Happy New Year!

Here’s hoping that 2010 is for you a time of great growth and blessing, when all the seeds of good things in your life begin to bear fruit, while the weeds in your life wither.

That was the year that was

Well, with all due apologies to T. S. Eliot, this is the way the whirl ends—not with a bang but a whimper. It's been two years since I posted that little in a month, and while I don't apologize for that, I don't want to make a habit of it, either. The discipline of writing has been good for me, and the discipline of thinking probably even more so; I know it's helped my sermon preparation, among other things.

I suppose the question is, has the blog been worth anything for its own sake? I think it has, though I might be biased on the subject. Obviously there were a lot of posts that simply took note of something or posted a video or were just for fun, but even those have their value; and I think that occasionally, at least, I managed to contribute something to the larger conversation. It may well be that the ultimate validation of this blog will come (or not) in whether I'm able to take any of the ideas that have sparked along the way for me and develop them further; but even if not, they're out there, and maybe they'll do some good.

Other people's work

I've been meaning to repost this poem my wife posted a while ago, one which she found on the group writing blog Novel Matters; it's by one of the contributors there, Latayne C. Scott. I lack the talent to be a professional musician—and, to be honest, the practice habits—but I love music, and one of the best things about living in Winona Lake is getting to hear some of the best musicians in the world play to the glory of God. Souls in their fingers, indeed.

Opus Envy

I watch his fingers
Teasing the piano
As he caresses the ivory teeth
It purrrrrrrs
Harder now—he strikes
A glancing blow off the black fang

An answering roar

ah Rachmaninoff
just because my soul is not in
my fingertips does not
mean I do not have
one

Climategate and the fundamentalist spirit

One of the most interesting stories of the past couple of months has been the whole Climategate scandal. I'm not going to dig that up and rehash the substance of it (though if you didn't see Bill's posts on the Thinklings about the lousy quality of the computer models behind the anthropogenic global-warming argument and the dubious nature of the standard assertions that the results of such models are truly properly peer-reviewed, you ought to), I just wanted to throw an observation out there. To wit, I recognized the spirit in those leaked e-mails, with their insistence that the theory must be right regardless of the data, and their willingness to adjust the facts as needed to fit the dogma: it's the spirit of fundamentalism. It's the exact same tone one meets in people arguing that the Earth must be only 6,000 years old and therefore, whatever facts that would seem to indicate otherwise must be incorrect.

Now, to call someone a fundamentalist doesn't mean they're wrong, by any means. I don't happen to believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and I don't happen to believe in AGW, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one or both couldn't be correct. But the spirit in which many who call themselves Christian fundamentalists argue (which is not, be it noted, equal with fundamentalism itself; one can hold to fundamentalist positions without this sort of attitude and approach) is one which is absolutely certain it has discovered the truth, unquestioningly convinced of its own rightness, and thus is committed to maintaining its position by whatever means necessary. This is the sort of spirit one also finds in Islamic fundamentalism—and it's the spirit that's in view as well in Michael Mann and the leaked CRU e-mails.

Again, that doesn't mean their position is wrong; to argue that would be to commit the genetic fallacy. It does, however, give the lie to their claims that they alone are scientific and their opponents are anti-science. In truth, what we have here is a religious dispute, complete with threats by the high priests against the heretics; and the pretensions of those high priests to be above ideology, their insistence that they are disinterested seekers of the pure flame of fact, have been shown to be a sham. This will be, I think, the long-term effect of Climategate: it's knocked AGW proponents off their pedestal, and I don't think they're going to be able to climb back up.

Thought on Gov. Palin

So Gov. Palin went out on her book tour, all over the media, attracting huge crowds, driving the Left to invent new “facts” with which to attack her (and also driving her book to the top of the bestseller list), and I had nothing to say about it. Of course, as noted, I haven’t had much to say about anything else, either, in this space for a while; in particular, what with one thing and another, I just haven’t had the energy or the time to spare to engage with political goings-on the way I typically do. This is especially true given the goings-on that are going on; I know where the Anchoress was coming from last month when she wrote,

I didn’t even give the news more than a passing glance because it was all so depressing.

Before that, though, I had a couple folks accuse me of hero-worship for Sarah Palin, and I’ve been wanting to respond to that charge, because it isn’t true. I’m convinced that the secret of Barack Obama’s success is that he tapped into a deep latent hunger (and not just on the Left) for a secular Messiah—and that as such, his success contains the roots of his failure, because he isn’t up to the task, as no mere human being could be—and I want no part of it. I do have people I consider heroes, but I don’t even feel hero-worship for them; and Gov. Palin isn’t in that category anyway.

However, I do have a tremendous amount of respect for her, and I support her staunchly, not as a hero or some sort of saving figure, but as I believe the best and most promising leader in the American political landscape. She isn’t perfect, but no politician is—indeed, no leader in any walk of life is; what folks like USS Mariner’s Dave Cameron have argued with respect to baseball managers (that there are few who significantly improve their teams, a lot more who really hurt their teams, and the vast majority in the middle who have little effect) seems to me to apply to politicians as well. The thing is, for various reasons, I believe Gov. Palin to be one of the relatively uncommon politicians who has done and will do real good, and so I support her.

First among those reasons is the fact that I agree with her political philosophy and positions. It’s a simple thing, but not a small thing: what she has done during her time in politics so far and what she has argued ought to be done agrees quite closely with what I believe ought to be done. I’m sure there are areas in which I am not in agreement with her positions, but in the areas in which she’s made her own position clear (as opposed to supporting John McCain’s agenda during her time as his running mate), I really haven’t found any yet.

Second, I believe Gov. Palin to be a person of strong personal integrity and character. This is not to say she’s sinless, which would be an incredibly unreasonable expectation of anybody; but it is to say that she has shown the character to resist significant political temptation, and to hold fast to her beliefs and convictions even in the face of hostile opposition. The fact that she has endured the slings and arrows of outrageous media over the past year and remained pretty much the same person with the same set of beliefs is strong evidence for this conclusion. The fact that she showed with her resignation that she has higher priorities than holding political office, with the power and perks that go along with it, is further evidence.

Third, while I don’t claim that she’s a genius, I believe Gov. Palin is plenty bright enough to be President, and more importantly has shown herself to be a sufficiently quick study to stay abreast of the information flow that runs through 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Fourth, Gov. Palin isn’t just a thinker, she’s a doer. Even having left the governor’s office in Juneau partway through her one term, she accomplished quite a bit; and since leaving office, she has exercised considerable influence on the political conversation in this country through the decisive stands she’s taken and the arguments she’s offered for them.

Fifth, it was once said of Grover Cleveland, “They love him most for the enemies he has made,” and something of that sort might be said about Gov. Palin as well. The fact that she clearly worries the hardline Left more than anyone else on the Right suggests that she is truly the natural leader for the American Right at this point in time; the fact that she is scarcely less disturbing to the inside-the-Beltway “conservative” elite says, I believe, much the same thing. I have argued more than once that the divide between the elite political-media complex and the rest of the country is at least as important as our left-right divide, and that our country really needs leaders to emerge—preferably in both parties, from both liberals and conservatives—who actually represent ordinary barbarians and not just the groupthink of our incestuous media-political class, with a perspective that reaches beyond the Potomac and the Hudson. At this point, the only major political figure who answers that is Gov. Palin—and I fear that if our elites succeed in squashing her, there won’t be another for a long time, if ever.

And of Gov. Palin’s faith? No, that isn’t a major issue for me. The fact that she clearly sees religious beliefs as equally valid with any other type of belief to be held and argued in the marketplace of ideas, and to be used to support platforms and positions in the political marketplace, is a good thing, but she need not be an evangelical Christian to understand that. As to the content of her faith, I know she is conservative and everything I see seems to confirm that it’s real, but I have no idea whether the churches that have formed her have truly been Christ-centered gospel-driven congregations, or simply preaching a mishmash of morality, patriotism, and can-do spirit. I don’t know what she thinks of Joel Osteen or if she’s read John Piper or Tim Keller (or, for that matter, Jared Wilson). As such, I can’t say that I know enough to say anything about her faith one way or the other.

