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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Peripheral Identities

October 28, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The Old Testament book of Ruth is a careful commentary on the interplay of self and social identity in its characters. No opportunity is missed to describe Ruth as the perpetual outsider. She is referred to throughout the story as “Ruth the Moabite” or “the Moabite woman” or even merely “the foreigner.” In fact, even Ruth refers to herself as a foreigner long after she left Moab. Yet her seemingly permanent status as an outsider is juxtaposed with her wholehearted declaration to identify herself with a new people, a new land, and a new God. “Where you go, I will go,” she says to her mother-in-law. “Where you stay, I will stay; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

Identity is a very complicated thing. Even when we try to identify ourselves with something new, something we know to be true, something given to us or chosen for ourselves, it may only be a peripheral identity.

Nineteenth century poet Francis Thompson led the turbulent life of one caught between such dueling identities. His father wanted him to study at Oxford and become a physician, but Francis wanted to be a writer and moved to London to pursue a career. Sadly, he lost his way in narcotics, and for the rest of his life he would oscillate between brilliant writer and homeless addict. He lived on the streets, slaking his opium addiction in London’s Charing Cross and sleeping on the banks of the River Thames. But he continued to scribble poetry wherever he could, mailing his work to the local newspaper. The editor was immediately taken, noting there was one greater than a Milton among them, a slumbering genius with no return address. Thompson acknowledged that he was running from God, and in fact, spent his life wrestling between his identity as a child on the run and his identity as a child who had been found. Once succumbing to the pursuing Christ, he penned the famous words to “The Hound of Heaven.”

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

Pain and loss have a way of shaping who we are and what we see. Thompson’s divine pursuer is one Ruth did not yet know, and Naomi could not see. Interestingly, the first time Naomi spoke directly of her God within earshot of the foreigner who pledged to follow this God, it was to say that God had made her cold and grieving. Naomi imparts that her name should no longer be Naomi, which means “my delight,” but Mara, which means “bitter.” “For I went out full,” she says, “but the LORD brought me back empty.”

Naomi’s words are honest. She has lost her husband and her sons and her grief is consuming. The very meaning of her name seems a cruel irony. But there was also more to her. Tightly wound within Naomi’s identity was understandably her status as a widow, her status as empty. But she was not only a widow; she was not alone in her grief. She had not returned entirely empty. Naomi returned to Judah with a loyal daughter-in-law who had pledged to discover the God of Israel, maybe even as Naomi discovered the God of Israel herself. Though the social status of widows would certainly have justified Naomi’s vision of herself as empty, God used another widow—a foreign widow at that—to bring Naomi back to the meaning of her name.

It is often in the battle of warring identities that we seem most clearly to discover who we are. Naomi was indeed bitter, and she had every right to cast off the identity of delight in her name. Ruth had chosen a new life for herself, but she was indeed a foreigner, and was reminded of her status as an outsider at every turn. Even so, these identities, reinforced by their social standing, would not sway the God who loved them.

In the book of Ruth, the identity of God is always somewhere in the interplay of the dueling identities of its characters. Who God is seems slow to emerge, though the divine Spirit can be ascertained in the care of the outsider and in the bringing of an empty woman through her bitterness. But the identity of these women as God’s own is made unmistakably clear in the tracing of the Messiah through the bloodline of their own lineage: a foreigner named Ruth and a grieving woman named Naomi.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mere Wrappings

October 25, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a study included in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine children were shown to overwhelmingly prefer the taste of food that comes in McDonald’s wrappers. The study had preschoolers sample identical foods in packaging from McDonald’s and in matched, but unbranded, packaging. The kids were then asked if the food tasted the same or if one tasted better. The unmarked foods lost the taste test every time. Even apple juice, carrots, and milk tasted better to the kids when taken from the familiar wrappings of the Golden Arches. “This study demonstrates simply and elegantly that advertising literally brainwashes young children into a baseless preference for certain food products,” said a physician from Yale’s School of Medicine. “Children, it seems, literally do judge a food by its cover. And they prefer the cover they know.”(1)

The science of advertising is often about convincing the world that books can and should be judged by their covers. These kids were not merely saying they preferred the taste of McDonald’s food. They actually believed the chicken nugget they thought was from McDonald’s tasted better than an identical nugget. From an early age and on through adulthood, branding is directive in telling us what we think and feel, who we are, and what matters.

But lest we blame television and marketing entirely for the wiles of brand recognition, we should recall that advertisers continue to have employment simply because advertising works. That is, long before marketers were encouraging customers to judge by image, wrapping, and cover, we were judging by these methods anyway. When the ancient Samuel was looking for the person God would ordain as king, he had a particular image in mind. In fact, when he first laid eyes on Eliab, Samuel thought confidently that this was the one God had chosen. But on the contrary, God said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

The study with the preschoolers is startling because adults can see clearly that a carrot in a McDonald’s bag is still inherently a carrot. Yet how often are we, too, blindsided by mere wrappings? Is the mistake of a child in believing the food tastes better in a yellow wrapper really any different than our own believing we are better people dressed with the right credentials, covered by the latest fashion, or wrapped in the right belief-systems? Covered in whatever comforts us or completely stripped of our many wrappings, we are the same people underneath.

According to the apostle Paul, there is one exception. Paul writes of a kind of clothing that changes the one inside them. “[F]or all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”(2) Clothed in the righteousness of the man Jesus, a person is wrapped in the identity of one without sin. They are given new packaging, new life, new robes worn only by Christ, and thus, like him, they are fitted to approach the throne of God.

Unlike the catch and costliness of well-marketed wrappings, the robes Paul describes are free. The beautiful and difficult word of Christianity is that Christ requires only that we come without costume or pretense. The many robes we collect, the covers with which we judge the world, we must be willing to give him. He takes from tired shoulders robes of self-importance and false security. He tears from determined grasps those garments of self-pity and shame. And then he clothes the needful soul with garments of salvation, arrays us in robes of righteousness, and reminds us that we wear his holy name from the inside out.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) “Foods Tastes Better With McDonald’s Logo, Kids Say,” Forbes, August 6, 2007.

(2) Galatians 3:27-28.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Making History

October 24, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

If you are familiar with the writing of the new atheists, you will notice that they often portray history as if there is an ancient and on-going war raging between science and religion. Why is it that such simplistic ways of viewing the past can become so prevalent?(1) One theory is advanced by Christian Smith in his book Moral Believing Animals. He argues that one of the central, fundamental motivations for human action is the locating of life within a larger external moral order, which in turn dictates a person’s sense of identity and the way in which they act. He claims that, whether or not they realize it, “all human persons, no matter how well educated, how scientific, how knowledgeable, are, at bottom, believers.”(2)

He suggests this is because “human knowledge has no common, indubitable foundation,”and therefore the way people choose to live and the knowledge they accumulate is all founded upon basic assumptions and beliefs that cannot themselves be empirically verified.(3) This includes the Enlightenment ideas of foundationalist knowledge, the autonomously choosing individual and even universal rationality itself, which he argues “always and only operates in the context of the particular moral orders that define and orient reason in particular directions.”(4)

In order to make sense of life, he suggests that all individuals perceive the world according to an all-embracing narrative, in which factual information about different events and people is woven into a storyline that makes an overall point. The Scientific Enlightenment Narrative, for example, is one that has been popularized by the new atheists:

“For most of human history, people have lived in the darkness of ignorance and tradition, driven by fear, believing in superstitions. Priest and Lords preyed on such ignorance, and life was wearisome and short. Ever so gradually, however, and often at great cost, inventive men have endeavored better to understand the natural world around them. Centuries of such enquiry eventually led to a marvelous Scientific Revolution that radically transformed our methods of understanding nature. What we know now as a result is based on objective observation, empirical fact, and rational analysis. With each passing decade, science reveals increasingly more about the earth, our bodies, our minds. We have come to possess the power to transform nature and ourselves. We can fortify health, relieve suffering, and prolong life. Science is close to understanding the secret of life and maybe eternal life itself. Of course, forces of ignorance, fear, irrationality and blind faith still threaten the progress of science. But they must be resisted at all costs. For unfettered science is our only hope for true Enlightenment and happiness.”(5)

Although this narrative may seem to be the very opposite of a religious worldview, Smith makes the interesting observation that “what is striking about these major Western narrative traditions is how closely their plots parallel and sometimes mimic the Christian narrative.”(6)

They all include a period of darkness followed by redemption, as well as a promise for the future and the identification of potential threats to the desired utopia. He explains that: “So deep did Christianity’s wagon wheels wear into the ground of Western culture and consciousness that nearly every secular wagon that has followed—no matter how determined to travel a different road—has found it nearly impossible not to ride in the same tracks of the faith of old. Such is the power of the moral order in deeply forming culture and story.”(7)

This is a fascinating observation, because it suggests that the Christian way of perceiving the world still informs the worldview of many of those who think they have jettisoned all the remnants of it. He argues that this pervasiveness is not surprising though, as “the human condition and the character of religion quite naturally fit, cohere, complement and reinforce each other,” because they link the narratives with the historical and personal significances at both the individual and collective level.

