July 2005 Archives

Terri and I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is both a remake of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and a movie version of Roald Dahl's book. Overall, I think I like the new movie with Johnny Depp. FYI, there are some spoilers toward the end, so stop now if you wish to avoid them.

I recently finished reading the book and have to say that Tim Burton has stayed a bit truer to the original novel than Mel Stuart. Given other movies in Burton's repetoire, this isn't really a surprise since he seems to share some of Dahl's apparent irreverence and sadism. Unlike many traditional books of children's fiction, Dahl likes to expose children to certain "adult" characteristics he happened to find repulsive. In fact, in the book (and it's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Eleveator) our hero, Charlie Bucket, actually doesn't say or do much. The real central figures are the adults and mostly Willy Wonka. The other naughty children also play a very central role.

As we see through the book, Dahl was very interested in exposing children's vices and how parents allow/promote them. The vices are demonstrated through each of the children besides Charlie. Augustus Gloop is a glutton. Varuca Salt is spoiled. Violet Beauregard chews gum. Mike Teevee watches too much television. Charlie, on the other hand, is forced by poverty to live a very humble life and never has the opportunity to develop such vices.

Anyway, in the latest movie, I think the novel's story is much more accurately presented than the 1971 version starring Gene Wilder. Personally, I don't think a 1970's audience would have accepted the book on the big screen as it was. The songs by the Oompa Loompa's alone would probably have sent most parents over the edge. Instead, they invented new songs, which had the same spirit, but which avoided saying things directly. (Such as calling Augustus Gloop "So greedy, foul, and infantile" or Violet Beauregard a "repulsive little bum/Who's always chewing chewing gum" or Varuca Salt's parents are called "sinners" or of Mike Teevee—who get's the longest song of all—who watches too much TV and "HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!") The new movie appears to use the original lyrics and the Oompa Loompa songs aren't quite so irritatingly catchy. (I.e., no "Oompa, Loompa, Doompity Doo...")

The one peace of liberty this movie takes with the original book is the motives and some of the actions of Willy Wonka. Wonka seems to have odd flashbacks of his childhood involving a rather imposing dentist for a father (played by Christopher Lee, a.k.a. Saruman, a.k.a. Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus). The ending also takes an odd twist before resolving to something similar to the real ending involving a side trip to dissolve Wonka's childhood angst. This tends to be a feature of modern films where we somehow have to explain a person's oddness as being a factor of childhood trauma. I find the overuse of this kind of drama a bit annoying, but I don't know that it would really violate the spirit of Dahl's vision (since his books seem to be twisted for just this sort of reason).

Anyway, the movie is pretty good and I think reading the book before or after would be a good idea too. I think most folks could probably read the novel in an afternoon as it's only a hundred pages long or so (written for elementary kids after all), but it's pretty fun (and fairly twisted). Cheers.

I watched the season opener for Battlestar Galactica this evening to see if I could become a fan again. I found the mini-series interesting and did watch an episode or so (bits and pieces mostly) from season one and I just don't think I like BSG. If you're a fan and haven't seen this particular episode, there are some spoilers, so you might want to stop here.

First of all, I'm a "bigot." I have a great deal of respect for women in the military, but I don't honestly don't think women should be put on the front-lines of battle. In fact, I think it's probably best if we keep them out of battles as much as possible. On the spiritual level, I believe God ordained different positional roles for men and women as a part of His ultimate plan. On the practical level, I think the military is weakened by having to lower standards of strength, endurance, and physical fitness in order to accept women. Let's face it, women are the physical weaker sex, it's just a fact and since God ordained this order, there's no shame in it! He only has good ideas, after all. Finally, in war, there are acts of violence that men often perpetrate against women that are truly, truly heinous. I don't think there are reasons good enough to put women at risk to that kind of treatment.

