The situation in Zimbabwe worsens

As the deadlock between Robert Mugabe and the democratic opposition continues—as his intransigent refusal to offer anything but the appearance of power-sharing prevents the formation of a functional government—the cholera epidemic there that began in August is spiraling out of control. According to the Telegraph,

More than 425 people have died since the outbreak in August and the number is expected to rise due to poor sanitation worsted by the onset of the rainy season.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has accused the government of under-reporting the deaths, saying that he believed more than 500 people had died and half a million were affected by cholera.

Zimbabwe's dilapidated infrastructure has made clean water a luxury, with many people relying on shallow wells and latrines in their yards. . . .

Hopes for easing the humanitarian crisis have dimmed as President Robert Mugabe and Tsvangirai have been locked in a protracted dispute over how to form a unity government after controversial elections earlier this year.

Zimbabwe's economy has collapsed under the weight of the world's highest inflation rate, last estimated at 231 million per cent in July but believed to be much higher.

If the report in The Independent is correct, even Tsvangirai is understating the scope of the disaster:

A senior official in the health ministry told The Independent yesterday that more than 3,000 people have died from the water-borne disease in the past two weeks, 10 times the widely-reported death toll of just over 300. “But even this higher figure is still an understatement because very few bother to register the deaths of their relatives these days,” said the official, who requested anonymity.

He said the health ministry, which once presided over a medical system that was the envy of Africa, had been banned from issuing accurate statistics about the deaths, and that certificates for the fraction of deaths that had been registered were being closely guarded by the home affairs ministry.

As Peter Davies points out, Mugabe isn't responding to this disaster like a man who cares about his country and its people, either; his actions make clear that all that matters to him is keeping power, never mind the cost.

Mugabe refused to grant entry visas to Zimbabwe for “elder statesmen” Ex US President Carter and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan last week, when they offered to visit the beleaguered country. Mugabe has much to hide.

Unfortunately, the South African government hasn't exactly covered itself in glory here; rather than taking a strong stance against Mugabe's blatantly illegal rule, they've essentially aided and abetted him in hanging on to power, and provided him cover as he does so. Zambia and Botswana have shown signs of wanting to stand up to Mugabe, but South Africa is the big power in the region; as long as they refuse to tell him he has to let go of the reins, no one else is going to be able to budge him (short of a sniper with good aim).

Pray for Zimbabwe. I had hope for a while there that Mugabe might actually be willing to share power, and that things might get better . . . but short of divine intervention, it isn't going to happen. Please, pray for Zimbabwe.

Further thought on the discipline of Advent

In the essay I mentioned yesterday, Joseph Bottum suggests that “maybe Christmas . . . lacks meaning without Advent.” That may sound strange, but I think he’s right. We live in a culture to which spiritual disciplines like self-denial are largely a foreign concept; to our society, the way to prepare to celebrate Christmas is by indulging ourselves in spending, consuming, and celebrating—shopping, throwing parties, shopping, decorating, shopping, eating, and more shopping. The problem is, that doesn’t prepare our hearts to celebrate, and still less to worship God; it just burns us out, leaving us sick of the whole thing. It essentially makes the celebration about the celebration—it makes it a matter of working ourselves up to the proper pitch of enjoyment just because everyone else is, and of making merry because we’re supposed to make merry—and that’s a very empty thing, with no substance to it, and really a very tiring one. Though the church tradition of preparing for Christmas with a season of reflection and self-examination and repentance is quite foreign to our world’s way of thinking, there’s a real wisdom to it if you stop and think about it.

Advent, if we take it seriously, disciplines our anticipation and the emotions that go along with it, in part at least because it focuses our attention on just why we look forward to Christmas; as Bottum puts it, it “prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.” After all, the message of Christmas is that the light shines in the darkness—which means we need to understand the darkness if we really want to understand the light. We need to understand the darkness not just in our world, but in our own lives, to really appreciate what it means that through Jesus Christ, God has caused his light to shine in our hearts. We need to look at sweet baby Jesus wriggling in a bed of straw, cooing and sucking his fist, and realize that that fat little hand is the same hand that scattered the stars across the night sky—and the same hand that reached down and formed the first man out of riverbank clay—and that he comes to us as God’s cosmic Answer to sin and death. Which means that if we’re going to take Christmas seriously, we need to begin by taking Advent seriously.

(Excerpted, edited, from “Out of Chaos, Hope”)

Camels, needles, and the eye of grace

And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said, “All these I have kept from my youth.” When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” But he said, “What is impossible with men is possible with God.” And Peter said, “See, we have left our homes and followed you.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time,
and in the age to come eternal life.”

—Luke 18:18-30 (ESV)

(I am greatly indebted in my understanding of this parable, and of the parables in general, to the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Bailey, author of Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels, and many other books, for his work in bringing Near Eastern cultural assumptions and interpretations to bear on our understanding of Scripture—including this passage.)

Some of you have probably heard this parable explained this way: there was a small gate in the city wall of Jerusalem which was called “The Eye of the Needle.” This gate was so small that a camel could barely fit through it—you had to take everything off the camel, get it down on its knees, and push it through the gate. Thus, the point of Jesus’ parable is that for the rich to get into heaven, they have to surrender all their riches to God and humble themselves before him. It’s a good explanation with a strong point; unfortunately, it isn’t true: there’s no gate known to have been called by that name, nor were there any gates of that size. One commentator has said wryly that the only gate which could possibly have earned that label was so small that the only way anyone could ever have fit a camel through it would have been to cut the camel into pieces.

OK then, so what do we make of this? Well, another explanation is that the Greek word kámēlon, “camel,” is actually a misprint, and that the word should be kámilon, “rope”; there are some ancient manuscripts which have this reading. Then, Jesus would be saying that it’s easier to get a rope through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom. Not easy, but a lot easier than a camel. However, it’s pretty clear that kámilon is actually the false reading, as copyists tried to soften this parable to something they could live with, and that Jesus was in fact talking about a large, ill-tempered mammal with a hump or two on its back and a mean glint in its eye. It wasn’t an original image, or unique to Jesus; in fact, it was common for rabbis to use the picture of a camel—or, further east, an elephant—going through the eye of a needle as an example of something impossible. In other words, Jesus is saying exactly what you think he's saying.

Which of course raises the question: does this really mean that rich people can’t be saved? To answer that, let’s go back to the beginning of the story and start over, with the ruler and his question. We don’t know much about this guy, just that he was a prominent member of the community, probably because of his wealth, perhaps with a formal position of some kind; but a couple things are clear. First, he shows Jesus considerable respect, addressing him as “Good Teacher,” which was a much stronger compliment than it sounds like to us; and second, he’s clearly a religious man, asking in all seriousness, “What must I do to be saved?”

The problem with this question is that it’s rooted in an unhelpful view of God and his law, one that sees salvation as something we can earn if we just do enough of the right things; the ruler is essentially asking, “What boxes do I have to check off in order to be assured that I’ve earned eternal life?” He seems to be asking completely sincerely, and out of good motives, but his understanding of God still needs to be challenged, and so Jesus challenges him. First, he questions the ruler’s opening compliment. In the Oriental world, one compliment requires a second, so it might be that the ruler is fishing for a compliment of his own; or he might just be trying to butter Jesus up. In either case, does he really mean what he’s saying? So Jesus omits the return compliment, choosing instead to hold the compliment he’s received up to scrutiny: “Why do you call me good? Only God is truly good; do you really want to apply that title to me?”