The fact that the message is so compelling will come as no surprise to Christians, but, above all, Smith’s work illustrates the problem faced by those who insist that they live by science, logic, and empirical evidence, rather than relying on any belief. It also highlights that there is a considerable blind spot in the thinking of many people today, when it comes to appreciating the role religion has played not only in shaping their own ideas, but also in underpinning core aspects of western society. It may be fashionable to dismiss this foundation, but the final word should perhaps be left to the influential German thinker, Jürgen Habermas, who explains that the Judeo-Christian legacy is neither insignificant, nor should it be forgotten:

“For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.”(8)

Simon Wenham is research coordinator for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Europe.

(1) Article adapted from Simon Wenham’s, “Making History: The ‘War’ Between Science and Religion,” Pulse, Issue 8 (Summer 2011), pp. 2-4.

(2) C. Smith, Moral Believing Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54.

(3) Ibid., 154.

(4) Idem.

(5) Ibid., 69.

(6) Ibid., 72.

(7) Idem.

(8) Ibid., 153.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – At the Table

October 23, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

When summer comes and city corners are full again of kids with bikes and basketballs, my mind returns to a particular playground. For several summers I worked at a church with an outdoor recreation ministry, whose intent was to serve the neighborhood, meeting the kids and building relationships. We played games, read stories, jumped rope, and organized basketball tournaments. One year a volunteer came and helped the kids make pottery, so we commissioned them to create some new communion plates and chalices for the church to celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Most of these kids had never taken communion before; many had never heard of the Lord’s Supper or been told the story of Jesus and his disciples in the upper room. So with muddied hands we told the story, and together that summer several sets of communion plates and cups were fashioned by kids eager to see them in use. I have never seen more colorful, misshapen objects grace the altar of a church; nor have I ever seen so many wide-eyed children come to life at the communion table. The elders held the lopsided plates and cups, inviting the church community to come and remember the one who shapes us. The children had a physical reminder of their place at the table, and the church was reminded again that we are all children being nourished by the Son of God.

When Christians proclaim the Incarnation, they proclaim the gift of a God who comes noticeably near his creation; the Lord’s Supper is another gift marking a God who comes near. The table is a place, like the manager in Bethlehem or the Cross of Calvary, where we are welcomed—rather, summoned—to come forward as we are: the poor to a benevolent giver, the sick to a physician, the sinful to the author of righteousness, children to the Father of life. Jesus left this sign and seal specifically with human beings in mind. When he gave us the command to take the bread and the cup in remembrance of his presence among us, he gave us a sign of this presence that is both visible and physical. Fourth century preacher John Chrysostom wrote of this physical gift as a vital reminder both because we ourselves are physical and Christ as well: “Were we incorporeal, he would give us these things in a naked and incorporeal form. Now because our souls are implanted in bodies, he delivers spiritual things under things visible.” We are given a sign to hold, a reminder of Christ’s nearness that nourishes both body and soul. In the act of eating, we are given the assurance of a real and present and nourishing Christ: “Lo, I am with you always even unto the ends of the earth” (Matthew 28:20).

Coming to the table like the disciples centuries before us, Christians consume a meal that sustains us like any other. And yet, it is at his table that we ingest the death and life of Christ; we participate in his birth among us, his suffering on the Cross, his humiliation and burial, his resurrection and new life. As a visible sign, it is far from one-dimensional. Like the children who first witnessed the Lord’s Supper from bright plates painted at their own hands, it is personal. It is so much more than a meal.

Christ calls those who will hear to the table to commune with himself and a great cloud of witnesses. He calls us to locate our selves and our redemption in the presence of a great community and in the midst of a remarkable story. We are invited to see our lives within the history of a covenant people and a vast community of believers. For we are children sustained by a mighty Father, a provident parent aware of our vast need and more than able to fulfill it. Christ was born as a child in Bethlehem not merely to come nearer, but to usher the world by his grace into communion and community, into his life and his death, the journey of faith, the pilgrimage of believers, and the story of salvation. We are invited to a great and intimate table:

On the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and broke it and gave it to those he loved saying, Come, take and eat, this is my body broken for you…

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Conversation Matters

October 22, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Search the Internet these days and you will find an abundance of entries on the art of conversation. Best-selling books have been written on how to interact with anyone from bus driver to head of state. Whether from the shortened sound bites of “Twitter” to the perpetual conflicts in government, the practice and the art of having meaningful and constructive conversation seems to be the topic of conversation! Sadly, it seems that opportunities for honesty, authenticity, and respectful debate are waning in today’s information-saturated yet disconnected world. When real conversations happen they are a true gift.

In recognizing both the gift of and the need for conversation in my own life, I discovered something very interesting captured by the writers of the Bible. Recorded within its pages are some fascinating conversations between God and various individuals. Far from being the polite, deferential, and circumscribed conversations of a more politically correct age, these conversations are full of questions, challenge, and doubt. These features, in and of themselves, should grab the attention of even a casual reader, for how many of us if given the opportunity to have a close encounter with God would even have the ability to speak? And yet, the writers of Scripture saw fit to capture even the kind of conversations in which the Almighty God engages reluctant and less than willing humans.

Early in the narrative of Genesis, for example, the first time we hear Abraham engage God in conversation, he responds to the promises issued by God to give him great reward with a certain level of incredulity.(1) “O Lord God, what will you give me, since I am childless?” (Genesis 15:2). These are the very first recorded words of Abraham. As far as we are told from the biblical story, Abraham left his country and family of origin without question; he heard God’s great promise of a great nation and blessing without any question or doubt. Yet his first recorded words question God. When visited by God at Mamre prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham bargained with God to spare the city. Lower and lower fell the number of the righteous required to save it until finally God promised not to destroy it if ten righteous persons were found.

Moses also questions God in his encounter with the Almighty.(2) Despite seeing a bush burning with fire but not consumed, despite seeing his shepherd’s staff transformed into a serpent, and despite seeing his hand become leprous and then healed of leprosy, Moses fires back question after question and challenge after challenge to the God revealed specially and uniquely to him: “I AM THAT I AM; I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE.” Moses appears not to recognize his conversation partner, the God of his father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, as he questions God repeatedly in their dramatic conversation: “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?” (Exodus 3:11). “Now they may say to me, ‘What is God’s name?’ What shall I say to them?” (Exodus 3:13). “What if they will not believe me, or listen to what I say?” (Exodus 4:1). “Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue” (Exodus 4:10). “Please Lord, send someone else to do it” (Exodus 4:13).

What amazes me about these dialogues is that they are included in the Bible at all. For on the surface, it appears that these are not examples of great conversations for God. If we simply evaluated them on contemporary conversational etiquette, or persuasive ability, neither party does very well. God isn’t very successful in terms of persuasion and the human conversation partners are better at giving excuses than giving respect. But of course, there is more to the story. As Abraham and Moses continue their conversations with God-as one offers up the child of promise for sacrifice, as the other negotiates with Pharaoh and then shepherds the Israelites in the wilderness-we hear complaint, lament, question, and argumentation that we could hardly imagine, let alone speak before the Almighty. And yet, Abraham is called “the friend of God” (Isaiah 41:8) and Moses beholds the glory of God on Mount Sinai (Exodus 33:18-9). The conversation matters—even conversation that questions and argues—for God values communion. Indeed, Abraham and Moses, Job, the psalmists, and the prophets all provide us with rich and engaging narratives of authentic, challenging, questioning, and even argumentative conversation with God.

