October 29, 2006 by djackson.

“Are you church shopping?”

I overheard someone ask that the other day.  Asked the question with a straight face, oblivious to the unintended irony.  Unintended because this individual considers himself an unusually mature Christian.  Ironic because the very phrase treats Romans 12.2 the way a congressman treats campaign finance laws.  The market is the metaphor for America.  When the American church makes the market her model, she squares the circle of redemption, shaping herself into a suitable peg for an ungodly hole.  We’re not just conformed; we’re contorted.  When Madison Avenue asserts eminent domain and slaps an eight-lane superslab over the Via Dolorosa, the church becomes the Asian Mail Order Bride of Christ as brothel trumps betrothal at the wedding feast of the sham.  Well, it isn’t too hard to understand.  When a smarmy Don Knotts look-alike pimps wedded bliss on the basis of “compatibility,” all sense of sacrifice as the stuff of true love withers beneath the napalm of selfishness enshrined as romance.

In his delightful book The Wisdom of Each Other, Eugene Peterson takes up this topic with his fictional friend Gunnar.  “The church,” he tells his perfectionist pal, “Is God’s thing, not yours.”  He thunders mercilessly on: “The church is not a natural community composed of people with common interests.  It is a supernatural community.  And the super in that word does not mean that it exceeds your expectations; it is other than your expectations, and much of the other is invisible to you as yet.”

“Church shopping”?  As if the visible community of redeemed saints were a restaurant bucking for five stars in the Michelin guide! The music had a good beat but I couldn’t dance to the sermon; I give it a four.  I hear people say they are “through” with the church.  It makes me think (as so many things do) of G. K. Chesterton.

So many people say they have been “through” things; when it is quite evident that they have come out on the other side quite unchanged.  A man might have gone “through” a plum pudding as a bullet might go through a plum pudding; it depends on the size of the pudding - and the man.  But the awful and sacred question is “Has the pudding been through him?”  Has he tasted, appreciated, and absorbed the solid pudding, with its three dimensions and its three thousand tastes and smells?  Can he offer himself to the eyes of men as one who has cubically conquered and contained a pudding? 

Church shoppers do indeed tend to go through congregations as a bullet goes through a pudding - a small dent on entry quickly followed by a gaping exit wound.  Yet such vagrants are “magic bullets” because they emerge from their journey themselves unscathed:  brassy-sleek in their self-assurance, gleaming beneath the full metal jacket of cocksure spiritual certainty.  But the full absorption of a single fellowship of saints, the cubic conquest of the three dimensions and three thousand delicious subtelties of the smallest of churches would be the work of a lifetime.  It is, indeed, more work than could be completed in a lifetime, and so must be taken up anew in the unbroken circle of saints at the foot of the throne of God. 

And now I have to stop writing, because it is Sunday morning and time for me to go to church.  If we have a good day, there may be eighty people there.  I have a lot of digesting to do.

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October 22, 2006 by djackson.

A norther roared in early Sunday morning.  It hollered down from the Arctic and slammed us with screaming winds.  When I awoke for worship I set aside my set Scripture reading and turned instead to Herman Melville. 

It was a queer sort of place - a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer - of whose works I possess the only copy extant - “it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind - old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper - (he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals. - Moby Dick, Chapter 2, “The Carpetbag”

I had arisen early, Dives-like to enjoy the blow, but Melville stole much of my pleasure.  I went next to the penultimate section of Job, where young Elihu hectors teh venerable patriarch.  In the midst of a really fine speech the upstart catches the glare of oncoming headlights as the highbeams of God’s storm chariot flick across his vision.  “He causeth it to come,” the upstart decides as he faces down God’s whirlwind, “whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy.” 

