June 29, 2009 by djackson.

In July of 1845 Sir John Franklin went missing while splashing about the polar regions looking for the fabled Northwest Passage. Inuit hunters later revealed that the crew had abandoned their ice-bound vessels and, on the unsuccessful journey to safety, resorted to eating one another in a bid for survival. Sir John’s widow, Lady Jane, could accept that her husband had died like other men, but not that he had dined on other men. Mortality is one thing, bad manners another. She appealed to celebrity novelist Charles Dickens to defend Sir John’s legacy. Dickens rose to the task in an immoderate and even racist rant which he published in his magazine, Household Words.

Richard Flanagan fictionalizes this historical incident in his novel Wanting. Flanagan conceives Dickens as terrified by any possibility of a crack in the fortifications of Victorian repression. In researching Franklin’s previous expeditions, he discovers an incident where, pushed to the extremes of hunger, the great adventurer had dined on his own footgear. “That,” Flanagan imagines Dickens thinking triumphantly, “was an Englishman. Stout heart, stewed boots, decency dressed up as diet.”

Like most Baptists, I suppose that I would rather eat my shoes - with my socks for an appetizer - than admit to any notion of the “real presence” of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Indeed, I fear I have occasionally allowed my language in the pulpit to become as intemperate as Dickens’ in print. I feel myself justified in this, guided by doctrinal commitments, but Flanagan causes me to wonder whether it might not just be possible that I was also pushed by personal phobias. Did a prior commitment to propriety ever masquerade as devotion to self-evident dogma?

Jesus’ congregation in John chapter six certainly went Dickensian on him when he started talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. You can argue that this sermon contains no direct reference to the Eucharist but the metaphors pass uncomfortably close. To make matters worse, Orthodox writer Frederica Matthewes-Green points out that Jesus “does not use the polite term for eating, phago; he uses the earthy trogo, the word for a cow munching grain.” To be fair, not everyone buys that distinction. Noted Greek scholar A. T. Robertson points out that the text uses both verbs with roughly equal frequency (phago, v.49,40,42,53,58; trogo, v.54,56,57,58) and argues that such usage blurs any sharp differentiation.

Still, it intrigues me. Rather than “decency dressed up as diet,” Jesus gives us a munching and crunching of crucified flesh, table manners that would shock a cannibal - or a cow! However much weight we put on fine shades of synonyms, no one can argue that the original audience missed this point: “Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, ‘This is a difficult statement; who can listen to it?’” (v.60). Indeed, when Jesus unveiled the menu of the Kingdom Cafe with its daily special of crucified and consumed savior, he cut his market share from at least five thousand to a mere dozen - a 99.76 percent drop in business!

In contrast to Dickens and Franklin, Flanagan portrays Matthina, a Tazmanian aborigine, daughter of a dead chieftain and one of the few survivors of both intentional (warfare) and accidental (disease) white genocide. Struck by her barefoot beauty while doing a native dance, Lady Jane declares, “One might almost say her body thinks.”

Thinking bodies or decency dressed up as diet - the table of our Lord demands that we decide. It has always struck me that in his famous sermon against transubstantiation, my hero C. H. Spurgeon (another Victorian Englishman!) attacked the Catholic position on the basis of science. He proposes to take consecrated wine and get a series of altar boys tanked up on it, arguing that the blood of Christ would not cause drunkenness, so altar boys on a bender would prove the falsity of the transformation. Of the idea of the real presence the great Baptist scoffs, “I should say that you do not expect us to believe you, whilst God allows our heads to be occupied by brains.” But surely a scientist might also offer to execute a series of rabbis and see if any of them rose from the dead, arguing along the same lines against the resurrection. In a faith based on the unaccountable actions of bodies, we should lean lightly on the scientific method.

But perhaps we might - just a little bit - if our bodies do the thinking.

Now, to be sure, Paul warns that the body needs a good beating now and again to keep its thoughts from running amuck. And I’m still too Baptist to gaze on a slice of bread as the priest intones, “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world.” Still, still . . . . Perhaps this is a time to re-jigger Our Lord’s old parable: If your right hand offends you, cut it off and eat mine. It is better for you to lose a part of your dignity than for your whole properly-fed body to be cast into hell.

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June 18, 2009 by djackson.

My computer is obsessed. Or possessed. Or possibly both.

