Recommended: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
No doubt you’ve heard of Randy Pausch and seen at least part of his “last lecture“. Pausch is a 47 year old computer science professor, husband, and father of three small children. In August, 2007, Pausch found out he was dying of pancreatic cancer. In September, he delivered a lecture called Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, a moving and winsome chronicle of his life and career, along with lessons he wants his children to learn one day.
Pausch has been on Oprah and the nightly news, and you can see his talk online for free (at the link above), but I just bought and downloaded his new book in audio format. It’s the contents of the lecture plus some background on his life and other general purpose life wisdom. I’m finding it extremely valuable and enjoyable to listen to.
A difficult grace
One of the hardest-to-take passages in all the Bible is the one that describes Moses’ momentary outburst of anger - and the consequences - in Numbers 20:10-12. After listening to the Israelites gripe for the hundredth time, Moses lost it (but only a little). “Listen, you rebels”, he said to them, “must we bring you water out of this rock?” Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.
Then comes this in v. 12 - But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them.”
It seems so unfair - the death penalty for getting jelly on the tablecloth, as Fred Craddock once put it. But L. L. Barkat, in her new book Stone Crossings, suggests that God’s discipline hides a severe mercy, a difficult grace. She says that the way Moses speaks to the people here shows that maybe he’s handled the things of God for so long that he is beginning to confuse himself with God (a common temptation in ministry). So God shuts him out of Canaan.
But this isn’t the end for Moses. At the end of Deuteronomy, God takes him to a high mountain and shows him the Promised Land. GOD does this, as a man might do for his best friend. And then Moses dies there on that mountain, and God buries him..as a man might do for his BEST friend. Getting shut out of the Promised Land wasn’t the same as getting shut out of God’s presence. Quite the opposite.
I read this in Stone Crossings today just after I read about the pitiful prophets of Matthew 7 to whom Jesus says “I never knew you”. “But Lord, Lord,” they say, “didn’t we do mighty miracles in your name?”
Maybe that’s where Moses was heading when God saved him from himself.
P. S. Did Moses ever enter the Promised Land? Sure he did. See Matthew 17:3 
The Burning Word by Judith Kunst
Years ago, my dad was teaching a Sunday School lesson to adults. He said: “We don’t know much from the Gospels about the early years of Jesus. What can we learn from Jewish history and culture about what his life may have been like?” An older man spoke up: “Since the Bible is silent on Jesus’ youth, we have no business delving into it.” End of discussion.
My dad liked to ask questions of Scripture. He would have enjoyed The Burning Word: A Christian Encounter With Jewish Midrash by Judith Kunst, a book that deals with the well-established Jewish tradition of wrestling with all Scripture - the knowns and the unknowns (and especially the unknowns). The word midrash literally means study but figuratively refers to the practice of commenting on Scripture and grappling with hard passages. For thousands of years, rabbis have written stories, poems, proverbs and other commentary on the meaning of the sacred texts, and by so doing have debated one another across the generations.
Kunst invites Christians into the practice of making midrash. How? Pick a text. Identify a question or problem it raises. Draw out of your imagination a solution for the problem, perhaps shaping it into a story or parable. Then find someone who will argue with your interpretation, refine it, or even reject it in favor of a better one.
Christians of my stripe tend to be leery of too much “grappling” with the text. Isn’t that disrespectful to its authority? Kunst convinces me that it isn’t, especially if I look at my ideas not as the conclusion of the matter but as the starting point for entering the discussion.
(Thanks to Bob Silvera for lending me this enlightening book).
Serve God, Save the Planet, Sweeten Your Life
I first heard of Matthew Sleeth, Christian, physician, and environmental activist when he spoke at Rob Bell’s church. It wasn’t his passion for earth-care that made me want to read his book. It was when he said that he had reduced his electric bill to $20. I figured that unless he was living in his car, he might have something valuable to teach me.
He did. But it wasn’t earth-care OR energy savings – not primarily. It was the sweetness of a simpler life.
Sleeth begins Serve God, Save the Planet with a litany of problems you may have heard elsewhere: The dramatic increase in cancer among young people; our addiction to oil; skyrocketing rates of depression in the midst of plenty. But he doesn’t linger on the gloom, because he believes that doing so leaves us feeling powerless, which is a strangely comforting way of avoiding responsibility for action. The tone of this book is upbeat and positive – joyful, in fact.
Sleeth spends some time educating us on the interconnectedness of things. He shows us the pollution created to bring us cheap food. He describes how what we throw away today, we drink tomorrow. He talks about how our over-consumption of nearly everything results in scarcity for millions of other people. But the larger focus of this book is on living a life that is simpler and sweeter. Sleeth has learned the joy of funneling all of life through a question: “Does this action, saying, movie, purchase, etc. bring me closer to God?” He says that “simplifying means having less, wanting less, being satisfied with what you have or less than you have”. Sleeth inspires you to reassess not just your recycling habits but your entertainment, hobbies, use of technology, your family time and the size of your house.
Serve God, Save the Planet is both practical and inspirational. It’s practical because the applications are at the family level rather than the global. It’s inspirational because Sleeth finds so much joy in this journey that it’s contagious.
Seeing ourselves through untrained eyes: Hemant Mehta
As I continue to read through I Sold My Soul on eBay (atheist Hemant Mehta’s exploration of churches) I find myself amused and often embarrassed by his observations. At one contemporary church, for example…
When the band started playing, it was just after the 8:30 start time, but there were fewer than forty people in the church. But by the time the band had finished singing and the pastor got up on stage, the crowd had more than doubled in size. I noticed families with young children walking in without any visible indications of guilt…Was the music so unimportant to them that they decided to come only for the “main event”?…Furthermore, in a small community church such as this one, I imagine people would know one another better than at a larger church. The people in the congregation, therefore, might know the people on stage who were singing and would surely respect them enough to show up on time. I didn’t see that respect being shown, though (pp. 70-71).
