Archive for the ‘Metaphor’ Category

Wrestling With God

Tuesday, March 19th, 2013

Genesis 32: 22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”  But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

Almost every morning around 4:30 AM I wake up. I have tried everything I know to stay asleep until dawn at least.  Tylenol PM, even some things that are stronger, but nothing works. Like clockwork, at 4:30 AM I wake up.

I look over at my wife hoping that she is awake.  But she never is. The soft, flannel sheet grace her beautiful freckled shoulders cashiering into my dark world the late moon light luminosity glimmering and dancing through our upstairs bedroom window. For 35 years I have awakened next to this woman and it still takes my breath away. “As winter strips the leaves from around us, so that we may see the distant regions they formerly concealed, so old age takes away our enjoyments only to enlarge the prospect of the coming eternity.” (Jean Paul)

The silence is surreal and disorienting.  This is the silence of a winter country mountain farm. There is no hint of a sound.

Nonetheless, my heart is almost always nearly breaking and I there are screams in my soul that I cannot drown out.

I wistfully reach out and gently touch her shoulder.  I dare now wake her up.  God knows she works so hard.  Loves me so much.  Cares for me.  I know I am a high maintenance husband.  She needs all the sleep she can get.  Especially that deep sleep that I know longer enjoy, that sleep between 2-6 AM, that deep nocturnal slumber that serendipitously visits so very rarely to my soul.

In high school I remember my high school teacher, Mr. Watson, asking, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, is it sound?”  The trees were falling in my forest and the sounds were deafening but I wondered if anyone was around to hear it.  And if no one heard my trees fall, was it really sound?

The darkness spoke only silence to my soul. The shadows of trees moving in the wind were my only companions this early morning.

This is, I assure you, the darkest time of every day.  The time when night is almost over but daylight has not come.

When I was a boy my dad would take us into the Devil Den swamps near Montrose, Arkansas, to ambush unwary green headed Mallard Ducks at daybreak. Like trolling mine sweepers, dragging our red ball hip books along through antediluvian mud, we would push through down tree limbs, avoiding jutting cypress knees.  The swamp had the sweet smell of death.  It was rumored that there was an old escaped slave den nearby, a place where runaway slaves would run and hide from cruel slave owners.  More than once I thought I saw their shiny black bodies run from tree to tree through the swamp. It was so dark.  It was even too dark to look at our compasses that probed into the frenzied quagmire that surrounding us and would have at least told us where North was if we could see it.  But we could not.

“Mallard ducks were worth it, “ I kept telling myself, although truly, I never liked eating wild ducks.  The meat was too rich and dark and perilous for this southern boy who liked anodyne, fried chicken, and domestication, cornbread.

It was so dark in the Devil’s Den.  And on those mornings, most mornings now, when I awaken at 4:30 AM, alone in the silence, I remember the Den. The only light we enjoyed was the North Star on the tail of the Big Dipper full of radiant repartee and iridescent chatter.

Genesis 32: 27 The man asked him, “What is your name?”   “Jacob,” he answered.  28 Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Every morning I struggle.  I struggle with what could have been.  Other friends, in other places, even family members, are awakening in this darkness but their worlds are full of certainty, of jobs, and of pensions.  They are tired, as I am, but not conflicted.  They are at peace with their repertoire. They may not know the drama in which they play a role, but they know their role, and they play it well.

In these early, disquieting mornings, I know my role, but do not know the play in which I perform.  I do not even know my next line. I feel lost.

John Barth, in his novel The Floating Opera compares life to a floating opera.  This opera is being performed on a floating barge that is slowly moving up and down the Hudson River.  Spectators are standing on the bank looking at the drama unfold.  As long as the floating opera is in their sight, they grasp the meaning of the play.  They may even join in a chorus or two.  Life is unambiguous and consequential and full of beans. But then the barge moves on and the spectators are left in quiet uncertainty.

 29 Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

The barge returns again and leaves again and so forth.

To me, the barge is absent at 4:30 A.M.  I am not sure what the story is.  I don’t know what my place is in the drama unfolding.  By 10AM I am regaining some élan. By 2PM I am completely confident; the play is right before me.  By 10 PM I am asleep . . . but again, at 4:30 A. M., the struggle begins again.

