Category Archives: Uncategorized

Thank God for God (a Thanksgiving meditation)

Posted on by | No Comments

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there;
the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” —Job 1:21
During the time of Napoleon’s reign in France, there was a political prisoner by the name of Charnet. That is to say, there was a man named Charnet who had unintentionally offended the emperor by some remark or another and been thrown in prison to rot. As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”

But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight. Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow. Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower. Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”

The guards saw what was happening; they talked about it amongst themselves, they told their wives, and the story spread, until finally somehow it came to the ears of the Empress Josephine. The story moved her, and she became so convinced that no man who loved a flower in this way could be dangerous that she appealed to Napoleon, and persuaded her husband to relent and set Charnet free. When he left his cell, he took the little flower with him in a little flowerpot, and on the pot he wrote Matthew 6:30: “If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith?”

There’s a lesson in Charnet’s story—the lesson of Job, I think. I struggled for years to make sense of that verse, until I found the key in an observation made by Rev. Wayne Brouwer, a Christian Reformed pastor in Holland, Michigan. Rev. Brouwer, writing on Psalm 22, muses, “Maybe it’s not that believers are grateful to God but that those who are grateful to God are the ones who truly believe him. Only those of us who are truly thankful are able to ride out the storms of life which might otherwise destroy us. Only those who have an attitude of gratitude know what it means to believe.” In other words, the root of our faith is gratitude.

We talk about the patience of Job, but in reality Job showed very little patience; what he did show was great faith, and that faith was firmly rooted in his determination to remain grateful for all the Lord had given him despite his losses. Thus he can say here, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”; thus he can affirm at another point, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth . . . in my flesh I shall see God.” In the same way, once Charnet found something for which to be thankful, that little plant struggling through the hard, dry earth, he found Someone to thank, and his faith grew back along with that little plant. Before that point, faith was impossible for him, because there was no root to sustain it.

If our gratitude depends on the number of our gifts exceeding a certain critical mass, if we miss the Giver for the gifts, then we have a shallow faith indeed. The example of Job calls us to a deeper gratitude, and a deeper faith, a faith that is able to see God and give thanks even when things aren’t going well. This is the faith the poet Joyce Kilmer expressed when he wrote, “Thank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife . . ./Thank God for the stress and the pain of life./And, oh, thank God for God.” That’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? Thank God for God. Thank God, as Psalm 23 does, that even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he is there with us. Thank God, as Psalm 22 does, that he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted. Thank God, as Job teaches us, that we don’t have to bury our grief and anger, but can bring them to God honestly; for Job challenges God fiercely, but his challenge is rooted in his faith, and so at the end God says of him, “He is my servant, and he has spoken of me what is right.” Thank God for God, because that is the root and beginning of faith; to quote Wayne Brouwer again, “Only the grateful believe, and faith itself which seems to soar in times of prosperity needs the strength of thankfulness to carry it through the dark night of the soul.”

One man who well knew the truth of this was Martin Rinkard, a Lutheran who was the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. This was the time of the Thirty Years’ War, and in that year Eilenberg was attacked three different times. When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees. Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkard’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day. Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster. But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinker wrote these words:

Now Thank We All Our GodNow thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms,
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.O may this bounteous God
Through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts
And blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in his grace,
And guide us when perplexed,
And free us from all ills
In this world and the next.All praise and thanks to God
The Father now be given,
The Son, and Him who reigns
With them in highest heaven,
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.Words: Martin Rinkart; translated by Catherine Winkworth
Music: Johann Crüger
NUN DANKET, 6.7.6.7.6.6.6.6.

Thank God for God. Only the grateful believe.

One other hymn

Posted on by | 1 Comment

My wife argued me into posting this—it’s a communion hymn I wrote a while back—thinking that there might be folks out there who’d want to use it. For whatever it might be worth, it is available to use by permission; just send an e-mail to the address in my profile or post a comment here if you happen to be interested. (If you aren’t familiar with the tune to which I’ve set the text, the link is below.)

Jesus Calls Us to His TableJesus calls us to his table,
Here to celebrate the feast;
He invites us to remember
How from sin we were released.
Here he calls us to communion
With each other in his name,
And assures us of the coming
Of the kingdom he proclaimed.

We remember Christ descended
To the human life we share;
We remember how we led him
To the cross and nailed him there.
We remember how he conquered
Death by rising from the grave;
We remember that he did this
All for us he came to save.

