My old InterVarsity staffworker, Joel Perry, posted this video on Facebook, and it’s so beautiful and meditative that I just had to share it. This is the Bulgarian National Choir singing Otche Nash (“Our Father”), a setting of the Lord’s Prayer by Nikolai Kedrov.
Category Archives: Religion and theology
Would that it were so simple . . .
Courtesy, of course, of icanhascheezburger.com.
Deliverance is in God alone
Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.
—Isaiah 40:27-31 (ESV)
I think the hardest thing about the Christian life is trusting God. Maybe I’m overgeneralizing here, but at least for a lot of people, this seems to be true. Certainly if you look at the history of Israel’s relationship to God in the Old Testament, their failure to trust God was at the root of many if not all of their corporate sins—time and again, they thought they needed the help of other gods to achieve their best life then, or they preferred to trust in their own military and diplomatic maneuvers to defeat their enemies. When things didn’t go well for them, though, they were certainly quick enough to blame God for that, whether they’d been putting their trust in him to deal with their problems or not.Thus, for instance, in Isaiah 40—when the prophet has just announced the deliverance of God, bringing his people back from exile—the response we hear isn’t gratitude but a skeptical whine: “God isn’t helping us; he can’t see what’s happening to us, and he doesn’t care that we aren’t getting the justice we deserve.” You can’t blame the prophet for his disbelief and irritation as he asks, “Don’t you get it? Are you really that dense?” God has all power over all creation, because he made all of it, and he knows everything that happens; indeed, he rules through everything that happens. In his power, in his character, in all of who he is, God is so far above anything we human beings can imagine as to be completely incomparable, completely beyond our ability to describe; as such, he’s also completely beyond our ability, or the ability of our enemies, to baffle, thwart, or evade. He raises up the powers of the earth, and then he brings them to nothing, as he will. Yes, he intends to deliver his people, and yes, he has the ability to do so any time and in any way he chooses. What is needed is for his people—for them; for us—to trust him.We need to trust him, because only he can see the right timing, and because we simply lack the ability to do anywhere near as well, nevermind any better. Our own strength is limited; even the best of us wear out and falter. Even a guy like Michael Phelps can only keep going for so long before he drops from exhaustion. But God says that if we will trust him, wait for him, depend on him, rather than putting our trust in our own strength and our own plans, that he will give us the strength and the endurance we need to do what he calls us to do. We will be able to fly as eagles fly—not by working hard flapping their wings, but by stretching out their wings and letting the wind carry them; we will be able to keep going through the weary times, because when our strength runs out, he will renew us, if we wait on him.This is important for us to remember as a nation, as we enter a new year in very uncertain circumstances; as we consider Iran, and terrorists, and the global economic situation, we need to remember what Isaiah tells us: surely all these problems compared to God are like the bead of condensation that slides down your can of soda, or the bit of dust that settles on the scale when you’re weighing the produce. Yes, economic trends could make our lives much less comfortable than we’ve been used to, and yes, al’Qaeda could hurt our country badly; but though God may permit bad things to happen to us, they will only happen when he permits them, and he will continue to work through them just as he works through the good things we see in life. In all things, well and ill, God is in control and at work to accomplish his purposes.(Excerpted, edited, from “The Incomparable God”)
Looking back: blogging as a spiritual discipline?
