Philip Yancey's Blog, page 12

The China Syndrome

You can hardly pick up a newsmagazine without reading about the resurgence of China.  That Asian nation has surpassed the U.S. for the unenviable title of the world’s largest polluter, and will soon become the world’s largest economy.  The Chinese government, however, does not broadcast one fact: China also has the largest population of church-going Christians.

David Aikman’s book Jesus in Beijing chronicles the story.  After more than two decades reporting for Time from more than fifty countries, Aikman resigned and moved to Hong Kong, primarily to research and write the story of the church in China.  At the time of the communist takeover, China was the pearl of the missionary movement, with 7,000 foreign missionaries overseeing seminaries, publishing houses, hospitals, and schools.  Almost overnight Chairman Mao forced them all to leave.

Four hundred years of missionary work had produced a million Protestant and several million Catholic converts, less than 1 percent of the population of half a billion (in 1950).  For several decades no one knew how the Chinese church was faring, especially during the chaotic days of the Cultural Revolution.  Had Madame Mao succeeded in her vow to destroy Christianity?

When China finally began to crack open its borders, some of these same missionaries returned to visit, astonished to find that the church had exploded in size.  China watchers estimate that the number of Chinese Christians now exceeds a hundred million.  No one knows for sure because many of them meet in unregistered (and illegal) house churches of twenty or thirty members.

I have visited China three times.  On my first trip, in 2004, I met with members of the “underground” or unregistered churches, some of whom traveled on an all-night train for the interview.  For five hours I listened to them, sequestered in a dingy hotel room overheated by a loudly hissing radiator and smelling strongly of insecticide.  Even so, my hosts kept the windows closed tight for fear of eavesdroppers.  They also searched carefully for recording devices and posted a guard in the lobby.  I felt like a character in a James Bond movie.

I heard from Pastor Allen Yuan, one of the founders of the house church movement, who spent two decades in a prison northeast of Mongolia after he refused to renounce his faith.  “It was a miracle!” he said with great excitement.  “I had only a light jacket and in the freezing winter weather I never caught a cold or the flu.  Not sick a single day!”

On Billy Graham’s visit to China in 1994, Pastor Yuan had hosted the evangelist in his apartment.  When President Bill Clinton visited a few years later, the government forbade any foreign reporters from meeting with Yuan—which of course made all 2,000 reporters want to do just that.  Indeed, Pastor Yuan had to sneak past guards surrounding his house just to meet with me.  He showed up at the hotel unexpectedly.  “I’m 90 years old and I’ve spent twenty-two years in prison—what are they going to do to me!” he said with a grin in perfect mission-school English.

“We live in a time like the apostles,” Pastor Yuan reflected.  “Christians here are persecuted, yes.  But look at Hong Kong and Taiwan—they have everything, but they don’t seek God.  I tell you, I came out of that prison with faith stronger than I went in.  Like Joseph, we don’t know why we go through hard times until later, looking back.  Think of it: we in China may have the largest Christian community in the world, and in an atheist state that tried to stamp us out!”

I also met with peasants more typical of the house church movement, such as an uneducated farmer named Joshua. He had spent six months in prison for his faith, followed by four years at a re-education camp. For a time he prospered and built large barns housing thousands of chickens, until the bird flu epidemic wiped out the market. Now he uses the barns to store Bibles.  (Chicken droppings offer a strong deterrent against searches by local officials.)

My interpreter, from Japan, explained the background.  “More than half of all Chinese Christians still lack access to Bibles, so a group of twenty of us will come over with fifty Chinese Bibles in each of our suitcases, and Joshua acts as a distributor.  He has distributed hundreds of thousands of these Bibles.”

On my next two trips, in 2010 and 2013, I was a guest of the “official” church in China, known as the Three-Self Patriotic Movement.  I conducted a writers’ workshop and visited with publishing executives in Shanghai.  Religious leaders walk a fine line, their activities closely supervised by atheist government bureaucrats.  For years the publisher had been trying to get official approval to translate and print copies of The Student Bible, a project I worked on with my colleague Tim Stafford some 35 years ago.  Finally—just last month, in fact—the New Testament was printed in Chinese.

Over the years, Communist China has shown a schizophrenic attitude toward its Christian population.  The early Maoists opposed all religion.  In the 1960s, Red Guards destroyed thousands of temples, churches, and mosques.  Many Catholic priests and Protestant pastors spent time in re-education camps, often enduring torture unless they signed statements renouncing their beliefs.  Children were urged to report any parents who prayed or read the Bible at home.  Some Christians were crucified, with nails driven through their palms.

As China opened up to the West, attitudes softened.  Deng Xiaoping used to say, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.”  Chinese leaders know that all of the top fifteen countries ranked on a Prosperity Index have a Christian heritage.  Indexes that rank nations by freedom, lack of corruption, and gender equality show exactly the same trend.  Even die-hard atheists have to recognize that religious faith can have good effects on society.

David Aikman records a statement from a Chinese social scientist indoctrinated in Maoism.  “One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world.  We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective.  At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had.  Then we thought it was because you had the best political system.  Next we focused on your economic system.  But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.  That is why the West has been so powerful.  The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics.  We don’t have any doubt about this.”

Several thousand Western Christians have come to China to work as English teachers, and they too have had an effect.  Says Aikman, “They behave well, they don’t get drunk, they don’t flirt with the local girls, they don’t have romantic relationships even with other foreigners, they are diligent, and they don’t complain a lot… The steady drip-drip-drip of one-on-one Christian evangelism by these earnest foreign teachers has had a deep impact among young Chinese intellectuals.  Almost every urban young Christian I met in China had come to the Christian faith through a foreign, English-speaking teacher.”

On the other hand, provinces periodically crack down on church activities.  In the last two years the government has forcibly removed more than 2,000 crosses from church buildings and razed many churches.  Those who protest—pastors, lawyers, human rights activists—are sent to prison, including the prominent pastor of a 10,000-member Three-Self church.

On April 14, one couple who stood in front of their church to block a bulldozer were buried alive.  Ever Since Xi Jinping took power, the party has tightened restrictions on religious practices, and a U.S. Congressional report judged 2015 the worst year on record for human rights violations in China.

When I asked one of the bishops of the unregistered church why the government perceived Christians as such a threat, he gave a clear answer.

“Three reasons.  First, we have loyalty to God, and the communists want total loyalty to themselves.  They are anti-God, and the conflict of loyalties infuriates them.
Second, they know about the growth in the church, and fear it as they fear any movement they do not control.  They know about the church’s role in bringing down communism in Eastern Europe.
Third, they have long memories and still think of Christianity as a Western religion.  Remember, missionaries gained the right to operate freely in China only after the Opium Wars, which Britain fought to force China to allow them to bring opium into China!  We have a lot of history to overcome.”

One in five people on this planet lives in China.  As the upsurge in religious faith continues to affect this society, what will happen?  Could China emerge not just as a global economic leader but as the next major center of Christian faith?

I met few Chinese who still believe the idealistic rhetoric of the early Maoists.  But in my meetings with “underground Christians” I sensed some of the same fervor of Mao’s revolutionaries who against all odds conquered this, the most populous nation on earth.  With their coercive, top-down approach, the Red Guards inflicted wounds from which their society is still recovering.  With a different approach centered on Christian qualities of love, justice, and compassion, these new revolutionaries are seeking to change society from the bottom up.

It is plausible, says Aikman, “that 20-30% of China’s population will be Christians in thirty years’ time.”  Inevitably, believers will find their way into key positions of leadership.  “China will be Christianized if the current trend continues,” Aikman concludes.  More, the church in China has set a goal of sending out 20,000 missionaries to other countries by 2030, to repay the “debt” of the same number of missionaries who served in China before Chairman Mao’s ban.

In my lifetime, the greatest Christian revival in history has taken place with little direction or foreign influence.  Before going to China I met with one of the missionaries who had been expelled in 1950.  “We felt so sorry for the church we left behind,” he said.  “They had no one to teach them, no printing presses, no seminaries, no one to run their clinics and orphanages.  No resources, really, except the Holy Spirit.”  It appears the Holy Spirit did just fine.

 

 

(Adapted in part from What Good Is God?)

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The Superhero Prophet

A fluke of this year’s calendar has the Jewish Passover and Christian Easter separated by almost a month. Historically, of course, they go together: Jesus celebrated the Passover meal, or Seder, with his disciples just before his arrest and crucifixion.

I once attended a Seder meal. Noting an empty chair and extra place setting, I asked, “Are we expecting another guest?”

“No. By tradition we set a place for Elijah,” came the reply. “And we leave the door ajar in hopes that he will show up.”

For the Jews, Elijah represents a longing for a type of Messiah they never got. For many Christians, too, Elijah represents what we think we want in a Messiah. Who among us does not harbor a secret desire for God to act now as in Elijah’s day?

On a visit to Beirut, Lebanon, I noticed shrines to Elijah in most Christian neighborhoods. You see statues of the prophet wielding a sword at intersections and on street corners. Pilgrims bring flowers, and kiss the statues. To the beleaguered Christian minorities in the Middle East, Elijah represents hope for a comeback. After all, he slew 850 false prophets (at a site just down the highway). They acknowledge Jesus as the central figure of faith, but who wants a peace-loving martyr as a militia mascot?

Jesus’ contemporaries wondered for a time if he might be Elijah reincarnate, but he soon disabused them of that notion. Jesus simply did not fit the Elijah mold:

Elijah solved problems. Elijah could order up a drought or rainstorm on demand. He became a popular house guest by providing a widow an endless supply of oil and flour. When the widow’s son died, Elijah resurrected him. Some of these miracles prefigured Jesus’ own, but with an important difference: Jesus’ miracles benefited others but not himself. He fed 5000, yet went hungry in the wilderness. The source of Living Water died with the words “I thirst” on his lips.


Nobody messed with Elijah. Children love Elijah stories because, frankly, they have an X-Man aspect to them. This scraggly desert prophet strolled into the gleaming metropolis of Samaria and took on a thousand false prophets in their fancy white robes. He blasted the king for seizing a commoner’s vineyard. When a company of soldiers came to arrest him, fire dropped from heaven to incinerate them. The contrast with Jesus could hardly be greater. His disciples earned Jesus’ rebuke by calling for fire on unrepentant cities. When Peter attacked a guard in Jesus’ defense, Jesus promptly healed the injury. And when the powers strung him up like a common criminal, he had only these words for his tormentors: “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”


Elijah gave absolute proof. Is there a biblical scene more theatrically staged than the confrontation on Mt. Carmel? (See 1 Kings 18.) There, Elijah singlehandedly defeated 850 false priests. It was quite a day: after disposing of the 850, Elijah called for an end to a three-year drought and bested a chariot in a 17-mile race. In contrast, Jesus declined every opportunity to prove himself (“A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a miraculous sign,” he said), resisted Satan’s temptations toward a more dazzling style, did not call on rescuing angels, and died listening to the skeptics’ taunts.


Elijah did not die. “Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home,” American slaves used to sing, harking back to Elijah’s dramatic departure from earth. Those chariots of fire, fodder for spirituals and movie titles, allowed Elijah to bypass death. A prophet who did not die—little wonder Jews anticipate his return. As for Jesus, he died in a public, ignominious style reserved mostly for slaves and insurrectionists. In a great irony, when he called out from the cross, “Eloi, Eloi…,” onlookers thought he was calling for Elijah’s help.

I know why Jews as well as the Christians in Beirut value Elijah. He stands for what I want in a prophet, what I want in a God: someone to solve my problems, protect me, give me absolute proof and offer an escape route around life’s messiest problems.

Yet, on further reflection, from Elijah I also learn why God does not always act as we may want.

In the first place, Elijah’s style did not achieve the desired results. Despite all the fireworks, his ministry accomplished little. Even the Mt. Carmel scene made barely a dent in the nation’s faith. The Bible shows repeatedly that spectacular miracles have minimal long-term effect on faith. Elijah himself, who had just stood down 850 priests and an angry king, fled like a scared dog from the threats of Queen Jezebel. The God we think we want does not always produce the results we think we’ll get.

In a tender scene following Elijah’s flight from Jezebel, God revealed a different style. At Elijah’s lowest point, God visited him—pointedly, not in a powerful wind, earthquake or fire, rather in a gentle whisper. Instead of overwhelming Elijah with supernatural power, God found a way to descend, and to restore the prophet’s confidence from the inside out. (I think of a similar scene centuries later when Jesus tenderly led Peter back from despair toward faith.)

In some ways faith in a superhero like Elijah is easier to understand than faith in Jesus. Jesus gave tough invitations: Take up a yoke of work, a towel of service. “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself,” he said, mindful of his impending crucifixion. He invited followers to take up a cross, not a lightning bolt—and if this world is to be won for him, it will probably be won by a gentle voice and self-sacrificing love, not by loud shouts and spectacle.

Even when Jesus conquered death he downplayed spectacle, appearing only to small groups of followers who already believed in him. The very first reports that Easter morning came from a few scared women, who, Luke admits, failed to impress the apostles “because theirs words seemed to them like nonsense.” Truth won out, however, and two millennia later, the news beyond belief is still spreading. By Jesus’ style, not Elijah’s.

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The Quirky Wisdom of T. S. Eliot

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s death. The premier poet of his generation, Eliot sent shock waves through the literati of Britain and America by becoming an outspoken Christian. The author of The Waste Land, a work of dark despair, began to accept writing assignments from the Anglican Church. A poet who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature set aside verse to write instead about schemes to improve society. His good friend Virginia Woolf grumbled that “Eliot seemed to be turning into a priest.”

In short, the world’s most famous poet decided that humanity had reached such a state of crisis that he must do his part to help preserve civilization. Caught between the polar evils of Nazism and Communism, the world faced a defining moment,and although The Waste Land had poignantly described the void, it had not proposed any solutions.  Eliot knew of only one alternative, a rediscovery of what it means to live “Christianly.”  He became increasingly skeptical of any real solution to social problems from politics alone, concluding that, “political remedies are about as useful as poulticing a cancer.”

As I recently read over some of Eliot’s writings, my mind flashed forward to today.  The contemporary world also seems in a perilous state, with countries like North Korea and Pakistan (and soon Iran?) possessing nuclear weapons.  Communism has receded, but a resurgent Islam has spawned a new breed of suicidal extremists who spread fear across the globe.  Eliot reminded me that things have been worse.  In his day, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and a militaristic Japan divided up much of the world.  German bombers pounded London nightly, killing more civilians every week than the number who died from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Eliot took his case to the British public in a series of BBC broadcast talks.  He held up Christianity as the most important bond between European nations: “I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith,” he said.  Such sweeping statements have a quaint ring to Europeans today, for their continent is organized politically through the European Union, which excludes mention of God or Christianity in its founding documents.  And yet the threats from radical Islam and the influx of refugees are causing a new identity crisis in Europe.

In tribute to T. S. Eliot, I have compiled the following quotations spelling out his insights, which are far less familiar than his poetry.  Some of his opinions seem quirky, while others are downright prophetic.

On modern capitalism:

(I’m waiting to hear Bernie Sanders quote these.)

It creates “people detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.”
“Was our society…assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?”
“…the organisation of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
Much like countries we view as hostile, “we also live in a mass-civilisation following many wrong ambitions and wrong desires, and…if our society renounces completely its obedience to God, it will become no better, and possibly worse, than some of those abroad which are popularly execrated.”

On Christian essentials:

(Tea Party Republicans would do well to ponder these.)

