January 29, 2007 by djackson.

In church yesterday our pastor Pastor Grover preached on the prayer-life of Jesus.  Among the rich smorgasbord of texts from the Gospel of Luke he included 23.46, “Father, into thy hands I commit My spirit.”  Grover told us that some scholars say this was a standard prayer uttered by children before going to sleep for the night.  In a flash I heard the words echo in my head,

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

In that moment, everything about the death of Jesus changed and deepened for me.

The preceding statement from the cross, what scholars identify as the sixth of the seven words of Jesus’ passion, was “It is finished,” John 19.30.  Theologians tend to identify this with the “loud cry” recorded by all three synoptics.  This was a victor’s bellow, the end zone dance of the halfback who has just scored the winning touchdown as time ticks from the clock in the Super Bowl. 

Then the child’s whisper followed the hero’s holler.  He who taught us that only by becoming as little children could we enter the kingdom himself expired with a child’s rote prayer on his lips.  Like an exhausted little boy, drained of energy by the day’s demands, he snuggled his bloodied face into the mighty shoulder of his father and sobbed himself into eternity.  “Now I lay me down to sleep . . . .”

Of course, he was not beaten.  Scripture records and the creeds affirm that his spirit rose from that sleep of death refreshed to attack new challenges.  Even as his stricken followers pried nails from the hands of a corpse and ripped tangled hair free from the bloodied thorns, the God-Man stood poised from the summit of eternity like a cliff diver in Acapulco balanced above the pounding breakers.  His figure stood silhouetted against the blazing Shekinah of God’s radiant glory, flashed for a moment in the pellucid air, then disappeared beneath the savage surf of man’s unmeant mortality.  He dove as deep as Death itself, treated the Gates of Hades as Sampson once treated the bolts and bars of Gaza, and kicked the hell out of Hell.  He rocketed skyward and errupted onto the right hand of the throne of the Father as his radiant righteousness sent angel-feathers flying.

Still, between the two peaks of power lays the quiet valley of the nursery prayer.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

When Luther the Reformer lay dying he summoned to his side his colleague, Dr. Justus Jonas.  Jonas asked, “Dear Father, will you stand by Christ and the doctrine you have preached?”  The old warrior, who had faced down popes and councils, who had stood before the Diet of Worms and flung down his famous “Here I stand,” looked his friend in the face and blurted out a German monosyllable for which English has no truly adequate translation.  “Ja!” he affirmed.  That was the ex-monk’s “It is finished!”, the capstone on a career which included assertions in print and in person which defied both the religious and civil authorities of his day.  As Jesus declared to the Sanhedrin that he was the Son of God who would come in clouds of glory, and to Pilate that he had come forth as God’s chosen King, so Luther had stood his trial time and again until it all came down to one shout of triumph.  Then three times before death took him home, he repeated, “Father, into thy hands I commit My spirit.”  The man whose preaching moved men died mumbling the set-piece prayer of a tired child at bedtime.

If life finds you today puddled in a pool of exhaustion between a great challenge met and a great effort demanded, remember that only as children do we enter the rule and reign of God.  Cuddle into the comfort of your Abba’s embrace, snuggle in the arms which unleash lightning bolts against enemies but cradle and care for his own, and pray the bedtime prayer of faith, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

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January 23, 2007 by djackson.

“I am weak today, though anointed king; and these men the sons of Zeruiah are too difficult for me.” - 2 Samuel 3.39

Joab was David’s Muqtada al-Sadr. 

Nouri al-Maliki is the duly elected prime minister of the new, democratic Iraq.  He rules by law as expressed in a ratified constitution.  He represents a break with the brutal dictatorship of Sadam Hussein.  Muqtada al-Sadr is a Muslim cleric and warlord who supports al-Maliki’s reign.  David was the God-anointed king of Israel who ruled according to Mosaic law.  He represented a break with the tyranny of Saul.  Joab and his brothers, the “sons of Zeruiah,” were old-school warlords who threw their support behind the young monarch. 

Al-Sadr, however, backs the new regime with old methods.  He fields his own band of fighters, the Mahdi Army, who answer to no one but him.  A partisan Shiite, he uses this guerilla force not to uphold the rule of law but to settle old scores against his Sunni rivals.  Joab had little use for David’s fanciful visions of theocracy.  To him, power rested on the point of a sword and he whose hand gripped the hilt pointed power where he wished.  Joab’s war bands answered to him and he used his position to slay with impugnity whomever he chose, settling family beefs and keeping tabs on tribal rivalries that had nothing to do with bringing stability to a deeply divided Israel. 

