Fourth Sunday in Advent

To my joy and anticipation, the fourth and final candle on our Advent wreath was lit this evening. Tonight again the Christchild comes.

Reading through the Gospel of John this month, I'm met with this strange but wonderful Christmas message of the Word made flesh who reveals the Father. Jesus says, "If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:7, 9). The same goes in John's introduction to his Gospel narrative: "No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known" (1:18).

But prior to Jesus' words in chapter 14 is the perplexing fact that, though he is "Lord and Teacher," he washes his disciples' feet and is among men as "one who serves" (Luke 22:27). Jesus never abandoned his full equality in being with God when he took on flesh in the womb of a poor peasant girl. He was still revealing the Father when he touched the ill, crippled, and unclean to heal them; when he was put to death in ignominy, abandonment, and shame. But how is it that in Jesus' deep acts of humility, meekness, and servanthood he truly reveals the Father? I cannot wrap my mind around this. How can God the Holy, the All-powerful, the Exalted, the Splendrous, be himself a God who serves? How is he, in his nature, a servant? How is this possible?

But Jesus shows us in his life and death that real authority looks far different than we perceive it with the eyes of the world. "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all" (Mark 9:35). "He who is the least among you all--he is the greatest" (Luke 9:48). Is it not the mystery of Christmas and the judgment of God upon the world itself that the Light of Christ "shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it" (John 1:5)?

Tonight and during the Christmas festival (that is, from today until Epiphany on January 6), let's pray with the blind beggar, "Lord, I want to see!" (Luke 19:41), that we might not try to find God in glory and power--these are the ways of the world, our sin and blindness--but as he has chosen to reveal himself: in a babe laid in a feed trough, the King of the world who has come to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

My Christmas wish list

With my 25th birthday having come and gone a week ago (Dec. 16) and Christmas coming in a few short days, it's nice to think about all the cool gifts I'd like to be given but will never actually receive, living some 8,700 kilometers from home. (That's 5,400 miles for all of you living in the past. Face it: the metric system is superior.) Nonetheless, here is my second annual Christmas wish list.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you're probably aware that I like to read a lot, especially about theology (and by that I mean, living truth about God and his ways). If it were possible and I didn't have an upcoming career in science education, I'd probably spend all my time reading, studying, and writing about such things. My theology picks are: Jonathan R. Wilson, God So Loved the World; N. T. Wright, Simply Christian; Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross; and Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God.

As far as other books go, there are few authors I'm more interested in than recent Nobel Prize winner and fiction writer Orhan Pamuk. His novels Snow and My Name is Red have drawn worldwide acclaim, but I'm most interested in his memoirs, Istanbul: Memories and the City. Throw in the latest anthology of poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I'll be occupied for a long time (especially as I own many books that I haven't even read yet).

As I was perusing the Detroit Tigers web page yesterday I read that, to my joy, a four-CD boxed set of recordings from announcer Ernie Harwell's illustrious broadcasting career is to be released soon. Having many fond summer memories of his sweet, Southern voice telling of strikeout victims who "stood there like a house by the side of the road" and home run balls that were "looonnggg gone," I really want to pick this up soon.

Living in a country where the drink of choice is made from salty yogurt and the alcoholic staple is an anise-flavored liquor that'll knock you off your chair (affectionately known as "lion's milk"), I long for some good beer. Sure, some crappy pilseners are available. But real beers have to have flavor, something that makes them memorable. Hats off to Bell's Brewery of Kalamazoo Brewing Company for my favorite, their Best Brown Ale.

Just like last year, I still want an iPod, seeing as how I spend three hours a day on public transportation, and my CD player is all but dead. (Though I still can't help but wonder how much the headphoned world contributes to our isolation from one another.) And I've got to have music for it, right? Ideally I'd be listening to The Appleseed Cast's new release Peregrine. I'm starting to dig their ever-morphing sound that is simultaneously rich yet lulling. If Peregrine is as good as Mare Vitalis, I'll be glad. Other albums I'd like: Rainer Maria, Long Knives Drawn; Mineral, End Serenading; Sufjan Stevens, Michigan; and some good jazz.

But none of this would really be worth anything without home, without my family. Dear Mom and Dad, all I want for Christmas is a plane ticket home for a week.

You cannot limit this Gospel!

I've recently begun helping with a Christian interparish refugee assistance program in the city providing housing, food, clothing, child care, and routine medical aid to migrants seeking a new life. Each week I get the privilege of having fun with children from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Most of them are knit by the common language of Arabic or, for those from Iran, Farsi. It really is a blast!


This morning as we got all the children together for a group photo, a conversation I had last night with Ziya Meral was still in my mind. Currently a human rights activist, Ziya has also authored several books, including one about what it means to have a truly native Christian theology. That is, for him, what does it mean to live as a Christian in 21st-century Turkey? You see, here as elsewhere in the Middle East, those who become Christians bear the stigma of being labeled traitors and converts to Western, Anglo-Saxon cultural ideologies. Having read a book last year about countries with shame-based worldviews (unlike Western guilt-based worldviews developing from Plato's Republic and Roman law), I began to see the importance of a truly cultural, indigenous idea of what it means to live as one bearning the name of Jesus Christ.

At the same time, culture shapes what we see and cherish in the gospel of the person and work of Jesus. For those in America, oftentimes the gospel is that Jesus bore the punishment for our sins and we are declared innocent or "righteous" before God. In Jordan it's that God himself is restoring the shamed and outcast to a position of honor, with his Son bearing their alienation and reproach. In Laos and animist cultures Jesus is the Victor who wields power and triumph over all evil spirits. In Bolivia Jesus brings equality and crushes injustice. All of these are true and biblically valid ways to understand and embrace the Messiah.

So this morning with the children I wondered, For each of the varied faces gathered there, could there be a unique Jesus for him, Jesus for her? (Yes, there is!) And I wonder just how much more there is to Jesus and God's amazing restoration that I cannot or have not yet seen simply because of who I am in culture and history. The Great News of Christ is so expansive that its contours cannot be boxed or constrained or limited or defined. No crack caused by sin, no fear or stain or injustice or disorder will be left unturned, unredeemed!

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You can check out two essays of Ziya's here: The Persecuted Church: Fighting Cultural Alienation with Contextual Theology and this passionate plea, A Message to the West from the Persecuted Church.

You too, be ready!

The guys in our Bible study had decided a few weeks back that we'd like to take a few weeks' pause from 2 Corinthians and instead read some Advent sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Last week I decided that this morning we'd read a sermon of his with Luke 12:35-40 serving as the text.

Last night I woke up at 4:45 because I heard someone walking around the foyer of our apartment, shut the door, then quickly run down the five flights of spiral stairs. Knowing that break-ins are very common here, I feared the worst. I quickly got up to check our house. All looked sound.

Right now we have a friend staying with us for a week, and looking at the couch where he was sleeping, it looked like he was still there; I could swear it was him I heard breathing as he slept. But even on the odd chance that it was he who had gotten up and left at such an early hour--he wasn't home when I got up at 7:30--the whole incident was a wake-up call (no pun intended).


Then this morning we read Luke 12:39-40, in which Jesus warns, "But be sure of this, that if the head of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have allowed his house to be broken into. You too, be ready; for the Son of Man is coming at an hour that you do not expect." Wow. Talk about bringing Scripture to light! Seriously, any day we could be going about our business, and Jesus will return, as suddenly and unexpectedly as whomever may or may not have been in my apartment last night. We will not be able to choose sides or shape up our lives then; we'll only be left in an unchosen reaction to his coming. How we live and what we choose now will determine whether we will at that day lift up our heads and see his coming as a thing of unimaginable joy, relief, and beauty; or else we'll melt in shame and fear, "our faces aflame" (Isaiah 13:8) in seeing Christ the King as a terror that humbles our worst of nightmares.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?

I read this interesting commentary of Catholic apologist Jacob Michael concerning the Christian versus secular views of the Christmas holiday, and I find it quite interesting and prophetic (although this really only works in branches of Christianity who celebrate Christmas on December 25, unlike our Orthodox brothers, who celebrate it on January 6).

". . . what Christians do (or should be doing!) during Advent and leading up to Christmas is a foreshadowing of what they will do during the days of their lives that lead up to the Second Coming; what non-Christians refuse to do during Advent, and put off until after Christmas, is precisely a foreshadowing of what they will experience at the Second Coming.

"We Christians are to prepare for the Coming of Christ before He actually comes -- and that Coming is symbolized and recalled at Christmas. Non-Christians miss this season of preparation, and then scramble for six days after the 25th to make their resolutions. By then, however, it's too late -- Christmas has come and gone. Our Lord has already made His visitation to the earth, and he has found them unprepared. This is precisely what will take place at the Second Coming, when those who have put off for their entire lives the necessary preparations will suddenly be scrambling to put their affairs in order. Unfortunately, by then it will have been too late, and there will be no time for repentance. The Second Coming will be less forgiving than the Incarnation. There will be no four-week warning period before the Second Coming, like we get during Advent. There will be no six-day period of grace after the Second Coming during which to make resolutions and self-examination, like the secular world does from Dec. 26 until Jan. 1."

How long, O Yahweh?

Last week I had the privilege of spending a few days in Prague, Czech Republic, with some friends. One day we visited the Jewish Quarter of this beautiful city of countless bridges. Next to a tiny, egregiously overcrowded burial plot -- the only land allotted to Jews for interment for three centuries -- stood the Pinkas Synagogue. On its interior walls were written the full name, birthdate, and date of death for all 77,000-plus known Czechoslovakian Jews who perished under the evils of the Third Reich from 1939-45. It was incredibly moving.*


During these past few weeks standing at the cusp of the Advent season -- not the Christmas season, which begins when the Light of God's Son enters our world late on Christmas Eve -- the narrative of Luke 1-2 has walked through the chambers of my mind, challenging me in what the Coming of the Messiah really means, and means to me. While at the synagogue those like the Virgin Mary, the priest Simeon, and the prophetess Anna came to mind, who were eagerly awaiting "the consolation of Israel" and "the redemption of Jerusalem" (Luke 2:25, 38). They may have been back within the physical boundaries of the Promised Land, but centuries of foreign occupation and oppression pointed them to the fact that they were still in exile, awaiting their homecoming in the kingdom of God. And something tells me that the erosion and pain the Jews have had to face is, really, that of all of us who belong to the new Israel of God by faith in his crucified and risen Messiah.

Am I so content with my life right now and what I have seen of God and his redemption that I no longer yearn with such pangs for our King's Second Coming? The Apostle Paul said that he groaned and longed for release from the pains of this life -- be they persecutions, illnesses, discouragement, slandering, his own sin -- into the freedom and glory of life in intimate, relational presence with his Lord when "what is mortal will be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:1-5; Rom. 8:18-25). Am I discontent with the now? Do we long with eager yearning for Christ to come, slay all enemies of his church, and make all things new? Is the news of a coming Savior the chief desire of ours?

O Mighty God, you have blessed us with your Son's coming to defeat sin and death and offer the promise of life and rescue to all who would flee to him. Free us from the love of the things of this world that cause us to sit in idleness and some discontent with the fact that it will all one day -- suddenly, like a thief -- be done away with, and you will be the sole source of joy to remain. May we learn to fix our hope fully on the grace that is to be ours at your revelation. Amen.

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*I thought it was especially poignant that on the synagogue's interior was written Lamentations 1:12: "Is it nothing to all you who pass by this way? Look and see if there is any pain like my pain which was severely dealt out to me, which the LORD inflicted on the day of His fierce anger."

The Lord is gracious and compassionate . . .

. . . so he kills babies? Apparently this is the line of thinking from some frontrunners within the (Episcopal) Church of England who believe that it is ethically permissible to allow severely ill or disabled newborns to die, as you can read here. (Also argued for is the consideration of financial cost of preserving the lives of desperately ill babies.)

Part of the statement by Bishop Tom Butler of Southwark includes "long premature" newborn babies. Guess what, Bishop: I was one such child. When my mother was pregnant with me in 1981, I had to be delivered by c-section eight weeks early due to Toxemia complications. As a result, I was only 2 pounds, 7 ounces and 15 inches at birth. Far from ideally healthy and at a time when few premature infants survived, I had to spend two months in an incubator. My skin was nearly translucent, and my heart even stopped beating once. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for choosing to trust "the Father of all compassion" (2 Cor. 1:3) to restore me to health and to provide the money needed to keep me in an incubator for two months. Thank you, caring Governor and Preserver, for miraculously keeping me alive and for providing the skilled doctors and nurses in the neonatal unit at the University of Michigan Women's Hospital.

Butler is quoted as saying, "There may be occasions where, for a Christian, compassion will override the 'rule' that life should be preserved." Who are we to say what "compassion" is? Are we to assume that the Church can import its own a priori definitions of love and compassion rather than seeking what God himself defines and commands in regard to them in his Word? I think of the blind man in John 9 whose life was not a biological mistake. Jesus insisted that his blindness happened "so that the works of God might be displayed in him" (v. 3).

Bishop Butler's submission also says that "The principle of humility asks that members of the medical profession restrain themselves from claiming greater powers to heal than they can deliver. It [also] asks that parents restrain themselves from demanding the impossible." While it's true that none of us inherently have a right to demand medical cures--all fruits of modern medicine and acts of healing are purely gracious gifts of God's kingdom breaking in upon an otherwise decayed and ill world--true humility does not give up hope. The humility of which Butler speaks is one that is full of pride, considering only man's desires for convenience and money and "compassion." It's a humility that trusts only in one's own less-than-guaranteed medical prowess. But true humility acknowledges our lack of control and power and instead turns us in faith to seek the merciful intervention of God Almighty, believing that he can indeed do the impossible (Matt. 19:26; Luke 1:37).

Just as Christ also loved the church

Last Friday night I was at a cafe with my friends Sara and Sarah, and we got on to talking about baptism. I was asked, "What exactly does baptism do?" I spent probably half an hour trying to explain the manifold things that happen to us at our baptism, but the question itself was never directly answered: What does baptism do?

Despite my fuddled attempts at answering her question, it turns out the question was never the right one to begin with: baptism doesn't do anything for us. Rather, it is God who acts for us graciously therein. Part of even my own confusion is the thinking of the sacraments as a "means of grace," as if grace were some sort of impersonal substance channeled through water or wine. No, grace is a personal attribute of God himself, a way he acts to us in undeserved love, mercy, and faithfulness at the font and table.

In his recent book God of Promise*, Michael Horton explains why we can rightly view the sacraments as something more than just an empty sign alone in which we merely remember a previous act of God or recommit our own faith. "In the [Lord's] supper we have to do with the signs and the things they signify. The ring in a wedding does not merely symbolize a union. At least according to the traditional language, we say, 'With this ring I thee wed.' If this is true in a humanly devised ritual, how much more so in a covenant ceremony in which God's promise has a seal of his own authority attached to it" (p. 168).

Granted, his a fortiori (from the lesser to the greater) logic fails somewhat here, but what a beautiful picture indeed! Just as the ring -- which remains a ring but no longer only a ring -- is an action of the groom to actually wed his bride and promise to her his everlasting love and commitment, so too does God in our baptismal waters and in the meal himself pledge to us his everlasting love and fidelity to his covenant of grace. We can choose either to ignore the ring or take it off in the car before going to work or to the night club, or we can look at it as a most precious gift and know the wondrous reality that a union exists and our Groom will forever be faithful.

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water [almost undeniably a reference to baptism] with the word. . . . 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is great [Can we see here a hint at our baptismal faith-union to Christ? - cf. Romans 6:3-7 and Galatians 3:27]; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church" (see Ephesians 5:22-33).

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*Michael Horton, God of Promise: Introducting Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2006).

Wine that gladdens the heart of man

Over the past month or so, the prophets' and psalmists' vivid descriptions of the fruits of God's realized kingdom have been standing out from my reading of the Old Testament. The Turkish word bereket -- abundance, plenitude, cornucopia, fecundity -- sums it up well. In the execution of his gracious reign God promises refreshing, life-giving rainshowers, fields golden with wheat, jars filled with wine to gladden people's hearts, trees whose limbs are bowed low with the weight of their fruits, tables spread with the choicest of foods. Particularly Psalms 84 and 104, Isaiah 25, 26, 41, 65, and Joel 2 and 3 have pointed me toward this.

"In that day the mountains will drip new wine,
and the hills will flow with milk;
all the ravines of Judah will run with water.
A fountain will flow out of the LORD's house
and will water the valley of acacias [a tree common to dry, arid climes]."
(Joel 3:18 NIV; see also 2:21-27)

Some may say that these are merely poetic images that serve to point us to some sort of spiritual reality beyond this creation. But when Jesus taught us to pray for our daily bread, he meant exactly that. "Bodily life is not disdainful," writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer. "Precisely for its sake God has given us his fellowship in Jesus Christ, so that we can live by him in this life and then also, of course, in the life to come" (Psalms, p. 44). We can and ought to pray for such things insofar as they turn us toward the Giver in dependence and gratitude.

But here's the tricky thing: this bereket belongs to the eschatological age of kingdom of God. On one hand, the kingdom in a present reality in which we live, as attested to St. Peter's use of Joel 2:28-32 in Acts 2 -- meaning that all these blessings are, in a way, our possession right now as firstfruits of the coming harvest. But that's just it: the full harvest has yet to come in. There is a way this will only be realized in the "new heavens and a new earth" for which we are still waiting (Isa. 65:17; 2 Pet. 3:11-13; Rev. 21:1; cf. Isa. 25:7-8).

So in what ways can we -- you, me, and anyone else belonging to God's redeemed -- expect, hope in, and pray for these type of rich bereket blessings in this earthly life? I surely do not want to expect less from our generous Lord than he wishes to provide, but at the same time I know that this world is fallen and we must live in the shadow of the Cross, passing through death into resurrection. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Ted Haggard

"I am of the flesh, sold into bondage to sin. . . . Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:14, 24)

"The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)

It's sad to say, but we ought not be so surprised and shocked at the Ted Haggard ordeal. Appalled, yes; grieved, yes; desirous of change, yes; but surprised, no. You see, the real problem with Haggard lies within every one of us: it is ME and my sinful nature, as Tim Challies so stingingly observes here. Ave crux unica spes mea--Hail, O Cross, my sole hope!

God's children will stand firm!

At a prayer meeting this past Tuesday morning, a man spoke on the Epistle of Saint Jude, which begins like this: "Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints" (v. 3). Little did I know that later that day it would strike home.

Clarissa and I met up with a friend named "Rose" who came to faith last year after a two-year period of searching, coming to our church every weekend, and spending a lot of time with us. We rejoiced! But she then left for a nine-month internship in Italy, where apparently all she could find were unorthodox Catholic churches. One of the big questions haunting many people coming from an Islamic background is "Is Jesus really God himself and not just a prophet?" Yet the priests she spoke with in Italy told her that she was mistaken and that Jesus was not God, but rather the son of God. Whether or not it was a matter of semantics (i.e., by "God" they all meant "God the Father"), no priest can claim Jesus is not "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made" (Nicene Creed). Rose was rocked so far to where she said, "I don't know what to do; I'm not a Muslim anymore but I'm not a Christian." Who ordains these ministers?

If you know me, there are a few things that really set me on edge: when people conned or wronged, people who don't pull their weight and do their share of the work, and bad theology. So just when Clarissa and I were hoping to spend time with Rose rejoicing in the common salvation we together share, we found a need to contend for the faith. Saint Paul warns of people who distort the true faith, "whose talk will spread like gangrene" (or, as John Calvin translates, "their word will eat as doth a canker"). Such are "men who have gone astray from the truth . . . and they upset the faith of some" (2 Timothy 2:16-18).

But amidst these buffeting winds there is a sure hope: "Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God [possibly the church, who in 1 Timothy 3:15 is described as 'the pillar and foundation of the truth'] stands, having this seal, 'The Lord knows those who are His.' " Jude's greeting rings with the same beauty: "To those who are the called, beloved in God the Father, and kept for [or by] Jesus Christ" (v. 1; cf. v. 24). No deceiver will ever lay hold of the Almighty's church, his chosen and beloved children! He will slay all such distorters with the breath of his mouth while dealing ever so gently and mercifully with those of us whose faith has been rocked, the "bruised reeds" and "faintly burning wicks" like our friend Rose. We reassured her of this, that just because she doubts some things doesn't mean that God has left her, and that we would continue to be wrestling for her in prayer to be kept by Jesus Christ, as she really is.

Frohes Reformationstag!

HAPPY REFORMATION DAY!

"To the only wise God be glory for evermore through Jesus Christ! Amen." (Romans 16:27)

On Oct. 31, 1517, a young monk and professor at the University of Wittenberg, Martin Luther, nailed his 95 theses to the bulletin board on the door of the Castle Church. In this document he invited his fellow professors to a debate. The Reformation historian, Myconius, wrote that the contents spread throughout Germany in 14 days and in a month throughout all Christendom.

In challenging the indulgence traffic, Luther was convinced that the answer to the problem of sin lay in God’s Word. While preparing lectures on the Psalms and on Romans, he discovered God as his merciful Father. The key to the Scriptures was God’s promise of forgiveness, to be accepted by faith in the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ. Luther noted that we must be truly humble before God and sincerely penitent to receive God’s forgiveness. In his theses he stressed that the Gospel is the real treasure of the church, stating that we "should not rely on the treasury of indulgences, but upon the real treasury of God’s wonderful grace, the holy Gospel."

This is what the Reformation message is still all about today. To God be all glory!

(From the LCMS daily devotion found here.)

Though the earth give way

About half an hour ago I was sitting at our "dining room" table, reading, when all of a sudden I noticed that everything began to . . . shake. At first I thought that one of my roommates snuck up behind me and was shaking my chair, but then I saw the bookshelf rattling against the wall. This went on for about fifteen seconds. My friend Clarissa, who was sitting on the floor in her flat, said "It felt like our apartment was made of nothing."

As it turns out, there was an earthquake of 5.2 magnitude on the Richter scale in the town of Gemlik, some 100-plus miles from us on the southeast corner of the Sea of Marmara. Couple this with Friday's 5.2 quake in the not-so-distant city of Balıkesir, and it can't help but make me slightly uneasy. While speaking with a civil engineering professor at a local university last year about the general lack of quality and adherence to codes in construction, he commented, "When--not if--a major earthquake hits here, it could be the costliest natural disaster in history."

