Tagged!

Michael Kruse tagged me several days ago, along with offering a generous recommendation of this humble little site. I confess that I've sort of been feeling like someone who has unexpected guests and hasn't been keeping up with the chores, but if you're stopping by for the first time, then welcome.

As the meme goes, I believe, I'm supposed to recommend several blogs that I think more people should be reading. Most of these I've been reading for some time now; I don't think that they'd qualify as lesser-known as per the original meme, but I think all of them are worth adding to your feed reader if you haven't already:

• James Mills - If James lived near me, I'd always be at his house raiding his bookshelf.
• Todd Heistand - Todd serves at a local church called the Well. He's a fellow Biblical grad who's trying to actually implement this whole "missional" thing.
• Todd Littleton - I met Todd during an etrek course a few years ago. He's thoughtful and balanced.
• Al Hsu - Al wrote one of the best books I've read on living missionally in suburbia.
• Bob Robinson - Bob puts together a great theologically oriented blog that offers a lot of substance.

The End is the Beginning: A People of Vocation

Previous posts in this series can be found here, here, here, and here.

God calls Abram in Genesis 12 and inaugurates a new era in history. Much ink has been spilled on this particular topic, but permit me to add my own small take: the call of Abram isn't something to be read in isolation from the previous 11 chapters, but rather as a continuation of them. In other words, God's call of Abram is a creational act, through and through - or, more specifically, perhaps we should call it an act of re-creation, a glimmer of the new amid the old.

What is really happening in the call of Abram is nothing less than God's reinstitution of his creation project that has become derailed. This is important, because what we need to recognize here is that God isn't about scrapping the mess and starting over. The creation project has become deeply and foundationally broken, but God remains committed to it, determined to see it to his desired end. And he intends to do this, not by starting a new thing as over against the old, but rather by bringing the new right smack-dab in the middle of the old, so that in the end the old will be subsumed in the new. Some time later, one of Abram's descendants will describe this sort of activity in terms of yeast and mustard seeds - but we're not there yet. In fact, this is a puzzling bit of news, as Abram is an old man without children.

The themes of creation are rich in the Abram narrative, if we know how to look for them. Perhaps the most significant is the theme of giving fullness to that which is empty - God fills the void of creation in Genesis 1, and God fills a similar void in Abram and Sarai's life by providing a child. This leads to a twofold promise in relation to the land - Abram's descendants will rule it and fill it, a microcosm of the vocational call of the image of God granted to the man and woman in Genesis 1. New creation begins here, with the institution of the people of Israel and the assignment of a vocation to them. We significantly misstate the point of Genesis 1-11 when we read it to discover how God went about the task of creation. This has little to do with creation in a general sense. Genesis 1-11 is included in our text specifically to tell us who the people of God are and what their task is to be. Genesis 1 is about Abram more than it is about Adam.

And yet, we are left with Adam's legacy - remember the statement in Genesis 5? Adam had a son in his image. Abram is as much a child of Adam as he is a child of God - the fundamental flaw that has endangered the creation project to this point in the narrative has yet to be resolved. The rest of the Old Testament is about the conflict between these two realities, image and curse - and at the end of the narrative, we find that Abram's descendants are cast from the land in an event that is strangely reminiscent of another exiling, long before, in a garden somewhere in the same neighborhood.

Good and Tired

I'm just coming off a fantastic weekend. My wife and kids are off to NY to visit family for a few days, so I took the opportunity to get together with my gaming buddies. As it so happened, we had something of a perfect storm - both of their wives were also away on Saturday, so lacking any other obligations, we chucked cards and threw dice and smoked pipes and had a ridiculously good time. We made it through two full games of War of the Ring (a multi-hour wargame based on Lord of the Rings, currently one of my faves); I lost the second game on the last turn as Frodo succumbed to the corruption of the ring standing at the brink of the Crack of Doom. Several games of Settlers of Catan were also in the mix - Cities and Knights as always but also including Fishermen, which is an excellent little expansion that was a magazine insert a few months ago and is relatively easy to track down (as well as being a bargain at generally under five bucks). If you're a Settlers fan, you owe it to yourself to get this one. In addition, we sampled a few new ones - Hive, which was fun but light (you can play it online at hivemania.com); Citadels, which was an instant favorite; and Twilight Struggle, which has immediately moved to the top of my "must haves" list. We started with WotR on Friday night at 9pm, and when we were finished went immediately into Settlers. We finally crashed at about 4am, slept until 11, and dove right back into Settlers after breakfast. The last game of the day was Twilight Struggle, which wrapped up at about 2am this morning. I haven't done this much gaming in ages - and I'm exhausted.

Gaming is such a fulfilling hobby. I think a lot of folks might read this list and wonder how I could sink close to 20 hours in one weekend into board games. For me, games have it all - the thrill of competition, the challenge of strategy and tactics, the rush of victory and the camaraderie of good friends. If you think of things like Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit when you think of board games, you need to know that the mass market crap that lines the shelves of your local big box retailer can't possibly compare to the fine offerings that you'll find at a smaller hobby-oriented games shop. There is a game to fit every person, whether you want competition or cooperation, a ten minute filler or a four hour dicefest, and they'll all offer something more than your standard roll the dice, move the piece insomnia cure with a Milton Bradley logo on the front.

I was going to say something about the recent Mark Driscoll thing, but to be honest, I'm in too good of a mood and I'm running on five hours of sleep. Maybe Driscoll should sit down with Pagitt, McLaren, and Bell for a game of Catan and a good cigar.