Naked (Monday)–Genesis 2:18-25

Naked. What does that word make me feel (to formulate JLB’s question to myself)? I want to say it makes me feel something akin to distaste, maybe embarrassment. What about my own nakedness? I think I feel pride mixed with shame—almost as if glory were involved, or its potential, but what my nakedness reveals at present is not what it might yet be. Perhaps I’m thinking of physical nakedness. But what about the spiritual nakedness, more pertinent?

I’m tempted to say I’ve come to be comfortable with spiritual nakedness. (I know what it is, don’t I?). I know my own shame; I know the things about me I want to hide. And I have laid them bare to God, even to a few others.

What, though, if I don’t know my own nakedness? What aspects of it do I not see? What fig leaves do I unknowingly wear?

God knows me. It behooves then me to drop the act before him. I may accept that he loves me as I am, not as I would like to appear.

In the bonds of covenant, nakedness is safe. But with what fire has it outside that ring ravaged. What glory seems a naked woman, beautiful. What folly the imagination works on those forms. With what industry has man exploited this body-spirit phenomenon. What havoc wrought on the brain. What damage done to bonds not made.

“Blind contingencies of nature made this.”
“It is meaningless, and benign.”
“It is overestimated,” while a system
Sells it and all with it for the price of souls.
“It is for you—use it as you will.”
“It is a construct, so construct it as you might
(Make use of these blueprints, though).”
“It is an unhappy compromise,
A ‘fair defect of nature’” (X.891-2);
Or “it is a happy accident, and if license
Or repression enthralled to ‘foul
Exorbitant desire,’(III.177), well then,
You happened as you were,
‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’” (III.99).

If it just happened, it bears the “blind impress” of ancient accidents. And say what postmodernity will, our “behavings bear” its marks.

Deny intrinsic nature or the knowledge thereof and obey your phantom’s dictates. Say of yourself what you will. Look into yourself and see a deep well of nothing; empty into it whatever endless content you wish. Draw an arrow from the ring or straighten the lines into an addition sign: naming a thing makes it what it is, you say.

Let the caterpillar become anything but a butterfly—emerge from the chrysalis and chew leaves again. Let the tiger call itself a lamb and bloody the waters when it dips its maw to drink. Let the penguin say it rides the air, and swim away from sea lions.

You may turn right or left by degrees, but in a maze, you will run into walls.

In the end, you might well say:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. (Yeats, 1-6)

Will you sail, then, to Byzantium?

Can the Ethiopian change his skin
Or the leopard his spots? (Jeremiah 13:23)

Not back then, he couldn’t. But now he can. And so it goes if it all simply happened. But what if it didn’t just happen? What if the impress we bear isn’t blind—if words weren’t our creations—if more than being, there was becoming—if before being, there was a word?

C.S. Lewis, in Miracles, writes: “We find ourselves in a world of transporting pleasures, ravishing beauties, and tantalizing possibilities, but all constantly being destroyed, all coming to nothing. Nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled.”

If he is right, it all didn’t simply happen. What we have is a distortion of what was:

“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”

For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:23-25)

Are you alone? Do you burn? Are you ashamed? Do you tremble in your fig leaves? Do God’s garments of skin chafe you? All is not as it ought to have been:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him. (Genesis 2:18)

Is that offensive? Remember, they were naked and unashamed.

Holiness (Friday)–Revelation 4:1-11

Transcendence-Immanence-Incarnation

I had trouble this morning focusing as I approached this reading. I was trying to read Psalm 99, and I was thinking about elementary school, a classmate from that time, and my friend, Barry. Barry resembles the classmate I was thinking of, incidentally, in appearance, ability. and existential leven. In Barry’s vocabulary, both are thoroughgoing turkeys, which is more positive than it sounds. Both grew up in strict religious environments, but their immanence demanded that they reject religion and faith, which, Barry says, lets people soar like turkey vultures. I also feel the pull of immanence.

Funny then, that as I read Revelation 4, those two kept obtruding. Nothing could be more exalted than Revelation 4: a throne room in heaven, with One like a jasper stone and sardius in appearance upon it. Before the throne is a sea of glass like crystal, and around it stand four creatures—one like a lion in appearance, a calf, a man, and an eagle. I wonder how limited John’s vocabulary was in describing his vision. Would a more modern lexicon have been able to report something more recognizable to us? Or would more advanced language merely garble the imagery more?

These two competing sets of images—turkeys and this literary object of turkey vulture fascination—represent something of what it means to be human. We are strung between transcendence and immanence, and it is an unhappy arrangement. Pious talk of God’s holiness annihilates all that we know and naturally love, though that is not necessarily bad. We love some destructive things. But utter immanence eventuates in meaninglessness, hopelessness, and death. If Christianity left us here, with Raphael’s painting, The School of Athens, and the disagreement between Plato’s ideals and Aristotle’s particulars, I would not be able to embrace it. But it does not leaves us with that irresolvable tension. It synthesizes it.

Christianity is neither immanent nor transcendent. It is both. It is incarnational. It begins with transcendence: “In the beginning God.” And it proceeds to immanence: “created the heavens and the earth.” The Fall of man broke the unity that inhered between these two realms. Man plunged into immanence. And God slowly revealed himself to man, in increasingly incarnational ways: angels, burning bushes, stone tablets, tabernacles, victories, land, a temple, prophets. I don’t know what this tension would have felt like for the ancient Hebrews. The Old Testament depicts such an immanent human experience and many transcendent encounters with God. But he deals with his people on a largely material plane, giving them land, riches, and abundance—as a rule, Job being a notable and essential exception—for their honoring Him.

But the full revelation came in Christ, when the transcendent God himself entered his immanent creation by taking on flesh like his creatures. Though God is transcendent, he created immanence. Therefore, it is not bad in and of itself. Although fallen man takes immanence and exalts it without transcendence, and though religious fallen man takes transcendence and exalts it without immanence, the Lord synthesized the two by becoming a man and esteeming both poles of being.

Jesus demonstrated by his life the proper way to navigate this Scylla and Charybdis of humanity. He did not reject immanence by refusing to eat, wear clothing, or drink wine, but neither did he reject transcendence by gluttony, materialism, or drunkenness. He did not love his immanence so much that he could not lay it down to go to the cross; and he did not abhor immanence by being reckless with his life when it was not his time to die. Because he was properly related to transcendence, he could embrace the end result of all immanence by itself—death. For he knew that the power of heaven was his, and that God would resurrect his body.

Christ’s form after the resurrection is crucial to us. Though he ascended into heaven, leaving us with the responsibility of working out the meaning of his incarnation, death, and resurrection, we know that we will be given new bodies. God’s plan is not that our souls will be finally freed from materiality. We will have perfect bodies, like Christ’s. And like him, we may even bear the scars that sheer immanence once inflicted on us.

This scene in Revelation, however, is so beyond the ken of mundane experience that it is almost utterly transcendent. And yet there are objects in heaven, and John chooses to describe the heavenly realm with earthly comparison. I’m reminded of the angel Raphael’s speech to Adam in Paradise Lost, when Adam asks for an account of the war in Heaven:

“High matter thou enjoin’st me, O prime of men,

Sad task and hard, for how shall I relate

To human sense th’ invisible exploits

Of warring spirits…

                                    ….Yet for thy good

This is dispensed, and what surmounts the reach

Of human sense, I shall delineate so,

By lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms,

As may express them best, though what if Earth

Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things therein

Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?” (5.563-576)

A fascinating prospect. What if earth is but the shadow of heaven? Rather than denigrating the earth, this thought exalts it. It is not superior to heaven, but it did proceed from heaven, and it would seem that things there resemble things here more than we would expect. On the other hand, it is so marvelous that we may suspect John’s inability to render it in detail.

