I would have loved to have been down in Evansville to hear RNC Chairman Michael Steele (even after his recent bout with Foot-in-Mouth disease, I still like the guy) and Gov. Palin, but there was no way I could justify the time; and really, it was an event for the folks in Vandenburgh County, and it would have felt like horning in. So here’s the next best thing: complete video of her speech in Evansville, beginning with Chairman Steele’s introduction:
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
Note on building a movement
So if you’re a conservative out there in Ohio or Florida or Colorado who’s waiting for RNC HQ to save the GOP, you’re part of the problem. If you want to be part of the solution, you’ve got to become an activist. You’ve got to organize.
Create a movement, and don’t worry about who the leader of the movement is. Be your own leader.
Wise words. One thing though, Mr. McCain: We’re doing it. We’re doing it one flash at a time.
Update: David Bozeman has some good thoughts on this as well.
One thumb up, one thumb down
I’ve been meaning to post on the recent pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama and its aftermath, for a couple reasons. First, President Obama deserves credit for giving the go-ahead for military action; I believe the appropriate response to pirates, terrorists, and anyone else who would hold innocent lives in pawn for their own benefit is best illustrated by the Israeli raid on Entebbe: no mercy, no quarter, no hesitation.
But second, that requires one other thing: no negotiation. Here, in my opinion, is a major black mark on this administration; to first offer to negotiate and then strike was a deeply problematic move, for reasons that Cornell’s William Jacobson lays out:
There are two choices when negotiating with hostage takers/pirates. One is the Israeli model of no negotiation. The only thing to be negotiated is the life of the hostage taker. Money, free passage, and other benefits are not on the table. The purpose of this approach is to deter further hostage takers, even if it means the death of the hostage.
The other model is the model of negotiating over almost any benefit, as long as the hostage is freed safely. This is the model Obama initially appeared to follow with the pirates. But if one believes the spin coming out of the White House, then negotiation was a ruse to buy time.
The problem is not in this case, which ended successfully, but in the next hostage taking situation. If one is going to follow a negotiation approach, the trust of the hostage takers in the negotiation process is key. If hostage takers believe negotiation is a ruse, then the hostage is in more danger. Words cannot be just words in a negotiation.
So negotiating as a ruse is the worst of all alternatives. It does not have the deterrent effect of the Israeli approach, or the hostage-safety effect of the negotiation approach.
This point was actually illustrated quite nicely on last Friday’s episode of NUMB3RS, for those who follow that show. The likely result of this approach by the administration will be what the pirates are already threatening: escalation. This tactic worked, this time, but it won’t work again—and as a consequence of its use, the pirates are much more likely to preemptively kill any Americans they take.
The ironic thing about this is that, all in all, the pirates are probably the best allies we have in the Horn of Africa.
Piracy is not a strategic threat to the US, it is a big problem for Europe and Asia but not for us. It wasn’t until Asia and Europe realized we weren’t going to solve this problem for them that they stepped up themselves.
Terrorism in Somalia has long driven Navy operations off that coast. On one side, we have a high visibility piracy problem that does not threaten the interests of the United States directly, at all, and our only current national interest regarding the piracy issue is one man with 4 guys in an orange boat 200 yards off the bow of the USS Bainbridge (DDG 96). There is a national economic interest, but the impact to date has not risen to a level that has created a serious concern among global leaders to the point they are willing to commit serious resources toward solving the problem.
On the other side of the Somalia problem, we have the terror problem no one else in the world is interested in doing anything about. And in the middle is the reality that while both the pirates and terrorists are operating in the same black market space, the pirates and terror groups don’t like each other.
Then there is another problem. What if we support a government strong enough to remove piracy, but too weak to do anything about the terrorism cells? Piracy is what has the international community involved in the problems of Somalia right now, if that goes away, we are left with the bigger threat to our national interests and no one internationally to help.
In other words, the pirates aren’t hurting us that much, but they are hurting the Somali terrorists that are a much bigger threat to us. I don’t like the idea that we might be better off working with them than fighting them—allying ourselves with thugs has never worked out all that well in the past—but from a Realpolitik point of view, it actually makes a lot of sense. Really, who else is there? That being the case, even if we leave that aside (as, morally, I believe we should), it does still suggest that our focus in Somalia should continue to be where it has been: not on fighting pirates, but on stopping terrorists.
HT (for the last article quoted): Smitty
Political machines hate reformers
That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of most of the news stories about Sarah Palin in recent months. It’s the reason for the wrangling between her and the Democrats over the Juneau-area state senate seat; it’s the reason for the fight over her AG nominee, Wayne Anthony Ross; it’s the reason for the sniping from machine tools in the state legislature like Fairbanks RINO Jay Ramras; it’s the reason the New York Times paid a visit to Alaska. This is what all the badmouthing boils down to.
Obviously, the stories about members of her family are not, in and of themselves, in this category; however, the fact that the MSM is more interested in the likes of Levi Johnston than they are in, say, President Obama’s child-rapist half-brother Samson is also a reflection of the fact that political machines don’t like reformers. Now, I don’t happen to think that Samson Obama ought to be a major political story, or indeed that he has any greater significance than anyone else who likes to rape 13-year-old girls, which is one reason I haven’t blogged about him; Barack Obama is human, and therefore a sinner like all the rest of us, and the same is true of his family, and some of those folks are going to be worse sinners than others. What matters is who he is and what he does. However, the same is true of Gov. Palin, even with respect to her children—anyone who thinks it’s possible to be a good-enough parent to ensure that your 17-year-old daughter is immune to the kinds of bad decisions and sinful acts to which 17-year-olds are prone is probably expecting that check from Nigeria any day now.
If Bristol Palin deserves attention from the MSM, well, what Samson Obama did was a heck of a lot worse—by that standard, he ought to be on front pages as far as the eye can see. And he isn’t. Why? Because of ideology, to be sure, but also because President Obama doesn’t threaten the machine—he’s of the machine, he owes it, and he can be trusted to behave accordingly. Gov. Palin isn’t, and doesn’t, and can’t, and so every bit of influence she gains is a direct threat to the (bi-partisan) political establishment that can neither predict nor control her.
This goes all the way back to the very beginning of her political career. (Note: much of this is covered in R. A. Mansour’s excellent post “Who Is Sarah Palin?”) In her first step into politics, she won a seat on the city council of Wasilla. At that point, she had the backing of her mayor. Did she repay his support by being a loyal supporter of his administration, following the expected rules of political patronage? No, she didn’t; when she decided that he was governing badly and in a manner that she considered bad for the community, she challenged him, ran against him, and defeated him. He’s still complaining about her ingratitude.
Later, after she lost the race for lieutenant governor in 2004, the new Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, one of the entrenched leaders of the oil-money-fueled Alaska GOP political machine, appointed her as ethics supervisor and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. One of her fellow commissioners was Randy Ruedrich, who also chaired the Alaska Republican Party; when she discovered he was guilty of ethics violations, she blew the whistle on him, even though she ended up having to quit the commission (giving up a six-figure salary) to do so. Gov. Murkowski backed Ruedrich, but he ended up paying a significant fine for his actions. In 2006, at least in part because of this and other dubious actions on Gov. Murkowski’s part, she ran against him as a Republican but a party outsider, and beat him.
If you’re keeping score, that’s twice that she was recruited by a Republican incumbent to be a good little foot soldier, declined to be a good little foot soldier in the face of her political patron’s bad conduct, and knocked said incumbent out of office. Those of you with a taste for old political fiction will probably understand why, even more than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, the politician of whom Gov. Palin reminds me most is Orrin Knox, the fictional senior U. S. Senator from Illinois (small irony there) in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. When it comes to dealing with her own party, she has definitely acted in line with Sen. Knox’s motto: “I don’t give a —- about being liked, but I intend to be respected.”
Now, up until about August 28 of last year, none of this posed any particular problems for the Democratic political machine, either in Alaska or nationally. You see, the national political machine’s biggest concern (in both parties) for holding statehouses has to do with the redistricting that takes place every decade, and Alaska has only one House seat and isn’t likely to gain a second one; as such, that doesn’t apply. Democratic interest in Alaska, then, was primarily focused on trying to unseat the state’s senior U. S. Senator, the corrupt but wily and very powerful Ted Stevens, and its lone House member, Rep. Don Young—and in that effort, Gov. Palin was a great help, which made her the Democrats’ favorite Republican. Sure, they had every intention of trying as hard as they could to unseat her in 2010, but at that point, she was more a help to them than a hindrance. She’d worked with Democrats in the Alaska legislature to replace laws that had essentially been written by oil-company lobbyists—specifically, the tax code on resource extraction and a gas-pipeline bill—with laws that were better for the people and state of Alaska. Back then, while Alaska Democrats weren’t above trying to take her down, they were happy to give Gov. Palin the credit for killing the “Bridge to Nowhere,” because it helped them make their case against the Alaskans who really mattered in her party.
And then John McCain named her his running mate—and everything changed. Suddenly, she was the Alaskan who mattered in her party, because she mattered in the presidential race; she gave the McCain campaign an energy it hadn’t had since the New Hampshire primary—the 2000 New Hampshire primary, that is—and thus became Public Enemy #1 for the national Democratic machine, and so for the Alaska Democratic machine as well. Conservatives4Palin has chronicled at length how the Obama campaign’s officials in Alaska, folks like State Senators Hollis French and Kim Elton, tried to bring her down (even going so far as to promise an “October surprise”), and how St. Sen. Elton got his payoff for his actions in support of the Obama campaign.
