Preaching

is bloody hard work. And then there's all the prep on top of that!

See, the hardest thing, at least for semi-insecure young men, is the emotional toll that it takes on the mind, body and soul. Last night I was an absolute mess, worrying whether I'm ever going to be less pathetic than my current standard.

The emotional turmoil isn't made any easier by my inability to actually get 'into' the writing of a talk early enough that it's a genuinely polished article by the time it gets preached.

Oh well. One day I'll be happy with a talk that I do.

The evening talk was actually quite good, but the delivery in the morning was pretty rubbish, and we didn't read out the whole passage which had me second-guessing what I'd planned to say the whole time. I wasn't sure what I could assume my audience would know. Argh!

Preaching on big chunks is also difficult for a youngster, and when you feel like your main point is a tiny bit abstract, you can be sure there'll be those in your congregation who think it more so.

Ah well, good to vent. I'm ok though. Quite ok. God's good.

My Mad Skillz

Incited by Nathan. See here for context.

I'm Kutz and I'm an ex roller hockey player. Hoquei em patines, for those spaniards among you.

Roller hockey is awesome. You take 5 steps, and then all of a sudden you're already going fast. Seriously. You don't need to keep running. You just roll. Your legs are still. And yet you're still going fast. A beautiful concept. Add to this the feeling of smashing someone into the wall, flicking a ball into the top corner (probably on the keeper's stick-side) and getting to hit a ball (and, on occassion, other people) with a stick and how can you go wrong?

Now, I used to play with a team of guys: Michael, Les, Dion, Matty, Serge (my bro), Chris, Peter and some others.

Michael's top 5 rules were:

Rule #1 - Hit Dion
Rule #2 - Hit Dion
Rule #3 - Hit Les
Rule #4 - Hit Dion
Rule #5 - Hit Les

Fun rules they were too. They aren't, however, mine.

My Five best* tips for playing roller hockey. (And these are genuine, and hence will interest only a very few of you)(They will also mostly be team, not individual, principles. That's because that's all my dad taught me.)

1. In negative sports**, a strong defence that puts some pressure on the opposition is the key to winning. So defend tightly, and communicate well.
2. Don't give away the ball close to the halfway line. Breakaways goals are imperative to avoid.
3. If you're trying to score, the hot-spots to skate to are here. (see diagram)
4. When defending man-on-man (ie, you're marking a specific player, not defending in a zone) skate in straight lines, roughly parallel to your penalty box lines. Skating in straight lines gets you there faster than skating in curves.
5. Try to make your team-mate look good. If everyone on the team has this mentality, hockey is a beautiful thing.
6. (Unofficial, but vital) Don't drop the soap in the showers.

Diagram 1:

Nathan's asked me to tell you now how applying these 5 tips will change your life. I would suggest that after intense thought and application these principles will simply confuse you if you try to use them while learning to play hockey. Our coach Eduard Karayan (ex-pro in Italian league) just let us go and have fun. So we did. :)

* May change after more than 10 minutes of contemplation.
** A 'negative sport' is my short-hand for a sport where in any given attacking phase it is more likely that the attacking team will not score than that they will score. Ie, football(soccer). A 'positive' sport would be something like basketball where the expectation is that more likely than not the attacking team will score from their attack.

I find it very difficult to

Adjust.

Especially when it's having to adjust to the idea that there are peers around me who are significantly more gifted than I am. It's simply not an admission that I'm used to making. I've never felt that I have to or should think that. Now, I'm in a context where I'm forced to deal with this as fact. It's difficult after 27 years.

I make no comment about whether this ought to be my perception, only that it's been my perception.

Only just realised

That somewhere deep down I've assumed that I'm infinite. I always thought that I didn't think that. But now I realise that there's a way in which I have been believing it.

A strange thing to change.

It's funny how long it takes me to find out what I really believe to be true.

Edit: Not sure this makes sense now, even to me. But it did at the time.

