Monthly Archives: September 2008

Reformation from the DNA out

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Jared Wilson is always one of my favorite bloggers, and right now, he’s really on a roll. I’m particularly struck by a couple of posts which he doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think do connect on a deep level. The first, “Ever the Cross,” is a riff on this line from C. J. Mahaney:

It is increasingly obvious that people are prepared to tolerate Christianity up until the point that it begins to define its terms.

The Rev. Mahaney’s right on with that, and not just with regard to the world outside the church—this is often the case within the church as well, and especially within congregations that seek to engineer success by accommodating themselves to that attitude. As Jared puts it,

Modern sermons and teaching that do not center or focus on the cross only reinforce this for us. Without meaning to, the church itself can support our error of judging God’s faithfulness to us based on our present circumstances, rather than on the great love he has shown to us in the past. Which is why we must always bring the glory of that past movement into our present worship and obedience. That’s the need for the call to a cross-centered life.

This is a critical point, because any other way of life leads us away from Christ, not towards him:

The call to follow Jesus is the call to die. Following Jesus means renouncing comfort, safety, and happiness in circumstances as the prime virtue of life. . . .What does it mean to remember the cross of Christ as a sign upon our right hand, between our eyes, and in our mouth? It means that Jesus is our way, Jesus is our truth, and Jesus is our life, and when the way, the truth, and the life heads toward crucifixion, we don’t part ways. We remember. We commemorate. We look to the cross like a pillar of cloud by day and to the empty tomb like a pillar of fire by night, the signs to follow. Where the world walks the wide path away from the point at which Christ defines his terms, the disciple continues on the narrow path into the way of the cross.

That’s powerful truth, and profoundly important. Unfortunately, as Jared notes in his post today on the missional reformation of the church, it’s also profoundly unsettling to many, many congregational (and denominational) leaders in this country, and profoundly threatening to their whole idea of how we’re supposed to lead the church, and what we as the church are supposed to be. For all that most of the fights in American churches are over style and programs and other matters that are superficial and therefore clearly visible, the real issues and the real problems are much deeper, and can be summed up in the statement that most churches don’t “remember the cross of Christ as a sign upon our right hand, between our eyes, and in our mouth.” We have not renounced comfort, safety, and happiness in circumstances as our goals, either in the church or in life in general, much less accepted the call to die. As a consequence,

What we are dealing with . . . is not a crisis of programming or style, but a crisis of culture. . . . Because of the state of the modern Church’s collective values and community identity, the call to reform cannot be met merely by offering alternative programming or adding an “emerging” service or what have you. We’re messing with DNA here.

This is long, slow work, which in most cases will not produce dramatic turnarounds suitable for book tours and TV appearances; that’s why so few people have the heart for it. It’s important work, though; I’ll never denigrate the valuable work of church planters, but it would be wrong to focus on church planting and just write off existing congregations because changing them would be too much work. Yes, there are congregations that simply will not change; but there are others that will, because the Holy Spirit is not going to abandon the people of God. And ultimately, the commitment to the work of the missional reformation of the church is not one that can be judged by results alone—even if it doesn’t “work,” that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The task itself is worthy, whether “successful” or otherwise. As Jared concludes,

It is wearying trying to sell our churches on the notion that what they’ve been selling for so long doesn’t work. It is difficult suggesting that the service-centered approach to reaching the lost has failed. It is a delicate thing to suggest that we have not exalted Christ and we have not glorified God and therefore we haven’t really served the people we’ve claimed to.And yet for some of us inside this culture, slogging away at discipling the culture into a more vital discipleship, it is incumbent upon us to, in our hearts and minds, say “Here we stand. We can do no other.”

To which I can only add, “God help us. Amen.”

Who’s lying here?

Posted on by | No Comments

I never cared for the McCain campaign’s “Education” ad; throwing in the Illinois sex-ed bill and calling it his “one accomplishment” was a cheap shot, in my book. (It was also bad politics, since it took all the attention from the actual point of the ad.)

That said, I also don’t care for the Obama campaign and the MSM getting away with labeling Sen. McCain a liar when the ad’s description of the bill is, in fact, accurate—as Brit Hume points out, quoting from the bill itself:

HT: Jennifer RubinAs Byron York points out,

Obama’s explanation for his vote [that he voted for it because of his concern over inappropriate touching] has been accepted by nearly all commentators. And perhaps that is indeed why he voted for Senate Bill 99, although we don’t know for sure. But we do know that the bill itself was much more than that. The fact is, the bill’s intention was to mandate sex education, especially concerning contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases, for children before the sixth grade and as early as kindergarten. Obama’s defenders may howl, but the bill is what it is.

