Turtles and PIrates

One of the fun parts of a forty-five minute commute is reading bumper stickers.   Bumper stickers are billboards, advertising their drivers souls.  You can read so much about a person from what they want to show others.

For example,  here's what I saw on a late model car this morning:

"I brake for tortoises"

I'm not sure how many tortoises one will find on Providence Road in downtown Charlotte, but I'm sure if there are many tortoises there, they are grateful for the this driver's kindness--though, I suspect the drivers behind him would not be. 

What really made this bumper sticker memorable was the other sticker the man had in the rear window of his car. It was a skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger, which proclaimed to the whole world "I am a pirate, or want to be."

Now, as I understand it,  pirates were about he most bloodthirsty, greedy, selfish,  destructive,  callous, uncaring, and downright evil people who ever walked the earth. That was why the "golden age" of piracy lasted so short.  After these scurvy dogs burned, killed, raped, and pillaged their way across the seven seas for a couple of decades, the nations of the world hunted them down and killed them.  Most of them wound up dead by the sword.  Others were hung.  Blackbeard's head was displayed for years a trophy in Williamsburg, after he murdered countless men, women, and children.

So why would a pirate care about killing a turtle?  I could not imagine Blackbeard or Calico Jack Rackham on rattling in a carriage over the cobblestone streets of Tortuga or Port Royal or Charleston yelling at his his carriage driver "Avast ye scurvy dog! There be a turtle on the road!"

Yet here we have a car in modern Charlotte with a vehicle bearing the Jolly Roger and a declaration to brake for turtles.

It seems to me that this sentiment is a microcosm of contemporary society that we borrow what we want from many ideologies, molding ideas to our liking, while leaving out the essential nature of them all. We remake good things and evil things into pale, harmless parodies of their nature.  Bloodthirsty pirates become harmless amusement park rides.  Vampires and werewolves become romantic heroes.  Our founding fathers become dancing cartoons on commercials.  Ecological concerns about the value of animal life becomes a declaration that if we see an animal in the road, we won't intentionally crush it.  We water down good and evil, and mix them together into a pallid stew.

The problem with our contemporary, symbol-based society is not that we do not have standards or dreams, but that we have too many of them.  We care about many things, but none of them deeply.  We turn history into slogans, and causes into fads.  Ultimately, we make our own reality and morality in our own image, using bits of older and deeper thought. Rather than being challenged by ideals such as environmentalism or religion, we we change them into something small and manageable and ultimately harmless. Like our image of pirates, good and evil are reduced to an occasional masquerade.

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Faith and Passion

One of the surprising things I've found in our recent sojourn among the Lutherans is that we Presbyterians are not the only "frozen chosen."  Lutherans call themselves that, too.  All this time, I always thought "frozen chosen" was a distinctly Presbyterian epithet.    It's nice to know we are not alone in the freezer.

Now, some Presbyterians may take umbrage with this,  that Lutherans would call themselves the
"frozen chosen."   We seem to take a certain pride in being the frozen chosen--in living  out our faith without messy emotionalism. We even have an answer to that gentle insult--we may have a frozen faith,  but at least it does not spoil so quickly as some other Christians.   We have kept the faith for a long, long time.

Presbyterians are not really cold, nor are we unemotional.  People  often forget that most of the great revivals of American history, including those accompanied by  wild exuberance, by shouting, barking,  dancing and so forth,  broke out first among Presbyterians and were largely led in their early stages by Presbyterians.  Jonathan Edwards'  famous hellfire-and-brimstone sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", was originally preached in a Presbyterian church to Presbyterians, and if the folk tales are true that while he had to ask the congregation to quit crying so loudly so he could finish it,  those were Presbyterians he had to tell to be quiet.

Nevertheless,  we must painfully admit that there are good reasons for calling us the "frozen chosen."  Presbyterians are in general a reticent and reserved bunch. Our dispassionate approach to preaching and worship is shocking to the unaccustomed.  Baptists, Pentecostals, and  African Americans with whom I currently work cannot fathom why Presbyterian do not shout with joy before such a wonderful God as ours.  Frankly, I wonder why we don't sometimes myself. 

In the face of the omnipotent,  majestic, and overwhelming  Lord of the Universe, why are we so unemotional?   Where is our joy in His presence? Where are our tears of fear and awe? Where is our zeal in praising Him?  Aren't our detractors right to wonder why we don't shout for joy?

Emotional reticence was not the way of our Presbyterian ancestors.  One cannot read Calvin, Luther, Knox, or the Puritans without being struck by the passion in their prose.  We cannot listen to "A Mighty Fortress" or read Knox's "Last Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Women" and think of them as the products of talking heads in an effete university.  These were men of flesh and bone and fire. 