30 So Jacob called the place Peniel,[g] saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

But it is 4:30 A. M.  again.  “James,” in Hebrew, is “Jacob,”  “the deceiver,” “the one who struggles.” It is my Peniel.  It is where I meet God face to face.  It is a time when, again, I decide, “Whom will you serve today? If God is God serve Him! If Baal is God, serve him! (1 Kings 18:21)

4:30 AM lying next to my gray haired campaigner, is my Peniel, my time of struggle, but it is also my Mt. Carmel.  Each day I go up to  Mt. Carmel to challenge the gods of this age.  With my pen, with my prayers, I dare the cacophonic sirens of this discordant land to challenge my God to a duel.

Mt. Moriah each morning and I meet again a God who loves me so, so much, but who has no hyperbole in His portfolio, who literally demands everything from me.  Whether I see all the drama unfolding before me on the river or not, whether I fully understand what the outcome will be, God demands, in great love, in only the way a Savior can, that I give Him my all, my everything again. Especially at 4:30 AM.

It is 6:30 AM and my sugar plum, whose transcendent beautiful will soon belong to Clinique and Origin, but whose raw courage and fortitude is mine, and mine alone, for this new day,  for this moment, for this new Genesis.

I see the wrinkles, the circles under her eyes, but I will not insult the ambiance, the chronicle, the time that I know put them there by pretending they are not.  No there is no histrionics in my Karen and I will have none either.  Not right now.  Not for this moment when we kiss and bask in the dawn again. She is more beautiful than Cleopatra, more exotic Bathsheba, for surely Mark Antony and Solomon would feel cheated if they could have known my exquisite life companion.

31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. 32 Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.

“Hi, honey. What is for breakfast?”

And I limp again, down the stairs, to my country kitchen for my oatmeal . . . and then I battle the gods of the ages again . . .

The Days of Obadiah Are Over

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

I believe that the days of Obadiah are over.  The days of Elijah have come.

Obadiah, pious, Godly has saved thousands of believers.  In order to do that Obadiah had to be anonymous, quiet.  Oh he was privately advancing the cause of YHWH.  And it must be said that he was a pious, Godly effective man in his day, to his people.

But the days of Obadiah are ending. . . the days of Elijah are coming.

Peter Berger, a secular sociologists, reminds us that the social structures we call “culture” are no longer sustaining our society, that, in effect, things are falling apart.  Our problems are much deeper than the economic crisis, there is a crisis of cultural authority. Or, as my old friend Professor Harvey Cox, at Harvard, coyly observed, “Once Americans had dreams and no technology to fulfill those dreams.  Now Americans have tons of technology, but they have no dreams left.”

The first strophe of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” begins:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is tossed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

American in the beginning of the 21st century is spinning out of control.  We are stretching our wings adventurously, but drifting farther away from our God. We are in trouble.

The days of Obadiah are ending and the days of Elijah are coming!

The fact is, and numerous theologians and social annalists echo this, America is in a post- Christian era.  Ergo, for the first time in American history, Evangelical, born-again Christians, are most definitely a minority element in America.  Writers like William Willimon, Thomas Sine, David Wells, Os Guinness, and others echo this theme of “resident aliens” throughout America.  Increasingly we who proclaim the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior are finding ourselves in a minority culture.

It seems, at times that Americans are lost.  “The sense of being lost, displaced, and homeless is pervasive in contemporary culture,” Walter Brueggemann writes. “The yearning to belong somewhere, to have a home, to be in a safe place, is a deep and moving pursuit.”  I am a pastor, and in spite of our hedonistic bravado, I generally find most of my congregation members–who generally are not living a life centered on Jesus Christ–are in fact desperately unhappy.  And no wonder.  This world does not provide what we need.  No, it really doesn’t.  It once thought it did.

