Who has believed our report?

See my servant: he shall accomplish his purpose;
     he will rise and be lifted up,
     and he shall be exalted most high.
Just as there were many who were shocked at him
     —one whose appearance was disfigured beyond that of any man,
     whose form beyond human likeness,
           so that his blood sprinkled many nations—
so kings shall shut their mouths because of him;
     for that which had not been told them they shall see,
           and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.
Who has believed our report?
               And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
        and like a root out of dry ground;
    he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
        nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised, lacking supporters,
        a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering;
    and as one from whom others hide their faces
               he was despised, and we thought him of no value.
Surely he has borne our suffering
        and carried our sorrows;
    yet we accounted him stricken,
        struck down by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced through for our rebellions,
        crushed for our iniquities;
    upon him was the punishment that reconciled us with God,
        and at the cost of his wounds we are healed.
All of us, like sheep, have gone astray;
        we have all turned to our own way,
    and the LORD has laid on him
               the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he allowed himself to be afflicted,
        yet he did not open his mouth;
    like a lamb that is led to the slaughter
        and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers,
        so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away;
        and as for his contemporaries, who realized
    that when he was cut down out of the land of the living,
        he was stricken for the rebellion of my people?
They made his grave with the wicked
        and his tomb with the rich,
    although he had done no violence,
               and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the LORD who willed to crush him, causing him to suffer.
    If you make his life an offering for sin,
        then he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days;
    the will of the LORD shall prosper through his work.
               Because of his anguish he shall see and be satisfied;
        by his knowledge, my righteous servant shall make many righteous,
        for he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him the many,
        and he shall divide the strong as the spoils of his victory,
    because he poured out himself to death,
        and was numbered among the sinners;
    yet he bore the sin of many,
    and made intercession for the transgressors.

—Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Hymn for Good Friday

Ah, Holy Jesus, How Hast Thou Offended?

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
That man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted.

Who was the guilty who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee:
I crucified thee.

Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
The slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered:
For man’s atonement, while he nothing heedeth,
God intercedeth.

For me, kind Jesus, wast thine incarnation,
Thy mortal sorrow, and thy life’s oblation:
Thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion,
For my salvation.

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
Think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
Not my deserving.

Words:  Johann Heermann
Music:  Johann Crüger
HERZLIEBSTER JESU, 11.11.11.5

Considering the Christian way of death

I've been thinking a lot about funerals lately, for one reason and another, and so earlier this week when I happened across my copy of Thomas G. Long's superb article "Why Jessica Mitford Was Wrong," I sat down to read it.  Dr. Long's piece, published ten years ago now in Theology Today, is a thoughtful and penetrating critique of the theology of Mitford's books, The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited.  He gives her the credit she deserves as a consumer advocate, but also the challenge she deserves as a cultural theologian.  I especially appreciate this section of Dr. Long's article:

What is often missing in the tug of war between the funeral-home-style service and the Mitford style is a thoughtful consideration of what a funeral—particularly a Christian funeral—could and should be. Obviously, a genuinely Christian funeral is not about the evils that Mitford found so easy to satirize—the vulgar, conspicuous consumption, the mawkish sentiment—but, strangely a Christian funeral is also not primarily about many of the good things that its friends claim for it: the facilitation of grief, helping people to hold on to memories of the deceased, or even to supply pastoral care and comfort to the bereaved. A Christian funeral often provides these things, of course, but none of these is its central purpose. A Christian funeral is nothing less than a bold and dramatic worship of the living God done attentive to and in the face of an apparent victory at the hands of the last enemy. Though the liturgy may be gently worded, there is no hiding the fact that, in a funeral, Christians raise a fist at death; recount the story of the Christ who suffered death, battled death, and triumphed over it; offer laments and thanksgivings to the God who raised Jesus from the grave; sing hymns of defiance; and honor the body and life of the saint who has died.

Dr. Long continues,

Thus, one measure of the veracity of a funeral is its capacity to face, without euphemistic smoke and mirrors, the reality of death. Death is, of course, the brute fact that occasions a funeral. Astonishingly, for all her talk about the funerals and the funeral industry, Mitford hardly mentions death at all, not real death. In Mitford's world, people do not die painfully or peacefully, well or poorly, blessedly or tragically, in despair or in trust, nor do those left behind have seasons of grief, memories to be cherished or forgiven, or faithful meaning to be wrested from sorrow, just a series of consumer choices. The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited cover many topics, but, ironically, death as a human experience, death as a force that robs life, death as a knife that severs bonds of love is not one of them. Milford jibes and smirks and hurls sarcastic witticisms at the blowhards among the morticians, and some of them, like clowns at a carnival pie-throwing booth, make themselves into easy targets, but one cannot help but see, lurking over her shoulder, the immense and terrifying mortal reality she will not turn to confront. To produce two books about death that do not actually speak of death is so strange, so inexplicable, that the sheer fact of it seems clear confirmation of William May's conviction that the unwillingness to name death betrays a repressed acknowledgment of its fearsome sacral potency. Contemporary people, he argues, "find it difficult to bring the word death to our lips in the presence of its power. This is so because we are at a loss as to how to proceed on the far side of this word. Our philosophies and our moralities desert us. They retreat and leave us wordless."

