Speechless

There are days and seasons of life that are silent.

They are not silent because they are empty. They are silent because they are full.

They are silent in the way that a ripe piece of fruit hangs on the tree, and weighs down the branch. If the branch could talk, it probably wouldn’t. It hangs there with nothing to say because it is about to burst. Countless future trees are weighing it down and it doesn’t even know it. So, it guards the moment with a deep silence.

Our souls are like that sometimes. Something has filled the soul up and it has run out of words or gestures to express it. It feels full and pregnant but has no idea what sort of thing is struggling to be born. It just knows that an inevitable moment is quickly approaching. All that is hidden inside, already felt but not yet revealed, will soon burst forth.

When a believer passes through a day like this – when his or her soul is full in this way – you can always be certain that the Holy Spirit is at work.
We learned from the Sound of Music that “starting at the very beginning is “a very good place to start.” So, whenever we talk about the Holy Spirit, we should begin there, at the beginning.

In Genesis, chapter one – which is about as close to the beginning as one can get – we read that before creation, “the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.”
I once read a rabbi’s commentary about that passage. He claimed that when we read those words, we should think about incubation and fertilization, as when a hen sits on her eggs. He said that the writer of Genesis is picturing the Spirit hovering over the primal stuff just about to be spoken into existence.

The Genesis passage would not be the last time the Spirit would be so depicted in the Bible. In scripture, the Holy Spirit is nearly always linked to some creative act, some great change, some sort of transformation.

For days I have been writing about the sovereign unpredictability and incomprehensibly of the Holy Spirit. I didn’t mean to imply though that we can’t talk about the Holy Spirit at all. I just mean to say that it is difficult to do it with words.

The writers of the scripture also seem linguistically handicapped when it comes to describing the Holy Spirit. However, they employ symbols to describe the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Old Testament uses wind, fire, breath, water and oil. The writers usually invoke these symbols whenever God is about to do something new, unexplainable, powerful and uncontrollable.

Notice how all of those symbols hint at “unstable,” uncontrollable things. Notice how difficult it is to hold onto and define these things.

The prophet Ezekiel, for example, tells about a vision in which the Wind of God revives a field of dead bodies. He tells us how the various body parts came together (you remember the old song: “the foot bone connected to the ankle bone”…) Then, the prophet says, skin formed upon the bodies. Nonetheless, it was still a valley filled with corpses. Only when the prophet spoke to the Wind did the bodies began to breathe and then stand on their feet.

Another great story is about Moses. He saw a bush burning out in the desert. However, the bush was not consumed. When he got closer he heard a voice coming from inside the fire. So asked that fire who he was.

The fire gave the most cryptic, puzzling response in the Bible!

"I am YHWH.”

That didn’t help because YHWH didn’t mean anything to Moses.

Just try to say those letters!

You hear nothing but breath!

Then again...breath is life.

The letters are actually connected to the Hebrew verb ‘to be’. The word to Moses might have meant, “I am what I am,” or perhaps, “I will be what I will be;” or, as one rabbi put it, “it might have been a way of saying, “you wouldn’t believe it if I told you because I am existence itself.”

You wonder what Ezekiel and Moses felt as they approached this moment that would change their life. The Spirit had led them, step by step, to an encounter with God that had been arranged before the world was created. However, they didn’t know that. They think they are just talking a walk. But I think the air must have been pregnant. Something was hovering, brooding, preparing the setting for what was about to occur.

This is the last day in Holy Week before the events begin to rush into the cascade we call the Easter drama.

Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, the night when Christ instituted the sacraments of Holy Communion and the washing of feet. After that came the arrest in the garden, followed by a night in prison. Beatings, trials, spit and insults made one event seem to flow into the next as the Lord was drug from one place to the other.

Finally came the crown of thorns, the cross and death by crucifixion.
A descent into Hell came next, with its unimaginable horrors and struggles.

Then, the darkness gasped and surrendered to the first real morning the world had
seen since the loss of Eden.

All had seemed lost.

And then, all was won.

The universe had swallowed the medicine that would eventually heal its mortal wound.
All that happened in a fury of activity exploded in merely three days.

On Wednesday though, no human being knew what was about to happen.

A hovering presence covered the pregnant earth, watching over the events below.

He heard the groans from the man in the garden who prayed for relief, as men always do when they are pregnant with the future. The fruit inside Him was ripe. The branch was too heavy to bear.

The Spirit kept His watch.

What was about to happen would open the door of the world. Soon, the Spirit would not merely hover. He would descend like tongues of fire and enter the souls of those about to be birthed by the pregnant man below.

The Man in the garden groans because He doesn’t see all of this yet and so he can no longer speak.

As for me?

What language shall I borrow to thank Thee dearest friend? For this, thy dying sorrow and pity without end?

I will cover my mouth with my hand. I will speak no more.

This indeed is joy unspeakable and full of glory and the half has never yet been told.

An Artist and A Lawyer

On this date in 1806, the Federal government authorized our first national highway.

It was to begin in Cumberland, Maryland, cross the Allegany Mountains and connect the east coast to the western city of Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). The road would then proceed to the unthinkable westernmost part of the country: Vandalia, Illinois.

I know a little about the National Road. I used to drive on it every day. Trish and I pastored a little church in Wheeling for a year. Sometimes, while stopped at the traffic light, I would read the historical marker about how I was on the very first federal highway of the Unites States.

Local people claimed that President Washington had a lady friend in Wheeling. That is why the National Road ran right past her front door!

I didn’t jump to conclusions about whether the father of our country had any connections with a certain lady in Wheeling. I did speculate about how or why such an enormous sum of federal money had been spent building that road to Wheeling. It was a good thing for the country, I suppose. So I will just leave it there. The interesting part about this old gossip is that great events and notable projects are often influenced by personal experiences. By the time the National Road was authorized, Jefferson was president. He had a rather expansive idea of national life. So whether the father of our country had anything to do with how that road project evolved is a mystery.

I have been talking about the Holy Spirit in my recent blogs and have noted how difficult it is to speak about Him. That is why most Western Christian theologians have been silent about the subject.

It is worth noting that Western theologians have often been lawyers. Naturally, Western theology has often revolved around definitions of words and the structure of language.

In contrast, Eastern Church theologians have often been artists. In the Christian east, theology was not just about intellect.They were also expected to manifest lives of piety and holiness. Not surprising, Eastern theologians tended to use artistic metaphors when speaking of the Holy Spirit.

The Eastern Churches have been much more comfortable with emotional prayer and mystical experience than Westerners. This resulted in a theology that was more accessible to everyday believers, and which tended to be directed toward the cultivation of one’s spiritual life. Western theology – with some notable exceptions – has tended toward intellectual refection on the meaning and analysis of the natural world. From late medieval times, Western Christianity became increasingly rationalized and therefore resistant to the role of emotion and mystical experience in spiritual life. This changed last century with the eruption of the Pentecostal movement in the United States, first among African-Americans and poor Whites, and later within the historic denominations.

A huge component of Western intellectual tradition is the aim of separating one’s emotions from his arguments. This serves a very useful purpose. No one will give great consideration to a man who claims that fine coffee cures cancer, dries up warts, increases fertility and releases endorphins in the brain just because he breaks down in tears while he makes these assertions. We will probably ask him for charts, statistics, studies and so forth. We are trained to discuss such matters in as non-biased, emotionless atmosphere as possible.

Science has taught Western people to examine theory in this way and it is an important cultural habit.

On the other hand, there are situations in which such an approach is out-of-place.

Imagine a woman asking her fiancee, “do you love me?”

Now imagine her lover replying like this: “Well, lets first define our terms. What do you mean by love? Aristotle and other great philosophers made precise definitions for love … well, on the other hand there are the opinions of many modern scientist who believe that what we call love is a trick our genes play on us in order to get us to reproduce. Now, now dear … don’t get so emotional, we’ll never get to the bottom of this question unless we approach this scientifically!”

(How much money will you be willing to place on the odds that this relationship will never become a mutually enriching one?)

This is the way much of Western theology comes across to the people of God.

When theologians are considering the linguistic roots of a Bible word because they are trying to translate it accurately, they should approach their task with as little of their own private emotion and opinion as possible. If they do that, we are more likely to arrive at the original writer’s intent than the opinion of the translator.

When we speak about the Holy Spirit however, we are talking about love and fire. We are discussing wind and breath.

We are talking about life.

In this situation, the Eastern approach, and dare I say the Pentecostal approach – with all its excess – is more in keeping with the subject at hand.

When married people talk about how to pay the bills, a non-emotional, rational approach is best. When they are making love, too many words get in the way.

I’ll just say it: experiencing the Holy Spirit is more like making love than like paying the bills.

One doesn’t meet the spirit by treating Him like a scientific problem.

Of course, the difficulty of expressing who the Holy Spirit is exactly, or what He is like, is not just a problem for theologians. Listen to Jesus speak about the Holy Spirit in John, 3:
“The Spirit blows where He wishes; you hear the sound but you cannot tell from where He is coming or where He is going.”

Definitions, formulas and explanations about the Holy Spirit are difficult, even for Jesus.

How could it be otherwise?

Who can explain the wind? Oh, we gain something from knowing how wind is created by the variation of global temperatures, the planet’s inclination toward homeostasis and all of that. But for most of us, the wind should be felt and experienced, not merely explained and defined.

In 1806, after making its way through the inevitable messy process of political life, an idea became a thing as some unknown worker scooped up a shovel of dirt in a field. Thirty-three years later, another generation of workers would pound the last shovel of gravel in Vandalia, Illinois over the road they had just completed.

It’s a spooky thing – the way experiences impact thinkers and politicians, moving from mind to mind; from discussion to discussion; meandering through legislation and committees until, finally, someone shovels some dirt.

You can’t see where it comes from and you don’t know where it’s going.

Smell My Finger

A writer once said that America and England are two nations divided by a common language.

Well, almost!

If Webster had had his way, the differences would be much more than they are. He wanted to completely alter American English, which would have probably encouraged even greater pronunciation differences than exists today among English-speaking people. Aside from a few changes (“Savior,” instead of “Saviour,” for example) Americans retained English’s archaic and cumbersome spelling system.

Our language has the habit of dragging along all the layers of our linguistic past as we continually modify it for current and future use. That habit affects our spelling – a lot – but it affects other things too, such as church culture.

Here is an example: think about how some Christians speak of the “Holy Spirit,” while others say “Holy Ghost.”

The reason for this difference is not theological. We use both terms because of our language offers both of them for our use.

English vocabulary comes from two major sources: the German and the French.

Our language was originally a form of German. Those Germanic roots gave us the word “Geist,” which over time became the English “ghost.”

When the French invaded England nearly a thousand years ago and made their language the official tongue of the realm, English also ended up digesting huge chunks of Romance. (The language refers to language, not love. The French tried to give love to Anglo-Saxons but so far they’ve refused the gift.) Romance – “the language of Rome” was in the process of becoming modern French. That’s where we got the word “esprit,” from the French and in time modified it to become a more English-sounding “spirit. “

Ghost and spirit mean similar things then, although we tend to use them differently.

English has thousands of duplicate words like this.

“Get” and “receive,” “father” and “parent,” “cow” and pig” are all examples of how our language draws upon both its Germanic and its Romance roots to create its vocabulary.

A rule of thumb about what words to use for which occasion seems to be this: the lower the class of the speaker, the more primitive his experience, or the closer to his heart, the more an English speaker will use German-derived words. The higher his class, the more refined his experience, or the more abstract the thoughts he wishes to express, the more an English speaker will use Romance- derived words.

Cuss words? All Germanic! For an explosive explicative, the soft sounding syllables of French will not do. People won’t even understand that we’re angry or frustrated.

SHEEFATAMAKENHABUKITZFOTSTS!

See what I mean?

However, when we want to eat, we ask for “a slice of mutton or beef;” not a “hunk of sheep or cow.”

Protocol requires us to choose between Germanic derived and French derived words several times a day.

But I’m off my subject.

Classical Pentecostals, who formed their denominations in the early 1900’s, have tended to use the term “Holy Ghost,” just as most English-speaking Christians did the past. However, since our language, like all languages, keeps changing; the tendency seems to be toward using the Latin based “Spirit” more than the Germanic word “Ghost” for spiritual conversations.

The fact is, both terms, although they may feel a bit different when we use them, mean exactly the same thing.

Whichever we use, “Spirit” or “Ghost,” we face a problem in defining the indefinable Holy Spirit!
Either term, “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost” seems to encourage a mental impression of something like an intangible, ill-defined, floating fog. When we put “Holy” in front of a perception like that, what do we get? Well, a Holy ill-defined fog!

This is especially true if we are thinking about the Holy Spirit as an impersonal force rather than as a Divine Person.

I don’t mean to be irreverent. However, I do want to point out how difficult is it is to describe the Holy Spirit.

Could this be the reason why Western Christians have often avoided discussions about the Holy Spirit?

Even great thinkers like John Calvin, the spiritual father of Presbyterianism, a man who seemed to lack never words about any subject, seems rather tongue-tied when it comes to the Holy Spirit.

It seems that Western theologians have usually preferred to deal with subjects that are more predictable, contain less mystery and are more easily described.

Ever since Roman times, Western Christians have preferred concrete definitions and articulated doctrines. We leave it to the spooky Easterners to use words that point toward some concept that cannot be fully expressed in words.

Most of the time, our preference for concrete words over abstract ones -- and for practical results over mysterious experience -- serves us well. Sometimes this preference makes us – well, so Anglo-Saxon. It can get in the way of spiritual growth.

It’s like the man trying to communicate with his dog about how to find food.

The man points to the bowl over across the room and yells, “FIDO!! OVER THERE! LOOK!

The dog only hears “FIDO!! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!”

So the dog walks over and smells the man’s finger.

As it turns out, communication problems exist everywhere; not just between the Americans and the English.

Of course, none of this would have been a problem if the French would have remained on their side of the Channel.

The Colorful Ghost

On this date in 1980, a group of thugs assassinated Oscar Romero as was blessing the wine and bread for Communion.

He had been an unlikely leader for a chaotic time. Many believe that El Salvador’s elite had agreed to his appointment as the nation’s archbishop because he was a scholarly type, a bit bookish and otherworldly; not the sort to cause a lot of trouble.

And he wouldn’t have caused any trouble, had it not been for a group of nuns who knew the Lord and who began encouraging his prayer life. Soon, he was attending to the needs of his flock and then began to really notice the suffering of the people that God and history had called him to serve.

The movie, Romero, tells the story of pastoral leadership and the effect of that leadership upon the nation. As Oscar Romeo prayed and went deeper in God, his life and sermons began to provoke powerful people – the very people among whom he had been raised and taught.

God had anointed him to speak a prophetic word of comfort to the suffering and a warning of God’s judgment to the powerful.

As is often the case, this pastor paid the ultimate price for trying to move beyond merely speaking the words of the gospel and into acting upon the words of the gospel.

Like many great men and women, Archbishop Romero was not naturally courageous. He trembled and shook as he walked into the dangerous work of exposing and rebuking evil.

Why did he do it?

How did he do it?

