It's been quite a year

Who would have imagined that “Tebowing,” “9-9-9,” “Occupy,” or “Arab Spring” would become meaningful terms? They weren’t part of our common speech when I started this little blog back on March 9. I’m happy to report at year’s end I’ve had close to 8000 page views. I’m amazed at that number, although I know it is small potatoes compared to others on the web. But I’m not famous like other bloggers are. (That’s my attempt at a joke. Let me know if I need to explain it.) My most viewed posts were about Tim Tebow, Penn State, Love Wins, and Jim Leyland. Maybe I should just stick to sports. I’ve declared I’m done writing about Tebow, but if I still wrote about him, I’d write about Bill Maher’s stupid Tweet referencing Tebow last weekend. If that’s not religious persecution it’s at least religious bad taste. Imagine the uproar if Tebow were to say something aimed at Bill Maher that referenced Hitler and Satan. My take on Tim T at this point is that while the jury is still out on his NFL QB skills, he’s the real deal in terms of humility and sincerity. I’m impressed with how he handles himself.

But enough about Tebow. Let’s move on to a subject I really like. Me. Something significant is happening to me, but you have to read through some other stuff to find out. In addition to writing here, I’ve reached a larger audience writing for two other blogs (The 12 and Think Christian) and for Words of Hope and Spotlight Radio. The Spotlight site went over one million hits in October. Most of those come from Vietnam, Korea and Ecuador. (When I wonder why posts on this site that I think are important aren’t viewed by more people, I comfort myself by thinking how popular I am in other parts of the world.) According to Google, even this little blog has been viewed over 1000 times by people living outside the United States. I know folks in Germany, Belgium and Sweden and understand why those countries would top the list, but this blog has also been viewed over 50 times by people in Russia. I like to imagine some guys in Siberia trying to keep up with the buzz about Tim Tebow. Thanks, whoever you are.

Okay, here’s my news. A new year brings new challenges, and I have accepted a new vocational challenge which begins next week. A couple of days before Christmas I was invited to become the new Vice President of Advancement and Communications for my alma mater, Western Theological Seminary, in Holland, Michigan. I am honored and very grateful to be able to serve the seminary and the Reformed Church in America in this way. Faithful readers may wonder what this will mean for this blog. I don’t know yet. The people who read this blog could make everything easy for me by becoming big donors to the seminary. Sounds good to me. Oh wait, I forgot about the guys in Siberia. Think they’ll go along? This might be tougher than I thought. Anyway, I plan to keep posting, although I know I’m not going to have as much time going forward as I’ve had. But I know I’ll keep reading, writing, watching and saying things, and I plan to keep sharing my reflections with you, as long as you keep reading.

Happy New Year.

George Clooney as Steward in "The Descendants"

We chose to go see The Descendants from the flood of interesting movies out now for different reasons. Gretchen’s primary reason begins with the initials G.C. Among the reasons I was interested was the advertising campaign, which makes it look like a comedy. But don’t be deceived. I knew the pedigree of the film’s director, and knew the movie would have depth. If you want lighthearted fare, don’t stop here. But if you want to be moved, to think about life and what makes it worth living, give The Descendants a whirl.

In my slightly skewed opinion, this is a movie about that horribly unfashionable church word “stewardship,” and how a mid-life crisis enables someone to take seriously the things in life that he holds in trust. George Clooney plays Matt King, an attorney and a descendant of the royal family of Hawaii. His crisis is ushered in by an accident to his wife that leaves her in a coma, and the discovery that she’d been unfaithful to him. The events made me think of the way Richard Rohr maps out mid-life issues in his book Falling Upwards, a book I wrote about in a post called Genuine Wisdom in July.

