Fahrvergnügen and Nichole Nordeman

I like Monday nights. I love the Spiritual and Ministry Formation class. Dr. Douglass always offers great insights. And, afterwards, I always enjoy the discussions with the other students in the class. Everyone seems to linger after this class, perhaps thanks to the coffee and St. Louis Bread Co. pastries that are served. It's a nice experience, and I gain some real insights from both the class and after class conversations.

And, then it is nice just thinking everything over on the way home. It was a beautiful night, and a nice night for a drive. As I drove along in my VW Bug and enjoyed the unique feel of a German vehicle connecting with the road on the nice, windy roads around Covenant, I thought, “yes, this fits the idea of fahrvergnügen perfectly.” I flipped on the CD player to find last time I had listened to it (which was a few weeks ago, actually, I often just listen to XM), I had been listening to Nichole Nordeman, so I picked up where I had left off. Nordeman's music fit perfectly on the drive. I had been contemplating the music and words of the traditional Doxology yesterday, so Nordeman's “Doxology”/”My Offering” were especially fitting.

It was a good night.

Upon a Rainy Night in Spring

A former professor of mine was telling me the other day that she was reading an argument about spring being a “crime of passion.” This, she suggested provides a “synthesis” to correspond with Chaucer's “thesis” (“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote”) and Eliot's “antithesis” (“April is the cruelest month”). I felt inspired tonight to write a little poem of synthesis.

Treasonous rain pours upon the dead leaves,
A gentle tyrant killing passions of spring,
Marching, marching, marching blossom killed
And plant drowned by the tears of hopeful clouds.
The rotting leaves of spring reveal the crime
Of Season covertly tantalizing trees,
Poor and senseless of the impending doom
Cruel nature saves to dash the sprouts of dreams.
Treason! Treason! Poisoned swords are ignored,
Usurpers die 'longside their rightful kings.
The lurid rain robs the colors of day,
And brings to earth a monotone of gray,
Awashes off the new birthed signs of life,
But leaves neither spent poison nor used knife.

Static IP's, Two Subnets and Linksys Routers

So, say you sign up for a DSL plan that comes with five static IP addresses. Let's also say you want most of your systems behind a NAT (Network Address Translation) system, nice and safe away from the internet, but you want a few systems to use those static IP addresses so that they can be easily accessed online. That's the scenario my church has at the moment.

In January, when we moved the offices back to the main building, I configured the network using two Linksys WRT54G routers. We only needed one wireless router, but for the small difference in price, it seemed advantageous to me to stick to one model for everything. We'll be deploying more WRT54G's as access points around the building eventually.

At any rate, I installed the first router directly connected to the DSL modem. I set it up to do PPPoE authentication. I tried to match the IP's and subnet on this unit to what the AT&T installer gave to me. The second router I assigned a static IP address to and told it act like a normal SMB router does — it assigned NAT IP addresses (in the 192.168.1.1-254 range). The majority of computers in the office connect to this second router either by wire or wireless. The second router is connected to a 16-port switch that helps fill in our wired needs.

At any rate, this worked fine for the NAT'ed computers, but for the one machine (other than the second router) that was hooked to the first router, things were amiss. This second computer is supposed to be accessible remotely for various reasons, and I assigned it one of our static IP's. It wouldn't connect from outside. Some other problems took over my time, and I only returned to this recently when it became more important. I reworked much of the network trying to figure out what was wrong. I ended up with the second router performing PPPoE and the first router acting merely as a switch. I thought maybe the Linksys router simply wouldn't work with static IP's (in fact, I was told by some that I was trying to do the impossible).

Well, I talked to AT&T support and found out at the install time I had been given the wrong subnet mask. I went in and tried the new subnet mask, but it didn't seem to work either. As it turned out, the problem once I had the right subnet was that I no longer had the routers setup like I originally had them. Once I returned the routers to my original configuration and entered the new subnet, everything sprang to life. It was frustrating that many, many hours were wasted because I was given the wrong subnet mask, but at least things finally work!

This is a far cry from the original network that was in place when I first started administering our systems in 1997. The network was not connected to the internet (everyone fought over getting a turn on using the fourth phone line to dial-up to Juno), was merely four computers hooked up to a switch, and the “wiring” was a multi-line phone cord that had been made to work as an ethernet line. We now have almost twenty systems running through the two routers and connecting via either 802.11g or high quality CAT-6 lines (in preparation for a future Gig-E upgrade); these systems run three different operating systems (Windows XP, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux). And, hopefully in the next few months, I'll be able to bring online some kind of GNU/Linux network authentication server that will allow granular access to the access points that will cover the building in connectivity.

Exciting times!

The Narrow Mission of the Religious Right

Roland Martin posted an excellent op-ed on CNN.com.

An African-American pastor I know in the Midwest was asked by a group of mostly white clergy to march in an anti-abortion rally. He was fine with that, but then asked the clergy if they would work with him to fight crack houses in predominantly black neighborhoods.

“That's really your problem,” he was told.

They saw abortion as a moral imperative, but not a community ravaged by crack.

If abortion and gay marriage are part of the Christian agenda, I have no issue with that. Those are moral issues that should be of importance to people of the faith, but the agenda should be much, much broader.

Most people would consider me a member of the religious right. I am pro-life, fairly politically conservative (and vote Republican more often than not, although I am not tied to the party), opposed the demythologization of the Bible, and so on. Generally speaking, that descriptor fits me better than any other that comes to mind politically. I'm Christian and I'm on the right of the political spectrum. OK. Another term people might use is “Evangelical,” which in today's culture is essentially synonymous with the first term.