When did he visit our church? 
An unreasonable faith
It is quite a contrast reading Paul’s Hattaway’s Back to Jerusalem alongside of I Sold My Soul on eBay. In the latter, atheist Hemant Mehta searches for a reasonable expression of Christianity, and he does so in an interesting and humorous way. But Back to Jerusalem reminds us that sometimes faith requires people to live way beyond reason, to pay a price that makes sense only in light of eternity.
Back to Jerusalem tells the stories of several leaders in the underground Chinese church, heart-wrenching stories full of persecution and imprisonment. One woman, after being jailed for some time, was told she was going to be released. They took her to a place where she could see her children (and they could see her) and then told her: “All you have to do is renounce Christ.” She refused and went back to prison for 20 years, losing the chance to be a mother. Such a faith makes sense only in light of Jesus Christ and eternity.
These underground believers have a plan for completing the Great Commission. They intend to take the gospel back to Jerusalem by heading west, evangelizing India and the Muslim world along the way. Two things they have going for them: They’ve been made tough by persecution; and they aren’t American.
If their goals sound unreasonable, so is their faith. I’m looking for them to succeed.
PS - Thanks to Joanie for bringing this book to my attention. :)
I Sold My Soul on eBay
Yesterday I began reading Hemant Mehta’s book I Sold My Soul on eBay. Mehta is a young atheist who, wanting to study religion up close, offered his time for sale on eBay. The winning bidder would get to choose which worship services Mehta would attend. If you think it crass that someone would actually offer up his soul for auction, so does Mehta, and he never did that. The soul-selling angle was added to this story by the press as news of the auction spread.
Several things make this book interesting. First, I Sold My Soul is published by a Christian publisher* and has a forward by Rob Bell. That’s because Mehta’s assignment, as determined by auction-winner Jim Henderson, was to visit churches and report on faith as seen through an atheist’s eyes. This is incredibly valuable market research for churches.
The second thing that makes this book so interesting is Mehta’s account in the first five chapters of how he moved from the faith of his youth (Jainism) to atheism, and his description of atheism and atheists. Any Christian who is seeking a reasonable faith will find a lot in common with Mehta and other atheists. As Rob Bell says in the introduction, “…the god they rejected is a god I’ve rejected”.
Anyway, I’m just getting into the chapters that describe his church visits, so, more later…
*Waterbrook Press is a Christian publishing division of Random House
My thoughts on The Golden Compass
I had never heard of The Golden Compass until four weeks ago when several people sent me email warnings about its atheistic message (Narnia for atheists!). Since then, this fantasy novel and movie have received lots of press. I decided to read the books (The Golden Compass is the first of a trilogy) and see the film. Here are some observations:
- Philip Pullman is a talented writer. He has created a compelling story and a fascinating fantasy universe (universes actually - the trilogy is built on the idea of multiple parallel universes).
- The movie and the first book are not very controversial. The series doesn’t get too theological until book two, and the movie tries its best to make the villains generic.
- Pullman really hates religion. (You might say that Jesus did too). The villainous church in the books is all about power, control, and persecution, which certainly are some of our more noteworthy sins. It would be hard to exaggerate Philip Pullman’s hostility toward the church and toward God. His heroes are on a quest to destroy both. But something is missing…
- There is no Jesus in Pullman’s church. The church he describes isn’t the one I know. His church has no good news, no grace, no Jesus or Mother Teresa or Shane Claiborne. No one is drilling wells for the thirsty, feeding the hungry, or setting up medical clinics in poor countries. Pullman’s church is a caricature.
- The movie is pretty average. Too many details are crammed into too tight a time frame and some key events from the book are rearranged. The lead actress is good and the CGI is great. Sam Elliott always makes me want to trim my mustache.
- Pullman gets quite preachy in the later books, which probably hurts his ability to persuade. He hates The Chronicles of Narnia, but he mimics C. S. Lewis in that both authors put forth a blatant world view in their books. Pullman dislikes The Lord of the Rings too, but both Gandalf and Saruman made it into The Golden Compass movie.
Film critic Jeffery Overstreet has a thorough and informative article on The Golden Compass at his Looking Closer blog.
Saving God’s Green Earth by Tri Robinson
I came to Tri Robinson’s book, Saving God’s Green Earth, already convinced that I need to be doing more for the environment (and so does the church.) Robinson didn’t add much to my conviction or my store of useful information. He did, however, provide this useful paragraph about the link between environmental stewardship and our witness:
“It was through creation that I realized there must be a Creator behind it all. And that same realization is just begging to be proclaimed to animists in the mountains of Thailand and Burma…(and) to your neighbors across the street who constantly work on their garden every chance they get…(and) to the radical environmentalists who feel the urge to fight for creation but don’t know why.” (p. 59)
Part of witnessing to the next generation is caring about the things they care about. The environment is one of those things.
My rating: 6 out of 10
Change or Die by Alan Deutschman
Change or Die is an excellent presentation of how people change. I found more useful information in Deutschman’s book than in anything I have read all year. What DOESN’T change people? Facts. Fear. Force. Yet these three Fs represent most of our efforts to get folks to change their ways (and most of my sermons). What DOES work? Three Rs - Relationships with a community of changing people; Repetition of the disciplines and practices that change us; and Reframing our view of the value of change. It sounds like stuff the church ought to be good at.
I give Change or Die a 9 out of 10.
Thanks to MHCC member Chip Eichelberger for recommending the Fast Company article by Deutschman that preceded this book.
