A Little Reading

Scott Chrostek is the pastor for the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection's downtown Kansas City church plant. In less than 10 years, the satellite of the megachurch in the KC suburbs has grown large enough that it is building its own facility -- the first church construction in downtown KC in more than 80 years.

Misfit Mission uses some stories of the downtown church's founding and growth to outline Chrostek's thesis that God frequently employs people most everyone would consider unsuited or maybe even unsuitable for the tasks at hand. From his own move into the ministry from a career in finance to his selection for the job of planting the downtown ministry -- putting a Detroit-area native into a city he'd never visited before the project came up -- he considers himself first among the misfits, so to speak.

The stories of how Chrostek and other members of the church firmly believe that God not only frequently fits square pegs into round holes but often prefers to do so make interesting reading. They're sometimes humorous and often inspirational. While they illustrate the thesis fairly well, Chrostek doesn't do as much as he might to highlight just how they do so. In some of the stories, the "misfit" dimension of the people under discussion seems less apparent as they succeed either in what they're trying to do or prove more than adequate for the job. While he seems to make the connection explicit in the earlier chapters of the book it is not always as much so later on.

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A lot of modern popular Christian thinking centers on ideas of God being an escape hatch from suffering and doubt in life. There are probably times when this is so, but frequently we read about biblical people whose encounter with God did not provide instant clarity and freedom from all doubt and darkness. Christian history also features many such people, and in modern times Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light lets us know that even the most committed of believers sometimes finds no smooth path through faith.

Eric Elnes, pastor of a United Church of Christ congregation in Omaha, writes to those folks in 2015's Gifts of the Dark Wood. The "dark wood" of the title comes from Dante Alighieri, who begins his strange journey in Inferno in a "fearsome dark forest." Elnes suggests that rather than fearsome, for the Christian the "dark wood" of failures and doubts offers opportunities to walk more closely with God than ever before.

His willingness to honestly confront the uncertain or lousy times of life is more novel than it should be among modern believers, making Gifts a worthwhile read whether one is dealing with trials or not. The marketing of the book is less helpful. The phrase "soulful skeptics" in the subtitle sounds a lot like preening among people who consider themselves a little too sophisticated to settle for everyday religion. Publishing blurb that says the book is for "anyone who prefers practicality to piety when it comes to finding their place in this world." The older description of piety as "holy living," or actually living out what one believes in the real world despite circumstances, makes it a better description of what Elnes is talking about than the marketing person at Abingdon thought. 

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Pastor Rich Wilkerson, Jr., uses the metaphor of his childhood sandcastle building as a lens to look at four people in Luke 7 in his 2016 book Sandcastle Kings. No matter how elaborate a sandcastle he and his brother built, the next tide washed it away. Sandcastles do not last. Wilkerson links the idea of sandcastle building to Jesus' words in Matthew 7 about buildings that rest on rock versus those that rest on sand. Like the castles made of sand, the latter do not survive storms.

Each of the four people in Luke 7 that Wilkerson discusses has rested some dimension of their self-identification in the things of the impermanent world. When they encounter life's storms, whether ordinary or severe, that self-identification comes crashing down. Only by rooting our lives in Jesus himself can we build lives and selves that weather storms.

Kings is written with a breezy and simple style that might not be directly aimed at young people but which will probably be best received by them. Wilkerson also has aimed more at people beginning their relationship with Jesus than those who may be searching for paths of deeper discipleship. Most of what he says is operating in the binary "with Jesus or apart from Jesus" arena. This is perfectly legitimate and doesn't preclude reading Kings for fuel on a disciple's journey, but it does add an extra layer to that task.

The third section -- dealing with John the Baptist's question to Jesus about his Messiahship -- is probably the one that most addresses issues that confront people already in their walk with Jesus. The fourth, expounding on the nameless woman who washes Jesus' feet while he eats at the house of Simon the Pharisee, seems most focused on those who may not have started that walk. The kind of fuzzy focus weakens Sandcastle Kings and might make you wish it had been packed together a little more tightly.

Step Aside, SMOD

The discovery a couple of years ago of the Higgs Boson, a particle predicted back in 1964 but not detected until much later, has led to some neat confirmations that help support the Standard Model of physics. This is good.

On the other hand, it's also led to confirmation of some potential dangers associated with what the Higgs Field, created by the boson, might do. One of them is collapse and destroy the entire universe. This is bad.

That said, the headline on Big Think's article on the matter is kind of misleading -- thank goodness. The headline refers to the field's collapse and the subsequent destruction, which is called "vacuum decay" as a "self-destruct button for the universe." This label implies we could actually do something to bring about the catastrophe, when in fact we not only can't, we wouldn't even know it happened.

