If we’re going to deal with life in any truly productive way, we need to begin by facing and accepting the reality that this world is neither what we want it to be nor what it was meant to be, and neither are our lives. It wasn’t always this way. God created the world good, in harmonious order, blessed with everything necessary for life. He made us in his image and gave us the world to manage and care for, to tend and steward for its benefit and our own; he created us for relationship with him, to know him and love him as our Creator and ultimate Father. All he asked of us in return was to accept his authority—to accept that he’s God, and we’re not.That’s why, when the enemy wanted to bring us down, he started where he did. What was the bait he used on Adam and Eve? No, contra Woody Allen, it wasn’t about sex; rather, it was about pride, and the desire to escape that authority. The serpent’s temptation was simple: “Do this and you will be like God. You won’t have to trust him to tell you what’s right and wrong—you’ll be able to decide that for yourselves.” You will be like God. Why was that the first temptation? Because the keystone of the created order was, and is, that God created everything and rules over everything, and all of his creation finds its proper place under his authority. To disobey, to reject his authority, was to break that order and plunge creation into chaos. We cannot find our way out of that chaos on our own, no matter how hard we try, because as long as we’re trying to do it on our own, we’re still contributing to the problem. The only way out is to surrender our desire for autonomy—our desire to be gods of our own lives—and let God lead us.(Excerpted, edited, from “Out of Chaos, Hope”)
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
God uses waiting
Advent is a season of waiting. It’s about waiting for God’s redemption, for his promised deliverance from the power of sin and death. It’s about learning to wait faithfully and patiently, trusting God to keep his promise; it’s about preparing ourselves to celebrate Christmas by using the time leading up to that celebration to examine our hearts and discipline our impatience. Especially in our broadband microwave instant-oatmeal society, it’s about stepping back from our culture’s emphasis on fasterfasterfaster and learning to slow down, to understand that just because God doesn’t give us what we want rightnow doesn’t mean he isn’t at work; it’s about learning to understand the work he does in our lives while we wait.And it’s about learning to understand the importance of trusting God in the waiting, and for the waiting. The Exodus gives us a great example of that. You may remember the story of how Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt, and eventually rose to power as the right-hand man of the Pharaoh, the king of that nation; and how in a time of famine, Joseph’s father and brothers and their whole household came down from Israel to live in Egypt. For a long time, this worked out well, and Joseph’s family grew into a large and flourishing tribe, known as the Hebrews; but then a Pharaoh came to power who hated and feared them, and made them slaves as the first step in destroying them. They cried out to him to deliver them, and did he swoop down right away and set them free? No. People were born in slavery and died in slavery. The Pharaoh who first enslaved them died, and his heir took the throne, and their slavery continued. But in the proper time, when everything was right, God acted, and they were set free.And notice who he used: Moses. Though a Hebrew, Moses grew up in the palace as Pharaoh’s grandson; he was a golden boy. On the one hand, he could have settled in to his position as royalty, turned his back on the people from whom he came, and joined the oppressors; certainly many, many people in his position would have done so, given the chance, and many throughout history have. He didn’t do that. On the other hand, if he was going to be the one to free his people from slavery, you might have expected that he’d do that from his position of influence, as one of the heirs of the man who held the reins of power. That didn’t happen either. Instead, Moses’ life went all wrong: he let his anger get the best of him and killed an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews, and ended up having to flee to the desert to avoid being put to death. He had it all, he had the perfect opportunity to do whatever he wanted to do, and instead he ruined the whole thing—or so it must have seemed at the time—and left himself no choice but to run for his life. Sure, his early life had seemed promising, but he’d squandered that promise, and now he’d spent forty years out in the wilderness tending sheep. He was a nobody, a has-been, a footnote to history. He was a sermon illustration in the temples of Egypt on what happens when you lose your temper. That’s all.Except, he still had one