That, by the way, was supposed to be a cascading payoff; the Alaska Democratic Party machine thought it could giftwrap St. Sen. Elton’s seat for St. Rep. Beth Kerttula (one of those Democrats who’d supported Gov. Palin until she became a threat to the Obama campaign), and then giftwrap her seat in turn for Kim Metcalfe, who chairs the local party in Juneau. But Gov. Palin doesn’t appreciate machine politics when practiced by either party—she’s willing to work with Democrats, but she’s as opposed to the Democratic machine as she is to the Republican machine, and so she’s been refusing to play along with their back-room maneuvers.
Gov. Palin is now in a difficult, though probably inevitable, position: she is opposed by a bi-partisan coalition of the machine politicians in Alaska, who oppose each other on policy but share a common higher loyalty to the old boys’ club and the perks and procedures to which they’re accustomed. Gov. Palin has the support of a strong majority of the Alaskan people, but only a minority of the state’s politicians. This has meant that the state legislature has been in full foot-dragging mode through the entire session—a fact which they now intend, via the Democratic Party PR department (aka the MSM, specifically the New York Times), to blame on her.
That the MSM will coordinate with the Democratic/Republican machine in Alaska on this is, I believe, a sign of their deepest agenda here—not just their general bias against conservatives, but a deeper bias yet: as much as they bleat about “speaking truth to power,” they are not the outside critics of the machine that they pretend to be. Rather, they are a part of the machine, they are inside the corridors of power, that’s where they want to be, and they really have no true understanding or interest of the world outside those corridors.
This is true, I believe, even of the conservatives within the MSM, which is why a lot of the elite conservative writers have been almost as unfair to Gov. Palin as their liberal colleagues; and if a Democratic version of Gov. Palin were ever to emerge, a true reformer who bucked the party machine, I don’t think the likes of Eleanor Clift and Paul Krugman would be any kinder to that individual than the likes of David Brooks and David Frum have been to Gov. Palin. The initial MSM reaction to the appointment of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton’s vacant seat in the U.S. Senate certainly supports that thought.
In other words, what we’re seeing here is the utter bankruptcy of the MSM as an “independent free press”; they are nothing of the kind. They are organs of elite opinion, constituent parts of the political machine. This, more than ideology, is the reason why they’re so determined to bring Gov. Palin down, because she represents a threat to their worldview on a more basic level even than ideology: she threatens their sense of their own superiority, and the rules by which they operate, and the perks and the comfort zone which those rules ensure, just as much as she threatens all those things for the machine politicians she’s been relentlessly at work to overcome and bring down.
This is one of the reasons why we need the continued rise of the citizen punditry via the blogosphere—we need to reclaim the national discussion on issues from the machine almost as much as we need to reclaim our government. (I say “almost” because whatever its failings, talk radio has also been outside the political machine, for the most part.) And it’s why we need to support Gov. Palin, and why I so much appreciate the independents and moderate Democrats who do, because if she goes down to defeat—if the Alaska political machine defeats her, or the national Democratic machine defeats her—the odds that someone else will try to buck the machine and bring real political reform to this country approach zero . . . from beneath.
Remember this, as you read the stories about Sarah Palin: remember that she’s spent her career trying to reform the machine politics of Alaska, and remember that political machines hate reformers—and they’re the ones who have the money, and the media. All Gov. Palin has is the truth, and the support of those of us who are fed up with the machine. Remember that, and don’t believe the hate.
Update: Welcome to folks dropping by from C4P; my posting has tilted toward religious topics in the last week or so, but even if that isn’t up your alley, you might also find my post in defense of the citizen punditry of particular interest. I hope to have a reflection on Gov. Palin’s visit to Evansville up in the next day or two as well.
Seven stanzas for Easter
I’m not sure why I didn’t think to post this earlier; John Updike is best known for his prose, but this poem is a jewel.
Seven Stanzas for Easter
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
The Victory of the Servant
From the beginning, God’s plan has been to rescue the whole world. He chose a man, Abraham, and gave him a family, which would become a nation to worship him and honor his name. At least, that was the idea—that Israel would be a light to the nations to draw them to the worship of the one true God. But there was one small problem: Israel didn’t live like that, and didn’t really want to; and if they didn’t, who had more reason than anyone else to trust God, what hope was there for the rest of the world? Why would the other nations be drawn to worship God if even his own people wouldn’t stay faithful?
In the place of his servant Israel, then, to carry out the task they had refused, God raised up a new Servant, to be his covenant to his people and a light to the nations, that he might be God’s salvation to the very ends of the earth, establishing justice in the world and freeing those held captive in the darkness of sin. He was to be God’s answer to the problem of the evil and sin in this world, not by explaining it or overpowering it—which are the sort of answers the world thinks it wants—but by an entirely different way. God chose to offer us, not the answer for which we were looking, but the answer we actually needed: he offered us himself. He came down to live our life, to identify with us, to endure the darkness of our fallen world with us, and to defeat that darkness, not with its own weapons, but with light.
