At the rail

Here is an essay I wrote for Lutheran Forum back in the winter of 2007. LF has put the essay in their online archive so I feel good reposting it here. You can download a nicer pdf of the file from LF here.

The article in entitled "At the Rail" and concerns the experience of being at the communion rail.


Lutheran church architecture has had a history of communion
rails at the altar. These rails mark a boundary
in the church space, separating the altar from the remainder
of the sanctuary. It is the spot where the Lord’s Supper
is received and where prayers are offered. Also offered are
“offerings,” most often money but sometimes also bread
and wine physically brought forward by the laity.

The spot can appear forbidding and hard, with stiff,
unyielding wooden bars that seem to gate off Christ’s presence
from the people. The people are expected to kneel
there, stop at the boundary and lower themselves, while the
pastor remains standing, towering over them, hands full.
This looks like what some in academia might call a power
ritual, a relationship of authority being acted out. At the
rail, the pastor and people are separated by a barrier, one
submissive and lowered, the other upright and in control.

Beyond this human relationship between pastor and
people at the rail, there is an implied connection between
people and God Himself. The very need for a rail, a boundary,
suggests danger. Fences keep back what is harmful from
those on the other side. The rail suggests that the people
approaching God must be careful. The Bible has plenty
of stories to back up this idea. People fall dead at wrongful
touch of the wooden ark of the covenant. The people
of Israel trembled at the foot of
dreadful Mount Sinai. Ananias
and Sapphira were struck down in
the book of Acts. There is terror at
the approach of sinful people to a
holy God. The rail suggests all this. The people bow, they
kneel, they close their eyes. They hold out hands in surrender.

The rail makes the greatest of us small. All are brokendown
sinners at the rail. The man intent on covering up
his sin must in any event bend his knee. His body confesses
what his pride refuses to allow him to say. The rich and the
poor, the single and the married, the charter member and
the visitor, the Alzheimer’s patient and the doctor: all crush
the same red carpet with their bony knees, all hold out the
same empty hands, all await the same blessing. The rail
stands in front of us all, impeding our progress, slowing us
down, making us stop and look up to where God rules and
reigns and looks down.

But time at the rail teaches other lessons too, surprising
ones. What the rail suggests, what the untrained eye sees
at first glance, turns out to be only one small part of the
story. The moments spent at the rail end up being not only
moments of humility but also of camaraderie, fellowship,
even gentleness. This wooden hurdle does not cause people
of faith to stumble but invites them to receive. It is a wall
that doesn’t keep out or exclude those who approach but
brings them closer to what they desire and need.

The unexpected kindnesses begin in the union of pastor
and people. The moments spent at that imposing wooden
shelf form an unexpected closeness and a trust between
pastor and people. One might even call them a time of
tenderness or softness. The words “at the rail” do not suggest
this sort of interaction between pastor and people, and
the relationship between pastor and flock is hard to discern
at the altar. Other places may seem more important: small
groups, hospital rooms, home visits, counseling sessions, the
meetings of the church, or social action. Yet the moments a
pastor spends at the rail are among the most important in
the ministry to God’s people.

Some of the most profound pastoral care happens not
only in counseling sessions but at
the rail. There the pastor prays:
for the grieving, for the soldier
dad far away in Iraq, for those in
sickness and childbirth and travel
and surgery and celebration. It is at the rail that marriages
begin in God’s name. There the pastor blesses and sends off
the congregation. The fruit of hours of labor are offered
with joy and thanksgiving.

At the Lord’s Supper, there at that rail, the pastor and
people meet in a most intimate way. Each individual comes
forward and the pastor’s fingers place bread on the tongue
or in the hand. There is a closeness at that instant which
often goes unnoticed for its frequency. It is a physical act, a
palpable touching. Hands and lips and teeth and chewing.
Like little birds do the Christians open their mouths. Often
the pastor misses and touches lips, cheeks, noses with hands
moist from the mouths of the flock. A tangible bond is present,
even if it is sometimes accidental,
embarrassing. In what other setting
do grown men with calloused hands,
rough from factories and farms, kneel
down and permit themselves to be
hand-fed by another adult? Where
else can you see proud ceos and
proper, well-heeled ladies bend their
bodies and sip and slurp from a common
cup, sharing drink with all others
in the room?

