In case you haven’t seen in the news, the situation in Zimbabwe is turning very ugly (even more so).  People are getting critically wounded and killed during prayer rallies.

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070312/26277_Zimbabwe_Police_Crack_Down_on_Protest_Prayer_Rally.htm

Zimbabwe police have arrested one of the chief opponents to President Robert Mugabe’s government during a blockade to a protest prayer rally planned for Sunday.

Organizers had planned to address Zimbabwe’s spiraling economic and political crisis at the rally organized by The Save Zimbabwe Campaign, a coalition of church, rights and opposition groups campaigning for political change in the country.

It was quickly thwarted, however, by truckloads of armed police who prevented local residents from getting to the stadium in the Harare township of Highfield where the rally was due to take place.

Riot squads arrested main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, along with dozens of other MDC officials and activists, while one MDC activist was shot dead. Police said he had ignored warning shots after leading a gang of protestors in hurling rocks at the police.

Morgan Tsvangirai after hospital treatment for head injury.

“They were ordered to disperse but began to advance menacingly at the officers,” said Wayne Bvudzijena, national police spokesman, in an Agence France Presse report.

“Warning shots were fired and the group still advanced. The police shot one male adult who appeared to be the leader of the group in the chest. He died on the spot and the group dispersed.”

As it turns out we were the inspiration for another GG blog at City Church.

This morning I was reading Brother Andrew’s ‘For the Love of My Brothers’ and in it is an analogy he gives for how God opens doors for the Gospel in seemingly impossible situations.

“The door may seem closed, but it’s only closed the way a supermarket door is closed. It stays shut when you remain at a distance, but as you deliberately move toward it, a magic eye above it sees you coming, and the door opens. God is waiting for us to walk forward in obedience so he can open the door for us to serve him.’ chp 2.

I believe Brother Andrew(a.k.a. the God Smuggler) when he says this as he has delivered Bibles and strengthened the suffering church behind the Iron Curtain and today in the Middle East.  In countless situations where people have told him, “you can’t do that” it somehow happened anyway and God has delivered him from all of his problems. Appropriately, his ministry is called Open Doors.  http://sb.od.org/

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…” So begins one of the most beloved hymns of all times, a staple in the hymnals of many denominations, New Britain or “45 on the top” in Sacred Harp. The author of the words was John Newton, the self-proclaimed wretch who once was lost but then was found, saved by amazing grace.Newton was born in London July 24, 1725, the son of a commander of a merchant ship which sailed the Mediterranean. When John was eleven, he went to sea with his father and made six voyages with him before the elder Newton retired. In 1744 John was impressed into service on a man-of-war, the H. M. S. Harwich. Finding conditions on board intolerable, he deserted but was soon recaptured and publicly flogged and demoted from midshipman to common seaman.

Finally at his own request he was exchanged into service on a slave ship, which took him to the coast of Sierra Leone. He then became the servant of a slave trader and was brutally abused. Early in 1748 he was rescued by a sea captain who had known John’s father. John Newton ultimately became captain of his own ship, one which plied the slave trade.

Although he had had some early religious instruction from his mother, who had died when he was a child, he had long since given up any religious convictions. However, on a homeward voyage, while he was attempting to steer the ship through a violent storm, he experienced what he was to refer to later as his “great deliverance.” He recorded in his journal that when all seemed lost and the ship would surely sink, he exclaimed, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” Later in his cabin he reflected on what he had said and began to believe that God had addressed him through the storm and that grace had begun to work for him.

For the rest of his life he observed the anniversary of May 10, 1748 as the day of his conversion, a day of humiliation in which he subjected his will to a higher power. “Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ’tis grace has bro’t me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” He continued in the slave trade for a time after his conversion; however, he saw to it that the slaves under his care were treated humanely.

In 1750 he married Mary Catlett, with whom he had been in love for many years. By 1755, after a serious illness, he had given up seafaring forever. During his days as a sailor he had begun to educate himself, teaching himself Latin, among other subjects. From 1755 to 1760 Newton was surveyor of tides at Liverpool, where he came to know George Whitefield, deacon in the Church of England, evangelistic preacher, and leader of the Calvinistic Methodist Church. Newton became Whitefield’s enthusiastic disciple. During this period Newton also met and came to admire John Wesley, founder of Methodism. Newton’s self-education continued, and he learned Greek and Hebrew.

He decided to become a minister and applied to the Archbishop of York for ordination. The Archbishop refused his request, but Newton persisted in his goal, and he was subsequently ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln and accepted the curacy of Olney, Buckinghamshire. Newton’s church became so crowded during services that it had to be enlarged. He preached not only in Olney but in other parts of the country. In 1767 the poet William Cowper settled at Olney, and he and Newton became friends.

