I don’t know why, but the tech gremlins have been working overtime on me this month. I think I have everything sorted out, though. I hope.
Tell me why, exactly, self-driving cars are supposed to be a good idea?
Photo © 2009 Justin Marty. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
The above graphic comes from a church down around Dallas, but if you’re a Christian and you use social media, chances are this isn’t the first time you’ve seen that slogan. (It may be the first time you’ve seen it used to advertise a sermon series, though. I have to admit, that amuses me.) I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen it, but it’s been at least twice this week.
In many cases, the people pushing this line clearly mean it in a rabbinic way, much the same as Jesus when he said, “If anyone comes to me and doesn’t hate his entire family, and even his own life, he can’t be my disciple.” Did Jesus really want us to hate people? No, he was using a typical rabbinic figure of speech: the idea is that our love for God should be so great that our love for everyone else, true though it is, looks like hate by comparison. (Given the propensity of people to declare that “If you loved me, you would . . .” and that if you refuse, you must hate them, this is no mere metaphor.) Similarly, in this case, the point isn’t to dismiss the importance of going to church—as noted, the graphic above is for a sermon series at a large church in Dallas—but to emphasize the truth that the church is much bigger than just a place to go on Sunday mornings. To quote from the description of that sermon series, “We are to be the church, we are to live dangerous lives for Christ, allowing ourselves to be God’s vessels for accomplishing extraordinary things.”
Though the intent is fine, this is a deeply problematic slogan, for two reasons. Read more
This was a rough month. I haven’t posted because, for a variety of reasons, I’ve barely been on my computer. The main exception to that has been time spent writing funeral services, as I had three this month (though I didn’t have the lead role in all of them). I’ve had little energy to write anything else.
It’s not really over; I still need to do what I can to care for and support those who are grieving. I hope there won’t be any more funerals for a while, but I can’t count on that. Even so, I’m starting to feel my energy returning for the tasks I laid aside this month, including writing. New Year’s is a fitting time to restart the engine.
2015 was an annus horribilis for me, but for all that, I’ve seen God’s hand at work. Here’s hoping for gentler blessings this year. Happy New Year, everybody.
Photo © 2007 Whit Welles. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
Just a quick thought: it seems to me that our nation(s) would be in much better shape if we all accepted that no matter what we do, even our best solutions will always work imperfectly and will always have downsides. We would do well to be skeptical of the promises of politics—not just politicians, but politics. We would do better to be skeptical of plans and programs and ideas for improvement—even our own. No matter what we do, this world will still be broken. Some people will be poor, and some will be exploited, and some will be abused; some will be exploiters, and some will be abusers, and some will be just flat evil. We need to set aside our technocratic assumption that these are problems to be fixed and realize that they are people to be faced. We need to give up the naïve idea that these “problems” can be fixed, which is really just avoidance: we don’t want to face these people. We don’t want to meet them honestly in their mess, we want the promise of a quick, clean, antiseptic solution that will make the mess go away where it won’t bother us. We ought to be deeply skeptical of such promises, and even more skeptical of the desire of our hearts to believe such promises.
We won’t solve the problem of human evil by passing laws. We won’t stop gun violence by passing laws against guns—or laws in favor of guns, for that matter. When someone is determined to break the law, what’s one more? That’s the easy way out, the cheap way out, the coward’s way out. We will only make a dent in the evil of this world the hard way: one life at a time, by knowing our neighbors and loving them as ourselves.
William Holgarth, The Polling, 1755.
Repentance is not a work of the Law. That thought came to me today, and I’ve been mulling it all afternoon. Repentance isn’t something we do as a duty to meet the requirements of the Law. True repentance, which involves a change of behavior, isn’t something we can do entirely in our own strength. Repentance doesn’t earn us forgiveness.Read more
David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values offered an observation eighteen years ago which is just as true, and just as important, today.
