Common Grounds Online

Melissa Kurtz, Prayers of Surrender

“Do you want to get well?”  This may have seemed like a silly question for Jesus to ask a person lying ill for 38 years.  After all, the answer appears obvious.  Who would choose to struggle against persistent sickness, when an offer of healing was available?  Why watch others receive the soothing balm when you, in your own flesh, could be cured?  Surely the man near the pool of Bethesda wanted what Jesus was offering—a life of restored physical health, or more simply, just to walk again. 

In many ways, I can deeply relate to this first century story.  Although physically well, I battle other chronic ills, more spiritual and emotional in nature.  I ache for the friend who has turned away from God and I cry over the pain of unmet desires.  I pray to God about desperate and seemingly desperate situations, but sometimes I don’t hear anything in return.  I occasionally feel what C.S. Lewis described when he was swimming in the grief of his wife’s death.  Hoping to find God in his own despair, Lewis found “a door slammed in [his] face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.”¹   This is hardly the response one hopes to get when all resources are depleted and the last Kleenex used. 

Although I want to be like the determined widow of Luke 18, whose tireless quest for justice ends victoriously, I don’t always persist in my knocking.  Of course I hope for circumstances to change, and for restoration to come, but then I recall how much time has passed and I grow faint.  In those times, I turn to this story in John 5, and I marvel over the unending persistence of God.  For when I am lying lifeless, God takes the initiative, approaches me, and asks me whether I want my ills to be made well.  I don’t always receive the instantaneous healing that the lame man got.  Sometimes I taste just enough balm to last the day.  But this story reminds me that when I surrender my long-held afflictions to God, I can be assured that whether in this life or the next, I will hear the words, “take up your mat and walk.”  For God is the healer who binds up the wounds of His people, even those that seem most difficult to cure. 

1. Lewis, C.S.  1961.  A Grief Observed.  New York: Harper Collins Publishers,  p.6

Melissa Kurtz, Roses and Thorns

Over the last two weeks, I’ve developed a new ritual with my housemates.  At the end of a long day, we convene on the balcony of our second floor apartment that overlooks a small portion of a quaint Hew Haven neighborhood.  One person lights fragrant candles, which provide warmth against the coming darkness.  Another unveils savory treats.  A third configures the chairs such that conversation can flourish.  Then, each in turn reveals her best and worst moments of the day.  Endearingly (if somewhat playfully and youthfully), we’ve come to call this time ‘roses and thorns.’ 

Kelly Monroe Kullberg, The Given Life

     Today is the happy 6-year anniversary of my marriage to David -- a "youngish" widower raising five great kids.  Today is also the 1-year anniversary of my mother's near-death, and gradual recovery to something like a stable condition in assisted living. 

When I was engaged, a friend suggested that I reconsider the wisdom of marrying because the demands on the "sandwich generation" (those caring both for children and parents) would distract me from my larger cultural calling (the Veritas Forum, in particular).  To credit my friend's foresight, I really didn't quite grasp what I was signing up for, either in marriage or in parenting.  (I'm sure David didn't, either).  Nor did I request a crash course this year in geriatric endocrinology, cardiology and nephrology that help keep my mom closer to me on this side of heaven, while I was working, and while two of the children were finishing high school, one entering college, one marrying, and another giving birth.  Nor, for that matter, do I remember ever signing up for any course, or life, of adulthood in any real form at all.  

The truth is that I'm not much of a Giving Tree ... 

Carolyn Custis James: Add Women, Change Everything!

In a New York Times op-ed on the current financial crisis, Nicholas D. Kristof wondered if, in addition to billion dollar bailouts, what banks really need is more women!

He went on to say that “At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, some of the most interesting discussions revolved around whether we would be in the same mess today if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters. The consensus . . . is that the optimal bank would have been Lehman Brothers and Sisters” (italics added).

Tim Udouj, Waiting to Ripen

A couple of years ago my family moved into a house with a large fig tree in the back yard. I've always wanted a fig tree. I love the musty, earthy taste of fresh figs. So, that first summer I religiously inspected the tree, looking for signs of fruit. It looked bleak at first because the tree had been victim of a late frost and many of its leaves were withered. But then, in late June there were tiny buds, barely teardrops of fruit. My wife was confused by my excitement, not being a fig lover like myself.

But as the summer pressed on, I began to question this tree's fruit producing proficiency. The process slow, the harvest not quite in sight. Late in the summer I took the kids out for an inspection—the tree was covered in figs, hard and green. We picked a couple, the milky latex oozed out of the stems. We cut the hard figs in half and registered the progress—definitely a few more weeks on the tree. Those final weeks where when we had to watch for predators—squirrels and birds that sneak in and try to steal the harvest. My daughter was particularly distraught over the birds, and frequently peered out the window to warn me of their presence. We were watching for that heavy droop; that deep purple hue. Ripen, already!

Reggie Kidd, Ranking 'The New Calvinism'? No Thanks

  "Catherine, it's hard to grasp the carnage your book describes in Rwanda. Didn't both the Hutus and the Tutsis have some form of the Christian faith in their cultural heritage?" 

"Yes, they did. It seems, though, that at some point, the Christian story came to shape people's experience less than their Hutu or Tutsi story did. When your tribe's story becomes more important than Jesus', your opponent stops being the-enemy-Jesus-tells-me-to-love and becomes the-thing-that-threatens-my-way-of-life. Then the killing begins.”

Catherine Claire Larson's answer in an exchange over her book As We Forgive gave me pause ... then a couple of days later I discovered that Time magazine has discovered Calvinism (I know not everybody at commongrounds is a self-described Calvinist, but many of us are, including me).

Evidently, "The New Calvinism" is No. 3 among the "ideas changing the world" -- and is muscling its way past other Christian voices largely by virtue of the bite of its austerely demanding God.

"Holy Misdirection, Batman!" I can't imagine a more seductive invitation to abandon the Christian story for a tribal narrative than to start assessing whether our tribe is high enough on the list of cultural influence.

Personally, I agree that the answer to the profound brokenness and temptation that so many grow up with now is neither better therapy nor more friends, but God. I also agree that when you try to define God in the Bible's terms, you find theologians of John Calvin's sort to be superior guides.

I also am quite certain (though the Time article doesn't discuss this matter) that the economic woes we find ourselves in is a direct function of the loss of the self-restraint their Calvinism taught our forbears (see my own blog "Paul on Civic Virtue ... and Your Credit Card Debt").

But staying under the sway of the big God who through his Son is narrating to the cosmos its one true story of creation, fall, incarnation, reclamation -- that is the point. Trying to gauge where we are on the chart of influence -- and whether it's, say, pungency or affability that is more likely to move us ahead of other tribal voices -- is off task. 

Lest the killing begin, thanks, Time, but no thanks.

--------- ----------

Editor's Note: a friend emailed me with this link from the same magazine, Time, sixty years before. From February 24, 1947, "Calvinist Comeback"?

Calvinism was once virtually the American Faith. It came to New England with the Puritans, to New York with the Dutch Reformed, to Pennsylvania with the German Reformed. And wherever Scottish Presbyterians went in the U.S., predestination, 90-minute sermons, and the "Shorter Catechism" went with them.

But the faith of ascetic, heretic-burning John Calvin was stern, hard and alien to a boisterous young country in a nature-taming age. Calvinism insisted on 1) the total depravity of man, 2) a God who, for His own good reasons, irrevocably divided all mankind into the Elect and the Damned, 3) strict "blue laws."-

Is Calvinism's stern faith on its way back—as a reaction against the emotional confusions of war, inflation and the atomic age? Sure of it, Professor Clarence Bouma, of Michigan's Calvin Seminary, writes in the current Journal of Religion:

". . . The once dominant and self-confident liberalism speaks a different language today. Horton and Van Dusen, Tillich and Niebuhr, Fosdick and Morrison—it scarcely makes a difference to whom you turn. All speak in the same apologetic strain, even though a few try to cover their retreat. . . .

"These liberals no longer speak of the perfectibility of man. . . . Whereas we used to hear of the glory, the progress, and the greatness of man, we now hear of his 'fate' and his 'predicament.'. . . What has all this to do with a possible revival of Calvinism?

"First of all, this new temper is a vindication—whatever the intent of the liberals—of the Pauline-Augustinian-Calvinistic view of human nature. . . .

"The message of Calvinism to modern man is that he must repent from his idolatry, which is his greatest and root sin. His idolatry, in that he has made a God of himself and made a problem of the living God of the Scriptures. . . .

"We have had enough religion, religious philosophy and religious psychology. It is time we again found the living God and began to build the theological temple. . . .

"Let theology be theology! We have made everything of it except just that. Theology is the coherent, systematic study of God and divine things. . . . Somehow modern theology will have to find the road back to the God of the Scriptures, the God of whom Pascal in his spiritual autobiography is reported to have exclaimed in the night of his conversion: 'God! the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! The God of Jesus Christ! Not the God of the philosophers and the scholars!'':

*In Geneva under Calvin (1541-64), joking and absence from sermons were crimes.

PAUL YANOSY: MID-STREAM COMFORT?

