A Meditation with both Palm Sunday and Good Friday in Mind ...

 

"My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this ... was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind."

- Miroslav Volf 

Exclusion and Embrace pgs. 303-304

10 Guidelines for Churches Considering Reopening

1. Make a full plan and ACTUALLY GET all necessary supplies before going public with it.  First of all, if you make a good plan, go public with it, and then find that you can’t get any of the gloves or Purell your plan depends on for another four weeks, your good plan just evaporated.  Furthermore, if you can’t get masks, then there’s a chance your dentist can’t either.  If you can’t get Clorox wipes, then there’s a chance the Dermatology office is also waiting in line.  If you can’t find hand sanitizer, then think about the local restaurant owner that you appreciate so much.  Only these peoples’ very lives depend on the speed at which they can get back up and running.
2. Know the plan for businesses/activities in your area… you are not a modern-day Martin Luther [or MLK Jr] if you have not taken the time to hear the other side.  Ignorant antinomianism is not civil disobedience in the cause of justice.  Know the criteria that are being used by your Governor, Mayor, or County authorities.  Take the time necessary to hear their thoughts and understand their approach.  It may not be as crackpot or Draconian as that guy on Facebook made it out to be.  Have you done your due diligence?  Start with the Johns Hopkins Guidelines to Governors for Phased Reopenings.  It’s a great, reasonable resource.
3. Know the plan of other churches in your area … don’t be slavishly bound to it, but don’t be too proud to be aware of and informed by what others are doing.  Like me, you might learn a thing or two from others in Christ’s body nearby.  There is also a strong possibility of an increased testimony from Christian unity as well as potential legal protection if you are able to act in concert with other churches in your local community.
4. Continue livestreaming – it is either disingenuous or unkind or both to give your high-risk folks “permission” to stay home during the uncertain transition-back period, and not continue to livestream for them during that time.
5. Consider Polling – finally a good reason for a congregational poll! … I’m almost always against church member polls, but in this case, there is a lot of value that can come to Church leaders by knowing where folks are – how many are comfortable returning?  How many would prefer to stay home another month?  How many would wear PPE?  How many would insist upon it?  How many would object to it?  This is really good information for those whose planning depends on willing participation from their folks.
6. Take Attendance – if you have multiple services, be specific.  The doctors are telling us a ‘cure’ is likely a long way away.  If someone in your church tests positive four months from now, it would be helpful to know which service they attended that week and who was near them.  For some techie churches, it may be as simple as a mid-service, wide-angle snapshot.
7. Eliminate high-touch surfaces as much as possible.  Passing offertory plates or communion trays from row to row, each touched by a hundred hands before making its way into yours… that shouldn’t be happening right now.  Consider going to bulletins or a projector as opposed to hymnals and prayerbooks [the traditionalist in me cringes to say it, but as a temporary measure, it’s worth considering.]  Put bulletins on chairs, rather than on a common pick-up table/basket.  Most churches don’t have automatic doors.  Consider propping doors open at start/close of services.  Our deacons are forming cleaning teams to wipe down arm rests, door handles, light switches, thermostats, bathrooms, etc. between services.  And our facilities manager just purchased an HVAC air purifier.  Lots of churches are investing in hand sanitizer dispensers by entry/exit points.  Don’t forget trashcans.  There will be lots more wipes, tissues, masks, and gloves than normal.  Where are these going to end up?
8. Think in terms of households.  Hey, it’s a category all over the New Testament! :-)  Medical guidelines suggest at least 6 feet of separation [more if singing btw] between households, not individual members.  The assumption being, everyone in the same household already shares the same level of exposure.  They don’t need to be separated from one another.  This may or may not help with seating.  Many reopening guidelines are based off of seating capacity, rather than a total number anyway.  Lots of churches are temporarily resuming service attendance on a sign-up basis.  Once the sign up list is full, assigned seating is arranged according to households.  A strange but effective approach for this unusual season.  Whatever your plan, be sure to have something in mind for those who might show up without signing up first [the same for those who arrive visibly sick or symptomatic.]  Even the most callous Calvinists among us would have a hard time turning away visitors at the door. :-)
9. Children’s ministries are in a different category – kids have zero concept of personal space and social distancing.  You know this.  So do our authorities and policymakers.  Kids’ activities are the last to resume.  If your church operations are interdependent so that you can’t restart regular worship services without children’s church going simultaneously, reopening will take longer.  In other words, the bigger your church, the slower your restart will likely need to be.
10. Expect big changes – Lowes, Walmart, McDonalds have all had to make big changes.  So will you.  Going out in public feels different now.  Church will not be an exception. Remember to manage expectations [theirs and yours] by communicating this.