And besides, I’ve always thought that Martin Luther had the right of it: better to be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish saint. I won’t be voting to send representatives to a church council next November, nor will I be voting for a Theologian-in-Chief in 2012; rather, I will be voting for politicians, and ultimately for a Commander-in-Chief. As such, I don’t want to confuse the issues; what matters most isn’t who’s the best Christian, but who’s likely to serve this country best in a given political office. My conclusion remains that the answer to that question for the 2012 presidential election is, at this point, Sarah Louise Heath Palin—and that’s why I support her.

Merry Christmas!

May your celebration of the Incarnation be filled with the joy and power of the Resurrection and the love and grace of the living Jesus.

Reflecting

As I noted last week, I've been sick, tired, and busy, which is a bad combination; at this point, there's nothing for it but to punch through Christmas, and then I can take some time to rest and recharge. Thinking about it, though, I realized that that's not the only issue: this interruption has knocked me off the discipline of writing. When I took up the thought of blogging as a spiritual discipline, that made a major difference in the frequency of my writing (as a look at the blog archive clearly shows), and I think it's done me some good; and part of that has been the most basic part of the discipline, that of just sitting down and posting something, even if I don't have anything particularly profound or significant to say. I've lost that in the last several weeks, and unfortunately, the last seven days of Advent aren't a great time to recover it, especially with a wedding to do right after Christmas. That, I think, will need to be part of my more general recovery time through the Christmas season proper. That discipline has been too valuable for me—I don't intend to let it go; and if it's occasionally been valuable to others as well, then so much the more reason.

So, yes, I'm still around, still breathing, and still experiencing an occasional flash when one neuron is willing to talk to another; and while I can't claim I'll be back to normal posting frequency tomorrow, I fully intend to be soon. In the meantime, God's richest blessings be upon you this Advent.

The things you see at the grocery store

I was doing a bit of shopping a few days ago, walking through the grocery store, when I looked up and saw a guy carrying a hand-written cardboard sign—the sort of sign you see people hold up when they're begging for money. Nothing unusual about that (though I've never seen someone holding one in a grocery store before), except for what the sign said:

Family kidnapped by ninjas—need money for karate lessons.

I should have gotten a picture. That was just so out of left field, I didn't react fast enough.

The unemployment statistics are worse than they look

The New York Times ran an article last Friday proclaiming good news:

In the best report since the recession began two years ago, only 11,000 jobs disappeared last month, the government said on Friday, and the unemployment rate actually dipped, to 10 percent, from 10.2 percent the previous month.

Leaving aside the question of when the recession actually began, this doesn’t actually support the piece’s positive-thinking opening paragraph:

The nation’s employers not only have stopped eliminating large numbers of jobs, but appear to be on the verge of rebuilding the American work force, devastated by the recession.

"The rate of job destruction slowed" does not equal "the jobs are all about to come back," even on its face. And here’s the kicker: what the numbers seem to say on their face isn’t what they actually say when you look at them closely. Rather, thanks to Simpson’s Paradox, the nature of aggregate statistics means that the overall unemployment rate makes things look better than they are. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Is the current economic slump worse than the recession of the early 1980s?

Measured by unemployment, the answer appears to be no, or at least not yet. The jobless rate was 10.2% in October, compared with a peak of 10.8% in November and December of 1982.

But viewed another way, the current recession looks worse, not better. The unemployment rate among college graduates is higher than during the 1980s recession. Ditto for workers with some college, high-school graduates and high-school dropouts.

So how can the overall unemployment rate be lower today but higher among each group? The anomaly is an example of Simpson’s Paradox—a common but misleading statistical phenomenon rooted in the differing sizes of subgroups. Put simply, Simpson’s Paradox reveals that aggregated data can appear to reverse important trends in the numbers being combined.

The jobless rates for each educational subgroup are higher today, but the overall rate is lower because workers are more educated. There are more college graduates, who have the lowest unemployment rate. And there are fewer high-school dropouts, who have the highest unemployment rate.

"It’s the magic of weighted averages," says Princeton University economics professor Henry Farber. "We have more skilled workers than we had before, and more-skilled workers are less susceptible to unemployment." Still, he adds, compared with a similarly educated worker in 1983, "the worker today has higher unemployment at every education level."

In other words, regardless of the overall statistic, whoever you are, your chances of being unemployed now are greater, the unemployment rate is higher for people like you, now than in the depths of the recession of 1982-83. Which suggests that before you buy into the NYT’s optimism, you might want to look into the underlying numbers and see if they bear that optimism out.

Diminishing returns on the Obama foreign policy

As a presidential candidate, Sen. Obama was firmly convinced (and convinced a lot of people) that the reason for America's unpopularity in some parts of the world was George W. Bush and his conservative policies. A vote for Obama, we were assured, would make the world like America again.

Roughly eleven months on from his inauguration, the bloom is well and truly off that rose, at least in the Arab/Muslim world.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again. . . .

In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

There are various reasons for this. One, which Fouad Ajami notes, is that anti-Americanism in that part of the world is useful—perhaps, indeed, psychologically necessary—as an alibi for the political and economic failures of those nations and a pressure release for the tensions and frustrations created by their autocratic, self-interested governments; having someone to blame for all that is far too valuable to be let go in return for a few pretty speeches.

As well, Ajami explains, the President's confidence that he could make everything better by apologizing for America to everyone in sight betrayed a fundamental failure to understand Arab culture.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

It also didn't help that in Iran, when the President was offered the choice between standing with the Iranian people protesting their oppression or standing with the anti-American religious tyrants who oppress them, he chose the tyrants. That, one suspects, will not be soon forgotten, and it's impossible to know what the long-term effects might be.

Some might be surprised that President Obama's approach to foreign policy is not yielding the promised results; but students of history shouldn't be. How many horror movies do you have to watch before you learn to expect that the pretty cheerleader going alone into the dark house on a stormy night is going to end up dead? I don't even watch horror movies, and I can see that one coming. This administration's foreign policy is just a remake of a movie we've seen before; it debuted roughly 33 years ago, it was called Carter, and as Bret Stephens pointed out a couple weeks ago, it didn't end well then, either.

An idealistic president takes office promising an era of American moral renewal at home and abroad. The effort includes a focus on diplomacy and peace-making, an aversion to the use of force, the selling out of old allies. The result is that within a couple of years the U.S. is more suspected, detested and enfeebled than ever.

No, we're not talking about Barack Obama. But since the current administration took office offering roughly the same prescriptions as Jimmy Carter did, it's worth recalling how that worked out.

Stephens explicates this through an examination of the 1979 battle over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, an incident remembered little (if at all) in this country, and its aftermath—an aftermath we're still dealing with today.

Among Muslims inclined to favor the U.S., the Carter administration's instincts for knee-jerk conciliation and panicky withdrawals only had the effect of alienating them from their ostensible protector. Coming as it did so soon after Khomeini's rise to power and the revolutionary fervors which it unleashed, the siege of Mecca carried the real risk of undermining pro-American regimes throughout the region. Yet American embassies were repeatedly instructed not to use their Marines to defend against intruders, as well as to pull their personnel from the country.

"The move didn't go unnoticed among Muslim radicals," notes Mr. Trofimov. "A chain of events unleashed by the takeover in Mecca had put America on the run from the lands of Islam. America's foes drew a conclusion that Osama bin Laden would often repeat: when hit hard, America flees, 'dragging its tail in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.'" It is no accident, too, that the Soviet Union chose to invade Afghanistan the following month, as it observed a vacillating president who would not defend what previously were thought to be inviolable U.S. strategic interests.

Here's hoping that if and when America faces another such incident in the Muslim world, that the administration has the courage, will and wit to react in defense of American interests and allies, rather than to follow the Carter path of trying to be as inoffensive as possible. I am not, however, optimistic.

