Saturday Library Post 1

It's Saturday morning, and I'm in the library. Only this morning I've brought my laptop, which seems a little disloyal to all these books surrounding me.

Anyway, I think I've probably mentioned (a million times) that I love the library. I love little libraries, like the kind in which I spent so much of my childhood
9and like the one I'm in this morning), and I love big ones, like the NYPL and the BPL. When I was a boy, my best friend George Knorr (where is he now, I wonder) and I used to walk to the library on just about every fine Saturday morning, each of us coming home with an armful of books more often than not. As I think of those days, they are always sunny. Why is that, do you suppose? For I'm sure it was not always so.

This morning, walking into my local public library (on a sunny morn, by the way), browsing the new books rack, I find this: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, of which Nicholson Baker said,

"Oddly inspiring.…This is the Super Size Me of lexicography….Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own.”

Speaking of reading, I've begun John Piper's The Pleasures of God. Just out of curiosity, I tracked down the single Amazon reviewer who gave this book a 1-star rating:

I read this for a theology class and found is crass, speculative, and self-serving. The picture of God as a pleasure-mongering hedonist was horrifying. It runs absolutely counter to the biblical data used to support it. I don't recommend this book even for a door stop - too light weight!

I will only say this: did you ever notice that people who take theology classes are always claiming books and authors are "too lightweight" for them, thus showing off their theological sophistication?

Anyway, here's a quote from the book itself:

I regard this book as a vision of God through the lens of his happiness. What the church and the world need today, more than anything else, is to know and love god--the great, glorious, sovereign, happy God of the Bible. Very few people think of God as supremely happy in the fellowship of the Trinity and in the work of creation and redemption. The volcanic exuberance of God over the worth of his Son and the work of his hands and welfare of his people is not well-known. God's delight in being God is not sung the way it should be, with wonder and passion, in the worship places of the world. And we are thepoorer and weaker for it.

I'll take Piper over aforesaid theology-student any day.

Just a couple of pretty good hoofers!

I love Fred Astaire and just read a pretty good book about him by Joseph Epstein. Epstein mentions some other great tap dancers of the Vaudeville era, so I thought I'd look some of them up on Youtube. What I discovered was that I have been sorely ill-informed about tap dancing, for I had never heard of the Nicholas Brothers. These guys are amazing.



Not to mention the great Cab Calloway!

A Few Random Thoughts on Lent

I received the imposition of ashes on my forehead this morning, administered by an Episcopal priest who is assigned to the university where I work. She drew the ashen cross on my head and said the old words, "Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return."

I came back to work with my smudgy cross on my head and now half of my co-workers are confirmed in their belief that I am somewhat witless where personal hygiene is concerned, and the other half think I'm Catholic!

Oh well.

My church and most of the people who attend it completely ignore the season of Lent. Many of them know nothing about it, discounting it as merely "religious." Me, I almost ignore it. I don't fast from anything, and I don't really meditate on the cross any more than usual, but it fills me with wonder to think that millions and millions of Christian believers are participating in a ceremony today in which they remember that they are dust.

Can you think of anything more counter-cultural than that?

Lent: A Season for Trembling

Piper on Humility

Here's something from John Piper's What Jesus Demands from the World (p. 131):

In Matthew 18:4 Jesus says, "Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." The Greek verb for "humble" did not generally describe a positive virtue in Jesus' day. It meant generally to crush, bring down, afflict, humiliate, and degrade. The word was chosen because Jesus' demand was not a romantic one, as though childlikeness was sweet and easy. For a strong, self-confident, self-sufficient, intelligent, resourceful, controlling person, Jesus' demand was devastating. Jesus knew that children were not the models for imitation in his day. The reason he chose them is because of "their powerlessness and their low social standing." His demand is that we end our love affair with power and status and self-sufficiency and rights and control."

Saturday Catch-All

Justin Taylor has a post linking the thoughts of two men on the subject of God's unconditional love. The two men are John Piper and David Powlinson, and together their thoughts help to clarify our muddled thinking on the subject. They get us past using the phrase as a means to downplay sin (we always want to do that). Here's a snip from Powlinson:

God’s love is more than conditional, for it is intended to change those who receive it. “Unconditional” often connotes “you’re okay.” But there is something wrong with you. The word “unconditional” may well express the welcome of God, but it does not well express the point of his welcome.

