tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91965454002767371662024-03-13T11:31:19.460-04:00PeriagoWalking about, following ChristJosh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.comBlogger54125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-44209776838222545802024-01-07T22:29:00.001-05:002024-01-07T22:29:39.608-05:00Moved<p>This blog now resides at <a href="https://periago.blog">periago.blog</a>.</p>Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-43135740671978480682023-08-31T23:10:00.003-04:002023-08-31T23:10:46.760-04:00College Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4W1Q90JUcbOWSeS_AP1t0DmNoZeeKcIcFZZVLj_viqPyS55bXoB23SBVYoBq8aPdUy9g18syrBe5bIGtIGY8pwMcaJnG3fHvFk31n1klH_HuoCQhJkwin5jQkDiyK3fHlStzYDaPAm1UgYydlb7GuRlSqcnXuasXDOTAMzIiYCTJ-_RbHrDtdQXLKjVI/s1500/Event_SA_Mix-and-Mingle_17AUG22_00035.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="450" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="1500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4W1Q90JUcbOWSeS_AP1t0DmNoZeeKcIcFZZVLj_viqPyS55bXoB23SBVYoBq8aPdUy9g18syrBe5bIGtIGY8pwMcaJnG3fHvFk31n1klH_HuoCQhJkwin5jQkDiyK3fHlStzYDaPAm1UgYydlb7GuRlSqcnXuasXDOTAMzIiYCTJ-_RbHrDtdQXLKjVI/s320/Event_SA_Mix-and-Mingle_17AUG22_00035.jpeg"/></a></div>
<p>Two of my kids went off to college this month, one to his senior
year, and one to his freshman year. Over their last two weeks at home, I
keenly felt, not stress, exactly, but <em>pressure</em> to make the most
of the rapidly dwindling time. So we took walks, played board games,
watched movies, went to church, got into discussions about software
development and politics and literature and video games and theology.
I’m not certain to what extent my sons felt the same about their
impending departure. (As <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/michael-gerson-column-goodbye-child/">Michael
Gerson observed</a> about sending his eldest to college, “He is
experiencing the adjustments that come with beginnings. His life is
starting for real. I have begun the long letting go. Put another way: He
has a wonderful future in which my part naturally diminishes. I have no
possible future that is better without him close.”) But we immensely
enjoyed the family time together.</p>
<p>However, I’m not sure if the pressure of those last two weeks is
entirely rational. Eighteen years times fifty-two-point-something weeks
per year makes 938 weeks, if your child leaves for college on their
eighteenth birthday. Who’s to say that the <em>last</em> two weeks are
more valuable than, say, week 537? In reality, <em>all</em> time with
people whom we love and who bring us joy is a gift from God; that just
may not be at the forefront of your mind when you’re on week 537 and
college seems so far off.</p>
<p>In reality, even 938 weeks is less than it may seem. <a
href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html">Paul Graham writes</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Life actually is short. Having kids showed me how to convert a
continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52
weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages
3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And
while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous
quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of
8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would
definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And that’s without invoking the countless clichés about telling
people you love them now because tomorrow may be too late, people can be
gone before you know it, treasure your moments because you never know
what the future may bring, etc.; these are no less true for being
clichés.</p>
<p>If I’m not careful, these trains of thought can produce, not just
pressure, but <em>stress</em>. Time is slipping away! Don’t waste it!
Optimize, organize, plan, develop habits and routines and life hacks!
Make the most of every week, day, hour! Make sure you have no
regrets!</p>
<p>There’s wisdom here - we should be good stewards of all the blessings
that God has given us, including time - but I’m not sure that this
attitude of carefully scrimping and spending a finite resource is
intended to be how we live as children of God. It’s a scarcity mindset -
what we have is all we have, so use it carefully, because when it’s
gone, it’s gone - but we serve a God of abundance, who loves us and
chooses to abundantly shower blessings upon us. The Bible has plenty to
say about the wisdom of recognizing our limited time in this life (Ps
90:10-12, James 4:14, Eph 5:16), but it also talks about spending our
time richly enjoying the blessings of family (Eccl 9:9), food (Eccl
9:7), work (Eccl 2:24-25), and worship (Ps 84:10). I should prefer to
drink deeply of God’s blessings now than worry about when they’ll
pass.</p>
<p>And, ultimately, our time isn’t so limited after all. As <a
href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8884970-the-eternal-may-meet-us-in-what-is-by-our">C.S.
Lewis observes</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[We] hope finally to emerge, if not altogether from time (that might
not suit our humanity) at any rate from the tyranny, the unilinear
poverty, of time, to ride it not to be ridden by it, and so to cure that
always aching wound (‘the wound man was born for’)… For we are so little
reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘How he’s grown!’
we exclaim, ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our
experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish
were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would
be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become,
one day, a land animal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>God “will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death will not
exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things
have ceased to exist” (Rev. 21:4), because he has arranged all eternity
with us in order to have enough time to show us his love (Eph.
2:6-7).</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-61476472913487455622023-04-25T08:08:00.000-04:002023-04-25T08:08:23.227-04:00Mistborn Evangelion<p>I don’t often write about specific works of fiction. It’s hard to
analyze a book or movie in a way that’s compelling to someone who hasn’t
read or seen it, and the find-your-audience blogging experts would say
that reducing your audience from “people who are interested in an
amateur theologian and software developer’s wandering thoughts” to
“people who are interested in those wandering thoughts and have any idea
about what novel he’s referencing” is perhaps a mistake. But the nice
thing about having a blog is that I’m free to occasionally wander
wherever I like, and I’ve been reading some good books lately, so here
we go.</p>
<p>Spoilers for the first two <em>Mistborn</em> books and “Neon Genesis
Evanglion” follow.</p>
<hr />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj34RtCvyX_PyLvJ2VtqxtYs7wL8EykC9UiFSO0PBfxhUQtEJjZd2syv4gRrWdTLCQ7JSRv7VtWDkVHq5IHTb4c9Zy135FoDW32ewjYM7RS7J5plT6kE7QdDa6nfWUCE-pRLUpcebE80X3sWZ2tQW179Uy66xe3NdDhniJoDtw89gNnAhTjVWMQfQZS/s399/well-of-ascension.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="399" data-original-width="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj34RtCvyX_PyLvJ2VtqxtYs7wL8EykC9UiFSO0PBfxhUQtEJjZd2syv4gRrWdTLCQ7JSRv7VtWDkVHq5IHTb4c9Zy135FoDW32ewjYM7RS7J5plT6kE7QdDa6nfWUCE-pRLUpcebE80X3sWZ2tQW179Uy66xe3NdDhniJoDtw89gNnAhTjVWMQfQZS/s320/well-of-ascension.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>I recently finished the second <a href="https://amzn.to/3Lu75XA"><em>Mistborn</em></a> book, <a href="https://amzn.to/41R8f4K"><em>The Well
of Ascension</em></a>, by Brandon Sanderson. Although he’s not extremely
well known in broader culture, Sanderson is one of the biggest fantasy
authors in the world and a prolific author, with over thirty novels to
his name. The <em>Mistborn</em> series follows Vin, a young thief who
grew up on the streets, as she falls in with a group of rebels, helps
overthrow a tyrannical ruler, and discovers her own magical powers. As a
fantasy series, it has many of the standard fantasy tropes: an immortal
evil overlord, a carefully explained system of magical abilities,
mysterious prophecies, centuries of backstory, and unearthly
creatures.</p>
<p>It’s all fun and well-written, but the fantasy tropes aren’t what
kept me thinking once the book was done - rather, it’s Vin’s
relationship with a young nobleman, Elend, with whom she falls in love.
Vin and Elend could hardly be more different. She grew up on the
streets; he’s the son of the most powerful noble family in the empire.
He’s an academic; she acts on instinct. Her life forced her to focus on
practicality and survival; he’s an amateur philosopher and an idealist.
Vin can use her magical abilities to become absolutely deadly in a
fight; Elend can barely hold a sword. As the plot develops, they become
responsible for a fledgling kingdom; Vin puts her talents to use at
night, spying, keeping watch, and eliminating threats, while Elend
spends his time politicking, drafting laws, and making speeches.</p>
<p>As their relationship progresses, neither of them think they’re right
for the other. Elend contrasts his ivory tower philosophies with Vin’s
resourcefulness and growing magical abilities and thinks she doesn’t
need him; Vin thinks that Elend should have someone who can more
properly fit into society and that she deserves to be alone in the
shadows. The various mundane and supernatural threats that they face
continually pressure them and force them to deal with them individually,
and since neither can manage to talk openly about their concerns, the
stresses and gaps and unknowns are filled in with insecurities and
fears.</p>
<p>In spite of this, they come to love each other; toward the end of the
book, they’re married in a brief, spur-of-the-moment ceremony, as Vin is
getting stitched up after being wounded in her latest magic-empowered
fight. When Elend asks a mutual friend, Sazed, for advice, Sazed tells
him how to think about their differences:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very
different. Different in shape, different in function, different in
design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature
might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to
keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination, he might see that without
one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock
and key were created for the same purpose. (p. 427)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Vin has serious trust issues. Her mentally ill mother killed her
sister. Vin’s brother taught her life on the streets by telling her that
everyone, even him, would eventually leave her - and he did. To survive,
she fell in with various thieves’ gangs, where stronger members would
frequently beat, assault, or steal from weaker members such as her. (The
fact that Vin can have <em>any</em> kind of healthy emotional life is
perhaps as fantastical as the book’s magic, especially when centuries of
rule by an immortal evil overlord did not allow for the development of
trauma-informed therapy.) Much of her relationship with Elend, then,
involves learning to trust him, and much of the reason she falls in love
with him is that he’s unwavering in his trust of her. It’s impossible
for her to guarantee that he would never betray her - yet she finally
concludes that “she’d rather trust him and be wrong than deal with the
worry of mistrust.”</p>
<p>While Vin’s and Elend’s relationship progresses (and armies invade
and conspiracies transpire and omens portend and so forth - this is a
fantasy novel, after all), their friend Sazed goes through struggles of
his own. He’s a Keeper - a member of an order of scholars who’ve
dedicated themselves to preserving the world’s lore during the dark age
of the evil overlord’s reign. Sazed’s specialty is religions; he’s
memorized three hundred of them, because he believes that these beliefs
and stories have value. When questioned as to how he can promote these
religions, despite their mutual contradictions, he explains that they
represent hope - hope that there is something greater than humanity,
hope that better times will come in the future. However, despite his
scholarship and wisdom, his quiet strength, and the support he offers
his friends, events in the book leave him shattered; although he
believed in hope as an abstract concept, there was nothing concrete in
any of the three hundred religions that could give him comfort.</p>
<hr />
<p>Love, marriage, trust, hope - none of these are new topics, and all
have been dealt with by numerous philosophers, theologians, ethicists,
and self-help books. So, from one perspective, we don’t really need a
popular fantasy novel presenting its take on things. But God has given
us both emotion and reason. (As Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its
reasons which reason knows nothing of.”) And art and stories can touch
emotions in a way that propositional truths may not; art is art because
it shows something true about life, and sometimes showing is worth more
than telling. (This may be part of the reason that God himself so often
<a href="/2023/03/bible-stories.html">communicates through stories</a>
and parables.)</p>
<p>During <em>The Well of Ascension</em>, Vin has the opportunity to
pursue a relationship with someone more like her, another
magic-empowered outsider, but she eventually decides to place her trust
in her key-and-lock relationship with Elend. And it is a relationship of
trust - she has to accept that, however much the street-scarred survivor
in her wants to ensure that she will never be hurt again, she cannot
guarantee that, and she loves him anyway. The trust that Vin and Elend
place in each other allows them to find strength when the abstract
belief of Sazed fails.</p>
<p>This all has me thinking about our relationship with God.
Christianity is, at its heart, a relationship with a Person, not a
system of belief in abstract concepts. Christians often talk about the
God-shaped hole in each of us. Blaise Pascal, again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that
there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is
the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything
around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find
in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can
be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by
God himself. (<em>Pensées</em> VII (425))</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We may try to fill this hole with things on earth - for example, with
relationships with those just like us - rather than looking toward the
lock-and-key relationship with the Creator who seeks to relate to us.
(This of course stretches the metaphor - a key and lock are created for
each other, but God in no way depends upon us. I appreciate the poetry
of the image regardless.)</p>
<p>It also illustrates something of the nature of faith. We talk at
length about the importance of faith, what it means to have faith that’s
accompanied by works, the relationship between faith and doubt, why God
allows for faith rather than arranging for certainty, and so on. All of
these are good and valuable discussions, but at the simplest level,
faith is trust in a Person. Faith and doubt coexist because sin-scarred
survivors such as ourselves can never guarantee that another person
won’t hurt us - many of our doubts are fundamentally relational rather
than intellectual. (If God is real and loves me, why doesn’t he act as I
expect him to? Why am I still hurting? Why is the world still hurting?)
Faith comes when, in spite of this, we choose to trust in One who is
unwavering in his love toward us.</p>
<hr />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9PazqWDjcHWgvNkcYjPblmlN_EFy3_k2gEYhXOSiJ_4GTPBXNljRRG3RglCA_3QISYk3MoXkRywtG3MV4i9Tl8jD528wPszM4dpeTytCsRg8EHhtGiY35i60BPckGneI49oEV2Ug_vdJ8wtuBBS3T8vUsr3mBoPMLZEWGz7CZiB4rjDNce2VdfN2h/s720/neon-genesis-evangelion.webp" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9PazqWDjcHWgvNkcYjPblmlN_EFy3_k2gEYhXOSiJ_4GTPBXNljRRG3RglCA_3QISYk3MoXkRywtG3MV4i9Tl8jD528wPszM4dpeTytCsRg8EHhtGiY35i60BPckGneI49oEV2Ug_vdJ8wtuBBS3T8vUsr3mBoPMLZEWGz7CZiB4rjDNce2VdfN2h/s320/neon-genesis-evangelion.webp"/></a></div>
<p>Thinking about Pascal’s “empty print and trace,” the God-shaped hole
that we attempt to fill with shallow relationships with each other,
reminds me of “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” a 1990s Japanese anime. One of
the most popular anime ever, it tells the story of Shinji Ikari, an
asocial Japanese 14-year-old, who’s drafted along with other teenagers
to pilot giant robots in defense of Earth against invading alien
monstrosities, dubbed “angels.” He does so as a member of Nerv, a
UN-backed paramilitary group led by Shinji’s absentee father, Gendo.
“Neon Genesis Evangelion” is a short series (26 episodes, 24 minutes
each - anime is more likely than American television to tell a story and
wrap up) but dense, with psychological drama, conspiracies within
conspiracies, Jewish Kabbalah references, and critical elements of
backstory and motivation that are merely hinted at. For example, Nerv’s
motto (which is never directly referenced in the show but is visible
onscreen as part of their logo) is “God’s in his heaven, all’s right
with the world.” This quote from the 19th century poem “Pippa’s Song”
sounds inspiring, but as the series unfolds, it becomes clear that Nerv
considers God to have abandoned humanity, just as Nerv’s leader Gendo
has abandoned his son, Shinji, leaving Nerv to play God on its own.</p>
<p>Early in the series, Shinji is introduced to the concept of “the
hedgehog’s dilemma” - porcupines want to be close to each other, but
when they try to do so, they only hurt each other. This becomes a
recurring metaphor - humans seek to fill their emptiness with each
other, desperately seeking the approval of others, yet they repeatedly
hurt each other in the process.</p>
<p>Despite the show’s at times bizarre religious references, this theme
ends up sounding quite Christian. Without our Father (in Christian
terms, in rebellion against God), yet created for relationship and
needing love, we try to fill our emptiness with each other. In the
science-fiction anime world of “Evangelion,” this takes the form of a
conspiratorial project to psychically meld humanity’s minds together; in
real life, it can take the form of the distractions of entertainment,
pleasure, work, or it can take the form of seeking relationships with
others just like us, longing for someone we can trust and yet hurting
each other like hedgehogs, instead of trusting in our relationship with
our Father and accepting his love.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-18034822316311014422023-04-10T08:16:00.003-04:002023-08-30T21:59:00.362-04:00You Have to Surrender<p>Jeremiah is a weird book.</p>
<p>It’s the longest book of the Bible (by word count - Psalms has more
chapters, but they’re shorter - and if you split Samuel, Kings, and
Chronicles into two books each, as our English Bibles do). Jeremiah’s
ministry was long, hard, and discouraging - he began prophesying while
he was perhaps still a teenager, during the reign of King Josiah of
Judah, and prophesied through the next four kings. He saw the collapse
of the Assyrian empire, the victory of the Babylonian empire over Egypt
that cemented its status as the dominant power in the Near East, the
fall of Jerusalem, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. According to my
Old Testament professor in college, he preached for forty years and
never saw a single convert. This is perhaps hyperbole - the book of
Jeremiah talks about a handful of connections in the priesthood and
royal court who supported him, plus his scribe Baruch - but his impact
on Judah within his day was seemingly negligible. After the fall of
Jerusalem to Babylon, he couldn’t even keep his countrymen from taking
him against his will to Egypt, in an attempt to avoid Babylonian
reprisals. He repeatedly clashed with prophets and priests and suffered
repeatedly for it - betrayed by his own family (Jer 12:6), flogged and
thrown in the stocks (Jer 20:1-2), put on trial after being nearly
killed by a mob (Jer 26:1-24), banned from visiting the temple (Jer 36:5),
falsely accused of defecting to Babylon (Jer 37:12-14), flogged and
imprisoned (Jer 37:15), thrown in a dry well to die (Jer 38:1-6),
rescued, and re-imprisoned, and only freed after the Babylonians
conquered Jerusalem.</p>
<p>The book of Jeremiah is also quite intimate in describing Jeremiah’s
own relationship with God. Several times throughout the book, he
complains to the Lord (Jer 11:18-20; 12:1-4; 15:10-21; 17:12-18;
18:18-23, 20:7-18). The book is complex to read; it’s a mixture of
prophecies, prayers, and narratives of Jeremiah’s life, often not in
chronological order, forcing the reader to keep the various Judahite
kings straight in their head as prophecies and stories jump back and
forth.</p>
<p>It contains several striking, even shocking, passages. Jeremiah’s
complaints to God. (“Lord, you coerced me into being a prophet, and I
allowed you to do it. You overcame my resistance and prevailed over me.
Now I have become a constant laughingstock… Sometimes I think, ‘I will
make no mention of his message. I will not speak as his messenger
anymore.’ But then his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of
me, burning in my heart and soul. I grow weary of trying to hold it in;
I cannot contain it… Cursed be the day I was born!… Why did I ever come
forth from my mother’s womb? All I experience is trouble and grief, and
I spend my days in shame” (Jer 20:7,9,14,18)). God’s denying Jeremiah of
the normal (and socially expected) activities of marriage, mourning, and
celebrating (Jer 16:1-9), as a lived parable of the desolation that was
coming to Judah. God’s instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for his
fellow Judahites (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11, 15:1), because of the depths
of their sin - when would we expect God to <em>not</em> want us to pray
for someone? One of the most shocking, though, is Jeremiah’s instruction
to surrender to Babylon.</p>
<p>Let’s put this in historical context. Israel and Judah were small
countries, positioned between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and
desert to the east, and so they formed a major trade route between the
north and south. The golden age of David and Solomon, when they were
militarily ascendant over their neighbors, enriched by trade, and
internationally esteemed, were long past; instead, they were a pawn in
struggles between Egypt to the south and Assyria and Babylon to the
north. By Jeremiah’s day, the kingdom of Israel had already fallen to
the Assyrians, who also very nearly conquered Judah during the reign of
Hezekiah, the great-grandfather of Josiah, and now the kingdom of Judah
feared imminent destruction from Babylon.</p>
<p>In the midst of this, Jeremiah sent messages to the surrounding
countries:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says to give your
masters this message: “I made the earth and the people and animals on it
by my mighty power and great strength, and I give it to whomever I see
fit. I have at this time placed all these nations of yours under the
power of my servant, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. I have even made
all the wild animals subject to him. All nations must serve him and his
son and grandson until the time comes for his own nation to fall. Then
many nations and great kings will in turn subjugate Babylon… Things will
go better for the nation that submits to the yoke of servitude to the
king of Babylon and is subject to him. I will leave that nation in its
native land. Its people can continue to farm it and live in it. I, the
Lord, affirm it!” (Jer. 27:4-7, 11)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And to the king and people of Judah:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Submit to the yoke of servitude to the king of Babylon. Be subject to
him and his people. Then you will continue to live. There is no reason
why you and your people should die in war or from starvation or disease.
That’s what the Lord says will happen to any nation that will not be
subject to the king of Babylon. ‘Do not listen to the prophets who are
telling you that you do not need to serve the king of Babylon. For they
are prophesying lies to you. For I, the Lord, affirm that I did not send
them.’ (Jer. 27:12-15)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>From a human perspective - this doesn’t sound good. It’d be like
Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, or George W. Bush after 9/11,
saying, “Welp, they got us good; we shouldn’t suffer war or hardship or
disease in trying to fight back.” Except that analogy probably still
misses the force of Jeremiah’s words, because our independence and
existence as a nation hadn’t been meaningfully threatened since 1865.
Perhaps it would be more like a preacher in Kyiv standing up and
declaring that Vladimir Putin is God’s servant and Ukraine needed to
peacefully surrender to him, but that’s okay, because God would later
judge Putin, too. Or <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw">William Joyce, aka
Lord Haw-Haw</a>, a fascist, Nazi propagandist, and former British
soldier who broadcast to the UK during World War 2 and was executed for
treason after its end.</p>
<p>It’s no wonder the authorities in Jeremiah’s day didn’t like him.</p>
<p>While Jeremiah was telling those in Judah and resisted Babylon that
God was going to judge them, he wrote to those Jews who had already been
carried into exile to tell them that God would take care of them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>’Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they
produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and
allow your daughters to get married so that they too can have sons and
daughters. Grow in number; do not dwindle away. Work to see that the
city where I sent you as exiles enjoys peace and prosperity. Pray to the
Lord for it. For as it prospers you will prosper…</p>
<p>‘Only when the seventy years of Babylonian rule are over will I again
take up consideration for you. Then I will fulfill my gracious promise
to you and restore you to your homeland. For I know what I have planned
for you,’ says the Lord. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you.
I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.’ (Jer 29:5-7,
10-11)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How do we interpret such passages? Is this just an interesting bit of
Old Testament history, yet another instance of God judging a faithless
people, or is there more that we can learn? Jeremiah 29:11 is a
wonderful promise to those in exile, and God’s faithfulness to those in
exile gives us reason to trust that he has a plan to care for us today,
but yanking that verse out of context as if it were given verbatim to us
fails to do justice to how challenging Jeremiah’s instruction to his
contemporaries was and how starkly it went against the religious
understanding of his day. As we look at the political, social,
and cultural struggles of the 21st century American church, is there
anything we can apply from Jeremiah’s instruction to surrender to the
pagan forces of his day and seek their prosperity, rather than
fight?</p>
<p>Many evangelical churches are currently struggling with questions of
whether, and to what extent, we should get involved and fight in the
political, social, and cultural issues that are dividing America. Full
disclosure: I have definite opinions - and definite concerns - about how
we’re engaging here. So there may be a temptation for me to take these
passages from Jeremiah and use them as proof texts to support my side of
the debate. But I’m no prophet - it would be as big a mistake for me to
use Jeremiah’s history as evidence that I’m right as it was for the
false prophets of Jeremiah’s day to use the history of God protecting
Israel as evidence that Jeremiah was wrong. Instead, I’d like to list
some things that we <em>can</em> learn from Jeremiah and encourage us to
work through how they can help us in our current challenges.</p>
<h4
id="god-is-often-less-concerned-with-external-religion-and-political-power-than-we-are.">God
is often less concerned with external religion and political power than
we are.</h4>
<p>Solomon’s temple was a magnificent structure, the culmination of the
preparatory work of the exodus and tabernacle, the fulfillment of
prophecies and plans of David and Solomon, the manifestation of his
presence among his people (1 Ki 8:27-29), and a place to make God’s
glory and fame known to the surrounding nations (1 Ki 8:41-43) - yet
Nebuchadnezzar, acting as God’s servant, burned it down and looted all
of its furnishings. In fact, God was willing to quite literally burn the
entire political, national, and religious system of his people to the
ground if it allowed him to reform his people into a remnant that was
faithful to him.</p>
<h4 id="true-religion-needs-to-touch-every-aspect-of-our-lives.">True
religion needs to touch every aspect of our lives.</h4>
<p>Josiah, who was king when Jeremiah started his ministry, started
numerous reforms to remove idolatry and refocus Judah’s religious
practices on the Lord. He removed idols, desecrated and tore down pagan
altars, repaired the temple, renewed the covenant, and organized a
national Passover celebration. Kings and Chronicles speak very highly of
him (2 Ki 22-23, 2 Chron 34-35). However, Jeremiah’s struggles suggest
that these reforms were often merely surface-level - the people followed
the structures and practices of their religion without it changing their
behavior and hearts.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Lord said to Jeremiah: “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s temple
and proclaim this message: ’Listen to the Lord’s message, all you people
of Judah who have passed through these gates to worship the Lord. The
Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: Change the way you
have been living and do what is right. If you do, I will allow you to
continue to live in this land. Stop putting your confidence in the false
belief that says, “We are safe! The temple of the Lord is here! The
temple of the Lord is here! The temple of the Lord is here!” You must
change the way you have been living and do what is right. You must treat
one another fairly. Stop oppressing resident foreigners who live in your
land, children who have lost their fathers, and women who have lost
their husbands. Stop killing innocent people in this land. Stop paying
allegiance to other gods. That will only bring about your ruin. If you
stop doing these things, I will allow you to continue to live in this
land that I gave to your ancestors as a lasting possession.</p>
<p>“’But just look at you! You are putting your confidence in a false
belief that will not deliver you. You steal. You murder. You commit
adultery. You lie when you swear on oath. You sacrifice to the god Baal.
You pay allegiance to other gods whom you have not previously known.
