The Church's Confused Effects and Purposes

Isak Dinesen famously expressed a cynical regard for man by asking “What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"
It takes a remarkably low opinion of man to so confuse the effect of his drinking with the purpose.
I have a woodstove in the den. That little metal box is a wonderful device for reducing an acre of forest into a bucketful of ash.
And what is a gun but a remarkable device for separating bullets from their casings. Loudly.
This trick of identifying an obvious but secondary effect and pretending it's the purpose is not a particularly impressive trick, though it can seem clever when done on purpose.
But you wouldn't think it clever if you went to visit a friend in January and discovered his house to be inhospitably frigid. Coming into the house through an open door he greets you with a blanket and offers you an ice cube to suck on, all the water in the pipes being frozen. You note with perplexity the windows left open and ask him if he doesn't have a woodstove, having noted the piles of wood, cut, split and stacked beside the door.
He smiles broadly. "Haven't I! And it's a real beauty. I keep it going all the time." He takes you downstairs to show off his hard-working stove and you discover that what heat is not going up the flue is heading out the open windows. But it's not the heat that your host is pleased about. He wants to draw your attention to the buckets of ash he is proudly displaying. "Just look at all this ash! And I've got piles more ash outside. You want to go see the ash pile?"
Well, I'm afraid that we can come across that way in the church sometimes. We've been given the fuel of God's Holy Spirit to produce the warmth of God's glory but we are carelessly indifferent to that glory, reveling instead in the byproducts of that holy combustion, the programs of the church the increases in attendance, etc. But those things are, at best, an evidence of the good things that have happened and not the good things themselves.
I have made the mistake at times of measuring the church by the size of the ash pile and not by the spiritual temperature, and I'm embarrassed to admit it.

Five Steps Toward Agrarianism

"I'm small and it's God who makes the sun rise, the moon spin, the springs froth, the rain pelt, the mountains quake, the oceans surge, the deserts spread, the wind rake, and the snow to muffle. Not me. God."
That's the testimony of the Psalmist and all the other Old Testament saints.
But we have an inflated view of our importance and a diminished view of God's involvement. This leads to all manner of folly and harmful mischief.
When it comes to our environment, right living is a great aid to right thinking. The Bible assumes at least an agrarian awareness in its audience, if not an agrarian existence. The Jewish liturgical calendar is remarkably agrarian. The imagery and metaphor of Scripture is predominately agrarian. The curse in Genesis is agrarian and the depictions even of the New Jerusalem in Revelation have an agrarian dimension.
So here are five suggestions that even urban people might act on in an effort to get into our right minds.

1. Follow the Moon
     If someone asked, would you be able to say what phase the moon is in today? Is it waxing or waning? To know requires the discipline of stepping outside in the dark to scan the sky, and that alone would be reason enough. We do far too little stepping outside in the dark and looking up.

2.  Take a Constitutional
     My grandmother was fond of taking a walk after a meal. It was very Victorian and quaint, but it served a valuable purpose beyond helping to digest one's food. Nature is obscured in direct observation, but reveals itself in the sidelong glance. If you would know creation well it's no good making a point of looking out the window or reading books on the topic. There is no substitute for strolling, for aimless walking.
     Honestly, when was the last time you walked beneath the trees with no haste and no object?

3. Keep a weather journal.
    My friend has a journal in his milking parlor. His grandfather kept a similar journal, containing notes about the weather mixed with observations about the goodness and majesty of God. There is something about accepting today's weather and jotting it down, whether with glee or resignation, that takes from tomorrow the power to distress.  Knowing what happened a day ago and a year ago makes me much less anxious about what will happen a year from now.

4. Experience extremes of weather
    If the wind never ruins your umbrellas, if the rain never soaks you, if the sun never warms you to the touch, if your return from the snow storm never means booby traps of icy puddles for your family to discover with their stocking feet you are soft and experientially impoverished.

5. Celebrate extremes of weather
     When confronted with weather extremes people are most likely to cry for legislation, but there is another, more legitimate response. When trees come down cry "Glory." When the thermometer rises cry "Glory." The wild variability of nature is not something of which we are guilty and it's not something we're responsible for fixing. It is a pointed reminder that our God is great, big, and thrilling. Let him thrill you and applaud him when he does.

Five Reasons Not to Audition

As a pastor I am very tempted to spend my Sunday mornings auditioning. I want for people to like me and to like our church enough to make it their own, and that's understandable. But spending Sunday morning in an effort to woo potential parishioners into giving us the part represents not only a missed opportunity, but a real failure.

1. Auditioning is exhausting.
     It's not just that auditioning is wearisome, but in the case of a church which will face, potentially, a new set of prospective worshipers each Sunday it means a future of perpetual auditioning, all "once more with feeling," never moving on. That is an unendurable prospect.

2. Someone is always doing it better.
      Whether it's the preaching, the music, or the coffee there is always going to be someone local doing at least one thing (if not everything) better than we are doing it. We can't afford to audition because we can't afford to encourage the assumption that churches should be evaluated on the merits of their production.

3. Auditioning misses the point.
       We call it a worship service because it is a service to God. It's effect as a worship service needs to be judged on the basis of how well God is served. That's a simple point, but judging by how often I seem to forget it, it deserves some emphatic repeating.

4. It's an unattractive quality to the right people.
         All of this needy auditioning expresses a fundamental insecurity. And it's not that insecurity is always wrong, but in the case of the Bride of Christ it is, at the very least, hard to account for. The sweaty anxiety of an auditioning church is going to be a turn off to many people, people like me, people who are looking for an awesome God and the victorious citizens of his coming Kingdom.

5. It is an attractive quality to the wrong people.
        That insecurity, the insecurity of an auditioning church, might put me off but it's catnip to the manipulators, the ambitious, and the advantage-seeking. To those who want influence, position and authority a Sunday morning designed to get their approval is the same thing as an invitation to mischief. And to the spiritually complacent an auditioning church is the safest place in the world. But God wants church to be dangerous, a strait door through which lies the way to adventure and life everlasting.

The Good for What Ails Us

I enjoy reading about health fads of the past. Their claims are bold, their language colorful, their tone earnest, and their promised remedies completely unrealistic. There is a certain charm in the suggestion that "Dr. Compton's Fennel Elixer" could cure baldness, purify the blood, and diminish the night fidgets, a charm utterly absent in today's bloodless health commercials.
Whether it's been ridiculous tonics or carefully applied leaches, there have always been remedies of dubious effect. When, after leaving Eden, Eve came down with that first case of the sniffles Adam , in a fit of genius, grabbed several catkins from a pussy willow and gave them to his patient, instructing her to place them in her nostrils, promising that they would draw out the evil humors. And thus was born the field of medicine (and the writing of apocrypha).
I don't mean to suggest that all medicine is snake oil. I am very grateful to doctors and to the science behind our medicine.
But here's what interests me. If each generation has found amusing much of what the previous generation found medically compelling, it seems that there are two ways of responding to that insight.
For the most part we respond to that insight with the smug conviction that everyone who came before us was adorably stupid. "Tonics for female sickness" we shriek, in a tone of incredulous fondness. "All those well-meaning primitives who proceeded us . . . " we murmur, with a disbelieving little shake of our heads.
Well that's one way to respond to the evidence that at any given point in human history a good portion of what we believed about health was, as it turns out, balderdash and poppycock. We can respond with disdain and, perhaps, sympathy that those benighted souls did not have the good fortune to live in a wiser, more sensible age, an age like our own, an age of pure science.
Or we can respond to that chastening insight with humility. We can look at the evidence and conclude that much of what we believe now with unshakable conviction will provoke the disdain of our posterity, assuming it does not actually prevent the production of our posterity.
I have some suspicions about what history will reckon to be our pharmaceutical follies but I'm less interested in arguing against specific remedies or diagnoses than in arguing for a general posture of intellectual modesty. I would like for every doctor to carry around, in addition to the stethoscopes and prescription pads a jar of leaches. I would like for every pharmacy to offer their customers complimentary teaspoons of castor oil with each prescription filled.
Because it's hard to write the prescription for the good for what ails us, when what ails us most is pride and vanity.