The Gospel According to Your Baptism ...

 

"The gospel is our power to know that the death and resurrection of Jesus actually accomplished our own death and our own resurrection.  Jesus did not die that I might live.  We say that as a wonderful shorthand, but taken by itself, it's not true.  Jesus did not die that I might live.  Jesus died so that I might die.  Jesus was buried so that I might be buried.  In Jesus, that's where I left all my guilt; all my shame; all my sins; buried there in that tomb two thousand years ago, abandoned.  And if I have died and been buried with Christ, that means I have been raised with Christ.  I am no longer beneath the domain of sin; beneath the tyranny of death.  I have been raised to new life in Him; with Him."

- Pastor Joe Carlson

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 ...

A Communion Hymn Meditation: How Sweet and Aweful is the Place

In a few moments we’re going to sing together a favorite Isaac Watts hymn “How Sweet and Aweful is the Place.  It’s a hymn about this great parable –

He opens the first verse by describing the great and admire-able feast of Christ’s Kingdom – It is a feast that is sweet and full of awe … and one that displays the choicest foods from His stores.

And when we join together for that great feast, from our hearts, we will cry out to the Lord – “Why am I a guest?  Why did I hear Your voice inviting me here when so many others choose to starve outside?”

Watts gives us the correct answer.  The Lord replies – “The same sweet love that spread this feast drew you here.  Without it, you also would have refused and perished.”

So Watts finishes the hymn with a prayer for us to sing together.

And it is the application of this Kingdom parable.

After confessing that the only reason we’ve been invited into the Kingdom feast was the sweetness of God’s love toward us, we pray and ask Him to have compassion on the nations and to extend the call of His sweet love to all the earth.  We ask Him to constrain or draw strangers to their true home and to make His Word victorious, that it would triumph in our world.

The fact that unworthies such as we have been invited to Christ’s great banquet-feast fills us with longing to see all of His churches filled with people to join us in singing from our hearts with one voice the hymn of His redeeming grace.

Why did Israel receive the immeasurable blessings of the Covenant?  Why have we received the priceless blessings of the Kingdom?

Not because we earned it.  Not because God knew He’d get a good return on His investment.  In fact, as we’ll see – God-willing – later this season when we get to Lk 17, when we have done all we can, we will still have failed to return God any profit for what He spent on us.

By inviting us to His feast, Christ has been gracious to those who can never repay Him, just as He has called us to do.  And so the Father has exalted Him and will yet still reward Him at the consummation of all things – the resurrection of the just and the wedding feast of the Lamb.

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.

"Widerstehe doch der Sünde: Stand strong against sin." BWV 54

Glenn Gould once said that Bach was the greatest architect of sound to ever live.  Here he takes us on a guided tour of Cantata 54.  Written to accompany the Lenten reading for "Oculi Sunday" from Ephesians 5.1-9.  As Gould notes, these are probably the words of our elder brother in the Faith, Johann, himself.  In it we hear and feel the swelling seduction of temptation along with the struggle and tension of dissonant chords, but then, through it all cuts the clear voice of the Spirit calling us to stand strong and overcome our enemy.

“Stand firm against all sinning, or its poison will possess you.. Those who commit sin are of the devil, for he has invented sin, but if one resists his vile shackles with true devotion, sin will straightaway take flight.”

What is Worldliness?

“Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, think processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is that system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to their periphery any thought about God.

Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.”

–David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 29.

To Consider on the First week of Advent ...

"The two values that are becoming dominant in our culture are: efficiency and control.
I think those are inadequate as virtues.  There's nothing inherently virtuous about them and they tend to move us in non-virtuous directions.  I think we need less efficiency and to give up control over things in order to have more virtuous lives."

- Quentin Shultze, 
author of Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living virtuously in the Information Age

Exodus & Wilderness

"In the end, it was a lot easier for God to get Israel out of Egypt than it was to get Egypt out of Israel.
The Passover and Exodus was about getting God's people out of Egypt.  The 40 years in the desert was about getting Egypt out of God's people."

