Reconciliation

This poem by Walt Whitman, Reconciliation, was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly
wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world:
... For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

If you want to hear our choir sing this (and the whole work by Vaughan Williams), then the details of the concert are here.

It's this Sunday at 5.

We're also premiering a new work by Australian composer Andrew Schultz, Beach Burial. Flutes that sound like incoming missiles!

Here's a way for the government to increase happiness

It comes from Ross Gittins:

Many people may doubt whether personal happiness is a matter governments should or could get involved in. Just how would governments go about increasing national happiness?

Well, one good way is to reduce egregious instances of unhappiness. And I'm pleased to see that the Productivity Commission, which you might have thought of as a leading advocate of economic growth as the cure to all ills, agrees with me - at least in relation to one great source of unhappiness: gambling.

According to the commission's draft report, Australians spend - that's to say, lose - about $18 billion a year on gambling. This is about as much as we spend on alcohol and represents about 3 per cent of consumer spending.

Yep; the suggestion is to reduce gambling. Excellent idea!

When you put it all together and shake it up

Bill Mounce:

When you put it altogether and shake it up, the ESV felt (in line with its translation procedures) that “letter” was too difficult in v 27 and went with “written code.”

If you have even a teensy bit of understanding of New Testament Greek, Bill Mounce is going to help you with his weekly posts on Koinonia. Here's the latest.

You can work out whether his argument succeeds, but it helps understand why, time and again, the ESV footnotes make the ESV a translation worth preaching on.

Jonah 1 and the fear of the LORD

Have you ever noticed that Jonah 1 is chiastic? Start in verse 4 to pick it up

1:1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.”

3 But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.

*A* 4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.

*B* 5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god.

*C* And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep.

*D* 6 So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”

*E* 7 And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

*F* 8 Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?”

*G*9 And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

*G’* 10 Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them.

*F’* 11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. 12 He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.”

*E’* 13 Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them.

*D’*14 Therefore they called out to the Lord, “O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.”

*C’* 15 So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging.

*B’*16 Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

*A’* 17 And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

That is to say, A corresponds to A', B corresponds to B', C corresponds to C', all the way through to G.

The effect of this structure is to make the fear of the LORD the centrepiece, and invite us to compare Jonah's faith with the faith of the pagan sailors, who really do fear God.

Isn't that great?

Fear God!

Taking one year off in seven

Stephen Sagermeister:

Obama attempts press censorship

It seems extraordinary for a leader to define a news organization as not a news organization, yet this is what has happened. Obama is not a man who likes criticism.

This is so important

Here are the two most significant paragraphs in Peter Jensen's address to the gathered Anglicans in Sydney:

I do not doubt, therefore, that our commitment to conservative theology and to a high view of scripture is entirely correct. Only this will carry Christianity forward in a culture such as Australia in the next fifty years. However, I do see signs in our midst of a tension:

I think that some of us will more readily come to terms with culture for missionary
reasons, but not being as careful as we should be about the purity of doctrine, we will
lose the structure of the faith and become effectively Unitarian. The theological weakness will begin, I think, with an impoverished doctrine of sin. From this will come a semi-pelagian anthropology, an exemplarist soteriology and a humanistic Christology. It will probably develop two forms - a wet pietistic one which will still look for spiritual experience, and a dry intellectualist one which will embrace cultural respectability.

Discuss.

Spilt milk

Our friend Sarah's in the paper.

I AM still trying to work out how it happened. How did I buy all that milk and then not notice that it never made it to the fridge?

Spring cleaning

What a simply super idea.

So, once a year, you look around at the pigsty that your house has become.

You take action.

Biggest pile, out the door.

Next biggest pile, out the door too.

Keep going, keep going.

Then when you get to the pile with the Stradivarius and the old stamps, have a break.

Then come back next year, and do it again.

Don't do too much inbetween, and especially, don't buy anything.

The stuff that goes out the door, make sure that the charity of your choice gets first go at it.

"Hello, is this [charity of my choice]?"

"Yes."

"I put some stuff out the front of my house, including the violin that didn't get made by Stradivarius, but by his brother Nokov. Could you come and take it away by Monday please, except for what you don't want?"

"Yes."

Then you sells the rest on eBay, or the council comes by and removes what you couldn't.

You need never clean again, until next time, or until the Lord returns.

A new blog for ministry wives

Nicole Starling and two of her friends have started a new blog for ministry wives, In Tandem.

May our Lord prosper your work!

The art of losing

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

This is a beautiful, shocking poem. Read the whole, here.

by Elizabeth Bishop.

