And Jesus said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." - Mark 1.17

In Ethics for Christian Ministry, Robert Creech of Truett Seminary observes, "Jesus never had only one disciple." Our teacher called his first apostles in pairs: Simon and Andrew, James and John. The disciples themselves caught on quickly: Jesus finds Philip, who immediately finds Nathaniel. The Christian walk is always personal; the Christian walk is never private.

We live in a world of intense - and false - personalization. Every commercial website or electronic publication invites me to create "my" version of their mass-marketed product. It is sad, but not surprising, that Christians have absorbed this ambient atmosphere of individualism. Rappers and commedians invade the Internet with snappy videos that discourage Christians from seeing the local church as an acceptable - let alone vital - component of living out the faith.

In such a time, we do well to realize that perhaps the most counter-cultural act a Christian can perform is to worship God in the presence of other believers. There's nothing new in this. In his Confessions, Augustine recounts the conversion of Victorinus, who claimed to be a convert but refused to receive baptism. His friend Simplicianus replied, "I will not believe, nor will I rank you among Christians, unless I see you in the church of Christ." Victorinus retorted, "Do walls then make Christians?" Walls, of course, don't, but visible confession does; Victorinus' real fear was losing the good will of his pagan colleagues. C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend who claimed to love Jesus but dislike Sunday services that, "The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practising members of the Church."

Sure, the church consistently fails to fulfill her high calling; nothing new there, either. Jesus had a congregation of twelve: one betrayed him, one denied him, three fell asleep during prayer meeting, and nine abandoned him in his hour of need. But Jesus never had only one disciple.

Everyone wants to be a radical believer these days. Well, the term "radical" comes from the Latin word that means "root." At the root of discipleship lies community. Want to do something really radical? Go to church.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. - Luke 2.7

The Tea Terrace Cafe in London will sell you yourself; well, more like "your selfie;" well, more like, "your selfiecinno." 

Here's how it works: You download the app and shoot 'em a headshot. The barista uploads it while he brews your beverage (hot chocolate is the other option) and the gizmo prints your portrait on the froth using flavorless food coloring. You, of course, then take pictures of the picture of your picture and post and text and share it while the coffee gets too cold to drink. And you're out seven-fifty American on the deal.

In a society that sees itself everywhere, we have to ask if we see Jesus anywhere. We see him in the Bible; we see him in sermons and songs; we see him in artists' renderings. But I sometimes wonder if what really appears is only a sugary-sweet self-reflection in the fading foam of our own minds. 

At this Christmas season, how will I know I have seen Jesus? The classic texts of the nativity offer a couple of ways. First, I've really seen Jesus if I want to worship him. We should avoid back loading a lot of developed theology on the shepherds and wise men; they may have seen the thing as more of a political than a religious action and they certainly didn't have the ghost of a clue about the Second Member of the Holy Trinity. Well, my own worship comes all jumbled with notions of nationalism and diplomacy and basic covering-my-uh-bases. But God has incredibly low standards about that sort of thing and receives my worship as much better than I offer it. If for even a brief hour on Sunday or a brief moment during the week. I see someone else's image in the latte of my life, I've taken a staggering step toward something greater than myself.

Second, I've really seen Jesus if I want to kill him. Herod's in-house seminary professors knew where messiah would be born, but not one of them left town that night. Some might say they stayed home where it was warm; I'd say they stayed home where it was lukewarm. Herod, on the other hand, took the thing seriously enough to attempt infanticide. If Jesus isn't the Savior, then he's a lot of trouble. Even if Jesus is the Savior, he's still a lot of trouble. Herod was the kinda guy who worried a lot about his brand; he put up a lot of buildings and saw that his name went with 'em. He wanted to be the only face in everyone's foam. If I ever really catch on to the full extent to which Jesus will not be an adjunct or instrument to my own plans, I will admit to a desire to ditch him.

In "Talladega Nights," a terrible movie with a surprising number of good lines, the main character, Ricky Bobby, prays to "Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Baby Jesus, in your golden, fleece diapers, with your curled-up, fat, balled-up little fists pawin' at the air." When someone protests that the Christ Child eventually grew up, Ricky snaps, "I like the baby version the best, do you hear me?!" Herod, of course, didn't even like that version, but the point is that we don't get to pick. We don't get to recreate Jesus in our own, fluffy, whipped-up image. 

