This will be yet another Pastor Scott-sponsored Big Al post. You may recall at the congregational meeting in July, Scott mentioned that he wanted each family to get into the practice of celebrating the Lord’s Day at home, and that Katie and I would be teaching the Church how to do it. I’ll start by suggesting that folks download the booklet Celebrating the Lord’s Day here. It’s only 30 or so pages, and it gives a lot of the background information, plus a complete ceremony for a festive Lord’s Day meal. In fact, since Lamb of God will be having a church-wide Lord’s Day meal together on Saturday evening September 13, try to download and read the booklet before then.

A comment on the image: It looks pretty bleak and not particularly joyful, but consider this: you’re looking at a poor laborer who has probably exhausted himself during the past six days in his efforts to provide for his family. By modern thinking, he could probably get a bit ahead of the game if he were to work an extra day. But he would never do that, because the Sabbath belongs to the Lord and was given for rest. This is the high point of his week.

OK, here’s some background on the celebration of the Christian Sabbath or Lord’s Day. In the 1970s and 80s, Katie and I were members of a Christian community that had the practice of inaugurating the Lord’s Day with a home/family service. All households in the community were expected to gather together on Saturday nights, pray together using a set liturgy, eat a festive meal, and in general make the evening a time of fellowship and enjoyment. The practice was based on the Jewish tradition of inaugurating the Sabbath with nice meal and a home service on Friday nights. Since our family is Jewish, we have kept the Friday night Sabbath tradition and have celebrated the Sabbath home service continuously (missing only the occasional Friday night here and there) for the duration of our marriage, 28 years. It’s part of our life together, and we guard it very carefully — we almost never attend Friday evening events, for example, because they would interfere with our consecrated family time. The meal is the nicest dinner we eat over the course of the week, and we make an effort to make things special. It’s the only meal that we have a dessert with, for example, and we spend a bit more money and time on the meal’s preparation. We even try to dress a bit better for it (our pastor when we lived in Michigan used to say that you shouldn’t dress like a schlump for the Lord’s Day). In doing so, we honor the Lord for His goodness to us during the past week — the meal is a sacramental activity. Read the rest of this entry »

The Franconia Ridge, one of the more spectacular sections of the AT in the White Mountains

I just finished my latest section of the Appalachian Trail: Glencliff, NH to Grafton Notch, Maine; a total of 130 miles through the entirety of the White Mountains. I completed this hike in 11 days, and it was the most continously physically demanding thing I have ever done in my life. The hike included an ascent of Mount Washington (worst weather in the world — the wind was gusting up to 60 mph when I summited), several miles of the Franconia Ridge, most of which were above tree line, and a trek through the Mahoosuc Notch, reputed to be the most difficult mile of the AT (it took me 2 1/2 hours to negotiate 1.1 miles of house-sized boulders).

I would rate this hike as not only the most physically difficult, but also the most dangerous or frightening piece of the AT so far. I was often descending very steep rock slabs with no steps to speak of. Several times I did so in the rain, and a couple times in fading light. Once or twice I found myself on an exposed ridge with a thunderstorm rolling in. Often on my AT hikes, I am able to pray pretty effectively over the course of each day for a short list of family and church needs. On this trip, I found that i spent a fair amount of time praying for God’s protection (from the weather) and direction (on those steep, slick slabs where one misstep could have resulted in serious injury or worse.

Notwithstanding the challenges and downright scariness of pieces of my hike, I enjoyed this trip as much or more than any other other. The views were spectacular (when the weather was cooperative), I saw alpine wildflowers and other plants that grow only on the high peaks of the New England mountains, and I saw wildlife that I had rarely (if ever) seen in the wild — porcupines, foxes, snowshoe hares, spruce grouse, and others. It was a time of giving thanks to God for having created such things as these in His world.

Our downstairs bathroom has had problems for quite a while — six or seven years ago, we had a minor flood, which damaged the floor and caused several ceramic tiles to come loose. Of course, those tiles were no longer made, so I couldn’t just replace the things. We pretty much ignored the situation until six months ago, when one of the family put her foot through the floor. Now, I know that there are some home repairs that I’m just not capable of doing well — I don’t have enough obscenities in my vocabulary to tackle certain tasks, and laying a new subfloor for ceramic tile (with those heavy concrete-laced panels) is one of them. So I hired someone to do that job, and meanwhile had Katie figure out what kind of tile pattern would look good and be appropriate for the period of the house. We decided on a pattern, I gutted the bathroom in late April, and the handyman guy laid the new subfloor. And then we discovered the problem with our tile pattern: it was made up of 2″ tiles, and we had to place each of some 2000 of the things one tile at a time, paying close attention to the pattern to make sure it came out right. This process took quite a while — the bathroom wasn’t really usable again until early June. By the way, did I mention that our downstairs bathroom is the guest bathroom? That it has the only shower stall in the house? We have a bathtub, but if you’re a shower person, you get kind of desperate for a shower after a while. Well, I’d like to announce that after six weeks of single bathroom showerless life, the Mendelsohn household has a newly tiled, bathroom. We still have to finish the mouldings, and we need to replace the door (we’re using a curtain to meet the demands of modesty), but the room is functional. Once we finish the last bit of work, I’m tempted to have celebratory event of some sort…

By the way, lengthy home improvement projects are ordinarily a recipe for low-level strife in the Mendelsohn household. Everybody gets out of sorts, arguments happen, and members of the household, particularly husband and wife, end up saying things we later regret. We actually got through this project without it being a cause for sin. Sure, we disagreed on how to proceed from time to time, but even with all the unplanned-for challenges, life went pretty well during the course of the project (other than the lack of sleep — we stayed up really late almost every night that we were working on the floor to make sure that the room would be functional by the time Sam came home from Ireland).

When a group of us returned from the ARC conference last week, Scott asked us whether we would be willing to take an additional passenger. He indicated that this passenger was very dear to him, and requested that we take especially good care of it. He fastened the seat belt himself. Those of us who rode with it in the van can report that it was very well behaved for the duration of the long journey.

A break from my usual stuff — I’m working on a post that’s going to be a bit of a rant, so I thought it would be good to post something entertaining. This is one of those things that’s so strange that nobody could have made it up.

The other day I stumbled across the obscure fact that Saint Rosalia is the patron saint of the city of Palermo on Sicily (I was doing a crossword puzzle — you learn all kinds of weird stuff when you do crosswords). While reading the wikipedia article about her, I found out that she had come from a noble Palermo family and lived the life of a hermit. She died in 1166 at the age of 36. In the early 17th century, when Palermo was in the midst of a plague, Rosalia allegedly appeared to a hunter, told him where to find her bones, and ordered that they be carried in procession through the city. He did as she commanded, and after the procession, the plague ended. That was a little odd, but still fairly typical of many stories that I’ve read about Catholic saints. The really serious bit of weirdness was at the end of the article, which I will quote:

Saint Rosalia was proposed as the patron saint of evolutionary studies in a classic paper by G.E. Hutchinson. This was due to a visit he paid to a pool of water downstream from the cave where St. Rosalia’s remains were found, where he developed ideas based on observations of water boatman [the insect]. The article, and its reference to St. Rosalia has lived on through the literature, often in the title of papers concerning biodiversity.

When I saw this, my initial reaction was that it was one of those wikipedia inaccuracies that crop up from time to time, so I looked up Hutchinson’s article. It’s true! He really did propose Rosalia as the patronness of evolutionary studies, and he did so out of gratitude. What the above text doesn’t say is that Hutchinson’s research wasn’t going anywhere — he had been unsuccessfully looking for a particular species of insect, and found it only when he followed the stream flowing from Saint Rosalia’s cave.

So far as I can tell, the Roman Catholic church has not formally declared Rosalia to be the patron saint of evolutionary studies, but it’s clear that she has a special place in the hearts of the scientists who study such matters — several scholarly articles published since Hutchinson’s 1959 article (available here) have mentioned her.

This meditation was written by James Kiefer, an old friend of mine. I’ve posted it to the church e-mail list every Good Friday for the past several years; this time I’m mounting it on my blog, which is a bit less ephemeral.

++++++++++++++++

There is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre called Morts sans Sepultre (The Living Dead – literally, The Unburied Dead: one English translation calls it The Victors.) I have not seen or read it recently, but part of it goes something like this: The scene is the attic of a house in France during the Second World War. In the attic are a half-dozen prisoners, captured members of the resistance. It is night, and the next morning they will be taken out one at a time and tortured for information. None of them has any information of value, so they need summon no will power. There is nothing to do but wait, and then suffer, and then die. But now the attic door opens and the soldiers throw another man in. He is the leader of the resistance for that region, but the soldiers do not realize this. To them he is simply someone caught out-of-doors after curfew, and so they are detaining him for the night and will release him in the morning. Now the other prisoners are in a different position. Now they have an active and mot merely a passive role to play in what awaits them. They tell the leader, “Don’t worry. We will hold our tongues.” He begins to say, “I thank you, for myself, for the Resistance, for France. Your courage and your sacrifice will not be forgotten.” Suddenly, one of the others, his fiancee, says, “Oh, shut up. Nothing you have to say could possibly mean anything to us. I am not blaming you. It is not your fault. But the fact is that you are a living man and I am a dead woman, and the living and the dead have nothing to say to each other. Tomorrow you go out that door to freedom and life, and I go out it to torment and death, and that fact puts an impenetrable barrier between us. I do not hate or envy you. I simply do not see you as a meaningful part of my universe. Now go sit down over there, and leave me to talk and hold hands with my brothers and sisters, the people with whom I shall be dying in a few hours.”

It occurred to me, when I read this, that an important reason for the Crucifixion is the breaking down of precisely that barrier between God and us. Without it, many of God’s demands on us would be simply infuriating. Consider a driver seated at the wheel of a car as his associates try to push it out of a mudhole. He keeps saying to them: “Push harder! Put your backs into it! Don’t give up. You can do it if you try. Oh, come now, you can do better than that. Keep at it. Two or three more good pushes and you’ll have it out.” And so on. They may remind themselves that it is essential to have someone steering, and that it is therefore unreasonable of them to resent his being where he is, but they would be other than human if they did not feel an overpowering urge to pull him out of his seat and send him sprawling face down in the mud. Note how different it would be if he were himself standing thigh-deep in the mud, shoving the car with all his might and gasping out encouragement to his fellow pushers. He might be saying exactly the same things as he was saying behind the steering wheel in the first scenario. The difference is that by getting into the mud and pushing with the others he has earned the right to say them. In just this way, God, by taking human nature upon him and living in poverty and dying in shame and torment, has earned the right to ask us to bear our burdens willingly. By forgiving those who have wronged him, he has earned the right to ask us to forgive those who have wronged us. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m currently reading the accounts of Paul’s missionary journeys, starting in Acts 13. I noticed that one of the themes that consistently comes up is spiritual jealousy. It’s pretty clear from these accounts that Paul almost always initiated his missionary efforts in a given city with a visit to the local Jewish congregation, where he proclaimed that Jesus was the Messiah. It also appears that most synagogues at that time had a number of Gentiles in their congregations. You can tell that Paul was speaking to these Gentiles as well as the Jews: in Acts 13:16, he says “Men of Israel and you that fear God”. This phrase “you that fear God” refers explicitly to Gentiles who believed in the God of Israel but who had not undergone full conversion.

So here’s the situation: Paul enters a synagogue and preaches the Gospel to both Jews and Gentiles. They clearly receive the Word gladly — they invite him to return the next Sabbath, and a number of the congregants follow Paul and Barnabas after the worship service and encourage them. The following Sabbath, it’s clear that the news has spread: “almost the whole city gathered together to hear the word of God”. This time, the response of the Jews isn’t so positive: “But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with jealousy and contradicted what was spoken by Paul…” This negative reaction pursues Paul and Barnabas for the rest of their journey. Jump ahead a few chapters to Paul’s next journey and we see a similar pattern: in Acts 17, the Jews at the local synagogue initially respond positively, then become jealous when non-Jews start coming to faith, and pursue Paul and make trouble for him when he moves on to the next city.

It occurred to me as I was reading that it’s very easy for us to fall into the same trap with regard to the exercise of spiritual gifts. When we witness someone manifesting a spiritual gift, particularly one that we don’t have, we can easily respond negatively. This can especially be the case when (1) you’re a long-time Christian/member of Lamb of God, and (2) the person exercising the gift is relatively new — a recent convert or someone who has recently started worshiping with us. Such spiritual jealousy can promote divisiveness and thoroughly quench the actions of the Spirit in our midst. Rather, we should rejoice in the gift of God to our congregation and the demonstration of His presence in out midst.