I have no doubt God has a sense of humor.  Mid-stream in our start-up enterprise, I spent the early part of the week with my colleagues / friends in Washington, D.C., drinking too much coffee and hashing through the business plan.  Tuesday morning we decided to open with prayer and a Psalm.  Still waiting for the caffeine to kick in, I listened for the familiar rhythm: situation is awful / I cried out to God / God delivered me / so everyone else put your hope in God too. 

Instead, the Psalm (chosen at random) was Psalm 88.  As any Bible trivia master knows (and as I now know), Psalm 88 is the only Psalm that starts down and ends down.  Unlucky: 

1 O LORD, the God who saves me,
       day and night I cry out before you.

 2 May my prayer come before you;
       turn your ear to my cry.

 3 For my soul is full of trouble
       and my life draws near the grave.

 4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
       I am like a man without strength.

 5 I am set apart with the dead,
       like the slain who lie in the grave,
       whom you remember no more,
       who are cut off from your care.

 6 You have put me in the lowest pit,
       in the darkest depths.

 7 Your wrath lies heavily upon me;
       you have overwhelmed me with all your waves

 8 You have taken from me my closest friends
       and have made me repulsive to them.
       I am confined and cannot escape;

 9 my eyes are dim with grief.
       I call to you, O LORD, every day;
       I spread out my hands to you.

 10 Do you show your wonders to the dead?
       Do those who are dead rise up and praise you?
 11 Is your love declared in the grave,
       your faithfulness in Destruction?

 12 Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
       or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?

 13 But I cry to you for help, O LORD;
       in the morning my prayer comes before you.

 14 Why, O LORD, do you reject me
       and hide your face from me?

 15 From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death;
       I have suffered your terrors and am in despair.

 16 Your wrath has swept over me;
       your terrors have destroyed me.

 17 All day long they surround me like a flood;
       they have completely engulfed me.

 18 You have taken my companions and loved ones from me;
       the darkness is my closest friend.

Les Newsom, Faith and Receiving

 My impression is that faithful readers of Common Grounds Online do not suffer from any want of critique from the more fundamentalistic strains of evangelicalism still dominating the religious experience of so many in America today. For most of us, the pendulum is still swinging quite in the opposite direction without too much help, thank you very much. Yet a recent Saturday morning children’s devotional I attended warrants some comment.

Halftime at my 9-year-old daughter’s basketball league is given to “devotional time,” due to the fact, I assume, that she plays in a church league. The speaker opened his message by holding a pen out in the palm of his hand. “Who would like to have this pen? It’s a free pen and anyone who wants it this morning can have it.” It took a minute or so before someone mercifully played along and walked up to take the free pen.

“You see,” he explained, “that’s exactly what the Gospel is. It’s free and it’s available. But you don’t have it until you receive it. And once you’ve received it, you need to use it.”

Again, my intention is not to nitpick what was likely a kindly volunteer at a simply country church function. Rather, the comment revived my recent quest to identify the nature and practice of this most fundamental of Christian acts: believing. The message of the Gospel, we were told growing up, was not activated in the life until it was “received” and “believed.”

My question for the gentleman speaker last weekend is simply this: when presented in this way, how do you avoid making faith meritorious? The gift of the Gospel exists, as it were, outside of me prior to my conversion. What releases the effects of that gift into my life is the simple act of “receiving and believing.” So then how is faith not a condition of salvation? How is salvation “free” if it costs me an act of reception in order to enjoy its effects?

Money, Beauty, Perfectionism, And Me by Tim Frickenschmidt

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  Jesus said that.  In fact he talked a lot about riches, saying things like “you can’t serve both God and money”; and “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”  Jesus said these things (and others like them) because people believe that the opposite is true.  We believe that life does consist in the abundance of our possessions; that we can serve both God and money; and that a rich man entering the kingdom of God is a fairly normal occurrence.

Why is money so potentially disastrous for one’s soul?  One answer is that money can give people, immediately and in this life, what only the gospel can give eternally in the age to come.  We learn this from the parable of the rich fool told in Luke 12.  He finds security, peace, significance, respect, pleasure, rest, food, drink, happiness, and more - all through money and all immediately.  It’s not money that’s so dangerous; it’s the immediacy.  Money’s just the middleman – we want, we need, what it gives.

But let’s not be too hard on money without taking our other middlemen to task as well.  And, make no mistake, there are more.  One that works and walks hand-in-hand with money is physical beauty.  I think that everything that the scriptures say about money, especially in regards to men, can be applied to physical beauty, especially in regards to women.  Physical beauty can provide, immediately and temporally in this life, everything that only the gospel of Christ can provide eternally in the age to come.  Think about it.  How common is it for rich men and beautiful women to be found together in this world?  Now, there is nothing inherently wrong or sinful about money or physical beauty. But they are such powerful mediators of immediacy and all our hearts were created to know they are dangerous.  Like wine, certain gifts of God require greater wisdom if they are going to be enjoyed rightly and not abused.

