Sorry that I haven't updated Nell's status on the blog, but that's because things have been astonishingly normal. The next MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)/MRA (magnetic resonance angiography) is in 6 months, so life goes on, and we wait.
Life is good, and we are adjusting to the newly discovered realities of this time. I live each day quietly watching to see if anything happens, and asking questions if something does happen. It is hard to live inside that vigilance, and hopefully time will erode it. But it is a new twist of this 13-year journey that takes some time to adjust to. We appreciate your prayers, and know that God's purposes are being worked out, even if we do not know what they are. God is good.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Dead Idea #4-- Permanence is more Important than Performance
Every established religion-- that is, every religion given privilege and power by the culture that surrounds it-- becomes enamored with bricks and mortar. Establishment gives a faith worldly resources that are most easily used for worldly ends, so faith is literally set into stone.
From every European city's cathedral to the square windowless mall-like warehouses of Dallas, the power and prestige of Christian faith is proclaimed by buildings no one lives in, built with great sacrifice by the common people, so that the culture at large cannot look across the skyline without having to encounter a cross on a spire.
But faith cannot be set into stone. The story can be told, yes-- but faith is written on human hearts. How many of those stone cathedrals now are warehouses for chairs in Europe? How many of the great stone piles put up in the flush times of the last century with names like Presbyterian or Episcopal on their signs sit empty across America?
Established faiths play on the impermanence of human achievement to garner riches to build these piles. Give your money to the church, and a stained glass window with your name, your beloved's name, will stand in the sanctuary, and people will remember you, and them. Buildings testify to us.
But Jesus says that we are to be witnesses to HIM! Obedience matters more than memory-- performance of Christ's commands matters more than the permanence of one's achievements. We have much to learn from our older siblings, especially the Jews of Europe. No great cathedral is necessary for the performance of our obedient love for Christ; all that is needed is a room, and the Book, and faithful people gathered in His name.
The true Church, the great congregations of this and every age, are not those that leave behind the largest sarcophagus in which their faith is buried. The true Church, the great congregations are those that so live out their faith and pour out their lives that the law of Christ is written anew on hearts young and old, of every race, station, and circumstance. The true Church does not leave anything behind it-- the true Church through obedience plants that which will succeed it.
From every European city's cathedral to the square windowless mall-like warehouses of Dallas, the power and prestige of Christian faith is proclaimed by buildings no one lives in, built with great sacrifice by the common people, so that the culture at large cannot look across the skyline without having to encounter a cross on a spire.
But faith cannot be set into stone. The story can be told, yes-- but faith is written on human hearts. How many of those stone cathedrals now are warehouses for chairs in Europe? How many of the great stone piles put up in the flush times of the last century with names like Presbyterian or Episcopal on their signs sit empty across America?
Established faiths play on the impermanence of human achievement to garner riches to build these piles. Give your money to the church, and a stained glass window with your name, your beloved's name, will stand in the sanctuary, and people will remember you, and them. Buildings testify to us.
But Jesus says that we are to be witnesses to HIM! Obedience matters more than memory-- performance of Christ's commands matters more than the permanence of one's achievements. We have much to learn from our older siblings, especially the Jews of Europe. No great cathedral is necessary for the performance of our obedient love for Christ; all that is needed is a room, and the Book, and faithful people gathered in His name.
The true Church, the great congregations of this and every age, are not those that leave behind the largest sarcophagus in which their faith is buried. The true Church, the great congregations are those that so live out their faith and pour out their lives that the law of Christ is written anew on hearts young and old, of every race, station, and circumstance. The true Church does not leave anything behind it-- the true Church through obedience plants that which will succeed it.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Dead Idea #3: Respectability=Piety
For the denominations given pride of place in Christendom, this dead idea is at the core of their decline. As Christianity ceased to be a faith to be embraced and became a mark of belonging in the larger culture of which it was claimed to be a part, faith practices atrophied, and cultural markers replaced them as evidence of Christian faith.
For many centuries, faith practices and cultural markers remained joined at the hip, reaching their apogee in the Victorian era. Be a good citizen, grow wealthy, be good to your spouse and children lived happily side-by-side with prayer, Bible Study, and doing what Christ directs you to do. But as doubts were raised about the Christian part of Western culture, the markers began to diverge from faith practices.
