An advent meditation--what exactly is a Hosanna chorus?

http://theologyforwomen.blogspot.com/2009/12/holidays-clarify-our-pain.html

Dostoevsky famously wrote that his Hosanna passed through a crucible of doubt but this very phrase suggests that the word "Hosanna" has a meaning that has so greatly changed over time it is difficult to discern precisely what it is supposed to evoke. In Dostoevsky's usage the word implies some kind of praise and an absence of doubt and yet in terms of its literal meaning "Hosanna" is perhaps more poignantly pertinent in the psalms of lament and psalms requesting aid in time of war.

Hosanna means "save us" or "please save us". It has been used so often as a chorus of praise and in a particularly upbeat way that the supplicatory nature of the word can be completely lost even in in settings by a composer as masterful as Bach. The osanna is often presented as a moment of triumph already realized which can happen even in a work like Durufle's Requiem (which I adore, just so you know).

So far I'm rusty on masses these days but if you compare the setting of Osanna by Frank Martin or Bach to, say, Arvo Part's Berliner Mass you'll see that each of these three wonderful masses have spectacularly different approaches to the very concept of the word. Bach's setting reflects a confidence in the work of Christ as though it were complete (as I hear the setting). Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir has an element of expectation to it but is fairly cheery. Part's setting is dark, lonely, and even sorrowful. Not even in Byrd's masses do you find this sort of sadness and Byrd, who had to circulate his masses under the noses of Protestant leadership, would seem to have had more reason to make a forlorn setting.

To sing Hosanna is to ask Christ to save us and for me at this time of year and with no job and uncertainty about the future and acutely aware of my capacity to sin and even my indifference to turning from discouragement, impatience, and other failings ... I find Arvo Part's setting of the text in the Berliner Mass most resonant, most poignant. Part captures the sadness and even the anger we can feel awaiting the salvation of the Lord and wishing that we were not simply stuck where we are. We are like David, acutely aware of his own sin and realizing that he fumbles over and over but anxious despite this sin to turn to what is right. I want to be like that even though I realize how often I am not like that. I know that my spirituality is essentially a sham ... and yet all our spiritualities are shams apart from Christ and within Christ they take a lifetime to become perfected by seeking the author and finisher of our faith, something I am of late not the least bit good at.

Augustine, somewhat amusingly, wrote in his Confessions that his prayer was for some time, "Lord make me chast ... but not yet." This is funny because it can be idiomatically re-presented to us as "Lord save me but don't save me yet." And how does Christ save us? Through the Cross. This is the cross He asks us to take up and carry as we follow Him, and it is the cross He takes up on our behalf. Even Christ had to have someone else carry His Cross and he was nailed to it. If Christ in His darkest hour could not carry His own physical burden of the literal cross even while He knew that that burden was to be borne for us, then He knows what it feels like to be forsaken.

Christ's life itself was a bearing of our infirmities and this for our salvation. How easily and quickly we can forget even when we tell ourselves this is the truth we live by, the story that guides our story. David forgot often, Solomon forgot often and eventually for an unusually long time. Even the best among God's people have ended in miserable failure forgetting what the Lord had urged them to remember. Samson ended in a way that was both triumphant and pathetic yet was considered a hero of the faith. Jephthah sacrificed his own daughter after making a rash vow and yet he was regarded as a hero in the faith, too, because he was a judge who executed justice on behalf of Israel.

The judges were the ones God raised up when His people cried out "save us!" These judges were all ultimately failures and the great judge had yet to come. Even when I realize that I do not want to be saved yet, like Augustine used to pray, I know that I cannot finally forget that asking the Lord to save me remains for me to bring to the Lord, a petition to not forget.

Omega bank debenture scam part two, the NESARA variation

http://www.quatloos.com/NESARA.htm

Scams are more effective when they are linked to things that exist that don't really amount to much. That scrap of truthfulness and the appeal to avarice or genuine need. What began as Omega has over time transformed into a new variation on an old trick in the NESARA scam.
If high yield investment plan scams where the craze of the 199os it looks like hiring scams are the newest craze. It's not fun applying for a job on-line only to discover you're getting called by telemarketers about things that don't interest you.

