What a Week!

This past week began with a dead fridge and a counterfeited credit card, and ended with a lost cell-phone and a stalling car while making a left turn ahead of oncoming traffic. These items made for a rather interesting inclusial to the main body of the week – attending the Regent College Pastors' Conference in Vancouver.

Actually, our trials are light and momentary as compared to those of the residents of Vancouver's downtown eastside, where Joyce (Heron) Rees directs the relational ministry of Jacob's Well in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. And the inclusial really did highlight things that Joyce, Len Sweet and John Stackhouse all spoke of in some way or another – the announcement of the Good News of the Kingdom of God has to take place in the midst of actual life.

More than anything, the announcement of Good News points our attention to the fact that God is always at work – in our lives, and in the lives of those to whom we are to proclaim the Good News. What we need, more than anything, is the eyes to see the signs of God's presence and activity all around us. Far too often we have been too hung up on the idea that everything is up to us, that we walk into situations where God was already at work, and try to rely on our programs or techniques as if we had to bring God to the situation. How much better to be reminded of the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath: First do no harm.

It was also good to be reminded that the Old, Old Story includes God's first commission to the human beings made in His Image: Be fruitful, multiply, fill and care for the earth, and take responsibility for its well-being in all things. Caring for the earth and caring for the poor are part of God's work for all human beings, and cannot be exempted from His work of redemption and restoration to which He calls Christ-followers in particular.

All told, it was a very good week.

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Harry Potter and the Missing Scripture Lesson

When I went to pre-order the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Amazon produced its list of "what other people who bought this book also bought". So I succumbed and bought the John Granger edited book Who Killed Albus Dumbledore? What Really Happened in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? It was an interesting read – all the various chapters were originally written as articles in HP cyber fandom.

What really struck me was just how detailed and energetic the HP fandom rank and file are in their scouring of the HP canon for information to help understand this alternate world known as the Potterverse. Numerous everyday people are comparing parallel passages, debating which language is "literal" and which also "symbolic" and looking for hints of what is yet to come in the back story. Just how will the creator of this world bring it to a conclusion? At what cost, and to whom, will the world finally be put to rights?

These people are excited to study and understand this world that they get to inhabit for awhile.

Christians also believe in another world – a world revealed in the canon of writings produced by its creator; a world called the Kingdom. It too operates according to different rules than the everyday world we inhabit. Actually our text tells us that this Kingdom world is the "real" world, and that our everyday world is truly the artificial, humanly constructed world. And that the creator of this other world has made it infinitely richer and more glorious than our everyday existence.

Given this belief, you would expect that the energy expended to dig into the back story, scouring the canon for information to understand the way this Kingdom world works, and what is coming next, would greatly exceed the efforts expended by HP fandom. Or I, at least, would so expect it.

Yet it has seemed to me that this is not the case. It has seemed to me that within the evangelical tradition of which I have been a part – a tradition labelled "word-centered" by Richard Foster in his material on the various traditions of the Christian faith – has been becoming ever less and less interested in the founding and shaping texts – what HPer's would call the canon. And I am certainly not alone in this observation. The internetmonk has made a similar observation in his post The Strange Case of the Missing Scripture Lessons, and points to other posts on the same observation.

Why this is happening, I do not know. I have some suspicions, but charity demands that I not elevate them to probabilities without stronger evidence. But it concerns me. I wonder about the long-term effects this trend will have on our churches, on the faith of the gathered people, and ultimately on our broader society. I wonder how God will respond. I wonder at what point He begins to repeat His words from Jeremiah 2:

"The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink back in horror and dismay," says the Lord. "For my people have done two evil things: They have abandoned me — the fountain of living water. And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all!"

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