Brinded Cow

Retiring the Cow

2006-10-20T15:49:00.000-05:00

I've started a new blog for our family. It will include the sort of rambling thoughts you found here, but add some focus on communications about our preparations for ministry in Slovakia. The new site is still a work in progress as I learn about scripting, but it has a wee bit of content already. Please visit us at www.the-lundgaards.com.

So it's good-bye to the Brinded Cow....

Athanasius on the Incarnation

2006-10-03T15:28:00.000-05:00

The new Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Interview

2006-10-03T07:34:00.000-05:00

Tony Reinke quizzed me last week, and posted the conversation on his blog.

Coming to Omaha

2006-09-14T06:40:00.000-05:00

If you plan to be near Omaha on October 14th and are looking for something to do, I have a suggestion....

Godly Arguing?

2006-09-13T10:48:00.000-05:00

John Newton (the man who wrote “Amazing Grace”) had some wise advice for Christians who enter into disputes over theology. His comments are published in the latest edition of Pen&Pulpit.

Quo Vadis?

2006-09-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

There is a small but growing ministry in Trnava, Slovakia, called The Building. The team is sent by Mission to the World (MTW), the missions agency of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). (Sorry for the alphabet soup.) I mention this team because Paula, Kristian, Ethan, and I visited them in May. We went there to see what they were up to, and to see whether we might fit in.

We thought we fit. They thought we fit. So they invited us to come work with them, and in a fit of ecstacy we said "Sure!" We have since applied with MTW and have been accepted. So now we begin our long walk the road to Slovakia....

Power through Prayer

2006-08-12T06:48:00.000-05:00

Excerpts from E. M. Bounds' exhortations to prayer are in this month's Pen&Pulpit.

Where is Happiness?

2006-07-30T07:33:00.000-05:00

Men travel side by side for years, each locked up in his own silence or exchanging those words which carry no freight—till danger comes. Then they stand shoulder to shoulder. They discover that they belong to the same family. They wax and bloom in the recognition of fellow beings. They look at one another and smile. They are like the prisoner set free who marvels at the immensity of the sea.

Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations. Our sordid interests imprison us within their walls. Only a comrade can grasp us by the hand and haul us free.

And these human relations must be created. One must go through an apprenticeship to learn the job. Games and risk are a help here. When we exchange manly handshakes, compete in races, join together to save one of us who is in trouble, cry aloud for help in the hour of danger—only then do we learn that we are not alone on earth.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded. These prison walls that this age of trade has built up round us, we can break down. We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the pathetic chant of the human voice.

—from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars

Chesterton's Orthodoxy

2006-07-05T11:14:00.000-05:00

The July Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

The Back of My Car

2006-06-26T17:09:00.000-05:00

I'm not really a bumper-sticker man, but I couldn't resist this one. It's Old Church Slavonic for "Glory to Jesus Christ." (I think.)

Pictures of our Pension

2006-06-26T12:22:00.000-05:00

If you go to this link and click "kino" on the left, you will see a slide show of the Pension we will be staying in for our English Camp in July. We will be teaching the advanced students, and representing the USA against the Czech Republic in a rematch of the World Cup fiasco.

Wandering in Slovakia

2006-06-23T17:03:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid my pictures are not the best, but here you can get a small taste of the beautiful country that we visited at the end of May.

The other pictures on that page are from last year's trip to the Czech Republic to teach English--Paula and I will do that again in about three weeks.

John Ploughman's Talks

2006-06-05T14:54:00.000-05:00

The June edition of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Richard Rolle of Hampole, c. 1300 – 1349

2006-05-18T12:42:00.000-05:00

Ihesu, als thou me made and bought,
Thou be my love and all my thought,
And help that I were to Thee brought;
Withouten thee I may do nought.

Ihesu, als thou may do thy will
And naething is that thee may let;
With thy grace my heart fulfill,
My love and my liking in thee set.

Ihesu, at thy will
I pray that I might be;
All my heart fulfill
With perfect love to thee.

That I have done ill
Ihesu, forgive thou me;
And suffer me never to spill
Ihesu, for pity. Amen.

Glossary

als – as
withouten – without
naething – nothing
let – hinder, impede, thwart
fulfill – fill; imbue, endow
liking – pleasure, delight
set – to base on or ground in
at thy will – in accordance with your will
spill – perish; be damned
for pity – on account of [your] mercy

Prose paraphrase

Jesus, since you made me and bought me, be my love and all my thought, and bring me into your presence. Without you I can do nothing.

Jesus, since you can do as you please and nothing can thwart your purposes, fill my heart with grace, ground all my love and delight in you.

Jesus, I pray that my will would be in accord with yours; fill all my heart with perfect love to you.

Forgive the evil I have done, Jesus; and never let me be damned, for your mercy’s sake. Amen.

The Flesh is no Brat

2006-05-17T12:39:00.000-05:00

Weeds happen; but even the smallest garden—a bonsai that will fit in the palm of your hand—requires painstaking cultivation. Sin happens; but mortification demands study, purpose, and care. The flesh is not an attention-starved brat who will go away if you ignore him.

The Climb

2006-05-17T12:36:00.000-05:00

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

—from Christina Rossetti, “Up-Hill”

Horatius Bonar's "The Rent Veil"

2006-05-13T07:50:00.000-05:00

The latest edition of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Time To Build a Woodshed

2006-04-17T06:52:00.000-05:00

“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”

—Thoreau

Do You Like Sentences?

2006-04-16T19:02:00.000-05:00

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”

“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know.... Do you like sentences?”

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.”

—from Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The Scandal of the Scriptures

2006-04-16T07:26:00.000-05:00

“When I was a child, the adult members of Pittsburgh society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They did not recognize the lively danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a dose of its virulent opposition to their world. Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.”

—from Annie Dillard, "The Book of Luke"

The World is a ... Maypole

2006-04-14T16:51:00.000-05:00

“The Metamorphosis of nature shows itself in nothing more than this that there is no word in our language that cannot become typical to us of nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a Mist; a Spider’s Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold, & it will give the imagination keen pleasure. Swifter than light the World converts itself into that thing you name & all things find their right place under this new & capricious classificaiton. There is no thing small or mean to the soul. It derives as grand a joy from symbolizing the Godhead or his Universe under the form of a moth or a gnat as of a Lord of Hosts. Must I call the heaven & the earth a maypole & country fair with booths or an anthill or an old coat in order to give you the shock of pleasure which the imagination loves and the sense of spiritual greatness? Call it a blossom, a rod, a wreath of parsley, a tamarisk-crown, a cock, a sparrow, the ear instantly hears & the spirit leaps to the trope; and hence it is that men of eloquence like Chatham have found a Dictionary very suggestive reading when they were disposed to speak.

We all know enough to be endless writers. Those who have written best are not those who have known most, but those to whom writing was natural & necessary. Let us answer a book of ink with a book of flesh & blood. All writing comes by the grace of God.”

—Emerson’s Journal, June 6, 1841

My First Published Poem

2006-04-04T12:53:00.000-05:00

The following parody of W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming" was published in Nit&Wit literary Arts Magazine in 1981. As I recall, the journal was published out of Chicago and had a circulation of 5,000.
_________________________

The Second Bathing

Rising and rising in the porcelain coffin
The waves of washing break against the body;
Clouds fill the tub; the bath tub cannot hold;
Dirty water is loosed upon the sewer,
The grime-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
Rats and bugs of innocence are drowned;
The best leave filthy rings, while the worst
Deposit their gritty foul matter fully.

Surely some more cleansing is at hand;
Surely the Second Bathing is at hand;
The Second Bathing! Scarcely are the words out
When a gross image out of Spiritus Mud Eye
Impairs my sight: somewhere in the swamp
A shape with bulbous body and the head of a child,
Eyes wide and searching as Lucifer’s,
Is wringing tiny hands, while all within him
Reel thoughts of rolling in the muddy water.
He splashes in again; but now I know
That twenty afternoon naps of faking sleep
Were spent scheming ways to ruin new clothes.
And what rough child, his turn to bathe now here,
Comes of his own free will in full submission?

John Donne's Holy Sonnets

2006-04-03T18:19:00.000-05:00

The April edition of the Pen&Pulpit is here. I enjoyed my work with Donne's Holy Sonnets, and hope the introduction and notes benefit you. These pearls are worth a dive or two.

Finding Rest

2006-03-30T15:27:00.000-06:00

As for me … I know what it is to be a subject and what it is to be a sovereign.

Queen Elizabeth I
Speech to Parliament, 1586

Kings and queens are the “makers of manners.” So saith Shakespeare, but it’s been centuries since royalty was hip on these shores. It isn’t the fashion for our civic leaders to insist on their divine rights, to have their political opponents beheaded, or even to prance about in ermine stoles. Monarchy as a fad was on the way out in February 1776 when Thomas Paine introduced his pamphlet Common Sense with these words:

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence [sic] of custom.

He couched those burgeoning sentiments in phrases like “the remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king” and “crowned ruffians,” and said plainly that “a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.” Paine pulled no punch. He procured for those anti-royalist sentiments a general favor, and ever since then it’s been downhill for hereditary tyranny. I can picture young Thomas curled up before the fire with a copy of Dante’s Paradiso in hand, the pages of Canto XIX, the litany of the sins of kings, yellowed and ragged from overuse:

What to your kings may not the Persians say,
When they that volume opened shall behold
In which are written down all their dispraises?

There shall be seen, among the deeds of Albert,
That which ere long shall set the pen in motion,
For which the realm of Prague shall be deserted.

There shall be seen the woe that on the Seine
He brings by falsifying of the coin,
Who by the blow of a wild boar shall die.

There shall be seen the pride that causes thirst,
Which makes the Scot and Englishman so mad
That they within their boundaries cannot rest;

Be seen the luxury and effeminate life
Of him of Spain, and the Bohemian,
Who valour never knew and never wished;

Be seen the Cripple of Jerusalem,
His goodness represented by an I,
While the reverse an M shall represent;

Be seen the avarice and poltroonery
Of him who guards the Island of the Fire,
Wherein Anchises finished his long life….[1]

Enough with the history. You don’t need to be told that you never bowed or curtsied to a King. Everything in our Constitution and our national consciousness seethes with disdain for the very idea of one man or one woman arrogant enough to try to rule over us. Long before you or I were born our forefathers beat down those antique ideas of “his or her royal majesty” and decrees and curtseying so that now they’re only quaint ceremonies on the movie screen in costume dramas. Whether we prefer Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in The King and I or Chow Yun-Fat and Jodie Foster in Anna and the King, either way we don’t want Anna bowing in front of the king of Siam—we want him to learn to treat her as his equal. Paine would smile on our egalitarian taste.

Queen Elizabeth I said she knew “what it is to be a subject and what it is to be a sovereign.” I imagine she’d feel awkwardly out of place around here. What does “sovereign” mean anyway? What do shopper-citizens at the mall think it means? I dare not guess, but suspect our definitions wouldn’t jive with the Virgin Queen’s. And if we don’t grasp what sovereign means with respect to earthly kings, can we be sure we understand what the Bible means when it calls God sovereign?

Perhaps we could get a clue from the word itself by noting that it conceals in it the word “reign.” That’s a word that would conjure up in Tom Paine images of the disease of monarchy, all that “avarice and poltroonery.” Are we any more comfortable than he with sovereignty?

Now I’m not interested in raising royalty on our republican soil. But I can’t help but wonder how our hard-coded hatred of monarchs flavors our response to the biblical idea that God rules over us and all creation with “absolute power,” a concept that is the political opposite of the “checks and balances” written into our beloved republic. Is it possible that we subconsciously overlay the idea of biblical sovereignty with a series of our own “checks and balances”?
A generation before Citizen Paine came along America produced her greatest theologian: Jonathan Edwards. Perhaps because he died before the ideals of royalty dropped completely out of vogue he was able to compose this undemocratic definition of God’s sovereignty:

The sovereignty of God is his absolute, independent right of disposing of all creatures according to his own pleasure.

In our sophisticated modern commitment to human freedom and independence we gag on words like these—yet God’s sovereignty has become for many believers the source of their greatest comfort and security. Edwards himself struggled with the doctrine when he was young: “From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God’s sovereignty.... It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me.”[2] But his thinking was later changed, until he could say, “I have often since had not only a conviction, but a delightful conviction. The doctrine has very often appeared exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not so.”[3]

Why isn’t the idea of the sovereignty of God as precious to us as it became to Edwards? It may be that our ideas of sovereignty are so shaped by the Caligulas, Neros, Hitlers, and Stalins of history that we struggle when asked to believe that God shares with such scoundrels anything that even smells of absolute power. There may be some psychological reticence in us not unlike an abused child’s confusion when thinking of God as Father.

This is where our theology can step in to make some helpful distinctions. First, we have to remember chapter one: God is Creator, we are creatures. There’s a big distinction in that. As Creator he isn’t limited as we are, nor is he fallen as we are. His rule will never be tainted by sin.

And the rest of theology fills the reign of God with adjectives that make it sound delicious to us: it teaches us to think of God’s reign not only as unlimited and eternal, but as wise, loving, just, merciful, and holy. As we let this more biblical picture of God’s majesty permeate our minds, our objections subside. We realize that the only way to run a universe is with God at the helm—and not just to run the universe, but to run our lives. So, with Edwards, we learn to rest[4] in thoughts of the sovereignty of God.

___________________________________

[1] This is from Longfellow’s translation (which, of course, Thomas Paine could never have read). The I and the M stuff refers to Roman numerals—Dante refers to Charles II of Apulia, and says his good deeds will be counted with a one (I), and his misdeeds with a thousand (M). Ah, poets!
[2] Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.

Please Pass the Sunset

2006-03-30T15:18:00.000-06:00

Bring me the sunset in a cup,
Reckon the morning’s flagons up
And say how many Dew,
Tell me how far the morning leaps—
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadths of blue!

Write me how many notes there be
In the new Robin’s ecstasy
Among the astonished boughs—
How many trips the Tortoise makes—
How many cups the Bee partakes,
The Debauchee of Dews!

Also, who laid the Rainbow’s piers,
Also, who leads the docile spheres
By withes of supple blue?
Whose fingers string the stalactite—
Who counts the wampum of the night
To see that none is due?

Who built this little Alban House
And shut the windows down so close
My spirit cannot see?
Who’ll let me out some Gala day
With implements to fly away,
Passing Pomposity?

—Emily Dickinson

For the Sake of Conversation

2006-03-30T15:15:00.000-06:00

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

—Anthony Hope

Make Your Choice

2006-03-26T19:54:00.000-06:00

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

—Woody Allen

Highlight from The Faerie Queene, Book 2

2006-03-25T15:49:00.000-06:00

But Guyon all this while his booke did read,
Ne yet has ended: for it was a great
And ample volume, that doth far excead
My leasure, so long leaues here to repeat:
It told, how first Prometheus did create
A man, of many partes from beasts deriued,
And then stole fire from heauen, to animate
His worke, for which he was by Ioue depriued
Of life him selfe, and hart-strings of an Ægle riued.

—Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.X.VXX

Modernized spelling of the above excerpt:

But Guyon all this while his book did read,
Ne yet has ended: for it was a great
And ample volume, that doth far exceed
My leisure, so long leaves here to repeat:
It told, how first Prometheus did create
A man, of many parts from beasts derived,
And then stole fire from heaven, to animate
His work, for which he was by Jove deprived
Of life him self, and heart-strings of an Eagle rived.

English Camp 2006

2006-03-25T14:54:00.000-06:00

Paula and I have been invited to return to Pastviny to teach at an English Camp in July. After our experience last year, I decided that the Czech students need more help with writing than with anything else. So I have decided to focus on the sentence—some grammatical aspects of the sentence, as well as stylistic aspects. The title of my lessons will be Maximum Sentence. I expect the pun will be lost on them (but I hope it isn’t lost on you).

Evangelical Reunion Online

2006-03-22T20:45:00.000-06:00

John Frame's book Evangelical Reunion is now online (as are other works of his). I recommend it.

Shows about Nothing

2006-03-22T18:35:00.000-06:00

The problem with Thomas S. Hibbs’s Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld is that it both inspires and helps me to be more reflective about the culture around me and its influences on me, and that it makes me uncomfortable. I say “uncomfortable” because it clues me in to the more subtle influences of the world that unquestionably, secretly, and maliciously shape my life. Hibbs reminds me that I can’t simply be an unreflective consumer of the novels, poems, movies, and art that I enjoy—none of it is meaningless and impotent, and its meaning can be helpful, harmful, or both. Even when it delights me it can be at the same time poisoning my soul.

Consider, for example, a lengthy nested quotation (including references to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) that is forcing me to reexamine my view of my family—and making me wonder whether I’m not, after all, another one of those individualists that I denigrate as antichristian:

There is, then, a hidden alliance between centralized government and individualism. They are mirror images of one another; each tends to give birth to its opposite. How are we to understand the relationship? According to Tocqueville, “When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself in contrast with so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness. The same equality that renders him independent of each of his fellow citizens, taken severally, exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number.” The impotence of the individual before the whole of society makes possible a hitherto unknown form of tyranny, a “new physiognomy of servitude.” The great danger is not, as it was in previous eras, the despotism of a single man or even of a class. We witness

“an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind.... Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if... its object were to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual
childhood.... For their happiness such a government willingly labors.... what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

What sort of citizens does such a regime produce? Tocqueville does not give them a name, but it would be hard to distinguish them from Nietzsche’s last men. According to Tocqueville, these enervated souls suffer from the shrinking of each person’s world to a very small circle. Some social conservatives might be surprised to learn that what they call family values and see as an alternative to liberal individualism is nearly indistinguishable from what Tocqueville calls individualism: “a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.” [37-38]

Hibbs troubles me later with his analysis of the film Trainspotting, which I have never seen nor want to see. The film itself critiques the American Dream from a different perspective from mine, but for the same emptiness I find in it. Then Hibbs summarizes painfully: “The problem for most of us is that we will return to our lives of paying bills and lowering our cholesterol. If we can find no higher goals than those of endless accumulation, and if our heroism peaks at daring to say no to drugs, our life looks pointless and comically hollow.” [142] Even seeing clearly the vanity of the Dream, I close my eyes and embrace it with the other fools.

Sigh. I have much to think about.

Thomas Hibbs, Cultural Critic

2006-03-22T14:53:00.000-06:00

Soon I hope to write a few notes on Thomas Hibbs's work of cultural criticism called Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld.

Until then you can read a tasty sample of his writing in this discussion of moral education, Harry Potter, and Pride and Prejudice.

You can access the archives of his reviews at National Review Online.

The Novelist is a Canary

2006-03-21T06:23:00.000-06:00

“The novelist is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that the coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over.”

—Walker Percy, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World”

Richard Baxter on Pride

2006-03-15T06:31:00.000-06:00

The March edition of Pen&Pulpit is published here.

The Tables Turned

2006-03-14T08:31:00.000-06:00

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ‘tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

—William Wordsworth

Matthew Arnold on the Vanity of Toil

2006-03-12T19:03:00.000-06:00

A section of Arnold's poem "A Summer Night" captures the emptiness I'm sometimes tempted to feel about my work. I pray it doesn't end this way for me:

...

And I, I know not if to pray
Still to be what I am, or yield, and be
Like all the other men I see.

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest....

Notes on Nina Balatka

2006-03-12T07:03:00.000-06:00

In a used bookstore last week I stumbled across and snatched up a copy of Anthony Trollope’s minor novel Nina Balatka. I had been interested in it for two reasons: I adore Trollope’s Barchester novels, and I have an interest in Prague, where NB takes place.

The plot follows the socially unacceptable love between a Christian woman and a Jewish man, and in the end shows how love can span social and religious barriers and conquer all bigotry and hatred. The question of marriage between people from different religions is complicated, and unfortunately Trollope is unable to treat it from any perspective other than a social one. For him religion is not a spiritual reality but merely a social differentiator—one more small-minded way that men distinguish themselves from each other and keep themselves separated. All the Christians and Jews in the novel who oppose the marriage of Nina and Anton do so on grounds that are clearly wrongheaded and indefensible. And Trollope even makes the Church bless their union in that the Priest has no arguments against Nina’s resolute love.

But her love is more than resolute: she swears more than once that she would rather die than deny her love for Anton, and she even says that she would give up her soul if need be in order to have him. Anyone reading from a spiritual perspective recognizes her idolatry, and it baffles me that Trollope would go that far. Everything is subordinated to love, so love now is the only true religion.

In that sense the novel is perfectly frustrating. But Trollope is a skilled writer, and I can see how he wins over the hearts of his readers and persuades them of even so ridiculous a position. There is a nobility in Nina’s love, and it is easy to root for her against her oppressors—because, of course, her oppressors are twisted caricatures, not a single one resembling a Christian with a vital, biblical faith. In fact, it is a wonder in the end that she doesn’t give over her faith completely, since it is so unattractive, so useless, so powerless, so unreasonable.

This is exactly the kind of novel I fear: good writing put to an ultimately evil (or at least wrong-headed) end.

Can you Define Beauty?

2006-03-11T07:05:00.000-06:00

"... when the cold hand of theory reaches for beauty, it will succeed in grabbing everything except the beautiful."

—Walker Percy, "Metaphor as Mistake"

Behaviorists and Dog Spit

2006-03-09T17:43:00.000-06:00

"Instead of having behaviorists trying to explain language by stimulus‑response theory, why not try to account for behaviorists by a larger theory of language (for after all the behavior of behaviorists is notable in that it is not encompassed by behavioral theory: behaviorists not only study responses; they write articles and deliver lectures setting forth what they take to be the truth about responses, and would be offended if anyone suggested that their writings and lectures were nothing more than responses and therefore no more true or false than a dog's salivation)?"

—Walker Percy, "The Delta Factor"

The Sovereignty of the Amateur

2006-03-09T06:31:00.000-06:00

"I make no apologies for being an amateur in such matters, since the one thing that has been clear to me from the beginning is that language is too important to be left to linguisticians. Indeed everything is too important to be left to the specialist of that thing, and the layman is already too deprived by the surrendering of such sovereignty."

—Walker Percy, "The Delta Factor"

One Sure Way not to See the Grand Canyon

2006-03-07T07:37:00.000-06:00

Every explorer names his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful—except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered.

Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas discovered the Grand Canyon and was amazed at the sight. It can be imagined: One crosses miles of desert, breaks through the mesquite, and there it is at one’s feet. Later the government set the place aside as a national park, hoping to pass along to millions the experience of Cárdenas. Does not one see the same sight from the Bright Angel Lodge that Cárdenas saw?

The assumption is that the Grand Canyon is a remarkably interesting and beautiful place and that if it had a certain value P for Cárdenas, the same value P may be transmitted to any number of sightseers—just as Banting’s discovery of insulin can be transmitted to any number of diabetics. A counterinfluence is at work, however, and it would be nearer the truth to say that if the place is seen by a million sightseers, a single sightseer does not receive value P but a millionth part of value P.

It is assumed that since the Grand Canyon has the fixed interest value P, tours can be organized for any number of people. A man in Boston decides to spend his vacation at the Grand Canyon. He visits his travel bureau, looks at the folder, signs up for a two-week tour. He and his family take the tour, see the Grand Canyon, and return to Boston. May we say that this man has seen the Grand Canyon? Possibly he has. But it is more likely that what he has done is the one sure way not to see the canyon.

—Walker Percy, "The Loss of the Creature"

Face to Face

2006-03-05T07:36:00.001-06:00

Face to face with the Lord,
Wisdom, understanding, counsel avail nothing.

—Proverbs 21:30, Revised English Bible

Speaking of God

2006-03-05T07:36:00.000-06:00

"We are speaking of God—is it surprising if you don’t understand? A pious admission of ignorance must be preferred to a rash profession of knowledge. To touch God to some extent with the mind is a great bliss, but to grasp him altogether is impossible."

—Augustine

Do I Know Enough?

2006-03-05T07:33:00.000-06:00

"I know only enough about God to want to worship him…."

—Annie Dillard

The Pole of Great Price

2006-03-05T07:32:00.000-06:00

"After all, one of the few things we know about the Absolute is that it is relatively inaccessible. It is that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions. Like the others, it is a Pole of the Most Trouble. It is also—I take this as given—the Pole of Great Price."

—Annied Dillard

Sufficient Sensibility?

2006-03-05T07:28:00.000-06:00

"On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?"

—Annie Dillard

On Being Candid

2006-02-18T21:02:00.000-06:00

From Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne, Chapter 40:

Now, it will be said that the doctor was not very candid in this; not more so, perhaps, than was Lady Arabella herself. But when one is specially invited to be candid, one is naturally set upon one’s guard. Those who by disposition are most open, are apt to become crafty when so admonished. When a man says to you, “Let us be candid with each other,” you feel instinctively that he desires to squeeze you without giving a drop of water himself.

Saying Dinner Grace

2006-02-18T20:58:00.000-06:00

From Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne, Chapter 19:

Mr Athill consequently dropped the word he was speaking, and uttered a prayer—if it was a prayer—that they might all have grateful hearts for which God was about to give them.

If it was a prayer! As far as my own experience goes, such utterances are seldom prayers, seldom can be prayers. And if not prayers, what then? To me it is unintelligible that the full tide of glibbest chatter can be stopped at a moment in the midst of profuse good living, and the Giver thanked becomingly in words of heartfelt praise. Setting aside for the moment what one daily hears and sees, may not one declare that a change so sudden is not within the compass of the human mind? But then, to such reasoning one cannot but add what one does hear and see; one cannot but judge of the ceremony by the manner in which one sees it performed—uttered, that is—and listened to. Clergymen there are—one meets them now and then—who endeavour to give to the dinner-table grace some of the solemnity of a church ritual, and what is the effect? Much the same as though one were to be interrupted for a minute in the midst of one of our church liturgies to hear a drinking-song.

And it will be argued, that a man need be less thankful because, at the moment of receiving, he utters not thanksgiving? or will it be thought that a man is made thankful because what is called a grace is uttered after dinner? It can hardly be imagined that any one will so argue, or so think.

Dinner-graces are, probably, the last remaining relic of certain daily services[1] which the Church in olden days enjoined: nones, complines, and vespers were others. Of the nones and complines we have happily got quit; and it might be well if we could get rid of the dinner-grace also. Let any man ask himself whether, on his own part, they are acts of prayer and thanksgiving—and if not that, what then?
_____________________________________________

[1] It is, I know, alleged that graces are said before dinner, because our Saviour uttered a blessing before his last supper. I cannot say that the idea of such analogy is pleasing to me.

The Poetry of Love?

2006-02-18T20:44:00.000-06:00

From Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne, Chapter 7:

We are inclined to think that these matters are not always discussed by mortal lovers in the poetically passionate phraseology which is generally thought to be appropriate for their description. A man cannot well describe that which he has never seen or heard; but the absolute words and acts of one such scene did once come to the author’s knowledge. The couple were by no means plebeian, or below the proper standard of high bearing and high breeding; they were a handsome pair, living among educated people, sufficiently given to mental pursuits, and in every way what a pair of polite lovers ought to be. The all-important conversation passed in this wise. The site of the passionate scene was the sea-shore, on which they were walking, in autumn.

Gentleman. “Well, Miss—, the long and short of it is this: here I am; you can take me or leave me.”

Lady—scratching a gutter on the sand with her parasol, so as to allow a little salt water to run out of one hole into another. “Of course, I know that’s all nonsense.”

Gentleman. “Nonsense! By Jove, it isn’t nonsense at all: come, Jane; here I am: come, at any rate you can say something.”

Lady. “Yes, I suppose I can say something.”

Gentleman. “Well, which is it to be; take me or leave me?”

Lady—very slowly, and with a voice perhaps hardly articulate, carrying on, at the same time, her engineering works on a wider scale. “Well, I don’t exactly want to leave you.”

And so the matter was settled: settled with much propriety and satisfaction; and both the lady and gentleman would have thought, had they ever thought about the matter at all, that this, the sweetest moment of their lives, had been graced by all the poetry by which such moments ought to be hallowed.

The Wonderful Effect of Divine Love

2006-02-18T20:38:00.000-06:00

From The Imitation of Christ, 3.5:

The Disciple

I bless You, O heavenly Father, Father of my Lord Jesus Christ, for having condescended to remember me, a poor creature. Thanks to You, O Father of mercies, God of all consolation, Who with Your comfort sometimes refresh me, who am not worthy of it. I bless You always and glorify You with Your only-begotten Son and the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, forever and ever. Ah, Lord God, my holy Lover, when You come into my heart, all that is within me will rejoice. You are my glory and the exultation of my heart. You are my hope and refuge in the day of my tribulation.

But because my love is as yet weak and my virtue imperfect, I must be strengthened and comforted by You. Visit me often, therefore, and teach me Your holy discipline. Free me from evil passions and cleanse my heart of all disorderly affection so that, healed and purified within, I may be fit to love, strong to suffer, and firm to persevere.

Love is an excellent thing, a very great blessing, indeed. It makes every difficulty easy, and bears all wrongs with equanimity. For it bears a burden without being weighted and renders sweet all that is bitter. The noble love of Jesus spurs to great deeds and excites longing for that which is more perfect. Love tends upward; it will not be held down by anything low. Love wishes to be free and estranged from all worldly affections, lest its inward sight be obstructed, lest it be entangled in any temporal interest and overcome by adversity. Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger or higher or wider; nothing is more pleasant, nothing fuller, and nothing better in heaven or on earth, for love is born of God and cannot rest except in God, Who is above all created things.

One who is in love flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free, not bound. He gives all for all and possesses all in all, because he rests in the one sovereign Good, Who is above all things, and from Whom every good flows and proceeds. He does not look to the gift but turns himself above all gifts to the Giver. Love often knows no limits but overflows all bounds. Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of troubles, attempts more than it is able, and does not plead impossibility, because it believes that it may and can do all things. For this reason, it is able to do all, performing and effecting much where he who does not love fails and falls.