As Christmas approaches, may God help us to see the true Jesus. And may God help us when we do!

And when the priests came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.

- 1 Kings 8.10-11

The snowball fight at Six Flags over Georgia was cancelled because of snow.

Organizers at the amusement park meant to sponsor a mighty battle involving a thousand patrons using fake snow. Then it snowed. It snowed so hard that it shut down the park. The real thing swamped the imitation.

King Solomon spent serious time and treasure to build the temple in Jerusalem, fulfilling the great dream of his father David. The Jews viewed this edifice as an earthly model of God's true throne room in Heaven. Every action taken in its precincts conformed to the Lord's commandments and conveyed symbolic truth about the true glory of the Almighty. The king assembled a cast of thousands to enact a stunning picture of the heavenly reality.

Then the real God appeared with such power that He drove the surrogates from the scene.

Sunday after Sunday the church gathers to offer analogue adoration which reflects the heavenly court. Some attack the assignment with more resources, some with less: a robed choir lifts soaring music skyward, backed by the serried ranks of a powerful pipe organ - or an upright piano tinkles out a tune as a few dozen voices drone out a hymn; a rockin' band belts out the latest in praise songs, or a terrified teen quavers his way through a tremulous tune; a polished pulpiteer limns God's goodness in choice vocabulary - or a bivocational pastor offers hard-won truth assembled in his few off-hours. These differences don't matter all that much; as the great R. G. Lee once said, when we reach Heaven, all earthly praise will sound like a bumblebee in a fruit jar.

What would happen if God's presence engulfed our practised praise? What if a real blizzard of glory snowed our preparation under? Would we welcome the arrival of all that we sought so diligently to portray, or would we grumble that God's interruption made our hard work meaningless? We should accustom ourselves to the idea. Revelation 15.8 says that even in the true temple in Heaven, when God's glory gets going even the angels must duck and cover.

This Sunday, let's pray that the reality of God utterly outstrips our best efforts and buries us in a blizzard of blessing. Then let's run out of church, eager to shout to everyone we meet the good news about what we've seen.

For more on this story, see Fake Snowball Fight Cancelled because of Real Snow

Touche!

Jesus reached out his hand and touched him, saying, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. - Matthew 8.3

Leper-touching, of course, was hardly the done thing.

The law forbade it. Common human fastidiousness shrank from it. And Jesus didn’t have to do it; he could heal lepers at a distance - ten at a time if the situation required it. But the Lord was always touching people he shouldn’t have: lepers, dead guys, tax collectors. I do choose.

In these days of inappropriate touching, scientists are big on the benefits of non-sexual physical contact. Reduced stress, a calmer heart rate, lower blood-pressure, even the reduction of the stress hormone cortisol: skin-on-skin contact can accomplish it all, boosting, along the way, working memory and the immune system. It even delivers a hit of oxytocin, the chemical equivalent of easing one’s feet into a pair of comfy slippers. Don’t know what to say to someone in a crisis? Touch communicates more viscerally than words without the risk of saying the wrong thing.  Indeed, cultures that cuddle their children less have higher rates of adult violence.

But we don’t do it much. Not men, anyway; at least, not American men, and this leads to boozing, drugging, hypertension, and what what Dr. Kory Floyd of the University of Arizona calls “skin hunger.” By this avoidance of contact, we turn one another into an entire society of voluntary lepers.

I do choose.

I cannot choose to heal leprosy; I can choose to touch. And that choice might heal a number of less-obvious maladies.

Of course the real miracle here predates Matthew 8. It occurs, instead, in 1.18: She was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Jesus could touch that leper because they both had bodies. But touch is risky: Herod could seek to kill the infant Christ because they both had bodies.

The Advent season takes us back to the time when the entire human race, suffering from “skin hunger,” found itself satisfied by a God with fingerprints. We should follow that example. One of the signal moments in St. Francis’ conversion came when, instead of lobbing a purse full of gold at a passing leper, he dismounted and embraced the man. At this Advent season, let us remember that Christ calls us to get in touch with one another - literally.

I do choose.

For more information, see: "Hug It Out, Man," by Andrew Reiner

When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from, (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bride groom.

- John 2.9

Michael Jordan tore it up that night. He went twenty-three of thirty-seven from the floor and sank twenty-one of twenty-three from the line. That cashes out as MJ's career-best and the ninth highest single-game scoring performance in NBA history. Toss in eighteen rebounds, six assists, and four steals and it isn't hard to understand why Jordan now says that on Wednesday, March 28, 1990, he handed in his all-time best performance. His heroics fueled the Bulls' 117-113 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. 

