Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, the 40-day period of repentance and contrition we Christians have observed for centuries as a way of making plain and personal and palpable our walk with Christ. I wanted to say something new and profound about it today, but in reading over what I wrote last year, I don't really think I have anything new or profound to add, so I'll just refer you to what I said then. You can read the blog, "Salvation's Ashes," by clicking here.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Preaching Conference

Just a reminder about the Preaching Conference I'll be leading at Mars Hill College this Saturday, February 28th. For more information, click here.

If you live nearby, I'd love to see you there!

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Big Bird, Bulverism, and Balderdash

This year, 2009, marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. I can’t believe it. It seems like only yesterday that I sat in front of the TV set with my two-year-old son (who’s nearly 33 now!) and snickered at the surliness of Oscar the Grouch; counted with The Count; howled with delight as the Cookie Monster was undone by the mere sight of chocolate chips; and wished the world as wonderful as Big Bird believed it to be. Forty years! Who knew? Today the program has been exported and dubbed into almost every country and culture on the planet, except, that is, for Great Britain. Back in the 50’s when Sesame Street made its debut, British broadcasters turned down the offer to televise the program to their audiences because (wait for it!) they deemed the program too authoritarian and imperious because the program kept insisting that there were right answers to things. That’s right…Big Bird was deemed by the Brits to be an intellectual bigot and bully.

C. S. Lewis saw it coming. Back in 1944, he penned an essay that was shockingly prophetic of the contemporary postmodern penchant to dismiss all truth claims as narrow-minded and bigoted. The essay, titled “Bulverism, or The Foundation of 20th Century Thought,” was intended to be more sardonic than prophetic, but as visionary as Lewis was, he could not have foreseen just how complete the triumph of intellectual egalitarianism would become.

In the article Lewis excoriates the “aspective anthropology” of the Freudians and Marxists who reduce all human beings to some “aspect” of their personhood, whether psychological or economic or whatever, and then explain and consequently dismiss any assertion they happen not to like solely on the basis of these allegedly vitiating factors, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Consequently, says Lewis, thanks to this kind of radical “aspective approach” to truth, the views of persons may now be dismissed not on purely logical grounds – that is, because one’s views can be demonstrated to be unreasonable or indefensible or otherwise lacking in supporting evidence or rational credibility – but rather solely on the presumption that one’s views are somehow psychologically or ideologically “tainted at the source.”

This method of assuming someone to be in error without discussion or analysis of the actual evidence and then proceeding to distract that one’s attention by explaining how one came to be wrong Lewis says was so pervasive in his time that he had to invent a name for it – Bulverism. He attributed this pseudo-philosophy to a certain imaginary inventor he named Ezekiel Bulver, “whose destiny,” Lewis says, “was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third – ‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment,’ E. Bulver assures us, ‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument [italics mine]. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet.’”

Today’s brand of Bulverists, known variously as deconstructionists, post-modernists, and purveyors of political correctness, have taken the method one step further. They, like their psychological and Marxist counterparts of another generation, not only affirm that everyone has a point of view, or an “angle of vision” as it’s now known, but, they go on to argue, reality itself is plural not singular. They say it plainly, in the Postmodern Manifesto: “Nothing is certain, not even this.” They argue that the so-called rational, coherent world which modernism attempted to give us has now unraveled completely. Modern assertions about allegedly “universal values,” so say the deconstructionists, have given way to the postmodern values of pluralistic alternatives, competing points of view, paradox, diversity, multiculturalism, deconstruction, uncentering, and ideological egalitarianism. Every “truth claim” must be deconstructed, analyzed for its “angle of vision” which is always biased, and therefore, never to be taken as absolute or accurate. There’s a word for that in Greek, difficult to bring over into English, but I believe the loose translation is “balderdash.”

Now, to be sure, all of this is great fun. What a wonderful way to win an argument! I don’t have to prove you wrong, I can just assume you’re wrong on the basis of your faulty, biased “angle of vision,” and then go on to explain to you how your particular point of view skewed your vision of things. But of course, this is a game at which two can play! If my “angle of vision” distorts my view of things, then doesn’t your “angle of vision” distort yours as well? And if all “angles of vision” are thus distorted, how shall we ever know that they are “distorted?” The knowledge of a thing cannot be one of its parts. If all ideas are only relativized perspectives, then isn’t my idea of relativity also relative? If the name of the game is “deconstructionism,” then mustn’t I also be willing to “deconstruct” my deconstructionism? Isn’t this a bit like trying to prove that all proofs are invalid? If you succeed, then you fail all the more, for the proof that all proofs are invalid must itself be invalid! I don't know about you, but I'm getting a headache.

There are two questions, according to Lewis, that ought to be asked of people who attempt to dismiss your thinking on the basis that it is biased toward some “angle of vision” and, therefore, tainted at the source. One is, Are all thoughts thus tainted at the source, or just some? The second is, Does the taint invalidate the tainted thought – in the sense of making it untrue – or can a thought be true despite the fact that the thinker may be biased, that is, “tainted?” If they say that all thoughts are tainted, then of course so also are theirs. If they say that only some thoughts are thus tainted, then the question becomes – and don’t let them wriggle off the hook on this one – how do you know which thoughts are tainted and which are not? What makes the difference?

At this point, you may move on to the second question: Does the fact that a thinker is “tainted” invalidate the thought of the thinker thus “tainted,” or can his/her thinking be true despite the fact that s/he may be tainted? If they say that the taint invalidates the thinking of the thinker, then so also must their thinking be invalid. If they say that despite the fact that a tainted thinker is doing the thinking, a thinker’s thoughts might still be valid on occasion, the question becomes again, What makes the difference?

The answer, of course, is reason. Unless we can trust reason to give us genuine insight into the nature of reality itself, and not merely the way our minds happen to work, then we can know nothing. The only reason I can argue with you that my idea of Charlotte is more accurate than yours is because there is a real city of Charlotte. If there were not, then the entire enterprise would be pointless. What I am saying is that in order to think at all I must claim for my thinking validity that is not credible if, as the Bulverists (of whatever generation) say, thought is nothing more than an exercise of my own unique “angle of vision,” and as such gives me no accurate information about the nature of things in themselves.

Suppose, Lewis illustrates, that you really do believe that you have a large balance in your bank account. And suppose you want to test this hypothesis to determine whether or not it is in fact true. You will never come to any useful conclusion about the size of your bank account by examining your psychological or social or political or racial or sexual condition or views, no matter how helpful such an exercise might otherwise be. Your only chance of finding out whether your allegedly large bank account is merely the product of wish-fulfillment or whether you do, in fact, possess extensive financial resources is to sit down and do the arithmetic. When you’ve thus checked the numbers, and not a moment before, you will know whether or not to order the new car. If the arithmetic validates your assumption, then no amount of psychological adumbration about your alleged propensity to engage in “wishful thinking” can be anything more than a complete waste of time.

But alas, that kind of thinking; indeed, thinking at all!, has gone the way of the dinosaur. The assault on reason has succeeded in shifting the ground from truth to power. Today, you don’t have to be right or correct to carry the day; you just have to be loud, at least louder than the other voices in the room. You get enough supporters on your side agreeing that three times three equals seven, and it does! Moreover, anyone who dares to suggest otherwise and says, “But the emperor is naked!” is riduculed, savaged, and regarded with suspicion. Postmodernism doesn’t do “think;” it only does “group think.”

Alas, I fear Professor Lewis was not only correct but prophetic in ways he could not have then imagined. Bulverism is alive and well and making its presence felt, and I do mean felt, both on the street and in the classroom. Despite his best efforts to warn us, we may be yet on the brink of the complete triumph of sloppy thinking. The noble pursuit of seeking truth through the careful sifting of evidence and ideas seems, in the current climate, destined to be inundated in a devouring deluge of sloganizing and name calling. Apparently it is still too much to ask that one be proven wrong before one is shown how and where one actually went wrong. The latter is so much easier, and a lot more fun, than the former. Refutation, it seems, is still no necessary part of argument.

And what of Big Bird? I sat there years ago wondering what kind of bird this big, overgrown, ridiculous creature was who kept insisting that questions had answers and that some answers were right and some were wrong, some were true and some were false. I think I now know. He was a Dodo.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Intimate Distance

Blaise Pascal once wrote that each of us has a “God-shaped hole” in our lives and that we are forever restless and incomplete until we fill that hole with the only Reality in the universe for which we were made – God.

Most of us don’t have to scratch very deeply to know that Pascal was right. We are hungry for God. That’s why we go to church, attend revivals and crusades, watch television preachers, read the books and listen to the tapes. We want to know God, and we’ll drive for hours if someone says: “Come with me and you can experience God.” What an appetite! Philip spoke for us all when he said to Jesus one day: “Lord, show us the Father, and we’ll be satisfied” (John 14:8).

At the heart of the Christian story is the message that the eternal, immortal, invisible God has become ephemeral, mortal, and visible in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Church calls it Incarnation (literally “in-fleshing”), and it means that the God Who created the universe - Who is so sovereign that “no man has seen God at any time” and so holy that mere mortals don’t see Him, just His glory (His shekinah) - this God has a face, a name and address. Jesus of Nazareth – who lived briefly, died violently and rose unexpectedly – is none other than the Eternal One Himself in blood and bone and bile.

I have, on other occasions, described the Incarnation as “intimate distance.” Do you hear the dissonance in that? Intimate distance means that one is near enough to gain a hearing, but distant enough to be heard. Every parent knows what I mean. As parents, we walk a fine line between being “chummy” enough with our children that they feel free to share their most intimate secrets with us, but not so chummy that we can’t be parents and make the tough decisions and hard calls when their best interest demands it. Intimate distance: at bottom that’s what Incarnation means – that God in Jesus has become enough like us to understand us, and yet enough unlike us to save us.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? But if we’re honest, we’ll admit that there’s a side of us that prefers a God Who “keeps His distance” to an intimate God Who comes to us, as Jesus does, and “rattles our cages,” disturbs our status quo, and questions our most cherished prejudices – who tells us to love our enemies, to reach out to the outcast, and to reject all forms of power as pagan and irredeemable (see Mark 10:42-45). But that’s not the kind of God Christianity offers. It gives us a God Who comes close, gets personal, moves in and stays…at least for a while. The Distant One has become Intimate with us.

And therein lies the test, and the secret, of the Christian faith - Incarnation. That, as one creed put it, “Very God of Very God who for us and our salvation came down.” The Apostle Paul once put it this way: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). I call it Intimate Distance. It may not be the kind of God I want, but it’s the kind of God I need.

You too?

Friday, February 6, 2009

Imagine*

Back in 1971, the late John Lennon of Beatles fame penned a poem that is widely regarded to be perhaps the most famous lyric ever written. The poem, titled “Imagine” was recorded as the title song in Lennon’s best-selling album of the same name. Many today still regard “Imagine” as the greatest song of all time. Indeed, former president Jimmy Carter once observed, “In many countries around the world you hear John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ used almost equally with national anthems.” Lennon’s “Imagine” is the musical manifesto of his secular utopian ideal. If the world were what it was supposed to be, Lennon believed, it would be like the world he envisioned in “Imagine.” Listen to the lyrics:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one.

That’s about as close as Lennon ever gets to what Jesus called the “Kingdom of God”: live for today…live for peace…share the world. But Lennon never “imagines” a place where people “love their enemies!” And yet, Jesus insists that this is the definitive evidence of the presence of the Kingdom of God.

Our text is part of Luke’s version of what Matthew calls “The Sermon on the Mount,” and while there are some significant differences between the two versions, the essential point is the same: Jesus’ disciples do not reciprocate, do not retaliate, do not respond tit-for-tat to those who would do violence to them, whether physical or emotional or psychological or financial. Matter of fact, disciples are not to draw their behavior in response to how other’s treat them at all; rather, they are to, and Lennon never “imagined” this, love their enemies. He goes on: “Do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who maltreat you.”

Now, you do understand, don’t you, that there’s nothing particularly “Christian” in and of itself about the injunction to non-retaliation. Ghandi too counseled his followers not to engage in retaliatory behavior. Why?” Because it doesn’t work. “An eye for an eye,” as Martin Luther King once observed, is a game that, if everyone plays, has all the participants winding up blind and toothless!

But love your enemies…? That’s something neither Lennon nor Ghandi ever imagined.

I’m intrigued as much by what Jesus didn’t say as what He did. Notice: Jesus didn’t say that you’re to go out and try to summon up from somewhere deep within you an emotional bond with your enemy. The kind of love Jesus is talking about is not a “feeling.” Loving our enemy doesn’t mean that we have to “like” them. “Liking” someone means feeling a certain way about them, and I can no more manufacture that feeling than I can manufacture my response to beets. I hate beets! I don’t have anything personal against beets, you understand. They’ve never done anything to me. I just don’t like them! There’s nothing either particularly sinister or virtuous about the way I feel about beets. It’s just the “is-ness of things.” That’s not what Jesus is talking about when He says that we have to “love our enemies.” He doesn’t mean that we have to try to like them. We don’t always “like” ourselves, but we always “love” ourselves in the sense that we wish our own good.

And that’s the sense in which Jesus insists that God’s children “love their enemies;” that they wish their good, not their ill. Indeed, there is nothing more dangerous than wishing our enemies ill.

As C. S. Lewis points out: “When you hear a bit of gossip about someone and it turns out not to be true, what is your first thought? Is it, ‘Thank God even they are not as bad as that!’ Or is it a feeling of disappointment, even a determination to hold onto the gossip for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the latter, then I fear you have taken the first step down a road which will turn you into a devil. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give in to that, later on we shall wish grey were black, then white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything – God, our friends, even ourselves – as bad, and not being able to stop doing it, we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.”

