January 28, 2009 by djackson.

Consider two recent stories about our new president, Barack Obama.

On January 24, the New York Times reported that, in an exchange with Eric Cantor, the Republican first mate in the House, the chief executive settled a difference of opinion by observing politely that “we have a difference of opinion here, and I’m president.” A variant manuscript tradition had Obama observing that the Congressman was “correct, there’s a philosophical difference, but I won so we’re going to prevail on that.” Either way, that exchange conveys the satisfying ring of the unilateral nature of executive power.

Two days earlier, however, the same paper ran a story revealing that the new president will wield a Blackberry, making him America’s first emailing top kick. The piece depicted Obama as “waging a vigorous battle” to retain his gadget and noted that he had “won the fight” for this “privilege.” The “battle” pitted the president against his “handlers” and required “a compromise that allows” him to stay connected rather than have the technology “taken away” from him. Compromise? Privilege? Taken away? Handlers? Such vocabulary belongs more properly to the sphere of a teenager tail-gunning for autonomy from his controlling parents.

I think this contrast reveals an important distinction between a human being and what William Stingfellow designates as a “principality.” Stringfellow takes very seriously, and very literally, Paul’s words in Romans 8.28 and Ephesians 6.12 about the believer’s battle with what the apostle calls “principalities” and “powers.” Such an entity, Stringfellow argues, is not a metaphor. Marshall Johnston, in his doctoral dissertation on Stringfellow, insists that “these legion powers and principalities are not the aggregate product of human being, willing, and acting.” Nor is the principality a “demon” in the sense of a personal tempter like C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape. A principality is instead “a living reality, distinguishable from human and other organic life. It is not made or instituted by men, but, as with men and all creation, made by God for his own pleasure.” The hitch is that, like all else that God made in this world, each principality is fallen, and thus dangerous and demonic.

One form of principality, Stringfellow explains, is the “image.” He cites celebrity examples such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. At some point, principalities overshadowed these persons until “only the latter died, the former is, if anything, livelier than ever.” Monroe really was - and is - a “sex goddess.” Dean really was - and is - a matinee idol. Invoking a darker example, Stringfellow names Adolph Hitler. In a passage that seems more worthy of Frank Peretti than a liberal Episcopalian like Stringfellow, he speculates that,

It may well be that long before his actual suicide the person named Adolph Hitler had been wholly obliterated by the principality named Hitler; that the person had indeed been possessed by a demon of that name; and that the devastation and massacre wrought int he name of Hitler waws not the work of just some dark genius of the man, nor even of the man’s insanity or gross criminality, bt of the awesome demonic power that possessed him.

So, in those terms, examine the two anecdotes about our new president. Until fairly recently there was a guy named Barack Obama - an intelligent, sincere and ambitious man who loved his wife and daughters and shot hoops with his pals and served in the U. S. Senate and used his Blackberry whenever he darn well felt like it. But that private individual has now come to grips with a principality named Barack Obama the Forty-Forth President of the United States of America. He can hook up with that power to boss around senior legislators but he must also grapple against it to retain the simple humanity of shooting a text message to a buddy. In fact, part of the debate concerned the fact that, as president, all of Obama’s communications now belong to the public under the Presidential Records Act. He no longer owns his own thoughts, even if they consist of beaming an LOL to his daughter.

And no, I’m not saying that our new president is demon-possessed and that the Christian chief justice, recognizing this fact, cleverly tricked the devil by garbling the oath of office. What I am inviting us all to ponder is the easily discernable distinction between, on the one hand, a great man who holds a great office and, on the other hand, a personal reality greater than either office or man, capable and - more to the point - completely willing to devour everyone associated with it in order to maintain its own existence.

So what to do?

Stringfellow counseled a Christian stance of “resistance” to the principalities and powers in all their forms. This resistance would take the form of, to use Dr. Johnston’s language, “minimal acts against a maximal foe,” smooth stones in a shepherd’s sling that seem too small to slay giants but bring victory in the end. For this reason, I rejoice that President Obama won the Battle of the Blackberry. It doesn’t affect me directly; I doubt I’ll be on the very short list of those who get his new address. (”None-of-your-business.com,” joked one reporter.) But it means that the Barack Obama has established a beachhead within the turf of President Barack Obama. In the same vein, R. R. Reno of First Things goes so far as to celebrate Obama’s failure to quit smoking, “the ultimate personal sin for any member of the new Establishment.” Smoking is not good and I worry about its effect on the president’s lungs and the nation’s children, but if nicotine constitutes chemical warfare against the principalities, it can’t be all bad.

