Read this—it’s beyond belief. I don’t know what part of the president’s economic policy is supposed to justify the illegal seizure of a man’s business, or to excuse forcing him into bankruptcy and rendering his 50+ employees abruptly unemployed, but this is completely infuriating. This goes against everything this country is supposed to be about.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
In the Midst of Suffering
(2 Chronicles 20:14-22; 2 Timothy 1:1-12)
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a couple of our folks here, and they asked me my opinion on the Rapture. I think they were a bit surprised when I told them I don’t believe in the Rapture—I will grant, mine is not the most common opinion—and wanted to know my reasons. There wasn’t time for an exhaustive explanation, so I pulled out 1 Thessalonians 4 and explained my understanding of the passage; that was sufficient unto the task, and we moved on to other things. I could have said more, though, about why I don’t believe God is going to give the church a “get out of suffering free” card on the Great Tribulation—with the simplest reason being, and maybe this sounds cynical of me, that he never gives us a “get out of suffering free” card on anything else. Like I said last week, God saves us into the world and its troubles, not out of them; if anything, we may even get a rougher ride than the average. The only thing that surprises me about that is that sometimes it surprises me, because I really ought to know better; my 11th-grade English teacher always used to say, “You’ve never lived ‘til you’ve been whomped,” and so it logically follows that if Jesus came so that we might have life, and have it abundantly, being whomped is going to be an important part of that.
Now, maybe that makes sense to you and maybe it doesn’t, but I’d argue that experience bears it out. In what is probably my generation’s collective favorite movie, The Princess Bride, the hero, Westley, snaps, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” I can only add that whatever they’re selling isn’t good for you, and will probably only leave you worse off in the long run. There’s just no way to avoid it: pain and suffering are part of the deal in this world. That’s part of what I meant when I said last week that Jesus doesn’t give us victory over our circumstances, but rather in the midst of our circumstances.
What then does it mean, at those times when our circumstances involve suffering, for us to live into the victory of Christ, the victory of the gospel, in the midst of suffering? I’d like to look at a couple things this morning. First, consider King Jehoshaphat. Our passage from 2 Chronicles is a continuation of the passage we read last week, which was Jehoshaphat’s prayer; if you were here last week, you remember that it was a time of crisis. The nation of Judah, the southern kingdom of the Israelites, had been invaded by armies from an alliance of three of their longstanding enemies—Moab, Ammon, and the people of Mt. Seir, the Meunites—and by the time the king got word, those armies had already overcome Israel’s frontier defenses and advanced as far as En-Gedi. This was important because En-Gedi was a major oasis west of the Dead Sea, and probably fortified, to boot—it certainly was later on; capturing En-Gedi meant that the allied armies had a source of fresh water and a base from which to support themselves as they pushed on into Judah. This was a big, big piece of very bad news.
In response, Jehoshaphat called a fast throughout the country, asking everyone to set aside food and all their normal activities to pray to God for help. Those who could do so came to Jerusalem, and they had a big prayer service, and the king stood up and prayed the prayer we read last week. I noted at the time that his prayer expresses his faith that God can and will deliver his people if we cry out to him—and what’s the foundation for his faith? Something that should sound very familiar to us after our time in Isaiah. Look back up the page at verse 6: “O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you.” God is the God of everything, and he rules over everything, and everything is under his control—including the global economic system, including the government of this country, including the governments of nations like Iran and North Korea, including the leaders of al’Qaeda and other terrorist groups, including those in this country who want to criminalize certain biblical opinions (as they’ve already succeeded in doing in Canada). In all of it, in every part of it, God is in control, and nothing happens except he allows it. As such, when hard times come, we can cry out to him in full confidence that what we ask, he can do.
