I don’t know anything more about it than this link—the show isn’t my cup of tea—but apparently Desperate Housewives decided to encourage the church to evangelism. Or something. One of the main characters, by the sound of things a woman who’s never given the church a serious thought in her life, decides to go to church; predictably (both for Hollywood and, let’s admit, for real life), the doing is harder than the saying, but despite that, she carries through. It sounds like a serious treatment of Christian faith, taken all in all, and an episode that was unafraid to point out something important: there are questions that we as human beings need answered that we aren’t capable of answering.It also sounds like a salutary reminder to Christians of just how alien the church is to those who stand outside its walls. That’s something that’s always been true, really, but in our culture it’s much more obviously so than it used to be; which isn’t entirely bad, but it means that if we’re going to be serious about evangelism—which we need to be, because there are a lot of folks out there who need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ—we’ll have to take that alienness into account, and be willing to answer questions seriously and respectfully. We can’t assume people will understand us and how we talk and how we do things, because all too often, they won’t.Which doesn’t mean, I don’t think, that we need to stop being alien; I think by now we’ve pretty well demonstrated that that sort of approach doesn’t work. The truth is, as Charlie Peacock pointed out, ours is a strange language; but it’s strange for the same reason it’s powerful, because “it’s haunted by an even stranger truth.” We can’t assume people understand it, but we can’t set it aside, either; instead, we need to take the time and effort to teach it, because there are folks out there who need to learn it.HT: grains of truth
Prosthetics, athletics, and the human future
The cover article in the latest issue of ESPN Magazine is on the new generation of prosthetics and the difference they’re starting to make in the world of sports; not only are they becoming sophisticated enough to allow athletes who have had limbs amputated to compete on a level playing field with those who haven’t, some folks are beginning to be concerned that they might provide a competitive advantage. In a classic knee-jerk overreaction, sports governing bodies have begun to respond, not by developing intelligent guidelines for the use of prostheses, but by banning them. Clearly, this isn’t fair.
The bottom line is this: Sports do not need knee-jerk segregation, they need rational and fair regulation. Every organized sport begins the same way, with the creation of rules. We then establish technological limits, as with horsepower in auto racing, stick curvature in hockey, bike weight in cycling. As sports progress, those rules are sometimes altered. The USGA, for instance, responded to advances in club technology by legalizing metal heads in the early ’80s. In Chariots of Fire, the hero comes under heavy scrutiny for using his era’s version of steroids: a coach, at a time when the sport frowned upon outside assistance. So if we can adjust rules of sports to the time, why not for prosthetics? Create a panel of scientists and athletes, able-bodied and disabled, and ask them to determine what’s fair. One example: We know the maximum energy return of the human ankle, so that measurement could be the limit for the spring of a prosthetic ankle. That type of consideration is much fairer than simply locking out an entire group of athletes.
If prosthetic technology can be used to enable people to compete on an even footing (so to speak), then it should be allowed for that purpose; obviously, the rules need to be carefully tuned to be as fair as possible, but the relative difficulty of that task should not be an excuse for not attempting it.There is, however, a deeper concern here.
If anyone can predict what sports will look like in 2050, it’s [Hugh] Herr, who lost his legs 26 years ago in a climbing accident. Herr wears robotic limbs with motorized ankles and insists he doesn’t want his human legs back because soon they’ll be archaic. “People have always thought the human body is the ideal,” he says. “It’s not.” . . .Bioethicist Andy Miah predicts that one day, “it will be an imperative, and the responsible course of action, to reinforce one’s body through prosthesis when competing at an elite level.” In other words, all pros will have engineered body parts. History will view the steroids witch hunt as a silly attempt to keep athletes from using technology to help regenerate after a season of pain. “In many ways, we’re facing the advent of the bionic man,” says MLS commissioner Don Garber. “It’s something our industry has to start thinking about.”
This is worrisome talk. The desire for a superhuman/post-human existence has done a fair bit of damage over the years, and as science starts to make “improving” ourselves a near-future possibility, we need to be very, very careful with that. We simply are not wise enough or knowledgeable enough to make playing God with our bodies a good idea; and I say that not only as a Christian but as a longtime reader of science fiction. The downside of trying to re-engineer the human body is just too great; and honestly, I don’t think the upside is worth it. If we “improve” everyone, what have we really gained?; and if we only “improve” some, haven’t we only taken the inequalities among people that already exist and made them worse? Do we really need more reasons for some people to think they’re better than others? These are the things we need to think about very carefully before we start declaring our bodies obsolete.
