Spirit Cry

All you can eat music downloads from Magnatune

I like to listen to a bit of music. I don’t always like to listen to the music played on the radio. I don’t like the prices charged for many CDs. And I don’t like being treated like a criminal every time I do buy a CD—I shouldn’t have to go to insane lengths just to get a disc to play on my computer!

A few years ago I came across Magnatune. Magnatune has a lot of great music for sale, but the business model is a little different to most. You can preview entire albums at no charge. If you want to buy an album, you set the price, and the artist is guaranteed to get half of what you pay. If you have a decent internet connection you can download the album (in a choice of formats) there and then, or you can pay a bit more and get a CD shipped to your door. And once you’ve got the music, you are allowed (within reason) to make copies for your friends.

Magnatune provides an example of ‘Free Culture.’ In short, the Free Culture movement says that culture is owned by everyone in a society. We shouldn’t lock aspects of our culture away, releasing it when it suits us and under conditions we impose. I’ll have more to say about that another time.

If you’ve listened to the prognostications of many of the big record labels you’d think the internet spelled the end of the recording industry. Magnatune has proven far more successful than its founder ever expected, and now they’ve changed their model again. For as little as US$10 per month you can subscribe to Magnatune and download as much as you’d like during the life of your subscription.

That’s right. If you’re dedicated you could get every album in their catalogue for ten US dollars.

I strongly suggest you head over there and have a listen to see if you like anything. The range is incredible—there will be genres to meet all tastes, although I’m yet to find any decent brass band recordings. I didn’t recognise any of the names when I first had a look, but it just goes to show: just because it doesn’t get played on Triple M doesn’t mean it’s not good.

(Note: I’m not being paid by Magnatune or anything. I just think this is a great thing their doing, and I really dig the music I’ve downloaded.)

Blog Comment Day 2008

: Blog Action Day

I think everyone like to get comments on their blog. John Smulo does too, so he’s launched Blog Comment Day, which will be celebrated on Wednesday, December 3.

The rules are simple:

On December 3, 2008 you will leave one comment on at least 5 different blogs.
Out of the 5 blogs you comment on, at least 2 of them will be blogs you haven’t commented on previously.

If you’re up for it, head over to John’s site and leave a message!

Which translation do you use?

Scot McKnight has posted the first part of a blog-series addressing the question, ‘Which Bible translation is the best?’ The answer, as you’ll find out if you go and have a look, is ‘depends on what you’re using it for.’

There’s some good advice in there, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

My favourites are the New Revised Standard Version and the New Jerusalem Bible. I especially like the NJB’s translation of the Psalms—they come across as poetry, and the imagery seems so much more alive. The NRSV is the one I use most for study, although it’s great for when you want to sit down and just read long passages at a time.

I preach from the NIV, because that’s what we have in the pews in our hall. It’s not that bad, although I think it’s become a victim of its own marketing.

What’s your favourite translation? Which is your least favourite? Do you use different translations for different purposes? What do you look for when buying a Bible?

Please, leave your thoughts in the comments!

Surprise!

The story goes that Karl Barth (a famous theologian who worked about a century ago) was accused of being a Universalist—that is, he believed that everyone would eventually end up in heaven, irrespective of their faith, behaviour of religion. He didn’t answer the accusation, but simply replied, ‘Well, let’s just say I think there will be a lot of surprises.

That’s the thing about grace. If God wants to give someone more than they deserve, so be it. After all, that’s what he gives each of us anyway.

(from The Naked Pastor.)

Pale Blue Dot

Today’s meeting at Colac was a little different from the norm. I invited the Colac City Band to come and provide music. I might talk about that another time—suffice it to say, we had a great time.

I didn’t intentionally pick a theme, but most of the music I chose seemed to refer to God’s creation and how it points to his glory. I followed this theme in my sermon. I showed a picture of the earth which was taken by the Voyager 1 space craft in 1990, when it was about four billion miles away.

The earth is that pale blue dot. I’ve circled it so you can see it. A trick of the light (the sun was just out of the shot) meant that it looks like the earth is in the middle of a sunbeam.

Carl Sagan once said of this picture:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

If you look carefully, you might see yourself. What were you doing on February 14, 1990?

When I see this photo, I think about how big the universe is. Or, how small we are.

Of course, this is just a matter of scale. If you were to stand next to a rock 8000 meters tall, you’d be forgiven for thinking nothing could be larger. Yet that rock stands on an even larger continent… which is just a small part of that pale blue dot, which is nothing compared to the sun it orbits, which itself is but a speck in a not so big galaxy.

On the other hand, next time a mosquito bites you have a look before you kill it. It’s tiny. It’s hard to imagine how things could be much smaller. But again, in it’s proboscis live parasites (which hopefully aren’t dangerous!). On those parasites live bacteria, which might host virii, which contain DNA, which are composed of genes, which are built with molecules, which are collections of atoms, which are made of all those sub-atomic particles New Scientist loves to write about.