Atheists are fools

Good on you Chappo:

‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”’ (Psalm 14:1)

Psalm 14 knows nothing of political correctness. With disarming clarity it states that the person who claims that there is no God is a fool. I find this a wonderful relief. The atheists I have met always appear to be so sophisticated and clever. I am tempted to feel inferior in their presence and I have been encouraged to hear God’s assessment of them. They are fools.

That's John Chapman speaking in the latest Australian Church Record. Download it and you can find a great, short article by the man himself.

Let's people smuggle

Buried in the last few paragraphs of Miranda Devine's opinion piece in today's SMH is a great idea from Fred Nile:

If Rudd really wanted to show compassion he would back the audacious plan of the Christian Democrat Fred Nile and go into the people smuggling business.

Hosting a meeting yesterday at NSW Parliament House for Christians from Egypt, Iran and Iraq, the upper house MP said he was worried about the plight of Christians in the Middle East, who were desperate to come here and make good migrants. In Iraq, says the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, there are only 400,000 Christians left, down from 1.4 million in 1987. Australia has a special responsibility for the Iraqi people, and from a self-interested viewpoint, Christians are likely to settle more easily into a Christian country than Muslims.

"It's a desperate situation," said Nile. "They're being told 'convert or die'."

Seeing how free and easy the Government has become with boat people, Nile has hatched a plan to bring a boat of 2000 Christian asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. He wants donations and he dares the Government to stop him.

So how about it?

A small victory for Roman Catholicism

Mark Thompson notes a small victory for Roman Catholicism:

But the word 'Catholic' literally means 'according to the whole'. The alternative to 'Catholic' in the early centuries was one or other of the schismatic groups — 'Donatist', 'Arian' etc. — which had broken from 'the whole'. (There is, of course, a tremendous public relations coup in the Roman Church labelling itself the 'Roman Catholic Church'.)

Old songs

Phillip Jensen's latest blog entry has a great twist.

You can either click here and read it, or look at the quote below, which ruins the surprise but saves you time:

But there is another lesson that we can learn from this advertisement. It is to have more confidence in our own Christian culture. So often we ape the world and its culture, instead of confidently asserting our own. Here is a song that if we were asked to sing in church, Christians would complain: ‘It is too old fashioned’, ‘does not communicate with the modern age’, ‘is musically very limited’, etc. Yet the world of big advertising budgets listens to that song and hears such a powerful communication possibility, that they make it central to their promotion.

This is what we'll be doing soon.

http://vimeo.com/6712657

The Dutch did it

In 1983 Australia won the America's Cup.

I remember waking up early to watch this historic victory.

Now it turns out we lied to make it happen, and Alan Bond (who was behind the effort), was a crook in this matter as in many others.

4:1 Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. 2 And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. 3 But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

4 Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.

(Ecclesiastes 4)

They used to believe the world was flat

No they didn't.

(Justin Taylor)

Sick leave

I'm on sick leave with erratic computer access for a week or so, so business on blog and facebook will be slow.

Jesus—all about advertising.

Or something like that.

I have a wee bit of a rant about it on the Sola Panel, here.

Krazy Kat goes a—wooing: Boxcar Blues

[Facebook readers—you gots to click through to see this classic]

2 min 21 sec. Worth it. Slide guitar by Tedd Smith.

Scripture in schools

The dispute over Scripture in schools continues in todays SMH. Hendry Wan got a good one in:

Cameron Sach, a teacher (Letters, September 30), says teachers are engaged in crusades to “instil” (read indoctrinate) ethical attitudes and behaviour in their students from 9am to 3pm, five days a week. If true, why is there a need to have another hour for a special ethics class? Thanks, Mr Sach, you have just made a brilliant argument for special religious education.

Hendry Wan, Matraville

And ths one was terrific as well:

Howard Packer says the education minister will require "the wisdom of Solomon" to sort out the dilemmas surrounding ethics programs and special religious education.

I agree, and I note that when that same King Solomon realised he needed help in ethics ("distinguishing between right and wrong", 1 Kings 3, 9), he sought his ethical wisdom not from the electorate, but from the Lord.

How apt. Apparently Solomon thought knowing the Lord rather than knowing an ethics syllabus was what enabled people to distinguish right and wrong.

Reverend Graeme Howells, Miranda

See more here.

I wrote another letter but it didn't get in. This is what I said:

Cameron Sach (Letters, Sep 30) spectacularly misses a point and shoots
an own goal in the process. I repeat, Scripture classes that I teach
involve almost no ethical instruction whatsoever. They are about
Jesus, his death and resurrection, and how to be rescued from your
sins. But if, as Cameron suggests, the teachers are crusading to
instil ethics 5 days a week, he merely reinforces how unnecessary an
extra hour of such instruction would be. What's left but to agree?

This is a significant battle for people in NSW. I am sure we will keep needing to fight this one, and as part of that we ought to be praying for our kids.

Clarinet

Matilda asked me to find some clarinet music for her on YouTube, so I did!

Isn't it beautiful?

It's Mozart's Concerto for Clarinet, 2nd movement.

Soloist Carelys Carreras, Cuba. Vienna Philharmonic Women's Orchestra

Off to the doctor

The legs weren't broken, so how about a slow, careful walk along the road, right and up the hill, down the hill, up the hill, left and along for quite a bit to the traffic lights, across the road and left into the surgery.

I could catch a bus some of the way.

I've got to think!

This is wonderful

Poms v Italy.

Low light.

here

There are so many levels of brilliance involved here that we should just begin with the acknowledgement that it's twilight.

Fiona thinks I am cerebral

Is that right?

Why or why not?

How would you reliably test such a thing?

Comments welcome.

Waiter/Jewish joke

A waiter comes over to a table full of Jewish women and asks, "Is anything right?"

From Jim West.

Scripture in schools

My letter in today's SMH:

A number of letter writers seem to think scripture in schools is all about ethics. I have been helping teach school scripture for five years, and I can confidently say there is almost no ethical instruction involved. What we teach is that when we fail ethically - as we all do - forgiveness and change are possible through the power of the risen Lord Jesus. That is a far more potent message than any ethical instruction can give.

But if the community decides ethical instruction in schools is necessary, there is a problem. If that instruction is given at the same time as scripture, children in scripture classes will miss out on something people seem to think is important. That is hardly fair, as even someone with my limited command of ethics can see.

Reverend Gordon Cheng

Gladesville

See more letters here.

For sure there will be more letters on this tomorrow. So if you feel like writing, then write!

Polymathy

Monomathy is for losers:

The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks—policy or science—the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,” Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. “Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical.

So get into it, dudes.

Funny things about atheists

They managed to close down Nathan's blog!

Nathan warned that his blog in new location might not preserve comment on the old blog, so purely for vanity's sake I'm posting here what I said in comments about the post that started the fuss, Five things that would make atheists seem nicer.

But first, and just in case Nathan's blog-move kills even the original post, let's see what he wrote in full:

I am trying really hard to cut down on generalising and bagging out “atheists” rather than specific people and streams of atheism.

They’re not all the same – and they aren’t all out to eat your babies. But atheists (general) keep giving me reason to think bad thoughts about them. Like the two who hijack this thread on Communicate Jesus.

Here are five tips for my atheist friends to help them seem nicer and more reasonable.

1. Stop being so smug.

2. Don’t assume every piece of Christian evangelism is directed at you – we want the undecideds, not the decided-uns.

3. Admit that the debate about God’s existence is complex – and that it can, depending on your presuppositions, be quite possible for intelligent and rational people to intelligently believe in an intervening deity who communicates through a book.

4. Admit that the scientific method – which by its nature relies on induction rather than deduction (starting with a hypothesis and testing it rather than observing facts and forming a hypothesis) – is as open to abuse as any religious belief, and is neither objective nor infallible.

5. Try to deal with the actual notions of God seriously believed in by millions of people rather than inventing strawmen (or spaghetti monsters) to dismiss the concepts of God – and deal with the Bible paying attention to context and the broader Christological narrative rather than quoting obscure Old Testament laws. By all means quote the laws when they are applied incorrectly by “Christians” – but understand how they’re meant to work before dealing with the Christians described in point 3.

Sound reasonable? Well, not according to the mouth-foamings of the atheists who bit back. It doesn't need a greatly developed sense of irony to find humour in atheists managing to prove what Nathan gently invites them to disprove.

Anyhow, Here's the comment I left on Nathan's thread, which had about 40 comments of general atheistic argy-bargy by the time I looked in:

G'day Nathan

This thread is quite funny, and considerably better than your previous efforts at baiting Nigerian scammers. Lousy ROI (Return On Investment) by comparison, wouldn't you say?

But I think you are wrongheaded. I note what you said about comments not moving to your new webhost, so I'll keep it short. This:

I am trying really hard to cut down on generalising and bagging out “atheists” rather than specific people and streams of atheism.

...is where you fail, to paraphrase Yoda, that great Jedi authority. It's just one of those polite and genteel hang-overs of a bygone era that finds no support whatsoever in Scripture.

Next time, start with "The fool has said in his heart, 'there is no God'" (Ps 14:1) This is far truer to the scant biblical testimony about atheism than trying the approach of reason, which gets...well, you've seen what it gets you. It gets you looking for a new webhost.

God bless, and congratulations on a very funny thread!

Atheism is not about reason, it's about a-theism (by definition), and deserves scorn rather than argument.