The final rupture between respectability and Christian piety began in the 1920's, as did so many of the cultural trends that continue today. Living in cities divorced from generational family ties, younger generations developed new ways of being "respectable," with the Christian faith practices more and more as a model for the way NOT to be respectable.
Christian faith became an object of dirision, as Clarence Darrow sought to humiliate William Jennings Bryan on the stand during the Scopes Monkey Trial. Faith practices were "backward" in a time confident that human scientific knowledge would lead to a better world. Those who practiced their faith in ways recognizable by the generations of faithful before them retreated from the culture at large into a dark corner, while those who had followed the path of respectability came to fear and despise those faith practices as the ways of the poor and the ignorant.
Respectability as a faith practice, though, has one major drawback-- it is not transformational. Respectability is the mark of the majority, the mark of belonging, and as such is always a moving target. To chase respectability, one must look like everybody else. It is dangerous to stick out in a respectable crowd. If respectability is one's aim, then one must always be a follower, wherever respectability leads.
So, now that respectability decrees that sexual practice is a matter of indifference, and that, if one is not indifferent to practices that the Scriptures call sin, then one cannot be respectable, those who have no Scriptural knowledge to fall back on, who know nothing of the real practice of the faith they profess, simply follow the rules of their culture. Their children abandon the "faith" they were raised in, and their denominations die.
Practicing the historic Christian faith now in the upper reaches of this culture is embracing downward mobility; it is a great way to lose the respect of respectable people.
But praying to Christ Jesus will change your life. Reading the Bible, believing God's promises, heeding the Spirit's call will save your life. Worshipping Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in daily life will open your eyes to your life's calling. Jesus Christ transforms every life He touches-- and no life, however rich in respect and the things of this world can compare with knowing Jesus.
Let goods and kindred go, Martin Luther wrote so long ago; this mortal life also. The body they may kill, God's truth abideth still-- His Kingdom is forever.
For many centuries, faith practices and cultural markers remained joined at the hip, reaching their apogee in the Victorian era. Be a good citizen, grow wealthy, be good to your spouse and children lived happily side-by-side with prayer, Bible Study, and doing what Christ directs you to do. But as doubts were raised about the Christian part of Western culture, the markers began to diverge from faith practices.
The final rupture between respectability and Christian piety began in the 1920's, as did so many of the cultural trends that continue today. Living in cities divorced from generational family ties, younger generations developed new ways of being "respectable," with the Christian faith practices more and more as a model for the way NOT to be respectable.
Christian faith became an object of dirision, as Clarence Darrow sought to humiliate William Jennings Bryan on the stand during the Scopes Monkey Trial. Faith practices were "backward" in a time confident that human scientific knowledge would lead to a better world. Those who practiced their faith in ways recognizable by the generations of faithful before them retreated from the culture at large into a dark corner, while those who had followed the path of respectability came to fear and despise those faith practices as the ways of the poor and the ignorant.
Respectability as a faith practice, though, has one major drawback-- it is not transformational. Respectability is the mark of the majority, the mark of belonging, and as such is always a moving target. To chase respectability, one must look like everybody else. It is dangerous to stick out in a respectable crowd. If respectability is one's aim, then one must always be a follower, wherever respectability leads.
So, now that respectability decrees that sexual practice is a matter of indifference, and that, if one is not indifferent to practices that the Scriptures call sin, then one cannot be respectable, those who have no Scriptural knowledge to fall back on, who know nothing of the real practice of the faith they profess, simply follow the rules of their culture. Their children abandon the "faith" they were raised in, and their denominations die.
Practicing the historic Christian faith now in the upper reaches of this culture is embracing downward mobility; it is a great way to lose the respect of respectable people.
But praying to Christ Jesus will change your life. Reading the Bible, believing God's promises, heeding the Spirit's call will save your life. Worshipping Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in daily life will open your eyes to your life's calling. Jesus Christ transforms every life He touches-- and no life, however rich in respect and the things of this world can compare with knowing Jesus.