So we gather at the table
Joined together hand in hand,
Men and women of all races,
From all times and every land.
We assemble as a body,
Joined in Christ who is our Head,
Knowing he is with us always,
And in him our souls are fed.

Thus we stand in hope of glory,
Of the dawning of the day
When we’ll see God’s kingdom fully,
All his saints, in bright array.
Then we’ll gather at his table,
There invited by his grace,
And in wonder, as he promised,
See our Savior face to face. Words: Robert J. A. Harrison, 2006
Music: Attributed to Benjamin Franklin White; from The Sacred Harp, 1844
BEACH SPRING, 8.7.8.7.D

Song of the Week

Posted on by | No Comments

Most people know this hymn, but most of those who know it don’t know it the way John Newton wrote it.

Amazing Grace
Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me,
His Word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow;
The sun forbear to shine;
But GOD, who called me here below,
Will be forever mine.

Words: John Newton
Music: traditional American melody from Carrell and Clayton’s Virginia Harmony, 1831
AMAZING GRACE, C.M.

Ministry as trinitarian work

Posted on by | No Comments

I noted last month that I was looking forward to reading Dr. Andrew Purves’ book The Crucifixion of Ministry: Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ, and had been ever since reading a version of the book’s introduction in Theology Matters. It’s not a long book, only 149 pages, but I read it slowly; it’s dense material, requiring thought and reflection and intentional engagement. I’m still processing it, and I expect I will be for a while.

At the moment, though, I’m only doing so indirectly. One of the blurbs on the back of Dr. Purves’ book is from Dr. Stephen Seamands, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary; the blurb reminded me that his book Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service had been sitting on my shelf, and my to-read list, for quite some time. On my last trip, then, I made sure to toss it in my bag so I could start reading it once I finished Dr. Purves’ book. It proved to be a wonderful pairing.

The core of Dr. Purves’ argument is that ministry isn’t something we do, because our own ministries aren’t redemptive; only the ministry of Christ is redemptive. Thus he writes, “The first and central question in thinking about ministry is this: What is Jesus up to? That leads to the second question: How do we get ‘in’ on Jesus’ ministry, on what he’s up to? The issue is not: How does Jesus get ‘in’ on our ministries?” We need to understand the work of ministry in light of “the classical doctrines of the vicarious humanity (and ministry) of Christ and our participation in Christ through the bond of the Holy Spirit,” and understand that true ministry, redemptive ministry, happens not through our work but through Christ working in and through us. Thus Dr. Purves speaks of “the crucifixion of ministry,” the displacement and death of our own ministry in favor of the ministry of Jesus.

Where Dr. Seamands’ book is proving to be such a wonderful complement to this is in the fact that he makes the same point but sets it in a trinitarian context. He agrees that, as he puts it, “Ministry . . . is not so much asking Christ to join us in our ministry as we offer him to others; ministry is participating with Christ in his ongoing ministry as he offers himself to others through us. . . . The ministry we have entered is meant to be an extension of his. In fact, all authentic Christian ministry participates in Christ’s ongoing ministry. Ministry is essentially about our joining Christ in his ministry, not his joining us in ours.”

Where Dr. Purves focuses on unpacking that truth, however—and rightly so, since its implications for how we minister are significant—Dr. Seamands broadens the picture: “The ministry we have entered is the ministry of Jesus Christ, the Son, to the Father, through the Holy Spirit, for the sake of the church and the world.” As he notes, Jesus’ ministry on Earth was directed to and guided by the will of the Father, rather than being driven by the needs, desires, demands and complaints of the people around him. “Of course, Jesus often met human needs and requests, but . . . they did not dictate the direction of his ministry; his ministry to the Father did.” This is a profoundly freeing thought for those of us who too often find ourselves captives to the wills and whims of people in our congregations—which I suspect is most of us in pastoral ministry, at least some of the time.

In discussing the role of the Spirit, at least in the first chapter (I’m not that far along in the book as yet), Dr. Seamands focuses on the fact that “only through the Spirit can we discover what the Father is doing,” and thus keep the work we’re doing oriented to the Father rather than to the church and the world. This is certainly critically true, and he’s right to emphasize the importance of surrendering ourselves to the Spirit’s guidance and leading; but I think he underemphasizes the fact that it’s also only by the Spirit’s empowering that we can in fact “get ‘in’ on Jesus’ ministry,” because it’s the Spirit who unites us with Christ and fills us with the power of God. Without the Spirit filling us by connecting us with God who is the source of all life, we have no power to do anything beyond our own skills and hard work; and as Dr. Seamands notes, “ministry . . . demands more than our best, more than anything we have to offer. To participate in the ongoing ministry of Jesus, to do what the Father is doing, we must be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Between these two books, I suspect I’m going to be spending a lot of time thinking about these things, and their implications for the work to which God has called me within his church. I would invite you to do the same.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .”