He clothed himself in the Holy Spirit. He went on the adventure with God. He stopped trying to control God, trying to use god words to buttress the status quo, and dared to follow God’s heart.
One moving scene in the movie is when Romero joins the nuns singing the popular Spanish folk song “De Colores.” He has been discouraged and afraid. So the Indian nuns form a ring around their leader and sing until he laughs and joins them:

De Colores
De Colores se visten los campos en la primavera
De Colores
De Colores son los pajarillos que vienen de afuera
De Colores
De Colores es el arco iris que vemos lucir
Y por eso los grandes amores
De muchos colores
Me Gustan a mi

All of us who have been on a Cursillo weekend, or one of the many spiritual retreats in Protestant circles modeled after Cursillo – know what is happening in that scene. The nuns are reminding their pastor that our work is “not by power nor by might, but by the Spirit of the Lord of Hosts.” Only the Spirit can turn the dark gray of winter into the “colores de la primavera” (the colors of spring time.)

In an age in which so many churches continue their death march into the cold professionalism, entertainment and business management in which the Holy Spirit gradually becomes a pious but meaningless term, how we need the Spirit that produces the “many bright colors that make my heart cry.”

When I was a young Pentecostal evangelist, I would often hold prayer services for those seeking to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I will never forget one of those services in my home state of West Virginia.

I had been going down the line of seekers, laying my hands on them as I went. When I came to one little boy, I laid my hand on him and said, as gently as a Pentecostal preacher can, “Receive the Holy Ghost!”

When I said those words, the little boy opened his eyes as far as they could open, bolted for the door and shouted back at me as he ran out of the building; “I don’t want nut’in to do with no ghost!”

That is unfortunately, the stance many adult Christians in all denominations have toward the dynamic and uncontrollable presence of God. They don’t want nut’in to do with no ghost.

When we call God, “Father” we have a place to begin with our attempts to imagine God. Even though we know that our heavenly Father must be considerably different than our earthly father, we understand what “father” means. The same is true as we speak of God as “The Son.” The term “Son of God,” although beyond our comprehension, is at least imaginable. Because of Jesus, we can even give God a human face in our imagination.

But how do we even begin to speak, write, think about or ever comprehend the Holy Spirit?

I find it difficult to write about the Holy Spirit.

He seems to elude all of our descriptions.

Perhaps the most important reason for this difficulty in describing the Holy Spirit is that one does not so much study the Holy Spirit as simply experience Him.

He is a Fire, mere words cannot contain Him.

He is a wind, mere ceremony cannot control Him.

He is, as the folk song puts it, the “brightest colors of springtime.”

He is dangerous, as Romero discovered. He does not guarantee our safety.

But He is good and He does guarantee our transformation.

In the movie, as Oscar Romero lifts the cup and says, “the blood of Christ, poured out for us, may it keep us unto eternal life,” a bullet rips through his chest. He does all he can to steady the cup and set it down gently on the Table. But he fails. The wine pours out across the Table until the blood and the wine become so mixed upon the altar that no one can tell them apart.

But outside the Cathedral, the pastor’s death takes the heart out of the war and it finally stops, from a sheer lack of interest.

The rainbow is vested across the blue sky and so must all love be of many bright colors that make our hearts cry.

De Colores!

Cities of Refuge

In today’s One Year Bible reading (Numbers 33) God instructs Moses to build cities of refuge. These cities were to be priestly communities – something like monasteries – in which the Levites went about their scholarly and pastoral work. However, in the event that someone accidentally killed another person or committed some other serious error, he could flee to one of these city of refuge. The reason for this was simple: the family of the person accidentally murdered might decide to avenge the murder of their kinsman before discovering the real cause. The city of refuge allowed the process of law to work toward justice as the momentary passions of the mob subsided.

This idea, of finding refuge in a holy place, came to be known as the law of sanctuary.

Throughout Christian history, church buildings became similar places of sanctuary where a person could not be arrested nor removed by force. The secular authorities would then reason with the one who had placed himself under the sanctity of God’s house until some verdict was reached.

As late as 1989, Americans witnessed a living example of the law of sanctuary.

The United States had invaded Panama to remove Manuel Noriega from office. As the armed forces got closer to his presidential palace, Noriega ran into the Cathedral, where he formally requested sanctuary. Americans – accustomed to a much more secular view of community and law – were appalled. This notorious criminal was granted sanctuary. The priests refused the army entrance into the building. Realizing that Latin American public opinion would simply not tolerate a removal by force, the Americans waited – something we are not gifted to do!

The soldiers played loud rock music over massive speakers, making it impossible for the church to conduct its religious services. Still the priests would not give in. Sanctuary is a sacred trust. It cannot be refused. The dictator remained in this place of refuge until the negotiators convinced Noriega to leave the church voluntarily.

The possibility of sanctuary –of refuge – implies that the church is a separate entity from the state or culture in which it works. Most of the time, church and state are in peaceful coexistence. However, sometimes their distinct roles in society force them into contrast and conflict.

There are situations in which the law of man violates the law of God. At such times, there must be a mechanism to slow down the process of law and force human government to think through its position in a more dispassionate and humble way.

The Church has the authority – even the responsibility – to do this.

The Church, after all, is not merely a name we give to an assembly of believers. God called the Church into being to guide, nourish and sustain believers as they walk through this world. It is not a democracy. It is not beholden to a particular nation. It is not subject to the whims of state and political trends. Although a church should nearly always obey the state, there are times when it cannot do so and must at such time, accept the penalty for its decisions.

As our nation continues its journey toward legalizing gay marriage, for example, churches will find themselves in the position faced by the priests at the Panamanian Cathedral. Do we obey the guys with the guns, or the One to whom we have pledged to follow in life and death? It’s a situation American Christians have never faced: denying the state’s legitimacy in an specific area of social influence. We believe that God has determined what constitutes Holy Matrimony and that cultures in all times and all places have generally agreed with that definition. The sudden decision of one culture to opt out of that definition and replace it with another seems to us to redefine the nature of law itself. It makes the state into its own god; the final arbitrator of what constitutes legitimate law.

The Church says “no.” It rejects the state’s legitimacy on this specific point.

When the Church acts in ways that are faithful to its own calling and identity, secularized people – even Christians – can become very confused. Secularism has no categories for entities that are neither compliant nor rebellious but are simply “other.” We are other than the political Left. We are other than the political Right. We are another kind of category altogether.

We are sanctuary and a refuge.

If a gay-bashing gang were in pursuit of a man simply because he was gay and if he was to solicit sanctuary from the church, the church would need to do all within its power to protect and defend him from harm.

If the same gay person was to ask the church to accept his lifestyle however, the church would be forced to deny his request.

A biblically faithful church sometimes frustrates everyone!

For centuries, American believers have been able to view their culture as an extension and an outgrowth of their faith. We have had little reason to think of the church as “other than” our society. However, we are apparently entering the same sort of cultural territory that believers have experienced throughout history, in which one’s life as a citizen of a state does not completely correspond to his or her life as a believer.

The Bible offers all sorts of metaphors – mental images -- to describe the Church’s spiritual identity and role in the world as a separate and “other” place.. One of those images is that of a kingdom. The king of this kingdom is Christ, who promised his followers that he would never leave nor forsake them. Christians believe that every good thing that this kingdom has done through the centuries has been Jesus at work through His people.

Another image of the church is “the body of Christ.”

The first person to use this phrase was St. Paul, who tells us in the first epistle to the Corinthians (chapter 11-14) that when we believe in Jesus we become a part of this body. Some of us are like ears; we hear the needs of the world. Some of us are like eyes; we see what must be done. Some of us are like feet; we mobilize the church to action. When this “body” works as it should, the members are in harmony, acting in obedience to the head of the body, which is Christ.

The metaphor of “body” can confuse some people because the New Testament also speaks of the bread we bless in Communion as “the body of Christ.” In fact, the very same passage where which Paul calls the Church the body of Christ, he calls the bread of communion the body of Christ.

There is a reason why Paul uses the same metaphor for both things. When Christians eat the bread, they all take into their bodies the very same substance.

We are what we eat.

We leave the worship service where we have eaten bread and drank wine in Christ’s name. We have been reminded of all that He taught us. We have prayed for forgiveness for the ways in which we have fallen short of being His body in the world. After doing all of that, we go out into the world to represent Him and His kingdom.

Jesus now waits in heaven until His Church completes the task of carrying His gospel to the world. Meanwhile, He rules His new Israel, His mystical Kingdom, His body - guiding it, leading it, and completing it, until the day He will be crowned King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

We are therefore, the embassy of a coming kingdom.

We are a city of refuge; an outpost of heaven.

Sponge Bob Sabra Pants

Today is my granddaughter’s birthday.

Her name is Sabra. Sabra Rain. She is turning four.

I nearly always write something about a historical event connected to the date or some comment on the daily reading in the One Year Bible. However, nothing much of lasting significance has happened on this date and today’s readings are difficult.

The passage from Numbers is more instructions to priests who have been dead now a long, long time and whose order of worship has been radically altered. I try to stay interested, but hey – I’m just a person. The New Testament reading is the third chapter of Luke, and is the genealogy of Joseph.

I think I will write about my granddaughter. Of course, that means I will have to write about each granddaughter as their birthdays come around. But that’s OK. It’s one advantage of having six readers!

Sabra is the daughter of Tiffany. Tiffany is the daughter of Daniel the Wise and Lady Patricia, his wife. Daniel the Wise is the son of Daniel the Elder and his wife, Joretta. Daniel the Elder is the son of John the Hunter and his wife Naomi the Just. John was the son of James the Shoeless and his wife Minerva. James the shoeless was the son of Richard of the Mountain and his wife Rebecca when they sojourned in the mountains, yeah for many generations.

Well, I could go on with this. I won’t because I can’t afford to lose any readers.

Sabra is a family name. The first Sabra is a family legend about a Native American woman who evidently begat with one of our ancestors and had sons and daughters. However, the family either lied to the census takers or something because she is edited out of any official document. The older members of the family all believe she existed and that they knew Indian members of the family who came down from the mountains to visit. There are even pictures – I saw them once, at my grandmother’s house. However, when I commented on them, I never saw them again.

So who was this Sabra? I have no idea, yet.

Something is askew however; because evidently strands of sickle cell anemia run through my family, and that is not generally a Caucasian, European disease!

We are left with official genealogies and unofficial genealogies.

Our Sabra is four years old. She doesn’t care. She wants me to change the television channel so she can watch Sponge Bob Square Pants.

Why do we need genealogies anyway?

Why do St. Matthew and St. Luke take our valuable time going on and on about obscure people who begat, sojourn, purchase a field and are then ‘gathered with their fathers?’

I think it is because covenant is about transmitting invisible things from one generation to the next. If one generation fails to pass something down. It gets lost. If one generation gets the information wrong, then what gets passed down is erroneous.

That’s why we can’t find the elder Sabra. She got lost. I don’t know why. Maybe she wasn’t the legal wife and therefore her children had to be registered as belonging to someone else. Maybe she wanted her children to pass as White and escape the stigma of belonging to a minority group in the America of the eighteen hundreds.

On the other hand, she is not completely lost. We have been talking about her for a long time in our family. There are no photographs or documents. There is only a crude gravestone with a large “S” on it.

And, there is now a four year old girl watching Sponge Bob Square Pants who has her name.

Her sister’s name is Moira Naomi.

That’s another story for another time because there was another Naomi before her. Two of them, in fact; one great-great aunt and one great-great grandmother.

The first Naomi was a force of nature who begat fourteen sons and daughters and who sojourned upon the earth for ninety years. Her ways were righteous before the Lord. Her children rose up and called her blessed.

Naomi probably knew the real story about the first Sabra. If so, for whatever reason, she took the story to her grave.

Sabra Rain is four and she already carries the history of her people. She has a name that gives witness to the sojourn of a people through generations, across mountains, through centuries, into a time when no one is forced to hide their name from their children because they belong to the wrong race.

Sabra Rain is a child of covenant.

As we tell old stories, she watches Sponge Bob Square Pants.

There will be plenty of time for serious stuff later.

For now, it time for birthday cake with a delightful gift from God.

The gift of our second Sabra, known and loved, and who will never have to hide.

St. Patrick Saves Western Civilization

Surely you realized what I would write about today!

It’s St. Patrick’s Day.

Patrick is one of history’s most beloved and influential figures.

Thomas Cahill claims that he saved Western Civilization by evangelizing the Irish.

Maybe so, but Patrick’s contemporaries would have laughed out loud.

He was a poorly educated victim of the Irish slave trade, under the constant suspicion of Church authorities in Britain, and was known for little more than wondering around the villages of Ireland praying for sick people and starting churches.

The greatness of Patrick consists in the bold step he took to preach the gospel outside the network of educated, Latin -speaking middle and upper classes of Europe. Not since Jesus had anyone purposefully visited the “fly-over” zones of the world to share the gospel. There were churches in Rome, Constantinople, Ephesus, Alexander, and so forth. Wherever people could read and discuss great ideas, the gospel seem to do well. Christians were an educated, literary people – people of the Book. The lower classes of people were “pagano,” or “bumpkins.”

The Irish were the worse bumpkins of all. Violent, immoral, unlettered, desperately poor, and steeped in a mystical form of nature worship called Druidism; they were not a people that church leaders thought about evangelizing.

It makes me think about our modern church planting movement. Have you noticed that most of our “church planters” are burdened for the upwardly mobile, cool, well educated and well dressed people of the great cities? Well that’s the way it was in Patrick’s’ day too.

However, Patrick insisted that he had a call. God had given him a vision to return to the place where he had once been a slave.

It was a dangerous mission. It was a mission that the rest of the church did not esteem.

He went anyway.

We love Patrick because he was like Jesus. He voluntarily went into a world no one else wanted to visit. He loved people that no one else loved.

There is a phrase in the Apostle’s Creed that talks about that. It’s when we say, “He descended into Hell.”

Evangelical Christians often have difficulty with that phrase. It doesn’t sound right. It sounds like Jesus went somewhere to be punished.

Our problem with the phrase is language. There is more than one word for “Hell” in Greek.

“Sheol” is indeed the place of punishment.

However, “Hades” means the abode of the dead.

The Apostles Creed only insists that we believe that Jesus descended into the place of the dead. I believe it means more than that, but the creed doesn’t insist that a Christian believe what I do about Christ’s descent into Hell.

A long time ago, God looked down from Heaven and decided to become a man. He decided to come into our mess. He didn't descend into Caesar's palace. He didn't descend into the Sanhedrin. He didn't descend into the academy in Athens. He descended into Hell.

First, Christ descended into an animal stall, a cave filled with nasty straw and horse manure. Down, down, he kept going into humiliation. He kept going all the way to the bottom of human civilization, becoming socially marginalized, and finally even criminalized.

Christ ended his life covered in spit. He was naked, humiliated, abandoned, and rejected: like a lamb led to slaughter.

Then he descended even further, into the mockery of demons and fallen angels, down where the slimy, underground creatures of death, disease and those alienated from God live; down into an unfathomable and unmentionable horror beyond all human imagination.

I do not know exactly what happened then. All I know is that on the third day, He rose again with the shout: "I have in my hands the keys to death, Hell and the grave."

It was then that Christ was able to say, these signs shall follow them that believe, "in my name you will cast out devils".

What had happened?

St. Paul said that He who ascended was the same one as He who had descended. And because he descended and then ascended, He led our captors into captivity and then gave gifts unto men: apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists.

Jesus gave birth to a people who can survive, thrive and minister the saving gospel of Jesus in the midst of Hell.

David had once said, If I make my bed in Hell thou art there!

Hell can't keep God out. He descended into Hell. Are you in Hell? God is there too.

Anytime we feel as though we are sinking into Hell, we must remember that God knows what Hell looks like and where it is.

We may indeed go through Hell. However, we are attached to the One who knows how to get out of Hell. He once entered Hell of his own volition. Then, of his own volition, He rose up, and as he arose, He carried upon His shoulders all who believe in Him. Since he has ascended to Heavenly places, so have we.

That’s what Patrick knew as he sailed toward the Irish coast. He was already free of Hell and therefore, wherever he went, Hell would not survive.

Like his Lord, Patrick went to Ireland to set people free from the power of Hell.

When he arrived, there were no Christians. When he died, he left a vibrant Christian church that would soon pour out missionaries and teachers into all of Europe, and in time, into North America and around the world.

If you can’t be in Ireland today, at least take a moment to wish you were. It will be craze there and many things will be done that St. Patrick would not have liked! Nonetheless, congratulations to all Irishmen everywhere –and to their scattered children across the world who have -- or who claim to have roots there.

Happy St. Patrick’s’ Day!

Unbend This: A Truck and an Ass

Leonard Griffin is a pastor of a wonderful church in Phoenix, Arizona. The blog is not really about him but I want to at least say that he and his wife Sharon may be two Christians I admire as much as I have ever met.

Anyway, like I said, the blog is not about him.

It’s about a story he once told me to illustrate the meaning of “depravity.”

He once bought a truck which he really liked. However, it kept pulling to the right.

He complained to the people who had sold him the truck. They promised to take care of it.

They aligned the truck. They balanced the wheels. After all of that, the truck still pulled to the right.

Finally, the mechanics discovered the bent axle. As it turns out, aligning the front-end and balancing the tires of a truck cannot fix that truck if the core issue is a bent axle!

When problem is that serious, a superficial solution doesn’t help.

Christians believe that human beings, like Leonard’s truck, are profoundly bent. That is what we mean by the doctrine of depravity. It doesn’t mean that we are not good looking, nice, or well mannered. It means that our axle is bent. It means that our attempts to correct our most basic flaw will not work. Our problem lies at a deeper level than any human effort can reach. A bent man cannot unbend himself. All the people who try to “unbend’ us, however noble, intelligent or gifted, are themselves “bent.” To unbend a human being requires the help of an Unbent Being.

Christians believe that there are deep laws governing the universe. The ancient Chinese described these “laws” as the “Tao.”

(My last blog was a reflection on what that means.)

Christians agree with Taoists that there is such a system of “laws” that undergird the universe. We disagree with Taoists that human beings can learn how to live in accordance with the Tao. We can discern what is right but we cannot actually do what we know is right – at least not all the time. The road – the Way (for that is what the word “Tao” means) – is straight enough, and we can certainly learn to see it, but when we try to drive on that road, we discover that we are driving crooked. Just like my friend Leonard.

Christians believe that an Unbent Man once came into the world to unbend us.

Jesus Christ was God “enfleshed.” He knows how we are made, for what we are made, and what keeps us from living in accordance with how we were made.

Through the the death of this innocent Unbent Man, Jesus Christ, justice was satisfied, evil was defeated, and redemption was made possible

By His death on the cross, Christ destroyed our sins and offered repair for our bent souls.

One of the Easter hymns of ancient Orthodox churches puts it this way: “He trampled down death by death.”

Some of the Church Fathers described the death of Christ as a victim on a hook. The enemy of our souls, the Evil Bender of souls, took the bait. He ingested the goodness and death-destroying power of the Son of God. Evil attempted to absorb goodness and revived a blow from which it will never recover.

As a result, the entire universe will someday be unbent.

Christians believe that after his death and decent into death, Christ resurrected. He then ascended into heaven to take His place at the right hand of God, the Father. He will be there until the work of universe unbending is completed.

The death, burial, and resurrection of Christ were not only personal victories for Jesus then; they were “vicarious victories,” that is to say, “done in the place of.”

All who believe in Jesus, will receive every benefits that He won in His struggles with death, hell, and the grave. (See Romans 3:35; 2 Corinthians 5:21; 1 Corinthians 15:3)

In Christ, God became human. Because of that we are now clothed with the nature of God. (See 2 Peter 1: 3,4)

Not only that, but one day every speck of dirt in the cosmos will be unbent, redeemed, sanctified, and glorified.

This is what we mean when we speak of the “vicarious work of Christ.”

Oh, today in the One Year Bible, we read about Balaam and his famous talking ass (Numbers 22).

It’s a funny story and I must comment on it.

It is a satirical account of a man of God with a reputation for displaying supernatural gifts. However this great prophet – God’s man of glory and power –is dumber than the beast he rides on.

The ass gets it right.

The prophet gets it wrong.

I was just thinking about how wonderful it is that in Leonard’s case, the situation was reversed!

Taoism and The Cure for Halitosis

The ancient Chinese believed that a wise person should move quietly through the personal storms that rule most people’s lives. They thought of such storms as ego eruptions, internal explosions created by a preoccupation with things like fame and fortune. Personal storms could also arise from one’s attempts to avoid suffering, which is, at any rate, an inevitable part of human life.

A wise person would develop his or her intuition, learning to discern the deep structure of reality that under girds life and nature. Then, the wise person would organize life, thought and emotion accordingly.

Honoring the structures of reality involved distinguishing between right and wrong. One could develop a deep intuition about the way things are supposed to work in the universe if only he could sense the rightness or wrongness of a particular thing. The rightness or wrongness of a thing was not constant; it involved its placement, timing, or how it balanced with other objects or events in its environment. Fung Shui is an example of this system of thought.

Ancient Chinese called the structure of reality, “the way,” or “Tao,” in Chinese.

(The word is pronounced dahwl, which may make Chinese laugh but gets close enough for people like me!)

Though the Chinese probably developed this idea to a more sophisticated degree than most other ancient peoples, it was nearly universally believed.

In his letter to the Romans, for example, St. Paul alludes to this sense of an underlying “rightness or wrongness” of things. His first chapter insists that God has imbedded a sense of right and wrong within the very structures of the universe. People of all cultures in all times and places thus have access to an unwritten text that teaches us justice and righteousness.

Earlier generations of Western thinkers, going back to the ancient Romans and Greeks, called this concept 'natural law'. For them, jurisprudence was the art of creating and interpreting the laws of a land in such a way that those laws would reflect that deep natural law that they believed was meant to govern all people everywhere.

As late as the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the concept of “natural law” allowed the Western nations to judge the disposed rulers of Nazi Germany for having committed “crimes against humanity.”

Christians believe that not only the Nazis, but that all human beings live in rebellion against the “Tao,” or “the way.”

In his writings, C. S. Lewis points out repeatedly that human beings experience this rebellion as a deep and irresolvable conflict. He charges that all human beings in every society believe some things to be right and other things to be wrong. He says that human beings are frustrated because even though they posses this knowledge of good and evil, they often choose evil. Lewis tells us, as all good teachers throughout Christian history have told us, that this frustration reveals a fundamental flaw at the core of human nature: that our sincere intention to do what is right is coupled with our inability to actually do what is right.

Christians explain this basic flaw of human nature in different ways, an by using different metaphors. The Biblical word for it is sin, a word that means, “missing the mark”.

C.S. Lewis again, in his science fiction book, Out of The Silent Planet, writes about the guardian angel of an “unfallen” planet, (one in which the inhabitants have never sinned,) trying to describe the concept of sin to those under his charge. He describes the spiritual inhabitants of the earth (demons) as “the bent ones.” The illness of soul that causes angels to be bent is called “evil.” When human beings are bent, we call their illness, “sin.” And that is as good a description of sin as we will find. Saying that a person is a “sinner” is to say that his soul, the core of his being, is “bent.”