Then you come and stand in my presence in this temple I have claimed as
my own and say, “We are safe!” You think you are so safe that you go on
doing all those hateful sins! 11 Do you think this temple I have claimed
as my own is to be a hideout for robbers? You had better take note! I
have seen for myself what you have done! says the Lord. (Jer 7:1-11)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(This kind of preaching no doubt explains why Jeremiah was eventually
prohibited from going to the temple.)</p>
<p>This passage is well-known to Christians because Jesus quoted it when
he cleansed the temple during the week leading up to his arrest. We
typically understand “a den of robbers” to mean simply that the people
inside the temple were robbing others, but Jeremiah’s charge is more
pointed than that: the religious practitioners were treating the temple
as a hideout or refuge in between their forays into immorality, a place
where they could find security and comfort while they lived their daily
lives however they wanted. They tried to follow the Lord and worship him
- but they also didn’t want to give up pursuing other gods.</p>
<p>As followers of God, our beliefs and formal religious practices are
important - but so are our choices to act with integrity, seek justice,
and avoid any idol that’s put alongside God.</p>
<h3
id="faithfulness---successfully-following-god---may-not-look-like-what-we-think-of-as-success.">Faithfulness
- successfully following God - may not look like what we think of as
success.</h3>
<p>Contrary to the expectations of Jeremiah’s contemporaries, it was the
exiles, not those who remained in the Promised Land, whom God was using
to reform his people. Jeremiah’s own ministry was long, hard, and
disappointing, with little to show for it in his day. In the view of the
religious leaders, he was dangerous and opposed to God. And yet, looking
back now, “Bible students consider Jeremiah to be one of the foremost OT
prophets. With good reason he has been called a sublime figure… Highest
praise has been given him; in fact, he has been credited with the
survival of his people after the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., a
veritable savior of the Jews” (Charles L. Feinberg, <a
href="https://amzn.to/3GcDgI4"><em>Expositor’s Bible
Commentary</em></a>). More importantly, God loved him, challenged him,
encouraged him, and took care of him, even in the midst of his
complaints (Jer 15:19-21).</p>
<p>It’s easy for us to think that church growth, compliments from
others, popular support in elections and polls and news media, and the
like are evidence that we’re doing good, but Jeremiah’s life shows that
following God may bring none of that.</p>
<h4 id="be-careful-when-saying-what-god-wants.">Be careful when saying
what God wants.</h4>
<p>The book of Jeremiah describes how priests and false prophets
repeatedly opposed Jeremiah, and it names several of them: Pashhur son
of Immer, Hananiah son of Azzur, Ahab son of Kolaiah, Zedekiah son of
Maaseiah. However, it says very little about their motives. Maybe they
were con artists, deliberately lying for prestige or financial gain.
Maybe they were deceived by spiritual forces, like Ahab’s prophets were
(1 Ki 22:20-22). Maybe they started out intending to speak truly but
gradually twisted their message into what people wanted to hear - social
media clickbait and “doing it for the likes” create powerful incentives
today to say whatever will get the desired emotional reactions out of
your friends and followers, but the underlying temptations aren’t
new.</p>
<p>And maybe some of the false prophets truly believed they were
speaking God’s truth. Maybe they said God would deliver Judah from
Babylon because they rightly remembered and retold God’s promises to
take care of his people and God’s deliverance of his people in the past
- but, if so, they were forgetting that promise and protection was only
<em>part</em> of God’s message to his people, that holiness and
accountability also must be included, and that God’s sovereign plan
means he may have purposes and priorities broader than they could
see.</p>
<p>One odd dynamic of the past few years has been the number of
self-proclaimed Christian prophets who’ve confidently declared what God
was doing and would do in American national politics and the 2020
election. Many of these predictions proved false. Even in less
charismatic streams of Christianity, churches and families have been
divided by confident proclamations of which candidates and political
causes God wants us to support. We should seek to understand what God is
doing - but any beliefs about what God intends with current events and
predictions about the future should never contradict or distract from
the simple, hard work of recognizing the holiness that God wants from us
(both individually and as his people), practicing love in unity for each
other, and trusting that God will take of us and protect us through (not
necessarily from) whatever happens.</p>
<h4
id="leaders-character-matters.-the-sins-of-the-past-matter.">Leaders’
character matters. The sins of the past matter.</h4>
<p>The book of Jeremiah has only one mention of Manasseh, the
grandfather of King Josiah: “I will make all the people in all the
kingdoms of the world horrified at what has happened to them because of
what Hezekiah’s son Manasseh, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem” (Jer
15:4). However, the books of Kings and Chronicles describe his reign at
length:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He did evil in the sight of the Lord and committed the same horrible
sins practiced by the nations whom the Lord drove out before the
Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had
destroyed; he set up altars for Baal and made an Asherah pole just as
King Ahab of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the stars in the sky
and worshiped them. He built altars in the Lord’s temple, about which
the Lord had said, “Jerusalem will be my home.” In the two courtyards of
the Lord’s temple he built altars for all the stars in the sky. He
passed his son through the fire and practiced divination and omen
reading. He set up a ritual pit to conjure up underworld spirits and
appointed magicians to supervise it. He did a great amount of evil in
the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. He put an idol of Asherah
he had made in the temple, about which the Lord had said to David and to
his son Solomon, “This temple in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of
all the tribes of Israel, will be my permanent home”… Manasseh misled
[Israel] so that they sinned more than the nations whom the Lord had
destroyed from before the Israelites… Furthermore Manasseh killed so
many innocent people, he stained Jerusalem with their blood from end to
end, in addition to encouraging Judah to sin by doing evil in the sight
of the Lord. (2 Ki 21:2-7, 9, 16)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As narrated by Kings and Chronicles, Manasseh was almost
single-handedly responsible for the Babylonian exile; God announced a
final judgment on Judah through his prophets during Manasseh’s reign,
and he never relented (2 Ki 21:10-15). The reforms of Manasseh’s
grandson Josiah, during Jeremiah’s youth, were valuable but brought only
a temporary reprieve (2 Ki 22:18-10). Jeremiah’s command to surrender
comes because, by then, the fall of Judah was inevitable; all that his
contemporaries could do was influence how hard and how fast the fall
would come.</p>
<p>As American individualists in one of the most prosperous and powerful
countries in history, we like to think ourselves responsible for our own
actions and outcomes and the masters of our own fates. There are deep,
important questions about the interplay between present responsibility
and consequences of the past (compare, for example, Deut 5:9 and Jer
15:4 to Deut 24:16 and Jer 31:29-30). But Jeremiah’s example suggests
that there may be times when, instead of fighting, we may need to accept
current events, consider the sins of our collective past (for example,
American sins of violence, greed, and racism), and repent and grow.</p>
<h4
id="even-when-opposing-sin-and-pronouncing-judgment-love-others-and-weep.">Even
when opposing sin and pronouncing judgment, love others and weep.</h4>
<p>Jeremiah gave harsh proclamations against the sin and superficial
religion of Judah - and yet, in spite of that, and in spite of God’s
instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for Judah in light of the
coming judgment (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11-12), he still prayed for
them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lord, we know that people do not control their own destiny. <br> It
is not in their power to determine what will happen to them. <br>
Correct us, Lord, but only in due measure. <br> Do not punish us in
anger, or you will reduce us to nothing. (Jer 10:23-24)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And this is no rote, checklist-style prayer; Jeremiah identifies with
the people he’s proclaiming judgment against and who opposed and
persecuted him, and he weeps over them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wish that my head were a well full of water <br> and my eyes were a
fountain full of tears! <br> If they were, I could cry day and night
<br> for those of my dear people who have been killed. (Jer 9:1)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In fact, God himself laments over the people:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I will now purify them in the fires of affliction and test them. <br>
The wickedness of my dear people has left me no choice. <br> What else
can I do? (Jer 9:7)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s easy to fall into us-versus-them thinking - any of our
opponents, anyone doing wrong, are first and foremost enemies to be
defeated, agents of evil, rather than fellow humans with whom we live in
community. Jeremiah risked his life opposing evil, but he also
recognized his ties to his people, and he never stopped loving. God
opposes and judges evil, but he never stops loving.</p>
<h3 id="there-is-always-hope.">There is always hope.</h3>
<p>Late in Jeremiah’s ministry, God instructed him to buy a field in his
hometown of Anathoth. This was just a year or two before Jerusalem fell
to Babylon; Jerusalem was already under siege at the time, and Jeremiah
was under arrest for his conflicts with Judah’s leadership. Jeremiah
explains the reason for buying the field: “For the Lord of Heaven’s
Armies, the God of Israel, says, ‘Houses, fields, and vineyards will
again be bought in this land’” (Jer 32:15).</p>
<p>Investing in real estate at a time like this would seem highly
questionable; it would be like our Kyiv preacher saying that Putin is
God’s servant and that Ukraine should surrender to him, but then while
in prison proceeding to invest in property in the war-ravaged Mariupol
in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine. After the land purchase, God
speaks to Jeremiah, promising that, in spite of his judgment for
centuries of Israelite sin,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I will bring them back to this place and allow them to live here in
safety. They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give
them a single-minded purpose to live in a way that always shows respect
for me. They will want to do that for their own good and the good of the
children who descend from them. I will make a lasting covenant with them
that I will never stop doing good to them. I will fill their hearts and
minds with respect for me so that they will never again turn away from
me. I will take delight in doing good to them. I will faithfully and
wholeheartedly plant them firmly in the land. (Jer 32:37-41)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Much of our contemporary rhetoric and dialogue about American
politics and the church in America has an almost apocalyptic flavor: if
this election doesn’t go the way we think it should, or this cultural
trend or that political agenda isn’t reversed, our country and churches
are doomed. This rhetoric seems overblown (it’s not the first time we’ve
feared an outcome of an election), but it may actually be the case; Judah in
Jeremiah’s day was doomed. But God remains faithful to his promises; the
gates of hell will not prevail against his church; he is still our God,
and we are still his people.</p>
<h4
id="gods-presence-and-deliverance-may-not-look-like-we-expect.">God’s
presence and deliverance may not look like we expect.</h4>
<p>Everyone in Jerusalem had no doubt grown up hearing of the Lord’s
miraculous deliverance from the Assyrian invasion, during the reign of
King Hezekiah, when God killed 185,000 of their soldiers overnight (1 Ki
19). This may have contributed to their confidence that they should
fight against the Babylonian invasion - but that was not God’s plan.</p>
<p>And yet, God remained faithful to his people, preserving and
purifying them and calling them back to him, at a time when many nations
and tribes dissolved and were absorbed into conquering empires. And
countless believers since then have drawn comfort from God’s promise to
the exiles: “I know what I have planned for you… I have plans to prosper
you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with
hope” (Jer 29:11).</p>
<p>Jeremiah himself had no doubt grown up hearing of prophets like
Elijah, who opposed idolatry and immorality with fire from heaven and
supernatural strength and miraculous victories, untouchable by any human
opposition - but that was not God’s plan for Jeremiah.</p>
<p>And yet, in spite of the persecution and hardships, God was with
Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I chose you.
Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you to be a prophet
to the nations” (Jer 1:5). “I, the Lord, hereby promise to make you as
strong as a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall. You will
be able to stand up against all who live in the land, including the
kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and all the people of the
land. They will attack you but they will not be able to overcome you,
for I will be with you to rescue you” (Jer 1:18-19).</p>
<p>It’s easy, and natural, to look for God in the miraculous, in
clear-cut confrontations of good and evil, in displays of power, in
victory. But God often chooses to act through human circumstances,
through loss, by being with us through defeat rather than guaranteeing
temporal victory, by proving his faithfulness and comfort in spite of
the bad, rather than simply removing the bad.</p>
<p>At Easter, God himself “surrendered” to evil, taking upon himself the
worst evil that humanity could deal out, rather than simply wielding
power against it as he did in the days of Hezekiah and Elijah. And, in
doing so, he defeated evil and death for all time, showing once again
his love and faithfulness.</p>
<iframe width="400" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xbYi02NmgkY" title="I Know the Plans Reprise" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-24074301670603617612023-03-28T07:50:00.004-04:002023-03-30T21:33:00.163-04:00You Have to Fight<p>“If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. You have to
fight.”</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
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<p>I was listening to a church discussion of how we relate to culture,
and this perspective was expressed by one of the participants. The
specific example that prompted it, chosen more or less at random, was
Starbucks’ choice to not put “Merry Christmas” on their holiday
cups.</p>
<p>There were - and are - lots of good arguments on both sides, but I’m
more interested in the implication that we <em>haven’t</em> fought, that
we <em>have</em> somehow given inches, that we need to do more or do
different if we don’t want to continue to lose miles. In my lifetime,
I’ve seen the American evangelical church fight abortion, LGBTQ rights,
music with explicit lyrics, music with unintelligible lyrics, Democratic
presidents, drinking, gambling, playing cards because of their
association with gambling, drugs, smoking, Dungeons & Dragons,
Pokémon, Harry Potter, sex in video games, violence in video games,
blasphemous art, R-rated movies, movies that fail to promote “family
values,” the theory of evolution, saying “happy holidays” instead of
“merry Christmas,” universalism, theological liberalism, political
correctness, Satanism, tattoos, child pornography, communism, socialism,
critical race theory, and K-Mart selling <em>Playboy</em>.</p>
<p>And this is nothing new. In the early 20th century, for example,
evangelist Billy Sunday preached his famous <a
href="https://www.billysunday.org/sermons/booze3.html">“booze”
sermon</a> in Boston, Massachusetts:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is my opinion that the saloonkeeper is worse than a thief and a
murderer. The ordinary thief steals only your money, but the
saloonkeeper steals your honor and your character. The ordinary murderer
takes your life, but the saloonkeeper murders your soul.</p>
<p>The saloon is an infidel. It has no faith in God; has no religion. It
would close every church in the land. It would hang its beer signs on
the abandoned altars. It would close every public school. It respects
the thief, and it esteems the blasphemer; it fills the prisons and
penitentiaries. It despises heaven, hates love, and scorns virtue. It
tempts the passions. Its music is the song of a siren. Its sermons are a
collection of lewd, vile stories. It wraps a mantle about the hope of
this world to come.</p>
<p>It is the moral clearinghouse for rot, and damnation, and poverty,
and insanity, and it wrecks homes and blights lives today. The saloon is
a liar. It promises health and causes disease. It promises prosperity
and sends adversity. It promises happiness and sends misery.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His preaching was a significant factor in the adoption of the
Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting alcohol in the United States, in
1917.</p>
<p>In the 1960s, to our shame, we fought against civil rights. Philip
Yancey writes in <a href="https://amzn.to/3FL6g9C"><em>Soul
Survivor</em></a> of growing up in Atlanta:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Martin Luther King, Jr.] was our number-one public enemy, a native
of my own Atlanta, whom the <em>Atlanta Journal</em> regularly accused of
“inciting riot in the name of justice.” Folks in my church had their own
name for him: Martin Lucifer Coon. (p. 17)</p>
<p>During my adolescence I attended two different churches. The first, a
Baptist church with more than a thousand members, took pride in its
identity as a “Bible-loving church where the folks are friendly,” and in
its support of 105 foreign missionaries, whose prayer cards were pinned
to a wall-sized map of the world at the rear of the sanctuary. That
church was one of the main watering holes for famous evangelical
speakers. I learned the Bible there. It had a loose affiliation with the
Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination founded in 1845 when
Northern abolitionists decided that slave owners were unfit to be
missionaries and the Southerners separated in protest. Even Southern
Baptists were too liberal for most of us, though, which is why we
maintained only a loose affiliation…</p>
<p>After the <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em> ruling, our church
founded a private school as a haven for whites, expressly banning all
black students…</p>
<p>The next church I attended was smaller, more fundamentalist, and more
overtly racist… There I learned the theological basis for racism. The
pastor taught that the Hebrew word <em>Ham</em> meant “burnt black,”
making Noah’s son Ham the father of Negro races, and that in a curse
Noah had consigned him to life as a lowly servant (Genesis 9)…</p>
<p>If anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the
trump card of miscegenation, or mixing of the races, which some
speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in
Noah’s day. A single question, “Do you want your daughter bringing home
a black boyfriend?” silenced all arguments about race (p. 21-23).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many years later, Yancey attended the “burial” of this second church
(“After moving to escape a changing neighborhood, the church found
itself once again surrounded by African-Americans, and attendance had
dwindled. In a sweet irony, it was now selling its building to an
African-American congregation” (p. 4)) and reflected on the poisonous
legacy of the church and how people such as Yancey’s brother turned away
from the faith as a result.</p>
<p>Looking back over this history, it’s hard for me to imagine what “If
you give an inch, they’ll take a mile; you have to fight” should even
look like, because it seems to me that we’ve been fighting non-stop,
with very mixed results.</p>
<p>Sometimes these fights are successful. Crime rates, for example, are
significantly lower than they used to be — <a
href="https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-least-and-most-crime/">60%
lower in 2020 than in 1980</a>. (However, the fact that this decline in
crime rates can be credibly attributed to <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis">the removal
of lead paint</a>, rather than moral renewal led by the church, may
shake our confidence in the church’s ability to bring moral change to
the broader culture.)</p>
<p>Sometimes these fights are still ongoing. The June 2022 Supreme Court
decision in <em>Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization</em>
removed federal protections around abortion rights, a decades-long goal
of pro-life activists, but pro-life activists would be the first to say
that we still have a very long way to go in creating a culture where
abortion is unwanted, where life is consistently valued, where unborn
babies and expectant mothers are protected and provided for.</p>
<p>Sometimes, in hindsight, these fights seem to have been misguided. I
don’t hear anyone too concerned about Pokémon or playing cards nowadays,
and church youth groups enjoy the occasional game of Dungeons &
Dragons.</p>
<p>Sometimes, we may realize, like Philip Yancey, that the
fight was simply wrong, that reading the Bible and professing to follow
Christ is no proof against sin, and that great evil can be rationalized
in the name of following God.</p>
<p>And sometimes, perhaps, we stop fighting too easily. Liquor usage
doesn’t appear to be a front-and-center concern for many contemporary
Christians, as it was in Billy Sunday’s day, but too many people can
still testify to the devastation that alcoholism can cause - <a
href="https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html">over
140,000 deaths in the U.S. per year</a>, not to mention the damage done
to relationships, families, jobs, finance, and health.</p>
<p>What would it mean to not give an inch? Looking over that list, can
we say we haven’t fought enough? Did we somehow fail to let secular
Americans know that we disapprove of what they’re doing? Was there some
tactic or measure that we failed to employ that could have compelled
culture to go our way?</p>
<p>Despite how it may sound, it’s not my intention to criticize these
combatants. We are all, I trust, trying to faithfully follow God in a
world with many temptations and snares; for me to say that “<em>I</em>,
unlike these others, know exactly what this should look like” would be
the height of arrogance. Following God sometimes means speaking out
against immorality or error and standing up for the victims of injustice
- in other words, fighting. The issues that we fight over often come out
of a commendable and correct desire to see Christ as Lord over every
aspect of our lives, to leave no activity or item unexamined. God may
call believers to different battlefronts and give them passion about
different causes, and I believe that God can use even misguided zeal of
someone who truly seeks to follow him. Conflicts that seem unnecessary or even silly from
the perspective of our current time period or setting may be more
important than we realize in another. (Paul wrote that idols are nothing
while also recognizing that, in the setting of the Corinthian church,
eating meat offered to idols could cause Corinthian Christians real
spiritual harm.)</p>
<p>But fighting can become a substitute for following - maybe because we
become so convinced of our own rightness that we decide we can judge
others, or maybe because straightforward standards of right and wrong
are easier to understand and control than pursuing an infinite God whose
holiness we can never live up to, or maybe because fighting obvious
immorality that we personally don’t struggle with is easier than facing
our own sin. Or maybe it’s simply that we’re afraid - afraid to see a
society that’s changing and falling away from religion, afraid of
hostility and harassment and losing cultural clout, afraid of whether
our own churches and families and children will be able to remain
faithful - and so we fight in the only way we know how, instead of
trusting Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will never prevail.</p>
<p>Because, ultimately, we do have to fight - but it’s a fight against
our own sinfulness, vigorously training our own bodies rather than
merely shadow-boxing (1 Cor 9:27), a struggle against spiritual forces
(Eph. 6:12), an assault against the gates of hell (Mt 16:18), a battle
to “snatch others from the fire” (Jude 23), as we’re watched by angels
(Eph. 3:10) and cheered on by those who’ve gone before us (Heb.
12:1).</p>
<p>Not just an argument over Starbucks Christmas cups.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-72172706030530259362023-03-21T07:41:00.002-04:002023-03-21T07:43:08.738-04:00Bible Stories<p>Why do we study Bible stories? We touched on recently in looking at
the lives of <a href="/2023/01/black-dress.html">David</a>, <a
href="/2023/02/a-tragedy-of-kings.html">Saul, and Solomon</a>, but it’s
worth a closer look.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM0GIYYf99AZKRkMRaWfVHg9hCj3l_ECRL0mfJgGOsLqB2fA1wkHydh8Psc0KUkSNS99PNmGdc19_aZ-eJZMhA97r-rFs3ydxfJl3UrgOQenSzVvF1uZvYW4-tI2khX3tOpYv7Wcw4vOc6CvKOvlc3vBuYm_OhFVVxzuO1KcUqHfiYgApYkYkghtZB/s768/bible-stories-stable-diffusion.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="768" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM0GIYYf99AZKRkMRaWfVHg9hCj3l_ECRL0mfJgGOsLqB2fA1wkHydh8Psc0KUkSNS99PNmGdc19_aZ-eJZMhA97r-rFs3ydxfJl3UrgOQenSzVvF1uZvYW4-tI2khX3tOpYv7Wcw4vOc6CvKOvlc3vBuYm_OhFVVxzuO1KcUqHfiYgApYkYkghtZB/s320/bible-stories-stable-diffusion.jpeg"/></a></div>
<p>There are a few reasons. First is simply that they’re history, and
(as high school students toiling through AP US History can attest),
we’ve concluded as a society that history is worth studying. It lets us
know the causes and effects that brought us to our current state of
affairs; it gives us understanding and precedent to guide our future
actions (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
- George Santayana); it helps us understand and appreciate our own
culture and traditions; it broadens our perspectives, giving us a window
into the lives and cultures and perspectives of people, times, and
cultures different than our own; it offers good stories, and as humans,
we enjoy and draw value from good human stories.</p>
<p>Bible stories aren’t <em>just</em> history, but they are history, and
they can help fulfill all of these roles.</p>
<p>Second, we can learn moral lessons from them. There’s biblical
precedent for this; for example, in 1 Cor 10:11, Paul talks about the
Israelites’ rebellion in the desert and writes, “These things happened
to them as examples and were written for our instruction.” In Psalm
95:8, God gives the Israelites in the desert as a negative example. Heb
11 lists numerous biblical characters and holds them up as examples of
faith.</p>
<p>This is where many of our modern Bible studies spend their time.
However, it’s possible to overdo this. In <a
href="https://amzn.to/3jSUpi6"><em>Joseph and the Gospel of Many
Colors</em></a>, Voddie Bauchum talks about delivering a sermon series
on Genesis and, afterwards, receiving a letter from a Jewish visitor to
his church thanking him for his sermon. He writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As I read her letter, my eyes filled with tears. However, these were
not tears of joy because the Lord had used my sermon in the life of a
Jew. On the contrary, these were tears of horror and shame! As I read
her words, all I could think of were Paul’s words: “But we preach Christ
crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those
who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the
wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). So why wasn’t my message a “stumbling
block” to this Jew? Was it because she was “being saved”? No. It was
because <em>I had not preached Christ!</em> (p. 16)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He goes on to argue that viewing stories through the lens of moralism
misses the gospel - the good news that Christ offers salvation apart
from our moral acts. If we read Bible stories <em>only</em> for moral
lessons, we risk reducing them to the level of one of Aesop’s fables or
moral-of-the-episode pop culture, rather than pointing us to Christ.</p>
<p>Third, and deeper, the stories tell us who we are. Let me illustrate
with an example from the workplace. When I joined a previous company, a
software development consultancy, my knowledge of them was limited to
what I read from their website and a few conversations with them over
the interview and hiring process. And, since it was a fully remote
position, my interactions with them were limited. However, I quickly
heard the story from before I joined of how they had lined up a major
contract, only to have it canceled at the last minute, and how they
navigated the resulting challenges. This was a major event in the life
of the company and became a part of their identity and DNA. This story
told me such a wealth about who they were - the inherent uncertainties
of their line of work, how they sacrificed to take care of their
contractors during this trying time, the frugality and caution with
which they approached finances and negotiations as a result. And, as a
new member of the team, it told me a wealth about who I was expected to
be - and it instilled those values in me far more effectively than any
corporate onboarding training or employee handbook could.</p>
<p>This dynamic applies in personal relationships as well as corporate.
Russell Moore <a
href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/march-web-only/russell-moore-ct-close-friendships-men-women-relationships.html">writes</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>New friendships are often made from stories. Whenever you meet
someone new, that person may ask you, “So what’s your story?” Even when
it’s not directly said, it’s an unspoken question. We tell pieces of our
life stories to each other and are often happy to find those stories
overlap… When you tell something of your story to a new friend, you are
saying something akin to “Here’s who I am. What about you?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Children grow up hearing stories of their parents and grandparents
and learn about their family, what their family values, where they came
from, and how they fit in. Growing up in a small town lets you hear
stories of the town’s colorful characters and memorable events, filling
this same role at the level of the community; the stories that we tell
in civics and history classes serve the same role at the national level.
Someone meeting their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first
time likely hears stories from their childhood, learning more about the
person who they’ve chosen to give their affections to.</p>
<p>Bible stories do this for us within the community of faith, because
God isn’t merely saving us individually and honing our individual moral
characters. He’s working throughout history to form a people for
himself, and so the stories help us to see how we fit into this broader
purpose of God, and the stories of God’s people in the past tells us
what it means to be a part of God’s people now, and we recognize that
part of the purpose of the stories of the past is so that we can be a
part of God’s people now.</p>
<p>Or, as Rich Mullins put it more poetically in <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GamlYvhJyiM">“Sometimes by
Step,”</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes I think of Abraham<br>How one star he saw had been lit for
me</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fourth, and deeper still, the stories help us better know God
himself. In <a href="https://amzn.to/42uSeTm"><em>Searching for God Knows What</em></a>, Donald Miller
describes teaching a Bible college class.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This year I asked the students to list the precepts a person would
need to understand in order to become a Christian. I stood at the white
board and they called out ideas: Man was sinful by nature; sin separates
us from God; Jesus died for our sins; we could accept Jesus into our
hearts… and so on. Then, looking at the board, I began to ask some
questions about these almost universally accepted ideas. I asked if a
person could believe all these ideas were true and yet not be a
Christian… The students conceded that, in fact, a person could know and
even believe all the concepts on the board and yet not be a Christian.
