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Well, way back in first century, about AD 33 (give or take a few years because our calendar is a bit off), something really strange happened. This strange event was unprecedented. Nobody had ever heard of anything like it. There had been stories about people coming back from the dead before, but they were always part of myths – fantastic tales that very intentionally and obviously blurred the lines between reality and fiction. This man Jesus of Nazareth coming back from the dead was something different. All the people that talked about it were stone-cold serious. They weren’t kidding or hyping it up. Today, people talking about religion will often group the bible in along with the Iliad, the Odessy, the old Hindu Vedas, Native American stories about the Coyotee spirit, etc. But they couldn’t be more different, especially the New Testament. When Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul talked about Jesus coming back from the dead, they talked like people giving real eye-witness accounts of this man they knew being executed and then blowing the door off his tomb for real a few days later. The other writers of this time, like Josephus the great Roman historian from the first century, and Tacitus and few years later, talk about Jesus coming back in very matter-of-fact language (even if they themselves were skeptical). In fact, as exciting as the resurrection is, the gospel accounts are far too boring to be considered myth literature.

Not only are they stone-cold serious, but many of the gospel accounts feature elements that anyone trying to sell the story would NEVER include. For example, the first people to the tomb, who later tell everyone the news – who was it? A bunch of women. This wasn’t the 20th century, this was eastern antiquity. Women had no rights back then. Their testimony was no good in court. They were 2nd class citizens in about every possible way. If you were trying to explain that Jesus came back from the dead back then and you actually wanted someone to take you seriously, the last thing on earth you would do is start telling about how a bunch of ladies were the first ones to talk about it. Gee, it’s almost like the story is told that way because they were just recording what happened that day and not trying to spin it.

But all I’m talking about is some of the written accounts we have from back then. Does any of this prove that Jesus came back from the dead? Of course not. In fact, I think it is folly to pretend like they do. Some Christians, with very good intentions, have tried to “prove” the resurrection of Jesus using a lot of archeology and quasi-scientific psychoanalysis of the apostles. The problem with this approach is it let’s the modern secular scientists ask all the questions. They get to set the terms of the debate and they will make certain that just throwing bible verses around is going to look silly. If you want to talk about the historical truth of Jesus’ resurrection, you are going to have to admit the limitations up front ask some different sorts of questions. Going into more detail on this would be something to do in an apologetics class.

You don’t even need to be a scientist to understand that dead people stay dead. This man Jesus didn’t though, or so somebody says. More amazing still, is the impact this news had on the world in just a few short years.

Let me read to you a passage from Augustine, written in his book The City of God about the year 426 AD:

What is really hard to believe, for anyone who stops to think, is the way the world came to believe. The fishermen whom Christ sent with the nets of faith into the sea of the world were men unschooled in the liberal arts and utterly untrained as far as education goes, men with no skill in the use of language,, armed with no weapons of debate, plumed with no rhetorical power. Yet, this catch this handful of fishermen took was enormous and marvelous. They hauled in first of every sort, not excluding those rare specimens, the philosophers themselves.

It is incredible that Christ should have risen in His flesh and, with His flesh, have ascended into heaven; it is incredible that the world should have believed a thing so incredible; it is incredible that men so rude and lowly, so few and unaccomplished, should have convinced the world, including men of learning, of something so incredible and have convinced men so conclusively.

What the little group of skeptics must explain is why they still hold out so blatantly against a whole world of believers who have an explanation of their faith. The world has believed this insignificant group of lowly, unimportant, and uneducated men precisely because the divine character of what happened is more marvelously apparent in the insignificance of such witnesses.

