Via the Baseball Crank:
We have news from Alaska that the investigator for the State Personnel Board has issued a report—contrary to the findings of the Legislature’s independent investigator—and concluded that Gov. Palin did not abuse her authority in the case of State Trooper Michael Wooten, the controversy over “Tasergate” or, if you prefer, “Troopergate.”
Read the whole thing.
and if you’re registered and haven’t yet, be sure to do so. Polls here in Indiana (this part, anyway) close at 6 pm.Also, may I just say that I don’t trust electronic voting machines?
is that the keystone of their agenda, once they have the votes to make it happen (which they probably will as of next January), will be to change the rules to make it as difficult as possible to vote them out. The Baseball Crank dubs this “partisan entrenchment”; the folks over at RedState have compiled a list of steps the Left is already advocating by which they can accomplish this. These steps would, collectively, enable unions (which are a major Democratic money source) to regain power through coercion, empower voter-registration fraud on the Left, silence conservative voices in the media, skew redistricting to favor Democrats, and, of course, put more liberals in the judiciary to suppress challenges to the other steps. Again, all of these are things which Sen. Obama and congressional Democrats are already trying to do, so it’s not as if it takes a leap of imagination to come up with this agenda: it’s taken right from the existing record. I don’t mind losing a fair election—well, no, that’s not true, I do mind, but I accept it—but I mind intensely when people (on either side, my own included) are willing to break the process just to achieve their desired outcome. The first job of our politicians, I believe, is to shepherd the process to ensure that it’s as fair as it can be to everyone, whether fairness is in the best interest of their careers or not; things like the abolition of secret ballots in union elections, or of requirements designed to prevent vote fraud, are nothing short of reprehensible.In the end, on a practical level, I’m less concerned about this than the folks at RedState are; I think the next year or two are likely to go in such a way as to produce a major backlash against the Democratic Party, which I think will overwhelm and wash away these efforts before they can produce the kind of forcible political realignment for which the likes of Nancy Pelosi are hoping. Even if not, I suspect that some, perhaps most, of the measures on RedState‘s list could be successfully challenged in the courts. One way or the other, let’s hope so—for all our sakes.
but I’m pretty sure it won’t be.We have, running for president, a man of an unusually long and clear record of integrity in political life, in John McCain—not spotless, no, but several standard deviations above the norm—versus a man who has no such record, in Barack Obama, who abandoned his pledge to take public financing, whose campaign has taken deliberate steps to enable illegal donations, whose past is still largely unexamined (and who has taken significant steps to keep it that way), and who has shown himself willing to enlist surrogates, including political supporters and government agencies, to destroy those who challenge him, if they can. It’s gotten to the point, if I were a liberal, I still wouldn’t vote for Sen. Obama—I’d be organizing a write-in campaign for Hillary Clinton.
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
—Colossians 3:1-4 (ESV)
Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
—Philippians 3:20-21 (ESV)
Citizenship, for all that Americans tend to be pretty blasé about it, is a profoundly important thing. It’s all about where we belong, and to whom, and where our allegiance lies; it’s about our identity in this world. As such, it means a great deal, whether we ever think about it or not.
It certainly was something the apostle Paul took very seriously, in a couple ways. In the first place, he was a Roman citizen—remember, under the Roman empire, not everyone was, by any means; there were a great many people, including most Jews, who weren’t citizens and thus didn’t have full legal or civil rights. Paul, however, was, and he used that to his advantage on more than one occasion. At a practical, concrete level, he knew just how much citizenship meant. In the second place, though, he also understood that his earthly citizenship had limits, because he owed God a higher allegiance. He understood that this world is no longer our primary allegiance, because this world is no longer where our true life is. We have a new and very different life, the life of Christ.
This is important for several reasons.
One, this tells us something important about salvation. In Colossians 2:20, Paul says, “If you died with Christ”; he begins chapter 3 with “If you have been raised with Christ.” Our salvation, as we usually understand it, isn’t just about a decision we made or an action we took or even the actions we take now; it’s about death and resurrection. It’s about a living God raising dead people. It’s about our old selves being crucified with Christ, nailed to the cross with him with all our sin and all our guilt and all our shame, and us dying with him and being raised to new life in his resurrection. It’s about a cataclysmic change in us, a change worked by the will of God in the power of his Holy Spirit through the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ, that makes us all new people. Our salvation is not merely a reversible act of our fickle human wills, it’s the irreversible act of God’s unchanging will.
Two, this tells us something equally important about the implications of our salvation: namely, being saved isn’t just about going to heaven. It isn’t even just about going to church and supporting the church. Both of these things are part of the picture, but only part. It’s about a complete transfer of allegiance that comes from a complete change of identity: we no longer belong to this world, and we’re no longer primarily identified with it. Our true life is elsewhere.
