intermission: what a year so far

Let's see what 2011 has brought us so far. Uprising and overthrow of an Egyptian regime. Spreading unrest in the Middle East, burgeoning unrest in China. Japan's worst national disaster since Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 10,000 dead at this point with nuclear meltdowns and spreading radiation that will continue to kill long after the ground settles and the waters recede. Amidst all this, you have the nutty evangelical doom-sayers leaping up and down, pointing at the tragedies and shouting for joy that Jesus is returning soon. It makes me sick.

All that's happened is awful. But it's nothing new. Because we're in the middle of it right now, it seems so much bigger than everything else that's preceded it. Every year there are countless disasters and tragedies, and every year some hard-ass Christians take it as a sign that Jesus' second coming is quite literally just around the bend. You'd think that year after year and decade after decade of different disasters and over-the-top eschatological predictions, there'd be a bit of humility (or at least hesitancy) in declaring Jesus' imminent return. Last year I watched a documentary about premillennial expectations, about Jesus' coming in the very near future. The documentary covered a span of twenty years in the lives of various Christians and their eschatological hopes. What I remember the most is how at one point, one of the interviewees said she was sure Jesus would return before she had kids; then she was sure, several years later, that Jesus would come back before her kids reached high school; then ten more years, and she was sure Jesus would make his appearance before her kids graduated college; and then before her kids got married, and then before they had kids... It just stuck out to me because I wondered if she realized what was happening. Each disaster, each tragedy, each political unfolding convinced her Jesus' return was on the brink. And each time it appeared to be a "false alarm." Yet the prophecies and convictions continue, and they'll continue, and they'll continue, until--out of the blue--Jesus returns. Perhaps instead of getting all excited about these tragedies we should get down on our knees and pray for God's healing and mercy, God's restorative power, pray for flowers to emerge from the ashes, for God's kingdom to advance in the darkest and most shadowy sectors of our world.

Don't get me started on all the Jerusalem hype. This unrest in the Middle East has gotten more than a few people all up in arms about Jerusalem, as if the city and her temple were more important than anything else in Christian history. It's as if we fail to realize that the city and her temple were signposts to the Real Deal, the Messiah, and Christ took the place of the Temple and performed the functions of the Temple, and the Temple came under God's judgment; Jerusalem and the Temple have their place in Christian history, but it's not the place warranted them by many: they're redundant, symbolic graveyards. They've had their time. And as to Jerusalem's destruction being a sign of Jesus' coming, YES. I agree. But I also believe that it's already happened. Judgment already befell Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The city refused her Messiah and God judged her accordingly; vindication took place, but it wasn't the vindication of the Jews but the vindication of Christ and all his people. I guess what I'm saying is that all this focus and fascination on Jerusalem has no real warrant in the New Testament. Jerusalem's mentioned negatively again and again, except for the New Jerusalem, which is eschatological and spiritual in scope and discontinuous with the actual physical city of Jerusalem as it was then and now. Only when we do hermeneutical injustice to the texts can we build up some sort of eschatology that puts Jerusalem and the Temple in the center of it all.

I don't know where this post came from. I was going to write about brake problems with my car, adventures with Skyler, enjoying some time at home with Amanda. But instead this poured forth. Forgive me if my tone comes off as arrogant or blustered; that's not my intention. I'm not good at conveying tone on paper (see the post preceding this), and many of my closest friends hold to convictions which I don't share. Nevertheless, it's not a barrier to our friendship, toward our comraderie, towards our love for one another in Christ. Ultimately these matters are "non-essentials": in the early church, for example, there was no real consensus regarding when Jesus would come back or how it'd come about (though everyone agreed with what would happen when he did: resurrection, judgment--damnation or vindication--, and the recreation of the cosmos). The early church fathers encouraged individual Christians to come to their own conclusions but to co-exist in love and harmony, not letting these things come between them. Although I can be quite... domineering... in my attitude toward eschatological things, don't be persuaded that I loathe everyone who disagrees. Absolutely not the case. Besides, every group of friends needs a heretic to keep things interesting.

happy halloween

The party last night was fantastic. I got to see so many good people whom I haven't seen in a while. I enjoyed three different Trappist beers, and ended up being one of the few who didn't end up getting drunk. However, apparently Trappist beers have higher alcohol levels, and I did feel quite buzzed for a while. I spent most of the night around the fire out back. Beer pong, Rock Band, and all sorts of other party tricks were going on inside, but I'm the type of guy who enjoys fireside conversations much more. So I sat out by the fire for nearly five hours and drank my beers and swapped stories with people I haven't seen since sophomore year of college. Eventually it got too cold and I went inside and sat in the living room with some other folk, and I enjoyed watching them and their drunken antics. Around 2:30 I headed home, giving Jobst a lift on the way. I passed out in bed nearly immediately. All in all a good night. The highlights are always the conversations and the laughter with people you haven't seen in a long, long time.

I wrote about this in an earlier post, but it happened again last night. Maybe it was being around people whom I haven't seen in a while--including her ex-roommate who actually introduced the two of us--but I've been thinking about Courtney a lot. It's been three and a half years, and the "thinking" isn't the kind that it used to be. There's no pain, no remorse, no nostalgia. More just thinking about the memories, memories which have become so warped and distorted that there's no litmus test available for knowing how things really went down (except for my journals from that period in my life, but I haven't looked through those in nearly a year and a half). I guess I've thought about it more these days because it seems like everyone I know is getting married. Kyle, Caleb, and Ben are all engaged now. Most of my friends from college are either engaged or married. Hearing them talk about it, going to the weddings--being in the weddings--makes me think of her, because we were going to get married, but that never happened. The living dream turned into a living nightmare, and I entered one of the darkest periods of my life thus far. Nevertheless, it was a great growing experience, as they say, and God really used that to help me grow into a better human person. Does that mean I wouldn't go back and do things differently? No. I'd try to salvage it all if I could. Not that anything I did brought about the end of the relationship; it was her doing. But sometimes--like right now--I would gladly go back and do things over again. But, then again, I wouldn't be able to love her like I did. Love doesn't work like that. I'm not depressed or sorrowful, more-so contemplative. And today hopefully I won't think about it as I hang out with more friends and visit some amazing coffee houses. 

the hermeneutic of humility

There is, I think, a certain humility that must be embraced when we read and study the scriptures and come to our own, albeit often shared, interpretations of them. By the nature of the thing itself, we’ll believe that our interpretation is the right one; if we didn’t believe that, then it wouldn’t be our interpretation. The truth of the matter is that no one agrees with anyone about everything; and another truth is that no one is right about everything. Humility, when it comes to our understanding of the scriptures and, thus, to our understanding of God, Christianity, and the world itself, should be embraced in lieu of several factors.

First, we must be aware that our interpretations do not come out of a vacuum. Some people will say, “Well, I just read the Bible for what it says.” Such people probably have never heard of those high-class terms “exegesis” and “eisegesis” and probably don’t think they matter too much. However, when it comes to reading the scriptures—and, really, reading anything informative—there should more than at least one cautionary step towards exegesis (reading out of the text) and eisegesis (reading into the text). The way that we read the Bible is laden with all sorts of preconceived notions and presuppositions. Our interpretations are influenced by our biases, education, experiences, social pressures and, at times, the need for rebellion or originality (and this originality for originality’s sake is really just conformity under a different name). When we read the Bible, we are constantly reading our own assumptions, presuppositions, and preconceived notions into the text; and these come from a variety of different influences, some which likely reside in the unconscious level, influences that we’ll never know and, thus, be able to guard against. Knowing this, we should strive to eradicate eisegesis as much as possible, employing the tools of exegesis; but all the while knowing that eisegesis will occur. The question is not, “Will I read into the text?” but “How much will I read into the text?” Being aware of eisegesis and all its trimmings, we should be cautionary when reading the scriptures and, at the same time, humble—even the most “clear” and “crisp” interpretations may be so only due to the eisegesis, be it seen or unseen, that we have performed in our studies.

Second, we must be aware of the difficulty of ascertaining truth. I’m a pretty modern, conservative person who isn’t into the whole postmodern thing with all its ins-and-outs. I believe in a thing called Truth, that is, something which refers to that Which Is and that Which Is Not. The problem, I think, is that when it comes to us discovering that truth, we find ourselves at a stand-still. We can employ all the techniques we want, but in the end we alone do not have the ability to ascertain truth for truth’s sake. We’re limited, finite creatures with low-capacity minds. We find puzzles when there are no puzzles to be found and we constantly misinterpret the world around us. Our worldviews, our meta-narratives, are a series of interpretations that overlap and intersect and even conflict at times. Amidst this morass of meta-narratives, I believe there is an ultimate meta-narrative, that which is Truth; but our meta-narratives swirl and collide and dance and go at war with each other below this. Not to say that the ultimate meta-narrative is so high that it cannot be touched. No doubt this swirling cesspool of limited meta-narratives often “reach into the heavens” and brush that ultimate meta-narrative. Certainly all of us have a conviction amidst our meta-narrative that runs parallel with the ultimate meta-narrative. The problem is that much of our meta-narrative is sub-par, in conflict with the ultimate meta-narrative, and we’re too limited and finite to tell which is which. Because of this, I think we should be humble in our perceptions of reality, open to change and re:thinking, constantly analyzing and scrutinizing, updating and revising our meta-narratives while knowing that what we think to be True now (if we didn’t think it to be true, we wouldn’t validate it in our minds) will, in some form or shape later, evolve and transform, too. Humility in our perceptions of Truth should be embraced, and, yes, I believe this is involved with our readings of the Bible. Do I believe that the Bible is inerrant in its original forms? Absolutely. But our interpretations of those original forms, 2000+ years later, are not going to be inerrant. Period. Anyone who says that they just “read the Bible” or “are led by the Holy Spirit” need to re:think reading the bible and the role of the Holy Spirit and just be honest with themselves. We’re not as smart as we think we are, and as dumb as we think we are, we’re probably dumber.