People sometimes ask, “Where’s God when it hurts—in the tragedies we see so often, and the large-scale injustices of this world?” and often they assume the answer must be “Nowhere”; after all, if there really is a God out there, and he actually heard our suffering, wouldn’t he do something about it? But the truth is, as Easter shows us, God has heard our suffering—he has heard every cry of anguish, felt every blow and every betrayal, and caught every tear in the palm of his hand—and in Jesus Christ, he has done everything about it. In Jesus, he came down to share our suffering with us, drinking that cup to the very dregs. He took the weight of all our sin on his shoulders—the entirety of human evil and human suffering, of all the brokenness and wrongness of the world—and he carried it to the cross, its cruel thorns digging into his forehead, its sharp splinters shredding his back; and there, for the guilt of all the crimes he never committed, he died.
He died for us. He died to pay the price for all the sins we’ve ever committed and ever will commit, for all the pain we’ve endured and all the pain we’ve caused, for all the darkness and brokenness and agony and grief in our poor misshapen world. Our sins deserved death, and more—even our death wouldn’t be enough punishment; not only could we never do enough in this life to make up for them, we couldn’t even die enough to even the balance. Morally, we were in the same position as so many mortgages these days: we were under water, owing more than we were worth. Only Jesus’ death—the death of one whose life was of infinite value and infinite goodness, the life of God himself—only his death could be enough to pay that price, to satisfy the demands of justice for the sins of the world, so that salvation could come to all the nations.
But if his death was sufficient to pay the price of redemption, it still wasn’t enough to accomplish the work; nor was it enough to satisfy God’s promise to his servant. “See my servant,” God says in Isaiah 52: “he shall accomplish his purpose; he will rise and be lifted up, and be exalted most high.” And again in chapter 53, “If you make his life an offering for sin, then he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; . . . Because of his anguish, he shall see and be satisfied. . . . Therefore I will give him the many, and he shall divide the strong as the spoils of his victory.” Justice for the Servant, the fulfillment of God’s promises to him, demanded that his death not be the end; and indeed, for his great work to end in victory at all rather than defeat required something more. If his story had come to its conclusion in that tomb, if he had died and stayed dead like any other man, then in the end, it would have been just another victory for the powers of evil; the price would have been paid for our redemption, but there would have been no redeemer left to complete the deal, and the sacrifice would have been for nothing.
And so, though the powers of evil capered and celebrated across that black, black Saturday, thinking they had won—thinking they had tricked the God of the universe into taking a bridge too far—God’s resounding answer to evil came on Easter morning. The Creed tells us Jesus descended into Hell, and I believe it; and after spending a couple nights there, that morning he got up, reached out his hands, and tore the gates of Hell from their very hinges. He stretched out his carpenter’s hands, those hands that could be so gentle to the weak and the suffering, and his shoulders flexed, and he tore the wall of Death apart. He heaved, and the grave burst open in a soundless explosion that shook the universe from one end to the other, a blinding flash of light that lit the sky from horizon to horizon; and he who had been dead got up, and was dead no more, never again to die.
And in that, you see, is the victory; in that, and nothing else. In that moment, the price that had been paid for our redemption was realized, and we were stripped from the power and control of the prince of darkness. That’s why Isaiah bursts out into song, calling out to his people that their redemption has been accomplished, that God’s salvation has come. God in his love has chosen to direct his anger at sin against his Servant—which is to say, against himself—and to take on himself the punishment that justice demanded; all that remains is for his people to accept the gift and revel in the love of God.
Isaiah 54 uses two different images to express this. In verses 1-10, the prophet pictures the people of God as a childless woman, abandoned by her husband; verses 11-17 portray them as a city that needs to be rebuilt. In both cases, he addresses them in the midst of difficult circumstances—poor, desolate, lonely, wracked by the storms of life—with the promise that the Servant’s victory has been won, and that the fruits of that victory are coming. With the first image, we see the fruits of restored relationships, beginning with the healing of their relationship with God. The exile of the people of Israel was the political realization of their spiritual reality—they had been alienated from the land God gave them to reflect the deeper truth that their sin, their rebellious disobedience, had alienated them from him spiritually, had broken their relationship with him.
That’s why Jewish leaders of later years have taught that the exile didn’t really end with the return to Israel, because their hardness of heart, their spiritual exile, continued; and it’s why the words of the prophets are as relevant today as they were in their own time, because while we no longer share the physical circumstances of the Israelite exiles in Babylon, their spiritual circumstances are our own. All of us begin life estranged from God; just growing up in the church, or even formally joining the church and being active in it, isn’t enough to change that, either. There are many in the church in this country, and perhaps even here this morning, who are still in exile and don’t know it, because they have no real relationship with God; like the people of Isaiah’s time, all the outward conformity is there, but the inner reality of faith is absent. What God wants from us is not good works, be it church attendance, volunteering, giving money, or any of that; those are all good things, but in and of themselves they aren’t enough. What he wants is for us to love him and trust him, to put him first in our hearts and minds.
This is the reason for the language we see in verses 7-10: “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will gather you; in a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment, but out of my hesed—my everlasting kindness, my unchanging faithful love, my covenant commitment to you—I have had compassion on you. . . . Though the mountains be shaken and the hills disappear, my hesed, my unfailing love, will not be shaken, nor will my covenant of peace disappear.” It’s a promise of enduring love, and an enduring close relationship, founded on the committed faithfulness of God; this is the fundamental promise from which all the others flow.
Thus the one who has been shamed and humiliated before the world will be set free from her humiliation. To understand this, you need to remember that in that time, not having kids wasn’t a lifestyle choice; the common view in that day and age, as Asbury Seminary’s John Oswalt sums it up, was that “a childless woman was a failure, someone who had apparently committed some sin, or had been at least judged unworthy of bearing a child.” Thus being childless brought terrible shame and humiliation. It also meant economic difficulties—back then, you didn’t have a 401(k) or Social Security; your retirement plan was that your children would take care of you in your old age, as you had done for your parents—and the certainty that your influence would end with your death. Similarly, Israel had been shamed and humiliated before the nations by the failure of her God to deliver her, and left with no apparent future; but God says, “Don’t fear, and don’t be humiliated, because I have wiped away your shame. Shout for joy, sing songs of praise, because I’m going to undo your disaster; step out in faith, because I’m going to give you a future—and a brighter one than you ever imagined.”
Thus as well God promises his people peace, prosperity, and security. He will rebuild his city out of precious stones, so that its walls will be not merely strong but also beautiful. Incidentally, where the NIV has “I will build you with stones of turquoise,” the literal reading there is “I will lay your stones in mascara”; the NIV translators apparently weren’t sure what to make of that, but I suspect it means that even the mortar used to lay the stones will be beautifully colored, to highlight the colors in the stones. The point is, God will make his people glorious; the outer glory of the walls will reflect the inner glory of their character and spiritual life. “All your children will be disciples of the LORD, and great will be their peace.” You could preach an entire sermon on that, on God’s concern that our children are not merely kept quiet and happy while the adults do the business of the church, but are seriously discipled as members of the people of God. “You will be established in righteousness, and so you will have nothing to fear; yes, there will be those who will attack you, but it won’t be my doing, and you will prevail against them.”
And then look at verse 17—this is the victory of the Servant of the Lord extended to his people. “No weapon forged against you will prevail, and no charge raised against you will be sustained”; this goes back to what we talked about a couple weeks ago, that God has both the might and the right to deliver his people. This is not to say that there won’t be attacks on his people—we know that God doesn’t insulate us from the troubles of this world—but it is to say that they will always fail of their purpose in the end. There is no one who has the power to overcome God’s protection over us; even the destroyers of our world were created by God, and even their weapons are the work of his hands, and so even they must ultimately serve his purpose. They may be able to harm us along the way, but only as he allows. And there is no argument that can stand against him, because there is no one who can sustain a claim that he is unjust; if we’re following him, there will be times that we’ll be accused of injustice by those who reject his ways, but we’ll always be vindicated in the end.
Why? Because this is the inheritance of the servants of the Lord. This is the promise of God to his Servant and the victory he has won, which he has passed on to us. Notice the progression: first Israel was the servant, then God raised up his perfect Servant, who brought many from the nations into his people, and now all of us are his servants, disciples and followers of his great Servant; as his followers, we share in his victory. All we have to do is trust him for it and accept it with gratitude, to celebrate his victory and his gift of that victory to us, and then to live in his victory. That’s all the Christian life is, really: you’ve been redeemed, you have the victory in Jesus—now go live that, live like you believe it. Live out the truth of what we celebrate this morning, that we serve a living Savior who has forever shattered the power of sin and death by dying for our sin and rising again from the dead for our redemption. Christ is risen!
Who has believed our report?
See my servant: he shall accomplish his purpose;
he will rise and be lifted up,
and he shall be exalted most high.
Just as there were many who were shocked at him
—one whose appearance was disfigured beyond that of any man,
whose form beyond human likeness,
so that his blood sprinkled many nations—
so kings shall shut their mouths because of him;
for that which had not been told them they shall see,
and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.
Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised, lacking supporters,
a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we thought him of no value.
Surely he has borne our suffering
and carried our sorrows;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced through for our rebellions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that reconciled us with God,
and at the cost of his wounds we are healed.
All of us, like sheep, have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he allowed himself to be afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter
and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away;
and as for his contemporaries, who realized
that when he was cut down out of the land of the living,
he was stricken for the rebellion of my people?
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the LORD who willed to crush him, causing him to suffer.
If you make his life an offering for sin,
then he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days;
the will of the LORD shall prosper through his work.
