Providence

Continuing on in the vein of my last post, I ended up writing a long and melodramatic tome on the providence of God. Watching the patterns emerge was hard; in some ways writing about it was almost as difficult. But also instructive in the way I've learned only hard lessons can be.

Anyone who has read a lot of Dickens knows he had an affinity for connecting everyone and everything in a nice loop at the end of his books. There were no coincidences and if you wondered what the hell was the point of discussing Jerry Cruncher’s grave robbing excursions, you just had to wait til the end of the story and you’d find out. Sometimes you have to wonder if God isn’t writing a Dickens novel and telling you the end would spoil it.

 As my motto says, God often works by contraries. Perhaps that's why James tells us to append "if the Lord wills" to any statement. We really don’t know what his secret plans are. And, as I've said, of all things we can be thankful to God for I think that’s one of the most valuable. We have no idea what he has in mind, only that it’s ultimately for some good. We pray earnestly to be conformed to the likeness of his son, to be used in some way, with no idea how he is going to answer those prayers. When he does, it’s usually in very surprising and sometimes unwanted ways. In my experience the times I see a definite answer have mostly been bone crushingly painful and I think “if I’d known this is what he was going to do I would have taken it all back”.

As I have often said, we go along brokering little deals with God, ignorant to the fact that he isn’t in the contract business and his silence isn’t acquiescence. Until we get to the point where he’s supposed to keep his end of the bargain, and he reneges. As we ride along one way, thinking "the Lord's SO in this" He turns. Hard. It's like how when you learn to ride a bike and take a turn too fast resulting in the bike going one way and you another. It ends with a thudding stop at the ground, a face full of dirt and many tears. The value is in what you learn from it.

It’s been a decade of learning from the fall. I think about the person I was then, and I know that without the falling down, I could never become the person I am. I know that God has been working providentially in all things to answer my immature prayers; they are too coincidental in the Dickensian sense to be anything else. And too painful and hard. It’s kind of amazing how he pushed and pulled me through it all to make the new me.  I would have never been able to do what I am doing now at 24. Would never have been able to be the person I am now. And part of me still laments that it took everything that it did to make me grow up. I know that it’s not all about me, but in the end these little things are how he brings us closer to him. And I want to thank him for all the hell he brought into my life that I could be outfitted for heaven. Working in contraries again.

**Then I wrote a bunch of what turns out to be insignificant details to advance the thesis. Let it be known that it was advanced. "Testimonies" often become hopelessly narcissistic and the forest becomes lost for the trees. But I have to give credit where credit is due, and as James said, know it was the Lord’s will that I would do this or that thing. He had and has bigger plans than me making it through the last ten years. Obviously I am to work for the good of my neighbours in my vocation, and in so doing become a mask of God and a means by which he acts providentially in their lives. He will make the differences through my small gestures of kindness. He will conform others to the likeness of his Son.

It’s pretty staggering when you realize that everything you’ve gone through isn’t just for your benefit but for the benefit of others. That he is going to keep that cycle going and continue to glorify his name in all the earth. And it’s like man. Despite how many times I showed up in the story, it’s nothing but a footnote in a serial. This wasn’t about me at all. I am Jerry Cruncher robbing graves.

I asked the Lord, foolishly perhaps

    It's Thanksgiving weekend here. I'm not averse to giving praise where it's due and I have a lot to be thankful for this time around. More than I can even speak of. I usually start bawling when I think about how much better my prospects in life are now than they were a year ago when the only thing I had to be thankful for was that Jesus was coming back at some point to destroy the world, and certain places with it.

     Needless to say I've had a bit of a reversal of fortune in the last month or so. It feels a little like the epilogue of Job, when the narrator says "don't worry, God gave him all his awesome accoutrements back".  Like waking to hear the birds singing and thinking maybe all that horribleness was just a dream because everything is right again. You have your life back. But as you regain conciousness, there's something different. Like a lump in the throat, a knowledge, a qualitative change in feeling that grows stronger the more you remember.

     I still have everything I ever wanted and needed, but it's not the same. These are different children and a different house; and moreover, I am a different human being. I saw God in the eye of a whirlwind--standing at the very epicentre of the hell my life had become.

