God's Residence

SOURCE:  "Who Has Not Found" by Emily Dickinson.  

https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/poetry/emily-dickinson/poems-463

KEYWORDS:  Christmas, Love Neighbor, Incarnation, Heaven, Earth, Descend, 

"Who has not found the heaven below

Will fail of it above.

God's residence is next to mine,

His furniture is love."

Beauty Secrets

SOURCE:  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/my-fair-lady-2/

KEYWORDS:  Beauty, kindness, love, interior, life, virtue, 

When asked about her beauty secrets, the actress, Audrey Hepburn, often shared this list which was originally penned by humorist, Sam Levenson.  

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.

For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.

For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.

For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day.

For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone.

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed; never throw out anyone.

Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of each of your arms. As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman must be seen from in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides.

The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mode, but the true beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It is the caring that she lovingly gives and the passion that she shows.

The beauty of a woman grows with the passing years.

Mandela and Reconciliation

SOURCE:  I cannot find a source for this story.  I would imagine that it is apocryphal.  However, there are other stories that speak of Nelson Mandela's efforts at reconciliation.  This article from the International Business Times speaks about three examples of Mandela taking dramatic steps to model reconciliation.  I will keep this story circulating the internet with caveat on the source.

KEYWORD:  reconciliation, peace, justice, violence, revenge, retribution, 

Nelson Mandela supposedly shared this story:

After becoming President, I asked some of my bodyguard members to go for a walk in town. After the walk, we went for lunch at a restaurant. We sat in one of the most central ones, and each of us asked what we wanted. After a bit of waiting, the waiter who brought our menus appeared, at that moment I realized that at the table that was right in front of ours there was a single man waiting to be served.

When he was served, I told one of my soldiers: go ask that man to join us. The soldier went and transmitted my invitation. The man stood up, took the plate and sat next to me. While eating, his hands were constantly shaking and he didn't lift his head from the food. When we finished, he waved at me without even looking at me, I shook his hand and walked away!

Soldier said to me:

- Madiba, that man must be very sick as his hands wouldn't stop shaking while he was eating.

Not at all! The reason for his tremor is another - I replied. They looked at me weird and said to them:

- That man was the guardian of the jail I was locked up in. Often, after the torture I was subjected to, I screamed and cried for water and he came to humiliate me, he laughed at me and instead of giving me water he urinated on my head.

He wasn't sick, he was scared and shook maybe fearing that I, now that I'm president of South Africa, would send him to jail and do the same thing he did with me, torturing and humiliating him. But that's not me, that behavior is not part of my character nor my ethics. Minds that seek revenge destroy states, while those that seek reconciliation build Nations ′′

SOURCE:  "Old TV Caused Village Broadband Outages for 18 months" by BBC News. September 22, 2020.  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54239180

KEYWORDS: Sin, pervasive, unknowing, blind, unaware

"An unnamed householder in Aberhosan, Powys, was unaware the old set would emit a signal which would interfere with the entire village's broadband.

After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.

The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again.

The village now has a stable broadband signal.

Openreach engineers were baffled by the continuous problem and it wasn't until they used a monitoring device that they found the fault.

The householder would switch their TV set on at 7am every morning - and electrical interference emitted by their second-hand television was affecting the broadband signal.

The owner, who does not want to be identified, was "mortified" to find out their old TV was causing the problem, according to Openreach.

"They immediately agreed to switch it off and not use it again," said engineer Michael Jones."

COMMENTARY:

This reminds me of the nature of sin.  We assume our sins only affect us.  We are unaware that our sins can inadvertently effect others or even the whole community.  Redemption is for the community, not just the individual.

The Persian Flaw

 SOURCE:  "Deliberate Mistakes in Handmade Persian Rugs and Carpets" by David Wilkins. December 16, 2013. http://www.orientalrugexperts.com/deliberate-mistakes-in-handmade-persian-rugs-and-carpets/

KEYWORDS:  Perfection, Flaw, Sin, Humility, Arrogance, Creation

In many handmade Persian rugs and carpets, you will discover the deliberate mistake. Followers of Islam believe only Allah makes things perfectly, and therefore to weave a perfect rug or carpet would be an offence to Allah. The original deliberate mistake is usually made in the execution of the pattern of the rug and not in the dying of the wool or silk, and certainly not the quality of the weaving. Genuine deliberate mistakes in oriental rugs and carpets may be very difficult to spot and can be as subtle as a different colour used in a flower petal. In reality with all handmade oriental rugs and carpets, mistakes creep in whether deliberate or not.

State of Marriage 2020

SOURCE:  "Latest Marriage Data Suggests Dark Future For America If Things Don’t Change Fast" by Craig Osten. The Federalist. September 2, 2020.  

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/20/latest-marriage-data-suggests-dark-future-for-america-if-things-dont-change-fast/

KEYWORDS:  Marriage, Family, Father, Mother, Children, Society, Social, Matrimony, Wedding

[The article references a Senate report, "The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home" which can be found here.]

The report states, “As sources of social capital, few relationships are as important as the family ties between parents and children.” Yet according to the congressional report, more than 45 percent of American children, by the time they reach late adolescence, spend some time without either a mother or a father in the home.

Eighty percent of black children are raised by a single parent, as well as two-thirds of all children whose mothers have less than a high school education. More than half of Hispanic births are out of wedlock, as are 28 percent of Caucasian births, up from 2 percent in 1960.

Marriage — which provides economic and social stability to both men and women and a loving, nurturing home for children — is in serious decline. According to the report, the percentage of women between the ages of 15 and 44 who are married has declined from 71 percent in 1962 to just 42 percent today. Meanwhile, the percentage of never-married women between the ages of 30 and 34 has gone from just over 5 percent in 1962 to 35 percent in 2019.

Another startling statistic is that cohabitation now precedes two-thirds of all marriages, compared to just 1 percent 60 years ago. This has contributed to the staggering increases in unwed childbearing, with only 5 percent of children in 1962 being born to an unwed mother and 40 percent today being born to an unmarried female.

The rates for minority families are even more alarming: 64 percent of black women in their early 30s have never been married, resulting in the staggering 80 percent of black children being raised by a single parent. That is why so many young men in our inner cities never know who their father is — or in some cases do not even have a relationship with their mother. Many of these children are raising themselves. If there was ever a cocktail for societal rage, that’s it.

The Toughest Assignment

 QUOTE:  

"Try your best to make goodness attractive.  That's one of the toughest assignments you'll ever be given." 

-- Fred Rogers

Civilization and a Broken Bone

SOURCE:  "How A 15,000-Year-Old Human Bone Could Help You Through The Coronacrisis" by Remy Blumenfeld. March 21, 2020.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/remyblumenfeld/2020/03/21/how-a-15000-year-old-human-bone-could-help-you-through-the--coronavirus/#e55e38437e9b

KEYWORDS:  compassion, love, care, do unto others, neighbor, mission, fellowship, koinonia

Years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about clay pots, tools for hunting, grinding-stones, or religious artifacts.

But no. Mead said that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur found in an archaeological site. A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. This particular bone had been broken and had healed.

Mead explained that in the animal kingdom if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.

Shaft of Light in the Darkness

SOURCE:  "Maximillian Kolbe: A Subversive Priest" by Elizabeth Scalia. Word on Fire. August 14, 2020. 

https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/maxmillian-kolbe-a-most-subversive-priest/28125/

KEYWORDS:  Courage, Faith, Substitution, Redemption, Witness, Love

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who died as prisoner 16770 in Auschwitz, on August 14, 1941. When a prisoner escaped from the camp, the Nazis selected 10 others to be killed by starvation in reprisal for the escape. One of the 10 selected to die, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began to cry: My wife! My children! I will never see them again! At this Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his place. His request was granted.

A survivor,  Jerzy Bielecki, called Kolbe’s action “a shock filled with hope, bringing new life and strength. . . . It was like a powerful shaft of light in the darkness of the camp.”

Read the whole article.

Saint Damien of Molaki

SOURCE:  "What Do Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump Have in Common?" by Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO, August 10, 2020.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-donald-trump-what-they-have-in-common/

KEYWORDS:  Compassion, love, charity, suffering

Meanwhile, we should all aspire to love with the kind of selfless love Father Damien [Saint Damien of Molaki] did. Writing to his brother about six months into his arrival in Hawaii, he said: “This may give you some idea of my daily work. Picture to yourself a collection of huts with eight hundred lepers. No doctor; in fact, as there is no cure, there seems no place for a doctor’s skill.” He would go to the homes of people — half of them were Catholic. He would offer them spiritual and temporal aid (the temporal not being contingent on the acceptance of the spiritual). They would have wounds full of maggots, some of them. Sometimes he wasn’t quite sure how to administer the final sacrament “when both hands and feet are nothing but raw wounds.”

Other Links:

https://catholicstand.com/god-helps-the-outcast-st-damien-of-molokai/

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2020/in-search-of-father-damien

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/07/31/the-suffering-and-faith-of-saint-damien-of-molokai/

The Power to Forgive

SOURCE:  https://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=8611

KEYWORDS:  Forgiveness, mercy, grace, freedom

"In this beautifully animated film, Holocaust survivor Eva Kor tells the powerful story of her time in Auschwitz, where she, along with her twin sister Miriam, were used as human guinea pigs, subjected to horrific experiments. Years later, feeling the need to free herself from the horrors of the past, Eva wrote a letter of forgiveness to a Nazi doctor, who agreed to accompany her to Auschwitz. When she realized she had the power to forgive, she finally felt free. "You can never change what happened in the past, all you can do is change how you react to it.""

What Can It Do?

SOURCE:  "The Ice Cube is Microwaving" by Chris Ritter.  

https://peopleneedjesus.net/2020/07/30/the-ice-cube-is-microwaving/

KEYWORD:  Improvisation, Imagination, Creativity, Ministry, Church 

The movie Apollo 13 is famous for the line, “Houston, we have a problem.” But the more important scene is when the engineers at NASA get in a room to figure out what to do about it. Flight Director Gene Krantz (Ed Harris) announces: “I want you all to forget the flight plan. From now on we are improvising a new mission. How do we get our people home?” With so much blown apart, they had to figure out what systems were still operational enough to sustain life.

"I don't care what anything was designed to do.  I care what it can do."

In Revelation 3:2, the church of Sardis was challenged to “strengthen what remains.” There are U.S. churches within United Methodism that are doing amazing ministry, reaching people for Jesus, producing new leaders, and deploying people for ministry. We have many pastors who called, gifted, and effective. Strong mission partnerships exist. There are denominational leaders and staffers who have vision, drive, and Kingdom vision. These folks need to be freed to do their best work… independent of any goal of denominational institutional maintenance.

Cross-Generational Connections

SOURCE:  "The Rotarian Conversation,"  The Rotarian, July 2020, pg 52.
KEYWORD:  generations, old, young, lonely, loneliness, connection, fellowship, koinonia

Marc Freedman is one of the leading experts in the United States on the longevity revolution and the transformation of retirement.  He was named a Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the World Economic Forum in 2014 and was featured by AARP the Magazine in 2012 among its "50 over 50 influencers. 

"There is a growing appreciation of connections in general these days, fostered by the awareness of how profound the problem of loneliness is in America and elsewhere.  People need a variety of connections -- with their peers as well as across generations.

A Harvard study found that relationships are the key to happiness throughout adulthood.  It shows that older people who connect with younger people are three times as likely to be happy as those who fail to do so.  Why is that bond so important?  One reason is that as we reach the time in our lives when there are fewer years ahead of us than behind us, it's a great comfort to know that what we've learned is likely to live on in younger friends and family members."

The End of the Story

SOURCE:  "You Decide the End of This Story."  The Daily Stoic.  July 23, 2020.

KEYWORD:  eschaton, faith, Abraham, hope, kingdom of God, 

Nothing better encapsulates Admiral James Stockdale and his heroism than this one quote, which applies today to our own adversity just as it did to the horrible ordeal that he went through:

"I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."

Hiding Money in Books

SOURCE:  "The Still Hide Money in Books," Daily Stoic, June 26, 2020.
KEYWORDS:  knowledge, wisdom, leadership, education

As a young boy, the famed basketball coach George Raveling learned an invaluable lesson about the power of both knowledge and ignorance from his grandmother, who raised him.

“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked the young boy, standing together in her kitchen.

“I don’t know, grandma,” he said.

“Because they knew the slaves wouldn’t open them,” she said.

...

From this early lesson, George Raveling came to see reading as a moral duty. To not read, to remain in ignorance, was not only to be weak, it was to ignore the people who had fought so hard, who had struggled at such great cost to read and to provide for future generations the right and the ability to do so. It was to spit in the face of Frederick Douglass, of Booker T. Washington, and, of course, of Martin Luther King, Jr. who Raveling had gotten to know.

Tower of Babel

SOURCE:  from the John Paul II National Shrine by Fr. Marko Rupnik 

KEYWORDS:  inhumane, incarnation, person, man, arrogance, power, kingdom

Fr. Marko Rupnik created this mosaic to depict the Tower of Babel from Genesis.  The faces of the builders are covered to suggest that as they try to exalt themselves, they lose their own humanity.  

We Want God

SOURCE:  "A Key Coronavirus Question: Do We Want God?" by KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ; May 25, 2020. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-john-paul-ii-centenary-we-want-god/
KEYWORDS:  hunger, desire, love, God-shaped hole, humanity

Do you remember when Pope John Paul II went back to his native Poland, about eight months into his pontificate? The Communist officials couldn’t not let him in — he was too beloved. But when they did, they didn’t stand a chance. And, as Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan, author of John Paul the Great: Remember a Spiritual Father, has written, from the moment he arrived there, “the boundaries of the world began to shift.”

Despite the government’s attempts to keep Poles from getting too emotionally invested in the visit, the people lined the streets to see him. During his first Mass there, in Victory Square, the crowd thundered the declaration that “we want God,” stopping a powerful homily with a cry from the human heart so deep and insistent — and resilient — that the coming victory over the evil of Communism was beginning to be seen, in the victory of Christ over death.

It was the vigil of Pentecost, when the Apostles were given the Holy Spirit to set fire to the world. And the Poles were ready, too. Their Polish pope was a sign like no other that freedom was coming, that God was not leaving them orphaned in their suffering. In his sermon, Pope John Paul II said: “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man. . . . The history of the nation is above all the history of people. And the history of each person unfolds in Jesus Christ. In him it becomes the history of salvation.”

He went on to say: “It is right to understand the history of the nation through man, each human being of this nation. At the same time man cannot be understood apart from this community that is constituted by the nation. Of course, it is not the only community, but it is a special community, perhaps that most intimately linked with the family, the most important for the spiritual history of man.”

QUOTE: Whale Through a Net

SOURCE:  Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (pp. 36-37). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Law vs. Faith, culture, society, religion, restraint, self-government, freedom,

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked:

We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams understood that liberty under the Constitution could only work if the people were virtuous, restraining their passions and directing them toward the good—as defined, presumably, by Adams’s rationalistic religious belief. Fortunately, having gone through the First Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, America was strongly Evangelical, and citizens had a strong shared idea of the Good and a shared definition of virtue. Unfortunately, this would not last.

QUOTE: Failure to Listen

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (p. 55). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Empathy, Love, Neighbor,

As psychologist Carl Rogers wrote, “Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively, skillfully, and with understanding to another person.”

Communicate or Die

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (pp. 6-7). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Fellowship, koinonia, community, social, society,

Captain Eugene “Red” McDaniel was a Navy pilot shot down in North Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for six years. In his book Scars and Stripes, he describes the desperate need of prisoners to communicate with one another to maintain morale. He says POWs tended to die much sooner if they couldn’t communicate. On many occasions, Captain McDaniel endured torture rather than give up his attempts to stay in touch with other prisoners, especially when he was in solitary confinement. Prisoners risked death to work out a complicated communications system where they would write under plates, cough, sing, tap on walls, laugh, scratch, or flap laundry a certain number of times to transmit a letter of the alphabet.

Captain McDaniel writes, “One thing I knew, I had to have communications with my own people here in this camp. There were people like myself who wanted to live through this, if at all possible. Communication with each other was what the North Vietnamese captors took the greatest pains to prevent. They knew, as well as I and the others did, that a man could stand more pain if he is linked with others of his own kind in that suffering. The lone, isolated being becomes weak, vulnerable. I knew I had to make contact, no matter what the cost.”1 For those brave men, it was communicate or die.

When we think of survival, we usually list food, shelter, and clothing as the essentials. I believe communications belongs in that grouping. Babies have died in hospitals because of lack of attention, caring, and handling.

Words and Music

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (p. 45). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

KEYWORDS:  Spirit vs. Law, Faith vs. Religion, passion, inspiration 

Mark Twain was a renowned speaker in his day as well as a famous writer. One morning as he was dressing, he found a button missing from his shirt. Annoyed, he took another shirt. But it was also short a button. Exasperated, he took a third shirt from his bureau. It, too, lacked a button.

Twain flew into a rage, swearing like a stevedore. When he was through, he was startled to see his wife standing at the door, fuming in her own way at his intemperance. Carefully, slowly, and without a trace of emotion, she repeated every obscene word just uttered by her husband.

That took several minutes. When she was through, she stood impassive and silent, hoping her display would shame Twain. Instead, with a twinkle in his eye, he puffed on his cigar and said, “My dear, you have the words, but you don’t have the music.”

Response to the Great Flood of 2016

SOURCE:  Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (p. 19). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

KEYWORDS:  Kingdom of God, neighbor, love, Edmund Burke, Service, Mission

Growing up in south Louisiana, whenever a hurricane was coming, somebody would take out the cast-iron kettle, make a big pot of gumbo, and after battening down the hatches, invite the neighbors over to eat, tell stories, make merry, and ride out the storm together. This spirit ruled the response to the Great Flood of 2016. Even as the waters rose, little platoons all over south Louisiana rushed out to rescue the trapped, shelter the homeless, feed the hungry (with mountains of jambalaya, mostly), and comfort the broken and broken-hearted.

This was not a response ordered from on high. It emerged spontaneously, out of the love local people had for their neighbor, and the sense of responsibility they had to care for those left poor and naked by the flood. Men and women of virtue—the Cajun Navy, church folks, and others—did not wait to be told what to do. They recognized the seriousness of the crisis, and they moved.

Jesus is the Way

SOURCE: 
Blackaby, Henry T.. Experiencing God (pp. 35-36). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:
Guide, guidance, mentor, way

SCRIPTURE: 
"Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'" -- John 14:6

THE FARMER WAS MY MAP

For twelve years, I was the pastor of a church in a city surrounded by farming communities. One day a farmer invited me to visit him at his home. His directions went something like this: “Go a quarter mile past the edge of the city, and you will see a big red barn on your left. Go to the next road, and turn to your left. Take that road for three-quarters of a mile. You'll see a large poplar tree. Go right for about four miles, and then you will see a big rock. …” I wrote all of this down, and only by God's grace did I eventually manage to find the farm!

The next time I went to the man's house, he was with me in my vehicle. Because there was more than one way to get to his house, he could have taken me any way he wanted to. This time, I didn't need the written instructions. You see, he was my map. What did I have to do? I simply had to listen to him and do what he said. Every time he said “Turn,” I did what he said. He took me a new way I would not have discovered on my own. I could never retrace that route by myself because the farmer—my map—knew the way.

Watergate and Easter

SOURCE:  Quote by Chuck Colson
KEYWORDS:  Lies, Truth, Easter

“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”

The Chief Article of Our Faith

SOURCE: "Calvin on the Resurrection."  Email of Foundation for Reformed Theology. April 8, 2020.
KEYWORDS:

As Easter approaches, let us hear again what John Calvin (1509-1564)--second generation Protestant Reformer, preacher, teacher, pastor, and theologian--has to say on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

First of all (1), in his commentary on the Gospel according to John, chapter twenty, Calvin writes:

"The resurrection of Christ is the chief article of our faith."

This is it! This is the sine qua non. Without this, we would have nothing.

Second (2), and more fully, Calvin wrote this in the Institutes, as an exposition of the Apostles' Creed:

"ON THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN FROM THE DEAD"

"Next comes the resurrection from the dead. Without this what we have said so far would be incomplete. For since only weakness appears in the cross, death, and burial of Christ, faith must leap over all these things to attain its full strength. We have in his death the complete fulfillment of salvation, for through it we are reconciled to God, his righteous judgment is satisfied, the curse is removed, and the penalty paid in full. Nevertheless, we are said to 'have been born anew to a living hope' not through his death but 'through his resurrection.' For as he, in rising again, came forth victor over death, so the victory of our faith over death lies in his resurrection alone. Paul's words better express its nature: 'He was put to death for our sins, and raised for our justification.' This is as if he had said: 'Sin was taken away by his death; righteousness was revived and restored by his resurrection.' For how could he by dying have freed us from death if he had himself succumbed to death? How could he have acquired victory for us if he had failed in the struggle? Therefore, we divide the substance of our salvation between Christ's death and resurrection as follows: through his death, sin was wiped out and death extinguished; through his resurrection, righteousness was restored and life raised up, so that--thanks to his resurrection--his death manifested its power and efficacy in us. Wherefore, Paul states that 'Christ was declared the Son of God . . . in the resurrection itself,' because then at last he displayed his heavenly power, which is both the clear mirror of his divinity and the firm support of our faith. Elsewhere Paul similarly teaches: 'He suffered in weakness of the flesh, but rose again by the power of the Spirit.' In the same sense Paul elsewhere discusses perfection: 'That I may know him and the power of his resurrection.' Yet immediately thereafter he adds, 'The fellowship of his death.' With this Peter's statement closely agrees: 'God raised him from the dead and gave him glory so that our faith and hope might be in God.' Not that faith, supported by his death, should waver, but that the power of God, which guards us under faith, is especially revealed in the resurrection itself.

"So then, let us remember that whenever mention is made of his death alone, we are to understand at the same time what belongs to his resurrection. Also, the same synecdoche applies to the word 'resurrection': whenever it is mentioned separately from death, we are to understand it as including what has to do especially with his death. But because by rising again he obtained the victor's prize--that there might be resurrection and life--Paul rightly contends that 'faith is annulled and the gospel empty and deceiving if Christ's resurrection is not fixed in our hearts.' Accordingly, in another passage--after glorying in the death of Christ against the terrors of damnation--he adds by way of emphasis: surely 'he who was dead has risen, and appears before God as our mediator.'

"Further, as we explained above that the mortification of our flesh depends upon participation in his cross, so we must understand that we obtain a corresponding benefit from his resurrection. The apostle says: 'We were engrafted in the likeness of his death, so that sharing in his resurrection we might walk in newness of life.' Hence, in another passage, from the fact that we have died with Christ he derives proof that we must mortify our members that are upon the earth. So he also infers from our rising up with Christ that we must seek those things above, not those on the earth. By these words we are not only invited through the example of the risen Christ to strive after newness of life; but we are taught that we are reborn into righteousness through his power.

"We also receive a third benefit from his resurrection: we are assured of our own resurrection by receiving a sort of guarantee substantiated by his. Paul deals with this at greater length in 1 Corinthians 15:12-26.

"We must, by the way, note that he is said 'to have risen from the dead.' These words express the truth of his death and resurrection, as if it were said: he suffered the same death that other men naturally die; and received immortality in the same flesh that, in the mortal state, he had taken upon himself."

John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. from the 1559 Latin ed. by Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., in Library of Christian Classics, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), Book Two, chapter sixteen, section thirteen (vol. 1, pp. 520-22).

See the Lord and Be Glad

SOURCE:  Quoted in an email from The Foundation for Reformed Theology. April 10, 2020
KEYWORD:  Witness, sight, eye, seeing,

Karl Barth (1886-1968)--preacher, teacher, pastor, theologian--preached the following as part of an Easter sermon at the Basel prison on March 29, 1964.

"On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, 'Peace be with you'. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples became glad when they saw the Lord." John 20:19-20

"Dear friends, we were not there when the risen Jesus, in spite of all the folly and mourning of his disciples, in spite of these doors shut from sheer terror, came into their midst. We cannot see him now as directly as they could, nor shall we be able to see him like that until he comes to judge the living and the dead at the end of all time. But in our way, indirectly, that is in the mirror of the narrative and so of the witness, the confession, the proclamation of the first community, we too can and may see him here and now. Many before us, a whole race of men, have seen him in this and have become glad. For this very reason we celebrate Easter, the festival in memory of that day, to join those people, to see the Lord in that mirror, and so too become glad. Without seeing the Lord nobody can be glad. Whoever sees him will become glad. Why should this not happen here to us as well, to the little Easter congregation of prisoners in Basel's Spitalstrasse with their chaplain and their organist, with all the inmates and wardens of this institution and (after all, I suppose I belong here too) with the old professor who occasionally pays a visit here? All of us can see the Lord too. So all of us may become glad too. God grant that this may happen to us. Amen."

Karl Barth, Call for God: New Sermons from Basel Prison (London: SCM Press, 1967), p.  124.

Seven Stanzas of Easter

SOURCE:  "Let Us Not Mock God With Metaphor" by Richard Burnett.  Theology Matters.  Email dated April 10, 2020.
KEYWORDS:  butterfly, bunny, spring, body, easter

Updike, as I mentioned, was a complex individual, a man of considerable ambiguity, and one who struggled in his faith. This is reflected in his writings. "Earthy" is a word that is often applied to Updike's writing. His novels typically probe theological themes alongside more seamier topics. Updike, nevertheless, especially in his later years, is said to have become more dedicated to the faith. Apparently, he was never able to think his way around the "materiality" and "transcendence" at stake in one of the central claims of the Christian faith, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

While an undergraduate at Harvard University, Updike entered the following poem in a religious arts contest in Massachusetts. It won first prize. With the various attempts within and without the church today to celebrate Easter according to "our own convenience" or "our own sense of beauty," I invite you to reflect on this poem.

                  SEVEN STANZAS OF EASTER by John Updike

                  Make no mistake, if He rose at all
                  it was as His body.
                  if the cells disillusion 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 befuddled eyes of
                       the eleven apostles.
                  it was as His flesh: ours.

                  The same hinge, thumbs and toes,
                  the same valved heart
                 that pierced, died, withered, decayed 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 paper-mache,
                  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, for our own sense of beauty,
                  lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
                           by the miracle,
                 and crushed by remonstrance.


[Written for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church of Marblehead, MA] Taken from John Updike, Seventy Poems, Penguin Books, 1972.

The Christian Hope

SOURCE:  Quoted in an email from Foundation for Reformed Theology, April 11, 2020
KEYWORDS:  Easter, Resurrection, Eternal Life, Heaven

Dr. John H. Leith (1919-2002)--preacher, teacher, pastor, theologian--has written the following about the Christian hope for eternal life:

"The Christian hope has been faithfully proclaimed throughout the New Testament and in every age since over against the fact of death. This Christian hope is summarized in three sentences from Paul's letter to the Philippians. Paul declares: 'Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself' (Philippians 3:20-21). 'For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better' (Philippians 1:21-23). The third statement that gives expression to the Christian hope in this letter is Paul's conviction 'that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father' (Philippians 2:12-11). In these statements Paul makes clear his conviction that at death we immediately depart to be with Christ, and yet there is something more: the coming of the Savior will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, and finally the time will come when every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. These convictions run throughout the New Testament, though they are never put together in any single, coherent form.

"The expression of the Christian hope today should begin with the recollection that eternal life has been an important part of the Christian witness from the very beginning. Eternal life, Walter Lowrie once wrote, is the core doctrine that brings all Christian doctrines into systematic coherence. '"This is the Christian faith, apart from which, without doubt, a man must perish everlastingly." These words which sound astonishing and offensive when used as an introduction of the so-called Athanasian Creed do not seem unreasonable when applied to belief in eternal life.' Christianity simply does not make sense apart from the Christian hope. . . . Austin Farrer has astutely commented that apart from the doctrine of eternal life, Christian faith does not make sense. . . .

"God, who chose us before the foundation of the world, destined us to be his children. The Nicene Creed declares: 'I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.' This is the Christian witness which the church has made in the New Testament and has continued to make in good times and bad up to the present day."

John H. Leith, Basic Christian Doctrine (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993), pp. 294-295, 297.

Opportunity to be Heroic

SOURCE:  "Now Is the Time for Heroes."  Daily Stoic.  April 6, 2020.
KEYWORDS: courage, virtue, hero

At the height of the Great Recession, Henry Rollins, musician and author, wrote,

“People are getting a little desperate.  People might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.”

Sin and Pastoral Care

SOURCE:  

John Haddon Leith, From Generation to Generation: The Renewal of the Church According to Its Own Faith and Practice (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1990) pp. 144, 145-146, 147, 149.

KEYWORDS:  Sin, pastoral care, grace, gospel

From Dr. Rev. Jim Goodloe:

Pastoral care is the application of gospel of Jesus Christ to the lives of the members of the church of Jesus Christ. It is exercised primarily through preaching and teaching. It also includes visitation, calling, caring, and praying with and for the people, especially the sick, the bereaved, and those who are suffering or in distress in any way. Thus pastoral care helps build up the church.

Consider the importance of a proper understanding of the human problem which the church addresses with pastoral care:

"The doctrine of sin bears on pastoral care. Human beings, made good by a good God, are broken by sin. This theological conviction tells us something not only about human beings but also about the nature of the church. Peter Brown, in his remarkable biography of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, contends that the Pelagian-Augustinian controversy was, in the final analysis, a debate about the nature of the church, and therefore about pastoral care. . . . 

"Augustine thought of the church as an inn for convalescents, not as an aristocratic elite, certainly not as an elite corps for social reform. Augustine knew, as few in the history of the human race have ever known, the significance of the human will. He defined a person in terms of the human will. A person is not as he or she thinks, but as he or she wills. More specifically, a person is as the person loves. But Augustine knew that many achievements in life are beyond the power of the human will. Augustine made the case not so much for the power of the human will but for the power of grace. 'No subject gives me greater pleasure. For what ought to be more attractive to us sick men, than grace, grace by which we are healed; for us lazy men, than grace, grace by which we are stirred up; for us men longing to act, than grace, grace by which we are helped.' For such declarations as this, the church called Augustine the Doctor of Grace. . . . 

"Augustine's case was more difficult to present than Pelagius's, but far truer to the facts. The difficulty of Augustine's case can be easily demonstrated. Sermons that denounce evil and sermons that emphasize the general religious quality of life are easily understood by American congregations. Sermons that proclaim God's forgiveness and mercy are more difficult for audiences that do not know that they need forgiveness. Yet a sermon that emphasizes the gospel, that we are all sinners saved by grace, that our security is not in our own achievements but in the grace of God, always touches a few hearts very deeply in any congregation. . . . 

"It is very interesting to observe that the church has always been tempted to Pelagianism. This is a human perversity rather than first of all a theological perversity. The evidence is that today the Pelagians are found on both the left and the right-wing of the church. The right-wing and the left-wing alike define the church in terms of human righteousness and achievement, though their definitions of righteousness are obviously different. It is difficult for the crusader and the advocate of a cause or an orthodoxy to show mercy. Sinners need an Augustinian, not a Pelagian of the right or the left, for a pastor."

SOURCE:  "When Things Are Tough, Remember This." Daily Stoic. March 27, 2020
KEYWORDS:  worse, tough times, bad times, overwhelmed, difficulty

Most languages have some expression to the effect of “When it rains, it pours.” For instance, in Latin malis mala succedunt means troubles are followed by troubles. In Japanese, they say, “when crying, stung by bee.” The point of these expressions is to capture an unfortunate reality of life: that what can go wrong will… and often all at the same time.

Unforeseen Consequences of the Black Death

SOURCE:  "This Pandemic Will Change Us. We Just Don’t Know Quite How Yet," by Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg File. March 27, 2020. https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/this-pandemic-will-change-us-we-just?

KEYWORDS:  unintended consequences, change, habit,

This pandemic is nothing like the Black Death in terms of its lethality, and the world today is nothing like that of the 14th century. But it’s worth recalling how much that pandemic changed the world—sometimes for the better (at least for the survivors, though not the Jews). For starters, we owe the plague credit for giving us the word “quarantine.” “During the Black Death, the Italians devised a 40-day isolation period for the sick, likely inspired by biblical events that lasted 40 days (the great flood, Lent, etc.),” notes the website Ranker. “The concept of isolating the sick pre-dates the Black Death, but the term ‘quarantine’ originates from that time.”

The plague killed a lot of people—estimates vary between 75 and 200 million in Europe and Asia. That’s something like one- to two-thirds of the global population at the time. The peasants left behind were left with a lot of land, and a lot of demand for their labor. Wages grew enormously and working conditions improved in order to attract labor. One lasting benefit of this new prosperity was that beer became less of a luxury and more of a commodity, giving rise to one of mankind’s greatest inventions: The British pub.

When aristocrats later tried to turn back the clock, waves of peasant revolts shook Europe, laying the groundwork for future uprisings.

The Catholic Church was forever wounded by the plague. First and foremost, the plague undermined the legitimacy of the church because it dealt a grievous blow to faith in God. It had more corporeal consequences as well: So many priests died—often the best ones—that the church was left with worse and more selfish leaders, and it grew more corrupt as a result. Bereft of quality manpower and with weakened credibility, the church retreated literally and figuratively from much of Europe.

Had this not happened, the Protestant Reformation may never have happened. That might be overstating things, but it’s a safe bet that it wouldn’t have happened the way it did.

Another—admittedly conjectural—benefit was that America didn’t become a Nordic country. The Vikings in Greenland were wiped out by the plague, making their eventual conquest of North America impossible.

Holding the Horses

SOURCE:  "This Pandemic Will Change Us. We Just Don’t Know Quite How Yet," by Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg File. March 27, 2020. https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/this-pandemic-will-change-us-we-just?
KEYWORDS:  habit, change, prejudice

When World War II was just gearing up, the British were ill-prepared. They couldn’t just wait for factories—at home or in America—to start churning out the arsenal of democracy. They had to get ready with whatever was on hand. To that end, they de-mothballed some light field artillery last used during the Boer War and assembled the five-man crew required to fire it. But when they drilled with the equipment there was something not quite right. According to procedure, three seconds before discharging the weapon, two of the men would stand at attention off to the side and hold position until after the shot was fired. No one knew why they did that. Ultimately, they had to call in an old retired artillery officer.

He watched the exercise for a while, and then a spark of an old memory struck and he recognized what they were doing: "I have it. They are holding the horses."

They could tell the choreography didn’t make sense, but (like Chesterton’s fence) they couldn’t quite figure out why it was required.

This story comes from Robert Nisbet’s wonderful book, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (which inspired my (underrated) second book, for what that’s worth). In it, Nisbet writes, “Habit and convention are so native to human beings, as to every other organism, because all behavior is purposive and adaptive. It is aimed at the solution of problems which beset the person or organization from the environment or from within.”

Love of Neighbor and the Image of God

SOURCE:  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated from the 1559 Latin edition by Ford Lewis Battles, 2 volumes, in Library of Christian Classics, edited by John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), Book 3, chapter 7, section 6 (volume 1, pages 696-97, emphasis added).
KEYWORDS: Imago Dei, love of neighbor, quarantine, social distance,

Recently shared by Rev. Jim Goodloe:

Scripture helps in the best way when it teaches that we are not to consider that men merit of themselves but to look upon the image of God in all men, to which we owe all honor and love. . . . Whatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him. Say, "He is a stranger"; but the Lord has given him a mark that ought to be familiar to you, by virtue of the fact that he forbids you to despise your own flesh. Say, "He is contemptible and worthless"; but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image. Say that you owe nothing for any service of his; but God, as it were, has put him in his own place in order that you may recognize toward him the many and great benefits with which God has bound you to himself. Say that he does not deserve even your least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of your giving yourself and all your possessions. Now if he has not only deserved no good at your hand, but has also provoked you by unjust acts and curses, not even this is just reason why you should cease to embrace him in love and to perform the duties of love on his behalf. You will say, "He has deserved something far different of me." Yet what has the Lord deserved? While he bids you forgive this man for all sins he has committed against you, he would truly have them charged against himself. Assuredly there is but one way in which to achieve what is not merely difficult but utterly against human nature: to love those who hate us, to repay their evil deeds with benefits, to return blessings for reproaches. It is that we remember not to consider men's evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.

A Life of "Generativity"

SOURCE:  "You Might Never Be Famous — And That’s O.K."  Daily Stoic.  March 10, 2020.
KEYWORDS: Meaning, Life, Humility, Humble

Emily Esfahani Smith, author of the piece in the New York Times, titled “You’ll Never Be Famous — And That’s O.K.”, shared the opinion of the 20th-century psychologist Erik Erikson, who said that a flourishing, meaningful life is one of “generativity”.  She said in an interview,

“When we’re young, we’re supposed to figure out who we are and what our purpose is. As we get older, we’re supposed to shift the focus from ourselves to others and be ‘generative.’ That is, we’re supposed to give back, especially to younger generations, by doing things like raising children, mentoring colleagues, creating things of value for our community or society at large, volunteering, etc. We each have the power to be generative. Fame and glamour are about the self—aggrandizing yourself. But generativity is about connecting and contributing to something bigger, which is the very definition of leading a meaningful life.”

The Dragon Must Be Slain Every Morning

SOURCE: "This is a Command, Not a Mere Reminder,"  The Daily Stoic, February 14, 2020
KEYWORDS:  Resistance, sin, doubt

Like most solo pursuits, the artist’s life is one that ceaselessly tests one's mental fortitude. Steven Pressfield likens it to dragon slaying. The dragon being what he’s coined the “Resistance”—that voice that questions your abilities, your worth, your sanity. “Resistance never sleeps,” Pressfield says. “It never slackens and it never goes away. The dragon must be slain anew every morning.” Anyone who sets out to make a career in the arts is confronted with this reality quickly, if not immediately.

The Difficulty of Being Still

SOURCE:  "Can You Be Still," The Daily Stoic, February 12, 2020.  

KEYWORD:  restless, active, "Don't just stand there. Do something."

SCRIPTURE:  Psalm 46:10 "Be still and know that I am God..."

"[Among the lessons found in The Odyssey by Homer is one that is easy to miss.] In fact, in some translations it’s cut off or ignored. What does Odysseus do after nearly ten years of war and then ten more years of struggle to make it home? What does he do shortly after arriving home after having been gone so long that his wife’s hair was grey and his old dog was barely alive? After he slaughtered the invaders in his home and secured his kingdom that he was blocked from for so long?

It’s almost unbelievable: Almost immediately after coming home, he gets ready to leave again! As Emily Wilson beautifully translates Odysseus giving the insane news to his long-suffering wife:

But now we have returned to our own bed,
As we both longed to do. You must look after
My property inside the house. Meanwhile,
I have to go on raids, to steal replacements
For all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed,
And get the other Greeks to give me more,
until I fill my folds.

Isn’t that the human condition in a nutshell? Isn’t that restlessness exactly what got Odysseus in trouble in the first place? The insatiability and greed that nearly took him and his men to the brink a hundred times? As Blaise Pascal put it, “all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room.” Because we cannot be happy, because we can’t just be, we waste years of our life. We go begging for trouble."

Choosing the Correct Handle

SOURCE:  "How You Look at Things Matter," The Daily Stoic, January 29, 2020
KEYWORDS:  Perspective, Rose-Colored Glasses, Worldview

"As Epictetus said, each situation has two handles—one that will bear weight and one that won’t. We have to choose carefully and properly."

How we view the world matters.  Do we see it from a Christian perspective?  Do we seek God's will in each situation?  Do we find ways "to move forward, to reduce anxiety, to find humility, or to even see the humor."