, there's always next year!

When Tradition Meets Archaeology...

I saw this story a couple weeks ago but just now got around to blogging it.......

The first-ever scientific tests on what are believed to be the remains of the Apostle Paul “seem to confirm” that they do indeed belong to the Roman Catholic saint, Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday.

So they have confirmed a tomb that tradition claims to hold the bones of Paul may in fact have bones of the right era. Still I find it a bit of a leap to say it is actually PAul's. I find it a convenient "confirmation".

Not that it really makes an iota's difference to me anyway.

A Choice I COuldn't Make...

ANd you have to know that the Gallinger's are not the only family in this situation. But few families would be willing and able to make this public a plea.

Realistically, it is cheaper to provide support to families and allow them to keep caring for their child than to have the child totally cared for by the state. Arguably it is healthier for everyone involved. And it appears to me that it should be the default to support parents to raise their own children.

For more about the situation click here

And while it is admirable how well she talks her way through it, no 5 year old should be that familiar with how to give medication. In a perfect world anyway...

Talkin' Bout ....Pop Music (Friday Five)

OVer at RGBP we read

The sad news of Michael Jackson's untimely death has me thinking about music and its effects on us - individually, as cultures, as generations. Let's think about the soundtracks of our lives...

1) What sort of music did you listen to as a child - this would likely have been determined or influenced by your parents? Or perhaps your family wasn't musical...was the news the background? the radio? Singing around the piano? A variety of things. My father put many many vinyl albums onto cassette. But for years he refused to buy the albums on cassette, preferring to buy the record and then copy it. We had a spectrum that included Olivia Newton John, Jim Croce, Cat Stevens, Carpenters, Kingston Trio, Glenn Yarbough, ABBA. ANd then the bass section of the church choir was known to practice at our place as Christmas or Easter drew near (although this is more in my late teens)

2) Going ahead to teenage years, is there a song that says "high school" (or whatever it might've been called where you lived) to you? In grade 10 we had the "famine songs" (I always liked Britain's Do They Know It's Christmas and Canada's Tears are NOt enough far more than We Are the World). My high school years also carry the memory of pop/disco/dance music mixed with a dose of metal (my grade 9 class was sharply divided between in his point--especially on the question of Duran Duran). A listening to '80s rock always brings me back to those days--through the rose coloured lenses of memory of course.

3) What is your favorite music for a lift on a down day? (hint: go to www.pandora.com and type in a performer/composer...see what you come up with!) SOmething with a Celtic lilt or a country beat most often these days. Mind you I am still wondering how Jon BOn Jovi shows up on CMT or why country artists are covering pop/soft rock songs of my teen years.

4) Who is your favorite performer of all time? Honestly? I really don't have one. Mind you the total lack of concert attendance might account for that.... There are artists I like most of what they have done but no real favourite

5) What is your favorite style of music for worship? A mixture. Not fond of praise choruses. Not fond of a lot of classic hymnody. But some classic hymns I love (out of curiosity, what exactly makes a classic??) and certainly a lot of newer hymnody and worship music I love. And of course in part it depends where I am at on that particular day whether a piece speaks to me. In the interest of full disclosure I will note that choosing music for worship often forces me to use pieces I don't like, but of course worship planning isn't all about what I like/need/want is it?

Bible Scholars in TRaining???

In this congregation there is a tradition whereby the UCW presents each baptised child with a children's Bible. And so we have three of them in this house.

Until recently they have been put away for safety since when the girls were younger they tended to be very hard on books. But two weeks ago Beloved used one of them to read the story of Ezekiel and the valley of dry bones during Sunday SChool ( the same day that I read a different version of the story for children's time and we listened to Dry Bones in worship).

This was a hit. They were fascinated by the story but also with the Bibles. Now they are the favourite book. Beloved will read out of one while the other two follow along in their copies. ANd they want to have the stories read -- Beloved says they will flip through and see a picture they like and ask for that story (tonight was "the four men in the fire" [Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego]).

Youngest was really excited last night yelling out "I found my leg bone" when she found the Ezekiel story. Her other favourite, the one she often asks for help finding is "the (or my) baby" which is from the beginning of Exodus.

The joys of PKs

"I Found Jesus!!!"

LAst year we bought a bath book of BIble stories for the girls. Included with the book were some cut out figures to go with the stories (an ark, Moses in a basket, Jesus walking on water etc). The girls greatly enjoy the book (although rarely in the bath, more often as bedtime reading).

ANyway, a month or so ago Beloved was checking that all the figures were in the storage net on the back of the book and noted that Jesus was missing. A quick look around produced no results and since it was bedtime the search was suspended.

A couple days later Monkey suddenly gets very excited and shouts out I found Jesus!,
Awfully young to become an evangelical isn't she?

BUt I thought Dogs were Hunters??????

Dogs, as is well known, are in the same animal family as wolves. SO they should be natural hunters right?????

Apparently not.

Yesterday afternoon we were all outside and a chipmunk came around the corner. Said chipmunk walked right past the dog who was facing the other way and was halfway across the yard before being noticed. Then tonight, not 30 minutes ago, same thing.

I let the dog (who has Labrador, DAchshund, and Golden Retriever blood in her -- all hunting dogs) out and as I hook her to the chain I notice that there is a bunny sitting in the yard. Bunny is at a spot which, depending how the dog went around things, would be just about the end of the 30' chain. But dog goes the other way, sniffing the ground intently and doesn;t notice. Bunny sits and watches the dog wander across the yard for about a minute and then nonchanlantly hops towards the back of the yard, pauses to look back, then continues on its way. Dog notices NONE of this.

Did I mention that this dog has hunting breeds for lineage????

THe Problem of Suffering

I just finished this book tonight.

Ehrman tells the reader that he was so struck by his struggles with the problem of suffering that it led him out of the faith. In this book he discusses a variety of Scriptural answers to the question of suffering and why he finds all of them unsatisfactory.

I share the struggle with theodicy. I too wonder why bad things happen to good people (and the corollary of why good things happen to bad people). ANd, like Ehrman, I find that many of the answers are unsatisfactory.

The thing is that it just doesn't make sense. As it has been put before, if God is Good then God is not GOD, and if God is GOD then God is not Good. Why do people starve? Why are people so cruel to each other? Why do earthquakes flatten whole villages? If God is, as Scripture claims repeatedly, in charge of everything then why does GOd cause or allow these things to happen?

On the whole I liked the book. HOwever, I had trouble figuring out how Ehrman approaches Scripture and theology. He claims that his academic work forced him away from a literalist approach to Scripture but it still seems at times that he holds on to that literalism. Same with theology. As someone with a doctoral degree in theology you would think that he knows there is a multiplicity of atonement theories in Christian thought but he maintains there is only one -- substitutionary sacrificial satisfaction. Admittedly this ties in to what he is trying to say about what may well be the most common answer to suffering (punishment for sin) in Scripture but still...

In the end I answer the question of suffering with a combination of SCriptural and non-Scriptural answers. It is a mystery (the poetry of Job and the philosophy of Ecclesiastes). It is a reality that will be changed when GOd's reign comes to pass (apocalypticism). And overall, maybe God is not GOD (meaning that God is not all-powerful, all controlling).

But the book is well worth a read. It gives one a chance to explore this issue that, honestly, troubles many people of faith. ANd even if there is no answer we need to ask why there is suffering and what our appropriate response to to that suffering is.