John Koessler's Blog, page 17

Stupid is as Stupid Does

[image error]Forest Gump’s momma said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Well, we all does stupid sometimes. I probably feel stupid more often than I deserve. But I deserve it often enough. Everybody has moments of stupid that haunt them, sometimes for the rest of their lives. A college friend once told me how he would lie in bed at night and relive an unfortunate incident from high school. It only took a moment for all the shame and embarrassment to come rushing back. He would lie rigid in his bed and moan out loud. He told me that more than thirty years ago. I suspect he still thinks about it at night.

I could make a list. Indeed, I do make a list. It’s one of the main things I dwell on in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. It’s either death or stupid. I worry about both. As it turns out, I can’t do much about either. Reason tells me that I ought to ignore what I can’t do anything about. But it never seems to work out that way. The sense of helplessness only increases my anxiety.

In his book Spiritual Depression, Martyn Lloyd Jones writes about those who are overcome with regret over “that one sin.”  This is the case of “those who are miserable Christians or who are suffering from spiritual depression because of their past–either because of some particular sin in their past, or because of the particular form which sin happened to take in their case.” Sin is stupid but stupid isn’t necessarily sin. Still, the language Lloyd Jones uses helps me to at least diagnose my symptoms. Sometimes the distress I feel is over a particular act of stupidity or because of the particular form that stupidity happened to take.

The feeling I experience in these instances is not just shame and horror, ultimately it is regret. I want to turn back the clock and do things differently. I want to change my past and thereby change my future.  I won’t ask the question. I won’t attend the meeting. I will leave the country and go into exile. My whole life will be different after that. And I will live happily ever after.

Now here is what is really interesting about these things that I regret. Most everyone else has forgotten them. Some of the people involved are dead. They probably noticed when the thing occurred, whatever it was. But I doubt that they thought about it much afterward. If they did it is likely that they only shook their heads. While I relived the moment in my mind that night, rewriting the dialogue to give me the advantage and make myself the hero, they were resting in their beds. Or else they were lying awake dwelling on their own version of stupid. The point is they weren’t even thinking about me.

It’s probably not as bad as you think. Even if it is, it won’t last forever. You might think about it for a long time but you will probably be the only one. I suppose I should leave you with three steps for forgetting about all the stupid things you’ve done. If I knew what they were, I’d be practicing them myself. What I can tell you is that as you lie there in bed dwelling on the past, like an old dog worrying a favorite bone, Jesus waits up with you. He is quiet. He does not lecture. He does not try to talk you out of it. He is simply there with you, aware of your pain and your regret. The good news is that Jesus forgives sin. He forgives stupid too.

The Seven Deadly Virtues-Prosperity

[image error]A while back I noticed a menu option on my retirement account’s website labeled “net worth.” When I clicked on it, the site invited me to upload information about my assets and liabilities. The result was a brightly colored graph which represented the sum total of all my worldly goods. I have looked at it many times since then and it always has the same effect. Rather than making me feel secure about my future, it leaves me feeling anxious. No matter how much I have, it seems I would like to have just a little more. There is a word for this condition. It is what the Bible calls greed.

Greed, like lust and gluttony, is a sin of appetite. While lust is usually associated with sex and gluttony is linked with food, greed is typically looked upon as a similar inordinate desire for money. Most of us are pretty sure that we don’t suffer from greed because we don’t have an inordinate amount of money. The rich are greedy perhaps but not us. The flaw in this reasoning is that desiring is not necessarily synonymous with having. It is certainly possible that a rich person might be greedy but so might a poor person. It is not the having but the wanting that is the problem. The adjective that best expresses the impulse of greed is not “most” but “more.” Whatever I possess will not be enough if I succumb to the influence of greed. I must always have more.

According to Dorothy Sayers the character of this sin has changed with the times. “It was an unromantic, unspectacular sin” she observes. “Unkind people sometimes called it by rude names, such as parsimony and niggardliness. It was a narrow, creeping, pinched kind of sin; and it was not a good mixer.” But times have changed and so has our view of greed. “It was left for the present age to endow covetousness with glamor on a big scale and to give it a title that it could carry like a flag” Sayers explains. “It occurred to somebody to call it enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, covetousness has gone forward and never looked back. It has become a swaggering, swash-buckling, piratical sin, going about with its hat cocked over its eye, and with pistols tucked into the tops of its jack-boots.”

In our own day, greed still possesses some of the cultural dignity that Sayers describes. But the way we tend to legitimize this sin is by viewing it through a more personal lens. None of us is really greedy. We are merely seeking prosperity. Since greed is bad but prosperity is good, there is nothing wrong with our desire for more. The Bible does indeed speak well of prosperity. In the Old Testament, the prosperity of the patriarchs was attributed to God’s blessing (Gen. 32:9, 12; 39:2). Similarly, prosperity is seen as a blessing of God in the New Testament (3 John 1:2). Our giving springs from God’s generosity to us (1 Cor. 16:2).

But we all know that what is good can also be turned against us. Indeed, one way to understand the nature of sin is to see it as a distortion of that which is good. In the case of greed, it is not prosperity itself that is warped by my desire for it. When greed overcomes gratefulness the focus of my devotion shifts from the giver to what is given. This is why Colossians 3:5 calls greed idolatry. This same verse says that the only way to deal with it is by putting to death “whatever belongs to your earthly nature.” This should be a clue to us that we are all prone to greed. It doesn’t really matter what your net worth is.

 

The Seven Deadly Virtues-Satisfaction

[image error]I have been bothered by my weight most of my life. I was heavy as a child, a condition which my mother euphemistically described as “big boned.” I was so obsessed with the fear of being fat that even when I was thin, I did not think of myself as thin. I am no longer thin and it bothers me. I am not alone. According to some estimates, 45 million Americans go on a diet each year.

In our weight-obsessed culture, you would think that we might be highly sensitized to the sin the Bible calls gluttony. The truth is, most of us wouldn’t recognize a glutton if he swallowed us whole. We certainly wouldn’t be able to tell whether we are gluttons and the mirror will not help us. That’s because gluttony isn’t really about one’s weight at all.

Traditionally gluttony is linked with food and drink. The Bible associates gluttony with drunkenness (Deut. 21:20; Prov. 23:21). Gluttony is essentially a sin of inordinate appetite. But what is it that makes this hunger inordinate? Hunger is a part of our nature. If we don’t eat, we die. Jesus Himself came “eating and drinking” (Matt. 11:19). Food, drink, indeed, all our bodily appetites are part of God’s design. But what is that design?

We are tempted to think that their function is to point us in the direction of fulfillment and satisfaction. In truth, it is the other way around. Our appetites by their very nature can never be entirely satisfied. Functionally, appetite is a means to an end. When it becomes an end in itself, it turns into a kind of slavery (1 Cor. 6:12-13). Spiritually, our appetites are signposts which point to a hunger that cannot be filled by any human means. They are a sign of our emptiness and our need for God. When we rely on earthly means to slake that appetite, we become those whose “god is their stomach” (Phil. 3:19).

Although gluttony seems to us to be an outmoded relic of medieval culture, those who live in a consumer society are especially vulnerable to it. That is because consumerism plays upon our emptiness by promising to satisfy our appetite. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the culture of marketing. “The consumer culture encourages us not only to buy more but to seek our identity and fulfillment through what we buy, to express our individuality through our ‘choice’ of products” author and activist Jean Kilbourne observes. “Advertising corrupts relationships and then offers products, both as solace and as substitutes for the intimate human connection we all long for and need.” It isn’t the buying and selling that is the problem here so much as it is the false promise of satisfaction.

Consumerism has profoundly shaped the way the church functions today. Not only because we are competing with one another to attract more attendees but because consumerism plays upon our spiritual hunger, causing us to promise more than we can deliver and offering cheap substitutes for those things that the Bible calls “worship” and “fellowship.” Instead of providing a context for encountering the reality of God’s presence, the main is to create a worship “experience.” In the place of koinonia,” we offer atmosphere. In this model, God and the church’s members are pushed to the margins.

The Bible’s warnings about gluttony are not a form of Gnosticism or asceticism. Eating is associated with fellowship with God in both Testaments. This theme was reflected in the many meals that Jesus shared with His disciples and was ultimately captured in the Lord’s Supper. It will find its culmination at the end of the age in the marriage feast of the Lamb. Only then will we find what we hunger for most. It is only then that our true desire will be satisfied.

 

The Seven Deadly Virtues-Love

[image error]The first of the seven deadly sins is lust. For most of us, this word is associated with sexual sin. But the Bible employs the term more broadly. In the New Testament, the Greek term that is translated lust is often one that simply means desire. In addition to illicit sexual desire, it can refer to both ordinate and inordinate desire. Lust is as liable to take the form of an illicit desire for someone else’s things or their success as it is an inappropriate desire for sex. John hints at the full scope of this cardinal sin in 1 John 2:16: “ For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.” As far as John is concerned, when it comes to lust everything in the world is a potential target.

The opposite of lust is love. But the terms themselves may not be of much help in distinguishing between the two. We often use “love” to refer to a multitude of desires and affections, some high and some low. A couple on a date might declare undying love for one another during dinner and then in the next breath say that they “love” the food that is on their plates. Neither thinks of the second of these as genuine love, at least not in the biblical sense.  Afterwards, they might decide to “make love,” using the same term in a third sense that is really more in line with what the Bible actually means by lust. Not every desire we experience is necessarily lust nor does every affection that we call love qualify as love in the biblical sense.

You would think that sin and love would be incompatible. After all, if the heart of righteousness is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself, then the essence of sin must be the opposite (Matt. 22:37, 39). To sin is to love yourself at the expense of your neighbor. More than that, it is to love yourself at the expense of God. Yet this assertion seems to imply something in addition to this. Namely, that sin has its own version of love.

Sin shaped love expresses itself primarily in the form of narcissism. It is self-absorbed love. This affection is actually a distortion of love which, once it has achieved its full effect, proves to be an exercise in self-loathing. It is hate masquerading as love, compelling us to engage in self-destructive behavior. Sin promises freedom and delivers slavery. It speaks the language of friendship while treating us like enemies. It is a cruel master who promises good wages only to reward our loyalty with hard service, disappointment, and death. Yet for some reason, we return repeatedly to this false lover and expect a different result.

In the Old Testament, David was criticized for preferring his unfaithful and rebellious son to those faithful men who had risked their lives for him. “You love those who hate you and hate those who love you” David’s commander Joab complained (2 Sam. 19:6). Similarly, when Jehu the Seer went out to meet Jehoshaphat after the king’s ill-advised alliance with Ahab, the prophet warned, “Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the LORD? Because of this, the wrath of the LORD is upon you.” A similar charge might be laid at our own feet in this present age. We claim love as our cardinal virtue. But a closer inspection all too quickly reveals that what we are really celebrating is an infatuation with ourselves.

The alternative to lust is love. It is a love that comes to us, like the righteousness of Christ, from the outside. Adopting the same language Martin Luther coined to speak of that righteousness, we might call it “alien love.” Because it is not our own it is the only love powerful enough to wean us away from ourselves.

The Seven Deadly Virtues

[image error]In the latter part of the Fourth Century, a monk named Evagrius Ponticus compiled a list of eight sins that people commonly commit. This wasn’t an exhaustive catalog of sinful behavior. The eight actions he singled out were meant to represent the main categories under which all other sins might fall. His list included gluttony, fornication, greed, sadness, anger, weariness, vainglory and pride. Later church leaders reduced them to seven reasoning that vainglory and pride were essentially the same thing.

No doubt some of the items in this list of will seem odd to us. Hardly anybody I know would call sadness a sin, let alone a capital sin. If it is debilitating, we usually call it a disease. Likewise, gluttony seems to moderns to be a throwback to an age when food was scarce. We might think that it’s unhealthy or perhaps rude. But we generally don’t consider it to be a sin.

I’ve only heard one sermon on gluttony in my life and that was from a guest speaker during a chapel service while I was a student in seminary. The athletically fit speaker told us that Christians who were overweight preached the gospel with their mouths but contradicted it with their lives. In the class that followed chapel, we were eager to know what our professor, a man of some girth, thought of the message. “Give me a moment,” he said. “I am enjoying a Snickers bar.” He chewed for a while and then in a wry tone declared: “All I have to say is that Proverbs 11:25 says, ‘The liberal soul shall be made fat.’”

