"Christianity Today" Cover Story on Lynching, Monuments, and Repentance

D.L. Mayfield writes the cover story for September's Christianity Today, focusing on a memorial that is being put together by a group called the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which is led by Bryan Stevenson.  Mayfield writes about lynching, the focus of the memorial:

"More than 4,000 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and the rise of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s.  Lynching was a brutal public tactic for maintaining white supremacy, frequently used with the tacit blessing of government authorities.  It was a part of my heritage I had never been taught, despite my homeschool community's heavy focus on American history and despite brave efforts by Ida B. Wells, perhaps the 19th century's most famous anti-lynching voice, to draw attention to the epidemic." (37)

She describes how Stevenson came around to the idea of the memorial:

"Stevenson became enamored with the idea of creating spaces for truth telling.  "We don't have many places in our country where you can have an honest experience with lynchings and racial terror," he said...So Stevenson decided to make one.  Next summer, EJI will unveil a memorial where visitors will be confronted with large tablets hanging from a square structure, visual reminders of more than 800 counties where lynchings took place.  The visual - so many markers engraved with so many names - will transform a hill overlooking downtown Montgomery, Alabama, into a place of mourning and remembrance, a place to lament and perhaps even to corporately confess.

"The Memorial for Peace and Justice, as it will be called, will also encompass a field spreading next to the main structure.  In that field, each hanging tablet will have an identical twin resting on the ground, invoking an eerie similarity to headstones.  These markers will be for counties themselves to collect.  Stevenson dreams of groups journeying to Montgomery, collecting their rightful part of lynching history, and displaying it prominently back in their towns and cities.  If people from a particular locale choose not to claim their piece, it will sit in stark relief on that Montgomery hilltop, a conspicuous token of unowned sin." (38)

Mayfield cites many scripture passages that emphasize communal sin and corporate confession.  In Daniel 9, Daniel confesses to another generation's sins and includes himself in them.  In Luke 11, Jesus claims that a particular generation will hold particular responsibility for the blood of prophets shed in the past.

She continues to explore the topic of confession in conversation with work by sociologist Michael Young.  As she cites him, Young demonstrates that twin emphasis on both individual sin and corporate sin led Christians to contribute to the temperance and anti-slavery movements in the 19th century:

"Take, for example, the concluding statement of an anti-slavery resolution passed by the First Church of West Bloomfield, New York, in 1837: "And in this we pledge ourselves as individuals and as a church."  Sentiments like these, common among abolitionists, obligated both institutions and worshipers to confess as a way to end national sins and spare their own souls from the fallout." (41)

To conclude this post, I was struck by a point Young made about protests:

"That is the key similarity Young sees between confessional movements of old and what Stevenson hopes to accomplish through EJI and the lynching memorial: an element of personal transformation that goes deeper than the moral outrage of so many modern protests.  "The crucial idea at the heart of 'confessional protest' is that it doesn't have the same self-righteous component to it," Young said.  "The person bearing witness is sort of implicating herself as part of the problem." (41)

This is very insightful.  Can protests and memorials be confessional?  I hope so.  The person who has known the grace of Christ and how it has touched and transformed sin will continue to own this confessional spirit - that 'I' am a big part of the problem - as a vision is articulated for what a city could be, what it means to be a citizen, and what is the reconciliation we yearn for.  It will lend to protests a mournful spirit, and to memorials a sense that it's important not only to remember events of history which depict us as we like to think of ourselves, but also events of history which depict us at our worst.  We will confess individually, but also understand the power of confessing corporately, like Daniel, on behalf of others, regardless of whether history would absolve us individually.  Despite tragic history, a spirit of confession will build bonds that will not be easily broken.

Lawns

Andy Crouch writes about the "world" of "grass and dirt, worms and beetles, trees and fields" that children discover.  Or, at least the world they've been able to discover in generations past:

"The world is lost to many of our children, and to ourselves.  Even the "nature" that surrounds many of our homes is shallow in a technological way.  A typical suburban lawn depends on many technological devices, each of which makes something far easier than it was for previous generations: lawn mowers, pesticides and fertilizers, highly refined seed, and automatic sprinklers.  The lawn itself is a kind of outdoor technological device, composed of uniform green grass, kept crew-cut short, with little variety or difference.

He continues on the subject of lawns:

"A peasant family in the Middle Ages had none of this technologically uniform pleasantness.  They would not have had a lawn, or possibly even a yard.  Their children would have wandered out into meadows and perhaps the thin edges of forests.  A meadow has countless different species of grasses and other plants, plus flowers in the spring and summer, of different heights and habits.  If you pay attention, you cannot possibly get bored in a meadow.  It is all too easy to be bored on a lawn." (The Tech-Wise Family, 144-145)

I won't lie: my backyard lawn does not look good right now.  Is it ok that this passage made me feel better about that?!

Andy, if you want to see a lawn with countless different species of "grasses", come on over to my house!

Conversation

This comes from Andy Crouch's book The Tech-Wise Family, commitment number 7 - "Car time is conversation time:"

"The author Sherry Turkle, who has done so much to help us realize the dangers to real relationship that come along with technology's promised benefits, suggests in her book Reclaiming Conversation that most conversations take at least seven minutes to really begin.  Up until that point, we are able to rely on our usual repertoire of topics - the weather, routine reports about our day, minimal and predictable chitchat.  But around seven minutes, there is almost always a point where someone takes a risk - or could take a risk.  The risk may be silence; it may be an unexpected question or observation; it may be an expression of a deeper or different emotion than we usually allow.  All true conversations, really, are risks, exercises in improvisation where we have to listen and respond without knowing, fully, what is coming next, even out of our own mouths."

What implications does this have for our device-usage?  More Crouch:

"The tragedy of our omnipresent devices, Turkle suggests, is the way they prevent almost any conversation from unfolding in this way.  A conversation interrupted several times before the seven-minute mark does not get deeper more slowly; it stays shallow, as each party makes room for the other to opt out and return to their device.  What might be on the other side of the seven-minute mark, we never find out." (157-158)

This is fascinating to me: why seven minutes?  What is it about humans that is simultaneously risk-averse with other people, and also risk-inclined to the point that given enough time and the right settings, we naturally, eagerly, take risks in conversation with others.