Scams like NESARA or Omega or hiring scams exploit ignorance, greed, and need. You can think that you're too smart to get suckered but that may well be when you get suckered most. Especially in the 1990s when evangelical Christians were dreading what Clinton would do to compromise civil liberties and abuse federal power things that promised insider information that would financially liberate them looked good. As Koholeth put it wine makes the heart glad and money is the answer to everything! Why, of course it is! If you have the secret wisdom that most Americans don't have because they don't know how things REALLY work in this country then you'll become successful, right?

Thanks to some not very prudent financial decisions people I have known have made over the years I developed an approach that is probably overdone. Where many people would like to say "nothing ventured, nothing gained" I tend to think, "nothing ventured, less is lost". I know risks have to be taken but when you have seen people take risks that are disasters and turned out to be foolish risks it's hard to feel inspired to follow those examples with confidence. If a man eats his way into diabetes I can't take him seriously when he looks down on other people for their lack of self control. If a man was busily fornicating with the woman who eventually became his wife I can't take seriously his moral outrage that other people do now what he so giddily did. If a man wipes out his business ventures for lack of a sound business plan it's hard to feel inspired getting advice from that guy to be more entrepreneurial even though I actually kinda want to be a bit more entrepreneurial about music. Plus I know that most businesses don't make it very far but that isn't a reason to not try.

To get random and tie this back to my observations on prosperity teaching, things can fall apart that are beyond your control. Scams hook people by promising some form of fast and total control to change their circumstances. Jesus rebuked Pharisees by saying that if they were merely blind they would not be guilty but because they claim to see their guilt remained. The only thing more dangerous than being blind is believing that you see and telling others you can lead the way.

Mockingbird on Kafka, great stuff

http://mockingbirdnyc.blogspot.com/2009/09/your-value-how-kafkaesque.html

http://mockingbirdnyc.blogspot.com/2009/12/whole-duty-of-man-part-i.html


For much of my life my favorite authors have been Kafka and Dostoevsky. The two would surely have gotten along terribly since Kafka was a Czech Jew and Dostoevsky was, well, Dostoevsky. No one could make a particularly compelling defense that Dostoevsky was not profoundly suspicious of the ethics and character of Jews and Poles alike (I have friends of Polish descent and no matter how much I love Dostoevsky's novels I note his way of handling Poles is exceptionally not cool as is also the case with his characterization of Jews).

When I was in my teens I connected to Kafka's ability to convey a sense of dread and a sense that society as a whole had no use for you and no real interest in you beyond your usefulness. Someone would probably tell me that the reason I don't have a very cheery disposition is that my idea of fun one summer was reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Franz Kafka over a summer. That would be an unfair supposition because I was listening to scads of Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin during that period.

Yet I admit to being a gloomy sort. I don't believe in the power of positive thinking of the greatness and triumph of the human spirit. I am unimpressed by people who prattle on about how free we are because most of those people do not realize that they will spend their lives paying the prices for freedoms they think they have that are generally the drives they do not discipline in themselves. Careerists look down on anyone who does not worship the same idol they do. Intellectuals look down on those who find meaning in things besides intellectual pursuits. The things we define ourselves by inevitably devour us as we devour them. Cheery, I know ... you wouldn't be surprised to learn that I have been a fan of Kafka, eh?

It is possible for great authors and artists ... even mediocre or poor artists or authors ... to accurately diagnose the problems in a culture. If the artist accurately assesses a problem in society and the self and happens to be a genius (as I believe Kafka was) then they are able to tap into a problem or quality of life and articulate it at a level that goes beneath rational articulation. Kafka showed how a person can live in an ostensibly free society and have no freedoms and yet abuse those few freedoms he thinks he has while not making use of the freedoms he actually does have. Where other authors might see the radically individual experience and action as liberating and wonderful Kafka sees it as the foundation of terror because he sees how powerless the individual is in the face of the social and internal impulses within.

I suppose I can connect to Kafka because Kafka (no doubt in part by having had an often miserable childhood and being a Jew where he was) manages to articulate a life characterized by dread even in the calmest moments. Kafka articulates for us what it is like to live a life full of fear. He didn't need to live in an age where people said terrified emails about what the evil creeps in Congress are plotting to take away your life and liberty. He already lived in a setting where he was not even allowed by the society he lived in to use his birth name. We in the modern United States tell ourselves we know what dread is like and we don't. Some of us do, I guess, and the Cold War left us with no small amount of unease about nuclear war but we have not lived in a time that for Americans warrants the sort of fear that a Cezch Jew living in a German-speaking culture full of anti-semitism would understandably have. Kafka understood, it seems, what it feels like when other people use their freedoms that they are proud to have to fence you in.

