Murder-Song Monday: Down in the Willow Garden

I suppose if you put all these murder songs back to back, well you could form a sad commentary on the human condition. That, after all, is the point of folk music. To tell a human story, serving as a familiar reminder or lesson to the community. In this song the remorseful fellow has poisoned, stabbed, and drowned his girl friend all in the same verse! Did these songs persist in so many versions from generation to generation as a warning to young women to be careful of who they went walking with? Anyway, Kirsten Hersh does an appropriately haunting version, but since embedding has been disabled on that one, I'll have to offer up Bailey Cooke as an alternative. I like her banjo-playing and tempo here. And the sound of the peepers in the background is kind of cool too.

Tim Keller: "The Gospel is not advice."

Keller, in the second chapter of King's Cross, makes the point several times that the Gospel is not advice but news. He must feel it is necessary to make this point because our churches are so flooded with advice instead of news.

Two weeks ago I went to a church in which the preacher talked about removing the obstacles from our lives that keep us from serving in the church. In that same church, at the start of communion, as the ushers passed out the little quarter-swallows of grape juice and tiny flakes of “bread,” an elder of the church talked to us about how God had spoken to him during his quiet time about . . . the need to have a quiet time. The elder then tried earnestly to impress upon us the importance of having our own special quiet time each day. No one ever seemed to think that maybe communion might be precisely the time to stop thinking about what we should do, and start thinking at last about what Jesus has done for us. In other words, rather than talking about quiet times, actually being quiet.

What I mean to say is, we're flooded with advice. So far, my on-again/off-again search for a new church home has been pretty disappointing on this score. No news, lots of advice. Either it's we should defend the faith and return America to its Christian roots, or we should be more generous, or we should examine our lives to see if we are pleasing to God, or we should remove the obstacles to service because the church needs us, or . . . well, you get the pictures.

I have no mind to be a church basher or a professional critic, but I will say this. By and large, people in the church accept this sorry status quo because they like it that way. I get the feeling that if a church service was focused on the announcement that Jesus Christ is Lord of all creation, they would walk away feeling they haven't been helped or strengthened in any way. I have seen Christians move happily from one system of advice to another with great enthusiasm. Seven steps to this, four steps to that, now let's everybody do this, now that, and each new set of principles is of course most definitely “life-changing.” And they hop on each of these bandwagons without the slightest sense that there all this seems deeply divergent from the New Testament model of discipleship.

In an interesting article about accountability groups, Tullian Tchividjian says this:

Paul understood that Gospel-driven change is rooted in remembrance. What Paul did for the Colossians is what we all need our Christian brothers and sisters to do for us as well: remind me first of what’s been done, not what I must do.

Tullian also quotes Sinclair Ferguson:

Historically speaking, whenever the piety of a particular group is focused on OUR spirituality, that piety will eventually exhaust itself on its own resources. Only when our piety forgets about us and focuses on Jesus Christ will our piety be nourished by the ongoing resources the Spirit brings to us from the source of all true piety, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Even the first disciples did not understand the this-changes-everything nature of the good news, and none foresaw the cross as anything but a horrible defeat and failure. To understand the nature of the victory Christ won on our behalf is at least one part of discipleship, and it is one task of the church to teach exactly that understanding and its implications for all of life.

[One book that might serve as a helpful reminder here: Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old Fashioned Way]

Books, Books, Books

Yesterday was a good day for my reading prospects.

First off, Tim Keller's new book, King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus arrived in the mail. I can't tell you how glad I am to get this one. Delighted, in fact.

Second, coming to me not in the mail but through Interlibrary Loan, two books by Stanley Hauerwas. I forget now what got me interested in him this past week. Something I'd read on a blog somewhere, no doubt. Anyway, the two books that came to me yesterday are going to be stimulating indeed. One is called Resident Aliens (written with William Willimon). I read the first chapter last night. Here are a couple of choice snips:

"The world was fundamentally changed in Jesus Christ, and we have been trying, but failing, to grasp the implication of that change ever since."

"The bible's concern is whether or not we shall be faithful to the gospel, the truth about the way things are now that God is with us through the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth."

"In Jesus we meet not a presentation of basic ideas about God,world, and humanity, but an invitation to join up, to become part of a movement, a people."

The other Stanley Hauerwas book that fell into my lap this week, on loan from a local seminary, is his commentary on Matthew . Here's a snip from its first chapter, which should get you thinking a little about the world-shattering nature of the plan of God:

"Matthew's Gospel is meant to train us, his readers, just as Jesus had to train his disciples, to recognize that the salvation wrought in the cross is the Father's refusal to save us according to the world's understanding of salvation, which is that salvation depends on having more power than my enemies."

That may not say it all, but it says an awful lot. I have a feeling I'm going to be spending time with these books long after I've finished reading them.

