Monthly Archives: June 2008

The Year of the Lord’s Favor

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(Isaiah 61:1-4; Luke 4:16-21)

At various points in the second part of the book of Isaiah, we have the appearance of the Servant of the Lord; these passages are usually referred to as the Servant Songs. The Servant is the one who will bring about God’s justice on the earth, and carry his salvation not only to Israel, but beyond, to the whole world; and in Isaiah 53, we see that the Servant will accomplish this through his suffering. Now, here in Isaiah 61, we have I believe the last appearance of the Servant, promising the day when God will make everything right. The Servant speaks both as a prophet—that’s the meaning of “the Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me”—and as a king—that’s the significance of “the LORD has anointed me”—so he has power both from God and on earth to bring this about. He has been given, as God’s chosen prophet and king, the mission to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to set captives and prisoners free, to comfort those who mourn, and to raise up the oppressed so that they may restore all that has been lost and rebuild all that has been destroyed.

The keystone of this passage comes in verse 2: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me . . . to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.” In our day and age, we think we can control time—we have atomic clocks, and we do business at all hours of the day and night, and we have computer calendars that keep our schedules months into the future—and so we use time words very precisely, because for us, time is about precision. For the ancient Hebrews, it wasn’t, and so we shouldn’t take this “year” and “day” language in that way; rather, this is typical Hebrew parallelism, pairing a time of God’s favor with a time of his vengeance. The significance of this is that they’re not two separate times—they’re the same time. The year of the LORD’s favor is the day of vengeance of our God. There are folks who think that’s strange, that there must be something wrong with that; but if you’ve ever been oppressed, if you’ve ever been done unjustly, you know better. To bring good news to the oppressed means bringing vengeance on their oppressors; healing the brokenhearted means judging those who broke their hearts; setting the captives free means breaking the power of those who hold them captive. These two things go together; the world cannot be put right until those who put it wrong have been judged.

Which is the interesting thing about Jesus’ reading of this passage: he gets as far as “proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor,” and then he stops. He takes these two things that go together, and he splits them; and then he says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This is an incredible thing, because it opens an incredible opportunity: in Jesus, you can miss out on the vengeance of God. We all need God’s vengeance on others, because we’ve all been done wrong; but we all have it coming on ourselves, because we’ve all done others wrong, too. We have been victims of injustice, but we’ve also done injustice, when we’ve gotten the chance. As much as we need the year of God’s favor, the day of his vengeance is a perilous time for us—and so Jesus came to create a space between them. In Jesus, the year of the LORD’s favor has already begun, but his vengeance is held off, to give us a chance to respond to his offer and escape judgment; this is God’s grace. That’s why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6, “Now is the favorable time; now is the day of salvation.”

Wronging rights and depressing the oppressed

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Last month, the PC(USA)’s Office of Interfaith Relations put out an excellent paper titled “Vigilance Against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias”; to the surprise of many, it was (and is) an excellent piece of work, searching and honest in its examination of the ways in which Presbyterians have been guilty of “anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish motifs and stereotypes, particularly as these find expression in speech and writing about Israel, the Palestinian people, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and steps toward peace.” Consequently, it garnered considerable praise from evangelicals in the denomination.Given the way things tend to operate in the PC(USA), the cynic in me is tempted to think that someone saw that praise and decided they must have done something very, very wrong; whatever the reason, the original paper has now been strangled in its bath and replaced by something very different under a revised title: “Vigilance against Anti-Jewish Bias in the Pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” The actual concern for vigilance against anti-Jewish bias is, to say the least, much more muted in this new paper; there is, however, a great deal of concern for how awful Israel is. It’s also far more self-congratulatory, to the point of arrogance, as Viola Larson notes; where the first document was an honest confession of denominational sin, the new one is effectively a frontal assault on that confession. That’s a shameful thing for those who are called to follow the Way, the Truth and the Life. I think the Rev. John Wimberley, of Western Presbyterian Church in D. C., said it best in his letter to Presbyweb:

I simply don’t know how we can release a document, receive high praise from the Jewish community, withdraw it and release a new document which profoundly angers the Jewish community and all of us who have spent a lifetime trying to build trust between Presbyterians and the Jewish community. This is beyond bad process. This is bad ministry. Who will trust our words in the future? Why should they?