Granted that I have a troubled relationship with the microchip, I really can’t see where this one’s my fault. I followed instructions and chaos ensued. Well, not exactly chaos, I suppose. If chaos is the lack of all order, then what I have is the Antichaos, order gone berserk.

It has to do with my delete button. A few months back our tech guy told me to go through a series of steps designed to sync my online calendar with my email. This simple action, he assured me, would confer many wondrous benefits. The two programs would harmonize, the planets would align, dogs and cats would settle their ancient feud and the OxyChem guy would be struck mute. So I control-alt-deleted my way through the instructions and did, in fact, notice one immediate change: my email delete function attempted to swallow two long-past events from my calendar and they got wedged in its throat. As a result, every time I go to clean out the trash folder I find these same two items - now over two years old - appearing multiple times. My computer obsessively deletes them, unable to make them go away for good. I clear the folder, wait a few minutes, go back in, and there they are all over again.

When this happens in humans, psychologists call it an “earworm,” a term first coined in German (Ohwurm) in the 1980’s. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, in his book Musicophilia, prefers the term “brainworm.” Call it what you will, we’ve all had the experience - a fragment of music, usually inane and irritating, overrides our conscious control and loops itself onto the mental intercom like muzak in an elevator. So my computer has a hard drive worm. (And now I have the theme from Gilligan’s Island to deal with for the rest of the day!)

I don’t know about anybody else, but this works for me as a good metaphor for forgiving. To be more specific, it works as a good metaphor for NOT forgiving. You know what I’m talking about. Someone hurts you, attacks you, speaks harshly or acts insensitively or fails to fulfill a promise. “I forgive him,” you tell yourself. “I forgive you,” you tell him. “I forgive him,” you tell God. You hit “delete.” You stop singing the song of he-done-me-wrong.

Then you turn your back for just one second, move on to other things, and before you realize it, there it is again: your soul’s delete file piled full of that same injustice. You stand in church trying to sing “Amazing Grace” but you can’t because the transcript of that misdeed is lodged in your head - set to the tune of the theme from “Family Guy.”

Mark Twain once wrote a hilarious short story called “Punch, Brothers, Punch!” in which the narrator finds himself overwhelmed with the mnemonic rap of a ticket-taker on the local tram line:

Conductor, when you receive a fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
Punch, brothers! punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!

He finally delivers himself by repeating his demon mantra to the local minister who absorbs the disease only to unburden himself by infecting his congregation. We sometimes attempt to deal with soulworms in the same fashion - by repeating them to others. Ministers, as Twain’s story notes, are particularly good targets. This technique, however, doesn’t work. Unforgiveness is like swine flu: we can pass it on to others while remaining sick ourselves. The original anger goes pandemic. I’ve seen it infect entire congregations.

C. S. Lewis once wrote to a friend that

only a few weeks ago I realised suddenly that I at last had forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I’d been trying to do it for years; and like you, each time I thought I’d done it, I found, after a week or so it all had to be attempted over again. But this time I feel sure it is the real thing. and (like learning to swim or to ride a bicycle) the moment it does happen it seems so easy and you wonder why on earth you didn’t do it years ago.

I suppose that’s the answer: just keep on forgiving. Maybe Jesus said what he did about “seventy times seven,” not because our brother would sin against us that many times, but because it would take that many deliberate acts before we could forgive the single sin that started it all. One nice thing about learning to forgive, I suppose: we’ll never lack for opportunities.

(”. . .the millionaire, and his wife. The movie star. The professor and Mary Anne. . .”)

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June 17, 2009 by djackson.

I’ve changed the name of my blog. (Cue Hobson from the movie “Arthur”: “I’ll alert the media.”) I chose the original title, “The Old Man From Scene 24,” almost at random from a jumbled mental attic where faded stacks of Spurgeon and shelves of Shakespeare jostle for space alongside trash bags stuffed with lines from sit-coms. A name for a blog seemed like a name for a dog - doesn’t matter much as long as he comes when you call him. Or a name for a cat - doesn’t matter because it won’t come no matter what you call it.

But my Bible reading the other day included a chunk of Psalm 119, the Obsessive Compulsive Doxology. This hymnopotamus, as Bible students know, contains a walloping 176 verses but the real kicker is in the structure: twenty-two blocks of eight verses each and each line of each block begins, in the correct order, with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Thus in Hebrew, verses 1-8 each begin with aleph, verses 9-16 with beth, 17-24 with gimel and so on clean to tav, the Hebrew z. This mania outstrips the alliterative outlines of a Baptist preacher in delirium. Mr. Monk the detective would love the 119th.