Friday Songbook: On the Sunny Side of the Street

Let's see, what have we covered so far in the songbook series:

Brother, Can you spare a Dime, by Gorney and Harburg (performed by Dr. John)
I Thought about You, by Johnny Mercer (performed by Billie Holiday)
April in Paris, by Duke and Harburg (performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong)
The Very Thought of You, by Ray Noble (performed by Billie Holiday)
It's Only a Paper Moon, by Arlen and Harburg (performed by James Taylor)
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, by Sherwin, Strachey and Maschwitz (sung by Mel Torme)

These tunes of "the great American songbook" frequently run through my mind, and almost every day I find myself whistling one old chestnuts or another. The song I've been whistling lately is Sunny Side of the Street. This may just be my favorite popular song ever. It was written in 1930 by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, and it really represents the dominant theme of Depression era music. Namely, keep your chin up. This melody manages to be both sprightly and bluesy at the same time in the hands of the great Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee:

Wednesday Book Report

I haven't read a great book lately. I mean, a really great book. The last really great novel I read was They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell.

I've put down a few books lately without finishing them. Dancing in the Dark was one. I had high hopes for that one, but it turned out to be rather heavy-handed literary criticism for the most part.

So I turned to a fantasy novel I'd picked up at a library sale a while back (costing me a nickel per book or something like that): Talon of the Silver Hawk, by Raymond Feist. It was pretty awful, juvenile stuff. I might have liked I when I was fourteen, reading all those John Carter of Mars novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Still working on the stash of books I bought from the library book sale, I have now turned to Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. This fantasy has what the Feist book did not, a fascinating story, and fine sentence-making. If I like this book in the end as much as I like its beginning, I'll be reading a lot more Robinson.

Finally, I sent for Tim Keller's King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. Even just the title has me intrigued.

Yet another church visit

I went to church again yesterday.

This time I continued with my plan to visit every church within walking distance of my home (walking distance defined as, oh, 20 minutes or so). This particular church has a "traditional" early service and then a contemporary service. I chose the early service, as the traditions can be a little more interesting to me than the familiar contemporary style.

Turns out that, when you do this bifurcating of traditional and contemporary, you get all the old people in one service, all the young'uns in the other. The congregation was almost entirely elderly folks in suits. The smell of perfume suffused the atmosphere of the sanctuary.

A fairly large sanctuary, the 50 to 60 attendees sat almost entirely in the back half of the church. The worship had an old time tent-meeting feel! An old fellow with a great voice led us in the singing (he reminded me of George Beverley Shea), to the accompaniment of a sort of honky-tonkin' piano that sounded almost like one of those old player pianos in Western saloons (in the movies, anyway).

We sang "Power in the Blood" ("There is power power wonder working power / in the blood of Jesus") and a typically lugubrious "Old Rugged Cross."

Now, the walls of the sanctuary were stenciled with life-size images of comic-book superheroes: Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Captain America. It seems the preacher was in the midst of a preaching series called "Superheroes of the Bible." This week's superhero was the good Samaritan.

The pastor was a big disheveled emotional guy who reminded me of an old friend of mine. I liked him immediately. His sermon was introduced by a video (oh, the ever-presence of screens, screens everywhere . . . I vote for a trend to de-technologize church!) which told the parable of the good Samaritan with a grinding guitar accompaniment that struck me as odd after the all the old-school hymn singing. Anyway, the sermon was a heart-felt plea for compassion and generosity, with the good Samaritan as our model.

I got to thinking how nice it would have been to just sing the songs, and even a bunch more, then maybe hear the reading of the parable and pray for one another, and then have lunch. Is all this sermonizing really all that important? Based on my experience lately, I'd have to wonder what good it's all doing. Not that I'd argue against anything this preacher said. And I have to admit, I'm not nearly as compassionate and generous as the Samaritan in the parable was. Not. That dude puts me to shame. Which is, I think, sort of the point.

Well, I'm all sermoned out, maybe. I've got plans to visit another church next week, and undoubtedly will hear another sermon that pivots on a preacher-ly "illustration," a personal story, a YouTube video, and a charge to the congregation. Is it wrong for me to just want to quiet down, think, pray, and maybe wait on God for a little while. How busy and bustling church is, and then how like a classroom full of bored students and a teacher who simply seems to be trying his best to rouse a roomful of sleepers.

Quotatious

If I were a pastor, I would want to preach in the spirit of the New Covenant, inviting everyone in the congregation to see the heart of God revealed in the cross of Christ. I would encourage them to interpret all of life’s hardships not as problems to fix or struggles to relieve or pain to deaden, but as important elements in a larger story that all God’s children long to tell. I would urge them to accept wherever they are on the journey, whether happy or miserable, as the place where God will meet them, where He loves them, where He will continue to work in them. And I would offer my own life as a growing, struggling, sometimes painfully unattractive example of what doing that might mean. I would beg God to deliver me from Calvary-denying sermons, which leave people feeling scolded and pressured….I would ask God to never let me again preach an Eden-denying message where psychological insights replace biblical wisdom in a misguided effort to repair emotional damage when the real problem is a serpent-inspired determination to experience life without God.