- Pastor Alan Burrow

Dante's Moral Imagination

"Dante does something very, very interesting and - to the limit of my ability to judge such things - something deeply true and wise in his characterization of the deepest level of Hell.
I have in my day seen three different discotheques named "Dante's Inferno".  To name a discotheque "Dante's Inferno" you are, I presume, counting on the notion of heat; transgressive sexuality; wild, hot stuff.  There is a kind of glamour in evil: "bad boys"  I've heard it said that the world of men is divided into husbands and lovers.  The husbands are dull and good, and the lovers are bad and sexy.  Rock stars for my entire lifetime have been cashing in on this motif.
Dante is having none of it.  For him, evil is not glamorous.  If I may be permitted such an observation, Milton gets into a fair amount of interpretative trouble because his Satan is so glamorous.  No one ever said that Dante's Satan is the real hero of The Comedia.  And there's good reason for that.  We only see him in one canto and he can't talk.  He is however very good at drooling.
This is de-glamorizing evil.  And evil is de-glamorized in another way, because the deepest level of Dante's Hell is not fire.  It's ice; cold, motionless, dark, near-absolute zero, frigidity; nothingness.  There's nothing cool - nothing cool - about Dante's Satan...
[Just as at Babel] what thwarts human presumption is a kind of anti-intellect, anti-intelligibility.  So what stands at the center of Hell is gigantic idiocy; literally gigantic, drooling idiocy.  And the punishment here is cold and ice."

- Dr Timothy Schutt, Dante Scholar  

Narnia and the 7 Deadly Sins ...

This Lenten season, I've been preaching a series of homilies on the 7 deadly sins.  Last week at the close of the service in which I had just preached on lust, a young boy from our congregation came up to me with a comment.  I am certain that he is still a bit too young to have understood much about the subject, but then he surprised [and delighted] me with this observation: "Pastor, if you really wanted to talk about lust, you should have talked about The Silver Chair.  That story teaches all about the sin of lust!"

It reminded me instantly of the [abridged] article below [although King argues for a different dominant sin in The Silver Chair].  I found it after hearing Rich Lusk reference Dr King's work which traces the 7 deadly sins through Lewis's 7 Narnia novels.  The full article can be found here.  Enjoy!

Narnia and the Seven Deadly Sins

Dr. Don W. King
Department of English 
Montreat College
© 1984 Don W. King 


Several years ago I discovered an interesting relationship between the seven deadly sins and C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.

The development of a list of seven especially damning sins is shadowy.  However, the list that came to be most influential in the church was developed by Gregory the Great (540-605) characterized by its Latin acronym, saligia: superbia (pride), avaritia (greed), luxuria (luxury, later lust), invidia (envy), gula (gluttony), ira (anger), and acedia (sloth).

William Langland's Piers Plowman, Dante's Divine Comedia, Chaucer's "The Parson's Tale," and Spenser's Faerie Queen all devote serious attention to these. It is not surprising then that Lewis knew them so well. Throughout The Allegory of Love Lewis refers to the seven deadly sins. In several other works he refers to specific sins on the list and in Poems he focuses an entire poem, "Deadly Sins," on each one.  It is my contention that he may either consciously or subconsciously have emphasized one of the seven deadly sins in each one of the seven Narnian books.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund personifies gluttony.

Book List [what I've been reading lately] ... 4 biographies

Since It's been ages since I've posted one of these ... I did recently just finish this latest set of 4.
You are what your mind eats ...

Who were the Nephilim?

Since the question is back on the table with this weekend's release of the Noah flop film, here is an answer deep from the archives.

As it turns out, the Nephilim have everything to do with Christian boys who lust after the Emma Watsons of the world and nothing to do with fantastic CGI rock giants or prurient alien angel-demons.

WHO WERE THE NEPHILIM?

An exegetical study of Genesis 6.

CONTEXT

According to the O and NT’s, Moses was the author of the Torah[1].  His audience was a post-Exodus, pre-conquest Israel.  His main spiritual concerns would have been: 

A. education – Israelite [and Canaanite] history and that of the land she was to inhabit; 

B. Faith in God through hardship and uncertainty [grumbling vs perseverance - especially while traveling; trusting God as He works in time and processes; being subverted by the temptations of food, idolatry, and compromise with powerful empire-builders]; 

and C. Purity through separation [ethical and marital; being subverted by women].  

All three of these themes are nearly omnipresent subtexts undergirding every portion of Genesis.  They explain the content and emphasis of nearly everything contained therein. 

To answer the question at hand, I would like to key in on the third concern – spiritual purity and marriage.  At the risk of overstating my case, if Genesis were written today as a sensational political paperback, it would be called something like: “Setting the Record Straight: The true history of the Israelite Nation: how women, paganism, and faithless compromise almost destroyed God’s people, why Canaan is rightfully theirs and why the bloodthirsty, idolaters must be driven from it.” 

Lewis's Other Trilemma

"This is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what he has, not what he has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not.  To be God or to be like God and share his goodness in response to his blessings or to be miserable; these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows- the only food that any possible universe ever can grow- then we must starve eternally... 