God is in those small things. If you were to keep shrinking and shrinking, or if you were to keep growing and growing you’d find God at every order of magnitude. To put it simply, God doesn’t care about scale.

That’s why a thousand years are as a day to God, and a day is as a thousand years. It’s why there are no big sins and small sins. It’s why God calls our foolishness wisdom and our wisdom foolishness. Like God, those things just are. It’s not that God has a different scale by which he measures. He simply transcends anything which we might think happens to be important.

So when you look at that pale blue dot, remember that God knows it (and everything on it) intimately. We are measured by him—and when we are found wanting, he gives us the grace to grow according to the one scale he cares about.

Better late than never

Today I had the honour of officiating at the wedding of Ray Hawkes and Rhonda Cooper.

The wedding was in a little spot called Stoneyford, about twenty minutes out of Colac. Whilst blowy and a few degrees below comfortable, the weather held off the worst.

I’ve made the mistake of turning up to a wedding late once. I’ll never do that again. I check the time each time I see the bride and/or groom in the week before. I consult several time pieces on the day of the wedding, and I make sure I have all the paperwork multiple times before I leave.

Anyway, I arrived at Stoneyford expecting to find a very nervous groom and a couple of elderly relatives.

Not today. There were two relatives, including one who was looking after the official photography. No groom, and nothing like the fifty or so guests I was led to believe would be there. That was fine. There was still half an hour to go.

I set everything up, making sure the papers didn’t blow away in the gale. T-15 minutes. Still only three of us.

At T-5 minutes the cake arrived. The reception followed immediately after the wedding. Still no groom, and still no guests.

At 1:30, the advertised starting time, the groom finally arrived. He looked a little flustered, and apologised for being so late. When he realised he was the fourth one there, he relaxed.

A few minutes later a mini-bus arrived with the majority of the guests on board. That’s smart thinking. Everyone was going to be drinking, and it was a fair hike for most guests, so putting on a bus made perfect sense.

Then, eight minutes late, the bride arrived. Eight minutes late is, in anyone’s bridal book, pretty early. After that, it all went beautifully.

So Ray and Rhonda, congratulations, and I really hope God blesses your union, and you’ll both keep your word to each other.

If only…

Today I came across the wonderful story of a mega church that decided it was time to stop worrying about buildings and programmes and start concentrating on the people it wanted to serve. This has to be one of the most inspiring things I’ve read in ages.

Hiam [the pastor] is now more aware of his impact on the community and can’t imagine going back. “Someone just yesterday came up to me and said, ‘I don’t have to drive to the church to feel like a Christian anymore. I just have to go out my front door.’ That right there told me we made the right decision.”

I don’t work in a big church, but I’d really like to be able to do what the pastor of that church did. The last paragraph of the piece makes it no less worthy an aspiration.

Redeeming the Creation Story

I’ve been teaching a lot of creation related stuff in RE lately. For those who don’t know, RE is ‘Religious Education’ at my children’s (public) school. It’s a privilege I have, but one I take very seriously. I don’t want to teach the kids (10-12 years old, for the most part) dogma, but I do want them to learn to explore God for themselves.

Creation’s one of those things I don’t really look forward to, because my beliefs on the matter are at variance to the ideas many other RE teachers teach. In short, I fully believe the universe is 13.7 billion years old, I believe the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and I believe my first ancestors came into existence as primitive single celled organisms 3.5 billion years or so. Give or take ten minutes.

Kids of that age can be fairly black and white in their thinking. I teach from the Bible every week—how do I get up and suggest that the first few chapters of Genesis didn’t actually happen and keep a straight face, not to mention credibility? As I said, I don’t look forward to this subject.

Another question is: how do I reconcile the two accounts of creation in my own mind? I can allegorise the biblical version away fairly easily, but that’s never been that satisfactory, because it feels like I’m fudging the issue. ‘Day-age’ theories (where each biblical day is understood to mean an epoch of universal history) also fall over when you realise they don’t fit the facts they’re supposed to.

I’d pondered this for many years, until I read the Enuma Elish. I’d heard about this before—it was the Babylonian account of the origin of the world. It bears some resemblance to the Genesis account of creation. For example, it assumes that the world is flat and sits on a body of water. However, I’ve ignored Enuma Elish in the past because I’ve heard people say that the Genesis account and the Babylonian account can’t be related. The Babylonian account talks of many gods, and the world is created in its current form as a by-product of fighting and strife between various divine beings. This is completely opposite to the Genesis account, where everything is done in an orderly fashion according to the sovereign will of God.

