April 30, 2007 by djackson.

A friend’s son gave his senior recital yesterday.  One of the selections on offer was an aria from Handel’s opera “Semele.”  I’d heard the binge before. - my wife is a vocal performance student, meaning that I’m getting educated way beyond my appreciation - but I never knew the song’s context until I read it in the program notes.

Seems that Jupiter, as that randy Roman deity was prone to do, had fallen in love with a mortal.  (Note: the mediterranean gods were a seriously hormonal bunch, which is why any comparison between the pagan demigods and the incarnate Christ is like comparing Hugh Hefner to Billy Graham.)  He plights his troth in the poetic way that gobsmacked gods are prone to do when punctured by Cupid’s hypodermic.  In this particular setup the god warbles to his intended about all the fringe benefits that come from being the flavor-of-the-week arm candy for the Boss Hog of Mount Olympus.  And I have to admit he offers her a pretty sweet deal!

Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade:
Where’er you tread, the blushing flow’rs shall rise;
and all things flourish where’er you turn your eyes.

Now that’s the kind of sound, sensible, marketable promise that any seeker-sensitive supreme being would make to a potential bride:  a climate-controlled ecosystem with portable shade and hot and cold running floral arrangements laid on regardless.  In fact, I must admit that this Jupiter bears a remarkable resemblance to the Jehovah preached from too many ostensibly Christian pulpits.  We hear much these days of a God of guarantees, an extended warranty sort of Lord who plies the potentially pious with prosperity and success beyond the dreams of avarice.

The real Christian poets, however, paint a different picture.  They speak of long treks through death valleys, of thorns corkscrewing into tender flesh, of Sloughs of Despond and Valleys of Humiliation and hard time in the dungeon of the Giant Despair and the vile world that is a friend to grace to help us on to God.  They tell us about armor worn, not on parade, but in the deadly earnest of daily combat, of notched swordblades dulled by close-order contact with the enemy’s habergeon.  Three trees do indeed crowd the crown of Golgotha, but they provide little in the way of shade; what comes instead is the deep shadow of darkness at noonday when God’s righteousness withdraws into eclipse before the price of obedient love.  They give us gardens, but these are Gardens of Gethsemane; not the blush of blossoms but the flush of blood-streaked sweat blooms in the grove of sacrifice.  What rises where we tread are not blushing flowers but brutal crosses.

Handel didn’t write his own lyrics; he swiped ‘em off the poet Alexander Pope.  Air-brushed love poems of idealistic forevers were all the rage in Merry Old England.  A century and a half earlier Christopher Marlowe gushed out an amorous prospectus which begins,

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields
Woods or steepy mountain yields

Again, a good deal, but hardly credible.  Sir Walter Raleigh called Marlowe’s bluff, countering with a sonnet of his own which leads off,

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

 Or, stripped of the Elizabethan gingerbread, “Pull the other one; it’s got bells on it.” 

Christ calls his bride from the cross, and he calls her to the cross.  He reads the fine print of the prenup in letters as large as the five wounds that puncture his flesh.  His is not the hormone-addled lovesong of a paramour who will say anything to enjoy one whom he wishes to use.  It is the battle hymn of a viking to a valkyrie.  Feel free to serve the crooning god of the world’s top forty, just don’t confuse him with Christ.  But if you wish to be the bride of the one who tells the truth about the sorrows that ennoble and the suffering that deepens, then take up your cross and walk the aisle.

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April 25, 2007 by djackson.

Note:  I am posting this sermon at the request of my pastor, Grover Pinson at Windsor Park Baptist Church.  Grover extended me the privilege of preaching to our congregation the Sunday after the tragedy at Virginia Tech.   