I can remember being seduced by the august institution that was HarvardUniversity.  In 1976, I really believed my university chaplain who told the incoming Harvard class, “You are the next history makers of America.” I wanted to believe it.  I needed to believe it. My acquaintance and colleague from Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Forrest Church, now pastor in a Unitarian Church in New York City, was fond of saying, “In our faith God is not a given, God is a question . . . God is defined by us.  Our views are shaped and changed by our experiences. We create a faith in which we can live and struggle to live up to it . . . compared to love a distant God had no allure.”  Indeed.  This thinking has gotten us into quite a mess.

Oh, but, my friends, the days of Obadiah are ending and Elijah is coming!

Elijah with his bravado and choleric melancholy.  Elijah with his intrepidness and eccentricity.  Elijah the prophet. Choleric Elijah is coming home—and no one wants him to come home.  He is crossing his Rubicon.  After a long time, in the third year, the word of the LORD came to Elijah: “Go and present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the land.”   King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, of course, hate him.  But even, Obadiah, a faithful follower of God and trusted advisor to the king and queen, who had learned so well to survive in this hostile land, who has done so much good for God’s people—Obadiah was not too thrilled to see him either.   In fact, no one welcomed Elijah—not the hostile king and queen nor the pious evangelical Obadiah. Even though Elijah brings good news—it is finally going to rain—no one welcomes him.  Elijah’s fish-or-cut-bait prophetic messages are irritating the life out of the status quo.  That is bad enough.  But what really scares the dickens out of everyone is the fact that Elijah has come home to Zion, to the City of God, to challenge the gods of the age to a duel.

In one sense, like Obadiah, we resist the coming of Elijah.  The anonymity that we evangelicals have so enjoyed over the last few years has caused us to prosper.  But there is no middle ground left to us evangelicals.

On the other hand, as Os Guinness reminds us, there needs to be a great falling away, perhaps a great persecution before there is great revival.  Bring it on, Lord!

Elijah is coming to town!

One of the most disturbing essays I have ever read is an essay by Thomas Merton entitled “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann.”  “One of the most disturbing facts,” Merton begins, “that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane.”  The fact is, given our world, we can no longer assume that because a person is “sane” or “adjusted” that he/she is ok.  Merton reminds us that such people can be well adjusted even in hell itself! “The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless (p. 47).”

Obadiahs, spread forth your grandeur!  Proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord!  For Elijah is coming!

Be the best you can be.  Speak, act, work with excellence!  Ask for no quarter, give no quarter, but go to the Mt.Carmels of our society, tear down the Asherath Poles, and confront the Gods of this age!!!!

1Walter Brueggemann, The Land (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977),  p. 1.

Easter Sunday 2010

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

By my estimation I have preached 29 Easter sermons.  This year, wishing to be different, I chose to preach on Romans 8.  I alluded to the Easter narrative, but I preached on Romans 8.

Why?  Because everything about this chapter screams “He is risen!”

The truth is, I bet the disciples were suffering that morning.  Certainly the ladies who visited the grave were suffering.  They had come to prepare the body for burial; not to meet a Risen Lord.

When Paul speaks of the spiritual life in Romans 8 he speaks much of suffering. We who are in Christ need not suffer from guilt or fear, for our sins have all been forgiven. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (8:1-4). When we sin as Christians, we need never doubt that we are justified by faith because God’s Spirit dwells within us, bearing witness that we are God’s sons. Further, because the Spirit of God indwells us, He not only leads us to do the will of God, but He empowers our dead bodies to do so (8:5-17) (Diffenbaugh).

But the best thing I like about Romans 8:15 when we are invited to call God “Abba” or “daddy.”  I don’t know about you, but, beyond age 4 or 5, I never called my dad “daddy.” It was not cool.  In fact, I wanted to be extra cool so I tried calling dad “father” but that only got a scowl from my mother.  I compromised and called him “Dad.”  I know my son-in-law, who is really cool, calls me “Jim.”  Coolness not withstanding,  that is too much.  I would like to be called “Dad” or at least “Big Daddy” but Karen refuses to be a “Big Momma” and how can you have a Big Daddy without a Big Momma?  But I digress.

Can you imagine, the pedantic, choleric, ex-Pharisee Paul, who until recently did not even pronounce the name of God—YHWH—now invited the Roman Church to call God “Daddy?”  Imagine the old stuffed shirt Jewish Christians in the congregation praying “Our Daddy, who art in heaven, halloweth be thy name!”  Ha!  It is embarrassing.