By contrast, the Christian funeral, at its best, speaks plainly of death. It does not shy away from naming death's power to pierce the human heart, to steal gifts of love, and to create empty places at the table of fellowship, and the Christian funeral bravely claims the victory over death won by Jesus Christ, and dares to trust the promise of the gospel's great mystery, "We shall not all die, but we will all be changed."

A second measure of the Christian funeral is the degree to which it treats the body of the deceased as the body of a saint. Mitford saved her strongest invective for the custom of embalming, restoring, and viewing the body, which she claimed is virtually unknown outside of North America and which she saw as utterly unnecessary, yet another sign of American bad taste, and an expensive trick pulled by funeral directors to con the gullible. She has a point, of course; the practice of paying someone a lot of money to put eyeliner and face power on an embalmed corpse so that it can be viewed under colored lights is difficult to defend. Nevertheless, two objections to Mitford's attitude toward the treatment of the body need to be raised. First, it is not simply that Milford has no use for chemically-treated bodies gussied up and on view in slumber rooms; she has little use for the body at all. As for the three women whom the Gospel of Mark reports were on their way to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body with spices, Jessica would undoubtedly have said, "Don't bother." Beneath her righteous consumerist rhetoric breathes the spirit of a gnostic who, like many educated people in our society, views the body as a shell, finally an embarrassment, part of what Geoffrey Gorer has called "the pornography of death." What to do with the dead body? It can be burned or buried, donated or disposed, but, like all pornography, it should be done out of public view. The theological anthropology that defines human beings as embodied creatures, that calls for the honoring of the body in life and in death, is out of Mitford's range.

In his fine book The Undertaking, poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch, comments on the "just a shell" theory of dead bodies. "You hear a lot of it," he observes, "from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws—folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others." He remembers a time when an Episcopal deacon said something of this sort to the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, and promptly received a swift slap. "I'll tell you when it's 'just a shell,' she retorted. "For now and until I tell you otherwise, she's my daughter." Lynch goes on to say,

So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is "just" anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as if we were to say that it was "just" a bad hair day when the girl went bald from chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised "just" a body from dead. What if, rather than crucifixion, he'd opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than "just a shell," he'd raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they'd have changed the calendar for that? . . . Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.

This is spot-on, as is Dr. Long's consequent point that

The most important measure of a Christian funeral is its capacity to place the event of a person's death into the larger context of the Christian gospel. "Funerals," says Thomas Lynch, "are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It is how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories." The Christian funeral is a liturgical drama, a piece of gospel theater, with roles to play and a time honored, if flexible and culturally varied, script. To understand Christian funerals as drama is not to say they are theater in the sense of Broadway entertainment, of course, but rather that they are community enactments of a formative narrative.

The unfortunate thing is that our culture has been so Mitfordized that even among Christians, there's no longer the awareness and understanding of this truth.  Instead,

The image of the deceased on a journey from this world to the next is now being replaced by the image of the mourner on a journey from grief to restoration. . . .  Deprived of the ritual of a saint marching into glory, we replace it with the psychically useful notion of a good, or at least somewhat interesting, person we will remember from time to time as life returns to normal. The Christian kerygma tends to fade in favor of biographical comments about the deceased, often delivered by a number of people, such anecdotes seemingly far more useful to the stabilization of the ego in grief than are comments about discipleship, eschatology, and mission.

This is a real loss, and part of the ongoing flattening and loss of spiritual depth of our culture, which is being mirrored in much of the church.  The challenge for the preacher who wishes to do a truly Christian funeral is to be concerned about more than just caring for the family, making the family happy, and doing the deceased honor—important as all three of these things are—but also about proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and his victory over death.  All the other purposes of a funeral must fall into line behind this one, or they too will ultimately fail and fall short, because those purposes do not create hope; they depend on the gospel hope to function, and so ultimately lack any real substance without the proclamation of the gospel.

For my wife, and other Peep lovers

with thanks to Alan W (who blogs here) for pointing it out:  Peep Research.  I have to agree with Alan, you should especially check out the research on the health effects of alcohol and tobacco on Peeps.

The hunt for Gollum

My thanks to Bill Roberts for posting this—it's the trailer for a fan-made movie about Aragorn's search for Gollum, a chapter in the story of The Lord of the Rings which isn't told, only recounted briefly by Aragorn.  It is, obviously, a low-budget production, but from the trailer, it seems to be an impressive piece of work nevertheless.

The work of faith

This from John Piper, via Of First Importance:

Faith is looking away from ourselves to another. Faith is total dependence on another. When faith stands in front of a mirror, the mirror becomes a window with the glory of Christ on the other side. Faith looks to Christ and enjoys him as the sum and judge of all that is true and good and right and beautiful and valuable and satisfying.