Despite Moses’s questioning of God, the Scripture tells us that “The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend” (Exodus 33:11). Perhaps the way we talk with God illuminates our willingness to engage in great conversation. Indeed, perhaps the way we talk with God illuminates the depth of our friendship.

Margaret Manning is a member of the writing and speaking teams at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Genesis 15:1.

(2) See Exodus 3-4.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – “What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?”

October 21, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

On my way to Jerusalem, I went through Athens, though at the time, I failed to notice the metaphor. I was a student traveling to Jerusalem for a semester of study; the 36 hour layover in Athens only seemed to be standing in the way. Like the early church theologian Tertullian, I wanted to get on with things, and really, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” In fact, Christians have been arguing over this question almost as long as students have been missing truth and life though it stares them in the face. While I was in my hotel room dreaming of the holy land, I missed (among other things) ancient Corinth, Thessalonica, and the Areopagus, all places where the very icon of philosophy and secular learning collided with Jerusalem itself, the symbol of religious thought and commitment.

The apostle Paul came to the city of Athens by way of trouble in Berea and opposition in Thessalonica. In Acts 17:16-34, Luke recounts Paul’s visit. As he walked through the streets and markets, Paul was taken aback by all that he saw. The shining city was by no means shining with its former glory, but it continued to symbolize the very heart of philosophy, paganism, and culture. Seeing that the city was full of idols, Paul was greatly distressed.

Accordingly, the apostle treated his distress with routine. Paul found, once again, the local synagogue, and reasons with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks from the Scriptures “as was his custom.” His method here was likely similar to the methods he used in Thessalonica or in Jerusalem itself. Placing the Scriptures and its messianic hope beside the life and events of Jesus, the apostle went about the work of an apologist—that is, “explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This is the Messiah, Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you’” (Acts 17:3).

While this might bring one to deduce that the work of apologetics (from the Greek apologia, or defense) is largely about speaking, explaining, or proving, it is wise to consider the rest of Paul’s visit. While in Athens, Paul also visited the Agora daily, the marketplace that pulsed with the sounds of a city and the noise of buyers and sellers, where he reasoned with “those who happened to be there” (Acts 17:17). This being Athens, many who happened to be there were members of the Greek intelligentsia from the two local schools of Epicurean and Stoic thought. In a culture full of minds that earnestly sought to keep up with the latest wisdom of the age, Paul came as one with a new teaching. And with winsome influence he won their hearing. Luke recounts, “So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means” (vv. 19-20).

Paul was taken to the Areopagus quite purposely. The Areopagus, or Hill of Acres, was the site of a council that once served as the institution of legal authority over Athens. By the first century, the council no longer exercised authority in matters of democracy, but it continued to consider matters of ethics, religion, and philosophy. It was thus the appropriate place for their inquiry and examination of Paul’s new teaching. The experts of Greek religion and philosophy were not about to let this strange and confident amateur slip away.

At this point, one might still deduce that the work of apologetics is much ado about talk and persuasion. And, in part, it is. As Paul stood before the Areopagus he delivered a sermon that is still commemorated beside the rocks that heard it first: “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:22-23).

But the work of the apologist is far more than truthful words and reason. Paul’s keen observations of the city full of idols and the passions of the learned were deftly employed in his conversations and interaction with them. Well before Luke describes Paul’s speeches, he describes Paul speechless. The apostle walked through the city listening, studying, and observing, such that when it came time to speak in the Areopagus Paul was able to respectfully see his neighbors as men and women who were “religious in every way” as well as a people willing to admit what they did not know. I would argue that such observations could only be made with humility, wisdom, gentleness, and prayer—the greater works of any apologist, and often the most difficult. It is far easier to view one’s neighbors in terms of all that divides us, with unfortunate words that reflect our differences, their oddities, and our superiorities. It is far easier to look at the disparities of Athens and ask dismissingly what it has to do with Jerusalem.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – House of Pain

October 18, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

We shuffled back and forth between the states that sat like metaphors between our divorced parents—a summer, a spring break, a Christmas without one of them. The pain of the one we were leaving was always palpable, but we always had to leave.

It’s strange the things we interpret as children with the limited perceptions we have. I was very little when I silently vowed I would not allow anyone to keep me on the wrong side of people in pain. As a result, I spent a lifetime collecting strays, searching for the oppressed, feeling the pain of others, and desperately attempting to bind broken hearts, usually without much success. Every church I have ever been involved with has been one somehow marked by suffering. I have at times been somewhat frantic about expanding my circle of care. The world of souls is a sad and broken place. I was certain of this because I was one of them, and I vowed that they would not be alone—or perhaps, at times, more accurately, that I would not be alone.

On occasion, there have been other unhealthy patterns to my ever-expanding circles of care. With each oppressed group, I came among them with the best of intentions. I gave everything I could and some things I could not—love, time, money, tears, depression—until I collapsed, no longer able to give anything at all. I always thought I was retreating out of necessity because taking in pain was understandably exhausting. I figured that the metaphorical house I tried to keep filled, at times, simply needed to be emptied from over-crowding. I was opening up my house until people were hanging from the rafters and lamps started getting broken, and I was falling apart. Little did I realize, the house was falling apart before any of them entered in the first place. I was inviting them into the wrong house.

Sometimes God in his mercy must tear down even walls built with good intention. “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain… In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—for he grants sleep to those he loves” (Psalms 127:1-2). Such was the case with me. In my house, the broken and the oppressed found care with limits, hospitality with conditions. But we are like olive trees who “flourish in the house of God,” says the psalmist. For in this house, we can “trust in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever” (Psalm 52:8).

Describing the disparity between the mind of humanity and the mind of God, Abraham Heschel writes, “The [human] conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort, lulling, soothing. Yet those who are hurt, and He Who inhabits eternity, neither slumber nor sleep.”(1) In other words, God never sleeps or slumbers because those who are hurting never sleep or slumber. Try as we may as caretakers we cannot be as God to the hurting. We can stay awake with them in their pain and suffering. We can care for them as neighbors. But the house in which the suffering find unfailing love is the Lord’s. Like the friends of the paralytic who carried him all the way to Christ, this is the house to which we must bring them. His is the house in which we must live.

Though I still seem to move toward broken communities and still struggle with the weight of some of the things I see, I realize I struggle equally with the apathy that makes me want to flee from it all and clear away the crowd. But I am convinced that the right side of pain can only be accessed through the house of God, a house built not by human hands, but held up by the beams of the Cross. Here our souls find a house with rooms prepared for them and a table set with room for our enemies. God has invited us into the kingdom; the doors of a great house are opened wide. And it is a house where hospitality is not a conditional sharing of personal pains, or a self-centered preoccupation with suffering, but an extension of Christ’s real invitation: Come to me, all who are weary and I will give you rest.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Perennial, 2001), 11.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith, Trust, and Evidence

October 17, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to avoid using the word ‘faith’ recently. It just doesn’t get the message across. ‘Faith’ is a word that’s now misused and twisted. ‘Faith’ today is what you try to use when the reasons are stacking up against what you think you ought to believe. Greg Koukl sums up the popular view of faith, “It’s religious wishful thinking, in which one squeezes out spiritual hope by intense acts of sheer will. People of ‘faith’ believe the impossible. People of ‘faith’ believe that which is contrary to fact. People of ‘faith’ believe that which is contrary to evidence. People of ‘faith’ ignore reality.” It shouldn’t therefore come as a great surprise to us, that people raise their eyebrows when ‘faith’ in Christ is mentioned. Is it strange that they seem to prefer what seems like reason over insanity?

It’s interesting that the Bible doesn’t overemphasize the individual elements of the whole picture of faith, like we so often do. But what does the Bible say about faith? Is it what Simon Peter demonstrates when he climbs out of the boat and walks over the water towards Jesus? Or is it what Thomas has after he has put his hand in Jesus’s side? Interestingly, biblical faith isn’t believing against the evidence. Instead, faith is a kind of knowing that results in action. The clearest definition comes from Hebrews 11:1. This verse says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In fact, when the New Testament talks about faith positively it only uses words derived from the Greek root [pistis], which means ‘to be persuaded.’ In those verses from Hebrews, we find the words, “hope,” “assurance,” “conviction” that is, confidence. Now, what gives us this confidence?