Tim Russert, RIP

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This is a shocker. Tim Russert, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” and chief of their Washington bureau, is dead at 58, apparently of a heart attack. According to the New York Post, “the network allowed itself to be scooped by other media outlets as it tried to contact Russert’s wife Maureen and son Luke, who just graduated from Boston College”; it’s good to know someone had their priorities straight. Too bad the rest of the media didn’t.As Newsmax noted, “Washingtonian magazine once dubbed Russert the best journalist in town,” and he probably deserved that label as much as anyone. Raised Catholic and trained in Catholic schools, he consistently stressed the importance of both, in such venues as commencement addresses at the Columbus School of Law (part of the Catholic University of America) and Boston College, and a fundraising dinner for the Catholic schools in the Fall River diocese. Russert, like most Washington media, was well to my left, but from where I sat he always seemed worthy of respect, both professionally and personally, and someone it would have been enjoyable to know. Requiescat in pace, Tim Russert; the decline of TV news just accelerated.(Update: I had to add a link to this excellent reflection on Russert by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.)

On being Reformed and missional

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At this year’s General Synod (our annual national decision-making assembly) of the Reformed Church in America, the delegates were blessed to hear three addresses from the Rev. Dr. Richard Mouw, currently serving as the president of Fuller Seminary. Those three addresses, with the discussion questions that followed each, have been combined into a single video. Taken as a whole, it’s a long one—almost an hour—and I wish they’d been posted separately, but they weren’t. Don’t let that stop you from watching Dr. Mouw’s messages, because there’s excellent material here. The first address, which focuses on the “Reformed” half of the equation, is about twenty minutes, while the second, which focuses on the “missional” half, runs another thirteen or so; the third, which brings the two together, takes up the rest of the video. They’re excellent, and if you’re interested in these matters, when you have the time to listen to them, I commend them to you.(Technical note: it’s my understanding that some versions of IE have had problems with this video; if you run into difficulties, you might try clicking the “Google Video” button in the lower-right corner, which will take you to the Google Video page for this clip.)

Update: I was pleased to find this post on the same subject on the blog Pursuing Truth (a blog I hadn’t tripped over before this); it’s not an interaction with Dr. Mouw’s addresses, but rather a separate consideration of being Reformed and missional (and an excellent one).

Living life flat-out for Christ

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Ray Ortlund, in a post in memory of his father, sums up the most important lesson he learned from his dad this way:

There is only one way to live: all-out, go-for-broke, risk-taking, pedal-to-the-metal, ferociously joyful and grateful enthusiasm for the Lord Jesus Christ. Halfway Christianity is the most miserable existence of all. Halfway Christians know enough to feel guilty about themselves but haven’t gone far enough to get happy in Christ. Wholehearted Christianity is very happy. How could my dad get there and stay there? He really, really knew that God loved him and had completely forgiven all his sins at the cross of Jesus. I saw dad in repentance. But he did not wring his hands and wonder what God thought of him. He believed the good news, his spirit soared and he could never do too much for his Savior.

Amen.

Our Swiss-cheese Bibles

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Scot McKnight has a piece up on the Leadership section of CT’s website about (and linking to) the hermeneutics quiz devised by BuildingChurchLeaders.com. I don’t actually find the quiz all that interesting, though I think they did a good job putting it together—the quiz informed me that I’m conservative, but moderately so, which wasn’t exactly news to me—but I thought Dr. McKnight’s comments were.

For some reason of late, I have become fascinated with the portions of the Bible we don’t tend to read, passages like the story of Jephthah. Or how God was on the verge of killing Moses for not circumcising his son, and his wife stepped in, did what needed to be done, and tossed the foreskin at Moses’ feet, and God let him alone. I’m curious why one of my friends dismisses the Friday-evening-to-Saturday-evening Sabbath observance as “not for us today” but insists that capital punishment can’t be dismissed because it’s in the Old Testament.I have become fascinated with what goes on in our heads and our minds and our traditions (and the latter is far more significant than many of us recognize) in making decisions like this.What decisions? Which passages not to read as normative. The passages we tend not to read at all.If we’re all subject to selective perception, at least to some degree, it’s important to recognize what we tend to miss or gloss over, especially if we’re church leaders.

