Tony Watkins

The Day of Judgement (Malachi 1:1 – 4:6)

Tony Watkins — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:00:48 +0000

I first wrote this post for the E100 Bible Reading Challenge. It was first published on the E100 blog in 2011.

‘See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,’ says the LORD Almighty. - Malachi 3:1

Central to the prophecy of Malachi, the last Old Testament prophet (a century after the exile in Babylon; probably around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah) is the concept of covenant. In a series of ‘debates’ or disputations, Malachi accuses the people of being unfaithful to the covenant which God made with their ancestors at Sinai.

They clearly think God doesn’t love them, but he points them back to the fact that he chose them to be his special covenant people (1:2–3). The problem, in fact, is not with God but with them. Malachi challenges their half-heartedness, expressed in their second-rate offerings and their lack of commitment to human covenants, particularly marriage.

Malachi also points forward to a day when God would be worshipped around the world (1:11) and to the coming of the One who would bring that about (3:1). After the exile, the Jerusalem temple had been rebuilt, but the people sensed that God had not returned to it. Malachi sees his coming as great news for those who trust God (4:2), but judgment for those who don’t. So the Old Testament closes with a sense of great expectation, which would be fulfilled by the coming of Jesus four centuries later.

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Daniel in the Lion’s Den (Daniel 6:1 – 6:28)

Tony Watkins — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:00:44 +0000

I first wrote this post for the E100 Bible Reading Challenge. It was first published on the E100 blog in 2011.

Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before. – Daniel 6:10

Daniel was a teenager when he was exiled to Babylon in 605 BC. Seven decades later, he could look back on a lifetime of God enabling him to thrive in a pagan context. He had even become one of King Nebuchadnezzar’s most important advisors. Then the Babylonian empire was seized by the Persians, and a new face ruled Babylon: Darius.

Darius’s plan to promote Daniel to the highest level provoked a hostile reaction from the old man’s colleagues. Was is simply jealousy, or did they find his absolute integrity a threat to their own behaviour? Either way, Daniel’s scrupulousness yielded no mud for them to sling at him.

Daniel’s response to their strategy of exploiting his faithfulness to God reveals the source of his character. He was utterly trustworthy because God had the first place in his heart. Nothing, not even the certainty of death, would deflect Daniel from his devotion to God. And nothing would make him hide his spirituality; it was a life of godliness lived in full view of others. This had been the pattern of Daniel’s life since he arrived in Babylon, and God had honoured his wholehearted commitment by making him a powerful blessing in a pagan world. He’s a fantastic model for Christians in contemporary society.

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The Story of Jonah (Jonah 1:1 – 4:11)

Tony Watkins — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:00:42 +0000

I first wrote this post for the E100 Bible Reading Challenge. It was first published on the E100 blog in 2011.

Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. – Jonah 2:8

God told Jonah to take a message far beyond the borders of Israel, to Nineveh, one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. But Jonah didn’t want this assignment, for reasons which only become apparent later. We assume it’s fear which made him board a ship heading in the wrong direction. But it’s not.

After being thrown overboard and swallowed alive by a huge fish, Jonah prayed from within its belly. He praised God’s compassion in rescuing him – even though it couldn’t yet have felt very much like deliverance (2:5–6). Jonah realised that God is at work since his new circumstances were clearly miraculous. More importantly, he understood that God is gracious, even towards those who deserve his anger.

Ironically, this was precisely his problem with his mission. He recognised that his announcement of judgment on pagan Nineveh was conditional on his hearers’ response. Jonah knew that, if they repented, God would show them grace and relent from destroying them. But Jonah clearly resented the idea of pagans receiving mercy and was furious when that is precisely what happened.

Jonah claimed to know God, who is ‘gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love,’ yet there seems to have been little sign of these qualities in his own life. He tragically failed to comprehend that the very reason God had blessed Israel was for that blessing to extend to every nation.

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Jeremiah’s Call and Message (Jeremiah 1:1 – 3:5)

Tony Watkins — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:00:38 +0000

I first wrote this post for the E100 Bible Reading Challenge. It was first published on the E100 blog in 2011.

My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. – Jeremiah 2:13

God called Jeremiah to be a prophet while he was still a youth, probably around 627 BC. These were the dying days of the dynasty that began with King David four centuries previously. Jeremiah announced, and experienced, the devastation of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BC (1:15). He was to say whatever God commanded (1:7,17), however hard that might be, and not to be afraid of his audience – though he had good reason to be (1:19).

Jeremiah’s message was unsparingly critical. The heart of it was that the people had abandoned God, despite everything he had done for them. Several centuries previously, the Lord had miraculously rescued them from slavery in Egypt, established a covenant relationship with them, protected them and given them the promised land of Canaan.