Though he asks the question, Jesus doesn’t press it—he isn’t trying to push the ruler to a declaration of faith, only to startle him into considering his words more carefully, and so he goes on to answer the ruler’s question. “What must you do? You know the commandments: Don’t commit adultery, don’t commit murder, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, and honor your father and mother.” It’s interesting here that Jesus only mentions the commandments that deal with how people are to treat each other, without touching the commandments that address our relationship to God. It makes a certain amount of sense, when you think about it; how we treat one another is something very concrete, and so it’s easier to tell whether you’ve killed someone than if you’ve kept a commandment like “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me.” As well, Luke shows a consistent concern for the self-focus that can come from having great wealth, and Jesus’ response speaks to that concern.

To this, the ruler says, “I have kept all these commands since my youth.” That’s a pretty bold statement. It was said of Abraham, Moses and Aaron that they had kept the whole Law, but of no one else, and now this young man calmly puts himself in their company; that would seem to open him to a charge of overconfidence, at the very least. And yet . . . as sure of himself as he is, the ruler can tell that something is missing, that somehow he’s falling short; why else would he have come to Jesus in the first place? If he really believes that he’s kept all the commandments all his adult life, then he clearly sees that even that is not enough—that something more is needed. That’s why Jesus proceeds to tell him what he still needs to do: “Sell everything you have and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

To fully understand how radical this command was, it’s important to know that the ruler’s wealth—which was probably mostly in land—didn’t merely belong to him; his home and land were the family estate, and the family estate was of supreme importance in that society. It supported the family, and it symbolized the unity of the family, which was far and away the most important institution and authority in each person’s life; the command to sell it all and follow Jesus was a demand for a complete transfer of loyalty and allegiance. No longer would he be able to put his family ahead of God, nor would he be able to trust to his wealth to support himself and his family; to obey Jesus, he would have to set both utterly aside and trust wholly in God, in defiance of all the commands of his culture and all other authorities. He would have to step out in faith, totally unsupported in worldly terms, with no one to follow but Jesus and no ground beneath his feet save trust in God.

“When he heard this, he became sad; for he was very rich.” Partly this was because he loved his wealth and didn’t want to give it up; partly it was because his wealth was the grounds of his self-confidence. After all, he was rich, so obviously God had blessed him for doing good, and he was doing good with his wealth, so obviously he was earning God’s favor; but Jesus blew all that away. Instead, Jesus demanded that he give up his wealth, give up every earthly sign of God’s favor and everything he could ever use to earn that favor, give up along with it his overarching loyalty to his family, and come to God as a humble beggar. What must I do to earn salvation? Give up any hope of earning salvation and accept it as God’s gift, and along the way give up any competing loyalties; and that wasn’t an answer the ruler could accept. In sorrow, he walked away.

In response, Jesus said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Now, this shocked the crowd, and it has shocked the church down through the years—but not for the same reason. Both the crowd and the church take this as a comparative statement about the salvation of the rich versus the salvation of the poor—but they take it in opposite directions. We tend to assume that Jesus is saying that it’s easy for the poor to get into heaven but impossible for the rich, and so we come up with ways to make this something less than impossible, as in the interpretations I mentioned earlier. The crowd, on the other hand, assumed that the poor had a harder time being saved. After all, the rich built synagogues, funded orphanages, gave money to those in need, paid for the upkeep on the temple, and in general did good things that most people could­n’t afford to do. Their wealth was a sign of God’s blessing, and it gave them the ability to satisfy the Law’s demands in a way that ordinary folk couldn’t, and so surely if anyone was saved, it was the rich. If it was impossible for them to be saved, what hope was there for anyone else?

Then of course there’s Peter, with a completely different concern: he figures that those who had done what the ruler had been unwilling to do—this being, of course, Peter himself and his fellow disciples—ought to be rewarded, and he wants to make sure they get what’s coming to them. His concern is understandable, because Jesus’ challenge here is daunting, to say the least: “Whatever besides me is most important to you—your wealth, your family, your sex life, your job, your hobbies, your ambitions, whatever—set it aside and follow me”; that’s a pretty high standard, and Peter wants to make sure that he and his friends who have tried to answer that call will get the reward they deserve. Jesus reassures him: those who have denied themselves and set aside all other loyalties to follow Jesus will indeed be rewarded—they will receive the life of the kingdom of God, in this life and the life to come; but still, as the crowd is wondering if anyone can be saved, Jesus doesn’t point to his disciples and say, “Look at them, they’ve done it, they’ve earned eternal life.” No, for them, too, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle; for them, too, their only hope is that “what is impossible for human beings is possible for God.”

The truth is, salvation is impossible, from our end; it can’t be earned, or man­ufactured, or accomplished in any way, shape or form. We might as well try to drive our car to the moon, for all the good it would do us. Unfortunately, this is something the church keeps losing sight of, as we often fail to take our own sin as seriously as the sin of others. I think that’s why so many of our arguments get so fierce: we assume that our salvation is perfectly reasonable, and that because “they,” whoever “they” might happen to be, are in some way outside the will of God, their salvation is unreasonable. Truth is, all of our salvation is unreasonable; none of us have any hope at all of being good enough to make it happen, no matter what we have or do right. When once we understand the demands of God’s holiness, what he requires of us, and what’s necessary to satisfy him, it becomes clear that we can’t do it, that we could never do it; if we truly see our own sinfulness and our own limitations, we realize that we’d have better luck trying to fly by flapping our arms and diving off the Sears Tower.

But what is impossible for us is possible with God, because of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have hope, that’s why there’s a reason for our faith, and that’s why he makes the staggering demands that he does, because in nothing and no one else can we find salvation. He has given us an impossible faith—impossible by our own effort, impossible by our own standards—in a God who has done the impossible for us, and so he makes impossible demands to go with it: “Be perfect, as I am perfect.” “Love your enemies, and do good to those who curse you.” “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me.” “Die to yourself.” “Sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and trust me to provide for all your needs.” We can’t do what God asks of us; but what we cannot do for ourselves, he has done for us in Jesus, and will do in us by his Spirit. And so, we don’t ask, “What must I do to be saved,” for we know that to be a question with no answer. Instead, we celebrate God’s amazing grace that saved us despite ourselves, and we give him all our love and all our loyalty and all our obedience, not in order to be saved, but because we have been saved.

Taking time for Advent

Tomorrow is the first day of the Christian year, the first Sunday of Advent. For those not familiar with it, Advent is the season of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ; it's a very different thing from what the world calls "the Christmas season," though the two run together. As Joseph Bottum put it in First Things,

Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany.

Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.

More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales. . . .

Even for me, the endless roar of untethered Christmas anticipation is close to drowning out the disciplined anticipation of Advent. And when Christmas itself arrives, it has begun to seem a day not all that different from any other. Oh, yes, church and home to a big dinner. Presents for the children. A set of decorations. But nothing special, really.

It is this that Advent, rightly kept, would prevent—the thing, in fact, it is designed to halt.

It's an excellent meditation on the meaning and purpose of the discipline of Advent, and why we need it; I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'd hoped to post this earlier, but haven't been able to connect; but I wanted to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving anyway. I hope you've had a wonderful one, full of the spirit of gratitude.

And for the people of Mumbai, and especially for those directly affected by yesterday's attacks, our prayers are with you.

On alcoholism and not laughing at the vulnerable

This monologue by Craig Ferguson has of course been around for quite a while, since he delivered it in February of last year; but I keep going back to it, and finding people who need to hear it and haven't, so I decided to post it. (I'm aware of the irony in doing so, given that the video I posted yesterday is after all a beer ad; but though that ad was used to sell beer, it wasn't about the beer, and I posted it for other reasons.) I will note that there is a little profanity in this monologue; but there's also a great deal of wisdom in it.

