May 27, 2008 by djackson.

He was a prominent Evangelical guru - president of some Bible college or other, author of any number of books and in demand as a guest preacher and banquet speaker. I used to catch his daily radio broadcast as I drove the scorching blacktop between our tiny town and the hospitals in Phoenix where my church members often ended up. Most of the content has become as unmemorable as my own sermons but this particular bit of egregious exegesis has stuck with me lo these many years later. He was commenting on Colossians 3.21, where Paul admonishes fathers not to “exasperate your children, so that they will not lose heart.”

Seeming to prefer the King James twist, “provoke not your children to anger,” he told how at his various seminars he informed parents that “if you’re making your teenage daughters and sons angry, you’re sinning.” He observed with much humor that this seemed to upset those adults; indeed, so much so that “they don’t want that verse to be in the Bible.”

Of course, the brother had made the mistake of so many exegetes before (and, though not a prophet nor the son of a prophet I can safely predict, after) him, of equating what he says the Bible says with what the Bible in fact says. Paul chooses his words far more carefully than to leave the spiritual standing of despairing Christian parents at the whims of a teenager’s addled hormones. For openers, the imperative “exasperate” is in the present tense, meaning that Paul cautions parents against making criticism their default setting in dealing with their kids. Perhaps more importantly, the adjective “lose heart” is, in this particular case, better rendered by the King James “discouraged.” Reduced to its literal Greek components the word means “to be without spirit.” It’s what the childless Hannah felt when Elkanah called in a brood-mare from the bull pen to replace her (1 Samuel 1.6). Fritz Rienicker in his Linguistic Key to the Greek New Testament sums up that, “a child frequently irritated by over-severity or injustice, to which, nevertheless, it must submit, acquires a spirit of sullen resignation, leading to despair.”

This verse could then become the motto text for the over-fathered sermon in the scalene scheme of homiletics. Remember that the “father” element of a sermon is the Idea, the reigning theological rubric of the preacher. (Disclaimer: also remember that “father” here takes the lower-case; I would never contend that preaching can focus too much on God the Father. We are talking about the ruling entity of the sermon, not the Maker of Heaven and Earth.) We too often hear sermons where the Idea runs roughshod over the sermon’s Energy and Power and turns it into a disspirited and disspiriting monolith of sound but indigestible systematic theology.

C. S. Lewis, who from bitter personal experience knew a thing or two about the domineering Victorian pater familias, skillfully anatomizes this dynamic in his essay, “The Sermon and the Lunch.” He describes a sermon on the joys of family life by a vicar who then goes home to lunch where, “ruthlessly interrupting” his son, he proceeds to pontificate about the situation in Germany (the story is set during the Second World War) even though “he has never been there and seems to know nothing either of German history or the German language.” His son, a military man, and his daughter, a government employ, both much better informed on this particular subject, listens for as long as they can until “the Vicar . . . says something so preposterous that the boy or the girl contradicts and insists on making the contradiction heard.” Things go downhill from there. As a result Lewis remarks that the children tend to talk in trivialities when at home because “it would never occur to either of them to say at home anything they were really thinking, unless it is forced out of them by anger.”

Another contemporary image of the over-fathered sermon would be the relationship of Mr. Perry and his boy Neil, the father and son duo at the core of Peter Weir’s 1989 film “Dead Poet’s Society.” Mr. Perry has decided that Neil will become a doctor. Neil, on the other hand, senses a vocation for acting. Lacking the resources to defy his father openly, and unable to talk to a man who refuses to hear, Neil finds himself driven farther and farther into a disspirited state. His dad “takes the heart out of him.”

In the over-fathered sermon we sense the incarnating Energy of the son-element longing to break free. While Jesus skylarks about the gospels loading his homiletic butterfly net with wild flowers and land-pirates and ADD sheep who flake off from the fold, the poor over-fathered preacher finds himself marching in measured step to the mathematical rubric of a theological erector set and wonders why the Lord gets to have all the fun. Somewhere along the way - probably long before she made it into any seminary - this preacher downloaded a program of careful handwriting on ruled paper. Such preaching will crew-cut the hirsute Samson and tidy up the loose ends of polygamist paragons. This homiletic presses a die-cut theology onto the whole-cloth of Scripture and bleaches out the blotches until everything comes out in dull but uniform monochrome.