Larry Crabb "Shattered Dreams"

Murder-Song Monday: Henry Lee

'Henry Lee.' This song appears on Crooked Still's most recent album, but I've already featured them once in this series, so here's Nick Cave doing the dirty work. Scottish ballads filtered down along the Appalachians from Nova Scotia to Georgia, and settled in the dells and hollows like dry leaves. Amazing how many songs tell this story of love and murder.

3 Things

1. An appreciation of the great Nat King Cole.

2. The popularity of Joyce Meyer has long been disturbing to me. As in, it's disturbing that she's running a profitable publishing and public-speaking empire, because she's teaching a concoction made up of one part extremely mashed and disfigured gospel, and nine parts self-help pop-therapy and prosperity pandering. Chaplain Mike chimes in brilliantly regarding her latest piece of egregious opportunism disguised as "wisdom."

3. And a poem by Louise Bogan: "The Dragonfly"

You are made of almost nothing
But of enough
To be great eyes
And diaphanous double vans;
To be ceaseless movement,
Unending hunger
Grappling love.

Link between water and air,
Earth repels you.
Light touches you only to shift into iridescence
Upon your body and wings.

Twice-born, predator,
You split into the heat.
Swift beyond calculation or capture
You dart into the shadow
Which consumes you.

You rocket into the day.
But at last, when the wind flattens the grasses,
For you, the design and purpose stop.

And you fall
With the other husks of summer.

[HT: Anecdotal Evidence]

Friday Songbook: A Nightingale Sang . . .

A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square is definitely one of my two or three favorite lovesongs ever. Furthermore, I feel it's long overdo that I should feature the great Mel Torme in this Friday series. Listen to his enunciation, his clarity, the way he plays with the words vocally but always to enhance and elucidate the feeling of the lyric.

"our childish desire to be happy"

A. W. Tozer said:

We inhabit a world suspended halfway between heaven and hell, alienated from one and not yet abandoned to the other. By nature we are unholy and by practice unrighteous. That we are also unhappy, I repeat, is of small consequence. Our first and imperative duty is to escape the corruption which is in the world as Lot escaped the moral ruin of Sodom. It is of overwhelming importance to us that we should seek the favor of God while it is possible to find it and that we should bring ourselves under the plenary authority of Jesus Christ in complete and voluntary obedience. To do this is to invite trouble from a hostile world and to incur such unhappiness as may naturally follow. Add to this the temptations of the devil and a lifelong struggle with the flesh and it will be obvious that we will need to defer most of out enjoyments to a more appropriate time.

Against this background of fact our childish desire to be happy is seen to be a morally ugly thing, wholly foreign to the Spirit of the Man of Sorrows and contrary to the teaching and practice of His apostles.

HT: anti-itch meditation

3 more things

A nice long list of time travel books. I've always liked time travel books. The Time Machine by Wells really fried my circuits back in, oh, about the 7th or 8th grade I think.

Top 10 Classic Film Comedies for a Well-Rounded Geek. I'm not sure what's so "geeky" about this list, unless loving classic comedy makes you geeky. [OK, wait, I just looked it up. One definition at Wikipedia says this: "A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream." Hey, I guess I am kind of geeky!]

Speaking of geeky, you gotta love Towel Day.

3 Things

1. I've been looking over Questions for Church Members over at 9Marks. A lot of food for thought there. I'm not sure I agree with everything there, but it's very helpful to anyone who is looking for a church.

2. Daniel, the senior pastor of Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, says his vision statement is, ”Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.” [HT]

3. It's Harold Arlen's birthday.  An amazingly prolific "tunesmith," he composed the music for a thousand songs, including those from The Wizard of Oz. His melodies are always elegant and gentle. Here's a beauty, with lyrics by "Wizard" co-writer, Yip Harburg:

Murder-Song Monday: Barton Hollow

Is this a murder song? I believe it must be, although it's lyrics are a little obscure for me. Still, something happened, and the dude is feeling very guilty, that's clear. The duo is called The Civil Wars, and the album was produced by Charlie Peacock. I love the energetic and doomed harmony here, as well as the dreamlike imagery.

A Church Visit

I went to church today.

There are plenty I could have chosen from, and most will have very similar statements of faith, and very similar approaches to conducting a worship service. The one I attended this morning was fairly typical. A couple of big screens showing a glitzy animation behind the projected lyrics, a rock band up on a stage and the congregation, audience like, facing the band. No one questions this stagey set-up, and in truth most people do seem right at home in it. We are the audience, you are the performers. There's a guy banging away at the drums, and a guy whaling away tastefully on his electric guitar.

I liked the songs they sang, but didn't really feel I was joining my voice with others, since the band was so much louder than we "others." If you closed your eyes, hiding the silly loop of graphics on the two big screens and hiding also the performers on stage, you might be able to focus on, you know, God. This doesn't seem to be a problem for most people. Guess I'm weird.

