Anchors

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. – 1 John 1:1-3

The part of this passage I want to focus on is this: ... and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.  For those of us who are either not part of a traditional communion or are perhaps somewhat ambivalent about our participation, to me, this seems to be something to keep in mind. 

To some extent I agree with those who maintain that the sacraments and the communion of the saints are vital to our life in Christ.  Corporate worship can be uplifting and refreshing.  We are called to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together because we benefit from the support, encouragement and accountability we share with others.  If we are known to be believers and a part of a local church, we are very much representatives of that body.  How we behave reflects upon the Church Universal as well as back on the brothers and sisters in our congregation.

As I was saying at OC yesterday, we have direct access to God, and I am one who, more or less, accepts the priesthood of the believer, as Peter says:  But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

I have always struggled with the idea of authority.  No king but King Jesus always sounded good to me.  I answer to God, but it is equally true and certainly necessary that – authority aside – I must answer to my brothers and sisters as well.  In fact my experience has been that whether they are Catholic priests or Protestant preachers, those who begin to think they have no accountability to the “flock”, who see themselves as shepherds only and not the “sheep of His pasture” themselves are most likely to go astray. 

You can tell me about Moses and David and Saul until you turn plumb blue, a cult is inevitably marked by a leader or leaders who are above being criticized, corrected, and called out by their followers.  If I ever (again) found myself in a church where I could not approach the leadership with a compliant or concern without being considered out of order and insubordinate, I would leave.  In a hurry. 

I have known these guys.  I have seen them both big-time and small-time surround themselves with a magic circle who tell them what they want to hear.  Sometimes they don’t even mean to do it.  The point is that authority flowing down can still have a great deal of potential for abuse.  Being a part of Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy does not necessarily protect the individual member of the flock from being misled. 

Ultimately our fellowship must be with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.  If I’m wrong, I may go to hell for this, but I don’t think “church” has to be a formal organization.  There are a myriad of benefits to be derived from a strong, solid organization, from a formal set of sacraments and ordinances and disciplines. 

Even as I write this, I feel as though I am declaring myself a special case who is himself “above” the Church.  I don’t want to do that, and I don’t mean to do that.  I think the vast majority of Christians derive a great advantage from belonging to a local congregation, an organized and formalized communion, and Catholicism is a good one.  This is especially true for those with children in need of foundational religious instruction and direction.  I thank God that I went to church as a child and as an adolescent.  Those lessons and that discipline have never left me.  If I am able to stand now without being tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes, it is because those elemental truths were driven in deep and anchor me solidly still. 

New and Improved

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.  -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

I’ve got nothing today.  I’m still recovering from the weekend.  I took the bike out Saturday and bombarded the back roads.  The Enterprise is surprisingly “nimble” for something that weighs 900 pounds – 1100 with me in the saddle.  The last big wreck I had on my old street bike back in the ‘80s was because the bike went off the edge of the road on a left-hand turn.  I can take hard, fast right-hand turns all day while even a sweeping left makes me tense up.  I’m getting better, but it’s still a fight. 

My wife did not go along.  She’s not feeling all that great.  She had another episode that put her in the hospital again that last week of June, and she re-started a steroid regime -- which seems to help, apart from some of the adverse effects.  I locked up all the guns.  The current course will be finished up next Monday, and we are trying to schedule a clinic visit at an academic hospital where there are more diverse specialists and additional testing possibilities.  We’ll see how it goes. 

So instead of having a big family gathering for the 4^th, we stayed home and did yard work.  I did manage to finish A Canticle for Leibowitz, and it certainly struck me differently from when I read it back in the ‘70s.  The verse above is related.  Humanity keeps making the same mistakes, despite our advances.  Of course, we didn’t start a big atomic war – at least we haven’t yet.  Currently, financial disaster seems a more imminent threat than an all-out nuclear devastation.  Still, I would not entirely dismiss the possibility of an EMP attack or an American city going up in a “flame deluge” like Sodom and Gomorrah. 

In the last section of the book, there is an exchange about utopian thinking that is close to something we have been kicking around at OC.  The idea of a “better” world can be unifying and constructive when everything is a mess and people are struggling just to get by.  For the person living in very primitive conditions, any technological improvement or advancement is a boon to the quality of life and productivity.  However, as we get more advanced and things really do get much better, the utopian ideal becomes more divisive and destructive. 

When much of the common goal becomes a present reality rather than a vague future promise, we realize that we were not at all in agreement about what we meant by “better”.  That’s more or less the problem we are facing in 21^st Century America.  We have achieved so much and moved so far into our future dream that some of us have decided it is not what we had in mind at all.  We sometimes find that technology now hampers and shackles about as much as it frees and empowers.  As “Hotel California” says, perhaps prophetically:  “We are all just prisoners here of our own device.”

Technology isn’t going to make us better people.  We can be barbarians with iPhones.  We could compare technology to Pandora’s Box.  Perhaps it is like those nested Russian dolls, boxes within boxes within boxes where each one opens the next whether we are ready for it or not.  Each one unleashes new challenges and raises new questions we may not yet be equipped to answer. 

Without giving away the ending for those who might not have read or recall it, I would say Canticle concludes in some hope.  Though we seem destined to wreck nation and kingdom and empire because it is not Eden, Miller, perhaps intentionally, echoes that quote from St. Francis of Assisi that we ought to give up trying to change the world and change worlds instead. 

For Freedom

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. --Galatians 5:1

Freedom:  without it, life itself is impossible.  To live is to be free.

