Song for the Christmas season

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I don’t care for most Christmas songs written during the last century or so, but there are exceptions; this year, we received a copy of Carolyn Arends’ Christmas: An Irrational Season, and added a few more to the list. This one’s my favorite, I think.

Come and SeeHave you heard, have you heard,
All the rumors are true.
Spread the word, spread the word,
This is such good news:
The dream is not a dream anymore;
Nothing is the same as before.Come and see, come and see,
He is lying in the straw;
He’s a new baby boy
Who’s the hope of us all.
Come and hear, come and hear—
It’s a sound both sweet and strange:
It’s the great love of God
In the cry of a babe.
It’s the great love of God
In the cry of a babe.See the star, see the star,
It will light our way;
Hear the song, hear the song,
Hurry to the place,
‘Cause if his mama says that it’s alright,
We can see the face of God tonight.ChorusSeeing is believing, yeah;
Believing is seeing, yeah . . .ChorusWords and music: Carolyn Arends
© 2004 Running Arends Music
From the album Christmas: An Irrational Season, by Carolyn Arends

The Great Counter-Attack

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Even people who couldn’t tell George Santayana from Carlos Santana are familiar with some form of his dictum that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Like most famous comments, it’s been overplayed, and many people tend to quote it glibly, without thinking about it; but it’s still an important warning of the consequences of failing to understand our history. To this, we might add that those who don’t remember the past will have no sense of perspective about the present.

I was reminded of that truth recently in reading the novelist Sandra Dallas’ review of the book Verne Sankey: America’s First Public Enemy, by South Dakota circuit judge Timothy Bjorkman. As the title indicates, Sankey was the first person ever to be named Public Enemy #1 by the FBI, “because he was the first to realize that in the wake of the Lindbergh baby abduction, kidnapping could be a lucrative gig”; he’s little remembered today because he wasn’t flashy, while so many of his criminal contemporaries were. As Ms. Dallas writes, “This was the Great Depression, when the rich were held in low esteem and the robbers and others who preyed on them were rock stars, glorified by the press. It was the era of Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger and Machine-Gun Kelly.” That set me thinking, because there’s much complaint in certain quarters about the glorification of street thugs by segments of American culture—which I certainly agree is a bad thing; but it’s often joined to the assumption that America is in decline from some past golden age when these things didn’t happen, and that just isn’t true. One might, I suppose, argue that the thugs some people glorify these days lack the style of past generations of celebrity criminals; but if we’re honest, we have to admit they’re really very little different.

The reason Santayana’s comment is largely correct is that if we don’t understand our past, we really can’t understand our present, either—which leaves us vulnerable to those who would use a skewed picture of the past against us. Granted, a truly unbiased understanding of history is probably beyond our grasp, but we need to get as close as we can in order to defend ourselves against those who interpret it to serve their own agendas (whatever those might be).

Perhaps the most significant example of this nowadays is in regard to Islam, where the Crusades are often presented as a great crime by Christendom against an unoffending Moslem world, launched for no apparent reason. The truth of the matter is far different. As Hugh Kennedy shows in his book The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, the early 7th century AD saw a new propulsive force break into world history: the conquering armies of Islam. Within the first hundred years, they had spread across most of the Christian world, and as Dr. Philip Jenkins notes in his excellent review in Christianity Today, “Before the Crusades”, this “tore Christianity from its roots, cultural, geographical, and linguistic.” The Islamic conquests essentially created the Western Christianity we now know, as the church was forcibly disconnected from its Asian heritage and character; and the Muslim armies didn’t stop there, occupying most of Spain, invading Italy and the Balkans, and even reaching as far as the gates of Vienna.

However wrong the Crusades went over time (such as the Fourth Crusade, which conquered and sacked not Muslim Jerusalem but Orthodox Constantinople, in whose defense the First Crusade had been launched), they began as a defensive action, a grand counter-attack intended to roll back the Muslim armies before they conquered all of Europe. In the end, they didn’t succeed; it would not be until the breaking of Ottoman power at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 that the tide of Islamic conquest would finally turn for good. Still, though we must never gloss over all the wrongs committed by Crusaders, it’s important to understand that the Crusades as such were an eminently justifiable military and cultural response to Islamic military aggression; they were a counter-attack launched in a great war begun by the other side.