Amen to that.  That's the reason we resist faith, just as it's the reason we resist grace.  The Reformed tradition emphasizes that salvation is by faith, not by works, and that even faith comes to us as God's gift, not as the result of our own efforts; but there is one work, of a sort, that is required.  The work of faith, if you want to call it that, is accepting our displacement from the center of our universe; it's the willingness to look away from ourselves, not only to acknowledge our dependence but to acknowledge our insufficiency and our need to follow rather than to carve our own path, and to find our joy in another rather than in ourselves.

Pastoral subtext

Of all of the workshops I attended at Calvin’s Worship Symposium this past January, my favorite was the one led by Craig Barnes, working out of material from his book The Pastor as Minor Poet:  Texts and Subtexts in the Pastoral Life.  I was glad, a week or so ago, to see the audio go up on the Symposium website; it's from the Friday session, not the Saturday one which I attended, but that’s fine.  (Warning:  there are some glitches in the audio.)

Craig Barnes, “Moving from Text to Subtext”


• download

The Rev. Dr. Barnes defines “subtext” this way:  “not the reality of what is said but the truth of what is meant”—the truth that lies beneath the surface, if you will.  There’s a lot in his talk, so I’m not going to try to post on all of it at once, because he looks at the movement from text to subtext in a few different (though connected) areas.

He starts off with the subtext of the pastor—the truths that lie beneath the surface of the pastoral life.  He uses the example of  the little Apostle Paul flannelgraph figure from his childhood Sunday school—worn from overuse, purple from Kool-Aid spilled on him, taped together after two kids, fighting over him, tore his head off—as a parable of sorts of how hard God can be on those he uses.

What I particularly appreciate about what he has to say here is that he sees meaning in this—which can be hard to do from the inside.  If the subtext of the call to be a pastor is, “You’re going to look purple and taped-together by your retirement party,” there’s a purpose to that:

That’s how you know how to do better ministry.  How could you possibly provide ministry to the subtext of people’s lives unless you knew about brokenness yourself? . . . God breaks apart his people by putting them into ministry, precisely so that they’ll be better pastors—if they respond well, as the invitation always is, if they respond well to that brokenness.

This is a profound truth about ministry, and one which has profound implications for every part of pastoral work and life (including, as he goes on to discuss, preaching).  One of the things I’ve been thinking about of late is how this fits together with Andrew Purves’ pastoral wisdom about the crucifixion of ministry, John Berntsen’s understanding that ministry must therefore necessarily be cross-shaped, and Steven Seamands’ insight that ministry is equally necessarily trinitarian in form; I have the sense that if you put all these concepts together, at the point where they cross, there’s something important about the nature of ministry and human brokenness, but I’m not quite sure what.

It seems clear that we must be broken if we are to minister—broken before God and before his people—and perhaps even that the awareness that we aren’t qualified to do the work is the first qualification we must have; it is, I think, the complete eversion of the kind of attitude Jared Wilson was talking about last week that sees pastoral ministry as a form of worldly achievement.  I think the key here is that ministry isn’t something we do, but rather a way that we live, and that in particular, it isn’t something we do to other people.

Instead, it seems to me that ministry is primarily a matter of identification—identifying with Christ, and particularly in his crucifixion, and with his people.  It requires the recognition that it is Christ who is qualified, it is Christ who is adequate, it is Christ who is capable; we aren’t any of those things, and it isn’t our job to be any of those things.  Our job is to be conduits of a sort, to be open to whatever God wants to do in us by his Holy Spirit, and to be open to our congregations to understand and identify with the subtext of their lives, the part they don’t want other people to see, so that Christ can exercise his ministry through us by the power of his Spirit.  It’s something we have to do to understand—it only makes sense when lived.

Coming down to earth

I'm a big fan of Pixar's Andrew Stanton, the writer/director behind Finding Nemo and WALL-E; I have tremendous respect for his creative gifts and approach (which he discussed in a fascinating interview last June), and I think he tells great stories well.  My lovely wife disagrees with me, but I think WALL-E's the better of the two; that's no putdown to Nemo by any means, it's just that WALL-E works on so many levels and really connects the intimate story of the two main characters to the epic background story of the human race and the fate of the planet Earth.

I'm also a fan of Peter Gabriel, and I'll admit that the crowning touch for me to WALL-E was the superb closing credit sequence with Gabriel's song "Down to Earth."  Gabriel's still one of the better songwriters going, I think, and this is a great song that fits the movie well.  It doesn't give God the credit, of course, but it's a wonderful paean to the simple goodness of creation.

Down to Earth

Did you think that your feet had been bound
By what gravity brings to the ground?
Did you feel you were tricked
By the future you picked?
Well, come on down.

All those rules don't apply
When you're high in the sky,
So, come on down . . . come on down.

We're coming down to the ground—
There's no better place to go;
We've got snow up on the mountains,
We've got rivers down below.
We're coming down to the ground;
We hear the birds sing in the trees,
And the land will be looked after,
We'll send the seeds out in the breeze.

Did you think you'd escaped from routine
By changing the script and the scene?
Despite all you made of it,
You're always afraid of the change.

