Carpe Cakem!

This is the prayer of St. Brendan the Navigator. It is told that this prayer was said as 5th century missionaries were sent out on the ocean in their rudderless coracles. Wherever they landed on the British isles they preached the gospel. If they landed nowhere, then they went to be with God, which was OK too.

Shall I abandon, O King of mysteries, the soft comforts of home? Shall I turn my back on my native land, and turn my face towards the sea?

Shall I put myself wholly at your mercy, without silver, without a horse, without fame, without honour? Shall I throw myself wholly upon You, without sword and shield, without food and drink, without a bed to lie on? Shall I say farewell to my beautiful land, placing myself under Your yoke?

Shall I pour out my heart to You, confessing my manifold sins and begging forgiveness, tears streaming down my cheeks? Shall I leave the prints of my knees on the sandy beach, a record of my final prayer in my native land?

Shall I then suffer every kind of wound that the sea can inflict? Shall I take my tiny boat across the wide sparkling ocean? O King of the Glorious Heaven, shall I go of my own choice upon the sea?

O Christ, will You help me on the wild waves?

I’ve been reading the blogs of African missionaries and also chatting with a few personally from Rwanda, Nigeria, and Kenya. The underlying story behind what they say continually reminds me how different Ethiopia is. Ethiopia is really a strange exception among all African missionary fields. It was the only place with an already-established church. A lot of the missionaries at first didn’t know what to do. They had been intensely trained for several years to convert pagans and largely avoid Muslims. What were they to do with these people? I was surprised to discover through my studies how so many of them really tried to initially present themselves as a reform movement working within the Orthodox church. Only a few of them were aggressive about planting new congregations and distinguishing themselves at first. They wanted to see the gospel preached and change people’s hearts, but most of them were able to quickly recognize that this did not require any sort of disestablishment among the Orthodox. Still, this almost never ended up happening, at least visibly. In the end, they always ended up starting new congregations. There was no way around it. It’s just how Christianity works.

I don’t think this is a case of the Holy Spirit working in their midst or not, but rather just a function of natural social dynamics. A lot of experienced people over the years have concluded that a congregation is a at it’s most active and communally potent somewhere around the 120 mark. To grow larger than that requires a certain amount of institutional glue that the leadership may not be able to provide. In that case, the most healthy thing for the church to do is multiply and start a new congregation. If they don’t, they will likely automatically divide over time regardless and not always in a positive way. I think this is the situation we find in the New Testament – the church as a network of house meetings. When Paul writes to the church in Rome, his letter was likely passed around many sub-congregations spread out around the region. Some probably had overlap of membership and their leaders being friends and acquaintances. Others were so separated by geography (remember, there were no cars) that they may have been only loosely connected to the nexus of the city and to the ones who originally received Paul’s written document.

So why do I mention this? As a young man, I used to think, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all the church’s could be united?” I remember attending prayer meetings where something along these lines was regularly petitioned for. That would mean our city of 25,000 would have one mega-church about 5000 strong. Wouldn’t that be great? Actually, no. I’ve changed my mind about that. Such a thing can never be and that’s actually a good thing. Diversity is good. Small congregations are good. Geography is a God-given natural state of creation, not some stumbling block of the devil. Our minds can only hold the names and faces of so many folks in our circle (some psychologists argue the max is about 400). It’s another “feature” of our intellect. We diminish when we try to bite off more than we can chew. Nobody should be more aware of this than shepherds. So now I’ve changed my tune. I say, the more faithful churches the better – just let them love one another whenever their paths cross.

A friend of mine has been telling me to check out the progressive Celtic rock band Iona for some time. Despite having heard a ton of neo-Celtic music in the past decade, I was unfamiliar with them. I recognized some of their personnel though from other projects and gave them a spin – a bit over-produced at times, but still a lot of cool playing and writing is going on. I’ve had this track on endless repeat for the better part of the week.

This weekend I went hiking in the wilderness with my wife and two oldest kids. My friends in the UK should understand that the state of Idaho is actually larger than England (if you don’t count Scotland) even though it has only 2 million people instead of 50+. Several large swaths of it are still true wilderness. Not a single soul lives there for miles and miles – not a single cabin. Into the edge of this we walked this weekend. Despite many camping trips as a child (and as an adult) this was the first time I had been on a very long walk from the nearest road and hours from the nearest power-line. My wife dreams of exploring these kinds of places. I listen to her stories.

Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste.

Saw: Untouched rivers and many trees touched by fire and lightning without intervention. The sun moving slowly across the sky, the shadow of the mountain serving as a dial. Fish jumping, a muskrat mooching from our campsite, tiny birds with long beaks hopping. My family from many angles as I climbed the rocks on the opposite shore. And everywhere stinging insects – yellow with black stripes, black with yellow stripes, and some with a proper fifty-fifty mix of black and yellow.

Heard: The river’s unending din, louder and more steady than any freeway. The sizzle of driftwood lit to heat coffee in an old tin can. My own footsteps across the clanky river rocks – no ninja walking possible.

Touched: Stung by wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, and bees. Bitten by strange flies of mythic proportions. In my food, in my eyelashes, in my daughter’s hair, in my sons blood stream making his hands and fingers inflate. But also the breeze on my face, the unhindered starlight on my skin at 2:00 AM.

Smelled: The freshness of the trees, the foreboding of rain down the canyon, the arrival of rain on the sand bar. The chicken soup my wife made and served in collapsible bowls before we all collapsed ourselves. Where is the soap, the scents, the engine exhaust? Smells in nature are spread wide and thin. It is man who collects and synthesizes and refines them, exploding some and covering up others. The rain and smoke mellows them all fast.

Tasted: Wild berries and not-so-wild nuts. Fresh water straight from the river. The bug that flew into my mouth. The cookies I stashed in my pocket.

I also read, my back propped against a mossy rock, several chapters of Jamie’s Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom. I couldn’t help but realize that all of the “cultural liturgies” he analyzes – the shopping mall, the sports stadium, and the university only exist in the large city. Only the most distant rumors of these things have been heard of here deep in the sticks. Here, in the U.S., we are all familiar with these institutions because we can drive to them with our cars, even if we live on the edge of the wilderness. In Ethiopia (for example), there are 80 million people but about 63 million of those are rural and may never visit a mall or stadium, much less a university. It just makes me realize how the book is only valuable in a specific context. It has great ideas in it, but if one was going to translate it into Amharic or Oromo, at least half the book would need to be completely scrapped. How many other books do we have like that and don’t realize it?

Anyway, back to the wilderness. I’m sure I’ll go back again. It was a nice contrast to the bustle of Seattle the previous weekend. Both were a nice contrast to the daily rhythms of the office. I’m glad my wife can introduce me and the children to its beauty. I would be but a poor spokesman myself.

People don’t sit still and neither do their beliefs. This, even while their creator, their God, both sits rock still, unmoving, unchanging and at the same time flits around like a hummingbird at the speed of light in his creation. We are like something between the two, but tremendously limited.

A systematic theology is more like a snapshot of someone’s current understanding, though it may reflect years of digestion and synthesis. In contrast, the autobiography is sometimes a better vehicle for understanding what a person believes and why. Being aware of the context of their lives brings many vague things into focus. Secularists like to do this to “demystify” faith. I say it is even more valid to use it to “humanize” that faith and bring it closer to the earth and those who dwell there.

David Miller recently posted this piece about his winding ecclesiastical journey from Reformed Presbyterianism, to Orthodoxy, to Anglicanism, and eventually back to the Reformed. Quite the ride. Hopefully his wife and kids weren’t rolling their eyes after switching church’s for the fourth time. Who knows. That’s probably none of my business. Still, I find Miller’s story interesting and I appreciate him outlining the journey and his reasons.

I am personally on a different journey and my reasons are yet again different. Since I find myself frequently having to explain myself to friends and family, I decided to take a stab at writing some of that story down here. This is not heavily footnoted or filled with scripture references. I could do that but it would take far longer to piece together and I don’t feel up to that tonight so it’s either write this shorter personal version or nothing at all at this hour. To other people on a similar journey (and I know a few of you personally out there!), this might help you to place where you are on the map or work through your own confusions.

The evangelical traditions I came from were very desperate to be cool. Usually they fell on their face. Sometimes they succeeded, at least for a few years. In the end though, despite the fact that it got some people in the doors following after something larger than themselves, I believe it ultimately served to obscure the gospel. Yet the gospel was still there. They have, at their core, remained faithful to biblical Trinitarian orthodoxy despite forgetting their history. Their awkwardness is my own awkwardness and so my journey never really leaves the realm of evangelicalism. However silly its people may be at times, Christ is there in their midst.

