O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

This particular hymn focuses in on on the good news of our God coming in our flesh to save us from our problems, and bring us into the cosmic plan of redemption of the heavens and earth. This is one of the practical implications for Christ’s Incarnation, and one reason why I look forward to celebrating Advent each year.

The video above is from a version I recorded of this piece this past week. You can also download a higher quality mp3. Enjoy!

And speaking of free music, I have an album of hymns set to new music for free. You can snag it here.

Old & New album cover

At the risk of sounding like a shameless plug, this past week I released an album you can download for free. It’s the first volume in what will probably be a three volume set.

There are some songs that will be familiar to OGC, some that we sing corporately and some that have been used as offertories in the past. All of the songs are taken from or inspired by older hymn texts, metrical psalms and poems, spanning from the 13th to 19th centuries. I think these words should be kept in our hearts and minds and I have tried to breathe new life into them through setting them to newer music (hence the name of the album, Old & New).

Our very own Matt Antolick does a great job playing drums on two of the tracks.

So if you want to take advantage of some free music, you can listen or download it below. And thanks for listening!

Official Store
Facebook Page
Official Website

So here’s a peek into some of the more noteworthy books I’ve been reading the past couple months (with Amazon links in case you want to check them out, too):

Practical Theology:
SoulTalk – One of the books I read (and am reading again) to help along our relationships with one another. I’ll be teaching an Equipping Hour class on this starting in a couple weeks.
How People Change – Read this for the upcoming Growth Group focus for our church. Reads more like a handbook.
Sticky Church – The leadership is reading this, trying to learn how to become better at getting people involved in the life of the body.

Theology Proper:
Shop Class as Soulcraft – Currently reading this half-scholarly look into the value of work and human dignity.
Walton’s Genesis Commentary – One of the commentaries I’m reading for our Young Adult series on Genesis.
An Old Testament Theology – a huge and hugely important book for understanding the Old Testament, especially the literary perspectives.

Novels, Biographies, etc.:
New York Trilogy – Paul Auster’s three post-modern writing life novels, in the detective genre. Kinda hard to explain. Yes, they’re weird. Weird and good.
The Red Pony – One of Steinbeck’s shorter novels. Steinbeck is so good at writing about deeply shared human experiences. This wasn’t one of my favs from him, but still good.
Ian McEwan novels – I’ve probably read four or five over the past couple of months. The majority of his writing is deeply disturbing, mostly because he presents darkness in such a banal way. He really gets to the idea of evil residing in every person.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy – another beast of a book (over 600 pages), but so incredibly exciting to read. Metaxas blends biography with a novel-like form. All that plus the spiritual significance of reading about such an inspirational person.
To Kill A Mockingbird – For whatever reason, I missed reading this classic while in school. So I remedied that problem last month.

Swanson – Great Catch

A couple of weeks ago I played an instrumental guitar piece that I wrote reflecting on Jeremiah 3:17:
“At that time Jerusalem shall be called the throne of the LORD, and all nations shall gather to it, to the presence of the LORD in Jerusalem, and they shall no more stubbornly follow their own evil heart.”

We also projected an image from John August Swanson, seen on the right. It was the conversation between the Old Testament prophet and the New Testament Gospel writer that really gave me pause for reflection. What does God’s mission in the world look like? What would it sound like? I definitely don’t think I’ve answered that question (is there only one answer?), but engaging with these questions on deep levels is what we get to do as sons and daughters of this nation-gathering God.

If you’re interested, I recorded a version of this piece. You can listen to it or download it from my website, here.

unfinished heelblocks

Over 2009′s Christmas break I was able to finish making an ashtray I started a while ago. It actually started as a guitar when I was a junior at UF. Myself and Steve, my roommate, were planning on making a guitar. I had access to the College of Art’s wood shop, so we had all sorts of cool tools at our disposal. Then we found out that making a guitar is really hard. And it takes a lot of time. So that ended up on the back burner for a bunch of years, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the fine pieces of wood that we bought in anticipation of our guitar masterpiece. One of those pieces that I’ve been carting around was a mahogany heel block, like the one in the pic. It’s basically a block of wood that you would finish and attach where the neck joins the body. It was a beautiful piece of wood, so I had to use it to do something. Not being a master wood worker and only having access to a Dremel tool, I chose something simple and functional: a cigar ashtray.

the finished ashtray

I routed out the tray (which took forever with a Dremel) and made a few spots to hold some stogies, sanded it smooth and sealed it. The finished product doesn’t look too bad.

