I totally feel him here.  I believe that we have lost an awful lot in making the choice, as a society at large, to place ourselves almost entirely at the mercy of technology.  Many of the technological advances which have made our lives significantly easier over the last few centuries have, I believe, had the unintended effect of making us less human.  When you can hop a plane and travel from one side of the country to the other in only a few hours, you lose touch with the reality of the tremendous distance between here and there.  When you have a large SUV with an excellent air-conditioning or heating system to take you wherever you want to go, you lose awareness of the world outside except as you can see it through your windshield.  Is this the way we were created to live?  Somehow I am not convinced of it.

Specifically, Merton laments the loss of awareness of the seasonal pattern of our world.  Humanity’s life no longer ebbs and flows in seasonal cycles; instead it is “a linear flight into nothingness”.

At any rate, here is Merton:

The modern pagan, the child of technology or the “mass man,” does not even enjoy the anguish of dualism or the comfort of myth. His anxieties are no longer born of eternal aspiration, though they are certainly rooted in a consciousness of death. “Mass man” is something more than fallen. He lives not only below the level of grace, but below the level of nature—below his own humanity. No longer in contact with the created world or with himself, out of touch with the reality of nature, he lives in the world of collective obsessions, the world of systems and fictions with which modern man has surrounded himself. In such a world, man’s life is no longer even a seasonal cycle. It’s a linear flight into nothingness, a flight from reality and from God, without purpose and without objective, except to keep moving, to keep from having to face reality….

To live in Christ we must first break away from this linear flight into nothingness and recover the rhythm and order of man’s real nature. Before we can become gods we must first be men. For man in Christ, the cycle of the seasons is something entirely new. It has become a cycle of salvation. The year is not just another year, it is the year of the Lord—a year in which the passage of time itself brings us not only the natural renewal of spring and the fruitfulness of an earthly summer, but also the spiritual and interior fruitfulness of grace. The life of the flesh which ebbs and flows like the seasons and tends always to its last decline is elevated and supplanted by a life of the spirit which knows no decrease, which always grows in those who live with Christ in the liturgical year. “For though the outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. . . . For we know if our earthly house of this habitation be dissolved that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven.” (II Cor. 4:16; 5:1)

Pat Robertson is no stranger to the realm of “He didn’t just say that, did he?  Oh snap, he did”.  Earlier this year he famously opined that a man whose wife was suffering from Alzheimer’s should divorce her.  Well, he’s at it again.  His latest on-air bloviation came when he was interviewing Condolezza Rice.  During the course of the interview, he opined that macaroni and cheese is “a black thing”.

No further comment is necessary.

Aloysius, our Executive Director of Sports Information here at Everyone's Entitled to Joe's Opinion, goes into hibernation during college football recruiting season.

Aloysius, our Executive Director of Sports Information here at Everyone’s Entitled to Joe’s Opinion, usually hibernates when the college football recruiting season starts up.  He is a little (make that a lot–Aloysius just glared at me threateningly) weirded out by the whole idea of grown adults obsessing over where some 18-year-old kid is going to spend the next four years of his life, and he prefers to just sleep through the whole thing.  If I didn’t have to work for a living, I’d be right there with him.  (Not that I’m complaining about having a job.  Especially in this economy.)  He usually comes out of hibernation when spring practice starts up.

Before he goes into hibernation, Aloysius would like to offer these thoughts on college football and the sporting world at large:

–I’m not sure who I hate more, Lane Kiffin or Jim Mora.  Lane Kiffin is an ignorant, loudmouthed doofus who thinks he’s a rock star and the whole college football world owes him a living just because his daddy can coach.  Jim Mora wanted the Washington job so bad, he mouthed off about it on talk radio while his Atlanta Falcons were in the middle of a playoff chase.  The Cons didn’t make it and he got fired.  Served him right.  So he went to the Seattle Seahawks and lasted all of about two years there.  Now he’s at UCLA.  Put it like this:  Both of them would taste really good right about now.