Christian faith is not belief in the absence of evidence. It is the proper response to the evidence. Koukl explains that, “Christian faith cares about the evidence…the facts matter. You can’t have assurance for something you don’t know you’re going to get. You can only hope for it. This is why the resurrection of Jesus is so important. It gives assurance to the hope. Because of a Christian view of faith, Paul is able to say in 1 Corinthians 15 that when it comes to the resurrection, if we have only hope, but no assurance—if Jesus didn’t indeed rise from the dead in time/space history—then we are of most men to be pitied. This confidence Paul is talking about is not a confidence in a mere ‘faith’ resurrection, a mythical resurrection, a story-telling resurrection. Instead, it’s a belief in a real resurrection. If the real resurrection didn’t happen, then we’re in trouble. The Bible knows nothing of a bold leap-in-the-dark faith, a hope-against-hope faith, a faith with no evidence. Rather, if the evidence doesn’t correspond to the hope, then the faith is in vain, as even Paul has said.”

So in conclusion, faith is not a kind of religious hoping that you do in spite of the facts. In fact, faith is a kind of knowing that results in doing. A knowing that is so passionately and intelligently faithful to Jesus Christ that it will not submit to fideism, scientism, nor any other secularist attempt to divert and cauterize the human soul by hijacking knowledge.

Tom Price is an academic tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Oxford, England.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Message and Mystery

October 16, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

An interesting display of language and culture befell my husband and me while standing in line at a cafe. The owner of the shop is a friendly man whose primary language is Hindi, though he took our order in English. The one preparing the desserts was a new employee, in the process of being trained, who spoke neither Hindi nor English, but only Spanish. Relaying our order along with the steps it would take to make it, the owner spoke in careful, fragmented Spanish, at one point stopping to ask his wife something in Hindi and clarifying something with us in English. “Te hables Espanol?” my husband immediately asked, impressed at the sight of such a blend of languages. “Not really,” the owner replied. “But the teacher is no good unless he speaks the language of the student.”

I have often wondered what went through the minds of the disciples as Jesus spoke of mustard seeds, wine skins, bread and flesh, and thieves in the night. In the three years they spent together as rabbi and pupils, I am sure the question often crossed their minds: What is this language he is speaking? More than once, the Gospels impart that the disciples conferred with each other like a group of befuddled students—What is he saying? Eventually, someone usually decided they had to ask the teacher himself. As Jesus finished telling a crowd of people a story about seeds and soil, the disciples took him aside and asked about his communication style. “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”(1)

I suspect his answer did not offer the clarity they were looking to receive. Jesus responded, “I speak to them in parables because ‘though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.’ In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.’ For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes… But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear” (Matthew 13:13-16).

Something in this at once reminds me of the circular discussions we have with children. There are certain lines parents use to signal the end of the current arsenal of questioning. Coming from a parent, “Because I said so,” is intended to be a conversation stopper. I would guess “Because God said so” is all the more hindering. In effect, Jesus seems to say matter-of-factly, “I speak to them in stories they don’t understand because they don’t understand.” I imagine it was equally silencing for his students to be the ones expressing the confusion and yet to be told they are the ones who understand. To an already bewildering retort, Jesus seems to add, “And I speak to you in stories you don’t understand because you do understand.” Nonetheless, after calling the disciples blessed because their eyes and ears were getting it, Jesus proceeds to explain the entire parable to them in great detail.

Though easily discounted, particularly in a world where mind and thought are often the emphasis, understanding seems to hold elements well beyond mere recognition. There are some students for whom language is not the crux of their failure to learn. But if it is possible to see and not perceive, to hear and not understand, perhaps it is also possible to hold the weight of a word or thought or soul before you, knowing there is far more to get your arms around.

What Jesus meant by all his talk about seeds, I’m not sure the disciples saw clearly before it was explained to them. But that the man before them and his strange manner of speaking had more to do with reality than they could yet grasp was knowledge that opened their eyes along the journey and made them blessed. He was full of mystery, and yet he was a mystery that had been revealed to them, one who walked and ate with them. I imagine their excitement was palpable when Jesus promised that a time was coming when he would speak to them “plainly.” But regardless of how he was speaking, the disciples knew their teacher was offering words that somehow reached beyond them, in a language that would out-stand their own wilting lives.

The words God has chosen to speak we may not fully understand at first hearing, but that God is one who holds value and purpose in revelation might compel us to listen or see or wait quietly again and again. Christ’s parables leave us asking not only, “What is he saying in this parable about the real world” but far more invasively they leave us inquiring, “What is the real world?” However this question is asked, with ears hardly hearing, with eyes opened or closed, in Hindi or English or Spanish, how wonderful that there is an answer.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Matthew 13:10.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – “Maybe”

October 15, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Recently, I attended the memorial service for a close family member. He was the fourth person to die in this family, and the fourth to die before the age of 70. As the extended family began to gather in the church library prior to the service, the grief was as palpable as if it was a figure in the room. Tears flowed freely, and we embraced one another in an attempt to offer comfort in the midst of the sorrow.

After the service, as we stood in a receiving line and watched people mill about, there were many children and young toddlers in attendance. Unaware of what had brought us all together, they ran around one another playing and screaming with joy and delight. I couldn’t help but wonder at this strange juxtaposition. For in this one space of a funeral where one person had died, new life was playing all around me. How ironic that a place flooded with tears was also a place that held the delightful squeals and joyful play of young children.

Having lunch with a dear friend in the days following, we spoke of her own experience with this ironic juxtaposition of joy and sadness. She had suffered the death of her young husband to cancer. Her eyes filled with tears as she recalled the unfathomable sorrow she felt when he told her how sad he would be to leave her behind, to leave their children, and the life he loved. All of the pain surrounding his death and untimely departure from this earth she carries with her now-even as she enjoys a new relationship with another young widower. They would have never met one another had it not been for death and loss of their beloved spouses; they feel both joy and sorrow as if they are united in their hearts like conjoined twins.

Poet and author Wendell Berry writes of this marriage of joy and sorrow in his poem entitled Sabbaths 2009. He begins with a quote by William Faulkner. “‘Maybe,’ Mr. Ernest said, ‘The best word in our language, the best of all.’” The poem proceeds to describe a bookkeeper tallying all the suffering and pain in one column of his ledger, everything he now knows of grief, pain and loss. He reckons these figures in their great weight, though he has no means of truly weighing them. Then he enters all he knows of the opposite decree—of beauty and love, generosity and grace and laughter. And he weighs these unweighable figures as well, knowing they can never be measured quantities, but simply register on his heart. He closes the book, not able to say which outweighs the other—good or evil, joy or sorrow-though he longs to know. Berry concludes with the bookkeeper’s ponderings:

He only can suppose

the things of goodness, the most

momentary, are in themselves

so whole, so bright, as to redeem

the darkness and trouble of the world

though we set it all afire.

“Maybe,” the bookkeeper says. “Maybe.”(1)

For many, ‘maybe’ honestly reflects the weight of carrying both joy and sorrow in their lives and in this world. And Berry’s poem honestly describes this life that is filled with both joy and sorrow; which outweighs the other we often cannot tell. Eventually, all those we love will die, or we will leave those we love. And yet the joy that comes in loving others overflows this inevitability of death and loss. Around every corner are new lives born or re-born through life transforming events-young and old-that counterbalance the surety of loss and senescence.

While these insights are not novel, it seems we humans prefer to believe we will somehow escape sorrow, pain, and loss. Intellectually, we know that suffering is a very real possibility, but we think it will not touch us. As a result, when life is filled with sorrow or loss we are ill-equipped to cope with it. We see suffering, grief, sorrow or loss as an aberration or a departure from ‘normal’ life, failing to recognize that the journey of earthly life would always include the push and pull between sorrow and joy. For Christians, the focus can easily center on victorious living and resurrection to the exclusion of Jesus’s matter-of-fact instruction to his followers that in this world they “will have trouble, but I have overcome this world.”(2) I had forgotten that many who have gone before me as that ‘great cloud of witnesses’ “did not receive what was promised.”(3) They, too, lived in a land of ‘maybe,’ and in the bittersweet juxtaposition of joy and sorrow.

