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?