There was one thing that kept hitting me, though. I was always having to struggle with the material to get it to do what I wanted to do. This is a similar idea found in a book edited by Jeremy Begbie, Beholding the Glory: Incarnation through the Arts. The chapter on the use of sculpture is written by Lynn Aldrich, a sculptor living in L.A. (here’s some of her work). My material was just a block of wood and it was using every ounce of inertia to stay that block of wood. I feel like the process really spoke to me about the universal idea of struggle or frustration. I had an end in sight and it took hours of struggle to see that end. This is not what life was meant to be. Life was never meant to be a series of struggles where in the end everyone dies anyway. But I have become so accustomed to struggle and frustration that I don’t often give it a second thought.

…cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”

(Gen 3:17b-19)

Maybe we should all get more frustrated or annoyed at the curse of the fall. We probably just accept it more often than not, and that might be a simple coping mechanism so that we don’t all end up in despair. But despair can be a good thing at times. It points to the great divide of where we are and where we want to be. A despairing person is definitely not alright with the way things are.

But we aren’t just left with despair, we do have a hope, a light that shines ever so faintly at the end of our dark tunnel. This is faith—believing that light does exist beyond our current circumstance.

Can a person be in despair and hope at the same time? I guess that’s the Christian walk, figuring out how to live in both of those worlds.

Part 1: Church without Christ, the tortured caricature of southern culture’s Christianity

Part 2: From Christ-Haunted to Christ-Fearing, fear and the south’s counterfeit hospitality

Part 3: From Christ-Haunted to Christ-Beloved, true morality versus a pretense of morality

(This image comes from The Atlantic’s In Focus photojournalism blog. It’s an incredible series, but not without some disturbing images of the protests.)

Amidst the barrage of water cannons, the protestor seems to be standing firm, holding the peace sign in both of his hands, speaking into the chaos.

Why does this image speak so much to us?
Surely it is an interesting picture, composed in such a way, but it is more than mere aesthetics that draws us to it. And it definitely is a moving image of human grit and determination. But I wonder if this particular image hits on another level, especially for those who have experienced the power of Christ in their lives.

Like the protestor standing for his country, Christ stands for His people, who would never be able to stand for themselves. He took the barrage of brokenness, of our idols and addictions. He took on our empty systems that we go to find meaning in this world, our structures of false power. He stood for us until every last drop of our sin was poured out upon Him. And he is found still holding out His arms, crying out into the darkness, “Peace!”

But God picks a different way.  Keep your identity as a true Israelite by seeking the peace and prosperity of the city.  God calls His people to create and consume in a way that causes the city to flourish. And in the city’s flourishing God’s people find their own:

But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jer 29:7 ESV)

We can have a tendency to want to separate ourselves from our environment, but God calls us to more.  Or even if we don’t separate ourselves, we surely don’t deem the flourishing of the city as important as we ought.  God’s words bring us back to our calling in a post-Christian environment. Through properly creating and consuming God tells us that is where we find our peace.

So this is a call to enjoy what our city has to offer.  And this is also a call to make our city better.  This includes all vocations in all areas from all people, for our peace and for the glory of God.

You can also get additional sermons by Tim Keller on the topics we will cover at Gospel in Life’s Resource Section.

Myself and two of my good friends went on a fishing trip where we ate what we caught.  We had an inextricable connection to our food. While we talked and enjoyed our company, we put a worm on the hook, cast the rod, reeled in the fish, removed the hook and the fish’s head, then cleaned, gutted, and removed its scales.

Basket with Loaves and Two Fishes, mosaic from a 5th century church

At the end of the day we grilled our catch along with spices and fruit and many other tasty provisions, making a lavish meal out of our day’s work. And then, only then, could we feast. This took time and energy (we used the whole day) to create, and we enjoyed the abundant setting.

Contrast this experience with going through a fast food drive-thru window. You talk to a menu, a disembodied version of a person whose only relationship to you is economical.  You order a number. You give your new friend some money and receive a bag with more bags and boxes in it.  You don’t know where this food has come from, the people preparing it don’t even know where it came from. The food inside your box inside your bag bears little resemblance to anything you might have seen in the real world. You consume the food as quickly as possible (sometimes without even looking at it) and you don’t even need to leave your car to do so. The eating experience is trying as hard as possible to erase itself.

In this process we are attempting to live as much outside of the world as possible. There is little affirmation of our place in the physical world through the lens of a drive-thru experience.  It plays down our earthiness at the expense of time and pleasure.  The more we see our food as abstract from this world, the easier it is for us to see that in ourselves.  We are gnostic eaters.

Wendell Berry gets it right in his anthology of essays, What Are People For? in saying the modern experience of eating is more like feeding than feasting, and this makes it easier for us to lose the connection to our place in this world.

Some of this might sound absurd: we’re lamenting the ease of our existence? But what we’re really lamenting is not embracing our existence.  It’s not the ease so much as it is the forgetting. We forget that we are physical creatures, dependent on the land and therefore, the Lord, to supply our needs.  We like to forget this because it gives an air of autonomy, thin slice it may be.

Now we won’t always have time to spend an entire day on a meal, and I’m not saying that fast food is intrinsically morally evil, but we should be seeking lives that lead to less material consumption and more proper, meaningful consumption. The kind that emphasizes our connection to this world and doesn’t seek to remove us from it. This affirms how God made us. We need to feed less and feast more.

This was originally posted on gregwillson.com.

I found this novel parallels many aspects of the Old Testament monarchy under David (complete with their very own prophet), and there are also parallels with classical Greek literature like The Odyssey and The Aeneid. These similarities tell us there is something powerful lurking under these words on the page. These stories have the ability to pull on our souls, whispering to us from another world.

These pulling whispers can inspire us and give us a fresh set of eyes to view the world, ourselves, and the possibilities therein. Fascination is a proper response to God’s creation and art through the hands of a good artist cultivates this.

And we need this cultivation. Badly. We’ve been singing the song Speak, O Lord each Sunday over the past four weeks and the last verse has these lines:

Speak O Lord and renew our minds
Help us grasp the heights of Your plans for us

In singing these words, we are asking God to develop in us a holy imagination, one that could begin to be conscious of more of what His plans might be. Now obviously we will never know all of his plans or even a majority of them, but we can know some of them, we can experience them, we can dream of them, we can pray for them. But we can’t do any of this unless God develops a holy imagination within us, one that comes from the renewing of the mind.

So how did Watership Down help in this regard? Well there were many areas, but the most pertinent (especially given our current capital campaign) was envisioning what courage looks like. Yes, a human can learn about courage through the children’s story of a few rabbits (read the book if you don’t believe me, in fact, just read it anyway). These rabbits do posses courage, but they are also mixed with fear. James Neil Hollingworth sums it up nicely with the semi-famous quote,

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

It can be a fearful thing to embark on a campaign to build a building, to rely on others so heavily, to possibly even fail. It can be a fearful thing to rely on God to provide, or to give something up to make room in your budget. But fear need not be the only emotion or action present. Courage can exist alongside such fear, and it is possible for us to act out of courage, if we have the hope that comes from a holy imagination.

Now I’m not saying that you will always succeed if you take courage and act out of this hopeful envisioning. For sure there have been many who have done so and failed at their task. But it is the first step. And this is what God has called us to—abiding in Him, trusting in Him, thinking His thoughts after Him. We may try things and succeed and we may try things and fail, but there is, or should be, something deeper than winning or losing, and that’s living.

Living with God, which includes all the above things, is no easy task for us independents who want things our own way and want it now. Living with God requires us to die to ourselves, and do it daily. And a building campaign is an opportunity to do just that. From the pastor to a layperson, it requires much. This stuff takes courage. How much am I going to be able to give? What can we do without to help in the process? These are all questions that ought to be properly framed within the heights of His plans for us.

Men, along with the rabbits of Watership Down, are a mix of dignity and humility, of adventure and caution, of courage and fear. We will almost always have multiple emotions going on inside of us, but we can act as if something is more important than fear, because we have the spirit of power, love and self-control that comes through faith in Jesus Christ. We can take courage, knowing that it is God who strengthens us and gives us such abilities. Having our imagination sanctified by the Word, we can begin a lifetime of discovering the heights of God’s plans for us. And this will do more than construct a building, it will turn people to pursue their ultimate satisfaction in Jesus.