The sermon today was part of a series to get more people to volunteer, since this is a growing church that intends now to add a third service (on Saturday evenings). So it was what I like to call a "church-maintenance service." This is where the preacher, recognizing that ministry XYZ needs more help, finds the requisite Biblical passage to preach in order to inspire more helpers.

At first I was disappointed that we had clearly chosen to visit this church on one of their church-maintenance Sundays. But I gotta tellya, the guy did a bang-up job, and by the time he was finished I wanted to jump up and volunteer as a greeter. The dude even quoted Henry V's St. Crispin's day speech at length, and with ease! In all seriousness, I loved it and thought it was a pretty fair sermon, all things considered.

But an inspirational message wears off quick. I daresay even Shakespeare's Henry V filled his outnumbered and exhausted troops with a lot of high-flown hooey that day. You may win the battle at Agincourt, and you may staff the lobby with friendly greeters, but nothing much matters if it is not Christ living his life through his people. If what the theologians call "union with Christ" is not a lived and felt reality, no inspirational rhetoric will substitute for long.

But I don't want to be harsh. The preacher is following the template he's inherited, and so is most everyone else. I also understand that my impression from one Sunday morning experience is nothing to be conclusive about. These folks are trying their best, and they believe all the things you're supposed to believe, and they're very conscientiously trying to do it all well. I'm more or less resigned to putting up with the audience-church template, and the goofy little cups of grape juice and the chicklets of "bread." And I'm delighted that the message I heard this morning was not a self-centered God-has-a-wonderful-plan message, but essentially a discipleship message. In truth, this is about the most I can expect from evangelicals in my area, methinks.

Sanctification, a strange dream, and the human condition

I posted some thoughts inspired by Isaiah 57:14-21 here, and then developed those thoughts a little more here. Today I'd like to add a few final thoughts.

I mention in the second post that our hearts harbor idols, and that these have a will-o-the-wisp nature, always inviting pursuit but never allowing capture. Idols appeal to the aspirational self, and many seem thoroughly worthy: there is the idol of beauty, the idol of respect, the idol of virtue. And a thousand more. Idols are simply the things we pursue apart from God. I said that Adam and Eve, for example, pursued personal autonomy. Control of their own destiny apart from God and his profoundly good plan for them. That pursuit and its consequences is the story of humanity.

It has often been said that the human heart is an idol factory, and by my definition that makes the human heart a frustration factory, because idols can never satisfy. When I first encountered God in a powerful way, it was as I came to the deeply frustrating dead-end of my own personal idol-chase. It was by grace that God brought me to the point of despair, because if I hadn't despaired, I'd still by chasing that elusive and misleading dream of autonomy, which leads in the end . . . I cannot say this any other way . . . straight to hell.

Another point I made in the second post, just to make sure we all understand it, is that Christians chase idols too. We do not give up on idols forever once we come to Christ. Our hearts are unwholesome. They'll never be truly undivided, this side of the Kingdom. Not even undividedly devoted to the Lord, though we might wish to give others that impression (some idols, you see, can have a very Christian veneer). The apostle Paul knew this was true about himself, and said so, so that we should not consider ourselves superior in holiness (more whole) than him.

Perhaps what sanctification really entails is a greater readiness to mistrust our hearts, recognize when we've been pursuing idols, and turn back to the One. Perhaps, by the grace of God, we are progressively less prone to chase them all the way to the point of despair. We know sooner (I hope this is so) when we've made the wrong turn, taken the wrong rode, and are sooner willing to turn back, long before reaching that bitter end.

Which brings me to my dream. I described the dream in the last post, but allow me to repeat myself:

I was walking around with a partial haircut. One half my head shaved, the other half hairy. I needed to go to a wedding, I think, so I needed to shave the rest of my head, but I couldn't find a razor, and then I did have a razor, but trying to shave with it was fruitless. It was like one of those running-in-place dreams. I just wasn't getting anywhere, and it was very frustrating.

I'm not sure that every dream we have is deeply symbolic, but I think this one was. Here's my "interpretation."

Note first: I'm needing to go to a wedding. There are many things I might say about this, but the Kingdom of God is often likened to a wedding feast in the Scriptures [see, for example, Matthew 22:1-24, and of course Rev. 19:7].

Now, to go to this wedding I need to shave my head. I believe a shaved head is a symbol of penitence. Remember Isaiah 57, the passage that started this whole conversation, where the backsliding heart comes to the point of contrition. Nothing can make our wayward heart sremorseful other than a view of God's nature, his glory and grace and persistent love for his rebel children. And it is the contrite heart that receives comfort from God.

This kind of remorse, then, is a very positive, a very needed thing. The trouble with us is, as I've said, we have divided hearts. Well, the trouble with me! I half-ray contrite, half-way still pursuing alternate goals. I want God and my idol--both/and--but God won't have us that way. And I know this intellectually, but so what! A contrite heart is not a theological concept, it is instead the deep recognition of the nature of ourselves, the lives we've been leading, and the nature of God.