Rookie forward Stacey King had a different take on the contest: "I'll always remember it as the night Michael Jordan and I combined to score seventy points." King sank one free-throw. 

The servants at the wedding feast might offer a similar testimony. 

When the bartender told his boss that the well had run dry, Jesus' mom goaded him into intervening. The Lord didn't just make up the shortfall! The King James measures this miracle in firkins, which almost nobody uses anymore; in modern terms, we're looking at around thirty gallons per barrel. Jesus, in essence, sets up a six-kegger wedding as he lays on 180 gallons of the warm south! John remembered it as the night Jesus performed the first of the seven signal signs of his messiahship.

I think the servants remembered it as the night that they and Jesus combined to make 680 liters of high-quality hooch. 

They couldn't turn water to wine, but they could fill jars with water. They couldn't do what was needed, but they could do what they were told. And their greatest reward was that these minimum-wage flunkies, probably hired off the books from a convenience store parking lot, were in on the secret that their boss never suspected. Sometimes when we do only what we're told to do, Jesus does what only he can do, and we get in on a record-breaking revelation and share the inside scoop on the movement of the Spirit. 

By the way, the Bulls won that game in overtime, meaning that regulation play ended in a tie, meaning that Stacey King's one point provided the pivot to victory. No solitary free-throw, no overtime; no overtime, no eight additional eight points for Jordan; no additional eight points means a final tally of sixty-one, which is respectable but no record-breaker. 

Do what you can; do what you're told. . .and remember it as the night you and Jesus teamed up to save the world.

Irresponsible Adoration

Mark 14.3-9

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. . .

. . .and the liberal politician said, “What a waste! We will never be able to provide universal, single-payer health care if the one percent are allowed to spend extravagantly like this!”

. . .and the conservative politician said, “Could have funded many important senate campaigns. Sad. Loser!”

. . .and her pastor said, “Doesn’t she know what kind of shape our budget is in? That much money could have paid off most of our building debt!”

. . .and Dave Ramsey said, “That jar of ointment was an investment. If she had held onto it, even figuring for a moderate increase in value, in ten years she could have paid her kids’ college tuition and still given far more.”

. . .and the Baptist college president said, “Darn! I’d been courting her for months to donate that oil to our endowment. Now we won’t be able to offer nearly as many scholarships to train young ministers. I hope she’s happy.”

. . .and the deacon said, “The preacher keeps telling us we have to tithe, and then she wastes money like that. I don’t see why I should have to give when other church members seem to have money to burn.”

. . .and the seminary professor said, “It’s clear that she lacks a good overview of the life and teachings of Jesus. Otherwise she would know he approves of simplicity, not luxury. I wish she’d consulted someone like me who has really studied Jesus.”

. . .and everybody posted about it on Facebook and argued back and forth and ended up unfriending each other.

. . .and the victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma said, “We still don’t have clean water and we’re living in tents. That money really would have helped.”

. . .and folks living in the Colonias said, “What kind of people have money like that just to throw away?”

. . .and orphans in South Sudan said nothing, because they were too weak from hunger to speak.

But Jesus said, "Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me.

For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her."

Nine Out of Ten is. . .Bad

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.  - James 2.10

We are accustomed to accepting pretty good, or even very good, as good enough. And sometimes it is. Ty Cobb hit .367 lifetime, or less than four hits for every ten trips to the plate, and he still holds the record. Read in this light, James' dictum seems a little harsh. After all, he describes a guy with a .900 batting average in the MLB - Moses League Behavior.

But if we shift our frame of reference, the statement makes perfect sense. I drive an '06 Hyundai Santa Fe. It's a great vehicle but after over ten years, nearly 200K miles, and some rough usage, it has a few, uh, quirks. For instance, the automatic door locks work. . .sometimes. On occasion, I hit the button and all the doors slam closed. Other times, up to three obey their orders while one resists. Say I park the car in a dodgy neighborhood, punch the device, and walk away. I return an hour later to discover that the local Visigoths have plundered the interior, making off with my broken CD player, a buck or so in spare change, and Hank Williams Greatest Hits. When I summon the local gendarmery to obtain a police report for insurance purposes, the officer admonishes me, "You should always lock your doors." I protest: "That isn't fair! I locked three out of four. I was batting .750, almost twice Ty Cobb's average!" Now the officer asks me to take a breathalyzer.

