A Fancy Word

I have been trying to avoid fancy words in these blogs about theology.

By fancy words I mean the Latin, Greek, Hebrew and German based terms that make up the jargon of theological conversation. Those terms drive people who want to talk about God and how He wants us to live our lives, positively nuts! To most of us, the jargon seems created for the purpose of keeping Joe Truck Driver away from the conversation.

(Joe Six Pack isn’t interested in the conversation.)

Today though, I want to use a Greek term: “anthropomorphism.”

Some people say that when we call God “Father,” we are guilty of being crude.

Anthropomorphism is an important word and it really will help us talk about God.

Anthropos is Greek for “man.”

“Morphe” is the Greek word for “form.”

Thus, anthropomorphism means, “in the form of a man.”

Anthropomorphism is the act of attributing human features or characteristics to non-human beings or objects.

Mickey Mouse is an anthropomorphisized mouse! In other words, Mickey is a mouse that acts, speaks and dresses like a man. Have you ever seen a real mouse dressed up like Micky in nature?

No, you haven’t!

We made Mickey up.

We imagined what a mouse would be like if it dressed and behaved like a human being.

Some people say that calling God, “Father” is anthropomorphism. They claim that we are creating an imaginary God, by attributing human characteristics to Him. (Oops! I am supposed to say, “Him, Her, or whatever God may be.”)

Truthfully? Sometimes we do treat God in an anthropomorphic way; don’t you think?

Even the Bible does it.

“God’s ear is not too heavy that He cannot hear; nor is His arm short that He cannot reach,” the Bible says.

That is classic, Biblical anthropomorphism. I mean, does God really have an ear or an arm?

No, He doesn’t.

However, God does hear. He also “reaches.”

Since human beings reach and hear with their arms and ears, they find it difficult to think about how a Being could hear or reach without arms and ears. Therefore, human beings envision God as having arms or ears. That helps us understand God.

This is a legitimate use of anthropomorphism. It helps us understand God, using terms and pictures that we can grasp.

In a sense, using the word ‘Father” in reference to God is, as the critics claim, anthropomorphic. God did not “begat” anyone in the way human beings “begat".

The issue is however, that God Himself Has chosen this term. He calls Himself a father and does do for His own good reasons.

Today’s Old Testament reading in the One Year Bible is about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams. This becomes the key to the future of both Egypt and Israel.

The New Testament reading is about how Jesus spoke to the people in parables. Jesus said that we have to pay attention to the parables because most people “look but don’t really see; they hear but they don’t really understand.”

Why the dreams?

Why the parables?

Why anthropomorphism?

Because there are things we need to know that are difficult to understand. We have to move step by step, picture by picture until we grasp what we need to know.

C. S. Lewis tells about a child that asked him once what adults meant by the term, “having sex.” (That was a long time ago!)

He replied that it was a fun thing adults did when they are married.

The child then asked if it was good as ice cream.

Lewis said, “Well, yes, it is as good as ice cream and even better sometimes.

The child was overwhelmed.

“Gosh, better than ice cream. Imagine that.”

Now we see as through a glass, darkly.

That’s why we need anthropomorphism

The Father: Begat, and Be Good!

The creeds began with the phrase; I believe in God, the Father. These days, many people have a big problem with using the word “father” in reference to God. They may understand that God is our “source of being” or “ultimate authority.” It’s just that the word “father” leaves them cold.

Obviously, their problem with the word “father” is usually due to some bad experience they have had with someone called father. Many people have been beaten, abandoned or even raped by fathers. It is extremely difficult for a person who has had such an experience to love and respect a God who is addressed by that title. For far too many people, the word “father” is a harsh and angry sounding word.

The problem with calling God, “Father” is not new. The people who heard Jesus had difficulty with it too, though for entirely different reasons. As a rule, before Jesus, religious people had usually addressed God only in reverential terms of awe. In fact, they often showed so much reverence for God that He seemed far away from everyday life. The word that Jesus actually used, Abba, meant something like “Daddy.” It sounded too tender, too gentle. It still sounds a bit jarring, even though we now tend to err in the opposite direction than those ancient Jews, away from reverence and awe and toward familiarity and even contempt.

Jesus came to reveal to us God's real nature. He deliberately chose His favorite title for God to teach us an important reason. Calling God “Father” thus teaches us something Jesus considered vital about how we should view God.

The Church Fathers must have believed this too.

The Apostles’ Creed begins with, "I believe in God the Father Almighty."

We can see then that the creed calls God Father even before it calls Him Creator. There must be a reason for this.

If we are to understand God as He wishes to be understood, then evidently we need to acknowledge Him as “Father.”

Still, we must be careful when we use the word “father.” God may not be a father as we imagine when we hear the word. Jesus calls God, “Father,” so Father He is. However we need to realize that God is a Father as He defines the word, not necessarily as we define it.

On this date in 1535, King Henry V111 declared himself the head of the English Church. He had been a faithful son of the Roman Church but then wanted to divorce and marry again, then do that again, and then do that yet again. The Pope had to draw the line somewhere. Henry wanted to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine after twenty years. He claimed to have a sudden "aha!" of conscience about marrying his late brother's wife, and blamed this oversight for his lack of legitimate male heirs. As always, there was much more going on than just these facts. But Henry wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, and needed Katherine out of the way. The pope said “no”.

Kings don’t like to be told “no” by anyone, including popes, and so he declared the churches of England free of papal control, and, for good measure, added that he would now head the church himself.

It’s a real historical problem for those of us with roots in English Christianity, since our Reformation was not as clean and clear cut as was the reformation on the continent. This is not the place to go into that, except to say that the king was merely moving the population where the people wanted to go anyway – out of the Roman orbit. Like many good politicians, he used the popular mood as an excuse to get what he wanted.

The issue for this blog is “fatherhood.” What does spiritual fathering look like? It certainly doesn’t look like religious bullying or political posturing. It looks like God, who comes to us like a shepherd of a flock. He’s not a jolly granddad up in heaven, laughing at all our silly sins – I mean he can get rough if he has to do so. What he really wants though, is relationship. He wants to grow us, mature us, defend us, and care for us.

God is the source of all existence. Thomas Aquinas used the phrase “fountain of existence.” I love that. I imagine a cosmic hole spewing out comets and kangaroos, rainbows and rhinoceroses (why isn’t it rhinoceri?) God not only created everything, the existence of all things continually depends upon Him. If He decides, the entire universe can disappear, not with a bang but without so much as a whimper.

Just poof!

God’s Fatherhood has to do with origin and source. Even the Godhead has its source in “God, the Father Almighty.” Fatherhood is what comes first.

We owe reverence to God for our existence.

We also owe reverence to our earthly fathers for our existence. Some of them try to deserve that reverence and some do not. That is the main point of the Book of Genesis, what we are reading right now in our church: Fathers do not just begat and then begone. They sustain, comfort, teach, train, defend, love, care for, mentor and grow up their offspring.

When we worship God as “Father,” we are learning how to parent as we as how to honor our own parents. That makes it possible to transmit covenant, civilization and culture form one generation to the next. So there’s a lot riding on this concept.

Oh, and if you want to know how to be a father, spiritual or otherwise, just look at Henry VIII.

Then, do the opposite.

YADA, YADA, YADA!

We are already into a month’s worth of blogs about theology.

“OK,” I hear you saying, but what is the importance of all of this to me right now, in this life? I am sure that God is a higher level of being than me, and I suppose He may indeed be paradoxically both One and Three. I’ll accept that if that is what the church says but for the life of me I can’t imagine how it really impacts my relationship with God or my personal life in the day-to-day.”

Glad you asked!

This gives me a wonderful opportunity to share one of my favorite Christian teachings about God!

In one of his epistles (1 John 4:8), St. John says, “God is Love.” Notice that he does not say that God loves, though that is certainly true. He says that God is love.

To translate the word “is” into the language of mathematics, we might say God = Love. The nature of an equal sign is that we can invert whatever is on each side of it and be left with the same fact. Therefore, “3+6= 9,” is the same statement as “6+3 = 9.” This implies that if God is love, then love must also be God.

Naturally, everything we call love is not God. However, love in its pure form; love undistorted by all our human stuff, is God. All real love in the universe comes from God because all real love in the universe is God.

That is such a beautiful teaching!

There is just one problem with it.

Love cannot exist without an object!

When we utter the word “love,” we immediately realize that there must be someone who loves.

We also realize that someone or something is the recipient of that love.

Question: how could love have existed before creation, when there was only one being in the universe? When God was alone, whom did He love? In what sense can we use the word love where there is only one being exists?

Before the existence of angels and humans, whom did God love? If He is love, He must have loved something or someone.

The doctrine of the Trinity – God’s Triune nature – evolved in early church theology in order to address this very question.

There is a reality within God’s nature that allows us to use the word “love” to describe Him, even when He is alone.

