Melbourne Book Launch/Uber Fund Raiser

What Jesus Sounded Like

When we read in Luke’s gospel the story of Jesus reading from Isaiah in the Synagogue we probably have a mental image of a European looking Jesus delivering a modern day kind of sermon. This video is not spectacular, but it is probably the closest example of what Jesus would have both looked like and sounded like as he read that day. The young man in the video is a Jew from Yemen, and he is reading/cantoring the Torah.

His pronunciation  is quite different from modern Hebrew and the rhythm in the way he sings the scriptures is thought by scholars to be the closest to the way Hebrew was read by Jews in Jesus’ day. It sounds to modern ears a lot like the Muslim call to prayer. A great reminder of Jesus Jewishness and his Middle Easternness.

more about “Yemenite Torah Reading“, posted with vodpod

Carry Two Pieces of Paper in Your Pockets

“A person should always carry two pieces of paper in his/her pockets. On one should be written ‘For me the world was created,’ and on the other, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ “

Hasidic Saying

Another Sayers On Our Culture

“A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.”

Christian Writer Dorothy Sayers

More endorsements For the Vertical Self

God forgive us for thinking too highly of ourselves. God forgive us for thinking too lowly of ourselves. God forgive us for thinking of ourselves so much…. Mark Sayers offers a brilliant corrective hereto a society that is self-absorbed, narcissistic and aching for transcendence. You can hear the whisper that you are beloved… and you can here the persistent call that if we really want to find our lives, then we need to give our lives away for others.

Shane Claiborne author, activist, and recovering sinner www.thesimpleway.org

Reading The Vertical Self, I was convinced that Mark Sayers has correctly identified the malaise that inhabits the western church – a malaise that cannot be addressed by anything other than individual reengagement with God on the deepest level. His sociological insights into the worldviews of the majority of Western Christians were so accurate and incisive I could not think of one church leader who would not benefit from reading this book. This is the most helpful book I have read in the last year and one of the most important I have read in the last decade.

Dr Cheryl Catford National Director, Australian Evangelical Alliance

Mark is just one of those people who is creatively gifted with a sense of what is important for his generation. In The Vertical Self he probes at the roots of personal transformation‹ – our sense of identity‹ and he it does it with rare cultural savvy combined with genuine theological insight. A unique read.

Alan Hirsch www.theforgottenways.com Author of The Forgotten Ways and co-author of Untamed

Are we tethered to the shifting sands of the messages of world around us or to the plumb line of God’s grace and love? This is the insightful question The Vertical Self lays before us. Mark Sayers provides queues and clues of the challenges of communicating God’s message of love and grace within contemporary culture whose sense of value is often derived from images and ideas as fleeting as they are unrealistic – a guide for personal examination and mission.

The Rev. Canon Ellis E. Brust Churches for the Sake of Others Church Planter, Orange County, California Former President, Anglican Mission in the Americas

MA-N-IPULATE!

I finally finished today recording the audio version of The Vertical Self. Wow, what a marathon! I did not realize how much reading there would be invovled, but with the help of Phil the sound engineer we pulled off some mammoth sessions to get it done in a week.

One of the problems with doing such long sessions is that you begin trip over words that you can normally say as your tongue and lips turn to jelly. For me my enemy word became ‘manipulation’ which in the last session at night I could not say to save my life. But we finally got there in the end.

What Your Swearing Gives Away About You

As humans we do not always share with those around us our deepest fears and feelings. We become very adept at wearing masks in public and learning to self censor. However swearing is a fascinating insight into how sometimes our shames and fears can burst to the surface in moments of stress and pressure. This is true not only of individuals but also of cultures.

In the West our swearing tends to focus upon human reproduction and human ablutions. This has not always been true however of our culture. For example the works of William Shakespeare contain many crude jokes, however in his time they did not have the weight that they do today because the real words not to drop were religious. People were not as offended by jokes about going to the toilet or sex but because culture as a whole was a lot more religiously minded, it was blasphemies that carried the biggest punch.

In Catholic countries, particularly latin cultures, most swearing revolves around mothers and illegitimacy, reflecting the cultural importance that the mother of Christ played in those cultures. In Cambodia one of the worst words that you can call someone could be translated as ‘land stealer’ which reflects the Cambodian cultures fear of having their land stolen by the nations that are their nearest neighbours. Some cultures refuse to swear in their own language and prefer to use other languages so as not to pollute their own tongue.