8:15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery leading again to fear, 18 but you received the Spirit of adoption, 19 by whom 20 we cry, “Abba, Father.” 8:16 The Spirit himself bears witness to 21 our spirit that we are God’s children. 8:17 And if children, then heirs (namely, heirs of God and also fellow heirs with Christ) 22 – if indeed we suffer with him so we may also be glorified with him. (Net Bible)

But it is true.  He is our Daddy,  Abba Father.  It is not cool, but it is true.  God the Creator of the universe, is so intimate, so wonderful, so loving, that he invites us to call him Daddy.  Wow!  Now that is an Easter message.

Worn Path

Friday, January 1st, 2010

In Eudora Welty’s short story “Worn Path,” the elderly and slightly senile grandmother protagonist, Phoenix, has come to the doctor to obtain medicine for her grandson. But, she cannot remember why she came!

The nurse tries to tease out of Phoenix her reason for coming.

“You mustn’t take up our time this way, Aunt Phoenix,” the nurse said. “Tell us quickly about your grandson, and get it over. He isn’t dead, is he?’

At last there came a flicker and then a flame of comprehension across her face, and she spoke. “My grandson. It was my memory had left me. There I sat and forgot why I made my long trip.”

“Forgot?” The nurse frowned. “After you came so far?”

After coming so far, after working so hard, have we home schoolers forgotten why we came? Are we at the place where we can get the solution to our problems, but have we forgotten why we came? The challenge for us in 2010 is to sit down together and talk. Look around at all that God has done, and give thanks. And then go forth, Elijahs, and challenge the gods of this age—at Harvard, at the Supreme Court, in Hollywood. Give no quarter and ask for none. The God we serve deserves nothing less, accepts nothing less!

Crossing the Rubicon

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

I don’t know, home schoolers, when we crossed the Rubicon. Perhaps it was when we turned off the television or refused to buy the latest entertainment center. Maybe it was when we drove our old cars another year so we could buy the best curricula for our kids. Or was it when we decided to read classics together in our homes? Somewhere, sometime, we crossed the Rubicon and there is no going back.

To push my metaphor farther, we were first “Obadiahs.” Obadiah, like Daniel, was a very influential in a very evil regime. King Ahab and Jezebel are very capable, and in many ways, successful monarchs. From their perspective, they are the ‘true’ leadership. Elijah, and the prophets, were radical, unreasonable, uncompromising troublers of Israel. They were not team players. No doubt Ahab and Jezebel could not understand why Elijah could not carry on a civil discussion about what they saw as tangential, civil issues.

This generation is the Elijah generation. To Elijah, the behavior of Ahab and Jezebel is absolutely appalling. While claiming to worship the Hebrew God they also fill the land with syncretism, with apostate worship of the BAALS. The crowning blow, to Elijah, was when these scoundrels placed the Asherah poles (places where believers could have sexual relations with temple prostitutes) on the hill next to the Temple. Enough was enough and Elijah was ordered home to confront these evil powers on Mt. Carmel.

And Elijah was not accommodating nor was he running away – don’t you just wish Ahab and Jezebel!—he is coming home to challenge the gods of this age.

Ahab and Jezebel are Post-Modernists. They celebrate the subjective. They are committed to compromise – it is their religion. Live and let live! What is the big deal?

Well, you see, Elijah cannot compromise with the stuff they are doing. There is no wriggle room in Judah and there is getting to be precious little wriggle room in the U. S. A. too.

The world of the Baals, folks, is falling apart. And quickly. As sociologist Peter Berger explains, “American mainline culture can no longer offer plausibility structures for the common man. It no longer sustains Americans.” Or, as my old friend Professor Harvey Cox, at Harvard, coyly observed, “Once Americans had dreams and no technology to fulfill those dreams. Now Americans have tons of technology, but they have no dreams left.”

In short order the Ahabs and Jezebels are going to find out that Elijah is not in a compromising mood either. Folks, there are some things one cannot compromise. Elijah and Jezebel are going to meet a man of God who speaks with concrete clarity, who carries the weight of truth.