Love is watchful. Sleeping, it does not slumber. Wearied, it is not tired. Pressed, it is not straitened. Alarmed, it is not confused, but like a living flame, a burning torch, it forces its way upward and passes unharmed through every obstacle. If a man loves, he will know the sound of this voice. For this warm affection of soul is a loud voice crying in the ears of God, and it says: “My God, my love, You are all mine and I am all Yours. Give me an increase of love, that I may learn to taste with the inward lips of my heart how sweet it is to love, how sweet to be dissolved in love and bathe in it. Let me be rapt in love. Let me rise above self in great fervor and wonder. Let me sing the hymn of love, and let me follow You, my Love, to the heights. Let my soul exhaust itself in praising You, rejoicing out of love. Let me love You more than myself, and let me not love myself except for Your sake. In You let me love all those who truly love You, as the law of love, which shines forth from You, commands.”

Love is swift, sincere, kind, pleasant, and delightful. Love is strong, patient and faithful, prudent, long-suffering, and manly. Love is never self-seeking, for in whatever a person seeks himself there he falls from love. Love is circumspect, humble, and upright. It is neither soft nor light, nor intent upon vain things. It is sober and chaste, firm and quiet, guarded in all the senses. Love is subject and obedient to superiors. It is mean and contemptible in its own eyes, devoted and thankful to God; always trusting and hoping in Him even when He is distasteful to it, for there is no living in love without sorrow.

He who is not ready to suffer all things and to stand resigned to the will of the Beloved is not worthy to be called a lover. A lover must embrace willingly all that is difficult and bitter for the sake of the Beloved, and he should not turn away from Him because of adversities.

Letters of Samuel Rutherford

2006-02-13T22:26:00.000-06:00

The February edition of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Turns Out My Kids are the Real Rebels--and I'm Proud

2006-02-03T07:24:00.000-06:00

And you can read about it here.

The Call

2006-01-26T06:07:00.000-06:00

Two more (brief) quotations from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand, and Stars.

* * *

The call that stirred you must torment all men. Whether we dub it sacrifice, or poetry, or adventure, it is always the same voice that calls. But domestic security has succeeded in crushing out that part in us that is capable of heeding the call. We scarcely quiver; we beat our wings once or twice and fall back into our barnyard.

We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow. But you, Sergeant, did discover the sordidness of those shopkeepers’ bustlings, those petty pleasures, those petty needs. You felt that men did not live like this. And you agreed to heed the great call without bothering to try to understand it. The hour had come when you must moult, when you must rise into the sky.

* * *

Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

The Men

2006-01-26T05:59:00.000-06:00

What follows is an excerpt from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand, and Stars. He is writing from his experience as a pilot in the 1920's and 30's carrying mail in North Africa and South America. The italics are mine.

* * *

MERMOZ IS ONE AIRLINE PILOT, and Guillaumet another, of whom I shall write briefly in order that you may see clearly what I mean when I say that in the mould of this new profession a new breed of men has been cast.

1.

A handful of pilots, of whom Mermoz was one, survey the Casablanca-Dakar line across the territory inhabited by the refractory tribes of the Sahara. Motors in those days being what they were, Mermoz was taken prisoner one day by the Moors. The tribesmen were unable to make up their minds to kill him, kept him captive a fortnight and he was eventually ransomed. Whereupon he continued to fly over the same territory.

When the South American line was opened by Mermoz, ever the pioneer, he was given the job of surveying the division between Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. He who had flung a bridge over the Sahara was now to do the same over the Andes. They had given him a plane whose absolute ceiling was sixteen thousand feet and had asked him to fly it over a mountain range that rose more than twenty thousand feet into the air. His job was to search for gaps in the Cordilleras. He who had studied the face of the sands was now to learn the contours of the peaks, those crags whose scarfs of snow flutter restlessly in the winds, whose surfaces are bleached white in the storms, whose blustering gusts sweep through the narrow walls of their rocky corridors and force the pilot to a sort of hand to hand combat. Mermoz enrolled in his war in complete ignorance of his adversary, with no notion at all of the chances of coming forth alive from battle with this enemy. His job was to ‘try out’ for the rest of us. And, ‘trying out’ one day, he found himself a prisoner of the Andes.

Mermoz and his mechanic had been forced down at an altitude of twelve thousand feet on a tableland at whose edges the mountain dropped sheer on all sides. For two mortal days they hunted for a way off this plateau. But they were trapped. Everywhere the same sheer drop. And so they played their last card.

Themselves still in it, they sent the plane rolling and bouncing down an incline over the rocky ground until it reached the precipice, went off into air, and dropped. In falling, the plane picked up enough speed to respond to the controls. Mermoz was able to tilt its nose in the direction of a peak, sweep over the peak, and, while the water spurted through all the pipes burst by the night frost, the ship already disabled after only seven minutes of flight, he saw beneath him like a promised land the Chilean plain.

And the next day he was at it again.

When the Andes had been thoroughly explored and the technique of the crossings perfected, Mermoz turned over this section of the line to his friend Guillaumet and set out to explore the night. The lighting of our airports had not yet been worked out. Hovering in the pitch-black night, Mermoz would land by the faint glimmer of three petrol flares lined up at one end of the field. This trick, too, he taught us, and then, having tamed the night, he tried the ocean. He was the first, in 1931, to carry the mails in four days from Toulouse to Buenos Aires. On his way home he had engine trouble over a stormy sea in mid-Atlantic. A passing steamer picked him up with his mails and his crew.

Pioneering thus, Mermoz had cleared the desert, the mountains, the night, and the sea. He had been forced down more than once in desert, in mountain, in night, and in sea. And each time that he got safely home, it was but to start out again. Finally, after a dozen years of service, having taken off from Dakar bound for Natal, he radioed briefly that he was cutting off his rear right hand engine. Then silence.

There was nothing particularly disturbing in this news. Nevertheless, when ten minutes had gone by without report there began for every radio station on the South Atlantic line, from Paris to Buenos Aires, a period of anxious vigil. It would be ridiculous to worry over someone ten minutes late in our day to day existence, but in the airmail service ten minutes can be pregnant with meaning. At the heart of this dead slice of time an unknown event is locked up. Insignificant, it may be; a mishap, possibly: whatever it is, the event has taken place. Fate has pronounced a decision from which there is no appeal. An iron hand has guided a crew to a sea landing that may have been safe and may have been disastrous. And long hours must go by before the decision of the gods is made known to those who wait.

We waited. We hoped. Like all men at some time in their lives we lived through that inordinate expectancy which like a fatal malady grows from minute to minute harder to bear. Even before the hour sounded, in our hearts many among us were already sitting up with the dead. All of us had the same vision before our eyes. It was a vision of a cockpit still inhabited by living men; but the pilot’s hands were telling him very little now, and the world in which he groped and fumbled was a world he did not recognise. Behind him, in the glimmer of the cabin light, a shapeless uneasiness floated. The crew moved to and fro, discussed their plight, feigned sleep. A restless slumber it was, like the stirring of drowned men. The only element of sanity, of intelligibility, was the whirring of the three engines with its reassuring evidence that time still existed for them.

We were haunted for hours by this vision of a plane in distress. But the hands of the clock were going round and little by little it began to grow late. Slowly the truth was borne in upon us that our comrades would never return, that they were sleeping in that South Atlantic whose skies they had so often ploughed. Mermoz had done his job and slipped away to rest, like a gleaner who, having carefully bound his sheaf, lies down in the field to sleep.

When a pilot dies in the harness his death seems something that is inherent in the craft itself, and in the beginning the hurt it brings is perhaps less than the pain sprung of a different death. Assuredly he has vanished, has undergone his ultimate mutation; but his presence is still not missed as deeply as we might miss bread. For in this job we take it for granted that we shall meet together only rarely.

Airline pilots are widely dispersed over the face of the world. They land alone at scattered and remote airports, isolated from each other rather in the manner of sentinels between whom no words can be spoken. It needs the accident of journeyings to bring together here or there the dispersed members of this great professional family.

Round the table in the evening, at Casablanca, at Dakar, at Buenos Aires, we take up conversations interrupted by years of silence, we resume friendships to the accompaniment of buried memories. And then we are off again.

Thus is the earth at once a desert and a paradise, rich in secret hidden gardens, gardens inaccessible, but to which the craft leads us ever back, one day or another. Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it may prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know that our comrades are somewhere ‘out there’—where, one can hardly say—silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful. And when our path crosses theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the shoulders! Indeed we are accustomed to waiting.

Bit by bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be heart rending, is still slightly bitter. For nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.

So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, we feel ourselves rich; and then come other years when time does its work and our plantation is made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us of their shade.

This, then, is the moral taught us by Mermoz and his kind. We understand better, because of him, that what constitutes the dignity of a craft is that it creates a fellowship, that it binds men together and fashions for them a common language. For there is but one veritable problem—the problem of human relations.

We forget that there is no hope of joy except in human relations. If I summon up those memories that have left me with an enduring savour, if I draw up the balance sheet of the hours in my life that have truly counted, surely I find only those that no wealth could have procured me. True riches cannot be bought. One cannot buy the friendship of a Mermoz, of a companion to whom one is bound for ever by ordeals suffered in common. There is no buying the night flight with its hundred thousand stars, its serenity, its few hours of sovereignty. It is not money that can procure for us that new vision of the world won through hardship—those trees, flowers, women, those treasures made fresh by the dew and colour of life which the dawn restores to us, this concert of little things that sustain us and constitute our compensation.

Nor that night we lived through in the land of the unconquered tribes of the Sahara, which now floats into my memory.

Three crews of Aéropostale men had come down at dusk on the Rio de Oro coast in a part of the Sahara whose denizens acknowledge no European rule. Riguelle had landed first, with a broken connecting rod. Bourgat had come along to pick up Riguelle’s crew, but a minor accident had nailed him to earth. Finally, as night was beginning to fall, I arrived. We decided to salvage Bourgat’s ship, but we should have to spend the night and do the job of repair by daylight.

Exactly on this spot two of our comrades, Gourp and Erable, had been murdered by the tribesmen a year earlier. We knew that a raiding party of three hundred rifles was at this very moment encamped somewhere nearby, round Cape Bojador. Our three landings had been visible from a great distance and the Moors must have seen us. We began a vigil which might turn out to be our last.

Altogether, there were about ten of us, pilots and mechanics, when we made ready for the night. We unloaded five or six wooden cases of merchandise out of the hold, emptied them, and set them about in a circle. At the deep end of each case, as in a sentry box, we set a lighted candle, its flame poorly sheltered from the wind. So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginnings of the world, we built a village of men.

Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this pocket handkerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited in the night. We were waiting for the rescuing dawn—or for the Moors. Something, I know not what, lent this night a savour of Christmas. We told stories, we sang songs. In the air there was that slight fever that reigns over a gaily prepared feast. And yet we were infinitely poor. Wind, sand and stars. The austerity of Trappists. But on this badly lighted cloth, a handful of men who possessed nothing in the world but their memories were sharing invisible riches.

We had met at last. Men travel side by side for years, each locked up in his own silence or exchanging those words which carry no freight—till danger comes. Then they stand shoulder to shoulder. They discover that they belong to the same family. They wax and bloom in the recognition of fellow beings. They look at one another and smile. They are like the prisoner set free who marvels at the immensity of the sea.

Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations. Our sordid interests imprison us within their walls. Only a comrade can grasp us by the hand and haul us free.

And these human relations must be created. One must go through an apprenticeship to learn the job. Games and risk are a help here. When we exchange manly handshakes, compete in races, join together to save one of us who is in trouble, cry aloud for help in the hour of danger—only then do we learn that we are not alone on earth.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded. These prison walls that this age of trade has built up round us, we can break down. We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the pathetic chant of the human voice.

Please consider supporting Third Millennium Ministries

2006-01-25T19:28:00.000-06:00

This week I was lucky enough to get a tour of the offices of Third Millennium Ministries. These people are doing something truly necessary. And they are providing a real solution that is valued all over the world. Have you thought much about how the world is changing--how rapidly the Church is growing outside North America and Europe? The Church of the future will clearly be led by Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. But theses future leaders of the Church have few seminary-level resources to prepare them. That's where Thirdmill comes in. They are providing materials that are being used in every continent except Antarctica.

As I said, I met the dozen or so people who are creating these materials, and I assure you these people are giving their lives for this ministry because they believe in it--they are not getting rich. They work in a small office in a strip mall, and somehow create excellent materials on a minimal budget. Their funds are growing, but they need help so they can finish the curriculum--leaders around the world who have used their materials love them, but they are begging for the rest of the curriculum to be finished.

Please consider making a donation or even committing some regular giving to this ministry. Consider it as a way to prepare the world for your grandchildren.

And it goes without saying (though I'll say it anyway) that you should pray for them.

Jeremy Taylor on the Eucharist (2)

2006-01-25T09:26:00.000-06:00

BUT if any man will search into the harder things, or any more secret Sacrament of Religion, by that means to raise up his mind to the contemplation of heavenly things, and to a contempt of things below, he may do it if he please, so that he do not impose the belief of his own speculations upon others, or compel them to confess what they know not, and what they cannot find in Scriptures, or did not receive from the Apostles. We find by experience, that a long act of Parliament, or an Indenture and Covenant that is of great length, ends none, but causes many contentions; and when many things are defin’d, and definitions spun out into declarations, men believe less, and know nothing more. And what is Man, that he who knows so little of his own body, of the things done privately in his own house, of the nature of the meat he eates; nay, that knows so little of his own Heart, and is so great a stranger to the secret courses of Nature? I say, what is man, that in the things of God be should be asham’d to say, This is a secret; This God onely knows; This he hath not reveal’d This I admire, but I understand not; I believe, but I understand it to be a mystery? And cannot a man enjoy the gift which God gives, and do what he commands, but he must dispute the Philosophy of the gift, or the Metaphysicks of a Command? Cannot a man eat Oysters, unless he wrangle about the number of the senses which that poor animal hath? and will not condited Mushromes be swallowed down, unless you first tell whether hey differ specifically from a spunge? Is it not enough for me to believe the words of Christ, saying, This is my body? and cannot I take it thankfully, and believe it heartily, and confess it joyfully; but I must pry into the secret, and examine it by the rules of Aristotle and Porphyry, and find out the nature and the undiscernable philosophy of the manner of its change, and torment my own brains, and distract my heart, and torment my Brethren, and lose my charity, and hazard the loss of all the benefits intended to me by the Holy Body; because I break those few words into more questions, than the holy bread is into particles to be eaten? Is it not enough, that I believe, that, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s, in case we serve him faithfully? but we must descend into hell, and inquire after the secrets of the dead, and dream of the circumstances of the state of separation, and damn our Brethren if they will not allow us and themselves to be half damn’d in Purgatory?