-Augustine, City of God, Book 22, Ch. 5

There are several things to notice here. When Augustine wrote this, much of the world he knew was full of Christians. There were not so many skeptics, so it was a bit easier for him to ridicule them and say, “So you are soooooo much smarter than, who? Just about everyone?” Actually, in the world today, there are places still like that. Countries like Ethiopia and Uganda are over 80% Christian. Millions of people and only about 1 in 5 you meet on the street does NOT believe in the son of God. The same goes for large areas in Latin America, such as Ecuador. Here in the U.S., unless you live in the Bible belt region, it’s more like the opposite. Only 1 in 5 people you meet on the street takes Jesus seriously. Here in the Pacific Northwest the number is closer to 1 in 10. In some parts of Europe there are even fewer believers like us.

Still, notice that Augustine calls the resurrection of Jesus Christ and “incredible” event. It really is unusual. So why does everyone believe it? Because the people that told the message were really clever? No! They were a bunch of stupid fisherman. There were unschooled blue-collar workers. Were they rich and powerful, disseminating their weird religious ideas by making a lot of calculated back-room political deals and brainwashing people by controlling all the TV channels? No! The apostles and early followers of Jesus were mostly poor country bumpkins. There were a few rich an influential people number among the early Christians, but they often had to keep things on the down-low so as not to rile up the secular authorities.

So why should anyone believe this stuff? Well, we believe that the Holy Spirit works invisibly in our hearts and minds so that we trust in this good news. God, our maker, knows it’s EXACTLY what we need to hear and when we do hear it, our eyes light up and even if we can’t articulate it or talk about it very well, we recognize that it is PRECISELY what could save us from this painful mess of guilt and death we are stuck in. More on that later.

Some of you may be sitting there right now thinking, “You know, I really don’t care so much about this science and history. It doesn’t shake my faith. I believe in Jesus because I’ve met him for real. I’ve heard him speak to me before. Sometimes when I pray, I can feel him next to me. Trying to tell me Jesus isn’t alive would be like trying to argue that the sky isn’t blue. God is very, very real to me, first hand. It doesn’t feel that way all the time of course, but it has often enough that I don’t really doubt it.”

You know what? If you can give a testimony along those lines, that is wonderful. I am glad that you experience His presence in such a way. That is the holy spirit interacting with you. Honestly, there have been moments like that for me too, thought I wouldn’t say it’s been the regular day-to-day experience for me. For some of us, part of our faith and part of our relationship with God is thinking these things through. We can’t rest until it makes a certain amount of sense to us and that takes time and often a lot of work. I like how one Christian thinker, Robert Hammerton-Kelly puts it: “The right explanation can help heal a mind distressed beyond endurance by events whose significance it cannot grasp.”

What I’m saying today may be of more benefit to some of you than to those who have experienced Christ in a more mystical and personal way.

I saw this article on the front page on Yahoo news just a couple of weeks ago. You’ve probably seen things like it before too on the cover of magazines or talked about on TV. This sort of thing comes out all the time. “Is science close to ruling out God?” “A complete understanding of the universe would leave no grounds for the existence of a higher power.” It goes on to talk about how religious thoughts are just certain chemicals reacting in our brains.

Well, IS science close to ruling out God? Well, no, not even close because that’s not the sort of thing science can do. The hearts of men can rule out God, and do – all the time! And they don’t need science to help them out. In fact, science can’t do it. Here is why.

Science can only answer questions about the natural world. It is a certain strict set of tools for combining what we can observe with our senses with rigorous reasoning. It isn’t a tool for metaphysical philosophy but rather a method for discovering how things in the present work. Science can’t explain WHY things work the way they do, only HOW. A doctor can examine a man’s body and say that it appears he died of a heart attack. It cannot say whether the man was a good man or not or whether it’s a good or bad thing that he died.

You probably learned about the scientific method in school. You start with a hypothesis about something. That is a suggested idea about how something works. It’s a guess. Then, you have to set up an experiment. A well-designed experiment will be “controlled”, meaning it will test just one idea or prediction at a time. If you try to do too much at once, you risk drawing wrong conclusions about why something did or didn’t work. I don’t work in a laboratory, but I do program computers for a living. This idea of the “smallest testable case” is the key to debugging software. I would be hopelessly lost at work without it.

