Well, that was a nasty bug. I’m used to riding them out, but that one took me down right and proper. It’s the first time I’ve had to call in sick on a Sunday in almost six years in ministry; and here over 40 hours from first onset, I’m still feeling pretty muzzy.This has left me with time to think, but not much working in the brainpan to do the thinking with; but in the altogether unsurprising fact that the church kept right on running without me, it has been a reminder that in all these things, God is at work. He takes our strengths and our weaknesses, our successes and our failures, our faithfulness and our rebellion, and he uses all of it; which is not to say that it isn’t better to be faithful than to be rebellious, but simply to note that it’s beyond our ability even to surprise God, much less to derail him (though we can both delight and grieve him). Even if we devoted everything we had to trying to ruin his work, we would still find that he’d used what we’d done to accomplish his purposes.That’s not precisely what this poem, one of my favorites, is about; but there’s a common truth here, I think.
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
—James 1:5-8 (ESV)
[Christ] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.
—Ephesians 4:11-15 (ESV)
I’ll be honest, I’m rather discouraged today; there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of good news out there. Of course, that’s hardly unusual—looking for good news from the world is rather like looking for your next rent payment on the roulette wheel—but it’s still got me down. In matters big (a financial crisis created by partisan stupidity that no one on either side of the aisle seems to have any real clue how to fix, but which may yet be exacerbated by yetmorepartisan stupidity) and small (the Seahawks are off to a bad start this season, both in their play and in their front office’s overreaction to it), things just seem to be going wrong all over the place. (Granted, the Red Sox did knock the Yankees out of the playoffs, but that only counts for so much when my own team is on the verge of 100 losses.) Throw in a bad night of sleep, and it’s a recipe for a funk.
But God is at work in these times as in any other, and last night when I was up into the wee hours and really starting to get low, he sent me a message, in the form of this YouTube video of one of my favorite groups, the defunct (and much-missed) Jacob’s Trouble:
Wind and Wave
(Lyrics are below; the Scriptures, of course, are above.) It was this morning, and is now, an important reminder to me: when I let circumstances get to me, when I let what seems to be an aura of bad news get me down, when I let myself get pessimistic, I’m falling back into allowing myself to be tossed around, buffeted about, and driven this way and that by the winds and waves of circumstances; I’m letting “human cunning” and “craftiness in deceitful schemes” wash me off my foundation and blow me out into the sea of doubt, rather than trusting in God. Granted, the circumstances right now aren’t pretty in a lot of respects, and it feels natural to me to expect the worst and then start glooming over it; but I have reason to stand on faith in God, rather than giving myself over to the wind and the wave, because I’ve seen other bad times (on a personal level, worse times) and he’s always brought me and my family through. Our country has seen other bad times, and he’s always brought the nation through; God has allowed this “almost-chosen people” to suffer many things, but he’s never failed us yet. The worries of the moment do not outweigh the testimony of the past; our hopes and fears for tomorrow are affected by this morning’s news, to be sure, but they are not at its mercy, for God by his providence continues to be at work, even through the bad news.
I don’t usually repost videos, but this song was another one God used this morning, just to remind me that even when the wind blows hard, he is with us on the road, and his mercy is always for us:
Kyrie
I have reason to trust in God; I have reason to be confident that the struggles of the present moment aren’t permanent. I just need to remember that, and to ask him for the wisdom and, yes, the faith I need to rise above those struggles, rather than allowing them to overcome me. And in doing so . . . I feel better already.
Wind and Wave
I needed wisdom on a matter of faith,
So I sought the Lord at his dwelling place—
Hello? Is there anyone home?
He said, “Let him who comes to me ask believing,
‘Cause faith is revealing but doubt is deceiving,
You know? Don’t you know?”
But I couldn’t seem to stand my ground—
I floundered, flailed, and almost drowned;
And as I sank, I thought I heard a sound.
Chorus:
Wind and wave, to and fro, back and forth, stop and go, Lost in doubt. Am I out or am I safe? Fire and ice, land and sea. It’s up to you, it’s down to me. Will I be eternally weak in faith On the wind and the wave?
