And now for something completely different
On the wonder of gecko feet.Forgiveness, repentance, and the Gordian knot
How forgiveness and repentance set us free.Repentance: accepting being found
The title sums it up nicely.In the wilderness
Where true worship begins . . . which might be a hopeful thought for us these days.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Do we need to have it all figured out?
Bruce Reyes-Chow, an occasional blog correspondent, a pastor in the San Francisco area, and the current Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has a wonderful blog post up on “The pastoral secret that everyone already knows, but pastors keep trying to hide”: namely, as Bruce puts it, that
pastors don’t really know what the heck they are doing.There I said it “out loud”. We all think it, know it and hard as we try to hide it, most of the folks we attempt to lead, pastor and influence know it too. We don’t really know what we are doing.I have always felt like somewhat of an impostor when it comes to this amazing role that I play in the life of a so many: my family, the congregation I serve or the denomination that I am part of. It is such an honor to be called pastor, but if we are not careful, we begin to believe our own hype and then driven by an insidious need for success, we get into trouble.
Lest anyone think otherwise, Bruce isn’t just speaking for himself or talking through his hat here; I don’t know that all pastors think this (there are bound to be some who feel they have a pretty good handle on what they’re doing and mostly believe they have everything figured out), but judging from the conversations I’ve had with colleagues (including some who’ve been pastoring churches longer than I’ve been alive), he speaks for many of us. In fact, I just had this conversation recently with a few folks whom I respect greatly—when I expressed this sense to them, they told me not only that they feel much the same way, but in fact said they felt like they know less now than they did when they were young in ministry.The question is, is this a bad thing?I’m not at all sure it is (and again, I’m not alone in this). When we think we know what we’re doing, we think we’re the ones doing it—and that we’re capable of pulling it off. Truth is, we aren’t; our work matters as part of the process, but it’s the Holy Spirit who builds the church. If we know what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, that means we’ve found something we can do in our own strength that “works”—which means in turn that we’re the ones doing the building. That doesn’t necessarily rule out that the Spirit is also at work, because we can never really tell God what he can and can’t do, but in general, organizations that are built that way, while they may be wonderful organizations, aren’t great churches.None of this, of course, is to rule out the importance of giving God our best; he commands and calls us to do so, and he uses what we give him, and it does matter. It would be just as wrong to use “trusting God” as an excuse for slacking as it is to try to build the church ourselves because we don’t trust God to do it right (i.e., our way). But it is to say that God doesn’t ask or expect or even want us to understand everything and have it all figured out and all together. Rather, what he wants from us, I think, is simply to serve him as faithfully as we can see to serve him in our given situation, in our given moment, and to trust him for the rest. As Bruce says,
I firmly believe that we must all live in this tension between God’s yearning for us to simply embrace our BEING and the gifts that God gives us to get out there and do some serious DOING. Neither posture is better then the other, but must always be held in tension; for if we sway too much to one side, we lose out on the opportunities that the other may provide.So what do we do to balance this BEING and DOING that God demands and Christ’s calling requires?We listen, we pray, we discern, we act, we reflect and then we do it all over again and again and again and again.
And again and again and again, being faithful day by day by day, until Christ gathers us home. The faithfulness is our work. The rest is God’s.