Along with that, here's an interview he did with Eye to Eye about his decision not to go after Britney Spears:

For all you Canadians, and non-Canadians

I was living in Canada when Molson came up with this commercial, and I'm not sure I've ever seen such a reaction to an ad. I got to thinking about it the other day, for who knows what random reason, and decided to post it. Call it a memento, of sorts.

On this blog in history: October 2007

Continuing this series of retrospective posts, there's rather a gap after May 2007; the one post worth noting from June, 1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West, is one I actually reposted in full not that long ago, and after that one the summer got very busy (both in town, and in my search for a new call). It was October before I got posting again.

Madeleine L'Engle, RIP
A belated tip of the hat to an author from whom I learned much.

Meme tag
In retrospect, I don't think this meme was really all that helpful; but I do think my positive section here, drawing on James 1, is worth remembering.

Good news—no boundaries
A post about the mission organization Words of HOPE, which I served as a board member for three years; this is basically a brief introduction to one of the best ministries I've ever come across.

Meme Reversi
My wife's response to the meme above was to toss it back the other way, with a challenge that I could wish had gone all the way back down the chain: if you've identified problems and how things ought to be, what are you going to do about it? This is my answer to that challenge.

Relevance, busyness, and fruit

Speaking of quotes, I got out of the habit of checking the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund's blog, Christ Is Deeper Still, when he took a couple weeks off to go hunting; which means I have a lot to catch up with, since he puts up a lot of great material. In his recent posts, I particularly appreciate two, which seem to me to stand in striking juxtaposition (though no one seems to have commented on this). The first is this quote from Thomas Oden:

I am doggedly sworn to irrelevance, insofar as relevance implies a corrupt indebtedness to modernity. . . . My deepest desire as a theologian is to be permitted to study the unchanging God without some pragmatic reason. I simply want to enjoy the study of God—not write about it, not view it in relation to its political residue, or pretentiously imagine it will have some social effect. The joy of inquiry into God is a sufficient end in itself. . . .

I relish those times when there are no responsibilities but to engage in this quiet dialogue that is my vocation. Then, I readpray, studypray, workpray, thinkpray, because there is nothing I more want to do.

So when old activist friends ask why I'm not out there on the street working to change the world, I answer that I am out on the street in the most serious way by being here with my books, and if you see no connection there, you have not understood my vocation. I do not love the suffering poor less by offering them what they need more.

The second is this one, from the next day:

In this provocative blog post, C. J. Mahaney helps me ask a change-conducive question: "Am I deploying my daily life fruitfully or just racing through it busily?" I am drawn back to Psalm 1.

The psalm bristles with contrasts. Not nuances. Stark contrasts. And not because the psalm is simplistic but because it is so profound. In this world's Gadarene rush of ever-expanding options we need that blunt clarity. Psalm 1 calls us back to the one choice we all face every day: good versus evil. It's that profound. It's a choice between simple confidence in the Spirit-filled ways of God versus nervous, hyper-active, carnal worldliness. . . .

It's a picture of impotent restlessness versus fruitful quietness. Wasn't it Pascal who said that all the world's troubles are due to men's inability to sit quietly in a room and read a book? Couldn't we make that case for The Book?

Busyness can be a drug. It makes us feel important and needed. Fruitfulness is another matter. It is a miracle of God's grace through his Word, imparted to a heart that stays quiet and low before him, set upon doing his will only.

It seems to me that there's an important truth here: often, fruitfulness only comes by setting aside the activity that the world deems relevant. True fruitfulness comes from being rooted in God, and that requires time spent, not "doing something," but sitting quietly in his presence. It requires time given over to "readpray, studypray, workpray, thinkpray," that we may come to better know our God and draw more deeply from his life.

This means two things. First, as C. J. Mahaney says in the post the Rev. Dr. Ortlund references, it's very easy to avoid the truly important things by keeping ourselves very busy with the urgent things, because the world around us will see our busyness and approve; indeed, one difficulty in seeking to do the opposite can be that people will think we're unproductive, and judge us accordingly. (Of course, that's not without some reason, since one can always fall off into laziness this way as well, and actually become unproductive.) To be fruitful requires us to buckle down and identify what really matters, and then to focus on that; and thus it requires most of all that we devote ourselves to seeking God's face, which we cannot effectively do in the midst of our busyness (though he can always interrupt our busyness, if he wills). For that, we need the spiritual disciplines of solitude and silence, "unproductive" though they may seem to be; and we need to be open to confront all the things about ourselves and our lives that we do not wish to confront.

Second, this means that we have to accept that our fruitfulness does not in the end arise out of our own strength. Certainly, we won't be fruitful if we truly do nothing, but the sheer expenditure of energy won't produce any fruit, either, if it's merely our own. As Psalm 1 points out, the tree produces fruit not by frantic effort, but because it's planted in good soil beside a river; it has sent its roots deep and is drinking deeply of the water, and drawing out the nutrients from that good soil. That is the effort from which the fruit comes, and no other.

Minor shameless plug

I have a bit of a project going with regard to our church's website, with which I'm still dissatisfied. One of the things I've decided to try is creating a sermon blog on which to put the texts of my messages and to link to that from the main website. It's not my preferred option, since it sends traffic off the church site and over to Blogger; but unless we're willing to expand the budget for our site by a considerable amount, it looks to me like it will work better than anything else I've come up with.

In any case, that blog is now up and running, and has the entirety of my just-concluded sermon series on Philemon and Colossians posted (more will follow over time); I've called it Of a Sunday, playing off the huge role that Billy Sunday and his wife had in the founding and early growth of WLPC, and each sermon is "posted" under the date on which it was preached. These are the straight texts I took into the pulpit, so they don't include whatever changes I made in the course of delivery, but the essentials are all there. A number of them have provided material for blog posts, so those who read this site with any sort of regularity will find some familiar thoughts and ideas.

Grace is free . . . that's precisely the problem

There's a change in the blogroll, under the heading “Theoblogians,” that I think is worth noting. I've regretfully taken Doug Hagler's blog Prog(ressive)nostications off, since he's shutting it down (given that it's been over a month since he posted, I can't be accused of being hasty in that respect) and added in the blog Of First Importance, a quote blog to which Jared Wilson pointed us a while back, which has some great material. I particularly like this one—I'd missed it, but my wonderful wife drew it to my attention—from Dan Allender, picked up from Gospel Transformation:

The cost for the recipient of God’s grace is nothing—and no price could be higher for arrogant people to pay.

That about sums it up, I think.

Is this how we pray?

More often than we'd like to think, I suspect.

Interesting comment on being right

from this comment thread over on Lookout Landing (on a post well worth reading if you're a baseball fan), from a commenter named Milendriel:

Bottom line is, there are people who want to be right and approach new information objectively, and then there are people who don’t want to admit they’re wrong—which is necessary to eventually be right; none of us were any good at evaluating from the outset.

Beautifully put, that. To be fair, I think we all need to realize that even the best of us spend at least some time in the second category—this isn't a justification for beating up on people; we need to keep in mind that this isn't about better people vs. worse people (which tends to mentally devolve to "us vs. them," which is completely counterproductive), but rather about differing mental attitudes and approaches. As long as we do that, though, this formulation does as good a job of contrasting the approach that produces real growth and understanding (the former) with that which merely produces pride and folly (the latter) as anything I've seen. It's not that we shouldn't be concerned about being right; it's that our concern should be for the real value of truth, and should thus be essentially disinterested and not about ourselves, rather than for being believed to be right, which is not about truth at all but rather about ego.

In case anyone is wondering . . .