Settling in

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Well, we started moving into our house on the 11th, and I started here at the church on the 16th, and now enough stuff is out of boxes and put away that it’s possible to get around; I still have a lot of books to get organized on my office shelves, but it’s beginning to look like someone actually works here. I keep getting sidetracked, though. This morning I pulled some of Stan Grenz‘ books out of a pile and put them in their place, and then I just sat down and looked at them for a while, and remembered. I can still feel the shock I felt in March 2005 when I was surfing the Web and tripped over the fact that he had died the day before, of a dissecting brain aneurysm. I can’t claim any sort of special relationship with him or his family; he was one of my favorite professors at Regent/Carey, and I met his wife Edna on a couple of occasions around the school, but if he’d been asked to make a list of his favorite students, I have no reason to think I’d have been on it. He was just good to all of us, that’s all, and I learned a tremendous amount from him, and enjoyed him greatly as a professor; you never quite knew what was going to happen when you walked into his classroom. He might be sitting there with his guitar, or the TV might be set up for Star Trek (he was a big Trekkie) or X-Files, or it might be a theological evaluation of a Gloria Estefan song. I won’t say anything was possible, but he was never completely predictable, either.

And while I don’t want to get into the arguments back and forth over the emerging church (at least, not today, anyway), I do want to say this. Dr. Grenz’ name is conjured a lot these days in those arguments, and he’s criticized pretty harshly by those fighting the emerging church; and I don’t recognize the straw man they’re holding up. The Stan Grenz they attack and vilify just doesn’t sound all that much like the one under whom I studied. It’s too bad; I learned a great deal from him, and I think those who consider him their opponent probably could too.

On the move

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The movers are here early this morning. They’ve already gotten started (they were here Saturday), and the hope is to get most of the packing done today; I think the computer will be up until Wednesday (they have to be down in Denver Tuesday), but I’m not sure. In any case, the roots are coming up, and we’ll be transplanting soon.

Five things I’m thankful for

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bearing in mind that “the best things in life aren’t things” . . .

For starters, and by way of introduction to this post, I’m thankful for Hap, who tagged me with this meme. Mind you, that’s not the reason I’m thankful for her, though it isn’t a bad thing, either. She’s been a dear, firm friend for—what are we on to now, fourteen years? a good chunk of my life, anyway—a woman steeped in the presence of God who’s as faithful as the sunrise and as true as eternity, and after my family, one of the people I love most on this planet. Glad you didn’t go to Spring Arbor, sis. 🙂

Carrying on, in reverse order . . .

Bronwyn, my youngest, currently snuggling on Daddy’s lap, chattering at me unintelligibly and pretending to drink water out of the cup in her older sister’s ball-and-cup toy. Almost 20 months and a complete Chaos Child, she’s also a complete charmer and something of a clown; I know she gets away with more than her sisters did because of it, but sometimes it’s hard to help.

Rebekah, my middle daughter—the original Chaos Child, she’s four now and more manageable, since she can be reasoned with (not that she always buys the reason). Absolutely fearless about most things, which is a good corrective and counterbalance to her older sister, she’s our rampant extrovert. We spent an hour or so one night standing in the hallway of a hotel in Ogallala, NE because of a tornado warning; when Rebekah wasn’t running full-tilt up and down the hall, she was walking up to total strangers, touching their elbows and asking them all sorts of questions. (Fortunately, they were all gracious about it.) She just loves everyone, and assumes they’ll all love her too.

Lydia, my oldest, my miracle child. Her delivery was a crisis, and then she needed an operation when she was two days old (albeit a minor one, if any surgery on a newborn can truly be called minor), so we kept her very close for the first few months; it still seems a little strange, when I think about it, that that was seven years ago. She’s an introvert, like both her parents (though oddly enough, our only one), but fortunately not too shy—certainly much less so than I was at her age. All our girls ask lots of questions, but she set the standard (and still does). She’s in first grade and absolutely loves school—she can be running a fever and throwing up, and she’s crying that she has to stay home; it no doubt helped that she had a certifiable genius for a kindergarten teacher (thank you, Jane Hill), but by nature, she’s the sort of kid who goes through life with her nose in a book. She’s a loving, generous, helpful child—even with her younger sisters, usually. 🙂

And finally, most of all, my wife Sara. Ten years is a pretty good start. I am richly, deeply blessed by her love, her wisdom, her insight, her care, her great gifts, her deep and strong relationship with God (even through the hard times we’ve had here) . . . I am blessed to know and love her, and to be known and loved in return. (I should note, she’s one of the reasons I’m thankful for Hap—who introduced us. 🙂 )

Anyway, I tag the Thinklings, both as a whole and in part. Y’all didn’t like the last meme, guys, but you should like this one.