But far from being repetitive, strained, or mechanical, this poem contains some of the most memorable lines in all of Scripture. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” - v.105. “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word” - v.9. And the life verse of seminary students: “I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation” v.99.

But this particular morning my assigned portion, like an episode of Sesame Street, was brought to me by the letter Kaph, v.81-88. At this point, one could almost imagine that the psalmist himself has become a little weary of the whole project. His “soul languishes,” his “eyes fail,” and he seeks “comfort.” I figure he wrote this section somewhere around mid-term. And in the midst of his malaise, I found the following line:

“Though I have become like a wineskin in the smoke, I do not forget Your statutes.”

That one got my attention, so I did a little checking. Turns out in that culture they slung their empties from the rafters and pretty much forgot about them. These “bottles” (King James Version), basically gutted goatskins with the legs and necks knotted shut, soaked up the smoke and soot that drifted toward the vent in the middle of the ceiling. They desiccated like a fielder’s mitt abandoned in right field through the off-season. They cracked and blackened and lost their elasticity. They hung unnoticed there in the dark while life went on below.

Despite feeling like an empty pop bottle buried in the landfill the psalmist asserts that “I do not forget Your statutes.” God has hung him out to dry, but he intends to hang in there.

This describes eloquently that time of spiritual aridity that St. John of the Cross labeled the Dark Night of the Soul. In these times, God sets us aside from sensible blessings or spiritual progress in order to do an inner work. We sprawl inert, “like a patient etherized upon a table,” and often fail to understand that the operation can succeed only if we remain motionless and trust the hand of the surgeon. We feel abandoned: tossed out, cast off, hung up, put down. Like the psalmist, we feel the energy that drove our original project of praise, our well-ordered architecture of worship, suddenly grow wearisome. Like the chariots of Egypt in the muck of the Red Sea, our chariot wheels drive heavily and our spiritual progress silts up in the muck of our own rutted routines.

What to do in the Dark Night, when our solitary souls grow as dingy as yesterday’s wineskins? The psalmist himself gives the answer: hang in there. Do not forget God’s Word even when it seems God has forgotten you. Don’t wriggle and writhe and try to get yourself off the hook. Don’t weep for the loss of your pristine patent-leather brightness. Let the shiny exterior of a fashion-conscious Christianity grow brittle and broken. And wait for the Lord to work.

Around the same morning that I read this verse, another image from the Psalms struck me. Psalm 78.65 contains a bizarre, almost blasphemous depiction of God. This verse shows the Almighty rising like a hung over Marine, finally angered to action after repeatedly hitting the snooze alarm. “The Lord awoke as if from sleep, like a warrior overcome by wine.” He stumbles from his sandbagged bunker, BDU’s rumpled, Kevlar askew, lobbing grenades and laying down a line of suppressive fire. Like the sleepy neighbor and unrighteous judge in Jesus’ parables, this God seems to answer his peoples’ prayers not so much out of love as an irritated desire to shut them up.

The picture is theologically problematic. The point, however, is that he does answer. Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal that their god was taking either a nap or a crap (1 Kings 18.27). Sometimes we fear our faith leaves us open to the same charge, but the only answer we know is to keep on calling.

I admit there was a time when I felt certain I would be one of the bloated bags of Christ’s new wine. People would come from all around, belly up to the bar, drink deep and sigh that 1960 was a good year. More often these days I find myself roasting up in the rafters, set aside amidst the smoke and smother of those who seem more useful. I’ve hollered from up here in the obscurity that someone made a mistake, told the Lord that if he doesn’t do something soon the skin of my soul will be so cracked and crazed that I won’t hold the new wine anymore. So far, he’s just kept me here, curing. So it seems my job is just to remember until apocalypse or irritation, salvation or sobriety, moves him to act.

And if that’s where you find yourself from time to time, well, welcome, fellow-wineskin, to the smoke.

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June 4, 2009 by djackson.

Ordinary Christianity
Mark 4.26-29

Sunday, June 15 begins Ordinary Time. Technically it begins the previous week, but that is Trinity Sunday, still a special day, so it doesn’t really count. The fifteenth kicks off Ordinary Time in earnest. Now, we should remember that ordinary in this context doesn’t mean what we use it to mean – plain, common, boring. It is the idea of “ordinal” as opposed to “cardinal” numbers. From here until the start of Advent next fall we mark the Sundays not by the great events of the gospel – the first Sunday of Epiphany, the sixth Sunday of Easter, but by plain old numbers – first, second, third.