thing: he still had faith in God, for whom he had chosen the side of his enslaved people over the side of luxury and privilege to begin with. He spent those forty years in the desert waiting, and maybe he still had ambitions or maybe he figured that he’d be a shepherd in the wilderness for the rest of his life, but he never stopped believing that God would be faithful to set his people free from their slavery in Egypt; and so when the time was right, God came to him and said, “Moses, I’ve chosen you to go tell Pharaoh to let my people go.” To be sure, Moses argued with him, but in the end, he went and told Pharaoh to let his people go; and in the end, Pharaoh didn’t really, but God delivered them anyhow, with Moses leading the way.There’s an important lesson in this, I think: when we’re waiting for God’s deliverance—from whatever we might need him to deliver us from—our waiting isn’t wasted time, and it isn’t unnecessary. It’s God preparing the ground, and preparing us—not only for our own deliverance, but to be his agent of deliverance for others as well. This is how he works, in this time between the times, when Jesus has come to begin the reign of God on earth but not returned to complete that work; he has left us in place here as his body, the body of Christ, his hands and feet through whom he works to carry on his ministry. What God is doing in us and for us isn’t just about us; as we wait for the answers to our prayers, he’s lining things up to answer them in the proper time, but he’s also preparing us to be the answer to other people’s prayers. We wait, not only for God to deliver us, but for him to work through us to deliver others; and even the waiting is part of his work.(Excerpted, edited, from “Deliverance”)
The best ’80s sitcom that never was
Neil Gaiman recently posted the news:
Like all of you, I believed that all episodes of the mid-80s Jonathan Coulton sitcom MONKEY SHINES (in which I guest-starred as the irascible drunken writer next door) had been wiped and lost for good. A great loss to the world of entertainment, and to fans of Paul and Storm (who actually got their start on the show, and not, as most trivia articles claim, as the pair of bloodsucking dentists in that X-Files episode).People talk about Bosom Buddies, Cheers, The Golden Girls and then the ones who were there say “. . . and Monkey Shines,” and the room falls silent, pondering the magnitude of the loss.So I was amazed when I heard that the title sequence had been rediscovered.
Here’s the story from Paul and Storm:
Jonathan Coulton’s short-lived sitcom “Monkey Shines” had an extremely brief run on ABC in 1985; it was cancelled during the first commercial break of the first episode, and was ordered destroyed by then-ABC President Grant Tinker. The show slowly developed a cult following through the years, however but although numerous rumors of bootleg recordings of the show circulated, they all proved to be hoaxes or, in several cases, episodes from season 3 of “Felicity”.In early 2008, in a sub-basement of the Yale University anthropological studies department, researchers unearthed a Betacam master video recording of the pilot episode opening credits. (Unfortunately, the remainder of the episode was apparently recorded over with footage of the Yale Whiffenpoofs “1991 Holiday Jamboree Sing-a-bration”) To date, this remains the only authenticated footage from “Monkey Shines”.
Without further ado, the title sequence from the infamously obscure sitcom Monkey Shines:
For those of you wondering what’s going on here, this is the original explanation:
“Monkey Shines” is Jonathan Coulton‘s entry to the Round 1 Challenge of the song writing competition, Masters of Song Fu.The Round 1 Challenge was announced on May 20, 2008. The challenge was:
You must do a song in the style of a classic television show. Not only that, but this song is the theme for a fictional television show about yourself (or your band). By “classic television show” theme song, we mean the type of themes found in shows from the 1960’s – 1980’s (ie Gilligan’s Island, Cheers, The Fall Guy, Diff’rent Strokes, Welcome Back Kotter, Greatest American Hero, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Facts Of Life, Green Acres, Gimme A Break, The Monkees, etc.). Your theme song must include both lyrics and music. It must run no shorter than 30 seconds, and no longer than one (1) minute.
Jonathan included the pitch for his “show” in announcing the song on his blog:
I am a stuffy, middle aged bachelor with an enormous inheritance. The monkey is a charming but unpredictable rake, who is also a master thief. In the pilot episode he is arrested while trying to steal my collection of jewels. He charms the judge, who much to my dismay orders that as a condition of his probation, the monkey must become my butler. Hilarity ensues as we try to live together, each of us coming to learn and appreciate the other’s perspective on life.
