Bumper-sticker social work

Posted on by | No Comments

Actually, technically speaking, it wasn’t a bumper sticker—it was a license-plate frame—but it’s a distinction without a difference. I followed this car for quite a while yesterday before I noticed the message: “PARENTS: PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT”—an injunction that assumes an awful lot. OK, so it’s better that people who owe child support pay it, but is that really the message people need to hear? Why assume the divorce and just focus on mitigating the consequences? Wouldn’t it be better to say “WORK ON YOUR MARRIAGE” or “BLESS YOUR MARRIAGE” or even (if you want to stick with the original hectoring tone) just “DON’T GET DIVORCED”?

“PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT” asks nothing of people but that they write a check once a month. A message suggesting they do what it takes to avoid getting divorced in the first place asks considerably more—things like humility, self-denial, repentance, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, and putting someone else ahead of oneself and one’s own desires. The real problem isn’t the percentage of people who pay child support, as significant as that is—it’s the percentage of people who think divorce is all about them and what they want, and who seek their own desires at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, once you start challenging that mindset, you don’t just make other people uncomfortable—you put yourself on the spot, too, because you’re challenging the whole cultural system of which you’re a part; it makes it a lot harder to get the frisson of superiority that “PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT” can give you effortlessly. In asking something meaningful of others, after all, you inevitably require something meaningful of yourself as well.

(To be sure, there are those who would avoid getting divorced if they could, but can’t, because the divorce is driven by their spouse’s behavior and decisions. They’re victims of the problem, not the problem; this reality doesn’t make identifying the true problem any less important.)

Draw Near

Posted on by | No Comments

(Ezekiel 36:24-28; Hebrews 10:19-25)

Carpe diem. As you probably know, it’s a Latin phrase usually translated “Seize the day”; I first heard it in high school when they had us watch Dead Poets Society. Which is fitting, since the line comes from one of the great dead poets, the Roman Horace, who ended one of his odes by advising, “Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.” Now, Horace’s idea was “Sit back, drink your wine, and don’t hope for much,” but the insight is sound, and one which we also find in the Jewish wisdom tradition. In the Pirke’ Abot, a collection of ethical teachings included in the Talmud, we find this prodding question: “If not now, when?” The future is not yours to rely on; it’s not even yours to know. James draws on this when he says in chapter 4, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. . . . Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live, and also do this or that.’”

Now, of course, that’s not to say that you should do everything you get a chance to do; some things aren’t really opportunities, and others aren’t good ones. But when something truly good comes along, we need to pursue it. It’s easy not to do so, out of fear, or uncertainty, or doubt, or lethargy, or simply because we’re otherwise occupied—but when there’s a chance not to be missed, don’t miss it, and don’t figure you’ll be able to take it later, because later might never come. Take the opportunity. Seize the day.

That’s the core of Hebrews’ point here. The author has argued at great length that Jesus has fulfilled the purpose of the law and replaced all the priests because he has given us true salvation and opened a way for us through the curtain that separated us from the presence of God—indeed, he has become that way for us, he is the way, and he is the door—and if that’s true, then what’s the application? Jesus has opened the way for you—take advantage! You have a great high priest in whom all your sins are forgiven—don’t be afraid! You are invited to come freely into the presence of the living God—so come! Approach God! Draw near! Don’t be afraid—in Jesus you have been washed, you have been purified, you are forgiven! God has put a new heart and a new spirit within you—his Spirit—he’s renewing you from the inside out. No matter what you’ve done, God sees you in Jesus, as he’s making you to be, and he loves you. Come to him, come close to him, with full confidence and trust, for you are welcome.

This is an invitation that should give us heart and courage, and I suspect it’s one that many of us can’t hear too often. There are some folks, certainly, who are quite sure they’re just wonderful—I’ve even known a few who were rather obnoxious about it; but for those of us for whom self-doubt is a familiar companion, this is a particular blessing. It’s very reassuring to know that it’s not about self-esteem or self-worth or believing in ourselves, all of which place a great weight squarely on our shoulders; rather, it’s about believing in God and his faithfulness and the power of what Jesus has done for us, and knowing that it doesn’t matter how we feel: whether we’re up or down and whatever the Devil may be whispering in our ears, Jesus saved us, God loves us, and we are his.