Nevertheless, the Spirit inspired the apostle to render it as he did, and we must be content to imagine and to wonder.

Until we see for ourselves, we must look to Christ, who saved us by movement from transcendence, to immanence, to synthesis, to ascension. By his power and his grace, we will follow in his footsteps.

The Breath of God (Thursday)–John 3:1-21

This weekend I watched Smashed, a film by James Ponsoldt. In it, a young woman with an aesthetic and satisfactory life realizes that she’s an alcoholic. Her arc is about taking off her masks and facing her true self, a process not without consequences. Another film of Ponsoldt’s with a similar theme, The Spectacular Now, had an impact on me two years ago, a little after spring break. I took its theme to heart and—only months later—let my life negatively demonstrate that theme. But I had that in for myself for a long time. Watching another powerful film from the same director is a little scary then.

After watching Smashed, I was in a reverie of reflection. I went all the way back to childhood. What did I want? What did I love? What did I hate? Of what was I ashamed? What shaped me? What disguises did I begin constructing for myself? Essentially, I remembered (re-membered) my primitive disasters, recalled the ensuing shame, and analyzed the fig leaves I’d sewed myself, the routes by which I’d sought to escape.

The next day, Baron and I smoked pipes on his veranda. He had just gone on a similar journey—looking at every picture he’s tagged in on Facebook, from 15 to 29 (something I’ve done before, as well). He said he “face-grabbed” several times (reflexively covering your face with your hands) in response to his embarrassment at his teenage self. As he progressed through the years, the face-grabs became more infrequent. But he saw who he was and who he was trying to be at each stage. I recommend this exercise, which, though it may be done vainly, can also be done honestly—the way Baron did it.

And last night, we watched Birdman by Alejandro Iñàrritu. It’s about this same thing.

Being a human is about trying to become a self. I think most of us are aware of what we’re working against in ourselves, what we’re trying to overcome, or to escape. I expect that many—when they investigate this—quickly see that they’re after redemption. We feel inadequate—perhaps guilty. Experiences confirm our doubts about ourselves—the bad one’s imprint us and inform our quests for authenticity and justification. We begin constructing disguises and costumes to pretend, to convince others and ourselves, that we are adequate. Actually, we want to convince others and ourselves that we are glorious. We don’t become whole unless we strip naked, encounter our shame and guilt, and get what we need—which our egos transmute into glory and godhood—which is really to be loved. Raymond Carver characterizes what each of us is after like this, “To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”

That’s the epigraph to Birdman. Michael Keaton’s character, Riggan Thomson is a washed-up Hollywood actor who is no stranger to disguises. In the early 90’s, he starred in a successful superhero franchise (sound familiar?), and in the wake of some disasters (a failed marriage, the realization that he was a bad father, his daughter going to rehab), he sets out to do something that matters, something authentic, by which he can become a self. The voice of his superhero persona (Birdman, i.e. his ego) grunts in his ear, critiquing his potentially genuine quest for authenticity, tempting him to revert to old means of identity making.

On Thomson’s mirror is a card that reads, “A thing is a thing not what is said of that thing.” Brilliant. You can interpret it many ways. Here’s the way I see it in relation to this issue: neither praise, blame, self-affirmation, nor self-criticism can clarify what you are; you are what you are and authenticity necessitates squaring yourself to that what. But we must ask, what makes us that what? The prevailing answer of our time is that we are our actions. If you behave well, you are good; if you behave badly, you are bad. If you act glorious you are glorious; if you behave ingloriously—you see the point. Existence precedes essence.

The Gospel flies in the face of this. It has a universal analysis of all human selves: there is none who does righteousness; all have sinned and fallen short; we are enemies of God. Brutal. But, if you believe that, Christianity flies in the face of your wallowing in self-loathing—authentic as that may be. The Gospel does not confront you with yourself without confronting your self with God’s absolute, inexorable, irreversible love for you. He gave up Godhood and heaven to come suffer with you in your environment and demonstrate that he loves you. You are beloved.

I think the Gospel agrees that “a thing is a thing and not what is said of that thing.” But it goes further. What God says about a thing makes a thing what it is. On the cross, God says we are beloved. God says that those who have faith in his act of definition are righteous. As my friend Jeff says, “Acceptance precedes essence.” (He says he wants to get that tattooed on him, but, so far, he’s all talk).

To become authentic you must will to be your self. To become a self you must ground yourself transparently in the Power that constituted you. To ground yourself transparently in the Power that constituted you, you must accept that power’s verdict of you. If you accept that Power’s verdict of you, must accept that Power’s reversal of the verdict—the power’s application of the verdict to itself and its subsequent attribution of its essence to you. (That’s just a formulation of the Gospel in Kierkegaardian, existentialist terms—Søren did it much better in The Sickness Unto Death). Jesus speaks of this process in John 3 as being born again. Here’s his formulation of the Gospel:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” (John 3:16-21)

The Breath of God (Tuesday)–Psalm 104 and Ezekiel 37:1-14

I’ve got a lovers quarrel with this human synthesis of immanence and transcendence. I need transcendence, but I seem mired in immanence. I seek transcendence, but I always seem to find immanence. In fact, I am like Icarus—precisely when the winds have born me into the upper ether, the sun melts the wax in my wings and I plummet to the sea. I can go directly from a day of singing hallelujah to a night of sloth, procrastination, and lust.

It must be that we begin in utter immanence. But utter immanence is swimming under water—deep under water. We need air. In our desperation for it, we search out any bubble we can find. Sooner or later, though, the gas in those bubbles proves noxious. We are not fish. We do not have gills—we have lungs.

When I find myself plummeting, flecks of wax trailing above me, and then weltering in the surf in a wrack of plumage, my inclination is to feel like the Israelites who say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished. We are completely cut off” (Ezekiel 37:11). I may not say it to myself after every fall, but always in my heart I believe, to some degree, that I will never get out this flying-crashing rollercoaster. I may simultaneously know that I will repent, run to Christ, and spread my wings again, but part of me doesn’t believe I’ll sustain flight. To this part of me, I think God says this:

“Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, My people. And I will put My Spirit within you, and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken and done it” (Ezekiel 37:12-14).

This is a challenge to believe, and it deserves some thought. Ezekiel received this as a prophetic vision. He was a messenger sent to the nation of Israel before the time of Christ. God didn’t just inspire him to write this for the sake of 21^st Century subjectivism. But in light of the New Testament, do we read this as some fulfilled prophecy that applied metaphorically to the pre-Messianic people of God? Or is it about the post-incarnation people of God—the church? My theology tells me that it doesn’t not apply to the church. And as a member of the church, I’ve got to heed this message for myself. I must believe God’s promise.

And how does this apply to a believer whose sanctification is not complete? Where am I in God’s process of regeneration? Surely, a believer cannot still be a skeleton lying in the dust. Surely an unperfected character cannot be clothed in skin, breathing, and reposed in the land of Israel. So have my bones been collected? Is sinew knitting me back together? Has the flesh begun to grow back over me? Surely a believer—one born again—at least has breath in his lungs, since this breath seems to stand for each body’s portion of the Holy Spirit.

