As the Deer

Harry Potter appeals for many reasons, chiefly the way J.K. Rowling spins out marvelous tales. Her mind is the magic. But as we watched the new Half-Blood Prince movie, a particular reason crystalized for me. I love the way evil in her universe is real and palpable.

In its fear of fundamentalism, my religion has demythologized and abstracted evil.  Evil now inhabits not persons but systems and structures. In the Bible, though, as in the world of Harry Potter, evil is personal not systemic. Here evil is particular and local, which makes it capable of being defeated. One cannot fight against a system — or rather, one cannot defeat it.

Kathleen Norris notes a desert father who said when we try to do what is right, the demons become our wills and fight against our effort.  At least here evil is personal again, something one can resist – not a protest march against an abstract, nefarious ism.

Newspaper editors pay attention to the placement of stories. They put key stories on the front page ‘above the fold.’ They also, I’m convinced, will lay two stories side by side to comment on one another.

The Raleigh News & Observer Thursday offered a story on atheists who set aside a religious upbringing through de-baptism.  In the rite a hair dryer labeled ‘reason’ removes the (long evaporated) water.  A certificate announces the exchange of reason for superstition. The de-christianized can send the paperwork to a former church and ask to be removed from the rolls. In their minds reason excludes religion.

Next to this story the editor put one to illustrate the other side of the matter — Buzz Aldrin celebrated communion on the moon forty years ago. He asked for a radio blackout and received the sacrament blessed at his home church in Texas.

I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility.

Aldrin found a way, as many of us do, to keep reason and religion together.

The Great Dismal Swamp straddles Virginia and North Carolina, covering 111,000 acres south of Norfolk. The land once belonged to George Washington. Today its wetlands and wildlife await hunters and nature enthusiasts.

Washington fell off his horse one day trying to mount. His body landed on the dirt like a large sack of grain.  His slave Caesar laughed at this misfortune, and Washington, incensed, sent him off to work in the Dismal Swamp. Which demonstrates a critical truth: Do not offend the King.

We walked along a paved hiking trail with water standing in a canal to the right. A park employee in a gray pick-up drew alongside us and warned us about bears. “They come out in the afternoon.”

Should one appear, we were resolved to turn and head back to the car. It’s not wise to offend the bears either.

This blog will rest till August.  Note the new Favorites tab above.  Grace and peace to you all.

ADDED:  It turns out blogging will just be spotty depending on computer availability while we travel.  Regular posting will resume in August.

Law professor Ann Althouse wonders why the race of a judge earns so much attention when religion gets so little.

I think religious diversity [on a court] is particularly important, because it has more to do with the individual’s mind. It’s part of one’s thinking, and legal analysis is thinking. Race and ethnicity might have an effect on your thinking — in that it may involve various personal experiences and feelings of identification — but it is not a characteristic that you have by deciding to have it or by believing you have it. Religion is different.

After Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, Althouse notes, six Roman Catholics will sit on the high court, along with two Jews and a Protestant.

Religion resembles race as an element of birth — our family gives us our first religious identity.  But religion differs from race in that we may change it as we age.  We embrace, modify or reject the religious identity received from our parents, even if that identity is irreligion.

I see two reasons why the religion of judges is overlooked.  First, the US Constitution disestablished a state religion, separating it from law and governing (for which we are grateful).  This relegates religion to the private sphere of life.  Second, the news media sees religion at the periphery of things.  It belongs on the religion page on Saturday — it doesn’t infuse all of life.

Six Catholics on the high court doesn’t trouble me.  Catholic thought has long reflected on issues of law, behavior and social virtue, which are exactly what courts must deal with.  But Protestants, who make up a religious majority in our country, are underrepresented.

Althouse’s diversity concern is kin to Dan Lawton’s question, Nearly all my professors are Democrats. Isn’t that a problem? Lawton, a journalism student at the University of Oregon, investigated the political affiliation of his professors in the departments of journalism, law, political science, economics and sociology.  He found Republicans make up less than two percent.  When he wrote an article about this for the campus newspaper, the hostility and profanity he encountered stunned him.

What’s so remarkable is that I hadn’t actually advocated Republican ideas or conservative ideas. In fact, I’m not a conservative, nor a Republican. I simply believe in the concept of diversity – a primarily liberal idea – and think that we suffer when we don’t include ideas we find unappealing.