Weariness also seems out of place to most of us. After all, isn’t weariness just a consequence of hard work? The industrious person is more likely to consider it a virtue rather than a sin. We don’t even know what vainglory is, though we tend to recognize it in others. In those instances, we call it boasting. While we may be reluctant to categorize boasting as a sin, we do agree that it is bad form. Unless, of course, it appears on a résumé.

Fornication is still generally considered to be a sin. But hardly anybody commits it anymore. Instead, people “make love.” Love is widely regarded to be a good thing and for many people making love is simply part of the dating ritual. Indeed, our view on these matters has become so degraded that what the ancients once regarded as sins modern people have relabeled and now consider to be virtues. These days the seven capital sins are the seven deadly virtues.

Almost 20 years ago Os Guinness observed, “Every generation has its own conscious or unconscious ranking of the sins–Victorians, for example, exaggerated sloth and lust while underestimating envy and avarice. But a defining feature of our generation is it minimizing of any notion of sin.” The irony of this is that we are also living in an age of collective moral outrage. One of the main features of this outrage, apart from its universality, is its largely impersonal nature. It is directed at large, systemic problems more often than at individual actions. When it is directed at individual behavior, it is usually aimed at media figures like presidents and movie moguls. When it comes to our own virtues or their lack, we have learned to be hypersensitive to the faults of others and generally blind to our own. We are quick to know when we have been wronged but would hard-pressed to define right and wrong in concrete terms. The tablets of stone upon which they were once inscribed by the finger of God are broken and we are cast adrift.

What’s in a Name?

[image error]The other day I saw a billboard for an area university that promised that its graduates would be “conquerors.” This was not the word I expected. It seems to me that another description might be more accurate. Competent comes to mind. Or perhaps capable. Or maybe even hirable, as long as it was combined with the additional qualifying phrase: “in certain economic environments.”

It seems to me that the trouble with a school advertising that its graduates will be conquerors is that it is making a promise that it cannot possibly deliver upon. I suppose it might be appropriate if the school specialized in military strategy and its students were preparing to be despots or generals. But even then I think I would be suspicious.

This billboard is an example of the kind of hyperbole we often hear in our culture. It isn’t limited to marketing. Sometimes it creeps into the names some families give their children. In the old days bread and butter names like Jack or Suzie were perfectly acceptable choices for our children. Now the names we hear sound more like titles. Instead of Phil it’s Royal. Instead of Judy it’s Precious. These aren’t names. They are adjectives.

Of course, I understand what is going on here. Such names are meant to send a message to the child. They are intended to build a child’s self-image. Parents want their children to feel that they stand out from the crowd. Why merely be Mark when you can be Magnificent instead? Still, sometimes I think we do children a disservice by promising so much. Parents who were forced to be more honest in their naming might call their child Average or possibly Irritating.

Some will say that the Bible sanctions this practice. After all, didn’t Jesus change Simon’s name to Peter which means rock? This is true. But I will point out that the term doesn’t seem to mean a boulder but something smaller. It is more like a stone. Do you know how annoying it is when you get a stone in your shoe? Jesus called James and John the Sons of Thunder. These were the two brothers who offered to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village that refused to welcome Jesus (Luke 9:52-56). One wonders if there wasn’t just a touch of affectionate ridicule in the name.

Then, of course, there was the prophet’s daughter-in-law who named her son Ichabod after the ark of the covenant was captured by the Philistines (1 Sam. 4:21). According to Old Testament scholar Robert Alter, the name meant something like “inglorious,” or “Where is the glory?” But this was more of an observation about current events than a value judgement about the child.

The trouble with marketing hyperbole, of course, is that it is empty. By saying too much it says nothing at all. I am afraid that the church is too much given to meaningless hyperbole in its rhetoric. When the church slips into marketing speech, it exaggerates its experiences and misrepresents the nature of the Christian life. It relies on sentimental tropes, pat answers, and superficial analyses of life’s problems. Such talk blunts the force of the Bible’s true hyperbole.

