The Cure for Legalism: Sermon Audio #2

At: bit.ly/IzRtKW

Sermon audio: He Makes Me Lie Down sermon #1

'The Human Schedule' sermon mp3 here.

Quotes from sermon 'The Human Schedule'

Quotes from yesterday's sermon "The Human Schedule," first in the series 'He Makes Me Lie Down': The Rest of the Christian Life. Some of these I didn't actually get around to using, but they fit well. 


"Time is like a handful of sand- the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers." – Anon     

“We are embedded in time but time is also embedded in us....[We are created] to live rhythmically in the rhythms of creation."  Eugene Peterson (his whole section on Creation in 'Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places' is excellent).


 “I cannot make the universe obey me.” - Thomas Merton

"We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin." – C. S. Lewis

[This is from the Atlantic article describing the cell phone going off in the middle of Wynton Marsalis' final phrase of his solo trumpet piece.  After the cell rings out, interrupting Marsalis...]
"People started giggling and picking up their drinks. The moment—the whole performance—unraveled...Marsalis paused for a beat, motionless, and his eyebrows arched. I scrawled on a sheet of notepaper, MAGIC, RUINED. The cell-phone offender scooted into the hall as the chatter in the room grew louder. Still frozen at the microphone, Marsalis replayed the silly cell-phone melody note for note. Then he repeated it, and began improvising variations on the tune. The audience slowly came back to him. In a few minutes he resolved the improvisation—which had changed keys once or twice and throttled down to a ballad tempo—and ended up exactly where he had left off..."

Resources on Christianity and Science

Since I'm preaching on Genesis 1-2 this week and next, here's some good resources on the relationship between Christianity and science.
Alvin Plantinga has a new book out about this issue called "Where the Conflict Really Lies," which I'm sure will be a definitive treatment.
Jack Collins was my Hebrew teacher during seminary and his exegesis of Genesis1-2 is the most helpful I've seen.  It's found in his commentary on Genesis 1-4.
Also helpful for covering the interpretive options and providing additional support to Collins' reading of Gen. 1-2 is Vern Poythress' book Redeeming Science.

New Sermon Series: "He Makes Me Lie Down" - The Rest of the Christian Life

Ok, I completely stole the last phrase of this series title from Mark Buchanan, who's book "The Rest of God," started me thinking about doing a series on this theme.  Tomorrow (4/15) and next Sunday (4/22) we'll talk about the Christian form and freedom of living in time.  Then we'll move on to talk about Sabbath (weeks 3 & 4), seasons (week 5), and our ultimate Sabbath rest (week 6). The sermons should be available at the Redeemer website and itunes via podcast by Sunday night of each week.

Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond by Denis Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All of these journalistic essays are good but a few of them are great. In "Hippies," Johnson and a few of his old buddies (who were real hippies back in the day), come out of retirement to attend The Rainbow Festival in Oregon.  Looking at his aged companions Johnson says "How did we all get so old? Sitting around laughing at old people probably caused it" (20).  The guys relive some of their former excesses (shrooms and all), but Johnson is cynical, haunted: he knows where all of this goes. "In a four-square mile swatch of the Ochoco Forest the misadventures of a whole generation continue.  Here in this bunch of 10,000 or 50,000 people somehow unable to count themselves I see my generation epitomized: a Peter Pan generation nannied by matronly Wendys like Bill and Hillary Clinton, our politics a confusion of Red and Green beneath the black flag of Anarchy; cross-eyed and well-meaning, self-righteous, self-satisfied; close-minded, hypocritical, intolerant - Loving You! - Sieg Heil!" (28). Johnson closes with a memory of his first acid trip, of the euphoria punctured by his mother's desperate "where have you been?!" -  a question, the author realizes, that remains appropriate of him and all his fellow travelers on the hippie trail.


"Bikers for Jesus" tells about Johnson's trip to a Christian motorcycle rally/revival meeting. Though alienated by some of the charismatic culture, Johnson identifies with these people who have found a road out of violence and addiction.  He recounts his own conversion to Christianity in this essay.


Finally, the pieces on Africa are brilliant: "The Civil War in Hell," "An Anarchist's Guide to Somolia," and "The Small Boy's Unit."




View all my reviews

Quotes & the Exercise from my sermon on Isaiah 52-53: Facing Anxiety

The first quote comes in the second point on God saving us from our guilt; it's from the book What It Is Like To Go To War by Karl Marlantes.  Marlantes appeared out of nowhere on the literary scene a couple of years ago with his brilliant first novel, Matterhorn, a semi-autobiographical account (it seems to me) of the author's experience as a Marine fighting in Vietnam.  That book appeared on many 'best books of the year' lists, and rightfully so; it's one of my favorite war novels. But then this year Marlantes published What It Is Like To Go To War, which are his personal reflections on the different aspects of being a soldier in the modern world. The quote I used comes in his chapter called "Guilt" and describes how the author was haunted for years by visions of the face and eyes of one of the NVA soldiers he killed up close in a firefight:

That kid’s dark eyes would stare at me in my mind’s eye at the oddest times.  I’d be driving at night and his face would appear on the windscreen.  I’d be talking at work and that face would suddenly overwhelm me and I’d fight to stay with the person I was talking with. 

The other quotes come from Tolkien's The Two Towers where Theoden expresses his doubt and despair in the face of the merciless siege at Helm's Deep:

It is said that the Horburg has never fallen to assault, but now my heart is doubtful. The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure.  How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?

Then, with Aragorn's encouragement (magnified in the movie version), Theoden and the remaining warriors ride out and charge into the sea of orcs before them:

With a cry and a great noise they charged.  Down from the gates they roared, over the causeway they swept, and they drove through the hosts of Isengard as a wind among grass.

Finally, as part of my application I asked people to work through the following exercise that I gave as a handout:

Martin Luther said true Christianity is a matter of ‘personal pronouns.’ Replace the generic pronouns in the (second, blank) text of Isaiah 53.5 below with a personal pronoun (“my”) or, even better, your own name. Then spend some time identifying the specific sins for which you still feel a sense of guilt: what past actions, thoughts, or failures rob you of a sense of God's comfort when you face anxiety?  What have you done that you feel "disqualifies" you from God's care?  

Write those things down in the appropriate blanks.

Read the result, meditate on Is. 53.5, and believe that Christ has put away your sins.

Isaiah 53.5

[5] But he was pierced for

our transgressions;

                  he was crushed for

our iniquities;

                  upon him was the chastisement

 that brought us peace,

                  and with his wounds

 we are healed.

[5] But Christ was pierced for
        

__________ ____________________;

                  he was crushed for

__________ ________________________;

                  upon him was the chastisement

that brought ____________ peace,

                  and with his wounds

 ___________ is healed.

Angels by Denis Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The 4th book I've read by Johnson and his first novel. I love his writing and characters. The story feels as off-kilter as the people and the situations they face, but I think that's Johnson's point. Compassionate and surreal, Johnson shows us the other America we hope doesn't really exist.  


View all my reviews

What It is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read this on a rec from my Dad (a veteran of Vietnam) saying that it captured and analyzed the experience of going to war in a profound way.  I couldn't put it down. Marlantes was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford when he decided to enlist. In my dad's words, he had a particularly "awful tour," which (it seems) is recounted in the semi-autobiographical novel Mattherhorn. Marlantes is concerned here to educate all those  who have not been to war so that they might understand those who have; he offers some great ideas that if taken seriously could help our military respond to the inevitable trauma and moral/spiritual confusion that battle brings. The weakest parts of the book are the analyses inspired by Jung and Joseph Cambpell; still, this is a moving and important book for anyone to read who's been to war or loves someone who has (or will).


View all my reviews

WWI, Modernism, and the Holocaust

What produced the Holocaust?

This question has haunted the West since the first death camps were liberated by Allied soldiers in 1945. Of course, a myriad of answers have been proposed that lay the blame on, variously, anti-Semitism, Hitler's evil/mad genius, the psyche of 'ordinary Germans', European Christianity/Lutheranism, the Treaty of Versailles, modernity, etc. (I assume the Christian doctrine of sin to be a necessary component of any theory of explanation - not that such horrors can be 'explained'). There's obvious truth to all of these answers, especially when taken together in some combination. But, in my reading on this subject there's always been something missing from all the attempts to get at what could have prepared the most advanced society of its day to carry out the slaughter of millions of people.