The middle term of that sequence is easy enough to grasp.  Salniity levels in Corpus Christi Bay threaten sea life.  We need an infusion of fresh water.  But this simple centerpiece serves as the fulcrum for a very strange teeter-totter.  My books tell me that correction here is the Hebrew word for “rod,” an instrument of punishment suitable for whacking a recalcitrant servant (Exodus 21.20), an ignorant know-it-all (Proverbs 10.13), or a teenager who clearly has it coming(Proverbs 13.24).  Mercy, on the other hand, is the Hebrew chesed, the covenant-based, contract-protected love of God which remains eternally unshaken by the various vagaries of the sinful people with whom the Lord has made his bad bargain. 

Of course, a God like ours is sufficiently dextrous to set two mutually exclusive purposes dancing on the pinhead of a single storm.  Still, it strikes me as strange that the blow can be both his kick and his kiss.  And then I found it:  Israel’s sweet singer, that anointed king and pop culture icon David, once got off a line so good it resonates to this day even among the irreligious and anti-religious:  “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”  A herdsman might use such a club to whack an errant ruminant, driving her back to the fold, or protect her from a predator (Micah 7.14), or to make sure she’s accounted for at the end of the day as the flock enters the safety of the pen (Ezekiel 20.37).  The rod, like God, is always the same; I experience it differently depending on my relationship to the Shepherd.

That sent me to yet a second slice of secular literature, e. e. cummings’ “what if a much of a which of a wind.”

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it’s they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn’t; blow death to was)
-all nothing’s only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live

The same wind corrects by killing illusion and shows mercy revealing reality.  What am I under all the leafy froth of religious rhetoric?  Crowned kings only seem better than beggars; Dives’ edge on Lazarus is more apparent than real.  The rich man’s salvation might have come in the form of a wind strong enough to blow a cold blast up his ermine-lined skirt.  The grass gets watered one way or another, but what about my relationship to this storm:  correction or mercy?

I went once more to literature, this time to Shakespeare’s King Lear standing naked in a storm for the first time in his privileged life.

 Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
(Act 3/Scene 4)

“Oh I have ta’en too little care of this” - correction.  “Take physic, pomp” - mercy.  Am I making my own summer with my own coals, or stoking the flames of my own Hell with the selfishness of my accidental wealth?  All in all, it was more than I bargained for when I got up early to enjoy the sound of the storm.

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October 18, 2006 by djackson.

A friend asks, “If there are personalities in heaven, can really good fictional personalities be there too?”  She specifically mentions Jay Gatsby.  With no resources in Scripture I fall back on the Apocrypha:  C. S. Lewis.  Jack argues in The Problem of Pain for the possibility of resurrected pets. 

Lewis argued that domestic animals attain to personalitiy in relationship to their masters.  “If a good sheepdog seems ‘almost human’ that is because a good shepherd has made it so.”  From there he speculates that a household pet enters the web of relationships that is the family, “and how much of that ‘body’ may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict?”  Cliff Notes version:  if our true selves enter eternity, then all that composes us must participate in that redemption, including Spot or Fido. 

Or Jay Gatsby?  I don’t know, but neither do I quite know why not.  The Rostovs and Mr. Peggoty and Queequeg the harponeer have outlived their authors and entered countless lives where they have shaped ideas and spawned actions.  Can their impact be so deep and so wide that anything truly resembling humanity must include them?  Is God less creative than his creatures, unable to sustain what he once bestowed, unable to complete what Ernest Hemingway, half-awash in whiskey, could begin?

Of course, as I reminded my questioner, our fictional friends would, like everything else, be redeemed in Heaven.  Imagine Gatsby if he found in Christ the love he mistakenly sought in Daisy?  If he heard the voice of his beloved and found it full of love instead of money?  If instead of an electric light on the end of the dock of a gaudy McMansion he lifted his hands in adoration to the blinding Shekinah of God Almighty?