“Then there is something missing, isn’t there?” I said to the class. “It
isn’t watertight just yet. There must be some idea we are leaving out,
some full-proof thing a person has to agree with in order to have a
relationship with Christ.”</p>
<p>We sat together and looked at the board for several minutes until we
conceded that we weren’t going to come up with the missing element. I
then erased the board and asked the class a different question: “What
ideas would a guy need to agree with or what steps would a guy need to
take in order to fall in love with a girl?” The class chuckled a bit,
but I continued, going so far as to begin a list.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>A guy would have to get to know her.</li>
</ol>
<p>I stood back from the board and wondered out loud what the next step
might be. “Any suggestions?” I asked the class. We thought about it for
a second, and then one of the students spoke up and said, “It isn’t
exactly a scientific process.” (p. 153-154)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To fall in love with God, we have to get to know him. And, to get to
know someone, we can spend time with him, and we can listen to him talk,
and we listen to stories about him, because stories tell us what the
person did and what kind of person he is and what’s important to him -
through both the stories themselves and the choice of which sequences of
events were selected and organized and retold. The stories of the Bible
help us fall in love with God by showing us his love, his faithfulness
to his people, his willingness to act on their behalf, his desire to
relate to them, and his anger at sin - at anything that interferes with
this relationship.</p>
<p>This may help explain why so much of the Bible is story, rather than
theology treatise. Because I believe that God, in his omnipotence and
wisdom, and in his inspiration of Scripture, isn’t merely relaying a
sequence of events; he has chosen those events and how they’re told in
order for us to better know him. And, because we’re relational,
story-telling creatures, this may teach us more than a theology treatise
would, just as my coworkers’ story of their canceled contract taught me
more than any corporate training could.</p>
<p>And the stories themselves become a way of spending time with God -
much the same as a family or old friends spend time swapping stories.
Russell Moore, <a
href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/march-web-only/russell-moore-ct-close-friendships-men-women-relationships.html">again</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When we spend time with old friends and tell remembered stories… we
aren’t communicating information; we’re reliving our experiences. We’re
saying things like “Can you believe we got to see that?” or “Can you
believe we survived that?” or “Don’t you miss that?” or “Aren’t you glad
that’s over?”</p>
<p>It’s just another way of knowing one another—and of being known.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And the stories become a way of praising God. By re-reading and
retelling the stories of God’s actions on behalf of his people in the
past, we’re communicating God’s power, his faithful promise-keeping on
behalf of his people, his mercy, and his love.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-68269091761155638702023-03-14T08:09:00.005-04:002023-03-14T08:09:50.694-04:00Stating the Obvious<p>At the risk of stating the obvious, Nero was not a nice man.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#/media/File:Nero_Glyptothek_Munich_321.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="head of Nero" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzii0WxcFpRyOVqbU-YhjoEPhjacbBxFVat2_jeLkrIyLN4l_xqbp6Gja6aXPGItpKOwR0udJqCfsHOt-N_j70UbywvwsDVecxz4cvKmBUhsyOH6tZt8Nq5cT0shTQG8RsenXlvtjXvm5VAaSDcUitWk0l0gmvHFY4UUIYA7qv3oLUJLe3evg0eiVD/s320/440px-Nero_Glyptothek_Munich_321.jpeg"/></a></div>
<p>The fifth emperor of Rome, Nero reigned from AD 54 to AD 68. He had a
widespread reputation for being “tyrannical, self-indulgent, and
debauched” (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero">Wikipedia</a>).
He killed his mother and has been suspected or accused of killing his
first wife, second wife (although this is questioned by modern
historians), and step-brother. After his second wife’s death in AD 65,
he had a young man who resembled his second wife castrated, married him,
and started treating him as a woman. He was believed to have started the
Great Fire of Rome in AD 64; after the fire, he rebuilt Rome, including
a new palace complex, the Domus Aurea (“Golden House”), funded by heavy
taxation and devaluing the Roman currency. After the fire, he was said
to have tortured and killed Christians, perhaps blaming them for the
fire, and had some early Christians burned alive. Later tradition said
that Peter was crucified and Paul beheaded during Nero’s persecutions.
When political winds finally turned against Nero (due in part to a
rebellion against his taxation), he fled to a villa outside of Rome. He
planned to commit suicide, lamenting, “What an artist dies in me.” He
ultimately could not go through with the deed and instead forced his
secretary to kill him.</p>
<p>Nero remained infamous after his death; a legend soon arose that he
had survived and would return to conquer his enemies and lead Rome. At
least three impostors, claiming to be Nero, organized rebellions, and
the belief in Nero’s return, called the Nero Revividus legend, persisted
in some places for centuries. Some scholars believe that Revelation’s
beast from the sea, which received a lethal wound but was healed
(Rev. 13:3), is an allusion to Nero Revividus. (John, or the Spirit
through John, could have easily chosen imagery and metaphors that would
be familiar and vivid to John’s first leaders.)</p>
<p>This forms the backdrop for 1 Peter, which evangelical scholars
believe was perhaps written sometime around AD 62-64. In 1 Pe 2:13-17,
Peter writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Be subject to every human institution for the Lord’s sake, whether to
a king as supreme or to governors as those he commissions to punish
wrongdoers and praise those who do good. For God wants you to silence
the ignorance of foolish people by doing good. Live as free people, not
using your freedom as a pretext for evil, but as God’s slaves. Honor all
people, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the king.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Notice what Peter does <em>not</em> say: “Honor the king, as long as
he isn’t tyrannical, self-indulgent, or debauched.” “Be subject to the
king, unless he starts fires and blames you for it.” “Honor the king
under normal circumstances, but if he starts killing family members or
burning people alive, feel free to verbally attack him.” 1 Peter may
have been written before Nero’s persecutions started, but even then,
Nero’s character wasn’t the sort that an observant Jewish Christian
would approve of. And, if Nero’s persecutions would have changed things,
it’s hard to imagine Peter’s inspired instruction not including that
caveat.</p>
<p>I think of this sometimes when I see a “Let’s go, Brandon!” sign or
dip my toes in the constant stream of political jokes, memes, and
insults on Facebook or Twitter. Because, if Peter didn’t write, “Be
subject to and honor the king, unless he’s a self-indulgent, debauched
tyrant,” he certainly didn’t write, “Be subject to and honor the ruler,
unless he’s a senile socialist” - or an orange-skinned grifter, or a
closeted Muslim from Kenya, or an <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Idiot#Themes">American
idiot</a>, to cover a sampling of the insults from the last twenty years
of American presidential politics.</p>
<p>This doesn’t mean that we automatically obey those in power. Peter
earlier said that, if forced to choose between God and humanity, he
would obey God (Acts 5:29). And this doesn’t mean that we can never
criticize those in power. Even in this passage, Peter speaks of “the
ignorance of foolish people,” and John the Baptist and Jesus both have
pointed criticism for political leaders (Mt 14:4, Lk 13:32). And there
may even be a place for vivid or even inflammatory language; both Jesus
and Paul did that if the issues they were addressing are important
enough (e.g., Mt 23:27, Gal 5:12). But I’m not nearly as wise or mature
as Jesus or Paul. And I also notice that the New Testament speakers’
most pointed criticisms are reserved for people claiming to be members
of the religious community - those who claim to share with us a higher
standard, whose actions are causing genuine spiritual danger to fellow
believers. I’m afraid that many of our political memes, jokes,
commentary, and slogans aren’t about offering a moral challenge or
applying God’s standards or protecting fellow believers. They too often
feel like just complaining, venting our spleen about situations we have
limited ability to change, bonding with those who share our views by
tearing down those who don’t.</p>
<p>Does this mean that there’s never a place for political humor? I’m
not sure. Satire is a powerful tool. Humor can be healthy (especially if
we’re poking fun at ourselves or those in our faction), and it can be a
useful coping mechanism. And I certainly have laughed and shared the
occasional critical joke. But, even if it’s not inherently wrong, I’m
not sure that our constant stream of negative political humor and
commentary is spiritually or psychologically healthy. If our fundamental
mentality is to be one of honoring and respecting those in authority,
it’s hard to reconcile that with some of the attitudes I see on Facebook
and Twitter. And I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s warning in <em>Mere
Christianity</em> about loving our enemies:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities
in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the
story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as
that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to
cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies
as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the
first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into
devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little
blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see
grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall
insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included
- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it; we shall be fixed for ever
in a universe of pure hatred. (p. 91)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m not a fan of Joe Biden. I have from time to time complained about
him. But <a
href="https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1515700473348730883">this
message</a> from him happened to pop up in my Twitter feed sometime
around Easter last year:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As we reflect today on Christ’s Resurrection, we are reminded that
with faith, hope, and love — even death can be defeated. From our family
to yours, we wish you hope, health, joy, and the peace of God, which
passes all understanding. Happy Easter and may God bless and keep
you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This was an important reminder to me - regardless of what I think of
the leadership and policies of Biden (or Trump, or Obama, or Bush),
what’s far more important is whether they and I are following Christ.
Paul writes about this in 2 Cor 5:15, in talking about what it means to
live for Christ as ambassadors of reconciliation: “From now on,
therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh” (ESV). Regarding our
political leaders as partisan allies or enemies, as the butts of our
jokes or as a means to the end of punishing our foes, is regarding them
according to the flesh. Instead, let’s give them the same honor and
respect that Peter gave Nero, while continuing to live as ambassadors of
Christ.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-79131423710955845922023-02-28T23:11:00.003-05:002023-03-01T21:57:05.892-05:0080 Seconds<p>I recently saw an ad about an “earthquake bed” - a high-tech bed
whose bedframe is actually a sturdy metal box. It has built-in sensors
so that, if it detects an earthquake, it quickly drops you into the box
and seals shut, protecting you from any falling debris.</p>
<p>There are actually two series of earthquake beds - one from Chinese
inventor Wang Wenxi, and one from Russian company Dahir Insaat. Some of
their iterations include built-in safety gear - food, oxygen, a fire
extinguisher, etc. - to keep you safe while awaiting rescue. I can’t
find the specific ad that I saw, but this CNN video shares Dahir
Insaat’s concept video:</p>
<iframe class="BLOG_video_class" width="320" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jmtlwpNn3ms?t=7" title="Would you sleep in this earthquake-proof bed?" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen>
</iframe>
<p>Neither creator’s bed appears to be commercially available; however,
based on their specialized construction, limited development, heavy
steel, and complex safety-critical devices, I’m guessing they’d cost
tens of thousands of dollars if they could be purchased.</p>
<p>I’m sure that the ad I saw was making the rounds because of February
6’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. I don’t begrudge the ad or the
inventions - I’m not sure how workable they are, but the goal of saving
lives is commendable, and invention and research involves pursuing ideas
that may or may not pan out, and trying to implement an expensive,
impractical idea is often the first step toward making something cheaper
and practical.</p>
<p>And yet there’s something so… human… about responding to tragedy by
offering safety through technology, if only you can afford it.</p>
<p>My own response to the earthquakes is a bit closer to this song by
Kimya Dawson, written in response to the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami">2004
Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami</a>. (Warning: sensitive content.) </p>
<iframe class="BLOG_video_class" width="320" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Uq5KBjn2Gys" title="Kimya Dawson - 12/26" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen>
</iframe>
<p>The earthquakes lasted 80 seconds. Over 50,000 people were killed.
Since February 6, 9,000 aftershocks have been reported. Over 170,000
buildings - some of them centuries old - have been destroyed or severely
damaged. Millions of people have been affected. <a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/2/25/death-toll-climbs-above-50000-after-turkey-syria-earthquakes">As
of Saturday</a>, nearly 240,000 rescue workers continue to dig through
the rubble, looking for victims, so they can at least give them a proper
burial.</p>
<p>What’s an earthquake bed supposed to accomplish? Tens of thousands of
dollars, times tens of thousands of people, just to be buried for weeks
in the rubble of what used to be your home?</p>
<p>We’re quite good at controlling our environment and protecting
against misfortune. Insurance, vaccinations, the Federal Reserve,
building codes, sprinkler systems, irrigation, deep freezers, weather
radar, floodwalls, and - yes - earthquake beds, to protect against
disease, economic loss, famine, drought, fire, flood, storm. But 80
seconds shows the limits of our power.</p>
<p>What <em>can</em> we do? We call earthquakes “acts of God,” and there
are rich resources within the Christian faith for developing our
understanding of when and how God acts, why God allows these things to
happen, and how we should respond. (“Those 50,000 who were killed when
the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria fell on them, do you think they were
worse offenders than all the others who live in the world? No, I tell
you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”) But so much of
the tragedy is human. From <a
href="https://thedispatch.com/article/picking-through-turkeys-rubble/">The
Dispatch</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 1999 an earthquake in western Turkey killed more than 17,000,
setting off a nationwide push to demolish old construction and rebuild
earthquake resistant buildings. Except many pre-1999 buildings in the
poorer south remained, and many new buildings weren’t built to withstand
the tremor.</p>
<p>[Turkish President] Erdoğan’s political rivals say shoddy new
construction—encouraged by the president and his ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP)—is in part to blame for the disaster. A recently
resurfaced video from 2019 shows Erdoğan touting new construction in
Kahramanmaraş following the passage of a law allowing contractors to pay
a fee to spare their unlicensed buildings from demolition. “We solved
the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maraş with zoning amnesty,” he said
of the housing projects, some of which were destroyed in the quakes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And some are <a
href="https://thedispatch.com/article/earthquake-undermines-erdogans-reelection-strategy/">blaming
the Turkish government</a> for playing politics:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In [Erdoğan’s] first public remarks [after the quakes], he threatened
legal action against those who criticized the government… The day after
the disaster, Erdoğan blocked access to Twitter, where criticism of the
government was proliferating. Rescue workers quickly condemned that
decision, because victims trapped under the rubble were using social
media to communicate their locations to rescue teams… Demolition crews
have been dispatched to <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/live/wM5dsZZiE8Q?feature=share">destroy
public records</a> office buildings that housed building permits, along
with the names and records of contractors and the public officials who
approved such projects… Various aid workers also told press outlets they
were pushed out of the way just as victims were being brought out of
collapsed buildings, then replaced by government-affiliated aid workers
who wanted to take the credit for the rescue in front of television
cameras.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Syria, the disaster has been complicated by the decade-long civil
war, with the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Helmets_(Syrian_civil_war)">White
Helmets</a>, a volunteer group that operates in opposition-held Syrian
territory, shouldering much of the burden of the rescue work.</p>
<p>There, too, leaders are <a
href="https://thedispatch.com/article/assads-earthquake-opportunism/">choosing
to play politics</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The United States Treasury announced a six-month freeze on sanctions
against the Syrian government involving “all transactions related to
earthquake relief.” Though U.S. officials insisted none of their
existing penalties on Damascus targeted humanitarian aid shipments, the
move followed finger-pointing from [Syrian dictator Assad’s] regime
officials who wasted no time in blaming Western sanctions for their own
deficient response to the catastrophe…</p>
<p>While his government complained about sanctions, the dictator of more
than two decades has been stalling the delivery of life-saving relief
for political gain. Until last week, the regime had insisted that all
international assistance be routed through the Damascus government,
delaying aid shipments to some of the hardest-hit areas in the country’s
rebel-held northwest.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>80 seconds would be devastating under any circumstances. But it’s
made so much worse when profit-seeking or short-sighted politics leave
infrastructure unprepared; when tyranny and war decimate a region for a
decade; when protecting yourself becomes more important than open,
honest information; when aid becomes a tool in bolstering someone’s
political position.</p>
<p>Human response, therefore, becomes important: people who are willing
to build strong communities and social ties that can be ready to bear
the weight when disaster hits. People who help out, who volunteer their
time and donate their money, even at personal risk and sacrifice. (Over
two hundred White Helmets have died performing their duties over the last
ten years.) People and countries who send aid rather than put their own
country first, who seek to protect the poor and powerless.</p>
<p>Last year, singer-songwriter Nick Cave <a
href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/in-your-opinion-what-is-god/">wrote</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>We must love each other.</em> And mostly I think we do – or we
live in very close proximity to the idea, because there is barely any
distance between a feeling of neutrality toward the world and a crucial
love for it, barely any distance at all. All that is required to move
from indifference to love is to have our hearts broken. The heart breaks
and the world explodes in front of us as a revelation.</p>
<p>There is no problem of evil. There is only a problem of good. Why
does a world that is so often cruel, insist on being beautiful, of being
good? Why does it take a devastation for the world to reveal its true
spiritual nature? I don’t know the answer to this, but I do know there
exists a kind of potentiality just beyond trauma.</p>
</blockquote>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-16977578215794437382023-02-04T21:44:00.002-05:002023-02-04T21:44:21.534-05:00A Tragedy of Kings<p>Last month, we looked at David. His life can be viewed as a tragedy.
He was Israel’s “beloved,” a man after God’s own heart, possessed of
military, musical, and poetic skill, with an unbroken stream of success.
However, after a single grievous sin and his further attempts to cover
it up, everything seemed to go wrong for him, and he died a greatly
diminished figure.</p>
<p>How does he fare compared to the other kings of Israel and Judah?</p>
<hr />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKJxTpGbau4tUCCV1KQ_SnK-TIsNhJBnjy_eQS8QTkmR8VaWt-CFkV3o6HRHoksm5g_z-alpYyHocsS2Lmrm1BBTC3Tb5uyMomYR9o9ZHbuDYEBEVOgTNs5AcgAJj2FYNdbWtyVY_PCq2wWrYkUMQXZSVYIhqtqs5ildwW8x4Y4eQ_Zru62ProMQkO/s631/Saul.jpg"><img alt="Saul" border="0" height="240" data-original-height="631" data-original-width="509" style="padding: 0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKJxTpGbau4tUCCV1KQ_SnK-TIsNhJBnjy_eQS8QTkmR8VaWt-CFkV3o6HRHoksm5g_z-alpYyHocsS2Lmrm1BBTC3Tb5uyMomYR9o9ZHbuDYEBEVOgTNs5AcgAJj2FYNdbWtyVY_PCq2wWrYkUMQXZSVYIhqtqs5ildwW8x4Y4eQ_Zru62ProMQkO/s320/Saul.jpg"/></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFVRvFenOCWH06nQUwbWcBaIpe5fCtSbLJO0mbYa7W6A-FPjEYh8_XHsbBrJ7iwzpdZNeoq7JBFvLAKpgBKn2yA4IBzckYL__zBgu2Y5GgeMpNw7p52ddynx6de4BzxY3zBLDQ8nPMWiJnwodiGDPlLmx8N3FhK8kVBt4q4epeoQv_t2FesosdgG9p/s631/David.jpg"><img alt="David" border="0" height="240" data-original-height="631" data-original-width="451" style="padding: 0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFVRvFenOCWH06nQUwbWcBaIpe5fCtSbLJO0mbYa7W6A-FPjEYh8_XHsbBrJ7iwzpdZNeoq7JBFvLAKpgBKn2yA4IBzckYL__zBgu2Y5GgeMpNw7p52ddynx6de4BzxY3zBLDQ8nPMWiJnwodiGDPlLmx8N3FhK8kVBt4q4epeoQv_t2FesosdgG9p/s320/David.jpg"/></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnQPsgtPv1aLkALpBc-pIbBk_bWK2DpV999_cvMFxuYsRJo6CfIixevA5WO8FAMl0YB2SjNsEFJbgkRYNSjrknI9SXmnRE7zjLi-mfX1rmZ17RQZ4g34O8guah5EXRsJxxz6DvUsqsLsTvbvKqobsM-qdIg2xQZmfZlLPNMllBqPSbkLBwPj7d1Fv5/s631/Solomon.jpg"><img alt="Solomon" border="0" height="240" data-original-height="631" data-original-width="491" style="padding: 0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnQPsgtPv1aLkALpBc-pIbBk_bWK2DpV999_cvMFxuYsRJo6CfIixevA5WO8FAMl0YB2SjNsEFJbgkRYNSjrknI9SXmnRE7zjLi-mfX1rmZ17RQZ4g34O8guah5EXRsJxxz6DvUsqsLsTvbvKqobsM-qdIg2xQZmfZlLPNMllBqPSbkLBwPj7d1Fv5/s320/Solomon.jpg"/></a>
</div>
<p style="text-align: center; font-style: italic; font-size: small"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul#/media/File:Saul_1878.jpg">Saul (1878), by Ernst Josephson</a>; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David#/media/File:King_David,_the_King_of_Israel.jpg">King David, the King of Israel (1622), by Gerard van Honthorst</a>; <a href="https://www.byarcadia.org/post/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-king-solomon">Portrait of Solomon, the Wise King (1670), by G. Pesaro</a></p>
<p>Saul, David’s predecessor, often gets a bad rap. We understandably
focus on his failures as a king: his disobedience to God in battles, his
brooding mental illness / spiritual oppression (1 Sam 16:14), his
jealousy and violence toward David, and his final suicide in battle
against the Philistines. This is an oversimplification, though; Ronald
F. Youngblood notes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Scholarly studies of Saul, the first king of Israel, have depicted
him as (among other things) villain, tragic figure, flawed ruler, naive
farm-boy, degenerate madman, fate-driven pawn, reluctant king—the list
goes on and on. Such characterizations are at least partially true. Saul
was surely one of the most complex persons described in Scripture…
Although at times moody, impulsive, suspicious, violent, insincerely
remorseful, out of control, and disobedient to God, at other times he
was kind, thoughtful, generous, courageous, very much in control, and
willing to obey God. (<em>Expositor’s Bible Commentary</em>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He starts out well. From a human perspective, he appears to be an
ideal ruler: handsome, physically imposing, from a wealthy family (1 Sam
9:1-2). He never sought the kingship himself; he acts with humility
throughout his anointing, coronation, and early reign (1 Sam 9:21, 1 Sam
15:17); he demonstrates restraint and mercy when people oppose him (1
Sam 10:27, 11:12-13). God “changed his innermost person” (1 Sam 10:9)
and gives him a spiritual experience of ecstatic prophecy (1 Sam
10:10-11). After his coronation, he goes back to manual labor on his
farm (1 Sam 11:5), rather than seeking to amass power and wealth. When
the city of Jabesh-Gilead is threatened militarily, he zealously rallies
Israel to their defense (1 Sam 11:6-11), in the style of the judges,
thus earning a loyalty from them that lasts even after his death.
Despite the Israelites’ wrong motives in asking for a king, Samuel’s
speech at the beginning of Saul’s reign offers encouragement as well as
warning:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now look! Here is the king you have chosen—the one that you asked
for! Look, the Lord has given you a king. If you fear the Lord, serving
him and obeying him and not rebelling against what he says, and if both
you and the king who rules over you follow the Lord your God, all will
be well. But if you don’t obey the Lord and rebel against what the Lord
says, the hand of the Lord will be against both you and your king… The
Lord will not abandon his people because he wants to uphold his great
reputation. The Lord was pleased to make you his own people. As far as I
am concerned, far be it from me to sin against the Lord by ceasing to
pray for you! I will instruct you in the way that is good and upright.
However, fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart.
Just look at the great things he has done for you! But if you continue
to do evil, both you and your king will be swept away.” (1 Sam
12:13-15,22-25)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Saul continues to defend Israel for the rest of his reign (1 Sam
14:47-48, 52). Even after the Lord rejects Saul’s dynasty and kingship,
Saul is shown remarkable mercy: he’s permitted to live for many more
years, with his eventual successor David as a trusted lieutenant and
aide, rather than being immediately judged and replaced.</p>
<p>However, Saul’s fearfulness and distance from God leads him to
disobey, offering sacrifice without Samuel at Gilgal (1 Sam 13), then
fighting timidly and foolishly against the Philistines (1 Sam 14),
failing to follow God’s commandments to destroy the Amalekites (1 Sam
15), growing increasingly jealous and violent toward David, and killing
the priests of Nob. It seems that, having failed once due to impatience
and insecurity, he compounds those failings at each subsequent step,
instead of repenting and growing. He goes from acknowledging the Lord
himself (e.g., 1 Sam 11:13) to referring to him as “your“ God in talking
with Samuel (1 Sam 15:30), to being completely cut off from the Lord and
his prophets (1 Sam 28). His reign and life ended with the military
defeat of Israel, the deaths of his sons, and his own suicide to avoid
capture.</p>
<hr />
<p>Solomon, David’s son and successor, starts out with enormous
potential. At his birth, he is named Jedediah (“beloved of the Lord”),
in response to a message from the prophet Nathan - the same prophet who
condemned David’s affair with Solomon’s mother Bathsheba. He begins his
reign with David’s support and acts quickly to secure and strengthen the
kingdom, dispensing justice to wrongdoers who had avoided judgment
during David’s reign. Solomon enjoys an unprecedented period of peace:
vassal states of that time would typically withhold tribute or rebel at
the death of a king, to test the new king’s rule, but he experienced
none of that (1 Ki 4:21, 24). He marries the daughter of the Pharaoh of
Egypt; Egyptian rulers had formerly refused their daughters to any
foreign land, and for a descendant of Egyptian slaves to marry an
Egyptian princess showed Solomon’s blessings and success. He offers huge
sacrifices to God in a display of his dedication to God, and God
responds directly in a dream, offering Solomon whatever he wants. In
Solomon’s answer, he thanks God for his love and promises, humbly
recognizes his own limitations, and asks for wisdom to serve his people.