With that in mind, I think this gentleman is right on the money. While I think abortion is one of the central moral issues of this present time period, that does not mean Christians are allowed to avoid all of the other issues. It does not excuse us from needing to exert a positive force in our communities. I think this is even truer when the issue is Homosexuality. While abortion is concerned with saving lives, when we seek to fight against “homosexual rights” we are merely fighting against one sin among many. While I agree that it is a sin, does a homosexual ever change his or her ways or, more importantly, come to Christ because we attempt to oppose the homosexual political action committees?

Our primary — and, really, only — allegiance is to Christ. If our politicking prevents one person from accepting the Gospel, we ought to suspend it. It would be much better for us to live in a country where our “rights” as Christians were stepped on and the government did what it wanted (it will anyway) than for Christians to be associated with moralism instead of the Gospel.

At Covenant Seminary there is a big focus on putting the indicatives (the Gospel of Grace) before the imperatives (how we should reform our morals and other things God requires of us). I think when we focus on a sin, such as homosexuality, to the exclusion of evangelism, helping the poor, and so on, we are putting the imperatives before the indicatives. We are yelling, “Evil world, reform! By our political savvy we will make you reform! Oh, and once you do, you'd be welcome to come to church and learn about Jesus.” Instead, we should say, “Come and know Jesus!” Once people know Christ, He and He alone will be able to reform the individual into His plan for him or her.

This mixup of indicatives and imperatives is precisely why Evangelical means little more than “religious right” these days. We are so focused on the imperatives as they translate into political action, our central message is lost in the noise of our vain attempts at national righteousness.

On Easter, and everyday, may we resolve to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified!

He Is Risen!

A joyous Easter to all of my friends in the blogosphere!

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

Were You There?

Courtesy of the CyberHymnal, a traditional African-American spiritual that is always hauntingly appropriate for Good Friday:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?
Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?
Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?

Were you there when they laid Him in the tomb?
Were you there when they laid Him in the tomb?
Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they laid Him in the tomb?

Good Friday Meditation: Jesus's Perfected Sign of Jonah

Following my annual tradition (2005, 2006), I have posted a Good Friday meditation online today. You will find this year's meditation over at Open for Business.

Making Sense of Facebook

I've been thinking lately about the dynamics of Facebook. I think there might be a real article in this, so I'm not going to go really deep into it here, but I thought I'd just write out a few ideas off the top of my head. I was talking with a friend the other night, and she pointed out how frequently the differences between how one interacts with a given person on Facebook and in real life can be quite stark.

In my own experience, I tend to think this is true. I think it is probably true of any electronic communication; there is something freeing about writing in bits and bytes that changes the social dynamic and frees people to communicate more. This is observable more in Facebook because it is a social networking system based primarily on real world connections, at least during most of its history. By initially limiting those who could join to those who had proof of membership in certain organizations (schools and businesses), it insured that quite a few of a person's Facebook friends are also real world friends from that organization.

The real value of Facebook in my estimation is that it is a useful way of sharing information and staying in touch with those one knows from the brick and mortar world. I resisted the idea of joining for quite awhile simply because I like to go against the flow. I'd rather do something different. But, this useful value to Facebook convinced me that maybe going with the crowd wouldn't be such a bad idea. The emphasis is obvious: not only do you have to prove your membership in a particular network (other than the regional networks), one also is encouraged to denote how one knows friends (e.g. work together, took classes together, etc.). All but five of my Facebook friends are people I have actually met.

Like I said, I think this also makes for a stark contrast, though. Because I know these people offline, I know how I interact with them normally. Because of this, I can note that I talk to some people on Facebook quite a bit more than I ever did in real life. This isn't bad at all, but it is a curious phenomenon. What does that indicate? I'm not quite sure, but I'm thinking about this. A few cases can be explained easily: they are people I would talk to more, but I may not see all that often. Other cases are more puzzling.

Really, it might be a good topic for a sociologist to pick up on.

The SBC and "the Journey"

If you are in the St. Louis area, you probably know about a current controversy between the Southern Baptist leadership and “the Journey,” a church they helped fund. The point of contention is an innovative program they came up with to have theology discussions at Schlafly Bottleworks, a brewery. That doesn't jive well with the SBC position on alcohol, but the Journey sees this as an important outreach opportunity.

In context of this, one of my professors, Dr. Lucas makes some interesting remarks on his blog:

For example, if the church (or a particular denomination) is meant to stand for “conservative evangelicalism” and that means standing for certain political or cultural positions, or standing for those positions in a harsh or insensitive manner, then the “emerging” generation will have none of it. As Darrin Patrick, the pastor of The Journey, put it in the article, “When you're stricter than God about what he commands and permits, younger pastors are not going to play ball. They're not going to take one for the denomination” (emphasis mine). I actually think this stance of “not taking one for the denomination” could be a good thing—if it forces church leaders to reorient themselves to Gospel priorities and attitudes.

This, of course, impacts not only the SBC but other evangelical denominations. Moreover, it intersects with an issue that I find especially interesting and actually wrote about for another class's weekly reading response: adiaphora, or things indifferent. To what extent is this an issue of refusing to permit people to have a “nonchalance of faith”? As Evangelicals, as Reformed, as Christians in general, how do we deal with things not specifically prohibited or encouraged in the Bible or which are up to different interpretations? How do we hold onto the particular interpretations we value without “essentializing” non-essentials?

Closing up shop.

Well, this is it. I've given up on blogging. I'm out of words. Farewell!