Without being able to articulate precisely why I have always related to that since the first time I read Kafka's The Trial and moved on to his other works. He presents to us a world that is as bewildering as it is and his writing serves as a rebuke to all the authors who speak as though they have unlocked the secrets, they have discerned how to make sense of things, they know the password and have the greatness that allows one to pass through the cordoned area into the place for very important people who get things done and do things that matter. Kafka delves into the price of that to the self and to the others who end up on the receiving end of that exchange.

Advent and hope, Advent and promises, Advent and prosperity

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

I began drafting this blog entry at the start of the week before I learned of the death of Oral Roberts or had read any of the material written reflecting on the prosperity gospel that has attended his death. However it cannot go without reflection that Roberts has died during Advent, during a time when we as Christians reflect precisely on how the promises remain fulfilled in part and not in full.

We anticipate the coming of Christ to set things right and live in the humility of knowing that all is not well. The central question the Christian faith grapples with is the existence and pervasiveness of evil, its depth, its deception, its allure and our capacity to be seduced by it. Christ is revealed as the answer. Prosperity teaching is dangerous because it is a partial truth. A pastor I have been listening to lately has said that what was happening in Galatia can be described as a situation where the Galatians were being urged that grace was good and God's mercy was great but that there were things yet left to be done. There was, if you will, a ten percent missing from what God had accomplished and it was in the ten percent that was added that Paul found a deadly usurpation of the message of Christ. 90 percent grace and 10 percent of anything else still proves a deadly mixture and yet that 10 percent is frequently what characterizes a lot of what passes for acceptable, even orthodox Christianity in America (notice the lack of the capital there, for folks who are curious about that, I trust you understand).

Christian teaching is often puzzling because there are many ways to mess up the teaching of Christ, just as there are many ways to mess up the teaching of the apostles. There are many Christians who effectively teach that the promises are for an improved life now, not the promise of a life to come.

John Donne pointedly asked that those who cannot weep and cannot find it in their hearts to empathize with the suffering of their fellow, what happens to those people when Christ comes to wipe away every tear to those who have never shed them? Christ declared a blessing on those who mourn now, saying that they shall be comforted. He also pronounced a woe upon those who laugh now, for in time they shall mourn and weep. It is better to go to the house of mourning than the house of mirth, Ecclesiastes tells us. It is good for us to recognize that the promises of God are good promises and that it is in these that we can our hope, a hope that will not disappoint.

We pay lip services to these promises while living lives full of hope that THIS life will be where we find our reward, THIS life will be where we cultivate our legacy. This life is also merely a shadow of the things to come and yet as Christians we often live and speak as though this life is all there really is or what you do or don't make of your life now indicates whether or not you will merit a better life to come. I don't just mean the "Your Best Life Now" and other Osteen-isms. I believe that the pastor who sells people on a fad like reverse-engineering your life has basically sold a form of prosperity gospel while pretending to himself that he hasn't.

Let me rephrase my concerns this way--the prosperity gospel is dangerous because it is a partial truth, a fragment of the message we get from the wisdom literature. The prosperity gospel is giving you the book of Proverbs as a rule book and not a book that has riddles in it. The prosperity gospel sells you the book of Proverbs without taking seriously Ecclesiastes or Job. There's no book of Job to correct for the simplified theodicy of Proverbs and there is no Ecclesiastes to demonstrate that axioms and proverbs have limits in the real world. There are none of the narratives that upend the rigorous flow of propositional statements and riddles. Nope, the prosperity gospel just gives us principles for living and practical counsel for how not be a failure in this life.

A certain pastor almost ten years ago predicted a renaissance in Christian teaching, even a new reformation, that would be derived from Christians returning to the wisdom literature. Well, guess what? It hasn't happened. Oh, wait, well it sort of has happened but it has looked suspiciously like prosperity teaching. Maybe that pastor was totally wrong in making that call. Or maybe the pastor's prediction came true after all but the prediction came true in an unexpected way.

