Author Archives: Rob Harrison

In the end, we can’t even foul it up properly

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Well, that was a nasty bug. I’m used to riding them out, but that one took me down right and proper. It’s the first time I’ve had to call in sick on a Sunday in almost six years in ministry; and here over 40 hours from first onset, I’m still feeling pretty muzzy.This has left me with time to think, but not much working in the brainpan to do the thinking with; but in the altogether unsurprising fact that the church kept right on running without me, it has been a reminder that in all these things, God is at work. He takes our strengths and our weaknesses, our successes and our failures, our faithfulness and our rebellion, and he uses all of it; which is not to say that it isn’t better to be faithful than to be rebellious, but simply to note that it’s beyond our ability even to surprise God, much less to derail him (though we can both delight and grieve him). Even if we devoted everything we had to trying to ruin his work, we would still find that he’d used what we’d done to accomplish his purposes.That’s not precisely what this poem, one of my favorites, is about; but there’s a common truth here, I think.

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Confrontation and reconciliation

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Joyce over at tallgrassworship has an insightful post up on dealing with disagreements—one which caught my attention in a particular way because she’s taken my post from earlier today on Christian unity and applied it in a way that’s congruent with what I was saying but hadn’t occurred to me, and it’s always interesting to me when people do that. The fact that she’s sandwiched that between insights from Justin Taylor and the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund means I find myself in pretty good company, too. And of course, Joyce puts it all together in a very wise and thoughtful way, offering good counsel. I encourage you to read it, and consider it well.

Restorative discipline

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The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, speak to your people and say to them, If I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take a man from among them, and make him their watchman, and if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning, and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.“So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked person shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way,
that person shall die in his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul.“And you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, Thus have you said: ‘Surely our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we rot away because of them. How then can we live?’ Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?“And you, son of man, say to your people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him when he transgresses, and as for the wickedness of the wicked, he shall not fall by it when he turns from his wickedness, and the righteous shall not be able to live by his righteousness when he sins. Though I say to the righteous that he shall surely live, yet if he trusts in his righteousness and does injustice, none of his righteous deeds shall be remembered, but in his injustice that he has done he shall die. Again, though I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ yet if he turns from his sin and does what is just and right, if the wicked restores the pledge, gives back what he has taken by robbery, and walks in the statutes of life, not doing injustice, he shall surely live; he shall not die. None of the sins that he has committed shall be remembered against him. He has done what is just
and right; he shall surely live.“Yet your people say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just,’ when it is their own way that is not just. When the righteous turns from his righteousness and does injustice, he shall die for it. And when the wicked turns from his wickedness and does what is just and right, he shall live by this. Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ O house of Israel, I will judge each of you according to his ways.”—Ezekiel 33:1-20 (ESV)My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul
from death and will cover a multitude of sins.—James 5:19-20 (ESV)Discipline is supposed to be restorative. It’s not just to make the guilty pay or the wicked suffer; it’s not just to avenge wrong or deter other wrongdoers; it’s not just to make us feel better. It’s also supposed to bring the sinner to repentance. That’s the ultimate purpose; that’s why God sent prophets, to give his people warning after warning before bringing the hammer down, and it’s why even before sending them into exile, he was already promising to bring them home. God will not tolerate our sin, and he will not simply ignore our wrongdoing, but his desire is not simply to blot out the wicked—it’s that the wicked should turn from their way and live.That’s why, when we see someone wandering off the path, we can’t just go yell at them, and we can’t just kick them out; we need to reach out to them and seek to bring them back—and if discipline is necessary, it must be directed to that purpose, and carried out in that spirit. Otherwise, it isn’t true discipline—it’s just another sin.

Christian unity

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I’ve posted this quote from Markus Barth, from his book The Broken Wall, before, but I think it bears repeating:

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

This is, I think, the litmus test for all of our schemes and programs and ideas to grow the church: if we’re just creating conditions in which “insiders or outsiders of a certain class or group meet happily among themselves,” we may have great success in growing an organization—done skillfully, that sort of approach is certainly the path of least resistance in doing so—but what we’re producing won’t be the church.Christian unity costs us something. It costs us our egos, our comfort zones, and our ease. It calls us not to avoid those with whom we disagree, or with whom we have issues, or with whom we’re in conflict, but rather to confront them head-on—and to do so not with anger, or self-assertion, but with love and grace. This is not to say we must do so with approval; there are times when rebuke is necessary, and refusing to speak the hard truths is a violation of unity just as much as refusing to repent of our own sin and ask forgiveness. It is to say, however, that we cannot hang back from the work of reconciliation, and we cannot let mere disagreement become grounds for disunity. We may be rejected by others—but we cannot in good conscience be the ones to do the rejecting; and though there are times when God calls us to correct one another, even correction must be offered with open arms.

