Here’s my annual Thanksgiving post.
Even in tumultuous times, we have much to be thankful for.
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On Memorial Day
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
John McCrae
Photo by Terence Burke on Unsplash
On Aspirations in the New Year
In my previous post I noted the importance of paying attention to the little opportunities for compromise that our culture routinely sets before us. As Solomon noted, even the little foxes can plunder the vines (SS 2.15).
I’d like to extend that thought to the positive side.
With the New Year, most of us—for completely illogical reasons, since calendrically speaking there’s nothing particularly historically significant about the annual day we call “January 1”—give some thought to turning over a page of self-improvement, sometimes including resolutions for change in the new year.
We ought to do that continuously, but whatever. :-)
I recently came across an essay by the old Keswick pastor and devotional writer F. B. Meyer (incidentally, the man who introduced D. L. Moody to Great Britain), called “The Common Task,” that we might consider as we seek self-improvement.
Meyer notes that lots of people are convinced—and some of them rightly—that their station in life is beneath their abilities—as he put it, that one’s “life afford[s] no outlet for the adequate exercise of his powers.” He offers some mollifying and sharpening thoughts to those in that situation.
I should note that Meyer is clearly not suggesting apathy or lack of aspiration; his biography demonstrates the kind of productivity that evidences devotion, effort, and energy. By all means, take a survey of your gifts and abilities, and seek ways to steward them for the greatest good in the world.
Be all that you can be.
But most of us know that we can aspire to things that we will never reach. Only 45 people in history have ever been POTUS; millions of others haven’t, but not for lack of thinking about it. You’re probably not going to be a star athlete, and I’m most certainly never going to be a fighter pilot, thanks to a bum ear—and the grace of God.
What do you do with the Now, even as you aspire to the Then?
Meyer offers several observations, from which I’ve selected and reworded for the current century.
- God has a plan for you, and it will happen. God is attentive to your situation, committed to your fulfillment, and able to bring it to pass. You are where and what you are by his benevolent plan, which includes an eternal future.
- No matter what your circumstances are right now, you can fulfill your most important goal—Christlikeness—in the midst of them. In Meyer’s words, “We ought … to be very careful how we fulfill the common tasks of daily life. We are making the character in which we have to spend eternity.”
- Doing anything well—even trivial things—makes a difference.
- The excellence you develop prepares you for doing greater things later. “You cannot be brave in a crisis if you are habitually a coward. You cannot be generous with a fortune if you are a miser with a limited income.”
- The way you handle small responsibilities is evidence of who you truly are. And God notices.
“There are great tasks to be fulfilled in eternity: angels to be judged; cities to be ruled; perhaps worlds to be evangelized. For these, suitable agents will be required: those who can rule, because they have served; those who can command, because they have obeyed; those who can save others, because they never saved themselves. Perhaps even now, our Heavenly Father is engaged in seeking those among us who can fill these posts. And he is seeking them, not amongst such as are filling high positions in the eyes of men, but in the ranks of such as are treading the trivial round and fulfilling the common task.”
In this New Year,
- aspire;
- plan;
- steward your abilities;
- and serve, with diligence and energy, wherever the Master places you.
Happy new year.
Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash
On Joseph
Christmas is tomorrow. Since my Christmas post for last year was about Mary, it makes sense that this year I should say something about Joseph.
We know precious little about him. If, as most scholars believe, the genealogy in Matthew 1 is that of Joseph, then he was the royal descendant of David in his generation—the heir to the throne of Israel. I suspect he knew that; the Jews kept track of such things, as is evidenced by the simple fact that the genealogy is produced in Matthew 1. If he was the heir, he certainly knew that he was.
But he also knew that he would never be king. First, because Rome. Caesar Augustus would never tolerate such a thing; he had installed a puppet, Herod, and called him “king,” but Herod wasn’t even really Jewish—he was Idumaean—and the Jews hated him as an interloper and collaborator with the hated Romans.
There was another reason Joseph knew he would never be king. God had cursed his ancestor, Jehoiachin (Jeconiah, or just Coniah), the last Davidic king of Judah (Jer 22.30), saying that none of his offspring would ever rule. Some scholars think that God reversed that curse with Zerubbabel (Hag 2.23), but Zerubbabel never ruled, nor did any of his offspring clear up to Joseph’s day.