So our swearing is a reflection on what are our deepest fears both individuals and as cultures. Our penchant in the West for dropping the f bomb illustrates both our obsession and our embarrassment around the reality of human reproduction. The fact that many of our swear words also revolve around bodily fluids, shows up our fears about our bodies in a secular culture fixated upon bodily perfection and horrified by the concept of bodily limitation and decay.

So next time you drop a hammer on your foot, pause for a second before you open your mouth as you might be giving away more than you realize.

The Trouble With Paris Three Years On

A totally self indulgent catch up with the self described (and totally deluded) stars of the The Trouble With Paris DVD.

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Life As Journey?

John Elder has written a fantastic article in which he examines our contemporary obsession with the viewing of life as ‘a journey’. Elder writes

Journey-talk, he says, is an attempt to bestow meaning on what we do. And why is it so ubiquitous? Hauskeller reckons we’ve always had the idea of life as a journey, but we make a great noise about it today because, having lost old certainties, it’s a way of convincing ourselves it’s true.

Philosopher and best-selling author Alain de Botton argues that journey-talk is ”especially appealing now … because of the exceptionally fragmented nature of our present reality. Think of the current concern with story as a reflection of the true chaos of our internal landscapes. Where does this chaos come from? The recent collapse of the faith in capitalism, deep scepticism about the environmental impact of business and fear as to the solidity of liberal civilisation in the face of outbursts of irrationality and faith-based violence.”

But surely what we think of as the civilised world has been through horrific, chaotic times. The poetry from the First World War isn’t larded with musings on lost legs, dysentery and lungs blistered by mustard gas as being part of life’s journey. Rather, there’s disgust, despair, the burdens of duty. The closest thing to journey-talk was fatalism or a surrendering to whatever God wanted.

While plenty of people still live by ”God’s plan”, there are many more who don’t. And the individual’s journey, with its mythical overtones, has probably taken up some of the slack.

Or, as sociologist Francesca Collins, of Monash University, puts it: ”Perhaps the ‘journey’ is a secularised version of ‘God’s will’. It allows us to make sense of the utterly unfathomable without resorting to God or some sort of compensation in the afterlife.”

I am going to be speaking about this tonight at Church and contrasting this view of life with the culture in which Jesus grew up in where life revolved around the idea of not a journey but rather anchoring ones reality in the study of Torah as a manual for life.

You can read Elder’s full article here.

The Vertical Self Audio Book

Today I started recording the audio version of my new book The Vertical Self. I have not read aloud so much in my life! I have been recording at the audio book studio at CBM HQ in Box Hill, so the excitment of the task was tempered by the fact that most of the other people in the building were working their socks off on appeals for aid for the victims of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. You can donate here 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gen Y gets Older

The Age has an article about Generation Y turning thirty. Nothing really that earth shattering or new in this article, it’s pretty much the same stuff you have probably read before. One problem with these kinds of articles is that they always tend to focus on Gen Y’s which are in the corporate world, which is not the mainstream of Y’s.

The majority of Gen Y’s are working as teachers or plumbers or in hardware stores, yet when you read these articles you would think that every Gen Y is the head of the marketing department of a major company. I guess this happens because most of the experts that they interview for these articles make their living consulting for major corporations. Anyways I will shut up now and let you get to reading the article. Fifty is just around the corner!

YouTube Bible

This video is from a website called Bibledex. It’s a series of short films about every book of the bible, kind of a cross between youtube and wikipedia – a snapshot into. It has been put together by the University of Nottingham and is an interesting little overview of each book of the the bible designed for people who are new to the bible or would like to brush up on their knowledge. You can check out the Youtube channel here

Marketing the Dalai Lama

The below quote is from an interesting article about the commodification of the Dalai Lama

As a measure of our cultural values, it is interesting to consider that the Dalai Lama has become a commodity. When he appeared at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, people flocked to the stage, mobile phone cameras aimed at His Holiness, presumably so they too could own a piece of the Dalai Lama, a snap shot as proof of their participation in the event.

Much as people took fragments of the Berlin Wall as keepsakes — history-as-commodity, concrete remnants of the past through which to personalise the enormity of the present moment — so too did the photographers of the Dalai Lama serve a personal interest. Their zeal to gather mementos feeds an ego that ironically contradicts the basic principle of selflessness that is central to Buddhist philosophy itself.

From Eureka Street. Read Full article Here