As I walked out of the church after the funeral, and I felt spent from grieving, I simultaneously felt more alive than I had felt in a long time. Feeling the full range of human emotion and experiencing the tension that exists between joy and sorrow reminds me of what it means to be alive. And while I follow the one who assures me that he “has overcome the world,” his assurance did not come without his own journey to the cross and to the full experience of human sorrow and suffering. The joy set before him accompanied him there in the most beautiful and transformative juxtaposition.

Margaret Manning is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2009, Sewanee Review, Volume 119, Number 2, Spring 2011, pp. 198-205.

(2) John 16:33.

(3) Hebrews 11:29.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Rule of Faith

October 14, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Some headlines are intended to startle as much as they inform. One morning I read several which did both: “Study Reveals Religion Does Not Lead to Healthier Society,” “Prayer Does Not Heal the Sick, Study Finds,” and “North Korea’s Christians Face Execution.”(1) While the first two headlines piqued my interest, the actual claims themselves may have held the intention of shock but were met merely with intrigue. Whatever a scientific study can say about prayer, it usually says more about the formula we are trying to measure and very little about the God before whom the prayerful stand. Likewise, there are many things that can be said about healthy societies and the impact of religion, but it was Jesus who perhaps said it best: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Luke 5:31).

But the last headline actually did startle me, and the article continued what the title began. “[To be Christian in North Korea] is really seen as treason against their whole political system—a system built to deify the leader.” Thus, the current regime “has a history of persecuting believers in the most savage of ways, including public execution.” Such an article startles those who are at ease in any belief to reflection. How sacred is the faith of one who is willing to face execution for it? How treasured the Bible that must be buried in the backyard for protection? And why is it so easy from places of comfort to forget those who are persecuted even when the rule of faith we follow is supposedly the same?

For the early persecuted church, the Rule of Faith, or regula fidei, was the essential message, the fixed gospel through which they saw the world. It was the foundation that set the Christian apart and often put them in danger: profession of one God, salvation in Christ, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. It was also the foundation on which they stood when all else was stripped away. In the life of a confessing Christian, the Rule of Faith was seen as the normative compendium, the communal account of the story that held the individual through daily trials and united them with the believing community. The Rule was not a rival of the Scriptures; on the contrary, it was the worldview that emerged from Scripture, but also the worldview with which they approached the Scriptures, their lives, communities, and afflictions.

In a world averse to rules and intent on independence, it may be all the more tempting to deem the regula fidei a relic—and hence an irrelevancy—of the early church. But to men and women persecuted in North Korea, the regula fidei, the very heart of the Story for which they suffer is the rule by which they live. To them we owe the startling reminder: we are not islands of spiritual autonomy, but pilgrims who think, live, and serve with the truth and power of a thoughtful chorus.

To be Christian is to follow God’s Way in the world, a Way that compels us to move along with it. For some this will mean persecution, even martyrdom; for others it will mean laboring to avoid becoming at ease in Zion, moving to the beat of a drum that may take us where we don’t want to go. But movement it will require: “As they led [Jesus] away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus. Then they brought Jesus* to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull)” (Luke 23:26, Mark 15:22). The regula fidei is the heart of a startling story, a story that turns the world on its head and empowers a different kingdom. And thus, it is something quite like the heart of God, which brings rhythm to a chaotic world and sweeps many up into its mission.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

(1) Matthew Provonsha, “New Study Reveals that Religion Does Not Lead to a Healthier Society” Skeptic, Vol. 12, No. 3.

Sam Knight, “Prayer Does Not Heal the Sick, Study Finds,” Times Online, Mar. 31, 2006.

Christian Caryl and B. J. Lee, “Houses of the Hidden: North Korea’s Christians Face Execution,” Newsweek International, Oct. 1, 2007.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Roots and Pendulums

October 11, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The average cell phone user would likely now claim that life without one would be more than inconvenient. Upon its invention, in more ways than one, we became untethered. We no longer get tangled up in phone cords while trying to make dinner, set the table, and finish that conversation with the garrulous friend. Nor do we need to dash home from work in order to make that important phone call. We make it on the way, sitting in traffic, driving to the next appointment, making a stop at the grocery store, or all three. For those who even remember that phones used to have cords, it is with great appreciation that we are no longer operating with a five-foot radius. Yet, this is not to say that we don’t feel a tethering of a different sort. Owning a cell phone can foster the attitude that its owner is always available, always working, always obtainable. While there is no cord to which we are confined, the phone itself can be ironically confining.

But these kinds of shifting dilemmas are not all that uncommon. Just as the pendulum swings in one direction offering some kind of correction, so we often find that the other side introduces a new set of problems. Major and minor movements of history possess a similar, corrective rhythm, swinging from one extreme to another and finding trouble with both. The pendulum swings from one direction, often to an opposite error, or at best, to a new set of challenges.

Within and without its walls, the church, too, is continually responding to what we perceive needs correction. When the need to get away from dead, religious worship initiated certain shifts within the church, it was an observation wisely discerned. But what this meant for many churches was unfortunately a shifting away from history, common liturgy, and its own past—in some cases contributing to a different set of problems. While breaking away from the “religiosity” of history, perhaps some now find themselves tethered in a sense to all things contemporary and individual, unable to draw on the riches of the history from which we have isolated ourselves. While the intent may have been good, and the shifts did separate us from certain problems within church history, it also seems to have separated us from all of history. As a result, many Christians now seem more divorced from history than ever, having swung so far in one direction that we can no longer see from whence we have come. Coupled with our culture’s general devaluing of anything that is “outdated,” the risk of seeing the church’s identity more in terms of today’s form than its enduring essence seems both high and hazardous.

Something in the image of the ever-oscillating pendulum reminds me of the countercultural professions and practices that are meant to root the church in an identity beyond the one that might exist at any given time or changing mood. In this ever-moving world, where technological improvements and ideological corrections come more quickly than we often have time to process, the Christian lives not in fear of the future or disdain of the past. Instead he prays for daily sustenance “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). We profess a community “upon whom the end of the ages have come” (1 Corinthians 10:11). And in the midst of a culture consumed with the new, the contemporary, and the progressive, the church roots its very identity in a man who lived 2000 years ago, one who proclaimed the reign of God on earth here and now, but whose future return he also asked we look to expectantly.

Moreover, beside this spirit of awe for the next up and coming thing as a path to meaning, the church professes something Christ left behind as a means to understanding our identity and mission today. Before going to the cross, Jesus imparted that the disciples were to continue breaking bread together, as they had done so often before, but that now these common meals would also hold new meaning. They could not go where Jesus was going, but they were to be partners in what was about to be done. The bread broken was to be his body which would be broken; the cup they share was to be his own blood shared—and their repeated sharing in this common meal was to continually move them to participation in his dying, rising, and victorious life. In this, the disciples were to be united with Christ in an event that would inform all past, present, and future. As Lesslie Newbigin explains, “[W]hen they are still far from beginning to understand what ‘the reign of God’ means, Jesus does a deed and gives a command that will bind them to him in a continually renewed and deepened participation in the mystery of his own being….The disciples will thus themselves become part of the revealed secret of the presence of the kingdom.”(1) So, too, Christians participate in this revealed secret today.

Counterculturally, the church has a natural gift in this participating, in this communion, a sacrament given for our good, in which we can discover again and again our identity and purpose. Though the pendulum swings, we live both here and now, and also with an understanding of all that is impending and at hand. And we can live as those who mysteriously participate in the death and life of Christ. We can live as those who proclaim the reign of God presently. We can live expectantly, preparing for the fullness of the coming kingdom. Such partaking and participating unites us with Jesus in history, roots us into a tradition beyond the swing of any pendulum, and sends us out with good news into a world ever-restless for the change that will finally make a difference.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 45.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On Human Nature

October 10, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Although John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty” was published in 1859, it continues to influence our thinking today. This is particularly true of the idea that human beings are essentially good. “Don’t tell me how to live!” essentially sums up Mill’s view of liberty. Yet in his essay, Mill not only tells us how we should live, but who we are! Human beings are essentially good, he declares, and his view of liberty hinges upon this idealistic perspective of human nature. Mill writes, “To say that one person’s desires and feelings are stronger and more various than those of another is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good.”

Many theologians and philosophers of Mill’s era were skeptical of the individual’s passions and one’s willingness to choose what is right over what is pleasurable. Furthermore, as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed, “[Mill] took for granted that those virtues that had already been acquired by means of religion, tradition, law, and all the other resources of civilization would continue to be valued and exercised.”