Obviously, we're fallen people and there are folks who could use this to manipulate others.  We should be extremely careful to "take risks" in conversation with people who could betray our trust or tempt us away from covenental relationships to spouse, family, church.  But in a society that can be so relentlessly shallow where we don't take risks in conversation with anybody, where our not trusting people has nothing to do with their trustworthiness and everything to do with our determination to hide from others, we should see if we can stay put in a conversation for seven minutes.

Portable computers have probably taken their toll and made all of us more indifferent to person-to-person conversation than we used to be.  I love the creativity of a family that takes stock of that and begins to revitalize the art of conversation - not in a Victorian-era drawing room, not at a dinner party - but in the car on the way to the soccer game!

Singing

Today is the first day in a long time that our nearly-two year old son was simply too excited to take a nap.  It just so happens that he is also on the verge of realizing he can climb out of his own crib.  Being as awake as he was, making it all the more likely that he just might have a go at climbing out, Jess and I agreed I would hover near his room so I could run in and, you know, make a diving catch.  With the monitor in one hand and a book in the other, I could hear him cycle through all the songs we sang in the car today.  He'd lie down for a moment, and then another one would pop into his head.  He's a musical little person!

I share this because the timing was just right to read Andy Crouch's chapter on singing in his book The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in its Proper Place.  I was looking forward to this chapter because when Jess and I heard him speak about his book Culture Making at Whitworth University a few years ago, he incorporated his piano-playing into his presentations to great effect.  That is to say: occasionally he would illustrate his points about theology and culture using music and the way music shapes the soul.

The ninth of his ten commitments that make up the book The Tech-Wise Family concerns singing: "We learn to sing together, rather than letting recorded and amplified music take over our lives and worship." (183)

He writes:

"It is absolutely possible to learn to really sing.  You may or may not be able to learn to sing on pitch, but you can learn to sing with heart, mind, soul, and strength.  The best time to begin to learn is in childhood, when our brains are primed for learning, our neuromuscular system is most able to be trained to connect mind with strength, and we are fearlessly willing to try something new.  And of all the components of well-led worship, singing is the one that is most immediately accessible and engaging to children (listening to sermons takes a while longer!).

"So the tech-wise family will do everything in their power to involve their children from the earliest possible age in expressions of church that model this kind of worship - not just the pleasant ditties of Sunday school or "children's church" but the full-throated praise that can come from people of every generation gathered in the presence of God.  Maybe that isn't the Sunday-to-Sunday reality where you worship (it's only sometimes so in our own church), but it's worth exposing our children to the communities and places that have kept alive the powerful tradition of Christian song.

"And as much as possible, we'll sing at home, when friends and family gather, as we clean up the kitchen and fold the laundry, as we celebrate holidays like Christmas and Easter, when we get up in the morning and when we lullaby ourselves to sleep.  Our singing will be nothing like the auto-tuned, technologically massaged pop music that provides the bland sound track for consumer life; it will be the sort of singing you only can do at home, where you are fully known and fully able to be yourself.  And it will be a rehearsal for the end of the whole story, when all speech will be song and the whole cosmos will be filled with worship." (192-193)

Our son clearly didn't 'lullaby himself to sleep' this afternoon.  But as I read this earlier while looking at the squirming, singing toddler in the monitor, I think the first paragraph I've quoted above rings particularly true: "singing is the (component) of worship that is most immediately accessible and engaging to children."

I was involved in a memorial service recently in which the hymns we chose to sing were songs the deceased actually loved to sing and everybody knew it.  You may have favorite songs to listen to.  But what are your favorite songs to sing?  Songs that you might simply find yourself singing in an absent-minded moment?  Songs that a loved one or a family member or a friend might associate with you?  What songs do you hear and immediately think of someone else who may be still alive or perhaps has died?  In what ways are your most precious moments of life or of discerning the reality of God or of the gift of existence all sometimes bound up inescapably with music?  

Does Poetry Matter?

I remember going over to my best friend's house on a Sunday when I was young.  Plates of lasagna, bread, and salad were passed around as I sat down to lunch with their family of five.  Before everyone sat down though, there was a collective stir as they looked for a book.  That book turned out to be a poetry anthology.  It was passed around and everybody read a poem out loud for everybody else.

This memory has passed through my mind several times in the last month.  Here's the funny thing about poetry: it doesn't have a point.  Most people know that, but they know it in the derogatory sense.  I mean it in a positive way.  I see people reading huge law textbooks in Starbucks or in Barnes and Noble.  That's a text that's a means to an end - they'll be able to practice law.  A John Grisham book is a means to an end - its a cliffhanger and you want to know what happens.  Whether for school or for relaxation, something's driving that text forward, and when you get out of it what you need, you no longer need it.

Can you think of anything you read that isn't a means to an end?  Where if somebody asked you why you were reading it, you really wouldn't know what to say?

Poetry doesn't have a point.  It is an end in itself.  Words that are put together merely for the sake of...enjoyment?  And yet of course, its not so much that poetry doesn't have a point.  Its that poetry is about everything.  A critic has written that he was puzzled in his first and second reading of The Iliad.  For all that the story seemed to be about the rescue of Helen, the poem sure didn't spend a lot of time on it.  On further readings, he realized The Iliad was not a means to an end to hear what would happen with Helen.  It was about that, but it was also about anger, honor, ships and home.  But even then, its not so much about those things, as it is a way to taste those things and feel their pull on you.  You can't summarize something like that.

For perhaps this very reason, poetry has needed to be defended as a good pursuit from time to time.  In our anxious, pragmatic, no-time-to-think age, it may be that time again.  Philip Sidney wrote a book called A Defense of Poetry in the 1500s.  The poetry he has in mind is primarily old myths and epics like Homer's Iliad or Virgil's Aeneid.

In one passage, Sidney compares the poet favorably to the philosopher and historian.  The poet will be the better, more thorough communicator:

"The philosopher, therefore, and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example; but both, not having both, do both halt.  For the philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him until he be old, before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest.  For this knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand.  On the other side the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is; to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things; that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.  Now doth the peerless poet perform both; for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it, by some one by whom he pre-supposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example."

The philosopher is "hard of utterance" and "misty."  Being the student of the philosopher is a gamble. You have to wade through it for a long time, trusting that you'll get some clarity eventually.  This is because what is being explained is so "abstract" and "general."  Only a few can understand what the philosopher says.  Fewer still can apply it.

The historian, on the other hand, is so tied to "the particular truth of things" that the "example draweth no necessary consequence."  The historian is journalistic - capturing the details and nuances of how things are actually done.  But, of course, this hardly addresses the question of how things ought to be done.  So the philosopher has plenty of vision, but its hard to understand and even harder to apply.  The historian has very practical content, but it lacks vision.*

I recognize both of these caricatures.  Perhaps any of us would.  Perhaps most of us have some of the philosopher and historian duking it out within us.  The 'philosopher' side of us holds to strict principles but struggles to explain them fully to anyone much less persuasively.  The 'historian' side of us just does what we need to do to get by and doesn't reflect too much on what ought to be done.  We try to live the best we can, and we don't try to persuade anyone of anything so much as we try to just live at peace with others and with the status quo.

So how does the poet fare?  Sidney claims the poet does both.  All the obscure mistiness of the philosopher becomes vivid and visible in some figure like Dido from The Aeneid or Achilles from The Iliad.  And the nitty-gritty feel of reality in which the historian trades is densely interwoven with a general sense of what is virtuous and worthy of emulation or vicious and fit to be shunned.  As Sidney puts it, "the peerless poet performs both."

I think this is deeply relevant for how we perceive God working in our midst and how we reflect upon our role as being his ambassadors.  I came to sense God's reality very strongly during college.  As I work in the ministry and yearn for heart change and deep sensitivity to God's ways to be a lively part of peoples' lives, I've reflected back on that college time - what was it?  What moved me so much?  The Holy Spirit, no doubt.  But as I've thought beyond that, what I keep coming back to is that I found Christ in his full gracious, redeeming, putting-sin-to-death-on-his-cross glory to be quite beautiful.  It was not the philosopher's obscure argument (although some of those helped later).  It was not in the historian's good advice on how to be happier or better-adjusted (although I've profited much from good advice).  I think what Sidney knows about poetry is what I know about beauty: it has the power to change hearts.  When you find something beautiful, or noble, or delicious, or satisfying, you more or less become an evangelist for it on the spot.  You don't have to talk yourself into it.

As I think back to my friend and his Sunday family ritual, I remember that he didn't remember any grand reason "why" they read poetry.  They just did.

That makes more sense to me now.



*Any observations I have here are tied firmly to Sidney's descriptions and don't necessarily have anything to do with the way philosophy or history are actually done now

(Now and Then) There's a Fool Such as I

Andy Crouch has written a book called The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in its Proper Place.  The book is structured around ten commitments for what I would call a critical appreciation for technology, and ordering it toward Christian flourishing.

His first commitment is about how we learn wisdom in our families.  But, along the way, being part of a family shows us what fools we are:

"Two great things happen in families - at least, families at their best.  For one, we discover what fools we are.  No matter how big your house, it's not big enough to hide your foolishness from people who live with you day after day.  We misunderstand each other, we misunderstand ourselves, and we certainly misunderstand God (when we remember him at all).  In our families we see the consequences of all that misunderstanding.  Our busyness, our laziness, our sullenness, our short tempers, our avoidance of conflict, our boiling-over conflicts - living in a family is one long education in just how foolish we can be, children and adults alike.

"And yet a second amazing thing happens in families at their best.  Our foolishness is seen and forgiven, and it is also seen and loved.  As the British writer G.K. Chesterton put it in his book Charles Dickens, this is the secret of "ordinary and happy marriage": "A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke.  Each has discovered that the other is a fool, but a great fool.  This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect." (Crouch, 53-54)

Occasionally, I feel obliged to remind people that though I may seem fairly serious in public, in my own home, I'm quite ridiculous.  It's often struck me that people often say the same thing about themselves in response. Maybe we've all experienced what Crouch is talking about.  Some of us may be more large, gross and gorgeous (!) fools than others!  But at least we can know this with great affection and even respect.

"A Hush Must Fall Upon Our Hearts"

Ronald Knox, in writing about the beginning of the Lord's Prayer, articulates the importance of a reverential silence:

"Surely he would have us remind ourselves that the presence into which we enter when we pray is one of infinite majesty, to which words can do no justice; all the praises and aspirations we can offer are a kind of profanation; silence is the best tribute we can pay.  We have not learned much about prayer until we have learned that an attitude of loving expectancy, of waiting upon God and allowing our souls to be overcome by the thought of his greatness, is the first preparation we need.  We are to call him our Father, with childlike confidence in his love for us; but, having so addressed him, we are not to plunge straight into the business of petition, as if nothing could possibly be of more importance than the needs which we feel at the moment, as if nothing could possibly interest him except our petty concerns, our importunate anxieties.  The citizens of that heaven in which he dwells cry "Holy, holy, holy" before him day and night; shall not we do well to tune our voices to that chorus of praise, before we dare to ask him for anything?  Hallowed be his name; a hush must fall upon our hearts, a pause must be made in our tumultuous thoughts, before the right atmosphere can be established in which we, creatures of a day, can approach him who dwells in inaccessible light, the sovereign Ruler of Creation." (Pastoral and Occasional Sermons, 29)

Some Thoughts on Biblical Community

In John 17:20-26, Jesus prays that the unity of the church would reflect the unity he has with his Father.  In her insightful book about small groups, Theresa Latini writes about Jesus' prayer, particularly the Greek word koinonia, which translates as joint participation or mutual indwelling:

"On the eve of his arrest, Jesus prayed for the unity of all believers with God and each other for the sake of the world.  In so doing, he pointed toward the ontological reality of koinonia - a multidimensional union and communion of the greatest possible intimacy and integrity.  This koinonia constitutes the being of God, the church, all humanity, even the cosmos.  It defines the identity of the church and orders all its practices." (Latini, The Church and the Crisis of Community: A Practical Theology of Small Group Ministry, 75)

Latini goes on to describe the breadth of this indwelling:

"Koinonia is multidimensional: it is comprised of five interlocking relationships: 1) the koinonia of the Trinity; 2) the koinonia of the incarnate Son Jesus Christ; 3) the koinonia between Christ and the church; 4) the koinonia among church members; and 5) the koinonia between the church and the world.  In all these koinonia relationships, the Holy Spirit is the mediator of communion...Jesus indwells the Father; the church indwells Jesus; the members of the church indwell one another and the world.  This multi-stranded union cannot be severed." (Latini, 77)

'Indwelling' is language normally reserved for places and locations.  Yet here, our lives are the places where God takes residence through Christ and the Spirit.  And Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are 'places' where we take residence.  Furthermore - and this is where Latini draws her observations for biblical community - we indwell one another.  Our lives are places where others take up residence.