–Jerry Sandusky belongs in my tummy.  So does anyone up at Penn State who enabled him to do the things he did, or who supports those who enabled him.  What’s up with everybody up there speaking out in support of Joe Paterno?  Those people have their priorities all out of whack.  Just let me loose up there, and I’ll teach some people a lesson.

–LSU is going to beat Alabama next week, and it isn’t going to be close.  At least not as close as everyone thinks.  For starters, it’s in the Superdome, which is a home game for LSU.  Do you think Alabama has a chance there?  LSU is a very fast team.  Alabama relies very heavily on size and strength.  This game is on artificial turf, which favors speed.  LSU hasn’t lost on artificial turf since the 2005 SEC championship in the Georgia Dome, when they ran into a very fast Georgia team.  I don’t think they’re going to lose this time.  And if I’m wrong about this one, well, I’ll be in hibernation by the time the game rolls around so you’ll just have to deal.

–Mark Richt is totally living right.  He caught a huge break when the new SEC schedule came out for next year and featured Missouri instead of Alabama.  This means he has a team just as good as this year’s, with a schedule just as easy as this year’s, if not easier.  Of course I expect the SEC to compensate in 2013 by scheduling Georgia in road games at LSU, Alabama, and the Green Bay Packers.

–Speaking of Georgia, they have issues this year and possibly next.  Apart from their special teams, which were atrocious and cost them at least two games this season, they have an even bigger issue:  Are they really that good?  Not that anyone thinks they aren’t any good; it’s just that–we just don’t know.  And that’s why the Michigan State loss hurts so badly:  win that one and you remove all doubt.  All they had to do was hold on to a 16 point lead or make a field goal in overtime.  But they didn’t, and all doubts remain fully intact.  And with no Alabama, LSU, or Boise State on the schedule next year, it is entirely possible for Georgia to win the SEC East and us still have no earthly idea how good they really are.

–Georgia Tech has issues too.  For them, the issue is talent–or the lack thereof.  Chan Gailey couldn’t coach worth a lick, but he sure could recruit.  With Paul Johnson they have the opposite problem.  He can coach, but he can’t–and doesn’t–recruit.  If they’re ever going to get any better, they need to get some better players into their program.  But I’m not too much concerned about this; the whole recruiting thing weirds me out.  Wake me up when spring practice starts up.

–And what’s this I hear about Harvey Updyke (the suspected Auburn tree poisoner) selling T-shirts on Facebook?  Seriously?  SERIOUSLY???  This idiot TOTALLY belongs in my tummy.  That’s all I’ve got to say.

Now then.  Allow me to ask a question.

Why have you come to Passion 2012?

Evangelicalism is notorious for putting all its stock in big events.  As a result, many of us are all about the next big thing.  They go from event to event, conference to conference, looking for the next big spiritual fix.  Some of you may fall into that category.

Some of you are not looking for a big spiritual sugar rush.  But you are seeking something from God nonetheless.  You are hoping that God will meet you here in a new and fresh way.  You are seeking vision and direction from God for your life.  You are desperately in need of a touch from God to strengthen you for whatever challenges you face in your life.  Whatever the case may be, the bottom line is that you are here out of a place of emptiness and yearning for God to fill you up, hungry and needing to be fed, and hoping and praying that that will happen in the next few days.

I know all about that because I’ve been there.  I have been to several of these things over the years where I have been hoping and praying that God would rock my world with a call and vision for ministry or missions.  So many students have gone through Passion over the years and had their lives turned upside down with a fresh vision of what God wants to do through their lives.  They have felt a call to missions so strong that they were unable to resist, try as they might.  I had hoped and prayed that that would happen to me at one of these things.

Sometimes I have come to these things empty and broken, worn out and beaten down from the struggles I faced, crushed by the doubts that I carry with me on this journey through life, desperately yearning for a touch from God to transform and renew me.  Just to hear from God and know that He is there and that He is with me.  Or even just to hear from God at all.