D. L. Moody, commenting on this passage, said that if you hang someone from the ceiling by a chain with ten links and one of them breaks, he falls. It's no good protesting that ninety percent of the string held fast.

In context, James means that sin matters and that there is no such thing as pretty good sanctity. Back up a little farther, and the particular sin he attacks is the mistreatment of the poor. In verse 11, he uses an analogy in which this sin equates to murder.

Holiness matters, and it embraces a good deal more than not going about the place killing people or sleeping with their wives. Yes, we're saved by grace; we're also expected to live it out. I'm reminded of a line from Peter Beagle's novel The Last Unicorn: "I always say that perseverance is nine-tenths of any art - not that it's much help to be nine-tenths of an artist, of course." Or a Christian.

What Do We Really Believe?

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. - John 15.10

I am far too Baptist to believe that Jesus intends to lay down any sort of works salvation here. If entrance to Heaven requires straight A's on the commandments of Christ, nobody's getting in and that includes Saint Francis and even my mom. 

I think what the Lord means here is that until Kingdom Culture ceases to be a sampler on the living room wall and becomes our basis for living, we haven't got a clue as to what unconditional love looks like. 

Tae Hea Nam, managing director of the venture capital firm Storm Ventures, makes a similar point about corporate value statements. "No matter what people say about culture, it's all tied to who gets promoted, who gets raises, and who gets fired." If an employee violates the values and his stock goes up, or abides by them and gets the boot, everyone knows what attitudes really govern reality.

In the clutch moment, I do what I think moves the down marker. If I return a slapped cheek for a slapped cheek, trade insults until I come out ahead, cling to what is mine when generosity beckons, I define promotion, raises, or rejection in terms of this present world and no amount of profession to the contrary means anything. It isn't that Jesus kicks me out of a love I had formerly enjoyed; I wasn't there to begin with. It works the same way at the level of Christian community: Church covenants are nice; what people watch is who moves up, who moves ahead, and who gets moved out. Might be good to ask of the congregation at large: What really buys a person some stroke around here?

The good news - and the hard news - is that we can always try again. . .but that we must always try again. As C. S. Lewis says in his essay, "A Slip of the Tongue," "He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; I know of no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise. For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls." 

So let us keep Christ's commandments so that we can abide in his love, until that great morning comes when we discover that we abide in his love, so we keep  his commandments.  

Mistreated Masterpieces

My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. - Gal. 4.19

One of the best-known works of art in the world is Michelangelo’s “David.” What is less-well known is the story behind the sculpture. It almost never existed.

In 1464 the Wool Guild in Florence hired Agostino di Duccio to produce the statue for a local cathedral. Agostino was a hack. He was a competent sculptor but did not know marble. Cutting this delicate stone was an art in itself and the craftsmen who did such work in the quarries high in the mountains had their own trade secrets, standards, and even their own jargon. Agostino knew none of this. As a result, he chose a bad chunk of rock to begin with, and then had it cut far too narrowly for its height. He roughed out the statue at the quarry, as was standard practice. He endowed it with a vaguely human form but left it oddly shaped. The boulder’s sheer size made transportation to Florence a nightmare; the trip took two years, aging the stone, exposing it to the elements and at least one bad fall. The client took one look and gave the whole thing up as a lost cause. They fired Agostino on the spot and left the monstrosity lying on its side in the cathedral courtyard for more than three decades, again exposed to weather and birds, completely “cooking” the marble, to use the technical term. Locals mocked it as "the giant" and it became a sort of town curiosity.

Finally, impetus built to rescue "the giant." Leonardo DaVinci turned down the commission so the city fathers brought in Michelangelo, a kid in his mid-twenties cocky enough to take on the job. The difference between Michelangelo and Agostino was that Michelangelo understood his material intimately; he was a true marble-whisperer who knew the stone-cutting trade from mountain to monument. He insisted on working in solitude, so workmen constructed a massive open-air shed around his project. Inside that enclosure, genius took flight. Rather than fighting the stone’s flaws, Michelangelo embraced them. That is why his David is lean and twisting with life, rather than the upright and immobile muscle-men typical of the era. Michelangelo turned a mistake into a masterpiece. He turned limitation into perfection.