“To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.”
“I have none of the feelings of nostalgia, the reverence for tradition, the desire to recapture the sentiment of Fra Angelico, which seems to animate most modern defenders of religion. All that seems to me to be bosh.  What is important, is what nobody seems to realize—the dogmas like that of Original Sin, which are the closest expression of the categories of the religious attitude.  That man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature, who can yet apprehend perfection.  It is not then that I put up with the dogma for the sake of the sentiment, but I may possibly swallow the sentiment for the sake of the dogma.”
“To me, religion has brought at least the perception of something above morals, and therefore extremely terrifying; it has brought me not happiness, but the sense of something above happiness and therefore more terrifying than ordinary pain and misery, the very dark night and the desert. To me, the phrase ‘to be damned for the glory of God’ is sense and not paradox; I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children’s game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end.”
“What is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial.”

On global dangers:

(In Eliot’s day, Communism loomed.  Think now of ISIS.)

“Russian communism is a religion…and you can never fight a religion except with another religion. If we are incapable of a faith at least as strong as that which appears to animate the ruling class of Russia, if we are incapable of dying for a cause, then Western Europe and the Americans might as well be reorganized on the Moscow model at once.”
“It is the soul of the West that the East wishes to attack, that soul, divided, uncertain of its principles, confusedly eager for spiritual liberation, and all the more ready to destroy itself, to allow itself to be broken up by Oriental anarchy, because it has of itself departed from its historical civilising order and its tradition.”
“The danger, for those who start from the temporal end, is Utopianism; settle the problem of distribution—of wheat, coffee, aspirin or wireless sets—and all the problems of evil will disappear. The danger, for those who start from the spiritual end, is Indifferentism; neglect the affairs of the world and save as many souls out of the wreckage as possible.”
“The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.”

On the church and society:

(Are Christians truly a counter-culture, or just another slice of modern culture?)

“But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative, or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things; liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.”
“The faith to which we must cling is that the life of every wholly devoted and selfless man must make a difference to the future… I mean the turning away of the soul from the desire of material possessions, of drugged pleasures, of power, or of happiness.”
“Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.”

On writing:

(Ah, how well I know this sense of melancholy struggle.)

“Of what use is this experimenting with rhythms and words, this effort to find the precise metric and the exact image to set down feelings which, if communicable at all, can be communicated to so few that the result seems insignificant compared to the labor.”
Dramatic plays vs. real life: “To make allowances for the villain is to weaken the drama: but the Christian is taught to love the villain while hating his villainy.”
Prose vs. poetry: “In one’s prose reflections one may be legitimately occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing of verse one can only deal with actuality.”
On accepting assignments for religious works: “The invitation came at a moment when I seemed to myself to have exhausted my meagre poetic gifts, and to have nothing more to say. To be, at such a moment, commissioned to write something which, good or bad, must be delivered by a certain date, may have the effect that vigorous cranking sometimes has upon a motor car when the battery is run down.”

And, finally, one of the greatest of modern poets leaves this legacy of belief: “I take for granted that Christian revelation is the only full revelation and that the fullness of Christian revelation resides in the essential fact of the Incarnation… The division between those who accept, and those who deny, Christian revelation I take to be the most profound division between human beings.”

 

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Born in the U.S.A.

Drs. David and Claudia Graham at the mission hospital where they served.

A friend of mine, David Graham, recently returned from thirteen years in Ecuador.  He had served as general surgeon and medical director of a mission hospital, and I visited him there in 2013.  We were on the edge of a jungle and, besides the normal equipment, treatment rooms displayed jars of fearsome snakes and spiders with instructions for the appropriate antivenom.

The hospital, in fact, was established at the missionary base from which Jim Elliot and four friends took off in 1956 in an attempt to make contact with a fierce tribe known as the Huaorani.  Operation Auca ended in tragedy as the Huaorani (known then by the pejorative word Auca for savages) killed all five of the missionaries.  News of the “Auca martyrs” was broadcast around the world, and later their story was celebrated in a series of books by one of the widows, Elisabeth Elliot (who died in 2015), and by Ethel Wallis in collaboration with Rachel Saint.

While working at the hospital, David Graham married Claudia, an Ecuadorian physician who had coordinated health care for four provinces.  For the two of them, 2015 involved a transition to a different country, a different language, and indeed a different culture.  At the end of the year, David reflected on some of the changes that struck him as he returned to his native country.  His insights gave me a new perspective on the U.S. and perhaps will do the same for you.  Like me, I’m sure you have your own mental list of things that annoy and things that inspire gratitude.

For this blog, I’ve adapted the following text from David’s letter:

A surgeon practicing his blowgun skills.

A few of the many things that have annoyed or frustrated me:

my first smart phone (they don’t come with any instruction book) which involved much frustration in learning how to use,
automated calling machines that ring your house time and again, often looking for people who have listed your number as their own,
credit ratings that too often penalize responsible living,
everything requiring a username and password (on some sites they must be changed every 90 days),
too many advertisements (whether TV, formerly ad-free YouTube, or videos linked to web pages that automatically play and must be stopped so you can read an article in peace), and
far too many people on government disability who shouldn’t be, too much intravenous and oral narcotic abuse, too much obesity, far too much material waste in hospitals.

But looking at the cup half full:

I love being able to use a credit card (not cash) to make purchases in any store or restaurant.
I am glad to once again live in only one country (i.e., following one set of rules, not two), and to live among those who speak my native language.
I am so happy to no longer have neighbors whose horrible throbbing music invades my home.
I enjoy once again living in a place with four seasons (especially autumn).
I am thankful for good health, and I am grateful for love in my life: in marriage, family and friendship.

Five books I read this year made me especially thankful:

Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, I-II,
Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking,
Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday, and
Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy. 

When you read of such tremendous injustice, human cruelty, and unbearable suffering (as the first three books describe) it makes your own complaints about work, government, or people seem petty.  We don’t fear a midnight knock at the door and long jail sentences for political reasons; don’t walk around with our bellies empty; aren’t forced to go out and work in subzero freezing weather (where we will most likely die); don’t sleep piled up next to others on hard sleeping platforms; or worry if the next opening of our jail cell door will mean it is our turn to be taken out and shot.  We also don’t live in a state of constant warfare, which was (and still is) the norm in pre-state, hunter-gatherer societies.  And the tremendous change that literacy has made on previously oral societies has made possible science, history, public health, medicine, and philosophy; it has improved the length and health of our lives, and tremendously expanded our linguistic capabilities, all of which make the lives we lead historically privileged.  I am grateful, truly grateful, for everything.

I must also mention some of my favorite old delights, renewed in 2015:

autumn in East Tennessee (the colors, the temperature, the leaves changing),
wildlife (We have a family of red-tailed hawks in a tree behind our house, plus neighborhood squirrels, rabbits, opossums, raccoons, foxes, and we have even seen a bear.),
Tolstoy’s War & Peace (great every time you read it),
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra’s Tchaikovsky album (They give my favorite interpretation of his 1812 Overture.),
eating at Cracker Barrel restaurants, and
being close to family, and seeing old friends again.

And, finally, some favorite new discoveries:

Gold Peake Green Tea (delicious!),
Pepperidge Farm Chocolate Chip and Caramel Apple Cookies (way better than anything Mrs. Fields makes),
Zatarain’s Red Beans and Rice (has a Cajun flavor to it),
Giovanni Bomol (Italian pianist—you can look for his videos on YouTube; try ‘Fire,’ ‘Autumn,’ ‘Pirate Attack’ or ‘Las Vegas’ to start with),
the music of Two Steps from Hell (e.g., Strength of a Thousand Men),
Sling TV (internet streaming for Olympic and specialized sports),
Google Maps on Smart Phones (makes big-city driving so easy!), and
the soothing screened-in porch behind our house, where it is quiet, and where we can sit in our rocking chairs and enjoy our wooded plot.

Reading through David’s lists, I couldn’t help contributing some of my own petty annoyances:

updates from Microsoft that make other devices, software programs, and macros either obsolete or incompatible,
panels of sportscasters, news commentators, and morning-show hosts who sit around giggling and interrupting each other,
our crazy way of choosing a President, by lining up a dozen or more candidates in a “debate” to see who can come up with the cleverest zingers,
electronic “keyboards” on iPads and smartphones that don’t include the characters I want,
the whole notion of communicating through texting, which uses the least convenient keyboards and the smallest screens,
the huge servings in American restaurants, contributing to obesity and food waste,
hard plastic packaging that cuts your fingers when you open it, and
soft plastic packaging: ziplock bags that neither zip nor lock like they’re supposed to.