Update: Here’s what Sen. Obama told Planned Parenthood last year about this:

sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is “age-appropriate,” is “the right thing to do.”

Obama, Prince of Denmark: To drill or not to drill

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while now: amid the posturing and the squabbling over offshore drilling, there was an interesting contradiction in Barack Obama’s acceptance speech a few weeks ago that few people have caught but that’s worth pointing out. I suspect the reason so few people have caught it is that it takes someone in the energy business, like The Thinklings‘ Bill Roberts, to see it:

Tonight, Obama said that drilling is a “stopgap measure”, not a solution. Right after that he said he’s going to promote clean-burning Natural Gas.Which is great, because the company I work for explores for and produces natural gas.But that’s where it gets weird: to get to natural gas you have to drill for it. And there are trillions of cubic feet of it in the outer continental shelf (OCS) that we’ve all been arguing about all this time.It gets even more complicated: It’s extremely common to get BOTH natural gas and oil out of the same wellbore.Sometimes natural gas is on top of the oil, kind of like a “cap” (and water is often under the oil—oil floats on water). So many wells produce all three products—water, gas, and oil. Sometimes the gas is dissolved in the produced oil and is separated when it gets to the surface.But, bottom line—it makes no sense to say no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas.I realize this is probably boring to many of you, but because I work with people who do the work to find the darn stuff, I found that to be a pretty interesting comment.

What this shows is that, like most of us (including Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the leadership in Congress), Sen. Obama doesn’t really know much about energy production and the issues related to it. That’s hardly surprising, but it does mean that at a time when energy prices are a major concern in our economy—and when, as John McCain and Sarah Palin have both pointed out more than once, oil and gas imports are a major foreign-policy concern—the Democratic presidential candidate is offering policy prescriptions in this critical area that are based not on actual knowledge of that area but rather on ideology and political convenience. Thus we see him doing things like “saying no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas,” just because he doesn’t know enough to know that he’s contradicted himself.This is one of the things which makes Sen. McCain’s choice of Gov. Palin so striking. She’s taken flak from both sides of the aisle for not being broadly and deeply versed in foreign policy and matters of national security, and he’s taken flak for choosing a nominee who lacks that kind of understanding; and there’s no question that she has a lot to learn in that area, and that the wisdom of choosing her as the VP nominee will depend to a considerable extent on her ability to do so quickly. That said, however, what she does have that’s far harder to find is a broad and deep understanding, both at the political level and at the down-and-dirty practical level, of the energy industry, energy policy, and all its manifold ramifications. She knows how to address these issues, and she’s managed to do so without ending up in Big Oil’s pocket, which is probably almost as valuable. At a time when energy policy is critically important both domestically and internationally, when the GOP nominee for President is already more than qualified to handle national-security issues but is not conversant with energy issues, I think Gov. Palin’s expertise in this area is a powerful qualification—and a pointed contrast to the ignorance on the Democratic ticket.