Which should give us courage to hold fast to our hope in Christ, and to our open declaration of that hope—which of course we must do if we are to draw near to God through him. If we begin to lose hope, or if we become ashamed to proclaim it, then we will naturally look for alternatives, and we will not draw near to God through Christ; but we have reason to be bold, for our hope is sure and certain. We have every reason for confidence in the faithfulness of God, because we have seen it in Jesus; we have every reason to be confident that Jesus is enough, because he has already done far more than we could ever have imagined. And we have every reason to proudly proclaim our hope to all who will listen, and to keep proclaiming it even when times get hard, even when we hurt, and even when there is opposition, because Jesus has never failed us yet. He doesn’t make the road easy, but if we hang on tight to him, he always leads us through.

Of course, doing that can be easier said than done, especially if we’re trying to do it alone. The reality that underlies the power and value of Alcoholics Anonymous and other such groups—one reality, anyway—is that it’s far, far easier to stay on the right road if we have others we care about who are walking it with us; and contrariwise, we’re a lot likelier to get ourselves into trouble if we’re hanging out with others who are going wrong. We need people around us who will spur us on to grow in love and to express that love in good works, and we need to do the same for them in turn. We need, we all need, that constant encouragement and support and exhortation if we’re going to draw near to God the way we should and grow in Christ the way he wants us to.

Now, can I just say, I love the way the author puts this here? I love the NIV’s translation, too. The word we have here in the Greek is the word from which we get our English word “paroxysm,” and it usually refers to intense anger; I’ve been told that the verb form is the one that would be used of prodding an ox along, and if they’d had spurs in those days, I would imagine it would have been used for spurring a horse, too. “Poke one another with a sharp stick to love and good deeds” just isn’t something most people would think to find in the Bible, but that’s basically the idea here, and for good reason: it’s something we need to hear.

We tend to be reluctant to provoke people, we hesitate to challenge others, because we’re afraid of the reactions we’ll get; we convince ourselves it’s not important enough to deal with. Instead, we go and complain to other people, which might relieve our stress a little but otherwise just makes things worse. The reality is, though, that we all need to be challenged at times, and we all have things we need to be called on; if you see something spiritually unhealthy in my life, or someone else’s—I’m not just talking about something you find personally irritating, but something sinful—then you need to go and do a little provoking to love and good deeds. And on the flip side, if someone comes up to you and says, “I see something in your life that’s getting in the way of your relationship with God,” be provoked—but not to anger. Rather, listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through that person, and let the Spirit provoke you toward Jesus.

For this reason, Hebrews says, we need to keep meeting together. I’m sure you’ve heard people say, “I don’t need to go to church to worship God, I can worship him anywhere”; I got that one a lot in Colorado, with people insisting they could worship God better hiking in the mountains or out on the lakes than in some building. There’s truth to that—though in my experience, most folks who say that are not in fact worshiping God when they go have fun, but whatever—but it’s not really on point, for two reasons. One, worshiping God together as a part of his body is different from worshiping him when we’re by ourselves, and we need both to be healthy—if the only time you worship is here on Sunday mornings, that’s not good either. And two, our gatherings are about more than just worship and teaching, they’re about living into one another’s lives, so that we have the time and opportunity to come to know each other, and thus to be able to poke one another to love and good deeds.

I’ve talked about this before, that the Greek word we translate “fellowship” is koinonia, from the word meaning “common”; it’s a much richer word than our English “fellowship”—it means doing, sharing, owning, living in common, being involved in something together, being involved in one another’s lives. It means doing life as a body, not just as disconnected pieces who happen to get together every so often, and being there for one another—all for one and one for all, sharing one another’s sorrows, and sharing our joys, too. It’s a powerful thing, because as the author Spider Robinson put it, shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased . . . but it’s completely impossible if we’re not together, and it’s hard for you to be a part of it if you’re not here.