Paul seeks to perfect the image of Christ, the Son of David, from the flawed spiritual stone of the Galatian believers. To do this, Paul must be the saint-whisperer, someone who knows his material thoroughly. He invokes the metaphor of giving birth, the most intimate connection one human being can have to another. He knows the faults and flaws of his congregation, cut from the sinful stone of Adam, disastrously dropped in the Fall, and thoroughly “cooked” by exposure to the spirit of this world. These flaws drive him, not to despair, but to discipleship. Alone in the open-air cathedral of his prayer closet, Paul prays to see the living form of Christ emerge from the suffering stone.

The main work of the church is not to inform, but to form. Souls come to us, jarred by life’s catastrophes, often carelessly carved by ill-informed teachers and sometimes long-neglected, “cooked” by personal, institutional, or cultural elements of this world. Our job is not so much to fix their flaws as to find their flow, not to remake them into the image we imagine, but into the image of Christ as Christ may be seen in them alone. This will require that we know, not only our subjects, but our objects; that we take the time and trouble to build an intimate knowledge of their stories and character, and the unique opportunities presented by the odd shapes of their souls. And this will mean much work in the silence and stillness of our prayer closets. May the Holy Spirit remind us to seek to see the living Christ hidden in the neglected giants under our care.

The National Pastime and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Inning

            It all came unstuck in the top of the fifth.

            With the home-field advantage and a 4-3 lead against the Chicago Cubs in game five of the National League Division Series, the Washington Nationals sent their ace reliever Max Scherzer to the mound. He retired the first couple of batters before allowing a pair of singles to put two men on. Then he gave up another hit that scored both runners.

Now down 5-4, the Nats intentionally walked Jason Hayward to create force-outs at all three bases. Scherzer fanned the next opponent, Javier Baez, but catcher Matt Wieter lost control of the ball on the third strike. As Baez sprinted for first, Wieter managed to overthrow both the first baseman and the backup fielder and fire the ball into deep right field. Another run crossed the plate and runners now occupied first and third. Catcher interference sent the following opponent to first and loaded the bases, then Sterzer hit Jon Jay with a pitch to walk in a run: 7-4 Cubs.

Washington never recovered. Final score, 9-8 Chicago. All of this happened on Thursday, October 12. The Nationals, it appeared, had gotten an early jump on Friday the Thirteenth – or it had gotten an early jump on them. An intentional walk, a passed-ball strikeout, catcher interference, and a hit-by-pitch on consecutive batters: it had never happened before in the history of big league baseball.

What do you do when it all goes against you? Yell, shake your fists at the heavens, curse your luck?

Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good  – Genesis 50.20. Joseph had a bad inning: thrown in a pit, sold into slavery, benched on a bogus rape beef, and tossed in the hole with a life sentence. At no point did he complain, despair, or engineer a master plan to right his wrongs, gain his revenge, and triumph over fate; he just kept doing the next right thing.

The New Testament take on Joseph’s proverb is, of course, Romans 8.28: We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. My own paraphrase of that has always been, “We can’t mess it up bad enough to frustrate God.”

So when it all goes south, take heart! In all of our fumbles and our stumbles, our drops and our flops, God remains calm. The Bible never promises us no-hitters or undefeated seasons. It promises something better: that the Almighty plays a long game, and gets glory no matter what. And that’s enough to keep us going, even when it all goes wrong.

When Jesus came to the place, he looked up. . .

If you hang money from a tree at eye-level, people will walk right by it. This happens because, as our parents taught us, and as we have taught our children, "Money doesn't grow on trees." Trained not to expect it, we refuse to see it. Scientists call it "inattentional blindness." We pay attention to what should be there, rather than what is. . .or could be.

Zacchaeus going out on a limb was the equivalent of money growing on trees: He had a lot of it. And like money, tax collectors did not grow on trees. They grew in the fetid soil of a social system that left them few good options; like drug-dealers and pimps, publicans were made, not born. And then, of course, the society that had made them rejected them. They became invisible. Zacchaeus couldn't see Jesus in the crowd because the crowd couldn't see Zacchaeus.

He looked up: Those may be some of the most beautiful words in Scripture. Jesus looked - he attended to what was there; what anyone could have seen but no one else did. And he looked up - he actually had to take the trouble to train his gaze beyond the level plane of normal life. 