A Dissuasive from Popery, 1664, Pt. II, p. 167

Jeremy Taylor on the Eucharist

2006-01-25T09:22:00.000-06:00

On our 25th wedding anniversary my wife gave me a copy of Jeremy Taylor's The Worthy Communicant that was printed in 1669 9and later rebound in leather). Here is an extraordinary excerpt from the opening pages:

* * *

THE holy Communion, or Supper of the Lord is the most sacred, mysterious and useful conjugation of secret and holy things and duties in the Religion. It is not easie to be understood, it is not lightly to be received: it is not much opened in the writings of the New Testament, but still left in its mysterious nature; it is too much untwisted and nicely handled by the writings of the Doctors; and by them made more mysterious: and like a Doctrine of Philosophy made intricate by explications, and difficult by the aperture and dissolution of distinctions. So we sometimes espie a bright cloud form’d into an irregular figure; when it is observed by unskilful and phantastick travellers, looks like a centaure to some, & as a Castle to others: some tell that they saw an Army with Banners and it signifies war; but another wiser than his fellow sayes it looks for all the world like a flock of sheep, and foretells plenty, and all the while it is nothing but a shining cloud by its own mobility and the activity of a wind cast into a contingent and inartificial shape: So it is in this great mystery of our Religion; in which some espie strange things which God intended not, and others see not what God hath plainly told: some call that part of it a mystery, which is none, and others think all of it nothing but a mere ceremony and a signe: some say it signifies, and some say it effects ; some say it is a sacrifice, and others call it a Sacrament; some Schooles of learning make it the instrument of Grace in the hand of God; others say that it is God himself in that instrument of Grace; some call it venerable, and others say as the vain men in the Prophet, that the Table of the Lord is contemptible: some come to it, with their sins on their head, and others with their sins in their mouth: Some come to be cured, some to be quickned; some to be nourished, and others to be made alive; some out of fear and reverence take it but seldom, others out of devotion take it frequently; some receive it as a means to procure great graces and blessings, others as an Eucharist, and an office of thanksgiving for what they have received: some call it an act of obedience merely, others account it an excellent devotion and the exercising of the virtue of Religion; some take it to strengthen their faith, others to beget it, and yet many affirm that it does neither, but supposes faith beforehand as a disposition; faith in all its degrees according to the degree of grace whither the communicant is arrived: Some affirme the Elements are to be blessed by prayers of the Bishop or other Minister; others say, it is onely by the mystical words, the words of institution; and when it is blessed, some believe it to be the natural body of Christ ; others, to be nothing of that; but the blessings of Christ, his word and his spirit, his passion in representment, and his grace in real exhibition: and all these men have something of reason for what they pretend; and yet the words of Scripture from whence they pretend, are not so many, as are the several pretensions.

My purpose is not to dispute, but to persuade; not to confute any one, but to instruct those that need ; not to make a noise, but to excite devotion; not to enter into curious, but material inquiries; and to gather together into an union all those several portions of truth, & differing apprehensions of mysteriousnesse and various methods and rules of preparation, & seemingly opposed Doctrines by which even good men stand at distance and are afraid of each other: for since all societies of Christians pretend to the greatest esteem of this above all the rites or external parts and ministeries of Religion, it cannot be otherwise but that they will all speak honourable things of it, & suppose holy things to be in it, and great blessings one way or other to come by it; & it is contemptible only among the prophane & the Atheistical; all the innumerable differences which are in the discourses and consequent practises relating to it, proceed from some common truthes and universal notions and mysterious or inexplicable words, and tend all to reverential thoughts and pious treatment of these rites, and holy offices; & therefore it will not be impossible to finde honey or wholesome dewes upon all this variety of plants; and the differing opinions and several understandings of this mystery, which (it may be) no humane under-standing can comprehend, will serve to excellent purposes of the spirit; if, like men of differing interest, they can be reconciled in one Communion, at least the ends and designes of them all can be conjoyned in the designe & ligatures of the same reverence and piety and devotion.

The Worthy Communicant, 1660, p. 8

Escape from the Hell Within Us

2006-01-22T15:39:00.000-06:00

Here's a truth to cherish from John Calvin's commentary on 1 John 1:9, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness":

If we confess. He again promises to the faithful that God will be propitious to them, provided they acknowledge themselves to be sinners. It is of great moment to be fully persuaded, that when we have sinned, there is a reconciliation with God ready and prepared for us: we shall otherwise carry always a hell within us. Few, indeed, consider how miserable and wretched is a doubting conscience; but the truth is, that hell reigns where there is no peace with God.

John Calvin on "The Christian Life"

2006-01-06T17:56:00.000-06:00

The January edition of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Movie Review: King Kong

2006-01-03T11:56:00.000-06:00

Many years ago I took a youth group to Uncle Cliff's Family Land amusement park in Albuquerque. Our first ride of the evening was on that big round thing that you stand up in, that spins around, pinning you to the wall. While it spins the whole contraption tilts at varying angles, but the force keeps you pinned against the wall.

As we got into our places, I noticed that the young man who was operating the ride seemed to be taken with a young lady who was also getting on. I don't know whether he knew her before the ride, but he obviously flirted with her. And the way he tried to impress her was by using his power to extend her time on the ride, giving her more for her money. I believe these rides are supposed to last about 90 seconds. But lover-boy let us spin for seven full minutes.

I didn't vomit. But it was the last ride for me that night--and it even had lingering effects for me that make almost all motion-based-thrill rides disagreeable to me.

The new King Kong reminds me of that night at Uncle Cliff's. Peter Jackson got hold of the controls to the special effects and must have had someone cute in the audience that he was trying to impress. The over-the-top action sequences were stretched beyond any reasonable suspension of disbelief--then stretched further, then shattered into a million pieces, then each of those million pieces picked up and stretched again, and again, and again....

I'm baffled by the favorable reviews.

St. Ephrem the Syrian

2005-12-22T16:39:00.000-06:00

The December Pen&Pulpit is posted here. Most of the editing for this issue was done by my friend Blane (and he did an excellent job on a difficult piece).

Christmas Lullaby: "Away in a Manger"

2005-12-07T12:34:00.000-06:00

The words and music to this Christmas lullaby are here, in case you need them.

There may be a Scrooge or two in the congregation who objects to singing this Christmas lullaby (“as if we were a bunch of babies gathered around the holy throne of God!”). Jesus himself is fonder of children than Ebenezer (see Matthew 19:13-15), and he insists that we learn a few things from our juniors if we have any notions about entering his kingdom (Matthew 18:3). The ritual blessing of children seems fitting here: “Lord Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary, you sanctified childhood; grant that these children may grow as you did in wisdom, age, and grace. For this we pray….”

v. 1 manger – a feeding trough for livestock; this was the best Mary could do for her son at the time, seeing there was no room in the inn (Luke 2:7); it’s difficult to imagine a more humble beginning for our Lord’s time on earth

v. 2 lowing – mooing

no crying he makes – poetic license, rather than realism; a foreshadowing of Christ’s meekness before his accusers (1 Peter 2:23)

nigh – near

Christmas Carol: "Angels We Have Heard on High"

2005-12-06T12:45:00.000-06:00

The words and music to this familiar carol are here.

With this carol we recite an imaginative dialog based on the story from Luke 2:8-20 of the angels appearing to the shepherds to announce Christ’s birth. The shepherds speak in the first verse, reporting the angelic visit; in the second verse an unidentified speaker—perhaps someone who met them on their return from visiting Mary and the child (Luke 2:20)—confronts the shepherds to ask what’s all the ruckus about; the shepherds respond with an invitation to come and see for yourself.

v. 1 Angels we have heard – see Luke 2:8-20

sweetly – the adjective is not used in a sentimental sense; the idea is that the song of the angels feeds and delights their souls; (see the extended comment on sweet in “All My Heart This Night Rejoices”)

the mountains in reply echo back – not merely the phenomenon of sound waves bouncing off the surrounding hills because of the volume of sound from a multitude of angels (though the echo does emphasize the number of angels appearing), but probably including the sense of creation itself joining in the praise—consider Isaiah 49:13:

Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth;
break forth, O mountains, into singing!
for the Lord has comforted his people
and will have compassion on his afflicted.

Gloria in excelsis Deo – Latin for “Glory to God in the highest,” the song of the angels in Luke 2

v. 2 Shepherds, why…? – as the shepherds went home after seeing the infant Messiah, they were “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen” (Luke 2:20); someone bumps into them and asks why they’re so tickled

jubilee – jubilant, exuberant rejoicing—the shepherds must have been whooping it up, they were so overwhelmed by joy; but the word also alludes to Leviticus 25, the year of Jubilee—and Christ’s coming is a fulfillment of what that ceremonial year of liberation looked forward to

strains – tunes, songs

prolong – they could not stop their joy

tidings – news, especially an announcement of an anticipated event

v. 3 Come to Bethlehem and see – the shepherds can only answer with an invitation to “Come and see for yourself”—words aren’t adequate to explain their rejoicing

Christmas Carol: "All My Heart This Night Rejoices"

2005-12-06T08:56:00.000-06:00

The words and music to this carol are here.

We cannot sing this song without imagination, for in it we travel back in time to the night of Christ’s birth. What’s more, we take with us what we know of the Messiah’s work to save us, so that at the angel choir’s announcement and the first sounds from the Babe’s lips we burst with joy.

v. 1 sweetest – this adjective has lost much of its manliness in our day, since we apply it to a young child singing about hot dogs in commercials, or we use it as an interjection to describe our materialistic “awe” (“sweet ride—is it yours?”); but in the seventeenth century a poet like George Herbert could use it dozens of times in his poems to convey a sense of the highest good, what is best and most pleasing in life, what is dearest and most precious—things metaphorically delicious and soothing to the heart and soul; for example, consider “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine / Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine”; or the opening of his sonnet on the Holy Scriptures:

Oh Book! infinite sweetness! let my heart
Suck ev’ry letter, and a honey gain,
Precious for any grief in any part;
To clear the breast, to mollify all pain.

So here the angel voices minister an unspeakable joy to the soul—and so they are sweet.

the air ev’rywhere now with joy is ringing – the air was filled and ringing with joy because “there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” (Luke 2:13-14)

v. 2 the foe – leading the list of those dread enemies this conquering babe comes to overthrow is Satan (Hebrews 2:14, 1 John 3:8, Revelation 20:10), followed by sin (Romans 8:2, 1 Corinthians 15:56-57), woe (Revelation 7:17, 21:4), death (1 Corinthians 15:26), and hell (Matthew 16:18)

God is man, man to deliver – the reason God took on our flesh was to rescue us

one with our blood – Christ took on our nature, and became our blood brother: “For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one origin. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers” (Hebrews 2:11)

forever – from all eternity the second Person of the Trinity has been God, but he has not always been a man; at a point in history 2,000 years ago he added our human nature to his divine nature and became a man; but he did not cease to be a man when he died, or when he rose, or when he ascended into heaven—he remains both God and man forever (see the Westminster Shorter Catechism, answer to Question 21)

v. 3 Shall we still dread…? – in light of the fact that God loved us so much that he sent his Son, his only Son, to die a criminal’s death so that we might be spared the same, how can we still cower before God as if he were out to get us, to smash us at our next slip up like some wicked stepmother from a fairy tale? This verse follows the argument of Romans 8:31-39: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (verse 32)

v. 4 for aye – always, continually, forever; note that aye rhymes with away

tenders – that is, he offers his life as a legal settlement on our behalf; God is the “injured” party, in that our sins are against him and our debt is to him; Christ’s life is of infinite worth, and therefore can fully satisfy God for us

race – not in the ethnic sense, but a group of people considered together because of one thing we all share in common: our sins

meet for glory renders – meet in the sense of “fitting”; so God, by his grace through his Son, makes this race of sinners fit to live forever in his presence, his glory

v. 5 Hark! - listen attentively

yonder – distant but within sight; remember, we are using our imagination and we are back in Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth—so we can see the manger over yonder

sweet – now this adjective may seem to take on more cuteness, since it refers to the baby’s first sounds—but every hint of sentimentalism disappears when we hear what he coos:

Flee from woe and danger.
Brethren, from all ills that grieve you, you are freed;
all you need I will surely give you.

This sounds remarkably like the gospel, and even in your wildest imagination it may be hard to conjure up a newborn whose first gurglings on the night of his birth are so articulate; but remember: when we took this imaginary trip back to the first Christmas, we took with us our knowledge of Christ’s saving work; so we may be hearing goos and gahs, but in our ears all we hear from the lips of Jesus are his sweet promises of deliverance

v. 6 banish – drive away into exile by force; there’s no room for sadness here, and at the first sign of grief or self-pity in this season we need to forcefully turn our thoughts toward the babe in the manger, and marvel again at the kindness of God to us in him

the star – surely the star that led the magi to the Childnear and far – he came not only for those who were near (his people Israel), but those who were far off (the gentiles—represented by the magi); see Ephesians 2:17

Advent Hymn: "Savior of the Nations, Come"

2005-12-03T17:27:00.000-06:00

The text and music of this hymn can be found here.

In this hymn we join the choirs of heave to marvel over and celebrate the incarnation, God becoming a man in order to save us.

v. 1 Marvel, heaven, wonder, earth – we call the angels and all creatures of heaven, together with all on earth, to join us in praise to the God who became Man

v. 2 No man’s power of mind or blood – those who believe in Christ and repent of their sins are “born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13); this is even more true of Christ, who was born of the virgin Mary by the Spirit of God (Luke 1:35)

made the Word of God be flesh – “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14)

v. 3 In her virtues – the young woman whom God chose to carry and bear Jesus was indeed an honorable and godly woman whose heart was ruled by God

v. 4 from his pure and kingly hall – before he was born into this world as a man, Christ ruled the universe from his throne in heaven

his heroic course – the Lord Christ was on a rescue mission—“the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10)

v. 5 Into hell his road went down – as we confess in the Apostles Creed, “he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven”; compare Ephesians 4:9-10: “In saying, ‘He ascended,’ what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”

v. 6 Father’s equal – we confess in the Athanasian Creed, “For the Father is one person, the Son is another, and the Spirit is still another. But the deity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, equal in glory, coeternal in majesty”

our ills of flesh and soul – one of the truths expressed in the incarnation of God is his care not only for our souls, but for our bodies as well; our destiny is to be bodily raised and bodily glorified to rule with Christ forever; so it is right and good for us to pray that he tend to our physical needs now, as well as our spiritual

v. 7 Night cannot this light subdue – the powers of evil, represented by darkness or night, cannot overcome God in Christ; compare John 1:5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”

Advent Hymn: "Once He Came in Blessing"

2005-12-03T14:16:00.000-06:00

The text and music to this hymn can be found here.

In this hymn we look back to Christ’s first coming to bring salvation, and reflect that he continues to come to us in our hearts to bring healing, comfort, forgiveness.

v. 1 redressing – atoning for, removing

in likeness lowly – in our likeness, as a man; Christ “made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:7)

v. 2 ere – before

he comes in terror – the second advent, Christ’s return, which will be a day of terror for his and our enemies; therefore it’s best to turn to his side before then

v 3. spurned – rejected with contempt or disdain

v. 4 a welcome royal – imagine what sort of reception a king might be able to stage—the King of kings will receive us far more warmly, with far more splendor and joy

here – one earth—until we die

Advent Hymn: "On Jordan's Bank the Baptist's Cry"

2005-12-03T12:05:00.000-06:00

The text and music are available here.