So Joseph is a carpenter (Mt 13.55), or perhaps a mason. He works with his hands, in the village of Nazareth, in Israel’s backwater (Jn 1.46).
And that’s that.
Under circumstances we’re not told, he becomes engaged to a Jewish girl. She gives evidence of true godliness. He’ll be able to support her and their eventual children. This will be good.
And then.
She’s pregnant.
He didn’t do it.
It all comes crashing down. Yet another curse.
He can’t sensibly give his life to a woman who has so deeply and thoroughly deceived him. The Law gives him an out, however; he can “divorce” her for fornication. The legal penalty is stoning, but he doesn’t want a big scene, or even personal vengeance. We’ll just handle this quietly and move on.
Like Mary, as it turns out, Joseph doesn’t understand either. It’s not what he thinks.
After 400 years of silence, God steps in to ensure the success of the hinge point of all history.
Joseph is asleep—that’s surprising in itself—and God sends a messenger in his dreams.
It’s not what you think, Joseph. Mary is not unfaithful. God is doing a work, a great work, an epochal work. Her child will save his people from their sins.
You need to adopt him.
Like Mary, Joseph knows what the social consequences of that will be. There will be a community wink and nod—we thought that’s who the culprit was. Joseph’s reputation will be ruined. What of his business? How will he support his family?
Adopt the child.
Why is that so important?
Remember the curse?
No biological son of Jehoiachin—or of Joseph—will ever sit on David’s throne. But only a descendant of David—through Solomon—can sit there.
Mary, too, is descended from David, but through his son Nathan, not Solomon (Lk 3). Her son has no claim to the throne by bloodline.
But if Joseph … adopts … the boy …
everything changes.
And there, sitting on his mat, in the dark of night, in a backwater village, a carpenter makes his decision.
He’ll trust, and obey.
Like millions of others before and since.
But unlike any of those others, at the key hinge point of all salvation history.
Next to the obedience of the Son Himself, the most important act of obedience ever.
And hardly anybody even noticed.
Joseph shows up one more time in the Bible, when Jesus is twelve. But after that, he disappears. No one knows what else this critically important man did or how or where he died.
_____
I’m not much for statements about what I’ll do when I get to heaven. I think the Lamb will be the focus of all of it.
But I hope I’ll have a chance to find Joseph and say thanks.
On Thanksgiving
Here’s my annual Thanksgiving post.
Even in tumultuous times, we have much to be thankful for.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
On Memorial Day
In the US, today is Memorial Day, the day when we remember those who have given “the last full measure of devotion,” who have died in the military service of our country. In an odd way, it’s a reminder of both the brokenness of our world—the ongoing frequency of war and the toll it takes on entire generations of families who have lost loved ones either to death or to deep psychological scars—and the pervasiveness of the image of God, reflected in the courage and self-sacrifice of those who serve.
There’s no more Christ-like action than to offer your life for those you love (Jn 15.13). I suppose no soldier actually intends to sacrifice his life; to paraphrase General George Patton, you win not so much by dying for your country as by making the other guy die for his country. That doesn’t lessen the significance of their sacrifice; every soldier is prepared to make that sacrifice, even as he takes steps to minimize the likelihood that he’ll have to.
Some of those who died never saw it coming and felt no pain in that moment. Others, however, made a deliberate choice to die in order to save their buddies, some by falling on a grenade, others in other ways. In that last moment, they were well past the point of “taking a risk”; they acted intentionally to give their lives for those they loved.
I have known men who saw such things—men who were the loved ones for whom others intentionally took the proverbial—or not at all proverbial—bullet. Most of them never, or almost never, talked about it. These were strong men, the Greatest Generation, tough and hard, but not hard enough, not tough enough, to hold back tears when they spoke of such things.
They came back, carrying heavy invisible loads of survivors’ guilt, and they paid private visits to the families of those who had died, and the ones I knew lived the rest of their lives in the memories of their heroes, their saviors. Indeed, living their lives, the lives paid for with the lifeblood of their friends, was the only chance they had to make some sort of repayment.
And live they did. They raised families, they worked hard, they formed the backbone of the greatest nation of all time. In the main, the defects of that nation today—and there are many—cannot be laid at their feet. They lived well, honoring the sacrifices of their unimaginably brave and devoted buddies.