And there's one more thing: that Greek verb also appears to describe the recovery of sight by the blind. At the risk of committing my favorite exegetical fallacy, the illegitimate totality transfer, where one unloads all possible meanings of a word into a single use of the word, I do think there's a connection. Looking up and regaining sight, in this story, seem to flow together: Jesus saw because he looked up; everyone else remained inattentionally blind. 

In a world where climbing the ladder of success often causes people to come up short and leaves them up a tree, Christ calls us to look, and to look up. May Jesus open our blinded eyes to see what - and more importantly who - is right in front of us.

For more information, see Why We Miss Objects that are Right in Front of Us, by Heather Murphy.

Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea

And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. - Mark 1.11-12

            The juxtaposition would jar us if familiarity had not worn it smooth: The Son’s action fully pleases the Father; the Spirit runs him out of town. Drove him out: it’s a violent verb, the image of a burly bouncer as he grips a drunk by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his britches and eighty-sixes him out of the bar. Three times before the end of this very chapter, Mark uses it twice to describe Jesus’ ministry of exorcism (v.34, 39). Jesus offers well-pleasing worship and God treats Jesus the way Jesus treats demons.

            Perfect obedience does not guarantee a pleasant outcome. Sometimes it invites a difficult one.

            In her book Clay in the Potter’s Hands, Diana Glyer notes that once a potter finishes shaping her work on the wheel, she sets it aside to dry. “I don’t know what pots are thinking, but sometimes I imagine that this is a pretty scary stage in the life of that pot. After enduring so much pressure and experiencing such close, careful attention from the potter, now all of a sudden the pot is cut loose, pulled away from the wheel, set aside, and left alone.” Saint John of the Cross called this the Dark Night of the Soul, which does not mean having a bad day or even enduring depression. It refers to times when it seems that God has driven us away from God, jumped on our backs like a rodeo cowboy on an unbroken bronc and ridden us hell-for-leather into the empty spaces of spiritual desert and left us there.

            But Jesus had work to do in the desert, and the angels showed up right on time.

            Don’t assume that if God seems distant, you have sinned. Don’t assume that you walk in obedience just because God appears present. The sick need the physician; those who are well get sent out on maneuvers. If the Spirit has driven you into demon-haunted places, if you sit like a pot on the shelf or a wineskin in the smoke (Ps 119.83), be patient and have faith. Combat is coming, and the angels are on the way.

           

Have You Hugged Your Asterisk Today?

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us. – Hebrews 12.1

            A human being can run 26.2 miles in two hours and twenty-five seconds, but only with an asterisk. At least so far.

            Last May, Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge turned in that blistering performance on a Formula One racetrack in Monza, Italy. His feat (and his feet) buried the existing world record by over two minutes. But there’s a catch: Kipchoge ran behind a rotating pack of six pacers who not only set the tempo but blocked the oncoming wind. Nike, who sponsored the time trial, explained that the unofficial conditions didn’t matter: If one athlete could conquer the two-mile marathon, even off the books, it would shatter psychological barriers and open the way for someone to do it under sanctioned conditions.

            I don’t know if anyone will ever run a marathon in less than 120 minutes. I do know that if someone does, that person won’t be me. But the asterisk intrigues me: That little five-fingered bandit of glory reminds everyone who encounters it that Kipchoge did not travel so far so fast without help.

            The pastor to the Hebrews makes a similar point. In the marathon slog of the Christian life, no one runs alone, thus victory comes with a caveat. Isaac Newton once wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” He stole the quote, which may go back as far as Bernard of Chatres in the twelfth century. At any rate, a stained glass window in the Chartres cathedral depicts the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as ordinary-sized men sitting astride the necks of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

            It would be wise to pause on occasion and ponder our own asterisks. Cambridge scholar Malcolm Guite has dismissed Descart’s famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” in favor of the more humble, “We belong, therefore we are.” Pause a moment today to give thanks for those who ran ahead of you, who took the headwinds and set the pace. If you have outrun them, it is only because they have run ahead of you.

            And while we’re at it, let’s kneel to give thanks for Christ, our great Forerunner (Heb. 6.19-20), who pursued his world-saving pace from Bethlehem to Calvary to the tomb to Hell and all the way into the Holy of Holies and the very presence of God in Heaven. Remember: If you find your name inscribed in the Book of Life, it will be tagged with an asterisk written in the blood of the Lamb.