Fighting Back Like A Christian
Ephesians 6.16
A Sermon Preached at Windsor Park Baptist Church, Corpus Christi, Texas, on the Sunday following the Virginia Tech Shootings
 INTRODUCTION
            At first glance, this might seem a peculiar – even a bad – text to select on this particular Sunday.  We all watched in horror last Monday as news reports trickled in, describing how Seung-hui Cho, a 23 student at Virginia Tech, entered a class building armed with a. 22-caliber semi-automatic pistol and a 9mm. Glock and began blazing away.   By the time he turned the weapon on himself, thirty-two of his professors and classmates lay dead in the worst mass killing in recent American history.
            And don’t let the chronological mists create an artificial gap between that story and this text.  The Roman sword in the first century world was the state-of-the-art weapon of mass destruction.  The text tells Christians, in effect, to take up the semi-automatic of the Spirit.  The Bible here becomes the Glock of God! 
            In light of all of this, you might well ask, “How dare he read that passage?”
            But really, this only invites a series of larger questions.
            Paul originally chose as his metaphor for the Christian life the full battle-rattle the empyreal storm troopers of the Roman police state.  Modern refinement makes us uncomfortable with that kind of talk.  Back in 1984 the United Methodist Church voted to remove  “Onward Christian Soldiers” from its hymnal.  They had to recant due to a backlash from the pews, but their original argument was that the worship of the Prince of Peace should not employ the language of war.  Even we Baptists, always less squeamish than our Wesleyan brethren, have stopped having “Sword Drill” in favor of the cuddlier “Bible Drill.”
            Yet here is a text which bristles with ordnance like the display racks at a weekend gun show.  It reads like an EBay ad aimed at gimme-cap-clad rednecks.  How dare I read that passage?  Perhaps the better question is, “How dare Paul write that passage?”
            But, again, we’ve only pushed the issue back an additional step.  We might well ask why the church chose to include it in our Bible?  After all, not everything Paul wrote was divinely inspired Scripture.  As far as we can tell, he penned at least two letters to the church in Corinth which nobody thought to archive.  I’m sure that at some point he wrote out a grocery list for Luke to fill while Paul was under house arrest in Rome.  Yet this passage winds up on the pages of our sacred book.
          It didn’t have to, you know.  Debates over the canon are nothing new.  Unlike holy writings which claim to have come directly from the mouth of an angel, or to have been transcribed whole from golden tablets, the books in our Bible had to win their spurs, had to rise to the top of the list in a crowded field of early Christian writings.  The ancient rabbis debated over some books in the Old Testament.  The Song of solomon was up for grabs for a while and if you wonder why, just read it in “The Message.”  They wondered if Esther should make it in because the name of God appears nowhere in the whole story.  Martin Luther wanted James and the Revelation voted off the island.  He thought James preached works salvation and scouted it as “a right strawey epistle.”  Of the last book in the Bible, he said that a revelation ought to reveal and this one only confuses.  Nothing new here.  That’s why, by the way, you should never be troubled when you go to Barnes & Noble’s religion section and see these lurid paperbacks with titles like Who Changed the Bible? or The Hidden Gospels.  It is no big secret that certain writings didn’t make the cut.  It isn’t as if there was a conspiracy of guys who met in secret and then deleted all the emails before Congress found out.  All this is a part of our history.  Great scholars and  theologians, and great servants of Christ, debated loud and long over the canon of Scripture.  In the early days it was sort of like a reality show, “Athanasian Idol,” perhaps, in which the churches voted and experts advised as to which letter or gospel should advance to the next round.  If you dust this text for fingerprints you will find that it has passed through the hands – and the hearts – of some of our greatest spiritual leaders.
            How could these early followers of the Lamb endorse such an inappropriate picture the ideal Christian?  How could they picture the fully-equipped saint as an Islamic suicide bomber, bulky and burly beneath his IED, waiting to wreak havoc in a sidewalk café?  Why would they imagine the mature saint as a street gang thug strapped with is nine and looking to bust off a few caps?
            How dare I read this passage?  How dare Paul write it?  Maybe the question should be, “How dare the Church embrace that passage?”
            Now, before you prepare to stone me for questioning the authority Bible, consider the only other alternative.  If this text is inspired, consider One who inspired it and the One who spoke it. How can the God who, we have it on good authority from elsewhere in this same sacred Book,  is love give us such a violent vision what it means to follow his Son?
            How dare I read this passage?  How dare Paul write this passage?  How dare the Church embrace that passage?  Let’s try the ultimate question: “How dare God inspire that passage?”
            It might help to place the passage in historical context.  Paul wrote Ephesians at the same time as Colossians: while he was held a prisoner in Rome.  Tradition, based on hints in the Bible, holds that he spent his days chained, manacled, handcuffed to a Roman soldier (Col 4.18), the living embodiment of his own oppression.  Paul writes as innocent man deprived his civil rights Caesar’s homeland security, manacled to a Marine in a cell at Gitmo with the write of habeas corpus suspended.  Under the circumstances, he is the last guy inclined idealize Roman military might.             Instead, what he offers is an alternative form of warfare, an entirely different response based on an entirely different reality, an alternative kingdom which rivals Rome.  Accordingly, he warns that those weapons that are the state-of-the-art standard issue for the world are no match for the panoply of Christian warfare. 
            We have seen this week what human weaponry can do, what tragedy it can inflict.  This has had predictable consequences.  The stench of cordite still hung in the hallways at Virginia Tech as the cable news pundits began debating the need for gun control.  You know the arguments.  One side says, “We have to take away all the guns so the bad guys won’t have them.”  The other side says, “We have to give everyone guns to that the bad guys aren’t the only ones who have them.”
            For Christians, however, the question is not whether need to get hold weapons Cho used or whether need to take those weapons away from others.  This text tells us that we need to understand that our fight involves completely different weapons, and we need to start using them!
            Seen in that light, the real question today is not, How dare I read this passage?  Or, How dare Paul write this passage?  Or, How dare the Church embrace that passage?  Or even, “How dare God inspire that passage?”  The real question is, “How can we dare to live this passage?” 
            And that is important, because I am convinced that this text – in light of the Gospel as a whole – can tell us two things about the Virginia Tech tragedy which no other source can:  why it happened, and how we should respond.·        WHY IT HAPPENED
“…the flaming arrows of the evil one.”
            Paul tells us that our enemy is not other people, but “the evil one.”  If there was any doubt about this point, verse 12 makes it clear.  But our society has a hard time understanding evil because we’ve denied the existence of the Evil one!  We don’t believe in a Redeemer, so we have no choice but to deny our need for redemption.  