Cowper helped Newton with his religious services and on his tours to other places. They held not only a regular weekly church service but also began a series of weekly prayer meetings, for which their goal was to write a new hymn for each one. They collaborated on several editions of Olney Hymns, which achieved lasting popularity. The first edition, published in 1779, contained 68 pieces by Cowper and 280 by Newton.

Through the years other writers have composed additional verses to the hymn which came to be known as “Amazing Grace” (it was not thus entitled in Olney Hymns), and possibly verses from other Newton hymns have been added. However, these are the six stanzas that appeared, with minor spelling variations, in both the first edition in 1779 and the 1808 edition, the one nearest the date of Newton’s death. It appeared under the heading Faith’s Review and Expectation, along with a reference to First Chronicles, chapter 17, verses 16 and 17 [see the below for this Scripture – Graham Pockett].

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears reliev’d;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believ’d!

Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promis’d good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call’d me here below,
Will be forever mine.

The origin of the melody is unknown. Most hymnals attribute it to an early American folk melody. The Bill Moyers special on “Amazing Grace” speculated that it may have originated as the tune of a song the slaves sang.Newton was not only a prolific hymn writer but also kept extensive journals and wrote many letters. Historians accredit his journals and letters for much of what is known today about the eighteenth century slave trade. In Cardiphonia, or the Utterance of the Heart, a series of devotional letters, he aligned himself with the Evangelical revival, reflecting the sentiments of his friend John Wesley and Methodism.

In 1780 Newton left Olney to become rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, St. Mary Woolchurch, in London. There he drew large congregations and influenced many, among them William Wilberforce, who would one day become a leader in the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Newton continued to preach until the last year of life, although he was blind by that time. He died in London December 21, 1807. Infidel and libertine turned minister in the Church of England, he was secure in his faith that amazing grace would lead him home.

Here is the newspaper article I was talking about last night. It is actually a review of a book about suffering.

Mysterious Ways
How do Christians explain a tsunami?

BY PAUL J. GRIFFITHS
Wednesday, August 3, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT The tsunami that swept over southeast Asia in December left in its wake not only death and destruction but a profound and vexing puzzle. What kind of a God would allow such a thing to happen? In the weeks and months that followed, skeptical commentators posed this question with irritated insistence, as if discovering for the first time–thanks to the sheer scale of the tsunami’s devastation–that we live in a world that may inflict grave harm with seeming randomness.

In “The Doors of the Sea,” David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian, tries to provide an answer. His book is, among much else, a rhetorically powerful and conceptually dense restatement of what Christianity has to say, over the centuries, about the suffering and death produced by nature itself–that is, by events outside human agency.

From a Christian point of view, Mr. Hart notes, such events are quite easy to explain, if difficult to accept. They are dramatic instances of the fact that the world is profoundly out of joint, damaged in deep ways by the fall of Adam and Eve and the rebellion of man. This fall, brought about by the exercise of human freedom, has altered the very physical order of the cosmos so that what God had intended to be a world of harmony and peace, free from suffering and death, is now a world running red with blood.

Much of this blood is shed by human ingenuity, in holocausts and genocides and gulags. But much of it is shed by earthquakes and storms and tidal waves and plagues, catastrophes independent of human will. This was the case for the quarter-million people who died in December but of course it is the case as well every time, for instance, a stray pathogen robs a single child of life.

Indeed, such tragedies are common. For Christians, they are horrors, evils opposed in every way to God’s loving intentions. (Mr. Hart notes, by the way, that the post-tsunami skeptics, in their what-kind-of-God question, posited a Christian and loving god and not a version of the cruel or indifferent gods that are a part of some other religious traditions.) More important, God can achieve victory over such tragedies and in fact has already begun to do so in the victory over death won by Jesus on the cross. There will be a time, too, when comfort is provided to those who have suffered and died, when the world will be irrevocably returned to the harmony intended for it.

But until then the only fully Christian response to events like the tsunami, argues Mr. Hart, is mourning and lament. The effects that natural disasters have on us are privations, absences, negative images of what God’s love intends for us and for the world. There is nothing good to say about them because, precisely, there is nothing good in them. By arguing in such a way, Mr. Hart draws upon and restates, with verve and ornament, the classical Christian view that all evil is an absence, a privation of good.

Thus to the claim that the tsunami provides evidence against the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God Mr. Hart responds: The disordered world in which we live isn’t as God intended and created it. God did order the world in such a way that natural disasters don’t happen. The only disaster he permitted was the one that we ourselves succeeded in bringing about, the one that disordered the world in the direction of chaos. God will finally overcome even this, Christian faith teaches. But until that victory is complete the damage wrought by chaos provides no evidence against God. Or, as Mr. Hart likes to put it: The God against whom natural disasters might provide evidence isn’t the one in whom Christians believe.

