December 31, 2007 by djackson.

You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood. - 1 Peter 2.5

Sue Welch of Cornell University recently initiated an intervention that helped a young woman confront her bulimia and steer clear of suicide. Ms. Welch is not a professor at the elite Ivy League university. She’s a janitor.

And no, she hadn’t stayed in a Holiday Inn the night before. See, Cornell’s administration worries about its reputation as a demanding institution where overachieving stress-junkies stroke out and off themselves. According to Elizabeth Bernstein of the Wall Street Journal, in a survey of students at fifteen top schools Cornell won the stress test. So many undergrads have belly-flopped off the towering nearby cliffs that campus argot refers to suicide as “gorging out.” (http://biz.yahoo.com/wallstreet/071228/sb119881134406054777_id.html?.v=4&printer=1)

So the university did some admirable and even daring things which resulted in cutting the suicide rate by more than half. For my money, though, their wisest move was training custodians to spot kids with mental health problems. Surplus puke in a single dorm room set off the janitor’s psychological smoke-detector. She took energetic steps through the proper channels and the young woman received the help she needed. “These kids are looking to us to provide care,” Welch told Ms. Bernstein. “But they don’t see administrators every day, they see me.”

The point being that presence may count for more than expertise when it comes to care, whether that care is medical, emotional, or spiritual. Whether the fingers a marginal person stuffs down her throat are physical or intellectual, whether the ensuing eruption is digestive or verbal, the best person to catch on is the one on the spot.

It’s true that training matters. (I teach at the seminary; surely you knew I’d get around to that one.) Ms. Welch could spot the fault line and even feel it slipping, but beyond sending up a flare she was limited. She couldn’t supply the counseling or prescribe the medicine that might ultimately be needed. What she could - and did - do was bring to bear a basic knowledge applied in light of noticing and caring.

When Peter performed the mass-ordination that made all Christians priests, I think this was the kind of thing he had in mind. We Baptists are big on the “priesthood of all believers” but too often think it means we get to be on committees and talk at business meetings. These things, however, are not in themselves signs of redemption and may in fact be ingredients in eternal damnation. (”Where the meeting endeth not and the agenda is not quenched.”) Anyway, they don’t require the blood of Christ since you get similar privileges if you join the Moose Lodge or buy stock in a publicly traded company.

Christians miss the point when we think that believer priesthood involves a top-rung seat on the corporate ladder of the kirkenreich. What it really means is that God lets us all put on khaki clericals and mop up the barf of our fellow believers when various ills attack the body of Christ. It isn’t a very fun job and certainly not glamorous, but the good part is that the assignment includes (if we’re open to it) on-the-job training in how to spot a stressed-out saint in need of the Spirit’s healing touch.

Okay, sure, we still need “experts,” pastors and counselors and maybe even seminary professors with specific training in a given area. Spiritual ills are complex and we will all frequently find ourselves outside of our competence, needing to call in the specialist. But it all begins when the base-line believer, someone who sees her fellow saints on a daily basis, notices an unusual amount of projectile venting or sees the sharp, skeletal bones of a starved faith as they poke against the thin skin of a malnourished soul. And does something - nearly anything, really - about it.

Your brothers and sisters are looking to us - to the church - to provide care. But they don’t see the professor or even the pastor everyday, they see you. The question becomes - do you see them?

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December 25, 2007 by djackson.

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. - John 1.14

John offers an irreverent description of a deeply reverent moment. “The Word became flesh.” He selects his noun from a twin set of Greek synonyms - sarx and soma. Both mean “body,” but these twins are fraternal, not identical, and John opts for sarx, the second-born, red-headed one. Soma is a nicer word, more polite. The church is the soma of Christ (1 Cor 12.27), but Paul had a thorn in the sarx (2 Cor 12.7). Sarx is the thing that belches and passes gas and sweats and has foot odor. Heidi Klum has soma. Jack Black has sarx.

Economics geeks have a term that applies here: “meat space.” It distinguishes between the neat realm of market theories and the messy reality where actual consumers make erratic choices without respect for the pundits and their predictions. The Word entered meat space and dwelt among us. The bar graph precision of Ephesians 1 risks all in the jumbled marketplace of earth where tempters retail red-tag triumph in place of expensive salvation and belly-filled multitudes calculate loaf-and-fish futures, offering cheaper crowns than the one made of thorns.