So King Jehoshaphat prays, and all his people pray, and then God’s Spirit inspires one of the Levites, a member of the priestly tribe, and he begins to prophesy. And notice what he says: “Don’t be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God’s. . . . Go out to face them tomorrow, and the LORD will be with you.” The battle is not yours, but God’s. You know, there are all sorts of examples across the books of the Old Testament of Israel and Judah being attacked, being invaded, coming under threat, and of their rulers praying, seeking God, sometimes meeting God’s prophets when they’re trying to avoid seeking God; some of these rulers were godly and faithful people, as much as you can expect, and some of them were rather less so. Some get happy messages, like Jehoshaphat did here—he was one of the good ones—and some don’t. As we saw in looking at Isaiah, Judah would ultimately be conquered and its people taken off into exile as a judgment on them for their sins. Military victory isn’t always in the cards for them, because their agenda and God’s don’t always line up.
But one thing holds consistent: the battle is not yours, but God’s. This gets said a dozen different ways by a dozen different prophets to a dozen different kings. God is in control here, and he’s going to accomplish his purposes. It’s not up to you in your own strength, by your own little schemes and plans and methods, to make this happen—God’s going to do that. Sometimes that means his judgment is coming, and you’re not going to be able to turn it aside; sometimes—more often, really—it means that his deliverance is coming, and you can be free of the fear of screwing it up, or being inadequate to the task. Always it means that God is supreme, and that it’s only by his power that the battle will be won; not that we’re free to do nothing, because he still calls us to do our part, but that we need to let go the idea that it depends on us and our efforts.
Thus the prophet tells Jehoshaphat, “The battle is not yours, but God’s,” but he doesn’t tell the king to stay home and get on with other things. Instead, he tells them to march out of the city and take up defensive positions against the enemy—to go out to the battle, and then let God fight it. And so what do they do? They go out to the desert and take up their defensive positions, and then they take up their weapon: they sing songs of praise to God for the deliverance that hasn’t happened yet. And as they begin to sing—not before, but only as they act in faith and declare through their praise their certainty that God will be faithful to do as he has promised—it is then that God ambushes the enemy armies, turning them against each other and destroying them. He gives them the victory, through their faith; and he does the same for us.
Now, as we’ve noted, our victory in Christ doesn’t always look as straightforward as the victory Jehoshaphat experienced. Looking back, I would say that I experienced the victory of Christ in my last church in Colorado, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. Certainly, had I been a perfect pastor or had they been perfect people, things would have been better, but I was never going to be and neither were they—and our errors and sins didn’t derail God’s plan and purpose. It was hard, and there was a lot of pain in it, and a lot of things that I’m still dealing with (and surely the same for them); and yet, there were people who came to Christ, and others who grew in their faith, and some deep and very difficult and painful issues from hurts that had been inflicted on that people in the past were brought out into the open where they could begin to heal. It’s not the victory I asked for; I had dreams of the church growing by leaps and bounds, of a revival breaking out in that pagan little community, and all sorts of other spectacular things. I would have preferred a victory that involved less suffering. Nevertheless, that was the victory God intended, and through all of our best efforts—even when we thought we were doing other things—he brought it about. He is faithful who promised.
That’s why the second thing I would say to you is, have courage. John Piper summarizes Paul’s main point in our passage from 2 Timothy this way: “Timothy, keep feeding the white-hot flame of God’s gift—namely, of unashamed courage to speak openly of Christ and to suffer for the gospel.” I think he’s right to see that as the overarching message of this passage, and indeed of the whole letter. Note that: the idea is to see suffering for the sake of the gospel as something to be faced with courage, not something to be avoided. What’s specifically in view here, of course, is suffering that comes as a result of preaching the gospel, in the form of persecution; but I think the application is broader than that. To take one famous example, Adoniram Judson’s terrible suffering in Burma came not because he was preaching the gospel but because of war between Burma and Great Britain—yet his suffering was not any less for the sake of the gospel because of that, and he was not in any less need of courage with which to face it. If we’re seeking to follow Jesus faithfully, suffering and hard times will come, as the enemy tries to knock us off balance, to get us to back down or to doubt our Lord; if we hold fast and keep following Jesus, then our suffering is for his sake and for the sake of the gospel.
And we should hold fast, and we should keep following, and we should do so with boldness; and we should face the prospect of suffering—including, yes, the prospect of suffering for telling people about Jesus, though for the near future, that suffering is unlikely to involve more than a little resistance and a little rejection—we should face that prospect with boldness, for good reason. In fact, for two good reasons, in fact. One, we have a wonderful message to share: our Savior Christ Jesus destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. That’s something we ought to be excited about, and we ought to want to talk about with anyone who will listen and most people who won’t; for something that good, we shouldn’t be put off when people resist us.