Or daisy, if she learned from the Crucified what it is truly to love?  If instead of wallowing in a rainbow array of silk shirts on a featherbed she found comfort in the rough towel of the Lord who washes feet?  Or Tom, if he discovered that strength is given, not to gain Nick’s approval or crush Gatsby’s facade, but to serve?  And Nick, if instead of demanding that the world stand at rigid moral attention he learned to rejoice in the relaxed moral posture of grace?  If instead of snobbishly chanting the mantra that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth, realized that Christ lavishes fundamental decency in unmeasured equality in the new birth?

Imagine how God will rewrite the ending.  “So we rush on, boats born on the current that takes its rise from the throne of God, borne on ceaselessly into eternity.”  Imagine the empty gaze of T. J. Eckleburg replaced by the living eyes of a loving God who does not need spectacles to see even the least significant garage mechanic lost amidst the ashes of the wasteland.

Imagine.

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October 14, 2006 by djackson.

A week ago Wednesday was the Feast of Saint Francis.  One reason I love my church is that my pastor, Grover Pinson, is aware of such things.  Better still, he is unafraid to mention such things from a Baptist pulpit.  Best of all, when he does mention them, he knows what he’s talking about.  So during Sunday’s sermon he told the story of St. Francis and the Leper.

 Have you heard that one?  Well, it doesn’t begin, “St. Francis and a leper walk into a bar . . . ” although, now that I think about it, it very well could.  There are different versions, but the gist of the tale is that the young Francis, who had a phobia about leprosy, saw an afflicted beggar limping along the road toward him.  Rotting rags draped running sores.  Fly-blown flesh hung in peeled strips like mildewed wallpaper.  Damp footprints mottled the dust with pads of mud and puss.  The dandified son of a wealthy merchant drew back in horror and twitched up the cuffs of his starched khakis, fearful lest standing downwind of this lump of psoriasis should stain the popped collar of his Izod sports shirt.  Stung by a spasm of conscience, he reached for his purse, flung it at the man’s three-toed feet, and wheeled about to flee.  Some versions of the story have Francis on foot, others on horseback, but it doesn’t really matter.  What counts is that just at that moment, young Bernadone’s heart told him that a bag full of kruggerands wouldn’t pay the debt.  He turned, walked to the beggar, placed the purse in those scabrous palms, and then hugged the fellow to his breast. 

Francis later dated his conversion from that moment:  not when he heard Christ speak to him from the crucifix above the altar of the ruined Chapel of San Damiano; not when he shucked his laundry in the town square and walked away naked to embrace Lady Poverty; not when the stigmata burst through his palms on Monte Alverna - but when a putrid, polluted body became the holy sacrament, when he hugged Jesus in the horror of a leper.

After the service, I eavesdropped as a congregant told my pastor the story of her grandson, who has Down’s Syndrome.  She began visiting the school where the young man spends his days.  Though she dreaded the visits, having a natural aversion to deformity, she quickly lost her heart to mentally retarded but emotionally gifted people who loved her without reservation.  One remark struck me in particular.  She said that the overseers tried to outlaw hugging.  Some of the residents had substandard personal hygiene, and Down’s Syndrome sufferers tend toward respiratory diseases.  The prohibition failed, however.  It seems that these people live for and by affection.  An interdiction against embracing had as much force as a ban on breathing.

We think we are heroes when we hug lepers.  We never suspsect that the bravery may be greater the other way.  To hug those who shun you, ignoring the subcutaneous shiver of disgust at the very feel of your flesh, to love so deeply and hold so tightly that prejudice asphyxiates and fastidiousness expires - now that’s courage.  To hold out your arms for an embrace, even if your intended victims take advantage of that pose to nail you in it permanently - that is the act of a saint.