Third, we need to beware the poison of intellectual arrogance. There’s nothing as sickening and revolting as someone who says, “Here’s the Truth. I have it. Bow down to my perception of things.” I used to be that way, and thankfully I got slapped around a bit back in my day. Now I have much hostility towards this. Arrogant Christians who think they know the ins-and-outs to everything need to swallow the pill of humility and face themselves for what they are. Arrogant Atheists who think they’ve got this whole “religion” thing down to a “science” (literally) should not vaunt themselves up as gods, simply replacing monotheism with some sort of humanitarian polytheism. I don’t care what your intellectual persuasions are: if you’re on the high horse, get off. If you stay on, eventually you’ll get knocked off and break your teeth in the dust. Might as well save yourself some trouble—and some teeth—and carefully dismount now. Pride in our interpretations of the scripture erects divisions between us and other Christians—divisions that we erect ourselves—and is a great hindrance to the advance of the gospel in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. Pretty soon a cold intellectualism will take root and we’ll become bitter, calloused creatures who see the world in black-and-white and can’t appreciate the beauty of the flowers in spring-time.

All of these three points (and I could name others, but I don’t want this post to be too long), bring me to my proposal. Out of all the hermeneutical tools out there, I think the best is the hermeneutic of humility. We must interpret with humility. We must acknowledge that, at least, 20% of what we believe is wrong. Our prayer ought not be, “God, show me by your Spirit what this verse really means…” (because that just breeds cold intellectualism and the automatic mental validation of whatever interpretation we come to) but, rather, “God, don’t make me perfect in my understanding of your world. Rather, keep me from straying too close to heresy.” 

she still haunts me

There's a tornado watch and the wind is howling and my left eye is swollen and irritated. Last night I dreamt about her. I hardly do anymore. It's been years since it all happened. She's married now, and happy, and I'm happy for that. At one time I wished she would've married me, but my feelings for her are entirely gone, replaced with a sense of cynicism regarding romanticism in all its shapes and colors. At church Sunday I remembered her. I remembered how we had a dream of getting married, having a family, working side-by-side. At the time I wanted to be a youth minister. Oh, how clear everything was, and how filled with hope! I miss those days. Our whole lives were laid out before us, ready to be grasped and embraced. It all fell apart, though, within a series of months, and for two years I nursed the accumulated wounds and battled demons I'd never known to exist. On Sunday I thought about her a lot. I thought about how she has everything she's wanted--a loving husband, a good job, a nice house--and how my dreams crumbled in my hands like oxidized parchment. I'm living at home, working a minimum-wage job (a job I enjoy, but not the job I want), surrounded by disappointment and disillusionment, falling into complacency (a better word may be resignation) while trying to keep my head above water. A certain numbness has befallen me, a numbness that intoxicates every thought and movement. Complacency, resignation, sterility. Coldness, cynicism, a calloused heart. Nouns and adjectives that serve as efficient signposts into my current state-of-affairs. I want more, I really do, but I feel powerless, weak, disabled. 

I don't want to make Starbucks a career. I want to advance God's kingdom. I want to preach, I want to teach, I want to write. I want to make a difference in the kingdom (not that I would be making the difference, but the Spirit would be making a difference through me; not that I would be a puppet, more-so a catalyst). I have applied at churches, I have sought to get my name out there, but all my queries and interviews return null and void. And amidst all that, I see those whom I went to college with doing what they've always felt called to do. Senior ministry, worship ministry, youth ministry, church directing, music directing... They got their degrees, their passion intensified, and they found, at least for the moment, their "niche" within the advancement of God's kingdom. It all fell together for them, the pieces coming together as if by divine intervention, and for all my struggling, I am met with blank stares and unopened hands. My passion is bridled by the inability to connect. And I know that there are other issues involved here, that nothing is as simple as it seems, there's complexity and paradox in the nature of everything. But amidst all the rejections and let-downs, amidst the disappointments and burnt-out hopes, my strength and resolve and determination is weakening. 

I want to get married. I want to have kids. It's my greatest dream, and I believe it is the greatest possible ministry. The back-stabbing, the cheating, the abandonment... All of this has turned my hope into a wasteland. I find myself terrified of commitment for fear of what lies down the road. It's not just that I've been broken-hearted; it's the betrayal, again and again, that has made me terrified of love and cynical of it all at the same time. I've dated girls since her, but I find that I always measure them up against her. Not in the sense of "Are they as funny as she was?" or "Are they as beautiful as she was?" but in the sense of "Do I feel as alive with them as I did with her?" Having been so close to my dream, having tasted it in the air, I remember day-in and day-out how I felt, finally, alive. I know, logically, that the feeling itself is not rooted so much in her, but more the circumstances and the fruition of the hopes and all that. She is not a goddess no matter the height of the pedestal upon which she sits in my mind. She's just a regular girl, and in the end she back-stabbed and betrayed me, ran off with another guy while we were together and ended up marrying him. She never apologized, and I don't hold it against her. Once I found out, our relationship was one of being bitter acquaintances at best. My anger and bitterness got the best of me every time we ran into one another and let chit-chat ensue. She's a good girl, she really is, and while I've dated girls who have been cheaters and whores, despite her cheating on me, I don't classify her as either. She did something out-of-character. It was a one-time incident and I happened to be on the dirty end of the stick. All of that aside, I don't think of her anymore, except for those rare moments (like Sunday), and sometimes she is there in my dreams, and in those dreams she haunts me: my mind doesn't just go back to those memories (which by now have been twisted and skewed into mere caricatures and shadows of the real events) but to the prophecies that I had made about "us": marriage, having a family, loving life and one another, our dreams coming true before our eyes. Now I am more cynical about all of this, and I'd like to think wiser, but that I'm not sure of. She--or at least what transpired between us--has become a thorn in my dream's flesh, has become a toxin which has corroded and distorted my romantic aspirations. I used to be a romantic guy, and now I'm cynical of everything romantic. Hopefully one day a girl will come along, perhaps after I have dealt with these issues (if these issues can indeed be dealt with), who will make me perspective on these things change. I really do hope so

a complex situation

The situation is complicated, to say the least. Last night the decisions of a certain someone put my sister in physical danger, and now she's terrified to even go to the apartment due to threats against her life. I thank God again and again that the douschbag involved was prevented from causing her harm as he went at her. The moment is over, but the danger remains: people like him are a menace to society, as the saying goes. This man doesn't have any quibbles about abusing women, and his own self-centered rage makes him a lethal weapon. The situation is complicated because the person who did this is dating my sister's roommate, a person who has repeatedly shown that she will make stupid decisions at the expense of the interests of others. I have, for the most part, overlooked this about her; but when my sister is put in danger, that changes things. My care for her roommate runs deep through my veins, and I am torn between what to do. There are no simple answers. Regarding Amanda, I know where I stand. Regarding her roommate, I don't know where I stand. The command to love in the Bible is put to the test when it comes to things like this--"How can I love someone who makes choices that endanger the life of the person closest to me?" Sure, she'll say this was a fluke, that it'll never happen again; but if she doesn't change the course of her actions, then that saying will become just as empty and hollow as all the others. These things escalate, they don't simmer down. I've been of the disposition that it's her life, not mine, she can do what she want, and I'll be there for her when she comes crawling back out of the abyss she's dug, even offering her a hand if she can't get out herself. But, again, when it gets to the point to where my little sister is in danger, there's a line that's drawn. The same man who threatened her threatened my life a while back; I remember being in that spot, seeing his rage and anger--a foolish, self-centered wrath--and knowing that if this man became anymore unhinged, I'd be a dead man. I prayed and prayed and thank God he backed away, saying something like I wasn't worth it or shit like that. I know this man, I've seen him in flying colors face-to-face, and I know from his history--a better word would be his literal rap-sheet--that he would have no qualms about hurting Amanda. He's not all talk, and that's a scary thing. Some people are so dehumanized that they will injure others for the slightest "offense"; he's one of those types.

