The election

I live in one of those states that hang in the electoral college balance:  Florida.  For the next three months we will be subjected to endless and demeaning political ads that don't particularly want to tell us the truth about anything or anyone.  Issues are beside the point and this election will succeed only in making more and more Americans grow more and more cynical and discouraged.  I never thought as a former political science major that I would come to cringe at the mention of the word "election", but I do. 

But then I indulged myself in a little reading of Karl Barth today -- Church Dogmatics II v. 2 -- and there I read about Election.  A great election.  God's unequivocal election of his people.   God in Christ says Yes to us.  He chooses us out of his grace.  "The election of grace is the sum of the Gospel."  God reconciles the world to himself.  The WORLD.  There is nothing we can do to keep God from saying Yes to us.  There is no card we can play to trump it.  God loves us unconditionally.  No strings attached.  No conditions.  No secret code.  No formula of prayer.  God chooses us and invites us to live in response to this election. 

We get to build our lives upon this vote that God casts for us.  We get to live the abundant life of assurance.  We don't have to worry whose on what side.  We're all on God's side.  Nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  It's one issue over which polarity does not exist.  And it just happens to be the most important issue of all. 

Finally, an election to be hopeful about. 

Penn State and the Presbyterians

In one of my all-time favorite Lake Wobegon pieces by Garrison Keillor he tells the story of a college professor in some Midwestern university who is slowly falling out of love with his wife and quickly growing infatuated with a female colleague. The two of them are scheduled to go to a conference together and he knows that when they do they will begin an affair. He stands out in his front yard waiting for the woman to come pick him up. It is at that moment that this man Jim begins to really think about what he’s doing – and later he describes what happened:




“I looked up the street of my little town which was health to my flesh and blood, where people went to church, and voted in elections, and bought what the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts sold them, rooted for the home team, raised money for the library and tended the parks. And I thought how much we depend on each other. All these houses and all these families, my infidelity will somehow shake them, pollute the drinking water, and send noxious fumes up the ventilators at the elementary school.



“When we scream in senseless anger,” the professor continues ruminating, “a little 8-year-old girl several blocks away we don’t even know spills gravy all over a white tablecloth. And if I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard the intersection, and someone’s child will be injured. A 6th-grade teacher will say, ‘What the heck,’ and eliminate South America from geography. The minister will say, ‘What the heck,’ and decide not to give that sermon about feeding the poor. The guy at the grocery store will say, “To heck with the health department, this sausage was good yesterday, it’s just as good today.’ And I decided that we all depend on each other more than we can ever know.”



The story ends with Jim walking back into his house and forgetting the trip.



Keillor beautifully makes an oft-ignored point. No man is an island. We live in a web. We are connected to everything else. Every move sends ripples across the web strings. And it reminds us that everything we do matters because it affects so many, far beyond what we know.



The tragic events at Penn State show clearly how much of a connected system we are in. Boys are violated and the web shakes as a result. And because we are all connected we all have a responsibility when the ripple crosses our part of the web -- whether we are the first to hear and see or the last to hear and see. And we each react and our action or inaction sends further ripples. It’s not just one man who is responsible and it’s not just a few men who are responsible. We’re all responsible because we’re all in the web. Blame lies not just with a team’s culture or with a university’s culture, but with a sport’s culture. I am a part of that. And I am just as vulnerable as the next person to be tempted to do the wrong thing, or to pressure others to do the wrong thing for the sake of my enjoyment. If I behave like I want my team to win at all costs – the team or coach might just do that. I bear responsibility for that.



And yet typically our response to such tragedy is to point fingers at whatever piece of the institution we think is most to blame and say, “There’s the problem.” We attempt to make it an island, dislodge it from the main, cut out the piece of the web that we think is guilty and attempt to leave the rest intact. The problem is that when you cut out a piece of the web, the rest of the web collapses. You have nothing to hang on.



We talk a lot about this on Good Friday. When Jesus hangs on the cross we don’t ask who’s to blame. We don’t point the finger at Pilate or the Romans and say, “It’s your fault.” We bear our own responsibility and rhetorically sing, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” And the answer is yes. We are in the human web, the sinful human web that brings about the death of the Messiah.