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April 25, 2007 by djackson.

David Brooks of the New York Times recently wrote a paean in praise of Darwinism.  Like a prizefight promoter touting the latest contender, he offers the theory of evolution as the champion who, having vanquished the Judeo-Christian worldview in a bruising twelve-rounder, will now dispatch postmodern deconstructionism with a single sucker-punch.  “It’s clear,” he bellows, “we’re not a postmodern society anymore.  We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history.”  Thus Derrida goes down for the count almost before the combatants have touched gloves.

I agree with Mr. Brooks that Darwinism (as opposed to the actual scientific hypothesis of evolution) is a grand narrative, what C. S. Lewis in his essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth” calls “one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which has ever been imagined.”  Lewis, an Oxford scholar who knew a thing or two about Medieval and Renaissance literature, compares the amoeba-to-monkey-to-man motif favorably to Elizabethan tragedy.  Whether Darwin packs sufficient psychological glue to put the Humpty Dumpty smash-up of modernism back together again is more than I am qualified to say, but I do want to point out a couple of what I believe are faults in Mr. Brooks’ reasoning.

His first mistake arises from intellectual snobbery - which rests on intellectual ignorance.  “Creationists,” he scoffs, “reject the whole business, but they’re like the Greeks who still worshiped Athena while Plato and Aristotle developed philosophy.”  Well, yes, creationism rejects Darwinism; he got that right.  But even a casual glance into Plato’s dialogues reveals that he took the gods as seriously as anyone else in his day.  A deeper dip into Socrates’ disciple shows that he laid the foundations for much of Christian mysticism.  But this flaw really isn’t so egregious.  Everyone knows that bigotry against Christians enjoys amnesty in our society.  As G. K. Chesterton says, “It (looks) not so much as if Christianity (is) bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick (is) good enough to beat Christianity with.”

I can spot Mr. Brooks his failure to understand Christianity; more culpable is his failure to understand his own story, or even to tell it consistently.  In contrast to religious narratives, on which he blames war and genocide (not very original, by the way, and as usual he forgets atheist holocausts like Buchenwald and the Gulag), “evolutionary society,” he demurs, “is built low to the ground.”  In other words, the diffidence of descent with modification replaces the egotism of special creation.  Actually, the thing works the other way ’round.  In point of fact, the whole Apostles’ Creed of Darwinism contains only one clause, “I believe in progress.”  Far from engendering humility, the recently-concluded Century of Evolution touched off pyrotechnical displays of hubris unrivaled in human history.  The geocentric medieval model, by contrast, placed humanity not (as is often mistakenly asserted) at the center of the universe so much as at the bottom.  In the old system, we knew our place; the new one gave us a biological and sociological horse race in which win, place, and show were up to the striving of the individual.

At any rate, Mr. Brooks cannot even keep the pride out of his own voice as he writes of this lowly outlook.  Moments before making the claim for humility he barks out praises to “human progress,” “mankind’s upward march from primative culture to higher civilization.”  Which is it?  The bedtime tale of submissive organisms bound by their biology, or of upwardly mobile DNA strands striving and overcoming?

But Mr. Brooks’ biggest flaw is his hypocrisy.  He seems willing enough to accept (and even celebrate) the view of humanity which Darwinism demands.  You and I and Beethoven and Rosie O’Donnel and your great aunt Sally are all of us nothing more than “machines for passing along genetic code.”  What we call morality (and its opposite, which we call immorality) are chimeras.  There is no such thing as what “should” happen and what “shouldn’t” happen; only what does happen.  “Individuals,” Mr. Brooks lectures us, “are predisposed not by sinfulness or virtue, but by the epigenetic rules encoded in their cells.”

Fair enough on April 15, 2007, when Mr. Brooks originally published his op-ed piece.  By the following Friday the same writer saw things differently.  Gazing back through the blood-soaked lense of a mass murder at Virginia Tech, things look different.  While still paying tribute to his idea that the individual “is like a cork bobbing on the currents of giant forces,” Mr. Brooks insists that “it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists’ insights without allowing them to become monopolists.”  But that’s what a grand narrative is:  a monopoly on the imagination of an entire society.  “It should be possible,” he continues, “to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility close to the center.”  Not, I think, if we find that ground zero occupied by a mindless mechanism for repeating chemical sequences on a double-helix.

Having yelped that Darwin’s black box must have a clearly marked exit, Mr. Brooks then slams that escape hatch shut when he sneers that, “It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons by better sermons.”  As Francis Collins, one of Mr. Brooks’ fellow-believers in evolution, a real scientist - head of the human genome project - and also a convinced Christian might point out, it is madness to suggest salvation could have come from anywhere else.

Real science tends toward real humility.  Stephen J. Gould, one of evolution’s leading advocates, declares that “to say it for the umpteenth million time:  Science cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.  We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.”  Mr. Brooks’ views demonstrate what inevitably happens when amateurs attempt to generalize and popularize what specialists keep carefully within its proper boundaries.

Pseudo-science sneers at faith because this is easier than examing the content of belief.  In his novel A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter Miller, Jr. depicts a Catholic monastery perched in the deserts of the American southwest a few centuries after one nuclear holocaust and a few centuries before a second.  Most scientific learning was lost when the world blew itself to bits, but humanity has begun to make significant strides toward its recovery.  One of the leaders of this new intellectual elite visits the abby and holds a Q&A with the brothers.  A young priest asks the expert if the academy has considered Augustine’s view that God created “germinal causes,” which then evolved into more complex forms, eventually including human beings.  The scientist’s smile, almost a sneer, makes his views of such silliness plain.  “‘I’m afraid it has not,’” Miller has him reply, “‘but I shall look it up,’ he said, in a tone that indicated he would not.”  Before Mr. Brooks chuckles at the hopeless backwardness of belief, he should, perhaps, look a few things up.

It may be worth noting that Mr. Brooks began his original meditation under the inspiration of the Rockefeller Museum which stands on a hill in Jerusalem.  Perhaps we would do well to ponder the social trajectory traced from a monument to western colonialism built by the ill-gotten gains of an American robber baron.  Perhaps we would do well to look to a different hilltop, one located outside that same ancient city, where a downwardly mobile Messiah redefined what it means to be “lifted up.”

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April 16, 2007 by djackson.

I’m a man; I’m therefore a misogynist, utterly self-involved, and have the concentration level of a rat terrier on benzedrine.  Who says so?  Bella Abzug?  Gloria Steinham?  Nanci Pelosi?

No.  The Christian Men’s Movement says so.  And they think they’re doing me a favor.