God honors Solomon’s request, making him the wisest man to ever live,
and also promising him a long life, wealth, and greatness.</p>
<p>Solomon enjoys a long, prosperous, and successful reign: he dispenses
justice, sets up an effective bureaucracy to govern his kingdom,
sponsors international trade and exploration, and receives international
acclaim and fame. His wisdom goes beyond leadership and legal judgments;
he’s known for his psalms, proverbs, and knowledge of animals and
plants. His kingdom becomes so fabulously wealthy that silver is viewed
as without value. He builds a palace to cement and symbolize his rule;
expands the city of Jerusalem; fortifies the strategic cities of Hazor,
Megiddo, and Gezer; and builds a network of store-cities to supply his
military.</p>
<p>He builds a temple to the Lord - the long-time dream of his father
David, and the culminating physical symbol of God’s decision to live
among his people. At the zenith of Solomon’s reign, he dedicates the
temple to the Lord in a massive and magnificent worship service where he
expresses his heartfelt devotion to God:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>O Lord, God of Israel, there is no god like you in heaven above or on
earth below! You maintain covenantal loyalty to your servants who obey
you with sincerity. You have kept your word to your servant, my father
David; this very day you have fulfilled what you promised…</p>
<p>God does not really live on the earth! Look, if the sky and the
highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this temple I have
built! But respond favorably to your servant’s prayer and his request
for help, O Lord my God. Answer the desperate prayer your servant is
presenting to you today. Night and day may you watch over this temple,
the place where you promised you would live. May you answer your
servant’s prayer for this place. Respond to the request of your servant
and your people Israel for this place. Hear from inside your heavenly
dwelling place and respond favorably. (1 Ki 8:23-24, 27-30)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Woven throughout all of this success and splendor, though, are hints
of trouble. Solomon’s marriage to the daughter of Pharaoh shows his
power and cements a valuable foreign alliance, and Jewish tradition
states that she became a Jewish proselyte, yet the Israelites are <a
href="https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Forbidden-Alliances">warned</a>
against foreign alliances and relations with Egypt, and Solomon seems to
recognize that the marriage falls short of God’s holiness (2 Chron
8:11). He spends seven years constructing the magnificent temple of the
Lord - but thirteen years constructing his own personal palace. (The
fact that he was aided by David’s preparations for the temple may
explain some of this but perhaps not all.) The court and kingdom are
incredibly wealthy, but that wealth is created in part through
significant forced labor and taxation, which spurs a rebellion after
Solomon’s death. His longstanding friendship and trade with Hiram, king
of Tyre, helps him build the temple and palace, yet he repays Hiram by
attempting to trade twenty towns (even though those should have been
considered part of the Promised Land) that left Hiram feel like Solomon
was ripping him off (1 Ki 9:11-14). Solomon’s splendor and power are
shown through his treasure, his army of horsemen and chariots, and his
many wives, and yet Moses forbids kings from amassing treasure, horses,
or wives (Deut 17:16-17).</p>
<p>All of this leads to disaster as Solomon’s reign progresses. His 700
wives, 300 concubines, and numerous foreign alliances become
entanglements and distractions that pull him away from God. It starts,
perhaps, as mutually beneficial alliances and politically expedient nods
toward other nations’ religious practices, but Solomon’s emotions become
entangled by his many marriages and he starts worshipping other gods
himself. Out of mercy, God postpones full judgment until after Solomon’s
death, but Solomon ends his reign harried by enemies to the north,
south, and within, with Israel only a short time away from rebellion and
a division that never healed.</p>
<hr />
<p>What are we to make of the lives of these three men?</p>
<p>All started, to varying degrees, with promise, potential, and
acknowledgement of God. All showed some measure of success and service
to God and his people. David and Solomon in particular showed, for
all-too-brief moments, what God’s people <em>could</em> look like, when
gathered together in faithfulness to celebrate and worship the Lord and
to enjoy his goodness. All three were later brought low - Saul by his
insecurities and disobedience that led to a growing darkness and
distance from God, David by the devastating choices and consequences
that flowed from a single act of adultery, Solomon in a prolonged
process of compromise and ensnarement that turned away his devotion to
God.</p>
<p>All three are tragedies. Like any good tragedy, they’re good stories
- as in tragedies since ancient Greece, we see the tragic heroes’
virtues and flaws, we watch their falls, we experience the catharsis of
pity for them and fear as we reflect on the potential for flaw and fall
within our own lives.</p>
<p>All three form a critical part of the history of God’s dealings with
his people. Saul’s failures set up the path to David’s kingship; David’s
devotion to God results in the epochal promise of 1 Samuel 7, that a
descendent of David would always be on the throne, that was ultimately
fulfilled in Jesus; Solomon built the temple that became the center of
the worship of God for centuries.</p>
<p>And there are good moral lessons to draw from the lives of all three.
We can see how Saul’s humility and zeal, from another angle or in other
circumstances of his life, can manifest as insecurity and impatience,
then we can reflect on how strengths can become weaknesses if not
tempered and centered in a deeper commitment to the good. David’s affair
shows us the necessity of fleeing temptation, the weaknesses that exist
even within a man after God’s own heart, and the importance of heartfelt
repentance. Solomon’s life prompts reflection on the differences between
intelligence, wisdom, earthly success, and faithfulness to God and the
paradox of how material blessings can tempt us to forget God. And so
on.</p>
<hr />
<p>Is that all, though? If we want a good tragedy, we can read
<em>Oedipus Rex</em> or Shakespeare’s <em>Macbeth</em> or see Anakin
Skywalker’s fall in <em>Revenge of the Sith</em>. The lives of Saul,
David, and Solomon give moral lessons, but so do the lives of Abraham
Lincoln, Gandhi, Tony Stark. Reading about the Israelite kings has the
not-insignificant advantage that they’re part of God’s people and their
accounts are divinely inspired, and they teach history in a way that the
lives of Stark or Skywalker don’t, but if all we gain is some catharsis
and historical knowledge and some moral teachings, we’re not seeing the
whole picture.</p>
<p>The Israelites were called to be God’s people. Moses promised that
someday they would have a king (Deut 17:14-20). We see that the kings
were to represent God as his regent on earth, to shepherd God’s people,
to ensure justice, to provide protection and rest so that the people
could enjoy the blessings of land and divine presence that God had
promised them. Yet Saul, David, and Solomon show that no human is fully
up to this task - whether humble beginnings or divine prophecies from
birth, unqualified success in battle or unprecedented peace, physical
stature or superlative wisdom, talent or wealth or eloquence, all ended
in tragedy. If even the best of humans fails, then the only way that
God’s people can have a ruler who faithfully follows God and guides his
people is if God himself is that ruler.</p>
<p>The lives of Saul, David, and Solomon, give the historical facts
around the prophecies and promises of Christ, but they also show our
need for Christ. The potential of Saul, devotion and strength of David,
and wisdom and splendor of Solomon all foreshadow the greater strength
and wisdom and lasting splendor of the Son of David.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-15605465740649145572023-01-16T08:06:00.002-05:002023-01-16T08:06:07.239-05:00Black Dress<blockquote>
<p>
Will she walk slowly<br>
Or will she come at all<br>
I can’t believe that I was watching<br>
Can’t believe I made the call
</p>
<p>I can’t get a handle on my thoughts<br>
now Guess I’ve already made my mind<br>
He’s a soldier in my battle<br>
I’m the king with too much time</p>
<p>Will she wear that black dress<br>
Will she wear that black dress<br>
As holy as the night<br>
As holy as I want to feel<br>
I want to feel all right</p>
— The Normals, <a
href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7jI8vBnqg1GrS60PWhFowA?si=5cbdffeca41749c2">“Black
Dress”</a>
</blockquote>
<p>The story of David and Bathsheba is well-known. Godly King David sees
Bathsheba bathing from the roof. He sends for her, and they have an
affair. To cover up the affair, he attempts to induce her husband Uriah
to come home from war and sleep with her, but Uriah refuses. David
instead arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle so that he can take
Bathsheba as his wife without further obstacle.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What if she is angry<br>
I know that we’re both scared<br>
Do I look her in
the eye<br>
Or do I even dare to care</p>
<p>I’m drowning in desire<br>
I’ve been good for so long<br>
I know I’ve got no right now<br>
But no one can tell me that I’m wrong</p>
<p>Will she wear that black dress<br>
Will she wear that black dress<br>
As holy as the night<br>
As holy as I want to feel<br>
I want to feel all right</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although the story is well-known, the consequences are less so.
Before Bathsheba, David appeared to lead a charmed life. As the beloved
of Israel (“David” means “beloved”), he won the love of Saul’s daughter
Michal, the loyalty of Saul’s son Jonathan, and the praise in song of
Israel’s women. He killed Goliath, earned a position as Saul’s
armor-bearer and court musician, won multiple battles against the
Philistines, amassed a loyal and successful group of fighting men, and
survived multiple attempts on his life from a jealous, insane Saul. He
was crowned king first of Judah and then of the entire nation of Israel
and won many more battles. He became famous for his poetry and songs. At
the culmination of his reign, he brought the ark of the covenant into
Jerusalem, amidst singing, music, sacrifice, and dance, making a joyous
celebration of the Lord as Israel’s God and David as his regent. And the
Lord made a covenant with David, promising that his descendants would
always rule.</p>
<p>After Bathsheba, everything went wrong. His first son by Bathsheba
died. His son Amnon raped his daughter Tamar. His son Absalom murdered
Amnon. Absalom led a revolt against David. David’s trusted advisor
Ahithophel (Bathsheba’s grandfather) betrayed David and joined Absalom.
Absalom was defeated in battle and killed, despite David’s attempts to
spare his life. David had hardly returned from the battle against
Absalom when the northern tribes of Israel, led by a man named Sheba,
started a second rebellion. David ended his life physically weak,
seemingly impotent, with an fragile kingdom that his son Solomon had to
act quickly to secure.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Maybe I’ll be good<br>
I could be gone when she gets here<br>
I’ve still got a chance to make this one all right</p>
<p>My temptation’s on the stairway<br>
My temptation’s at the door<br>
My temptation is before me<br>
She is standing before me in that black dress</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s an intriguing thought - what was going through David’s head as
he waited for Bathsheba? <em>Could</em> he have “been good”? From my own
experience with temptation and sin, I’d guess that the answer is no -
“maybe I’ll be good” is true in the abstract, but in practice it’s a lie
to silence a conscience that’s still kicking against the impending
action, rather than any real possibility.</p>
<p>In 1 Corinthians 10:13, Paul writes, “God is faithful: He will not
let you be tried beyond what you are able to bear, but with the trial
will also provide a way out so that you may be able to endure it.” (This
sometimes gets distorted into the popular but unbiblical saying, “God
will never give you more than you can handle.”) Paul writes this to
encourage the Corinthian believers, after warning them of the
Israelites’ failures and rebellions in the desert: even though the
Corinthians will face temptations, like the Israelites did, God will
enable them to stand firm. And I believe that this promise applies to us
as well as to the Corinthians. In my more melancholy moments, though, I
wonder <em>when</em> God provides the way out. What if, by the time
David was waiting at the top of the stairway, alone with his thoughts
and his libido, the way out was in the past? Maybe the way out was to
spend more time writing psalms the day before so that his thoughts would
have been more heavenly-focused that night on the roof. Many people have
observed that the story of David and Bathsheba starts “in the spring of
the year, at the time when kings normally conduct wars” (2 Sam 11:1); if
David had been in the battlefield, alongside his men, the affair could
not have happened. Maybe David’s taking of multiple wives (polygamy was
tolerated but never condoned in the OT, and see Deut 17:17) made it a
bit too easy to take one more. Maybe living in a palace that (literally)
raised David over his fellow Israelites (see Deut 17:20) made it a bit
too easy to view them as merely a means to meet his wants; certainly it
made it a bit too easy to spy on them. And all of this - the palace that
rewarded his position and success, the wives that were expected of a
king of that time, perhaps even the well-earned respite from battle -
was understandable, but the consequences were catastrophic.</p>
<p>I’m afraid that many of our ways out are the same. How many of our
angry outbursts, petty selfishnesses, white lies, or opportunities for
good passed over due to cowardice or laziness or self-absorption - to
say nothing of the bigger abuses and addictions and betrayals and
failures - can we honestly hope to avoid in the heat of the moment? And
how many of them instead have as the way out to read the Bible, to pray,
to fellowship with believers, to practice a lifestyle of serving others
rather than using or ignoring them, so that we have the strength to
stand firm when the trial does come?</p>
<p>As I said, this is a melancholy line of thought. I’d like to think
that I’m capable of doing the right thing, that all I have to do is
muster enough willpower or find the right technique or make the correct
New Year’s resolution. What if, instead, there are trials which I
haven’t even dreamed of bearing down in me in the future, and I’ve
already missed the way out due to my failure to pursue God in the past?
“Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
(Rom 7:24)</p>
<hr />
<p>The Normals’ song “Black Dress” ends with David’s crushing sin with
Bathsheba. But, in the song that immediately follows on their album,
they sing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oh, we of little faith<br>
Oh, You of stubborn grace</p>
<p>We are the beggars, we are the beggars<br>
We are the beggars at the foot
of God’s door</p>
<p>We’ve known the pain of loving in a dying world<br>
And our lies have made us angry at the truth<br>
But Cinderella’s slipper fits us perfectly<br>
And somehow we’re made royalty with You</p>
<p>We are the beggars, we are the beggars<br>
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door<br>
You have welcomed us in</p>
— The Normals, <a
href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0VESl6DafFdKyNxe2zI4Eg?si=eb6e64a1776646a2">“We
Are The Beggars”</a>
</blockquote>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-70900674093213816582022-10-11T22:55:00.005-04:002022-10-11T22:55:42.103-04:00Cyber Damage<p>I hurt my back last week. I was carrying a heavy box and pivoted at
the waist to try to manuever something else, and my back really didn’t
like that. I probably would have been okay if I weren’t still recovering
from an earlier back injury that resulted from leaning to move a bag of
mulch.</p>
<p>By itself, this isn’t very interesting. “Middle-aged man’s body
doesn’t work as well as it used to” is hardly newsworthy; “lift with
your legs, not with your back” is not revolutionary advice. What’s more
surprising to me is how quickly and easily the injuries happened. The
box and bag were heavy but well within the limits of what I thought I
could handle, and the actions only took a few seconds each, but the
resulting injuries were felt for days or weeks. Engineers design their
vehicles, machinery, and tools with safety tolerances to ensure that
they’ll be able to withstand the forces upon them, and yet I suspect
even a high school physics student could calculate the forces and
leverage that I placed on my joints and realize that it wasn’t going to
end well for me. It’s surprising how easily my strength to act exceeds
my strength to handle the results of my actions.</p>
<hr />
<p>Wendell Berry is an American novelist, poet, farmer, and Christian.
As an environmental activist, he’s spoken out against nuclear power,
coal power, mountaintop removal coal mining, and industrial farming. In
his essay <a
href="https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1506&context=hastings_environmental_law_journal">“Damage,”</a>
he describes one of his efforts to improve his farmland:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have a steep wooded hillside that I wanted to be able to pasture
occasionally, but it had no permanent water supply.</p>
<p>About halfway to the top of the slope there is a narrow bench, on
which I thought I could make a small pond. I hired a man with a
bulldozer to dig one. He cleared away the trees and then formed the
pond, cutting into the hill on the upper side, piling the loosened dirt
in a curving earthwork on the lower.</p>
<p>The pond appeared to be a success. Before the bulldozer quit work,
water had already begun to seep in. Soon there was enough to support a
few head of stock. To heal the exposed ground, I fertilized it and sowed
it with grass and clover.</p>
<p>We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and
thawing. The ground grew heavy with water, and soft. The earthwork
slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down
into the pond.</p>
<p>The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little
knowledge. The fault was mine.</p>
<p>I was careful to get expert advice. But this only exemplifies what I
already knew. No expert knows everything about every place, not even
everything about any place. If one’s knowledge of one’s whereabouts is
insufficient, if one’s judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of
little use.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With a palpable sense of guilt, he goes on to reflect on how he
caused “a lasting flaw in the face of the earth… that wound in the
hillside, my place” that can heal only “in the course of time and
nature.” He reflects on how art and culture can make a “map” or
“geography of scars” such as the one on his hillside, reflecting the
past damage caused by our lack of wisdom, in hopes that future people
can learn wisdom and learn their limitations from them. He concludes by
quoting poet William Blake:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Blake gives the just proportion or control in another proverb: “No
bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” Only when our acts
are empowered with more than bodily strength do we need to think of
limits…</p>
<p>But a man with a machine and inadequate culture-such as I was when I
made my pond-is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I sat nursing a sprained back muscle, I questioned Berry’s reading
of Blake; I’m not even convinced that I can be trusted with my own
bodily strength. But this helps prove Berry’s broader point: if we can’t
necessarily be trusted with our own bodily strength, then what makes us
think we can handle a bulldozer, a power plant, an industrial farm?</p>
<hr />
<p>It’s popular to hate on social media nowadays. Psychologist Jonathan
Haidt argues that it’s helped make us <a
href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/">“uniquely
stupid”</a> and contributed to rising polarization; Facebook
whistleblower <a
href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/tech/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-what-we-know/index.html">Frances
Haugen</a> accused Facebook of prioritizing their own profits and growth
over their users’ well-being; <a
href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/academic-study-reveals-new-evidence-of-facebook-s-negative-impact-on-the-mental-health-of-college-students-1031766646">recent
research</a> provides further evidence that Facebook is harmful to
users’ mental health; and so on. And that’s before getting into the more
partisan debates and accusations (“They spread misinformation and
conspiracy theories!” “They’re censoring our free speech!” “They’re
helping the far right!“ “They’re pawns of the far left!“); the constant
scrutiny, critiques, and foibles of their tech billionaires founders and
would-be owners; or various cybersecurity concerns (such as the recent
Twitter whistleblower, <a
href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/23/tech/twitter-whistleblower-peiter-zatko-security/index.html">Peter
“Mudge” Zatko</a>, or concerns over the Chinese Communist Party’s
involvement in TikTok).</p>
<p>The root problem might be more fundamental than that, though. On a <a
href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-214-quiet-quitting/id1515786216?i=1000579919288">recent
podcast</a>, author Cal Newport describes what he calls “Twitter’s
cybernetic curation distribution algorithm,“ with “the effect of all of
these individuals making retweet/non-retweet decisions, all pushing and
pulsing through a power law graph / topology graph… [that] does a really
good job of centering or surfacing things that are interesting or
engaging or would catch our attention.” When I hear “cybernetic,“ I’m
enough of a sci-fi geek that I start thinking of these guys:</p>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwcM-QahPflx5O8cLx0XY4KKjvCyKIcwTMvdumY10tcm89YLwHfc8FKsh_0iayLN8_gn-h2FmzAUiLbdTasbVKLZfN2Wckz6C3yvjVEH0GERFo3u0WUq8EYTlrr-qR4T3NhwFO5POkCfezAo6gSApSndKH7U4SmN_EvndyBK2WAin0gbX9BjlbxR15/s1280/s_c_f_by_ptitvinc_dbhr4ww-fullview.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="723" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwcM-QahPflx5O8cLx0XY4KKjvCyKIcwTMvdumY10tcm89YLwHfc8FKsh_0iayLN8_gn-h2FmzAUiLbdTasbVKLZfN2Wckz6C3yvjVEH0GERFo3u0WUq8EYTlrr-qR4T3NhwFO5POkCfezAo6gSApSndKH7U4SmN_EvndyBK2WAin0gbX9BjlbxR15/s400/s_c_f_by_ptitvinc_dbhr4ww-fullview.jpeg"/></a>
</tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.deviantart.com/ptitvinc/art/S-C-F-694947488">S.C.F., by ptitvinc</a>
</td></tr></table>
</div>
<p>In sci-fi such as anime, literature, and tabletop or video games,
cyborgs are humans who’ve replaced significant parts of their bodies
with high-tech equipment. Sometimes this is done to replace body parts
damaged by trauma. Often, though, it’s done to enhance their abilities
beyond normal human capacity - heightened strength and durability,
electronic senses, built-in weaponry, and so on. (I don’t have much need
for built-in weaponry, but a cybernetic spine would have saved me some
pain.) In many fictional works, the replacements often come with
downsides, such as a reduced sense of touch, or a psychological sense of
alienation from other humans; some works do this as part of a Serious
Examination of What It Means To Be Human, while more gaming-oriented
settings might do it just to discourage players from tricking out their
characters with every piece of cybernetic gear possible.</p>
<p>Speaking more realistically and more technically, “cybernetic“ is
defined as “control and communication in the animal and the machine“ (<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics#Definitions">Normal
Weiner</a>). As applied to Twitter, Cal Newport’s point seems to be that
Twitter is the result of interaction between the “animal“ (humans
decisions and actions to tweet, reply, and retweet) and the machine
(Twitter’s servers sharing people’s tweets with each other and analyzing
tweets to decide what are most interesting / relevant / shareable /
viral, based on what people have revealed of their interests).</p>
<p>Just like a sci-fi cyborg, the result is strength well beyond normal
human capacity: an endless stream of engaging, sometimes addicting,
content; the ability to view in real time the shared thoughts of
society’s elites, friends, strangers from around the world; the
potential to have thousands or millions of people interact with what you
have to say. And, just like a sci-fi cyborg, there are downsides: a
reduced sense of touch and a sense of alienation from the people on the
other side of the screen, as facial expressions and nuance and gestures
are stripped away, as complex thoughts and discussions are crammed into
280 characters, as the platform’s incentives push people to forget the
humanity of those they’re interacting with and engage in increasingly
extreme behavior to get likes, go viral, and fit in with their similarly
incentivized online peers.</p>
<p>And, if Wendell Berry is right, if we scarcely have the wisdom to
handle a bulldozer or a power plant - if our own musculature can exceed
what our strengths can sustain - then what hope do we have of handling
the power law graph / topology graph of a cybernetic curation
distribution algorithm?</p>
<p>Our online world is changing so rapidly; how can we possibly have a
chance to build up Berry’s geography of scars to learn our limitations
there?</p>
<p>Plenty of solutions have been proposed: Give up social media, get
more government involvement, put the right person in charge. Many of
these solutions are, I think, a bit facile. Maybe we should start
smaller: Practice the humility of recognizing the limits of our wisdom.
Don’t overexert our strengths - don’t do something just because we can.
Be sensitive to the damage that our strength may be causing to others or
to our environment. Be human more. Be cybernetic less.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-24790375060087186692022-10-03T23:03:00.005-04:002022-10-03T23:08:17.592-04:00The Virtue of Strange Service<p>Since Queen Elizabeth II’s death last month, I’ve seen countless
takes and commentaries on her reign and on the British monarchy.</p>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmDGld6jJpVxTHgXRmfk82SpNw67wNW27Mgq183eLzG4-lxH4yt6_dKyhfxgyb6toJgwYBH2iLcF54ePEbno2c5Mq8P9n348JhwIxWuAGd_W7PIf60WD8eslzW3bOcRPWrfhy6XhnvSMhVNRtQ6AyRAVrHwP-2alqBU64Wa4ZSgtpt9Cinxrh9udi5/s800/Day_194_-_West_Midlands_Police_-_Royal_Diamond_Jubilee_Visit_%287555521830%29.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmDGld6jJpVxTHgXRmfk82SpNw67wNW27Mgq183eLzG4-lxH4yt6_dKyhfxgyb6toJgwYBH2iLcF54ePEbno2c5Mq8P9n348JhwIxWuAGd_W7PIf60WD8eslzW3bOcRPWrfhy6XhnvSMhVNRtQ6AyRAVrHwP-2alqBU64Wa4ZSgtpt9Cinxrh9udi5/s320/Day_194_-_West_Midlands_Police_-_Royal_Diamond_Jubilee_Visit_%287555521830%29.jpeg"/></a>
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<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28731665">Royal Diamond Jubilee Visit</a>, by West Midlands Police
</td></tr></table></div>
<p>On the one hand, she was by all accounts extremely devoted to serving
her country and the institution of the monarchy. Commentator David French <a
href="https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/queen-elizabeth-and-the-power-of">discusses</a>
her lifetime of service, as well as the military service of Princes
William, Harry, Andrew, and Philip, and concludes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. As Andrew
[Sullivan] notes, when Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she “was tasked
as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing
that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly
human—for the rest of her life.”…</p>
<p>Duty and honor without power—that’s the role of modern royalty… There
is also immense meaning when a monarch lives the values their role
demands. Queen Elizabeth lived with honor and did her duty, and in so
doing she helped bind together a fractious people. She helped give them
a sense of shared identity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On the other hand, the monarchy - the idea that someone should,
simply by accident of birth, be placed into that role for 70 years - is
a strange institution, especially to Americans in our belief that all
men are created equal. (We even fought a war to end the monarchy -
although <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/Royalist-Revolution-Monarchy-American-Founding/dp/067473534X">historian
Eric Nelson</a> argues that the early American revolutionaries saw
themselves as rebelling against Parliament and weren’t necessarily
against the monarchy.)</p>
<p>As part of her role, Elizabeth studiously avoided commenting on
political positions. David French explains, “Britain’s constitutional
monarchy separates the functions of the head of state and the head of
government. The head of state is doing her job when she’s explicitly not
political, when she instead conducts the formal affairs of the state and
embodies (as well as any human can) certain core national values.”
British theologian Alastair Roberts <a
href="https://twitter.com/zugzwanged/status/1570434333600620546">writes</a>,
“In resisting entanglement in political conflict and refraining from
participation in public political debate, the monarch guards their true
character and influence. They stand for something that greatly exceeds
political conflicts and party interests, even highly charged ones.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are plenty of important political and
national issues that may deserve people’s attention. At what threshold
does someone with influence decide that something <em>is</em> worth
addressing? If the argument is that, in order to preserve your influence
for some future need, you must avoid using your influence to address a
current need, at what point does that become self-defeating?</p>
<p>Queen Elizabeth was loved by millions of people; the <a
href="https://www.space.com/queen-queue-funeral-space-satellite-visible">hundreds
of thousands of people who stood in queue</a>, sometimes for twenty-four
hours or more, in order to pay their respects after her death was a
powerful illustration of this. However, the British monarchy and Queen
Elizabeth are a reminder and representation of Britain’s history of
imperialism, colonialism, and slavery for many others - for example,
blacks and Desi who are still dealing with the aftereffects of the slave
trade and colonization.</p>
<p>Queen Elizabeth supported numerous charities and <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II#Beliefs,_activities_and_interests">helped
raise over £1.4 billion for them</a>. On the other hand, she had a
personal fortune of roughly $500 million, simply by virtue of her birth,
which she was able to pass on tax-free to Prince Charles - in addition
to the significant assets of the monarchy itself.</p>
<p>Queen Elizabeth was a devout Christian; in 2000, she said, “For me
the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God
provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of
you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ’s words and
example.” <a
href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/preachers-talk-about-christianity-queen-elizabeth-went-out-lived-it">N.T.