Once a scientist’s experiment is successful in portraying a certain outcome, the next step is for it to be repeated. You have to do the experiment again and again and get the same results. If you don’t, then something is happening that you don’t understand and you need to go back to the beginning and refine your hypothesis or narrow the scope of your experiment. Another important element is that other scientists need to be able to test out your experiment on their own and come up with the same results. If they don’t, then something about your research is flaky.

Science is a wonderful tool for discovering all sorts of things in the natural world and thinking clearly through many of the problems we try to solve every day. Isaac Newton, who worked back in the 1600’s, was probably the best guy to ever do all this right. In the process, he figured out an astounding amount of things about calculus, light, gravity and astronomy. He was also a Christian and spent about a third of his time studying the bible, much to the dismay of some scientists who admire him today. Perhaps they should not be so dismayed?

Something people often forget today is that the scientific method is of little use for analyzing history. History is something we don’t have immediate access too. An event in the past happened only once. You can’t repeat it. You can’t observe it first hand to record accurate eyewitness data yourself. Even something as simple as hearing whether the Vandals won their football game yesterday (probably not) is based on hearsay. You can’t set up an experiment to prove it. You can only dig up some evidence and make some informed guesses.

In our age, the prevalence of video has created an illusion in ours minds that if we have a recording of something, then it definitely happened. Even things as far back as WWII seem a lot more undebatable since we have lot of old film footage from then still around.

Except we all know that videos can be fake – not just by what they show, but usually in what is NOT shown. Science can only use what we know about the natural world to say whether something COULD have happened a certain way. Skeptics say the gospel accounts are fake. We can’t “prove” that they aren’t, just like we can’t prove anything else about history. But we can see if what they say makes sense and does a good job of explaining things or not.

Example: The following is from a documentary that discussed the use of staged protest and conflict photos in middle-east journalism.

 

The passage today is John chapter 21. Now, I like reading John so much, I don’t want to cut to the chase and just read a few key verses. I love reading scripture out loud. I love listening to it out loud. It’s usually better than preaching anyway! So I’m going to read most of it.

After this Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, and he revealed himself in this way. Simon Peter, Thomas (called the Twin), Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together. Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.
Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the shore; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it to them, “Children, do you have any fish?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the, and now they were not able to haul it in, because of the quantity of fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved therefore said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work, and threw himself into the sea. The other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, but about a hundred yards off.
When they got out on land, they saw a charcoal fire in place, with fish laid out on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, 153 of them. And although there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” He said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.) And after saying this he said to him, “Follow me.”
(John 21:1-19 ESV)

So lets set the context just a bit here. Peter ran to the tomb on Easter morning and saw it empty. Later, he and the other disciples met the risen Jesus briefly. But, Peter still doesn’t know what to do. He’s confused, he doesn’t know what it means, he doesn’t think anyone but his friends care that Jesus is (sort of) back anyway. He can’t keep doing what he has been doing the last three years. He’s afraid of the Romans, afraid of the Jewish leaders, and he’s probably very ashamed of having denied Jesus the night before he was executed. He still hasn’t dealt with that yet. We know about it from reading the scripture, but I really doubt he told any of the other disciples until afterwards. Peter could have stood by his master that night, but he threw him under the bus instead. Does Jesus want anything to do with him now? “I wouldn’t want anything to do with me.” he thinks.

So he hikes back up north to his hometown, dusts off his fishing boat and goes back to his day job. He’s trying to catch some fish, but he’s just not into it. Then, on the beach, Jesus appears again. “Oh my gosh! I’ve got to get back to him. I just can’t go back to my old life. He changed everything about my life. I’m a total mess without him. I don’t care what he thinks, I’ve got to go see him.”