     John Newton wrote a dark and plaintive hymn on that experience. The failure of every plan, the destruction of all you held dear by God himself. All is lost and all you can do is trust in the one who slays you. And that's where he meets you--in the pits of death, clinging tenuously to what life you have left, crying with all the pain of your soul. Job himself would have understood so well.

I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;
Might more of His salvation know,
And seek, more earnestly, His face.

’Twas He who taught me thus to pray,
And He, I trust, has answered prayer!
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.

I hoped that in some favored hour,
At once He’d answer my request;
And by His love’s constraining pow’r,
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this, He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry pow’rs of hell
Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more, with His own hand He seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe;
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried,
Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
“’Tis in this way, the Lord replied,
I answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I employ,
From self, and pride, to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou may’st find thy all in Me.”

    When the birds are singing in the morning, one can't help but note how silent they were mere hours before. And you know you're never going to forget what the silence was like. Because God has stepped in and changed you, and in that, everything around you. Just not in the way you ever expected.  To paraphrase Luther, he took you to heaven by way of hell. And heaven seems so much more beautiful knowing what hell was like.

And man. Who the hell writes hymns like this anymore?

B Team

As you all know, I enjoy history of theology. Usually when we study the history of faith we like to emphasize the stalwart heroes. Those are good and inspiring stories after all. We all know how much Athanasius suffered and how brilliantly he fought both the Arians and the progressive Originians (at least you should if you've ever read this blog). Luther was a lighting rod with the strength to withstand the charge that began the reformation that was years in the making.

Yet we know that for every Athanasius there's a Liberius and for every Luther there's a Melanchthon. The ones who fell down a few times. Hard. I find that people with no experience of such pressure and a Donatist streak in their hearts like to reach through the ages to push them down all over again. Yet in many ways, they exemplify the struggles of the faithful better than their stronger contemporaries. Not everyone has the strength to stand contra mundum. Not everyone is meant to. We repeat the story of Peter's betrayal, understanding he was forgiven, but often do not extend the same to those who followed after him.

So I love Athanasius and Luther, but I understand Liberius and Melanchthon. And I think if most of us were honest with ourselves we would. We aren't Athanasiuses (as much as we would like to pretend we are while arguing with losers on the internet). We don't have his brilliance or his foresight or his ability to know which battles to pick and how to pick them. Most of us are b team with the other rejects.

Liberius had both the weight of exile and of his flock back at home on his shoulders. In the end it proved too hard to be separated from them all. His lapse was certainly a disappointment and it seems he tried hard to forget it. He capsized in humiliation and weakness.

I have often thought Philipp Melanchthon was a man in some ways out of his own time, faulted for lacking conviction and being too conciliatory (today he'd probably be commended for his irenicism). He seemed so unsuited to the role foistered on to him-the scholar now following around in Luther's wake like a clean up crew of one, apologizing for all the destruction. He tried hard to build bridges--but too often those bridges led to nowhere and he wavered and foundered in trying to build them. While he did show weakness of conviction, he struggled to do what he thought was best. It turned out it wasn't.

As much as I'd like to hang with Athanasius, this sounds like my team.

In the end I think we need to give the less than heroic brothers a break. They have much to teach us. If the Christian life really is one of repentance as Melanchthon's great friend said, it requires some ugly and abject defeats. But our failures could not give up on the faithfulness of God even when they had to give up on themselves as sunken wrecks and disappointments. They, not the heroes, are the ones who remind us of the faithfulness of God in Christ to the faithless, to the broken. When one is sinking in the sea, one can only reach out in one direction. In weakness, they can only point to him.

I am the man

Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

So it's been a few years since this was the daily cry of my heart. For awhile it seemed every day was one of lamenting, one saturated with the stench of blood, filth and death. And I guess most days still are. I would say I am a different person now than I was then, and it was in part on this anvil this new me was shaped. I remember the afflictions and the wanderings. As do we all.