According to Rohr (and many others) there are two distinct stages of life. The first half is about achieving success and accomplishing goals. Eventually, something happens that we don’t have the emotional and spiritual energy to resolve, and the meaninglessness of the first half of life is revealed. The second half of life is about meaning, making peace with mortality, and deepening spiritually. It’s about discovering intimacy, depth and loss. This is the way I expressed it in a sermon I preached earlier this year: During the second half of life we live fully aware of paradox and irony and above all the tragic sense of life where success is found in failure and life is found in death. We want certainty and clear answers in the first half of life but live comfortably with doubt and uncertainty in the second half of life. We want things to be black or white in the first half of life, but realize there are two sides to everything in creation in the second half of life. We know our selves are filled with both shadow and light, and know everyone else must be that way, too.

There are multiple story lines going on in The Descendants. Matt King is sole trustee of thousands of breathtaking acres of undeveloped land on the island of Kauai. He and his cousins are poised to make millions from the sale of the land. His wife’s accident coincides with the decision to be made about this property. We also gather from the interactions between Matt and his daughters that he’s been a largely absentee father (“I am the back-up parent,” he says. “The understudy.”) As he comes to grip with who his daughters are and what it might mean to actually behave like their father, he also comes to grip with his wife’s betrayal of their marriage. Hence, as I see it, the question of the movie: what does it mean to be a steward of what you hold in trust? On one level, he holds the undeveloped land in trust, on another level he holds his daughters in trust, on yet another level he holds his relationship with his comatose wife in trust. The fact that she has violated that trust does not excuse him from it. How would you market that if you were a Hollywood studio? What they’ve decided to do is show a clip of Clooney running which looks funny and a few clips of some of the sharp-edged, humorous lines between characters. There is a lot more to the movie than that.

There are great performances that create powerfully realistic characters. Robert Forster is particularly memorable as Clooney’s angry father-in-law, unrelenting in his feeling that if Clooney had been a better husband the accident never would have happened. Beau Bridges is one of Clooney’s island-mellow cousins, who, beneath the laid-back veneer, will go to war to get the land sold. Shailene Woodley is wonderful as Clooney’s oldest daughter, as is Nick Krause as her spacey friend Sid. And then there is Clooney, in one his best performances in a long while. Don’t be surprised to see his name when Academy Award nominations come out. They all come across as very real people and you’re never sure how they will behave in any situation.

This is a movie from Alexander Payne, who has shown his willingness to portray people realistically in films like Sideways and About Schmidt. (I also remember how the setting of those films – the California Wine Country and Nebraska – practically became characters. Payne does that again, this time with Hawaii.) Like The Descendants, those movies all have funny moments, but they aren’t particularly funny movies. There is more pathos than humor, and if you liked the pathos of Payne’s earlier offerings, you won’t be disappointed by The Descendants.

Boxing myself on Boxing Day

I posted on why I need to get more stuff a day after I spent a day getting stuff on The 12 today. You can see it by clicking here. Hopefully it will make you smile and think.

Also, I posted a Christmas meditation on Think Christian yesterday. In all humbleness, I thought it was pretty darn good, and you can see for yourself by clicking here in case you missed it yesterday.

Enjoy!

A Christmas Mess

A meditation for this special day. Merry Christmas.

My son's record collection

Talk about the gift that keeps giving! My son Jesse found a guy in Big Rapids through Craig's List and paid him $50 for a few hundred vintage records. What a bargain! How could someone not want these? Tell me the picture of Engelbert you see to the right is not worth twice that amount alone! The cover art is often stunning and as for the music inside . . . well, you haven't really lived until you've listened to the Ray Conniff singers, in their inimitable upbeat style, sing Bridge Over Troubled Waters . . . "When you're down and out. When you're on the street . . . When friends just can't be found . . ."

For Christmas, Jesse wrapped up a treasures like A funny thing happened on the way to hell and gave them to various relatives. He gave his Polish grandmother an album of Polka music and she said, "You mean this as a joke but we actually like this music." And she's right -- some of the music is spectacularly good. Some of it is just as spectacularly bad, but some of it is wonderful.

And, as I look at Gomer here, and Henry Mancini below, I want to know why men don't wear more ascots? And, as I look at Lynn Anderson, I wonder why women don't wear their hair like that anymore.

