To Enter God’s Rest

I wrote about this in 2008 but the subject of rest came up recently in a class, or “lab,” on the subject of faith and work (it’s using a subset of a curriculum from Faith & Work Journey).

This obviously provoked me to think again about entering God’s rest, because I’m not very good about the whole “rest” thing. Now I still agree with what I wrote before, but I also think that I didn’t give enough attention to the actual word used there: rest.

What is rest, actually? One thing it’s not is agitation. I am an expert in agitation (no brag, just fact). A recent example is from just last year. The false self (any “false self” will do, it doesn’t have to be the false self) brings agitation, and to enter God’s rest, I guess I have to shed whatever false self I’ve wrapped myself in. And in place of that, as the Apostle Paul writes, “clothe yourselves in compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” (Colossians 3).

Oh, maybe it's a virtuous-cycle kind of thing? As I make some effort to enter God’s rest, and clothe myself with those things, he clothes me with garments of his salvation and wraps me in robes of his righteousness (Isaiah 61 has something about that)? And helps me be my true self, to live with integrity, and more fully enter his rest.

Which all sounds very good to me.

Some Words on Anxiety

I have been thinking lately about anxiety. You know what the Apostle Paul said about anxiety, right?

And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?

2 Corinthians 11:28–29 (RSV)

That’s right; he felt the pressure, just like you do. You want people to choose love and faith and generosity, rather than indifference and fear and envy. You long to see Christ formed in them. And in these pandemic times, you can’t see them in person to encourage them, or hold their hands while you pray for them. Paul knew about that, too.

Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith. Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you. May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.

1 Thessalonians 3:10–12 (NIV 1984)

Is anxiety good then?

Well, it’s not really recommended. Another famous writing of Paul tells us not to worry about anything, but to pray about everything (Philippians 4:6–7). And the Lord Jesus himself told us,

So do not worry, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:31–33 (NIV 1984)

I’ll add a pastoral word here: Paul the Apostle himself was at times beset by anxiety, so he is not scolding us, wagging a finger as he lectures us about worry. Neither is the Lord Jesus assuming a punitive posture in this extract from the Sermon on the Mount. Rather, his attitude is more like this father, coaxing his child to take a first step:

This is the same Jesus who said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28–30)

That invitation from our Lord is intended for everyone who is weary and burdened, for those “in ministry” and for those who don’t think of themselves that way. In other words, it’s for you and me.

So let us come to him, let us take another step to him. That, more than any of our accomplishments or possessions, is what pleases him, and what brings us life and peace.

I’m blind! Well, I was, anyway

In case you missed it, Matthew Dutton-Gillet, formerly rector at Trinity Menlo Park (California) was caught misappropriating church funds for personal use, at least $125,000 taken over the past five years. I was very disappointed to learn of this news, but beyond that, I was surprised to note that the idea of jail time for Matthew had not occurred to me until some weeks afterward.

That was a blind spot for me. Matthew committed a crime, maybe more than one, and he admitted this. How did it escape me that this is a criminal case? I’m far from the only one; there are Trinity members who to this day say that the police should not have been informed. I suppose that because we like and respect Matthew, we don’t want to think he’s also a criminal.

Speaking of “cognitive dissonance”…

Last November, we learned that MPPC’s senior pastor, John Ortberg Jr., was put on personal leave because of an error in judgment regarding a certain volunteer. (In case you missed it, here’s a timeline.) Some things about the whole story were puzzling (why did that volunteer confide in Daniel Lavery, formerly Mallory Ortberg?), but because I like and respect John, I don’t like to think of him as recklessly endangering children. I didn’t want to think about it; I wanted all to be well. MPPC’s communications folks were ready to help me with that.

As you can see, I have blind spots galore. When it was revealed earlier this month that the volunteer was John’s younger son, John III, some scales fell off even my eyes. One puzzling question was shockingly answered, and yes, it now seems to me astoundingly reckless to allow John III to be alone with children to whom he felt sexually attracted.

In the week or so since I started writing this, I have seen a wide variety of responses from people I know personally at MPPC. Apparently I am not alone in my disorientation. As Jeremiah famously wrote, “the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure; who can know it?” It is difficult—for me anyway—to discern the severity and gravity of mistakes made by people we respect or admire. I now have a new understanding of how deeply and severely I at least can deceive myself.

Thus I am so very glad that the Lord Jesus Christ promised that the Spirit of Truth would guide us into all truth. How much I need to pay attention to that Spirit in these days!

Why am I impatient?

So this guy at work faced a software problem: the code was hanging at a certain place, he said. I won't say that he's hard to work with, but I wanted him to provide me with all the data so I could look at it "offline"; that is, I wanted to examine the evidence after the fact, rather than doing everything interactively.

So I gave him some instructions. Type script, then at the next prompt, type /usr/software/gdb/bin/gdb.sksim xxx. Then when it gets to the hang you mentioned, generate a coredump by typing generate-core-file. Then type exit until you see /this message/. Give me the path to that file.

For reasons known only to him, he kept not doing it. He typed script (good), but then he didn't type the exact thing I told him to type. I even told him the reason to type /usr/software/gdb/bin/gdb.sksim, not simply gdb, but still he typed gdb. He said "I don't know why the coredump keeps getting corrupted." This was after I told him that the stock debugger produces unreadable coredumps.

I did tell him at one point, "After I see that you have executed the correct steps, then I will look at your problem." I'm happy that I didn't go all, Look, you want help with this problem? Why do you keep doing what I told you not to??

But why was I so miffed? Why was I screaming inside? Why couldn't I just think, "He's not doing what he needs to do to be effective; when he starts acting reasonably, I hope I can help him"? and just go on and do other work (of which there is no lack)?

I think I know the answer, but I don't much like it. It has to do with what some people call the "false self." Well, "false" may be a bit of an exaggeration—or maybe not! Wendy Wright explains it well in this snippet from Exploring Spiritual Guidance (Upper Room Books, 2006; ISBN 0-8358-9834-2), about a woman who volunteered for a month in a rural setting:

This woman went with the idea of helping others, fulfilling her Christian duty by using her gifts on behalf of less fortunate persons. Her experience was exactly the reverse. A city girl, she found herself quite helpless on a farm. She had to be constantly tutored in the most gentle and compassionate way by those she had imagined she would serve. As this woman gradually came to accept her dependence on others, she became aware of all the subtle ways she had learned over the years to mask her neediness. Always having to look good was one way. Always having the right answer was another. always being competent was a third. (56)

I like being competent and having the right answer. I like being that guy who can help people solve their technical problems. But is that really who I am?

The psychologically correct answer, the mentally and spiritually healthy answer is (you guessed it), "No." The true self, as I profess to believe (and as the Church has taught for millennia), is that I am a beloved child of God, beloved not because of my accomplishments or virtue, but for no good reason whatsoever. And because God loves me, I want to be loving and kind to others; part of how I do that is by helping people learn how to approach their technical problems.

When I can keep this principle front and center in my consciousness, I experience joy and peace, and I can share that with those around me. But when I lose track of it, I become agitated, and what I share instead is my agitation and impatience.

Therefore, as the Apostle Paul said, "Brothers and sisters, pray for us." Especially if you have to work with me.

What did Jesus mean when he said “salvation”?

Recently the story of Jesus’s encounter with Zacchaeus appeared on pray-as-you-go at this link for November 19th; “coincidentally,” Menlo Church’s November 24th sermon covered the same passage. The lovely Carol showed me a page from her devotional guide that also focused on this passage, and encouraged its readers to write a few paragraphs about salvation: what does that mean to me? Following are a few thoughts.

---

⁹Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. ¹⁰For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Luke 19:9–10, NIV (2013)

Perhaps you know the story: Zacchaeus, a rich and corrupt tax collector in first-century Israel, encounters Jesus in Jericho; Jesus goes to Zack’s house for a meal, Zack repents, and Jesus says that salvation had come to the house. The full text is here.