To understand why the United States has the highest divorce rate in the world, go to some weddings and listen to what the brides and grooms say. In particular, listen to the vows: the words of mutual promise exchanged by couples during the marriage ceremony. To a remarkable degree, marriage in America today is exactly what these newlyweds increasingly say that it is: a loving relationship of undetermined duration created of the couple, by the couple, and for the couple.
Our tendency may be to shrug off the significance of formal marriage vows, viewing them as purely ceremonial, without much impact on the “real” marriage. Yet believing that the vow is only some words is similar to believing that the marriage certificate is only a piece of paper. Both views are technically true, but profoundly false. Either, when believed by the marrying couple, is probably a sign of a marriage off to a bad start.
In fact, the marriage vow is deeply connected to the marriage relationship. The vow helps the couple to name and fashion their marriage’s innermost meaning. The vow is foundational: the couple’s first and most formal effort to define, and therefore understand, exactly what their marriage is.
I had been wanting to post on this yesterday, or this morning at the latest, and to do so at greater length. Unfortunately, life did not cooperate. Even so, I couldn’t let Thanksgiving pass without at least noting an excellent column in the Boston Globe from eight years ago titled “The Opposite of Thanksgiving.” I also want to give my own thanks to my colleague the Rev. Winfield Casey Jones, who brought this piece to my attention. The column is by Eve LaPlante, who puts the point starkly in her third paragraph:
This modern version of Thanksgiving would horrify the devout Pilgrims and Puritans who sailed to America in the 17th century. The holiday that gave rise to Thanksgiving—a “public day” that they observed regularly—was almost the precise opposite of today’s celebration. It was not secular, but deeply religious. At its center was not an extravagant meal, but a long fast. And its chief concern was not bounty but redemption: to examine the faults in oneself—and one’s community—with an eye toward spiritual improvement.
A thanksgiving day, as actually celebrated by 17th-century Americans, was a communal day of fasting, meditation, and supplication to God.
LaPlante centers her account on the story of Samuel Sewall, one of the nine magistrates who presided over the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. In 1697, Sewall publicly repented of his part in those trials. After telling his story, she closes her column with this telling comment:
The belief in repentance—and its power to improve the American experiment—has also retreated. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that this Thursday a powerful leader will stand before the nation and admit to a disastrous mistake—or say, quoting Samuel Sewall, “I desire to take the blame and shame of it, asking your pardon, and especially desiring prayers that God would pardon that sin and all my other sins.”
I can actually imagine President George W. Bush doing so, or having done so. He’s about the only powerful politician of whom I can say that, though. “The belief in repentance—and its power to improve the American experiment—has . . . retreated,” and we are much the poorer for it.
“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth,” 1914, Jennie A. Brownscombe. Public domain.
Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
—James 1:22 (ESV)
When it comes to the Christian life, what matters most isn’t how much we know (or think we know), or how good we are at saying the right things. It isn’t how much of God’s word we’ve read, or how much we’ve studied, or even if we have a degree in it. What matters is how much the word of God has changed us and how much God’s character and will are expressed in our lives. Are we people who just hear the word of God and then go on about our business, or are we doers of the word?Read more
The view that Christianity is all about following a set of rules—the only thing that matters is that you do x and don’t do y—has always appealed to a great many people. After all, if all God wants us to do is meet a particular standard of behavior, then it’s easy to tell who’s a Christian and who isn’t. More than that, it’s easy to look at yourself and tell how you’re doing. One nice thing about a fence is that you always know which side of it you’re on. The other is that you know exactly how far you can go before you’ve crossed it. The fence tells you what you can get away with as much as what you can’t.
As I’ve said before, my time in pastoral ministry has convinced me that on the whole, people really don’t want grace, and we don’t want to live by grace. We may say we do, and we may sing about it, but when you get down to brass tacks, we’d rather live by some form of law. If you ask the law, “How many times do I have to forgive somebody before I can give them the punishment they have coming,” the law may tell you, “Three times,” or it may say “seven times,” but it will give you a standard you have a chance to meet. Ask Jesus the same question and he says, “Seventy times seven”—once you lose count, you’re just getting started. Law gives you a limit to what you have to do. Grace calls us to keep going, and going, and going, long after we want to quit.
