In the Bible there is a tendency for resurrected people to eat. Consider the following verses:

Luke 24:41-43 And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.

Luke 8:54-55 But taking her by the hand he called, saying, “Child, arise.” And her spirit returned, and she got up at once. And he directed that something should be given her to eat.

Luke 24:40-43 And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.

John 11:39 Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.”

John 11:43-44 When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

John 12:1-2 Six days before ithe Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at the table.

It doesn’t happen in every instance, but it does happen often enough to make you wonder what is going on. Are people still hungry after they die? Well, maybe, but I think there is a little bit more behind it. It seems that spirits (including angels) cannot eat food. In Genesis 18 when Abraham is visited by angels, he sets food before them (v 8) [EDIT: Actually, yes it does say they ate right there in verse 8!] but it doesn’t say that they ate it. They begin talking to him, not eating. In Judges 13 at the announcement of the birth of Samson, the angel who tells Manoah and his wife about Samson refuses to eat food offered him (v 16).

There is extra biblical evidence as well. In the apocryphal book of Tobit, the angel Raphael who had visited Tobit and helped him finally reveals himself as an angel at the end of the story. He says “All these days I did appear to you; but I neither ate nor drank, but you saw a vision.”

I think the reason that people are given food after they are resurrected is to prove that they are really alive, that it isn’t a ghost or an angel. The resurrection will be literal and physical. Our bodies will be reanimated and renewed. Freed from sin.

I went to the mall today. I just needed a book on managing an Airport network from Barnes and Nobel but after buying it I decided to wander into the mall and eat at the food court.

What a sad place. I looked at the store windows and saw immediately the lie. In the windows the models and mannequins are slim and beautiful. The clothes hang on them perfectly. The lighting is placed specifically to make them look their best. There isn’t any mustard on the sleeve of the jean jacket or creases in the lower back of the blouses imprinted from a long ride in the car. It is imaginary.

Reflected in the glass that separates us from that world I saw the reflections of real people. The man with the large gut that strained his t-shirt. The middle-aged couple pushing their baby in an oversized baby carriage, neither looked particularly attractive and both looked like they needed sleep. Their clothing chosen for functionality over aesthetics. I saw my own reflection. I need a haircut and a shave. My clothing fits loosely because it is more comfortable that way. I don’t look like that male model on the poster, I am nondescript. I blend in.

But there we all are. We are walking through the shopping wonderland than tells us what we need to be happy and then packages it so that we’ll come to them to get it. As if they know what we need. As if they could package it. As if they could profit from it.

Then I see the group of girls who are juniors in high school (who are followed by a similar group of boys). They are trying desperately to look like the models. They have bought the lie and are trying to live it. Next week they’ll have to come to the retail temple and offer their sacrifices of plastic to get the next thing to keep them at the top of the ever shifting social structure. It never ends my friends, it never ends.

So what is a Christian to do? One answer seems to be that we eschew the entire mess and crawl into an enclave somewhere. We only buy from companies that have a fish symbol on their logos. We homeschool our kids. We get rid of the television. We only listen to Christian radio and Christian music. We isolate. This is the Protestant form of monasticism.

Another answer is to try to blend in. Dress, shop, talk, act like them but all the while we have a secret joy in our hearts. We can make our churches compete with whatever they have going on a Sunday AM or Saturday night or whatever. Worship as concert, preacher as entertainer.

The most common way is neither of those, as surprising as that seems. The most common way amongst American Christians is to just live in the midst of it as if it is all normal. Oh sure, we’ll avoid Abercrombie and Fitch because they’re immoral. We don’t listen to rap or heavy metal but K-LITE radio is fine, nothing there is too offensive. We shop just like everyone else: we shop as if owning stuff defines us. Jesus is a option in the American lifestyle. A little Blockbuster, some Claire’s, a touch of Pier One, gotta have some Gap then sprinkle it with Jesus when we get home.

Keep in mind that I currently include myself in this entire thing. I am just as deeply involved in all of this as most everyone else. This isn’t countercultural Tim judging the unenlightened masses. We suburban Americans all live in the same basic fishbowl, swimming in the same water, eating the same fishmeal. It is the world we live in.

I’ve had a chance to step back a bit because for the past three months my life has been constricted to school and work. Today was the first day in a while I got a chance to get out and do something unstructured and impulsive. So what did I do? I went shopping of course. That is what suburbites do.

But is this “Christian”? I think we’ve come to believe that it is. This is what life is like. This is just how things are done. Isn’t this how we do church? The term “church shopping” isn’t inappropriate or accidental. We go to the church that meets our needs and has the programs we’re after. I have even heard about people who choose their church based on which night of the week the AWANA program is! Shopping and choosing. A little of this, a little of that. We like the music. The pastor is a bit longwinded at times. My kids have friends in the Sunday School classes. The youth program fits our schedule and it isn’t teaching heresy. We attend retreats that show us how to be better dads or husbands. Sometimes we feel challenged and convicted.

Isn’t it a lot like the mall? There is an image behind glass that is attractive and unattainable by us. But there are people who will tell us what we need to do to get there. But when we look in the glass and see our own reflections, they don’t match.

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. ? James 1:22-24 (ESV).

There must be more than shopping. There is something that we’re supposed to be doing, to be “being” that we (myself not only included but as and example) are not. Jesus fits like another commodity in our lives. We have the right words to confess, we sing the right songs and carry the right study Bible, but we aren’t who we think we are. We’ve look in the glass of the shop window, stared intently at our natural face and having turned away, we’ve forgotten who we are and look for the next bargain.