Regarding Amanda, I know what to do. Regarding her roommate, what am I to do? The situation is complicated even more by the fact that she is in an abusive relationship, everyone knows it, but she won't face the facts. She makes excuses for every abusive thing he does. When it was just verbal abuse, she said, "Well, he would never hurt me." After two years of tearing her down emotionally and bringing her to tears every night, he started breaking her things and going into fits of rage. "He just has a bad temper, it's not his fault." Then he started abusing her, and we get more excuses: "It's not really him who's doing it, it's his anger. I still see the good in him." What good in him? Stories abound about women like her in relationships like this, the escalation with time, finally culminating in murder or at least something close to it. Just as she said he would never hurt her, so now she says he'll never hurt her "that bad." I want to scream in her ear, I want to open her eyes, but she's clamped her hands over her eyes and clenched her eyes shut. She refuses to acknowledge what's going on, refuses to see that he's just using, abusing, and manipulating her (despite his own confession that "I control you, you stupid bitch."). What am I to do regarding someone who is so blind, who keeps running into the arms of someone who is abusive? Oh, call the cops, you say. Yeah, we've done that. It's not so simple. Unless she ends up in the E.R., she pretty much has to ask the cops to help. They can't intervene otherwise (or at least that's what we've been told after multiple police incidents). What am I to do when I care about her deeply, when I love her like a sister? I want to talk to her about this, but so many thoughts are running through my head--and she's ignoring me, rightly-so, because she knows what will happen--that I can't just pick up the phone and call her (though if I did, she wouldn't answer). I love her like a sister, and that makes this whole thing hard as hell.

But she's not my sister. Amanda is my sister. I'll do good by her. She trumps her roommate any and every day. If I have to choose, as it were, loyalty to one of the other, then I would choose Amanda, despite the pain that would cause me. If she's putting my sister in danger, the line has been drawn. If she wants to keep screwing up her life, despite having the ability to change it within her means and the shrieking of friends and family in her ears about it, so be it. But when she starts screwing up other peoples' lives, and my sister's life at that? I won't stand for that.

And what am I to do about the douchebag who threatened my little sister? Charges may be filed, but I know the guy. The criminal justice system doesn't operate that fast, and if he finds out between the period of the filing of the charges and the actual arrest or whatever, I fear--legitimately--that he'll seek his own perverted sense of "justice" (which would really be serving his own self-centered ego). And if the charges don't stick, then what? Yes, knowingly threatening someone can land you in prison for ten years; but that doesn't always happen. Sometimes the charged goes free. And this guy is a guy who doesn't let grudges die. If he buries the hatchet, it would be in my sister's head. All of this is quite frightening. What, as a Christian, am I to do? How am I to pray? Am I to pray that God will judge this man? I've found that most often when we pray for God to judge someone, it's because we (a) are actually jealous of that person, (b) want revenge, or (c) we want an escape from the fear and oppression. It's quite self-centered. Last night, when we got the call from Amanda around 3:30 in the morning, as she was sobbing about what had just happened, I quietly did what a wise old man once told me to do in this situation: pray that God will deal with him as he sees fit. I know what I--in my selfishness--want God to do. But I pray that God will do what he sees fit to do. 

a friday night

My Friday evening was spent thus: after work I deposited my check at the bank. I went and got my tire fixed so I can go down to Cincinnati at the end of the month. Discovered the gas leak is worse in my car. Oh well. Went by work to do some coffee tasting (Espresso Roast) and to work on my PDP. Watched a few television shows while eating dinner (Subway). Spent the rest of the evening reading N.T. Wright's "Climax of the Covenant" while sitting on the front porch with lit candles. It's 9:10 and I'm going to bed in a moment. But first: 

One of my biggest interests in theology is the history of theology (i.e. how we came about, historically, to believe the way we do about various things within theology). In reading Wright's exegesis of Romans 9-11, especially of verses 25-27, I learned a little bit and it made me happy. One of the most popular interpretations of the passage is that Paul is speaking of a last-minute wide-scale salvation of the Jews, probably at or around Jesus' "2nd Coming." Their salvation is based upon their ethnic heritage alone; in this way, God is faithful to his covenant with Abraham. Never-mind that Paul has said throughout Romans in particular, and elsewhere as well--such as 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, and Philippians--that covenant membership and, consequently, salvation come about only by grace through faith. There are all sorts of scholarly explanations for how this passage is even present in the Romans discourse, all acknowledging--with the exception of most lay-Christians--that there is a brutal contradiction with the rest of Paul's literature. Suffice it to say, I don't (as with most New Testament scholars) agree with this conclusion, and I believe that there is a manner of reading the text that does justice both to the text itself and to the coherence of Paul's thought (i.e. the text is about the salvation of 'all Israel' in referent to both Jews and Gentiles as a whole). The interesting thing to me is where the idea that this speaks of a last-minute widespread ingathering of Jews comes from. Apparently this perspective became widespread following the Holocaust, when Christians were faced with the horrors the Jews underwent, the evil which they suffered under the Nazi regime, and then to go on 'missions' to the Jews was to be viewed as antisemitic or at least anti-Judaism. Face-to-face with the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the bones littering ditches all over France and Germany, the 'two-covenant' theology became very popular: Jews are saved by virtue of their ethnic heritage; faith in Jesus is about God's way of saving gentiles alone. I'll be honest: this is a very attractive portrait, and it gives some semblance of comfort when we contemplate all the innocent Jews slain in the concentration camps. Nevertheless, this two-covenant theology is, I am convinced, wrong. It's just interesting, I think, to see how theological beliefs are born and how they spread. There's a little lesson for you.

a sketch

Vocation. The thing about vocation is that you just know what you're supposed to do, who you're supposed to be and to become. The more I pray, the more I search, the more the word of God comes to me: "Prepare the Way." That is what God wants me to do: preach the gospel. Announce the king and, as his herald and emissary, call people to loyalty to the king. And while I know this, there's this fear: I'm timid. I'm not bold. I'm shy in many ways, often fearful of confrontation. I've led a disappointing life, one marked quite poignantly by failure. I work a minimum-wage job, I am often overwhelmed emotionally, I can be, at times, unstable. And yet here's God, inviting me--no, summoning me--to be a bold and fearless herald of his kingdom, to announce an unsettling proclamation, to call out false gods and pseudo-gods wherever they may be. But I'm timid, and I'm shy, I look like I'm twelve, and I often wonder if I've gotten this wrong--at least, I try to convince myself this isn't what God wants me to do, for a variety of reasons (fear being one of them)--but god is always there, reminding me: "You're mine, and I've chosen you to be a light in the darkness, a guide to the blind, a teacher of fools." But I feel swamped in darkness, blind as an eye-gouged Zedekiah, a fool in thought and praxis.

Calling. I vividly remember when God called me to this task. I was in prayer and worship alone when I heard what I can only describe as a semi-audible voice: "Prepare the Way." My heart stopped and the world slowed and I knew and still know: God had spoken to me. It was this which led me to C.C.U. I was determined to advance God's kingdom. I studied and I prayed and I led Bible studies and preached sermons and served as a leader in my church. People spoke often of how God would use me, how God spoke to them through me, encouraging and convicting and enlightening them. I was filled with an insurmountable passion, a fire in my gut, and like Jeremiah I cried out, "There is in my heart a burning fire in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot!" I fell in love with God and with Jesus and felt joy and peace and knew this is what God wanted me to do, that he was leading me to C.C.U. where I could receive training in the advance of his kingdom.

Disintegration. Depression overcame me my sophomore year of college, and I embraced in my weakness and despair all those classic escapism techniques: sex, drugs, and alcohol. I became a bitter and calloused person, void of any hope and life, a shell of what I had once been. I allowed the sin in my life to infect me to the bones, and I became, in a sense, dehumanized. I reached a cataclysmic low and, in a sense, repented. I stopped the performance of the sins but retained the corrupted heart. In February of this year, after months and months of refusing God's heed to fully and finally repent (in truth, while I stopped worshiping the false gods of sex and pleasure, I didn't turn to God but turned to worshiping the false gods of pride and fortune), God dealt me a deeply-wounding blow. It was a blow of wounding to bring about healing. He hurt me so that he could restore me. The very night all this happened, God spoke to me again: I wept, asking him, "Why would you let this happen to me if you love me?" and he replied, "I didn't let this happen to you. I made it happen to you because I love you." Having ignored all of God's pleadings with me to repent, God's declarations meant to bring me to my knees, he did what I refused to do on my own: he brought me to my knees, and not so that I could stay there, curling into a fetal position and whimpering about my life. Rather, he brought me to my knees so that he could lift me up again.

Repentance. I fled to a sanctuary and really began probing--in thought and prayer and study--what had happened. Eventually, after nearly two months of wrestling both with God and the intensifying pain of what happened in February, I knelt before God and repented. I turned from my false gods to him. And in a week, the pain of February vanished, completely gone, not even an inkling returning to visit me since then. It wasn't as if the pain faded, or even decreased into a mere trickle to try up. It just went away. One night I was in great pain over what happened, and the next day I went to bed and realized: I don't feel anything. It wasn't a fluke, it was an answer to prayer. The blow had been struck, I had been wounded, and when I repented, the healing began--the first step being the divine eradication of the emotional hell ensuing following the events in February.