I remember a church member who worried a great deal about my preaching and sought, doubtless from pure Christian charity, to repair the breeches in my tumbled-down wall. He once gave me a tape of a prominent radio preacher’s sermon on the spiritual armor from Ephesians 6. He indicated that THIS was what a sermon should be. Now, that particular passage is one of my favorites, as it is the favorite of any man who discovered it while still a boy, young enough to be fascinated with the whole concept of armor and combat. Ephesians 6.10-17 is the G. I. Joe passage of the New Testament, an invitation to believers to unwrap some of God’s coolest gifts and enter with excitement the joyous business of the Christian life. I plugged in the cassette and listened in horror as this man took one of the most thrilling passages in all of Paul and reduced it to a lecture on breastplates and the doctrine of biblical innerrancy. Not one single image, not one story ever broke though the interlocking intellectual teeth of the relentless coffee-grinder that ground the explosive text into harmless bits of information.

No one has ever diagnosed the disease of over-fathered preaching like Calvin Miller, particularly in his book Spirit, Word, and Story. In a chapter entitled, “Story as Relational Truth,” Dr. Miller tells the story of two women: a skeleton in a college classroom, a congeries of bones whom the class nicknamed “Caroline,” and an attractive co-ed named Bonnie. “Bonnie and Caroline,” Miller observes, “had a lot of things in common. I knew that they were structurally alike, but I dated Bonnie. Perhaps that says enough about how precept and story differ.” Perhaps; but if it does not, consider Miller’s tabulation that

Jesus’ sermons do not labor over word roots. Jesus did not exegete for 55 minutes nor dissect any Old Testament word. His Sermon on the Mount is his only entire sermon mentioned and can be preached in 18 minutes. In an economy of 2,320 words, Jesus spends 348 on such images as wolves, sheep, light, rock, sand, and storms.

Yet the over-fathered sermon continues to swagger hobnailed over the tender creativity of the son. Doubtless the father-ridden sermon is safe. With systematic theology in the saddle of a sermon’s soul one never worries that the stallion will run wild. Such sermons are “normal,” they are what the congregation expects to hear. While the preacher might not thrill, and might anesthetize, he will not shock or offend. Such sermons remind me of what Dorothy Sayers’ fictional novelist/detective Harriet Vine observes about certain people of her acquaintance who “cultivated normality until is stood out of them all over in knobs, like muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all. And they talked interminably and loudly. From their bouncing mental health ordinary ill-balanced mortals shrank in alarm.”

I do believe that the “abnormal,” the sick and sinful, the poor in spirit and those who hunger and thirst, shy away from the knobby normality of the father-ridden sermon. I also believe that, statistically, such people, while not perhaps “normal,” are indeed common. And I can’t help remembering what was said of the sonful preaching of the Son of God who trashed the rabbi-quoting style of his day in favor of yarns about buried treasure and Stephen King shockers about hacked-off arms and gouged-out eyes: “The common people heard him gladly.”

One final word about over-fathered preaching. Lewis speaks of the anger always ripening just below the surface of the over-fathered psyche. I believe that, eventually, over-fathered preaching also becomes angry. The creative Energy of the sermon has to go somewhere. It may turn inward and depress the preacher until sermons become heavy, brogan-footed, clodhopping monstrosities bound down beneath a mule’s load of muddy thinking and muddier language. On the other hand, it may turn outward as the tone of the sermon - perhaps without the preacher’s knowledge and certainly without her understanding - becomes uniformly vindictive.

Lewis’ prescription for the over-fathered family is that the adult discover the truth: that this young woman or man before him is an adult like all others - equally intelligent, equally mature, equally worthy of respect and courtesy. In the same way, the sermon becomes trinitarian instead of scalene when Idea discovers that Energy serves preaching, not the Idea itself.

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May 21, 2008 by djackson.

FATHER DEFICIENT
In my previous post I outlined Dorothy Sayers’ trinitarian view of literary heresies. Writing, she believes, suffers from an imbalance somewhere in the three key elements of Idea (father), Energy (son), and Power (spirit). I proposed to offer a rubric for diagnosing preaching styles using this grid. Remember that I said these flaws are stylistic, not doctrinal - the trinity here is analogous, not literal. A preacher might, for instance, proclaim a strong doctrine of Christ and yet do it in a son-starved style. That is why I consistently use lower-case letters for father, son, and spirit. I’ll begin with the first category, under-fathered preaching, or that which lacks a ruling Idea.