So maybe, now that I think about it, we are using ordinary in the ordinary sense. Because Ordinary Time denotes the life of the church after Pentecost and until Advent, in the long, repetitive haul between Our Lord’s departure and his promised return. That’s the time in which we’ve always been the church, and it is a hard time to be the church. A. J. Mojtabai says it well in her novel entitled, appropriately enough, Ordinary Time as she narrates the morning routine of an aging Catholic priest who tends a dying flock in a Texas town called Durance – which means “prison”!

It is time – time to be up and about. Ordinary time, Father Gilvary reminds himself, the longest, and hardest season of the liturgical year. But why ahrd? When the message – the reign of God is already in your midst – is so simple . . . Not in the mighty wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the blazing fire, but in the murmuring breeze, the still, small voice. In the yeast working unseen through three measures of flour. In Jesus and Peter paying the temple tax, half a shekel each; Paul instructing the Thessalonians, no goldbricking while waiting around for the apocalypse: continue quietly working and earning the food you eat.

Be here now.

What could be easier than this?

Almost anything, actually . . . Great occasions, miracles, rescues, tribulations, scourges. Epic sacrifice. Anything sudden and vivid with trumpets blazing on high. Anything – anything but the long laboring for the kingdom, the following-through, the daily round. . . .After the valleys and peaks of Lent and Triduum, the flights of Easter and Pentecost, they are back to the flatlands of time, to the time between the Times.

Something to that, isn’t there? It is Ordinary Time, and for the next six months we just have to suck it up and love Jesus. Oh, I know - we have to love Jesus all the time but now we have to love him when the temperature and the humidity are in a neck-and-neck race to see which can go higher, and we have to mow the lawn, and there’s no hope of the Astros getting into the penant race and the kids are out of school and underfoot all day.

So it is good that the lectionary for this Sunday points us to Mark 4 and Jesus’ parable of the seed growing by itself. This, by the way, is the only parable found exclusively in Mark’s gospel. Scholars have long noted that Matthew and Luke ripped Mark off when they wrote their gospels, taking shameless liberties with his copyright, but neither of them seemed interested in this little snippet.

And I can’t blame them. We don’t like it very much either, don’t preach from it often. It isn’t a very ambitious parable, is it? Not very . . . American, somehow. After all, it seems to say that the kingdom comes in its own process and at its own pace and there’s nothing we can do about it. You don’t hear this story featured at a lot of church growth conferences. We prefer entrepreneurial parables, like the one about the venture capitalist in Matthew 25. You remember: the CEO of a dot-com start-up heads to Washington to lobby his senator for a slice of the federal bailout bonanza but before catching his flight he calls in three junior execs and gives each a budget for any project he wishes to pursue and the guy who brings in the biggest ROI gets the corner office.

That’s the kind of story we like: Horatio Alger stuff. Grab the church by the reins and ride her like Rachel Alexandra at the Preakness! Go to the whip on the backstretch if you have to but do whatever it takes to bring home the prize. Not this laissez faire business about leaving well enough alone. It seems too boring, too uninspiring, too . . . well, too ordinary. But it would be a mistake to ignore this parable, a mistake to skip it and move on to something more dramatic. This parable tells us that, for the church as she awaits the full coming of God’s kingdom, it is always ordinary time, and that this fact is good news for a few reasons.

Before I get to those reasons, it is probably a good idea to define a key term. Jesus says his parable is about “the kingdom of God.” Sometimes he calls it “the kingdom of Heaven.” Either way, he talks about it a whole lot. There are a couple of things it doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean the church, and it doesn’t mean the place you go when you die. For Jesus, it means any place, right here and now, where people live out the truth that the risen Christ is Lord and therefore all the rules have changed.

I saw something recently that helps me understand this. President Obama made a crucial speech on Thursday, June 4. He wanted to reach out to the Muslim world and try to heal the rifts, hatreds, and misunderstandings that separate us. Toward that end, he did one thing that seems small but actually constituted a bold move: he referred to a nation, “Palestine.” Now, if you keep up with middle eastern politics, you know that no such nation exists. There is a Palestinian people, and they claim to have a homeland and they have a government - two rival governments, in fact - but no piece of territory officially recognized as their own. But President Obama didn’t talk about the Palestinian people; he talked about “Palestine.” One expert described the impact this way: “Now Obama is saying, ‘Palestine’ is a present reality.”