 

Yet we see people everywhere deprived of freedom who live, or appear to live.  What if, tomorrow, I am thrown into a prison cell, chained and tortured?  It happened to Paul, and it did not seem to be much of a hindrance to his liberty.  He could pray and believe and love.  Nothing can separate us from the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17). 

Tomorrow will mark 238 years since a solemn assembly issued our Declaration of Independence.  As a nation we have wandered far from the path of freedom, the trail marked by the Founders, but hope that we will again find our way remains.  It depends on us.  No nation or people may long be free who submit to the slavery of sin and seek to live independent of truth and of God. 

Meanwhile, we as individuals have the choice to reject the world, the flesh and the devil and the shackles of delusion, regardless of what the majority choose, regardless of governments, of oppressive, ungodly laws and tyrannical regulations.  If we do not have freedom in our hearts, we will not see it on the earth.  If we do, there has not been and never will be forged the chain that can bind us. 

Tomorrow, I will thank God that I was born in the time and place I was, born an American with all the opportunities that I have enjoyed.  Especially I will give thanks for the privilege of knowing Christ, of being set free through the cross from the dark dungeon of falsehood.  Perhaps, too, I will offer a prayer of confession and repentance for too often turning from the light to chase after shadows, of sometimes preferring the darkness where I might seek to hide an evil deed.  I will remind myself that the decadence of a nation or of a class is no excuse for debauchery in myself, that I mock liberty and can never be free of oppression if I am willing to oppress and enslave others for my own benefit.

The Lord says that He desires truth in the inwards part, honesty in my heart.  Where there is no truth, there can be no freedom.  If we are willing to know the truth, the truth will indeed set us free (John 8:32).

Have a happy 4th of July.  May God's grace be shed upon us and deliver our nation from destruction.

The Practice

Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches,  but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord. – Jeremiah 9:23-24

This is a cross-reference from First Corinthians, but what struck me is where the Lord is said to practice His love, justice, and righteousness:   in the earth.   

It is notable that He practices, which to me means something like a doctor practicing medicine or a lawyer practicing law – jokes about those things aside.  Love and justice and righteousness are part of who God is as well as what He does.  We are here because of that.  Earth, all of material existence in the universe, is here that God might interact with us in expressing such.  All that exists in creation is exists because of God’s love and goodness.  

Heaven, in its full, everlasting conformity to all that God wills cannot be perfected; it is perfect.  Thy will be done, on earth as it is [always and everywhere and forever] done in heaven.  Earth is the borderland, the place where order and perfection are drawn out of chaos as the Spirit hovers over the roiling potentials of the deep.   

We come to understand that God did not only initiate creation out of His divine character and person, but He works in it now, first, because it is always now to the Eternal One.  He is creating, sustaining, and revealing.  Most often -- I tend to think, His practices are not so obviously and overtly miraculous.  The Lord works by His Spirit dwelling in believers; He works in and through us.  As my friend used to say, God doesn’t rain twenty dollar bills down from heaven because He is not a counterfeiter.  The coin Peter found in the mouth of a fish had been dropped or lost by someone.   Jesus could have turned stones into bread, but what He did was take a little bread offered and multiple it to meet the need.

Through prayer and faith in communion with our Father, we can experience His steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in our lives.  God is delighted when He sees us offering these blessings to others, multiplying the bread of life out here on the frontiers of the kingdom. 

The Cross and the Single Christian

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. -- 1 Corinthians 1:18

The truth has a tendency to interfere with our fun, so we think.  The cross, in particular, seems to be a challenge for us to accept.  One of the things that adds to our struggle is the disdain in which so many around us hold the reality of Christ crucified.  Man wants to be able to figure out his own way of living, control his own destiny, and find his own way of salvation.  The cross empties human ambition and achievements of their glory. 

When we receive the gospel and the light that it gives, we begin to see the transience of so much that enraptured us in the past.   What we thought vital when in darkness is seen through and understood as no longer having significance.  As worldly wise we perhaps valued the acclaim of the crowd and the cachet of our positions and possessions.  Seen from the perspective of the cross and eternity, the crowd is made up of fickle fools and all that we have is dissolving in rust and ruin. 

It does seem like foolishness when we look at how God wants to save the world through blood and death and suffering.  The intellectual stumbles upon this and calls it accursed by his rejection of it.  How can one save his life by losing it?  How can we be unburdened by bearing the cross?  How can we be righteous by laying aside our own righteousness? 

Here is God becoming weak, taking on flesh and submitting Himself to an ignominious death, crucified as a slave and criminal.  Yet in this death is life, and through this apparent weakness is the ultimate revelation of God in all His might and power and wisdom and glory.

Mankind was enslaved and held captive by death.  I’m sure I do not have a full understanding of what that means, but I can see that life appeared to be defeated by death.  This dark terminus marked all our efforts, all our ideas, all of our intellect and understanding as futile for the individual. 

Apart from Christ, death makes a mockery of you and I as persons.  We are meaningless.  The only thing that matters in a Christ-less world is our genetic material and our contributions to the perpetuation of the species.  And even that, if we look far enough, is vanity, as the Preacher would say. 

The Cross shows us the death, so to speak, of death.  To God it is the individual who matters most of all.  Nations, tribes, peoples, races, ethnic groups, the human race itself – these are the transitory.  

Jesus lives.

You will live forever.  I will live forever.  This truth puts the lie to the idea of “the greater good”, of a merely Darwinian and natural survival of our species.  Christianity is anti-statist, anti-collectivist. 

As Christians we practice love and kindness and goodness and forgiveness, not to the tribe or the nation or the race, but to the neighbor, to my sister and my brother.  God doesn’t save Rome.  He saves a Roman, and another, and another  … because nations pass away but the soul of a man never dies.