Wardrobe Malfunctions

[A]nd to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness -- Ephesians 4:23-24

This has been a busy week, not a particularly bad one, but it seems as though it went by too fast.  I did not get everything done that I would like.  We have had non-stop rain here for the last six days.  Now we have the remnants of tropical storm (or depression or whatever) Bill pouring torrential amounts of water out of the sky.  Therefore my grass is going to be a foot high before I get a chance to cut it.  (Saturday is no good for other reasons.)  So I got some things done that are not part of my usual weekly routine.  For example, I got a haircut.  I guess it had been a while.  My wife got me started going to this shop at the mall, and this was probably my third haircut since February.  I went in and asked if they would have time to work me in that evening (Tuesday, I think).  The girl – not the usual 40ish woman – said to give her twenty minutes. 

While I was waiting -- it's the mall, right? -- I went looking for a summer sport coat to wear to church.  I found one in my size in a lightweight, kind of tan material that should work with brown, black, gray and probably navy pants.  I tried it on, paid for it, took it out and hung it up in my car, and came back in to finish waiting for my haircut.  I got my money’s worth on the haircut.  I said, “Just make it high and tight.”  She did.  There is nothing left to mat down under my helmet.  I’m probably good for the rest of the summer.  I gave her a generous gratuity despite the fact that she was talkative. 

Then tonight I took some stuff to Goodwill.  I’m going to take more -- none of Vickie’s stuff.  I can’t do that.  Her shoes are still where she left them on the steps up out of the garage.  Another pair of her shoes, her coat, and some other clothes are still in the laundry room.  I don’t know when I’ll even be able to move them back to her closet.  Anyway, I’m cleaning out some of my things that are just taking up space.  I’ll get rid of some old suits and other clothes that I don’t wear any more this fall probably.  I bought that new sport coat because the ones I’m going to take to Goodwill are out of style and have funky colors.  Some of them I think I got from Goodwill, and they were cheap but they never fit me well. 

I suppose I could take one of those old jackets to a tailor and have it let out in the chest and taken in the waist, have some of that padding pulled out of the shoulders, etc.  One time I was talking to a contractor about how he got started.  He said he learned a little about a lot of trades as a kid because his dad was always working on their old house.  He said it seemed like they were always adding and remodeling and refinishing one room or another.  He chuckled a little and asked, “You know what we had when we were done?”  I shook my head.  He said, “An old house.” 

Some of us try to fix up the old self.  We try to reform it and clean it up.  We work and work to make the old self more presentable and attractive and acceptable, to get it to conform to God’s law and His standards.  When we are done we have the old self.  The leopard has not changed his spots. 

God doesn’t call us to reform.  He has a better way.  He says all a person has to do is take the old self off and toss it, pitch it, throw it away.  We don’t need it.  He offers us this glorious new self that does not need reform.  It is already in the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness.  We don’t need to work and worry to get righteous because we have put on Christ, and we are clothed in His righteousness.   

It’s amazing.  Look at it again:  put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.  That’s it.

I really wish I could be a good person.  I’d like to live in a way that’s pleasing to God.  I’m all messed, though.  I have all these stains, cigarette burns, and tears and holes in awkward places.  I can’t go before God like this.  But I can … put on the Lord Jesus Christ…  (Romans 13:14). 

Fig leaves and Spiderwebs

But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” – Genesis 3:9

Did the Lord need to ask this question? We could see this as the Divine Parent addressing the misbehaving child with a rhetorical, “What have you done?” On one level, God calls man to become aware of his state, make his confession, and begin his return to right-standing. God needs to and does ask all of us this same question. Beyond that, however, sin creates what appears to be an impenetrable wall between God and man. In some sense, apart from Christ, man is hidden from his Creator.

God cannot “see through” sin. He does not lack the power, but it runs across the grain of His Being. It is like interference. Sin always involves some kind of deception. To deceive is to hide or obscure truth in some manner. If we think about it, the whole idea that we will tell people things we ourselves do not believe or that we know to be untrue is rather fantastic. That deception can at times appear the wise or reasonable path shows us how twisted we are. Most of us do not approve of being lied to, but we have fewer qualms about lying to others – from the peace-keeping “No, Honey, your butt doesn’t look big” to the desperate “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes.” Hiding behind falsehood is almost the definition of humanity.

If there is any flaw in The Screwtape Letters, it is that ol’ Screwtape seems to reveal more than a devil should, even among his colleagues. Lewis was aware of this, but he had to pull the curtain back a little. To tell the truth in the negative you still have to tell the truth. In his foreword, Lewis described what he wanted to avoid: But the really pernicious image is Goethe’s Mephistopheles. It is Faust, not he, who really exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of Hell. The humorous, civilized, sensible, adaptable Mephistopheles has helped to strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating.

Far from liberating us, evil is a lock that disguises itself as a key, a predator that looks like prey. Evil hides by its very nature, and the follower of evil is swallowed up and hidden within sin’s dark belly. We recall God’s words to Cain: If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.. Deception is pictured as a wild beast that will turn on and devour its master if we fail to keep it beaten down.

It is not that God does not see evil taking place. Our sins are not hidden from Him. No one is getting away with anything in the dark. Rather, because the sinner is cloaked in sin, God no longer sees His own image and likeness. He does not rain down judgment upon man but upon sin. Of course, if one is “in sin” when the smack-down comes, the effect is pretty much the same.

The one Man of whom the Father never lost sight was the Son – not until the Cross when the Son was enveloped by the darkness of the sin of all humanity. Christ’s obedience and perfect righteousness, even when engulfed by evil, shattered the big lie once and for all. Sin was turned inside out. And sin's captives were set free -- dumped out like reprieved kittens from a tow sack.