In today’s One Year Bible reading (Numbers 16), the lessons continue about making a difference between sacred and profane things. One can profane a sacred thing by using it outside its appointed boundaries or treating it as though it were like everything else. In the Psalm (55), the writer bewails the loss of a friend who has betrayed him. “We took sweet counsel together and walked in the house of God in company.” What the Psalmist would have expected of an enemy has been done by a friend. Things are out of joint, twisted, not right.

Christians call this “not rightness,” “sin.”

We first learn to recognize sin in others. Early in life we realize that people do unjust things to us. “It’s not fair,” the child cries when other children do not share, or they do not receive something that was promised.

It takes a long time for us to realize that the terrible, twisted, bentness we observe in others is in us too. There is a mechanism in each human being that continually creates and dramatizes his or her own life story. In this autobiography, the one who creates the story is the same one who hears it and therefore, the person for whom the story is told is always the hero, always in the right, and always has a good explanation for why things go wrong in the world. Usually, a relationship crisis becomes the first breakthrough – often devastating – when the “hero” realizes that he too is bent. All that he has observed in others that is unrighteous and unholy, is his very same condition.

An old African proverb claims “no one knows when his own breath stinks.”

Christianity says that every human being has halitosis and that we work day and night to hide it from ourselves.

The first step to finding the Way, the Tao, is the realization that our finder is broken. We cannot FIND our Way, we must be FOUND BY the Way.

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse writes, “those who name the Tao do not know it; those who know it, do not name it.”

With all great respect to the great sage, I must say that Lao Tse was mistaken. The Tao has a name. The Tao is the One who once said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

The Old Testament book called The Proverbs asks the question: “can that which is crooked be made straight?”

Yes! It can. We can cry out to the eternal Tao, as one poor man once did, “Jesus, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

It’s a free alignment and its always just one confession away.

Royal Telephone

When I was a kid, we sang a song about a “royal telephone to glory.” Its interesting to me how folk culture adapts spiritual language to the inventions of the time. Generations before had sung about how “Life is like a Mountain Railroad.” Before that, people talked about taking a trip in a good old gospel ship.

Frederick Lehman wrote Royal Telephone in 1919 and I am thinking about it today because on today’s date in 1886, Alexander Graham Bell shouted in the world’s first telephone, “Watson, come here; I need you.”

By 1919 most Americans had used a telephone. They were amazed at how the human voice could find its way over miles and into a receiver at the other end. Lehman envisioned a telephone wire stretching from earth to glory. It would be a trouble free line, where “central” – the place where the switchboard operator made the connection between callers – would never be busy.

“Central’s never busy, always on the line. You may hear from heaven almost anytime.”

It was the lyrics of a Christian explaining his faith in an era of instant communication.

Every generation has done that: explained how the connection works between heaven and earth.

Of course, sooner or later, the explanation always comes back to Jesus.

In the One Year Bible reading today, we read about Jesus before the Sanhedrin.

It is not an easy thing for a believer to read. It seems so unfair and bitter.

The heart of the story, though, is not about the tragedy of it. It’s about the connection that the death and resurrection of Jesus opened up between earth and heaven. The metaphor of a “royal telephone” leaves a lot to be desired, but aims in the right general direction.

In every religion, the faithful people who follow it want to imitate their founder’s life and to obey his teaching. Christians are no exception. Christ was a great man. He was a wonderful teacher. If we try to imitate His life, we will become better people. However, we must admit that a person would also be a better person if he imitated the Buddha’s life, or Socrates, for that matter.

Imitating the life of Christ, as important as it is, is not the main thing for a Christian.

The New Testament teaches that the main point in serving Christ is not imitating Him, but participating in His life! (See 2 Peter 1:3-8)

As a person follows Christ, he or she should expect the character and power of Christ to penetrate his or her own being. Such a person, to use a phrase from St. Paul, “puts on Christ.”

Jesus began the process of “colonizing” our human nature, when He, “for us and our salvation came down from Heaven … became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”

Why did He do it?

Certainly Jesus came down from heaven in order to reveal God’s love to us.

Without a doubt, He also wanted to live an exemplary life, so that we would have an example to follow. The imitation of Christ is a vital part of our spirituality. He also wanted to show us how to die – in submission to God.

Even more importantly though, Christians believe that Jesus lived and died as one of us because the deep structure of the universe required a “settling of accounts.” The connection between earth and heaven was broken and needed to be repaired. Christians believe that this was accomplished through the vicarious death, (that is, a death in the place of) of a man who was wholly innocent, Christ Jesus.

Alexander Graham Bell probably invented the telephone because his mother went deaf when he was a child. He had experimented for years with various acoustic devices, trying to discover a way for her to hear again. How often great things are born from compassion seeking to bring relief to those who suffer!

Our Lord was led into the Sanhedrin in today’s reading to the jeers of religious people. They didn’t believe in his mission. They didn’t know who he was. He had to suffer mockery of the crowd and the denial of his followers.

Just a few hours later though, as he gasped his last breath on the cross, he mustered up enough strength to moan, "it is finished.”

The connection had been made. A call could get through from anywhere on earth, from any person speaking any language, at no cost whatever.

The Royal Telephone was in full service mode and has been ever since.


There will be no charges, telephone is free,
It was built for service, just for you and me;
There will be no waiting on this royal line,
Telephone to glory always answers just in time.

Kiss A Teacher Today!

In 1775 on this date, Thomas Payne wrote his explosive paper, African Slavery in America.

Boy, did it upset things! It was like what happens when someone has experienced a temporary malfunction with flatulence control and releases noxious fumes into a small space. No one wants to acknowledge what has occurred and so everyone keeps on speaking as though nothing is amiss. Then someone just says it, “who ^#$#$%?”

Teachers are not just interested in making us learn multiplication tables or the capitals of the fifty states. Teachers mentor us in the fine art of thinking. Without teachers we imbibe and then regurgitate other people’s thoughts. Much of culture is just that – people drinking in the regurgitated thoughts of others, then regurgitating those thoughts back out into the ideaosphere for others to drink.

Teachers make us stop and ask, “do I really want to drink this? Is this really my own thought? What makes this thought true; just because everyone I know repeats it over and over? Does that really make it so?"

For some reason, teachers can make people very, very angry.

Socrates had to drink hemlock just because he asked too many questions and had too many people thinking at one time. That upset the upper crust of Athens.

It happens all the time. A real teacher messes up your head. It’s not usually pleasant.

I don’t like Thomas Payne, for example. He was antichristian, for one thing.

I respect him though, which is not the same thing as “like.”

He makes me answer important questions about my faith, my political beliefs and my commitment to a country in which we allow ideas to fight one another so the people who hold them won’t.

Payne was already telling the nation that was about to be born that this slavery thing was a really, really bad idea.

Six people attended his funeral.

Even so, he was, and is, a great teacher. He deserves to be thought of as one of the nation’s founding fathers.

Isn’t it amazing that our Lord used the word “teacher” in reference to himself more than any other tile?

Jesus was a powerful teacher. He made his points so clearly that to this day He is infinitely easier to read than all the people who try to explain him to us.

He was a supreme story-teller. He was not a scribe, that sort of rabbi who endlessly analyzed the sacred text and gave learned commentary on it. Jesus referred to scripture often. His public prayers were nearly always based upon the common prayers used in the synagogue. However, his words were not really rabbinical discourses. He was something like a first century Will Rogers, someone making points about spiritual life by telling tales of ordinary fishermen, farmers and runaway children.

Most of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem made fun of His style.

The people however, listened.

He was, of course, history’s greatest change agent. Western civilization’s all too gradual (but continual) liberation of slaves, women, and the poor; the care for the handicapped; respect for minorities and the powerless of society; all these social movements owe much to the preaching of Jesus. This world-changing power did not flow from political genius; it erupted from a gentle but persistent knock on the door of the human heart.

Jesus changed hearts. The men and women with changed hearts changed the world.

The Lord preached his first sermon in Caperneum. (Luke 4: 16-22) I have been there, among the ruins of that very synagogue.

The synagogue was remarkably similar to a modern church. Children remain with the adults for prayers and hymns, and were then dismissed to adjoining rooms in order to play and receive religious instruction. One can still see the marks on the floor where the children played a first century equivalent of hop-scotch. After the children were dismissed, Jesus took the scroll from its place, kissed it, unrolled it and read from the reading for the day: Isaiah 61: “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me for He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” Then, after he had read his text, he said these words: “today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

From that day he kept teaching, in synagogues and open fields, mostly in the little towns around Lake Tiberias, what the New Testament calls the Sea of Galilee.

We still listen to sermons and songs based on his words. Sometimes, we even attempt to put His words into practice. When we do, the words still cause people to stop and stare.

Teachers are an enigma. The upper crusts profess an admiration for teachers but do not want their children to become one. The lower classes tend to make jokes about crazy teachers who don’t know how to tie their own shoes. We pay nearly everyone a lot more than we do teachers and then berate them because they are not doing a good job teaching our children.

Why anyone actually wants to become a teacher is a mystery.

But everyone in a while, a little boy or a little girl reads while others play, learns obscure things that interests no one else, then selects a career that doesn’t pay enough to survive.

Why do they do it?

Because the world is dark and someone needs to turn on the light.

Sectarianism Sucks

Regi Stone is the worship leader at Christ Church Nashville, the congregation I serve. Every Sunday he leads us in singing joyful songs that lift up our hearts. He composes many of the songs we sing, and other congregations around the country have adopted them for their own worship services.

That’s pretty much the extent to which I have known Regi.

The other day however, he sent me a prototype for a new worship magazine he is about to launch. I was blown away! The magazine was filled with stunning photography and wonderful articles by people from all parts of the Lord’s church. It was visually and theologically committed both to contemporary worship and to a deep 'rootedness' in the soil of our ancient faith.

Like many believers, I have been troubled by the American worship wars of the last decade or so. Some churches sing hymns but refuse to sing newer worship choruses. Other churches banish the organ, damn the choir to the outer regions of Hades, and only sing songs written in the last five weeks.

Largely, these churches are built around specific generations. Older people tend to like hymns; younger people tend to like praise choruses.

When the conflict gets really hot, each group refuses to share community with those whose musical tastes differ from its own.

Me? I like ancient, liturgical worship. I like Russian Orthodox chant. I like the great hymns of the Reformation. I like songs that make me think as well as feel.

I also like Matt Redman, Israel Houghton, and The Gettys.

I like C.C. Winans and really great black gospel choirs.

I really want it all. I want access to every part of the Lord’s church and all that every part of His church offers.

I think sectarianism sucks.

Jesus didn’t seem to like rigid religious categories either.

Nor cultural categories, for that matter.

Jesus was not a monk. He came from a working class family that lived in a poor village.

Nazareth was a crossroads where caravans of merchants made their way to and from the various cities and towns of what we now call the Middle East. This means he was exposed to many different types of people and languages.

Jesus was not the sort of Jew one might have found in Jerusalem, someone who might live most of his life with only minimal contact with those of other ethnic backgrounds. It would be too much to call Jesus cosmopolitan, certainly. However, neither would it be accurate to say he was from some isolated, rural background. Jesus was a child of the empire. He was keenly aware of his peoples’ heritage and that his people were a disadvantaged minority within the Roman Empire.

He was familiar with both farming and fishing, as we can see from his parables.

He seemed neither ill at ease with the wealthy nor the poor because he demonstrates an ease and familiarity with both.

He was not an ascetic, one who to seeks to gain God’s favor by living a severe life. In the time of Jesus, there were many such people, men who wandered through the desert trying to kill off all the desires of the flesh. Such people would provide a model for later Christian monks. John the Baptist may even have been one of them.

Jesus did not speak ill of the ascetics, but he was not one of them.

He was a friend of sinners and a lover of life.

He was, by his own testimony, a wine drinker and a meat eater. In fact, the gospel writer makes a point of the fact that Jesus began his ministry by blessing a wedding party and making more wine for it. The way he intentionally began his ministry demonstrated his claim that he came to give life, not to destroy the legitimate pleasures that enhance it.

He spoke often about Heaven and the appropriate use for self -sacrifice.

Upon occasion he would go on a spiritual retreat. During those time, he experienced severe, one might even say ascetic, deprivation. However, that was not his normal lifestyle.

Jesus was not overly fond of religious strictures and control and he famously challenged the Pharisees who adopted religious control as their core attitude toward life.

At the same time, Jesus believed most of what the Pharisees believed.

The Lord’s disciples were zealots, tax collectors, and fishermen. That would be like having a church with truck drivers, florists, members of the John Birch Society, and leaders of Acorn.

You just can’t nail Jesus down. He escapes all efforts to categorize Him.

So if you just hang out with Christians who sing like you, preach like you, and vote like you; well, it’s quite likely that your perception of Jesus has become terribly narrow. You may not know Him as well as you think.

Regi Stone has a great idea and I hope it soars to success. I’m going to try to help that happen if I can.

He doesn’t have an ax to grind or battle to win. He just wants us to listen to what others think about worshipping God – in song, in art, in prayer and in life.

Someday, Francis of Assisi is going to meet Matt Redman. The two of them will have a long conversation with Charles Wesley and Oral Roberts. John Calvin will ask Joel Osteen to explain his sermons and Sir Christopher Wren will want to know what the heck we were thinking when we decided to build church buildings that look like office parks.

Regi wants to do all that now.

Well, why not?

Jesus did.

Thank You, Mr. President

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson chaired the first meeting of the League of Nations.

A devout Presbyterian, the nation’s twenty-eighth president tried to bring a sense of justice and morality into international affairs. While campaigning to convince congress to join the League of Nations, he had a stroke and collapsed.

He never fully recovered.

Wilson’s idealism still evokes both scorn and praise. Some believe his high ideals represented the best side of our country. Others view him as dangerously naïve.

The League of Nations did not last long.

Italy ignored its protest of its invasion of Ethiopia.

Germany withdrew when the League protested Hitler’s persecution of Jews.

Few deny Wilson’s good intentions. Many deny that his intentions were realistic.

History is full of great schemes for achieving utopia. Religious people create cults. Political people create agencies. Artists create stories and sounds. Some of us are moved. Some of us laugh. Some of us die. But century after century, dreams fail and hopes are crushed. Wilson’s “war to end all wars” was followed by a war even more terrible. The twentieth century witnessed a continual eruption of despotic idiots like Stalin, Hitler, and Papa Doc.

So what are we to make of the greatest dream of all, the day when “men will beat their swords into plowshares and not learn of war anymore?”

One thing for sure, good intentions won’t do it! Even the good intentions of the world’s greatest man won't do it.

If Jesus is a mere man, then his words just stir people to believe in one more hopeless dream.

If he is more than a mere man, then his words may be much more than good intentions.
Of course, most people believe Jesus was a great man. However, only Christians believe that He was incarnate God.

Even through the mists of time and legend, he is compelling to human beings everywhere. His teachings are so clear, his virtue and grace so transparent, that people the world over seem drawn to him.

Hindus put pictures of him in their temples.

Buddhists draw parallels between his teachings and that of their master.

Muslims revere him as the greatest prophet of all.

Even atheists are usually reluctant to speak ill of him.

On this point most of the world agrees: Jesus was an altogether wonderful and magnificent human being.

So who was he?

He was born to a poor family in occupied Palestine, a border province and outpost of the Roman Empire.

By the time he was born, the Israel of King David and Solomon was as legendary as medieval Europe is to us. Most Jews no longer spoke Hebrew. Most did not even live in the holy land.

Jesus was born in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire. So there is little doubt that he spoke Greek and Aramaic. He could also read Hebrew, because we know that he did the public reading for a Synagogue service on at least one occasion.
All these things are interesting but are maddeningly trivial in comparison to what we would like to know. The details of his life are few. We know next to nothing about his childhood, for example.

We have a record of his birth, his teachings, miracles and his death. Oh, and we know about a small event called the resurrection!

We also have the stories of the next few centuries in which millions of human beings began to worship him as God.

We also have the effects of this man upon history. The explosion of medicine, education, science, and art in following centuries are a witness to his hold upon the world’s imagination.

And, the story has not even ended yet! Every year, millions more of the world’s peoples respond to the message of Christ. As Europe and North America grow cold and indifferent to his life and teaching, the rest of the world seems more intrigued than ever. Despite what academia and media pendants say, Christianity remains the world’s fastest growing religion – by far. It is one reason why many parts of Islam has become so militant: Africa has turned to Christ in our lifetime and encroaches upon the heartland of Islam.

Why?

Because Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

He was not just a dreamer.

He was God.

So our twenty-eighth president may have gotten it wrong. Perhaps he was, as people claim, a hopeless romantic. He probably did die of a broken heart, as many romantics do.

But if Wilson was wrong, his error was just about timing and means.

The Kingdom of God will come when God decides. We can’t make it happen. We can’t even predict when it will happen.

We can worship the One who will someday make it happen.

We can serve Him by serving others until it happens.

We don’t become broken hearted over what we are unable to accomplish. But we don’t give up either. We keep praying. We keep working.

Someday there will be a real League of Nations.

The Jew will take the Egyptian by the hand and say, “let us go up to t \eh House of the Lord and offer there our sacrifice unto the God of Jacob.”

When that Jew and that Egyptian get there, they will see a throne. On that throne there will be a man who not only had good intentions but the power to turn his good intentions into reality.

Perhaps this year. Perhaps next. Perhaps a generation from now. But someday.

Thank you Mr. President for daring to dream.

Sleep well.

When you wake, you will see everything you hoped for.

Those who laughed will not see it.

The Kingdom of God is for the pure in heart; the ones we often call naive.

Eek, a Witch!

On this day in 1692, the leaders of Salem, Massachusetts began their investigation of Sarah Osborne, Sarah Good and Tituba, a Native American woman, who were suspected of performing witchcraft in their community. Finally, 150 people were tried for "Certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcrafts & Sorceryes."

Nineteen of these were hung from the neck until dead.

The people were probably guilty of using native medicine to cure disease. Even if one believes in witchcraft as the bible defines it, the Salem suspects were not witches. And, they probably did a lot less damage to the human family than the leaders of Bear Stern and the other robber barons of our time. But this is not a political blog and so I – with great forbearance and discipline – now turn my attention back to the matter at hand!


In my last blog, I talked about why the Bible condemns wizards, witches and soothsayers. Their practices create a system in which the material world becomes less valued than the spiritual world. God doesn’t want that. Even though many theologically impoverished gospel songs and fiery sermons make the same mistake, that doesn’t make it right. God is the creator and sustainer of the material world. He wants us to appreciate that world. He doesn’t want us to disdain it or try to escape it.

In fact, God himself became a man!

Now that’s making a real statement! What more could we ask?

Obviously, the belief in the incarnation separates Christianity from all the other religions of the world. In my last blog I mentioned that even Judaism rejects our belief in the incarnation.

Judaism teaches that because God is a Spirit, He cannot be either imagined or represented in any material way.

Most of the great Eastern religions believe that a god might from time to time assume a human shape... but to actually become a man? To them the visible, material world is a “veil of illusions,” something a religious seeker must seek to overcome. Why would a god put himself into the very situation that his followers are encouraged to escape?

In contrast to all other religions, Christians believe that human beings are both material and spiritual.In fact, we believe that reality itself is both material and spiritual!

There are only three basic ways to view reality.

Either reality is material or spiritual, or both material and spiritual.

If reality is material, then all abstract and invisible categories must be viewed as being at best just useful metaphors or recreational figments of our imagination. In this view, things like love and thoughts are products of brain matter; little hiccups of neuropeptides; eruptions of endorphins.

If reality is spiritual, then all material, visible things are mere manifestations of thought. In this view, things like viruses and the taste of vanilla are simply “printouts” of either human or superhuman thoughts.

The third view is the incarnational one, that belief that reality is both material and spiritual and that each sphere impacts the other.

That is the Christian view. It separates us from New Agers on one hand. It separates us from secular humanists on the other.

The Nicene Creed asserts that “we believe in God, the creator of all things, visible and invisible.” This means that Christians believe in a single Creator. Thus, we believe that everything in creation was formed according to a common plan. We believe that this creation and everything in it – whether belonging to the visible or invisible part of the universe – is, or ought to be, subject to a single government: the kingdom of God..

Thomas Aquinas, reflecting on this incarnational view of reality, said that God made three orders of creatures: material creatures called animals, spiritual creatures called angels, and incarnational creatures called human beings. This means that when God became a man, He crossed the line from being purely a spiritual creature to becoming an incarnational creature. He became like “one of us, just a stranger on a bus.”

So the doctrine of the incarnation forces Christians into a solitary position among world religions.

On one hand, Hindu, New Age, and other types of Pantheistic faiths deny – at least to some extent – our materiality.

On the other hand, materialists (the intellectuals of Western society for the last two hundred years) deny our spirituality.

One side claims, in effect, that our spirituality is an illusion. The other claims that our materiality is an illusion. In contrast to all of these, Christianity claims that human beings are incarnational, that they consist of both matter and spirit. We believe this will always be the case, even in eternity. For “we believe in the resurrection of the body.” This explains why the belief in God’s incarnation is so important to us. We believe that our God came to us incarnated as a man because He wanted to suffer with us, identify with us, and relate to us.

This doctrine has inescapable consequences. For example, how can we disdain our bodies, while we worship a God who has taken a body like ours for Himself? For that matter, how can we disdain the world or any material thing in it, since we now know that our God is capable of clothing Himself in matter? Or how does this belief, that we are not just spiritual beings, impact worship? Should we really aim for a worship that is wholly “spiritual?” Or should our worship have something of the material about it?

Believing in the incarnation as we do, what should we expect worship to look like?

Here we are again, talking about worship! As we have been saying, all genuine theology leads us to worship. For Christians, worship involves a declaration that the “stranger on the bus,” is no less than God in a human form.

As for the Salem witches, it is one more example of power overpowering compassion and so-called spirituality defying common sense.

Add Salem officials to history’s dance of dunces; ignorance posing as piety, dragging defenseless people to their deaths who were only trying to survive a plague by asking Indians how to cure their illness. Add to their number the likes of Freud, the old fraud, with his penis envy and Oedipus complex. Add Ann Rayn, who still hypnotizes millions into various forms of respected heartlessness. Add Howard Stern, Hugh Hefner and Jerry Springer – all rich from cynically exploiting the weaknesses of common men and women.

“My people are destroyed because of their lack of knowledge,” the prophet cried.

That’s why they sometimes cause such enormous harm.

It's nothing that worship would not cure; if only they could taste of the powers of the world to come. There are thin places in that curtain that separates matter from spirit and the God-Man, Jesus the Christ, has come to lead us there.

It’s a lot better than witch-hunting -- or stealing billions of dollars because you have powerful friends in high places, for that matter.