Here’s what I’ve got to conclude: by God’s grace, I’ve got breath in my lungs. I didn’t receive that breath for my ability to stay in the air. I received it because God loves me, died for me, and sent the Holy Spirit as a gift. The cross means that when I crash, I really have to square myself to the fact that God isn’t mad at me, that He poured all his wrath, all the punishment I deserved for my sin, on his Son. And by simply accepting that gift, I am covered in the righteousness of God. Nothing I do can ever mess that up. No matter how hard I fall, I cannot disqualify myself from grace. Yes, sin begets more sin, but I don’t have to fear that God will punish me by some sort of karma.

What is left then? The only thing to do is to take God’s hand, get back up, and take flight again. Only, it’s likely we’re meant for flying about as much as we’re meant for breathing underwater. The purpose of our wings must be to let God’s breath carry us and place us on land. So maybe my mixed metaphor—a shameless blend of myth and Scripture—is mistaken. Perhaps to be like Icarus is to forget that you were one skeleton among many, and that God’s work in your life is not to give you wings, but to give you flesh, to put breath in your lungs, and bring you where you belong—“on your own land” (vs. 14).

The Breath of God (Monday)–Psalm 104 & John 20:19-23

Psalm 104 is a joyful, majestic thing. What a varied, manifold, colorful, textured place the Lord has made. Thoroughgoing pessimists and Naturalists only need to take a look at it to see that there still remains some shalom in nature—common grace. The earth is not yet a post-apocalyptic dustbin. Green, blue, red, and yellow, and every color in between flourish. The sea is full and the mountains stand. Trees sway, springs flow, join rivers, and run to the sea. Water ascends to the sky and rains back down on the heights. The animals drink their fill. Whales are made to sport in the oceans.

And if it is not all a mirthful dance of cuddly creatures, the Psalmist tells us that the young lions—whom we might consider gluttonous predators—seek their food from the Lord. Someday the lion will lie down with the lamb, but the current arrangement doesn’t run contrary to his will. God makes vegetation to grow for the labor of man. The verse refers to agriculture—a circumstance that arose in the wake of the Fall. So even in that—by the sweat of your brow—there is common grace. And one of the fruits of this labor, God says, is wine, “which makes man’s heart glad, so that he may make his face glisten with oil.” God has made arrangements beyond utility. Even food “sustains man’s heart.” Certainly without food the organ, the heart, would not beat. But why not say ‘body,’ instead of this word ‘heart,’ which usually refers to the affective seat of personhood. It seems then, that even food has something to do with the spirit of man. “Desire fulfilled is a tree of life, but a hope deferred makes the heart sick.”

I have already imagined in this time of reflection conversations I may have with dour dualists, “infected with Gnosticism and Manichaeism.”

“Look at Psalm 104,” I will say, “And just you try to tell me God is down on the body and on the planet.”

“Yes, but there are far more Psalms which deal with sadness, suffering, guilt, and misery—and the spiritual corollaries of those states—wrath, judgment, grace, lovingkindness, etc.”

“No doubt. But must you emphasize those things at the expense of forgetting such things as Psalm 104?”

“Well…anyway, Psalm 104 is in the Old Testament. God mercifully made it easier on those people to understand His ways by using stuff to illustrate his spiritual nature.”

“You know–that, without God, there wouldn’t be any stuff in the first place. He made matter, and he seems to like the stuff.”

“Well, yes, until we infected all of it with sin.”

I look up at the white clouds rolling over us in the blue sky for a moment. Then, I look into the palm of my hand.

“Though my body will one day rot, at a later time it will be renewed. Until then, I will remember that with a real body Jesus drank wine. With a real body he walked all over Palestine. With a real body he touched people’s bodies and healed them. As a real body he was tortured. With a real body he died. With a real body he rose again. And with a real body he ascended to heaven. Ponder the mysteries of the incarnation, my friend, and take the sweetness of life with its bitterness.”

“You’re probably an atheist. Only a materialist could be so immanent.”

“And if I were to withdraw my goodwill from you, I would suspect you of being a closet Buddhist, as contemptuous as you are of God’s green earth.”

“Well, you’re just a poop head.”

“And you are a straw man—a figment of my imagination, the rendering of whom displays my somewhat un-Christlike resentment of Gnosticism. Forgive me for putting words in your mouth and making you sound like a child. That said, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

And yet, it would be just as bad to be a materialist. In fact, I can’t decide which would be worse—pure Gnosticism or pure Materialism. Suffice, to say, I’m glad our Lord is neither.

I love that this vengefully earthy Psalm goes with the week’s theme of God’s breath—an emphasis on the spiritual. Even in the Psalm itself, the breath of God is identified with life—when God takes away his breath, the animals die and return to dust. Such is a materialistic philosophy without the spirit—it always ends in death. So what an excellent place to begin—in John 20, where the resurrected Christ appears to the disciples in his body and breathes on them to give them the Holy Spirit.

Christ’s appearing to them in this manner seems to do a few things: it comforts them, commissions them, and equips them.

First of all, it comforts them. Bound as they are to time and matter, they are shut behind barred, wooden doors, fearing for their earthly lives at the threat of the Jews, who just succeeded in nailing their leader, in whom all their hopes were invested, to a tree. The Lord—with supernatural power, posits his resurrected, physical body in the middle of that physical place—and says to them, “Shalom,” “Peace be with you.” When he’s said this, he shows them the wounds in his hands and side. They rejoice over him.

Second, he commissions them. Again he says, “Peace be with you.” Shalom. It’s easy for me to overlook the power of this salutation. He’s not just wishing them well. He’s blessing them by invoking the stuff that was in the air, in the trees, in the fruit, in the rivers, in the animals, in the human bodies, and in the relationships between all things—man and nature, man and animal, man and woman, humanity and God—in the Garden of Eden. And this is no ordinary man invoking this force. This is the Lord, Creator and Restorer of the Universe. This blessing carries weight. Shalom, he says to them.

In the same sentence, he commissions them. “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” How did the Father send Jesus? Through the incarnation. Jesus reigned in heaven and enjoyed the flawless, ecstatic fellowship of the Trinity, from eternity past, and yet he obeyed the Father by lovingly taking on flesh in a fallen world. He came to us to restore us to himself—to bring us Shalom and make us his agents of spreading it to the rest of the world. So, he is saying, “Here, I have given you Shalom. Go—descend as I have—and take it to the world. What does this entail? Review my life: power, miracles, suffering, joy, fellowship, love, death, resurrection. It’s no cakewalk, but you have my power and I am the Lord. I will succeed through you.”

Thirdly, Christ’s appearance equips the disciples. He breathes on them and tells them to “receive the Holy Spirit.” It is interesting that he tells them to receive the Holy Spirit after he breathes on them, which seems to indicate his act of bestowing it upon them. His command (which might seem polite—like, “Here, friend, have a drink”) reminds us that we have a role to play in God’s work in our lives. In a mysterious way—perhaps even paradoxically—our choices are part of God’s providential plan.

The Holy Spirit is the Power by which God produces shalom in and through us. As the shalom in the Garden grew fruit from the trees to feed Adam and Eve, so the fruit of the Spirit grows in us to feed our fellow sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. God reaps glory through our obedience; by his power, we receive peace, we receive his Holy Spirit, and we imitate the incarnation. The world is wide, dangerous, beautiful, and hostile. Though it carries traces of shalom, it is fallen. He sends us out into it as lambs to wolves, but he is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and he makes the mountains stand, the valleys lie, the skies rain, and the rivers run. He gives the whales mirth in the oceans, and he gives lions meat in the darkness. All upon his earth is all within his plan. He sends us with shalom to participate in his renewal of the world.