As liturgical churches in the United States lost their vibrancy and orthodoxy in the past century, the form has remained but everything else evaporated. This has led many Christians to be highly suspicious of the form. The contemporary evangelical Anglicans come back and say though, “Wait! The form is actually great. Just fill it with the spirit again. Bring Jesus back into the hearts of the people!” As those who for a while sped over the waves on a light jet boat but have since have been tossed on the ocean for decades with only a few scraps of driftwood to hold on to, a passing iron freighter looks like a dry and stable home. This big ship could be Roman Catholicism, or Orthodoxy, or whatever. It’s slow moving, but maybe that’s a good thing. Is it pointed toward the right destination? Jesus loves his church. He’s bringing all these boats in even if some of them seem to have their rudder stuck in a circle.

The Anglican way is to be faithful to the anglo-catholic liturgy that is 500+ years old – stick to your guns, and trust the holy spirit will do the rest. You don’t have to have a cool video montage. Just read lots of scripture out loud. Preaching is good – have good preaching – but that only goes so far so only have a moderate amount of that. Articulate the gospel but don’t make their head explode. We can give students that in a classroom setting elsewhere. God has promised to be with us everywhere, be he has especially promised to be present to us in a special way in the Eucharist, in the bread and wine. Take this part of the worship gathering seriously and make it the most important part. Again, God will do the rest. Don’t bother with greeters armed with walkie-talkies trying to scope out new families in the parking lot and have someone from the same demographic meet them at the door. We don’t need to busy ourselves with any of that stuff. Be faithful in worshiping the Triune God and other people will be drawn unto him. Don’t light candles during worship to be gimmicky. But it’s what our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers did and it’s beautiful and subtle. Those are good enough reasons to still light them.

I considered sticking with the evangelical Baptists of my youth, but the heavy yoke of semi-Pelagianism (often preached unwittingly, not intentionally) was more than I could bear. In addition, the lack of beauty in art and music made me further despair. I could always see Jesus but he seemed so very far away.

In college I fell in with the Pentecostals. Jesus was large and right there in the room! It was exciting and the words in my bible came alive and exploded off the page every time I opened it. I read through the Gospel of John three straight times in one week during that first winter away from home. I swear I saw miracles – not least of all the miracle in my own prideful and elitist heart as it was made softer without the work of human hands. But then I found, after several years with my new friends, that God made me to be a quiet thinker. I streeeeeetched myself to fit the bombastic culture but found I could only stretch so far. Eventually as I matured from a young 17-year-old to a father of several children and nearly 30 myself, I found I no longer felt at home in that community anymore. It had stayed the same but I had changed. It was a nice place to pass through but I couldn’t find it in my imagination to make a permanent home their for the next sixty years. Some people could, but I couldn’t.

But where could one go? I am not an individual consumer and autonomous chooser of paths. I am formed by my history, by my genes, by my geography, by my wife, by the holy spirit. If I am honest with myself, I will acknowledge that I am constrained by many things.

I considered following the road to Reformed Presbyterianism. The theology is well considered and it is on my mother’s side after all. But I became too disheartened by the frequency of nasty debates amongst its cannon lawyers and the general allergy to the more mystic work of Christ. I also found little room in their midst for those who valued certain activities of the Holy Spirit. It’s not that there aren’t charismatics in these churches, it’s just that they have to stay in the closet. Though several close friends followed that path, I found I could only appreciate them from a distance.

I considered Orthodoxy for a time then. It has many corrective measures liturgically and theologically to the weaknesses of my past formation. I felt particularly excited at the theology of Christus Victor and the deep appreciation for beauty and mystery. But the cultural gap was just too large. The different branches of the Orthodox church are just too tied to ethnic identities – Greek, Russian, Ethiopian, etc. There isn’t any natural room for a rural-born North American. It would be a shoe-horn if ever there was one. Maybe this will be less of the case in 100 years as it gains more traction as a grass-roots movement in the West, but that is not the case today. It felt too disingenuous to try to join the Orthodox church. It’s not who I am. Tough. An intellectual assent will only take you so far. It doesn’t help that I had some friends go Orthodox and then go completely off the rails (though others seem fine today). I eventually found myself only a distant acquaintance.

Though I had come to appreciate certain aspects of Roman Catholicism, I never seriously considered swimming the Tiber. God bless them, but it’s not a movement I can get behind. In the end, I have to agree that the Reformation was ultimately a good thing and that my ecclesiastical allegiance lies elsewhere.

The Anabaptists have their strengths as well I have some other friends who followed that path and are seeing fruit from it in their lives and their communities. I found I couldn’t get tremendously excited about it though either. When it comes down to it, the news that Jesus work alone has utterly negated my guilt is the thing I need to hear the most. It’s the only thing that truly quiets my soul. It’s the only thing that allows me to hear “God loves you” without disbelieving it. And a tradition that emphasizes that grace-heavy Jesus, Jesus, Jesus soteriology in preaching and song and in regular conversations on the street – that is what turns my crank. It’s a key ingredient in the kind of church I can imagine living in. And, again, God bless them, but that sort of “Grace turned up to 11” attitude, I have only found (despite their other problems), with the reformed, with the Calvinists and their ilk. It’s not that it wasn’t there in the other traditions, just that it wasn’t in a form that resonated with me. I had difficulty hearing it due to my own particular scars. It’s not their fault really, but I am nevertheless drawn elsewhere.

So what does that leave me with? A tradition that has a relatively robust theology of grace when talking about the work of Christ – essentially reformed (small ‘r’). A tradition that isn’t too culturally distant – one that is largely English speaking but is not Euro-centric or U.S.-centric and wide enough to include significant swaths of Africa (which I cannot forget since traveling there). A tradition that appreciates and appropriates old things – old music, old beautiful art and doesn’t fall pray to the zeitgiest or to chronological snobbery. A tradition that values contextual expression and flexibility, but values order and consistency more. A sacramental tradition. The Anglican church foots the bill.

So why haven’t so many more evangelicals come to this conclusion? How come I get so many strange looks when I talk about this? The answer is simple. The expression of the Anglican church in the United States, the Episcopal Church of America, was completely taken over by liberal theologians about fifty years ago. They are now but an object of derision amongst evangelicals with their leading bishops both publicly denying the bodily resurrection and demanding that their lesbian sexual practice be legitimized in the public square. It’s like a bad joke. It’s no wonder that nobody has wanted to touch what remained of their worship form with a 10-foot or even 100-foot pole.

But then again C.S. Lewis was an Anglican and nearly everyone agrees he had his head on straighter than, well, just about anybody. Scholars like N.T. Wright have been putting out such excellent orthodox teaching over the past couple decades that even distant outsiders are starting to take notice. Influential seminary professors like Robert Webber (may he rest in peace) started digging around with their shovels and realized that the Anglican tradition has a thousand useful tools to help us on the giant task of reforming and (paradoxically sometimes) refreshing the evangelical church.

So I look back at all the traditions and I see a lot of useful tools for reforming and reenergizing, not just the western church in general, but especially in my own life, in my own family, with my own kids, with my own day-to-day prayer and faith and doubt, and even within the life of my friends and community. I look and I see lots of good, but within the Anglican tradition, I find the largest number of things I can pick up and use along with the fewest number of stumbling blocks. So that is why I’m here, walking down the road to Canterbury… or possibly Nairobi.

OK, “But what about them hurdles?” you may ask. Oh, they are there. I guess now is as good of time as ever to bring some of them out into the open. I’ve talked about some of the good, but what about the bad and the ugly?

The Bad:
Like all Christian traditions, contemporary conservative Anglicanism has it’s strengths and weaknesses. In the weakness department are, I think, a general difficulty and adverseness to being prophetic. That is my impression anyway and that of quite a few others. Anglicans can often be happy doing their own thing and not putting a lot of effort into reaching outwards. (It’s the same thing Roman Catholics in the west are not particularly good at in general, though there are exceptional pockets here and there.) They are not typically to be found preaching on street corners or making a lot of noise in the public square. They do send missionaries, but not near as many as the Baptists. There are evangelists within the church, but other groups like the Assemblies of God do a much better job of training and energizing these folks. When the evils of the current age or the corruptness of politicians needs addressing, you are more likely to find a hot Reformed Christian writing or talking loud and articulate about it. The Anglicans are soft-spoken and that can be a good thing, but not when it’s time to fight, and sometimes it IS time to fight.

The Ugly:
Ecclesiastical infighting amongst bishops with big egos is real and occasionally nasty. When Presbyterians fight, they set up courts and denounce each other as formally as possible with hundreds of confessional footnotes. When Charismatics fight, it is couched in highly spiritual language about one person or another “quenching the spirit”, with an ugly church split described as a “new move of God”. When evangelical Anglicans fight, it’s somewhere in the middle between these two things. So you get some of both kinds of “bleh”. The insults hurled at Nigerian leaders (who are flush with people, but dirt poor) by the last remaining Episcopalians (who are flush with cash and property but with dying congregations) will make you want to hurl. Don’t look it up. The Anglican Church in North America has been mostly successful in uniting and absorbing many of the conservative movements throughout the U.S. and Canada – but not entirely so. There have still been some messy fights and huffy resignations that seriously derailed the work of some local congregations and, at best, was a discouraging distraction. Though debates about sexual ethics, soteriology, and biblical orthodoxy are (thankfully) pretty well settled at this point, the limitations of women’s ordination looms ahead. Expect a few more nasty exoduses (one way or the other) over this one in the following decade. Sigh.

So there you go. My journey is something like Conservative Baptist –> 3rd Wave Charismatic –> Post-evangelical wilderness –> Anglicanized evangelical. Whether I have the opportunity to serve or worship in a formally Anglican church is maybe not so important. There is no such congregation in the vicinity – for the time being, I want to stay where I am at and serve the best I can. That could be for quite a while, especially since my wife and I are trying to stay put for a while to give the kids a lot of stability. I would rather see them formed by the observation of friendship and steadfastness in our lives than by the quest for increasingly exact and accurate theology or practice. None of these places I’ve passed through on my journey to understanding and worshipping Jesus has been a fixed point to be abandoned. They are all still living inside of me – my parents, the people that loved me, the ones that taught and chastised me, and the people that let me down too. I let my share of them down. But the Lord is faithful and I desire to keep my eyes on him as I walk.

Here are some of my thoughts about the Anglican 1000 church planting conference put on in Seattle by the ACNA this week.

It was wonderfully refreshing to converse with men (and a women) of very similar theological and ecclesiastic stripe. This, being a religious conference featuring pastors and writers and thinkers, you would think there would be some debates about theology. There was virtually none. Nobody argued about soteriology. It was essentially reformed. Some may have leaned slightly another way, but it never came up once. There was zero discussion about sexual ethics. It was never even mentioned except in the context of pastoral care. This is a group that formed (among other things) along the lines of the traditional orthodox position on sex and marriage. In a world (both local and online) that is SO saturated in debates about gay marriage and such, it was strikingly quiet and peaceful to hang out with a group of people who wanted to talk about Jesus and how to contextualize the liturgy, etc. There were no fundamentalists beating the drum about the culture war – not even as a 5-minute aside. There were no progressives trying to start a “conversation” about marriage  equality. Good Lord, that was restful.

The other thing I discovered was that nearly everyone I talked to was charismatic. They spoke it tongues, prayed for divine healing, and raised their hands during worship. But they weren’t pentecostals. This sort of activity was not the essential core of the faith and wasn’t emphasized in the liturgy or required of disciples though, depending on the person, it may be encouraged to varying degrees. It was there just under the surface if you brought it up, but wasn’t always being mentioned. The broad range of the Anglican tradition allows for a range of expression, but strict cessacionism is outside of that – thank God.

One thing I was expecting to find was a lot of bi-vocational ministers. After all, nearly everyone I’ve talked to, both in Anglican circles and just evangelical circles in general have been saying that bi-vocational ministry was going to soon be the new normal. (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, this means pastors and priests who have day jobs and receive only a small amount of their income from their church responsibilities.) But, what I found was nearly everyone, even all the young guys, working full-time for their churches. Some of them described working part time for the first year while they were starting a new congregation, but every person I talked to, once they past about the 50-60 mark, pursued paying a full-time rector. This took priority over paying rent for a nicer space to meet or any other thing. Nevertheless, I still had several people tell me that this IS changing – that in the future it will be more likely to find teams of part-timers with shared responsibilities. BUT, for now it seems that the old way of supporting the clergy is still largely in place. I think some of the hurdles related to formal ordination have made this take longer to catch on in the Anglican church. Other groups who have more relaxed rules about who can serve the eucharist are able to be more agile in this regard. But I guess it’s a price worth paying to keep the larger tradition intact. You can’t have it both ways. Sometimes you just have to make a call and stick with it. With Anglicanism, at the end of the day, to have a legit congregation, you need to have a full-blown priest who had hands laid on him by a bishop of apostolic succession. End of story. So work from that.

Several guys discussed new innovative ways to train and credential clergy. This was something I was particularly interested in and asked quite a few people for their opinion. Do you HAVE to have a Masters of Divinity to serve in any kind of formal capacity? Are other kinds of theological education potentially acceptable? The answer I got is that, yes, other things are being accepted. A Masters of Religion from institutions held in high regard (like Trinity School of Ministry or Regents) are probably going to be “good enough” for most bishops nowadays. Some people are even pursuing ordination through apprenticeship programs outside of the academy. Believe it or not, this is actually the old, old way of doing things. This is all encouraging to me as someone who might want to eventually serve in some kind of capacity as a priest or deacon, but who does not want to uproot his family to go to seminary and descend deep into debt (terrible idea). One guy in Chicago even had a network of fast multiplying congregations run by lay-ministers. This is apparently the African model used in parts of Nigeria and Rwanda where there are way more people than they have priests to handle anyway.

The men running the ACNA are very interested in contextualizing the gospel and reaching people for Christ, but they have no interest in being cool. One of the speakers recounted a story about how he was helping a young guy (from another denomination) who was trying to plant a cool alt church. He had a fo-hawk, skinny jeans, some tattoos, and some thick hipster glasses. It wasn’t working. Finally he realized that the guy wasn’t cool at all – he was a nerd. “Dude, you need to knock this off. Plant a nerdy church. You can actually do that. Don’t worry. It’s OK. There are lots of nerds out there and Jesus loves them too.” This reflect the theme of their worship philosophy as I see it. Worry about worshipping God well and not being seeker-sensitive. In the long run, this works because it lifts up Christ, not the people.

One of the few Bishops in the Northwest, Kevin Bond Allen, led the Eucharist service in the evening. It was a wonderful mix of Celtic prayers (some of them taken from the Northumbrian Prayer Book), psalms, and some contemporary worship songs with guitar and piano. I don’t know what else to say about the service except that I was rather emotionally moved, which is unusual.

Afterwards, some of us went out for drinks at an Irish Pub and discussed (among other things): whether Christian universities are actually Christian anymore, what it’s like to pastor a church deep in the Yukon, adapting the Alpha Course for the military, and how different Seattle is from Texas. We also traded pictures of our children and argued over whether the Scotch Ale was better than the Hefewiezen.

I had to get home and back to the office so I left after the second day. I think they are just wrapping up today (Friday) and then traveling to Boston to do it all over again soon. For me, it was fortunate that they decided to put on several small regional gatherings this year instead of one large national one. It certainly made my participation possible. It’s one thing to read books and blogs and correspond by email. It’s another to meet face to face and I was really blessed by the openness, friendliness, and practicality of everyone I met. I’ll be posting my notes and thoughts on some of the discussions here later once I’ve thought through them a bit more.

I just spent the last two days talking to and eating and drinking with leaders and church planters from the Anglican Church in North America. The event was in Seattle and I just got back from six straight hours of driving. I hope to write a few things up about it later this week, but I haven’t processed it all yet. It was, in short, a wonderful and encouraging time. Special thanks to my wife for watching all the kids for most of three days so I could attend. Whew!

Update: I have posted some of my impressions here.

Hip hop artist Coolio was on the radio a lot in my younger days. One of his songs starts out:

This is some of the lingua-fringa of da funk business,
And people come from miles around
with an almost religious devotion to get on down…

Their dedication to dance at the club and to pick up chicks is “almost” religious. It’s analogous to it at least, right?

A few years earlier, when I was too young to listen to the radio, Madonna could be heard singing:

When you call my name it’s like a little prayer,
I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there.

Conversing with her lover is like talking to God.

More recently, Bruno Mars blurs the lines even further by using a metaphor instead of a simile (like Madonna) or quantitative comparison (like Coolio). On “Locked out of Heaven” he croons:

Never had much faith in love or miracles, Never wanna put my heart on the line.
But swimming in your world is something spiritual
I’m born again every time you spend the night

OK. So blurring the line between romantic love and divine love has a rich and long history. But I think this works its way into other quarters as well, like the devotion to Mammon over and against devotion to the creator.

Have you seen those ads from Charles Schwab with the middle-aged man pretending to be a hot stock trader from the comfort of his living room? More than a few people have pointed out that the stock ticker is like an oracle for those who worship at its altar. Our politicians speak constantly of “development” and “growth” being the instruments of our salvation. The “invisible hand of the market” is spoken of as there were very little to distinguish it from the providence of God.

The same goes for those who are devoted to some exciting consumer product and spend hours pouring over prophecies about its next iteration and some even traveling thousands of miles on a pilgrimage to catch a glimpse of it’s face. Look at these two photographs below – the first of several people fawning over an iPhone prototype on a pedestal and the other of a woman burning incense to the Buddha. Do they honestly look like activities of different natures?

What is going on here? I think all these kinds of devotions are the same. It is not that stuff directly involving God is “religious” and all this other stuff isn’t. With regards to how we direct our minds and use our bodies and time and energy, they are completely the same. They are essentially their own religions.

James K.A. Smith says as much here:

[George] Lindebeck recognized the French Revolution as a “quasi-religious phenomenon”. But why only QUASI-religious? In fact, it offers an “idiom for dealing with whatever is most important” and functions as a “ritual reiteration of certain definitions of what is ultimately good and true”. I’m suggesting that we drop the “quasi” and recognize such formative “secular” rituals as properly “religious.”

I use the term secular loosely since one of the implications of this analysis is that there is no secular. If humans are essentially liturgical animals, and cultural institutions are liturgical institutions, then there are no secular (a-religious or nonreligious) institutions.

-Desiring the Kingdom, footnotes on p.88

To eat or not to eat is not a viable question in life. “WHAT are you going to eat?” is. In the same way, to worship or not to worship is not the right question. The right question is: “WHAT are you worshipping?” What are you ascribing value to?

I absolutely love it when the “forth wall”  is broken between enemies in the course of art, or especially everyday life. Some think it perverse when considered theologically, but I am absolutely thrilled and cheered by the notion of tragedy being interrupted by the actors taking off their masks (up until that point you forgot they were actors) and dancing or chatting together like old friends. I love it when movies or plays end with a dance number and the villain comes out and is stomping and spinning to the music next to everyone else.

Theologian James Alison likes this idea too and in one of his essays uses the example of the Hippo and Alligator dance from Disney’s old Fantasia animated film. At one point the hippo is surrounded by the evil alligators and seems to be in deadly peril. For just a moment though, she looks up at the camera and gives the audience a wink. It may look like all is lost, but you don’t know the whole story. The player does though. They trust the script writer.

The Super Mario video game franchise gets a lot of mileage out of this idea. One minute, Mario and Bowser are trying to kill each other. On Monday, Mario is roasted alive by fireballs. On Tuesday Bowser is pushed into a sea of lava. On Wednesday they are back, racing go karts and playing tennis together. Video games are a trifling diversion. What could they possibly teach us about the real hard world outside? I think they can help us imagine, just a little bit, what it is like when death is not the end. Death seems so final now, but in the Kingdom of God it is but a distant memory. What is good practice for not taking the scary too seriously today? Perhaps this.

The famous Christmas Truce between English and German soldiers on the front lines in 1914 is an excellent real-life example of this. For a few hours, they put down their machine guns and shared cigarettes and sang hymns. The next day, they went back to slaughtering each other, but with the recognition that all of this was happening as part of some much larger story – one they couldn’t seem to escape, it’s true, and so they pressed on with their part. But it takes real humility to do that – and not taking yourself too seriously. In fact, at the point of loving embrace of the enemy, you are not taking yourself seriously at all.

Another example came up in a photo essay published by the New York Times this week. The author visited a prison in Argentina where the felons enthusiastically practice and play rugby. The program has been praised by some for seemingly helping to rehabilitate the prisoners and keep them psychologically healthy. Once every three months, they get to travel outside the prison and play a full game on a real field against another team. This was my favorite part: Who makes up the opposition? Local lawyers, guards, and even a couple of judges. Classic. The law is as hard as stone but we as creative (not just created) beings are are also gifted with the strange ability to step right outside it, at least for a moment.