One extra – if I may humbly suggest:
11. Make vital mental distinctions – Brothers, remember that this is not the Church being persecuted or singled out unnecessarily.  Again, read the Hopkins Guidelines. Church activities are being reviewed alongside every other community activity and rated according to very rational criteria for risk vs modifiability.  Church services are potential superspreader events.  It’s just a fact.  Be patient as our authorities try to reopen the right way.  Good grief – they are talking about cancelling the NFL.  If that doesn’t show you how serious this thing is across the board, nothing will!  Be willing to wait in line and recognize that there are lots of folks in line ahead of us whose lives and livelihoods depend on them restarting before we do.  We are not being told to stop preaching in Jesus’ name [Acts 4.18].  We are being asked to continue doing so online for some number of weeks more.  Recognize that while we are doing this, everyone else around us is sacrificing.
Also, be willing to do the nearly impossible work of mentally distinguishing personal political philosophies you hold from truly Scriptural Convictions based on plain Scriptural Commands  [IOW, do not confuse the traditions of men, even good, Conservative, Christian men, with God’s Words and God’s Commands!]  As much as we may hold them dear, “don’t tread on me”; “no king but Jesus”; “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; or “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble” are not phrases we got from the Bible.  They are political concepts we might hold, I hope for good reason, but I also hope not with the same degree of zeal or affection that we do the tenets of our most holy faith and commands of Scripture.  Be self-aware enough to recognize this.  And for Pete’s sake – stop the spread of misinformation and specious arguments!  There are reasons Walmart and liquor stores are allowed to stay open in times of public crisis while church buildings are closed.  It’s textbook civic management.  Be patient with your authorities.  It is no easy thing to run a city [let alone a county, state, or nation!].

photo credit: Vatican News

Autoculturalism

"The identities we are chattering about today tend to impose a kind of imperative to restlessly reinvent oneself; to construct - what I call - a culture of one.  We are less threatened by multiculturalism than by autoculturalism."

- Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal

Against Heterosexuality by Michael Hannon [abridged]

Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations... 

Michel Foucault, an unexpected ally, details the pedigree of sexual orientation in his History of Sexuality. Whereas “sodomy” had long identified a class of actions, suddenly for the first time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the term “homosexual” appeared alongside it...designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual.”...cementing these categories of hetero- and homosexuality in the popular imagination...Sexual orientation, then, is nothing more than a fragile social construct, and one constructed terribly recently. designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual.”

My own prediction is that we will see this binary thoroughly deconstructed within our lifetimes. But in my view, we proponents of Christian chastity should see the impending doom of the gay–straight divide not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity. More than that, I want to suggest that we should do our best to encourage the dissolution of orientation within our own subcultural spheres wherever possible...

The Main Problem with the Media ... [might not be what you think]

"I think that the main problem with the press is not bias.  The complaint of those on the left and conservatives is that it is.  I think the main problem with the press, rather, is superficiality.  Their inability to go beyond the narrative structure of antagonist and protagonist; who's up and who's down; their inability to understand, frame, and report on issues that are not simply political.  The tendency is to force these kinds of cultural issues onto a political frame of reference; to see them only as struggles of power."

James Davison Hunter
in a Mars Hill Audio Journal interview with Ken Myers [ from 1994!]

... don't you want to keep reading???? [below]

Deep Gospel-infused Beauty

"Bach is inseparable from the words that he uses.  He's a religious composer and his outlook on life is told to us in the cantatas.  And even in the secular music, one has to embrace his worldview.  No matter how the voice leading it is so wonderful or the counterpoint is so wonderful, it goes beyond itself.  It tries to tell us a message and that message is usually complicated.  It's not quite simple.  So I think there's a lot more to Bach than the surface."