You know it's bad when

Have you ever had that sinking feeling that comes when you realise that not only does your nose hair grow at an alarming rate and extend at strange angles, but a percentage of it is also grey?

For those among you of the female persuasion who can relate to what I'm saying, my heart goes out to you.

This post is here because that's where it is

Click image to enlarge.

From here.

The theme verse of Acts?

Ok, so it's not the theme verse of Acts, but then it would have been a whole lot less exciting to announce the possibility of having discovered only one of the many verses in Acts which pick up on its theme, now wouldn't it?

Still, I think this is exciting.

In my judgement, Luke-Acts is about the fulfilment of the plan that God had all along, to bring blessing to the whole earth through Jesus. (Luke 2:32 (citing Isaiah 42:6) Luke 3:6 (citing Isaiah 51:10 and Psalm 98:2-3), Luke 24:46-8, Acts 1:8, 10:15) Luke-Acts is designed to show that the missionary work in Acts is valid. Huzzah! I've not believed in vain.

But a sub-theme to this is the irony that many of the Jews actually end up standing in God's way and trying to thwart His purposes. Stephen's speech in Acts 7 shows that this, too, is what had been happening all along, throughout the history of Israel. In reality, a number of Jews resisting God's plans is business as usual.

Note well, then, that 90% of the trouble that Paul gets into in his missionary journeys is instigated and funded by the Jews, not the gentiles. Luke uses the word jealousy to describe their motivation. (Acts 17:5)

The message? Summed up in a man who may well have been speaking even better than he knew: Paul's old Pharisee mentor, Gamaliel.

"If this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!"

Let us make sure that we're never being jealous people who think that we have the inside running with God. Let us make sure we're not smugly sniping or actively hindering anyone from hearing the gospel. Especially, let's not attack a member of Christ out of jealousy.

It's just possible that we may be found to be opposing God.

A couple of 'old' friends

Arthur is someone I've never met. In person. But we've shared some very interesting and perhaps at times speculative theological discussions. With his recent comment on this blog, I'm now back in contact, and looking forward to reading his (and Tamie's!) blog. :)

And then, of course, there's Anna. The amazingly talented crazy-girl who's forever pushing her boundaries, in most senses. I'm hoping that I get to read some more of her posts on her blog in the near future.

Welcome, 'ole buddies!

Speaking of new words...

We were discussing the propensity of some people to spend hours agonising over their previous conversations: how they'd gone, whether they'd said the 'right things', whether the other person hates you, etc.

But there is also an activity which many step to new heights to engage in: the pre-mortem. It's a beautifully and tragically descriptive label on an almost prophetic level, don't you think?

Shakespeare, most creativelyable poet of their time

Which of these words used nowhere else than in Shakespeare do you like the best?

* bepray
* bragless
* compulsative
* conceptious
* confineless
* continuantly
* correctioner
* disliken
* exceptless
* exsufflicate
* foxship
* insultment
* oathable
* offendress
* omittance
* overgreen
* overstink
* questant
* razorable
* successantly
* thoughten
* uprighteously
* wenchless

In whose judgement

There is an interesting ambiguity in Paul's grammar in Romans 3:4. The NIV reads:

Let God be true, and every man a liar. As it is written:
"So that you may be proved right when you speak
and prevail when you judge."

While the quote reads a little differently in the ESV:

"That you may be justified in your words,
and prevail when you are judged."

The change of the final word makes us ask: "Is God judging, or being judged?". We'll go into the fascinating use of Psalm 51 in this chapter tomorrow, but for today it will suffice to ask the question, "in whose judgement?".

Why did the different translations choose to make the meaning of the words different?

The answer is that in Greek the phrase is ambiguous. The words are:

kai nikeseis en tw krinesthai se

Or, word for word translated,

and be victorious in the judging you

So is the phrase objective or subjective? Is it 'in your judging' with God doing the judging of with God being judged?

