Love Letters

Artist Andrew Wyeth wrote forty love-letters to his girlfriend Alice Moore. A Boston auction house plans to put ‘em on the block and thinks they could go for as much as $120,000. I make that three grand per epistle; nice work if you can get it. But that’s not even triple-A ball; one missive from Abraham Lincoln to his first fiancé gaveled in at $700K, still the all-time record. A less-juicy number still pulled in $110,000 a while back. One of Napoleon’s to Joséphine fetched nearly a half-mill. A racy on from Horatio Nelson weighed in at north of $175,000 and a mash note from Winston Churchill was good for a little under $114,000. To put that in perspective, one of his letters to Stalin went for a mere thirty thou.

Thomas Venning of Christie’s Auction House in London says it is the personal touch that rakes in the cash; the writer’s took a blank scrap of paper “and they filled it with a part of themselves.” It’s the unexpected vulnerability of powerful men that ups the ante. A letter from Joltin’ Joe to Marilyn Monroe outperformed one that Arthur Miller sent her, though one assumes that the award-winning playwright was the better writer.

It makes one wonder why Bibles don’t cost more.

The apostle Paul, a man not known for his sentimental side, after giving the church in Corinth a good talking to, winds up with, “My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen.” (1 Cor 16.24) Peter the hard-handed fisherman writes to the church in the tenderest of terms, and survivors like James and Jude sometimes get downright sappy. Of course, in a larger sense, it is not this or that human instrument, but Almighty God who coos and woos His way through the sixty-six love letters that comprise Holy Scripture.

Perhaps the reason these astounding examples of love letters, blank blocks of parchment which the Creator in person and Persons fills with a part of Himself, fail to command big bucks is their general audience: God’s heart flows out to all humanity and each human being with a love that belongs to all, but reaches out to each.

I could never gin up the quarter-mil I’d need to buy Mick Jagger’s missives to his girlfriend-at-the-time, but I’m not too worried. I can, whenever I choose, listen to the Lord of Life declare undying and unconditional love recorded with an iron nail for a pen and the blood of Christ for ink.

And I wonder why I don’t do it more often or more eagerly.

Poetry, Prose, and Prayer

            Former New York governor Mario Cuomo once observed, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” After the soaring rhetoric of the stump speech comes the elbowed awkwardness of putting promises into practice.

            Isaiah prophesied in poetry, but it fell to Nehemiah to govern in prose.

The latter portion of Isaiah is all vision – lowered mountains and exalted valleys, deserts like the Garden of Eden, and flocks fattening in what was once a wilderness. Moreover, even gentiles and eunuchs get an all-access pass as the temple becomes a house of prayer for all nations.

The book of Nehemiah is all policy. If the “valleys” in Jerusalem’s wall were going to be exalted, the work would be by the weary backs of the Jewish remnant. Instead of a house of prayer for all nations, he found all the nations out to get him. He had to make hard decisions about economic exploitation and mixed marriages. He researched family trees to make sure priests were sufficiently pure. Some of his actions exemplify Isaiah’s dreams; some seem to undo them. In the end the wall went up and the staggering nation toddled forward into God’s future.

We theologize in poetry. We practice in prose. Those who express disdain for the flaws and failures of the local church would do well to read Nehemiah. The actions of redeemed-but-sinful believers will always be, at best, a blunt instrument in the effort to express Christ’s Kingdom. Those who criticize their fellow-Christians for applying their faith in different ways would do well to read Nehemiah. The choices of sincere-but-incomplete saints will often land those with the same convictions on different sides of a choice. We need the poetry – without it vision perishes, cynicism reigns, and we cease to desire a better world. We need the prose – without it poetry dissipates into complete impracticality and we fail to touch the actual world.

This is why, whether we theologize in poetry or practice in prose, we need to do everything in prayer.

Backwards Eschatology

Therefore. since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. . . - Hebrews 12.1

On Tuesday, February 28, in a speech to the joint houses of the United States Congress, President Donald Trump introduced the widow of William “Ryan” Owens, a Navy seal recently slain in an anti-terrorist raid in Yemen. The audience burst into an ovation that lasted for more than a minute and a half. The President then commented, "Ryan is looking down right now, you know that, and he's very happy, because I think he just broke a record."

He offered no basis for how Mrs. Owens “knew” this detail about the behavior of departed souls, but what interests me more is his assumption that the applause of earth gladdens the occupants of Heaven.

Of course, the President is the Commander in Chief, not the Theologian in Chief, and his intent was to comfort a grieving widow, not to deal with Christian doctrine. Still, my experience as a pastor leads me to suspect that the remark accurately expresses the somewhat squishy theology of many American believers. This is of more than passing interest. Examined closely, the President’s statement implies that a blessed soul would increase its joy by turning away from adoring the beatific vision of the Trinity to bask in earthly acclaim.

When John, from his prison cell in Patmos, finds himself transported to the throne room of eternity, he falls face-first before the blazing glory of his risen Lord. The open door of Heaven vaults him into a circle whose center is the throne of God. The centripetal pull of the divine presence draws all objects - eyes, praises, crowns, the works - toward itself. It would be hard, in that moment, to imagine the Revelator turning away to check the Amazon reviews for the book he is about to write.

This is not political partisanship; doctrine matters. If we posit a view that the worship of God in Heaven runs a poor second to a two-minute warning of earthly adulation; if we imply, however unintentionally, that accepting applause in the places of political power provides a satisfaction that giving praise in the throneroom of the Almighty cannot match; if we do this, we reverse thrusters on the very engine that drives our forward progress to the face of God. Heaven is a place to offer praise, not a place to receive it. The glorified saint gazes into the divine center, not outward to the earthly periphery. Sometimes we still sing good doctrine in church: “And the things of earth will grow strangely dim/In the light of his glory and grace.”

Not that Heaven’s saints pay no attention to our earthly struggles. Paul likens the Christian life to an athletic contest in which competitors strip themselves of all outward entanglements and strain every sinew toward the goal of glory. In the stands sits a great cloud of witnesses who, having finished the same race, now bear testimony to the value of the endeavor. In chapter 11, the author picks out a few of the more prominent faces among this throng: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Sarah, Joseph, and Moses; Rahab, Gideon, and David, and fierce women who refused to release their dead before the time had come. Now, says N. T. Wright, “they are there at the finishing line, cheering us on, surrounding us with encouragement and enthusiasm, willing us to do what they did and finish the course in fine style.”

There is, then, an exchange of applause between Earth and Heaven, but it flows downward, not upward, and it exists to exhort, not to exalt. Our purpose in eternity - for which we train each time we gather to worship with God’s church - is not to accept, but to offer, glory to Him who alone deserves it.