HUNTING FOR WONDER

A Life Lesson from the Gerasene Demoniac

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:39:00 +0000

What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?
Luke 8:28

When the Lord Jesus comes and asks you for mastery over some part of your life, do you kneel in surrender, or do you growl, if ever so quietly, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” Although you may look very different from the demonized man from this gospel story, are you saying the very same words to your rightful king?

But there is another picture in this story, the opposite picture of the demonized man with the broken chains: the clothed man, in his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus. You see, there is a kind of happiness, a kind of fulfillment, indeed, a kind of pleasure that can only be found by kneeling before your rightful king.

Have you yet experienced this pleasure? Have you discovered, as this man finally did, that the place where you will find peace with yourself, with others, and with God is kneeling in submission at Jesus’ feet?

Experience this special joy and surrender to your king. Begin your morning by actually kneeling before him and praying for his will in your life. Anyone who tries to save his life will lose it, but whoever surrenders their life and kneels before Jesus will gain it all.

The Great and Little Lovers

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:40:00 +0000

What does it mean, for you and for me to become the righteousness of God? Enter Luke 7:36-50––a portrait of a woman who had become just that...

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Eloi, Eloi

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:50:00 +0000

New birth, a living hope, an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade: for everyone who belongs to Jesus Christ, these are the present-moment benefits. But what was the cost? In what shape did God’s great love come, that we should now be known by Him, as children?

To see the answer to that question, we turn our eyes back. Back to the rejected man hanging from a wooden beam on a hill called Golgotha––Skull, being taunted by the jeers of the onlookers, laboring for breath, now calling out with a parched throat up into the darkened heavens, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?"

If you knew nothing about this man before hearing that cry, you might have written him off as just one more among the thousands, crucified and crushed by the rumbling Roman war machine. Just one more lacerated nobody, now calling out, what was it? Eliya? Elijah?

The Gospel of Mark tells us, "When those standing by heard this, they said, 'Listen he’s calling Elijah... Leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah will come and take him down.'

It could have been any one of us, saying those words, knowing nothing about the man pinned to the wood, bleeding and wheezing and appealing to the air. But what if you knew him? What if you knew that here was a man who lived on the Scriptures of God like others live on food, who saw in his life and his person, the promised fulfillment of those Scriptures’ many strands? And what if you were listening just a little more closely than the casual spectator that day?

Would you have caught it? Would you have realized he was calling not for Elijah, but for his God, and calling for Him in the words of Scripture, the opening refrain of Psalm 22, as if he had learned it especially for this moment?

Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Those were the only words he quoted from that Psalm. But if we take those words as being spoken by a man who lived and breathed the Scriptures of God, we may be able to hear more of his dying thoughts simply by reading on in Psalm 22...

Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?

All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads.

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.

My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me.

My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to its roof;

My God, my God, why? You lay me in the dust of death.

A pack of villains encircles me;

They pierce my hands and my feet.

All my bones are on display;

people stare and gloat over me.

they divide my clothes among them

and cast lots for my garment.

And then come the closing verses, which read like this:

...all who go down to the dust will kneel before him––

those who cannot keep themselves alive...

They will proclaim his righteousness,

declaring to a people yet unborn:

He has done it!

And so the cry of despair ends in this note of triumph, given voice by Jesus’ final words, “It is finished.”

We are those unborn people mentioned in the Psalm, now born anew into a living hope with God. And all because of this man on the cross, this God-sent Son who cried out to his Father in the words of this Psalm, not in despair, but in confidence that the ordeal he was enduring would end just like the Psalm: in praise for what the Lord had done.

How to Stun the Lord of Glory

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:55:00 +0000

Have you ever stood at the knees of a mountain, craned your neck and sent your eyes soaring up along its slopes, over its forests, its faces, its lofty peaks, smoking with shifting blankets of fog? All of that breath-taking grandeur is just one aspect of the world we inhabit; but there are other sides to this reality, which cannot be measured by these bodily instruments.

Enter Luke 7:1-10––one man’s passing brush with the Son of God...

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Which Builder Are You?

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:57:00 +0000

Imagine a gospel without all the hard parts...