So in my dream I'm half-way there, I'm divided. I'm half-penitent, and so not able to attend the wedding. I need wholeness, I need to shave the whole head, and so I'm looking for a razor with which to shave the rest of my head and thus be able to go to the feast. And I can't find one . . . and then when I do, it doesn't work. The overall feeling pervading this dream is desperate frustration.

I take it as a warning. A grace-filled warning. You can go the way you're going, son, but it will not prepare you for the wedding feast I have in store.

It is the grace of God toward his children to open our hearts to the good news that the lives we've been leading, the path we've been walking, leads nowhere . . . so that we won't keep walking it. See Ezekiel 33:11, for example. God sees our lives in the context of eternal things, and the destiny he has planned for us. He would give us great gifts, if we would only turn to him. [See Trevin's recent post for more on this point).

The story from Adam and Eve's eviction from the Garden to the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 is this story, this pursuit of a half-hearted people by a whole-hearted God. That's the macro-contect of your life and mind. If we were so whole-hearted (as a thousand contemporary worship songs claim), we wouldn't ever need to repent, and God wouldn't have to chase us down.

So, bottom line, I have to thank God for long nights and disturbing dreams. What you find in the Scriptures is that God is serious about this:

Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.
(Revelation 3:2 ESV)

Onward.

Theological Term of the Day: Union with Christ

I have long believed that "union with Christ" is often short-changed as a Biblical theological concept. There are far fewer books written about it, far less to-do made over it, than things like justification and sanctification, and yet these things, and indeed the whole Christian life, cannot be properly understood without it. That's why I really appreciate Justin Taylor's recent post, Union with Christ: A Crash Course.

Taylor quotes many sources, but in particular Sinclair Ferguson:

[Union with Christ] is rooted, not in humanity and their achievement of holiness or sanctification, but in what God has done in Christ, and for us in union with him. Rather than view Christians first and foremost in the microcosmic context of their own progress, the Reformed doctrine first of all sets them in the macrocosm of God’s activity in redemptive history. It is seeing oneself in this context that enables the individual Christian to grow in true holiness.

The "reformed" view is in contrast to the general run of modern evangelicalism, where the "microcosm" of the self can seem the measure of all things. That's a worldview shift that American Christianity badly needs.

Friday Songbook: It's Only a Paper Moon

I went to a chiropractor the other day, and what do you think was playing in the waiting room, but a Fats Waller tune, Honeysuckle Rose. The timelessness of this music always surprises me. It simply stays on our cultural playlist, forever.

I like Honeysuckle Rose, but that's not our song this week. For this edition of Friday Songbook I choose It's Only Paper Moon. This is another Yip Harburg lyric. It was never my intention to give special attention to Harburg-penned songs, but this is the third in this brief series so far. It all started with the iconic Brother, Can You Spare a Dime (written with Jay Gorney), and continued a couple of weeks back with April in Paris (written with Vernon Duke).

With "Paper Moon" Harburg was teamed up with the great Harold Arlen, the duo that composed the music of The Wizard of Oz. Paper Moon is another characteristic song of the 30s, both recognizing the intrinsic limitations of the "make believe," but also using its gimcrack imagery to say something about the reality of love. But something more even than love. The wished for thing here is simply to be believed in. In an era in which 25% of the workforce was unemployed, in which the fathers and "bread winners" were often on the road looking for work, and in which the fear of abandonment was very real, the singer not only sings a love song, but dreams of a time of restored faith.

This song is certainly one of my favorites, and of course there are countless wonderful versions. Most crooners have given it a sprightly beat and missed the tinge of sadness inherent in the lyrics. James Taylor captures both the sadness and the persistent hope that is a mark of this song and really of much depression-era music.

More Thoughts on the Heart ... and a dream I had last night

I woke up this morning thinking God was going to break my heart one of these days.

I don't do much self-examination. I don't really want to look into the rag-and-bone shop of my own heart. And I certainly don't want to do that in public. Here, look what I found in my heart. Ugly!

But I'm still thinking about Isaiah 57:14-21. God speaks of the heart often in His Word, and He speaks of it there to Isaiah. He speaks of a backsliding heart ("backsliding in the way of his own heart," v.17), a contrite heart ("contrite: 1. caused by or showing sincere remorse. 2. filled with a sense of guilt and the desire for atonement; penitent"), and a comforted heart (producing praise, v.19).

Everybody has idols. I take that as a given. These idols live in our hearts. We create space for them there, like a shelf a bowling trophies in the basement.

But maybe that's not the right simile. Too static, too stationary, too dead. Idols move. Think will-o-the-wisp. Something you chase but never really catch. Producing, not praise, but frustration, despair.

Example: Adam and Eve chased the idol of personal autonomy. That's a motif of the Scriptures, is it not? People chase after personal autonomy, freedom from restraint, but in fact they never really find it. We never catch up to that idol. We just go on chasing and chasing, our hearts set on something that it cannot catch, but the chasing--which is nothing if not habit-forming--can nevertheless occupy us day and night. It can make us very cold and hard, or wily, deeply deceptive. Think Frodo and the ring.