Healing. The process of healing, a process that continues even now, is no pleasant thing. Just as a wound itches and burns as it heals, so it is--often, and for me--with spiritual healing. There's purging, inflammation, bruising. Scars form and peel off and the wound is opened again. But healing goes on, a healing down by the Spirit. My spiritual healing has involved much self-analyses and confessions, the splintering of pride and the shattering of dreams. It's involved the exposure of my corrupted heart, of the false gods I have worshiped and crucifying them in my mind even as they whisper in my heart. It's a brutal healing, to say the least; but it's a good healing. I am being developed into a stronger and better person, and not by my own doing, but by the power of the Spirit. I am experiencing peace and joy again.

Re:thinking. Amidst all of this, I have been rethinking everything: myself, my life, my world, and my God. Living for years in a state of ruined produced all sorts of flawed thinking and erroneous perceptions. The errors in my meta-narrative have been and are being exposed in the light of the gospel, and piece-by-piece, wing-by-wing, they are being dismantled. Rebuilding is taking place. The way I perceive God, the world, myself, and life itself is being built into a new shape. 

Arabia. And so I find myself being healed, rethinking everything, bathing in prayer and scripture, seeking at least a flimsy coherent framework for my thoughts and praxis. At the center of all this lies the wrestling with vocation, and in that is the wrestling with a certain promise of God delivered to me in December of 2006. This is my Arabia: I know, in my heart and mind, that which God has called me to; and I am seeking out how it will work out, what it will look like en-fleshed. I perceive this to be a critical part of my life. On the outside, it seems run-of-the-mill. Working full-time at Starbucks, paying my bills, going to bed early every night, juggling car troubles. But on the inside, there is a stormy sea with the promise of calm skies on the other side of restoration. 

Restoration. God wounded me so that he could heal me. And he heals me so that he can exalt me, lift me up, restore me. I believe that had I remained committed to God years ago, my life would look drastically different. God won't change the past, but he can remake the future. My vocation hasn't changed: "Prepare the Way." The promise of God is not null and void. Now, what restoration will look like the other side of Arabia, only God knows, and I'll simply have to find out. For now I am left with the call--"Announce the king and call his subjects to loyalty!"--and I am confident the Spirit will show me the way.

nostalgia

A year ago to the day I was living in the Lehman House, in the heart of Cincinnati. A year ago today I found myself overcome with a deep sense of unsettledness, and I left the house and drove through the Kentucky highlands and found myself at the baseball fields in Ludlow right by the river. I sat in the dugout and it was night-time and quiet and cold, and I prayed, "This is where Courtney and I confessed that in one another, we found our dreams coming true. Her dream came true. Mine didn't." And then: "Please bring me a wife soon. A woman I can love and be loved by. And please bring Sarah a wonderful husband. And if at all possible, please make me that husband be me. I want to give her everything she wants. I pray she'll accept it." That's word-for-word my heart-wrenched prayer. I know because it's written in my journal on this very day in 2009. A year later I find myself praying the same prayer, in a sense; Sarah isn't a part of it, but the prayer remains: "Please bring me a wife." It's a selfish prayer, really, but let's be honest: most of our prayers are selfish. That doesn't mean God doesn't care. And I know that marriage, no matter how badly I want it, isn't a guarantee in this life. I don't believe that God sets aside people whom we're going to marry and then makes it happen. I think it's much more complicated--and serious--than that. But nevertheless, if my perspectives be wrong (and, in a sense, I hope they are), then perhaps my prayer will find fruit.

I miss those drives I used to take. Tonight I went for a drive down the winding back roads. Empty roads with fog hanging over everything. A beautiful mist. Man, I really do miss those Cincinnati drives. My most frequent was the OH-50 turnaround, but sometimes I would go downtown and drive around the stadiums where drug deals went down once 3:00 AM hit. Sometimes I would go across the Brent-Spence to Ludlow, Kentucky and sit on the bleachers in the old baseball field and across the river and up the rise was the Lookout at Mount Echo where many painful memories have been forged. And other times I would just get lost--on purpose--in the hills of northern Kentucky, sometimes arriving at abandoned graveyards where I would park and lay out amongst the overgrown tombstones and just look at the sky where the city's smog didn't block out the stars. I miss the drive through Eden Park, around the fountain and out through the ritzy district of Mount Adams; when going through the park, I would always slow down by the gazebo to see if the wailing ghost would appear (she never did). I miss how the drives would often result in me sitting on the patio at the Mariemont Starbucks, or when I'd find myself sipping coffee at The Anchor Grill in Covington. I miss my eggs and coffee at The Anchor, I really do. I can never make it as good even with a French press and constant practice flipping eggs. 

Most of all I miss my life back then. It was a simpler life. Things were black-and-white. I would wake up, go to school, work twenty hours a week. The rest of my time would be spent hanging out with my friends, too many friends to count. I miss how we would sit around the dining room table and laugh until our sides were splitting, and I miss how we would congregate on either the back or front porch and drink beers (or wine for the more ritzy girls). I miss how the nights were cold and I would crawl into bed with the heater blowing and just curl up in my blankets and be sang to sleep by sirens and city traffic. I miss all of these things, and more. Were those days any better than these? No, not at all. In fact, these days are far better. Emotionally, I'm healthier; physically, I'm WAY healthier. But I do feel lonely a lot. Dylan, Tyler, and Dewenter are wonderful friends but I don't see them as much as I would like. Everyone's so busy. There are many nights that I just sit on the front porch and watch the moon rising above the trees and I wonder if my life will always be this way. And I know that there will come a day when I'll look back on these days and wish for them again, but they'll be gone, and I'll romanticize them, turning them into something they weren't; it's the same thing I've done with Cincinnati. Those years in Cincinnati were (a) the best years of my life and (b) the worst years of my life. But the human mind is a strange thing, and except for traumatic events, generally we only remember the "good times" of the "old days". And maybe that's why we miss them so much--we don't miss those days as they are but those days as they have become in our minds. 

"Justification"

Having finished N.T. Wright's recent book "Justification", all I can say is: "Wow." Of course, I say that with most of what N.T. Wright says. The book is all about the Christian doctrine of justification, and is also a response to John Piper's book "The Future of Justification." Regarding justification itself--what it means, it's background in Jewish thought from the law-court, covenant, and eschatology--Wright doesn't really give any new information than he did previously in his chapter on the subject in "What Saint Paul Really Said." The beauty of the book is found in its second half, where Wright does exegeses on several prominent texts dealing with the righteousness of God and the righteousness given to believers. His exegesis on Galatians is phenomenal, though he leaves a bit of ambiguity regarding the function of the Law in 2nd-Temple Palestinian Judaism as well as the detailed convictions of the agitators infiltrating the church there. He deals with this some more in his exegesis of Philippians, and after an exegesis of two critical texts in the Corinthian Correspondence, he looks at how justification isn't about soteriology vs. ecclesiology as some have proposed, using Ephesians, as it were, as a template for this (an interesting choice, since Ephesians has long been used to propose said argument). The final chapter of the book is by far the best: Wright's exegesis of Romans. Romans is one of my favorite texts (I wrote my own exegesis on it about 1 1/2 years ago), and Wright really brings to light some things that were confusing in my own study of the text. While I don't agree with what Wright proposes as the rhetorical situation of the letter itself, his arguments regarding various passages and how to ease some of the strain that even the most skilled exegetes (and I do not in any way consider myself skilled in the art) find difficult. All in all, it's basically a fuller expose on the doctrine of justification by faith than the one given in "What Saint Paul Really Said," but you won't find anything in this book that you didn't find foundational in the other (which is a good sign, showing that Wright probably understands his argument through-and-through). 

confessions & latte art

My last few posts have been melancholy, to say the least. There are days when I just feel really down, and I guess those were such days. Reality be admitted, I live a pretty good life. I take a lot for granted. I am surrounded by loving family and friends. I have a job that pays enough for me to make all my bill payments on time. I've lost sixty-five pounds and am continuing to lose weight. I'm feeling confident in how I look, and that's something new. I live in a quiet town without the fear of bandits or robbers, without worrying if a stray bullet will come through the windows and strike someone I live. I can sit on the front porch at night without worry about roving gangs. I have more than enough to eat and a warm bed and a steady job. I am, in light of the conditions of the rest of the world, blessed beyond measure. And to top it all off, I have a God who has chosen me as one of his own; a God who rains down his grace and love on me daily; a God who gives me good gifts and yearns for me to use my talents and abilities to advance his kingdom. I am blessed, then, with purpose: not a purpose of self-serving and self-indulgence, but the calling to a higher purpose, a higher end. I am called to advance God's kingdom (as all his people are), and the pay-off (if we can speak selfishly) is quite good, too (although much suffering and bearing of the cross is necessary in the present). Maybe it's the cyclical depression or just my recurrent blindness, but I often lose sight of all the blessings God gives me, blessings I don't ask for and blessings I sadly don't thank him for. I'm just so narrow-minded and self-focused that I miss all of that sometimes. I pray my God will cleanse me of this short-sightedness and enable to see things as they really are, to see myself for who I really am, and within that framework to live out my calling and to do what God wants me to do; and even more, to become the man (now and forever) God wants me to become. 

