Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Our Bounden Duty

Day before yesterday (actually it was night before yesternight) one of my patients asked me to bring her Communion, since none of the pastoral staff of her church had been to visit her during her long hospital stay. In preparation, I was attempting to determine the Gospel reading for that Sunday, since I use the Anglican liturgy when I do weddings, funerals, and Communion.

The Anglican Church is not to be outdone by anyone for making the simple absurdly complicated. They have fancy names for regular things. For instance, the janitor is called the Sextant. Now you could throw your chest out and say you are a Sextant by profession, and non-Anglicans would think you to be a navigational expert.

Well, it was kind of like that, trying to figure out the Gospel reading for this Sunday. I wasn’t in church because it was a work day. So I began going through all the tables in the front of the BCP (Book of Common Prayer), the book that contains prayers, collects, ceremonies for every occasion imaginable, and maybe including Elizabethan imprecations to pronounce on your children when they “get to be too much.”

The Anglican Liturgical calendar starts with Advent Sunday, which is usually the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Then there are the Sundays of Advent, then Epiphany, then St. John the Evangelist Sunday, and Holy Innocents Sunday then in the spring are the Gesima sisters, Septuagesima, Sexigesima (she’s the bad girl in the family) Quinquagesima, and their little step-sister, Ash Wednesday. Then there is Lent (or Lint, depending on what kind of filter you have), and Easter, and then the rest of the year is the first Sunday after Easter, the Second, etc., until Advent comes back around.

Well, I finally ran out of time and guessed that this was the 427th Sunday after Easter. Using this bit of divination, and reckoning that, since last Sunday the Gospel reading was the last part of Luke 16, this Sunday, it might be the first part of Luke 17. So I chose that for the Gospel portion to read when I said the Eucharistic Liturgy for my patient.

In Luke 17, Our Lord tells a parable of a man who has a servant. He asks if the man should thank his servant for doing his job. “I trow not,” he said. “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done that which was our duty to do.’“

In the Eucharistic Liturgy there are a couple of passages which resonate with this passage from Luke.

One is , “It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty, Everlasting God.”

Another is “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice unto thee . . . .”

My point is this, that it is our bounden duty to give thanks to God for His goodness to us and to offer up our selves, our souls and bodies in His service, even to the point of death. But even if we should do these things perfectly and to the letter (which we don’t), we would not give back to God any surplus on His investment (this is the meaning of unprofitable). We would only have done that which is right and “our bounden duty” to do.

Which brings me to the bare truth of the matter which is stated in the prayer of confession: “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed . . . provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.”

We haven’t even done that which is our duty toward God to do. And we engage in that which it is our duty not to do.

And yet, we can pray that, through the substitutionary merit of Jesus Christ, God would receive us and forgive us, “not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Thanks be to God! Amen.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Understanding the lovingkindness of the LORD

“Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall understand the lovingkindness of the LORD.”

This is the last line from Psalm 107. This Psalm gives examples of different ways in which the LORD is kind and loving toward Adam’s race. I have written previously about expressions of God’s wrath in Nature, and that it really is no surprise, once the truth about man’s natural emnity toward God, and God’s righteous indignation about it is grasped. The only surprise about things like devastating storms and fires and such is that they don’t happen more often.

The real shocker is in this Psalm where God’s acts of kindness to His ungrateful enemies are set out by several examples. Yes, God does express His wrath, but more often, He expresses His lovingkindness in the ways that He makes things “Turn out alright.”

And yet the point of the Psalm is that God’s lovingkindness toward us, His enemies, is taken for granted. It is not recognized as a mercy and a kindness, a lovingkindness from the Sovreign God. We usually just act like it should be that way. The fact is it should never be that way. The point of the refrain in this Psalm, “Oh that men would praise the LORD for His wonderful works to the children of men!” -- is that they almost never do.

Nevertheless, God goes on thanklessly, both chastening man in His wrath, and at the same time wooing us toward repentance through His lovingkindnesses.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

A Hot Stake or a Cold Chop

The other day my friend John (www.cowart.info) and I were having breakfast, as we are wont to do about every other week or so. Then we went back to his house and had a pretty interesting discussion. I have had to think about it for some time. John, I know you are reading this. Set me straight if I misstate something.

John expressed concern that the way the Gospel is presented is without hope. He said, moreover, that even the way I present it offers no hope. (Imagine! This is the cost of friendship -- having to hear an honest assessment about one’s self.) He went on to say that it distresses him that the miraculous moves of God we hear about always seem to take place somewhere else, at some other time. We discussed the possibility that some of these reports, the extra-biblical ones anyway, may be overstated. We also talked about fake miracles that seem to abound these days. We considered the Billy Graham Crusade that took place here a few years ago. The promo was that Jacksonville would never be the same. But it’s just about like Mr. Graham found it -- unchanged -- well, except for an increase in local government corruption. John said it was really nothing but a Republican political rally with some Christianity sprinkled in.

More about hope: by hope, John appeared to mean hope that God is going to help me with the rent, or heal my child, or fix my toothache, etc., if I believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I listened to John and tried to process what he presented. After leaving and thinking about this conversation for days, it appeared to me that our discourse moved around three ideas:

1. That God ought to do more miracles since there are so many people who need them, if He is really good.
2. That if He would, we would not have to rely on faith. We could see some miracles for ourselves.

I have struggled for two weeks now trying to think how to write this. I seem unable to express my thoughts without becoming over-complex. In outline, they are these:

1. There is an assuption that if God is really good, He will do as I think He should about my and others’ problems. This in turn assumes I am good and my goodness is the measuring rod of God’s goodness.