On the limitations of computers
This is Bill James again, from his comment on the Oakland A’s in the 1984 Baseball Abstract; the essay was republished in This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones: Bill James Without the Numbers under the title “On Computers in Baseball,” which is where I have it. Nearly a quarter-century after he first wrote this, it still seems to me to be as true as ever.
The main thing that you are struck with in the process of learning about a computer is how incredibly stupid it is. The machine simulates intelligence so well that when you accidentally slip through a crack in its simulations and fall to the floor of its true intelligence, you are awed by the depth of the fall. You give it a series of a hundred or a thousand sensible commands, and it executes each of them in turn, and then you press a wrong key and accidentally give it a command which goes counter to everything that you have been trying to do, and it will execute that command in a millisecond, just as if you had accidentally hit the wrong button on your vacuum cleaner at the end of your cleaning and it had instantly and to your great surprise sprayed the dirt you had collected back into the room. And you feel like, “Jeez, machine, you ought to know I didn’t mean that. What do you think I’ve been doing here for the last hour?” And then you realize that that machine has not the foggiest notion of what you are trying to do, any more than your vacuum cleaner does. The machine, you see, is nothing: it is utterly, truly, totally nothing.
Deliverance
(Exodus 3:1-10; Hebrews 11:24-28)
I said last week that Advent is a season of waiting—that it’s about waiting for God’s redemption, for his promised deliverance from the power of sin and death. It’s about learning to wait faithfully and patiently, trusting God to keep his promise; it’s about preparing ourselves to celebrate Christmas by using the time leading up to that celebration to examine our hearts and discipline our impatience. Especially in our broadband microwave instant-oatmeal society, it’s about stepping back from our culture’s emphasis on fasterfasterfaster and learning to slow down, to understand that just because God doesn’t give us what we want rightnow doesn’t mean he isn’t at work; it’s about learning to understand the work he does in our lives while we wait.
And it’s about learning to understand the importance of trusting God in the waiting, and for the waiting. The Exodus gives us a great example of that. You may remember the story of how Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt, and eventually rose to power as the right-hand man of the Pharaoh, the king of that nation; and how in a time of famine, Joseph’s father and brothers and their whole household came down from Israel to live in Egypt. For a long time, this worked out well, and Joseph’s family grew into a large and flourishing tribe, known as the Hebrews; but then a Pharaoh came to power who hated and feared them, and made them slaves as the first step in destroying them. Moses was a Hebrew who had been raised in the palace as Pharaoh’s grandson, who fled Egypt after killing an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews, and who made a home with one of the nomadic tribes of the wilderness.
That’s the setup for our passage from Exodus: God putting his plan in motion to deliver his people from their slavery in Egypt and bring them back to the land he promised their ancestors. This would become, for the people of Israel, the definitive example of God’s deliverance, the original act which, above all others, defined them as a people and gave them reason to trust in God’s promises. When he brought them back from their exile in Babylon, that was seen as the “new Exodus”; the New Testament takes the “new Exodus” language of Isaiah and applies that to the coming of Jesus. We’ll talk some about all that next week. For now, the key is this: Pharaoh enslaved the people of God, and they cried out to him to deliver them, and did he swoop down right away and set them free? No. People were born in slavery and died in slavery. The Pharaoh who first enslaved them died, and his heir took the throne, and their slavery continued. But in the proper time, when everything was right, God acted, and they were set free.
And notice who he used. Moses grew up in the palace; he was a golden boy. He could have settled in to his position as royalty, turned his back on the people from whom he came, and joined the oppressors; certainly many, many people in his position would have done so, given the chance, and many throughout history have. He didn’t do that. Equally, if he was going to be the one to free his people from slavery, you might have expected that he’d do that from his position of influence, as one of the heirs of the man who held the reins of power. That didn’t happen either. Instead, he let his anger get the best of him, ruined the whole thing—or so it must have seemed at the time—and left himself no choice but to run for his life. Sure, his early life had seemed promising, but he’d squandered that promise, and now he’d spent forty years out in the wilderness tending sheep. He was a nobody, a has-been, a footnote to history. He was a sermon illustration in the temples of Egypt on what happens when you lose your temper. That’s all.
