Thoughts on Jesus' ascension

Is there a less-noticed Christian holy day than Ascension Day? If there is, I can't think of one. (Mind you, I'm not including saints' days in this category, for various reasons.) Part of that, no doubt, is that it falls on a Thursday, so it can't even get the casual-mention-in-the-bulletin kind of notice—you have to schedule a special service for it, which it seems nobody much does. (Of course, many Protestants never did; but though Catholics are supposed to, from what I can see, a lot of them don't anymore either.) More than that, though, I don't think most Christians in this country see the point; I would expect that most of us would affirm that Jesus died and rose again would also affirm his ascension, but have no sense whatsoever that it matters. To us, it seems more like a clerical detail than anything else. Jesus left, but he didn’t die, so, OK, he just sort of took off and disappeared, instead. If anyone came along and said, “No, no, he didn’t ascend into heaven, he just did thus-and-such,” we wouldn’t think it was all that important; we don’t think this matters.

The thing is, though, it does matter, because the ascension is important—quite profoundly so, in fact. It’s no mere afterthought to the resurrection, nor is it just a footnote to the work of Christ on the cross; rather, it’s the necessary completion of that work. Without the ascension, the resurrection is incomplete; it’s only in the ascension of Christ that all that he accomplished in the resurrection is truly fulfilled.

Now, I imagine that sounds strange to a lot of folks; it’s certainly not the way we tend to talk at Easter, or the kind of thing we usually say about the resurrection of Christ. There’s good reason for that, because the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are the central event of human history, and it’s there that the saving work of God was accomplished; we don’t want to do anything to take the focus off that truth. However, if in emphasizing the resurrection we forget about the ascension—as we too often do—then we risk losing much of the meaning of the resurrection as well. It’s only in strongly affirming that Jesus ascended into heaven that we can truly say with the people of God throughout the ages that he is risen from the dead.

There are several reasons to say this, but they all come down, ultimately, to one key truth: Christ didn’t come just so we could be “saved” in the sense that we get to go to Heaven instead of Hell. That's certainly part of the story—part of what Christ did on the cross was take our unrighteousness and give us his righteousness, so that by his sacrifice our sins could be forgiven—but there's more to it than that. Jesus’ purpose, his mission in this world, wasn’t only to make us legally right with God so that we could skip out on going to Hell—it was to make us right with God in order to heal our alienation from God, to remove the obstacle that kept us from having a right relationship with him. This is where the importance of the ascension comes in, because while Jesus’ death and resurrection are the core of that work, the ascension was necessary for its application to us.

You see, while Christians these days are accustomed to thinking of the Old Testament priestly system as merely a relic of a dead past, it isn't really; as Hebrews tells us, it's just been relocated, to a different priest, of a different priestly order, in a different temple. Jesus is our great high priest who offered the final, ultimate, total sacrifice for human sin; and under the Old Testament law, the Torah, what was to be done with the sacrifice for the nation that was offered on the Day of Atonement? The blood was brought into the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God, and presented before his throne. That's what Jesus was doing in his ascension: he was bringing his sacrifice before the throne to be presented to the Father. Having done that, he then took up his place as our high priest, bringing our prayers to the Father and interceding with him on our behalf.

Of course, all this was only fully completed and realized at Pentecost, when God poured out his Spirit on all his people; but that's a post for another day.

Song of the Week

I'm preaching a series on the Ascension this Easter season, inspired by the Rev. Gerrit Scott Dawson of First Presbyterian Church (EPC) in Baton Rouge and his work on the subject; this hymn is one we'll be singing this morning as we begin the series. It's a text by my RCA colleague James L. H. Brumm, and I appreciate it because it captures the significance of Jesus' ascension for us.

God Has Gone Up with Shouts of Joy!

God has gone up with shouts of joy!
Christ claims the throne of glory:
Immortal Word in mortal flesh
To share with God our story
Of humans lost to death and sin
Who ache to be invited in
To Love's eternal blessing.

Christ has gone up, still bearing wounds,
Still bound to race and gender;
His royal robe all crimson blood;
His triumph all surrender.
Now we, though bound to who we are,
Can follow, with our pain and scars,
To Love's eternal blessing.

Christ has gone up! Now Christ in us
Leads all the world to glory.
The Word finds voice on Fiery Breath;
Our lives relate the story
Of how God went through death and Hell
That we might have Immanuel
And Love's eternal blessing!

Words: James L. H. Brumm
Music: Bohemian Brethren's Kirchengesänge, 1566
MIT FREUDEN ZART , 8.7.8.7.8.8.7.

Just for grins

I remember reciting this poem in 7th grade, because I thought it was funny; it still amuses me, though it sounds a bit formal to my ear now. It was written, I believe, by a woman named Carolyn Wells.

The Overworked Elocutionist

There was once a little boy whose name was Robert Reese;
And every Friday afternoon he had to speak a piece.
So many poems thus he learned, that soon he had a store
Of recitations in his head, and still kept learning more.

And now this is what happened: He was called upon one week
And totally forgot the piece he was about to speak.
He brain he cudgeled. Not a word remained within his head!
And so he spoke at random, and this is what he said:

“My beautiful, my beautiful, who standest proudly by,
It was the schooner Hesperus–the breaking waves dashed high!
Why is this Forum crowded? What means this stir in Rome?
Under a spreading chestnut tree, there is no place like home!

“When freedom from her mountain height cried, ‘Twinkle, little star,’
Shoot if you must this old gray head, King Henry of Navarre!
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue castled crag of Drachenfels,
My name is Norval, on the Grampian Hills, ring out, wild bells!

“If you’re waking, call me early, to be or not to be,
The curfew must not ring tonight! Oh, woodman, spare that tree!
Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on! and let who will be clever!
The boy stood on the burning deck, but I go on forever!”

His elocution was superb, his voice and gestures fine;
His schoolmates all applauded as he finished the last line.
“I see it doesn’t matter,” Robert thought, “what words I say,
So long as I declaim with oratorical display.”

Brief meditation on gratitude and discipleship

“See, I believe that if you were chosen—that if you were elected—I believe that if God has anything for you it’s not just to make you happy. God did not choose you and call you out of this world just to make you high. And God didn’t choose you and God didn’t call you out of this world just so that you could be pious. Because there are enough pious people
and there are enough happy people in the world. What God called you for
and what God called you to is to make a difference in the world.”

—Rich Mullins

Happiness is a good thing, and piety is a good thing. (Piety has a bad name with some folks, but that's only because they've come across distorted versions of it rather than the real thing.) The limitation to each of them, though, is that they're inner-directed. That's not bad, it's not a flaw, it's just a simple fact: every person and every thing is limited, and this is their limitation (or one of them, anyway). Happiness is about me and my life and my circumstances, and piety is about me and my life and my relationship with God. Both are good and perfectly appropriate things; they just aren't enough in and of themselves. God doesn't call us to be primarily inner-directed (not that you'd know it from a lot of American spirituality); he calls us to be directed outward, in love, and grace, and gratitude.

Indeed, the primary response God asks of us for our salvation is gratitude for what he has done for us and given us; out of that gratitude, then, he asks us to share what we have been given, and to love as we are loved. He calls us to make a difference in this world not out of a grim sense of duty, but out of a deep sense of joy, in simple thankfulness for the opportunity.

Honor, reputation, and sacrifice

I wrote a while back, with reference to John McCain, about the difference between honor and reputation, arguing that Sen. McCain knew the difference even if the New York Times didn't (and presumably still doesn't). Now Sen. McCain's campaign has released a rather extraordinary Web ad which, inter alia, proves that he does indeed know that difference well. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this ad is that it's all about how he learned that difference—and that it's unsparing about just how much he had to learn, and how much growing up he had to do, before he went to war. He's not pulling any punches about the kind of person he was before his stay in the "Hanoi Hilton," and I respect him even more for that.