Reflecting on this story, and particularly what Jesus says about salvation, it struck me that my understanding of the passage is quite different from the way I understood it 20–30 years ago. Back then, as a young evangelical, I would have had a very narrow idea of “salvation”: I thought it meant the shift from a dim eternal destiny to a bright one. Before salvation, Zacchaeus was headed for hell; once saved, he was headed for heaven.

The way this happened, I would have said, was that some time during the visit, Zack came to “believe in Jesus” (in a John 3:16 sort of way), and at that point, became a child of God, as John 1:12 promises. Being thus adopted by God, he was now destined for heaven. And I would have said that his proclamation (“Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor…”) was evidence of Zack’s belief and perhaps of an incipient transformation wrought by God.

That belief somehow caused God to change his mind about Zack; God’s view used to be that Zack was deserving of hell, but after Zack came to believe, God saw him as forgiven: in the words of the hymn, “clothed in His righteousness alone / faultless to stand before the throne.”

OK, that explanation wasn’t as clear and crisp as I’d have liked, though, because as Romans 3 teaches, nobody ever looks for God. Ephesians 2:8 says we’re saved by grace through faith, but even faith is a gift from God; we can’t generate that faith by ourselves.

Suppose that Zacchaeus had said nothing about providing for the poor, or about making restitution to those he cheated? It would not have made any difference to me back then; my view, based on verses like John 1:12 and John 3:16 and John 5:24, was that basically “all you need is to believe.”

Although there was some muddiness in my understanding, that’s how I thought about the “salvation” thing.

Thirty years later…

How is my thinking different today? For one thing, my understanding of “salvation” is broader and with a different focus. As I understand it, in first-century Israel, Eternity-in-Hell-after-you-die was not the thing people would feel most in need of being saved from. They would be thinking of how to be saved from oppression, poverty, fear or shame. Or from being a pariah in the community.

Which Zacchaeus was. I wonder how his short stature affected his experience growing up. Was he ridiculed or bullied? Is that why he he decided to collaborate with the Roman oppressors to exploit his own people? And to cheat them besides?

So he became a tax collector, then chief. He got money, and maybe some sort of revenge against his persecutors, but his wealth didn’t gain him respect within the community. I see him as caught in a viscious cycle partly of his own making. And I think that when Zacchaeus saw Jesus, he didn’t see the kind of hate and judgment that he saw on the faces of those around him. Somehow, during the party, he was enabled to see a way out of that viscious cycle—he saw a better way to be. This is the kind of thing that can happen when Jesus encounters us: we find ourselves suddenly able to take a step we had not previously imagined.

As Paul wrote in Titus 3: “For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, spending our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and mercy of God our savior appeared, he saved us, not on the basis of our good deeds, but according to his mercy…”

God, in the person of Jesus, made it possible for Zacchaeus to escape the slavery of those various passions and pleasures—or at least, to begin the journey. How could Zacchaeus keep on the journey? How can any of us do so? The author of Hebrews exhorts us to pay attention so as not to drift away.

¹We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. ²For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, ³how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?

from Hebrews 2

She writes that Jesus is “the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (5:9). She exhorts us to be diligent in pursuing our hope, that we may not be sluggish, but “imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises” (6:12).

What does this look like? Suppose I fall into the ocean at night. I can’t touch bottom. Suddenly I hear a life preserver splash in the water but I can’t see it. A voice tells me to swim ahead. It tells me to turn right; I pay careful attention and do what I’m told. Eventually I grab it. In this story, I have a big problem: I’m helpless in the water. Do I want to be saved? Well, yes—but I’m way more concerned about drowning than about eternal destiny. I had to pay attention; I couldn’t ignore such a salvation. I had to obey.

But I might also be worried about eternal destiny; it’s the kind of thing we tend to postpone thinking about until the last possible moment. And a first-century Israelite might very well be thinking about sin and forgiveness. The book of Leviticus has the most instances of “forgiven” of any in the English Bible. John baptized people “for the remission of sins.”

So I think people would be concerned about both. Actually, as I was thinking and writing about this, I remembered that first-century Greek has a lot fewer words than modern American English. The word translated “saved” can be (and sometimes is) translated “healed.” And in Matthew’s gospel, we read that the angel told Joseph to call the baby Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins” (1:21).

I now think of salvation as being much broader: as saving the whole person from every kind of hurt: ostracism, drowning, cancer, PTSD, guilt and shame, loneliness, depression, famine, sword. Ultimately, from death: as the Apostle Paul writes, we are destined not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep (a euphemism for dying), we may live together with him. I think that’s in 1 Thessalonians… yes it is: link here (NASB)

Palm Sunday: A Festival of Disappointment?

Both sermons I heard today featured disappointment, a theme I have perhaps forgotten from Palm Sundays past. Or perhaps I just hadn’t been paying attention. I heartily recommend both sermons, which can be found (starting perhaps tomorrow) at the respective church websites.

At Trinity, Matthew Dutton-Gillett spoke of the crowd’s wholehearted welcome as Jesus entered Jerusalem, and the subsequent wholehearted disappointment and rage when it turned out that his mission was not what they had hoped it was. That is what we humans naturally seem to do; we don’t need to be taught, as my granddaughter showed me the other day. “Grandpa has to go away now!” she declared. She is not quite three years old, but she’s got the disappointment and rage thing down like a pro.

These days I often hear things that make me wonder about the evangelical beliefs I accepted when I was younger—beliefs I thought were traditional, but sometimes turn out not to have been believed by the Church for its first thousand years, or its first 1,800 years. I wonder how much of what I think I know about what the Bible says, or what the Church has believed for millennia, are in fact what I thought. Probably I need to consider these ideas in light of Acts 17:11, which tells us that the Bereans listened to new teaching and examined the Scriptures to see whether these things were so.

For example, I recently heard a podcast discussing hell, about which the Bible does not speak mathematically. When Paul writes that God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2), or Peter writes (2 Peter 3) that God doesn’t want anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance, do they actually mean that? The Lord is the God of all flesh; nothing is too difficult for him (Jeremiah), right?

I've been taught that this is a tension, like the idea that God didn't create evil but he wants us to have a choice (etc.), but couldn’t it be possible that in the end God will change us and open our eyes (as Paul indeed prays in Ephesians 1:15sqq.) so that all will in fact come to repentance and a knowledge of the truth? And might they come to repentance after leaving this mortal life? (If not, what Scriptures prove that position?)

But I’ve digressed.

An hour or so after Trinity’s service, I watched as Laura Turner took the stage at Menlo Church to introduce the topic of what happens when our vision doesn’t agree with God’s. Laura spoke of hope and disappointment in light of eternity, quoting Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff from his book Lament for a Son. “I believe in God the father… I also believe my son’s life was cut off in its prime,’ and that he cannot reconcile those two beliefs. The eternity part comes from 1 Corinthians 15:19: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

She spoke of the need for trust, though we are often mistaken about God’s intentions, and at that point I wondered, how are we supposed to do that? I mean, what does that look like? What did trust look like for Laura when, after three miscarriages in nine months, she found herself pregnant for the fourth time? Each previous time, she and husband Zack hoped and trusted… in what?

I think I know a part of the answer, but I am not sure I have the authority to write it. You see, I have had almost everything in life a man could reasonably want. So I’m completely unqualified to write anything about disappointment.

That said, I think the answer has to be something along the lines of trusting in the name of Jesus, by which I mean his character and identity, as I wrote about before. As I hear about people’s lives these days, I often think of the place where Paul writes that God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep (i.e., whether we are still in this life or not), we can live together with him (1 Thessalonians 5:9–10).