David tolerated Joab because he couldn’t afford to cross him.  When his rogue general sucker-stabbed a potentially powerful ally, David rigged a lavish state funeral and wrote the eulogy himself, but admitted that his arm lacked strength to muzzle the real murderer.  Al-Maliki has not reined in al-Sadr, who holds court in his own fifedom within Baghdad, a district designated “Sadr City.”  Either he fears he cannot remain in control without the support of this Middle Eastern Al Capone, or he secretly agrees with al-Sadr’s old-school gang wars and happily lays off the action while retaining plausible deniability.

As David lay dying he briefed his son Solomon on handling Joab:  “Do not let his gray hair go down to Sheol in peace.”  (1 Kings 2.6)  The outgoing monarch read his long-harbored indictment against the indispensible incubus who had kept David powerless by keeping him in power.  Joab shanked and shivved his way through the ranks of his rivals.  He swaggered about in a blood-boltered cummerbund.  Something had to be done, but David had compromised too long to be the one to do it.

As soon as Junior mounted the throne, Joab learned that even the horns of the altar did not shelter him from the horns of the dilemma on which he had impaled himself.  There was a new sheriff in town who agreed (anachronistically) with one of Shakespeare’s kings that “no place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize.”  Similarly, President Bush has put the prime minister on notice:  if America stays in the game, al-Sadr goes.  Political niceties will no longer protect one who fights his own private wars.  Solomon decided early the kind of kingdom in which he would live.  His insight deduced that Joab had backed the wrong side in a civil dispute and no longer held sufficient cards to bluff out the hand.  Al-Maliki must now run the risk, either of betting heavily on American commitment or putting his pile on al-Sadr.  What kind of world he works with will depend on which kingdom he picks.

Jesus’ entire message came down to a single sound-bite, a bumper sticker slogan of salvation which Mark 1.14-15 defines as the essence of the gospel:   “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”  Put in the parlance of the Old West, “There’s a new sheriff in town.  Lay down your weapons and receive a full pardon, or we’ll settle it all in a shoot-out at the OK Corral.”  This is a cheek-turning, second-mileing, cloak-and-shirt-shedding warfare in which love outweighs hate as a weapon of mass construction.  It’s a crazy way to fight a war, based on a philosophy of mutually assured redemption.  What kind of world we work with depends on which kingdom we pick.

So we find ourselves identifying with Prime Minsiter al-Maliki.  Common sense says that we need the support of those who are powerful and cunning in the ways of The World - the only world we’ve ever known.  A deeper part of us, one that we keep quietly cloaked while in Sunday School, adds that we really like the ways of the flesh and yearn to see our old rivals paid in full for their past crimes.  On the other side of this equation we find Christ, the Lord of Hosts, who quietly but firmly insists that he has come to rule and reign according to an entirely new set of realities.  “Repentence,” in this context, simply means weighing up the data and making our wisest choice.

So - in which king do you believe?  In which kingdom will you live? 

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January 16, 2007 by djackson.

I went to hear one of our students preach a couple of weekends ago.  It was Epiphany Sunday and she took her text from the Gospel reading of the lectionary - the visit of the magi in Matthew 2.  She camped on v.12 and made the elegant point that a true encounter with Christ always alters one’s course, though the change may seem slight.  In fact, of the two words for “another” available in the Koine Greek language, Matthew chose the one that indicates the smallest amount of difference, “another of the same kind”.  The wise guys still headed back to Baghdad, they just took the Farm to Market roads instead of the superslab. 

Encounter with Christ leads to change, and it is the long-range trajectory, more than the immediate adjustment, that matters.  The magi may not have gone far out of their route, but in fact they crossed the Rio Grande into an entirely new kingdom.  They left a world in which junketing statesmen cleared their credentials with local overlords and entered one in which REM-sleep messengers for a diaper-clad king outranked that system.  They bowed their knees to the powerless prince of peace enthroned in a Bethlehem duplex and thumbed their noses at the local incarnation of Saddam Hussein.  What seemed like a simple left turn when the main road ran right was in fact a deeply subversive act of political and social and spiritual sabotage.

It is, then, a dangerous thing to go rambling about looking for Jesus.  The search is good exercise, a chance to stretch your legs.  The problem is that if you look, you just might find him.  After that, you might make one small change in your predictable and respectable behavior without realizing that you just knocked your world base-over-apex.

Parker Palmer, in The Courage to Teach, examines the seduction of objectivism, the ruling epistemology of western civilization.  “When a thing ceases to be an object and becomes a vital, interactive part of our lives . . . it might get a grip on us, biasing us toward it, thus threatening the purity of our knowledge once again.”  Herod, from inside his palace in Jerusalem, can objectively order the death of a baby he’s never seen.  The wise men, from the crouching stance that puts them at eye-level with this remarkable baby, must act to save the infant’s life.