And without that—without that support, without that encouragement, without that provocation, without that group of people we don’t want to disappoint—it’s hard to hold fast to our confession of hope in Christ, it’s hard to keep our faith from wavering, and so it becomes hard to keep drawing near to God through Jesus. We need to be worshiping God through all of life, but what we do here, participating in the life of his people and worshiping together, is the linchpin of that; we cannot sustain a life of worship if it isn’t anchored in the corporate worship of the body of Christ.

And that ought to be a priority for us, because we’ve been given an opportunity which no one had for thousands of years, and which millions of people still don’t know they could have: the opportunity to come freely into the presence of God without fear and without condition. It’s an opportunity people have literally died for, and are continuing to die for all over the world. And for us, it’s right here for the taking. All we have to do is see it for what it is, and recognize its value; all we have to do is recognize that this is something that’s worth more than all the other things we do and all the other things that fill up our days, and grab hold of it. Grab hold of it now, while it is still called “today,” and don’t let go. Carpe diem. Seize the day.

9/11: A reminder that freedom isn’t free

Posted on by | No Comments

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

—John Philpott Curran

During the decade of the 1990s, our times often seemed peaceful on the surface. Yet beneath the surface were currents of danger. Terrorists were training and planning in distant camps. . . . America’s response to terrorism was generally piecemeal and symbolic. The terrorists concluded this was a sign of weakness, and their plans became more ambitious, and their attacks more deadly. Most Americans still felt that terrorism was something distant, and something that would not strike on a large scale in America. That is the time my opponent wants to go back to. A time when danger was real and growing, but we didn’t know it. . . . September 11, 2001 changed all that. We realized that the apparent security of the 1990s was an illusion. . . . Will we make decisions in the light of September 11, or continue to live in the mirage of safety that was actually a time of gathering threats?

—George W. Bush, October 18, 2004

History will not end until the Lord returns, and neither will the twist of the human heart toward evil. The idea that we can just ignore or deny this reality and go on about what we’d rather be doing, whether in domestic or in foreign policy, is the political equivalent of cheap grace; and it is no more capable of bringing what blessing our politics can muster than its theological parallel can bring salvation. It may be true, as Theodore Parker said, that the arc of the moral universe “bends toward justice,” but if it is, we must remember that it’s only true because God is the one bending it—taken all in all, the collective effort of humanity is to bend it the other way.

This world is fallen, and all of us are tainted by the evil that rots its core; and all too many have given in to that evil and placed their lives in its service. Most have not done so knowing it to be evil—there are very few at the level of Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s version of Richard III—but that doesn’t make them any better. Indeed, the fact that people like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden do vast evil believing they serve what is right and good only makes them more dangerous, because it makes them far more effective in corrupting others, and far less likely to repent. Evil is a cancer in the human soul, and like any cancer, it will not stop growing until either it or its host is destroyed—which means that those who serve it will not stop unless someone else stops them.

Which is why the 18th-century Irish politician John Philpott Curran was right. There are those in this world who are the servants of evil, those movements which are driven by it, and those nations which are ruled by such—some in the name of religion, some in allegiance to political or economic theory, some in devotion to nation or tribe—and in their service to that spiritual cancer, they operate themselves as cancers within society, the body politic, and the international order; they will not stop until they are stopped. As Edmund Burke did not say (but as remains true nevertheless), the only thing that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing; the logical corollary is that to prevent the triumph of evil, those who would oppose it must be vigilant to watch for its rise, and must stand and fight when it does.

