Book & Movie Reviews

Nothing Is Impossible With God

Details: Created on Tuesday, 11 September 2012 19:00

The influence Paul's mom had on him seeing Jesus is evident in his foreword to her new book, Nothing Is Impossible with God: Reflections on Weakness, Faith, and Power (New Growth Press). Be encouraged as you read.

Forward to "Nothing Is Impossible With God"

My mom has written this book on her life's journey since Dad's home going in April, 1996. But the best book is the one we get to watch every day--her life. Paul tells the Corinthians (3:3), "You show that you are a letter from Christ...." I love to tell people, "How many 87-year-old woman work almost full time as missionaries to Hindus in London?" When she is in London, when weddings or births or visa problems aren't pulling her home, she is regularly serving and meeting with Asian woman. She just loves it.

But it gets better. Mom is not just working in London, she communicates regularly with her family of five children, twenty-four grandchildren, and twenty great grandchildren. Just getting birthday presents for that horde is a full time job in itself.

And better. She voraciously. She's introduced me to the whole genre of British Indian fiction. I didn't even know what the Mann Booker Prize was until Mom would tell me, "Paul, you need to read Brick Road; it just won the Mann Booker Prize." The what? How many 87-year old moms keep their sons on the cutting edge of culture? Just this morning she gave me a book by an Australian author, Gregory David Roberts, called Shantaram.

And still better. Mom hascultivated about a dozen, maybe even a couple of dozen friendships with women who share their lives with her and she with them. One of those friends, Sandy Elder said this about Mom, "Shirley & I often say, no matter the age difference, in our case 30 years difference, that she is so a "peer". What we mean by that is that whatever we confess to one another that we are struggling with, she has this amazing way that will always respond 'Oh ladies, believe me, I struggle with the same thing in my heart too, so please pray for me as I pray for you.' And we know she does. She is also one of the few women I know who has made the Holy Spirit to be real and accessible through her testimonies and teaching; it is, I suppose, because she really does rely on Christ through the Spirit."

And for those of you who are familiar with the Sonship course, Mom is constantly rediscovering the gospel. She will battle out of a fog into the clear air of the love of God for her. Her spirits will lift when something from the Word feeds her soul. Another friend, Sandy Smallman said this about Mom, "I am always challenged and blessed by Rose Marie's "restless" Christian heart......restless in a good way. She is never willing to simply be a status quo Christian, one who is happy with some blessings here and there. She demands more. She wants more of God, more participation in His ministry, more of His peace and joy. She frequently asks me to pray that she would not depart from a simple and pure devotion to Christ.' She says that so often that it has become something like a mantra to me. She often adds that she prays that for me as well."

Mom has sown a life immersed in the Word, and she is reaping a harvest of faith. All our lives have trajectories; all of us are in a continuing process of reaping and sowing. Old age, though, is heavily weighted toward the reaping side of life. It is the time in life when, to quote Jesus, "hidden things are revealed." If I had to summarize Mom's life I would say, "In the battle of life, she immersed herself in the Word and community, which in turn fed her faith and empowered her love." Easy to say. Wicked hard to do. She often tells me the "back story" of what is going on in her life. Mom's life now is characterized by ongoing forgiveness, surrendering her will, waiting on God, fighting discouragement, and just stuff.

Mom's example has impacted my wife Jill's assessment of my retirement--Jill informed me that it wasn't going to happen! It was a no-brainer for Jill. She compared Mom's life with the lives of Christians who had slowed down and had drifted into low-level narcissism, and she didn't want any parts of it. The life of a pilgrim is far too attractive. Proverbs captures it best, "The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day."

Enjoy the book. Enjoy watching Mom reap. Enjoy the trajectory of her life. Just remember that the real book is working in London with Hindu women or walking the dog in Philly.

Paul E. Miller

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Book Review: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Details: Created on Saturday, 08 November 2008 05:00

Book Review: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

December 8th, 2008

My 84-year old mother, Rose Marie Miller, a full-time missionary in London keeps me supplied with cutting edge books. I’m not kidding. She’s more in touch than I am!

I just finished The Namesake today. It is written by a Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali woman, and it is the story of a Bengali family coming to America. It won a Pulitzer Prize and you can see why. Lahiri does a wonderful job of drawing you very simply into the lives of each of the family members as we follow the family for almost 50 years from their life in Calcutta to America first through the eyes of the father, then the mother, the son, his wife, and finally the son again.

It is a melancholy story. The whole book is a search for community, for love. And it is generally a fruitless search. The son in particular keeps trying to find solid ground, but it eludes him. By the end of the book, my heart was aching for people that don’t know Jesus, that don’t have any community to build their life around. The twin issues of personal identity (psychology) and community (sociology) are left unanswered. I thought of the hymn, “I turn unfilled to thee again.”