The old pastor didn't do it that way . . .

Carol Howard Merritt put up an interesting post early last week about intergenerational differences in work style and approaches to getting things done, and the ways in which those differences affect our churches.

Work looks different. And sometimes it pesters the intergenerational tensions like a chigger just below the skin. There is something annoying and wrong, although we can’t figure out just what it is. Older generations of people cannot point to anything that their younger pastor is not doing. In fact, the church might even be growing, but there is a difference in the manner in which she is getting it done that vexes them.

She lays out differences in the ways we study, the ways in which we communicate, and the work which we do; and though every pastor and every church is different from every other, as generalizations, I think the differences she identifies are quite perceptive. (Certainly her first point is all too familiar to me as something that got me into trouble at the last church I served.) It's not a long article, but you'll likely spend more time thinking about it than you do reading it.

Oh, and as a side note, you might pray for the Rev. Merritt, who fell last Wednesday and dislocated her shoulder.

Note

Obviously, I haven’t been around much the last few weeks; between being busy, being short on sleep, and being sick, I’ve had little time or energy to be. I hope to have more time to write in the next couple weeks; we’ll see how that plays out. I certainly have things I want to write about, if I can get the brain space and schedule space to focus on them. In the meantime, at least I finally have audio for the whole James series posted over on the church website, so that’s something.

A day that shall live in infamy

68 years ago this morning, Japanese forces under the command of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo launched an unprovoked sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II (though what would have happened in the Atlantic had Hitler not declared war on the US is hard to say). I appreciate Sarah Palin’s comment on this anniversary:

On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the U. S. Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in which thousands of Americans lost their lives and our naval fleet was severely damaged. The events of that day, which President Franklin Roosevelt vowed would “live in infamy,” proved for many Americans that aggressors would not simply ignore us if we ignored them. The attack on Pearl Harbor launched America into the Second World War, and our Greatest Generation did not hesitate when asked to sacrifice for their country. American men enlisted in droves, American women went to work in the factories that became our “Arsenal of Democracy,” and many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds that funded it all. They stormed the beaches at Normandy and fought on little known islands in the Pacific in the name of liberty. They don’t ask for our thanks, but I hope we will continue to give it because the sacrifice that began at Pearl Harbor is one of the many events that have defined the United States of America as “the last best hope of man on earth.”

—Sarah Palin

I agree wholeheartedly with that. The lesson of Pearl Harbor, I think, is that in this fallen, broken world, sometimes war is necessary to prevent the triumph of evil and tyranny; it wasn’t actually Edmund Burke who declared that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” but whoever said it first was wise (and in line with Burke’s thought).

Our refusal to fight others will not result in their refusal to fight us; there are nations in this world that are ruled by evil people, and if we are seen to be weak (in their terms), such powers will only be encouraged to aggression. Thus has it ever been, throughout history; thus will it ever be, until Jesus comes again. The curse of Santayana lays on all who do not accept that fact.

Hymn for Advent—more than I knew

Of the Father’s Love Begotten

Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see, evermore and evermore!

At His Word the worlds were framèd; He commanded; it was done:
Heaven and earth and depths of ocean in their threefold order one;
All that grows beneath the shining
Of the moon and burning sun, evermore and evermore!

He is found in human fashion, death and sorrow here to know,
That the race of Adam’s children doomed by law to endless woe,
May not henceforth die and perish
In the dreadful gulf below, evermore and evermore!

O that birth forever blessèd, when the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bare the Savior of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face, evermore and evermore!

This is He Whom seers in old time chanted of with one accord;
Whom the voices of the prophets promised in their faithful word;
Now He shines, the long expected,
Let creation praise its Lord, evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him; angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him, and extol our God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert sing, evermore and evermore!

Righteous judge of souls departed, righteous King of those alive,
On the Father’s throne exalted none in might with Thee may strive;
Who at last in vengeance coming
Sinners from Thy face shalt drive, evermore and evermore!

Thee let old men, thee let young men, thee let boys in chorus sing;
Matrons, virgins, little maidens, with glad voices answering:
Let their guileless songs re-echo,
And the heart its music bring, evermore and evermore!

Christ, to Thee with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving, and unwearied praises be:
Honor, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory, evermore and evermore!

This text (with one slight alteration on my part to adjust the rhyme scheme for shifting English pronunciation) is courtesy of Dan Clendenin. All I’ve ever seen in hymnals is verses 1, 6, and 9 of the above; it’s interesting how much theology they cut out, and how much deeper is Prudentius’ exploration of the mystery of the Creator becoming the created. I admit, you’re not likely to get most congregations to sing nine verses of a hymn . . . but it’s too bad.

The original of this hymn is a Latin poem from around the turn of the fifth century; I presume the above text is all John Mason Neale’s translation. Of the poet, Aryeh Oron writes,

Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (whose name is some times shown with a prefix of “Marcus”) was a Roman Christian poet. He was born in the Roman province of Tarraconensis (now Northern Spain). The place of his birth is uncertain, but it may have been Caesaraugusta Saragossa, Tarraco Tarragona, or Calagurris Calahorra. He came of a distinguished Christian family and received an excellent education, studied law, became an office-holder and rose rapidly, was twice governor of a province, and finally received high office at the court of Theodosius. Towards the end of his life (possibly around 392) Prudentius retired from public life to become an ascetic, fasting until evening and abstaining entirely from animal food. He decided to devote himself to poetry in the service of religion and the Church. He collected the Christian poems written during this period and added a preface, which he himself dated 405.

Neale set this text to a plainsong melody from the 11th or 12th century; the tune is now usually referred to as DIVINUM MYSTERIUM (Divine Mystery), though the CCEL page identifies it as CORDE NATUS EX PARENTIS, after the first line of Prudentius’ poem.

The pursuit of God

I would be willing to bet that if you read the Bible much, you have a favorite part. For some, it will be the letters of Paul; others love the gospels best, for their stories of Jesus; and still others are drawn first to the Psalms. For my part, I love all those, and others, but I go first to the prophets, and especially to Isaiah. I’m not sure why that is, but I think our vacation to the canyonlands of Utah and Arizona a few years ago gave me an insight: like standing on the rim of Bryce Canyon or inside Double Arch, in the prophets I am captured by the power of God’s imagination, and the power with which it communicates his love and his beauty.

At the same time, though, reading the prophets can be more than a little frightening. I say this especially as a preacher, for anyone who stands to preach the Word is exercising a small part of the prophetic ministry and calling (which is one reason why preaching is such a dangerous act, at least for the preacher). The prophets are people who have been captured by God to a greater degree than almost anyone else, and in their impassioned calls to the people of God, we see the gulf between our sinfulness and God’s holiness more clearly than almost anywhere else. We also see, just as clearly, God’s absolute determination to cross that gulf with his love and redeem us despite ourselves, a determination which led to the birth of the Son of God, and his death on the cross.

And of all the prophets, I think we see most clearly the lengths to which God will go—and to which he will command his prophets to go—in Hosea. This is a deep and remarkable book, and a remarkable story. It begins with this command: “Go marry an adulterous woman and have children of adultery, for the land has been unfaithful to Yahweh.” So he goes and marries Gomer, and they have a son; and then she has two more children, and while we can’t be sure, the text suggests that maybe they weren’t Hosea’s. Things escalate, and she abandons her husband and children for her lovers; and in all this, God tells Hosea, the pain and hurt of the prophet’s experience, the betrayal he suffers, mirror God’s experience with Israel. Just as Hosea’s wife has gone chasing after other men—pretty much any man she thinks she can get something from, it sounds like—so Israel has gone chasing after other gods.

Now, we know how this sort of story ends—in divorce court—and that’s pretty much how it ended in Hosea’s day, too. But that’s not what happens here. Instead, we see Hosea’s determination to woo his wife back, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered, and to rebuild their marriage into what it should have been; and through him, through this acted parable, this enacted prophecy, of the love of God, we see God’s determination to do the same with Israel. And so God tells Hosea, “Go love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as Yahweh loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods”; and so he does.