Undone (Friday)–Hosea 6:1-6

Towards the end of Frederick Buechner’s novel Godric, the protagonist-narrator gets candid:

One summer day I lay upon the grass. I’d sinned, no matter how, and in sin’s wake there came a kind of drowsy peace so deep I hadn’t even will enough to loathe myself. I had no mind to pray. I scarcely had a mind at all, just eyes to see greenwood overhead, just flesh to feel the sun. (p. 143)

I felt like this Friday.

I have slowly been spinning out of rhythm with the rest of the world, my body making its own circadian time signature. I’ve never had trouble getting to sleep, but since moving to Hallam, I lie awake for a few hours every night. Some days, I’ve succeeded in waking up early in spite of the night before; coffee enables me to have a fairly normal day after such little sleep. I always expect to drop like a rock after such a day, but so far it hasn’t mattered: I lie awake at night, alert as a lemur.

I bought a new mattress when I arrived in July, and I foolishly chose the “healthy” option: firm. Once on a trip to China, where the hotel mattresses are hardly softer than asphalt, I slept like a corpse. My brother-in-law, healthy almost to a fault, sleeps on a firm mattress because it’s better for your back (he got my sister a differentiated bed so her side could be softer). I sleep on my side, and that’s part of the problem: on this mattress, my shoulder presses into my torso. I lie on my favored side as long as I can; then I try my back until I feel my sinuses filling up like the open hull of a boat in a storm; then I lie on my other side until the futility is undeniable. Typically, I switch on my bedside lamp and read Cervantes or Sherman Alexie, stoking an awareness of the world’s fathomless despair. Somehow, after a few hours, I finally fall asleep.

After these nights I usually sleep until ten, eleven, even twelve o’clock and wake with my sides, my back, and my shoulders aching (it has to be the mattress). And after sleeping in so late, I am listless, unmotivated, and even ashamed. I’m tempted to spend the day watching movies, to read a novel. The thought of writing descends on me like a crow. And after a day like yesterday, I want only to wallow.

I got up early on Satuday, though I had slept little. I had an appointment to have my car serviced in the city. I read the Bible, but truncated my reflection and prayer time. The garage was an hour and a half away, and I spent a few hours waiting in the dealership. I had forgotten to bring a book. I read Outdoor magazine, Backpacker, and some travel publication (how did the Subaru dealership know exactly the kinds of magazines I would want to read?). I even watched a full broadcast of The View. On the way home (my bank account feeling emptier), I let myself get mad at a guy who raced me off the block at a stoplight: I hadn’t seen that my lane (the right) was ending in a few hundred yards, and I didn’t want to have to brake and get behind the several cars lined up behind me to the left. The guy glanced over at me and floored it; I kept pace with him but couldn’t pass him in time. I braked and changed lanes behind him—almost but not quite tailgating him. To make matters worse, he was driving a Prius. Even writing about it, my anger returns. The road brings out my pettiness. How pathetic—a guy in a Subaru getting mad at the pettiness of a guy in a Prius. I spent the rest of the day poorly, watched the first two episodes of Twin Peaks and started a new novel, though I’m already reading three.

I did go on a run a little before five. I’d laid off my regimen because a couple weeks ago I stepped on a pot hole covered in leaves and rolled my ankle, but I suspected my new sedentary trade was leaving me with excess stores of energy, perhaps fueling my nocturnal wakefulness. The run was hard. I went as far as I had been going two weeks ago. The hill back to my house punished me. I beat myself up.

At eight, I drank some Sleepy Time tea. I took the cup up to my chair and read a few chapters of A Confederacy of Dunces. After about an hour, I nodded off. I had two paragraphs left of the chapter, and I fought off the sleep. I must have read the penultimate paragraph nine times. I brushed my teeth, turned out the light, and got in bed.

My body was zapped from the run, sleep deprivation, and teaching. I also had a slight headache—some dehydration and the violence of the run, I suspected. It was the same. I tried both my sides and my back. I gave each posture a longer chance than usual. I couldn’t sleep. I got up and decided I would be better off watching a movie. I was feeling guilty, too. I had sinned, and hadn’t made moves of repentance. My headache worsened. I decided to call my friend Roderick and told him about everything. He preached the Gospel to me and talked me off the ledge. I went downstairs and watched No Country for Old Men and drank a beer. After the film, I went up stairs and laid myself in bed. My headache was a little worse.

It was near midnight and I was almost asleep when I heard my father come home from his Bible study. The clatter of the door, the creaking of his steps—nothing too disturbing. But I was just about to fall asleep, when he cursed loudly in his bedroom. I jumped out of bed and went in to check on him. He apologized. He had clipped an open drawer with his shin. The left leg of his kakhis was torn badly, and his shin was bleeding.

“I got hit by a car today.”
“What?”
“I was on my bike and a guy changed lanes into me.”
“Jeeze. Did you crash?”
“He pushed me up into the curb.”
“Did you talk to him? How did he respond?”
“He was a total jerk face. Tried to blame it on me… I was in the bike lane.”
“There are bike lanes in Hallam?…Well damn, Dad. I’m glad you’re all right.”
I turned and walked out of his room.
“What?”
“Uh…I just said I’m glad you’re alright. Goodnight.”
“Oh. Thanks. Night.”

We had been whispering because my mom was asleep—or had been. I reflected that I was jumpy after the film, and that I was jumpier in the country in general–having watching a film about a serial killer in a rural community, having recently read In Cold Blood, hearing reports of break-ins around–typical for an East Coaster returned to the green hot…South? West? Bible Belt? After that, my head started aching badly. Behind my right eye I could feel pressure. I tapped on my cheekbone with my knuckles. Sinus congestion, I thought. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse. Eventually, it felt like a tumor was pushing my eye from behind. I sat up and pressed my skull with my palms. I lay back down and groaned softly. I furrowed my brow and massaged my temples. The pressure increased. I winced and started sucking air and exhaling through my teeth—that sighing, anxious pulmonary response to intense pain.

Finally, I got out of bed and contemplated going to Walgreens. I was shivering and yanked on the sweater that was hanging on my desk chair. I wondered if it was a migraine, which I’d never had. Of course, neurotic that I am, I speculated about brain tumors and quickly dismissed my hypochondria. Still, I had never had a headache so bad. I got on the Internet and looked up the symptoms. It could have been a bad sinus headache, but it sounded more like a migraine. Or a tumor.

I tried to lie back down—in vain. After a few moments I got up, looked up Walgreen’s hours. Getting out at 3AM, walking out to my car in the cold night, and driving to the drugstore sounded as miserable as lying in bed with my head about to burst. I suddenly realized I could raid the medicine cabinet to see if we had any Advil (I certainly didn’t buy any medicine, and I hadn’t noticed any around the house). On the medicine lazy Susan in the kitchen was a bottle of ibuprofen. I took twice the recommended dose and lay back down. The little ball of sharp pressure was throbbing behind my eye, lighting my image of skull’s interior from the center of my forehead to the middle of my cheek. I winced and started hyperventilating again.

Then I started praying—for a miracle, for forgiveness, for help, for grace, for the power to endure my weakness, to know what the hell power is perfected in weakness meant. I’ve never had a worse headache. I adjusted my alarm from 5:30 to 7:00 it being near 4:00 AM. Somehow, at some point, I fell asleep.

I woke in the morning with my back aching and my legs sore, but my headache was gone. It had no time for Scripture or for a shower, but, oh, sweet relief! The feeling was better than waking up from a dream in which you’ve ruined your life—committed murder, had sex with the worst person possible, or skipped a class all semester. Since, I’ve been shaken up—like post flu-weakness, not quite queasy, but bone-timid. Teaching was tough. It was a worksheet day.

