Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Politics and the Christian tongue

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Above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.

—James 5:12 (ESV)

This isn’t normally thought of as a political text, but I think it is, in a way.  At least, I believe it has significant implications for the way in which we conduct our politics. There are a number of reasons for James’ objection to oaths, but one is that oaths and strong language are an attempt to manipulate our hearers. We use such language to try to get people to believe what we say or to go along with what we want them to do, not because they believe us or trust us, but on some other basis. Oaths are essentially persuasive language, but not an honest or straightfoward form of persuasion; rather than attempting to persuade people with facts and honest argument, they attempt to persuade people by impressing them with our determination, or our anger, or our force of character, or the strength of our words.

This is the same sort of problem we see in our political advertising and argument. Most of the time, most of our politicians are unwilling just to come right out and tell you what they stand for and what they intend to do, and then to let you decide to support or oppose them without any attempt on their part to influence your choice. Equally, most politicians are unwilling to allow their opponents to do the same without their interference. As a consequence, they’re all trying to spin their own positions for maximum votes—trying to convince you that they’re saying what you want to hear—while at the same time doing everything they can to make you believe that the other candidate is a cannibal mass-murderer who apprenticed under the Wicked Witch.

Though sordid, this isn’t really all that surprising (or shouldn’t be). The problem with career politicians is that politics is their career, which means they have to win if they want to continue to have a job; as such, their highest priority usually tends to be winning. Just as the first priority of any business is to stay in business (for after all, none of those other priorities can be realized if you go out of business), so most politicians come to see staying in office as their highest priority. While they may, at least at first, hold that priority for good and noble reasons, over time, it will tend to corrupt them; and in particular, it will tend to lead them to de-emphasize truth. Truth, after all, is uncontrollable, and honest persuasion isn’t the most effective way to win—so if winning is your primary concern, you’re going to find another way to go about it.

For Christians in politics, this is a major problem, and a grievous temptation. James calls us to eschew such manipulation of language for plain, straightforward speech—to speak the truth, say what we mean, and mean what we say. As Christians, we shouldn’t need to add anything to our words to convince people of our honesty and sincerity; we should be known as truthful people whose word can be trusted and whose integrity is obvious. Others may not agree with us, but they should have no doubts that we’re being straight with them; nor should they have any doubt that we’re treating them with respect. We should not seek to manipulate others into doing things our way, nor to pressure or intimidate them into giving way for us. Rather, our practice should be to speak the truth plainly and openly—not that we have to say everything, but that we should not seek to misdirect others by what we say and don’t say, or by how we say it.

This, of course, is not necessarily the optimum course to achieve success as the world defines it; but as Christians, we should understand that success ultimately is not in our hands anyway, but in the hands of the God who is Lord of, in, and through all things. As it is God who determines our success, then, we should devote ourselves to the truth and let him do as he will. This necessarily leads to the countercultural conclusion that the truly Christian politician should not run to win, but rather should run to present the truth, as best as they understand it, and to offer their best judgment for what should be done as clearly, cogently, and fairly (and, yes, persuasively, with integrity) as they possibly can—and leave the vote in God’s hands.

(Adapted from “Speaking before God”)

Tamar: A Widow Wronged

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(Genesis 38, Deuteronomy 25:5-10; Matthew 1:1-3)

To many modern eyes, it seems strange that Matthew begins his gospel with a genealogy; but it didn’t seem strange at all to his Jewish audience. For them, genealogies were very important, because they told you who you were, and showed you your place in God’s chosen people. That’s why Matthew goes back to Abraham, because he was the ultimate ancestor of the people of God. The interesting thing, though, is that unlike every other genealogy of his time, Matthew includes women in his genealogy of Jesus, highlighting five women whom God used as part of his plan to redeem the world—and the women he highlights aren’t exactly conventional Jewish heroines. So why does he mention them? Well, thereby hangs a tale; and it all begins with Abraham.

When God told Abraham to move to Canaan, promising him that his descendants would be a great nation, he was 75, his wife Sarah 65. The move wasn’t easy, but they made it, then waited for God to fulfill his promise . . . and waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. A quarter-century passed, and still no son; and then one day, the Lord appeared again and told Abraham, “This will be the year that Sarah has her son.” Sarah laughed at that, but it happened just as God said; they named their baby boy Isaac, which means “laughter.” Isaac in turn had twin sons of his own, Esau and Jacob; and though Jacob was the younger, God chose him over Esau to be the ancestor of his chosen people.

This wasn’t the first time God had chosen the younger over the older—Isaac had an older half-brother, Ishmael, and God had favored Abel’s offering over Cain’s—and it would happen again among Jacob’s twelve sons; his oldest, Reuben, would disgrace himself, and God’s choice would fall on his younger brother Judah. The chosen kings of Israel, David and his descendants, would be from the tribe of Judah, and from David’s line would come Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, the Savior of the World.