And two, we have the Spirit of God, who is a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. We were talking about this a bit around our table yesterday morning, that we often don’t want to take seriously the fact that we have the Spirit in our lives, because we’re afraid of what might happen if we do. Which is to say, ironically enough, that we’re afraid of no longer having a spirit of fear—we’re afraid of what we might do if we acted in a spirit of power and love and self-control. We’re afraid to let go control and let God work, and I think at least in part that’s because if we do that, we might suffer.
And you know what? If we let go, we will suffer—it’s guaranteed. We have God’s word on that. But you know what else? If we don’t, we’re still going to suffer—the only difference is, it won’t be for God. We’ll suffer instead for our fears, and our doubts, and our sins, and there will be no victory in it. If we are willing to face the prospect of suffering for the gospel with boldness, with unashamed courage, by the power of the Spirit of God who is in us—who is not a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power and love and self-control—well, we’ll suffer either way, but if it’s for the gospel, it’s not for nothing, it’s for a purpose; and if we suffer for the gospel, then we suffer for Jesus, and he is with us in our suffering by the power of his Spirit.
The key thing in all this, I think, is that our suffering for the gospel is not unnecessary, it is not incidental, it is not pointless, and it does not mean that we have been defeated. Rather, as God used the suffering of Christ on the cross to crush the power of sin and death, so he works through our suffering for his sake to accomplish his purposes in us. He uses our suffering to humble us, to soften us, to teach us, to sand away our sin—and to prepare us to minister to others in their suffering, for we could not speak the word that sustains the weary and gives hope to those in pain had we not known weariness and pain ourselves; and when we suffer, he is with us to uphold us and to bring us through it, because he understands. He’s been there too.
Boldly going all over again
I have not yet gotten the chance to see the new Star Trek—this week has just been too crazy—but I’m hoping my wife and I will be able to go sometime next week. In the meantime, I’ve been interested to read the various reviews and comments (including, of course, the brilliant spoof The Onion came up with—see below), which have left me looking forward to the movie. I’d rather see a sequel to Serenity (preferably involving a couple resurrections), but goodTrek is a solid second-best. Of everything I’ve read, I might be biased, but I’ve appreciated my friend Eli Evans’ analysis the most—especially this, which I think is quite insightful:
Trek presents us a vision of a future that, frankly, I wouldn’t want to live in. It seems like the most ponderous, politically correct, and (quick! think of another word that begins with “p” . . . yes!) and perfect place. Too perfect. . . .
It’s as if the UN were running the world—no, the galaxy—and (get this) they’re doing a bang-up job. Suspension of disbelief, indeed.
James Tiberius Kirk always rubbed against the grain of that society. Why? Because he refused to evolve beyond his petty human ego. He realized that human nature has no history. People are people, no matter where (or when) you go. Kirk is an un-reconstituted man in a world that is entirely reconstituted, right down to the replicated coffee and doughnuts. (Wait, no. Starfleet personnel definitely do not eat doughnuts. Unless they were square and made of a substance resembling balsa wood.)
Much of the dramatic tension in the 60’s TV show came from the conflict between the adventurer Kirk and his bureaucratic surroundings. Starfleet Command is chirping on the subspace frequency? Don’t answer it, Lt. Uhura. We have aliens to fry.
Now, I like “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and I have a lot of respect for Patrick Stewart as an actor. But then and there, the Trek producers pretty much de-fanged the franchise. Picard is a man settled into his society. Yes, he pops out of gear now and then, but for the most part, he’s a cog in the Starfleet machine.