Along with the sermon, our student included a pastoral prayer.  She told me later it was a sort of gumbo of her own thoughts and something she half-remembered reading.  In any case, the words moved me as I thought of small meetings with Jesus and the kingdom-collisions they precipitate.  In part, the prayer says,

God we confess that ours is still a world

In which Herod seems to rule.

The powerful are revered.

The visions of the wise are ignored.

The poor are afflicted.

And the innocent are killed.

Show us that salvation comes

In the innocence of the Christ child.

Yet, we hunger for the security of weapons

And the walls which divide us.

A little later comes the plea, “Forgive us God, when we look to the palace/Instead of the stable.”

Jerusalem is only a short distance from Bethlehem.  If you are standing far enough away, the difference in looking toward one instead of the other may be only a few compass points.  The small changes in those who see Christ reorient reality for all eternity.

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January 9, 2007 by djackson.

In an editorial in yesterday’s Corpus Christi Caller-Times pundit Daniel K. Thomasson unleashes a verbal daisy-cutter aimed at those who demur from selective shopping for fetuses.  Mr. Thomasson, who writes for Scripps Howard News Service, believes that pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is humankind’s ticket into the luxury skybox of a Brave New World. He cites a case in which a cancer-prone set of parents held a casting call for a petrie dish full of aspiring embryos, culled the vulnerable, kept the “clean” candidate (I’m quoting Mr. Thomasson) and gonged the rest. His response to those who protest that such behavior usurps the prerogative of the Deity isn’t very original or very convincing: he asks, “Didn’t God give those scientists who developed this and other procedures the brains to make things better?”.  Yes, and the brains to make things worse.  God also gave us the soul to know better, though we frequently fail to employ it. 

I only want to respond at length to one of Mr. Thomasson’s statements.  He inveighs “against blind adherence to sectarian dogma that should be thousands of years in the past.”  Blind, secterian, outdated - this is a rhetorical hat-trick in which the writer goes 0-for-three. 

BLIND

Why is adherence necessarily blind?  Kiergegaard did indeed commend the “leap of faith,” but this was an informed act by which one completely abandoned one state for another.  The “leap” involved, not ignorance but commitment.  Mr. Thomasson seems to adhere (blindly?) to the definition of faith given by Richard Dawkins as “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.”  To this bold attack on a boogey-man Francis Collins, head of the human genome project, rightly replies,

That certainly does not describe the faith of most serious believers throughout history, nor of most of those in my personal acquaintance.  While rational argument can never conclusively prove the existence of God, serious thinkers from Augustine to Aquinas to C. S. Lewis have demonstrated that a belief in God is intensely plausible.  It is no less plausible today. 

SECTARIAN

One wonders how Mr. Thomasson defines this term.  My guess is that, as used in his sentence, it means, “Not everyone agrees with it, particularly not the people I run into at cocktail parties.”  But the term, properly understood, implies that something is narrow in scope, limited in outlook.  Is it indeed, a sectarian view that human beings, especially the weakest, should be treated with respect amounting to reverence?  In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis proposes a virtually universal moral code which he calls “the Tao.”  At the end of the book he provides an appendix which purports to show that virtually all great societies in all eras have recognized certain moral “givens” which, like the point, line, and plane in Euclydian geometry, cannot be proven but cannot be done without.  Under the heading, “The Law of Mercy,” Lewis lists the following:

The poor and the sick should be regarded as lords of the atmosphere. - Hindu. Janet, 1.8.

Whoso makes intercession for the weak, well pleasing is this to Sama. - Babylonian. ERE v. 445.

In the Dalebura tribe a woman, a cripple from birth, was carried about by the tribespeople in turn until her death at the age of sixty-six. - Australian Aborigines, ERE v. 443.

Under “Duties to Children,” Lewis includes:

Great reverence is owed to a child. - Roman. Juvenal, xiv 47.

The Master said, Respect the young. - Ancient Chinese. Analects, ix. 22.

Mr. Thomasson might like to relegate respect for human life to Evangelical trailer-trash, but he can’t.  And his contempt for that socially impoverished, though often spiritually wealthy, segment of society calls into question his claim that he would never want genetic screening to become cultural cleansing.

Outdated

Reverence for life, and special reverence for especially needy life, should remain “thousands of years in the past.”  But isn’t it significant that such conviction comes with a history that reaches through the topsoil of intellectual fashions to grip with deep roots the bedrock of civilization?  Job’s buddy Bildad got a lot of things wrong, but he displayed a valid epistemology when he advised,

Please inquire of past generations, And consider the things searched out by their fathers. For we are {only} of yesterday and know nothing, because our days on earth are as a shadow. Will they not teach you and tell you, and bring forth words from their minds?