In other news, Rob Hoos made a beautiful picture in a latte and made sure to show it to me. It's a Tyrannosaurus rex!

everything used to be so clear...

Before going off to college, I knew exactly what I wanted out of life. I was going to be a pastor. I was going to shepherd a small flock and advance God's kingdom. And I was going to do this alongside a wonderful wife, with whom I would have children. I expected this all to come to fruition. I believed, "This is what God has called me to." And though these hopes were cemented, they soon chipped away as disappointment after disappointment, trauma followed by trauma, overcame me like tidal waves. My hopes floundered as I was back-stabbed and betrayed, cheated-on and abandoned. I caved into myself and launched into all sorts of escapist techniques: sex, drugs, alcohol. I came to my senses, thank God, but the effects of that have not totally worn off. The cynicism and skepticism still clings to me like a heavy blanket. I've repented and returned to God, but I still carry this burden, a burden which cannot be named or defined but only felt and experienced; and since it cannot be called-out, it cannot be dealt with as it should be. So I find myself now with all these hopes--to advance God's kingdom as a pastor and to be a husband and a father--dispelled by the seeming ridiculousness of it all. Not that advancing God's kingdom or being a husband and a father is ridiculous--just that this life never really lives up to what we think it will, and sooner or later disillusionment will force us to rethink everything. I guess I'm in that rethinking stage, wrestling with the reality of life itself and with the hopes and desires and, what I have perceived to be (but which may not be) the vocation given to me by God. This wrestling is a good place to be, I'm sure of it; and if I were not wrestling, then I would just be complacent. But wrestling is what I am doing, struggling to figure out how it all works together and where I fit into the story. I just hope that a light will break soon and that dawn will creep on the horizon. I'm tired of not knowing what to do, not knowing who to be; I'm tired of being torn between the apparent chasm between Reality & Hope. Everything used to be so clear but now it'd muddled and faded, and I'm left to picking up the pieces and trying to reassemble them into something more solid and sturdy than what I had built before in my naivety and ignorance.

the first day of autumn

It's the first day of Autumn and about 80 degrees. Next week it should be cooler, though, and I'm looking forward to that. I'll also have TWO DAYS OFF in a row, which is a pretty big deal. Mandy and Tony are visiting Jessie in Illinois this weekend and I probably won't be able to go because I have to work, which sucks. It's not that work sucks, but it's not being able to hang out with them for two days that sucks. Moving away from Cincinnati was a good decision for a multitude of reasons; yet the thing I miss most about Cincinnati is the people there. Such a great group of friends, friends who stuck closer than brothers; and I miss all the laughter, the great conversations, the random adventures. And, suddenly, I miss bubble tea. *sigh* The worst part is that even on my days off, I can't go visit, because my car won't survive the highway (it barely stays alive when I drive it to and from work). I would borrow Mom's car, but she hates my car and wouldn't want to drive it with all its problems while I would be down in Cincinnati. All of this is just overwhelming: the car troubles, the bill payments, the inability to spend time with great friends. I feel like I'm imprisoned in Centerville, Ohio, looking out at a world just out of reach but unable to be grasped.

I'm going to stop writing about all that before I get depressed. So instead I'll recount my day: I woke up, had coffee, ran to the bank, had Subway for breakfast/lunch (brunch?) and watched TV. Then I did some work on my book on repentance and then went to the gym and I just showered and now I think I'm going to go to the cafe and do some reading with some iced espresso. I wish I could wear my jeans and cowboy boots today, but it's too darn hot. I work tomorrow 6:30-3:00; then Friday 1-9:30; then Sunday 3-11:00 (which is why I can't go to Illinois!); and then I have Monday and Tuesday off. And I'm going to try and visit some people in Cincinnati on Monday, if Mom will let me borrow her car. Fingers crossed.

Dear Autumn, please come soon. K thanks.

the last day of summer

It's been a pretty good summer. I've done lots of reading, lots of writing, have enjoyed working at Starbucks and am sure I will continue to enjoy it. I haven't lost as much weight as I would've liked (only 'bout ten pounds, but I'm working on that). My car's continued to atrophy, falling apart in various ways. Today when I left work, I found my front tire flat. I just sighed and fixed it. These things don't even affect me anymore.

This summer, too, I "dated" two girls and then "broke their hearts" (it's not like I drove a knife into their hearts; it's more akin to disappointing them when I decided I didn't want to date). Tyler also "broke a heart" this summer, and we talked about it the other night. Maybe we're commitophobes, or maybe we just enjoy being single. But I think more of it is that there are still some issues I need to work through following Courtney. Sure, it was many, many years ago; and, sure, I don't ever think about her anymore or dream about her anymore (I kept dreaming about her long after I stopped thinking about her). But the whole situation, which was FUBAR to the nth-degree, still affects me to this day, I think. In some ways it affects me positively; in others, negatively. It's these negative things I need to work on. But working on these things isn't like "losing weight" or "writing a book", things one can easily do if he puts his mind to it and disciplines himself. Working through these issues is a hard thing to do, because (1) I don't know what these issues are, and (2) as with all things psychological, the brain can use all sorts of tactics to keep you from really doing what you want. Unable to understand what's wrong with me, and thus being unable to really diagnose the problem, how do I know which kind of treatment to embrace? I think the obvious answer is to let God, who searches hearts and knows hearts even when we do not, deal with it. And I don't mean that in the supra-Christian way. I mean it in the sense that I want God to heal me in these hidden, subconscious areas so that my actions and decisions are not goaded by them. I can't do it but he can. Of course, as with all "issues", sometimes they'll lie dormant to the point of dying; and sometimes, when someone comes into your life, those issues will be brought to the surface and slain right then and there.

Gah. Too much thinking. Right now I need to work out, clean my room, do some laundry, and fix dinner. Mom's High School Girls' bible study is here tonight so I need to fix my dinner, eat it, and clean the kitchen before they arrive in a couple hours. I'm thinking grilled chicken (or fish?) with grilled mushrooms.

on the paradox of predestination

Today at work my friend Carly asked me my views on predestination. My answer? "I don't have one." Which, I guess, isn't true. Even a view that doesn't fit within the normal bounds ("I agree with it/I don't agree with it") is still a view. I'm not Calvinist in the sense that I believe that God chooses certain people over and against other people to save (though he would be totally merited and valid in doing this; a thing called grace, you see!). I don't believe that Jesus' cross achieved victory only for those whom God chose and everyone else has no hope (that wouldn't be a very effective victory; more like winning a skirmish line; and nor do I suppose that Jesus' death on the cross, and subsequent resurrection, means universalism is the way to go). I'm not Arminian in the sense that I believe people can make an uninfluenced choice to put their loyalty in Jesus. All this talk about "Free Will" is a pretty individualistic, western idea, given a hefty boost into modern thought with the American Revolution (the people said, "We have the choice to determine what happens; we have the choice to decide who gets to rule over us," and this mindset greatly steered the methodology and theology of the colonial churches). There is no such thing as "Free Choice", in the sense that every decision we make, even if it is (apparently) from our own determined volition, is not unfettered; there are countless variables and influences that drive us to make the decisions we make. Our decisions are largely dependent upon our environment (and I mean environment in the large sense of the word, encompassing everything from our hearts to social structures). And topping all of this, the debates between Calvinists and Arminians are entirely removed from the wrestling and struggling of the New Testament. It wasn't an issue in the early church. This seems crazy to us--"How could it NOT be an issue?!"--but we must remember that the debate itself was relatively unknown till the protestant reformation. Peeling through the letters of the New Testament to find out which reformer was right (if we can call Arminius a reformer) is like looking through a car mechanics manual to figure out which color would look best as a racing stripe. The New Testament wasn't written with this tension in mind.

So where do I stand on the whole subject? As of now, I would call myself (if I were forced to don a label) a Calminian. Embrace the paradox! What paradox? The command of Joshua--"Choose this day whom you will serve!"--and the message of the New Testament--"God has chosen you!" The paradox is that God chooses us and we choose God; we choose God and God chooses us. Asking which comes first is like asking the old question about the chicken and the egg. It's a nonsensical question. So I stand on the paradox and I embrace the paradox and I choose whom I will serve and God chooses me to be his child. If you don't like paradoxes, get over it. The Bible is full of 'em. (Of course, a paradox to us would not be a paradox to God; but when our feeble, narrow-minded minds can't wrap around something, "paradox" is a good word to use) If you don't like paradoxes, as my old New Testament professor used to say, become a Muslim. You'll be happy that way.