Barack Obama tries to duck accountability . . . again
This from Andy McCarthy on the current state of the argument over releasing more photos from Abu Ghraib. The Obama administration is claiming to have come up with a new argument against the release, when in fact (as they surely know full well) they’re advancing the same argument made by the Bush administration:
As the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision last September in ACLU v. Dep’t of Defense relates, back in 2005, the Bush Justice Department first argued, in the district court, that the release of the photos “could reasonably be expected to endanger the physical safety of United States troops, other Coalition forces, and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The judge rejected this argument—incorrectly in my view, for what that may be worth—despite acknowledging the “risk that the enemy will seize upon the publicity of the photographs and seek to use such publicity as a pretext for enlistments and violent acts.” (Opinion at pp. 4-5). Then, as the three-judge Second Circuit panel noted, this national security argument became the Bush Justice Department’s “lead argument on this appeal.” (Id., pp. 8 & ff.) It’s simply false for Gibbs to contend otherwise.
Why all the legerdemain? Because, as I said in the lead argument made in Tuesday’s column (and on which I will elaborate in a new article later today): Obama is using this litigation as a smokescreen. He’s now getting plaudits for reversing himself and his Justice Department (which, in contrast to the Bush Justice Department, didn’t want to fight this case at all—just wanted to release the photos). But he is still trying to get away with voting present—which is to say, he is hiding behind the judges.
McCarthy explains,
It is in Obama’s power, right this minute, to end this debacle by issuing an executive order suppressing disclosure of the photos due to national security and foreign policy concerns. As I’ve noted, there’s no need to get into a Bush-era debate over the limits of executive power here. In the Freedom of Information Act, indeed, in FOIA’s very first exemption, Congress expressly vests him with that authority. See Title 5, U.S. Code, Section 552(b)(1)(A) (FOIA disclosure mandate “does not apply to matters that are …specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and . . . are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order”).
Besides being simple, issuing such an order would be a strong position and the screamingly obvious right thing to do. But it would also be a fully accountable thing to do, and that’s why President Obama is avoiding it. He realizes—especially after he surrendered details of our interrogation methods to the enemy—that he can’t afford to undermine the war effort again so quickly and so blatantly; but his heart is with the Left on this—that’s why he agreed to the release of the photos in the first place and why he is trying to prevent mutiny within his base. So here’s the game: Obama tells those of us who care about national security that he is taking measures to protect the troops and the American people, but he also tells the Left that he hasn’t made any final decisions about the photos and that the question is really for the courts to decide. That’s why he carefully couched yesterday’s reversal as a “delay” in the release of the photos.
Alternatively, of course, if the president really believes that releasing the photos is the “screamingly obvious right thing to do,” he could just go ahead and order it done; but that would also be a fully accountable thing to do, and so would not answer his core objective. McCarthy goes on to note that the administration has not elected to invoke the executive-order provision in its FOIA defense, but rather “a section relating to the withholding of records ‘compiled for law enforcement purposes,'” presumably leading with a weaker argument to increase the odds that the court will order the release of the photos. That way President Obama can get what he wants without actually having to do it himself and thus take responsibility for it.
Of course, all this involves trying to manipulate the court, and as McCarthy notes, that may not go over well:
I can assure you that federal judges don’t like to be toyed with. Supreme Court justices may not mind if the administration treats the media like a lap-dog and the public like we’re a bunch of rubes; but, regardless of their political leanings, the justices have goo-gobs of self-esteem, and they will not take kindly to being treated like pawns in the Obamaestro’s game. The Solicitor General should expect some very tough questions about why the busy justices should waste their valuable time grappling with a tough, life-and-death legal issue when Obama could simply issue an order—regardless of how the Court rules—suppressing the photos. This, of course, is the question the media should be asking. Unlike the White House press corps, the justices will take the time to understand what’s happening and they will not roll over.
Lay down your specialness
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
—Philippians 2:5-11 (ESV)
I’m filling in right now for the regular leader of our Wednesday evening Bible study, leading those who come through Philippians (when he asked me to cover this period for him, we selected that together). This evening, as we were working on 2:5-18, a couple dots connected for me that had never connected before, and I realized a bit more of the punch of this remarkable passage.
As you may know, the official Roman religion was emperor-worship, and its creed and sole tenet was “Caesar is Lord.” The various emperors took their proclaimed divinity with varying degrees of seriousness, but they all valued it as the glue that held the empire together. This, incidentally, is why Christians had such a rough time of it, because their insistence that Jesus alone is Lord made them a national security threat. (Shades of Janet Napolitano.)