Except, Hebrews tells us, that he still had one thing: he still had faith in God, for whom he had chosen the side of his enslaved people over the side of luxury and privilege to begin with. He spent those forty years in the desert waiting, and maybe he still had ambitions or maybe he figured that he’d be a shepherd in the wilderness for the rest of his life, but he never stopped believing that God would be faithful to set his people free from their slavery in Egypt; and so when the time was right, God came to him and said, “Moses, I’ve chosen you to go tell Pharaoh to let my people go.” To be sure, Moses argued with him, but in the end, he went and told Pharaoh to let his people go; and in the end, Pharaoh didn’t really, but God delivered them anyhow, with Moses leading the way.
There’s an important lesson in this, I think: when we’re waiting for God’s deliverance—from whatever we might need him to deliver us from—our waiting isn’t wasted time, and it isn’t unnecessary. It’s God preparing the ground, and preparing us—not only for our own deliverance, but to be his agent of deliverance for others as well. This is how he works, in this time between the times, when Jesus has come to begin the reign of God on earth but not returned to complete that work; he has left us in place here as his body, the body of Christ, his hands and feet through whom he works to carry on his ministry. What God is doing in us and for us isn’t just about us; as we wait for the answers to our prayers, he’s lining things up to answer them in the proper time, but he’s also preparing us to be the answer to other people’s prayers. We wait, not only for God to deliver us, but for him to work through us to deliver others; and even the waiting is part of his work.
Further thought on Islam and Christianity
Whenever Christians start arguing about Islam, it always seems to come down to assertions as to whether or not Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Broadly speaking, liberals will assert that we do, and conservatives will assert that we don’t, with the sides pointing to different Scripture passages and historical facts to make their case.Every time this happens, I have the same question: what on earth does that statement mean, anyway? From the typical Christian point of view, there only is one God, and the question is how truly or faithfully or properly one worships this God; there simply aren’t any other deities out there. With that in mind, granted that Muslims are seeking to worship the one true God rather than something of this world, we might say that the real question is whether they’re doing so in a way which God finds acceptable.That said, one might say that the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God are so different as to be mutually exclusive, which seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable conclusion. All that proves, however, is that they’re different religions—which is to say, it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know (since I don’t think anyone’s under the illusion that Islam is merely one among many Christian denominations). For the statement that “Muslims and Christians worship the same God” (or “don’t worship the same God”) to be in any way meaningful, it has to say more than that; it has to be a statement about the relationship between the two religions. Maybe it’s intended to be; but if so, what is it intended to mean? I’ve honestly never been able to figure that out. As far as I can tell, it’s just an unhelpful bit of rhetoric deployed not to convey real meaning, but merely for emotional effect; and if that’s all it is, it would be better to drop it from the conversation.
