What was that again about “the best-laid plans of mice and men”? I was going to get last Sunday’s sermon posted on the sermon blog, and I had a couple posts I wanted to put up here—and instead, I discovered that Google has created some new and interesting template options for Blogger, and I wound up spending all my time playing with them. Well, tomorrow . . . Lord willing.
Gov. Straight Talk is at it again
I hope he’s not even thinking of jumping into the coming presidential campaign; New Jersey needs him too badly, and he really needs to have a successful first term and win re-election before he has enough reason to be thinking about a run for the White House. But if he keeps this up, with a little luck, he could definitely make that run and win. For now, it’s just really good to have someone on the national political scene willing to tell people the home truths they don’t want to have to hear; there are very, very few of those, and especially few who do it as well as Gov. Christie.
“What did the President know and when did he know it?”
That was the question posed by Fred Dalton Thompson, minority counsel to the Senate committee investigating Watergate, and asked by his boss Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking minority member of that committee, that some say ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It may be a question that now needs to be asked, in earnest, of President Barack Obama with regard to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. According to columnist Kevin McCullough,
It seems incomprehensible that the president and other members of the administration still have jobs when it is now being reported that the federal government was apprised by BP on February 13 that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was leaking oil and natural gas into the ocean floor.
In fact, according to documents in the administration’s possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February.
Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig’s fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, “They damn near blew up the rig.”
It’s also now being reported that BP was asking for the administration’s help on this matter long before the deadly accident and the now gushing well of tar.
If this is true, then the administration’s inaction—because they were unwilling to take their focus off getting ObamaPelosiCare passed?—was reprehensible. What did the President know, and when did he know it? It’s easy to see why he’s taking the “I was as surprised as you were” tack, telling us he accepted the assurances of others that nothing would go wrong; but if he truly, honestly didn’t know about this—why not, and what does that say about his administration?
Can he yodel?
I’ve been thinking about the President’s Oval Office speech last week, and about his response to the BP disaster more generally. I saw Gov. Palin take him apart:
That wasn’t surprising, of course, but watching Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews hit him even harder definitely was. Even harder on the President—no real surprise, since he’s less of a partisan than the MSDNC guys—was Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times in his “Top of the Ticket” blog:
The first two-thirds of the president’s remarks read just fine . . .
But watching the president and hearing him was a little creepy; that early portion of the address was robotic, lacked real energy, enthusiasm. And worst of all specifics. He was virtually detail-less. . . .
Trust me, the president said, tomorrow I’m going to give those BP execs what-for. As CBS’ Mark Knoller noted on his Twitter account, the president has allotted exactly 20 whole minutes this morning—1,200 fleeting seconds—to his first-ever conversation with the corporation responsible for the disaster.
Then, he’s got an important lunch with Joe “I Witnessed the World Cup’s First Tie” Biden. . . .
President Obama has said he doesn’t sense an appetite to address something as large as the illegal immigrant issue this year. But suddenly—watch the left hand over here because he wants you to not focus on how long it’s taken him to take charge of the spill—he thinks there’s a compelling need to spend a motorcade full of moola that the federal government doesn’t have in order to change the country’s energy habits.
And we’ve gotta start that right now because of an underwater leaking pipe 40 miles off Louisiana that we haven’t plugged and don’t really understand how it broke in the first place. So let’s do the electric car thing and build more windmills now.
And if, by chance, the nation’s politicians end up fighting over an energy plan during the next five months until the voting, maybe the politically damaging healthcare regrets and hidden costs will drown in all the words like so many thousands of seabirds in all the gulf’s still-surging oil.
Of course, no one reasonable expects the President to know how to fix the blowout. Gov. Palin isn’t criticizing him for that, because she doesn’t know how to fix it either. The problem is, we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation that nobody knows how to fix. Which means, you have to mitigate the problem, and it’s there that people do have ideas and that executive leadership is needed from the White House to enable the people who have the ideas and the equipment and the experience to go to work to fix what can be fixed—and it’s there that Barack Obama and his administration are not only falling down on the job, but in fact are being actively counterproductive; significant, experienced help was offered—and rejected.
I realize that most Americans don’t take the Dutch all that seriously (those of us who grew up around their American descendants don’t make that mistake, however), but as James Joyner pointed out,
As to the fact that the Netherlands government has a plan for this and we don’t, I’m not terribly surprised. It’s a small, maritime and riverine country surrounded with oil drilling.