- Murray Perahia

Prayer to End Abortion on the 44th Anniversary of Roe v Wade

  Heavenly Father, rise up to protect every unborn child in our land.  We pray to you for them with confidence 
and firm trust knowing that it is your Holy Will to remove the scourge of abortion from off the face of Your 
earth. Thank you that, on this, the 44th anniversary of our Supreme Court’s infamous decision about these 
things, You have helped Your people and given many victories in defense of unborn life since then.  Continue 
these victories by Your mercy.  Change the minds and melt the hearts of all who promote this evil, or who 
seek abortion as a remedy for the troubles of their lives, which troubles are – for many – very great. Make 
us – in our lives – a testimony of sexual purity; those who cherish human life, love and help our neighbors,
 guard and adopt the fatherless and unwanted, honor Your holy image wherever it is found in mankind, and 
willingly sacrifice of ourselves, our comforts and possessions, so that we might truly be your servants and in practical ways, bring about Your Kingdom and Your righteousness. Heavenly Father, we ask you this in the 
name of Jesus, Your Son.  
Amen.

The Givenness of Things

"There is no freedom except when what we are, and do, corresponds to what has been given to us to be and to do."

-Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of Nations

Why NOT to pray and fast on Election Day

Yesterday I preached what was probably the hardest sermon of my ministry career.  I told my congregation that - while I am all for things like prayer and fasting - I think there are important reasons NOT to do so tomorrow, in attachment with election day.  That was a shocking comment, and not one I made lightly.  I attempted to explain it and would like to elaborate here.

The entire sermon was an attack on the ways we make an idol of politics.  My community is a military community and we, of all people, in our closeness to the activities of the state, are tempted in the direction of political idolatry.  I fear that I made too little of the anguish that my parishioners feel as they watch our country arrive at this new low point.  Many of them have given their lives in service to our nation, and the heartache that is their current portion is significant and warranted.  It was not my intention to make light of it.
But where that heartache means total despair, it reveals the presence of an idol.  This is what I find so alarming about the way American Christians are calling for prayers and fastings in association with the voting process.   On the very day when the impotence of our idol is being exposed, we still cling to it with our eyes tightly shut refusing to acknowledge the judgment and truth.  We can pray and fast and hope it ain't so.  But there it is.  Our politics cannot save us.  We are not going to vote ourselves out of this mess.

Politics is very limited institution, mostly negative in it's power of enforcement and authority.  Law brings guilt, as the Apostle says, not life.  To look for solutions or lifegiving power from a political swordbearer is to put our trust and hope in a prince, which Scripture famously warns against.  It is like giving a farmer a hundred plowed acres, but only allowing him to use pesticide and a machete while expecting a bumper crop.  These are tools of excision, not growth.

A call to fast and pray is usually regarded as a call to repent.  Yet, at the top of the list of the sins we need to repent of nationally, are our political idolatry and our childish hunt for quick fixes to profound problems.  Yet, paradoxically, connecting a call to pray and fast with a political election will mostly likely simply reinforce and perpetuate both of those sins!

Our nation is like a morbidly obese man who is seeking relief from a peddler of pills.  The problem is that his own living throughout the decades of his life is what is killing him, and no pill will cure him of his own behavior.
Furthermore, I fear that calling for prayer and fasting on the day of elections is like that obese man calling his family to pray and fast on the day of his doctor's examination.  But the damage has already been done.  He ought to call them to pray and fast as he is driving to the grocery store, or as he is looking to join the membership of a gym, or pulling into the parkinglot of a buffet.  On the morning of the doctor's exam, it is too late.  Abraham told Dives, your time is up.  You had your fun.  The season of prayer has come to an end.

And this gets at the point.  Civil Government is not intended to solve our problems.  So stop praying that God would use it in that way.  We need to repent of thinking that our social problems have political solutions.

If you want to pray and fast for our country on a level that matters and on the day that counts - pray and fast on the first day of Christian school year - and then on the first day of summer break.  Pray and fast when your children are baptized or when a church building is under construction or when a neighbor moves in next to you, or a nursing home closes.  Pray and fast during Advent, Lent, and Holy Week - and repent of your own sins with the same zeal that you bring to bear when discussing taxation policies, illegal immigration, or gun rights.

Further thoughts ...

Francis Schaeffer on Punk Rock

"Why does human life have any value at all?  Not only are you going to die individually, but the whole human race is going to die.  Someday the world will grow too hot or cold and all you people will not only be individually dead, but the whole conscious life on this world will be dead and nobody will see the birds fly.  As you know, I don't speak academically, shut off in a scholastic cubicle.  I have lots of young people come to us from the end of the earth.  And they have gone to the end of this logically.  They realize what the situation is.  They can't find any meaning to life.  It's the meaning of the words "punk rock".  I must say that on the basis of what they're being taught in schools, that the final reality is only this material thing - they're not wrong; they're right."

- Francis Schaeffer

Islam: Mirror of Christendom

An abridged essay by Dr Peter J Leithart; the full essay is available here.

“For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.”

—The Epistle of James, 1:23-24

Deep in the pit of hell, the pilgrim Dante came across Mohammed, walking with his torso split open from chin to groin.  The surprise in this scene is not the gruesomeness of Mohammed’s punishment, but the place where this scene occurs: the ninth Bolgia of Malebolgia, in the subcircle of hell reserved for schismatics. Mohammed is not among the idolaters or the pagans, but among sinners being punished for breaking off from the Christian Church, all of whom, appropriately enough, have their bodies rent as retribution for rending the body of Christ.

In treating Mohammed as a Christian schismatic, Dante was not inventing a new perspective (he rarely did), but presenting views widespread in his time. Many in the Western medieval world believed that Mohammed himself had apostatized from Christianity.  Centuries before Dante, John of Damascus (675-749) treated Islam in the final section of his treatise de Haeresibus, calling it the “heresy of the Ishmaelites.”

Cultures cultivate. A culture is more like an ecosystem than like a supermarket. And human persons, as encultured creatures, are generally less like independent rationally choosing shoppers than like organisms whose environment predisposes a certain set of attitudes and actions.

Cultures cultivate. Not that our activities are absolutely determined by cultural influences. We are rational beings, not just instinctual beings. We can make choices that go against the conventions sustained around us. We can lean into the prevailing winds, but only if we know how to stand somewhere solid. Only if we are not being carried by the wind. We need to be able to imagine alternative ways of perceiving reality.

Cultures cultivate, so if we want to offset the influence of cultural systems that distort or misrepresent reality, we need more than good arguments that analyze the distortions. We need cultural alternatives that provide opportunities for participating in a different way of telling the story of human experience.

For example, counteracting the materialistic reductionism of our time requires practices that convey to our imaginations the coherent unity of matter and spirit. Challenging the assumptions that human beings are best understood and best treated by social structures as autonomous choosers whose choices provide meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe requires settings in which submission and obedience to some order of things that precedes our willing is known as a delight and a blessing.

Distorted institutions and practices can’t be confronted only by arguments. They require well-ordered practices and institutions. Resisting cultural confusion is more than a matter of thinkingoutside the box. We need to be able to intuit outside the box. And to encourage well-ordered intuitions to those under our care, especially our children — because cultures cultivate.

Book List

You are what your mind eats …

As the Angels in Heaven: A Theological Reflection on the Plight of Bruce Jenner

Long after his sordid story broke, we are still talking about Bruce Jenner.  His sad state fascinates us and brings many of our societal failures and follies to the surface.  Chief among them is our destructive devotion to the ultimacy of personal choice.  Devotion that borders on idolatry.

In this man's fractured life, we see the folly of making the subjective will ultimate. 

When a full-grown man says something like, "as far back as i can remember, i have felt like and identified as a woman," and we are unable to respond with anything but, "well, then you must really be a woman," we are in deep trouble.

Certain fundamental things precede memory.  Certain truths are objectively true about us - whether we prefer and identify with them or not.  Several of these objective truths of reality come by way of the body we're given. We receive our bodies, and therefore our genders, long before we possess anything like memory or feeling or a sense of identity or even any self awareness at all.
You show up at conception and there it is - already right there in your DNA from the first second of your life.  And centuries after you die, if archaeologists happen to dig up your bones, one of the first things they will determine by the most basic testing is whether you were male or female.