That’s a little like what Jesus means here. He says that the kingdom of God is more than an ideal, like Camelot. It is a present reality. And he invites you and me to live in it right now, right here, today. He says to people like us, enslaved by sin and, perhaps, disenfranchized by this world’s power structures, that we have a kingdom and a king!

So what kind of a kingdom is it? How do we get in on it? And if I’m living in the middle of a mighty revolution and Jesus is turning over the whole world, why doesn’t anyone notice? Why does life still seem so, well, ordinary? That’’s where we want to look carefully about what Jesus says about this kingdom of his and how it works, so we can decide if we want to live there. Look at some things he says here about it.

First of all, IT IS ALWAYS ORDINARY TIME, AND THE CHURCH DOES WELL IN ORDINARY TIMES. It is always Ordinary Time. We might as well get used to that idea. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that “nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters,” but he was wrong . . . about the bullfighters. Most of life, anybody’s life, is routine. Even if you were a matador or a rock star or an NBA forward or a seminary professor or some equally romantic and glamorous job, the bulk of your life would end up being spent bathing, shopping, sleeping, waiting in traffic.

And since we have to live most of the time in Ordinary Time, isn’t it a good thing to know that the Kingdom of Heaven does well in such soil? No need for constant hype, the exhausting business of psyching ourselves up with one big project or promotion or cause after another. Go to bed, get up. Hit your stride. Find your rhythm. Jesus does not invite us to laziness, but neither does he condemn us to a 24/7 Blackberry-driven, internet-ridden hyper-connectivity. In fact, note a couple of things about the text.

First, did you catch that Mark has his days and nights backwards? “He goes to bed at night and gets up by day.” We wouldn’t say it that way. Neither would Mark’s original Roman audience. In fact, he indicates elsewhere that he is fully aware that they don’t tell the time the same way that the Jewish people did, and still do. In Mark 14.30 where he predicts that Peter will betray him, the literal Greek is, “Today - yes, tonight.” But Mark preserves Jesus’ original wording here, perhaps as a hint to the over-worked Romans to whom he originally wrote his gospel that, since Jesus has things under control, the first order of business for a believer is a good night’s sleep!

Now, second, look at verse 28. “The soil produces crops by itself.” That last phrase is in Greek literally “automatically,” and it comes first in the original text: “Automatically the soil produces.” Again, not to encourage laziness, but to promote peace. The kingdom isn’t exactly on auto-pilot but it is at least on cruise-control. No need to keep stomping on the accelerator, laying rubber on the straight and narrow way trying to outrun the Almighty.

So the good news here is that you don’t need to worry if your life, whether we are talking about your work life or your family life or your church life or your personal spiritual life seems a little ordinary, a little routine. Jesus tells us that this is ideal campaigning weather for the kingdom. God is at work, even if you can’t see what he’s up to or make it happen sooner.

Secondly, IT IS ALWAYS ORDINARY TIME, AND ALL OUR WORK IS EXTRAORDINARY IN ORDINARY TIMES. Don’t miss the balance here. The farmer doesn’t sleep all the time. “he goes to bed at night and gets up by day.” God, it seems, is deeply interested in our ordinary lives. We all know the story of Noah and the rainbow - God’s promise that he won’t flood the place out again. But what does he really promise? Look at Genesis 8.22: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” The Lord promises us . . . what? A routine! And he seems to think he’s done us a favor. Apparently our everyday duties matter to him. Apparently, in fact, he rejoices in them and uses them to his glory.

We find this elsewhere in Scripture. Psalm 104.10-23 describes God’s ideal dance. God makes things grow. He takes care of everybody. At the same time, he invites us to participate, gives us meaningful tasks to perform. After the animals clock off at the end of the night-shift, “man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening” (v.23). It is the same in our story: The farmer doesn’t just sleep the whole time. He gets up at sunrise. He has work to do.