BSG, though, has downright dainty women in combat situations and flying fighters. The obvious reason is that Hollywood prefers a pretty face to a realistic one, but gee-whiz, at least Ivanova from Babylon 5 was believable. One of the enlisted marines looked like a light breeze would knock her over. The gun she was shooting was longer than she was tall. I usually turn off my reality-checker when I sit down to watch a show or movie, it's just more fun if you try to lose yourself in it. However, I have my limits and this was a stretch.

Next, I get kind of irritated at the documentary filming style. The camera is always too close on characters and it's always moving so you can never be certain what you're looking at. I'm a visual person and this movie spends too much time flipping camera angles on me before I can get a good view of what's going on. Anyway, that just annoys me.

Then, theres the fact that the abilities of the Cylons stretch my ability to believe that they can't just swat the rest of the humans. They have the magical ability that when they die they transmit their consciousness of across space and time to instantaneously be resurrected in a fancy new body. I haven't seen enough episodes to know if any limitations have been set on this, but it appears to be a faster-than-light feature with an unlimited range. Since we know that Cylons have planted spies on the Galactica itself, it seems like they should be pretty dang easy to track by using this transmission device just to hold open a link.

Coming back to this episode, an unknown bogey crashes into the hull of the Galactica. The ship makes it more or less intact into the hull. However, there doesn't seem to be any worry about it on the Galactica itself. The moment I realized that the writers had sent this object colliding with the hull, my first thought was "boarding party," which is in fact, apparently, a major plot point of the second half of this episode (data I gleaned from the trailer). Weirdly, when the crash happens a fighter pilot stops to look to see if the ship explodes or not and he reports the status back to the Galactica. Where the hell are the marines? Where are the damage control teams? It appears that the thing is left to sit in the hull while they jump out of system and then twiddle there thumbs.

Anyway, maybe I've been reading too much David Weber and my reality-check systems have been too well sharpened by stories that are backed by research in military tactics and such. Anyway, I like SciFi and I'm glad some of you like BSG, but I just don't get very excited by it. I generally don't watch TV. I only watch it if there's something on that I really like. I find that I don't much care what happens to the Galactica and it's crew. Thus, I doubt I'll make any effort to watch another episode.

That's okay, though. Harry Potter 6 is on it's way to our house and Survivor: Guatemala should be starting in just a few weeks. I certainly have too much entertainment at my fingertips as it is anyway. Cheers.

I'm a little excited as the two projects I've been working on for the past few years are coming along nicely. I'm preparing the last few bits of code needed to upgrade this web site to use Contentment instead of Drupal. I also just made the first release to PAUSE this afternoon of FleetConf (which should be posted on my CPAN page sometime this evening).

Anyway, I thought I'd use this to summarize my current project interests.

FleetConf. My Master's Report started this project a couple years ago. Initially, this was a very simple agent system for creating accounts. It was extremely informal and basically integrated Best Practical RT: Request Tracker with some custom Perl scripts to do the tasks of creating accounts, creating home directories, adding users to mailing lists, and notifying the users of the status of this activity.

I have since expanded this into a full-fledged agent configuration system. My aim is to provide a system that is able to perform just about any task on a list of records. I call this list of records the workflow as an agent makes changes to the state of the records as part of the process. For example, with the account manager, the system waits for jobs to arrive in the form of RT tickets and then agents running on a number of different systems take actions based upon the content of the tickets. Future agents could iterate over the list of all users and check for anomolies or take action based upon the records—for example, an agent could iterate over all user accounts once per day to find temporary accounts that have expired and create account manager jobs to suggest their deletion. Another list might be to iterate over the list of IPs and check those IPs for OS type or other vulnerabilities. I have even considered a sort of controlled viral infection to install itself on any machine for which it knows the password or has an authorized SSH key.

Anyway, the system is now beginning to pay off as it provides a maintainable and testable framework for designing agents. I hope to start expanding it beyond account management tasks over the next few months.

Contentment. This is a project I've written from scratch over the last couple years. Originally, this system was written to cope with our need to build a database of documentation. We wanted something that could be stored in a simple and readable text format on disk so it would be easy to copy and paste from into emails. We also wanted an on disk format that we could use vim to edit with rather than some nasty web form such as a Wiki provides. I decided to use on-the-fly transformation into HTML and use CVS (originally, but now Subversion) for version control and content distribution.

I originally wrote the system in HTML::Mason and Perl because I had planned (and still do) to integrate it in some small fashion with RT. Mason also provides a pretty nice framework for generating indexes and theming that was easy to manipulate for the start. Somewhat ironically, the document language we liked the best was reStructured Text, which is a format used by Python. The system is now a bit slower than I'd prefer, but with a little more effort in caching, it should be plenty fast. (The latest version of Contentment is also much, much faster with a couple tricks I need to publish and need to start using on the CIS Support Site.)

At this point, the system has grown well-beyond these roots and now features on-the-fly transformation for a wide variety of formats with a plugin system for adding new filters and transformations. It can perform content generation on Mason templates, regular Perl scripts, and POD documentation (the reStructured Text generator is actually a plugged-in feature at work as I'm not sure that's really a good target to include). It has a functionally hooks system allowing any part of the API to insert clean plugin code in appropriate places. It uses a VFS system for providing interesting path handling.

The latest feature I'm working on is the final piece of the puzzle, the "Contentlet" system. That's my cheesy name for plugins that include the handling of storing data in the backend and providing some mechanism for viewing and updating that data on the front-end. I'm currently building an API for the back-end which somewhat resembles the "node" system of Everything or Drupal.

File::System. This was a fun module to write. I created it to provide the VFS system because the other VFS modules I found on CPAN were either intended for a very different purpose or provided documentation for a non-existant implementation.

Basically, the goal is to provide an interface for finding paths in a very standard way suitable for using as partial URIs. I think the API I've created is very well suited for this task.

ParrotJoos. This is something I hack around at every now and then. I find the Parrot project intriguing. I'd like to do something to contribute, but I want to understand it a bit better first, so I've been taking the JavaJoos idea from my ol' CIS 706 course and trying to adapt it to Parrot. So far, I'm stuck building a compiler since I'm not very skilled at translating the LL(1) specification intended for yacc into a recursive descent parser for Parse::RecDescent. Perhaps I should use one of the Perl parser generators that understands LL(1) grammars or just use yacc/bison.

Anyway, this is one of those things I hit when I start to feel overwhelmed or bored with one of my other projects and need a break. I suppose that one of these days I'll either get tired of messing with this or my interest will finally spark and I'll start contributing to Parrot.

PtrCalc. This is a tool I'm designing to help me with teaching CIS 450 (web site only accessible to my students) this fall. One of the things I teach in that course is "Masaaki's Rules." He didn't really invent the rules, since they're just the rules that C uses to perform pointer calculations, but they're infamous in the undergraduate program. I've taken these same rules and made them my own by formalizing the notation he used into a sort of proof calculus for pointers. I'm writing this program to basically give students the right answers so they can experiment with this a little more on their own and get a little more familiar with the topic. Of course, this means that I'm going to have to be a little more aggressive in my testing as well... Muahaha!

Anyway, that's all the projects I can think of that I'm currently digging around on a bit.

My wife is out of town for a few nights at a conference in St. Louis. As such, I'm spending my time as I usually do when she's out of town: I hide at home alone, eat junk food, drink too much pop, stay up too late, and watch violent movies. That is, I revel in the heady days of bachelorhood for a short enough period to enjoy it, but not long enough to regret it too badly. I suppose I'd better while I can because sooner or later I'm going to be old and decrepit and have kids and then all the fun ends. ;)

Anyway, last night I decided to watch the Matrix trilogy. I made it through the first two by 2:30 am last night, but decided that I should go to bed at that point since I wanted to be in at work at a decent time the next morning. I just finished The Matrix Revolutions a couple hours ago. As usual, this movie moves me in a really powerful way to think about God.

What do I mean? Well, SciFi often has this affect on me because it generally provides a worldview where either God flat doesn't exist or His existence isn't really evident. In a way, this drives a strong wedge of confidence in the truth that there is a God and He cares.

