A shift in the US political scene?

So argues Michael Barone; and since there's no keener or more insightful observer of American politics, if this is what he sees, we'd best take a long, hard look. It's his explanation of what is otherwise a surprising and somewhat confusing fact: "every [presidential] candidate's strategy has failed." That's not something one would expect, given all the seasoned candidates and operatives out there, but it's the truth; Barone argues that the reason for it is that the ground has shifted out from under their feet.

For a decade from 1995 to 2005, we operated in a period of trench-warfare politics, with two approximately equal-sized armies waging a culture war in which very small amounts of ground made the difference between victory and defeat. It was pretty clear what the major issues were, what strategies were necessary to win a party's nomination, how to maximize your side's turnout on election day (and, increasingly, in early voting).

As more than a few people have noted, it was Karl Rove's mastery of this situation (which he intentionally exacerbated as a political strategy) which produced victories for Bush in 2000 and 2004.

But times change. Somewhere between Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006, I believe we entered a period of open-field politics, in which voters and candidates are moving around—a field in which there are no familiar landmarks or new signposts. . . . The fact that every campaign's experts came up with losing strategies suggests that, in this year's open-field politics, all the old rules may be broken. It's been a wild ride in the 35 days since the Iowa caucuses, and it may be even wilder in the 271 days until the polls open in November.

It's an intriguing thesis, and a compelling one—especially coming from someone with Barone's track record for being right. It suggests that, far from the foregone Democratic coronation many have expected, that the '08 presidential election may belong to whoever figures the new rules out first.

Skeptical conversations, part I: Who is God?

As part of my ordination process some years ago, I was required to write a credo—a statement of my beliefs. I wound up, for various reasons, writing it as a conversation between myself and a friend of mine who was an avowed agnostic; some of it came out of actual exchanges we'd had, while the rest is my invention. I've decided to start posting it in chunks (it's fairly long); you can find the first section here.

Update: I've moved the first section here.

Now this is just shameful

J. R. R. Tolkien's estate is suing New Line Cinema for ripping them off: $6 billion for the studio, not one cent for the creator (well, his heirs). The more I see of New Line, the less I like them.

Lenten Song of the Week

Last year during Lent, I posted Isaac Watts' greatest hymn, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross"; this year, I think I'll start off Lent with another of his great ones (minus the frankly execrable Ralph Hudson chorus).

Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed?

Alas! and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sov'reign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?

Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut his glories in,
When Christ, the great Redeemer, died
For man the creature's sin.

But drops of grief can ne'er repay
The debt of love I owe;
Here, Lord, I give myself away—
'Tis all that I can do.

Words: Isaac Watts
Music: Hugh Wilson
MARTYRDOM, CM

The idolatry of perfect parenthood

Jason Byassee has a review up on the First Things website of a book by Methodist theologian Amy Laura Hall titled Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction; the review is wonderful, and it sounds like the book is, too. I won’t try to summarize it, I’ll just encourage you to read the piece and mull over the ways in which “mainline churches have pursued a theology of ‘Justification by meticulously planned procreation’ (emphasis original), exemplified in a mid-century conference at which Methodists pronounced the Christian family ‘the hope of the world’”—and to let yourself be challenged and (I hope) energized by Dr. Hall’s final words: “The call to be a Christian has become, for me, a call to risk seeming like just the sort of backward, crazy, Holy Spirit-inspired white girl that my grandmothers hoped I would progress beyond.”

Preliminary thoughts on the knowledge of God

I should begin by noting that while I intend this post to be able to stand on its own, it doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s part of my response to a couple of questions Erin posed me in the comments on this post on her blog, and to the overall discussion. In order to keep my comment there reasonably short, I thought it best to offer some of my thoughts here.

What sparked my original contribution there was this comment:

if the rules and standards we live by are God’s, then it would have to be true that love is the measuring stick for everything . . . including this ever elusive “holiness”. And maybe we can’t help but fly once we grasp the awesomeness of God’s love.

The last line there I agree with wholeheartedly—indeed, I think that’s a critically important truth for the church to grasp—and I regret not having said so earlier; but I raised the following objection to the first statement:

I would say that God is the measuring stick for everything. Yes, God is love, but God is not reducible to love—God is light without darkness, God is perfect good without flaw, God is life without death, God is the source of all good things . . . we have to be careful not to pick just one biblical affirmation about God, even one of the key ones (like “God is love”), and lose sight of the others; doing that makes it easier for us to reduce our view of God to the size of our definitions.

Now, it’s easy to say that, but (as Erin pointed out), what does that look like, and how do we do that? For that matter, since we already know what love is, what’s the problem with just collapsing it down and using love as our measuring stick? Ironically, however, that’s precisely the problem: we already know what love is—or rather, we think we do. The reason we need to “grasp the awesomeness of God’s love” is that, most of the time, we don’t, even though we have been grasped by it; most of the time, for most of us, our understanding of love doesn’t really get all that far beyond the one we’ve learned from the world, and the world’s idea of love is adulterated. It’s weak tea beside the real thing, nowhere near deep enough, high enough, strong enough, alive enough, selfless enough, committed enough . . . any of it.

This is why I would argue that we cannot simplify our view of God even to “God is love,” because when we say that by itself, we tend to shrink God down to our understanding of love. We need to hold on to all those other affirmations, not just because they’re all true, but because collectively, they reinforce each other; when we say that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” it reminds us that when we say “God is love,” his love is a vastly greater thing than ours. Our love is too often sentimental, too often weak, too often prone to settle for comfortable half-truths and affirmations; we shrink back from challenging and confronting people, even when that would be the loving thing to do, perhaps because our love just isn’t strong enough to move us to do so, or perhaps because we don’t know how to do so as an act of love rather than as an act of anger driven by fear or hurt. We can’t really understand how a loving God could hate our sin as an act of love, and so either we keep our idea of love and soft-pedal the whole idea of sin, or else we keep the idea of sin and become loveless and merciless in judgment, because our understanding of love is too small. Because, as J. B. Phillips said, our God is too small.

The problem underlying all this is that in logical terms, there is very little we can positively know about God; most of our affirmations about God are negative—which is to say, they take the form of “God is not this,” and “God is not that.” We can say, for instance, that God is eternal—that he is not bound by time as we know it—but we can’t say very much about what that means. Even some of the positive affirmations we find in Scripture work this way. “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” We know from this that “God is light” means that there is no darkness in God—no shameful thing hidden in secret, no dark motives, no shadow of any evil desires, nothing of that sort—but speaking positively, what does it mean? Does it mean that the speed of God is 186,000 miles per second, or that he can be refracted by a prism? Clearly, the idea is absurd. But what it does mean that God is light is mostly beyond our grasp; we simply affirm that there is no darkness in him, and hang on to that.

We run into similar problems trying to grasp everything the Bible says about God. We can understand that his life is undying, and that he gives us as his children undying life; we can even understand that his life is of a different quality from ours. But what that difference is, is much harder to grasp; we seek as Christians to live into that, to have his life more and more come alive in us, but we cannot define it, we can only experience it. It’s the same way, really, with his love. We can’t use it as a measuring stick, because a measuring stick is something we can pick up and hold and manipulate; it’s something which is useful precisely because we know its limits. We don’t know the limits of the love of God—if the cross should teach us anything at all (beyond that “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life”), it should be that. We cannot hold it—rather, it holds us; and it is far too great a thing for us to manipulate.

So, then, the question: “If we can’t measure things by Love, how would you measure things by God?” To which my rather perverse answer: we can’t. To say that God is our measuring stick is to say that we have given up measuring. It doesn’t mean there are no measurements; it simply means that we don’t make them, and we don’t determine them. We simply follow where he leads. That’s what defines us as Christians—not where we’re standing right now, or what we have right or what we have wrong, or what rules we follow and what rules we don’t, or any of that; what defines us is which way we’re moving. Christians are those who, however imperfectly and however confusedly, are on the road together behind Jesus, following him in his mission in this world. This is how we know God: not by affirming certain things or upholding certain rules, though some affirmations and rules are important in helping keep us going the right direction, but by following him. We know him as we know anyone: in relationship. And this is how we measure things by God: do they truly contribute to our following him, and to others’ doing the same?

