A Picture? Or a Thousand Words?

I recently heard this narrow slice of our modern era—the late 20th, early 21st century—described as the “age of image.” The notion behind it being that our use of information today is primarily image-based rather than word-based. 

It’s not hard to see how this is true. Consider that in the last century we’ve seen not only the advent of digital media, but—going waaay back—of picture books for kids and pop-culture magazines that have had their verbiage squeezed out a little each decade by images. Our children today, and for the last couple of generations, really, have been raised, educated, pacified, and entertained with images. 

This would seem to speak to the old proverb that a picture is worth a thousand words. But is it? The answer, of course, depends on the words. For example, one picture cannot express…

• a mission statement
• your epitath
• a knock-knock joke
• what Emily Dickinson can with 10 words
• the simplest legal document

I understand what the maxim means to say: that some pictures—pieces of photo journalism come to mind—communicate ideas, truths, impressions that could not be captured in the same way with words. I don’t dispute that. But there’s a kind of job that images can’t do. They can’t argue. Not really. Images can’t present claims. They can’t reason syllogistically. They can’t sequence premises, conditions, and conclusions. For communication that compels a reader to action—whether the action is a change in thought, an emotion evoked, or a purchase—we need words. 

I am not proposing that words are innately better than visual images. That would be like saying trees are better than clouds; each has value within a particular context. And the context in which words have value is that of human thought and expression. More than these even, words have value that's rooted at our most fundamental essence. The power of words for humans is derivative; i.e. God first used words to form creation, and our use of them derives from being made in his image. Words are permanent (they can't be replaced by images) because they’re somehow essential to existence itself. 

So we can call this the bit of history—and the next one, and the one after that—whatever we want, but one thing’s certain, we’ll use words to do it.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1

Merry Christmas!

Last night, as is the tradition in my extended family, one of the kids read the Christmas account from Luke 2. And though the angel proclaiming the news to the shepherds does refer to the child as "Savior", the focus of the narrative is on the circumstances of Christ's birth, not the reason. To fill out the reason, we can look to other scripture.

Here in Paul's letter to the Colossians we have the objective of Christ's incarnation:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

And in his letter to the Philippians, we have the attitude that such a mission required:

...Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death even death on a cross. 

So the baby in the manger came to die, "to reconcile to himself all things...by the blood of his cross." And while it's true that Christmas points to Easter, we should be careful here. To say that one celebration is better than the other (and I've heard the statement before) is to miss the point. The objects of both Christmas and Easter celebrations are part of the same story, which is the story of the entire Bible and the whole of the Christian faith--that God is a redeemer and he redeems at his own expense.

As I teach my kids to think about the incarnation (and it's an amazing thing to ponder), I must remember that it fits within a broader context--the whole gospel of Jesus Christ.  

Merry Christmas!

Put Christ Back in Christmas? No way.

Before you read this, you might brush on these two stories: 

Nadab and Abihu and unauthorized fire

Uzzah and Ark of the Covenant

God knows our hearts. In Exodus (c.20) he tells the people that when they erect an altar they’re not to add images to it. In fact, says God, don’t even use a tool on the stones or you’ll “profane it.” This prohibition, this tether on the Israelites’ creativity was not repression but kindness. He knew then, as he knows now, that once a tool was applied to the stones, the next thing to follow would be a carving, an image, something aesthetic and more to their liking than plain field stone. And of course, one image would not suffice. The unadorned stones would cry out for the same treatment, and soon the entire altar would be swallowed up in a work of art. So what’s wrong with art?
Nothing, in and of itself. Creativity is part of being made in God’s image, so it’s good. But art, visual art especially, when it comes along side worship won’t be content as an aid. It will make itself front and center. We like to see things. We crave image and spectacle, and our sinful hearts will always turn from the invisible and the realm of faith and bend toward the visible and the realm of the senses, especially if the visible thing is made by our own hands. The Bible calls this idolatry.
We don’t need to look far to see this error play itself out to its logical ends. Just open your eyes between Thanksgiving and New Year's. What began as an aid to worship, a special season marked out on the calendar to celebrate the incarnation (seems innocent enough), has become an orgy for the senses. The “aid” itself has taken center stage, making Christ a bit player. So we need to put Christ back in Christmas, right? 