In the case of The Matrix, it is heightened because it is an extremely spiritual movie. I mean "spiritual" as everything has some sort of mystical or religious meaning. Morpheus likes to talk about his beliefs and "the Path." (Making him sound vaguely Buddhist.) In Revolutions, Neo meets a program that believes in Karma. Agent Smith is constantly referring to "purpose." Neo ends up as a sort of blind prophet who becomes the messiah when he destroyes Agent Smith through a sacrifice that was visually portrayed as a crucifixion. After this "crucifixion," the AI being states, "It is done," which is a clear reference to the statement of Jesus on the cross, "It is finished." Also, a sort of reincarnation is implied as the Oracle expects Neo to one day return again.

And yet, with all these religious overtones I find myself at the end of the movie deeply unsatisfied. All the religious connotations have no ultimate meaning. It's as if the message is that our purpose is simply to exist and do the tasks set before us. The final movie makes a profound statement of truth when the Oracle says, "Everything that has a beginning has an end." This is a natural side-effect of the linear progression of time. I.e., sooner or later, humanity and earth and the universe itself must have an end. Therefore, if this is the case one can accept the hopelessness that what happens here doesn't really matter because it will all end eventually, one can deny this truth and seek to redefine reality so that there might not be an end, or one must believe that there is some greater purpose that exists beyond the end.

When I watch The Matrix I sense the hopelessness of that universe without any God. Sooner or later the humans and the machines will be destroyed. They must have an end. But, what's the rest of it mean until then? As far as I can tell, nothing except to toil according to your lot in life.

"Ergo," the hope I feel when I think back upon the reality I know here! I know that the end will come, but that the end of this universe becomes a sort of beginning for the next where time has no meaning. It boggles the mind to try and consider it. Yet, I know it to be true and just out of the reach of a mind confined within the ceaseless ticking of time. The Architect makes a statement about "hope" being a foolish construct of the human mind providing it's greatest strength and greatest weakness. Of course, in a universe such as that, hope is for fools. However, in a world doomed to burn, there is great hope yearning for the eternity to arrive at time's end!

Anyway, that's a rather whimsical view of why I'm encouraged by such otherwise hopeless material. It helps me to recognize the blessings I have and the hope of my calling by Christ through the Spirit according to the will of the Father.

On my way to work yesterday, I heard a news report talking about a group trying to put warning labels on pop cans. They want them to say something like, "Sugar-based beverages have been found to cause obesity." The spokesperson for the group cited teenage obesity as the reason for such a label.

Okay, I take issue with this on two counts. First, this is stupid. What moron can't read the back of a can of pop and see "Calories: 150" clearly labeled? Not only this, but everyone of our dear teenage children go through or have been through The Presidential Fitness program or whatever they call it. Part of this PE curriculum is to explain that, in general, the average person needs about 1200 to 2500 calories per day, depending on size and how active the person is. It really doesn't take a math genius to realize that drinking 10 cans a pop a day will make you obese. The spokesperson on the radio finished by stating, "It's liquid candy!" Um. Duh.

Second, it's disingenuous. Do these people really think this is going to change anyone's mind or affect anyone? We've had labels on cigarettes for decades and I still see people my age smoking. In fact, among college students, smoking is still very popular. The problem is that folks my age and younger have an invincibility complex that is kind of part of being this age. Long-term consequences aren't on the radar screen of most young people, it's just a fact. Telling someone that drinking pop causes obesity is likely to be met with blank stares.

No, either these people are turning a blind and deaf ear to 30 years of cigarette labels that had little effect or they have another agenda. Given that humans will do what is in their own best self-interest far more often than not, I find it easier to believe in an agenda. What's the agenda? What can they stand to gain? Well, 10-to-1, this organization is filled with and backed by lawyers. If you can get the government to establish that something is a health-risk and that "Big-Soda" was trying to cover that up by not placing such a label out on its own, they have a basis by which to sue "Big-Soda" and earn buku-gobs of money in settlements and fees. This is the exact tactic that was used to get Big-Tobacco and the lawyers are moving on because that cash-cow is starting to look a little lean.