Today these structures of tradition and authority no longer hold sway in our culture, whereas the idea of the essential goodness of humanity has taken on a life of its own and is now imbedded in our modern psyche. Moreover, the assumption held in Mill’s day—that truth is knowable and should order our lives—is no longer believed by many, who instead would agree with the words of Nietzsche: “Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses.”

On the contrary, the Scriptures witness specifically to the reality of sin and our need for God, and the experience of our world undeniably witnesses to the reality of darkness in our hearts. If this experience has not inspired a change in philosophy, perhaps it is because the illusion of human goodness brings us greater comfort. Yet, does it really? Do we not find it incomprehensible how one could abuse or torture a child? And do we really believe that given time and progress we will learn to love our neighbor as ourselves? Surely the horrors of the twentieth century alone have proven the idea of the essential goodness of human beings to be false.

Jesus himself said in Mark 10, “No one is good except God alone.” But just before declaring this, Jesus showed us how we may know the power to love and to do good—by coming to him in humility, as children aware of their need for a Savior. “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them,” he said, “for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth: anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – This Sickness

October 9, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

One of the scenes in the Gospels involves a man whose words were never recorded. Lazarus is first introduced in the Gospel of John as one Jesus loves—and one who is sick. The illness had silenced Lazarus to the point where it was Mary and Martha who had to send word to Jesus. “Lord, the one you love is sick.” When Jesus heard the news of his friend’s condition, he immediately replied: “This sickness will not end in death.” A few days later, Lazarus was dead.(1)

There are times when I read this story and I long to say in response, “But it did end in death.” Before the story of Lazarus was a story fully marked by the scandal of resurrection, it was first a story marred by the force of death. Lazarus still walked through the pain of his illness; he still faced the uncertainty of dying; his loved ones, the sting of grief. Mary and Martha still mourned at the grave of their brother for four days. And Jesus himself wept.

Even for those who are able to see resurrection as their certain hope, death is still a jarring occurrence. The journey toward death was harsh and shocking to Lazarus, his family, and his friends. But it was not the final word. There is a voice that can be heard even through the last shriek of death.

Author and professor James Loder tells the story of his younger sister’s transforming encounter with death and life. From an early age, it was evident that Kay would be a child marked by struggle. Loder describes her as “a troubled young girl living in a middle-class family in which there seemed to be no trouble at all.”(2) Yet off and on throughout her childhood, she would suddenly break into tears and fall into bouts of genuine discontent, such that she was having great trouble both at home and in school. When she was fourteen, their father was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Nine months later, on the night before he died, Kay and her brother took a walk together in the rain. As they walked quietly together, they came to a lake. Both slowed at the sight of it and its various reflections in the light. On the other side of the lake was a figure that stopped them both completely. Remarkably, there seemed in front of them the silhouette of a Christ-like figure; he was carrying a burden as he walked in the rain. They were both transfixed. “Do you see what I see?” Loder asked. “Yes,” came the hushed reply of his sister.

After that evening life was somehow different for her. Their father passed away, but the vision of Christ in the midst of it was somehow more permanent. Kay’s life took an entirely different turn. She sailed through school and pursued theater with the idea of bringing God into it. Loder explains that it was never easy for her; in fact, “it was very hard,” he said, “but always there was the vision…. [S]he was continually ripped off. Her material was stolen, and she died at the age of thirty-nine. [Yet] even in dying, her great love of God and the power of the vision gave death to death; in love she was married to the Lord for life and for life after death.”(3)

We don’t know how Lazarus reacted to his own death and subsequent resurrection. The gospels do not offer us a single word from the mouth of the one who was raised. In fact, the man at whose grave Jesus wept is known only in the gospels as one who listened. Amidst a crowd drawn by sorrow to a graveside in Bethany, Jesus called out in a loud voice: “Lazarus, come forth!” And the dead man indeed came out, his hands and his feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.

There is something about suffering and despair that brings some to strain our ears for the voice of God. Where we have written God off as silent, where we have lived with the suspicion of a distant or demanding ruler, there is a compulsion within our pain that forces us to listen again. There is an image of Christ who carried the same burden. And it is met with the promise of one who speaks: This sickness will not end in death.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) John 11:1-45.

(2) James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), 228.

(2) Ibid., 229.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Radical Convention

October 8, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Author Dorothy Sayers was never one to live by convention. The only child of an Anglican clergyman, she was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford University in 1915. After graduating from Oxford, she made her living writing advertising copy until she was able to publish more and more of her fiction. In the early stages of her career, she fell in love with a member of a motorcycle gang in England, and joined them in their travels far and wide.(1) Had she convinced C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams to ride with her, the Inklings group might have taken on an entirely different character!

Perhaps it was her unconventional life that led her to highlight the more unconventional side of Jesus’s own life and ministry. In a collection of essays published after her death, she wrote:

“He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But he had ‘a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly,’ and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.”(2)

Indeed, Jesus stormed into the temple—the site of religious convention—consumed by zeal. He upset the tables of the moneychangers and he drove the vendors out with righteous rage. There was nothing dull about this first act John’s Gospel records for us as Jesus entered Jerusalem for Passover. Perhaps it was the last act that finally got him killed. He upended the commoditization of temple worship, driving out those who would prevent prayer by charging a fee. He was anything but dull.

Jesus was disruptive. And his disruption disturbed the status quo. So disruptive was he that the religious leaders of his day feared the entire nation might perish as a result of his advent. As Caiaphas, the high priest warned, “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish” (John 11:50).

Those who sought to kill him did so because they sought to protect law and order, tradition and teaching. It was not vice and corruption that sought him dead, but piety and due process. After all, wasn’t this man the one who allowed prostitutes and tax collectors into his presence, dining with them? Wasn’t this the man who allowed a pound of the finest perfume to be poured on his feet by Mary who then wiped his feet with her hair? Was this not the one of whom it was said, “Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax gatherers and sinners” (Matthew 11:19)! He was too much for the status quo to handle; “If we let him go on like this, all men will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (John 11:48). So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.

It is a painful irony that the ones who wanted him dead were not the lawless, but the pious and the righteous ones. These are the very ones Jesus argued for his followers to exceed in terms of the standards of righteousness: “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” But the righteousness that Jesus espoused looked radically different from the righteousness of the religious leaders who now called for his death. In his upending way, he revealed that those who often appeared to be righteous were really “white-washed sepulchers.” His was a righteousness of compassion and not sacrifice, of reconciliation with offended brothers and sisters, of faithfulness and not lust, of commitment to spouses and not divorce, of keeping one’s word and repaying evil with good.(3) His was a righteousness that pierced straight to the heart where the transformation of mind, body, and action began. His was a righteousness that did not maintain peace and quietness.

As Dorothy Sayers wisely noted in her life and her writing, into every generation and every life Jesus comes to upend and disrupt the status quo. He is not dull. And he calls those who would follow him to forsake self-righteousness and the pride of piety. Like those before us, would we instead do away with God in the name of whatever peace and quietness we now seek to maintain? The journey to Golgotha is lined with the righteous as well as with sinners.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) “Dorothy Sayers, Writer and Theologian,” Biographical Sketches of Memorable Christians of the Past, 17 December 1957.

(2) Dorothy Sayers, The Whimsical Christian: Eighteen Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 17.

(3) See Matthew 12:7 and Matthew 5:20-48, the Sermon on the Mount.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Sky Is Falling

October 7, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Chicken Little is afraid. The sky is falling and she needs to tell the king. She dashes off as fast as she can, running into friends along the way with whom she shares her fear. “The sky is falling!” she yells, and her worried friends join the race to find the king.

The well-known misadventures of Chicken Little and her friends tell a tale of fear and its infectious grasp. Chicken Little had been minding her own business when out of nowhere an acorn fell on her head. Her assumption and subsequent proclamation of the absolute worst-case scenario caused hysteria wherever she went. The derived moral of the story is usually something about the dangers of jumping to conclusions or believing everything you hear. But the message we seem most popularly to have identified with is one pertaining to fear. Chicken Little’s mantra, “The sky is falling,” has become a phrase used to indicate the belief that disaster is imminent, however reasonably or unreasonably surmised.