In the time of Advent we need to remember that the book of Proverbs is not characterized by promises from God of the sort we see in the prophets or the Torah. Proverbs says that we can devise our plans in our hearts but that the Lord directs our steps. The scriptures are not particularly interested in reconciling causality and determinism. The scriptures seem intent on having things both ways. The prosperity gospel is anything that gives us Proverbs without Job and Ecclesiastes. The prosperity gospel is giving us Proverbs as rules without riddles. The prosperity gospel forgets that there is a not yet to the already of the promises that are being fulfilled through Christ.

Worst of all, when you fail the prosperity gospel, whatever its form, will tell you that if you'd just repent of your sin and failure to be what you ought to be by the measures of a prosperity gospel that everything will come together. The prosperity gospel is the sort of view that can say there aren't any righteous poor in America or, at any rate, very few of them. James 2:5 isn't really in the Bible, after all. These are people who just don't realize that in Christ they might have to answer their own prayers because sometimes that's what you have to do. Wait ... is that prosperity teaching?

The answer to that question may depend on who you ask. If you urge other people to sacrifice so that you can take the credit while ostensibly saying the Lord did it for you then you may be embracing prosperity teaching in your heart while claiming to do otherwise. If you are willing to let others take the blame for your failures while you take credit for their successes you may be embracing a prosperity teaching. You see Christians of all sorts can look down on prosperity teaching without realizing it is in the very heart of what they say and do and teach because they have not examined their own hearts.

Theo-blogging and watch-blogging comes in various forms but I don't know that in the wake of Oral Roberts' death and during Advent, no less, that we may get enough self-examination. How many people are going to blog about their own embrace of forms of prosperity teaching instead of either defending that teaching or denouncing it others. I propose that some of the people who have been most vehement in denouncing prosperity teaching have been guilty of their own forms. Let us repent of our own embrace of the errors of prosperity teaching instead of looking down on prosperity teachers or, worse yet, simply embracing our form of prosperity teaching without examining it.

Let us remember those who died utter failures in this life whom the scriptures count as being so great in the faith that the world was not worthy of them. We cannot remember them because we do not know their names. Many of them died and were lost to history because none of them mattered in this age. In the age to come they will matter. It was not for nothing James wrote his rhetorical question, has not God appointed the poor to be rich in faith? It was not for nothing that Paul wrote that God delights in using the things that are nothing to subvert the things that are. The Lord uses the foolish and simple and humble things to overturn the wisdom of the wise, the power of the powerful, the greatness of the great, and the strength of the strong.

These promises are not yet complete and they come to us in the most baffling fulfillment of them all, the coming of Christ as we did not expect him, as we did not desire him and at length we considered his claim to fulfill the promises of Yahweh to be a great betrayal of the promises we expected Yahweh to fulfill for us. At length for our sins Christ died so that He could reveal that He has come not to fulfill the promises of Yahweh to us as we expected and demanded but in a different, troubling, yet ultimately better way.

Link: Inhabitatio Dei-- "You're not post-anything ... "

http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2009/12/17/youre-not-post-anything-so-shut-the-hell-up/

Ah, this made me laugh. Yes, indeed. It amused me greatly, greatly amused me it did. Now before I continue to sound like a cross between Mojo Jojo and the wildly self-congratulatory Beast Wars Megatron I am going to leave it at that.

time for a hundred visions and revisions, part 2

In addition to the usual job-hunting enterprise I have been revising the prelude and fugue in C minor for solo guitar. Well, revising the prelude but adding additional and critical left hand instructions for the fugue. After playing guitar for nearly twenty years and in the heat of the compositional process I can sit down with my guitar, work out a passage fairly quickly and commit it to the page (Finale is useful here) without necessarily putting down all the instructions for HOW I played that passage that didn't seem too bad. This becomes a big problem when you run it by even an experienced, capable guitarist who doesn't know what you did (and, just as importantly) didn't do in the process of playing through something.

Some people like to claim the guitar is a miniature orchestra. That's bunk if you don't appreciate it for being the analogy (with all the attendent limitations analogies have) that it is. I would say that the guitar is in very practical ways more like a choir. You can hold notes for so long before you run out of breath and that is what has happened with inadequate instructions on how to handle barre chords in the prelude. Unless you have a left hand like a C-clamp you can only play bar chords for so long!