And yet it had all turned so sour. The people had turned their backs on God and embraced worthless idols (2:11). Jeremiah graphically compares them with prostitutes and animals on heat. The perversity of their behaviour is enough, says God, to make the universe shudder with disgust (2:12). Yet we, too, commit idolatry whenever we look to something other than God to meet our deepest needs. In our cravings for other things, we, too, forget God. Jeremiah forcefully reminds us that to do so is the height of stupidity.

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The Suffering Servant (Isaiah 51:1 – 53:12)

Tony Watkins — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:00:05 +0000

I first wrote this post for the E100 Bible Reading Challenge. It was first published on the E100 blog in 2011.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. – Isaiah 53:6

By the eighth century BC, Judah (the southern kingdom following Israel’s split into two) was in a moral mess. Isaiah announced that they would therefore face severe judgment at the hands of the Assyrians and, later, the Babylonians, including exile for many. But a remarkable reversal comes in the second part of the book, when Isaiah starts promising liberation.

In a series of intensely moving passages known as the Servant Songs, Isaiah reveals that God will rescue his people through his Servant. It becomes increasingly clear that he is also talking about something much bigger than rehabilitating the nation. Isaiah has in view both a liberator in the not-too-distant future, when God will once again comfort his people (51:3,12; 52:9) and bring them home (51:11), and a greater saviour through whom God will eventually do something far more remarkable (52:13ff).

Astonishingly, Isaiah anticipates the Servant dealing with the fundamental problem of human sin. Even more unexpectedly, Isaiah sees this Servant actually bearing the punishment deserved by those who have asserted their independence from God. It’s a rescue which goes way beyond Judah to embrace all nations (52:9–10,15). As the New Testament writers recognised, (e.g. 1 Peter 2:22–25) it is an extraordinary prophecy of Jesus who came to bear our sin on the cross.

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The Joy of Books

Tony Watkins — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:18:43 +0000

This brilliant animation is a real labour of love – many hours spent moving and re-shelving books to make this.

HT Dick Staub

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Nature. Beauty. Gratitude.

Tony Watkins — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:11:42 +0000

Louie Schwatzberg shoots beautiful images, particularly time-lapses. Here’s a 10-minute talk from TEDx in San Fransisco in which Schwatzberg focuses on the extraordinary beauty of the world around us. He wants us to fall in love with the world because, he says, ‘We protect what we fall in love with’. The latter part of the talk is a film featuring a young girl’s wise words about imagination, and some powerful reflections on the importance of gratitude in our lives from Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast. Enjoy.

HT Nev Pierce.

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An Island of Misfit Toys – Moneyball

Tony Watkins — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:58:29 +0000

This article was first published on Culturewatch. © Tony Watkins, 2011

Brad Pitt as Billy Beane in Moneyball. Image © Sony Pictures Releasing

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sits brooding in the empty Oakland Coliseum stadium. He switches on his radio to listen for a few moments to the commentary of a baseball game, then turns it off. It’s only moments before he turns it on again. Off. On. Off. A little later, as Billy sits in his truck, it is clear from the snatches of commentary that the Oakland A’s have lost the match. He hurls the radio out of the window into the rain before climbing out of the truck to angrily stamp on it. It’s October 2001, and the A’s, the team for which Beane is general manager, has just lost the American League play-offs to the New York Yankees. The problem, as Beane sees it, is that the wealthy teams can pay huge salaries to buy the best players, leaving modestly funded teams like the A’s unable to compete on equal terms. And straight after the play-offs, those rich teams rub salt in Beane’s wound by poaching his star players. It’s a classic sporting underdog story. Bennett Miller’s engaging Moneyball, written by Aaron Sorkin (reworking an earlier script by Steven Zaillian), is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Michael Lewis which explains how a statistical approach to baseball, developed by Bill James, transformed the game, starting with Billy Beane’s 2002 team. The arc of the film is, therefore, familiar – in that the story is about the changing fortunes of a losing team – yet also refreshingly unfamiliar in that the focus is on changing attitudes rather than achieving success.