The Gospel for 9/16/01

Posted on by | No Comments

For me (and, I suspect, for many preachers), 9/16 is a date inextricably linked to 9/11: it was the day we had the task of standing in the pulpit and presenting the gospel response to the terrorist attack on America. That day found me the guest preacher at the Church of the Good Shepherd, a congregation of my denomination (the Reformed Church in America) in Lynnwood, WA, on the north side of the Seattle area. They were between permanent pastors at that point, and I had agreed several weeks before to fill in for the Sunday between the departure of one interim pastor and the arrival of the next. To preach to a strange congregation five days after 9/11 was a daunting task, especially with one as inexperienced as I was, but it had one great benefit: it gave me something to focus on that helped me absorb and process the shock of what had happened.It’s interesting, seven years on, to go back to that sermon; it certainly shows my inexperience, but I think the thrust of it was right. If I needed to use it again, I would no doubt rewrite a fair bit of it, but I could keep the core as is. Indeed, when almost three years later, our community in Colorado was hit by what I think we can fairly call an act of local terrorism, that’s pretty much what I did. For all that it’s clearly the work of someone who hadn’t preached very much, I can stand by what I was doing my best to say. (For anyone who’s interested, the sermon follows after the jump.)***********The world changed this week. When terrorists flew airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, the earth shook, and those towers, those great mountains raised up by human effort, fell; and the world changed. It was not just Manhattan or Washington, D.C. that shook, it was the earth under our feet; we were shaken, as these symbols of our country were attacked in a way that we have never been attacked before. We were shaken by the loss of life—the hundreds aboard those four airliners, the thousands more who died in the buildings which were hit; the firefighters and police officers who died trying to help those caught in the wreckage. Through the network of relationships that unites us across this country as family, friends, and colleagues, we have all been touched by the fear and pain of this last Tuesday. September 11, 2001: this day will live in infamy alongside December 7, 1941, and we will never be the same again; we mourn the loss of thousands of lives, but we also mourn the loss of a little more of our innocence. What words can possibly work to describe what happened? Unthinkable? Unbelievable? Horrific? This was a disaster movie produced and directed by Satan; it was designed to kill and to destroy, as our enemy so loves to do, but also to shatter the foundations of everything we hold true. The world has changed, the earth has moved, and we will never again trust it in quite the same way. Yet there is hope, even as the horror of last Tuesday echoes in our minds and hearts: in the midst of this upheaval, there is still a place to stand where we will not be shaken. With all that has changed, we need to remember what has not changed. We need to remember that God is, and what that means for us.Let’s look to the Psalms this morning, and hear God’s reassurance. Open your Bible with me to Psalm 46, and let’s read that together:God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging. Selah
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah
Come and see the works of the LORD,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
he burns the shields with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” “Trouble” seems far too mild a word for what the psalmist has in mind—“disaster” would be more to the point. First, there is natural disaster, and the language is vivid, evoking the earthquake to end all earthquakes: the earth heaves so fiercely that the very mountains crack and collapse; their rubble falls into the ocean and causes great waves, great enough to shake the remaining mountains all over again. It is a scene of incredible physical terror—but the psalmist says, “We will not be afraid, because God is our refuge, our strength and our help.” Second, there is potential national disaster, the threat of the nations against the city of God; but the city will not fall, because God is there. No matter what disaster may come, God is very near to us, and he is our refuge.In the midst of disaster, God is our refuge. We can rest in him and he will protect and comfort us, body and soul. If you look at your outline you’ll see the opening of another psalm, one of my favorites, Psalm 91: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty,” as the NIV has it. The psalm gives us the image of a bird comforting its chicks, protecting them from the traps left by the hunter and from diseases which could kill them; under God’s wings, in his shadow, we are safe from diseases of the spirit and those who would attack our souls. We may not be free from pain, but we are comforted.But as we look out at the world this week, we still see the suffering. Who can forget the images of a 110-story building collapsing into so much twisted, broken wreckage? Who can forget the nightmare thought of secretaries, janitors, and receptionists who actually found jumping out of windows 90+ stories up their best hope of survival? And it doesn’t end there. The television still shows us shattered buildings, rubble everywhere, people in grief and shock; how could this happen? Is the Devil bigger than God after all?The Psalmist’s answer is firm: No. Even in the midst of suffering, destruction and war, God is in control. In Isaiah 45, the prophet puts this even more strongly, as God declares, “I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.” In other words, what happened on Tuesday didn’t take God by surprise; he isn’t pacing around his throne room pulling out his hair trying to figure out what to do about this situation. In all the circumstances of life, in all the trials we face both huge and smaller, the one who is our refuge and our help is in control of the situation. As your congregation looks for a new pastor, and as you suffer setbacks in your search, God is in control. As you struggle with difficult relationships, whether in your family, at work, or elsewhere, God is in control. As you or someone you care about fights serious illness, God is in control. As those of us who are unemployed look for jobs, God is in control. And yes, as men with evil in their hearts turn our airlines into weapons of inconceivable mass destruction, God is in control. He has not been outwitted; he has not lost the battle, much less the war. The God who is our fortress and our help is still the one writing the story, and evil will not have the last word.But this raises a hard question: if God is in control, if he is the one writing the story, then why do we get chapters like this week? Why does he allow such evil and suffering?I don’t have any easy answers; and if I did, I don’t imagine you’d trust them. There aren’t any easy answers. In part, we know that when God created us, he gave us the dignity of freedom, to choose to follow him or not; and he respects us and leaves us free to choose, even though so often our choices pierce his heart. At the end, God will tell all the nations, “Be still, and know that I am God,” and all evil will be banished, but until then he gives us the dignity of being able to say no to him. But that’s only part of the answer; it doesn’t tell us why evil succeeds, why things don’t go right the first time. How much of a change, really, would it have taken for the men who carried out this attack on our country to fail rather than succeed in their efforts? A few alert, suspicious security guards, perhaps, and none of those planes are hijacked.I don’t know; but if I have learned anything in my life, it is the lesson C. S. Lewis put so well: that “God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” God is shouting to us in this time—it may just be a coincidence, but did you notice that the date of this attack was 9/11? 