For the past few years, this gap has started to be filled by two sources: studies of WWI and of turn-of-the-century German culture. Recently, to my great joy, I discovered a book that brings these two topics together: Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins.

The first part of Rites of Spring is a study of how the turn-of-the-century cultures of France, England, and Germany enabled them to enter into and fight the truly mad and frivolous Great War. In chapter two, Eksteins turns his focus on Germany. He examines European modernism as it took root in the German soil of romanticism, idealism, nationalism. The fruit of this combination was a culture trapped in its own delusions of aesthetic grandeur and cultural superiority, primed for war. Eksteins produces evidence for this war-lust in Germany. In the month after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the German population gathered by the thousands in town and city squares across the land, demanding retribution. The author also shows that frenzied support for military action was nearly unanimous among all classes of society, especially among intellectuals, artists, and those on the political Left. Eksteins quotes one observer who recalled that in those days in Germany "The incomparable storm unleashed in the people has swept before it all doubting, halfhearted, and fearful minds" (63).

One would think that the components of German culture that led the nation to war in 1914 would be critiqued and rejected after its devastating defeat; certainly, many did exactly this (Barth, Rosenstock-Huessy and the Patmos Circle, et al). But for many more in Germany, those same cultural forces remained solidly in place, fueling a bitter reaction to the catastrophe and setting the stage for the rise of National Socialism and the even greater tragedies that followed.

There's far more to Eksteins' book than what I've discussed here: he spends several chapters on the war itself. The last section of the book examines in detail National Socialism, Hitler's triumph and Germany's ultimate downfall in WWII as (partly) an outcome of the cultural forces examined in part one.

Not only is Rites of Spring worth reading on its own terms; it also nicely complements a few other books on these subjects that I recommend as highly as this one:

1). Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust, a study of how the German embrace of modernity (rationalization, industrialization, the embrace of 'technique,' efficiency, managerial bureaucracy, etc.) was essential to the mentality and methods of the architects of the Holocaust.

2). Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Out of Revolution written during the 1930's in Germany by a WWI survivor who classifies WWI itself as the fruit of a European-wide revolution that continued to gain power in Germany after WWI. ERH's analysis of 19th-20th century German thought, politics, culture, as well as his contemporary reaction to Hitler and the National Socialism is spread throughout the book.

3). The correspondence of Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity, carried out while each was deployed with the German army in the early days of WWI. While the letters focus on religious and philosophical questions, the backdrop to the discussion is the war, and each man's awareness that their country was in the grip of deadly fantasies that could lead to national disaster. This book was out of print for many years, but has recently been republished in a new edition that includes several helpful essays about the correspondence and its historical context.

The Christian Revolution

D. B. Hart argues in The Atheist Delusion that moderns fail to understand the impact of Christianity on the ancient Roman world because we are so unfamiliar with just how different that world was from ours.

In a New Yorker review of several books on the legacy of Rome in the West, Adam Kirsch says the following: "In general, the lot of the ordinary Roman was no different from that of the vast majority of human beings before the modern age: powerlessness, bitterly hard work, and the constant presence of death. The thing that strikes Knapp [author of Invisible Romans, a book under review] most about Roman popular wisdom is its deep passivity in the face of these afflictions, which feels so alien to moderns and especially to Americans. The Romans, he writes, had no concept of progress: 'The implication is that the order of the universe is static, that social perspectives do not change; they must be the way they are. The "is" and "ought to be" of the world are the same.' (January 9, 2012, p. 74).

Hart argues brilliantly in his book that this despairing passivity in the face of a fixed world order was a persistent feature of ancient paganism; and that it took Christianity, with its "ought to be," to challenge it and bring to pass much of the positive change we take for granted in the modern era.

Mavis Staples sings "The Weight" with Wilco and Nick Lowe

Here.