Best of Cerulean Sanctum

Tougher People

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Migrant Mother by Dorothea LangeI don't usually blog about my emotional well-being, but it's been a rough week. Monday I got bad news about a serious dental problem I have that can only be resolved by drastic, painful surgery to the tune of a year's tuition (or more) at Harvard. With both of us deflated by this news, my wife asked me what people with my condition did before this kind of surgery was available. The only answer? They lived with it.

So I've been thinking since then about folks who lived long before any of the amenities we take for granted today. Amy Carmichael, missionary to India, never took a COX-2 inhibitor in her life, bedridden with constant pain for twenty years before she met her Maker. Yet her poetry and wisdom live on long after she succumbed to the affliction of living on this planet. Millions of women somehow got through childbirth without an epidural. And after suffering through the mind-numbing agony of a kidney stone late last year, I don't understand how anyone could have existed without opiates to dull the shrieking nerves.

Dentistry back in the old days consisted of a pair of pliers and a bottle of rotgut. There were no bionic limbs two hundred years ago for the soldier maimed in war; a hook or crutch would have to do. Infection took its toll on many body parts and no plastic surgery plied his trade in making torn bodies whole again. Deformity was life and you went on living it no matter how much you wanted the mirror to lie, if only for a moment.

Couples buried their children by the dozen. Mothers often accompanied their mis-born children to the grave. Life was often brutish, nasty, and short. Ask Hudson Taylor, the great Asian missionary, who returned to England—his own health shattered—after leaving his wife and several children in the cold Chinese soil. Many could tell you that living seemed much more about avoiding being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A simple handshake with the wrong person could leave a deposit of microbes for which there was no known cure, diseases like diptheria or pertussis that are rarely spoken of today.

You can't dismiss that people were tougher then. No one thought himself a victim of fate, either. One simply pressed on and that was it. There weren't scores of therapists to hear Abraham Lincoln talk about his sadness over the deaths of his children and the increasing mental instability of his wife at a time when the nation he presided over was torn in two, brother set against brother. More pressing needs begged for his allegiance, so he soldiered on.

I can't see myself crowded around Jesus, trying to clutch at His robe saying, "If only…." Instead, I would be marveling at the truly shattered people who flung themselves at him, people so broken that some of them weren't recognized as human any longer, except by the Lord Himself. I think I would have to give up whatever place I had in line if I'd seen someone like that. Those were hard days and it's a miracle to this child of the 1960s that anyone could live at all.

There aren't too many tough people in the West anymore. Perhaps this is why we are so willing to forget about the Lord; we have other answers for our problems, even the tiniest ones. A balm exists for whatever ails us as long as the price is right. And even when it isn't, the lengths we'll go to in making it right shows how easily we are bought, sold, and traded on the open market.

It's sobering to know I would've been one of those casualties a hundred years ago. I was hospitalized for two weeks at two years of age for pneumonia, a dreaded killer in the time of my great-grandfather, but not for someone born in the Camelot of Kennedy's era. Should my recovery have been only partial (and partial was what many hoped for in the fin de siecle), I would've been known as a "sickly child," a terminology we don't toss around today simply because we don't see it too often.

Jesus wants tough people who rely on Him for everything, particularly when everything is not provided without fail. If that's my prayer for myself right now, then it's my prayer for you, too. We can't live on "what if?" or "if only…." Faith demands more and asks for tougher people. On that Day, the Bride of Christ will be radiant in her beauty, but She will have gotten there bloodied and beaten—yet not defeated.

Be tougher.

{Image: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" (1936)}

Witch Hunt

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Joan's pyreI’m getting really fatigued. Mad, too. If this is all the Church is in this country, then we’ve lost the whole point.

What I am referring to is the increase in witch hunts that are breaking out in the Christian blogosphere. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t tolerate horrid doctrine. But neither do I tolerate people with perfect doctrine who can merely point fingers and do little else. Anyone (and I’m including myself here) can be a critic, but very few people can be a means of grace that helps people dying for help.

So here’s what I’m saying in a nutshell:

  • If you insist that people must be exactly {miscellaneous Christian necessity}, but you are doing nothing concrete to help them achieve {miscellaneous Christian necessity}, then SHUT UP.
  • If you believe that {miscellaneous Christian ministry/teacher/author/pastor} is doctrinally wrong in some area, take a moment to ask if what he/she/it is saying in another area is something you need to hear before you call him/her/it heretical, or else SHUT UP.

I’m not willing to do the millstone thing. Have I done it in the past? Even on this blog? Probably. But folks, if we are truly going to be the Church, then we have got to start burying the hatchet in something besides each other, especially if we can only point out problems, but have no solutions. That kind of hypocrisy gets us nowhere.

Here’s a case of what I am talking about.

I am no fan of the Emerging Church or Postmodern Christianity, or whatever you want to call it. It’s got profound flaws. But I am not going to rip them up one side and down the other just for existing because they have several points of contention that we should hear. You can point out every single lousy doctrine in the Emerging Church, but what about some of the issues they are raising in areas like Christian stewardship of God’s Creation, justice for the poor, simple living, making people a priority, or making choices to live in places that are not upscale or safe because they would have no Christian presence otherwise? Honestly, has anyone in the Evangelical, Reformed, Mainline, or Whatever Church who has ripped the Emerging Church lately taken one second to say, “You know, they do that a lot better than we do. Perhaps we need to improve in that area,” or is it just one tirade after another, with closed ears and a heart unwilling to take the correction God may be doling out through the equivalent of Balaam’s ass?