911. Perhaps this is an emergency call to a nation that is in desparate need of God. And people are picking up the phone. On CNN, a newscaster admitted that “Even if you don’t believe in God, at times like this you want to reach out to a higher being for salvation.” As horrific as this attack was, even this God can turn to his purposes, even this he can use to rescue people who are lost and need him; even from these black, evil, poisonous roots, God can grow beautiful flowers.God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. And so, as the great Catholic mystic Julian of Norwich once wrote, God did not promise us, “You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted”; but he did promise us this: “You will not be overcome.” Therefore we will not fear, though the earth shake, the mountains fall, and our cities be attacked; we will not fear, though we struggle financially, or with our families, or with our past; for God is our fortress and our help, and he is still in control, whatever may come.And we will not fear because in the midst of our weakness, God is our shepherd. Let’s turn to our second psalm, Psalm 23:The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.Our God is no impersonal God—he knows each of us by name, and he watches closely over each of us; he cares for us and takes care of us as a shepherd watches over and takes care of his sheep. He wants us to know and love him as he knows and loves us, and he wants us to call on him when we are uncertain, when we are in need, when we are in pain, when we are in danger. That, after all, is what a sheep does: when it realizes that it is lost in the wilderness and has no idea where its flock and shepherds are, it will lie down and begin to bleat at the top of its lungs so that the shepherd can come and find it and bring it back to the flock. The sheep knows it’s in a bad situation, but it trusts the shepherd to take care of it, and God wants us to trust him in the same way.We can trust him for a couple of reasons. First, in our uncertainty, God is our guide; he leads us as a shepherd leads his sheep. He leads us in the paths of righteousness—not crooked paths which will wear us out uselessly and waste our efforts, but the right paths, those which will take us where he has called us to be; the paths which will lead us to growth in righteousness. When we wander from the path, he leads us back, even when that means lifting us up and carrying us. But the straight path is often not the easy one; in Israel, the best way from one pasture to the next often led through deep, narrow canyons and ravines where the steep, high slopes kept out the light, where the sheep could only trust and follow the sound of their shepherd’s voice. In the same way, the path for us often leads us through pain and suffering, through valleys like this week when the road is too dark for us to see beyond the next step. In times like these for our nation, when the weight of suffering and loss seems too great to bear, God is our shepherd. In this time of uncertainty for you in this church, God is your shepherd. We are in this place, we are in this time, dark as it is, because God has led us here, because this is the right path, the path that will bring each of us where he wants us to be; but he has led us into the valley of the shadow of death in order to lead us through it and out into the light once more, and he is here to comfort and protect us in the darkness. “God did not say, ‘You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted’; but God said: ‘You will not be overcome.’” That is a promise for us this morning, here in the valley of the shadow.The promise, too, is that God will meet our needs, because he is our shepherd; in our need, he is our provider. That, after all, is how Psalm 23 begins: “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not be in need.” He provides us with green pastures and quiet streams, not merely meeting our physical needs but doing so in a way which refreshes us and gives us rest. He restores my soul, the Psalmist says.Do any of you feel the need to have your souls restored this morning? I know I do; there have been times in the last few days when it seemed wrong and unfair somehow that we had blue skies and sunshine and could still see the beauty of the day when at the World Trade Center the sun had not shone since Tuesday for all the smoke. Others I know felt violated by this attack; my brother’s comment, after a long conversation, was, “I want my country back.” Another friend of mine said he has been walking around in shock since hearing the news, that part of him is frozen up inside. The promise to us this morning is that God meets us at this place of our need, that he will restore our souls.God is our strength in the midst of disaster, and our shepherd in the midst of our weakness; he provides for us in our need and guides us through the darkness. Through everything we face, God is with us. That is why we need fear no evil as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death—because God isn’t leading us from up ahead somewhere, he isn’t sending us on from behind, he is walking through the valley with us, carrying his staff to keep us on the right path and his rod to drive away enemies. That’s why he is able to restore our souls, because he is with us in our hurts and losses and fears. That’s why he is our refuge and strength when we are under attack. And it’s why we can trust him when we don’t know how we’ll pay the bills . . . when we fear what the future holds for us . . . when we don’t know what to do next . . . when someone we love is sick . . . and even when we watch the news and hear the death toll from Tuesday’s attack: because he is with us. He was there with those people who lost their lives in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he was there with the passengers who died on the airliners, he was there with the firefighters who rushed in when the first tower was hit and died when it fell on them, he is there with those who have lost sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters; he is here with us this morning as we struggle to come to grips with what has happened, as we think of those we know who escaped or are among the missing, and as we deal with all the other problems and struggles that fill our lives. He is here with us in his Spirit, and his Son came and walked the very same earth we walk. He knows us, he knows us inside and out, he loves us more than we will ever understand, and he is here with us to care for us as a shepherd cares for his sheep. We worship a God whose name is Immanuel, God with us, and if we are too weak to stand that is just fine with him; he wants us to lean on him as he leads us through—and out of—the valley of the shadow of death and into his glorious light.

