The Gardner Heist was everything you would want in a work of non-fiction: it was engrossing, entertaining, and informative. It is the true story of the 1990 St. Patrick’s Day robbery of the Gardner Museum in Boston. The thieves made off with $500 million worth of art. To this day, no one knows what happened to the art.

If you are looking for a fun new book for that upcoming trip to the beach, check it out. Click here for a short video introducing the book and its author.

Our class slogan: Christ is the Question.

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We used these four focal points to limit the scope of our discussions:

1. Our reading must deal with the reality of our experiences (or lack thereof) with Christ.

2. Our reading must pay especially close attention to the role of prayer in our faith.

3. Our reading must develop a rich sense of community among the church.

4. Our reading must engender a faithful response that will permeate the life of the church.

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We centered the majority of the class around the five speeches in the Gospel of Matthew. Here is a recap of the various theological “high points” we took from each one:

1. The Sermon (chs. 5-7) presents Matthew’s theology in a nutshell. The main call: love your enemies.

2. The Mission (ch. 10) discourse presents kingdom work—embracing the reign of God.

3. The discourse in chapter 13 uses narrative. How might we use the narratives all around us?

4. Chapter 18 asks us how we might become “like children.” But it also calls for accountability for life in the community.

5. The final discourse (chs. 23-25) speaks of judgment, but it also speaks of readiness and use of “talents.”

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We used the idea of praying through Matthew as a guide for most of the study. We had a written prayer every night of the study. Sometimes I wrote the prayer; sometimes the Jack’s Creek members wrote the prayer; and sometimes I tool the prayer from a published book of prayers. I found Walter Brueggemann’s (Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: The Prayers of Walter Brueggemann and Prayers for a Privileged People) and Michel Quoist’s (Prayers) work especially helpful.

Click here for a Word doc (.docx) of the prayers prayed during this study.

Father,

Your Holy Spirit prompts us to do hard things—nothing, it seems, is easy.

And all we can do is listen.

But our listening is an anxious one, an excited one.

For we see your work being done all around us, but often don’t know all that it means.

And we thank you, our Father, for our part in the work being done.

May we endure, Father, as we go.

May we endure, Father, as we send.

May we endure, Father, as we remember your promises.

You have placed relationships in our lives—and they look differently in everyone’s life. But we love those with whom we are in relationship.

May our lives be those defined by compassion to those people.

You have provided missionaries among us—in our midst, even—and we pray for them also.

We pray for Jennalyn and Jeremy.

We pray for the people they know, the encouragement they need, and wisdom.

St. Matthew has been teaching us of your son. May we now act in a real and tangible way in response to our study.

In the name of the one who is with us, even until the end of the age. Amen.

“Any experience of God as possessing some finite form or idea which we can grasp is an experience not of God but only of something that remotely resembles him in an analogical way. There is nothing whatever in existence that even remotely resembles God as He is in Himself. And yet the ‘knowing’ of God in ‘unknowing,’ far from being unreal and uncertain, possesses the highest reality and certainty of any experience accessible to man.”

This quote comes from Thomas Merton’s foreword to William Johnston’s The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Desclée, 1967), ix.

Dye, Ross W. “Waybill for Decline,” Gospel Advocate 110 (May 30, 1968), 337, 342.

337:

“Sermons filled with quotations from Neibuhr, Barth, Cox, Bonhoeffer and such like will stir up the young to look beyond the Bible for the answers to the questions of their hearts. This will greatly assist the preacher who is tired of sermons on sin, grace, redemption, repentance, baptisms, sanctification and godly living. This will enable him to be ‘relevant,’ and thus empty the church buildings in a generation.”

Apparently he didn’t drink green beer or wear a funny red beard. Go figure.

The book is a little “preachy.” But that is okay. Patrick was a really admirable guy. Saint Patrick is part of Thomas Nelson publishers‘ “Christian Encounters” series; this is a new series of books that presents short (Saint Patrick was only 132 pp.), popular-level biographies of important figures in Western Christian history. It told me all I really wanted to know about a man who interested me, and it gave me the bibliographic resources to make the next move should I choose to do so.

Now I know a little about the man who is credited with Christianizing Ireland. But the more I read between the lines of Rogers’s book, the more I realized that with regard to substantive information on Patrick, “a little” is about all anyone really knows.