In this hymn we look back to Christ’s first advent, when John announced his arrival on the banks of the Jordan River, and we compare that to his advent (coming) into each heart that is prepared by repentance to receive him. In that sense, this song is an invitation to sinners.

v. 1 the Baptist – John the Baptist, that is, calling all to repentance in preparation for the coming of the Lord; see Matthew 3:1-12, Mark 1:1-8, Luke 3:1-18

nigh – near

hearken – listen, pay attention (and comply with what is said)

tidings – news, especially an announcement of an anticipated event

v. 2 cleansed be every life – John called for repentance that every heart would be prepared to receive Christ at his coming

make straight the way – in Isaiah 40 these words spoke of building a “gun barrel” highway for the King to return to Jerusalem after the exile; in the New Testament it refers to the “straightening” of hearts by repentance, that Christ might enter in to make his home within us

v. 3 hail – welcome, salute

v. 4 let your face upon us shine – God’s smile is our blessing (his frown is a curse); see Aaron’s blessing in Numbers 6:25

Advent Hymn: "O Lord of Light, Who Made the Stars"

2005-12-03T11:45:00.000-06:00

The text and music of this hymn is available here.

This is a simple prayer of praise for Christ’s first coming in humility to deliver us from sin, and a request for protection at his second coming in power to destroy his enemies and deliver his people.

v. 1 who made the stars – the one who took on our flesh and was born to a peasant girl and laid in an animal’s feeding trough was none other than the one who created the universe

v. 2 taking on our mortal cares – the second person of the Trinity, who as God had no cares, became one of us—became fully one of us, with all the burdens of humanity, including the guilt of our sin that he took on himself for our sakes

v. 3 blessed Mary – we should never allow the excesses and even the idolatries of others to make us blush to honor our Lord’s mother; see Luke 1:42 and 48

victim pure – as foreshadowed in the law of Moses, the sacrifice for sin must be without blemish; Christ, of course, was without sin, but he became sin for us; see, for example, Leviticus 4

v. 4 earth’s last day – a day of terror for some, joy for others, because Christ comes to deliver his people from their enemies once and for all

Advent Hymn: "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel"

2005-12-02T12:49:00.000-06:00

You can find the text and music to this hymn here.

In this hymn we recall, recite, and reflect on a series of five loosely related metaphorical names for Christ, each suggesting aspects of his character and ministry. As we use our imagination to ponder the cascading implications of each, they stir us to cry out in that prayer of longing, O Come! O Come!

v. 1 Emmanuel – “God with us”; see Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:23; the central promise of God’s covenant is his presence with and relation to his people (see Exodus 29:45, Jeremiah 31:33, 2 Corinthians 6:16, Hebrews 8:10, Revelation 21:3)

mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear – although we live after the first coming of Christ and enjoy God’s presence by his Spirit, there is a sense in which we are still in exile; that is, we live between the first and second comings of Christ—between the inauguration of his kingdom and the consummation of his kingdom, between the budding of our salvation and its full blooming

v. 2 Lord of Might – Exodus 3:15; in the Exodus God was strikingly present with his people to deliver them from their enemies, guide them by the pillar of cloud and fire, and speak to them (though Moses) his perfect law

v. 3 Rod of Jesse – Isaiah 11 (KJV); the rod is a symbol of rule, authority, and power—by this rod God destroys our enemies and brings us peace

v. 4 Dayspring – Luke 1:78 (KJV); the spring or fountain of the day is, of course, dawn; as a metaphor dawn suggests many delightful aspects of the coming of Christ, including the light shining in the darkness, the breaking of the power of darkness, a new beginning, resurrection to new life—use your imagination

v. 5 Key of David – Isaiah 22:22, Revelation 3:7; having the key that opens is a glorious privilege, as everyone acknowledges when mayors honor dignitaries by giving them the symbolic key to the city—when God gave us Christ he honored us by giving us the Key to heaven itself

close the path to misery – to twist a cliché: when God opens one door he closes another; that is, when he gives us the key to open heaven to us, he shuts forever the door to hell for us

Advent Hymn: "Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending"

2005-11-30T20:22:00.000-06:00

The text to this hymn, along with the music to which we sing it at RPC Austin, are here.

This hymn builds on the expectation of the fulfillment of the advent of Christ described in Revelation 1: 7: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen” (ESV) The prophecy in Revelation alludes to Zechariah 12:10, and continues the theme of the terror of that day. Certainly it is a day of joy for those who belong to God, because it is the day of their final deliverance; on the other hand, it is a day of unimaginable sorrow for those who refused to submit themselves to Christ, and so will be cut off forever.

The threefold repetition in the second half of each verse was not a feature of either John Cennick’s original text (1752) or Charles Wesley’s reworking (1758), but is added to fit the meter of the melody we use. But note how well it works to swell the joy of the saints (in verses 1, 3, and 4) and the anguish of the lost (verse 2).

v. 1 thousand thousand – not literally a million, but a vast number of saints in the returning King’s entourage, coming with him to execute judgment (Jude 14-15)

train – the great army attending on the Lord: his saints

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! – the trebled praise of the saints—their joy cannot be contained; contrast this with the deep wailing in verse 2 of those who rejected Christ

on earth to reign – our expectation is not of some disembodied, featureless state of bliss in the clouds, but of the putting right of all things in a new heavens and a new earth—where Christ will reign, and we will rule with him (Revelation 20:4)

v. 2 every eye – see Revelation 1:7 and Zechariah 12:10; those who despised and mocked him will now see him in all his glory, and be terrified at his dreadful majesty

deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing – the trebled woe of the damned—their agony cannot be contained

v. 3 dear – precious

tokens of his passion – the nail marks in his hands and feet, the spear hole in his side, the scars on his head from the crown of thorns, and those on his back from the whip—these tokens will forever remind us of his suffering for us, so they will indeed be dear to us and a cause of endless exultation

dazzling body – because it is glorified

v. 4 Yea, Amen! – see Revelation 1:7 (“Even so. Amen.” in the ESV); our joyous assent to the promise of his return—and our prayer of longing for him to come quickly

Poythress Online

2005-11-30T06:30:00.000-06:00

I'm currently reading Vern Poythress's Symphonic Theology and, as usual, it is profoundly helpful. If I were a theologian, I'd want to write the way Poythress does--he is careful, humble, and appreciative of the strengths of those he disagrees with, without being in the least bit wishy-washy.

The good news is that four of his books, including Symphonic Theology, are available online.

Advent Hymn: "Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates"

2005-11-29T19:12:00.000-06:00

You can read the text and music to this hymn here.

Psalm 24 celebrates God’s glorious presence with his people in his temple. This hymn takes up that theme with a New Testament slant: because Christ sends the Spirit of God to live in believers, each of us is a temple of God (1 Corinthians 6:19).

v. 1 Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates – see Psalm 24:7, 9; but here the temple is the believer’s heart

the King of glory waits … is drawing near – note the emphasis on God’s coming to us, how eager he is to come among us; this strikes us as odd, since we should be the ones begging him to let us into his presence

v. 2 chariot … crown … scepter – symbols of a warrior king, but transformed here into humility … holiness … pity—the character of our King, by which he conquers our enemies and helps us

v. 4 portals – doors

set apart from earthly use for heaven’s employ – when God taught his people holiness through priestly ritual, those implements set apart for use in his worship could not be used for anything else; for example, the recipe for the incense used in the temple could not be used elsewhere (Exodus 30:37); likewise, we were set apart (sanctified) by the blood of Christ for God’s purposes, and should live in such a way that we are useful for noble purposes (2 Timothy 2:20-22)

v. 5 Redeemer come! – having encouraged each other to open our hearts to God, we now turn individually to Jesus and invite him directly to come into our hearts

Let me thy inner presence feel – a strong sense of Christ’s presence is not always ours—but it is a sweetness we are right to pray for

v. 6 the glorious crown – Revelation 2:10

Advent Hymn: "Comfort, Comfort These My People"

2005-11-28T20:16:00.000-06:00

The text of this hymn and the music to which we sing it at RPC Austin are here.

After Isaiah assured Judah that their sin would lead to exile in Babylon (Isaiah 39:5-7), God commissioned him to comfort his people with hope of a future deliverance (Isaiah 40). Although the nation returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple, they still struggled with their sins—so the fullness of the promised deliverance was delayed many years, till the Messiah came.

In preparation for the Messiah, John the Baptist comes as the fulfillment of God’s prophets and to complete Isaiah’s commission. Matthew 3 describes him as the voice crying in the desert, preparing the way for the return of the King. The imagery of the return from exile—the land being leveled by the razing of mountains and the raising of valleys to create a highway for the exiles to return from Babylon and for the King to ride into Jerusalem—is transformed for the spiritual kingdom of Christ: the rough places to smooth and the crooked places to straighten are in our hearts, and we smooth and straighten them through repentance of our sins, as John preached.

In this hymn we look back to God’s promises in Isaiah through their fulfillment in the advent of Christ, and proclaim the certainty of the gospel.

v. 1 dread – as an adjective here: feared greatly, dreadful, awful

rod – a wand or staff (carried) as a symbol of office, authority, power (OED); hence, sin’s dread rod is a reference to the terrifying master that sin wields over people apart from Christ

their sins I cover – see Psalms 32:1 and 85:2; when God covers our sins, he hides them from his sight so that he “forgets” them, and does not hold them against us—as in verse 2: “All that well deserved his anger he no more will see”

v. 2 nor heed – because he has covered our sins, he can no longer hear them crying out to condemn us and call for judgment against us

we exchange – in the gospel God makes us an offer we can’t refuse: we exchange our sins for Christ’s righteousness, our death for his life, and here our pining sadness for his comfort, peace, and gladness!

v. 3 in the desert – Isaiah’s prophecy ultimately spoke of John the Baptist as the herald coming in the desert to proclaim the good news—then as now, the “desert” is more than the arid land; it symbolizes the wasteland of a life lived apart from God, a world going its own way in rebellion against God

let the valleys rise to meet him, let the hills bow down to greet him – see Isaiah 40:4—what is described here is a highway construction project in the desert: the land between Babylon and Jerusalem would be leveled so that a straight and level highway would be made for the exiles to return, and for the King to enter the holy city

v. 4 Straight must be what long was crooked; make the roughest places plain – the highway project from verse 3 continues—but now the highway clearly leads into our hearts, and we make ready our hearts by the repentance that John preached

token – a sign or symbol; this verse looks at Isaiah 40:5 through its fulfillment in Christ as he comes to stand before John the Baptist (“Here the glory of the Lord stands so graciously revealed”)—John points to him and calls him the Lamb of God, and his coming certainly assures us that God’s word is never broken

Advent Hymn: "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus"

2005-11-28T19:12:00.000-06:00

The text and music to this advent hymn can be found here.

The season of Advent is a season of longing. Here we sing a tender prayer to Jesus, begging him to come at long last to fulfill all his promises to us for his glory and our joy.

v. 1 rest – rest in many senses, but especially in the senses alluded to in the first part of the verse: rest from our oppressors, rest from our enemies, rest from our sins

Israel’s – the people of God who are his true Israel, his Israel by faith; see Romans 9:6-8

consolation – comfort

hope of all the earth – again emphasizing that Jesus came not just for ethnic Israel, but for all nations, all peoples, to bring them near to God

dear – precious, highly valued

Desire of every nation – see Haggai 2:7 (KJV), a prophecy of the coming messiah

v. 2 born a child and yet a king – part of the irony of the incarnation, that even as a babe lying in an animal’s feeding trough, Jesus was the ruler of the nations

born to reign in us – for now his kingdom is “not of this world” (John 18:36), but he rules over the hearts of his people

all-sufficient merit – we have no merit of our own that would win God’s favor, but the wonder of the gospel is that Christ’s merit will become ours (Romans 5:19), and we will be exalted with him to reign with him over the new earth (Revelation 20:6)

Hymn Commentary: "Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation"

2005-11-26T10:59:00.000-06:00

This hymn as we sing it is available at the RPC website.

Here we affirm the unity of the Church in heaven and on earth, and her eternal praise of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and we call on God to draw near us in our worship, receive our praise, and hear our prayers.

v. 1 sure – firmly established, stable, steadfast, not likely to give way (OED)

foundation – the Church is based on Christ, depends on Christ—he is the source of the Church; see 1 Corinthians 3:11

cornerstone – in a figurative sense derived from the foundation of a building, a cornerstone is the indispensable or essential part; that on which all else depends (OED); see Psalm 118:22, Isaiah 28:16, Matthew 21:42, Acts 4:11, Ephesians 2:20, 1 Peter 2:6-7

binding all the church in one – as a cornerstone holds together the joint of a foundation or wall, Christ holds together his people; there is just one Church of Jesus Christ, though we see her sadly splintered across countless denominations and factions

Holy Zion – originally the Jebusite fortress that David conquered, Zion came to refer to the Temple mount or dwelling place of God, then to the entire city of Jerusalem (or its people); in Hebrews 12:22 it refers to the Church, and that is the meaning here

confidence – a source of trust (OED)

v. 2 that dedicated city – Zion, and here in the sense of the Church; dedicated – devoted to God for sacred use, for his purposes

exultant – triumphantly or rapturously joyful (OED)

jubilation – loud utterance of joy, exultation, (public) rejoicing (OED); heightened by the adjective exultant, this suggests a heightened celebration we rarely reach on earth; perhaps this expresses the unrestrained festival of the Church in heaven (hence the perpetual melody); still, when we consider the greatness of God and his condescension in drawing near us, we should wonder that such joy is uncommon among us

God the One in Three – one God, one divine nature, yet three Persons—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; an expression of the doctrine of the Trinity

glad – filled with, marked by, or expressing joy (OED); this says something about how we should sing our hymns of praise

v. 3 this temple – Holy Zion, that dedicated city: the Church, the people of God, particularly as gathered in worship and united to the Church in heaven

Lord of hosts – commander of the armies of heaven

wonted – habitual, customary, usual (OED); God is in the habit of showing us covenantal love and hearing our prayers

benediction – blessedness, favor (OED); the smile of God (Numbers 6:25)

v. 4 vouchsafe – give or grant in a gracious manner (OED)

evermore with thee to reign – our eternal destiny is to reign with Jesus Christ forever; see Revelation 20:6

v. 5 Laud – praise highly, sing or speak the praises of; celebrate (OED)

Hymn Commentary: "Blessing and Honor and Glory and Power"

2005-11-25T18:42:00.000-06:00

The text of this hymn is here, along with the music to which we sing it at RPC Austin.

We pronounce and declare the praises of Christ that resound through all heaven and earth for all time. The first verse is a conflation of the songs and shouts of praise in Revelation 4 and 5. The other stanzas continue the imagery from that scene.

v. 1 Blessing and honor and glory and power – not only is Christ blessed and honored and glorified and confessed to be powerful—all goodness and honor and glory and power come from him; Revelation 5:13; compare Revelation 4:11 and 5:12

wisdom and riches and strength – again, Christ has all wisdom and riches and strength, and bestows all wisdom and riches and strength; Revelation 5:12

him who our battle hath won – see Revelation 5:5 and 9; note the irony, that he conquers by being slain

the kingdom, the crown, and the throne – notice how many times the throne is mentioned in Revelation 4 and 5

v. 2 Soundeth the heaven of the heavens with his name – “the highest heavens are filled with the sound of his name in praise”

ringeth – filled with talk of, resounding with renown or fame (OED)

ocean and mountain, stream, forest, and flower – there is no nook or cranny in all creation that fails to praise the Lord

v. 3 ascendeth the song and the joy – not simply the rising of the sounds, but an allusion to the incense rising before the throne (Revelation 5:8)

ever descendeth the love from on high – as often as our prayers rise up to the throne, his love descends to us

Hymn Commentary: "At the Name of Jesus"

2005-11-24T13:18:00.000-06:00

Here is the text of the hymn (the commentary follows):

1.
At the Name of Jesus, every knee shall bow,
Every tongue confess Him King of glory now;
’Tis the Father’s pleasure we should call Him Lord,
Who from the beginning was the mighty Word.