You've got a lot on your chest;
Well, you can come as my guest,
So come on down . . . come on down.

Chorus

Like the fish in the ocean,
We felt at home in the sea;
We learned to live off the good land,
Learned to climb up a tree.
Then we got up on two legs,
But we wanted to fly;
When we messed up our homeland,
We set sail for the sky.

Chorus

We're coming down (down)
Coming down to Earth (down)
Like babies at birth (down)
Coming down to Earth (down to Earth)
We're gonna find new priorities (down)
These are extraordinary qualities (down)
(Down, down to Earth)

Chorus

Words:  Peter Gabriel; music:  Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman
©2008 Pixar Music/Wonderland Music Company Inc.
From the movie WALL-E

Is the Obama administration leading us to . . . fascism?

It sounds startling, especially with all the voices calling him a socialist—but in one way, at least, that's actually correct, as Thomas Sowell points out:

Socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production. Fascists believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of this government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it and then, when their interventions turn out badly, summon executives from the private sector before Congress and denounce them on nationwide television.

It's a great piece; Dr. Sowell covers a number of topics in his inimitable way, putting his own spin on the standard "notes" column, and it's well worth your time to read the whole thing.  Here's another excerpt to encourage you to do so:

Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover's policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR's policy of trying to micro-manage the economy and Neville Chamberlain's policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent. . . .

Barack Obama's favorable reception during his tour in Europe may be the most enthusiastic international acclaim for a democratic government leader since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938, proclaiming "peace in our time."

Frightening thought, that.

Reader's guide: posts on faith

Keeping faith in mind
Is it a choice between brains and belief? No.

A matter of trust
Do we really believe God knows and wants what's best for us?

Thoughts on the nature of Christian faith
Flannery O'Connor was right: it's harder to believe than not to.

For a 90° turn: meditation on faith and reason
Learning from St. Augustine.

Thought on belief
We're wired to believe.

Statement of faith
Just because I believe in God doesn't mean it came—or comes—easily.

The stubborn faithfulness of God
In the end, this is what really matters.
 

God’s specialty: life out of death

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord:
look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;
for he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him.
For the Lord comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places
and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.”

—Isaiah 51:1-3 (ESV)

There are a lot of folks in the church these days who are lamenting the state of American culture and saying pessimistic things about the future of this nation; I know this in part because there are days when I’m one of them.  I think, though, that we would do well to step back from that a bit and realize that while it certainly might well be all downhill from here for the USA, our pessimism on that point isn’t justified by our faith.  The unstated assumption behind that pessimism is that God can’t overcome the unrighteousness of Americans—and that just isn’t true.  On this point, we would do well to consider this passage from Isaiah, and think about it carefully.

“Listen to me,” says the Lord. “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek me; listen and look.” He’s addressing the faithful remnant within Israel—the people who are still seeking God and pursuing his righteousness, who have neither turned their backs on him nor rejected his servant. These are the ones who are willing to trust God—but even for them, it’s hard.  

Indeed, maybe for them it’s especially hard, despite their faith, because they see their people’s dire situation much more clearly than their more secular friends and relatives. They can see beyond Israel’s physical exile to their much deeper and more serious spiritual exile, the distance of the people’s hearts from God, and their consequent spiritual barrenness and deadness; they can see past the obvious difficulty of Israel’s deliverance to the real difficulty that underlies it, and so they worry—not that God is unable to deliver his people, or that he doesn’t care enough to do so, as other Israelites do, but that the faithlessness of their people will somehow sabotage everything in the end anyway. They trust God, but they know better than to trust his people.

To them, God says, “Listen to me: look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.” A quarry is not a place of life; nothing comes out of it but dead stone. This is an apt metaphor to describe Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of their people, for Sarah was barren, and both were far past childbearing age; even now, with our advanced technology, we don’t see 90-year-olds having children. When God says, “When I called Abraham, he was but one,” he’s not kidding; and yet, as God points out, “I blessed him and made him many.”

The very foundation story of the family that became the nation of Israel is a story of God bringing life out of barrenness and deadness; that sort of miraculous birth is at the core of their national identity. “Trust me even in this,” God is saying, “because I’ve done even this for my people before.” What is now a wasteland, he will make “like Eden”—and this doesn’t just mean physical life, but also spiritual life, for Eden isn’t merely a physical paradise, it’s the place before sin, and before the curse of God that fell on us because of our sin.

As such, we should think long and hard before concluding that anyone, or any nation, is too messed up and too spiritually dead for God to revive.  God spoke, and a 90-year-old woman had a baby; he spoke, and a virgin bore a son.  He spoke, and Jesus who had been crucified rose from the dead.  What can he not bring to life, if he decides to speak?

(Partially excerpted from “The Herald of Salvation”)

In defense of the citizen punditry

When the term-limits movement began, I was initially a big supporter of the idea. Over time, that changed, as it became apparent that the real effect of term limits for politicians is primarily to shift influence from elected officials to unelected staff and lobbyists; but I'm still a believer in the underlying principle, even if term limits are a bad way to realize it. We should not have a separate class of professional politicians; that undermines the very nature of representative government.

