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Of Madness and Gravity

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:42:55 -0400

I used to hate it when I was young and people would say what I’m getting ready to say.

I have a vivid memory of a spat between my father and older sister back in the ‘80’s over, of all things, the movie Footloose. My sister had taken a bit of a shine, as did most teenage girls in that decade, to Ren McCormack and his misunderstood rebel ways. My father had taken the position that the film had glorified youth rebellion and was far from something to be celebrated.

I watched and kept score as the two traded volleys over this little nugget of cultural artifact. My father lost the debate, in my estimation, at this comment, “Well, if this is where the young people of our generation are headed, then I’m frightened to think where it might end.” There it was—the old slippery slope argument. Long before I even knew to call it such, it already sounded lame.

Fast forward to late July 2008. I am sitting in a comfortable “stadium” seat in a local theater watching the mega-blockbuster The Dark Knight. And a shudder runs through me. I am terrified of our younger generation in a way that has not struck me in over 20 years of youth ministry.

Mind you, this is my second viewing of The Dark Knight. I am, as are all, in awe of the look, the tone, and the twisting plot of a beautifully crafted motion picture. And I am stunned by the brilliance of the late Heath Ledger to achieve a level of creepiness heretofore not yet reached even in the horror genre. But on this my second viewing, my being creeped-out has graduated to a shudder of horror, and it has nothing to do with cackling Joker. It is another cackle that scares me.

In the row behind me sit four teenage girls. They are decked out, as high school girls will be, in the latest thing that the magazines have told them is cool to wear—mostly black, I notice. They crunch popcorn (no butter, of course) and sip diet sodas. And every time the Joker utters even the most slightly amusing remark of diabolical dialog, the girls giggle like, well…like schoolgirls.

This goes on for the movie’s entirety until the Joker’s last scene and his last line. Hanging upside down (of course) and explaining the way the world works to Batman, the Joker says, “Madness is like gravity. All it needs is a little push.” Behind me, I hear one of the girls half whisper, “Awesome.”

And I am terrified because I suddenly get it.

It suddenly occurs to me that Heath Ledger’s life and death is a powerful apologetic for the Joker. Think about it: here is a cultural heartthrob at the top of his game, a prince in his profession. He is supremely gifted and devilishly handsome. Until, that is, he takes on his most challenging role, a demonic jester who lives outside of anyone’s moral universe. And he owns the character so convincingly that he’s very likely to receive one of the first posthumous Academy awards in more than 30 years. He is also tormented with a crippling depression that pushes him to take his own life.

But what is this character that he has “owned” so well? The Joker, I contend, is so much more than “evil.” To refer to him as such is so overly simplistic as to be inaccurate. No, the Joker is the embodiment of this generation’s greatest fear. Any good horror film will identify and exploit the things that an audience truly fears. Notice how many times he is referred to as a “terrorist.” And the grainy, shaky-camera videos of his victims were taken straight out of Al Jazeera stock footage that treated Internet voyeurs to everything from torture to beheadings.

It would be wrong, however, to say that the Joker represents this culture’s fear of terrorists. That’s too shallow. No, the Joker is what we fear about terrorists. A terrorist comes without warning, without consideration, like a dishonorable kamikaze, set on nothing other than upsetting the plans of those who think they have a plan. They destroy hope and safety and the idea that your life will go well in pursuit of “the good.” Harvey Dent is driven to madness as Gotham’s “White Knight,” a crusader who must feel the futility of his best-laid plans and live in the insanity that flows from the knowledge that we are helpless before the darkness of fate.

Remember how the line goes, “Madness is like gravity.” The terror is in the inability to stop the evil that will come upon you if you believe in something, anything, to save you. Recall Agent Smith in The Matrix standing over a head-locked Neo as they wait on the tracks for the racing subway, “Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson?” he growls. “That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death.”

Christian apologists, I now realize, have spoken too glibly about the “problem of evil” and its excuse-making lure to this generation of God-disbelievers. It is not just that evil exists; it is that it cannot be stopped that terrifies us. What if I am a helpless eventual recipient, no matter how well my life is going, of some soul-crushing event or tragedy or realization that will bring my house of cards crashing down around me? This is the sum of the next generation’s fears.

And the four teenie-boppers sitting behind me in The Dark Knight have embraced it and dubbed it “Awesome.”

For a generation like that, it occurs to me that, though absolutely true, it will not do for Christians to simply tell this culture about a hero who really will overcome evil in the world. Why? Because even in the Christian story, the answer is not expressed that tidily. God is not the author of evil, nor does he tempt a man so that he sins, yet he rules and overrules the evil inflicted by the Devil in order to bring about his holy will. But anyone who thinks that this is a neat explanation of the world we have to live in is stricken with a most strident form of Pollyanna-ism. The crucifixion was nothing if not messy in its intertwining God’s purposes and the purposes of evil. This generation is calling us who continue to believe to dwell on that fact until we give it a bit more respect.

True (and little wonder) that Christian sermons first centered on the resurrection as the demonstrative proof to that evil-beaten generation that they could have tangible hope even while staring in the face of the Joker. But I don’t want to race there too quickly before I feel what The Dark Knight is saying, because it is saying something that is quite true if there is no resurrection. That is, there is an undefeatable inevitability that omni-intends your misery. If you haven’t tasted it yet, you will.

Forgive the uncharacteristically depressing (and lengthy!) post, but perhaps we can honor this generation by taking their fears seriously while we seek to find ways to express to them the hope we have in our hero, Jesus.

