Audio: The Promise to a Barren Land (1 of 4)
December 11th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
"Waiting" by Mary Cassatt, 1879-80, Art Institute of Chicago
Sermon audio (11-30-08): The Promise to a Barren Land
This sermon opens a series on barren women in the Bible, using Isaiah 54:1-3 as a thematic text, called “God’s Way With Unbelief.” To introduce the topic, we study the experience of Abraham and Sarah.
I used the Cassatt drawing in the Powerpoint slides for this sermon because it seemed to express the kind of sorrow so many feel while they wait for God.
New Name and Look
December 11th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
MER Christianity has changed, as you can see, not only to a new design but to a new focus.
A tritone is a dissonant interval of three whole tones, an interval that needs resolution. My new focus is on the Christian life as it is lived in the tensions of society, thought, and the arts. I will post more items each week, and cover a little more territory than just the subculture of evangelicalism. More to come …
Unbelief, Ignorance, and Guts
December 11th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
My sermon on Sunday explored the connection between ignorance of God and unbelief. When God’s people don’t know his history, his promises, and the worldview he instantiates in the Bible, they cannot have confidence in him. In their worship, God becomes a mystery guest.
The broad ignorance of American evangelicals about the faith they claim is well-documented. But I have many questions. Specifically, what kind of ignorance are we facing? In order to have abiding faith in God, what should evangelicals learn? And how?
Many have decried evangelicals’ biblical illiteracy, which I have seen all too often. Once, at a banquet where I’d been invited to speak, I was seated next to a woman who’d been highly involved at the host church. She told me about a T.V. movie she had seen: a young man in olden times was sold into slavery by his own brothers, was taken to a foreign country, even wound up in prison, but eventually became the nation’s ruler. The movie was really exciting, she said, adding brightly, ”And it was based on a true story!”
There is, beyond this, a lack of doctrinal knowledge. People no longer learn a system of teaching about the faith, a biblically derived intellectual framework. Some even attack doctrine as a hindrance to faith.
Further, people lack a knowledge of devotional disciplines, which the spiritual formation movement now aims to teach. Further yet, there is a broad decline in practical family skills like parenting, budgeting, and communication — skills that used to be inherited but now have to be taught.
All these species of ignorance populate evangelical pews. Churches are filled with men and women who are confident socially — who smile and laugh with their friends, and who are eager to be involved in activities. Many of the people have confident political views as well. But let God become the sole focus of conversation, and their eyes show a certain retreat, a vulnerability and wariness.
So, what are we dealing with?
First, we are oppressed not such much by individual ignorance as by cultural ignorance. Regardless of what individuals may or may not know, communities don’t know enough. People do not have a large enough fund of shared knowledge.
Cultural knowledge is, as the rhyming preachers say, caught not taught. It is gained in the rhythms of a way of life. A person learns the story of Joseph deeply — learns Joseph’s traumas, learns his importance, learns the Lord’s providence in his life — not because she hears about him in a class, but because in her church Joseph is still alive. He is a constant reference point, an icon of God’s faithfulness in human suffering. Joseph is shared.
Cultural knowledge is not fully conscious. The bulk of it is prejudicial. It is not theoretical or abstract, but instantiated. It is not even coherent, in the sense that the community has fully untangled all its paradoxes. Cultural knowledge is gut-level.
Which leads to a second point: evangelical ignorance is not merely a dearth of facts but of emotion. Evangelicals do not recognize the significance of the Bible, of doctrine, of devotional and practical godliness — recognize the significance at gut-level. Spiritual realities leave them unmoved.
When people do not have shared knowledge, they do not feel deeply enough.
A Christian way of life in America has been lost. Its rhythms of community are loose, and its shared symbols are neglected or sentimentalized. For a long time now, evangelicalism has been a parasite on consumerism, having little vitality or nourishment on its own. This is why evangelicals become wary when they’re confronted with God himself. They do not share him; they share worldliness.
Pastors have been frantically trying to replace cultural knowledge with mere training. Give the people more facts, more tools, more tips.
In particular, pastors have been trying to make applications of biblical knowledge using generalizations. Joseph’s story isn’t “practical enough” as Genesis narrates it. In order to become “practical,” the man Joseph has to be atomized into a series of “principles” that can be “applied” to “real situations in your life.” So, keep a good attitude in hardship. Always do your best, whether you’re in prison or in power. Just like Joseph in olden times. See ya next week.
This training approach is not necessarily wrong. But it won’t educate the kind of ignorance we face: it won’t build up a community’s shared knowledge. It won’t train people’s guts.
If evangelicals are going to believe God deeply again, the preacher will need to address his own ignorance. He will need to explore how the Bible instantiates truth artistically — through poems, narratives, and, yes, sermons. He will need to find how he can instantiate the same truth, bringing the Bible’s instances to life with such specificity and detail that no one can ignore the implications. He will need to recover a sense of drama with God as the central character, not human beings.