My reason for writing of these two issues is to raise the greater concern of perfectionism.  Again, money and beauty are middlemen; what we are after is perfection.  At least that’s one way to say it.  Another way is to say that men and women want to be whole again, free from the consequences of sin – its guilt, corruption, and brokenness.  And the good news of what God has done through Jesus is that perfection is coming for God’s people in the age to come.

Richard Winter, in his book Perfecting Ourselves To Death, writes that perfectionism is “the desire to be unblemished and faultless in some or all areas of life.”  That is actually a good desire.  It is the desire to regain all that was lost through the fall of mankind into sin and death.  Our desires aren’t our first problem; our mediators are.  Money and beauty make promises of immediate perfection, of salvation. In the short term they provide, but then thieves come in and steal and the flower of our physical life fades.  We are left like the rich fool of Luke 12 with our “life required of us this very night.”  Unhealthy perfectionists, like those described in Winter’s book, often find themselves with low self esteem, seeking to excel at any cost, controlling of others, exhausted and exhausting, depressed, impatient, self-blaming, irritable, fearful of criticism, avoiding challenges and risk, inordinately competitive, distant from others, and distrustful.

I’m confident of the accuracy of those adjectives listed above, because I am an unhealthy perfectionist.  Or, at least I can quickly become one when the gospel slips into the recesses of my heart.  I read (and re-read) Dr. Winter’s book and too many parts were more like looking into a mirror than reading.  In chapter three he delineates between a “performance” perfectionist, then “appearance”, “interpersonal”, “moral”, and finally “all-around” perfectionists.  As I read the chapter I thought, “Oh, I’m this one…no, this one…no, this one.”  Then I arrived at the “all-around” perfectionist and was able to stop trying to choose between the previous four.  I don’t remember if I laughed or cried.

So what’s the imperatival application of this post?  Read Perfecting Ourselves To Death.  Dr. Winter’s writing on perfectionism has been used of God in untold ways to spread the healing salve of the gospel over the wounds of my soul.  And perfectionism is not just a personal quandary of mine; it’s a cultural component of our life together.

Melissa Kurtz, The Problem We All Live With

Certain situations are more pervasive than they first seem.   Perhaps this is what artist Norman Rockwell was trying to convey in his 1964 portrait of Ruby Bridges entitled, “The Problem We All Live With.”  Not long ago, I stood in front of this portrayal of a six-year-old African American girl.  In the painting, Ruby is guarded by four U.S. federal marshals as she walks past racist graffiti to an all-white New Orleans elementary school.  There she would spark controversy in the desegregation debate, spending a full year as the lone pupil in her first grade classroom following the systematic removal of her peers from the school grounds by their parents.  Ruby’s unassuming persistence yielded racial integration at this one academic institution and initiated vast changes nationwide, but playing a part in this historic transition came at a price for both Ruby and her family.  Not only would Ruby become the target of numerous angry protests, but her father would lose his job and her grandparents would be driven to another state in search of new work. 

While Ruby was indeed the inspiration for this Rockwell masterpiece which would initiate a new series of more serious topics for the illustrator, she was not the only individual the artist had in mind when the drawing was created.  Like many Rockwellesque scenes depicting more sentimental aspects of American life, this sobering image of Ruby was meant to extend beyond individual particularities in order to convey a more generalized message concerning the nation’s social climate.  Perhaps it is Rockwell’s title which most reminds us that Ruby is not the only person affected during a turbulent era of change.  In fact, the racial divide creating challenges for this one little girl runs deep, impacting everyone regardless of position or situation.  In short, the systemic nature of the problem at hand is unavoidable. 

As the new year dawns, Ruby’s story reminds me of the pervading nature of current day problems with which we all still live.  Battles of differing sorts rage today, and some are fierce.  Though hopeful about the future, I see the impact which the presence of sin has left on whole families, communities and nations and I am called to consider my own response.  One inclination has been to turn to simple prayers like Ruby did as she faced crowds of opposition.  In the wake of animosity, she prayed, “Please, God, forgive those people, because even if they say those bad things, they don’t know what they’re doing.”  Ruby’s words were uttered at the encouragement of her parents who understood the love of God and wanted even those who perpetrated cruel acts against their daughter to know this love.  They are strikingly reminiscent of those prayed by Christ when he too faced troubles of many kind.  This year, as I ponder how change might come in those corners that seem hard to affect, I want to remember that even the most difficult problems can be transformed through a simple prayer like the one offered by Ruby.  For in these places too, Jesus longs to reign.