Must that always mean war? Not necessarily; as Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among others, have shown, there are times when nonviolent moral resistance is the most effective form of opposition (helped in Gandhi’s case, I would argue, by the fact that the Raj was not evil). But the fact that that works in some societies doesn’t mean that it works in all, because nonviolent resistance depends for its effect on the willingness of others to repent—and not everyone is willing. Some people are hard of heart and stiff of neck, unwilling to humble themselves, liable only to judgment; they will not stop unless they are forced to do so. When such people rule nations and are bent on tyranny and conquest, then sometimes, war becomes necessary. A tragic necessity, yes, but no less necessary for all that.

We have enemies who have decided in their hearts that they must destroy us, and they will not be shaken from that decision, because they have excluded anything that could shake them; they are unflinching in their resolve to building up the power and ability to do what they have committed themselves to do. This is hard for Americans to understand or accept, because—with the characteristic arrogance of our Western culture—we think that everyone, deep down, thinks and feels and understands the world as we do, and thus is “rational” on our terms, by our definition of the word. We fail to understand people and cultures that really don’t value their own lives and their own individual wills and desires above all else. But there are those in this world who don’t, who simply have different priorities than ours, and who consequently cannot be negotiated with or deterred or talked out of things as if they were (or really wanted to be) just like us—and who in fact have nothing but contempt for the very idea.

There are people, movements, nations, who want to destroy America and our culture (which they believe to be Christian culture, far though it is from being so), and who will not be dissuaded by any of our attempts at persuasion or appeasement. Indeed, go as far back as you want in history, you’ll never find a case where appeasement of enemies has worked; rather, time after time, it only encourages them. If someone is determined to defeat you and has the ability to do so, it isn’t possible for you to choose for things to be different, because their choice has removed that option; your only choice is either to let them do so, or to try to stop them.

But is it right to try to stop them? What of the morality of force? As individuals, when someone hates us, we are called to turn the other cheek and trust to the justice of God—but that’s when we ourselves are the only ones at risk. When it comes to defending others from harm, the calculus is different; this is especially true of government, which bears the responsibility to defend all its citizens from evil, and has been given the power of the sword for that purpose. The decision to use force of any sort—whether it be the national military or the local police—must not be made lightly; it must be done only when there is clear certainty that the deployment of force is necessary in the cause of justice. But when it is truly necessary in order to defend the right, if that defense is properly our responsibility, then we cannot shrink back: we must stand and fight, or else allow evil to triumph.

Freedom and justice and true peace only come at a cost, in this lost and broken world of ours; they must forever be defended against those who do not value them, and would destroy them for their own purposes. This includes defending them against those who would use the fact that we value them against us—who would subvert our freedoms and use our willingness to accept a false peace, the mere absence of overt military conflict, to extort from us our own piecemeal surrender. If “peace” is achieved by craven cowering before the threats of the vicious, it is no real peace, merely a temporary and unstable counterfeit that does nothing but postpone the inevitable conflict; and if that false peace is gained through the sacrifice of freedom and justice, it is worth nothing at all. For any society willing to do so, the only epitaph has already been written by Benjamin Franklin:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

A Democratic loss is not exactly a Republican victory

Posted on by | 1 Comment

As the indispensable Jay Cost has been pointing out—no longer at Real Clear Politics, though, as he’s moved on to write for the Weekly Standard, where among other things he’s doing a column every weekday morning called “Morning Jay”—the polling numbers for President Obama and the Democrats (and doesn’t that sound like a ’50s rock band?) are bad and getting worse, to the point where the party is starting to throw incumbents overboard. In fact, it’s gotten so bad for the Dems that expectations are starting to become a problem for the GOP, prompting some Republicans to start trying to deflate them.

And for good reason, because as big as the bullseye is across the Democrats’ collective back, the electorate isn’t really any happier with the Republicans. As Cost notes,

There is great turmoil that the two political parties have been (so far) incapable of handling, and the public is still casting about in search of competent leadership. I think something similar happened between 1974 and 1982. The country is unsatisfied with the state of the nation and has so far disapproved of both parties’ performances. But in a two party system, there is no choice but to swing back and forth until folks finds leaders who are up to the job.

