This is how you play the game

It's been interesting reading the avalanche of media commentary on the New York Times' would-be hatchet job on Senator John McCain; at bottom, they mostly seem to come down to the conclusion that the Grey Lady just didn't have the goods, and shouldn't have let itself be stampeded into running the story without them. At this point, it looks like little harm has been done to the senator's well-earned reputation as the most difficult man on Capitol Hill. Perhaps more interesting, though, has been watching the McCain campaign's response, and its sequelae. Almost immediately, they said they were "going to war with the New York Times," and they have, with deadly efficiency; he was sharp enough to hire Robert Bennett, a veteran of D.C.'s brutal infighting, to represent him, and Bennett has been particularly effective at dismantling the Times' case.

The campaign's goal has been not merely to defuse this story, but to use it to bring the senator's conservative critics on board. It's been working, because at the same time as the campaign has been using this to reel them in, conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh have also been trying to use the NYT's attack—to pull Sen. McCain in a more conservative direction. The message is clear (and Limbaugh made it explicit): "Stop trying to be liberal enough to keep the media happy with you—if you're the Republican nominee, they're going to hate you and try to take you down regardless. Stand up and be a conservative—you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a goat." I think it will work to some extent (I've argued before that conservatives can expect this, after all); the interesting thing will be to see to what extent, and how quickly. In any case, watching the maneuvering between the campaign and the conservative media establishment, each trying to leverage this story to shift the other, is a fascinating lesson in how you play the game of politics in this country. One more for the textbooks.

Update: David Brooks has an extremely interesting column in today's Times on a longstanding, deep, and bitter rift between Sen. McCain's two long-time chief advisors—his campaign manager, Rick Davis, and the one source mentioned by name in the original Times piece, John Weaver. Though it isn't clear how, it seems very likely that this vicious rivalry played some part in the story.

The value of experience

The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to the rank as America's worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow.

Thank you, George Will. (Though it should be noted, of course, that Lincoln was an extraordinary individual; it need scarcely be said that not every former one-term congressman would have done quite so well.)

Inconvenient truth?

The conventional wisdom is that the earth is warming, that it's the fault of human activity, and that we need to make major changes to reduce CO2 emissions or we're heading for disaster. Certainly, that's the line pushed by the scientific and media establishments, and by much of the political establishment as well; as for the cultural elite, they showed their view of the matter when they gave Al Gore an Oscar for his film expounding that point of view, and then topped it off with the Nobel Peace Prize (in one of the stranger awards in the already strange history of the Nobel Prizes).

Which is a very good thing, if this is a real problem. But is it? Is the science really there? Maybe not. For all the worry about shrinking ice caps, for instance, the ice has come back under the Northern Hemisphere's coldest winter in decades, which has given it its greatest snow cover in over 40 years. For all the concern about polar bears, their population is up. And for all the insistence that global warming is caused by human CO2 emissions, the temperature data and the CO2 data don't correlate; that's why 30 years ago, the alarmists were proclaiming that human CO2 emissions were driving a cooling trend that would send us into another ice age.

The fact of the matter is, we know beyond a doubt that the climate has been heating and cooling all through human history; around the turn of the 17th century, we had a "little ice age" that saw the Thames and the Hudson freeze, while earlier, during the Viking period, Greenland was pleasant enough to warrant the name they gave it. We know that the sun's behavior varies, and it seems likely that fluctuations in solar activity is one of the major drivers in global temperature change; the fact that other planets of our solar system have also been experiencing “global warming” certainly suggests that this is the case. The driving force behind the global-warming argument appears to be not science, but the wisdom of Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”

That said, does it necessarily follow that we can ignore the question of CO2 emissions, or other forms of pollution? While I think it's inappropriate of the establishment to smear dissenters as “in the pay of the oil companies,” there are certainly those who oppose the global-warming argument not because it's bad science, but because they have their own agendas. As Christians, we should be very careful about that. Regardless of the scientific case one way or the other, we have powerful theological reasons to fight pollution; we know from Genesis that God has not given us this planet, but has rather entrusted it to our care as stewards under his authority, and we will most assuredly be called to account for how we have taken care of it. I believe the earth God has made is much more resilient than we often believe, and that our capacity to damage it permanently is quite a bit less impressive than we, in our twisted pride, tend to think—but that in no way frees us from our responsibility to enhance the earth by our labors rather than diminishing it. Will continuing to pump our pollutants into the air cause catastrophic warming that will kill billions of people? I rather doubt it; but if we continue to do so without doing everything we can to clean up our act (bearing in mind that today's solutions often produce tomorrow's problems), we'll still pay for it in the end.

(Update: here's an excellent column by Thomas Sowell on the subject of global warming.)