Most of all I am heartened that our president, again in Reno’s language, “seems to have been more directly influenced by his church than anyone elected president in living memory.” Fiery sermons about AIDS conspiracies aside, Jeremiah Wright is a great one for giving the single-finger wave to the powers. In fact, I think I like the rough camel hair of Reverend Wright more than the smooth invocation of Rick Warren. But then again, Obama’s selection of Pastor Warren outraged the principality as well.

So pray for our president - and pray for Barack Obama. We have to have the former and we desperately need the latter to survive the ordeal. And remember that principalities seek to seduce others besides presidents - perhaps even students and pastors and humble seminary professors. Perform a few minimal acts today; more may ride on it than you suspect.

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January 19, 2009 by djackson.

“For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.” - Romans 8.19-22

My dog died last Friday. About a month shy of his eleventh birthday Joey, a shepherd/lab mix, developed a bleeding tumor. He walked with me and Becky to her morning classes on Thursday, prancing like a puppy and sniffing everything in sight. Twenty-four hours later he could barely make it out of the house. That evening we stroked him as the vet put him down.

We originally rescued him from a shelter as a present for my younger son’s eighth birthday. I didn’t want a dog in the family, believing that none of us - myself included - would invest the time and energy needed to make the animal an asset instead of a liability. Quickly, he became the companion of my walks and runs and solitary drives. He . . . never mind; any dog owner can tell the same story and no non-dog owner can quite relate. “He was a dog, take him for all in all/I shall not look upon his like again.”

And my question is: Is my doggone dog gone for good?

William F. Buckley tells the tale of a little old Catholic lady (we have little old Baptist ladies like this; little-old-ladyness, fortunately, is very ecumenical) who approached an avuncular Jesuit priest with that classic question. She stated quite bluntly that if her dog wouldn’t be in Heaven the she would not be happy there. “I told her,” the reverend father recounts, “that if it were true that she would not be happy in Heaven save in the company of Fido, then she could absolutely be confident that Fido would go to Heaven.” Buckley notes the power of the conditional in that reply. (”Your If is the only peacemaker,” as Shakespeare noted; “Much virtue in an If.”) “The Jesuit,” Buckley explains, “was sophisticatedly, but not sophistically, stating that his friend should perhaps consider the possibility of happiness without Fido.”

Quite right, too. To envision myself suddenly transported to Revelation 1, standing before the fire-eyed, flame-footed, Niagara-voiced Son of Man, or perhaps in Revelation 4, somehow admitted to the circle of the saints around the central throne of the gemstone God with crowns whipping like Frisbees across crystal seas and angels bellowing the trisagion . . . and imagine piping up in my puny voice to whine, “It’s all very nice, Sir, but I miss Fluffy!” Well, it simply can’t be done. “I always like a dog,” says G. K. Chesterton’s detective Father Brown, “so long as he isn’t spelt backwards.” There’s a proportion in these things that must preserve us from a blasphemous sentimentality.

All the same, what about it? Will there be animals in Heaven? And will that one, particular animal whom I now miss be among them?

As to the first question, I think I’m on pretty solid ground to answer in the affirmative. Isaiah twice describes a menagerie to warm the heart of the veriest PETA Nazi that ever lived.

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the young goat, And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze, Their young will lie down together, And the lion will eat straw like the ox. The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra, And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den. - Isaiah 11.6-8

We get something very similar in the last verse of Isaiah 65 so that both Isaiahs or even all three of them (if you’re into that kind of thing) agree on this view of eternity. Whatever animals are for (a question we’ll take up in a moment), they go on being for that forever.

I’ll go a little farther on the solid ground of Scripture before I dare a spot of speculation: not only will there be animals in Heaven, but domesticated animals at that. You may notice that Isaiah’s list alternates between wild beasts and those with whom humanity has made friends. Goats and cows and oxen (lambs make the list in chapter 65), and even a little boy to play cowboy (another thing I’m glad God redeems forever) all find their home here. Indeed given the general tranquility that reigns here (”They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain” - Isaiah 65.25), it seems that domestication is the order of the unclouded day.

