Author Archives: Rob Harrison

On liking Jesus and building the church

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A church sign I passed today has up what I would guess is the title of this coming Sunday’s sermon: “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.” Of course, I know that isn’t original, but comes from Dan Kimball’s book of the same title, but it got me thinking. Taken purely as a cultural observation, that would seem to be hard to argue—there are indeed a great many people who like Jesus but don’t like his church at all, and there are certainly churches out there that make it easy to understand why. No question, the American church needs to do a better job in a number of ways at living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, starting with actually being committed to living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, instead of all the other junk we so often get on about instead.

But stop a minute. If we were truly a Christ-centered gospel-driven Spirit-actuated community of committed believers who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, would that mean that “they,” whoever “they” are, would like the church and we would all feel nicely validated? The thing about Kimball’s title, which our neighboring church pastor borrowed for his sermon, is that most people don’t seem to take it or offer it as merely an observation, but rather as a criticism—that if we just did this church thing right, whatever “right” is supposed to look like, that “they” would like us. The underlying assumption here is, I think, that it’s perfectly reasonable that the world around us should like Jesus, and that if we were just more like Jesus, the world would like us too, our churches would grow, and we would be more “successful.”

It’s a widespread assumption, in part because it’s a very comfortable one for an American church that, by and large, still hasn’t realized that Christendom is dead, has been given its eulogy, and is now feeling the thumps of the gravediggers’ shovels; but there are voices that demur. Above all, there is this one:

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets. . . . Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”

—Luke 6:22-23, 26 (ESV)

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”

—John 15:18-21 (ESV)

“The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.
And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.
But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember
that I told them to you.”

—John 16:2b-4 (ESV)

Of course, if “they” hate you, maybe they hate you because you’re shining the light of the gospel into the darkness of their hearts, and maybe they hate you because you’re a jerk; that phrase “on account of the Son of Man” is not one we can interpret however we please. But there’s a very important question here: if people outside the church like Jesus, is that actually an opportunity, or a sign they don’t really know him? As Jared Wilson has memorably pointed out, there are a great many counterfeit Jesuses floating around our culture, all of them very likeable; just pick your favorite and go with it. The real Jesus, by contrast, ticked so many people off so badly, he ended up crucified. To the extent that people like Jesus but not the church, it may just be that both halves of that statement are unfortunate.

The bottom line here is that the American church is, with very few exceptions, deeply culturally embedded, and its self-understanding is incorrigibly capitalist and consumerist; even those congregations which don’t consciously operate in terms of “market share” and “customer satisfaction” still think of themselves in these sorts of customer-response categories. There is the pervasive subliminal assumption that we can and should measure success by whether or not our customers are happy, whether or not they come back, and whether or not they draw in new customers. Of course we want them to like us—if they don’t, we’ll go out of business, and that would be failure, and is to be avoided if at all possible. And of course they like Jesus—after all, we like Jesus, and he wouldn’t have built such a big and successful brand if he weren’t likeable, would he?

It’s a hard thing to change this sort of mindset. It has to start, I believe, with the recognition that often, the main reason we like Jesus is that we’ve picked out the parts of him that we find congenial and are working determinedly to ignore the rest; we aren’t letting him confront the idolatries of our hearts, or the cultural idolatries in which we’re enmeshed, or the areas in which we indulge sin in our lives as a comfortable old friend. I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who said, commenting on Jesus’ command to us to love our enemies, that the greatest of all the enemies Jesus calls us to love is God—that if we truly take him seriously as Lord and God, he will often seem like an enemy to us as he challenges, rebukes, corrects and disciplines us, working to prune away the diseased, rotten, and overgrown areas in our souls . . . and as he prunes us, he calls us to the incomprehensible spiritual discipline of loving and praising him for the pain and suffering he’s causing us.