What’s more, the offer came through official channels, via the Netherlands’ consul general in Houston, which means it should have been treated far more seriously and respectfully, and not just for environmental reasons:
You’d sure think taking advantage of an ally’s offer of assistance would have made sense, not only in terms of the spill itself but for building better relations with Europe. Given the scale of our economies, it’s rare that the Netherlands can bail us out. Why not let them when the opportunity arises?
Why not let them? Well, if you’re thinking like a Chicago Democrat, it makes perfect sense:
What about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn’t and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren’t really any foreign vessels that could help.
The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It’s the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.
What’s more important than getting the mess cleaned up? Making sure that if there’s any spending to be done, it’s your supporters who get the money. And, of course, making sure that whatever else happens, all federal laws and regulations are strictly enforced—don’t want to set any precedents for deregulation, now, do we?
Or the decision to deny Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal to deploy barges to skim oil from the Gulf’s surface. Can’t do that until we see if they’ve got enough life preservers and fire equipment. That inspired blogger Rand Simberg to write a blog post he dated June 1, 1940: “The evacuation of British and French troops from the besieged French city of Dunkirk was halted today, over concerns that many of the private vessels that had been deployed for the task were unsafe for troop transport.”
Taken all in all, it’s no wonder that the best thing the President can find to do about this disaster is . . . blame Congress. To be sure, he was trying to blame just Republicans; but you might have thought he would have realized a) that all such comments would do is make voters more hostile to Congress in general, and thus more likely to vote against their current federal representatives, and b) that his own party currently controls Congress, and thus would be more likely to be hurt by the effects of his comments.
Were I a Democrat, I don’t think I’d be at all pleased with the way the President has shown in this situation. Since I’m not, I’ll just say that more and more, he’s reminding me of this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zf6hUSUPAms
The Victor through Suffering
(Psalm 8, Psalm 22:22-24; Hebrews 2:5-18)
To listen to the sermon “Yet at Present” by the Rev. Scott Hoezee, to which this sermon and its author are heavily indebted—beginning from the opening line—go here.
“I read the news today—oh, boy.” So begins “A Day in the Life,” the closing track from the Sergeant Pepper’s album, one of the most influential songs the Beatles ever wrote. It’s a familiar reaction, isn’t it? On June 1, 1967, the day that album was released, someone picking up the paper might have read about civil war in Nigeria, or growing tension between Israel and its neighbors—the day before, the president of Iraq had declared, “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. . . . Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map”; instead, on June 5, Israel would respond with a sneak attack on Egypt’s air force, beginning the Six-Day War—and of course, there was always news from Vietnam, which by 1967 always seemed to be reported as bad news regardless.
Today, Israel is still threatened, though these days Iran is the big problem, and the looming bad news is that Turkey seems to be moving that way as well; we aren’t fighting in Vietnam, but Afghanistan just passed it as the longest sustained military conflict in our history, and the prospects there don’t look good; and of course, there’s always news from the Gulf of Mexico, as a blown-out oil well a mile under the water continues to spew while BP fumbles, and our government dithers and interferes. I read the news today . . . oh, boy. Oh, boy, indeed.
In the face of this, there’s a real temptation to just—not read the news today. Pull into our bubble, figure the rest of the world can do or not, and just make the best of our own little circumstances. There’s too much suffering out there; insulate ourselves from it, as much as we can. Just don’t think about it, unless you have to. Just go through life with headphones on, as Jars of Clay put it in a recent song; a friend of ours who’s a longtime flight attendant for United has commented, somewhat sadly, that people talk a lot less on flights now—as soon as the light goes off, the headphones go on, and most of the people on the plane disappear into their own little worlds, tuning out and ignoring everyone else. After all, isn’t it safer that way? After all, if you let someone else start talking, you never know what you might hear.
A lot of churches, you’ll find that sort of attitude in worship, too. It’s most visible in contemporary churches, not because there’s anything wrong with contemporary worship—I appreciate it, just as I appreciate the hymns, and there’s some truly great songs being written these days, and some great things being done—but simply because that attitude often drives contemporary worship leaders. Crank up the volume, crank up the tempo, generate lots of energy, get everybody whipped up—it’s a proven way of attracting people, in part, I think, because it lets hurting people pretend for a while they aren’t hurting. But those who are ready to deal with their hurt, or who could be, just get run over—there’s no room for that.