Of all the unlikely people God chose to use, though, Judah was perhaps the unlikeliest. Jacob and his family were living in Canaan, but though God had promised them the land, they were a small minority among the idol-worshiping natives; that’s why Abraham had sent a servant back to his homeland to find a wife for Isaac, and why Isaac had sent Jacob back when the time came for him to marry. Judah, though, didn’t care about that; instead, he went out and married a Canaanite woman, and clearly spent more time with his pagan neighbors than he did with his family.

What’s more, he was a cold, selfish man. You see, Jacob fathered twelve sons (and some number of daughters) by four women, but he only loved one of those women—his second wife, Rachel—and he favored her two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, far beyond the others. In Genesis 37, Joseph’s neglected brothers (who despised him) ambushed him and threw him into a pit. They were going to kill him, but Reuben persuaded them not to; Judah took advantage of this while Reuben was away, convincing his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery for twenty pieces of silver. They followed this up by taking Joseph’s fancy robe—a special gift from his father, of course—dipping it in the blood of a goat, and taking it to their father to convince him Joseph had died. This was the kind of man Judah was.

We can see this in our chapter this morning. First, all we’re told about Judah’s wife is that he liked her looks, he had sex with her, and she bore him three sons. Clearly, this is all Judah really cared about, except probably that she put dinner on the table every night. Second, while Judah felt free to choose his own wife, he had no intention of allowing his sons to do so—and when the time came to choose a wife for his oldest son, Er, he simply grabbed another Canaanite woman. Third, he obviously didn’t do much of a job raising his sons. Er was so bad that God killed him off young; after that, his younger brother Onan selfishly refused to do his family duty, so God killed him off too.

In case the nature of his duty is unclear to you, the idea here is the same as Deuteronomy 25. This practice had two purposes. One was to ensure that the widow was remarried and thus provided for—widows were extremely vulnerable in that day and age. The other was to ensure that the dead brother had legal heirs to carry on his name, which otherwise would be forgotten. Of course, in Judah’s version, he doesn’t tell Onan to marry Tamar—he really doesn’t care a whit about providing for her; he just wanted an heir for his dead son. Onan, however, doesn’t want that. As the situation stands, he’s the oldest son and only has one brother to split the inheritance when Judah dies; but if he does his duty and Tamar gets pregnant, his share goes down dramatically. So, Onan sleeps with Tamar—he didn’t seem to mind that part—but practices birth control to ensure that she never gets pregnant. He probably figured he’d get away with it because Tamar would be afraid to expose him. What he doesn’t seem to have known, given the way Judah raised him, was that God was watching and wouldn’t tolerate his behavior. He might get it past Judah, but he wouldn’t, and didn’t, get it past God.

So here we are: Judah’s first two sons are dead—and you notice, he doesn’t mourn them at all? Their deaths are extremely inconvenient, but there’s no sign of grief—the problem is, they’re dead, and he still has no grandchildren; and instead of blaming them for their deaths, he blames Tamar. The way things were normally done, he should have kept her in his house and taken care of her—it was his responsibility, in that culture, as her father-in-law—but instead, he sends her back to her own father’s house, telling her to remain a widow until his third son, Shelah, grows up a little more. That is to say, she’s to consider herself betrothed, not free to marry anyone else, and to wear only the clothes that marked her as a widow in mourning. Unfortunately for her, Judah has no intention of keeping his word. Unfortunately for Judah, she figures that out—and lays a trap for him. Once Judah’s wife dies, she puts her plan into action.

The important thing to realize as we consider her plan is that under the laws of her society, it was probably perfectly ethical. Deuteronomy just says, if a man dies and he has an unmarried brother, he has to marry the widow and give his dead brother an heir; that responsibility doesn’t extend to their father. In the law codes of other cultures in that part of the world, however, it did, if the father were no longer married. Tamar is probably doing something perfectly acceptable by the ethical standards by which she was raised, whether Judah would have considered it so or not. Certainly, the fact that she waits for the death of her mother-in-law to carry out her plan indicates that she is trying to act rightly and morally, as best as she understands it.

In order to make her plan work, of course, she needs good information, and so she has an informer somewhere in Judah’s household. When the time is ripe, the informer tells her that Judah will be going up to Timnah to oversee the shearing of his sheep (and, probably, to enjoy the partying that always went along with it). Tamar takes off her widow’s garments, dresses up, puts on a veil (to ensure that Judah won’t recognize her), and sets herself up where he’ll be sure to see her. He does, and likes what he sees—and once again, that seems to be all that matters; taking Tamar for a prostitute, he goes over and asks to have sex with her. She plays along and asks him, “How much will you pay me?”

At least he makes her a good offer: a young goat from his flock. She accepts, on one condition: he has to leave a pledge with her to ensure that he’ll actually bring the goat—and the pledge she demands is steep. The seal was a disk or cylinder worn on a cord around the neck; on letters or official documents, it would be pressed or rolled into a piece of soft clay, and that would serve, in our terms, as an authorized signature. The staff was Judah’s symbol of authority, and had the mark of his seal carved into the head. These were things he could not afford to lose; in our terms, it’s as if he’d given her his driver’s license, passport and Social Security card. Still, Judah accepts her terms, takes what he wants, then goes on his way; and unbeknownst to him, she does the same, returning to her father’s house and going back undercover, so to speak.