Our message to the world is not supposed to be, and cannot be with any integrity, “Come to Jesus and get what you want”; sometimes it seems like it’s just the opposite. We worship a Lord who traded success for failure, a home for homelessness, a good job for unemployment, social approval for the scorn of the elites, and ultimately life for death—how on earth can we present him accurately to a world to which none of this makes any sense at all and expect them to applaud? If you want success in the world’s eyes, according to its categories (building, attendance, budget, media profile, etc.), the very idea is nuts; clearly, you can’t grow a church that way. And indeed, you can’t. But then, you can’t grow anything that’s truly a church any way, and neither can I, and neither can anyone else. Only God can, and this is how he is pleased to do it.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that,
as it is written,
“Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

—1 Corinthians 1:18-31 (ESV)

If our goal is to get people to like Jesus and like us, we’ve gotten both halves of it wrong. That is not the rock on which he said he would build his church, but the shifting sand against which he warned. We can’t judge what we’re doing based on results, because we can’t assume that the results we want are the ones Jesus wants to produce in us. All we can do is proclaim the gospel of grace and seek to live by grace in a manner according to the holiness of God—and if the world looks at that and tells us we’re crazy, and that maybe they don’t like Jesus either, well, results aren’t our business, they’re God’s. Ours is to be faithful and let him take care of the rest.

Programming note

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I haven’t gone anywhere, I’m not dead, and I’m not feeling overwhelmed by life; but I think my wireless card is going, as my connection has been sketchy, and I have been ill (though doing better today, it seems). We’ll see how the day goes, but I have at least a couple things I’d like to finish up.

No Rivals

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(Psalm 2, Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 1:1-2:4)

When I graduated from Hope College, up in Holland, Michigan, in 1996, I was very pleased to have gone there—and not just because that’s where I met Sara. It’s a great school, and not just academically; my professors weren’t just names and lectures, but people I knew and could depend on, from whom I learned a lot outside of class as well as in it. I grew spiritually because of the chapel program, and made many wonderful friends; and it was interesting, when we visited this past April, to find that every single professor we talked to remembered us—even the one we’d only known as the father of a friend. As pleased as I was then with my choice of college, though, I’m even prouder to be a Hope grad now; during a time when many colleges have suffered great losses economically, and when many once-Christian schools are running away from the faith as fast as they can, Hope is weathering the economic and spiritual storm amazingly well. Wonderful things are happening there, and the folks tasked to lead the ship have the right vision to see that continue and grow.

Which is probably what one should expect from a school whose symbol is the anchor. You can’t spend any time at all around Hope without seeing it—the big anchor at the old entrance to campus, the anchor on the college seal, the anchor on the school’s more informal logo. It’s all over the place—and for good reason. The school was founded in 1854 as the Holland Academy, the work of one of the great figures in the history of the Dutch community in America, the Rev. A. C. Van Raalte; and in his dedication speech, he declared, “This is my anchor of hope for this people in the future.” From that line the school would ultimately take both its name and its symbol, and a profoundly important piece of its identity.

“This is my anchor of hope.” In saying that, Rev. Van Raalte was drawing on the book of Hebrews, specifically Hebrews 6:19-20, which declares our hope in Christ to be “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul”; he wasn’t putting his faith in the institution, but in Christ. The institution of the school would be an anchor of hope because it in turn would be anchored in Christ, and only for as long as that remained true; and by the grace of God, so far, it has.

Of course, that hasn’t been without struggle or conflict; there are plenty of people who would like to see Hope anchored in something other than the historic Reformed understanding of the Christian faith. Some of them are even on the faculty, legacies of a previous administration that didn’t care about this so much. That’s really not surprising, because we all face the temptation to put our hope in something other than Christ, to find our soul anchor in anything but him; the world tells us that we can’t possibly put our faith in someone we can’t hear or see or touch, that there are far more sure and certain anchors for the soul than Jesus. Money, perhaps; a college degree, or maybe even a graduate degree; personal relationships; there are a great many things we value, and it’s easy to put our trust in them instead of in Jesus, to hope in our bank account or our marriage, our résumé or our children, instead of in Christ. It’s easy because we have some control over those (though not as much as we think we do), and we just find it easier to put our hope in our own work than in the work of someone we cannot control.

This is an age-old temptation, and we see it right here in Hebrews, because it’s the temptation the letter was written to address. We don’t know who wrote this letter, or to whom, and in fact that knowledge was lost very early on; but we can see clearly why it was written. Whoever the author or authors of this letter may have been, they had one single overriding concern: to demonstrate beyond any conceivable room for argument that Jesus Christ is superior to anyone else and anything else, that there is no one and no thing else in whom it makes any sense at all to put our faith and hope and trust. Christ alone is our soul anchor, he alone is our anchor of hope, and he’s the only anchor that will hold through the storms of life. He has no rivals; he never has.

This overriding concern, this overarching theme, is what we’re going to be focusing on for the next number of weeks as we spend time going through this book—which is a difficult book if you’re not familiar with it, because it draws heavily on the religious culture of the first-century Hebrews, which is thoroughly alien to us. Even so, the book’s main focus is very clear in our passage this morning, right from the very first verses. “In these last days, [God] has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.” And off the book goes for a while to talk specifically about that aspect of Christ’s superiority, that he is above all other spiritual powers.

We also see, in this passage, something about the structure of the book. Hebrews isn’t just saying all these things about Jesus so we know them, after all, but because the author wants to encourage people to put their faith in Christ and Christ alone, not in anything else, not in anything additional. With Paul’s letters, what you typically get is a long theological section and then several chapters of application, but Hebrews doesn’t work that way. Rather, what we see is a repetitive structure in three parts.

First, the author makes part of his case for the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ—in this passage, the argument that Christ is superior to angels. Then he applies that. Here, that application is quite brief, in chapter 2 verse 1: because Christ is superior to angels, and thus his message is superior to any message ever delivered by angels—which, as he reminds his hearers in verse 2, is no small thing—then we need to pay more careful attention to the message of the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ. We need to take that message seriously and respond appropriately, so that we don’t wind up drifting away and putting our faith and hope in anyone or anything else. Having said that, then comes the third part, the warning: if you ignore the only salvation God has offered, which is given through Jesus Christ alone, the only result will be ultimate and absolute disaster, with no hope of escape.

The key thing to understand here, though, is that this warning isn’t rooted in punishment—indeed, it isn’t really about punishment at all. It’s more like a sign reading “Bridge Out Ahead.” If you see a sign like that and insist on ignoring it and going around the barricades, unless there’s a cop sitting right there to stop you, you aren’t going to be punished for ignoring the sign; you simply won’t be able to get across, because there’s no bridge there to get you across. And if you insist on trying to cross it anyway, you won’t be punished for that, but you will suffer the consequences of trying to do the impossible: you’ll have an accident. That’s essentially what Hebrews is talking about in the beginning of chapter 2. It’s not that God is just waiting to punish you if you try to do things your own way—it’s that Christ is the only way, and if you put your hope in anyone or anything else, you are trying to cross the canyon where there is no bridge, and so you will inevitably fall.

But if you will hope in the Lord, he will never fail you; you may stumble, but you will not fall. The one who is the radiance of the glory of God and who upholds the universe by the word of his power is the one who upholds us, for he is the one who purified us from sin and now intercedes for us before the throne of heaven; no one and nothing else can save us, no one and nothing else could ever be enough, but he is enough, and he has done it—and he will never fail you. He is faithful who promised.

What is the purpose of argument?

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I mean that as a completely serious question. I’ve been mulling it recently, ever since I got tangentially involved in an argument in a comment thread on another blog. The blogger in question seems to spend the largest part of his time going after atheists, and it would appear that there are many who rise to the bait. I’ve never quite understood that behavior, really; I’m happy to debate issues with people who comment here—as long as the conversation seems to me to be productive, and an actual conversation—but I don’t generally have a great deal of interest in going to other people’s blogs just to tell them they’re wrong.

I know there are vast numbers of people out there who believe very differently from me, including on issues on which I hold deep and strong opinions, but I simply don’t feel the compulsion to go fight with any of them about it simply because of that fact. Yet some people do. The commenters with whom I briefly argued (on a point of historiography, not faith) seemed to have a sort of long-standing relationship with that blogger which consisted mostly of them being offended by him believing differently and expressing that fact in what seemed to me to be an intentionally provocative manner. I don’t see the point in that, and I don’t see the justification—on either side, really.

