Bumper Sticker Theology

This saying was sent to me by my old friend, Don Newby. It's an interesting twist on a very familiar line from a song. 
I replied I wish I had it on a bumper sticker. 
Well, I do have Photoshop.

(click to enlarge)

The Annual Question

Every year at this time, I find myself asking the same vexing question:

Why would the King of all leave the perfection and comfort of Heaven to come to a place that is foul, smelly, loud, chaotic and, frankly, somewhat hostile?
Oh, no. I'm not talking about the stable in Bethlehem.

I'm talking about my heart.

—Wayne S.

Kin-tsugi

KIN-TSUGI is a Japanese word which means, in literal English translation, "golden joinery." It refers to the craft of repairing broken pottery with a compound of ki-urushi (raw lacquer) and pure gold powder. The result, while obviously highlighting the former damage, is always unique, and almost always beautiful. Blake Gopnik explains the history of the craft in a Washington Post article: 

The story of kintsugi may have begun in the late 15th century, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a damaged Chinese tea bowl back to China to be fixed. It returned held together with ugly metal staples, launching Japanese craftsmen on a quest for a new form of repair that could make a broken piece look as good as new, or better. Japanese collectors developed such a taste for kintsugi that some were accused of deliberately breaking prized ceramics, just to have them mended in gold.

How fascinating that it is considered art—and indeed beautiful, desired art—to repair something in such a way that the repair is what draws the eye. This is so unlike our way of thinking (my mind turns to Mr. Bean's "repair" of Whistler's Mother). We want our repairs, be they rhinoplasty or fender work, to appear as if nothing has been changed or damaged. 

Yet could there be value in our scars? I love the way Leonard Cohen put it:

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat.

Jesus was not ashamed of His scars, freely extending His hands to the disciple who doubted He had risen from the dead. I should be willing to show my scars as well. They do not tell anyone anything they wouldn't or shouldn't know. They tell others I am a flawed, broken individual. Yet I have been—and am being—repaired. And my scars are glorious.

—W.S. 

Google Sky Map, Copernicus, Galileo and Grace

   While recently foraging about for apps for my new Android phone, I came across Google's Sky Map. This fascinating application allows you to point your phone at a star in the sky and, using GPS data and an internal compass, it will label the star or constellation. Fascinating.
   But it got me thinking. What Sky Map does is create a virtual "dome" above you, and like a planetarium projector, it will produce a representation of the sky on that "dome." This is a very pre-Copernican way of looking at the sky.

   Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), as many of us know, was the Renaissance astronomer who first posited that the earth was not the center of the cosmos. He held off publishing this finding until months before his death, fearing both scientific and religious criticism. But the religious criticism was six decades in coming (reason: no Kindle), and it arrived with a vengeance due to the efforts of another smart fellow, Galileo Galilei, and his new and improved telescope, which allowed him to verify many of Copernicus's findings. It was Galileo who suffered for his integrity, found a heretic and confined to house arrest from 1634 until 1642, when he died at age 77.

   What does all of this interesting history have to do with grace? Perhaps this: it is very, very difficult for non-believers (and more than a few believers) to understand grace. And much of it has to do with pre-Copernican thinking. It seems more logical, more personal, and more comforting to understand our relationship with God as revolving around us. The main reason this is so is this is where we are. We see the world from our perspective, not any other. The night sky will look different when viewed from Jupiter, but we will never see it.
   Many people (maybe most) believe that what you do and what you are will make all the difference in how God accepts you. Blessings, heaven, health, all the good things, are the result of a zero-sum game: if you are more good than bad, you will get more good things than bad things. This is the spiritual equivalent of thinking the heavens revolve around the earth. It is old thinking. But again, it is easy to think this way, because this is our default viewpoint, and we are often too lazy or thoughtless to consider another.
   Grace teaches us that the spiritual universe revolves around God, that it is His pleasure and plan to allow us to play, plan and work (and even mess up) in his infinite creation. He has chosen us to be a part of it all. And it has nothing to do with our worthiness or goodness. It has everything to do with His goodness.
   Really, which would you rather have? A static spiritual world where everything revolves around you, yet is always tantalizingly just out of reach, and where your ability to move is severely limited? Or a dynamic world that is spinning at 1040 miles an hour on its own axis, while spinning around the sun at 18.5 miles a second, in a solar system whirling through space at 185 miles a second? A world where you're a valued, loved and needed part of it all. It's enough to make you dizzy.
   That's what grace is like.
   And those of us who have made this discovery should tell about it. We may be skittish, like Copernicus. We may be roughed up a bit (even by the church!), like Galileo.
   But we will be right, like them both.


—Wayne S.

