October 12, 2009 by djackson.

Are you a practicing Christian?

You don’t hear that question a lot these days, though I can remember when it was fairly common. D. L. Moody once buttonholed a prospect who, when questioned about his faith, replied, “I’m a Baptist, but have not worked at it in a good while.” Perhaps “worked it out,” per Philippians 2.12, would have been better phrasing, but the man was onto something. Christian faith, in other words, should produce some sort of activity. That’s the subject of James’ whole rant in James 2.14-26.

We don’t talk a lot about being “practicing Christians,” but the term “Christian practices” does seem to be all the rage. Dorothy C. Bass defines the term as “patterns of cooperative human activity in and through which life together takes shape over time in response to and in the light of God as known in Jesus Christ.” She refers, in the same place, to “the ordinary, concrete activities of actual people - and also the knowledge of God that shapes, infuses, and arises from these activities.”

It’s that last phrase that deserves closer attention. Sally Brown of Princeton Seminary, in an article in the October ‘09 issue of Theology Today, invites us to explore what she terms “the text-practice interface.” Her idea seems to be that while we do things because the Bible tells us to, we also understand what the Bible by watching what we do about it. She offers the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who absorbed the worship services and social activism of African American churches during his trip to the states, then read his Bible in Germany in a way radically different from many of his fellow German theologians under the Third Reich. “No Christian community’s practices,” Brown boldly asserts, “are solely derived from its authorizing texts, nor does any community in actual point of fact employ only the Bible to adjudicate disputes about the appropriate conduct of the community’s practices.”

As Dr. Carey Newman, director of Baylor Press and my former seminary roommate, likes to put it, “Obedience is a fully hermeneutical act.” Or, as Mark Marquez, worship leader at Bay Area Fellowship Church once told some of my students, “If you want to understand God, pick up a broom.”

So I’m curious: What are your “Christian practices,” whether personal or communal? How has your reading of Scripture shaped them? How have they shaped your reading of Scripture? At the porous border of text and activity we do well to examine whom we’re letting into the Promised Land.

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October 9, 2009 by djackson.

I have, of late, like Shakespeare’s Benedick, had “some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me” or, to be more precise, broken over my head. Because they were bald jokes. Now, it isn’t (I don’t think) that I am thin-skinned or can’t bear to be teased. (Although I do wonder: we’re not allowed - and rightly so - to tease fat people; and they can diet. Why is it acceptable to abuse people for a genetic condition that no amount of exercise or eating yogurt and oatmeal and Elmer’s glue can cure?) No, I think what bothers me is the complete lack of wit, thought, or cleverness in these jibes. It seems that the mere mention of a receding hairline is, by definition, funny. It’s not the heat; it’s the stupidity.

It reminds me of a scene from Rostand’s classic play, “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Cyrano, the reader may recall, has a honker of truly Jimmy Durante proportions, a brobdingnagian proboscis suitable for battering down city gates. And he’s a trifle sensitive about it but he is also a poet and playwright, “a fellow of infinite jest.” When a would-be comedian offers the observation that, “Your nose . . . is very big,” Cyrano trouble deciding what’s worse - the insult to his pride or to his craft. In the end, he goes with the latter:

Ah no! young blade! That was a trifle short!
You might have said at least a hundred things
By varying the tone

To remedy the omission, he offers a few insults of his own. It occurred to me, that if I have to hear jokes about my hairline, at least I they shouldn’t be hair-brained. So, ala Cyrano, with due apologies to Rostand, I offer the following menu to those who have the compulsion to make bald jokes, but not the wit.

Aggressive: ‘Sir, if I had such a head
I’d amputate it!’ Friendly: ‘Well, it’s true -
That you must save a fortune on shampoo;
Unfortunately, you can’t change your hairdo!’
Descriptive: ”Tis a rock!. . .a globe!. . .a dome!
—A mound, forsooth! It is a cupola!’
Curious: ‘How serves that oval cranium?
A pot to hold your prize geranium?’
Gracious: ‘You love the little birds, I think?
I see you’ve managed with this shiny map
To find the little things a place to crap!’
Truculent: ‘When you smoke your pipe. . .I dread
That the tobacco-smoke beclouds your head—
Would not the neighbors, as the fumes rise higher,
Cry terror-struck: “The moon is all afire”?’
Considerate: ‘When driving do take care
You do not cause a wreck with such a glare!’
Tender: ‘Pray get a small umbrella made,
Lest its bright shining blots out all the shade!’
Pedantic: ‘That beast Aristophanes
Names Hippocamelelephantoles
Must have possessed just such a solid lump
Of flesh and bone, above his forehead’s bump!’
Trendy: ‘The latest fashion, friend, that dome?
Like rappers’ bling-bling? ‘Tis a flashy chrome!’
Emphatic: ‘No wind, O majestic brow,
Can give THEE cold!—save when hurricanes howl!’
Dramatic: ‘When you blush, what a sunset!’
Admiring: ‘An add for Rogaine certainly!’
Lyric: ‘Is this an orb, a monarch you?’
Simple: ‘When is the monument on view?’
Rustic: ‘A forehead? Dang! Don’t that beat all!
‘Tis a dwarf pumpkin, or a basketball!’
Military: ‘A powerful redoubt!’
Practical: ‘Put it in a lottery!
Assuredly ‘twould be the biggest prize!’
Or. . .parodying Pyramus’ sighs. . .
‘Behold the head that mars the harmony
Of its master’s phiz! blushing its treachery!’

And so I leave you with Cyrano’s own peroration:

—Such, my dear sir, is what you might have said,
Had you of wit or letters the least jot:
But, O most lamentable man!—of wit
You never had an atom, and of letters
You have three letters only!—they spell Ass!

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September 26, 2009 by djackson.

“The kingdom of heaven is like medieval war booty stashed in a field by a greedy sword-band stealing back from a raid. A millennium or so later some hapless bozo with a metal detector stumbles across it and scores to the tune of upwards of mid-six figures American.”

Or, as Jesus put it (filtered through the stately phrasing of the old King James, which seems unusually appropriate here): “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” - Matthew 13.44. Jesus’ pocket-parable and the recent experience of Terry Herbert of Staffordshire, England (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/world/europe/25treasure.html) bear striking similarities. The stash in Jesus’ story was a credible premise: the war-wrecked history of Palestine left the land studded with do-it-yourself 401-K’s squirreled away when hapless citizens had to bug-out in the face of shifting battle lines. Many never made it back to dig up their booty. In the same way, Dark Ages England formed a patchwork of warring kingdomettes where robber barons with monickers like Penda and Wulfhere and Aethelred the Unready shot squads of soldiers back and forth over one another’s borders in smash-and-grab blitzkriegs to get what could be gotten. If the retreat went bad the pirates might be forced to cache their prizes, perhaps dying in the subsequent skirmish and taking their secrets with them.

Also, the hero of Jesus’ story would be a poor man, a worker in the field but not the owner of it, probably a day-laborer hiring out his time to raise someone else’s crops when suddenly he feels and hears the ploughshare plink against fired clay instead of soft soil and knows this is his day to buy a lottery ticket. Similarly, Herbert has no job and lives off welfare. He was tilling someone else’s land with his metal detector when the beeper told him he’d hit something big.

Finally, Jesus’ guy figures out a way to cash in, even though it meant cashing out. Herbert faced different legalities but had the same goal: hanging onto at least some of what he’d found. He alerted the proper authorities because, in addition to market value, this particular find also offers vast riches to historical research. All the same, the British crown plans to auction off the items and by law Herbert gets half.

And such, says Jesus, is the kingdom of heaven. Meaning exactly . . . what?

That voluntary poverty purchases eternal redemption? That Heaven hides out hoping we’ll blunder by and buy in? That if I go without now I’ll be gunnel-deep in worldly goods in the life to come?

No, not any of that, I don’t think.

The key lies in that phrase that according to Matthew 4.17 defines the message of Jesus: “the kingdom of heaven.” Or “of the heavens.” Dallas Willard argues persuasively that the Greek text of the first Gospel puts it in the plural thirty-two times and that we best understand it as meaning something like “atmosphere” or “space.” “The kingdom of the heavens,” then, simply means everything around us, each square inch of which God packs with his presence, overflowing it without being identified with it. To enter this kingdom, then, simply means surrendering control over my own little fiefdom and swearing fealty to God.

When C. S. Lewis’ fictional interplanetary pilgrim Elwin Ransom finds himself on a planet where sin has never contested God’s undiluted occupation, he discovers that he is left “not to solitude but to a more formidable kind of privacy.” As he will later tell his friends on Earth, “There seemed to be no room.” Lewis continues:

But later on he discovered that it was intolerable only at certain moments - at just those moments . . . when a man asserts his independence and feels that now at last he’s his own. When you felt like that, then the very air seemed too crowded to breathe; a complete fulness seemed to be excluding you from a place which, nevertheless, you were unable to leave. But when you gave in to the thing, gave yourself up to it, there was no burden to be borne. It became not a load but a medium, a sort of splendour as of eatable, drinkeable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you and not only poured into you but out from you as well. Taken the wrong way, it suffocated; taken the right way, it made terrestrial life seem, by comparison, a vacuum. (Perelandra, chapter 6)

We “enter” the kingdom when we sell all that we have - our independence, our right to ourselves - and give into the weight of glory, the pressure of the treasure that seems like an obstruction to our ploughing when in fact it is the point. We shift from asphyxia to being a source of breath to others, from aching emptiness to prodigal fullness. We cooperate with the truth that stuffs all of reality full of Himself. And then - what?

Frederick Buechner, in a novel entitled, appropriately enough, Treasure Hunt, tells us, I think. This is the fourth book that tells the story of the venerable Leo Bebb. Bebb is an equivocal hero, a semi-shyster Southern evangelist who is at least as much Balaam as John the Baptist, probably more Simon Magus than Simon Peter. For all that the story’s narrator, Bebb’s son-in-law Antonio Parr, finds himself fascinated with and drawn to the old rogue. At one point he muses,

Dear Bebb. What was there about him? It is hard to say exactly. He never had that much time for me, not even when he must have known I most needed him. He was always in a hurry, always so intent on the next thing he had to do . . . that you felt he wasn’t entirely with you even when he was. He was by no means the wisest person I’ve ever known or the most eloquent or the most warm-hearted and heaven knows he had his shadow side like the rest of us. Not even counting his five years in the pen, or his smog-bound finances, or the ambiguous nature of his various evangelical entrerprises, you had the feeling that during his life and for all I know during innumerable other lives thrown in he had moved through dark and painful places that had left tht one gimpy eye of his needing to flutter closed every once in a while to shut out the dark an painful memory of them. And yet, what was there about him that made me miss him more than any man? Even at his lowest and bluest, there was a life in him that rubbed off on you, that’s all. You might feel better or you might feel worse when Bebb was around, but in any case you felt more. There was more of you to feel with.

“There was a life in him, that’s all.” And that life made more of the lives that it encountered. At the end of John 6 the crowd stalks off in a snit because Jesus won’t guarantee a public option on school lunches. The Lord then rises to the summit (or plummets to the pit) of incarnation as he turns to the twelve and asks, “You do not want to go away also, do you?” Peter replies in an Antonio Parr vein: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” In essence the former fisherman seems to say, “Jesus, I agree with the gang: you could have been king last night but you busted up your own coronation party. You had ‘em back this morning for the price of a single miracle. Instead you go rambling on about cannibalism and drinking blood, none of which is kosher as you well know, and completely blow our market share. I have half a mind to hand in my portfolio with the rest of ‘em and go back to gutting redfish for a living. But there’s a life in you that rubs off on me, that’s all. I might feel better or I might feel worse (right now it’s worse) when you’re around, but in any case I feel more. There’s more of me to feel with, and I can’t give that up.”

“More of you to feel with.” That’s pretty much it. Yeah, yeah - Heaven instead of Hell when we die, sure, that’s part of the deal, but it’s a part that only makes sense if we grasp the present reality. Will I always feel good in Heaven? Define good; but I know I’ll always feel more, because there will be more and more and more of me to feel with and what I will feel will be the presence of God.

And, like Leo Bebb, that’s what the kingdom gives us the opportunity to become for others. That’s the treasure hid in the field that we find when we think we’re doing something else. Somehow being saved, though it ought to make us steadily better, doesn’t seem to make us perfect. John of the Cross was a snob, Spurgeon hated Catholics, and Athanasius once punched a guy out at a business meeting. Somehow God refuses to cauterize all our flaws lest we mistake grace for perfection. But in the end it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because if we sell out to buy the treasure, if we bargain away self to absorb Christ in exchange, we find our bellies welling up with living water. There’s a life in us, that’s all, and as a result those who draw near end up being more than they were before, and they ultimately discover that only Jesus explains it.

An old tale of the desert abbas has it that three young men went annually to visit St. Anthony and hear his insights on their spiritual walk. Two peppered the old monk with questions but the third sat silent. After this had gone on for many years, Anthony finally said to the youth, “You often come to see me, but you never ask me anything.” The lad replied, “Abba, it is enough to see you.” Commenting on this tale, Henri Nouwen remarks that “by the time people feel that just seeing us is ministry, words . . . will no longer be necessary.”

Even so, Lord Jesus, come!

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August 29, 2009 by djackson.

A recent newspaper article speaks of “the singularity,” a term popularized by science fiction writer and real-life scientist Vernor Vinge to describe the moment when humans create machines smarter than we are and thus engineer our own demise - or at least subservience. Some scientists take this notion quite seriously, positing rogue warriors and self-replicating robots. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html)

And I can’t even program my cell phone. I’ll go down in the first wave. The writer asks what it would be like “to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?” A step down from handling the microwave, my wife would probably reply.

Still, the whole thing gets me to wondering about the current state of technology as it relates to our spiritual life. When I was a kid, one guy in our (very large) church had a phone in his car. The phone was a boat-anchor and the car was a Caddy, facts which frame two conditions of such devices back in those days: the machinery was clunky and the machinery was for rich people. Now, for a fraction of what that device ran, the lower-middle classes can purchase prepaid cell phones that also take pictures and send text messages. Democracy in action? Perhaps.

But writer Bruce Sterling flung out an observation at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin last spring that deserves consideration: “Poor folk,” he quipped, “love their cell phones.” Behind that provocative dicho lurks the notion that if you’re rich enough you can shut down the Blackberry if you feel like it. The rest of us, fighting to hang onto the jobs we have and perhaps trade up to the ones we (think we) want, must stamp out the characters of constant connectivity, Facebooking and Tweeting and Skyping our fingers (or thumbs, at least) to the bone. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-medium-t.html)

It makes me wonder where our spiritual practices fit into all of this. In the opening lecture of my spiritual formation class this week I gave the students my standard spiel about no cell phones or pagers. After class a student explained that his Blackberry now holds his Bible(s) - multiple translations - and that if he shuts it off, he bans the books and the parchments from the classroom experience.

So I’m interested to find out: How does modern technology fit into your spiritual life? Do you shut down the grid to tune into God? Or have you discovered ways for cyberspace to serve spiritual activity? One free volume of Spurgeon’s sermons (old-school: actual pages between hard covers) to the best response.

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August 22, 2009 by djackson.

“Summer’s almost over. Soon it’s back to school.
Soon they’ll drain the water out of the swimming pool.
Adopt a brand new attitude, a positive outlook.
Buy yourself some pencils and a loose-leaf notebook.”

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III

Yes, he’s the same guy who wrote “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road,” but I’m in a more contemplative mood this morning. Summer is, in fact, drawing to a close. I have summers now, by the way, now that I’m a professor. As a pastor I didn’t have them. Oh, June, July and August still reported for duty, but no seasonal shift marked the transition, no change in schedule differentiated the days. Historians to this day do not know which stream is the Rubicon; it was such an insignificant trickle that nobody marked it on the map. What made it important was that Caesar crossed it. In my pastoral days a similar brook might have separated one season from the next but I had no time to stop and notice. The full-out blitz of chronos pushed me past any dividing line of kairos before I had sufficient leisure to be aware.

Not so in my current incarnation, where academic life breathes in and breathes out on a regular basis. We don’t shut down for the dog days here at the South Texas School of Christian Studies. Office hours remain as posted and we stand our watches as faithfully as ever. But it is a different time, a different season. No students, of course: classes met in one-week intensives very early in June and right at the end of August but nothing in between. Also, our president graciously allows each faculty member an additional afternoon off during this time. And we do different things - a little more long-range planning, additional attention to institutional life and overall vision, a little more sowing, a little less reaping and gathering into barns.

Still, classes begin next Tuesday. Wainwright’s lyric sounds the clarion call: I don’t actually use loose leaf notebooks much anymore and prefer my calligraphy pen to a Dixon Tyconderoga #2, but the point’s the same.

Summer’s almost over. A new season’s coming up.
Time to gird your loins and don your jockstrap and your cup.
The hiatus is ended. The lax living has to stop.
Get rid of that beer belly. Do wind sprints till you drop.

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III/blockquote>

Well no, not that, God be praised. Whenever, this summer, I’ve felt wistful about my advancing age (I’ll put another zero on the odometer before the spring semester ends), I’ve caught myself driving by a sun-bombed high school football field, gazing at the seven-man blocking sled like John McCain pondering the Hanoi Hilton and thanking God that youth is fleeting. Still, there is a sort of mental and spiritual “girding up,” a 1 Peter 1.13 kind of thing taking place. And let me say quickly that I like this change. I find myself waking up in the morning with lines for a lecture coursing through my mind.

Yet, teetering here on the apex of the roller-coaster track, poised on the tipping point of classes beginning and the Labor Day holiday, waiting to plunge forward into the adrenaline-splattered rush of it all, I thought it would be a good idea - at least that, if not a spiritual discipline and an act of worship - to pause long enough to ponder what the summer looked like, what it taught me, and what I take forward from here.

Stephen Scaer has written a delightful poem called “Time Management” that seems to fit my mood:

Luther in the year he spent
as Junker Joerg in Wartburg towers,
translated the New Testament
to pass the everlasting hours.