Without any word that foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of man had nowhere to lay his head, and that anyone who calls himself a follower of Christ must take up his cross, and lay down his life, every day, every week, every pay-cheque period.

Take that part out, take out the discipleship, but keep in the love, at least the comfortable love.
Keep in the part where it says that God so loved us, so delighted in us, that in order for him to win the eternal privilege of our company, He sent his Son to buy us a place among the blessed, and buy it in such a way as to convey our infinite worth in the eyes of our Creator.

What would be the natural response of a person fed on that kind of gospel?

"Hm. I love me, and it turns out that God loves me too. I think the two of us'll get along just fine. Now then, where to go for supper?"

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Go, Soul, the body's guest...

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:13:00 +0000

There comes a point when we need to stop believing our own P.R., when we need to stop giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt, and ask some hard questions about who we really are. In the words of Sir Walter Raleigh, there comes a point when we need to give ourselves The Lie. Raleigh was an English explorer-adventurer who saw everything this world had to offer, whose experience and Christian faith taught him about the passing nature of all his world’s pomp. So he wrote this poem called, “The Lie,” in keeping with Jesus' words about good and bad trees...

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What a Tangled Web We Weave

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:29:00 +0000

Jacob was a liar. He lied about who he was to secure the greater blessing, then fled his older brother, who wanted to kill him. But many years later, having married and grown wealthy, on the night before Jacob was to meet Esau once again, someone confronted him. A mysterious man who grappled with Jacob through the long night until Jacob held him fast and demanded a blessing. What then did God’s angel said to Jacob?

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How the Leopard Changed His Spots

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:31:00 +0000

His past was the same: he had lied to his father and stolen from his brother. His present was the same: running from home, toward an alien future. And even this place where he had spent the night looked no different from when he first laid down... and yet, everything was different; something new had come into his life.

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Frank Lloyd Wright and the Body of Christ

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:28:00 +0000

In December 1934, the Kaufmann family of Pittsburg invited an architect out to their forest retreat in Western Pennsylvania. His name was Frank Lloyd Wright, and they wished him to design for them a new country house. Nestled amidst the growth of hardwood trees, native rhododendron, and Appalachian wildflowers, the Kaufmann's mountain property was a haven to which they often resorted, not only for their own refreshment, but also that of their many employees and friends.

And for all of them––family, friends, and employees alike––the focus of this woodland getaway was centered on a single geographical treasure: a waterfall cascading over a sandstone ledge in the heart of the forest.

After returning from his visit, Wright penned a note to the family, saying, "the visit to the waterfall in the woods stays with me and a domicile has taken vague shape in my mind to the music of the stream."

But when Wright showed his preliminary sketches to the Kaufmanns, they were startled to find that their dwelling was to be built not facing the much loved falls, but directly on top of them. This was unexpected, unconventional, and––they would eventually realize––altogether brilliant.

“Monotony kills,” said Wright. “Human feeling loves the vigor of spontaneity, freshness, and the charm of the unexpected...”
Thus was born what has since been praised as "the best all-time work of American architecture," a house to which Wright himself would give the name, "Fallingwater."

Now the genius of this structure lies in the organic way that Wright designed it not to interrupt the waterfall, nor merely to view it as from the outside, but to become a part of it, and so allow the house’s inhabitants to experience the falls directly.

How?

By building the house directly over the falls, and then installing a glass hatchway in the middle of the living room which opened upon a staircase leading down to the gurgling stream, that the sound and fragrance of the waters below might rise through the room and wash those inside with the exhilarating closeness of nature.

Organic architecture: this is how Frank Lloyd Wright described his dream––to make of a dwelling place a complete work of art, a house that would be something more than an arrangement of cookie-cutter rooms to be filled with cookie-cutter furniture, something more thoughtful, more living, more suited to the individual people for whom the house was built.

How many of us sigh our way through the years of our lives just looking for that room, that single place of refuge where no matter what else may befall, we can know that everything is okay because we have our place in life, that one-of-a-kind fit, where we know that we belong.

Whether you would call yourself a believer, or a seeker, or something altogether different, the Spirit of Jesus is inviting you to step in from that anonymous wasteland and come into your room, that place in God’s kingdom, prepared with you in mind...