Because of Jews
The story is told that on one occasion, Karl Barth was asked why he believed in God, and he responded, “Because of Jews.” When his questioner, surprised, asked, “Why because of Jews?” Barth is said to have responded, “Find me a Hittite in New York City.”Now, I don’t know for a fact that Barth said that—though it sounds quite plausible to me—but whether original to Barth or not, it’s a good point. The Jews are to anthropology and human history what the crocodile is to paleontology and zoology: a remarkable survival from a vanished time. And no, I’m not comparing Jews to crocodiles—quite the opposite, in fact, which only intensifies the point; where the crocodile has survived because it’s an indomitable predator that’s too mean and too efficient at killing things to die off, the Jewish people have not survived through power politics, but rather despite them. They have survived and kept their national and religious identity through conquest and exile, enduring centuries in which everyone’s hand was against them. This is a survival which is unmatched in human history.To understand this, consider Barth’s case of the Hittites—or for that matter, the Philistines, the Carthaginians, the Etruscans, the Assyrians, the Parthians, the Scythians, the Medes, or the Babylonians. None of these peoples exist anymore. They were conquered, assimilated, lost their national and cultural identity, and disappeared into memory. This was, throughout the pagan era, the normal pattern. Religion was the tentpole of the culture—the people took their identity in large part from the gods they worshiped, and the gods were worthy of worship as long as they sustained the independence of their people and brought them victory in battle. When defeat came in battle and the nation was conquered, that marked the defeat of their gods by another, more powerful, set of gods; that brought an end to their religion (sometimes more gradually than others), which left the culture largely unsupported and caused it, over time, to collapse.Along with that, the language would go, because there was no longer anything to keep it alive, and no longer any utility in speaking it. In the modern era, with the rise of nationalism, we’ve seen a force develop in resistance to that process, and efforts to revitalize languages from Navajo to Welsh and rebuild the base of native speakers; but in the pagan era, whatever efforts there might have been to keep languages like Hittite alive, they didn’t succeed. There simply wasn’t the cultural capital for such an effort to succeed, or even to make sense, and so languages died with their cultures.The great exception from that time period is the Jews. Granted, Hebrew largely died as a spoken language and had to be reconstituted, even reinvented; but it was possible to do so, and the people still existed to do it. They survived conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians, and endured as a distinct people in exile to be returned to their homeland under the Persians; they endured the rule of the Persians and the Greeks, won their independence for a while, were reconquered by the Romans, who ultimately dispersed them across the empire—and they endured that, too. They existed as a people and a religion without a homeland, through many different cultures and under many different regimes, for the better part of two millennia; and after all that time, the idea of a Jewish state still made sense, because there was still an identifiable Jewish people to live in it. We’re accustomed to this as we’re accustomed to so many things simply because they’re facts—and yet, what an extraordinary fact it is! If we don’t stop and think about it, we miss that.To my way of thinking, then, Barth (or whoever actually said it first) was right to hold up the simple existence of the Jews as a reason to believe in the God of Israel. This is one of the reasons why, contrary to what folks like FVThinker seem to believe, the God of Israel cannot be disproven on the same grounds as the old pagan gods: his people still exist as his people, and theirs don’t.
Addition to the blogroll
Apparently the economics department at George Mason is big into blogging: professors in that department maintain four separate blogs on economics and other matters. I had had some familiarity with one of them, Café Hayek, but the others were new to me. Since in the current situation, it’s good to have a guide or four to help us sort out the good ideas and statements from the bad, and since these bloggers do have interesting things to say beyond the scope of the dismal science, I’ve linked them and given them their own category down the sidebar a ways.
Obama threw down the gauntlet; Rush picks it up
Obviously, an old-fashioned duel is out of the question, so Limbaugh has challenged the president to its modern-day political equivalent: a debate.
If these guys are so impressed with themselves, and if they are so sure of their correctness, why doesn’t President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies. Now, his people in this Politico story, it’s on the record. They’re claiming they wanted me all along. They wanted me to be the focus of attention. So let’s have the debate! I am offering President Obama to come on this program—without staffers, without a teleprompter, without note cards—to debate me on the issues. Let’s talk about free markets versus government control. Let’s talk about nationalizing health care and raising taxes on small business.Let’s talk about the New Deal versus Reaganomics. Let’s talk about closing Guantanamo Bay, and let’s talk about sending $900 million to Hamas. Let’s talk about illegal immigration and the lawlessness on the borders. Let’s talk about massive deficits and the destroying of opportunities of future generations. Let’s talk about ACORN, community agitators, and the unions that represent the government employees which pour millions of dollars into your campaign, President Obama. Let’s talk about your elimination of school choice for minority students in the District of Columbia. Let’s talk about your efforts to further reduce domestic drilling and refining of oil. Let’s talk about your stock market.
I’m quite sure Barack Obama is neither gutsy enough nor foolhardy enough to take that challenge, and in some ways, I wouldn’t be happy to see him reduce the dignity of the office enough to do so . . . but that would be a fun three hours.Update: Of course, if he doesn’t, Jeffrey Lord is right: his own team’s language is going to make him look pretty bad. After all, David Plouffe called the GOP “paralyzed with fear of crossing their leader” because they haven’t taken on Limbaugh; given Limbaugh’s challenge to the president,
the Obama crowd has now set up a breathtakingly stupid proposition: either Obama debates Rush one-on-one or he is, in the words of his own staff, paralyzed with fear.