Elijah is coming in 2010, Christian brothers and sisters. The days of Obadiah are over. Elijah is coming to town.

Are you ready? Can you give up your anonymity? Will you risk everything this year to do what God tells you to do? Will you go the extra mile in your home schooling to make sure that this generation will stand on Mt. Carmel and proclaim the sovereignty and goodness of our God? So they can bring the Kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven? The stakes are high; the potential rewards astounding. We have a chance, perhaps in our lifetime, to experience an unprecedented revival. This is the generation of Elijah. The generation that will have to walk the long, arduous walk up Mt. Carmel and they will challenge the gods of this age. Bring it on! We are ready! Every knee shall bow, every tongue shall profess, that Jesus Christ is Lord. Bring on the fire of Elijah, again, on this nation! God is calling forth our children–Elijahs who will go to the high places of our nation to challenge the prophets of Baal—in the courts, in the university, in the shop, in the home, in churches.

Metephor

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Rhetoric demands that we reclaim the use of metaphor. Our mindless search for relevance and literalness has gotten us pretty lost in the cosmos. Metaphor or comparison between two ostensibly dissimilar phenomena is absolutely critical to creative problem solving. Metaphor, along with other mysteries, have been victims of 20th century pretension and pomposity.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss, laments the fact that in the field of literature the great works are no longer read–and if they are there are no rules for interpreting them. In philosophy, indeed in all communication, truth and reality are considered relative. With no rules, no honor, the rhetorician is allowed to come to any conclusion he wishes. The decline of responsible rhetoric has help hasten this event. Philip Johnson calls this “the great vacuum” that has been filled with totalitarian regimes. Rhetoric ferrets out truth. If there is no Truth, can there be any sense of authority? And can a society survive if there is no authority? If there is not Truth can there be freedom? But if there is no freedom can one arrive at the Truth? Without a legitimate, honest, well considered rhetoric, will history be reduced to the “pleasure principle?” Is Truth the first casualty of slipshod, faulty, propaganda that some call “rhetoric?”

In some ways the Evangelical Christian loss of Rhetorical skills–and I think rhetoric is akin to apologetics–has presaged disaster in many arenas. Without rhetoric Christians have no tools to engage modern culture. In some ways we have lost the mainline denominations to neo-orthodoxy and we have lost the university to liberals. Today the vast majority of American, indeed, world leaders come from 12 universities and not one is a Christian university (Wall Street Journal). Where are the Jonathan Edwards? C. S. Lewis? Good thinking, good talking, may redeem the Church from both the overzealous and the skeptical. Rhetorical skills–debate–may help us regain the intellectual and spiritual high ground” (Alister McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity). George Marsden in The Soul of the American University and Leslie Newbigen in Foolishness to the Greeks both conclude that we Christians have conceded much of American culture to modernism by our inability to merge thought and communication in a cogency and inspiration that persuaded the modernist culture. Without the main tool to do battle–rhetoric–Evangelicals allowed orthodoxy to be sacrificed on the altar of relativism. David Wells in God in the Wastelands argues that evangelicals and liberals have both drunk from the trough of modernity, though from different ends. Unless the evangelicals participate in serious apologetics, God will be “weightless.”

Crossing the Rubicon 3

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

Elijahs brought Good News but not welcome news. Good News that we gave them in our modest homes. Year after year, one music lesson after another, one coop meeting after another, year after another, we raised this generation. And today, today they are on the threshold of changing their world. They are housewives, they have small businesses. They are writing scripts in Hollywood. Writing speeches for presidents. Lobbying for Godly causes in Congress.

Do we have a vision of what lies ahead? Will we seek the Lord’s face to cooperate in His equipping , enabling and empowering process? Will we trust God? Elijahs are wild and crazy! They will move beyond our traditions and our comfort zones. Elijahs always do.

So Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him the bad news, and Ahab went to meet Elijah. When he saw Elijah, he said to him, “Is that you, you troubler of Israel?”

“I have not made trouble for Israel,” Elijah replied. “But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the LORD’s commands and have followed the Baals.

Challenge the gods of this age home schoolers!