This is of particular importance in the letter to the Philippians because Philippi was a Roman colony, and thus everyone born in the city who was not born into slavery was a Roman citizen. That put them ahead of most people who lived under Roman rule, for relatively few people in the empire had citizenship, and the difference in legal status between citizens and non-citizens was profound—only citizens could participate in political life (though they didn’t have the option of not doing so), and only citizens received the full protection of Roman law. Being a citizen was thus a very big deal, and so since native free Philippians all had citizenship, they took great pride in this fact, and in their city. Their sense of Roman identity, of both their civil rights and their civic responsibilities, was very strong, and Caesar-worship was very strong in the city as well.
This meant that Christianity was counter-cultural in Philippi to a much greater degree than in most of the rest of the Roman Empire. In this passage, though, Paul pushes that even further. You see, one of the rights of Roman citizens was that they could not be crucified; in fact, Cicero once wrote,
To bind a Roman citizen is a crime; to flog him is an abomination; to execute him is almost an act of murder; to crucify him is—what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.
As you can see, Roman citizens had a very high opinion of themselves; by virtue of their status as citizens, they were quite certain they were better than every other class of people on the planet. The idea of being crucified would have been unspeakably, nauseatingly horrifying to them—maybe even more from the psychic shock and the assault on their identity and self-image than from the physical agony. They were too special to be treated like that. And yet Paul says, in effect, “Sure, you’re special, you’re Roman citizens; but look at Jesus—he was even more special; he was God become human, and look what he did. Now you go and do likewise: do not consider your status as citizens something to hang onto, but make yourselves nothing, taking on the full reality of slaves, and humble yourselves even to the point of death on a cross, if it should come to that.”
Lay down your specialness for Jesus Christ, and in humility, serve others, even to the point of laying down your life. That’s what it means to follow Jesus; that’s the road that leads to sharing his reward.
Photo © 2012 Tobias Lindman. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
The gospel from the margins
Now there were four men who were lepers at the entrance to the gate. And they said to one another, “Why are we sitting here until we die? If we say, ‘Let us enter the city,’ the famine is in the city, and we shall die there. And if we sit here, we die also. So now come, let us go over to the camp of the Syrians. If they spare our lives we shall live, and if they kill us we shall but die.” So they arose at twilight to go to the camp of the Syrians. But when they came to the edge of the camp of the Syrians, behold, there was no one there. For the Lord had made the army of the Syrians hear the sound of chariots and of horses, the sound of a great army, so that they said to one another, “Behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Egypt to come against us.” So they fled away in the twilight and abandoned their tents, their horses, and their donkeys, leaving the camp as it was, and fled for their lives. And when these lepers came to the edge of the camp, they went into a tent and ate and drank, and they carried off silver and gold and clothing and went and hid them. Then they came back and entered another tent and carried off things from it and went and hid them.Then they said to one another, “We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news. If we are silent and wait until the morning light, punishment will overtake us. Now therefore come; let us go and tell the king’s household.”
—2 Kings 7:3-9 (ESV)
This is a piece of a larger narrative that takes place during the reign of Jehoram, king of Israel, one of the sons of Ahab. You may remember King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, and how they were always at odds with the prophet Elijah. Ahab and his wife are both dead by this point, and Elijah has been taken up in the whirlwind; Jehoram reigns in Ahab’s place, and Elijah has been succeeded by his protégé, Elisha.
Jehoram’s actually not a bad king by Israel’s standards, as he generally treats Elisha with respect, but at the time of the story, things are going badly. Ben-Hadad, king of Aram—modern-day Syria—has invaded Israel and laid siege to the capital city, Samaria. This was on top of a famine in the land, and so there’s very little food in the city. In fact, things have gotten so bad that people are paying exorbitant prices for donkey heads and bird droppings just to have something to eat. It’s in this context that these four lepers decide that they might as well go see if they can surrender to the enemy; the worst that can happen is for the Arameans to kill them, and even then it’s likely to be a quick death—which is still better than starvation. And so they go down to the enemy camp, and what happens? They find it deserted. God has spooked the enemy, and the army has fled.