Book Review: UnChristian

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:13:21 -0500

UnChristian: What A New Generation Really Thinks
About Christianity… And Why It Matters

published by Reformation21.com

Ever since Augustine penned the classic City of God, City of Man, the Church has wrestled with the question of how to be the Church in the world. Throughout the ages, the pendulum swings along a predictable trajectory. At one end, what might be called the Antithetical Church stresses that the Church is to be separate from the world. “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins,” says John in Revelation 18:4. At the other end, the Engaging Church, living under an obligation to advance the Kingdom of God as a tangible, “this-world” reality, seeks that God’s will be done personally, socially, politically, and intellectually “on earth as it is in heaven.”

This is an inescapable question with which every churchman must grapple: what is my congregation’s posture towards the world that they occupy six days out of the week? Am I to load my sermons with warnings from Scripture about the necessity of holiness and how dangerous it is to come in contact with the patterns of this world? Or, am I to embrace the church’s necessary “missional” charter by constantly pushing my people into the world to engage them with the transformational power of the Gospel? Are we about personal piety or cultural transformation?

Of course it is foolish to assume that a pastor should have to choose between the two. But inevitably, over time, our churches take on an “air,” a corporate identity that is most easily noticed in what we harp on, with what we are continually preoccupied.

David Kinnaman believes we are doing a poor job at both, and though he offers precious little solutions to the age-old problem, his analysis of the extent of American evangelicalism’s confusion on this question is as disturbing as it is interesting.

Writing his first book as president of The Barna Group, Kinnaman focuses his research on Mosaics (born between 1984 and 2002) and the Busters (born between 1965 and 1983). He began his research as a way of looking into the reputation of evangelicals to “outsiders” after the turn of the century, a sort of “Report Card from the World” on how the Body of Christ is being received by those she has come to evangelize.

Speaking from my experience as a campus minister for the last 14 years, I contend that the results are telling, but not surprising. First, Kinnaman reports that “outsiders” view Christians as hypocritical. Should we be surprised by this? After all, does anyone like to be told that they are helpless, hopeless sinners in need of a rescuing savior? On the other hand, Kinnaman accurately exposes the lingering problem in much Christian discipleship, namely, the tendency to define faith by my spiritual accomplishments and not by my dependency upon Jesus alone. This means that Christians are to lead with their limps (to borrow Dan Allender’s phrase) and not with their superiority.

Second, Kinnaman helpfully identifies that evangelism-as-technique is growing less and less compelling to the next generation. Evangelism and discipleship cannot be so easily distinguished (nor, I would argue, does it need to be) in the kind of ministry the next generation really needs. In its place, he argues, there needs to be an evangelism that is wrapped up in community (where someone has a chance to receive multiple exposures to the Gospel) and service (where ministry of Word and deed go hand in hand).

Kinnaman goes on to explain that the world sees Christians as homophobic. He is absolutely correct about this. There have been fewer trends that have been more unsettling to me than how much my religious beliefs on homosexuality create or close open doors within the lost in the campus community (and this coming from perhaps one of the most socially conservative campuses in the southeastern US!). Questions concerning homosexuality as a viable sexual alternative are utterly taboo. One can hardly mention the topic without adding the culturally enshrined Seinfeld-ian line, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that….”

However, it is in his chapter on how the world defines the church as “sheltered” that Kinnaman stumbles upon the complexity of his thesis. “Outsiders,” he explains, need to see that Christians can get involved with them in the world, while at the same time maintaining a “balance” between “proximity and purity.” Kinamman quotes Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute:
Being salt and light demands two things: we practice purity in the midst of a fallen world and yet we live in proximity to this fallen world. If you don’t hold up both truths in tension, you invariably become useless and separated from the world God loves. For example, if you only practice purity apart from proximity to the culture, you inevitably become pietistic, separatist, and conceited. If you live in close proximity to the culture without also living in a holy manner, you become indistinguishable from fallen culture and useless in God’s kingdom.

The problem with this analysis is that it simply does not answer the question. That a Christian needs to live in the world but not of the world is not in question. How he is to do so remains illusive to this generation of believing people.

Kinnaman’s answer to this question throughout the rest of the book (chapters follow on how Christians are too politically minded and, finally, too judgmental) amount to little else than a simple charge of “can’t we just be a bit nicer.”

I, however, would like to argue that what is needed is a new model for defining how a Christian sees himself in the world. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus unfolds two great spheres of Christian activity. The Kingdom of God is the new realm of which he is king and his people are his vice-regents. God’s people are called to advance his lordship into every area of life.

The impetus for this charge is the Church, against which the gates of hell cannot withstand. That is, a people, called to be holy and distinct from the world, gathered together worshipping and praising their God, constitute the empowering means of God’s assault on the world. Here, the Word of God stands absolute and immovable.

Taken together, Christians are called to stand firm as the Church, giving themselves to her purity and life. They are equally called to take the Kingdom truths gleaned from their fellowship together and behave as salt and light to a dying world. For the Church, the Christian has great zeal and certainty. For the Kingdom, she allows freedom of conscience for those to pursue the advancement of God’s purposes in means that seem suitable to them.

O. Palmer Robertson, principle of the African Bible College in Uganda, Africa put it this way: “The Church is the impetus for the Kingdom.” Which means, among other things, that a large part of Christian responsibility throughout the ages consists of the Church ranging wide in her declarations about the necessity of advancing God’s Kingdom. While at the same time, the Church must humbly withdraw from areas in which she has merely generalized expertise.

Kinnaman wants to sound the alarm that the world dislikes Christians, and that some of those reasons are legitimate. No kidding. But there is something far more foundational for the Reformed among us to consider in our generation: how are we to be the Church in the world?