He goes on to credit the quiz with helping us do this, which I don’t really think it does, to any significant degree; but I certainly agree that this is something we need to address, because it leads to us missing and misunderstanding what God wants to say to us. It gives us a truncated gospel—one which, funnily enough, usually tends to be truncated neatly to fit our comfort zones.There are, I think, several reasons for this. In churches that use the lectionary, a lot of this is done for you, as the folks who put the lectionary readings together did a nice job of trimming around all the troublesome spots. We do it ourselves, because dealing with those spots takes work—we can’t just toss out the pat answers we’ve all learned, we have to wrestle with the text and put thought and effort into it. What’s more, dealing with those sorts of passages carries an emotional cost, as we come face to face with the fact that we don’t worship a nice, comfortable god who wants us to live nice, comfortable lives. In some cases, as Jared Wilson points out, the Scriptures tell us things we just flat-out don’t want to hear; it’s no shock that we tend to avoid those passages if at all possible.And so we end up with Swiss-cheese Bibles, with great voids in them, and we take our nice neat slices with their nice neat holes in them, and we end up with a much less messy and much less discomfiting faith as a consequence; but then, it seems to me, we end up with a faith much less able to deal with the messy and discomfiting parts of life—they go sailing right through the holes. We need to make the effort to fill in the holes, to consider what parts of the Bible we’re avoiding, and why, and take them head-on; we need to open ourselves up to listen to, and proclaim, the whole counsel of God.

On the power of stories to teach, part II

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I’ve been meaning for several days now to get back over to Dr. Stackhouse’s blog, having gotten a couple weeks behind on reading his posts; I was interested to find there a four-post consideration and defense of the novel The Shack, which has generated quite a bit of interest and comment, both positive and negative. I haven’t yet read the book, and given the events that drive the book’s plot, I’m not at all sure I’m going to read it, either, at least in full; but given the responses it’s generated (both positive and negative), I definitely want to know as much about it as I can from reviewers who are both fair and perceptive. That’s why I appreciated his four posts addressing the book’s genre, some theological concerns, and some praiseworthy aspects of the book.In light of my post this past Sunday, I was also interested in the first of those posts for another reason. Dr. Stackhouse writes,

It seems to me important that authors of fiction defend art as needing no justification on some other grounds. From a Christian point of view, a well-rendered novel—or short story, or poem, or song lyric—needs only to be good in and of itself. It does not have to explicitly praise God or testify to Jesus or draw people closer to the gospel or attract people to Christianity—although the paradox is, I suggest, that inasmuch as it is authentic and true to both the artist and to reality, such fictional writing does indeed do all those things implicitly. Still, art needs no justification, as H. R. Rookmaaker’s book title reminds us, and it is good that art is free from the obligation to perform some other service.To assert that principle, however, is not to assert the corollary that art must not ever serve more than one purpose, and in particular must not “preach,” as Atwood says. One can defend art “for art’s sake,” as Wilde put it, without restricting oneself to aestheticism in which art is only for art’s sake. . . .So, yes, if you want to preach, write a sermon—which is a truism, in fact. But if you want to depict your concerns in a fictional way you hope will render them plausible, even cogent, to a reader, then the weight of western civilization is on your side.

Lest anyone think this is a Christian defense of propaganda, here’s the late Dr. Isaac Asimov saying something very similar:

But in every worthwhile story, however long, there is a point. The writer may not consciously put it there, but it will be there. The reader may not consciously search for it, but he’ll miss it if it isn’t there. If the point is obtuse, blunt, trivial, or non-existent, the story suffers and the reader will react with a deadly, “So what?”

The danger of propagandizing is very real, of course, for the writer who consciously desires to communicate their understanding of truth through stories, through fiction; the question of when one has crossed the line is very real. Dr. Stackhouse argues that that point comes

when the fictive art is compromised for the sake of the ideological message. When dialogue becomes stilted, when characters become inconsistent, when events become implausible, when a deus ex machina saves the day—in sum, when “what would happen” is sacrificed to “what should happen.”

