Unfounded Sentiment

She was naturally of a gay, lively, and peace-loving disposition, but from continual failures and misfortunes she had come to desire so keenly that all should live in peace and joy and should not dare to break the peace, that the slightest jar, the smallest disaster reduced her almost to a frenzy, and she would pass in an instant from the brightest hopes and fancies to cursing her fate and raving, and knocking her head against the wall. -Dostoevsky from Crime and Punishment

I’m tired of words like hope, change, and faith. I’m tired of them because they are so often used haphazardly. Words like this simply cannot stand on their own. They need some sort of referent. Either grammatically in the form of a direct object–faith in what, change to what?; or logically–hope because of what? We use sentiments are shortcuts to thinking. We haven’t had a care to what love actually is, or what thing might be reasonable in which to put our faith, or to what end is our change taking us. We’ve become lazy, and it’s all incredibly frustrating.

But I don’t just have an intellectual annoyance. I’m also concerned. On my college campus (and no doubt campuses across the country) we made sophist comments in our classes about loving others and living in harmony, and all other sorts of unfounded rubbish. Then we cheated in our studies, lied, backstabbed our roommates, created drama, gossiped, and engaged in normal, though sinful, early twenties behavior. Just hypocrisy? Yes and no. This wears the garb of hypocrisy. Of course we must always be wary of falling into whitewashed tombs and large hunks of wood in our eyes, but this is something more. Just like the quote above, there seems to be a correlation between tightly held sentiments and experiencing those sentiments–the greater I believe in peace, the less likely I am to actually experience it or pursue it for others.

Therein lies the trouble; absolutizing sentiment which is untethered from a referent is just ‘chasing after the wind.’ The sentiments become relativized and individualized to such an extent that they only serve our purpose. Who of us hasn’t lived in a family, or seen examples where the person who is treated the ‘most fairly’ is the one who bullies the most and shouts the loudest? All animals are equal, some are just more equal than others.

Unfounded sentiments are dead sentiments. Faith is a dead term–what really matters is its object. Peace is a dead term– what really matters is how you might pursue it. Hope is a dead term– what really matters is what grounds you have for it. The crowds were cheering as they greeted their Messiah, shouting ‘peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’ Jesus, while receptive of their praise, was also not swept away in its ecstasy. Instead, he wept, saying, ‘Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.’ Christ implores us to know the referent of our sentiments–and then takes the crowds with him to the cross.

 

Raskolnikov’s Cruelty

I’m currently reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a novel which I should have read my senior year (sorry Mrs. Carswell). Ever since, I’ve been intrigued by it–it’s pedigree, it’s milieu, it’s psychological explorations, it’s terror. I’ve picked the book up three times since High School and have only now been able to make it past Part I.

I think I’ve been afraid of it. In Raskolnikov, the main character, Dostoevsky explores the ‘radical intelligentsia’ so common among young, poor upper middle class university students all across Europe in the 19th century. Marxists, Bonapartists, and all manner of -ists and -isms were being paraded in the Universities. Many of these radicals thought that the new world would arise at the leveling of economic and class inequality, and these grapes of wrath would continue to ripen for the communist harvest in 1917. All of this is history to us, but Dostoevsky puts a grotesque, human face to it.  For Raskolnikov is believable; not just for mid-19th century Russia, but for our present day.

Raskolnikov’s grotesqueness came clearly into view in his first long conversation with Sonia, a tragic yet noble prostitute, ‘”There are three ways before her,” he thought, “The canal [suicide], the madhouse, or…at last to sink into depravity which obscures the mind and turns the heart to stone.” The last idea was the most revolting, but he was a skeptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel, and so he could not help believing that the last end was the most likely.”‘ Here was a young girl, driven to poverty and prostitution, of good character yet bad reputation, and Raskolnikov could only treat her as a specimen. For a living, breathing, needy person to merit his cold, academic interest… ‘cruel’ was never so aptly placed.

I’m reminded of Judas in the fourth Gospel scolding Jesus for allowing himself to be anointed by a sinner– that money could have been saved for the poor (or his own pockets), Judas exclaimed. And yet Judas didn’t see the poor people before his eyes, exchanging kindness and love towards one another. He was too abstract–too cruel to notice.

In many ways, we can be like this; imagining a new world with all the structures in place, and forgetting the people who will live there. “Love believes all things” the apostle Paul tells us; Love has no room for abstraction and skepticism.

 

Far as the Curse is Found

This is a copy of a short book review I wrote for Redeemer Presbyterian Church, San Antonio.

How can I find purpose in a world that is under the curse of God? This question had been nagging me recently, and only compounded by the ‘vanity of vanities’ that our church is learning about in Ecclesiastes. For that reason I was very thankful to pick up Michael D. Williams’ book Far as the Curse is Found to write this book review. In it I found my faith grow as I saw again how God will set all things right, and how he has called me into that great project with him.

Taking the name of his book from Isaac Watts’ famous lyric in Joy to the World, Williams traces God’s words and actions in history to show how God makes his blessings flow as far as the curse is found. Williams asserts that God’s heavenly blessings come to man through the covenant that He has graciously established with his people. God’s covenant with Abraham is a good example: “I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

When we look through the pages of the Old Testament, however, we see a different story.Israelconstantly breaks covenant with the God who promised to bless them and everyone through them. How can God bless the entire world if the bearers of that blessing break covenant with God?

This has always led me to frustration. If God is about saving the world through the covenant he made with Israel, it seems like he made a bad choice. Curse and futility appear to win. But then God promises a New Covenant, by sending Jesus. He was faithful whereIsrael was not. Williams says, ‘Jesus is not just the savior ofIsrael; he is also the embodiment of whatIsrael was meant to be.’ God has always intended that Jesus himself will keep covenant with God whereIsrael failed.

Williams goes on to say that in Christ we have sure grounds for believing God’s concern for the entire creation: On the cross, the curse ofIsrael’s covenant breaking has fallen on Jesus’ shoulders so that the blessings of God would spread to the ends of the earth.

The promises and blessings of God are now ours by faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus has once and for all secured the blessings of God. And Williams writes to remind us, the people of God, that we are called into this mission on the sure foundation of Christ. Now, in Christ, his purpose of being a blessing is now our purpose: “We come to make his blessings flow—far as the curse is found.”

 

Oz, The Great and Terrible

In my last post, I spoke about how L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was as dreadful as any fairy-tale because it reminds us of the daymare that haunts our waking hours: Why is God hidden from us? Why doesn’t he just show himself? What is he hiding? We are like Job, ‘Oh, that I knew where I might find [God], that I might come even to his seat! I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know what he would answer me and understand what he would say to me…behold I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him; on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him; he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him.’ Job 23:3-5, 8-9.

The journey of faith to the Wizard is an enduring context in which this question can be played out. I call it an enduring context because of the proliferance of films, tv shows, and plays which occur in Oz. (As of this post, there is a movie in preproduction, Oz: The Great and Powerful.) I cannot say that I have watched or read more than two of these stories, but I would like to comment on the two that have had the most effect on our culture– Victor Fleming’s movie, The Wizard of Oz, and Stephen Schwartz’s musical, Wicked– I’ve personally seen them each about four times.

A brief analysis of these stories will show similarities which are offset by a highly different cultural expectation concerning the answer to the question of the hidden God. The milieu sets the perfect stage for the contrast. Both begin with endearing female leads-Dorothy and Elphaba- who realize that the only one who can help them is the all-powerful wizard of Oz. They are both guided by a fairy god-mother character. Glinda, the good witch of the North, is a well-meaning if naive character who assumes the Wizard will answer Dorothy’s questions. Madame Morrible, the headmistress of Shiz, sees Elphaba’s potential as a asset that can be used to her advantage, and so uses the name of the Wizard to stir her needy heart, ‘why I predict the Wizard will make you his magic Grand Vizier.’ Dorothy and Elphaba thus begin their quest to get to the Wizard–Dorothy by skipping down the yellow brick road to the happy singing of the munchkins; Elphaba by singing her first song, ‘The Wizard and I’; a song of such deep hope that one must be deaf not to hear the foreboding disappointment rumbling (‘I’d be so happy I could, melt!’). How will Oz answer our heroines prayers?

The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach maintains that all religious people worship nothing more than a collective human projection. He argues that God only exists in human imagination. While this is certainly not my perspective, Feuerbach is helpful because he gives us a category through which to view art as representing (or creating) our cultural projection of God. From the tone that The Wizard of Oz and Wicked immediately strike, there is a marked difference. When Dorothy pulls the curtain on the Wizard she meets a man who is powerless save in reputation, affable, and, though misguided, generally harmless. The Wizard whom Elphaba meets is different. His is, though apologetically, much like Machiavelli’s Prince. ‘Power is knowledge’, he might repeat from Foucault, and the Wizard uses his to continue his rule and undermine diversity–totalitarianism in maintained with unitarian thought. Yet Schwartz’s Wizard doesn’t seem to relish his position. It may have been thrust upon him, or a bid for power gone terribly wrong. Repentance may still be possible for this Wizard, if only through abdication.

Each of these Wizards represents different projections of the God of our culture. We have journeyed to the throne room through Dorothy and Elphaba, have knocked on His door, and forced him to answer us. ‘I would know what he would answer me and understand what he would say to me’ we say with Job. We may have him impotent and grandfatherly, perhaps able to shed a tear for us, but completely unable to help us. Or we may have him selfish and evil- possibly able to help, but entirely unwilling to do so unless it helps him first. In approaching His throne room we are left with that old question of theodicy. Either God is not powerful, or God is not good. Culture will always oscillate so.

We assume God is hiding because He can’t answer our questions. We, His creatures, have silenced God, and he is bound to stay hidden behind the curtain. But what if the curtain isn’t His protection? What if the curtain is our protection? In Exodus 33 Moses and God are speaking to one another. Moses asks God if he can see his Glory. God answers, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I am gracious and show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me a live.’ So God hid Moses in the cleft of a rock, and covered him with the back of his hand and passed before him. God, in his grace and goodness, has protected us sinners from seeing his holiness and so being consumed.

Does this mean that he will stay silent? Will we ever get an answer? If we would, our heroine cannot be Dorothy or Elphaba. We must approach the throne-room of God through the only one who has seen God’s face and lived. In Christ, the curtain wasn’t just pulled back, it was torn in two. In Jesus, we have access to the father ‘by blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain…[so] let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.’ (Hebrews 10:19-22). We may not have all the answers all at once, but at the cross of Christ we need not answer our own questions in our own monologue in our own time. We, like Job, must respond to God’s questions in humility, ‘Behold I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice but I will proceed no further.’ (Job 40:3-5). Maybe then will we be able to hear His answers.

 

The Man Behind the Curtain

I recently read the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum. I have a more than a fleeting interest in fairy tales, and am very interested in the author’s approach to, in Baum’s words, ‘the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy.’ I was sorely disappointed. In three short paragraphs I was ready to throw the book on the ground. Baum insists on ‘modernized’ tales in which there are no ‘heartaches and nightmares’ devised by the author ‘to point a fearsome moral to each tale.’ We have enough morality in schools, he says, why not just just ‘dispense with all disagreeable incident’ and simply ‘seek entertainment’?

My frustration rests less in his approach (though what child doesn’t want a classic good vs evil story?), and more in his follow through. Without seeing the irony, Baum wrote himself directly into his own story in the person of the Wizard–Baum pulls the strings as the Wizard; Baum speaks from on high as the Wizard; and Baum is even exposed as the Wizard.

When Dorothy approaches the Wizard in Chapter 11 of Baum’s book, one cannot help but notice the similarities between the Wizard and God himself. He dwells in his throne room; his closest guards have never seen him; Dorothy is asked if ‘she will really…look upon the face of Oz the Terrible’; the throne room is covered  in a ‘great light, as bright as the sun’; and finally says to her, ‘I am Oz, the great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?’

Baum is still writing a morality tale for the simple fact that he has written his deistic angst right into the story by comparing God with the Wizard. When Dorothy and her friends enter Oz’s throne room after completing their task, no one appeared to be there. “They kept close to the door and closer to one another, for the stillness of the empty room was more dreadful than any of the forms they had seen Oz take.” His fairy tale is a platform to comment on the heavenly vacancy–maybe God is just man’s fantasy after all?– and he has taken us into his nightmare, for the thought that no one is there is ‘more dreadful’ than anything I can think of.

The curtain is drawn. Baum’s ‘modernized’ story is a perfect picture of modern man. He has attempted to dispense with all fearsome morals and to seek entertainment. Yet for all his great and terribleness, he is still standing in a dreadful silence and waiting… hoping for God to speak.

 

Odysseus and work

I’m reading The Odyssey right now, a work I had only previously read abridged. What I most appreciate is that many of the virtues of the pagan world, though without a firm foundation in Christ, are still praiseworthy and stir my heart to growth.

When Odysseus first arrives at home after years of wandering, Athena disguises him as a beggar so that he may plot against the suitors who have invaded his home, and test his servants fidelity to him. As a lowly beggar, he is the object of much abuse from the brazen suitors, and we long for his vindication–for the true man to emerge and repay his enemies. As this is occuring, Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, is also coming of age, as a ’beard appears on the boy’s cheek.’

Homer is begging us to ask:  What does it really mean to be a man? It is a joy to peer into Homer’s world and see his story weave an explanation.

One answer to that question is how a man relates to work. In this excerpt, Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, is being hassled for his apparent laziness:

“Stranger, how would you like to work for me if I took you on–I’d give you decent wages–picking the stones to lay a tight dry wall or planting tall trees on the edge of my estate? I’d give you rations to last you year-round, clothes for your body, sandals for your feet. Oh no, you’ve learned your lazy ways too well, you’ve got no itch to stick to good hard work, you’d rather go scrounging round the countryside, begging for crusts to stuff your greedy gut!”

This hit me to the core because I know my laziness all too well. My generation doesn’t work very well. We are not convinced that the difficulty of work will be met with the satisfaction of a job well done. In some senses, we are right– the curse has made our work difficult, and we feel its futility. Yet there is a fire in me that still wishes I knew a good day’s hard labor. Odysseus, the man, deftly responds:

“‘Ah, Eurymachus,’ Odysseus, master of many exploits, answered firmly, ‘if only the two of us could go man to man in the labors of the field… In the late spring, when the long days come round, out in the meadow, I swinging a well-curved scythe and you swinging yours–we’d test our strength for work, fasting right till dusk with lots of hay to mow. Or give us a team of oxen to drive, purebreads, hulking, ruddy beasts, both lusty with fodder, paired for age and pulling-power that never flags—with four acres to work, the loam churning under the plow—you’d see what a straight, unbroken furrow I could cut you then.’”

This poetic response rekindles the virtue of work. To be a man is to know how to work well. Yet could I respond in such a way when I know the futility and difficulty, shame and frustration of work? These themes remind me of Romans 8:18-19

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

So, what does it mean to be a man? Like Odysseus, Christians are waiting to be revealed in glory. One of the glorious virtues that God is restoring in us is by cultivating in us desire and patience to work in God’s creation.

 

The Purpose of Lost

Lost is about to be come to its conclusion. Before it ends, I have begun to re-read some literature that captures the two overarching themes of the show: The alienation of place, and the multi-dimensionality of time. Through the use of these two themes, Lost is contributing to the ongoing discussion of humanity and his relationship to his fate, by interacting with his theology. Competing Natural, and ‘Revelatory’ theologies vie for the heart of each character as he understands his alienation on the Island, and his purpose there—if he even has one.

In this vein, five related works of literature jumped out at me, just enough to research, and yet not too many to inundate me. I’ll give a brief description of why I chose each, and how Lost is informed by these works.

The Tempest, Shakespeare

The Tempest is where it all began, and from which flows all my other literary selections.  Prospero, the Magician who was banished by his evil brother, is seeking his revenge and conjures a great tempest to blow his ship and all on it onto his tiny Island. Separated and disoriented, the groups are trying to find their way home as they slowly, by Prospero’s design, journey closer and closer to meet their captor, all the while growing to understand the evil of the master they once served. At the same time, we meet Prospero’s servant Caliban, writhing in agony under his master, but because of crimes he has committed. Caliban’s fate is pitiful, but his wrath unsatiable, all the while plotting Prospero’s downfall even as a man attempts to destroy the God who made him. While the similarities are striking, the dissimilarities prove to me the use and even recapitulation of Shakespeare’s classic. Shakespeare, to spite his critics, employed Aristotle’s three unities of time, place, and action—something that he had only done once before in his plays. He does it to such an absurd degree that hardly a scene goes by without someone asking the time. The entire play takes place in one place in one day, with only one plot. These unities are not employed in Lost to an absurd degree, but ironically, the effect of the purpose of the plot is similar. The time traveling in Lost so blurs time that it makes time on the Island almost stand still, like in the Tempest. The subplots of Lost are so intricate that answering all of the questions posed by following all the plots would be absurd. Therefore, Lost will (mark me) have one final answer, which won’t explain everything, but will sum up the story in a final way. Even in their dissimilarities, The Tempest and Lost are playing around with the fantastic to such an extent that we can only assume that each Island exists in a different reality, albeit intimately connected with it. A quick glance at a few of the Dharma stations will help us to see this: The Looking Glass (the sequel to Alice in Wonderland), The Lamp Post (a reference to the entrance to Narnia), and finally, The Tempest.

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce is my best guess at the reconciliation between the flashes forward, backward, and sideways. If you haven’t read this book, Lewis is essentially pulling back the world as we see it to explore what our decisions look like in the eternal realm. In other words, our decisions may seem petty, but they redound into eternity, or the fantastic in this case—struggles with smoke monsters, polar bears and the walking dead on an eerily beautiful Island.

Caliban upon Setebos, Browning

This poem explores Caliban’s servitude to Prospero; his choices that led him there, his hatred of his deity, and how he, as a representative of humanity, responds to seemingly cruel fate.

The Sea and Mirror, W.H. Auden

Auden’s powerful commentary on The Tempest in verse. This is important for me as Auden is contributing to the literature of Browning and Shakespeare as his imagines himself in the play from a Christian perspective. As an analogue to life, Auden and Browning represent differing perspectives regarding how man must deal theologically with his alienation on a spiteful Island. How do we understand and deal with ourselves in this cosmos. Who can we blame? Is there hope for praise?

Psalm 50, a Psalm of Asaph

At a pivotal point we hear God’s words in this psalm: ‘You thought that I was altogether like you.’ This is the fate of Caliban, and form Browning’s prologue. If humanity can see purpose, can he handle the author and designer of that purpose? This, I believe, is the final question in Lost. Do we reject revelation and go our own way? Do we reject revelation and fight against it because we hate it? Where do we stand when we come face to face with the author of our purpose?

Writing about this in another blog post would be silly. You are just going to have to ask me what I’m learning when you see me!

 

Reality in the Ethical Universe

So how’s this for a terrible topic: ‘Reality’. I’ve been thinking about what makes things real for the last month, and I haven’t been able to finish my blog because the endeavor is just way too big. However, with some prodding from friends, I’ll throw down what I have and maybe continue with it in later posts.

Recently, fairy tale philosophers have convinced me that reality isn’t so bare bones as I once thought it was. We’ve been led to believe that boiling something down to its essential qualities helps us to know what is real—as if all of life submitted to some systematic order.

Systematically ordering the world, while useful, just doesn’t make anything more or less real. We labor under the delusion that once we’ve figured out what “reality” is and what’s not (as far as we can tell), we’ve understood it, quantified it, objectified it, and reduced it to its essential ‘realness’. CS Lewis, in The Abolition of Man talks about the folly of only submitting the natural world to the test of realness:

“It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.”

The point of all this is that we’ve emptied the world of its power, and the world becomes demystified—at least for a time. Man can’t live in that dissonance for long. On the question of origins, for example, after attempting to strip the world of a creator God, Dawkins (and others) have suggested Alien Seeding as a possible beginning of life. My point here is not to debate the origins of the universe but rather to show that humanity cannot live without mystery for too long. Inevitably, we will all attempt to assign some metaphysical or moral mythology to our understanding of the world. In the human imagination, anything real has more than just physical characteristics—reality is by nature ethical, even though we often try to forget it.

On my part, one of the paths to recovery from demystified modern existence has been by reading Fairy Stories, which have helped me see reality in its full splendor. G. K. Chesterton remarks: “[For the modern world] the leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it.” In this sense, Fairy-tales reconnect humanity to the world. If golden apples grow on trees in fairy tales, we should be astounded and overjoyed when we remember that they just so happen to be red in our world! Tolkien simply calls this ‘Recovery’.

Of course fairy stories cannot restore the ethical dimension to reality—they don’t attempt to—but they can plant a seed in us. If nothing else they can help us to understand the mystery of our world. Man lives in a mythological universe. When we come to terms with that reality, it isn’t absurd to think that eating an apple got us into this mess in the first place.

 

Loving Covenant Youth

I wrote this article for last month’s church newsletter. I thought I’d share it seeing as Youth Ministry is something dear to me.

“Congratulations!” I sometimes tell my students, “You’re entering the stage of life when no one will trust you and everyone will look down upon you.” This statement obviously errs on the absurd, but it actually diffuses some of the angst teenagers feel towards adults with its silly humor. Such a statement names the rift between adults and teens, both in our culture, and in our churches, and yet opens the door for healthy ‘cross-cultural’ dialogue. Even though teens might tell us otherwise, both sides have their baggage. Paul’s oft quoted words to Timothy pose a challenge for each generation: “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12). Paul challenges those who are younger to live up to that which they have received, and for those who are older to encourage and not despise them as they continue on their journey. One of the primary goals of the Youth Group is to help grow these teens in the knowledge and fear of the Lord. Naturally, it is equally important that the Youth Group help till up the hearts of the adults at Redeemer that we might love and care for God’s covenant youth in our fellowship. God has called us into a covenant family, and teenagers form a vital part of that family. So how do we go about renewing our relationships with teenagers, as members of the body of Christ? As we evaluate our own hearts concerning this issue, we may begin to realize that we have some of our own hidden angst or cynicism against teenagers.

As Christians, we might hope to be immune to the cultural rift. Though we do know to what end we strive—to ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Romans 13:14), ‘to be found in him’ (Philippians 3:9), ‘to attain…mature manhood, to the measure and stature and fullness of Christ’ (Ephesians 4:13)—even still, we struggle to catch a vision for a restored relationship between adults and teens. Succumbing to the strong force of our cultural pessimism, it’s easy for Christians to believe implicitly that God does not work in the lives of those between the ages of 13 and 19. Paul David Tripp, in his book The Age of Opportunity, comments on this trend, “Although they would never say this, the working theology that hides behind this view is that the truths of the Scripture, the power of the Gospel, biblical communication, and godly relationship are no match for the teen years (emphasis mine).” Tripp reminds us that being gospel-driven in our approach to teenagers is the only way to dissolve the cynicism that keeps us apart, restore the broken relationships, and bridge the ‘generation gap’. A gospel-driven approach teaches us not to think first about what the teens are doing wrong, but about what we are doing wrong. We are called to regard our sin first, knowing that our sin is the barrier in all our relationships—with God, man, and even teen—and only the love and forgiveness of Christ can remove that barrier. Growth in relationships means learning to live by repentance and trust in the God who binds us together despite our sin. Applying the Gospel to our relationships with teenagers means turning from our belief that teenagers are beyond help, or can’t change. It means clinging to the God of all hope who is faithful to melt our cynicism. As we go about applying the gospel to our lives, we will actually begin to see more peace with the teenagers in our midst. It turns out that the best way to encourage a teenager to love and good works is by loving and serving him first!

How do we practically apply the Gospel to our relationships with teens? Primarily, we must understand that joining with the Youth group is not something that everyone can do, but something that everyone has already done, by virtue of joining this church body. In Christ, we are a part of each other, and teens are no exception. In fact, this emphasis on the covenantal nature of God is the source of my greatest encouragement. I am so very blessed by all the love that is already showered on the youth by the members of this congregation. Because of all the support from the church, the youth leaders have a running joke that it isn’t Redeemer Youth Group unless there is a one to one student to leader ratio! But, our work is not yet complete. ‘…Brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more’ (1 Thessalonians 4:1). Until heaven and earth are one, there is still much do.

As we continue to repent of our pessimism, more opportunities will open up around us. Though we are always looking for youth leaders, you don’t have to lead a small group or come to CE on Sunday mornings to be a vital member of the Redeemer Youth Group. Simply extending your hand and your heart to the teenagers you see on a Sunday morning will make their day. Read what is going on with the youth in the church bulletin. Taking a few moments to catch up on our activities will give you excellent points of contact in conversations with our teens. Ask them how the Bible Study on the Fruit of the Spirit is growing them, or if they will go to see Harry Potter with the youth group. Supporting the upcoming Youth Mission Trip to Laredo and VBS Retreat with your prayers, or opening your home for a youth event one evening are all ways of displaying your heart for the teenagers at Redeemer.

By the grace of God, we at Redeemer know that mimicking the culture is not what we are called to do. As such, our bold prayer is that the Youth Ministry of Redeemer Presbyterian Church would help deepen our hope, and help create a culture where the gospel is lived out amongst teens in the presence of a company of loving adults. The Spirit is already at work creating this culture. How might you get involved?

 

So begins the End of All things

Frodo: I can see the Shire. The Brandywine River. Bag End. The Lights in the Party Tree.
Sam: Rosie Cotton dancing. She had ribbons in her hair. If ever I were to marry someone, it would have been her. It would have been her.
Frodo: I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things.

This is my first post of my first ever blog. For those who know me, it is fitting that I would oxymoronically begin “The end of all things” with a Lord of the Rings Quote. The quote comes after the ring is destroyed, and Mount Doom is bellowing. The entire plot, indeed the entire history of Middle Earth has come to this point. Even before the “Doom, Doom” in the depths of Moria, Frodo and Sam have marched, animated by the drums of their fate.  And on Mount Doom they are certain they will find their end.

Tolkien, however, a philologist by passion, knows his languages. The end of Frodo and Sam, even the end of all things, is not chronological. End comes from the Greek word telos, which infuses the word ‘end’ with a purpose. So, if I was a good Athenian, and heard ‘the end of life is death’, I would engage myself in understanding the purpose of death. Purposelessness, Nihilism, in not an option for those contemplating the end of all things, it is a grammatical impossibility.

If any were tempted to abandon their search for meaning at the end of all things, telos has another secret to unlock. It also has another etymological connection–another shade of meaning. Telos comes originally from the Indo-European root kwel which is the root word for English words such as wheel and cycle and quest. Wrapped up into one word is termination, continuance, and purposefulness. The pagans arrived at an almost universal conclusion: There is an endless economy of life and death for the continuance of a particular race, religion, or kingdom. One sacrifices to the gods to continue life. The end of life is death, and the end of death is life. The Aztecs sacrificed humans to the sun god, not because they were particularly bloodthirsty, but because it was the only way to entice the sun to rise for the rest of posterity. So ran the pagan cycle, as sure as the sun, and as tragic as drums dooming humanity onwards. There was no going home, and no way to break the cycle.

It is here that we have Frodo and Sam, at the end of their quest, exchanging prayerful longings to get home, resigned to their doom, having sacrificially offered themselves so that other life may continue,  when suddenly the eagles appear. Some have balked at Tolkien’s use of the deus ex machina to save his heroes, but this was not an afterthought for Tolkien. He didn’t write himself into a bind. He didn’t need an escape. The eagles were the only possible end of all things. They herald Tolkien’s greatest triumph–Sauron is not only an enemy destroyed. Sauron’s  Ring bound the light of the world in the darkness. After its destruction, the entire world order collapsed. The economy of life and death was turned on its head. Doomsday became festal.

And we have arrived at an end as well. Saint Peter as well as Tolkien tell us that ‘the end of all things is at hand’ (1 Pet. 4:7).The great catastrophe at the end of life has turned into, as Tolkien called it, the great eucatastrophe of the cosmos. Christ resigned himself to his doom to set the captives free: ‘he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself’ (Heb. 9:26). But God did not write himself into a bind. He didn’t leave his Son with no way out. With the resurrection of Christ, the stranglehold that death held on life was loosed forever. ‘Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power…[and] the last enemy to be destroyed is death’ (1 Cor. 15:24-26).  The end of life is no longer chronological. It is moral and personal and festal. ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’ says Christ. Christ himself is our end, and now we have a new economy; a new cycle. Christ has died to buy life for all mankind once and for all. Frodo and Sam began and ended in Bag End, they completed the cycle of their quest. But it was also the beginning of a new day. The end of all things leads us to hope with Sam: “Is everything sad going to come untrue?”