Which is to say, do they make us more like him? Or less? Because the way we know we’re truly following Jesus is that we’re becoming more like him, and thus doing the work he did: feeding the hungry; caring for the sick; welcoming the outsider; defending the oppressed; lifting up the downtrodden; loving the unlovable; breaking down the barriers between race and class and gender; and, when the opportunity arises, speaking the truth so clearly and unflinchingly that people want to kill us for it.

John McCain

With Mitt Romney's decision to suspend his campaign, the pundits would have you believe that John McCain is now guaranteed to be the Republican presidential nominee. He may well end up such, but I don't think it's anywhere near that certain; to this point, Sen. McCain has received less than half of the votes cast in Republican primaries, and if most of Gov. Romney's supporters go to Mike Huckabee, I think the convention could well end up deciding this race. (On the Democratic side, I think that's highly likely to happen. Heaven help Denver.) Still, the odds would seem to favor Sen. McCain at this point—which has a lot of the conservative talking heads completely apoplectic. "McCain's not a true conservative," etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, combined with dark suspicions about his stability and the like.

Now, as a Navy brat, I know a lot of people who knew Sen. McCain back when he was still, say, LCDR McCain, and I trust them to have more of a perspective on the man than your typical pundit. Here's what one of them, as true-blue a conservative as anyone I know, had to say about him a while back (this is posted with permission):

Lt. John McCain was a flight instructor in VT-7 based at NAS Meridian, MS in the summer of 1964 while I was a student Naval Aviator there. Based on my observations and those of my best friend then and now, it is my opinion that the best thing that ever happened to him was doing hard time in the Hanoi "Hilton." He had a violent, hair trigger temper and was arrogant, self-serving and vindictive. Following his experience as “ground zero” of the Forestal fire (a lesser man would likely not even have survived that) he needed to find a way to get his now-denied combat experience to stay competitive for promotion. I have no doubt that he used his considerable political influence to immediately get a set of orders to CAG-16 deploying on the Oriskany.

During his tenure as a POW he demonstrated immense courage and resourcefulness. He was tough and I admire him greatly for the way he handled himself and I think that experience took the edge off of his most negative qualities. Just a side note here for those younger folks who may read this and for whom the Viet Nam war is little more than a few pages in a dusty history book, the gutty conduct of most of our POWs in that war was nothing short of incredible. And Senator McCain was right near the top.

I had the privilege of quaffing a couple of beers with him and a few of his pilots in Yuma following his repatriation while he was CO of VA-174 (the East coast A-7 RAG). He was mellow and gracious and a pleasure to be with then.

I was a big fan of his until he started his first run for president and I became aware of his inconsistent positions on several issues that I held dear. In short, he didn’t appear to have a coherent conservative worldview. I also think he blew his chance for the nomination in 2000 because he didn’t understand and embrace the evangelical grassroots. He had that block for the taking early on when they were still skeptical of W. Instead, he thumbed his nose at them (us) and lost the nomination. Most of the grassroots energy in the party comes from the so-called “Christian right” and McCain missed his chance (although he may never have been any more able to connect with them than, say, Hillary).

The problem with the entire Republican field is that there is no “Reagan conservative” anywhere to be seen so we are back to asking, “which one will we settle for?”

On the plus side: McCain is pro life, anti spending and spot-on on the WoT. Negatives are: Soft on immigration, voted against tax cuts and McCain-Feingold was a disaster that gave us Soros, Lewis et al. Also, have to give him credit—though I was unhappy with him at the time—for getting our Supreme Court nominees through.

Senator McCain may end being my man though I think the governor from Arkansas is the best of the bunch in debate and thinking on his feet.

Now, this is far from pure adoration of the "he's the ideal candidate" type. Clearly, he isn't. However, while there are certainly reservations here about McCain (reservations which I share), I don't think there's reason for hysterical opposition, either. Yes, he's a man of great pride and greater temper who can be a bit short in the fusebox; no, that doesn't make him "unstable" (the kindest insinuation I've heard). And yes, he's spent too much time poking conservatives in the eye, and yes, he needs to give up the adulation of the NY Times and come back to his conservative roots on some things; but I agree with John Weidner: once he's no longer a thorn in Bush's side, but instead the guy standing between the MSM's favored candidate and the White House, the NYT's gloves will come off, and that will solve the problem.

The bottom line: if Sen. McCain is the nominee, I think folks like Rush who are suggesting conservatives are better off if he loses have gone clean 'round the bend. As Dan Lehr says, if he isn't the nominee we wanted, we need to grow up and get over it. Two reasons: one, we will get far better judges out of Sen. McCain than out of Hillarack Oblinton (two peas, one pod). Even if you don't trust him on nominations, anyone he'll come up with will be much, much better than anyone either of those two would put forward. And two, he will prosecute the GWOT, and probably far more effectively than the current administration; the Democrats will concede our gains. We have turned the corner in Iraq; we can't afford to be in thrall to those who want us to turn back around it. I'm still voting Huckabee in Indiana, but if it's McCain in November, then my vote is McCain all the way.

Again, credit where credit is due

I didn't give Mitt Romney enough credit: today he suspended his campaign. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Does this, as the pundits are saying, seal the deal for John McCain? Or does Gov. Romney's support go to Mike Huckabee and make this a national two-person race?

Either way, it will probably mean one more lesson for the political-science curricula that are sure to be written off this screwball presidential campaign.

The cross at the center

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

—T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets, II.

Ashes

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Today is also the first day of the rest of Mitt Romney's political life. I hope he's honest enough with himself to face that fact; and if Mormons celebrate Lent and Ash Wednesday (I don't actually know if they do), I hope this day's observance means more to him than its political significance. (Update: apparently they don't—see #329.)

I have to say, I've been rather disappointed in Gov. Romney over the course of this campaign. I pulled for him for a long time. Originally, I had expected Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist would be the GOP's nominee this year, and I looked forward to that; when Sen. Frist failed to do his job to get the President's judicial nominees through, however, I decided I could not support him. (I even sent an e-mail to him to that effect; I got a canned e-mail back.) Having done so, I looked around for someone to support, and Gov. Romney seemed far and away the best choice on the horizon. Given his record and his gifts, I thought he'd be a strong candidate and a good president.

Eventually, of course, I changed my mind and started supporting Mike Huckabee (not that that means much—my endorsement means nothing and I have no money to contribute). Some of that was because of Gov. Huckabee's own strengths; a lot of it, though, was that Gov. Romney had actually proven himself quite a poor candidate, spending lots of money to very little result. (Gov. Huckabee, in this respect, has been the anti-Romney.) Unfortunately, he hasn't handled that very well, and neither has his team, leading to this rather unbecoming sequence, caught by BigJolly at the Lone Star Times. First, Gov. Romney scolded Gov. Huckabee:

“First a couple of rules in politics,” he said. “One: no whining. And number two: you get them to vote for you and so I want them not to vote for Mike Huckabee and not to vote for John McCain and to vote for me . . . that’s not voter suppression. That’s known as politics.”

Good and noble words, but they didn't last very long; following his loss in the West Virginia caucuses when John McCain's supporters switched en bloc to Gov. Huckabee, Gov. Romney's campaign manager had this to say:

Unfortunately, this is what Senator McCain's inside Washington ways look like: he cut a backroom deal with the tax-and-spend candidate he thought could best stop Governor Romney's campaign of conservative change.

Governor Romney had enough respect for the Republican voters of West Virginia to make an appeal to them about the future of the party based on issues. This is why he led on today's first ballot. Sadly, Senator McCain cut a Washington backroom deal in a way that once again underscores his legacy of working against Republicans who are interested in championing conservative policies and rebuilding the party.

At this point, if he's really all that interested in stopping “Senator McCain's inside Washington ways,” the best thing Gov. Romney could do would be to cut his own deal with Gov. Huckabee: throw his support behind the real “man from Hope” (Bill Clinton mostly grew up in Hot Springs, AR) in exchange for policy promises, which he could then widely publicize as satisfying his own concerns. Somehow, though, I don't think that's going to happen. But at this point, Gov. Romney has it backwards: a vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for John McCain. Which might not, in the end, prove to be all that bad a thing; I'm pulling for Gov. Huckabee, but I'll be content to vote for Sen. McCain in November as well. I don't know the future, so as far as I know, we might all be better off if Sen. McCain wins the nomination. But if Gov. Romney thinks otherwise, he should take a deep breath and a long hard look at the situation, and act accordingly.

