Last Week on Tov Unleashed

This has been a good week at Tov Unleashed — good conversations with good people about good topics.

Beginning with what we have missed most during the pandemic: table time:

What I miss most then is table time.

Greg Mamula called Table Life: An Invitation to Everyday Discipleship. In it he discusses what happens at the table when we are with one another, share a meal with one another and do life with one another. Greg suggests the following:

Meals foster community.

There is no substitute at Northern Seminary cohort classes for the week-long (day long) intensives. We come to know one another and learn one another’s stories. We go out at lunch for tacos on Taco Tuesday. Many of the students go out for dinner and some go to Wrigley for a Cubs game.

Meals create a family identity.

We become siblings because of table time, because of time in the same room all day long with one another, because of random conversations with one another. Zoom does not duplicate this. It cannot even imitate it.

Because we have so many who want to dismiss the significance of race in our society and think that by ignoring it will go away, we need another look at Jemar Tisby’s new book, How to Fight Racism,:

Hear this:

Race is a social construct.

Race is a socially constructed category that offers certain privileges and advantages to one group, which is the US context is white people, to the detriment of all those who are excluded from that group – that is, “nonwhite” people, or people of color.

Race then is not a biological reality or a spiritual reality but a socially-constructed category. Tisby says the amount of melanin in our skin determines race, and nothing else.

Lent is a time for lament, so we are looking at Rebekah Eklund’s  Practicing Lament. What is lament? Her former definition looked like this:

… a persistent cry for salvation to the God who promises to save, in a situation of suffering or sin, in the confident hope that this God hears and responds to cries, and acts now and in the future to make whole. In other words, lament calls upon God to keep God’s own promises.

She’s not so sure now that “confident hope” is accurate. Sometimes, she says, lament is offered through “clenched teeth and tears … when we cling to a thin thread of hope that seems about to snap.”

Her thematic verse can be seen as Isaiah 64:1: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down …!”

One of the highlight books of the last twelve months is Ryan Burge’s new book, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.

You and I need studies that work as hard as possible at eliminating bias and basing views on researching data. I’m talking sociologists and political scientists who know more than the average blogger with an opinion and have less passion about what the pastor wants to be true enough that he or she can convince the congregation that the world really is falling apart if we vote for this party or that party.

Ryan Burge’s book steps into that space with a solid study. Read it.

Finally, I dipped into an outline of a lecture I sometimes give called “Who was Jesus?”

In the end, he was asking people in his world – from Galilee to Jerusalem – to look at what he was doing, to listen to his words and answer one question:  Who am I?

The same question is a question today. It’s THE question for Christianity and the question for evangelism.

All other questions follow, but not until this one is answered do the others make sense.

What is your answer? Who is he?

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