. . . I really haven't dropped off the face of the earth; but between being sick myself, having a sick wife and (for a while) a sick daughter, and major computer work at the church (which will be well worth it, when it's done), I haven't had a great deal of time or energy to put into this blog. (I'm also behind on e-mail as a result of the same issues, so if I haven't gotten back to you, please, don't give up on me.) A more normal posting schedule will no doubt resume when circumstances permit, but it probably won't be until next week.

In the meantime, I've been meaning to comment on Tyler Dawn's recent post on the nature of prophecy, so I'll recommend you go read it. Even if you believe the gift of prophecy ceased with the death of the first apostles, she has some good things to say about the nature of our relationship with God, and about what real Christian leadership looks like.

Further thought on submission and expectations

Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.

—Colossians 3:18-21

One of the things we often miss about this passage, and its parallel in Ephesians 5 about which I posted earlier today, is that as he addresses different groups of people, Paul directs his comments to them—for instance, his comments about wives are addressed to wives, and his comments about husbands are addressed to husbands.

This might seem obvious, but we often tend to read them the other way around—as if Paul had written, for instance, “Husbands, your wives are supposed to submit to you as to the Lord”; we focus on what others are supposed to do for us, rather than on what Paul commands us to do. Verse 20 isn’t addressed to parents, to use as a stick with which to beat our chil­dren, but to the children themselves; yes, we need to teach our children to be obedient, but you know, the reason really isn’t “Because I say so.” It’s not because I say so, it’s because God says so, and because I in my place am trying to do the best I can to teach them to do what is wise and good and pleasing to God. And the first sentence isn’t written to tell husbands what we have the right to expect; the word to us is, “Love your wives.” In Ephesians, Paul takes it a step further: “Love your wives as Christ loved the church.” It’s an absolute command; it isn’t contingent on anything anyone else does or doesn’t do. Our job is to do our job, not anyone else’s. That’s just how it works.

Brief meditation on submission and marriage

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, wives to husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also should wives submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without stain or wrinkle or any other mark, that she might be holy and unmarred. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. Whoever loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am talking about Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself,
and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

—Ephesians 5:18-33

That first paragraph above is Ephesians 5:18-24, and if you’re used to English translations, it probably looks weird to you. Your typical English Bible will put a full stop after “our Lord Jesus Christ,” then set verse 21 off as a separate paragraph: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Then you'll have a heading, most often Wives and Husbands, and then verse 22 will read, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.”

The only problem is, that verb in verse 22 doesn’t exist; inserting it, and the heading, makes it sound like a new and separate command from everything that’s gone before, and it just isn’t. It’s a particular application of a broader command: the command to mutual submission. To the world, this sounds like a really strange concept, since what the world has in mind when it thinks of “submit” or “be subject” is one person bossing another around—I tell you what to do and you do it, and that’s that. It’s a one-way street. What Paul means is something very different: all of us as brothers and sisters in Christ are supposed to submit to one another as part of being filled up by the Spirit.

What this means is, submission isn’t about hierarchy, and it isn’t a matter of most of us doing what a few people tell us to do. Instead, it’s a matter of how we as Christians relate to one another and care for one another. It’s a matter of heeding Paul’s words in Philippians 2: “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” As the ultimate example of this attitude, Paul points to Christ, who had more right than anyone to insist on his own way and his own prerogatives, but chose instead to give them all up and accept crucifixion. It seems to me that the command to submit to each other doesn’t mean that we have to do whatever anyone tells us to do, but rather that we don’t have the right to dominate others; we can’t insist that we are more important than they are. Instead, we should be willing to let others be more important, we should be ready to let others have their way, and we should be as concerned for the good of those around us as for our own good.

This is the context in which Paul turns to address wives and husbands. Many argue that this is a special case, that mutual submission is only the rule outside of marriage, and that inside marriage, submission is a one-way street. The reason I’ve usually seen offered for this is that Paul doesn’t go on in either of these passages to tell husbands to submit to their wives, and that therefore this must be a special duty for wives, not husbands. On first read, that makes sense; but if that’s the correct reading of these passages, then what do we make of the fact that Paul tells husbands to love their wives, but never tells wives to love their husbands? Clearly, he doesn’t mean that wives don’t need to love their husbands. This suggests—especially in light of the command in Ephesians to mutual submission—that he doesn’t intend submission to be just one-way, either; after all, one element of loving another person is being willing to put them and their will and their good ahead of ourselves and our own. Rather, it seems likely that Paul emphasizes submission to wives and love to husbands for some other reason.

My guess is that that reason is the cultural situation he’s dealing with, which enshrined the legal superiority of husbands over wives. Husbands had, at least in theory, absolute power over their wives—and, for that matter, their children; and we all know what absolute power does: it corrupts. It corrupts those who wield it; it also corrupts those who are under it. Paul’s driving concern, then, is to address both halves of this relationship and tell both husbands and wives how to deal with the situation as Christians. The key principle here is that this should be all about Christ, and doing what pleases him (which includes not submitting to things which clearly do not please him); along with this, we see the truth that greater authority doesn’t mean a greater opportunity to get your own way, but rather a greater opportunity to love and serve. Thus Paul tells husbands, “Love your wives as Christ loved the church.” How did Christ love the church? He laid down his life for the church. That, and nothing less, is the standard.

This is a strange world we live in

and every advance in technology seems to bring a new opportunity for the human race to find new ways in which to sin.

Second Life affair ends in divorce

HT: TMH

Camille Paglia on Sarah Palin

Even though I don't agree with Camille Paglia on very much (if anything) politically, I admire her greatly for her honesty, the clarity of her perception, and the true independence of her mind, and also for her great gifts as a writer. Her latest column in Salon shows her at the top of her form, particularly in this telling observation about Barack Obama:

As I've watched Obama gracefully step up to podiums or move through crowds, I've been reminded not of basketball, with its feints and pivots, but of surfing, that art form of his native Hawaii. . . Obama's ability to stay on his feet and outrun the most menacing waves that threaten to engulf him seems to embody the breezy, sunny spirit of the American surfer.

It also shows her refusal to close her eyes for the sake of ideology, as she expresses concern over

the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama—even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai.

She mentions specifically the evasiveness of the Obama campaign, and the unanswered questions about his association with Bill Ayers and (especially, to her) Bernardine Dohrn, writing,

We don't need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don't like feeling gamed or played.

Those two sentences, comparing the behavior of Sen. Obama and his campaign to that of the hated President Bush and his administration, have to have cost her. Paglia spends a fair chunk of her column on Ayers and Dohrn, whom she clearly finds disturbing; and from there she turns to Gov. Palin, writing,

Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology—contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is—and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English—big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns—that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee—what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry's nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama's pick and who was on everyone's short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin's. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan—nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.

It's a powerful smackdown to groupthink and cant from someone who's as free of both as any columnist around (on either side of the political aisle); the fact that it's also a powerful defense of someone who both needs and deserves it just makes it better.

All about Sarah?

I'm starting to wonder. There have been folks on the right who've been insisting since John McCain chose Sarah Palin that liberals are afraid of her and feel a particular need to destroy her; I've tended to think that was overstated. Certainly, I think a lot of folks on the left found her particularly galling—for daring to go "off the reservation" and be a successful woman in politics on non-leftist terms (with her strong pro-life position being the main part of that), and for Sen. McCain having had the nerve to pick a woman as his running mate when Barack Obama hadn't—but I figured it was much more that she represented someone who could actually put the McCain campaign over the top, and therefore was a threat to be destroyed ASAP, by whatever means necessary.