Not good. None of Obama’s guys are chess players, I can tell—so far, there doesn’t seem to be one member of this administration who thinks beyond the next move.
The rights of the Author
Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb:
“I am the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens,
who spread out the earth by myself.”—Isaiah 44:24 (ESV)For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!—Psalm 139:13-17 (ESV)The Lord rules all creation because he made all of it. He is the Author of the story, and it’s his word that brought all things into being; as the author, he has absolute authority over everything that is in the same way as I have, under him, absolute authority over this sentence. Indeed, his is far greater, not only because his authority is over me and working through me as I write, but also because at any given point I might make a mistake, while God never does. His authority is not only complete, unrestricted by any limitation whatsoever; it’s also perfect, unflawed by any error of any kind, and perfectly sufficient, not shared with anyone or anything beside himself. It’s not just that no power can compete with God’s—it’s that in comparison to him there is no other power. He is the great Author of everyone and everything else that exists; there is no one and nothing capable of rising off the page and wresting the pen from his hand.This includes the fact that the Lord is the one who formed you in the womb. He made, specifically, you. Your character, your body, your gifts, your strengths and weaknesses, the things you value and the things you dislike, aren’t simply the semi-random product of your genes and your environment; sure, God used your genes, and he used the environment in which you grew up and in which you live, but he is the one who created you and who made you who you are. He gave you the gifts you would need to do the work for which he created you, and he gave you the character and temperament he desired you to have to be the person he wants you to be.Granted, to be human and not God is to be sinful, and so you also have traits that aren’t what God wants for you—but even those have been allowed for, and even in those, he’s at work to teach you to trust him and depend on him, and to trust and depend on others. The point is, God knows you far better and far more deeply than you know yourself, because he is wholly responsible for making you who you are, and he is Lord over your life not just at the superficial level, but all the way down to the deepest wellsprings of your character and nature.(Excerpted, edited, from “God’s Mysterious Way”)
Buyer’s remorse is setting in hard
with folks like David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Jim Cramer, and Maureen Dowd (and perhaps Evan Bayh, too), as well as Obama supporters on Wall Street. That’s what happens when you buy the rhetoric over the record, folks . . .Update: Here’s Michael Ramirez’s take on this:
Will Darth Biden have to use the Force?
Because there’s a rebellion afoot in the Senate, and the rebel base isn’t on Yavin or Hoth, it might just be right here in Indiana. I always thought Evan Bayh was a Democrat I could respect, and now I think he’s gone and proved it:
This week, the United States Senate will vote on a spending package to fund the federal government for the remainder of this fiscal year. The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 is a sprawling, $410 billion compilation of nine spending measures that lacks the slightest hint of austerity from the federal government or the recipients of its largess.The Senate should reject this bill. If we do not, President Barack Obama should veto it. . . .Our nation’s current fiscal imbalance is unprecedented, unsustainable and, if unaddressed, a major threat to our currency and our economic vitality. The national debt now exceeds $10 trillion. This is almost double what it was just eight years ago, and the debt is growing at a rate of about $1 million a minute.Washington borrows from foreign creditors to fund its profligacy. The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America’s publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests. The more of our debt that foreign governments control, the more leverage they have on issues like trade, currency and national security. Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence, and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.The solution going forward is to stop wasteful spending before it starts. Families and businesses are tightening their belts to make ends meet—and Washington should too. . . .Voters rightly demanded change in November’s election, but this approach to spending represents business as usual in Washington, not the voters’ mandate.Now is the time to win back the confidence and trust of the American people. Congress should vote “no” on this omnibus and show working families across the country that we are as committed to living within our means as they are.