In fact, I’ll go a little farther. Look at the word that describes our work in v.27: “he gets up by day.” That is the world most commonly used in all of the New Testament to speak of Jesus’ resurrection! So every morning when you wake up, it is a reenactment of the very basis of our salvation. Every day when the alarm clock goes off, you rise from the dead! (I know, I know - for some of you death tends to linger until at least the second cup of coffee, but still.) This is more than poetry; it is sound theology. Every day of the Christian’s life comes as God’s gift, filled with meaning because Jesus has defeated death and therefore nothing we do is unimportant or temporary. On the brink of Ordinary Time we do well to remember that every ordinary day is also Easter Sunday!

Now, this has some sobering implications, because it means that we can’t write anything off, can’t ever say, “Oh, it just doesn’t matter.” It means that we must examine each day, each moment, each word, each action in light of the eternal consequences that they doubtless have. I think C. S. Lewis has said this best in his famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory”:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nighmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrrors or everlasting splendors.

It is ordinary time, so get to work! Do the ordinary things with the inspiration (literally, the “filling of the Spirit”) that comes from realizing that those ordinary things bear - for good or ill - eternal fruit, for which you will one day give accoundt at the judgment bar of God.

Finally, IT IS ALWAYS ORDINARY TIME, BUT ONLY UNTIL THE END OF TIME. We get around to the reaping at last, and this is something you shouldn’t miss. It’s a pleasant, pastoral picture, isn’t it? Reminds me of the great old hymn, “Come Ye Thankful People Come”: “First the blade and then the ear/Then the full corn shall appear.” You know it; we sing it at Thanksgiving as visions of gluttony dance in our heads. Well, I’m all for thanking God for his provision, but that isn’t what’s going on here. To get a feel for the real meaning, we have to look back and then forward.

First, let’s try looking back to the Old Testament, to the probable source of Jesus’ parable. Remember that Jesus knows the Old Testament well enough to quote Deuteronomy to the devil after a forty day fast. He is steeped in the Torah and regards it as the absolute and inspired Word of God. So his teaching consistently arises from Old Testament roots. The most likely candidate here is Joel 3.12-14:

Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: F13 for the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.

Not quite as cozy as a Thanksgiving dinner, is it? The passage speaks of the time after God has judged his own people, Israel, and now turns around to let loose on the surrounding nations who have attacked her. Nor can we dismiss this as some sort of backward, bloodthirsty Old Testament thing. Because next we will look ahead to see what the early church made of Jesus’ imagery here. We get a very close parallel in Revelation 14.14-19:

And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle. And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe. And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped. And another angel came out of the temple which is in heaven, he also having a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe. And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.

I’m not much good at math, but I make that five references to sickles in five verses - one in each verse. This is no longer “Come Ye Thankful People Come.” This is “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” a song I never really liked because it basically amounts to a prayer that God would bless the Yankee army as it marched south to kill my ancestors. But at any rate, here we are with the Lord “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,” where he as “loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,” or sickle, at any rate.

So what are we to make of all this? Simply this: that Ordinary Time is decisive time. Jesus calls on us to make a clear-cut choice, one way or the other. We stand in the Valley of Decision where we make a choice that God himself will one day ratify for all eternity. This is very unpopular imagery in our day. Everybody tells me we Christians should not preach about damnation because Jesus was a sort of first century Mr. Rogers who spoke only of peace and love. But read what he said - just some of his parables if nothing else. You get chaff torched in a blast-furnace, inedible fish blasted to a crisp, underdressed wedding guests tossed into the Black Hole of Calcutta. He seems unafraid to set himself up as an unavoidable and unmistakable point of decision. It is worth asking yourself which choice you have made.

One more thing, just to wrap up. I like what Dr. David Garland of Truett Seminary says about this passage. He writes in his commentary on Mark’s Gospel that “we live in the in-between time, between the beginning when the seed is sown and the end time when the final stage becomes manifest and all God’s purposes are accomplished.” He’s right, of course, but that leaves an open question: just how “in-between” are we? At what point do we stand on the line that stretches from the fall of Spirit-fire at Pentecost to the sickle-stroke of the final harvest?

The answer, of course, is that we do not know. I said earlier that we are in a time of waiting, checking days off our calendars until next November when, once again, we remind ourselves of our yearning for Christ’s return. But that, of course, is a contingent statement: because the return could actually happen before we get another chance to enact it ritually! Jesus uses some interesting grammar here to talk about the harvest: “But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” Look at three words.