We may imagine that Judah sent that goat as quickly as he could; notice, though, that he doesn’t take it himself, but sends it with his friend Hirah. Hirah gets to the place Judah described, and—no one there. So he asks around; only to keep Judah (or himself) from looking bad, he dresses things up a bit: “Where is the temple prostitute who was sitting by the road here?” After all, sleeping with a temple prostitute was an act of worship, nothing to be embarrassed about. However, putting things that way made the question rather ridiculous, because temple prostitutes worked in the temples, not along the roadside; and so the people Hirah asks look at him like he has a screw loose and say, “There haven’t been any here.” So Hirah goes back to Judah and says, “I couldn’t find her, and no one I talked to had seen her.” This is a problem for Judah—but as he sees it, the biggest problem isn’t the loss of his ID, but the fact that if this gets out, if people hear that he was played for a mark, he’ll be a laughingstock; so he tells Hirah to give up the search. Keeping this quiet is more important than getting the seal and staff back.

Now, Tamar had to know that if her plan worked, her pregnancy couldn’t stay hidden for long; and since she was carrying twins, she had even less time than she might have expected. About three months later, someone figured it out and took the news to Judah. Does Judah react with grace? What do you think? She’s betrothed to his son Shelah (whether or not he ever actually intended to let them marry), and so she’s guilty of adultery—and worse, of making his family look bad. These are not crimes he’s prepared to take lightly. Little does he know, of course; and so, as she’s being dragged out to be burned alive—rather an extreme punishment, that—she sends a message to her father-in-law: “The man who owns this seal, cord and staff is the man who got me pregnant. Rec-ognize them?”

And here comes the pivot point of the story, because this obviously hits Judah right between the eyes. NIV softens this, unfortunately, because what he actually says is, “She’s in the right, not I.” In other words, she acted rightly, and I’m the one at fault here; she was justified in her actions, and I wasn’t. This is completely out of character for Judah as he’s been to this point in Genesis. For the first time, he takes stock of himself and recognizes—and admits!—his fault; for the first time, he lets considerations of right and wrong guide his actions. For the first time, he really pays attention to someone besides himself. It’s the beginning of a critical character shift in Judah. Six chapters later, in Genesis 44, the man who callously sold his brother into slavery will do everything in his power to keep his youngest half-brother, Rachel’s son Benjamin, from suffering a similar fate, even offering himself as a slave in Benjamin’s place.

Now, from an Israelite perspective, Tamar isn’t an obvious hero. She was a woman, for one thing, and the heroes of the stories were more often men, though not as much more often as you might think. More importantly, she was a Canaanite—a foreigner, and a member of a people who were a real threat to the faith of the people of God. Finally, however defensible her actions might have been by her own standards, there’s no denying that they were, at the least, irregular by the standards of God’s law. And yet, she’s clearly the hero of this story, and just as clearly deserves to be. Despite her religious background, despite her decidedly problematic marital history, she is clearly the one person in this entire story who is faithful to God’s plan, and the one through whom God acts to bring that plan about.

There are a couple of reasons for that, I think. One is that she stays faithful to Judah’s family even when he is faithless to her. Why this is, we can’t say for sure, but the standard interpretation makes sense: even though Judah wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the God of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, Tamar could see the hand of God on him and his family, and had made a decision to cast her lot with them. That’s a plausible explanation because it makes sense of her clear determination to be a part of this family despite the ill-treatment she had received from them; while she had few if any legal options herself, her father and the rest of her family could have put considerable pressure on Judah, had she wanted to get free of her sham “betrothal.” Instead, all she seems to want is what she was promised: to bear a child to continue Er’s line.

This is a big thing, because for all Judah’s disregard of his family’s faith, his family was nevertheless identified with a God alien to Canaan; for her so decisively to choose Judah’s family over remarriage into another Canaanite family—to choose these outsiders over her own culture—was to choose their God over those of her own people. As such, though her deception is problematic in some ways, she was acting out of faith in the one true God, however imperfectly she knew and understood him. Yes, her act of faith was impure, tainted by her deceit, and her ethics didn’t come up to God’s standards; but are we any better? None of our motives are unmixed, after all, nor are any of our actions completely pure, and we have more reason to get it right than Tamar did.

There are a couple of lessons we might draw from this story. First, in a very real way, this marks the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promise that in Abraham, all the nations of the world would be blessed. The fulness of that promise would come in Jesus Christ, of course, who would draw people from all nations into the family of God; but it begins here, with this Canaanite woman who chooses to stay with the people of God rather than take a place among her own people.