Thus, I see this tactic as just being a way to make people think these people are good people while giving these same people a lever to make profit off of an otherwise legal business. People with this idea aren't high-minded, they're tax collectors, they've just found a way for the private citizen to collect the tax (and without any voter representation being present). Disgusting. Period.

Oddly, this seems to be a topic that I would rather muse about than rant on. When I first considered the topic I thought I would probably rant, but the more I thought about it, the more it became a muse.

Anyway, this muse is in reference to a recent Slashdot article referring to a book by Don Watson. I read the Newsweek.com article that Slashdot linked to and I like what Watson has to say.

The basic premise is that every organization out there now seems to be selling itself through the use of "vision" statements, marketing documentation, etc. If you look through Watson's web site, you'll find listed a number of both humorous and disturbing marketing-speak phrases to describe otherwise simple concepts.

I really don't care very much about schools, hospitals, and government offices and their use of obfuscating marketing terms, but I am disturbed by churches doing this. The language itself doesn't bother me nearly as much as the motive behind it. The use of such terminology demonstrates a clearly manipulative approach to religion that I think both denies the sovereignty of God and distrusts each person's own responsibility for her actions.

Very often this sort of behavior is justified by using terms like "relevant" and "application-rich." We want to reach out to "people" by making our message relevant. We want to reach out to "people" by making the message "application-rich." What is really meant by these terms, more often than not I'm afraid, is: We want to soften the messasge so that it's not offensive and that helps a person help himself. This sounds great, I'll admit it. Why would I want to share an offensive message? Why wouldn't I want to help someone help himself? Of course, I want both of these things, but truth trumps all.

The truth is that the true gospel of the Bible states that humans are worthless, steaming piles of dung. We really don't have anything to offer God at all. Not only that, but we don't really want to offer anything to God, we want it all for ourselves. This is one of the ironies of free will. While we have the free will to offer up ourselves and everything we have to God, we won't. As long as we are fallen, it is our nature not to, even though we could. As such, to present a message that helps a person help himself is delusional. No one can help herself; she must first be called by God.

Furthermore, this message is utterly offensive. What person wants to be told, "You're a steaming pile of dung and have never done anything on your own that merits God's attention?" Yet, this is the very message of the gospel. We bring nothing into a relationship with God and yet He imputes righteousness to us on the basis of His work. He plans every aspect of this transaction even while He works through the actions of humans to do it. We aren't His pawns, but we can't help but do His ultimate sovereign will.

Thus, it is my belief that churches should shy away from worldly devices, such as vision statements. I won't go so far as to say they are a bad idea, but they'd better be meaningful and they'd better be geared towards explaining the church's stand clearly and without omission. This is just a device for getting a message across. It cannot save people, it cannot hold people on course, it cannot equip believers to do any work. Let's keep our focus on the goal and the work that our Lord has set before us.

This is a continuation of the study I started in Part 1.

Unity is a virtue for Christians between Christians. I suppose, in a more general way, unity is a virtue in all places in life, but it is vital to the Christian community. I think Christians have succumbed to believe too much in science and see their local church as a semi-random gathering of people who want to know Christ better. No. God has hand-picked each of the believers in that place and each has a role and a place to serve there, if they will do so.

No one is out of place in a local community. No one is there without a purpose.

One Lord.The "one Lord" is Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God. This plays out in many versus where Jesus is described as Lord. (Acts 2:36, 10:36) We live to Him and He is Lord of both the living and the dead. (Romans 14:8-9) Jesus is the Lord to all who believe. (1 Corinthians 1:2) Jesus is our Lord and not a human leader. (1 Corinthians 1:13) All things exist through our Lord. (1 Corinthians 8:6) We are all given various gifts to serve our one Lord. (1 Corinthians 12:5) Everyone will confess Jesus' Lordship. (Philippians 2:11) Nothing is as important as knowing our Lord. (Philippians 3:8)

Of course, the word "lord" has not nearly the depth of meaning that it would have had to someone living in the Roman empire in the first century. The dictionary defines "lord" as someone having influence or power and a master or ruler. A lord is someone to whom you show respect, honor, and obedience. Jesus is "the King of kings and Lord of lords." Such titles have been given to many men now dead, but Jesus lives on and is really the "the King of kings of kings and Lord of lords of lords." There is no higher power.