Lovely As A City

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:11:25 -0500

I have lately had my vision of heaven dramatically altered. You see, I have always imagined myself in heaven living in a beautiful palace and walking around on streets of gold. Every now and again, I might journey to the center of the city to visit Jesus, reigning on a throne of light with this Father.

But then I actually read Revelation 22. Notice carefully:

9 Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God,

Now, verse 9, I understood. The Church of Jesus gets called a “Bride” throughout the New Testament. And that particular truth has always been deeply gratifying. Along with the rest of believers throughout history, we constitute Jesus’ forever love, his spouse. And the angel invites John to come take a look at her. But what does he take him see? A city! The text does not say that the Bride dwells in a city, but that she IS a city. John’s visions in the Apocalypse are full of mixed metaphor, and the glory of the New Jerusalem is not that the Church will live out her days IN it, but AS it.

Now I suspect that I’m safe in assuming that very few gentlemen readers of Common Grounds Online have ever found themselves gazing into the eyes of their beloved, awash in affection, and said something like, “My darling, you are as lovely as…as…as a city!”

But I have to confess that since I discovered this little exegetical nugget, the passage has a new power over me. First, John describes the precious jewels with which she is constructed. God is promising not simply to adorn me in precious jewels, but will make me to be like a precious jewel. This would not have moved me before I was married. For over eleven years now, I have occasionally caught my wife staring at her engagement ring, still fascinated at its brilliance. The sands of time have made my wife’s glances at me quite rare. But if this passage is true, Jesus will never tire of looking at the beauty he will make me to be.

John also goes into quite a lot of detail about the massive height of the walls of the city. Commentator Dennis E. Johnson explains how silly is would be to assume John is talking about a literal city wall, whose further reaches would extend into the path of many orbiting space satellites. No, John is talking about us, Jesus’ Church! I have come to see that John here describes the vast expanse (a number no one can count, cf. Rev. 7:9) of God’s people on the one hand, and the unshakable security of them on the other. What an image! I am destined to be a living stone in a living city, gathered with an innumerable host of others saved by the same blood of Christ. And my existence in that state will be eternally and unchangeably safe. No more threats, from within or without. No more insecurity and fear of the future.

All that to say, I think I am happy now to give up my former dreams of streets of gold and gem-studded palaces for a picture of a Savior who, by his own merit, looks at me that way!

Knowing and Imagination

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:10:45 -0500

“Daddy, is the Easter Bunny our parents?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I mean, is it true that on Easter, it’s not the Easter Bunny that brings us our candy baskets, but you and mommy?”

I wish that I had a picture of my face through my 8-year-old’s eyes when she directed this question at us recently before bedtime. She probably saw a sheepish grin spread over our faces combined with looks of vague disappointment. She would also have noted that her father stalled out on his question. It took a few seconds for me to respond.

The reason I hesitated to answer is that I had been dreading this question for years. And my dread is NOT just because the question represents the end of an era of parenting for my wife and me.

Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias once said that meaning is established across a lifetime in four distinct phases. First, as a child, the dominate path to meaning comes by wonder: the gleam in a child’s eye on Christmas Eve night as she dares to peek out of her window to steal a glimpse of Santa and his sleigh. Second, as a young person, meaning looks much like a quest for truth: questions are asked; logic is sought; coherence is deeply valued. Third, as one grows older, meaning takes on the appearance of a desire for love: the search for community and understanding, the deep desire for someone to commit themselves to us. Finally, as old age creeps along, meaning morphs into a desire for security: what happens to me when I die; what can I really count on in life.

If Zacharias is right, then my daughter’s question represents a departure marker. And I’m sure that the look on our faces reflected some sense of lament at the loss of wonder. I expect that, even though it may be necessary, my daughter’s quest for truth has just begun.

There is something more to our disappointment, however, than parental nostalgia. Truth is, I hate that question. I hate that question because of what it says about the manner in which my children come to “know.” What I wonder is this: why do I have to choose between something that is “make believe” and something that is “real?” When did those two things get pitted against one another?

I’m sure there is some brilliant psycho-socio-philosophical answer to that question, though, I’m not able to offer it here. I simply know that something profound is lost in my child’s life when she ceases to see the world as infused with magic and mystery and trades it for a world that is scientific and logical. I’m not suggesting that she doesn’t gain something in the exchange—science, after all, has given us all kinds of neat-o things like iPhones and the like. But I hate the thought that she suddenly has to choose between the two. Just because the Easter Bunny exists primarily in my child’s imagination doesn’t mean that there is no “truth” to its existence.

I also hate that I have to qualify this last statement. Of course, I have not intention of suggesting that the Easter Bunny replace the joy of our risen Lord in our celebration of that holiday. Nor do I think that we ought to welcome any pagan notion into our collective Christian consciences without serious critical evaluation. I simply want for my child’s pursuit of Christ to include, not preclude, an ability to access him in her imagination, in the place where dreams come true.

I’m sure that other childhood characters are soon to follow. I expect that the Tooth Fairy will be the next to fall, followed by the loss of Santa Claus. And I will lament them each in their turn. In the meantime, I’ll just try to keep her guessing with the response I gave her on that fateful night, “Sweetheart, just because something is make-believe doesn’t mean that it’s not real.”

When Freedom Isn't Freedom

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:10:03 -0500

Imagine a fish who one day decides that the real source of his problems in life is not his family, not his “school,” not his friends…but water. “Water,” he assumes, “is so restrictive, so limiting. It’s time to start to think outside of the box.” What he wants is a new life, free from the mundane and the usual. So to that end, he decides one day that he’ll leave the confines of the water for the happier shores (literally) of dry land where there is warm sun and beautiful beaches, but most exciting of all…air! Forthwith, he throws himself out of the water and onto the ground. But it doesn’t take long before he realizes that the “warm sun” is hot and burning. The beautiful beach is scratchy and rakes across his scales. And the first big gulp of air he tries to take chokes him. Freedom from water is not so freeing after all.