I have to wonder what Gomer thought of this. Here she’s run away from her husband, she’s living with her lover, and one day her husband shows up on the doorstep and says, “I’d like to buy my wife back.” And what does she hear from the guy? Protestations of love? Demands that Hosea leave and never come back? No, she hears, “Sure—how much?” That can’t have been good for her ego. But on the other hand—she’s left her husband, she’s shamed him before all his people, she’s run off to be with another man—and yet, despite all that, her husband not only still wants her back, he’s willing to pay a steep price to get her back. That had to have made her look at Hosea in a new way.

So what does she make of it all? How does she respond to this costly demonstration of her husband’s love? We don’t know. We know what Hosea tells her, but we don’t know how she responds—we don’t know what becomes of them. We’re given the assurance that at some point in the future, Israel will return to God, that that relationship will be restored; but whether the same applied to Gomer and Hosea, we aren’t told. We’re left hanging, the story unfinished, wondering what happened next.

Now, strange as that is, I think there’s good reason why Hosea’s story stops in the middle; and if you’ve been wondering why we’re talking about this on the first Sunday of Advent, here’s the reason. You see, Jesus does much the same thing in the story of the prodigal son and his brother—we’re left hanging at the end with the father’s appeal to his older son, with no hint given of the older son’s response. The reason for that was that the older son represented the Pharisees and their allies, and it was up to them to make that response. The story—the real story—wasn’t finished. In the same way here, the deeper story wasn’t finished; telling the end of Hosea and Gomer’s story would have given it a false sense of closure. But this way, we’re drawn in to try to finish the story ourselves.

That’s important, because the deeper story here is the story of Advent. Remember, the season of Advent is a season of waiting and preparation for the coming of Christ—preparation to celebrate his first coming, which we do on Christmas, and preparation for the time when he will come again. The cry of Advent is “Come, Lord Jesus! Come, O come, Immanuel! Come and buy us back, come and set us free!” And the message of Advent is that he did come and buy us back, at a far greater cost than just silver, barley, and wine—he bought us back and set us free at the cost of his own life; and having done so, he is coming again to take us home with him.

Now, we all know this, or at least, we’ve all heard it before; but I wonder if we’ve ever thought about what this really means for our lives. I hadn’t, until a colleague of mine gave me a copy of the book Furious Pursuit. I have a number of quibbles with the book, but I still highly recommend it, because the audacious truth at the center of this book is something we desperately need to hear: Christianity isn’t about us chasing God, it’s about God chasing us. It isn’t about us earning his love, it isn’t about us being good enough or obeying hard enough; to pull from another colleague of mine, from a sermon that nearly put me on the floor, “We hear God saying, Obey me, obey me, obey me, but that’s not right. Yes, God wants our obedience, but that comes later. What God is really saying is Trust me, trust me, trust me; and as we learn to trust, we learn to obey.” Christianity isn’t about you straining every muscle to hold on to God, it’s about the fact that God will never let you go—never—and that whether you run to him, run away, or just try to ignore him, he will never stop pursuing you, because he loves you.

That’s what Advent is about. It’s about a God who loves you so much, who loves all of us so much, that even though we had rejected him, he came down to this earth, looked the devil square in the eye, and said, “I’d like to buy my people back.” We were in rebellion, we had set ourselves against him as his enemies; despite all that, at the right time, he died for us, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered. The Son of God traded in his throne and his crown for dirty straw and dirtier diapers; he gave up all the wealth of heaven for the poverty of homelessness; he set aside all the power and honor of deity to accept the powerlessness and shame of a criminal’s execution on a torture device. And he did it all for you.

What will you do?

“All to Jesus I surrender . . .”

Let us look at our lives in the light of this experience and see whether we gladly glory in weakness, whether we take pleasure, as Paul did, in injuries, in necessities, in distresses. Yes, let us ask whether we have learned to regard a reproof, just or unjust, a reproach from friend or enemy, an injury, or trouble, or difficulty into which others bring us, as above all an opportunity of proving how Jesus is all to us, how our own pleasure or honor are nothing, and how humiliation is in very truth what we take pleasure in. It is indeed blessed, the deep happiness of heaven, to be so free from self that whatever is said of us
or done to us is lost and swallowed up in the thought that Jesus is all.

—Andrew Murray

Amen. May it be so.

HT: Ray Ortlund

One unique incomparable Savior

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 18
Q. And who is this mediator—
true God and at the same time
truly human and truly righteous?

A. Our Lord Jesus Christ,¹
who was given us
to set us completely free
and to make us right with God.²

Note: mouseover footnotes for Scripture references (does not work in IE 6).

As Reformed Christians, we affirm that salvation is all of Christ and none of us, because no one but he could have accomplished it. He is unique, and not in any minor way; he is the only one who could encompass the work that needed to be done and the price that needed to be paid so that we might be saved, and no one else could even have begun to approach it. We don't have to be worthy, we have no claim on pride in our own salvation, we cannot undo or lose this great gift—it is all of Christ, bestowed on us through his Holy Spirit by his incomparable grace and unfathomable love toward us who were his enemies, until he redeemed us despite ourselves and made us his friends.

Exploring The Westing Game

My eldest daughter's class is doing a unit on mysteries, and one of the books the class is reading is Ellen Raskin's novel The Westing Game. My daughter's reading a different one, because she's already read that one—I suggested it to her, because it's one of those books I loved as a child and still love now. On a whim, I looked her up on Wikipedia, and was interested to find that she had donated the manuscript of The Westing Game to her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin; they have made portions of it available online, accompanied by audio of Raskin talking through the manuscript. I haven't had time to fully explore this yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Further programming note

The last sermon in the series on James is now up over on my sermon blog (as can be seen as well from the post below this one, which was adapted from that sermon); I'm not as far along in getting sermon audio up over on the church website, but that should all be done within the next few days. As well, this morning's message, the first in this year's Advent series, is also up; I won't be excerpting these sermons on this blog, because their narrative structure doesn't really suit that sort of excerpting, but I'm quite fond of this series. Titled "The Women in His Life," it's a look at the women named in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of his gospel—women whose inclusion in that genealogy was out of the ordinary, in more ways than one. Check out this morning's sermon, on Tamar, and you'll see what I mean.

Politics and the Christian tongue

Above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall
under condemnation.

—James 5:12 (ESV)

This isn’t normally thought of as a political text, but I think it is, in a way; or at least, I believe it has significant implications for the way in which we conduct our politics. There are a number of reasons for James’ objection to oaths, but one is that oaths and strong language are an attempt to manipulate our hearers. We use such language to try to get people to believe what we say or to go along with what we want them to do, not because they believe us or trust us, but on some other basis. Oaths are essentially persuasive language, but not an honest or straightfoward form of persuasion; rather than attempting to persuade people with facts and honest argument, they attempt to persuade people by impressing them with our determination, or our anger, or our force of character, or the strength of our words.

This is the same sort of problem we see in our political advertising and argument. Most of the time, most of our politicians are unwilling just to come right out and tell you what they stand for and what they intend to do, and then to let you decide to support or oppose them without any attempt on their part to influence your choice. Equally, most politicians are unwilling to allow their opponents to do the same without their interference. As a consequence, they’re all trying to spin their own positions for maximum votes—trying to convince you that they’re saying what you want to hear—while at the same time doing everything they can to make you believe that the other candidate is a cannibal mass-murderer who apprenticed under the Wicked Witch.

Though sordid, this isn’t really all that surprising, or shouldn’t be. The problem with career politicians is that politics is their career, which means they have to win if they want to continue to have a job; as such, their highest priority usually tends to be winning. Just as the first priority of any business is to stay in business (for after all, none of those other priorities can be realized if you go out of business), so most politicians come to see staying in office as their highest priority. While they may, at least at first, hold that priority for good and noble reasons, over time, it will tend to corrupt them; and in particular, it will tend to lead them to de-emphasize truth. Truth, after all, is uncontrollable, and honest persuasion isn’t the most effective way to win—so if winning is your primary concern, you’re going to find another way to go about it.