Positive feminist perspectives on Sarah Palin

Posted on by | No Comments

As Jonah Goldberg and the Anchoress, among many others, have commented on, there’s been a veritable avalanche of hysterical attacks on Sarah Palin from various liberal feminists; I suggested earlier that a lot of liberals were furious that the GOP put a conservative woman on the ticket—how dare they!—and the more recent wave seems to bear that out. A number of feminists are even going so far as to deal with the cognitive dissonance of Gov. Palin’s existence by denying that she’s really a woman. (Shades of Elizabeth Moon.)They are not, however, the only voices out there. Though fewer, there have also been liberal feminists who have expressed appreciation for Gov. Palin, even as they disagree with her positions. Perhaps the most important such voice is the redoubtable Camille Paglia, whose essay in Salon is profoundly important; though her description of Gov. Palin’s “brand new style of muscular American feminism” has drawn the most attention, she has a number of important things to say. I was particularly struck by her critique of her own party:

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances. . . .It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism—one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired. But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.

Also of interest is a perspective from the British press, Rebecca Johnson in the Telegraph:

Politics be damned, Palin was a woman and she was an Alaskan! Moreover, I had been impressed with her when I interviewed her—not for her politics (I’m one of those east coast liberals she doesn’t care about) but for the other things that people across the country are responding to right now: her warmth, her work ethic, her “can-do” attitude.We should celebrate what is groundbreaking about Sarah Palin: a card-carrying member of Feminists for Life is a big step forward from Housewives for Life. And then we should talk about the issues.

Finally, DeeDee Myers offered the Obama campaign some wise advice in The New Republic, making the case that they should leave Gov. Palin alone:

What Sarah Palin has done, and this is something I like about her, is that she’s a women who has succeeded very much on her own terms. She talks about motherhood as a training ground for leadership; she manages and balances her family and her work in her own way. It’s very hard to see where her family ends and her work begins. I think a lot of women see their lives that way. Not everyone’s going to go out and shoot a moose and put their hair up in a bun and put on their sexy open-toe shoes and go to dinner. . . . But does everybody have to be lock-step on every issue? Or can somebody who’s outside—in Sarah Palin’s case, very much outside—the traditional feminist agenda still move the ball forward for women? I think the answer is yes. When I hear Pat Buchanan on TV, decrying sexism in the media, you know? This is not all bad. . . . I don’t know where abortion rights are going to end up in all this, and honestly that concerns me, but I think we need to find a different language to talk about it. I think that there are more women who identify with Sarah Palin than Gloria Steinem right now. Even if they don’t agree with 100 percent of her agenda, her life looks more like their lives.

HT: Jennifer RubinUpdate: see also Camille Paglia’s latest contribution on Sarah Palin, and this comment from Elaine Lafferty, the former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine.