The implications of the decisions are interesting (though not completely earth-shattering). The change from the NIV to the ESV brings the verse to mean that when God stands trial his testimony will always be found true, and the verdict will always display him victorious. In any proceedings. The implications of this are vast, especially given our propensity not to trust God. There is no situation we find ourselves in in which God's words and actions will not be shown to be right.

With context being the basis for the decision as to which we should go with, we've got plenty to help us think through the answer, especially given that it's an OT quote. But that's for tomorrow...

A weekend away

Back now. It's been ages, my blog-friends. My apologies.

What should a start of year theological college retreat be?

We enjoyed hearing each others' testimonies and praying for each other.

We heard a cracking Bible talk on Gen 4 about the ill fate of jealousy and the word of forgiveness spoken by the blood of Jesus.

We heard about the need for personal formation as well as intellectual endeavour.

We heard about the need to rightly engage a changing culture with an unchanging message.

We sang to our great God together.

We thought about the nature of true knowledge, and that it is relational as well as objective.

It was all really good.

Unfortunately, the thing we didn't enjoy together in the program was the beauty of laughter and levity together. I just wish we'd have been able to add not taking ourselves too seriously to taking God's word, mission and ministry seriously.

Nearly :) but just a tiny bit :|

The speed limit, as the number of passengers approaches infinity, approaches 0.

Long distance driving, the inescapable law:

From here. Click image for larger size.

Less oversimplified?

As a follow-up to this post, I thought I'd publish a couple of thoughts.

In Genesis 12-17, I would identify at least these 6 distinct promises that God makes to Abraham:

1- Make you a great nation (many descendants, bless you, be very fruitful, etc)
2- Will give this land (forever)
3- Make your name great (cf Babel)
4- You will be the reference point of blessing and cursing (Ie, will bless those who bless you, curse those...)
5- All peoples on earth blessed through you. (not to be confused or conflated with 4)
6- I will be your God and the God of your descendants (relationship, forever)

I would probably argue that all of these promises hold significant biblical theological weight, and even if you could conflate a couple of them I reckon you'd be hard-pressed to reduce them to 3 without losing some seriously significant stuff.

In fact, I reckon not understanding the significance of the bits that are normally left out of the standard Goldsworthian threefold schema would lead to a much less clear reading of the Deuteronomic histories, the prophets and even the Psalms.

Particularly, I say this in terms of the laments where the writers are struggling with the dissonance between these promises and the current or past experience of Israel. Their dilemma is partly trying to put together the promises made to Abraham and the fact of their being oppressed by outside nations.

More thoughts?

Our fifth

Well, it's our fifth wedding anniversary this coming Friday, and we're heading off for a little holiday! :) Should be tops.

In the meantime, just carry on. Please don't cry. Unless it's your party, and you want to. Blog will resume in under a week.

Grace and peace,
Kutz

Men, angels and Yahweh

Something I've found interesting of late when reading Genesis 18-22 is the means by which God visits people. He calls from heaven, gets his angel to call down from heaven, he sends a posse of 3 blokes who then become 2 angels on the way from Abraham's place to Sodom. Sometimes the messenger seems to be speaking, at other times it's Yahweh himself who speaks. An interesting set of interactions.

I'm wondering now what can be made of God's choice of method, and the fluidity of the change from 'men' to 'angels' in the story of the men of Sodom's rape attempt. Why did God choose to interact with people in the specific way that he did? Is it supposed to tell us something about the nature of the interaction?

Oversimplification?

Does anyone else think that while the tri-partite concept of Nation-Land-Blessing is a helpful identification of major Biblical theological themes, that it is somewhat inadequate to capture even most of the aspects of these promises:

Genesis 12:1-3

The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.

² "I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.

³ I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you."

Genesis 12:7

The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring [a] I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.

Genesis 15:4-5Then the word of the LORD came to him: "This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir." 5 He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be."

Genesis 15:18

On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river [d] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates

Genesis 17:3-8

Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, 4 "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram [b] ; your name will be Abraham, [c] for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God."

?