The "backsliding" heart is the idol-chasing heart. The contrite heart is the heart of one who, having chased and chased, now falls to his knees in hopelessness, realizing all the damage his chasing has done. The contrite heart is the broken heart.

And to this heart God promises comfort. And the God-comforted heart is the heart that draws near to God. The heart that worships.

I said in a recent post that we are all somewhere on this spectrum. We are all either backsliding, broken, or drawing near. But we have to break. To lose faith in our idols can seem a devastating experience. This is the kind of heart-breaking that only God can do. It is an aspect of his mercy, but it burns. "As on who has come through fire," is, I believe, an apt description of the way we all experience salvation.

One more point. And this is the point I really wanted to make from the start. This "breaking" is not a one-time experience that leads us to God once-and-for-all, from whose side we never again will stray. Nope. On this side of the Kingdom, it's just never going to work that way. In the kingdom of God there will be no false idols, no turning away, no thirsting for water from other wells than the well of the one who sees you and knows you through and through. But until then, given the nature of our hearts, even the best of us--the model believer--flees from God and after idols, hides in the shrubbery with some paltry leaves covering his sin when God comes calling. This is important. We are not the lovers of God that we think we are, that we often portray ourselves to be. As others have said, our hearts our idol factories, and it is the mercy of God to break our hearts, for they need breaking, again and again.

So, when we pray for the Kingdom, we should realize that this is the way it comes. We are all traitors at heart.

So, anyway, last night I had this crazy dream. I was walking around with a partial haircut. One half my head shaved, the other half hairy. I needed to go to a wedding, I think, so I needed to shave the rest of my head, but I couldn't find a razor, and then I did have a razor, but trying to shave with it was fruitless. It was like one of those running-in-place dreams. I just wasn't getting anywhere, and it was very frustrating.

And then I woke up, and I was thinking to myself, God's going to have to break that hearts of yours. Soon.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Stratton on Film

Gary David Stratton of Two-Handed Warriors writes intelligently about the movies, a fairly rare thing. His latest is on Casablanca, which is certainly one of my favorites. Stratton's extended 3-part take on It's A Wonderful Life is also excellent (part 1, part 2, and part 3). Actually, this stuff is brilliant. I'd like to write about classic film here at some point, and hope to do so with one-tenth the keen perception that Stratton has.

All of Stratton's posts on film are collected at Worldview, Film, and the Power of Story. Good stuff.

What I'm reading . . .

Picked this one up at the local free book emporium: Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.

Murder-Song Monday: The Banks of the Ohio

You can find lots of old bluegrass versions of this song by the likes of Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, the Louvin Brothers, Jim & Jesse, etc. All I can say is, courtship in "the old South" must have been a touch-and-go affair for the women! I like Joan Baez's version, so she gets the nod.

From Today's Lectionary Reading: The Problem of the Human Heart

In Isaiah 57:14-21 we see a kind of universal drama depicted. It is the drama of a holy God, and an unholy people. The holy God has just cause for anger, but He says, 'I will not contend forever, I will not always be angry." (v.15)

Why? Because it would break the back of his people. His anger would consume them. "The breath of life" would grow faint in them. (v.16) This is not what God desires. God's anger is just, but his desire is for a people.

So he says, though I abide in a high and holy place, I will be with the contrite and lowly spirit. In fact, this is the "thesis" of the entire passage. A holy God will not necessarily be aloof, distant from his people due to their sin. He will come and be with the contrite of spirit.

[Here are a couple of supporting verses: Ps. 34:18, Ps. 138:6]

Now, verse 17 is very interesting to me.

Because of the iniquity of his unjust gain I was angry,
I struck him; I hid my face and was angry,
but he went on backsliding in the way of his own heart.

This is the Biblical story in a nutshell. The anger of God caused people to "backslide," which I take to mean draw away from God rather than near. In other words, the situation was only getting worse! [By the way, this tells you something about trying to use anger as a form of coercion (in families, the workplace, etc.). It doesn't work.]

Note: broadly speaking, this is the trajectory of just about every story line ever conceived. There is a problem. The problem gets worse. The problem here, in a nutshell, is that we are all backsliders. What is to be done? Or, in other words, "Who shall save us from this body of death?"

Note also: two kinds of hearts are mentioned here. A backsliding heart, and a contrite heart. The key question might be, how is a heart transformed from a backsliding heart to a contrite heart? From a heart that draws back from God, hiding itself (think Gen. 3:8), to a contrite heart, drawing near to God? If itt is not anger that will do this, then what? Answer: it is simply the mercy of God.

The transformation of hearts is a God-thing. It all hangs upon the word "but" in verse 18.

I have seen his ways, but I will heal him;
I will lead him and restore comfort to him and his mourners,
creating the fruit of the lips.