Added to all this is the human condition
of those approaching the rail
for the sacrament. The pastor knows
their sins, their tears, their smiles, their
grief, the family heartbreaks and happiness,
the mental illness, the suffering.
Many struggle even to make it to the
rail, weighed down by age or frailty. Yet
they come, many stubbornly so, with
middle-aged caretaker children trying
to discourage them, trying to make
things easier, urging them to stay in
the pew (“They will bring communion
to you, sit down!”). But on they come
to the rail. The young family struggles
to keep kids from scurrying around
and under and on the rail. The widow
wipes away a tear. The stiff, unhappy
faces of couples estranged and struggling
with a marriage in trouble show
themselves there.

Among all these kneeling frail
people, the pastor stands with a presence
that can be imposing, vested with
physical signs of authority. But the
surprising kindness comes at that very
moment of weakness on the part of
the people. The pastor, towering over
them, is not there to berate or judge
or even educate them, but comes to
them, hands heavy with gifts, gifts of
divine favor and mercy. Bending down
to feed the people, giving them to
drink, serving them, the pastor turns
out to be a lowly waiter serving tables.
The “power ritual” flips upside down.
The lowly ones are served by the one
marked with clout. The one elevated
in royal robes is in truth the servant at
the bottom of the rung, serving those
who kneel.

Yet the reality of what happens at
the rail between pastor and people is
really only a window to a greater surprise.
To come to the rail is, in the end,
to obey an eschatological summons.
The altar rail demands from those
who approach a humility before God.
The rail reminds us of our mortality
as our bones creak and complain at
the indignity of lowering our bodies.
The rail forces us to feel what we hate:
that we are weak and small and helpless.
A body meets God at the rail, the
true God, a God of power vested with
the stars and sun and moon and holding
in His hands hurricanes and thunder
and fire. Our coming forward to
this rail anticipates the final meeting
with this God.

At this final altar rail, our prospects
don’t appear so good. God can push
His advantage, parade His power and
justice upon rebellious sinners. We, in
the depths of our being, expect Him to
extract His due: punishment, extinction.
There is a power relationship
between the almighty one and those
far below, under His authority. Debt,
obligation, terror are the responses
from those cowering on their knees
before this God. It is hard to wish in
truth and sincerity to come to the rail.
But at this rail of last resort, at the
rail separating creator from creature,
at this barrier between the end of this
world and the beginning of the new,
we find a surprise, something not
found in the world or in our experience
of fallen daily life. The powerful
one on the other side of the rail is
familiar to us and beckons to us. The
God of the universe and the God
Who holds all things in His hand turns
out to have face like ours. The one
Who rides the clouds and Whom we
fear to meet has a human face, a face
acquainted with grief and dread. God
the awful judge is a human figure with
hands split open by nails, with a side
draining water and blood. At the rail
we meet a God not anxious to extract
some advantage or divine tax from us,
or to drain assets from His inferiors to
fill His own coffers.

No, we find at the rail that the God
of heaven and earth kneels beside us.
That is the greatest surprise. The Lord
of the Scriptures, the living God, joins
us on our knees, joins us in the fear
and guilt and sin and death to face
His Father. God is on both sides of the
rail. He kneels with us and offers Himself
with our offerings, prays with us
in our prayers, despairs with us in our
despair, dies with us as our creaking
bones and guts ultimately fail. Jesus is
on our side of the rail as we face His
Father. He faces the rail with us as we
face the one who made us and meets
us at the final barrier.

God is on both sides of the rail. He
is the fearful other, the one beyond
all beyond, the one great judge and
Father outside all thought and imagination.
He is the one from Whom our
thoughts turn away in terror, for He
brings all things to light. He is the one
from Whom nothing is hidden. He
is the fire on Sinai, the holy ark, the
avenger, the just and holy God.
And He is the one kneeling, bleeding,
dying with us. When we come to
the rail, we face a holy and terrible
God, and next to us, as we face that
God, is… God, our brother, Jesus.
The rail turns out to be the meeting
place of God and His people but not
just this. It is also the meeting place
of God the Son and God the Father,
and we are caught up in their encounter.
It is the place where God Himself
resolves our situation into His,
the place where judgment bleeds into
union, where in the body and blood
of Christ God-in-flesh is fed to Chris-
tians and Christians take God into
themselves and the body grows into
the head.