“When the crop permits.” It is a strange phrase because it does not employ the usual Greek verbs for ripening. Instead, this word is most often used to describe Jesus’ betrayal. In fact the last time Mark uses it, just shortly before this story, is when he writes of “Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Him” (Mk 3.29). So what? Well, it seems to me that Mark drops a hint here: in one important sense, the grain has already “permitted” itself to be harvested, has “handed itself over” (a more literal translation of this verb) to the sickle. The crop is already ripe, the kingdom of God has arrived.

That leads me to the second word I want to notice. “Immediately.” This is one of Mark’s favorite words. He’s always saying “immediately.” In fact, some scholars think it amounts to an ancient Greek version of “um” or “you know.” But I don’t agree because I don’t think the Hoy Spirit inspires filler. No, I think that throughout his Gospel, and especially here, Mark wants to tell us that every moment counts, that there is an immediacy to the claims of Christ that we ignore at our own peril.

Then look at a last word: “the harvest has come.” Jesus phrases that verb in what is called a perfect tense. Without getting too technical, let me just say that this means the action in question is not momentary in the present, nor potential in the future, nor confined to the past, but stands complete in the present moment. “The harvest stands ready right here and now,” might be a good way to say it. And that is important if we go back to Jesus’ initial sermon, the bumper-sticker version of his whole message found in Mark 1.15. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repenet and believe in the gospel.” Both of those first two verbs are also perfect tense. In other words, Jesus says, not that all of this has already happened, or will happen very soon, but that it is happening right now, in the present moment.

And this means two things. The first is that you can choose to live in the kingdom of Heaven right now, right this very instant. You can decide to turn to Jesus and let him produce his kind of life in you in the big fat middle of your ordinary life in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The second thing it means is that Ordinary Time could end forever at any time! There is nothing else that needs to happen before Jesus comes back and does all the sickle-swinging and vintage-trampling that we talked about a moment ago.

Time, then, is never really “ordinary,” even in Ordinary Time. Time is precious, time is limited - time is now. What are you going to do, in this ordinary moment, with the only time you have?

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May 29, 2009 by djackson.

I gave up Facebook for Lent. Well, I wasn’t going to give up coffee.

Lent has become an important season to me. It’s probably because I’m a Baptist and discovered the liturgical calendar late in life. Nothing worse than a convert, you know? And of course there’s the whole Beverly Hillbillies aspect to it, the ecclesiastical equivalent of marveling at the “cement pond”. Expose Baptists to liturgy and we’re like trailer trash eating off china for after a lifetime of paper plates.

All the same, I’ve come to look forward to Lent as a time when things slow down. I think the quote is apocryphal, but Einstein supposedly explained the theory of relativity by comparing a minute spent with one’s hand on a hot stove lid to an hour spent in the company of a beautiful woman. (He didn’t, as far as I know, comment on how the same hour felt to the woman but we’ll let that go.) Anyway, the point is the same: forty days’ regular forbearance of a favorite food or activity becomes a long time, meaning that I have longer to ponder the mysteries of the incarnation and the crucifixion, and to yearn for Easter.

So as I pondered my response this year, Facebook seemed like a natural. I’d begun to experience the social networking site as a kind of microchip caffeine: brief updates bounce like handballs from the back wall of my head to the reciprocal hard surfaces of cyberspace, ricochet to another recipient who smacks them with the additional energy of his own comments and off we go. But it gets noisy - internally so. I found myself at odd moments rummaging through my mental slip bucket looking for scraps from which to cobble a new status update. Not satisfied to keep everyone posted on how recently I’d eaten a burrito, I began to regard these cyber-snippets as a sort of haiku. Writers never simply type; we invariable compose.

So I shut down. Noah mainlined Dramamine and shoveled elephant dung over the gunwail for forty days. Moses spelunked on Sinai and peeped out at the Almighty just before the door shut. Elijah ate angel food cake and did a walkabout and listened to praise music from Earth, Wind, and Fire in an attempt to achieve theophany. Jesus, of course, went mano-a-mano with Mephistopheles, duked it out with El Diablo in the desert and took a TKO in the third. Me, I stayed off Facebook.

It was nice. Quiet, as I had anticipated. And a few people said really kind things about missing me. I missed it, of course, which is at least part of the point. As with most asceticisms, this one came without the optional epiphanies - no locutions, no visions, I’m still short. But I did take a little time to ponder how the sudden explosion of constant connectivity may be affecting my soul. (I’m not going all Charismatic here; your soul is not something indiscrete from your body so everything you do affects it. That’s why eating a Big Mac - or not - is an act of spiritual (de)formation.)