Now I'm going to start roasting some potatoes for dinner. Potatoes, grilled asparagus and mushrooms, pan-simmered tilapia. Oh boy!

journal entry - 9.11

I love autumn. I really do. It's beautiful. But for some reason, it carries with itself an odd sense of sadness. Maybe it is the way that the beauty is but a precursor to when death will wrap itself about the world. I don't know. At work today I was hit with a wave of sadness. Dead-end job. Dying car. Fruitless life. A life characterized by broken dreams and overwhelming disappointments. It's not what I expected. And now I'm more cynical--albeit wiser--than I was. This world sucks. It's a shadow of what's coming. I want the future to be NOW. I want Jesus to appear, to finish what he started. There's no solid hope in this life. There's no genuine happiness, only echoes of it; and I'm craving the real thing.

walkin' tall against the rain

Last night I dreamed I lived in Ketchikan, Alaska. I worked at a small church and wore flannel and jeans and cowboy boots all the time. I drove a beat-up Chevy with rust and dents along the side. Every morning I had eggs and toast at a local diner and then walked the boardwalks and felt the rain. I woke up sad. Alaska still haunts me. I From what I've heard, Alaska holds some sort of mystical power: even those who have never been there long to be there. Having been there, if only for a week, the longing grows and grows within me. I dream of it often, waking and sleeping. Not simply Alaska, mind you, but the Inside Passage; especially Ketchikan, where the picture above was taken. I would do anything to just move there, get a house, and then advance God's kingdom in that rainy place. But, alas, here I am in Dayton, Ohio. Still living with my parents. Driving a dying car. Not making enough money to get my own place and barely paying the bills that I have. *sigh* I do want a change. I want to get my own place and build my own life. The economy is so bad here that all I can really do is make coffee; don't get me wrong, I love the job, and never really dread going in. The people I work with are fantastic, the customers are great, it's a wonderful job. But I can't afford my own place with it. Oh, if Alaska were here right now, or if I were on a plane there with a job and place awaiting me... That would be wonderful. But I guess I'll just keep it real "down south" (as those Alaska people would say) and keep doing my thing, walking tall against the rain (to quote one of my favorite house songs).

"Evil & The Justice of God"

Having finished N.T. Wright’s “Evil & The Justice of God”, all I can say is: “Wow.” The entire book is extremely enlightening, captivating, enlivening. While a lot of the material is “nothing new”—in the sense that he’s written about it in even more depth elsewhere—he focuses on several things that help bring “the problem of evil” into focus, and these things are matters integral to the Christian faith.

I like how Wright doesn’t say “Here’s what evil is, here’s what evil isn’t,” etc. He acknowledges that there are various ways of looking at evil, categorical systems prominent in systematic theology, but he says that they don’t really take evil seriously enough. Aside from the definition of evil in theology, he looks at the definition of evil in politics, especially from a western perspective: the “us vs. them” ideology, seen most vibrantly in “capitalism vs. communism” or “democracy vs. dictatorship.” His words in the first chapter should be necessary reading for those Christians all in hoopla about the current political currents of Islam in America (he writes about 9/11 several times, acknowledging that the terrorists were, indeed, evil; but that the whole situation has brought into the cultural mind a framework of evil that embraces the faulty “us vs. them” mentality). Ultimately he says that any theological definition of evil must acknowledge that the Bible doesn’t say where evil came from; Genesis 1-11 is more of an analysis of evil, a diagnosis of the situation, that about its origins. And throughout the Old Testament, the question of evil, while addressed, isn’t solved. The paradoxes and struggling of the saints are evident throughout scriptures, not least in the Psalms. The fantastic ending of Job—often called the classic Old Testament theodicy—doesn’t really shed any light on the subject. So what does God do about evil? In the Old Testament we see him restraining it, containing it, not letting it have its full reign, and even using it sometimes to further his own purposes (sometimes God uses evil in such a way that he gets his own hands bloody, as we see in the Israelite conquering of Canaan). Nevertheless, there’s no solid theodicy in the Old Testament; what we find is that anything resembling a theodicy (with the exception of Job, which is widely misread) is focused upon God’s covenant with Israel: God will deal with evil through the covenant, though as to how, no one (at least in the Old Testament) really knows.

Which leads to what I think is the best chapter of the book: “Evil & The Crucified God.” Wright advances the Christus victor approach to the cross (originated with Gustaf Aulen, and a very interesting approach to what God did when Jesus was crucified): that on the cross, Jesus defeated the powers of evil in all its forms. We find in the Old Testament God restraining and containing evil; but on the cross, evil is given free reign, allowed to rise to its fullest. It thrusts itself against God and with all its might kills him. It is the ultimate act of evil. It seems like a loss for God, but then Jesus raises from the grave: the resurrection (at the least, and that’s an understatement) shows that when Jesus died, he defeated the powers of evil, often invoked as death and sin. Death—the ultimate, God-defacing, human-defacing, creation-defacing act of evil—is undone, showing that evil itself has failed. It burned itself out when it threw itself against Jesus. It exhausted its powers and came to a loss. This is the New Testament conviction seen in the gospels and in the epistles of St. Paul. The cross is God’s answer to evil.

But, of course, as Wright continues to say, things aren’t completely better. Yes, the victory over evil has been won. Evil has been defeated and dismantled and, in a sense, destroyed. Yet it still seems to flourish and even prosper. We feel evil’s affects every day, and sometimes the affects are so deep and wounding that we’re scarred for the rest of our days. Wright acknowledges this and says that the cross and resurrection is but the first step of God’s answer to evil. Not that the cross is thus no big deal, or unnecessary, or not that important—no, it is a cosmic victory, an apocalyptic turning-point in history. God’s new age, where evil is vanquished and exterminated forever, has been inaugurated; and on a future day, it will be fully consummated. Evil has been judged and on that day, the sentence will be carried out.

The question becomes, “So what do we do now?” In this “interim” period, in this “now but not yet” moment in history, what are Christians to do? The isolationist technique of holing up isn’t feasible, and nor is the apathetic position of saying, “Well, God’s going to sort everything out in the end, so let’s just keep to ourselves.” Wright talks a lot about justice—what it is, what it isn’t, etc.—and has a lot of interesting things (as an aside) to say about the current prison system in America. Christians, as servants of God and agents of Messiah and his kingdom, are to implement the victory over evil by pursuing justice. He also talks about beauty, art, creativity—various ways of advancing God’s kingdom. And then, in the final chapter, he talks about forgiveness. I put it in italics because this is one of the best chapters I’ve ever read in my life; everything Wright says about forgiveness is mind-blowing, intrinsically tied to the defeat and dismantling of evil, and I would recommend every Christian buy this book, no matter your views on Wright, and read this chapter on forgiveness. He talks about what it is, what it isn’t, what it means, all of that. And he puts on the table a perspective of forgiveness that takes forgiveness seriously. Anyone who says Wright disregards or discredits the atonement should be put to shame just by reading this chapter; as a believer in the atonement, I find this chapter on forgiveness—forgiveness granted by God and given man-to-man—to be illuminating on the entire subject.

A small book. A handful of chapters. Decently-sized print. And worth every penny. One of the best Wright books I’ve read thus far, hands-down.

on death

A woman from Dylan’s house church died unexpectedly of leukemia yesterday morning. Nine months ago the diagnosis came, and things were looking up, and out-of-the-blue she felt sick with a fever and then died a few hours later. She was only middle-age and left behind a loving husband and several teenage kids. The shock felt by family is immeasurable, and the shock felt by her loving house church is but a glimpse of what her immediate family is going through. I thought about this a lot last night, and I kept remembering St. Paul’s words in Philippians, where he talked about yearning to die and be with Christ in paradise.

He’d been there before, been swept up to the “third heaven”, that place called Paradise where the dead redeemed live in rest and tranquility, taking deep breaths and even (as Revelation seems to imply) reign alongside Christ. There’s a lot of ambiguity and confusion in the church regarding what happens when someone dies, and the modern conception of “heaven”—this ethereal, pie-in-the-sky place where we sit on clouds and play harps all day—doesn’t really make one share St. Paul’s enthusiasm (“He must be nuts!” we say). Without getting into the long (albeit fascinating) history of where this modern idea of heaven came from (or, rather, evolved from), I’ll just say that it’s wildly off-base. The Bible doesn’t really tell us much about the afterlife; it’s called Paradise, from the Greek paradeismos (or something like that), which was a Greek word depicting a beautiful garden with trees and orchards and fountains and a high gate protecting it from hostile forces. It is derived from a Persian word that was used in reference to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (the most exquisite gardens in the history of mankind to-date). The Jews took this Greek word and used it in their Greek Old Testament, and they used it to talk about the Garden of Eden. I like the idea of paradise being the Garden of Eden, in the realm of God (“But wasn’t the Garden a physical place? And isn’t Heaven a spiritual place?” Our preconceived notions of heaven as a “spiritual” place as opposed to a “physical” place should be rattled simply by Jesus reigning bodily and physically in heaven; heaven refers to the realm of God and shouldn’t carry with it supra-spiritual overtones). Regardless, we can be sure that paradise is a pretty great place to be. It speaks of rest, relaxation, “taking a breather”. Paul, having been there, speaks of being there, in contrast to being “in the body” (that is to say, in his perishable body living a perishable life in a perishable world), as being “far better.” Personally, I anticipate death and am excited about it; not in some passively-suicidal way, but in a mature and logically-thinking way.