Let goods and kindred go, Martin Luther wrote so long ago; this mortal life also. The body they may kill, God's truth abideth still-- His Kingdom is forever.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Dead Idea #2: God is an Intellectual Concept
There were many consequences to the Constantinian Compromise, which made Christianity the mascot of Western Culture, but the atrophy of the most basic functions of faith is the most dangerous.
Cultures of all sorts fall victim to Dellacroix's dictum, "effort and pretension are everywhere." And when following Jesus Christ as Lord became fashionable, the fashions of the world slowly overgrew their foundations, encrusting faith with a mantle of intellectual sophistication that, by the middle of the 20th century had become the challenge of making theology inaccessible to the average person. Perhaps the apogee of this form of "study" is Karl Barth, whose sentences can run for pages without a period.
Theology in this Babylonian Captivity to Western culture became the study of concepts and systems, until God Himself became just another idea. The entire "God is Dead" movement of the 60's and 70's was simply the popular expression of this: if God is just an idea, then ideas have a shelf life. Perhaps God was an idea whose time had passed.
John Shelby Spong and his disciples embraced this "idea" and promoted it. In my theology class at Princeton Seminary, I was publicly rebuked for thinking of God as a person, not a concept. It has now become "tacky" to speak of God as person-- it is the intellectual equivalent of being bare-foot and pregnant.
This is why, dear brothers and sisters, Bishop Robinson in New Hampshire says that Rick Warren prays "to a god I do not know." Christians are now using the same words, but meaning very different things. One group talks about God, and means to have an intellectual discussion of ideas, while the other group talks about God, and means to share experience and understanding (however limited) of the One who was, Who is, and Who is to come.
The first group will continue to dwindle because its task is simply an interesting hobby; the second group will continue to grow, because each one who is touched by the reality of God knows that life and death are at stake in the sharing. The idea group at best sees Christianity as a lifestyle; the revelation group at its best knows Christianity to be the Way, the Truth, the Life.
Cultures of all sorts fall victim to Dellacroix's dictum, "effort and pretension are everywhere." And when following Jesus Christ as Lord became fashionable, the fashions of the world slowly overgrew their foundations, encrusting faith with a mantle of intellectual sophistication that, by the middle of the 20th century had become the challenge of making theology inaccessible to the average person. Perhaps the apogee of this form of "study" is Karl Barth, whose sentences can run for pages without a period.
Theology in this Babylonian Captivity to Western culture became the study of concepts and systems, until God Himself became just another idea. The entire "God is Dead" movement of the 60's and 70's was simply the popular expression of this: if God is just an idea, then ideas have a shelf life. Perhaps God was an idea whose time had passed.
John Shelby Spong and his disciples embraced this "idea" and promoted it. In my theology class at Princeton Seminary, I was publicly rebuked for thinking of God as a person, not a concept. It has now become "tacky" to speak of God as person-- it is the intellectual equivalent of being bare-foot and pregnant.
This is why, dear brothers and sisters, Bishop Robinson in New Hampshire says that Rick Warren prays "to a god I do not know." Christians are now using the same words, but meaning very different things. One group talks about God, and means to have an intellectual discussion of ideas, while the other group talks about God, and means to share experience and understanding (however limited) of the One who was, Who is, and Who is to come.
The first group will continue to dwindle because its task is simply an interesting hobby; the second group will continue to grow, because each one who is touched by the reality of God knows that life and death are at stake in the sharing. The idea group at best sees Christianity as a lifestyle; the revelation group at its best knows Christianity to be the Way, the Truth, the Life.
Friday, January 9, 2009
The Challenge of Disenthralling Ourselves
In her review of Matt Miller's book, Kathleen Parker in today's Washington Post is bringing forth the great challenge for us in this time: we must disenthrall ourselves, as Abraham Lincoln put it in 1861. What is killing us right now is not the death of precious ideas-- it is our unwillingness to think anew, and act anew. We will not let go of what is gone, so we cannot grasp hold of what is coming.
What is going is traumatically so drastic that to let go of it, we must let go of some essential pieces of what it has meant to be an American in the last half-century. Miller lists six such dead ideas, but the PC(USA) has others to contribute to the list. What I intend to do for a while is to list and describe these dead ideas.