This is one of the great ironies of Israel’s history: four lepers, four outcasts, are now in possession of the good news of God’s deliverance. They are the heralds of salvation to a city they aren’t even allowed to enter, under normal circumstances. Indeed, the very fact that they were outcasts is what put them in position to make this discovery. Their first reaction is to keep it for themselves, but it doesn’t take them too long to wise up—and though their decision is partly pragmatic, it’s more than that, too; the desire to avoid getting in trouble plays its part, but the main reason they decide to bring their good news back to the city is that it’s the right thing to do. They had good news to report, and so they had the responsibility to share it with all those who needed it.
That’s where we as Christians find ourselves in these difficult times: we are those lepers. That can be hard for us to see, for a couple reasons, but it’s true. It’s hard to see, first off, because centuries of Christendom have covered our eyes to it—we aren’t used to seeing ourselves as marginal figures; we’re used to thinking of this as a Christian nation, and of ourselves as the majority and the mainstream. Demographically, that’s still true, but culturally, it really isn’t anymore, and practically speaking, it’s unhelpful; we need to realize that while the institutions of the church may still be prominent in this country, the message of the gospel—which is what the church is supposed to be about—is increasingly marginal, even among churchgoers. For the majority of people in this country, and in many congregations, “Christian” is defined roughly as being nice, being a pretty good person—or, to some people, being a royal hypocrite to pretend you’re better than everyone else when you’re not—going to church once in a while, and voting Republican. Oh, yeah, and liking Jesus. There’s not much more content to the cultural perception than that. If you start talking about the gospel, you might as well do it in the original Greek.
Like the lepers, we have been given good news to share with hungry people, and like them, if we tell people about it, we aren’t going to meet with automatic belief and acceptance. People want to hear “Follow us and all of your financial problems will be solved”—that’s the good news they’re hoping for—and unlike the lepers, we don’t have that message; we can’t promise people a return to what they’ve come to think of as the good life. Instead, what we have to offer is the faith of King Jehoshaphat: that when calamity and disaster come, if we will cry out to the Lord, he will hear us and save us. He doesn’t promise us prosperity in the midst of the meltdown, merely that he won’t let us be defeated by it. Which is not nothing, but isn’t necessarily what people are looking for, either. The good news we have to offer is much bigger and deeper than just financial prosperity; our responsibility is to help them see, by what we say and how we live, just what good news it is.
(Excerpted, edited, from “For Such a Time as This”)
Political fairy tales never end right
Once upon a time, there was a politician who said,
Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a VP. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. . . .
You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits. . . .
Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that—they’d be fired.
That politician was very good at saying things that made people think highly of him, and so in the fullness of time, he grew up and became President of the United States. But along the way, he picked up a traveling companion, a Scarecrow named Joe who said whatever came into his mind, including using Gov. Palin’s youngest child to score political points; and the politician didn’t fire him, or stop him, or tell him to back off. And this was a sign that maybe he didn’t mean what he said after all. And the press continued to do what he’d told them not to do, and he said nothing further; and this was another sign.
And then after the politician became president, there came the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which it is traditional to have a comedian make fun of the president, to show that the president can laugh at himself and take a joke. But since this politician didn’t like laughing at himself and taking jokes, they had a comedian to make fun of his opponents instead, including a crude “joke” about Gov. Palin and her family. The comedian told this joke right in front of the politician who had once said,
Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics.
In any proper fairy tale, this should be the cue for the politician to step up and say, “I said this was inappropriate, and I meant it. I said we need to respect those with whom we disagree, and I meant it. I said we need to base our politics on political issues, not on character assassination, and I meant it. Stop this nonsense right now.” This should be the cue for the politician to defend the one unjustly abused.
Did he? No . . . he laughed. All his words about the good, the true and the beautiful were just words.
Political fairy tales never end right.
On this blog in history: February 1-9, 2008
Another idea of a good Christian woman
My contribution to the Better Christian Woman conversation (see the links in the post if you missed that one).
The idolatry of American politics
Reflections on the ways in which politics and country are idols for many of us.