Law said “If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead.” Those are hard words to take. Will it really make no difference whether it was women or patriotism, cocaine or art, whisky or a seat in the Cabinet, money or science? Well, surely no difference that matters. We shall have missed the end for which we are formed and rejected the only thing that satisfies. Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well?" 

- C S Lewis

from The Problem of Pain and A Slip of the Tongue

White Lent

Thanks to Dr Jim Jordan for introducing us to it and the Clerk of Oxford for posting a great recording of the French Carol and Lenten Hymn: White Lent.

1. Now quit your care
And anxious fear and worry;
For schemes are vain
And fretting brings no gain.
To prayer, to prayer!
Bells call and clash and hurry,
In Lent the bells do cry
'Come buy, come buy,
Come buy with love the love most high!'

2. Lent comes in the spring,
And spring is pied with brightness;
The sweetest flowers,
Keen winds, and sun, and showers,
Their health do bring
To make Lent's chastened whiteness;
For life to men brings light
And might, and might,
And might to those whose hearts are right.

3. To bow the head
In sackcloth and in ashes,
Or rend the soul,
Such grief is not Lent's goal;
But to be led
To where God's glory flashes,
His beauty to come nigh,
To fly, to fly,
To fly where truth and light do lie.

4. For is not this
The fast that I have chosen? -
The prophet spoke -
To shatter every yoke,
Of wickedness
The grievous bands to loosen,
Oppression put to flight,
To fight, to fight,
To fight till every wrong's set right.

5. For righteousness
And peace will show their faces
To those who feed
The hungry in their need, 
And wrongs redress,
Who build the old waste places,
And in the darkness shine. 
Divine, divine,
Divine it is when all combine!

6. Then shall your light
Break forth as doth the morning;
Your health shall spring,
The friends you make shall bring 
God's glory bright,
Your way through life adorning
And love shall be the prize.
Arise, arise,
Arise! and make a paradise!

Leithart on Lenten Fasting

Paul insisted that Christians had the right to eat meat that had been prepared in sacrificial rituals to idols.  But he also knew that some Christians disagreed.  Some believed it was compromise with idolatry.  Paul thought they were wrong, but he didn’t simply write off his brothers.

 Instead, whenever he talks about food, he emphasizes that love and deference for brothers take priority over his own convictions and preferences.  “Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died,” he writes to the Romans, and to the Corinthians he adds, “if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.”

Paul doesn’t address fasting in the same way, but he would, and he would want us to.  

Memorizing the 7 Deadly Sins - A Lenten Preparation

The 7 deadly sins historically listed can be memorized using the acrostic WASP LEG -

wrath
avarice
sloth
pride
lust
envy
gluttony

Lists of "deadly" sins appear at several points in the New Testament [Mk 7; Rom 1; 1 Cor 6; Gal 5; Eph 5; Col 3; 1 Tim 1; Rev 21 & 22] but the primary Scriptural list of 7 is found in Proverbs [6]:

Lent for Dummies [and Presbyterians] part 3 of 3: Putting On

The Right Kind of Putting On

Of course, formal fasting is not always necessary for Lenten observance.  Remember, giving up is never the point of fasting.  Positive tasks can be done for God’s glory and our good without picking something to “give up” [James 1.27].  So I encourage you to think as much of "Lenten resolutions" as you do of Lenten fastings.

How about buying 40 stamps for letters of encouragement to missionaries or people in our congregation or long-deserved Thank you cards.  Since the middle ages, Lent has been associated with Spring cleaning. Perhaps you need a season of house cleaning and organizing; regaining a handle on stuff, time, and life; culling your wardrobe and giving away 40 of your possessions to others; 40 days without missing my time of devotional prayer and Scripture reading; 40 days of family Scripture reading and singing before bed; 40 days of being on time [or early] for every appointment or engagement [see the point about being overly-busy below]; 40 new verses memorized; 40 days of reading that Christian classic you’ve always wanted to read; learning 40 new things about your spouse; 40 days of re-evaluating your financial stewardship, giving, updating your budget and will; 40 days of doing the dishes for your wife or helping mom with the cooking and cleaning; 40 days of tucking your children in every night.
Is 40 too many?  Why not 7?  One a week [rounding up].  7 weeks of attending the men’s prayer breakfast or our midweek services; 7 passages of Scripture memorized;  7 weeks to knock out that ministry project or Evangelistic Bible Study; 7 weeks of praying outside the Abortion "clinic"/mill or making hospital or nursing home visits; 7 weeks of Saturday mornings working to help your elderly neighbors or fix up that broken, shoddy, unpainted, part of the church building that's bothered you for so long; 7 weeks of inviting the fatherless kids you know to join in your fun activities and outings; 7 weeks of helping out young families that are struggling, providing childcare; 7 weeks of focusing on discipline in the home and re-establishing first-time obedience; 7 weeks of demonstrating your love to your wife by knocking out those lingering honey-do list items or a wife her husband by cleaning out the attic or garage.  Does this seem too mundane?  We need not be hyper-spiritual about things.  God certainly doesn't ask us to be [see Peter Jones here].