Martin Luther King Jr.: yad vashem

Forty years ago this evening, at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, America lost one of her great-souled sons when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by an assassin. The memorial at the hotel appositely cites Genesis, from the story of Joseph:

They said one to another, “Behold, here cometh the Dreamer. Let us slay him and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”

—Genesis 37:19-20 (KJV)

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Rev. Dr. King's death is that so much of his dream died with him. Too much of the church, too many of his brothers and sisters in Christ, have set aside his call, which is the call of Christ, that we are to be one in our Lord across all our divisions, racial no less than any other—and for what? For business as usual, and the easiest, most expedient ways to grow congregations. There's no denying, the “homogeneous unit principle” serves the cause of numerical church growth; what it doesn't serve is the cause of the gospel, the work of the kingdom of God on this earth. On this point, more people should listen to Markus Barth:

When no tensions are confronted and overcome, because insiders or outsiders of a certain class or group meet happily among themselves, then the one new thing, peace, and the one new man created by Christ, are missing; then no faith, no church, no Christ, is found or confessed. For if the attribute “Christian” can be given sense from Eph. 2, then it means reconciled and reconciling, triumphant over walls and removing the debris, showing solidarity with the “enemy” and promoting not one’s own peace of mind but “our peace.” . . . When this peace is deprived of its social, national, or economic dimensions, when it is distorted or emasculated so much that only “peace of mind” enjoyed by saintly individuals is left—then Jesus Christ is being flatly denied. To propose, in the name of Christianity, neutrality or unconcern on questions of international, racial, or economic peace—this amounts to using Christ’s name in vain.

It's easy to blame the white church for this, of course, but it's not only the white church that's guilty of leaving the Rev. Dr. King's vision behind; as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, one of his good friends and coworkers, writes, those who claimed the role of leadership of the black community did the same, and did so intentionally. Where the Rev. Dr. King preached the gospel of Jesus Christ for all people, many of those who would claim his mantle “were in no mood for reconciliation, and are not to this day.” The year after his death would see the beginning of black liberation theology with the publication of James Cone's book Black Theology and Black Power, which argued that

In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors. . . . Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation and against the white oppressors, or he is not.

The following year, Dr. Cone took his seat at Union Theological Seminary in New York and published his second book, A Black Theology of Liberation. In that book, he wrote,

The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God's experience, or God is a God of racism. . . . The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition God's own condition. This is the essence of the Biblical revelation.

That's how we got from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.; and it's why so many folks who looked at Barack Obama and thought they were getting the incarnation of the Rev. Dr. King's dream are now wondering if they were sold a bill of goods. The good thing in all this, though, is that Sen. Obama is right—words do matter—and that however the name of Martin Luther King may be used or misused, and however his work and legacy may be invoked or distorted to whatever purpose, his words remain, and they ring with power. Whatever else he was, the Rev. Dr. King was a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he spoke the word of God to America—and when God sends out his word through one of his followers, that word will not return to him empty-handed, but it will accomplish the purpose for which he sent it. As such, it is not too great a thing to say, as Fr. Neuhaus does, that the Rev. Dr. King's words will continue to echo until their purpose is fulfilled.

As long as the American experiment continues, people will listen and be inspired by his “I Have a Dream,” and will read and be instructed by his Letter from Birmingham Jail, and will once again believe that, black and white together, “We shall overcome.”

Amen. In the house of God and within its walls, he has a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off. May Jesus Christ be praised.

The need for ritual

Heather McDougal, who blogs at Cabinet of Wonders, has a brilliant post up on ritual and the reasons that drive us to create rituals—including, especially, why children do. I won't even try to summarize it—I'll just encourage you to go read it—but I will say that of the various points she makes, I think I appreciate this one most:

Mindfulness is not a bad thing, and making up rules to make one's life more interesting can be a good thing. Eating your apple and raisin tart in small bites, and dividing each raisin in half to get at the sweet bit as you go, can be a way to help bring yourself into the present, to pay attention. It means you are tasting, exploring, nodding to each part of what you're eating. Going through life like this can mean you are not gulping down experiences, not rushing yourself, but making a way to see things, feel things, notice things.

Responsibility

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us
and the light goes out.”

—James Baldwin

In this world as we know it, that's about it. God is fixed, and so as Christians we have hope of something better coming; but for now, we must live in this world as it is, without trying to pretend it's anything different. Our call is simply to reflect God's light in this shadowed world as brightly and clearly as possible.

Another poem for the week

George Herbert is one of my favorite poets, and I think this is my favorite of all his poems. I thought about it last night going to prayer meeting.

Prayer (I)

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;
Engine against th'Almighty, sinners' tower,
Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear,
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Charity begins . . . where?

Arthur Brooks, the academic who discovered that conservatives give more time and money to charity than liberals, has a thought-provoking piece up on NRO titled, "Barack as Scrooge?" Most of the attention I've seen in the blogosphere has been focused on the comparison he cites to make his point:

After Mr. and Mrs. Obama released their tax returns, the press quickly noticed that, between 2000 and 2004, they gave less than one percent of their income to charity, far lower than the national average. Their giving rose to a laudable five percent in 2005 and six percent in 2006, with the explosion of their annual income to near $1 million, and the advent of Mr. Obama’s national political aspirations (representing a rare case in which political ambition apparently led to social benefit).

According to an Obama spokesman, the couple’s miserly charity until 2005 “was as generous as they could be at the time,” given their personal expenses. In other words, despite an annual average income over the period of about $244,000, they simply could not afford to give anything meaningful. . . .

In 2006, another wealthy political couple with significant book royalties was Mr. and Mrs. Cheney, who had a combined income of $8.8 million, largely due to Mrs. Cheney’s books and the couple’s investment income. Just how much did the Cheneys give to charity from their bonanza? A measly 78 percent of their income, or $6.9 million. (No, that is not a misprint.)

Certainly, the comparison is interesting, but it really isn't that surprising. All it really says is that the Obamas have the attitudes typical of upper-class liberals, which is what we should have expected of them, since that's what they are. As such, I'm much more interested in where Dr. Brooks goes with this comparison:

This last fact does not generally square with the well-cultivated liberal trope of the blackhearted Cheneys. Unless, that is, you believe that private charity is not an important value that defines one’s character, compared with government taxation and welfare spending (which Mr. Cheney generally opposes, despite the profligate ways of the Bush White House). . . .

[Many] political liberals simply don’t believe that redistribution is very effective at the voluntary level; rather, redistribution is so important that it should be undertaken at the large-group level as a matter of law.

From this perspective, private charity, while a lovely thing, is still a dispensable extravagance. This might help explain the Obamas’ relatively meager giving before they got rich. . . . For many Americans, however, this view of charity as an expendable luxury is anathema. Giving is a necessity, not a luxury—a year-in and year-out necessity.

Which view of giving is correct? The answer is the kind of values question we should hope to debate in this November’s election.

And all I can say is, may the best giver win.

HT: Jared Wilson

Update: by way of comparison, Hillary Clinton released her 2000-07 tax returns today, and they paint a rather different picture from Sen. Obama's; of the $109 million she and her husband earned over those eight years (mostly from speaking fees and book royalties), they gave around ten percent to charity.