Second, we see the power of the transforming grace of God, who can use anybody to accomplish his purposes. At the beginning of the story, Judah is about as ungodly as a socially respectable man can be; he fails as a son, as a brother, as a father, as a father-in-law, and above all as a follower of God, acting with complete disregard for anyone but himself. Tamar, meanwhile, is an alien to the family, both ethnically and religiously. Neither of them is a faithful servant of the God of Abraham. Yet at the end, God uses just this improbable couple to carry out his will. Perez and Zerah are born, and through Perez, the line continues which will lead ultimately to the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Judah has been changed by this encounter, his incorrigible selfishness broken, beginning the movement toward his act of utter selflessness in chapter 44 on behalf of his father and youngest brother. And Tamar has earned herself a place in the litany of the heroes of faith—and a place of honor among the ancestors of Christ.

We might look at people like Judah and despair, for in this world, hate, and selfishness, and pride, and many other evil things are strong and mock the Christmas message; yet for all that, the message of the Christmas bells is true: God is not dead, nor is he sleeping, and his purpose will not fail. Judah’s position seemed impregnable, his hard, cold heart incorrigible, yet God worked through Tamar to shatter both. However powerful and clever the wrong might seem now, it is neither strong enough to overpower God, nor shrewd enough to outsmart him. In the end, no matter what anyone might do, God’s will shall be done.

On this blog in history: May 1-13, 2008

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The Gospel in the Ascension
God’s love goes farther than our sin

.Why lawyers shouldn’t teach history
Those who misunderstand history will never learn its lessons . . .

The problem with historical parallels
. . . and as a consequence, will misapply them to current events

.In defense of the church, part III: Doctrine
On why the attack on doctrine is incoherent and unfounded.

Belated thoughts on prayer
Power isn’t in prayer, power is in God.

Speaking Before God

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(1 Kings 17:1-7; James 1:5-8, James 5:12-20)

As we’ve been working our way through James the last couple months, we’ve seen a consistent concern with our speech, both the ways we talk and the things we say. That concern is most clearly expressed in the first part of chapter 3, as James laments the damage our tongues can do and our inability to control them, but it finds its beginning in chapter 1 in his command that we are to be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger, and recurs throughout the letter as he issues commands against various forms of negative speech. His concern is well-founded, since the things we say can do great harm—but for most of the letter, there’s nothing positive to balance that concern. If you stopped the book with last week’s passage, you might come away thinking there’s nothing for it but to join the monks and take a vow of silence.

Here at the close, though, James winds up his letter by laying out a positive vision for our words and our speech. This section is usually read as a section on prayer, and certainly prayer figures largely in it, but his concern is broader than that. He’s talking more generally about our speech together as the people of God—and in the process, he highlights the fact that everything we say, we say in God’s presence; God is involved in everything we say, and thus our words are more significant than we tend to assume. In a sense, one of the subtle lessons of this passage is that prayer isn’t just specific things we say to God; we are standing in his presence every moment, and he’s involved in every conversation we have and every statement we make, and so we need to think and speak accordingly.

This, I believe, is the connection between verse 12 and the rest of this passage. At first glance, this verse doesn’t seem to connect to anything around it, until you stop and consider what oaths are. When you swear an oath, you call a power greater than yourself to witness that you’re telling the truth. People don’t do this seriously very much anymore—though our legal system and public ceremonies still require people to swear on the Bible, which is to call the word of God to witness to our truthfulness—but the remnants of it are all over our speech. That is, among other things, where the casual use of the names of God comes from, as people used to swear by God the Father or by Jesus Christ; the meaning has dropped out, but the pattern remains. In each case, whether the oath was sworn in the name of God, by some aspect of his creation, or even by one of the pagan gods of the old myths, the point was the same—to invoke some greater power than myself to support my own assertion that I’m telling the truth.

There are several problems with this. First, this kind of thing ultimately raises real questions about our credibility. As the New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, using oaths to support our speech becomes, paradoxically, an admission that we can’t be trusted to tell the truth on our own; the harder we work to convince people, the stronger the language we use, the more suspect our own honesty becomes. Second, implicitly, oaths are a form of manipulation of God, as we try to use his name—or the name of something he has made—for our own purposes, to get people to believe what we’re trying to tell them. That, as James well knows and indeed as the whole Bible makes clear, is nothing God is going to tolerate.

And third, oaths and strong language are an attempt to manipulate our hearers as well, to try to force people to believe what we say or to go along with what we want them to do, not because they believe us or trust us, but on some other basis. Oaths are essentially persuasive language, but not in an honest or straightfoward way; rather than attempting to persuade people with facts and honest argument, they attempt to persuade people by impressing them in some other way. It’s the same sort of problem we see in our political advertising and argument, where our politicians are unwilling to come right out and tell you what they stand for and what they intend to do, much less to allow their opponents to do the same. They’re all trying to spin their own positions for maximum votes, while at the same time doing everything they can to convince you that the other candidate is a cannibal mass-murderer who apprenticed under the Wicked Witch. Truth is uncontrollable, and honest persuasion isn’t the most effective way to win—so if winning is your primary concern, you’re going to find another way to go about it.