The Christian discipline of forgiveness

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I’ve been thinking, periodically, about the whole question of repentance and forgiveness ever since Hap’s post a couple months ago on the Emerging Women blog; and so I was interested, in dropping in on Dr. Stackhouse’s blog this morning, to see that he began his reflections on Advent this year with that very theme. It’s supposed to be the first post in a two-part series; the second part isn’t up yet, but there’s more than enough to think about already. I particularly appreciated this section:

Repenting and forgiving are not pretending the past didn’t happen and that what seemed evil is somehow okay. Repentance and forgiveness name what was wrong as wrong. If it weren’t wrong, it wouldn’t need repenting of and forgiving! Repentance and forgiveness also do not pretend the future will be sunny and that there will be no repetition of wrong. You may have noticed that people generally don’t become perfect after a single round of repentance and forgiveness. Jesus tells us to forgive the same person seven times in a single day to make hyperbolically clear that a single episode of repentance and forgiveness may not be the end of it.

and this one:

To forgive the offender is to give a great gift. It cuts the offender free from the Jacob Marley-like shackles of past sins. It gives the offender a fresh start. It does not “re-member” the past sins by repeatedly bringing them up again and fastening them afresh to the present person. It leaves the past in the past, and lets people go ahead into the future. But “forgive and forget” is bad advice, and on two counts. First, one can’t do it. Second, one shouldn’t. Refusing to pretend as if the past didn’t happen instead helps us act realistically to maximize shalom for everyone involved.

I like that—remembering as “re-membering,” taking the the wrongs others have done us in the past and giving them new bodies (as it were) in the present, giving them new life to cause hurt all over again. Thus Dr. Stackhouse concludes,

So let us repent and let us forgive, and neither forget nor re-member. In that paradox is the path of a hopeful, healthful future.

That’s the idea in a nutshell, except that I don’t think it’s a paradox, really, just a middle way: the way of acknowledging the past but not living there, letting it be the past and not the present.

Harold O. J. Brown, RIP

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Harold O. J. Brown wasn’t one of this country’s most famous evangelicals, and I don’t recall Time putting him on its list of the 25 most influential; but he may well have been one of its most important. A multivalent scholar, writer and teacher, he had a remarkable career, but it’s instructive that those who knew him were less impressed by what he had accomplished than by who he was in Christ. In particular, it’s worth noting that he never had the high public profile of a Jerry Falwell or a Ted Haggard, not because he lacked the gifts—he was a prodigiously gifted man—but because he never wanted it.

Of the various eulogies for the Rev. Dr. Brown, the one I’ve appreciated the most has been this one, from S. M. Hutchens in the latest Touchstone. Since it isn’t available on their website, I reproduce it (by permission) here in its entirety.

At a gathering of Harold O. J. Brown’s friends after the memorial service in his honor, William D. Delahoyde, a Raleigh attorney and protégé from his Deerfield days, rose to state what I am sure was a consensus: While it was doubtful his passing would be noted by the general media, most of us there thought that in knowing him we had a brush with greatness.In that company the observation bore a peculiar taste and weight, for the people with whom I had been conversing at the obsequies, especially the older ones who had known him for many years, were not the sort for whom the attribution would pass easily.Many of them were, after all, members of America’s nobility, old Harvard grads who knew, and often were on familiar terms with, people whom most of us have only read about. Listening to them reminisce was like an evening spent in a well-marked part of my library—but here the books were alive.All of us knew Joe as a brilliant intellect: the valedictorian of a Jesuit high school who took his degree in Germanic Languages and Literature from Harvard College magna cum laude, who absent-mindedly forgot that he had been accepted at the Medical School, instead studying theology on the continent on Fulbright and Danforth fellowships, returning to Harvard after and Evangelical conversion in Germany to take his doctorate in Reformation history under George Hunston Williams. He lectured or conversed in German, French, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Hindi, and several other languages.Like Max Weber, who taught himself Russian to pass the time during a week of convalescence, Joe’s talent for language and the breadth of his literary knowledge were legendary among those who knew him. Conspicuous at the gathering were any members of his Harvard rowing crews, whom he had coached to notable victories, including first-place cups at the Henley Royal Regatta.Most of us there had met him later than the Harvard days, and heard of all this as the prelude to a distinguishe pastoral, teaching, and journalistic career with InterVarsity in Europe, Park Street Church in Boston, Yeotmal Seminary in India, Christianity Today, Trinity-Deerfield, the Religion and Society Report, and finally Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte.A strong Protestant, Joe was a friend of Christians wherever he found them, including us at Touchstone. He wrote several pieces for the magazine, and served as one of the principal speakers at the Rose Hill conference in 1995.He was a particularly bold (sometimes to the point of folly) mountain climber, ran—or if he had to, walked—marathons, despite being plagued with the congenital lower-spine deformity that caused his distinctive posture and gait. He was a loving and attentive husband to Grace—a redoubtable counterpart, fully as remarkable in her way as he was in his—and father to Cynthia and Peter. While perhaps most widely known for his political and intellectual leadership in the pro-life movement, he was in scores of individual lives a paraclete who by dint of his gentle attention and concern became Kierkegaard’s pinch of spice that made all the difference.But this suffices to represent his phenomenal accomplishment. Joe was embarrassed by such notice, and on his deathbed, Bill Delahoyde told us, he emphatically said—or rather wrote, for he could no longer speak—that he did not see in himself the man that others saw in him. His childhood and early family life, of which he spoke little, was odd and less than satisfactory, and what he became cannot be explained except through the glass of redemption. Here, to be sure, was great native ability and desire to achieve, energized by a strong sense of noblesse oblige, and a desire to love so that he might be loved in return.This may become the stuff of greatness, but on reflection I think this is perhaps not really what we are speaking of here. The proper word is “glory,” in which Joe’s observation about what he could not see in himself merges into what he did see in Another, and which we beheld in him.This glory was manifest in a humility that dispersed its gifts—which in others would have gone into the construction of a world-historical character—among his friends as the animating force behind a task to complete. His kenosis was not carried out simply in consent to a divine mission to the world, but in befriending us—making himself of minor repute principally by concentration on the cultivation of others. Thus we beheld his glory, but in its very revelation it was hidden, and so it is with the best of his servants, who, taught in his school and following his example, tend to spend their lives giving away what “great” men have so often learned to keep for themselves.Harold O. J. Brown, whose view of his work at the end of his life echoed that of Thomas Aquinas, saw no greatness in himself because he had lived long in the shadow of his Master, simply doing for others what had been done for him. But he will be happy, I think, when his friends rise up to say that they saw in this the reflected glory of the Lord.

Christian escapism

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I have Hap to thank for pointing me to ASBO Jesus, Jon Birch’s strange, often fascinating, and frequently very funny comic blog. (I have Birch to thank for the following explanation: “btw. for the non british among you… an ‘asbo’ is an ‘anti-social behaviour order’… the courts here award them to people who are deemed to be constant trouble in their neighbourhoods… presumably according to their neighbours!”) I’ve appreciated any number of his comics, but I especially like this one, because I too have a problem with the whole idea of the “Rapture.” I agree with Birch that it’s bad theology, though we can argue that at another time; more than that, it’s bad exegesis.

I imagine that statement will surprise some people, who are no doubt already flipping to 1 Thessalonians 4 to prove me wrong. I can hear them now: “See, it says, ‘The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.’ See, there’s the Rapture right there!” Fine, except . . . it isn’t. Does that text say the Lord will return? Yes. Does it say we’ll all meet him in the air? Yes. But look closely and notice what it doesn’t say: which direction we’ll go from there. The assumption behind the idea of the Rapture is that Jesus will go back to heaven for a while and we’ll go with him—but the Scripture doesn’t actually say that. It’s only an assumption.

Now, I can predict the most likely rejoinder here: “It’s obvious!” Except, once you get outside the assumptions of our culture, it isn’t. To understand what’s really going on in 1 Thessalonians, remember the parallels between this passage and the wedding parables of Jesus. In several places, Jesus compares those waiting for his return to people waiting for the bridegroom. Thus for instance we have the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, in Matthew 25. In that parable, the crisis comes for the foolish bridesmaids when the cry comes, “Here comes the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!” Here’s the parallel to 1 Thessalonians 4: the Lord, the Bridegroom, returns, and we go out to meet him and escort him to the house.

In other words, the coming of Christ Paul talks about isn’t a halfway coming to pick us up and leave the rest of the world to rot; it’s his final return to earth, and we will go out as the wedding party to escort him in. There’s no Rapture in this passage, no “Get Out of Trouble Free” card; only our wishful thinking makes it so.

Update: OK, this follow-on of Birch’s really cracked me up.

Thank God for God (a Thanksgiving meditation)

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“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there;
the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” —Job 1:21
During the time of Napoleon’s reign in France, there was a political prisoner by the name of Charnet. That is to say, there was a man named Charnet who had unintentionally offended the emperor by some remark or another and been thrown in prison to rot. As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”

But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight. Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow. Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower. Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”

The guards saw what was happening; they talked about it amongst themselves, they told their wives, and the story spread, until finally somehow it came to the ears of the Empress Josephine. The story moved her, and she became so convinced that no man who loved a flower in this way could be dangerous that she appealed to Napoleon, and persuaded her husband to relent and set Charnet free. When he left his cell, he took the little flower with him in a little flowerpot, and on the pot he wrote Matthew 6:30: “If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith?”

There’s a lesson in Charnet’s story—the lesson of Job, I think. I struggled for years to make sense of that verse, until I found the key in an observation made by Rev. Wayne Brouwer, a Christian Reformed pastor in Holland, Michigan. Rev. Brouwer, writing on Psalm 22, muses, “Maybe it’s not that believers are grateful to God but that those who are grateful to God are the ones who truly believe him. Only those of us who are truly thankful are able to ride out the storms of life which might otherwise destroy us. Only those who have an attitude of gratitude know what it means to believe.” In other words, the root of our faith is gratitude.

We talk about the patience of Job, but in reality Job showed very little patience; what he did show was great faith, and that faith was firmly rooted in his determination to remain grateful for all the Lord had given him despite his losses. Thus he can say here, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”; thus he can affirm at another point, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth . . . in my flesh I shall see God.” In the same way, once Charnet found something for which to be thankful, that little plant struggling through the hard, dry earth, he found Someone to thank, and his faith grew back along with that little plant. Before that point, faith was impossible for him, because there was no root to sustain it.

If our gratitude depends on the number of our gifts exceeding a certain critical mass, if we miss the Giver for the gifts, then we have a shallow faith indeed. The example of Job calls us to a deeper gratitude, and a deeper faith, a faith that is able to see God and give thanks even when things aren’t going well. This is the faith the poet Joyce Kilmer expressed when he wrote, “Thank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife . . ./Thank God for the stress and the pain of life./And, oh, thank God for God.” That’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? Thank God for God. Thank God, as Psalm 23 does, that even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he is there with us. Thank God, as Psalm 22 does, that he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted. Thank God, as Job teaches us, that we don’t have to bury our grief and anger, but can bring them to God honestly; for Job challenges God fiercely, but his challenge is rooted in his faith, and so at the end God says of him, “He is my servant, and he has spoken of me what is right.” Thank God for God, because that is the root and beginning of faith; to quote Wayne Brouwer again, “Only the grateful believe, and faith itself which seems to soar in times of prosperity needs the strength of thankfulness to carry it through the dark night of the soul.”

One man who well knew the truth of this was Martin Rinkard, a Lutheran who was the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. This was the time of the Thirty Years’ War, and in that year Eilenberg was attacked three different times. When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees. Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkard’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day. Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster. But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinker wrote these words:

Now Thank We All Our GodNow thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms,
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.O may this bounteous God
Through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts
And blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in his grace,
And guide us when perplexed,
And free us from all ills
In this world and the next.All praise and thanks to God
The Father now be given,
The Son, and Him who reigns
With them in highest heaven,
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.Words: Martin Rinkart; translated by Catherine Winkworth
Music: Johann Crüger
NUN DANKET, 6.7.6.7.6.6.6.6.

Thank God for God. Only the grateful believe.

One other hymn

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My wife argued me into posting this—it’s a communion hymn I wrote a while back—thinking that there might be folks out there who’d want to use it. For whatever it might be worth, it is available to use by permission; just send an e-mail to the address in my profile or post a comment here if you happen to be interested. (If you aren’t familiar with the tune to which I’ve set the text, the link is below.)

Jesus Calls Us to His TableJesus calls us to his table,
Here to celebrate the feast;
He invites us to remember
How from sin we were released.
Here he calls us to communion
With each other in his name,
And assures us of the coming
Of the kingdom he proclaimed.

We remember Christ descended
To the human life we share;
We remember how we led him
To the cross and nailed him there.
We remember how he conquered
Death by rising from the grave;
We remember that he did this
All for us he came to save.

So we gather at the table
Joined together hand in hand,
Men and women of all races,
From all times and every land.
We assemble as a body,
Joined in Christ who is our Head,
Knowing he is with us always,
And in him our souls are fed.

Thus we stand in hope of glory,
Of the dawning of the day
When we’ll see God’s kingdom fully,
All his saints, in bright array.
Then we’ll gather at his table,
There invited by his grace,
And in wonder, as he promised,
See our Savior face to face. Words: Robert J. A. Harrison, 2006
Music: Attributed to Benjamin Franklin White; from The Sacred Harp, 1844
BEACH SPRING, 8.7.8.7.D