Does this mean we’re supposed to withdraw from the world? With a few exceptions, no; God has placed us in this world to live in it for him. What it means is that, to borrow language Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 5, we should regard ourselves as his ambassadors—we live here, but not because this is our home; rather, we live here as his representatives, in order to serve him and carry out his ministry in the community and country in which he has placed us. From the point of view of this nation, we’re citizens here and owe it our allegiance, but from God’s point of view—which should be ours as well—our allegiance to this nation is and must be secondary, and our primary citizenship is not on earth at all, but in heaven. Our focus should be not on the things of this earth, but on the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; the goods we seek should be the goods of heaven, and the goals on which we set our minds and hearts should be the goals Christ has set for us.
None of this is to say that we should ignore the things of this world, or that there’s something wrong with them; God created them too, and he created earthly pleasures, and he wants us to enjoy them. But we should see them in their proper light, not as goals in themselves but as things to enjoy along the way; we should remember that they come to us as blessings from God’s hand, and that they’re not what life is about, or what we’re supposed to be living for. We need to keep our priorities straight.
This is of course particularly important to remember on the threshold of a presidential election. As John Piper writes in the piece I linked to last Thursday,
Christians should deal with the world. This world is here to be used. Dealt with. There is no avoiding it. Not to deal with it is to deal with it that way. . . .
But as we deal with it, we don’t give it our fullest attention. We don’t ascribe to the world the greatest status. There are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. We use the world without offering it our whole soul. We may work with all our might when dealing with the world, but the full passions of our heart will be attached to something higher—Godward purposes. We use the world, but not as an end in itself. It is a means. We deal with the world in order to make much of Christ.
So it is with voting. We deal with the system. We deal with the news. We deal with the candidates. We deal with the issues. But we deal with it all as if not dealing with it. It does not have our fullest attention. It is not the great thing in our lives. Christ is. And Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls. So we vote as though not voting.
As Christians, as the ambassadors of the kingdom of God on earth, we have the responsibility to work for the good of our community, of the nation in which we live, and of this world; God told his people through the prophet Jeremiah, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf,” and that command applies to us as well. We need to use the minds he’s given us to come to the best conclusions we can about what this country needs and what ought to happen, and then we need to act on that; which means, at the very least, voting. But having done that, we need to be careful not to put too much weight on it, or to get too tied up in it; we need to leave the results in God’s hands, for whatever his purposes may be.
Of the options we have, there’s no doubt in my mind who would make the best president—but that doesn’t mean I know whom God intends to set in that position, or what his reasons and plans are, or to what purpose; and so on Tuesday, I’m going to do my part, and trust God forhis, remembering that “no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls,” it remains true that “Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy”—and that my life, our life, is not in a political party but in Christ. Our salvation is not in this election, or any election, but in Christ; for we are citizens of another city, the city of God, and it is from that city that we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our life.
I’m told that there’s a guy who recently filed suit against Barack Obama demanding that Sen. Obama produce his birth certificate. His argument, if I understand this correctly, rests on the fact that when Sen. Obama’s mother married Luis Soetoro, Soetoro adopted her son Barack, and the family moved to Soetoro’s native country of Indonesia, mother and son became Indonesian citizens, and under US law at that time had to give up their US citizenship to do so. This guy contends that as a consequence, they can no longer be considered natural-born citizens, and thus that Sen. Obama is constitutionally ineligible to be the President of the United States.
Now, on its face, this lawsuit is laughable. First, it’s true that up until recently, US law forbade dual citizenship (except for citizens of Israel)—but that only really applied to adults; children of American citizens born overseas could be considered citizens both of the US and of the country of their birth until they turned 18, at which time they had to choose between those two nations. Second, this is a matter of interpretation, not of black-letter law, because this specific issue isn’t addressed anywhere in the US Code or in the text of the Constitution, and it’s a question which up until this point has not been raised; thus what this guy asked the courts to do was, on the basis of no supporting precedent, declare the frontrunner in Tuesday’s presidential election ineligible. There isn’t a judge in this country that would have the guts to do that, even if he believed it was an open-and-shut case that he should; and it isn’t, not by a country mile.
As a result, the whole lawsuit is just so much wasted effort. I’m not really a believer in deciding elections in the courts anyway, but if he was going to try to do that in this case, there are much worthier legal issues to raise than this one. The only merit to this guy’s suit is that he takes citizenship seriously. Which he should. Which we all should, and probably quite a bit more seriously than many people in this country do, because for all that Americans tend to be pretty blasé about it, citizenship is a profoundly important thing. It’s all about where we belong, and to whom, and where our allegiance lies; it’s about our identity in this world. As such, it means a great deal, whether we ever think about it or not.