Evidently, God’s nature is something like the following: the Father loves the Son and the Holy Spirit without limit, the Son loves the Father and the Holy Spirit without limit, and the Holy Spirit loves the Son and the Father without limit. This dynamic of infinite love begets infinite love, receives infinite love, and then gives it out again. Think of it as a trillion Niagara Falls, pouring vast reservoirs of love from each of the divine persons into the waiting pools of love in the other divine persons. Each of these “pools of love” swirl through infinite, unfathomable eons of time and space, ever-multiplying the power of love as God contemplates His own glory and goodness, then pouring the increased love back into the other persons of the Godhead.

And how does this affect you?

Well, St. Paul tells us that those believers are “in Christ.” C. S. Lewis said once we are truly “in” Christ, then we become the recipients of that love that the Father has toward the Son. If this is true, and it seems to be the case, then we are now involved in that cosmic dynamic motion of ever-increasing love within the Godhead.

The divine love for us penetrates our being and mutates us into an entirely new form of life.

Surely you will remember the old science fiction movies where people were somehow exposed to radiation. Usually, the people in these stories gained some strange new power or mutated into some bizarre form. I think the love of God must work something like that in us.

St. John says, “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God!”(1 John 3:1) Isn’t he talking about this sort of spiritual mutation?

The love of God, whirling through the infinitude of space and time in self-multiplying glory, overflows to become creation. This same love now infects us, like some great virus. Only this is a “virus” that creates instead of destroys. It gives life instead of taking it away. When we catch it, it creates even more love.

As we grow in God, we learn how to give God’s love to others. Our love too multiplies as we share it.

We learn how all this works by observing the One and Triune God, loving Himself and all of creation so that creation is continually lifted and transformed.

As He loves us and we love Him, we learn to think as He thinks. We learn to feel as He feels. We learn to do as He does.

That, my friend, is Christian theology. It’s not an armchair exercise in foolish speculation.

It is life everlasting.

What the Beatles Say About Theology

The Beatles launched their career in the United Sates on this date in 1964 with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” Had they known how our generation would have lived, they might have just called the song, “I Wanna!”

I remember where I was when I first heard the song. I was listening to my little transistor radio. What a marvel it was! Technology was going places. It was wicked, listening to devil music like that but I couldn’t help myself. I was eleven and was just beginning to wander what it meant: “and when I touch you I feel happy inside.”

I felt happy inside listening to the little transistor radio, before going out into the cold to walk to school through ice and snow.

I walked ten miles to school, trudging through the forest everyday to get my education.

That’s actually a lie. It just sounded so good to me that I had to write it down.

The radio and the Beatles are not lies though. That really happened.

It’s so much more fun to write about the Beatles than about Plato and Aquinas. I mean, the Beatles actually existed. The other guys seem so removed from our everyday lives.

If Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas had had neat haircuts or sang with guitars, they would have made a better impression.

Why should anyone care about people like that or what they wrote?

If anyone has a hope that we will pay attention, then they must convince us that a study about God – or theology – has a real purpose.

When I was listening to the Beatles on the radio, I had no idea that the world was going to change as it has in my lifetime. It had already changed really; we were just about to deal with the implications.

Hitler was dead then for twenty-five years but he had so rearranged the world with his madness that we were still reeling. Millions of Jews were dead. Also, the discoveries in physics that had occurred in the early part of the century now had to be faced.

How were Christians to think “Christianly” about such things as quantum mechanics theory, genetic engineering, management science, or any other “secular” information we were about to face?

A Christian wants to understand his chosen life’s work in the light of his spiritual journey. If his spirituality is to be anything more than an escape into his own imagination, then what we learn from the spiritual journey must have serious and usable applications in other areas of life. Conversely, whatever we learn in other areas of life, if it is really truth, ought to shed light upon our spiritual path.

Spirituality is not; after all, a diversion from life; if it is true, then it is life.

However, changing our view of spirituality from a weekend diversion into the core of our existence takes work. We have to apply ourselves. We have to actually learn about our faith. Prayerfully learning about the ideas of faith is a way of forming our inner being, of expanding our capacity to reflect the glory of God. It is the way we connect our adult lives (and our chosen field of work) with God’s Word so we and our work may reflect God to the world.

After all of my talk about cookbooks and dinner, giraffes and Jell-O, we now return to our original question: why should we ever bother ourselves about obscure and ponderous Christian doctrines?

Perhaps we are now ready for the answer.

Thinking about a difficult concept like the Godhead is sometimes nothing more than an exercise in pride. It can be an egghead’s escape into an inner world of hopeless abstraction. If the egghead cannot face up to the challenges of a real life with real people, abstractions are the smokescreen behind which he hides from real life.

Theology can even be a religious intellectual’s way of avoiding God. He can waste everyone’s time spinning endless words about God.

These are often the charges laid against theology. They are often well-founded and are thus warnings about the dangers of intellectualizing our faith.

On the other hand, contemplating Christian doctrine can also be a way of humbling the intellect under the hand of God. It can be a way of letting God in-form us, re- form us, and, in the end, completely “trans-form” us.

The Bible tells us (in Philippians 2:5-11 & Colossians 2,3) that Christ Jesus came “in the form of God.” In other words, Jesus came to reveal the fullness of God to human beings.

God had already revealed Himself through nature. He had also revealed Himself through the Bible. However, God has most fully revealed Himself through the person and teachings of Christ.

God first informed through the scriptures and the hearing of the gospel. Then He became a man and revealed himself through the flesh of Christ. He has revealed Himself to us through the Holy Spirit as well, who came to not only live with us, but to live inside of us.

We are called to worship and meditate upon the One and Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As we do, His grace and glory bursts through one after another of our intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, and finally even our physical limitations. His aim is to make us into creatures that will shine like the stars.

That is why contemplation is important; it is about loving God with our minds. It brings the intellect under the influence of glory.

On that day in 1964, in Marmet, West Virginia, as I was getting ready for school, my world was suddenly interrupted by a new sound. Coming out of a piece of technology that would soon reconfigure the way human beings communicate and store information, the sound hit the ears and the brain of an eleven year old boy. It was from London, far, far away. It was in an accent that was different than mine. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. It promised experiences that I could hardly imagine.

The world has been reeling since.

The Beatles have come and gone.

Transistors have become dinosaurs.

Men have walked on the moon.

Under the swirling eddies, the foundations hold the world secure.

He who is wise takes the time to acquaint himself with all that is eternal, and with all those through history who think about those things.

That’s what I wanna.

The Beatles didn’t have a thing to say about that.

That’s why they weren’t all that important after all.

General Jackson and an Alligator

Too much contact with Plato can drive you crazy.

I think that’s what happened to Andrew Jackson on today’s date in 1815. That when he fought the British in the Battle of New Orleans.

Johnny Horton claims that when the Americans run out of canons, they used alligators. Here is the official scoop on that.


“So we fired our cannon 'til the barrel melted down.

Then we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round.

We filled his head with cannon balls and powdered his behind.

And when we touched the powder off, the gator lost his mind.”


The untold part of this story was that while all this madness was occurring, General Jackson was busy reading Plato’s’ Republic. He was not paying attention to everyday reality and had his head up in the world of forms. At least that’s my theory.

He should have read Aristotle.

Aristotle was Plato’s student, who modified his teacher’s theories about forms in ways that that angered the old man and still ticks Platonists off.

For example, Aristotle used Plato’s idea of forms to explain how humans learn.

He believed that we learn by “abstracting” a thing’s form from its substance. When we speak of someone thinking “abstractly” that’s what we mean.

Aristotle taught that if I see a bear, I will “abstract” (make a mental picture of) the bear’s form and then absorb the bear’s form into my brain. (Well, I certainly can’t absorb the bear’s substance into my brain!)

I don’t even have to see a “real” bear to do this. I can get a bear’s form into my brain just by seeing a picture of a bear, or by reading about a bear.

Aristotle called this process “in-formation,” (certainly a common word for us!)

St. Aquinas was a medieval Bible student who studied Aristotle. Like Plato and Aristotle, he believed that as we learn (as we are in-formed), we are profoundly changed. Every form of every object or idea that we take into ourselves becomes a part of our constantly expanding self.

Modern neuroscience agrees with this and tells us that learning changes the very structure of our brains.

Imagine a man living in Bristol, England in 1820. He reads an article about a giraffe in the encyclopedia. The article explains where giraffes live, what they eat and so forth. Beside the article is a little pencil drawing.

Aristotle would claim that as the man in Bristol reads, he is being “in-formed” by “giraffeness.”

Remember now, the reader has not seen an actual giraffe. If he ever goes to Africa and sees a giraffe, he will realize that his imaginary, mental giraffe simply did not compare to a real giraffe. Nonetheless, he will recognize the long-necked animal when he sees it. The encyclopedia in England in-formed him and he now knows. Therefore, when confronted with a real giraffe, the man from Bristol is prepared to recognize it.

The process of being “in-formed” changes a person.

