Wednesday Link List

Try to have your link suggestions in by 8:00 PM EST Monday.

• What happens when Anabaptist convictions and Catholic worlds collide? An interview with Jesus For President co-author (with Shane Claiborne) Chris Haw on his latest, From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart.
  
• CNN did an exhaustive profile on the father/son relationship between Charles Stanley and Andy Stanley. (Skip the comments, though; no wonder media outlets are shutting down their religion blogs.)
• For those of you with high speed internet, Duke Taber has a collection of ten contemporary Christian Christmas songs — never thought I’d have to construct a phrase that way — to put you in the mood for 12/25.
• For pastors, worship leaders, and church leaders in general: A contrast between success and fruitfulness in ministry.
• Some Arminians don’t want to include open theists in their group because it gives credence to a Calvinist belief that Arminianism is part of a slippery slope toward… open theism. Roger Olson explains.
• At Daily Encouragement, we were recently informed that in some parts of Asia, the equivalent to “How Are You?” is “Did You Eat?” We have much to be thankful for.
• Carolyn Arends and her 14-year old son are on opposite sides of the table when it comes to creation theory, as are many Evangelicals.
• Now, see, if we were into sensationalism, we’d include a link to the one about the 80 year old priest who bit the ear off another clergyman.
• Or the one where Pat Robertson dismisses the whole David Petreaus scandal as something to be expected. (And here’s the word he used.)
• A church an hour east of Toronto, Canada is using a mobile app as a major part of its church growth strategy.
• Albert Mohler thought the election results were an “Evangelical Disaster,” but one author thinks maybe it was a good thing.
• Inside Perspective: What does it look like when the funeral protestors show up in your own home town? 
• When she’s not biographing Justin Beiber, Cathleen Falsani is following U2′s Bono to Georgetown University, where she summarizes the evening and includes a video of his full address.
  
• Mark D. Roberts referred to an author I remember reading, Ben Patterson who taught him to remember that our words should please God.
  
• Renown atheist Penn Jillette of magic team Penn and Teller has included the Bible in his list of six favorite books.  Of course he’s being cynical.
• This links takes you to the channel for articles by Anna Heydenrych, an author women will resonate with, whose column Coffee Break originates with Gateway, a South African Christian news portal.

Calvinism Defined and Other Quotes

Much of what goes by the name of “Calvinist,” is really just a small handful of doctrinal commitments read through an assumed American ideology.

~Kyle Strobel, August 21, 2011

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The best response to an atheist is to cook them dinner and give them a hug..

~Either Phil Vischer or Skye Jethani on a recent Phil Vischer podcast., I think it’s the one I linked

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I make everybody know the book is not happy if it’s in the cabinet or in the drawer.. It should be sent out and read; it should go to the hands of the readers

~Hernando Guanlao, age 60, who turned his Manilla home into a public library as quoted in a Toronto Star article on September 26th … also at Huffington

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Compromising the music wars by having two services can further divide a congregation. Your contemporary service should include one hymn; your traditional service should include one modern worship composition. This gesture keeps both groups united.

~Outspoken Christian blogger Paul Wilkinson who came up with this while thinking out loud one day last month.

To My Skeptic Friend

Dear __________,

Here’s an idea.

There’s nothing I can say or do today that will convince you that God exists, that the Bible can be trusted, or that Jesus has a legitimate claim to be God. But humor me for a moment.

All I’m asking today is that you begin with a God-exists hypothesis. Not the Bible. Not Jesus. Just that there is a God, in the more or less traditional way that’s understood.

Now then, ask all your questions, and frame your answers along the lines of the hypothesis. In other words, “Why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?” becomes, “If there is a God, why does he permit so much evil and suffering in the world?”

And so on.

What possible answers might you come up with to your various questions? Maybe some fairly crazy ones!

I’m not saying assume anything or commit to anything. I’m just saying take your toughest questions, your philosophical questions, your metaphysical questions, your ethical questions; and instead of framing them within a vacuum, frame them within the hypothesis.

Oh yeah, one more thing: For 48 hours. Do this for a couple of days, not a couple of minutes.

You might even want to say this — don’t think of it as a prayer, but more as a role play to get you in the right head space — “God, I don’t believe you exist, but for the next couple of days, I want to see how the world adds up if I were to believe you’re really out there.”

Think of this ‘let’s pretend’ game as meeting me halfway.

~Paul

Wednesday Link List

• So let’s start with Ed Young’s Pastor Fashion blog. We’re being set up here, right? Mind you, the fashion blog and Ed’s regular blog contain the same spelling error:  Taking something to a whole other level, is whole, not hole. And that is him in the videos. So maybe this is serious. Besides, it’s not April 1st.
  
• But we’re not being taken at the blog No Longer Quivering, which was one of several established to question the whole “Quiverful” movement, (Check a Bible concordance for context) not to mention Christianity itself.  Lately however, things have gotten even more complicated, as in this introduction to a 9-part post. (Note: the blog is in the middle of a move from Blogspot to Patheos.) How does a former (male) pastor move from repressing gender issues to a full-blown transition? (Did I say this one is complicated?)
  
• With all the drug war violence in the news, six people weigh in on the subject of safety issues implicit in missions trips to Mexico.
  
• And speaking of youth groups, Rachel Marie looks back realizing that something was seriously missing from body image pep talks.
  
• If Christianity is nothing more than a “hell avoidance system,” then obviously it comes crashing down if there is no hell. That’s the subject of Hellbound – The Movie releasing in September.
  
• On the world stage, two of the weekend’s religious news stories involved Twitter, in Pakistan and Kuwait.
  
• 36 faculty have resigned from a Baptist college in George over its new lifestyle statement.
  
• Podcast aficionados: Ravi Zacharias guested at John Ortberg’s church on the weekend. Sermon audio podcast is available.
  
• Nominated for four Billboard Music Awards in April, the band Casting Crowns went on to take Best Christian Artist and Best Christian album on Sunday night. Not surprisingly, top Christian song was “Blessings” by Laura Story.
  
• Know someone 15 or older who has left the church?  They may fall into the prodigal, nomad, or exile category.  Here are six things to consider which might minimize the exodus.
  
• On the contrary, here’s a woman who left church around age 16, has lived that much lifetime again, but now finds herself missing God. John Shore responds.
  
• Along that line, what about your friends who say they are Christ followers, but don’t like going to church?  This 3 min vid suggests they’re rejecting the wrong “church.”
  
• Aaron Niequist has released the third in the series, A New Liturgy.  Also, here’s a link to another of Aaron’s projects, the song, “God’s Children.”  I love the line, “God of every class, from the greenest grass, to the underpass.”
  
• From our leftover from April files, the creator of Veggie Tales is planning a new project and it’s not for kids.  Learn more about the Phil Vischer Show.
• Lots of links from CT Inc. today. (I finally opened all those newsletters!) Here’s one by Carolyn Arends on the challenges of the term “literal interpretation.”
  
• I had never actually seen the site Truthinator until Monday. It’s supposed to be “humor,” but after a few posts you realize you’ve never seen so much hate on a so-called Christian blog.
  
• Looking for more reading? There’s eight great links from Saturday’s Weekend Link List.
  
• Finally, if the t-shirt above isn’t exactly what you had in mind for a Father’s Day gift, if Dad thinks the local church choir sounds like a bunch of howling cats, the image below includes a link where you can buy a 8″ X 10″print of the choir in question for only $25.

Wednesday Link List

By request, a fresh take on the recurring List Lynx pun here

(B)link and you’ll miss it! 

• Hard to imagine anyone opposing a translation of the Bible into another language, but the Jamaican patois version isn’t pleasing everyone.  Text sample: “De angel go to Mary and say to ‘er, me have news we going to make you well ‘appy. God really, really, bless you and him a walk with you all de time.”
• Daniel Jepsen admits it’s not like him to walk out of a church service, but he did just that when the service went too far, or perhaps didn’t go far enough. Teaching the Bible would have been a refreshing addition.
• Fuller Theological Seminary’s Kara Powell thinks that while adults and children are all sharing the same church, they’re all having a different experience of it.  In a 4-page article at CT, she suggests keeping kids in church beyond high school means giving them a faith that sticks.
• He uses his involvement in TV and film production to evangelize well known actors, and he’s been fired by one prominent casting agency for doing so.  Steve Cha talks to Christian Post about evangelizing Hollywood.
• This is the link to part one of the original video that Ben Breedlove posted at YouTube just days before he died on Christmas Day; though you need to watch part two to get the full story.  Gateway Church in Austin, Texas also posted the 42-minute memorial service  video in which lead pastor John Burke refers to Ben’s faith in Jesus Christ.
  