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When I Come to Genesis One... Part 5

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:49:00 +0000

What does it mean to be made in the image of God?

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When I Come to Genesis One... Part 4

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:50:00 +0000

God made the two great lights: the great light for dominion of the day, and the small light for dominion of the night...

and the stars.

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When I Come to Genesis One... Part 3

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:38:00 +0000

To all things counter, original, spare, strange...
To the ability of green things to replenish themselves...
To the effortless serenity of God's creative energy...

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When I Come to Genesis One... Part 2

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:26:00 +0000

Theistic evolution or spontaneous creation, a single big bang or many inflations... these questions are ours. But what were the queries of this book's earliest hearers?

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When I Come to Genesis One... Part 1

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:43:00 +0000

Rambling out of doors again––what better way to meditate on the Bible's opening maserpiece?

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The Unwithered Tree

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 18:55:00 +0000

Out for a walk the other day, I recorded this...

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...a devotional from Psalm One, downloadable here.

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The Anonymous Genius

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 14:39:00 +0000

In 1972 the greatest chess player the world had ever seen went missing. Bobby Fischer had come on the field like news from another world: Thirteen years old and he took the U.S. junior championship, fourteen and the professional title was his, and on he went, like some mischievous sprite sprung from mythic fable, until he sat across the table and stared down the board at the Russian world champion, Boris Spassky during the height of the cold war.

After that match, one chess master called Fischer’s victory, “the story of a lonely hero who overcomes an entire empire.” The unthinkable had occurred: a twenty-something youth from the city of Chicago had slain the Great Bear and won the world title.

And then, with as little warning as when he first appeared, Bobby Fischer vanished. Every once in a while he would materialize: once in 1977 to defeat MIT’s chess computer, and once again some fifteen years later in a rematch against the former Russian champion.

There were rumors of him living in Budapest, reports of his appearance in the Philippines, Japan, and Iceland, but for all intents and purposes, the greatest chessman the world had ever seen had folded his hands over his chest––and POOF!––disappeared, like a magician from a stage.

Then one day, on some online chess site, an anonymous player showed up whom no one had seen before. And once again, as if in repeat of Fischer’s first rise so many years before, that anonymous player began dispatching his opponents one after the other, grandmasters themselves, including Nigel Short, who was then considered one of the world’s greatest practitioners of speed chess.

“I am 99 percent sure that I have been playing against the chess legend,” said Short to reporters. “It’s tremendously exciting.”

At first, this anonymous player might have been dismissed as a novice or nut, because he was opening his matches with these reckless moves that seemed to go against centuries of received chess wisdom. The only problem... was that he was winning.

Why?

Because to each and every game, Bobby Fischer carried a secret weapon: a deeper understanding of chess than the conventional wisdom was based on.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been following the career of a very different hero through the Gospel of Luke. But like Bobby Fischer, Jesus came on the scene of his day, literally like news from another world––an anonymous young man come to overthrow an entire empire by acting according to a deeper understanding than the conventional wisdom was based on.

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Will It Be Okay?

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:50:00 +0000

From a video I wrote for Family Life Network:

It will be okay. These are the words of self-comfort: a skill that each of us learns in a world rife with disappointment. Whether with a thumb in the mouth or a prayer in the dark, we need something to help us cope. But is that all our faith is? An invented answer to the need for self comfort?

Is that all that Christmas is? With all the flying reindeer and industrious, toy-making elves, and an entire mythology invented around a rotund holiday saint, it might be easy to get confused at this time of year. It might be easy to just lump it all together: reindeer, elves, and the Christmas story itself, and call the whole thing holiday make-believe.

And since it might be easy to do that, to get confused and lump the historical part of Christmas in with the mythological part of Christmas, the first thing that I want to tell you about Anna, the subject of our sermon this morning, is that she was a real person. How do I know?

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Jesus in the Country, Kicking at the Stones

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Lately, my four year-old son has been having night terrors.

My wife and I will be stirred by the sound of whimpering coming from his room, and walk down the hall to discover that he’s awakened in the dark and seen the shadows of branches coming in through his window and clawing on his walls.