I refer to “The Church for Men,” the latest excresence from the tumor of self-seeker sensitivity battening on American Evangelicalism.  This “church” meets in a gym. . .on Saturday nights. . .once a month.  Women are not welcome.  The organizers guarantee a sixty minute max and run the scoreboard clock to prevent the message from breaking the quarter-hour mark.  (Note:  the Sermon on the Mount takes eighteen to twenty minutes to deliver.  I guess Jesus would be ejected.  “So you men could not keep watch with me for one hour?”  Well, Lord, you ran overtime and the Spurs were on.)

What next?  Since the pulpit sits at the top of the key, why not a three-second violation if the preacher remains in the paint for too long?  After all, we toddlers need constant movement to keep us plugged in.  Maybe fire up the shot clock, too, and force the speaker to relinquish the microphone if he goes that long without using a sports illustration.   

I confess to resenting the demeaning stereotypes.  “Musically men want AC/DC,” says Christian comedian Chris Elrod, “and we give them Celine Dion.  Lyrically men want Tom Clancy and we give them Danielle Steel.  Spiritually men want ‘Braveheart’ and we give them ‘Sleepless in Seattle.’”  Well, my own musical tastes run on a continuum from Hank Williams to Gregorian chant, I read Tolstoy and Jane Austen, and hardly go to movies.  Guess I don’t qualify as a follower of the Son of He-Man.  I reluctantly admit that I can stay focused for an hour of liturgy and Biblical preaching.  Evidently, that isn’t a manly thing.  Mike Ellis, purported pastor of this farce, brags that “I have the attention span of a flea.”  And the waistline of an elephant seal if the photograph in the paper is at all accurate.  One hairy-chested church in Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have a pastor; they have a “coach” who integrates “a masculine spirit throughout the entire church.”  Funny; I thought the pastor was supposed to convey the Holy Spirit.  I thought I’d read somewhere that the way this Christian thing works is that I get transformed; not that God gets conformed.

What drives this drivel?  Why would those who claim to follow the risen Son of God see the need to drape the Gospel in a jersey, douse it with Gatorade, paint its face in someone’s team colors?  After all, if these boys want an all-male club with a cross out front they can just enroll in Southwestern Seminary.  There they’ll be completely safe from women, at least women professors.  (Well, except the boss’s wife, but it appears that even the boss isn’t safe from her.)

A comment by United Brethren pastor Chuck McKeown answers the question.  “If the church is going to survive,” he whimpers, “we have to get men plugged back in.”  Ah!  When Jesus said “on this rock I will build my church” he didn’t mean Peter and he didn’t mean Peter’s confession of faith.  (At least the men’s movement can put an end to one of the oldest contentions in the Protestant/Catholic schism.)  The “rock” he had in mind was beer-bellied arrested adolescents who think God has to cater to their carnality in order to keep up his standing in the Nielson ratings.  Theology that begins with the vulnerability of the church has set aside the power of Christ and made its own savvy the power truly to be trusted.  Nothing good can come of that.

Although I should admit that there exists a scriptural precedent for all-male worship.  It dates back to the birth of the faith, that first Easter Sunday when the men met alone because they didn’t have the guts to accompany the women to the last place anyone had seen Jesus.  The risen Lord didn’t seem to mind commissioning a woman to bring these lunkheads up to speed.  Christ’s own fault, of course: he should have booked a rock band and promised to empty the tomb on a time-limit.

Jesus cried at funerals.  Jesus went to weddings.  Jesus kissed one of his pals right in front of a brigade of Marines.  Jesus sent his mom a mother’s day card in the midst of the ultimate bad day at the office.  I think we can just keep going to church.  If we want to pound on our chests, that’s all right too.  But not like Tarzan; more like mourners in sackcloth who confess their need to rise above a lying culture and to give God, not what they want but what He demands.  Now that sounds like a man’s work to me.

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April 10, 2007 by djackson.

Great sermon on Easter Sunday.  My pastor, capping off a truly worshipful week during which we gathered each night to focus on Our Lord’s sacrifice at Calvary, preached about the women making their Dawn Patrol trek to the tomb.  (Sidebar:  the Greek word “to run” is trecho, though it has no actual connection to our English verb.  Still, it appears about four times in the various accounts of the resurrection, two of them with reference to the women.  Easter Sunday looks more like a track meet than a formal worship service and these early-day Wilma Rudolphs burned up the cobblestone race course of ancient Jerusalem!) 