This isn’t just a “contemporary” problem, though, it happens just as easily if you sing hymns; the only differences are the volume and the tempo. Just do our little bubble thing, sing songs about how great God is and how blessed we are, read happy Scriptures and say happy things, eat cookies, and go home. It’s easy to do, and again, it feels good; and again, it leaves real issues unaddressed. One of the reasons I appreciate the traditional liturgy is that it took its form during a time when the church couldn’t pretend that everything was ducky-wonderful, and so if we take it seriously, it holds us to confront and to address the realities of sin and pain; it directs us to the fact that this thing we do isn’t just for us, but is part of our response as followers of Jesus to this “lost and broken world so loved by God” in which we live.
Of course, it’s completely true that God is great beyond the limits of wonder, and good beyond the limits of joy, and that we are blessed far more than we realize or deserve, and that we do have profound reason to rejoice deeply; but to affirm that in a way which is really true and which really connects with and takes into account the sorrow of our world requires us to understand that in a different way than we often do—and here, Hebrews has something profoundly important to say.
At this point, I need to stop and acknowledge my deep debt here to one of my favorite preachers, Calvin Seminary’s Scott Hoezee, whose Worship Symposium sermon a few years ago on Hebrews 2 has permanently shaped my thinking on this passage; I think the only other person who has comparably influenced my understanding of any piece of Scripture would be Dr. Kenneth Bailey on the parables in Luke. You see, the Rev. Hoezee caught hold of something in this chapter that I hadn’t seen before, and it is, I think, what makes the whole thing turn.
As I mentioned last week, the agenda of Hebrews is to drive home that there is no one greater than Jesus, no other savior, no one who can add anything to the work he’s done, and no alternative in which or in whom we can place any real faith. First, as we saw, he compares Jesus to the angels, and shows how he is greater than any of them, or than all of them put together; this was a rebuke to those tempted to worship multiple spiritual powers, and also to those who insisted Christians must still keep the whole Jewish law, for Jewish tradition taught that the Law had actually been delivered to Moses by angels. Now, Hebrews builds from there to argue that Jesus is superior to the Law, that he is a higher authority—indeed, that he is the highest authority, having been given all authority over everything that is—though not as king, here, but as its great high priest. That’s a very important point in Hebrews, and we’ll come back to it in the weeks ahead. For now, just look what he says about it.
He starts with Psalm 8, and does something very interesting with it. Obviously, part of the reason it’s here is that phrase “son of man,” which Jesus used as a title for himself, and thus he takes this psalm as referring to Jesus—and rightly so, though some argue otherwise. The real turner, though, comes a little further on. You see, in the Hebrew, Psalm 8 says, “You made him a little lower than elohim.” If you were here when we started off in Genesis, you may remember my saying that the Hebrew word for a god is el; the dual form, which would mean two gods together, is eloah; and the plural, for three or more, is elohim. This is the word Hebrew used for talking about the gods of the nations; it’s also the word it used as one of the principal names for God. And this is the word we have here in Psalm 8, leaving ambiguity as to what exactly the psalmist means.
Now, the NIV, like a lot of translations, passes the ambiguity on. The first Greek version of the Old Testament, though, didn’t: it reads “angels,” following the common interpretation of the time that the psalmist is stressing human inferiority and insignificance. Hebrews takes that and combines it with the understanding that this psalm is referring not to people in general, but to Jesus, and comes up with this: God made the Son of Man lower than the angels for a little while, but has now crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his authority. And just to ram that home, the author doesn’t stop with the psalm, but adds: “And when he says everything, he means everything. No exceptions.”
Up to this point in Hebrews, then, we’ve had this great long soaring arc of praise to Jesus Christ. He is the radiance of the glory of God, he is the exact copy of his nature, he is the one who upholds the universe by his word, he sits at the right hand of the Majesty of the universe, he is eternal and his rule is without end, he is above every other being that exists, and he has been given full authority and power over all creation. It’s like the Hallelujah Chorus, building and building and building to that last triumphant, overpowering declaration of praise . . . and then, suddenly, there’s the pause, and just when you expect this crescendo to hit a full-throated climax, something to take your breath completely away, the author breaks off, and says quietly, “Yet at present we do not see everything subject to Jesus.”