In other words, the folks who are saying that this is about an essentially conservative country coming back to the party that better represents it aren’t really on the point. I do think the US tilts right of center, but not by a whole lot, and the electorate we’re seeing isn’t pro-Republican—it’s anti-both-parties and anti-government. Any Republican politicians who are looking forward to getting back in power and going back to business as usual should think long and hard about this warning from Scott Rasmussen:

Voters are ready to deliver the same message in 2010 that they delivered in 2006 and 2008 as they prepare to vote against the party in power for the third straight election. These results suggest a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

In other words, as I’ve been saying, this isn’t really about one party versus the other, it’s about people across the ideological spectrum versus the parties. That cracking, booming sound you’re hearing is the sound of the fissure widening between our rulers and the rest of us—which in our system means that they won’t keep being our rulers much longer if they don’t wise up. Which they probably won’t . . .

On this blog in history: June 20-24, 2008

Posted on by | No Comments

There’s a parable in here somewhere . . .
This isn’t my story, it’s Neil Gaiman’s, but it bears remembering.

Radicals & Pharisees
It’s not what you think.

Memo to self: don’t get cocky
“Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.”

Skeptical conversations, part VII: The Holy Spirit and the Bible
On the role of both in our faith

The gospel according to Firefly
This beats The Gospel According to Peanuts all hollow.

It’s about Christ, not burning Qur’ans

Posted on by | 3 Comments

I’m sure you know that down in Gainesville, Florida, a church-like institution led by an individual impersonating a pastor is planning a bonfire of Qur’ans on 9/11. You probably know that his plan is opposed by public figures not just on the Left, but on the Right; I think Glenn Beck and Gov. Sarah Palin offered perhaps the best statements on the matter. Gov. Palin, I think, did a particularly good job of appealing to the better nature and judgment of Terry Jones, the guy who hatched this plan:

If your ultimate point is to prove that the Christian teachings of mercy, justice, freedom, and equality provide the foundation on which our country stands, then your tactic to prove this point is totally counter-productive.

However, I think she might have given him too much credit on this one, because as you may not have known, Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center are brothers-in-pickets with Westboro Baptist Church, the “God Hates Fags” people; when a group of folks from Fred Phelps’ nasty little “church” did a protest tour of Gainesville, Jones and his people used their worship time to join in.

I don’t know what this guy really thinks he’s going to accomplish, but one thing he’s certainly accomplishing is giving the media-industrial complex a chance to blacken the image of Christians—hence the repeated descriptions of Jones as “an evangelical pastor.” If this guy’s an evangelical, I don’t know the meaning of the word. Heck, if this guy’s an evangelical, I’m an egg-salad sandwich. As Beregond points out, this is really a pretty dubious operation:

50 members on 20 acres that are worth more than a million and a half dollars, a charismatic church not affiliated with any denomination, and a pastor who takes no prisoners. If someone were writing about such a church in a vacuum the 20 acres, church building, ministry for women, and outbuildings would be called a “compound.” But if you have a political agenda and are willing to smear conservative Christians to further that agenda then such hints of a cult can be ignored.

Jones invokes the name of God, and talks a lot about the devil, and shows a strong focus on America; but Christ seems to be absent from his vision. How can he have the gall to call what he’s doing “Christian” when he’s not in the least about Christ? Ray Ortlund’s post nails it:

What is Christian? What makes anything Christian? Not that it has to do with theology, not that it has to do with ministry, not that it has to do with church business, and so forth. What makes anything Christian is that it reflects Christ. It is “according to Christ.”

We reach the sacred watchword here, and pause to listen to it. “Not according to Christ,” not on His line, not measured by Him, not referred to Him, not so that He is Origin and Way and End and All. The “philosophy”in question would assuredly include Him somehow in its terms. But it would not be “according to Him.” It would take its first principles and draw its inferences, a priori and from other regions, and then bring Him in as something to be harmonized and assimilated, as far as might be. But this would mean a Christ according to the system of thought, not a system of thought according to the blessed Christ. . . . It must have Him for Alpha and for Omega, and for all the alphabet between. It must be dominated all over by Him.