Father-deficient preaching suffers, to use Sayers’ words, from “a confirmed feebleness in the ‘father,’ or Idea,” and thus “betrays itself in diffusion, in incoherence.” This kind of preaching comes from weak theologians who, having no central doctrinal core, might sprout TULIPS one week and re-baptize the saved the next. They don’t lack Energy (or son) - their sermons often have admirable and even intricate alliterating outlines. They don’t lack Power (spirit) - the eloquence stirs our emotions. Like a Fourth of July fireworks show they produce one stunning image after another but it is all smoke that drifts away on the wind and gives place to the next - and unrelated - configuration. The literary figure of under-fathered preaching would be Harry Smith, a small-town political activist in Katsuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day. He is if anything like Hamlet, “too much i’ the son” - able and every-eager to put together a coherent argument in debate. He’s plenty spirit-ual - amped up with the energy of his own passion. But another character complains that “he’s entertaining enough to listen to for a while, but really, he’s all in a muddle. At times you’d think he was some sort of Communist, then he comes out with something that makes him sound true blue Tory. Truth is, he’s all in a muddle.”

I can see several reasons why our own era produces so much under-Fathered preaching. The three I’ll mention are the preacher’s unique calling, the rise of postmodernism, and the pragmatism generated by the church growth movement.

The very task of being a pastor carries the built-in danger of a weak father. The evangelical pastor occupies the unenviable position of being the last generalist in a world of specialists. If you ask a doctor what’s wrong with your tax return, he can plead ignorance with no loss of face. Indeed, ask him about your spleen and he sacrifices no professional clout if he says, “I’m an osteopath. That isn’t my area.” I’ve learned that even among religion professors there is no deduction in street-cred if one is asked about, say, the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch and replies, “I don’t know. I’m a New Testament scholar.” A pastor, however, must speak to textual, theological, and hermeneutical issues from both testaments, not to mention ethics, church finances, and the Texas Rangers’ starting lineup. His work requires such a wide range of reading and study that it is no wonder if he finds it difficult to maintain a central position. She must look at so many ideas that she is always prone to wind up looking through an array of ideological stances.

Postomodernism has, of course, shattered the metanarrative and even theology finds its stained glass window now more Marcelle Ferron than Charles Connick. Indeed, to push the metaphor, the stained glass window is now a kaleidoscope whose whirling colors not only do not represent a recognizable image from a stable biblical narrative but do not even remain stable in their abstraction from one week to the next. No real surprise, then, if the preacher of today struggles to maintain an equidistant father in the sermon.

Finally, the church growth movement has taught the pulpit to serve the baptistery, or maybe the altar. Actually, neither of those is right. The pulpit should serve baptistry and altar in that preaching seeks the conversion of souls. What church growth does is pressure the pulpit to serve the new member’s class, a thoroughly modern creation unknown to the New Testament. (As was, I admit, the altar call - but not the baptistery, even if it was a creek instead of an indoor tank.) Seeker-friendly preaching by definition will be under-fathered preaching because such friendliness must be as diverse as the seekers and because the packed caliche of Christian doctrine often refuses to conform itself to the soul of the pilgrim’s foot. Doctrine, then, must be upholstered to cushion the seeker’s path; plush shag on a thick pad softens the demands made by a narrow path on a pampered sole. Church growth has led preachers to fulfill, in the most bastardized possible sense, the call of Isaiah to make the crooked places straight and the rough places plain. When preachers start reading pollsters to find out what “issues” are “relevant,” then run to their Bibles to cobble together an acceptable acrostic dealing with that latest fad, the controlling Idea of preaching, its doctrinal father, atrophies.

On a related note, one obvious symptom of the prevalence of under-fathered preaching in American evangelicalism is the rise of the package-deal online sermon series. Preachers have always stolen sermons, and to some degree always should. T. S. Eliot, literary arch-thief of the twentieth century, quipped that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” and the same could be said for pulpiteers humble enough to accept a good idea from someone else and skilled enough to digest that material fully into their own work. This, I think, is very different from the pastor who downloads, whole-cloth and for a fee, a series of sermons from the website of a megachurch megapastor. I recall driving by a church building one day and seeing a slick, professionally done banner announcing their upcoming pulpit emphasis complete with sermon titles and texts. On a whim I went back to my study and “Googled” the relevant phrases. There it was - the first entry: the entire and exact menu available for a fee to any father-stunted preacher foolish enough to buy into the notion that someone else can be the father without making the child a bastard.