Wright speaks warmly</a> of her love for and service to Jesus. As
“Defender of the Faith” and head of the Church of England in a secular,
post-Christian country, she no doubt had an influence for God in her
country. On the other hand, as an American Christian, I’m firmly in
favor of the separation of church and state: I believe that political
power can too easily corrupt the church, and I believe that God gives us
free will and we should therefore avoid coercing or compelling others,
and there’s an argument that the establishment of religion has
contributed to Europe being a post-Christian continent (by allowing
Christian churches there to become complacent in government support
rather than striving to innovate and reach out).</p>
<p>What do we make of all of that?</p>
<p>If nothing else, Elizabeth’s birth into the royal family reminds me
that the American approach of egalitarianism and free individual choice
is a relative novelty. Jesus tells a parable which one person might have
ten times the gifting of another. Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist
were set aside from birth; Moses, David, Jeremiah, Paul, and others were
given huge responsibilities with little say in the matter. The obvious
counterargument here is that these people were directly and explicitly
chosen by God. Elizabeth, in our understanding, was not (except in the
general Romans 13 sense of all human authorities existing under God’s
control). For whatever reason, though - whether differences in God’s
designs and God-given talents, inequalities from human competition and
sin, or the vagaries of a centuries-old British institution - the
differences persist, often in spite of people’s efforts to address them,
and what you do with your own gifts and powers is often more important
than comparing where you stand relative to someone else (Jn 21:22).</p>
<p>It occurred to me, though, that a more direct Biblical reference may
be the Rechabites of Jeremiah 35. During the last days of the nation of
Judah, when the Israelites were practicing empty formalistic public worship of
the Lord, mixed with private syncretism and idolatry, Jeremiah
fruitlessly tried to warn his fellow Israelites of God’s coming
judgment. In a strange story partway through his book, Jeremiah sent a
message to the Rechabites, apparently a small ethnic group descended
from Moses’ father-in-law who lived among the Israelites, to invite them
to the temple. There, he offered them some wine. They refused,
explaining,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We do not drink wine because our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab
commanded us not to. He told us, ‘You and your children must never drink
wine. Do not build houses. Do not plant crops. Do not plant a vineyard
or own one. Live in tents all your lives. If you do these things you
will live a long time in the land that you wander about on.’ We and our
wives and our sons and daughters have obeyed everything our ancestor
Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In response, Jeremiah blessed the Rechabites (Jer. 35:18-19) and
contrasted their behavior with the Israelites’:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘I, the Lord, say: “You must learn a lesson from this about obeying
what I say. Jonadab son of Rechab ordered his descendants not to drink
wine. His orders have been carried out. To this day his descendants have
drunk no wine because they have obeyed what their ancestor commanded
them. But I have spoken to you over and over again, but you have not
obeyed me.”’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The point isn’t that Jonadab’s restrictions were from God or were, in
and of themselves, automatically good. The point is that the Rechabites,
out of a desire to honor their ancestor and out of a belief that a
simple nomadic lifestyle was worth practicing, faithfully obeyed. As a
result, their faithfulness to human instruction, given by one person
centuries ago, presented a powerful rebuke to the Israelites repeated
unfaithfulness to God’s commandments, delivered repeatedly through Moses
and the prophets.</p>
<p>I’ve seen a lot of the takes since Queen Elizabeth’s death, but my
opinion on the British monarchy isn’t worth much. On this side of the
pond, it doesn’t really affect me, and I can’t change anything. But I
can appreciate her faithful service to her country (even if it did come
in the form of a strange, anachronistic, human-made institution), and I
can appreciate her faithful service to Christ.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-4096271938847665742022-07-18T23:24:00.002-04:002022-07-18T23:25:21.556-04:00High Priestly Garments and Working Steel<blockquote>
<p>The robe is to be on Aaron as he ministers, and his sound will be
heard when he enters the Holy Place before the Lord and when he leaves,
so that he does not die… These [linen undergarments] must be on Aaron
and his sons when they enter the tent of meeting, or when they approach
the altar to minister in the Holy Place, so that they bear no iniquity
and die. It is to be a perpetual ordinance for him and for his
descendants after him.</p>
<p>— Exodus 28:35,43</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My first thought when these verses were pointed out to me was of some
sort of hazmat or biohazard suit. The sort of thing you’d wear to
protect yourself from ebola.</p>
<p>My second thought was that this metaphor would have God in the place
of ebola. That seems quite wrong, theologically, so I went with the
image of a steelworker instead.</p>
<p>Molten metal can range <a
href="https://ohsonline.com/articles/2017/03/01/the-need-for-a-shield-against-steel.aspx">from
1,200°F to 6000°F</a>. Early industrial steelworkers (for example, in
Carnegie’s 19th century steel mills) had minimal safety gear, perhaps
just <a
href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegie-steel-business/">two
layers of wool long-johns</a>, but later steelworkers wear <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO-z3LtfPec">layers</a> of FR
(flame-resistant) clothing, an apron (sometimes), hood, gloves, and
steel-toed boots, all engineered to protect against flames and splashes
of molten metal and reflect heat. Depending on the era, clothing would
be made of leather wrapped in wet burlap, or asbestos, or aluminized
Kevlar capable of withstanding <a
href="http://www.firesleevetec.com/html/2014/Fiberglass-Fabric_0923/57.html">3000°F
of radiant heat and 1100°F of direct contact</a>. Some walking surfaces
could be hot enough to melt rubber, so steelworkers could wear wooden
shoe guards around their boots for further protection. Melters at the
furnace itself would wear cobalt-colored melter’s glasses to let them
look directly at molten iron to check its temperature. All of this is to
deal with the fact that steelworkers work daily with forces and energy
far too powerful for humans to withstand unaided.</p>
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<p>Reading the Old Testament, it seems that this is an accurate
metaphor. God wanted to, and chose to, dwell with his people and walk
among them as their God (Lev. 26:11-12). To show this, he placed his
presence in the tabernacle and the temple, even though (as Solomon said
when dedicating the temple) “heaven and the highest heaven cannot
contain you, how much less this house that” Solomon built (2 Chron
6:18). Yet God’s power, holiness, and glory, when encountering human sin
and frailty, are simply not safe. No one could see God’s face and live
(Ex. 33:20); even hearing him speak or seeing his messenger brought fear
of death (Deut. 5:24-26, Jdg 6:21-22). When God came down onto Mount
Sinai to deliver the Law to Moses, anyone who touched the mountain would
be executed; otherwise, God would “break out against them” (Ex.
19:12-13,24). Mishandling the ark of the covenant, which symbolized
God’s throne within his dwelling place of the tabernacle or temple,
resulted in death (Num 4:5, 20; 1 Sam 6:19; 2 Sam 6:6-7). Even the
chosen high priest could only enter the most holy place, the place in
the tabernacle or temple where the ark of the covenant was kept, once a
year. There’s a story that the high priest would tie a rope around his
ankle when entering the most holy place so that, if he was struck dead
by God’s holiness, his body could be safely dragged out; this is
apparently <a
href="https://www.bibleplaces.com/blog/2009/01/that-rope-around-high-priests-ankle/">a
myth from the Middle Ages</a>, but the Bible does record several priests
and would-be priests who died because they failed to properly follow the
rituals laid out in the Law.</p>
<p>Read within this light, the rules regarding the priests’ garments in
Exodus 28 and the rituals for consecrating priests in Exodus 29 make
more sense. The different elements of the high priest’s clothing - a
breastpiece of gold and semiprecious stones, an ephod of woven gold and
cloth with engraved onyx stones, a robe decorated with golden bells and
pomegranates made of yarn, a turban with an engraved golden plate - have
symbolic importance (some of which may be unclear now), but besides any
specific symbolism, the details of the precision, artistry and expense
that went into the garments served to demonstrate the care and value
needed to properly approach God in his holiness.</p>
<p>Reading the Old Testament gives me the impression that the priests
were closer to the long-john-clad laborers of Carnegie’s day, one
mistake away from disaster, than to the drilled, carefully protected
steelworkers of today. This is probably an unfair impression, since
tabernacle and temple worship continued for roughly one thousand years,
and we see mostly low points from its early days.</p>
<p>It does, however, bring us to the New Testament. Christ, as our great
high priest, fulfills perfectly the role which Aaron and his descendants
did with fear and trembling.</p>
<p>More than that, Christ let us “confidently approach the throne of
grace” (Heb. 4:16). What the high priest could do only once a year,
painstakingly clothed in his safety gear, at the earthly representation
of God’s throne, we can now do with freely and confidence at the throne
of God itself.</p>
<p>More than that, we’re told to clothe ourselves with Christ (Rom
13:14, Gal 3:27). It’s as if the high priest’s safety garments are
turned inside out - instead of dressing up to protect and isolate
ourselves from God’s holiness and power, God enables us to dress up as
Christ, the image of God. As described by C.S. Lewis, “If you like, you
are pretending. Because, of course… you are not being like The Son of
God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you
are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and
self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up
as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek.” As outrageous, perhaps, as
thinking we could sculpt a suit of molten steel. But Lewis continues,
explaining what it means to put on Christ:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A real Person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are
saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a
good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as
much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the
world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the
old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has…
Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort
of thing; into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way,
has the same kind of life as God; which shares in His power, joy,
knowledge and eternity. (<em>Mere Christianity</em>, p. 146-147,
149)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This gets at a truth which we sometimes neglect in Western
evangelical churches. We describe salvation and the Christian life as
being freed from sin, receiving the promise of eternal life, and being
sanctified to be more moral people. And it is all of these things - but
not just these things. 2 Peter 1:4 says that we will become “partakers
of the divine nature.” Orthodox Christians refer to this as
divinization. It’s not that our fundamental nature is changed, that we
cease being humans and become divine; instead, through union with God,
we are suffused with his grace and holiness. Orthodox Christians use the
analogy of a metal in fire; it doesn’t stop being metal, but it’s
suffused with the fire’s energy, like molten steel, radiating light and
heat to all around it.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-10827769997433553772022-07-10T23:17:00.005-04:002022-07-10T23:25:51.770-04:00A Eulogy for Monoliths<p>I have an <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1523513527?tag=atlasobscura-20"><em>Atlas
Obscura</em> desk calendar</a>. Each day, it showcases a different
location around the world: sometimes a natural wonder (such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierve_el_Agua#/media/File:HierveElAguaMexico1.jpg">Hierve
el Agua</a>, a massive rock formation in Mexico that resembles a
waterfall), sometimes unique wildlife (such as the <a href="https://www.discovery.com/nature/rare-blue-ghost-fireflies-only-glow-in-one-part-of-north-america">blue
ghost fireflies</a> of North Carolina), sometimes human art (such as the
<a href="https://www.visit-kuwait.com/visiting/attractions/house-of-mirrors">House
of Mirrors</a>, a private house decorated entirely in mirror mosaics by
Italian-Kuwaiti artist Lidia al-Qattan, or <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/decebals-head">Decebalus’s
head</a>, a 140-foot-tall mountainside carving of 1st century Romanian
king), sometimes just odd bits of local culture (such as a Manhattan
collection of items salvaged from trash, kept in the second floor of a
garbage truck garage). Each day offers a little glimpse into the
variety, beauty, creativity, weirdness, and wonder of earth and its
inhabitants.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiZElqG5RxZQtDrObOhokbxoySUUz9obimRlgV-nCQeWSiUwkb_zVYYqpZ1MAJGH-ar9r7Z8omTJVfgVLeG3PTiSu5OZ8VBhHM2qmGUmMEZEMe-pSTdFp7yTABmeRgq34-yeMxtvjI1TIlOuHuYMeKTOZ6cN_Ym9vRtsDRrWkWgSBABXnYqLp0fHn9w" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Georgia Guidestones" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1920" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiZElqG5RxZQtDrObOhokbxoySUUz9obimRlgV-nCQeWSiUwkb_zVYYqpZ1MAJGH-ar9r7Z8omTJVfgVLeG3PTiSu5OZ8VBhHM2qmGUmMEZEMe-pSTdFp7yTABmeRgq34-yeMxtvjI1TIlOuHuYMeKTOZ6cN_Ym9vRtsDRrWkWgSBABXnYqLp0fHn9w=w400-h266" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118062388">Photo by Quentin Melson</a></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones">Georgia
Guidestones</a> are not, to my knowledge, part of my Atlas Obscura desk
calendar, but they easily could be. Built in 1980 by a pseudonymous
“Robert C. Christian,” representing an anonymous and mysterious group,
they’ve been called “America’s Stonehenge.” They consisted of six
granite slabs, weighing a total of 237,746 pounds, and are believed to
have been intended as a message to survivors of a nuclear war. They were
intended as a compass, calendar, and clock and contained the following
guidelines in seven different languages:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with
nature.</li>
<li>Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.</li>
<li>Unite humanity with a living new language.</li>
<li>Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered
reason.</li>
<li>Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.</li>
<li>Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a
world court.</li>
<li>Avoid petty laws and useless officials.</li>
<li>Balance personal rights with social duties.</li>
<li>Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the
infinite.</li>
<li>Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room
for nature.</li>
</ol>
<p>Since their unveiling, they became a tourist attraction (drawing
roughly 20,000 annual visitors) and the target of significant
speculation (including a documentary) as to their purpose and their
anonymous creators’ motivation. They’ve also become the subject of
various conspiracy theories; maintaining a world population under 500
million could perhaps be tractable after a nuclear holocaust, but
”guiding reproduction“ evokes dark memories of eugenics and racism, and
Christians such as Kandiss Taylor, 2022 Georgia Republican candidate for
governor, have alleged that they’re Satanic and related to the New World
Order.</p>
<p>On July 6, an unknown perpetrator set a bomb that destroyed one of
the six slabs and heavily damaged the capstone. The remaining
Guidestones were dismantled for safety reasons. The motives of the
attacker are unknown, but it’s likely that they were spurred by the
accusations of Satanism and New World Order.</p>
<p>I feel that the world is a bit poorer for their loss. I am, of
course, opposed to Satanism, and I do believe that there are malign
spiritual forces active in the world. But I believe that Satan is rarely
so obvious as to engrave his guidelines on tourist-attraction granite;
the consumerism, tribalism, and pressures to compromise one’s ethics and
beliefs that permeate modern American society are much greater threats
for most of us than eugenics. And, if the Guidestones were intended to
promote the New World Order - if they were part of a conspiracy of
global elites to establish a totalitarian world government, as
understood by some interpretations of the Book of Revelation - then any
effort we might make to stop God’s prophecy seems rather misguided. I
might even go further and, rather than opposing them, respond with
“Maranatha!” (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20); I’m not exactly looking forward
to the end-times tribulations as understood by many Christians, but I’m
very much looking forward to Christ’s return, and it seems that we may
have to pass through the one to get to the other.</p>
<p>These particular conspiracy theories are pretty easy to dismiss. But
there’s a deeper consideration here. There’s a strain of Christianity
that’s especially attentive and alert to spiritual forces of darkness,
to sinister hidden motives, to political or social actions that seem
innocuous but may be the first steps toward an evil end. And we should
be on guard against such things (1 Pe 5:8, Eph 6:12, 1 Cor 10:19-20,
etc.). As James Sire writes in <a href="https://amzn.to/3OR60Zb"><em>The
Universe Next Door</em></a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The New Age has reopened a door closed since Christianity drove out
the demons from the woods, desacralized the natural world and generally
took a dim view of excessive interest in the affairs of Satan’s kingdom
of fallen angels. Now they are back, knocking on university dorm room
doors, sneaking around psychology laboratories and chilling the spines
of Ouija players. Modern folk have fled from grandfather’s clockwork
universe to great-grandfather’s chamber of gothic horrors… While spirit
activity has been constant in areas where Christianity has barely
penetrated, it has been little reported in the West from the time of
Jesus. Christ is said to have driven the spirits from field and stream,
and when Christianity permeates a society the spirit world seems to
disappear or go into hiding. It is only in the last few decades that the
spirits of the woods and rivers, the air and the darkness have been
invited back by those who have rejected the claims of Christianity and
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. <em>(p. 166, 168, 3rd ed.)</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a lot to unpack and evaluate there, and the topic of how we
interpret and understand spiritual activity in Bible times and ours is
far too involved to get into here. But this sort of “direct,” explicit
spiritual activity is not, I think, the greatest risk in modern America.
Modern culture instead seems to <em>de</em>-spiritualize, depersonalize,
and homogenize everything. We’ve gone from family-owned stores where
proprietors and shoppers knew each other, to store chains where we
interact with minimum-wage workers whose upper management have done
their best to make them interchangeable, to (post-pandemic) curbside
pickup and deliveries, as if even the minimal interaction of the
check-out line is too inconvenient. We can travel two thousand miles
cross country—an unthinkable distance in earlier history—and eat at
restaurants and stay at hotels barely different than where we left.
Internet and cable TV news lets us obsess over words and pictures from
people in other states and cities who we’ll never interact with, while
the decline of local news means we often know more about current events
in Ukraine than in our own communities. So many facets of our existence—our interactions online, our viewing and reading habits, our purchases—are quantized and aggregated and turned into grist for corporations’
efforts to optimize their efficiency and profits. Social media collapses
the distances between people—everyone’s talking to each other <em>all
the time</em>, with little space to be alone or to be different or to
agree to disagree. Our culture wars further collapse the distances and
distinct spheres that people used to operate in; Yuval Levin <a href="https://comment.org/how-to-curb-the-culture-war/">observes</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our culture war plainly lacks boundaries. Every realm of our lives
has become one of its battlefields. Not only in politics but also in
schools and universities, in corporate America, in our places of worship
and places of work, in civil society and in our private lives, online
and in person, there is often just no getting away from that intense,
divisive, and rigidly partisan struggle.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It may sound like I’m bemoaning the decline of Western civilization
or pining for a lost past. That isn’t my intent. There are many
wonderful benefits of our modern economy, technologies, and
conveniences; our culture has improved in some areas even as it
struggles in others; past times and cultures have dealt with their own
sins and struggles; and, as Christians, this world is not our home
regardless.</p>
<p>But, precisely because every culture deals with its own sins and
struggles, I want to be aware of this one. I want to celebrate the
creative, the quirky, the weird. I want to be reminded of the variety
and uniqueness of other people, countries, environments, and cultures. I
like pausing my workday of developing and debugging software code to
read a bit of whimsy or wonder from the Atlas Obscura calendar on my
desk. I like living in a world where people can use their God-given
gifts, abilities, and resources to create Internet sites and optimize
check-out lines but also carve 140-foot statues of Romanian kings and
erect mysterious monoliths in Georgia. And sometimes the results may
seem wasteful or weird or questionable, but we can question the bad
while still thanking God for the good.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-28951643910378786942022-06-16T20:49:00.001-04:002022-06-16T20:49:18.745-04:00Deuteronomy 6:4-9<h4 id="hear-o-israel"><em>Hear, O Israel!</em></h4>
<p>Israel’s name means “he strives with God.” Jacob strove with man and God for most of the first part of his life - manipulating his brother Esau into selling his birthright, tricking his father Isaac into giving him his blessing, scheming against his father-in-law Laban, bargaining with God after God’s appearance to him in a dream at Bethel, wrestling with God at Peniel. And Israel, the nation named after Jacob, strove with God too, in continual cycles of rebellion, apostasy, and syncretism. Here, Israel is instead offered - and commanded - to cease their strivings and love God.</p>
<p>The name Israel may also be translated, “God strives.” God strove with Israel. As my grandfather said, “God chose Israel to bear the full brunt of his faithfulness.” No matter how many times they tried to leave him, he pursued them, through prophets, priests, law, and judgment. And, when even that was not sufficient to bring his people to him, God gave his own life.</p>
<p>And God strove <em>for</em> Israel. He chose his people; he delivered them from slavery and oppression in Egypt; he fights for them.</p>
<p>When Jacob wrestled with God at Peniel and was given the name Israel, he finally understood: he strove with God, not in an attempt to bargain with him or exploit his own advantages, but because he recognized that he was dependent on God to bless him. We strive with God to pursue him, to be faithful to him, to acknowledge our need for his blessing.</p>
<h4 id="the-lord-our-god"><em>The Lord our God</em></h4>
<p>“Lord” is how our English Bibles render the Hebrew Yahweh: God’s name as revealed by himself to his covenant people, “I am who I am.” Quoting <a href="https://soundcloud.com/alastairadversaria/biblical-reading-and-reflections-february-23rd-exodus-3-matthew-918-34?in=alastairadversaria/sets/morning-prayer-lectionary">Alastair Roberts</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And the answer that God gives here [to Moses in Exodus 3:14], “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be” could in some way be seen as not an answer. God isn’t defined by anything other than himself. When we think about naming things we’re typically naming things as a means of getting control over them. When we give something a name we feel we have some power over it, some understanding of it, and yet when God gives his name, God is the only one who can pronounce his name truly, and when he pronounced his name is not a name that we can define relative to anything else. God is self-defining and God’s name is also something that speaks of his existence and perhaps also his self-determination. God will be what he will be. It’s not for us to put God within our control; we cannot do that.</p>
<p>A further thing to reflect on here might be the other attempts that we see in Scripture to ask God’s name. In the book of Judges 13:17-19, the name of the angel of the Lord is asked by Manoah and his wife, and the response is, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” It is a name that is not truly given. But then Manoah offers sacrifices to “the God who works wonders,” playing upon the name. It seemed here that maybe there’s a giving of a name in a not giving of a name. In Exodus 3, maybe it’s the other way around; maybe there is a giving of a name, but that name that is given is also in some sense not a name. God has a name but the name itself describes something of God’s ineffability, that God cannot be captured by any name, that no name actually is adequate to speak of God, that God exists beyond all names, and what names we have that we used to speak of God are all found to be lacking. Ultimately, God will be who he will be…</p>
<p>There’s a veiling but also an unveiling… [of] God’s commitment to be with his people. Remember, the first time we see “I will be” is in reference to God’s promise, his assuring promise to be with Moses as he goes to the Egyptians. And perhaps one of the things that the name of God describes here is his unchanging and unfaltering commitment to his people, the fact that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever, he’s the Alpha and the Omega, he’s the beginning and the end, he’s the one who does not change, and as a result he will be with his people and assure his people of his presence, not just in their present sufferings but in whatever sufferings they may face in the future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, by affirming that the <small>LORD</small> is our God, we affirm his transcendence and his glory, his existence beyond creation and beyond our understanding, but also his presence with us. And we may remember that, while his foundational self-revelation to Moses expressed his ineffability and supremacy, in his ultimate self-revelation in Christ, he gave the name Jesus: “the Lord saves.” <small>I AM</small> saves his people.</p>
<h4 id="the-lord-is-one"><em>The Lord is one!</em></h4>
<p>Quoting <a href="https://soundcloud.com/alastairadversaria/biblical-reading-and-reflections-may-5th-deuteronomy-6-luke-431-44?in=alastairadversaria/sets/morning-prayer-lectionary">Alastair Roberts</a> again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There are various ways in which this statement has been interpreted and translated. Some see it as, “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” That’s a statement of the exclusively of God as the Lord of his people. There are no other gods that they will have besides him…</p>
<p>Another way to take it is that “the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” That being a statement about God’s nature: that God is unique, there is no other being like the Lord, or that God is simple: that there is no division in God, there’s no separation is no distinction between action and potential in God or between genus and species.</p>
<p>It could also be interpreted as, “The Lord our God is one Lord.” The claim there would be that the Lord is not many, a lord of this location and a lord of that location, but the Lord of all the earth, the Lord of all things.</p>
</blockquote>
<h4 id="you-shall-love-the-lord-your-god"><em>You shall love the Lord your God</em></h4>
<p>“Love” is a heavily overloaded word in English; it may cover how we feel about anything from our spouses to our sports teams to God to pizza. The NET Bible suggests that here it “communicates not so much an emotional idea as one of covenant commitment. To love the Lord is to be absolutely loyal and obedient to him in every respect.”</p>
<p>I appreciate Voddie Baucham’s definition of love: “an act of the will, accompanied by emotion, that leads to action on behalf of its object.” He applies this definition in discussing the New Testament’s command to love each other, but it can apply to God as well: We choose to love God by committing to be faithful to him. This doesn’t depend on emotion, but it’s accompanied by emotion; how can we not feel gratitude, awe, and affection? And we act based on this, seeking to learn more about God, enjoy his presence, deepen our relationship with him, and serve him.</p>
<h4 id="with-all-your-heart-and-with-all-your-soul-and-with-all-your-might."><em>With all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.</em></h4>
<p>The heart, in Hebrew thought, was the seat of the will and intellect. We must love God with all of our minds.</p>
<p>The soul refers to someone’s self, life, or being. The Hebrews didn’t think of a human as the union of a physical body and immaterial soul - that was a Greek idea - so the idea is instead to love God with all of one’s being, with all of one’s self. I too often feel scattered or dis-integrated - pulled in a dozen directions by worries and distractions and competing desires. I instead want to be integrated and single-minded, making God my goal, and letting the rest of my life flow out of that.</p>
<p>And we must love God with all of our might - our capabilities, abilities, strength.</p>
<h4><em>And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.</em></h4>
<p>We’re told to <em>talk</em> about these commandments. People naturally enjoy talking about what’s important to them: current events, their families, their work and hobbies, sports teams’ accomplishments, the media they’re following. It should be natural to talk about what we’re learning about God, what our church is doing, what God is doing around us, how we seek to serve and grow.</p>
<p>We’re told to create <em>physical</em> reminders of these commandments. Early Jews took this literally: they put fragments of Scripture in leather boxes, called tefillin or phylacteries, and tied them around their arms and forehead. Physical practices and symbols like those can become rote or legalistic, but if used properly, they serve a useful purpose: we’re physical creatures, and so physical objects and actions serve as a way to direct, reinforce, and remind ourselves of our focus. This may be most obvious as part of the role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but many Christians also practice it with physical Bibles, kneeling, lifting hands, intentionally chosen decorations and mementos, and so on.</p>
<p>And we’re told to <em>teach</em> these commandments. That can mean formal instruction, but much of teaching is simply a way of life: demonstrating the kind of life that’s transformed by God, showing what it means to follow God, showing that God is <em>real</em> and worth following, so that people who want to know what it means to follow God can use us as examples (Phil. 4:9).</p>
<p>And underlying all of these specific actions is the assumption, belief, and knowledge that this commandment in Deuteronomy 6:4-9 is part of God’s Word; that, like all of God’s Word, it’s worth repeating, studying, and meditating on. At 114 English words, the average adult can read these verses in thirty seconds or so; yet it’s repeated every morning and evening as part of Jewish prayer services for thousands of years. And, as we’ve seen here, even these 114 words have significant depth and richness as we meditate on God’s glory, transcendence, uniqueness, and faithfulness and on what it means to be part of God’s people, to recognize him, to love him with all of our being, and to live out from that.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-44814106439097334482022-04-27T22:27:00.000-04:002022-04-27T22:27:08.032-04:00God and Government<p>Between Facebook, Twitter, and the ever-expanding op-ed and “analysis” sections of online news sites, it’s hard to go online without finding political opinions. Too bad they all disagree with each other.</p>
