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.

Psalm Singing in the Reformation

Alec Ryrie describes the role that Psalm-singing played in the Scottish Reformation:

"The praying and the singing of the Psalms as a means of cementing religious identity was one of the most distinctive features of Reformed Protestantism across Europe.  Metrical Psalms were a form of music which was irreproachable even to the dourest Reformed theologian.  They became a badge of Reformed identity, and their texts were peculiarly well suited to peoples under persecution.  When Adam Wallace's Bible was finally taken from him, he spent the night before his execution 'in singing, and lauding God...having learned the Psalter of David without book, to his consolation.'  George Buchanan, imprisoned in Portugal by the Inquisition, passed his time by composing metrical Psalms.  When the Edinburgh Protestant Elizabeth Adamsoun was on her deathbed, in about 1556, she asked her companions to sing Psalm 103, which she said had first taught her soul 'to taste of the mercy of my God.'" (Ryrie, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 122)

John Calvin's love of the Psalms was characteristic of this continental movement:

"Certainly as things are," Calvin explains, "the prayers of the faithful are so cold, that we ought to be ashamed and dismayed.  The psalms can incite us to lift up our hearts to God and move us to an ardor in invoking and exalting with praises the glory of his Name." (Calvin quoted in Boulton, Life in God, 34)

Matthew Myers Boulton goes on to describe broad qualities of this movement:

"...for many in the sixteenth-century reform movements, the psalms became identified as the music of the people, God's Word once only accessible to a few, now sung by one and all.  Indeed, in an era when women's voices were prominently heard in public worship only in convents, and children's voices only in specialist choirs, the joyous roar in Genevan churches rose from the entire assembly, men, women, and children singing together - with children often leading the way, teaching the adults the new psalms, a method Calvin recommended.  Both the music and the singing practices met with enthusiastic acceptance, as well as enthusiastic resistance, well beyond Geneva: Queen Elizabeth I is said to have dubbed the new psalms "Genevan jigs."  For both adherents and detractors, psalm singing became a distinctive signature of the Reformed movements.  Soon after the complete Genevan Psalter was published, the congregation at Saint-Pierre was singing through the entire Psalter in twenty-five weeks of public worship, or roughly twice a year - a clip of more than thirty stanzas per week." (Boulton 35)

The re-discovery of the Bible is a well-known point of unity among the European reform movements of the 16th century.  What interests me is the re-discovery of singing the Bible, and the role that played in forming the identities of these familial groups in the midst of hardship.  Whatever one may say about the power of singing or of music, it is a powerful way to experience a text in community at the same time.  It builds unity.  It establishes shared vision.

When Jayber Stopped Mowing the Lawn

Jayber Crow, the titular character of farmer and author Wendell Berry's novel, writes about ceasing to mow the lawn in his old age:

"For the first several years I was here, I kept a sort of yard cleared for some distance around the house, once a year scything down the nettles and wild grasses and elderberry bushes and seedling trees.  And I kept open a prospect on the river.  This suited me for a while and seemed the proper thing to do.  I loved the clarity and neatness my mowing and cutting made.  And then one year I stopped, not from laziness (though using a scythe on a hillside will produce sweat enough) but just to give room and welcome to whatever would come.  Since then I have mowed mainly my paths down to the river and across to the garden and up to the road and the woodpile and out to the privy.  When the trees send their branches too close, I cut them back to keep them from scraping the walls or banging on the roof.  The windfalls are big enough I saw up and split for stovewood.  Otherwise I let it be as it will.  Now, sitting out on the porch in the summer among the tops of the young trees, I am among the birds.  And in the last few years something wonderful has begun to happen.  Not just near the house but all along the hillside, the seedlings of the true forest have begun to come to the higher ground: sugar maples and hickories and chinquapin oaks.  Now that I am old, I talk to them, I talk to the birds, the way Athey Keith used to talk to the stray dogs and cats in his own exile up in Port William." (Berry, Jayber Crow 304)