There on the beach, Jesus restores Peter. His life changes forever. He never forgot this conversation with Jesus. It was a long time ago and we don’t have full records of everything Peter did in the years afterwards, but what we do have show us a man that really had lost all fear. He no longer cared what people thought about him. He didn’t care what the oppressive government thought. (Then eventually killed him too.) He didn’t care what the religious leaders thought. He didn’t care what his family thought. He didn’t try to build up his career or buy a new fishing boat. He never denied Jesus again. All the terrible pain of that moment had been erased by this man who had come back from the dead and forgiven him. He thought absolutely all was lost – that his mistake would haunt him and stick with him the rest of his life. Any rational person would think so. But it didn’t. He failed at life, but he got it all back. Jesus came back, had lunch with him, and gave it all back to him.

Wouldn’t you like to receive the same thing Peter got that day? Have you failed at life? Do you have a failed marriage? A career that got torpedoed, probably by yourself? Do you dread family gatherings at Christmas because your father and mother never say anything nice to you? Have you really screwed up? Did someone really screw you over? This is all due to us living in a broken sinful world. No amount of wishful thinking and mental gymnastics can patch this up. The gospel has no weight if Jesus is not really risen. Peter knew He had been – the Lord was right there in front of his face. He couldn’t have explained how that changed everything right then and there, but he knew it did for his life. We are more distant from the event – very distant now in fact, so we have to believe without seeing (blessed are we!), and there is no shortage of people on the sidelines who may laugh at us part of the way.

The following 6-part series of posts constitute the bulk of the sermon I gave on 10/28/2012.

I knew we were close to wrapping up the Gospel of John and I really wanted to talk about the centrality of the resurrection. Sometimes, when I go to study the bible, I can get several pages into it and feel like I’ve come up with nothing – nothing worth talking about anyway. This time, it was just the opposite. I found, reading through scripture and other books and thinking about my own relationship with God, I had so much to say about the resurrection, I didn’t even know where to start. I think I could yack up here for five or six hours and not even come close to running out of what I consider to be compelling and interesting and useful material! But doing that wouldn’t help anyone, including myself. I tried to boil things down to a “best of” playlist of sorts, but I found that many of the top ideas just didn’t fit together really well. What I’ve come up with instead today is a bit meandering. I’m just going to follow one train of thought as it winds through the landscape of the resurrection of the Son of God. Let me tell you where I’m going to try and go with this before I begin.

Our passage today features Simon Peter, the apostle, rather prominently. I want to look a bit at his life and talk about how Jesus coming back from the dead affected it in some really profound ways. From there, I want to look at some of the evidence we have that Jesus really did rise from the dead, as well as discuss the pitfalls of trying to “prove” these sorts of things about God in the first place. In there, I want to take a look at several possibilities for what happened on Easter and afterwards and explain from several different angles why we Christians believe what we do. Finally, I want to return to Peter and compare what the resurrection meant to him and how it means similar powerful things to us today, especially regarding it’s power to cast out our fear and give us (much needed!) hope for the future.

First, let us pray. This is a bit of a longer prayer, but it says all I intend to ask of God this morning.

Father, negate all my faults and fears as I come to speak against men’s faults and to negate their fears with good news. Your good news of the resurrection of Jesus, your son is potent medicine – the only cure for our world, and for each of our individual persons. Stretching out to touch us now, 2000 years later, it is a wave that builds up steam as it goes, a tidal wave of your grace, covering all our sins, our hates, our twisted desires, washing over us, burying the world and all living things with your kingdom. We will not drown in your love, but find we can breath in a richer world than we ever imagined. Jesus when you opened your eyes on the third day in the tomb outside of Jerusalem, death began to work backwards. If death seems stronger now, it is only due to its frantic fevered grasping for straws before the dawn comes and the grave is overcome completely. Jesus, send your holy spirit to quiet our hearts and still our fears. Those fears are many and sometimes we do not trust you. We do not believe you rose, or we do not believe that it means anything of significance for us. Those are almost the same thing. Strengthen our faith, not because we need to psych ourselves up because we have nothing (or almost nothing) to believe in, but strengthen our faith because we have something so great and terrible and wonderful to believe in that we cannot bring our cynical skeptical selves to take it all in. The good news of the work and love and resurrection of your son Jesus is more than our minds and hearts can contain and so we fill them with other things instead that seem to allow us some space to breath or some concepts we can work with safely. Forgive us for that. Regardless, we declare to you now that we desire you, all of you, the full force of your power for every man, woman, boy, and girl. Lord, we ask you to fill us with faith, empty us of fear, and cause us to overflow in love. Amen.

