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)

All the little things He does.

"...the writing of many books is endless..." 

Ecclesiates 12:12

Biographies are one of my favorite forms of literature. I always have a bio on my bedside table or Kindle (currently, I am reading The Narnian, about C. S. Lewis). I have several volumes on Teddy Roosevelt, one of my favorite subjects, and probably fifty biographies overall.

The number of biographies on a specific individual are not always commensurate with his or her popularity, influence or notoriety. In many cases this is true (think Churchill, Hitler, or Lincoln). But in others, there is a glaring lack of production.

Perhaps the most obvious example is that of a man who really revolutionized the entire world, yet the entire eyewitness accounts of his exploits are contained in four small novella-sized narratives. They are woefully incomplete in proportion to his importance. These books record many of his most important acts, dialogues and speeches. Yet surely there were so many other amazing things said and done that are not preserved for our scrutiny and enjoyment.

And the author of one of the books makes an audacious statement in his closing:

Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (John 21:25, ESV)

What does that mean?

If they were said and done, why weren't they written down? And doesn't the claim itself seem a bit overblown?

Suppose you follow a very busy person—lets use the U.S. president—for a single term. You record every speech and meeting. You record his Cabinet meetings and private conversations. What books he reads. You transcribe his conversations on the golf course. Words shared between with his wife and children. How long he sleeps. Whether he dreams. How many steps he takes in a day. Even how many times he breathes.

If you included every bit of minutae from his life, would the results realistically be larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica? Yet the Enclycopedia Brittanica is but a drop in the ocean of books (The Library of Congress contains over 22 million books).

The whole idea seems preposterous.

The comment seems a bald-faced lie.

Unless...


Near the end of another of these mini-biographies, the author quotes Jesus as saying this:

And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20).

The rabbi Paul, author of many letters to the early church, puts it another way:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.(Galatians 2:20)

Major W. Ian Thomas, in his book The Indwelling Life of Christ, explains this mystery:

Salvation is so much more than a change of destination from hell to heaven! The true spiritual content of our gospel is not just heaven one day, but Christ here and now. In the economy of God, conversion is only an essential preliminary to discipleship, which is a lifetime of allowing Christ to live in you to do His work through you.

So, according to these witnesses, Jesus Christ is still active, performing acts of love, mercy and service through all those who follow Him. And He has throughout the years since His resurrection, and will until He wraps the whole story up someday in the future. And every one of those followers has countless stories of all the little things He does.

How many books do you think they will fill?

Safe for the whole family?

There is a local Christian radio station that my wife listens to exclusively (or would that be religiously?). The only time I listen is when I am in the car with her. It's not that I'm against Christian music. I don't even listen to FM radio at all. But Christian music doesn't move me like it moves my wife. When it does, it is not the big worship anthems, or the vocal gyrations of the "pop" songs, but rather the quiet, reflective songs that put words to my deepest hopes—and doubts.

The tagline for this local station is "Safe for the whole family." I always wonder, what exactly does that mean? I think they mean that their content and on-air personalities can be trusted not to be objectionable or provocative. And they pretty much deliver on that trust (although I find some of the inane chit-chat of the DJs objectionable just from a communicator's point of view).

I fear, though, that for many, "safe for the whole family" can be a very misleading and even dangerous notion. It infers that there is a safe, protected place where, if we are careful, we can insulate ourselves from harmful influences, harmful thoughts, and harmful acts. In other words, from the world at large.

If there is such a place, I haven't found it, and I've been around almost six decades.

It cannot be found by hiding in the church. Christians by the hundreds are being killed for their faith. Even Christians in countries where there is freedom of religion find themselves mocked, reviled and marginalized. To hide in our "Christian ghetto" with others just like us is to avoid the issues. It is also to avoid being salt and light to a sick and dying world.

Safety cannot be found by hiding behind God. Please notice, I did not say hiding in God. The Psalms alone won't let me get away with that. I simply mean that it is wrong to hide from the world under the robes of God, as if we were chosen because we were holier than those outside. Nope. We were chosen to become holier, but we started out in the same place, and truth be told, we are still probably more like those without our club than we are like God.