By contrast, James calls us to plain, straightforward speech—to speak the truth, say what we mean, and mean what we say. As Christians, we shouldn’t need to add anything to our words to convince people of our honesty and sincerity; we should be known as truthful people whose word can be trusted and whose integrity is obvious. Others may not agree with us, but they should have no doubts that we’re being straight with them; nor should they have any doubt that we’re treating them with respect. We should not seek to manipulate others into doing things our way, nor to pressure or intimidate them into giving way for us; our practice should be to speak the truth plainly and openly—not that we have to say everything, but that we should not seek to misdirect others by what we say and don’t say, or by how we say it. As it is God who determines our success, we should devote ourselves to the truth and let him do as he will.

James continues by encouraging us to pray in all kinds of circumstances—for songs of praise are a form of prayer in their own right. If we’re in trouble, we should pray; but just as well, we should also pray when we’re happy and all seems right with the world, because God deserves the credit and thanks—and because we need to remind ourselves of that fact. And in cases of serious illness, James says, call the leaders of the church to pray for you. This is something that tends to be ignored outside Pentecostal and charismatic churches, which is too bad. Partly, this is an aspect of the pastoral responsibility of the leaders of the church—pastors, elders, and deacons alike—and partly it’s an indication of the kind of people church leaders ought to be: people of sufficient maturity and faith to lead such a prayer and seek God’s will in the faith that he can and will bring healing. As part of that prayer, James says they should anoint the sick one with oil, symbolizing that that person is being set apart for God’s special attention in the prayers of the church.

Now, James says, “the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well”; does that mean that he’s guaranteeing physical healing if we just pray hard enough and have enough faith? There are those who believe so, but this runs counter to the rest of the New Testament; such an understanding makes the work of God dependent on us rather than on his love and grace, and it turns prayer into just another attempt to manipulate God and make him do what we want. How then do we understand this promise, since we know that God does not in fact bring physical healing to everyone for whom we pray?

The answer is to be found, I think, in the fact that the Greek verb which the NIV translates “make . . . well,” sozō, doesn’t only mean “heal”—it’s also the standard New Testament word for “save.” Some, in fact, take this and try to give this passage a purely spiritual meaning, though that doesn’t really work here. It does, however, point us to an important reality: sometimes it isn’t physical healing that God is most concerned about in our lives. Everything he allows to happen to us, he allows for a purpose—and sometimes he allows illness or other physical problems so that he may demonstrate his power by healing them, and we need to believe that, and pray accordingly. But at other times, he has other purposes in our physical afflictions. He may use them to humble us, to teach us to rely on him rather than to trust in our own strength; he may allow them as a way to force us to deal with emotional or spiritual issues in our lives. Or, to take the case James highlights, he may send them to discipline us for our sin and push us to repentance; in which case, the primary problem is the sin, not the illness.

This is why he says, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” It’s not that every sickness is the result of sin; but sin which we have not confessed or of which we refuse to repent blocks the healing work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The obvious reason for this is that God does not honor disobedience or reward rebellion, but there’s more to it than that; sin is itself a sickness, a spiritual illness, a defect that blights the health and goodness of creation. If we would truly be healed, if we truly want to be whole, we need to confess our sin, lay it aside, and turn our back on it—whether our sin is the direct cause of any bad circumstances in our life or not. This isn’t a disconnected precondition God imposes on healing us, nor is it reason to complain that he has unreasonable expectations; it is, rather, something which is simply necessary for its own sake.

But if we will confess our sins to one another and lay them aside, if we will pray for one another in God-given faith, there’s no telling what may happen. The prayer of the righteous, James declares—and here, he’s not referring to super-saints, but to anyone who has found salvation in Jesus Christ and is not harboring unconfessed sin—the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. That power isn’t inherent in us, nor is it anything magical about prayer; it is, rather, the power of God made available through us. When we seek God’s will, he guides us to pray according to his will, and his power goes to work through us to accomplish his purposes. To illustrate this, James offers the example of Elijah—a great prophet, yes, a worker of miracles, yes, a holy man of God, yes, but someone fundamentally different from us? No. At bottom, he was just another human being, really no different from us. He didn’t have some special magic power, he was simply a man of prayer who devoted his life to following and serving God; as a prophet, he was filled with the Holy Spirit, and as followers of Jesus Christ, so are we. There was no power available to him that isn’t also available to us, if we will walk by faith in God rather than by sight and our own strength.

Now, none of this comes easily, for we all struggle against the sin that’s rooted deep in our hearts; God is at work by his Spirit patiently rooting it out, but sometimes we don’t want it rooted out—sometimes we want to hang on to it. Sometimes our sinful desires distort our vision, and we come to mistake the evil for the good. And sometimes we just get tired, or distracted, and wander away from the truth. When that happens, sometimes we can put things right ourselves, but more often, we need help. We need each other, people to come alongside us and speak truth into our lives—the kind of truth Dr. Larry Crabb talks about in his book Real Church, that I hope you’ve been reading with us. We need people to tell us, gently and humbly, that we’re a mess, that we’re off the rails, that we really need to face up to the sin in our heart—and that however great our problems may be, however dark the darkness in our heart may be, the love of God is greater, and the grace of God shines brighter, and there is nothing wrong in us that he does not have the power and the desire to put right. There is no evil we can do out of which he cannot bring good, and no part of our lives that he cannot redeem. This is a great and profound truth; but it’s a truth we need to hear from others before we can tell it to ourselves.