Our leaders are, in large part, representative of no class and no group but their own; while they retain some connection to the voters who elect them, they have shed any real identification with us, any real sense of belonging to and with us and being a part of us, in favor of their new class, their new group, their new culture. It's a class and a culture which has some resemblance to the country as a whole, including a roughly similar ideological spectrum from left to right, and so we can select people whose voting patterns are more or less congenial to our beliefs—but this doesn't mean that they share our cultural referents or that they actually think like the rest of us, and we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking they do. We should expect most politicians, even those with whom we most agree, to at least occasionally do something we find completely incomprehensible, because they're operating in a different reality than ours, with different priorities.

I don't know how we solve this; I don't even know that there is a solution. Happily, however, I believe we're seeing a solution arising for a linked problem: the hegemony of the professional punditocracy.

Just as I don't think there should be professional politicians, so I don't think we're better off for having professional pundits; I believe in citizen pundits just as I believe in citizen politicians, and for the same reasons. Living in the echo chamber does bad things to your understanding of the world. You can imagine the effect if the only mirrors you ever saw were funhouse mirrors—it would distort your vision and give you a false view of yourself and the world around you; the effect of becoming entirely a creature of the political inside is similar. Even the best of the pundit class suffer the effects of having no real perspective on the outside world.

Here, however, the Internet and the rise of the blogosphere is providing a counterweight. While I grant that the blogosphere can't simply supplant the news media because it is itself dependent on the work of professional reporters, and while Sturgeon's Law applies here as well as everywhere else (if anything, we might be lucky if as much as 10% of the stuff out there is worth reading), yet what Seattle sports blogger John Morgan says about sports media is true on a much broader scale:

There are two layers of media at work. A nascent shadow media of questionable reputability and standards that, ironically enough, actually pursues the truth, and an established media that reports naïve truth as it's fed to them.

I would argue that the best of our online commentators have already rendered most professional columnists and talking heads redundant. The MSM haven't realized this yet, of course—or they haven't admitted it if they have—and so folks like David Brooks, David Frum, Ellen Goodman, and Jeff Jarvis continue to wield influence; but at this point, they're only significant because people are still trained to think they're significant. They're already obsolete. The only thing keeping them in service is that their true obsolescence hasn't registered with most of the media consumers in this country . . . yet.

In their place we will see the continued rise of the citizen punditry. This is a development with significant downsides, no question, most notably the sort of vicious nastiness we see in the online comments on newspaper websites like that of the Anchorage Daily News. We've had, thanks in considerable part to the professionalization of the media, a period of relative sanity and civility in our political discourse. That's been unraveling for a while, though, and the growing deprofessionalization of our political commentary will likely only hasten that unraveling; given the behavior of the MSM in the last election, I don't see any reason to believe that they would be any better in the end.

Over against that, I think the proliferation of citizen pundits will in the end bring a sort of Wikipediazation to our political commentary. The free market doesn't work perfectly, but it works better than a command economy; what we currently have is something of a command economy of opinions, and as the free market of the Internet supersedes it, I think we'll see a more balanced commentariat emerge than what the MSM has given us for generations. Individual pundits may well be less fair and/or farther from the center (or maybe not, I don't know), but in the aggregate, I would bet that the result will provide a relatively even portrait of American politics. It's not that we'll have a neutral point of view (something which I don't believe exists anyway), but rather that each point of view will have its equal and opposite, which should make it easier to identify the truth among the competing claims.

Doing so will of course take work on the part of readers; but then, for readers who are willing to put in that work, this may well be the best part of all. It won't be as easy as simply believing what the newspapers tell them, but it will be far more satisfying . . . and far more free.

Remembering Louie

Three years ago today, Louie Heckert died from injuries suffered when he was attacked by a rogue bull moose.  Louie was a long-time member of the congregation I served in Colorado, and he was the most universally beloved man I have ever met.  He was the character in chief in a town full of them, but unlike so many of the others, he was a gentle and welcoming man who always seemed to have a good word for everyone he met.

I will never forget telling my oldest daughter, who was then five years old, that he had been hurt and was probably going to die; her face grew sad and solemn, and she said, “I like Mr. Louie. He’s a nice man; he gives me candy.” There are a lot of things people will remember about him, and the candy is certainly one that children of all ages will remember fondly. There are others that stick in my mind as well, like his standard response when I asked him how he was doing: “Can’t complain, and nobody’d listen if I did.” I knew he had to be joking, but he said it as seriously as he ever said anything, with that twinkle in his eye.  I wish I’d heard all his stories.  I wish I had a good enough memory to recall all the ones I did hear.  I’m glad I got the chance to get to know him.