In other words, evangelical ignorance results from the emotional detachment of evangelical preachers.
Unbelief and Ted Haggard’s Return
December 4th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Early in 2007 I went to a writers conference in Colorado Springs, the home base of Ted Haggard. Haggard was supposed to have been a headliner at the conference, but a couple months prior he had become a headliner in a less positive way: he had resigned from his megachurch and from the presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals because of drug use and sexual immorality.
Though he was not speaking at the conference, he haunted it.
At most meals, conversation discovered members of New Life, where he had been pastor, and gingerly probed them, finding them in various stages of anger and sorrow — and also defensiveness. One man of Calvinistic views and Socratic habits, whose method I had the misfortune to witness over dinner, peered at a New Lifer through heavy glasses and questioned whether Pentecostalism had been the real cause of Haggard’s fall.
The hardy soul under interrogation insisted New Life was going to be just fine.
In this buzz, I happened to be pitching a novel about pastoral deceit (since published as Fallen). I took it to a mentor for some feedback, an editor who lives in Colorado Springs, and after reading the first couple of pages he mused about the lightning chain of people he had witnessed saying to each other on the day Haggard fell, “Have you heard about Ted?”
Colorado Springs had been haunted for months.
It is not free yet. Two weeks ago, an article reported that Haggard was back, not at New Life, but at a church in Illinois. What are we to think about his return to preaching? The piece sampled many reactions, three of which made me realize something about the nature of unbelief among Christians.
Start with H.B. London of Focus on the Family — a faithful man who is devoted to restoring fallen pastors, and who had been helping with Haggard’s restoration. The article summarizes his view: “a return to vocational ministry in less than four or five years would be dangerous.” Then London is quoted as saying, “To sit on the sidelines for a person with [Haggard's] personality and gifting is probably like being paralyzed. If Mr. Haggard and others like him feel like they have a call from God, they rationalize that their behavior does not change that call.”
That kind of personality and gifting. He’s wired to lead. You can see why he rationalizes his return, but . . . it’s dangerous.
A negative assessment majoring on compassion. London’s emphasis probably isn’t reflected accurately by the article, but I wonder why the nod toward Haggard’s charisma and talent is needed at all, and why his return would be dangerous rather than completely unjustified.
The statements seem tempered. What I think ought to be sharp edges of principled reasoning are blunted. As reported, they are weak.
A second reaction comes from Leo Godzich, who has met with Haggard weekly as part of the restoration process. “If all men are honest,” he says, “all men are liars and deceivers. Once someone is gifted and called, that is something they generally cannot escape. . . . True redemption occurs when someone is fulfilling a destiny and purpose in their life.”
Those sentences almost made me blow out a swig of coffee.
1. The doctrine of moral equivalence: all men are Haggard. Hit the gong. Not all men have systematically deceived their wives, their children, their associates, their subordinates, their boards, their constituents, and the public at large in order to cover up their behavior.
2. The notion of calling: Haggard “cannot escape” his “destiny.” Get the hook and yank Godzich offstage. There’s a substantial difference between “not escaping” and renewed self-promotion.
3. The new salvation: “true redemption” as fulfilling your purpose. It’s trapdoor time for Leo. Down to the dungeon. True redemption is actually the forgiveness of sin, not the fulfillment of a calling that is very much in question.
This is the perversion of principles to fit a man.
A third reaction comes from the Illinois pastor who invited Haggard to preach. Chris Byrd says, “I had confidence his heart was solid, his theology is sound and the message he’s always brought to the body of Christ would come forth.” By what standard was Byrd confident that Haggard’s heart was solid?Why should I be confident Haggard’s theology is sound? On Byrd’s say-so?
This is the substitution of pious avowals for discernment, again because of partiality to a man.
I constantly encounter people whose faith in Christ is in crisis. The reason is always the same: their relationships are entangled in unconfessed, unrepented sin. Sometimes the sin is their own; often it belongs to others. In order to salvage these relationships, they want to give and receive compassion. They want to have the space to change, and they want to give that space to others.
They are dancing a minuet of mercy with their partners. To keep the dance going, they have to keep Christ from cutting in. They have to redefine sin, broaden righteousness, and avoid judgment. But after years of giving and receiving vague compassion, they have relationships haunted by destruction. And when their rationalizations no longer give comfort, they want Christ to wave his magic wand and do a “work of transformation” — which he won’t do on such terms.
This is an anatomy of unbelief today.
In all likelihood, many New Lifers from that haunted 2007 conference have learned something about true redemption — that sin, righteousness, and judgment will not be redefined by partiality, and that forgiveness is a sharp tool for healing.
My prayer is that they’ve gained a gospel worth believing.