The Bible does not call us conquerors. It says that we are more than that “through him who loved us” (Rom. 8:37). In the same context it also mentions trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and the sword (vs. 35). This is no marketing hype but real life that has been intersected by the grace of God.

Mob Action

[image error]It wasn’t a parade, it was a procession. It was also a coronation of sorts. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem the multitude walked with Him, some going before and others following after. They cast their cloaks down upon the road before Him and cut branches from the trees to lay them down as well. They shouted for joy. “Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Their words were both an acclamation and a cry for deliverance. If we had been among the disciples, we too would have thought that Jesus had finally come into His own. God’s people had recognized their king.

Yet in less than a week a different cry would go up. The crowd that gathered to watch Jesus’ trial, now more mob than multitude would howl for Jesus’ blood. For a short time, Pilate allied Himself with Jesus and tried to set Him free. “Here is your king!” he declared to the crowd spread out on the pavement before his judge’s seat. This was more or less what the multitude had meant when they had cried Hosanna. Now they changed their tune, incited by the jealousy of the religious establishment. “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!” they shouted. Pilate, who was no friend, after all, acquiesced. He turned Jesus over to the soldiers to be crucified.

Watching all of this from a comfortable distance of more than two millennia, I am shocked by how quickly the celebrating crowd turns into an angry mob. How is it that they can move so quickly from apparent devotion to denunciation? But then I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at all. That is the nature of the mob. They are quickly moved and easily incited. We see it all the time on the Internet in our day. I should not be surprised by their inconstancy, I should be shocked by my own. For I find that I am more like Pilate than the screaming mob. Like him, I too can move from acknowledgment to acquiescence in seconds.

Sometimes it’s the crowd that compels me. I am more attuned to their sensibility than I am to the motions of the Spirit. I don’t want to stand out. I’d rather fit in. Or maybe I am falsely persuaded by the force of their enthusiasm and make the rabble choice. But more often it is my own heart that turns traitor. In the blink of an eye and in the quietness of my own soul I make the choice. I still know that Jesus is my king. But with a look or a word or an act I surreptitiously take up the mob’s rebel’s cry, “We will not have this man to reign over us.”

Just As He Was

[image error]When I heard the news of Billy Graham’s passing, it brought to mind a story I heard about him several years ago. Billy came to a small Bible conference in Western Michigan and asked to speak at the evening service. The leaders of the Bible conference politely turned him down. But over the next few days, they noticed that the attendance at their services began to thin until it was only a handful. Billy had set up on the beach and a crowd had gathered. Nearly everyone who was supposed to be attending the services at the Bible conference was coming to hear him instead.

I’m pretty sure that if I had been one of the leaders of that Bible conference, I would have made the same decision they did. How were they to know that the bold young man who invited himself into their pulpit would eventually become the Billy Graham we know of today? This was before the days of the Los Angeles crusade that made the evangelist a household name. It was long before Graham achieved the status of “America’s Pastor.” In those days Billy was just another unknown preacher looking for an audience. Did they make the wrong choice? Most of us would probably say yes. But that’s only because we know what Billy Graham eventually became.

How do we distinguish between presumption and the call of God? Often it is only history that enables us to know the difference. There are many things we would like to do but might not have the ability. There are other things that we might able to do but will never be granted the opportunity. The race does not always go to the swift or the battle to the strong (Eccl. 9:11).

The fact that you can do something does not automatically mean that you will do it or even that you should. The fact that you are better at the task than someone else, does not necessarily mean that God will choose you to accomplish that task. The prophet thought it was a good idea for David to build the temple until God said otherwise (2 Sam. 7:3). God’s choice for the task was Solomon, a man who eventually proved to be of lesser character.

So what does all of this mean for our dreams and aspirations? It means, at least, that we need to leave room for God to have the last word about how they will turn out. His plans usually unfold differently from those we envision for ourselves. It means that we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw about our successes. The fact that more people show up on the beach to hear us may not say as much about our own skill or effort as we might think. We should be even more careful with the conclusions we draw about our perceived failures. The outcome is hardly ever up to us and we rarely know the whole story.

This is What Forgiveness Feels Like

[image error]A few years ago I was diagnosed with cancer. Although it was a common form and treatable, I was shattered by the news. I felt betrayed, not so much by God, but by my own body. I lay awake nights thinking about the thing I had inside me and wishing that I could go back to the days before the diagnosis. When the doctor told me that my surgery appeared to be successful, I felt like a condemned prisoner who has just been given a pardon. “This is what forgiveness feels like,” I told my wife.

But sin is not really like cancer. Sin is not something that can be cut out of us or brought into remission by repeated treatment. It is not an alien presence. This is what I think Paul means when he says, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature” (Rom. 7:18). Sin not only is in me, it is me. It is part of my nature. It is because sin is so deeply embedded within, that we have such a high tolerance for it.

Theologian Josef Pieper describes sin as a warping of our created nature: “Sin is an inner contortion whose essence is misconstrued if we interpret it as sickness or, to descend into an even more trivializing level, merely as an infraction against conventional rules of behavior.” Because of this, the only solution for sin is an extreme one. The remedy is death. Since sin is me, there must be an end to me. This is somewhat ironic since death is also the progeny of sin. Death entered the world through sin (Rom. 5:12). Through Jesus Christ, God turned sin’s own weapon against itself. Those who belong to Christ have been united with Him in His death and resurrection (Rom. 6:5).

This remarkable union places the power of the cross at our disposal. Those who have been joined to Christ in His death have been granted power to “put to death the misdeeds of the body” (Rom. 8:13). The once for all death and resurrection of Jesus Christ produces within us a continual experience of dying and rising when it comes to our struggle with sin. There is an end point to this. The climax of our redemption will be our own bodily resurrection when the imperishable will be clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality (1 Cor. 15:54). Then death will be swallowed up in victory and sin along with it. That is when we will really know what forgiveness feels like.

About Time

[image error]I had a dream about my boys the other night. They really aren’t boys anymore. My two sons are young men in their late 20’s and early 30’s. But when I dream about them, they almost always appear as little boys. I, on the other hand, am ageless in my dreams. Not so much when I wake up. Within seconds the weight of my years settles upon me and I feel as old as I am. When the dream was over, I lay in the dark listening to my wife’s quiet breathing, the ticking of the clock in the other room, and wondering if age is a characteristic of the soul.

My soul had a beginning but it has no end. There was a time when my soul did not exist. Now that it does, it will exist for eternity. Since the soul is the undying self, it seems that it must have a certain ageless quality to it. My soul exists in time but is not debilitated by it in the same way that the body is. Yet the soul does not seem to be static. If the soul is the essence of the true self and that self is subject to change, should not the soul change as well? My sons are not the boys they once were. They have changed with time and experience, as have I. To put it another way, does the soul mature?

Augustine once observed that just as the human body changes with the passing ages of life and is changed with the changes of place and time, so also does the soul. “It varies by countless changes and thoughts” Augustine said. “It is altered by countless pleasures. By how many desires is it cleaved apart and distended!” In her book Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body, Andrea Nightingale explains that this statement reflects Augustine’s belief that when humanity fell into sin, we lost our sense of the divine presence. We also lost our sense of self-presence. As a result, we are distended in time, living in the present but ranging in our thinking from the past to the future. The present is not a dwelling place but a barely noted way station. We give it little regard because we are distracted by our memories or inflamed by our expectation of what is to come. Meanwhile the swiftly passing present is squandered.

Our basic problem is not really the passing away of the present. It is, as Augustine observes, an absence of the sense of God’s presence. Our awareness of God gives meaning to the present.  His presence sanctifies our boredom and redeems our discomfort. As long as we are aware of God, the present is more than a staging ground for the future. It is a moment of fellowship.

Jesus said that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God of the dead but of the living (Luke 20:38). This makes Him the God of our past and our future as much as He is the God of our present. He is the guarantee of all He has promised to those he has called. His grace is the remedy for all our regret and His assurance is our hope for the future. Does the soul age? I do not think so. At least, I do not think it ages in the same way that the body does. But I do believe that the soul develops. We are not what we once were. We are not yet what we will be. But for now, we are children of the living God and that is enough.