After his death, folks in Grand Lake put a couple videos together, to help raise money to restore his old black Jeep and to advertise the town (something Louie would have considered an honorable tribute, given how much time and effort he put into advertising the town himself).  Here’s the shorter one, with just the song and the ad at the end; this is the inimitable pairing of Steve Cormey on guitar and vocals and Walter Holland, the Swiss Army Knife of woodwind players, on clarinet:

This is the longer video, with added interviews with Gene, John Cook, Cormey, and others:

Where does experience come from? Bad judgment

I haven't had anything to say about Levi Johnston's decision to exploit his inadvertent fame by going on national TV to trash his ex-fiancée, because I don't think there's all that much to be said, really, and because the folks at C4P have been doing a good job of saying it (here and here); this leaves me with a low opinion of the kid and a lower one of her sister (who does indeed seem to be jealous of Bristol Palin and glad that her brother's no longer engaged), but so what?  Something did occur to me, though, which I thought might be worth noting:  while I really don't care all that much about Johnston, being far, far more concerned about the Palin family, I do have to wonder—while all the attention's on what this kid's doing to his ex and her family, did any adult sit down and try to tell him what he'd be doing to himself?  Or did any adult in his life even think that far ahead?

Someone should have.  For the short term, this no doubt seems like a great idea to him—make some money, hurt his ex, hurt her parents while he's at it (since it appears they never cared for him much), get some attention.  But what about the long term?  What effect is this likely to have on his adult life?  It's hard to say for sure, but it can't be good.  This whole thing will blow over, the news cycle will move on, the PR effects will fade . . . and then the real meaning of his actions will set in.

Obviously, he's permanently alienated the mother of his son and her family, which is going to do bad things for his relationship with that son in the future; maybe he's shallow enough that that will never bother him, but while I think he's pretty shallow, I don't see any reason to believe he's that bad.  And whether he is or isn't, this is going to hang over any future relationships he might have; any woman who comes along is going to look at him as a man with a son from whose mother he's estranged because he took advantage of her and betrayed her.  Which is to say, if he wants to get married, have kids, etc., he's set up a heck of a hurdle for himself to get there.

Then there's the question of the wider consequences of his actions.  In Alaska, of course, he's a marked man—everybody knows who he is, and that's going to be the case for a long time.  There are probably those whose desire to bring down Sarah Palin is so great that his dishonorable behavior won't hurt him in their eyes . . . but before he goes and applies for a position on Hollis French's staff, he ought to consider that his evident immaturity, irresponsibility and bad judgment still won't recommend him for anything.  Folks like that want to use you, kid, not employ you; they see you as a tool, not someone on whom they want to rely (even if they thought you were actually reliable—a conclusion which your behavior to this point does not tend to support).

Meanwhile, those without a strong political animus against Gov. Palin will focus mainly on what this reveals about Johnston's character and judgment—and what it reveals isn't good.  For the rest of his life, he's going to be the guy who got a girl pregnant, dumped her, then went on national TV to make a quick buck trashing her.  That's the sort of thing that gives most people a built-in prejudice against you; it's the sort of thing that makes it hard to convince folks that you're trustworthy, responsible, and a man of integrity.  As such, it's the sort of thing that tends to work against your ability to get good jobs and make a good living; if you do get a job, it can be the sort of thing that makes people not want to do business with your employer.

And that's not just in Alaska, either.  It will be worst there, no doubt, but even if he leaves the state to get away from the stigma, this is the age of the Internet; anyone looking to hire him, or date him, or work with him, is going to Google him if they don't know who he is, and if they do that, it will all be there.  Those folks will have to ask themselves whether they want to be associated with the guy who got a girl pregnant, dumped her, then went on national TV to make a quick buck trashing her—and I suspect that not all that many people will.  Even if they like the political effect of his actions, the fact remains that he didn't do what he did because he was a deep-cover Democratic Party dirty-tricks specialist, he did it because he's an immature, low-character jerk (or something of that sort).  What he did before, he might very well do it again—and if you're associated with him, this time it might be your daughter, or someone else you care about.  As such, even those who like and appreciate his actions at a distance aren't likely to approve of them close up.

All of which is to say, there's likely to be fallout from this whole episode for many years into Levi Johnston's future, and there's no good reason to think that any of it will be positive.  I could always be wrong, but it seems to me that what Johnston has done is likely to make it harder for him to form another stable romantic relationship, harder for him to get a woman to trust him enough to stay with him, harder for him to get good jobs, and harder for him to keep them.  The support of political liberals for his actions will probably prove to be abstract, not translating into meaningful support for him at a personal level, while the animus of political conservatives will most likely be very concrete and very direct; those who judge him without regard to political concerns will find little good to say about him from his behavior in recent months.  I hope Tyra Banks paid him well for the ratings boost, and I hope he's smart enough to save most of it . . . I think he may need it.

Pride (in the name of love)

This video was produced, as far as I can tell, as an ad of sorts for the History Channel's show on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; it features John Legend's version of U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)"—which is a rare accomplishment: a cover of that song that's actually good—accompanied by footage and photos of Dr. King and other participants in the civil-rights movement.  Ad or otherwise, it's a worthy tribute.