2. It also assumes that we do not deserve God’s unbridled wrath. But according to the Bible, we are criminals against His law, we hate Him by our inherited nature, we are willing participants in the kingdom of His enemy, Satan, and we want nothing to do with Him (God). We make up fake gods who are like us (see #1).

3. It ignores that hope only has meaning in the face of despair. If we understand our true condition before God, we should be in the depths of despair. We should not expect to have any hope.

With these in mind, I contend that the Gospel as it is presented in Scripture is that God has made an arrangement in the form of a covenant to forgive anyone who will believe on His Son, Jesus Christ as his or her substitute. This implies an admission that what happened to Jesus should happen to us. So the point of hope is that God will forgive us. I don’t see any other kind of hope presented in the New Testament except that God will forgive us on these terms, and as a result will not torture and then exterminate us in the world to come, as we deserve. I have not seen anything in the preaching of the Apostles that involves getting a new refrigerator, or even a good used one, God giving me money or anything else. He may do these things. But the presentation of the Gospel does not include this, and for many, believing on the Son of God has meant a cold chop or a hot stake, or imprisonment or poverty, or persecution. What is offered is the promise of resurrection from the dead (which all will experience) and that, at the judgement, those who belong to Christ will be passed over for judgement, and therefore will enter into eternal life.

Regarding miracles to confirm my faith: No amount of miracles is enough for those who are dependent on them. For those who recognize that the miracles that have occured in confirmation of God’s revelation in history and have been recorded in Scripture, no more are necessary, whether God ever does another one or not.

Friday, October 5, 2007

A Broken World

I was sitting at a club I belong to the other day. I was reading, as I frequently do there. A woman came up pushing a stroller with a child too big to be in a stroller. She told us she was waiting for her daughter who was attending a religion class.

But I was interested in this child. It was clear that he had some kind of congenital brain damage. He reminded me of a cousin whom I have not seen in many years. She had a similar distorted facial expression, undirected eyes, and spastic, unpurposeful movements.

When I see something like this, as we all do from time to time, it sets me to thinking about the nature of things -- of the Universe and of God. What pricks my interest is that when I saw this child, I knew something was wrong. This can only mean that I know that something is right and that this is a breach of it. A skeptic could argue that my concept of right in this sense is just based on my perception of normal, or on a social construct that is longstanding but only arbitrary.

But if I go back hundreds of generations in my thinking, I must conclude that somewhere there were some people who did not have this tradition behind them, and yet knew from within that something was wrong, implying that they also knew something was right and this is a breach of it -- that something is broken here.

The Bible says there is a God. Common sense demands there is a God, the pratting of Athiests notwithstanding. Either the Universe has always existed, which it obviously has not because it would have run down by now; or it created itself, an absurdity; or there is an all wise God of unlimited intelligence and ability who made it.

The Bible states this is the case and then goes on to say that when He made it, He said it was good. But it is clear when I see things like this poor child and his poor mother that something is broken. What was good, what I inately know to be “right”, is no longer good. Somehow it is broken. And I know it is even if no one tells me so.

So when I see things like this, I know that we live in a world that is no longer good as God made it. It does not mean God is not good. It means that man in his sinful nature, acting according to his free will, has ruined it starting with the original disobedience recorded in Genesis chapter three.

The Bible says that Christ came into the world to bear away the sin of Adam’s race and to eventually put everything back right. He will impose righteousness on people who have been forgiven by believing on Him for forgiveness of sin. He will destroy all those who chose not to, putting them out of existence, so that God may be all in all. Then God will be glorified in His creation.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Napoleon's testimony to Christ and the Bible

"I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon sheer force. Jesus Christ alone founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men will die for Him. In every other existence but that of Christ how many imperfections! From the first day to the last He is the same; majestic and simple; infinitely firm and infinitely gentle. He proposes to our faith a series of mysteries and commands with authority that we should believe them, giving no other reason than those tremendous words, 'I am God."

The Bible contains a complete series of acts and of historical men to explain time and eternity, such as no other religion has to offer. If it is not true religion, one is very excusable in being deceived; for everything in it is grand and worthy of God. The more I consider the Gospel, the more I am assured that there is nothing there which is not beyond the march of events and above the human mind. Even the impious themselves have never dared to deny the sublimity of the Gospel, which inspires them with a sort of compulsory veneration. What happiness that Book procures for those who believe it!"

Napoleon Bonaparte as cited in "Tributes to Christ and the Bible by Brainy Men Not Known as Active Christians" in The Fundamentals vol. III p. 364 published by Baker Books, 1993.

Monday, October 1, 2007

My best skill

I have a project to work on this morning, the next step in finishing a screen porch I have been building on the back of my house. I find that it takes more effort to get started on these things than to actually do them. This problem has lead all my life to a problem with procrastination.

I looked into joining a new local Procrastinators Anonymous program to get some help with this. But they keep postponing the first meeting.

The upside of this procrastination thing is that I have watched movies on video and dvd that I would have never had time to see; I have taken marathon naps that would never have been taken and dreamed of places I will never be able to go to.

As I get older I find that I have less energy (what’s up with that) to overcome inertia in getting anything started. And as tasks pile up undone, I get a little depressed because of all the things I need to do, which makes me want to go take a nap.

I have discovered that I do much better with the jobs waiting to be done if I start by making a list on a 3x5 card of about six things. It is easier to do the card, which gives me a run-up on starting the first task on the card. Let’s see, I’m looking for a card. Huuumm!. I don’t see one. I think I’ll go back to bed for a while and see if I can find one there.

What does this have to do with my Christian faith? Nothing I know of. Just that I have meant to relate these things before, but I am just now getting around to it.