I recently heard Tim Keller contrast the difference between the present generation and our grandparent’s. He said that for our grandparents, the highest good was “being good.” Most valuable to them was the thought that they had done what was right, they have been a “good person.” However, for those calling the cultural shots in our day, freedom is the highest value. The knowledge that I was not coerced or manipulated in any way, that no one was trying to pull the wool over my eyes, that my choices were, indeed, uninfluenced…this, says Keller, drives the heart of contemporary culture.

Of course, there are two problems with our culture’s thinking here. First, is there really anything like an “uninfluenced act” in human experience? This kind of atomistic thinking sees man a bit more radically separated from his environment than he actually is. Human beings are deeply influenced by each other’s actions…especially our words. The connections between our sense of “self” and our environment are much more powerful than we would often like to admit. Every act of mine is “influenced” in some way by the human forces around me.

But the second problem with our culture’s blind pursuit of “freedom” so called is that it fails to account for the fact of man’s design. That is, the self is not random. There is order to our existence in every facet. So persistent is this order that when we violate that design, we experience dysfunction. Our lives fall apart. For instance, if you fail to account for fact that your body runs on food, and instead feed it, say, motor oil, your intestinal tract will begin to experience alienation.

So the question before us is this: what if the human soul has a design, a pattern? And what if my most acute problems in life—heartbreak, loneliness, sadness, bitterness—are all functional results of my pursuit of freedom in a way which violates my soul’s design?

Further, what if when I honor that design (what we call in Christian parlance “obedience”) I actually broaden my human flourishing instead of diminishing it, and thereby, increase the enjoyment of my life? I once heard a preacher tell a story of a Pennsylvania public school system that had a large playground on one end of its property. Over the years, the neighborhood grew up around the school and the streets bordering the playground became busy and full of traffic. Fearing an accident, school administrators put up a large fence all the way around the playground.

Well, parents were deeply offended. It looked like their children were in a prison. The fight became so heated that the conflict went all the way to the city school board where it was decided that the fence would be torn down. What do you think happened the very next day? If you are thinking that a car struck a child, you’d be wrong. The children huddled together in a tiny clump in the middle of the playground, dreadfully afraid of the expanse of the playground all around them.

Do you see the point? The fence actually GAVE them the playground. What if God desperately wants to give this culture the playground? But we are so offended at fences (and screaming “Legalism!” at any sniff of them) that we either race out into dangerous traffic OR we huddle together in tiny clumps, never seeing just how much joy might actually be “out there.”

The Worst Sin In The Bible

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:09:16 -0500

Take a trip, when you have some spare time, through the books of 1 and 2 Kings. Of all the dismal failures of the Jewish people at the hands of their misguided leaders, one particular failure gets mentioned over and over again. Take for example 2 Kings 15:9,
“And he [Zechariah, not to be confused with the prophet of the same name] did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, as his fathers had done. He did not depart from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin.”
If this were the only example of this, then it would go unnoticed, but over and over again, kings of Israel are summarily dismissed as bad leaders for having not “departed from the sins of Jeroboam.”

So what was the “sin of Jeroboam?” 1 Kings 12:28 gives us the answer.
“So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. And he said to the people, ‘You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’”
The way he phrased that last line ought to sound familiar. The very same words are used by the wandering Israelites in Exodus 32:4 when they fashioned for themselves the original golden calf. Lesson: God’s not all that excited when his people make golden calves and worship them.

But though this sin seems distant and quaint to those of us living without literal golden calves, I am beginning to understand that this is the worst sin in the Bible. A little closer examination of the text in Exodus 32 will show what I mean. Don’t make the mistake, as is easy to do with a cursory read, that the Israelites are worshipping the actual calf itself. Aaron sees what they have built and announces in verse 5 that, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” That is, “to Yahweh.” The sin of the Golden Calf is not worshipping the calf, but worshipping the God of the Bible through the calf.

Again, what’s the big deal? Surely God would appreciate a bit of creativity once and a while from his worshipping people. But if not, then surely they can get partial credit for having at least made the effort. Good intention, bad execution…right?

But this strikes me as an awfully shallow application of this story. There is much more to this act than can be summed up in an admonition to follow carefully a regulative principle for worship as the people of God gather. Rather, what seems to be the concern is the tendency among God’s people to remake him in their image. “God created man in his own image and we gladly return the favor,” I once read somewhere.

In other words, God condemns his people in the most thoroughgoing of ways when they decide that they “don’t like to think of God in that way.” He is holy, granted, but what that means, among other things, is that he is unchangeable. He is who he is. “I am that I am,” he says to Moses. “Don’t you try to make me fit into your categories. Love me and worship me on MY terms and not yours.”

Now, before you charge God with a bit of relational peevishness, consider that this tendency is the death of any real relationship. For years, I have observed the moment when a dating relationship reaches its D-Day. The moment that one person begins to resent what the other person is, the relationship is over. Love, if it is to be unconditional, loves that person, NOT what they like to imagine that person to be. The vast majority of relationship strife I have seen stems from one person trying to manipulate their partners into fitting into their mold what they think they ought to look like. It is the supreme relational selfishness.

What if God’s condemnation of the Golden Calf incident (and the many calves to follow) is simply his way of protecting the integrity of the relationship he wants to establish with us? Because in demanding that we accommodate OUR relationship with Him to the realities of His character, has not HE also accommodated himself to US by “taking on the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men?”