H. C. G. Moule, Colossians and Philemon Studies (Grand Rapids, n.d.), pages 142-143.

The further we go with this comprehensively sweeping adjustment, this all-encompassing humility before Christ, the more Christian we will be, the more it will feel like revival.

And the further we go with anything else—however noble or important we may think our goal to be—the more we may talk about revival, but the further we’ll be from ever seeing it.

Shadow and Reality

Posted on by | No Comments

(Psalm 40:1-8, Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 10:1-18)

I’m no movie buff (that would be David Kavanaugh), but you don’t have to be a film-school geek to know that the story of the year in the world of cinema is Christopher Nolan’s Inception. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a movie about a man who makes his living, with his associates, going into other people’s dreams in order to steal information from their minds—or in this case, to plant an idea in someone’s mind—with dreams within dreams that have a powerful effect on events in the real world.

Or is it? There are those who argue that in fact, none of it is real, that what seems to be the real world in the movie is actually just another dream. After all, when you’re playing with the whole question of dream vs. reality, and when you have someone with the ability to create realities within the world of dreams, how can you tell when the playing stops? And does it matter? If this is what you perceive as reality, if it’s real for you, is it really important if that perception doesn’t exist outside your own head?

This all reminds me of the big news in film eleven years ago: The Matrix. This was another movie that played with the question of whether the real world is actually real, though from a very different angle and in a very different way. At the time, people were calling the Wachowskis geniuses, and I’m not sure the movie’s stood the test of time quite that well—partly because the sequels disappointed people—but even if nothing else endures, I think people will long remember the scene where Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus stands before Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, and offers him the choice between the red pill and the blue pill. “You take the blue pill,” Morpheus says, “the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” Of course, if Neo takes the blue pill, no movie, so he takes the red pill and wakes up to find out that the world he thought was real is actually a virtual reality created by machines that have enslaved the human race to power themselves. As you can see, it’s not exactly a lighthearted comedy. But the idea that there’s a deeper reality behind what we see resonated with many, many people.

Of course, it wasn’t a new idea; as Professor Kirke said more than once in the Chronicles of Narnia, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato,” and not just in Plato, either. It’s an intuition rooted deep in the human soul—and for good reason, because the world we see is not all there is. Of course, as we’ve noted, human beings tend to overreact and overcorrect, and so you get the Buddhist idea that this world is just an illusion, and you get the old heresy of Gnosticism that says that only spirit is important, that our bodies and what we do with them don’t matter; that’s going way too far. The Scriptures tell us that everything matters because God made it, and made us as part of it, and so nothing about this world is to be put down or disregarded as unimportant. But there is a greater reality than what we can perceive with our senses, for which God is preparing us, toward which we’re being led—which is, ultimately, the full experience of the presence of God, who is the source of all reality and the maker of all that is. There are greater joys and greater goods than this world can give us, and greater possibilities than we can imagine; in God, the future is not limited by the past, and what can be is more than what has been.

This is profoundly good, not least because it means that in God, this is true of us as well; God has more for us than just more of the same. He’s at work in us making us new, from the inside-out. But that means that this thing that we’re on about with God, and that God’s on about with us, is a lot bigger than most people think. A lot of people like religion, and many who don’t will tell you that they like spirituality instead, and if you ask them why and what they mean by that, they’ll talk about finding meaning and purpose and significance, about becoming better people, about satisfaction and comfort, about wisdom for life and coping in hard times, and other ideas of that sort; you’ll get a laundry list of ways in which religion is just like Coke—things go better with it. These are good things, and blessings God does give us; but they aren’t what gospel religion is about. They aren’t the purpose, they aren’t the point. Any religion that’s focused on blessings and winning us benefits isn’t God’s thing—it’s too small for God. It’s a shadow religion, and God is calling us beyond that to something better, deeper, more true.