I think this is what the apostle Paul was getting at when he talks to the fractured Corinthian church and says, “YOU are the body of Christ. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’” We in the Church are connected to each other whether we want to be or not. We can’t disown a part of the body just because we don’t like it or understand it. Paul continues, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”



So I find it curious that when the Church finds itself in disagreement there are some whose response is to dislodge themselves from the main and create an island. Disconnect from the web and see if we can go it alone. Become like-minded. Dismember themselves from the body and say, “I have no need of you.” It seems to fly in the face of I Corinthians 12. It’s easy for us to find something that gives us reason to separate because we live in the fantasy that we are stronger on our own.



Our friends in State College, Pennsylvania are known to exclaim on Saturday afternoons, “We are Penn State.” It was true last year and it’s no less true this year. When some suffer, all suffer. When some rejoice, all rejoice. We’re all responsible.



Doesn’t the same go when we sing with our children, “I am the church. You are the
church. We are the church together?” Or when we sing, “Blest be the tie that binds?” Christ has entangled us in his web and there is no letting us go or, for that matter, letting each other go.

God, church and baseball

I'm in Pittsburgh attending the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. It is the bi-annual gathering of Presbyterians where we go to discover how different we are. For some reason this always seems to surprise us. We lament how little we have in common. We cast aspersions on folks on the other side. Sometimes the divide is razor thin, sometimes a little bigger. There is always dissent. It is as it should be. It's what makes being a Presbyterian such a great thing. It seems though at these things we spend so little time focusing on what we have in common; the core reason for why we're there. While in Pittsburgh I stole away one night to catch a baseball game. The Pirates were in town playing the Astros. I like baseball and I'm a big St. Louis Cardinal fan. I don't follow particularly the two teams that were playing, but the game itself brought me there. Not everybody there was a Pirates fan, nor an Astros fan. But we were all baseball fans. We like the game: the balls and strikes, the pitches and catches, the home runs and strikeouts, the play of the players. Everybody understands what we're there for - to watch, cheer and participate in baseball. What's the "game" that brings us to be the church? In my church back home we do something just about every Sunday - we repeat together the Apostles' Creed. Just about everything else we do is different each Sunday - the music, the scriptures, the prayers, the sermon - but the creed stays the same. And once we leave our variety of actions are even more varied than what we've done "in sanctuary". Still we come back each week to say the creed. It's what we believe, it's what informs our particular paths and it's what brings us together. It's baseball. The Church gets in trouble every time we try to add to it, and when we insist that the rest have to agree to the "add-on". We do this with new confessions, new policy positions, new moral guidelines. And we offer these add-ons not as ideas and points to consider and celebrate, but rather as dictums to be obeyed. And sure enough we gather at the stadium and spend our time fighting in the stands rather enjoying a good game, the best game. There are more U.S. Presbyterian denominations than there are Major League baseball teams. Each seems to want to play a different game. And yet few would disagree over the Apostles' Creed. God in Christ has done an amazing thing. It takes a lifetime to even scratch the surface of how amazing it really is. Every day affords us the chance to respond to it in wide, varied and creative ways. How about a Church of the Apostles' Creed? How about when we gather we take in the game? Celebrate the game? Participate in the game? And not let the rest distract us from what's going on on the field. I know it sounds like a naive suggestion and I know it will fall prey to the sophisticated and the cynical. But wouldn't it be a place to start a conversation - a new conversation about an old game.

We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain sort.

“We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain sort.” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)




In one beautiful sentence Lewis points to a fine line in the spiritual journey that is challenging for any of us to walk. Those of us who are offspring of the Reformation are eager to agree that spirituality is not as much about what we do, but what God does in us. The first project for God is not the world, but the soul. Each soul. It is through recreated souls that God brings about certain actions that shape the world in a certain way.