When we hear ourselves asking questions like - "Can you imagine being trapped in a body you don't belong in?" ... as if you could be switched at birth into a foreign body by accident or trickery... as if - because of its gender - your body were something you could be "trapped inside of" like an elevator in a blackout.

The Grave Importance of Church Funerals and Cemetery Yards

"[The problem is] not that our culture doesn't believe in God.  It's that our culture doesn't believe in death ... really.  And as a result, [we] don't really get the point.  Our culture is dedicated to distracting us from this inconvenient truth.  We are dedicated to being distracted from distraction by distraction."

- David Bentley Hart

Book List

You are what your mind eats …

ADHD in Context

"I think that ADD is probably a necessary neurological adjustment to the all-at-once environment that we have.  This was Marshall McLuhan's prophetic awareness - to understand this.  ADD is a necessary adjustment."

- B.W. Powe

The Redemption of Bernard Nathanson

Few people, if any, did more than Bernard Nathanson to undermine the right to life of unborn children by turning abortion from an unspeakable crime into a constitutionally protected liberty. [And] someday, when our law is reformed to honor the dignity and protect the right to life of every member of the human family, including children in the womb, historians will observe that few people did more than Bernard Nathanson to achieve that reversal.

Dr. Nathanson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, had his first involvement with abortion arranging an illegal abortion for his girlfriend. Many years later, he [called it] his “introductory excursion into the satanic world of abortion.”

Nathanson became a nearly monomaniacal crusader for abortion. As Director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, he presided over more than 60,000 abortions and performed 5,000 himself [one of which included his own son or daughter inconveniently conceived out of wedlock]. 

Sin, Righteousness, and Judgment

Within the churches are those who defend the historic Christian teaching on sexuality.  It is assumed that there will always be some discernible dissonance between the Church and the world and that part of the mission of the Holy Spirit through the Church is, as Jesus says in John 16, to “tell the world that it is wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.” 

On the other side are those who reject the historic Christian teaching and who seem to believe that the world, as represented by its most self-consciously progressive institutions and thinkers, is ahead of the Church in ushering in the Kingdom of God. Indeed, that the world is right in telling the Church that it is wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement. They say that God is doing a new thing. But they seem unable to imagine that God might say ‘no’ to any new thing done in the world in the name of progress. There seems to be no room on the part of the revisionists for any truly prophetic word to be spoken to the world’s claims about love and justice.

-Ken Myers

Judges as Umpires

[Folks, here's an old piece I wrote for my students several years ago when we were studying government and history.  I'd probably nuance differently today, but the basic thesis holds true and is quite timely.]


Thurgood Marshall once admitted that his judicial philosophy boiled down to “do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”

This is exactly what we mean by the phrase ‘judicial activism’. A man [or woman] in a black robe takes it upon himself to change a state or country whether or not the Constitution gives him that authority.  It's a quiet coup.

This is the heart of the issue. We all want to change the country, but the ultimate question is this: which side is attempting to do so illegally? It’s that simple. The Constitution lays out what our judges are and are not authorized to do. Any actions they take beyond those found in that document are, properly-speaking, illegal.  As Justice Scalia helpfully points out, if you want to change the nation, pass a law.  Don't appeal to the Constitution or its interpreters [judges] because Constitutions are adopted to impede change, not facilitate it.  Stability is their whole purpose.

He uses the analogy of being a referee or umpire in the legal system.  A judge is umpire.  He doesn’t agonize about whether the rules are fair or right or good for the future of the game.  He makes the call to the best of his ability by applying the rules. That’s all. He doesn’t have the power to make or alter the rules based on a preferred outcome! He’s just an umpire. They’re just judges.

"In the system which says that the Constitution changes and it’s up to the judges to say what it means – they really have no answers. There is no criterion for when it changes and how it changes. Every day is a new day. Some of my collegues have said that they agonize a lot. I don’t agonize at all. Sometimes it’s hard to follow and find the record in history, but you know, I don’t agonize if there’s a right to this or that. But with these guys – every day’s a new day. Last year the death penalty was constitutional and I’ll have to worry about whether it’s still constitutional next year."