A thought or two on Islam
A preacher of my acquaintance was recently asked whether Islam is evil. Being a blunt-spoken sort and not one for pulling his punches, he said, “Yes.” I can’t help thinking that it wasn’t a very helpful answer, in part because it isn’t a very helpful question; it can mean several different things, covering multiple areas of interest and concern.For instance, one might consider this question theologically: is Islam, considered as a body of beliefs about God, evil? As a Christian, I would say that Islam is a religion which preaches a form of works righteousness, thus encouraging people to put their faith in their own efforts rather than in Jesus Christ; as such, it’s as evil as any other such religion, including a number of things which generally pass themselves off as forms of Christianity. This is not to say that there’s no real difference between a given stream of Islam and your typical American church preaching “moralistic therapeutic deism,” but the core theological issue would seem to be the same in both cases. One may call specific versions of Islam evil—the jihadists who plan terrorist attacks and preach suicide bombing as a form of religious martyrdom are clearly teaching something evil—but it seems to me that you can’t call Islam as a whole evil, on a theological level, without saying the same about some ostensibly Christian preachers. (To some, that might be a deterrent to calling Islam evil; to others, it might prompt a re-evaluation of some American religious leaders.)That said, I’m pretty sure that the person who asked that question didn’t have that concern in mind; I suspect that their interest was less theological than political. We might therefore ask, Is Islam necessarily the cause of political evil? I know there are those who are pessimistic and would say “yes” to this because they believe that Islam naturally tends to despotism; but I believe this question is properly answered in the negative. One, even if one agrees that there can be no such thing as a healthy Islamic democracy, modern Western democracy isn’t the only good way to run a country; Morocco, as a constitutional monarchy that has seen significant positive developments over the last couple decades, offers another possible way forward. Two, there are Muslim thinkers at work developing a particular Muslim theological and philosophical groundwork for democracy, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to declare their work a failure before it even has the chance to bear fruit. This is especially true given that we have in Iraq a potential cradle for Islamic democracy, and early signs of its success are encouraging.At this point, someone might object by pointing to evil Islamic governments and leaders, and certainly I have no great opinion of any of the rulers of Iran; but to say that there are evil people who carry the label “Muslim” is not to say even that all Muslims are evil, let alone that Islam itself is evil. After all, there are evil people who claim to be Christian, too; the first person who comes to my mind isn’t a political figure, but Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, who was an elder in his Lutheran church in Wichita. It’s a severe logical stretch at best to assume that because a person who professes a given faith is evil, that faith must be the cause of their evil.The bottom line: I believe Christianity is true, which logically entails the belief that Islam is false. I think it’s perfectly fair to say that there are streams of Islamic tradition, such as Wahhabism, which are bad news. A sizeable percentage of the world’s terrorists are Muslim, and while I suspect a lot of them (perhaps most of them) would still be pretty malignant people if they’d been raised as Buddhists or Baptists, the fact remains that they both justify and promote their terrorist activity on the grounds of their Muslim beliefs; I think it’s foolish in the extreme to pretend not to see that. But all of that said, it seems to me that treating Islam (and Muslims in general) as if the likes of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al’Zawahiri are representative of what it necessarily means to be Muslim is like holding up Fred Phelps and saying, “This is what a Christian looks like.” A more nuanced evaluation, I think, would be preferable.
Politics just keeps getting stranger
as Michelle Malkin points out; if it isn’t Sarah Palin inspiring the loonies on the Left, it’s Barack Obama inspiring the nutcases on the Right (although some of those, it seems, are actually Clintonites who just can’t let go). I particularly appreciate her conclusion:
I believe Trig was born to Sarah Palin. I believe Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. I believe fire can melt steel and that bin Laden’s jihadi crew—not Bush and Cheney—perpetrated mass murder on 9/11. What kind of kooky conspiracist does that make me?
HT: Baseball Crank
And you think bureaucracy is bad now
I’ve been reading David Hamilton-Williams’ book Waterloo: New Perspectives: The Great Battle Reappraised, which I picked up used some time ago on a flyer; it’s a controverted work and I’m no expert in Napoleonic history, so I don’t claim to pronounce on the accuracy of the author’s conclusions, but it’s an interesting read. One of the things which struck me was his account of the screwy bureaucratic structure under which the British army labored, and the ways in which it hampered military operations. I don’t think one needs to know much about the Peninsular War (the 1807-13 war in Portugal and Spain; Arthur Wellesley took command of the British forces in 1809 and was eventually created Duke of Wellington for his success) to understand this letter from Wellington to the War Office which the book quotes:
Gentlemen: Whilst marching to Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your request which has been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and then by dispatch rider to our headquarters. We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents, and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, spleen of every officer. Each Item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg you your indulgence. Unfortunately, the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstances since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall. This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government, so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of the alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue one with the best of my ability but I cannot do both. 1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or perchance, 2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.