To his four year-old mind, those crooked shadows have no business being in his room, intruding on his night time peace. But the thing about my son is that he’s a reticent little fellow, slow to share his feelings. It gets to the point where he will physically hide his smile when we know full well that he is beaming on the inside. And this reticence extends at times to our evening prayers, and he’ll get shy about praying out loud.

So as I tuck him in at night, I try to find other ways to engage him with God, and instead of making him pray, we’ll sing Jesus Loves Me or some other song together.

But this past Wednesday, my son started the longest conversation he and I have ever had about God.

We were lying on his bed with the lights turned out, and he wanted to know where God was. When I told him that God was everywhere, he pointed to different spots in his room and asked me if indeed God was present in all of those places, and I told him, "Yes, son, God is in that spot––and you know what else?––God is even in those shadows on the wall.

Well when he heard that, his face brightened into a grin and he said, “Yeah, God will smash those shadows into pieces!” And then we sang that Veggie Tales song, “God is Bigger Than the Boogie Man,” and he fell blissfully to sleep.

God is bigger than the boogie man. He is bigger than than the shadows on the wall and the thing under the steps and all our imaginary fears. And he is bigger than the real evils in our world, like disease, and ignorance, and the spiritual parasites that thrive on the dark. God is bigger than the boogie man, in whatever form the boogie man takes, and so is God's son.

He proved it one day in a town called Capernaum...

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Isn't This Joseph's Son?

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 02:48:00 +0000

First century Nazareth, the hometown of Jesus...

They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way. (Luke 4:29)

Jesus would never return to his hometown again. After he left, the townspeople went on with their weekly singing of hymns, their readings of scripture, and their offerings of prayer. Sabbath after sabbath, they continued to gather and say the right words and sing the right songs and smile and worship together in that God-forsaken place, having rejected God’s favor, and oblivious to its absence.

How did it come to this? Just a few moments earlier, we see that...

All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips.

So how did they shift from amazement at the gracious words of Jesus, to driving him out to the foot of a cliff? And how did that shift begin?

With a seemingly innocuous question, recorded in verse 22:

Isn’t this Joseph’s son?

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Promethean Engineer or Divine Father?

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:52:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I watched Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and it stuck with me because its storyline carried a kind of myth that I’ve been seeing more and more lately, and that myth goes like this:

Maybe, at some far point in the distant past, we were planted on this earth by an alien race of biological engineers who went back to their planet after their work was done.

As I said, I’ve been hearing this theme more and more, not just from movie writers, but even some science writers. And I find this emerging cultural myth very interesting, because it shows the lengths to which the human mind will go to create a more comfortable creator: one who is conveniently distant and lacking any ultimate moral demands on the way that we live.

That is not the God whom Mary’s son would name Father, the God who in the words of Psalm 56, is close enough to keep track of all our sorrows, who collects our tears in his bottle, and records each one in his book...

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Before I Give Up My Life, I Want to Be Sure This Is True

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:35:00 +0000

Choice means rejection. For every path we choose in our lives, there is one or two or three or more other paths which we rejected in the same moment we accepted the path that we chose.

Choosing to date this person rather than that person, to go in this class rather than that class, to take this job rather than that job––choosing to walk down one path in life necessarily means walking away from other paths that you might have chosen. That's what it means to make decisions.

And because time is ever pushing forward, none of us, not even those who do nothing, can avoid making decisions about the paths our lives will take.

But every now and then, we come to a spot where we look back over the path we've taken, and wonder, "Did I make the right choice?" And we think about turning back, because continuing down the path we're on somehow feels too risky.

Say you're a bright young Greek, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, poised on the brink of a promising career. Your wealth, education, and family connections all foretell a glittering life ahead––evening parties at seaside villas, inside conversation with men of influence, and the attention of Rome's most eligible ladies––all of that––if you will but continue on the path you've been walking your whole young life.

But there's just one problem: your family doctor. Successful as he is, he's gone and joined this Jewish splinter-group called "The Way," and abandoned himself to sailing the known world in propagation of its message, a message you can't help but admit has unexpectedly taken root in your heart as well.