Of course I began thinking about Christ.  Imagine the scene when he announced, from the center of the circle of unending glory, that he intended to don the putrid protoplasm of his hybrid humans and hold them close to God of very God.  His seraphic handlers fluttered nervously at his side.  Angels and archangels quoted complex passages from theological policy manuals in a desparate bid to save the Savior from himself and from the scandal of sinful skin.  They appealed to the throne and the prohibition of his Father, but the Almighty smiled mightily and sent his only begotten.  So the Down’s Syndrome Deity, the mongoloid Christ of the manger lept into the mass of humanity.  He touched lepers when he knew full well that remote-control healing worked with equal efficiency.  He could call Lazarus from the tomb with a word of command, but he touched the open bier that bore the widow’s son in Nain.  He molded spittle-spiked mudpies on the unseeing eyes of one man, as if determined to involve them both in the messiness of creation.  In the end, they declared him unclean, but a clutch of women dirtied their hands with ceremonial polution on Judaism’s holiest day.  Love had outhugged law; determined acceptance overwhelmed disgust.

“I have decided to accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior.”  Good for you, but don’t get cocky.  The real miracle is not that we would take him, but that he would have us.  Our repentance from sin is good, but nothing like so great as his rejection of righteousness.

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October 9, 2006 by djackson.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Donald Miller’s metaphysical thriller, revolves around a monastery of the Albertian Order of St. Leibowitz.  Like the Celtic cenobites of the middle ages, the monks of the AOS, living in the new Dark Ages of post-nuclear holocaust America, preserve the tatters of Western learning.  Their skilled scribes turn out illuminated copies of shopping lists and grade school text books as they await a new Renaissance.  After over a millennium as curators of these “Memorabilia,” they finally see the rise of scholars capable of deciphering the ancient texts.  Paulo, the abbot, greets the development with honest ambivalence.

“It’s unpleasant to think of it,” he confides to a friend.  “For twelve centuries, we’ve ben one little island in a very dark ocean.  Keeping the Memorabilia has been a thankless task, but a hallowed one, we think.  It’s only our worldly job, but . . . it’s hard to think that the job’s soon to be finished - soon to become unnecessary.  I can’t believe it somehow.”

Miller’s monk invites introspection.  Do we do our work to the glory of God, or is our work for God a glory unto itself?  I’ve worked hard on my boat.  How happily will I leave it behind when the journey continues on land?  In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis depicts a man who spent his days as a scholar arguing for the afterlife.  When he arrived on the outskirts of Heaven he was unhappy.  “Everyone here,” says Lewis’ personal Virgil, “had ’survived’ already.  Nobody took the least interest in the question.  There was nothing more to prove.  His occupation was clean gone . . . . In the end he went away.”  The cicerone continues, “Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them?  Or an organiser of charities that had lost all love for the poor?  It is the subtlest of all snares.”

Subtle indeed.  A church member once gave me a copy of a novel, a work in progress by her brother.  Of course it was about the End Times.  The would-be author was passing his manuscript around, soliciting comments.  One reader had scribbled on the cover, “Wonderul!  Please hurry up and finish it before the Rapture comes!”  That plea has stayed with me over the years:  the dear soul felt that experiencing the Raputre would be second-best to reading about it.

And what about us preacher and teacher-types when the Kingdom finally comes in its full glory?  Will the golden boulevards of the New Jerusalem echo with the sad laments of redeemed pulpiteers moaning like latter-day Othello’s,

Farewell the plumed choir, and the big hair/That made ambition virtute! O, Farewell!/Farewell!  The preacher’s occupation’s gone!

Last Wednesday was the Feast of Saint Francis, a medieval madman who manifested a healthy and holy insanity about such matters.  Among other acts of kindness, the little man ministered to lepers.  With Christlike love he cuddled the puddled pus of their flesh and laundered the rags soiled by their sores.  But he never let his love for the diseased become a love for the disease.  If there were lepers, he was glad to minister to them.  He never made the mistake of being glad there was leprosy.  The need to be needed is, when examined, a need for people to have needs.  Obsolescence is the only genuine spiritual goal - an eternity of adding our superflous voices to a chorus of praise which God never needed in the first place. 

Until then, we hold our hallowed tasks lightly.  The trick is to grasp the work firmly enough to let it callous and even cut our flesh, but never to clutch.

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