Now that I'm done, more or less, with C minor, I am 9 of 24 down in the set. Igor Rekhin's set is the benchmark for solo guitar fugue-writing and I hope to add to that. Russian music is not necessarily Western music the way we usually understand that term "Western music". If Rekhin is the first composer in the East to compose 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar then if I happen to be the first composer in the West to tackle such a project that's great, and if not that's still great. As Stephen Colbert put it to Tom Wright on his show, "It's not a race." Of course the bishop jokingly replied, "Oh, really? I thought it was."

Jonathan Edwards as a failed pastor

http://gratefultothedead.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/preacher-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-church-the-fall-of-jonathan-edwards/

By way of Jared Wilson to Grateful To the Dead this is a piece by Chris Armstrong on Jonathan Edwards getting kicked out of his church for advocating a strict position on closed communion. This is not the sort of thing that we could ever imagine happening in a megachurch today. Of course this sort of thing would never happen in churches where there was not any change in the administration of communion. Certainly Catholics and Orthodox would not run into this situation. Catholics have become famous for covering up sexually abusive priests and Orthodox have their own skeletons and all three streams have a virulent history of anti-Semitism that some dispensationalists think their views prevent ... but clearly I digress.

Edwards ran afoul of members in his flock who didn't like the stricter, older standard for participating in communion Puritan churches employed. Eventually the battle led to his being ousted from his church for wanting closed eucharist and he went to do missions work among American Indians. I just find this fascinating and since I have the George Marsden biography on Edwards on my floor (as I don't have enough bookshelves just yet for the books I own) I may have to consult it soon.

Recent history for evangelical Protestants does not suggest that the leader of a prominent church would get the boot from his congregation over something ostensibly as simple and clear-cut as closed communion. A pastor who departs from his leadership position in a Protestant church NOW probably does so because he was discovered to have been taking illegal drugs and hiring a male prostitute (Ted Haggard); or for having an affair with one of his administrative aids (Todd Bentley); or perhaps for being accused of misappropriating the tax identification number of another church (R. C. Sproul Jr). In fact without getting particularly detailed Edwards' ouster was not as simple as the mere issue of closed communion.

People who espouse ideas or oppose ideas attach immense personal emotional weight to those ideas. People who are complementarians really think, more or less (in many cases) that the whole of the Gospel stands or falls on their one pet doctrine. People who think that the whole Gospel of Christ is lost if we lose double imputation are making one aspect of teaching so central that if it is not emphasized enough (never mind disputed) then anyone who doesn't champion the cause as that person does is the enemy.

As I have complained many times elsewhere, there have been more than a few Christians I have known who have championed the absurd foolishness of "courtship" as though it were a doctrine on part with hypostatic union and were actually far more concerned with the former than the latter even when they were not living lives that indicated they were even dating or courting or wished to do any of the above. The teaching, however, became useful in informally declaring anathema on people they already disliked on other grounds. I have grown weary of people who fool themselves into thinking arguing about these sorts of things is a matter of principle and standing up for Christianity when it is being Corinthian in an unusually petty way.

But at the end of things Edwards managed to move into doing something else. Being ousted from his church was not finally a failure. This perhaps more than anything else is what I am talking to myself about, that there come points when you will fail. Edwards failed. He could be considered to have failed at the right time for the right reasons but it does not seem as though we live in a cultural setting where a pastor would be encouraged to look to the life of Jonathan Edwards and say that you, too, should be willing to be a failure in the same way that Edwards was. If you speak up for just behavior and just speech and are hammered for it and you have failed is that a failure? It might not be--that failure (whatever it costs you) may be the greatest victory you have in your life. It is better to lose the right battle for the health of your soul and the cause of Christ than to win the wrong battle for the sake of your success. Reconciling yourself to failure can be the most important step forward possible.

From Jared Wilson: Imperfect Love Drives in all fear

http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2009/12/imperfect-love-drives-in-all-fear.html

Sometimes a simple link will suffice.

Our witness is a double edged sword

It seems as though we as Christians are often told more about how our lives our to be a witness for Christ rather than being told to examine our hearts to consider how we are a witness AGAINST Christ. Not everyone who aspires to have a quality witness among "the Gentiles" necessarily has one in the end. It is not without cause that people have come to think of notorious Christians as notorious sinners and hypocrites. We generally are, aren't we? We can dress up our moral superiority in different sorts of theological garb but it is still possible for our witness to be a double edged sword. People can bless the Lord through us or curse the Lord through us Paul warned that on account of Israelites the name of the Lord was blasphemed among the Gentiles.