The Ascension and the Second Coming
Over at The Gospel-Driven Church, Jared raised the question from N. T. Wright, “Is the Second Coming a Pauline Innovation?” Bishop Wright contends it is; I think, however, he’s mistaken, primarily because there’s an element missing in his reading of the Olivet Discourse: the Ascension. In John 14, Jesus bases his promise to his disciples on the fact that he’s going to leave them—in order to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, it’s necessary for him to go, and when the time comes, he’ll return to lead them (and us) home to be with him; in the meantime, he will send the Holy Spirit to be the one who walks alongside us. In the context of Hebrews’ teaching on Christ as our great high priest, it seems clear to me that this has to be a reference to the Ascension and the work Jesus is doing on our behalf now, and thus that his coming again must refer to his final return in glory, not to his resurrection from the dead.
Search and Rescue
(Psalm 24, Ezekiel 34:11-16; John 14:1-7)
“The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it”; the world, and those who live in it, belong to him. In the Hebrew, just to make the point as clear as possible, the opening words of the psalm are “The LORD’s”; we might render that, “The LORD’s, the earth is.” It’s an emphatic statement of the truth that is the foundation of everything else, all other truths, everything we believe: the Lord God rules over everything that is, because he owns all of it. There are no other claims to ownership, and no other claims to authority, that can stand against him; all such claims are secondary. The only valid earthly powers are those which God has established, which derive their authority from his authority, and they’re only fully valid as far as they acknowledge his authority and conform themselves to his will. As for our claims to ownership of this, or that, or the other thing, all are temporary, matters of convenience only, not reality. God owns everything always—he merely lets us use some of it for a little while, and he holds us accountable for how we use it. We are stewards, managers caring for someone else’s property, nothing more.
On what basis does God make such a sweeping claim? On the best basis of all—he made all of it, including all of us. We sometimes describe people as “self-made,” but in truth there’s no such thing; everyone is God-made. In our laws, we recognize intellectual property rights, through such things as copyright law; if you write a book, or a song, or a computer program, that’s yours, and you have the right to control what’s done with it, unless you sell those rights. You also, of course, have the right to profit from it, and anyone who deprives you of that profit without your consent is a thief and may be prosecuted as such. In a way, we might think of the universe as God’s intellectual property, because all of it began existence as a thought in his mind, and came into being when he spoke the word; nothing of anything would exist otherwise.
Now, one could scarcely blame such a powerful God if he didn’t care tuppence about us one way or the other. After all, to take a human analogy, how many human authors actually care about all the characters they write? The Scriptures make clear, however, that God does care about us, and indeed that he created the world primarily in order to create us, so that he could invite us into the circle of his love. Unfortunately, we fouled that up, rebelling against his authority and breaking our relationship with him; and so while God still seeks to draw us close, now there’s a problem.
“Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD?” writes the psalmist, “And who shall stand in his holy place?” Who is fit to enter the temple, the place on earth where God made his home, and to stand in his presence? It’s an important question, with a daunting answer: “Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who don’t put their trust in what is false”—this might refer to idols and idol-worship here; it might also mean “falsehood,” and thus people who trust in lies and dishonest schemes—“or swear deceitfully.” This is a description of a person who is innocent of wrong against God and against other people, who is committed to truth and free of any sort of deception, and who worships and serves God alone. That is the kind of person who is welcome in the presence of God.
Now, does that describe anyone you know? I’m sure you can think of people who are a lot like that, at least some of the time, but do you know anyone who’s all the way like that all of the time? It’s a high standard. In fact, it’s impossibly high. No one can live up to that. That’s why in the Old Testament, there was the whole sacrificial system we talked about last week; people sacrificed animals to pay the price for their sin, a few sins at a time, so that they would be pure enough for God for a little while. But that was only a temporary system at best, and a limited one, enabling people to do nothing more than go to the Temple to worship God from a distance; to get closer, to actually enter the presence of God, was still impossible, for all but the high priest once a year, and not even the high priest could do so with confidence and peace of mind. The barrier between us and God had been breached, but it still stood; to restore the relationship sin had destroyed required more. It required a permanent solution.
What it required was something unprecedented, and to that point unimagined, in human history. The human idea of religion always boils down in the end to us seeking God, which casts us in the role of independent agents using our own wisdom and strength to find and please whatever deity we identify; but the biblical picture is a very different one, indeed. So far from portraying us in this light, the Bible shows us as sheep, dumb fuzzies so focused on the grass we’re eating that we’re forever wandering away from God. Not only are we not capable of pleasing God on our own, not only are we unable to earn his favor, we aren’t even capable of guiding or protecting ourselves properly—we need his guidance and his care. We aren’t making our way toward heaven, we’re lost on the open hills, unsure which way is home, or how far we have to go to get there.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter, because it isn’t up to us; if we’re like sheep who’ve wandered away from the flock, our God is a good shepherd. Even after sending his people into exile as a judgment for their sins, scattering them by his own hand, he still promised to gather them back to himself and bring them back to their own good pasture. This he did, by his own hand, coming down himself as the man Jesus of Nazareth to seek and save the lost, to gather in the lost sheep of Israel—and not only of Israel, but through them, the whole world. He didn’t sit up in heaven waiting for humanity to work its way back to him, which is what the religions of the world expected; instead, he came down to us, going out on the hills as the good shepherd in a search-and-rescue mission to find his lost sheep, to bring back the strayed, to bind up the injured, and to strengthen the weak, fulfilling the promise he had made through Ezekiel.
And then he went home, to take the next step in that process. Note Jesus’ words in John 14—his promise to his disciples isn’t based on what he’s taught them so far, or even on his crucifixion and resurrection, but on the fact that he’s going to leave them. It’s his going away that makes the fulfillment of his promise possible.
Note why he goes. First, he says, “I go to prepare a place for you,” a place in “my Father’s house.” There are two aspects to this. One, from his place at the Father’s side, he would continue to prepare his disciples for their place in heaven, in the kingdom of God, through the Holy Spirit; this is the transforming work of God that we’ll talk about in a couple of weeks, which is the Spirit’s job. Christ, being human, could only be in one place at a time, but the Spirit can and does work in all of us at once, making us ready for our place in the kingdom. Beyond that, though, Jesus also returned to the Father’s side in order to make room for us there, to make a place for us. Some of that we talked about a few weeks ago, that in bringing our humanity into the presence of God, Christ made it possible for us to enter his presence in our full humanity; he made a place for us in that sense. Beyond that, we don’t know what exactly Jesus means by this, what exactly he’s doing for us in this respect; but we know his purpose, that he is making a place ready in heaven for each and every one of his people, that none of us might be left out.
Second, even as he goes to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house, Christ goes before us to make the way there. Jesus tells his disciples, “You know the way to the place where I am going,” and Thomas immediately shoots back, “No, we don’t. We don’t even know where you’re going—how can we know the way?” There’s the tendency here, as later, to pile on Thomas a bit for his question—sort of a “there goes Doubting Thomas again” reaction—but if you stop to think about it, he’s just being honest. The disciples know roughly what Jesus is talking about, but at the most basic level, they don’t know where he’s going, and they don’t know how to get there—because they can’t. None of us can, on our own; no human being is capable of knowing how to get to where God is, much less walking that road. It’s beyond our capacity. Thus Jesus responds to Thomas by saying, essentially, “Yes, you do, because you know me, and I am the way.” The only way to God the Father is through Jesus, who is the truth incarnate—the only visible revelation of the God who is the goal of the journey—and the only source of the true life possessed by all who stand in the presence of God. And so Jesus goes ahead of us, returning to heaven, in order to be the way for us to enter heaven as well.
The key in all of this is that when Jesus ascended, when he returned to heaven, he wasn’t leaving us, he was leading us, going ahead of us to prepare our way, to show us the way, to be our way. That’s why he says, “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am, there you may also be”; and that’s one reason why he sent us his Spirit, as the agent through whom he leads and guides us in this life, on the way toward the kingdom of his Father. Remember, “the earth is the LORD’s, and all that is in it,” and he’s actively at work in all of it—and that includes speaking to us and guiding us.