That is not where I am now.

Of course I am always in need.  There is not a single moment in life when I am not in need of the Father’s grace, the Son’s advocacy, and the Spirit’s refreshing.  The same goes for you, whether you are willing to admit it or not.  The next few days are an excellent place for you to receive all these things and more.  Open wide your mouth; it will be filled.

There are plenty of opportunities out there for a Christian to engage in advancing the cause of Christ in this world.  The Do Something Now campaign will be highlighting the issue of human trafficking, one of the greatest crises of our generation.  You will have ample opportunity to learn and to engage, to be part of the remedy for this grievous evil.

There will be plenty of fine teaching to help you move forward in your Christian life.  There will be plenty of top-notch worship music that will give you glimpses of God’s presence.  You will learn.  You will be refreshed.  You will be challenged.  You will experience glimpses and snatches of God’s presence.  You may even have your life turned upside down as a result of what God shows you during these days.  Passion is all about providing space for these things to happen, but none of these things is the point.

I want to be done with coming to Passion empty and hoping that God would fill me up or lay a fresh vision of what He wants me to do in life.  I want to be in a place where I am empty of ideas and desires for what I hope to get out of Passion.  I want to come without motive or agenda, and just lay myself open before God in these days.  I want to find space and solitude, a quiet place just to be before God.  This will be a challenge; the music will be loud and the crowds will be large and the pace will be hectic–but it can be done.

I want to just be here, before God, in these coming days.  Nothing more.  Nothing else.

How about you?

What is even worse than this is when a Christian organization goes through a rebranding effort and then tries to convince us all that God led them to do it.  That is exactly what happened recently when Campus Crusade changed its name to “Cru” and came up with a whole new logo to boot.  Read what Rachel Held Evans has to say about this.

Those of you who were involved in Campus Crusade in the past or now, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

When the new temple was built, there was a dedication ceremony.  The book of Ezra recounts this; this was an extremely spartan affair compared to the dedication of Solomon’s temple.  There was much weeping during this ceremony.  I believe this was for two reasons:  First, the Jews knew from having read their history that the dedication of Solomon’s temple was a lavish and impressive affair, and this was nothing compared to that.  Second, and more importantly, the people realized that they had been unfaithful to God and that their unfaithfulness had led to exile in Babylon.  But they had been restored to their land.  They had been given another chance that they never thought they would get.  They were determined to get it right this time.  It was out of this that the Pharisees were born.

Fast-forward a few hundred years.  Israel is still in its own land, but it is nothing like what it was under David and Solomon.  It has not had even a whiff of independence since the Babylonian invasion.  It has been a vassal state to all the reigning superpowers of the day, first the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans–and an extremely undesirable one at that.  The Romans viewed Israel as the “stinking armpit” of their empire.  The voice of a prophet has not been heard in Israel for hundreds of years.  People who were concerned about such things believed that God had forgotten them.  But most people were not concerned; they just went on about the daily business of their lives and did not give the apparent absence of God from their land and their lives a second thought.

And then, one night some shepherds were out in a field and crazy things started happening.  A whole bunch of angels appeared in the sky and told them to go check out what was happening in a stable near Bethlehem.  They went, and found that a baby had been born.

This was no ordinary baby.  This was the one upon whom all the promises of the prophets converged.  This was Jesus Christ.

Solomon’s reign, climaxed by the opening of the temple in Jerusalem, was without a doubt Israel’s finest hour.  But as we saw last week, there were cracks in the foundations.  In the centuries that followed, the whole thing would be reduced to a mountain of sand and gravel and twisted steel.

There was ample evidence, even in the height of Israel’s glory, that Israel had forgotten its story.  Israel had forgotten that they were a nation of slaves that had been delivered from Egypt by God for the express purpose of reflecting the image of God to all the world and bringing the deliverance they had experienced to all the peoples of the world.  In many ways, they became the very thing that God had delivered them from.

What did God do about this?  He sent the prophets.  A goodly portion of the Old Testament is devoted to the writings of prophets who came to Israel in the years and centuries that followed, reminding Israel of their story and identity and calling them back to that.  But they did not listen.  And ultimately the exile of the Israelite soul became actual, physical exile.

It started right after Solomon’s death.  His son Rehoboam was a rash young man who promised to be much more the brutal tyrant than Solomon ever was.  The ten northern tribes of Israel couldn’t take any more of this, so they appointed their own king and broke away.  Less than forty years after the opening of the temple, the kingdom of Israel was divided in two.

From there it only went downhill.  The northern kingdom, which retained the name Israel, slid into idolatry and corruption and within two centuries the Assyrians came and wiped them completely and totally off the map.  The ten tribes that made up that kingdom were never seen or heard from again.

The southern kingdom, also known as Judah, fared only slightly better.  They had a few good leaders mixed in with the bad, and they hung on for a couple of centuries longer.

As noted earlier, the people of Israel and Judah did not listen to the prophets.  Their leaders persecuted them.  God was patient; He just kept on sending prophets.  But the people refused to listen.  They had forgotten their story.  They could no longer hear the cry of the oppressed, which was once their own cry.

Finally, the Babylonians invaded.  Virtually all of Judah was destroyed and its inhabitants were hauled off to Babylon.  There they were servants–slaves–in a foreign land.  Just like Egypt.  All over again.

But this is not the end of the story.  In Babylon, the Israelites had time to reflect.  They came to realize that their condition of exile was a result of their failure to live up to their role as God’s people, and God was punishing them for this.  But there was hope there, because if God was punishing them then at some point their punishment would end.

They also connected their exile in Babylon with the exile of their forefathers in Egypt.  They realized that, just like their forefathers, they needed another exodus.  But this could not be like the exodus from Egypt, or else the cycle of deliverance to failure to exile would continue all over again.  This exodus would have to take place on a much deeper level.  For the Egypt that they lived in was not a physical kingdom–it was an Egypt of the soul.  And every person who has ever walked the face of the earth lives in that Egypt.  We all need an exodus from that Egypt.

During this time in Babylon, the whole tenor of the prophets changed–so much so that the back half of Isaiah, which speaks to Jews after the exile in Babylon, is believed by many scholars to have been written by a “second Isaiah” who lived around that time.  The message of the prophets became a message of hope–that Israel’s time of punishment was at an end and that God would restore them.  The prophets spoke of God delivering His people on a deeper level:  writing His law on people’s hearts instead of on stone tablets, making His temple in the hearts of men, and other such things.  And their promises all converged upon one man, the man who would be God incarnate, whose birth we will celebrate in just a few days.

Tim Tebow is someone that people either love or love to hate.  He wears his Christianity on his sleeve, in a way that wins him a great deal of admiration from a certain subgroup of Christians.  Is this helpful to the cause of Christ?  Or is it just a gratification of Tebow’s need to have his faith out there in public and be known by it (if in fact that is a need for him), or of our need as evangelicals to have heroes in the public arena who are completely and totally in-your-face about the Christian faith?

Read “The Strange, Sad War Over Tim Tebow” by David Sessions

For the answer to this question, we must fast-forward a couple of centuries.  Israel has settled in the Promised Land.  After a long and turbulent season, Israel has established itself as a cohesive nation-state with a king.  (This was not without controversy: Israel’s asking for a king was an act of disobedience motivated by a desire to be just like the other nations surrounding them.  Samuel, the reigning prophet at that time, called them out on this and warned them of dire future consequences that would result from having a king.  But Moses had foreseen that Israel would eventually want a king and left detailed instructions on what sort of man this king was supposed to be.  More on this later.)