Of Faith and Inadequacy

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:07:37 -0500

I am sitting in a tiny Mexican cachina in midtown with a student. It’s a different meeting than the sort I am used to because he is a vocal and self-conscious skeptic of all things Christian. For some reason, he has been attending our Bible studies regularly and wants to meet for lunch. He has been sucking down margaritas for about a half hour now, and he announces that he has a question.

“Why is God hiding?”

“Okay, I’ll bite…why is God hiding?” I say confused.

“I mean, if God wants people to believe in him so badly, why doesn’t he make himself more obvious? Why all the cloak and dagger? Why not just come out of hiding and let everyone know that he is absolutely here?”

I love/hate to tell this story to my incoming freshmen. I love/hate it because of the inevitable answer I get from them when I ask them what they would say to my half-lit friend.

“Well, if God made himself obvious, then we wouldn’t have to have faith,” they, without fail in my 12 years of student ministry, say.

There’s that word again: faith. I am becoming more and more convinced that this is the single most misunderstood word in all of evangelical jargon. Why? Because that answer is just wrong. Think of the logic: God actually is hiding (to use my friend’s wording) but he does so in order that he can draw from me some mental leap, some momentary purge of doubt that magically transforms our relationship into one of perfect kinship and peace.

Set aside for the moment the hopelessness of trying to determine if I actually have really made that leap or not, OR if I was sufficiently purged of enough doubt to get me over that magic line of salvation. I want to challenge my friend’s question first before I answer the question of the nature of faith. The two are closely related.

First of all, nowhere in the Bible are we allowed to believe that God is not actively making his presence known. Psalm 19 demonstrates that nicely. And that presence is so obvious that men are “without excuse,” says Paul in Romans 1:18ff. So what must be true if I don’t see God, but he assures me that he’s making himself known?

It can only be the case that it is not HE that is hiding, but ME! Apparently, according to the Bible, I am not quite the objective observer that I figure myself to be. As a matter of fact, it is in my nature to twist the truth, to bend it to my own ends. Those ends, as it turns out, are determined to oust God from my life and curtail any influence he wants to have on me, not the least of which is acknowledgement of his active presence in the world.

Hence, my next question to my friend, “If you were being deceived, would you know it?” Of course not, is the answer. That’s what it means to be “deceived.” So what if God is not only NOT hiding, but he is actively, endlessly, desperately revealing himself in every electric moment of my life…I just don’t want to see it. I’ll have nothing of it. This, it seems, casts quite a different light on the so-called “apologetic moment,” does it not?

Does it not follow then that the only way a deceived person begins the process of seeing the world aright is by a bold admission of his self-deception. In other words, a confession of his emptiness must come before the spell can be broken and he begins to listen to the words of the all-seeing, all-conditioning, and never-deceiving God.

This, I suggest, is the definition of faith. Faith cannot be a “work.” It can only be an admission of an inability to work. In our evangelical world, we have raised a generation of young people who have been told that faith is “asking Jesus in your heart” or “accepting him as your personal Lord and Savior.” Therefore, they are a fickle, doubting crew, at best; and, at worst, they have raced right past the first step of true Christian experience: utter dependence.

Of Faith and Fasting

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:06:47 -0500

The “sermonette” portion of my visit with this student was mercifully over. I sat back and waited for him to burst into tears and tell me his life was forever changed by the poignancy of my presentation. His response was less than I was hoping for.

“I’ve heard all that before. You don’t understand, Les, I know the information. It’s getting that information to mean something to me, to really grip me. I guess I just don’t have any faith.”

This conversation has repeated itself with countless students over the last decade, to the end that I am realizing that there is an epidemic of understanding the nature and marks of true Biblical faith. In almost every conversation I get to have with evangelicalized students, faith is almost always conceived as a new work, a re-directed effort, or a renewed expulsion of doubt.

For instance, I recently asked a group of students about the nature of Jesus’ miracles. Why weren’t they more spectacular? If I were going to think up a miracle to wow my congregation into belief in me, I would have more pyrotechnics, more drama, perhaps some flying around a bit. But Jesus seems content in the Gospels to heal and feed the sick and poor. To put it more crudely (quoting yet another student visit), “If Jesus wants us to believe in him so badly, then why doesn’t he make himself more obvious?”

Almost without fail, the answer comes back that if God made it that obvious, then we wouldn’t need to demonstrate any “faith.” Faith, so conceived, is the volitional leap into the dark; the more absurd, the better.

The problem with all this discussion however is that it misses the essential nature of faith. Jesus says that “not even in Israel have I found such faith” to a centurion, who, only verses before, confesses, “…I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.” (Luke 7:1-10) Faith, I am suggesting, is the soul’s response to the uncovering of its emptiness. And the problem with every misconception of faith is that it still ends up being about ME, and not Jesus.

New believers often quickly despair when they begin to think about what they have just done in signing on with Jesus. “Was I sincere enough?” they think. “Did I repent properly?” they wonder. “Do I have faith?” they ask. The simple answer to these kinds of questions ought to be, “Absolutely not.”

But isn’t that the point? Truthfully, these questions reveal a stubborn self-righteousness that sincerely wants to contribute something to this transaction of salvation: my sincerity, my heart-felt repentance, my faith. When our coming to Christ ought to be the abandonment of these things for wholehearted focus on Jesus and his merits on my behalf.

Consider this: why would Jesus have his followers to stop eating periodically as a source of spiritual discipline? “How strange,” thinks the outsider. And it is strange. But what if hunger is the nearest physical analog to the spiritual sensation of faith? Faith, then, is the realization of my spiritual hunger and the consequent feeding upon Christ.