The challenge though is to read this sentence and not jump to the conclusion that we are the certain sort of people God wants. Doesn’t God have more to do with you? One of the pitfalls of religion is to base the prototype of spirituality on ourselves. How boring and self-righteous! It’s what makes life exciting – to think that God’s not through we me yet! And the more we realize what more God has left to do in us, the less we might be worried about what more God has to do in others. Maybe that’s the sort of person he’s looking for – someone who graces others as much as she or he has been graced by God … to be as gracious with other’s faults as God has been with ours.



In the end, we will know what kind of people we are becoming by what actions we are performing. Is the nature of my behavior changing? Jesus said, “By their fruits you shall know them.” Is my fruit pleasing for those around me? That will go to show what tree I’ve become.

That which I greatly feared has come upon me.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. Surprised by Joy, p. 228 I was rereading this account of Lewis’s transforming moment today and discovered something I don’t think I ever knew: Lewis when he tells his story tells it to us, partly, through the words of Job: “That which I greatly feared has come upon me.” (Job 3:25) Isn’t it interesting that Lewis quotes the terrifying experience of Job when he tells the story of his own epiphany? It is as if to suggest that truth – in whatever form – can be terrifying. A new reality is destabilizing. It can come in the form that we mostly greatly fear. Do you wonder if there are forms of the truth that we keep at bay because we are simply afraid to face them, or to have them face us? I heard a man recently talk about his decision for sobriety. It came when he had to confront something true about himself – he was causing too many other people pain. His problem was everyone else’s problem. That which he greatly feared had come upon him. He was powerless when it came to alcohol. Sometimes a new idea surfaces in our society and because we have spent so much time convinced of another idea we are afraid to consider something new. We don’t want to consider the possibility that we may have been wrong. And even though shades of the new idea are convincing, we still push it away. The new idea for Lewis was the credibility of God, and that which he greatly feared (being wrong in his atheism) had come upon him. Don’t worry if a new idea pulls you kicking and screaming into a new opinion. You join the ranks of many who have found new life. Lewis continues: I did not see then what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? If you find yourself kicking and screaming – you might just be on to something. That which you’ve greatly feared has, maybe, come upon you.

Past Watchful Dragons

Lewis in his great essay on writing for children talks about the challenge of writing stories that bear the reality of the gospel but without the doctrinal and interpetive baggage that adults want to place on the simple story. Says Lewis, "I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could." There is something about us preachers and teachers that sometimes doesn't want to trust the power of the story itself. Somehow we feel the compulsion to tell people what the story means, instead of letting the story do it. I suppose in a sense that's what preaching is -- explaining the story. But maybe our preaching and teaching become the "watchful dragons" that prevent people from feeling the grasp of the tale. George MacDonald, Lewis's literary mentor, in his great essay The Fantastic Imagination compares these things to the experience of listening to a sonata: "If two or three men sat down to write each what the sonata meant to him, what approximation to definite idea would be the result? Little enough -- and that little more than needful. We should find it had roused related, if not identical, feelings, but probably not one common thought. Has the sonata therefore failed? Had it undertaken to convey, or ought it be expected to impart anything defined, anything notionally recognizable?" Can we trust that the story of Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit will rouse in those who read and hear what can and should be roused? Jesus seemed content to tell gospel by simply telling stories. Why must we post watchful dragons of explanation and doctrine at the door?

Playing the Part Well

In C.S. Lewis's great essay, The World's Last Nighthe speaks of what it means to have a healthy appreciation of the doctrine of the Second Coming. Too many, he feels, are worried about the plot and ending that they fail to understand their own role. Writes Lewis, "It is (because of) our attempt to guess the plot of a drama in which we are the characters. But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess aobut the scenes that follow it." Lewis goes on to illustrate by talking about a minor character in King Lear to whom the playwright does not even give a name. In the third act he performs an act of instinctive loyalty and bravery and as a result is killed. His unnamed part is 8 lines long, but, as Lewis puts it: "But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted." The part best to have acted. It's nice not to have to worry about the ending of the play or the plot that leads to it. The key is play your part. When the director points our way, act! This is our contribution not only to the present, but to the ending. As students of the New Testament we may be given a peak at the ending, but there is a whole lot of acting that needs to be done in the meanwhile. Who knows? Maybe the whole play turns on our part.