How can I become like that—so that it’s a matter of indifference whether I continue in this life or not, so long as I can be with Jesus? I guess it requires a supernatural transformation. So be it.

The Power of Love

I heard a fascinating insight on NPR’s This American Life—episode 638, “Rom-Com” [download].

“If you loved me, you’d learn to read” was the feeling; the speaker, a stand-up comedienne, had learned that her boyfriend had dropped out of school in the fifth grade. Somehow he mostly managed to get along without reading skills: he had a job and an apartment,which they shared. She wanted to help him remedy his illiteracy. You might guess that this didn’t go well, and you’d be right.

Her insight was that obstacles—in this case, her boyfriend’s illiteracy—carry the attractive promise that if we can somehow fix them, life will be great and we’ll be able to do all the things we wish we could. It is, of course, an illusion. As Shakespeare didn't write, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our obstacles, but in ourselves.”

Which reminds me of something I heard many years ago: some couples will hire a contractor to build their “dream home” or maybe remodel their present home to remove all its defects. Shortly after construction is complete, divorce usually follows. I don’t recall exactly where I heard this, or whether any explanation was given for these divorces, but I suspect that when their home is in its “ideal” state, there’s no more “if we could just get [this or that] fixed…” and one partner blames the other instead: “If I could just get rid of you…”

This also is doomed to failure. As Merton wrote, “Hence I do not find in myself the power to be happy merely by doing what I like. On the contrary, if I do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable almost all the time.” (No Man Is an Island 3.1, p.25)

Which brings me to this morning’s sermon at Trinity, where Aaron asked us, “If you could have a superpower, what would it be?” Having been primed by the reading—1 Corinthians 13, the “Love chapter” (and also by Huey Lewis and the News)—I called out, “The Power of Love!”

I suppose Lewis sings about another kind of love, but the reason the power of love would be my desired superpower is that those other lesser ones—being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound—those things can only overcome material and temporal obstacles. But the power of love, the power to be patient and kind, to not be envious, to not keep track of wrongs but to rejoice in goodness—that’s the power needed to overcome my greatest obstacles, by which I mean my selfishness and impatience and hubris and laziness.

Oh, and what did Merton mean by his comment about being miserable almost all the time? Basically that we make decisions for reasons we don’t actually know: “…our acts of free choice are… largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance. Our choices are too often dictated by our false selves” (Merton, loc. cit.). And that’s why if we just do what we like, the effects are often not to our liking.

So we need a superpower, or at least I do. I need the power of love—love from God. As John says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). I need him to change me, and I need to seek him and cooperate with him as he does his work.

Retribution or restoration?

My buddy “Homer” was in the men’s recovery program at Cityteam San Jose. We have a weekly appointment, but he called to say he couldn’t meet me; triggered by a big disappointment, he’d yielded to the siren song of the bottle.

The lovely Carol was packing for a road trip, and our little dog was skittish. Showing her anxiety or her displeasure or maybe both, she also displayed a regression in her, ah, continence—once on our bedspread, and once on a bathmat we had near the patio door.

I heard a loud crash in the parking lot. Turning around, I saw the crumpled front end of an expensive European sedan. Behind the wheel of a white SUV that had smashed into it, the teen-aged driver looked stunned.

The model of retributive justice would jail or fine Homer, shoot the dog, and somehow punish the student driver. I have to think there’s a better way.

It’s probably because I’ve been thinking about restoration and retribution that I noticed these events, which occurred within a week; we all of us make mistakes, choose poorly, lose control from time to time. We hope to have fewer and milder such episodes as we get older and, we hope, wiser. And yet the only way to stop completely is to also stop breathing.

When I do choose poorly, lose my head, or just slip up, how do I want to be treated? Do I need to be jailed, fined, shot or something? I don’t think most of us want that for ourselves, though we may wish we could do that to someone else. What I want is help and restoration, and so I must offer that to those in my world. I thanked Homer for calling me, and told him about naltrexone. I am now more diligent to let the dog out first thing in the morning, and also whenever she indicates to me that she needs it—and also to give her enough cuddles. And I told the teen-ager that it’s very important to get behind the wheel again as soon as he reasonably could.

Of course, it’s not always as simple as that. If the undesirable behavior were to continue, and it became evident that it sprang from disregard for oneself or others, we would want to take some other action, but ultimately our aim would be recovery, restoration of trust, rehabilitation. In the dog’s case, some consultation with a trainer would probably be indicated.

The Apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 6, “Beloved, if a man is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, looking to yourselves, because it could have been you.” Actually I think in the NASB it reads “yourselves, lest you too be tempted,” but my old friend’s paraphrase is more striking.

Because it really could have been me. Why did that boy’s car, rather than mine (when I was learning to drive decades ago), hit the late-model Mercedes sedan? Because I was so much more skillful? Ha! I’ve made many many mistakes in my life, and things could have gone horribly wrong. In Hebrews 5 we read that a high priest “can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness.” Since we are “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2), we do well to remember that we are in fact beset with weakness, and as our Lord said, “Do not judge, lest ye be judged.” (Matthew 7 I think, AV)

This attitude of humility is important to remember, which does not make it always easy to remember. Do I sometimes say to myself, “How awful! I would never...”? Of course I do; so do you. But I like to think I remember soon afterward that “there but for the grace of God go I”: given a different set of parents, a different set of strengths and weaknesses, different experiences growing up, then I could very easily end up being just like that guy I think is so terrible.

Who are you?

A few days ago, in this prayer guide from https://pray-as-you-go.org, the following paragraph appeared:

Just one question to think about today, a question asked in this passage: “Who are you?” – not as easy a question to answer as it might seem. Imagine that you have been asked that question; what words would you find to answer? “Who are you?”

The passage was from John 1, where priests and Levites quizzed John the baptizer.

With a decade at most before retirement, I’m finding the question a lot more interesting. A passage from Wendy M. Wright’s Exploring Spiritual Guidance (Nashville, TN: Upper Room, 2006; ISBN 0-8358-9834-2) came to mind. It doesn't explicitly ask that question, but shows some of the wrong ways I sometimes answer it:

A career woman I know once spent a month at a L’Arche community farm. L’Arche is an organization that brings together persons with mental challenges and persons without such challenges into a shared life experience. This woman went with the idea of helping others, fulfilling her Christian duty by using her gifts on behalf of less fortunate persons. Her experience was exactly the reverse. A city girl, she found herself quite helpless on a farm. She had to be constantly tutored in the most gentle and compassionate way by those she had imagined she would serve. As this woman gradually came to accept her dependence on others, she became aware of all the subtle ways she had learned over the years to mask her neediness. Always having to look good was one way. Always having the right answer was another. Always being competent was a third. She came to see that the tables had turned. The very persons she came to help were helping her. They were her spiritual mentors in the way of God’s love and the dignity of each human life. (56)

Paraphrasing, three wrong answers to “Who am I?” are:

• The one who always looks good (I take this to mean reputation rather than beauty because, well…)
• The one with the right answer
• The competent one

Now there’s nothing wrong (I hope!) with wanting to look good, or wanting to have the right answer (rather than wrong ones), or wanting to be competent (rather than…?). Reputation, knowledge and competence are good servants but they make poor masters. If we find ourselves in a place where reputation is useless (as Nouwen did at L’Arche), where questions have no real answers, where there is no human competence—what do we do then?

I had lunch lately with an old friend, a very smart guy, a former professor and consultant. We worked together on and off from the ’80s into the early 2000s. A while ago, the executives who knew him all retired, and he's left without (as he put it) “interesting problems to solve.” I look at him and see my future.

Well, part of it, anyway. The part about no interesting problems to solve, that’s not a happy prospect. It’s not just the lack of problems, but the lack of people who are interested in whether I solve them. Am I interested in getting approval and appreciation? Of course I am! But almost as much, I’m interested in doing something for people, helping them make progress on their goals.