Things are in better perspective now than they were then I suppose. But I've been thinking lately about the gospel of the man who has seen affliction again from this new perspective-I guess I'm in a reflective mood and things keep reminding me of my time of wallowing in it. It is still powerful, still horrifying and still beautiful.

At the time I wept many tears and spilled much ink (probably melodramatically) echoing and pondering the cries of the suffering poet of the lamentations-especially the central work of the book, the third lament. The only one that carried in it words of hope, the one that personified the horror and points to life in death. It is pure gospel.

It is a world of judgment and pain into which steps the man of the lament. He is the archetype of human experience. He suffers God's wrath. He is brought down in darkness, walks in death. As we do. He is a chilling mirror to the torment of our souls.

To think that when God became a man, when he entered the broken world clothed in flesh, it was to this he came. This was the cry he took upon himself and made his own. Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus and perhaps this is what he cried; I have seen affliction. The wail of agony from the man suffering in his sins became his-indeed none could take it as he did. And he did take it-to the grave and back again. It was he who lay in the dust silently with our yoke of iron around his neck-a yoke that strangled and killed, one that no man could bear. But he bore it. And there in the midst of death and judgment he came giving a yoke that is easy, one of life and hope.

Though it may be hard to see in the darkness of the pit of despair, hope is there. For he is there. The man who was filled with our disgrace and came near when we were in the pit. He came, the man who was God himself, and showed that he had not cast us off forever. There in the pit of death he descended to us. There he wept for our destruction, and there he redeemed our lives as his was vindicated when he rose. We don't deserve this dark and painful grace, the beauty and power of the cross. We are scum and refuse. Yet he takes up our case.

The years have abated the sorrows with which I cried this lament. It is however as stark and profound a proclamation of the gospel as ever. Though I no longer struggle through it, it still has the power to make me weep-though now from a new perspective. Praise God that he has given such voice to the cries of our hearts and more than that taken them himself in the person of Christ.

The Lord indeed is good to those whose hope is in him.

In Christ...

A Christian is an impregnable person. He is a person that never can be conquered. Emmanuel became man to make the church and every Christian to be one with him. Christ's nature is out of danger of all that is hurtful. The sun shall not shine, the wind shall not blow, to the church's hurt. For the church's Head ruleth over all things and hath all things in subjection. Therefore let all the enemies consult together, this king and that power, there is a counsel in heaven which will disturb and dash all their counsels. Emmanuel in heaven laugheth them to scorn.

Richard Sibbes

As I'm sure you all know I love Richard Sibbes (have you read the Bruised Reed yet?). I was reminded of this quote once again by the struggles of an acquaintance.It's one of my faves.

Sibbes here reminds me a little of Torah and Numbers in particular. Nothing could prevent God from delivering his people, not the many enemies without nor the people delivered. Just so, nothing can prevent Christ from fully redeeming his church. He has already done it in fact and if we are in Christ, we have nothing to fear from what may be done to us or even from ourselves and our own weaknesses. Even the enemy of self is under his subjugation. For those of us bleeding out from self-inflicted wounds it is powerful to remember that he controls all things and works them together for the good of his people. Of course this turns our normal perception on it's head for it means that when evil comes there is ultimately goodness hidden in the evil which we receive by Christ. All our sufferings are good, even those self-inflicted ones. Evil then is turned in on itself by the power of the crucified and risen Christ.

Of course we are not safe from evil because we are special, get things right, or feel the right way, but because we are in Christ. We are weak and we fail and pain comes, but Christ has succeeded even when we feel like utter failures. Christ is victorious even when we feel like we have been completely conquered by others' cruelty or our weaknesses. No suffering harms us in Christ. In Christ. No two sweeter words may comfort us in trial. All the promises of God find their yes in Christ. That is why it is through him we utter our amen to God-for his glory.

Ultimately it is all about him and his glory, glory revealed in suffering, Christ's and ours. This is why God upholds us-for Christ's sake and for the glory of his Name. Not because one day we would "pay him back" and be a good return investment. No from beginning to end, salvation is of God and he alone. That is why we may rest so securely in it, That is why we can laugh with God to the scorn of his enemies (and our old man is certainly one of them) and not fear what they may or may not do. He will do what he has set out to accomplish, and he has set out to make us his own sons, at one with him. These sufferings are his way of making it happen.