For Christians in politics, this is a major problem, and a grievous temptation. James calls us to eschew such manipulation of language for plain, straightforward speech—to speak the truth, say what we mean, and mean what we say. As Christians, we shouldn’t need to add anything to our words to convince people of our honesty and sincerity; we should be known as truthful people whose word can be trusted and whose integrity is obvious. Others may not agree with us, but they should have no doubts that we’re being straight with them; nor should they have any doubt that we’re treating them with respect. We should not seek to manipulate others into doing things our way, nor to pressure or intimidate them into giving way for us. Rather, our practice should be to speak the truth plainly and openly—not that we have to say everything, but that we should not seek to misdirect others by what we say and don’t say, or by how we say it.

This, of course, is not necessarily the optimum course to achieve success as the world defines it; but as Christians, we should understand that success ultimately is not in our hands anyway, but in the hands of the God who is Lord of, in, and through all things. As it is God who determines our success, then, we should devote ourselves to the truth and let him do as he will. This necessarily leads to the countercultural conclusion that the truly Christian politician should not run to win, but rather should run to present the truth, as best as they understand it, and to offer their best judgment for what should be done as clearly, cogently, and fairly (and, yes, persuasively, with integrity) as they possibly can—and leave the vote in God’s hands.

(Adapted from “Speaking before God”)

Why I don't do holiday shopping

This Brewster Rockit strip from last Friday captures my view of things quite nicely:

Active patience

Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door. As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen
the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

—James 5:7-11 (ESV)

The images James offers of patience and perseverance put a different spin on the way we usually think of those words. We tend to think of these as essentially passive words, as just a matter of putting up with things; we frame them in terms of letting things happen and trying not to be bothered by them. “Don’t let it get to you,” we say; “chill out, calm down, let it roll off your back”—but that’s not at all what James is talking about, and so he gives us very different pictures to illustrate his point.

The first one he offers is that of the farmer who “waits for the land to yield its valuable crop”—but not passively! No, we might say the farmer is actively patient, waiting for God to provide the early and later rains, waiting for the land to respond to the rain with a crop, but at the same time hard at work to do everything possible so that the crop will come, and so that it will be large and healthy. The interesting thing about that language of early and late rains is that this is Old Testament language, used in a number of places talking about the faithfulness of the Lord to provide for his people and keep his promises. In the way he phrases this, then, James is reinforcing his point: God is faithful to do what he said he will do, he is faithful to take care of his people, and we can trust him to do what he has promised. As such, we can persevere, we can hold fast, we can keep going, trusting that Jesus is coming, that the work to which he has called us will not be in vain, and that though the wicked seem to prosper now, their victory will not endure.

James also offers examples from the history of the people of God, first of the prophets, then of Job. Both of these are interesting. The prophets, of course, are strong examples of active patience—none of them passively waited around for God to do something, or simply endured suffering, but all actively and stubbornly went about proclaiming God’s word, often to people who really didn’t want to hear what they had to say. Indeed, for most of them, that was the cause of the suffering they faced—if they’d just been willing to shut up and go hide in a corner, they could have had much more peaceful lives. They would not. They saw injustice, and they spoke out against it; they saw unrighteousness and disobedience of the will of the Lord, and they would not be silent. Because they condemned injustice, they suffered it, and because they did the will of God, they faced significant trials; but that did not cause them to give in. Instead, it only strengthened their resolve, and their commitment to be faithful to God who called them to be his messengers, trusting that he would vindicate them—as, indeed, he has.

And then there’s Job. People will often talk glibly about the patience of Job, and I’ve said more than once that anyone who can do so has clearly never read the book; I wouldn’t particularly call him “patient.” However, that’s not what James says. He talks, rather, about the perseverance of Job, about the fact that Job endured suffering. If you’re familiar with the book, stop and think about that for a minute. Job as we see him in the book isn’t an especially pleasant man, though certainly he has reason not to be. He has a great deal to be angry about; he lived a righteous life, he followed God faithfully, and all of a sudden, his entire life was destroyed; and then, to make matters worse, his three best friends come along and start telling him it’s all his fault, that obviously he was really a terrible sinner in disguise. You could see why he’d complain. But complain he does—at God, to God, about God, to his friends, about them, and all in a rather self-righteous way—again, understandable, but still, a little grating.

But what’s the one thing Job doesn’t do? He doesn’t follow his wife’s bitter counsel to “curse God and die.” He doesn’t change sides, and he doesn’t give up. The one thing he has left to him is the faith that somehow, someway, God is still out there and still good, and that God can be called to account to Job for what he’s done to Job. It’s bedrock faith stripped down to the absolute bedrock, nothing left standing on top of it. I think James holds the endurance of Job up as an example because Job’s endurance wasn’t particularly pious, or pretty, or meek and uncomplaining, but it was uncompromising. It didn’t look holy, and it gave his friends plenty of room to criticize him, but he never let go of God. Job didn’t understand, and he raged about it, but he raged in faith . . . and God loved him for it, and blessed him for it.

And as a consequence, James says, “You have seen what the Lord finally brought about” in the life of Job—which is twofold. First, through his trials, God refined Job, bringing him to greater maturity and a deeper understanding of and relationship with God, which is the sort of thing James is talking about in chapter 1. And second, God vindicated Job and restored his fortunes, giving him back everything he’d lost. As such, the example of Job reminds us that our present suffering and our present struggles are not the end of the story, and do not have the last word. When Christ comes again, God will transform our situation for good. Why? Because the Lord is full of compassion and mercy. He cares for us, he suffers with us in our suffering, and his love for us never fails; he is absolutely faithful to us, he will never let go of us, and his commitment to us never wavers. This explains his forbearance with the unjust, for he loves them, too, and is at work seeking to bring them also to repentance; but he will only let them go so long before at last his justice comes. We will be vindicated in the end, and all that is wrong will be made right, because our Lord is faithful, and he loves us.

(Excerpted from “Trust in the Lord”)

Justice is coming

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.

Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold,
the Judge is standing at the door.

—James 5:1-9 (ESV)

Be patient, James says, because you can trust God for what he’s going to do. Be patient in the face of suffering, be patient in hard times, be patient in dealing with injustice, because it’s all only temporary; the Lord is coming, and his justice is coming with him, and all will be made right. Be patient and strengthen your hearts, because the Lord is coming—and he is coming not only to bless us, but he is coming as the one who will judge the world. No one will be immune from his judgment, for even the best of us are sinners; this is why James says, “Don’t grumble against each other,” for if we let our frustrations in hard times turn us against each other, we are liable to judgment for that. Still, for those who follow Jesus, though the day of judgment will not leave us unscathed, it will be a time of joy nevertheless: it will be the time of our vindication, and the time when all that is wrong will be set right.

This is not to say, it should be noted, that anyone who is rich is by definition guilty of the things James talks about; there are those who have earned their wealth more or less honestly and justly (“more or less” being the best any of us ever manages in moral matters), and who have sought to use it for the good of others. There are those who are, however, to one degree or another, and who have the arrogance to believe that their wealth will keep them from being brought to justice. Similarly, there are many others in this world who are equally arrogant for other reasons. They may even be right—in this world; but God is a God of justice, and he sees everything and everyone, and no one can elude his justice forever.

We can be patient in dealing with trials and suffering, we can endure the injustice of this world—though not without doing what we can to create justice, but in the understanding that even our best efforts will be both flawed and limited—because we know that perfect justice and an end to all suffering are coming. As such, we are to work actively for what is good and right in every way that we can, trusting that God is coming, and when he comes, everything will be put right, and our efforts will not have been in vain. Like Paul, James encourages us not to lose heart in doing the work God has given us.