There is one sort of singing meant to fill a cathedral or a Broadway stage. There are other kinds though that are naturally much more personal. This is one of my favorite examples. If you had to belt this out to be heard by anyone outside of a tiny living room, it would become something else entirely.

I have a few posts that may be of interest from my other blog, which may not be relevant enough for anyone’s feed reader.

• On Starbucks
• A Taste of Addis Ababa

A few weeks ago, we had some friends over for a “Hobbit Second Breakfast”. We ate a large brunch filled with scones and sausages and I read some out of Tolkien’s essay On Faerie Stories. Good times.

We also had music playing in the background the whole time. I tried to pick some light happy (but not too fast) celtic stuff that a contented hobbit might want listen too, along with a few relevant tracks from the films.

Here is my hobbit playlist (Title, Artists, Album):

• Flaming Red Hair, Howard Shore, LOTR Complete Recordings Vol. 1
• The Bog of Allen/Eanach Dhuin/Bill the Weavers, Teada, Music and Memory
• A Sligo Air/Sally Gally, Teada, Music and Memory
• Aibreann, Lunasa, Lunasa
• Stolen Apples, Lunasa, Otherworld
• O’Carolan’s Welcome/Rolling in the Barrel, Lunasa, Otherworld
• The Miller of Drohan, Lunasa, Otherworld
• Island Lake, Lunasa, La Nua
• Snowball, Lunasa, La Nua
• Stepping Stone/An Seanbhean Bhocht, Teada, Give Us a Penny and Let Us Be Gone
• Mazurka, Altan, Island Angel
• An Mhaighdean Mhara, Altan, Island Angel
• May It Be, Enya, LOTR Complete Recordings Vol. 1

My gosh, what a title. What could this possibly be about? Just that.

Are you familiar with the Super Mario Brothers video games? Of course you are. The franchise is still going strong. I grew up playing everything from the original old school Nintendo titles to the most recent Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the Wii, which my kids love. From very early on in the game’s history, Mario has had to visit desert worlds and fight his way through quicksand, snakes, cactus monsters, the angry hot sun, whirlwinds, and all the usual sorts of adventuresome things you might find in a desert. And what is always there in the background, scrolling along or on each side of the map as you wind your way through? Pyramids. Lots of pyramids. Some games even include levels inside of scary pyramids, usually inhabited by a mummy of some sort. It’s obviously all a cartoonish reference to ancient Egypt. It can’t possibly be anything else.

But now for the music. What is deserty music? Something middle eastern, right? Sure. So what have many of the Mario games features in the soundtrack over the years? Wait for it… sitar. The East Indian sitar and tabla drums. Now in case you are geographically challenged, India doesn’t have squat to do with Egypt, pyramids, or the Sahara desert. It is thousands of miles to the east and inhabited by Hindi people of an entirely different genealogical and cultural line as that of northern Africa or the Arabian peninsula. The time is also all out of whack too. The great Pharaohs who built the pyramids and filled them with creepy mummies lived in antiquity. We are talking 2000 BC and such. The sitar is not an ancient Indian folk instrument of a similar era, but rather a relatively modern development from 18th century eastern classical music. The sitar really came in to common use about the time Bach was writing his violin concertos and organ works in Germany. True story.

