I have to begin with the positives of the sermon.  Ironically, the end of his sermon provided the strongest part of his sermon.  He talked about how porn is destroying the marriage relationship, how men are sometimes too negative, and how performance and fear can sometimes get in the way of a healthy marriage.  We do need to recognize that porn is destroying our nation and that the ‘performance’ being all important (as touted in most Hollywood sex scenes) sets an impossibly high standard.

But Driscoll also had an extremely high number of unnerving points in his sermon that made me squirm in my seat.  Making the same mistakes as evangelical pastors (such as those who propogate the myth that Charles Darwin recanted on his death bed), he makes a blanket statement, supported with no ‘biblical’ evidence, saying “all men are visual.”  It took me a total of five seconds to search on google to find a scientific study that disproved this pop myth social theory, but Driscoll used no scientific studies to back up his claim that “all men are visual.”  What is more unnerving is that Driscoll, who is known for using the bible to back up his claims, cited no scripture either in support of his “fact” that men are visual.  I am not a fan of proof-texting, but I would think that Driscoll would cite some scripture if he is going to make a claim on half of the human race.

He goes on to make the extremely sexist statement, informed by his “masculine” view on the world, that:

“Men are in a fight every minute of every day.  Women don’t understand this.”

Perhaps some don’t, but most do.  Most women are also in a struggle every minute of their lives.  But this is not the main point.  The main problem with saying this is it indirectly encourages sin. When Driscol uses the blanket word “men” and says “fight,” those men who may not feel the same way as Driscoll are now ostracized in his community.  What’s more?  Women feel that it is abnormal to struggle everyday with sexual issues.  Driscoll is institutionalizing the sin that he hates by doing this.  Some may think I am being extreme here, but there is a better way to deal with this topic:

Make this a human issue instead of a men’s issue.

Driscoll also keeps mentioning “lust” without defining it.  The largest problem in discussing sexuality is the lack of terminology that pastors “assume” people already understand.  Then they make analogies like Driscoll made in the sermon to explain Lust.  He suggests that looking at a women and considering her beautiful is not lust, but looking back at her a second time is lust.  He has just created the arbitrary sin of looking twice at a women. Thus we created men who are afraid to look at women………..

We have to come up with better terms for lust than this.  I have many more qualms with the article, but I would first like to open up discussion here:

What is lust and why is it a sin?  I’m hoping that people will be as specific as possible.  This is a very important topic.

2. One person writes on why Obama should include McCain in his cabinet. I think this is the BEST idea I have head in a while and hope that others will encourage Obama to do the same.

3. Will females be represented on Obama’s Cabinet?  This is question we all should be watching closely for in the announcements next week.

4. With the holidays coming up, Jonathon brings up the catch-22 involved with retailers this Christmas.  On the one hand, we don’t want to be consumed by consumeristic tendencies, but on the other hand not buying will hurt our economy overall.  See the New York Time Article on the economy for more.

5. Over at FP Passport, I am happy that Obama is considering a regional approach to Afghanistan, but am still angry that he is considering a bailout for automakers (Jordon Cooper seems to share my anger…while you’re there also look at what Starbucks would look like if it were a church).  I would encourage everyone again to read about the famine in Afghanistan and get president-elect Obama to help fix the conditions which lead people towads terrorism in Afghanistan.

6. Lord, we pray for Wilmington and the 7,000 who have lost their jobs in this unfortunate layoffs at DHL.  Please help Clinton County recover this and get them back on their feet.

7. The New York Time also deals with the catch-22 of foreign policy having to do with Pakistan and the Taliban.  Now that Pakistan is actually taking action, the times reports that it is much more difficult for Pakistan than they originally thought it would be.  They have to destroy elaborate tunnel system to get to the Taliban.  This would not be so difficult if they could resort to what the times calls “the scorched early policy,” but this type of fighting alienates the neutral Pakistanis and throws them further into the hands of the Taliban.  If we support Pakistan by giving them more resources, they will use it for more money in a war that, even with full sustained military action as in the region they are in now, is much more difficult to “win” because of the elusive nature of the enemy.  The soluation?  Humanitarian aid and decisions made by non-western leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Taliban.  This is the only way to get the aid in to the people who need it most.

8.  The extreme home make over Haifa Street Edition.  At least there seems to be some good news in the world. =)  Read the essay on it here.

9. The president of Iran sent a letter to congratulate Mr. Obama upsetting conservatives and receiving praise from moderate politicians.  It will be interesting to see how things turn out for Ahmahenjad in the upcoming election in Iran.  Lord, we ask for your divine presence to be in Iran.  We ask for your spirit to speak to these people.  We ask for your power to present in all of these situations.

10. Father Stephen quotes Kallistos Ware’s Cosmic Christ and it is worth reading to get an Eastern Orthodox perspective on creation.

11.  More talk about Shane Claiborne at Evangelical Political Analysis.

12. Alan Creech gives a timely post on St. Martin in the midst of veterans day.

1. It is important to observe contradictory trends. For example, “He said we have a lot more good commentaries available to us than we did fifty years ago. Yet, mainline churches have fewer conversions than ever before.”  I especially like Reformed Pilgrim’s thoughts when he says, “Our mainline churches are focusing on the minutia difference between supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism, for example, but are ignoring the call to both know God and to follow his sending us to our neighbor’s house. There should be a constant tension between group Bible studies and sharing of one’s faith. Otherwise we end up in a holy huddle somewhere arguing about non-essentials.”