I am of the opinion that the funerals of the redeemed should be joyous occasions where we celebrate the fact that our loved ones now dwell with God and are resting and, perhaps, ruling with God until the day when God remakes the heavens and earth and gives his people new bodies in which they’ll live and reign in this new earth. I want my funeral to be filled with upbeat songs and dancing and I want people to drink good wine and to take shots and to share laughter and love and be jealous of my current state. Yet at the same time, I know that this doesn’t fully take into account the great loss felt by death. It would be super-spiritual to say, “Death is a great gift!” but that’s ignoring the reality of what death is. Death, while perhaps being an integral and beautiful piece of God’s original creation, has taken up the guise of the executioner, now unleashing its wrath upon God’s image-bearing creatures. Death drops its scythe upon all of mankind, and the depth of the loss is felt by everyone. We were not meant to die. We were meant to develop into fully-flourishing human beings and to stay that way. Death brings it all to an (apparent) end. Death is a reminder that God’s new world, though inaugurated with the resurrection of Jesus and experienced in various degrees in the here-and-now, is not yet here in its fullest form. Death still raises its ugly head and suffering still runs rampant. Though defeated, evil continues to flourish and prosper. Death reminds us of this. Even those who have been closest to God, most devoted to God, most in love with God, feel the sting of death. Yet for those who are members of God in Christ, the sting of death is taken away—death is not the end of the story. Jesus rose from the grave. He conquered death. And we who have participated in Jesus’ death and resurrection by aligning ourselves with him and his cross have conquered death as well—though death may sinks its teeth into us, the victory belongs to us and to our King, who has gone into death and come out the other side.

I am reminded of St. Paul’s words to the Thessalonian Christians, who were in great anguish over the deaths of some of their fellow Christians. They presumed that since they had died, then they would not participate in God’s new world. Paul’s rebuttal, seen throughout the letter in various ways, is an adamant “NO!” to this idea. The dead are with Christ in paradise and will get to participate in God’s new world. That strange, apocalyptic, and metaphor-riddled text in 1 Thessalonians 4, where Paul talks about Jesus coming to earth as the royal king to deal with the problems—and the redeemed helping him in that text—give a more-than-certain hope to those who have lost loved ones. Death is not the end of the story. Those who have died are with Jesus, and when Jesus appears, they will appear with him in glory—and those in Christ who have not died will join them! When Jesus appears, all the righteous dead will be flanked at his sides, joining in the “cavalry charge”—and those who are “on earth” will take their stand with their brothers and sisters, will take their stand alongside Christ, and they will receive—we will receive—new bodies and will inherit a new universe where we will live and reign with God.

St. Paul tells the Thessalonians, “Do not grieve like the pagans, who have no hope.” He is not saying, “Don’t grieve.” Jesus wept over the loss of his friend Lazarus—he felt the sting of loss, felt the bitterness of death, even before he experienced it himself. We find Christians mourning over Stephen, the first Christian martyr, while acknowledging his presence in paradise. Death hurts. The loss is overwhelming. Anyone who denied this, especially on religious grounds, is a nut-case. Yes, there’s hope. But that doesn’t eliminate the loss, the pain, the suffering death causes. We are to mourn, but unlike the pagans, we are to mourn with hope. We are to focus on the future, that day when we will be reunited with our loved ones who have been lowered into the ground, that day when we will join them side-by-side and reign along with them in the new universe.

I’m tired and I’m not even going to bother editing this post. These are just things I’ve been thinking about. My sympathies go out to Dylan’s friends and to the family of the woman who died (I don’t even know her name). My prayer is not that people will deny their pain, or try to color it up with religious lace, but will acknowledge the hurt and the loss and, simultaneously, find hope in the cosmic and eschatological future. Though I know that’s easier said than done.

crucifying the mind

I am constantly reminded at how much I need to reorient my thinking around the gospel. Last night while at work I found myself in the drive thru watching car after car come through. These were nice cars, the expensive kind of cars that only those with bookus of money (or bookus of debt) are able to buy. These were people with nice and well-paying jobs with regular hours. They were handsome men with beautiful wives. I found myself envying them--the successful careers, the immaculate cars, the good-looking physique and the beautiful broads. I kept looking at my own situation--working full-time at Starbucks making minimum wage and having difficulty paying my bills, driving a wretched-looking car that threatens to break apart every time I hit a bump, an awkward body with a massive chest--and I honestly became a little depressed. It gets worse when those handsome men in the nice cars are people I graduated high school with; usually no words are said, but more than once they've laughed seeing me in my green apron handing out drinks and running a cash register. All of this envy and jealousy of their money and social success is symptomatic of a heart that has not yet come in tune with the rhythms of the gospel; it is symptomatic of a mind that is in dire need of renewal. The pride of life runs deep through my veins, and I must crucify it again and again. The renewing of the mind, I think, is no passive thing; it is a hard and at times excruciating endeavor, killing off all those thoughts that lose sight of the way things are and instead seek self-glorification and ease in life. I know the gospel and I know the Christian message--the two are actually not the same thing--and I know the Christian hope; and I know that as a member of God's covenant people reworked around Jesus, my hope is not to be "in the pride of life and lust of the eyes and lusts of the flesh" but in the eschatological victory over sin and death, of a new and recreated universe. A day is coming when, dare I even say it, all my dreams will come true, when I will experience the existentialist's wet dream, being fully and finally who I was created to be and living-out fully and finally that God-given vocation. But right now there is tension, a tension held taught between two historical poles: Easter and Consummation. Evil, albeit defeated, still looms large and heavy and even prospers in its own crippled manner. The world is still characterized by sin and death even though both of them have been defeated in Jesus' death and resurrection. Right now my vocation is not to "live the dream" but to "bear the cross"--and bearing the cross isn't fun.

the sermon: "forgiving others"

When we talk about the cross of Christ, specifically in regards to the purpose it served, it is easy to become removed from the actual event; it is easy to leap into the world of theory and hypothesis without coming face-to-face with the blood that was spilled, the agony that was endured, and the cosmic importance of God crucified. We often forget that what happened on the cross was a turning point in human history, the long-awaited fulfillment of what God had promised he would always do: deal with the evil in the world, namely overpowering it and defeating it. The cross of Christ gives a glimpse into the paradox of how God does things: while it seemed that the powers of evil were leading Jesus to the cross in triumphal procession, the reality of it all was that Jesus himself was leading the powers of evil to the cross in triumphal procession. When Jesus’ death is talked about, most often it is talked about in reference to the atonement; and the atonement, being one of the most shocking and stunning realities of what happened on the cross, can easily become detached from the over-arching purpose of the cross itself. We must remember that in the cross, in the suffering and death of Jesus, evil itself was defeated and dismantled.

Atonement—the doctrine that speaks of God forgiving us so that our relationship with him can be restored—only finds itself truly coming to life within the framework of what has been called the Christus victor approach to the cross: that in the cross, God dealt decisively with evil, destroying its power and thus dismantling it. The new age given birth through the death and resurrection of Jesus—an age characterized quite poignantly by the forgiveness of sins—is an age where evil’s power and sway over the world has been, to say the least, crippled.

When we talk about the atonement, we must talk about forgiveness. Forgiveness is the centerpiece of what atonement is all about. The most elemental understanding of atonement is that it is what happens when God forgives a sinner, thus reconciling the sinner to himself. There is much more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it all. An adequate understanding of atonement must take into consideration the reality of forgiveness. When we talk about God forgiving us, we do not mean that he pretends that we were never that bad after all; we do not mean that he excuses us for what we’ve done and who we’ve become; we do not mean that he is simply ignoring all of that awful stuff about us. At the heart of biblical forgiveness is the destruction and dismantling of evil: when God forgives a person, the evil within that person and all the evil things he has done or thought is not ignored, excused, or turned into something “not really that bad”; rather, all of that stuff is defeated. Evil’s affect upon our relationship with God is broken, destroyed, annihilated. That is at the heart of forgiveness: forgiveness is what happens when the evil that has taken place between two sides of a relationship is named for what it is, condemned for what it is, and then defeated for what it is—and thus the relationship is restored. If forgiveness were anything but that, it wouldn’t be forgiveness at all.

When we talk about the Christian commandment to forgive our neighbors, oftentimes there is a transition in thought. While we will say, of course, that forgiveness between God and man involves the destruction and dismantling of the evil between them, we will often say that forgiveness means something quite different when it is between two mere human beings. Forgiveness takes on several different forms when the context changes, and these perceptions of forgiveness which have infiltrated the church on every level are at best distortions of biblical forgiveness and at worst mockeries of it.