For as long as I can remember, my family has thrown a huge party on the 4th. We have BBQ and go watch fireworks. I look forward to it each year. Since I spend a pretty good bit of my summers in Mexico, I have missed that party more than once. And I always regret it. This year we are taking a break from the party scene, but next year things will get back to normal. I can’t wait.

Last year I read a fascinating post about the 4th of July on Richard Beck’s blog in which he quoted Walt Whitman’s views on America. I recommend its thoughts as my own. You can view it here.

I am taking a little more time than I thought away from the blog world. At this point I am spending a pretty good bit of time resting and getting ready for yet another school year (but this time as a teacher!). I’ll be back soon enough, though.

May the God of grace bless you all richly. And happy 4th of July.

So now, summer is approaching. And I have to admit that I am having to re-learn how to be me. The load of the semester completely consumed me. I probably turned in 250 pages, and I read and reflected upon thousands. It was rough. It kept me from reading for my own spirituality, and limited it. And obviously it kept me from blogging. I still kept up with reading my favorite blogs, but I was not able to really think for myself and I had no desire to write just for fun.

As I am getting geared up for this summer, and the traveling and working that it will bring, I am more excited than I have ever been to read. I have a stack of novels (McCarthy and Vonnegut) and books on spirituality (mostly Merton) that I am going to read. But there is one book above others that I am so excited to read: the Bible.

I have been a full-time student of theology for the past four years. I have literally read tens of thousands of pages of theological literature. But I have not read the Bible very much in these past four years.

But I am, for the first time in memory, no longer a full-time student of theology. And it is time for me to “re-discover” the Bible.

I have been thinking about 1 John a lot lately. Perhaps I will begin there.

Pray for me as I rediscover not only the Bible, but also myself this summer.

I love movies—especially Coen brothers movies. As you know, they just came out with another called No Country for Old Men—most of you have probably seen it. I must admit, it was intense; but I could not turn away. I have seen it three times! It is a wonderfully made movie. And it has gotten wonderful reviews. They really needed this after the past few flops they have had!

The movie is based on a novel by the same title by Cormac McCarthy. I anticipated the movie so much I decided to read the book before going to see it. I could not put it down. I read the whole thing in about two days. Granted, it is not that long of a book, but that is still pretty good for me (I am a slow reader). The book read like a movie, and I just kept looking for excuses to read more and more.

But the book and movie also presented some pretty real struggles for me. They were both incredibly violent. Profoundly so. From the very first pages of the book, and the first scenes in the movie, we are bombarded by violence.

I realize that McCarthy is one of the most respected living American authors. So as I read the book and watched the movie, I was really trying to read between the lines to get to what he was saying through this story. I know he wasn’t just putting violence out there for the sake of violence—as is so common in movies, television, and video games. This is a story that is intelligently saying something. And there are some important themes presented throughout the story. (I will save my interpretations of the story for another post.)

As many of you know, throughout the past few months I have been thinking a pretty good bit about the issue of pacifism and non-violence. I have even published here on the issue. And when I return to those issues and put them in conversation with No Country for Old Men, some real questions begin to emerge: can violence (in art) have a redemptive function? In other words, can I accomplish a valid artist goal by using violence in my art—as McCarthy has done? Or has he? Is that valid for Christians?

And where does this stop? I mean, if I argue that No Country for Old Men can/should be used to make some real and important statements about humanity, America, or God, then can I use something as senselessly brutal as Halo as well? What is the difference? Is it that McCarthy actually has intelligently placed violence before me? Does the intelligence (or intentionality) behind something validate it more?

You see where I am going with this. I just want some consistency here. Am I going to find it? How?

In case you have not noticed (I hope you have), I have taken a leave of absence from the blog world. I have done so for the simple reason that I have had about 14,000 things going on over the past two months and have just not had time to write at all. Since my last post, I have written 5 papers, traveled to Mexico twice, spent time in six states (some of them more than once), and worked at the Lob. Needless to say, I have been pretty busy!

And, to top it all off, I just began working seriously on my comprehensive exams for my M.Div. This is going to eat up all my time until early April. Also, I am taking 10 hours in addition to Comps, and am working like 20 hours a week!

All that to say, I will probably have to extend my little blog break for most of this semester. I have a few older posts that I never published that I will try to put up here over the next few weeks, but there are only two or three.

I will be back in the swing of things come May. Don’t forget about me!

Que Dios les bendiga.