Decaf non-fat latté with a shot of God
If the church isn’t challenging people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, then what’s the point?
Keeping faith in mind
On why we don’t have to choose between our brains and our beliefs.
Preliminary thoughts on the knowledge of God
On how we can know God without shrinking him.
Gospel victory in difficult times
Part of the good news that is ours in Jesus Christ is that now that Christ has won his victory, he extends that victory to us; accept that victory, accept his gift to us, and live accordingly. This is critical for us in understanding what it means to live the Christian life, because it points us to the fact that we should not expect Christ to leave us as we are, with the same old behavior patterns and the same old comfort zones. We may well have many of the same struggles—Jesus doesn’t magically make all our temptations go away when we become Christians—and indeed, as we grow closer to him, we tend to find new ones, as his Spirit convicts us of areas of sin that we’d overlooked; but though our struggles don’t disappear, our attitude toward them ought to change, and we ought to see progress in our lives toward the holiness of God. Our lives should not look the same as everyone else’s.
The problem in talking about Christian victory, though, is that we have to be careful to explain what we mean. After all, we have an idea of what victory means that we’ve learned from the world, and so it’s easy and natural to assume that God is talking about the same thing; that’s why we have the “prosperity gospel” types who teach that victorious Christian living means job success, financial comfort, a perfect marriage, kids who turn out exactly how you want them to turn out, and whatever else it might take to give you a perfect sense of self-satisfaction and self-fulfillment on your own terms. It’s basically your dream life on steroids, and if you don’t get it—if your life has disappointments and struggles and failures—well, then, you just must be a bad Christian.
And that isn’t the gospel. That isn’t even related to the gospel. When we talk about gospel victory, we need to remember first and foremost that our exemplar for gospel victory is Jesus—and what did his victory look like? Thorns—nails—public humiliation—and death from heart failure due to blood loss and dehydration. Victory in Jesus is not necessarily going to be a dream come true. In point of fact, where some like to talk about living in victory—your “best life” (whatever that means) now, without all the messy growth process—I think we do better to talk about living into Jesus’ victory, because it’s really not something that comes naturally for us. We have to retrain ourselves and our expectations, and our sense of what that victory actually means for us and our lives.
That begins, I think, with accepting that Jesus’ victory doesn’t mean victory over circumstances so much as it means victory in the midst of circumstances. God doesn’t save us out of the world, but rather into the world, for the sake of the world. He doesn’t insulate us from its problems because that would insulate us from the part he wants us to play in addressing them. As we look at the world around us, as we consider the hard times so many are facing, with layoffs and stock losses and foreclosures, it’s tempting to circle the wagons and focus on what this is doing to us. It’s a lot harder in times like this to sit up and say, “We don’t exist for our own sake, just to take care of ourselves; we exist for the world around us, and we need to keep our focus there.” But you know what? Hard as it may be, that is why we exist, and that is what we need to do; as Mordecai said to Esther, it’s for such a time as this that God placed us here to begin with.
(Excerpted, edited, from “For Such a Time as This”)
Bumper-sticker theology
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read, “God bless the whole world—without exceptions.” You see variations on that theme from time to time. I always want to catch the driver and thank them for their desire that God bless George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and the Republican Party, and then see what they say; and then to follow that up by asking them what they understand a prayer to bless Osama bin Laden, Ayman al’Zawahiri, and al’Qaeda to mean. For my part, I know what it would mean for God to bless Osama—it would mean to bless him with repentance and to bring him to worship the one true God of the universe—but somehow I tend to doubt that those folks would agree with me.
Still, that bumper sticker catches in my mind because it makes me uncomfortable, and not for the reason you might think. The truth is, I don’t think I would ever put that on my car, not because I object to what people would assume it meant about my political leanings, but rather because I could never live up to it. Taken seriously, that’s a powerful gospel prayer—and I couldn’t claim to mean it consistently enough. I have too much Jonah in me. Some days, I can feel pretty good about the command to us to love our enemies . . . but that’s only when I don’t really have any enemies around. At times when I’ve actually been suffering, I’ve been much less sanguine about that. God send me grace to love my enemies when I actually have them.