September 26, 2006 by djackson.

“There are,” writes C. S. Lewis in the Preface to The Screwtape Letters, “two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils.  One is to disbelieve in their existence.  The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.  They themselves are equally pleased by both errors.”

Well, the scaley old reporbates must be dancing jigs on their cloven hooves these days.  Both mistakes abound.  I recently came across a new translation of The Dark Night of the Soul, a classic work on prayer by St. John of the Cross.  The interpreter, Mirabi Starr, explains in the Introduction that she took a few liberties.  “Where John spoke of El Diablo, the term ‘fragmented self’ has been chosen.”  So, error number one:  no Devil; just an extreme need to pull myself together.

On the other hand, a couple of high-profile characters have recently spoken of Old Nick in terms of absolute belief.  When Hugo Chavez appeared before the United Nations one day after President Bush spoke in the same venue, he sniffed the air and declared, “The devil came here yesterday, and it still smells of sulphur today.”  (www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/09/20/chavez.un/index.html)  A week or so later, Jerry Falwell told a mob at the Value Voters Summit that Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid would do more to rally the Moral Monotiny than a candidacy by Satan himself.  http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-falwell24sep24,0,4255550.story?coll=la-home-headlines  (By the way, I’ve noticed that while PC fastidiously avoids the masculine pronoun for God, nobody minds if we use it for Lucifer.  No one suggests grammar-slammers like “The devil the devil’s self”.)  So, error number two:  the Enemy is omnipresent and devil-sniffing dogs must snuffle him up like German shepherds at airport security sniffing for contraband hand lotion.

Lewis said that the demons like either error equally well, but I think Chavez and Falwell have created a refinement which tips the scale in their direction.  Ms. Starr is simply a dishonest scholar.  When St. John said El Diablo he didn’t mean some psychologized source of inner angst, more the province of Dr. Phil than anything else.  He meant a malign personality who invades from without.  The dictator and the pontificator, however, have put a novel twist on Lewis’ second category.  It is one thing to fixate on Satan, but to fix him somewhere else represents a real refinement of that mistake.  Chavez said that the devil had come the day before, leaving only his signature fragrance behind.  More likely, the reek rising to the Venezuelan’s nostrils rose from the armpits of his own soul.  Reverend Falwell wants Hillary to run because he figures she’d incite more outrage - and raise the Radical Right more money - than Satan.  If he wants to know which candidate delights the devil, maybe he should follow the money.

So it isn’t enough to say that the devil is “there.”  We haven’t really come to terms with true doctrine until we’re willing to say the devil is “here”.  If I find no evidence of his existence, maybe it is for the same reason that I cannot see the back of my own head.  If I find too much evidence for his actions elsewhere, maybe I should, with Queen Gertrued, turn

“mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.”
 

Posted in General | No Comments »

September 25, 2006 by djackson.

In a great sermon on worship yesterday from 1 Samuel 7, my pastor made a passing reference to the way in which we Christians “pick up false gods the way a ship’s hull picks up barnacles.”  He was talking about verse three, where the crusty old prophet tells the congregation that if they want a work of God, they’d better off-load the strange deities and eighty-six the Ashtaroth.  This directive comes, mind you, after a two-decade stretch of “lamenting after the Lord,” mentioned just one verse previous.  In our Sunday school lesson for the day, based on Joshua’s farewell address in Joshua 23.  To a generation which had followed the Lord with sufficient zeal to administer a serious butt-whipping to hosts and hoards of heathen armies, Joshua says, “put away the strange gods which are among you.”

So it seems that even the best-intentioned believer grows vulnerable to hitch-hiking deities, opportunistic infections of our holiness which encroach on any unprotected surface of our souls.  These barnacle gods do not necessarily ask for our alliegance, or even our acknowledgement.  They work below the water-line to clot and clog our keels, slowing our motion through the waves of this world and warping our Christ-like configuration into a more secular shape.  In the old days of tall sailing ships, vessels often sat becalmed for days on end.  Their undersides grew weedy as they wallowed innactive in that flat calm.  This trailing beard of vegetation didn’t threaten to sink the ship, but slowed its speed and rendered it unwieldy, less responsive to the turn of the helm and the set of the sail.

“Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul admonishes in Romans 12.2.  He does not speak of treason, a beligerent bowing of the knee to Baal.  The Greek verb refers to the adoption of an exterior stance or pose, and its construction orders a cease-and-desist to an action already in progress.  So it seems as if exterior alteration works endlessly to defile the profile of Christ in us.  Paul countermands that process with a positive injunction, “But be ye transformed.”  This word works on the inward nature, and the conjunction “but” which separates the two is the strongest way Paul possessed to show opposition. 

Sailors periodically haul ships into dry dock to have their hulls scraped.  Sometimes, a good exterior de-barnacle-ing is the best we can do.  Better still, however, is a continuous attention to the wind of the Spirit, a tacking and turning in sensitive attention to his inexplicable movements.  This keeps us from lying becalmed long enough for the weedy ways of the world to latch onto our unoccupied exteriors and make us look more like masses of moss than mobile vessels carrying gospel freight to a needy world.

Posted in General | No Comments »

September 19, 2006 by djackson.

“American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarrassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.” - Eugene Peterson

My daily Bible reading this morning included Isaiah 30.15, ”For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not.”  That last line is the kicker.  The context reveals that God’s people expressed a marked preference for the eight-cylinder chariots of Egypt over a foot-pace pilgrimage after YHWH.  ” will flee upon horses,” they reply,”We will rely upon the swift.”  God’s people choose a “2 Fast 2 Furious” spirituality over the pedestrian business of waiting on the Lord.  Military alliance with Egypt makes more sense than a paying of peaceful attention to the the Law.  Judah sits like Ricky Bobby in the passenger seat of an old station wagon and mindlessly chants, “I wanna go fast!  I wanna go fast!”  And the Lord, as he does far more often than we give him cfredit for, grants their request.  “Therefore shall ye flee…therefore shall they that pursue you be swift.” 

God says salvation rests in quietness.  Not “quietism,” a venerable medieval heresy holding that the Christian can, and should, do nothing, remaining instead passive in the presence of God, but “quietness,” a spirit of calm which recognizes that the Almighty doesn’t need our help.  So much of the ecclesiology I encounter these days is of the pedal-to-the-metal variety.  Experts and consultants tell us that in our battle against the secular Assyria, the church must tie her tow ropes to the trailor hitch of Egypt, the market-driven, media-savvy frenzy of high-octane, formula-1, flat-out speed. 

To change the metaphor, these guys sound like captains (or, perhaps, pirates!) aboard a sinking ship.  They bellow into bullhorns as the crew scurry across decks which dip perilously close to the waterline.  We seem to be running gunnel-deep and in danger of going down.  The pumps clatter watch and watch as we sweat to clear the bilge clear and keep ‘er afloat.  It is as if Jesus has once again gone to sleep in the stern and we either can’t or won’t awaken him to ask that he still the storm. 

The whole thing reminds me of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam,” a painting which I’ve never liked for a number of reasons, the chief one among them being that, at a glance, it is a little difficult to figure out who is creating whom.  Look at the canvass.

The Lord leans out (out, not down) from the battlements of Heaven, as Adam graciously offers his index finger for the Creator’s attentions.  Adam sits at ease, but a buzzing squadron of cherubs supports the Almighty, whose bulk otherwise threatens to plunge him to the turf.  (Only a Renaissance artist could have done that painting.  A medieval would have had God distinctly “above” his creature.  A modern would have Adam receiving the baton from Neanderthal man.  Heaven only knows how a POMO would depict the scene.)  But my point is that this painting reveals much of the prevalent attitude toward church.  God is going down if we don’t do something about it.  We hold meetings and host conferences, fluttering our little wings like so many moths at a monster porch light, wearing our paper-thin appendages to rags trying to keep the Big Guy afloat.

It isn’t that we should do nothing.  It is simply a need to recognize that we are not doing work “for” God; we are doing the work “of” God - work which, according to Ephesians 2.10, is a prefab job to begin wtih.  Returning and rest, quietness and confidence.  Since God is everywhere, we will probably find him sooner by standing still than by running amock.  Since Jesus walks on water, we are never in danger of sinking.  Since God cannot fall, he doesn’t need us to give him a boost.  Since the work is already done, we can calmly go about doing it.

Posted in General | 4 Comments »

September 18, 2006 by djackson.