And yet whenever I return from an international trip, I feel a wash of gratitude for the good old U.S.A.  Compared to virtually anywhere else, we have low taxes, an abundance of freedom, an emphasis on consumer rights, checks and balances on corruption, good (though expensive) health care, and a reservoir of basic human decency.  Every time I’m involved in an accident, or pull over with car trouble, some good-hearted soul stops to see if they can help.  In some other countries, they would stop to rob me.

If we could just figure out a better way to choose a President…

 

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Snow on Snow

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow

            or seen the storehouses of the hail…

From whose womb comes the ice?

            Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens

when the waters become hard as stone,

            when the surface of the deep is frozen?

                                                (Job 38:22, 29-30)

 

We moved from Chicago to Colorado in November of 1992, towing a small U-Haul trailer behind our Toyota packed with essentials (warm clothes, a mattress, two place settings, a computer) just in case the moving van didn’t make its promised delivery.  Sure enough, the van showed up five days later, so we wandered around an empty, echoing house trying to imagine our new life in the mountains, so different from downtown Chicago.

The morning after our arrival, which happened to be my birthday, I looked out the window and saw paradise.  Five inches of snow had fallen during the night, coating the blue spruce trees and Ponderosa pines with a blanket of pure white.  The snow-laden forest, backed by snow-capped mountains, formed a landscape of exquisite beauty.  In Chicago, snow had called forth groans, complicating such everyday tasks as walking to the store and parallel-parking on the street.  Within a day, city snow degrades to ugly grey slush.  In Colorado, a dry climate where salt is not used on roads, the snow stays pristine white.

We bought snowshoes and cross-country skis, and for the first time looked forward to winter—a good thing, since our area averages more than a hundred inches of snow each year.  Is there a better feeling than breaking trail for an hour or two of brisk exercise and then retiring to drink a cup of hot chocolate beside a crackling fireplace?

One year we toured Yellowstone National Park on cross-country skis , staying in a rustic cabin in the wilderness.  The famous waterfalls were transformed into sparkling ice sculptures.  We picnicked by hot springs, surrounded by bison and elk.  In the winter, animals congregate around the geysers and steaming hot springs, where they can still find grass to eat. Conserving their energy, they ignore human intruders no matter how close you get.

Only once in our twenty-three years in Colorado has snow turned into an enemy instead of a friend.  On St. Patrick’s Day, 2003, it started snowing heavily, and did not stop for three days.  Seven feet of snow fell.  The house turned dark, with all skylights covered and drifts blocking windows and sliding glass doors.  Electricity went out, which meant we had no heat and no water (our well pump required electricity).  I worked for hours with a snow shovel, digging a tunnel to the woodpile so that at least we could keep a fire going in the living room.  I returned drenched in sweat from the exertion, and had no way to warm up.  I couldn’t take a shower or bath, and our fireplace and a propane heater kept the inside temperature around fifty degrees, just enough to keep pipes (and ourselves) from freezing.

When the snow finally stopped, I tried hiking up the hill behind our house.  Even on snowshoes I sank up to my crotch with each step and then had to lift my weighted snowshoe back to the surface.  It took me forty-five minutes to climb a hill that normally takes five.  I have never heard such silence.  Snow muffled all sound except my breathing.  I stood atop the hill, gazing at the smooth white mountains in the distance, until a retort like the crack of a rifle startled me.  Who would be hunting at such a time?  It was no rifle, but a huge branch of a Ponderosa pine tree giving way and falling to the ground, where it sent up a fountain of snow.

The sound startled a deer as well.  I watched as the doe leaped, then leaped again, and again.  She paused after each lunge, eyes wide with fright, sides heaving, trying to summon energy for the next attempt.  Soon a herd of deer made their way to our birdfeeder, pawing through the snow in search of the sunflower seeds buried underneath.  As I stood on the hill, another branch gave way, then another.  Whole trees tilted sideways and toppled over with a dull crash.  In all, we lost more than two hundred trees in the storm.

The invasion of Iraq began that very day.  At night we gathered around candles and turned on a portable radio for just a few minutes to preserve the battery, listening to the sounds of war in a hot desert thousands of miles away.  In Colorado, too, helicopters clattered overhead, in this case not to conduct war but to rescue mountain people who had medical emergencies.  News reports told of five thousand passengers stranded at Denver’s airport, short on food.

In the daytime we worked hard, smacking evergreen trees with a long pole to relieve their burden of snow, struggling up a ladder to break the ice dams forming in our gutters.  No snowplow could make it up our half-mile driveway, and Denver had already requisitioned the available heavy machinery.  Regardless, no one could make it to our house until we chain-sawed the trees blocking the road and driveway.  After two days a neighbor’s relative made it to the end of our dirt road with a diesel-powered turbo Hummer, but every time he plowed into the now-compacted snow the Hummer high-centered, planing on the snow, its tires spinning uselessly.

At first I relished the idea of an enforced vacation.  I scheduled thirty minutes a day for email, trying not to drain my laptop battery.  But I found it difficult to read a book or magazine in the snow-darkened house and, besides, it’s hard to read when you’re shivering.

We ate well, cooking on a gas stove the contents of our thawing freezer.  On the sixth day of isolation, we finally re-entered civilization, the road-blocking trees cut into firewood, the driveway cleared by a costly front-loader.  Gawking like tourists, we drove slowly on a county highway, with snow piled nine feet high on either side, to a fitness club, where we luxuriated in our first hot showers in a week.

As is true of most anxiety-producing calamities, in retrospect the snowstorm became a kind of adventure.  Shops sold “I survived the Blizzard of 2003” t-shirts, and more than a decade later locals still swap stories about what they endured.  The snow melted, producing a bumper crop of wild flowers that Spring; our house survived with little damage; in time we tidied up the forest.  And after a few uneasy years we came to look forward to winter once again.

This past Christmas we spent two days in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a mountain town that had already received 150 inches of snow, half its winter average.  We drove across Rabbit Ears Pass, where evergreens laden with snow bowed as if in praise.  We hiked to Fish Creek Falls through waist-high snow, on a trail barely wide enough to accommodate snowshoes.  Animal tracks—deer, elk, fox, bobcat, is that a moose hoofprint?—were the only marks in undulating drifts.  Hardy Mountain Chickadees darted from tree to tree, searching for bare branches on which to perch.

We watched brave souls climbing the frozen falls with ropes and ice axes.  As we turned around, the afternoon sun tinted the snowy landscape a soft yellow, and then orange.  A full moon rose on Christmas Day, shining bright against the clear blue Colorado sky.  Snow was once again our friend.

Driving home the day after Christmas, on roads made treacherous by snow now hardened to ice, I found myself humming the haunting tune of one of my favorite Christmas carols, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” by  Christina Rossetti.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

We don’t know the exact day of Jesus’ birth, of course, much less the weather forecast for that day.  Rossetti caught the significance of the first Christmas, however, which came at a time when “Earth stood hard as iron.”  One night the child born in a stable in bleak midwinter cast a different light on all creation.  It gave earth a foretaste of transformation and hope.  Like snow.

 

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Paris and Beyond

On the day when bullets flew and bombs detonated in Paris, plunging the City of Light into darkness, I was visiting the most populous Muslim nation in the world.  First in Indonesia, and then in Malaysia and Hong Kong while on a publisher-sponsored speaking tour, I heard breaking news in snatches only if the hotel carried CNN or BBC in English.

I felt oddly distant from the mood that must have descended like a shroud of fear over the U.S. and other Western countries.  I flashed back to the somber days following September 11, 2001.  I searched the Internet for the precise sites of the atrocities in Paris: on my travels to that splendid city, had I visited that restaurant, that stadium, that concert hall?  I help support a missionary couple who have planted two churches, and reside as the only non-Muslims in an apartment building in a Parisian suburb—what must they be feeling at such a time?