Christianity and Suicide

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:05:57 -0500

One of my former students who had graduated in May of 2005 had gone on to take a job with my organization’s internship program, designed especially for young men to see whether they are equipped for ministry. While involved with my ministry, he served as the chaplain for his fraternity and the head of our mercy ministry servant team. He was dearly loved by all who knew him, was engaged to be married this coming June, and planning on pursuing the ministry after his internship. Last week, he allegedly hanged himself in a closet in his apartment.

I use the word “allegedly” because it is still so hard to fathom. Mind you, not in a “oh, I can’t believe he did this” fashion, but simply for the fact that not one of his closest friends, his campus minister, nor even his fiancé were given even the slightest hint that he might have the kind of troubled heart you expect someone to have when they do this kind of thing. No noticeable depression, no unmanageable stress, no heartache to speak of…nothing.

In the midst of trying to do some triage on my shattered flock of heart-broken students, two questions have emerged.

First, is suicide the unforgivable sin? With no disrespect to certain corners of Christendom, this is a silly question. Jesus says in Matthew 12:31 that “every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men” except blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is the judicial hardening of the soul that occurs after repeated rejections of the Spirit’s call to faith and repentance. Suicide is not blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Ergo, suicide is not the unforgivable sin.

Second, how could a Christian do this? This is a much more interesting and delicate question. How could someone who has the Spirit of God working in them get to such a level of discouragement that they would take their own life? I hope you won’t think it trite if I give a one-word answer: sin.

I have always thought that Christian growth could be described as the process by which the theoretical becomes practical; the purely abstract becomes wholly tangible. We talk about sin being a restless evil. We talk about its ability to consume its victim. We talk about the fact that sin is not eradicated at conversion but only at glorification. Suddenly, something like this happens and we wake up and realize that the Bible wasn’t kidding.

But isn’t that the point of the Gospel? Wasn’t it our helplessness that drove us to Christ? Did we come thinking that our sincerity, our surrender, our wisdom, our conviction of sin, or any other evangelical grace was the ground of our union with Christ? Of course not. We came to Jesus empty handed, spiritually alone, devoid of any righteousness in ourselves. And the Gospel promised us salvation.

My friend sinned in what he did. I have no doubt he presently regrets what he did. But I also know of countless conversations we had where he detailed his love for Christ and his dependence on his grace alone for salvation. I have no idea what could possibly have been going through his mind when he committed this horrible act. But I don’t have to know. It doesn’t matter on this point: that Jesus holds his people despite their failings, their sorrows, their foolish choices. Why? Because salvation is “of the Lord.”

“Head Knowledge" vs. "Heart Knowledge”

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:05:06 -0500

“There’s nothing wrong with you spiritually right now that can’t be cured with 18 inches,” the dynamic youth communicator dramatically said. “The 18 inches that exists between your head and your heart is what is keeping you from being a truly sold out Christian.”

Am I the only one who absolutely hated hearing this on just about every youth retreat I attended as a teenager? And since I’m feeling uppity today, I want to entertain the possibility that my irritation was not entirely ill-founded. This head/heart dichotomy is sub-Christian.

To be fair, if all the speaker wants to say is that it is possible that our knowledge of God is purely theoretical and abstract, then I heartily agree and need to do a bit of self-examination in response. I submit, however, that the formulation of the problem creates more problems than it reveals in the potential repenter. Let me explain.

Disjoining the head from the heart is a decidedly Greek notion of human existence. Mankind, in this view, is a body/soul constitution from the beginning and the dichotomies multiply from there inward. Even the soul can be divided up into parts. There is an inner zone where the thoughts live and another where my feelings live. The “mind” contains the thinking, the rationality. The “heart” emits the feelings, the passions.

But any good exegete of Scripture will tell you that the Bible’s understanding of the “inner zones” of humanity centers on the conception of the “heart.” In Scripture, the “heart” houses not just the feelings, but all of life. My thinking, my feelings, my believing, my committing, my loving: it all proceeds from the heart. Proverbs 4:23 comes to mind, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”

So how does this help? Well, first, it rescues me from a hopeless inner struggle to feel something that I currently do not. Will someone kindly tell me just how it is that I am supposed to breach the precarious 18 inches by some willful, emotive act? It reminds me of the senseless husband who comes home to find his wife crying. “I just feel sad,” she says.

“Well, you shouldn’t feel that way.”

“Well… thanks for that. Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll just feel differently. Why didn’t you come home sooner to drop that pearl of pastoral wisdom on me,” she must think.

Second, the Bible’s corrective here helps focus my spiritual journey on what I believe, rather than what I feel. The greatest problem that I have in my spiritual life is what I am presently committed to, what I am worshipping, what I am delighting in, what I am serving with my daydreams, my money, and my daytimer. In short, my problems center on my faith.

What I need is to hear the Gospel proclaimed to me over and over. I need to hear how committed God is to me, how much in Christ he delights in me. Leaving the head/heart dichotomy as an apparatus to think about my inner life reorganizes the priorities of Christian self-discipline, helps keeps first things first, and gets me off the hopeless treadmill of trying to figure out if I feel like a Christian today.

And best of all, I don’t need a yardstick to figure it all out.

Katrina and the Kingdom

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:04:01 -0500

Once upon a time a benevolent King created a theatre for his glory. Glorious though it was in all its potentialities, his creation was designed as just that…potential. Apparently, the idea was to allow his vice regents, his “images,” to experience the joy of being, as Tolkien calls them, “subcreators.” To give them an idea of the direction in which he wanted to go, he planted a garden in the middle of this theatre, a place of pleasantness, beauty, and joy.