So now for the big question: Are these newly-minted creatures, cranked out by God fresh for the purpose of populating eternity’s pastures? Or are they, perhaps, recycled, resurrected beasts, beings with some continuity to those we now know? Will my dog go to Heaven?

No less a theologian than John Wesley thought so. In his sermon, “The General Deliverance,” taken from the text cited above, he argues for the immortality of all creation, “not by annihilation; annihilation is not deliverance,” but by a return to and a perfection of life. Speaking of the eternal joy that wipes away ever tear he asks rhetorically, “Is the faithful dog, that waits the motion of his master’s hand, or his eye, exempt from this?” The founder of Methodism thinks not.

But I want to qualify that. See, the query as I have posed it, “Will my dog Joey be in Heaven?”, invites the rampant individualism with which it seems we modern Christians all think about everything, eternal life included. It’s an improperly posed speculation, as if, upon reading 1 Corinthians 15, I should ask if my left thumb will be in Paradise, and then imagine it having some kind of life of its own involving eternally pressing remote buttons or giving the thumbs-up to God’s glory.

And since Paul consistently speaks of the church as the body of Christ, and all of us as members of it, it makes as little sense to ask if you, or I, or anyone else, “will go to Heaven.” The very words invite us to picture isolated individuals doing personal things. Here’s the error that leads us to say dumb things about watching the Super Bowl forever or eating chocolate or playing golf (which people may have to do in Hell; I don’t know). The problem with all of this is that it imagines eternity as what I do, unrelated to what We do and who God is.

So back to my dog. If dogs enter eternity they do so as a part of the web of relationships they knew in life. And indeed it might be that our stewardship of these relationships has a considerable bearing on the matter. “Man,” says Wesley in the same sermon, “is capable of God; the inferior creatures are not.” And because we alone can respond to God, “as a loving obedience to God was the perfection of man, so a loving obedience to man was the perfection of brutes.” Thus, “as man is deprived of his perfection, his loving obedience to God; so brutes are deprived of their perfection, their loving obedience to man.” If this is correct, then we work for the redemption of animals when we move them toward greater conscious life. As George MacDonald once wrote, “No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them, even amongst the fishes, it may be with a dimness and vagueness infinitely remote, yet shadows the human.”

Eternal life for a dog, then, begins with the restoration of communal life with human beings. C. S. Lewis, a pupil of MacDonald’s who freely acknowledged the debt, argues that “in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems ‘almost human’ that is because a good shepherd has made it so.” Lewis goes on to explain that

you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood, [an entire family which] may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary not only for the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular beatitude which is coloured by that particular terrestrial experience.

In the end Lewis offers that “in this way it to me possible that certain animals may have immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters.”

Now this is all very speculative but when the final seconds tick off the shot-clock the pay value is this: Heaven is all about relationships. This is something I’ve noticed in the two days since my dog died: Relationships are all about taking trouble for one another. I said that, eleven years ago, I didn’t want a dog, and I didn’t. I saw the whole thing in terms of food bowls to be filled, of walks and brushing and obedience training. We couldn’t leave town without finding a caretaker. I’d have to suck dog hair out of the couch cushions every time I vacuumed. And I was right about all of that. Where I made my mistake was in believing that this would keep any relationship with the dog from being enjoyable. In the end, these things made the relationship that blessed me so much.

Joseph Conrad figured this one out when he had Charlie Marlow, narrator of his novella The Heart of Darkness, explain his sorrow at the death of a Congo cannibal whom he had trained as a steersman. Marlow muses that

I missed my late helmsman awfully, - I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don’t you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back - a help- an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me - I ahd to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken.

I miss Joey; missed him, indeed, while his body was still lying before me in the vet’s office, moments after the overdose of phenol barbitol hit his heart. Some will smile at this mourning for a brute who was no more account than a grain of sand in a canine Sahara. But Joey had done things - sat, stayed, shaken hands, heeled, jumped in my pickup on command. I worried about his deficiencies . . . and the worries made us a team. Of course, we cringe at Conrad’s racism - the idea that a black man was a spec of mica in a dark desert simply because no one in Europe would ever hear of him. Who knows whether, one bright day in eternity, we will not share a similar shudder for the way we once thought of our dogs? (Or cats, though I admit it with regret.)