Whatever version of law we come up with, if it’s our idea and our standard, we will find ways to make it something we can live up to in our own strength. In comparison to the holiness of God, we will inevitably make it far too small a thing. For instance, many people say, “Christianity isn’t about believing certain things, it’s about living a life of love.” That sounds very pious, unless we stop to ask a basic question: how do we know what love is? How do we know what it means to live a life of love? To answer that question, we have to believe certain things, and what things we believe will determine the answer we give.
The classical Christian answer is that we know what love is because God is love, and God has revealed himself to us in his word. He has shown us himself in his living Word who is his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the words of Scripture, which he inspired by his Holy Spirit. Scripture shows us the truth of who God is, and thus what love is. We take our definition of love from these pages. If we set Scripture aside, we’re left to define love for ourselves, according to our own preferences, prejudices, and preconceived ideas. We’re free to tell ourselves that all God wants from us is whatever we’ve already decided we want from ourselves. It’s a lot easier to call ourselves followers of Jesus if we claim the right to plan the itinerary for ourselves.
(Excerpted, edited, from “The Heart of the Matter”)
Photo of the Reichsgerichtsgebäude Zwölftafelgesetze, Leipzig © 2010 Andreas Praefcke. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
During our time in British Columbia, the governing party—a socialist labor party called the New Democratic Party—held a leadership race. The provincial premier, a deeply unpopular little mountebank called Glen Clark, had a neighbor and friend who was under investigation for running an illegal gambling operation. Said neighbor was also a contractor who had built a sundeck for the Clarks at their main residence and another at their vacation home. Together, they added up to about $10,000 worth of work. When the news broke that Clark was the subject of a criminal investigation, he abruptly resigned from office. (He would be indicted on two felony charges; he was ultimately acquitted on both counts, though not without being admonished by the judge for his bad judgment.)
The race to succeed Clark was a circus, as BC politics tended to be, and produced some truly funny moments. One of my favorites came from the Agricultural Minister, Corky Evans. Evans had a country-bumpkin image which he liked to play up for comic effect. In announcing his candidacy for party leadership, he told the story of the time he had decided to build a house for his family. Being impatient, he hadn’t wanted to take the time to put in a foundation, so he just built the house right on the ground. It seems to have come as a surprise to him when the house began to sink. As he told the crowd, this left him with two choices: either tear down the house, or lift it up and put a foundation under it. Either way, it was going to be a very messy business.
Corky Evans used this to describe the state of his party, but it applies just as well to the church. There is and always has been the tendency to try to build the church with, on, and out of human efforts. Some churches are built with music. Some are built on the charisma of the leader. Some are built out of programs. Some are built by spending lots of money on advertising and entertaining Sunday services. All of these are accepted methods for church growth.
The problem is, to build a church in such a way is to do what Corky Evans did: it’s to build a house without a foundation. If you try to build a church on the most popular music, or the most entertaining preaching, or the most exciting service, or the best structure, or any other worldly foundation, you may appear to succeed for a time. You may well produce a large organization that has lots of members and money and a high profile in the community. What you will not have in any meaningful sense is a church, and so it will not endure. Sooner or later, it will begin to sink, leaving you with only two options: either tear the whole thing down, or try to lift it up and put a foundation under it, because without the proper foundation the building cannot stand. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, the only foundation on which the church can be built is Jesus Christ. It must be built with the truth of who Christ is and what he taught if it is to last.
(Excerpted from “The Glory of the Truth”)
Photo: Foundation framework and reinforcing steel for 150-ton permanent cableway hoist house. United States Department of the Interior, 1933.