HT: Bill

Keeping faith in mind

John Stackhouse has a series of posts up on his blog addressing the question, "Do you have to choose between your brains and your beliefs?" His answer, succinctly summarized: No, no, and sort of, but no.

Expanded somewhat, his basic points are these:

• "Obviously, obviously, you don’t. Many, many manifestly smart people don’t."
• Faith is both grounded in what we know and important to our ability to know.

  Everyday life, however, constantly presses us beyond what we know (or think we know) and requires us to exercise faith. We frequently find ourselves compelled to trust beyond what we’re sure of, to make commitments that go outside our sense of safety. And yet these moments of trust and commitment—these acts of faith—are intrinsically and importantly related to knowledge. . . . Faith relies on knowledge even as it moves out from knowledge into the unknown.
  

• Faith is ultimately necessary to be a Christian—we cannot get to Christianity by our own efforts (of reason or anything else), but ultimately only through God's gift of faith by grace. However, we can't get to anything else truly meaningful without faith, either.

As he sums it up, "So the question isn’t whether to have faith or not. The question is, In what or whom will I place faith, and on what grounds?"

Decaf non-fat latté with a shot of God

Stand at a coffee bar long enough, you'll eventually hear someone order a decaf latté made with skim milk. Whenever I hear that, I'm reminded of the coffee bar we used to frequent (even though I'm not a coffee drinker; you may have guessed that my wife is, though) that had gotten that order often enough, they'd put it on the menu. I think this may have been JP's, in Holland, where Sara, Hap, Wayne and I went to college, since they were fond of naming their drinks; in any case, whichever establishment it was, in putting the decaf non-fat latté on the menu, had named it "What's the Point?" For some reason, none of the patrons ever actually used the name—but you can bet the baristas did . . . :)

I was reminded of this recently in visiting another church for a funeral. It was a UCC congregation, and clearly in step with the liberalism of that denomination; I was out in the hall on kid duty, since our younger ones lack the patience or understanding to sit through a service, so I had plenty of time to read the various materials they had up on the walls. One big eye-catching display was of the graduates of their most recent confirmation class, with "CONGRATULATIONS CONFIRMANDS!" in big letters, life-size head shots of the teens, and copies of brief essays they had written. It made me rather sad, because from the essays, the only thing these students had been confirmed in was what they already believed; there was little gospel there, and little sense of God challenging their comfortable conclusions. It was all much more about them creating their own idea of Christianity than it was about God creating and recreating them.

The most extreme example of this, and the one that really caught my eye, was one young woman who declared in her essay, "I am an atheist." I looked at that and I thought, "Why bother? What's the point?" And what's the point of a church that can teach its children about God, have one of them come out declaring herself an atheist, and consider that a good thing and something to be celebrated? She has every right to her atheism, certainly, but I can't help thinking, that's an awfully thin-blooded version of the gospel; in the end, in the coffee bar of life, that's little more than a decaf non-fat latté with a shot of God (or maybe even a half shot). What really is the point, anyway?

The idolatry of American politics

Someone with sharp eyes may have noticed that I added the Anchoress to the blogroll. Why it hadn't occurred to me quite a while ago that she wasn't on there, I'm not sure, but that oversight is now rectified. At least it was good timing; I checked in just in time to catch her asking the question, "Are Our Ideologies Our Idols?" Some might disagree with me, but I'm pretty sure (and have been for a while) that the answer is "yes," and she provides some good evidence for the proposition.

The truth is, I've been convinced for a while that our politics is idolatrous, ever since God convicted me about some of my habits. For instance, I've tried (and I think succeeded) to stop saying, "I'm a Republican." I most often vote Republican, and to say that is a simple statement of fact; but to say "I am a Republican" (which I was—I paid dues to the Republican National Committee and kept my membership card in my wallet, for a while) was to define myself in terms of the Republican party. It was to say that the Republican platform was a defining part of my identity, and that the leaders of that party were my leaders. As a Christian, I have no right to do that, nor do any of us.

We're called to be in the world, yes, but not of the world; to vote, to participate in our government, is to be in the world, but to attach ourselves to a political party and adopt it as our own is to be of the world. Our Christian faith—the content of our beliefs, our commitment to each other, and above all our commitment to follow Jesus the Messiah—must be the source and control of all our political beliefs and actions, and that cannot be the case if we have a pre-existing commitment to the positions or the political success of any political party. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” and it’s equally true that where your goals are, where your sense of identity is, there you will find your heart as well; and when we let that happen, when our politics shapes our faith rather than the other way around—when our identity is defined even in part by a political party or a political cause—then our political commitments have claimed a place that belongs only to God, and we are guilty of idolatry. We are to find our identity in Christ and him only.

It’s worth noting that the same applies to patriotism. I’m not saying that love of country is always or necessarily idolatrous, because it isn’t; but it can be, very easily. After all, America is a concrete reality which has benefited us in concrete ways, and which needs improvement in concrete ways; the kingdom of God, by contrast, can be a little harder to see, and easier to forget about. Plus, we all get to pledge allegiance to our own concept of what America ought to be, and to define our patriotism accordingly; which makes America a very flexible idol indeed. We need to be careful of ourselves.

Testing, testing, 123 . . .

Thanks, Erin. :)

Herewith, the rules:
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

My wife happened to be walking up to me with a book just as I caught the tag, so the book is Camp's Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B. C. to the Present (which should be a fruitful source for this sort of thing).

(Our topic is "Greed," btw; the book is arranged thematically.)

"Yuppies' creed: 'I want it all and I want it now.'"

—Russell Baker, New York Times, February 6, 1988

"I think the enemy is here before us. . . . I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed. . . . I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land."

—Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, 1949

Weird meme. :) So, tags:

Sara
Wayne
Ruth
Doug
Bill

Another idea of a good Christian woman

So there's a discussion going on elsewhere regarding a conservative Christian stereotype known as the Better Christian Woman, or BCW—the label comes from Erin, who may well have coined it (as a sardonic label, anyway), and I know Hap and my wife have joined in, as have others; Barry contributed a post or two addressing the fact that men in the church deal with these sorts of expectations as well, which seems to have surprised some (female) folks.

I'll be honest and admit that while I see the effects of this in the lives of people I know and love, it's all a little alien to me. I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative church, but apparently a somewhat different kind of conservative; after all, one of my grandmothers was a career pastor (specifically, she and Grampa were officers in the Salvation Army), and my mother was an ICU nurse who got her start in the Navy. The women in my family show a distinct tendency toward the helping professions (add in a couple social workers, for instance), but then, so do the men (ditto, plus a couple more ministers, including me). I guess I just grew up with the idea that God calls people on an individual basis, depending on who he made each of us to be and what particular set of gifts he's given us, rather than a categorical one.

It might be in light of that, and it's certainly in light of the ongoing discussion, that I was interested to read this piece by the Rev. Dr. Linda Schwab, a chemistry professor turned Methodist pastor, on her career path and choices. Her situation is a little different, but ultimately I think her piece raises and deals with the same basic set of questions: who am I, and who am I supposed to be? One of the things I value about her essay is that she understands where the answer to those questions is to be found: not in human expectations, but in God.

Justice and mercy

"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just:
that his justice cannot sleep for ever."

—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 289

God is our judge; he is a God of justice. It's a major biblical theme, a heavy biblical truth, and it's one that a lot of people don't like; we tend to prefer the warmer biblical language that God is love, that he's our good shepherd, and so on, and so a lot of times, we quietly shuffle the "judge" language out the back door into the shed. In some ways, this is ironic, because many of those who most dislike thinking about God as judge are quite convinced they want justice, even folks who really should be asking for mercy (as the Calvinator noted in the comments a while back); I guess the lesson here is that people want "justice" defined as them getting whatever it is they happen to think they deserve. We want justice measured by our own standard, and God uses his standard, not ours.

If we're going to be faithful to Scripture, though, we just can't go along with that. All through the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, as God declares himself the God of the weak and the powerless, of whom the archetypal examples are the widow, the fatherless, the homeless foreigner, and the stranger; over and over, he condemns the evildoers who “kill the widow and the stranger, [and] murder the orphan.” Again and again, we have the affirmation that God is a God of justice, and that those who exploit the poor and defenseless will be punished. The psalmist may ask, “How long shall the wicked exult?” but he does so in the certainty that the one who disciplines the nations will dig a pit for the wicked in the end. Those who build their mansions on the backs of the needy may prosper for a time, but not forever.

