Author Archives: Rob Harrison

The underlying problem

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Christians voiced anger and dismay Tuesday after a Bible, which was part of an exhibition inviting viewers to add their reflections, was defaced with offensive and foul-mouthed scrawl.

Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art has decided to put the Bible in a glass case after the exhibit, called Untitled 2009 and part of a show entitled Made In God’s Image, was vandalised.

Artist Jane Clarke, a minister at the Metropolitan Community Church, asked visitors to annotate the Bible with stories and reflections, as a way of making it more inclusive.

But visitors to the gallery took the invitation a bit further than she had anticipated. . . .

On the first page of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, someone had written: “I am Bi, Female and Proud. I want no god who is disappointed in this.”

It’s a pretty predictable story, really; Clarke appears to have been surprised by what happened, but that only shows her to be severely naive. She’s quoted as saying, “I had hoped that people would show respect for the Bible, for Christianity and indeed for the Gallery of Modern Art,” but that was never going to be the universal response, for reasons which the response I quoted above shows.

Most people, when they read the comment written on the first page of that Bible, will focus on sexuality; but the truth is, whatever you think of homosexuality and the biblical teaching about it, that’s not the most significant issue here. Whether this woman’s homosexual practices are sinful or not, her comment shows her to be guilty of a greater sin—indeed, the greatest of all sins—that of idolatry. She’s made it very clear what her real god is: her sexuality. All other claims on her allegiance are measured against that one; she’s willing to worship other gods as well, to add other deities to her personal pantheon, but only if they are content to serve her chief god.

And the Lord of creation, the God of the universe, won’t do that. He will never do that. He claims our absolute obedience and allegiance, and he will not share his glory with another—and that’s why so many people resist him. That’s the root of our objections to God, that he insists on being our only god, calling us to give up all competing loyalties and affections; and there are many who are unwilling to do so. If the church is going to reach out in any intelligent way, it has to start by realizing that fact. As Tim Keller says, we cannot effectively preach the gospel without naming and addressing the idols of our culture and our people.

HT: the Rev. Wayne Paul Barrett, who referenced this in his sermon yesterday at Delmont Presbyterian Church. (My apologies for initially failing to note this.)

Sin and pleasure

Posted on by | 2 Comments

One of the biggest lies the Devil sells us is that sinning brings pleasure. To be sure, it’s an effective lie, because it’s true in the short term—but the long term is a different story. The Devil’s aim isn’t to give us good things, but to deprive us of good things, or rather to talk us into depriving ourselves of good things. That might seem like a strange thing to say, when so many people’s idea of Christian living is “thou shalt not do anything fun”—but it’s the truth. Despite what some might think, God is the one who created pleasure, and he’s the one who wants you to live a really good life; Satan, by contrast, might use pleasure to get you hooked, but his ultimate goal is to deprive you of everything worth having. Just look at drug addiction—the real pleasure, the real fun, is all in the beginning; after a while, all that’s left is desperation, craving and need.

That’s the pattern of sin, and the pattern Satan wants to get people into—the minimum pleasure necessary for the maximum slavery; and whatever they might think themselves to be doing, even if they proclaim themselves agents of liberation, that’s ultimately the end that all the false teachers of this world serve. By contrast, the Christian faith calls us back to see the true goodness of God, and the true goodness of all that he made, through the deception and confusion of all this world’s counterfeit versions. He calls us to see the true goodness of marriage through the counterfeits of free love, hooking up, and whatever else this world can spin out there; to see the true goodness of food through all the ways we misuse it; to see the true goodness of all the things God has made through all the ways we abuse them. When we treat this as anything less than his good creation—whether by rejecting it, by worshiping it, or by treating it as merely something to exploit—we dishonor God, we distort his truth, and we do ourselves grievous harm.

(Adapted from “Led Astray”)

Accepted on a journey

Posted on by | 3 Comments

Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
She said, “No one, Lord.”
And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

—John 8:10-11 (ESV)

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

To another he said, “Follow me.”
But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.”
And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”
Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

—Luke 9:57-62 (ESV)

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.

—Luke 18:22-23 (ESV)

People like to talk about Christ accepting everybody and forget that the acceptance of Christ is not a thing that says to us, “I’m fine with you just the way you are; you just keep doing what you’re doing.” The acceptance of Christ, rather, says to us, “Go and sin no more.”

He says to us, “I love you just the way you are—but too much to let you stay that way.”

He says to us, “You’re all messed up, but I love you anyway; that’s why I’m going to change you from the inside out.”

He says to us, “Give up your life—give up your plans, your desires, your ideas of how things should be—and I’ll give you something better.”