Now, though, I'm beginning to think that the voices insisting that liberals hate/fear her specifically may have more of a point than I thought. What has me considering this is a recent post on the media blog for Condé Nast Portfolio on whom the New York Times should hire to replace Bill Kristol if rumors prove true that they're inclined not to keep him on their op-ed pages. The blogger in question, Jeff Bercovici, is clearly an unapologetic liberal, which is no surprise; what is a surprise is the theme that seems to underlie his suggested alternatives. Of the four names he puts forward, two are Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy—the folks who got caught dissing Gov. Palin on a mike they didn't know was open. A third is Kathleen Parker, whom he makes a point of labeling as a Palin-hater. Why highlight that unless it's part of the point, and to be adduced as evidence that she has "the independence of thought that Kristol so glaringly lacks"?

Which in turn makes me think that that supposed "lack of independence" on Kristol's part may be code for "he likes Sarah Palin"; which, if so, is ludicrous, since Kristol was booming Gov. Palin for the slot back when it required incredible independence of thought to even entertain the idea. Which makes me wonder if there isn't a subtext for replacing Kristol: the Grey Lady is willing to have a conservative columnist or two around if it has to—but one who supports Sarah Palin is just too much. If they're going to have a conservative columnist, it must at least be a properly elitist Palin-hating conservative.

Do I take this as proven? Obviously not. But I'm wondering if there might be something to it . . . and if so, what its significance might be.

For my wife, the Rome junkie

Google has now added a 3D "Ancient Rome" layer to Google Earth, based off the best scholarship we have; check out this video on it:

HT: Carlos Echevarria

Clarification and further comment on double standards

After I put up my post last night on "the double standard of the Left," frequent commenter and cyberfriend Doug Hagler called me out on a couple things. I posted a response to him in the comments there, but after thinking about it a bit, I decided to post an edited version of that comment on the main page as well.

Part of his objection was to the blog to which I linked—or rather, to the commenters on that blog. As I noted, on high-traffic blogs, I don't read the comments unless I know they're tightly patrolled (as with, for example, U.S.S. Mariner, or Adam Brickley's blog), because otherwise, they will uniformly be ugly. (And if you think this just applies to political blogs, spend some time in the sports blogosphere—your eyes will be opened. Republicans vs. Democrats has nothing on Red Sox. vs. Yankees.)

More importantly, to point out a double standard on the Left is not to imply anything, positive or negative, about the Right; there's simply no logical connection there. If there's one thing I've found to hold true about groups of people, it's that they're all the same—the same tendencies, good and bad, will tend to emerge in roughly the same proportions unless something specific to the group acts to emphasize or suppress them. As such, do I imagine that being conservative means that one is immune to certain sins? No, certainly not. In this particular case, for instance, I know full well that the Right has its tendencies toward double standards, too.

However, I will note that in areas in which the Right tends to get publicly sanctimonious, it usually follows through against its own, even if only because the media won't let it do otherwise. Where is Mark Foley? Where is Larry Craig? Where is Ted Haggard? The list is not without exception (David Vitter comes to mind; the only explanation I have for his survival is that Louisiana is a different world politically), but neither is it short. When you have a preacher peddling leftist hate, like the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., liberals defend him; by contrast, preachers peddling rightist hate will often find their sharpest critics among evangelicals. Fred Phelps, that malignancy on the body politic, is a classic example.

The question with regard to the attack on Mount Hope Church is, are there liberals who will call a spade a spade here, the way evangelicals (and even some fundamentalists) routinely do every time Phelps opens his yap, and denounce this as an intolerant assault on freedom of speech and freedom of religion? And with regard to the Obama campaign's disabling of protections against credit-card fraud, will the liberals who sermonize about the corrupting influence of money in politics step up and call this what it is—namely, corrupt?

The point is not that there's supposedly some kind of vast left-wing conspiracy—we got enough of that kind of talk in the other direction from the Clintons. The point is, when the Left talks about tolerance, and political ethics, and the the need for campaign-finance reform, and all those things, are those just clubs to use to beat up Republicans? Or are folks on the Left willing to call out their own side on these issues?

Certainly, Republicans aren't perfect in this respect, but there are always GOP pundits and politicians willing to take up that role. The question is, are there leaders and media figures on the Left who will do the same? Or do they only care when it's Republicans who are guilty?

Why the 44th President is doomed

No, I didn't say "Why Barack Obama is doomed"; I don't think his policy appointments and decisions will help the economic situation any, but I'm not suggesting that John McCain would have had the winning economic strategy. Rather, the point is that there isn't a winning economic strategy at this point—the forces in play are just too big. Read Michael Lewis' excellent piece in Condé Nast Portfolio to understand why. It's long, but well worth it; remember, this is the guy who first identified the roots of the problem 20 years ago in his book Liar's Poker, returning to autopsy the patient who died of the cancer he originally diagnosed. Trust me, read the whole thing—read it to the end; it will blow your mind.

Then read the accompanying article on why there won't be a recovery for a while yet, despite what the optimists say, and reflect on the fact that presidents always get blamed when bad things happen, whether it's their fault or not. (George W. Bush can point to the mishandling of Katrina by Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin, for which he took pretty much all the blame outside of Louisiana; granted, Michael Brown and FEMA also did a very poor job, but the hit President Bush's popularity took had far more to do with matters under their control than with things for which he was actually responsible. The only upside for Republicans is that this did lead the people of Louisiana to elect Bobby Jindal the next time around.) The Oval Office is going to be a rough place to be in 2010, and would be no matter who was sitting in it, for reasons which in large part will have nothing to do with its occupant. (At least on the economic side; when it comes to foreign policy, that's another matter.)

HT: Baseball Crank

The bottom line on this campaign

is that I ended up thinking a lot less of both the final candidates when it finished than I did when they first started running.

Oddly enough, the opposite is true of Hillary Clinton.

(I still think she's a political opportunist, etc.; but I have to admire the spirit and resiliency she showed, even if it was in the service of raw, vindictive ambition. The negative things that she displayed during this campaign didn't surprise me any, but we also, I think, saw some really positive aspects to her that I at least hadn't seen before.)

Too little, too late

After sitting sphinx-like as his senior staff impugned Sarah Palin's intelligence and character, John McCain finally opened his mouth—and this is the best he was willing to do? I'm sorry, Senator, but that's just plain pathetic. To wait so long to say anything, and then not to address any of the specific lies floating around out there or call out any of the liars from behind their curtain of anonymity—especially given his vigorous defense of Barack Obama against attacks he deemed inappropriate—to fail to defend her against false charges given how hard she worked for you and how badly she was pummeled by your opponents for supporting your cause . . . that's purely dishonorable. There is no other word for it.

The evangelical temptation to the political heresy

The thing I appreciate most about Phil Johnson's post on that subject over at Pyromaniacs is that he keeps the lines clear:

My main point is about how the church corporately should be spending her time and resources, not about what an individual who is vocationally (or avocationally) involved in politics should do.

That's a critically important distinction; losing it renders the whole conversation unintelligible. There is no question that Christians should be politically aware and engaged; the question is what the mission of the church should be. I do believe, obviously, that Christian theology applies to politics, and so I don't think political quietism is a wise or appropriate Christian stance; that said, as Johnson argues at some length, the preaching of the gospel and the teaching of Scripture must lie at the center of our ministry and must be the core of our testimony at every point. We should apply that to politics as to every other part of life, but our politics—like our behavior in every other part of life—should always flow out of our faith, rather than the other way around. If it's the other way around, we have a problem. The job of the leaders of the church, in this respect, is to make sure that it isn't and we don't.