Yet at present. As the Rev. Hoezee says, it’s a line with which every sane person in this world can agree—and if anything, an understatement. I read the news today, and did I see the world operating under the rule of Christ, acknowledging his authority? No, I saw wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and floods, starvation and terrorism, injustice and indifference, death and betrayal, and somehow encapsulating the tragic mystery of our screwed-up world, the ongoing story of a 7-year-old boy who seems to have vanished into the thinnest of air right from the hallway of his school. If you believe his stepmother anyway, and it looks like the police aren’t so sure they do. You may remember Time magazine during the Rwandan genocide of the ’90s quoting a missionary who declared, “There are no devils left in Hell. They are all in Rwanda.” Sure, there are good things, too, saints and revivals and works of light, but precious little to match the horrors we keep concocting. This is the news as we know it; as the late Rich Mullins put it, this is the world as best as we can remember it. Oh, boy, indeed; oh, heaven help us all.
No, Hebrews declares, at present, we do not see everything subject to Jesus, and all God’s people say, “No kidding.” And it’s not just out there somewhere, where so many don’t want everything subject to Jesus—we see it in our own lives, and in our families. We see people we love who desperately want someone to love and marry, and can’t find them, or desperately want children, and can’t have them; we see children turn away from Christ to go their own way, and we see marriages shattered by betrayal or starved by indifference. We see cancer run amok and infections that won’t heal, and if we’re honest when we look into our hearts, we see that the spiritual disease we fight is even worse.
Even in our own souls, we do not see everything subject to Jesus; instead, we see self-will and distrust, rebellion and pride, and the desire to want what we want when we want it. Oh, we fight those things, to be sure, they are not the whole story of our lives, and we know the Holy Spirit is at work in us . . . but they’re still there. God has placed all these things under Jesus’ authority; yet at present, most days, we don’t see it.
But. But, says the author, this is not the last word. At present, we do not see everything subject to Jesus—but: we see Jesus. We see Jesus. And who is the Jesus we see? We see the Jesus whose crown of glory is a crown of thorns, who is honored for accepting dishonor—we see the Jesus who’s been reading the same news we read, and who not only observed our deepest tragedy, but lived it. We see the Jesus whom the world trampled under its feet; indeed, Hebrews affirms, that is exactly why God has now put that same world under his feet. We do not see Jesus distant and glorious, majestic and awe-inspiring to the point of being terrifying—we see him as he was made like us in every way and bore every grief and temptation we bear.
Indeed, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, he was tempted far worse than we ever are, because we only go so long and then we break; he never broke. Satan hit him with everything he had, and Jesus took it all and stood fast under suffering far greater than anything we could survive. And of course, he didn’t survive it; his victory required that he accept suffering to the point of death, and beyond—and he accepted that suffering, and so won that victory, for us. He did it so that he could pay the penalty for our sin, a penalty beyond all our resources and abilities put together to pay; and so that in so doing, he could set us free from our slavery to sin, and bring us out from under the dominance of death, which together were a bondage we could never have escaped, no matter how hard we might try. This is the victory he won; this is how he won it; this is the Jesus we see, and no other.
And in truth, how else could it be? We keep looking for God to win victories the same way the world does—but we have plenty of politicians and plenty of generals already; is one more of them, even a better one, really going to help? Is not the Jesus we actually see, the one who experienced the sorrow and agony of our world to its shattered-glass depths, who bears its marks deep in his being—isn’t this Jesus the Savior we truly need? Everyone else who claims authority in this world does so in some way on the basis of power—whether as brutal as a military coup or as gentle as a majority of the popular vote; Jesus receives it on the basis of sacrifice and suffering. They claim it for themselves; he claims it, in a very real sense, for us.
The one to whom God made this world subject is not some distant conqueror, mighty warlord, or calculating politician; he isn’t someone who just wants everything to run smoothly with no complications, and never mind what happens to individuals in the machine. No, he’s the one who grieves as we grieve for the sister who is addicted to meth, for the brother who has just been abandoned by an unfaithful wife, for the father who has Alzheimer’s and the mother whose husband no longer remembers her, for the daughter who longs to have children and cannot, for the son who has declared his hatred of God and started wearing pink triangles and rainbows.
No, with the eyes of this world, we do not see all things subject to him, not on this tortured, fractured planet of myeloma and Alzheimer’s, terrorism and murder, deformity and death, war and betrayal; but with the eyes of faith, we can look at the cancer clinic and the dementia unit, at the battlefield and the funeral, and at every other place where people sin and people suffer—which is everywhere—and we see Jesus. Because Jesus is there, bringing reconciliation, redemption, repentance, and healing. This is the gospel, not that Jesus is striding through the world preventing the bad people from causing suffering, but that when suffering comes, he is in it with us, working through it for our good, to bring us his victory—and that he is enough. He is enough for us now; he is enough for us for always.