After years of thinking about this, it occurs to me that this is a great proof that the Genesis account is based on the Babylonian. The starting point was the same (contrary to popular belief, Genesis 1 doesn’t teach creation ex nihilo. The first few verses make it quite clear that there was a primordial ocean—just like in Enuma Elish.) The big difference between the two is the important one. According to the author of Genesis 1, the world wasn’t created when many gods decided to start fighting. It was created when the One God decided to create a world, which he saw was good. In other words, the author redeemed the popularly accepted view of the creation of the world. ‘We’re here,’ (s)he said, ‘because God wants us to be. We are not an accident of the gods.’

Understanding this helped me understand how Christians of the 21st Century should approach the question of our origins. Just like the ancients redeemed their story of creation and attributed it to an orderly God, we can redeem the modern story of the universe by placing God at the centre of the action.

The universe started with a Big Bang. It may have been chaotic, but it was ordained by God. God saw it was good.

The earth formed when God caused a disc of material around a nascent star to coalesce into a sphere, according to the physical laws he had ordained. God saw it was good.

God populated this planet using a set of very simple chemicals which could be arranged in incredibly complex ways, and which could replicate and recombine in a way to produce more and more varieties of creature. Even though death always threatened to undo it, life was irrepressible. God saw that it was good.

You get the picture.

The incredible thing is that four classes of pre-adolescents understood and accepted this. Just because it took me twenty years, I shouldn’t assume kids will find rational explanations of the things of God too hard to understand at all.

Mark Sayers: A theology of luxury

Marks Sayers has an interesting post up about what he calls a ‘theology of luxury.’

So what is behind this global desire for Luxury? I was recently listening to a forum on the BBC world service and one of the contributors noted that Luxury today operates as a kind of religion. Luxury items are items or services that have been overlayed with deep sociological, cultural and even mythological meanings. For example a signed copy of Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan will carry far more symbolic meaning that a signed copy of an album by the Huey Lewis and the News cover band that play Tuesday nights at your local sports bar. Why? Because our culture has deemed that Bob Dylan carries a tremendous amount of cultural currency. Therefore an album by him particularly with his signature, carries far more mythic symbolism. Thus you could say that a luxury item is a totemic symbol. It carries an almost magic quality. By adding a symbol such as the Louis Vuitton logo to a product all of a sudden its status changes. Fashion designers operate as modern day priests or alchemists turning ordinary objects into totemic luxury items.

Hmm. Something to think about.

What’s in a name?

A few weeks ago I posted about the problems we have with labels. They can be useful—let’s face it, they do simplify things a lot, and we’d be cactus without them—but they do oversimplify things a little. On that post I published the result of a questionnaire which attempted to rate me according to different labels we use to describe Christians today.

I said that the questionnaire seemed to sum me up pretty well. Looking back, I’m still pretty impressed.

Even so, I didn’t score more than 86% on any of them. In other words, I don’t fall fully into any category. My top score was ‘Emergent/post-modern.’ I do like Brian McLaren and Tony Jones, and a lot of the blogs I read are written by people who identify as ’emergent.’ Still, I find it odd that it is possible to label oneself as ’emergent’—one of the features of post-modernism is a suspicion of labels and any attempt to categorise people into these sorts of groups!

The next highest score was for ‘evangelical.’ This term has some negative connotations, but in terms of theology and practice, it seems to fit. A similar thing could be said for the next item on the list, ‘Wesleyan/holiness.’

Whilst all of these labels sort of apply, none of them really sum me up! When anyone uses one of these words to describe me, I cringe. Not because I find it offensive, but because I’m aware of how much I’m not whatever I just got called.

How, then, do I describe myself? Like many others, I could call myself, ‘just a Christian.’ That’s pretty good, but even that term has meanings I’m not sure about. In my context it seems to be synonymous with either ‘evangelical’ or ‘Roman Catholic.’ Some take the term to mean I’ve been baptised, whilst others would (justifiably) view me with hatred.

I could call myself a disciple of Christ. That’s pretty good, but it comes over (to me) as a little sanctimonious. Jesus says a lot about disciples in the Scripture, and whilst the term may be quite applicable it could sound like a claim to be living the sort of life Jesus expects. Do I truly love my neighbour as myself? Am I really prepared to take up my cross in order to follow Christ? True discipleship moves toward these things, but the epithet would appear to be a claim to have reached the destination.

There is one name I am comfortable with. Albert Orsborn, a former Gerneral of the Salvation Army, wrote about it in one of his hymns (Number 59 in the Salvation Army Songbook):

Thy name is joined with mine
By every human tie,
And my new name is thine,
A child of God am I;
And never more alone, since thou
Art on the road beside me now.

Bearing the name ‘Christ’ is a high calling. But it’s not a name that comes with a burden—it comes with the strength of the one who bestows it upon us.

Lord, mould me for your name’s sake!