The rail is a place of surprises for
Christian people. The mighty bend
down and the lowly are exalted.
Authority serves and fear is conquered
by love. All this in a church, at a simple
wooden rail, where people kneel,
prayers are said, and food is eaten.

A nice song about not belonging

It is Scott Avett covering a Roger Miller tune.

The "moralism" of Rolling Stone Magazine

This is a great essay on the incongruity and irony of Rolling Stone magazine's high handed and smug preaching on the financial crisis. Well worth a read.

Some bits:

But leaving aside the specific tales of Wall Street swindles, what concerns me here is that underneath all the vulgar bluster and riotous sneers of Taibbi’s treatment of these matters, the careful reader will discern something extraordinary: Taibbi and Rolling Stone have assumed the office of public moralist.

Now anyone familiar with Rolling Stone over the years will not fail to register how discordant such a claim sounds. Therein lies a remarkable irony. This magazine has been at the forefront of cultural antinomianism since its inception. It has marched in the vanguard of every proposed liberation from traditional mores since its founding in San Francisco in 1967.

...


The point is that in any other context besides banking, Rolling Stone would treat of moralists with unrelenting scorn and derision. The magazine has been extolling the irresistibly admirable qualities and transgressive coolness of rebels, thugs and charlatans for several generations now. Were Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, instead of a staid and respectable financier who has worn suits every day for 30 years, a slick mafioso captain, or a scruffy counterculture radical, or a chic academic theorist of anti-bourgeois revolution, Rolling Stone would adore him, and hold him up for the admiration of all right-thinking readers. Would Blankfein only intersperse his Congressional testimony on credit-default swaps with biting jabs at American imperialism, or the oppressive conformity of middle class life, or the imposture of Western literature —

Let the tears of your hearers be your glory

When teaching in church seek to call forth not plaudits but groans. Let the tears of your hearers be your glory. A presbyter's words ought to be seasoned by his reading of scripture. Be not a declaimer or a ranter, one who gabbles without rhyme or reason; but show yourself skilled in the deep things and versed in the mysteries of God. To mouth your words and by your quickness of utterance astonish the unlettered crowd is a mark of ignorance ... There is nothing so easy as by sheer volubility to deceive a common crowd or an uneducated congregation: such most admire what they fail to understand.

St. Jerome Letter 52.

My Essay on Small towns is up at Popmatters

A while back I published an essay at First Things on life in a small town. PopMatters has picked up the essay and, after a bit of editing, is running it on the front page of their site today.

Take a look here: Small Towns: Life in a Low Tech Web

Here are a few bits:

American small towns are mysterious places to people who have never lived in one. Some think guns and religion dominate cultural life. Others romanticize them as places full of lost virtue and uprightness. For someone who actually lives in a small town, this all sounds strange.

I live in Catawba, North Carolina, population about 700. I have lived here for over 12 years as a Lutheran minister at Redeemer Lutheran Church on Main Street and this place bears little resemblance to familiar stereotypes.
Small town life has its advantages and disadvantages but they are not the obvious ones. When the media focuses on small towns, one gets the feeling that they were visiting a distant nation not their own. They are sometimes delighted to be somewhere they haven’t been before (much like a tourist in the third world) but are unsure how to react to something so different. The extremes of media coverage tend to be way off the mark. Small towns are not Edens of “real America” nor bitter enclaves of the small minded.


...


Land and family inevitably bring one in contact with the past. The past lives here in ways that are inconceivable elsewhere. To go to the grocery store is to potentially encounter your entire past life and even ancestry: your grandmother, your first grade teacher, your girlfriend from high school, your cousin, your boss from years ago. When one lives in the place where one was raised and when that place is small and self contained, the past is its own character in the drama of life.


Read it all here.

The problem with success at being relevant is—well, God.

Here is another good essay from the current issue of the Chrisian Century ( yes that Christian Century!) on the dubious success of churches at being relevant and how the historic traditions, doctrines and liturgy free one from individualism and selfishness. By M. Craig Barnes.

