A Sense of Place

We are developing the life of the mind. Does it matter where we do it? I am a radical fan of the God-Man, Jesus Christ. The Word that deigned to become flesh. Oh yes, place, food....stuff matters. Place, like clothing, reminds us of who we are and what we are doing.

Now that my two eldest are studying in parts distant for the present - one in music conservatory in California, and one in St Petersburg, Russia - I am especially delighted that my at-home student wants to study wherever I am. Our favorite spots therefore, have to have room for at least two.

So, the kitchen table...Especially for the last couple of weeks, when I have been teaching, discussing and dispensing aid while stirring up fresh bruschetta, freezing green chili sauce, drying tomatoes and herbs, and baking zucchini herb bread. The harvest not only of garden gems, but of camaraderie has been bountiful.

Though our girls are gone, we are still a productive family.



And since autumn has come in with darkling rain and frosty mornings, we curl up with our books and cups of hot mocha before the fireplace. We revel in the delicious warmth of fellowship with great minds - some of them in our books, some of them right there by the fire in the flesh.



Our tech den is really more of a wired library. Desks tucked between bookshelves lit with Tiffany lamps and softened with a futon where we can both settle with laptops to get down to business. Witness to our labors are the beautiful paintings and photographs the children have created over the years. We remember there that the works of our hands will endure, so we should labor to craft them well.



And finally, we love to study with our speech and debate club, Counterpoint Cultural Alliance. We explore the interface between philosophy and theology and find ways to speak to those around us who are still lost in a closed universe where God doesn't burst through the brazen heavens. We make history come to life in documentary films and inspirational one-acts. We make opportunities to bring our book-learning into real world impact today. So our study spot might be the classroom, but it might just as easily be pounding the pavement promoting the Denver Rebelution Tour or questioning defendants in Teen Court, or jolting a jaded church youth group out of their rut with hilarious and searching dramatic presentations.

Most of all, we love to study wherever our Lord places us. We are everywhere He wants to be (apologies to VISA).

Sabbath or Slavery: Understanding the Banking Bailout Part 3

The passage of the banking bailout is profoundly troubling. When men play God, their plans soon go awry and other men suffer. And when men manipulate a fiat currency, they declare that they can change the standards of measure without reference to any higher authority or any stable measure of value. They imply that they themselves are the standard of value. That is playing God.

The God who rules from on high will not be mocked. I think this will turn out badly. However, that is not the end of the story.

Ancient Israel was destroyed by God in response to Israel’s perversion of His law, particularly for oppressing the poor economically and judicially (see Amos). Judah, the southern kingdom was sent into exile for oppressing widows and orphans. It looked like the end for them. But the prophets never said so. Wherever they predicted death, they also predicted resurrection for those who would devote themselves to God anew. The judgments were designed to remove oppressors and to promote those who served God to wider influence.

Consider Daniel and his three friends. They were torn from their families, displaced from their homes, shoved into a rehabilitation program designed to produce good little Babylonian yes-men. But, drawing on the pastoral training of Ezekiel, they refused to despair. They dared to look to God as a deliverer, even as they knew Him to be the avenger of wrongs. They purposed to follow Him, come what might, and to throw themselves on His mercy rather than on Nebuchadnezzar’s. Essentially, they determined to be on the right side of God’s vengeance the next time.

God did become their protector, and more. He became their promoter. Though they had been princes in little, backwater Judah, God promoted them in exile to the highest influence and direct authority in the greatest power of their time. Death and resurrection. A purge and then promotion.

I don’t pretend to know how this will work out precisely for us in this situation. But I do know that the response of the faithful will look something like Daniel. We should not hope in the banking bailout; neither should we despair as it produces more oppression. We should imitate Daniel and his friends.

What did they do?

1. They confessed the sins of their nation, acknowledging God’s justice in judging those transgressions.
2. They asked for God’s mercy, not because of any righteousness in Judah, but because Judah represented God to the nations and Judah’s demise would bring God’s reputation into question among the heathen.
3. They purposed to follow God regardless of men’s demands, determining that they would rather fall into the hand of God than into the hand of man.
4. They hoped in God’s deliverance, and depended on His goodness. But they did not expect an easy time.
5. They looked for opportunities to serve God and to spread His rule to those among whom they found themselves.

All this we can do in our situation. Despite the assumption by the Federal Reserve and other economic bigwigs that they are in control, we must depend on the One who owns every asset in the universe.

My favorite commentary on Daniel: Handwriting on the Wall by James B. Jordan. It's inspiring, encouraging, practical, and soul-searching. Available at Biblical Horizons or American Vision.

Sabbath or Slavery: Understanding the Banking Bailout Part 2

The beauty of the Sabbath and Jubiliee is that it is a reliable 50-year cycle, which limits government manipulation of the economy, limits the expansion of the rich at the expense of the poor, and acknowledges the Providential power of God in the affairs of men.

God’s Providence would be evident to the people in the lush crop God promised in the sixth year, which could sustain them until the harvest after Sabbath. His care for the poor was evident in his provision for the return of the lands of their ancestral inheritance every 50 years, and the required liberation of all Israelite slaves (A man could sell his labor until the Jubilee in order to pay his debts – hence Biblical slavery). So a poor family had a real chance to return to mainstream socio-economic life. All this without Government intervention.

In this case, less is infinitely more. No Government intervention means no Government manipulation. It also means that the local community took responsibility to care and to provide for its own poor. The welfare of the poor could not become a political issue as long as local people looked after their impoverished brothers. Under our current Government-centered impersonal welfare system, we no longer even think of the poor among us as brothers. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, in a speech honoring former Fed Chairman, Milton Friedman, explained that one of the aggravating factors in the Great Depression was the impersonalization that the creation of the Federal Reserve brought to the banking crisis of the early 1930s. With the creation of the Fed, Bernanke observes, the larger banks which in former times would have aided smaller banks, no longer felt obligated to do so. The resulting rash of small bank failures deepened that financial crisis.

The Jubilee cycle carries with it a 2-3 year recovery period. No one plants in the Sabbath year, so there is no crop until the harvest in the year following the Sabbath year – not quite two years. When the Jubilee rolls around, the new harvest comes in the third year. It is a very limited time. It is predictable and therefore even your average guy could plan and prepare. Nobody panics.

Contrast this with the recovery from the Great Depression. Milton Friedman’s new book, A Monetary History of the United States, estimates the recovery at a minimum of ten years, and lays blame for the depth of the correction and its nearly interminable length at the door of the Federal Reserve. While it seems intuitively obvious that Government intervention exacerbated the problem, Friedman maintains (incredibly) that more intervention in the form of an increased money supply, would have solved it.

“Increasing the money supply” is a euphemism for Government theft. The government simply prints more money. The traditional way of viewing this is as a debasement of currency, the equivalent of shaving a few grains of silver off of a coin or of mixing increasing amounts of lead into the silver when minting the coins. There are indeed more coins, but they are worth less and less.

A more modern way to view it is to see money as a measure of productivity. All that means is that printing more money is printing more promises of future work. Literally, we are selling the labor of our children when we increase the money supply. A $700 billion bank bailout means agreeing not only to become slaves to this debt ourselves, but to agree to enslave our children and grandchildren pretty much in perpetuity.

What to do? Come back tomorrow for some hopeful recommendations.

Sabbath or Slavery: Understanding the Banking Bailout

Most Christians understand the Bible to teach that God built cycles of death and rebirth into the natural world: winter then spring, decay enriching new growth. What most of us don’t realize is that He built the same cycle into the social and economic systems of man.

God’s Old Testament model of society, ancient Israel, included an economic reset button that must have felt very much like a self-imposed mini-recession. It was the Sabbath year and the Jubilee year. Every seven years, Israel was to allow the fields to lay fallow and to subsist on their stockpiled goods. The poor, who had no stockpiles, could glean from the fields that which grew up “volunteer”. On that seventh year, they were to cancel debts within the nation; the debts they owed to each other. They were also to free those Israelites whose debts had brought them into slavery. And after seven cycles of seven years, they were to observe a second year of Sabbath rest called the Jubilee, so that the complete economic cycle encompassed 50 years. (See Lev. 25)

The gracious purpose of God was to give the land rest and rejuvenation, as well as to limit both debt and tyranny. Though a man could be enslaved for repayment of huge debts, no one could obligate himself for longer than seven years. Only God owned the land, and He had granted it to certain families. A family might lease the use of the land to another family for a few years, but on the Sabbath year, the rights to the land returned to the original family. Under those circumstances, no rich man could enslave or oppress a fellow without restraint. No government redistribution plan could encumber a generation’s children or manipulate the redistribution for political gain.

The only exception to this radical freedom and personal responsibility was the man who refused the risks of freedom and preferred the security of being kept. Such men were allowed to choose permanent slavery. He was marked by having an ear pierced to signify that permanent subjection (Ex.21: 5-7). But his children were free.

This model has several implications pertinent to our current banking crisis in America, which I’d like to discuss over the next few days.

Lenten Bible Study

Often Lent is viewed as a time to put away luxuries of life for a little while or to put aside self-indulgence - but not too seriously. Chocolate goes for a few weeks, but is back again permanently after Easter. Seems to me this does us little real benefit.

Lent is a good time to consider our ways and to form new habits more conformed to the image of Christ. Prune back the thorns that choke out your productive branches. If you want to lose weight, don't just fast frequently during Lent. Form a habit of eating less, and remind yourself when the hunger pangs come, that your strength for the day comes from God, not simply from the food you eat.

One of my Lenten observances this year is to become more regular in my communications with you. I'd like to begin by offering a preview of the Lenten series of devotions I'm writing. So here's installment one, a little background on Lent and the use of the Lectionary on which these Bible Studies are based.

My writing will improve if you comment. Perhaps that could be one of your Lenten observances: cease lurking and speak up!

Beauty for Ashes

Daily Devotions for the Lenten Season

These devotional meditations are based on the readings organized in the lectionary found at www.oremus.org. The lectionary is perhaps the first Christian Bible study manual, compiling parallel and thematically related passages of Scripture from the Psalms, the Old Testament and the New Testament in a daily reading regimen that covers the entire Bible in a three-year cycle. This tradition of readings stretches all the way back to the ancient synagogues’ practice of reading through the Torah, so as to acquaint the people with as much of the Scripture as possible.

Hearing the antiphonal voices of Old Testament echoing New Testament themes gives extraordinary richness to familiar passages. We are enabled to capture the reverberations of Old Testament stories in the nuances of those densely-packed New Testament narratives and analyses. Seeing what those Old Testament events foreshadowed in the New Testament helps to make sense of some of the odd consequences of seemingly minor events in those first events (For instance, why was it so important for Moses not to strike the rock that poured out water for Israel in the wilderness, so important that because he disobeyed, he was barred from entering the Promised Land?).

This particular series of readings is from Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary, which pairs Luke’s Gospel with the Old Testament prophets. The Revised Common Lectionary is used by Protestant churches across the English-speaking world.

Bread of Heaven

All Creation speaks to us of God and His works. That is why no occupation, no matter how mundane, is merely drudgery.

Others may feel trapped on a treadmill of meaningless repetitions, but children of the Creator should understand that it isn't a treadmill. It's the stairway to heaven. Every task can speak to us of something He has done for us or in us or by us.

It's a fractal universe. Every shape is made up of shapes just like the larger shape. Our gestures echo, in microcosm, His. He uses our own small hands to teach us the cosmic textures of spiritual realities.

Take bread. For most of the world, it's the strength-for-the-day staple. Bread and salt; the invitation to life. Bread is the foundation of hospitality. The aroma of baking bread draws us into "Welcome home!" and "Remember when?"

It is the mystery of secret growth; sin and righteousness, the Serpent's seed and the Church. Revolution hiding in plain sight. Penicillin and the death of men's plagues.

Bread is the appetizer for the Lamb's wedding feast. It is the memorial of Christ's ordinary, gracious, invitational, mysterious, nourishing, healing sacrifice.

Break it. Drink in the steamy fragrance. And, with the disciples at Emmaeus, recognize Him.

This recipe was a gift from a dear friend, who brought it to our Thanksgiving feast one year. Isn't female bonding all about food 90% of the time?

Cheese Bread Knots

Combine:

10-11 cups white flour

4 pkgs. Dry yeast

Heat in saucepan until just warm:

4 cups milk

12 oz. Swiss Cheese

1 cup sugar

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter

2 tablespoons salt

Combine milk mixture, flour, and 2 eggs. Beat for ½ minute at low speed of mixer. Beat at high speed 3 minutes. Stir in enough flour to make a soft dough, then knead until smooth and elastic (5-8 minutes).

Shape into a ball and place in greased bowl. Cover and let rise until doubled (1 ½ hours). Punch dough down and turn out on floured surface. Divide dough into four equal pieces. Shape each into a ball. Cover and let rest 10 minutes.

Roll each ball into a 12x16 inch rectangle. Cut crosswise into 6x1 inch strips. Tie each strip into a loose knot. Place on a greased baking sheet.

Cover and let rise until doubled (about 40 minutes). Bake at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

These freeze well.

Redeeming the Time: Waiting

"And the Bridegroom tarried..." (Mt. 25:1-13)

Waiting. It feels so unproductive, so helpless, often so hopeless. And yet God arranges our lives to that waiting is a large part of what we are called to do.

In the parable of the Wise & Foolish Virgins, these ladies are asked to wait in the dark for an unspecified length of time right on the doorstep of the party. The only sure thing is that the Bridegoom will come.

And we have this in common with the saints before the Incarnation, that we do not know when exactly to expect the One for whom we long, but we are asked to wait in the dark until then. We wait not only for the final coming of the Lord, when He will finish all the work He has in hand here, but also we wait for those small, personal Advents when He dispels some darkness within each of our hearts and invites us to commune with Him in some fresh intimacy.

I do not know what darkness engulfs you: sickness, poverty, business failures, separations, persecutions, mental instability, worry over children...But I do know that God rarely removes these things quickly or easily. And I know that, in His sovereign omnipotence, He could. And that knowledge increases my darkness.

So what is it about waiting that God values so much that He leaves us to suffer in the dark for so long? Well, according to this parable, waiting separates those who will remain faithful through darkness from those who won't. Waiting reveals those who have a personal connection to the oil merchant, the flame-giver, the Spirit. Waiting causes us to take the initiative seek the Spirit before we are tested, to establish a relationship with Him that will sustain us through the longest night. Waiting increases our longing for deliverance, for the pleasures that are in Jesus' company, for the revelations that the blazing light at the feast will show and that our little lamp wicks teach us to expect.

This Advent, as we light the first lonely candle on our dark Advent wreath, we will read this parable and ask for the Spirit's full supply of the 'oil of gladness' that sustained Jesus through the darkness of His sojourn with us, and that will surely sustain us through whatever midnight we are asked to watch. And we will brainstorm together ways to nourish the little flames of hope and anticipation God gives us particularly in the areas of our lives where we find the deepest darkness.

And this week, we will have all our dinners together lit only by the light of that one Advent candle, as we speak of our longings for more closeness with the Bridegroom and of the foretastes of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb that we have seen that day.

Bon appetit! and keep your matches dry.

Sacred and secular

"No distinction was made between the sacred and the everyday...their life was all one piece. It was all sacred and all ordinary." ` Sue Bender ~ author of Plain and Simple

There is, of course, a sense in which this sentiment is admirable. Surely every aspect of life should be brought joyfully under the lordship of Christ, every thought captive to His obedience. This attitude was one of the great strengths of the Puritans, and a legacy that we are still mining.

The basis of Western scientific inquiry is the insistence that God created and sustains the material world, not just the "spiritual", and that material things reflect His orderly and utterly faithful character. In other words, we can perform a scientific experiment and expect to be able to replicate it, to find consistency in the behavior of material things, because their being is sustained by a faithful, consistent Creator. So in some sense, a distinction between sacred and secular would hamper our secular inquiries into truth.

This removal of the distinction between sacred and secular has given us a respect for the value of every kind of work. We recognize the dignity of every calling, not just the calling to a specifically Christian vocation. In fact, one of the descriptions of the New Jerusalem is that ordinary work right down to cooking pots and horse harnesses will proclaim holiness to the Lord (Zech. 14:20-21). So our eternal destiny calls us to shape our daily work on the model of God's divine work.

But this removal of the sacred/secular distinction has its downside. If everything is sacred, is anything special? If everything is sanctified, can anything be properly used for common service? Or is it that nothing is sacred?

Certainly the modern trend in worship is to make everything casual, entertaining, accessible to anyone and everyone. In a word, secular. Throwing frisbees might be just as appropriate in one of these services as prayer. Come to think of it, it might BE a prayer.

Marriage isn't sacred anymore either. It is just another pleasant association like dozens of others you could name. It doesn't need special protection or consideration any more than your friendship with the waitress at the local diner or your rapport with your family doctor. Marriage is simply an ordinary contract offered and withdrawn at will.

On the other hand, everything in the natural world is becoming sacred. Animals, trees, oceans, you name it. Nothing can be touched or tampered with. It is holy. It cannot be used for ordinary purposes like food, clothing, shelter, and such.

We need to learn how to de-sanctify things to their primary purposes. And we need to remember how to hold the truly sacred things apart for their special uses.

It is interesting in this context to reflect on Abraham's custom during his wanderings in Canaan, after God had promised that land to Abraham's descendents. Wherever Abraham camped, he dug a well near a venerable tree and held worship there. Essentially, he was de-sanctifying that land from its pagan gods and establishing a holy space for the worship of YHWH. Centuries later, Abraham's descendents did inherit that land, worshipping YHWH in a sacred space that was a glorified oasis: pillars like tree trunks loaded with gold and tapestry fruit, and a huge laver so big it was called a "sea".

We need to become skilled in distinguishing what should remain distinctly sacred or secular in order to rightly understand how secular things can be elevated and ennobled in service to or in imitation of the sacred. But not AS sacred.

So find the Tree of Life and dig a well. Reclaim history and creation for its proper use. Let the streams of living water flow from that well to restore the world to its proclamation of its Creator's glory.

Lunch Break in the Salt Mines

"Once in a while you have to take a break and visit yourself ." - Audrey Giorgi

I am an artist. Blood and bones. I am never so happy as when I have paint and canvas, ink and paper, or photos and scrapbook pages in hand and an empty afternoon at my disposal. It is meat and drink to me to re-arrange the furniture and wall decor to celebrate the next phase of the church calendar and to welcome visitors. Or to light candles, turn off all the lights (because there's a whopping good thunderstorm that will likely turn them off anyway) and play some thundery Beethoven or Chopin or accompany my family singing hymns until the storm subsides (or we get tired of squinting).

I am an artist. That is difficult to remember amidst the rockslides and sluices of administration that the Lord has served me this spring and summer. I am making it possible for other people to exercise their arts, while I'm stuck with the pick and axe work. Is this really me? Why am I good at what I hate to do? Will I ever get to do art again (melodramatic sob)? Will I ever even get to blog regularly?

When my husband and I were first married, we moved half-way across the continent in our first week. No friends. No church. No family. No piano. No paints. No funiture to speak of. My husband's new job was fairly all-consuming.

What I did have to work with was chicken, well, and vegetables. I came to view these as my canvas. Those veggies had to be delicious, nutritious AND beautiful. It got to be a game: how many ways to serve chicken can I find or invent? Aristotle says that tangible matter resists the forms of perfection imposed upon them. I found it so with chicken - even the occasional hamburger defied the forms. My game was called 'taming the stubborn tangibles'. Eventually, I realized it was art.

Perhaps all I really need is to be able to view administration as art. The institutions are my canvas and people are my paints. Yes, and paperwork is my brush (heavy sigh!). These tangibles resist form more than any other media I have ever worked with. They have to be persuaded to stay on the canvas. They mix with the yellow instead of the blue. Regular paint doesn't have to want to be purple, but people have to want to be in the painting.

Is it art? I'll let you know, but maybe it's the end of the tunnel.

Notes from Underground

Administration! It really is the pits! My salt-mine has a lot more extensive galleries than I ever suspected. I thought I saw light at the end of the tunnel, but it was just a ventilation shaft.

Well, since I'm not getting out any time soon, I'll try to enjoy the scenery.

My middle daughter, Anne visited the salt mines for which Salzburg is named. She said it was incredible not only what God had wrought, but what men have done. The walls sparkled, and wherever they were thin between chambers, light could penetrate so that the walls shone like pink hurricane glasses around a candle.

The miners of salt have an absolutely amazing method of extracting and purifying the salt that they mine. They dig drainage tunnels between the galleries to the outside world, where an enormous holding tank awaits. Then they pump the gallery full of water. Salt dissolves! Remember? When the water has reached its saturation point, they pump the water out into the holding tank and allow it to evaporate. What is left is pure salt. Water, air and gravity have done the heavy lifting.

What's more, the miners ride an enormous slide down to work every day. Picture one of those mountain slides you ride for hundreds of feet under the summer sky - only underground.

I gotta figure out how to make my salt mine work like this...

Furrowed

I'm tired. I'm so tired, I'm numb. Nothing sounds interesting. Everything's a chore.

But I'm planting the garden anyway. The seeds rustle dryly out of their envelopes and disappear into the soil, invisible in their dirt camoflage (how do the birds find them?). It looks pretty pitiful, really. Nothing but rock-hard pellets and broken earth. An apt reflection of the gardener: prostrate, broken, leafless.

But I'm planting the garden anyway. Under the furrowed dust, I am longing for a taste of those vivid tomatoes that only come out of one's own backyard. I believe there will be a salad that is as much a feast for the eye as for the palate - violets, nasturtiums and pale pansies crowded between the spinach and cranberries. The pungent basil will be worth its weight in gold, and the bees will use it to flavor our honey with a minty perfume. I am counting on roasting chilis this fall, and being able to put up quarts and quarts of salsa, paprikas sauce and green chili.

I am counting on renewal. On resurrection.

Let's See...

Creation is supposed to speak to us of its Creator, but mostly it doesn't. A sunrise doesn't remind us of the joy of Christ hastening to claim His Bride (Ps 19). Mostly, a sunrise simply means that we went to bed too late, and now we're up too early (groan!). The fault does not lie in Creation but in its observers.

Often, it takes a work of art to bring Creation's message into focus for us dullards. The framed close-up of water rushing over brook stones makes us take note of its beauty and reflect upon the swiftness of time, and the permanence of our Rock. Bach's counterpoint gives us heart-breaking insight into the freedom, beauty, independence and harmony among the persons of the Trinity. Sunday dinner with its aromas, its crystal and candles on white tablecloths reminds us that worship isn't merely propositional. It is a feast. We aren't simply invited to an intellectual exercise. We are invited to a party.

Art lets us see into the depths and dimensions of what seems at first to be opaque material. But we don't need to go to the art museum to catch a glimpse of these undergirding realities. Just consider for a moment, why you arrange your schedule the way that you do, and how it might reflect God's work. Would consciously arranging your work to imitate His patterns actually be more productive as well as more beautiful? When you discipline your children, aren't you sculpting a human soul? And doesn't that open new horizons on God's dealings with you?

The beauty of Art is that it is a way of seeing as much as anything else. It is a habit of the heart. Perhaps the only thing that changes us more deeply is suffering.

Metamorphoses

Would that men had words and minds and songs enough
To honor that magnificent, unspeakable One
Whose love transforms us more surely than time,
More deeply than grief,
More gloriously than a thousand dying suns;
Who pours Himself out for us in scarlet richness
From the dark wound of womb-wrenching
Separation
Who breathes into our sterile spirits new-birthed Life,
By that Breath-born Prince and that ancient Breath
That still makes dust
Live!

Kim Anderson
Copyright 1979
All rights reserved