2.
At His voice creation sprang at once to sight,
All the angel faces, all the hosts of light,
Thrones and dominations, stars upon their way,
All the heavenly orders, in their great array.

3.
Humbled for a season, to receive a name
From the lips of sinners unto whom He came,
Faithfully He bore it, spotless to the last,
Brought it back victorious when from death He passed.

4.
Bore it up triumphant with its human light,
Through all ranks of creatures, to the central height,
To the throne of Godhead, to the Father’s breast;
Filled it with the glory of that perfect rest.

5.
Name Him, brothers, name Him, with love strong as death
But with awe and wonder, and with bated breath!
He is God the Savior, He is Christ the Lord,
Ever to be worshipped, trusted and adored.

6.
In your hearts enthrone Him; there let Him subdue
All that is not holy, all that is not true;
Crown Him as your Captain in temptation’s hour;
Let His will enfold you in its light and power.

7.
Brothers, this Lord Jesus shall return again,
With His Father’s glory, with His angel train;
For all wreaths of empire meet upon His brow,
And our hearts confess Him King of glory now.

The text is taken from and elaborates on the “Christ hymn” in Philippians 2:5-11; in this hymn we exult in the authority of Christ in his exaltation over all creation.

v. 1 At the name … call him Lord – See Philippians 2:9-11

who from the beginning was the mighty Word – John 1:1

v. 2 At his voice creation sprang at once to sight – Christ is Creator, and he created by the power of his word; see John 1:3, Hebrews 1:1-3 and 11:3

all the angel faces … their great array – a catalog of heavenly beings created by Christ

dominations – a realm of authority assigned to celestial being, usually translated dominion in Scripture; could also refer to the celestial being as ruler—the point is that all the highest powers in creation, whether visible or invisible, are under Christ; see Ephesians 1:21 and Colossians 1:16

array – a body of soldiers, here referring to the angelic hosts

v. 3 Humbled for a season – Christ took on flesh and thereby veiled his glorious deity, and humbly obeyed the will of the Father to the point of submitting to death; see Philippians 2:7-8; note that though his humiliation was temporary (“for a season”), he remains both God and man forever

to receive a name from the lips of sinners – the name is Jesus, and every tongue confesses that he is Lord; see Philippians 2:11

faithfully he bore it spotless to the last – he bore the name that is above every name without sin, in spite of all the temptation and trial he faced

v. 4 with its human light – perhaps light here refers to illumination or making known—Christ as man is the image of the invisible God, Hebrews 1:3

to the central height – the place of highest honor in heaven; see Philippians 2:9

v. 5 Name him – ascribe to him the attributes reflected by the following names or titles (Love, Savior, Lord)

Love as strong as death – see Song of Songs 8:6

bated breath – holding our breath in fear, reverence, and awe in the presence of our God

v. 7 wreaths of empire – the laurel wreath is the traditional crown of emperors; all authority in heaven and on earth is given to Christ

Hymn Commentary: "Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying"

2005-11-24T13:11:00.000-06:00

The text of this hymn can be found here, along with the musical setting we use at RPC Austin.

The background of this hymn of exhortation and expectation includes Jesus’ parable of the virgins in Matthew 25:1-13, of the wedding feast in Luke 12:35-48, and the imagery in Isaiah 62 and the book of Revelation. As in Christ’s parables, we exhort each other and ourselves to watchful readiness as we anticipate our Bridegroom’s return, and we encourage each other and ourselves with the expectation of the unimaginable delight of hearing his voice at long last.

v. 1 night– night represents our time of waiting till our Lord returns; not that we are in utter darkness, for he has left us with his Spirit to guide us; yet, in comparison to the radiance of his glory that we will in that Day see face to face, we live in darkness

Jerusalem – here a reference to the people of God, the Church; compare Isaiah 62

at last! … thrilling cry … Alleluia! – note the expressions of relief and joy that the Day is finally here; we cannot imagine how everything will change in that instant, how all fear and sorrow and pain will be swept from our consciousness by a flood of happiness

v. 2 Zion - originally the Jebusite fortress that David conquered, Zion came to refer to the Temple mount or dwelling place of God, then to the entire city of Jerusalem (or its people); in Hebrews 12:22 it refers to the Church, and that is the meaning here

Her Star is risen, her Light is come! – the Star is Christ (2 Peter 1:19, Revelation 22:16); of course the Light is Christ (John 1:9, for example); both are images of the breaking of dawn

We follow till the halls we see – the word order is inverted to fit the meter; “We follow till we see the halls”

v. 3 Of one pearl each shining portal – the gates in heaven or the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21:21), an image of unparalleled richness

Nor eye hath seen, nor ear hath yet attained to hear what there is ours – what awaits us is, alas, unimaginable; Nor … nor … is an archaic expression for our Neither … nor ….

Godly Cursing

2005-11-10T10:09:00.000-06:00

I confess that I've always been troubled by the "break-their-teeth-in-their-mouths" psalms. But I also confess I've never been satisfied by the explanations I've read of them, such as C. S. Lewis's revulsion at them in his Reflections on the Psalms (which is still a valuable book, in spite of its glaring weaknesses) or Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Psalms: the Prayer Book of the Bible.

This week I read John Day's Crying for Justice and found it exegetically solid and very much to the point. He addresses Lewis and Bonhoeffer and others, shows how their explanations are not up to snuff, and then sets biblical curses (not just the psalms, but those from Jesus, Paul, Peter, and the martyrs in Revelation) in their covenantal context. He addresses the apparent contradictions ("bless, and do not curse") and shows the place for cursing even in the context of the commands to love your enemy.

I'm grateful for the book.

Now to carefully apply it, and not use it as a license for indiscriminate cursing....

George Whitefield on "Christ the Best Husband"

2005-11-09T11:38:00.000-06:00

The November edition of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

The Doctrine of Vocation

2005-11-08T08:18:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend I read Gene Edward Veith's God at Work. You can read the introduction here. Drawing on Luther's doctrine of vocation, Veith puts not just our work (employment) but all of our callings in perspective. He helps us see God's (hidden) hand in it all, and understand that we are called to love and serve others in all our callings (father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister, poet, priest, electician, homemaker, farmer...). A quick read, but well worth it.

Thomas Ken's Manual of Prayers

2005-10-07T11:45:00.000-05:00

The October edition of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Christina Rossetti's Later Life

2005-09-07T21:20:00.000-05:00

The September edition of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Termites?

2005-09-05T12:22:00.000-05:00

"Narcissism is seldom encountered in its pure Greek form. We develop ways to maintain our narcissistic predispositions without attracting (we hope) the notice of Nemesis. The usual way in which we avoid the appearance of crass individualism is through sectarianism. A sect is a front for narcissism. We gather with other people in the name of Jesus, but we predefine them according to our own tastes and predispositions. This is just a cover for our individualism: we reduce the community to conditions congenial to the imperial self. The sectarian impulse is strong in all branches of the church because it provides such a convenient appearance of community without the difficulties of loving people we don't approve of, or letting Jesus pray us into relationship with the very men and women we've invested a good bit of time avoiding. A sect is accomplished by community reduction, getting rid of what does not please us, getting rid of what offends us, whether of ideas or people. We construct religious clubs instead of entering resurrection communities. Sects are termites in the Father's house."

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 244

Conclusion to Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych

2005-08-10T11:46:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

The Blunder

2005-07-29T17:45:00.000-05:00

I recently returned from two weeks in the Czech Republic, working in an English Camp. Other than the scriptures and my teaching materials, I didn't pick up a book the entire trip--till I got on the plane to come home. In fact I performed an experiment: I had been wondering whether I might spend a wee bit too much time with my nose in books, and not enough time with family and friends. So I laid aside the books and let myself enjoy the students, the Czech leaders, the land, the games....

So what happened? I savored (almost) every minute of the English Camp. I developed a rapport with several of the people, and would even call them my friends--in fact I hope to see them again, and to maintain our new friendship online.

I doubt whether this happy result is directly and exclusively attributable to not reading--but I don't doubt that turning away from the books to the people, to real experience and relationships, made a difference. And I think this has implications for how I should live my life. I may need to change my approach, back off from the books, and enjoy people more.

Funny thing: the book I started reading on the way home was Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind, a study of totalitarianism written in the early 50's. In his description of a writer whom he called "Alpha," I found this:

He perceived that he had blundered into falseness by living in the midst of ideas about people, instead of among people themselves. What he knew about man was based on his own subjective experiences within the four walls of his room.

As a reader, rather than a writer, I perceive that I have blundered into the same falseness....

Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych

2005-07-12T06:07:00.000-05:00

The latest Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Chesterton's Heretics

2005-06-15T17:37:00.000-05:00

The new issue of the Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

Book Recommendations

2005-06-12T08:55:00.000-05:00

I have now finished and can recommend most highly Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. It filled me with joy and renewed my love for my family--and made me long for heaven. I can't imagine a more glorious achievement by a book.

* * *

Along with Milton's Paradise Lost I've read Milton and the English Mind, by F. E. Hutchinson, and The Muse's Method, by Joseph H. Summers. These are those out-of-print sorts of treasures that I mine for on www.abe.com. Hutchinson made me feel that I could admire Milton's genius, but I probably wouldn't have cared for his company. Summers intrigues me as a critic--both of Milton here and of Herbert elsewhere--who writes from the inside. I mean that he must be a believer, for his knowledge of Christian doctrine and of the faith-filled intentions of Herbert and Milton is inescapably personal. Both Hutchinson and Summers helped me enjoy Milton more--which is what I hope for in a critic.

* * *

I've also found a copy of a book I've been coventing for almost two decades: How Does a Poem Mean, by John Ciardi. Too soon to tell whether it's worth the wait.

Paradise Really Lost

2005-06-02T12:30:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Milton lately and have to share the first spat between Adam and Eve after the fall. Adam speaks first. I hope you can follow it--don't let the odd spelling throw you. If you can't stay with it, skip to the end and read the last three lines.

* * *

Would thou hadst heark’nd to my words, & stai’d
With me, as I besought thee, when that strange
Desire of wandring this unhappie Morn,
I know not whence possessd thee; we had then
Remaind still happie, not as now, despoild
Of all our good, sham’d, naked, miserable.
Let none henceforth seek needless cause to approve
The Faith they owe; when earnestly they seek
Such proof, conclude, they then begin to faile.

To whom soon mov’d with touch of blame thus Eve.
What words have past thy Lips, Adam severe,
Imput’st thou that to my default, or will
Of wandering, as thou call’st it, which who knows
But might as ill have happ’nd thou being by,
Or to thy self perhaps: hadst thou bin there,
Or bere th’ attempt, thou couldst not have discernd
Fraud in the Serpent, speaking as he spake;
No ground of enmitie between us known,
Why hee should mean me ill, or seek to harme.
Was I to have never parted from thy side?
As good have grown there still a liveless Rib.
Being as I am, why didst not thou the Head
Command me absolutely not to go,
Going into such danger as thou saidst?
Too facil then thou didst not much gainsay,
Nay, didst permit, approve, and fair dismiss.
Hadst thou bin firm and fixt in thy dissent,
Neither had I transgress’d, nor thou with mee.

To whom then first incenst Adam repli’d.
Is this the Love, is the recompence
Of mine to thee, ingrateful Eve, exprest
Immutable when thou wert lost, not I,
Who might have liv’d and joyd immortal bliss,
Yet willingly chose rather Death with thee:
And am I now upbraided, as the cause
Of thy transgressing? not enough severe,
It seems, in thy restraint: what could I more?
I warn’d thee, I admonish’d thee, foretold
The danger, and the lurking Enemie
That lay in wait; beyond this had bin force,
And force upon free Will hath here no place.
But confidence then bore thee on, secure
Either to meet no danger, or to finde
Matter of glorious trial; and perhaps
I also err’d in overmuch admiring
What seemd in thee so perfet, that I thought
No evil durst attempt thee, but I rue
That errour now, which is become my crime,
And thou th’ accuser. Thus it shall befall
Him who to worth in Women overtrusting
Lets her Will rule; restraint she will not brook,
And left to her self, if evil thence ensue,
Shee first his weak indulgence will accuse.

Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning
And of thir vain contest appeer’d no end.

Richard Baxter on The Church

2005-05-09T20:37:00.000-05:00

The May edition of Pen&Pulpit is posted here.

A Day with Berta

2005-05-04T06:33:00.000-05:00

2 March 1996, Krakow

I have no words in my vocabulary to describe what I saw and what I was told—it is surreal to me, beyond the farthest stretch of my imagination. I could more easily believe that Star Trek was a real picture of our future than believe that Berkinau happened—than believe that human beings did what I was told they did to other human beings at Berkinau.

The unbelievable stories of Berkinau were told by our tour guide Berta. She was a young woman from the area, probably in her late twenties. She told her stories with passion. Even though she had told these same stories to hundreds of people over the past four years, she simmered with anger as she told them again. She was a zealot with a cause. And her cause was to make sure that the world would remember.

She began every portion of her presentation with the words, Please remember. It made me think about communion in church, about an event that is not only history, but transcends history in a way that changes life. The memory of the incarnation of Evil in the holocaust is a story that must be told again and again, that must be painted in bright red to every generation, so that we will always remember.

I will never forget what happened at Berkinau. And I will never forget Berta.

I’d like to share a meal with Berta. I’d like to explore her mind, perhaps find out what she thinks of the gospel. After the tour she talked about her life, and she told us that there were almost no more Jews in Poland. She said she grew up in the old Jewish Quarter of Krakow—yet as a girl she did not even know what a Jew was. One day she was looking at a sign that was written in Hebrew characters, and a man asked her whether she knew what she was reading. She said No, it was just some crazy symbols. He explained to her that is was Hebrew, and told her about the Jews.

Berta says that she was brainwashed by communism, and believed in a pure Polish race of communists. But her eyes, she says, were opened, and she came to see that what separates us is not biology, but ideology. We are all human, the same—but it is coded in our genes to think that we are superior to others.

Berta cannot go to the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. She thinks it is just an arm of the State—that it never talks about God, only ideology—only politics and anti-Semitism. Berta said that God is not fair, that he treats some of his children better than others. As an example she said that the USA was paradise, and everyone else was jealous of us.

I only spoke with Berta for a few minutes after the tour, but in my heart I cared for her deeply. I am sorry that I will never see her again on this earth.

What kind of resurrection song is this?