A simple pass through the Lord’s chastising of the seven churches in Revelation 2-3 shows that He rewarded both good doctrine and good works. He chastised those churches that lacked in either of those two. The lesson is clear: You have to have both good doctrine and good works. I see no lack of good doctrine in the Christian blogosphere, but many of us may be lacking in the works department. Like I’ve said before, Jesus does not call us to be a good apologist or a good servant of others, He calls us to be both. You may be the greatest Web apologist out there, but if you don’t clothed the naked, what good are you? Likewise, you may be out on the street every day doing good works, but if the Christ you’re sharing with someone else isn’t the Christ of the Bible, what good are you?

As for witch hunts, everyone reading this now is a (figurative) witch. Why? Because some Christian out there is going to find something wrong with your Christianity if he or she looks hard enough. Now how many of us want to be under that withering, soul-killing magnifying glass day in and day out? I don’t. I can’t possibly please every single faction or fraction of Christianity out there no matter how bullet-proof my doctrine or actions are.

Can we ease up on the witch hunts for a while? Can we start finding out what is good, perfect, noble, and pure and start emphasizing those things, making them happen in the lives of people who truly need them? Too often we come to those blessed things not for what they are, but for what they are not. If we can only think of “good” as being “not bad” or “pure” as being “not corrupted,” then we have lost the mind of the Lord.

The Least-Believed Verse in the Bible

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In the past few days it appears the Spirit has wanted me to blog about the supernatural. I wrote about demons on Saturday, Pentecost and the Holy Spirit on Sunday, and on Monday the tendency of some Christians to believe that God no longer speaks to individuals.

Bible imageMonday’s post felt incomplete, so I feel compelled to expand it to discuss the fascination some Christians have with deflating everything supernatural, be it inside the Church or outside. And even though there are some naysayers who want to cast doubt on the very miracles that Jesus performed, I would offer that even for Christians who believe in the innerrancy of Scripture, especially those in the rarified air of nationally-known preachers and teachers, this is the least-believed verse in the Bible:

Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.
—Mark 11:23 ESV

From the lips of Jesus Himself and yet so many of us rush right over that verse and automatically filter it through our newfangled Western Scientific Rationalism Sunglasses, so we see it, but we don’t believe it. “Mountains cast into the sea just by believing? I know that’s what it says, but—”

Talk about big “buts!” I think for most of us who have been around for a while, Mark 11:23 merits a logical explanation that goes something like this: “You know, the Bible does contain hyperboles. Jesus was just being hyperbolic. He’s such a card! You ever see a flying mountain? C’mon!”

Now I’ll be accused of faulty exegesis by most of the people who read this blog, but I’m going for it anyway because I don’t believe the following verse has merely the traditional exegesis so often given it. I think Paul is saying something even more startling:

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be…lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.
—2 Timothy 3:1-2a,5 ESV

Traditionally, the meaning of “denying its power” has solely been attributed to justification and sanctification, God’s powerful transformation of children of damnation into Children of God. I will not even begin to question that interpretation. However, I also believe that this passage is a cautionary bit of advice to Timothy by Paul concerning those people who would handcuff God’s supernatural power operating in the lives of believers. And those supernatural powers extend to raising the dead, speaking in tongues, healing, and all those other numinous manifestations of God’s power working through the lives of believers, and which operate within God’s justification and sanctification of those same believers.

I find it odd that many who would lessen God’s ability to do such things today love to equate preaching the Word with prophesying. And while I am perfectly comfortable with them believing that, I am mystified as to when preaching passed away when those other gifts supposedly ceased. Preaching/prophesying is listed as one of those supernatural gifts of the Spirit we find in 1 Corinthians 12, though I didn’t know that it or its well-loved compadre faith bit the dust with John’s last breath, yet some would have me believe that.

Although I suspect those same folks would argue they fully believe the least-believed verse in the Bible, they have a funny way of showing it by their tendency to use tangled arugments to mock anyone who might still believe that the Lord can raise the dead today just as He raised Lazarus. And while many are willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to the Earth being created in only six days, somehow a modern day Lazarus-like resurrection just ain’t possible.

I’m really getting fed up with anti-supernaturalists who want to have compartmentalized “miracles” on their own terms and not God’s. If God wants to blow through Bob Jones University and blast everyone there with the gift of tongues, well, stranger things have happened—and God was in control of those stranger things, too.

J.B. Phillips wrote a book with one of the greatest titles ever: Your God Is Too Small. I can’t help but believe that a deity who no longer speaks to people in his own voice, who can do no more miracles, who was once mighty but is now routinely outdone by Satan’s counterfeit parlor tricks is just that small. And perhaps our problem is that we so easily put qualifiers on a verse like Mark 11:23 that we’ve created for ourselves a convenient god that is pleasurable in his smallness, convenient enough so that he does not ruffle our little kingdoms more than he ought, and while a tad bit idolatrous, looks enough like the big “G” God of the Bible that few people will notice his impotence.

That is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If we really wanted to know why the Church has become a joke to most people I think its largely because too many self-professed Christians believe in a handcuffed God who closely resembles the god of Deism, a god who stepped back and never again brought his superatural touch to mere mortals. This is a god easily encapsulated and who bears a too comfortable resemblance to you and to me. Who wants a god that pathetic?

I don’t know about you, but I want a big “G” in my God.