Dead Idea #1: the Church must follow wherever the Culture that gives it status leads.
This idea is the most deadly holdover from the Christendom era. When the Church and its surrounding society cooperated in perpetuating the lie that the entire culture was Christian, the Church received power and status in return for tacit obedience to this central idea. Hence, at the beginning of World War I, every army was blessed by its pastors, priests, and bishops to go out and kill the other armies. Christians were blessed by the Church to go out and kill other Christians, because the cultures were at war.
The PC(USA) has been done in by this same phenomenon from the 1960's, when the culture that gave the PC(USA) status declared war on the rising youth culture of the time; we are now almost 50 years into that war, and it still hasn't ended.
So much of what is happening inside the Church is still being driven by this principle. In an argument over whether the Church should bless gay marriage, the winning trump in my brother's hand was this: "don't you realize that in 20 years, every state in the union will recognize gay marriage?"
My response: "So what?"
All I received was a dumbfounded look.
The Church is not bound to follow this culture-- it is bound to follow the Lord, led by the Word. When the Church follows the Lord, preaches the Word, and obeys, it will lead Culture, not follow it.
What is going is traumatically so drastic that to let go of it, we must let go of some essential pieces of what it has meant to be an American in the last half-century. Miller lists six such dead ideas, but the PC(USA) has others to contribute to the list. What I intend to do for a while is to list and describe these dead ideas.
Dead Idea #1: the Church must follow wherever the Culture that gives it status leads.
This idea is the most deadly holdover from the Christendom era. When the Church and its surrounding society cooperated in perpetuating the lie that the entire culture was Christian, the Church received power and status in return for tacit obedience to this central idea. Hence, at the beginning of World War I, every army was blessed by its pastors, priests, and bishops to go out and kill the other armies. Christians were blessed by the Church to go out and kill other Christians, because the cultures were at war.
The PC(USA) has been done in by this same phenomenon from the 1960's, when the culture that gave the PC(USA) status declared war on the rising youth culture of the time; we are now almost 50 years into that war, and it still hasn't ended.
So much of what is happening inside the Church is still being driven by this principle. In an argument over whether the Church should bless gay marriage, the winning trump in my brother's hand was this: "don't you realize that in 20 years, every state in the union will recognize gay marriage?"
My response: "So what?"
All I received was a dumbfounded look.
The Church is not bound to follow this culture-- it is bound to follow the Lord, led by the Word. When the Church follows the Lord, preaches the Word, and obeys, it will lead Culture, not follow it.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Deckchair or Lifeboat?
Now that I am down to about 5 kleenexes/hour, and the coughing only lasts the first 2 hours of the day, I am trying to get back in the swing of things. Nell has been at school for the first two full days, but I'm afraid she's caught this bug now, so she's taking it easy (which is hard for her). Ruth heads back to college on Monday, and everything goes to full speed next week at Church (we're at about 1/2 speed this week).
As I've been reading the blogs, I've been thinking about Bruce Reyes-Chow's challenge to define a center that can hold inside the PC(USA), about Beau Weston's assertions that the tall-steeple pastors should re-form their "establishment" to form that center.
The image may be brutal, but I think it is apt. It doesn't matter whether you are partial to the port side, starboard side, bow, midships, or stern of the Titanic. There is no sense in arguing where is the best place to gather together. All parts of the ship are headed in the same direction. The ship turns out to not be "unsinkable" after all. If this last six months should have taught us arrogant Westerners anything, it should be that no human creation is unsinkable, or too big to fail.
All of the foundational institutions of "the American Century"-- corporations, unions, health insurance, pensions-- are coming apart. The question is not how to save them, but how to create what comes next. In that context, the question of a "center" makes sense.
This is the great enterprise of this time-- and it will not be engaged in by those who are on the deck, with their shoulders to the wheels of the old system as it grinds its way into oblivion. The grand enterprise will start as a collection of lifeboats, not some sheared-off portion of the old ship. This is why I believe that Dr. Weston is mistaken. The real creative energy of a new center is not going to be found in the first class saloon of the old; it will be found in those striking out in new directions around the periphery. If there is a hope for something new to salvage the precious treasure bound up in the old, it is in the lifeboats.