Jesus doesn’t call us to stay where and what we are because he’s not much of one for staying in one place; he calls us to follow. He calls us to a journey, and a relationship, and like any journey and any meaningful relationship, that means change. It means leaving things behind, and getting new things in return.

And yes, that includes the things of which we say, “God couldn’t possibly want me to give that up; he can’t possibly mean that I’m not allowed to do that.” In fact, it especially includes those things, because those—whether sinful in and of themselves or not—are the things in our lives that most interfere with his lordship: they are our idols. They are the things which which we must give over to him if we’re to follow him; clinging to them is nothing less than idolatry.

And yes, that includes our sexuality—and that means for all of us. He may give it back to us in pretty much the same form, or he may not; he’s been calling people to celibacy for a very long time, after all, for a great many reasons. But whether straight or gay, married or single, our sexuality absolutely must be surrendered to his lordship in our lives if we’re to follow Jesus faithfully; and that may very well mean accepting that we cannot do that which we most want to do, and which we’re most accustomed to doing.

And yes, that includes our money, and our careers, and our other family relationships, and our gifts and talents and aspirations, and all the other things that matter to us. He calls us to surrender to him everything of significance in our lives, to do with as he will. This is not the price of his acceptance, but its consequence; it’s what it means to be accepted by Jesus, because to be accepted by him is to be invited to go with him, to go where he’s going and do what he’s doing, instead of going where we want to go and doing what we want to do.

 

Take Care of Your Own

Posted on by | No Comments

(Psalm 94:1-15; 1 Timothy 5:3-16)

Our passage from 1 Timothy this morning is a complicated one; there’s a lot here that Paul is just assuming, because Timothy already knows exactly what’s going on in Ephesus—but we don’t, and so there’s disagreement as to the exact situation Paul was addressing. Two things are clear, and then from there we sort of have to figure it out for ourselves. First, the church in Ephesus was committed to supporting its widowed members financially. Second, the false teachers in Ephesus had had a lot of success among the younger widows in the congregation. That much we know; the rest is disputed.

For my part, let me give you my best understanding of what was going on here. It seems clear that there was some sort of formal roll of widows in the church who were supported by the congregation; and from the language Paul uses, it appears that the widows on this roll were expected to devote themselves to the work of the church, such as they were able, and especially to prayer. It seems likely from verse 12 that they made some sort of pledge that if the church provided for their needs, they would dedicate themselves to the church. Some commentators have even gone so far as to describe these widows as ordained officers of the church; that’s too strong a statement for the evidence we have, but it does seem clear that they were working right alongside the deacons in ministries of service, whether they were officially ordained to that work or not.

Now, I can’t be sure, but this might give us insight as to why the false teachers in Ephesus had such success recruiting younger widows. It sounds like priority for support was given to older widows in the congregation—as Paul is clear that it should be—both because the older widows who lacked family support were in greater need, and because they showed greater spiritual maturity and stability; the younger widows as a group were less mature, and also much likelier to remarry and thus to come off the list. This doesn’t mean that the Ephesian church didn’t provide for younger widows to ensure their needs were met—especially if they had children to support—but that they didn’t have the same status as the older widows, and that their support wasn’t as high a priority. I suspect that some of the younger widows resented this, and that the false teachers played on their resentment to win their support; thus Paul feels the need to point out the behavior of some of the younger widows (who were taking advantage of the help they were receiving to live irresponsibly) to reaffirm the church’s policy in this area.

Now, there are two threads running through this passage, and we don’t have time to address them both this morning. The first is Paul’s concern for the behavior of some of the younger widows, who are following the false teachers and in consequence are acting in ways that make the church look bad; we’ve talked about this to some extent in the last few weeks. The second is new in this passage, and so that’s where I’d like to focus our attention this morning, as we also see here Paul’s concern that the church in Ephesus do the best possible job of providing for and taking care of those in their midst who were in need. This concern follows quite logically on Paul’s instructions to Timothy, which we considered last week, to train himself in godliness and to lead the congregation to do the same: one of the ways in which we do so, one of the ways in which we grow spiritu-ally and bear witness to the truth of the gospel, is to take care of our own.

There are several points to note here. One, the first responsibility for widows in the church belonged to their families, if they had families to support them. Partly, this was for financial reasons, to enable the church to use its resources as effectively as possible; after all, the church in Ephesus probably wasn’t swimming with money. This is an issue we deal with as well, as we have money to use to meet people’s needs, but we don’t have enough to do everything for everyone—especially in the current economy; we have to think about how much we give, and to whom, and for what, to make sure we don’t just run through the money we have. It’s hard, since we don’t know what needs are going to come down the pike a week from now, or a month, or three months. That’s a tough call to have to make, to say, “We can do this much and no more”; to be able to do that consistently, you have to set up guidelines. For the early church, this was one of them, that the priority for church support went to widows who didn’t have families to support them.