Bonhoeffer on seeing people as they are

Every day I am getting to know people, at any rate their circumstances, and sometimes one is able to see through their stories into themselves—and at the same time one thing continues to impress me: here I meet people as they are, far from the masquerade of "the Christian world", people with passions, criminal types, small people with small aims, small wages and small sins—all in all they are people who feel homeless in both senses, and who begin to thaw when one speaks to them with kindness—real people; I can only say that I have gained the impression that it is just these people who are much more under grace than under wrath, and that it is the Christian world that is more under wrath than grace.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

Bonhoeffer on vanity and grace

On Sunday afternoon I attended an extremely festive high mass in Sacré Couer. The people in the church were almost exclusively from Montmartre; prostitutes and their men went to mass, submitted to all the ceremonies; it was an enormously impressive picture, and once again one could see quite clearly how close, precisely through their fate and guilt, these most heavily burdened people are to the heart of the gospel. I have long thought the Tauentzienstrasse [Berlin's red-light district] would be an extremely fruitful field for church work. It's much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas

Buechner on grace

After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody's much interested anymore. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.

   Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There is no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.

   A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?

   A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do.

   The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you.. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.

   There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace is yours only if you reach out and take it.

   Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

—Frederick Buechner, from Wishful Thinking, a Seeker's ABC.

Lent, perfection and grace

We may be believers, but our belief is sometimes shaky. We may be redeemed, but we are far from perfect creatures.

None of us wants to be defined by our worst moments. And our faith tells us that God doesn’t define us that way, either. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should try to obscure our shortcomings, inconsistencies and failures, whether moral, ethical or of conscience.

Lent, which begins in most of Christendom in a few days, is the period during which we believers are meant to be preparing ourselves for the coming Eastertide. We are supposed to take stock, prayerfully. Repent. Prepare our hearts and souls for the resurrection. Lent is the time when we should be the most honest with ourselves and with God. Look our sins and shortcomings and failures straight in the eye.

As I understand it, the point of the Easter story — of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection — is that we can’t fix ourselves by ourselves. We cannot live a perfect life that would earn our place in the kingdom.

Lent points to Easter and the point of Easter is grace.

We can’t do it by ourselves. In fact, it’s nothing that we do ourselves that remakes our hearts and minds into the kind of perfection that God deserves from the people he loves (and who are supposed to love God).

Our leaders (civil or religious) should not be expected to live perfect, consistent lives any more than the rest of us should. We are all hypocrites. We are all conflicted. We all make mistakes.

To pretend otherwise is a lie that cheapens the grace that goes before us all.

--Cathleen Falsani at The Dude Abides.

The Gospel According to my iPod

I love music.



Way back when (and I mean way back, in the early 70s) I even played music, dragging my guitar and my own songs (as well as Cat Stevens's and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s) all around.



I like all kinds of music. I know, that sort of comment usually prompts a rolling of the eyes, and a suspicion that whoever is speaking really doesn’t know all that much about music. But my Ipod has over 14,500 songs, from over 5200 albums, representing over 3800 artists (from ABBA to Zappa, as I like to say), and I can tell you something about each one of them. I have songs in Latin, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Russian and Italian. as well as a lot of jazz and classical, which have no words. I think music is the soundtrack of life, and a world without music would be far less rich.



One of the nice things about portable music players is the ability to shuffle music. In shuffle mode, the player simply plays the songs in random order. For someone with a lot of music, this affords me the chance to hear tracks that I haven’t chosen lately. It’s always a treat to hear something that I haven’t heard in a while.



Occasionally, there is a sublime juxtaposition of two songs which, taken separately, might say one thing but, taken together, say something else altogether. Recently, I heard something like that.

Suzanne Vega, an English major turned pop storyteller, has many interesting songs to her credit, some bright and optimistic, but many dark and mysterious. One that falls in-between is the song Caramel, from her album Nine Objects of Desire.



The song is pretty straightforward. The singer is telling someone that, for reasons unknown, she must refuse a love relationship.

It won't do

to dream of caramel,

to think of cinnamon

and long for you.



It won't do

to stir a deep desire,

to fan a hidden fire

that can never burn true.

I like how the reason for her decision is never revealed. What is it? Race? Religion? Age? Most likely, most people’s thought goes to adultery—either she, the other person or both are married to someone else.



But whatever the story, she has made a decision, although the song’s tone seems to give the listener reason to believe her resolve is perhaps not exactly rock-solid. Nevertheless, she has made a good choice—for now at least—although it was obviously a hard one.

I like Suzanne Vega’s voice. I like the song, too, so it was a treat to hear it. No less a treat was the next song in the shuffle. Lari White is the daughter of a rock-and-roll guitarist and the granddaughter of a Primitive Baptist preacher (which curiously, allowed no musical instruments in church) and she draws deeply upon both men with her gutsy, gospel-choir powered version of There is Power in the Blood from the soundtrack of the movie The Apostle. You know the words:

Would you be free

from the burden of sin?

There's power in the blood,

power in the blood;

Would you o'er evil

a victory win?