(Excerpted from “Trust in the Lord”)

Programming note

A combination of illness and technical problems put me behind on updating my sermons online, both the texts on my sermon blog and the audio files on the church's website. Those problems have now been resolved, however; I'm not fully caught up (I still have the text of this past Sunday's message to post, and a number of audio files to post), but I should be by the end of the week.

Thank God for God (a Thanksgiving meditation)

Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there;
the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

—Job 1:21

During the time of Napoleon’s reign in France, there was a political prisoner by the name of Charnet. That is to say, there was a man named Charnet who had unintentionally offended the emperor by some remark or another and been thrown in prison to rot. As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”

But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight. Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow. Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower. Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”

The guards saw what was happening; they talked about it amongst themselves, they told their wives, and the story spread, until finally somehow it came to the ears of the Empress Josephine. The story moved her, and she became so convinced that no man who loved a flower in this way could be dangerous that she appealed to Napoleon, and persuaded her husband to relent and set Charnet free. When he left his cell, he took the little flower with him in a little flowerpot, and on the pot he wrote Matthew 6:30: “If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith?”

There's a lesson in Charnet's story—the lesson of Job, I think. I struggled for years to make sense of that verse, until I found the key in an observation made by Rev. Wayne Brouwer, a Christian Reformed pastor in Holland, Michigan. Rev. Brouwer, writing on Psalm 22, muses, “Maybe it’s not that believers are grateful to God but that those who are grateful to God are the ones who truly believe him. Only those of us who are truly thankful are able to ride out the storms of life which might otherwise destroy us. Only those who have an attitude of gratitude know what it means to believe.” In other words, the root of our faith is gratitude.

We talk about the patience of Job, but in reality Job showed very little patience; what he did show was great faith, and that faith was firmly rooted in his determination to remain grateful for all the Lord had given him despite his losses. Thus he can say here, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”; thus he can affirm at another point, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth . . . in my flesh I shall see God.” In the same way, once Charnet found something for which to be thankful, that little plant struggling through the hard, dry earth, he found Someone to thank, and his faith grew back along with that little plant. Before that point, faith was impossible for him, because there was no root to sustain it.

If our gratitude depends on the number of our gifts exceeding a certain critical mass, if we miss the Giver for the gifts, then we have a shallow faith indeed. The example of Job calls us to a deeper gratitude, and a deeper faith, a faith that is able to see God and give thanks even when things aren’t going well. This is the faith the poet Joyce Kilmer expressed when he wrote, “Thank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife . . ./Thank God for the stress and the pain of life./And, oh, thank God for God.”

That’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? Thank God for God. Thank God, as Psalm 23 does, that even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he is there with us. Thank God, as Psalm 22 does, that he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted. Thank God, as Job teaches us, that we don’t have to bury our grief and anger, but can bring them to God honestly; for Job challenges God fiercely, but his challenge is rooted in his faith, and so at the end God says of him, “He is my servant, and he has spoken of me what is right.” Thank God for God, because that is the root and beginning of faith; to quote Wayne Brouwer again, “Only the grateful believe, and faith itself which seems to soar in times of prosperity needs the strength of thankfulness to carry it through the dark night of the soul.”

One man who well knew the truth of this was Martin Rinkard, a Lutheran who was the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. This was the time of the Thirty Years’ War, and in that year Eilenberg was attacked three different times. When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees. Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkard’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day. Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster. But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinker wrote these words:

Now Thank We All Our God

Now thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mother's arms,
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God
Through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts
And blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in his grace,
And guide us when perplexed,
And free us from all ills
In this world and the next.

All praise and thanks to God
The Father now be given,
The Son, and Him who reigns
With them in highest heaven,
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.

Words: Martin Rinkart; translated by Catherine Winkworth
Music: Johann Crüger
NUN DANKET, 6.7.6.7.6.6.6.6.

This is a repost from November 2007.

On this blog in history: May 1-13, 2008

The Gospel in the Ascension
God's love goes farther than our sin.

Why lawyers shouldn't teach history
Those who misunderstand history will never learn its lessons . . .

The problem with historical parallels
. . . and as a consequence, will misapply them to current events.

In defense of the church, part III: Doctrine
On why the attack on doctrine is incoherent and unfounded.

Belated thoughts on prayer
Power isn't in prayer, power is in God.

Science vs. the sense of wonder?

For some people, perhaps:

The countercultural gospel of rest

Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you get up early
and go to bed late,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives sleep to those he loves.

—Psalm 127:1-2

One of the more memorable nights of my oldest daughter’s life (for me, at least) came when she was maybe a month or two old. It was right around 11 o’clock at night, and she needed her diaper changed—and when Sara got her cleaned up, we discovered that we were out of diapers. Now, we were in Surrey at the time—it’s one of the suburbs on the southern edge of the metro Vancouver area—and our local Safeway closed at 11 pm; the convenience stores were still open, but for some obscure reason they only sold size 3 diapers, which were way too big for her. Obviously, one of us needed to go out and try to find someplace that was still open that sold diapers in her size. I trust you don’t need me to tell you which one of us that was.

I spent a while hitting various big stores around southwestern Surrey, only to find that all had closed for the night; I could have headed north into the metro area, but I knew my odds wouldn’t be good, because Vancouver as a city doesn’t tend to stay open very late. So I headed south towards the border, for my home state of Washington, where even towns the size of Lynden, with 7,000 people, have grocery stores open 24/7. I drove down to Ferndale, north of Bellingham, walked into Haggen Foods, bought diapers, and drove home. If memory serves, I got back around 1 in the morning.

As I was driving around on my wild-goose chase—or should I call it a wild-diaper chase?—I was muttering imprecations under my breath about what kind of big city rolls up the sidewalks at 11 pm and what kind of country is this anyway? and other things of that sort. After all, I went to college in a town of around 50,000 people, and we had Meijer open ’round the clock—if you know the Midwest know Meijer, which has been out-Wal-Mart-ing Wal-Mart for a long time; for those of you who don’t, combine Wal-Mart and your typical big chain supermarket, then drop the prices—so why, if I was living in a metropolitan area of three million people, was I having to drive across the border to pick up a lousy package of diapers?

Now, you might be thinking that the fault was really ours, for not having another package of diapers on hand, and you’d certainly be right about that; as the saying goes, poor planning on our part didn’t constitute an emergency on anyone else’s. I felt pretty sheepish about that, which is one reason I was so irritated. In retrospect, though, I’m more interested in the expectations I had then, because I didn’t grow up with them. My hometown growing up wasn’t tiny, wasn’t an especially big town either; I was in high school when K-Mart came to town, and that was a big deal—and even then, while they were open later, they still closed at 9 pm. So I grew up with the idea that everything closes at night; the first time I ever heard the phrase “24/7” was in college. We just didn’t have that sort of economy.

In college, though, I discovered that I’m a night owl—and I discovered a world in which there are places open at 2 am where you can go to get food, or anything else; and I got used to that. I became accustomed to the idea (though I never would have put it this way) that there were people out there whose job was to stay up all night just in case I happened to want something. And I became an enabler, in a small way, of an economy in which people wind up doing just that: working at night, while the rest of the world sleeps, and sleeping during the day, while it works and plays, in order to make a living.

Now, it wasn’t news to me that some people work at night; my mother’s a nurse, and during our time in Texas she worked the night shift at the county hospital for a while. There are certainly some places—like hospitals—that really do need to stay open all night; if an appendix bursts or a baby needs to be born, you can’t very well say, “Hold that thought, and we’ll be with you at 9 am sharp.” But the idea that people need to stay up all night just so careless folk like me who don’t keep track of their supplies can buy a package of diapers at midnight—is that really reasonable?

From a human perspective, I don’t think it is; but from an economic perspective, if there are enough customers to keep the store profitable, the answer is “yes.” As a result, we’re increasingly moving to a 24/7 economy, one in which the rhythms of life as our ancestors knew it—work when it’s light, sleep when it’s dark, a day of rest each week, and so on—are being obliterated by the demands of making money; the net effect is that businesses stay open longer and longer hours just to keep up, and their workers perforce must do the same. It’s a treadmill, nothing more, and for many people, it defines their lives; after all, you have to do whatever it takes to make a living.