Sure, I have no doubt provoked people on this blog, and over the years in real life, but not with the intent of being provocative; I’m looking for something different. If you try to pick a fight, you’ll get one, but you’ll usually get one with people who just like fighting; if you try to generate an argument because you want to have an argument, you’ll usually end up dealing with people who fight you because they’re offended that people could actually be so stupid as to believe something they find completely unacceptable. That is what we’ve come to call (in a manner unfair to the folks who first stood up to argue for the fundamentals of the Christian faith) the spirit of fundamentalism; and while it’s no doubt partly temperamental, personally, I don’t have a lot of interest in arguing with diehard fundamentalists, be they conservative Christian fundamentalists, atheist fundamentalists, Muslim fundamentalists, liberal fundamentalists, or whomever. I tend to think of that in the spirit of the old Texas judge who advised, “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It can’t be done and it annoys the pig.”

The key here, I think, is that folks who have that sort of attitude seem to view the purpose of argument as winning. That’s why they argue, and it’s what they see as the value of argument, as far as I can tell. I don’t know if it’s a matter of ego gratification in triumphing over other people, or if it’s a defense mechanism against insecurity in their own beliefs, or what, but there really does seem to be that sort of attitude that the reason that you argue with people is to get them to admit that they’re wrong and you’re right.

I have a problem with that—or maybe two, but they’re related. The first is that that sort of approach is all about the self—it is, at base, selfish. It’s all about aggrandizing the ego, building up the self at the expense of others, and so it is not concerned about others except insofar as they provide an opportunity to show one’s own superiority (because the reason for wanting to demonstrate the superiority of one’s position is to prove that one is superior for holding it).

The second is that it’s about the self instead of being about the truth: if you go into an argument with the goal of proving yourself to be right, then you’re showing that what really matters to you is not knowing the truth, but being seen to be right and being affirmed as right. With that sort of attitude, it wouldn’t really matter what you believed—indeed, you could change beliefs like some people change clothes, so long as that put you in a position where the beliefs you professed were applauded by those around you as correct. (And indeed, there are people who do exactly that.)

It seems to me that the purpose of argument ought to be to help us together to find truth. This is not to say that it ought to be timid, or half-hearted, or accompanied by qualifiers that really, whatever you believe is fine, and it doesn’t matter that you and I disagree; quite to the contrary, actually. If you and I disagree, then it could mean that both of us are wrong, or it could mean that one of us is wrong and one of us is right—or even, depending on the subject, that both of us have perceived an aspect of the truth but have drawn some false conclusions from it. Whichever is the case, this is profoundly important, not as a threat to either of our egos, but as an opportunity for our growth. If I believe something which is not true and you come to me with the truth, then I need to know this information—and how am I going to learn it, except by you demonstrating it to me? And how will you demonstrate it to me except through reasoned argument?

Of course, it will never be true in this world as we know it that everyone will be selflessly concerned to know only what is true; our own sin, and particularly our pride and our selfish fear, make that impossible. I certainly can’t claim it to be true for me; I want to believe only what is true, but I know that I don’t always act accordingly. Scientists will tell you that this is how science works, but it isn’t, not by a long shot—the desire for wealth, the desire for success, the desire to win approval from the establishment by conforming to the dogma of the day (in science, the technical term for dogma is “paradigm”), all corrupt the process, just as similar considerations corrupt it in every other discipline and every other part of society. That said, the fact that we can’t perfectly reach a standard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth setting, and it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth disciplining ourselves in that direction. The purpose of argument, I believe, ought to be to discover truth—which will inevitably mean sometimes discovering that we’re wrong, and learning to accept that fact not only with grace but with gratitude. May we all get better at this.

A thought on the Trinity

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In the course of preparing a sermon I did the other week on the Trinity, I was going through all the usual images and analogies people use to try to illustrate or explain it (a group which runs all the way from bad to incipiently heretical) when I ran across one I’d never heard before that actually has something to recommend it. Believe it or not, there are those who argue that the structure of our government was influenced by trinitarian theology. As history, I don’t know what to make of that—it’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t seen any primary sources that support it—but as an analogy, it has its points. There is a certain hierarchy and structure to our branches of government, but none of them are dominant; each does different things; and the relationship between them constitutes our government and makes things happen. Thus, for instance, laws are passed by the legislative branch, executed and administered by the executive branch, and enforced by the judicial branch.

Of course, like any analogy, this one has its dangers (including the temptation to snipe about the tendency of government to think it’s God) and its limits: God is unlimited and perfect, while our government is limited and imperfect (though it occasionally forgets the fact) because it’s composed of limited and imperfect people. It also, however, has this advantage, that it points us to one reason why the doctrine of the Trinity matters. The structure of our government is intrinsically relational—each branch acts on the others and is acted on in turn, and it’s those actions and relationships that actually constitute the workings of our government.

Unlike the Trinity, of course, no one would ever describe the interrelationships of the three branches as a dance, but like I said, every analogy has its limits. It remains clear even so that our government is fundamentally different from what one might call a unitarian government (such as a monarchy or dictatorship)—it’s not just a different version of the same thing, but something truly different in kind. In the same way, the Triune God is profoundly different in being from any unitarian god we might imagine, and that difference is of fundamental importance.

Jesus didn’t come to save your agenda

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I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

—Philippians 4:11b-13 (ESV)

What we tend to miss when we take just that last verse, just that last sentence, out of context is that “I can do all things” does not mean “Jesus will help me do whatever I want.” The promises of God are not promises for our worldly success, they are promises that he is just as much in control and just as much sustaining us for our good in times of disaster and pain as in times of wealth and health. As Jared Wilson sums it up in a great post titled “Kill Your Jesus Talisman,”

Jesus is no talisman. Crucify “Jesus as key to your personal achievement” and he will stay dead. But the real Jesus achieves a victory greater and far superior to any wish-dream of any man. He is life itself, and life eternal. Worship that Jesus.

The Ministry of Parenthood

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(Exodus 20:12, Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Ephesians 6:1-4)

You may have heard the story about little Johnny in Sunday school one day, when the teacher holds up a picture like this one and says, “Now class, what is this?” Johnny raises his hand, and when she calls on him, he says, “Well, it looks like a squirrel, but I know the answer is supposed to be ‘Jesus.’” We laugh at that because it’s silly, and probably many of us know someone who’s very sure that Jesus is the answer but has forgotten what the questions are; if Jesus is the answer just because that’s the answer you’re supposed to give, obviously, that doesn’t mean much. At that point, we’re right back to Doug in Up: “Squirrel!” But as my friend Jared Wilson pointed out in a blog post titled “Squirrels that Look Like Jesus,” when you move beyond “What has four legs and a bushy tail?” to the deeper questions of life, the questions with which the Scriptures are concerned, the answer really does come back to Jesus in the end. It always comes back to Jesus, because we’re all imperfect people, we all have parts of our lives that are really messed up, and we need grace—we need forgiveness, and help to get back up when we fall, and a way to get free of the junk in our lives—and we only find that in Jesus.

As an example of that, take this commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” That gives each of us a responsibility to our parents—even if our parents are dead; this doesn’t just say obey your father and mother, it says to honor them, which doesn’t end with their death. For those of us who have children, it gives us a responsibility to them, too: the profound responsibility to raise them to be the sort of people who will honor us, not because we require it from them, but simply because of who they are. God tells our children to honor their parents, and in so doing he hands us the job of raising them as people who will give honor, and who will themselves be honorable.

Which is, if you take it seriously, terrifying. How are we supposed to do that without screwing up? Tell truth, we can’t, not all the time. Of course, we aren’t the only ones who screw up—our parents did too, and most of us mostly survived the experience. We all do our best, and we all need grace for the times when our best ain’t that great; that’s just the way it is. But how do we make our best better—and maybe even something that looks sort of like good enough?

The answer is, not on our own. Hillary Clinton, back in the day, made famous an African proverb that says, “It takes a village to raise a child”; you may not agree with what she did with that, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Africans had a point. In my experience, they usually do on those sorts of matters. There is no one of us, and really no two or three or four of us, smart enough to raise a child well; we either need to get very, very lucky, or we need a community. We need the knowledge and experience of others who have been through this before and who have learned from mistakes and successes alike, and who can pass on the good advice they received from others; we need the wisdom of a community that can show us the things we’re missing, and help us fix things we’re doing as parents that are wrong or unhelpful; and we need the support of a community that can keep us on our feet when our burdens are bringing us to our knees.