Though I received email requests to write an immediate response to the events, while keeping a busy schedule in a foreign culture half a world away, I felt ill-equipped.  Only later did I gain some perspective, in part by reflecting on a lecture I had heard from J. Dudley Woodberry, a specialist in Islam at Fuller Theological Seminary.  Is the Muslim my enemy or my brother? Woodberry asked.  His answer: both.

Islamic extremists in ISIS and Al Qaeda relish the label of enemy.  After the recent attacks against Russia and France, and the execution of hostages from Norway and China, nations around the world face a universal threat.  In a reprise of previous centuries when Muslims surrounded Europe, some extremists today plot a global conquest.  They kill and maim civilians in London, Paris, and New York; torture and decapitate Christians in Libya and Iraq; burn churches in Egypt; persecute Jesus-followers in places like Iran, Pakistan, and the Philippines.

Yet, as Woodberry reminded his audience, Muslims are also our brothers.  When I spoke at a church in Hong Kong, a Muslim imam attended, and each time he approached me afterwards with words of appreciation.  Muslims share many values with Christians, such as a disciplined life and an emphasis on charity and care for the poor.  They accept much of the Christian Bible as a sacred text—though they look to the Koran as a more complete, final revelation.  Muslims use the Psalms as a prayer book.  And the Koran includes ninety-three references to Jesus, presenting him as a prophet second only to Muhammad, a Messiah who will return someday to restore justice on earth.

I have met people in the restrictive Islamic societies of the Middle East who remain culturally Muslim yet follow Jesus.  In those countries conversion from Islam is illegal, and brings swift retribution—banishment and possibly death—from the convert’s family.  So the new Christian does not, for example, change his name from Muhammad to Peter, and he continues to pray five times a day and even attend mosque, where he privately worships Jesus the Messiah.

Almost all Muslims have the goal of winning the world for their faith, though only the more extreme groups, like ISIS, resort to violent means.  (Let’s admit that Christians have a similar goal.  We, too, represent a conversionist faith, and many ministries strive to “win the world for Christ.”)  I must say, blowing up people and what they cherish is a most perverted form of evangelism, far more likely to turn people away from Islam.  A decade ago the lower castes in India had considered converting en masse to Islam until the Taliban famously demolished the Afghan World Heritage Site statues of the Buddha, a revered figure to Indians.

At various times Christians also have used coercion.  Charlemagne ordered a death penalty for Saxons who would not convert, and in 1492 Spain decreed that all Jews convert to Christianity or be expelled.  Priests in the American West sometimes chained Native Americans to church pews to enforce church attendance.  Over time, Christians learned that the faith grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.  In the words of Miroslav Volf, “Imposition stands starkly at odds with the basic character of the Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving—God’s self-giving and human self-giving—and not about self-imposing.”

Tellingly, in his last miracle on earth Jesus healed the ear of an “enemy” whom his own disciple had wounded.  Those who wish to remain faithful to Jesus must bear witness as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting the gospel as a true answer to basic thirst.

A friend of mine who grew up in Palestine observes that those of us in the West will always view Muslims as the enemy unless they renounce violence and coercion.  He wrote me, “Although the Qur’an calls Muslims descendants of Abraham, it rejects the dignity of Jews and Christians, calling them pigs (for Jews) and infidels (for Christians).  They are to be forced to convert, otherwise subject to taxation,  enslaved and/or destroyed.  Unless these ominous sections are excised from the Muslim ‘sacred texts,’ there is no hope for reconciliation.”

Yet on my trip, I read daily editorials in Malaysian and Indonesian newspapers denouncing the Paris attacks and other acts of extremism.  Islamic nations acknowledge the threat: after all, many more Muslims than non-Muslims have died at the hands of terrorists.  These two Asian countries are charting a middle way, favoring their Muslim majorities while officially guaranteeing the rights of minorities from other faiths.

Officially, I say.  Christians in Malaysia told me of evangelism techniques that, while nonviolent, are still coercive.  Muslim men actively seek out Christian women to marry (they can have up to four wives), forcing them to convert and bear them Muslim children.  Aggressive imams offer money to illiterate Christian villagers if they sign a document with an X; when they show up for church the next week, an officer informs them they have now registered as Muslims, a designation that cannot legally be changed.  And Christians in Malaysia find it almost impossible to get permission to build a church, or even repair an aging building.

Indonesia has more freedom but also, in some regions, more direct persecution.  As one Christian in Malaysia said, “We’re so blessed, because in Indonesia they’re burning churches and killing Christians, but here we just have to put up with discrimination and restrictions on our activities.”  In Indonesia, where Christians are actually dying for their faith, another said, “We’re very blessed, because in Malaysia they can’t freely publish the gospel.  Here, we still can.”  Indeed, I spoke at a Christian book exhibition in Jakarta held in the atrium of a public mall.

I wrote in Vanishing Grace about an important insight I learned from a Muslim scholar who said to me, “I have read the entire Koran and can find in it no guidance on how Muslims should live as a minority in a society.  I have read the entire New Testament and can find in it no guidance on how Christians should live as a majority.”  He put his finger on a central difference between the two faiths.  One, born at Pentecost, thrives cross-culturally and even counter-culturally, often coexisting with oppressive governments.  The other, geographically anchored in Mecca, was founded simultaneously as a religion and a state.

As we talked, he pointed out that Islam seeks to unify religion and law, culture and politics.  The courts enforce religious (Sharia) law, and in strict Muslim nations the mullahs, not the politicians, hold the real power.  In contrast, the Muslim man reminded me, Christianity works best as a minority faith, a counter-culture.  A recent book by Lee Beach, The Church in Exile, shows that throughout much of the Old Testament and all of the New Testament, God’s people operate as a minority within a surrounding culture that may well prove hostile.  Beach calls for the church to establish “communities of engaged nonconformity” to show the world a better way to live—not by coercion, but by persuasion and example.

Historically, when Christians have reached a majority they too fall to the temptations of power in ways that are clearly anti-gospel.  The blending of church and state may work for a time but it inevitably provokes a backlash, such as that seen in secular Europe today, where you find little nostalgia for Christendom.

Ajith Fernando, a writer and theologian from Sri Lanka, has this explanation for the recent turn toward violence: “Muslims believe their culture is superior because they think its features were dictated by God and reported verbatim in the Qur’an.  So the Muslim extremists are humiliated over these defeats and some of them are responding by hitting out violently in anger.  The Western leaders say they are fighting evil.  The Muslim extremists feel that the West is evil and that they must protect righteousness by battling the West.  So they hit targets that they associate with the West.”

Americans and Europeans understand the difference between a committed Christian who accepts Jesus as a model for living and a cultural Christian who happens to live in a nation with a Christian heritage, but not everyone elsewhere can make that distinction.  Much of the world, in fact, draws conclusions about Christians by watching MTV, online pornography, and movies glorifying violence.  To them, celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Charlie Sheen, and Kim Kardashian (or, more confusingly, her transgender step-father) personify “the Christian West” as much as Billy Graham and Pope Francis do.

It seems the entire world has now arrayed itself against ISIS, a relatively small group of zealots who welcome the opposition.  Do they represent the death throes of a distorted theology or the beginning of yet another long-term ideological conflict?  Post-Christian Europe can muster a police response but no real ideology to counter its attackers.  As a German friend told me, “We are baffled by people willing to blow themselves up for a cause in which they believe.  Most of us find it difficult to articulate what we are living for, much less what we might be willing to die for.”

Jesus came as God’s messenger of love, and chose to serve rather than to dominate, to die rather than to kill.  Such a time as this calls for a vigorous faith from his followers, “communities of engaged nonconformity.”

Can we respect and dignify the majority of Muslims while simultaneously striving to root out the extremist minority?  Can we resist the temptation toward vigilantism and prejudice against all Muslims? Can we not only accept them as neighbors but love them, as Jesus commanded?  Can we live in a way that demonstrates to the Muslim world that “the Christian West” does not equal decadence, just as “the Muslim world” does not equal extremism?  Can we maintain our cherished values of freedom and justice while under assault from forces that undermine them?

ISIS has proved how a dedicated minority of zealots can disrupt the world.  What can Christians do to show the troubled world another, better way?

 

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Boomerang Prayers

Because I wrote a book with the title Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? I receive letters and emails from readers who give wrenching accounts of unanswered prayers.  A man quit his job at a printing plant when it began printing pornography and, despite his urgent prayers, never landed another job.  A couple desperately wanted a child and found themselves infertile.  Another woman got her wish for a child, only to have her daughter die of a rare disease before reaching the age of two.

I wrote two chapters on unanswered prayer, but frankly, all words seem impotent against the mystery of why such prayers go unanswered.  When prayer seems more like struggle than relationship, when I find myself repeating the same requests over and over and wonder, “Is anyone really listening?” I take some comfort in remembering that Jesus, too, had unanswered prayers.  Four come to mind.

As Luke records, Jesus spent an entire night in prayer before choosing the inner core of twelve disciples.  Yet if you read the Gospels, you marvel that this dodgy dozen could represent an answer to prayer.  They included, Luke pointedly notes, “Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor,” not to mention the pettily ambitious Sons of Thunder and the hothead Simon, whom Jesus would later rebuke as “Satan.”

“O unbelieving generation,” Jesus once sighed about these twelve, “how long shall I stay with you?  How long shall I put up with you?”  I wonder if, in that moment of exasperation, Jesus questioned the Father’s response to his night of prayer.

The particular makeup of the twelve may not truly qualify as an unanswered prayer, for we have no reason to believe that any other choices might have served Jesus better.  Even so, I find it comforting that while on earth Jesus faced the same limitations as does anyone in leadership.  The Son of God himself could only draw from the talent pool available.

A clearer instance of unanswered prayer occurred in the Garden of Gethsemane when, as Luther put it, “God struggled with God.”  While Jesus lay prostrate on the ground, sweat falling from him like drops of blood, his prayers took on an uncharacteristic tone of pleading.  He “offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death,” the Book of Hebrews says—but of course Jesus was not saved from death.  As that awareness grew, Jesus felt distress.  His community of support had all fallen asleep.  “Could you not keep watch for one hour?” he chided.

We have few details about the content of Jesus’ prayers, since any potential witnesses were dozing.  Perhaps he reviewed his entire ministry on earth.  The weight of all that went undone may have borne down upon him: his disciples were unstable, irresponsible; the movement seemed in peril; God’s chosen people had rejected him; the world still harbored evil and much suffering.

In Gethsemane Jesus seemed at the very edge of human endurance.  He no more relished the idea of pain and death than you or I do.  “Everything is possible for you,” Jesus pleaded to the Father; “Take this cup from me.”

The third unanswered prayer appears in an intimate scene recorded by John, the disciples’ last supper with their master.  Jesus expanded the scope of his prayer far beyond the walls of the Upper Room, to encompass even those of us who live today:

My prayer is not for them (the disciples) alone.  I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.  May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me.  May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me.

Disunity virtually defines the history of the church.  Pick at random any year of history—pick now, with 45,000 Christian denominations—and you will see how far short we fall of Jesus’ final request.  The church, and the watching world, still await an answer.

The fourth unanswered prayer appears in what has become known as the Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus taught as a model.  It includes the sweeping request that “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  Surely that prayer remains unanswered today.

On television I watch the long lines of migrants fleeing war—some 42,000 displaced every day—and think of their prayers for peace and the simple yearning to return to their homes someday.  I am haunted by the image of twenty-one Egyptian Christians kneeling in orange jumpsuits by the Libyan surf, their heads bowed in prayer as, one by one, each is beheaded by ISIS.  God’s will is not being done on earth as it is in heaven—not yet, at least.

I sense a partial clue into the mystery of unanswered prayer in what I call boomerang prayers.  Often when we pray, we want God to intervene in spectacular fashion: to heal miraculously, to change evil hearts, to quash injustice.  More commonly, God works through us.  Like a boomerang, the prayers we toss at God come swishing back toward us, testing our response.

I think back to Jesus’ unanswered prayers.  The disciples?  Eventually, except for Judas, the twelve submitted to a slow but steady transformation, providing a kind of long-term answer to Jesus’ petition.  John, a Son of Thunder, softened into “the apostle of Love.”  Peter, who earned Jesus’ rebuke by recoiling from the idea of Messiah suffering, later urged his followers to “follow in his steps” by suffering as Christ did.

In Gethsemane, Jesus did not receive what he requested, removal of the cup of suffering.   His plea for intervention looped back like a boomerang.  Hebrews affirms that, though Jesus was not saved from death, nevertheless “he was heard because of his reverent submission.  Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.”  It was God’s will that Jesus had come to do, after all, and his plea resolved into these words: “Yet not what I will, but what you will.”  Not many hours later he would cry out, in profound summation, “It is finished.”

How many times have I prayed for one thing only to receive another?  I long for the sense of detachment, of trust, that I see in Gethsemane.  God and God alone is qualified to answer my prayers, even if it means transmuting them from my own self-protective will into God’s perfect will.  When Jesus prayed to the one who could save him from death, he did not get that salvation; he got instead the salvation of the world.

The final two prayers, for unity and for seeing God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven, put Jesus’ followers in the spotlight.  “It is for your good that I am going away,” Jesus assured the disciples.  “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”  He turned over the mission to us, as ill-equipped and undependable as that original band of twelve.

In Vanishing Grace I wrote about hearing the musician Bono of the band U2 describe his short-term mission to an orphanage in Ethiopia.  For a month he and his wife Ali held babies, helped nurse them back to health, and then donated money to equip the orphanage.  Bono said that after his return to Ireland his prayers changed, taking on an angry, defiant tone.  “God, don’t you care about those children in Africa?  They did nothing wrong and yet because of AIDS there may soon be fifteen million parentless babies on that continent.  Don’t you care?!”

Gradually Bono heard in reply that, yes, God cares.  Where did he think his idea of a mission trip to Africa came from?  The questions he had hurled at God came sailing back to him, boomerang-like, as a prod to action.  Get moving.  Do something.  The role of leading a global campaign against AIDS held little appeal for Bono at first—“I’m a rock star, not a social worker!”—but eventually he could not ignore what felt unmistakably like a calling.

Over the next years politicians as varied as President Bill Clinton and Senator Strom Thurmond, and then Tony Blair and Kofi Annan and George W. Bush, found a musician dressed all in black and wearing his signature sunglasses camped outside their offices waiting to see them.  In a time of economic cutbacks, somehow Bono managed to persuade those leaders to ante up fifteen billion dollars to combat AIDS.

With government support assured, Bono went on a bus tour of the United States, speaking to large churches and Christian colleges because he believed that Christians were key to addressing the global problem of AIDS.  He invited others to participate in what God wanted accomplished in the world, and many did.

My understanding of prayer has changed.  I now see it less as trying to convince God to do what I want done and more as a way of discerning what God wants done in the world, and how I can be a part of it.  Mystery endures, but a different kind of mystery: What tiny role can I play in answering Jesus’ prayer for unity, and in doing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven?  The boomerang circles back.

 

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Winston

If you had met Winston on the street, you would presume him to be a vagrant.  Day after day he wore the same ratty blue jeans and plaid flannel shirt.  Even at the height of summer he wore a stained jacket and often a knit cap covering his nearly bald head.  He had more teeth missing than present.  He walked with short, shuffling steps, assisted by a cane—until he went blind, when he hardly walked at all.  Instead he sat in a reclining chair by the front door waiting for the man from Meals on Wheels to deliver his daily fare.