The man who reads about a giraffe cannot return to his previous state, before his mind got infected by “giraffeness.” After he actually sees a giraffe, smells it, touches it – or God forbid, tastes it – he will become a different man than before. The form of the giraffe, the “giraffeness,” will have become a part of his own nature.

As Aquinas contemplated this sort of reasoning in the light of Scripture, it suddenly made sense to him why God wants us to read the Bible, pray, eat the bread and drink the wine of Holy Communion, smell the incense and so forth. He thought that as we pray and meditate on God, (“tasting and seeing that the Lord is good") the form of God enters our spirits. Thus, holy habits, performed with faith in the crucified and risen Christ, results in a divine “in-forming” of our nature. Gradually, our “per-form – ance,” (a word which means “to put form into action,”) works to “trans-form” us; into the image of our Lord.

Therefore, thought Aquinas, worship is submission to and contemplation upon, the nature of God. It is a human heart’s humble cry to be changed, to become more like God. Therefore, our intellect, no less than our emotions and our will, must be involved in worship.

To use the words of Scripture, we must learn to “worship God with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength.” That’s how we get informed, allowing “this mind that was in Christ to be in us, who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God.”

Well, that’s probably enough theology for the day. Ideas like this are heavy. We moderns are not accustomed to them.

We need a car chase or a naked person now to run across the screen so we can relax.

The best I can do on a church site blog is to cut back to poor General Jackson in 1815. He had already been there a while.

Jonny Horton says so:


“In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin' on
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.”

If only the British had read the right encyclopedia, they would have known that in New Orleans, anything is possible. The poor alligator was about to be made into gumbo anyway and after a night in the French Quarter, was quite ready to allow someone to put a cannon ball in his mouth and powder his behind. Neither the alligator nor the British were informed and so the Americans performed according to their own script.

That’s why, evidently,

“They ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go.
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch 'em
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.”

When you write your own story, you get to control its form. That’s how Jonny Horton, St. Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle and General Jackson all get to be in the same short blog. This has never occurred before in the history of the world.

I formed it that way.

Pepe Le Pew And The Epiphany

Can you tolerate just one more visit to Plato’s world of forms and substance?

Even though today is Epiphany?

It’s really important. To understand the world in which the New Testament writers lived, a little knowledge about Plato and his teachings is flat out necessary.

(In our contemporary world, a thing to note is that Pepe Le Pew was created on today’s date, in 1945. Mr. Le Pew was envisioned to be an amorous but confused skunk that fell in love with cats. When this “form” became “substance,” it created layers of unwelcome questions from curious children. This has been happening ever since. Some ideas should never see the actual light of day. They should remain pure forms.)

Believe it or not, in the first century Plato’s ideas were the topic of everyday conversation. Two centuries later, the Bishop of Constantinople complained in a letter to a friend that one could not go to the public bath or buy a carrot at the market without being accosted with questions about philosophy and theology. Most of those questions were Plato’s fault, directly or indirectly.

The good bishop would have enjoyed being a pastor in our times. If I get accosted at the market; it’s almost never about theology or philosophy!

I am much more likely to get in a conversation about some figure like Pepe Le Pew, as to whether or not he is or is not an appropriate cartoon for healthy Christian children to watch. Personally, I think Le Pew stinks, and am willing to take a stand on that.

Anyway, back to Plato and how his ideas influenced Christian theology. Who knows when the days will return like those that troubled the bishop of 3rd century Constantinople? We will need to be prepared.

Imagine God preparing to create the universe. First, according to those influenced by Plato, God made “molds” or “forms.” Because these ‘forms” were made of spiritual “stuff,” and came from the being of God, the forms were eternal and perfect.

Now imagine God making material substance, stuff we can see and taste. (I personally don’t know anyone who can taste a form.)

Finally, imagine God taking His various mixtures of “earth-stuff,” all the carbon, water, silicon, and whatever else seemed good to Him to make, and pouring this stuff into His invisible and perfect “forms.”

If you can imagine that process, you have started to understand Plato.

However, as you can imagine, when “substance” gets poured into the forms, the result is never as perfect as the forms themselves were before becoming matter. A building’s lines aren’t as straight as the blueprint designed them to be because the materials used to build buildings are always a bit faulty, a bit “de-formed.”

I don’t know if Pepe le Pew turned out exactly as Chuck Jones planned. I doubt it. The artists and engineers, the sound guys and the program directors all had to tweak the idea as it moved through production and I’m sure the original idea shifted a bit before it became a cartoon character for kids to watch on Saturday mornings.

The visible parts of the universe are not in as good shape as the invisible parts. (Except for the Devil and his friends but that’s another story.) Here in the material universe, things diverge in small and big ways from the divine plan. This difference in quality between “spiritual” things and “material” things, are due to the imperfections of substance. That’s Plato’s idea, anyway.

This way of looking at things is behind many expressions and arguments in the New Testament, as we will see.

Once again, material things – things that exist in our visible universe -- are imperfect. They do not adequately represent the eternal and invisible forms that give them definition, shape and identity.

Plato coined several terms that we use every day to express his view of reality.

For example, he created the word “deformed.” When something is deformed, it has lost some of its form. When things are deformed, they should be “reformed,” that is, “returned to the original form.”Sometimes, we can change the form of a thing, in which case it will be “transformed,” or “made into an entirely new thing.” If something is “formal,” then we are observing the form much more closely than we do under normal circumstances. All meetings have a form but a “formal” meeting tolerates much less deviation from that from than when the meeting is more relaxed.

We could go on and on about this, but you get the idea – if you are still reading!

In Plato’s opinion, all visible and material things are imperfect copies of the perfect and eternal forms, up in the real world (what the New Testament calls “the heavenlies.”)

Some Platonists, or people who study Plato, believed that this inferred that material things are necessarily further from God than the eternal and perfect forms. That is not a New Testament idea, but one that crops up repeatedly in Christian history.

So even though the New Testament writers used Platonic terms, they did not agree with him in some very important ways.

Nonetheless, the idea that things in this world are only imperfect copies of the eternal, and perfect things, is used several times in the New Testament, particularly in St. John’s gospel and the book of Hebrews.

The New Testament twist on Plato is that material things as they are today, after the fall of Adam and Eve, are indeed imperfect representations of what God originally intended. However, material things, before the fall, were “perfect,” at least perfect in the sense that material things were exactly what God created them to be.

Since the fall, material things are not as they were created to be. Material things have indeed become imperfect, or to use a platonic word, “deformed.”

That is why God called the Wise Men from far away by the light of a star, which we celebrate on Epiphany. It announced that light would now be shared with the gentiles – the non Jews – about God and faith. The nations would now be given the law of God and the good news that Jesus Christ has come to save us from our sins.

Now, one question remains: why doesn’t Pepe get it when Penelope the Cat tells him that she doesn’t want him around? Why does he keep thinking that she wants him but just can’t bring herself to admit it?

Perhaps it’s because he cannot recognize his own stink and has no grasp of his real condition.

If only Chuck Jones could talk to Pepe about the original design and how to bring life and love into conformity with that design.

Of course, he would have to pay attention.

Becky Scott, The American Revolution and The Renewing of Our Minds

In the last blog, I tried to interest you in Plato. If I succeeded, I will be nominated teacher of the year. Or, we could give that award to Becky Scott, since today is her birthday.

I could also talk about how that near this date in 1784, the American Revolution officially ended and the founding fathers signed the treaty of Paris. (In happened on January 14th, to be exact.)

Perhaps we should forget about Plato and all the rest of this stuff and just return to our Bible readings!

However, reading the first stories of the Old and New Testaments requires us to stop and think. Sometimes as much as talking about Plato.

(Understanding what was gained by the American Revolution also requires a thoughtful reading of -- and reflecting on -- the nation’s founding documents. We used to do that in an ancient course called “civics,” which taught us how to be citizens. So, healthy citizenship and Christian discipleship each require mature and thoughtful engagement with a text. Who would have thought?)

Anyway, why were the Bible stories written in a way that although entertaining at surface levels, requires such intense thought to get the main points?

Why do the characters in the Bible stories say what they say?

Why are things mentioned in those stories that seemingly lack any connection to the plot?

You can be sure that there are no “throw away” passages or meaningless insertion into the stories. Every word counts; every symbol speaks; every reference to another part of scripture is there for a purpose. So what’s the deal with the complicated structures of the Bible?

Well, reading God’s word is a form of meditation. Prayerful reading focuses our thoughts and emotions and leads us into what we might call “spiritual” consciousness. That’s when we begin to see the connections and begin to submit our intellect to the molding influence of the Holy Spirit.

Many influential Christian thinkers have taught that we learn to stretch toward God by contemplating what lies behind and beyond the things God has made and the things He has said. To use Plato’s language, we learn to look through the substance of a thing in order to perceive that which makes the thing what it is – its form.

(If you didn’t get that, go back and read the last blog on Plato and Jell-O.)