The following recording is a great example of what I’m talking about with the Mario soundtracks. This one is from the “Dusty Dunes Galaxy”.

I’m probably not the first person to point this out. Also, don’t think that by doing so I am critical of the eclectic combination. I am not! I love Mario. I love the desert motif, and I really dig the sitar music. It’s all great! But, I’m sure someone out there has made the casual assumption that if you were to go to Egypt and see the pyramids, you might hear some sitar music in the market. Absolutely not. An oud or shawm or a solo singer maybe, but definitely no sitars.

One question I have is, given Mario’s vast popularity, has this strange association rubbed off into other forms of media? Are there movies set in the desert featuring sitars in the soundtrack? Those sorts of musical associations can be hard to separate, especially once made in youth.

(Click the image for a large version.)

This a cross post of sorts from my other blog. A while back, I came up with this chart to display all the different variables that go into producing coffee. Using just the combinations listed here and assuming about 20 growing regions, you get 2 x 5 x 20 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5, or 135,000 combinations! That’s a lot of variety in flavors. It really is just like wine. Maybe even more than wine.

Even if you are a veteran coffee drinker though, you may have never heard of some of the things on this list. Can you tell me what varietal is in the cup you are drinking right now? Typica? SL28? Do you know if it was dry processed? What grade of bean was used? OK. So you look on the package and see it’s called “House Blend”. What does that mean? Coffee nerds might know some of these terms. If you buy your beans from someone that charges $15 a pound or more (Stumptown for instance) some of these things might be printed on the label. At the grocery store or your local coffee shop though, what are you going to see? Most likely, the number one thing you are going to see on a label, even more than the roast, is the ORIGIN. Yes, the country of origin. Why? Well, because over the years, of all the things on the above list, this one has come to take on the most meaning. In fact, many of the other things on this list are actually implied from this one piece of information. There really aren’t 135,000 combinations. Not in the real world any way. Revealing the origin narrows things down the MOST.

Here are some examples (at least in the U.S.)

Ethiopia = Arabica species, Heirloom variety, wet processing, medium-dark roasting, single origin (loose), preferable brewed in a press pot, served black

Columbia = Arabica species, Typica variety, wet processing, dark roasting, blended with other stuff, drip, served with cream and sugar

Panama = Arabica, Geisha variety, wet processing, light roast, single origin (strict), pour-over brew, served black

India = Robusta, dry process, dark roast, blended 1/6, espresso (Italian style)

Sumatra = Arabica, Mandheling variety, wet processing, medium-dark roast, blended 1/3, espresso

These are generalizations of course, and there are plenty of exceptions. What I find fascinating is how much is rolled up into just ONE of these variables.

Naming the origin immediately introduces a bunch of constraints. Places with easy access to a lot of water will use wet process instead of dry. Places like Ethiopia that have been producing coffee for centuries have all kinds of crazy varieties growing there. Places that only began to be cultivated in the 20th century (El Salvador for example) will have farms growing entirely high-yield varieties put together by agriculture engineers in the 1950s. The soil of Indonesia is so radically different from other regions, it largely determines the flavor of the coffee AND it’s use as the sub woofer component in espresso blends. I could go on and on. The origin tells a story. The other variables do too, but the origin tells the longest tale.

It makes me think about the other words we pack full of meaning and implications. It’s what “stereotypes” are really. It’s too bad the word (and the idea itself) has so much stigma attached to it. It is just a natural outworking of our minds trying to categorize things in the most  efficient way possible.

Reading bad scholarship from Christians is infuriating. I guess it’s like listening to bad music. I have a lot of practice tuning that out and turning it off though. Forcing myself to read something with bad argumentation is just painful. Agony! Why are we so stupid AND so self-congratulatory at the same time? The book I was thinking of was covered with gushing blurbs and a couple “action” shots of the author in some public debate. The book is OK, but it’s not great. How come we have to be so mediocre? (People have been asking this about Christian pop music for some time now.)