This is one way I know I was never cut out for the monastic life. Regarding that life, Merton wrote in No Man Is an Island:

The human affections do not receive much of their normal gratification in a life of silence and solitude. The almost total lack of self-expression, the frequent inability to “do things for” other people in a visible and tangible way can sometimes be a torture and lead to great frustration. That is why the purely contemplative vocation is not for the immature. One has to be very strong and very solid to live in solitude.

8§18 (p. 155, 2003 B&N edition)

As much of an introvert as I am, I’ll tell you right now I'm not “very strong and very solid” in that way.

Back to the original question, “Who are you?”—the answer, “I’m a software engineer at N--- Inc.” isn’t factually false, but neither is it the right answer. “I’m a husband and father” is more meaningful and enduring, as it’s not contingent on my current employment situation.

As you can see, I struggle a bit with the answer. A Christian-ly correct answer might be, I’m an adopted child of my heavenly father. Now this one is true but also meaningless to a lot of people I know. What does that mean to anyone unfamiliar with the jargon, and what comfort does it bring to me? I mean, God loves me, but (as Judd Hirsch's character says in Ordinary People) “he likes everybody—he’s got no taste.”

The answer I want to be the most true is: I’m a man who’s becoming more compassionate, peaceful, patient, kind, courageous, generous—a man who, when people talk with me, they feel empowered and liked and encouraged and strengthened. Whoa, it just hit me, I mean just at this moment as I type—I know what I want. I want this verse from Isaiah 58 to be true of me:

And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
    you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
    the restorer of streets to dwell in.

Isaiah 58:12 RSV

What should the church think about nontraditional sexuality?

(title updated 2017-12-10)

Some years ago, when I was recruiting the next cohort of elders to be on our church’s board, I spoke with a sister I’ll call “Dorcas,” whom I thought eminently qualified. She declined, citing Tim Keller’s teaching that women are forbidden from the office of elder. I was quite surprised at Dorcas’s demurral, but wondered whether my ideas were more enlightened than hers, or just less pure.

Though I hate to disagree with Dr. Keller, I nevertheless undertook my own study of the issue, consulting other writers as well as the Scriptures. You can see the results here on my blog.

Fast forward to about a year ago, when my younger daughter Sheri asked me to consider a study regarding the Bible’s teaching about homosexuality. Was the traditional interpretation in fact correct, and is the 21st-century Church drifting away from the truth? Alternately, have we been wrong all this time, as we were about slavery for example, and are we due for a change?

Before going into my study and its results, I’ll summarize my understanding of the issue when I started out. A few points, in no particular order:

• In the beginning, God created humans male and female, as the Lord Jesus said in Matthew 19.
• The Law (the first 5 books of what Christians today call the “Old Testament”) forbids various kinds of sexual activity; I blogged about one such prohibition back in 2007, when the One Year Bible’s daily reading included Leviticus 18.
• Although Jesus affirmed some parts of the Law (Matthew 5:17ff), he revised other parts (Mark 7:5–7, 17–23). Hence it’s debatable whether the Old Testament’s gender-related prohibitions were confirmed vs. revised by Jesus. From my limited understanding it appeared to me that Jesus didn’t revise or amend any of those gender-related prohibitions.
• The above notwithstanding, Jesus never directly addressed gender identity nor sexual activity (or attraction) between persons of the same gender.
• It bears repeating here that Jesus did directly address sexual sins such as adultery, which he defined very broadly (Matthew 5:28); anger; covetousness; failure to care for the hungry, the alien, the prisoner, the sick. These sins are practiced very widely, even within the church—to our collective shame.
• I remember a conversation I had at that time with a fellow elder on my church’s board. Based on my understanding of the Scriptures, I asserted that God would never punish sexual activity by eternity in hell. My fellow elder’s reply was something like: “I’m more concerned with how we treat them here on earth.”

  I’m glad that we were in agreement regarding ultimate destiny, but his comment influenced me in the intervening years in the way I think about the Christian life. Jesus did speak of the world to come, but he spoke a lot more about life here and now.

Also, around that time, I read

• Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality by Jack Rogers;
• Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting; and, some time later,
• Justin Lee’s Torn.

The Rogers book I found wholly unconvincing at the time. I’m unsure what I’d think of it today.

Hill and Lee are gay men who have struggled with their orientation for many years. These brothers of mine desire to follow and obey and worship and serve God. They did not ask for their same-sex attraction; indeed, they sought to change their orientation. One passage in Washed and Waiting particularly touched me when I read it in 2011. Hill attended a wedding reception and got bulldozed into dancing with a young woman he knew slightly in college.

A couple of days later I explained to my friend Chris over breakfast what had happened. We danced, I said. I was with this beautiful girl. I was holding her hand and touching her back. Her dress was thin and showed every curve on her body, I said. I could feel her sweating through the dress, and, inches from her face, I could see every exquisite feature she had. “And, Chris,” I said, “I felt nothing. No attraction. No awakening or arousal of any kind. No sexual desire whatsoever.”

Chris nodded. He knows my situation backward and forward and wasn't fazed by what I was telling him.

“The worst of it,” I continued, “is that while I wasn’t attracted to this stunningly beautiful person who was my dance partner, I couldn’t stop looking at the guy dancing several feet away from me. I did notice him. I noticed his body, his moves. Chris,” I said, “I was attracted to this guy. All I could see and desire was another guy across the room while I’m dancing with this girl. This is so frustrating. This is what it means to be gay, and I would give anything to change it!” (133)

Poignant and painful, these paragraphs gave me a little bit of a picture of what it’s like to have only same-sex attraction. As I paged through the book, searching for this passage, I confirmed my impression that Hill’s view is the traditional one.

I read Lee’s book a year or two later, shortly after it came out late in 2012. As Hill gave me an idea what it’s like to have same-sex attraction, Torn gave me a picture of what it’s like to be in the Church as a gay man. As one might expect, it’s a mixed bag. Lee has some prescriptions for us all, whether or not we take the traditional view on same-sex attraction. I think these steps would be very helpful, and I hope this little essay is a baby step forward.

One thing from Lee’s book that shocked and saddened me was his discovery that so-called “reparative therapy” has never actually worked—as far as his investigation was able to find. He quizzed people about successful case studies, but none seemed to exist. In other words, the whole thing was wishful thinking at first and a fraud later on. Whether you believe Lee, or some of the claims in Exodus International’s wikipedia article, the organization no longer exists.

When Sheri prodded me to undertake my current study, she pointed me at video lectures by Gushee (I’ve lost/forgotten the links), which the lovely Carol watched with me. These presentations discussed the experience of LGBT folks in the church; I’m sorry to say that overall we have not welcomed them and we have not loved them the way Jesus would have us to do—independent of whether certain kinds of sexual attraction and activity are (or aren’t) considered OK by God. In hindsight, it was appropriate that my current study began with the more important question, viz., how are we doing on that new command Jesus gave his disciples? “A new command I give you,” Jesus said: “That you love one another even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35).

That said, the question “What does God think about certain behaviors?” is still important, and to that end I’ll mention a few resources that I encountered this past year:

• Brownson’s book Bible, Gender, Sexuality
• Loader’s 2008 essay, What does the Bible say on Homosexuality?
• Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church (Preston Sprinkle, ed.), which folks have recommended to me; I’ve read only this review of it.

Brownson argues persuasively that neither the traditional interpretation (basically what I thought in 2013) nor revisionist interpretations (I think of Rogers, but it’s been several years since I actually read him so I’m not sure) are correct. He ends up pretty much saying what Loader says, but his argument is more comprehensive (it’s a book to Loader’s short essay). I’ll jot down a few things that I remember from it.