HT: Power Line

Hillary Clinton's chickens coming home to roost

When the Antoin “Tony” Rezko story broke, followed by the ABC News report on the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a number of pundits responded by saying, “This is why Hillary Clinton is still in the race—if she hangs in long enough, something may come up that knocks Barack Obama out of it.” Now, however, it looks like that might have backfired on her. Having first undermined her own credibility (and taken some of the heat off Sen. Obama) with her Tuzla story, which gave the Obama campaign a wonderful opportunity to call her a liar who can't be trusted, now she's facing an accusation from the past along the same lines. As a 27-year-old lawyer, thanks to a recommendation from one of her former law professors, Hillary Rodham was given a job on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, working on the Watergate investigation, under the supervision of that committee's chief of staff and general counsel, a lifelong Democrat named Jerry Zeifman. When President Nixon's resignation ended the investigation, Zeifman unceremoniously fired her and refused to give her a recommendation.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

The reason for her “unethical, dishonest” behavior was an attempt to deny President Nixon legal counsel during the investigation, a point which was ultimately rendered moot by his resignation. Whether it makes matters better or worse that her motives were political rather than personal, I'll leave to others to decide; but as Ed Morrissey observes, “all of this forms a pattern of lies, obfuscations, deceit, and treachery.”

And for anyone who might want to argue that it's his word against hers, or that Zeifman is making stuff up, not so fast: he kept a diary at the time in which all this is recorded, and at the time, “he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.” Voters may well decide that this doesn't really matter (especially since it was only Nixon, after all), and Sen. Clinton's campaign may survive this; but there's no honest way to pretend it didn't happen, and to my way of thinking, it casts a truly ugly light on both her character and her judgment.

HT: Power Line

The Dumbfounding

(I'm just in a Margaret Avison mood all of a sudden, for whatever reason. For those not familiar with her work, she was a Canadian poet, whose Christian faith was a powerful force in her poetry. She died last July at the age of 89, having been lauded as one of Canada's national treasures; the Globe and Mail rightly called her contribution to Canadian literature "incalculable." This poem is the title piece of her second collection, which was the first one published after her conversion to Christianity in 1963. It seems an appropriate piece for the Easter season.)

The Dumbfounding

When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: "His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country?"

Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried "A ghost"
and only on our planks counted you fast.

Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.

The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.

You died.
We said,
"The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this."

When you were seen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.

Now you have sought
and seek, in all our ways, all thoughts,
streets, musics—and we make of these a din
trying to lock you out, or in,
to be intent. And dying.

Yet you are
constant and sure,
the all-lovely, all-men's way
to that far country.

Winning one, you again
all ways would begin
life: to make new
flesh, to empower
the weak in nature
to restore
or stay the sufferer;

lead through the garden to
trash, rubble, hill,
where, the outcast's outcast, you
sound dark's uttermost, strangely light-brimming, until
time be full.

Reason for optimism in Zimbabwe

My thanks to everyone who has been praying for Zimbabwe (whether in response to my previous post or for any other reason)—it looks like God may be answering our prayers in the affirmative. According to the latest reports, Robert Mugabe and his aides are looking at the results and beginning to realize that accepting and admitting defeat is their only good option. Of course, they may resist that realization and refuse to do so—they may decide to fight to stay in power—but there's reason to hope they won't. There's reason to hope. Keep praying.

April Fool!

April Fool’s Day isn’t a Christian holiday, but the more I think about it, the more I think it ought to be. After all, while we tend to think of this as a day when people try to make fools of each other, it also reminds us of all the ways we make fools of ourselves, and the interesting fact that sometimes it’s the smartest people who are the biggest fools—both theologically quite important points. For instance, one of the smartest men who ever lived was the 17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon; this is a man who was interested in everything, who invented modern scientific method, and who was gifted enough that some people think he wrote Shakespeare’s plays on the side. Bacon died stuffing snow into a chicken. Honest.

One afternoon in 1625, Bacon was watching a snowstorm and was struck by the wondrous notion that maybe snow could be used to preserve meat in the same way that salt was used. Determined to find out, he purchased a chicken from a nearby village, killed it, and then, standing outside in the snow, attempted to stuff the chicken full of snow to freeze it. The chicken never froze, but Bacon did.

In Bacon's defense, of course, he was on to something there; it was the execution, not the idea, that was off. His foolishness came from the fact that he was too smart for his own good—he saw the possibilities, and didn't stop to think about the downside. That's often the way of it with us; which is why, as the saying goes, it's not what we don't know that hurts us, but what we do know that ain't so. (I've seen that attributed, btw, to Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Josh Billings; I wouldn't presume to know who said it first.) As I've said before, the root of the problem is that we're neither as smart nor as wise as we think we are; when we come up against true wisdom, the wisdom of God, we cannot understand it without his help, because it contradicts everything the world teaches us to think is wise. By the world's standards, God is a fool, and his wisdom is folly.

That's why, as Dr. Stackhouse wrote during Holy Week, Easter is subversive. The crowds wanted Jesus to come along and take the world's pretensions seriously, play along with them, and win on their terms; they wanted him to be a military and political messiah, a great liberator and conqueror, who would capitalize on his popularity to drive out the Romans and re-establish Israel as a political entity, as a nation among the nations. Instead, he confronted those pretensions and tore them down, exposing the emptiness behind them. Where the crowds identified Rome as their enemy and their salvation as overthrowing Roman rule, the enemy he set out to destroy and the salvation he would offer were very, very different. Indeed, what he did, he did as much for the people of Rome as for the people of Israel—and while that made him the king they needed, he wasn’t the king they wanted; and so, within a few short days, the crowds went from shouting “Hosanna!” to shouting “Crucify him!”

Where the world celebrates those who climb the ladder of success, praises Jesus as long as he seems to be heading toward an earthly throne, and is even willing to follow him when it looks like a good career move, we’re called to praise and follow him on the road of thorns; where the world glories in money and power, we’re called to glory in the cross. Which is foolish, from any human perspective; what glory is there in all that pain and blood and death? But that’s the faith to which God calls us—not a Palm Sunday faith, that celebrates Jesus when he’s popular and we’re riding high and everything’s going well, then turns on him when he starts making people mad and the road starts to look rough, but an Easter faith: a faith that understands that it was precisely by his defeat that Jesus conquered, that such a shameful and scandalous moment as a criminal’s execution on a cross was indeed the moment of God’s greatest glory, and that it’s only by going through that death and coming out the other side that Jesus brought about our salvation. To the world, the idea that a triumphal procession would lead not to a throne, but to that, is pure foolishness; but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God for us, in which we glory.

A laugh for the evening

I tripped over this, and it just made me grin. This is how I like to play with my girls . . .




I'd never heard of this guy Eric Herman before, but this is just the tip of the iceberg; he has some great stuff. Check out his website and you'll see.

The fallacy of diagnosis

Bill over at The Thinklings has a truly excellent post titled "I've Identified the Problem and it's You", which I strongly encourage you to read, challenging a tendency he's seen among Christians to broadly blame pretty much all Christians but themselves for whatever problem they happen to be complaining about. (I would note that in my experience, this sort of approach is equally common among non-Christians.)

What particularly struck me here, and where I think Bill has expressed himself with particular aptness, was his use of the word "identified." In family systems theory—the application of general systems theory to human relational systems, following the work of Murray Bowen and Edwin Friedman—this is an important word. When the relationships between a group of people are broken—which is to say, when the system is dysfunctional—the system will tend to blame the problem on one person, to say it's that person's fault that things aren't going right. This is a form of scapegoating as a way of offloading responsibility ("There's nothing wrong with me, I'm fine; you just need to fix him!"), and the person on whom the blame is set is referred to as the "identified patient." The term used for this is "diagnosis": someone "diagnoses" the "patient" as having the problem, thereby implicitly asserting that everyone else is just fine.

In counseling, the key in responding to this sort of situation is to recognize that the diagnosis is in fact false, and that the problem rests not in one person (even if that person is the one showing the symptoms) but in the relational system as a whole. That's not the easiest thing in the world to do, even when you can get all the members of the family or group together in one room; what Bill has identified, though, is considerably harder to address, since it's so much more diffuse. Indeed, I'm not sure how to address it, except that (obviously) we must begin by naming and identifying the problem, as Bill so ably has. Beyond that, I'm not sure what can be done except to gently, patiently, graciously call people back to grace and humility, and to remind them that they, too, are sinners.