There's wonderful

power in the blood.

It occurred to me the proximity of these two songs was providential. Every day, we make choices. Some are easy. Some, like the one described by Ms. Vega, are harder. Some seem impossible. It is then that followers of Christ have something extra. The power of the blood. Simply put, it is a power, a gift given of God and within us, that lifts us higher than we can go on our own, and allows us to do, or do without. And to discover that a hard choice can be more than loss, but gain.

It's grace. It's growing. It's being saved all over again every day (not positionally, but practically). And it's part of the real, warty you in this real, rocky world. Grace is not needed in a sinless world.

Here are performances of the two songs. I would encourage you, if you like them, to buy the studio versions.

Candles

Click image to enlarge.

It's personal

Salvation is personal. Jesus didn't die for church people. He didn't die for a country, or a race. He died for you. And He didn't do it just so you could be a good person, a good family member, or a good citizen.

Jesus didn't die to make you good. Jesus died so God could show you what good is. He wants to love you, and have you love Him. — W. S.

Helter-Skelter and Grace

This past August marked the 40th anniversary of the Manson family murders—Steven Parent, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate on August 9, 1968, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the next night.

An excellent docudrama on the History Channel brought back the memories I had of the crime, and of reading Vince Bugliosi's account, Helter-Skelter. The story is one of pure and unexplainable evil.

But a perusal of the web turned up an interesting fact: Two of the murderers, Susan Atkins and Charles "Tex" Watson, have become Christians.

No doubt this infuriates some, as it did when infamous serial-killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer also professed faith in Christ shortly before his murder in prison.

But the truth is, grace is available to anyone. Anytime. As much as we would like to say that Jesus died to keep people like Atkins and Watson from killing, the thing we must all accept, if grace is unmerited, is that it always follows sin. It is the only know antidote.

So, rejoice. As William Camden wrote in Remaines, speaking of a dissolute man who died when he fell from his horse:

     My friend, judge not me,

     Thou seest I judge not thee;

     Betwixt the stirrop and the ground,

     Mercy I askt, mercy I found."

W. S. 

Seeing the tables and chairs

A few verses in Proverbs, chapter 3, seem to offer an interesting insight into how certain people view the world, and sin in particular. They read as follows:

       "But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, that shines brighter and brighter until the full day. The way of the wicked is like darkness; they do not know over what they stumble."

Only the cruelest, most adolescent among us would find humor in a blind person trying to negotiate a living room without benefit of cane or directions. So why are we surprised when the spiritually blind among us trip over or break things? If anything, we should be more surprised, more dismayed, and even more baffled when the spiritually sighted trip over something that they can actually see. That, to me, seems to be the essence of grace and the promise of sanctification: not that we will never stumble or break things, but that, as the light gets brighter, we will recognize more and more what we must avoid.

In a letter entitled 1st John, the author says, in verses 6-8 of the first chapter, "If we say we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the light as He himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us."



So for those among us who are spiritually sighted, the challenge is not to save the china or avoid the cat's tail--it is to have our "eyes" open enough that, at best, we avoid some obstacles, and, in general, confess our "clumsiness" (sin) when we stumble.

But there is more to sight than that. While we may see the obstacles, we may also see something else the blind cannot see: the table, set for a feast, and the feast-giver Himself, holding an outstretched hand to an empty chair.

W.S.

Feast of Simon the Pharisee by Peter Paul Rubens,oil on canvas, ca. 1618, 

189×254.5 cm, Ermitage, Sankt Petersburg. Click to enlarge.

The faith of last resort

There is no inherent superiority in being a Christian. C. S. Lewis was once asked, “Which religion is the best?” He replied, “While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is the best.” The point I think Lewis was making was this: Christianity is the faith of last resort. It is one you choose when all the others have proved inadequate. It is the one you choose when you have run out of choices that allow you to run the show.

And the reason it is the last choice is simple—it expects all of us. Properly devoted to, it requires us to die.

-- W. S.

C. S. Lewis quote from God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

Remembering

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart until, 

in our own despair, against our will, 

comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. 

—Aeschylus, from Agamemnon.

God and Man

God doesn't learn from experience, does He, or how could He hope anything of man?
— Graham Greene, from Our Man in Havana

Sin Boldly

"If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. This life in not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says, we look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. . . . Pray boldly-you too are a mighty sinner." --Martin Luther (Weimar ed. vol. 2, p. 371; Letters I, "Luther's Works," American Ed., Vol 48. p. 281- 282)

"It's all about grace."

"You can call it what you like, categorize it, vivesect it, qualify, quantify, or dismiss it, and none of it will make grace anything other than precisely what grace is: audacious, unwarranted and unlimited. In the end, it's all about grace. — Cathleen Falsani, in Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace

On God, On Me

God is everything I am not

Yet I am not nothing  

Just nothing without Him. 



W. S.