• When we protestants read the Bible, we make all kinds of judgments about what we must follow vs. what we need not follow today, following various kinds of logic. So for example, we discard the prohibitions against bacon and shrimp not only because they’re delicious, but also because Jesus declared all foods clean. The Apostle Paul also wrote a lot about this in Romans and Colossians.
• These arguments are not just about Old vs. New Testament commands, either; Jesus commended foot-washing. The Apostle Paul forbade braided hair and golden jewelry. He also commanded that men lift their hands when praying.
• To determine whether a particular biblical precept or prohibition is normative for today, then, we engage the text with some kind of logic or another. These we hope are coherent and consistent, and are not based solely on what feels good vs. icky to us.
• When we examine the prohibitions against sexual activity between two people of the same gender, we must try to understand how to interpret them. Are those commands like the Old Testament prohibitions of bacon and shrimp? Or the commands prohibiting sexual intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period?

  Alternately, are they like the New Testament commands to greet one another with a holy kiss, or to abstain from braids and jewelry? Or are they in the same vein as “Do not lie to one another”?

• Romans 1 seems to condemn same-sex sexual activity, but if that’s the common-sense interpretation of Romans 1:25–32, what’s the meaning of “you who pass judgment do the same things” (2:1)? The same things: what same things?

  Brownson explains it better than I ever could, but his point is that in order to explain the flow of the argument in 1:25 onward, the explanation must also say what 2:1–4 means. The rhetorical style seems to be that in 1:27–32, Paul takes the part of certain moralists of the day. Then in 2:1 he takes a sharp turn and shows why his readers must not just nod in smug agreement with the previous several sentences.

The short version is, Brownson convinced me, and Loader’s essay is a terrific shorter summary of part of Brownson’s argument.

But more important than a list of what specific sexual behaviors are permissible between which specific partners—about which reasonable, diligent, devoted disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ disagree—is the question of how we treat our neighbors (the subject of second greatest command, which is like the first, Jesus said in Matthew 22:38–39) and how we treat one another (John 13).

And that, as a former manager used to say, is all I know.

What is our hope?

I recently came upon Mary Jo Balistreri's lyrical, poignant essay, At the Window, in Issue 13 (spring 2017) of Minerva Rising. Balistreri was 71 when she wrote the essay, speaking of the present and the past, of her dead grandsons and her dying daughter, and her own failing body.

I re-read the essay during a week when I learned of two deaths. I met Bill, who was about my age, in the early 1980s; I last saw him a few years ago in Yosemite. He died in an automobile accident earlier this month. The next day, Marshall, 71, perished in an airplane crash. I served with Marshall several years ago in the coffee and hospitality crew at our church's San Mateo site.

My mind turned toward my own future as these events, and Balistreri's essay, seeped into my consciousness. I reminded myself that every day is a gift, that life is uncertain. And I thought about hope. Yesterday morning, the lovely Carol read to me from Frederick Buechner's Secrets in the Dark (HarperCollins, 2006) [author's site]:

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

And what does that mean about the future? What do we have to hope for, you and I? Humanly speaking, we have only the human best to hope for: that we will live out our days in something like peace and the ones we love with us; that if our best dreams are never to come true, neither at least will our worst fears; that something we find to do with our lives will make some little difference for good somewhere; and that when our lives end we will be remembered a little while for the little good we did. That is our human hope.

op. cit. pp. 63–64, in “A Room Called Remember”

Buechner goes on to describe a better, fuller hope.

Then death shall be no more, neither shall there be any mourning or crying. Then shall my eyes behold him and not as a stranger. Then his Kingdom shall come at last and his will shall be done in us and through us and for us.

loc. cit.

This is hope indeed. We pray to God, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” but speaking for myself I often fail to do what I know to be his will. Love my enemies, pray for my persecutors? I have the hope that one day I'll be fully willing and able to do all that.

But for today, I put one foot in front of the other. I ask for help. I fall down. I get up. And I remember, or try to, what God has done in my life and in the world, and I hope.

Isaiah, Merton, Rob

When we lived in Kobe (Japan), our pastor frequently spoke on the theme of the way we live our lives. A big problem we have, he said, is something he called “My Way.” I was reminded of this recently when he posted a photo of a printed prayer, with the caption “If you pray this sincerely from your heart, you will be given eternal life!” (roughly translated).

I expect that Pastor Rob composed that prayer, which reads in part: “I've gotten so tired of doing things my own way” (roughly translated. Actually all my translations are rough, so this is the last time I'll say that). The prayer goes on to describe an earnest desire to live God's way from now on.

I'll include the entire prayer below, but this contrast between “My Way” vs. “God's way” reminds me of another prophet—the Old Testament prophet Isaiah actually. One of Isaiah's famous quotes is from chapter 53, which you may have heard in Handel's Messiah:

All we like sheep have gone astray.
We have turned every one to his own way.
And the Lord hath laid on Him
the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53:6 (AV)

Isaiah writes about our ways vs. his ways a fair amount in these chapters. In chapter 55, for example, we read

Let the wicked forsake his way
    and the evil man his thoughts.
Let him turn to the Lord, and he will have marcy on him,
    and to our God, for he will surely pardon.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways“
                        declares the Lord.

Isaiah 55:6–8 (NIV 1984)

And what does that look like, to go my own way? Thomas Merton, a 20th century Trappist monk, writes very insightfully that

…I do not find in myself the power to be happy merely by doing what I like. On the contrary, if I do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable almost all the time.

No Man Is an Island 3.1 (p. 25)

The prudence of the flesh is opposed to the will of God. The works of the flesh will bury us in hell. If we know and love and act only according to the flesh, that is to say, according to the impulses of our own nature, the things we do will rapidly corrupt and destroy our whole spiritual being.

op. cit., 8.3 (p. 134)

According to Merton, the antidote to “My Way” isn't necessarily to join the military or monastery, where we're no longer free to act as we like. On the contrary, he writes that

…we must remember the importance and the dignity of our own freedom. A man who fears to settle his future by a good act of his own free choice does not understand the love of God. For our freedom is a gift God has given us in order that He may be able to love us more perfectly, and be loved by us more perfectly in return.

Love is perfect in proportion to its freedom. It is free in proportion to its purity. We act most freely when we act purely in response to the love of God. But the purest love of God is not servile, not blind, not limited by fear.

op. cit., 8.1–2 (pp. 132f)

So that's the thing: we act most freely by acting most purely in response to the love of God. This is a supernatural thing; it does not come naturally. Consequently, we need help.

Which brings me back to the prayer, which as I mentioned I believe is due to Pastor Rob.

天の神様
私にはあなたが必要です。
God of heaven: I need you
今へりくだって、あなたを呼び求めます。
Humbly now I call on you.
もう、自分のやり方でやって行く事に
疲れてしまいました。
I've totally gotten so tired of going my own way.
あなたのやり方で生きて行けるように助けてください。
Please help me to live life your way going forward.
私は、今、自分の人生の扉をあなたに向けて開きます。
I now open the door of my life to you.
あなたが私の主となり、救い主となってください。
Please be my Lord and Savior.
私の心にぽっかり空いた穴を聖霊で満たし、
私を完全な者にしてください。
Please send the Holy Spirit to fill the hole that opened up in my heart, and make me a perfect person.
主よ、私があなたを信頼できますように、
私があなたを愛せますように、
私があなたのために生きていけますように、
どうか私を助けてください。
Lord, please help me somehow—to be able to trust you, to make me love you, to live my life for you.
あなたの恵みと憐れみ、平安を私が理解できますよう、
私を助けてください。
Please help me to understand your grace and compassion and peace.
主よ、感謝します。 アーメン
Thank you Lord. Amen.

Thanks to my friend Shuji for checking my transcription, and for his suggestions on my translation. All remaining errors are mine.