In light of that, I particularly like where Bill ends his post:

It breaks my heart because Christ died for the church, His Bride. And if someone is truly saved, they are part of the Bride and part of our family, even if they don't measure up to your definition of cool, even if they don't line up with your cultural tastes or ecclesiology,

Even if they say things sometimes that embarass you.

Even if they disappoint you.

There is a way to go, in grace, to specific people in your family and work out your problems.

But what Christ never gave us the option of doing was drawing our own lines in the sand to determine which of his children we'll call "brother" and which we won't.

This is an important truth, and something we really need to hear.

Further thoughts on prophecy and Jeremiah Wright

The discussion with Daniel C. in the comments on the previous post started me thinking. The biblical prophets laid their lives on the line time after time after time because when the kings and other powerful people of their land were unrighteous, they confronted the wicked with the righteous anger of God, to their face, in the sharpest possible terms. One of the reasons I disparaged (in my old Presbyweb piece) the claims of Presbyterian liberals to be speaking prophetically is that there was no risk involved—they were merely aligning themselves with one group of powerful people against another in an interparty dispute, saying things which had been said many times before.

The same surely cannot be said of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Any government which would turn biochemical weapons against a group of its own citizens and plan atrocities to justify policy decisions—for such and no less is what he has alleged—would never allow anyone who exposed its activities to live, at least without divine intervention. These are the sorts of things, if true, that one might expect God to reveal to one of his prophets. If the Rev. Dr. Wright's accusations are in fact prophetic revelations from God, then they're justified. If not, then he's a false prophet. Given that we know how AIDS entered this country, courtesy of Randy Shilts (who bears particular responsibility for publicizing the story of Gaëtan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant who was one of those who brought the virus here from Africa), I'd say that test doesn't look too good for Sen. Obama's pastor.

At first blush, he would seem to look better on the test of boldness; certainly he pulls no punches in his language. Where he fails, however, is in his location. Jonah went (under protest, of course) to Nineveh; Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos and many others went into the court of the king. True prophets, when they have a condemnation to announce, do so in the presence of the one whom they are condemning, setting aside all earthly safety, trusting God to get them out. (Or not, as the case may be; tradition has it that Manasseh had Isaiah sawed in half inside a hollow log.) Put another way, true prophets speak to "us." The Rev. Dr. Wright, by contrast, denounced "them." He failed the test.

There's a deeper significance to this as well: denouncing "them" tells "us" that "we" are free to believe what we want to believe, both about ourselves and about "them"—and that's not something God's prophets do. Judgment begins in the house of God, and so that's where his prophets begin: by challenging and rebuking us. Before they let us pronounce the judgment of God on our enemies, they call us to pronounce it on ourselves—to fall to our knees in repentance for our sin and to rise in humble awareness of our fallenness, and our desperate need for grace. In so doing, they bring us to a place where we would be just as happy to see the repentance of our enemies as their obliteration.

The problem with self-anointed prophets is they don't stand in that place, because they don't have that humility. As I wrote in 2005, to folks like that,

the rest of the world divides into two camps: the righteous (those who agree with me) and the unrighteous (those who don't), which leaves only the question, "What fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Belial?" There in a nutshell is the state of things . . . for too many folks, the presence of people who disagree with us, instead of serving as an opportunity for learning and self-correction, merely hardens us in our own positions, because "we" are light and "they" are darkness. This wouldn't be a problem for someone whose life and beliefs were already 100% in accordance with the will of God, but that isn't any of us; we all have areas where we need to grow, and beliefs (sometimes cherished ones) which are simply wrong, and we can't afford to set those in stone. . . . [We] need to set aside this self-aggrandizing nonsense that we're speaking "prophetically," which sets us above those with whom we disagree, and learn instead to approach them in a spirit of humility and grace. Our motives and vision just aren't pure enough to justify doing things any other way.

Speaking prophetically

Three summers ago, in a burst of irritation at a few of my colleagues in the Presbytery of Denver, I wrote a Viewpoint article in Presbyweb titled, “Speaking Prophetically.” (If you're not a subscriber to Presbyweb, you can also find the piece here.) At the time, I had had it up to my (receding) hairline with liberals claiming the “prophetic” mantle for what was, essentially, leftist boilerplate with a garnish of Christianese, and I felt the need to fire back. I wasn't exactly stunned to find that no one changed their ways in response to my objection, but at least it made me feel better.

Still, people haven't changed their ways, and it does continue to irritate. The whole flap over the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., though, takes the whole thing to a new and truly egregious level. More than a few writers have attempted to defend and excuse the Rev. Dr. Wright by calling him “prophetic,” and situating him in a supposed prophetic tradition in line with the likes of Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Diana Butler Bass, in her post on Jim Wallis' “God's Politics” group blog, is typical:

Throughout the entire corpus, black Christian leaders leveled a devastating critique against their white brothers and sisters—accusing white Christians of maintaining “ease in Zion" while allowing black people to suffer injustice and oppression. . . .

As MSNBC, CNN, and FOX endlessly play the tape of Rev. Wright's “radical” sermons today, I do not hear the words of a “dangerous” preacher (at least any more dangerous than any preacher who takes the Gospel seriously!) No, I hear the long tradition that Jeremiah Wright has inherited from his ancestors. I hear prophetic critique. I hear Frederick Douglass. And, mostly, I hear the Gospel slant—I hear it from an angle that is not natural to me. It is good to hear that slant.

There are two problems with that—what we might call the historical and the theological problem. The historical problem is that the equation Jeremiah Wright = Frederick Douglass presumes another equation: 2008 America = 1858 America. It presumes that our country hasn't changed at all in 150 years. And that just isn't true. We are, no question, still an imperfect country—but on matters of skin color, however far we have yet to go, we've come a long way.

The theological problem here is what concerns me more, however, because Dr. Bass' idea of the gospel is really screwy at this point. When the Rev. Dr. Wright declaims, “God damn America! That's in the Bible!” he's right as Dr. Bass is right to point us to the fact, as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus also notes, that “Biblical prophets called down the judgment of God on their people,” and often in harsher terms than those used at Trinity UCC. But there is a profound, a deep and profound, difference between what he was saying and authentic biblical prophetic language. As Fr. Neuhaus continues,

They invoked such judgment in order to call the people to repentance. They spoke so harshly because they had such a high and loving estimate of a divine election betrayed. The Reverend Wright—in starkest contrast to, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr., whose death we mark next week—was not calling for America to live up to its high promise. He was pronouncing God’s judgment on a nation whose original and actual sins of racism are beyond compassion, repentance, or forgiveness. He apparently relishes the prospect of America’s damnation.

That is the key point that every other commentator I've seen has missed; that's the point at which the Rev. Dr. Wright's message unequivocally ceases to be gospel, indeed ceases to be in any real sense Christian, and becomes something else altogether—something very, very ugly. There was a discussion on The Thinklings a while back about the imprecatory psalms, where David and the other psalmists similarly aim harsh, violent language at their enemies; these are psalms not often read in most churches. As one of the commenters pointed out, however (probably Alan), there's an interesting feature to most of these psalms: when David prays that God would destroy his enemies, he prays that God would do so either by slaughtering them or by bringing them to repentance. It's that either/or that brings this sort of bitter prayer within the compass of a Jewish/Christian understanding of God. Without it, it's nothing more than a pagan cry for vengeance.