Sayers’ representative under-fathred writer is the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes. She sites an instance in which he pronounces himself quite prepared to alter his work drastically “if a majority decide against it” and asks “what writer whose trinity was strongly co-ordinated would even dream of revising his work to conform with the majority report of a committee?” Still, at least it would be his work. An even more shocking speculation is to ask what preacher with a well-coordinated trinity would ever dream of letting his work be handed to him by someone else?

By contrast, Sayers insists that “those whose Idea is in full control are especially obstinate and impervious to criticism; for in speaking for the father they speak with authority and not as the scribblers.” The overtone from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is more than allusive here. Jesus went to the cross at least largely because the “father” in his teaching so owned him that he could not customize his words to fit the prevailing religious and political demands. A preacher who spends his ministry accepting the passive imprint of someone else’s father will not stand up well to persecution because he has no Idea on which to stand. Indeed, it probably won’t ever come to persecution; she will have become so adept at accepting the approved script that she will have very little idea that any sort of opportunity for martyrdom has ever presented itself. C. S. Lewis once claimed that reporters can’t really lie because the very concept requires some clear notion of the truth. “To call them liars,” he explained, “would be as undeserved a compliment as to say that a dog was bad at arithmetic.” And to call the utterly fatherless preacher a Judas would pay him the undeserved compliment of saying that he at least knew Jesus well enough to pick him out of a crowd of thirteen as the one on whom to plant his kiss.

Indeed, Lewis offers a keen analysis of under-fathered work in his science fiction novel Perelandra. His hero, Ransom, finds himself on an alien planet with three rational species. One of them, the pfifltriggi, are a race of born artisans and one of their number, Kanakaberaka, explains to the earthling how his people obtain the raw materials for their craft.

All keep the mines open; it is a work to be shared. But each digs for himself the thing he wants for his work. What else would he do?

To Ransom’s reply that on Earth miners and artisans each specialize the pfifltrigg scoffs,

Then you must make very bent work. How would a maker understand working in sun’s blood (gold) unless he went into the home of sun’s blood himself and knew one kind from another and lived with it for days out of the light of the sky till it was in his blood and his heart, as if he thought it and ate it and spat it?

When preachers let others begin to do their digging for them they cease to understand the Son’s blood quarried from the solid text of Scripture because they no longer go into its home, no longer live with the text for days on end until it occupies their heart and they think it and eat it and spit it.

Spurgeon once urged his students to eat their way into the text as a silkworm devours the leaf until they could spin it out in silken threads. He exhorted them to digest their text until their blood became “bibline.” On one occasion he fell asleep after a long evening of wrestling with his text for the next morning. His wife awoke in the early hours to hear him, in his sleep, expounding the passage with clarity and force. She committed his speech to memory and retailed it to him the following morning. This was a preacher who had found his own father, who thought and ate and spat the text until he owned and was owned by it. While a quick click of a computer key could have saved the Prince of Preachers from a restless Saturday evenign and his wife from an interrupted night’s sleep, the resulting sermon would have been an orphan or, worse, a robot, a cyborg sermon of gears and cogs incapable of touching or being touched.

Sayers does not cite Shakespeare as the icon of the perfectly triangular writer, the trinitarian genius whose works are always equilateral and never scalene. She does not, but she might. And the Shakespeare of the pulpit for my money remains Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the prince of preachers. Spurgeon’s preaching was strongly fathered by his unflinching commitment to the doctrines of grace. One or more of the five points gave structure to each point of Spurgeon’s every sermon. He once complained to his students that:

I believe the remark is too well grounded that if you attend to a lecturer on astronomy or geology, during a short course you will obtain a tolerably clear view of his system; but if you listen, not only for twelve months, but for twelve years, to the common run of preachers, you will not arrive at anything like an idea of their system of theology.

He followed up this critique by claiming that:

Brethren, if you are not theologians you are in your pastorates just nothing at all. You may be fine rhetoricians (author’s note: son/Energy), and be rich in polished sentences (author’s note: spirit/Power); but without knowledge of the gospel, and aptness to teach it (author’s note: father/Idea), you are but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

Let us not orphan our preaching by the under-drawing of the first leg of the triangle. Let us discover our Idea before we preach or discover that we lack one and be silent.

Next: The Pulpit Pater-Familias: the Father-Ridden Sermon

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May 19, 2008 by djackson.