On liking Jesus and building the church
A church sign I passed today has up what I would guess is the title of this coming Sunday’s sermon: “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.” Of course, I know that isn’t original, but comes from Dan Kimball’s book of the same title, but it got me thinking. Taken purely as a cultural observation, that would seem to be hard to argue—there are indeed a great many people who like Jesus but don’t like his church at all, and there are certainly churches out there that make it easy to understand why. No question, the American church needs to do a better job in a number of ways at living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, starting with actually being committed to living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, instead of all the other junk we so often get on about instead.
But stop a minute. If we were truly a Christ-centered gospel-driven Spirit-actuated community of committed believers who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, would that mean that “they,” whoever “they” are, would like the church and we would all feel nicely validated? The thing about Kimball’s title, which our neighboring church pastor borrowed for his sermon, is that most people don’t seem to take it or offer it as merely an observation, but rather as a criticism—that if we just did this church thing right, whatever “right” is supposed to look like, that “they” would like us. The underlying assumption here is, I think, that it’s perfectly reasonable that the world around us should like Jesus, and that if we were just more like Jesus, the world would like us too, our churches would grow, and we would be more “successful.”
It’s a widespread assumption, in part because it’s a very comfortable one for an American church that, by and large, still hasn’t realized that Christendom is dead, has been given its eulogy, and is now feeling the thumps of the gravediggers’ shovels; but there are voices that demur. Above all, there is this one:
“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets. . . . Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”
—Luke 6:22-23, 26 (ESV)
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”
—John 15:18-21 (ESV)
“The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.
And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.
But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember
that I told them to you.”
—John 16:2b-4 (ESV)
Of course, if “they” hate you, maybe they hate you because you’re shining the light of the gospel into the darkness of their hearts, and maybe they hate you because you’re a jerk; that phrase “on account of the Son of Man” is not one we can interpret however we please. But there’s a very important question here: if people outside the church like Jesus, is that actually an opportunity, or a sign they don’t really know him? As Jared Wilson has memorably pointed out, there are a great many counterfeit Jesuses floating around our culture, all of them very likeable; just pick your favorite and go with it. The real Jesus, by contrast, ticked so many people off so badly, he ended up crucified. To the extent that people like Jesus but not the church, it may just be that both halves of that statement are unfortunate.
The bottom line here is that the American church is, with very few exceptions, deeply culturally embedded, and its self-understanding is incorrigibly capitalist and consumerist; even those congregations which don’t consciously operate in terms of “market share” and “customer satisfaction” still think of themselves in these sorts of customer-response categories. There is the pervasive subliminal assumption that we can and should measure success by whether or not our customers are happy, whether or not they come back, and whether or not they draw in new customers. Of course we want them to like us—if they don’t, we’ll go out of business, and that would be failure, and is to be avoided if at all possible. And of course they like Jesus—after all, we like Jesus, and he wouldn’t have built such a big and successful brand if he weren’t likeable, would he?
It’s a hard thing to change this sort of mindset. It has to start, I believe, with the recognition that often, the main reason we like Jesus is that we’ve picked out the parts of him that we find congenial and are working determinedly to ignore the rest; we aren’t letting him confront the idolatries of our hearts, or the cultural idolatries in which we’re enmeshed, or the areas in which we indulge sin in our lives as a comfortable old friend. I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who said, commenting on Jesus’ command to us to love our enemies, that the greatest of all the enemies Jesus calls us to love is God—that if we truly take him seriously as Lord and God, he will often seem like an enemy to us as he challenges, rebukes, corrects and disciplines us, working to prune away the diseased, rotten, and overgrown areas in our souls . . . and as he prunes us, he calls us to the incomprehensible spiritual discipline of loving and praising him for the pain and suffering he’s causing us.
Our message to the world is not supposed to be, and cannot be with any integrity, “Come to Jesus and get what you want”; sometimes it seems like it’s just the opposite. We worship a Lord who traded success for failure, a home for homelessness, a good job for unemployment, social approval for the scorn of the elites, and ultimately life for death—how on earth can we present him accurately to a world to which none of this makes any sense at all and expect them to applaud? If you want success in the world’s eyes, according to its categories (building, attendance, budget, media profile, etc.), the very idea is nuts; clearly, you can’t grow a church that way. And indeed, you can’t. But then, you can’t grow anything that’s truly a church any way, and neither can I, and neither can anyone else. Only God can, and this is how he is pleased to do it.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that,
as it is written,
“Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
—1 Corinthians 1:18-31 (ESV)
If our goal is to get people to like Jesus and like us, we’ve gotten both halves of it wrong. That is not the rock on which he said he would build his church, but the shifting sand against which he warned. We can’t judge what we’re doing based on results, because we can’t assume that the results we want are the ones Jesus wants to produce in us. All we can do is proclaim the gospel of grace and seek to live by grace in a manner according to the holiness of God—and if the world looks at that and tells us we’re crazy, and that maybe they don’t like Jesus either, well, results aren’t our business, they’re God’s. Ours is to be faithful and let him take care of the rest.
Programming note
I haven’t gone anywhere, I’m not dead, and I’m not feeling overwhelmed by life; but I think my wireless card is going, as my connection has been sketchy, and I have been ill (though doing better today, it seems). We’ll see how the day goes, but I have at least a couple things I’d like to finish up.
No Rivals
(Psalm 2, Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 1:1-2:4)
When I graduated from Hope College, up in Holland, Michigan, in 1996, I was very pleased to have gone there—and not just because that’s where I met Sara. It’s a great school, and not just academically; my professors weren’t just names and lectures, but people I knew and could depend on, from whom I learned a lot outside of class as well as in it. I grew spiritually because of the chapel program, and made many wonderful friends; and it was interesting, when we visited this past April, to find that every single professor we talked to remembered us—even the one we’d only known as the father of a friend. As pleased as I was then with my choice of college, though, I’m even prouder to be a Hope grad now; during a time when many colleges have suffered great losses economically, and when many once-Christian schools are running away from the faith as fast as they can, Hope is weathering the economic and spiritual storm amazingly well. Wonderful things are happening there, and the folks tasked to lead the ship have the right vision to see that continue and grow.
Which is probably what one should expect from a school whose symbol is the anchor. You can’t spend any time at all around Hope without seeing it—the big anchor at the old entrance to campus, the anchor on the college seal, the anchor on the school’s more informal logo. It’s all over the place—and for good reason. The school was founded in 1854 as the Holland Academy, the work of one of the great figures in the history of the Dutch community in America, the Rev. A. C. Van Raalte; and in his dedication speech, he declared, “This is my anchor of hope for this people in the future.” From that line the school would ultimately take both its name and its symbol, and a profoundly important piece of its identity.
“This is my anchor of hope.” In saying that, Rev. Van Raalte was drawing on the book of Hebrews, specifically Hebrews 6:19-20, which declares our hope in Christ to be “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul”; he wasn’t putting his faith in the institution, but in Christ. The institution of the school would be an anchor of hope because it in turn would be anchored in Christ, and only for as long as that remained true; and by the grace of God, so far, it has.
Of course, that hasn’t been without struggle or conflict; there are plenty of people who would like to see Hope anchored in something other than the historic Reformed understanding of the Christian faith. Some of them are even on the faculty, legacies of a previous administration that didn’t care about this so much. That’s really not surprising, because we all face the temptation to put our hope in something other than Christ, to find our soul anchor in anything but him; the world tells us that we can’t possibly put our faith in someone we can’t hear or see or touch, that there are far more sure and certain anchors for the soul than Jesus. Money, perhaps; a college degree, or maybe even a graduate degree; personal relationships; there are a great many things we value, and it’s easy to put our trust in them instead of in Jesus, to hope in our bank account or our marriage, our résumé or our children, instead of in Christ. It’s easy because we have some control over those (though not as much as we think we do), and we just find it easier to put our hope in our own work than in the work of someone we cannot control.
This is an age-old temptation, and we see it right here in Hebrews, because it’s the temptation the letter was written to address. We don’t know who wrote this letter, or to whom, and in fact that knowledge was lost very early on; but we can see clearly why it was written. Whoever the author or authors of this letter may have been, they had one single overriding concern: to demonstrate beyond any conceivable room for argument that Jesus Christ is superior to anyone else and anything else, that there is no one and no thing else in whom it makes any sense at all to put our faith and hope and trust. Christ alone is our soul anchor, he alone is our anchor of hope, and he’s the only anchor that will hold through the storms of life. He has no rivals; he never has.