The solution is obvious: the A’s needs more money. ‘I can’t compete against a hundred and twenty million payroll with thirty eight million dollars,’ Beane complains to the team’s co-owner, Steve Schott (Robert Kotick). But Schott insists, ‘We’re going to work with the constraints that we have. . . . I’m asking you to take a deep breath, shake off the loss, get back in a room with your guys and figure out how to find replacements for the guys we lost with the money that we do have.’ Billy is ambitious, determined, and haunted by the spectre of failure. So if the obvious solution is not an option, he will need to find another approach. By the time he meets with his scouts to consider players for next season, he has concluded that the game is fundamentally unfair because it all comes down to money. And he knows that the conventional ways of assessing the worth of a player are flawed. As a young man, Billy had turned down a scholarship to Stanford in favour of joining the New York Mets because, the scouts had said, he had the makings of a baseball superstar. Only it hadn’t happened. All Beane’s promise as a player had come to nothing; the scouts had been wrong. Now, he is certain, they must think differently.

The difficulty is always how to find a significantly different perspective. How are we looking at things within the wrong framework? How can challenges be approached in a different way? Louis Pasteur once noted, ‘chance favours only the prepared mind,’ so when Billy Beane meets with his opposite number at the Cleveland Indians, his mind is ready to notice the discreet influence of one of their front office team: Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). After the meeting, Beane quizzes Brand about his role, and discovers that this young economist, just out of Yale, has precisely the alternative perspective that the A’s need. ‘There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening,’ he says, ‘and this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. . . . Baseball thinking is medieval. They’re asking all the wrong questions and if I say it to anybody I’m ostracized.’

Beane wastes no time in recruiting Brand as his assistant so that the young man can bring his mathematical approach to finding players. ‘We’ll find the value of players that nobody else can see,’ he tells his new boss. ‘People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws: age, appearance, personality. Of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe there’s a championship team of 25 people that we can afford because everyone else in baseball undervalues them. Like an island of misfit toys.’ Together, the two men identify a number of players whose careers had been all but written off, or who were considered almost worthless. But in everyone else’s mind, it is a completely wrong-headed approach; Billy is ignoring years of accumulated wisdom in favour of some economist’s computer projections.

Sport is a rich source of metaphors for life, and the central thread of Moneyball reflects the way in which the value we place on people is so often subjective and superficial. Peter Brand, for example, is the sort of person who is often undervalued: far from being athletic and cool, he is overweight, diffident and nerdy. One of Beane’s new acquisitions, Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), was considered of no value after an injury to a nerve in his elbow, but Beane and Brand knew that he still had immense value – if he learnt new skills to play in a new position. The Oakland A’s as a whole was looked down on as a hard-up team (especially when Beane signed up a collection of ‘losers’), but once each individual’s specific contribution was properly recognised, it became a powerful force which could give the rich teams a run for their money.

Billy learns to re-evaluate himself as well as others. He comes to understand that his unsuccessful career in baseball was a result of being swept along by other people’s views of what he could and should be. He comes to think differently about what really has value in life, and when he is faced with a similar choice to the one he faced as a teenager, he takes a radically different decision. Having been in a situation of desperation, he was forced to look at things differently, and, with Peter’s help, he learns to look beyond the obvious to the things that really matter.

The real value of a person is not on the surface, in baseball or in life. Indeed, the true worth of a person as a person, rather than as a baseball player, is not revealed by any statistical analysis, but by what they do, how they speak and behave towards others, how they respond to adversity, and a host of other actions that we might easily overlook in a world preoccupied with money, status and looks. As Jesus noted, ‘A tree is identified by its fruit. Figs are never gathered from thorn bushes, and grapes are not picked from bramble bushes. A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart’ (Luke 6:44–45). Billy finally recognises that his worth does not lie in achieving victory in the play-offs, but in who he is: what he contributes to the team as a whole and, even more, his role as a father. From a Christian perspective, one would want him to go even further and discover that his true worth is found in his standing with God, but he nevertheless becomes a more rounded human being who has discovered the immense value of looking beyond the surface. Whether he is aware of it or not, his approach actually reflects that of God, who ‘chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful’ (1 Corinthians 1:27). There’s a warning, and an encouragement, in this for all of us: the value this world puts on people is, all too often, a result of looking at things from the wrong perspective altogether.

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sits brooding in the empty Oakland Coliseum stadium. He switches on his radio to listen for a few moments to the commentary of a baseball game, then turns it off. It’s only moments before he turns it on again. Off. On. Off. A little later, as Billy sits in his truck, it is clear from the snatches of commentary that the Oakland A’s have lost the match. He hurls the radio out of the window into the rain before climbing out of the truck to angrily stamp on it. It’s October 2001, and the A’s, the team for which Beane is general manager, has just lost the American League play-offs to the New York Yankees. The problem, as Beane sees it, is that the wealthy teams can pay huge salaries to buy the best players, leaving modestly funded teams like the A’s unable to compete on equal terms. And straight after the play-offs, those rich teams rub salt in Beane’s wound by poaching his star players. It’s a classic sporting underdog story. Bennett Miller’s engaging Moneyball, written by Aaron Sorkin (reworking an earlier script by Steven Zaillian), is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Michael Lewis which explains how a statistical approach to baseball, developed by Bill James, transformed the game, starting with Billy Beane’s 2002 team. The arc of the film is, therefore, familiar – in that the story is about the changing fortunes of a losing team – yet also refreshingly unfamiliar in that the focus is on changing attitudes rather than achieving success.