Posted on by | No Comments

Unexplained Blue Cloud Floats, Darts Around Customers At Gas Station

I don’t even know what to say about that except—that’s really weird. I guess it’s a salutary reminder, though, that we really don’t know as much as we think we do. Hamlet was right: there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy (at least, most of our philosophies).

The spirit of the soul

Posted on by | No Comments

My wife and I had an interesting experience while watching NUMB3RS tonight (as I’ve noted before, I like mysteries, and the writers are doing a good job with that one). Just past the teaser, up came Lynn Redgrave, looking regally and serenely into the camera, declaring, “I want to die from eating too much chocolate. Or from exhaustion, dancing the tango. I want to die of laughter, on my 87th birthday. But I refuse—I refuse—to die from breast cancer. I want to die from something else.”

I’m not ordinarily much of one for commercials (that one was for Bristol Myers Squibb), but that was truly cool. Part of it, of course, was that Lynn Redgrave is a woman of great presence. More than that, however, I really liked the attitude she expressed. There was no fear of death, nor any effort to avoid the fact that she, like all of us, will at some point die; that much, she accepted as a given (which far too many people don’t). It was simply the determination not to let that beat her, not to die that way.

I realize, certainly, that there’s a danger here, that of coming to believe that we can die on our own terms; I realize that that way lies a great many dangers. And yet . . . there is still something noble and honorable in the refusal to accept defeat at the hands of a dishonorable enemy; when paired with the acceptance that death will come at some point, and the understanding that it really is beyond our control, to stand and fight and refuse to give in is admirable, as long as it isn’t taken too far.

It reminds me of Harvey Mansfield’s recent article in First Things titled “How to Understand Politics,” in which Dr. Mansfield (a professor of government at Harvard) insists on the importance of the Greek concept of thumos. He defines thumos as “the part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance . . . Sometimes translated as spiritedness, it names a part of the soul that connects one’s own to the good. Thumos represents the spirited defense of one’s own characteristic of the animal body, standing for the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat. . . . Thumos, like politics, is about one’s own and the good. It is not just one or the other . . . It is about both together and in tension.” Like almost any good, we can become unbalanced in pursuing it; but we can also become unbalanced in undervaluing it. Lynn Redgrave, in that commercial, is expressing thumos; and I say, good for her—and thanks for letting us see it.

Packing up the dreams

Posted on by | No Comments

For the last eighteen months, since May 2006, I have been in the process of searching for a new call—looking for a new church to serve as pastor. Last Wednesday, I accepted a call to another congregation; following subsequent developments, I’m finally feeling secure that nothing’s going to happen to derail this.

I have no doubt that this is God’s move in God’s time, from the way everything came together; but it’s still hard. For one thing, I had a lot of hopes and dreams for this congregation in this place, for what Christ could do in this community . . . and most of them haven’t been realized. What has been accomplished is really pretty remarkable, given the history of this church; I’ve been here longer than any full-time pastor in Trinity’s history except one (though my “temporary” predecessor was here on a part-time basis for eighteen years), and in that time, I think we’ve managed to break the congregation out of its death-grip survival-ministry mode, which is no small thing. There were a lot of issues and a lot of buried conflicts from past events in the church’s history, and it took a long time and considerable work to bring those out to the point where they could be addressed; mostly, I think, we’ve done that. One of my colleagues in Michigan likes to say, “In ministry, you’re either digging rocks or you’re following the guy who dug the rocks.” Here, the rocks were big enough and heavy enough that digging them needed two stages: before they could be moved, they had to be excavated. That much, at least, we’ve done. It’s not nothing. But it’s so much less than what I’d hoped, it still doesn’t feel like enough. I’ve learned to accept that, largely thanks to colleagues in the presbytery; but I’m still a little disappointed.