This gift separates us widely from the unbeliever. No one but a believer serves the one Lord. Many unbelievers claim to serve Christ, but they will change Christ's definition so that they serve a different Christ or their claim will be empty, followed by inaction. James stated that it might be possible for a believer to have faith without works, but he didn't understand it. How can one believe in Christ and not be driven to obey and serve? His implication is that, perhaps, such a person doesn't really believe, though only God can see through a person's facade into their heart and know.

As a for of unity, it is clear that if we all have the same commander-in-chief it makes no sense to act in civil war. Yet, this is what so man "Christians" do. If you disagree with someone in the Church, you don't have the luxury of writing them off and going separate ways, a mistake that the Apostle Paul and fellow missionary Barnabas made, but eventually reconciled. We should be reconcilers, not dividers, at least within the Church. If we disagree, let it be in love. God will surely straighten each of us out in the end.

Application: I think it should be obvious. Honor and glorify the Lord Jesus Christ. We do this through obedience to his commands. This includes making Him our highest and most important priority above spouse, children, work, friends, school, hobbies, and anything else (i.e., the First Commandment). This includes fulfilling our desire to know him by reading and meditating on His word and sharing our hearts and listening through prayer. We do this by reaching out and sharing our message with others whenever we can.

One faith. If there is a word in this passage that has been corrupted by American culture, it's this one. Typically, when an American says the word "faith," she is referring to the fact that a person has spiritual or religious convictions of some kind. In a sense that's not a misuse of the word itself, but to read this word in that sense is a mistake. Another definition for the term that's even more sinister is presented by many of the modern televangelist ministries, those that fall under the "Word of Faith" movement. In this movement "faith" is used as some sort of magic power that if one can build up enough of it and leverage it, he can get God to do things for him, like make his work successful or get some job he wants. This isn't much different, in my eyes, from the Wiccan who believes that by living in harmony with nature she can gain enough psychic power to do essentially the same thing. Both are superstition and sorcery as far as I'm concerned.

Instead, faith here is according to truth. One can't simply have some nebulous "faith" that gives them power, you have to have faith in something. To have faith in something you have to define that something. Therefore, the true key to having faith is good doctrine—i.e., having good definitions of what you have faith in. In the context of Biblical truth, faith is in Jesus Christ, our one Lord. Jesus Christ is defined pretty clearly in the Bible. There may be differences on minor points, but anyone who calls himself a Christian (literally, little-Christ) should be sure to get the core truths down.

We receive greater faith through "equipping" (i.e., learning more about God and preparing ourselves to serve him), according to a later verse in this chapter of Ephesians (4:13). Our faith is that which God uses to justify us. (Romans 3:30) There are different, false faiths (called "different gospels"). (2 Corinthians 11:4) These other gospels are false because they are worthless lies. (Galatians 1:6-7) Faith unites all believers regardless of background. (Galatians 5:6) Faith is a gift from God. (Ephesians 2:8-9) Faith belongs to God's elect. (Titus 1:14) We should imitate the faith of our godly leaders. (Hebrews 13:7) Faith is demonstrated through works. (James 2:18) We should fight for our faith. (Jude 1:3) We should build ourselves up in it. (Jude 1:20)

Certainly faith is unique to the believer. A true believer is one who has faith in the God and Christ defined in the Bible. A pagan might have a "faith" but it will be according to her own definition or according to a definition handed to her by a false teacher. We are separated from these different gospels. Obviously, focusing on a core of true beliefs will create unity within the body of Christ. We should not get too caught up in minor differences, but we should explore those differences lest we fail to equip ourselves when challenged from outside the Church. Remember, our faith is increased through equipping, we should fight for it and build ourselves up!

