Author: kevingdrendel

I am sixtiesh, an English Literature major in college and an attorney by profession. Faith informs my life, and this blog is about my faith journey.

The Gospel and Justice Go Hand in Hand

Jesus was the Gospel incarnate, so we should follow His example.

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I am on the Board of Directors of Administer Justice, a faith-based legal aid clinic. Bruce Strom, the founder of Administer Justice moved on five years ago to form the Gospel Justice Initiative that has established 75 other faith-based legal aid clinics around the country. The tagline for GJI is “communicating the truth of the gospel through justice.” That tagline inspires this blog.

Justice, especially with the social prefix, is code in some circles for a liberal, progressive political orientation. Gospel, in some circles, suggests conservative “Christian” people who ignore issues involving justice. These perceptions are often inaccurate mischaracterizations, but one thing is true: focusing on one to the exclusion of the other misses the heart of God.

We have no better example of God’s heart than Jesus: God who become flesh and lived among us, being obedient to the purposes of God the Father, even to the point of dying on the cross for us. His life is the Gospel incarnate. This Jesus will ultimately mete out justice to all mankind.

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all his angels are with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. The people of every nation will be gathered in front of him. He will separate them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right but the goats on his left.” (Matthew 25:31-33)

Do you know the basis of the justice that Jesus will mete out?

It will be based on what people did when they saw the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the needing clothes, the sick and the imprisoned. (Matthew 25:34-46)

Why? …. Because Jesus said,

“Whatever you did for one of my brothers or sisters, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40)

When John the Baptist was in prison and wanted some assurance of who Jesus was, before Jesus answered him, “[Jesus] healed many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many who were blind he bestowed sight.” (Luke 7:21) Then Jesus said:

“Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.” (Luke 7:22 alluding to Isaiah 61:1-2)

The message Jesus gave to signal who he was – the Anointed One, the messiah the prophets spoke about – was given only after the demonstration. Continue reading “The Gospel and Justice Go Hand in Hand” →

All The Little Things

All the little things we tolerate in our lives add up and weigh us down.

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I spend some Saturday mornings meeting with people at a low-income, legal aid clinic. Many people come with “one” big issue, but the conversations often reveal a myriad of things they are dealing with.

The one big issue brought them to the desperate point of reaching out, but that one big issue often belies many little things that plague them. The little things they tolerate in their lives, often lead to the big thing that brought them to the point of desperation.

The circumstances aren’t always the result of bad decisions, bad behaviors or other failures, but often they are. We can be our own worst enemies, and lack of knowledge and understanding compounds the problems that result from those failures.

I often feel overwhelmed by the loads that people carry. Simple answers are rarely sufficient. Many peoples’ lives are bogged down by a thousand little things, and the one big thing is the just tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The best I can do in our short session on a Saturday morning is to identify the key issue(s) to be dealt with and a strategy for dealing with them, but I can often only recommend treatment for the symptoms. It isn’t hard to see evidence of the virus behind the symptomatic issues that are demanding immediate attention. We might call that virus sin.

Sin, in its etymology, means “missing the mark”. We miss the mark in many small ways that we might assume are insignificant, but the little things add up. They form habits of thought and behavior that are counter-productive to achieving the things we all want – comfort, security, harmonious living with our family and world, and satisfaction in life.

Sin isn’t just doing something that God frowns upon. Sin is falling short of the way we are meant to live – the way God made us to live. A thousand little bad decisions, a thousand misunderstandings that are unwittingly adopted, a thousand little things that we allow to creep and remain, without addressing them, pile up and weigh us down.

To be fair, we all struggle with sin that threatens to undo us. Some of us just manage it better than others. Some of us learn to use our sinfulness to our own selfish advantage. Others are steamrolled by it and the sins of others that leave destruction in its wake.

Regardless of our ability to manage our sins, it catches up to us – now or later. The most beautiful, white-washed tombs are as empty as a pauper’s grave. Sin has real consequences for us and for the people around us.

Continue reading “All The Little Things” →

The False Promise of Pleasure

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Statue of writer and playright Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square in Dublin, Ireland.