Congratulations to the Spartan Nation

I root in all things for my Washington teams—the Seattle teams in the pros, the University of Washington, Gonzaga as well in basketball, and really, I'm usually happy to see Washington State do well, also—and of course for my alma mater, Hope College; but at the college level, I pull for Michigan State, too, since between my own extended family and my wife's family, I'm related to a large number of Spartans.  I have of course been cheering MSU on in the NCAA tournament this year (and especially since Purdue took out the Huskies, which made me quite unhappy)—I even called them beating Louisville, since I thought they matched up really well with the Cardinals, and I have great faith in Tom Izzo as a coach.  I figured, though, that Izzo would have to be content with his fifth Final Four in twelve years, since I didn't see them beating Connecticut (in fact, UConn was my pick to win it all); even with the home-court advantage, I figured the UConn front line would be too much for them.  I even expressed that belief to my father-in-law this morning.

I was wrong.  Michigan State 82, Connecticut 73.  Congratulations, Coach Izzo and the Spartans—and good luck against North Carolina Monday night.  They'll be your third straight #1 seed, which is quite a gauntlet to run . . . but I think you can take 'em.

Thought on prayer and the routine

Today was taken up with a trip down to Indianapolis.  On the way back, we saw two overturned semis—one by itself, one at the center of a multi-vehicle accident (in the lanes going the other direction) that had drawn upwards of a dozen emergency vehicles, all with lights going.  One of my daughters asked, after we passed the big one, why it had happened; I said I didn't know, but the comment was made that probably someone hadn't been paying attention.  There was a little red car, undamaged, stopped a short distance ahead of the accident, which made us wonder if perhaps that car had cut someone off or made a sudden move of some other sort, setting off a chain of events that made the semi swerve and overbalance, among other things—the sort of careless move that people make and get away with all the time, but this time at just the wrong moment to cause a tragedy.

We take so much for granted, most days.  We take for granted that we can drive wherever we need to go and get there and back safely—and if we don't, people call us worrywarts.  We take for granted that we can do whatever it occurs to us to do and it will all be okay, and that if we're a little careless, no harm will be done.  We may pray for God's protection as we travel or do other things—I had asked for prayer Wednesday for traveling mercies for us—but we do so lightly, more in the spirit of "just in case" than with any sense that it's actually important.  We take for granted that the routine and the mundane really is, of its essence, the routine and the mundane.

And it isn't, as the folks involved in that accident were reminded, and as we were reminded, passing by in the other direction.  It isn't at all.  There is always the possibility for the unexpected and the uncontrolled to intrude—and if, at any given point, that possibility may be quite low, it does build up after a while.  There's always more out of our control than we like to admit, and more variables (many more) than we can possibly track, and far more ways that things can go wrong than there are ways they can go right.  We expect routine good fortune, take it for granted, and consider ourselves ill-used when we don't get it, when we really ought to realize that even that much is a great gift, an act of God's grace.  It is, truly, no small thing to pray for traveling mercies—and no small blessing when our request is granted.  Every such answer to prayer is a victory over the chaos in our world; and every such victory should be taken seriously as reason for gratitude.

Franklin Graham likes Sarah Palin's coattails

I have an envelope sitting on my desk from Samaritan's Purse, the organization founded by Franklin Graham; on the outside, the envelope references two of the many projects in which they're involved:

Ministry in the Slums of Honduras

Feeding Families on the Alaska Frontier

Now, had you asked me in advance which of these two would get top billing, I would have figured from past experience that it would be Honduras, which sounds more exotic and a bigger deal.  Past fundraising appeals from Franklin Graham, whether for Samaritan's Purse or for his father's ministry, have featured evangelistic work in places like India for just that reason.  But no, Honduras is relegated to a small strip below the address window of the envelope.  Most of the front of the envelope is taken up with the mission to Alaska.

Why? My best guess in two words:  Sarah Palin.

Most of the right side of the front of the envelope, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the total space, is occupied by a picture of Graham standing next to Gov. Palin, both grinning (he looks very like his father in this shot), handing out a big box of food.  The picture dominates the envelope; the eye goes first to Graham, looking down into the box, then moves immediately to the Governor, because she's dressed in red and so stands out from the rest of the colors in the picture.  The message in this one is very clear:  Franklin Graham is allied with Sarah Palin—they're working together to minister to the people of Alaska.

Lest you think I'm overemphasizing this, I'm not.  Open the envelope and pull out the letter, the first thing you see is a different photo, filling the top half of the page, of Graham and Gov. Palin giving away another large box of food; the only major difference in composition is that Graham is significantly closer to the camera and therefore looms larger.  Gov. Palin is still dead-center in the shot, and her red still draws the eye.  The caption, at the top of the page, reads, "EMERGENCY FOOD:  Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and I delivered much-needed boxes of food to native families in the wilderness of western Alaska."  In the text of the letter, the governor's office is mentioned in the second paragraph, she's mentioned by name—and praised in strong terms—in the third, and the entire fourth paragraph is her praise of Samaritan's Purse.