To make this simple: we should practice looking at and through the world, the Bible, and our experiences. We should continually meditate about what these things mean. Our everyday lives, the life of our society, and in the life of the world to come depend upon eternal truth, goodness and beauty that shines through the World in unexpected places.

Many great men and women of God have claimed to have been transformed by their contemplation of God’s Word.

One of my favorite people in history is a medieval monk named Thomas Aquinas. While not all Christians agree with his theology, he is an example of how human intellect humbles itself before the majesty of God. He did this without sacrificing his intellectual integrity. Aquinas believed that once we give our allegiance to the Word of God, we can apply our intellect and emotions in the life-long work of filling our being with the presence of God. We can learn to see all of life, not just the “religious” part of life, through God-touched eyes.

Aquinas especially wanted to understand and explain the old Greek philosophers (Aristotle and Plato) in the light of Holy Scripture. As he did this, he came up with some pretty amazing thoughts about how contemplating God can transform the human heart.

Most of us are not as smart as Thomas Aquinas or Plato, of course. But we don’t have to be. The simplest believer opens himself to the wisdom of God every time he reads the words of scriptures.

Plato said that there is a form behind and beyond “things.” The form is eternal. It exists in another time and another place. A thing’s substance looks as it does and acts as it does because of the form that gives it shape and definition.

The Bible is a concrete, material thing: a book. However, this book expresses God’s eternal nature. If we read it with a worshipful heart and a fully engaged intellect, the Bible will pull us into God. This can only occur if we read with reverence, focused attention and remain intellectually engaged. Our reading has to become a form of prayer – conversation with God.

If we do these things, the Word will penetrate our intelligence, disciple our minds, and stretch our capacity to think.

The Bible claims that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds.

The renewal of our minds is made possible by the entrance of the Word into our minds.

Our human substance becomes deeply affected by the way we take into ourselves the Form that is above all human form, when we, as the New Testament puts it:

Let this mind be in us that was also in Christ Jesus. The American founding fathers were scholars who were well acquainted with everything I have said here. They envisioned a citizenry that would master the great ideas that formed our republic, come to solid opinions about how to apply these ideas to the nation’s on-going political life, and thus become capable of governing themselves: the first such nation in history.

They didn’t envisioned that we would not take the time to read the founding documents, be unconcerned with what those documents say and would prefer politicians who speak in sound bites, wear nice haircuts and who never challenge us to think. Perhaps they would not have fought a revolution had they realized that we would hate civics so much.

The writers of the Bible also believed that we would want to meditate upon the Word that God had inspired them to write. They believed that we would read until we learned how to live, how to think, and how to find God. They thought that forming a God-consciousness that transforms one’s life would be worth the effort of reading, meditating, praying and acting out the Word of God.

More About Julia Child

I never, ever thought I would be writing about Julia Child, and certainly not twice in one week!

However, so many of you wrote me about my last blog, I knew that I should to do a follow up.
So I began thinking last night about all the chefs and cooks I have known. In fact, I called a couple of them yesterday. I wanted to thank them for the attention they have shown to food preparation and what that has meant to my life.

Food must be important; the Bible certainly talks a lot about it.

Just think: the first thing that goes wrong in the Bible is when someone eats the wrong food. Adam and Eve caught cosmic food poisoning and passed it on to all of us.

Then, the last thing that goes right in the universe (according to the Revelation of St. John) is a great meal with all the saints of all time.

Now, in between those two events the Bible talks about hundreds of generations divided into two great spiritual eras – the Old and the New Covenants. The most intimate and holy ceremony in both of those covenants is a sacramental meal. Passover and Holy Communion are invitations to human beings to eat a meal with God!

All this has made me think about how a fine meal relates to our awareness of ourselves as creatures made in God’s image and likeness.

We can, after all, survive as animals, just eating crap out of cans. We may not stay very healthy doing it, but we could actually survive on dog food. Then we wouldn’t need forks, spoons, napkins or butter dishes. We certainly wouldn’t need candles and crystal.

The fact is, we don’t carefully prepare our food or worry about its presentation because of our physical needs. We fuss about food because we are spiritual beings.

When we rush about stuffing junk in our faces as we run out the door, we are forgetting that life is about much more than surviving. We forget that we are creatures of dignity. When we forget that, we get into all sorts of dysfunction and grief.

(This is not the time or place to talk about spiritual fast food – about worship reduced to on-the-run funny stories by clever preachers and fuzzy worship songs. I won’t even try to address the unbearable flip top communion cups with their attached wafer thingamabob, from which one guzzles reconstituted grape water and devours pressed hydroflorinated reprocessed monosodiumcrapanate mash into one’s mouth while the preacher mumbles something sweet and we all rush to the parking lot. One day, if you will actually read it, I will write about all of that “worship” foolishness…but not today.)

This issue for today is that quality, reflection, attention, and respect for one’s self and one’s colleagues does not naturally occur. Please read this again: these attributes do not naturally attach themselves to anything or to anybody; they are deliberately (and usually incrementally) developed by some person who cares.

Someone like Julia Child. Seriously!

Moses and Christ both wanted worship to require our time, evoke our attention and provoke our transformation. Both of them would have been aghast by our “fly-by” worship. We know this because of the two sacramental actions they instituted. Neither Passover nor Eucharist can occur quickly or haphazardly. Likewise, the things Moses and Jesus wanted to occur in our lives can’t actually happen unless we do the spiritual services they both asked us to do. Modern substitutes just don’t deliver the same spiritual life.

Julia Child longed for Middle America – or “servantless Americans,” as she put it – to have the same opportunity as Parisians to enjoy quality cuisine. She wasn’t against our hamburgers or hot dogs; she just wanted us to experience something that took more time, more attention, quality ingredients and so forth. She knew that experiencing fine cuisine would enrich our lives.

People like Julia Child, who champion quality -- particularly aesthetic quality –, have an uphill climb. Many people will even ridicule the quest for the aesthetic qualities of music, food, clothing and so forth. They think aesthetic quality is frivolous and vain. Indeed, the pursuit of aesthetic quality can become idolatrous, as can all human endeavors, including religion. However, aesthetic quality is one of the ways that human beings separate themselves from animals.
Without aesthetic life, we sink into barbarism and social chaos. So it is important – vitally so – to our emotional and spiritual health to recognize and celebrate quality.

There are some ‘Julia Childs’ in my own life, people who have tried to show me respect through the way they prepare food. Will you take a moment and read a sentence or two about each of them?

Denise Palma cooks Italian food; great Italian food. She should open up a restaurant. Someone should invest some money so she can do just that! She unites people with her food. She invests time and talent into a meal, just like Jesus and Moses asked us to do. Her house is like the house of God (because we know that God probably lives in Italy). Go eat there sometime – if she invites you!

Robert Hill did some research about my life. That’s why he decided to make Ecuadorian cerviche when Trish and I went to visit him and his wife Maren. I appreciated his efforts. However, I figured it wouldn’t be authentic. Americans just can’t make Ecuadorian cerviche. I was wrong! He prepared cerviche just like it would have tasted in a good restaurant in Quito. Then we ate fennel. Fennel! What the heck! Not fennel seed, some exotic garnish. Full blown fennel! And then… trout. Not just regular old trout. Oh, Lord have mercy. Trout that he had caught and prepared himself! Finally, he served grilled pineapple and covered it with some sauce that is evidently a secret recipe from some distant ancestor. (I made that part up, but I want to keep you reading my stuff.) All of this effort and care produced a magic meal. And to think, the man who did all of this serves the immigrants of our church with his time, love and prayer for untold hours every single week.

Barbara Dyson, the high priestess of Martha Stewartism, is a force of nature. She is the queen of the kitchen. If she ever invites you to her house for dinner, go. Yea, I say unto thee again, go thou with haste! She prepares her home, her food and herself to make wonderful evenings for all her special guests. There will be great conversation, well-seasoned and interesting foods, and regionally appropriate beverages. (Also, her husband John will catechize you as you eat, unless she makes him stop.)

Maria Maciuk has an Argentine/ Ukrainian heritage. Her unique background deeply affects her mouthwatering cuisine. Her presentation leaves you wondering whether it would be a sacrilege to actually eat her food. Then you do and burst forth into tongues of men and of angels. Her pastries have made grown people just break down and weep. Her food is an altogether spiritual experience, may her tribe increase.

Finally, my sister-in-law, Lisa. She can cook from Julia Child if she likes, and she does sometimes. However, in the last few years, she has poured her talents into preparing the traditional foods of the American Southeast and making them available (and affordable) to the people who keep our city alive. She and Marty run a restaurant called The Sweet Tea Dinner. They serve catfish and fried chicken there that will ruin your diet but bless your soul. They learned to cook by preparing midweek dinners for poor people in their church. When the season of working on a church staff came to an end and God delivered them, they opened their diner. But the lessons they learned in the church about community and relationships flowed into their business. They serve home cooking with a heart – and a soul.