And in the end, though talk of God as a God of justice and judgment rings a harsh note, it’s important for us to remember that the judgment of God comes on those who do evil, on those who reject his ways; and it’s important to remember that it’s rooted in his insistence on making right all that is wrong, and on his concern for the powerless—and that his concern includes us. The highest and greatest expression of this concern came in Christ, in his death and resurrection on our behalf, taking the punishment for our sin and paying the price that we were powerless to pay, winning for us the freedom we were powerless to win.

Which means, I think, that here we see justice and mercy meet; God’s greatest act of mercy was also his greatest act of justice, as here he defeated not just human evildoers but the power behind them, the slavemaster who bound all of us helplessly in sin. In showing us mercy, he was working justice on our behalf.

Sigh of relief

Rudy Giuliani has dropped out of the presidential race (as has John Edwards on the Democratic side), which removes the only "Republican" contender I simply could not support. Once John McCain came roaring back and re-established himself as a contender, that just sucked all the oxygen out of the room for Rudy; once he'd been one-upped on national defense, he simply didn't have a compelling pitch. For my part, I'm glad.

Church as consumer option?

I've been troubled by Richard Mouw's defense of church shopping, published recently in Christianity Today; I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Mouw, but I think he's really missed the boat with this one, and I've been trying to figure out what needs to be said in answer to his article. As such, I was grateful to see Anthony Sacramone's response today on the First Things website; he makes some points which really need to be made, and I think he makes them well. Check it out.

The Jesus heresy?

Perhaps the most thought-provoking session I attended last week was one I took as a second choice after something else had filled up, a session with Lester Ruth on the view of God in contemporary worship music. I thought it would be interesting, but I didn't expect a lot more than that. I was positively surprised. Dr. Ruth (no jokes, please) is a Methodist pastor and worship historian who teaches at Asbury Seminary and the Webber Institute for Worship Studies, and what he had done was to take 15 years' worth of top-25 lists from CCLI and analyze the songs they included (72 in his sample) for their Trinitarian content. The results, which can now be found (in updated form) in chapter 1 of the book The Message in the Music: Studying Contemporary Praise & Worship, were dispiriting; they revealed not only a near-total absence of the Trinity in the most popular songs of the contemporary church, but very little explicit awareness of either the Father or the Holy Spirit. Jesus got the most attention, but even then, only about half the songs were addressed to him; most were generic. As Dr. Ruth noted, on the whole, the songs he examined could be described as "functionally Unitarian."

There's a lot that could be said about his findings, including various aspects I haven't mentioned (such as the paucity of references to the saving work of God, even with all the songs directed to Christ), but what struck me the most was this question Dr. Ruth posed to us: "Is it possible to worship Jesus too much?" In thinking about it, I'd have to say that it is. There's a lot of insistence in evangelical circles that our faith is all about Jesus, that Christian piety has a cruciform shape, that our worship has to be Christ-centered, and the like, and in a way, all of that is true; but when it leads us into a sort of Jesus-only Unitarianism, which seems to be the case in a lot of churches, then that ceases to be true. British Methodist scholar Susan White, in raising this question, titled her paper, What Ever Happened to the Father?: The Jesus Heresy in Modern Worship, and if her title is provocative, I think it's on point.

The reason for this is that if our worship is Christocentric, as it should be, but not fully Trinitarian, as it also needs to be, then it distorts our understanding of Jesus; we cannot be properly Christocentric if we are not also Trinitarian. We need to remember that it isn't all about Jesus, because Jesus wasn't all about Jesus; his purpose was to point people to the Father. Similarly, while we are united with Christ, we are united by the Holy Spirit, and so we cannot understand who we are in Christ if we leave the Spirit out. It is in Christ that God most fully revealed himself to us, and God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and so Jesus is our entry point into the life of the Triune God; our worship must be Christocentric because there's simply no other place to start. However, while we must start there, we must not stop there; to borrow from Stephen Seamands, we need to offer worship in Jesus Christ, the Son, to the Father, through the Holy Spirit, if we are to worship God truly. If we direct our worship to Jesus alone, our worship is false—even our worship of Jesus.

Does it make me unspiritual

that I get more worked up over my poor Mariners making a disastrously idiotic trade than I do about people rejecting Jesus?

. . . no, don't answer that . . . I already know.

*sigh*

Continuing the "different" theme . . .

Take a look at this.

My inner technogeek says, "That's really cool." Which it is; beyond that, I'm not sure what to think. (Except to be annoyed that they did the Crucifixion without the crowds.)

HT: Café Grendel

Morning prayer

I watch this morning
for the light that the darkness has not overcome.
I watch for the fire that was in the beginning
and that burns still in the brilliance of the rising sun.
I watch for the glow of life that gleams in the growing earth
and glistens in sea and sky.
I watch for your light, O God,
in the eyes of every living creature
and in the ever-living flame of my own soul.
If the grace of seeing were mine this day
I would glimpse you in all that lives.
Grant me the grace of seeing this day.
Grant me the grace of seeing.

—J. Philip Newell, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Evening Prayer, 2.

As a pastor, that's a beautiful note on which to begin the service of the Lord's Day.

Whose table?

The Symposium concluded today, leaving me with a 2 1/2-hour drive home and much to ponder on it, and for time to come (and no doubt a lot to comment on as well). As always, it concluded with a communion service. For some reason, as we celebrated the sacrament, I found myself feeling somewhat detached and disconnected. This was strange—as a pastor, I'm usually the celebrant, and I relish opportunities just to receive—and it concerned me. Was something wrong with me? Was I failing to do my part?

And then, though I wouldn't say my mind cleared (or my heart, for that matter), I did remember something important: this isn't my work. The sacrament isn't something I do, and it isn't about anything I do; I wouldn't say that just showing up is enough, or that it doesn't matter at all how I receive it, but fundamentally, like all of worship, it's not about me. It's not about anything I do, and it's not my own effort or my own piety or my own anything that makes it meaningful, or makes it work. It's all about God, and what he did in Christ—it's his table, not mine—and what he did is valid regardless of how I happen to be feeling about it at any given point; however focused or not I might be, however pious or not I might be feeling, what matters is simply that I receive it, and that I do so with gratitude whether I feel that gratitude or not. Repentance is accepting being found.

In the wilderness

One of the sessions on my schedule today was Michael Card and Calvin Seerveld teaching on lament in corporate worship. The highlight of the session for me was this sentence: "All true worship begins in the wilderness." We don't tend to think that way—we tend to treat our worship services as oases, as if we could shut out the wilderness and pretend it isn't there; but it's the truth. All true worship begins with God calling us in the wilderness—in the midst of our struggles and pains and difficulties—and us bringing ourselves to God in response to his call. All of ourselves; God wants nothing less. If we try to begin our worship anywhere else, if we try to leave the wilderness out (or keep it out) of our worship, then to a greater or lesser extent, we're being fake with God—and that's false worship.

Scott Hoezee (that's pronounced "José," for those unfamiliar with Dutch names) made a similar point in the worship service yesterday morning, preaching on Hebrews 2. The author of Hebrews draws on Psalm 8 to make his claim that everything has been placed in subjection to Jesus, and that "everything" means everything; Jesus Christ is Lord of everything and everybody, no ifs, ands, or buts, and has authority over all of it. And then, just when you might expect another round statement about the power and greatness of Jesus, you get instead this honest confession, "At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him." As Scott put it, "And the people of God said, 'No kidding.' . . . It's the sort of statement where you don't know whether to say 'Amen' or 'Duh!'"

When we look around, we most definitely don't see everything in subjection to Jesus; we see a cracked, fallen, messed up, evil-infected world. "But," continues Hebrews, "we see Jesus." Though we don't see him reigning unchallenged as Lord, we nevertheless see him "crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone"; we see him who entered into our world, and into our suffering, and bore it with us, and for us. And we see that it's because of that that all things have been placed in subjection to him—and that until that is fully realized, we see him in it with us. Which means that if we deny the reality of our fallen world in our worship—if we fail to begin in the wilderness—then we do him no honor, for we are in effect denying his work and his presence.