Mr. Hart also addresses what he takes to be a confused explanation of natural disaster offered by well-meaning Christians themselves, who claim that the sufferings and deaths produced by tsunamis and their like are part of God’s plan, God’s providential will. Those who say this, and they are many, are likely to offer bromides like “it’s all for the best” or “we can’t understand what God means by such things” to those bereaved by catastrophe. But if the classical Christian view is right, this is nonsense. It is not for the best. God doesn’t mean anything by it. Suffering and death and evil are meaningless horrors, privations that produce nothing. The best response for the bereaved, apart from lament, is to direct their gaze to a time when all tears will be wiped away.

This does not mean, Mr. Hart observes, that redemptive qualities do not ever accompany suffering. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-97), for example, welcomed the blood coughed up on her pillow as evidence that she would die a painful death from tuberculosis; she delighted in the suffering to come as a partial recapitulation of the redemptive suffering of Jesus. To most moderns, Christian or not, this idea sounds almost pathological, but it need not be judged that way. Mr. Hart’s account can be extended to embrace this view of suffering, and he begins to do so toward the end of the book. What’s needed is a clearer distinction than he yet offers among kinds of suffering, between what is redeemable in suffering and what is not.

But this is a minor criticism of an altogether outstanding book. Mr. Hart is learned in philosophy and theology, widely read in literature and moved by strong intellectual passions. “The Doors of the Sea” stands a good chance of becoming a classic and deserves to be widely read, by Christians and by anyone else concerned with the agonizing subject it addresses.

Mr. Griffiths holds the Schmitt Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

That’s right, Handel’s Messiah, sure to convert you if you’re not already

Please let me know no later than Thanksgiving if you’re interested in going with us on Monday Dec. 18th. Info is below:

Handel’s Messiah

Handel’s most beloved oratorio comes to life in the hands of Music Director Jeffrey Thomas as he leads the American Bach Soloists and American Bach Choir in a performance of the 1743 version from the London premiere. Four world-class soloists join the ensemble for these stirring performances–a holiday tradition for fifteen years!

“I doubt the Messiah choruses have been sung with greater attention to detail anywhere.” (San Francisco Classical Voice)

Where:

Grace Cathedral

When:

Monday, December 18, 2006 – Tuesday, December 19, 2006
7:30 pm Pacific Time

Tickets:

$20-$55 ($18-$50 Student/Senior)

To purchase tickets or for more information visit American Bach Soloists online or call (415) 621-7900.

Hi guys,

After last Friday my Dad (Paul) said he forgot to tell us the type of prayer we entered into last Friday called Lectio Divina summarized below:

Latin: lectio = word, divina = divine

A way of meditating or chewing on the word

LISTEN – read 1^st time aloud and listen for the word or phrase to which you are drawn or which you particularly notice. It might be a phrase that disturbs you. Pay attention to your feelings and your thoughts.

MEDITATE–read a 2^nd time aloud and look for a connection between a phrase or word and some situation in your heart, life, family, relationships, work, etc.

PRAY–read a 3^rd time aloud and this time do you sense Jesus inviting you to take a step of following him. If so respond to him in prayer.

REST–now just rest quietly in the presence of God and his love for you without a word.

The practice itself has a long history that many trace all the way back to Judaism. This approach to bible reading has been preserved for more than 1500 years in the Benedictine order which was founded in Italy by St. Benedict (480-547 AD). For a more complete description of the four steps of lectio divina, you can visit the home page of St. Andrews Abbey in Valyermo, CA at http://www.valyermo.com/and click on Lectio Divina.

Also, if you want to learn more about my Dad’s ministry see www.theleadershipinstitute.org. My parents really enjoyed meeting all of you and said numerous times of what a great time they had.

Kirk

First, thanks to Kirk’s dad for a great GG last night. I think we set a new record for attendance and the fire of the Holy Spirit descended upon a few of us

Christianity Today has compiled a list of the 50 most influential books if you need some inspiration for winter reading. It would be great if people could recommend good books that they’ve read here on the website.

I just wanted you all to know that I’m going to a wedding in Minnesota this weekend…I’m very bummed to miss a 3rd GG in a row
(and to miss meeting your dad, Kirk!)
I hope it is filled with God’s good word.
Love,
Erin

Hi everybody, wanted to throw out a praise report.  God has quickly provided a place for us to move to that we are excited about.  It has many of the current amenities (OK for bikes & bbq grill, balcony, bathroom ) plus a few other new ones… dishwasher(!), better location (closer to church, friends, Caltrain, & Shannon’s work), free Google internet (thanks Jason), etc.  The current resident has shrines set up all over the place I think to Hindu gods, so we may need to have GG at our place sometime soon in order to ”clean house” and welcome in the right Spirit.  We’ll be moving in early November with some rent overlap, which is good for moving even though it’ll cost a little more.  Look forward to seeing everyone at GG Friday evening.

Daniel & Shannon