In other words, one of the main things this letter wants you to take away is that Gov. Palin loves Franklin Graham and Samaritan's Purse, and that they're allies in ministry.  This is, of course, a fundraising letter, so what this tells you is that Graham and his staff think that invoking her name is a good way to get people to give money—and that's no small judgment, because these folks are past masters at this craft.  When most folks think of Billy Graham, they don't think of him as a fundraiser, but all those crusades cost a great deal of money; who exactly was responsible for raising it initially I don't know, but over the years, that's one of the areas at which the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has gotten very, very good.  If they think Gov. Palin's picture and imprimatur will help them raise money from the sort of folks who support them, they're no doubt right.

Why does this matter?  Well, besides the fact that Samaritan's Purse is a good ministry that will do a great deal of good work with that money, it also matters because those same folks make up a sizable chunk of the Republican base—and for that matter, the Blue Dog wing of Democratic voters, many of whom now self-identify as Palin Democrats.  The calculation of Franklin Graham and the development folks at Samaritan's Purse with regard to Gov. Palin's probable effect on their fundraising isn't a political one, but it has political implications; at its root, it's the same calculation Saxby Chambliss made when he invited Gov. Palin to be the closer for his campaign in the runoff election for Senate in Georgia:  Sarah Palin has big coattails.  She inspires a lot of people across this country, and if she supports someone or something, that will encourage many, many other folks to do the same—with votes, time, money, whatever.  Whether it's "Vote for Saxby" or "give money to Samaritan's Purse," if she says it, millions of people take it a lot more seriously than if someone else says it.  That matters.  It matters a lot.

This also matters because it's a good gauge that all the Democratic efforts to smear this woman aren't really working.  Sure, they're no doubt serving to fire up the Party faithful, but outside of the elite echo chambers where people pull out lines to convinced each other of things of which they're both already convinced, when it comes to actually changing the minds of the citizenry, they aren't taking root.  For all the work the Democrat smear machine is putting into breaking her image as someone of high morals and ethics, that's clearly how most people in this country think of her, or else her support wouldn't be this useful to an evangelical ministry like Samaritan's Purse; they clearly don't see her as damaged goods, or they wouldn't be parading her support the way they are.

One might also point out that it matters because it means that Graham and his staff have a better feel for the political realities in this country right now, even without trying, than the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the various other party organs that exist inside that great echo chamber of the DC-NY corridor.  Were that not the case, the NRSC and NRCC would have hung on and waited for her to agree to attend their event (as she probably would have done) when she could do so at an appropriate point, rather than turning to Newt Gingrich as a speaker.

The bottom line is that this fundraising letter is just one more piece of evidence of Sarah Palin's extraordinary appeal and connection to a vast swath of the American populace; Palin Power is a very real thing, and the folks at Samaritan's Purse clearly judged it well worth their while to make a deliberate and intentional effort to tap into it.  (Which, since she supports and appreciates their efforts, was an entirely appropriate and valid thing for them to do.)  The sooner the national GOP starts doing so as well in an intelligent way—namely, without asking her to tap-dance to their tune for the privilege—the better off they'll be.

Update:  When I posted this, I was so focused on the letter that I wasn't thinking about the trip it recounts, so I didn't link to the post Joseph Russo put up on that trip at the time.  That omission is now corrected.  It's particularly significant because that post sparked people to donate to Samaritan's Purse in honor of Gov. Palin, which probably contributed to their decision to highlight the trip.

Problem solved

OK, the Internet issues here at the house have been resolved—apparently, Embarq had a problem which was affecting a lot of people here in the area (because of the flooding, someone said) which they've now been able to repair.  It's good to have this working again.

John O'Sullivan sees Margaret Thatcher in Sarah Palin

Thanks to Joseph Russo for posting the link to this—it's a great piece.  (Since it's 1 AM and I can't sleep, I also appreciate my computer working well enough so I could read it.)  O'Sullivan writes,

I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common. . . .

Mrs. Palin has a long way to go to match [the world-historical figure who today is the gold standard of conservative statesmanship]. Circumstances may never give her the chance to do so. Even if she gets that chance, she may lack Mrs. Thatcher's depths of courage, firmness and stamina—we only ever know such things in retrospect.

But she has plenty of time . . . to analyze America's problems, recruit her own expert advice, and develop conservative solutions to them. She has obvious intelligence, drive, serious moral character, and a Reaganesque likability. Her likely Republican rivals such as Bobby Jindal and Mitt Romney, not to mention Barack Obama, have most of these same qualities too. But she shares with Mrs. Thatcher a very rare charisma. As Ronnie Millar, the latter's speechwriter and a successful playwright, used to say in theatrical tones: She may be depressed, ill-dressed and having a bad hair day, but when the curtain rises, out onto the stage she steps looking like a billion dollars. That's the mark of a star, dear boy. They rise to the big occasions.

Mrs. Palin had four big occasions in the late, doomed Republican campaign: her introduction by John McCain in Ohio, her speech at the GOP convention, her vice-presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden, and her appearance on Saturday Night Live. With minimal preparation, she rose to all four of them. That's the mark of a star.

If conservative intellectuals, Republican operatives and McCain "handlers" can't see it, then so much the worse for them.

John O'Sullivan knows whereof he speaks.  Check it out.