Sport is a rich source of metaphors for life, and the central thread of Moneyball reflects the way in which the value we place on people is so often subjective and superficial. Peter Brand, for example, is the sort of person who is often undervalued: far from being athletic and cool, he is overweight, diffident and nerdy. One of Beane’s new acquisitions, Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), was considered of no value after an injury to a nerve in his elbow, but Beane and Brand knew that he still had immense value – if he learnt new skills to play in a new position. The Oakland A’s as a whole was looked down on as a hard-up team (especially when Beane signed up a collection of ‘losers’), but once each individual’s specific contribution was properly recognised, it became a powerful force which could give the rich teams a run for their money.

No related posts.

Twilight – True Blood and True Love

Tony Watkins — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:40:25 +0000

This is a repost to coincide with the cinema release of The Twilight Sage: Breaking Dawn (Part 1)

Vampires are currently one of the biggest phenomena in popular culture. They are central to hit television series like True Blood, Being Human and The Vampire Diaries, but leading the pack are Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books and their film adaptations. These are just the most obvious examples of a recent surge in interest after Buffy the Vampire Slayer a decade ago.

But of course the popularity of vampires in fiction goes back to John Polidori’s short story TheVampyre (1819) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Since then the folk-tale origins of vampires have been overlaid with all kinds of newer traditions, including fangs, sensitivity to sunlight and having no reflection.

Meyer gives them some new twists. Her vampires are not afraid of being in the sunlight, except when humans are present, because the light reveals their ‘true nature’ – not ugly monsters but possessing a beautiful glittering skin. A more important variation is that Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the vampire hero of these stories, comes from a family that has learned to control its lust for human blood. They call themselves ‘vegetarians’, meaning that they feed off animals, not humans.

This takes us to the heart of the tension that pervades The Twilight Saga: deep-seated physical urges are at odds with an ethical sense that they should be kept in check. Edward and his family struggle with instincts that could reduce them to the monstrous behaviour of other vampires.

Bella (Kristen Stewart), the saga’s human heroine, experiences similar inner conflict, although she doesn’t have the same strength of will to resist her longings. She is completely infatuated with Edward and will risk anything to be with him, despite how obvious it is that a human-vampire romance will have bad consequences.

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said we are driven to reproduce, so ‘ the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything, misjudges everything, and blinds himself for ever to the object of his passion.’ Bella certainly demonstrates exactly this in the first film, insisting that she doesn’t care that Edward is a monster who has killed people.

But although the films don’t make it very explicit, there must be more to their love than mere animal magnetism. If not, these movies would follow most others about teen love and make the relationship sexual (that’s coming, but not until the fourth film). Vampire stories have long been a metaphor for sexual desire and gratification, so the fact that Edward and Bella abstain from sex, and he from drinking her blood, is counter-cultural. It’s one of many ways in which Meyer’s Mormon background shapes her narrative.

Bella and Edward are each convinced that the other is their soul mate, that they could never love another person as truly and deeply. They want to be together forever, just like any young couple that has fallen madly in love. As far as Bella is concerned, the solution is easy: all Edward needs to do is bite her and make her like him. But he is reluctant to oblige, and with good cause: to do so would, he believes, destroy her soul and condemn her to hell. At the end of the second book, New Moon, he finally agrees to her request, but decides to wait for a few years.

The main attraction of The Twilight Saga may well be the brooding, unfulfilled longing for an idealised, apparently unobtainable lover. But why the wider preoccupation with vampires? Perhaps part of the answer is that when our instinctive longing to be connected with spiritual reality is obstructed by the prevailing secularism of our culture, it still comes creeping out of the shadows in some misshapen way. It seems that we can’t stop telling, or lapping up, stories about the supernatural or spiritual, and about humans becoming immortal, even if through terrible means.

The love that Edward and Bella yearn to share, once she sorts out the place of werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) in her affections, is what we all long for: exclusive, intimate and forever. It’s how we feel true love should be because it echoes precisely what we were made for: an exclusive, intimate, eternal relationship with God himself.

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Citogenesis – how spurious factoids become established

Tony Watkins — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:04:23 +0000

A good warning from xkcd about the hazards of references in the online world:

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