But you know how the story goes. The “images” were duped into believing that it was not the King’s intention to make them happy; that he, in actuality, was holding out on them. So they decided to take their pursuit of happiness into their own hands created what we know now as Fallen Mankind.

So the King immediately set in motion a plan that would eventually result in bringing these creatures back into line with his larger program for his theatre. He would send his Heir among his images to bear in himself the curse for their rebellion and restore them with the ability to honor the King as they were designed to do.

Such is the defining story of every Christian in every age.

But for American Christianity we seemed to have missed a vital epilogue to this story: having been rescued from ourselves, our King intends for us to pick up the original plan. Our King enacted redemption on our behalf NOT so that we could sit back, wait for the Rapture with the cool satisfaction that heaven awaits us on the other side.

Rather, the King intends that we be about the business of two great tasks. First, we are to move throughout this Earth repairing the wreckage which continues to be inflicted on this creation by the presence of sin in mankind. Second, we are to move throughout this cosmos uncovering the infinite potentialities implanted therein.

As I write this, I have spent hours in the previous days watching the mind-numbing horrors unfold only five short hours from my house. Images of dead bodies floating down flooded city streets, a violently angry lower class in New Orleans screaming at me while I sit safe in my living room for help, condescending reporters taking the “present administration” to task for failing to act quickly enough, and stammering politicians scrambling to say the right thing without looking wholly uncompassionate…it has been a jarring, depressing, and numbing two weeks.

A thought, however, occurred to me as I watched New Orleans crumble into chaos. “I guess this is how societies dissolve.” Put enough tragedy plus enough poverty plus enough desperation and that equals anarchy. I’m not trying to be apocalyptic. In all likelihood, we are going to get through this tragedy and pick up the pieces and start over.

BUT NOT WITHOUT THE CHRISTIAN STORY! In other words, I have realized that only the Christian story ennobles and prepares and mobilizes into action the necessary amount of spiritual and social resources to preserve life in these situations. Jesus promised that his advent would mark the coming of the Kingdom of God on the Earth, and the relative degree of peace and human order that our world has known throughout the last 2000 years is due directly to the fact that the King’s vice regents were marching throughout history, repairing the ruins, building up the broken places, and created pleasantness, beauty, and joy wherever they landed.

May God help us as his Kingdom strides forward to reclaim yet another chapter of human history marred by the destructive effects of sin.

Sex and the Supper

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:03:13 -0500

I’ve been thinking about the Lord’s Supper lately, and (bear with me…) about sex as well.

Before I get flagged by every internet filter known to cyberspace, let me explain. This last semester, my campus fellowship did a series through Dating, Marriage and Sexuality. We all learned a lot as worked through what God intends for us in our dating and relating.

So when the topic of sexuality emerged toward the end of the semester, I was amazed at the increase in our attendance. Sex, I tried to explain, is a transcendent experience. What is going on between a man and a woman on the marriage bed extends far beyond the physical experience and into the spiritual realm. When I sleep with my wife, there is far more going on than mere mechanics.

Sleeping with my wife is just as much a pledge as it is a pleasure. By giving to her (and sex works much better when it is a “giving” more than a “getting”…married folks know what I mean) with that level of intimacy, we are revisiting a day about nine years ago when I stood up in a rented tuxedo in front of a church in Jackson, Mississippi full of people and made a promise. In short, I promised that I would be there.

I promised I would be there socially (sticking around through thick and thin), emotionally (attending to her needs), spiritually (being a spiritual encouragement rather than an impediment), and, yes, even financially (sharing all our “worldly goods” from then on). And in bed, I am BOTH celebrating that fact as well as re-pledging myself to keep those promises. In short, I am telling my wife that no matter what happened this week, no matter what forces that might have threatened to undo us, and no matter how distant we might feel towards each other…I’m still here. I haven’t left. We’re still “okay.”

Now, what does that have to do with the Lord’s Supper? Well, it occurs to me that all the things that move me most about sex with my wife move me equally when I take the bread and the wine. They say the same things!

What if God, striving to keep his stiff-necked people from an ongoing affair with Gnosticism (where the physical is denigrated and the spiritual elevated), gave to his people a physical sacrament, a way in which we can gather together (no private masses) and say to him, “No matter what happened this week, no matter what forces that might have threatened our union, no matter how distant I feel from you this morning…I’m still here.”

But the glory of the Lord’s Supper is not found in OUR pledge to God, but in the fact that we have a God who is willing to say the same thing to US in the same act. God is WITH his people at the Table in a unique way, pledging himself over and over again to bless his people for ever and ever. Pleasure and pledge…in the same act.

My wife and I have noticed (and Lauren Winner has helped confirm in her gloriously racy Real Sex) that there regularly comes a time in our marriage where “it’s just time.” And both of us have a remarkably tuned intuition as to when that time is. If there is anything I wish that I could nurture in my spiritual life, it is an intuition for when “it’s just time” that the people of God gather together to celebrate the Lord’s goodness to us by coming to the Table and loving our God.

Maybe it’s just me, but it’s more than just quarterly.

Married To Jesus

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:02:26 -0500

My wife stood in perfect position to see the bride. Having arrived forty-five minutes early for this wedding, the much-coveted “aisle seat” was undeniably hers. The wait ended up being well worth it. It surely is true that all brides are beautiful, but this one was especially radiant, a huge, giggling smile spread all over her face. I have to admit that I was a bit taken myself by the scene until I felt the sharp pain of my wife’s elbow in my gut.