Bits:

Whenever someone starts talking about relevance, the focal point is always on the self. The individual is the one, and the only one, who gets to decide if something is relevant.

The assumption behind the relevance agenda is that we are on our own to construct life as best we can. Relationships, work, place, philosophies and religion are all à la carte resources that can, or cannot, be used in building a life that we prefer. Our choices depend on their relevance to our cherished ideal of the self.

Relevance is such an unquestioned idol of contemporary society that many congregations have grown by marketing their ability to provide relevant programs, music and preaching. It's as if they are saying, "Our church can provide better products than the rest of society as you try to collect the pieces of a life you will like."

The problem with this success at being relevant is—well, God. The church marketers are claiming that they can make God relevant to you, but when they do this, God ceases to be God and becomes instead just one more optional resource. By contrast, the historic churches and the seminaries that serve them are filled with old theological traditions. Most of them don't feel particularly relevant on any given day. That's by design. Their devotion is not to make the gospel relevant to the individual, but to make the individual relevant to the gospel. This is the function of our creeds.

...

We believe that the best chapter of our life's story did not happen when we graduated from school, got a job or had children. The most formative chapter was not the time we failed at something important, lost a spouse or contracted a disease. The most powerful chapter, the one that changes everything, is when the word became flesh and dwelled among us.

We believe that this story gives our lives an eternity of meaning and purpose precisely because the story is not about us. It includes us, which is more of a grace than we can fully appreciate, but it's not about us. Isn't that a blessing?

We are dominated by an exaggerated sense of the self. We worry about "my job," "my kids," "my health," and when we're stuck in traffic we ask, "Why me?" By the time we make it to church on Sunday we're sick and tired of the self and ready to hear a better story, a glorious story revolving around Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

...

The past isn't past

This is a good article on the value of history, tradition and remembering in a congregation and a denomination. By Margaret Bendroth in the Christian Century.

Some bits:

Modern society, however, rewards forgetters. Better to drop it and move on, the self-help books advise; let bygones be bygones, make a fresh start. And so we teach children to improvise and innovate—we reward the ones who create something brand new, who think "outside the box" and are free from old regrets and superstitions ...

... In the end, we avoid history, I suspect, because it forces us to come to grips with our finitude. The past is the realm of the dear and not-so-dear departed. I sometimes contemplate with awe the fact that every item in our archives is a living connection with someone now on the other side of mystery. The library is full of books by people whose arduous life work survives only as a tiny blip of an obituary notice in some obscure publication. In my work, I pause now and then to say their names aloud, not to summon their spirits but to give the universe a chance to hear an old and beloved combination of words one more time.

Engaging the past is something more than a sudden encounter with Great Aunt Harriet in the upstairs bedroom. Critical reflection on all the stuff of history, the good as well as the bad, is a source and a sign of institutional vitality. Congregations that understand their origins and how their spiritual DNA has quietly shaped their course over the years are richer and more textured communities than they would be otherwise. Denomi nations with long and intricate association with their past are more sure-footed, more three-dimensional than those content just to skim off a famous name or two now and then.

God may be "still speaking," as they say in my denomination, the United Church of Christ, but that same God is also the Ancient of Days, loved and sought by generations of people who walked this earth many years before any of us came along. Those now voiceless men and women once owned and inhabited the earth we now enjoy; they contemplated the same horizon of hills and sunsets that we do; they toiled along streets that we walk on. They demand our respect, our thanks and our willingness to remember them with honesty and grace, never losing sight of what they might still be saying.

Trees have no dogmas

In the February issue, Richard Johnson, editor of the Forum Letter, published by Lutheran Forum offers this selection from G. K. Chesterton in his book, Heretics. (You can read the whole book online here.)


The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms ...

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

Christ dwells only among sinners

The Southern Lutheran Kantor shares this magnificent selection from Herman Sasse:

“Christ cannot enter into living communion with a sinner.” This the German edition of St. Thomas Aquinas interprets the statement of Thomas Aquinas that the man in the condition of mortal sin cannot be united with Christ and thus must not receive the Sacrament of the Altar.