In some cultures, especially in the Middle East, and even within many religions, forgiveness is not viewed as a duty or even as a virtue, but rather as a moral weakness. Forgiveness is what weak people do; it is the easy way out of the situation of evil, the way of avoiding the hard task of bringing about justice. Some will even go so far as to say that forgiveness doesn’t take evil very seriously. The Christian conviction, however, is that forgiveness does take evil seriously, and that in the naming of that evil and in the acknowledging of that evil for what it is, forgiveness is the act whereby the evil itself is defeated.

Others will say that forgiveness is the same thing as tolerance. It’s been hip in the church to say that we must be “inclusive”, that Jesus welcomed all kinds of people just as they were and since the church believes in forgiveness, the church should thus let the doors fly open and let everyone do everything they want. The “forgiving” church is the one that reinstates a preacher after a bout of sexual immorality; the “forgiving” church is the church that allows elders to keep their positions after dipping their hands into the church’s finances; the “forgiving” church is the one that allows convicted pedophiles to go into children’s ministry—well, normally we don’t say the last of these, which shows that we’ve retained at least some amount of common sense. Forgiveness is not the same as tolerance, inclusivity, or indifference. Inclusiveness, taken at the extreme, means ignoring evil, downplaying it, or even embracing it in the spirit of welcoming; forgiveness involves naming it, facing it, and defeating it.

More common mistakes regarding how we view forgiveness is saying that forgiveness means professing that the evil didn’t matter. But if it didn’t matter, then there’s no need for forgiveness. The fact that forgiveness is needed means that evil did happen, it was awful, and it needs to be dealt with. Another mistake is the idea that forgiveness means pretending that the evil didn’t happen; part of the point of forgiveness is committing oneself to working towards the point where I can act as if it didn’t happen. But it did happen, and it mattered, and forgiveness isn’t supposing that it didn’t or turning a blind eye to the fact that it did. It’s looking hard at the fact that it did happen and making a conscious effort of the will to set it aside so that it doesn’t become a barrier between the people involved.

These false perceptions of forgiveness will often plague us. We must remember that when the Bible talks about God forgiving us and us forgiving those who sins against us, there is no change in the meaning of forgiveness. Forgiveness means the same thing in both cases, and the command to forgive is resplendent throughout the New Testament. Jesus taught us to pray that God will forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. In Matthew 18, Jesus warned that unless we forgive, we will not be forgiven: the servant who was forgiven a massive debt but who then refused to forgive a tiny one to a fellow servant had the initial forgiveness revoked. This is a difficult text but we’ll look at it in a moment. The point is made, however, that forgiveness is a pretty big deal in the Christian faith. God has forgiven us, so we are to forgive others. Period. This means that when evil takes place between us and someone else, and when that evil is pressed against us from the other person, we are to forgive. We’re not to pretend it didn’t happen, or say it really wasn’t that bad, or ignore it altogether. Forgiveness involves, as I’ve said again and again, naming the evil and shaming it. It means acknowledging in all its awful depth the evil that happened and facing it for what it is. Often this means difficult and nauseating confrontation, but it is confrontation that must take place. Forgiveness, after the acknowledgment of the evil between the two people, is a determination on the side of the offended to do everything in his or her power to resume an appropriate relationship with the one who sinned against them. It means settling in one’s own mind that we will not allow this evil to determine the nature of our relationship. It is, in essence, reconciliation: in forgiveness, the naming of that evil and the defeating of that evil by living as if it didn’t happen when acknowledging that it did, reconciliation, the re:harmonizing of the relationship, takes place.

The question is begged, “How often should we forgive someone when they sin against us?” It’s not a new question; in Matthew 18.21-22, Peter asked Jesus the same question. We find Peter asking Jesus, “How many times should I forgive my brother? As many as seven times?” Many ancient Jews taught that the maximum amount of times for forgiving someone for the same offense was three times; Peter’s speculation of seven is quite commendable: twice the norm and plus one! Jesus’ response is cryptic: “No, not seven times, but seventy times seven.” This is not some abstract proposal—forgive your brother 490 times, and then you are allowed to cease forgiving—nor is it just figurative language—keep forgiving your brother time and time again. Rather, Jesus is looking back to an ancient prophecy found in Daniel 9, where the prophet Daniel asks an angel how long the exile will continue. “Will it be seventy years, as Jeremiah foretold?” The angel answers, “No: it will be seventy times seven.” 490 years—seventy years times seven—is how long it will take “to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness” (verse 24). Jesus’ cryptic answer points back to this promise, and he is saying that the New Age has dawned, the kingdom has come, the age of forgiveness has broken forth. The only reasonable response is to embrace and embody this new age, the new age of the kingdom, this new age of forgiveness: forgiving is to be a way-of-life for the members of this kingdom.

The commandment to forgive, then, is not simply a new and tougher piece of ethics that we dare not even attempt. The command flows directly from the situation Jesus has inaugurated and sealed in his death and resurrection. The atonement is not simply an abstract transaction making God’s forgiveness available to all who want it; it is the towering and shocking achievement by which evil itself was defeated so God’s new age could begin. And those who claim to follow Jesus, who are members of this kingdom and thus of this new age, are to embody that reality.

The claims of the church—that a new age has dawned that is characterized by forgiveness of sins and thus by reconciliation—is made a mockery as long as we continue to live in a stubborn refusal to forgive those who sin against us. When we are more than happy to claim God’s forgiveness of us and yet harbor resentment, distrust, and, essentially, an unforgiving disposition towards those around us, we are mocking the cross and living as if our faith is a sham. By refusing to forgive others, we are calling God a liar, we are calling this new age a farce, and we are conniving with the forces of darkness and spreading our legs wide to sin and death. And when we do this, when we deny the reality of the kingdom in our own lives, we let the evil that was done fester and boil within us. The evil takes hold and spreads through our hearts, minds, and souls. We distance ourselves from others and stop trusting people; we call it strength, but really it’s coldness. We become calloused creatures who cannot forgive nor accept forgiveness, broken and pitiable creatures who cannot love nor accept love. The refusal to forgive doesn’t just deny the reality of the cross and of the atonement; it allows evil to enslave us, and we become dehumanized. Our lives become consumed with bitterness anger, and resentment. We become grouches and grumpies, and that’s the most benevolent sketch of what happens to us; in all truth, what happens is that we become sub-human. Not forgiving others is something to be taken very seriously.

That Jesus takes it seriously is seen in Matthew 18.23-35. I promised we would look at this text, and now we will. Jesus isn’t saying that forgiving others is an arbitrary commandment and if we don't do it, then God won’t forgive us. He is, rather, pointing out that the one who refuses to forgive is the one who is embroiled in his or her own self-worth and pride. He is the one who exalts himself over everyone and everything else. He is the one who makes himself, and his own convictions, his God; he is thus making himself out to be the Judge and Juror. And when he does this, he cannot at the same times be a servant of God. He may make a showy pretense of religion, and read the Bible every day and pray, but his own refusal to forgive is symptomatic of the fact that he has not yet truly experienced forgiveness.

Forgiving others is not an easy thing to do. It is hellishly difficult, especially when the pain and hurt is immense. It is much easier to try to pretend it didn’t happen, or to say that it didn’t matter, or to try and numb the pain through all sorts of escapism techniques. All of this doesn’t deal with the evil; it just gives it room to grow and exponentially multiply like gangrene spreading through a wound. The very act of acknowledging that evil has been done, that someone has been sinful, hurtful, and damaging to us is difficult. And while that may be difficult, the act of forgiveness—not letting what happened affect the relationship—is bound to be pretty near to impossible sometimes. This is when we must rely on the strength of the Spirit, and it often means that we forgive others even when our hearts are not in it: forgiveness is often not a pleasant thing, and sometimes it means we grit our teeth and do it despite every inclination not to do so. It is by this great and difficult act that the evil is defeated and reconciliation takes place, though often in small steps and over much time. Forgiveness isn’t ignoring the evil, excusing the evil, or forgetting the evil—it is, and I can’t stress this enough, defeating the evil by disallowing it to exercise its power over us and over the relationship.

It is at this point that I encourage everyone to examine their own lives and to ask the question, “Do I forgive others?” And I mean really forgive them. Do we not shirk away from confronting evil when it happens? Do we not then seek to establish reconciliation with those who have hurt us? If we do not, then there is good reason for us to ask the next question: “Do I really love God?” It is, after all, the greatest commandment, to love God. Loving God essentially means being devoted to God; and if we refuse to forgive, then our devotion is upon ourselves (which, ironically, leads to the destruction of ourselves; yet another paradox!). But beware: the question isn’t “Do I find it easy to forgive?” but “Do I forgive?”

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This is the sermon manuscript from last Sunday. Admittedly it is a topic from whence I drew much inspiration from N.T. Wright (I "quote" him a few times, though without reference; that would never fly in the scholastic world). His chapter on forgiveness in "Evil & The Justice of God" far outweighs anything in this sermon, and I recommend giving it a read. As to making a five-part series on forgiving others, I decided not to do it. Laziness is to blame, and I have other stuff I need to be spending my time on. But, regardless, there's the second sermon I preached at F.C.C.