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Update Monday morning, May 22: It struck me that this prayer can be a response to Matthew 11:28–30, where Jesus says

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Impressions - HIM 2017 conference Honolulu March 16

The lovely Carol went with me to the Hawaiian Islands Ministries 2017 conference. The conference started Thursday evening 3/16, which felt like drinking from a fire hose. I took a couple hours Friday morning to digest Thursday evening's notes...

Thursday's general session and the Jeff Vanderstelt "Gospel Fluency" session reinforced the centrality of the gospel in the life of the church, both for leaders/teachers/preachers but for every disciple.

So I've read Romans 1:16 (I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it's the power of God...) and 1 Corinthians 2 (I was determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ crucified) and 1 Corinthians 15 (gospel that saves you... that Christ lived and died and was raised according to the Scriptures... OK, it's 1 Cor 15:1-5), but I think yesterday's sessions (particularly David Choi and Jeff Vanderstelt) gave me a clearer understanding of Paul's mindset than I'd had before. Or reminded me of it.

In other words, I was somewhat surprised that we'd need a conference focused on a concept so basic to the faith, but upon reflection it shouldn't be surprising at all, because the idea of mercy is one that repels the mind. It crucifies pride and vainglory, and this is hard for flesh and blood to bear (with apologies to E.M. Bounds, but the idea's the same).

A video from Thailand, "Giving is the best communication," illustrates the theme of mercy. Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XADBJjiAO_0 That was shown Friday morning.

EXTREMELY long notes follow. You have been warned. Editorial comments shown like this

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Dan Chun: Today's youth see Christians as hypocritical, judgmental, anti-homosexual [etc.], unfortunately for good reason. Indeed, would Jesus say Mt 23:23 to us today? How much like Jesus are we in his outreach to the Gestapo of his day (the centurion), the Syrian refugees of his day (the Syro-Phoenician woman), the AIDS patients of his day (lepers), etc.?

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices--mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law--justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.

-- Matthew 23:23, NIV [1984]

We must remember what we've forgotten: that we've been shown mercy and we must show it to others (1 Ti 1:16).

But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life.

-- 1 Timothy 1:16, NIV [1984]

David Choi: The Greatest Challenge. It's not evangelism, prayer, or Bible study, or even loving our neighbor. The greatest challenge is to believe that I'm truly the beloved of God, and that for only one reason: the finished work of Jesus Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection.

(Reminds me of John 6:27)

"What must we do, to do the work God requires?"

Jesus answered, "This is the work of God: to believe in the one he has sent." [vaguely reconstructed from memory.]

The point is not: To do the work, you must believe. Rather, the point is: Believing is the work itself.

We want someone to know us with all our mess, and love us anyway, like Beauty loved the Beast. This makes it uncomfortable, so when Beauty comes to us, we push her away

Thus do smart women make foolish choices wrt nice guys. (Reminds me of the verse that says the gospel is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.)

Therefore, we we try to earn love. We are driven by the desire to earn applause: by getting good (perfect?) grades, by being funny and athletic, by having correct doctrine and preaching well. But unbelievers can do ministry: Matthew 7, Lord, Lord, didn't we drive out demons and prophesy and work many miracles in your name? Why does Jesus call them evildoers? Because they tried to justify themselves by their works.

(I want to check this interpretation with commentaries.)

Antidote: the prayer from Ephesians 3:14-21. Power is mentioned 3x. Is it power to prophesy, to evangelize, to do miracles? No, it's power to believe in Christ and be rooted in love and know his love.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians 3:14-21, NIV [1984]

(Reminds me of Col. 1:9-12, power to have endurance and patience)

Jeff Vanderstelt, Gospel Fluency (see the 2017 book): Big point here is that the good news of Jesus (cf. the greatest challenge) has something to say about everything in life. So when we talk about premarital sex, we shouldn't use purely hedonistic or public-health arguments; instead we should talk about the groom who pursued his filthy bride for years, who by his blood purchased a perfect wedding dress for her, and still waits for her.

(This is a valuable perspective, but I'm not 100% on board with it. When Jesus saw people jockeying for the best seats at a banquet, what did he say? Not some theological paradigm; his appeal was directly about avoiding embarrassment. In other words, it was practical/hedonistic... Luke 14:7-11)

When someone complains about being underpaid and unrecognized and poorly treated at work, we mustn't just empathize; we must also remind each other of Romans 6:23 and Paul's exhortation to work "as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving." (Col. 3:23f, NIV [1984])

(Key words above are "just" and "also": we must show love by truly listening and understanding, validating their feelings. But we must not stop there.)

What must we do to be able to do this?

1. Know and believe the gospel for all of my life. Do I love the gospel? Do I love Jesus? Has the gospel changed my life?
2. Regularly take thoughts captive (2 Cor. 10:4-5) When a stray thought comes, give it the Acts 17:11 treatment. Four helpful questions:
   • Who is God (what am I believing about who God is)?
   • What has he done (what am I believing about...)
   • Who am I? (ditto)
   • What do I do?
   The answer to the last reveals my thoughts about the first three. If I'm anxious, it might be because I think I should be in control but I'm not. And I think I should be, because I think God has lost control or isn't watching. And *that* I think because he's uncaring or inattentive.

   I may need someone to help me overcome my blind spots here. We must gain a hearing and show we understand (James 1:19f) but we must also speak Jesus and the gospel into their lives (Acts 20:26f, "I am innocent of the blood of all men, for I haven't hesitated to proclaim the whole will of God.", cf. Pr. 24:11f)

   It's not enough to say "God loves you," because that could be any old god, and besides what's love anyway? But if we say Romans 5:8, that's more definitive. Likewise, "God is powerful" isn't nearly as good as remarking on the resurrection of Jesus (Romans 1? yeah, 1:4). Or "God is present" isn't as good as saying that he's present in the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 3..., ah, Romans 5:4).

3. Immerse myself in a gospel-saturated community, where in every testimony we should ask ourselves, "Is Jesus the hero?" and after every meeting we should ask ourselves, "Was Christ proclaimed?"
4. Tell it to each other regularly

Those are steps toward gospel fluency.

Following are questions to ask myself... ourselves.

1. What about the gospel do we not know or are we unaware of?
2. What about the gospel have we forgotten?
3. What about the gospel don't we believe
4. How does the gospel speak to this situation?

If somebody cuts me off on the freeway and acts like I'm cheating, and I want to yell at him that I just came from the on-ramp and therefore was just doing what I'm supposed to... why am I so excited about that? I'm pursuing a righteousness that's predicated on this random guy's opinion of my driving? There's a lot about the gospel I'm forgetting!

“Did my best” doesn’t mean “Time to slack off”

Did I work hard for my success, or have I just been lucky? Have I always done my best? And will I tomorrow?

These ideas aren't fully developed, but here's where I'm heading: Looking back, I see that I have been astonishingly fortunate in life, but that doesn't mean I should rely on that luck to continue; if I want to continue being fortunate, I need to be diligent and alert to make the best of my fortunate circumstances. Similarly, if we think everyone is pretty much always doing their best, as Brené Brown and others say, that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to grow so that my 2017 best will be better than my 2007 best, say. And since I always like to think of what this means for those who follow Jesus, it struck me that the preceding is similar to the point that just because my past sins are forgiven, that doesn't mean I should just sin when I feel like it (Romans 6:1).

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David Brooks writes in a 2012 NY Times op-ed column, “The Credit Illusion”:

You should regard yourself as the sole author of all your future achievements and as the grateful beneficiary of all your past successes.
…

As an ambitious executive, it’s important that you believe that you will deserve credit for everything you achieve. As a human being, it’s important for you to know that’s nonsense.

What does he mean by all that? I can’t improve on Brooks’s writing, but I can summarize: Looking backward, you should recognize that a lot of your success is more about pure dumb luck—being born to the right parents, taking a class from the right teacher/professor, etc.—than it was about your brilliance and hard work, as I’ve written elsewhere. But looking forward, you need to focus on what you need to do to make the best use of the advantages that have fallen into your lap.