Lenten Song of the Week

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

"Man of Sorrows!"—what a name
For the Son of God who came
Ruined sinners to reclaim!
Hallelujah! what a Savior!

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood,
Sealed my pardon with His blood;
Hallelujah! what a Savior!

Guilty, vile, and helpless we,
Spotless Lamb of God was He;
Full atonement!—can it be?
Hallelujah! what a Savior!

Lifted up was He to die,
"It is finished!" was His cry;
Now in heaven exalted high,
Hallelujah! what a Savior!

When He comes, our glorious King,
All His ransomed home to bring,
Then anew this song we'll sing:
Hallelujah! what a Savior!

Words and music: Philip P. Bliss
HALLELUJAH! WHAT A SAVIOR, 7.7.7.8

Abiding in the light

On my post below on the PC(USA)'s recent church-court rulings, my wife's Uncle Ben left a comment in which he noted, among other things, that "we all have varying lists of issues A-Z that we consider essential that don't quite match what other people think are non-essential. Of course, one gets tangled up in that nasty charity stuff, too, even if we can codify essentials. Darn that I Cor 13." True statement, that, one which was echoed today by the Rev. Paul Detterman, executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal, in a powerful sermon to our presbytery assembly on 1 John 2:1-11. (Unfortunately, no one taped his message, but when I asked him for a copy, he said it would be posted on the website; when it is, I expect I'll have more to say on it.)

As the Rev. Detterman noted, sin is sin, and it's "not love but cultural capitulation" to tell people otherwise—and yet, when we let those who disagree with us become enemies and treat them as such, that's sin too. "By this we may know that we are in [Jesus]: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. . . . Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness . . . and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes." We may disagree—in fact, we will disagree, there's nothing more certain than that; but how did Jesus treat those with whom he disagreed? He spoke to them quite sharply, to be sure, but he never stopped loving them; though their hard, cold hearts drove him to his death, that death was for them, too, just as surely as for any of the rest of us. May we also learn to love those who oppose us, even to the point of being willing to lay down our own good for theirs.

Two cheers for political polarization

I know I've lamented the polarization of American politics in this space before; but then, I've also argued at least once for the value of historical perspective, and with a dose of perspective, I may have to rethink my lament. In a brilliant essay in the Wilson Quarterly titled “In Praise of the Values Voter,” Jon A. Shields (an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs) makes a strong case that “political polarization has improved civic life”—a statement I would never have thought to read. Apparently, however, our current polarized state, with strong ideological divisions between the two parties, was deliberately induced by activists of the Left who believed, in the words of a special committee of the American Political Science Association, that “the ‘ailment’ of American parties was their absence of ideological cohesion, a condition that had dangerously slowed ‘the heartbeat of American democracy.’” The response to this was an effort to reform the system which was motivated, according to James Q. Wilson, by “a desire to moralize public life.” Such an effort was bound to increase controversy and partisanship, but people like Tom Hayden embraced that, saying it would “vivify” a political system they perceived as demoralized, paralyzed, and devoid of any real meaning.

The irony in all this, as Dr. Shields notes, is that now they and their heirs are “mounting a counterattack against their own revolution,” in large part because “‘values voters’ . . . turned out to have the wrong values.” In Dr. Shields’ analysis, the project launched by the New Left did indeed breathe new life into the American political system—but it did so in large part by strengthening the conservatives they despised; where liberal political scientists assumed that “liberal Democrats would benefit from the hardening of party differences,” the opposite has turned out to be the case, and so now they badly want to push the djinn back in the bottle. Unfortunately for them—but maybe, just maybe, fortunately for our country as a whole, however exhausting the current state of things often is—it ain’t going.

(My thanks to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus for his essay, also excellent, which pointed me to Dr. Shields’ piece.)

A clear-eyed view of the Middle East

courtesy of one of the best observers out there, Reuel Marc Gerecht. Short form: the world out there looks rather different than you've probably gathered from the media. The irony of the Democratic Party position on the GWOT (we supported Afghanistan, but not Iraq) is that it's led to all sorts of assertions that Bush lied to get us into Iraq, that it's a quagmire, etc., but given the administration a free pass on Afghanistan—and yet, we're over the hump in Iraq, clearly winning, and have dealt al'Qaeda a heavy body blow there, while we're losing in Afghanistan, may wind up losing Pakistan as a consequence, and will almost certainly be fighting an actual war up there long after Baghdad is no scarier a duty station than Pusan. Of perhaps greater significance, this administration has never faced up to the immense problem of Saudi Arabia. It may well be that they were hoping to get Iraq stabilized as a trustworthy ally first—an understandable strategy, if so, and a possibility Gerecht doesn't consider—but probably not; and even if it was, given the time Iraq has taken (and was always going to take), it still wasn't a good idea in the end.