Of course, not every community will serve us equally well. Oliver Twist offers an excellent illustration of that; Oliver finds a community with Fagin and his pickpockets, but it’s a community headed toward destruction. Sometimes, if we all gather together and bring only what we have in ourselves, what we end up with is nothing more than our collected foolishness. We need a community which is founded on true wisdom—not merely our human “conventional wisdom,” which is proven wrong about as often as right, but on the wisdom that comes from God; which must necessarily mean a community founded on the everlasting and faithful love and grace of God.

That’s why, in Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people to love God with everything that’s in them, with all their might—to be completely sold out for God—and then to take God’s commandments and teach them to their children, not just once in a while, but throughout the day, every day, in every situation and everything they do. That’s the necessary foundation for a community that loves and faithfully follows God. It might sound like a tall order, but think about it: those of us who are parents are always teaching our kids, when we’re at home and when we’re on the road, when we go to bed and when we get up—we’re teaching them by everything we say and don’t say, by what we tell them to do and don’t tell them to do, by what we let them get away with and what we enforce. Everything we do teaches them something, and helps shape them into the kind of people they’re going to be. In biblical terms, by the things we say and the things we do, whether we’re intentional about it or not, we are most assuredly making our children disciples, followers, of something. The only question is, what?

In the end, everybody comes up with their own answer. Some people answer it by not bothering to answer it, or by not even considering the question; that very rarely ends well. Some answer it just by going along with what the world around us thinks; that also often doesn’t end well, since the world is fickle and unstable, not to be trusted. Some answer it by imposing laws and rules and harsh punishment; that may produce good behavior, but it often produces rebellion in the end, and it does not breed love, because it does not know grace. Children need grace. We all need grace, children are just more aware of it; we adults aren’t really any better, just better at faking it.

People come up with a lot of answers, but the Bible’s answer is consistent: if you want children who honor you, raise them to honor God. Bring them up, Ephesians says, in the discipline and instruction of the Lord; do it, Deuteronomy says, not just every so often, but throughout the day, as you find teachable moments. And don’t just tell them about rules and what they can’t do, either; that’s part of the picture, but not the central part. Tell them you love them, and God loves them, and that he made them special; tell them when they do something wrong, yes, but also admit it when you do something wrong, because we all need God’s grace and forgiveness—and by his grace, he’s always waiting to forgive us. Tell them that they don’t need to earn God’s love, that he loves them no matter what; and most of all, tell them about Jesus, who showed us just how much God loves us: so much that he was willing to become human and take the punishment for all the bad things we do, so that we wouldn’t have to, so that he could set us free, and make us better.

What President Obama should have done about the BP spill

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It’s probably too late now, but this administration that’s so fond of appointing “czars” for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria:

  • Available immediately—no point in naming someone whose appointment would only delay matters
  • Experienced executive, particularly in dealing with large, complex projects
  • Experienced politician—given the political fallout, the political complications, and the need to keep the public informed, the job would need someone used to working on the national political scene
  • Experience in working politically with Big Oil, but independent from them—not someone on the payroll of any of the oil companies, but someone familiar with energy issues who has a track record of keeping them honest and cooperative
  • Some familiarity with the Gulf states, and/or relationships with their governors—wouldn’t need to be someone from that area, but someone who could reasonably expect to work comfortably and effectively with state and local governments in a manner that showed respect and appreciation for the cultures of the region
  • Ideally, a Republican—it isn’t likely that the GOP would have objected to the establishment of such a position, but if so, naming a Republican would have drawn their fangs, and given the President a bit of a bipartisan boost; also, of the governors of the Gulf states, there are four Republicans, three high-profile (Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Bob Riley), and one who used to be (Charlie Crist), so naming a Republican would help in that regard

Now, it could be that I’m biased, but looking over this list, it seems to me that there’s one person above all others who would fit the bill: as Jason Killian Meath pointed out a couple weeks ago over at BigGovernment, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin.

The only downside here is that if Gov. Palin had performed well in that role, it would have boosted her political standing tremendously (though if she hadn’t, it would have hurt her but still helped the President). But if it was for the good of the country, and also the administration, wouldn’t that have been a price worth paying?

Maybe we should call him President BP Obama?

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The incomparable Michael Barone writes,

Looking back on all the presidential contests held since Obama as a Columbia undergraduate was parroting leftist criticisms of Ronald Reagan, it can be argued that Republicans have won the elections that turned on ideology, and that Democrats have won the elections that turned on competence.

Republican victories in 1984, 1988 and 2004 were clearly endorsements of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s policies. Democratic victories in 1992 and 2008 were indictments of the two George Bushes for incompetence and in 1996 an endorsement of the competence of Bill Clinton.

The one election in this period that is hard to classify was in 2000 and had a split verdict, with the Democrat winning the popular vote and the Republican the Electoral College.

That makes sense, if you think about it; polls have pretty consistently shown the US to be a center-right country, closer ideologically to the Republicans (though not by a lot), but the Democrats have pretty consistently shown themselves more capable at actually running government, and particularly at doing so in a way that’s consistent with their ideology. Given that the ideological content of the President’s policies is not all that popular right now, anything that makes him and his party look less than competent is bad news—and it’s starting to look like this disaster in the Gulf could be very bad news indeed. Dick Morris wrote in The Hill,

Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.

America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.

Of course, Morris has been anti-Obama all the way along, so it’s not as if there was any support here for the President to lose; but how about Peggy Noonan, a certified Obamacan? From her, we got the anguished cry, “He was supposed to be competent!”

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. . . .

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.

Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.

How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls? . . .

Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

Of course, the President and other Democrats are trying to blame this one, too, on George W. Bush; but it just won’t wash. President Bush could have blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton—if President Clinton had done his job better, al’Qaeda would never have been able to launch the attack (and Osama bin Laden might not even have been around to try). President Clinton could have spent all kinds of time at the beginning of his term blaming George H. W. Bush for the state of the economy. Ronald Reagan could have done the same with Jimmy Carter, since he inherited an economic mess that might have been worse than the one we’re in. Gerald Ford certainly would have had a great deal to blame on Richard Nixon. The list goes on. None of them did it; they took responsibility, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work solving the problems they’d been given to solve. That’s what Presidents do.

At the rate he’s going, we could expect to find Barack Obama in 2012 still campaigning against President Bush, still blaming everything bad on President Bush, as if he’d never been elected; this incessant blame game is indeed change, but not the kind of change people wanted—it’s unseemly. He needs to accept, as Noonan wrote months ago, that it’s his rubble now. That’s part of being the president, just as it’s part of being the captain of a ship: whatever happens, fair or not, it’s on you, and you need to step up and deal with it. Yeah, you get blamed for things that aren’t your fault. That’s life, it’s happened to every other president; you wanted the job, you got the job—all of it, not just the good parts. President Obama seems to be trying to only accept the good parts, and that has to stop.

To some extent, none of this should be at all surprising; at the time of his election, Barack Obama had no track record of successful executive experience to support the idea that he would in fact be a competent executive rather than just someone who talked a good game. I expected, wrongly, that we would see a major terrorist attempt on U.S. soil during his first year in office, as we had with his two immediate predecessors; I’m deeply glad to have been wrong about that, but not at all glad that the “ineffective, dithering response” I predicted to such a crisis has been the sort of response we’ve seen to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, it’s been worse than I thought, because as well as ineffective and dithering (even to the point of hamstringing the state of Louisiana’s efforts to protect itself), the President’s response has also been remarkably disengaged, which is something I would not have predicted.

Taken all in all, it’s enough to make one wonder—something which, as Sarah Palin noted, the media certainly would have wondered about a Republican president—if there’s any significance here to the fact that

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

The administration and its allies have been trying to deny, play down, and obfuscate this fact, but the records show the falsity of their denials, and the fact that other oil companies have given more to other politicians really isn’t on point: the only actors here are the Obama administration and BP, and President Obama has been America’s biggest beneficiary of BP money. Has this influenced the way the White House has treated BP in all this? Did it play a part in their decision to “keep a close watch” on BP’s efforts and otherwise let the company deal with the mess as it chose? We don’t know; we ought to. The media ought to be asking, and they aren’t. Eventually, those questions are going to have to be faced, and answered. Right now, it certainly looks as if all that BP money to Barack Obama bought a fair bit of accommodation and slack from his administration.

As a final note, I think the guy who’s come off best in this disaster is James Carville. I’ve never cared much for the man, but I have to respect his honesty and passion on this one . . . this whole story makes me sick, and I’ve never even been to Louisiana—I can only imagine his agony at what’s happening to his home state.