<p>Putin invaded Ukraine because Biden is weak. Putin invaded Ukraine because the US has been encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence for years. Putin would have invaded Ukraine regardless. Biden is doing too much for Ukraine and should pay more attention to matters at home; Biden can’t do more for Ukraine, because we might provoke Russia; Biden should do more for Ukraine and should make Russia afraid of provoking us. Biden is doing great; Trump would do much better; Trump would do much worse.</p>
<p>Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of war (Mt 24:6).</p>
<p>Inflation is transitory and not much to worry about; inflation is a huge problem, and we should vote the politicians responsible out of office. Inflation is because of too much pandemic spending, so we should spend less. Inflation is because of supply chain problems or human infrastructure limitations, and we should spend more to address those.</p>
<p>Jesus said that we would always have the poor (Mt 26:11).</p>
<p>Covid arose naturally from a wet market; Covid leaked from a lab; Covid was a Chinese bioweapon; Covid was the product of an American conspiracy. The best way to deal with it is mask mandates and lockdowns; mask mandates and lockdowns are harmful and should be avoided; we need more vaccination; we need less vaccination.</p>
<p>Revelation says that death and pain will be removed in the new heaven and new earth (Rev. 21:4) - but not before then.</p>
<p>And I enjoy some of these discussions, and I’ve engaged in a fair number myself. But I can’t help but think there’s sometimes some arrogance there. I am neither a foreign policy expert nor an economist nor an epidemiologist; I can have an informed opinion, but humility should remind me that I likely don’t know better than the professionals, and I may not have much basis for thinking that my preferred remedy would actually work.</p>
<p>Within my chosen niche of software development, we have plenty of our own opinions to argue about - enough that these have earned the tongue-in-cheek name of “holy wars.” Which text editor should you use to write source code? Which hardware design is best? Which programming language is best? Should you use a Mac or a PC? One of the most famous holy wars is whether programmers should format their source code with the tab key or the spacebar; this has gained enough notoriety that it made an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7PLxL8jIl8">appearance</a> on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”</p>
<p>Even tabs versus spaces, though, pales next to the debate of Windows versus Linux. For years, an assortment of developers and upstart businesses pushed Linux, a free operating system, as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, backed by Microsoft’s billions of dollars and monopoly business power. Countless marketing initiatives, technical whitepapers, and websites pushed one or the other. Developers on both platforms competed to write the best Windows-only or Linux-only software. Emotions ran high. In one of the more noteworthy examples, Dan Greer, a cybersecurity researcher, wrote a 2003 report arguing that Microsoft Windows’ dominance was a threat to national security. He was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Geer">fired</a> from his consultancy the day the report was released.</p>
<p>It turns out that the answer to Windows versus Linux is, depending on how you slice it, either “Both” or “Who cares?” “Both” is because businesses still happily run Windows, while servers and cloud computing (even at Microsoft) often run Linux; “who cares?” is because the operating system on your desktop matters little when all of your activities are conducted through a web browser, and mobile phones and tablets have replaced desktop and laptop computers, both as a focus of innovation and as many people’s primary computing device. Time and change rendered the entire debate irrelevant in ways that neither side foresaw.</p>
<p>Dan Greer is relevant to this discussion for reasons other than his Windows-versus-Linux foray. In 2013, he delivered a talk, <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/dan_geer_explai.html">“Tradeoffs in Cyber Security”</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I previously worked for a data protection company. Our product was, and I believe still is, the most thorough on the market. By “thorough” I mean the dictionary definition, “careful about doing something in an accurate and exact way.” To this end, installing our product instrumented every system call on the target machine. Data did not and could not move in any sense of the word “move” without detection. Every data operation was caught and monitored. It was total surveillance data protection. Its customers were companies that don’t accept half-measures. What made this product stick out was that very thoroughness, but here is the point: Unless you fully instrument your data handling, it is not possible for you to say what did not happen. With total surveillance, and total surveillance alone, it is possible to treat the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence. Only when you know everything that <em>did</em> happen with your data can you say what did <em>not</em> happen with your data…</p>
<p>We all know the truism, that knowledge is power. We all know that there is a subtle yet important distinction between information and knowledge. We all know that a negative declaration like “X did not happen” can only [be] proven true if you have the enumeration of <em>everything</em> that did happen and can show that X is not in it. We all know that when a President says “Never again” he is asking for the kind of outcome for which proving a negative, lots of negatives, is categorically essential. Proving a negative requires omniscience. <em>Omniscience requires god-like powers</em>…</p>
<p>John Gilmore famously said, “Never give a government a power you wouldn’t want a despot to have.” I might amend that to read “Never demand the government have a power you wouldn’t want a despot to have.”… When you embark on making failure impossible, and that includes delivering on statements like “Never again,” you are forced into cost-benefit analyses where at least one of the variables is infinite. [Emphasis added.]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don’t know Greer’s religious beliefs - if he’s actually trying to make a theological point, or if he’s using (to him) nothing more than a vivid metaphor. But he’s right. In some of the more extreme versions of our political debates - and in some of what we ask our governments to do or seem to think they can do - we act like war or poverty or disease would cease to be urgent issues if our opinions prevail. In doing so, we claim to solve problems that <em>Jesus himself</em> says are not fully solvable in this lifetime. At best, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment; at worst, we’re asking fallible humans to try to claim enough power to do God’s job. Bob Weinz at Christianity Today <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/february/33.52.html">made a similar point</a> in 2005, reflecting upon 9/11:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Last March former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the U.S. government “failed to prevent the tragedy of 9/11.” He proceeded to apologize for that failure… Clarke seemed to presume that “your government” should somehow have been able to anticipate and prevent evil from happening—both the evil that we call <em>natural disasters</em>, and the evil that comes directly from the hearts and hands of evil people. It is a false premise. To presume the government’s ability to prevent such a catastrophe is to assume that it possesses qualities and abilities that no person, let alone a government, can ever possess. <em>Omniscience</em> and <em>omnipotence</em> are qualities that we ascribe only to God.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a saying: “Opinions are like armpits. Everyone has a couple, and most of them stink.” I saw a more positive alternative online: “Opinions are like luggage: expensive, and heavy to carry around, so don’t take more than you need.” Paul wrote to “reject foolish and ignorant controversies because you know they breed infighting” (2 Tim 2:23) and to “avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, quarrels, and fights about the law because they are useless and empty” (Titus 3:9). There’s nothing automatically wrong with having opinions, debating, and discussing them. It can be an important part of loving God with all of our minds and trying to use our gifts and positions to serve others. But let’s practice humility, realizing that we may easily be wrong. Let’s travel lightly, saving our time and energy for people and service. Let’s avoid foolish controversies, remembering that time and change will render so much of these moot. Let’s remember that we ultimately depend on Jesus to solve the world’s fallenness, rather than hoping in or foolishly empowering our institutions to try and do so.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-65731685059003549332022-04-16T23:19:00.003-04:002022-06-06T12:40:51.458-04:00Psalm 22<p>Sometimes, I think, we may not give the Psalms enough credit. We read them for moral lessons (like the importance of God’s Word from Psalm 119), or comfort (Psalm 23), or as prophecies of Christ (such as Psalm 110). Or we use them as the basis for praise songs like U2’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt9Xc4jO-Yc">“40”</a> (Psalm 40) or Third Day’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEF7IoQ3eUk">“Your Love Oh Lord”</a> (Psalm 36).</p>
<p>And all of those are good and true and wonderful. But the Psalms are more than that; it’s the prayer book of the Bible, and the prayers and praises written within it can become part of our prayers, shaping our thoughts and attitudes towards God and giving us the words to say if we don’t know how to pray. As my grandfather used to say, the book of Psalms is unique because, in it, humanity’s words to God become part of God’s Word to humanity.</p>
<p>What would it look like to pray Psalm 22 as our prayer?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?<br> I groan in prayer, but help seems far away.<br> My God, I cry out during the day,<br> but you do not answer,<br> and during the night my prayers do not let up.<br> You are holy;<br> you sit as king receiving the praises of Israel.<br> In you our ancestors trusted;<br> they trusted in you and you rescued them.<br> To you they cried out, and they were saved;<br> in you they trusted and they were not disappointed.<br> But I am a worm, not a man;<br> people insult me and despise me.<br> All who see me taunt me;<br> they mock me and shake their heads.<br> They say,<br> “Commit yourself to the Lord!<br> Let the Lord rescue him!<br> Let the Lord deliver him, for he delights in him.”<br> Yes, you are the one who brought me out from the womb<br> and made me feel secure on my mother’s breasts.<br> I have been dependent on you since birth;<br> from the time I came out of my mother’s womb you have been my God.<br> Do not remain far away from me,<br> for trouble is near and I have no one to help me.<br> Many bulls surround me;<br> powerful bulls of Bashan hem me in.<br> They open their mouths to devour me<br> like a roaring lion that rips its prey.<br> My strength drains away like water;<br> all my bones are dislocated.<br> My heart is like wax;<br> it melts away inside me.<br> The roof of my mouth is as dry as a piece of pottery;<br> my tongue sticks to my gums.<br> You set me in the dust of death.<br> Yes, wild dogs surround me—<br> a gang of evil men crowd around me;<br> like a lion they pin my hands and feet.<br> I can count all my bones;<br> my enemies are gloating over me in triumph.<br> They are dividing up my clothes among themselves;<br> they are rolling dice for my garments.<br> But you, O Lord, do not remain far away.<br> You are my source of strength. Hurry and help me!<br> Deliver me from the sword.<br> Save my life from the claws of the wild dogs.<br> Rescue me from the mouth of the lion<br> and from the horns of the wild oxen.<br> You have answered me.<br> I will declare your name to my countrymen.<br> In the middle of the assembly I will praise you.<br> You loyal followers of the Lord, praise him.<br> All you descendants of Jacob, honor him.<br> All you descendants of Israel, stand in awe of him.<br> For he did not despise or detest the suffering of the oppressed.<br> He did not ignore him;<br> when he cried out to him, he responded.<br> You are the reason I offer praise in the great assembly;<br> I will fulfill my promises before the Lord’s loyal followers.<br> Let the oppressed eat and be filled.<br> Let those who seek his help praise the Lord.<br> May you live forever!<br> Let all the people of the earth acknowledge the Lord and turn to him.<br> Let all the nations worship you.<br> For the Lord is king<br> and rules over the nations.<br> All the thriving people of the earth will join the celebration and worship;<br> all those who are descending into the grave will bow before him,<br> including those who cannot preserve their lives.<br> A whole generation will serve him;<br> they will tell the next generation about the Lord.<br> They will come and tell about his saving deeds;<br> they will tell a future generation what he has accomplished.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>On Good Friday, we read this as referring to Christ. And we should! The details of Christ’s death - pinned or pierced hands and feet, thirsty, surrounded by enemies, with sarcastic taunts that God should save him, his clothes divided up and used as gambling prizes - are uncannily accurate for something written one thousand years before. Clearly, the Spirit spoke through David, to enable him to prophesy. But I don’t think that David necessarily knew he was prophesying; instead, I think, he spoke metaphorically about his own life, and his prayer was truer than he knew.</p>
<p>David could have written Psalm 22 in response to several circumstances in his own life. Saul, his master and the anointed king of Israel, went insane and tried to kill him; David’s son Amnon raped his daughter Tamar; his son Absalom conspired against him, forcing him to flee Jerusalem for his life; his trusted advisor Ahithophel betrayed him and joined Absalom’s rebellion; his son Adonijah tried to steal the throne in David’s old age.</p>
<p>Since the Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, and if David initially wrote Psalm 22 about his own life rather than Christ’s, then can we pray it, too? I believe we can. Most of us have experienced times when God seemed to not answer, or when his help seemed far away. We haven’t (I hope) had enemies like David’s, but we have experienced enemies; we’ve seen people taunt believers and sarcastically dismiss God’s help; we may have felt times when our strength drains away, when our hearts are like wax. Praying Psalm 22 helps us give words to these experiences. And it also reminds us, as David reminded himself, that God protected our physical and spiritual ancestors; that he has provided for us since we came out of our mothers’ wombs; that we look forward to praising God for his response; that nations and future generations will acknowledge God. And remembering God’s faithfulness in the past, both to past believers and in our own individual lives, and remembering his promises for the future can help us in the present.</p>
<p>What does it look like to pray Psalm 22 as our prayer <em>on Good Friday</em>? Good Friday reminds us that, just as David’s words in Psalm 22 were truer than he knew and ultimately applied to Christ far more directly than they did to David, our own prayers are truer than we know. If we feel that God does not answer, Jesus felt that too; if we feel weak or despondent, Jesus felt so more; if we face opposition from others (either personal hostility from individuals or generalized rejection or indifference of a fallen society), Jesus received far worse. <em>And he chose to do so</em>: all the suffering that David prayed, that we pray, Jesus voluntarily took upon himself on the cross, to defeat evil and show his love for us. All the pain that believers throughout history have prayed, all the pain from believers and unbelievers alike that has gone unspoken, Jesus took upon himself. Not only that, but all the times when we’re the enemy - when, knowingly or unknowingly, we’re the ones hemming others in, piercing them or pinning them down, acting like we don’t believe in God’s help, leaving someone feeling weak or in despair - Jesus took that upon himself too.</p>
<p>Because Jesus didn’t just pay the penalty for our sins on the cross (as if the word “just” could apply to so great a salvation). Easter shows us that God the Son fully identified with humanity; that, whatever the depths of our fallenness and suffering, Jesus did not exempt himself from that; that we can therefore trust in him and his love.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-3192203641731441682022-04-11T23:07:00.003-04:002022-04-11T23:08:54.983-04:00Four Anecdotes<p><strong>One</strong></p>
<p>There’s a blog called Coffee & Covid that made the rounds a couple of times on Facebook during the pandemic, so several months ago, while the delta variant was making the news, I took a look at <a href="https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/what-the-church-needs-to-know-about-covid-19-2307dc2a111c">one of the posts</a>. The author, a Christian lawyer, makes the following arguments:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Covid (and the delta variant in particular) aren’t nearly as bad as they’re made out to be, and the Covid vaccines aren’t as helpful as they’re made out to be.</li>
<li>Culture is surrendering to a “Spirit of Fear” about Covid. Fear is a spiritual problem, not a medical or scientific or political problem. It’s manifesting itself in anxiety, depression, and more. The Bible teaches is not to fear (Phil. 4:6). The church needs to boldly speak out against this Spirit of Fear.</li>
</ol>
<p>I could argue with some of his first point, except that I’ve made a policy to not get involved in Covid debates online. I agree with much of his second point: Covid has caused a lot of mental harm, and the Bible does command us not to fear. I think that fear is an “acceptable” sin among Christians - the prevalence of anxiety and stress and worry among Christians (not just around Covid) suggests that we aren’t taking Scripture’s teachings seriously here. If the church can speak to this and can help people with their fears and anxieties, as the Coffee & Covid post argues that it should, then that’s great!</p>
<p>I’m more interested in the relationship between the first and second points. If Covid isn’t nearly as bad as it’s made out to be, and if the dilemma about whether or not to get vaccinated isn’t as high-stakes as it’s made out to be, then fear is an intellectual and emotional error, not a spiritual problem. (In other words, we don’t need to fear because there isn’t really anything to be afraid of.) Saying that fear is a spiritual problem means that, even if whatever we’re afraid of is genuinely terrifying as all get-out, we need to trust God regardless.</p>
<p><strong>Two</strong></p>
<p>Donald Trump’s position on abortion has been the focus of much scrutiny over the last several years. In older interviews, he described himself as pro-choice, but <a href="https://www1.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2011/04/08/brody-file-exclusive-donald-trump-explains-pro-life-conversion">starting in 2011</a>, he said that he was pro-life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m pro-life, but I changed my view a number of years ago. One of the reasons I changed – one of the primary reasons – a friend of mine’s wife was pregnant, in this case married.</p>
<p>She was pregnant and he didn’t really want the baby. And he was telling me the story. He was crying as he was telling me the story. He ends up having the baby and the baby is the apple of his eye. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He elaborated in a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/the-problem-with-trumps-change-of-heart-on-abortion-commentary/2016/01/26/9fc38d6a-c45d-11e5-b933-31c93021392a_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3Q26BQFbBuAeFKvs0IDUX4c55md07ERUjYcnbRB8PWOLRxGioWbXW5zRE">2015 debate</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Friends of mine years ago were going to have a child, and it was going to be aborted. And it wasn’t aborted. And that child today is a total superstar, a great, great child. And I saw that. And I saw other instances.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In another exchange,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>he responded to a reporter who wondered if he would have become pro-life had the child been a “loser”: “Probably not, but I’ve never thought of it. I would say no, but in this case it was an easy one because he’s such an outstanding person.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In some of the ensuing abortion debates, some pro-life advocates pushed back on Trump; they argued that abortion should be opposed because human life is intrinsically valuable, not because the fetus may go on to be a superstar and an outstanding person.</p>
<p><strong>Three</strong></p>
<p>In <em>Joy at Work</em>, Dennis Bakke, a Christian business leader, talks about his philosophy and experiences as the head of AES, a multi-billion-dollar international energy company. When he and cofounder Roger Sant started the company, he adopted the philosophy that enjoyment - joy - at work came from making meaningful, challenging, and rewarding decisions, and companies’ approach of a centralized hierarchy of authority stifled employees’ ability to do this. AES therefore radically decentralized its decision-making; decisions such as HR, salary, and acquisitions were pushed out as far as possible to those most directly affected, while executives merely gave advice. Bakke also made a commitment to operate the business on Christian principles and to consider its impact on society, employees, suppliers, and customers, instead of prioritizing the interests of the shareholders.</p>
<p>When AES went public, they included the following text in their public-offering memo:</p>
<blockquote>
<em>Adherence to AES’s Values - Possible Impact on Results of Operations</em>. An important element of AES is its commitment to four major ‘shared’ values: to act with integrity, to be fair, to have fun, and to be socially responsible. See ‘Business - Values and Practices.’ AES believes that earning a fair profit is an important result of providing a quality product to its customers. However, if the Company perceives a conflict between these values and profits, the Company will try to adhere to its values - even though doing so might result in diminished profits or forgone opportunities. Moreover, the Company seeks to adhere to these values not as a means to achieve economic success, but because adherence is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. The Company intends to continue these policies after this offering. (p.39)
</blockquote>
<p>Bakke explains that, when they submitted this memo to the SEC, the SEC suggested that they move this paragraph under “Special Risk Factors,” advising potential investors of risks of investing in the company. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In our case, the SEC thought our values were a hazard… I loved it. I could now say that the U.S. government thought it was <em>very risky</em> to attempt to operate a business with integrity, fairness, social responsibility, and a sense of fun.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>AES was very successful. Bakke goes on to write, though, that explaining its values was a constant challenge; the board of directors kept thinking that AES was successful because of its values and its radical approach to decision-making, and Bakke kept trying to explain that AES followed its values because they believed it was the right thing to do, and he would continue to do it even if it wasn’t successful. He ultimately failed; when the energy industry was rocked by the Enron scandal in 2001 and AES’s stock price tumbled, the board decided that its philosophy was no longer working, and they forced Bakke out.</p>
<p><strong>Four</strong></p>
<p>I didn’t watch the 2014 movie <em>God’s Not Dead</em>, but I heard enough about it that I’m familiar with the basic plot. A Christian college student named Josh enrolls in a class taught by an aggressive atheist who challenges the class, “God is dead.” Josh ends up being challenged to a formal debate with the professor. At the end of the movie, Josh is vindicated: he wins the debate, and the professor reveals that his atheism stems from anger with God at some past tragedy in his life.</p>
<p>The movie was very popular within evangelical circles: it cost $2 million to make, grossed $62 million, and spawned three sequels. I felt like the ending was a little bit of wish fulfillment, though; evangelicals feel harassed or looked down upon by broader culture (especially the cultural elites of media and academia), so we wanted to see a movie where the Christian “won.” If Joshua had lost the debate (which, humanly speaking, would be likely, given the professor’s broader learning and experience), flunked out of college, and worked as a Starbucks barista for the rest of his life, it would still be a story of faithful Christian witness; in fact, compared to many historical Christian witnesses (the original meaning of the Greek word “martyr”), he would have gotten off easy.</p>
<p><strong>Why?</strong></p>
<p>What do a pandemic blog post, a president’s pro-life conversion, a billion-dollar energy company, and a possibly kitschy Christian film have in common? All of them confuse means with ends; all of them confuse the value that a thing can bring with the value of the thing itself.</p>
<p>We say that God’s eye is on the sparrow and that we don’t have to fear anything, yet we can’t help but try and argue that our fears are smaller instead of remembering that God is greater. Truly conquering the spirit of fear would mean saying that, even if all of the worst doomsayer predictions of Covid were right, and it killed one of out ten people and could spread through surfaces and even the briefest outdoor contact and required brutal lockdowns and became endemic with unending variants, we can still know that our heavenly Father will provide all the things that we need (Mt. 6:31-33).</p>
<p>If Trump’s friend’s baby really did help Trump realize the value of life, then that’s great. But the reason we’re pro-life is because we believe that human life has inherent value, because it’s made in the image of God, and that life has value and is worth protecting even if Trump’s friend’s baby grew up to be a total scuzzbucket who brought his parents nothing but grief and heartache.</p>
<p>Countless business books, articles, and talks espouse virtues such as leadership, teamwork, trust, communication, and responsibility and talk about how these can promote success in business. Few business leaders are willing to say, like Bakke, that the real reason to talk about these good traits is because they are, in fact, good, and they remain good even if they don’t “pay off“ and even if they hurt a company in the marketplace.</p>
<p>And I appreciate <em>God’s Not Dead</em>’s depiction of a Christian willing to stand firm for his faith. But I can’t help but think that it would not have been nearly as successful if it didn’t also show him winning the debate and succeeding in college as a result of standing firm for his faith. (Case in point: <em>Silence</em>, a movie about the brutal persecution of Christians in 17th century Japan, featuring a Catholic missionary who renounced his faith, earned only $22 million against its $50 million budget, despite critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination.)</p>
<p>And so forth. So many of the stories, fables, and works of fiction, both for children and adults, show someone doing something good and then being rewarded for it. Good stewardship is encouraged as a means of achieving financial success, instead of simply the right way to treat the finite resources God gives us. Christian purity culture encouraged abstinence before marriage by saying that it would result in better sex within marriage, even though that risks getting further involved in culture’s over-sexualization rather than offering a meaningful alternative. Left-wing writers, in a well-intentioned effort to oppose inequality and discrimination, insist that there are no meaningful differences in skill or aptitude between men and women; maybe so (the topic of gender differences is worth books by itself), but this argument leaves unchallenged the deeper lie that our skills and aptitude determine our worth, that someone who’s smart or a math genius or socially adept is simply better than someone who isn’t. Right-wing writers uphold Christian values as part of what makes Western civilization great; maybe so, and following God’s ways can certainly brings blessings, but we’re better served (and better serve) by quietly living out Christian values (1 Pe 3:15-16) than by getting involved in culture wars over Western civilization.</p>
<p>Most of us within evangelical churches are very aware of the dangers of the prosperity gospel: the “name-it-and-claim-it” idea that God will always reward us with financial success, physical health, and temporal happiness, as long as we approach him with the right kind of prayer and sufficient faith. But the prosperity idea can be much more subtle than that: the idea that it’s better to be smart, sexy, successful, rich, well-respected, independent than not; the idea that goodness and morality and God’s ways are good because they can help us achieve these states; the idea that doing the right thing will produce good results; the idea that, if you didn’t get good results, it’s because you did something wrong. Now, obviously, God does bless those who do the right thing. And following God’s ways will make things go well for you (he did, after all, create the universe in accordance with his ways) - but maybe not right away, and maybe not in this lifetime, and maybe not where we can see it. And, regardless, that isn’t why we do it - the point is our desire to please the One we love, not the benefits that we may or may not get out of it.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When the fig tree does not bud,<br> and there are no grapes on the vines;<br> when the olive trees do not produce<br> and the fields yield no crops;<br> when the sheep disappear from the pen<br> and there are no cattle in the stalls—<br> I will rejoice because of the Lord;<br> I will be happy because of the God who delivers me!<br> The Sovereign Lord is my source of strength.<br> He gives me the agility of a deer;<br> he enables me to negotiate the rugged terrain.<br></p>
—Habakkuk 3:17-19
</blockquote>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-53617284355387684562022-03-10T23:09:00.009-05:002022-03-10T23:10:51.110-05:00Fractal Fallenness<p>Fractals have been on my mind lately. A fractal, according to <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fractal">Merriam-Webster</a>, is “any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes for which any suitably chosen part is similar in shape to a given larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size.”</p>
<p>That’s a fairly obscure and technical definition. An example helps. One of the better-known fractals is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpi%C5%84ski_triangle">Sierpiński triangle</a>, which is created by taking an equilateral triangle and then repeatedly dividing it into smaller triangles:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpi%C5%84ski_triangle#/media/File:Sierpinski_triangle.svg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="381" data-original-width="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiD-lXNorx4rXQoYN1PAvxCP-UTt6_ANXHFgF80l0X_kSK42A0eyWslf-z-QZNJasaaGdNQtGx_-SnyAKvdFY8jSWt-pMQ4vbnGyCzTtRKvWaGAvyDlPnfGecOKG_io28Zt791B-MH_Vb7cybhDfgef9GMYAJpSYUWThpi2ofnT3eqHnI9M7orqSBKg=s320"/></a></div>
<p>Because this application of triangles can be done at smaller and smaller levels, you can zoom in or out as much as you want - even infinitely. It’s a rather mesmerizing (or at least dizzying) effect.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://tenor.com/view/fractal-sierpinski-math-pascals-triangle-triangle-gif-24771205" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg4GIo0hcRfJ95fRxE_E-SWcw8WnTqE5Q3LRG5YdOzq-v67v51jAQ3wTfACwoqttk_1Zi92xJb7DtrOLyjFW0hXZ9TUe1bNuTJqtAyxBfebq85pFGPreiCo1eKWP7-htzZgQUHfoHrne6XLUsIReoSuaLM76ZbCPQ7ZRqPjhjVuqTpmVEP3CJmHvHEK=s320"/></a></div>
<p>Fractals aren’t just a mathematical curiosity, though. For example, they show up in nature, “in such places as broccoli, snowflakes, feet of geckos, frost crystals, … lightning bolts,” and the circulatory system (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_curve#Fractal_curves_in_nature">Wikipedia</a>). Tree branches are one example: the trunk splits into boughs, which split into smaller branches, and so on down to twigs, with (often) a similar branching pattern each step of the way.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/zThTy8rPPsY" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="3672" data-original-width="4896" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh88hjCYqek2CasIvvhAkbBat2yMW9A2Tm9m8F8JA4XT6DJO5-GfjZC8YoE5FFhRhjOHNDozZenhIEgNGP1FJkA4mY9m4ennQvG56AmFajJYr9BkcDDHOmZlq4dUg1IAtbn0rzI69cJ_W756ypCCiDtU0T37q0H4l1xzkkLl-H__-JgM8sS-zpZU25u=s320"/></a></div>