Wrong.
God never asked for our help here. Nowhere does his word prescribe the Christmas celebration or anything like it. And it’s no wonder—he knew we’d screw it up. He knew we’d get out our tools and start carving away, and we’d end up with something more aesthetically pleasing, more to our liking. He knew we would fashion an idol. What arrogance then to think that worship, as God himself specifies it, requires any help from us. Forgive us, Lord.
Instead of putting Christ back in Christmas, let’s do this: let’s recognize that he never asked to be there in the first place. Let’s use our tools for what they were meant for—subduing the earth and having dominion over it. And let’s let God determine how we’ll worship him.

And if Christmas for you is more about presents and eggnog and, yes, even family, then take Christ out of Christmas, lest his name be profaned. He's King of kings, after all, not a bit player.

Contentment and Martyrdom

I've been reading through Revelation (it's never the same book twice, is it?) and was struck by this:


[The beast] was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.
   
   If anyone is to be taken captive,

   to captivity he goes;
    if anyone is to be slain with the sword,
   with the sword must he be slain.

   
   Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints. (c.13)


Whether you read this as a future event or one that's already passed doesn't matter. Either way it's scary because it presents a plausible death for any Christ follower. We might die by a sword or a bullet or a bomb. And our profession of faith might be the trigger. 


I think it's a perfectly healthy practice for Christians to consider their own martyrdom. I do it all the time. I hear some horrible, glorious story of endurance through persecution or faithful testimony in the face of torture, and I wonder, "What would I do?" And then I remind myself of how God's grace comes to us in our time of need, that I'm not strong enough or courageous enough to withstand such trials, but that Christ is and that he'll provide what I need when I need it.


It's the gospel, and it's all true, of course, but today I had another thought. What if I'm not calling out to Christ now? What if here in the day of small things, when torture is a clock that ticks too slowly and persecution is a student who snickers when I say I went to church last Sunday--what if on days like these I habitually try to get through them on my own? Will I know how to persevere in Christ under a "big" trial when I can't or won't do it under a triviality? 


I'm thinking no.   


I murder time. I hold the clock in contempt and despise the day of small things, and it’s a flat-out sinful act of rebellion. The small days are just as much God’s unfolding of his will as are centuries and millennia. Same goes for the circumstances that fill them. Cancer and colds are both God's, both to be used as sanctifying means for his children, and we're to seek him in both.

So while it's a hard lesson, and one I'll have to learn again and again, it's always true that I can always be content because I am always in the exact circumstance of God’s ordaining. Whether it's a Monday afternoon meeting or a 7pm diaper change on Tuesday or 4th hour on Thursdays, I'm always where God my father wants me. 


I'm just now learning to see that enduring such times alone is stupid when I have the gospel. I need God's grace to be content where I'm at, and I need to practice it daily, for there can be no doubt that someday I'll need his grace for a day of bigger things. If I'm not depending on Christ now, I probably won't do it later. And that makes passages like Revelation 13 really scary.

Writer, Proof Thyself

Proofing your own copy is like tickling yourself—you'd think it would work, but it doesn't. Just ask Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Here’s the complete title of her book:

Eats, Shoots and Leaves:

A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation 

And in the subtitle we find, of all things, an error in punctuation. The compound modifier zero tolerance, because it modifies a noun immediately following, needs to be hypenated, as in zero-tolerance approach. 

(It’s a great object lesson for anyone proofing copy, but don’t let the slip-up prejudice you against Truss’s book—it’s a great read, and no, I’m not forgetting that it’s about punctuation.) 

The more time a writer spends with a piece of work, the more familiar it becomes. If errors aren’t caught early, the writer’s eye and brain (they’re the same organ, really) will begin superimposing correct form onto the copy. You’ll read it correctly because the sentence’s content and syntax encourage you to anticipate and assume the correct form. It’s nothing new; we see what we want to see. 

Some remedies:

• spell check is a start, but it will miss distinctions between words like wear and where
• reading aloud is helpful for broader form concerns like sentence fragments, misplaced or dangling modifiers, and style, but it won’t catch spelling and typo problems
• reading copy word for word in reverse—this eliminates the brain’s assumptions about form since there’s no syntax to hypnotize you. This is a good complement to reading aloud as it will only catch spelling and typo errors.
• farming the copy out to a proofreader for one last pass

But your best bet is to be doing all four. That’s the true zero-tolerance approach to proofing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need my wife to read this before I post.