When George, protagonist of John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, grows frustrated in his stewardship of the man-child Lennie, he vents his feelings in a mantra of idealized freedom.

God ‘a’ mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an’ work, an’ no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and get whatever I want. Why, I could stay in a cat-house all night. I could eat any place I want, hotel or any place, and order any damn thing I could think of. An’ I could do all that every damn month. Get a gallon of whisky, or set in a pool-room and play cards or shoot pool.

At the books’ end, as he prepares to euthanize his friend, George tries to nerve himself by repeating this creed, but can’t make himself finish. Life without Lennie does indeed mean life without trouble - which means no life at all. Joey is two days dead and already I realize the inconveniences his absence removes. In the morning I had to move about the apartment surreptitiously; if Joey awoke and heard me, he would begin yelping to come inside. If I kept him out, his whining woke my wife. If I let him in, his exuberance made a hash of my morning devotions. In the midst of a busy day, I often wondered how I would find the time and energy to take Joey for his walk. His hair fogged the floors and required constant vacuuming. All of that is gone now, and I realize how importance it is that I be inconvenienced. When C. S. Lewis’ rather controlling father, Albert, died Lewis, in a letter to his brother, recalled the stifling, regimented tenor of life in their childhood home. “And now,” he concludes, “you could do anything on earth you cared to in the study at midday or on Sunday, and it is beastly.”

I can do anything I want with the time once devoted to the care of my dog, and it is, well, not “beastly,” but whatever word refers to the absence of a beloved beast. So whatever his own chances in eternity, Joey continues to prepare me for mine. Once again, and from beyond what may or may not have been all the existence God meant him for, that beloved mutt teaches me how to love Christ: by loving his deficiencies and inconveniences in his kenotic presence among the imperfect people who help to perfect me.

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January 12, 2009 by djackson.

Cesar Millan, National Geographic’s “Dog Whisperer,” has an article in the current issue of Parade Magazine entitled “What Your Pet Can Teach You.” Among other valuable life lessons he lists, “Celebrate every day.” The canine conjurer explains that “for a dog, every morning is Christmas morning. Every walk is the best walk, every meal is the best meal, every game is the best game. We can learn so much by observing the way our pets rejoice in life’s simplest moments.”

This struck me when I read it Sunday afternoon because that morning it had been my turn in the church nursery and I’d spent a good deal of the time with a two-year-old boy named Michael. No, I’m not equating dogs with two-year-old boys: Most dogs obey quicker, house-train easier, and smell better. But Michael demonstrated the same spirit of celebration. In a plastic bin of random toys, e discovered a tiny, battery-driven car and a wooden arch. He set up the arch and aimed the vehicle to drive beneath it. When this happened, he clapped his hands, said, “Yay!” and even waved both hands in the air. He gazed raptly in my direction, inviting, even insisting that I participate in the party. And he did this over and over - all that emotion and energy for the simple event of watching a plastic car roll under a crescent of knotty pine.

This festive spirit reminded me of my own sons at that age. We used to give our oldest a Flintstone’s vitamin every day; you know - Barney, Wilma, Dino, that gang. Each morning when I pulled a pill from the bottle, my son would ask, “Which one is it?” When I told him, no matter which character I’d drawn, he’d declare, “My favorite!” And I remembered taking a bike ride with the younger boy on a Sunday afternoon when he was five or six. We’d cruised around the neighborhood for a while when he suddenly blurted out, “This is the best day ever!”

G. K. Chesterton understood this canine-and-kid enthusiasm when he wrote in Orthodoxy that “a child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”

In The Everlasting Man Chesterton describes the moment of each young Adam’s fall from this state of grace. “There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat.” He continues,

There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired of playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

So a sense of wonder at the merely good saves from boredom with the holy, and the ability to party over littleness delivers from the malaise of nothingness. Maybe this was some of what Paul was getting at when he commanded us in Philippians 3.1 to “rejoice in the Lord,” and added the disclaimer that “to write the same things again is no trouble to me, and it is a safeguard for you.” The word safeguard means “to be secure” and gives us our English term asphalt. Joy places a smooth surface over the pits and ruts of life, paves our path on the narrow way and saves us from the stumbles of sinful indifference. No wonder Paul returns to this them in Philippians 4.4 as he admonishes us to , “rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!” Perhaps Jesus managed not to turn the stones into the bread that the weren’t because he retained the ability to delight in the excellent rocks that they were.