We may believe our testimony and witness for Jesus should redound to Jesus' glory and for Jesus' fame but we may simply become bywords for our self-righteous self regard. We may thank God we are not like those people who actually read The Stranger, maybe, or believe in The Global Warming or vote Republican or vote Democratic or whatever it is through which we measure others and find them wanting, but when our marriages fail or we abuse each other citing divine right we do not further the cause of the Gospel. We give unbelievers every occasion to blaspheme.

I feel like my "witness" is a frankly terrible one. I used to believe my witness was terrible because I wasn't witnessing to people and attempting to evangelize them. I frequently doubted the credentials of my own profession of faith. I didn't avoid explaining why I was a Christian to those around me but I was not constantly pressing people for "a decision for Christ". In fact I can't say that I remember ever doing that. On the other hand, I sometimes found myself explaining in very passionate terms how it bothered me when the teaching of Christ was abused by those who used it to rationalize their own fears about whomever they didn't want to be their neighbor. I eventually discovered that the person with whom I was sharing this frustration was precisely the sort of person who some conservative American evangelicals would very much not want to consider a neighbor. Well, that person is my neighbor and Christ's teaching tells me so.

Within the fold of faith we are probably not very well situated to see whether or not people who are not Christians are praising or impugning the name of the Lord on our account. Of course what I mean in having said that is that wwe may PERSUADE ourselves we are a credit to the name of the Lord even though we are not. We may consider people speaking against Christ on account of us to be a sign of persecution. Michael Spenser has blogged so much about that topic I see no need to add more commentary on that.

On the other hand, I have seen church conflicts spiral out to the point where a number of people became so bitter about things they left the faith altogether. Now I know that any number of people could say "Well, then, they weren't really Christians." Sure, if those people die tomorrow or today in their agnostic or atheistic state we can say they didn't perservere and therefore didn't count as Christians for having run the race to the end.

What I am pondering now is whether or not Christians would accept that their own sin becomes part of the testimony against Christ that allows people to be persuaded to turn away? Jesus said that temptations will come but woe to the one through whom they come. The great tempter is Satan but the great tempter is also our flesh. Yet Christ warns against those who would place stumbling blocks before the little ones. How many of us have placed stumbling blocks before people who truly (since we cannot presume to know the sincerity of their faith) sought the Lord but were set to stumbling by our own vanity?

I don't mean to suggest we should just go around feeling guilty that our sins caused other people to turn from the faith. Christ has atoned for those failures, too. I do, however, want to suggest that among sins we should confess to the Lord and perhaps to each other is the consideration that my bad witness may have been a witness that led someone to forsake Christ. Pastors may need to consider this most seriously above all. What if the sins you commit through pride or grasping for power or loving comfort or casting aspersions on the poor becomes not only a witness against your character but a witness against the cause of Christ Himself?

I have at least one friend who, years ago, grew so disenchanted with the bitterness and backbiting of Christians he left the Christian faith altogether. God mercifully drew him back and now he is a pastor and a valuable friend but his story sticks with me because while he certainly sinned in various ways when he turned from Christ what about the witness of those Christians whose animosity inspired him to give up? We would LIKE to say that we are not culpable for leading people away from Christ through our bad example but this is not something my conscious allows me to do right now. I have had some friends who turned away from Christ because they were sick of dealing with what they considered the hypocrisy of Christians.

I don't need to belabor that these men had their own spectacular hypocrisies, they were not necessarily wrong to feel as though the selfishness of professing Christians presented problems. They also had some emotional balance issues that I do not think Christians adequately took seriously but Michael Spenser's blogging about mental illness and Steve Hays' critique of the limits of nouthetic counseling are not things I wish to recapitulate by way of anything more than allusion.

I admit that I am not confident that my "witness" for Jesus is very good. I have to trust that the kindness of Christ can spur me to be kind to others. I am not a spiritual titan or a very accomplished man and this does not, in some ironic way, make me a spiritual giant because I am so humble about it. I can't consider myself a humble man. This does not somehow paradoxically make me humble.

I may have done some part in leading people away from the faith or being a bad example. I may have friends who turned from the Lord not simply because they did not perservere but because other Christians failed, utterly, to demonstrate that we are His by our love for one another. The "truth before friendship" espoused by what you might call Machen's Warrior Children (though, really, they exist far beyond Presbyterian circles and are in every other Christian confession) has led to "truth" being spoken over so-called friendships that are now nothing more than the abandonment of people who are considered dead weight or no longer useful.

In my angrier moments I find myself praying that those who use people will find themselves used and so come to a clearer understanding of what they have done to other people. A man who is willing to get emotional satisfaction from a single mom and blames her when the relationship goes south has been hurt, certainly, by being rejected but a single mom has to realistically consider that no matter how much she may want a husband not all men are competent to be husbands to single moms. A man who was happy to enforce social codes he didn't live up to so he could put down another Christian may be bitter when he gets the receiving end of that sort of treatment. The double-edged sword cuts in every direction. I have been accused of painting things in excessively black and white terms but the reality is that I feel overwhelmed by all the shades of gray. I would "like" things to be simpler than they are but I cannot acknowledge them to be simple.

People who a few years ago seemed fiery in their Christian advocacy are now agnostic or refuse todarken the door of a church because they didn't get things going their way. Part of me thinks these people failed to grasp the way of the Cross and the level to which you must endure wrongs. But I don't wish to diminish the wrongs they experienced even as I observe that they actually brought a lot of grief on themselves. I don't want to say their problem is somehow that they didn't repent of their habitual sin because, frankly, the people most likely to tell them that usually have their own habitual sins they never even think to repent of in daily living. The idea that a person who is fallible can't speak about another person's fallibility due to being fallible doesn't make sense to me. In fact that is one of the perennial struggles I have. The whole, "I'm not perfect but I'm better than you and that's why I get to judge you" is probably one of the reasons people leave the faith and for that I wish I could say I could get around that. I can't get around that, it's just something I have to give to the Lord, over and over, because I know that to someone I am that sort of obstacle to faith. I must be.

Jesus died for you so you can indulge in moral outrage

I have been borrowing House, M.D. on DVD from my sister over the last few months and one of the funniest moments in the show happens somewhere along season 3 where House, realizing he needs a team to bounce ideas off of on a plane turns to a kid with an Australian accent and says, "You, agree with everything I say." He turns to another man and says, "You, disagree with everything I say." The man replies that he doesn't really speak English well. Then finally he turns to a woman and says, "You, be morally outraged with everything I say." She replies, "Is this a joke?" House replies something on the order of, "Perfect."


The joke is awesome because it plays on known tropes in the show. Shows that learn how to make fun of themselves tend to be more enjoyable than the ones that don't. House on a plane as an extended joke wasn't an extended joke as awesome as "Bad Blood" on the X-Files but it was still funny. The essence of the final joke, of course, was that Cameron wouldn't be Cameron if she weren't morally outraged by some serious or jocular statement House made at any point in any episode of the show. However moral outrage can only be sustained for so long before it rings hollow and implausible as Jack Bauer's limitless cell phone minutes and reception so good even Batman would envy his gadgets. Someone may have already written a skit in which Jack Bauer tortures a Muslim terrorist into giving up information using a G. I. Joe trading card in one hand while playing Tetris on his cell phone with the other.


Appropos of an end to moral outrage, Cameron has been written off the show and even though she was one of my favorite characters early on in the series, someone House dismissed as the most naive atheist on the planet, that aspect of moral outrage has made her a tiresome character. Writers may have decided that she decided House plays God too much but couldn't they have just made a nod back to Tritter being right about some things? That would have made more sense (and have been a more stinging rebuke to House if that's what they were insisting on).

Well, like Cameron's moral outrage flagging after about five seasons so goes the moral outrage of a few Christians I have known over the years. In fact I'm afraid that the emotion I am most jaded against is moral outrage in Christians. It is the cheapest of emotions among Christians because we can invoke or evoke the crucifixion for it at any number of levels. Christians can consider their sacrifices as though their small inconveniences here in America, their significant but self-generated travails, and also their personal devestation that really is devastating are all equivalent to the suffering of Christ.

Now at one level that is certainly true. Long-time readers will notice that I did write an essay about how when Christians belittle the suffering of other Christians by saying, "What you're going through is nothing compared to what Jesus went through." they belittle the suffering of Christ in others and essentially employ the cross and Christ's suffering on it as a pretext to say "Quit your bitching and get in line". I still stand by that rebuke.