The reason I say thank goodness is that if this collapse really were a "self-destruct" button we could somehow access, there would be people who might consider triggering it before Tuesday. While most of us, er, them would probably reconsider and figure that neither a Clinton 2.0 or Trump administration actually justified destroying the universe, that light might dawn too late for some and endanger us all.

(The "SMOD" in the title is the acronym for Sweet Meteor of Death, a more limited version of the same concept that merely involves wiping out life or civilization on just our planet, instead of the entire cosmos.)

Stylin'

When you are as gifted with language -- real and imagined -- as was the late J.R.R. Tolkien, you are capable of using a significant number of words to say, "Bite me." But in doing so, you make it sound so much better and dial the insult factor way up past eleven.

Help Him, Rhonda...

"Privilege" is a buzzword used to highlight how people who've had different experiences view the world through the lens of those experiences. Like a lot of concepts, the kernel of truth at the center has been wrapped up in so much silliness that an idea we could potentially use to try to understand one another better has become a club to hit people over the head with.

After all, who could deny that my experiences growing up in a medium-sized city during the 1970s and 1980s affected how I look at the world? And who could deny that someone who grew up in a different city or different era would see things differently? Makes perfect sense. But then using those differences to say that one or the other of us needs to shut up makes...less than perfect sense. By a mile.

How bad can it get? Comes now Ben Ratliff, writing for the New York Book Review about the Beach Boys. While their songs may seem like jaunty and fun little slices of 1960s California coastal life, Mr. Ratliff alerts us that they are "poems of unenlightened straight-male privilege, white privilege, beach privilege."

Now, I know what straight-male privilege and white privilege are, and I can even acknowledge that they do exist, although not nearly so often or oppressively as some would say. Those phrases describe real things.

But what the hell is "beach privilege?" Seriously, what the hell is beach privilege supposed to be? What special status is conveyed by a song and look that recalls the last stretch before the land gives up? What extra rights and abilities come with sand? Is the oppressive power strictly an oceanfront feature, or are lake and river beaches also just another instance of the man trying to keep the people down?

Is there not enough real oppression around the world that Mr. Ratliff has to claim that the little deuce coupe is an agent of the 1 percent? Are there not enough real problems that we have to picture the little old lady from Pasadena when we fight the power (I know, not a Beach Boys song. But beach privilege is everywhere, dude).

Those are rhetorical questions that I wouldn't expect Mr. Ratliff to answer, operating as I do with the privilege of having a blog that would be nowhere near his radar.

That's all for now. I need to go out and learn how to surf so I can continue to tread the masses under my huarache sandals.

(H/T Kathleen Timpf)

Postponement

Last night (or early this morning), the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, the first such win for the franchise since 1908. This event effectively armors 2016 against being terrible, no matter what Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton does to it come Tuesday.

Of course, whichever of them wins is going to make 2017 through 2020 pretty rotten, so even as something as mighty as a Cubs Series win can only delay the inevitable.

Deep Breath Time?

David Harsanyi, writing at The Federalist, suggests that, despite what at least one candidate claims, Tuesday's presidential vote will not be the "the most important election in our lifetime."

Harsanyi suggests that since the candidates are not vastly different except in a couple of areas, since neither of them is likely to do too much to "fix things" and since neither of them is likely to be very effective at whatever their agendas may be, there are important ways in which it doesn't matter at all which candidate we elect.

I certainly think he's onto something if he sees both candidates as equally ineffective. So it would make sense to not lay too much weight on what one or the other of them says about what they want to do.

Some Questions Need Not Be Asked

A pretty clever person researched the top 3 responses to Googles' Autocomplete search function for each state and region, and then entered them on a map of the United States.

Autocomplete, if you don't know, is a function that Google has that will complete your search question with some of the most commonly-typed searches. You start typing a question, such as, "Why is ____ so...," and Autocomplete finishes it for you. A question that has been asked by more people shows up higher on the list of possible finishes for your sentence.

One interesting thing is that most of the top questions seem to be complaints or whining. Folks exploring Kansas, for example, were most likely to ask why Kansas was so hot, so windy or so boring. Others asked why Florida was so weird, bad or hot.

Another interesting feature is that most of the questions about some places imply that the old "There are no dumb questions" assurance from your teacher may not have been as solid a statement as she thought it was. The number-one question asked about Minnesota, for example, was "Why is Minnesota so cold?" That one is indeed a poser, as it is for North Dakota. It's only the second-most common question about Alaska, though.

I may be risking my credibility here, but it might be that Google searches don't always attract the smartest questions. But I'm not sure where to go to look that up.