In light of that, I pray that someone who has pull with the Rev. Dr. Wright—perhaps Sen. Obama, who I can't help thinking should have done this years ago—will draw him aside and call his attention to a couple passages from the Book he was supposed to be preaching from all these years:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

—Matthew 5:38-48 (ESV)

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the cosmic powers over this present darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

—Ephesians 6:10-12 (ESV)

Bumper-sticker philosophy

Driving in to church this evening for the Wednesday night stuff, I ended up behind a car (briefly) with a bumper sticker that read, "Question everything." I thought, "Really? Everything? Does that include questioning questioning everything? Why question everything? Question it how? On what grounds? And if you question everything, what sort of answer should you expect to get?"

I was of course partly being snarky (to myself); but I do wonder, does that person really mean it? What would they think if you started questioning science? "Are you sure the theory behind the internal-combustion engine in your car is sound? Why should you trust that gravity will hold your tires on the road? Can you be certain that turning the wheel actually makes the car turn? On a different note, why do you believe in the theory of evolution? Is there really the evidence to support it? Can you be sure that the people who support it aren't doing so from ulterior motives?" And so on, and so forth . . .

Then too, I saw recently, I don't remember where, that someone (Richard Dawkins?) had propounded a set of "Ten Commandments for Atheists." Leaving quite aside the question of why atheists would support having commandments in the first place, one of them was, "Question everything"; and yet, I know they don't mean that, because on the evidence, they certainly don't believe one should be commanded to question atheism. At least, Dr. Dawkins and his ilk tend to respond pretty sharply to those who do.

The truth of the matter is, no one ever means anything like "Question everything"; even René Descartes, who came the closest, didn't get that far (nor, I think, did he want to). Most people, when they say "Question everything," really mean something like this: "Let me question everything you believe that I don't want to believe in, and let what I want to believe right alone." Saying that would be far more honest; somehow, though, it doesn't have quite the same ring.

OK, so maybe I'm a sucker

and maybe at heart I'm still the ten-year-old who thought The Lord of the Rings was the best thing he'd ever read (there still isn't much that tops it) and that nobody was cooler than his Dad, except maybe for the people his Dad admired; and certainly, once a Navy brat, always a Navy brat, and there's no denying the effect growing up Navy has had on who I am. Whatever you want to make of it, this gets me every time:



I've said before that I have long had reservations about John McCain politically; based on the candidates' positions, he was no more than my third choice in this race. I also have to say, though, that about John McCain the person, though he's far from perfect, I admire him tremendously. Certainly Barack Obama has proven he can inspire people with his rhetorical gifts (much missed in recent American politics) and the vision he paints (though time will tell what his association with the Rev. Dr. Wright and his race speech has done to the potency of that vision); but I believe Sen. McCain is equally capable of inspiring our country with the ideals he upholds—and the way he has lived out those ideals in the service of his country—and the power of his expression. Maybe a few policy disagreements are a small price to pay for that.

Are we really this easy to play?

Check this out—my thanks to Jared for posting this.



Jared's right, that's freaky; it's also a little scary to think that we can be manipulated that easily. I like to believe I can think for myself—but this makes me wonder what influences are shaping my thought processes without my being aware of them. (And everyone else's, for that matter.)

Pray for Zimbabwe; please, pray for Zimbabwe

One of the deep joys of my years in Colorado was the time I spent as a member of the Partnership Committee of the Partnership of Zimbabwe and Denver Presbyteries. The Presbytery of Denver had ended up involved in ministry in Zimbabwe through the work of a couple in one of its churches, and decided in consequence to establish and build a presbytery-to-presbytery relationship with the Presbytery of Zimbabwe, which is part of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa (UPCSA). I was never able to travel to Zimbabwe (though I would have been offered the chance if we hadn't been leaving), which I regret, but I did have opportunities to meet a few of our partners on their visits to Colorado, and there are a couple whom I consider dearly-loved friends.

Which is why my heart breaks, and has been breaking, for the country of Zimbabwe. I could give you a long list of links about what Robert Mugabe has done to his nation over the last eight years—he was a good leader before that, as long as people kept voting for him, but once the voters began to tire of him, he turned on them; whether he rules well or ill, all that matters to him is keeping power—but I think Peter Godwin summed up the story well enough in the Los Angeles Times, at least for starters. Godwin, who dubbed Mugabe "Zimbabwe's Ahab," knows whereof he speaks, as a native Zimbabwean; he's written several books, including the memoirs Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, and still laments what was lost.

The presidential election is this Saturday, and there are those who have hope that maybe this time, the opposition and the international community will prevail, and the election will bring about the end of the Mugabe government. Please pray that it is so, and with a minimum of bloodshed. Please pray for the peace of Zimbabwe.

Revelation 7 multiculturalism

One of the more interestingly problematic characters in contemporary SF is John Ringo. As the blogger over at Aliens in This World put it, “John Ringo is an odd bird, even by comparison to the normal oddness of science fiction writers. Ringo can write really really good, bad, and creepily-unwholesome-I-need-a-shower books. Often inside the same cover.” That captures it quite well, I think—particularly the way Ringo so often juxtaposes things I really appreciate with things I really don't. He has in some ways a very perceptive eye, but a deeply flawed worldview underlying it, which makes him one of the few people I've run across (along with Ann Coulter) who can articulate conservative conclusions in such a way as to make me react like a liberal. This all is probably why the only books of Ringo's I really like are the Prince Roger/Empire of Man series he's co-writing with David Weber. (IMHO, they fill in each other's weaknesses quite nicely.)

As I say, though, he does have a good eye, and little tolerance for nonsense (he'd use a much more pungent word there, of course, having a rather rough tongue), virtues which are often promiscuously on display in his work—along with his pronounced animus against received pieties of any kind. That animus can color and distort his perception, but at times, it can also inform and strengthen it; when it does, the attacks he unleashes can be devastating.

One good example comes from the fifth chapter of his latest project, a novel titled The Last Centurion, in which he takes a swing at multiculturalism. The novel is set in the future, but the examples on which he draws are from this decade, including this one:

Group in one of the most pre-Plague diverse neighborhoods in the U.S. wanted to build a play-area for their kids in the local park. They'd established a “multicultural neighborhood committee” of “the entire rainbow.” . . .

There were, indeed, little brown brothers and yellow and black. But . . .

Sikhs and Moslems can barely bring themselves to spit on each other much less work side by side singing “Kumbaya." . . .

The Hindus were willing to contribute some suggestions and a little money, but the other Hindus would have to do the work. What other Hindus? Oh, those people. And they would have to hand the money to the kumbaya guys both because handing it to the other Hindus would be defiling and because, of course, it would just disappear. . . .

When they actually got to work, finally, there were some little black brothers helping. Then a different group of little black brothers turned out and sat on the sidelines shouting suggestions until the first group left. Then the “help” left as well. Christian animists might soil their hands for a community project but not if they're getting [flak] from Islamics.

Now, maybe that sounds unfair to you; but if so, check out this piece (among others) by Theodore Dalrymple, based on his extensive experience working as a doctor in one of Britain's immigrant slums. I won't cite any of his stories—you can read them yourself; be warned, they aren't pleasant—but I can tell you the conclusion to which they've led him:

Not all cultural values are compatible or can be reconciled by the enunciation of platitudes. The idea that we can all rub along together, without the law having to discriminate in favor of one set of cultural values rather than another, is worse than merely false: it makes no sense whatever.

The problem here is the unexamined assumption that “the intolerance against which [multiculturalism] is supposedly the sovereign remedy is a characteristic only of the host society,” and thus that if those of us who belong to the dominant culture would just set aside our idea of our own superiority, then all the problems would go away. Unfortunately, life isn't like that. For one thing, this rests on the essentially racist assumption that all “those people who are different from us” are really all alike and thus all on the same side; but it ain't necessarily so. To be sure, this assumption isn't only made by white folks. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assumed that Hispanic immigrants would ally themselves with American blacks, and thus supported loosening immigration laws; Jesse Jackson assumed the same, which is why he proclaimed the “Rainbow Coalition.” As Stephen Malanga writes, though, it hasn't worked out that way.