There is a way out of this quagmire. I know there is. And I want to find it. I want to live my life like Jesus really is God incarnate. Like God really was born in a stable. Like he really did heal and preach the kingdom. Like spikes really did pierce his hands and feet. Like he really did hang from those spikes on a Roman torture device. Like he died bearing the burden of sins. Like he really did come to life from death after three days in a cave. Like his actually ascended into the sky and vanished from his friends sight. Like he really is coming again to rule and judge and reign. Like he really is my savior and not just my latest
purchase.

Today’s installment comes via a RoamAbout PCMCIA card in my PowerBook, the old Airport card back in the iBook and a new Airport base station. Yes folks, the house has a wireless network. Very much geeking out.

I got the Airport base station and the RoamAbout card for the price I would have paid for the RoamAbout card everywhere else I looked. So, using government accounting practices, I invested the money I didn’t spend elsewhere on something I didn’t need.

A couple of items of interest on this. First, the Airport software built in to OS X is great. I have an Airport card in the iBook and with it I can tell the Airport base station to dial up the internet and hang up. Totally cool. But with the Roamabout card in the PowerBook I have to use third party drivers. The Airport extensions don’t work. So I had to get a Java app to do this for me. These work wonderfully. If this is an option for you, get this software. I was hoping that, being a Java app, someone had turned it in to a Konfabulator widget, but I haven’t found one yet. Here’s hoping.

This is a clever ploy. A Maine lawmaker half-heartedly introduces a bill that would ban the abortion of “homosexual” fetuses. While a bit of a silly, unenforceable bill, it does open the questions of whether homosexuality is genetic and it seeks to force the liberals to chose between gay rights and abortion rights. He could have pressed the issue even further by amending it to say that abortions for sexual preference that discriminates against female fetuses. That’d get the feminists in a knot fighting for both abortion rights and against sexual discrimination. There’d even be a chance of theoretically enforcing that one since a gene actually does exist for determining male and female.

The state representative said that he got the idea from Rush Limbaugh which should immediately warn you that it is most likely extreme and a bad idea.

The great news is that I got to baptize two of my children last Sunday! I’m really proud of them both, we didn’t push them to it, they decided that they needed to do it.

For a brief devotional before the baptism, I chose the verse that most evangelicals flee: 1Pt 3:21 “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

The first part of this verse I want to touch on to help us understand baptism is the “appeal to God for a good conscience.” In Hebrews 9:14 we are told that it is the blood of Jesus that cleanses our conscience. Baptism, then, points to the blood of Christ or his death. This is the consistent testimony of the New Testament as Paul says explicitly in Romans 6 and Colossians 2 that we are baptized into Christ’s death. Whereas baptism is an appeal, the reality is in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Baptism is an identification rather than salvation.

The other part is the phrase “corresponding to this”. The immediate question is “corresponding to what?” The context of First Peter 3 is corresponding to Noah. Noah didn’t suddenly wake up in the ark and find himself saved. Nor did he hate and fight God up till he was on the ark and thereby become saved. No, God had been working in Noah’s life for over a hundred years. Jesus preached through Noah. God declared him as the only righteous person on all the earth. Noah obeyed God and built an ark. God had clearly been working with and through Noah for a long time. And this is true of my children also. God has been working in their lives for the past few years and now they are seeking to be identified with his death and resurrection in baptism.

Derek Webb has an iTunes exclusive unplugged EP. No new songs but nice versions on three from his current album I See Things Upside Down. The following link will only work if you have iTunes installed. It works for either PC or Mac.

I am now the PROUD owner of an Apple 15″ Titanium Powerbook G4/867MHz 40GB hard drive, 768 MB, 32MB video memory, combo drive, Airport card computer. I am a happy geek. Virtual PC actually works on this. The screen is big enough to work on, the G4 processor screams, the video memory is what it should be. The only draw back is that there is a ding in the case and the battery is only lasting about 1 1/2 hour or so.

Moving from the iBook couldn’t have been easier. Plug in a Cat 5 cable to each computer and drag and drop. I had to reinstall about three programs, the others I just copied over. This is how computing is supposed to be!

On Christ’s office of prophet, I take a slightly different tact than most standard systematic theologies. I acknowledge that Jesus is the fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy in Deuteronomy 18:15 but he is more than simply another, greater Moses. Jesus reveals the Father (John 1:18). Indeed, the Father has spoken to us through the Son in a way he did not to the fathers (Heb 1:2). In this revealing role, Jesus fulfills his office as prophet. This would also necessarily involve his condemning and forgiving sin, giving law, judging etc. Jesus is the better prophet because he is the Word, he is God’s revelation of himself to us. This is an office like “super prophet” as in it cannot get any clearer than this.

Jesus role as prophet (as I’ve described it above) has the Christian life wrapped around it. No one has seen the Father, Jesus has revealed Him (John 1:18). Anyone continues in a sinful life has not seen God (1 John 3:6). It is the Holy Spirit who leads us to Christ (John 15:26). God’s unbounded power has given us all things we need for life and godliness through knowledge (epignosis, true knowledge) of Jesus and partake of the diving nature escaping worldly corruption and sinful desire (2 Pet 1:3-4). All of these things revolve around Jesus’ role as “God revealer” or prophet and all play into our sanctification. Our growth in holiness is dependant on Jesus’ role as prophet.

Two cool ESV (English Standard Version) things:
1) If you have FireFox (and you should, I’m dumping Safari for it) you can download a plugin for the search box. You can type in a scripture reference or a word and it automatically knows which it was. There are many other plugins here.
2) The ESV Reformation Study Bible will be published on March 31. I can’t wait. I’ve wanted that particular study Bible but I don’t care for NKJV so I never got it.

Does Al Gore know about this?