"Secular Lent"

I find it interesting that many who say they don’t believe in God and that Christianity is a fraud will make New Year’s Resolutions in 2008. “What do the two have to do with each other?” you ask. Plenty. New Year’s Resolutions typically have to do either with starting or stopping some behavior that will, if carried out and carried through, make me a better person. It usually lasts only about a month or so and then the whole enterprise is abandoned. I guess you could call it a “secular Lent.” Matter of fact, that’s exactly what I call it. At bottom, both these practices – one secular, one sacred – have to do with what Christians call “sin.” Sin can take two forms: commission (doing something we would to God we hadn’t) and omission (failing to do something we would to God we had). New Year’s Resolutions attempt to address the same reality – human imperfection (which, note well, is not denied), only without introducing God into the issue.

But, of course, without God, the whole idea of “sin” is nonsense. You can talk about an “oops” or an “uh oh,” or, if you have a more philosophical or psychological bent, a “universal human glitch,” but you cannot talk about “sin.” Sin implies that Someone’s or Something’s standard, norm, template of what it means to be appropriately “human” has been violated. But if you’ve jettisoned the whole idea of God, then this is pure nonsense. As Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s nihilistic antagonist in The Brother’s Karamazov, says, “If there is no God, then anything is permissible.”

Sin is not some universal human glitch; it is willful, stubborn, purposeful rebellion by the creature against the Creator’s purpose. Remember what David said following his adultery with Bathsheba? “Against Thee and Thee alone have I sinned and done what is evil in Thy sight” (Ps. 51:4). All sin is finally sin against God because it is rebellion against God’s purpose for us as human beings. Incidentally, that’s why the Bible is far more interested in “sin” than in particular “sins,” the latter being only a symptom of the former.

For the Christian, the worst thing about stealing is not getting caught. The worst thing about stealing is that stealing makes you a thief, and God didn’t create you to be a thief; He created you to be a person made in His image. If you steal, even if you don’t get caught, you’ve still violated God’s purpose for you and missed your chance to be the “you” God had in mind when He “thought you up” in the first place.

That’s why dealing with sin always involves repentance and redemption. It’s not just tinkering about with this “glitch” or that one; it’s laying down our arms, surrendering, quitting the rebellion, and coming back home – to God and to our true selves.

And that’s why we need God’s help to do it. If it were merely a matter of just making a resolution and trying harder and doing better, Weight Watchers would be out of business in 2008!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, from our house to yours. Cheryl and Wayne

"A Pastor's Passing"

I was thirty-nine years old when I came from the faculty of Midwestern Seminary to be pastor of the historic First Baptist Church of Raleigh, and in the congregation each Sunday was John M. Lewis, beloved, legendary pastor of the Old First Church who for more than a quarter of a century led that grand old congregation through some of the most tumultuous times in modern Baptist history.

I had actually met him some years earlier. At Midwestern in those days, it was our practice to invite pastors to campus whom we felt would be good models for our students to emulate. In what we called "A Week of Preaching" these model pastors would preach each day in chapel, be a guest lecturer in our classes, and have both formal and informal conversations about ministry with students and faculty. Our faculty had invited John to campus while I was there, and I had the high honor of playing host to him during part of the week.

I still recall the impression he made on me. He had just lost his beloved wife, Jean, and was obviously in grief, but that did nothing to diminish the quality of what he did on our campus that week. His sermons were brilliant and beautifully crafted; his classroom lectures were both practical and profound; and his conversations with the faculty in the Faculty Lounge were memorable and disarming. I recall one in particular. A group of us were in the Lounge picking John's brain when I asked him if he could summarize for us what he had learned in over forty years of ministry, nearly thirty of which with one congregation, amazing in light of the fact that the average tenure of Baptist pastors is less than two years. He thought for a moment, looked at me and said: "I guess I would say that after forty years of ministry I've learned that only a few things really matter."

That week and those conversations fluttered up in my mind when I took the pulpit of that great church where John had been simply brilliant week in and week out. He could have had me for lunch most Sundays; he could have made my life miserable; he could have undermined my ministry and done me in. He didn't. He was the consummate Christian gentleman, the personification of pastoral integrity, and the best friend a pastor could have had.

I miss him. I miss our talks. I miss his quiet wisdom. I miss his poetry. I miss his letters. I miss his deep, resonant voice. I miss his love of language and learning. I miss his Southern charm and Christian grace.

Baptists lost a legend last week. John M. Lewis died in Raleigh at the age of 86. We will not soon see his equal.