This is why James tells his hearers, “Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way”—whoever sees someone wandering down a path that leads away from God, and corrects that person and brings them back to the true way—“will save a soul from death and cover over a multitude of sins.” Sin leads to death, sooner or later, as inevitably as falling leads to a sudden stop at the end, and believing things which are not true about God will inevitably result in doing things which are not true to his character; none of us gets everything right, of course, but a serious departure from the gospel of Jesus Christ has very serious consequences. When we see people going astray from the core truth of the gospel and the holiness of God, wandering into significant sin, it’s nothing less than an act of love to reach out to them gently and seek to correct them, to bring them back to the truth. They may not want to hear it, they may resist, they may not perceive it as loving—but it is; for in so doing, if they do ultimately respond, we prevent a great many sins they would otherwise have committed, and save them from making shipwreck of their lives. Such can be the power of godly speech, of speech that is filled with the power of God—for when God speaks, even when he speaks through us, his word never fails to accomplish the purpose for which he sent it.

And on that note, James concludes, leaving us with a word of hope. We cannot control the tongue, and in failing to do so we can do great damage; but God can, and as we speak to him and he speaks through us, we can also do great good with our words. The way of friendship with the world is what sets our tongue ablaze with the fire of Hell, but the way of friendship with God opens us up to the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives, which puts out that fire and fills our mouths instead with the word of the gospel of the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ, that we may speak words of life instead of death, blessing instead of cursing, peace instead of destruction.

The countercultural gospel of rest

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Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you get up early
and go to bed late,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives sleep to those he loves.

—Psalm 127:1-2

One of the more memorable nights of my oldest daughter’s life (for me, at least) came when she was maybe a month or two old. It was right around 11 o’clock at night, and she needed her diaper changed—and when Sara got her cleaned up, we discovered that we were out of diapers. Now, we were in Surrey at the time—it’s one of the suburbs on the southern edge of the metro Vancouver area—and our local Safeway closed at 11 pm; the convenience stores were still open, but for some obscure reason they only sold size 3 diapers, which were way too big for her. Obviously, one of us needed to go out and try to find someplace that was still open that sold diapers in her size. I trust you don’t need me to tell you which one of us that was.

I spent a while hitting various big stores around southwestern Surrey, only to find that all had closed for the night. I could have headed north into the metro area, but I knew my odds wouldn’t be good, because Vancouver as a city doesn’t tend to stay open very late. So I headed south towards the border, for my home state of Washington, where even towns the size of Lynden, with 7,000 people, have grocery stores open 24/7. I drove down to Ferndale, north of Bellingham, walked into Haggen Foods, bought diapers, and drove home. If memory serves, I got back around 1 in the morning.

As I was driving around on my wild-goose chase—or should I call it a wild-diaper chase?—I was muttering imprecations under my breath about what kind of big city rolls up the sidewalks at 11 pm and what kind of country is this anyway? and other things of that sort. After all, I went to college in a town of around 50,000 people, and we had Meijer open ’round the clock—if you know the Midwest know Meijer, which has been out-Wal-Mart-ing Wal-Mart for a long time; for those of you who don’t, combine Wal-Mart and your typical big chain supermarket, then drop the prices—so why, if I was living in a metropolitan area of three million people, was I having to drive across the border to pick up a lousy package of diapers?

Now, you might be thinking that the fault was really ours, for not having another package of diapers on hand, and you’d certainly be right about that; as the saying goes, poor planning on our part didn’t constitute an emergency on anyone else’s. I felt pretty sheepish about that, which is one reason I was so irritated. In retrospect, though, I’m more interested in the expectations I had then, because I didn’t grow up with them. My hometown growing up wasn’t tiny, wasn’t an especially big town either; I was in high school when K-Mart came to town, and that was a big deal—and even then, while they were open later, they still closed at 9 pm. So I grew up with the idea that everything closes at night; the first time I ever heard the phrase “24/7” was in college. We just didn’t have that sort of economy.

In college, though, I discovered that I’m a night owl—and I discovered a world in which there are places open at 2 am where you can go to get food, or anything else; and I got used to that. I became accustomed to the idea (though I never would have put it this way) that there were people out there whose job was to stay up all night just in case I happened to want something. And I became an enabler, in a small way, of an economy in which people wind up doing just that: working at night, while the rest of the world sleeps, and sleeping during the day, while it works and plays, in order to make a living.

Now, it wasn’t news to me that some people work at night; my mother’s a nurse, and during our time in Texas she worked the night shift at the county hospital for a while. There are certainly some places—like hospitals—that really do need to stay open all night; if an appendix bursts or a baby needs to be born, you can’t very well say, “Hold that thought, and we’ll be with you at 9 am sharp.” But the idea that people need to stay up all night just so careless folk like me who don’t keep track of their supplies can buy a package of diapers at midnight—is that really reasonable?

From a human perspective, I don’t think it is; but from an economic perspective, if there are enough customers to keep the store profitable, the answer is “yes.” As a result, we’re increasingly moving to a 24/7 economy, one in which the rhythms of life as our ancestors knew it—work when it’s light, sleep when it’s dark, a day of rest each week, and so on—are being obliterated by the demands of making money; the net effect is that businesses stay open longer and longer hours just to keep up, and their workers perforce must do the same. It’s a treadmill, nothing more, and for many people, it defines their lives; after all, you have to do whatever it takes to make a living.

That leaves us with a lot of people who are, in effect, slaves to their work—their work runs their lives and determines their schedule. For many, it’s simply the need to make ends meet; we see a lot of that up here, where living is expensive and a lot of jobs don’t pay all that well, and so finding enough money to keep a roof over one’s head and food on the table becomes an overriding priority. Others have enough, but they want more than that—they want to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, and so they want the money to afford the kind of house, car, clothes, and lifestyle that Mr. and Mrs. Jones have. Then, of course, there are people who want to be important, for one reason or another; for them, it’s not so much the money that matters as the status, and perhaps the power and influence.

There are also people like a couple of friends of ours back in Washington, both engineers, who worked insanely hard; even after their first child was born, he was still regularly working 70- and 80-hour weeks. At one point, they were working different shifts and basically never saw each other awake, though I don’t remember how long that lasted. He would work those long weeks, then spend much of his weekend frantically enjoying himself on his mountain bike or snowmobile, depending on the season—he never skipped church, but church was about the only other thing he did, many weekends—and then it was back to work on Monday to do it all over again. He’s a devoted Christian, but that didn’t affect his view of work. Work was something you had to do in order to pay for the things you wanted to do, and so he got into that cycle of working long hours to afford a few hours of hard play to enable him to survive the long hours he was working to afford it.

Now, whatever the precise reward people have in mind, the bottom-line view in all these cases is the same, the one my friend articulated: work is something you have to do in order to get what you want, and however much it takes, that’s what you have to do. It’s up to us to make everything happen, to earn the blessings we want; it’s up to us to work hard enough and long enough and well enough to be a success, whatever we might define success to be. That’s the conventional wisdom.

God’s wisdom is another matter. The key to life, the psalmist tells us, isn’t how hard we work or what long hours we put in; all those short nights and long, anxious days, trying to keep up with the treadmill, are in vain, because we can’t make success happen on our own. We can’t build a good family, a good life, on our own; we can’t build a good nation, or keep it safe, on our own. Unless the Lord builds the house, unless the Lord guards the city—unless he builds our family, unless he builds our church—all our work is in vain. Ultimately, he’s the one who determines success, not us.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’re free not to work, which is how some have tried to take this psalm. Paul dealt with folks who took that position in his second letter to the church at Thessalonica; his response to them was, “Such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and earn their own living.” A couple verses before that, he laid down the law quite firmly: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” We all have our work to do, and the responsibility to support ourselves if we’re able to do so; the Scriptures are perfectly clear on that.

The point of this psalm, then, is not about whether we work, but how, and how we regard our work. Even as Christians, we tend to work as if we believe that our success depends on us and our effort and the time we put in, and that if we fail, it’s because we didn’t work hard enough or do our work well enough. In our work, we carry the weight of our lives on our shoulders—and we shouldn’t do that. That approach to our work creates anxiety and deprives us of rest; it also breeds pride, if we do well, or despair, if we don’t; and it makes work, rather than God, the true lord of our lives, setting our priorities and controlling our time. As such, if we take this approach to our work, if we view our work from the world’s perspective, it isolates us from God and cuts us off from his blessings, leaving us to carry our burdens alone.

By contrast, the psalmist says, if you aren’t doing the Lord’s work, it’s pointless, and if you are, you don’t need to work so hard; either way, there’s nothing to be said for letting work rule your life. Now, a lot of folks would disagree, and there’s certainly no denying that a lot of people who work hard for long hours are great successes by the world’s standards; but besides all the stuff, what do they have, really? They can’t have any assurance that their success will continue—especially in this economy, where so many former successes have cratered—so how can they have any peace? And are they as rich in relationships and integrity as they are in money? From the psalmist’s point of view, financial wealth without the rest is a bad bargain; and this psalm was written by King Solomon, who certainly knew whereof he spoke.