The first king was a man named Saul.  He was not a very good king; though he had some initial success he left Israel worse off than he found it.  His successor was a man named David who would go on to be the best king Israel ever had.  Under him many of the promises concerning Israel and the Promised Land came to fruition; all of Israel’s enemies were subdued and Israel’s territory was enlarged to almost all of the maximum area promised.

David wanted to build a temple.  But God had other ideas.  Still, David was passionate about the temple.  Though he was not permitted to build it himself, he worked very hard for it and arranged things so that all his son Solomon had to do was give the order and the thing would practically build itself.

So we resume our story during the reign of Solomon.  The temple has just been completed and dedicated in a very large-scale ceremony where impressive prayers were prayed and crazy things happened to show that God was inhabiting the temple.  This is, by all accounts, Israel’s finest hour.

But there are some cracks in the foundations.  In 1 Kings 6:38 and 7:1, we see that Solomon spent seven years building the temple but thirteen years building his own palace.  This should start to raise some concerns.  1 Kings 9:15:  “Here is the account of the forced labor King Solomon conscripted to build the Lord’s temple, his own palace, the supporting terraces, the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer.”  For “forced labor”, read “slaves”.  Slaves labored to build the temple of the Lord who sets slaves free, who set Israel free when they were in slavery in Egypt.  The former slaves have now become the oppressors.  Alarm bells should be starting to go off now.

At Israel’s finest hour, they have forgotten their story, that they were once slaves in Egypt but God liberated them and they should be seeking to make that liberation happen for others as well.  So the answer is no, Israel did not accept the invitation that God had extended to them.

But wait.  It gets worse.

At the end of 1 Kings 9:15, there are some place names.  These are the names of fortresses–in more contemporary parlance, military bases.  One of these is Megiddo, from which we get Armageddon.  What is Solomon doing here?  He is using his massive resources and wealth to build fortresses to protect his…massive resources and wealth.  What’s wrong with this picture?

But wait.  It gets worse.

1 Kings 10:26:  “Solomon accumulated chariots and horses; he had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horses, which he kept in the chariot cities and also with him in Jerusalem.”  Pharaoh and his soldiers used horses and chariots to attempt to chase down Israel as they were leaving Egypt.  Now Solomon was getting horses and chariots from Egypt.

1 Kings 10:29:  “They imported a chariot from Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and a horse for a hundred and fifty.  They also exported them to all the kings of the Hittites and of the Arameans.”  So Solomon was an arms dealer.  Who knew?

Does this look like maintaining justice and righteousness, and hearing the cry of the oppressed?  One would be very hard pressed to say so.

But wait.  It gets worse.

1 Kings 11:3-4:  “He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.  As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been.”  This is worse than any of the systemic failures mentioned above.  This is a failure of the heart.  Solomon broke covenant with God–the very first commandment.

In Deuteronomy 17:16-17, Moses gives detailed instructions about what sort of person the king of Israel is to be.  Solomon is the complete antithesis of this.  “The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them…”  Solomon imported horses and chariots from Egypt and had so many of them that he had to build special cities just for them.  Fail.  “He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray.”  Solomon took many wives, and his heart was led astray.  Fail.  “He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.”  Solomon made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones (1 Kings 10:27), and every year he made 666 talents of gold (1 Kings 10:14).  Fail.

Notice that the writer of 1 Kings says 666 talents of gold.  Numbers in the Bible usually mean more than what they actually mean.  Anytime you see the number 666 in the Bible, it is a distinctly Jewish way of saying that something is very very very wrong here.

Israel is in its finest hour under King Solomon, yet we see that the story has taken a very tragic turn.  Israel has forgotten who they were, who God intended them to be.  And God is in a very awkward place.  What do you do when the people whom you appointed to be your image in the world look nothing like you?  When they become the very embodiment of all the things that you are against?  When they go back the very way that they were not supposed to go, to the very place that you rescued them from?

There’s a word for this:  exile.  More on this next time.