Julia Child wanted to teach – and Julie wanted to learn – what constitutes the soul of cooking. All the people I have mentioned in this blog have been life-long students of that certain something.
What does one do to nourish the souls of those who eat the food one prepares?

Indeed, how does any work touch a soul? Can sheer business structure and bottom-line thinking do that?

It’s a great question.

I wish more pastors would ask it.

Julia Child, Good Food, and a Mitzvot

This will be a longer blog than normal.

I promise, this one is worth it. It might even change your life.

(I know that’s manipulative. But I’m a preacher. Without manipulation, how could we do our work? Give me a break!)

My daughter, Talitha, wanted to see a movie the other night. Julie and Julia, a chick flick if ever there was one! I agreed. I love her and wanted to spend some time with her.

I prepared to be bored.

“At least it is a true story,” I said to myself.

The advertisements and trailers all had their time and then the chick flick began.

A young lady named Julie is turning thirty. She compares herself with her friends. They all have promising and ego-enhancing careers. She doesn’t.

The weeks go by. She moans to her husband: “Life isn’t going anywhere. I have no focus. I’m a failure.”

One evening, as her husband oohs and ahhs over her beef bourguignon, she begins telling a story from her childhood. Her mother, in a panic about what to fix her husband’s boss, had prepared a recipe from Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking. Julie remarks to her husband how proud she was of her mother that night, how delicious the meal had been ,and how much she loves Julia Child.

Suddenly, she gets an idea: she will work her way through every single recipe of Julia Child’s book. She will also blog about her experience.

So she begins. Each day she prepares a new dish.

The weeks go by.

Her only reader, apparently, is her mother. Her blogs are going out into the blogoshere without provoking a response. Her workday has become difficult because of her self-inflicted burden. Her husband is eating Tums and angry because of the diminished quality of their sex life.

Meanwhile, we are treated to flashbacks from Julia Child’s life. We watch her trying to convince first the French, then the Americans, that anything good will come from sharing the culinary delights of Paris with Middle America.

For Julia Child the years go by without acclaim or recognition. The same thing is evidently happening to Julie.

Bored yet?

Well, watching Julie and Julia waste their lives on such trivia without a sex scene, a car chase or some gruesome destruction of a human body to break the monotony– that is a tailor-made movie disaster! How can I expect you not to be bored with this blog about such a movie?

Ok, then. The punch line.

Gradually, Julia Child trains Julie how to cook. The task Julie flippantly undertakes in order to have a subject to blog about, teaches her how to become a real cook.

A. J. Jacobs did this same thing, twice. First, he decided to read the Encyclopedia Britannica – all of it! The notes he took while reading became a wonderful and very funny book, The Know It All. Then, after a rest, he decided to read through the Bible, obeying literally every single commandment and teaching of the Holy Scripture, Old and New Testaments, for a year. His notes from that experience became The Year of Living Biblically.

So there’s something going on in our culture about people assuming tasks and experiences that promise to expand their lives in some way.

The Jews call it a mitzvot. It is a path or a discipline one undertakes for a season in order to “put on” some new habit, skill, or knowledge.

Now that I think about it, I have had some experience with this.
The year was 1979. I was 26.

I had not completed high school and was wondering around the world speaking to little churches in North and South America. I was married. I had a young child to support. I had to find a job for a few months, make some money to tide me over until my next preaching appointment.

My father had once sold insurance. Maybe I could do that too. However, the woman at the office said that I needed a high school diploma.

So, I went to the Kanawha County Board of Education building. I talked to some woman there dressed in a pant suit and pearls about getting a GED. She told me where and when the next test would be administered.

I don’t remember the taking the test. I just remember how nervous I was the day I returned to get my score. I wondered if I had passed. The woman with the answers didn’t help me at all. She just stared at me and shook her head.

“Did I pass? Did I get my GED?” I asked her.

“Sir,” she replied as she glared at me over the tops of her glasses, “these scores tell me that you should be in college. Don’t waste your life doing menial and low-paying jobs! Do what you have to do and go back to school!”

“College? Me?” I wondered as I went home to tell Trish.

Anyway, the main thing was that I could now sell insurance!

A few days later, Trish showed me an article in the Reader’s Digest. It was about adults who had earned college degrees through self-study. The University of the State of New York had a program for people like me.

“You should do it,” Trish said. “The woman at the Board of Education said that you should do it. You read all the time. Why not try?”

But where would I begin?

A few days later, I saw an advertisement in a magazine from The Book of the Month Club. They were offering Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization in 11 volumes for only twenty-five dollars. All I had to do was agree to purchase a number of books over the next few years.

That was a good deal. I bought tons of books anyway! So I filled out the card. I dropped it in the mailbox. Then I waited.

When the volumes arrived at my house, I just stared. The huge, thick, heavy volumes just stared me in the face, mocking me, just as Goliath must have taunted David in the Valley of Elah.

(Ok that’s a bit of melodrama. It’s just to keep your attention.)

Sometime that week, I began volume one, Our Oriental Heritage.

Several months later, I began volume two, The Life of Greece.

We moved to Montreal. The books went with us.

I kept reading.

Nearly four years later, I finished volume 11, The Age of Napoleon.

By that time, I had also passed a GRE subject examination. The University of the State of New York rewarded forty credit hours for that accomplishment. I was well on my way to earning a B.A with an emphasis in History.

In 1982, I received my B.A. I had earned 210 credits. The University had to send me a registered letter asking me politely, “don’t you ever intend to graduate?”

I had only needed 120 credits for my degree.

Oh, well. Now I had specialties in History, Sociology and Spanish Literature!

The following year, I began my M.A. The California State University was offering a Masters in Humanities for people like me, who studied on their own while working and raising a family.

I have never stopped learning since.

I am convinced that the foundation for all my graduate and post-graduate training, my brief career as a college professor , the books I have written – everything I have done professionally for over thirty years – all have their roots in the mitzvot I assumed that day I opened the box of books from Book of the Month Club.

A mitzvot, undertaken joyfully (and carried through until its mentoring role is complete) is transformational.

After seeing Julie and Julia, I have been wondering: what would happen if hundreds of people in our church would carefully chose a mitzvot for 2010? What if we would chose some challenging but doable task, commit to that task for the specified amount of time, make ourselves accountable to a friend or group of friends, give continual reports of our progress, and persevere through the inevitable boredom and ‘I-want-to-give-up times” until it is finished.

What would that do?

I think we should find out.

We have several months to choose a good mitzvot. Each of us can think of something we have always wanted to do, something we have intended to learn, some way we have planned to serve, some action that is deeply connected to our passion for life. We keep putting it on hold.

But why not this year? Why don’t we do it this year?!

Give it a date to begin, tell our friends – so they know what to get us for Christmas – and just do it, finally!

What’s in it for me?

Well, I was thinking; perhaps someone will chose to work their way through a cookbook and ask me over several times a month.

Something Americans Can Agree On!

On this date, in 1865, our greatest and most noble president died at the hands of a fanatic.

Lincoln was far from a perfect man.

Writers and painters have tried to make him out to be some sort of statesman that was never motivated by political considerations but did what was right regardless of the consequence. That is hardly the case.

Lincoln was a political genius who was uncannily perceptive to the winds of political and social change. He was not above timing his stands to coincide with some shift of public opinion.

For most of his life, he was a good writer, a great speaker and a mediocre leader. He lost most of his elections and did not achieve great distinction until the presidential election of 1860, in which so many candidates had split the public vote that he was able to slip into office. His transformation into our national icon was slow and excruciatingly painful.

The war waged on and could neither be won by bullet or ballot. His political skills failed him. His public approval ratings plummeted. He was hated and ridiculed. He walked the halls of the White House as everyone else slept.

Slowly, he began to focus on what he believed and what he would do.

He would redefine the union.

He would end slavery.

He would provoke a rebirth of freedom and national spirit. He redefined the union and the nation’s shortest and most beloved speech: the Gettysburg Address.

The day before the speech, the grammatically correct form of the verb “to be” what one used when referring to United States was “are;” as in, “these United Sated are.” The day after the speech, the newspapers begin to use “is;” as in, “the United States is.” It was a profound change of attitude as well as grammar.

He decided to end slavery in prayer. By his own account to his staff, “I have made a commitment to the Almighty to press forward on this matter.” He now believed this to be the reason God had given him life.

The rebirth of freedom and national spirit began with his second inaugural address, also a very short speech, in which he told the nation hat God’s wrath had been poured out on the country for its sins against humanity but that national repentance and an end to slavery had at last brought the favor of the Lord upon us.

His death burned his spirit and ideology deep into his country’s psyche.

The country at last realized the gift that this awkward, strange looking man had been. As the secretary of the state said at his death: “now he belongs to the ages.”

And the ages received him.

Election Response

As Americans, we have the responsibility to vote our conscience. As Christians, our conscience is formed by the Word of God. Therefore, as American Christians, we try to vote in a way that is guided by our discipled conscience. That is not always easy. Sometimes the lines are blurred and neither side fully represents our values. One side holds to one of our values; the other side holds to another. In such times, believers find themselves on differing sides. Nonetheless, we each vote our conscience.