Maybe my convictions should be thousands of years in the past.  The same cannot be said of Mr. Thomasson’s, because his views are strangers to that ancient era.

One more word.  Mr. Thomasson insists that “those with no interest in the matter (especially uninvolved men)” have no right to speak to the issue of reproductive roulette.  Let me make two responses.  First, the front page of the same edition of the same paper carries a story about Dr. Alex Rotta, a local physician, and Jamie Longoria, a two-year-old heart patient.  Jamie’s case has inspired Dr. Rotta to run in an upcoming marathon in order to raise money for the care of chronically ill children.  “This is a kid that’s been through the ringer several times,” Rotta says.  “He’s a fighter.”  But it occurs to me that, if Dan K. Thomasson had his way, Jamie wouldn’t be a fighter because a rubber-gloved assassin would have KO’ed him before he ever made it into the ring.  The little boy’s courage and the sacrifice it has sparked would both have been flushed down a laboratory toilet. 

Second, I plead innocent to the charge of being “uninvolved.”  I have a son who suffers from a genetic heart defect.  I would trade the three chevrons on my doctoral robe for the series of zippers that scar his chest.  They are marks of courage that come in second only to the reckless smile with which he has confronted life for sixteen years now.  On the day we discovered his imperfections, while he was still floating in amniotic ignorance of his rotten luck, a doctor told us that we had “choices.”  We told him that we didn’t.  Our son now distributes joy to the lives all around him.  A microscope might have told us his heart was one chamber shy of a quota and badly mis-plumbed.  It could never have predicted the wicked zest with which he wisecracks on his dad.  It could never have predicted that he would become my hero.

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis?  I’ve read that Dr. Margaret Mead, asked to state the first archaeological sign of the emergence of civilization, replied, “A healed femur bone,” because members of the community had to care for that useless individual until the break knitted.  If a healed bone is the sign of civilization’s birth, a discarded fetus may be the sign of its death.

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January 4, 2007 by djackson.

We have Sunday night services at our church.  Not only that, but our pastor actually preaches meaningful sermons.  The bottom half of the Sunday double-header has fallen into disrepute of late.  Seekers, it seems, aren’t all that sensitive once the morning “amen” signals that they have again done their God-thing for the week.  At our church, however, we gather again once the shadows lengthen.  Age and illness, to be sure, keep away some who come in the mornings at the cost of considerable discomfort.  Work schedules, weariness and other factors keep many away.  Still, we form a respectable little group, and we receive a double portion.

Last Sunday, Abba Grover preached a comparison of the stories of Nicodemus and the woman at the well.  John yokes these incidents in adjoining chapters of his gospel and the pastor invited us to ponder why that might be.  He made the interesting point that Nicodemus rejected Jesus’ message because he had a religious reputation to lose if he signed a letter of intent to play for this rogue rabbi from the sticks.  The Samaritan Gunga Din, by contrast, had no reputation to lose; or, rather, she had a reputation she very much wanted to lose, and this made her more open.  Nick-at-Night came to Jesus well after the family hour so nobody would know.  Ms. Sychar AD 30 left Jesus in broad daylight and hit town at high noon wanting everybody to know.  I thought it was an excellent point.  When I approach Jesus, do I come as one who has something to lose, who is afraid of having to start all over?  Or do I come as someone who has something I need to lose, who desperately wants to start all over? 

Note:  as a religious professional I hate stories about Jesus-blind religious professionals who feel they are too old for a second career even if the first one has proven to be a bust.  My pastor is a big fan of Gregory the Great (well, aren’t we all?  I hear his Pastoral Rule is selling right up there with the Left Behind books) and as I listened to the sermon I was reminded of an anecdote related by C. S. Lewis in his essay “Christianity and Literature.”  Lewis, in turn, is retailing a scenario contrived by Dante in the Paradiso, “where

poor Pope Gregory, arrived in Heaven, discovered that his theory of the hierarchies, on which presumably he had taken pains, was quite wrong.  We are told how the redeemed soul behaved; ‘di se medesmo rise.’  It was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.”

I will, I am certain, one day discover how laughable most of my sermons were.  I am less certain that I will laugh.

The mark of a really good sermon, however, is not that it conveys great thoughts, but that it produces them.  The next day, as my wife and I were microwaving the message for a Monday afternoon spiritual snack of leftover exegesis, she pointed out an important extension of Abba Grover’s Jesus-vs.-reputation theme.  She said the bigger issue was not that Nicodemus’ reputation could have suffered by associating with the Master.  What matters, she maintained, is that Jesus’ reputation could have suffered by associating with the woman!  I’m not ashamed of Jesus!  Well, good for me.  The real shocker is . . . Jesus is not ashamed of me!

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