• Cerebral palsy and epilepsy didn’t stop Toronto’s Robert Gagnon from completing a BA at Redeemer and an MTS at Tyndale Seminary, or from launching a new ministry for people with visible disadvantages, Abilities in Christ.
  
• Here’s an interesting standup routine by Phil Long that gets some deep analysis on Tyler Braun’s blog.
  
• Still haven’t made those New Year’s Resolutions?  Ann Voskamp offers five steps to help you begin.
  
• Is heaven and The New Jerusalem the same thing? Think about it.  Here’s a C201 blog post that took on a life of its own in the comments.
  
• Mike Breen looks at the Rainer Research Group’s ten trends for the next decade in church life.
  
• The man at the center of the Jesus movement in the early 1970s, Costa Mesa California’s Calvary Church pastor Chuck Smith is now battling lung cancer though he never smoked.
  
• TV Producer Mark Burnett is joining with Zondervan and the digital team that developed Glo Bible to introduce a new app, Bible 360 which will integrate with devices and social media. Sales will be through iTunes.
  
• Seems a policy statement issued at Rossville Christian Academy in Tennessee is really just a mass memo directed at a single student. (The video is useless, but there’s a full text of the story when you scroll down.)
  
• Time for one last Christmas image; J. R. Briggs got this from David Fitch; it’s titled Advent Distraction:

So How Would You Respond?

First, someone who subscribes to some faith-focused view of things decided that this was an appropriate response to atheism:

But then, as often happens in these situations, someone subscribing to atheism decided to fire back across the bow with this:

At this, the majority of Christ-following blog readers here are expected to be offended.  However, for some reason, I’m not.  I rather like the rather quaint way of putting the story because it highlights that this is indeed a story of “foolish things that confound the wise.”

Cosmic?  Yes, in the sense of ‘out of this world.’  In fact, I would think it very important to begin the story with the premise that the intersection of God and mankind is very much the intersection of different dimensions.

Jewish?  Yes.  Christianity is birthed out of and is very much the fulfillment of the promise given to Abraham, even the promise given to Adam.

Zombie?  Well, that’s a little extreme, but it fits.  Personally, I always viewed Zombie-ism as a kinda a lifestyle thing, so for me it could describe both Jesus and John the Baptist in their respective wilderness days.

Live forever?  Indeed!  Eternal life starts now.

Eat his flesh?  No self-respecting Christian I know has ever denied that this is a “Top 5″ entry in the category, “Hard Sayings of the Gospel.”   But non-Catholics would say the language is figurative inasmuch as we partake of his sufferings on the cross; Catholics would claim a more literal experience of actually eating his flesh.

Telepathically tell him you accept him?  I’d say the person who wrote this has a better understanding of the gospel than the average church-attender, because at least he/she grasps that the centrality of crossing the line of faith has more to do with an act of believing faith than it does with trying to earn acceptance on the basis of helping little old ladies across the street.  Apologies to elderly females reading this.

…As your master?  Again, bullseye!  There are references in the New Testament to Jesus as Savior, but they outnumbered by references to Jesus as Lord by a ratio of 215:1.  Besides, if you’ve bought in to this point — if you’ve gotten past flesh-eating and zombies and telepathy — you probably feel you’re on to something that you’re going to dedicate yourself to, right?  In for a penny, in for a pound.

So he can remove an evil force?  Sorta.  The Apostle Paul acknowledged the ongoing presence of sin and temptation in the life of the Christ-follower.  I’d refine that one to read, “So he can give you the power to conquer an evil force” on the basis of the conviction that he already conquered it.

A rib woman was convinced by a talking snake…?  God created beings with totally free will including the ability to both reject his authority and to reject his love and desire for community with mankind.  But that had to both be tested out, and also be demonstrated for the man and woman to see for themselves.  There might be dozens of ways to do this, but if you’re looking for a good story, you really can’t make this stuff up. In the first chapter of The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey quotes Walter Wink as saying, “If Jesus had never lived, we never would have been able to invent him.”  That’s how I feel about this.