So by God’s grace I will whoop it up today. Oatmeal for breakfast - my favorite! The best cup of coffee ever! May we celebrate our way to sound footing and pave the pilgrim path with rejoicing in the routine.

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January 6, 2009 by djackson.

We Evangelicals have stowed the magi just as they should be showing up.

Lot of confusion surrounding the wise guys: not kings, for openers; more like king-advisers and king-makers. Then there’s the number. Our older son gave his mom an Albert Einstein action figure for Christmas this year. We put it in the creche along with Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Why not? Matthew totals up the gifts, not the givers. Coulda been a round dozen for all we know.

But the big mistake regarding the magi has to do with their itinerary. They didn’t make it to the manger. Matthew clearly talks about a house, not a stable, and Herod sets the slaughter deadline at two years. Granted, homicidal dictators tend to leave a wide margin of error, but figure eighteen months anyway, based on Herod’s careful calculations about the star’s appearance.

Ancient Christian tradition has the magi checking in twelve days after the birth itself and designates this day - January 6 - as Epiphany. I packed up the Christmas decorations last Saturday, magi and all, meaning that I boxed up the boys a good three days before they should have checked in!

The Greek word epiphany means something like “to shine out, to show forth.” In this context it refers to the star, of course, but more to the light of Christ finally breaking into the world’s darkness. Another thing about Epiphany - it’s a gentile thing. The magi weren’t, after all, sporting yarmulkes when they double-parked their camels outside of whatever shelter Joseph had finally found for his little family. “From the east” (Matthew 2.1) doesn’t mean Jersey. These guys were Persians, guild-members of the same brain-trust that Daniel was dean of back in the day. Luke doesn’t mention the wise men, but he notes at the Lord’s presentation at the temple that old Simeon quotes Isaiah’s line about “a light to lighten the Gentiles” (Luke 2.32).

The whole point of Epiphany, then, is that the light of salvation enlightens everyone, even us unscrubbed non-Jews. I was thinking about that the other day while doing a Bible study on the Exodus. Of course, the heavy in that narrative is Egypt. Pharaoh gets the black hat and the bullwhip but he’s just an embodiment of the abstract concept “Egypt.” That theme holds throughout the Old Testament. Egypt to Israel was as the Montagues to the Capulets, the Shia to the Sunni, KAOS to Control, the Klingons to the Federation or lima beans to a five-year-old. Israel sinned if they wanted to go there and got sent there if they sinned.

Ponder, then, a little prophecy tucked away in Isaiah 19.

In that day there will be an altar to the LORD in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the LORD near its border. It will become a sign and a witness to the LORD of hosts in the land of Egypt; for they will cry to the LORD because of oppressors, and He will send them a Savior and a Champion, and He will deliver them. Thus the LORD will make Himself known to Egypt, and the Egyptians will know the LORD in that day. They will even worship with sacrifice and offering, and will make a vow to the LORD and perform it. The LORD will strike Egypt, striking but healing; so they will return R718 to the LORD, and He will respond to them and will heal them. - Isaiah 19.19-22

Even Egypt, the Simon Legree of the Old Testament, is loved of the Lord and will be brought to know him. So will our Egypts, whatever form of political affiliation, economic status, skin color or other distinction they take, which is something to ponder. How enlightened are we on this day of light? Out of what darkness of bias must we crawl, pupils protesting against the stabbing rays of truth?

In honor of the feast of Epiphany, I leave you with T. S. Eliot’s meditation on the event, “The Journey of the Magi.”

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

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January 2, 2009 by djackson.

This Sunday is Epiphany Sunday. Like Advent, it’s a sort of portmanteau feast that packs a couple of concepts into a single observance. (For the concept of “portmanteau,” see Lewis Carroll’s introduction to “The Hunting of the Snark.” For general enjoyment, see the poem itself.) Specifically, Epiphany celebrates the arrival of the wise men at Bethlehem (pretty much the focus in the Western church) and Jesus’ baptism by John at the Jordan (more of an Eastern thing).