A year ago today, I put up a post asking whether blogging can be a spiritual discipline (and if so, how), and came to the conclusion that it can. I tried to start a meme and get others asking that question, but mostly that didn’t happen; my question did prompt a little discussion, but then it fizzled. Unexpectedly, the main effect of the question I posed was on my own posting habits. That was my second post of 2008, and the 97th post on this blog; in 2007, I had 65 posts. By contrast, a year later, this is now my 668th post since that one; it’s fair, I think, to say the change was significant. Clearly, blogging has become a discipline for me. The question is, has it been a spiritual discipline?The most obvious answer is, not always. There have been a lot of posts over this past year for which I couldn’t make that claim, for one reason or another. That doesn’t necessarily make them bad posts, though some of them might have been; it just means that posting, say, Jonathan Coulton’s mock ’80s sitcom title sequence probably didn’t make me a holier person (though it did make me smile, which is a good thing, too).To some extent, though, I think it has. I wrote last year that “blogging can help me see the gaps between what I live and what I believe,” and that has proven true, though not exactly in the way I thought. I do try to “apply my beliefs and their implications not only to the lives of others out there in the culture, but also to myself and my own life”—to ask the question, “If I say x, and that means someone else ought to change and to live differently, how does it mean that I need to change and live differently?”—but I know there are times I manage that and times I don’t; but here’s where the public aspect of blogging comes in handy, because in those times when I don’t, or when I’m careless about doing so, there’s usually someone out there to post a comment and point it out. As such, one aspect of blogging as a spiritual discipline is that it exposes one to the correction of others. (Bearing always in mind that no commenter is any more infallible than I am, or than anyone else is, so there is some need to sift and weigh the comments one receives; nevertheless, the conversation is valuable.)As well, I think the simple discipline of writing has helped. I don’t know that it’s made me a better preacher, but it’s made me a better writer, and has made the process of writing smoother and less wearying for me; as such, it has at least made me better at producing sermons. That in and of itself, again, might not be a spiritual discipline, except that I think better, and learn better, in conversation than solo; writing might not be quite as good as a good talk with the right person, but writing about God and Scripture and the church can still be quite valuable for my spiritual growth. I’ve never been very good at the stereotypical “quiet time”; silence is a good discipline for me primarily because it’s a very hard one, and I can’t sit still to save my life—unless I have something to focus me, like writing. Writing becomes my devotional time, if I’m writing about things which serve that purpose; writing about God sets my mind and my heart on him, and writing about his people shapes and forms me as a pastor.
A point of perspective
In the face of the resurrection it becomes finally impossible to think of our Christian narrative as only “our point of view,” our perspective on a world that really exists in a different, “secular” way.There is no independently available “real world” against which we must test our Christian convictions, because these convictions are the most final, and at the same time
the most basic, “seeing” of what the world is.—John MilbankMy thanks to the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund for posting this quote from Dr. Milbank’s book The Word Made Strange. It’s a profoundly important point; in particular, it’s a crucial rebuke to any purely subjective understanding of Christianity. We’re dealing here with a reality which is far greater and wilder than our subjectivity, and which shatters our comfortable reductionism.At the same time, the logic underlying Dr. Milbank’s argument is also a stiff challenge to secular pretensions of greater objectivity; for secularists, too, their convictions “are the most final, and at the same time the most basic, ‘seeing’ of what the world is.” We cannot, any of us, get outside ourselves to measure ourselves against reality apart from any presuppositions; we cannot see from no point of view.
The God of bad mornings
This morning did not go well at all; in fact, it went badly on a number of levels, and I’m already feeling frazzled. I’m hanging on hard to the truth that God is in charge, command, and control at every point and in every circumstance, and that even in my bad mornings, he’s at work for—among other things—my good. There is nothing that may go wrong in my eyes that is beyond his power to use, repair, or redeem; and his plans and his understanding are greater than mine, and he sees what will be when I can only see what is not. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
God does the improbable, too
We had a good and surprising thing happen today—I won’t go into what, because it’s my wife’s story to tell or not to tell, as she chooses—and it got me thinking. It wasn’t the sort of thing that’s completely impossible unless God does a miracle, and so you pray for a miracle, and sometimes God says yes; rather, it was the sort of thing that’s completely improbable, and so you never pray for it because it never crosses your mind that it could happen. It was the sort of possibility that’s so far off the normal course of how things happen that my wife had never even thought to hope for it, or to ask for it . . . and yet, in God’s good time, it did, completely out of left field. She never saw it coming (nor did I).God does this sometimes; he doesn’t just do the impossible, he also does the wildly improbable—the sort of thing which is objectively easier than healing the sick and raising the dead, but just as unheard-of in our experience. I think in some ways that impresses us even more, despite the fact that it’s objectively easier; granted, it might not show off as much of the power of God, but instead it reveals a great deal about the imagination of God, that he can think of and bring about good things which would never cross our minds. God isn’t simply a being who has a lot more power than us, nor even just a being who has a lot more power and knows a lot more; he’s also infinitely wiser, more creative, better at thinking sideways and around corners. He conceives of possibilities that we would never conceive of even if we had the power to make them happen; and then he brings them about, out of the blue, just to remind us that he’s God and we’re not. (Well, not just to remind us, since he uses them to accomplish all sorts of other things, too. But still.)