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My son Tim, a talented set designer/builder, is looking for work in the Chicago area. Somebody out there in the theater biz--or someone who knows someone, etc.--just may be reading this blog (!) I suppose. Contact me if you've got something for him.

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Meanwhile, my other son Nate is hanging around with a bunch of folkies in Memphis. Thousands of musicians in a big hotel, jam sessions all night in rooms, hallways, and hotel lobbies. I think Nate's likin' it!

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I definitely want to see Throw Down Your Heart. Here's the trailer:

Yes!

Ray Ortlund recently quoted Anders Nygren, and I'm just repeating after him, because some things are just worth repeating:

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

Let Us Break Bread Together

Somehow the barking dog sound effects, the hippie dancing, and the soulful gospel music works for me. How does it work for you?



Josh Garrels is amazing. Here's another of his fine soulful gospel songs.

Hmmm

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'" Charles M. Schulz

Going on about Bob

I have a new job!

I'm working as a general get 'er done guy at a cartographic library/museum. That means maps, son, and don't you forget it.

Actually, this institution is a division of the university library where I have worked for the past 7 years or so, so I'm still swimming in the same pool, ya might say.

Which has little to do with what I was going to say. I was going to say, I really like Ray Ortlund's blog, Christ is Deeper Still. That's a good title, don't you think? By way of personal application:

Christ is deeper still than my new job.

There you go! And all the stuff going on at that job, and the pressures and "circumstances" associated with it. In fact, speaking of circumstances, Ray recently quoted Francis Schaeffer concerning them:

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us [nor, I would add today, postmodernism or materialistic consumerism or visceral sensualism or whatever]. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

Wonderful startling truth, that. Again, by way of application: whatever is going on around you at your job (conflict with your boss, boring work, low pay, etc.), the real problem, Schaeffer would say, is in you trying to deal with these things and navigate these circumstances "in the power of the flesh."

Hmmm. I plead guilty. Guilty as it gets.

Along the same lines, Ray recently excerpted a 1987 interview with one of my spiritual heroes, Eugene Peterson, in which Peterson said this:

...my job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them to see the grace that is operating in their lives. It's hard to do, because our whole culture is going the other direction, saying that if you're smart enough and get the right kind of help, you can solve all your problems. . . . The work of spirituality is to recognize where we are -- the particular circumstances of our lives -- to recognize grace and say, "Do you suppose God wants to be with me in a way that does not involve changing my spouse or getting rid of my spouse or my kids, but in changing me, and doing something in my life that maybe I could never experience without this pain and this suffering?"

Ah, circumstances again. Have you noticed that we use that word as a euphemism for things we'd rather not be going through. I mean, a heavy debt load is a "circumstance," but a holiday in Hawaii certainly is not. Which leads me to this thought: we're so emotionally preoccupied with wishing things were not the way they are. Have you ever noticed that? As an alternative, we might want to try being preoccupied with what God would like to do in and through us right there in the midst of the circumstances.

Well, that's all. Now go over to Christ is Deeper Still and just read. Good stuff over there.

Lost Highway Friday

First, the great Hank Williams:



Hank had something that was absolutely unrepeatable, but I really like this Willie Nelson version:



Exceptional! Willie, btw, is one of my musical heroes!

I love a song about river . . .

A Miner's Lament

My favorite singer. One of my favorite songs. Period.

Imperfect Bootstraps

I just love these words of Robert Farrar Capon:

"The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof grace--bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us singlehandedly. The word of the Gospel--after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps--suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home free before they started...Grace was to be drunk neat: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale..."

HT:Buzzard Blog

Self-life vs. Christ-life

Someone has been telling me his story.

It's a long story, with many chapters. Or layers. Or episodes.

In them all, though, he's the hero, struggling against great odds, alone and misunderstood, as is the way with heroes. He will push on, though. Heroically. In the end, he expects to win.

Another person has been telling me his story.

It's a different story, though. Instead of a hero, he's a victim. He's the eternal victim. Nobody understands. Many are against him. Especially the devil. It's hard, and someday he wants to be triumphant, but for now he's hanging in there, pushing on, etc. Someday he'll be the hero, but it seems so far away.

Then there's the story of the trickster/conniver. I guess it's a subset of the hero story, kind of an anti-hero. He wins frequently, and his story is about winning and winning again in life's little skirmishes. He is not always ethically consistent. Whatever. He just wins, which is the point of his story.

All these people have a story, and want to tell me about it. In every case they're at the very center of that story, and the world sort of swirls around them, or comes at them, or bears down in them, or whatever.

All of these people are Christians.

They frequently tell me their stories, the hero, the victim, the trickster. I want to say, "When you begin to die to self, your heroic self-image will die. Your whole story will shrivel up. It will be replaced by another story, greater by far than yours, a story with a different hero. You will be glad to give him the star part, the central role. When you begin to die to self, that is."

But I notice that a lot of Christian publishing thrives on promises that you too can be the hero of your story. That's why so many book covers depict people raising their hands in triumph atop rocky crags that they've just conquered. As if to say, read this book and become a hero, the prince or princess, the victorious warrior, the great man or woman that you are supposed to be.

This is idol worship, that's all.

The alternative? Not I who live, said Paul, but Christ lives in me. Who is the hero in such a statement?

When the serpent tempted Eve, it was by telling her that she could be a star! She bought it, she bit it, and the rest is history. The tendency of the flesh is toward repeating the very same behaviors that alienated us from the presence of God in the first place.

Bad idea, you might think. But to put it aside seems a massive and very unpromising project in self-denial, even should the spirit be willing.

Who will save us from this body of death, I wonder?

And then I remember my hero, Jesus Christ.

Absolutely the best blogpost I've come across so far this year

Michael Spencer's Twenty-Five Sortof Random Things I Do and Don’t Believe. One of the remarkable things about Michael's list is that, well, I agree with pretty much all of it (with a little quibbling here and there). Here are a few of my favorites:

2. I don’t believe America is a Christian nation. I actually don’t believe there is such a thing, and if there were, America wouldn’t be one. Not on paper, not from the founders and not now. We’re a secular republic and I like it that way.

3. I believe that Christian publishing does a lot of good, but I also think it does a lot of harm. All in all, we’d have to say that for all the good done, we still have a monstrous collection of lame, dangerous and outright perverse results from the various money-making adventures of the people who publish gems like “The Prayer of Jabez.” Without Christian publishing making a lot of nut jobs legitimate, things in evangelicalism would be a lot less wacky.

12. I don’t believe there’s all that much good about institutional Christianity. It exists, has to exist and always will exist, but Jesus started a movement, not an institution. (And definitely not a business or a club.) Christianity is a cross-cultural, evangelistic, church planting movement. It’s all about taking the Gospel to individuals and cultures first, then practicing what it means to be Christians in whatever context we live. I can be pretty annoying about this.

17. I believe evangelicals have a fetish of wanting preachers to know everything and to tell them what to do. In fact, when the Washington Post said, years ago, that evangelicals were “…easily led,” they were more right than wrong. I’m not into the Roman Catholic view of church authority, but among what group of Christians are you more likely to be told during the sermon what to think about politics, economics, child-raising, science, psychology, literature, entertainment and education? Who’s more likely to have a series of 300 Life Principles that tell you everything including where to buy your vitamins? Yeah, that’s right. Everyone say “Baaa.”

23. I believe tithing was old covenant and really has no place in the teaching of Christian stewardship today.

24. The whole concept of revival seems like a confused mess to me. A bit of truth in there, but mostly it’s a lot of tradition and manipulation.

Michael's just questioning a lot of unquestioned assumptions here. The president of the university that I work for likes to say that institutions need to build in mechanisms for self-criticism. I agree, but there is much that works against this need; defensiveness is the standard posture of the flesh. The church is really, really, really bad at self-criticism. The spirit may seem willing (although it usually doesn't) but the flesh is certainly weak!

Anyway, thanks for the hard, cold truth, Michael!

What I'm reading...

I've just begun reading and enjoying Alan Jacobs' Original Sin: A Cultural History. Jacobs is a fine essayist, he does his homework, and he writes like a lover of words. This looks like a good one!

Pick it, boys!