I say all of this to justify offering an Epiphany meditation on the coming of the forerunner as described in Luke 3.1-18. I also want to read the passage as a sort of New Year’s text, an approach that I think is justified simply by the fact that old Camel Coat came announcing a new era that required new behavior.

We need all the help we can get with this New Year’s resolution business because the numbers are against us. According to the New York Times (motto: “All we print is the news that fits”), eight out of ten of us who re-solve on January 1 dis-solve before February 14. Seventy percent of bypass patients revert to artery-stuffing within two years of surgery and two-thirds of dieters make up the deficit within the same year that they lose the pounds.

Just look at Oprah. Which is easy to do. After a famous shape-up-and-slim-down a few years back the daytime diva has slipped her cable and once again displaces something north of two hundred pounds. “I didn’t just fall off the wagon,” she laments. “I let the wagon fall on me.” Good thing it wasn’t the other way around or God help the cart horse.

So how can an ancient prophet whose diet of free-range grasshoppers would never get him his own cooking show help sophisticated modern people like us to achieve meaningful change? Let’s take a look.

Lesson 1: Don’t wait for better circumstances. Many of us find ourselves parachuting from our lofty goals as we chant the mantra of Lloyd Bridges’ character Steve McCroskey in “Airplane,” “Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit smoking . . . drinking . . . sniffing glue.” But notice how Luke leads off in his story about the coming of John: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar . . . .” He rattles off a list of the current bigshots, starting with the empire and working his way down to the local level. Now, unless you’re really up on your first century history, those names don’t mean much to you. Even if you are up on your first century history, all their meaning hits your head, not your gut. But the thing is, these were bad guys, bad rulers, politicians who cared more about padding their PAC’s than feeding their flocks. Try it in paraphrase:

Now in the eighth year of the presidency of George Bush, when Rod Blagojevich was governor of Illinois, when Rick Wagoner was CEO of General Motors, and Alan Mullaly was CEO of Ford, and Robert Nordelli was CEO of Chrysler, in the high priesthood of Joel Osteen and when Ted Haggard was president of the National Association of Evangelicals . . . .

Does that bring it home a little bit? John didn’t come preaching change in an age where circumstances favored righteousness. Indeed, it was the very need for radical reformation that fueled the interest in his message. So don’t wait for wind and weather to favor a change of course. If changing was easy we’d all already have done it.

Lesson 2: Think action before attitude. John lets loose a lot of black powder rhetoric about wrath and tree roots and bonfires and calls everybody snakes. Notice that in response, the people don’t ask, “Then what shall we believe?” but “Then what shall we do?” Apparently John preached that the key to change is, well, changing. Alan Deutschman, author of the book Change or Die, suggests that one key to lasting improvement is to act like the kind of person you are trying to become. These folks ask John a pretty good question: What, specifically, ought we to do? That’s not a bad place to start with becoming more conformed to Christ in whatever area of our lives we think most needs it.

Thomas Wingfold, the hero of George MacDonald’s novel The Curate’s Awakening, is an Anglican curate who isn’t sure that he believes in Jesus. To settle the issue, he decided to begin reading the Gospels. (Bear with the poor man; Evidence that Demands a Verdict hadn’t been written yet.) As he ponders the life and words of Christ, he notices that Jesus was all the time telling people to do stuff. At one point the pastor faces his congregation from the pulpit and admits that, during his Bible study,

All at once my conscience awoke and asked me, “Do you do the things he says to you” And I thought to myself, “Have I today done a single thing he has said to me/ When ws the last time I did something I heard from him? Did I ever in all my life do one thing because he said to me, “Do this”?

That’s not a bad place to begin. We will probably best succeed in becoming more like Jesus if we begin by acting more like Jesus told us to act. But that leads to the next step.

Lesson 3: Make “little moves against destructiveness.” Nancy Bedford, writing in the anthology Practicing Theology, edited by Miroslav Volf and Dorothy Bass, uses that phrase as a contrast to the grandiose (and largely failed) agenda of liberation theology in her own context of Argentina. In words that might have resonated deeply with John’s congregation, she writes that “the need for liberation in its widest sense continues to be acute. However, the exhilarating sense of impending revolutionary change is long since gone.”