Last night we were enjoying an evening with some friends and the records came out. They left with a big pile for their children, to make a very special Christmas. Come on, where else can you get the Longines Symphonette performing You and me and a dog named Boo?

So it's a Merry Christmas in the Munroe house. Hope it's a happy one for you, too. Enjoy these images. It's the Christmas gift that keeps giving.

Advent IV: Shepherds and Peace

It's the fourth Sunday of Advent, which means Think Christian has run another of my meditations today. You can find it by clicking here.

What Might Happen if you Watch "All-American Muslim."

A group called the Florida Family Association wants to make sure I don’t watch a show on TLC called All-American Muslim. They needn’t worry about me, because the show is on TLC. (Maybe if it were on ESPN, but TLC . . . ?) They are so worried about me watching it that they’ve inspired advertisers – most notably Lowe’s -- to quit sponsoring it because of the show’s controversial nature. I’m not sure why Lowe’s has been singled out – according to the Florida Family Association, 65 advertisers have quit the show, including Home Depot. So back off Lowe’s, people!

What’s so controversial about All-American Muslim? According to the Florida Family Association: “The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamist believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.” That’s right; the program is controversial because it shows some Muslims being ordinary folks.

There’s no telling what might happen if people thought some Muslims were ordinary folks.

Here’s a show I want to propose for TLC. It’s called All-American Christian and it shows Christians as ordinary folks, instead of people whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to the liberties and traditional values of anyone who believes something different than they do.

Last week I defined Uneasy Evangelicals as Christians who feel compelled to apologize for the behavior of other Christians. Let me say “I’m sorry” about the Florida Family Association. Of course, they are Christians. You probably could tell that because they use the word “family” in their name. Let me also apologize for the Christian co-opting of the word “family.” Sorry single people. Sorry nuns and monks and priests. Sorry Jesus. Sorry Modern Family. (By the way, in case you couldn’t guess, The Florida Family Association doesn’t like Modern Family, either. I do. It’s funny. But I digress.)

Here are some other things the Florida Family Association wants to protect us from. I’m sorry about their stance on these, too:

• Gays serving openly in the military
• Socialistic entitlement of taking money from those who work hard and giving it to those who don’t
• Hyping up environmental dangers for the taking of private property and over restriction of natural resources
• A regressive economy and lower quality of life versus harvesting America’s abundant energy resources

Remember that time in the New Testament when Jesus stood on up on a little hill and said what he did about hating gays and people of other religions and the poor and told us that the goal of life is to be wealthy and that the reason the world was created was so that we could exploit it for our own benefit? Remember that time when he told that story about a guy who was beaten and robbed by a Muslim and left for dead by the side of the road and a gay man and a lesbian both walked around him and didn’t help him but a happily married Christian millionaire in the oil business found him and helped him? Yeah, me neither.

Rick Perry makes Tim Tebow So Last Week

My new Advent meditation ran yesterday on Think Christian and is running today on The 12. I linked to it yesterday, but I can see it has had approximately 10% of the readership as my last post related to Tim Tebow. Click the link for a great read (in my humble opinion) about our cluttered lives and simplicity.

Speaking of Tebow, he engineered another amazing comeback yesterday against the Bears. That's six wins in a row and seven of eight. There is nothing like winning to shut up the know-it-all critics, those knights of the keyboard who do nothing but sit at home and lob criticism at the people out there actually doing something in the world.

But wait a minute, you say, weren't you one of his critics? "Moi?" I ask innocently. My wife's family lives in Colorado. I'd never root against Denver. And besides, Rick Perry proved my point about using Christianity to divide our culture much more powerfully than Tebow ever has. Have you seen Perry's recent ad about being a Christian and lamenting the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? It's the one where he says that our kids can't celebrate Christmas in school but gays can openly serve in the military and calls that "Obama's war on religion."

Besides reminding me of what I'd written last week, Perry's ad also made me think of these two lines in the current issue of Time magazine: "The Republican Party has abandoned sobriety in favor of bombast. It has abandoned conservatism in favor of radicalism."