Makes perfect sense?  Depends to whom you’re speaking.  “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” II Cor. 4:4 (NIV) On the other hand, “But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. “  John 1:12 (NLT)

Thanks for reading today.  If you’ll excuse me now, I’ve got to spend some time in telepathic communication, and then me and the rib-woman are gonna have some breakfast.

Wednesday Link List on Saturday

List Lynx

I thought it was only fair to give you weekend lurkers a window into what happens here during the week. Maybe W.L.L. can also stand for Weekend Link List.

• Given the season, we’ll kick off with a feel-good, flashmob video; Deck the Halls as it sounded at the Carlson School of Management.  Don ye now yer gay apparel.
• Veteran Christian blogger Andrew Jones notes that 2011 was the year we talked about hell. “How can someone say that hell contains literal fire that scorches your butt while heaven contains metaphorical wine that you cannot enjoy? That’s not consistent. It’s also bad news for wine drinkers. And how can all the words for ‘hell’ in the Greek be interchangeable while the words for ‘love’ are highly nuanced?”
• In response to the child abuse scandals that have rocked on particular denomination, a UK sculptor reminds us yet again in this pixelating piece titled Cardinal Sin.
  
• Here’s a 2012 book title that looks interesting: Imaginary Jesus by Matt Mikalatos. From the book blurb:Imagine Matt’s astonishment when he finds out that the guy he knows as Jesus . . . isn’t. He’s an Imaginary Jesus: a comfortable, convenient imitation Matt has created in his own image.” Here’s the video preview.
  
• Pastors must love it when parishioners are literally ‘overflowing’ with the weekend message; saying that they “knocked it out of the park.”  Check out Free Will vs. Free Will.  The preacher in this case is Mark Vroegop of College Park Church IN INdianapolis INdiana, IN case you were wondering.
• Move over Martha Stewart Department: What Christmas table wouldn’t be complete without some Christmas Eve Mice desserts?   Mine, apparently; until I read about them at Daily Encouragement where they’re known as Church Mouse Cookies. Bet the Church Mouse name came first and then it got P.C.-ed. Looks too good to eat, though.
  
• While this video was posted to GodTube a few days ago, I think I’ve seen this one before; the one where the little girl either steals the show or ruins the show depending on whether or not you had kids in this particular Christmas production. Note: Earplugs recommended.
• Christian Week profiles Luke Gilkerson of Covenant Eyes and his summary of Five Ways Porn Warps Minds.  Sample: “It taps into the neuro-circuitry of our brains, making us desire the rush of sexual energy from porn again and again.”
• Some Evangelicals may not have liked Christopher Hitchens, but the renown atheist kept us on our toes. Hitchens passed away Thursday at age 62.  Doug Wilson offers a Christian reflection at Christianity Today.
• At Christianity 201, I offer up two videos to try to contrast the difference between apologetics and evangelism, featuring two people who are very skilled at both. Longtime readers here will recognize the first vid.
• At Stuff Fundies Like, it’s time to reveal the truth about Christmas — and Rudoph — in this classic sermon based on ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.
• Lastly, Roger Morris is a Christian in Australia who confesses that his kids have done the whole Harry Potter thing, and then goes on to recommend doing so, “in a controlled and supervised fashion.”  Read his reasoning at Christian Today.

Deconversion: Because Crossing the Line of Faith Works Both Ways

I’ve been reading the blog, Losing my Religion by Jeff McQuilkin since long before I started one of my own.  Maybe he had me at the title.  Jeff’s blog has always been at the leading edge of discussions on the issue of faith and doubt.

This one is a longer post, it might take you a good five minutes at least, and then I hope you’ll also track with the comments people have left there.  It’s about two people he knows of which one (to use language we use in this blog) is moving away from the cross while the other is moving toward the cross.

It’s also about faith that it is intellectual versus faith that goes beyond the mind.  It’s about objective absolute truth versus the subjectivity of belief based on empirical evidence.

It’s about you.  It’s about me.