For a while last year, honestly I was gripped with a bit of paranoia and fear regarding the possibility of a severe quake. But standing over and against that is Psalm 46 and the God Most High who holds the world in his hands:

God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging. (vv. 1-3)

Teens in trouble?

A recent article in the New York Times comments on a seeming downward trend in the number of teens who are "Bible-believing Christians." (However, the article writes entirely about evangelical Christians. Are our Catholic and Orthodox brothers not Bible-believing Christians?) Having spent a year teaching high school and hopefully beginning soon a career in science education, this is of no little importance to me. Tons of questions swirl in my mind regarding what I can do, what churches and pastors ought to do, what teens are seeking, etc.

I was blessed to have known some people in my own high school who invited me to their youth group, and in a few of them I saw something different: being a Christian meant something. But even then I couldn't help but be involved with this youth group simply because I felt good to be doing something "right" and to be part of something that others were involved in. Not to knock Teen Mania, Acquire the Fire, or many youth groups, but it's no secret that teens (like most adults) seek approval and inclusion. They want to be popular and liked. But is some hip, cool youth group meeting the answer? How many teens are involved in big gatherings like "See You at the Pole" simply because others are there and they want to show that they, too, are "good kids"?

I thankfully don't lose much sleep over the future of today's teens regarding Christian faith. I don't take it lightly at all, but wherever the sacraments are administered and the Word of God is preached in truth and in such a way that no one is left thinking that she can stand upon the law and her own goodness, but Jesus' alone, there the Holy Spirit will create and establish faith. (Though it is worth considering that in many such evangelical churches, baptism is a mere "ordinance" pushed off by students until they believe they have enough faith or personal merit to warrant it. How can the Spirit use that to promote the message of grace?)

And if by some random chance you're reading this, Carly, Alison, Emily, and Tim -- keep the faith and keep running (literally). I'm proud of your devotion to the Lord and rejoice in the evidence of his redeeming grace in your lives.

"This mystery is profound"

With Reformation Day coming up soon (October 31), yesterday I began reading Martin Luther's treatise On Christian Liberty (also known as The Freedom of the Christian).* In it he develops the following theses: "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none" and "A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all" (p. 2). I wish to relay a discourse concerning the role of Christ to his Church as that of a bridegroom to his bride, because it's simply so beautiful. (If you wish to save time, the first paragraph contains the essence.)

The third incomparable benefit of faith is that it unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united to her bridegroom. By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul become one flesh [Eph. 5:31-32]. And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage--indeed the most perfect of all marriages, since human marriages are but poor examples of this one true marriage--it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has Christ claims as his own. Let us compare these and we shall see inestimable benefits. Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ's, while grace, life, and salvation will the soul's; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride's a bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?

Here we have a most pleasing vision not only of communion but of a blessed struggle and victory and salvation and redemption. Christ is God and man in one person. He has neither sinned nor died, and is not condemned, and he cannot sin, die, or be condemned; his righteousness, life, and salvation are unconquerable, eternal, omnipotent. By the wedding ring of faith he shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are his bride's. As a matter of fact, he makes them his own and as if he himself had sinned; he suffered, died, and descended into hell that he might overcome them all. Now since it was such a one who did all this, and death and hell could not swallow him up, these were necessarily swallowed up by him in a mighty duel; for his righteousness is greater than the sins of all men, his life stronger than death, his salvation more invincible than hell. Thus the believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom, free from all sins, secure against death and hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ its bridegroom. So he takes to himself a glorious bride, "without spot or wrinkle, cleansing her by the washing of water with the word" [cf. Eph. 5:26-27] of life, that is, by faith in the Word of life, righteousness, and salvation. In this way he marries her in faith, steadfast love, and in mercies, righteousness, and justice, as Hos. 2[:19-20] says.

Who then can fully appreciate what this royal marriage means? Who can understand the riches of the glory of this grace? Here this rich and divine bridegroom marries this poor, wicked harlot, redeems her from all her evil, and adorns her with all his goodness. Her sins cannot now destroy her, since they are laid upon Christ and swallowed up by him. And she has that righteousness in Christ, her husband, of which she may boast as of her own and which she can confidently display alongside her sins in the face of death and hell and say, "If I have sinned, yet my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned, and all his is mine all mine is his," as the bride in the Song of Solomon [2:16] says, "My beloved is mine and I am his." This is what Paul means when he says in 1 Cor. 15[:57], "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ," that is, the victory over sin and death, as he also says there, "The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law" [1 Cor. 15:56]. (pp. 18-22)
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*Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty, tr. W. A. Lambert (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress, 2003).

"They actually kicked our ass."

Boo-yah! "Where is the Big Unit? Where is the touted offense? Where is the $25-million superstar? Where is the critic? Has not Jim Leyland made foolish the predictions of the nay-sayers?" (1 Corinthians 1:20, New Dee-troit Version)

That's right, the unstoppable Yankees got flogged by the Tigers, whom everyone else had written off weeks ago. Led by outstanding efforts from Kenny Rogers and Jeremy Bonderman (left), Detroit's pitching staff held the Bronx Bloopers to batting only .095 with runners in scoring position and held them to 20 consecutive scoreless innings . I couldn't put it any better than New York third-sacker Alex Rodriguez: "Plain and simple, they dominated us. It's not like we lost by one or two runs. They actually kicked our ass."

All I've gotta say is: Bring it on. We're not losing the pennant to Baked Ziti and the Oakland Unathletics. (What the heck is an "Athletic"? And why is their logo an elephant?)

Congratulations, boys. Thanks for restoring the roar. Keep it going!

Church of St. Savior in Chora

A few days ago, my roommates and I took a day for some adventure around some of the older districts of the city . One of our stops was the Church of St. Savior in Chora ("in the countryside," though it was soon lay within the city walls built by Theodosius c. A.D. 420). The current building dates to the 11th century and is filled with dozens of beautiful, ornate mosaics. A later addition to the church (c. 1320) contains many intriguing frescoes. Two illustrations from the church stood out to me in how they portray Christ.


Anastasis. This fresco depicts the Lord Jesus Christ at the final Resurrection taking Adam and Eve by the hand and drawing them from the grave. I love how Jesus is here the absolute Lord over all things, over the destiny and redemption of humanity. Yet he is not distant; he is personally bringing these two from bondage to decay and into "the freedom of the glory of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). And in the Last Adam giving anew life to the First Adam, we see the truth that redemption in Christ is not a limited phenomenon; rather, he is reconciling the whole world to himself and creating a entirely new humanity (Colossians 1:20). "When this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortality will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, 'Death is swallowed up in victory' " (1 Corinthians 15:54).


The Dormition of the Virgin. Though probably based more upon tradition than fact or Scripture, this mosaic of the assumption of Mary is an amazing work of art. I'm not exactly sure what all is entailed in the idea of her assumption and being taken into union with her Son and Savior, a few beautiful things are captured here: (1) I think it's a beautiful thing that angels are here at her death, fighting ever still against spiritual powers of evil in service of those who are to inherit salvation (Heb. 1:14). "Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His godly ones" (Psalm 116:5).

(2) Jesus is holding an infant representing Mary's soul. I've heard that in Orthodoxy this represents that only upon our death and entrance into the fullness of life in the kingdom are we truly born and come to true life, ever growing in the joyful presence and knowledge of God.

(3) I see the supremacy of Christ in creation here, in that even though he is her Son, he is the one who holds her in his power. Even when Jesus was yet to be born, did he not yet hold Mary's life in his hands? "For by Him all things were created . . . all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:16-17).

You can see more pictures from our excursion at http://andrewhall.photosite.com. Please e-mail me at drew@aderes.net for a password to see the site.

Love seeks not its own

The way Jesus has called us to love one another really is otherworldly. Everywhere you look in the Gospels and in the rest of the New Testament the word for love is agapē, as opposed to eros. The type of love we're to live in, above all things, "seeketh not her own" (1 Cor. 13:5). It's not obvious to us right off the bat, but how often what we call love has mingled with it at least some measure of seeking some measure of love or self-profit from the beloved: his aid, her affection, his continued friendship. When love seeks a response from the beloved back toward the lover, it goes bankrupt.

When we who go by the name "Christian" aim toward Spiritual love, as Bonhoeffer so often insists, our relations with others must be solely mediated through Jesus Christ, the one who is among us "as the one who serves" (Luke 22:27). That is, it is to live in our freedom from needing to bind ourselves directly to others. Finding ourselves in Christ means that we're already complete (Col. 2:9-10) and now freed for others, serving not ourselves but our Lord and the God whose image they bear.

This is why Jesus teaches us to love our enemies. The normal person would weep over unrequited love, because the enemy will not serve him back or give himself in return. Jesus didn't stop loving his own people after crying, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing" (Luke 13:34). He lived in his divine freedom to serve others.

O Lord, teach us to love. Free us from ourselves and our selfish desires and corrupt motives. Give us eyes to see the truth that "we love because he first loved us," that we are so entirely possessed by God and that we truly possess him as well, lacking nothing, that we can be freed to be your lips, your hands to others. Amen.

"I have made, and I will bear"

Well, it's been six days in Istanbul now, and I must say that I'm pleased with how things are going (a bit of digestive disagreement notwithstanding): if anything, my Turkish has improved, and daily sundries are like old hat. On top of that, I really like my roommates so far. One of them, Ryan, is an even bigger theology geek than I am: he's studied Greek for two semesters and brought along the entire Christian Origins and the Question of God series by N. T. Wright!

Naturally, Ryan, Anthony, and I ended up having an hour-long conversation about the ways the Holy Spirit works within us to renew our wills and desires. Discussion drifted into competing philosophies (if one can even peg Christianity as a "philosophy"; we were talking about spirit-matter dualism) and how "people"* use these to excuse their own sins and keep away from the Lord Christ. But that little spark inside reminded me a lesson I've had to learn from seeing friends drift far away from fellowship with the Lord: If it wasn't entirely for God's faithfulness to me and his powerful sustaining of my own faith, I would've shipwrecked long ago.

It's so easy to wag my finger and shake my head in no small bit of smug condescension at those who reject Jesus or fail to "get it." But if it weren't for God, I'd be no different. Every earnest prayer, every loathing of my sin, every longing for God, every whispered confession of Jesus as Savior, every hope for the life to come--these I owe entirely to God, as he continues to work faith in me.

Sometimes I wonder, Why on earth does he fight so fiercely for me? Why does my Father, like an eagle clutching me within its talons, still keep me and never let me slip?

Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from before your birth,
carried from the womb;
even to your old age I am he,
and to gray hairs I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save.

To whom will you liken me and me make equal,
and compare me, that we may be alike?
(Isaiah 46:3-5)

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*As if this were only restricted to others and not to the three of us! "Nathan said to David, 'You are the man!' " (2 Sam. 12:7).

T-minus forty-three hours

A year ago my buddy Ryan said that "the future has a strange way of casually becoming the present." So it goes for me. By this point on Sunday I'll be five hours into my flight to Istanbul via Frankfurt; what was once a three-month summer at home has come and gone. I've enjoyed being home with my parents, following the Tigers, and cycling. With several friends of mine having recently begun their teaching careers, a real part of me wants to be in the classroom right now as well. And I do hope that an amazing job will come along for me next year. (If you know of any middle or high schools with openings in the biology or chemistry realms, I'm your man!)

During my senior year at Michigan State I read through the book of Romans during my spring break trip to Istanbul. My heart sank at the truth that, as regards the vast majority of people in Turkey, "no one understands . . . and the way of peace they have not known" (3:11a; 17). But later in the week I read the following, which lifted my spirits so greatly: "as it is written, 'Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand' " (15:21, emphases mine). Paul is quoting Isaiah's prophecy regarding the Suffering Servant (Isa. 52:15), as people will come to understand the message of the revelation of God's power ("the arm of the LORD," 53:1). And so again I find it fitting that culminating Psalm 22, which so vividly portrays the suffering Messiah and his triumph through God's deliverance, are equally encouraging words of hope for the gospel message:

All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before you.
For kingship belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations.

Posterity shall serve him;
it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation;
they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn,
that he has done it. (vv. 27-8, 30-1)

Praise God that his grace and the triumph of the gospel in the lives of people from everywhere on the globe is far more stable and sure than the Tigers' hitting.

March 19, 1982

"Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:5-6)

I love my baptism. Or, more accurately, I love the God whose grace is promised me within it. While I was a three-month-old baby still pooping in my diapers, incapable of doing anything morally noble or worthy or virtuous, the baptismal waters upon me sealed his promise to me that he saves me not by how wonderful I am or how free of filth (either that of sin or of the digestive result of last night's milk).

Now I can look back upon that morning at Immanuel Lutheran Church and breathe a sigh of joy and relief. Whenever I'm faced with my fallenness and sin, I need only say to myself, "Andrew, you were baptized and brought into God's family and promised righteousness by faith while you were still a helpless infant. Rest in your Father's love and grace." Amen!


P.S. - My mom made sauteed zucchini tonight while I grilled the Labor Day burgers.

Singing the "No Zucchini Blues"

Let it be known: I really like zucchini. My dear mother asked me which meals I'd like to eat before I leave for Turkey and things like barbecued pork and flavorful beers become unobtainable. My votes: bratwurst with sauerkraut, grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup (made with milk, of course), and spaghetti with sauteed zucchini. So when dinner is served tonight, I was dismayed to find there was no zucchini.

I was on the verge of becoming a discontented, grumbling Israelite: "The rabble with them began to crave other food, and against the Israelites started wailing and said, 'If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost--also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never have anything but this manna!' " (Numbers 11:4-6). Is it of note that the zucchini's next-of-kin is the cucumber?

How blind I was to the abundance before me: spaghetti with hamburger sauce, garlic bread, salad, milk. But all I saw was no zucchini. This summer--perhaps more than ever before--I've been really irritated by the advertising that makes us think we need some new $30k car or a $300 iPod to be happy or fulfilled. And in a way, I bought into it; though it was manifested in a garden vegetable. How many people depend upon a daily (if they're fortunate) handful of rice or beans? or rummaging through a restaurant's dumpster? Perhaps it was a twisted, blessed weening in disguise when God sent such starvation upon the Israelites that they were forced to cannibalism (see, e.g., Lamentations 2:20; 4:9-10).

O Lord, forgive us. May we not be like the horse or mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by the bit and bridle of poverty and hunger. Rather, may we live content with all you provide and bless you from grateful hearts for your kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Amen.

C. S. Lewis on Transposition

On Pentecost 1944 C. S. Lewis delivered a message he titled "Transposition." He provides an apologetic against claims that the heavenlies are merely a human conception, since they are described by purely natural things. "If we have really been visited by a revelation from beyond Nature, is it not very strange that an Apocalypse can furnish heaven with nothing more than seelctions from terrestrial experience (crowns, thrones, and music), that devotion can find no language but that of human lovers, and that the rite whereby Christians enact a mystical union should turn out to be only the old, familiar act of eating and drinking?" (The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses [San Francisco: Harper, 1980], 94).

In his defense of the use of natural imagery in the Scriptures, he first details how our varied emotions (the "higher medium") may be "transposed" into physical sensations of, say, tears or trembling (the "lower medium"). The tears are not the joy or grief itself; to be absolutely identified by weeping itself is to say grief and joy are one and the same. At the same time, however, these emotions are never experienced or tangible to us apart from the sensations into which they're "transposed." In like fashion, pictures aren't merely symbolic of the material world as transposed onto paper or paint. They are not simply signs or symbols that only correlate only by convention, as spoken and written words do.

Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only be being part of it. Their visibility has the same source. The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them; that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes. . . . It is a sign, but also something more than a sign, and only a sign because it is also more than a sign, because in it the thing signified [in this example, light] is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental. (p. 102)

I know this is getting long, but bear with me. His coup-de-grace is pure genius, lifting us into wonder at the possibilities of stark, joy-bringing realities of heaven--realities which for now are only known to us by crowns, thrones, music, and the like.

Let us construct a fable. Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance, she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities, and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. "But," she gasps, "you didn't think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?" "What?" says the boy. "No pencil marks there?" And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition--the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother's pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.

So with us. "We know not what we shall be" [1 John 3:2]; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.

You can put it whichever way you please. You can say that by Transposition our humanity, senses and all, can be made the vehicle of beatitude. Or you can say that the heavenly bounties by Transposition are embodied during this life in our temporal experience. But the second way is the better. It is the present life which is the diminution, the symbol, the etiolated, the (as it were) "vegetarian" substitute. If flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom [1 Corinthians 15:50], that is not because they are too solid, too gross, too distinct, too "illustrious with being." They are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal. (pp. 109-11)

For eyes to see

Do you think, perhaps, that heaven really is here right now? I mean, we seem to think of heaven as some sort of upper sphere of the cosmos, separated from the terra firma like layers on a cake. This is not without warrant; Revelation 21:3 says that "I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God." But doesn't it seem rather Manichean or Gnostic of us to think that the spiritual perfection where God dwells is completely distinct from the material earth?* And could it be that when the Bible speaks of the skies as the heavens, perhaps it's not merely symbolic?

We know that "now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known" (1 Cor. 13:12). Saint Paul prays that the Father of glory "may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your heart enlightened" (Eph. 1:17 -8). That is to say, there's a whole lot we cannot yet see or sense.

Our eyes can only pick up a narrow range of the total spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Far from being able to see infrared, ultraviolet, microwaves, X rays, and the like, we base our realities on what we can see with the paltry assortment of rods and cones in our eyes. When the eyes of our hearts are regnerated, when our sin-plagued, mortal bodies are swallowed up by life (Rom. 8:18-25; 2 Cor. 5:1-5), we'll see so much more--all the deep, shimmering realities that yet lie hidden to our senses.

We also can't see gases, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. And when we can "see" them, it's only when the sky acts as a prism to refract certain wavelengths of the sun's light to us. How the skies appear depends on the angle and intensity of the sunlight reaching it. Illuminated by the very luminescence of God himself (Isa. 60:19-20; Rev. 22:5), will we see that the gases that fill the "heavens" are those same ones that we inhale every moment of our lives and that God turned out to be with us all along?

Now I don't mean to get all sappy or to throw out the Bible. But I sometimes wonder, what more is there? (Seriously, I need to get around to posting some quotes from C. S. Lewis' essay "Transposition".)

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*The philosophies of Manichaeism and Gnosticism arose out of the erroneous belief that matter was inherently corrupt and evil, as opposed to the good and pure immaterial spirit.

More thoughts on the Sacraments

"Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him--to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ. Amen." (Romans 16:25-7)

When I read through this passage at the tail end of Romans this morning, I recognized that this passage is speaking of the gospel proclaimed and "made known through the prophetic writings." But then I thought of another proclamation: the Lord's Supper. In 1 Corinthians 11:26 Paul says that "whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." If you connect the dots, the Supper is also a proclamation of the gospel that would serve to effectively "strengthen and preserve [us] in the one true faith unto life everlasting," using the words of the Lutheran liturgy. After all, it is a sign of the atoning death of Christ, a "visible gospel" tangible to our senses in the bread and wine. It says, "As truly as this bread and wine are real and give you life by being in you, so too do you have within you life by union to the crucified and risen Lord."

But it's not just the Lord's death that is proclaimed; it's also his resurrection and the consummation of the kingdom and our redemption. Note that little phrase "until he comes." Jesus talks of the meal as something to be shared again upon its fulfillment in the kingdom of God (Luke 22:14-18). Whenever we share this meal, we are (or ought to be) aware and expectant of the resurrection that followed Jesus' tomb and, by virtue of our union to him and participation in him through this meal, our own resurrection as well. Maybe this is why Catholics sing the mysterion before the Eucharist: "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again"--an eager expectation of the coming wedding feast of the Lamb.

Finally--and here's where stuff gets way weird and theologically deep--we baptize children as a sign and seal of "our ingrafting into Christ, and partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace" (Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 94), right? Baptism incorporates us into the body of Christ, the church. And because Christ died for all people and gives us new birth by grace, not by physical, intellectual, or spiritual maturity, we baptize children. "And truly, Christ has shed his blood no less for washing little children of believers than he did for adults" (Belgic Confession, article 34). "Infants as well as adults are in God's covenant and are his people. They, no less than adults, are promised the forgiveness of sin through Christ's blood and the Holy Spirit who produces faith" (Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 27).

So here's my question: ought we also allow children to share in the Supper? After all, if baptism seals or guarantees what it represents: "partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace," and such benefits include the gospel-confirming, faith-strengthening Supper, ought we not deny children this very benefit? Yes, Scripture says we are to "recognize" or "discern" the body of the Lord in the Supper (1 Cor. 11:29). But I'm not sure this has as much to do with consubstantiation as with the visible fellowship of the church in the Supper: "Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of one loaf" (1 Cor. 10:17). Would a little girl who loves Jesus and knows that Jesus loves her see everyone else communing at the Table and wonder, Why am I not allowed to take part? Didn't her baptism make her part of the body, the one loaf of which others partake?

Why Evangelicals Can't Write

In an entry on the Reformed Credenda/Agenda online magazine (http://credenda.org) titled “Why Evangelicals Can’t Write,” [1] writer Peter Leithart laments the lack of literary genius from Western Protestants. The reason he cites: the disappearance of real sacramental theology from Protestantism. He brings up the 1529 Colloquy of Marburg, where Lutherans and Zwinglians (from whom the Reformed and Anabaptist understandings of Baptism and the Supper stemmed) split over—of all things—the “real presence” of Christ in the Communion elements.

For many post-Marburg Protestants, literal truth is over here, while symbols drift off in another direction. At best, they live in adjoining rooms; at worst, in widely separated neighborhoods, and they definitely inhabit different academic departments.

Here is a thesis, which I offer in a gleeful fit of reductionism: Modern Protestants can't write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics. Protestants need not give up our Protestantism to do this, as there are abundant sacramental resources within our own tradition. But contemporary Protestants do need to give up the instinctive anti-sacramentalism that infects so much of Protestantism, especially American Protestantism. …

In contrast to this Christian affirmation of the cosmos, [Roman Catholic author Flannery] O'Connor saw Manichean impulses behind the modern denigration of material reality, and believed this made fiction writing almost impossible: "The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so much an incarnational art." …

Symbols separated from reality and reduced, as they are in much Protestant theology, to "mere signs," cannot do anything, whether in reality or in fiction. They exist as sheer ornament, or, at best, as pointers to some something in some real realm of reality that can do something. But if this is so, then the moment of grace, whether in fiction or reality, never enters this world, into the realm of what-is. Without a sacramental theology, and specifically a theology of sacramental action, Protestant writers cannot do justice to this world or show that this world is the theater of God's redeeming action. …

The renewal of literature, like the renewal of the world, begins in worship. The renewal of literature, like the renewal of the world, begins from the pulpit, to be sure. But the pulpit will renew literature only when it is nestled where it should be nestled, between the font and the table.

Raised in an ecumenical Catholic and Lutheran family and now drifting to and from Reformed understandings, I’ve been met with myriad understandings of the Sacraments (and I mean the only two instituted by our Lord, Baptism and the Supper): known respectively as transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and, for lack of a better word, signification. And to think: as the Western (Catholic) Church separated from the Eastern (Orthodox) over the matter of from whom in the Godhead the Holy Spirit proceeds (i.e., whether he proceeds from both the Father and Son, or from only the Father through the Son), so did the Lutherans and Zwinglians part ways over exactly how it is we receive grace and fellowship with the risen Christ in a cake of bread and a cup of wine.

But Marburg really wasn’t about an inconsequential speck of doctrinal dust. Indeed, the whole of history “plays” at the Table. [2] All the thoughts upon literature and Flannery O’Connor aside (and I just picked up a copy of her complete short stories, which I’m eagerly looking forward to reading this year), the Incarnation is a reality, and whenever we encounter God in this life and the next, it’s bodily, through the raw stuff of this world. I love my edition of the vivid Bible paraphrase The Message: its cover pictures the boards of a splintering, white-washed wall, not glittering gold-leaf embellishments.

I think this is affirmed on a number of levels: (1) The third person of the Trinity is denoted by the Hebrew word ruach and the Greek pneuma. "Both terms mean, specificially, moved and moving air; they mean breath or wind, probably also storm" [3].

(2) God chooses first not to reveal himself in the Old Testament as some sort of esoteric body of knowledge or a Divine Consciousness or something like that, but he comes as a pillar of fire, a cloud of water vapor. His shekinah glory actually shines like the sun; it’s no mere illustration. The psalmist speaks of God’s voice as thunder (Psalms 18, 29). It’s not that God only used these things as inspired imagery; God actually came to people in these ways, as he met godly men in a burning bush or in a storm atop Sinai or in a gentle blowing (or as in the KJV's beautiful rendering, a "still small voice").

(3) God is revealed fully and satisfactorily in becoming the enfleshed Word dwelling among us (John 1:1-3, 14, 18), living a fully human life in a body that breathed, slept, and bled. Jesus said, “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” Perplexed, his disciple Philip asks him to show them the Father. What was Jesus' reply? “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:7-9).

(4) That we are all held accountable to God’s self-revelation is true, but through what medium? Spirit? Knowledge? Nay—matter. “What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:19-20, emphasis mine).

(5) God’s main chosen vehicle of revelation is not in some sort of euphoric vision, but in plain ol’ words on a page: scripture. As Scripture is read aloud in human words, God even takes on a human voice. (As an aside, this is part of why I believe biblical “tongues” are intelligible but foreign languages that can be interpreted for others’ benefit, as at Pentecost, not some sort of Spiritual gibberish a la Billy Madison.)

(6) Even the “higher emotions” of life—and surely those of life with God—be they joy, love, grief, relief, etc., are never ours apart from some sort of physical, bodily component. Neurotransmitters like adrenalin and dopamine are released; electric impulses trigger our sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems; our blood pressure climbs or ebbs. We perspire or go dizzy. [4]

I don’t know yet where I precisely stand concerning the sacraments (though I’ve been tiptoeing from Calvinistic Reformed [as opposed to Zwinglian] toward the Lutheran understanding), but it’s undeniable that God can be known apart from mediation through matter. To ask God that we come to him apart from his written and spoken Word, apart from human contact, apart from sunrise and vale, font and table, is to seek God not in truth nor on his own terms, but it is to seek the spirit of the world, avoiding the humble, avoiding the cross. Such will be only an exercise in futility; he does not promise to meet us otherwise. Now if only God would reveal himself through baseball!

____________________________

[1] http://credenda.org/issues/18-2liturgia.php; accessed 23 August 2006.

[2] Ref. Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005).

[3] Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1963), 53.

[4] See C. S. Lewis’s amazing essay Transposition. (Then again, aren’t all his essays amazing?) Relevant excerpts shall likely be forthcoming on this blog.

A cruciform city plan

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sir Gallahad the Chaste stumbles upon Castle Anthrax and sees above it a vision of the holy grail, the cup of Our Lord's last supper. Upon entering its gates, one of the nuns living there sorrowfully exclaims, "Oh, bad, bad Zoot! She must've set alight to our grail-shaped beacon again." As funny as the movie is, it's not far from the truth that the light of the church, the "city upon a hill", must illumine the Cup of Christ: the new and eternal covenant in his blood.

"No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known." (John 1:18)

"To be sure, he [Christ] was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God's power. Likewise, we are weak in him, yet by God's power we will live with him to serve you." (2 Cor. 13:4)

I've begun studying "Second" Corinthians (actually Paul's fourth letter to Corinth) out of the desire that God will graciously guide my roommates and I this year into true knowledge of him and that we'd serve him rightly in making known the message of reconciliation. Two related quotes have recently stood out to me, embracing how truly we must embrace a "cruciform" existence if we are to actually communicate the gospel in truth, not as false peddlers.

The first is from British Anglican pastor-scholar N. T. Wright's book The Challenge of Jesus (London: SPCK, 2000), as found on my buddy Ryan's Web site.

"When we speak about 'following Christ,' it is the crucified Messiah we are talking about. His death was simply not the messy bit that enables our sins to be forgiven but that can then be forgotten. The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God; the more we learn about the cross in all its historical and theological dimensions, the more we discover about the One in whose image we are made and hence about our own vocation to be the cross-bearing people, the people in whose lives and service the living God is made known.

"And when therefore we speak of shaping our world, we do not--we dare not--simply treat the cross as the thing that saves us 'personally,' but which can be left behind when we get on with the job. The task of shaping our world is best understood as the redemptive task of bringing the achievement of the cross to bear upon the world, and in that task the methods, as well as the message, must be cross-shaped through and through" (pp. 94-5).

Over sixty years earlier, German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw equally strongly the need for the body of Christ on Earth to display not glory alone in letting our light shine before men, but the glory of the cross and "the light of the Resurrection":

"Men are not to see the disciples but their good works, says Jesus. And these works are nothing other than those which the Lord Jesus himself has created in them by calling them to be the light of the world under the shadow of his cross. The good works are poverty, peregrination, meekness, peaceableness, and finally persecution and rejection. All these good works are a bearing of the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross is the strange light which alone illuminates these good works of the disciples. . . . It is by seeing the cross and the community beneath it that men come to believe in God. But that is the light of the Resurrection" (The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Muller, rev. ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1959], 133-4).

Dear Lamb of God, may we come to know the very heart of our Father through your sufferings and death, and in this, so know his love for the world more deeply, compelling us to die to ourselves to bring life to the others in our spheres. Amen.

Guilty until (or even if) proven innocent?

This is what sucks about the United States media culture: pure sensationalism. I thought we threw out yellow journalism with the 19th century. No one gave a crap about bike racing (probably the world's most grueling sport) until Americans actually won the Tour de France--most recently Floyd Landis. Gotta have the Big Story. And now the media has already crucified Landis for mere allegations that he is using illegal hormone doping.

Let's set the facts straight: First, the testing. During the TdF, the riders who win the day's stage as well as the overall leader are subject to blood and urine tests within half an hour of the finish of each day's race. This means Landis would've been tested after stages 11, 12, 15-17, 19, 20. Four other competitors selected at random are tested each day as well.

Okay, so Landis gets his blood and urine tested seven times. Six of the seven times, nothing abnormal shows up on the first test or "A" test. Although cycling's governing body, the Union Cycliste International (UCI), does not require positive A tests to be confirmed by a second "B" test, standard laboratory protocol would assume this is necessary to offset any potential testing errors. (Does this say something already about the UCI?)

What Landis' post-stage 17 A test revealed was an "elevated" ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. Normal people have a T:E ratio of between 1:1 and 2:1. Above 4:1 is considered abnormal, although some people do naturally have ratios in this range. A naturally occurring hormone (a biological "messenger"), testosterone stimulates muscle growth following strenuous efforts. Normally, an athlete would have to use testosterone supplements over a long period of time during training, with recovery afterwards, to reap the benefits. A quick shot of it following stage 16 would've been largely pointless and provided no tangible results one day later. The only evidence to the contrary is that Landis looked downright pissed off at the people crowding around him when he got off his bike after stage 17--a case of 'roid rage, perhaps? And even if, as some erroneously claim, that Landis was drinking tons of water during stage 17 to dilute his blood, doing so only decreases absolute concentrations, not relative concentrations (as concerning the T:E ratio).

The UCI is partners in crime with the World Anti-Doping Administration (WADA). Now it's true that various forms of performance-enhancing doping were rampant within professional cycling and cross-country skiing, and I applaud the UCI's crackdown on it since the "Festina scandal" in 1998. But the UCI has gone so far off the deep end that they've demolished athlete's careers on the basis of mere speculation (case in point: the team Astana riders who were prevented from starting this year's Tour, even though they never conducted any blood tests and were later acquitted). Even at the slighest whisper of fraud, the UCI slaps racing bans of up to four years. This has unduly tarnished cycling's reputation, causing many sponsors to pull out. For example, the Spanish Comunidad Valenciana team has lost its sponsorship post-Tour, and now the struggling athletes are left jobless. This happens all the time.

I find it interesting that TdF runner-up Oscar Pereiro, upon being told he would become the champion of Landis is stripped of his title, said that he doesn't want the title--a mere "academic" championship, he said. With all he has going for him, Pereiro doesn't even trust the UCI's testing!

If tests can prove unquestionably that Landis cheated, then by all means he ought to face the consequences. But the UCI, WADA, and--most of all--the American media need to give athletes the benefit of the doubt and live by the "innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt" rule. After all, isn't due process part of the Bill of Rights by which we live or die?

Beloved Before Time is entering the political fray!

As if there weren't enough politically-minded weblogs already, I have now decided to enter the game. (Well, it may only be one post.) But the real impact comes not in my crappy blog, but in last night's unformal commencement of . . .

THE FED PARTY!

As a collective of seven keen-minded twenty-somethings, we are FED UP! (We figure being called the "Fed Up" Party wouldn't give us as much cred'.) We hereby propose two initial changes:

Repeal/reduce property taxes. Joe and Janet Yankee have lived in their modest two-story home for forty-one years, having finished mortgage payments eleven years ago. According to their deed and the bank, their home is paid off and is theirs. But should they miss a few property tax payments, the government is now the proud owner of the Yankee homestead. Wait a sec, didnt' I already finish paying for my house? Apparently no one can actually own anything in America. I mean, the reason I can't pay my property taxes is because Social Security ran out! Granted, it is a good thing to have the mortgage and property tax allowances on ye olde 1040, but something's amiss here. We are somewhat agreed upon seeking the offsetting revenue in luxury taxes or an increase in income tax. (Don't get me started on eminent domain.)

Establish runoff balloting. No, this does not mean that we steal all the ballots, run off with them, and cast all the votes in our favor. Runoff balloting has been promoted by those sometimes-genius folk in the Green Party as a way to give a third (or other) party greater clout. Although varying formats have been proposed, here's the gist: Voters are allowed to cast votes for not only one, but two or more candidates (perhaps rank-ordering them), and the winner is declared on the basis of greatest overall approval by the voting public.

Given the artifically and unnecessarily polarized platforms of the current incarnations of the Democratic and Republican Parties, let's say 50% of the public votes Democratic but, loathing the Republicans, votes for the Green Party candidate as a second choice. The other 50% votes Republican and hates the Democrats, so they also vote Green with their second choice. The result: the Green Party gains the highest overall approval, landing its candidate in the Oval Office. The Asses and Elephants can no longer target select voter groups like the Religious Wrong, but must consider what would gain the widest approval by all voter groups.

Let's face it: the Democrats and the Republicans are both off their respective rockers right now: no honest person considering all sides of any given issue can be as bigoted and polarized as either party. While I sit around vainly wishing for Lieberman-McCain duel in '08, I know that's not going to happen (heaven forbid that progressive moderates would actually be selected by their parties!). Is anyone else FED Up?

Congrats, Floyd!

The champions of the closest TdF in years, from left to right:
2nd place, Oscar Pereiro (Caisse d'Epargne), Spain
1st place, Floyd Landis (Phonak), USA
3rd place, Andreas Klöden (T-Mobile), Germany

Thanks for the thrills.

Forget Gatorade

By now everyone in the cycling world (and all you futbol bandwagon wannabees had better pay attention: the Tour de France is the world's largest spectator sport, not the World Cup) knows how Floyd Landis roared back into contention on stage 17. According to Patrick O'Grady of VeloNews he "chased down an 11-man breakaway, killed and ate them, built a new bicycle out of their bones, and roared away in a pillar of fire to win the stage to Morzine and jump back to within 30 seconds of the yellow jersey."

Apparently the secret to Floyd Landis' success on stage 17 of the Tour de France was due to . . . beer. I can hear the cyclists of the world applauding. Maybe this is why Belgium churns out both amazing ales and grizzled cyclists. After actually pedaling so slowly that he rode backwards on the final climb of stage 16 (well, almost: he lost a minute per kilometer), Landis was asked, "How do you deal with this from a mental standpoint?"

"I don't know. Drink some beer? That's what I'm thinking about now."

Landis drank tons of water on his epic ride. Aside from the temps in the 90s, was there any other reason? "Maybe it was the beer I had last night," he admitted. I can see the made-for-TV movies now: "The making of a true American hero: Raised in an oppressive Mennonite family and forbidden to wear shorts, Landis broke free of his restraints, moved to California, became a pro mountain bike racer, and even shaved his legs. Now, like a bubbly head of foam, he has risen to the top of the cycling world, owing it all to beer."

On one last note (sorry), maybe the Germans have had it right all along (no surprise there). The inspiration for many of today's citrus-tweaked wheat ales, the German Radlermass, or"cyclist mug", is a carbohydrate-rich mix of beer and lemonade, ready to replenish the weary rider.