Things get confusing in meat space. Theology, like theory, seems far-fetched. Redemption’s symphony, a score composed from eternity past in the flawless three-part harmony of the one triune God must now be banged out on the broken-stringed banjo of a fallen creation. When God the Son surrenders the Stradivarius that first sang the music of the spheres and accepts instead the kazoo of human flesh, a wrong note becomes a real possibility.

He took a risk, did God; wagered his glory with no reserve and hollered “Let it ride!” as he rolled the dice from Bethlehem to Calvary. He went for it on fourth-and-long with the final seconds trickling off the clock and no timeouts left. He strapped it on in meat space and played by the rules to let us all find out if God’s playbook translated to our struggles.

Advent ends! Christmas begins! Christ has come! But where has he come? To meat space, to sarx, to real combat, not a rigged contest. As we celebrate Christmas we do well to remember that while we are right to cheer, we are cheering the report of the starter’s pistol, not the sound of the final gun. That comes later, that comes at Easter, and the long trek of Lent lies in between. In the Apostles’ Creed, “Suffered under Pontius Pilate” jostles close against “Born of a virgin.”

In us as well as in the Bible, the Word enters meat space. A barter-system economy offers easy trades in return for faith. Ukulele ditties lure us into capers much easier to follow than the endless dance of salvation’s symphony. The God who bet it all on the Son’s incarnation now ups the ante with a ludicrous wager on the local church. Christmas kicks us into meat space. Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy; Christ have mercy; Lord have mercy.

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December 24, 2007 by djackson.

Then those who feared the Lord spoke to one another, and the LORD gave attention and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before Him for those who fear the Lord and who esteem His name. - Malachi 3.16

They call themselves “America’s forgotten soldiers,” ragged remnants of Hmong insurgents who infest the hill country jungles of Laos. The CIA recruited and armed these tribesmen during the Viet Nam War. They defended covert landing strips in the mountains and harrassed Communist supply trains on the Ho Chi Minh trail. They lost the fight for a democratic nation. The Americans went home and eventually established diplomatic relationships with the Marxist government of Viet Nam. The Laotian government simultaneously hunts these holdouts and denies their existence. Tiny bands of these aging warriors and their extended families scrape a hunter-gatherer subsistence and skip between temporary camps to dodge the patrols that hunt them.

Their one hope: America will come for them. When New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller slogged fifteen hours on foot through the forest to find the last of these brave men and their descendants, some tough old vets wept at the sight of him: “America help us,” they chanted their litany to the first Westerner they’d seen in fifteen years. “America help us.”

As Advent ends, some honest Christian soldiers might confess sympathy to that prayer. Two millennia back the Son of God supposedly came to declare a new kingdom, an insurgency prophesied to topple empire. From then until now thousands have signed on as citizen-soldiers. The Spirit issued them armor and orders to upset the paradigms of power, along with a hope that the Lord would return to finish the fight. But many died in the jungles of persecution waiting for the promised intervention.

In his novel Perelandra C. S. Lewis depicts the taunt of Satan’s spokesman to a Christian facing just such a lonely fight.

And you think, little one, that you can fight with me? You think He will help you, perhaps? Many thought that. I’ve known Him longer than you, little one. They all think He’s going to help them - till they come to their senses screaming recantations too late in the middle of the fire, mouldering in concentration camps, writhing under saws, jibbering in mad-houses, or nailed to crosses.

Advent not only recalls the time before Christ came; it yearns for the time he will come again. It yearns, and tries to believe. “Jesus help us,” it prays, even if only inspired by the visible implements of worship such as a pastor’s sermon or an ancient hymn or the elements of the Lord’s Supper. “Jesus help us.”

Malachi lived in a day when Israel found faith difficult, and many found it fraudulent. Exile behind them, poverty all around them, and four centuries of God’s silence before them, they served God with papers in a lawsuit and cross-examined their absentee deity. They sought a divorce on grounds of abandonment and damages for breech of promise. In the years to come some would compromise with empire, cut deals with illegitimate usurpers to get what they could of the plunder to be had. Others would launch doomed revolts that aimed to beat the enemy at his own game. Many would simply hunker down and survive offering a peasant’s mute servility to kings both human and divine.

But a few, the prophet predicted, would form communities of hope. They would keep alive in conversation the crazy dream that Messiah was on the way. If history overtook them and death prevented them from remembering, it could not force God to forget. Their names would live in the mind of the Eternal. They would be present at the ultimate roll call.