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Not long ago, I was browsing through my Google Reader, kind of sorting through and unsubscribing from blogs that had become inactive, and I came across a “good-bye” post from a fellow blogger. He had been struggling with his faith for some time, and I’d tracked with him for awhile because he had expressed such honesty and candor about his doubts and his feelings. This post was several months old (I was admittedly behind in my reading), but he’d written a good-bye post to close out this particular blog because he had finally decided there was no God, and he was now an atheist. Since the blog was about struggling with faith, and for him there was no more faith to struggle with, he’d moved on to write a new blog about atheism.

When I read his words, my heart sank in grief, and I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. I only know this person from his writing–I don’t think we’d ever even commented on one another’s blogs–but I felt this profound sense of loss, and I grieved for my brother who had struggled so long and had come to such a sad conclusion. I say “sad,” because when I look at my own life and struggles, I cannot imagine the amount of sorrow I would feel if I ever came to the conclusion that there had been no divine purpose in it all, that all this time I’d been muddling through on my own, that there was really no One watching out for me. Never mind the implications of the afterlife–even the idea of living in the here-and-now with no belief in God (especially if belief was once there) is a completely devastating thought to me. This is why I grieved so for my brother who had lost his faith.

I am acquainted with another atheist for whom I don’t feel the same sense of grief and loss; in fact, I feel a bit of hope. In hearing him talk about his own struggles with faith, it’s actually apparent that he wants to believe. He’s not a militant atheist, and is friendly to Christians, even admires them; he says that the only thing that really keeps him from crossing the line into faith is that he is so analytical that he can’t get his mind around the idea of the supernatural. In short, his logical mind gets in the way.

From my perspective, the biggest difference between these two atheists is the direction the struggle for faith is taking them. For the latter, I think his path is ultimately toward Christ; he would totally be a Christ-follower if he could just overcome the mental block, and I have hope that one day this will happen for him. For the former, he’s coming from the opposite direction–he once had faith (or at least belief), but got disillusioned, and for one reason or another his doubts were never satisfied. So he walked away from Christ.

But despite this difference…

…continue reading here…

Debating My Religion

Be it resolved that in debates about religion, nobody wins.   I’m not even sure you can reduce the mystery, the transcendence and the faith-element of Christianity to the rigors of systematic logic.

But making the attempt can be, if nothing else, good entertainment, which may be why the organizers of the sixth event in the Munk Debates series — named after founder businessman Peter Munk — chose the plush seats of Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall as the setting for the debate between renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens, and recent convert to Catholicism, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The CBC News report, one of the more detailed on the internet, was written by someone more aligned to Hitchens’ view, although…

Still, I was touched by Blair’s heartfelt concessions to Hitchens’ argument. Blair, too, dislikes fanaticism. But it was very clear that his version of religion is a generous one. More importantly for Blair, an open, generous religiosity is a human necessity.

That led him to remind us of the elephant in the great secular hall: Religion will not disappear anytime soon, he pointed out. You can’t reason or wish it away.

…but stated at the outset…

If you have attended these New Atheist debates in recent years, what you would have heard on Friday for the most part were “best summary” arguments.

They included Hitchens’ witty declaration that humans have turned God into a vain, madcap despot, who is so obviously insecure that He needs constant praising and praying to.

The punchline: God’s rule can be compared to the kind of divine despotism that you would find in a place like North Korea, which had the audience chuckling.

The full transcript of the debate is available at New Statesman.

Of course, for most people, the question is, who won the debate, though it reduces the evening to the calibre of the football or hockey matches played in the sports halls in Toronto  just a few blocks south.   Most of the media outlets I read online were reporting a clear victory for Hitchens, but that’s not how debate works.   The key is to look at the vote beforehand, and then the vote afterward, and do the math to see how many of the undecided were swayed by what they heard.

If you do that, then again, if they were truly undecided at the outset, the debate went to Hitchens, but it’s interesting that the undecided followed the general trend of the stats going in; and in fact the final statistics don’t look a lot different than those before the debate started.   This may say more about the composition of the audience than anything.

Which is where I want to end this particular discussion.   Atheists are not stupid people.   They are intellectuals who enjoy the stimulus of a good debate.    The $60 ticket price for this is worth it, and sitting in Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall listening to the debate is no less satisfying than going to the same venue to hear symphonies by Mahler or Schubert.