Repentance: accepting being found

First day of the symposium: seminar with Kenneth Bailey on "Jesus as Theologian" and plenary session with Dallas Willard on "Worship as the Fine Texture of Life in Christ." In other words, an embarrassment of riches, and certainly more to think about than I can absorb in one day—and it's only the beginning. One thing that particularly struck me, though, was this from Dr. Bailey's analysis of the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:1-7):

Repentance is defined as acceptance of being found. The sheep is lost and helpless and yet it is a symbol of repentance. Repentance becomes a combination of the shepherd's act of rescue and the sheep's acceptance of that act.

In other words, our repentance is one more act of the grace of God, not our hard work in which we can take pride, but something God does for us which we gratefully receive. In the later (and better-known) Parable of the Two Lost Sons (usually miscalled the Parable of the Prodigal Son), the prodigal's repentance doesn't come in the far country—that's just a scheme to work his way back into favor; his repentance comes in the village, when his heart breaks at his father's sacrifice for him, and he accepts being found; he accepts being welcomed back into the family without his having earned it.

The gift of worship

Continuing with the "random Web discovery" thing, here's something else I missed during the moving process. Hap had embedded this video in one of her posts last month, but I only just discovered it, apparently by chance, this morning. ("Apparently by chance" being a pseudonym for the Holy Spirit.) Since I'm heading off this evening for the Symposium on Worship that the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship puts on every January (it starts tomorrow), the topic is very much on my mind.



I'll comment a bit more on this later.

Another sort of different

It's amazing what you can find randomly wandering around the Internet. Usually, you don't (or at least I don't), but there are times when Web panning turns up a nugget. I was surfing aimlessly yesterday for a couple minutes while my brain tried to track something down, and I landed at Doug Hagler's blog, only to find myself in the blogroll. I would not have expected that. Doug's good people from what I can tell—we've never met personally, I only know him from around the blogosphere, and primarily from his comments on Jim Berkley's blog—but he and I don't agree on a whole lot. (I would have said we don't agree on much of anything, but from his blog, it's evident we agree on Tolkien, anyway.) Doug's one of those folks in the More Light/Covenant Network stream of the PC(USA), and I'm . . . slightly not. Still (especially these days), one is always grateful for those with whom one can disagree intelligently and civilly, because there can be real value to those conversations; and I'd certainly put Doug in that category. (Besides, you have to like someone who can write, "You're only allowed to take me as seriously as I take myself. That should serve to restrain both of us.") As such, I'm happy to return the favor and add him to the blogroll. I'd especially recommend his post on eucatastrophe, which is perhaps my favorite of Tolkien's concepts. (This all ties in with my earlier post on Alison Milbank's book.)

I should also note, I'm grateful to Doug for tipping me off to a development I'd missed during the whole packing/moving process: Peter Jackson has settled his legal squabble with New Line Cinema, and he and Fran Walsh are back on board to do The Hobbit (and also a sequel; my wife was wondering if they're planning to make a movie of the journey back home, which Tolkien completely glossed over). There are legitimate criticisms to offer of the work Jackson, Walsh and Philippa Boyens did with LOTR, but that said, I can't come up with anyone who would have done a better job. Jackson et al. doing The Hobbit is clearly the best-case scenario, and I'm glad to see it.

Forgiveness, repentance, and the Gordian knot

A while back, I commented on Dr. Stackhouse's first post on repentance and forgiveness, which was the beginning of his reflections on Advent this year; I meant to go back, when he posted the second part and comment on that too, but other things distracted me, and I'm just now getting back to it. As with the first part, it's an excellent piece, one which directs our attention to the key truth in understanding repentance and forgiveness: our sins aren't just between us human beings, they're between us and God. The Psalmist even goes so far as to say to God, "Against you and you only have I sinned" (Psalm 51:4).

This means that when we sin against someone else, or when they sin against us, we aren't inextricably bound to them by that action; we aren't enslaved by their refusal to repent, or by their refusal to forgive us if we repent. God is the one against whom the offense was ultimately committed, and he gives us the opportunity to free ourselves from it. We are free to forgive the one who hurt us even if they do not repent, because it's not up to us to bring about their repentance (or their judgment)—that's in God's hands; and we are free to repent and receive forgiveness even if those on this earth whom we've hurt will not forgive, because God can and will forgive us, if we truly confess our sins to him and repent. (As Dr. Stackhouse notes, "the Bible says surprisingly little about repenting to each other, and a lot about repenting to God.")

One of the ways in which our sin enslaves us is by binding us together in Gordian knots of guilt and pain and suffering and shame, knots we often cannot seem to undo no matter how hard we try, even though we were the ones who tied them. In Christ, however, God calls us to repent of our sins and be forgiven, and to forgive one another, and thus to cut that Gordian knot, and find freedom. In so doing, as the Rev. Casey Jones says, we can leave behind this world's way of life and enter into the life of the kingdom of God here and now. This is good news; this is gospel.

(Note: subscription required for that last article; but the first month's subscription to Presbyweb is free.)

And now for something completely different

29 “And these are unclean to you among the swarming things that swarm on the ground: the mole rat, the mouse, the great lizard of any kind, 30 the gecko, the monitor lizard, the lizard, the sand lizard, and the chameleon. 31 These are unclean to you among all that swarm. Whoever touches them when they are dead shall be unclean until the evening. 32 And anything on which any of them falls when they are dead shall be unclean, whether it is an article of wood or a garment or a skin or a sack, any article that is used for any purpose. It must be put into water, and it shall be unclean until the evening; then it shall be clean. 33 And if any of them falls into any earthenware vessel, all that is in it shall be unclean, and you shall break it. 34 Any food in it that could be eaten, on which water comes, shall be unclean. And all drink that could be drunk from every such vessel shall be unclean. 35 And everything on which any part of their carcass falls shall be unclean. Whether oven or stove, it shall be broken in pieces. They are unclean and shall remain unclean for you. 36 Nevertheless, a spring or a cistern holding water shall be clean, but whoever touches a carcass in them shall be unclean. 37 And if any part of their carcass falls upon any seed grain that is to be sown, it is clean, 38 but if water is put on the seed and any part of their carcass falls on it, it is unclean to you.”

—Leviticus 11:29-38, ESV

Some number of years ago, my friend Hap wrote a poem dealing, in part, with what happens when a dead gecko falls into your pot. She was good enough to send me a copy; unfortunately, thanks to the magic of cross-country moves, I don't know where my copy is. (Update: problem solved. Too perfect. :) Thanks, Hap. To the rest of you—go and read.)

Anyway, it turns out there's good reason the Torah is only worried about dead geckos falling into your pot; apparently, though I didn't know this, gecko feet are among the wonders of nature, maybe up there with the fact that bumblebees can fly. Certainly they were as mysterious as the flight of the bumblebee. I love the picture Heather McDougal paints:

Traveling in Southeast Asia, geckos on the ceiling were a common occurrence. They would stake out territory, chasing each other away with vehemently waving tails, as if they did not notice they were in the middle of a rough, lumpy, peeling ceiling, hanging upside-down. I would lay in my bed and watch them fight, wondering why one of them did not fall on my face. As it turns out, no one else knew either until relatively recently.

The answer to the puzzle is a fascinating one (or at least, I think it is). Go read the post and see if you agree. Personally, it makes me marvel at the incredible imagination of God.

God's own fools

18 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,and the discernment of the discerning I
will thwart.”

20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

—1 Corinthians 1:18-31, ESV

God's foolishness begins with a crucified Messiah, but it doesn't end there. If God’s use of the cross is foolish on our terms, is it any less foolish that he chooses to use us? Put it another way—if you were God and wanted to fix the world, would you start with us? I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be inclined to focus on the important people, the ones who control the world’s governments, media, money, etc.

Once again, though, God doesn’t work that way. He certainly wants to save the rich and powerful just as much as anyone else, but he doesn’t focus on them; rather, he chooses the weak, the powerless, the insignificant, the foolish—he chooses ordinary people, and many of the weakest and most vulnerable among us—in order to show up those who think they are powerful and important and don’t need him. God does this because we matter to him as much as those in power do, but he also chooses us to make it clear that there is no one who has the right to boast in themselves; there is no one who does not need him, and no one who can stand against him. There is no one he cannot raise up, and no one he cannot bring down.