HT: Bob

The double standard of the Left, in full force

as seen in two very different ways. For one, the Obama campaign has officially gotten away with fraud, which isn't surprising. What's rather more surprising is that they're still getting away with it. Check out Gateway Pundit for the thorough rundown of how the Obama organization has been enabling—and is continuing to enable—significant credit-card fraud in order to fill their coffers. They will, of course, not be audited or investigated—that sort of thing is only for Republicans.

For another, my prayers go out to the folks at Mount Hope Church in Lansing, MI who were assaulted—there is no other word for it—by a radical gay group this past Sunday. I know that church, slightly; I've never attended there (though I've driven by it many times), but we've known people who attended there, and know it by reputation. It's a good church, and didn't deserve this attack. Don't expect the MSM to decry the intolerance of their attackers, though—again, that sort of thing is only for Republicans.

The work of holiness

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised,
barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.

Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

—Colossians 3:5-17 (ESV)

I said yesterday that the bad news is that we're all sinners, and that we'll never win free of that in this life. That's the bad news of the law, for which the good news is Jesus Christ; and for those of us who bow to him as Lord, though we may never know complete freedom from sin this side of eternity, we don't have to just give up and give in, either. God’s grace is at work in us, setting us free from sin, and while that work is unfinished, he never fails of his purposes. No matter how bad we might be (or might have been) or how holy we think we are now, no matter how old and set in our ways or how young and callow, God is at work in us, and he calls us to work with him, to align our efforts with his. Paul lays out two parts to that in this passage.

First he says, all these things that belong to this fallen world and to your old selves, put them to death. It’s much the same thing he says in Romans 8:13, where he writes, “If you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.”

This isn’t something we can accomplish in our own strength; our own efforts need to be a part of it, and there’s an important place for spiritual disciplines such as prayer, worship, and silence, but it’s only by the power of the Spirit of God that we can make any real progress in dealing with our sin. The goal is the complete rooting-out and destruction of sin in our lives; we’ll never reach it in this life, but it’s nevertheless the goal toward which we work. It’s an ongoing struggle against the sin in our lives, to weaken and starve it, so that through loss of strength and lack of food, it dies away little by little, losing its ability to draw us into sinful actions. This requires us to know our own sinfulness, to be aware of the ways in which our sin tricks us and overcomes us, if we are to fight against it intelligently; and it requires constant vigilance—but then, as the Irish politician and writer Edmund Burke noted, that’s always the price of true freedom.

Along with this, Paul says, “Change your clothes!” The image here is of the old self with its sinful practices as a suit of clothes we wear, and of the new self, which is from God, as another suit of clothes. The more we come to appreciate the new life God has given us, the more we learn to see the old self, those old clothes, for the dirty things they are. Imagine coming home after some fiasco, soaked to the skin, cold to the bone, covered in mud and filth, and taking a long, hot shower, or perhaps a long, hot bath; when you’re warm and clean, are you going to put those clothes back on? And yet that, in a sense, is just what we do whenever we turn back to sin: we’ve been washed clean, and yet we put the filth of the old self back on. Paul says, “Don’t do that—put on the habits of your new life in Christ.”

If we put these two commands together, we get a complete picture. As we work to put to death the inward reality of sin, we are also to be at work stripping ourselves of our sinful habits, which are rooted in that inward reality, and replacing them with new ones. For the things we need to set aside, Paul points on the one hand to the disordered desires which lead us to pursue the pleasures and things of the world instead of God, and on the other, to the destructive passions, and the destructive language that goes with them; put those aside, he says, take them off and get rid of them. In their place, clothe yourselves with a new way of living, one which is marked by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, and a forgiving spirit. These words describe an attitude that doesn’t give way to rage when one is done wrong but chooses to show grace, and is willing to waive one’s rights for the good of others, even when they don’t deserve it. The ultimate example of this is Jesus, who at times spoke quite sternly to the Jewish leaders who had set themselves against him, yet died on the cross for them, with a prayer for their forgiveness on his lips. Just so, says Paul, we should bear with one another and forgive one another just as Christ has forgiven us.

Of course, it would be very easy to take these things and turn them into just another legalistic religion, just another way of putting faith in our own ability to be good enough—just work hard enough at being compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, patient, and forgiving, and you’ll please God. But look what Paul says next: clothe yourself with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. In other words, these virtues aren’t individual things to be worked on individually and to be accomplished by stern effort—they’re supposed to be the fruit of the love of God and the peace of Christ in our lives. When are we not compassionate, kind, humble, and so on? When we don’t love the people we’re dealing with, or when we’re not at peace—when we’re in conflict within ourselves, when we’re in conflict with those around us, when we’re anxious, when we feel the weight of our own lives resting on our shoulders. But if we open ourselves up to the love of God—because love, too, is not something we do in our own strength; love comes from God, it’s his gift to us and his work in our lives—and let him fill us with his peace, then these virtues are the result.

For those who served, and serve

I am the son of two Navy veterans, the nephew of a third, and the godson of a fourth. One of the earliest things I remember clearly was the time in second grade when I got to go on a Tiger Cruise—they flew us out to Honolulu where we met the carrier as it returned home at the end of the cruise, then we rode the ship back to its homeport in Alameda. I grew up around petty officers and former POWs. When one of our college students here described her chagrin at asking a friend if she would be living "on base" this year—and her friend's complete incomprehension—I laughed, because I know that one; my freshman year in college was the first time I had ever lived anywhere outside that frame of reference.

In short, as I've said before, I'm a Navy brat; for me, "veterans" aren't people I read about, they're faces I remember, faces of people I know and love. They are the people without whom we would all be speaking German, or Russian—or, someday, Arabic—but they're also the people for whom we give thanks every time we see them that they came home, and those we remember who never did. They are my family, and the friends of my family, those who taught and cared for my parents and those my parents taught and for whom they cared in their turn. They are the defenders of our national freedom, and they stand before and around us to lay their blood, toil, tears and sweat at the feet of this country to keep us safe; and for me, and for many like me, their sacrifice and their gift is not merely abstract, it's personal. May we never forget what they have done for all of us; may we never fail to honor their service; may we never cease in giving them the support they deserve.

Dad, Mom, Uncle Bill, Auntie Barb, all of you: thank you.

Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for one's friends.

—John 15:13

Sarah Palin in her own words

The biggest problem for Gov. Palin going forward is the number of people out there who are against her because of who they wrongly believe her to be. Unfortunately, there are a lot of influential folks, including media types, who see it as in their best interest to reinforce those false images; fortunately, all she has to do to overcome them is to get her own message out, to be herself where the nation can see her, so that people can see for themselves that the ideas they have are not in fact true.

That's why her interview with KTUU-2 in Anchorage and the Anchorage Daily News has popped up in the national media, and why she has a number of national interviews lined up, beginning with this one with Greta Van Susteren which aired yesterday. It's amazing how happy she is to talk with the media when she doesn't have someone else setting her interview schedule, isn't it?

Video below the jump of Gov. Palin's interviews with Van Susteren and Matt Lauer.

Palin-bashers discover the Law of Unintended Consequences

I took note last Friday of the dishonorable cowards in the McCain campaign who started trashing Sarah Palin before the election had even been held, presumably to try to shift the blame for the loss away from their own performance.

It didn't work. It didn't work because Gov. Palin made an implausible scapegoat when conservative pundits had been griping in print for weeks about how badly the campaign was being run (with one aspect of that being their mishandling of Gov. Palin). It didn't work because the conservative base, on the whole, is far more impressed with her than it is with Sen. McCain. Neither of these things should be surprising, as both were eminently predictable.