It all depends what the meaning of “is” is
In today’s daily piece on the First Things website, titled “The Good Life,” Amy Julia Becker meditates on what it means for life to be good as it is in the face of human disabilities—and in the face of those who vehemently deny that possibility. She begins with this quote from William Motley, an Oxford geneticist, from a letter to the editor of the New York Times:
Fighting Down syndrome with prenatal screening does not “border on eugenics.” It is a “search-and-destroy mission” on the disease, not on a category of citizens.
As Becker notes, this is merely an attempt to evade the fact that his “search-and-destroy mission” will in fact eliminate a category of citizens, regardless of whether they are declared to be its targets or not; he’s attempting to defend himself by redefining the reality, and thus by avoiding the argument rather than answering it. Put another way, he’s attempting to define the humanity of Down Syndrome children out of the discussion.Which prompts the thought that there is no category of people with whom you couldn’t do the exact same thing. Want to get rid of homosexuals, or black people, or redheads? It’s not eugenics, just a “search-and-destroy mission” on a particular characteristic. All you need is for society to agree that that particular characteristic is undesirable, and boom! you’re free to proceed, unhampered by any of those pesky ethical considerations.It’s just one more way to argue that society should be free to get rid of the inconvenient. Which seems fine, as long as you’re strong and productive and able to defend yourself. But those who live by that particular sword will die by it in the end. Sure, right now, everyone agrees that you’re a contributing member of society; but will they always?
Samuel Huntington, RIP
I’m working with a fairly limited connection here at the moment, but I wanted to note the death of Harvard political scientist and author Samuel P. Huntington. Over the last decade, Dr. Huntington took a pounding from his fellow members of the liberal Western intelligentsia; when they wanted to join Francis Fukuyama in celebrating The End of History, he had the guts in his article “The Clash of Civilizations?” (and the resulting book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order), to point out how foolish that triumphalism was. As Mark Steyn put it, Dr. Huntington’s key point was that
the conventional western elite view of man as homo economicus is reductive—that cultural identity is a more profound indicator that western-style economic liberty cannot easily trump.
As a consequence, he argued that the post-Cold War era would not see the end of major conflict, but rather would see a shift from wars of ideology to wars driven by conflicts between cultures—and particularly by the conflict along “Islam’s bloody borders.” He was pilloried for his argument, but it seems to me that history has validated his analysis, where Dr. Fukuyama’s position has fallen by the wayside. For those interested in reading more, Power Line has a good short roundup of pieces on Dr. Huntington, including Robert Kaplan’s excellent profile of him in The Atlantic. For his insight, his capacity for independent thought, and his willingness to follow out his analysis in the face of the conventional wisdom, Dr. Huntington will be greatly missed.
The world’s wait and the church’s mission
When Christ came to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, he inaugurated the kingdom of God on earth; in forbearing to declare the day of God’s vengeance, he put off its consummation. He established a time of mercy, with judgment held off; which means that while the patience of God is extended to sinners—which is all of us—the world continues to wait for its complete redemption, and for the fullness of the kingdom of God. Sometimes people cry out against that fact, asking with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord? How long will the wicked prosper? How long will you let the injustice and suffering of the world go on?” We don’t have answers for those questions, because God hasn’t given us those answers; we don’t know when Christ will come again to set everything finally right, and so we don’t know why he hasn’t come back already. But what we do have, as we contemplate the child in the manger, is a response to those questions. Indeed, in a way, we are the response to those questions, or ought to be. God responded to the wickedness and injustice and suffering in this world by sending his Son Jesus Christ, and Christ left us behind to continue his work until all the world has heard the good news and the time is right for him to return; and as this world waits for that fulfillment, that wait is our opportunity to work on his behalf as his agents and representatives, as the agents and representatives of the world which is to come.What this means is, we as the church aren’t just about gathering for an hour or two on Sunday mornings. This is an important part of our life in Christ, as we come together to worship him and to be trained for the rest of our mission, it’s the beginning of everything we do, but it’s only the beginning. When Jesus returned to the Father, he left us behind to shine his light into every corner of the world—both outward, into the areas of our society and other places around the globe where his name is not known, or where people know his name but resist him, and inward, into the darkest places in our own hearts. Our mission is to follow the example of the one who sent us—the one who told the truth so clearly and unflinchingly that people finally killed him for it—so that all those who seek the light of God may find it.(Excerpted, edited, from “The Incoming Kingdom”)