You would not know that Winston was a World War II veteran who served in the occupation force in Japan.  That he had seen the shadows of men, women, and children etched into the concrete bridges and buildings of Nagasaki.  That in oil-starved Tokyo he rode buses powered by coal, with a little man squatting on top to shovel black chunks into the hopper.  That he used to sneak food from the PX to his translator, who had eaten nothing but rice for months and suffered from beriberi.

You would not know that he once harvested wheat in Kansas.  The combines, he recalled, started at the margins of the fields and worked their way in, harvesting the grain in a rectangular pattern that became smaller with each cut.  As the great machine plowed through the last remaining square, small animals such as mice, rats, voles, and rabbits dashed across the open field; to Winston’s astonishment, unseen hawks and falcons and other raptors shot out of the sky like missiles to pluck off the terrified creatures.

You would not know that before the era of interstate highways Winston had driving adventures in Alaska and Colorado, and on dangerous roads in Mexico.  Or that he owned the first Volkswagen Beetle in Georgia.  In the 1950s the state had an eighteen-month waiting list, so Winston flew to Kentucky where a dealer friend sold him the first Beetle to be registered in Atlanta.  Later he drove a Porsche, then a motorcycle, then a Volkswagen station wagon.

You would not know that Winston was my uncle.  My own father, Winston’s brother, died the month after my first birthday, and Winston did what he could to fill in.  He taught me to tie a necktie, and to shave, and to shoot a gun—the three essential skills for every Southern male.  (I still shave but rarely wear a tie, and haven’t shot a gun since that memorable lesson at Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta.)  He paid me five dollars to memorize the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, and had me read aloud the longest English sentence without punctuation.  It came from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses and totaled 4,391 words.  Fortunately, he didn’t ask me to memorize that.

When I went to college, my uncle gave up his two-pack a day smoking habit—Winston cigarettes, of course—and sent me fifty dollars a month, money I needed just to stay in school.  Typically, he thanked me for giving him an incentive to quit smoking.

My dominant memory of Uncle Winston is of a nattily-dressed insurance executive, ruddy-cheeked, cheerful, a lifelong bachelor who filled his room with gadgets: ham radios, a teletype machine, and every iteration of personal computers.  His car license announced his radio call sign: WA4TFB—“Stands for Tired Fat Bachelor,” he said with a laugh.  A wooden cabinet housed a bayonet and gun collection, including a German Mauser rifle with walnut stock made in 1917.  Boxes on the floor held transistors, bolts and screws, a soldering gun, vacuum tubes, bullets, colored wires, typewriter parts, and ink ribbons.

My uncle’s decline began after I moved away.  His only living brother moved to Australia, and he lost both his mother and his sister to cancer.  Winston got laid off during a recession and never landed another job.  He earned a little money by doing chores for widows in the neighborhood: cutting grass, repairing plumbing and electricity.  He could fix anything.

Diabetes affected his eyesight, and eventually Winston went blind.  We tried to find a home for him with assisted-living care, but he insisted on staying in the house he knew best.  His daily menu never varied: frozen waffles in the morning and chicken nuggets at night.  Blind, vulnerable, gullible, he made a perfect target for the grifters who prey on senior citizens, and on four separate occasions they cleaned out his bank account.  Each time he lost his life savings he responded sheepishly, “Oops, I think I made another mistake,” and never gave it another thought.  Though my uncle caused the rest of us endless worry, he seemed perfectly content.

In the last decade of his life, something amazing happened to my uncle Winston.  All the goodness and kindness he had shown to others came back to him, like a boomerang.  When he wore his World War II Veteran hat, strangers offered to buy him lunch.  A nearby church signed him up for Meals on Wheels, adding much-needed nutrition to his diet.  The widows he had helped in the neighborhood volunteered to take him to the doctor and to the grocery store.  His next-door neighbor offered to sort his mail and pay his bills.  A younger couple faithfully stopped by to let him pet their two dogs.

A woman connected with an organization that helps the visually impaired got him a reading machine and helped monitor his insulin doses.  She and her husband invited him to church, which he had not attended since childhood, and after he got used to the new music my uncle sat on the front row every Sunday, singlehandedly raising the median age of one of Atlanta’s hip churches.  A business executive became Winston’s best friend, spending many hours to help him negotiate the Veterans Administration and other bureaucracies.  An African-American caregiver lovingly put both the house and my uncle into an order he had never known.

Thanks to these good-hearted people, my uncle was neither homeless nor friendless.  And each of them told me, “The pleasure we get from being with your uncle far exceeds anything we might have given to him.”  Winston continued his full, rich life even though he spent most of his time in the reclining chair by the front door.  His friends and neighbors brought the world to him.

You would not know that, if you had wandered into the VA hospital and noticed my uncle sitting with the other damaged veterans in the waiting room.  You would think, “Poor guy, what a sad life he must lead.”  You would be wrong.

My uncle Winston died this summer at the age of 86.  He has changed forever the way I look at people, especially those I am tempted to judge by appearance.  The vagrant with the hand-lettered “Will Work For Food” sign at the street corner.  The disabled child who interrupts church with loud grunts and groans.  The tattoo-covered juveniles smoking in front of a drug rehab facility.  The refugees swarming into Europe.  I do not know their stories, but if I did I would likely discover behind them a mother, a compassionate friend, or perhaps a nephew, who sees past the appearance to the real person inside.

In the summer of the Great Depression, James Agee wrote a book about the Alabama sharecroppers he interviewed on assignment for Fortune magazine.  He gave it the ironic title, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  The men and women he profiled were anything but famous, the very embodiment of Southern poverty.  This is what he learned:

All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.

The biblical Book of Hebrews says something similar, in fewer words: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

 

 

 

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Jesus and Miracles

Having written books with titles like Where Is God When It Hurts and Disappointment with God, I hear from a lot of people who recount their unanswered prayers for physical healing. When I wrote Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? I interviewed several dozen physicians and always asked, “Have you ever seen a bona fide supernatural healing of one of your patients?  Most would think for a moment and come up with one, or maybe two, but none said, “Sure, all the time.”

Then a physician friend of mine told me about  Miracles: the Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, a meticulous two-volume study by theologian Craig Keener. This is what my friend wrote:

I was ready to “see through” yet another theologian who didn’t know much about psychosomatic illnesses, temporary improvements with no long-term follow up, incorrect medical diagnoses, conversion disorders, faked cures, self-deception, and the like. Keener’s book would no doubt be instructive, would add more information to my pool of learning, would refine a bit this world view I had been working on for so many decades. So I opened the book, plowed through the philosophical chapters, and came to the chapters of case studies.

I was blind-sided.

Keener reports literally thousands of cases in these two volumes. I read them with the critical eye of a skeptic having many years of medical practice under the belt. I found many reports to be unreliable. In most other cases where reporting seemed accurate, I could see alternative, naturalistic explanations for the cures.

But “most” cases is not the same thing as “all.” Not by a long shot. And it was the minority (still numbering in the hundreds) that I found to be stunning. They couldn’t just be dismissed with a knowing answer and a cheery wave of the hand. With respect to my world view, I had had the chair pulled out from underneath me.

Around the same time, I had a close-up encounter with an apparent healing with no easy medical explanation.  Another friend was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, with liver involvement—an almost certain death sentence.  She went through chemotherapy and, to the doctors’ amazement, five months after the treatment had stopped, the tumor started shrinking.  Two years out from the diagnosis, she has regained full strength and energy, and doctors can find no sign of active tumor cells.  She credits her visits to the Christian Healing Ministries founded by Francis and Judith MacNutt.

After reading Keener’s book, I too find it impossible to dismiss that remarkable healings take place, often in response to prayer.  Having watched my friend virtually resurrect from skin-and-bones and 10 percent of normal energy, I celebrate her recovery with joy.  I’m sure I’ll continue to hear from people who lost a child or other loved one despite fervent prayers.  Yet, like my physician friend, I’ve become less skeptical of miraculous healing.