It certainly was something the apostle Paul took very seriously, in a couple ways. In the first place, he was a Roman citizen—remember, under the Roman empire, not everyone was, by any means; there were a great many people, including most Jews, who weren’t citizens and thus didn’t have full legal or civil rights. Paul, however, was, and he used that to his advantage on more than one occasion. At a practical, concrete level, he knew just how much citizenship meant. In the second place, though, he also understood that his earthly citizenship had limits, because he owed God a higher allegiance; in Philippians, he even frames this in political terms, telling them, “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Here in Colossians, he doesn’t use that particular language, but the same core idea is in view: this world is no longer your primary allegiance, because this world is no longer where your true life is. You have a new and very different life, the life of Christ.
This tells us several things. One, this tells us something important about salvation. In our passage last week, Paul says, “If you died with Christ”; he begins this section with “If you have been raised with Christ.” Our salvation, as we usually understand it, isn’t just about a decision we made or an action we took or even the actions we take now; it’s about death and resurrection. It’s about a living God raising dead people. It’s about our old selves being crucified with Christ, nailed to the cross with him with all our sin and all our guilt and all our shame, and us dying with him and being raised to new life in his resurrection. It’s about a cataclysmic change in us, a change worked by the will of God in the power of his Holy Spirit through the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ, that makes us all new people. Our salvation is not merely a reversible act of our fickle human wills, it’s the irreversible act of God’s unchanging will.
Two, this tells us something equally important about the implications of our salvation: namely, being saved isn’t just about going to heaven. It isn’t even just about going to church and supporting the church. Both of these things are part of the picture, but only part. It’s about a complete transfer of allegiance that comes from a complete change of identity: we no longer belong to this world, and we’re no longer primarily identified with it. Our true life is elsewhere.
Does this mean we’re supposed to withdraw from the world? With a few exceptions, no; God has placed us in this world to live in it for him. What it means is that, to borrow language Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 5, we should regard ourselves as his ambassadors—we live here, but not because this is our home; rather, we live here as his representatives, in order to serve him and carry out his ministry in the community and country in which he has placed us. From the point of view of this nation, we’re citizens here and owe it our allegiance, but from God’s point of view—which should be ours as well—our allegiance to this nation is and must be secondary, and our primary citizenship is not on earth at all, but in heaven. Our focus should be not on the things of this earth, but on the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; the goods we seek should be the goods of heaven, and the goals on which we set our minds and hearts should be the goals Christ has set for us.
This isn’t to say that we should ignore the things of this world, or that there’s something wrong with them; God created them too, and he created earthly pleasures, and he wants us to enjoy them. But we should see them in their proper light, not as goals in themselves but as things to enjoy along the way; we should remember that they come to us as blessings from God’s hand, and that they’re not what life is about, or what we’re supposed to be living for. We need to keep our priorities straight.
Three, on this Sunday before our presidential election, this all has a very particular application this week. One of the great preachers and teachers of our time, John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, has written a wonderful piece on this, a meditation on 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, called “Let Christians Vote as Though They Were Not Voting”; with permission, I’ve made some copies available on the table in the back, and I’d encourage you to take one and read it, because I think he’s dead on. As Piper says, we’re in the world, and God has given us this world to use for his purposes and to his glory, which means we have to deal with it, in all its manifestations; the key is that we don’t take it too seriously. And so, as he continues,
There are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. We use the world without offering it our whole soul. We may work with all our might when dealing with the world, but the full passions of our heart will be attached to something higher—Godward purposes. We use the world, but not as an end in itself. It is a means. We deal with the world in order to make much of Christ.
So it is with voting. We deal with the system. We deal with the news. We deal with the candidates. We deal with the issues. But we deal with it all as if not dealing with it. It does not have our fullest attention. It is not the great thing in our lives. Christ is. And Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls.
As Christians, as the ambassadors of the kingdom of God on earth, we have the responsibility to work for the good of our community, of the nation in which we live, and of this world; God told his people through the prophet Jeremiah, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf,” and that command applies to us as well. We need to use the minds he’s given us to come to the best conclusions we can about what this country needs and what ought to happen, and then we need to act on that; which means, at the very least, voting. But having done that, we need to be careful not to put too much weight on it, or to get too tied up in it; we need to leave the results in God’s hands, for whatever his purposes may be.
Of the options we have, there’s no doubt in my mind who would make the best president—but that doesn’t mean I know whom God intends to set in that position, or what his reasons and plans are, or to what purpose; and so on Tuesday, I’m going to do my part, and trust God for his, remembering that “no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls,” it remains true that “Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy”—and that my life, our life, is not in a political party but in Christ. Our salvation is not in this election, or any election, but in Christ; for we are citizens of another city, the city of God, and it is from that city that we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our life.