Well, unfortunately this is where the word 'crisis' comes into play in Latini's book.  Guided by sociologist Robert Putnam's research in his classic book Bowling Alone, Latini describes a steady withdrawal from community: 

"In the past 35 years, Americans have become 10-15 percent less likely to voice their views publicly by running for office or by writing Congress or the local newspaper; 15-20 percent less interested in politics and public affairs; 25 percent less likely to vote; 35 percent less likely to attend public meetings; 40 percent less involved in political and civic organizations in general." (Latini)

Latini ascribes a great deal of this to the erosion of personal skills, leading to a lack of trust in those around us, which then leads to a lack of obligation:

"The community's role in our moral formation also has been undermined by the dynamics of modernity.  Illness, death, insanity, and deviance are technical matters handled by experts rather than moral issues handled by communities.  Institutions hide these moral issues by "sequestering" the persons who suffer from them.  Hidden from our daily view, the kinds of existential issues that call for ethical action do not confront us directly.  More generally, relationships of trust are disembedded from community.  We trust expert systems - transportation systems, banking systems, utility companies, medical establishments, and so forth - to help us function with ease on a daily basis.  We depend not on people we know and love but on abstract systems.  These systems "deskill."  Few of us have friends or neighbors who can help us with our plumbing, electricity, computers, or cars; fewer of us can sustain these basic systems ourselves.  So we depend on and trust representatives of organizations who market their skills to us.  Outside of the context of trust that is personal, their sense of obligation to us may be weak, and we may have little incentive to become loyal customers.  Our commitment to each other is not based on concern for our mutual well-being; instead, it is based on efficiency and ease." (Latini, 19-20)

In this paragraph, Latini capably does two things.  She shows how it might not feel like we have a crisis of community thanks to our expert systems.  They seem to keep things going pretty well.  But by trusting 'experts', we are forgetting what it means to trust one another.  "Relationships of trust are disembedded from community."  We are in community, but we don't invest as much trust in it.  We hold it at arms length.  "Our commitment to each other is not based on concern for our mutual well-being; instead, it is based on efficiency and ease."  In other words, our commitment to one another is measured not in terms of what we do for others, but what we get out of it.  

And, of course, if this is true, we've come quite far from the biblical sense of koinonia.

What can be done?  This breakdown of community provides the historical background for small group programs at churches:

"Sociologist Robert Putnam identifies small groups as one of four countertrends to the depletion of social capital in the United States.  Two small-group ministries are described as "exceptional cases in which creative social entrepreneurs (are) moving against the nationwide tide and creating vibrant new forms of social connectedness." (Latini, 33)

Perhaps members of small groups will recognize themselves in what people reported about the power of small groups:

"The proliferation of small groups, whether inside or outside the church, is fueled by acute psychosocial and spiritual yearnings of people living in the United States in late modernity.  People gather in small groups to experience or enhance a connection to God, a connection to others, and often a connection to their truest selves.  The vast majority of participants report significant positive changes in their experience of God, of themselves, and of others." (Latini, 32)

So small groups can help us re-invest in community and get outside of ourselves.  Yet, small groups can sometimes perpetuate our focus on ourselves:

"Yet Wuthnow, Putnam, and Minnick do not praise small groups without reserve.  Putnam notes that many groups foster bonding social capital to the neglect of bridging social capital.  Minnick warns that self-help groups cannot cure our cultural fragmentation.  And Wuthnow vividly illustrates that small groups simultaneously mitigate and accommodate individualism: "Small groups are colored by the same shades of individualism that pervade the rest of our society," he says.  "Just because people are joining support groups, we should not conclude that they have made the needs of others a priority in their lives.  They may be seeking community but only finding themselves." (Latini, 34)

I think there are several take-aways from all this.  First, there is some comfort in knowing that our resistance to being part of any sort of community outside of our own family is not just our own unique selfishness, but is really a societal trend.  Our society itself bends and moves us in such a way that we find this a plausible and good way to live.  A biblical understanding of sin, as Fleming Rutledge described it in her recent book The Crucifixion, is never just a matter of personal behavior, but the Bible describes sin as a power that acts upon us.  So as Christians we learn to pay attention not only to behavioral sins, but also to the way sin acts upon us through the well-traveled grooves by which we make our way in the world.  Second, as we find out about ways we are implicated in sinful ways of living, we are always free to begin to yearn, pray, and take steps to live a different way.  An awareness of these trends can give us a lens to see when we are viewing small groups only as opportunities to find ourselves, but we aren't very interested in actually loving others.  And when we become aware of it, we can begin to engage with God in a new way, knowing that God is the one who removes our hearts of stone and gives us a heart of flesh that longs to run the way of God's commands.  Finally, I'm reminded of Jesus' command to be hospitable to those who can't repay us. (Luke 14:12-14)  Becoming attentive to the ways that we enter into community for our own sake can then liberate us for entering into community for substantial and sacrificial friendship.  Maybe we would not only find ourselves obeying the command of our Savior, but maybe we would also find ourselves living into a new day of mutual trust and of mutual obligation toward one another in our country.  

Dry Creeks

Dana Allin was with us yesterday, speaking to us about "dry creeks."  Elijah prophesies drought for Israel.  Then, when he is driven out, he is driven to a place where he is fed by ravens and where he drinks from a riverbed.  Israel, full of worship of false gods, will go thirsty.  Elijah, hungering for the true God, is fed.  As a member of our church put it to me the other day, "it's all about priorities, right?"  Yes, it is, my friend.  Yes, it is.