Saying goodbye

Posted on by | No Comments

What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord,
I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.—Psalm 116:12-15 (ESV)I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.—1 Corinthians 15:50-57 (ESV)It’s been a long couple days. Sunday I had a meeting after church and places to be all afternoon, and then yesterday was my first funeral here in Indiana, as we buried one of the lovely old saints of this congregation, someone who’d been a part of the church here for 44 years. On the one hand, it was a real celebration of a woman who’d lived a remarkable life and blessed a great many people; we did not grieve as those who have no hope, nor did we weep for her, because no one had any doubt at all that she died in Christ. On the other hand, that doesn’t make our loss right now any less real, and it was a very emotional service.Still, I would have loved to have been able to bear witness to the Resurrection the way Sir Winston Churchill did at his state funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral. For most of the service, it was a very traditional Anglican funeral, but after the benediction, a bugler positioned high in the dome of St. Paul’s began to play Taps: “Day is done, gone the sun from the hills, from the earth, from the sky. Go to sleep, rest in peace, God is nigh.” Not typical procedure at an Anglican funeral, but normal for a military funeral, and so certainly fitting for Churchill. But no sooner had the last note faded to echoes than another bugler, positioned across the dome from the first, began to play Reveille—“It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning!” It was Churchill’s final testimony, that at the end of history, the last note will not be Taps, it will be Reveille—a Reveille to wake the very dead, as the trumpet will sound not an end but a beginning, not death but resurrection, and the end of all death. That is the promise of Easter; that is our hope in Christ.

The Image of the Invisible God

Posted on by | No Comments

(Isaiah 40:21-31; Colossians 1:15-20)

This is one of my favorite passages of Scripture—I could easily preach for 45 minutes on this text. I know that because I’ve done it! (Just ask Sara, she was there.) As such, this passage is also the reason why I write out all my sermons. It was back when we were in college, and I was preaching to our InterVarsity chapter, of which I was one of the student leaders; it’s the only time I’ve ever preached without a manuscript. In my defense, I was also sick as a dog that night (which is the main reason I hadn’t written the thing out), so I had even more of a tendency to ramble—but still: 45 minutes—and that was when I talked a lot faster than I do now. Be glad I’ve learned a few things since then. My fellow students at the time were . . . diplomatic. They did agree, though, that I hadn’t repeated anything, and that everything I’d said was good—I just hadn’t known when to stop. There really is enough here to talk about for 45 minutes easy, especially if you don’t know when to stop. Like I said, be glad I’ve learned a few things.

This is a magnificent hymn of praise to Christ, in my opinion one of the high points of the New Testament; many scholars believe that Paul took up a hymn that was circulating around the early church and just plugged it in here, but I don’t believe that. For one thing, that assumes that there’s another great writer floating around the early church about whom we know nothing, which seems unlikely; for another, this passage just seems to erupt out of the end of Paul’s prayer, which is characteristic of Paul. He’s praying for the Colossians, he lays out the reason for their faith, and he mentions Jesus, “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins”—and then he just explodes into praise for who Christ is and what he has done. He can’t help himself, he has to; Jesus means so much to him, his love for Christ is so great, and his understanding of who the Savior is and what he has done is so deep, that praise just bursts out of him. To understand Paul, and to understand anything he writes, we have to begin with that fact, because everything he says and does flows from that.

The first thing Paul says about Jesus is that “he is the image of the invisible God.” This is a powerful phrase. It was well established in the Old Testament, as we talked about a while back, that no one has ever seen God, that no one can see God and live, not because God won’t permit it but because our physical and emotional being is too limited: we simply couldn’t handle the experience. Light is a wonderful thing, but too much light blinds and burns the eyes; heat is necessary for life, but too much heat kills; and joy is essential for our spirits, but too much joy overwhelms and overloads us. For us to see God as he is would be all of these things and more, and we could not endure; we would burn like paper in a bonfire. That’s why we sang at the beginning of the service, “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.”

This is the problem for all human attempts at religion. Hinduism and its descendants deal with it by making a virtue of necessity, making that extinction of the self the goal of religion. A lot of modern folks, who really prefer a tame God anyway, choose to deny the whole problem. The teachers who were leading the Colossians astray made human effort the solution—if you just work really, really hard and give up all these pleasures and do all these religious things and cut out all your bad behaviors, you can purify yourself enough to see God—an approach which is still fairly common today, especially among diet books. None of these can solve the problem; only God could do that. In Jesus, the one who was immortal took on human mortality—and died; the one who was invisible in the brilliance of his glory bound himself in human flesh and bone and became visible—and indeed, touchable, and knowable in a whole new way.

Now, this is possible because God created us in his image, and though that image in us is broken and marred by sin, it still remains; and so the fact that Jesus is the image of God, the image in whom were were created, tells us something important about ourselves as well: we were made to be like Christ, and any shift away from him, any shift away from the life to which he calls us, no matter how “natural” we might claim it to be, is in fact a betrayal of our true nature. The problem, as Paul well understood, is that sin has so ensnared us and so deceived us that in ourselves, we no longer know who we are, much less who we’re supposed to be; but in Jesus, we can see who we’re supposed to be, and how we were meant to live. In him, we can see not only who God is, but who we truly are, and will be when his work in us is complete.

Having made the ringing statement that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, Paul then says several specific things about him. First, in him all things were created. He was the creative agent through whom God the Father made everything that is—nothing exists that he didn’t make, nothing exists apart from him, nothing has life that he did not give life. What’s more, nothing exists which was not created for him; everything that exists is properly his, created to serve his will and his purposes.

Interestingly, Paul emphasizes that this is true not only of the visible, physical world, but also of the invisible world, what we might call the spiritual world. This is probably in response to the false teachers in Colossae; they seem to have believed that when you ascended to the throne of God, you had to pass through a number of realms, each controlled by an angel with whom you had to negotiate—perhaps, though we can’t be sure, by offering them worship. These angelic figures, then, were of some importance, independent powers who must be treated with considerable respect. To that, Paul says, no: they too, if they exist, were created in Christ, through Christ, for Christ, and are properly under his authority, whether they accept it or not. As such, Paul says, there is only one power who truly matters in this world: Jesus.

Paul goes on to say of Jesus that “in him all things hold together.” Our scientific age has developed this idea of the universe as, essentially, a giant machine—even if God did create the world, all he had to do was put it together, wind it up, start it moving, and walk off to do something else; it would run just fine without him. Thus we have the image of God as divine watchmaker—which is a powerful argument for his existence as creator of the world, but not for his ongoing involvement with it. To this idea, too, Paul says no: the universe doesn’t run all by itself, it runs because Christ holds it together, and if he ever stopped, it would all fly apart; if the universe is a giant watch, it’s a watch with no back but God’s hand to hold all the parts in. The will of Christ sustains our lives, and the life of all that is; apart from him, we have no life, no existence, at all.

Finally, Paul says that through Jesus, the man who was fully God, the only one sufficient for the purpose, God has reconciled the universe to himself. Now, this might seem like a strange assertion, because when we look around, we don’t see that; we see a world that is very much unreconciled—to God and to itself. We see wars and rumors of wars, we see division in the church, we see millions upon millions of people chasing other gods; and when we look at ourselves, if we’re honest, we see that God’s work is very much unfinished in our own lives. And yes, it’s true that not everyone will be saved; where the peace of Christ is not freely accepted, it will be imposed. Jesus didn’t win the devil over, he conquered him. But though the conflict at the heart of creation continues, that’s only a temporary reality, until the victory of Christ is brought to full completion. The key point Paul wants to make is that the victory has already been won, the work of reconciliation and healing has already begun, and its completion is sure; even though we have not yet seen all things reconciled to God, we can speak of it as something that has already happened, because it’s a done deal. The forces of evil are like remnants of the Imperial Japanese army holding out on Pacific islands after the end of World War Two—they may still be fighting, but the war has already been decided.

If you want evidence of that, just look around: we are the sign of the coming kingdom, not in ourselves but in what our lives demonstrate. We are the vanguard of Christ’s victory, and the proof of what God has done, is doing, and will do through Christ. We were estranged from God, in rebellion against him, cut off from his love, and therefore estranged from each other, and from ourselves; our sin set up a barrier around us, crippling our efforts to relate to each other and making any attempt to reach out to God impossible, and that same barrier cut through our souls, keeping us from being who we were meant to be. Through his death on the cross, Christ broke down that barrier and ended our estrangement, bringing us back into relationship with God, back to his love and his life. The charges against us for all our evil were dismissed, and we were set free—set free to live in God.