Let’s continue to talk about worship.  In an excellent sermon on worship yesterday, my pastor used an image that had never occurred to me.  In speaking of the creation story in Genesis 1, he invited us to imagine a magnificent fireworks display, in which one stunning set of rockets after another bursts into the darkened sky (”without form and void”).  My mind went immediately to Job 38.7, where God, bellowing and booming out of a category-4 theophany, calls the old sore-scraper’s attention to the boot-up of the cosmos, “when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”  In my thoughts I pictured the angels packed like so many picnicking day-trippers onto the grassy slopes outside the Heavenly Jerusalem.  As God’s “Let there be” lit the six-fold succession of fuses, they gazed earthward and gasped, “Oooh…ahhhh!  Oooh…ahhhh!” 

Then (as we preacher-types are prone to do), I thought of the context of that line, and remembered the Almighty is basically emphasizing that Job’s good opinion is not an essential element in the Lord’s glory.  A few verses later (Job 38.26), God describes the global waterworks which he uses, “to cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; to satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth.”  The Message renders that last line as, “Drenching the useless wastelands so they’re carpeted with wildflowers and grass.”

My point is that God doesn’t need an audience.  Or a creation, for that matter.  Dallas Willard, asked what God did in the eons of eternity past, replied, “He was enjoying themselves.”  The mutual glorification society, the unbroken communion of love between Father, Son, and Spirit, was sufficient unto itself.  He created us, not to increase his glory, but because the increase of his glory overflowed and spilled out as you and me and, as he reminds Job, the hippopotamus. 

Which has what to do with worship?  Just this:  if God doesn’t need an audience, neither do we.  So why do we measure the value of worship by the number of spectators it attracts?  G. K. Chesterton, in his essay, “About Widows,” criticizes the modern trend toward publicizing private lives.  Such an obsession indicates, he says “a lack of interest in private life” as something worthy in itself.  Paris Hilton broadcasts every aspect of her private life because, one suspects, it would be unbearable being Paris Hilton all by yourself.  “It is the idea that life inside the house is wasted if people outside the house know nothing about it,”  Chesterton continues.  And church-as-show says the same thing about worship inside the house of God.

I like a big turnout at church as much as the next person.  There’s an energy in a packed auditorium that is really enjoyable.  But I think we do well to remember that God grew flowers on Saguaro cacti in the Sonoran desert centuries before the first pilgrims slogged down from the Bering Strait to take a gander, and that worship contacts the Eternal equally well whether offered by few or many.

Posted in General | No Comments »

September 15, 2006 by djackson.

I attended Divine Liturgy at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church here in Corpus Christi yesterday.  Of course, the whole thing was a bit much for a trailor trash Baptist like myself.  Huge slabs of ikonography stared across the nave, gilt and jewels flashed from the altar like the glowing coals of Revelation 8, and the priest swept gracefully about in brocaded panoply.  I was impressed.

(Note:  I intend no theological snobbery.  Evangelical sanctuaries tend to be just as ornate.  Our elaborate ikons, however, are internal - complex wiring weaving a tapestry of power point and WiFi shooting unseen about the ether like the angels of Mahanaim.  Orthodox architecture intends to reproduce the throneroom of heaven.  It’s Evangelical nemesis attempts to mimic a multiplex.)

But if I was impressed at this shekinah of praise, the natives knew better.  At one point, the script contained a prayer which included the line, ”We also thank You for this liturgy which You are pleased to accept from our hands, even though You are surrounded by thousands of Archangels and tens of thousands of Angels, by the Cherubim and Seraphim, six-winged, many-eyed, soaring with their wings.”  The humility of that struck me:  acknowledging God’s goodness in turning away from perfect praise to pay attention to proceedings which must seem like pretty small beer to the One who inhabits the center of Isaiah 6.

I heard once that the great R. G. Lee, after a magnificent choir had thundered forth the anthem, lept to the pulpit amidst a cannonade of applause and barked, “When we get to Heaven, that will sound like a bumblebee in a fruit jar!”  Such language contains less stained glass than the Orthodox version but says substantially the same thing:  God is not impressed. 

Yet he is blessed.  He is “pleased to accept from our hands” our hymns or praise choruses or sermons or prayers or, for all I know, announcements.  We bring clumsy water colors to the heavenly Father who hastens to post them on his refrigerator and point out with pride to the circling angels, “My child gave me that!”

So calm down:  our worship at its worst, if given as our best, blesses the heart of Him whom we praise.  And come down:  our worship at its best, though a technotriumphant tour de force of electronics and eloquence, requires that our Lord put flaming cherubim on hold.  The glory of our worship is not how good we are at it, but how good God is to receive it.  And he is always good.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »