A Biblical Mystery

DOB and I are taking our twenty-year-belated honeymoon this week, back to my favorite place in the world (which is luckily only a couple hours away) and more or less near the spot where we spent a very short weekend after the actual wedding. (Do not get any ideas, creepy internet lurkers, our house is still full of large, cranky teenagers, an alarming number of melee weapons, and very loud dogs.)  

It involved a ferry ride and on the ferry ride there was a vehicle with some kind of small boat tied to the top. (An outrigger?) There was a verse on the side, but because of the way the rope was tied, all I could read was "Zechariah ??:6"

Naturally once we arrived I had to do some research and figure out *which* Zechariah ??:6 was intended. The options are as follows:

1:6 But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers? and they returned and said, Like as the LORD of hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us. (Kind of clunky, not a good fit.)

2:6 Ho, ho, come forth, and flee from the land of the north, saith the LORD: for I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heaven, saith the LORD. (This sounds exciting, but we were traveling east, not south. They might have had Alaska plates, though, I didn't know to check.)

3:6 And the angel of the LORD protested unto Joshua, saying, (Kind of abrupt, not getting much here.)

4:6 Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the LORD unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts. (OK, yes, I'm sure it was this one. Shush. We must check them all.)

5:6 And I said, What is it? And he said, This is an ephah that goeth forth. He said moreover, This is their resemblance through all the earth. (Well, I don't know what an ephah going forth is, but I also didn't know what the boat was called, so perhaps it is an ephah and that is their resemblance through all the earth.)

6:6 The black horses which are therein go forth into the north country; and the white go forth after them; and the grisled go forth toward the south country. (Not really seeing the connection here.)

7:6 And when ye did eat, and when ye did drink, did not ye eat for yourselves, and drink for yourselves? (This seems like it would work better on a yacht.)

8:6 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; If it be marvellous in the eyes of the remnant of this people in these days, should it also be marvellous in mine eyes? saith the LORD of hosts. (It didn't seem like a particularly marvellous boat, but I don't know much about boats.)

9:6 And a bastard shall dwell in Ashdod, and I will cut off the pride of the Philistines. (Kind of earthy, I like it!)

10:6 And I will strengthen the house of Judah, and I will save the house of Joseph, and I will bring them again to place them; for I have mercy upon them: and they shall be as though I had not cast them off: for I am the LORD their God, and will hear them. (A nice sentiment, and "cast off" is kind of nautical.)

11: 6 For I will no more pity the inhabitants of the land, saith the LORD: but, lo, I will deliver the men every one into his neighbour's hand, and into the hand of his king: and they shall smite the land, and out of their hand I will not deliver them. (If the land is getting smitten, it's better to be on a boat?)

12:6 In that day will I make the governors of Judah like an hearth of fire among the wood, and like a torch of fire in a sheaf; and they shall devour all the people round about, on the right hand and on the left: and Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place, even in Jerusalem. (Not very nautical, but pretty exciting)

On Ends, Means and Obedience

A certain article by John Piper on obedience popped up in my Facebook feed a lot last week (or two . . . I have never caught up with the pace of internet discussions.) Apparently it struck a chord.

It struck a few chords with me, too: dissonant ones. For starters, anytime someone starts turning parenting choices into a matter of life or death, they have lost my ear. It's like the vaccination debate. Vaccinate and your child will die of horrible complications! Don't vaccinate and your child will die of preventable diseases!

The truth is, death is highly unlikely in either scenario, so let's set that aside and look at reasonable risks. Similarly, disobedience might, in some circumstances, lead to death, but so might unquestioning obedience. ("Theirs not to question why, theirs but to do and die.") In any case, cooperating with people pointing big guns at you or with people about to take you six miles into the air are both more matters of self-preservation than obedience. Forget obedience, I hope I can raise my children not to be stupid.

But the real problem I have with the article is its open twisting of Scripture. No, the Bible does not say, "Parents, make your children obey you." It never, ever does. And John Piper of all people should know better than to put things into the Bible that aren't there. It doesn't matter that it doesn't make sense to him that God would tell children to obey and not tell parents to make them obey: God is perfectly capable of saying exactly what He means. God also never says, "Wives, make your husbands love you," or "Masters, see that your slaves obey cheerfully, as unto the Lord."

Now, if I don't believe that God tells me to force my children to obey, does that mean I sit back idly and let them do whatever occurs to them, however wrong or dangerous? Of course not. If it was my small boy playing with an electronic device on the plane, and they didn't turn it off, it would be spending the rest of the flight in my purse. (And then, if it WAS one of my small boys, we would have a long and vivid discussion of the possible consequences of interference with radio transmissions, and all the people within earshot would be traumatized for life.)