Because of his anguish he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge, my righteous servant shall make many righteous,
for he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him the many,
and he shall divide the strong as the spoils of his victory,
because he poured out himself to death,
and was numbered among the sinners;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
—Isaiah 52:13-53:12
The Arm of the Lord Revealed
(Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Luke 22-23)
(Note: this sermon was delivered in sections over the course of our Good Friday service, as a series of brief reflections.)
Isaiah builds to this point with a crescendo of commands, like a mighty surge in the ocean building toward the shore, rising as the land rises: “Listen, look, listen, hear me, awake, awake.” “Listen, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord; hear me, you who have my law in your hearts. Awake, awake—rise up, O Jerusalem; awake, awake, and put on your strength.” Something has happened, something has changed—wake up, listen, and pay attention. But listen to what—look at what? What has happened? And then the crescendo reaches its climax, the great wave crashes on the shore: “See. See my servant.”
See my servant who was so disfigured, people were devastated at his appearance and wondered if he was even human; see my servant who sprinkled many nations with his blood to purify them from their sin. See my servant, who shall act wisely, and because of his wisdom shall prosper—despite everything that happens to him, through everything they do to him, he will accomplish his purpose, and for that he will be honored; he shall rise, he shall be carried up, and he shall be exalted most high. This is language which belongs to God himself—how does this make sense? Even the kings of the earth will be stopped in their tracks, dumbfounded and speechless, by this bizarre turn of fortune, confronted by a reality they never saw coming, and never could have seen coming. How can this be? How can this possibly be? What on Earth is God doing here?
And yet, they should have believed—they’d been told, they’d been warned, they should have seen it coming. But who did? Did anyone? . . . No, no one did—not even us; not even us.
The arm of the LORD? We’d heard the promises—“The LORD has bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God”—and his justice, too, don’t forget that. We knew what that would mean: God would reveal his power and glory and bring down his justice on the world to obliterate evil and sweep away the unrighteous. He would crush our enemies, and we would be vindicated in the eyes of the whole world.
But this . . . who saw this coming? When the arm of the LORD was revealed, who would ever have thought it would look like that? We expected his arm to be revealed in power, and instead it was revealed in weakness; we expected it to be impressive, and instead, we were unimpressed. The Lord himself came in all his power and authority—as nobody special, a mere ordinary man, nothing more. There wasn’t even anything impressive about him—he wasn’t handsome or imposing—no sense of majesty about him at all. He was just . . . ordinary. If he had won dazzling victories, achieved stunning successes, we could have respected that, but no—he had no great achievements, no great triumphs, only great suffering, which he took and bore with all the patient acceptance of a slave; he didn’t show us mighty strength, he showed us weakness. His life was meaningless, of no value, or so we thought—how could he be the Servant of God? How could we possibly have gotten it so wrong? How far from God must we be to look at his chosen one, whose life was worth everything, and think he was worth nothing? What does this say about us? If we could miss what God was doing that badly, there’s no hope for us. Not on our own, anyway.
What we didn’t realize is that his sorrows, his griefs, his pains, his weakness, weren’t his own—they were ours. We stood back and watched him suffer, we watched him die, and we didn’t lift a finger even to help, let alone to save him, nor did we utter even the smallest sound in protest, because we figured he must have had it coming. We left him alone in his agony, never even realizing that everything he suffered was for us; never realizing that we were the ones causing his suffering, for it was our sins crushing him under their weight. We just watched, and we let him die alone.
He took our sorrows, and he loaded our suffering on his back, and he carried them. He took all our guilt and all our shame, he took everything that’s wrong and twisted and distorted and broken in us, and he carried it all. Was he disfigured? Was he marred? Was he cracked and striped and scarred by our abuse, by the blows we gave him? Yes, and it was nothing more than our disfigurement, the marred state of our souls, visible on his face. He took all our darkness, and he paid the price for it. We didn’t have to bear the punishment for our sins—he did. We didn’t have to pay the penalty for all we’ve done wrong—he paid it. He dealt with everything that’s wrong in our lives so that we could have peace with God, and so that we could be healed.
All of us turned away from God, wandering off like sheep to seek our own paths; and by God’s will, he paid the price for all our wandering, for all our wrong thoughts and deeds. Each of our sins was like an arrow aimed at his heart; and they all found their mark, and he bore them all. He was the voluntary sacrifice for our sin—for all of it—so that we might be, truly, well.
It was all by his choice. It was all his decision. The authorities thought they were in control, the soldiers thought he was in their power, they all thought they were imposing their will on him, but they were all wrong. He did nothing, he said nothing, he made no protest and put up no resistance—but he could have; he could have stopped it, at any time, and he didn’t. He chose everything that happened to him, it happened only because he allowed it; he accepted the injustice, he willingly submitted to suffering and death, so that he might bring us life. The sacrifice of animals could never be enough because they couldn’t really substitute for a person; they couldn’t willingly choose to die on our behalf. Only another person, only someone like us, who was truly one of us, could do that.