When the election is over, as Americans we are either delighted or disappointed, depending on whether our side won or lost the election. As Christians we know that “the dice is in the hand of the man but the outcome is in the hands of the Lord.” So we turn from our pre-election passion and turn toward our spiritual responsibility to pray for and support in every way our conscience allows, the person whom God has seen fit to make the leader of the nation.

St. Paul tell us to pray for kings and those in authority. When he wrote this, the emperor Nero was killing Christians. How were Christians to pray for Nero? That he would come to faith, surely. That he would learn the ways of God and lead in a just way. In the end though, “God puts up kings and puts down kings.” We do our part: we vote. Before the election, we make our beliefs known. After the election, we pray.

Yesterday, young Senator Obama became president of the United States. We are unsure of what sort of president he will become. He may become a wicked and despicable leader; he may become a godly and great leader. We all have our opinions but the story is not yet told. We have to wait. We have to pray. As Americans, none of us will benefit from him becoming a bad leader. As Christians, we are forbidden to anticipate that he will become bad. Rather, we are called to do all we can to help him become good.

Yesterday, the new president began his day in prayer with T.D. Jakes. They were together a long time. We don’t know what was said or done. We do know that he invited a godly and a good man to pray with him. Lets pray that this sort of influence will grow and that this president, like Lincoln whom he admires, will bow his knee to God and seek His direction for our nation.

President Obama and the Communion of Saints

In the days leading up to the inauguration, there was a lot of talk about President Abraham Lincoln by both Obama and his team. Two nights ago, the new cabinet members joined the soon-to-be First Family in a meal recreated from the favorite foods and even the personal china of our sixteenth president. Then, yesterday, our new president took his oath of office on Lincoln’s Bible.

What are we to make of this reverential acknowledgement of the great emancipator? What does Lincoln have to do with Obama? What does the world of our nation’s sixteenth president have to do with us?

Well, I am moved by the tribute to Lincoln. His speeches, letters, diary and life have been a continual inspiration to me, as they have been to countless other Americans. Lincoln is a treasure.

In many ways though, Lincoln is hardly a symbol of our country as it has become. Introspective, often depressed, scholarly and physically unattractive, Lincoln is everything that modern America tries not to be.

We are dangerously addicted to entertainment and much too inclined to glorify ignorance. We substitute piety for knowledge and sincerity for responsible reflection and informed action. Lincoln may have been tempted to do those things too, for all we know. However, if this was so, his times and his duties pushed him into an entirely different direction.

Perhaps against his will, he peered long and deep into the reality of the human condition and pondered the divine purpose for our country’s existence like few of our leaders ever have. Today, there are few pastors who are inclined to do such a thing!

We are doers. We live in the fiery rush of urgency. We thrash about, listening to bits and pieces of this and that, doing what is at hand to do, answering our email, greeting dozens of individuals a day with a superficial sentence or two. We do not truly converse. Even when we try…well, before any meaningful words are exchanged, we must answer our cell phones. Then, when we return to the conversation, the moment of connection has been lost.

This is not the age of Lincoln.

Our sixteenth president often retired to read the scripture, or Shakespeare, or to tell several jokes to a few friends. He wrote letters. He prayed. He took long walks. He plunged into solitude for hours at a time.

Lincoln did all of this not because he did not have urgent things to attend to. People were forever complaining that the president was lazy and unfocused. He moved with a quiet deliberation at his own pace and came to conclusions when they had matured in his own mind and heart.

That is how we got the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. He was molding a nation, not merely responding to crisis.

Lincoln is an altogether beautiful man, at least when viewed through the mists of the generations and fourteen decades that separate us from him. He was a man of his own time that did not allow the issues and urgencies of his own time to imprison him. He stood on a mountain and looked out over the future and dedicated himself to preparing as good a world as he could – for us.

Leon Kass claims (in The Beginning of Wisdom) that the entire focus of covenant is to help a man become responsible, first to his living family, then to his descendents, and finally to his ancestors.

Modern America has drifted very far into a preoccupation with self, the immediate, the urgent and the titillating. This is as true of believers as it is of unbelievers.

When Obama put his hand on Lincoln’s bible, perhaps he was telling us that he intends to take a different course of action than we have been taking of late. Perhaps he is thinking about how to become a great man and not merely a popular man. If so, he will walk a lonely path. Lincoln could tell him that. But the loneliness will be worth it if he succeeds in waking us up from our stupor and focusing us on our nation’s purpose: to make it possible for every man, woman, boy and girl to become truly great and truly free.

Lincoln can help Obama do all of that because Lincoln did it.

Christians call it the Communion of Saints. It is the belief that our past brothers and sisters are living presences in our everyday lives and that their journey can inform our own.

The reward of taking seriously the communion of saints is that we slowly join their ranks. Our contemporaries may not see it; indeed, we may not see it ourselves. However, gradually, little by little, our thoughts and our deeds become a part of the great conversation and the archive of the ages. An Obama can become a Lincoln. I can become a Daniel, a Barnabas or a Patrick.

It takes a lot more than eating Lincoln’s food or putting one’s hand on his Bible.
But it’s a start; a very good start.

Watching the Seasons Change

Today, for the tenth ten time of my life, a new president will take the oath of office.

I can tell the story of my life by recounting the various presidents I have known: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush; and, today, Obama.

Like most Americans, I have taken pride in the peaceful way we transfer our highest office, sometimes between bitter opponents. So far, we have always passed the baton with dignity and with a sense of celebration. As President Kennedy once reminded us, an inauguration is not the victory of a man. It is not even the victory of a party; it is a “celebration of freedom.”

Ten times now, I have witnessed this celebration of freedom.

I remember the day Johnson took his oath on a Dallas airfield. The people around me were weeping, still in grief for the President he had replaced. The transition was hardly noticed because we were so stunned. Still, the presidency survived and the ship of state sailed on.

Several times, I heard an inaugural speech on foreign soil. I heard Nixon’s farewell speech through a Portuguese interpreter, for once wishing I could hush the tones of what may be the world’s most beautiful language in order to hear the relatively harsh tones of my own. The leader of my country was surrendering his office and I wanted to hear the same words, in the same language, that my fellow citizens far away in North America were hearing. When I heard the new president take his oath of office, I was still irritated that I had to hear it through a Brazilian interpreter. Still, I joined, in the best way I knew how, my countrymen’s celebration of freedom.

Many years later, I was living in Montréal when Reagan came to visit Prime Minister Trudeau. It was his first state visit. I was proud when he gave a part of his greeting to the Canadian people in French. The interpreters, always attentive to their erudite and multilingual prime minister, scrambled to react to the unexpected utterances of our new American leader. I smiled and knew that this new president would do well.

Whether here or aboard, the beginning and ending of each presidential administration has marked the seasons of my life.

Eisenhower was president until I was eight years old. I remember seeing him only once. He was on an oval-shaped television screen in the house of my mother’s friend. I was fascinated by the television. Few people had one in those days. However, its owner stopped to ask, “Do you know who that is? It’s the president, Mr. Eisenhower!” So I looked more intently at the primitive television set.

For some reason, her remark and my vision of the president on that television screen got etched into my memory. Other than that, I hardly recall the presidency of the great Second World War general. I respect him; I just don’t personally remember him.

Kennedy was the first president I really remember. When he took office, I was in the first grade. Our young president fascinated us most West Virginians. We memorized passages from his speeches and collected pictures of him and his family.

The violent ending of his presidency (and our romantic attachment with his administration) came on a cold November day when I was in the third grade. The adults had fear in their eyes that day. That made me afraid too. I had no idea that the violence and fear would continue in our country until the end of that decade.

During the Johnson administration, I discovered girls. Other, more important things occurred during his years in office – the civil rights act, the war on poverty, Viet Nam – to name but a few; but I was a teenager. World events merely formed a backdrop against which my unfolding life was taking shape!

By the time Nixon took office, my family was preparing to move to South America. Walking through the streets in Quito, I sometimes saw our president’s name written on the walls with a swastika, where there should have been an “x.” I didn’t understand why the president was so despised. Sometimes it felt personal. Most of the time, I just went on with life as an immigrant teenager, getting ready to become an adult.

As the Nixon years continued, I increasingly felt caught between cultures and languages. I was an American but had also become a member of a global community. I wanted to speak many languages and understand the customs of the world’s peoples. However, many of my countrymen were drawing back from intimate interaction with the world’s cultures. I first experienced what would become a life-long issue: the sense of patriotism mixed with an appreciation and respect for other cultures and languages. This tension would sometimes alarm those Americans who are uninterested in the richness of the world’s cultures. Then and now, this disinterest in the opinions and contributions of others would strike me as a false and even putrid form of patriotism. I learned to dislike it then and I dislike it still.