That leaves us with a lot of people who are, in effect, slaves to their work—their work runs their lives and determines their schedule. For many, it’s simply the need to make ends meet; we see a lot of that up here, where living is expensive and a lot of jobs don’t pay all that well, and so finding enough money to keep a roof over one’s head and food on the table becomes an overriding priority. Others have enough, but they want more than that—they want to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, and so they want the money to afford the kind of house, car, clothes, and lifestyle that Mr. and Mrs. Jones have. Then, of course, there are people who want to be important, for one reason or another; for them, it’s not so much the money that matters as the status, and perhaps the power and influence.

There are also people like a couple of friends of ours back in Washington, both engineers, who worked insanely hard; even after their first child was born, he was still regularly working 70- and 80-hour weeks. At one point, they were working different shifts and basically never saw each other awake, though I don’t remember how long that lasted. He would work those long weeks, then spend much of his weekend frantically enjoying himself on his mountain bike or snowmobile, depending on the season—he never skipped church, but church was about the only other thing he did, many weekends—and then it was back to work on Monday to do it all over again. He’s a devoted Christian, but that didn’t affect his view of work. Work was something you had to do in order to pay for the things you wanted to do, and so he got into that cycle of working long hours to afford a few hours of hard play to enable him to survive the long hours he was working to afford it.

Now, whatever the precise reward people have in mind, the bottom-line view in all these cases is the same, the one my friend articulated: work is something you have to do in order to get what you want, and however much it takes, that’s what you have to do. It’s up to us to make everything happen, to earn the blessings we want; it’s up to us to work hard enough and long enough and well enough to be a success, whatever we might define success to be. That’s the conventional wisdom.

God’s wisdom, though, is another matter. The key to life, the psalmist tells us, isn’t how hard we work or what long hours we put in; all those short nights and long, anxious days, trying to keep up with the treadmill, are in vain, because we can’t make success happen on our own. We can’t build a good family, a good life, on our own; we can’t build a good nation, or keep it safe, on our own. Unless the Lord builds the house, unless the Lord guards the city—unless he builds our family, unless he builds our church—all our work is in vain. Ultimately, he’s the one who determines success, not us.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’re free not to work, which is how some have tried to take this psalm. Paul dealt with folks who took that position in his second letter to the church at Thessalonica; his response to them was, “Such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and earn their own living.” A couple verses before that, he laid down the law quite firmly: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” We all have our work to do, and the responsibility to support ourselves if we’re able to do so; the Scriptures are perfectly clear on that.

The point of this psalm, then, is not about whether we work, but how, and how we regard our work. Even as Christians, we tend to work as if we believe that our success depends on us and our effort and the time we put in, and that if we fail, it’s because we didn’t work hard enough or do our work well enough. In our work, we carry the weight of our lives on our shoulders—and we shouldn’t do that. That approach to our work creates anxiety and deprives us of rest; it also breeds pride, if we do well, or despair, if we don’t; and it makes work, rather than God, the true lord of our lives, setting our priorities and controlling our time. As such, if we take this approach to our work, if we view our work from the world’s perspective, it isolates us from God and cuts us off from his blessings, leaving us to carry our burdens alone.

By contrast, the psalmist says, if you aren’t doing the Lord’s work, it’s pointless, and if you are, you don’t need to work so hard; either way, there’s nothing to be said for letting work rule your life. Now, a lot of folks would disagree, and there’s certainly no denying that a lot of people who work hard for long hours are great successes by the world’s standards; but besides all the stuff, what do they have, really? They can’t have any assurance that their success will continue—especially in this economy, where so many former successes have cratered—so how can they have any peace? And are they as rich in relationships and integrity as they are in money? From the psalmist’s point of view, financial wealth without the rest is a bad bargain; and this psalm was written by King Solomon, who certainly knew whereof he spoke.

Those who build the house themselves, those who guard their little empires alone, must stay up late and rise early, for they can never relax their vigilance or let their effort slack; but those who trust in the Lord are free to sleep, for he gives sleep to those he loves. He may not give great financial success, but he gives enough; and along with it he gives peace, and rest, and assurance. The lives of those who pour themselves into their work are unbalanced, as the goods that work produces are overemphasized while others are neglected; in contrast, God offers us a balanced life, a life with time for both work and family, both work and rest.

The best example of this is the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest, which was set aside in part for reasons of economic justice. Within the economy of Israel, the Sabbath—the Hebrew word is shabbat, which means “rest”—served (when honored) to ensure that masters didn’t work their laborers seven days a week, 354 days a year, but that they got the time off they needed. As the website Judaism 101 puts it in its entry on Shabbat,

In modern America, we take the five-day work-week so much for granted that we forget what a radical concept a day of rest was in ancient times. The weekly day of rest has no parallel in any other ancient civilization. In ancient times, leisure was for the wealthy and the ruling classes only, never for the serving or laboring classes. In addition, the very idea of rest each week was unimaginable.

It was unimaginable to the rest of the world because the rest of the world was ruled by money and its demands, which tends to be the world’s default position, but God knew what he was doing when he wrote that into his law; he knew we need a day set aside to rest and recharge our bodies, by not working, and our souls, by coming together as his people to pray and worship him. He knew that we need that to keep our lives balanced, and keep everything in its proper perspective. And of course, while we’re called to be in prayer all the time and to worship God with every part of our lives, with all he’s done for us, he deserves to have us gather once a week to worship him together.

From the world’s perspective, it makes no sense—if you want to make a living, if you want to keep up with the Joneses, if you want to have the money to live the life you want to live, if you want to be prepared when things go sour, you can’t afford to take days off!—but from the Christian perspective, it makes perfect sense, because we know what the world doesn’t: that God is in control, and that ultimately only his work, done his way, in accordance with his will, meets with final success; and that while the world goes on working 24/7, scrambling to stay one step ahead of the game, those who serve him can step back, confident in his care, take some time off, and rest, for he gives sleep to those he loves.

The prosperity gospel and the bursting of the American bubble

The latest issue of The Atlantic has a big cover picture of a cross against a blue sky with a “Foreclosure” sign on it, and the lurid main headline, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” As is so often the case, the article in no way justifies the headline; it does, however, make a compelling case that a particularly pernicious American heresy, the so-called “prosperity gospel,” may have been a significant contributing factor.

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

THEOLOGICALLY, THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common . . . Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. . . . One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.

The emphasis there is mine, of course. Read the whole thing; it makes me think that part of the crash this country suffered may well be God’s judgment on the idolatry of his people.

Re-Defeat Bill Owens in NY-23

Or, Why Sarah Palin's Coattails May Have Been Bigger than Credited

Check this out:

• There was a virus discovered in some of the voting machines in NY-23, which were reprogrammed just before the election; none of the other voting machines by that manufacturer used across the district were checked.

• "In Jefferson County, inspectors from four districts claim that 'human error' resulted in their 'mistakenly' entering 0 votes for Hoffman in several districts, resulting in Owens leading Jefferson County on election night though the recanvas of the computer counts now show that Hoffman is leading."

• "Doug Hoffman, the Conservative candidate in this election says that he was forced to concede after having been given erroneous election results on Nov. 3rd, in particular from Oswego County. Oswego County's election night results were off by over 1,000 votes. . . . Hoffman is raising funds for a possible legal challenge to the results and requesting that the Boards of Election hand-count every vote. On Tuesday, he 'unconceded' the race. In light of the current concerns over the accuracy of the machine-counted votes, Hoffman may now have a legitimate reason to contest the election results."

• "The ImageCast machines have one more significant and scary flaw: USB ports. . . . [Using these ports,] software hacks or remote control of the voting machine could be implemented or a virus introduced. Since standard count audits are only done on 3% of the machines unless there is a malfunction, a functional hack or software change could adjust election counts with the County or State Boards of Election none the wiser."