Don’t you see? It’s the essence of our sin that it’s willful. It’s not just that we fail in what we try to do—we’re limited beings, God never made us able to do everything; even if we didn’t sin, we’d probably still fail at things. It’s not just that we’re flawed; we are, certainly, but we didn’t choose our flaws, and you could argue that we aren’t responsible for what weaknesses we have. But what we do about them—ah! that’s another matter. Granted our limitations, granted that we’re all tempted differently and in different ways, that we have different weaknesses, the bottom line is that we sin because, at some level, we want to. We wander away from God because we want to make our own way—just because he tells us that he leads us to the best pastures, beside quiet streams, doesn’t mean we believe it; like any sheep, we remain convinced that the grass must be greener on the other side of that hill over there. And that willfulness is the thing God can’t just overlook; it requires punishment.
Which means that either we have to bear that punishment ourselves, or someone has to bear it for us; and to bear it for us, it must be a completely voluntary self-sacrifice. What’s more, no ordinary human being could offer it; any of us would simply be voluntarily accepting the punishment we’re already due for our own sins. It had to be someone who didn’t deserve to die, but willingly accepted death anyway for us, without once objecting or resisting; but no one thought of this. He died for us, and no one understood.
But though he suffered for us freely, he didn’t do it on his own—he suffered as the Servant of the LORD; God did this through him. All of this happened because it was the LORD’s idea, because it was the LORD’s will. He gave up his life as an offering for sin, and God accepted it, because he was completely blameless, completely without sin, and because he offered his life freely for us. And so, despite his suffering—no, because of his suffering—he shall prosper, for he has accomplished his purpose; though he was of no value in human eyes, yet he shall rise, he shall be lifted up, and he shall be exalted as high as it is possible to be. Even kings, even the mighty of this earth, shall stand speechless in awe before him, as they see his glory; the one they thought they had crushed, they shall see rise up in triumph over them, taking them as the fruits of his conquest, and they will struggle to understand how this happened.
They will struggle because they don’t understand that God doesn’t do things the way they do, or they way they would have expected; he doesn’t do things the way we would have expected. He doesn’t use his power to crush the unrighteous—he reaches out in love to win them back. The Servant didn’t use his power to defeat anyone, but rather to surrender, to give himself up as an offering for our sin; in so doing, he made us right-eous, he gave us his righteousness, and so he won us as his children, as his people. He voluntarily identified himself with us and gave up his life for us so that we might live for him.
Hymn for Good Friday
Ah, Holy Jesus, How Hast Thou Offended?
Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
That man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted.Who was the guilty who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee:
I crucified thee.Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
The slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered:
For man’s atonement, while he nothing heedeth,
God intercedeth.For me, kind Jesus, wast thine incarnation,
Thy mortal sorrow, and thy life’s oblation:
Thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion,
For my salvation.Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
Think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
Not my deserving.
Words: Johann Heermann
Music: Johann Crüger
HERZLIEBSTER JESU, 11.11.11.5
Considering the Christian way of death
‘ve been thinking a lot about funerals lately, for one reason and another, and so earlier this week when I happened across my copy of Thomas G. Long’s superb article “Why Jessica Mitford Was Wrong,” I sat down to read it. Dr. Long’s piece, published ten years ago now in Theology Today, is a thoughtful and penetrating critique of the theology of Mitford’s books, The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited. He gives her the credit she deserves as a consumer advocate, but also the challenge she deserves as a cultural theologian. I especially appreciate this section of Dr. Long’s article:
What is often missing in the tug of war between the funeral-home-style service and the Mitford style is a thoughtful consideration of what a funeral—particularly a Christian funeral—could and should be. Obviously, a genuinely Christian funeral is not about the evils that Mitford found so easy to satirize—the vulgar, conspicuous consumption, the mawkish sentiment—but, strangely a Christian funeral is also not primarily about many of the good things that its friends claim for it: the facilitation of grief, helping people to hold on to memories of the deceased, or even to supply pastoral care and comfort to the bereaved. A Christian funeral often provides these things, of course, but none of these is its central purpose. A Christian funeral is nothing less than a bold and dramatic worship of the living God done attentive to and in the face of an apparent victory at the hands of the last enemy. Though the liturgy may be gently worded, there is no hiding the fact that, in a funeral, Christians raise a fist at death; recount the story of the Christ who suffered death, battled death, and triumphed over it; offer laments and thanksgivings to the God who raised Jesus from the grave; sing hymns of defiance; and honor the body and life of the saint who has died.