That’s ministry, though, often enough; and at this point, what’s done is done and cannot be changed, and it’s time to pack up the dreams I brought with me, using the lessons I’ve learned here as packing material to keep them from breaking, and carry them along to Indiana. I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with dreaming big, and I go forward hoping that what I didn’t see God do here, I’ll see him do there; after all, what’s the point in asking for less than his best? And if I’ve begun to understand along the way that it truly is Christ’s ministry, not mine—if I’ve come to see, at least dimly, what Andrew Purves means when he talks about the crucifixion of ministry (on which more shortly)—well, while it’s been painful, it’s been worth the learning. God send grace that I will be the pastor my new congregation needs to become everything he wants and calls them to be, now and (I hope) for many, many years to come. Amen.

Credit where credit is due

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Over at my favorite group blog, Quaid (whom you might call a quasi-Thinkling) has been beating the drum for Mike Huckabee for a while now. (An Arkansas governor as President? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Does lightning really strike twice in the in the same place? Anyway . . .) He’s managed to convince De in the process, but others have been more dubious that Huckabee has any real chance—me included, I’ll freely admit. The thing is, though—as Quaid has pointed out—Huckabee’s an extremely effective, engaging and winning candidate, and his supporters are fervent and committed, two factors which are doing a lot to overcome his tiny budget; he may not be able to spend much of anything, but he’s continuing to climb in the polls, and the big names are starting to notice. Dick Morris, for instance, has been pointing this fact out for a while, even betting Bill O’Reilly that Huckabee would crack 10% in the national polls, which he now has; and Morris is now saying that Huckabee can win Iowa. If he does—or even finishes a strong second, which looks at this point to be the worst he’ll do—then he will have established himself as a frontrunner. Should that indeed happen, he has a good chance to come out of New Hampshire as the leader, with second place behind Rudy as probably the worst likely outcome; and with that, the money will start to come, and the difficulties will start to fall away, leaving Giuliani as a very beatable opponent.

Huckabee’s not the greatest candidate the GOP has ever put up; his record on social issues is strongly, consistently conservative, but his fiscal policies as governor of Arkansas have led to strong challenges from the likes of Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform. Still, he’s clearly better on both fronts than George W. Bush was, to say nothing of Dole or the elder Bush; and even if he’s no Reagan, he’s still the best option we’ve had since then (as Romney would also be if he manages to recover and win the nomination). That’s not everything, but then, as Mal would say, it’s not nothing, either; and in fact, it’s good enough. Huckabee for President.

. . . and it’s not even fake Carson

Posted on by | No Comments

As a student at Regent College (the Canadian school—not Regent University in Virginia, which is a rather different sort of place) from 1997-2001, I had the opportunity to get to know Dr. John Stackhouse just a bit, and to appreciate him both for his first-rate theological mind and for his acerbic and rather black sense of humor (most notably expressed in his occasional turns as singer-songwriter in chapel). I’ve continued to appreciate him ever since, both for his books and more recently for his blog.

The newest post on his blog at the moment finds Dr. Stackhouse taking a swipe at D. A. Carson—and not fake Carson, either, but the real one. From the sound of things, it seems like Dr. Carson, ordinarily one of the best and most worthwhile NT scholars out there (at least on the evangelical side of things), needed a quote for his book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications and couldn’t find one from an actual emerging-church figure that fit—so he found the best quote he could find, from an article Dr. Stackhouse had written a decade before, and jimmied it in. Unfortunately, the result was that Dr. Carson ended up significantly misinterpreting and misrepresenting both the quote and its author, as Dr. Stackhouse points out (at some length).

Unfortunately, I say, for two reasons. The first is that this sort of academic misfeasance, minor though it may be, only weakens the argument Dr. Carson was trying to make. Whether you agree with his view of the emerging church or not, that’s no good thing, because to the extent that his challenge is valid, it needs to be heard and addressed—and to the extent that it isn’t, it still needs to be presented as ably as possible so that it can be answered as fully as possible. Second, this sort of misreading/uncharitable reading, whether deliberate or due to sloppy work, is unbecoming of Christian scholars, and yet (as one of Dr. Stackhouse’s commenters notes) we’re starting to see it with distressing frequency in arguments between Christian academics. Another example would be the exchange between Roger Olson and John Piper over the I-35W bridge collapse, as Alan noted over at The Thinklings. It’s getting very tiresome, and I think it makes Christians look bad. We ought to have the grace to extend our fellow believers at least the first courtesy of disagreement: the assumption that though they might be wrong (as we see it), they are wrong for good reasons. To assume that since they’re wrong, it must be for bad reasons (whether intellectually bad, morally bad, or both) is uncharitable and un-Christlike, and we need to stop doing it.