<p>Ukraine has been on my mind lately. News stories regularly try to sum up the current state of suffering: As of Tuesday morning, 401 civilians confirmed dead and 801 confirmed injured, with the actual casualties likely much higher. More than 2 million refugees. But that’s just the big picture. Like a fractal, you can zoom in to see more and more detail, and more and more suffering. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/06/ukraine-checkpoint-wedding/">A wedding with military fatigues and rocket-propelled grenades</a>. <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/03/08/ukrainian-girl-dies-of-thirst-under-rubble-of-home-mayor-a76827">Reports of a girl, trapped in rubble, dying of dehydration</a>. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2022/03/photos-ukrainian-refugees-say-goodbye-home-and-family-members/626964/">Photos of farewells at train stations as the war separates families</a>. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/06/ukraine-russia-war-crimes/">A man digging through the rubble of his house after his wife and daughter were killed</a>.</p>
<p>Or you can follow a different branch of the fractal tree to look at Russia: 140 million people in an economy that’s cratered under crippling sanctions, a government that may be about to default on its debts, thousands of Russian soldiers killed, under a regime so repressive that merely calling what’s happening in Ukraine an “invasion” can be punishable by up to three years in prison. All for a war that none of them had any real say in.</p>
<p>Let’s zoom out a step. Here’s a map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as of this week, courtesy of <i>The Washington Post</i>.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/24/maps-ukraine-russia-attack/" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1076" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiLqH29Oug5sx_aFDStVzUhAauXiygrPNAo2S3WIWdPdTHo_tcyQ4_Jq-0ksU-TSZX8YpWmrLxx83rDexLXh1qH18qGc2hJ5peLmqEd3VlT0lug80SwY6qI2MJApshXQph1KuK15Q7Bz1j-AuXjuwwcraoFZ2iW7GXGAP9qCuRFkLwgvIp2qdHfQ7tf=s320"/></a></div>
<p>Ukraine’s population is (was) 43 million people. Plenty of those 43 million people live outside of the red areas.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://www.worldpop.org/geodata/summary?id=49349" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgU5mpYNe1GtowAUWisxSFKvht2N2gfWIDhLiye6YpNCw0YPFODdFITJ6wSMLdNjjG3KCQP4MMQtii3kU7Sn2hRwGmvNKswZc0sJgkqTJMkRryS42tz74_zrYE7esd68pKTkHxSSausIr3MAthJ9rnk5s4Iugo1izLG0BW5ZLsTGDitWLSd28WTYg0O=s320"/></a></div>
<p>I don’t know how the demographics break down - how many of the casualties and refugees are from different parts of the country - but, given that Putin’s aim appears to be to take all of Ukraine, it’s easy to fear that things could get much worse.</p>
<p>Let’s zoom out again. Here’s Moldova.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldova" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh5WgpUuLAWxE3D6AO9LZvUX-b_r9zE9OeUrY6uBY3759iihIVkZO4HiCYUB8MLiq9Czs1qrtyeF41_cTYpzoS02408S_PywJeFI2Ui24vYcHH0Monwqd5kKoYqhivmeXQfky6WUfEFMnQGw1jg0RNyiBzNyx5y0TdRfylBQxj7K7vS6mPzv6o4tBdM=s320"/></a></div>
<p>It’s another former member of the Soviet Union, just south of Ukraine, small and (like Ukraine) relatively poor. Moldovans <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/06/moldova-ukraine-war-invasion/">worry</a> that their country will be invaded next, especially after Belorusian dictator and Russian ally Alexander Lukashenko showed a map that appeared to indicate planned troop movements into Moldova. Moldova has its own separatist region, Transnistria, similar to Ukraine’s separatist, Russian-friendly regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Transnistria is tiny (500,000 people), completely outside of Moldovan control, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/06/moldova-ukraine-war-invasion/">backwater</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s a place of Lenin statues, hammer-and-sickle flags and once-grand Soviet architecture in decay… Unrecognized by the United Nations, it has a currency, the ruble, that is virtually worthless outside its borders. International bank cards don’t work at Transnistrian ATMs. Salaries are low. For all of Russia’s influence, the biggest power in Transnistria is a monopolistic company, Sheriff, that operates with scant oversight and controls everything from the gas stations to the supermarkets to the soccer club.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anywhere along the fractal, it seems, we can see more loss, more fear, more scars from the past. And that’s just from looking at current events in and around Ukraine. We can follow the branches back through history, to look at the Russian poverty and malaise after the collapse of the Soviet Union that fueled Putin’s rise to power, or the history of autocracy, imperialism, and <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/in-some-ways-this-is-a-religious-war/">politicized religion</a> that Putin has inherited. Or we can zoom out further and follow the fractal’s boughs to the <a href="https://morning.thedispatch.com/p/the-morning-dispatch-the-growing-ee0?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0NDExODk0LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0MzU5OTY0OCwiXyI6Ikp1VVF1IiwiaWF0IjoxNjQ2OTE3NDU2LCJleHAiOjE2NDY5MjEwNTYsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0yNTUxOSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.4f-KKpHbtMPyMnmUvxyB7T9av2CDpwwQLUAhdgbW35g&s=r">civil war in Ethiopia</a> between Tigray and the central government, with “ethnically motivated killings, sexual violence on a massive scale, looting, and mass displacement to unequipped neighbor states and countries”; or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_%282014%E2%80%93present%29">civil war in Yemen</a>, where Saudi Arabia, using US-provided weaponry, is waging a brutal war against Houthi rebels that’s killed over 100,000 people and started a famine that’s killed 85,000 more.</p>
<p>And, of course, if you follow the branches and boughs back far enough, you come to the Fall, to humanity’s rebellion against God that started in Eden and ripples throughout history and throughout the world.</p>
<p>What’s a Christian to do? Or, to be more direct, what is God doing? Our typical answer is that Jesus’ death and resurrection means we can escape all of this and go to Heaven. And that’s true, good, and wonderful, but it’s only part of the story. After all, it would seem strange if God saw this infinite fractal of pain, loss, and death and gave only a single, unitary response. Instead, I believe, God’s redemption and its outworking are similarly fractal, being rooted in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection but branching out into every aspect of our existence:</p>
<ul>
<li>God at work in the thousands of blessings of everyday life - good meals and sunrises and jokes with friends and a sound night’s sleep</li>
<li>God at work in the arcs of our individual lives, guiding us as we live and work and learn and grow</li>
<li>God at work in the local church, where we share in the love and support of our brothers and sisters as we worship and serve</li>
<li>God at work in society, as believers and non-believers alike work under God’s common grace to treat poverty and illness, address injustice, and otherwise ameliorate the effects of the Fall</li>
<li>God at work through his Word, speaking to us today just as he spoke to its human authors, and speaking to us through the millions of lesser words of Christian preachers, speakers, authors, singers, songwriters, theologians, and journalists who use their gifts to build us up</li>
<li>God at work even in our hardships, as our hardships help us to develop endurance, character, and hope (Rom 5:4); provide an opportunity to show our faith and gentleness (1 Pe 3:13-16); and inspire others (as Ukrainians’ courage is inspiring many around the world)</li>
<li>God at work throughout history, as his church spreads the gospel “throughout the whole inhabited earth as a testimony to all the nations” (Mt 24:14)</li>
<li>God at work through Jesus, who exactly reveals God to us, and whom we can know and relate to as surely as the disciples who walked on earth with him 2,000 years ago</li>
<li>God at work through the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, where the Fall is not merely escaped but destroyed, where “he will live among us, and we will be his people, and God himself will be with us, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain” (Rev. 21:3-4, paraphrased)</li>
</ul>Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-91796645128652790752022-03-02T22:18:00.001-05:002022-06-13T22:37:40.050-04:00Peace on Earth<p>A friend of mine left church early yesterday so that he could make it to his family’s Christmas celebration. Now, I know that there are a wide variety of Christmas traditions, but late February doesn’t seem to work for any of them - too late for Epiphany, way too early for Christmas in July, etc. He explained, however, that this was simply when his family could get together. I’ve done the same in the past, thanks to having family scattered from North Carolina to Michigan; I think our record was a family Christmas get-together in April.</p>
<p>Despite the calendar mismatch, the mention of Christmas put me in the mind of Christmas songs. Not the traditional, happy carols like “Joy to the World” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” (although I do love those). Nor the modern, intricate instrumentals of Trans-Siberian Orchestra or Mannheim Steamroller (although I do love those, too). Instead, I was thinking of the not-so-happy songs, like U2’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J74E6yanaO8">“Peace on Earth”</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They’re reading names out over the radio All the folks, the rest of us, won’t get to know Sean and Julia, Gareth, Ann and Breda Their lives are bigger than any big idea</p>
<p>Jesus can you take the time To throw a drowning man a line Peace on Earth To tell the ones who hear no sound Whose sons are living in the ground Peace on Earth Jesus in the song you wrote The words are sticking in my throat Peace on Earth Hear it every Christmas time But hope and history won’t rhyme So what’s it worth? This peace on Earth</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sean, Julia, Gareth, Ann, and Breda were victims of the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland on August 15, 1998.</p>
<p>Or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7670CXvPX0">“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I heard the bells on Christmas day Their old familiar carols play; In music sweet the tones repeat, “There’s peace on earth, good will to men.”</p>
<p>And in despair I bowed my head: “There is no peace on earth,” I said, “For hate is strong, and mocks the song Of peace on earth, good will to men.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem upon which this song was based in 1863, during the height of the American Civil War. His wife had died in a fire two years earlier, and he had received word that his son, who had joined the Union Army without his blessing, had been severely injured in battle.</p>
<p>And this seems like a downer - inappropriate Christmas songs for an inappropriate Christmas season - but there’s a lot to be down about right now.</p>
<p>An unprovoked war rages in Ukraine, leaving hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes, and it’s just starting.</p>
<p>Economic hardship is bearing down on 140 million Russians, most of whom have little or no involvement in the war.</p>
<p>India remains conspicuously neutral, because of their own past <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30469143">conflicts</a> and history with the West.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War">Civil war in Ethiopia</a> continues, with thousands dead and 2.5 million displaced, with a fraction of the attention that the war in Ukraine has received. (Because people aren’t concerned about it threatening surrounding countries? Because they don’t look like us? I don’t know.)</p>
<p>There is much evil in the world.</p>
<p>And that’s to say nothing of the smaller, personal tragedies hitting those around me: A beloved church elder and businessman dies suddenly from Covid. A young couple’s marriage falls into pieces. A family deals with the fallout of their daughter’s molestation. Another man battles cancer while weighed down by depression, a history of health problems, and bad medical advice. A family copes with the revelation that their newborn has a fatal genetic disease. All of these pale in size and scope to wars in Ukraine or Ethiopia, but that makes them scarcely less painful to those affected.</p>
<p>Sometimes downer songs are an appropriate response - to mourn those lost, to acknowledge if we’re drowning or bowing our heads in despair, to feel the gulf between Christian hope and humanity’s history. In Biblical terms, to lament. Because these Christmas songs also remind us that lament isn’t the end. Longfellow’s carol continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor does He sleep, The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, With peace on earth, good will to men.”</p>
<p>Then ringing singing on its way The world revolved from night to day A voice, a chime, a chant sublime Of peace on earth good will to men.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Christ has come! God is with us. And he has promised to make all things right, to defeat evil and death, to wipe away every tear, to remove mourning and crying and pain (Rev. 21:3-4).</p>
<p>And, even when we can’t hear the Christmas bells’ promise - when, like U2, the words stick in our throat and we’re left wondering what it’s worth - the act of bringing these laments <em>to God</em> is itself a statement of faith in God. Because we know that Immanuel, God with us, means that Christ has experienced the same hurts that we have, that he has taken the world’s evil upon himself, that he is with us even in the midst of our despair.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-61140415690783923442021-09-16T20:56:00.002-04:002021-09-16T20:56:55.720-04:00Outraged<p>“I just feel angry all the time.”</p>
<p>So shared a Christian friend of mine last week. “I feel like I’m going to snap. There’s so much <em>wrong</em> in society right now,” he continued.</p>
<p>I can sympathize. Maybe not about all the specifics - my political views don’t quite align with his - but certainly with the general sentiment. Over the last eighteen months in particular, there’s been a lot to feel angry about. And a lot of people have snapped:</p>
<ul>
<li>On July 31, an airline passenger allegedly assaulted and groped three flight attendants. He was <a href="https://heavy.com/news/maxwell-berry-frontier/">duct-taped to his seat</a> to get him under control.</li>
<li>On July 6, a woman allegedly <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/american-airlines-woman-duct-taped-seat-after-attacking-plane-crew-2021-7">tried to exit an airplane in midflight</a>. She was duct-taped to her seat to restrain her.</li>
<li>In May, a flight attendant <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/southwest-airlines-flight-attendant-loses-two-teeth-after-passenger-assault-n1268493">lost two teeth</a> after being assaulted by a passenger.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-face-verbal-and-physical-assaults-from-anti-mask-customers-2020-7">Nearly half of McDonald’s workers</a> were verbally or physically assaulted over the summer of 2020.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/workers-killed-fights-masks">At least four employees</a> have been killed in fights over masks.</li>
<li>Domestic abuse rates have spiked since the pandemic started. According to <a href="https://time.com/5928539/domestic-violence-covid-19/"><em>Time</em></a>: “300% in Hubei, China; 25% in Argentina, 30% in Cyprus, 33% in Singapore and 50% in Brazil… 18% in San Antonio, 22% in Portland, Ore.; and 10% in New York City… One study in the journal Radiology reports that at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, radiology scans and superficial wounds consistent with domestic abuse from March 11 to May 3 of this year exceeded the totals for the same period in 2018 and 2019 combined.”</li>
</ul>
<p>I could go on for quite some time. And that’s without getting into the deeper fault lines over race, politics, religion, and economic differences. There’s <em>so much</em> to be angry about. To quote Heather Heyer, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” (Heather Heyer was herself a victim of the anger of the last five years; she was killed when someone drove a car into her during the Charlottesville, VA protests in 2017.)</p>
<p><em>“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on the cause of your anger. Do not give the devil an opportunity.” - Eph. 4:26-27</em></p>
<p>By itself, anger is just a feeling, right? And feelings are simply part of being human; they aren’t automatically good, bad, moral, or immoral, any more than being tall or short or breathing oxygen or drinking milk or any other facet of being a human. Dallas Willard defines anger:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In its simplest form, anger is a spontaneous response that has a vital function in life. As such, it is not wrong. It is a <em>feeling</em> that seizes us in our body and immediately impels us toward interfering with, and possibly even harming, those who have thwarted our will and interfered with our life… The primary function of anger in life is to alert me to an obstruction to my will, and immediately raise alarm and resistance, before I even have time to think about it. (<a href="https://amzn.to/3tFFRm8"><em>The Divine Conspiracy</em></a>, p. 147-148)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This clarifies the situation: the reason everyone’s so angry is because there are so many obstructions to people’s wills right now. We will to go to restaurants and social gatherings without restriction or fear; to know that those around us are taking appropriate health precautions; to not have unreasonable health precautions forced upon us; to read the news without seeing the latest Democrat or Republican outrage; to work a stable job; to not lose loved ones. These wants and so many others have been repeatedly dashed over the last eighteen months.</p>
<p><em>“O Lord, do I not hate those who hate you and despise those who oppose you?” - Psalm 139:21</em></p>
<p>Add to that the deeper causes for anger. We will for there to be racial harmony and justice; for sufficient resources for the poor; for a society that correctly balances and exercises freedom and responsibility; for political leaders who demonstrate moral character and promote moral policies; for freedom from natural disasters like Haiti’s earthquake and Hurricane Ida; for peace and justice for war-torn countries like Afghanistan and oppressed peoples like the Uyghurs of China. And, as Christians, we will for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done on an earth where it so often isn’t. All of these wants, too, are repeatedly dashed. Righteous indignation is a natural response: to respond, like the psalmist in Psalm 139, with anger toward the enemies of God.</p>
<p><em>“The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has fully carried out his intended purposes. In future days you will come to understand this.” - Jer. 30:24</em></p>
<p>And righteous indignation has a place. And it can be rather intoxicating: the rush of being angry, combined with the moral certitude that we’re right and the pleasure of being able to judge others. But the critical assumption behind hating God’s enemies is that we can correctly identify who God’s enemies are; we too often forget that, in <em>present</em> days, we may <em>not</em> yet understand his intended purposes. Because racism and poverty and political leadership and foreign policy are all <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem">wicked problems</a>, and just maybe some of the people we think are God’s enemies actually have better ideas about how to address these temporal problems than we do, and just maybe some of the people we think are God’s enemies are actually appointed by him (for example, Isa. 45:1) for purposes we may not yet see.</p>
<p>The psalmist said in Psalm 139:21 that he hates God’s enemies, but that was only after Psalm 139:1-18, where he meditates on the mystery of God’s omniscience and the limitations of the psalmist’s own ability to understand him. And David demonstrated this attitude in his own life: when Absalom rebelled against him and David fled Jerusalem for his life, he refused to take action against a man who cursed him, because he realized that it was possible that he was in the wrong and that this opposition was from the Lord (2 Sam 16:5-12).</p>
<p><em>“The Lord passed by before him [Moses] and proclaimed: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, keeping loyal love for thousands [of generations], forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But he by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children and children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”” - Ex. 34:6-7</em></p>
<p>And, however much righteous indignation we may experience at the state of the world, however much we feel anger at having our will for the world thwarted, God could be said to experience even more. Not that his will can be meaningfully thwarted (it would be wrong to suggest that of an omnipotent God), but there’s a great deal that he has said is contrary to his will, and he knows all of it - every cutting remark and broken relationship and falsehood of our political partisanship, every story of every suffering person who we see only briefly in photographs and newscasts from foreign correspondents, every hunger pang and addict’s craving, every act of greed and selfishness and bigotry and rage. And it does make him angry - in fact, the Bible talks quite a lot about the wrath of God - but, as shown in God’s glorious self-revelation to Moses, his love and forgiveness outweighs his anger hundreds of times over.</p>
<p><em>“Where do the conflicts and where do the quarrels among you come from? Is it not from this, from your passions that battle inside you? You desire and you do not have; you murder and envy and you cannot obtain; you quarrel and fight.” - James 4:1-2</em></p>
<p>Because the other aspect of the problem is that our “righteous” indignation isn’t nearly so pure as God’s. Our hearts are deceitful (Jer. 17:9), and that includes deceiving us into mistaking our warring passions for righteous anger. And modern society encourages and accelerates this: social media divorces people’s words from their actions and lives, so that all we can judge are the words. Technology has made sharing these words effectively free, so the supply becomes effectively infinite, and the constraint - what determines whose words are consumed - becomes people’s attention. And the easiest way to attract attention, in both traditional media and social media, is to be extreme, inflammatory, to rile up the emotions of the people on your side and to provoke inflammatory responses from people on the other side, because that just draws more attention. And so voices that are calmer, more moderate, more loving get crowded out. Pundits and politicians keep adding fuel to the fire - some of them because they’re deliberately quarreling and fighting and spreading falsehoods to get what they do not have, and some of them because their hearts, too, have deceived them. And, too often, we willingly participate, by joining in the debates and listening to the pundits and politicians and giving platform and fame to those who inflame and divide.</p>
<p><em>“Let every person be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” - James 1:19</em></p>
<p>If anger is merely my response to my will being thwarted, then the Bible offers a different way of dealing with it. If I’m humble enough to recognize the limits of my own agenda and let go of my own ego, if I remember that there are things more important than my task list, then I can let go of my anger when my computer doesn’t work or I’m stuck in traffic or I get a frustrating work email or my kids don’t do what I want. If I pour my love and attention into my relationships with those around me, then I can accept when their wills interfere with mine. Remembering that “this present world is a perfectly safe place for us to be” (Dallas Willard, echoing Mt. 6:25-34) helps me take the losses of the pandemic in stride - not that it doesn’t hurt, and not that we don’t feel anger, but we put it in its place, because we know the bigger picture and how it all ends. If I remember that it’s the Spirit’s job to change people and that God is still working on us (Phil. 2:12-13, 3:15), then I can accept when people don’t agree with me. I can choose to prioritize Christian community over social media tribalism; I can place my hope in God rather than in politics; I can seek truth and understanding instead of seeking for my side to win.</p>
<p><em>“For human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness.” - James 1:20</em></p>
<p>Anger has a place. There are things in life that are contrary to God’s will, and that’s something that we need to care about. But, even at its best, I’m not sure that our righteous anger does much to accomplish God’s righteousness. And, ultimately, God’s own anger did not accomplish his righteousness: that was done by his love, poured out on the cross.</p>
<p>So let’s follow his example. “Be angry and do not sin” when the situation calls for it, but grieve and lament as well - those are also biblical, and they’re too often neglected. Relax our grip on our own egos and desires so that we can accept when our wills are thwarted. Take a step back from the warring passions of contemporary media and spend more time in true community. And love one another.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-9637136635345762792021-05-11T08:16:00.004-04:002021-05-24T18:08:23.893-04:00Gradually Then Suddenly<p>About a month ago, Gallup published <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx">new research</a> showing that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who are church members fell below 50%.</p>
<p>This, by itself, may not be too surprising. Many of us have some general awareness that American culture is less religious than it used to be. What’s <em>really</em> surprising is how quickly it’s happened:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/1mlbpqjqyuma9i2skgqowa.png" alt="Chart of church membership in America" width=472 height=259 />
</figure>
<p>What’s going on? What changed in 2000 (to pick a nice round number) to cause the rate of decline to accelerate so much?</p>
<p>I’m not a sociologist or a professional minister; there are others who are better qualified to speak than I. But, looking at that chart, I’m reminded of a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s <em>The Sun Also Rises</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“How did you go bankrupt?”</p>
<p>“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is one of those pithy, attention-grabbing quotes that seems contradictory but, upon reflection, contains a lot of truth. Because that’s often how bankruptcy works - a household or a business may be able to continue for quite a while living just a bit beyond their means, making the minimum credit card payments, or with expenses gradually creeping up while sales gradually creep down. Then something hits - there’s an unexpected medical expense or costly repair, or one too many late payments cause fees and penalties to snowball, or an economic dip or competitive pressure suddenly makes the fragile business unsustainable - and bankruptcy occurs seemingly all at once.</p>
<p>Looking at that Gallup chart, I can’t help but think that something similar happened here. A healthy, vibrant church, full of active, committed Christians, doesn’t simply have its membership plummet in less than a single generation; I can’t help but wonder what kind of gradually-then-suddenly scenario American Christendom has been going through, what weaknesses we’ve allowed to fester and grow until our position became untenable in the face of a worldly culture.</p>
<p>It’s easy to guess at what those weaknesses might be. I suspect that part of the decline is because we’ve too uncritically allied ourselves with particular political agendas and a particular political party; even when those causes have been good, it’s hard to maintain our distinctiveness when the broader culture sees us as yet another political interest group. Russell Moore <a href="https://www.russellmoore.com/2021/04/15/losing-our-religion/">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even as a teenager, I could see that the “voting guides” that showed up in Bible Belt America were kind of like the horoscopes one could find in the newspaper. The horoscope could say, “Today you will find a surprising new opportunity,” and a certain sort of credulous person would be amazed at how this just happened to be true—without ever thinking about the fact that this is true of virtually every human being at virtually every moment, if one just pays attention to it. Likewise, the voter guides lined out the “Christian” view from the “anti-Christian view” on a list of issues that just happened to line up with the favored party’s platform that year. Somehow the Bible suddenly gave us a “Christian view” on a balanced budget amendment or a line-item veto, things that… were never noticed in the text until the favored candidates started emphasizing such things.</p>
<p>And along with all that came apocalyptic warnings that if these candidates weren’t elected, or these policies weren’t enacted, we would “lose our entire culture.” But when those candidates lost, no one headed for the bunkers. The culture didn’t fall—at least not any more than it had before.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The sad fact is that, for many Americans, the only experience they have with evangelicals is at a distance, as their opponents at the ballot box. To borrow from <a href="https://amzn.to/2R9AHA2">Philip Yancey</a> and <a href="https://amzn.to/3tyiGbK">Gregory Boyd</a>, it’s incredibly difficult to extend grace to people when you’re also trying to defeat them politically; it’s hard to advance both the kingdom of the cross (which transforms people from the inside) and an earthly government (which can merely compel external behavior).</p>
<p>I suspect that part of the decline of the American church is because we’ve allowed moralism and legalism to be portrayed as key parts of Christianity. This shows up in a variety of ways - an emphasis on “obvious” sins like sexual immorality, alcoholism, and drug addiction instead of subtler sins like pride and dishonesty and bitterness, as well as picking out everything from R-rated movies to teetotaling to particular styles of clothing to Dungeons & Dragons to violent video games as vital moral issues. Please don’t misunderstand me. Morality - trying to live a life pleasing to our Creator, following the way he wants us to live - is obviously incredibly important. And I <em>love</em> that my brothers and sisters have been trying to apply God’s standards to every facet of their lives - R-rated movies and teatotalling and the rest - because examining every facet of our lives and living with a clear conscience is also part of trying to live a life pleasing to our Creator. I’m even in agreement on a decent amount of this. But the problem comes when we set up these as a central aspect of the faith, rather than our best human effort to live out our faith; people mistake the legalism for the Gospel and walk away from it all, or they see the inconsistencies in our causes or the flawed, human, sometimes arbitrary morality (because we’re all flawed and human and sometimes arbitrary) and think that the whole of the faith is that. In <a href="https://amzn.to/3e8uHjU"><em>The Life You’ve Always Wanted</em></a>, John Ortberg suggests that part of the problem is that we let these moral issues become “boundary markers” - “highly visible, relatively superficial practices - matters of vocabulary or dress or style - whose purpose is to <em>distinguish</em> between those inside a group and those who are outside”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The church I grew up in was a fine church, and I am deeply in its dept, but we also had our own set of markers there. The senior pastor could have been consumed with pride or resentment, but as long as his preaching was orthodox and the church was growing, his job would probably not be in jeopardy. But if some Sunday morning he had been smoking a cigarette while greeting people after the service, he would not have been around for the evening service. Why? No one at the church would have said that smoking a single Camel was a worse sin than a life consumed by pride and resentment. But for us, cigarette-smoking became an identity marker. It was one of the ways we were able to tell the sheep from the goats…</p>
<p>A boundary-oriented approach to spirituality focuses on people’s position: Are you inside or outside the group? A great deal of energy is spent clarifying what counts as a boundary marker.</p>