Weird: Dillard's Insight into Sight

In a recent post, I looked at how sight and meaning develop together, that we only ever see a thing with our physical eyes if there’s a corresponding knowledge of it in our brains. But what if the brain develops apart from sight? What if we’re born blind? What then?
What happens then is just downright weird.

If I had to cite only one writing influence in my life it would be Annie Dillard. And if I had to recommend only one of her books, it would be her break-out, Pulitzer-nabbing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In it, she writes, among many other things, on the phenomenon of seeing. She refers to an account by Dr. Maurice von Senden of surgeries done in the early 1960s on congenital cataract patients (blind from birth) and writes,

“...The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden's opinion, no idea of space whatsoever. Form, distance, and size were so many meaningless syllables. A patient ‘had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness.’ Before the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them; now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing.”

It sounds crazy. A blind person touches a ball and a cube. He’s given sight but can’t tell by looking which is which. The problem with our understanding of what’s going on here is that we can’t separate out the experience of shape without sight. The two are too closely tied. Try it yourself. Put something in your hand and close your eyes. The skin of your fingers and palm, the muscles of your arm holding the object’s weight are drawing on visual sense memory to “create” an image of the thing in your hand. Your brain can do that because the visual information is there and retrievable. For a person blind from birth, there are no such files to draw from. But there are plenty of touch files. So the newly-sighted patient looks at the sphere and cube, and shrugs. But he reaches out a hand and touches them, and knowledge is there, as instantly as turning on a light in a dark room.  

Their perceptions of themselves occupying physical space were just as bizarre as the ball and cube. Dillard writes:

“Of another postoperative patient, the doctor writes, ‘I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to show me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index-fingers a few inches apart.’ Other doctors reported their patients' own statements to similar effect. ‘The room he was in ... he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger. . .Those who are blind from birth . . . have no real conception of height or distance. A house that is a mile away is thought of as nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps. . . . The elevator that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical distance than does the train of horizontal.’”

Reach out and touch the screen or the coffee cup in front of you. The thing only exists for you in space because you know space visually. Your arm is extended out, slightly down, and touching the coffee cup, and you can imagine it sitting on your desk 18 inches away because the knowledge of physical space is already there. You know the context. But what immediate knowledge does a blind person have of such an object? The knowledge of hard, smooth, and cool, of arm muscles contracting a certain way--all touch sensations that don't have anything at all to do with space. Imagine, if you can, a brain formed in that way, for which sensation is primarily touch and feel. There could be no perception of space (as the sighted know it) because space is purely perspective and perspective is purely visual.

I look at my screen now, and can see the edge of a picture frame. I know the monitor hides the rest, the image of Elizabeth, because the idea of space and that something can exist behind something else is a visual thing. Now try to imagine--and you can't, but try anyway--by sense of touch alone, something hidden behind something else. If you're a seeing person, or even if you've not been blind for life, you can't do this without bringing in the visual. You can't do it because the whole phenomena, for us the sighted, is one of perspective. And your perspective is based on visual perception. Even with your eyes closed, it’s based on memory of your visual perception. Ideas like behind, in front of, and hidden only exist as a function of perspective.

One more thing. Of the accounts of Jesus healing folks while he was here on earth, I’ve always thought this one strange: In Mark 8, Jesus heals a man of blindness. He does it in stages, and after the first round of spitting and laying on of hands, the man says to Jesus, “I see men, but they look like trees walking.” Like trees? Until I’d thought about these matters of sight and blindness and perception, that always sounded strange to me. Trees. It doesn’t anymore. It makes perfect sense. A tree to a person born blind is man sized, limbed, up and down. So I thought this especially fascinating: Dillard, quoting von Senden, writes, “One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that ‘men do not really look like trees at all.’” hmmm.

Told you it was weird.

Nouns - the Last Frontier

We’re running out of frontiers for carrying out our dominion mandate, but I think I’ve found one—the world of nouns. Not the concrete kind. Those have it easy. They get named as soon as they’re sighted. But the abstract kind, situations, particularly—they’re the shadowy corners of the word world.

Here’s a few that I’ve taken the liberty of naming. I’m not sure that I’m really the first to do it, but I don’t see any flags planted on these, so I feel ok about it. They’re in dictionary format to make them seem, you know, real. And there’s an example for each because I’m, you know, an English teacher...

1. sermat (sir maht) n.: the sudden, sometimes awkward silence that can arise during group discussions. (Note: there is a belief that sermats occur most often at 20 minutes to and after the hour; this is a stupid belief.) From the Latin sermo meaning to talk and the Greek stamato meaning to stop or pause. Ex: A lively discussion on God’s sovereignty flowed on into the early hours, interrupted only by the pizza-delivery guy and the occasional sermat.

2. floscus (flah skus) n.: the explosive effect that can occur as one takes the very last bites of a closed, sandwich-type food item. From the latin fluo, meaning flow, and esca meaning food. Ex: You’re getting near the end of that burrito, Lewis, and that’s a clean shirt—watch out for the floscus!

3. incurputation (in ker pyu tay shun) n.: an encounter in which two people, approaching from opposite directions, attempt to pass by one another; but in the attempt to make room, each chooses the same side, thereby running into the other. This is often followed by a series of similar side-to-side moves as each participant tries to get past the other. Incurputations are often terminated by one or both parties smiling or laughing awkwardly and saying something like, “shall we dance?” Variations include two or more cars starting and stopping simultaneously at a stop sign, a European kiss to the check where the parties bump noses, and introductions between people from the West and Far East in which the opposites can’t figure out whether to bow or shake hands and so attempt to do both, alternately, clumsily, ineffectively. From the latin incurse meaning to collide and the Greek perpate meaning to step or walk. She had determined to make an elegant entrance into the restaurant, but a blushing incurputation with a waiter spoiled the effect.

There. Flags are planted. Time to go look for more land.

"When Lilacs Last on the Roadside Bloom'd"

Staring at my four-month-old got me thinking about brains. That and Monday Night Football tonight (as lame a match-up as it's likely to be) made a good argument for recycling a post from one of my early attempts at blogging....

"When Lilacs Last on the Roadside Bloom'd"

One afternoon, a few years back, I learned to see lilac bushes. My father-in-law, a world-class talker, pointed to a bush and said, “That’s a lilac.” It was the first time I’d ever really looked at one, so I listened as he said that it was a favorite, that it was the most spring-ish of spring-time flowers, that it bloomed in white, red, purple, and—naturally—lilac. And that was all. It was a discourse of about one minute, and I planned on forgetting it.

But then a miracle happened. Overnight, across the state of Michigan, along highways, driveways, back roads, and backyards lilac bushes sprang up full grown and in bloom. For days after, I could hardly turn my eyes to any familiar stretch of countryside without seeing a lilac bush where there had certainly not been one before.

The miracle, of course, was in my own brain. That the new information about a flowering tree should so quickly change the way I saw the landscape was to me, and still is, miraculous. And it’s an every-day miracle. Scientists believe—and good ones, I presume—that a baby can’t see things until his brain learns that such things really are. So a newborn may see the shape of a face, but not the nose. He can’t (or doesn’t) see nose because there’s no corresponding knowledge, no nose file to refer to. As he has more and more experience of nose, his ability to see it fills in, slowly, like a lens bringing an image into focus.

Maybe you’ve heard the eye described as being an extension of the brain; it's a helpful notion for seeing how closely the two work together to bring our world into focus, to make of it something solid and navigable. Until there’s enough input, we simply don’t see whatever it is our brain is making sense of. You can test this yourself. Look at a page of text written in an unfamiliar language—say, German. You see nothing but letters broken up into what seem to be word-sized chunks. But there’s no recognition beyond that. You see no patterns, nothing familiar. Now glance at a page of English text, and it’s all familiarity, like the faces of friends. The content is the same: German and English use the same alphabet. But it’s the patterns of letters and their correspondence to known words that make up the seeing as we read. Knowledge here literally gives sight.

So what was there before, there in the lilac-bush place of my mind’s eye? There’s no way to know now because the lilac bush is one place in the scene to which I, apparently, paid no attention. I don’t remember it being a blank or a gray smudge in the picture, but maybe it was. Maybe it was filled in with some stock photo from my head called “bush” or “nondescript shrub”. And here’s fascination for you: that our vision is always filled with something. Our page of German, indecipherable as language, is still filled with clear black and stark white, with letters and punctuation. It’s filled but waiting for more.

My brother-in-law can see deer in the woods. That may not seem like a feat unless you’re with him, unless he’s pointing at a curved piece of gray-brown lump pressing out from a thick tree trunk. And no amount of squinting and straining, no trick of the imagination will allow you to see what he sees, not until the lump moves and either disappears behind the tree or materializes into a deer. His brain has long been trained to see forest patterns and therefore breaks in the patterns. And those breaks, at certain heights off the ground, in certain un-tree-like curves and colors are often deer. But, like learning a new language, it takes years to see that way. And yet always, at all points in the education of our eyes, the forest is full of something.

I’m only now learning to see the trees that hide the deer. Four years ago, I bought a house that has a wood stove, so I’ve spent some time in woods, felling, splitting, and hauling a variety of hardwood and not-so-hardwood trees. I’ve learned to see maple and cherry and oak and beach and poplar and elm. They look different, these trees. Their bark, leaves, limbs, and shapes are different. And I’ve learned this so gradually that I can’t remember what woods looked like when they were filled only with tree. So how do I know that I’m seeing more now that I once did? Because I narrate. I walk the woods and practice the vernacular. “That’s dogwood…old beech…maple there…nice cherry tree…beautiful sycamore.” I didn’t do that just a few years ago because I wasn’t really seeing different trees. I had not the vocabulary for it. And now, as my tree vocabulary grows, so does the variety and complexity of what I see.

And I’m just a neophyte. If I leaned in close to a biologist in the woods, would I hear the synapses pop and crackle as his eyes sweep across a field of vision packed with pattern and familiarity? No, I don’t think so. The brain seems to have an inexhaustible capacity for more and finer detail—I doubt that a biologist's head makes any more noise than mine does. But in the woods he must see more than I do, just as the German speaker must see more in the written language.

This idea that seeing is powered by knowledge brings me to more questions: what am I missing right now? What parts of my nascent vision are comprised of stock footage? And am I even able to detect such blindness? It gets very tricky here. To be able to see a blur, a lack of pattern, requires first a recognition of pattern. So no, I can’t detect the blindness. I can’t look around at the landscape and say now there’s a lack of clarity and detail just waiting to be filled in with knowledge. I can’t because there’s too much detail already filled in around it, the detail exactly matching the knowledge beneath. I can’t see potential patterns anymore than a child can see the inches he has yet to grow or read the language he has yet to learn.

But that’s part of the nature of God’s creation and our experience in it. The visual detail keeps up perfectly with its growing, corresponding knowledge. I learn that the difference between the black maple and the silver maple right next to it are its smoother bark and fewer leaf lobes. And then vision! From that point on, I see them differently. I watch a rugby match, and it’s all chaos and confusion. But a friendly hand points out the patterns in strategy, and the game becomes something new. Knowledge comes and makes vision possible. It differentiates and brings order.

So where there was once at the side of the road a passing blur of white or red or purple, there is now a lilac bush, syringia in all of its deciduous detail. I’m still calling that a miracle.

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.                                           ~ Walt Whitman

Called it!

In case the grid ever goes down--I mean really down, as in complete societal collapse, no wifi, cannibalism, that sort of thing--and in the aftermath we’re reduced to small, tribalistic, local agrarian economies, I call brewer!

I could go a few ways with this. I could explore the simple, beautifully efficient parliamentary procedure of calling. I could break down the various ways the "grid" could go down and the harrowing events that might follow. I could examine the economic implications of the industrial and post-industrial ages. Or I could talk booze. 

I think the choice is clear. 

God seems to have made the world in such a way that it just wants to ferment. Wine practically makes itself. Expose grape juice to the air, and yeast will find it and do its thing. Beer’s a little more complicated, but not much. Barley right from the field needs only to be soaked and dried a few times, and it’s ready for yeast (some Belgian beers are still made using open-air vats. The wild yeast that comes in on the breeze does the work). Let’s face it: where there's cultivation, there's fermentation.

I’ve thought about this, and I’ve thought about the other jobs I’d like to have: the village blacksmith, the village baker, the village cheese maker (that’s right, cheese), but I keep coming back to village brewer. Here’s why...I think: making your own adult beverage out of something as commonplace as juice or grain has magic to it. It’s alchemy, and it makes me say wow. There's no wow in bread. I like bread. It's just that it makes plain sense to me. You mix stuff together, heat it up, and it cooks. It, or something like it, happens every day in most kitchens. Cheese, now that’s a little more interesting, but not much. It's still a process that seems to be in the cook’s hands the whole time. Separate curds from whey, add a little flavor, you got cheese. But beer...Beer’s mysterious.


It also spans more disciplines than mere cooking. Yes, at first it’s culinary. It’s mixed like soup--grains and hops are steeped, spices are added, yeast is pitched. But then it goes in another direction. It goes scientific. You have airlocks and fermenting carboys, surgical tubing, and hydrometers. Your wort (the malted barley, grains, hops, and yeast mixture) sits in a dark, cool place for weeks where chemical reactions change sugar to CO2 and alcohol. Then the bottling. The process has now gone from culinary to scientific to industrial so that different apparatus is needed--bottles, a bottle capper, a bottling bucket, priming sugar for carbonation. Your kitchen’s an assembly line. A week or two later, you have something that should not have come from a kitchen or basement but from a pub or a 7-11.


I’ll say it again. It’s magic.


A long time ago, before cities became the centers of culture, there was the expectation that if you got good at something, you really could be the best around. Of course, the around was much smaller, no bigger than your village. But still, you could ply your craft or trade and be appreciated by those who found value in it. Yeah, it still happens today, but not on the same scale. You get good at something now, and maybe the people in your department or on your floor or branch will notice, but odds are there’s a guy in the next cubicle doing the same work. And odds are real good that the work you’ve gotten good at is the work that offered the best prospects for a paycheck.


Take my own job--teacher. Today you couldn’t throw a copy of the best-selling and widely-acclaimed Dragon Haint across a room and not hit a teacher. But in a little, post-apocalyptic village, you’d have just one, probably teaching in a one-room school house, and everyone around would know exactly who the teacher is. They’d probably call him or her “Teacher.” And next door to Teacher would be Smithy who lives next to the Millers who are neighbors with the Masons and the Bakers and the Treecutters (whose name might change in later generations to Wood or Sawyer). And just up the rode, in a brown wooden house would live the Brewers. No more Beals. I’m Brad the Brewer now, and when my boys marry, they’ll be raising little Brewers, expanding the shop, carting our brew all over lower central Michigan. And someday my great, great grandson will make brew commercials on the moving picture screen.

Or, maybe my sons decide to be the village something-else. If the village is still small enough, that is. That’s one thing we’ve lost to modernity--the chance to be the village something. But maybe we'll get that chance back. 

Go ahead, Heidi, roll your eyes, but the grid’s going down some day. Better call your job now before someone else does. 

I call brewer.

the 3 most disturbing words on TV: "Move That Bus!"

If you have in your head a picture of my big wooden house and it's anything other than a drafty, leaky, ergonomically hazardous eyesore, please discard it. Yes, it's big. Almost three times the size of our last one, but it's low-end big. It's pole-barn big, not Pottery Barn big, if that makes sense. It's squat and brown and cedar sided. I often refer to it (privately, as H doesn't like me to say it out loud) as "the turd." Don't get me wrong. I like my house. It serves my family well. But it's just a house.


I was reminded of that last night as I watched water drip from the ground-floor bathroom ceiling. I was reminded for the next hour as I crawled through the space above trying to sort out the maze of pipes--water, drains, and roof vents. And I'll be reminded again over the weekend when I re-grout the boys' shower. It's just a house, just a temporary place this side of eternity to spend our days out of the weather. But it's sooo easy to make it something more. Mike Cosper of the Gospel Coalition speaks to this tendency to make our homes, and other "lesser things", idols to be worshiped:  http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2010/11/22/the-3-most-disturbing-words-on-tv/

It's also a good follow-up to Kevin's sermon on holiness from last Sunday. And Kevin's blog post for today is a good summation of that sermon: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2010/11/23/the-hole-in-our-holiness/

whatever you do, don't open your Bible

Yesterday, I had one of those magnifying mirrors that women use for make-up shoved into my face, and I was shocked. I’m getting old, but I had no idea I was that old. Wrinkles gaining ground. Pores of my skin big as smallpox scars. Nose getting bigger—no one told me about that! And double bags to go with my double chins.

My first reaction? To shut my eyes tight and think of something pleasant.

OK, this is what we in the profession call a metaphor (from here on, I'll try not to use any more technical, highly-sophisticated Greek terms like metaphor). It wasn’t a mirror in front of me. It was the Bible, 2nd Peter. And the one holding the mirror was my pastor, Kevin DeYoung. Throughout the book Peter admonishes his listeners (it would have been read aloud to the church) that though we are elect, chosen by God, we must still be eager to make that calling and election sure. In other words, though God chooses and keeps us, we must strive (by grace) to live holy lives.

And that's hard. Actually, it's much more than hard—it's absolutely impossible. No wonder people don’t want to open a Bible or go to a church where someone else might open one. And by people, I mean unbelievers and Christians both. Unbelievers don't want to be shown God's holy standard because deep down they know it's an impossible one, so they know they're doomed. Their logic goes like this: God is holy. I'm not; therefore, I'm doomed. Better to kill God by atheism or indifference. But believers also don't want to be shown the standard, not because they know they're doomed, but precisely because they know they're not. They know the Gospel, so they know it is possible, if not to live it out perfectly, then at least to move toward that standard. Their logic goes like this: if God commands it, and if I have his Spirit, I can obey it. But I don't want to change, so I'll just shut my eyes and ears to it.

The world has hold of the unbeliever outright, but it still pulls at the believer, and we believers like our shows, our movies, our music, our friends. We've killed the big sins, or at least made them quiet; surely God doesn't want us to be legalists over all the little ones, right? But we forget that obedience is not legalism. To that end, Kevin made this great point: we want to feed the poor, and the Bible has a few verses on that; we want to evangelize, and the Bible has a few verses on that too; but we don't want to live holy, Godly lives, even though the Bible has many, many more verses on that. From 2 Peter alone, Kevin pointed out 20 reasons that Peter gave for his church to be holy. Of course, we don't need 20 reasons to obey. We only need one—that God says so. But God knows what we're made of—dust, grass, sheep matter. He knows it's hard, so in his grace he gives us many reasons.

Here's the good news, both for the believer and unbeliever: the Gospel replaces what we see in the mirror because it replaces the object within it. So while it doesn't make us beautiful, it does show us Christ because a very real exchange has been made, our condemned life for his perfect one. This blows apart the poor logic of the believer and unbeliever alike. In fact, if we submit ourselves to Christ and his word, he will show the unbeliever how he's no longer doomed, and will share with the believer his own desire for holiness. We'll be holy because he is holy (Justification), and we'll want to be holier because he is holy (Sanctification).

But if you can't handle the shock of seeing your un-holiness, whatever you do, don't open your Bible. Instead, just close your eyes, maybe stick your fingers in your ears, and try to think of something pleasant. As for me, it's too late. I've seen myself up close.

"...be holy, for I am holy." - Lev. 11:44

family worship = gov't in action

I’ve been thinking lately about family worship and about government. Not together, but as separate topics. Then I remembered hearing or reading somewhere this propostion: that God’s primary unit of government on earth is the family. If that’s true--and I believe it is--then what God says about the family's role should give us some help in what we think about government's.

And what do we think about government's role? Some smart guys a long time ago thought this:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I have to say first I’m embarrassed and ashamed (both as a citizen and an English teacher) that for my whole life I’ve read this wrong. I had always read it to mean in order to form a more perfect union, we the people do these things: we establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for common defense, promote general welfare, and secure blessings. And on top of that, we write this Constitution.

Not only does that not make sense (how can you do those things apart from the C?), it’s not at all what the grammar makes it say. What it really says is this: We the People do ordain and establish this Constitution in order to...

• form a more perfect union
• establish Justice,
• insure domestic Tranquility,
• provide for the common defense,
• promote the general welfare,
• and secure the Blessings of Liberty

So we the people don’t do the benefits. We the people do the Constitution in order to promote the benefits.

So what’s that got to with family worship? Everything.

As God’s primary governmental unit on earth, the family (I should qualify that: the family with Christ at its center, the worshiping family) effects the same benefits that our Constitution is supposed to. Let's look at each. I’ll save the first for last--you’ll see why.

1. The worshiping family establishes justice. It acknowledges that God is the first and only source of Law and that God is both merciful and just.

2. The worshiping family insures domestic tranquility. When Mom and Dad’s eyes are on Christ first and most, the family does not fall apart. It grows in grace like a tree planted by water.

3. The worshiping family provides for the common defense. Christ teaches us to lay our lives down for each other. Could there be a more effective call to the common defense than Christ’s call to take up our cross, die to ourselves, and follow him?

4. The worshiping family promotes the general welfare. To treasure Christ above all things is to obey Him, which means we love our neighbors as ourselves, we hold loosely to things of this world, which is passing away. To obey Christ is to “work as unto the Lord” with “honest weights and measures.”

5. The worshiping family secures the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity. When we worship Christ, we worship the actual source of liberty. Christ destroys chains, and Christ promises his blessings to those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.

6. Finally, if the nation were made up of worshiping families, and we were receiving all the benefits of 1 - 5, how would we not form a more perfect union?

Our Constitution, as good a document as it is, is no match for the government of the Christ-centered family. So parents, gather your family around God's word and get to the work of governing.

you root for Vick because Jesus is coming

Did you root for Michael Vick last night? It’s ok. You can admit it. Even dog lovers are warming up to the guy.

There's not a QB in the league I like to watch more than Michael Vick, and last night was as much fun as this pseudo-sometimes sports fan has ever had watching two teams I don’t care about. And though the 3 hour praise-fest was a little gratuitous (it put in mind network anchors gone giddy over Obama in ‘08), I found myself joining in on the superlative heaping.

Which got me thinking: if Vick hadn't been brought so ignominiously low two years ago, would the announcers—would I—have such enthusiasm for him now? The answer is easy—no way. In fact, it’s the brought low in his story that makes him so much fun to root for. More than that, it’s the fact that he put himself there that makes it work.

We may love the rags-to-riches, by-the-bootstraps story because we love the thought of exaltation, of someone being lifted up out of circumstances that would otherwise destroy. But there’s more than mere exaltation in Vick’s story. It’s precisely the fact that he caused those circumstances, that he did something reprehensible, that he made us all think he was a low-life scrub good for nothing but writing off that makes his story so compelling. There’s no story here without the crime. There’s no redemption without the guilty verdict. Of course we need other things—contrition, confession, a demonstrable change in direction—but it’s the guilt that makes a performance like last night’s such a story.

His comeback is a kind of redemption, and we long for redemption because we all know the original redemption story. At least deep down, a part of us knows it because the Law written on our hearts testifies to it. Christ's redemption of his people, culminating in his return, is the original version of this story. All else is shadow. And when we see its shadow—publicly on football fields, privately when mercy is given—we hear within ourselves, whether we know Christ or not, a corresponding and compelling ring. It reminds us that there’s another very old, but very true, redemption story.

To put it simply, you root for Michael Vick because Jesus is coming back for his people.

good preachin, Pat

Pat Quinn preached from Hebrews last night on Christ being both God's exalted son and our incarnate brother. One part stands out for me, not because it was new, but because it's very, very old, and because I've thought of it many times.

He talked about microscopes.

Actually, what he said was that Christ is Lord over both the macro and the micro, that the creation was spoken into existence through Jesus, and that Jesus now holds the galaxies and quasars together by his power and will. He's the designer, engineer, and maintainer of big things like planets and stars and gravitation and electromagnetism.

But he's also Lord of the small, the atomic and subatomic. He is the strength behind the forces that hold the various parts of atoms and molecules together. After the sermon, as I was talking to the kids about this, I used a spring as an analogy for God's strength in the universe. If I squeeze a spring together and hold it, it doesn't move, but it has energy behind it, energy that would be released if I let it go. In the same way, the universe--at both the micro and macro levels--is being held together by God; and behind everything we observe or theorize, there is great energy. That energy is Christ's hands holding all things together.

The unbeliever looks into a telescope and sees the size and grandeur of the universe and claims that if there is a god, we're too small to merit his attention. But have the skeptic turn the telescope around and look in at the microscopic and he'll see that things go on in that direction in the same way. We're not at the little end of things--we're suspended between, with infinity on either side. It still means we're small, of course, but it makes God something else completely. It puts him beyond size itself, beyond big or small.

Like I said, it's not new to me, but every time I think of it I'm amazed. At any given time, the very atoms of my own body and the world around me are at that moment being held together by Christ because he wills it. How could I not acknowledge such a one as Lord?

Thanks for preaching, Pat. And thanks for the reminder.