i am probably overthinking this

from the presence of the Lord

2011-05-27T09:00:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to make it a summer goal to read through as much of the Pentateuch in Hebrew as I can. Who knows how far I'll get, but the exercise is, I think, spiritually valuable as well as good practice for this fall (when I'll start Old Testament Historical Traditions at school). There's something about the very difficulty of reading in a foreign language - you have to slow down, and because you do, you notice words, expressions, themes that tend to melt into the background when you read in English.

So I'd like to try to throw out some of these observations, things I notice from what little of the Bible I've read in the original languages, just to get thinking about how things fit together, how themes pop up over and over. I've started with Genesis 2 (having spent quite a bit of Hebrew III in Genesis 1) and have just finished chapter 4.

Cain is a failed Adam in several ways. He's a tiller of the soil (`obed 'adamah, v. 2) like his father was made to be (2:15), but where Adam was also to "keep" or "guard" (shamar) the garden, the guilty Cain disavows his own duty as keeper/guard (shomer) of his brother (v. 9). Elements of the curse in chapter 3 are fairly obvious; "sin" is personified as a wife to Cain, carrying Eve's curse of desiring him, though where God earlier predicts Adam's mastery over Eve (3:16), here He urges Cain to exert mastery over sin (4:7).

Here too is the curse on the ground that Adam earned (3:17): except its curse is transferred to Cain (4:11) - assuming "now you are cursed from the ground" is the best reading of we`atah 'arur 'atah min-ha'adamah. That "from the ground" pops up thrice here. In v. 10 it's the origin of the cry of Abel's shed blood; in v. 14 it's where Cain complains he's driven away from (there it's "from the face of the ground") to wander the earth. That suggests to me a double meaning: the outcry against Cain rises from the ground; so does a curse upon him, a curse that sends him away from the ground that has hitherto given him his livelihood.

I wonder, too, if there's a comparative aspect to the min- ("from") here. "You are more cursed than the ground you have defiled with your brother's blood" - interestingly, the earth "opens its mouth" to receive the shed blood, which could be taken as a fulfillment of the curse against Adam. Cain has irrigated the land with blood, making it barren, in contrast to the purpose of God's creation of man (2:5); now the land participates in and bears his guilt, although he bears it all the more. Cain's exile completes Adam's exile, while Seth's line will stick around and labor on the ground in hope of one who will bring relief; it will take a sort of baptism and renewed sacrifice to wash away the blood-guilt from the ground.

When Cain leaves, he goes away "from the presence of the Lord" (not just from the land), a phrase (milliphney YHWH) taken up in Jonah and repeated several times. Jonah would rather be a Cain than go and bring the enemy city to repentance; he flees west to avoid doing so. There are numerous Cain-Jonah parallels, especially in Jonah 4: isn't this what I said would happen, asks Jonah, while I was still "in my country" - literally, "on my ground [adamah]"? God asks, "Do you do well to be angry?" much like he prompts Cain to "do well." Jonah then leaves the city and "settles to the east" (v. 5) just like Cain. When God appoints the plant to shade Jonah, He is referred to as "YHWH Elohim," "the LORD God," just as He was named in Gen. 2-3, and "Elohim" as in Gen. 1 when He destroys the plant; when He addresses Jonah with His judgment, though, He is once again Yahweh, rebuking Jonah for his attachment to the plant he did not make grow, instead of godly pity for a city of 120,000 "Adams."

That'll do for a start.

a true easter thing about me

2011-04-27T07:38:00.002-05:00

When I was a youngster, I distinctly remember never liking Easter very much, chocolate and hard-boiled eggs notwithstanding.

As I've come to adulthood, I realize that this was most likely a result of an allergy to lilies.

broken words

2011-03-12T10:11:00.003-06:00

I think Jameson's latest on his reading through the Old Testament gets a lot of things exactly right, and once again I don't think the interaction I'd like to do with it would fit in a comment, so I'll pull some quotes over here and try to share some thoughts and (I hope) fruitful ways to deal with some of the questions he raises.

(What kind of insight might we gain if we listened to a professional actor read the whole of Deuteronomy as a dramatic monologue?)

I can only heartily second this sentiment - especially in light of, say, Nehemiah 8, in which the command of Dt. 31:9-10 (quoted in Jameson's post) is fulfilled once again after the years of exile. These words were meant to be heard.

Fun little factoid: "These Are the Words" is in fact the title of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible - since the Pentateuch in particular is essentially a single five-volume (i.e. five-scroll) work, the different scrolls were identified simply by their first words, so that the Hebrew title of Genesis is "In the Beginning," that of Exodus is "These Are the Names," Leviticus is "And He Called," and Numbers is "In the Wilderness." Jameson's reflections on the significance of the titular words are spot-on: the words themselves are life or death, and Israel is exhorted to choose life.

It's especially worth noting the connection between the words of life and death and the idea of testimony, the establishment of a figurative courtroom setting in which heaven and earth (31:19), the Israelites, and God Himself are to bring their respective cases in the inevitable event of a breach of covenant. This is absolutely vital, I think, especially to John but really to all four Gospels (on which a bit more later).

The theme of land and the purity thereof is also very well read - and I think this context helps the hard-to-swallow harshness of God's commands for the coming war of conquest at least make sense. Note the emphasis on destroying the cultic existence of the current inhabitants - it's more explicit in some places than the emphasis on killing the people themselves. The point is to destroy the enemies of God as enemies of God, not to subjugate them and create an empire that simply absorbs the pollution they have worked in the land. Not once, so far as I know, is the wholesale destruction of the Canaanites commanded without reference to idolatry

And though I know it seems like making excuses, I do want to invoke the case of Rahab at Jericho here - the response of faith in Yahweh and cooperation with Israel saves her and her family from the utter destruction of her city, and there's not the slightest indication, so far as I can tell, that this mercy toward these few who responded in this way was seen as contrary to the general command to wipe out the Canaanites. There's an evangelism in this, as repugnant as the general practice comes across to our sensibilities.

Jameson's final section is most pertinent to our ongoing discussion; there are some things that are very clearly expressed in the text that can make a lot of evangelicals (at least the Reformed type) shuffle uncomfortably while reading.

He starts with an honest assessment of how the Law is presented in its original context:

First, the law, as taught by Moses, was seriously meant to be followed. It is simply not a lens through which we are meant primarily to see our absolute sinfulness. It never says that it is, and in fact it tries to indicate just the opposite.

Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, "Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. (30:11-14)

There it is, plain as day. This book was meant to be followed. Not that Moses actually expected the Israelites to follow it: "For I know that after my death you will surely act corruptly, turning aside from the way that I have commanded you. In time to come trouble will befall you, because you will do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger through the work of your hands."

This is crucial, and I think it's absolutely right. While many of us in the Reformed world would love it if the text said, "Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, because Jesus Christ will follow it perfectly on your behalf," but it just doesn't. As Jameson points out:

There is nothing in the law that requires absolutely perfect obedience--hence the whole sacrificial system, which is meant to atone for even unintentional sins.

This is unavoidably clear in context, and as others are fond of pointing out, it's typical of the whole Pentateuch and, really, the whole Bible. If we're going to be honest in claiming to acknowledge the Bible's authority and unity, we'd better get used to this fact.

The problem, of course, is that the Israelites would not follow the clear and reasonable commands of God to them, as Jameson also points out:

Not that Moses actually expected the Israelites to follow it: "For I know that after my death you will surely act corruptly, turning aside from the way that I have commanded you. In time to come trouble will befall you, because you will do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger through the work of your hands." (31:29) Why was Moses so pessimistic about Israel's faithfulness? Was it original sin? Was it total depravity? Moses never appeals to theological categories; his evidence is simply his first-hand experience of his people: "If you already have been so rebellious toward the Lord while I am still alive among you, how much more after my death!" (31:27) ... What Moses was saying about Israel was that they were prone to completely disregard even the basics.

I think this is the key point that helps us know what to do with Jameson's second point:

Second, the law, as taught by Moses, was meant to be followed forever. "You shall love the Lord your God, therefore, and keep his charge, his decrees, his ordinances, and his commandments always." (11:1) Over and over again, Moses repeats that the Israelites should keep the entire law, saying, "You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you." (4:2) Now, I simply do not know how to deal with this as a Christian. Jesus rescinded some commandments (e.g. food laws) and added others (e.g. no divorce). If we truly respect this text as it stands, we cannot pretend there is perfect continuity. Does Jesus have the authority to reinterpret the law, or not? If he does, fine! There is no reason why Moses should stand if "something greater than Moses is here." But that means Moses was wrong, and if Moses was not wrong, Jesus was wrong. Not completely wrong, not utterly wrong, just wrong, as in, not right, at least not totally right. As in, I don't see what it would mean to take every single word of this as "authoritative," unless you mean something quite different from the classical orthodox Protestant meaning of "authoritative."

I think the difficulty here must be resolved precisely in terms of what's come earlier: the Israelites simply wouldn't do it! There's no real obstacle to affirming wholeheartedly (not that Protestants have necessarily done so consistently!) that the Law was meant to be kept entirely and eternally; the only problem is that, by the time Jesus shows up, it's not happening and never will be.

This is where the notion of the "courtroom" comes in: for all the Gospel writers, especially John, Jesus is Yahweh come to make His case against apostate Israel, and when he is rejected, the crucifixion and resurrection are simultaneously Jesus' vindication in court and Israel's condemnation. The Mosaic Covenant is broken, not solely because God decided to do something different (though I think we can affirm this from the perspective of God's eternal purpose), but because Israel has broken it again and again, and finally they have ceased to be Israel.

So Jesus isn't coming in to tweak the marching orders the Jews were following; he's coming to give Law that will be in effect in the finally-coming Kingdom of God, and while there's a radical continuity in some ways with the broken-for-good Torah, it's ultimately the Law of a new community that finally fulfills promises older than Moses. There would be a legitimate question of whether Jesus and Moses are in conflict if Moses were still really in play by Jesus' time; as it happened, this just wasn't the case. The Jews chose death, but Jesus came once again to set before them life and death, and not just before them, but before the whole world.

as it is written

2011-03-10T09:24:00.003-06:00

So then: if we're seeking an understanding of Scripture in keeping with our quest to live and think as followers of Jesus, we need more than anything to sit at his feet and learn from him how best to regard what we think of as the "Old Testament."

Again, I don't want here to try to nail down a particular stand on "inerrancy" - what I'm most concerned to do is to demonstrate that Jesus affirms (insists on, I might say) a fundamental unity to the OT witness and an authority to which he himself submits and to which his disciples and opponents alike are called to submit.

It's hard not to sail into a sea of proof-texts here, and my eyes always glaze over when I look at a paragraph that's half chapter-and-verse listings, so I'll try to be selective and quote briefly such that using the quotes as search terms here will get anyone who cares to look them up to the passages I mention. Most typically quoted here is Jesus' "not an iota, not a dot [traditionally "not a jot or tittle"] will pass from the Law until all is accomplished"; it's a classic text to haggle over in terms of what it means for our relationship to purity laws and such, but I think it's more important to note that, for Jesus, every bit of the Pentateuch (at the very least) counts as what he has come to "fulfill." That is to say, the books of Moses are unified in having their ultimate reference point in Jesus himself.

Jesus also settles theological disputes - notably silencing even those who are ready to stone him for blasphemy - by quoting the Psalms, taking their language as precedent for his own testimony, and asserting that "Scripture cannot be broken." They may ignore his reasoning and continue to seek his life, but evidently Jesus considers his citation of the OT as something that should settle the issue. So we have the purview of Jesus' appeal to Scripture extended at least to the Psalms, and we see Jesus' expressed expectation that the specifics of the OT's content should be decisive for disputes on teaching.

Note also the Emmaus Road experience: it's "all the Scriptures" that Jesus interprets to the grieving disciples to show them how to understand the tragedy they'd experienced in light of God's promises and plan.

This is, as I say, a pretty small sampling of what Jesus has to say about, by use of, or in explanation of the OT, but I think it's also pretty representative. I've hinted above (I hope) that I'm trying to say only as much as is warranted, by a pretty conservative reckoning - but it seems to me that the available evidence in the Gospels (all four of them) shows that Jesus understood his identity and mission primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of both the conceptual framework and the very specific words of what we now call the Old Testament, which he shows every sign of considering to be a unified, cohesive, coherent whole, and without exception a collective witness to who he was to be and what he was to do.

None of these affirmations lets us off the hook in wrestling with the stuff in the OT that we find unpalatable, or in trying to work through what the OT's complex textual history (and the NT's reliance on the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew) means for our understanding of where inspiration happens or where inerrancy resides; still, I think we can safely affirm with Jesus that the OT is not the way it is by accident and that it speaks with a voice we need to hear and submit our understanding to if we are going to see it with the eyes of our hearts enlightened.

I don't want to skip over discussing our acceptance of the New Testament as Scripture if that would be incomplete, but this whole series of posts was sparked by problems with the sticky bits of the OT. If it's agreeable, I'd be interested in trying to have some dialogue on where it's difficult to see the unity (or even agreement) between Jesus' teaching (as God's spokesman par excellence) and the interpretations put forth by the authors of the OT, as well as whether the tensions we perceive show up within the OT itself.

the Word and the word

2011-03-08T11:53:00.001-06:00

Having laid out the agenda thus far, I want to try to move from Jesus the Word of God toward developing my understanding of Scripture as the word of God - the whole of it, unified, with all its parts interdependent and all normative for our understanding of God's character and works (whether or not they are all normative in the same way).

The historicity of Jesus' person, work, life, death, resurrection, ascension and inauguration of the Kingdom is, as I've said, the starting point for Christians. Initially, then, I would suggest that our link to a Christ-conditioned understanding of Scripture must be the simple need for source material - that is, how do we know what we know about these historical events? There are, of course, references to a Jesus from Nazareth called "Christus" or "Chrestus" or something, who was crucified while Pontius Pilate was over there mucking about in Judea, in Roman literature fairly close to the events. But that's about it - we know this Jesus had a reputation as a wonder-worker, we know he died the same death any number of rebels, thieves, and other miscreants suffered, and we know there were some followers saying some truly bizarre things about the events following his death.

Obviously, the Gospels flesh out this information considerably, giving further indications of the nature of his teaching and works and especially the events leading up to and following his crucifixion, and this alone makes them by far the most valuable sources available to us for reconstructing the history of the Jesus event. But far more important is the fact that these documents provide us with a written record of the interpretation of these events. "Jesus was crucified" is more or less a raw historical fact. "Jesus died to take away sins" is an interpreted historical fact, one wholly unavailable to us without the testimony of the Church historically, which it is fair to say, I'd venture, is embodied in the canonical Gospels. That is to say, we can say that the kerygma (proclamation) of the early Church is the essential source of the propositional (and relational!) truths we affirm about Jesus, and if that is so, then we are somewhat duty-bound to acknowledge, as they did from a very early date, the Gospels as being permanent repositories of the Apostolic message.

I am not here arguing out of this for any stance on "inerrancy" one way or another - I simply want to assert what seems to me hardly controvertible: that any Christian is deeply indebted for what he or she believes about Jesus to the Gospels, and as such, if he or she intends to be a follower of this Jesus, no other source will provide with any reliability or depth the teaching of Jesus on any given topic.

The upshot of all this is that, I argue, our doctrine of Scripture can and must be developed under Jesus' own instruction, and that if we have committed ourselves to him, we have committed almost by logical necessity to the reliability of the Gospels, and so we can look into their reportage on Jesus' attitude toward Scripture in order to shape our own. Onward and upward...

what does biblical authority even mean?

2011-03-07T10:32:00.003-06:00

Thus one of the big questions is stated.

Maybe it's the big question for the self-styled evangelical: so we've got this book. This library, really, which didn't really have an original form other than a whole pile of scrolls. And I am somehow going to try to argue - for my own benefit as much as for anyone else's - that there is a radical, underlying unity to all these disparate sources, and more, that they still speak authoritatively to God's people today, which is to say that they both reliably recount and authoritatively interpret God's dealings in space and time with people, and that this witness continues to be directly relevant to us where we are situated in space and time, both to locate our own individual and corporate narratives within the grand arc of The Story, God's own history of the world, and to give us the tools we need to answer the related question, "How shall we then live?"

Thus far my attempt (by no means definitive or final) of stating what I mean by "biblical authority." What I'd like to do from here on out is to try to develop it by thinking through some of those sticky issues that Jameson raises - why don't we go ahead and affirm some notion of continuing revelation? Why consider the canon closed? Why should the New Testament continue to govern our decisions on gender roles, homosexuality, and the like? More basically than that, how (and why) do we seek to consider our present situation in light of these documents?

I mean more to set the agenda here than to jump into these questions individually, but I'd like to begin outlining where my thinking is, to show something of how I approach the issues. First, I think it's fair to say that all of these issues are relevant only in the context of affirming the definite significance of the Christ event - that is, Jesus' incarnation, ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Spirit. Whatever else we want to say about Scripture, none of it matters (for a Christian) if these things didn't actually happen. I'd venture to say, beyond that, that if we're affirming the centrality of this event, then we need to hold at least a basic respect for the Gospels as witnesses to it and interpreters of it. If we take that step, then that has major implications for our attitudes toward the rest of Scripture - which is what I'd like to go on to sketch out.

death, destruction and love

2011-03-06T13:52:00.003-06:00

For purposes of space, I want to interact here with Jameson on his latest post charting his reading through the Bible.

It seems to me that he's assumed, more than anything, the mantle of arbiter of morality.

What does he mean by "experiencing the text firsthand, before making... a judgment" on why one should bother? That seems naive; he didn't stumble upon this book in the absence of any prior information on its history or its context within a larger set of texts. No one does, not really. I appreciate the notion of reading the text without trying to eisegete one's prior theological commitments or hobbyhorses into every passage, but it seems to me very much the case that he's decided to go into his reading with an eye toward judging the text, as opposed to going in with the intention to be instructed by God. I don't think there are more alternatives than that.

The clear message of the entire Pentateuch is that Yahweh is far more consistent than any people. Whatever the commentators might say, God's anger with Moses isn't that hard to explain: Moses just didn't obey. He took it upon himself to decide how things would be done, whatever details you latch onto. God isn't like that; He isn't shown to waver. He is merciful and compassionate, but He hates sin. There's no flinching from His purpose to raise up a people in fulfillment of His promise to Abraham, and even in threatening to obliterate the people He's been leading through the wilderness He never abandons that promise. God is consistent; we aren't.

You know what? If Allah is God, and if his commands are what the Qur'an indicates, then it can't be wrong to blow up buildings in his name. It can't, because "love" and "righteousness" are not eternal attributes of Allah, and "right" and "wrong" are not rooted in his revealed character. But they are of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - which means that, unless someone can show me where our God condemns Israel's attempts to practice this genocide, then those commands cannot be inconsistent with His love. Period.

That doesn't make this easy to work out. It doesn't make it easy to stomach the thought of wholesale slaughter and destruction. It makes me thoroughly grateful to live in the era in which I do live. I know Jameson isn't not very impressed with DeYoung's defense of the doctrine of God's wrath, but what about God's wrath as a function of His love in the face of human scorn?

And whatever else God's wrath is, it's not arbitrary. Don't forget that Israel's failure gave Canaan an extra generation of life, prosperity and stability. Don't forget that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all their people lived in Canaan as worshipers of Yahweh for centuries before their exile in Egypt. Don't think God didn't judge Canaan for a multitude of atrocities of their own; this was God striking down kingdoms that were utterly perverse. And even in the midst of that, as he notes, the tribes do keep popping up later - for all God's anger at Israel for an incomplete extermination, He didn't truly wipe everyone out, and in quite a few cases, one may notice, He allowed for the preservation of individuals, families, and even peoples - to the point of incorporating them into the Messianic family tree.

I hardly think God's wrath went away with Jesus, either! Who talks about hell more than anybody else in the Bible? Goodness, the nonviolence of Israel's mission was established long before Jesus' time. This wasn't under the new covenant - it was God's direct command to His people before the coming of the Messiah, and it was the establishment of a new way for them to become a blessing to the whole world, though they failed at that too. Like it or not, the commands God gives His people are progressive in nature; He is not using them for the same particular goals in every epoch, and it is terribly arrogant to presume that because we know God's commands for us, we can judge whether it was the same God who gave other commands to people in another time or place. But our questions are continuous with Israel's; it is the same God, and the different commands at different times are part of the same plan. If that's not the case, Jesus makes no sense at all.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying "God doesn't work like that anymore, but it was okay back then." I'm saying that it would be okay right now, if that were where "right now" fell in God's plan of redemption. And it would not have been okay for Israel to execute God's judgment on Canaan if God had not so ordered. We have the benefit of living 2,000 years after God permanently defined the mission of His people as the discipling of all nations. Our culture and our assumptions, praise God, have been radically shaped by Christ (whether that's acknowledged or not). The definitive judgment of God that He executed through mankind has been accomplished in Jesus' suffering and death. But how can you say that the slaughter of the only innocent man who ever lived was an act of love and not be willing to say that war can be such as well?

If war, slaughter, death and destruction are incompatible with God's love, then He is either not love or not there. I don't think you can get around that.

the possibility of first principles

2010-12-18T13:05:00.004-06:00

More thoughtful thoughts from Jameson, this time explaining some of the basics of what he's working through politically.

I don't love politics, but I think he's a little too pessimistic on some points.

Am I being true to my faith, and trying to build a consistent Christian worldview? Or am I simply picking and choosing what I want to believe?

I feel that the only way to deal with this question is to break down some common assumptions with which Christians are often burdened. The first is that there is such a thing as a Christian worldview. I simply know of no comprehensive view of the world that has ever been shared by the majority of Christians.

I'm not sure how this begins to deal with the question, really. To ask, "Am I trying to build a consistent Christian worldview," then dismiss such a project by saying, "There is no such perfectly formed worldview out there," seems to me analogous to asking, "Am I trying to play by the rules of football?" and then claiming that this is impossible because no football game one can remember has ever been played start to finish without any penalties.

I suppose Jameson may be interacting with Van Til's language here, but I don't know that it's fair to characterize his (or his disciples') view as implying an overrealized eschatology in which Christians have been given a comprehensive world- and life-view, ready made, and have failed only to apply it as comprehensively as it deserved (taking exceptions, or some such). The assumption that that is the notion behind talk of a "Christian worldview" is evident:

This fact is symptomatic of a deeper truth: we do not arrive at our understanding of the world through a predefined system of learning. We learn about the world largely by accident, through our interactions with whatever lies in our limited sphere of existence.

First, "by accident" always makes my little Calvinist nose twitch. It's a key issue: is the way we learn a function of randomly defined limits on our perspective, or is there a governing will behind our individual situations? And does this degrade the notion that our knowledge, though necessarily limited, can be true? I think it might.

More importantly, though, is the problem that this appears to deny that the facts we take in do come to us interpreted, even if our interpretations don't necessarily live up to that definitive interpretation. Hence the following:

The hope of constructing a thoroughly Christian worldview presupposes the ability to evaluate everything from a God's-eye perspective, which we do not have. It will not do to appeal to those sources, such as the Bible or the pope, which we hold to be authoritative, since there is still the problem of interpretation. As tempting as it is to dismiss all interpretations we don't agree with as heretical, experience shows that this kind of dismissal rests on a great deal of presumption.

I'd say, rather, that the hope of constructing a thoroughly Christian worldview presupposes only that there is in fact a God's-eye perspective, not that we can ever share it (which, again, Van Til would treat as the most delusional presumption possible). This hope would rest on, again, the existence of that perspective and the promise that God is actively intervening to promote a worldview among His people that is more in line with it - not in its comprehensiveness, but in its character. We certainly can't dismiss any interpretation that disagrees with ours as heretical, but there is a line somewhere with just about any issue. Where is that ever to be drawn, if our attempts to think through these issues lack a Christian teleology?

Then comes the question of "first principles":

A second related assumption is even more basic: we are tempted to assume that we can at least agree on first principles when it comes to something like politics. This is false. It is by no means obvious, even in principle, how to treat politics in relation to faith. Should we be concerned with politics only insofar as it allows us to be devout in this brief existence, until we finally leave this world behind and go to heaven? Or is our task in politics to enact God's will on earth? Perhaps our task to find some middle ground, in which we do our best to enact God's will but trust that most of the time we will probably have to be patient, waiting for God to act on his own. Or maybe we just shouldn't be involved in politics at all! This is by no means a settled question, and if we cannot even settle on a starting point for political discussion we can hardly expect to agree on most of our conclusions.

I don't know that I would be so hasty to make this denial. Is it not fair to say that "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to [Jesus]" might function as a first principle of Christian political thought, whatever one then does with it? That is to say, aren't all the possibilities listed in that paragraph somewhat overlapping, and don't they in some way hold that particular principle in common? It seems that seeking to make politics allow us private, devout lives in this temporary state would be one way to try to "enact God's will on earth," as would avoiding involvement altogether. Either way, we're trying to work out the implications of the fact that it is Jesus who is really King - and I don't think it's unfair to say that any "Christian" view of politics (or anything else) which flat-out denies that fact really is heretical, even entirely un-Christian.

And I think Jameson goes on to affirm this nicely:

I do think faith is to be all-encompassing. God's sphere of influence is everything, and even if we can't evaluate everything from a God's-eye view, we can at least be conscious that our Father does see all things. We may not arrive at a comprehensive worldview, but we can inch our way toward a greater understanding of the world that has been given to us. If as little children we must enter the kingdom of heaven, we ought to start here on earth to fumble around as little children do, trusting that our Father will teach us how to thrive. If we know at least that the second greatest commandment is "Love your neighbor as yourself," politics should be one of our greater concerns as Christians. Politics, after all, is fundamentally about that critical question: "And who is my neighbor?"