A voice inside me said, “You’re on your own!
You blew it once too often, now He’s left you alone!”
Oh, no! Please say it isn’t so!
So I clung to my feelings, forgot the facts,
‘Til I heard the voice of Jesus telling me to relax,
“Let go. I’ll take control.”
Well, it was tough at first but I obeyed.
I just went limp and then I prayed,
“Please, Jesus, save me from this open grave.”
Chorus
Now, I’m not saying that I will never doubt again,
‘Cause after all I’m just a man, yeah, yeah.
All I know is if I should doubt again
He’ll understand. He understands.
“I will never leave you nor forsake you;
I will always be with you.
I will never leave you nor forsake you;
I will always be with you.”
I’d never heard of Brandon Heath before he asked my wife’s cousin Curt and his kids to be among the cast of extras for his new video. The video is now out (my thanks to my dear wife for posting it), and it’s a great song; I’m not ashamed to say it made me weep. We fall so short of loving others the way God calls us to love; certainly, I do. Dear God, this is my prayer too.
Give Me Your Eyes
Looked down from a broken sky
Traced out by the city lights;
My world from a mile high—
Best seat in the house tonight.
Touch down on the cold blacktop—
Hold on for the sudden stop;
Breathe in the familiar shock
Of confusion and chaos.
All those people going somewhere—
Why have I never cared?
Chorus:
Give me your eyes for just one second,
Give me your eyes so I can see
Everything that I keep missing;
Give me your love for humanity.
Give me your arms for the broken-hearted,
The ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me your heart for the ones forgotten;
Give me your eyes so I can see, yeah.
Step out on a busy street,
See a girl and our eyes meet;
Does her best to smile at me,
To hide what’s underneath.
There’s a man just to her right,
Black suit and a bright red tie,
To ashamed to tell his wife
He’s out of work, he’s buying time.
All those people going somewhere—
Why have I never cared?
Chorus
I’ve been here a million times;
A couple of million eyes,
Just move and pass me by—
I swear I never thought that I was wrong.
Well, I want a second glance,
So give me a second chance
To see the way you’ve seen the people all along.
Chorus
Give me your eyes,
Lord, give me your eyes,
For everything that I keep missing.
Give me your heart for the broken-hearted;
Give me your eyes,
Lord, give me your eyes.
The road which the church is called to walk as we follow Jesus Christ toward the kingdom of God is a road rather like the Oregon Trail: it leads to someplace better, but it isn’t an easy road. Back in the days of the Oregon Trail, families heading west often started off with far too much baggage; when they hit the Rockies, they found they had to leave many of their things behind, or else they wouldn’t make it across the mountains, and so along the trail one could find tables, beds, dressers, and other pieces of furniture abandoned by families who needed to lighten the load. The road behind Jesus is similarly littered. Matthew and Zacchaeus left behind their tax booths, and the fortunes they had stolen. Simon and Andrew, James and John, left behind their boats, and the family business. St. Francis of Assisi left behind a rich inheritance. John Newton, the author of “Amazing Grace,” left behind the slave trade.Sundar Singhleft behind his religion and his family.
Some of the things God calls us to give up if we are to follow him are sinful, some aren’t; some are easy to give up, while others are bitterly difficult to let go. Some are harmful in themselves, while others merely absorb time and energy to no real gain. But all of them are things which compete with his will in our lives, and so they are things which we need to lay aside if we want to follow Jesus on his road. The work of discipleship is, ultimately, the work of aligning ourselves with the grain of God’s will, and against the grain of everything that competes with his will—including many of our own desires, and many of the world’s expectations. The good news is, as Michael Card and Scott Roley wrote a couple decades ago, that there is freedom to be found if we leave all these things behind to follow our Lord.
Things We Leave Behind
There sits Simon, foolish and wise;
Proudly he’s tending his nets.
Then Jesus calls, and the boats drift away,
And all that he owns he forgets.
More than the nets he abandoned that day,
He found that his pride was soon drifting away.
It’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Matthew was mindful of taking the tax,
And pressing the people to pay.