A similar oddity applies to the concept that people do the best they can; Curt Thompson writes in The Anatomy of the Soul (2010) about his mother, orphaned at age three. He had been angered, he said, by his mother’s passivity and resignation, but as he listened to her with a willingness to be touched by her story, he began to weep.

As if the proverbial scales had fallen from my eyes, I saw that she had not simply chosen to live her life the way she had. She had done the best she could without anyone to attend to her heart, to her emotional states, to her distresses and hopes. Her anxiety, fear, and passivity were not intentional; they were her coping strategy. Beginning at age four, she had developed strategies to ensure she didn’t tick anyone off, and this eventually included God. It was the only way she knew to ward off the overwhelming feelings of desertion, and she had maintained this defensive posture into adulthood. She had not actively chosen this path but rather had reacted unconsciously.

Curt Thompson, The Anatomy of the Soul (xv)

It was not only Thompson’s mother who had done her best, he realized: “I began to see that I, too, had lived my life as well as I could. No longer was I so ready to condemn myself as being not quite enough.” (op. cit., p. xvi).

Brené Brown presented a more generalized conclusion: that basically, everyone is doing the best they can. MaryAnn McKibben Dana writes about this, summarizing chapter 6 of Brown’s Rising Strong. One of Brown’s big ideas is, those who agreed that “everyone is are doing the best they can” were also on her list of “wholehearted” people: those willing to be vulnerable, and who believed in their own self-worth.

One such person is her husband, who says life works better if you think that way.

I say it’s similar to the luck “vs.” hard work thing, because when we think about the future, we need to make the effort to do our best, to be our best selves, to step up and, as New Testament authors write, “make every effort” to be our best and to do our best.

Speaking of the New Testament, we find there a similar division in how we think about the past vs. the future: in John 5, we’re told that (Jesus speaking) “he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come into judgment; he has passed out of death into life.” In 1 John 1 we read that “if we walk in the light…the blood of Jesus… cleanses us from all sin. …If we confess our sins, he… will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” So we are forgiven.

But how am I to live today? I should make every effort to obey what Jesus said—not because I won’t be forgiven, but because I am forgiven and because I’m also adopted as a child of God, and hence I want to be like him: to be characterized by love and mercy and justice more than by intelligence or competence or good looks.

So looking back, I want to be at peace that I did the best with what I had and who I was at the time. Looking forward, I want to grow and change to become the best person I can be—the best husband and father and brother and son, the best employee and mentor, the best neighbor and friend. So that, in the future, “the best I can” will be better than my best was last year, or what it is today.

Why follow God if he doesn’t guarantee health or wealth?

During a spiritual conversation, I happened to mention that God doesn’t guarantee career success or wealth or health or those things people often call “the good life.” He said, “Then why should I follow God?” I emailed my answer, a trimmed version of which follows.

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Dear Luke,
I’ve given more thought to your question, “Why follow God, if there’s no guarantee that things will go well?” We already talked about the inevitability of certain problems and the uncertainty of life, but I remembered this passage.

I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all. 

Ecclesiastes 9

There is no course of action that guarantees wealth, health, happy children, etc., but I can do things that make those outcomes more likely: love my wife (Ephesians 5), not exasperate my children (Ephesians 6), listen before speaking (James 1) and so on.

But the main thing I want to emphasize is the passage which says that in all things God works to make us more like Jesus (Romans 8:28-29). Just a simple example: suppose I was getting killed by a bunch of people. That happened to Jesus, and he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23). Or, back to Ephesians 5:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body.

So, I want to be like Jesus, who gives his life for the church; who prayed, “Father, forgive them.” Sure, it’s nice to be rich and to have a good job, etc. But when I die, will I be happy to see God?

Will I hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant”?

Will I have real life (Jesus said in John 17: This is life eternal, to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he sent)?

If I say I want that, then I’ll want to follow him today.

How is Jesus Christ the Savior? How does he save?

This time of the year, many of us sing or speak of the birth of Jesus Christ the savior. O Holy Night begins with these lines:

O holy night,
    the stars are brightly shining.
It is the night
    of the dear Savior’s birth.

One verse of Silent Night has a verse which ends: “Christ the Savior is born; / Christ the Savior is born. ”

Even a television show, A Charlie Brown Christmas, broadcast annually for the past half-century, includes an excerpt from Luke’s gospel:

⁸And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. ⁹And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. ¹⁰And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. ¹¹For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

Luke 2:8–11 (King James version)

So what do we mean when we speak or sing of Christ the Savio(u)r?

Thirty or even twenty years ago I probably would have spouted some evangelical jargon about what happens after you die, the summary being that because of Jesus, your eternal soul’s prospects can be good rather than bad.

Today I think I’d begin instead by talking about life here and now, because that’s what Jesus spoke mostly about. The short version would be that by following him, I can live a fruitful, meaningful life and become a good (well, better anyway) person. After explaining a bit more about that, if by then you don’t think I’m a total whack job, I might mention the hope that I can be with him in the world to come.

I might begin like this. You can read a lot these days about paths to success. Recent articles on Linkedin and in print media describe ways to appear more competent or intelligent. The power of such suggestions comes from the nagging doubts we have: Am I really okay? If I do these things that make other people think I’m competent and intelligent, maybe that will quell my own fears.

Such doubts also energize advertisements: maybe I can feel better about myself if I have these gadgets or clothes or this car, or if I live in this neighborhood. And maybe I can overcome my doubts about parenting if my kids get these grades or go to these schools.

These doubts, these insecurities, can poison my life and my relationships. Maybe I’ll pressure my kids to go to absurd lengths in pursuit of some name-brand school; maybe I’ll try to enhance my self-esteem by taking on a mortgage I can’t afford, or spend so much on cars or clothes or gadgets that my family faces constant financial stress.

About those kids: maybe they’ll rebel against the pressure; maybe they’ll crack; maybe they’ll buy into my anxieties and make them their own. So that when they’re at that name-brand school—or even if they aren’t—they’ll contantly wonder, “Am I okay, really? Am I good enough?” That way my destructive legacy can live on—not a happy prospect.

What I’ve described is a kind of life that we need saving from, and by “we” I mean people like you and me. So how can that happen? How can you and I escape the pressure brought about by our doubts and insecurities?

The promise of salvation in Jesus Christ begins, for me at least, with the knowledge that I’m forgiven. Consider that famous verse from John’s gospel, “God loved the world so much that he sent his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). I’ll write more about eternal life in a bit; let’s consider the word “perish.”

When I think about “perish,” the image that comes to mind is an overripe banana. Now that’s perishable! In a way, all of us are perishable in the way that a banana is; one day, you and I and everyone we know will get to room temperature, and unless our bodies are burned or something, they will all rot.

There’s a picture, then, of a useless life: we live, we accumulate possessions, we become room temperature, and our bodies are burned or buried. That’s “perish.”

About “believe”: What does it mean to believe in God’s Son? What must we believe when we “believe in” him? Among many things said of Jesus in the gospels, the claim that he takes away sins is pretty important. In John 1:29, John the Baptist refers to Jesus as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” I’ve written about this elsewhere (also here) but the short version is that unless we believe his promise enough to act on it, then it won’t have much of an effect on our lives.

In other words, it’s not magical in the sense that if I say some special phrase, the gods are compelled to do something; it’s more like if I’m hanging off a cliff by my fingernails and someone dangles a rope in front of me, the rope won’t do me any good unless I believe in it enough to grab it. The promise of forgiveness in Jesus doesn’t do me any good if I’m trying to find redemption through buying a bigger house or more toys, or by pressuring my kids to get better grades to get into a better school, or by looking smarter or more competent. I’ve got to accept forgiveness and stop my frantic pursuit of the false promise of so-called “success,” or I’ll continue to poison my life and relationships…

OK, now about eternal life. I don’t quite understand what form our immortal souls take, or what the world to come is about, but the New Testament authors make quite a big deal about it—almost as big a deal as modern evangelicals do!