Luther asserted the very opposite: “Christ dwells only among sinners.” For the sinner and for the sinner alone is his Table set. There we received his true body and his true blood “for the forgiveness of sins” [Matt 26:28], and this holds true even if forgiveness has already been received in absolution. That here Scripture is completely on the side of Luther needs no further demonstration. Every page of the NT is indeed testimony of the Christ whose proper office it is “to save sinners” [1 Tim 1:15], “to seek and to save the lost” [Luke 19:10]. And the entire saving work of Jesus — from the days when he was in Galilee and, to the amazement and alarm of the Pharisees, ate with tax collectors and sinners, to the moment when he, in contradiction with the principles of every rational morality, promised paradise to the thief on the cross —

yes, his entire life on earth, from the cradle to the cross, is one, unique, grand demonstration of a wonder beyond all reason: the miracle of divine forgiveness, of the justification of the sinner. ”Christ dwells only among sinners.”

A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom

Here is a review of a new book that says Little Richard was the true father of rock and roll. I am inclined to agree.

Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll by David Kirby, reviewed by Chrsitel Loar.

A bit:

Though he also pays respects to Little Richard’s other seminal work on Specialty Records in the mid-50s, Kirby’s true love is for the two-minutes-and-55-seconds of raw, aural energy that is ″Tutti Frutti″. His primary assertion in Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll is that ″A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom″ was the shout heard ‘round the world, and that it triggered an entirely new revolution in America.

Little Richard-Tutti Frutti
by DJ_DeeDee

The big fight over medieval handwriting

Here is a fascinating little article reporting on the big stink over the folks at Kings College in Cambridge who want to axe the endowed chair in the paleography. Oh, there is ruckus!

My favorite part of the piece is the tortured politco-academic langague used to justify the decision to end the program:

As Cambridge Classics don Mary Beard reported in her blog, the pointy-heads at that institution have decided to “create financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment.” To decipher their code, what this means is that the country’s only endowed paleography chair isn’t bringing in money and, being dedicated to the scribblings of dead white men, isn’t serving any political purpose, so it’s being downsized.

The church is filled with persons more eager to leave it than to come there

Here is a bit of Augustine. This passage delights me. It displays the fallible nature of both pastor and people. In the early centuries of the church, which so many romanticize and dream of as a golden age, the pastor is peeved and irritated and the people are fickle and shallow. Thank goodness! That means there is hope for me and my little flock.


Many are the sacred mysteries stored within the holy Scriptures; whether those we have yet to search for, or those the Lord has deigned to make known to our lowliness, but which time does not allow us to unfold to Your Holiness.

For I have come to notice that in these days particularly, the Church is filled with persons who are more eager to leave it than to come there; who find it a burden should we occasionally speak to you at a little length, and who at the same time should they be held till evening at the dinner table, to which they are hurrying, neither leave nor suffer inconvenience, nor will they without any shame abandon it at any time.

Yet, because we cannot cheat those who come here hungry, we shall not pass over in silence, although briefly, the mystery of this day: that Our Lord Jesus Christ, in that Body in which He arose from the dead, has ascended into heaven.

The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, Volume 2, page 416.

Book reviews for Pop Matters

I am going to be doing occasional book reviews for the website PopMatters. PopMatters is a website that covers all aspects of pop culture: movies, music, books, internet, dvd's etc. It is like a giant blog with many contributors. I am glad to be one of them. I will be reviewing books on history, popular culture, music and whatever strikes my fancy.

Books and writing are my hobby. Being a pastor is what I do. People sometimes ask me what my hobbies are. Some people fix up cars, do model trains, play music or garden or activities like that. I like to read and write with my extra time. So this Pop Matters thing fits right in.

My first book review appeared a few days ago: High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly
by Donald Spoto.

Thoughts to chew on

The truth is more important than the facts.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
- Charles de Gaulle

Never judge a book by its movie.
- J. W. Eagan

Worst Bob Dylan Song Pick Up Line Ever

Can you cook and sew?
Make flowers grow?
Do you understand my pain?

"Is Your Love in Vain", Street Legal, 1978.

How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault

That is one writer's strategy for getting a story on the most emailed article list.

Read here what science has to say about which articles and stories we email and pass along the most and why.