Sense of place and the global economy

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I don’t know if you’ve heard of Richard Florida and his book Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, but he makes an interesting argument:

It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where you live doesn’t matter: you can telecommute to your high-tech Silicon Valley job, a ski-slope in Idaho, a beach in Hawaii or a loft in Chicago; you can innovate from Shanghai or Bangalore.According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Place is not only important, it’s more important than ever.Globalization is not flattening the world; on the contrary, the world is spiky. Place is becoming more relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. The choice of where to live, therefore, is not an arbitrary one. It is arguably the most important decision we make, as important as choosing a spouse or a career. In fact, place exerts powerful influence over the jobs and careers we have access to, the people meet and our “mating markets” and our ability to lead happy and fulfilled lives.

Intuitively, this makes sense to me, because (as Florida puts it in the first chapter of his book, excerpted here)

The place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being. It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families. People are not equally happy everywhere, and some places do a better job of providing a high quality of life than others. Some places offer us more vibrant labor markets, better career prospects, higher real estate appreciation, and stronger investment and earnings opportunities. Some places offer more promising mating markets. Others are better environments for raising children.

Even if the sense of place our ancestors had is indeed fading away, Florida’s right that place matters, in and of itself; that’s the reason sense of place developed to begin with, and the reason that even as we become more moble and mix ourselves up more and more, different places still have different identities and characters and subcultures (and sub-subcultures). Given that, and given our need to belong, and our need for self-definition, I suspect that while our sense of place may evolve somewhat and weaken with the mobility of our society, it may look different in our children and grandchildren, but it will never really disappear. Who knows—add in the tendency of each generation to react against the generation before, we may even see a resurgence, and an intentional effort to recreate an older, more settled form of community. It would be nice.HT: Chris Forbes

The unsafeness of God

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I mentioned earlier that I’d yielded to the urgings of a couple folks and set up on Facebook (which I hadn’t thought of doing on my own hook, since I’d tried MySpace and disliked it); I’m grateful to them for that. So far, what I’ve appreciated most is the chance to reconnect with a lot of folks I’d lost touch with, friends from high school (and further back) like Melissa Holgate and Elizabeth Howe and people from Hope as well. Among the latter group, someone I always really appreciated was Erin Koster (now Erin Ortlund), in part (but only in part) because she played the primary role in leading Sara to attend Hope, which obviously has been a great blessing to me. 🙂 I was reading her blog this morning, and was struck by her post on the first snow of the season up in Saskatchewan. She uses a quote from Frederick Buechner on that subject, one that I didn’t remember (even though I’ve read Telling the Truth, it was some time ago); and somehow—maybe it’s just the way Buechner’s writing works on my brain—it put me in mind of this passage from The Hungering Dark:

As the Italian film La Dolce Vita opens, a helicopter is flying slowly through the sky not very high above the ground. Hanging down from the helicopter is the life-size statue of a man dressed in robes with his arms outstretched so that he looks almost as if he is flying by himself . . . [When] the great dome of St. Peter’s looms up from below . . . for the first time the camera starts to zoom in on the statue itself with its arms stretched out, until for a moment the screen is almost filled with just the bearded face of Christ—and at that moment there was no laughter at all in that theater full of students and their dates and paper cups full of buttery popcorn and La Dolce Vita college-style. Nobody laughed during that moment because there was something about that face, for a few seconds there on the screen, that made them be silent—the face hovering there in the sky and the outspread arms. For a moment, not very long to be sure, there was no sound, as if the face were their face somehow, their secret face that they had never seen before but that they knew belonged to them, or the face that they had never seen before but that they knew, if only for a moment, they belonged to.I think that is much of what the Christian faith is. It is for a moment, just for a little while, seeing the face and being still; that is all. . . . Just for the moment itself, say, of Christmas, there can only be silence as something comes to life, some spirit, some hope; as something is born again into the world that is so strange and new and precious that not even a cynic can laugh although he might be tempted to weep.The face in the sky. The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is ever the same again.Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.For those of us who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that. God comes to us in the hungry man we do not have to feed, comes to us in the lonely man we do not have to comfort, comes to us all in the desperate human need of people everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon. It means that God puts himself at our mercy not only in the sense of the suffering that we can cause him by our blindness and coldness and cruelty, but the suffering that we can cause him simply by being ourselves. Because that is the way love works, and when someone we love suffers, we suffer with him, and we would not have it otherwise because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.

