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.