This overriding concern, this overarching theme, is what we’re going to be focusing on for the next number of weeks as we spend time going through this book—which is a difficult book if you’re not familiar with it, because it draws heavily on the religious culture of the first-century Hebrews, which is thoroughly alien to us. Even so, the book’s main focus is very clear in our passage this morning, right from the very first verses. “In these last days, [God] has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.” And off the book goes for a while to talk specifically about that aspect of Christ’s superiority, that he is above all other spiritual powers.
We also see, in this passage, something about the structure of the book. Hebrews isn’t just saying all these things about Jesus so we know them, after all, but because the author wants to encourage people to put their faith in Christ and Christ alone, not in anything else, not in anything additional. With Paul’s letters, what you typically get is a long theological section and then several chapters of application, but Hebrews doesn’t work that way. Rather, what we see is a repetitive structure in three parts.
First, the author makes part of his case for the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ—in this passage, the argument that Christ is superior to angels. Then he applies that. Here, that application is quite brief, in chapter 2 verse 1: because Christ is superior to angels, and thus his message is superior to any message ever delivered by angels—which, as he reminds his hearers in verse 2, is no small thing—then we need to pay more careful attention to the message of the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ. We need to take that message seriously and respond appropriately, so that we don’t wind up drifting away and putting our faith and hope in anyone or anything else. Having said that, then comes the third part, the warning: if you ignore the only salvation God has offered, which is given through Jesus Christ alone, the only result will be ultimate and absolute disaster, with no hope of escape.
The key thing to understand here, though, is that this warning isn’t rooted in punishment—indeed, it isn’t really about punishment at all. It’s more like a sign reading “Bridge Out Ahead.” If you see a sign like that and insist on ignoring it and going around the barricades, unless there’s a cop sitting right there to stop you, you aren’t going to be punished for ignoring the sign; you simply won’t be able to get across, because there’s no bridge there to get you across. And if you insist on trying to cross it anyway, you won’t be punished for that, but you will suffer the consequences of trying to do the impossible: you’ll have an accident. That’s essentially what Hebrews is talking about in the beginning of chapter 2. It’s not that God is just waiting to punish you if you try to do things your own way—it’s that Christ is the only way, and if you put your hope in anyone or anything else, you are trying to cross the canyon where there is no bridge, and so you will inevitably fall.
But if you will hope in the Lord, he will never fail you; you may stumble, but you will not fall. The one who is the radiance of the glory of God and who upholds the universe by the word of his power is the one who upholds us, for he is the one who purified us from sin and now intercedes for us before the throne of heaven; no one and nothing else can save us, no one and nothing else could ever be enough, but he is enough, and he has done it—and he will never fail you. He is faithful who promised.
What is the purpose of argument?
I mean that as a completely serious question. I’ve been mulling it recently, ever since I got tangentially involved in an argument in a comment thread on another blog. The blogger in question seems to spend the largest part of his time going after atheists, and it would appear that there are many who rise to the bait. I’ve never quite understood that behavior, really; I’m happy to debate issues with people who comment here—as long as the conversation seems to me to be productive, and an actual conversation—but I don’t generally have a great deal of interest in going to other people’s blogs just to tell them they’re wrong.
I know there are vast numbers of people out there who believe very differently from me, including on issues on which I hold deep and strong opinions, but I simply don’t feel the compulsion to go fight with any of them about it simply because of that fact. Yet some people do. The commenters with whom I briefly argued (on a point of historiography, not faith) seemed to have a sort of long-standing relationship with that blogger which consisted mostly of them being offended by him believing differently and expressing that fact in what seemed to me to be an intentionally provocative manner. I don’t see the point in that, and I don’t see the justification—on either side, really.
Sure, I have no doubt provoked people on this blog, and over the years in real life, but not with the intent of being provocative; I’m looking for something different. If you try to pick a fight, you’ll get one, but you’ll usually get one with people who just like fighting; if you try to generate an argument because you want to have an argument, you’ll usually end up dealing with people who fight you because they’re offended that people could actually be so stupid as to believe something they find completely unacceptable. That is what we’ve come to call (in a manner unfair to the folks who first stood up to argue for the fundamentals of the Christian faith) the spirit of fundamentalism; and while it’s no doubt partly temperamental, personally, I don’t have a lot of interest in arguing with diehard fundamentalists, be they conservative Christian fundamentalists, atheist fundamentalists, Muslim fundamentalists, liberal fundamentalists, or whomever. I tend to think of that in the spirit of the old Texas judge who advised, “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It can’t be done and it annoys the pig.”