“Look at John!” she whispered through her own tears.

As I craned my neck to see the groom, I understood what had the crowd so spellbound. John’s knees had buckled. His face burned red as a beet. Down his face rolled big, hot tears. I have never since seen a man so taken with the vision of his bride as that young man on that day.

But truth be told, I have seen it many times since. I experienced it myself at my own wedding. There are few experiences that compare, for a man at least, than that vision of seeing the doors swing wide and the most beautiful woman in the world walking down the aisle to give herself completely to you.

Having officiated at dozens of weddings, I have had some time to think through this event and even make some attempts to process why the impact of that moment is so intense. Is it possible that the tsunami of emotion and longing that wells up at that moment is itself a memory trace? That the scene corresponds in some way to a desire mapped out on our spiritual DNA, imprinted in us as the image of God within his human creatures? That we were made to be in relationship with God in no casual way, but, indeed, married to him?

Isaiah 62:5 seems to think as much, “…and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”

But make sure you get the image straight. It is not that we ought to look at Christ as a groom longingly looks at his coming bride. No, the illustration places us as the Bride and Christ as the Groom. And at the heart of Christianity is this singular truth: we never know any true holiness, any real wisdom, any profound human insight, until we look, as it were, down the aisle of our own salvation and see the Lord Jesus, not with his arms crossed, his foot tapping in frustrated impatience with how well I measured up to whatever standard that week, but with his knees buckling, with big hot tears streaming down his beet red face, so enamored is he with what he has wrought in his redeemed creatures.

I have come to believe that this is the key to every spiritual defect from which I suffer. The reason my prayer life stinks is because I implicitly believe that when I bow my head to pray, Jesus is not glad to see me. Truthfully, I don’t like to spend time with anyone around whom I feel guilty. Walk into a room after I have offended you and my gut instinct will be to avoid you every time. Likewise, I am not holy because I have not learned to love God’s law because I simply cannot accept that his ways are for my good, and not my ill.

I believe we come on this point to the very center of Christianity. Jesus marries screw ups like you and me. That’s it. Granted, there is an ocean of gracious theology that upholds and frames that statement, but fire it in a crucible to its irreducible minimum and you have a nail-pierced, blood-soaked groom, standing at the right hand of his Father, beaming at the whore who walks down the aisle towards him.

The degree to which I have experiential knowledge of that truth is the degree to which I live the Christian life in the manner in which it is supposed to be lived.

Where Are You, God?

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:01:37 -0500

“Because I didn’t see you at church…”

“As they make music they will sing, ‘All my fountains are in you.’” Psalm 87:7

I’ve been thinking lately about who the Psalmist is talking about here. When he says, “All my fountains are in you,” whom does he mean? Does he mean his fountains are in God or in God’s people? Do these music-inducing moments of joy have their source in the great thought of God, or the people of God as they gather, the Old Testament “City of God,” the New Testament Church?

But something has only recently occurred to me: why do I have to choose? What if the line that exists between the enjoyment of God and the enjoyment of the people of God is not quite as thick as we often assume it is? In other words, what if God has chosen, in some sense, to manifest himself to us through each other?

I guess I am coming to realize that there have been more times than I can count when I have been on my knees crying out, “Where are you, God? Why won’t you answer?” About that time, I hear a knock on my door, and it’s a student, or a co-worker who has just dropped by to “see how I was doing.” Typically annoyed, I complain about God’s distance, his absence, his refusal to work in my life the way in which I want him to.

But it almost never occurs to me that my visiting friend may themselves be God for me! I know at first that sounds blasphemous and I am not so stupid to suggest that these visitors are divine in the same way we talk about God being divine. But from the language of the sacred Scriptures, I think my statement easily defended on the grounds that God himself talks like this.

For instance, why does Jesus, having toppled Pharisee Saul off his camel (both literally and figuratively) say, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” “No offense, Jesus, but Stephen told us at his death that he could see you at the right hand of God the Father. Saul’s mission wasn’t against you, but against your followers, the Church.” The only way in which this statement makes any sense is if, at least in Jesus’ mind, persecuting his people is the same as persecuting him. They are one and the same thing.

Again, Jesus says in the days just prior to his execution that there would come a day when he would gush over his people, thanking them for “feeding him when he was hungry, clothing him when he was naked, and visiting him when he was in prison.” Confused, they will respond, “When did we do that?” “…whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

The point is: God has grown far too intangible for most of his followers. The earliest Christians regularly made statement along these lines, “You cannot have God as your Father if you don’t have the Church as your mother.” I suspect that at the heart of my student’s struggle with what they commonly refer to as “head knowledge vs. heart knowledge” is a failure to see that God is not nearly as abstract as they assume him to be, but has manifested himself in what C. S. Lewis calls “the holiest object presented to your senses,” namely, your neighbor.

There’s a joke about an old Christian man who, upon hearing that the flood waters are coming, goes outside to wait on the salvation of the Lord. A truck comes by warning him of the danger to which he responds, “No thanks, I’m waiting on the Lord’s salvation.” The flood waters rise and the man climbs up to his roof when a boat motors by offering him a lift. “No thanks,” he persists, “I’m waiting on the Lord’s salvation.” Finally, the flood waters up to his neck, a helicopter spots him, lowers a rope ladder and begs him to grab it. With one last gasp, he cries, “I’m waiting for the Lord’s salvation.”

In heaven, the man defiantly marches up to St. Peter at the pearly gates and says, “What’s wrong with you people? Couldn’t you see how faithful I was being? Didn’t you hear me cry out to you for salvation?”

To which Peter replied, “We sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter. What more did you want?”

Exactly.