"It's About Time"

Those who know me know the impact C. S. Lewis has had on my thinking and theology. But perhaps the most influential idea I got from him was his simple statement that just because we live in time and space doesn’t mean God does (see Mere Christianity, “Time and Beyond Time”). We humans live life incrementally – one moment at a time. For us, life is arranged as a unidirectional series of moments: past, present, future. “One moment disappears,” he says, “before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each.” What he means is that we actually live in a tiny little piece of time-space (to use Einstein’s term) called “now,” and in the very act of saying “now,” “now” slips past and becomes “then.” Indeed, “past” and “future” refer to moments to which we have no access. Our access is limited to that tiny little moment called “now.” And notice: Because this is the way we experience time, we naturally assume that this is the way God experiences time too. But Lewis says that this is surely wrong:

Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty – and every other moment from the beginning of the world – is always the Present for Him.

Imagine, he says, that time were represented as a line with the points A, B, C, and D representing moments of time out of our lives. You couldn’t move on to “Point B” until you had finished with “Point A” or “Point D” until you had finished with “Point C.” But not so with God. He experiences the whole line at once and has equal access to every point on the line. There is no point on the line God must “pass” before moving on to the next. His life is not dribbled out in increments, one moment at a time, as ours is. He is present to every moment and has infinite time to spend (read “eternity”) on each.

A simple idea, but the implications are worth considering. Take “Incarnation” for example, the belief that “once upon a time” God became a man. “Well, who was running things up in the cosmos while God was human?” we ask. But notice: My question smuggles in the assumption that Jesus’ life as God was a piece taken out of God’s life as a whole – “Point C” lifted out of the whole line. That is, there was a time before God was Jesus, a time when God was Jesus, and a time after God was Jesus. That is, the Incarnation is a period or “point” in the history of God’s life. But if God doesn’t “live in time” like we do, then this kind of thinking is surely mistaken. God has no history because to have a history means that there are “points” on your timeline to which you have no access. As Lewis says: “You cannot fit Christ’s early life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time.” The mystery of the Incarnation is a timeless truth about God that all that we humans are – our weakness, our vulnerability, our ignorance, our pain, our suffering, our death – are somehow included in God’s life. Or as Paul says: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.”

And therein lies the real mystery of the Incarnation – He became what we are so that we might become what He is. Maybe, if we have the faith for it, our lives too won’t always be measured out one moment at a time. And when that day comes, we’ll say, “It’s about time!”

"Einstein's Biggest Idea"

One of the best and most widely acclaimed programs of the outstanding PBS series NOVA was the program they did on Albert Einstein called Einstein’s Big Idea. The program originally aired in the fall of 2005, and focused on Einstein’s famous “Theory of Special Relativity” and the equation that captured it: E=mc2. The program achieved the near impossible: It explained the Theory of Special Relativity in a way that even I could understand it! It went on to track Einstein’s genius to its lair by making the startling claim that Einstein, as no other mathematician or physicist before him had done, was able to recognize that fundamental elements of our universe, like space and time or mass and energy, are (if we move deeply enough into them) actually two facets of the same thing. Before Einstein we talked about space and time as though they were different things, now we talk about the “space/time continuum.” Before Einstein we talked about mass and energy as though they were separate and distinct, now we know that mass is merely one manifestation of energy (heat and light being two others). Einstein’s “Big Idea” forever changed the way we view our universe.

But as important as his “Big Idea” was, the Theory of Special Relativity was not his biggest idea. A new book about Einstein by Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Schuster 2007) provides a revealing glimpse into the life of this remarkable man. On balance, theology may have been Einstein’s biggest idea. Born a Jew, educated in Christian schools, Einstein’s life and thought always brushed the edges of the Mystery that is God. Though he never expressed his belief in images or language most Christians or Jews would recognize as “orthodox,” he nonetheless believed that the sheer immensity of the Mystery behind the universe demanded a theology.

Isaacson captures something of Einstein’s theology when he recounts how the mathematician responded to the question of how he would describe his belief about God. Einstein purportedly said:

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is.

Granted, that’s a far cry from the Christian belief in an Incarnate God – very God of very God Who for us and for our salvation came down… is how one early creed put it. And as a Christian a fundamental of my faith is the belief that the Ultimate Mystery behind all things was once born among us as a baby “…with a head so small you could crush it one-handed,” as Frederick Buechner wrote.

But that said, in a culture where God has been whittled down to size – God is our copilot, our buddy, our confidant, our spiritual advisor, our financial guru, our cheerleader – give Einstein his due; his was a God with some SIZE.