I was chatting with my daughter about Bible translations, and in the course of the conversation she mentioned something that I hadn’t been aware of (she took an OT Hebrew class in college). There’s a phrase that opens many of the OT prophets: “The word of the Lord came to…” Pretty much all of the common English translations use some variation of these words. But the thing is, that’s not what the Hebrew words really say. The literal translation is something more like this: “The word of the Lord was, (or happened) to…” To my mind, that has a very different meaning — it carries the sense of the prophet not just hearing or seeing but actually experiencing with his entire being the words that God has given him to say. No wonder Jeremiah said:

But if I say, “I will not mention him
or speak any more in his name,”
his word is in my heart like a fire,
a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
indeed, I cannot.

In fact, it’s pretty clear that many (most?) of the OT prophets didn’t really have much choice in the matter — a number of them didn’t want to be prophets. Moses and Jeremiah come immediately to mind, and Amos refused to let people identify him as a prophet. But God placed His word in or on them, and that was the end of the discussion. Now, I’m pretty sure that our experience of prophesying or otherwise sharing God’s word during our gatherings is not necessarily going to mirror the experience of Jeremiah or any other OT prophet. I know that this isn’t my experience on the occasions when I share or (rarely) prophesy. Maybe this kind of stuff happens only to people who wrote the books of the Bible…

Today’s NY Times (3 Feb 08) has an outstanding op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristof (go here to look at it) entitled “Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love”.  While making it clear that he’s no friend of orthodox Christian theology, nor does he hold with the political conservatism of the typical American evangelical, he at the same time speaks of the great things we have accomplished for the poor, especially abroad.  By way of background, Kristof is the “international” columnist for the NY Times — he often visits and writes from the world’s hot spots, such as Darfur, North Korea, Afganistan, etc.  In any case, read the column — it’s one of a very few positive evaluations of evangelical Christianity by a liberal columnist.

One of the things that’s been on my mind a lot over the past month or so is the Incarnation and what it means for us. Some of this is not new — Scott has preached numerous sermons over the years addressing these matters — but I recently re-read a few discussions of the Incarnation (or Incarnation-related topics) that I found very insightful and helpful.

The first text that I came across is from Calvin, writing about the Lord’s Table. I’ve heard a lot of teaching on Communion, I’ve studied it pretty intensively, and I’ve read this text many times, but this time around Calvin’s comments really struck me as expressing a deep truth about living the Incarnational. He states:

Rather, it [the Table] was ordained to be frequently used among all Christians in order that they might frequently return in memory to Christ’s Passion, by such remembrance to sustain and strengthen their faith, and urge themselves to sing thanksgiving to God and to proclaim his goodness; finally, by it to nourish mutual love, and among themselves give witness to this love, and discern its bond in the unity of Christ’s body. For as often as we partake of the symbol of the Lord’s body, as a token given and received, we reciprocally bind ourselves to all the duties of love in order that none of us may permit anything that can harm our brother, or overlook anything that can help him, where necessity demands and ability suffices.

What I think Calvin is getting at is that when we partake of the Table, we commit ourselves to personify Christ to one another. To fail in being attentive to one another’s physical and spiritual needs is to strip the Table of a large part of its meaning; it’s to fail to discern the Lord’s Body and Blood.

The other text that I read was the first few pages of Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in which he contrasts cheap and costly grace. He closes his discussion of each with a statement about the Incarnation:

“Cheap grace is a denial of the Incarnation of God”

“Costly grace is the Incarnation of God”

Bonhoeffer basically describes how Christians behave when their lives are characterized by cheap grace (uncommitted, unchanged, and weak) and by costly grace (sold out and strong). When he says that cheap grace is a denial of the Incarnation, I think that he’s telling us that lives lived under cheap grace make Christ invisible, while lives lived under costly grace clearly portray Christ both to the world at large and to other believers.

Brothers and sisters, I want to see the face of Jesus when I come to church on Sundays, but I also want to see Him when I hear about and participate in service opportunities. I want to hear about how a bunch of folks had a great time helping someone move. I want to be with a group of guys remodeling the church office space to make it usable for ministry, counseling, and other activities. These are the things that enflesh Jesus in our midst.