And finally when we are revealed as the sons of God and with Christ in his glory we will see just how powerful our God is. On that day I'm sure we'll laugh at how foolish we were to cower fearfully in the impenetrable fortress that is Christ-which even now we reside in.


Anyway that is where my mind has been wandering lately.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I remember thinking how actively my dad embodied the command of this famous poem as he lay in his hospital bed. It's powerful refrain played in my mind as he fought for every slow breath that he could gasp, as his heart sluggishly pushed blood through his veins just one more time... If there ever was one to fight the dying of the light, he was the one. He lived for almost two years though his prognosis was for a few months. He just stubbornly held on.

My dad used to think he would die of a heart attack; "the Moores all have weak hearts" he'd say. His father and uncles all died when their weak hearts gave out on them. But he had a Smith heart, a strong one that fought like hell to continue beating. He was always more like his mother anyway. We told him as much as he lay there battling for another minute, another second. Obstinacy comes from the Smith side too.

It has been a year, and that strong Smith heart is probably worm food by now. However sad I may continue to be for existing in a world that does not include him, there is yet joy. Not just in knowing he is with Christ, finally knowing what it really is like to be perfect (and humble! I can't wait to see what that's like, heh) but his heart will one day beat strong again in a new body, in a new world. One that has been redeemed and freed from death, as surely as our foolish and darkened hearts have been.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

From Athanasius; the bishop of Alexandria, Father of orthodoxy, and my favorite church father:

If... it is by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ That death is trampled underfoot, it is clear that it is Christ Himself and none other Who is the Archvictor over death and has robbed it of its power.

Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and resurrection of His body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ Who mounted on the cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally.

When the sun rises after the night and the whole world is lit Up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven away the dark. Equally clear is it, since this utter scorning and trampling down of death has ensued upon the Savior's manifestation in the body and His death on the cross, that it is He Himself Who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to His victory in His own disciples. How can you think otherwise, when you see men naturally weak hastening to death, unafraid at the prospect of corruption, fearless of the descent into Hades, even indeed with eager soul provoking it, not shrinking from tortures, but preferring thus to rush on death for Christ's sake, rather than to remain in this present life?

If you see with your own eyes men and women and children, even, Thus welcoming death for the sake of Christ's religion, how can you be so utterly silly and incredulous and maimed in your mind as not to realize that Christ, to Whom these all bear witness, Himself gives the victory to each, making death completely powerless for those who hold His faith and bear the sign of the cross? No one in his senses doubts that a snake is dead when he sees it trampled underfoot, especially when he knows how savage it used to be; nor, if he sees boys making fun of a lion, does he doubt that the brute is either dead or completely bereft of strength. These things can be seen with our own eyes, and it is the same with the conquest of death.

Doubt no longer, then, when you see death mocked and scorned by those who believe in Christ, that by Christ death was destroyed, and the corruption that goes with it resolved and brought to end.

I admit it, I bawled like a little gel the first time I read this. I think Athanasius is the only person who could draw that kind of emotion with sheer polemics (usually polemics stir rather different feelings in people, heh).

Though it is not the main point of his argument, Athanasius' acknowledgement of
1)death as a powerful enemy and,
2)Christ as the Archvictor over death which then is something we who follow him can scorn,
is such a different tack then the one often taken in the church today. It is a far superior tack if you ask me. No "christians are happy about death because it is a release from the world of woe and we are glad to be going home". Rather Athanasius builds his argument assuming everyone realizes what a horrible enemy death is. When death does come, it does not feel like something natural or good-because it is not. Our hope is not the "release" of death, but rather that we belong the one who forced death to release him from it's bonds. And he will carry those who cling to his cross back with him.
After masses of hollow platitudes about death that seem to cover the painful wounds only slightly, Athanasius comforts with a much better balm.

Future generations: When I die, do read this exerpt at my funeral. If you say I have "gone home" or "left the mortal coil" I will make a point of coming back to the mortal coil to haunt you.