What I am talking about here is actually the impulse to say, when hearing someone else's tale of woe, to invoke that kind of sentiment. When you use your suffering to belittle the suffering of others, still more if you invoke the suffering of Christ, you are trafficking in the currency of moral outrage. When you say "What I went through is so much worse than what you went through" it isn't from empathy that you speak but judgment and the apostle James warns against judging brothers. When I hear tales of suffering that I honestly don't get I try not to think in terms of "What did that person do in terms of sin to get what is now their proper comeuppance?" I have known Christians who think pretty strongly in these terms and it never seems to dawn on them that they, too, have their own Christianized form of karma. Ignorant Christians would say this is the result of Calvinism or Wesleyanism or whatever theological bugbear in the clothing of an intellectual tradition gets their goat. It all amounts to the application of sympathetic magic or a kind of prosperity teaching in the guise of something more orthodox.

As Romans 2 puts it when you pass judgment on others in this way you condemn yourself because you do the same things. A person with an established career may look down on someone who doesn't have a "real" job as being a failure and having their god as their stomach. Yet that person may be a workaholic who works himself into adrenal problems or digestive problems. He may also still have his stomach as a god in his life. He may spin all this as suffering for the cause of Christ and it may be partly that but our sacrifices are, at best, incomplete. That job isn't necessarily ONLY sharing in the suffering of Christ but may also be revealing his own idol. It is not false to say that there is none of the suffering of Christ in that but we are earthen vessels used for God's glory.

As a recent, good sermon put it, the problem we often have is not that we go around saying that there is grace and works as though works were the whole thing. The problems come about when we start talking about things being done MOSTLY by grace. It is that "mostly" part that brings death and destruction. Our moral outrage can be the last hold-out of a "mostly grace" approach to dealing with people or ourselves.

We are in the midst of the already but not yet. There are disturbing shades of gray that Christ working in us permits when we wish we were all black or white. I mean, sure, Christ shared in human suffering and so can understand what it means to voluntarily take on physical suffering to redeem humanity but our capacity for self-pity as an overflow of moral outrage can be dangerous.

There is a place for moral outrage but I am not here writing to discuss all of those scenarios and settings. I am here considering that Christ on the cross was placed there because of our moral outrage and not simply to vindicate that moral outrage. Religious leaders outraged at Jesus' failure to perform by their rules and uphold their standards killed him by trumping up charges against him. What they did was done in the service of community and as Christ warned the apostles there would come a time where anyone who killed them would be certain he was doing God a favor. Christ died for that moral outrage, too, not just the obvious sins of the "sinners".

Because of the particularlities of my spiritual journey I struggle with moral outrage. I want neither to dismiss it as only motivated by self-righteousness and pride because then I might overlook real indignities and real injustice, nor do I want to give it free rein as though it were only possible for my moral outrage to be justified. As Tim Keller explained emotions in a useful sermon, the scriptures do not enjoin us to either dismiss emotions or to be governed by them but to present them to the Lord in prayer and work through them. This is difficult.

From Bill MacKinnon at the BHT: Let, let, let, let

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2009/12/07/let-let-let-let/

So much Christian teaching is reduced to:

Let God do ___________

You can fill in the blank.

I hear the “let God” advice all the time from every direction. But no one seems to be able to tell me how to “let God” do whatever it is I’m supposed to let Him do.

Of course this presupposes that God wants to “do” something to me, in me, or for me, and is waiting for my permission.

So this is my serious question: How do I do it? How do I “let God” do whatever it is He wants to do with me, in me, for me?

That's a good question and I wish had an answer. Well, I don't have an answer that would explain the answer to the question as Bill literally asked it.

I do have a rather too cynical answer about the reason "let" statements get made. It is common for a Christian to be told by another Christian that you should "let God do ______" when what is really being said is something akin to the Christianese parlance of advising something to someone (often in an unsolicited way) and then saying at the first expression of doubt or disagreement, "Well, pray about it." This often comes across as saying nothing more than, "Well, EVENTUALLY I hope you agree with me."

The "let God do" statement I'm sure is often made with complete and unwavering sincerity but it has the risk of being said in times and ways that basically tell the recipient, "Come around to my way of thinking because the way I think is biblical/traditional/holy/righteous/correct/better-than-yours."

So for those who may be inclined to say "let God do _____" how do you SAY that to someone and manage to not actually be a self-righteous tool who tells people they need to let God do something that you in practical reality expect them to do for themselves or maybe even you?