All kidding aside, though, something I think of is the promise from 2 Peter 1, which talks about adding knowledge and other virtues to our faith; in verse 8 he writes “For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they will render you neither useless nor unfruitful…” Let me invert that and say that we can be fruitful and useful with the qualities he mentions: faith, knowledge, goodness, brotherly kindness and so on. The point I want to make, though, aside from those qualities, is the goal of all that, viz., to have a fruitful, useful life.

If my life is fruitful and useful, then the effects will remain after I’ve left this earth. Which may not be eternal life exactly, but would, I hope, be better than having a life whose effects all perish with my corpse.

And that in the end is what I want to be saved from: a life that ends when the undertaker’s bill is paid off. And that’s what Jesus saves me from: by assuring me that my sins are forgiven, he makes it possible for me to become something useful, rather than the alternative of poisoning everything in a wrong-headed attempt to escape my demons.

Science and Faith (not by Mary Baker Eddy)

Yesterday's talk on "Science and Faith" was enlightening. A key insight was that some study science for many of the same reasons that some study faith. These sets overlap, as in the case of our speaker, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, an oceanographer and former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. (I'll not comment on Jefferts Schori's theology, except to say it came up only peripherally in yesterday's talk.)

So why do people study science? And faith? For one thing, they (we) are inspired by wonder and a desire for understanding. We bring passion to our study: a love of beauty and excellence. An elegant theory is a beautiful one, in both fields.

Both science and faith have history and tradition; both are done in community. And in both fields, advancement comes from questions. (Questions can also bring trouble, which occurs to me just as I type these notes.)

Change is often resisted by the community, but if the community is healthy, new ideas are evaluated according to their merits. The Bereans, for example, upon hearing new ideas from Paul and Silas, judged these ideas for their content, rather than on their political implications (Acts 17:11). Contrast this with the reactions of the Thessalonians in Acts 17:5-7.

Science, too, has good examples and bad. The good examples we consider normative and typical, as we'd like them to be. But bad examples abound. Think of Semmelweis and hand-washing, Galileo and his debunking of Aristotle, or the chilly reception the Big Bang theory got in the previous century.

So religion and science have more similarities than I'm accustomed to think. This puts me in mind of a class Carol and I took some time back, "Encountering the World of Islam," where a key insight for me was that there are a lot more similarities than differences.

Differences there are, to be sure—fundamental differences in fact. But similarities abound. In science and faith, in Islam and Christianity, there are good characters and bad, those motivated by truth and those motivated by self-interest. Well, that's a bit simplistic; we all have mixed motives, but some are more willing, perhaps more able, to accept truth when it surprises them.

Math == Theology?

During the Q&A period after the talk, a man across the room said that with new ideas in science, we can test them via evidence. If people can run experiments similar to yours and get similar results, they can confirm the theory. But for theology, where's the evidence?

The bishop replied that there's the evidence of a life well-lived, but that the time scale is quite different.

But I was stuck on the idea of running experiments. You can run experiments in physics or chemistry or even psychology. Neuroscience. But mathematics? (I studied math in college.)

A mathematical proof is an argument by which you try to force the other guy to accept your claim. Well, all scientific proofs are, I guess, but you can't run math experiments very easily; you appeal to past results, you apply axioms and rules and theorems to one formula to get another, and someone can say you've made an incorrect inference, if you have. But there's no experimenting.

And theology? God doesn't necessarily cooperate with any experiments. You want a control? God won't be controlled.

Postscript: Questions

Jefferts Schori mentioned that advancement comes through questions, and it occurred to me while typing that questions sometimes bring trouble. We see this in Genesis 3, where an accusation comes in the guise of a question—a question asked by the devil in the guise of a serpent! I think honest questions that spring from honest curiosity—or even honest doubt—are great and must be encouraged. But we need to pay attention and to be discerning lest we drift away, as the writer to the Hebrews (2:1) warns.

The Lord himself said, be as shrewd as snakes (Matthew 10:16); the Apostle Paul wrote, "I want you to be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil." The Apostle Peter tells us to be on the alert (1 Peter 5:8)—not against questions, but against the accuser.

The way of power, and the way of love.

This morning's sermon included some words from Henri Nouwen's book, In the Name of Jesus. I didn't quite start crying, though the words obviously made an impression on me—particularly Nouwen's comments about his powerful self vs. the vulnerable self. The powerful self can produce things, accomplish things, prove things, influence things. The vulnerable self finds itself in feeling loved by Jesus.

That's profound, but where I almost lost it was the story of Henri and Bill's trip to Washington DC, which I'll copy/paste from this page:

Once when asked to speak at the Center for Human Development in Washington, D. C., on Christian Leadership in the 21st century, Nouwen decided that to be true to what he was going to say, he should go in partnership — two by two as the Gospel says — with one of his mentally handicapped friends, Bill Van Buren. So he told Bill, “We are doing this together. You and I are going to Washington to proclaim the Gospel.”

Together they flew to Washington, got settled in their hotel, and went to the conference. When the time came for the address, after being introduced, Nouwen took out his handwritten text and began his talk. At that moment, he noticed Bill had left his seat and come up to the podium, planting himself right behind him. Thought Nouwen, “It was clear that Bill had a much more concrete idea about ‘doing it together’ than I did.” Each time I finished a page, he took it away and put it upside down on a small table close by.

When Nouwen began to speak about the temptation to turn stones into bread as a temptation to be relevant, Bill interrupted and said loudly, for all to hear, “I have heard that before!”

When Nouwen came to the second part and was reading the words, “The question most asked by the handicapped people with whom I live was, “Are you home tonight?” Bill interrupted and said, “That’s right, that is what John Smeltzer always asks.”

Then, said Nouwen, “After I had finished reading my text and people had shown their appreciation, Bill said to me, ‘Henri, can I say something now?’” Said Nouwen, “My first reaction was, ‘Oh, how am I going to handle this? He might start rambling and create an embarrassing situation?’”

Bill took the microphone and said, with all the difficulties he had in speaking, “Last time, when Henri went to Boston, he took John Smeltzer with him. This time he wanted me to come with him to Washington, and I am glad to be here with you. Thank you very much.” Everyone stood and gave him warm applause.

On the way back, on the airplane, Bill said, “Henri, did you like our trip?” “Oh, yes,” I answered, “it was a wonderful trip, and I am so glad you came with me.” Bill looked at me attentively and then said, “And we did it together, didn’t we?”

Said Nouwen, “Then I realized the full truth of Jesus’ words, “Where two or three meet in my Name, I am among them” (Matthew 18:20) In the past, I had always given lectures, sermons, addresses, and speeches by myself. Often I had wondered how much of what I said would be remembered. Now it dawned on me that most likely much of what I said would not be long remembered, but that Bill and I doing it together would not easily be forgotten.” (In The Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, Henri J. M. Nouwen, Crossroads: New York, 1989.)

From https://skokiecentralchurch.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/2010-08-22-“all-bent-out-of-shape”-luke-13-10-17/

Love and grace are evident here, in abundance. This story, and Nouwen's words about the powerful vs. the vulnerable self, put me in mind of the words from John 1: and of his fullness all we have received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses [but] grace and truth came by Jesus Christ: truth in the sense of my true self (vs. the powerful yet false self) and grace in particular by being a conduit (not a sink) for the unmerited favor & love I receive every moment of every day. As a conduit of grace, I am called among other things to be gentle: A bruised reed he will not break, as the prophecy says, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.