Or, to put it another way, it comes when we as sub-creators cease to be thinking “primarily about what is best for this thing we are making” and let the good of our agenda trump the good of the creation; it’s when “what’s best for us or what we want to do” becomes the primary consideration.

Song of the Week

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As I said last week, I’m on a bit of a Steve Taylor kick. For this one, I’ll let Taylor’s own words (in the booklet for the boxed set Now the Truth Can Be Told) explain my reason for posting it:

Ah, to have the Bible’s sense of balance.My goal with “A Principled Man” was to write a song that inspired me to live a principled life. The seed came from a “tree motif” in the Book of Psalms: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water . . .” (Psalms 1:1-3)But lest principles become an end unto themselves, we have in Ezekiel the dark side of the tree metaphor: “Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says: Because it towered on high, lifting its top above the thick foliage, and because it was proud of its height . . . I cast it aside.” (Ezekiel 31:10-11)This song still inspires me. May it continue to do so for all the right reasons.

A Principled Man

Under a flag they swore a bond;
Caught under fire they ran.
Are you the one standing your ground?
Are you a principled man?Followers fall, blinded by kings,
Lost in the lie of the land.
Are you the one sworn to be true?
Are you a principled man?Now . . . begin—come alongside it,
Seize the wind—come along, ride it.
One day it will be you believing
There is a principled man.Who goes there? Do you belong, lad?
You know there is a new dawn, and
One day to say, “Stick with me, baby,
I am a principled man.”Many’s the man grounded by greed,
Leaning on power and land;
Show me the one lost in the stars—
Show me a principled man.ChorusBleeding and hushed, hung between thieves,
There the foundation began,
Are you the one taking your cross?
Are you a principled man?Words and music: Steve Taylor
© 1987 Soylent Tunes
From the album I Predict 1990, by Steve Taylor

Malcolm Reynolds, patron saint of not-quite-lost causes

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—or at least, so he would be if he were ever actually canonized, which of course is a rather remote prospect. First the fight against the Alliance, which he could never quite stop fighting, then the “Can’t Stop the Signal” campaign after Firefly‘s cancellation—the man positively collects them, and keeps on flying.Which reminds me: there’s a rally at the Federal Courthouse in Seattle at 4:30 pm on June 16, part of the campaign to stop that modern-day robber baron and keep the Sonics in Seattle where they belong. . . . Anyone in Seattle have Nathan Fillion‘s number?(Update: the rally drew over 3000 people and earned serious attention from ESPN. Way to go, guys—you rock. Can’t stop the signal!)

Firefly, Tolkien, and narrative theology

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The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, from “Mythopoeia”It has been my custom, while using my rowing machine, to watch episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, which I consider one of the two greatest television shows I’ve ever seen. (I don’t believe TV as a medium has produced much true art, or many truly great stories, but I do believe both are possible.) Lately, however, I’ve been watching other things while I row, and this week, I started in on the other greatest series I’ve ever seen: Firefly. It’s the first time I’ve watched any of the episodes since the movie came out; what Joss Whedon did with the movie hit me too hard. That’s also why I haven’t posted about being a Browncoat, or linked to fan sites like “Whoa. Good Myth.” Rather like being a Mariners fan these days, it’s just been easier not to stress about it too much.Now, this might seem like an odd and pointless thing to get worked up about—so a TV show was canceled after fourteen episodes—so what? It’s still a TV show, after all. So Fox handled it badly, gave the show no real chance, and canceled it unfairly soon; is it really that big a deal? Well, it was that big a deal for all the folks who worked on the show, for one thing. Beyond that, we all have our reasons, and I’m sure mine aren’t the same as everyone else’s; but for me, it’s the story, or rather, the stories, which were untimely cut off, and the lives of the characters in those stories. Whedon, Tim Minear, and their crew of writers had a great world and a great set of characters and stories going, both enjoyable and deep; to have that brought to an untimely end is a great loss.That’s why I rejoiced when the movie deal went forward; which meant that what Whedon did with Serenity really hit me hard. I think he put his own ideas of what is artistic ahead of what was best for his creation—not only the story and the characters, but also the communities he had created, most importantly the actors, writers, and crew, and also all of us who call ourselves Browncoats. Tolkien speaks of us as sub-creators, people who create what he calls “Secondary Worlds,” creations which are real within their own laws, to the best of our ability to make them real; we create in reflection (or, perhaps better, as refractions) of the great Creator who made us, because we were made like him. The desire to be gods ourselves may have been what led us into sin, but it was not perhaps a wholly wrong one, properly channeled—for when we create, we are in a sense small gods to our creation. If we take Tolkien’s point of view, however (as I believe we should), this has a significant implication for our creative activity: we have the responsibility to be, as best as we can, good gods to our creation. Our work has to be primarily about what is best for this thing we are making, whatever it might be, not merely about what’s best for us or what we want to do. On my read, from the things he’s said, Joss Whedon violated that with Firefly/Serenity; he was a bad god to his creation.Still, though, you might say: does this matter? Wasn’t it, after all, still just a TV show? Yes, of course it was a TV show, but no, it wasn’t just a TV show. Nothing is ever just anything—especially not people; and thus, especially not stories, to the extent that they’re true stories about people. By that I don’t necessarily mean factual; there are biographies and histories which are factual but aren’t really true, because they miss the heart of the matter, while many historical fictions, though they depart from the facts, are far truer because they give us real understanding of people and events. Indeed, many novels about things that never happened and people who never lived are nevertheless true stories in that they broaden our awareness of ourselves and of others, open our eyes and minds to things we have not before seen or realized, and deepen our knowledge of what it means to be human.Stories are powerful things. It’s one thing to express an opinion, or to set forth a proposition about how the world works; it’s quite another thing to bring that opinion or proposition to life in a story. People who might reject, or at least argue with, your position if it were plainly stated may find themselves influenced by it, if your story is powerful enough and sufficiently well-crafted; and those who wouldn’t understand it intellectually in a propositional form may well get it intuitively and affectively if you bring it to life in a story. That’s what stories do with our ideas: they bring them to life, incarnating them in the lives of the characters we create, making them not merely intellectual realities, but human realities.This is one reason why the greatest of all Christian theologians is not Paul, but Jesus himself. (There are others, of course, such as the fact that Jesus was original, while Paul was derivative of Jesus.) This is something too often missed, as Dr. Kenneth Bailey points out (and as Jared Wilson has also said, though his emphasis is a little different), because we tend to see Jesus as a nice moral teacher telling quaint stories; we don’t really believe that those stories can be theologically profound and powerful. In fact, though, they can, and they are; the more overtly “theological” works in the New Testament, profound as they are, are simply developments, explications, and applications in propositional form of the truths already communicated incarnationally through the parables of Jesus, and also through the broader narratives of the Gospels, Acts, and the Old Testament. God doesn’t give us a three-point outline, he gives us a story—from which to learn, and in which to live.Of course, it’s possible to take this too far; there are those who would overbalance the other way, exalting the biblical narratives to the extent of diminishing or even discounting the NT epistles (and other non-narrative portions of the Bible—but the epistles, and particularly Paul, usually seem to be the main target). That’s not right either. What we need to remember is that the epistles, though not themselves narrative texts, are nevertheless part of a narrative; their context is a story. They were written for particular reasons to particular human beings in particular situations dealing with particular things, even if we don’t know all those particularities (in some cases, we have a pretty good idea; in others, we can only speculate); and when we read them, we read them in the middle of our own story as God speaking to us in our particular situations and issues. We need to understand them accordingly—and we need to understand that that fact is the reason why they matter.Stories matter. They matter because they’re the stuff of our life, of our reality and our nature, and the expression of the creative ability we’ve been given by (and in the image of) the one who made us—and we matter. They matter because they affect us, moving our emotions and shaping our view of the world, both for good and for ill. And as a Christian, I affirm that they matter because everything we do matters, because the best of what we do will endure forever. And if they matter, then we need to take them seriously, both as readers and, for those of us so called, as writers—for our sake, and for everyone’s.