It's a bit early yet for a post-mortem on this presidency's foreign policy, but as we begin to think about that question, the good news is that the grand move for which the administration has been pilloried, the invasion of Iraq, is ending up a great accomplishment. The bad news is, with regard to the Arab/Muslim world as a whole, it's been their only real accomplishment. Still, on the whole, I agree with Gerecht's take on this: "Iraq and the war on terror will likely save the president's legacy in the Middle East."

Rice for Veep

Condoleezza Rice, that is—just the thought has The Nation worried. They're thinking for Sen. McCain, but I think she'd be equally good for Gov. Huckabee in the (increasingly unlikely) event that he ends up with the nomination. On the symbolism front, her presence on the ticket would balance the Democrats; what's more, she would be an incredible campaigner, since she's charismatic, tough, and deadly in debate. For Gov. Huckabee, she would shore up his greatest weakness, the widespread distrust of his ability to handle foreign policy; for Sen. McCain, she would amplify his greatest strength. (She might also help address his greatest weakness, the distrust he's earned among the party's evangelical wing; though not known primarily for her views on domestic policy, she is herself an evangelical and is well regarded among evangelicals.) Plus, she's already a national figure with significant experience in the Executive Branch. Her presence on the ticket obviously wouldn't address charges that Sen. McCain (or for that matter, Gov. Huckabee) "isn't a real conservative," but I would think that those could be addressed in other ways. (My preferred thought at the moment would be to bring Gov. Romney aboard the campaign as presumptive nominee for Secretary of the Treasury.)

Rice for running mate. If she'll take it, who better?

It all depends on what the meaning of “shall” is

but the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly (hereafter GA PJC) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has apparently decided that “shall” actually means “shall,” and that if the church's constitution says you can't do something, then you actually aren't allowed to do it. That might sound like a trivial exercise in logic, but not, alas, in this denomination, where there are many who insist their personal beliefs/preferences trump the decisions of the body, and thus that they don't have to play by the rules. We even had a task force composed of a lot of bright people suggest that we formalize that; on their recommendation (at least as widely understood), if you want to be a Presbyterian pastor without believing and doing what Presbyterian pastors are supposed to believe and do, all you should have to do is stand up and say, “I don't accept this part, that part, and the other part” (for instance, only have sex with a person of the opposite sex to whom you're married; the deity of Christ; and the belief that salvation is only through Jesus) and your presbytery should say, “Oh, OK, well, we have no right to object,” and approve you as a pastor anyway. Now, however, the denomination's top court has come along and said, “No, you can't do that.”

—At least, that's what they've said to the behavior part; as far as beliefs go, I'm not sure. On the one hand, when GA PJC told presbyteries they can't adopt resolutions declaring that they're going to hold candidates for ordination to the constitutional standards, their reason was as follows: “Adopting statements about mandatory provisions of the Book of Order for ordination and installation of officers falsely implies that other governing bodies might not be similarly bound; that is, that they might choose to restate or interpret the provisions differently, fail to adopt such statements, or possess some flexibility with respect to such provisions.” That would seem to imply that in fact other governing bodies are similarly bound. On the other hand, in the Pittsburgh case, they noted that the church requires candidates “to conform their actions, though not necessarily their beliefs or opinions, to certain standards” (emphasis mine); clearly, they're leaving room for dissent. Which is fine, as far as it goes, since we don't all agree on everything, and never have; the question is, how far does that go? Does that just apply to “manner of life standards”—you can disagree with the requirement to obey X, but you still have to obey it? Or does it apply to theological standards as well? Someone's going to try to argue that it does, you can be sure of that. Which would mean, if we ended up there, that you could deny the deity of Christ, the necessity of his saving work, and pretty much everything else that has historically defined what it means to be a Christian, as long as you don't have homosexual sex. If GA PJC has upheld the behavioral standards but not standards of belief, then at least we all have to play by some of the same rules; but how much have we really gained?

My greatest objection to all the toleration of defiance in this denomination, and to the task force recommendation which was clearly intended to institutionalize that, has always been that it's a deadly blow to what we understand by “church”; if we're truly to be in relationship with each other, then each of us has to honor and abide by whatever the body as a whole decides. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”—if it does, then something is deeply, deeply wrong. We have every right to work to change policies and standards with which we disagree, but that doesn't give us the right to act now as if they didn't exist. To claim otherwise isn't a mark of spiritual maturity, but of the highest degree of spiritual pride. For us to be a part of this denomination is to be committed to each other, and to recognize that we really do need each other after all; and to do that, we need to stand down and accept that if the denomination—which is all of us together—says, “No,” that means “No.”

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