Those who build the house themselves, those who guard their little empires alone, must stay up late and rise early, for they can never relax their vigilance or let their effort slack; but those who trust in the Lord are free to sleep, for he gives sleep to those he loves. He may not give great financial success, but he gives enough; and along with it he gives peace, and rest, and assurance. The lives of those who pour themselves into their work are unbalanced, as the goods that work produces are overemphasized while others are neglected; in contrast, God offers us a balanced life, a life with time for both work and family, both work and rest.The best example of this is the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest, which was set aside in part for reasons of economic justice. Within the economy of Israel, the Sabbath—the Hebrew word is shabbat, which means “rest”—served (when honored) to ensure that masters didn’t work their laborers seven days a week, 354 days a year, but that they got the time off they needed. As the website Judaism 101 puts it in its entry on Shabbat,

In modern America, we take the five-day work-week so much for granted that we forget what a radical concept a day of rest was in ancient times. The weekly day of rest has no parallel in any other ancient civilization. In ancient times, leisure was for the wealthy and the ruling classes only, never for the serving or laboring classes. In addition, the very idea of rest each week was unimaginable.

It was unimaginable to the rest of the world because the rest of the world was ruled by money and its demands, which tends to be the world’s default position, but God knew what he was doing when he wrote that into his law; he knew we need a day set aside to rest and recharge our bodies, by not working, and our souls, by coming together as his people to pray and worship him. He knew that we need that to keep our lives balanced, and keep everything in its proper perspective. And of course, while we’re called to be in prayer all the time and to worship God with every part of our lives, with all he’s done for us, he deserves to have us gather once a week to worship him together.

From the world’s perspective, it makes no sense—if you want to make a living, if you want to keep up with the Joneses, if you want to have the money to live the life you want to live, if you want to be prepared when things go sour, you can’t afford to take days off!—but from the Christian perspective, it makes perfect sense, because we know what the world doesn’t: that God is in control, and that ultimately only his work, done his way, in accordance with his will, meets with final success; and that while the world goes on working 24/7, scrambling to stay one step ahead of the game, those who serve him can step back, confident in his care, take some time off, and rest, for he gives sleep to those he loves.

The prosperity gospel and the bursting of the American bubble

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The latest issue of The Atlantic has a big cover picture of a cross against a blue sky with a “Foreclosure” sign on it, and the lurid main headline, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” As is so often the case, the article in no way justifies the headline; it does, however, make a compelling case that a particularly pernicious American heresy, the so-called “prosperity gospel,” may have been a significant contributing factor.

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

THEOLOGICALLY, THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common . . . Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. . . . One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.

The emphasis there is mine, of course. Read the whole thing; it makes me think that part of the crash this country suffered may well be God’s judgment on the idolatry of his people.

Re-Defeat Bill Owens in NY-23

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Or, Why Sarah Palin’s Coattails May Have Been Bigger than Credited

Check this out:

  • There was a virus discovered in some of the voting machines in NY-23, which were reprogrammed just before the election; none of the other voting machines by that manufacturer used across the district were checked.
  • “In Jefferson County, inspectors from four districts claim that ‘human error’ resulted in their ‘mistakenly’ entering 0 votes for Hoffman in several districts, resulting in Owens leading Jefferson County on election night though the recanvas of the computer counts now show that Hoffman is leading.”
  • “Doug Hoffman, the Conservative candidate in this election says that he was forced to concede after having been given erroneous election results on Nov. 3rd, in particular from Oswego County. Oswego County’s election night results were off by over 1,000 votes. . . . Hoffman is raising funds for a possible legal challenge to the results and requesting that the Boards of Election hand-count every vote. On Tuesday, he ‘unconceded’ the race. In light of the current concerns over the accuracy of the machine-counted votes, Hoffman may now have a legitimate reason to contest the election results.”
  • “The ImageCast machines have one more significant and scary flaw: USB ports. . . . [Using these ports,] software hacks or remote control of the voting machine could be implemented or a virus introduced. Since standard count audits are only done on 3% of the machines unless there is a malfunction, a functional hack or software change could adjust election counts with the County or State Boards of Election none the wiser.”
  • “The manufacturer of the machines, Dominion/Sequoia Voting Systems is the same company that Dan Rather accused of causing over 50,000 votes to go uncounted in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida due to intentional oversight. Rather’s report claimed that Sequoia was well aware of the issues but proceeded into the election utilizing an inferior product and told election workers and technicians to ‘ignore the problems.'”

And it goes on, and on, and on . . .

What we don’t get about the gospel

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This is just spot-on:

It’s no wonder that self-help books top the charts in Christian publishing and that counseling offices are overwhelmed. Our pride and our neglect of the gospel force us to run from seminar to seminar, book to book, counselor to counselor, always seeking but never finding some secret to holy living.

Most of us have never really understood that Christianity is not a self-help religion meant to enable moral people to become more moral. We don’t need a self-help book; we need a Savior. We don’t need to get our collective act together; we need death and resurrection and the life-transforming truths of the gospel. And we don’t need them just once, at the beginning of our Christian life; we need them every moment of every day.

—Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson, from Counsel from the Cross

(Emphasis mine.) That is, I think, the crux of the American church’s cultural resistance to the gospel; that’s the thing we don’t want to hear.

HT: Of First Importance