What's more interesting is the other reason it didn't work: because other staffers on the campaign wouldn't stand for it either. Folks like Randy Scheunemann (Sen. McCain's top foreign-policy advisor), Steve Biegun (who briefed her on foreign policy)—and even the folks believed to be behind the leaks, Nicolle Wallace (a senior campaign advisor) and Steve Schmidt (one of the two heads of the campaign)—as well as longtime Palin staffer Meg Stapleton, a wave of denials has washed away the charges, and left a very positive picture of Gov. Palin behind. Not exactly what they'd hoped to accomplish, I'm sure.

“I've been working over 20 years in Washington and I've been around literally dozens and dozens of politicians. She is among the smartest, toughest, most capable politicians I've ever dealt with,” Scheunemann said. “She has a photographic memory.”

————————————

Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser to McCain who helped on the Palin account early on, said Friday on NBC that the governor was “perhaps the most un-diva politician I've seen.”

Twelve hours before Palin said all she’d ever asked for was a Diet Dr Pepper, Wallace told NBC: “The only thing I’ve seen her ask for is a diet soda.” . . .

“Gov. Palin was a breath of fresh air, particularly for those of us who've been living in the Washington bubble,” said Tracey Schmitt, the vice presidential nominee’s traveling spokeswoman and a veteran of the RNC and both Bush campaigns. “Because she is a working mom, she brought a real sense of perspective to the campaign trail, which was important.”

Schmitt said that Palin’s effort on McCain’s behalf was a dogged one—that she was completely devoted to helping the man who made her famous.

“She was tireless on the stump and would have shaken every hand on the rope line if there were time,” Schmitt recalled. “It was evident that this work ethic and enthusiasm was fueled by her sincere commitment to helping Sen. McCain get elected.”

Two other McCain aides who were pressed unexpectedly into Palin duty also have only positive things to say about her now.

“One of the great developments of this campaign is the addition of Sarah Palin as a powerful and energetic new voice in American public life,” said Taylor Griffin, a McCain press aide who had been focusing on economic issues until he was dispatched to Alaska in late August. “She's smart, insightful, and has an uncanny ability to ask the right questions.”

John Green was McCain’s Capitol Hill liaison for much of the year but was quietly tasked this fall with helping Palin deal with some of her Alaska-related issues, spending significant time there and with her on the campaign trail.

“I thought she was an exceptional political person, but more than that an exceptional person,” Green said. “She’s in line with conservative principles and is an everyday Republican—what we’re going to have to find more if we’re going to get back to being a majority party.”

————————————

In general, according to Beigun, Palin had a steep learning curve on foreign issues, about what you would expect from a governor. But she has “great instincts and great core values," and is "an instinctive internationalist.” The stories against her are being “fed by an unnamed source who is allowed by the press to make ad hominem attacks on background.” Biegun, who spent dozens and dozens of hours briefing Palin on these issues, is happy to defend her, on the record, under his own name.

Reader's guide: posts on the nexus of religion and politics

The developing center of this blog, I think, is a core of reflections on the interrelationship between Christian theology and praxis and American politics. As such, I wanted to post this as the first part of an orientation to this blog, and what it's all about (updated through 5/31/09).

Barack Obama and the case for faith in the public square
This is the first post I ever put up about Sen. Obama; while he hasn't lived up to my hopes, I still appreciate the call he put forward in his address to the Building a Covenant for a New America conference for "a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country."

The idolatry of American politics
One of my recurring themes: "When our politics shapes our faith rather than the other way around—when our identity is defined even in part by a political party or a political cause—then our political commitments have claimed a place that belongs only to God, and we are guilty of idolatry."

Moral arguments and the political process
Returning to the theme of "the case for faith in the public square," and why secularism should not be privileged above other faiths.

Politics in a state of grace
Thoughts on a properly Christian approach and attitude to politics.

Memo to the movement: be careful
On Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and avoiding the temptation to messianic politics.

Moral psychology and voting right (or left)
On understanding the reasons why people disagree with us (and why that's more of a problem for liberals than for conservatives).

Put not your trust in princes
On the proper limits of political convictions and commitments.

Keeping perspective on the election
The key is to remember who holds our first allegiance.

Thoughts on the humility proper to politics
On being aware of our own imperfection, and especially with respect to our political positions.

What has Christ to do with politics?
What is the proper connection between the life of faith and political life?

The temptation and peril of theologized politics
The dangers of letting our politics drive our faith.

Using faith for political ends
On the importance of ending the political subservience of religion.

Foresight in hindsight

Since my first post on Sarah Palin this past June, I've had a fair bit to say about her and why she was the best person to run alongside John McCain. Now the campaign is in the rearview mirror, I thought it might be a good idea to go back and see how I did.

From my first post, "Sarah Palin for VP":

One, she's young, just 44; she would balance out Sen. McCain's age.

I think that worked out decently well; it did open the McCain campaign up to the argument that her youth took the "inexperience" argument against Barack Obama off the table, but taken all in all, I don't think it really had that effect. If anything, trying to make that case hurt the Obama campaign a little, because their attacks on her inexperience rebounded on him. As Ramesh Ponnuru said at the time, "Obama has diminished himself . . . by getting into an Obama vs. Palin contest." Once he gave up, he did better, because "experience" was never going to be an argument that was going to win this election anyway; and unfortunately, while Sen. McCain had a strong argument to make for himself as the real change agent in this election, an argument which Gov. Palin reinforced, he was curiously reluctant to actually make it.

Two, she has proven herself as an able executive and administrator, serving as mayor, head of the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and now as governor; she would balance out Sen. McCain's legislative experience (though he does have command experience in the Navy).

This gave the McCain campaign and others the ability to make a strong argument that Gov. Palin is in fact more experienced and better qualified than Sen. Obama. Had they done a better job of that, it could have intensified their experience argument against him. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional character of the McCain campaign and their seeming inability to put out a strong, coherent message undermined this. In the end, what I think this campaign demonstrated is that while Sen. McCain's experience advantage meant something in national-security issues, it was in other critical respects meaningless. Those of us who pointed out that Gov. Palin was the only one of the four candidates who had ever run anything, and thus that she had a meaningful edge in executive experience, were right; those who noted that as an implicit criticism of Sen. McCain were also right. I can't imagine Gov. Palin could do a worse job running a national campaign, certainly.

Three, she has strong conservative credentials, both socially (she's strongly pro-life, politically and personally) and fiscally (as her use of the line-item veto has shown); she would assuage concerns about Sen. McCain's conservatism.

Which would be why she fired up the base the way she has. Check.

Four, she's independent, having risen to power against the Alaska GOP machine, not through it; she's worked hard against the corruption in both her party and her state's government. She would reinforce Sen. McCain's maverick image, which is one of his greatest strengths in this election, but in a more conservative direction.

This is why, as even many conservative pundits who were initially skeptical have said, she was "the only choice who could have simultaneously excited the base and strengthened the ticket's appeal to independent voters." In the end, the media attacks and the badly mismanaged response to them from the McCain campaign succeeded in blunting her appeal to independents, but her connection with the GOP base remained strong; given a few more years to build her resumé, I think she's in a good position to rebuild that support among swing voters as well.

Five, for the reasons listed above, she's incredibly popular in Alaska. That might seem a minor factor to some, but it's indicative of her abilities as a politician.

A point which has been referenced in some commentary. Of greater importance is the fact that those abilities have clearly made the transition to the national stage.

Six, she has a remarkable personal story, of the sort the media would love.

And so they did, when they weren't desperately trying to find some way to use it to destroy her. But then, as I noted,

No one now in American politics can match Sen. McCain's life story (no, not even Barack Obama), but she comes as close as anyone can (including Sen. Obama); she fits his image.