More seriously, it isn't only Western culture that is plagued by intolerance, hatred, violence, and other forms of human evil; other cultures have their own problems, too. As Dalrymple writes, “many aspects of the cultures which they are trying to preserve are incompatible not only with the mores of a liberal democracy but with its juridical and philosophical foundations. No amount of hand-wringing or euphemism can alter this fact.” Nor will any number of appeals to the better angels of our nature; human sin is a cross-cultural reality.

Does this mean multiculturalism is hopeless? No, but it means it cannot be accomplished politically. If the divisions between people, and between groups of people, are to be healed, there must be another way; and by the grace of God, there is. It's the way incarnated in the ministry of the Church of All Nations, a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation in Minneapolis which is founded and pastored by the Rev. Jin S. Kim. It's the way that says that our divisions cannot be erased by human effort, but only by the work of the Spirit of God—and that we as Christians have to be committed to giving ourselves to that work. We can't make it happen, but we need to do our part to be open to God making it happen. This is the vision God has given us to live toward:

“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number,
from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes,
with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice,
‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’
And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders
and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne
and worshiped God, saying, ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving
and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.’”

—Revelation 7:9-12 (ESV)

Untameable Christ, irreducible Easter

There was a remarkable little essay in Slate last week on "Why Easter stubbornly resists the commercialism that swallowed Christmas"; I think the author, James Martin, overstates his case somewhat, since there are commercial traditions around the holiday (Easter baskets full of candy, Easter eggs and the kits they sell to dye them, all courtesy of the Easter bunny), but his point holds: Easter is still primarily a Christian holiday, not a "consumerist nightmare," as he describes Christmas. I hadn't really thought about it before, but there's good reason for that—neither the crucifixion nor the Resurrection are commercial-friendly:

Despite the awesome theological implications (Christians believe that the infant lying in the manger is the son of God), the Christmas story is easily reduced to pablum. How pleasant it is in mid-December to open a Christmas card with a pretty picture of Mary and Joseph gazing beatifically at their son, with the shepherds and the angels beaming in delight. The Christmas story, with its friendly resonances of marriage, family, babies, animals, angels, and—thanks to the wise men—gifts, is eminently marketable to popular culture. . . .

The Easter story is relentlessly disconcerting and, in a way, is the antithesis of the Christmas story. No matter how much you try to water down its particulars, Easter retains some of the shock it had for those who first participated in the events during the first century. The man who spent the final three years of his life preaching a message of love and forgiveness (and, along the way, healing the sick and raising the dead) is betrayed by one of his closest friends, turned over to the representatives of a brutal occupying power, and is tortured, mocked, and executed in the manner that Rome reserved for the worst of its criminals. . . .

Even the resurrection, the joyful end of the Easter story, resists domestication as it resists banalization. Unlike Christmas, it also resists a noncommittal response. . . . It's hard for a non-Christian believer to say, "Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead." That's not something you can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at least God's son. What he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you.

Easter is an event that demands a "yes" or a "no." There is no "whatever." . . .

What does the world do with a person who has been raised from the dead? Christians have been meditating on that for two millenniums. [sic] But despite the eggs, the baskets, and the bunnies, one thing we haven't been able to do is to tame that person, tame his message, and, moreover, tame what happened to him in Jerusalem all those years ago.

Amen.

Hymn for Easter

Alleluia, Alleluia!

Alleluia, alleluia! Hearts to heaven and voices raise:
Sing to God a hymn of gladness, sing to God a hymn of praise;
He who on the cross a victim for the world's salvation bled—
Jesus Christ, the King of Glory, now is risen from the dead.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! Death at last has met defeat:
See the ancient powers of evil in confusion and retreat;
Once he died, and once was buried: now he lives forever more,
Jesus Christ, the world's Redeemer, whom we worship and adore.

Christ is risen, we are risen! Set your hearts on things above;
There in all the Father's glory lives and reigns our King of love;
Hear the word of peace he brings us, see his wounded hands and side!
Now let every wrong be ended, every sin be crucified.

Alleluia, alleluia! Glory be to God on high:
Alleluia to the Savior who has gained the victory;
Alleluia to the Spirit, fount of love and sanctity!
Alleluia, alleluia to the Triune Majesty!

Words: Christopher Wordsworth; vv. 2-3 alt. Jubilate Hymns
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven, adapt. Edward Hodges
HYMN TO JOY, 8.7.8.7.D

Meditation on Holy Saturday and Easter

The day after Jesus’ crucifixion must, in some ways, have been the hardest day of the disciples’ lives. For the rest of Jerusalem, the world was back to normal after the commotion of the three crucifixions; their fellow Jews would be getting up and going to the synagogue to observe the Sabbath, some of them probably with a sense of satisfaction that that Galilean gadfly was out of the way. For Jesus’ disciples, however, the reality and enormity of their loss was just beginning to sink in, and the world would never be back to normal; it would never be right again. Oh, they would adjust in time, learn to go on—but life would never be the same. Saturday was an empty day, all the color in life faded to a drab, dingy, depressing grey.

As such, I think Holy Saturday is a particularly important holiday for our culture, whether we pay any attention to it or not, because this is where many people in this country live. Why else is depression reaching epidemic status in America, especially among those of the younger generations? Why else could Elizabeth Wurtzel call her memoir Prozac Nation—and why else would that book have been a bestseller? Why else are our suicide rates so high? We live in a world that’s just getting by, most of the time, a world of people trying to cope with broken marriages, abusive parents, drug-addicted children, broken dreams, evaporated hopes, one failure after another . . .

I used to believe that most people sailed through life with no major hurts or disappointments, but three decades have taught me that’s an illusion; there are very few people like that, and most of those are fakes. Rather, there are a great many people in this world this morning who are standing exactly where Peter stood that Saturday: someone just pulled the rug out from under them, and they aren’t sure there’s a floor beneath their feet.

And it's at this point, into this moment, that Easter comes. After the darkest nights in human history, in the dirty grey light of not-quite-morning, the Son of God, lying dead on a stone slab, got up; and as the Christian singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson put it, “the sound of the fiery blast of Death exploding shook the firmament.” The entire world, all of creation, lurched sideways, and the chains holding it down snapped; the grey of the day shattered in a million pieces as the Light of God blazed forth from that tomb. Hope conquered hopelessness; life overcame death; love broke the power of sin; God had the last word; and indeed, nothing would ever be the same again.

But if Easter is a light to crack the sky and blind the very stars, it's still a light that far too many people don’t see. Perhaps they haven’t heard the message; perhaps they have only heard a distorted version of it that hides the light; but whatever the reason, they walk on in shadow. C. S. Lewis described Narnia under the reign of the White Witch as a land where it was always winter and never Christmas; for many in this world, it's always Saturday and never Easter.

And so we see people carrying on as best they can, seeking out scraps of meaning to paper over their doubts, snaring bits of hope to give themselves a reason to keep going, snatching fragments of answers to ward off the questions that haunt and torment them; and from our cities and our towns we hear the wail of grief and the shriek of rage, the moan of pain and the cry of fear, and running through them all the sad whisper of loneliness, isolation, and alienation.

As human beings, at some deep level we need answers to the questions of why we are here and what our lives are worth, and we need the promise that someone loves us no matter what; and apart from God, this world can't provide those. It can't offer any resolution to the discordant voices of grief and pain, rage and fear. But over and above the discord, the thunder unleashed that first Easter continues to sound, the blast front of that explosion continues to roll over us; as Peterson says, “Throughout the wail and shudder, over the shriek and moan of man, the thunder has sounded and sung, and it is both the answer and the promise. It sings still, and you can hear what it says if you listen: love never dies.”