Hearing the call, he responded in faith
And followed the Light and the Way.
Leaving the people so puzzled, he found
The greed in his heart was no longer around.
It’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Bridge
Every heart needs to be set free from possessions that hold it so tight
‘Cause freedom’s not found in the things that we own—
It’s the power to do what is right.
With Jesus our only possession, then giving becomes our delight,
And we can’t imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
We show a love for the world in our lives
By worshipping goods we possess;
Jesus said, “Lay all your treasures aside,
And love God above all the rest.”
‘Cause when we say “No” to the things of the world,
We open our hearts to the love of the Lord, and
It’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Oh, and it’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
I guess it’s ’80s pop week here—more than a little odd for someone who never listened to the stuff at the time. Still, there were a few songs from that era I really liked anyway;“We Didn’t Start the Fire”was one of them, and this was another one.
For those who don’t know,kyrie eleisonmeans “Lord, have mercy.” Many don’t; I’ve seen people write that it means “God go with me,” and I’d always assumed that the songwriter thought that’s what it meant. In fact, though, John Lang (whowrote the lyrics)grew up singing theKyriein an Episcopal church in Phoenix, and knew the meaning of the words. In a lot of ways, that makes the song more interesting, I think; it’s still a prayer for God’s presence as we go through life, but Lang knew when he wrote it that it’s also a prayer for his mercy on that road, which we certainly need, both in the bright days and when our path leads us through “the darkness of the night.”
I appreciate Lang’s almost mystical sense of life in this song; in the context of an ancient Christian prayer, with the imagery of wind and fire which has been used of the Spirit of God going all the way back to the time of Moses, one can certainly understand it to refer to the work of the Spirit in our hearts, and the song as a prayer for his mercy as we seek to follow where he leads us.
My one quarrel here is the third line of the chorus:“Kyrie eleison—where I’m going will you follow?”I don’t think that really fits with the first line (“Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel”), and taken by itself it gets matters exactly backwards; actually, when we start looking at things that way—”God, I’m going this way; are you coming?”—tends to be when we get into trouble (and thus need his mercy the most, of course). I suspect it was most likely meant to ask, “Are you going with me down this road you’re sending me on?” but that misses the fact that God doesn’tsendus, heleadsus. There have been times when I’ve sung this song, privately, as a prayer, but when I do, I reverse that third line:“where you lead me, I will follow.”That’s the orientation we need to have if we’re seeking to live under the mercy of God; his mercy isn’t simply something to which we appeal when we go wrong, but is in fact the light that guides us to go right.
Kyrie
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie . . .
The wind blows hard against this mountainside,
Across the sea into my soul;
It reaches into where I cannot hide,
Setting my feet upon the road.
My heart is old, it holds my memories;
My body burns, a gemlike flame.
Somewhere between the soul and soft machine
Is where I find myself again.
Chorus:
Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel; Kyrie eleison through the darkness of the night. Kyrie eleison—where I’m going will you follow? Kyrie eleison on a highway in the light.
When I was young I thought of growing old—
Of what my life would mean to me;
Would I have followed down my chosen road,
Or only waste what I could be?
Courtesy of JibJab, I’ve had this tune stuck in my head for days now; so I decided to post an annotated version. Note: most of the links are Wikipedia, but not all.
Chorus:
We didn’t start the fire—
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning.
We didn’t start the fire—
No, we didn’t light it,
But we tried to fight it.
We didn’t start the fire—
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning.
We didn’t start the fire—
But when we are gone,
It will still go on, and on, and on, and on, and on . . .
You say the river’s too far to go,
And the star’s too high to reach;
In the shade it’s much too cold,
And in the sun there’s too much heat.
Ooh, would you say to me
The sky’s too blue, the sea too green;
In the night there’s too much dark,
And too much crying in your sleep?
Chorus:
Inside of you, how deep does the ocean go?
Inside of you, how loud does the lion roar?
Inside of you, do your feet know how to dance?
Inside of you, does heaven ever really have a chance?
You’re telling me the chair’s too soft;
You’re telling me the bed’s too hard.