So if the end result is the same, why do I bother to differ? Because I think it makes a difference where you start from. Piper's article, and many articles and books on the same thing, makes it sound like the beginning and end of parenting is authority--that our purpose as parents is to exercise our authority so that our children will learn to submit to authority because authority is the Way Things Ought To Be.

But authority is a means, not the end. The end and beginning and summation of all things is love. God is love. God is not "authority." (He is the King, but note that a king is a person. Someone we can love.) The whole point of the change from the Old to the New is that obedience out of coercion was no good at all. We need a new heart, and then we obey out of our new heart, because we love Christ and pick up his mannerisms. Authority as a parent is not an end goal, but something given to us to serve our children in teaching them to be an independent adult and modeling for them how to be a follower of Christ.


Even if the issue is exactly the same, it makes a big difference whether the reason for making a child obey is, "They are the child, I am the parent, and I must make them obey," or "It's my job to help them grow in this area." It's important to remember that parents are sinners, too. And too much harping on our own authority is a dangerous temptation. It's very easy to slide over . . . I have done it many times myself . . . into "You should not DARE to challenge me," or "How can I make you hurt enough to stop this?" And neither of those attitudes are Christlike at all.

In a practical example, suppose a child is told to pick up their toys and doesn't want to. Looking at this through the lens of authority, this can only be interpreted one way: Disobedience. Challenge to authority. Child must be coerced into obedience so that authority is not disrupted. There might be various ways the coercion is applied, but there must be no doubt about the coercive force. Any approach that might distract from authority (making a game of it, using an incentive) is suspect if not outright forbidden.

However, if I'm looking at it simply with the goal of helping my child grow up, I realize that the child probably isn't thinking about my authority one way or another---they just don't want to pick up their toys, something I identify with very much. (By the way, I have been amazed as a parent how seldom, if ever, my children actually challenge my authority if I don't bother to assert it for its own sake. It's been a complete non-issue.) My job is not to bend them to my will, particularly, but to help them learn to overcome that natural reluctance because it's an essential life skill to do stuff you don't want to do and to take care of your own things. Now games and incentives, or just doing it alongside them, are back on the table, because those are all great strategies for learning to do stuff you don't want to do. Even if you do a consequence that might look like punishment (like removing toys that aren't cared for), it can be done, not as the authority setting yourself in opposition to the child, but as a sympathetic guide helping them streamline their life.

After all, obedience to earthly authority is not the sum total of righteousness. Quite the opposite. One of the other things I want to teach my children is that there is a time to disobey. That someday they may need to stand with William Tell and John Adams and Christ's own apostles and say, "This is an unlawful use of authority and I will not obey."

A Different Thought on Giving

Money conversations are always awkward ones, and religious money conversations are doubly so. Even people who would never dream of supporting a prosperity gospel at other times seem unable to avoid it when they start talking about giving, and phrases like, "You can never out-give God" pop up. (Actually, you can. We've done it.) Those of us whose experience with money has not reinforced these cheery phrases tend to just clam up or walk out. So dialogue doesn't happen.

Sometimes people try to broaden it by talking about giving of "time, talents or treasures," but besides being obnoxiously alliterative, there are times in life when one not only doesn't have cold hard cash, one doesn't have time, either, and one's talents have shriveled up from sheer exhaustion. Discussions about giving can just be another paper-cuts-and-lemon-juice reminder of how little you have to give and therefore how unspiritual and disobedient you will have to continue to be (and, perhaps, how badly you must have sinned to be in that position, whether you can figure out an offense or not).

First of all, the emphasis on the New Testament is on giving out of abundance, which I submit right off the top should mean that no one should feel that they ought to be giving if they genuinely don't think they can afford it. People are supposed to give as God has prospered them (I Cor. 16:2), not 'till it hurts.

But I think we may be missing an even more critical point about giving, which is "Why?" God doesn't need our money. He's got the cattle on a thousand hills and the whole world in his hands and all that. Nope. Not for God.

Some people talk about it being for us, so we can remember that everything belongs to God, and that may be part of it. Some people think it's so that God can give us more stuff, and they're just wrong.

But in the New Testament, when it talks about giving, it talks about a different reason: for unity and fairness within the body:

For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness your abundance at the present time should supply their need, so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be fairness. 2 Cor. 8:13-14.

If giving is really about sharing within the body, then something is true--where there is a giver, there must also be a receiver. Which means that people who don't have time, talents, or treasures to give, still have something to give--their need. Sometimes, that is the hardest thing to give.

And yet, sometimes that is what God has blessed us with--a need, a gap, a hole, that others can have the opportunity to fill, so that there can be unity, so that the whole body can grow up together into Christ. If everyone had surplus and no one had a lack, then there would be nothing to draw us together as a body. It is the flow of things within the body that binds it together.

Of course, there are other needs besides pecuniary ones and other gifts to give, some that don't make it onto anyone's asset lists at all and yet are the stuff life is made out of: friendship, example, comfort, a smile. Maybe stewardship as part of the body requires looking at both parts: Where do you have an abundance that you can share? Where do you have a lack that others can supply? Because I'm willing to bet we all have something in both columns.

Miscellaneous

The environmental attorney I work for has had a case that he thought was headed for settlement suddenly turn out to be headed for trial instead, which has meant I have suddenly had almost more work than I can squeeze in sorting documents. This is, on the one hand, not the most scintillating of tasks, but on the other, one that it is easy to keep at for hours on end even when I'm seeing cross-eyed (unlike research and writing which require a certain degree of mental clarity) and I am attorney enough to know the joy of billable hours.

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Between work and school, then, I have been happy to let the cleaning part of life slide, until DOB started having dust reactions. He thinks it's more because of moving offices last week, but I'm thinking that not vacuuming in a month is not very helpful, so I have been getting reacquainted with the vacuum cleaner this weekend.

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I came across this link that reminded me of another not-actually-in-the-Bible statement I should dispute: "God will never give you more than you can handle." Actually what the Bible says is, "God will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you can resist." We are promised grace for temptation. We are not promised that we will never be taken beyond our physical, emotional, financial, or spiritual breaking points. I've been there and I know it's not true.

But not only is it false, I wonder if the very presence of the idea doesn't make us cold to each other. It's a pat, comfortable thing to say, "Well, you know God won't give you more than you can bear." Or, in other words, "Depart in peace: be ye warmed and filled." If God's not going to give those folks more than they can handle, then the rest of us don't really need to get involved, do we? But sooner or later most of us are going to come across more than we can handle; that's why we are commanded to bear each other's burdens.

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Late Friday evening I went to call the kids in for bed and discovered that Dot had outclimbed her range in the fir tree. Deux was up with her, being stuck above her in the tree. They did fine for a while pretending they were Tigger and Roo, but eventually Deux figured out  a way around and Dot began to panic. I climbed up to retrieve her while DOB talked with her about the advantages she would find from being a bird, which kept her distracted until she had to face the terror of me trying to lower her. Fortunately we had a friend visiting who helped bridge the last distance to DOB and solid ground.

Before we were up the next morning, they were all climbing the tree again, though Dot was careful to only climb as high as she was sure she could get down. I am very appreciative of gutsy kids, though I did wish a bit that they could have given me a little more time to recover.

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After doing classes at the Y through the fall and winter, we have decided to call it quits for now. The kids are tired of going to classes, and I am tired of being in a loud building full of moving people for three hours every Saturday morning. DOB shall have to just do his workouts by himself. Except for all those loud, moving people. Maybe I will take the kids to the park. Or maybe I will sleep in while they climb trees.

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I have moved and brightened up my homeschooling blog, so if you want to read the details of what we do and very occasional pontification on educational subjects, that's the place to go.

Jesus is Not the Answer

So how does the modern penchant for approaching everything as a puzzle to be solved affect religion? It's almost swallowed it up. That's what BIBLE stands for, right? "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth." How to have a better life, God's way. God's answers to man's problems.The instruction manual from the Maker.

Which is pretty sad. Think of the scintillating metaphors the Bible uses for itself . . . honey, a sword, fire, bedrock, precious jewels . . . and our favorite metaphor is the most tedious and forgettable lump of words literacy has produced?

There are so many practical examples of this that I won't even bother to list any. You've seen the books, heard the sermons, read the blog posts. Full of how to improve your marriage/financial life/parenting/relationships/happiness by doing things God's way.

Yet anyone who reads the Bible with half an eye for the actual story will find out that a lot of people followed God and had pretty terrible lives; and some other people did a whole lot of awful things and still got rewarded. If you teach the Better Life Jesus long enough and hard enough, people start to notice that life doesn't really work that way and start walking away from the whole facade.

The Bible wasn't written to be a self-help manual and if (God have mercy) that's really what you want out of life, you can get a thousand other more specific self-help manuals for much less trouble. People don't need yet another self-help manual that is a couple of thousand years out of date.