Our emotional reticence does not come from the Bible, which tells us to shout with joy , to weep before the porch and the altar, and encourages us to bring even our worst fears and anger before Him by the example of the Psalms, but is a product of the Enlightenment reason-worship, Platonic dualism, and Victorian prudery.  It is a denial of both the full image of God, which includes His passion, wrath, and delight, as well as of total depravity, which  posits that our heads are as fallen as our hearts.  Furthermore,  our tendency to look upon the emotional excesses of other churches with distain is simply the instinct found in every sinner to spot the mote in another person's eye while missing the log in our own.

The truth is that it does not matter how right our doctrine may be if we do not marry it with spiritual passion.  Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence argues successfully that our ability to understand emotions is a better predictor of success than our ability to reason.  Gestalt psychology, for all its faults,  demonstrates successfully that showing emotion intensifies emotion, that laughing makes us happy, crying makes us sad, and arguing feeds our anger.  The  Old Testament writers in expressing praise used words denoting outward actions not inward feelings--brightening the face, shouting,  even leaping for joy. They understood that we cannot separate having feelings from displaying our feelings.   If we know it, we should show it.

As I said before, Presbyterians are not unemotional people--we are very emotional at times.   But we are sometimes reticent to show them,  so we lack their power.  We'd love to be swept away in praise to the Lord, as were Paul and the Puritans--we really would. But we fear  embarrassment and so we do or say nothing.  We wait for God to excite us,  overwhelm us, empower us,  but when the chance arises, we don't want to show it until we are sure. Uncertain of its propriety, we wait for an awakening of soul that never comes.

C S Lewis wrote of the lion Aslan  (who represents Christ) in The Chronicles of Narnia that he is not a safe lion, not a tame lion, but one that is good.  We among the "frozen chosen" are looking for Christ to be both tame and good.  We want God to bless us, but we do not want to risk becoming foolish while He  does. Our shyness keeps us from embracing His lovely wildness; our fear of uncertainty keeps us from leaping out in faith; our aversion to embarrassment keeps us from  childlike glee.  We will not ride the winds of the Spirit until they are safely in a bottle.  Bottled wind, in the end is nothing but stale air. 

This is not intended to take anything away from Presbyterians (or the Lutherans either).  The historic Protestant traditions have made vast contributions to Christian life and thought. We make the best teachers, the best administrators, the best scholars.  But is it so hard to imagine that we can be more than just scholars, or that the Spirit of God is more than just an intellectual ideal?  Is it possible that we can not only reason like Paul but dance like David, as well?  We have our theology down cold, but  we need more than a cold theology. Revival is more than this. It is being swept away in the wonderful God, in the passion of Christ,  and in the power of the unpredictable winds of the Spirit. 

 I believe that we will never be revived if we are not wiling to release the power of Spiritual passion--to cry over our sins,  to shout over our salvation, to dance with joy and prostrate ourselves in sorrow. As long as we play it safe and keep our feelings to ourselves, our energies  will forever be wasted in the senseless pursuit of composure.   Church will feel like a duty,  worship will feel like a funeral, praise will be joyless, love will be mirthless,  repentance will be tearless,  evangelism will be mere news without  goodness,  charity will be cheerless, and hope will be hopeless.  Our heads may be the rudder of our lives, but we will not get far without the winds of Holy Spirit passion.  Without the fire,  the truth we offer  the world will be as appealing as a frozen steak on a plate. 

Revive us, o Lord. Fill each heart with Your love  Let our soul be rekindled with fire from above.  Amen and amen.

From Ashes to Eggs

Right now, while we are church hunting, Joy and I have been visiting a Lutheran church, along with a couple of others.  I am surprised how much the Lutheran worship, with its "bells and smells" appeals to me.  There is something about being in a place where I don't know the ritual by heart and where the preachers wear white robes instead of black ones, that makes me feel comfortable and alien at the same time. The people are nice and the pastor is good.  I have no plans to convert at the moment, but it is a good place to visit, nonetheless. 

Anyway, I just returned from an Ash Wednesday service, the first one I think I have ever attended. 

The pastor came down and asked the people what they were going to give up for Lent.  The answers came back "chocolate" "Coke" "wine."  I started to shout out "liver" since I don't like liver anyway, and I figured it won’t be hard to give up.  I did mention that I was keeping a devotional prayer blog  I'm keeping for Lent,  over at sixweeksofprayer.blogspot.com., just in case you might be interested.

Lent fascinates me, especially this year. I'm working on a paper for seminary on the early church has made me aware of the process of discipleship.   When a convert confessed Christ, he was taken through a three year catechetical school. Then on Easter at dawn, he was finally baptized. A few weeks before his baptism, the new Christian was taken through a time of fasting, prayers, and vigils   with the intent of humbling him, so he would not feel proud of his accomplishment in graduating from catechetical school.  Sort of like a final exam, except without the munchies.  That was the beginning of Lent.

I never underwent humiliation when I graduated. If I had, it might have done me a world of good.  I can get mighty proud when I hear Rev. or Dr. in front of my name sometimes, and pretty smug about being a "man of God" even when I act like nothing of the sort.  But it's hard to keep that smug composure, though when a man it putting ashes on your forehead and solemnly intoning "dust thou art, and to dust you shall return."