“Do you mean to tell me that the rape of that little girl I saw reported on the news last night is just in a script God wrote for his own amusement? Are we all just pawns on the chessboard of some sick game? The devil is just an actor backed up by an extensive cosmic make-up department? We are just robots playing our part? So there isn’t real good or evil? The horror of war is just some kind of bad joke?”

No. Emphatically no. These are the sorts of questions asked by people who cannot trust the author. On a bad day, I ask these sorts of questions too. (The fact that a handful of Calvinists jump to answer “yes” to some of these questions posed above doesn’t help either.) In chapter 13:15, Job says, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” This is coming from someone who really did trust the author, despite his lack of understanding. The reason you can trust him is that He is the kind of author who doesn’t leave his people in the ground. He is the kind of author who raises the dead. And he even sent himself to be the prototype for this resurrection. No-one can fathom how all of this is supposed to work or especially why. You don’t need to. Learn to trust the author.  He is arranging for the victory over death to be total. We are walking somewhere in the second half of the story book.

 

In Luke chapter 1, Gabriel announces two upcoming miraculous conceptions – first to Zacharias and then to Mary.

Both of them are a bit incredulous at first and reply with a question.

Mary says, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” In reply she gets a legitimate answer to her question. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you.”

Zacharias, on the other hand, says, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is well advanced in years.” Sounds like a good enough question really, and in the same format as Mary’s – Really? How? (Gives a reason why not).

Gabriel doesn’t think so though. He flips out and says something like, “I stand in the very presence of God and have been sent to tell you this, but you didn’t believe me. Are you crazy or somethin’? For that, you will not be permitted to speak for about 10 months. See ya.”

Why the difference? Is it something beyond the words, something not communicated on the page? Perhaps Gabriel could read their minds and tell that Mary (despite her questioning) had a simple underlying faith and that Zacharias had underlying doubt in need of rebuke. But Aquinas says angels can’t read minds and he’s probably right. Besides, they don’t need telepathy to do their jobs. They deliver messages to men. The two-way interaction is pretty limited.

Well maybe it wasn’t mind reading then. Perhaps it was body language or other “halo data”. Perhaps something in Zacharias’s tone of voice annoyed him. Moral of the story: Don’t talk back to angels. But that’s not the story and it doesn’t have a moral, so scratch that.

Maybe there was more to the conversation that wasn’t recorded. Perhaps Zach expressed his doubt more forcefully, but Luke (who is recounting the story not just second-hand but third-hand at least) condensed the conversation into two sentences. I’ll buy that. But the way that scripture has been kept intact by the Holy Spirit over the ages means that every word counts and that every missing word is not particularly important. So though I do not believe in the particular late modern Evangelical doctrine of “inerrancy”, I believe that everything in the gospel accounts is completely true and sufficient as-is. A greater (missing) context is not required to get all (not just some) of the important points. So the account of this interaction according to Luke is good enough.

But that still leaves us stuck. Why the rebuke to Zacharias and not to Mary? All I can figure is that the audience mattered. Mary was a teenage girl in a blue-collar family. Zacharias was an elderly priest. It was (literally) his job to know the word of God and to serve in the temple for the worship of Yahweh. Not only that, but it had been his job for many years – his whole life. It would have also been the job of his father and grandfather since he was from the tribe of Levi. He should know better.

The Pharisees often came from the priestly class. We aren’t told if Zacharias was sympathetic with the Pharisee sect, though it’s at least likely. Perhaps he was associated with the Essenes, another renewal movement of sorts. They cared a lot about God too. The old testament prophets usually came from the priestly class as well. They were used to spending time in (or at lest near) the presence of God and were more cut out to being his mouthpiece. Zacharias is of the same ilk and so Gabriel naturally expected a little more from him than from a young girl.

And so Zacharias the priest was “judged more strictly” for his initial unbelief. But in the end this doesn’t change a thing. God’s grace, his gift, is coming like a freight train into both their lives, whether they react to it properly or not. Mary got Jesus, and a good husband later that year. Zacharias and Elizabeth still received their new son John just the same. And that is a comforting thought for us who also sometimes do not believe.