This is practical atheism. The eternal, the transcendent, the permanent--that's an afterthought. What matters is living right and getting rewarded for it right here, right now. It doesn't matter how correct your doctrinal statement is if that message is the one that gets repeated and lived.

Sometimes people don't miss the whole point; sometimes it's framed in terms of man's problem being sin and God's solution being Christ--but this, well, it's still missing the point. It makes the whole thing about us and slants it as if it were all over but the shouting.

The history of the universe, the meaning of life, is not a "problem" with a "solution." It's a story--a tale of love, betrayal, exile, restoration. It's a story we get to participate in, but it is not primarily about us. It is a true story. A real one. It is not tidy or predictable. And it is not over yet.

The Opposite of Magic

In the church I grew up in, the pastors made a special point, it seemed like at each instance of celebrating communion or baptism, of saying, "Now, there's nothing magic about this bread (or water). This is just something we do in obedience."

Something in me always rebelled against that. If there was nothing special about it, why go through it? Why would God order meaningless actions? But, no, I didn't really believe in magic bread or water, so I let it lie.

Over the past couple of years, as we've explored sacramental churches and stepped back and then explored again, I've come to realize that a sacrament is the opposite of magic. Magic is an intangible action--a word, a gesture, a symbol--to generate a physical result. But a sacrament is a physical action to transmit a spiritual reality.

We are physical beings. And we are spiritual beings. In the sacraments, God promises to meet us on both levels. And as we began to acknowledge it as such (and recognize that God had indeed been present to us, in that way, all through the years of being told that there was nothing special but we were going to do it anyways), we've begun to see a whole lot of things differently.

We've begun to see that salvation isn't something that rests on the fervency of our own faith, or the complexity with which we can articulate doctrine. It rests simply on the work of God in Christ. It is not a deal to be signed by those who have reached the age of consent, but a meal to be shared with all who come. And looked at that way, it no longer made any sense to keep from sharing it with our children.

Which is why we celebrated this Easter by having all four of the children baptized and receive first Communion.

Do they understand it all? Neither do we. When was I "saved," after all? Was it the first time I prayed the prayer, hiding in the grass as a toddler? Was it when I was seven and wrote it out in my Bible? Was it when I was baptized at eight because my older siblings were? Was it when I was twelve and the enormity of God dying for me hit for the first time? Was it when I wrestled with and walked through doubts as a teenager and young adult?

Or was it all God the whole time? Did it matter how clearly I understood or simply whether I received? Did Jesus, who commended us over and over to the faith of a little child, really mean to tell us that their faith didn't count?

So today we recognized the gift of faith in them and permitted them to receive God's grace through baptism. The older ducklings can answer catechism questions with the best of them, and the twins know that they belong to Jesus. Will they have doubts? Surely. Will they have a crisis of faith, of wondering if it is really theirs or just something inherited? Very likely. I will probably have a few more crises of my own. But that won't change what God does, nor do I hold back from receiving His grace now because I might not take advantage of it in the future.

Small Heresy

I am teaching the twins' Sunday School class, a choice that is probably ill-advised because:

a) I am pretty lousy with 2 and 3 year olds.
b) the twins are two-thirds of the class, and
c) they spend most of it fighting over my lap.

However, things are getting a little better, and today we actually had a pretty decent lesson about the Trinity. D4 was coloring a paper with a triangle on it, each point with a label of "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit." Then he turned it over and started marking on the back.

"Dis is God da Fadder," he said, pointing to his mark.

"OK," I said, pleased to hear the lesson was taking hold.

He drew another mark: "What's dis?"

"That must be God the Son," I said.

"OK," he said, and drew another mark.

"And there is God the Holy Spirit," I said.

He continued on, making a fourth mark. "What's dat?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"Dat is God da Car!" he exclaimed in triumph.

Ruth and the Idolators

The book of Ruth, beginning, end, and middle, is wrapped up in Naomi's search for a man for security. She's like an Old Testament Yenta: "Even the worst husband--God forbid!--is better than no husband--God forbid!" She hopes her daughters-in-law will find security with new husbands; she takes it on herself to help Ruth hunt one down; and she finally relaxes in the last scene with a baby grandson in her arms who will take the place of the husband and sons she has lost.

Partly it may be Naomi's personal obsession; partly it may be a sign of a culture in which women had to depend on men for security. More than that, though, I think it is a sign of a culture in which people had to depend on other people. Surely an old and feeble man would have been just as desparate to have someone young and strong to bring home the mutton. Their world was a personal one; there was no Social Security or Society for the Aged and Infirm. If there wasn't a someone to go to, there was no somewhere to go.

By the same token, their idols were personal ones. They worshipped gods with bad habits and shrewish wives. Their gods might have been lacking in looks, hygiene, and basic morality, but they were never lacking in personality.

I think we tend to have the opposite problem, which obscures our favorite form of idolatry. Sermons do preach against idolizing money or pleasure, but I think what we most like to idolize is systems. Systems are where we turn for security. Systems are what care for us when we need help. Systems are what we ask to fix things when things go wrong. Even the One True God sometimes has a little too much personality to suit our tastes, and we prefer to fit Him into one of our systems.

This is where a lot of things in modern Christianity go bad. We start looking for the System that will solve our financial problems, find us the perfect spouse, raise our children, grow our church, win the lost, care for the poor, or what have you. We want to know what the right steps are to follow, and if we just follow those steps, we would prefer a money-back guarantee on the results.

Lots of time the original idea wasn't a bad one--every step of it can be shown from Scripture!--but it's the nature of our age to turn it into a System. And from there it's an easy step for us to expect it to provide us with peace, joy, love and holiness. We still say those things come from God, but really we would be quite astonished and a little offended to find God working outside our beloved System.

The ancient Israelites wanted gods with bodies; we want gods with checklists. Just as much for us as for them, God is something far greater than we can conceive.

Jesus and the Fish Fry

This Sunday's sermon was on what is one of my all-time favorite Scripture passage, John 21. Passion Week is over; the Resurrection is over. Everything is over. And the disciples go fishing.

I've seen commentators make out from this that the disciples were somehow slacking off on the job and returning to their old way of life. Not sure what's up with Jesus, guys; let's go back to work. I disagree. No other group of humans has gone through such a tumultuous week as the disciples had, with death turned to life and eternity shaken and the world turned upside down. But if I ever did have such a week, I can tell you where you'd find me after it was all over: at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes.

Sometimes when the heart and spirit have had all they can bear and more, the body needs to take over for awhile. You need to work until it hurts. So, I think, the disciples needed to do something hard, something familiar, something that would give their minds time to sort through all that had happened. They went fishing.

Jesus, who knew them not just as a detached omniscient deity, but as a friend, knew they would be fishing. He is waiting for them, on shore. He greets them with the same little trick of a miracle he used when they first met, like an old joke between friends. Once again they have fished all night and caught nothing, once again Jesus fills the nets with fish as morning breaks.

Here is none of the flash and show of signs you would expect from a resurrected God; here are only the homely miracles of fish in the nets and a fire lit on the shore. Jesus, his deity confirmed forever, is standing by the barbecue, wearing an apron.

No doubt our spiritual needs are the greatest, and it is those Jesus came to fill. But he also knows that we cannot feel them so acutely as we can feel our tired feet and empty bellies. So he starts there, even with his oldest friends. First, we eat. Then we can talk. Here is our God; here is the one who puts every meal on the table and every fish in our nets; here is our friend.

Good Friday Thoughts on I Peter

The Christmas season seems more contiguous than Easter. You can spend the whole month building up to the big day. Whereas before Easter the joy of Easter coming is always tempered by the knowledge that Good Friday must come first.

If we were the ones having the baby we might see Christmas differently. I'm sure like any new mother, Mary's anticipation of holding her new son was tempered by her anxiety over the suffering she would endure first. Joy comes not in spite of suffering, but because of suffering.

In his first epistle, Peter applies this theme to us. The book has the feeling of a general's speech before battle. Gear up for action, men. Prepare to take some hits. But Peter takes it beyond the merely human response to trouble.

There are two human ways to respond when we are treated unjustly. One is to fight back, which at least does something about the injustice, but so often we overdo and trigger a reaction and injustice piles upon injustice beyond all human remedy. Or we can suffer in silence, but while this may be good for our souls it does little to set the world aright.

Here, indeed, we need Divine intervention. Only God could find a way to set us right both within and without. Through Christ's suffering, He restored all things. Christ did not just endure, he overcame.

Now, Peter says, we too can suffer like that. Not just a stoic endurance of what cannot be helped. Suffering that is itself a power. Meekness that wins the battle. Kindness that conquers.

Whatever small injustices we have to face let us participate in the one Great Injustice, when God took the sins of man. As we receive the grace to face curses with blessing, hardships with joy, we see from within the power of that last moment when God suffered death and defeated death forever.