“Meaninglessness does not come from weariness with pain. Meaningless comes from weariness with pleasure….  No one is more fed up with life than one who has exhausted pleasure. Some of the loneliest people in the world are those who have lived indulgent lives and emotionally and physically drive themselves to impotence.”

This is a quotation from Ravi Zacharias in a talk he gave titled, the Problem of Pleasure.* If you listen to Ravi Zacharias much, you will note that he returns to this theme often, and he often mentions Oscar Wilde, the famous Irish poet and playwright. Wilde, of course, was a brilliant writer and thinker who was an outspoken atheist and lived a hedonistic lifestyle.

Wilde is described as “the supreme individualist”. His book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is described as a “novel of vice hidden beneath art” tinged with “self-conscious decadence”. The Importance of Being Earnest, commonly believed to be his best work written at the height of his career, is more subtle and nuanced, but continues the same theme, as do all of the works of Oscar Wilde. (See Wikipedia)

We know much of Wilde’s private life. Many of his secrets were paraded before the world to see in a much publicized court case, ironically, when Oscar Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel.

Queensberry’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was the person who introduced Wilde to “the Victorian underground of gay prostitution”. Queensberry’s defense to the libel charges was to prove his statements true by hiring private investigators to uncover the “salacious details of Wilde’s private life”. The trial that Wilde brought against Queensberry left him bankrupt and exposed.

Wilde, the “colourful agent provocateur in Victorian society”, spared himself no pleasure. He also wasn’t shy about his lifestyle. He championed licentiousness in his art and in his life.

Like Solomon, though, he retained a sort of wisdom borne of experience. Having been baptized as a child, he often used biblical imagery in his writing, though it’s use would have likely been considered sacrilegious.

During a two year prison sentence for homosexual actions, he requested copies of the Bible in multiple, languages, Dante’s Divine Comedy and other works with Christian themes. When he was released from prison, the Catholic Church turned down his request to spend six months at a monastery, and Wilde wept at the news.

As I sit here thinking of these things, I am also thinking of the unfolding story of a friend, a very enthusiastic and committed believer in God. He is a lover of the stage, a former Shakespearean performer. In that sense, he shares something in common with the playwright, Wilde.

My friend is in a hospital ICU as I write, having suffered a series of strokes that could leave him uncommunicative and paralyzed. Even in his desperate physical situation, he and his family have experienced the presence of God sustaining them in faith. They exhibit a transcendent joy and peace in the middle of the difficulties they face.

We are naturally attracted to pleasure and pull back from pain. Sometimes, however, the pleasures we seek cause us pain. We tend to think that pleasure is good and pain is bad, if not in a moral sense, then certainly in an experiential sense. God gives us the ability to experience pleasure and pain. In that sense, God gives us both pleasure and pain.

Neither one is intrinsically good or bad. CS Lewis implies this when he says that God whispers to us in our pleasures, but He shouts to us in our pain. Though pain can be the result of our own reckless indiscretions, it isn’t always so. My friend in the hospital is proof of that.

Continue reading “The False Promise of Pleasure” →

Stairway to Heaven

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Stairway to Heaven is, perhaps, my favorite song of all time. I was a big Led Zeppelin fan growing up. A case can be made that Stairway to Heaven is the greatest rock song of all time. It has all the elements of a great song. It has great melody. It has thoughtful, poetic lyrics. It rises and builds from a delicately unforgettable introduction to a crescendo of orchestration that matches the sweep of the lyrics with one of the most iconic guitar solos ever performed.

I am not one of those people who listen to music first for the lyrics. I hear the music first. I may never really learn the lyrics. Sometimes, I can’t even remember the song title. So, as I listened to the song recently, some 45 years or so after I first heard it, I realized that the song is about inspiration and hope. I hadn’t really thought about it much before. I just liked the song.

Like many rock songs, Stairway to Heaven was written with the seemingly eternal exuberance of youth and youthful energy. Though I am much older now, it, still resonates. It’s still sits in the pocket for me. It’s still a song of hope, ultimately, but I now have a different perspective.

Continue reading “Stairway to Heaven” →

The Fibonacci Sequence: Common Descent or Common Design?

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Ever heard of the Fibonacci sequence? It is a sequence of numbers where each one is the sum of the previous two numbers. The sequence runs 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on. What’s fascinating about the Fibonacci sequence is that when you make squares the size of the numbers, […]

via A Spectacular Sequence — God does not believe in atheists

I spent the weekend at a fair talking to people about science and faith. While some believe the two topics are incompatible with each other, I beg to differ. The compatibility of science (and math) and faith is the theme of the article I have reblogged here. (Please take some time to read it at the link above.)

The article got me thinking about some conversations I had or overheard at the fair. We usually post a question and invite people to vote on it. The question on Sunday was this: Do humans and apes share a common ancestor? The question draws people who want to weigh in, and sometimes it sparks conversation.

In more than one conversation triggered by a “yes” vote on our question, people cited for support the commonalities between apes and humans for evidence of common origin. Indeed, the commonalities can be seen at almost every level, from body design to DNA.

It’s a reasonable argument, but common ancestry isn’t the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the evidence, as the article I have reblogged observes. The evidence could be explained by common design.

As an example, the article linked above notes:

The “Fibonacci spiral” is found everywhere. It is to be seen in plant leaves, pine cones, seashells, pineapples, ferns, daisies, artichokes, sunflowers and even galaxies. It’s in the arrangement of seeds on flowers. It’s in starfish. It’s in the cochlea of your inner ear, which is not simply a spiral shape, it’s the actual Fibonacci spiral, with the exact number sequence.

The Fibonacci spiral is present in our bodies, as it is present in things as diverse as plants, shells and galaxies. The Fibonacci spiral is even present in storm patterns. So it seems fair to ask: are the commonalities we observe evidence of common descent? Or evidence of common design?

If you will indulge me a moment, the commonality of the Fibonacci spiral in animate things and inanimate things are diverse as shells, galaxies, and weather patterns is more suggestive of common design than common descent. Common descent might account for the appearance of the Fibonacci spiral in living things, but common descent does not explain the presence of the Fibonacci spiral in non-living things. Common design, however, can account for the repetition of the Fibonacci spiral in animate and inanimate, living and non-living, things.

The growing field of Evolutionary Developmental Biology has identified “toolkit genes” that are “turned on” to direct changes in certain ways. The toolkit genes are present, but when and where they are triggered determines the direction of the change in the organism. These scientists have also identified “developmental bias” that makes some changes “easy” and other changes impossible to occur. These things channel evolution in certain directions, making evolution something other than random.

Scientists in the field of epigenetics are seeing similar things. They have observed that environmental stressors can trigger mechanisms in the genetic code on or off. The mechanisms are programmed in, but they get are triggered by outside forces. Epigenetic “tags” can be passed down so that the environmental stressors (experiences) of ancestors can affect the traits of the next generation. The mechanisms are nonrandom; they are built in, and they are triggered by environmental pressures. They see “phenotypic plasticity” built into living organisms that allows a single genotype to produce different phenotypes (forms) depending on the environment.

The toolkit genes, developmental bias, epigenetic tags, phenotype plasticity, and other observable mechanisms are coded into the DNA, epigenetic materials, and other components of cells in living things to direct changes in those living things over time that we have called evolution. The evolution we see today (and which always existed) is not driven by purely random mutations as we once thought.

The ways that living organisms change over time is driven by embedded determiners. Environmental and “experiential” factors trigger these mechanisms, which cause the change to occur in predetermined directions. It is not random in the way we previously thought.

All of these modern discoveries are changing our understanding of how living organism change and adapt over time. All of these discoveries make our understanding more consistent with the idea of common design, and they open the door wider than previously thought to the idea of a common Designer.

As Stephen Meyer postulates in his book, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, whenever we see complex design, especially interactive design like DNA, epigenetic materials, and the panoply of interdependent mechanisms in cellular structures, we need to ask: what is the most likely explanation for that communicative complexity? What models do we see in our experience that can account for that? Meyer says there is only thing that can account for that complex interworking of communicative expression, and that is a mind. Nothing else in the universe that we have been able to observe produces that kind of interactive complexity built into a functional entity.