I’ve been particularly struck by the growth of the emergent church and its quest for community. My son John happened to be with us for Sunday a year ago and heard me talk on community during Sunday School. Afterwards he came up to me and said, “Dad I wish the emergent church could hear this.” I had described how the quest for community never worked. Basically, it is a quest for a group of people who will love me. What does work is to begin to love. Love creates community. It is just another version of Jesus asking us to follow him into his death. My death, my willingness to cease hunting for community and to begin to reach out to to the broken, the lonely, and the hurting always creates community. The only way I can do that is through faith, through relying on the blood of Jesus. So the formula is simple: faith => love => community/intimacy. It is one of the central paradigms of the new testament. Another way to write this formula is Jesus’ death => my death => our resurrection. As I follow Jesus into his death, then life comes.

Kim is home sick today.

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Why I Believe in the Resurrection

Details: Created on Tuesday, 31 March 2009 05:00

Why I Believe in the Resurrection

March 31st, 2009

Six weeks before our little Benjamin went to heaven I did a PrayerLife Seminar at West Shore Efree church. During lunch I sat with a couple, professional photographers, who told me how they would donate their time to take pictures of children who had just died or were about to die. This consortium of photographers’ website is www.NowILayMeDownToSleep.org. I did not know that in six weeks I would be calling them to ask them to take pictures of our little Benjamin.

They did a beautiful photo album of Benjamin that we got a copy of last week. The picture of John and Pam holding him is like a photo taken at the heart of the valley of the shadow of death.

Easter will be very special this year. Here are some of my thoughts on the resurreciton. Why do I believe it?

1. Jesus’s Resurrection. Without question, this is the biggest reason for believing it. The interlocking pieces of evidence for it are best summarized at a popular level by Lee Stobel’s The Case for Christ and at a scholarly level by N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Wright’s book is brilliant. His interlocking arguments are so inrresistible that Anne Rice of vampire novel fame said it was one of the keys to her becoming a believer. Wright traces how the Greek world did not believe or want a bodily resurrection. Neoplatonism’s dominate culture shaping mold wanted, like Eastern religion, to be freed of the body. Jewish thought affirmed the goodness of the original creation and thus was looking forward to a future resurrection that would happen to everyone, not one isolated person. So no one was expecting a resurrection. The Greeks didn’t want one and the Jews couldn’t imagine it. Wright and Strobel both discuss the multiple interlocking pieces of the Gospels accounts. My favorite one is that the women are the primary witnesses to the resurrection. The 21st century equivalent of that is me telling you that my grandson Benjamin is really alive and I have Martians who will testify that they’ve seen him!

2. The Spirit. In Ephesians 1 Paul tells us that the Spirit is God’s downpayment on the resurrection. That spark of unexpected joy that you see in your heart, the way your heart leaps at times into love, the way your spirit soars in worship are the Spirit of Jesus in you. The Spirit makes real the presence of the resurrected Jesus in your heart. Practically, this is why most of us believe the resurrection. We taste that resurrection Spirit every day.

3. The Creation. As I look out my window I see the lingering effects of an earlier resurrection in creation. Resurrection is just new creation. As I type I seen grass, trees, blue sky, and birds flying. Its a little dull and rusty, but it is still glorious. Resurrection simply means that God is going to do it again. So in Paul’s speech at Athens he begins with God’s first creation and ends with God’s re-creation. I am most indebted to N.T. Wright for this reason. Wright traces how the Jewish belief in a good creation is at the heart of the Jewish belief in a coming resurrection. In other words, the creation is not bad, it is just corrupted. Like our hearts, it too needs to be reborn.

4. Dead Bodies. If you’ve know a person and then see their dead body, C.S. Lewis tells us that we are never confused between that dead body and the person’s existence. Yet our cultural elites would tell us that tell us that brain/body=person. Yet every culture that has ever existed has affirmed that body does not equal person. It was clear in seeing Benjamin’s dead body that this was not Benjamin. Like the ancient Chinese, like the Bantu, like the American Indians, I affirm that Benjamin was an embodied spirit. It is obvious to any observer.