Yesterday being Trinity Sunday I thought it might be a good devotional practice to read “Scalene Trinities,” a chapter from Dorothy Sayers’ book The Mind of the Maker. Though Sayers was no mean theologian she’s not really - or at least not primarily - doing theology in this book but literary criticism. She anchors her method, however, in the ancient Trinitarian creeds of Christianity - the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian. (She left out the Baptist Faith & Message but there, she was an Anglican and a Brit so we’ll absolve her.) She posits that the holy trinity of good writing is Idea (corresponding to the Father), Energy (which answers to the Son), and Power (the Spirit, of course).

In this particular chapter she offers to diagnose the failings of various writers based on where their trinities are out of whack, or scalene, a geometrical term that refers to a triangle with unequal sides. For instance, if a writer’s work is “fatherless” we might get any number of beautifully turned phrases but no coherent message. A writer who is short on son might convey a great governing conception in terms so abstract that we get an autopsy instead of a living creation. A spiritless author may clothe a powerful concept in a well-constructed plot but mishandle the actual words and so leave the reader cold - or perhaps injured.

Christology, of course, has always given us the most interesting heresies and Sayers even dabbles with fine-tuning son-starved writing with particular false doctrines. Thus a Gnostic writer, believing his exalted conception too good for sullied flesh, rejects metaphor and simile and fogs out swirling, multi-syllable abstractions. An Arian, on the other hand, is “all technique and no vision,” since mere words can never rise to the divine. A Manichee’s writing is hollow - all external effect with no true content.

Now all of this is good fun and spiritually healthy at the same time but it occurred to me to put Sayers’ system to a different use. Before turning to The Mind of the Maker I had been perusing David Norman’s blog (http://www.davidnormanblog.com/). In one recent posting David reports the results of a series of self-evaluations he’d taken in order to discover his spiritual gifts and determine his Ministry Preference Assignment, Leadership Style, and DISC, whatever that is. Anyway, it seems David was supposed to discover if he is an otter, lion, beaver or golden retriever.

I have several standing views on this kind of thing. First of all, I’ve never liked spiritual gift inventories, a sort of Cosmo Quiz for Christians. Taking a test to identify your gift makes about as much sense to me as reading the Sears catalogue to find out what your aunt got you for Christmas. (Well, bad analogy; your aunt always gave you clothes.) The way to discover a gift is to open it and play with it. If the giver happens to be handy, this works even better because, as someone who loves you and delights to see you enjoy his present, he will join you in the process and bubble along about what he’s given you and how it works.

Second, I’m suspicious of these leadership style things. Trevor Carpenter, a graduate of our Logsdon program here at the School of Christian Studies, briefly attended different seminary located north of us geographically and right of Bob Jones theologically. They subjected him to one of these color-the-bubble gizmos and the results indicated he had the personality of a born church-killer. They encouraged him to consider another line of work such as selling Amway or hosting a game show. Trevor is now pastor of Baptist Temple, a multi-ethnic megachurch down in the valley and one of the most dynamic congregations you’ll ever run across.

Finally, I don’t like the otter/beaver/lion/retriever schematic. All of these gimmicks (and the same four-square form appears under different names in the various half-baked Christian psychology books produced by various half-baked Christian psychologists) come originally from Aristotle who believed that four physical substances (called “humors”) governed the body and that having more of one than another determined your character. Apart from the discredited biology, I object to analyzing Christians based on theories concocted by a pagan, never mind how smart a pagan.

Which brings me back to Sayers. It occurred to me that since pseudo-scientific self-analysis is all the rage among evangelicals I might be able to cash in on the trend and simultaneously introduce at least a measure of theological sanity to the process. Sayers’ schematic is at least based in Christian theology instead of premodern biology. I wonder if I could use her insights into writing to critique preaching styles. I plan to give it a try over the next few days. At the end, if I’m feeling particularly bold, I will offer my view of my personal preaching heresy. In the interval I strongly suggest reading Sayers’ essay which can be found online at http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/dlsayers/mindofmaker/mind.10.htm.

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May 15, 2008 by djackson.

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games.

- “The Naming of Cats” from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot

The same could be said for the naming of churches, though the two-syllable word would louse up the meter. If you want your church plant to go platinum and land you in the exalted ranks of the megapastors, a catchy name is a must. Calvin Miller has his fictional Pastor Sam ponder just such an issue as he shoots a round of golf.