Beyond the financial reason for this policy, though, is a deeper reason: it’s a religious duty, it’s our Christian obligation, to provide for family members in need, and especially if it should be our parents who are in need. You might think that’s strong language, but that’s exactly Paul’s language. It’s ironic in a way; Christianity was accused in its early days of undermining the family structure, since it called people to honor a higher authority than their parents (or, for that matter, the government). Here, Paul proves the falsehood of that charge, coming down hard on people within the church in Ephesus who were neglecting their responsibility to provide for their parents. People who don’t take care of their relatives, and especially their immediate family, Paul says, are worse than unbelievers—since after all, those outside the church at least accepted this responsibility, whatever else they got wrong; and in acting worse than the world, worse than those who have no faith in God, they have rejected their duty to God and effectively denied the faith. That’s how serious a thing it is to refuse to take care of those who have taken care of you, to whom you owe responsibility as your family.

Now, for those who don’t have children, grandchildren, or other family to support them—or whose family is outside the church and has rejected them—that responsibility passes to the congregation; and as we’ve noted, Paul spends a little time here on how this responsibility ought to be handled. One main consideration, of course, is financial, as the church should give the greatest help to those in the greatest need; that’s only logical. Along with that, however, Paul is concerned with the spiritual state of these widows, and their commitment to the church. This again was probably in part to focus the church on helping those who were truly its own, rather than having people drift into the church just to get help, with no real interest in being a part of the body of Christ; and if we’re right that widows on the list were expected to devote themselves as best as they were able to prayer and works of service, then it only makes sense to give priority to those who will take that commitment seriously, and who have demonstrated their concern for others.

The key in all this, once again, is that the church should embody and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ; and we see this concern here from three different angles. The first is that the church needs to focus its resources on that mission, that everything the church spends and everything it gives away should in some way further the work of Jesus in this world—as giving to those in need obviously does. Second, taking care of our own, providing for those to whom we’re related—whether by blood, or as brothers and sisters in Christ—is part of training ourselves in godliness, which we talked about last week; it’s part of our call as Christians to care for others before ourselves, and to put the love of Christ into practice in a meaningful way. After all, as Jesus told us, we can’t claim to love other people if we aren’t willing to give of what we have to help them. God brings us into relationship with others—through our family, through his body, the church, and by other means as well—and then he calls us to love each other, and part of that is taking care of each other; we cannot refuse to do so.

And third, we see here an abiding scriptural theme, God’s concern for the powerless, of whom the archetypal examples are the widow, the fatherless, the homeless foreigner, and the stranger. Under Roman law, these were people who had no rights, no ability to defend themselves, and no real opportunity to earn a living We see this all through the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, as God declares himself the God of the weak and the powerless, and condemns the evildoers who “kill the widow and the stranger, [and] murder the orphan.” Again and again, we have the affirmation—which Paul echoes in 1 Timothy—that God is a God of justice, and that those who exploit the poor and defenseless will be punished. The psalmist may ask, “How long shall the wicked exult?” but he does so in the certainty that the one who disciplines the nations will dig a pit for the wicked in the end. Those who build their mansions on the backs of the needy may prosper for a time, but not forever.

And in the end, though talk of God as a God of justice and judgment rings a harsh note, it’s important for us to remember that the judgment of God comes on those who do evil, on those who reject his ways; it’s important to remember that it’s rooted in his insistence on making right all that is wrong, and on his concern for the powerless—and that his concern includes us. The highest and greatest expression of this concern came in Christ, in his death and resurrection on our behalf, taking the punishment for our sin and paying the price that we were powerless to pay, winning for us the freedom we were powerless to win. In a sense, God’s greatest act of mercy was also his greatest act of justice. We worship a God who did not love from a distance, but came down to bear the weight of human need through humble service, and who calls us to do the same—to show his love not just in words, but in our actions, in care for those who are weak and needy and defenseless, and especially for those who are close to us. His love opens us to see the needs and burdens of those around us, and his compassion calls us to bear them in his name and for his sake, to share the gift of his self-sacrifice with others.

Character is who you are when you’re not thinking about it

Posted on by | 3 Comments

Remember, as you think about this photo, that Barack Obama considers Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. a friend, and is comfortable enough with him to call him “Skip.”It speaks well for Sgt. Jim Crowley that he’s solicitous of Professor Gates, helping him down the steps; I think it also speaks well of Dr. Gates, that he seems completely comfortable accepting Sgt. Crowley’s help. It seems clear that they’ve made their peace, and that’s good. It does not speak well of the president that he strides on ahead, oblivious.By way of comparison, here’s Barack Obama’s predecessor with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who was neither a close personal friend nor a political ally:

I believe the contrast between these two pictures captures something real and significant about the contrast between these two men.