5. Jesus Himself. This is the most subtle and I don’t know if I can quite capture this but let me give it a try. When Jesus says to Martha, “I am the resurrecion and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”, I am just riveted. At one level what is amazing is Jesus’ authority, his boldness, but those words don’t come close to capturing what Jesus is saying. Even saying that Jesus is claiming to be God doesn’t quite capture it. That is true, but that almost dumbs it down a bit. He isn’t claiming to be God, he’s talking like he’s God. I think you get closer when look at Jesus through the eyes of the temple guards who the chief priests had sent to seize him. They returned a little later empty handed and the incredulous priests said, “Why did you not bring him?” The officers of the guard said, “No one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7) I think Napoleon, who evidently became a believer while reading the gospels near the end of his life captured Jesus best, “I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. Everything in him astonishes me. His spirit overawes me, and his will confounds me. Between him and whoever else in the world, there is no possible term of comparison. He is truly a being by himself.” (see. p. 274 of Person of Jesus manual). That gets closer. You can’t get your mind around him. As you listen to him, as you look at him, he fills you up, but your spirit can’t even begin to contain him. He overflows your spirit. It is like looking at a 1,000 Grand Canyons. You are touching, looking at, the center of the cosmos, the source. He is life itself. Life itself will never die. It will rise again.

And of course, this man Jesus, said that he was coming back. I heard a sermon a couple of years ago from one of my favorite teachers who preached a whole message on the 2nd Coming without mentioning that Jesus was the person coming again. The “2nd Coming” was its own entity. My friend David Powlison said that if you keep it simple, you just have to remember that the 2nd Coming is just the man Jesus coming back again, this time, though, without disguise. Like he did with his beloved disciple John in Revelation 1, he will need to reach down and touch each one of us so that we can see the glory.

Can’t wait to see Benjamin.

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“Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” by Richard Bauckham

Details: Created on Tuesday, 21 April 2009 05:00

“Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” by Richard Bauckham

April 21st, 2009

I just finished reading this fascinating book. Bauckham (a Scottish scholar) makes the case that the gospels are eyewitness testimony. He reviews patterns in ancient historiography and personal names, using a recently published first-ever lexicon of 1^st century Jewish names he does a careful analysis of the names in the Gospels.

What does this have to do with our study of the gospels? For the last couple of years when I’ve done the Person of Jesus study Lesson 6 on the sinful woman at Simon’s house, I ask the question, “Did Jesus’ rebuke get through to Simon?” There are several clues that it did. The first is that we know Simon’s name which suggests that Simon was the one who told this story to Luke, and was living in the 1^st century Jerusalem church. The second clue is that Luke tells us what Simon is thinking. Who else but Simon could have told that? So it was fun to read a book that corroborated what I thought the text suggested.

Here are some of his fascinating tidbits:

Mark describes the rather strange instructions that Jesus gives “two of his disciples” to “meet a man carrying a jar of water and follow his to a house where they are to prepare the Passover/Last Supper”. It is an odd passage. Bauckham analysis: Judas, at this point, is trying to find an evening local where he can report the location of Jesus and his disciples to the priests. If Jesus tells all the disciples where they are eating the Passover, then Judas will know. So Jesus arranges a clear sign that will direct two of the disciples without alerting Judas as to the location of the supper. It is a distinct sign because a “man carrying a water jar” would really stand out. Men seldom carried water jars in the ancient world. When I was in a remote corner of western Uganda over 20 years ago with a team from World Harvest exploring the Ruwenzori Mountains I was walking down to the steam to get water for us to boil. An old woman came up to me, took the water jar from me and went and filled the water jar. Men just don’t do some things!
John mentions several eyewitnesses that the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) are strangely silent about. Malchus, the high priest’s servant, Peter—the disciple who cut off his ear, and Mary the sister of Martha, the one who pours perfume on Jesus’ head and feet. Why are the synoptics silent? Bauckham suggests that since they were written while the witnesses were alive, the identity of some of the witnesses had to be kept secret. Peter is an obvious one. He was assaulting someone who was on official Roman business, and actually the object of the assault. Mary’s anointing was exactly what made someone a “Christ” or “Messiah”. The fact that is was spiritual would easily get lost on the Roman government.

What I didn’t like? He makes far too much of Papias (early 2^nd century bishop who had known several of the eyewitnesses) comment of “the elder John”. Mainstream scholarship has been making a big deal of “the elder John” trying to say that he was the one who wrote John and not John the disciple. But creating a whole new disciple, a second John who is Jesus’ best friend, that no one anyone, anywhere else even mentioned in antiquity is just odd. The idea has been around for a while and is typical of the herd mentality that is so common in mainstream scholarship.

Modern scholarship has never understood something very basic about being around Jesus. It is this: you can’t see him without it changing you. You can’t be a neutral observor of Jesus. But it is more than that, when you are around him and discover what he is like, you just want to dissappear. You feel like a plain looking girl in a room with a beauty queen. All four gospels writers in their own way, but John especially, want to dissappear. So their names only appear on the front cover and no where else. When you see Jesus, you don’t want to be seen anymore!

Having said that, the book breaks with much of mainstream scholarship by looking at the gospels as eyewitness testimony. It is a brilliant and courageous book.

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