But isn't this precisely what he's just denied is possible - the assertion of a first principle that all Christians ought to be able to agree on? If it is such a principle, then we've probably all signed on to it, regardless of how we go on to apply it, and the result is an attitude of seeking to grow in grace and in the knowledge of God in our political thinking and action. That's precisely what I, demanding that Christian political thought conform to a Christian worldview, would ask - increasing conformity to a perfect standard that does exist, to which our access is indeed limited, but not thereby false. Our interpretations cannot be identified with God's, but I think they can and should be judged on their conformity to what we know of the divine standard, and I think we have good reason to believe that they will, over the generations, come to conform increasingly to that standard. I think that having these (again) first principles in mind - there is a God, and we are not Him - help to assuage much of the worry Jameson has over the thought of trying to construct a specifically Christian political philosophy.

I'll pass over most of the rest of what he brings up (for already-much-diminished brevity's sake), moving to Jameson's final paragraph:

Christians will continue to disagree for very good reasons about what our political philosophy should be. But I am very sincere in my belief that Christians ought to hold to the principles of individual freedom from coercion and minimal arbitrariness in government. This is not a direct revelation from God, nor did I deduce this belief from scripture. It is the simply the product of my reading, thinking, and, believe it or not, praying. I offer it up simply as my own belief, and I hope that others will consider it or at least be challenged by it.

"...nor did I deduce this belief from scripture" - but why not? I think he certainly could have. Read the Old Testament with basic political questions in mind and a careful eye for the implications of God's law for Israel, and you'll find pretty stringent limitations on the power of the state over individuals. At the very center of the Law, in fact, is included an affirmation of the lawfulness of private property, and case studies show God's response to arbitrariness on the part of rulers.

The simple fact that any Christian thinker ought to acknowledge is that any political philosophy that is worth implementing is inevitably so precisely because and to the extent that it does accord with God's will and is consistent with the founding principles of the Creator-creature distinction, divine providence, and Christ's sovereignty - unless there is not a living God who made heaven and earth, whose Son upholds the universe by the word of his power. To deny this theoretically is to deny Christianity. To deny it practically is to be inconsistent with Christianity. To implement it consistently - well, that's hard, and no one should say it isn't. But it should be our goal, and consciously so, more and more, as God leads His people into all truth.

right on

2010-10-11T18:16:00.000-05:00

My goodness, it's like he knows churches and single people and everything.

imaging God

2010-10-09T19:21:00.002-05:00

Good thoughts again from Jameson, this time on the notion of free will and how it might be expressed in terms of the human creative contribution to the world.

The physics illustration is helpful; if our thoughts, words and actions insert something into the world we inhabit, there's a sense in which our freedom of will is meaningful, even if it's constrained, either by a sovereign God or by the inevitable bouncing around of subatomic particles. Especially trenchant is the thought that atheism doesn't really have the philosophical wherewithal to make any use of the thought of meaning rendering our acts of will "non-conservative."

Of course, given that God exists and that what we think, say and do can be said to have meaning relative to Him (that is to say, that it is actually Meaningful and not simply a particular arrangement of physical occurrences), this is a pretty helpful way to deal with the theological stickiness. What we do, whether eternally decreed by God or not, expresses meaning, adds meaning to the world, and is in that sense not to be dismissed as lesser than what is usually meant by "free will." (Now, since that's true whether or not we see God as actively determining events, I'd say that ought to remove objections to a Calvinistic conception of divine sovereignty - but maybe that's just me.)

How do we best express the manner in which our action is non-conservative, my brother wonders? Reading the question in light of this post, I'd suggest that perhaps our contribution could be characterized as gratuitous order, an arrangement of that which we shape or speak that exceeds the baseline of deterministic action-reaction, that goes beyond survival and need. In that way we most clearly image God, and our contributions have value, whether positive or negative - we are either continuing (or rebelling against) the construction of tohuwabohu into beauty, truth - Good.

typological thoughts

2010-10-09T11:48:00.002-05:00

Peter Leithart cranks out little gems like these day in and day out.

Throughout the early chapters of Exodus, Yahweh is hardening Pharaoh’s heart. By the end, there is a heart of stone in the heart of Egypt.

To say that Israel has a heart of stone that needs to be turned to hearts of flesh is to say that Israel is an Egypt that needs to be re-Israelized through exile.

At another level, Israel has a heart of stone because in the heart of Israel is the tabernacle, and in the heart of the tabernacle is the ark, and in heart of the ark are two tablets of stone written with the finger of God. Israel is constituted as an “Egyptian” or “Egypt-like” stone-hearted people. Like the Egyptians, they live under stony stoicheia.

Ultimately, what is needed is not Yahweh’s word made stone but Yahweh’s word made flesh.

This is Ezekiel's promise to Israel, of course, but taking the nation-as-body notion a step farther, Israel being excised from Egypt in the Exodus and then being raised to life out of its dry-bone deadness looks quite a bit (to me) like God making the first human bride out of excised bone.

And so even in the judgment through the Exodus, there's a note of hope that Egypt's death-sleep won't last forever, but that the two shall in due course become one flesh.

my brother's coattails

2010-09-30T20:47:00.001-05:00

My goodness, it seems my little brother is a real live conservative writer.

post-evangelicalism

2010-09-11T17:04:00.004-05:00

My brother posts some good thoughts on the draw of liturgy in our postmodern (or "post-evangelical," as he'd have it) age. Some of my own thoughts as I read:

Postmodernism, it seems to me, is more or less just modernism that has given up. There's nothing particularly postmodern, to my mind, about pluralism or individualism - my goodness, wasn't it the Enlightenment that taught us to think atomistically about ourselves as human individuals?

And I suspect that evangelicalism in America has largely failed to notice how much of its anthropology it's borrowed from our national religion, Enlightenment deism, meaning that as an increasingly "postmodern" society has lost interest in legitimating any corporate teleology through its myth of the sovereign, autonomous individual, so have people who would once have spoken and understood the language evangelicalism learned from deism lost interest in Church that's holding onto what is for them a dying Latin.

(Good) liturgy really is a wonderful corrective for this, for the several reasons my brother outlines. We're no longer meant to be the sources of our own "authenticity," no longer reliant on the subjective experience alone to tell us that we really have interacted with God, no longer speaking the language of a dying empire, but the language of a Kingdom with a living Lord.

Another thought: I have little doubt that there's a correlation between contemporary evangelicalism's disconnect from contemporary people (who sometimes drift toward more strongly liturgical worship traditions like Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism) and the general lack of real education among even the educated classes of our culture, but I wonder what's the chicken and what's the egg. Has evangelicalism stalled in a subjective-experience-driven, sub-liturgical irrelevance because its leadership tends to lack any contact with a good, broad spectrum of excellent thought and art from centuries gone by (that is to say, "old books" in Lewis's sense, or Great Books - classical education, I suppose), or has the revivalist-bred antipathy to "formal" liturgy devalued that sort of education itself?

I'd guess that a corollary to the effect of liturgy in giving us words and an experience that accomplish what they are meant to regardless of our own insufficiency as participants is that it puts those words into us. That is to say, you can't read off the pages of the bulletin or prayer book without reading, without in some sense being schooled in the language of God's royal, priestly, chosen nation. Scripture- and tradition-derived liturgical prayer will enrich our extemporaneous prayers as well, just as one can't learn to write without reading, nor learn to speak or sing without listening, nor paint without seeing.

"Lord, teach us to pray," the disciples begged Him. We have lost the way somewhere, somehow, if we can't relate to those who would ask such a thing, if we refuse to be taught.

essaying

2010-09-02T19:16:00.005-05:00

I wonder how you teach writing.

A freshman comes in, without a clue what her first freshman-comp assignment is supposed to be. We look at the syllabus, and I talk through what the professor is asking for, how she might start off, what parts of the assignment to focus on at what phase.

Really, though, I am tempted to throw my hands up and despair at the whole enterprise. This professor has written a pretty good description of what a personal narrative essay ought to be; of course it's not quite clear, but how can it be?

Here, freshman, it says: get meta. Start thinking about your story. Now start thinking about what big story your little story is a chapter, a page, a paragraph of. Now start thinking about what big story your little story tells in miniature. Start thinking about your thinking, thinking about why you think the way you do about your thinking. Who are you? Now tell me how your story helped to make you into a person who thinks this way about your thinking; then stop telling me and illustrate it with your words. What does your past taste like to you now?

Can you teach someone who was brought up on figuring out the Right Answer to write down for her teachers for twelve years how to imagine herself, how to imagine the world she lives in, how to live the contemplative life on a set of deadlines?

Maybe you can, but I suspect you have to teach her to read these things, to become the sort of person who would read such an essay voluntarily because she wants to know how another person imagines himself and the world he lives in, to taste the fruit of the life contemplative. Can you do that in a semester? Possibly. Can you grade appreciation? Possibly. It all just seems so unlikely. Writing is art and art is less than Real to us Americans, us modern Westerners.

How do you make artists? Love art corporately, I suppose. I wonder how we become a society that does that, that thinks it is worthwhile to love art and want to do it ourselves.

marriage thus far

2010-08-31T21:41:00.009-05:00

Life is boxes.

Wedding gifts still trickle in, though it's down to a drop every few weeks or so now.

Books for fall coursework arrive, and I wonder if I will have a bookish son someday who will believe those books have always existed just as they are on the shelf where he knows them to be, wondering what mysteries they hold. For a few days, I can know little more than he will. I suspect I may forget to tell him that a great many of those books belonged to the grandfather he never met, so he will have to deduce it from the name scrawled in a tiny hand on those inside covers and be left to speculate on whether they had some sentimental value to me on account of being my inheritance.

They do.

I wore the wrong shorts to IKEA today, nice linen ones that breathe well in Texas August's lingering burn, but that have distressingly shallow pockets prone to depositing their contents in any seat in which I allow myself to get too comfortable. We bought a couch, achieving this, of course, only after seating ourselves on a great many couches for comparison. Once I recovered my phone from the cushions; once my phone was found and turned in by a kind foreigner, and I had to venture upstairs out of the customer zones to fetch it.

We feel like a strange sort of foreigners there. There is no lingonberry soda in the fountains in the cafeteria here, but they do have the famous Swedish meatballs and hot dogs and, this being the country that it is, tamales (not Swedish). The free refills seem to be unremarkable to hoi polloi. The layout is more or less exactly what one finds in, say, Tempelhof or Woltersdorf or Spandau; everything is written, distressingly, in English. There are black people there. It is, in short, not Berlin, and yet there is our coffee table, which we buy again, and there is Anna's bedspread, and there are the Paulus-Gemeinde's benches, and there is my futon. Oh! homesickness, our first shared Nostalgie.

Driving away, I remark that I hope I left my Swiss Army knife at home, because if such is not the case, it is surely buried in some Ektorp loveseat somewhere on that monstrous second floor. The ride is tense. That knife is another memento of my unborn children's mythical Grandpa, bearing no logo (long since fallen out), scarred and beaten but eternally handy. Nobody ever really gave it to me; I designated it my own inheritance.

When I found it in the La-Z-Boy in our study, Anna hugged me.

Now the mountain of IKEA boxes reminds us that we are a little closer to being sharers of a single domestic life, complete with things to sit on.

The best thing so far is having a whole nother person in your house who doesn't know how to be a grownup any better than you do but is willing to give it a shot if you are.

stumbling blocks

2010-05-31T08:54:00.003-05:00

This is an interesting little piece (occult angle and all) that brings back plenty of memories of Berlin. That city wears her past on her sidewalks, these days.

you renew the face of the ground

2010-05-22T16:25:00.002-05:00

A good friend of mine, a fellow seminary student, has let me teach his middle-school Sunday School class on a few occasions. I'm up again this coming Sunday, Pentecost.

Teaching is a strange thing for me - or at least, teaching kids is. With college students, it's not so tough to think back a few years and remember what sorts of things I knew, where the gaps in my understanding were, how I wanted to be taught. But sixth-graders - goodness, who was I back then? What was I aware of? How did I think, and what do I wish somebody had pointed out to me then?

So I think I'm probably erring on the side of teaching them as though they are older than they are, trying to lead a Sunday School class I'd enjoy being in. It's pretty conversational, with lots of leading questions, trying to push them to make associations and come up against things they'd never necessarily considered. Why did God pick out a particular people in the first place, anyway? Why did Jesus need to be Jewish? What are the Psalms doing in the middle of the Bible, and what are we supposed to do with the gory parts?

I'm not sure I'm the most self-disciplined teacher; I love following rabbit trails, and I think if I had sufficient prep time, I could easily teach a two-hour class on some of this stuff. Tomorrow's lesson will be from Psalm 104, with an emphasis on how that little reference to "send[ing] forth your Spirit" informs our understanding of the events of Pentecost in A.D. 33 (or whenever it was exactly); but wait! Where did Pentecost come from in the first place? What did the Jews celebrate on that day? What did it mean that that's when the Spirit came upon the Apostles? There's going to be a lot of Bible-page-flipping, and I wonder if we'll be able to cram in all the connections between Creation, Noah, Sinai, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and Jesus' resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Spirit, together with actually picking apart all the wonderful stuff in this particular Psalm - one of the more beautiful hymns of thankfulness and praise in the Psalter.

I hope the kids enjoy themselves half as much as I do when we work through this stuff. What fun Scripture is!

new chapters

2010-04-23T22:37:00.002-05:00

Life has a funny way, the lovely cliché goes. It has a funny way of doing this or that, catching you off guard, confounding your plans and expectations, twisting and turning away from the places you try to grasp it.

A Christian such as I - that is to say, one who probably takes himself more than a bit too seriously much of the time - can't properly say that, can he? It's the Lord, the Giver of Life, who has all the funny, confounding ways, and Who has, sometimes, so much to say that you lose track of your own efforts to scribble down notes, then have to be content with what memory can tell you about how He got you where you are.

Let me explain: I watched Once for the second time tonight. The first time was, amazingly, well over two years ago now. I love it now as much as I loved it then.

How fateful words can be! "I have loved," I claimed then, "every single person I have ever made music with." I think that was true, really I do; I certainly meant it then. It was a beautiful thought to have, and it lingered with me over the next year and all that it held. Then, some three and a half months later, I met a girl with a beautiful singing voice, a self-taught pianist. I met her, fell for her, lost her, found another girl, and thought I was safe and happy, I with my girlfriend, she with my friendship, not all that disturbed at the prospect of that state of affairs lasting another few months and then parting ways.

And then Anna and I made music together, rehearsing to lead at a team prayer meeting last spring, a horrible awkward day of feeling guilty for how good it felt to sing and play, of trying not to fall in love with her again and knowing somewhere deep down that I was failing.

Now, over a year later, I am trying to pick out words and music for our wedding, wishing I knew how to choose the right songs for an occasion of such splendid weight, wishing I knew how to respond to God, which of His words to offer back up to Him to ask His favor and to teach us how to love each other and love Him the way we're meant to for the rest of our common life. What words and music will tell those who join us to celebrate the beginning of that common life about God's funny ways and the twists and turns and the parts neither of us planned for or dared to hope for?

I am too much of a perfectionist, I suppose, when it comes to these sorts of things. I imagine all the time that there must be some perfect conjunction of word and sound and text and ceremony that will capture it all, tie it all off into a neat package and make it clear to all present just what has been going on in my life and what it all means. But that's foolish, isn't it? Milestones are just that - they shouldn't come only every ten or 20 or 50 miles, shouldn't mark only the monumental occasions.

I mean that, just as the Great American Novel will be written by someone who has written lots of other things, just as that masterwork will be one effort among a lifetime's attempts at telling the right story the right way, and perhaps really the greatest of those only in retrospect, so a wedding is one gathering of God's people in worship, one chance to cut a covenant in His sight, one beginning and ending among more than I ever bother to try counting, maybe more than I can count, in the span of years I've been given.

It's one more chapter break, the start of a new chapter I've longed for, but that I know will lead to a longing for the great Chapter still to be written, the one that won't end as all these little tales we tell always must.

paedosocratic method

2010-03-26T02:59:00.002-05:00

This has been kicking about some Reformed circles for a good long time, and I've enjoyed it each time I read it.

roasting day

2010-03-12T16:40:00.003-06:00

An afternoon in front of a big panel window with a good book and a mug of dark roast you need both hands to lift, watching the wind blow and the sky radiate its blue onto the tentative new green being dabbed onto the long-naked twigs and knowing that wherever you go for the rest of the day a slow-fading memory of that aroma will linger on you - those are good hours.

ingenuity

2010-03-06T11:22:00.003-06:00

Wow.

Maybe this guy should produce the next OK Go video.

cowboys and bulldogs

2009-12-19T19:26:00.003-06:00

I have finally, after many, many months, seen a live broadcast of a football game. And what a game it was.

Gotta love the Wyoming fan's sign: "6-6 Doesn't Look So Bad When You've Played the Best."

repatriation: day one

2009-12-17T07:21:00.006-06:00

Of course, having looked forward to a double-digit number of hours of sleep after the four total hours I'd enjoyed in the previous two (long) days, I slept for exactly eight hours, was up before the sun, and am now getting a fresh start on noticing things I'd forgotten about America.

Item: I am going to walk to a Wal-Mart (almost seems sacrilegious, doesn't it?) later to do a little light shopping. Mom asked me to look for a box of chocolates "but they might not have them." Even a "small" Wal-Mart such as I'm going to is a structure on a scale such that, were it an asteroid headed Earth's way, would be serious cause for alarm, and they might not have chocolates? It's going to be a while before I get used to not being able to pop into a gas station and come out with a box of perfectly serviceable chocolates should need arise.

Item: The esteemed manufacturers of Chex, having come to the stunning realization that the corn and rice from which their cereals are made do not contain gluten, are now trumpeting this achievement with a proud "Gluten Free!" label atop each box.

This country is weird.

last day

2009-12-14T18:17:00.003-06:00

It's coming up on 1:30 in the morning. I've been up and about since 9:00, getting my apartment ready to hand over to Anna tomorrow (again at 9:00) and then pack and figure out the screaming little details that remain.

And it occurs to me that, it being well past midnight, it is now my last day in Berlin; departure is some 30 hours away. How odd. I think I can say truthfully, though, that I've spent the last days being, very deliberately, the person that I am now in the context I've lived in. It's been good to be here and say a lot of goodbyes and feel - without real relief, admittedly - that I did the job I was brought here to do, that it's done, and that soon I can rest for a little bit and then try to do the next one.

For now, it's all pretty unreal. It's not going to compute for a while, and I'm trying to be OK with that, trying not to force myself to think the right things or feel the right way or say all the words all at once. I want it to be all right if I don't perfect all my goodbyes. I want my last days to be like all the other days I loved here, to the extent that that's possible amid the stress and the bag-stuffing and the lack of sleep and flurry of visits. I guess I'll see in a few days whether I've succeeded at all.

Good night, Berlin. Two more sleeps. I'll miss you.

Ick liebe dir.

farewell words

2009-12-03T04:29:00.002-06:00

I am trying to write a letter to my church. It's a strange thing to be attempting; I don't know that I've ever addressed them as a congregation, ever said anything for them to hear corporately. Honestly, I feel I've said very little even privately, revealed sadly little of who I am and what I think about things to the people who have been my church family here. That's a testament to the missionary's lack of competence, the expatriate's obscurity. I can express myself reasonably well in German, but not enough to feel quite that it's myself being expressed, not all the way.

How do you say a goodbye well? How do you speak to people you've had to fight so hard against seeing as projects rather than brothers and sisters, to comfort them and maybe leave them with a little bit more of yourself than you've been able to give all this time? It may be impossible, I suppose; maybe I'm in the process of learning that what's done is done - and what's undone will stay that way regardless of the eloquent expression of my sentiments.

I wish I were happier with words of generic goodwill. This is tough.

oooh

2009-11-10T11:40:00.003-06:00

TCU is getting shiny new uniforms with lots of specifications and things for the biggest game of the last 70 years.

mauerfall

2009-11-10T03:07:00.005-06:00

How serendipitous it has been to have spent these particular two years and change in Berlin - especially yesterday, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We met friends for coffee and cake, hopped on the train and headed down to the Brandenburg Gate...

I'm glad to be able to say I was there. It was in some ways typical of that sort of event: it was dark, and cold, and rainy, and full of people jostling and spearing you through the eyeball with the tips of their umbrellas' ribs (if you are my height) or knocking your umbrella out of your hand with their eyeballs (if you are normal-sized), and dominated by a total lack of certainty as to when the climactic domino-toppling would happen - but we survived, We Were There, Twenty Years On.

It's in its own way a milestone for me. [DISCLAIMER: If you are any older than I am, the following might make you feel kind of elderly. Sorry.] I remember the news stories, some of the coverage, from when the Wall came down; I was in kindergarten, and I remember watching the news with my parents (our evening ritual led by MacNeil and Lehrer) and hearing over the next year how Germany was becoming one country again. How strange it is to remember hearing big news from twenty years ago. How strange to have finally reached an age where memory stretches back that far.

And now I was there.

gekündigt

2009-09-12T07:35:00.002-05:00

All manner of things have happened, and I ought to write a bit about them. But the thing that happened today (well, one of them) is that I sent in my three months' notice that I'm moving out in mid-December.

I've effectively started the countdown; it's one of those point-of-no-return moments that feels disproportionately big. It seems silly to think about it so much in the midst of a fairly busy month, but it makes the return to America seem much more real. How frightening to have set myself a real deadline.

In that way, I've really officially started the end of my term. I'm a bit of a lame duck - I'm trying to do ministry stuff, trying to make the most out of the time left, but I'm also facing the frustration of knowing I can't invest a lot of months into anything I start up, and I can't really start up anything that isn't designed to be handed over to another team member or to Germans. And I'm necessarily thinking a lot about the future, which means it's so terribly hard to really keep my head in the game here.

That is where I am.

run away turn away

2009-09-07T14:31:00.003-05:00

Heiko's latest selection for a song to translate into German:

He has also written a song for his girlfriend. He played it for me and showed me the lyrics. I feel decidedly outclassed.

burning truth

2009-08-24T13:32:00.002-05:00

You Christian types thought this was gonna about the Gospel and stuff, didn't you?

No, I meant this. So true it burns.

on solstice hill

2009-06-25T06:17:00.003-05:00

It's rash, hopping out of the train halfway home, still lugging the guitar, already tired and ready for home and quiet.

Still, I am pretty resolved. It's the longest day. I want to remember the sun the way it is here, lingering, making summer evenings that love you, take hours saying goodbye.

So we follow the fence a longer way than we thought we had to. Far off ahead, the sky is black - not the direction we want to look anyway. The wind picks up. Finally, the footbridge, red against the leaves glowing above and the tracks glowering below. Past the joggers, into the woods, we are mostly alone.

The light: oh! I want to drink it; mingled with the air, it's a golden wine, rich and strong. On the trees, it disorients, dazzles. Looking up, we see kaleidoscopic gilded green, the threat of black up ahead, the depth of the blue still visible in the broken clouds. I glance to the side into a dream I once had, or maybe a dream I dreamed of having so long ago I've forgotten. I still can't remember what it was about, but it must have been a good story.

We take a shortcut and are brought up short on the hill's far shoulder. Two rainbows climb above the rose garden below, fragile and wan and all the more lovely for that. We stare and try to find words, only briefly.

This time, we take the stairs, exerting ourselves for the sake of speed, and it pays: we're at the top with twenty minutes or more to spare, and we spare it, breathing deeply, sucking at the wind that shoves and prods and ruffles us, looking. We soak in the east side, then head a few steps to the west, see what the far-off sun has done with the blankets of clouds hanging, it seems, just overhead, just out of reach, a painting done with God's brush on His living room wall.

It lasts a long while. I say once how I feel, and that is more than enough.

The black in the east catches up to us. I try an umbrella for a bit, then give up and give in to being pelted by the chill summer storm. On the verge of letting go, heading downhill and homeward, we see the sun's farewell, the last gap between cloud and horizon, invisible until now, with all the desperate fury of the last light reaching out to us through it.

Knowing every moment that we need to go, we walk to the west tower, see the city settling into the twilight, watch the gold and red fade into memory, the sky fade into cool satisfied dark, even as it keeps pouring on us.

Soaked and giddy, we start back down, trying to hurry without losing hold of the ground, delighted soggy fools. All the way home, though, I feel I've been watered.

On the way down, I mentioned the dream, and she smiled at me.

holidays i learned about in school roughly 15 years ago and never forgot despite never observing

2009-06-19T15:01:00.002-05:00

1. Juneteenth

Happy #1, everybody.

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gardens of the world

2009-05-26T14:33:00.004-05:00

A long time coming: pictures of flowers and buildings and things in the Gardens of the World in the Marzahn Recreational Park, my May Day excursion.

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playlist for 1 august 2009

2009-05-21T13:00:00.003-05:00

Step 1: Master guitar technique.
Step 2: Master angry facial expressions (to convey INTENSITY).
Step 3: Profit.

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and even then they sometimes thought he was a bit of a twit

2009-05-21T12:50:00.002-05:00

What they took for passivity in him was a deep and innate respect for expertise, and a too seldom-questioned faith that the one whom the powers that be had placed in a position of responsibility was possessed of such. His tacit certainty that his own expertise ruled in his given spheres they took for stubborn arrogance, and so a year was barely enough for the vacillation between contempt and exasperation to subside.

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ascents and sensibility

2009-05-21T12:27:00.003-05:00

It's Ascension Day here in Germany. That is to say, it's Ascension Day wherever the Gregorian calendar is found, and in Germany it is Christi Himmelfahrt, which name amuses me endlessly. I am inspired in this amusement by the wife of my boss's boss, who is sort of matronly and at the same time is the sort of person who laughs at German words that end in "-fahrt." And who can blame her.

(Tammie, I don't really think you're matronly.)

Peter Leithart has posted a totally neato meditation from a couple of sermons by Leo I on why what we celebrate (and by "we" I mean next to nobody in any church I've ever gone to, which is too bad) is such a big deal. His blog is a good one to subscribe to. It'll make your brain sweat sometimes.

In Germany, Christ's Fahrt to heaven is also a public holiday, which I totally failed to take into account when scheduling my English courses, which is why I am sitting here having been stood up by all (2) my students this evening.

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- why should i not admit it? - my heart was breaking

2009-05-04T05:01:00.003-05:00

I've recently completed a little Kazuo Ishiguro kick, having just reread The Remains of the Day after reading, in close succession, Never Let Me Go and An Artist of the Floating World. He's become a favorite - between his books and M. Robinson's Gilead, I think I've become a legitimate fan of fictional memoir.

It's a bit odd to me that Remains should be the most highly-acclaimed of the bunch. Certainly in some ways it sums up Ishiguro's oeuvre: meditations on regret, unrealized love, and misguided loyalty, all couched in episodic reminiscences that reveal, piece by piece, the truths and hurts the characters can't bring themselves to acknowledge outright or up front. But it's also a bit broader, it seems to me, than either Artist or Never Let Me Go, with at least one scene's concept bordering on being a gag. The narrator is more obviously in denial of the reality of his past, somewhat unbelievably unable to acknowledge the contradiction between his professed beliefs and feelings and the actions he describes himself taking.

But for all that, it's as emotionally wrenching as either of the others - more so than Artist, which it resembles more closely. I suppose that's Ishiguro's real master stroke - it's disarmingly amusing to watch a protagonist craft such a clichéd caricature out of himself, amusing enough that his own growing realization of what he's lost in the process feels like an ice bath in comparison.

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seems like a good thing

2009-04-29T14:43:00.000-05:00

as far as I can tell
you and I are surprises to each other

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r.i.P.od

2009-04-20T15:26:00.004-05:00

I will miss you, old friend. You have helped me be bitter and overjoyed and lonesome and tired and awake, made the colors brighter, the journeys smoother, the heartbreak somehow beautiful, the delights to transcend the brief lifetime memory allows them, good work to seem a bit more possible.

I am not crying, but I'm giving it serious consideration.

You would know, if you were a thing that could know, many things I did, many things I said that I'm glad no other human heard, many things I wished I could have said to another human, many things I saw that no one else will ever see. You were connected physically to the interior of my ears, which makes it hard not to imagine you could even have known some of the things I thought, some of which I went on to write at your urging, some of which I went on to bury in the songs you put into me.

Thank you.

Now I suppose I should put some real effort into finding my Shuffle, though perhaps it's best to spend some time just grieving before I try to move on.

2002-2009

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you're a lot prettier than i am

2009-04-16T15:31:00.001-05:00

I've seen a fair bit of debate on the topic, but I'll have to come down on the side of Knocked Up being one of the sweeter movies I've ever seen.

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ah worked mornin' t' evenin' in the cotton fields all mah lahf

2009-03-12T10:46:00.002-05:00

The English curriculum I use is pretty good about presenting a variety of accents in its listening activities; occasionally it's clear that the students are expected to be most used to hearing Oxford English or some London accent or other, and so the tracks featuring speakers with those accents tend to be a bit harder for my students, who mostly hear my muddled American accent, but so far I've heard English, Scottish, Australian, Canadian, and various ESL accents on the tapescripts, which is nice.

And last night, my students were introduced to the vocal stylings of an elderly black lady from the American South, pictured (of course) sitting out on her verandah, where she no doubt sips a mint julep or sweet tea now and again as she reminisces about her share-cropping childhood. Her accent was of course a bit inconsistent, which some words "standardized" a bit, but the marks of a fine high Southern accent were there - and my students loved it.

So, my Southern friends (particularly any of you who happen to be elderly, black female Georgia natives), know that your way of speaking English is possibly the most aesthetically appealing to elementary-level German speakers in the entire world.

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blug blurgle blah

2009-03-11T07:38:00.002-05:00

I have bad speaking days.

When you live overseas and operate in a second language, it's perfectly typical to have days where you're just not on, where you can't seem to speak at whatever level you've actually reached in that language. Today is like that - the German I used to order my coffee and lunch was comprehensible, but mushy and stumbling.

And then I got here to church and talked briefly with David and realized my English is that way too, and it seems the fact is that my lips and tongue just never quite got out of bed this morning.

It's kind of weird.

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hot sunny late winter days

2009-03-09T03:55:00.003-05:00

In the bakery this morning (where I got an extra Berliner for free from the nice lady behind the counter), the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack was playing. I haven't heard that in ages. It was kind of nice. Outside the bakery was a very scary-looking man barking at people, "Hey! D'you speak English?"

I played German and ignored him.

Last night it was clear and moonlit, then it rained hard enough to wake me up around 5:00, and when I finally got up for real, it was beautiful and clear again. This seems like a positive step toward actual spring weather, though it's still cold. It's kind of fun to think that I might actually be able to let myself get used to the sun soon.

The color palette of houses is a little different from what you tend to see in the States; most streets are, of course, lined with apartment buildings rather than "houses" as Americans tend to think of them, and I'm told that even 10 years or so ago, they tended to be sort of drab and Communist, grayish-brown and ugly. Now there is all manner of warm color, from eggshell whites to pale yellows, peach, salmon, mint green, orange, to various colors I can't really identify but which probably have an "au" in them somewhere. It's all about catching the light; the inner courtyard outside the window where I sit now is a painted light yellow with white trim, and when the sun comes out, the room brightens as though I'd flipped a switch.

I like it.

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happy casimir pulaski day

2009-03-04T13:46:00.004-06:00

Actually, it was officially Monday. But today is the guy's actual birthday.

Try not to cry too much.

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around the white lake, over the mountain of lights and southward

2009-03-01T15:30:00.003-06:00

My camera battery hasn't been charged in ages, but thanks to the wonders of Google Earth, I've put together a little photo-tour of the walk I took this afternoon using pictures other people have been kind enough to put on the internet for me.

read the rest:

I started by heading due east into an area in this borough called Weißensee, where I found a fascinating complex of apartments and stores with really interesting architecture. I wish I could find a picture that did it justice; this is the best the internet provided:

Toward the center of Weißensee, you enter an old town that recalls the area's village origins, with sprawling cemeteries and lovely courtyards.

It's a green area, with a number of parks, including the actual Weißer See, the lake that gives the district its name. The pond and the lake pictured here were both still mostly frozen over, despite the well-above-freezing temperature today.

Heading south from the lake, I entered Lichtenberg, a very Eastern part of town that looks like this:

I walked through this split stone hemisphere, though the flowers were conspicuously absent.

On the southern edge of the Stadtpark (city park) in Lichtenberg is what is apparently the largest youth theatre company in Germany or the world or Berlin or something.

(Once again, I'm using other people's photos. It didn't go from spring back to winter in the course of an hour. In fact it was pretty dreary by this point, but there's no snow anywhere.)

Continuing south, I crossed a bit of colorful Friedrichshain.

Then I had to cross the train tracks at Ostkreuz, a busy station that handles a lot of former East Berlin's traffic.

Proceeding south along the tracks toward Treptow, I came upon this abandoned glass factory. I'm pretty grateful that some dude on the internet took a much nicer picture than I could have.

I crossed the Spree on this bridge. I did not have this view:

I did, however, have this view:

On the other side of the river, past the harbor, is the Treptower Park, where there is a great big memorial to Soviet soldiers. It's impressive stuff, and it was getting pretty dark by the time I got there, so you, dear internet readers, are getting a better look than I got.

The triumphal arch at the north entrance:

Mother Russia:

On the way up the avenue:

The giant stylized Soviet flag on either side of the hill, with soldiers kneeling in front:

The view of the center of the memorial, with the statue Liberation as the centerpiece.

...and then I took the train home because it was dark and I was tired.

Fin

fast thursday

2009-02-26T05:10:00.003-06:00

I've posted once or twice about my personal observance of Lent here. It's funny; I only finally decided yesterday (Ash Wednesday) what I was going to do this year, and without consulting my own records, I landed on - just as before - a Thursday fast.

Thursday is just the day it seemed to work out; it's my least busy day, aside from my late English class, which doesn't usually require a ton of advance planning, meaning it's not as much of a worry if I don't have quite as much blood sugar all day.

I think my reflections on fasting still stand, but there's a bit of an added wrinkle this year. It's my last year in Berlin, more likely than not, and that means I have a lot of questions about what's next, about what sort of person I'm supposed to go become afterward, about calling and desire and leading. And it really seems like what you do, if you are trying to model yourself on God's people in the Bible, is fast and pray. I've wanted to do this monthly this year anyway, and it seems good to go ahead and make it weekly during a season that's kind of about fasting and prayer anyway.

So today I would like to get my English lesson ready and then go be alone and quiet and talk about things with God, because I don't ask Him nearly enough what He thinks about stuff.

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appearances

2009-02-25T15:34:00.002-06:00

This, for the interested, is what it looks like when I am playing guitar at church.

I'm the one playing guitar.

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can zombiehood be far off?

2009-02-25T03:17:00.002-06:00

So I've got a touch of the ol' pinkeye. Sort of. Maybe. My doctor friends called it a Bindehautentzündung, which the ever-essential LEO translates as "conjunctivitis." My actual eye isn't pink, though - it's the eyelid that's affected. That's more accurately described as blepharitis, if Wikipedia and/or WebMD are to be trusted. You know what's fun? Trying to figure out what disease you have when you've been diagnosed in a foreign language, not to mention trying to figure out the directions on your medicine. I've now got myself a little bottle of antibiotic eyedrops that should hopefully clear me up within a week, now that I've established (thanks again, LEO and Wikipedia!) what a Bindehautsack is and where my conjunctival sac actually is.

So I'm working from home this morning in an effort not to scare the children (I am not a pretty sight right now - I mean, even less so than usual). I suppose I could still play guitar this afternoon for Kids' Club if I put on an eyepatch. I wonder what German with a pirate accent would sound like. Maybe we can find some songs that sound like sea shanties.

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mother of cities

2009-02-24T15:51:00.005-06:00

The train ride from Berlin to Prague alone is almost worth the cost of the ticket. There is a beautiful region south of Dresden with sandstone cliffs and rock formations. Natural beauty isn't a strong point of Berlin or its surroundings, really, so for a kid who spent some of his growing-up in West Virginia, it's a nice reminder of what this planet is capable of.

Prague itself aims to please, to be Europe with an extra-capital E, to provide your fix of ornate and pointy buildings, very nicely lit up at night and colorful in the day.

read the rest:

There's something smug about it, almost. The city survived World War II with little to no damage, so it lacks that scarred, sobered feel that Berlin has. There's a cynicism here in Berlin that I can sort of relate to, though maybe I haven't earned it out of my personal experience. Prague has its dark side, and maybe that's part of the "smugness" - Berlin was leveled, but Prague got away with it. The capital of Hitler's Germany got its comeuppance. The former Jewish capital of Europe ended up with very few Jews and relatively little war damage.

All the same, it is lovely in a way Berlin doesn't pull off. It's cozy, despite the fairy-tale look, easy to get lost in and hard to get bored of. Plus they have pretty good beer.

deep light

2009-02-23T15:02:00.002-06:00

As I walked through the archway, out to the sidewalk, the blue neon light from the Aral station across the street looked like some sort of heaven. The air was the right temperature for that shade of blue, the reflection on asphalt, concrete and cobble a vision of a gateway into beauty and rest. That was a good moment.

I've needed one of those for a while, I think - a little stab of joy, joy in Lewis' sense, suddenly glimpsing the heavenly in the mundane, suddenly remembering the longing so sweet as to be longed-for itself.

The worst of missions, I think, is that just in the places where you feel everyone expects you to be in some sort of mountaintop communion with God, you prove yourself to be more tiresome and unspiritual than you can imagine the most dull and thoughtless pew-warmer back home to be. Just when you are in the situations you read about that make for great stories, the trials that make heroes of believers, you discover that you aren't a hero, that you just want it to stop and you want God to leave you alone and let you be mediocre and safe.

And in the midst of all that, you realize you don't remember what it's like to really think that anything is beautiful. That is horrible.

So when you're out of the dreariest depths, when you hear a lot of words that are good for you, when you hear God talk to you everywhere for a while, then maybe you can see truly for a minute how deep the light is that shines into the darkness. Not that you're suddenly dancing and smiling sunshine at everybody, but you have some better idea of what it's going to be like to have that thirst quenched, to see the Face you've been longing for look at you with the love you never believed could be yours.

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happy 200th, abe and chuck

2009-02-12T07:36:00.004-06:00

It's quieter today and there aren't quite so many humors leaking out of my head, both encouraging facts. So I'll throw out some miscellanies:

1. Recent reads: both passed along to me by Kelly. I finally caught up to all those famous mid-'90s personalities and read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, a fable-y adventure story about following your dream or something like that. It's breezy and has some fairly useful insights about life in general, but its overall Oprah vibe was kind of off-putting. The moral of the story seems to be something like, "Fixate on one idea or goal and be single-mindedly obsessive about it for your whole life and you will get rich. Or something." I don't know, just a little too watered-down-pop-religion for me.

read the rest:

Much more compelling was Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize-winner The White Tiger, a seedy-underbelly rags-to-riches story of India, the sort of thing that would tend to be called a "searing exposé" or something like that. Stories I've read about India tend to hold on to a little bit of the mythical-magical-mystery side of things in ways post-colonial writings about Africa and Latin America don't seem to (or at least don't do so without any subversive intent); Adiga's narrative voice is unsparingly cynical and despairing, which is in its way a bit refreshing. It's a bleak story, but I think the sort of schizophrenically amoral-yet-morally-outraged protagonist captures the contradictions of contemporary India in a way that's pretty accessible to the Western reader. It's another fairly quick if unsparing read, and entertaining in a way that makes you feel a bit guilty for being entertained. Definitely worthwhile.

2. There is a dude staying in my living room at the moment. He is here as an MTW intern, making promo films for teams throughout Europe. Ours will feature our church plant and serve as a thank-you/introduction to supporters back in the States. It's interesting having a roommate after so long living alone. I figure it's probably good for my mental health, diet and hygiene. Takes some getting used to, though. I have to remember to, like, close the door to my bathroom when I'm in there. Weird.

3. Customs declarations take out some of the fun of getting presents in the mail when you live overseas.

4. Tonight I'll be starting up my second beginners' English course. My class yesterday had to be canceled due to everybody being sick, so this won't be the first week where I teach two classes, but it will be the first time I teach a class on Thursday. Next week, God willing, will be the first with two actual classes taking place. I guess that's success or something. My clientele:

one married couple, an IT guy and a nurse
two retired ladies
one teenage girl
a hairdresser and her partner
two mentally-handicapped guys
three Bangladeshi kids (I get paid in free Indian food)

You never know what you're gonna get.

5. The thing about Prague is, it's pretty much delightful in any possible weather, time of day, season, or circumstance. They light it up amazingly well at night, it's easy to get around even if you get lost a lot, and you can see a lot of it pretty quickly. The beer is extremely fresh, which with Czech beers is key.

An extremely good hint, especially if you are traveling with That Special Someone: go down to the riverside at night. There's a way down next to the Kafka Museum on the Malá Strana (Little Quarter) side, and if you're daring (particularly when it's snowy), you can pick your way downriver a bit until you reach a small bit of secluded ground where ducks and swans gather and you have a gorgeous water-level view of the Charles Bridge and the Old Town. It is quiet and lovely and perfect.

post-nasal caverns

2009-02-11T07:02:00.003-06:00

I'm working on getting over a cold or something, which I was worried based on the symptoms might be a sinus infection. While I'm pretty sure it's not, I got to discover more fun quite-literal German terminology: the sinuses are called Nasennebenhöhlen, literally "the caverns next to the nose". This makes a sinus infection (in classic German compound word style) a Nasennebenhöhlenentzündung. What a fun language.

I suppose while I'm writing this that now would be an opportune time to talk about my life recently, but I don't know if I can really do that without overusing the word "snot" rather egregiously.

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5:15 a.m.

2009-02-01T22:15:00.002-06:00

Haven't slept in 20 hours or so. It was totally worth it.

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the fog

2009-01-26T08:03:00.004-06:00

I haven't been to a lot of port cities, and certainly it's been a good long while since I was in one. Charleston was the last, probably, and it was fascinating, such a mix of old and new, unexpected cultural artifacts and influences, a certain aesthetic that's hard to capture in words - and I really just scratched its surface.

Amsterdam has that feel to it too. Some of it is the fog; maybe the city itself isn't all that mysterious (it wears a lot of its workings on its sleeve), but it feels that way at night, in the chill, when the air gets heavy and the mist slows the light from the streetlamps so that as you walk you wade from gold to black, black to gold. And when you stop and maybe lean on a railing by the docks, the water lapping behind you and the circulation of the capillary side streets slowed to a quiet car here, a noisy trio of pedestrians there, but mostly silence, the city seems to be dozing. You wonder if it's dreaming.

Anything could come out of the fog and seem to be the start of something big. Night at the docks could be the start of a beautiful friendship or a farewell to the only love of your life, the beginning of the end or an escape into the great unknown. In the cold heavy vapor every spark of life is tiny, but tiny like a seed that could grow into anything at all.

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sidewalking

2009-01-20T11:19:00.003-06:00

The man on the bike seemed to be looking at him, so he looked up, failed to recognize the man, and smiled slightly anyway, so as not to stare rudely. The man grinned in apparent recognition. Was it - ? no, still no one he knew, but in that moment of uncertainty he must have brightened up visibly, and as the two passed, they must have looked like good friends surprised and delighted to pass one another on the way home.

He wondered who he had been mistaken for. It must have been someone nice.

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to amsterdam

2009-01-20T02:46:00.003-06:00

A way to feel pretty awesome about yourself is to land in a new city, wander around looking for somewhere to eat the first night you're there, and unwittingly stumble upon what turns out to be (according to your tour guide the following afternoon) the best Chinese food in town. It really was quite lovely.

That full day was similarly serendipitous. Morning was devoted to the fine Van Gogh Museum, which, while it lacks many of Van Gogh's more famous works ("Starry Night" and such), is set up to take you chronologically through each stage of his life and work. I'm not sure any painting impressed me quite as much as his "Almond Blossom," painted some six months before his suicide. In the midst of what was eventually a fatal period of depression, he drew new life to celebrate the birth of a nephew, the son of his beloved younger brother.

I made it my desktop background. I don't think you can have too many reminders of what beauty can come out of the darkest periods.

The afternoon walking tour (strongly recommended) we took was led, appropriately enough, by a Bostonian who outfitted himself in Van Gogh's signature hat, coat, and red beard (though minus the aural self-mutilation). Passionate little guy, very enthusiastic advocate for the whole Amsterdam vibe ("tolerant/tolerance" popped up enough times that it could have made for a very dangerous drinking game), a good sense of the history of the place, and all sorts of recommendations, including which coffeeshops (see previous post) have the best edibles.

After a stunning closing oration where Vincent (not his real name) earned his tips, we were just around the corner from the Anne Frank House, which is like walking through the diary. It's powerful and you should go. It gets weirdly political at the very end before you go, though, with a room dedicated to (fairly even-handed, as far as I could tell) debate on issues like the right to privacy and similar. Not that that's not a valuable thing to have in a museum, but it was a little jarring to move from such an intensely personal look at the great tragedy of the last century to what felt like a high-school round-table discussion of current events. Strange.

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back home

2009-01-16T16:01:00.003-06:00

I'm back from vacation. Did I mention I was on vacation? I was, and it was all sorts of wonderful.

I don't think I'll try to pack everything into a single post, but pictures should eventually be forthcoming, and hopefully some remarks on the things I saw and did as they come to mind.

One: Amsterdam is in some ways exactly as seedy as its reputation insists. There are girls in the windows advertising themselves (though only in a specific area of town), and coffee shops are sprinkled liberally throughout the city. It is truly strange to stroll through the red-light district, though, and realize that the windows are in the ground floors of truly beautiful buildings, their neon lights making rather lovely reflections on the tranquil, jet-black nighttime waters of the canals in which swans glide.

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day one

2009-01-01T07:47:00.003-06:00

New Year's Day, even last year when it was snow-covered and beautiful everywhere, always feels a bit post-apocalyptic to me. It's the hangover, I suppose, from drinking in a whole year, which I've heard can be hard on your liver.

Christmas Eve is always, in my experience, a remarkably silent night. So too with New Year's Day. Christmas morning is full of clamor, as is New Year's Eve, but there is a pause at that eleventh hour before Christmas' din, and there is a pause at the end of the din. Then, I suppose, the noise of the year will build from there. I don't know. I never really remember January much.

So there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. 2008 is gone for real. I tend to want years to stay that way, out of sight, out of mind. I spent all of it here in Germany, probably about a month's worth of it ecstatically happy and inspired, something like three to four months' worth pretty miserable and alienated, and the rest in various states of in-between. The current trajectory is, I suppose (or hope), crawling up out of the bad bit.

2009 is hard to sketch out in advance. Lots of ifs. I could be back in the States in spring if finances don't improve. I could be here through the summer, do another couple English camps, and be back in the States in the fall. In neither case do I know what I'll be doing when I get back there.

I wish I knew what I want to be when I grow up. That's about where things start this year. I wish I felt more optimistic about it.

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silvester downtown

2008-12-31T18:18:00.002-06:00

My camera's battery was low and it's not the best piece of equipment, so the firework shots aren't great, but here's what I got.

Happy New Year to all of you, guten Rutsch, all that. I'll try to do better this year.

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completion

2008-12-30T04:45:00.003-06:00

Is there anything quite as nerve-wracking as finishing a big project? I've been tinkering with and editing and generally occupying myself with our team's songbook, the one we use when we meet together for worship and prayer, off and on for about a year, and over the last month I've really buckled down and worked on it in earnest.

At this point, I've truly lost track of how many hours I've put into the stupid thing. It's been a good outlet for all the anal-retentiveness within, but that comes at a price. I think I just finished it, but with nobody else serving as editor, I am absolutely certain that there remain some embarrassing and laughable errors in there, things that will immediately be noticed as soon as we start using the thing.

But I will never catch all of them. So when do I declare the the Mission is Accomplished? I think it's now. The files are safely squirreled away in a USB stick, ready to be taken off to the printers where I'll try to figure out how to say things like "spiral bound" in German. Then - well, it'll be time to hope for the best.

Oy.

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i know i seems an insane person

2008-12-26T15:54:00.003-06:00

Seems rather silly to really review a five-year-old movie that everybody saw, so just a few scattered thoughts...

Andrew Lincoln and Keira Knightley's story made me want to throw myself off a bridge.
Poor Laura Linney. She is awful good at acting, though.
Having a crush on Alan Rickman is kind of weird. I'm not a lady, though. Maybe you ladies in the audience can relate. Perhaps there should be an exemption for Harry-Potter-loving ladies, because having a crush on Snape would be weird for everybody. What do you think?
Being a single prime minister or president would be really kind of rough. Also Billy Bob Thornton is apparently kind of a sleazebag and we probably shouldn't elect him President after Obama. Or ever.
How did Mr. Bean being in the movie catch me by surprise? It kind of did, though.

merry christmas and good night

2008-12-24T16:48:00.000-06:00

I hope you get what you want.

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behold my servant

2008-12-24T03:49:00.002-06:00

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be discouraged
till he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his law.

Thus says God, the LORD,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people on it
and spirit to those who walk in it:
“I am the LORD; I have called you in righteousness;
I will take you by the hand and keep you;
I will give you as a covenant for the people,
a light for the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.
I am Yahweh; that is my name;
my glory I give to no other,
nor my praise to carved idols.
Behold, the former things have come to pass,
and new things I now declare;
before they spring forth
I tell you of them.”

Sing to the LORD a new song,
his praise from the end of the earth,
you who go down to the sea, and all that fills it,
the coastlands and their inhabitants.
Let the desert and its cities lift up their voice,
the villages that Kedar inhabits;
let the habitants of Sela sing for joy,
let them shout from the top of the mountains.
Let them give glory to the LORD,
and declare his praise in the coastlands.

Who is the prophet referring to, asks the Ethiopian eunuch, himself or someone else? And the answer Philip gives is the good news about Jesus. The answer is Yes. It's easy, I think, to take that as a Sunday-school answer: "Who is the prophet talking about?" "Jesus." But that's not exactly the lesson at hand. Of course he is talking about Jesus, but what the answer is is the good news, and the good news is - well, not bigger than Jesus, but it shows how much is rolled up into Jesus.

read the rest:

Because it's all about the Servant, and sometimes it really looks like the Servant is the prophet who's preaching these things to Israel, and sometimes it looks like it's somebody who is to come, but a lot of the time it's Israel himself - or Israel themselves, the people as a whole, who are the Servant. And all those things are true; there's not an answer spelled out. The people of Israel are the servant, and the prophets and priests and kings, they are all Israel, albeit imperfectly, often failing to live up to it.

And then, hundreds of years later, a child is born in a stable and all of these things come together into a single person; he is the Prophet, the High Priest, the High King of Kings, the Anointed of Israel, and he is there to save his people from their sins, but it's bigger than that. He is there to be his people, to live their story, being pursued as a baby by a wicked king, fleeing to Egypt and returning, crossing Jordan with John the Baptist, building a kingdom around him and being hailed as the one who comes in the name of Yahweh - and then being exiled from Jerusalem, taken out of the city and killed by heathens.

The thing is, he doesn't come just for the people, to do for them the things God promised to do for them, but to embody them, to do for the whole world the things God promised they would do for the whole world. He won't stamp out the weak, he won't make a lot of fuss; he will bring justice and won't stop until the work is done. He will bind the nations to God and open blind eyes and free the prisoners. And all of this is what Israel was there to do.

But this doesn't stop, it doesn't wrap all of these things up into a one-word answer. Jesus holds all these things in himself, and like a seed he goes into the ground dead, but then he bursts into new life, and that means that Isaiah and David and Moses all go into the ground dead with him and burst into new life, and that the whole of Israel dies and rises and grows, becomes something new. And what's more, now the people who believe are brought in, we become a part of Him, a part of the people that now embody the perfected Israel.

That means that just as every individual in Israel was charged to be Israel, just as Moses and Elijah and David and Isaiah were to all live the life of the Servant, we have been brought into the life of the Servant People so that we all live the life of the Servant ourselves. The project continues and expands. We are in it, each living out Christ, all together living out Christ, because Christ came to live the life we're called to first.

In the manger in Bethlehem, that's where that seed is, with everything wrapped up in it, all the life of a chosen people put into a baby who would do their dying for them and bring them across death into the life of the world to come and change everything for everyone.

Merry Christmas.

a very merry christmas indeed

2008-12-24T03:10:00.002-06:00

Ooh, just let me soak it in, maybe watch that highlight reel one more time...

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santa claus is something grumble slur

2008-12-22T16:39:00.000-06:00

miscellaneous notes from sunday morning

2008-12-21T07:44:00.004-06:00

1. In the train on the way to church was a man with a cockatoo on his shoulder. He also had a dog, but that's very common. I asked the girl sitting next to me what that kind of bird is called in German (her answer was "Papagei," which I think is the more generic word for "parrot"). This was probably the first time I've actually struck up a chance conversation with somebody in the U-Bahn, so it's kind of sad that my stop was the next one.

2. This note is To Self: try not to sit directly under the lip of the balcony at church. Children above you may well be eating gummi worms and not have as firm a grip on them as they think they do.

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in which javier bardem has sex with everybody

2008-12-20T13:47:00.005-06:00

The late-2008 Oscar fodder is just starting to work its way into theaters here now, and I've started my consumption with Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The moral of the film, so far as I understand it, is "Be Javier Bardem if at all possible. Impossibly beautiful women will sex you up if you are."

It's a very pessimistic movie, though, in all honesty (the downside to being Javier Bardem is that Penelope Cruz is absolutely nuts and may have stabbed you at some point). Eponymous best friends Vicky and Cristina (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson, respectively) go to Barcelona, get ballsily invited by Bardem (a Spanish artist) to spend a weekend in the town of Oviedo, where they will have the opportunity to see the sights, eat good food, drink good wine, and sex him up if they feel so inclined. Despite strait-laced Vicky's outrage and suspicion at the suggestion, they take him up on it. Sex and occasional hilarity ensues.

read the rest:

The film is largely taken up with a pretty universally negative look at the contrasting attitudes toward love its leads display - Hall is engaged to a stable sort of guy who epitomizes her desire for commitment and compatibility, while Johansson is the passionate, bohemian free spirit out to find something magical, unpredictable - "counterintuitive," as she puts it.

Allen's pretty scathing toward the Vicky side of things, the desire to settle on someone "suitable" and have a long, successful if potentially loveless marriage, but he doesn't spare Cristina's forced libertine attitude. The ménage à trois she eventually lands in with Bardem and crazy ex Cruz is a mess she initially convinces herself she is happy in, but it's ultimately disillusioning. In that way, Allen sets up a bit of a catch-22; nobody wins at love, at least neither of the extremes - and there's no real suggestion of a middle ground that might work out. The best he can offer is that love is intriguing enough to remain pursuing despite it all.

It's hard not to wax moralistic in reaction to the film; the infidelities and debauchery of the characters are clearly as unfulfilling as the mores they're out to break free from. But what I see as the more fundamental issue is the characters' unvarying narcissism. Each one is out to fulfill him- or herself, and that's that - it doesn't happen, but there doesn't seem to be any question that that's what the whole thing is about. And I'm not sure how much of that is something Allen's out to highlight, or something he does assume, like his characters. They live lives of absurd opulence, dining on mansion terraces and boating for amusement. The value of the specific things their class lusts after is called into question, but I don't know that the fundamental sense of entitlement growing up young and beautiful in their world really is.

So the story is, to those fundamentally sympathetic to the basic worldview of the jetsetting characters, a great little dissection of the allure and basic impossibility of love. To me, it's a cautionary tale about the essential hollowness of a life lived in pursuit of self-actualization.

Man, I feel like a bit of a puritanical twit to say that. But that's how I see it.

yikes

2008-12-19T11:04:00.005-06:00

So here I am, sitting alone in the church office. Tonight we have open visiting hours for a small art exhibit we're hosting, which teammate Elizabeth has asked me to man, as she's overbooked this evening.

I do my best to pretty the place up appropriately, setting out the bistro tables with their seasonal decorations, lighting candles, putting on music. The candles are really quite lovely, put together by one or another of the various craft-and-decor-oriented ladies of our church, made of a glass vessel (a vase? I'm not sure what to call it) half-filled with nuts of various persuasions, bits of candy, with a candle set atop the nuts, and the whole thing wrapped with a pretty red ribbon.

Nobody much is stopping by, so I sit at my computer in the office, print some things, read some things, and generally amuse myself. I smell someone's dinner cooking next door. Man, I'm hungry, I think. The smell grows stronger, smokier - somebody must have left something in the oven a bit too long.

Wait, that isn't right. None of the windows are open. How am I smelling dinner from the next apartment over?

Oh, hell.

I hurry, suddenly prescient of what I'll see there, into the sanctuary. Reality does not give the lie to my clairvoyance. The classy little candle holder right in front of me is ablaze, filling the church with the aroma of mixed nuts roasting in an open fire and, one is forced to admit, a certain festive fireplace cheer.

Thinking quickly as always, I blow it out. This works, for a certain value of "works." All I can say is, good thing our building doesn't have smoke detectors, or I'd be much deafer and possibly failing spectacularly at explaining the whole misadventure to the police and/or fire service.

Thus begins the weekend.

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the lyre and the sound of melody

2008-12-14T15:31:00.003-06:00

Oh sing to the Lord a new song,
for he has done marvelous things!
His right hand and his holy arm
have worked salvation for him.
The Lord has made known his salvation;
he has revealed his righteousness in the sight of the nations.
He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness
to the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;
break forth into joyous song and sing praises!
Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre,
with the lyre and the sound of melody!
With trumpets and the sound of the horn
make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord!

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who dwell in it!
Let the rivers clap their hands;
let the hills sing for joy together
before the Lord, for he comes
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.

These weeks are a time for thinking about the greatest parade that will ever be seen, Jesus the Emperor entering His city in triumph, with trumpets sounding, the people cheering - not just Jerusalem's rabble, but every nation filling the streets, from the beggars to the great warriors to the factory workers to the rulers of empires on which the sun never set in their time.

read the rest:

And more: all the musicians, if they obey this call to worship (and who will be able to resist, when the time comes?) will set aside their bickering and passive-aggression and perfectionism and pick up their instruments and strain to pour every drop of their skill into them and outward into the deafening melody of trumpet and lyre and upraised voice. And yet more: not even the land and water themselves will be able to ignore it. The jubilee will verge on the absurd, the water and the fish and the squid and barnacles all roaring together in greeting, the rivers clapping splashy, watery hands, the mounds of dirt and rock echoing giddy polyphony through their valleys over the rhythm of their rills, for He is coming to judge, this Yahweh who spent so much of His time fiddling with a bunch of contrary nomads in the desert.

It's a scene too huge to take in but a pleasure to imagine, still. I don't even like loud noises and crowds, but it's infectious to think of so much concentrated joy, the catharsis of shouting out every word of praise I know and banging on my guitar (that is my lyre) and knowing that everything is being set to rights, that it's all right now, that He is here - and not just me, but everything. Everything that has breath, I mean, and apparently some things that don't. Or maybe they will, maybe they will catch their breath for the first time, just to be able to cry out like the stones would have, if the Pharisees and Sadducees had managed to shut up the rabble.

How alien it is to think of this when you spend your days hunched over a computer poking at keys and trying to somehow be Doing Ministry. How foolish it seems to read words like this when your heart won't leap for anything these days, how sad to compare myself, barely able to contemplate the company of people who have already proven themselves loving and friendly, to the crowds who will be delighted to be surrounded by strangers all shouting and singing in every tongue - how far away that parade seems, and how easy it is to convince myself that I might somehow miss it, that God might have me working overtime and unable to call it a day in time to see the King as He passes by.

No, but it can't be alien or foolish, sad, far away or forbidden, because it is my whole story, beginning and end, being caught up into that parade, welcoming the King in, watching Him suffer and die and being washed with water and blood, joining into His story, and living my whole life from there waiting to hear the far-off notes that say it's time to wake up, to be done with school and go on holiday, to be done with toil and join the feast.

I am an absurd little creature and I need to have this in my mind, because if I could, if I could live in Advent in my mind the way I do in God's (worshiping the infant King, waving palms before the donkey-riding Lord, breaking bread with the risen Lamb, singing the holiness of the Alpha and Omega with the gathered host), then I wouldn't think about my absurdity or littleness quite as much and I might be beautiful like the words that tell me my story.

we believe

2008-12-12T09:16:00.002-06:00

So I was searching YouTube for Graham Kendrick's version of the Apostles' Creed (titled "We Believe"), and the top suggested search when I typed in "we believe in" (the first line of the song) was "we believe in barack obama."

Crikey.

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the mountains skipped like rams

2008-12-07T15:45:00.003-06:00

When Israel went out from Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
Judah became his sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.

The sea looked and fled;
Jordan turned back.
The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.

What ails you, O sea, that you flee?
O Jordan, that you turn back?
O mountains, that you skip like rams?
O hills, like lambs?

Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
who turns the rock into a pool of water,
the flint into a spring of water.

God in His advent brings a people with Him. Not just a people; a sanctuary, a throne room for Him to occupy and judge the world. But He is not idle. He is God the great Missionary, moving, invading, making a path for His people to walk as He leads them from the only home they had known - a land dominated by foreigners, speakers of a strange language - to a home they had not known but that He had promised them.

I never know how to think about going home - what it means for me, where "home" is, whether I've ever felt that a place or situation was home for me. It always seems facile, then, when I hear the Advent sermons about homecoming tell me about how we as Christians are at home in God. Or something. It seems more accurate, from what I can see, to say that God is at home in us, which is a scary and beautiful thing. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, pitched His tent, made His home.

And we, the walking, talking, eating, drinking, breathing home of God, are also a people being brought home. There is an already to it, of course, since as we live together we are never away from the One who defines what "home" is supposed to be. But we are also that people marching through the desert, on the way to a place we know deep in our bones that we are meant to be, a place where we can live with God and rest and be at peace. Because we have God in and with us, no mountain or hill, river or sea can stand in our way. We will reach that holy place.

It all seems like so much poetry, I guess. But I am desperately trying to realize what it means that God Himself actually wants to be around me, wants to live with and in me. That is mind-shattering if you are the sort of person who really doesn't ever expect people to want to be around you, and doesn't really get it when they do. And I'm also a person who doesn't really believe in "home," and so it hurts my brain a little bit to think that God is telling me that we are actually on our way there and that we will for real get there.

My hills and mountains and rivers and seas are things like depression and insecurity and fear, people I can't deal with and tasks I don't know how to do. They can't stop Him, though. They look laughable when Advent happens. I need to learn that, to laugh with the saints in Jesus' train, asking those mighty obstacles what's wrong with them, why they're skipping away. And if I can, I think I might be able to listen to God when He says we're going home, and believe that even if I don't know what it means or where it is or what it will be like.

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oh dang

2008-12-06T17:26:00.006-06:00

Here I post something I think my brother ought to appreciate, and it turns out he's already blogging! This is cool. He is more political than I am, but that's OK, because he is a pretty smart dude and more serious than I am and probably less likely to post, well, this.

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compounding

2008-12-06T10:12:00.002-06:00

One of the side effects of learning a foreign language pretty well (though maybe I'm flattering myself) is that you sort of lose perspective on how the language looks to the outside eye. A pretty basic feature of German is that more complex vocabulary tends to be formed through compounds of basic words. English, on the other hand, tends to use Latin-based loan words more often and string them together in phrases rather than single compound words.

I was watching a soccer game, for instance, where an ad was scrolling across one of the digital displays for "Arbeitsunfähigkeitsversicherung." It struck me that that's a really scary word if you don't speak German. Ten syllables, 31 letters. It means "disability insurance," and it's actually a bit more literal than its English equivalent - break it down, and it could be rendered as "inability-to-work-insurance," or even more literally, "work-unable-ness-insurance."

Not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that it's funny what you can get used to. Also, Kelly, when you come to visit, don't be intimidated by the big long words. Remember: they're just as scared of you as you are of them.

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making a list, checking it twice

2008-12-06T09:39:00.002-06:00

Today is Saint Nicholas Day. Not having at any point been a German child, I'm not really sure what it's like to celebrate, though it's the occasion of a few sales and celebrations here and there, and for the kids it centers around leaving one's (well-cleaned) shoes out on the doorstep for Nikolaus to fill with goodies. Or a twig, if you've been a little hellion.

My shoes were disappointingly empty this morning.

I spent the day celebrating by not talking to anybody or thinking about anything. It was nice.

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my brother should appreciate this

2008-12-05T04:27:00.000-06:00

while i have my being

2008-11-30T15:53:00.004-06:00

Praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD, O my soul!
I will praise the LORD as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the LORD his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

The LORD sets the prisoners free;
the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
the LORD loves the righteous.
The LORD watches over the sojourners;
he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The LORD will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, to all generations.
Praise the LORD!

It is Advent again. Berlin is decorated and full of Christmas markets, Glühwein, and all the signs of a season I think is celebrated rather more gracefully on this side of the Atlantic.