John preached to people who knew liberation theology, even if they didn’t call it by that name. The Zealots and Siccari haunted the limestone caves of the same desert where John preached. They called for metanarrative mounting to the scale of mega-narrative: gut the few rich who profited from the impoverishment of the masses, revolt against the Roman taxation that beggared the people and rise in rebellion against the occupying military. But notice that John, while he uses the same categories, offers an agenda that differs in two regards. First, he tells these poor people how they themselves can act differently, instead of focusing on how the rich and powerful should act differently. Second, he gives them fairly small steps to take.

So you aren’t rich, don’t sport a rap singer’s wardrobe, but you have a few extra garments. Don’t take a vow of poverty; just give one coat away. So you collect taxes. Don’t storm the IRS and toss fistfulls of coin to the crowds; just help people keep as much of their own money as you can manage. So you’re a cop. Don’t embrace pacifism; just use your power to protect instead of to profit.

In other words, John gives them things to do that they can do and that, consequently, they can’t excuse themselves for not doing. Alan Jacobs, writing in the current issue of First Things, describes the sacrificial work of Paul Farmer among the miserably poor in Haiti. He stresses that he does not offer Farmer as the minimum standard of genuine discipleship, as in, “You must be taller than this line to enter the kingdom.” “There are,” he cautions, “hardly any Farmers in the world; he is an outlandish force of nature, as was Mother Teresa before him.” Well, I’d change “nature” to “the Spirit” but the point holds: the excuse of what we cannot do becomes invalid in the face of our calling to do what we can.

Lesson 4: Act eschatologically. When I made this point in Sunday school last week (yes, I’m recycling the lesson), my pastor Grover Pinson gently suggested that in fact these moves might not have been as small for the people of John’s day as they seem to us. The tunic, after all, was the garment worn next to the skin; John counsels people to give away their one spare pair of skivvies. As for tax collectors, Grover pointed out that bare honesty was a concept so radical as to be mythical; John might just as well have told them to lasso a unicorn. Again, the quasi-military police force of Herod (one doubts that a significant number of Roman soldiers paid much attention to John) functioned in such a climate of corruption that any soldier who refused to gouge the locals would be a kind of Serpico or Richie Roberts, a kind of “innaction hero,” if you will.

This is what Craig Dykstra and Dorothy C. Bass call “the problem of the too big and the too small.” Trying to digest our entire theology in a single action “would be too grand to be of much direct use” (the problem of the too big), while piecemeal practices here and there make it “difficult to keep in view the larger wholes to which these smaller pieces belong.”

How do we navigate the double-jeopardy of this double-perspective? John’s warnings give a clue. Messiah is coming, a fruit inspection and a chaff reduction are about to take place. There’s a barn and a bonfire to be considered. In light of this fact, the relative size of an action ceases to matter nearly so much as the direction in which it moves us. “How big is the thing I am doing?” ceases to matter nearly so much as the question, “How good is the thing I am doing?” which leads naturally to the question, “What is the good toward which this thing should tend?”

In his movie La Nube, or The Cloud, director Pino Salanas comes up with an interesting device: His protagonists walk forward when their actions align with their stated convictions, but shift into reverse when they behave in ways that deny their beliefs. Rejiggering that conceit to the classic three-story universe, perhaps we can say that John places a fire below us and a barn above, fruit in the highest bow and an axe at the lowest root. The only important question about a given choice now becomes whether it moves me toward the barn and the boughs which I claim to believe are eternal life, or the flames and the sawdust that I see as eternal damnation. I’m just quoting John here. I’m not arguing for works salvation; but I do seem to be arguing for works.

Does losing a few pounds have eschatological impact? Maybe it does, and maybe realizing that would make me more committed to do it. Does ramping up the numbers in worship matter as much as worshiping? Maybe it doesn’t, and maybe keeping that in mind would change the way I sing or preach. What do better grades, less fingernail biting, getting up earlier or getting back into my smaller pants have to do with the bonfire and the barn, the axe and the apples?

Maybe the reason my resolutions fail is that they end up being not resolutions but revolutions in a tight orbit around the small circumference of the self. Perhaps ultimacy is the key to greater immediacy and more importance to something more specific is the answer to “too big” and “too small.”

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