For all the saints who from their labors rest,
Who thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
Thou wast their rock, their fortress and their might;
Thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight;
Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true light.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
For the apostles’ glorious company,
Who, bearing forth the cross o’er land and sea,
Shook all the mighty world, we sing to Thee:
Alleluia, Alleluia!
For the Evangelists, by whose blest word,
Like fourfold streams, the garden of the Lord
Is fair and fruitful, be thy Name adored.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
For martyrs who, with rapture-kindled eye,
Saw the bright crown descending from the sky,
And seeing, grasped it, thee we glorify.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
O may thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
The golden evening brightens in the west;
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest;
Sweet is the calm of Paradise the blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;
The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of glory passes on his way.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
Singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost:
Alleluia, Alleluia!
Words: William Walsham How
Music: Ralph Vaughan Williams
SINE NOMINE, 10.10.10.4.4.
I know I’ve mentioned our time in Vancouver, British Columbia, where I attended seminary at Regent College, and how much I enjoyed both the school and the city. Living the young married student life, we didn’t have the money to take advantage of nearly as much in the city as we would have liked to—the time Ragtime came through the Chan Center, for instance; one of my classmates who was a Juilliard graduate went and told us all about the performance, but tickets for that were nowhere near our budget—but we did what we could, and there were always a great many wonderful opportunities to choose from.From an arts perspective, one of the best of those opportunities was, and continues to be, the Pacific Theatre, a small company with a large artistic vision and the ability to back it up. PT had a fair bit of difficulty establishing itself in highly secular Vancouver because that vision is uncompromisingly Christian: co-founder and artistic director Ron Reed is another former Regent student who considered being a pastor for a while. The key is that his vision isn’t Christian in the VeggieTales sense, but something broader and deeper; as he put it in an interview with CanadianChristianity.com,
I, and the company, are preoccupied with the things Jesus talked about and embodied: reconciliation, forgiveness, restoration, new life and a new start, the supernatural, ethical and moral decisions, and peace and justice. So we put on plays that explore these themes.
The result is art which honors God not merely in its message, but in its quality; PT does good work, and so has earned a hearing, and a following, and a great deal of respect, in a city that loves art but does not love the church.
Rory Holland declared: “Ron Reed’s singular vision, accompanied by the many people who have stood beside him, has provided Vancouver a unique theatre experience. Often we see theatre as just another mode of entertainment.”PT, he asserted, “chose more, chose to see the stage as a place where people can be moved, hearts changed, thoughts provoked—all through the medium of damn fine writing, directing and acting. I know we are a better city because of Pacific Theatre.”Playwright and actor Lucia Frangione observed: “Most Christian theatre is actually ‘family oriented’ theatre. There’s nothing particularly Christian about it, aside from the exclusion of certain material that some would find offensive—or not suitable for children, or seniors with a heart condition.”PT, she added, “is one of the rare true ‘Christian’ theatres, where issues of faith, morality, religion, Christ’s teachings—and how they relate to the modern world—are honestly examined. The material they explore often is too bold for ‘family oriented’ theatre, and too controversial for secular theatre.”For many theatre troupes, she contended, “religion is a ‘red flag’ which they try very hard to avoid in their programming, out of fear they will alienate certain audience members. Thank goodness Pacific Theatre has the courage for red flags.”
If you want to understand how to be a true Christian and a true artist, Ron Reed is one of those (along with our own Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh and his Christian Performing Artists’ Fellowship, among others) who points the way; and whether that’s you or not, if you ever happen to be in Vancouver and up for a performance, go check out the Pacific Theatre. You won’t be disappointed.HT: Jeffrey Overstreet via Stephen Ley
Halloween isn’t, that is. For all that, I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it as a kid, if only for the candy; but when the candy lost its charm (I have a sweet tooth, but for pastries), so did the holiday, for it’s a rather exhausting process. In recent years, I’ve discovered that it’s all the more so for parents. This year was easier; living someplace where we actually get trick-or-treaters, and with our daughters going around together with their friend from the neighborhood and her mother as well as their own, I got to sit on the front porch, read Dorothy Sayers, and hand out candy.Now, to a lot of folks, the idea that that might be preferable to going around extorting candy from neighbors probably sounds strange; those folks are, with (possibly) a few exceptions, extroverts. To extroverts, who are the loud majority of the human race, they are normal, and those of us who are introverts are “moody loners” who should be treated with some care because “some of them are serial killers.” My thanks for that phrasing goes to New Reflections Counseling, Inc., of western Ohio, for their “Introvert’s Lexicon,” which they describe as “a humorous look at the world from an Introvert’s point of view”; if you’re an extrovert and there’s an introvert in your life, I suggest you read it (and the material which follows it on that page), as it could be helpful to you. (If you want further information, you might also check out Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 piece in The Atlantic titled “Caring for Your Introvert,” as well as the sidebar materials.)HT: cranekid