But what would he name his church? Something with Brook in the title, of course. All megachurches had brook or creek or river in the title.

On the cart track between the eighth green and ninth tee Sam settles on Rumpton Rill Community Church after a drainage ditch just off the back of the property. But another parallel with Eliot’s poem strikes me. His opening quatrain continues:

You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

How Trinitarian! The poet goes on to explain these three levels. The first is the cat’s given name - the one his putative “owners” use (and to which he answers only when it suits him). The second is the animal’s “particular” name, what I would call his “cat” name - one that his colleagues use and that describes his character. (These monickers constitute one of the chief pleasures of reading Eliot’s collection of verses.) Finally, there is the one that “THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess,” the name that is not just a lable but the mystical expression of his true essence.

I think churches have a similar trio of titles. First, there’s the one we put on the sign and in the yellow pages and on our Sunday bulletin: Shibboleth Baptist Church if you’re fairly traditional, or Breaking Winds Fellowship if you’re going for mega, or New (choose one:) Wine/Song/Day/Pants Community if you lean to the charismatic side of the picture. Next, congregations almost always have a sort of nickname used as shorthand among the family - “First” or “FBC” for First Baptist Church, or sometimes the initials, like NPBC for North Phoenix Baptist Church where I grew up or 2BC for Second Baptist, Corpus where I served as pastor for thirteen years. But somewhere down deep, underneath all of that - underneath whatever theological conviction or illusion, whatever marketing strategy, whatever history or sentiment originally informed the official title - somewhere beneath lies WHO WE REALLY ARE, what Eliot calls our

ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

I was thinking of this because of an article by Kyle Childress, pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches. The piece, published in volume 11 of Baylor University’s ethics journal, Christian Reflection, is a meditation on another Sam, Sam Gamgee from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This Sam is a gardener, not a shepherd, but the parallels are clear and even biblical. In his essay Pastor Childress asserts that “God is calling us to be a hobbit church in a dark world.” He goes on to mull the idea of this tiny, hirsute-heeled race of chubby farmers and how their very humility equips them to destroy a means of power that ineluctably corrupts the mighty. Pastor Childress uses the kenotic confession of Philippians 2 to anchor his ideas in Scripture, but I thought immediately of the Hobbit-sized Hundred and Thirty-First Psalm:

LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever.

Now there’s a furry-footed little psalm that Samwise might quote while having a pint at the Green Dragon in Bywater. Nor is this a wisp of Hallmark escapism. The poet doesn’t say that he won’t accept difficult tasks, choosing instead to remain cuddled in existential anesthesia on the billowy bosom of some heavily upholstered nanny-God. He simply acknowledges that this is where he belongs and that if he must go forth it will not be because he volunteered for greatness (like, say, Boromir) but because some great deed was the only road back to the embrace of his Lord.

Pastor Childress quotes Sam’s soul-struggle when he finally feels the weight of the One Ring on his own stubby finger. He imagines himself as the mega-horticulturist of a megagarden with multiple flowerbeds in former deserts. The image intrigues, but in the end he realizes that “the one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.” Miller’s Pastor Sam, by contrast, dreams of a “fully zonified” congregation where underlings kick their heels beside hospital beds while the Señor Pastor choreographs and stage-manages breathtaking pulpit production numbers. In a day when seminarians and second-string micropastors are harangued to become ranchers who delegate ministry to minions in order to corral the multitudes, it might be a good thing to think about one small congregation, not a congregation swollen to a dominion, and our own hands with which to touch, not the hands of others to depute.

The mischief overtakes me, and I see it there on a bylane in a small town, or perhaps a mean street in the inner city: Hobbit Church, reads the sign, and a dirt walkway leads to a round green door with the knob exactly in the center. Well, perhaps not that. But maybe, under the sign-name and the family-name, maybe down below consciousness where names begin to matter, we can be Hobbit Church, and find ourselves to be Cross Church, and Christ Church.

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May 12, 2008 by djackson.

“Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” - Ecclesiastes 12.12

Now there’s a slice of biblical inerrancy that would even rate a rousing “amen” on secular university campuses - at least for the next week or so. Legions of zombie-eyed scholars, their metabolisms operating on the alternative fuels of Red Bull and Monster, would agree that Solomon knew his stuff. (Frat men would probably respect him even more if they discovered how adept he was at scoring with chicks.) I can vouch that the sentiment resonates with our students here at the South Texas School of Christian Studies. And I’ve discovered since entering my new line of work that teachers feel the same way. Sometime in the past fortnight I hit that point where I start quoting lines from Arnold’s “The Scholar Gypsy,” a thing I did midway through fall budget planning when I was a pastor. It’s about a kid who drops out of Oxford when his Pell grant goes bust and instead decides to do a fellowship with a gang of hippies. Arnold imagines his hero as becoming immortal by eschewing “making many books” and “much study,” then adds:

O Life unlike to ours!

Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,

Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,

And each half lives a hundred different lives;

Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.

By Sunday I was done - all my students had holed out on eighteen and were in the clubhouse. Their final grades - eagles, pars, bogies - all logged on various official forms; I’d graded all the papers and filed all the lectures. I have a summer class to teach, and four lectures on C. S. Lewis to prepare for an “adult VBS,” and a couple of preaching gigs coming up, but for the nonce I thought I’d just catch my breath. So I unleashed my big, shaggy dog Joey and we headed out on the walking trail that skirts the shores of my island. (For insights into why Ward Island is “mine,” a claim that would be news to Texas A&M Univeristy of Corpus Christi, see my blog “Marooned,” November 13, 2006.) We strolled around. I got my St. Francis on, taking in the flowers and enjoying the breeze. Joey shed and drooled and wet on stuff. We had a great time.

I have to admit the idea wasn’t entirely my own. One of our students, David Norman, has been doing a series on his blog (davidnormanblog.com) about how to avoid a “stage-only” faith. He takes his title from the story of a pastor who invited his congregation to prayer one Sunday and suddenly realized that was the first time he’d pinged the Almighty that week. Anyway, David offers several tips to avoid this kind of thing and one of them is “Get alone with the Creator.” David carefully distinguishes this from his previous exhortation, “Get alone with God.”

It sounds like the same thing, and it is the same goal, but I have found great power in getting alone with God in creation. I live in a coastal city, so I go to a remote spot on the beach and just spend time in God’s presence. I used to live in a wooded area and would do the same in the middle of a forest. That could be desert, a park, or any other place that you have found suitable for you to meet and encounter God regularly.

(Sidebar: for insights into why I waited until the semester was over to write this blog, see David’s entry for Thursday, May 8 entitled “Final Exams & Other Reasons to Study.” Poetry and mysticism are fine things in their place but finals week is no time for a professor to go about the place invoking an existential crisis.)

Anyway, as I tromped along the beach taking in one of the native species of the Texas coast - the white-bellied HEB bag - lines from Wordsworth came to my mind. “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned,” a tag-team of meditative poetry he punched out in 1798, form a sort of one-two counter-punch combination for those of us who mainlined the Puritan work ethic while still in the womb and like theological crack babies entered this world hooked on hurry. In the opening salvo the poet imagines himself berated by a friend for sitting all morning and staring at a lake. “Where are your books?” this straight-A(nal) interloper demands. Wordsworth explains that he has found companion ways of sleuthing out truth:

Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

In round two the poet himself begins the conversation. “Up! up! my Friend and quit your books,” he chides. A few lines later he offers his own Message version of Ecclesiastes 12.12: “Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife.” Instead, he argues

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Or “Consider the lilies of the field” as a first century scholar gypsy once put it.

I came home refreshed - my body relaxed and my mind humming with Wordsworth and the Word - no mean combination, I believe. A smart woodsman stops to sharpen his ax, Ecclesiastes 10.10 observes. But then again, the purpose of an ax is not to be sharp, but to be used. Wordsworth, after all, also composed the “Ode to Duty,” a sober Valkyrie whom he invokes as the “Stern Daughter of the voice of God!” Meaning it is no longer Sunday but Monday, my ax glistens, and a load of lumber awaits me. Or, to end with another poet:

I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

But what about after that? Beyond the sleep, I mean. John sees martyred souls taking a siesta beneath the heavenly altar but like restless toddlers they whine to God that nap time has gone on long enough and should yield to activity. The Lord assures them that he has work enough to occupy them for all eternity (Rev 6.9-11). The rhythm of exertion and relaxation serves as a tune-up for eternity, for what N. T. Wright calls “life after life after death.” C. S. Lewis, who learned early in life to dislike school and love summer vacation, puts this tantalizing thought in the mouth of Aslan as he declares the end of Narnia and all known worlds: “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is morning.”

Even so, Lord Jesus, come.

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