Though living as a refugee
Erasmus wrote his tour de force.
In Praise of Folly’s said to be
the product of a trip by horse.

With dinners late, D’Aguesseau saw
an opportunity to write
his sixteen-volume work of law
in fifteen minutes every night.

Today I slept late, took a walk,
sipped my coffee on my ragged lawn,
checked the mailbox, saw the clock,
and noticed half my life was gone.

Well, yes, and I’m sure Scaer’s humility is admirable and quite genuine. But I’m not so sure that a late morning, a long walk, and coffee with the dandelions is an unworthy way to mark one’s halfway point. At least I hope not, because my summer didn’t include major works of theology, law, or literature. Well, no more stalling; here’s the tab:

1. Travel: I went to Houston with my wife to visit our older son and his fiance, and Becky’s parents. We spent a couple of days in Brownwood with my folks as well, both of us taking individual time with good friends who live there and capping the whole thing with a fairly hilarious dinner on our last night. I even made a solo pilgrimage to Winedale, Texas to watch “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Richard III” performed by student actors in a barn so old you could still see the adze marks where some pioneer squared the logs. And last weekend an hegira to Dallas with my younger son to see our Boston Red Sox drop one to the Rangers in the Ballpark at Arlington. For someone who has always agreed with G. K. Chesterton that, of the two ways of getting back home the first is never to leave, I think this is a respectable record.

2. Exercise: My gym membership at the university expired and, not feeling like forking over forty-five bucks for the second summer session, I decided to start running again. I stopped a couple of years back when my body reached some kind of burnout and I’ve come to miss it. So I bought new shoes (twice what the gym pass would have run me!) and began with rather pitiful half-mile trots along the hiking trail here on our island. This morning I did three miles along the bay front and felt good at the end. I’ve renewed the membership at the fitness center and started integrating resistance training with my runs again. It’s all about Ecclesiastes 7.18.

3. Reading: I rediscovered Frederick Buechner’s Book of Beb this summer, a series I haven’t read since my initial encounter some five or six years ago now. It was like slipping on an old, comfortable pair of shoes after a work week spent in wing tips. Before that, I had remembered out of the blue (or dare I say “been reminded;” I’ll leave the subject of that passive verb purposefully vague) of an old favorite from my junior high days, Sinbad and Me by Kin Platt. An old pair of shoes? This was more like a time machine that put me back in the tennis shoes of a carefree kid with hours of time and miles of unfenced imagination in an Arizona summer long past. I recalled suddenly that it was this book that had first planted in me the lifelong ambition (as yet unfulfilled) to own an English bulldog.

4. Hobbies: Scanning a theological journal as I prepped for a fall course, I came across an article about a Japanese girl, stricken with cancer after Hiroshima, who set out to make one thousand origami cranes because tradition held that such an offering would bring peace to the world. It didn’t, and I still don’t think it will, but I somehow conceived a desire to try it for myself - one thousand prayers for the peace that will come only with the final realization of Christ’s kingdom, and will come today in my world only to the extent that I open myself to my Lord’s ancient prayer, “Thy kingdom come.” I’m up to seventy-seven of ‘em, enjoying myself immensely. I’ve sent some to friends and Becky has begun converting them into mobiles that hang from our ceiling. I’ve even figured out how to customize them because I know which part of the paper will end up being which part of the bird and so can put pictures or text where I choose. On the downside, I haven’t gotten as far as I’d like in my goal to teach myself the harmonica, but I’ll keep plugging away.

5. Mental exercise: When I started running, I decided I would use the time to memorize my favorites among Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. I’ve puffed down the path along the beaches of Ward Island with slips of sweaty paper in my hands, my feet slapping the surface in rhythm to the words I chant: “That’s my last duchess painted on the wall/Looking as if she were alive. I call . . . .” When I began I had only a few lines of a single piece, and could barely run far enough to recite that. This morning I strode my way through “My Last Duchess,” “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “The Laboratory” and, just for good measure, the “Prologue” to Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Summer’s almost over, fading like a tan.
Vacation time is running out like an unplugged fan.
Labor Day is coming. Wet the old grindstone.
For all those lazy, hazy, crazy days you must atone.

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III

But perhaps that’s the wrong verb. “Atone”? No; first of all because, if any of these was a sinful use of my time, One much better qualified than I has made atonement already. And second because I can’t feel any of these was a sin - an enjoyment yes, but not a luxury; not plunder, though clearly a gift. Atonement? No! Thanksgiving. And I offer it heartily, for what lies behind, and what lies ahead.

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