And some of them, those who were able, have stood at the graves of their friends, heads bowed, deep in grief, wishing for a chance, just a moment, to speak one more time with their savior, to express their gratitude, to tell him about the life they’ve lived and the good they’ve done and the joys they’ve seen, to assure him that they’ve tried to make his sacrifice Worth It. And to say, through tears, how much they wish that he could have experienced those things with them.
We stand in their shoes.
Someone has died for us as well.
He did see it coming, for all eternity, and he planned it himself as the just means of justifying, not his friends, but those who hated him without reason and by their own choice.
It was not painless. Indeed, the form of his death may well have been the most painful ever devised, and the most shameful as well.
How shall we then live?
We don’t need to stand by his grave and weep, because there is no grave, because there is no body. Unlike our honored dead, this Savior emerged from his grave, taking death by the throat and squeezing every bit of power and authority out of it, crushing the serpent’s head.
He is not there. He is risen. As. He. Said.
How shall we then live?
To the fullest. In honor of his sacrifice, in eternal service to him. This do in remembrance.
Photo by Selena Morar on Unsplash
On Easter
Since this is my last post before Good Friday and Easter, I’d like to interrupt the current series for a meditation.
I’ve appreciated the writing of American writer John Updike for many years. I think my interest was first stirred when I learned that he had written a series of short stories set in the fictional town of Olinger, PA, in a book appropriately called Olinger Stories. I later came across his short story “Pigeon Feathers,” the story of a boy’s crisis of faith through the influence of H. G. Wells and a defective local Lutheran minister, which was resolved through the death of a simple barn pigeon. The last sentence of that story really got me.
Eventually I came across his poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” which I offer here as a meditation. I don’t believe anything I can say could improve on what he has already said.
He is risen. Indeed.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
by John Updike
Make no
mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and
fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in
the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the
slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with
hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of
beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Photo by Lindsey Garcia on Unsplash
On a New Year
This is my 65th New Year. The first few I was completely unaware of, but since then, like a lot of other people, I’ve enjoyed the sense of excitement and optimism that our culture associates with the date. There’s something bracing about turning the page, starting out fresh, doing things better this time around.
Sometimes those among us who have half-empty glasses feel the need to point out a couple of things about the new year—as a public service, of course—
- There’s really no such thing as a new start, you know. We carry with us the consequences of our previous sins and failures and misjudgments.
- If the past is any guide, your good intentions are going to fade in a few days, and statistics show that pretty soon you’re going to be back in the same old rut.
As someone whose glass is perpetually half full—with contents that are quite tasty, thanks—I’ll observe that while those two statements are technically true, they’re practically false by virtue of their incompleteness. Let me explain.
First, it’s true that we carry with us the consequences of our past failures. The founder of my university used to say that if an inebriated bar patron loses an eye in a bar fight, and then gets gloriously converted, he’ll be forgiven, but he’ll never get his eye back. There are consequences of our sin that are inescapable.
True enough. But let’s not forget that he does get gloriously converted, and that’s nothing to slough over. And with conversion comes a whole raft of change and empowerment that will certainly affect the path that the convert takes for the rest of his life.
So yes, you do bring some baggage into this new year, and you can’t pretend that the baggage is weightless. But if you’re a believer, you have the Spirit of God indwelling you, changing your thinking, enabling you to act on that new way of thinking, and surely and powerfully bringing you, over time, into conformity with the Son of God (2Co 3.18). This new year is another step in that sure process.
Divine enablement is a powerful, powerful thing. If your New Year’s resolutions involve spiritual progress, they come with serious momentum behind them.
Now about that second point. Let me note first that statistics don’t “show” anything about the future. They show tendencies about past activities. But rare things do happen.
It’s demonstrably true that most people accomplish less toward their New Year’s resolutions than they intend. But that says nothing about how you’ll do on yours. The fact is that a minority of people do make and maintain significant changes. Somebody’s going to succeed; why can’t you be part of that group? Set reasonable goals, lay out a plan, pray for grace, and go for it.
Maybe you’ll accomplish less than you intend. Fine. But you’ll accomplish something. Refer to point 1.
So much for the naysayers.
My experience also tells me that some new years seem to hold more promise for change than others. In my lifetime, the Big One was Y2K, which involved the potential End of Civilization As We Know It and turned out to be, well, a dud. (Yeah, I filled some containers with water so we’d at least be able to flush the toilet after the End. Can’t hurt to make simple provisions.)
This one is 2020, which is a new decade, and a balanced number, and carries the connotation of clear vision, so who knows? Might be a big year.
But we make too big a deal about Big Years.
Of course our lives include major events—birth, marriage, parenthood, maybe a championship of something, or some other form of public recognition—but the important stuff, the really important stuff, is typically all about simple consistency and attentiveness and faithfulness. The wedding is a Big Deal, but the marriage involves simple daily kindness, gentleness, and thoughtfulness. The birth of your child is a Big Deal, but parenting is a daily slog that is sometimes difficult and frustrating but in the end leaves delightful memories.
So this year, steward your goals, and make them achievable. Make them less about the fireworks and more about faithfulness in the shadows. And watch God keep his promises for your growth in him.
Happy New Year.
Photo by madeleine ragsdale on Unsplash
On Mary
As my Christmas post this year, I’d like to share some thoughts about Mary.
The first thing I notice about her, which may surprise some people, is how ordinary she is. Like you and me, she has difficulty understanding and even accepting God’s plan. Like any other woman, she’s puzzled by Gabriel’s announcement that she is to have a son (Lk 1.34). I’m not criticizing her; my point is that her response is completely understandable—completely ordinary. At the visit to the Temple for the baby’s circumcision, she’s surprised by Simeon’s exalted blessing over the child (Lk 2.33). When Jesus is 12, she questions his respect for her and Joseph, drawing a mild rebuke (Lk 2.48-49). At the wedding where Jesus will perform his first recorded miracle, she appears to have priorities that her son needs to correct (Jn 2.3-4). And in the most surprising episode of all, Mark, writing under Peter’s direction, seems to suggest that Mary and her other sons thought Jesus was mentally unbalanced (Mk 3.21, 31)—something consistent with John’s direct statement that during his earthly ministry, Jesus’ brothers did not believe on him (Jn 7.5).
Mary appears to respond to her unique situation pretty much as we would. It’s all pretty confusing; there’s a lot she doesn’t appear to understand.
There’s no evidence in the Scripture that Mary herself is immaculately conceived, or that she was perpetually a virgin—as though sex isn’t something really holy people do (Heb 13.4)—or that she is sinless. Yes, she is said to be “full of grace” (Lk 1.28), a statement that has given rise to the idea of a “treasury of merit” into which she and other “saints” have deposited (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1477); but the same Greek expression (charitoo) is used of all believers over in Eph 1.6. We’re all “full of grace,” by God’s grace.
So she’s ordinary, like us.
But.
In her confusion and wonder, she trusts God and consequently pleases him.
When told she’s going to have a child out of wedlock without having done anything wrong, she agrees to the arrangement (Lk 1.38). She knew there would be significant negative social consequences for this; virgin births were no more common in her day than they are in ours. Nobody would believe her. Indeed, 30 or more years later Jesus’ enemies threw his “illegitimacy” back in his face (Jn 8.41).
She treasured Jesus’ words even in confrontational situations (Lk 2.51). After her son’s mild rebuke at the wedding in Cana, she instructed the servants to hear and obey him (Jn 2.5).
She was a woman of grace and dignified accession to the will of God.
And where did that come from?
We don’t know anything about Mary’s childhood or upbringing, but we can see evidences of it in her speech. When we carefully study her most famous statement, the “Magnificat” (Lk 1.46-55), we find an apparently extemporaneous speech astonishingly filled with Scripture: she quotes
or alludes to about 19 different verses in 5 different Old Testament books from all 3 of the sections of the Hebrew canon—Genesis and Deuteronomy from the Law, Isaiah from the Prophets, and Samuel and Psalms from the Writings. This in spite of the fact that it was common for Jewish girls in that day to be illiterate, and even if she could read, she certainly did not own copies of the Scrolls, which were prohibitively expensive. Most likely she listened at synagogue—from the women’s section—and committed those passages to memory, deeply meditating on them to the point where she could weave them—artfully—into an extemporaneous expression of gratitude to God in the midst of deep social embarrassment.
With all of our education and all of our copies of the Scripture, few of us today could do something even remotely similar.
Mary kept things in her heart (Lk 2.19, 51). She treasured the words and works of God.
What a rebuke she is to our shallow and reactionary thinking.
What a model for all of us to follow.