I reflected last night on the nature of horror movies. No Country is a chilling thriller, almost more disturbing for its philosophical implications than for its demonic antagonist. I typically don’t like scary movies, especially slasher flicks—but No Country, though not especially gory, was one of the first scary movies I truly enjoyed. Why do people enjoy such things? I realized that horror movies have a cathartic effect, like tragedies; we pity the protagonists and fear their fate, seeing that such evils could technically happen to us. Furthermore, they make our own lives seem far more suitable. Even if you’re mired in everydayness, oppressed by the ordinary, the boring, the familiar—resenting the absence of the extraordinary, the exotic, the new—a terrifying movie makes you appreciate the safety and boredom of your potentially meaningless life.

Sickness, injury, and pain—once they’re over—have the same effect. How much better it is to be healthy, to be whole of heart and limb, and to be pain free. Still, we carry the thought with us, even after such trials, that—one day—sickness, injury and pain will fatally overtake us. Death is not going to be fun. It might be quick, but quick deaths are typically violent. It might be long, and long deaths are usually painful. And, whether you believe in a resurrection or not, you must admit the primitive terror of death. For things to go “black as midnight on a moonless night,” (episode 2 or 3 of Twin Peaks) to feel like Ivan Ilyitch, lying in a painful bed, feeling like you’re being stuffed into a dark sack—horror.

And where is God in all this? Why so much evil, senseless pain, and terror? Was original sin so bad that he had to let this loose? At the end of No Country, Tommy Lee Jones’s character contemplates evil, his duty to keep peace and deliver justice as a sheriff; he admits his fear and sense of helplessness. His friend asks him why he wants to retire. He talks about the fathomlessness and senselessness of modern evil and says he feels “overmatched.” He says he expected that, when he got old, God would come into his life—but He didn’t.

Godric, listless and wallowing after his sin, lies in the grass and looks up into the trees overhead:

A light breeze blew from Wear that tossed the trees, and as I lay there watching them, they formed a face of shadows and of leaves. It was a man’s green, leafy face. He gazed at me from high above. And as the branches nodded in the air, he opened his mouth to speak. No sound came from his lips, but by their shape I knew it was my name.

His was the holiest face I ever saw. My very name turned holy on his tongue. If he had bade me rise and follow to the end of time, I would have gone. If he had bade me die for him, I would have died. When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the Savior’s face itself I saw. (Buechner p. 143-4)

Reading Hosea this evening reminded me of Godric’s vision:

“Come, let us return to the Lord.
For He has torn us, but He will heal us;
He has wounded us, but He will bandage us.
He will revive us after two days;
He will raise us up on the third day
That we may live before Him.
So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord.
His going forth is as certain as the dawn;
And He will come to us like the rain,
Like the spring rain watering the earth.”
What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
For your loyalty is like a morning cloud,
And like the dew which goes away early.
Therefore I have hewn them in pieces by the prophets;
I have slain them by the words of My mouth;
And the judgments on you are like the light that goes forth.
For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice,
And in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

Undone (Wednesday)–II Samuel 12:1-25

Some light reading this morning in the Blue Book. In spite of its horror and heaviness, this is one of the richest passages in Scripture. To a nonbeliever, I can think of few more offensive passages. For a believer, I can think of few more sobering, troubling, and convicting.

To come across this cold as an unbeliever must be satisfying confirmation of skepticism. First of all, here’s David, the King from the Golden Age of God’s chosen nation, and he has seduced a good man’s wife, killed him, and acted like a complete hypocrite. Now, he’s too dumb to hear himself in Nathan’s little parable. How convenient, too, that Saul can’t so much as keep some forbidden cattle, tear a guy’s favorite coat, and visit one medium before he loses his kingdom and gets tormented by demons and paranoia until he dies, while David gets to do whatever he wants and only suffers the loss of a child. And isn’t this supposed to be the merciful God orchestrating this? And here he is killing a child for the sins of its father? More likely, David got caught and orchestrated this whole thing, only acting as contrite as was necessary to convince the people who knew about it that he was really pious. In the end, he gets to keep his new wife, and he gets a replacement son to boot. But what can you expect when the powerful write the history?

Honest doubts, I think. But there’s another way to look at all of this. First of all, at least half of those criticisms of David land. He did some evil stuff. To the existentialist who says, “existence precedes essence,” and, “a man is nothing but his collected actions,” he is evil. But God’s economy of identity is not the existentialist’s economy. In fact, if you read the Bible, Old and New Testaments, you’ll find a lot of wicked people—many of them apparently the heroes of the stories. From the patriarchs, to Moses and Aaron, from Samson to Saul, from David to Solomon to the Kings of the divided kingdom to the disciples, the protagonists often, at one time or another (if not many others), act like chimpanzees.

But that’s not a full picture: there are heroes, too, who, even if they screw up occasionally, cut an admirable character: Able, Joseph (great character arc), Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Elijah, Nehemiah, Isaiah, and the apostles—though they have their moments—are overall heroic.

Many of the worst characters do some amazing things with their lives. Samson made a career out of ignoring his calling, obeying his impulses, and getting into trouble, but at the end of his life, he becomes a true judge. Even David spent years as a political fugitive and refused to kill his enemy Saul, his king and the Lord’s anointed, showing mercy even to Saul’s children. Solomon, too, though he fell into woman-worship and regular old idolatry, asked God for wisdom when he could have asked for anything; on top of that, he built the temple and prospered his kingdom.

The Bible doesn’t depict two-dimensional characters—it depicts real people, and real people have virtues and vices. The heroes of the Bible are not the ones who did the best job following the rules. In a sense, the heroes of the Bible are not the heroes of the Bible: almost all of them have serious hubris. Noah, after being chosen as the sole survivor of mankind and being delivered from the deluge, gets sloppy drunk (which, all things considered, is pretty understandable). Moses wasn’t allowed into the Promised Land because he directly disobeyed God; Elijah, after witnessing one of the most decisive and unambiguous cultural victories in history at Mount Carmel, runs into the desert to pout. Even Paul, the author of most of the New Testament, was a Christian killer before he became an apostle.

The protagonists of the Bible have a character arc—a dynamic development with a certain tendency. The character arc doesn’t have to be steady or lifelong, and it doesn’t have to feature more good deeds than bad. It doesn’t have to end positively. In fact, even a character like Samson, whose slovenliness far outweighs his virtue, can be exemplary. A character’s final meaning is determined by an x-factor.

The name of this blog, goodbadredeemed, comes from something Johnny Cash said about the first album he produced with Rick Ruben, American Recordings. If you know anything about Cash’s music (and who doesn’t?), you know that it’s raw and honest. In a documentary about the album, the elderly Cash answers a question about the content in the songs (for instance, “Delia’s Gone,” which features uxoricide—wife murder). He says, “Well, some of it’s good, some of its bad, but I’m redeemed.”
Like Cash’s life itself and the lives of biblical protagonists, his music features the dialectic—good, bad, redeemed. Biblical heroes are not heroes, nor are they usually more good than bad. Their redeemed status is determined by an x-factor, which the Christian sees even in this horrible episode in David’s life.

“Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.” II Samuel 12:13

At this point the nonbeliever must balk. “This is precisely my beef with Christianity: as long as you feel bad about it and ‘repent,’ you can do whatever you want. David only gets away with this because he was a powerful man.

