Happy Friday
In you, Lord my God, I put my trust.
Psalm 25:1
One of life’s most valuable skills involves learning who and what to trust and who and what to doubt. May we learn to lean into Christ more fully and to thoughtfully doubt our doubts.
Question of the Week: What makes me mad and why? Should it? Am I able to be angry and yet not sin?
NR1: I used to love the news. In fact, my dream job was to be the political cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune. Alas, Jeff McNally had the job, I can’t draw, and not everyone appreciates how consistently funny I am. (OK, very few people do.) I’m now glad I let McNally keep his job (and win his Pulitzers) because I think thinking about the news all day long is a bad thing. In fact, I’ve started establishing “News Rules” (NR). Here is my first: I read the Bible before I read the headlines. With the exception of Sunday AM, when I allow myself a quick peek at the lead story just to be sure something so game-changing hasn’t happened that I need to start writing a new sermon, I read the Bible before I read the news. I’ll share more NRs next week. Let me encourage you to try it, and let me know if you have any “news rules” of your own.
Without Comment: 1) The average person has 1,602 unread emails sitting in their inbox; 2) This past year, over 4 million miles were driven by autonomous test vehicles; 3) Reading and math scores of U.S. grade-school students are down significantly after COVID interrupted schooling patterns; 4) Over seventy percent of Starbuck’s sales are for cold drinks; 5) Unhappiness continues to rise worldwide, with the people of Afghanistan and Lebanon leading the way; 6) The gasses at the center of the Milky Way mean it likely smells like raspberries; 7) Cleopatra lived in a time nearer to the iPhone launch than the completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza; 8) According to a 2018 MIT study, lies “diffuse significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information and in many cases by an order of magnitude”; 9) The death of a company’s founding entrepreneur typically wipes out – on average – 60 percent of sales and 17 percent of jobs within four years.
Fill in the Blank: Christ’s “own joy, comfort, happiness and glory are increased and enlarged by _______________.”
An Update on The Rings of Power: I thought the third episode of Rings was better than the first two, but it’s still too early to know what to think about the show. BTW, I heard that while the budget for the series was twice as expensive as all three Peter Jackson movies combined, the cost for the first 8 episodes was “only” $467M, not the $800M first reported. Speaking of Tolkien: 1) In this podcast – which I recorded last week – I put the Lord of the Rings in context; and 2) You’re better off reading the books, especially if there are some kids around that you could read to.
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The Radical Act of Forgiveness: One hundred years before Cancel Culture became a thing, G.K. Chesterton employed the protagonist of his Father Brown novels to prod Christ-followers to forgive others. One example has the priest-turned-crime-detective telling people, “It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes… you forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.”
Word of the Week: Authoritarianism and Civil Unrest were nominated, as was eucatastrophe (a Tolkien creation describing a helpful catastrophe) and deaditors. (I thought it might be fun to honor the 300 Wikipedia volunteers who updated the Queen’s Wiki entry immediately following her death.) Who even knew that there is a special fraternity of Wiki-writers who sit around waiting to be the first to update the Wikipedia entry of a celebrity. But I am going with Cosmic Vertigo, which describes the dizzy feeling we get when we try to grasp the incomprehensible scale of space.
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Clean Up on Aisle Five: Many wrote in to say that Princess Di died on Aug. 31 and Mother Teresa died on September 5th– thus they did not die on the same day as I claimed last week. All I can say is you have a lot of company – including the deaditors. No wonder no one has written a book about this.
The Answer: The answer to the question asked above, at least according to Thomas Goodwin – 17th century Puritan divine – is that: “Christ’s own joy, comfort, happiness and glory are increased and enlarged by his showing grace and mercy, in pardoning, relieving, and comforting his members here on earth.” Ponder that stunning thought. It’s a game-changer.
Closing Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, you said that you are the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Help us not to stray from you, for you are the Way; Nor to distrust you, for you are the Truth; Nor to rest on any other than you, as you are the Life. You have taught us what to believe, what to do, what to hope, and where to take our rest. Give us grace to follow you, the Way, to learn from you, the Truth, and live in you, the Life. Amen (Desiderius Erasmus – 1467 – 1536)