The key here, I think, is that folks who have that sort of attitude seem to view the purpose of argument as winning. That’s why they argue, and it’s what they see as the value of argument, as far as I can tell. I don’t know if it’s a matter of ego gratification in triumphing over other people, or if it’s a defense mechanism against insecurity in their own beliefs, or what, but there really does seem to be that sort of attitude that the reason that you argue with people is to get them to admit that they’re wrong and you’re right.
I have a problem with that—or maybe two, but they’re related. The first is that that sort of approach is all about the self—it is, at base, selfish. It’s all about aggrandizing the ego, building up the self at the expense of others, and so it is not concerned about others except insofar as they provide an opportunity to show one’s own superiority (because the reason for wanting to demonstrate the superiority of one’s position is to prove that one is superior for holding it).
The second is that it’s about the self instead of being about the truth: if you go into an argument with the goal of proving yourself to be right, then you’re showing that what really matters to you is not knowing the truth, but being seen to be right and being affirmed as right. With that sort of attitude, it wouldn’t really matter what you believed—indeed, you could change beliefs like some people change clothes, so long as that put you in a position where the beliefs you professed were applauded by those around you as correct. (And indeed, there are people who do exactly that.)
It seems to me that the purpose of argument ought to be to help us together to find truth. This is not to say that it ought to be timid, or half-hearted, or accompanied by qualifiers that really, whatever you believe is fine, and it doesn’t matter that you and I disagree; quite to the contrary, actually. If you and I disagree, then it could mean that both of us are wrong, or it could mean that one of us is wrong and one of us is right—or even, depending on the subject, that both of us have perceived an aspect of the truth but have drawn some false conclusions from it. Whichever is the case, this is profoundly important, not as a threat to either of our egos, but as an opportunity for our growth. If I believe something which is not true and you come to me with the truth, then I need to know this information—and how am I going to learn it, except by you demonstrating it to me? And how will you demonstrate it to me except through reasoned argument?
Of course, it will never be true in this world as we know it that everyone will be selflessly concerned to know only what is true; our own sin, and particularly our pride and our selfish fear, make that impossible. I certainly can’t claim it to be true for me; I want to believe only what is true, but I know that I don’t always act accordingly. Scientists will tell you that this is how science works, but it isn’t, not by a long shot—the desire for wealth, the desire for success, the desire to win approval from the establishment by conforming to the dogma of the day (in science, the technical term for dogma is “paradigm”), all corrupt the process, just as similar considerations corrupt it in every other discipline and every other part of society. That said, the fact that we can’t perfectly reach a standard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth setting, and it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth disciplining ourselves in that direction. The purpose of argument, I believe, ought to be to discover truth—which will inevitably mean sometimes discovering that we’re wrong, and learning to accept that fact not only with grace but with gratitude. May we all get better at this.
A thought on the Trinity
In the course of preparing a sermon I did the other week on the Trinity, I was going through all the usual images and analogies people use to try to illustrate or explain it (a group which runs all the way from bad to incipiently heretical) when I ran across one I’d never heard before that actually has something to recommend it. Believe it or not, there are those who argue that the structure of our government was influenced by trinitarian theology. As history, I don’t know what to make of that—it’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t seen any primary sources that support it—but as an analogy, it has its points. There is a certain hierarchy and structure to our branches of government, but none of them are dominant; each does different things; and the relationship between them constitutes our government and makes things happen. Thus, for instance, laws are passed by the legislative branch, executed and administered by the executive branch, and enforced by the judicial branch.
Of course, like any analogy, this one has its dangers (including the temptation to snipe about the tendency of government to think it’s God) and its limits: God is unlimited and perfect, while our government is limited and imperfect (though it occasionally forgets the fact) because it’s composed of limited and imperfect people. It also, however, has this advantage, that it points us to one reason why the doctrine of the Trinity matters. The structure of our government is intrinsically relational—each branch acts on the others and is acted on in turn, and it’s those actions and relationships that actually constitute the workings of our government.
Unlike the Trinity, of course, no one would ever describe the interrelationships of the three branches as a dance, but like I said, every analogy has its limits. It remains clear even so that our government is fundamentally different from what one might call a unitarian government (such as a monarchy or dictatorship)—it’s not just a different version of the same thing, but something truly different in kind. In the same way, the Triune God is profoundly different in being from any unitarian god we might imagine, and that difference is of fundamental importance.