Pastor Grover pointed out that, to everyone else, this was a day for getting back to normal.  Sunday was the Jewish Monday; people got up, grumbled a little, and went back to work.  Moreover, this particular Sunday followed the close of Passover, so everyone had that post-holiday hangover.  The Law had slapped a prohibition on unleavened bread for the previous seven days so women began baking rich, yeasty loaves.  After a week of choking down saltines, people snuffed up the scent of rising dough.  The current incarnation of the Gibeonites gazed at the temple grounds, red with the gore of thousands of goats and sheep slain over the weekend.  They manned their mops and began swabbing up the mess.  Priests rubbed sore shoulders and complained about arthritis aggravated by slitting too many sacrificial throats.  The Roman soldiers breathed a little easier.  Passover was always a dicey time for the hired muscle in a police state, but things had gone off fairly peacefully; had to crucify three guys but it avoided the riot.  The terror alert sank from fuscia to teal and the big men eased off their full battle rattle for the first time in weeks.

Meanwhile, for a handful of outland peasants, the whole world somersaulted twice.

Their world had ended a few hours earlier when their Messiah died.  Then their ended world became their upended world at dawn when their Messiah refused to stay dead.  Before it was over the psychic shift reached critical mass sufficient to switch their day of worship forward by twenty-four hours, and if you think recalibrating three thousand years of religious tradition happens for no good reason, you’ve never tried to get a Baptist to sit in a different pew at church!  Something had ended besides one more Passover; something had begun besides another work week. 

I thought of this on Monday morning as I settled down for the six Sundays of Easter.  Holy Week had been an ordeal, though a blessed one.  Well, there’s always that kind of intensity around religious festivals.  Archaeologists now believe that downriver from Stonehenge was a big town built to handle the holy tourism drawn to that sacred shrine at the solstices and equinoxes each year.  Excavations have revealed vats of beer and the general remains of restaurants and souvenir shops.  Evidently Easter sales at the mall are nothing new, nor are money changers in the temple.  Once the crisis passes we sigh our relief and hunker down to plough the old familiar furroughs.  Thank God (or the gods, or whomever), now things can get back to normal.

Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises centers around the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona.  Though the book deals mostly with the famous bullfights, the narrator admits that “San Fermin is also a religious festival.”  On the day before this holy observance, Jake Barnes, scanning the sidewalk cafes in the town square, notes that “the marble-toppped tables and white wicker chairs were gone.  They were replaced by cast-iron tables and severe folding chairs.  The cafe was like a battleship stripped for action.”  At the end of the week we read,

In the morning it was all over.  The fiesta was finished. . . .The square was empty and there were no people on the streets.  A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square.  The cafes were just opening and the waiters were carrying out the comfortable white wicker chairs and arranging them around the marble-topped tables in the shade of the arcade.  They were sweeping the streets and sprinkling them with a hose.

Back to normal.  But for the characters in the story, irrevocable change has come, irrevocable damage has been done, irrevocable injury sustained.  The village doesn’t know; the village goes back to its business.

The world didn’t know it on that first Easter “Sunday” (our psychological Monday), but they now rebuilt their routines on the rubble of an unmade world.  The besieged city stood down and returned to comfortable furniture and comfortable food and comfortable religion, but revolution sank delicate tendrils in the cracked hearts of some crackpot Galileans, tendrils that would eventually bust up the foundations of the social edifice and sink taproots into a rich new soil.

I recently watched, as part of my Lenten penance, a documentary on the Shroud of Turin.  The producers made the rather goofy claim that the purported relic contains evidence of an “event horizon,” the phenomenon theorized to occur at the mouth of a black hole where all the laws of physics break down and the rules no longer apply.  Now, as a Baptist I have far more regard for revelation than relics, for Scripture than scraps of cloth, but the concept itself intrigues me.  Whatever else went on in that tomb on that Sunday, the world did indeed experience an event horizon.  We received new rules and, more importantly, a new Ruler. 

I woke up at my usual hour on Monday.  My newspaper had gone from rotund to anorexic after a bulemic purge of all the fat advertising flyers.  No evening services on the weeknights.  But my world, unmade on Good Friday and remade on Easter Sunday, will never be the same again; indeed, it never was.

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