Our country has made steps toward diversity in the last generation, with more needed.  It’s clear, though, that while some categories of diversity consume our attention, others do not matter.

Bob Cornwall defends denominations against those who consider them old baggage in a new ’postdenominational’ world.  He agrees with Michael Kinnamon and Jan Linn that to be vital churches must affirm their heritage embodied in a particular tradition.  He used to discount denominations, but now Cornwall embraces the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

He gives no other reasons, though, for embracing a particular tradition, nor does he discuss the pitfalls they present.  The relevance of denominations is more ambiguous than this.

The earliest form of Christian community is the congregation, the ecclesia.  Anything beyond this came later.  In the Presbyterian Church, where my ordination lies, congregations in America first joined together to form presbyteries, and presbyteries joined together to form larger synods and a national church.  But the matter began with local congregations.  As for other traditions, no matter what structure or polity exists now, the movement began in Palestine with a loose collection of house churches.  The roots of things are in the local congregation.

And whatever church structures exist now, their purpose is to serve the local congregation.  I see denominations doing this well in specific ways.  A denomination connects a congregation to something larger and older than itself — an antidote to a local church becoming narcissistic.  A denomination can also engage in forms of mission, education and healing beyond the reach of a local congregation.  Resources pool to water many fields.

But denominations carry dangers too.  Chief among them is their resistance to necessary change.  Witness how slowly music has changed in mainline denominations — for over a generation the musical instrument of our culture has been the guitar, acoustic and electric, but the mainline churches have been reluctant to embrace it, and they have paid a high price for this.

Denominations also, like any institution, tend to become an end in themselves rather than a means to an end.  Their chief goal becomes to perpetuate their own existence.  (This danger can also characterize the local congregation.)  They become like the temple stones that impressed the disciples — Christ had to remind them all those stones wouldn’t last.  They were never meant to.  They’re ruins today.

The Shorter Catechism says Christ communicates his benefits to us in three ways:  word, sacrament and prayer.  Believers experience these in the communal life of a local congregation.  As Christ communicates his benefits to them, so he also equips them to be his servants and ambassadors in a needy world.

The denomination that helps local congregations do this deserves our respect and loyalty.  The denomination that doesn’t, that fritters its energies on other pursuits, should fall into ruins.

Prepare me the kind of tasty food I like and bring it to me to eat.  (Gen 27.4)

Preparing a sermon is like cooking in a Crock-Pot.  I start with the meat — a healthy portion of scripture.  I put the meat in the pot on Monday.  I study the scripture and let it begin to cook.  The type of meat matters.  Scripture comes as narrative, poetry and discursive writing.  I prefer to preach on narrative texts, but the others have their possibilities too.  For a balanced diet, it’s probably good to vary the type of scripture.  What’s important is it be a passage of substance.  Make sure there’s plenty of meat.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I add vegetables to the pot — illustrations and interpretations on the scripture.  These I draw from commentaries, online resources and my own reflections.  I’m looking for the intersection where the Bible and life meet.  It helps to get away from the office to a public place, a park, a library or a table at the grocery deli.  I sit and watch people and write what comes to mind.  I also reflect on that ongoing conversation with my parishioners, drawing on what I’ve learned listening to their lives.  All these juices mingle together in the pot. Whenever possible I add seasoning to the mix – humor, or at least something quirky that makes me smile.

I let the mixture cook until Thursday, when it’s simmered enough to write an outline of the message.  Here’s where the analogy breaks down.  Before I serve the congregation, I must eat the meal myself — that is, get the words off the printed page and inside of me.  Preachers can’t simply read an essay aloud.  They must embody a message, and for that to happen it needs to live in the blood and sinews.  Over Friday and Saturday then, I talk through the message a half dozen times or more and so consume it.

No longer writing a full manuscript helps me to have more natural speech patterns as I preach. On Sunday I’ll keep the outline handy but only reference it occasionally.  For all practical purposes I’ve written the message on my heart — I need only deliver it with energy, animation and lots of eye contact.

Afterward when the sermon’s done, I seldom worry about it.  Sermons don’t end when they end — they continue in the listener’s mind and heart.  In this I agree with Kathleen Norris:  “The sermon is an oral art form, always more a thought in progress rather than a finished product.  Even more so than with literature, the listener is the one who completes the work.”  To take up the cooking imagery again, a meal isn’t complete until someone eats it — their body digests it and draws energy from it.

Everyone practices the art of preaching differently, but this is how I prepare a tasty sermon.

I officiated at two funerals this week. The first went well, except for when I mispronounced the person’s name right at the start. Two family members sitting in the front row corrected me. I felt like an idiot. I knew the name — it simply came out of my mouth wrong. The family was kind about it afterward.

The second funeral preceded a meal at church. The family at first asked us to plan for 200 at the meal; we suggested 75 and then settled on 100.  When the time came 65 people ate, counting our own servers, which meant empty tables and lots of leftover food (though less than I’d feared). The number at a funeral meal is always hard to judge. Families base their expectation on love, and we base ours on experience. But it’s better to have too much food than too little. Our volunteers were cheerful and industrious. The funeral itself was a lovely thing, with three adult children offering tributes to their father.

It’s getting harder for churches to provide funeral meals. This practice holds over from an earlier era when life habits and demographics were much different. I no longer suggest such meals, but if the family requests one we comply.

Reading the Gospel of Matthew this week, the cleansing of the Temple story, a line leaped out at me.  “The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them.” (Mt 21.14)  I glanced at the cleansing story parallels in the other Gospels, and this line doesn’t appear in them.  It’s unique to Matthew’s account.

Even in the last days before his death, with controversies and intrigue swirling all around him, people in need still sought Jesus out for the help he alone could give them.

There are days when I don’t feel like a major character in the Bible drama.  I’m not Peter, Caiaphas or Mary Magdalene.  I don’t have a name at all — frankly, I’m not that important.  I take my place among the masses of unnamed characters who only enjoy a minute or two on stage and then disappear again.  But their brief encounter with Jesus alters them forever.

I am the blind, the lame, the poor who come to Jesus, and suddenly I see, I walk and I possess untold wealth.  I need only come.

She wore a pink and black top, black slacks and flip-flops as she stood before the judge. She pleaded guilty to attempted larceny — she’d stolen jewelry from a home where she was babysitting. (The larceny charge itself the court dropped in exchange for her plea.)  She wiped tears from her face as the judge spoke to her, admonished her and set a sentencing date for August. She then said good-bye to her attorney and left the courtroom, a look of deep embarrassment on her face.

This was one of a dozen defendants in Judge Margaret Noe’s courtroom Wednesday morning. Sitting in the gallery, we watched brief acts of ongoing dramas in the lives of real men and women. Theft, assault, drugs, home invasion — each crime carrying its own penalty.

As things proceeded I thought, of all things, about substutionary atonement. Christ takes the penalty we guilty sinners deserve, securing our innocence. John Calvin, whose 500th birthday we observe tomorrow, summarizes this classical understanding of atonement:

This is our acquittal: the guilt that held us liable for punishment has been transferred to the head of the Son of God. We must, above all, remember this substitution, lest we tremble and remain anxious throughout life — as if God’s righteous vengeance, which the Son of God has taken upon himself, still hung over us. (Institutes 2.16.5)

These are hard words.  It’s easy to understand why this doctrine has fallen into disfavor and disrepair in the liberal Protestant church.  It makes God, whom Jesus likened to a heartsick Father, look punitive and vengeful.

Yet I wonder if our theology has withered for casting this doctrine aside.  God is so loving and compassionate now our actions no longer carry consequences.  If all that matters is God loves me no matter what I do, then what I do no longer matters.  But the courtroom tells me actions do bring consequences.  If I break a human law, I will suffer a penalty.  Does breaking God’s law bring none?

If I stood before a judge, as the woman did yesterday, caught in the machinery of justice, and a painful penalty stared me in the face, I’d be stunned and grateful for anyone who made it all go away — even if I didn’t understand exactly how that happened or who absorbed the cost.

On a TV crime drama a young woman was driving her father home when she killed a boy riding a bike.  After the accident, her father compelled her to change seats with him so it would appear he had been driving.  He went to prison in her place out of love for his daughter.  This is substitutionary atonement.  It’s not morally plausible — it’s an act of desperate love.

I don’t know if this is what Jesus meant when he described his death as ‘a ransom for many.’  I also realize atonement has many meanings.  But all this helps me understand the atonement in a new way, although the idea itself is as old as religion.  Christ switches places with me, absorbs the consequences of my crimes and drains them of any further danger to me.

‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.’  I suspect this is an inescapable part of the gospel.