You would like to cool your fever,
But the water’s just too far.
So you sit staring at the door
Like something’s gonna walk on in;
Tell me what are you waiting for?
Sitting still’s your greatest sin.
This is one of my favorites from one of my favorite poets, and one which really fits today. (Yes, I’m in a better mood this evening than I was yesterday evening—why do you ask?) Unfortunately, if there’s a way to get the proper formatting through this site, it’s beyond me, so apologies for the squared-off stanzas.EDIT: New site, different problems; the formatting isn’t one of them now.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
I started doing these posts “in defense of the church” (as you can see from parts I, II and III)
in large part because I think the church takes a lot of flak that really isn’t fair; granted that there are a fair number of congregations out there which are truly poisonous (any pastor can tell you that), and a fair number more which are thoroughly dysfunctional (ditto), and another pile on top of that which are preaching something other than grace, to move beyond criticisms of specific congregations to dismissal of the church as a whole seems to me ungracious and unwarranted. Hence my three previous posts in this irregular series.
I have others of that sort I could add to them, and I may well, at some future point; but lately I’ve felt God poking me that there’s something else I need to say first, something that comes out of a place where he’s convicted me in the past. The most basic thing to say in defense of the church, the first thing that needs to be said, is thatJesus loves the church; inEphesians 5, Paul describes the church as the bride of Christ (and says that we husbands are supposed to love our wives as much as Christ loves the church—remembering always that Christ wascrucifiedfor the church). We’d best be careful, I think, what we say about the church, because I’ve never met a groom yet who took kindly to people ripping on his bride; I don’t imagine Jesus does, either.
Which is not to say that criticism of particular congregations (or denominations, for that matter) is out of line; as noted, there’s a fair number of them that have gone fair wrong. I come out of the Reformed tradition, which makes a point of the three marks of the true church; from our perspective, just because somethingcallsitself a church doesn’t mean itisin any meaningful sense. (If anything, my theological forebears were probably a mitetoowilling to declare churches to be false churches.) And for that matter, fair, reasoned, gracious critique is important for all of us, as individuals and as the people of God, to grow, and so that’s never out of place or inappropriate. But when we go so far as to denounce “the church” and suggest that God doesn’t like “the church” any more than we do—no, that’s too far. Jesus loves the church, and that isn’t going to change.
Yes, this even means that he loves the people in it who hurt us and make us miserable—he died for them just as he died for the soldiers who crucified him, praying as he died, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” As brutal hard and painful as it is, he wants to bring us to the point where we can love them, too, even as he commands us to love all the rest of our enemies. The love and grace of God are hard things, because they go as much to the people we want cut off as they do to us; if we’re going to accept them for ourselves, we have to be committed to showing them to others. (Which is not to say that we have to beableto do so right away; forgiveness takes time. There are people in my past that I can’t forgive yet, so I know that full well. But we have to be committed to getting to that point, as we heal.) Jesus loves the church—and yes, that includesthatpastor,thatelder,that deacon,thatmember; which means we’d best be careful what we say about it, and about them, and in what spirit we say it.
I was going to link to this song, which I posted as song of the week over a year ago; but I think I’ll just post it again here. I like this one a lot, in large part because it continues to convict me, and to call me back to a proper heart for ministry; and because it gives me hope that someday, we as the church will live up to the love Jesus has for us.
Jesus Loves the Church
You say that you believe in us—at times, I wonder why;
You say you see the Father in our eyes.
But I think if I were you, Lord, I’d wash my hands today,
And turn my back on all our alibis.
Chorus:
For we crucify each other, leaving a battered, wounded bride—
But Jesus loves the church;
So we’ll walk the aisle of history, toward the marriage feast,
For Jesus loves the church.
We fight like selfish children vying for that special prize;
We struggle with our gifts before your face.
And I know you look with sorrow at the blindness in our eyes
As we trip each other halfway through the race.
Chorus
I want to learn to love like you; I don’t know where to start.
I want to see them all but through your eyes.
For you believed enough to live amidst the madding crowd,
Enough to die before our very eyes.