• "The manufacturer of the machines, Dominion/Sequoia Voting Systems is the same company that Dan Rather accused of causing over 50,000 votes to go uncounted in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida due to intentional oversight. Rather's report claimed that Sequoia was well aware of the issues but proceeded into the election utilizing an inferior product and told election workers and technicians to 'ignore the problems.'"

And it goes on, and on, and on . . .

What we don't get about the gospel

This is just spot-on:

It’s no wonder that self-help books top the charts in Christian publishing and that counseling offices are overwhelmed. Our pride and our neglect of the gospel force us to run from seminar to seminar, book to book, counselor to counselor, always seeking but never finding some secret to holy living.

Most of us have never really understood that Christianity is not a self-help religion meant to enable moral people to become more moral. We don’t need a self-help book; we need a Savior. We don’t need to get our collective act together; we need death and resurrection and the life-transforming truths of the gospel. And we don’t need them just once, at the beginning of our Christian life; we need them every moment of every day.

—Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson, from Counsel from the Cross

(Emphasis mine.) That is, I think, the crux of the American church’s cultural resistance to the gospel; that’s the thing we don’t want to hear.

HT: Of First Importance

Give me a home among the gum trees

One of my enduring memories of Regent is one Fall Retreat (my first year there, I think), seeing the school's entire Australian contingent, led by our utterly irrepressible Australian Pentecostal NT professor Dr. Rikki Watts, perform the song "Home Among the Gum Trees"—as a sort of chorus line, no less. I've had that rattling around in my brain today for some reason, and decided to post it. It says a lot about Australia and its people that this performance was from the memorial service for Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, who I'm sure would have mightily approved.

Politics and fuzzy math, cont.

When Sen. Obama, on the campaign trail, made his gaffe about having been in 57 states (and having two to go), I think most of us figured it was just the sort of thing that happens when someone's brain is wearing down from too much stress and too much travel. Given the fuzzy math skills his administration is showing in trying to track the stimulus, though, I'm not so sure; there seems to be a pattern here:

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There's one problem, though: There is no 9th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There's no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government's Recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don't exist.

I appreciate the willingness of ABC, home of Jake Tapper, to report this. Read the whole thing—it's beyond belief.

Cap-and-tax under fire—from the left

We have a center-left grassroots political action organization here in Indiana, focused on state environmental and energy issues, that comes around once a year wanting petition signatures on whatever their latest issue is—so far, it’s always been something beating up on the energy companies and always something to do with coal-fired plants. I was amused to note that this year, they have two big pushes: one against the local utility, and one against the American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as Waxman-Markey or the cap-and-trade bill. I wouldn’t have expected that second one, but here was this self-labeled hippie solemnly explaining to me that Waxman-Markey is a bad bill because it’s nothing more than a massive bailout for the coal industry; the way he talked about it, you would have expected to find it was a Republican idea.

The sheet he handed me described the bill thusly:

While Americans have been clamoring for a national energy policy that helps their pocketbooks and the environment, Congress has caved to special interests and drafted a bill that is nothing more than a massive giveaway to the utility industry. ACES . . . was railroaded through the U. S. House (by a vote of 219-212) without proper public input. Now in the U. S. Senate, the bill is subject to even more manipulation from coal and utility lobbying.

The claim is that ACES, drafted in large part by Duke Energy, will protect ratepayers, reduce carbon emissions, and help solve global warming. But it is an attempt to maintain business as usual in the electric utility industry.

The reason for ACES is that in the past 2 to 3 years numerous coal plants have been cancelled because lenders would not assume the risk of financing overly expensive and polluting coal-fire power plants that take years to build. . . .

Coal plants are already financially unviable. Now utility companies need ACES to keep their coal plants running and have an excuse to build more.

Not “a” reason, mind you—“the” reason. The folks who put this together seem completely convinced that there is no environmental motivation behind the cap-and-tax bill at all, only the desire to do favors for coal and energy producers. I don’t have a very high opinion of Nancy Pelosi (who hails from that noted coal-producing city of San Francisco) or Harry Reid (I’m sure coal is king in Nevada, too), but even to me, that seems unduly cynical. Still, if what they’re saying about all the loopholes that have been written in for utility companies is correct, that is indeed another good reason to oppose this very bad bill; and if those of us who oppose it from the Right can make common cause with folks on the Left to bring it down, so much the better.

Look for the smoke machine

You've probably heard it before: "Where there's smoke, there must be fire." Like most proverbs, it makes a lot of intuitive sense; it fits the balance of probabilities. Follow it, and you'll be right most of the time.

But not always, as I learned from the same source where I first ran across this proverb: Agatha Christie. Both of her main detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, dealt at various points with domestic mysteries in small villages, which usually featured "spinsterish old cats" (not unlike Miss Marple herself, actually, save for the latter's complete absence of malice) declaring that Dr. So-and-so must have murdered his poor wife, because everyone was saying so, and "where there's smoke, there must be fire." Usually, in those stories, there proved to be no fire at all, but someone else determinedly laying down a smokescreen.

To be sure, those were mere fictions to entertain an evening, but they highlight an important fact: certain kinds of people, and people in certain kinds of situations, find smokescreens very useful. They can misdirect the attention of people who might be watching; they can cover one's activities; and of course, they can conceal evidence, including evidence of one's own guilt. And because people are generally predisposed to think, "If there's smoke, there must be fire," one can often use them to convince the public of negative things about one's enemies.

This is, I think, the basic strategy of the Left for dealing with Sarah Palin. Should they ever find any actual fire in her life, you may be sure they'll pull every alarm they can reach and turn it into the biggest media conflagration in recent memory; but in the absence of that, they've settled for taking every chance they can spot, twist, or invent to blow smoke at her. It doesn't matter whether there's even the thinnest shred of a reasonable justification for doing so—they'll do it anyway.

In one recent ludicrosity, they've taken her observation about "In God We Trust" being moved from the face of the presidential line of dollar coins to the edge and put words in her mouth to accuse her of falsely blaming the current administration for that act. Before that, they tried twisting Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's words to make it look like he was dissing Gov. Palin. They falsely accused her of trying to force the Iowa Family Policy Center to pay her for a speaking event. They twisted her statement about death panels in the Pelosi/Obama/Reid health care plans. They continue to peddle old lies such as the accusation that she tried to ban books. (And yes, the "they" in these cases usually includes Politico's Jonathan Martin.) And the list goes on, and on, and on, and on . . .

Why are they doing this? They're creating a smokescreen, figuring that people are conditioned to think there must be a fire around somewhere; if Gov. Palin's enemies can just keep the smoke thick enough around her, they expect voters to infer a fire, never mind that they've never seen any actual evidence of one. Meanwhile, those of us on the Right (who aren't in thrall to one of the other 2012 contenders, or enthralled by the bright lights of the Beltway media) keep hooking up our fans and trying to blow the smoke away. Which is a laudable and necessary thing to do, and certainly we'll be hard at it from now through November 2012 and, very likely, beyond. Lies must be fought with truth, and liars must be answered; the sincerely misled must be given the opportunity to clear their eyes of the smoke. It is a worthy exercise for its own sake.

At the same time, though, we need to recognize that our fans aren't big enough to clear the air; and as such, we need to find ways to make another point to the electorate: watch the smoke. Watch the smoke and realize that it keeps changing—the color and direction are never the same twice. The storylines keep shifting, new accusations keep being made—often contradicting previous accusations. One might start to wonder if all this smoke is in fact coming from the Caterpillar's famed hookah, given the way it seems to enable one to believe six (mutually) impossible things before breakfast. Watch the smoke and realize it's all implication, allegation, suggestion, prediction, and third-hand claims; realize that for all the smoke, no one has yet actually found any fire. Watch the smoke, and learn the real lesson: when there's a little smoke, or a fair bit of smoke, yes, there's probably a fire; but when the smoke just keeps on billowing by without a hint of a spark or any cinders on the breeze, stop expecting a fire—and look for the smoke machine.

(Cross-posted from Conservatives4Palin)