We are called as Christians to be fools in the world’s eyes; our salvation is foolishness to the world, and the idea that God would choose to use us is foolishness, so if we are to follow God we must choose his foolishness over the world’s wisdom. We're called to follow Jesus Christ, God’s own fool, and to live in this world as he did. He turns to us as he did to Peter and says, “Come, follow me”; if we protest, “Lord, they think you’re a fool,” he just says, “Come be a fool with me.”

But what does that mean? Clearly, we aren’t called to random acts of foolishness, after all; we're called to be fools like Jesus. Just as he valued doing God's will over all the things the world thinks important—comfort, success, material well-being, and the like—so should we. More than that, just as he valued doing God's will more highly than his own life, accepting suffering and death in his Father's service, so should we. In the world's eyes, this is foolish; but to us who are being saved, it is the power and the wisdom of God.

“He is no fool who would choose to give the things he cannot keep

to buy what he can never lose.”

—Jim Elliott

God's own fool, part II

(I was originally intending just one more post on this, but now I think it will work better as two separate posts.)

The following is an actual ad placed in an Irish newspaper some years ago: “1985 Blue Volkswagen Golf. Only 15 km; only 1 driver. Only first gear and reverse used. Never driven hard. Original tires; original brakes. Original fuel and oil. Owner wishing to sell due to employment lay-off.” Sound a little odd? Take a look at the picture.

The conventional wisdom is, you need a car . . . Sometimes, though, following the conventional wisdom is a pretty foolish thing to do. Conversely, sometimes those the conventional wisdom calls foolish aren’t fools at all. Sometimes they’re actually three steps ahead of the rest of us. Take the example of Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express and the man who created the overnight delivery which we now take for granted. He first proposed this in a paper when he was a student at Yale University; the professor gave him a C, telling Smith that his idea was interesting but couldn’t be done. Smith went ahead and did it anyway, even though a Ph.D. had told him he was foolish. We know who was right.

The thing is, the world just isn't as wise as it thinks it is, and so sometimes you have to be willing to be a fool in order to get anywhere. Which might sound like a truism, but it’s an important thing to remember. Even in the church, too often we get caught up in the conventional wisdom about life, and when that happens we start to judge the gospel by the standards of the world’s wisdom, or to try to make it fit with what we consider wise. The problem with that is that it's a demand that God play by our rules, and he's just not going to honor that; he's not going to conform the truth to our idea of wisdom. The gospel is not wisdom by any human standard—it is a contradiction to human wisdom.

God’s foolishness begins with a crucified Messiah. Many of us have gotten used to this, as Easter goes by every year, but if you really stop to think about it, it's crazy. As the great New Testament scholar Gordon Fee put it, “No mere human, in his or her right mind or otherwise, would ever have dreamed up God’s scheme for redemption—through a crucified Messiah. It is too preposterous, too humiliating, for a God.” Put another way, no self-respecting God would put himself through something like that—becoming human, sharing all the unpleasant and messy parts of life, and then submitting to be tortured to death—and for what? For us? Surely that’s beneath God’s dignity, isn’t it? Yes, it is; no self-respecting God would do a thing like that—which tells us something very important about God: he will never let his dignity get in the way of his love for us.

If the whole idea of a crucified Messiah is God’s foolishness, then surely Jesus was God’s designated fool; and for all that we tend to think of him as a great wise man and a great teacher, he made a lot of those around him think he was a fool, or worse. It wasn’t long into his ministry before Jesus had convinced his family that he was insane, and the priests that he was possessed by Satan himself. After all, he just didn’t act like a normal person, and his teaching challenged almost everything the religious leaders taught, in one way or another. He upset people’s expectations, and sometimes their furniture; and when he started to explain things to his disciples, it only upset them, too.

Jesus just wasn’t what anyone was looking for. The Jews knew what Messiah would look like; he would come with signs of God’s power and lead his people out of their captivity, just as Moses had done so long before. The Greeks, on the other hand, being the philosophical types, had their systems and divided the world into all its appropriate boxes; they were looking for a perfectly reasonable God who fit their system, who fit into their boxes. Both were sure they had God all figured out; to both, the idea of a crucified God was scandalous—indeed, it was insane.

And yet, it was through this crazy plan—and this equally crazy Messiah—that God saved the world. It wasn’t through any of our own work or our own wisdom that God saved us, not even the best we could offer; in his own wisdom, God saw to that. Though this all looks foolish to the unaided eye, God’s foolishness outsmarts our wisdom. Christ’s crucifixion, the ultimate act of powerlessness, is the ultimate act of God’s power; his crucifixion, which is complete foolishness to those who are lost, is the ultimate act of his wisdom. We don’t have the choice to look for some wiser way, because there isn’t one; we can only trust God and be saved by his wise foolishness, or cling to our own wisdom and be lost.

God's Own Fool

OK, so this one is Erin's fault; I got along exploring her blog after her response (which I very much appreciated) to the meme I started, and ran across her post on foolishness and God. Apparently it's part of a synchroblog that she and some other folks have going; but while I might not resonate with this in the same way as they do, this is something with which I resonate powerfully nonetheless. It begins with Jesus, God's designated Fool; and it ends with us, his designated fools. I'll talk about that tomorrow. For now, I want to let Michael Card do the talking, because I've always loved this song.

God's Own Fool

It seems I've imagined Him all of my life
As the wisest of all of mankind;
But if God's holy wisdom is foolish to men,
He must have seemed out of His mind.
For even His family said He was mad,
And the priests said, "A demon's to blame";
But God in the form of this angry young man
Could not have seemed perfectly sane.

When we in our foolishness thought we were wise,
He played the fool and He opened our eyes;
When we in our weakness believed we were strong,
He became helpless to show we were wrong.
And so we follow God's own fool,
For only the foolish can tell;
Believe the unbelievable—
Come, be a fool as well.

So come lose your life for a carpenter's son,
For a madman who died for a dream,
And you'll have the faith His first followers had,
And you'll feel the weight of the beam.
So surrender the hunger to say you must know,
Have the courage to say, "I believe,"
For the power of paradox opens your eyes
And blinds those who say they can see.

Chorus

Words and music: Michael Card
© 1985 Mole End Music
From the album Scandalon, by Michael Card

More tomorrow.

Gospel witness

Barry's post today on evangelism got me thinking. Evangelism has gotten a bad rap with a lot of people thanks to the high-pressure approach of a few—the sort of folks who grab random strangers, stick a half-dozen Scripture verses in their ear, badger them into saying a certain prayer, stuff a tract in their pocket, and walk off confident they’ve “saved another soul.” I’m sure God can use that; after all, God used Jacob, he used Jonah, he used Peter—who am I to say God can’t use anybody or anything. But what we tend to forget is that in Acts 1, Jesus didn't say, “You will do witnessing,” he said, “You will be my witnesses.” Our call as Christians isn’t to “save souls” in that sense, but to share the life Jesus has given us with the people around us; and we aren’t called to witness to Jesus just by memorizing some spiel, we’re called to be his witnesses by the way we live our lives. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”

Now, the downside at this point is that we often don’t hear this correctly; we have the tendency to mentally translate this into “I don’t have to tell people about Jesus, I just have to go out and live my life and that’s good enough.” Well, yes and no, sort of. Go back to that quote from St. Francis and think about this for a minute: “Preach the gospel at all times.” That’s the standard: our lives are to be sermons on the word of God, backed up by our words. Our call as disciples of Christ is to go out into the world and live in it as he did—talking with others about our Father in heaven, and just as importantly, showing his love to those around us in every way we can think of. We are called to do the work he did: to feed the hungry; to care for the sick; to welcome the outsider; to defend the oppressed; to lift up the downtrodden; to love the unlovable; to break down the barriers between race and class and gender; and to speak the truth so clearly and unflinchingly, when the opportunity arises, that people want to kill us for it.

Bumper-sticker geopolitics

I saw a bumper sticker today that caught my attention: "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." It made me wish I had the person who owned that car there to talk with, to ask them one question: Why? This isn't a truism, after all, something that can simply be presented as inarguable; and while I suppose it might be presented as a dictum that impresses by the force of its truth, I don't find it so. Rather, this is an assertion which needs to be supported with logic and evidence; if it is so, it needs to be proven.

To be honest, I don't think it can be—I think the study of history is very much against this proposition. To be sure, there are times when efforts to prepare for war undermine or even negate efforts to prevent it (World War I would be the classic case in point); but given the reality throughout history of aggressive expansionistic powers which tend to treat countries unprepared for war as hors d'oeuvres—which does at least make for short wars, I'll grant—there are clearly many cases in which failing to prepare for war makes war inevitable. (Just ask Neville Chamberlain.)

The bottom line here, I think, is that war (like most major human undertakings) is complex, and neither the factors that cause it nor the strategies for preventing it can be summarized and dismissed in a bumper sticker. That sort of simplistic thinking does no one any good.

Songs of the week, for Hap

This is prefatory to a post or three on Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical, which has gotten me thinking about hope, and faith. That in turn, though, along with a conversation with Hap, got me thinking about these songs, so I decided to post them.

Come In

If you're standing next to someone
Who doesn't know your name,
Come in, pull up a chair;
You and me, we are the same.

This is the palace of the thinkers, dreamers, in-betweeners,
The broken record-players hearing something in this music;
Here the wind blows softly, carrying a note forever,
Cradling the melody of hope.

If you're screaming in the dark
And no one hears your voice,
Welcome to this whole new world of sound;
Come in, friend, sit down.

Chorus

Oh, it's the atmosphere of truth
With an offering of peace;
Under your flesh of withered pride,
So many broken dreams,
Fallen man and other things . . .

If you're reaching out to no one
And holding in a smile,
Come in and know your name;
Oh, friend, I'm listening.

Chorus

Words and music: Sarah Masen
© 1996 River Oaks Music/Andi Beat Goes On Music
From the album sarah masen, by Sarah Masen

Hope Like a Stranger

Hope, like a stranger, came to my door;
I was afraid, I was rude—"What are you coming here for?
Have you come to stay, or are you just passing through?
I've seen your face, but I do not know you."
He said, "You know me, but I've had to remain
Hidden in the shadows of your sorrow and pain,
For you have lived your life as a slave, so it seems,
Believing your nightmares instead of your dreams."

Hope, like a stranger, posed a question like a dare:
"Can you mask the mysteries of your heart, pretending not to care?
For the thing that you dismissed with your cynical façade
Was the hope you'd been given from the very heart of God.
And it drove you in secret, but you held it close at bay,
And you tried to disown me, but you're not made to be that way;
So I stand here longing, for no matter where you run
I will wait like the Father of the Prodigal Son."

He said, "Hope, by itself, it can never be an end—
It's like holding paper money that's impossible to spend.
Unless the value is a given, the bargain's incomplete."
Then he showed me the scars on his hands and his feet.
I touched his wounds as I steadied my nerve;
He said, "I only bear the marks of the Master I serve,
And He sends me here to tell you I am bound up with Him.
You'd do well, when he comes, to also let Him in."

Hope, like a stranger, came to my door;
But he's risen and he stays a stranger no more.

Words and music: Bob Bennett
© 1991 Bright Avenue Songs
From the album Here on Bright Avenue, by Bob Bennett

Hope

We'll be taking off our clothes to sing;
We'll be wearing our own skin.
We'll be taking off a whole lot more
Just so we can sing,
Just so we can sing.

Hope is coming out tonight,
Knocking at the door.
You've got to let that stranger in,
Looking at your soul,
Looking at your soul.

A peeling and a shedding mind,
Changing what we're worth—
Blessed are the meek, somehow;
They're taking in the earth,
Taking in the earth.

And all this talk of love and peace
And wanting something true—
Well, peace can cut the rope sometimes
That's holding on to me and you,
Holding on to me and you.

Chorus

No sentimental bags of gold
To occupy the hurt;
It's knowing what the demons sold
When falling to the earth,
When falling to the earth.

Now I'm stretching out across the land,
Trying my best to understand
While fear is barking like a dog,
But I'm holding out my hand,
Still holding out my hands.

Chorus

Standing in the cold,
Looking at your soul.

Words and music: Sarah Masen
© 2001 Dayspring Music, Inc.
From the album The Dreamlife of Angels, by Sarah Masen

Anniversary of a miracle

Today marks the 67th anniversary of a miracle—one which Michael Linton, writing in First Things some time ago, suggested is "the greatest artistic miracle of our times." On January 15, 1941, in the Nazi POW camp Stalag VIII-A at Görlitz in Silesia, the great French Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen, a prisoner in the camp, premiered his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the end of time"). Messiaen, who had been given time, space, and resources by the camp commandant to enable him to write, composed the quartet for himself (on piano) and three other musicians among the prisoners, a violinist, a cellist, and a clarinetist.

What makes the work miraculous is not only the place and time in which it was written, but its character. As Linton writes:

In the midst of chaos, Messiaen wrote about the apocalypse in a completely "unapocalyptic" manner. In the previous century, the sequence from the Requiem Mass had given composers the opportunity to unleash all the thunder they could muster to depict the horrific details of God’s day of accounting. Berlioz and Verdi had both written depictions that chill—or more honestly perhaps, thrill—us to this day. And not too long after Messiaen’s quartet was completed, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Britten, and Penderecki would write pieces expressive of the horrors of the Nazis and their war, music full of screams, howls, and cries for righteous justice against the oppressor.

But Messiaen has no place for such neo-pagan hysterics. In the middle of a prison camp, a prisoner unsure if he would ever again see his family or home again, Messiaen composed a vision of heaven where anger, violence, vengeance, and despair are not so much repressed as irrelevant. This work has nothing to do with war, or prison, or "man’s inhumanity to man." This piece is entirely about the work of God and the glory of Jesus. There is no darkness here. There is no bitterness. There is no rage. Instead there is power, light, transcendence, ecstasy, and joy eternal.

Messiaen's music isn't everyone's cup of tea, by any means—it's modern music, for one thing, and then it's modern in a different way from most of the music of this past century; but this is a beautiful and powerful piece that deserves to be appreciated. I'm not going to put all of it up (it's a fairly long composition, in eight movements), but here's a taste or two. This is a video of the first movement, "Liturgie de cristal":



Here's the fourth movement, "Intermède":



And the fifth, "Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus":

It's great music, even if it isn't to everyone's taste; but just as much, and something we can all appreciate, it's a powerful testimony to the way in which the love and the grace of God can overcome human evil.

The fantasy of the Real

I am, and have been for many years, a fan of fantasy and science fiction. Fortunately for me, as an English major, I attended a college with an English department that was generally open to such things, without too many professors who drew a distinction between "“genre fiction” and “real literature.” (I could go off on a rant about how “literary fiction” is just another genre, and indeed one of the more rulebound, hidebound and unprofitable ones, but . . . some other time.) I appreciated that at the time because it meant I didn't have to feel put down (very often) for my reading preferences; over the years, I've come to appreciate it even more as I've come to realize just how constraining the standard academic view of literature really is. John W. Campbell, Jr., founding father of modern science fiction, famously argued that science fiction is the only real literature because it alone encompasses all possible pasts, presents and futures (and thus includes all literature); I think his conclusion is overblown, but he has a point.

It seems to me that what distinguishes real literature from efforts which don't rise to that level is that real literature opens our eyes, our minds, our ears, and our hearts—it helps us to see, hear, and understand people, including ourselves, for who we are, and our world for what it is. The thing about science fiction, moving forward and backward along the axis of time (including onto the parallel tracks of alternate history), and fantasy, moving sideways along the axis of alternate worlds, is that they offer far more angles from which to do this. Indeed, by adopting an “unreal” setting, I think they make it easier for us to see and understand our world and ourselves more deeply than we can within a “realistic" frame of reference. (The flip side to this would be the way in which “reality shows” are the most unreal things on television.)

Now, I've been convinced of this for a long time, and in the process I've learned a lot of good theology from fantasy writers like C. S. Lewis (no surprise), J. R. R. Tolkien (ditto), and Stephen R. Donaldson (which might be a little more unexpected); but it's not a case I've heard many people make. Now, however, along has come Alison Milbank with her book Chesterton and Tolkien As Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real to explore the truth of this in the work of these two great English Catholic writers. I can't comment directly on the book, since even on Amazon, it's going for $93.60, and that just isn't in the budget right now; but from the review Ralph Wood wrote for the First Things website (in “On the Square”), I'm very much looking forward to reading it. In Chesterton and Tolkien (among others), we are caught by the understanding that the world is more real, and high and beautiful and perilous and terrible, than our senses tell us it is; and from what Wood has to say, Milbank captures this well.

Both writers resorted to fantasy as an escape into reality, as Tolkien liked to say. They were fascinated with fairies because Elfland, as Chesterton called it, enabled them to envision the world as wondrously magical no less than terribly contingent: as “utterly real and enchanted at one and the same time.” Whereas conventional Christian apologists often cast theological stones at the obduracy of atheists and materialists, Tolkien and Chesterton answer them with dwarves and ents.

Beautiful. I look forward to reading this book.

Exactly what we don't need

Hillary Clinton's win in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, when polling leading up to the vote had Barack Obama leading by double digits, sent even the best and most respected political commentators (such as Howard Fineman) scrambling to explain what happened. It also, unfortunately, sent conspiracy theorists scrambling; it's sad that we can't have a close contest anymore without someone screaming it was rigged, but so it goes. Of course, when it's just conspiracy theorists, you can ignore them; but now, Democratic presidential (sort of) candidate Dennis Kucinich is calling for a recount. I'm not sure what to make of Kucinich doing this, since it's certainly not going to help his candidacy—either he's gunning for a slot in an Obama administration, or his loopiness includes a certain loopy integrity, because this isn't going to help his popularity with the Democratic party leadership, either—but there's no question, it gives the idea that there might have been irregularities in the NH primary a certain legitimacy.

And all I can say is, dear God, please let it not be so. Obviously, I have no intention of voting for whoever the Democratic candidate is this November—anyone looking through this blog should have a pretty clear idea where my political positions fall on the spectrum—and I suppose one might look at this and say, anything that hurts the Democrats is good. If Sen. Clinton's campaign really did steal the NH primary, which is what Rep. Kucinich is essentially saying, I can't see how that wouldn't hurt the Democrats; from a cynical point of view, then, I suppose one might hope it turns out that way. But I just can't do that, because if this is true, the damage is far, far greater to our political process. To operate properly, democratic/republican politics depends on a certain level of trust and mutual commitment to the process, and that's strained enough in this country as it is; if these allegations are true, it's another major body blow to that trust, and to that commitment to playing by the rules, and America really can't afford that. Especially not right now.

Besides, as much as I don't particularly care for Sen. Clinton, I do believe in her idealism, or at least that she once was an idealist; I think her hunger for power is real, but I also think that it's largely rooted in the desire to do good for her country, or at least that it started out that way. I would truly, deeply hate to believe that she has fallen so far that she, or anyone else in her campaign, could actually do something like that.

"Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men."

—Lord Acton

If you like good stories

keep an eye out for Noah Farlee. Heather McDougal at Cabinet of Wonders met him, I'm not sure where, and has a splendid post up about him; at 16, he's already a fresh, original, creative, and truly interesting storyteller. (Check out his short story "Giskard the Genius"—warning, it's a PDF file, because it's graphic fiction, not merely text—and you'll see what I mean.) I also appreciate this statement of his: "With Giskard, I wanted to prove that you could still tell a story for a story's sake. I wanted a story that was enjoyable to people of any age, instead of just 'acceptable' for all ages. No gritty violence, no brooding main characters or political commentary, but also no distracting morals or nauseating innocence. Just plain clean fun." That's a worthy goal, I'd say, if you can pull it off—and especially if you're honestly funny enough. This guy can, and he is, and I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

Spiritual discipline?

So my friend Wayne credits me, among others, with "helping me to view blogging as in many ways a spiritual discipline for the 21st century"; and that started me thinking, because it had never occurred to me to consider it that way. Dallas Willard, in his classic book The Spirit of the Disciplines, has this to say about them:

We can, through faith and grace, become like Christ by practicing the types of activities he engaged in, by arranging our whole lives around the activities he himself practiced in order to remain constantly at home in the fellowship of his Father. . . . When we call men and women to life in Christ Jesus, we are offering them the greatest opportunity of their lives—the opportunity of a vivid companionship with him, in which they will learn to be like him and live as he lived. This is that "transforming fellowship" explained by Leslie Weatherhead. We meet and dwell with Jesus and his Father in the disciplines for the spiritual life.

We could also say that spiritual disciplines are practices in which we engage in order "to cultivate our daily lives into fertile ground in which God can bring growth and change"; practicing the disciplines forms and shapes our lives much as the farmer forms and shapes the soil, clearing away unhelpful growth and carving the ground into furrows that will receive the seed and the rain, so that the crop will grow.

Now, I could go on and talk about the role and importance of spiritual disciplines such as silence and solitude, prayer and fasting in actually living the life to which Christ calls us; but what I'm wondering is, does blogging really belong on that list? Not that blogging is automatically a spiritual discipline—but then, none of the disciplines are automatic. You have to be, well, disciplined about them. The question is, granted that we can blog unspiritually just as we can pray unspiritually, can we really use blogging as a discipline for spiritual growth?

It's a question I'd never thought about before; but I think we can. What's more, I think this is something those of us who are Christians who blog need to consider seriously and carefully. That being so, though I haven't been a meme-y sort, I'd like to pose it to you as a meme:

In what ways can you use blogging as a spiritual discipline?

For myself, the first thing I'd have to confess is that I often don't. Granted, I never have on a conscious level; but the thing about spiritual disciplines, properly understood, is that they aren't just something we do, they're something to which we submit. If, for instance, your prayers are merely a litany of your own arguments and opinions and requests, with no room in them for anyone but yourself, that's not a spiritual discipline, because there's no space in there for you to be changed. Similarly, if all I do in blogging is assert my own ideas and contentions, whatever the value of those ideas might be, it's not a spiritual discipline; someone else might be formed by that, but I certainly won't be. It seems, then, that in using blogging as a spiritual discipline, a key element has to be receptivity.

Given that, then, and given the natural tendency of human beings to want to challenge others without challenging ourselves, my first thought is this: blogging can help me see the gaps between what I live and what I believe. Put another way, one spiritual discipline for me in blogging is to apply my beliefs and their implications not only to the lives of others out there in the culture, but also to myself and my own life. If I say x, and that means someone else ought to change and to live differently, how does it mean that I need to change and live differently? It's an important question, and one that blogging as a discipline can force me to face.

That's one thought, and certainly not the only one; I'd like to hear what others have to say. If you happen to come across this post, I'd like to challenge you to think about this question, and answer it for yourself. To start the ball rolling, I'm specifically tagging Wayne (of course), Hap (ditto), and Dave Moody at blog 137. You three, and whoever will, I ask to do the following:

1. Answer the question on your own blog. (If you don't have one and would like to chew on this anyway, please do so in the comments on this post.)

2. Keep this going--tag a friend or three.

3. Come back and post a comment here to let me know you've responded, and where to find your response. I would very much like to see what others have to say on this.

Thanks.

Huck rock

I'm surprised I haven't seen anything on the Thinklings yet about this—I really expected Quaid to be all over it—but Mike Huckabee rocked Leno last night. Literally.

I should note, I only tripped across his appearance, since I've been pretty sick and haven't been following much of anything the last week or two; I knew Law & Order's season premiere (which also rocked, btw) was last night, though, so I watched that, and thus saw the ads for Leno's return, and Huckabee's appearance. I was interested to see what Leno would have to say about the writers' strike, and just as interested to see Huckabee, so I stayed up to watch.

I was quite impressed. Of course, as I've noted here earlier, I'd already been worked around to supporting Huckabee, so it's not like I was predisposed against him; but still, as compared to a guy like Fred Dalton Thompson, or other pols I've seen on Leno, Huckabee seemed very natural and relaxed, poised but at his ease. He talked very freely and naturally about his faith and some of his policy positions—among other things, he made hands-down the best case I've ever heard for replacing the national income tax with a national sales tax, an idea about which I'm now actually somewhat less dubious than I was; he also talked about his decision not to go negative on Romney in Iowa and told some of his own story, including his early rock-and-roll ambitions. At that point, Leno asked him, "Are you good enough to play with the band?" and he answered, "No, but I'd like to anyway"—and when they came back from the commercial break, there he was on bass guitar, next to Kevin Eubanks. Granted, it was a pretty standard walk-it-up bass riff, nothing real challenging, but still, it was obvious that he and everyone else was having a grand old time; he got a high-five from Eubanks as he headed back to the couch.

All in all, I have to think Mike Huckabee won himself some votes last night; I suspect there are also a number of us out there who are rather more firmly in his camp now than we were. Not a bad night's work, Governor; not a bad night's work at all.