David doesn’t deserve the sentence he gets. Even his own sentence on the proverbial guy who stole a lamb was death and fourfold restitution (verses 5-6). Tragically, the consequence for David’s sin is the death of his infant child. Furthermore, his household is cursed with the sword, a prophecy later fulfilled through Amnon and Absalom. But David’s life is spared and his sin is taken away. How is that possible? Samuel announces it immediately after he says he’s repented. There wasn’t even time for a guilt offering or any signs of repentance. Is that all it takes?

“You got me. I did it.”
“Okay. You’re forgiven.”

That’s obviously an oversimplification, but the speed of the forgiveness is astounding. How did the holy God take away David’s sin so quickly, almost immediately?

The answer lies in the x-factor. It’s what redeems even characters who live their whole lives like pond scum, whether in the Old Testament or the New. Back in Genesis 3:15, God prophesied to the serpent that Eve’s seed would bruise his head. The promise carried on to Abraham, through whose seed God swore he would bless all the nations of the earth. The promise went on in David and Solomon—they would never lack a man on the throne, and through them Messiah would come. The direction is obvious. All these promises, all God’s ritual institutions of sacrifice, and all these stories, point to the central event of scriptural narrative—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through his perfect life, substitutionary death, and victorious resurrection, every character from Able, to Moses, to David, to St. Paul, to Johnny Cash has been redeemed. On the cross, Christ made grace—the gift of unmerited favor, which justifies the unjust, cleanses the filthy, and redeems the enslaved.

By grace and inspiration, David understood God when he wrote Psalm 51. The poem is heavy with brokenness, and grace is laced throughout it. The dialectic—the character arc—is on display. God is good, and he created a good world with good people in it. But every one of us reenacts Adam and Eve’s choice—we make a rebellious bid for godhood and bring death into our lives. We become bad. But God is gracious, and he forgives those who own their guilt; he resurrects them with his Son, and those whom he resurrects are the redeemed.

Undone (Tuesday)–Luke 5:1-11

Peter, James, and John’s first encounter with Christ is strange and dynamic. He’s standing by the lake, teaching the people, and he climbs, apparently uninvited, in to Peter’s boat.

“Put out a little way, will you?”

Peter does it. Jesus continues teaching the people. When he’s finished, he says: “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for catch.”
The plan doesn’t make sense to the fishermen. They know their trade. They’ve worked all night and caught nothing. They’re not suddenly going to start biting. On top of that, we’re tired, damn it. But fine, we’ll do it.

I wonder why Peter called Him Master immediately. The multitude was listening to him, but then why not call him Rabbi? Is it a class thing? Surely Jesus looked like a peasant—a poor, travelling rabbi at best. Or maybe he was only recently come from his carpentry gig, his clothes thus still decent. Did Jesus have a good income in his carpenter days? What kind of capital did he leave behind to begin his ministry?

I find what happens next paradoxical. Here’s this guy who wrecks your plans and calls into question your basic desires, tells you to sell everything and give it to the poor, who very shortly will get these fishermen to leave all their capital—boats, nets, sails, etc.—and here he does exactly the kind of thing you’d want him to do: gives the fisherman the jackpot. They lay into so many fish that their nets start to break and their boats sink. It would be like hearing that your bank didn’t have the capacity for a wire transfer someone made into your account. That’s what I’m talking about! Right? Bring it on, Jesus—manipulate nature to make our lives better! For me, it would be like hearing Simon and Schuster wanted to go ahead and give me a book deal and that they knew it would be a best seller. Get ready for the limelight, Mr. Ericson.

Here’s what Peter says, though: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!”

I might have asked: “Hey, do you want to go fishing with us tomorrow, too? You can stay all week if you want…or all year. We could put you on salary.”

But Peter responds like Isaiah to the sight of God, surrounded by Seraphim, smoke filling the temple. Awareness of God’s holiness brings him to his knees. The first thing he realizes is his own unworthiness. Luke says the disciples were seized with amazement. They don’t say, “That’s the ticket, Jesus. Hook us up!” They fall at His feet.

The paradox of this sign comes into focus in verse 11. In verse 10, Jesus tells them, “Do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching men.” In 11, Luke tells us that the fishermen leave everything and follow Him.

Peter, James, and John mess a lot of things up later on, but they begin their Christ following career on a good play. Instead of idolizing success or wealth and thinking of God as a heavenly vending machine, they worship Him and leave all their possessions behind to go with Him. It doesn’t even say what they did with the fish. So what does God think about prosperity. At the very least, in terms of material wealth, he’s pretty ambivalent about it. We know how we feel about it, though: most of us are not ambivalent about it.

Honestly, if you could look into my heart and see what it wants more than anything, it would probably be to have my cake and eat it—for my novel to be a work of immortal prose that would aesthetically enrich a wide—really wide—audience, and also that it would make me pretty decent money. How greedy am I? Probably more than I realize. How noble are my motives? Probably less noble than I would like to think. Part of me wants to participate in the “multiple enrichment and efoliation of creation” by leveraging all my talents and doing what my hands have found to do with my might;but  part of me just wants to do what I love and suffer as little as possible. Part of me just wants to make a living doing what I love; part of me wants to make a killing doing what I love.

Christ’s calling of these disciples tells me this: God could inspire me to write better than Shakespeare and James Joyce combined, make a bigger splash with my book than Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huck Finn together, and let me sell more copies than J.K. Rowling and Stephen King in tandem; He could also so change my desires and motives that I relinquished the copyrights to my immortal prose, gave my billions to charity, and found my calling as an after school tutor in northwestern Kansas.

The key to the paradox is in Christ’s response to their amazement: “Do not fear, from now on you will be catching men.” It strikes me as a little oblique. Aren’t they afraid of you and your glory, Jesus? Wouldn’t the more appropriate response be, “Do not fear, I am incarnated fully so that you can be in my presence and live. I did not come to wreak vengeance on sinners. I came to make grace.” Or is he saying, “I know. It’s kind of scary to see so many fish. Don’t worry; I won’t frighten you with such phenomena again. We’ll go for men. That will be better won’t it?” I think not. I suspect intentional ambiguity. He could be the speaker in Joe Pug’s “Hymn #101”:

I’ve come to say exactly what I mean
And I mean so many things.

I think another way to read His “do not fear,” is to hear it addressed to their impending insecurity and uncertainty. They were about to follow a homeless rabbi around for three years, royally piss off the establishment, and make themselves enemies of the state. Eventually they would die for it—with the exception of John the Revelator (though his fate, exile, may not have been much better).

Perhaps he was addressing their doubts about their new career. “Don’t worry,” he says, “the work is meaningful and important. You’ve been fishing for guppies—I’m taking you marlin fishing.”

I’m reminded of Inglorious Basterds. Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, breaks into a prison to recruit a notorious criminal named Hugo Stiglitz. Brad Pitt introduces himself and says: “I think you show great talent. But your status as a Nazi killer is still amateur. We all come here to see if you wanna go pro.”

In fact, now I’m seeing the Tarantino film as a twisted metaphor for Christ’s ministry: guy from a backwater part of the country (Maynardville, TN) leads a bunch of Jewish men around to deal with the woes of the world–with men as their quarry. Ultimately, they descend to hell (going to the Nazi film premier a la Beowulf diving into the lake after Grendel) and strikes a death blow to the führer of darkness. All the “disciples” but one (B.J. Novak) die, and you could even say that the leader kind of gets resurrected. Of course, that ignores the female protagonist’s narrative; furthermore, Jesus won the nonviolent way, not the Tarantino way. I think it’s an interesting reading, nonetheless. But I digress! Back to the Bible.

So did Jesus come to get the disciples to “go pro?” In a way, yeah. He trains them how to fish for men instead of fish. Do they succeed? I don’t know how much evangelism they did while Jesus was around, but as soon as he ascended after the resurrection, they got to work. On Pentecost, Peter—an erstwhile fisherman to whom Jesus had given the catch of a lifetime—preaches a sermon to a multiethnic crowd and converts about three thousand souls (Acts 2). He would continue that work, the work of the Great Commission, until the Romans crucified him—as legend has it—upside down.

Only a really good cause, a true cause, could motivate a life like that. Only a great power could enable an uneducated fisherman to lead such a movement. Only One with the reins of nature in His hands could convince someone to leave their life behind and take a new calling.

What will I do when that call comes?

Loved by God (Saturday)–Isaiah 54:10

Here’s a snapshot of my mental life. But first, a little context: I sat down to do my quiet time after long delay this afternoon (yes, I also slept in). As is my custom, I read a theological book over breakfast (or more technically perhaps–lunch), my friend Cort called me, we talked for an hour, and then I was really in the mood to get off the blocks—start work, get about my day. But I knew I had been interrupted and that I still needed time in prayer and the Word. I dithered. Finally, I conquered myself and sat down with my Bible and the Blue Book. My thoughts were all over the place, like a flock of sheep scattered by a bad border collie and a mischievous child. I watched the tumult for a bit and then began to “call my roving thoughts home”:

“Return to the fold, bright imaginings of the future,
Hail Grace, slinking shame for yesterday’s sin,
Control thyself, burbling reflections of pride,
Recall thy boon, ye who know your Shepherd;
Come back and enjoy his doting presence;
Harken to His strong and gracious voice.”

Overwrought, I know. Nevertheless! I asked God’s help in stilling my self to read the opening prayer. Seeing the reading for today, Isaiah 54:10. Just verse ten. I fizzled a mischievous thought. Intuitively, I knew it was safe; I still think it was okay, but it might seem bad—even blasphemous. I looked up at the ceiling and spoke to God:

“One verse. That’s my kind of quiet time.”

I then chuckled.

Offensive? Does your sense for God’s transcendence, holiness, and wrath kindle in outrage? The possibility of offense occurred to me, but I said it anyway (sill, I know). Why?

My friends and I use a similar mechanism to joke all the time. It’s irony. My friend Roderick and I were sitting on the patio of a corner coffee shop in Cambridge, MA, once, doing quiet times. The post-postmodern denizens of that intellectual capital swarmed around us. I was pretty distracted. The Blue Book had me in the Prayer theme that morning and the reading was actually Jesus telling people not to be hypocrites and not to pray on street corners, to go in their closets instead. I laughed. Rod asked, “What?” I told him. We acknowledged that we were gaining no social capital whatsoever by reading our Bibles in public next to the Law school. Jesus’ message to us would probably be almost opposite, something like:

“Walt. Don’t be ashamed of me. You’re afraid of being judged by these people—don’t be. You’re instinct in this moment, to not read your Bible, is the same instinct that prompted the Pharisees to pray loudly in public—they wanted men’s approval. You’ve got my approval. Be bold. However, a noisy street corners is probably not the best context for a quiet time.”

Roc and I talked about it later. We talked about the pious Pharisee persona, and we started making fun of it. To characterize it, Rod knit his eyebrows in sanctified earnestness, and in his best early 18th Century Puritan pastor voice, said:

“Dear-uh Gahd, I thank Thee…that I am naht like these sinful postmodern folk, and that I instead know Thy grrreat favah and grace.”

I immediately thought of John Cleese dressed up in his Pharisee outfit at the stoning in Life of Brian (which is, that scene and a few others aside, a film of questionable merit). All the time now, we say, “Dear-uh Gahd,” when we hear ourselves patting our own backs.

In fact, making fun of the milder instances of Christian hypocrisy or pious silliness is one of my favorite pastimes. If I tell a friend that I didn’t have a quiet time or that I said “shit” after stubbing my toe, and he tells me, “Don’t worry too much: Hell might not be that bad,” I will probably laugh in mirth. It isn’t that Hell is not a grave matter; it’s the absurd legalism that often gets associated with it. If I tell a friend that I accidentally cut someone off on the highway, I’m going to chuckle in delight if they respond: “Well, what’s another year in purgatory?” If someone asks me if I’ve seen a certain R rated film, I might reply: “Yeah, see, I love Jesus, so…movies like that aren’t my cup of tea.” My friend Rod and his Bible students call such replies Jesus jukes. If a kid in Rod’s class forgets to do an assignment, he’s likely to say: “Jumped right into the hellevator, huh?” If I ask my friend and pastor Dillon what he’s been up to on a Thursday, he’s apt to say: “I’ve been working on the sermon all morning…yeah, I’m a pretty good pastor. Pret-eh, pret-eh, pret-eh, holy, you know?”

It’s delightful irony, funny because it hits close to home and constructive because it implicitly affirms a rich understanding of God’s grace. So, when I jokingly say out loud to God, “One verse—that’s my kind of quiet time,” I am partially being honest and wholly being ironic, banking on his grace, the belief that he’s got a sense of humor, and that he can take a joke. He invented humor after all. Medieval monks and others were pretty sure Jesus never laughed. They are not without reason.

None of the Gospels record his laughter. He was a man “acquainted with sorrows.” His life was a life of suffering and passion. But how could he not have laughed with his understanding of the foibles of human hearts and the ironies of life on the earth? He was on a grave mission during the incarnation, but could He have avoided being wry when Nathaniel, who had just totally trashed his home turf (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”), approached him, in response to which the Lord said, “Here is an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile?” Could his love have been unmixed with amusement when Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore like a capuchin monkey to see him? Did He keep a straight face during the following exchange with Peter?

“Lord, do You wash my feet?”
“What I do you do not realize now; but you shall understand hereafter.”
“Never shall You wash my feet!”
“If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.”
“Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.”

Anyone else laugh? Jewish humor is famously ironic and subtle. I’m not saying Jesus was the Larry David of his day, but the forgoing conversation reminds me of The Princess Bride:

Westley: Give us the gate key.
Gatekeeper: I have no gate key.
Inigo: Fezzik, tear his arms off.
Gatekeeper: Oh, you mean this gate key.

At any rate, such joking is only made possible (or un-blasphemous) by a firm understanding of God’s grace. Hypocrisy can get ugly, but it’s inherit lack of self-awareness is the essence of comedy. Sin and Hell are serious subjects, but if you put serious stock in God’s grace, you can afford to joke about bad theology. At the end of the day, it’s all self-deprecating. Every who values righteousness has pharisaical tendencies, the more you know the Gospel, the sillier you see these tendencies in yourself and others. The innuendo can surprise the intellect; make you laugh, and thus help you connect with the Gospel implications.

I think God has a better sense of humor than any of us. So does my dad. Early one morning, he was walking on our “flowering lawns, amid the rustle of his planted hills” (Yeats, Meditations in Time of Civil War), pouring his heart out, praying to God in deathly earnestness (maybe taking himself too seriously–as both of us are wont to do). He was asking God for an answer; he heard a sputtering noise and got the high-powered sprinkler system stream right in the butt. My dad’s the first to tell the story and laugh.

So, what did I find in that easy quiet time, that completion-grade Bible assignment this morning?

“For the mountains may be removed and the hills may shake,
But My lovingkindness will not be removed from you,
And my covenant of peace will not be shaken,”
Says the Lord who has compassion on you.

A dead serious promise of God’s committed and unconditional love. I don’t know if He thought my joke about my own impiety was as funny as I did. As I read the verse though, my eyes watered a little.

See how pious my affections are? Pretty good theology, too, huh? Pret-eh, pret-eh, pret-eh good.

And for the record, I wrote all the way up to the end of this without…wait for it…getting struck by lightning. Whew.

P.S. Enjoy the following and laugh with the Gospel:

Gate key–Princess Bride Stoning–Life of Brian Classic Jesus Video–Vintage 21

Loved by God: Zephaniah 3:14-20

Loved by God: Psalm 36 and Zephaniah 3:14-20

The Lord your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.

I feel distant from this truth, honestly. Is God in our midst? I am conscious that Zephaniah said this to a Judah about to be destroyed by Assyria, a Judah that had forsaken the way of the Lord. He spoke to warn them and to reassure them that the coming judgment would vindicate God’s righteousness and serve to deliver those truly belonging to the Him. And the promise is in the future tense: “He will exult.” What about now? Does the simple fact of Christ’s accomplished work on the cross guarantee and redeem these old promises for us now? Can there be any doubt that God loves us intensely? I think not.

What does it mean that God is a victorious warrior? Many peace-loving folk today must not like that characterization. Jesus never hit anybody. He was meek and peaceful. I guess he got sort of violent casting moneychangers out of the temple, but he didn’t hurt anyone. Or did he use a whip to drive them out? In John 2, he makes a scourge of cords and uses it. It would not be the last time Christ encountered a whip in Jerusalem.

In one of the better protest songs I’ve heard, Joe Pug sings:

War is older than mankind
But it’s younger than grace
Won’t you bury me far from my uniform
So God will remember my face

It’s a metaphysical statement, but is he right? Grace—what is it? Where does it come from? If God created us, how was there war before Cain and Able? Paradise Lost imagines it—the war in heaven between Satan’s army and the Father’s. But is grace older than that? Before there were even angels, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit existed in eternal glory, a community of love, and even back then, God knew what would go down and how he would respond to it. But why is there so much violence in the world?

If you buy the Naturalism and Evolution metanarrative, it’s unavoidable. Even if humanity descended from free-love, hippie-commune, food-sharing bonobos rather than the warfare-organizing, cannibalistic, infant-slaughtering chimpanzees, even those bonobos are descendants of reptiles, and we know how they are. But even though violence, for the Christian, is completely out of hand for anything except perhaps self-defense or to prevent further violence, violence is–in a certain way– essential to Christianity. But who invented it—God or man?

I think the answer is surprising. The first mention of violence in Scripture is made in God’s judgment on the serpent:

And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel. Genesis 4:15

This is massive. First of all, from whence does this enmity come? The answer is obvious and perhaps surprising—from God. But this isn’t bad news; in fact, it’s the Good News. Theologians call this the protevangelium, which means “first gospel.” It is a description of the brand of dualism that inheres in reality: the conflict between good and evil. The serpent is identified with Satan, and his role in the fall of man was a tactical move against his enemy—God. The enmity that God puts between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s is merely an extension of the enmity that already existed between God and the devil. The devil’s sin is original sin. He rebelled first and convinced us to follow him down. It is in the character of God’s holiness that He must do something about sin; the action He must take involves violence. In Paradise Lost, God’s thunder is the weapon that overpowers the artillery of Satan, who had underestimated his Adversary. When he and his angels wake up in the lake of fire after falling for days through space and chaos, they are “thunderstruck.” War is older than mankind.

But violence is not God’s primary characteristic; love is. I don’t know why the devil received no grace; perhaps he was offered it and refused it, or perhaps different rules apply to spiritual beings, unbounded as we are by space and time. But the fact is—God, though severe with us, also loves us, and from the beginning of the fall, demonstrates his love for us, gradually revealing more and more of it as history leads up to the Incarnation. Who is the woman’s seed? Is this just an explanation for the ancient species warfare between reptiles and hominids? According to the Christian tradition, no.

The seed of the woman, which will bruise the serpent’s head and receive the serpent’s bite, is Christ. In fact, in the very violence of being snake-bit, He would deliver the fatal stomp. On the cross, Satan thought he had killed the king of the universe; instead, the king of the universe killed him. Peter Kreeft calls it judo, a martial art in which the enemy’s weight and momentum is used against him.

But what of God’s violence towards us? Human violence first manifested itself in Cain. God disapproved, saying, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). He dealt mercifully with Cain, but his descendants built a civilization that multiplied violence. To deal with mankind’s violence, God used violence. He sent a flood to destroy mankind, sparing only Noah and his family, who were saved from the wrath by a wooden vessel.

When the waters subsided, God made His will explicit, “Whoever sheds man’s blood/By man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6).

Humanity is violent. Whether or not we descended from Cain, chimpanzees, or bonobos, we are what we are. In the last century, we killed more people than all the people ever killed by violence in history. Is that excused by the relatively larger modern population? I think not. Violence is perennial and incorrigible. If you object to Christianity because God uses it in the Bible, I ask you this—do you think you’ll avoid violence in any another worldview? Do you think Christ calls Christians to be antagonistic–after he said, “turn the other cheek?” Whole societies have committed atrocities in the name of Christ, but those societies did not act in the Spirit of Christ.

In response to the necessity of blood as recompense for sin, God finally did not demand our blood; he provided his own. He poured the flood of his wrath out on himself in the person of His Son, so that we might live and have peace with Him.

Watch almost any war film—Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Fury, The Thin Red Line—and you see warriors sacrificing themselves for the sake of others, for their fellow soldiers, their superiors, and for their family and fellow country men. Soldiers bear on their bodies the wounds aimed at others. They stand in the gap and take the hit. Christ told his disciples, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). He called us his friends (John 15:13), and He laid down his life for us. If you’re worried that Christianity is violent—or that it shirks the necessity of violence in the face of violent evil—the truth is, Christianity is violent—at it’s center, it is a man being flayed, bled dry, and suffocated on a cross; but it doesn’t call us to be violent. Don’t worry that true Christians will shed blood; face the fact that as a true Christian, you are called to deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow Christ.

I’m reminded of two 20th century saints who suffered violence: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Following Christ’s example, Martin Luther King courageously stood up for the cause of truth and justice. He lovingly used his talent and resources to fight evil and oppression in the face of hatred and violent opposition, and, of course, he fought with the power of nonviolence. It ultimately cost him his life: because of the incorrigible hatred and violence of racism, he was gunned down at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was no stranger to violence. When he was a boy, his older brother died serving in World War I. As an adult, he remained faithful to Christ and the true Church in the face of the oppression and violence of the Nazi regime. When Hitler’s violent insanity was clear, Bonhoeffer made the difficult decision to risk his life by participating in an assassination plot against the führer. When the plot failed, Bonhoeffer was arrested and eventually hung, only months before the Allied victory.

Instead of sentimentally denying the centrality of violence in the cosmos or rejecting Christianity because of its violent elements and the human evil that commits violence in its name, we should recognize the place of violence and see that Christianity is the only worldview that truly justifies the claim:

War is older than mankind
But it’s younger than grace.

The Lord is a warrior. He bore the violence we deserved and saved us from the consequences of our sin. He defeated the violence of Satan and the powers of sin and death. Though he died, he rose again and lives forever. Now, then, it is really true:

The Lord your God is in your midst,
A victorious warrior.
He will exult over you with joy,
He will be quiet in His love,
He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.

***In honor of Veteran’s Day yesterday and of the grace of God’s dealing with violence, check out these songs:“Bury Me Far from My Uniform”by Joe Pug and“Pride (In the Name of Love)”by U2.

Bonhoeffer at Westminster Cathedral

Martin Luther King, Jr. at Westminster Cathedral