From continued reports of international economic distress, unanswered corruption and unrest in Africa, government shutdowns in the U.S., the dangers of tainted drinking-water, or the increasing global epidemic of diabetes, the sound of alarm is uninterrupted. The current worldwide tenor is often one of fear and uncertainty. The sky indeed seems to be falling, and depending on the knock these stories make on our heads we may even join in the commotion. Broader cultural anxieties also add to this sense of fearful doom. If we are not consumed by increasing cancer rates and declining education scores, we are fearful of the multiple ways in which our children face dangers that we did not, within a world where uncertainty now seems the only certainty.

Playing on these anxieties, politicians, marketers, and media producers know well that fear is a compelling motivator, and a profitable one at that. Like the music man in the Broadway musical, if they can convince us that “There’s trouble right here in River City,” we will hear what they have to say and open our minds (or wallets) to do something about it. Just this week the inquisitive blurb, “Will staring at a computer screen make you go blind?” commanded my fearful attention and convinced me to stay tuned, ironically, staring at the computer.

While the worry and unrest that is ever being stirred into the worldwide caldron may indeed be based on real concerns, the combined ingredients in this pressure-cooker are at best a recipe for misperception. I read the “terrifying true story” of the Ebola virus in high school and became far more terrified that I would die of a super-virus than I have ever been impressed with the eradication of serious illnesses like polio, measles, or smallpox. Focusing on our fears, ever-reacting to our worries, and accepting this culture of fear as a given, not only affects our subsequent reasoning, living, and faithfulness, our fears in fact become us. Our fears tell us how to spend our money, raise our children, vote in an election, and participate in (or isolate ourselves from) society. We become no different than Chicken Little or the slave in Jesus’s parable who withdrew in fear of his master and buried his talent in the sand.

Yet the harsh rebuke of this slave in the parable of the talents makes it clear that safe-living is not an option, nor an ultimate value, in the countercultural kingdom of God. Is there perhaps a distinctively Christian alternative to the atmosphere of fear that is so pervasive and contagious? The parable of the talent asks its hearers to see the power and control we allow to masquerade as security and so convince ourselves that we are living wisely, perhaps even morally upright, when we are really living only in fear. These fears move us to withdraw from the kingdom Jesus calls us to join and join with him in announcing. Instead of moving further up and farther into the kingdom he proclaimed among us, we dig for our souls a place in the outer darkness.

There is indeed an alternative, but it is neither safe nor easy. It involves laying down fears to follow Christ with faith’s daring; it involves opening our lives to a world that will scare us, and rejecting the anxiety of a world convinced the sky is falling. The Christian alternative to a culture of fear is a kingdom of hospitality and abundance, vulnerability and generosity, love and self-sacrifice—the very kingdom Christ shaped with his living and his dying.

“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’”(1)

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Matthew 16:24.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Reputation Management

October 4, 2013 broboinhawaii 1 Comment

While many industries struggle during times of economic downturn, the identity management industry, a trade emerging from the realities of the Internet Age, continues to gain business steadily. As one company notes in its mission statement, they began with the realization that “the line dividing people’s ‘online’ lives from their ‘offline’ personal and professional lives was eroding, and quickly.”(1) While the notion of anonymity or the felt safety of a social network lures users into online disinhibition, reputations are forged in a very public domain. And, as many have discovered, this can come back to haunt them—long after posted pictures are distant memories. In a survey taken in 2006, one in ten hiring managers admitted rejecting candidates because of things they discovered about them on the Internet. With the increasing popularity of social networks, personal video sites, and blogs, today that ratio is now one in two. Hence the need for identity managers—who scour the Internet with an individual’s reputation in mind and scrub websites of image-damaging material—grows almost as quickly as a high-schooler’s Facebook page.

With the boom of the reputation business in mind, I wonder how identity managers might have attempted to deal with the social repute of Jesus. Among officials, politicians, and soldiers, his reputation as a political nightmare and agitator of the people preceded him. Among the religious leaders, his reputation was securely forged by the scandal and outrage of his messianic claims. Beyond these reputations, the most common accusations of his personal depravity had to do with the company he kept, the Sabbath he broke, and the food and drink he enjoyed. In two different gospels, Jesus remarks on his reputation as a glutton. ”[T]he Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’”(2) In fact, if you were to remove the accounts of his meals or conversations with members of society’s worst, or his parables that incorporated these untouchables, there would be very little left of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. According to etiquette books and accepted social norms, both from the first century and the twenty-first, the reputation of Jesus leaves much to be desired.

Ironically, the reputation of those Jesus left behind does not resemble his reputation much at all. Writing in 1949 with both humor and lament, Dorothy Sayers describes the differences: ”For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian churches have labored, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master. They have hustled the Magdalens from the communion table, founded total abstinence societies in the name of him who made the water wine, and added improvements of their own, such as various bans and anathemas upon dancing and theatergoing….[F]eeling that the original commandment ‘thou shalt not work’ was rather half hearted, [they] have added to it a new commandment, ‘thou shalt not play.”(3) Her observations have a ring of both comedy and tragedy. The impression Christians often give the world is that Christianity comes with an oddly restricted understanding of words such as “virtue,” “morality,” “faithfulness,” and “goodness.” Curiously, this reputation is far more similar to the law-abiding religion of which Jesus had nothing nice to say. ”Woe to you, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 23:23).

When the apostle Paul described the kind of fruit that will flourish in the life of one who follows Jesus, he was not giving the church a checklist or a rigid code like the religious law from which he himself was freed.(4) He was describing the kinds of reputations that emerge precisely when following the friend of tax-collectors and sinners, the drunkard, the Sabbath-breaker, the Son of God. Jesus loved the broken, discarded people around him to a social fault. He was patient and kind, joyful and peaceful in ways that made the world completely uncomfortable. His faithfulness was not a badge that made it seem permissible to exclude others for their lack of virtue. His self-control did not lead him to condemn the world around him or to isolate himself in disgust of their immorality; rather, it allowed him to walk to his death for the sake of all.

There are no doubt pockets of the world where the reputation of the church lines up with that of its founder. The prophets and identity managers of the church today pray for many more. Until then, in a world deciphering, critically or otherwise, the question of reputation, “What does it mean to be Christian?” perhaps we might ask instead, “What did it mean to be Christ?”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) From the website ReputationDefender.com/company accessed Jan 15, 2009.

(2) Luke 7:34, Matthew 11:19.

(3) Dorothy Sayers, “Christian morality” in The Whimsical Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 151-152.

(4) “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Living Toward Christ

October 3, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Do not love the world, nor the things in the world,” reads 1 John 2:15. These are strong words, and when I first heard them as a young Christian they were given more weight than they might be in certain quarters today. As a new believer, I sought guidance on how I should live, and was duly rewarded with an appropriate set of prohibitions. The instruction was largely of the “don’t do this” or “avoid that” variety. I quickly grasped that the main agenda was to avoid contamination. This is what Dallas Willard describes as “the gospel of sin management.”

Armed with my first burst of enthusiasm and zeal for my newly born faith, I took to the “not-doing” and “avoidance” with a missionary zeal that would have put William Booth to shame. I read books on the exchanged life. I was sure that the sloppy, half-hearted, and mediocre life I was living was a denial of true Christianity and a mockery of the real thing. Yet my focus on withdrawal, personal holiness, and my purity became, however subtly, a distraction. I was more occupied with me and less with Christ. My internal state, feelings, and spiritual condition (as I saw it), totally filled my horizons.

The great reformer Martin Luther suffered similar preoccupations in his time. He obsessed about sins, he feared God’s wrath, he longed for a divine welcome. His awakening to what he called an “alien righteousness” (something provided by another for him) shattered his self indulgent illusions and opened up a world rooted in God’s amazing grace and mercy. Luther learned what so many have had to learn since; namely, that salvation is the gift of God’s grace. We can’t earn it, work for it, wrestle it to the ground, or fight for it. It is God’s gracious, merciful gift (cf. Ephesians 2:8-9).

Now, the yearning for righteousness, Christlikeness, and a devout life is an admirable longing; indeed, it is an essential longing of discipleship. But the great mistake is to somehow embrace this as a call to individualism and self-obsession. It is not. As the French theologian Jacques Ellul said, “The yearning for holiness is not at odds with the desire for relevance. For while holiness sets us apart unto God, it is God who calls us into the world.”(1) Christians are called to God and sent by God into the world.