Someone said that an evangelical can be defined as someone who says to a liberal, “I’ll call you a Christian if you’ll call me a scholar.”

What causes this sort of thing I wonder?

When our received feedback is to be hailed and congratulated in our own cultural ghetto, then we begin to believe our own immature position is sufficient and we have little to no need of refinement or growth. “Growth” is redefined as simply the achievement of a larger stage from which to shout the same thing we are already shouting now rather than always thinking about how we could be saying it better, smarter and wiser. This is why youthful success is so dangerous. We are highly susceptible to thinking that our foundations are established and we can now turn to cultivating our ambition for influence. In fact, we need to be learning something new EVERY day and continue to exercise our fundamentals.

Good musicians know this. A professional in an orchestra will spend half her practice time on scales. A high school student will likely spend the entire time on the piece itself, top to bottom. The former will define success as playing a passage with very accurate pitch and smooth bowing. The latter will satisfy herself with simply getting through the piece without getting lost. This is all well and natural. The problem is if the young student is rewarded and showered with praise for her modest springtime accomplishment. What is the next step she may ask? Spread my (already existing) awesomeness to a larger audience! Let’s take this show on the road! No no no no no. Have a show for sure, but keep it at the proper level. Then make yourself aware of what it COULD sound like by listening to older and wiser people play it. Then go back and work on the tricky spots and wood-shed the bowing in the fugue and hammer scales so the position shifts in the second movement always land in the right spot. Later you may, like the professional, have the opportunity to move up a notch. And when you are up there, you keep doing the same things that got you there – working patiently and steadily on the slow hard things.

The chief problem with celebrity pastors comes when they get surrounded by yes men at a young age. Seriously, men can’t HANDLE being surrounded by yes men until they are at least 40. Even then the praisers are dangerous, but at least could be mitigated by a wise and self-reflective leader. At 26? Terrible! You see this in the gossip columns with young Hollywood actors. The former teen sensations usually have by far the worst time adjusting to an adulthood that isn’t all roses – even if they retain their popularity and financial success (many do not). The actors that seem to have the most stable lives are the ones who worked their way up playing modest roles in television or on stage and finally were noticed as having a lot of chops. So now at 40 when everyone is fawning over them on the red carpet, they don’t lose their head after the award show and drive around town drunk (Lindsey Lohan), run around downtown with no clothes on (Britney Spears), sleep with their director (Kristen Stewart). Geesh, how come I can only come up with actresses? Guys do this stuff all the time too. Apparently they just get away with it more often. Or maybe it doesn’t get reported on as often? Unknown.

Now I’m not saying these guys don’t grow up or get better. Often they are very talented and have plenty of potential to increase in knowledge and leadership skill. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they just stay 26, but now at 50 they are in charge of a million-dollar organization and have a platform from which to pontificate about national politics. That’s bad. We need really wise people doing that, not talented 26 year-olds disguised as wise old men.

At the end of the day though, who am I criticizing? Most of the fingers are pointing back at myself. Going back to the two violin players, I have to honestly say that I never learned how to practice. Sure, I got it in my head. I’ve woodshedded (nice verb) enough things to know I CAN do it, but the WILL do it is truly uncommon. Mostly I just wing it on whatever skills I developed in junior high singing along with a lot of pop radio. That will get you somewhere, but if you want to go farther you have to put your nose to the grindstone and that I have been largely unwilling to do. Not just in practicing music, but in EVERYTHING. Relationships, parenting, work, learning, writing, car maintenance. You name it. Slowly I am learning. I don’t know if I can say each year is “better”. It doesn’t feel better, it feels awful. But I think it feels a little more normal. I still continue to let others down – my wife, my kids, sometimes my friends, etc. Ugg. It’s a good thing God hasn’t allowed me to become surrounded by yes men -what a walking disaster I would be. Still, I could sure use someone who believed in me regardless.