Now, again, did the backslider's heart grow contrite because of the anger of God? Of course not. God's anger only caused more backsliding. Did something else cause the contrition, something apart from the action of God, such as (for example) an apologetics discussion at Starbucks? Not likely.

Instead, God simply finds the backslider, has mercy on him, leads him, restores him, and thereby provokes in him (creates) fruitful lips! The author of Hebrews gives us a little indication of what that fruit might be:

Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. (Hebrews 13:15 ESV)

It is God's mercy to break our hearts. Then to draw near and heal, comfort, and restore, producing on our lips the fruit of praise. This is the action of God in and among his people, always. This is life. We are caught up in this action, located somewhere on this trajectory from backsliding to contrition to praise, at every moment of our lives.

Final point: the New Testament locates this heart-transforming action of God among His wayward people in the ministry of Jesus. In the ministry of Jesus God once and for all effectively deals with the problem of a backsliding people. The plan of God to draw a people to himself through mercy--through mercy!--is fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus heals, comforts, produces praise. He breaks hearts and restores them. He fulfills these promises of God, bringing the Good News and confirming it forever by his death and resurrection. He is the way.

Preacher, if you were ever to preach Isaiah 57, don't let your sermon end with a call to contrition. Therefore, brethren, let us all have contrite hearts! That's not going to do a thing. Instead point your people to Jesus as God's provision, His solution, to a problem that only He could solve.

Books and Movies

So I like the way the blogging has gone in the past month. I think I posted more in January than any month previously, and I liked the tone and the range of subject. I still want to post more frequently on the books I'm reading, and maybe once in a while find something intelligent to say about the movies I've been watching. For instance...

Books:

My latest novel is called Five Black Ships, the story of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe as told by his jester! Didn't know he'd brought a jester along, did you? I don't know if he really did, but the book is pretty exciting. Out of print now, only available in used copies on Amazon.

I've also started reading a couple of biographies, one about Frank Sinatra called Frank: The Voice, and the other about Mickey Mantle, called The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of Americas's Childhood. I'm guessing I'll mostly just scan the Sinatra book, but delve into the Mantle biography.

I'm still reading Randy Alcorn's If God is Good, which I am liking a lot, but obviously it's not really catching me up, or I'd be much further along than I am.

Among other things I'm going to try to get to is an old book of short stories by Katherine Anne Porter called The Leaning Tower and a little memoir by the great nautical historian Samuel Eliot Morison, called One Boy's Boston 1887-1901.

Movies:

Been taking in musicals lately. This is spurred on by my desire to learning about the great songwriters. The most recent three are Funny Girl, West Side Story, and A Star is Born. West Side Story is one of the greatest movies ever made, excellent at all levels.

My favorite movie bloggers, by the way, are Macguffin Movies, Another Old Movie Blog, Out of the Past, and Classic Film Boy's Movie Paradise.

More on Christian Ambition

Nanci quoted it, and I'm going to as well. The blogger is Dirty Shame (great name for a blog, by the way), the post is Apologia:

I was raised a pastor's son, spent quite some time in my father's footsteps, and have lived the last few years, still credentialed, but off to the side. This is what I see - roadkill, the Church is strewn with it, the air acrid, the ground stained. But we just keep on truckin', pursuing the visions in our own heads, barreling down the highway in our pink cadillacs of missional love, forgetting what lies behind, no turning back, no turning back. Everyone seems heavenbent on being part of a movement, if not leading one. I'm sure they're out there, but I can't hear a single voice interested in a stop-and-back-up-ment, maybe a pull-over-on-the-shoulder-ment. If we just keep moving the cries are muffled, hardly a whisper. We've got places to go, busy, busy, busy.

This touches on what I wrote the other day concerning Christian ambition. We have a tendency to honor personal ambition--just like the culture--as long as it has a "missional" sheen to it. I know plenty of people who try to hitch these two--ambition and mission--and hope that the kingdom is served as well as the ego. In other words, hope that we can serve God and be "successful" (in the commonplace sense of that word) at the same time. But it seems to me the early disciples gave up ambition for mission. They didn't try to serve both at once. In no way were anyone of them a success-story, a model of the can-do spirit, etc.

Just thinking out loud here.

Friday Songbook: The Very Thought of You

Like many in my generation, I grew up with an onerous level of exposure to 1) second-hand smoke, and 2) easy listening radio. ELR represented the degeneration of Swing Era music, the paunchy middle-age of the 30s jitter-buggers. In ther 60s every radio market had at least one such station, and its rating were usually pretty high. They played Como, Mathis, Sinatra, Doris Day, Nat Cole, etc. The preference was for the bland, the unimaginative, and the saccharine.

Some of that music can still make me cringe even now (and laugh, and then cringe again, harder). There has always been a trend, when it comes to the great songs of that era (by Rodgers, Arlen, Carmichael, etc.) to pack in the lush strings, the emphatic vocal climax, the grandiose emotionalism, all of which struck us kids as incredibly false. Our parents were listening to utter trash!