1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West (repost)

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(I have in general decided against reposting old material, which is why I’ve started doing the “retrospective” links posts; but I’ve been thinking this week about this post from June of last year, and it seemed sufficiently apropos that it made more sense to me to repost it, lightly edited, than merely to link back to it with a comment.)I preached through 1 Timothy last summer, and when I hit 1:12-20, it started me thinking about the whole concept of conscience, and how so many in the American church abuse it. The word “conscience,” if you take it apart etymologically, means “to know together with”; it refers to the things we know together with God about the way the world is supposed to be and the way we’re supposed to live. It’s the awareness God has placed within us of his character and will. We might almost call it a sixth sense, as it gives us the ability to perceive reality in its moral aspect. The problem is, it’s only valuable as far as it accurately reports reality—in this case, moral reality, what is right and wrong in the eyes of God—but that’s not how we want to use the idea of conscience; rather than recognizing it as something objective relating to real right and wrong and actual guilt, we want to take conscience as subjective, reflecting how we feel about something, whether we feel we’ve done right or not. We strive to unhook our conscience from God’s character and will, so that far from challenging our own preferred standards of right and wrong, our sense of conscience merely reflects them.As I was thinking about why this is, and reflecting on Paul’s paean to the mercy of God, it hit me for the first time that at some level, we don’t want the conscience God gave us because we really don’t want what God is offering—we don’t want his solution, and we don’t even want to believe what he’s telling us about the problem. The word of God tells us we are sinners, rotten at the core, who need to accept his mercy, to be saved by his grace, through none of our own doing and none of our own merit, and we just don’t want to hear that. We want to believe we’re basically OK—and if we run up against something we can’t get around, that everyone agrees is bad behavior, we want to redefine it as a disease; that way, we’re not bad, we’re just sick.When the Bible tells us that we do bad things just because we like to do bad things, and that the purpose of our conscience is to convict us of our sin, not to justify our behavior, we resist. As much as we call the gospel good news, it often doesn’t come to us as good news. We don’t consider it good news that we’re sinners saved—despite the fact that we do not and will not ever deserve it—solely by the loving grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That kind of thinking is for losers, and we all want to think we’re winners, if there’s any way we possibly can; we want to believe that God saved us because we’re such all-fired wonderful people that we just had it coming. And the truth is, we aren’t, and we didn’t. The truth is, Christianity is for losers—and that means us. Even the best of us.That’s one reason 1 Timothy is so important for us. Paul was far more of a winner than most of us could ever hope to be, a man who would tower over the church of our day just as much as he did in his own time, and yet he gave all the credit for all his success to the power of God; for himself, he said this: “It is a true statement and worthy of acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.” He understood what folks like the Covenant Network don’t, or at least don’t seem to (any more than bad drivers in Dallas), that the good news of the gospel has nothing to do with lessening our sin and our guilt. Instead, it has everything to do with the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace of God, this spectacular gift we have been given, which overwhelms our sin and guilt, washing it all away through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit. The good news of the gospel is that yes, we are sinners, yes, there really is a problem with us, and that God has fixed that problem, because Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

Barack Obama: pro-abortion extremist

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Read Robert George on this.

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress. . . .Before proving my claims about Obama’s abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama as ”pro-abortion” rather than ”pro-choice.” . . .Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition. Such people—Thomas Jefferson was one—reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They certainly didn’t think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as ”pro-choice”? Of course we would not. It wouldn’t matter to us that they were ”personally opposed” to slavery, or that they wished that slavery were ”unnecessary,” or that they wouldn’t dream of forcing anyone to own slaves. We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a placard that said ”Against slavery? Don’t own one.” We would observe that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.Just for the sake of argument, though, let us assume that there could be a morally meaningful distinction between being ”pro-abortion” and being ”pro-choice.” Who would qualify for the latter description? Barack Obama certainly would not. For, unlike his running mate Joe Biden, Obama does not think that abortion is a purely private choice that public authority should refrain from getting involved in.

HT: Bill

The dying art of civil civics

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I first ran across “Timely Tips for Having a Civil Political Conversation” four years ago, and thought it was important then; when Terry Paulson wrote, “the shrill and explosive nature of the comments made about this election make serious political dialogue in America difficult at best,” I could only agree. Four years later, it’s only gotten worse. Despite the issues that divide us, I truly believe that if folks would take Dr. Paulson’s advice to heart and follow it, we’d all be a lot better off.Of course, to do that requires humility and the willingness to respect those who hold positions with which we disagree; and a lot of folks find that hard, and far too many dogmatically reject the idea. As Dr. Johnathan Haidt has pointed out, doing that requires people to be able “to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning,” and some people find that very difficult.

Final word for the night on poverty

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Jared weighed in earlier today with an excellent practical suggestion of what we might do to alleviate global poverty one person at a time; Erin had a superb (and quite convicting) observation about the priorities we see in many church budgets (something, it’s worth noting, that Jared has also posted about at various points); and Heather asked, simply, WWJD?: What would James do?My wife capped off the day for me by bringing her ongoing consideration of the reality, or lack thereof, of money to bear on the problem; she manages, I think, to fuse this issue with my earlier ruminations about economics as one of the elemental powers of our society and how we should respond to that. I think she’s found another part of the response, and I encourage you to read her post.