My electric guitar is important to me. That statement is a paradox. I don't even own my own guitar right now. This hurts me deep down inside.

I started playing guitar in my church's worship band about 7 years ago. Previously, I had taken lessons with the worship leader, so he asked me to play. At that time, depression and loneliness were normal in my life. Playing my guitar became a cathartic release. It allowed me to explore parts of worship and parts of my relationship with God I had never considered.

There is a lot of beauty in corporate worship. I joined a small community of people who led the congregation in worship. I became transfixed in worship while playing my guitar. Every once in a while you could see people's lives changed by what God was doing. It was a beautiful experience.

I recently moved to a new city. Now, I'm not regularly playing in a worship band. I'm not regularly mesmerized by worship. I'm mostly bored with worship. It's been about 4 months since I've played my guitar in earnest. It takes a toll on me. I haven't been doing what God called me to do.  

My guitar is important because not only is it an act of worship, it is a discipline. I don't yearn to play my guitar in order to worship God. I yearn to play my guitar because it enables me to worship God more fully. This is what I'm striving for - holistic worship. Worshiping God outside of corporate worship is harder when I don't worship him within the bounds of the community.

Whatever it is that you do that enables you to worship God - strive for those things. God has put a guitar in my hand because it helps me (and I like to think it helps others) worship. This is why my guitar is important to me and this is why I need to go pick it up and play it.

I love steak. That’s why I became a vegetarian. I loved meat too much. I loved meat even though almost a billion people in the world are hungry. So, I decided to do something about it. I gave up meat, and never looked back.

Worship happens when we align ourselves with how God is moving in the world. I knew that because I loved meat, I could never really understand what it was like to live in a third world country and struggle. I couldn’t understand, because I could simply drive to McDonalds and get a Double-Cheeseburger for a dollar. I didn’t know struggle. I couldn’t fully align myself to God’s will for my life because I didn’t fully understand God’s will for the world.

 God’s will doesn’t include famine, disease, or war in the world (most of which is happening in the developing world). God’s will is for peace, for the wolf to lay with the lamb, and for the calf to hang out with a lion (Isaiah 11). There will be an eschatological age of peace! I want to live my life in that peace. I want to take hold of what God is doing, claim it in my life and bring the kingdom of Heaven to Earth.

 I want peace in my life that only God can give. I was listening to a sermon by Greg Boyd, and he said, “Purity of heart means that you are no longer double-minded.” We live in between Jesus’ resurrection and his second coming. We live in a state of “in-between-ness.” The fullness of God’s glory and power hasn’t come to fruition, but we are charged to live it out. In order to have a more pure heart, I can’t let something as little as Jesus’ second coming stop me from living as if God had redeemed everything.

 So, I became a vegetarian in order to live out God’s eschatological peace (consider it a sort of head start). I didn’t have to and I certainly don’t advocate others to do the same, but God was calling me to it. I still love steak and I still struggle sometimes but now, I’m happy to struggle.

On Tuesday, Karen King (Harvard Divinity School) revealed an early manuscript that seems to claim that Jesus was married. It is interesting as it is written in Coptic but it uses Greek letters and is thought to be from the 4th century. There is only a fragment of the manuscript, it looks as if it was cut out of the larger manuscript. There was a lot of publicity about Jesus being married after the Da Vinci Code saga. To some, this is more proof. To others, it's just a gnostic document.

As you can see, what little there is, is completely incomplete. It's composed of sentence fragments and incomplete thoughts. There is no context. The Text literally reads:

1: not [to] me, my Mother gave to me li[fe]

2: The disciples said to Jesus "

3: deny. Mary is worthy of it

4: Jesus said to them "My wife

5: she will be able to be my disciple

6: Let wicked people swell up

7: Let wicked people swell up

8: As for me, I dwell with her in order to

9: an image

There you have it...  What scholars are calling the Gospel of Jesus' Wife. It is likely from a gnostic text. Gnostics have written about Jesus kissing Mary Magdelene in the Gospel of Phillip. For something like this to finally come out, isn't that surprising. This text doesn't validate a belief that Jesus was married. It only means that someone at one point believed Jesus was probably married, not that he actually was married.

What do you think about this new manuscript? Do you think Jesus could have been married? Why or Why not? If He was married, would it change anything about your personal relationship with God? Would it change anything about the institutional church?