But songs that seemed utterly saccharine in the wrong hands became lovely sound-poems in the hands of those few who could "interpret" them with respect and humility. Here are two versions of Ray Noble's The Very Thought of You, first Billie Holiday's verison from the 30s with its easy swinging pace, then Nat Cole's from the late 50s, which despite the often over-used string section seems at once lush and yet still somehow understated. Holliday was an ensemble vocalist, "playing" the song along with the other musicians, while Cole typified the crooner era, the singer as a kind of romantic hero, out in front of the band, whose task is simply to provide the moody backdrop. I love both versions.





[Update: I just listened to Shirley Horn's version. It's pretty amazing. Again, an interpreter that really lets the lyric breathe.]

On the Nature of God's Calling

A church in my area is having a sort of testimony festival. Everyone is encouraged to come and share a testimony, thus encouraging folks and getting people saved. Yup, that's what they're saying.

Now, me being a snarky son-of-a-gun, my first reaction is to think about how painful that would be to sit through, and my slightly guilt-driven second reaction is to try to be generous and think how encouraged lots of folks might be by it all.

Then again . . . we have Mark Galli writing about testimony at Christianity Todayin an articled entitled Are We Transformed Yet?

I think one of the most spiritually dangerous practices today is encouraging people—in small groups or in front of the church or even in print—to talk about how God has transformed them. They are told to explain how they used to have a bad temper or a problem with porn or were stingy or had one bad habit or another—and through prayer, effort, and grace, they have been changed. The formal glory all goes to God, of course, but the focus unfortunately is often on the self—on how I have been changed.

Our desire to be thought well of, to be recognized, to garner accolades, is very strong. Galli's next paragraph is deadly accurate.

Those who share such testimonies cannot but be tempted, as was the Pharisee in Jesus' parable [Luke 18:9-14]: "Lord, I thank thee that I am transformed, that I am not like this untransformed fellow next to me." And those who hear such testimonies find themselves praying, "Lord, why am I still struggling with this and that; why am I not like this transformed person?"

Galli's ultimate point is that we ought to take the spotlight off ourselves and mostly keep it off ourselves.

This is in line with something Piper said recently. Piper refers to the writings of the 19th century Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne:

God had given McCheyne the gospel key to pursuing personal holiness.

He received it through the teaching of Thomas Chalmers. Chalmers was very concerned about excessive introspection in the pursuit of holiness. He knew that a believer cannot make progress in holiness without basing it on the assurance of salvation. And yet the effort to look into our sinful hearts for some evidences of grace usually backfires. [HT: Justin Taylor]

That's so with me, anyway. If I look into my own sanctification I have a tendency to whine, "What sanctification?" Because I don't actually see it.

Which brings me to Chaplain Mike's response to Galli's article. Mike speaks of the need for humility.

Humility is not self-loathing, but self-forgetfulness. We look away from ourselves to Christ.

But "self-forgetfulness" is not our default position. Not only that, but it does seem that most of our best-selling (best-marketed) Christian books and music encourages self-focus, not self-forgetting. That's a pretty strong indictment, but it's true.

All this is another reason that evangelical ambition can be so dangerous. The holy-seeming desire to do great things for God--the very basis of most youth-ministry--makes us deeply dissatisfied with the ministry of the ordinary (sometimes known as "the daily grind"). We want our personal story to be an outstanding example of sanctification. We want to impress. We'll give the glory to God, of course, as long as someone notices. In fact, I have seen plenty of folks work hard at their "Ministry" to the neglect of their families, all the while saying they're devoting themselves to the work of God. They came up with a clever name for their Ministry, printed up the three-color brochures, learned public speaking, established a glossy-edgy website, and yet their families were tragically neglected. But the "minister" received lots of accolades in the meantime.

As we "grow in Godliness," does that necessarily mean we grow into church-sanctioned ministries (worship leaders, small-group leaders, this-or-that leaders, etc.)? Or does it mean this: we're quietly loving the people in our lives more, even sacrificially, but not even noticing. We're praying more for the needs around us, which we seem to notice more now, but our prayers are mostly private. Meanwhile, we're probably pointing to ourselves less, and to Jesus more. We're more sorry for our own entrenched-seeming sinfulness, and thus more glad of God's grace. We're more satisfied in the given day, in the small, the local, the moment to which God has called us, the now.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

It's not heroic. It's nothing to write home about. You're mostly anonymous, and there is no great sense of joining a movement, no shouting, no glory. You're just living in your place, getting rooted, being reliable. You're mostly just walking, almost never soaring. Your life is a folk-song, not a symphony. And someday angels will welcome you home.

Also note:

At Gospel Centric: Examining the Desire for Christian Leadership

And let me end with something I just found over at Challies.com:

I sometimes think that the very essence of the whole Christian position and the secret of a successful spiritual life is just to realize two things … I must have complete, absolute confidence in God and no confidence in myself. —D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones