So, Sew, Sow...

So when you write just to write the perils are a plenty. And when you begin a sentence with “so” you violate all the old rules. I especially noticed this about 10 years ago when I heard it in response to a question, almost like the person was just continuing the sentence.

“How many hours from Lexington to Chicago?”

“So,” came the reply, “hustle and you make it in 5 hours.”

“So...?” Yes, and so what. Language changes.

So I'm learning to play along. But I still refuse to begin an answer with “so.”

That makes 100!

One Hundred Words

I love to read and I know one hundred words is seldom the limit of any “piece” one can find. But I wonder if I might write better if I stopped at 100 words. Could I say anything worthwhile? Twitter has a limit, recently increased I'm told. I've never posted on Twitter and will not start. But would a 100 word limit engender more frequent writing? It would certainly engender brevity, that gift found in heeding Jesus' reminder that every jot and tittle will be judged. As Cicero put it, "Brevity is a great charm of eloquence." There's one hundred!

Ministry Remnants: Jonah in the Belly of the Whale

 After the awful news from Israel I felt I must spend time reminding us to "pray for the peace of Jerusalem" and so we did. But it seemed right to pick up Jonah and go into chapter two. Tying the two together is a challenge and I almost didn't try. It was appropriate to pray for Jerusalem, it was appropriate to pick up Jonah again. No explanation required.

But my mind wouldn't let it go so I offered observations tied to the idea that the chosen people are a gift to the world, though in ways ironic and difficult.

1. The Jewish people consider themselves a people offered up for the world, very much like a sacrifice. This seems in part a way to make sense of their painful history as the carriers of God's self-revealing, reaching its pinnacle (for Christians) in Christ. But it is most awful and ironic in the Nazi's attempt to exterminate them, itself a large scale iteration of what people have tried to do as long as the Jews have been a nation. 

Bottom line, holocaust means burnt offering. And in some sense Jews see that awful history as being offered up for the world, perhaps an expiation of sorts that can only be accomplished by them, God's chosen people. It is an echo of what Christians believe Christ did for the world.

2. Related closely to that theme is Jonah's call to Nineveh. Nineveh was full of not-nice people. God could have just wiped them out. Instead he sent Jonah to warn them of certain judgment. And then when they repented, He showed mercy. Jonah was angry about this this plan but God is better than all of us, his servants not excepted. 

Bottom line: God's plan for His people is to reveal Himself through them and He was doing so with Nineveh, reaching out to them with mercy before judgment. This is who God is, working in infinite ways seen and unseen to reconcile the world to Himself.

3. Jonah was offering himself for a task that would change life for a great many people in a city that was on its way to hell. 

- - - - -

The best point is likely something like this: God is always at work with His people, using them to get the world's attention. He even allows tragedy. To borrow the familiar idea from CS Lewis, these things are a megaphone to rouse a dull world. We are dull, we need waking up, and we need to pray for the peace of Jerusalem!

(I did go on to give reasons why Jonah found Himself in the belly of the whale, but I will leave off that for another day.)

Ministry Remnants: Jonah is Mercy on Repeat!

 Across the years I have grown to love Jonah, the story in the fifth book of the minor prophets, self-named after its famous main character. Of course the real main character is God.

I tried to think about it on a basic two-fold analysis: 

• the story teaches us about God, 
• the story teaches us about ourselves.

We dealt only with the seventeen verses of chapter one where in 5 verses Jonah goes from calling, to running, to sleeping in the hold of a storm-tossed ship. Then the remaining narrative finds him tossed into the sea so the storm will stop and the sailors be saved. And in the sea a great fish swallowed him. Amazing!

What do we learn about God? He calls: in particular, in seasons, for a lifetime.

What do we learn about ourselves? We can resist, we can run. We are not forced.

But the story teaches us more. Jonah's calling was to speak truth in a difficult context. Easy to shy away from that! Our calling always involves speaking truth with care and self-giving love in the day, season and life we are living.

If we run from our calling God may come after us -- He is good that way. And there will be turmoil and difficulty until we heed the call and follow. God will use all means at his disposal to help us come back. The storm, the sea-toss, and the great fish are this story's version of seeking the lamb lost from the fold.

There is much to consider about calling and I tried to go there, reminding us we all have a calling, it is good and fitted to who we are, and we need the help of others to discern and follow. But my main takeaway as I reflect now and look to the remainder of the book is the recurring mercy of God: mercy in calling Jonah to Nineveh, mercy in seeking the running Jonah, mercy in sending the great fish, mercy on repeat.

In Jonah we see ourselves, unwilling to follow God's way.  And we see God, unwilling to let us take our own poor way without pursuing us. God's mercy is in that pursuit, to be sure. And that's the happy remnant as I look forward to chapter two for next week.

Ministry Remnants: Miracles in Everyday Life

The fruit of the Spirit is enough everyday miracle to change the world.

Learning to serve the church as the preacher is a peculiar calling. Very earthy to be sure, for the preacher's humanity is on full display. And he dare not be self-conscious for then he merely adds to the cacophony of reasons to wonder about his calling and it's peculiar mode of being. But I digress.

This morning I tried to preach from the wonderful, brief story in II Kings 6. The school of prophets -- young men under Elisha's tutelage -- call for the building of a new ministry training center. Elisha approves and they begin felling trees and erecting a log structure. In the course of the work an axe head falls into the water. The worker is alarmed, especially because the axe head was borrowed. Elisha plunges a stick into the water, the axe head "swims" and is recovered.

Wow! I talked about the real down to earth nature of walking with God, and especially the neediness we always have. This is pretty plain and simple in the story. Then I troubled over how to handle the miracle. Even if I were able to challenge everyone to "Expect a miracle!!" or "Bring your lost axe heads to God and believe the iron will swim!" I wonder.... Would that be the right approach?

Careful exegetes and expositors will ask, as closely as one can with narrative, this simple question: "What is the intent or core meaning of the text?" To my mind the core meaning is as follows:

• We have real-life problems which we can bring to God.
• God sometimes does miraculous acts to aid our efforts.

That's all I have but as I tried to see the clear implications of the story I thought it made sense to deal with miracles more broadly. With that in mind I spoke of the everyday miracles we have in the ordinary of life: love of children, friendship, a sunrise, genuine love. I tried to think about it this way: "Sometimes we see the miracles already there; sometimes God's gives us miracles to help us see." If we open our eyes we will see the touch of eternity in all of life and be encouraged that God is at work all the time in countless ways.

This brings me to the reason for this "remnants." My main concern is that we not think God only does miracles in dramatic, clearly supernatural ways, like making iron swim. The signs and wonders He wants to make real in our lives are daily expressions of the Gospel at work. In a word, the fruit of the Spirit is enough everyday miracle to change the world. And it should be everyday -- the seed of the Gospel continually growing.

That's the remnant. Don't feel lesser-than if you have no dramatic miracle, and don't strive for one. Asking is ok of course and hoping is the human wont. But best to lean in to being transformed by the grace of Christ. This is active daily grace, the miracle in our everyday life. 

The Allure of 'You Too!:' Can we quell, or spell, tu quoque?

"Shut the door, Randy!" My older sister could be bossy sometimes and I could certainly be lazy. The sliding door on the VW van hung open and I wasn't about to leave my comfortable seat to close it. "You've left it open before!" I said, happy with my logic. Her retort was immediate, full of primal reason: "That makes no difference!"

Fast forward too many quick years and I am up late reading a fascinating story about chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. My wife, concerned my lack of sleep and absorbed psyche will ruin the day, sweetly and sleepily expresses concern. My inner response? "You do it, too!" I can't say what I think so I argue within: "She is up late from time to time doing what she enjoys!"

But there is a problem. That is entirely beside the point! Whether she does it once or a million times has nothing to do with whether I should do it or not. As the philosophers might say, "P is P, not something else." In common language, the door is the door and sleep is sleep. That is the only thing on the table, so deal with that, not perceived or real inconsistency with the challenger.

This fallacy is called "tu quoque" and means literally "you too." We see it all the time in political discourse. Perhaps it is easiest to see in the inverse: "Because Nixon lied (to borrow an ancient story) so can I." We know this is wrong on its face, but it's the same fallacy. We justify our behavior because someone else did it: "You too!"

Of course the normal pattern is when an opponent tries to make a charge stick, say in the morass of sex-related scandals in DC these days. The hue and cry is all over: "Bill did it, too. And you said nothing about it then." True enough but it only speaks to hypocrisy, not the issue at hand which is -- you-name-it -- let's say Roy Moore's alleged abuse of power. Is his in any way lessened because of the other party's easy treatment of Bill's behavior?

"You too" is tenacious as a carnival monkey except its head seldom gets wacked. Like too many fallacies it feels so right we just plunge on. But poor thinking is still poor and never leads to a good place.

How to fix it? Address the problem at hand and forget the rest. Refuse to press the argument beyond the terms. News flash: this makes arguments less fun, less frequent, and diminishes the thrill of moral indignation. And it means we all have to deal with our own front porch instead of someone else's. Man, that's hard! I'd much rather point out your problems. It is so much easier and fun to say "you too!"

But don't you see? When we say "you too" we catch the ricochet full in the face. If our opponent is in some measure wrong for doing it, saying "you too!" means we implicate ourselves as also wrong! Since I didn't want to do the right thing, I faulted my sister for having not done it. It is one of a thousand ways we shoulder off responsibility for moral misbehavior. If someone else didn't do it but somehow suggests we should, instead of dealing with the suggestion, we deal with them. We say "you, too", and we are still stuck in our bad behavior.

And that's why, much chagrined but rightly upbraided, I am laying this silly laptop aside and going back to bed. She's right. Whether she follows her own advice all the time is simply beside the point.

But I might check Facebook one last time. She would!

Ministry Remnants: You can Rely on God

The very gifted Malcolm Muggeridge said, "Writing isn't hard: you just sit down at the typewriter, slash your wrists, and bleed to death." A suitable metaphor no matter the particular difficulty one has with writing. Mine are multi-faceted, arising in too many ways to deter the simple lifelong love I have had for writing, coupled with the human wont of lack of discipline, motivation, ability. We are born with deficits and we feed them such that they make themselves known. And we have the soul-making task of overcoming, refusing to let various normal lacks dim our vision and drag us down. And so the best among us demonstrate that mettle by normal daily means and the worst sometimes are not so pronounced in their failings but are failing nonetheless. Someday the tide will go out and, as one Warren Buffet says, "We will then know who was swimming naked." Or to apply an apt western metaphor: "We will know who was 'big hat and no cattle.'"

All that to address the problem of writing, in a blog about ministry remnants? I suppose, because it is always easier to think about writing and see where that goes than to actually write about the matter at hand. Diversion is so much easier. Could we play a trick on ourselves so we allowed the diversion to be the thing we actually needed to produce? No doubt that is the sum total strategy of many a very successful person, and plumbing that strategy would be fascinating indeed, while very difficult. At base it seems the diversion, for some reason, is something more appealing. Maybe, then, my own writing, such as it is, should be all about the random diversions that come up when ever I sit down to write. I may be on to something there!

For now I will continue this path, itself a diversion from other necessary work, to muse on the Sunday message from a week ago. I described the largest of the enormous trucks used in strip mining: weighing over 600 tons empty, 25' to top of bed, 13' tall tires, 84 gallons of oil in the motor, able to haul payload of 366 tons. In a word, grande! My point was these trucks can be relied upon to carry a load. 

I used a bag of salt pellets to illustrate a burden and talked about what that burden is like for a truck of that size. The bag weighs maybe 40 pounds. The bed of the truck is about 1/3 the size of the congregation seating area. Setting the burden down in the bed of the truck would be like dropping a leaf in the back of my neighbor's F-150.

These trucks are large with a scale of capacity that boggles our mind. But compared to God's ability, they are child's play. Reckon God can handle our burdens? Reckon we can rely upon Him? Reckon when Jesus says "Lose your life for my sake and you will be OK" he meant what He said because He can handle anything that comes our way? Not only is He more capable than the truck, He made all things that go into that truck, including the ability of the geniuses that engineered it.

They say a sermon is supposed to have one main idea. The main idea I worked toward was this: God is reliable. He will not let you down. He can handle any burden you have. And I closed, as I began, with the incomparable piece from the oratorio Elijah, echoing several verses of Psalms:

Cast thy burden upon the Lord; and he shall sustain thee.
He never will suffer the righteous to fall:
He is at thy right hand.
Thy mercy Lord is great, and far above the heavens.
Let none be made ashamed, that put their trust in Thee.

It feeds me now as I remember it, and I pray it may do some good for someone reading from some distant place or time. 

Bring your burden to the Lord and leave it there.