But what if instead of passing on destructive gossip and enlarging upon it, we were to do what our children did last Sunday in the Children’s Sermon. Remember? They were playing the “Pass It On” or “What Did You Hear?” game, and when they couldn’t get it right, they did as they were instructed and simply retreated to a uniquely Christian posture. They whispered in each other’s ear: “Jesus Loves You.” Kind of hard to think of someone as an “enemy” when you’re telling them “Jesus Loves You!” isn’t it?

“Loving your enemies,” as Jesus instructed us, is not trying to “muster up” a warm, fuzzy feeling about them. You can’t “manufacture” a feeling. Ever tried to “fall in love?” It is reminding yourself that your enemy is God’s child too and relating to them accordingly.

And that’s not easy to do! In fact, we need God’s help to do it. That’s why Jesus called “loving your enemies” a grace. He says it clearly three times in our text.

Don’t be fooled by the translations; they obscure what Jesus really said. They translate vv. 32-34, “If you love those who love you, or do good to those who do good to you, or lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you?” But that’s not what the Greek says. The word translated "credit" in Greek is charis - "grace." The Greek says: “If you love those who love you, where’s the grace in that?” And then, in what may be the most radical statement in the entire New Testament, Jesus cinches the matter: “Because you are children of your Father in heaven Who,” says Jesus, “is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.”

What He means by that is that God’s grace is His DNA; it’s just what He is, and if you’re His child, God’s “DNA,” His grace, will be in you too! You see, God doesn’t love you because He finds in you something “lovable” that lets Him love you.

It’s not a matter of the “cute baby syndrome.” You know, researchers have isolated the “cute baby” characteristics, and they seem to be universal and cross-species: large, over-sized eyes, close-set, dominating the rotund little face. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a human baby or a puppy, they all share the same characteristics that adults call “cute.” Why? So that the parents won’t eat their offspring, the researchers say!

But God’s love is not like that. It has nothing to do with you at all. God doesn’t love you because you’re cute or good or valuable; you’re valuable because He loves you! He loves you because of Who He is, not because of who you are. Merit has nothing to do with the grace of God, because the grace of God is God’s grace.

Grace - it’s God’s “DNA” and, therefore, the definitive evidence that you are His child. I guess you could say, “Like Father, like son.” Or to say it another way, if you don’t love your enemies, you’ll never win a “paternity suit” in the Kingdom of God.

And that’s not a matter of trying harder or doing better; it’s a grace. It is God’s gift to you, His “DNA” in you, and it’s the definitive evidence that you are a “child of God.”

The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, put it this way: “The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian answer to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and doable. It is a prior commandment to believe. The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the grace to believe that everyone is loved, and until this discovery is made, until this liberation has been brought about by the divine grace, men and women are imprisoned in hate.”

Picture a face? Your worst enemy. Got it? Now change the face to Jesus’. Can you? If you can, do you still feel hate?

And it’s the best evidence I know that salvation is journey and not just event. Anybody want to claim that they have this “loving your enemies” thing down? I didn’t think so.

I know…I know. “Like Father, like son.” He became what we are so that we might become what He is, and Jesus loved His enemies. There’s DNA and then there’s “DNA;” there’s grace and then there’s Grace.

Will Willimon tells a story about walking across the Duke campus one day with the late Stuart Henry, professor emeritus. It was Friday afternoon, the first day of “Oktoberfest,” the annual Bacchanalia on West Campus, which is justified as a means of enabling everyone to blow off the steam that has allegedly built up because of overexertion in the library which, many professors would argue, their students haven't yet learned the location of!

Willimon says, “We stood there, Professor Henry and I, in front of Duke Chapel, on the steps, and surveyed the breakdown of Western civilization, the drunken brawl taking place before us, the carousing and carnality on the lawn, and Stuart said to me, ‘Will, do you know what is for me the ultimate proof of our Lord’s divinity?’”

Startled by the seeming disconnect between Henry’s question and the scene being played out before them, Willimon played along, “Okay, I give up, Stuart. What is the ultimate proof of our Lord’s divinity?”

“It’s that verse,” said Henry, “you know, the one that says, ‘And looking out at the multitudes, He loved them.”

Can you imagine that?

*Alright...okay...you asked for more sermons on my blog, so here it is. This is the sermon I preached last Sunday for the good folk where I serve as Interim Pastor, who call me "Pastor-for-a-While," as opposed to "Pastor Forever" which, of course, no one is. But that's another blog....

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Preaching Workshop

Some of you (you know who you are!) have asked where you can learn more about the way I do preaching. I will be conducting a Preaching Workshop at Mars Hill College on Saturday, February 28, 2009. The Workshop is titled: Preaching: Three Simple Principles; Four Easy Moves. Times, costs, and registration information are available by contacting:

Dr. Gordon Benton
Director of Church and Community Relations
Mars Hill College
(828) 689-1276
gbenton@mhc.edu

Space is limited, so registration is recommended.