2. Current evangelical fragments are moving into a new phase — into polarized “clumps.”  One way to help break these clumps is to stop the divide between youth and adult worship that sometimes occurs in traditional structure.  Clumping is not really a new phenomenon.  Ever since the reformation we have been seeing clumps forming and breaking off from state religions.  As state religions lost more and more power in Europe, individual communities could build localized contexts to meet local needs.  This idea of ‘locality’ was carried nowhere more than in America. With the advent of Luther and ’sola scriptura,’ there have been varying ways in which different scholars have interpreted the Bible.  The only ‘new’ thing about this is that, more and more often, more radical or ‘extreme’ views of scripture can gain ground via the internet through blogs and social networking.  Recently I was listening to post-election panel discussions on Princeton’s website, and one professor noted that Barack Obama understood something about the world.  She said we are not living in a world where America can be at the ‘top’ anymore.  America has to, instead, be a central network hub for the world with lots of connections.  This shift in policy that will come with Obama’s presidency also says something about the way that church will happen in this new century.

3. The most dangerous trends in any age are the trends that most people do not see.  I have quoted one of those trends on my blog earlier from a New Yorker article on sex that needs serious consideration.  I would suggest also looking at how the blog halfway to normal dealt with this issue of sexuality.  Carson makes the case that evangelical leaders need to stop beating the dead horse of 1920’s liberalism, and according to Reform Pilgrim, “Today’s issues like justification, inerrancy, primacy of family, gender roles, sexuality, pornography, modesty, race relations (very few race-integrated churches), tolerance, consumerism and human flourishing are the current issues at hand.”  I like this outlook.  On trend that we have to consider is why superheroes have often taken the place of Saints in contemporary times.

4. There is a trend in our churches to be consumed by social concern.  David Fitch recently wrote on why full-fledged support of Obama, while not necessarily harmful, sometimes help us miss the centrality of the gospel as small (we so often want it to be something large that we forget it is like a mustard seed…and props to Jason for the link to Fitch’s article).  Over at Kingdom Grace, there is also a wake-up call going on asking why we are so involved with social concern (which, seems to be argued there, is only an extension of Christian sub-culture).  Social concern is very true of the emergent movement.  Jesus himself, however, was quite concerned about social issues.  The main question we must consider is how and why Jesus concerned himself with social issues (the answers to this are as many as the books who claim to know the historical Jesus).  If you read Crossan, for instance, he says:

…[Jesus sought to] rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return.  The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenged launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterrean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shae, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish heirarchies, and maintain discriminations.

Is this necessarily the picture of Jesus?  Or is it perhaps Crossan’s longing for his own world to see political equality and egalitarianism?  The question may not be answered simply.  Crossan certainly does make a valuable point about the life and times of Jesus missed by more conservative readers, but he does make a bold statement that the central message of Jesus is about “free healing” that launched a political revolution.  Did Jesus really mean to launch a political revolution?  How do we put all of this together with his kingdom?  These are all central questions that Christian organizations must deal with today.

5. There is a trend in our churches to emphasize discipleship over the gospel.  I think that there should be a balance between the two, just as there is with everything else.  Gospel should naturally lead towards discipleship.

James once said “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself form being polluted by the world” (James 1:27).  This doesn’t seem like such a radical point of view until one considers the way that the Romans viewed religion.  Borrowing from Richard Horsley’s Jesus and Empire, we can see just as much Romans viewed religion as an extension of the state:

“The most divine Caesar…we should consider equal to the Beginning of all things…; for when everything was falling [into disorder] and tending toward dissolution, he restored it once more and gave it to the whole world a new aura; Caesar…the common good fortune of all…the beginning of life and vitality…All the cities unanimously adopt the birthday of the divine Caesar as the beginning of the year…who was being sent to us and our descendants as Savior, has put an end to war and has set all things in order; and [whereas] having becoming [god] manifest, Caesar has fulfilled all hopes of earlier times…the birthday of the God [Augustus] has been for the whole world the beginning of good news (gr: evangelion) concerning him [therefore let a new era beginning from his birth).” –OGIS 2.#458

When James says the word “religion” and does not include the word “Caesar,” he is subverting empire and committing a crime against the crown.  Not only that, but it is a commentary on the whole power structure of Rome.  How did Rome perpetuate the infamous Pax Romana?  The ‘peace of Rome’ was sustained by taking money from conquered people’s in the form of tribute to the capital and Rome redistributing that money to Roman legions who would, in turn, protect the crown.  While Rome takes from others to protect themselves, the church, as a vital and life-sustaining force for the world, gives to others who cannot protect themselves.

But this is the way that church has always been.  We have always been called to give ourselves away and to show God’s grace by helping the helpless.  We have always been called to share the gospel to all, even if this means great personal loss for ourselves.  We have always been called to carry our cross.  We have always been called, even if it is dangerous…

Andrea talks about whether or not pastors are abusing their exemption from taxes.

Justin wonders if Obama is really a socialist.

Andre talks about how another Christian president might not be the answer.

In an especially interesting article, Kelly talks about why she is not totally happy with Shane Claiborne.