They pinpointed "awe" as the most important component.

Thanks to daughter number two for ... yes ... emailing this article to me.

In Praise of Euphemism

Bill Murchison with a delightful little essay on the value of "the substitution of inoffensive for offensive words".

Here is a bit:

Writers nowadays use blunt, succinct language in speaking of the human rear. OK, the words they use are in the dictionary, but so is the “F” word, which still for most purposes of human discourse remains sheathed. There seems to me no reason for the writer not to get playful when faced with the necessity (when it is a necessity) of dealing with the topic. I myself suggested once that a particular congressman’s constituents might want to kick him in the place generally reserved for sitting down. Takes longer to say it that way? So what? It’s better writing.

Euphemism invites playfulness because the euphemist is dancing. He wants to say what he wants to say, only without blunt instruments. So he dances around “hell,” which becomes “the place of eternal torment” or just “the hot place.” The phrase stands out instead of fading into the rhetorical woodwork.


Read it all here.

No Exit: Interesting take on American warmaking ...

... in the American Conservative.

A few bits:

That the post-Cold War United States military, reputedly the strongest and most capable armed force in modern history, has not only conceded its inability to achieve decision but has in effect abandoned victory as its raison d’être qualifies as a remarkable development.

...

The results have been disappointing. Where U.S. forces have satisfied Max Boot’s criteria for winning, the enemy has tended to be, shall we say, less than ten feet tall. Three times in the last 60 years, U.S. forces have achieved an approximation of unambiguous victory—operational success translating more or less directly into political success. The first such episode, long since forgotten, occurred in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson intervened in the Dominican Republic. The second occurred in 1983, when American troops, making short work of a battalion of Cuban construction workers, liberated Granada. The third occurred in 1989 when G.I.’s stormed the former American protectorate of Panama, toppling the government of long-time CIA asset Manuel Noriega.

Apart from those three marks in the win column, U.S. military performance has been at best mixed. The issue here is not one of sacrifice and valor—there’s been plenty of that—but of outcomes.

A seesawing contest for the Korean peninsula ended in a painfully expensive draw. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs managed only to pave the way for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam produced stupendous catastrophe. Jimmy Carter’s expedition to free American hostages held in Iran not only failed but also torpedoed his hopes of winning a second term. Ronald Reagan’s 1983 intervention in Beirut wasted the lives of 241 soldiers, sailors, and Marines for reasons that still defy explanation. Reagan also went after Muammar Qaddafi, sending bombers to pound Tripoli; the Libyan dictator responded by blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland—and survived to tell the tale. In 1991, George H.W. Bush portrayed Operation Desert Storm as a great victory sure to provide the basis for a New World Order; in fact the first Gulf War succeeded chiefly in drawing the United States more deeply into the vortex of the Middle East—it settled nothing. With his pronounced propensity for flinging about cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs, Bill Clinton gave us Mogadishu, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo —frenetic activity with little to show in return. As for Bush and his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the less said the better.

...

The impetus for weaning Americans away from their infatuation with war, if it comes at all, will come from within the officer corps ...


What conclusions will they draw from their extensive and at times painful experience with war? Will they affirm this country’s drift toward perpetual conflict, as those eagerly promoting counterinsurgency as the new American way of war apparently intend? Or will the officer corps reject that prospect and return to the tradition once represented by men like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Matthew B. Ridgway?

Read it all here.

If Filmakers Directed the Super Bowl

This is a humorous take on Super Bowls "directed" various filmmakers. I especially like the one by Werner Herzog on the Bears 1985/1986 Superbowl. That season was the greatest ever by an NFL team in my opinion. They were so dominant. Of course, I was living in Chicago at the time, the year after I graduated from college, working, bumming around. It was a great season.

It is better in perplexity to be silent and believe

Athanasius on the foolishness of inquiring about the origin of the Son in the Trinity. His advice here is applicable to many matters hidden in the divine will.


Nor must we ask why the Word of God is not such as our word, considering God is not such as we, as has been before said; nor again is it right to seek how the word is from God, or how He is God's radiance, or how God begets, and what is the manner of His begetting.

For a man must be beside himself to venture on such points; since a thing ineffable and proper to God's nature, and known to Him alone and to the Son, this he demands to be explained in words. One might as well ask where God is, and how God is, and of what nature the Father is. But as to ask such questions is irreligious, and argues an ignorance of God, so it is not holy to venture such questions concerning the generation of the Son of God, nor to measure God and His Wisdom by our own nature and infirmity.

Nor is a person at liberty on that account to swerve in his thoughts from the truth, nor, if any one is perplexed in such inquiries, ought he to disbelieve what is written. For it is better in perplexity to be silent and believe, than to disbelieve on account of the perplexity: for he who is perplexed may in some way obtain mercy , because, though he has questioned, he has yet kept quiet; but when a man is led by his perplexity into forming for himself doctrines which beseem not, and utters what is unworthy of God, such daring recurs a sentence without mercy.

Athanasius, Against the Arians, 2.36.

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor ...

... played by my daughter.

Justification and sanctification are not two separate realities ...

... but the same reality viewed from the different perspectives of God and man.


Dr. David Scaer on sanctification in Lutheran perspective:


Luther's concept of simul justus et peccator is fundamental for a Lutheran understanding no only of justification but also of sanctification.

Before God the person is totally justified and the same person is in himself and sees himself as a sinner. What is important in this understanding is the Latin word simul, at the same time, and not in a sequential sense as if one followed the other in point of time. Historically this distinction was lost in Lutheranism, as in the case of Pietism, where man is first justified and rescued from sin and then the work of sanctification begins. The end result is perfectionism or at least a mild form of it.

The matter is viewed in this way: After a person is justified by faith, the new life of obedience sets in and progresses. Justification is seen as a past event in the
Christian life and sanctification as a temporal result, separate and distinct
from justification as the cause. Wherever justification and sanctification are
separated from each other with this kind of temporal understanding,
Lutheran theology is brought to ruin. Such a distinction common in Pietism was picked up by Wesley theology justification describes the believer's relationship with God.

Sanctification describes the same reality as does justification but describes the
justified Christian's relationship to the world and society. Justification and
sanctification are not two separate realities, but the same reality viewed from
the different perspectives of God and man. From the perspective of God the
reality of the Christian is totally passive and non-contributory as it receives
Christ only. From the perspective of the world, the same reality never ceases
in its activity and tirelessly performs all good works. In this scheme the
justification of the sinner never becomes a past event.

In the phrase simul justus et peccator the simul carries the weight. This scheme resolves the often alleged contradiction between Paul on one side and Jesus, James, and the writer of the Book of Revelation on the other. Therefore, before God it is no works and pure grace, but before the world it is only works. As James says, "And I will show you my faith by my works." This scheme can be reversed only with the most disastrous results. Works have no standing before God and faith has no standing before the world. Activism before God is an affront to Him and makes Christology meaningless. Passivism in the world prevents God from acting Christologically in the world and thus thwarts His purposes.

Concordia Theological Quarterly
49 (April-July 1985) no. 2-3:181-195.
©1985 Concordia Theological Quarterly

Songs about Cigarettes

Cigarettes are bad but sometimes the songs about them are good. A paradox, I know, but listen ...

"Smokin in the Boy's Room" by Brownsville Station ... a hilarious, wonderful song from 1973, not the silly Motley Crue version. "Teacher, don't you fill me up with your rules!"



This is a great rock and roll record by an Australian girl group named the Spazzys. "We'll have something to do to pass the time while we wait for the time to pass"



Merle Travis wrote this one; Tex Williams recorded it.

"Tell St Peter at the Golden Gate that you hate to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette"




Three Cigarettes In An Ashtray by Patsy Cline

Cigarettes And Coffee by Otis Redding

More Cigarettes by the Replacements

Any others?

My brother-in-law won a Grammy yesterday

Kurt Elling, a jazz vocalist, brother of my wife, and a nice guy, was nominated for the ninth time and won it this year for best jazz vocal recording. The album name was "Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman"

Congrats, Kurt!

Some links:

News story

News story

Kurt's site

Issues Etc. Blog of the Week

Jeff Schwarz tells me that incarnatus est is blog of the week over at Issues Etc.

Sweet.

Thanks guys, it is an honor.