Let those who want to yell about whether the iceberg was on the left or the right of the ship, whether if we had turned to port or starboard things might have been different-- let them argue on. There are new horizons to be explored with those ready to get in a smaller craft. I see no reason why Bruce and I cannot explore that new horizon with our two boats together. In fact, sticking together makes MORE sense in a lifeboat than it does in a deckchair. The era of the modern American Titanic is over, for good or for ill. Let's save what we can of her, and see what the Lord will lead us to build to replace her.
As I've been reading the blogs, I've been thinking about Bruce Reyes-Chow's challenge to define a center that can hold inside the PC(USA), about Beau Weston's assertions that the tall-steeple pastors should re-form their "establishment" to form that center.
The image may be brutal, but I think it is apt. It doesn't matter whether you are partial to the port side, starboard side, bow, midships, or stern of the Titanic. There is no sense in arguing where is the best place to gather together. All parts of the ship are headed in the same direction. The ship turns out to not be "unsinkable" after all. If this last six months should have taught us arrogant Westerners anything, it should be that no human creation is unsinkable, or too big to fail.
All of the foundational institutions of "the American Century"-- corporations, unions, health insurance, pensions-- are coming apart. The question is not how to save them, but how to create what comes next. In that context, the question of a "center" makes sense.
This is the great enterprise of this time-- and it will not be engaged in by those who are on the deck, with their shoulders to the wheels of the old system as it grinds its way into oblivion. The grand enterprise will start as a collection of lifeboats, not some sheared-off portion of the old ship. This is why I believe that Dr. Weston is mistaken. The real creative energy of a new center is not going to be found in the first class saloon of the old; it will be found in those striking out in new directions around the periphery. If there is a hope for something new to salvage the precious treasure bound up in the old, it is in the lifeboats.
Let those who want to yell about whether the iceberg was on the left or the right of the ship, whether if we had turned to port or starboard things might have been different-- let them argue on. There are new horizons to be explored with those ready to get in a smaller craft. I see no reason why Bruce and I cannot explore that new horizon with our two boats together. In fact, sticking together makes MORE sense in a lifeboat than it does in a deckchair. The era of the modern American Titanic is over, for good or for ill. Let's save what we can of her, and see what the Lord will lead us to build to replace her.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Digesting
My eager desire and hope being that
I may never feel ashamed.
But that now, as ever, I may do honour to Christ
In my own person with fearless courage. Philippians 1:20 (Moffat)
As I am trying to feel my way through the fog of this time, I picked up Oswald Chambers and began another year of My Utmost for His Highest. The Scripture above is the first Word from the book. I think I understand more now what it means.
This process is an education in the nature of the world. It is breathtaking in its cold, cruel and senseless beauty. All the picket fences and locks, security systems and 401(k)'s and health insurance cannot protect us from its dead, remorseless progress. It has no care for negotiation, no rules it must follow. Being good is no protection. All the routines of our lives do not send it scurrying away.
It is this essential senselessness of the world that I think Heath Ledger captured in "The Dark Knight," which we watched on Sunday (thank you, David and Michael). He and Two-Face are the two faces of our natural reaction to it: a selfish delight in joining in the destruction, or a rage-filled demand for fairness, for some sort of sense. Both reactions simply fuel the cruelty.
There is another reaction that is possible. It is to stand and fight-- not to win, but simply to fight-- to fight the cruelty, the coldness, the senselessness with the one abiding power that has no human explanation, and is just as visceral as the hate, fear and rage: love. But that now, as ever, I may do honour to Christ In my own person with fearless courage.
Courage to stand with Nell, and not lie, but speak the truth that Love will not lose-- it WILL be ok, even if it seems that all is lost. Courage to pick up a light instead of cursing the darkness. Courage to love in the face of the hatred and cruelty of those who know the world, and in resignation or selfishness feed its powers, indifferent to the suffering around them. Courage to live in a world terrified of dying.
If we walk down the path and Nell's eloquence is swallowed in silence too early, or the work we do in Oak Cliff bears little fruit, or all that I cherish is taken from me-- I still choose to love. And when this world has ground me into the dust, then with Christ
I WILL RISE.
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