Dr. Long continues,
Thus, one measure of the veracity of a funeral is its capacity to face, without euphemistic smoke and mirrors, the reality of death. Death is, of course, the brute fact that occasions a funeral. Astonishingly, for all her talk about the funerals and the funeral industry, Mitford hardly mentions death at all, not real death. In Mitford’s world, people do not die painfully or peacefully, well or poorly, blessedly or tragically, in despair or in trust, nor do those left behind have seasons of grief, memories to be cherished or forgiven, or faithful meaning to be wrested from sorrow, just a series of consumer choices. The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited cover many topics, but, ironically, death as a human experience, death as a force that robs life, death as a knife that severs bonds of love is not one of them. Milford jibes and smirks and hurls sarcastic witticisms at the blowhards among the morticians, and some of them, like clowns at a carnival pie-throwing booth, make themselves into easy targets, but one cannot help but see, lurking over her shoulder, the immense and terrifying mortal reality she will not turn to confront. To produce two books about death that do not actually speak of death is so strange, so inexplicable, that the sheer fact of it seems clear confirmation of William May’s conviction that the unwillingness to name death betrays a repressed acknowledgment of its fearsome sacral potency. Contemporary people, he argues, “find it difficult to bring the word death to our lips in the presence of its power. This is so because we are at a loss as to how to proceed on the far side of this word. Our philosophies and our moralities desert us. They retreat and leave us wordless.”
By contrast, the Christian funeral, at its best, speaks plainly of death. It does not shy away from naming death’s power to pierce the human heart, to steal gifts of love, and to create empty places at the table of fellowship, and the Christian funeral bravely claims the victory over death won by Jesus Christ, and dares to trust the promise of the gospel’s great mystery, “We shall not all die, but we will all be changed.”
A second measure of the Christian funeral is the degree to which it treats the body of the deceased as the body of a saint. Mitford saved her strongest invective for the custom of embalming, restoring, and viewing the body, which she claimed is virtually unknown outside of North America and which she saw as utterly unnecessary, yet another sign of American bad taste, and an expensive trick pulled by funeral directors to con the gullible. She has a point, of course; the practice of paying someone a lot of money to put eyeliner and face power on an embalmed corpse so that it can be viewed under colored lights is difficult to defend. Nevertheless, two objections to Mitford’s attitude toward the treatment of the body need to be raised. First, it is not simply that Milford has no use for chemically-treated bodies gussied up and on view in slumber rooms; she has little use for the body at all. As for the three women whom the Gospel of Mark reports were on their way to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body with spices, Jessica would undoubtedly have said, “Don’t bother.” Beneath her righteous consumerist rhetoric breathes the spirit of a gnostic who, like many educated people in our society, views the body as a shell, finally an embarrassment, part of what Geoffrey Gorer has called “the pornography of death.” What to do with the dead body? It can be burned or buried, donated or disposed, but, like all pornography, it should be done out of public view. The theological anthropology that defines human beings as embodied creatures, that calls for the honoring of the body in life and in death, is out of Mitford’s range.
In his fine book The Undertaking, poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch, comments on the “just a shell” theory of dead bodies. “You hear a lot of it,” he observes, “from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws—folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others.” He remembers a time when an Episcopal deacon said something of this sort to the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, and promptly received a swift slap. “I’ll tell you when it’s ‘just a shell,’ she retorted. “For now and until I tell you otherwise, she’s my daughter.” Lynch goes on to say,
So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as if we were to say that it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from dead. What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? . . . Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.
This is spot-on, as is Dr. Long’s consequent point that
The most important measure of a Christian funeral is its capacity to place the event of a person’s death into the larger context of the Christian gospel. “Funerals,” says Thomas Lynch, “are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It is how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories.” The Christian funeral is a liturgical drama, a piece of gospel theater, with roles to play and a time honored, if flexible and culturally varied, script. To understand Christian funerals as drama is not to say they are theater in the sense of Broadway entertainment, of course, but rather that they are community enactments of a formative narrative.
The unfortunate thing is that our culture has been so Mitfordized that even among Christians, there’s no longer the awareness and understanding of this truth. Instead,
The image of the deceased on a journey from this world to the next is now being replaced by the image of the mourner on a journey from grief to restoration. . . . Deprived of the ritual of a saint marching into glory, we replace it with the psychically useful notion of a good, or at least somewhat interesting, person we will remember from time to time as life returns to normal. The Christian kerygma tends to fade in favor of biographical comments about the deceased, often delivered by a number of people, such anecdotes seemingly far more useful to the stabilization of the ego in grief than are comments about discipleship, eschatology, and mission.
This is a real loss, and part of the ongoing flattening and loss of spiritual depth of our culture, which is being mirrored in much of the church. The challenge for the preacher who wishes to do a truly Christian funeral is to be concerned about more than just caring for the family, making the family happy, and doing the deceased honor—important as all three of these things are—but also about proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and his victory over death. All the other purposes of a funeral must fall into line behind this one, or they too will ultimately fail and fall short, because those purposes do not create hope; they depend on the gospel hope to function, and so ultimately lack any real substance without the proclamation of the gospel.