Most basically, of course, and most importantly, God speaks to us through the words he inspired, which include the record of the life he lived for us on this earth; it’s through the Bible first and foremost that Jesus leads us by his Spirit, as he continues to speak to us by his Spirit through these words, and he will not say anything that contradicts what he has already said. But that’s not the only way he speaks to us; it’s not the only way he guides us. He speaks through us sometimes as we talk with each other, making us agents of his wisdom; sometimes he may speak truth to us through people outside the church; he touches our minds and hearts through his creation, the natural world; and sometimes he speaks to us directly, in the back of our minds and the quiet of our hearts. I’ll never forget one time I was absolutely furious at someone—a couple someones, actually—and in my mind I heard Jesus say, “Show them grace.” I knew it was God, since it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and I protested angrily, “They don’t deserve it.” To which he responded, “I know. That’s why it’s called grace.”
To be sure, it’s not always easy to recognize his leading—though that time was pretty obvious—but even when we’re not sure how or where Christ is leading us, we can always trust that he is, and that he’s good enough at what he’s doing that he won’t foul it up. We simply need to spend time reading his word, since it’s the main way we come to know him and recognize his voice, and in prayer—not just talking to him, though that’s important, but spending time being silent, listening for his voice—so that we learn to know him when he speaks; and we need to learn to expect him to speak, because he is at work leading us by his Spirit every day, in every moment. Christ came down to seek us out in our sin and rescue us from the power of death, and he’s busy right now bringing us home; and what he starts, he finishes. Period.
Song of the Week
Flash
I’ll chase the light at four o’clock
Until I glow, until I know
I’m draped in color like the trees;
It’s beautiful to me.I stare into the setting sun
On 35, until I find
A way to let it seep into my soul;
It’s beautiful to me.But You call me with a light more bright than anything I’ve ever seen—Flash for a million miles or more
Until what is dead is swallowed by life;
Flash for a million miles or more
Until my whole life is clothed in eternal light.Tonight the stars are whispering
A mystery while we sleep—
It’s more than just another wish for peace;
It’s beautiful to me.But You call me with a light more bright than anything I’ve ever seen—Chorus
Bridge
In a moment we’ll all be changed,
And this dim reflection will fade away
Compared to the light that You offer us
And the glory we’ll see on Your face.
You’re beautiful to me; You’re beautiful to me.ChorusWords and music: Allison Ogren
© 1999 Photon Music
From the album Follow the Narrow, by Clear
Don’t be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”
So says 1 Corinthians 15:33; and if there’s a lesson from the Obama presidential campaign, increasingly, that would seem to be it. First we heard about Antoin “Tony” Rezko, and friends of Rezko’s like Nadhmi Auchi; then we learned about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright (anyone wanting additional context can find it here); then some folks started complaining about another black South Side pastor with whom Barack Obama is associated, the Rev. James T. Meeks; then it turns out Sen. Obama is good pals with founding members of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn. Sen. Obama tried to brush that off by saying, in essence, that their bad side was ancient history, and now they’re mainstream. Unfortunately, given these audio clips and these video clips of Ayers and Dohrn (to say nothing of Ayers’ blog), that’s not very encouraging. If this is Sen. Obama’s idea of “mainstream,” we have reason to worry. No, no one accuses him of holding the exact views of Ayers and Dohrn or the Rev. Wright; but as Mark Steyn says, “this is the pool he swims in”. Then, finally, Sen. Obama received a new endorsement—from Hamas; and while he’s tried to minimize that by denouncing Hamas, John McCain has a good point: that doesn’t mean much when Sen. Obama has already said he’ll meet unconditionally with the Iranian government, which controls Hamas.
No one denies Barack Obama is a good man; but the company he keeps is dragging him down.
Esteem for US rises in Asia, thanks to Iraq war
Seems counterintuitive to an American ear, given the dominant strain of reporting around here, but so says The Australian, which is certainly closer to the issue than we are. The article’s actually based on the work of an American analyst, Mike Green, who specializes in NE Asia, but the article offers independent support (pointing out along the way that, against the narrative that “the world hates us because we’re in Iraq/supporting Israel/etc.,” the last couple years have seen the election of a new wave of pro-US leaders in countries like France, Germany, South Korea and Australia. It’s an interesting and encouraging piece.
HT: Power Line
Iraq rising
However much the MSM tries to spin things to the contrary, the news from Iraq is good and getting better. It’s getting so if Obama wins, he won’t bring the troops home, he’ll just get more favorable coverage and take credit for the victory. The Washington Post declared Basra a victory for Moqtada al’Sadr, but in fact it was al-Sadr who lost and is now backing down; now, because Nuri al’Maliki stood up to his fellow Shiites, Iraq’s largest Sunni party has come back into the government, Iraqis as a whole have rallied around the Prime Minister, and the government has earned considerable respect around the Muslim world. The Iraqi Security Forces performed well on the whole, and al’Maliki is now stronger at home and abroad than he was before, with greater credibility in dealing with other internal challenges, such as al’Qaeda holdouts in the Mosul area. Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times points out, the Muslim world is turning decisively on al’Qaeda; in part, that’s the result of the heavy damage we’ve done them, and in part, they’ve done it to themselves trying to respond to us. Peter Wehner is right: though our struggle isn’t over, we’ve made “enormous and heartening progress.”
The clans of Yale and the tribes of America
In the course of reading Redstate.com’s analysis of the Philly vote in this week’s Pennsylvania primary (an analysis which convinces me that, despite the smooth assurances that the Democratic coalition will come back together just the same as always once Sen. Obama limps to the finish line and finally secures the nomination, the Obama-McCain general election is going to look very different from what we’ve been used to seeing lately), I found a link to an old piece in the Village Voice written by Michael Gecan (a community organizer in the footsteps of Saul Alinsky, as Sen. Obama was) titled “The Tribes of Yale.” It’s a fascinating piece of cultural-political analysis; and if Gecan’s assertion that conservative political leaders “don’t know what in the world—in the bigger, broader world where most moderate Americans live and work, play and pray, and try to raise their kids—they are for” is inaccurate, as I’m quite sure it is, I think his broader argument that they’re driven more by what they’re against than by what they’re for is thought-provoking, especially in the context of his overall understanding of the liberal/conservative cultural clash. Even if his conclusions are incorrect, the story he tells is an important one, I think, for those who would seek to understand American politics in the first decade of the third millennium AD.
All aboard!
Ready to Ride
Sixth Street, sun is going down;
Pavement’s cool underneath.
A vagrant, so they say in town;
Seems like mercy can’t compete.Sleeping in a doorway
Near the docks of Oyster Bay.
Thirteen years of carrying shame,
Never hearing the voice of the One who took his blame.
A whisper—
He raised his head . . .Surrendered out, do you believe,
Are you ready to ride the train?
Abandoned not by love, you’ll see,
If you’re ready to ride.A one-piece paper suitcase;
A past whose future was foretold.
A life not made for dying;
Instead the mystery began to unfold.
Unfolding—
He raised his head . . .Chorus
Bridge
Born into despair an orphan child—
Will You care for me?
And like the train that saved me,
Adopted in by love eternally.Opening His arms, He wants you rich, you poor, you black, you white;
Receive His love that runs so deep and high and long and wide.ChorusWords and music: Matt Berry
© 1998 Photon Music
From the album Clear, by Clear
My thanks to Bill for directing my attention to this song; he posted the video and got the song stuck in my head, so I went out and bought the CD (which was dirt cheap on SecondSpin, at least). I’ve been thinking about the lyrics off and on ever since. It’s not the greatest lyric I’ve ever run across (it seems to me the bridge gets a little muddled for a moment), but I love the song’s central image, which I think the video captures quite well. In particular, I think there are two things this lyric gets at which we too often forget.One, we are the vagrant in the face of God’s mercy and grace; as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, we are the beggars at the foot of God’s door. We none of us earn our way to God; we can only accept his unearned (and too often unwelcome) invitation. By mercy and that alone we live.Two, God’s invitation to us isn’t to some private little one-on-one thing, it’s to ride the train. When you get on the train, you share the journey with whoever else is on there, and the train goes where it’s going to go; you have no control over where it’s going—that was determined by the one who set the route for the rails—or who your companions are. You’re all in the journey together; your only choice is to take it or get off. It seems to me that’s a wonderful metaphor for the life of faith. It’s not like driving our own car, because we don’t have the freedom to pick the route or set our own speed—God does that—or to make the journey on our own, because we become fellow travelers with the rest of the people of God, whether we always appreciate that fact or not. The train, the church, is going, God knows who and where and why and how fast, and he simply invites us to climb aboard and take our part in what he already has in process.”The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace . . .”