Relocating To Elfland

A part of great preaching is to be able to say something once and have it stick, to say it so vividly and well that it is instantly memorable. The preacher who has to say the same thing four times to make the lights go on is wasting three attempts, which suggests the lights are dimly lit in his own mind. Lacking a scalpel, he must flail about with his machete, and his audience is in for a very long sermon.

I recently listened to an interview with Kenda Creasy Dean on the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Dean is a professor at Princeton Seminary, served as a researcher with the National Study of Youth and Religion, and has recently written a book (based on her work with the NSYR) titled Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. Here are her opening few lines from the interview: “I think one of the things that is really tricky, particularly to convey to parents, and to congregations as well, is that if you are trying to form your kids to be Christians, it’s not going to fit them very well for American culture. And actually, it’s probably going to deform them for some of the things that we value as a society. And nobody wants to deform their kids – everybody wants their kids to fit in, and to be able to do well.”

This is a call to discipleship that many Christian parents simply won’t embrace. They want their kids to have everything that’s valuable by the standards of North American culture – comfortable affluence, popularity, sex appeal, social experience, all the toys and perks and bells and whistles – and they hope their kids will somehow also want to be in church and keep their virginity as long as possible. The idea that following Jesus might deform their children from the standpoint of cultural values, that maybe their kids won’t fit right in and succeed in all the paths their peers are treading . . . it’s unthinkable. Jesus wouldn’t require such a thing.

Having grown up in separatist Christianity, I’m sensitive to the problem of Christians making themselves “weird” for weirdness’ sake. There’s no problem, for example, with Christians being comfortably affluent – for some, it’s their calling. For every one of us, not to work hard in order to have for purposes of enjoyment and generosity is simple disobedience. But anyone who thinks a life fully oriented to the glory of God won’t make you look weird by North American standards is asleep to the cost of Christian discipleship. Christian faithfulness doesn’t fit in. Get over it.

People say a preacher must preach to an audience of One. That’s ridiculous. God didn’t ordain preaching because He needs to hear it, but because His people need to hear it. It is true, however, that a preacher must preach for the approval of One. And in this he must be resolute.

“Leaders choose daily, but the real weight on their shoulders lies in the need to decide. And there are no easy decisions. To decide requires a death, a dying to a thousand options, the putting aside of a legion of possibilities in order to choose just one. De-cide. Homo-cide. Sui-cide. Patri-cide. The root word decidere means ‘to cut off.’ All decisions cut us off, separate us, from nearly infinite options as we select just one single path. And every decision we make earns us the favor of some and the disfavor of others.” (Dan B. Allender, Leading with a Limp)

A primary reason why many of us need to be spending more time in the presence of our Lord is not so much that we need to be reminded of His majesty as that we need to be reminded of His joy.

We’ve been talking in Bible school the past two weeks about what it means to be the church in the world but not of it (read: the Christ and culture problem). Here’s a brilliant example of cultural engagement that hasn’t lost any of its Christian teeth.

Today is the fifth anniversary of my ordination to the gospel ministry. It seems appropriate to pause on the occasion for a bit of ruminating.

Pastoral ministry has given me a perspective nothing else could have on life in our 21st century North America (having never lived anywhere else, I can’t comment on things elsewhere). One particular sensation stands out from the past five years, and it illuminates the perspective I’m referring to. The sensation – which I experience acutely and regularly – is that of spinning my wheels, of being crushingly busy all the time while not being at all sure what I’m accomplishing. Now, this is very similar to another sensation which is merely the result of finitude: we never see in this life all God is doing in us and through us, but we remain cheerful, because we know He’s doing something and it’s good to be part of it. What I’m describing is quite different: it’s a fairly clear-sighted sense that the value of my work doesn’t match the voluminous energy I am pouring into it. Before someone takes this as an unconvincing attempt at self-deprecation (or, worse still, an outburst of self-pity), let me explain.

I believe a pastor’s most important work is to study and ponder the goodness, truth, and beauty of God (we could bundle all of this into that wonderful biblical phrase, the glory of God). Why? Because his second-most important work is introducing other people (his sheep, in particular) to the goodness, truth, and beauty of God. And the reason for this is that God created humankind to know, ponder, adore, and image His goodness, truth, and beauty – this (borrowing language from Wendell Berry) is what people are for.

I could not have expected, five years ago, how nearly impossible it would be to fence out time for my most important work. “Oh, brother, another pastor complaining about time management.” No, that’s not where I’m going with this at all. In fact, the very mention of time management is an indicator of what I really want to strike at, something I have come to believe runs so deep in our modern thinking that we no longer perceive how pernicious it is.

I expend an utterly astonishing amount of time as a pastor doing two things. First, I administrate. That is, I organize and oversee vast amounts of labor foisted on us by our modern labor saving devices: dozens of phone calls (which can at best be postponed by letting a queue pile up on my answering machine); flurries of emails surrounding every event in the life of the church (not to mention hundreds more that pop into my inbox because someone thinks I may have a boredom problem); hours of time on the information superhighway making sure I don’t sound like an idiot if (God forbid!) I miss something someone else believes newsworthy; and a half that has not yet been told. From the time I roll out of bed until I fall back into bed – at home, in the study, and on the road – I am constantly managing a massive jet stream of data and communications.

Second, I solve problems. I give input (lots of it) on crises (lots of them). Some crises pertain to the beehive as a whole; many others arise in the personal lives of individuals. All are “urgent”; some are genuinely important. But on any given day, I have (to throw out a number) twenty such crises that may, in one way or another, erupt and demand my attention. And I don’t mind this at all, except that when I’ve finished addressing the latest crisis, I often wonder if truly sustainable progress has been made. Crisis aversion is not, after all, the same thing as construction.

Which leads me, finally, to what I have discovered about life in 21st century North America: We are a society (as Chesterton never tired of saying in his context) that values utility above all else. There are things to be done, there are problems to be solved, we want to get these things done (we especially want the problems solved), and we never ask why any of it should be done. We don’t stop to ponder the greater purposes for human existence, and so we have no real reason to ask why sending the next email or making the next phone call is more important than, say, taking an afternoon off to think about why God made apricots, or to read the work of Girard Manley Hopkins, or to play checkers with grandmother. If all that matters is getting things done, it is not long before the supreme virtue in society is efficiency, speed of execution, and acquisition of the technical skills that make one competitive in the marketplace of productivity. It is not long, in fact, before humans are commodified: before their value is determined by how quickly and how well they can do whatever it is society is doing. Entire educational institutions exist to give their students the technical skills to do things – never mind whether students have the foggiest notion what it means to do nothing and think; never mind if truth has ever captivated them, if they love beauty or can even recognize it, if they are passionate about goodness or even regard good and evil as differentiable – certainly never mind whether they have ever worshipped, or ever will.

Of course, the fact that utility and efficiency are ultimately soulless does have its complications. We can’t escape our created humanness, and eventually we feel the emptiness of a life filled with merely doing things. We can’t sustain meaningful relationships, notwithstanding all our skill at keeping in touch; we feel like we’re drifting even when we’re on task; we’re bored even though we’re completely over-stimulated. Enter the therapy industry, with its offer of efficient solutions to make us feel as if we have a soul. If our circuitry is misfiring, we need to be reprogrammed – be it through medication, catharsis counseling, positive thinking, yoga, or what have you.

Personally, I think the therapy industry, like our educational industry, and the time management industry, and a whole lot of what passes as “pastoral ministry,” is largely a product of the system it proposes to improve. We need to radically reconsider our most basic cultural understanding of what people are for, of what it means to be created human in God’s image.

Let me take this directly to the church and offer but one “for instance.” Do you want to have a more meaningful, more connected, more joyful family life? You don’t need a therapist for your marriage and your kids; you need to spend more time as a family doing what God made people for. You need to read the great books together (especially The Great Book, until its grand story of the world captures your imagination, and begins to shape your sense of what you’re doing in the world). You need to eat together, and linger over it. You need to play games together. You need to sing and pray together. You need to grow flowers and raise gerbils and catch fish and practice archery and recite poems and look at the Milky Way through a telescope on cold winter nights. You need to turn off the phone and the computer and the television until you have a clear idea, individually and as a family, of what the purpose of humankind might be, and what this has to do with goodness, truth, beauty, and glory. And only once all of this is clear in your heads should you flatter yourselves that you’re qualified to use the tools the modern world has given us.

The trouble with truth, goodness, beauty, and glory is that they aren’t things we do and they aren’t in the same universe as questions about utility (much less efficiency). What is the “use” of glory? It isn’t useful. It’s glorious. Its value lies in itself, which to apprehend is the life of the soul.

If I have a burning desire for the next five years of my ministry, it is that I may waste more time pondering, savoring, recounting, and enacting the goodness, truth, and beauty of the Lord. I have wasted time doing so here, and it has seemed a fitting way to celebrate the anniversary at hand.

At the heart of manly leadership is the dogged pursuit of horizons one will not reach, of goals one will not attain, without the skills and resources one needs, without self-pity, and without understanding or sympathy from others. If a man demands more than this, he should find a different calling.

During my studies of Reformed worship in seminary, I was introduced to something called the “collect,” a particular form of prayer. At my professor’s recommendation, I picked up a book titled The Collects of Thomas Cranmer, edited by C. Frederick Barbee and Paul F. M. Zahl, and have found this form of prayer to be eminently useful in my own prayer life.

A collect is a short prayer made up (usually) of five parts. The following is a well-known collect that will enable us to identify each of the parts:

“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

Notice the five elements:

1. The Address. This is a name or title of God that He has revealed to us, in this case, “Almighty God.”

2. The Acknowledgment. This is a quality or attribute of God upon which the petition to follow is based. The petition in the above collect is for cleansing of thoughts, so the particular qualities of God that are noted relate to His omniscience (His knowing all things, including the thoughts of our hearts).

3. The Petition. This is the precise thing asked for (a specific need). In the above instance, it is cleansing of our thoughts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

4. The Aspiration. This part is generally introduced by the word “that” and discloses the purpose for which we ask the petition. Here, we desire perfectly to love God and worthily to magnify His holy name; this is the purpose for which we ask His cleansing of our thoughts.

5. The Pleading. Finally, we plead the mediation of our Lord Jesus Christ. All prayer for all things must be made in His worthy name: “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

I hope to put up a number of collects in the coming months, and I would encourage readers to consider writing and praying their own collects as a way of introducing fresh order, clarity, and beauty into their private prayers.

There’s an interesting scene in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that bears on one of my growing pastoral burdens. To sketch the burden first, I believe there are certain “pillar” virtues in a human life (and in a human society) which, when they collapse, bring down with them whole tenements of other virtues. One of these “pillar” virtues is reverence: a heartfelt fear and awe and respect in the presence of sacred things, in the presence of things loftier than oneself. This virtue has pretty well disappeared in North America. We tremble at little or nothing anymore, except the occasional horrific tragedy (before the media reduces it to banality), and perhaps the thought that Washington may take awhile restoring economic comfort. God doesn’t scare us; parents and politicians are a joke; goodness and truth are lost in cynical caricatures; beauty lies beneath airy subjectivism; evil fails to impress after eighteen thousand crime shows; and even death is blunted by agnosticism and rosy myths about a better place. Tradition is funny, marriage is passé, love is sex, and sex is cheap. There’s nothing we can’t blow off, nothing before which we fall on our faces, veil our eyes, lay our hands on our mouths. There is no holy ground. (In fairness, one does occasionally sense something like religious fervor in defense of the notion that everyone should be free – and subsidized – to do exactly as he or she pleases.)

As the death of reverence is particularly epidemic in the rising generation (people my age and younger), I have begun to judge the quality of a young person by what, if anything, awes them. I want to see what it takes to erase the James Dean gleam of insolence in their eyes (or the Jerry Seinfeld glint of mockery) and replace it with something like what one sees in the eyes of young soldiers before the battle of their lives, or the eyes of third world sufferers of famine, or the eyes of eastern mystics in the presence of their master. I want to see what produces fear, what evokes deep sobriety, what stirs something approximating humility.

Sadly, among the Christian youth I know the answer is not, by and large, the Almighty. Even if they display some attentiveness during the rituals of corporate worship (hardly a given!), God is no imposition on their thoughts and lives elsewhere (an occasional flicker of conscience doth not reverence make). What fear of God they possess they would cheerfully lay aside, at least to the extent it impinges on their freedom. This is not universally true, by any means, but it is far too much the norm among those whose defining mark is to be the fear of the Lord. But why is this?

I think the answer, in short, is that we presume on the patience of God. God is slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness and faithfulness; and while He stays His hand, we draw the wrong inference, and stop taking His majesty seriously. This is what happens in Narnia when Aslan lets himself be bound and dragged to the Stone Table. He makes his way toward the assembly of his enemies. “A howl and a gibber of dismay went up from the creatures when they first saw the great Lion pacing toward them, and for a moment even the Witch herself seemed to be struck with fear.” The evil rabble, like Lucy and Susan, hold their breaths, waiting for Aslan’s roar and spring; but it never comes. “Four Hags, grinning and leering, yet also (at first) hanging back and half afraid of what they had to do” approach him. As he patiently submits, the murderous crowd begins its task; soon they are so emboldened as to kick the Lion, hit him, spit on him, and jeer at him with “mean laughter.” And in the end, they seem to succeed.

Of course, we know the rest of the story. Aslan rises and triumphs over his enemies. And so will the Lord Christ over all of His enemies.

Now to be clear: I am not saying that lack of reverence among God’s people necessarily means we have gone over to the side of His enemies and will share their fate. But if it does not mean that, it is perhaps even worse, because we are failing to honor and love and stand in awe of the Lord who has claimed us as His subjects, His friends, His brethren, and His children – and if it is folly not to fear a great king who is one’s enemy, it is inexcusable wickedness not to fear a great and good king who is one’s father and benefactor. And this, sad to say, is where a lot of us in the North American church have arrived. We have no more respect for the Lord our God than for anything else in our shallow lives – and this in the teeth of His patience and kindness!

What might be done? I mention but two things, almost at random. First, it should be obvious that it all begins in parenting. A child who does not reverence his father and mother, who does not rise up before the hoary head, is a poor candidate for the fear of the Lord. Second, I think some attention need be given to details of corporate worship that cultivate reverence, such as kneeling for confession of sin. Our bodies were made for worship, so posture is not a light matter. When we physically bow before the Lord, it forms a habitual way of thinking about who He is and who we are in His Presence. (I ponder, incidentally, whether the more reverent worship in other faiths and communions might not explain why there is such a draw toward Roman Catholicism among evangelicals, and toward Islam in the broader culture. Say what you will about bowing toward Mecca five times a day: it’s a statement about authority, transcendence, history, and awe; and the yearning of the heart for these things will simply not go away.)