Christians are not stupid people either.  While intellectualism is more highly regarded among Mainline Protestants than Evangelicals, the Evangelical movement has its scholars and great writers.   (Though some Mainline Protestant intellectuals would no doubt side with Hitchens on the particular parameters of this debate.)

But Joe Evangelical is not given to attend this kind of event.   For whatever reason.    The ticket price?   The use of the term “religion” which grates on some Evangelical ears?  The fact Tony Blair, despite being the former PM of a G8 country, is not among the current list of Evangelical superstars?  Or the fact he is Roman Catholic?

And the bottom line is that you’re going to see the audience composition reflected in the final score more than anything else.  The numbers no more reflect a victory for the New Atheists than they would for Christians (or members of all religions including Muslims and Jews) if the numbers were reversed.

But it is important for members of both groups to engage the dialog and know the opponent’s position, even if they define their terms somewhat differently.   As the CBC reporter, Richard Handler noted, “It was almost as if both men had different models in their heads of just what constitutes the religiously minded.”

That makes the debate somewhat impossible from the beginning.

Wednesday Link List

Not enough links for you in yesterday’s NIV post?   Well then here are few extra…

• First of all a quotation from Bishop Fulton Sheen we found at Big Blue Wave:  “So much of what people call atheism is not so much the negation of God as the deification of the ego.  All atheists believe in God, but the god is themselves.”  Ouch!   This is a website that deals with social issues from a Christian perspective.
• A story in the Imperial Republican in Imperial Nebraska is one of the most amazing things I’ve read this week.   Little Colton Burpo had a near death experience that resulted in his dad, Todd Burpo publishing the story with Thomas Nelson in the just-released book, Heaven is for Real. Check this one out, and be sure to read the four reasons why his dad concluded that his son really did get a look at heaven.
• It took Kelley Mooney two years, but she finally got the mechanical rights to use Leonard Cohen’s song Halleluljah with substituted lyrics which look at Jesus’ road to the cross.   Check out the video premiere in Nova Scotia, Canada with an awesome children’s choir.
• Some great stuff at Christianity 201 recently including:  Michael Krahn’s look at the Wayward Son’s older brother;   Mark Batterson on the Jewish “3D” understanding of sin;   Bob Coy wonders aloud how long The Flood was effective in wiping sin off the face of the earth;  an anonymous e-mail forward takes a look at the 23rd Psalm;  Daniel Jepson cites Nancy Leigh DeMoss’ take on the subject of brokenness;  David Fisher finds a church in Belfast which, rather than a statement of faith has a statement of ethos.
• Greg Koukl at Stand To Reason takes a cue from Jesus’ ministry and suggests that when someone is trying to trap you with a question about some controversial social issue; turn the table and answer the question with a question.
• In Christian circles preoccupied with pastors who are major authors, or attendance figures at megachurches, Darryl Dash celebrates the beauty of average or ordinary churches including this quote from Derek Webb:  “I’ve found that often success looks more like failure, riches more like poverty, and real life often feels more like death.”
  
• Regent College theology professor John Stackhouse flat out thinks that Mark Driscoll needs to take a study break to sharpen his exegetical skills.   C’mon, John; tell us what you really think.
  
• Robert A. Schuller does an unscheduled 20-minute interview with Jim Cantelon at the daily Christian talk show in Canada, 100 Huntley Street; including a mention of how his son, Robert Vernon Schuller, aka Bobby, pastor of The Gathering, brokered a meeting between Robert A. and grandfather Robert H. Schuller.  This is a two part video; here and here.
  
• And speaking of the Crystal Cathedral, Karen Spears Zacharias suggests that Joel Osteen should be taking notes on what is happening at the big glass church.
  
• Joshua Harris looks at the big picture of how we approach Sunday morning worship, including a growing lack of punctuality, which we’ve also noticed recently in a few churches.   Does it say something about our increasing apathy in our hearts?  Do people in your church fill the front rows first?   Is the hunger there, or is there complacency?
• Our picture below is from a general interest website, BoingBoing; which spells out the scripture mentioned in the sign:  “Mark 11:12-14 The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’ And his disciples heard him say it.”