HT: Thomas Lifson, via Whitney Zahnd

The real bigotry of Gatesgate

Posted on by | 4 Comments

isn’t racism, but classism—not black vs. white but elite vs. ordinary barbarian. Michael Barone captures this well in his Examiner piece from yesterday when he writes,

When Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life.

Gates had much less to lose. His foolish mouthing off—in street talk, for goodness sake—at worst would get him a couple of hours in jail, as it did. That’s unpleasant, but even before being hauled off he could see a more-than-offsetting benefit: this could be the subject or the jumping off point for his next television documentary! Crowley had the power to put Gates in jail for a few hours, but not much else.

Gates, on the other hand, had the power to destroy Crowley’s career. And he seemed to enjoy wielding that power, or at least to be acting in reckless disregard of his capacity to destroy the professional life of another human being. Yes, Gates was jet-lagged and presumably irritated that he was locked out of his house. But the possibility that Crowley was a decent professional, not at all a racist, properly investigating a possible crime, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Crowley was just one of the little people, a disposable commodity in the career of an academic superstar.

This accounts well for something that rather surprised me: the swiftness and unflinching conviction with which Sgt. Crowley’s colleagues and the officials of his union stood up for him and stood behind him. I would have expected some of them to try to curry favor with Professor Gates, Harvard, the mayor of Cambridge, and the president, in the face of the radioactive allegation of racism—but none of them did. I think Barone’s right, that they recognized the real bigotry in the Gates-Crowley encounter, and though they didn’t play the victim, they weren’t willing to knuckle under to it, either.

As Barone put it, they refused to let “a Harvard swell . . . destroy one of their peers . . . on a totally specious basis for his own fun and profit.” Good on them. I don’t imagine there are a lot of Palinites on the Cambridge, MA police force—but they clearly have their fair share of strong, proud ordinary barbarians, and that’s a profoundly good thing.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

The buck stops . . . somewhere else

Posted on by | No Comments

A couple days ago I noted the disconcerting failure of leadership (disconcerting to Democrats, anyway) shown so far by the president on the health care bill, which is after all one of his signature initiatives; I found it puzzling. Yesterday, Michael Barone offered an explanation that makes sense, and one that dovetails with something I’ve written before: Barack Obama isn’t leading the legislative process because he doesn’t know how. And why should he? He’s never done it. He’s had the title of a legislator, but he’s never really been one.

He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.

In other words, he’s never done much work putting legislation together—especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people’s lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year—the stimulus, cap and trade, health care—the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.

The administration could have insisted that the stimulus package concentrate spending in the next year. It didn’t. It could have insisted that the cap-and-trade bill generate the revenue that was supposed to underwrite health care. It didn’t. It could have decided either to seek a bipartisan health care bill or to insist that a Democratic bill be budget-neutral. It didn’t—and it still hasn’t made this basic policy choice.

I worried, during the campaign, about electing someone with no real record of substantive accomplishment—someone who knew how to talk about ideas but not how to realize them, who had no real experience getting things done; now, I think, we’re seeing the fruit of that. When his agenda runs into trouble, all he knows how to do to push it forward is talk; that’s why, as Politico‘s Carol Lee pointed out,

He’s been in office only six months, but already there’s a strong sense of déjà vu around the way Americans are seeing and hearing from President Barack Obama.

The president keeps returning to the same communications tactics over and over, and all the pages of his PR playbook have one thing in common: a big dose of Obama.

His prime-time news conference Wednesday night, one of the standbys, brings his total to four. That’s the same number that George W. Bush did—in eight years as president.

To be fair to President Obama, he is handicapped by having to work with Nancy Pelosi, who’s proving a remarkably, perhaps historically, ineffective Speaker of the House. But every leader has to work with and rely on lieutenants who are less than they ought to be; effective leaders get the most out of those folks that they can and try to avoid putting them in a position where they can derail things. So far, anyway, that’s not Barack Obama. I’ve been saying that he’s a smart man and he’s bound to figure it out, but so far, he hasn’t; so far, all he’s managed to do is prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t spell “president” without “PR”—and he has the diminishing returns to prove it.

 

Not fair?

Posted on by | 5 Comments

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 9
Q. But doesn’t God do us an injustice
by requiring in his law
what we are unable to do?

A. No, God created humans with the ability to keep the law.1
They, however, tempted by the devil,2
in reckless disobedience,3
robbed themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.4

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

Jerome De Jong writes (35-36),

After having considered the greatness and the extent of man’s sinfulness, disobedience and wretchedness, the Catechism concludes this division on human guilt by suggesting three possible objections. . . .

The initial objection concerns the Creator himself. Is not God unjust? . . . Is it right for God to require what man cannot do? But what is it really that God requires—a series of regulations and commandments and ordinances? Let us remind ourselves again that the entire law is summarized in one word: love! If man now has become a sinner, must God now say that it is no longer necessary for the sinner to love him? Of course not; God remains the same. His requirements do not change. But supposing this to be correct, can man fulfill the requirements of the law? The answer is No, but the answer was Yes! God created man able to perform and to do all the good pleasure of God. But Adam deliberately turned his back on God and disobeyed.

Dr. De Jong elaborates on this with the example of a contractor who agrees to build a home, then takes the money for materials and spends it on a drinking binge; he asks, reasonably enough,

Is it unjust for the original party to demand that his home be built? Can the contractor claim immunity because of his weak character? The contractor was given the means with which to build the house and willfully squandered them.

To be sure, as Kuyvenhoven admits (32), this doesn’t exhaust our objections on this point:

Still, we bristle in self-defense: That temptation happened . . . millennia ago. Why should we be doomed for what none of us remembers?

Here again, it’s a matter of perspective. We protest like individualists. But the Bible says that the very fact that we are able to think of ourselves as unrelated, disunited individuals presents evidence of our sinful perspective. God’s revelation views the human race not as a pile of gravel but as a giant tree. We are not pebbles thrown together but twigs and branches on a tree, all organically united.

We form a corporate unity. In many respects you and I have never doubted it. The national debts . . . are your and my debts. Yet when the debts were incurred, some of us were not yet born and none of us were asked. Similarly, the debt of the human race is yours and mine.

It’s an interesting illustration, since nobody really does deny our liability for the national debt; perhaps it’s because the corporate unity represented by the nation is visible, tangible, and human-created. It’s a reminder that, however hard we may try to avoid the fact, our responsibility in life goes beyond merely that for which we want to admit responsibility.

A good piece on Obamacare

Posted on by | 2 Comments

from a former president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Daniel Johnson Jr.: Memo to My Fellow Physicians: We Have Reached the Moment of Truth. It’s well worth your time, because he knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade; I found his thumbnail history of the debate over nationalized health care particularly interesting. Here’s an excerpt:

Now, with elderly, poor, women, and children covered, all that is left is a segment of the population outside of those groups that is reasonably self-sufficient and most of which has private insurance. Those folks will be forced into government coverage because of a “public option” plan that all intellectually honest observers, including both proponents and opponents of single payer, realize is a Trojan horse for a Canadian-style single-payer system. Once private insurance is crowded out by the unfair competitive tactics of the federal government intruding into an already flawed marketplace, it will be a simple matter to consolidate all of these different groups into one single entity.

What does this mean to physicians and their patients? “Clinical effectiveness research,” when operated by government instead of the medical profession, will become “cost effectiveness” restrictions on what care is available and to whom—determined by the federal government. It will only be a matter of a short time before Americans will enjoy the pleasures of “quality adjusted life years” wherein people my age will be denied services from which they might benefit because of their age and/or some other infirmity.

We don’t have to make this stuff up: It is already the law of the land in some other developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, and has been long advocated here in the U.S. by voices from the left, including major media outlets. The federal government will exert total control over payment for all medical services.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine what will happen when the payment-control mechanisms used by Medicare are extended to the entire private sector. The occasional inability of Medicare patients to find physicians who are willing to provide for their needed care at a loss will become the standard experience when the cost shortfall can no longer be shifted to the private sector.

Practicing physicians in the U.S. have become accustomed to the continued availability of ever better diagnostic and treatment innovations created by our academic and research colleagues. In my own specialty field of diagnostic imaging, the pace and breadth of scientific innovation to help us help clinicians be more effective in the management of sick and injured individuals or in the early detection of life-threatening illness, such as breast cancer, has been amazing. Yet I remember only too well the mid 1970s when the federal government and all but two states (Nebraska and Louisiana) did everything in their power to deny the American people access to the technology of computed tomography because of cost. As sure as the night follows the day, we will see that same kind of limitation imposed, but on a much larger scale. But in contrast to the ’70s, total federal control will prevent physicians and patients from overcoming the stricture as we were able to do back then.

Read the whole thing, and remember, this man is a good doctor: take his diagnosis and prescriptions seriously.

HT: Shane Vander Hart