This is good news, and reason for praise and thanksgiving. The one through whom the Father made the world, the one who holds it together, is the one who holds us together, as individuals and as a congregation. When sin pulls us away from God and we begin to grow distant from him, Jesus pursues us and draws us back. When old patterns and old ways of living reassert themselves, when we begin to act again as if we were still slaves to sin, Jesus sets us free. When the enemy attacks, seeking to use our own sins and the sins of others to break us down, Jesus builds us back up and shields us with his love. And when the devil seeks to use our sins and the sins of others to drive wedges between us, to break relationships and sever the sinews of the body of Christ, Jesus is at work there, too, bringing reconciliation. None of us is perfect; we all make mistakes, we all do wrong—you know I do, I know you do, you know each other do—and in the course of life, we’ve all hurt each other; but Jesus’ reconciling work continues, if we will only accept it, and will continue until he comes again. We are his disciples, we are his people, and whatever may come, and whatever we may do, he is right here with us, holding us together. That’s good news.

What ABC didn’t show you

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Check out this article on the various pieces of Charlie Gibson’s first interview with Sarah Palin. Looking at the parts of the transcript that weren’t aired, it’s clear this wasn’t just editing for length—it was editing to put as bad a face as possible on Gov. Palin’s answers. No surprise, but if you really want to know how well Gov. Palin understands foreign policy, read the article—and then go on and read the transcript.It’s enough to make me think that Glenn Reynolds is right: politicians who agree to interviews should bring their own cameras and post the raw video themselves so that people can see what really happened.

Moral psychology and voting right (or left)

Posted on by | 3 Comments

Dr. Johnathan Haidt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has written an absolutely fascinating article titled “What Makes People Vote Republican?” This isn’t another piece of boilerplate liberal condescension after the manner of Thomas Frank, or another disciple of George Lakoff peddling the idea that if Democrats just wrap liberal ideas in conservative language, people will all vote the way they ought to (i.e., for the Democrat). Rather, it’s a careful analysis using the language and tools of what Dr. Haidt calls “moral psychology” which aims to rebuke and replace those models:

Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

The model Dr. Haidt works with here is complex, though not complicated, but I think this paragraph summarizes the results of his research clearly enough:

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at http://www.yourmorals.org/.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

This produces a result with which many conservatives are familiar: as Dr. Haidt told the New York Times‘ Judith Warner,

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view.

I’d always attributed that to the effects of the liberal echo chamber that is the MSM; it’s interesting to think that there’s something deeper and more significant to it. It’s also interesting, and encouraging and heartening as well, that Dr. Heidt offers hope and a possible way forward to address the problem he’s identified. It’s a remarkable article, and perhaps one which could have as great an effect as the work of Frank and Lakoff—only in, I think, a much more productive direction for our country. My thanks to Mark Hemingway and John Derbyshire for calling attention to it.

And the 2008 Zirnhelt Award* for Political Honesty goes to . . .

Posted on by | 2 Comments

. . . Dr. André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. Dr. Lalonde’s reaction to Sarah Palin’s emergence as a role model for mothers of Down Syndrome and other special-needs children:“The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada.”In other words, he’s worried that that Gov. Palin’s example might “inadvertently influence” women to keep their Down Syndrome babies instead of aborting them, as he obviously feels they ought to do. (Though Dr. Lalonde tried to deny it, “Members of Canada’s Down syndrome community say that many of the country’s medical professionals only give messages of fear to parents who learn their baby will be born with the genetic condition.”) That rather takes the pro-choice mask off the pro-abortion lobby, doesn’t it?And no, before anyone reacts, I’m not saying that everyone who supports legal abortion wants to promote abortion; but a lot of those in the business, either as practitioners or as advocates, absolutely do, and hang anything that gets in the way—even basic public-health concerns.*For those unfamilar with David Zirnhelt, he’s a Canadian politician and former New Democratic Party cabinet minister in British Columbia who was known for his quick temper and uninhibited tongue; Minister Zirnhelt is probably best remembered for telling a group of reporters, “Remember, government can do anything.”HT: The AnchoressUpdate: Andrew Malcolm commented on this as well in his “Top of the Ticket” blog on the Los Angeles Times website; somewhat suspiciously, that post appears to be missing. Hugh Hewitt has a PDF copy of it available here.