And that message is a man: Jesus, the son of the Most High, a light for revelation to Greeks, and for glory to the people of Israel, the kingdom of God come down in person. This is the message in which these followers of The Way have instructed you, and this is what now stands between you and the kind of future your parents had planned.

Why? For the simple reason that these Christianoi, these little Christs, as their opponents call them, have almost no standing in the greater Roman world. Even the Jews themselves––from whom the Christians claim their origin––have rejected the movement as an aberrant heresy to be pinned and mounted to a cross, like the Christ from whom the Christians draw their name.

Up until now, this movement has been something of a hobby for you, a fascination with the out-of-the-ordinary, as it were. But now that you recognize the consequences of being numbered among those of The Way, now that you see that becoming one of them may very well mean losing that golden future you had so anticipated, you wonder if maybe the time hasn't come to reconsider the solidity of the things in which these Christians have instructed you.

And into that moment of reconsideration, as though it were sent by the fates themselves, there arrives a gift from the good doctor, which your servant opens, and begins to read out loud in your hearing...

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To Galilee and Beyond

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:37:00 +0000

“This very night you will all fall away on account of me...

but after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee...”

Back home, to Galilee. To the land of Jesus’ boyhood. A land of hills and valleys and men with calloused hands. It was the land from which Jesus had plucked each of his twelve disciples, ill-suited as they were: fishermen and taxmen, menders of nets and collectors of tolls––hardly the kinds of students on which an up and coming rabbi should think to build a following. And yet, despite their glaring lack of promise, that is exactly what he made of them: the single most transformative following the world has ever seen.

What a contradiction these men were; just take Peter, for example, who, out in a boat during the fourth watch of the night, saw Jesus walking toward them on the lake, and called out, “Lord if it is you, tell me to come to you on the water.”

And when Jesus answered, “Come,” Peter gets down out of the boat, walks on the water and goes toward him. But then seeing the wind, he becomes afraid, starts to sink, and flailing about, he sputters, “Lord, save me!” And then Jesus, catching him in his arms and bringing him up, says, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Doubters with little faith. Such were the men that Jesus chose: fickle and unsteady; and yet... it was this same Peter to whom Jesus said,“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” Our Lord had a vision for who people might become in him.

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The Bird and the Tree

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Sometimes you get to a place in life where you feel like you've gone off track, like somewhere along the way, you somehow misplaced your purpose and your passion and your sense of who you are; and when you stop and look at your life and who you've become, you feel like maybe... just waiting for the next season of Mad Men to come out isn’t enough, like maybe you're missing something...

We were meant to live for so much more. Have we lost ourselves?

Do you remember that song? Do you remember how often the stations used to play it? That one Christian song: funny how it was able to cross over into mainstream radio, and just connect with people, like it was giving a voice to what so many are feeling.

We were meant to live for so much more. Have we lost ourselves?

Seven hundred years before the time of Jesus, the nation of Israel had lost themselves. They'd gone off track and become estranged from who God had meant them to be. But into those colorless years, there stepped a poet, a painter of pictures, a prophet named Isaiah. And among all the pictures that the prophet painted for his fading nation, there was the the bird and the tree...

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The Secret of Growth

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:10:00 +0000

When I was a young man, reading through the small, black, New King James Bible given to me by my parents, every now and then I would come upon a sentence which would lay a blanket of bewilderment across my mind: a sentence which almost without knowing it, I would pass over, because in some troubling way, it confused me. Here is one of those sentences:

Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. (Luke 2:52)

“Jesus what? He increased in wisdom? In favor with God? How can that be? Jesus is the Son of God, and as such, has all the wisdom in the universe, and all the favor of God that it is possible to have! How can it be that this same Jesus, whom the Bible says is God, could grow... in wisdom, and in favor with God, like any other of the 12 year-olds on his street?”

I couldn't have articulated that question so clearly when I first read this sentence, but it is a good description of the vague unease that I felt. So what did I do? I simply skipped over this sentence and let my confusion slumber, unspoken for years, until one day I noticed another sentence in the Bible...

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Morning Devotions

rdaren@gmail.com (Daren Redekopp) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 19:31:00 +0000

Now to take the seed in hand

Fist it through this stony crust

Pray for sun and rain to come

Tend the life that grows in dust

by Daren Redekopp