2005-05-02T20:25:00.000-05:00

When John the apostle previews the end of earth’s history and the sublime life of those who rise to rule with Christ forever, he begs, “Come, Lord Jesus!” When John Donne ponders the same resurrection of the dead, he also begs—begs that the other John’s prayer not be answered just yet: “let them [the dead] sleepe, Lord” (line 9). Why?

“At the Round Earths Imagin’d Corners” (see below, Sonnet 4) was published in 1633 as the fourth of a series of 12 Holy Sonnets with the subtitle Divine Meditations. Donne wrote at least some of them as early as 1609, after a smothering wave of depression and illness. He opens the sonnets with a prayer of preparation for his meditation, in which he confesses,

Oh I shall soone despaire, when I doe see
That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt’not chuse me. (lines 12-13)

In the second sonnet he thinks of the sickness that foreshadows his death; the third brings him to the very instant of his death; our poem, the fourth, looks to the general resurrection and Judgment Day; the fifth considers damnation; and the sixth more hopefully looks at the death of Death at the resurrection of the righteous. All are marked by fear and doubt, a heart-crushing recognition of sin and what it deserves.

Look closely at our poem: it begins in wonder, Donne’s imagination stirred by images from the book of Revelation, with pictures of “numberlesse infinities / Of soules” rising at the sound of the angels’ trumpets. The bodies rising from the scattered dust remind him of their deaths, whether quickly in war or slowly in poverty, naturally by age or wretchedly through wasting sickness, executed by some government or swept away “by chance.” And from their deaths and rising to judgment he turns to his own—how he too will stand before God to give an account, and this pulls him up short:

For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
‘Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there…. (lines 10-12)

Faced with his own conscience, he feels himself to be the “chief of sinners,” unable to stand—and after death there will be no last chance to look for grace. This compels him to what seems to us a ridiculous prayer: he asks God to stay the Second Coming. Boldly, selfishly thinking only of his own soul’s good and laying aside the eternal happiness of those “numberlesse infinities,” he asks Christ to “let them sleepe” in their graves. And why? So that he still has time to ask Christ one thing more:

… here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon, with thy blood. (lines 12-14)

Donne’s prayer isn’t ridiculous. It shows that he isn’t like the fool who wanders through life with no thought of his death, never thinking of the very night that his life will be required of him (Luke 12:20). The thought of his sin and God’s judgment oppresses him, but even near despair in the dark night of his soul, he knows his only hope of salvation is repentance, and the only source of repentance is God’s grace, so he turns from the darkness to him.

Each of these six sonnets on death and judgment looks to God, though sometimes with failing sight. In them Donne reminds us to turn our minds to death and judgment—not just as general dogma, but as our certain destiny. The world seems so fixed and enduring to us, and our day-to-day concerns so urgent. But they will all melt in the twinkling of an eye, and then where will we be?

From Donne’s Holy Sonnets (1633)
Divine Meditations

1
As due by many titles I resigne
My selfe to thee, O God, first I was made
By thee, and for thee, and when I was decay’d
Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine,
I am thy sonne, made with thy selfe to shine,
Thy servant, whose paines thou hast still repaid,
Thy sheepe, thine Image, and till I betray’d
My selfe, a temple of thy Spirit divine;
Why doth the devill then usurpe in mee?
Why doth he steale nay ravish that’s thy right?
Except thou rise and for thine owne worke fight,
Oh I shall soone despaire, when I doe see
That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt’not chuse me.
And Satan hates mee, yet is loth to lose mee.

2
Oh my blacke Soule! now thou art summoned
By sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion;
Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turne to whence hee is fled,
Or like a thiefe, which till deaths doome be read,
Wisheth himselfe delivered from prison;
But damn’d and hal’d to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned;
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke;
But who shall give thee that grace to beginne?
Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne;
Or wash thee in Christs blood, which hath this might
That being red, it dyes red soules to white.

3
This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,
My spans last inch, my minutes last point,
And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoynt
My body, and soule, and I shall sleepe a space,
But my’ever-waking part shall see that face,
Whose feare already shakes my every joynt:
Then, as my soule, to’heaven her first seate, takes flight,
And earth borne body, in the earth shall dwell,
So, fall my sinnes, that all may have their right,
To where they’are bred, and would presse me, to hell.
Impute me righteous, thus purg’d of evill,
For thus I leave the world, the flesh, the devill.

4
At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe
All whom, the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
‘Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon, with thy blood.

5
If poysonous mineralls, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortall us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damn’d; Alas; why should I bee?
Why should intent or reason, borne in mee,
Make sinnes, else equall, in mee, more heinous?
And mercy being easie, and glorious
To God, in his sterne wrath, why threatens hee?
But who am I, that dare dispute with thee?
O God, Oh! of thine onely worthy blood,
And my teares, make a heavenly Lethean flood,
And drowne in it my sinnes blacke m emorie;
That thou remember them, some claime as debt,
I thinke it mercy, if thou wilt forget.

6
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee;
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell.
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleepe past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.

Welcome to the King's Feast

2005-04-23T20:50:00.001-05:00

I've been writing a brochure for our church in order to give people a perspective on our worship service. You can see samples of the liturgy at the Redeemer Pres website in my links in the column on the right. I'd appreciate any comments you have--it is not yet published....

Welcome to the King’s Feast
Reflections on the Joy of Worship at RPC

Before the Service

The King’s Invitation

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

With those words Dietrich Bonhoeffer condemned easy-believism and restored the high view—the costly view—of Christ’s call for us to take up our cross and follow him. But while our Lord calls us to lay down our lives, he also promises to be our Life. He promises, in fact, to give us everything we need. And what we need more than anything is him. So he also bids us, “Come and dine.”

That’s right: he invites us to dinner. And not just any dinner, but a feast fit for a King—because it is the King’s feast, where the King is mysteriously both host and server, both chef and entrée. That’s one reason we call our worship at RPC the Divine Service—because it is here that our Lord gathers his people to serve them.

Our Preparation

Imagine that the Queen has asked you to be her guest for dinner at Buckingham Palace: how do you get ready? Do you come as you are, or do you primp and preen? Do you read up on royal etiquette, or assume she’ll be charmed by your casual Yankee-ness?

None of us would wait till the last minute, breeze past the stone-faced guards in the big fluffy hats, and plop down on a comfy cushion like we owned the place. Even we provincial Americans have more sense of ceremony than that. We would take time to select (or even shop for) some fine clothes fit for the affair. We might get a haircut or have our nails done. You can be sure we would shave with a new blade, floss and gargle, and scrub an extra five minutes in the shower. Not to impress anyone, but to honor our gracious hostess.

To prepare for the Divine Service many of us choose our best clothes as well, and adorn our bodies as part of our tribute to God. But since he looks more on our insides than our outsides, we are even more concerned to dress up our hearts. On Saturday night and early Sunday morning we remind ourselves (and each other) of our privilege to sup with our Lord, so that the anticipation mounts as the hour approaches. We remember what orphans and outcasts we would be apart from God’s mercy in Christ, and renew our gratitude to the Father who has welcomed us into his holy family. We make sure we don’t have any grudges against our brothers and sisters, so we can join together with them in love in worship. And, just as we scrub in the shower before heading to the palace, we ask the Spirit to scour our hearts as we humbly confess our sin and our need of his mercy.

As we arrive outside the sanctuary we see our brothers and sisters gathering for the feast—we greet them with a warmth and joy that only those united in Christ can share. Inside the sanctuary doors our joy swells, but it’s more quiet now—we’ve come to honor the King, and it’s fitting to show reverence. We hear music, because our Lord’s house is a house of beauty. And we see on the first page of the order of worship some scriptures to reflect on before the service. These are the finishing touches as we find our places in the banquet hall.

The Service of Entrance

The Entrance Hymn

When the hour strikes, we may hear the choir burst into song. We hear the rising music of the entrance hymn, and see the pastor raise his arms to call us all to stand together. The music builds; then with one voice we unleash in song our built-up anticipation.

What is happening is nothing less than a parade into the presence of the great King—a parade into his courts, as we enter carrying our gifts of praise. You may have noticed in your Bible that Psalms 120 through135 are called Songs of Ascent. These are the songs that the Church of Israel sang in procession up to the Temple, to feast with God. Remember how as a child you loved parades, with all the floats and balloons and music and marching—the grand celebration? Now you are in the parade, marching with the people of God into the house of the Lord.

When we say “House of the Lord,” we mean more than the building we see with our eyes and touch with our hands. We mean that by faith we enter into the great temple in heaven itself. That sounds strange, but the writer of the book of Hebrews says that we have come to “the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”[i]

Now that calls for a parade.

The King’s Greeting and Our Prayer of Adoration

As our parade comes to the palace doors, we are greeted by the King’s emissary. The pastor wears a robe to remind us that he represents our Lord’s presence with us—and he greets us in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. To believers, those words should sound tenderly familiar. They remind us of the words spoken at our baptism, when we were welcomed into the Church. It is as if God says to us again, “I know you, my children: welcome. Come in!”

Then the pastor prays, and we pray with him. We offer words of affection for God and delight in him. We respond to his greeting by telling him how glad we are to see him.

Corporate Confession of Sin and Declaration of Absolution

The parade has led us up to the door of the palace, where we have been welcomed to come in—but it rained this week and along the way we stepped in some mud puddles, and we can’t drag that mess in here. The mud puddles, of course, are sins—the snares of the world, the flesh, and the devil that have soiled the feet of our souls. Our sins have no place in God’s presence. So how do we “wipe our feet”?

Do you remember what Jesus did for his disciples on the night when he was betrayed?

Jesus rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, do you wash my feet?” Jesus answered him, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean.”[ii]

By God’s mercy our sins haven’t cut us off from him (as Jesus said, we’ve all had a bath and have a share with him, baptized clean by his blood and word). Still, our recent sins hang like a cloud between us—something like the cloud between husband and wife when they quarrel: not that their love is dissolved, but the air needs cleaning. So together (we are, after all, a family) we admit our sins to our Father and to each other, and wait like children to hear what he says to us.

Absolution isn’t a word we use every day of the week. But it’s a good one: it means that God lets us off the hook—sets us free from the debt and guilt of our sins. And this is exactly the reassurance we need before we go any further: if we don’t know that he accepts us fully, and that he isn’t angry with us, we better not take another step toward him. It isn’t safe to fall into the hands of an angry God.[iii]

So when the pastor pronounces the words of absolution, look up. This isn’t time to bow our heads or look around. It’s another good time to remember that the pastor wears the robe to remind us that he represents God to us, and the kind words he speaks now are as good as God’s, because they come straight from his promises in his holy word.

Doxology and Song of Gratitude

The doxology is so simple, yet it is one of the highlights of the divine service. Our Father has said to us, “I know you’ve made a mess of things, but my Son Jesus has taken on himself your debt and guilt, and now as far as I’m concerned all is clear between us. Pull up a chair and sit with me a while.” If this doesn’t yank from us a shout of relief and praise, what ever could? This is where we raise the roof.

The Service of the Word

The Psalter and the Lessons

We have now taken our seats at the table, and our Father has some words for us. He will encourage us with promises, caution us against danger, rebuild our hope, correct our errors—he will be a perfect Father to us. He may speak to us through the choir in a sung or chanted psalm, or through each other in a responsive or antiphonal psalm, or through the reader with a lesson or two from the scriptures. Whichever way he speaks, we need to tune in, because Father is speaking. When Father speaks to us, let’s sit up straight or stand, and lift our eyes in ready attentiveness. It’s not time to read along in your Bible—that will come later, in your private devotions. It’s time to hear the word as it’s read in public.[iv]

At the end of the lesson the reader pronounces, “This is the Word of the Lord” or, if the text is from one of the gospels, “This is the Gospel of the Lord.” That’s our cue to reply in hearty faith, “Thanks be to God!” or “Praise be to you, O Christ!” With these words we acknowledge our Lord’s rule over us, and confess that his word is true and aimed at our good—and we promise to obey.[v]

Hymn of Response and Confession of Faith

We more fully respond to God’s word with a song of praise or encouragement—to practice what Paul tells us in Colossians 3:16:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

Then we confess our faith together, usually with words from an ancient creed like the Nicene or Apostles’ Creed. And here we recite more than simply saying what we believe; more than that, we confess and declare the one in whom we believe—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. We use these ancient statements because they express a faith that is common to all Christians, from the days of the apostles until today. Even as we say these words, countless of our brothers and sisters around the world are confessing the same faith with us. And many of us memorize these words, so that they work even more deeply down into our hearts.

The Prayer of Supplication and Thanksgiving

We said that we’ve been invited by the King to his palace for a banquet. But we must be careful to remember that he didn’t invite us because we were the high and mighty of the world. On the contrary, the high and mighty were too busy to come, so the King sent his messengers out to collect a rag-tag bunch of beggars to come and savor his magnificence.[vi] That’s us—the beggars.

But we’re privileged beggars—beggars who have been made the bride of the King, like Esther before King Ahasuerus:

So the king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther. And on the second day, as they were drinking wine after the feast, the king again said to Esther, “What is your wish, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled” (Esther 7:1-2).

To compare God to king Ahasuerus and say that he’s invited us to ask him for extravagant gifts is no exaggeration. We have it from the lips of Jesus that God is even more generous than Ahasuerus:

Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in
the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it (John 14:13-14).

So we come. One of our shepherds, either a ruling elder or a pastor, will lead us to the throne of grace. But it is together that we make our requests known. Our shepherd isn’t there simply to pray for us, but for us to pray with him. So we bow and join our hearts to his in prayer. With each request, feel free to offer your audible Amen.[vii] And to seal our corporate requests we will join together with the words of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Prayer of Illumination and the Sermon

The pastor will read another lesson from the scriptures, and then ask God to open our eyes to see wonderful things in his word. By this prayer we confess that we must have the work of the Spirit within us if we are to understand, believe, and obey God’s word.[viii]

Then we sit to hear God speak to us in the sermon. That’s right, God speaks in the sermon. Preaching is not simply one man giving his opinions about theology and philosophy—it isn’t even a mere lecture by a highly educated man. It is an exposition of God’s word, an application of God’s word to our lives, and a proclamation of God’s word to a particular flock of Jesus Christ.
In order to hear God speak in the preaching it might help to remind ourselves yet again why the pastor wears the robe: to show that he has been set aside as God’s spokesman to this flock—he’s been sent as an under-shepherd, if you will. The robe is a heavy burden on his shoulders, representing a high calling and a grave responsibility to correctly interpret and faithfully proclaim God’s word to us.[ix] And we must understand our own calling as hearers of the word: not to sit over the pastor as critic or judge, but to sit under the authority of the word proclaimed through him, not resisting it, while God rebuilds and transform us by his word.[x] We are here to feast on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4), and this is no time to be finicky or complain about the cooking.

Tithes, Offerings, and Hymn of Gratitude

When a friend invites us to dinner, if we know our manners we ask what we can bring. And although God needs nothing from us (Psalm 50:9-14), he gives us the dignity of participating in the feast by bringing our tithes and sacrifices. Our tithes are a tenth of our gain during the week, a token of gratitude to remind us that all we have comes from and belongs to God. Our sacrifices are now the praise of our lips—so we sing as we give our tithes (Hebrews 13:15-16).

The Service of the Table

The Passing of the Peace

In 1 Corinthians, writing to a church torn apart by factions, the apostle Paul speaks of both the wonder of our communion with Christ, and the potential grave danger of it. In chapter 10 he calls the wine a “cup of blessing” and “a participation in the blood of Christ,” and he calls the bread “a participation in the body of Christ.” And he says that we, the church, are “one body.” We don’t have time in this little pamphlet to marvel at what he expresses here—for now just notice that our communion is a blessing, that in the blessing we partake of Christ, and that in so doing we proclaim that we are united to Christ and to each other so that we are one body.

But just a few verses later, in chapter 11, Paul lays down a dreadful warning—he says that it is possible in this meal of blessing for a person to “eat and drink judgment on himself.” This is the opposite of blessing. And the way a person calls down this curse on his head is by not “discerning the body.” In the context of the Corinthian civil wars, and in light of the fact that Paul has just called the church one body, this likely means that when we presume to partake of Christ in his body and blood, and thereby proclaim ourselves united to him and his church—yet at the same time we know in our hearts that we are separated from others in the church by some breach of love—we make a mockery of communion, and risk God’s discipline.

In effect Christ says, “There will be no fighting at the table. Those who choose to harbor enmity in their hearts will be sent to bed without dinner.” Oh, you may eat the bread and drink the cup—but your spirit, far from flourishing, will wither like the grass under the August sun (see 1 Corinthians 11:30 in context).

So we pass the peace. This is more than a time to say hi to the people around you—it is a time to exchange with them priestly blessings, to assure them that you have no ill will toward them and offer them your love in Christ. Your handshakes and hugs are tokens of God’s grace to them—and theirs to you. And if you remember now a broken friendship in the body, find your offended brother or sister and make things right between you. Then commune and eat God’s blessing.[xi]

Lift up your Hearts!

When the pastor charges us with these words, he calls us to offer up everything that we are to God, and he reminds us that we are in heaven before the throne of God. So by faith we respond with all our hearts, We lift them up to the Lord! The pastor then reads a sentence that fits the season of the Church, but always leads us to join all the company in heaven singing Holy is God the Lord of Sabaoth three times. That’s what the Hebrew word Sabaoth means, and this is the song that we hear sung whenever we get a peek into heaven in the scriptures (see Isaiah 6:3 and Revelation 4:8 in their contexts).

Prayer of Thanksgiving and the Words of Institution

The Eucharist is no ordinary meal. Our Lord sets the table himself, and offers himself as the main course in the bread (life) and the cup (joy), so the minister always reads Christ’s words of the institution of his supper. His words are trustworthy and they reassure our weak faith that just as truly as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we participate in Christ.

Hymns with the Distribution of the Bread and Wine

We sing for lots of reasons. We sing to express our deepest affections, from joy to lament—or sometimes to try to change our emotions. We sing our love to our beloved, we sing our commitment to country or college, and we even sing to teach (remember the alphabet song?). But why do we sing while we receive the bread and the wine?

For several reasons, but at the top of the list is joy. We sing of the love of Christ for us, which is displayed in the body and blood of the meal. Our songs reflect on how bottomless our debt is to him, and how bottomless his love is for us. In a sense, when we come to consider this wondrous love, we can’t help but sing.

Benediction

Through the pastor the Lord proclaims his blessing on us.[xii] As the pastor raises his hands, lift up your heads and look at him, and receive God’s best wishes as the feast winds down and it’s time to go home.

Departing Hymn

After Jesus and his disciples ate the last supper, they sang (Matthew 26:30). So we sing just one more song before we go, one more reminder of our unity and harmony in Christ, one more expression of our joy in fellowship with him and his people.

It’s Time to Sit and Eat

In spite of all we’ve said, sometimes we come to the Divine Service, come to this glorious communion with our Lord, yet leave unmoved and unchanged. Why? How can this be?
Perhaps it has to do with our not realizing what a feast awaits us. After all, even with the visible ceremony that we have, our humble worship service doesn’t always look, smell, or taste like a feast. That’s because for now, until Christ returns and we join in the ultimate wedding feast, our worship in this world is a feast that we join in by faith. We can’t see the fullness of it with our earthly eyes—we can’t see our Father at the head of the table, or the Son at his right hand. We can’t see the myriads of angels and all the saints in heaven and on earth joined with us around the table. They’re all here—we just can’t see them, except by faith. So maybe one reason we come to the feast and remain unmoved is that our faith needs some strengthening.

If so, the Divine Service is just the place to start. It is here that God serves us—it is here that he feeds our faith, refreshes our souls. This may be the hardest thing of all to believe, but he really loves us, from the infinite bottom of his infinite heart, and he longs to wait on us.

George Herbert wrote of the soul’s entrance into heaven (or, in a sense, the soul’s entrance into worship and communion with God) in a poem titled simply “Love.” The scene is an inn at the end of a pilgrim’s long journey. Love, in the role of inn keeper, greets the dusty, weary traveler and invites him in. But the traveler draws back, ashamed of himself and convinced he is not fit to enter such a fine place. Love sweetly pursues the traveler, and overcomes all his objections, till at last the traveler agrees to enter, but only as a waiter at Love’s feast. But this is not good enough for Love—“You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.” All the traveler can say in reply is, “So I did sit and eat.”

Yes. If we can believe he loves us so, we can sit and eat—both now in this shadowy foretaste of heaven, and later in the eternal Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

-----------------------------

Notes

[i] See Hebrews 12:22-24. [Add a comment here to explain what the passage means in context]
[ii] See John 13:1-11.
[iii] See Hebrews 12:29, and note that these words are in the context of his discussion of our entering heaven in our worship.
[iv] 1 Timothy 4:13
[v] Compare the response of the Israelites to God’s law on Sinai: “All that the LORD has spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). There they committed themselves to God in covenant. Similarly, our weekly Divine Service is a ceremony of covenant renewal, and it is right for us to reaffirm our covenant vows to follow God. To study this in more detail, see Jeffrey J. Meyers, The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2003).
[vi] See Luke 14:12-24
[vii] See 1 Corinthians 14:16
[viii] See 1 Corinthians 2:6-16
[ix] See, for example, 2 Timothy 2:15, Acts 20:27, and 1 Corinthians 4:1-2
[x] See, for example, Hebrews 4:12-13, James 1:19-27, Romans 12:1-2, 1 Thessalonians 1:4-7, and Acts 17:11
[xi] Compare Matthew 5:24
[xii] See Number 6:22-27 and Luke 24:50

It Could Be Verse

2005-04-23T20:43:00.000-05:00

"His great defect was that he cared very little for verse."

C. S. Lewis, in Suprised by Joy, writing of his life-long friend Arthur Greeves.

Lyrics Disease

2005-04-16T15:00:00.000-05:00

Long before anyone knew the debilitating symptoms, I had been infected. A recent MRI showed the telltale cloudy areas in my brain, but long ago I had been diagnosed. Though it won’t make the pain go away, I can plead ignorance: in the early seventies, when I was exposed, no one had even given the syndrome a name. I first heard about it in 1989, when I met Scott. We got on well right from the start. We’d go over to the senior pastor’s house to workout a few times a week, and we’d pass the time with clever banter. It wasn’t long before I noticed how often he and I both interjected lines from popular songs into the conversation—and we did it as if it were second nature, part and parcel of the language we spoke. That’s when he told me: we both had been stricken with Lyrics Disease.

Lyrics Disease is pandemic in our culture. Hardly anyone can escape serious infection. I caught it on Sunday afternoons during junior high, when I religiously listened to Casey Kasom count down America’s Top Forty—and week after week I stayed with Casey all the way to number one. After a few years I knew enough Elton John, Cat Stevens, and Fleetwood Mac songs to carry on an entire conversation without a single original sentence.

Lyrics Disease is an enemy of spiritual mindedness. A mind filled with pop lyrics struggles to stay focused on God. Even now, when my watch alarm goes off in the morning, its beep pattern somehow conjures up the simple yet cruel organ rhythm of “Philadelphia Freedom,” and I open my Bible with “I used to be a rolling stone you know” running through my brain. It makes me physically ill. It’s like the whippoorwill of freedom zapping me right between the eyes….

Scott was troubled by the disease and set out to counter its effects with extensive memorization of the scriptures—I’m glad to say it’s easier to remember him reciting the story of the sheep and the goats than tossing off a Bob Dylanism. I’ve fought it by reading and memorizing poetry in addition to scripture. Still, I cringe to think how many brain cells I’ve wasted on “silly love songs.”

Is it Safe?

2005-04-11T08:11:00.000-05:00

… unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.

Robert Frost

A Motto

2005-04-10T14:14:00.000-05:00

Father Latour was lost. His canteen was empty. His horse and pack mule had not drunk since yesterday morning. He knew that his animals wouldn’t recover till they got water, but “it seemed best to spend their last strength in searching for it.” He himself was feeling sick, tasting fever in his mouth and unsettled by seizures of vertigo.

The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless—or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he had stood still. He must have travelled through thirty miles of these conical red hills, winding his way in the narrow cracks between them, and he had begun to think that he would never see anything else. They were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks—yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brick-dust, and naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees. And the junipers, too, were the shape of Mexican ovens. Every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish green, as the hills were a uniform red. The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over.

The blunted pyramid, repeated so many hundred times upon his retina and crowding down upon him in the heat, had confused the traveller, who was sensitive to the shape of things.
“Mais, c’est fantastique!” he muttered, closing his eyes to rest them from the intrusive omnipresence of the triangle.

When he opened his eyes again, his glance immediately fell upon one juniper which differed in shape from the others. It was not a thick-growing cone, but a naked, twisted trunk, perhaps ten feet high, and at the top it parted into two lateral, flat-lying branches, with a little crest of green in the centre, just above the cleavage. Living vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the Cross.[1]

Right here Father Latour does something that must be either glorious or insane: he slides off his horse, draws from his pocket a worn book, and kneels before the cruciform tree. For the next half-hour he seeks Jesus in his devotions. In his own withering thirst he remembers “that cry, wrung from his Saviour on the Cross, ‘J’ai soif!’ Of all our Lord’s physical sufferings, only one, ‘I thirst,’ rose to His lips.” Latour’s own sufferings are reduced to a single purpose: to make more real his meditation on his Beloved.

Here is a man whose only hope for life on this earth is to find water. In his saddle I’d have been all-aflutter, working toward a regular panic, devoting every thought to finding trail or water. What could make him, while he still has strength left, interrupt his parched search?

Only, I reckon, a greater thirst.

Feeling a little lost myself, I’m looking for the trail. I’m looking for the trail that leads to the kind of singleness of mind that possessed Father Latour. I know Latour is just a character in a story,[2] but he puts meat on the bones of my dream. If I were a knight at Arthur’s Table, this emblem—the parched priest kneeling before the Cruciform Tree—would be painted on my shield. And my motto: J’ai Soif.
-----------------------------------------

[1] Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, copyright 1927 by Willa Cather. Copyright renewed 1955 by Edith Lewis and The City Bank Farmers Trust Co.
[2] Cather based Father Latour on Archbishop Lamy of Santa Fe.

Test Your Poetic Sensibilities

2005-04-09T21:16:00.000-05:00

Here's a simple test to determine whether you have a poetic imagination. Read these eight lines by Christina Rossetti:

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you;
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I;
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.

Now, what is this poem about?

If you say something like “The movement of air across the surface of the earth and its physical effects on the earth’s features, along with its remarkable characteristic of invisibility,” you suffer from myopic literalism (an inability to see beyond the bare definitions of words to complex or subtle meaning), and need metaphor-therapy—stat.

I read these lines to my son Kristian when he was eight and asked him what they were about. Without a pause he said “God.” He was right. He may not have known it in the most sophisticated way—he doesn’t know who Christina Rossetti was and that she wrote lots of Christian verse, and I don’t suspect he had in mind Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3. But he did notice the trees bowing down when the wind went by.

Did you?

Ever Restless and Irregular

2005-04-08T14:50:00.000-05:00

In his poem titled “Man,” Henry Vaughn considers the lilies of the field and the birds and the bees, and how like clockwork each of them so faithfully and carelessly carries out God’s purpose and plan. He envies them. He groans to be like them, but he knows that man still has his “toyes, or Care,” and “no root”—in fact, he is “ever restless and irregular,” his life the antithesis of the clock-like faithfulness of simpler creatures.

What makes matters worse is that man “knows he hath a home,” but he has plumb forgot where it is or how to get there. So like the cursed ghost doomed to wander the earth, man “knocks at all doors, strays and roams,” and is more stupid than a stone, which can find its way home even in the dark.

Finally, Vaughn compares our perpetual motion to that of the shuttle moving in and out along the loom in a “winding quest.” And he says almost fatalistically that God has ordained this motion, but has ordained for man no rest.

If this were Vaughn’s only poem it would leave us little hope. But it is part of a larger whole, the collection called Silex Scintillans (“flaming flint”). Here we find an answer, in the poem titled “Peace.” Here Vaughn turns to his own weary, wandering soul, and assures himself that there is hope for peace—but not here; true peace awaits us “Far beyond the stars.” The peace we find there isn’t elusive or transient—it is a “Rose that cannot wither,” secured for us by our “gracious friend,” the “One who never changes.”

But this hope isn’t just for the future, for a far-away time when we finally reach that far-away land of perfect peace: if by faith we fix hour hearts—our souls—on this country, where the Lover of our souls awaits us, we can still our restlessness now. We can leave our “foolish ranges,” our traversing land and sea in search of rest in this world. Though many toys here offer peace or security or rest, “none can thee secure.” And isn’t this why God has ordained here no rest—no rest in the things of this world, so that we will grow weary of our frustrated search for peace, and cast ourselves on him?

Man
Weighing the stedfastness and state
Of some mean things which here below reside,
Where birds like watchful Clocks the noiseless date
And Intercourse of times divide,
Where Bees at night get home and hive, and flowrs
Early, aswel as late,
Rise with the Sun, and set in the same bowrs;

2
I would (said I) my God would give
The staidness of these things to man! for these
To his divine appointments ever cleave,
And no new business breaks their peace;
The birds nor sow, nor reap, yet sup and dine,
The flowres without clothes live,
Yet Solomon was never drest so fine.

3
Man hath stil either toyes, or Care,
He hath no root, nor to one place is ty’d,
But ever restless and Irregular
About this Earth doth run and ride,
He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where,
He sayes it is so far
That he hath quite forgot how to go there.

4
He knocks at all doors, strays and roams,
Nay hath not so much wit as some stones have
Which in the darkest nights point to their homes,
By some hid sense their Maker gave;
Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God order’d motion, but ordain’d no rest.

Peace
My Soul, there is a Countrie
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged Centrie
All skilfull in the wars,
There above noise, and danger
Sweet peace sits crown’d with smiles,
And one born in a Manger
Commands the Beauteous files,
He is thy gracious friend,
And (O my Soul awake!)
Did in pure love descend
To die here for thy sake,
If thou canst get but thither,
There growes the flowre of peace,
The Rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortresse, and thy ease;
Leave then thy foolish ranges;
For none can thee secure,
But one, who never changes,
Thy God, thy life, they Cure.

Henry Vaughn, 1655