“They will be Mine,” says the LORD of hosts, “on the day that I prepare My own possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his own son who serves him.” - Malachi 3.17

If your manger remains empty here at the end of Advent, if you cannot discern a coming conqueror, his blood-dipped robe draped across the massive shoulders of his white stallion, his mouth-wielded broadsword scything down injustice; if all you can see is empire planting its flag in marketplace, battle field, and sanctuary, do this: gather with others who fear the Lord and speak together. Remind yourselves that our Commander may assign us to dangerous posts but he never destroys the records of our service nor cuts treaties with his greatest foe.

To the forgotten saint-soldiers of the coming kingdom, I offer a couple of thoughts from two of my favorite saints. Use them as prayers if your own can find no words. Let them be your way of speaking to one another.

Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle. - C. S. Lewis, “The Efficacy of Prayer”

If I ever become a saint - I will surely be one of “darkness.” I will continually be absent from heaven - to light the light of those in darkness one earth. - Mother Teresa of Calcutta

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December 13, 2007 by djackson.

Welcome to Smyrna, Birthplace of Homer!

Welcome to Smyrna, Deathplace of Polycarp!

Signs outside the ancient city could have born both legends. Historical markers might have pointed out the spot where the blind balladeer entered this world or where the octogenarian bishop left it. Homer won immortality when he sang the anger of Achilles. Polycarp entered eternity when, told to renounce Christ or die, he replied, “Eighty and six years have I served him, and he never once wronged me; how then shall I blaspheme my King, Who hath saved me?”

The risen Christ holds out hope for his beleaguered church on the basis of a meaningful end to the cycle of life. As the one “who was dead” he has the right to call his saints to face martyrdom. As the one who “has come to life” he can offer reward beyond the grave.

Richard Hays rightly points out that no degree of Christian martyrdom (verses 9 and 10 trace the trajectory from economic sanctions to jail to death) makes sense apart from the resurrection. “If the world is always to go on as it does now, if the logic that ultimately governs the world is the immanent logic of the rulers of this age, tehn the meek are the losers and their cheekc-turning only invites more senseless abuse. As a mundane proverb, ‘Turn the other cheek’ is simply bad advice.”

But if there is a “last,” if there is a stopping point in the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of human history, then action that advances one toward the goal makes more sense than action that simply keeps one in the loop. And the end is not something but someone, as Jesus identifies himself personally with the consumation of history. Ultimately the important question about the end of life is not When or How but Who. Faithfulness until death makes sense if the next step is a crown of life.

Polycarp died because he refused to burn a pinch of incense and recite, “Caesar is Lord.” He accepted martyrdom for refusing to say the pledge of alliegance once Rome tangled up faith and citizenship. This was not misplaced loyalty to a dead hero. It was instead wise obedience to a living Lord.

Perhaps the largest question of Advent is not whether we believe Jesus came, but whether we believe he is coming; not whether we believe he is the First, but whether we live as if he will be the Last.

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December 12, 2007 by djackson.

In a scene from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” Maria orders the fool - an Elizabethan equivalent of the standup comic - to tog up in a set of clericals as part of a practical joke. As he struggles into the get-up the jester so soliloquizes,

Well, I’ll put it on, and I will dissemble myself
in’t; and I would I were the first that ever
dissembled in such a gown.

But he won’t get his wish. He’s too late to be the first to treat a religious uniform as a Halloween costume - too late by at least seventeen centuries (Shakespeare wrote the play around 1600). Jesus points out that the ecclesiastical superstars of his day decked themselves out from top to bottom in stylish spiritual gear. From phylactried foreheads to fringed coattails they radiated respectability, authority and expertise.

But Jesus jokes (and it is a very funny passage) that they’ve forgotten these things are only there to help them remember. The little leather case of Scripture which a devout Jew bound to his brow reminded him to meditate on God’s word (Exodus 13.9). The blue tassels on his hemline were not for decoration like buckskin fringe on a biker’s jacket. These pendants pointed beyond themselves to the demands of God’s word (Numbers 15.37-40). When means become an end in themselves true faith suffers the indignity of being turned into a dress-maker’s dummy.

Many a preacher and deacon since Jesus’ day has worried more about preserving his reserved parking space than about making room for the outcast in the family of God. The pompous have paraded through church in their power ties with no thought of loosening the bonds of prejudice and greed that tie the downtrodden up in poverty. We might not claim the seat of Moses, but certainly reserve the right to sit in our usual pew and woe to the one who usurps it.

Jesus shows deep respect for the spiritual realities that our external exercises claim to promote. He strongly advises that we worry less about accessorizing our holy accoutrements and focus instead on inward change.

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