That made her a threat—and a bigger one than I realized. An awful lot of folks in the MSM reacted accordingly.

Seven, she would give the McCain campaign the "Wow!" factor it can really use in a vice-presidential nominee. As a young, attractive, tough, successful, independent-minded, appealing female politician, though not well known yet, she would make American voters sit up and take notice.

Check, and enough said.

Eight, choosing Gov. Palin as his running mate, especially if coupled with actions like giving Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal the keynote slot at the GOP convention, would help the party going forward. The GOP needs to rebuild its bench of plausible strong future presidential candidates, and perhaps the best thing Sen. McCain can do for the party is to help with this.

I still believe this, but obviously, the proof is yet in the future.

In my post "Sarah Palin hits the bullseye," I wrote,

John McCain leads Barack Obama among women over 40—normally a solidly Democratic voting bloc. To take advantage of this, Dick Morris concludes, McCain should take dead aim at this demographic, perhaps by selecting a female running mate who would appeal to them.
To do that, are there any better options than Alaska's Sarah Palin? I don't think so; and as Adam Brickley points out, people are noticing. Gov. Palin for VP.

This is hard for me to judge, given the collapse of the campaign as a whole over the last month and a half. Anecdotally, it seems to me that adding Gov. Palin to the ticket did indeed provide the boost the McCain campaign was hoping for, but that the campaign lost at least some of that boost because they couldn't make a good enough case for Sen. McCain, and he couldn't make a good enough case for himself.

A week later, in a post titled "Sooner or later," I said this:

This is not an election for the conventional approach. That's one of the reasons why I think Sen. McCain needs to name Gov. Palin as his running mate . . .: if Sen. McCain is going to win, he needs to shake up the conventional wisdom and cross up people's expectations.

The Palin nomination certainly accomplished that. Unfortunately, he couldn't match that when the economic crisis broke.

I called Sen. Obama's pick of Joe Biden as his running mate "One more argument for Sarah Palin" thusly:

Joe Biden on the ticket with Barack Obama is the best argument yet for Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket.

accompanied by a list of comparisons and the suggestion, taken from Adam Brickley, that Gov. Palin would be the best person available to debate Sen. Biden. She handled him well, and I do think she did better than anyone else out there would have been likely to do (with the possible exception of Bobby Jindal, who had taken himself out of the running).

On the eve of Sen. McCain's announcement, I wrote this:

A great many people across this country—many Republicans, but also more than a few moderate Democrats—are catching the vision of a McCain/Palin ticket, and getting excited about the possibility. This is the reason John McCain needs to name Gov. Palin as his running mate, because you can't say that about anybody else; the arguments for the other candidates are all purely rational, coldly political parsings of the data. There are equally strong rational arguments, and perhaps stronger, to be made for Gov. Palin, but among them is this: she excites people. None of the other candidates do that, except Mormons for Romney; none of them excite both wings of the Republican base; none of them excite people beyond the Republican base. Only Gov. Palin does that, and I hope Sen. McCain realizes that.

He did, and she did. I could wish he and his staff had given her more support, rather than hamstringing her.

When the attack on Gov. Palin began, I wrote this:

To go one step further, I think the Democrats are making a major mistake here. They're trying to neutralize her with ridicule as a lightweight, hoping for the quick wipeout right out of the box, instead of treating her seriously; and while that would work if she were a lightweight, she isn't, and she's faced worse before. What this means is that, when she comes to the debate with Joe Biden, the expectations for her will be low.

and that because of Republican enthusiasm for her, she's insulated from being Quayled:

If she does put her foot in it and give the media the opportunity to label her a lightweight, out of her depth—I'll be surprised if she does, but even the best of us do it at the worst of times—Republican voters aren't going to buy the line. Instead, we'll defend her against it to anyone who will listen, and some people will.

On the former, all I can say is that I wasn't giving her enough credit there; she outperformed my implicit expectations, turning the ridicule back on the Democrats time and time again. For the latter, things played out that way to some extent; every time someone on the left tried to turn something into a "gaffe," Republicans rose up in all directions to hammer them down. Those efforts still left their mark in the minds of more swing voters than they should have, though, due to the McCain campaign's efforts to mold Gov. Palin and keep her under control rather than just turning her loose.

I also put up a post suggesting that Gov. Palin would be a very difficult target for the Obama campaign, and so she turned out to be; one of Mitt Romney's strategists went so far as to describe them as "like a lion tiptoeing around a turtle—they don't know what to do with it." Unfortunately, the media filled in the gap by beating her up with all sorts of half-truths, invented stories, and interviews edited with malice aforethought, doing everything they could to create a false image to weaken her appeal. The campaign tried to fight this, but they were left playing catch-up; they would, I believe, have done better just to turn Gov. Palin loose to go over the heads of the MSM on every talk radio show and local TV station she could find

Taken all in all, though, I think the Palin nomination has to go down as a significant political success; she didn't put Sen. McCain over the top, but he finished a lot closer than anyone would have expected, and a lot of that is the fact that she energized the base in a way in which he never could have. That freed him up to go after swing voters, and that was working until the economic crisis swung them back into the Obama camp. The appeal she brought to the ticket was fairly easy to see coming, if you could just break out of the conventional wisdom long enough. Credit for that goes to folks like my father-in-law, who got me looking at Gov. Palin to begin with, and Adam Brickley, who kicked the whole thing off nearly 21 months ago. Now that's foresight.

Thoughts on the humility proper to politics

I've argued before that there's an idolatrous spirit about American politics these days, and that we as Christians need to reexamine our attitude and approach to politics and the political arena. There are various reasons why this is a significant problem; one that I don't think I've written about to this point is that it leads us to overidentify our cause with God’s, and thus to conclude that our opponents are necessarily God’s enemies.

To be sure, there are real evils in this world, and thus in our politics, and some of them have powerful political constituencies and advocates; we as Christians have the responsibility to identify those evils and oppose them to the best of our ability. However, we have to be very careful as we do so, because there are traps for the unwary that go along with that, and if we aren't wise we could easily fall into them. One is the trap of assuming that those who disagree with us must necessarily do so out of evil motives; there are no doubt those for whom this is true, but there are many others who are seeking to do what’s best, to the best of their ability and understanding. The correctness of our own positions is by no means as self-evident as we too often assume it is. We need to give people who hold opposing positions the benefit of the doubt unless and until they give us strong, certain reason to do otherwise. The other is the trap of assuming the purity of our own motives—that because we are in the right, it makes us better people with purer hearts. If we look at ourselves honestly, we have to admit that our motives are just as mixed as anyone else's, and our understanding just as flawed; if on any given point, we believe what is right and true, that doesn't mean it's right and true because we believe it, it simply means that God has given us the grace to perceive the truth. It's a gift, no credit to us, and we need to see ourselves accordingly.

The truth is—and we must never forget this—we’re all sinners. Some of us sin less, some of us sin more, we’re at different levels of spiritual maturity and going different directions, but even the most godly people among us are still sinners saved by grace. We have died with Christ, we have been raised with Christ, we have been given new life in Christ—but in the same old flesh, well-practiced in all the same old sins. We are justified, we are saved, we are being transformed into the image of Christ, but we’re still in process. That’s just how it is in this world, and we need to keep that in our minds. In our disputes and disagreements, in our wants and desires, in the issues we face and the decisions we must consider, we must always remember that we too are sinners, and take that fact into consideration. No matter who we are, our positions, our preferences, our ideas, our desires, our plans, are all tainted by sin, and we have no right to pretend otherwise.