I married an American girl, from Appalachia, like me. We moved to South America and traveled around the continent. We were still newlyweds; spending a month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil the day Gerald Ford took office.

When our daughter Talitha was born, Jimmy Carter was president. Trish and I were visiting Chicago, taking Lamaze classes to prepare for her arrival. On the way out of the class, we noticed how a bright star flanked the crescent moon. We shivered at the sight. That same day, the president had met with Prime minister Began, Chairman Arafat and President Sadat at Camp David. What did that sign mean? We still talk about it sometimes.

When our second daughter, Tiffany was born, Ronald Reagan was president. During his term of office, we moved to the United States, finally settling in Nashville. We raised our children during his administration and that of his successor, George Herbert Walker Bush. It was a good season. I became more deeply acquainted with the culture of Middle America and marveled at the richness of our national heritage.

The first Bush presidency maintained the culture and atmosphere of the Reagan years, for the most part. However, things kept changing. The Berlin Wall came down. My children couldn’t understand why I wept at the reports from Germany. The final vestiges of the Second World War were just swept away as people in Leipzig drove to Bonn for the first time in fifty years. The Russians pulled down the hammer and the sickle for the last time. Communism was finally dead everywhere but at Harvard, Yale and Berkley.

Clinton became the first Baby Boomer president. Someone from my own generation was president of the United States. Imagine that! The times really were a changin’.

Our family moved to Phoenix. We discovered the Western part of our nation. We ate fish tacos and toured Native American towns more than a thousand years old.

Our children grew up.

Our children got married.

George W. Bush became president and almost immediately, the world changed again. Towers came down in New York. Air traffic ceased for the first time in a hundred years. We were at war. My life entered a severe turbulence in Phoenix that mirrored the turbulence of the world. We had a grandchild. Then another. Trish had a brain aneurism. We moved back to Nashville. We had another grandchild. Trish slowly recovered. Trish and I experienced together the deepest joy of our lives: having lived long enough to know and to love our grandchildren.

Today, Mr. Bush will go back to Texas and we will enter a new season of life. We wish him well. His was a difficult and taxing season. For the moment, many Americans associate, perhaps unfairly, the sorrows of this season with his name and with his face. Perhaps the future will look kinder upon him. In any case, the moment has shifted to a new season.

A young man is taking his oath of office today. He never saw President Eisenhower on an oval-shaped screen. He never took a drink from a water fountain set aside for people of his race. He neither served in Vietnam nor dodged the draft. He doesn’t remember race riots. He is a new face, a very new face.

Today, Mr. Obama will become the President of the United States.

He is younger than I am -- by a decade. That’s new for me! He is an African-American. That is also new! As is true of all new presidents, we are not yet sure what he will be like or what the season he represents holds for us. We only know that we have once again transferred our highest office peacefully and with great celebration. Most of us, even those who did not vote for him, wish him well. We are all proud that our nation has proven to the world that any citizen can become president. We have proven once again that ours is a nation with many faults but it remains a land of great opportunity and possesses a nearly unbelievable ability to renew itself.

May God give President Obama the wisdom and the courage to be a righteous man. He inherits what is in many ways a damaged nation. It is dangerously unsure of its values and alarmingly unstable. But we have been here before. Each time we have been granted a new season because a new leader found a way to call us back to greatness.

On this tenth occasion of a presidential transition in my lifetime, it is my hope that this new president will be such a leader. May this new season be a good one that my grandchildren will remember fondly.

Expensive Gifts

About twenty-five years ago, I received a gift that changed my life.

From the start of our marriage, Trish and I had been in missions work. We now had two small children and had just moved to Nashville to join the Christ Church staff (all three of them!). We moved into the Elysian Fields apartments on Nolensville Road, and arranged our very sparse furniture into eight hundred square feet on the third floor. I know; I should have been thankful that I didn’t have to carry much furniture up those three floors. But my mind was elsewhere.

The church had already begun to grow and I was teaching Bible studies every week in Brentwood and Franklin. The people in those Bible studies were all considerably more affluent than any group I had previously served, and I was a bit intimidated. So I often parked my old car down the block from all the nice cars and walked to the Bible study.

I’ll confess that I once got into my car after leaving one of these beautiful homes and sat at the wheel feeling sorry for myself. I wondered out loud to God why I was raising my children on the third floor of an apartment complex while others were living in these fine homes. However, I immediately felt that the Spirit of God was displeased with me for being angry about my lack of finances. So I asked for God’s forgiveness and thanked Him for providing a warm house for my healthy children.

Some months later, after the Sunday night service, Jim Enoch approached me and asked me to sit down on the pew. “I need you to clear your schedule this week,” he said, “I am going to take you to look for a house.”

‘But Jim,” I protested, “I don’t have any money. Also, I have lived for years outside the United States; so I have no credit history.”

He pushed my protests aside with a wave of his hand. “God has spoken to a couple in our church” he replied. “They are going to pay whatever it takes to get you into a house. They told me they want you to pay the same payments you are paying now after all the transactions are finished. And they said that I am to help you chose any house you want.”

I was so taken aback by his words that I didn’t know what to say for a few minutes. I finally got out something to the effect of “No, I won’t choose this house. I might either ask for too much or settle for too little. You and this couple can find the house; we will be grateful for whatever you choose.”

That’s how we bought our first home. It was at 581 Whispering Hills, just a couple of miles from the church.

What a thrill it was the first time we drove our car into the garage – into our own garage!

That one lavish, out-of bounds generous gift, gave us a financial foundation. It allowed us to raise our children. We sent them both to good schools. Year later, we even sent ourselves back to school!

Every financial blessing in our lives since has been tied in some way to that one surprising gift.

I can also tell you this: we have lived in several houses since then. However, no house has been so precious to us or has been more appreciated.

Oh, the couple that gave us that gift. They have never mentioned it to us – not ever. Every time the gift has surfaced in conversation with them, it has been because Trish or I have reminded them of the gracious thing they did for us so long ago, and thank them for all the fruit it has produced.

I deeply appreciate that financial gift, of course. Even more importantly though, I am thankful for how that gift taught me the nature of generosity. That gift taught me what a gift can do to transform lives.

This past Sunday, as I asked everyone to think about making a lavish, out-of-bounds-kind-of-gift this year to someone or to some cause this year; I had in mind the gift that changed our lives. When I asked everyone at our church to make this the year that they would do something so spectacular and unexpected that their gift would touch people for generations – I knew what I was talking about.

I don’t know what people will do with that sermon. I don’t even know yet what I will do with that sermon. However, I do know what such a gift can accomplish. I also know by experience that people really are blessed in order to be a blessing and when they abandon themselves to generosity, great goodness flows into the world.

All three of my grandchildren live in homes that their parents own. All three are being well educated because their parents value education. All three live in safe, warm and loving environments. To a great extent, all this has happened because one couple, who at the time barely knew me, decided to make a contribution that would change our lives.

I cringe when I think that I could have squandered the opportunity. I could have so mismanaged the gift that their good intentions could have been entirely wasted. Such things often happen. We hear about them all the time and they makes us cautious about giving. So I certainly could have added one more story to prove that it doesn’t pay to try to help people. Given my level of financial knowledge, it surprises me that I didn’t do that.
Thanks to my church, who believed that teaching people how to manage money is a Biblical part of discipleship, I avoided the worst mistakes. I steadily built a financial foundation that has already proved strong enough to touch two generations. Our next step is to make our financial structure strong enough to raise the next generation to come. We are working on that!

Anyway, this blog is really a prayer of blessing. I want God to bless my benefactors. In this economically challenging time, May God remember what they did for us. May He prove to them the truth of His word, “he who gives to the poor, lendeth to the Lord.” After twenty years, the interest on the money they paid back then would be very considerable now. I think this would be a great month for the Lord to pay them back! Perhaps He will.

In the meantime, I hope to influence us all to be out-of-bounds-generous. Perhaps we do not have the ability to buy someone a house. But could we buy them a car? Pay a year’s tuition? Buy them a great suit? Buy a computer? Could we send someone’s child to a good school for a year, or pay to get their teeth fixed?

As I learned twenty some-odd years ago, the world is full of opportunities to do good. Every few days I recall how one couple made a strategic investment in my life. I have thought about it more times than I can count. When I do, I shake my head and wonder: how could anyone do something so wonderful, without attaching any strings except for the love that has continually poured from their family into ours for over a generation?

May God remember. May He repay in full. And may He teach me to be as kind and as generous as that one precious couple – our own personal Magi!

Joy

Joy To The World is probably the most famous Christmas carol, after Silent Night. Everyone knows the first line, and most Christians seem to know the rest of the first verse. Naughty little children (I never was one) have been known to change the words now and then. As humorous as those lyrics can be, I want to talk about the real ones.

Joy to the world, the Lord has come
Let earth receive her king!
Let every heart prepare him room
And Heaven and nature sing

The words speak for themselves. They are straightforward and clear.