Lent for Dummies [and Presbyterians] part 2 of 3: Putting Off

So how ought we observe and benefit from Lent?  I recommend the 2-fold Biblical Pattern of putting off and putting on.

Putting Off

Putting off involves first repentance and then forms of fasting.

As a point of important clarification, it is vital to remember that Christians never fast from sin.  Sin isn’t to be fasted from.  It is to be repented of quickly and forcibly.  Remember our Lord’s words in Matthew 5.29-30.
Fasting is a temporary time of giving up otherwise good things; things like certain types of food or drink, alcohol, caffeine, a meal, TV, the internet, use of a computer, phone, or mobile device, Facebook, the daily news, talk radio, secular music, shopping, that fine-but-time-consuming-hobby, etc. and replacing them with prayer, Scripture, and good works.

During this season of preparation, repentance is the first order of business.  What sins have drifted in under the radar?  Where have we become lazy in our sanctification, holiness, purity, or integrity?  We plan to meditate through the classic list of the seven deadly sins.  This is the time to consider yourself honestly.  Ask your spouse or a close friend for the favor of a faithful wound.  What sin most needs targeting by your deliberate repentance?  Pray earnestly for God to show you.
In addition to specific sins, there is the general malaise that can creep in.  I recommend spending the next few days prayerfully considering the patterns and habits of your life, individually and in your home.  What sorts of habits, intakes, entertainments, ways of speaking, cycles, unhealthy dependencies, budding addictions, negative tendencies have begun to crop up?  Lent is the season to uproot these.

But don't ever forget that Lent is a season of putting off in order to put on.

Lent for Dummies [and Presbyterians] part 1 of 3: Introduction

Next week begins the Church Season of Lent or Lententide.  Because so many of us did not grow up in churches that made much use of the Church calendar, and because Lent has a way of sneaking up to catch us off guard, a bit of preparation for the Season of Preparation is in order.

Despite the impression given by many Protestants, Lent is far from a Roman Catholic invention.  There were various set times of fasting mentioned by the early Church Fathers, but the first mention of Lent from history comes in the writings of the Council of Nicea [A.D. 325] which refer to the 40 days of fasting and preparation in Spring.

In the centuries since then it has undergone changes and timing adjustments, but remains a fixed part of the yearly Church cycle.  Just as the preparations of Advent precede the celebrations of Christmas, so the preparations of Lent precede the celebrations of Easter.  Humility before Exaltation.

Originally called “The Forty”, its name was changed to “Lent” referring to the lengthening of days at the start of Spring [and allowing less misunderstanding for the football fans among us].

Many Christians from many different denominations and backgrounds observe Lententide as a time of “focused devotion upon the Lord Jesus Christ” and “a season of repentance, struggle, and self-denial.” [Strawbridge]

In Scripture, 40 days mark an important and complete season for God’s people.  I submit to you that it is especially effective as a period of habit breaking and/or cultivation.  But more on that in part 2.

Lent derives directly from a remembrance of Jesus’ forty days of temptation and victory over the Devil in the Judean desert.  He triumphed in forty days where Israel failed for forty years.

You will notice that this year Lent begins with Ash Wednesday on March 5^th and ends Saturday April 19.  If you add up the squares on the calendar you will find that the total is 46 days.  This is because the 6 Sundays in between are excluded from the normal 40 since they are Lord’s Days – and every Sunday is a mini-Easter in celebration of our Lord’s resurrection.  Thus many Christians do not maintain their Lenten fasts on Sundays [in fact, some early Church fathers prohibited any fasting on Sundays].

In imitation of our Lord, in keeping with healthy Church traditions, in preparation for the celebration of Easter, and for a well-needed time of focused intensity about our own walks with and before the Lord, I encourage you to consider observing Lent this year.

Part 2-Putting Off.

Screwtape on Chastity

If he must think of the medical side of chastity, feed him the grand lie which we have made the English humans believe, that physical exercise in excess and consequent fatigue are specially favourable to this virtue. How they can belive this, in face of the notorious lustfulness of sailors and soldiers, may well be asked. But we use the schoolmasters to put the story about — men who were really interested in chastity as an excuse for games and therefore recommended games as an aid to chastity.

- Screwtape

C.S. Lewis