Early returns on Obama's speech

On the practical question—did it work?—the answer appears to be: yes and no. Yes, as regards the Democratic primary; Hillary Clinton's campaign is still trying to leverage the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr. against Sen. Obama, trying to convince superdelegates to line up behind her and throw the nomination her way, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen—Bill Richardson, former Clinton cabinet official and current governor of New Mexico, just endorsed Sen. Obama. It's a pretty powerful indicator, as PowerLine's Scott Johnson notes, that the Democratic Party establishment really wants to put the Clintons behind them; Sen. Obama just needed to do enough to allay their concerns to get enough support to put him over the top. He's been hurt by this whole situation, and he hasn't really repaired all the damage, but at least he's avoided derailment.

As regards the general election, though, that's another matter; and based on the current poll average, where he remains slightly behind John McCain (and significantly behind in certain battleground states) and isn't regaining ground—if anything, he's losing a little—it doesn't look like the speech helped him, at least to this point. Part of the problem is that his name remains tied to the Rev. Dr. Wright's in many people's minds; perhaps a bigger problem is that where he was trying to rise above the issue of race, to offer the American people a different bargain, that has collapsed; what Bill Clinton tried to do in South Carolina—to make Sen. Obama "the black candidate"—Sen. Obama has now effectively done to himself. Instead of "come transcend race with me," his pitch now is, "come talk more about race and about what whites have to do to make things right with blacks." That will work just fine in winning Democratic votes, but when it comes to attracting Republicans and independents . . . not so much.

This is only reinforced by the sense I'm getting that a lot of people are having the same reaction I am to Sen. Obama's speech: the more we think about it, the less well certain things sit with us—Sen. Obama throwing his grandmother under the bus, his offering justifications for the Rev. Dr. Wright's hateful language at the same time as he condemned it, and, fundamentally, the fact that he dodged the fundamental question: if you're really about what you say you're about, Senator, why attend that church? Why stay? As Charles Krauthammer asks,

If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? . . . Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

So far, only the crickets have answered; and that's just not good enough.

Hymn for Good Friday

Go to Dark Gethsemane

Go to dark Gethsemane,
You that feel the tempter's power;
Your Redeemer's conflict see,
Watch with him one bitter hour:
Turn not from his griefs away—
Learn of Jesus Christ to pray.

Follow to the judgment hall;
View the Lord of life arraigned.
O the wormwood and the gall!
O the pangs his soul sustained!
Shun not suffering, shame, or loss—
Learn of him to bear the cross.

Calvary's mournful mountain climb;
There, adoring, at his feet,
Mark that miracle of time,
God's own sacrifice complete:
"It is finished!" hear him cry;
Learn of Jesus Christ to die.

Words: James Montgomery, alt.
Music: Richard Redhead
REDHEAD, 7.7.7.7.7.7.

The heart of the matter

For the bedtime reading for our two older girls, we're in the process of working our way through the Chronicles of Narnia; right now, we're six chapters in on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is and always has been my favorite of the books. (Hey, I'm male, and the son of a sailor to boot, and it's the most classically adventurish of the lot.) This evening, I was reading ahead a bit, and in chapter seven I was struck by an exchange I'd completely forgotten about:

"I think you've seen Aslan," said Edmund.

"Aslan!" said Eustace. "I've heard that name mentioned several times since we joined the Dawn Treader. . . . But who is Aslan? Do you know him?"

"Well—he knows me," said Edmund."

Well—he knows me. Most of the time, it seems our focus is on whether we know God, or whether other people know God; but Jesus makes it clear that there are plenty of people who "know God" but God doesn't know them. As my friend the Rev. Tryg Johnson has put it, if we go up to the White House and ask to be let in because we know President Bush, we can talk all day and it won't get us anywhere; but if President Bush comes out and says, "It's all right—I know them, they're friends of mine," that's quite another matter. That we know God, if we truly do, is an important thing, yes; but the truly important question is, does God know us? And if we can say, in all honesty and assurance, that we are known by God . . . everything else is secondary to that.

Skeptical conversations, part III: The problem of evil

From the consideration of who God is and what he's like, the third section of my credo raises (and begins to address) the problem of evil.

Update: read the first section here, the second section here, and the third section here.

A remarkable speech

This morning in Philadelphia, Barack Obama gave his promised speech on race; and a remarkable speech it was, for many reasons. Reactions to it are all over the map, which is no surprise, and no doubt there will be many more to come over the next few days, but I think we can already say it was an excellent speech; and while it's always risky to try to write history in the moment, I think too that we can say that whatever becomes of Sen. Obama's candidacy, this will be seen as an important moment in American history. As Mark Hemingway wrote, Sen. Obama "spoke about as candidly and eloquently about race as one could hope of a politician." I would add that he did so in a way that I think does honor to the promise of his campaign of a way through, and past, our current racialized politics to a future in which race doesn't matter. I respect him for that. The question there is, given that Sen. Obama has now acknowledged and accepted race as an issue in this campaign—something he's largely been trying to avoid to this point (except when he could employ it backhandedly by accusing the Clintons of "playing the race card")—and thus consigned post-racial politics to the future, rather than seeking to embody them in the present, what will that do to his prospects? At this point, I don't think anyone can do more than guess.

There are probably those (though I haven't seen anyone yet) who will blast Sen. Obama for not disowning the Rev. Dr. Wright and cutting all ties with him. There's no question that the Rev. Dr. Wright's views are offensive—and not just superficially, as he counts as his theological mentor a man who wrote this:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . . Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.

It's hard to swallow a presidential candidate being so closely associated with someone who thinks this way; so the argument that Sen. Obama should completely estrange himself from his pastor has force. Personally, though—and yes, I'm a pastor, so I'm biased on this one—I respect him more for not doing so. The Rev. Dr. Wright brought him to Christ, brought him into church, raised him as a Christian, performed his wedding, baptized his children, discipled him across two decades, and has been his mentor and friend for most of his adult life; in my book, anyone who could take a relationship that close and that important to them and sever it for the sake of expediency would be a person of no moral character and precious little courage. Whatever anyone might think of the Rev. Dr. Wright, he deserves better than that from Barack Obama, and I'm glad he got it; and like Paul Mirengoff, I respect Sen. Obama's courage in giving it to him. (Though, as I should have recognized, he effectively threw his grandmother under the bus for the sake of expediency, and she also deserved better from him than that; that's a move I cannot respect.)

That said, it still raises the question, which Sen. Obama didn't answer: why is Jeremiah Wright his pastor at all? This is, after all, a relationship of choice; Barack Obama didn't have to go to that church or develop such a deep relationship with its pastor. Why did he? One cynical explanation is that he did it to give himself credentials on the South Side, building his base for his political career. Another, which I find more compelling, is that he was looking for a sense of identity. It's easier now to call Sen. Obama biracial, but the man's 48 years old—when he was a kid, "biracial" wasn't an option. He was a black boy in a white family, and he felt it; and for all that his mother was white and his father from Kenya, most white Americans would still have seen him as just another black kid. It makes sense that he would have felt the need to identify with the African-American community, and that Trinity UCC under the ministry of the Rev. Dr. Wright would have been powerfully appealing; indeed, as Kathleen Parker suggests, given the prejudices and reactions of the white grandmother who raised him, "the anger Obama heard in Rev. Wright's church may not have felt so alien after all"—and from his speech this morning, still might not.