Os Guinness captures the necessary tension between our need to pursue holy lives as individuals and the desire to connect meaningfully with our culture and those around us. He speaks of “prophetic untimeliness” and the sense that the man or woman of God lives by the eternal in time. Likewise, Richard John Neuhaus, former editor of First Things magazine, suggested we are to be “in the world, not of the world, but for the world.” The danger for many of us is to live the extremes in either direction. I so love the world that I embrace its ways, values, attitudes, and delights uncritically—thus, losing any sense of distinction and prophetic edge for the gospel. Or I so withdraw from the world that my life may seem pure (to the audience of oneself), but exists in splendid self-obsession; thus I may end up (perhaps) morally distinct, but socially irrelevant.

Must we embrace such a dichotomy? Surely the example of Jesus in his incarnational ministry is far superior? Or the model of the apostles and the early church who took to the streets, the forums, and the places of civic discourse? They lived, loved, and preached in all of these diverse places and were themselves the better for it. They lived, loved, and preached in all of these places not because they were consumed with themselves but because they were filled with the love of Christ and hence a love for the world around them.

Stuart McAllister is vice president of training and special projects at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Charles Ringma, Resist the Powers (with Jacques Ellul) (Colorado Springs, Colorado: Pinon Press, 2000), 171.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Empty Cross

October 2, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There was a body on the cross. This was the shocking revelation of a 12 year-old seeing a crucifix for the first time. I was not used to seeing Jesus there—or any body for that matter. The many crosses in my world were empty. But here, visiting a friend’s church, in a denomination different from my own, was a scene I had never fully considered.

In my own Protestant circles I remember hearing the rationale. Holy Week did not end with Jesus on the cross. Good Friday is not the end of the story. Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried. And on the third day, he rose again. The story ends in the victory of Easter. The cross is empty because Christ is risen.

In fact, it is true, and as Paul notes, essential, that Christians worship a risen Christ. “[For] if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Even walking through the last events of Jesus on earth—the emotion of the Last Supper, the anguish in Gethsemane, the denials of the disciples, the interrogation of Pilate, and the lonely way toward Golgotha—the Christian is well aware that though the cross is coming, so is the empty tomb. The dark story of Good Friday will indeed be answered by the light of Easter morning.

And yet, there is scarcely a theologian I can imagine who would set aside the fathomless mystery of the crucifixion in the interest of a doctrine that “over-shadows” it. The resurrection follows the crucifixion; it does not erase it. Though Christians confess that the cross has indeed taken away the sting of death and that Christ has truly borne our pain, the burden of discipleship is that we will follow him. Even Christ, who retained the scars of his own crucifixion, told his followers that they, too, would drink the cup from which he drank. The Christian, who considers him or herself “crucified with Christ,” will surely take up one’s cross and follow him. The good news is that Christ goes with us, even as he went before us, fully tasting humanity in a body like yours and mine.

Thus, far from being an act that undermines the victory of the resurrection, the remembrance of Jesus’s hour of suffering boldly unites us with Christ himself. For it was on the cross that he most intimately bound himself to humanity. It was “for this hour” that Jesus himself declared that he came. Humanity is, in turn, united to him in his suffering and near him in our own. Had there not been an actual body on the cross, such mysteries would not be substantive enough to reach us.

Author and undertaker Thomas Lynch describes a related problem as well-meaning onlookers at funerals attempt to console the grief-stricken. Lynch describes how often he hears someone tell the weeping mother or father of the child who died of leukemia or a car accident, “It’s okay, that’s not her, it’s just a shell.”(1) But the suggestion that a dead body is “just” anything, particularly in the early stages of grief, he finds more than problematic. What if, he imagines, we were to use a similar wording to describe our hope in resurrection—namely, that Christ raised “just” a body from the dead. Lynch continues, “What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than ‘just a shell,’ he’d raised his personality say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? […] Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.”(2)

Surely, the body of God on a cross is a mystery. On the cross, we find the one whose offering of himself transformed all suffering and forever lifted the finality of death. We find the very figure of God with us broken, a body who cried out in a loud voice in the midst of anguish, on the brink of death, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Precisely because the cross was not empty, the resurrection is profoundly full.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: Penguin, 1997), 21.

(2) Ibid.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Consuming Christ

October 1, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

It can happen to any of us since it begins innocently enough. We need to get a new camera, or a new outfit, and we begin an online search. We begin comparing prices and online reviews hoping to find the best value. Before we know it, we’ve spent an entire afternoon shopping for whatever is the latest and greatest product.

Perhaps we feel great about scoring the best deal, but I know that for me, I am overcome with a sense of disgust that an entire afternoon was lost to shopping. I feel sheepish about how I’ve used what little precious time I have to satisfy my latest consumer craving. Furthermore, the more I indulge my desire to satisfy my purchasing power the more my identity becomes that of a purchaser. As Annie Leonard notes in The Story of Stuff, “Our primary identity has become that of being consumers—not mothers, teachers, or farmers, but of consumers. We shop and shop and shop.”(1)

For the United States in particular, what began as a period of unparalleled optimism and prosperity in following World War II has become a national obsession. Retailing analyst, Victor Lebow, expressed the solution for converting a war-time prosperity into a peace-time economy of growth and abundance: “Our enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption….[W]e need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”(2) In addition, the chairman of President Eisenhower’s council of economic advisors stated: “The American economy’s ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods.”(3)

This seems a very reductive purpose statement when looking at something as complex as economic systems. But this was the basic thinking of the time. I wonder about the success of this strategy. On the one hand, I did just spend hours of my day shopping. On the other hand, there are the perennial issues of health care, education, citizens, communities, housing, transportation, recreation, or less poverty and hunger to consider as well. Should the ultimate goal for any economy be to simply create a mass culture of consumption? Or is it to create a better society?

It doesn’t take an expert to see the impact of this ‘solution’ in our lives today. We live in a throw-away society, where what we currently have today is passé tomorrow. More insidious, of course, is the way in which a consumptive-economy works to make us feel inadequate if we do not have the latest and greatest shoes, clothes, cars, tools, technology, or gadgets.

Of course, no one is immune from this entrenched influence. A consumer-driven mentality impacts the way in which Christians view and participate in church community. Casual language about “church shopping” belies one of the more subtle impacts. It becomes more and more difficult to see the church as the present day representation of Jesus Christ; we are members of this organic body entrusted with mission and witness in the larger society. Instead, consumerism tempts Christians to see ourselves as “shoppers” examining who offers the best product for our needs. Following Jesus looks more like a marketing strategy for a better life, marriage, kids…and on and on the shopping goes.

If belonging to a church is judged as a product to be consumed, the church must appeal to the consumer to “buy into” the product. As a result, the message sounds more and more like self-help messages of Jesus as the answer to our every need, our every discomfort, and our every trial. Indeed, Jesus becomes the ultimate product to provide us with the life we’ve always wanted—comfort, convenience, and efficiency. As the church reduces Jesus to a commodity, there is more and more pressure to “sell” the benefits of following Jesus. As a result, the counter-consumer messages of the gospel are ignored or altered. But what did Jesus say?

Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth.

No one can serve two masters.

If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does life consist of possessions.

Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves….for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.(4)

Indeed, in response to this last teaching of Jesus, John’s gospel reports that many of the disciples said, “‘This is a difficult statement; who can listen to it?’….[And] as a result of this many of his disciples withdrew, and were not walking with him anymore” (John 6:60, 66).

Who can hear the message of the gospel in a world that makes consumer confidence the measure of strength or weakness, success or failure? Who can listen to it when our chief desire is for a packaged Jesus, not too challenging and certainly comforting, ready and able to meet every need? Indeed, who can listen to the challenging words of Christ when we are about the business of converting “the buying and use of goods into rituals,” and seeking “our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption?”(5) Are we rightly consuming Christ or simply shopping for another product?

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Anne Leonard, http://www.storyofstuff.com.

(2) As cited in “Consumer Culture is no Accident” by David Suzuki, http://www.eartheasy.com/article_consumer_culture.htm, accessed Sept 13, 2013.

(3) Ibid.

(4) See Matthew 5:44, 6:19, 24, 7:1; Mark 2:17, 8:34; Luke 12:15; John 6:53-68.

(5) Victor Lebow as cited in “Consumer Culture is no Accident” by David Suzuki.

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