Isaac Watts was trying to do a musical paraphrase of the 98th Psalm which begins with the line, “Oh Sing to the Lord a new song! For He has done marvelous things.” The Psalm continues to say that we should shout, compose songs, and play musical instruments to express our joy. We should do this the psalmist says because the Lord is coming to judge the earth and to heal it of all of its sicknesses. The Psalm tells us that if we will sing, shout and play our instruments in worship God that nature itself will be healed.

Isaac Watts wanted to express those thoughts in this song. He was not trying to write a Christmas Carol, necessarily. His intent was really more to teach us about the Lord’s Second Coming. But whether we are talking about the Lord’s first coming or His Second Coming, the message is the same: when God shows up, things are going to change.

We know that already, of course. We all want God to come into our lives. But our frustration is that God works in ways that we simply cannot see and sometimes we honestly wonder if he is doing anything in our lives. So how can we be sure that God is at work in our lives? How can we know that the Lord has come to us?

This carol seems to say that the chief sign that God has shown up is the presence of joy in our lives. Joy is our inner radar going off, a resonating of deep inner chords of our soul, telling us that our lives are moving toward God and toward the purposes for which He made us. This means that when we do not have joy, something in our lives is askew. It means that our lives are not moving on, moving toward God’s purpose for us. We may be good people, we may be trying to do our best, but if we do not have joy, either we have taken the wrong turn or there is some new important turn we should take. Well, maybe you have never heard it put like that but it rings true. It’s still frustrating! How do we learn how to move toward joy, and thus toward God and toward His purpose for us?

Obviously, joy does not result from the things we hear people admiring. Time and time again I have watched people whose lives were apparently miserable, perhaps living in poverty or illness of some sort, who nonetheless were full of joy. The presence or absence of joy seems to have little to do with security, fame or fortune. Those things are wonderful and I have known famous and wealthy people who were full of joy. Certainly poverty and loneliness don’t bring joy either. But joy seems to flow from one state of being and that state alone: the state in which our soul feels connected to God and to the purpose for which He created us.



If God created you to be an artist and your Father convinced you that artists can’t make a living, even if you became a very successful banker, all the complements and awards people send your way will not bring you joy. Your soul knows that it has plugged into the wrong place in life.

A friend of mine who is an intelligent, godly, hard working person experienced this a few years ago. He has repeatedly been called upon to lead others. He is responsible and healthy. But last year he decided to attend a painting class. He was embarrassed that as he began to pull the brush across the canvas that the tears were flowing down his face. Great emotion was stirring inside his being. “What was that?” He asked. “Were you sad?” I asked. “Goodness no”, he replied. “I felt incredibly happy!”

As he told me that I recalled that a few years ago my wife bought me dancing lessons for my birthday. You need to know that my church taught that dancing was evil. My wife and I have never danced. As the dance instructor showed us the steps and coached us on how to do what many of you have taken for granted, my emotions nearly overwhelmed me. I got in the car and wept like a baby. I was embarrassed and confused about that emotion. But if you were to force me to name the emotion I was feeling, I would say it was joy. Joy for being able to hold my wife and move to music, joy to know that I was free from damaging rules that inflicted needless pain and which kept me from one of the most enjoyable doors to intimacy with the person I want to love and know the most. Also I love music. My body wants to move to music. I have been suppressing that need all of my life because in the places I have lived and worked, moving ones' body to music is a sure sign of instability and flakiness. On the floor with the dance instructor and my wife, clumsily endangering all feet within reach, something in me was breaking out, reaching to become what I really am, an expressive, musical, emotional person. Being who I really am brings joy. Because by being who I really am I glorify God. By being who I am, I say with my actions – you made me well, my God. I am happy that you made me as I am.

Does God care if I dance? Yes. It is not the world’s greatest tragedy if I do not dance. I doubt that now I will ever really learn how to dance well. There are many things much more important in my life than dancing. I can live without it. But my point is that dancing was a part of what I was made to do that I have not done, and so it has gone unexpressed. The day I danced with my wife gave part of me a chance to live, and that became a moment of unexpected joy! The joy was a sign that I was moving towards being who God made me to be.

The reality of life is that we will not get to be all that we were created to be. That is what Heaven is for. But we must not needlessly restrict ourselves from being what we were created to be. Not only for happiness' sake, but because God made each of us to be something that brings life to the world. If we miss being what God created us to be, the life He wants to flow through us will be restricted. The sign that this life is beginning to flow is joy!

When God shows up there is joy. When God is near, when we have turned toward God in some way, our soul feels His presence. Our soul knows that He can heal us. It understands that He is our source of life. When our soul realizes that He is closer in some way, it leaps. It knows what our conscious mind has often forgotten to remember, that God has the power and wisdom to deliver us. He can deliver us from ourselves and from all the false moves we have made in life away from Him and away from our true selves. He is our Shepherd. He restoreth our soul.



So let every heart prepare Him room! For if we let Him in, He will begin the work of making us into what we most long to be. Heaven and nature will then sing a duet. Heaven and human nature are harmonized when the Lord comes.

The third verse of Joy to the World is probably the heart of the song, though it is the one most often omitted. Isaac Watts made the most powerful statement of the song in that verse.


No more let sin and sorrows grow
Nor thorns infest the ground
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found

The curse to which Watts refers is the curse of sin. Christians believe that this curse has invaded every part of human, animal and natural life. Once you know that, what we call the doctrine of original sin, you will understand why Jesus came, and why he is coming again. It tells us why we say what we do during the celebration of communion: “Here then is the mystery of our faith, that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.” Why has Christ died, risen and coming again? Watts tells us. “He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.”

Well, where is the curse found?



The curse is in our bodies: we get sick and die.



It is in our minds: we get ill in our emotions and thoughts.



It is in our families and marriages: we get out of sorts with those we love, our ability to experience intimacy gets restricted and sometimes even destroyed.



The curse is in our eating. It’s in our sexuality. It’s in our art and science. The curse is nothing less than the erosion that eats at all the good things of life and breaks them down so that they become dysfunctional.



The result of this curse is sadness and sin. But the carol writer tells us that when the Lord comes, He brings healing: “No more let sin and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground.” You already know what that means! The rose is beautiful. It smells so nice. Its velvet petals invite us to tenderly touch its softness. So we get closer and then, “OUCH!” a thorn draws the blood. In this fallen world, beauty comes with a price. But the Lord is coming and He comes to change things. He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.

I don’t know about you, but I have some thorns in my life, thorns that sometimes break the skin and draw the blood. There are things in my life that sting and bite. But then I stop the whining. I remember that I am a Christian. I recall that the Lord has come into my life and will soon come physically into the world. He intends to “make His blessings flow far as the curse is found”.

Isaac Watts urges us to keep confessing that our Lord is sovereign. He is king over all. As He works to remake our world, we should not weep and pine. We should sing.

Joy to the world the Savior reigns
Let men their songs employ
While fields and floods
Rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding Joy.

Nature itself joins in when our lives really worship God. You begin changing your surroundings the day you begin to allow God to change you and God begins to change you the moment you begin to worship Him.

I left the last verse to last because I sometimes struggle with what it proclaims.

He rules the world with truth and grace
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness
And Wonders of His love

Truthfully, if God rules this world, he sure rules it differently than I would rule it. He allows his enemies, those who rebel against Him to have their say and to inflict pain on others. Is this any way to rule a world?



I have discovered that when I try to govern things under my authority that way, it just seems to undermine all that I want to do. Why does God allow the injustices and miseries of the world? The answer is that God has not yet abolished evil from the world. He rules fully only in our hearts. As we really become His people by living how He taught us to live, the blessings which come on our lives as a result, transforms us. Then that transformation in us is supposed to spread through the world. That is the part that sometimes staggers me. I wonder sometimes if it could be true.

Does God reign? Despite everything, something deep inside my soul says that He does, and there are times that He makes it extremely clear that He does reign.

A few years ago, my sister and brother-in-law were driving from Juarez, just the other side of El Paso, Texas on their way to Amarillo. They had been to Juarez to visit a sick person in the hospital. On the way back they got into a terrible snowstorm. The snow got so bad that Josias couldn’t see. It was in the early morning hours and the car just wouldn’t stay on the road. They were frightened and didn’t know what to do. Suddenly, they say the lights of a vehicle in front of them. The vehicle was moving slow and they discovered that they could follow its lights and stay in the road. After a while, the vehicle put on a turn signal. Neva and Josias decided to do the same. They made the turn in the blinding snow and found that they were in the parking lot of a church. Josias stopped and looked for the vehicle in front of him. There was none. He got out. There were no tracks. He and my sister waited a couple of hours until daybreak and until the snow had lifted, safe in the house of God.


He rules the world in truth and grace and makes the nations prove the glories of His righteousness and wonders of his love. God doesn’t always avert tragedy. He doesn’t always remove pain and sorrow. But when we move toward Him, He gives grace even when we do not understand. The soul can know joy even when the way is hard...if the Lord is there.



Joy to the world!