Taken all in all, I have to think Sen. Obama helped himself with this speech. It's always brutally difficult to give a message that you have to give and can't afford to screw up, especially when the stakes are this high and the subject is this difficult, but given that, I think he did about as well as could be expected. The question is, is it enough? Given that even if he has sufficiently addressed concerns about his church, that still leaves his association with Tony Rezko and all the fallout that may come from that, it's hard to say. At this point, the only thing we can be sure of is this: when they write the political science textbook on the 2008 elections, this will be another chapter.

Update: if Mickey Kaus' analysis is right—and he certainly has more of a track record than I do—then Sen. Obama may actually have hurt himself here, possibly badly.

David Mamet moves right

In what might be the strangest event yet of this truly bizarre election season, renowned playwright David Mamet has published an essay in the Village Voice on "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" This startling change of mind came during the course of writing a play titled November, which he describes as

a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

Indeed, it seems he has, as he goes on to write,

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

I suspect this essay will induce a fair bit more tooth-grinding on the part of a lot of liberals, but I hope people can get beyond partisan reactions (whether rage or glee) and read it for its own sake, because it's a fascinating essay in practical political philosophy (not least for the presence of that rabbi, who I think is spot-on). Plus, I appreciate Mr. Mamet's concluding paragraph:

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.

A matter of trust

A year and a half ago now, a colleague of mine, preaching at our classis meeting in Colorado Springs, hit me right between the eyes with his sermon. He was preaching about trusting God, and all the reasons God has given us to do so, and how our spiritual life really begins there, at that point; in the moment that etched itself in my mind, he said, "We hear God saying, 'Obey me, obey me, obey me'; but what God is really saying is, 'Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.'" As he went on to say, yes, God wants our obedience, but not out of fear, or duty, or desire for reward, or any of the other reasons we come up with; God wants us to obey him because we trust that he truly knows what is best for us, and wants what is best for us, and is at work to do what is best for us.

And that's the rub, isn't it? Most of us, at least, don't trust God for that, and don't particularly want to. At some level, in at least some things, we believe we know better than God, and that God is telling us "no" because he really doesn't want what's best for us—he has some other agenda, some ulterior motive, someone else he wants to benefit at our expense. We don't obey because we don't trust; and even when, time and time again, events prove us wrong, trusting God still doesn't seem to get any easier. And yet, through all of it, he remains faithful even when we are faithless; he remains trustworthy even when we refuse to trust him; and he keeps calling, in the stillness of our souls, "Trust me. Trust me. Trust me." If only we will learn to listen . . .

A bad week for Barack Obama

If you look at the polls, you see that in the last week or so, John McCain has surged; where he was once clearly behind Sen. Obama and trailing Hillary Clinton as well, now he's showing a narrow lead. Some of this is probably the ugliness that is the Eliot Spitzer story, which certainly hasn't made the Democrats look good (and which hits Sen. Clinton harder, given her ties to him); more of it, though, is that courtesy of ABC News, America has discovered Sen. Obama's pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Those who were paying attention knew about him already, but as with any powerful preacher (and he certainly is that), reading is one thing, seeing is something else again. The result has been to raise some serious questions about Sen. Obama and his campaign; given that so much of his appeal has been his image as a post-racial figure who can be an instrument of racial reconciliation and healing, seeing him so closely tied to a mentor who decidedly isn't has done him serious damage. Mark Steyn, in his usual snarky fashion, has captured the reactions of many quite well.

Sen. Obama, of course, is trying to distance himself from the Rev. Dr. Wright—a problematic thing when this man has been his pastor for two decades, officiating at his wedding and baptizing his children—but it may not work. Really, it shouldn't; whatever specific words Sen. Obama may or may not have heard his pastor say, you can't associate that closely for that long with someone of such strong character and opinions and not know what that person is made of. Or at least, anyone who could would be grossly unqualified to serve as president of this (or any) country.

Unfortunately for Sen. Obama, l'affaire Wright hits harder because of the Rezko trial. Antoin "Tony" Rezko is of course a very different person from the Rev. Dr. Wright and has played a very different part in Sen. Obama's life, but his trial has already weakened the Senator and put some cracks in his image. In particular, when Sen. Obama has been arguing that people should vote for him because "in a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters," it really hurts him to have to turn around and say, as he did regarding Mr. Rezko, that "his private real estate transactions with Rezko involved repeated lapses of judgment" (emphasis mine); when he's been running, essentially, on his character, the appearance of character flaws is particularly damaging. It raises the question: if, as Paul Mirengoff argues, Sen. Obama is "the quintessential self-made man," who is he, really, at his core? The kind of people with whom he associates closely suggests that we might not like the answer; and that suggestion, if it takes root in enough people's minds, may prove to be the one thing his campaign cannot survive.

See also:
Race and the Democrats, Part III
Race and the Democrats, Part IV
The Audacity of Hate, Part One, Two, Three, Four
The Audacity of Hype

Hymn for Palm Sunday

Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates

Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates;
Behold, the King of glory waits!
The King of kings is drawing near;
The Savior of the world is here.

O blest the land, the city blest,
Where Christ the ruler is confessed!
O happy hearts and happy homes
To whom this King of triumph comes!

Fling wide the portals of your heart;
Make it a temple, set apart
From earthly use for heaven's employ,
Adorned with prayer and love and joy.

Redeemer, come, with us abide;
Our hearts to thee we open wide;
Let us thy inner presence feel;
Thy grace and love in us reveal.

Thy Holy Spirit lead us on
Until the glorious crown is won;
Eternal praise, eternal fame
Be offered, Savior, to thy Name!

Words: Georg Weissel, translated by Catherine Winkworth
Music: Thomas Williams
TRURO, LM

Reclaiming the gospel?

I applaud the Evangelism and Church Growth arm of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s General Assembly Council for taking evangelism and church growth seriously. All Christians should, after all, and particularly those called to lead a declining denomination like ours, which is declining in considerable part due to a failure to take them seriously. I applaud them for seeking to reach out to and inspire those “who have a passion for evangelism, for church growth, and a desire to share the gospel message with all God’s people.” I applaud them for holding a contest for middle-school and high-school students to produce a T-shirt design to help them do that; contests have a way of getting people excited, and unveiling the winner at the Evangelism Breakfast at General Assembly should stir up interest.

Where I have a problem is with the theme of that breakfast: “Reclaiming the Gospel.” There are a lot of things we might say we need to do with the gospel, but reclaiming it? In the first place, we don't need to re-anything the gospel. It is already “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,” as Paul teaches us; it doesn't need anything done to it, and certainly not by us. We just need to stand up with Paul, declare that we aren't ashamed of it, and preach it.

In the second place, if we did need to re-something the gospel, it wouldn't be reclaiming it. We never claimed it in the first place—it claimed us, or rather Jesus did, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Theoretically, we as heirs of the Reformation understand that the gospel isn't about us—it's something God did for us by his grace, not any of our own doing—and that the power of its proclamation isn't about us either, it's about the Spirit of God. To talk of reclaiming the gospel, it seems to me, gets that seriously out of whack, as if we somehow appropriate it and put it to work to accomplish our purposes. No. God appropriates us and puts us to work to accomplish his purposes through us. It's Christ's ministry, not ours; it's the Spirit's power, not ours; our job is not to reclaim the gospel but rather to submit ourselves to the gospel, to place ourselves at Jesus' disposal, so that by the leading and power of the Spirit we may be used to carry out his ministry in this world.

I appreciate the heart being shown here for evangelism, but I'm seriously concerned by the fuzzy and human-centered way in which that heart is expressed. This is of a piece, it seems to me, with the very un-Reformed understanding of grace expressed in the Covenant Network's mission statement, which I think also shows a laudable heart skewed by a serious failure of understanding; it suggests to me that our theological foundations have eroded to a significant extent, such that our guiding assumptions come less from our Reformed heritage than from the world around us. In the end, that's no way to build up the body of Christ; it's no way to grow the church.