Dust thou art.  Dust I am.  Not exactly, since the name Adam really means "dirt" in Hebrew--but close enough. I was born in dust, live in sin, and will return to inanimate clay one day, all my conceits locked away in a pine box under the earth, to be worm food for all eternity. 

The truth is,  that my righteousness is like filthy rags,  according to Isaiah.  I am nothing without Christ.  All I am is a two hundred-and-fifty-pound pile of future fertilizer.  I have nothing to bring God on my own, but I have a Savior who has given me everything. 

Lent is (or can be) a reminder of that fact,  just as Easter is a reminder of the rest of the story--that this pile of future fertilizer is to be transformed into an eternal child of God by the most amazing experience in all of history--the death and resurrection of the son of God.

That's why we have eggs at Easter--to remind us of new birth.  We may be dust, and we may return to dust, but our spirits are reborn, and can never die as long as God holds in His hand and in his heart, which will be forever.

So this year,  for the first time, I'm going to take Lent seriously.  I'm going to become smaller so that Christ can become larger. I am going to give up in order to receive, so that I can me more fully His.

 

A Prayer for the City

There's a spot on Randolph Road going to church that makes me glad to be in the city. It's when I just round the top of the hill near Wendover Road, and I catch my first view of Charlotte.   There it is with its towers and spires, reaching upward to heaven,  like the fingers of a giant, beckoning us towards it. 

Nothing compares to a modern city--nothing.  Nothing like it has ever existed on earth--not in Rome or Babylon, not even in Babel has there been such towers that reach to the heavens.  In the morning or in the evening when the sun is right,  they seem to catch fire, reflecting the orange rays of the sun. In the night the twinkle with electric stars,  dimming the faint light of the moon and the distant planets.  All this was built by people, people who dreamed and worked and sweated their way to the topmost buildings, who envisioned a world of beauty and utility, who  laid down layer upon layer in regular rows so they could wind their way in their metal vehicles around the bases of the massive stone slabs., and climb up their interiors until they stood over the world  on the edge of open space.

I know I'm getting a bit poetical about all this,  and I admit, I'm digressing.  Ever since I stopped traveling daily into the country and daily turned my car towards the city, It has amazed me.  The city is an amazing place to see, but it is an even more amazing to live.  It is a place teeming with human life in its fullness.

The school where I work sees itself as a ministry to the city.  We even have a department of urban ministries.  We believe that the city is the key to changing the world. After all, this is where the people live, and where they meet across the barriers of cultures.  We need to see and feel the life of it, pray for it,  witness to it,  and yes, love it.

Charlotte is among all the cities I have ever visited certainly one of the most beautiful--so beautiful, in fact, that we often fail to notice. We are like a  man married to a supermodel who forgets that all women are like her.  Charlotte is breathtakingly beautiful.

But like all cities, Charlotte is a contradiction,  it is just as ugly as it is beautiful.  We don't see the pain of the people as we rush past, but it is there.  The other day, I was traveling on North Tryon, and passed an area where people loitered on the street. I never noticed them before,  they were just people. Looking like they were waiting for a bus. My friend who was with me noticed them.  They were homeless people hanging near a shelter, waiting to warm themselves inside.  It boggles the mind to think of the human suffering those people represented, that they felt.  Unlike cities in third world countries, where the suffering is evident, here it goes on behind neat little walls, so we don’t notice.

Christ died in such a city.  So did Peter and Paul.  Cities were where the ancient church first taught others to love their neighbors. 

Cities need to be confronted, not ignored. They need to be embraced, comforted, rebuked,  warned,  loved and desired.  Most of all cities are just people--people for whom Christ died.

How much time do we spend praying for the city?  Not enough I’m sure.  Jesus prayed over Jerusalem. Surely, we an take some time to pray over a city as beautiful as Charlotte. 

Blogging as a Spiritual Discipline

This week I have been rereading a book that meant a lot to me in the past, but that I have not read in years.  Until this last week, I did not even have a copy of it any more. The book is Richard Foster's Celebration of Disciplline.  Of all the books I have ever read, it has probably made the most sense as to why we should live disciplined lives of prayer,  study, and simplicity.   Spiritual disciplines, Foster says, are not essential to the Christian life,  they are the Christian life. To pray and to seek God is what it means to sow to the Spirit. Without great stretches of quiet and inner meditation,  our lives quickly become superficial and valueless, out of control and out of bounds, like kudzu growing amok in a field.  

Thoughts on the Presbytery Report

Last week I received my packet for our spring presbytery meeting,  all fifty-two pages of it.  It contained its usual budget reports , committee reports, promotions for retreats and conferences,  and so on.  But buried in the report was something that should alarm us.

The statistical report on pages 24-25 shows  that in one year we lost 1.86 percent of our active membership.  From 1995 to 2010, our presbytery has lost 8.8 percent.  From 2005 to 2010 we lost 1.72 percent.  That means that in one year, we lost more members  than we did in the preceding five.