Green Your Christmas Week One

Toys.

It seems to me that no matter who you are, no matter who lives in your household, you seem to be scouting out great toy deals around the holidays for some little tyke. Luckily for those of us who encounter little ones on a regular basis (and buy colorful, entertaining devices for those little munchkins), there are more and more GREEN toy options popping up everywhere--even local box stores, which really have to have motivation to change their inventory to costlier options.

Green toys are truly mainstream now and readily available. Its refreshing to buy a toy that fosters creative play and critical thinking, are non-toxic and aren't easily broken! To many people, this more than off-sets the cost investment of quality products that aren't made of imported plastic. The following are a couple of options to consider:

*Melissa & Doug (www.melissaanddoug.com)--frankly, these toys are very comparable cost option!
*Soopsori (www.soopsori.com)--free shipping!
*Green Toys (www.greentoys.com)--sells not only their products but link to a slew of other green toy sites
*Plan Toys (www.plantoys.com)--inventive, unique designs
*Target & Amazon (www.target.com & www.amazon.com)--believe it or not, both of these sites offer fairly significant green toy collections

But, lest we forget, adults deserve green toys, too!

*Gaiam (www.gaiam.com)--quality products for sustainable living
*Portable sustainable solar charger (www.amazon.com)--pretty...cool
*First World Trash (www.firstworldtrash.com)--chic, urban products made completely from recycled materials
*Eco-artware (www.eco-artware.com)--various luggage pieces made from recycled firehose (!!!)

In fact, green products are so easy to find, and they're often much more unique than anything you can purchase from your local box store. A quick Google search is a perfect place to start.

Not 95 But 9 Theses: Best I Could Do In A Pinch

This past summer my wife and I had an opportunity to tour the Laurentian Library in Florence.  The building was designed by Michelangelo to house the books and manuscripts of the Medici family, including the oldest manuscript of the Latin Vulgate Bible, sixth-century Syriac Rabula Gospels, and many other priceless and ancient documents.  (Ask Lenore; she has pictures!) 

As exquisite as the building is, what struck me the most was the pew like reading desks where once the ancient books were kept, prior to modern preservation in controlled environments.  Imagine a few select scholars sitting at those desks pouring over the books, so rare and priceless in the days prior to the printing press that they were chained in place.  It was a different time.  Even today one must be a recognized scholar to have any access at all to the books beyond a few on display in glass cases.

I thought of this library again because this morning CLC had a guest preacher, E. Dean Windhorn, who for the sermon dressed up as Luther in Reformation garb, and reminisced as if an old man looking back over the major events of his life.  Amazing how a little theatrics spices up a sermon.  What caught my attention was the fact that it wasn’t until Luther became a Doctor of Sacred Theology that he had regular access to a manuscript of the Bible.  It was because of this access that Luther began his Reformation journey, why he was stimulated to author the 95 Theses, why he ended up crosswise with the Church, and ultimately why he translated the Bible into his native German so that others might have the access he had, as printing technology developed.

Luther's 95 Theses were of course controversial.   They were designed that way.  They were intended to be confrontational, to provoke people.  The readers were invited to debate the issues with Luther, and he expected opposing views.  He expected to touch off a conversation.  And he did.  However, if you read those theses now, they sound a little disconnected from today’s world.  We have lived through the Enlightenment, the discovery of the New World, the Industrial Revolution, have an entirely different understanding of the universe, and have raised worldwide human communication to a level of real time pervasiveness not even imagined in the days of print technology.  The questions we ask of our world and of our place in it are necessarily quite different than the questions Luther asked of his world.

The 19^th century pictured Jesus as the ultimate Enlightenment man, a European Caucasian with long flowing blond hair, who lived morally perfect in a flawed world.  Most of the 20^th century, reacting to that 19^th century image, followed Albert Schweitzer in picturing Jesus as a darker more ethnic Mediterranean type, proclaiming the apocalyptic end of the world ruled by Rome.   Most of the church still likes that apocalyptic image of Jesus, but conveniently forgets that Schweitzer saw Jesus as a tragically failed apocalyptic prophet.   Current scholarship, in opposition to Schweitzer, offers a picture of Jesus as a wisdom teacher, a man with penetrating insights into human nature, who used parables to provoke us to ask ourselves life’s most basic questions.  Every age imagines Jesus as the perfect embodiment of those virtues and values it holds most dear, the ultimate answer to what the current world most needs.

Just as every age rediscovers Jesus for its own time, Paul’s relation to Jesus is rethought anew.  We have moved from the Reformation’s theological and religious Paul to a quite different Paul.  A Paul that is understood in a real 1^st century historical setting, rather than an abstract theological setting.  A Paul who remained faithful to his Jewish roots rather than a Paul who started a new religion.  A Paul in the context of Roman Empire rather than a Paul exclusively in a Jewish religious setting.  A Paul sensitive to gender issues rather than a Paul trapped in a male patriarchal world.  A Paul as much political as religious.  In short, Paul as community organizer rather than Paul as abstract theologian. 

When our understanding of Paul changes, our understanding of church changes also.  So I offer these 9 contemporary insights into Paul to get you thinking about their implications for reforming church in our day.

1.       Paul was not a systematic theologian, but more what we would call today a community organizer.  We need to quit arguing about what was the essence of his systematic thought, and focus instead on how he was trying to motivate people to action in his culture.  He motivated communities using metaphors and grand symbols.  His reinterpretation of the Jewish idea of a General Resurrection restoring this earth was the grandest metaphor of the bunch.  Metaphors are neither scientifically true nor false, neither morally good nor bad.  They are a way of talking about human reality. 

2.       Denominations need to pitch their catechisms, and quit pretending that church is all about correct religious thinking, as opposed to the wrong thinking of ‘others’.  Community organizers worth their salt don’t care about how people think.  They care about what people are doing together in the community. 

3.       Paul was Jewish, and he didn’t ‘convert’.  He remained a Jew with a modified appreciation of Jesus, a fellow Jew.  Jews are not legalistic hypocrites to any greater degree than people in today’s churches are legalistic hypocrites.  And truth be told, probably less so. 

4.       The doctrine of grace needs some revisiting.  When asked rhetorically in Romans 3:31 whether he was nullifying the law, Paul’s response was a vigorous ‘Certainly not!  We are affirming the law.’  Paul was trying hard to emphasize a point, and Protestantism ought to pay attention to what he was getting at. 

5.       Jesus critiqued primarily his own Jewish culture, which was laboring under the strains of Empire.  Paul’s life work was to welcome ‘the nations’ (Gentiles) as partners with Jews, reasoning that Jews and the nations were jointly subjugated by Rome.  Since in God’s scheme of things they were all in the same boat, it made (divine) sense to be supporting one another.  Paul used the Father Abraham and Second Adam metaphors to convince people, Jews and other nations subjugated by Rome, that they had common interests.  Unfortunately, after the Jewish revolts failed, ‘the nations’ threw Judaism under the bus to protect their own skin in the Empire.  That has continued now for 2000 years.  It needs to end. 

6.       Scholars need to let go of the notion that their work actually means something, if it doesn’t somehow get down and dirty with real people in community.  Churches can’t long exist without knowledge of their roots.  Scholars need the church, and the church needs scholarship.  But the two haven’t been talking to each other lately.  As our church sign currently says, Ignorance of the Good Book has reached biblical proportions! 

7.       Just because it was right for Paul or Jesus in the first century doesn’t mean it is right for us in the 21^st century.  America is an empire, but it isn’t the Roman Empire.  They didn’t struggle with life then so that we could stick our heads in the sand now.  Paul and Jesus lived their lives among the vanquished, not among the victors. 

8.       In the last 500 years we have become overly fascinated by printed communication, which is more individual and more abstract.  The more natural mode of human social communication, in all previous human history, is visual and metaphorical.  Steve Jobs was on to something, moving from text back to image.  The Church needs to pay more attention to its metaphors, and less to its theology.  MLK didn’t move people with academic books on the equality of all people.   “I have a dream . . .” is what moved people, and that is a metaphor.  

9.       The Reformation has run its course, and the church needs to build on a new foundation.  The world is a different place, and different questions are being asked.  Human community today needs to rediscover substance before cosmetic fixes.  Paul is where the Reformation started, and Paul is where we need to return, to start again. 

What if church wasn’t about ‘converting’ people?  What if Paul really wasn’t gender biased?  What if we quit debating whether metaphors are true, and started debating what they mean?  What if God really wants us to participate in resurrecting this world?  Let’s see.  Augustus = slaves, patronage, cronyism, conquest of nation and gender.  Paul  = a different kind of community based on a servant model rather than a domination model.  Maybe he was on to something when he said Augustus was not lord, but someone else was.  That is a metaphor that might be fun to try to live by.  People might join with us, if they thought we were really serious about it.