Ahab, the bad king of Israel, "was willing to sacrifice a singular devotion to God for the sake of security, money, power, status, prestige, and comfort."  Whether its our appearance, our 401ks, our jobs, our food, or our families - we are like Israel, ready to sacrifice a singular devotion to God for the sake of these things.  Dana was encouraging his son in his tennis endeavors.  But was it about his son?  Or was it about himself?  "Dad, is this your dream or mine?"  Gotcha.  Right between the eyes.  How easy it is to live our own unfulfilled dreams through the next generation.  Are your dreams unfulfilled?  Are mine?  I think of the Trinity.  The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit exist in perfect love and unity.  They see one another.  They regard one another.  They glorify and magnify one another.  They love one another.  And if I share in this divine company by grace, if I am a participant in God's life by Christ's cross, why am I so restless and unfulfilled?  Why is grace so dissatisfying to me that I must pursue YOLO (you only live once) experiences and novelties to remind myself I'm alive?

Listen to theologian William Cavanaugh on consumerism:

"Consumerism is the remarkable ability to be detached even from those things...to which we are most obviously attached.  But the detachment of consumerism is not just the willingness to sell anything.  The detachment of consumerism is also a detachment from the things we buy.  Our relationships with products tend to be short-lived: rather than hoarding treasured objects, consumers are characterized by a constant dissatisfaction with material goods.  This dissatisfaction is what produces the restless pursuit of satisfaction in the form of something new.  Consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else; that's why it is not simply buying but shopping that is the heart of consumerism.  Buying brings a temporary halt to the restlessness that typifies consumerism.  This restlessness - the moving on to shopping for something else, no matter what one has just purchased - sets the spiritual tone for consumerism." (Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire, 35)

When Dana asked us "Are our works so different that the world takes notice?", I am inclined for my own part to shake my head and say "no."  But if I lived the way Dana Allin talks about, and the way William Cavanaugh talks about, I would not be swallowed up in restlessness, but would trust that God has a great claim on my life, and every person I come across, and every thing I come across I am free to receive as a gift.  Every one of us has lost the world and everything in it through our sin and death.  Through Christ, we gain it all back.

I don't like the phrase 'church-shopping.'  Now, I'm a pastor, so you'd think I'd like it if people were shopping for my church.  But I confess I don't even like it then.  Because as Cavanaugh sees, so much of our shopping is a type of restlessness which buying only satisfies for a brief while before we're shopping again.  We don't buy churches.  But we're told in the New Testament that Jesus purchased a people for himself with his blood, with his life. (Galatians 3:13, 1 Peter 1:19)  Jesus buys a church, and he doesn't get tired of it and throw it away so he can go shopping for another one.  As the assurance of pardon puts it, he died for us, rose for us, reigns in power for us, and even prays for us.  He practices a sustained attention to us so that we will become like him in this way.

So Dana, when you arrived at midnight west coast time last night, I hope that despite your physical tiredness, that your spirit was strong, and that your love for the unchurched in Santa Barbara has grown stronger from being with us.  And I pray that we'll see that in Christ, we have all the strength we need to live out our fourth word - 'serve' - and love our neighbors this week.  Thanks again for being with us!

Harriet Beecher Stowe in Mandarin (Quote of the Day)

"The Stowes were a real force in the life of Mandarin.  They had come to the village only two years after the War Between the States, while the economy of Florida was still shaken and the sense of bitterness was still rankling in the hearts of the people.  Times were not easy; but the Stowes, entranced by the charm of Mandarin and sincere in their desire to become a part of a new life, gave their entire strength and efforts to the building of this old-new village.  Whenever the Stowes were in residence there was sure to be activity.  Calvin Stowe, though healthful in appearance, was actually very fragile and suffered from an incurable disease; nevertheless, he devoted himself to teaching German to a class of young ladies, and he gave simple, earnest sermons to the group that gathered in the church-school house each Sunday.  His wife assumed the more strenuous duties in the village and used ever means to enliven and enrich the life in Mandarin.  Mrs. Stowe and her daughters were faithful performers when the Mandarin Amateur Dramatic Association was active.  Then there were groups that met in various homes for the Sunday evening "sing."  Though not musical herself, Mrs. Stowe enjoyed the harmonious get-togethers and proudly proclaimed her daughters as the "family choir."  In all of Mrs. Stowe's writings, whether they were personal letters or commercial contracts, there was a reference to the charm and congeniality of life in Mandarin.  No paid advocate could have done more for Mandarin in the years between 1867 and 1884 than Harriet Beecher Stowe.  These were years of contentment for Calvin Stowe and his wife, for here they lived fully and simply among friends who respected and accepted them as individuals and not merely as celebrities."

-Mary B. Graff, from Mandarin on the St. Johns

Quote of the Day

Esther de Waal writes about the Rule of St. Benedict, which has governed monastic communities since the 500s A.D.  Here, she writes specifically about the vow of stability:

"For stability says there must be no evasion; instead attend to the real, to the real necessity however uncomfortable that might be.  Stability brings us from a feeling of alienation, perhaps from the escape into fantasy and daydreaming, into the state of reality.  It will not allow us to evade the inner truth of whatever it is that we have to do, however dreary and boring and apparently unfruitful that may seem.  It involves listening (something which the vow of obedience has illuminated) to the particular demands of whatever this task and this moment in time is asking; no more and no less.  This is the limitation which the artist knows when he accepts the necessity imposed upon him and turns it to good account.  'When we have discovered that a necessity is really necessary, that it is unalterable and we can do nothing to avert or change it, then our freedom consists in the acceptance of the inevitable as the medium of our creativity."

-Esther de Waal, from Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict

Quote of the Day

Well, its more like several passages...

Jerry Sittser writes about the growth of the early church in the town of Antioch:

"Cities provided people with new opportunities, but they also created serious problems.  Cities like Antioch bordered on social chaos.  A considerable proportion of the population consisted of newcomers, mostly from distinct ethnic groups, who moved to the city as displaced persons seeking their fortune.  They usually found people from the same ethnic group when they settled into these large urban areas.  These ethnic enclaves did little more than exacerbate intraethnic rivalries.  For example, there were eighteen identifiable ethnic groups in Antioch, and these groups staked out their own quarters in the city to create a sense of belonging, though such belonging remained fragile.  Newcomers to the city had difficulty forming attachments in a city that suffered from a high turnover rate, disease, crime, and disasters.  In fact, Antioch was afflicted with a natural disaster of one kind or another forty-one times over a six-hundred-year period, which led to loss of life, displacement, homelessness and instability.

"The fledgling Christian movement thrived in such an unstable environment.  The church became like family to aliens and outsiders who flocked to the cities.  The church welcomed people from a wide cross-section of society and taught a message that was easily understandable - more "middlebrow" than sophisticated - which appealed to those who lacked the education to comprehend impenetrable mysteries.  The Christian community offered an array of social services too.  Christians cared for widows and orphans, visited prisoners, fed the poor, nursed the sick, and buried the dead.  Church members gave freely of their money to support these various ministries.  "The appeal of Christianity," Peter Brown states, "still lay in its radical sense of community: it absorbed people because the individual could drop from a wide impersonal world into a miniature community, whose demands and relations were explicit."

-Jerry Sittser, from Water from a Deep Well: Christian Spirituality from Early Martyrs to Modern Missionaries

Quote of the Day

"I am crucified with Christ."  Thus the apostle expressed his assurance of his fellowship with Christ in his sufferings and death and his full participation in all the power and the blessing of that death.  And, showing he did truly mean what he said and knew that he was now indeed dead, he added, "Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."  How blessed must be the experience of such a union with the Lord Jesus!  To be able to look upon His death as mine, just as truly as it was His - upon His perfect obedience to God, His victory over sin, and complete deliverance from its power as mine; and to realize that the power of that death does, by faith, work daily with a divine energy in mortifying the flesh and renewing the whole life into the perfect conformity to the resurrection life of Jesus!"

-Andrew Murray, from Abide in Christ

How Do We Know God?

C.S. Lewis is well known as a Christian apologist, but it is worth remembering that he was a literature professor who had many insights into the ways ancient people used language vs. the way modern people use language.  This has implications for how we treat the Bible.  

Peter Macky summarizes Lewis' approach to the value of metaphors:

"Both poetic-type speech and scientific-type speech are valid language-games, neither of them to be judged by the standards of the other.  Metaphor is most at home in the poetic-type (including religious speech), for that is the way to speak of supersensible human experiences.  It is best done by appealing to the imagination, using metaphors that enable us to taste reality rather than just talk about it.  But even when we move toward theology and talk about God as if he were an object we could analyze, our abstractions are still metaphors, often unrecognized metaphors.  Thus our choice in speaking of God is not between metaphor and literal speech.  Rather it is a choice between the authorized, concrete metaphors of the Bible that enable us to participate in a relationship with God and the humanly-developed abstract metaphors of theology that keep us as spectators and are mainly valuable for marking out the limits of the more concrete metaphors." ("The Role of Metaphor in Christian Thought and Experience", 246)

If we expected the Bible to read like an owners' manual, or like a guide to how to put a jogging stroller together, we might be very disappointed when we found that the Bible was filled with visions, prophecies, parables, and stories.  How unhelpful!  The Bible does not use scientific speech as much as it uses poetic speech.  It uses metaphors.

So in our disappointment we think now we have to work harder to get beneath the artistic exterior to find the inner practical part that tells us what to do.  But, as Macky points out, metaphors and poetic speech are great language to use to get us to participate in what God is doing.  If God wanted us only as spectators, he could have used scientific speech.  Metaphors enable us to "taste reality rather than just talk about it."

Maybe its not that the Bible is hard or that its easy to lose the narrative thread in, say, Isaiah (although that is true enough).  Maybe as modern people we are too eager for the Bible to speak to us in the voice of an owners manual which we can stand outside of and handle as a casual spectator.  And as we do this, it is so easy to miss that the Bible presents a series of metaphors - God as Father, rock, ancient of days, Jesus as a 'Son', a 'Lamb' who 'loves, forgives, judges, saves' (all metaphorical language), the Holy Spirit as 'wind', and many, many, many more - that appeal to us in participants language.  "Come, he replied, and you will see." (John 1:35)   If we cling to the metaphors, rather than expecting to outgrow them, we would not merely observe God scientifically as though he were in a petrie dish, but would 'taste' him.  "Taste and see that the Lord is good." (Psalm 34:8)

Do we know the Lord like we know a geometric equation, a scientific-type knowledge which keeps us at arms length as a spectator?  Or do we know him more like we know the face of a friend or spouse, which involves us more as a participant?  If the latter, we might expect that a biblical metaphor couldn't be used up and discarded in one reading or five.  We might have to treat it like a life-long lozenge, that we meditate upon, that we memorize, that we carry with us, that we think about when we lay down at night and when we rise up.  We would treat it, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.  To enjoy.  "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." (Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 1).

Culture Care and Artists

Makoto Fujimura is a Japanese-American painter and a Christian.  His book Culture Care is a book which seeks corollaries between environmental care and culture care.  An environment must be cared for and protected.  We're learning to do this.  Fujimura argues that we must learn to care for culture in the same way.  One of the best ways to learn to care for culture is to care for artists.

Fujimura likes the word mearcstapa to understand artists:

"Recently I was speaking with my colleague and collaborator Bruce Herman.  He introduced me to an Old English word used in Beowulf: mearcstapas, translated "border-walkers" or "border-stalkers."  In the tribal realities of earlier times, these were individuals who lived on the edges of their groups, going in and out of them, sometimes bringing news back to the tribe.

"Artists are instinctively uncomfortable in homogeneous groups, and in "border-stalking" we have a role that both addresses the reality of fragmentation and offers a fitting means to help people from all our many and divided cultural tribes learn to appreciate the margins, lower barriers to understanding and communication, and start to defuse the culture wars." (58)

Fujimura articulates the risks and rewards of mearcstapas in the figure of Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings series.  Strider/Aragorn keeps company with an elf and a dwarf and this transcending of tribal identity holds clues to his destiny:

"In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien introduces the shadowy figure of Strider the Ranger at an inn in the homely village of Bree, where the comfortable and hospitable innkeeper warns the travelers not to trust him.  Strider is a mearcstapa, and it is in large part his ability to move in and out of tribes and boundaries that makes him an indispensable guide and protector and that helps him become an effective leader, fulfilling his destiny as Aragorn, high king of Gondor and Arnor, uniting two kingdoms.  He even marries across tribes with his union to Arwen, daughter of Elrond Half-Elven." (59)

I like this illustration very much.  The Lord of the Rings depicts social fragmentation between elves, dwarves, hobbits, humans, trees, and even the living and the dead.  Aragorn plays a central role in a new unity and reconciliation thanks to his 'border-stalking', or his ability to move in and out among different tribes.  We have social fragmentation too.  Big time.  Couldn't artists be part of the solution as they go in and out from the tribe, leading to a greater unity as with Aragorn?

In the Furnace

Jeff Arnold preached on the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the book of Daniel, chapter 3.  "As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe, and all kinds of music, you must fall down and worship the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up.  Whoever does not fall down and worship will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace." (3:5)

But our three heroes refused to do it!  Some astrologers tell on them: "But there are some Jews whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon - Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego - who pay no attention to you, Your Majesty.  They neither serve your gods nor worship the image of gold you have set up." (v. 12)

They are thrown into the fire.  But they are not burned, even though Nebuchadnezzar had made the fire even hotter than before.  Then Nebuchadnezzar reverses course.  Now, anyone who does not worship the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is to be cut into pieces and their houses to be turned into piles of rubble. (v. 29)

Nebuchadnezzar abandons the furnace for the blade of the sword.  There will be conformity of worship.  No.  Matter.  What.  Leaders in the world expect conformity.  But Christians follow Romans 12:2: "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

Mind-renewal doesn't come from living for ourselves.  Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego weren't doing that!  They were pointing to God.  How do we point to God?  How do we glorify God?

Jeff, quoting some words from another pastor, told us to pay attention to our furnaces, to our storms: "It seems like you are either moving into a storm, in the middle of a storm, or just coming out of a storm."  Like all those signs posted throughout the Black Hills of South Dakota pointing you to the town of Wall Drug, we are to be pointing to the Lord.

Could it really be that the way you depend upon God in the storms of your life will be like a sign pointing others to the destination of God?  At the close of the 10:30 service, I saw someone singing "Never Once" and, while singing, in the midst of everyone else in the sanctuary, was also pointing up to God.  I wonder what storms that person has been through?  I wonder what life has brought to this person's doorstep that has been too much to handle?  And I wonder what this person knows about how God has used the storms of life so that there is now, today, a desire to give glory to God, to point to God in public?

This person was a sign to me yesterday!  So my prayer is that God would use my words, my actions, the way I handle problems, the way I live when I don't know who is watching, to bring glory to God, so that I can be a sign too.

The Wall Drug signs work.  Jessica and I drove through those Black Hills back in 2008.  We heeded those signs, stopped for donuts and coffee, and I purchased a jackalope t-shirt as a souvenir so I know they work!

God has blessed you and I with many great signs in the Christians we know.  These signs work.  I wonder who have been powerful signs pointing you to God, signs that work, signs that give you strength to be conformed not to this world, but to the Lord.

Devotion on Philippians 3:1-4:2

Does it ever feel like you spend six days a week pursuing entirely different things than what you pursue on Sunday?  Like me, maybe you pursue status, influence, authority, pleasure for six days, and then on the Lord's Day, we think in terms of faith, hope, love, meekness, humility, and religious things.

Paul in today's scripture reading passage in the MPC reading plan shows us that if we aren't finding our status and significance in Christ, then we are not only blunting our growth as Christians, but we may be becoming "enemies of the cross."  Yikes!  That sounds bad.  Let's turn to Paul.

On the whole, Paul is warning the Philippians about those who would sell them short on what Christ has done.  Why?  One can either have confidence in Christ or in the flesh.  Even religious preoccupations can fall under the category 'the flesh.'  Paul begins to name off all the ways he found status and significance in Philippians 3:5-7: circumcision, a part of Benjamin's tribe in Israel, a Pharisee, a church persecutor, with a flawless righteousness as it pertains to the law.  But this all builds to a disavowal of these things.  They are nothing, they are garbage, not because they are not worth pursuing, but because he only really gets any of this from Christ. (v. 7-8)  He goes on to show this.  He gets righteousness from Christ (v. 9). As close as he is to Benjamin (his tribe), or to Israel, he is now closer to Jesus Christ: "I want to know Christ - yes to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings..." (v. 10)  Christ is his identity and status.  Finally, where circumcision was a sign of death in Israelite tradition, a sign of dependence on God's work alone, the Jews Paul is railing against have turned it into its opposite - a sign of confidence in oneself.  But now Paul has a true circumcision in Christ's death. (v. 11)  Only participation here, in Christ's death, will lead to resurrection.  Each of the things Paul talks about in verses 5-7 - circumcision, having identity with the people of God, and being righteous - find their true fulfillment in Christ in verses 8-11.  Paul's key point: I don't pursue them in and of themselves.  That way, they are garbage.  When we pursue Christ, we achieve all the status and significance we were hoping for from those things.

Let's return to our own priorities.  What status and significance do you pursue all week?  By investing in the work, the people, the projects, the goals that you do, what are you hoping to achieve?  These things are not built or made to withstand your ultimate yearnings and hopes.  Seek Christ first.  A lot of what we do during the week is great.  But a lot of it can be dehumanizing too.  (Sit in traffic for an hour and tell me you are feeling the full glory of what it is to be human!)  You need Christ to continue to show you both the great worth of what you pursue with your time during the week, and also that you are not defined or measured by your work in God's eyes.  You have an identity and a righteousness with Christ beyond what you do.

Heavenly Father, we cling so much to the status symbols and markers of identity that the world gives us because we are desperate to know who we are.  Thank you that you have left none of this to chance.  Thank you that we are not our own, but belong in life and death to our Savior Jesus Christ, and that we have a heritage and an identity not only for the next life, but this day, today, right now.  We pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.

Alyosha Praying for the People

I'm reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov with a friend.  In Part I, Alyosha is sent out into the world.  He has lived in a monastery, but his elder Zossima asks him to go out on some kind of mission, but it is far from clear what that would be.  The world, it turns out, is a mess.  Furthermore, Alyosha's family - the Karamazovs - are a huge mess.  Returning to the monastery at the end of Part I, Alyosha remembers that Zossima had sent him out into it all.  Far from having helped with anything, it seems that things may be even worse.  Alyosha is about to say his prayers and go to sleep when he remembers to open a letter he'd received.  It turns out to be a gushing love letter from a young girl.  And just when he thought it couldn't get any messier:

"Alyosha read the note with surprise, read it a second time, thought a moment, and suddenly laughed softly and sweetly.  Then he gave a start; this laughter seemed sinful to him.  But a moment later he laughed again just as softly and happily.  He slowly put the note into the little envelope, crossed himself, and lay down.  The confusion in his soul suddenly passed.  "Lord have mercy on them all today, unhappy and stormy as they are, preserve and guide them.  All ways are yours: save them according to your ways.  You are love, you will send joy to all!"  Alyosha murmured, crossing himself and falling into a serene sleep." (160)

I think the first laugh is a laugh of condescension.  This is why it feels sinful to him, because he feels as though he's making light of this young girl's sweeping emotion.  But the second laugh is a soft and happy one.  I think, in light of his prayer, that Alyosha has reached the place where he has resolved to give the weight of all the unresolved hopes, dreams, and expectations of all the people he's encountered to the Lord.  As the old Christmas Carol of the Incarnation of Christ puts it: "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."  This makes him happy because he loves them all.  His prayer gives him joy because he senses that God intends to take care of the storminess, the hopes and fears of all the years.  And as though he were hearing the soft warm tones of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" drifting through the air, Alyosha is able to fall asleep.

God intends for you and I to have everything we need to love others.  If we have Christ, all the obstacles of pride, sin, death, busy-ness, distraction, conflict and more are overcome by him.  Grace allows us to travel light.  People stop being a burden if we can learn to pray the way that Alyosha prays.

I hope I can learn to pray that way!  I'm going to take my unhappy and stormy people to the Lord right now!  I hope you will too.

Trees

I was reading from Marilynne Robinson's book, Gilead, this morning.  This passage struck me about trees:

"As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial - if you remember them - and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost.  There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they'd fly past my head.  All this in the dark, of course.  I remember a slice of moon, no more than that.  It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail.  I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me.  I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me." (56-57)

I wonder if any trees have astonished you lately.  The one by Trees' Steakhouse astonished me again recently.  There's a big tree in an apartment complex off Old Kings Road where the roots were nearly yanked out of the ground from the October 2016 storm.

Joshua Hochschild talks a lot about trees in his essay, "How to Look at a Tree" which is published in the June/July 2017 issue of the magazine First Things (firstthings.com)

"Across the road from my house, presiding over a patch of lawn between my parish church and the old schoolhouse, there is a chestnut tree.  I cannot say that the tree is particularly important to me; days can go by without my looking at it or taking any thought of it.  And yet, if I turn my attention to it, I realize that my experience of this tree is bound up with much of what I know about where I live, my family, and the history of my country.  I have sat in the shade leaning against its rough, ridged bark, noticing how its roots distend and break through the surface of the soil, as I read a book or watch my children ride their bikes.  Every fall, I have kicked the prickly hulls, drying from yellowish green to rusty brown, that fall on the path that takes me and my family to Sunday Mass." (40)

Even in this short passage, Hochschild is preoccupied with the tree, but he is also preoccupied with how we pay attention.  It is difficult for him to reflect on the tree without also reflecting on memories, associations, people who are somehow connected to it: "My musings about the tree are inseparable from a sense of myself as a father, a member of a parish community, and a participant in a larger ecological and political history." (41)

He goes on to ask how we pay attention in our increasingly distracted age.  How does my smartphone affect the way I pay attention?  It is a "device of distraction."  It turns out that the economy is noticing too.  He writes about Dopamine Labs, which helps software developers design their apps to be addictive:

"Dopamine Labs and its clients in the market for your attention presumably do not want you to stop and contemplate this simple truth: Not all habits are good habits.  But what is the difference between distraction and responsible attention, between mind-numbing watching and mindful seeing, between losing oneself in keeping up with the next thing and finding oneself in meaningful relationship?  We need an account of virtuous and vicious habits of attention." (43)

I'd like to figure out the difference between "mind-numbing watching and mindful seeing."  Do you and I see ourselves as the main character, the hero, and all the people, rocks, trees, rivers, and animals, and books, and gravesites, and all those who have passed on are are just supporting characters for telling our story?  I hope not!  But my eyes are a little more opened to how distracted I get.  And there sure is something frustratingly shallow about surfing around on the surface of the world on my smartphone all day.  Like Malcolm Guite puts it in his poem, "O Radix":

"We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
and find no virtue in the virtual
we shrivel on the edges of a wood
whose heart we once inhabited in love." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 73)

Dry Bones

Jessica preached this past Sunday on the dry bones of Ezekiel.  The people of Judah had a "small view of God."  This view manifested itself in 1) a casual view of sin, 2) a lack of love for others, and 3) they no longer trusted God.  "They thought God abandoned them, but they had drifted."  In the vision of the dry bones, Ezekiel's view of God gets bigger.  This is shown in these ways: 1) God restores.  Because of Jewish laws regarding contact with the dead, bones also represent defeat and humiliation.  Uncleanness.  Yet, even all this is restored.  2) God resurrects.  God's power is such that dead things come alive again.  Dead bones can live.  So can dead Judah.  Physically dead people can live again.  So can spiritually dead people.  Finally, 3) God works through Ezekiel.  God could have done all the work.  Instead, God tells Ezekiel to prophesy.  In the Bible, humans are expected to just watch God do things.  God does his work through people.

God's words will bring the dead to life again, and this will come through human words.  This made me think of the Bible.  The Bible consists of real human words written by real human people.  So are all other books.  So where does the uniqueness come in?  As I heard Jessica read from Ezekiel 37, it occurred to me that the biblical God claims the power to create from nothing and to bring the dead to life with his own words, but also insists on using human words.  We see that God's word expresses itself in human words.  Ezekiel prophesies.  Is he just making up words?  Or is he God's puppet?  Isn't it both?  God's word expresses itself in Ezekiel's words.

Jessica shared that God brought those bones back to life and that God put flesh and tendons on them.  This is where I want to place my hope today.  Death is all around.  I'll be participating in a memorial service this Saturday.  I'll die too someday, and so will all of us.  God looks at Ezekiel and refers him to the dead bones.  "Can these bones live?"  If God has that power, he can use it.  But he looks at Ezekiel, and at you and me, so that we'll reason within ourselves and decide if death is the greatest power in the world, or if God has power to bring life from death.

Ezekiel answers, "Sovereign Lord, you alone know."  That's right!  Only the Lord knows.  And the Lord's ultimate answer comes when Jesus' dead bones live.  Easter answers the dry bones, for Jesus Christ, and by extension for all who belong to him.

I trust the message spoke to you too.  You can find it at the MPC website.