If you need proof of this, consider that Donald Trump is going to host his own Republican debate. Oh how I wish a great conservative thinker like William F. Buckley were still alive to weigh in on what's happened to the Republicans.

Speaking of weight, weighty issues like this are now occupying me. I'm officially done with Tebow. He was so last week. It's on to other things for me, and I start with my Advent post about our cluttered lives and joy. Hope you'll take a look.

Advent III: Modern Shepherds and Simple Joy

There is a relationship between joy and simplicity. The more we have, the more cluttered our lives become, the more difficult it is to find that elusive combination of delight, satisfaction and well-being known as joy.

Agree with that? If you do, I hope you'll read my meditation for the third Sunday of Advent, posted today at Think Christian and accessible by clicking here. The mystery of why the third Advent candle is pink is also revealed. Enjoy!

Tim Tebow and Uneasy Evangelicals

Ten days ago I quoted four friends who don’t appreciate the way Tim Tebow expresses his faith. Before 24 hours had passed, this became the most viewed post I’ve ever done. It would be a stretch to say it went viral, but it was mildly contagious. Thanks, Tim! Many people commented (although not actually on my blog, but through Facebook). The comments fell into three categories: 1) Get off his back, he’s living out his faith in a wonderful way; 2) I agree, he’s obnoxious; or 3) Judge not, lest ye be judged – which is sort of a variant on Rodney King’s famous “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Well, we don’t get along. According to the unassailable source Wikipedia, there are 38,000 Christian denominations worldwide, and even if their number is off by 10,000 or so, the fractured nature of the Body of Christ is still staggering. For the first thousand years after the time of Christ there was one denomination, until the Eastern and Western churches split. 500 years later Christian divisiveness really picked up after the Protestant Reformation. But still – 38,000? That’s embarrassing!

Within that wide spectrum of belief is a camp called American Evangelical Christianity (which is an ethos instead of a denomination). Even though this group has been making its presence known for about thirty-five years, many media commentators don’t understand American Evangelical culture and don’t quite get the story right. For many Evangelicals, the real issue in the Tebow conversation is how Christians should relate to the rest of the world and share their faith. Is Tebow a model of how to do that or a model of how not to do that?

I asked my friend Bob from Chicago, who commented here on Tebow last week, for some further thoughts about the question of how Christians should relate to the rest of the world. I would call Bob an incisive thinker and uneasy Evangelical. My observation is that there are Evangelicals and uneasy Evangelicals. Uneasy Evangelicals tend to begin a lot of sentences with “I’m sorry.” Other Evangelicals believe they have nothing to apologize about. (And in case you are counting, I believe the uneasy Evangelicals are in the minority.)

Here is a bit of what Bob the uneasy Evangelical said: “It comes down to how Christians define their purpose. Many Evangelicals define themselves in tandem with the ‘Great Commission,’ which says to go make disciples, and believe they are compelled to go ‘make Christians.’

“The problem with this posture is when Evangelicals carry out their mandate to make Christians at the expense of the great commandment to love God and love our neighbors. When Evangelical tactics divide our culture in the name of making Christians, it’s a problem.

“Many Christians believe it is their responsibility to ‘save’ humanity. If we could just convince our government and corporations to say ‘Merry Christmas’ instead of ‘Happy Holidays,’ then we’ll have a much better chance of saving our country. The flaw in this thinking is that they believe humanity can save humanity. That’s God’s responsibility. Humanity was created by God, for God, and for community. We were made to love and be loved.”

That’s worth thinking about, especially his line about Evangelical tactics dividing our culture in the name of making Christians. I take this to mean when the method becomes confrontational it is in conflict with the greater message of love. Hence the need for uneasy Evangelicals to apologize for things like the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Jimmy Swaggart, The 700 Club, certain Presidential candidates, etc. Of course, some of this bleeds into the dorky Christian category that uneasy Evangelicals also feel the need to apologize for, like Jim and Tammy Faye, gospel ventriloquists, a lot of autoharp and recorder music, Pat Boone, Kirk Cameron movies, highway billboards in an Old English font, etc.

What do you think?