Sorting through all this, I went back to a study I once did of Jesus’ miracles.  The following observations do not constitute a “philosophy of miracles” by any means, but this is what I found:

1) The Gospels record about three dozen incidents of miracle, some of them group healings.  Although very impressive to the afflicted people and to eyewitnesses, the miracles affected a relatively small number of people who lived in one tiny corner of the world.  For example, no Europeans or Chinese felt Jesus’ healing touch.  Clearly, he did not come to solve “the problem of pain” while on earth.

2) Jesus resisted miracles “on demand,” to prove himself, even when he had splendid opportunities to do so: before Herod, with Satan in the wilderness, in response to the religious authorities.  He rebuked those who asked for a miraculous sign, calling them “a wicked and adulterous generation.”

3) Jesus often hushed up his miracles, ordering people to “Tell no one” about them.  He seemed wary of the kind of faith that miracles may produce: an attraction for show or for magic, not the kind of lifelong commitment he required.

4) In the Gospel accounts, spectacular miracles usually create distance, not intimacy.  For instance, when Jesus calmed the storm on a lake, his own disciples drew away from him, terrified.  Could this help explain why he interfered with nature so rarely?

5) People in Jesus’ day found it no easier to believe in miracles than do people in our modern, skeptical age.  The Pharisees in John 9 held a formal inquiry in order to disprove the blind man’s report of healing.  Similarly, they responded to Lazarus’s resurrection by seeking another opportunity to finish him off.  Most astonishingly, the Roman soldiers who witnessed the greatest miracle, the Resurrection, experienced no great change of heart; instead, they changed their story in return for a payoff.

6) Most miracles of healing came as a result of Jesus’ compassion—the sight of a suffering person moved him deeply.  Yet several times Jesus fled from crowds who were pressing him for ever more miracles.

7) “Spiritual” miracles tended to excite Jesus more than physical ones.  The scene with the paralytic lowered through the roof makes this point well.  “Which is easier,” Jesus asked, “to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’?”  Jesus’ entire ministry provides an answer: physical healing was far easier.  Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver’s part.  Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcize.  But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert.  (Why is it, I wonder, that many ministries are founded that focus on physical miracles, but I know of few organized to combat sins like legalism, pride, gluttony, lust, or greed.)

8) Though they did not solve all problems on earth, Jesus’ miracles were a sign of how the world should be, and someday will be.  They were at once a reminder of a broken world and a preview of the future.  In the words of R. C. Trench, “The healing of the sick can in no way be termed against nature, seeing that the sickness which was healed was against the true nature of man, that it is sickness which is abnormal, and not health.  The healing is the restoration of the primitive order.”

9) Jesus did no miracles for the purposes of fundraising, fame, or self-protection.  Unlike other miracle-workers, he did not try to encourage mystery or wonder, or appeal to a sense of magic.  And, denying his disciples’ requests, he never did miracles of retaliation.

10) Jesus also performed miracles to establish his credentials─so that when he declared who he was, he would have some evidence to back up the claim.  “Even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.”  (John 10:38)

I pray for miracles all the time—an instinctive human response when things go wrong.  And, as Craig Keener’s book impressively shows, miracles in our own time have been a key factor in the growth of the church in many places.  Edward Gibbon listed “The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church” as one of five reasons for the phenomenal growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

As I study the life of Jesus, I try to pray for miracles in the way that Jesus modeled.  I recognize that, in Paul’s words, “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth” (Romans 8:22) and will continue to do so until its final restoration.  In the meantime, I celebrate every miraculous healing as a powerful clue to what God intends for each of us who suffer—physically, mentally, or spiritually.

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Holy Subversives

I finally got around to watching The Butler, in which Forest Whitaker plays the fictionalized role of Eugene Allen, a White House butler who served eight U.S. presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan.  An African-American, Allen stood at the edge of the room as President Kennedy discussed with his brother Bobby when to send federal troops to force integration in the South, and as Lyndon Johnson and his aides (often with Johnson sitting on the toilet) debated the political risks of civil rights bills.

What do those people want? the Washington power brokers wondered aloud as blacks and their white supporters marched in Mississippi, Alabama, and Washington, D.C.  No doubt Eugene Allen could have told them, but as a loyal servant he offered opinions only when asked.  Once, President Eisenhower asked if Allen knew why one of his favorite TV shows, hosted by Nat “King” Cole, had been canceled.  The butler explained that the show had trouble lining up advertisers, who worried about the possibility of white Southern boycotts.

In the movie version, the butler’s son had a more confrontational response to racial oppression.  After training in nonviolent resistance, he joined the demonstrators who staged sit-ins at department store lunch counters. Angry whites doused the demonstrators with mustard and ketchup, then punched, kicked, and spat on them.  The protesters’ nonviolent response to such abuse helped change the national mood.

As I watched the intertwining stories of father and son, it occurred to me that the oppressed have a peculiar advantage, a kind of double vision.  Eugene Allen returned home at night longing for justice after listening to white politicians debate the pros and cons of granting it.  Likewise, antebellum house slaves spent their days among white masters of the plantation and retired to the slave cabins at night; they understood the nuances of both worlds.  And African-American protesters in Alabama could easily predict how the white sheriffs would respond to their marches and protests—Martin Luther King Jr. planned his strategy around their violent reactions—while the sheriffs had no clue about what to expect from the black protesters.

Jesus’ own stories reveal this double vision.  He spoke with equal ease about beggars and the wealthy, masters and servants, rabbis and crime victims.  Meanwhile, his encounters with rulers like Herod and Pilate left them scratching their heads in confusion.  Jesus understood them while they were clueless about him.  Paul wrote, “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:15).  A public spectacle it was indeed when the very powers and authorities that men and women took such pride in were exposed as false gods by Jesus.  The most refined religion of the day accused an innocent man, and the most far-reaching justice system of the day carried out the sentence.

In Vanishing Grace I use the term Holy Subversives to describe Christians’ strategy in a secular culture.  “I am like a spy in a higher service,” wrote Kierkegaard about his role.  He could see right through the hypocrisies surrounding him, and how they failed to measure up to Jesus’ ideals.  Now we live in a celebrity and success culture that judges worth by such qualities as beauty, power, fame, and wealth—the antithesis of Jesus’ message.  To resist that message requires constant vigilance, and a dedication to Jesus’ countercultural way of life.  “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Paul told the Romans.

We are “foreigners and exiles” in the world, according to 1 Peter, called to subvert whatever dishonors God or God’s image bearers.  “The world looks with some awe upon a person who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame,” said Winston Churchill.  “The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain…”

I would add that the world looks with awe on someone who responds to injustice not with the normal reaction of revenge or hate, but with the power of grace.  Martin Luther King Jr. once preached a sermon on “Loving Your Enemies”:

To our most bitter opponents we say: “… Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you.  We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.  Throw us in jail and we shall still love you.  Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you.  Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you.  But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.  One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves.  We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.”

After the massacre at Emanuel AME church in Charleston, there were no riots or outbreaks of violence.  Instead, relatives of the victims stood before the racist killer one by one, and in the midst of their grief extended to him forgiveness.  The victims’ families understood hate, and violent oppression, but they understood something deeper as well: the power of grace.  Within weeks politicians who had long resisted calls to remove the Confederate flag from state properties in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia changed their minds.  What happened in South Carolina “calls upon us to look at this in a different way,” said the governor of South Carolina.  “By removing a symbol that divides us, we can move forward as a state in harmony and we can honor the nine blessed souls who are in heaven.”

Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist on living a different way.  We can make those around us at least question our society’s slide toward violence and polarization.  We can subvert our celebrity culture’s emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty.

Richard Foster, a Christian theologian and author in the Quaker tradition, cites a Jewish story about a little boy who went to a prophet and said, “Prophet, don’t you see?  You have been prophesying now for fifteen years, and things are still the same.  Why do you keep on?”  And the prophet said, “Don’t you know, little boy, I’m not prophesying to change the world, but to prevent the world from changing me.”  To resist requires a spirit something like subversion.  And sometimes, as happened in Charleston, it also helps change the world.

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