As we come to the end of this long central section of Hebrews—as the author wraps up his argument for the superiority of Christ and his priesthood over the high priests in Jerusalem, and thus for the superiority of Jesus-worship and Jesus-religion over Judaism—this is the truth he’s underscoring. He’s not saying anything new in this section, just summarizing the points he’s made so far: animal sacrifices could never be enough, could never bring salvation; the best the priests could do was only temporary, and so had to be repeated over and over and over; the law was just a shadow and a copy, not the reality; God wants to change our hearts, not just control our behavior; a greater sacrifice was necessary, one that could purify our hearts, not just our bodies, and thus make true salvation possible; Christ offered that sacrifice once and for all. These are all things we’ve talked about as we’ve gone through the last three chapters. But in pulling them together in this way, the author makes the fundamental appeal clear: the law is the shadow; Jesus is the reality. Come to the reality. Come be made new.

Come be made new. That really is the bottom line; that’s what God’s on about, and nothing less. Even the law, which was given by God to prepare the way for the coming of Christ, is by itself only a shadow, not able to accomplish God’s full purpose; and if that’s the case, how much more must we say this about any religion that isn’t all about Jesus? We all want life to go better—we want things like long, happy marriages and children who turn out well and healing when we’re sick and successful careers and prosperous retirements, and there’s nothing wrong with any of those, nothing wrong with asking God for them; they’re all blessings that he may give us if we serve him and follow him faithfully. But they aren’t why God saved us. He didn’t send Jesus to be tortured to death so that we could live happy, comfortable lives protected from the agony of the world. He’s on about something a lot bigger—and a lot better, in the end.

And so James declares, “Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance”; and if you were here last fall, you know what was going on the morning I preached on that passage. You remember the agony of the Sonntags as someone appeared to be stalking them and threatening their lives, and it turned out Joel had made up the whole thing. Consider that all joy? And the pain of the world marches on. I gave Tom Abbitt a hug yesterday after Cathy’s memorial service, and I grieve with him; it is deeply wrong that she’s dead of cancer at 49, with their youngest still in high school. We don’t want that, we want to avoid it—we want a god who offers us a road around the valley of the shadow of death; and so there are no end of religions promising that sort of god. But in the end, that god and that road are illusions, and we all know that valley, all too well.

This world is deeply wrong, it’s broken at the core, and God does not and will not shield us from the pain; and shadow religion can’t deal with that. It has no answer for pain, except to insist that those who suffer must have brought it on themselves—they didn’t obey well enough, or they didn’t have enough faith. Shadow religion can’t deal with our sin, except to tell us to just work harder. It can’t deal with the fact that the world is wrong, because it has no power to make things new. Only Christ can do that, and only his gospel can give us hope. Only he can say to us, “Your sins are forgiven”; only he can tell us that our pain and our sorrow are not for nothing, and are not forever. He doesn’t lead us around the valley of the shadow of death, but he does lead us through it, walking with us every step of the way—and assuring us with every step that he knows where he’s going, because he’s been this way before, and this is the way that leads home.

Our rat-infested politics

Posted on by | 4 Comments

In the list of abuses of power by our government and its members, this doesn’t rank high for size—but it’s telling:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Congress members from both parties have been abusing their per diem—funds accorded them to cover travel expenses, including meals. When their expenses are picked up by other people, such as foreign government officials or U.S. ambassadors, they are expected to return the unused funds, which ultimately belong to you, the taxpayer.

In many cases, however, they don’t. Some spend the leftover cash on gifts or use it to cover their spouses’ travel expenses. Others merely put the extra money in their pocket. Not that the cash, which can add up to as much as $1,000, is exactly pocket change by most Americans’ reckoning. . . .

Among the most flagrant offenders are Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), former Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC). In an ironic twist, Rep. Butterfield is—get ready for it—a member of the House ethics committee. . . .

Perhaps the cake taker among the above-named Congress members is Robert Aderholt, who claims he isn’t sure if he keeps the money because doesn’t retain receipts.