Application: That's it. Seek to know God as best you can. We should all study the Bible as often as we can. We can't spend all our times in seclusion praying and studying, but American Christians are far too distracted by career and family and fixing up the house and washing the car and playing video games. The Bible should be our primary hobby. Reaching out should be our primary task whenever we aren't studying. That's faith.

To be continued... I have five "ones" down and two to go, along with four "alls"...

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. – Ephesians 4:4-6

I should first comment that I was not actually looking forward to studying this passage. I mean, it reads like "blah blah one blah one blah one blah one all all all." It didn't really seem like it was that significant. However, after digging in, I found that I learned a "passel pot-load" (as a former boss of mine used to say) of stuff. I can now say that this passage would get me at least seven and more probably ten or eleven different sermons, if I were a homilist.

Here's the outline:

1. One body. Unity in through the Church.
2. One Spirit. Unity in the Holy Spirit.
3. One hope. Unity in the inheritance to come.
4. One Lord. Unity in Jesus Christ.
5. One faith. Unity through faith according to truth.
6. One baptism. Unity through the works of the Holy Spirit.
7. One God and Father. Unity through the Father and full Godhead.
8. Of all. God is the Father of...
9. Over all. God is completely sovereign.
10. Through all. God's sovereignty operates through creation.
11. In all. God's work within His children.

I think that would be a really great series that can be taken from this tiny little passage. There is a lot more here than meets the eye because one has to search to determine what each of these "ones" and each of these "alls" is getting at.

In summary, each of the "ones" describes a gift to God's children that "unbelievers" do not possess. Each presents something that separates Jesus' followers and makes us distinct from the world while also presenting a commonality that we should use to gravitate towards unity within the Church. That is, we have unity with other believers, but not with the world. This is the whole "be in the world, but not of it" distinction that Christians frequently discuss. This is especially apparent given the fact that Paul spends the previous half of this letter describing doctrines that set Christians apart from the world. Therefore, while the major thrust is unity, the underlying implication is always that unity is exclusively with Christians not with everyone. (Romans 16:17-20, 2 John 6-11, James 3:17, Ephesians 4:15)

One body. It's interesting to note that almost each of these "ones" seems to tie back to this "one" and one particular passage Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit." (1 Corinthians 2:12-13) This passage goes in depth to describe the nature of the Church through the analogy of a human body. (By the way, by a common convention I use the capitalized "Church" to refer to the whole body of Christian believers in all diverse forms and "church" to mean local groups that gather together.)

I think Paul's words are better than mine on this subject,

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensible, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestore the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together, if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. – 1 Corinthians 12:14-27

Paul says that we are, figuratively, Christ's hands and feet and eyes and ears and intestines. This has lots of implications. For the individual, it means that God has a prepared a place for you in his Church. You weren't redeemed just to wander around and hope that you can do something for God. He's actually created you for the purpose of becoming redeemed and taking part in the works in the Church in a specific place. He has a plan. He is in control.

For the body as a whole, it becomes improper for any one believer to say to any other, "Nope, your gifts aren't needed." False. Untrue. God has a place for every believer with all ranges of skills, personalities, and abilities. I was a bit offended today when someone told me, "You become a janitor when you can't be anything else." That's hubris of a fairly nasty kind. What would the world be if there were no janitors? I shudder at the thought. Janitors and trash men and police officers and firefighters and ambulance workers and soldiers all have there place even if most of us don't want their jobs are can't comprehend the impulse that takes a person there.

The same can be said in the Church, just because you don't understand why a person is gifted in a certain way, doesn't mean that gift isn't needed. You might be surprised to find out it is when you give that person a place to exercise it.

Application: Unity means working together to serve God in whatever capacity God has gifted you and those around you. Unity means trying to make sure everyone else is best able to do the job they've been called to while they support you. This may mean helping each other learn our gifts and to become better at using them to work in God's kingdom. This might mean giving up something we want to make sure God's work happens for another. Unity through this gift from God is making sure we recognize other members of the Body and help them fulfill their potential.

One Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a gift to Christians that modern Christians don't often claim and aren't often comfortable with. The origins of this gift are in the Old Testament, but the promise is given most clearly in Acts 1:5, where Jesus said, "John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." Then, in Acts 2, the arrival of the Holy Spirit is described, "When the day of Pentecost arrived, they [Jesus' Twelve Disciples] were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance." The story continues when they went out and preached in the streets and each person on the street heard them preaching in their own native language.

In a day and age when "science" is the defacto religion, where observable and repeatable evidence is required to believe something, the Holy Spirit is an uncomfortable ally. As such, modern (and post-modern) Christian's tend to understate the importance of this gift. We're all guilty of quenching the Spirit by merely ignore Him and pretending that we can do the work of God somehow on our own.

However, we should remember that it is by the Spirit we gain access to God the Father. (Ephesians 2:18) It is into the name of the Spirit (along with the Father and the Son) to which we are baptized with water. It is the Spirit from whom all the power of the spiritual gifts of the Christian life are delivered. (1 Corinthians 12:14)

The Spirit is a gift especially unique to believers. An unbeliever can enter the church and have the illusion of belonging to the body, but an unbeliever cannot have the Spirit.

Application: I believe the application of this point is that we need to remember the Spirit. We need to realize that we are powerless to do God's works without the Spirit. He may not settle on our heads with tongues of fire, but He is the source of power to become obedient to Christ. He is the one that does the real work of touching the lives of others and saving them. Unity comes by relying on the power of the Spirit to work out our differences and to give up our own desires and will to yield to the will of the Spirit.

One hope. This is the longest clause in the passage, "just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call." It is also interesting because when I look for the "one hope" I find many hopes. I think this is "one hope" as in these are the hopes that all Christian's share.

First, the "call" is another one of those mystical things that a lot of Christian's squirm over. I think Neo put it well during the famous Red-Pill-Blue-Pill scene of The Matrix (my paraphrase):

Morpheus: "Do you believe in fate, Neo?"

Neo: "No."

Morpheus: "Why not?"

Neo: "Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control."

Morpheus: "I know exactly what you mean."

The "call" is a thing similar to destiny in that God, not we, control it. It is that compulsion that God brings about in the life of a redeemed person to "call" him to Himself. The best picture I know of for this calling is in John 10:2-5, "But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. Whenhe has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and teh sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers." Language such as this is the very reason I am a Calvinist. I don't believe that I could have come to Christ unless I already belonged to him, but my name had not yet been called.

The calling is yet another thing that Christians possess that unbelievers do not. Either the unbeliever has not yet been called or they will not be called, yet this is not the "one" Paul mentions in Ephesians. Rather he mentions the "hope" given to us through our call. I believe this hope to be the assurance we have of our calling. This assurance is the hope for a changed life and the yearning hope of the hasty return of Christ.

The believer looks forward to being united with Christ and forgetting the world's woes. We will, at that time, taste the fullness of eternal life spent in the glory of our God that we desire to know with ever greater fervor. This hope is given to us through our call and we can be assured of our call because we hope for these things. We know our hope is not in vain because Christ Himself goes before us through His resurrection and He's promised to prepare a place just for us in the New World.

This is in stark contrast to the hope of the world. A worldly man says, "No, I want to bathe in the lust of this world just a little longer." I regenerate man might feel that same temptation and even indulge in that same sin, but he ever returns to the hope that God will take him home soon.

Application: We should share this hope with one another constantly! This is a truly wonderful gift that God has granted us. We didn't deserve the salvation we received, but God gave it to us anyway. Let's rejoice in that we look forward to one day receiving that compliment above all compliments, "Well done, my good and faithful servant."

To be continued... Okay, I'm running out of time to continue tonight. I'm going to post this and try and finish this in a few days.