While offline, I read an article in the New York Times Magazine, April 16. The author, Virginia Heffernan, quoted a line delivered by Bruce Sterling at the South By Southwest tech conference in Austin. If you’re not from Texas, try to understand that Austin is hyper-cool, like Silicon Valley with spurs. A venue like that - a technology-fest in the Lone Star version of San Francisco - makes Sterling’s remark all the more striking: “Poor folk,” he sniped, “love their cell phones.” Meaning . . . what? Heffernan parses:

“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

I didn’t think too much of it all at the time; didn’t ponder it, in fact, until I’d returned to Facebook after Resurrection Sunday and saw a friend’s comment on that exact subject. My friend is a woman whom I’ve known since her childhood and who now, as a young adult, continues to delight me with the same freshness and frankness she showed as a preteen, youth, and college student. She’s doing some sort of masters degree in business, marketing, that kind of thing and made a remark to the effect that she is now on Twitter, not because she likes it but because she can’t afford to shun an important self-marketing tool. A person with a very strong soul, she now meets Heffernan’s definition of poverty: “those without better options” than a symbiotic synthesis with beeping and buzzing gadgets.

Yet I had managed, almost on a whim, to unplug for forty days. Is my soul stronger than my young friend’s, or is it only that my wallet is fatter? Or the happy accident of having chosen a profession sufficiently stodgy that I can remain safely behind the times? Sterling’s vignette of “the man of leisure,” filtered through Heffernan’s midrash, reminded me of a passage from C. S. Lewis’ too-often-neglected spiritual autobiography, The Pilgrim’s Regress. John, the protagonist, and Vertue, his traveling companion, happen upon Mr. Sensible, a sort of Thomas Jefferson character holed up in his private Monticello and attempting self-sufficiency, a goal he pursues by importing luxuries and off-loading the dirty work to his servant, Drudge. Vertue, who has absolutely no party manners whatsoever, catechizes the old phony and sums up: “Your art, then, seems to teach men that the best way of being happy is to enjoy unbroken good fortune in every respect. They would not all find the advice helpful.” The Jefferson reference is apt: T.J. lived the vigorous life of bold independence with no more assistance than a tumescent bank account and an army of slaves.

This troubles me. Was my Lenten fast, my “sacrifice,” really nothing more than self-indulgent luxuriating in the well-upholstered accidents of my age, education, and profession? “Take no thought for the morrow” means different things depending on whether you must say, “sufficient to the day is the evil thereof” or “thou hast much goods laid up for many years.”

Then I stumbled across an interview with Dr. Pauline Wiessner, an anthropologist from the University of Utah. She spent some time in the ’70’s hanging out with Bushmen in the Kalahari desert and discovered that their whole program of social security, health care, and insurance consists of maintaining good relationships. They tell stories about distant relatives and send them beautiful handmade gifts. Then when a famine strikes (the Bushman equivalent of a subprime lending crisis), they go visit their better-heeled kin until things turn around. The interviewer asked Dr. Wiessner if she sees any examples of similar behavior in American society. Her reply stunned me:

Facebook. People who use it say it keeps memories of distant friends alive and it sometimes brings long-lost relationships back home. . . .One constantly hears stories of people finding jobs and business opportunities through these sites. Hey, and what does a blogger do? Tell stories! The videos and snapshots that people post echo the exchange gifts of the (Bushmen). They are a kind of token that says, “I’ve kept you alive in my heart.”

Of course, the same day’s paper had an article about how American teenagers are dangerously sleep-deprived and have repetitive-stress injuries to their thumbs from the ratcheting demand to pay the social tax of constant connectivity. Adolescents, of course, live in constant fear of social poverty and so never feel free to cease sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.

Well, Lent is over, Christ is risen, and I’m back on Facebook. This Sunday is Pentecost and then we’re back to Ordinary for the next half-year or so. Maybe that’s the best place to work out these aspects of our salvation after all - the non-color-coded sequence of days spent waiting for Our Lord’s return. It will always be a mixed bag, a trade-off between radical trust in God and disguised trust in man. Maybe that’s why Paul added the part about “fear and trembling.” Because we can never be certain whether we’re well-souled or simply well-heeled until our final status post reads, “And so we shall ever be with the Lord.”

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