Again, the biggest division in our politics isn’t between left and right—it’s between “we the people” and our governing elite—and our biggest political challenge is reclaiming our government so that it will once again truly be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We on the Right don’t need to “take back our country” from the Left, just as they didn’t need to take it back from us—it’s the country of the whole political spectrum, and will be for as long as it endures. But we the people, conservatives and liberals alike, do have the right and the need to take it back from those who are not truly representative of us. The unlamented Mark Souder is on that list; is it too much to ask that the U. S. Representative from northeastern Indiana should be a man of Indiana, not of the Beltway?

Gospel hope and gospel change

Posted on by | 2 Comments

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.

—Hebrews 6:19-20a (ESV)

And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

—Hebrews 6:11-12 (ESV)

The gospel rests ultimately on the fact that God is faithful. We have hope because God who cannot lie and who cannot go back on his word made a promise, and in Jesus, he kept it. In Jesus, we need not worry about being swept away by the storms of life or capsized by their waves, for our hope in him is a soul anchor, a sure and steadfast anchor for the soul that holds us firm and steadfast where we need to be in the face of the worst life can throw at us. Nothing in this world can pull that anchor loose, because it isn’t hooked onto anything worldly: it’s hooked onto the very throne of God.

This is, or should be, our reason for holding fast to our faith in Christ and pressing on even when it’s difficult; and it’s essential for trying to live life by faith rather than by control. Unfortunately, too often in the church we undermine it, because we’re trying to build the church ourselves, our way, rather than trusting Jesus to be faithful to build it his way, and so we go looking for motivational methods that “work.” Some opt for driving people with fear, leaning heavily on warnings about sin and Hell; others push with the language of duty and obligation, speaking in the tones of command, or try to whip people along with the lash of guilt. Still others use the carrot, trying to use people’s self-interest to produce the desired behavior. These can all be effective motivators for building successful organizations; but what they can’t do is make disciples of Christ. Disciples of Christ, people of the gospel, are built by hope which is rooted in trust, grounded in the assurance of the unending faithfulness of God our Father; we are built by the transforming work of that hope, as Jesus changes us by his Holy Spirit, not from the outside in (as law seeks to do), but from the inside out.

This is one of the key differences between the religion of the gospel and any merely human religion, even if that human religion uses the language of Christianity. Human religion is all about power and effort, command and control, bribery and coercion; it seeks, by one means or another, to make people behave in a certain way. It’s primarily about the outward self, because that’s what people can see. The gospel, by contrast, is first and foremost about our hearts, because God sees us as we are, all the way down, all the way through. It’s about shifting our deepest allegiances, freeing our souls from all the idols to which we’ve given ourselves so that we can give our allegiance totally and wholeheartedly to God; it’s about purifying and redirecting our deepest desires, the wellsprings of our motivation and conduct; it’s about setting us free from our fears and healing our distorted understanding of love. The gospel breaks the shackles of sin on our lives and changes the things that drive and steer us, changing what we do by changing why we do it and what we want to gain from it. The gospel says, “Fill yourself with the love and the grace of God, fill yourself with the full assurance of hope in Christ, and the rest will follow.”

(Adapted from “Soul Anchor”)

Bill Kristol on conservative intolerance

Posted on by | 3 Comments

As noted, I have my reservations about the Beck rally last Saturday, but I do appreciate the opportunity it gave Bill Kristol for this comment:

So evangelical Christian Sarah Palin spent Friday night with (mostly) observant Jews, along with various Christians, including some Amish. Then on Saturday she spoke at a rally hosted by a Mormon who went out of his way in his remarks to refer to the important role of “churches, synagogues and mosques” in American life.

Early Monday morning, as it happened, I received an e-mail from (Catholic convert) Newt Gingrich from Rome, asking for contact information for a (Jewish) scholar whose book on certain (not very religious) enlightenment thinkers he was reading.

Welcome to today’s intolerant, divisive, close-minded, and just plain scary American conservatism.