On July 3, 2008, the Fresno Bee ran an article about kids of different faiths using their time and money to help others. The story, “Good Guys,” by Ron Orozco highlights, amongst other kids, my nephew Joshua.

They are doing a lot of good things for others, driven by loved ones setting good examples—and by their faith.

Joshua, Shriya, Patrick, Alexandra and Faisal come from homes practicing Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism or Islam. And despite other differences, the world’s religions share common teachings on caring for and helping others, particularly the disadvantaged….

Joshua Watson, 5, earns quarters for feeding the family’s dogs, Leia and Lucy, and the cat, Mazie, and for helping in grandmother Pam Watson’s tomato garden at their Clovis home. But he never spends anything.

“He’s a good little boy,” Watson says.

Instead, he puts the quarters in paper rolls and donates them every Sunday at Quail Lake Community Church in Clovis, an evangelical congregation where he and his grandmother worship.

The quarters always go to Littlest Angels, a ministry that collects or buys new clothing, caps, booties, blankets and accessories for newborns who might not otherwise receive them. Joshua will enter kindergarten at Quail Lake Elementary School in August.

“He’s thinking outside of the box so early,” says Kim Espinosa, the church’s Littlest Angels coordinator. “He can become a warrior for God.”

There are a couple of reasons motivating Joshua. His grandmother saves money and gives it at church. He also listens to church members attending a weekly Bible study in their home and talking about the New Testament book of James 2, which is about faith and deeds.

Joshua also is aware of a family tragedy. His mother lost a baby girl in the seventh month of pregnancy. Pam Watson says: “He talks a lot about having a sister, Emily, in heaven.”

This story reminds me of the work Interfaith Youth Core does. Most religions have service for others at the core of their ethical practices. IFYC asks can greater religious cooperation occur around that shared value of service? Can we learn more about our faith and the faiths of others as we serve people who need help? The kids in Orozco’s story aren’t in discussion groups together, but I hope that this early service shapes them profoundly and creates an appreciation that other religions also value service. I hope that my nephew doesn’t just learn that Christians are called to help others, but that other religions call their members to service, and that he can learn to work alongside those religions in helping newborns, the sick, the hungry, and creation.

Rick Meigs at The Blind Beggar initiated a synchroblog on “What is Missional?” Busyness kept me from signing up, but I’ve enjoyed reading the answers others have posted. Though I’m not participating, I thought I’d offer the following quotation from Darrell L. Guder’s book, The Continuing Conversion of the Church regarding the good news of God’s mission in the world. Guder is something of a founding-father in contemporary missional discussions.

Through the particular encounter of God with Israel, the good news that God is loving and purposeful enters into human history and becomes knowable. Apart from such a particular history, Christianity has no universal message to proclaim. The Bible is not a collection of universal ideas cloaked in a particular culture. Universal ideas cannot be the good news that the concrete testimony of a particular people at a particular time can well be, if their witness is credible. Such universal ideas are merely the product of human imagination and creativity. Christian witness is not the interpretation of philosophy but the continuation of the event of God’s self-disclosure in human history. The historical experience of God is the surprising result of God’s initiation, God’s desire to speak and be heard. That surprise continues to define the concrete history of the world, and of the mission community within the world which is called to be the witness to God’s goodness, the “gospel of God.” God’s mission is good news because it is historical: it has been historical from the beginning and continues to be the history that defines our hope. We encounter God within that same history as God makes us part of salvation history for the sake of the world he loves. (29-30)

Over at Mere Mission, Todd Hiestand asks what the announcements in our church bulletins can tell us about how missional our congregations are.

Are all your announcements about things internal? While I’m a believer that discipleship and community life stuff is important for the mission of a local body, if all of the activities, programs, etc are pointed inward, this might be a good indication that the church needs to take some intentional steps outside itself.

This is a good question, in my opinion. If bulletins tell us what is happening in the life of a congregation from week to week, I think they can give us a sense of where our focus lies. This would be a challenging and life-giving experiment for many churches, I imagine.

Matt Barber sent me this GigaOM interview with director Brad Bird regarding how he engenders a creative environment. He sounds like a fascinating manager. Bird has made some of the most original and multifaceted films in the past ten years. He doesn’t receive the attention he deserves and I think that’s because his films are animated, as if that medium is somehow deficient compared to live-action movies. But Bird’s three films, The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, are testaments to his imagination and skill at inspiring people under his leadership to express their creativity. Here are a couple of their exchanges.

The Quarterly: Do angry people—malcontents, in your words—make for better innovation?

Brad Bird: Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team?

Brad Bird: I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person… I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together…

What would it look like in churches if we employed similar ideas? It might be chaotic, but there is certainly something beautiful in Bird’s sense of we are stronger together than as individuals.

For my Christmas post this year, I decided to reflect on some hymns, and this is a rather wandering reflection. I have found great enjoyment and deep meaning in singing some of the traditional Christmas hymns. In the past, I experienced a level of familiarity and comfort singing their melodies—they just feel like Christmas—but I rarely reflected on the words I sang. For whatever reason, I’ve become more reflective of the words we sing. My favorite in recent years has been, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” with its lyrics ringing thoroughly of exilic woe and hope. This year other hymns have become especially meaningful, but I find the most moving and hopeful parts in later verses. “O Holy Night,” offers a wonderful picture of hope that Jesus’ incarnation is not merely about my salvation, but about a salvation, a re-ordering, a re-creation of the world that instills hope, justice, grace, and love. The lines written by Pla­cide Cap­peau and translated by Adolphe C. Adam, “A thrill of hope, the weary soul rejoices, / For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn” evoke the despair I have felt lately and the glimmer of hope onto which I can cling. If you’ll allow me another reference from The Lord of the Rings (this quickly seems to be turning into a Tolkien blog), “A thrill of hope… a new and glorious morn” reminds me of Aragorn holding onto hope at the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. He speaks of the morning’s hope, when he says, “Yet dawn is ever the hope of men,” and displays this hope in his parley with his enemy.

‘Why do you look out? Do you wish to see the greatness of our army? We are the fighting Uruk-hai.’

‘I looked out to see the dawn,’ said Aragorn.

‘What of the dawn?’ they jeered. ‘We are the Uruk-hai: we do not stop the fight for night or day, for fair weather or for storm. We come to kill, by sun or moon. What of the dawn?’

‘None knows what the new day shall bring him,’ said Aragorn. (527)

The ensuing victory over that particular army of evil gives me a stirring picture of the power of the new day Jesus’ birth brought the world. The “new and glorious morn” also points me in the direction of the new day after the end of all things when God will bring the new beginning of all things and we will know God’s reign in its fullness.

I mentioned my despair above. In a previous post, I discussed that the unique and universal pain of losing my father has has awoken in me a consuming fear of death. (It is a pain virtually all will have to experience, but it feels different than any other pain.) I notice death around every corner. Our world boils over with death and destruction—and not only human death by disease, but also destruction of the environment, the violence of the endless wars, the decay of human relationships, and our constant rebellion against God’s kingdom. In recent weeks I have been unable to muster much hope against death’s onslaught. I find little resources within myself to point to hope. I need the words of others to speak hope to me and for me. I need the reminder from “O Holy Night,” that,

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His Gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His Name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy Name!
Christ is the Lord! O praise His name forever!
His pow’r and glory evermore proclaim!
His pow’r and glory evermore proclaim!

Against the tide of death, I find hope and comfort in a later verse of Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymn, “Hark! The Herald Angel Sings,”

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.
Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die.
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.

In the past I understood the “second birth” as the spiritual second birth of which Jesus speaks. I think that interpretation is probably what Wesley had in mind, but in the face of Dad’s death, the words point me to the great Resurrection when God will raise all from the dead. As I said in my eulogy for my father, “My hope is not so much that Dad is ‘in a better place.’ Rather, my hope as a Christian is that Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death and that one day Dad and I will rise from the dead and see each other again as our transformed selves.”

This Advent season has been more than a reflection on the historical event of the Incarnation or a forward hope for Jesus Christ’s second coming—I have ached to see Jesus’ reign here and now. I pine for it and I have only caught glimmers of light in the darkness. But my hope is in that light, for light defeats darkness. I leave you with a verse proclaiming the victory of Jesus, the light of the world.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (Jn 1.5)

Merry Christmas, everyone.

From the John Maynard Keynes entry on The Economist website’s research tool:

As for the frequency with which his opinions would evolve: “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?”

I first came across that quotation a while back. I quite like it.

In an earlier post I quoted Dom Helder Camara, who observed that doing justice can be more controversial than doing compassion. I wanted to add this quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr., in his sermon, “A Time to Break Silence.” I think it shows how compassion—helping the hurting—should lead to justice—stopping what hurts people.

On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

The surrounding text of this quotation is extremely challenging.

NT Wright, from his talk, “Resurrection and the Task of the Church” (link opens audio file):

The work of the church is to implement the resurrection of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final new creation… We are called to be people of new creation now, in the power of the Spirit.

In the comments of an earlier post on my top 5 closing lines of novels, Timbo suggested that a top 5 list of closing lines of movies would make a post. I agreed. Now, remember, these are my top 5 lists, not lists that I’m arguing are the best of all time for all people. I also decided not to use the line from The Return of the King since I already put that in my list for novels—it’s no fun to have things show up in multiple lists unless it’s something like Richard Nixon showing up in historians’ lists simultaneously for the best and worst U.S. Presidents. Again, these are the last lines of movies, so there are likely spoilers. Consider yourselves warned.

It’s a famous quotation, but one worth repeating. From Brazilian Archbishop, Dom Helder Camara:

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.