We cannot even be safe in Christ. Did He not say that if you want to follow Him, you must "take up your cross"? Didn't the apostle Paul (who never had Christian radio) pray that he would "share in His [Christ's] sufferings" because he (Paul) knew that simply knowing is not the same as sharing? Jesus said: "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10:28) He was talking about himself. Does he sound safe? I am reminded of Mr. Beaver's comment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as he describes the great lion Aslan, a type of Christ: 

“Safe?" said Mr. Beaver."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.” 

The dangers, as I see it, of the well-meant "safe for the whole family" mindset are manifold. Perhaps most of all, it insulates us from the fallen world. It gives us a false notion of purity, a heightened sense of other's sin, and sometimes a dulled sense of our own. It also suggests that true Christianity is best lived right in the middle of the road, away from the dangerous shoulders. But at the edges is where life is truly lived. That's where ministry takes place. That's where love, mercy and grace are most needed. In John 4:1-30, Jesus met the Samaritan woman at a well, not in the temple. She wouldn't be allowed in the temple. The side of the road is where Paul met Christ (Acts 9:1-9). It is where we will find the man beaten by thieves (Luke 10:25-37). Let us not be like the priest and the Levite, who hurried by (perhaps singing a catchy song?).

A safe place. It's a nice place to visit sometimes, but I wouldn't want to live there.

In fact, I can't. And shouldn't.


—Wayne S.

Why I Chose God

For me, the essence of "faith" is choice, and the key quality is "nevertheless." Faith is the very tension between yes and no, between reliance and rejection, and is the occasion for making an utterly personal decision all by yourself, all for yourself.
It works like this: 
On the one hand, I really, honestly, do see, hear, and experience everything that atheists adduce as evidence that God is an illusion. What is more, as a former executive in a brain-monitoring company I understand perhaps better than most of them the scientific basis for their argument that there is no "there" there beyond some intracranial synapses creating an illusion some call "God".
On the other hand, I also see, hear, and experience in my everyday life what I just as really, honestly, understand as God.
This brings me to a free choice: I can choose to live my life according to either one depiction or the other: without God or with God. The act of "faith" is choosing one over the other "nevertheless." The nevertheless means I don't deny, dispute, or dishonor the evidence and the argument to the contrary; it simply means that I choose not to adopt it as the definitive guide for my own thinking and feeling and actions during what poet Mary Oliver calls my "one wild and precious life." Perhaps the same process holds true for those atheists who acknowledge that there really are two sides to this issue: they, too, see some evidence on both sides, weigh it, and choose the alternative instead (although I can imagine that calling this decision an act of "faith" might not be very palatable to some).

Eliot Daley, quoted in the Huffington Post.

"The winter is also His."

 "It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His--the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness--even 'the winter of our discontent.'"
I stole a glance at Adela. Her large eyes were fixed on the preacher.
"Winter," he went on, "does not belong to death, although the outside of it looks like death. Beneath the snow, the grass is growing. Below the frost, the roots are warm and alive. Winter is only a spring too weak and feeble for us to see that it is living. The cold does for all things what the gardener has sometimes to do for valuable trees: he must half kill them before they will bear any fruit. Winter is in truth the small beginnings of the spring."

—George Macdonald, from The Complete Works of George MacDonald. 

Where have all the movies gone?

   "We are at a point in our culture when we actually have to pull for grown-up movies, when we must try to encourage them and laud them when they come by. David Lean wouldn't be allowed to make movies today, John Ford would be forced to turn John Wayne into a 30-something failure-to-launch hipster whose big moment is missing the toilet in the vomit scene in Hangover Ten. Our movie culture has descended into immaturity, deep and inhuman violence, a pervasive and flattened sexuality. It is an embarrassment.
   "In Iraq this year I asked an Iraqi military officer doing joint training at an American base what was the big thing he'd come to believe about Americans in the years they'd been there. He thought. 'You are a better people than your movies say.' He had judged us by our exports. He had seen the low slag heap of our culture and assumed it was a true expression of who we are.
"And so he'd assumed we were disgusting."

—Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal.

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.