Sin no longer hides us from God. We need no longer take sin as a covering for our nakedness: Their cobwebs are useless for clothing; they cannot cover themselves with what they make. As Paul said, …[W]e do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. We are clothed with Christ and hidden in Him.

How to be Adventurous -- Part 2

Negative, feeble, old-according to our critics, our Western culture is all this and worse. And indeed in a materialist society people are born old. Flesh-and-blood grandfathers and grandmothers are not our problem. True, we have more of them than we used to, so many that they are becoming a special medical study and a new political power. Yet, if all were well, that should be our gain. In a healthy nation Grandmother's smiling wisdom ought to balance Granddaughter's reckless and restless energy; Grandfather's serene detachment should offset the youthful passion of Grandson. But what if there is no deep youthful passion? What if Grandson, in the Army at twenty, complains over the loss of Mum's cooking and the tame desk job? What if Granddaughter, married a year or so, finds beating up cake batter too great a task for her slack muscles and fretful mind? What if the highest ambition of youth is to be safe? – Joy Davidman (Mrs. C. S. Lewis) Smoke on the Mountain

The spirit of adventure is closely tied to the spirit of youth. Jesus, calling us to be as little children, calls us to adventure. And what is adventure except an adventure: the coming of something important and new. But how can something new happen all the time? I mean even crawling into your house through the window will get old after a while. On the other hand, going into a new house is kind of an adventure, even though you usually go in through a door. Maybe you could just hire someone to go in once in a while and move all your stuff around so you wouldn’t be able to find it: hide-and-seek. Or, how about if you were a different person every time you walked through the same door? Sounds sort of Chestertonian.

But I was going to say something about youth.

On the one hand we seem to worship youth and want to extend it. There are those who complain that adolescence has been used to hold back children, to keep us child-like too long. Older people – the only ones who watch the evening news these days -- are bombarded by pharmaceutical commercials that promise all the advantages of youth. We tend to think of ourselves as a youth culture. Generally leftists think of this as a good thing, while conservatives tend to bemoan it as being fickle and unstable.

I wonder, though, if someone did stumble across the fountain of youth, what would we do with it? We seem only to want to look young, not be young. Often our books and films imbue the child character with innate wisdom beyond their years. Children are depicted as mature and more sensible than their elders. In real life, we frequently see parents putting pressure on their offspring to perform and to rack up accomplishments, perhaps either for bragging rights or relive some aspect of childhood vicariously. I’m not sure we understand the purpose of youth any more.

I will now prove that I am officially an old fart...

Back in my day (should I add "sonny" here?), I, and all most all of my contemporaries worked on the farm doing something as soon as we were big enough to carry a bucket of feed or feed a calf. When I was too little to do anything else, my father had me getting hound pups “broke to lead” – taking advantage of the infinite patience of a five-year-old in relation to young animals [insert laugh track]. In the dairy I carried buckets of grain which I dumped into the individual troughs for the cows to eat while they were being milked. Some cows ate faster than others, and I soon learned to accommodate their various habits. In the days before pipeline milkers, I was our pipeline, carrying the freshly filled buckets back to run through the big filtered hopper into the bulk tank. I dumped milk for years before I was tall enough to look over the edge of the hopper and see where the milk was going. I hauled hay in the summer and fed hay in the winter. I cut brush, cut ice, built fence, and wrestled livestock, all while going to school nine months out of the year.

Strange as it may seem, despite the work I know I did, I seemed to have quite a bit of free time, and this was truly free time. I wandered all over the countryside as a pre-teen with knives and firearms, alone except for my faithful stock dog, Penny. I thought nothing of taking off on my bicycle and going a mile or two down the road to visit one of the cousins. We might then take off again across country on our very non-mountain bikes to build a fort – with real axes, to find a tree to climb or a grapevine to try and swing across a creek on. Everything was fine, as long as I was back in time to get the cows in (they might have missed Penny more than me as she was the one who actually found and brought in the occasional straggler) and start milking.

I would guess that degree of physical freedom is close to unimaginable for today’s average ten-year-old who, conversely, is probably a master in World of Warcraft and has soccer practice every afternoon. One of the reasons I enjoy watching something like “Mythbusters”, “Man vs. Wild”, or some of the extreme sports is that it gives me hope that the sense of adventure is not dead in our culture. Even so, to me, it appears to be quite constrained. Parents have to keep an eye on their children constantly for fear they will be abducted, though I think there are fewer stranger abductions than we tend to believe. The Amber Alerts, Code Adams, and Tragedy TV coverage make us much more aware of the ones that do occur. Games – safe, organized games with protective equipment – have replaced the sometimes wild, reckless endeavors we tended to launched.

Ever been hit with a mudball? Ever had a mudball grenade explode next to your head? I might explain that a mudball grenade was created by inserting a firecracker into a mudball, lighting the firecracker, then hurling it at your cousins on the opposite side of the creek. Timing is critical. Short fuses can get ugly. They inevitably had some gravel in them – kind of like shrapnel. I never had an eye put out, but then I wore glasses, and they took a beating a few times, as did the old eardrums. Speaking of games and protective equipment, I well remember when my nephew was trying to learn to throw a curveball. He could throw hard, but his control was less than pinpoint, and they didn’t always break. What I thought was going to be a curve turned out to be a fastball, just high and inside. No helmet. It could explain a lot that happened later.

No, it was not safe, but that’s what youth is for, learning, exploring, finding one’s limits. It’s for looking at old things in a new way – or at least what we thought was a new way.

The truth is, though, you really don’t need to put body parts at risk to see with, as Rick says, eyes made new. Adventures in vision don’t have to be deafening. Daily putting on Christ, putting on the new man, makes everything new. In other words, it doesn't matter so much how we get in the house as who is getting in the house.

Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind -- Romans 12:2