<p>But Jesus consistently focused on people’s <em>center</em>. Are they oriented and moving <em>toward</em> the center of spiritual life (love of God and people), or are they moving <em>away</em> from it? (p. 34-37)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I suspect that part of the decline is specific sins that we’ve allowed within the church: the racism of the American south, sexual abuse within the Catholic priesthood and other churches, financial exploitation by televangelists and others. The sad fact is that we have a lot to answer for here. White southern evangelicals did little to help the civil rights movement, and many of our private Christian schools in the south were founded in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education by whites who wanted an alternative to the newly desegregated public schools. Sexual abuse by religious leaders and organizations from Catholic priests to <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/february/ravi-zacharias-rzim-investigation-sexual-abuse-sexting-rape.html">Ravi Zacharias</a> to <a href="https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/they-arent-who-you-think-they-are">Kamp Kanakuk</a> have done grievous harm; organizations frequently chose to protect themselves or the perpetrator (for example, by trying to handle it internally) rather than prioritizing bringing justice for the victim, and Christian teachings such as Bill Gothard’s <a href="https://twitter.com/MindShift2018/status/1388384743427919873">downplayed the harm and blamed the victims</a> (before Gothard himself was accused of repeated sexual harassment). Christian leaders such as Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, and Jerry Falwell Jr. have all had heavily publicized scandals. These aren’t just “a few bad apples”; I’ve read too many accounts of racism, of theology that’s abused to excuse sexual sin, of a willingness to overlook warning signs if a ministry is successful, of preying on people’s political fears or luring them with health-and-wealth. We need to repent. Now, especially, when the broader American culture is seriously confronting sexual harassment and abuse and America’s history of racism - through some mix of God’s common grace and fallen human moralism - the church’s failings in these areas become even more glaring. I’m afraid that we at times even let attitudes on race and sex become boundary markers themselves - “secular progressives are emphasizing these things, so we’re instead going to de-emphasize them, because those guys are our enemies.” This should not be.</p>
<p>And I suspect that part of the decline may be that some of the church membership and church activities from 2000 and earlier was, in fact, just going through the motions. In a 2014 column, Ross Douthat suggests that we’re seeing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-christian-penumbra.html">“the Christian Penumbra”</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here is a seeming paradox of American life. On the one hand, there is a broad social-science correlation between religious faith and various social goods — health and happiness, upward mobility, social trust, charitable work and civic participation.</p>
<p>Yet at the same time, some of the most religious areas of the country — the Bible Belt, the deepest South — struggle mightily with poverty, poor health, political corruption and social disarray…</p>
<p>The social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief. And where practice ceases or diminishes, in what you might call America’s “Christian penumbra,” the remaining residue of religion can be socially damaging instead…</p>
<p>It isn’t hard to see why this might be. In the Christian penumbra, certain religious expectations could endure (a bias toward early marriage, for instance) without support networks for people struggling to live up to them. Or specific moral ideas could still have purchase without being embedded in a plausible life script. (For instance, residual pro-life sentiment could increase out-of-wedlock births.) Or religious impulses could survive in dark forms rather than positive ones — leaving structures of hypocrisy intact and ratifying social hierarchies, without inculcating virtue, charity or responsibility.</p>
<p>And it isn’t hard to see places in American life where these patterns could be at work. Among those working-class whites whose identification with Christianity is mostly a form of identity politics, for instance. Or among second-generation Hispanic immigrants who have drifted from their ancestral Catholicism. Or in African-American communities where the church is respected as an institution without attracting many young men on Sunday morning.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Several Christian leaders have suggested that religious faith within a family follows a <a href="https://leaders.church/4-generations-faith/">regular pattern</a>: The initial converts of the first generation are active and passionate in their faith. Their children, the second generation, inherit their parents’ faith; they’re still active, and their faith is still meaningful, but they lack the firsthand commitment and passion of their parents. As a result, in the third generation, religion is more of a formality, just going through the motions. The fourth generation then leaves the faith completely.</p>
<p>All of this is, of course, a generalization; every family is unique, and plenty of families (including my own!) have a powerful, multi-generational legacy of faith. But it’s a penetrating illustration. I suspect that much of church membership has been these “third-generation Christians,” going through the motions, and what shows up in the polls as church decline is merely the next step of the decay. The remedy is for each generation to be the first: each new generation of Christians must make that personal, passionate, first-hand commitment for themselves.</p>
<p>I grieve over the American church’s decline. I love the church, and I believe that it can offer enormous good; I love Christ, and I want people to know him. But, if what I said is accurate, if what we’re seeing is the merely the next step of the Christian penumbra and nominal third-generation faith, then it may not even be a bad thing. C.S. Lewis observes in <em>Mere Christianity</em>, “When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going-provided he does it for honesty’s sake and not just to annoy his parents-the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before.” Christian novelist Leif Enger <a href="http://createsend.com/t/r-0A9DF8BBA7DA22E52540EF23F30FEDED">writes</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I may offer a perspective on the church ‘losing a generation,’ it’s worth considering that widespread disillusionment with evangelicalism is largely a positive development. I can’t speak for a soul outside my experience, but as the product of Midwestern charismatics who subscribed early to Fox News and never looked back, I suspect the progression from Falwell Sr. to Falwell Jr. applies more broadly than any of us care to imagine. A teen who sees through the rot and ‘falls away’ remains as available to the Creator as any prodigal in history; those who remain despite the rot will learn to tolerate it, follow it, and finally exalt it. This is predictable and proven before our eyes. At this fraught moment it’s the non-skeptics I dread.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>God is still at work, in his church and in the world. The story isn’t over yet, not for the individuals whose decisions make up the decline or for the American church as a whole. Church attendance numbers and cultural influence are nice, but the point is following Christ. The Gallup polls show a snapshot in time, but we know that ultimately the gates of hell will not prevail and every knee shall bow (Matt. 16:18, Phil. 2:10).</p>
<p>So let’s re-center our lives and our faith on Christ and his kingdom, not on political causes.</p>
<p>Let our morality flow out of following Christ, rather than being a legalistic cause and identity marker.</p>
<p>Confront and repent of our sin.</p>
<p>Commit to Christ, and teach our children to do the same.</p>
<p>Further reading:</p>
<ul>
<li>Russell Moore’s <a href="https://www.russellmoore.com/2021/04/15/losing-our-religion/">“Losing Our Religion”</a> wrestles with the Gallup poll’s findings and presents his personal perspective, and David French presents an <a href="https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/a-resurrection-faith-retains-its">Easter meditation</a> on it.</li>
<li>Rachael Denhollander is doing critically important work on sexual abuse within the church. <a href="https://twitter.com/R_Denhollander">Her Twitter feed</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/JJ_Denhollander">her husband’s</a> are good (and sad) reading. (I first heard about her when she <a href="https://au.thegospelcoalition.org/article/rachael-denhollander-extraordinary-speech/">extended the Gospel</a> to her abuser, former USA Gymnastics team doctor, Larry Nassar, in courtroom testimony.)</li>
</ul>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-37677425881845278432021-02-15T23:19:00.002-05:002021-02-15T23:19:24.382-05:00Dayenu<p>Back when I was a student at the University of Tennessee, I got involved in the Christian Student Fellowship (CSF), a small non-denominational campus ministry that met in a house just off a main campus thoroughfare. UT is a big school in the Bible Belt, and so of course the CSF wasn’t the only campus ministry at UT. I walked past the Episcopalian ministry every day on the way to class; there was a Catholic ministry a bit up the hill, in between the Baptists and the Methodists; and so on.</p>
<p>On the corner near those ministries, in a brick building with a window wall looking out over the street, was the Jewish Student Center. Each year, they invited the anyone who wanted from the Christian campus groups to join them in a Passover meal. I attended along with several others from the CSF; after all, we believe in Passover, too, and it was an interesting cultural experience and good food. (From what I recall, they served a full conventional meal, in addition to explaining the traditional elements of the seder.) And I found out some interesting trivia at the Passover meals, too; for example, one year, a Jewish student who sat at our table explained that they couldn’t drink beer during Passover week, because it was made from grain and needed yeast to produce, but vodka was fine, since it was made from potatoes.</p>
<p>At these events, someone from the Jewish Student Center talked about the Passover feast. It’s an ancient tradition, rich in symbolism: bitter herbs to represent the bitterness of slavery in Egypt, vegetables dipped in salt water to represent tears shed, unleavened bread to remember both the poverty of life in Egypt and the haste of the Jews’ departure from Egypt, and the Passover lamb itself, remembering the means by which God delivered his people. One year, the woman who spoke talked about this theme of deliverance. She suggested that we Christians had too small a view of deliverance; we primarily or only talked about God as delivering people from sin. In reality, she argued, God is always interested in and acting to deliver people in every way, offering all-encompassing freedom and overturning oppression of every kind: sin, the slavery of the Jews in ancient Egypt, racial and political and economic injustices and oppressions in the modern world, and so on.</p>
<p>Perhaps to drive home this point, they recited or sang <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayenu"><em>Dayenu</em></a>, a thousand-year-old Jewish song: (“Dayenu” is a Hebrew word meaning “it would have been enough” or “it would have sufficed.”)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If He had brought us out from Egypt, <br> and had not carried out judgments against them <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had carried out judgments against them, <br> and not against their idols <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had destroyed their idols, <br> and had not smitten their first-born <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had smitten their first-born, <br> and had not given us their wealth <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had given us their wealth, <br> and had not split the sea for us <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had split the sea for us, <br> and had not taken us through it on dry land <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had taken us through the sea on dry land, <br> and had not drowned our oppressors in it <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had drowned our oppressors in it, <br> and had not supplied our needs in the desert for forty years <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had supplied our needs in the desert for forty years, <br> and had not fed us the manna <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had fed us the manna, <br> and had not given us the Shabbat <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had given us the Shabbat, <br> and had not brought us before Mount Sinai <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had brought us before Mount Sinai, <br> and had not given us the Torah <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had given us the Torah, <br> and had not brought us into the land of Israel <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
<p>If He had brought us into the land of Israel, <br> and not built for us the Holy Temple <br> — it would have been enough!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don’t completely agree with this Jewish woman’s take. God is, of course, concerned with justice and deliverance. However, I’m concerned that making broad temporal justice an emphasis of the church can too easily drag the church off its mission. We are to be first and foremost a foretaste and beachhead and first installment of God’s eternal kingdom, not an inherently temporary fix for the kingdoms of this earth.</p>
<p>And yet…</p>
<p>There are pitfalls in our emphasizing only deliverance from sin. In <a href="https://amzn.to/3rMjxFy"><em>The Deep Things of God</em></a> (p. 15-16), Fred Sanders writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Evangelicalism has always been concerned to underline certain elements of the Christian message. We have a lot to say about God’s revelation, but we emphasize the business end of it, where God’s voice is heard normatively: the Bible. We know that everything Jesus did has power for salvation in it, but we emphasize the one event that is literally crucial: the cross. We know that God is at work on his people through the full journey of their lives, from the earliest glimmers of awareness to the ups and downs of the spiritual life, but we emphasize the hinge of all spiritual experience: conversion. We know there are countless benefits that flow from being joined to Christ, but we emphasize the big one: heaven.</p>
<p>Bible, cross, conversion, heaven. These are the right things to emphasize. But in order to emphasize anything, you must presuppose a larger body of truth to select from…</p>
<p>When evangelicalism wanes into an anemic condition, as it sadly has in recent decades, it happens in this way: the points of emphasis are isolated from the main body of Christian truth and handled as if they are the whole story rather than the key points. Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>God delivers us from sin, not because he doesn’t <em>care</em> about deliverance from slavery and racism and poverty and the rest, but because sin is the root problem behind slavery and racism and poverty and the rest. It’s not that the others aren’t important; it’s that God is too big to fix only those temporal evils without also fixing sin and death and the entire universe. In our commendable desire to emphasize salvation from sin and eternal life in heaven, we sometimes almost give the impression that Christianity is mostly a “get out of Hell free” card. It is that, but it’s not only that; it’s God speaking to us through his Word, and the fellowship with other believers, and an abundant life that starts now, and a purpose and provision on earth, and the joys of God’s creation, and the treasury of God’s actions on behalf of his people, from the Passover culminating in Jesus. Any one of those, as the hymn says, would have been enough.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Everything belongs to you, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future. Everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. - 1 Cor 3:21-23</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And yet…</p>
<p>From our perspective, any of those blessings would have been enough. After all, any of those blessings are more than we deserve; that’s why we preach grace. God’s perspective, though, seems to be different. He “made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, <em>so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus</em>” (Eph. 2:6-7, ESV, emphasis added). If we take Paul at his word here, he’s saying that part of God’s reason for giving us eternal life is so that he can have eternity to continue showering grace upon us, to grant us “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and… the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph. 1:18-19). For God’s love and God’s grace, nothing less than infinity is been enough.</p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-65307691611414130512021-01-29T23:05:00.000-05:002021-01-29T23:05:30.574-05:00For Christ<p>I like Paul.</p>
<p>There are a few reasons for this. One reason, of course, is that he wrote about a third of the New Testament. That’s obviously nice and important. I like that he’s smart and a good thinker, even if he is hard to understand sometimes (2 Pe 3:16). I like how passionate he is and how that comes out in his letters. It means that, when I read his letters, I’m not just having someone tell me what to do, I’m also <em>seeing</em> how someone thinks and feels when they’re totally committed to Christ and to letting others know about him.</p>
<p>One reason I like Paul is that he’ll give totally ordinary advice for daily life - the sort of thing that moral teachers and philosophers and parents and self-help guides have been saying for thousands of years - but tie it to the grandest, most cosmic reasons and rationales possible.</p>
<p>Consider, for example, Philippians 2:6-11:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>who, though he existed in the form of God, <br> did not regard equality with God <br> as something to be grasped, <br> but emptied himself <br> by taking on the form of a slave, <br> by looking like other men, <br> and by sharing in human nature. <br> He humbled himself <br> by becoming obedient to the point of death <br> —even death on a cross! <br> As a result God highly exalted him <br> and gave him the name <br> that is above every name, <br> so that at the name of Jesus <br> every knee will bow <br> —in heaven and on earth and under the earth— <br> and every tongue confess <br> that Jesus Christ is Lord <br> to the glory of God the Father. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Embedded in the middle of Paul’s letter, it’s a beautiful hymn to Christ. It clearly states Jesus’ divinity, it movingly describes what he gave up in order to serve and save us, and it concludes with a ringing statement of his future glory. It’s one of my favorite passages of Scripture.</p>
<p>And the reason why Paul wrote this beautiful hymn? Going back a few verses to Phil. 2:3: “Instead of being motivated by selfish ambition or vanity, each of you should, in humility, be moved to treat one another as more important than yourself.” Phil 4:2 goes into a bit more detail: “I appeal to Euodia and to Syntyche to agree in the Lord.” In other words, Paul thought that people in church weren’t getting along well enough, and two people in particular were having enough trouble that Paul called them out by name, and so he told them to shape up.</p>
<p>There are lots of reasons that Paul <em>could</em> have given for why Euodia and Syntyche and the rest of the Philippians should stop arguing and avoid ambition and vanity. Arguments can increase levels of cortisol (the stress hormone). Humility had been recognized as a virtue at least since the days of Moses (Num 12:3), who was revered by any Jewish Christians in Paul’s audience, and was commended by Solomon (Prov 3:34), the wisest man who ever lived. Arguments, selfish ambition, and vanity all hurt group dynamics and cohesion and can impair organizational effectiveness. For the church in particular, they can interfere with its mission of reaching others for Christ. Paul could have given any of these perfectly valid reasons and arguments, but instead, he ties it with the biggest reason possible - the example of what Christ did for us - and he does so seemingly effortlessly and naturally.</p>
<p>Philippians 2 isn’t the only place where Paul does this. In Col 3:13, for example, he writes, “Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also forgive others.” There are numerous good reasons that Paul could have given for why we should forgive others. It’s necessary for healthy relationships; any human relationship is sure to have disagreements and failings, and so forgiveness is needed to move past those. It’s psychologically very healthy; numerous books and studies discuss this, and some studies even show that it can have physical benefits. Paul, of course, didn’t have access to these findings from modern psychology, but the ancients had some understanding of the importance of harmony, too (Ps 133, Prov 17:22). For Christians, forgiveness is even more important: Jesus says that our forgiving others is needed to receive God’s forgiveness (Mk 11:25, Mt 6:14). It’s not that our forgiveness is necessary to earn rightness with God, but a failure to extend grace to others suggests that we don’t understand grace well enough to receive it ourselves. Paul, however, doesn’t go into any of these reasons here - the restored relationships and psychological benefits and rightness with God. Instead, he simply says that the reason - and the standard - for our forgiving of others is that Christ has forgiven us. If Jesus has forgiven us the full magnitude of our every offense against God and human, in spite of all that it costs him (Paul implies), then how can we not forgive others of their limited, sometimes provoked wrongs against us?</p>
<p>Rom 14:2-4 is another example: “The one who eats everything must not despise the one who does not, and the one who abstains must not judge the one who eats everything, for God has accepted him. Who are you to pass judgment on another’s servant? Before his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.” This is a somewhat complex situation - probably worth a post on its own - but the short version is that there was a conflict between Christians who believed that their faith required certain moral practices (a restricted diet and observing particular holy days) while others understood that they had freedom in Christ to do or not do these things. As with forgiveness and the Philippian church’s disputes, there are several ways Paul could have addressed this. He could have insisted on unity, in spite of the differences, for the sake of good human relationships or organizational effectiveness or the health of the church. He could have tried to persuade one side or the other to change their views; after all, we can tell from Paul’s letters that he’s a formidable writer and can present a powerful argument when he wants. He could have pulled rank: as an apostle, he could have simply commanded one side or the other to give up their opinions and comply. (We can tell from Paul’s letters that he’s willing to do <em>that</em>, too, when the situation calls for it.) Instead, Paul once again appeals to how God treats us: God has judged us right with him, so it’s not on us to judge each other, and the awesome reality that we now live for Christ supersedes the details of what we eat and how we arrange our calendars.</p>
<p>Several years ago, Jon Acuff wrote about <a href="https://stuffchristianslike.net/2010/11/16/the-jesus-juke/">“the Jesus juke”</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At another airport I went to, a humongous bodybuilder spent his time in the terminal doing ferocious push ups right beside me. I tweeted about it… One [response] stuck out. It was different than the rest, but is something I am growing familiar with.</p>
<p>I call it the “Jesus Juke.”</p>
<p>Like a football player juking you at the last second and going a different direction, the Jesus Juke is when someone takes what is clearly a joke filled conversation and completely reverses direction into something serious and holy.</p>
<p>In this particular case, when I tweeted a joke about the guy doing pushups, someone tweeted me back, “Imagine If we were that dedicated in our faith, family, and finances?”</p>
<p>I was fine with that idea, I was, but it was a Jesus Juke. We went from, “Whoa, there’s a mountain of a man doing pushups next to the coffee shop at the airport,” to a serious statement about the lack of discipline we have in our faith and our family and our finances.</p>
<p>I don’t know how to spell it, but in my head I heard that sad trumpet sound of “whaaaa, waaaa.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Acuff goes on to explain how these Jesus jukes tend to prompt shame (“You’re not as spiritual as I am, because you didn’t think to talk about Jesus here”) and are rarely helpful. And it could almost feel like that’s what Paul’s doing in these examples; whether he’s talking about group dynamics and personal relationships and diet and holidays and work, he keeps going all the way up to God and Jesus. But it doesn’t feel like a juke, a last-second athletic reversal, when Paul does it; it feels like Paul’s life is so saturated in Christ that it’s the most natural thing in the world for him to bring him up. It feels like Paul can’t help but think of what Christ did for him as the motivation for everything that he does, rather than being driven by interpersonal care or abstract ethics or concern for effectiveness.</p>
<p>I want that to be true of me, too.</p>
<p><em>And whatever you do in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. - Col 3:17</em></p>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9196545400276737166.post-27940460059300126562021-01-10T21:52:00.001-05:002021-01-11T07:42:29.855-05:00"Forgive me, but it's hard to be a human"<p>Let’s talk about Congress.</p>
<p>No, not the story you’re probably thinking of. Although we’ll get to that later.</p>
<p>I read last week that the son of Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) committed suicide on December 31, 2020. On January 5, Raskin and his wife wrote a deeply moving obituary for their son:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[In school], his irrepressible love of freedom and strong libertarian impulses made him a skeptic of all institutional bureaucracy and a daring outspoken defender of all outcasts and kids in trouble. Once when third-grade Tommy and his father saw a boy returning to school after a weeklong suspension and his Dad casually remarked, ‘it looks like they let finally let him out of jail,’ Tommy replied, ‘no, you mean they finally let him back into jail.’…</p>
<p>He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip, stopping all such gossipers with a trademark Tommy line — ‘forgive me, but it’s hard to be a human.’…</p>
<p>Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind. He began to be tortured later in his 20s by a blindingly painful and merciless ‘disease called depression,’ as Tabitha put it on Facebook over the weekend, a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family and friendship network of hundreds who adored him beyond words and whom he adored too, the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world.</p>
<p>On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son, Hannah and Tabitha’s beloved irreplaceable brother, a radiant light in this broken world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reading <a href="https://thedispatch.com/p/uphill-what-to-expect-when-congress">the newsletter where I first heard about this</a> and <a href="https://repraskin.medium.com/statement-of-congressman-jamie-raskin-and-sarah-bloom-raskin-on-the-remarkable-life-of-tommy-raskin-f93b0bb5d184">the full obituary by the Raskins</a>, I was struck by two things:</p>
<ul>
<li>Tommy Raskin worked to bring humor, joy, knowledge, and goodness into the lives of everyone around him.</li>
<li>Tommy Raskin suffered greatly, and his death will bring more pain into the lives of those around him.</li>
</ul>
<p>Last year was incredibly hard in many ways. It drove home the fact that we simply don’t know how much time or opportunity we’ll have to interact with others. Maybe we’ll have the countless hours over many decades that we expect, or maybe pandemic or violence or accident ends a life much sooner, or maybe life continues but lockdown or geography or changing circumstances makes the relationship impractical, or maybe a relationship that we took for granted decays or is torn apart. Why not take the opportunities we have to give others humor, joy, knowledge, or goodness?</p>
<p>And last year drove home the fact that we simply don’t know what pain others are going through. As we careen through life, scrambling to meet our obligations and check off items on our agendas and satisfy our wants and goals, we’re often oblivious to the nicks and dents we inflict on others who are similarly hurtling down their own paths, and we’re often oblivious to the opportunities we have and miss to make someone’s life better. Often these oversights and injuries are easily shrugged off, forgiven or forgotten, but how often do we unwittingly place a burden on people like the Raskin family who, because of the pain they’re going through, may not be able to handle <em>one more thing</em>?</p>
<p>This may seem trite, but it’s important. Please bear with me.</p>
<p>There are lots of sayings that I could quote right now. “Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” “If you can’t find anything nice to say, don’t say it.” “If you can be anything, be kind.” And so on. These are, frankly, cliches. As such, I dislike quoting them. But calling a statement a cliche doesn’t mean it’s false; it’s merely lost its impact due to overuse <em>because it’s true</em>. Maybe it’s time to reclaim the impact.</p>
<p>Kindness is often equated with niceness - pleasantness, politeness, a kind of superficial avoidance of anything displeasing. It goes much deeper than that. After all, when Paul talks about God’s kindness in Rom. 2:4 and Tit. 3:4, he isn’t saying that God is pleasant or polite; he’s talking about God’s work throughout history to restore humanity’s relationship to him, culminating in sending Christ. And when Paul exhorts us to be kind in Gal. 5:22 and Col. 3:12-13, he links it with “bearing with one another and forgiving one another… just as the Lord has forgiven you; and to all these virtues add love.” The standard of how we treat others is how Christ himself treats us! “Practice random kindness,” indeed.</p>
<p>The events in the Capitol building last week are, I believe, the dark inverse of this. No one wakes up on a sunny day, feeling that all is well with their life and the world, and says, “I think I’d like to participate in a deadly riot today.” Instead, it grew out of many years of political partisanship and mutual hostility, and repeated choices to double down on grievance and anger instead of looking for common ground, and looking for the worst in your opponents instead of extending grace, and a willingness to listen to cynical or deluded or self-serving people who fan the flames of it all. Any single act may seem harmless, but - without minimizing the responsibility of everyone who directly participated in or instigated last Wednesday’s events - it all built up until chaos and destruction and death resulted.</p>
<p>It’s easy to think that small, day-to-day gestures have little impact. But, again, last year - and last week - show that’s not the case; the opportunities taken and missed, goodness such as Tommy Raskin’s life and pain such as his death, all ripple out and affect others far beyond what we can see. In fact, our actions toward others are the greatest impact we can have. As C.S. Lewis writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. — <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Weight-Glory-C-S-Lewis-ebook/dp/B08R2TGQCR/"><em>The Weight of Glory</em></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So practice kindness. Make others’ lives easier rather than harder. Remember that it’s hard to be a human.</p>
<p>Hug everyone in your household.
Send an encouraging note to a coworker or fellow churchgoer.
Give your parents, siblings, or adult children a phone call.
Turn off your electronic device so you’ll have more time for others.
Go to bed early so you’ll have the energy and patience to be kinder tomorrow.
Complain less. (Most folks on Facebook and Twitter probably already know what things bother you; you probably don’t need to inform them.)
If you’re struggling, let people know. (Kindness doesn’t mean being dishonest, and you give people an opportunity to be kind to you.)
Respond to bad political news with <a href="https://www.9marks.org/article/what-can-miserable-christians-sing/">lament</a> and prayer instead of outrage and grievance.
Forgive others, as Jesus forgave us.
Do what you can to help those around you take a tiny step toward everlasting splendor.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>If you or someone you know is struggling, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. Crisis counselors can also be reached by messaging the Crisis Text Line at 741741.</em> — <a href="https://thedispatch.com/p/uphill-what-to-expect-when-congress">“Uphill”</a> on Tommy Raskin)</p>
</blockquote>
Josh Kelleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07856694907555007654noreply@blogger.com0