For Sen. Bayh to write this in the Wall Street Journal is definitely a shot across the bow of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate—but he’s not the only hand at the linstocks. According to Politico,
Moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate are starting to choke over the massive spending and tax increases in President Barack Obama’s budget plans and have begun plotting to increase their influence over the agenda of a president who is turning out to be much more liberal than they are.A group of 14 Senate Democrats and one independent huddled behind closed doors on Tuesday, discussing how centrists in that chamber can assert more leverage on the major policy debates that will dominate this Congress.Afterward, some in attendance made plain that they are getting jitters over the cost and expansive reach of Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget proposal.Asked when he’d reach his breaking point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, said: “Right now. I’m concerned about the amount that’s being offered in [Obama’s] budget.” . . .Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who assembled Tuesday’s skull session, added that he was “very concerned” about Washington’s level of spending, especially in a $410 billion “omnibus” spending bill to fund the government until the start of a new fiscal year in October.As for the tax increases on high-income earners called for in Obama’s plan, Bayh said, “I do think that before we raise revenue, we first should look to see if there are ways we can cut back on spending.” . . .If the moderate Democrats in the Senate are willing to work with moderate Republicans—as Bayh said they are eager to do—they will negate the White House’s ability to portray opposition to Obama’s spending as partisan obstructionism.
I think we now know why Barack Obama didn’t pick Sen. Bayh as his running mate, eh? Biden had best go grab the helmet . . .HT: Jennifer Rubin
Some people don’t need PR
Conservatives4Palin found an astonishing post on the Governor by a blogger who goes by the handle The Aged P, an infrequent poster but clearly someone well worth listening to when he does post. I’m going to do something I rarely do and quote the post in full, because it would be a shame to chop up the analysis:
The one thing that Gov Palin has not been short of since the election has been advice from Republicans and the media—stand for governor again in 2010, go for the Senate, go for POTUS 2012, wait until 2016, write a book, go into the media, give up politics and concentrate on her family—the options are endless.As an outside observer, however, it strikes me that she is intelligent enough and shrewd enough to make up her own mind. I think that maybe she has already decided on a course – I believe she is going de Gaulle.General de Gaulle entered France alongside the Allies at the head of his Free French army after years of exile in London. Initially greeted as a returning hero by the French he served as the President of the Provisional Government but within two years he had resigned, disillusioned by the re-emergence of the old inter-party squabbles that had characterised the pre-war regime.For the next few years he led his own political party but, tiring of the political rat race in 1953 he withdrew from public life and retired in self-imposed internal exile to his home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to write his war memoirs, and many pundits wrote him off as a man whose time had passed.His followers, however, retained their cohesion because they saw de Gaulle as a man of destiny who one day would be called forth from his exile by the people of France to rescue them at a time of great danger—which is exactly what happened in 1958 when France was torn apart by the Algerian crisis. The General returned to office but this time on his own terms and remained in power for the next decade.Since the Alfalfa Dinner Gov Palin appears to have chosen Alaska as her own Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, far enough away from the mainstream of US politics, concerning herself with her responsibilities as Governor and keeping a distance between herself and the spotlight, just as de Gaulle did in the 1950s. She has stayed away from CPAC, she did not attend the NGA, causing some irritation amongst some elements who would prefer her to act as some Joan of Arc type figure scorching across the lower 48 thrusting and slashing at the President and Congress. Staying out of the spotlight is not an option for some of these folk who often see politics as showbiz where your PR people will tell you that you have to be forever working on your next film or album to remain in the public eye.But the Governor does not need any of that—like de Gaulle she is so deeply impressed upon the public’s imagination that she needs no PR, she is simply there.De Gaulle was relatively unknown to the French people in 1940 but millions of them heard his broadcast from London at the moment of their deepest despair and in those few minutes he became the inspiration and hope for so many. Governor Palin walked onto the stage at the Republican Convention, electrified millions and stole their hearts forever with her grace, her honesty and her love of life sealing there and then a contract and covenant of support through fire and flood whatever may happen. Camille Paglia called her an immensely talented politician whose time had not yet come. But perhaps, one day, just as in 1958 with de Gaulle, a message will go across Canada to the north saying her time has come—and then the banners must unfurl . . .
Other than noting that Gov. Palin isn’t exactly in internal exile, but is in fact continuing to do her job as an effective and popular governor, I don’t think there’s anything here I’d argue with. Click the link, give this man some traffic and leave a comment, because he’s produced a remarkable piece of political commentary here.And I agree with Ramrocks—that last sentence really gets me.
The limits of liberty
“What exactly is liberty? First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage. It was free to be alone. It was free to sing. In the forest its feathers would be torn to pieces and its voice choked for ever.
Then I began to think that being oneself, which is liberty, is itself limitation.
We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out,
we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.”—Gabriel Gale, in “The Yellow Bird.” The Poet and the Lunatics. G. K. Chesterton