I don't really feel it yet, that expectancy, that weird Christmas feeling. I want it, I think, but it's not a feeling I'm very good at manufacturing. No doubt it will show up spontaneously now and then as the month progresses, but at the moment I'm just tired (and writing this unfortunately late at night) and uncertain about most things in my life. At Thanksgiving dinner, I had a hard time saying what I was thankful for in the past year. I didn't really know whether there was anything I'd received or experienced that I wasn't at least a little ambivalent about.

read the rest:

How hard that makes it to read the Psalmist talking about praising Yahweh as long as he lives, singing as long as he has being. It's humbling, maybe worrying, to look at myself and feel I'm so far from that attitude, so far from giving thanks and really saying heartfelt things to God. I turn pretty quickly to suspicion, wondering what sort of nonsense it was for a man to claim he could keep praising through everything life could throw at him. Was he trying to pep himself up? To put on airs and seem extra spiritual? To set an unreachable goal before himself, knowing it wasn't true of him but hoping he could keep striving for it?

I don't really know. I suppose it was something he just did, whether he felt like he was being authentic and worshipful or not, and that he didn't stop even when he felt like a fool or a hypocrite, because it kept being the right thing to do, maybe the only thing to do.

And he knew who this Yahweh was: the King par excellence, the Maker and Judge, the Undoer of wrongs. The highest praise the Bible gives to God is to recount the things He does for the miserable, the imprisoned, the blind, deaf, lame, mute, sick, lonely, oppressed, alienated people of His world. "The righteous" are among those miserable, the people who endure everything the world can throw at them and don't let go. They are truly blessed even when they don't look like it, even when they don't feel like it or really know it, not because of this wonderful moral quality in them, but because their trust, the place their hearts go when everything falls apart, is in the mighty hand and outstretched arm that made the very earth and sky and all that is in them.

So I am one of those "righteous," somehow, which is strange. I want to feel pious and humble and demur when the title seems to be demanding that I own it. But I can't, really, unless I want to somehow pretend I'm in no sense blind or a prisoner or oppressed or hungry or alien. I know I am weak, and I know the things I usually want to trust are weak too, which means that in the end I have to trust What I can't see or test the strength of and believe that He is what He says He is. That is hard, and it must have been yet harder so long ago when Yahweh's everlasting reign in Zion was something off in the future.

Advent is an exercise in grasping the feeling of being one of these foolish righteous who really believe their God can save them from all of this. It's looking back and seeing the signs pointing toward that coming fullness of time, the signs the people saw dimly at best, looking back and seeing the tangible and visible and audible fulfillment of all that waiting and expectation and drinking in the glory of living in an age when it has already come to pass, and sharing in the waiting, aching even more than the patriarchs and prophets knew how to, knowing the real consummation of everything is still yet to come.

What a mystery faith is.

alphabetization question for the truly anal-retentive

2008-11-25T06:45:00.002-06:00

When alphabetizing titles, should a title that starts with the contraction "I'm" be placed as "Im" or as "I am"?

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done

2008-11-20T14:37:00.002-06:00

It took me a long time, with many lapses, but I finally finished looking through the whole Jamie Livingston Photo of the Day archive tonight.

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linguisterious

2008-11-18T07:07:00.003-06:00

Man, English just doesn't make much sense at all. Seriously, how did we get to the point where we can't ask questions or negate things without throwing in a whole nother verb?

I like teaching a lot, but probably the worst thing about it for me is when I have to tell people, "Sorry, man, that's just how it is. You have to learn it and that's that."

But when you teach English, you have to do that a lot.

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mmm

2008-11-14T08:32:00.005-06:00

further adventures in english

2008-11-13T14:21:00.003-06:00

So Mildly Retarded Lars and I have continued to meet Thursdays (since the course I wanted to have that evening didn't really pan out), and today we went to his place, a group home not far from the church where he lives with about five or six other disabled adults in a setting where they practice life skills to enable them to (eventually) live independently.

I got to meet most of the residents, maybe all, and the caretakers. It's a nice place, sort of a dorm setup with single rooms. Lars introduced me to his best buddy Heiko, who is also learning-disabled but a bit higher-functioning, though he's wheelchair-bound in addition to his other issues.

They play in a band together with a couple of the caretakers. I got to hear a couple of songs.

I was impressed. Their rendition of Bryan Adams' classic "Summer of '69" is one I'll not soon forget.

So we talked quite a lot, mostly in German, of course, and it was a nice time - both of them are interested and happy to have me come over and work on some conversational English with them, and we're going to keep that up, it looks like. They are saddened by the prospect that I won't be here permanently, and both are curious about me and my church - Lars a bit more enthusiastic, Heiko a bit more guarded.

And there's a reason for that, apparently; Heiko was at some point in a hospital affiliated with a Protestant denomination where, he says, he was told (by professing believers!) that his disabilities were his own fault. It kills me that this is the sort of witness Christians can have. Neither of these guys has a particularly negative attitude toward faith in general, which is unusual enough here, and here somebody would actually tell one of them to his face something that's flatly contradicted by Jesus' own testimony. How dare they.

So here I am, the Church's next chance to say its piece. More stories to tuck away, more hopes that I can be light in darkness, that Heiko and Lars are the way they are so that the works of God might be displayed in them.

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seventy

2008-11-09T12:07:00.002-06:00

Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, which happened in 1938.

David's sermon today happened to focus on the Church as committed to the good of the city, particularly through reconciling Jew, Gentile, Asian, European, African, into one new humanity, which I don't think was intentional, but still cool. See Acts 11:19-30 and 13:1.

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jesus is a friend of mine

2008-11-08T15:08:00.002-06:00

So apparently this is already a bit of a meme, but I just came across it today...

It's invaded my brain and I love it.

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messyanism

2008-11-06T09:27:00.002-06:00

I've remarked elsewhere that the reaction of the world as a whole to Obama's election is kind of scarily messianic in flavor. I mean, he's an inexperienced senator who will be in power for no more than eight years, but people are speaking about him, without irony, as though he's come to right all the wrongs America's committed - and not just in the last eight years, either.

And it occurs to me that this affords a valuable insight into the character of the Christian message, because I don't know if I've ever been in an atmosphere of so much unabashed hope before. So as much as I tend to feel really, really cynical about it, it's sort of nice to have such a big real-life reference point for what Advent (less than a month away!) is meant to feel like, what people like Zechariah and Simeon and Elizabeth and Anna and the people who went out to see John the Baptist in the desert felt like when Jesus showed up.

The world is such a good story, even when you know it won't live up to the hopes people have for it.

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electioneering

2008-11-04T08:44:00.003-06:00

Lars just stopped by. He is a pretty big Obama fan, and I felt sheepish to admit, when he asked, that I didn't vote.

It's nice to have a political discussion at his level of sophistication, especially given that anything more considered would place rather excessive demands on my German. Lars has the feeling that a lot of people aren't very happy with Bush and think Obama would be better. He also likes the fact that Obama came here to Berlin and said some very nice things. I was able to agree.

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blergh

2008-11-03T03:34:00.002-06:00

Hell cannot possibly have any torment at its disposal to match the misery filling out a self-evaluation form works in me.

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auf wiedersehen, tempelhof

2008-10-31T04:18:00.003-05:00

The vote on this was held months ago, and now the end is near for Berlin's third airport, the closest one to the city center.

I can't honestly say this has huge emotional resonance for me like it does for a lot of Berliners - though not that many, as a pretty solid majority didn't vote to save it - but it's a bit of a sign of how things have changed and continue to change here. The famed Airlift (here called the Luftbrücke, literally "air bridge") is an early memory of quite a few older people here, and the attitude of Germans in general and of Berliners in particular toward America was shaped dramatically by that experience.

I listened to stories from one man in particular who rode in one of the DC-3s mentioned in the story on his way to America as a ten-year-old in 1948. That image of America - as benefactors, friendly and generous people butchering the German language and defying Soviet aggression against West Berlin - has been slow to fade. It's sad that we've lost so much good will here over the course of the Bush presidency. In a way, Tempelhof's downfall is emblematic of that cooling of relations, though it's not causally related. I wonder who will remember that national friendship a generation or two from now.

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dropping by

2008-10-29T04:45:00.003-05:00

I remember a lot of frustration over the 14 months of my support-raising before I came out here when I realized that I had no Missionary Stories to grab the interest of my hearers and readers, no tales of God's mighty deeds abroad among the heathen and all that.

Eventually you do start to collect those stories, particularly when He sticks you right there on a street corner in the field and makes you visible. Day in and day out, I sit in the entry area of our church, which has a big bright sign and posters in the great big plate-glass windows and interesting-looking pictures on the walls, and people drop in.

read the rest:

A Russian lady wondered if it would be possible to rent out our space for the exercise classes for seniors that she leads. A couple of folks wondered if we knew where a charity grocery service's offices were. Some people are curious about English. Some wonder who we are and what kind of weird church we are. Some remember when this place was a sketchy bar whose proprietor was murdered a decade ago, and how long it sat empty afterward, and they're impressed with the renovations.

And some people have more questions. Another Russian lady said she had never felt comfortable walking into a church with her questions about the basics of Christianity, but she worked up the courage this time. A young father and his little daughter came in because she felt a sudden compulsion to do so; he's an atheist, but somewhat favorably disposed to churches, and he's interested in having his daughter take part in children's programming.

And today - right now, as I write - there is a man who came in saying that he is contemplating suicide, and he's sitting in David's office. Judi and Alex and I prayed for a little while, while the kids here for Kids' Camp ate their snack, while the heating repairman poked around, while all this ministry chaos raged, and I suppose I am still writing this as a prayer that God will show Himself through David right now, that He will save another life, that He will bring this man into the place where he can be healed and know that there is Someone to live for, Someone Who would send His Son to love him and give Himself for him.

Just one little corner of one city of one small continent in this whole world - I try to picture the human experience here, and it's an incomprehensible swirl, a maddening blur of paths crossing and diverging and running parallel, burning passion and dark, cold loneliness, sparks of hope and glow of love, and everywhere need, pushing and pulling them all.

And here we are on one little corner of that little corner, and a lot of paths run by us, and a lot of them run into our home, and we get the stories.

away

2008-10-20T05:21:00.005-05:00

Off I go this afternoon to the Brandenburg countryside about an hour outside Berlin for a week of not being in Berlin and also being with the whole missionary team and just sort of eating and worshiping and praying and wandering around a nice lake and staring thoughtfully into the distance and probably convalescing a bit because I got sick over the weekend and not writing any more absurd run-on sentences for a week.

This will now be the second time I've attended, for the record. I'm taking my camera this time around.

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good things for looking at

2008-10-17T05:26:00.002-05:00

This fellow hasn't posted anything new in a while, but what's there is lovely.

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how to make a cloudy and despondent sort of morning seem bright

2008-10-17T05:07:00.002-05:00

Wake up to this lovely news. The fact that it's newsworthy primarily because it's a disappointment for a team with high hopes gives my joy a strong element of schadenfreude, but all's fair in love and college football, as they say.

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mr. rogersesque

2008-10-16T08:31:00.005-05:00

I never had a neighborhood before.

read the rest:

The first house I remember living in was in a little burby residential area in Fort Worth. We knew our next-door neighbors, and that was about it. Then we lived in an apartment complex in Atlanta, where we got to know some of the other kids, and we could walk to Target if we were so inclined, but that, again, was it.

Then onward to small-town West Virginia, which I suppose was the closest experience I've had. Our town itself was a has-been sort of place (I say this with all due respect, if any of you Ronceverte residents read this), with most of the business and entertainment options up the hill in the next town over. But that town had a small main drag, and I got to be a regular at the local coffee joint, the bakery (cheap day-old bread is a wonderful after-school snack), and just generally on the sidewalks of Washington St.

College isn't really a move closer, though it's a more pedestrian lifestyle (in the sense of, you know, being on foot). It's homogeneous, a great big pile of people like you and businesses catering to people like you.

So here I am. I work on the same street I live on. Across from my apartment building is a little bakery that is fattening me up with its greasy delicious breakfast pastries. Between there and work, I pass probably four or five businesses I've patronized, including a great little Vietnamese/Thai place that let us hang a flyer for English camp in their entrance area, a vaguely Swedish café, and an Indian restaurant across from work that makes as good a curry as I've found in this city. Half a block farther is a great Lebanese place for all your shawarma needs.

Granted, it's not necessarily all local and homegrown sort of businesses, and it's not this incredible, tight-knit community of people (as far as I know), but I see a lot of the same faces day in and day out, and I'm the guy you see when you wander in the door at that weird new church on the corner where that sketchy bar used to be, so it feels like I've got a place here too, that I'm a face that belongs on this street.

I like that.

downsides of working in a nice, newly renovated church with lots of smooth surfaces

2008-10-15T03:14:00.001-05:00

1. A sneeze sounds like a shotgun blast.

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figures

2008-10-11T17:36:00.003-05:00

The one TCU game that takes place early enough for me to follow the ESPN GameCast from here turns out to be a pathetic bore-fest.

At least we won.

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further adventures in self-medication through material acquisition

2008-10-11T12:03:00.004-05:00

So a buddy found a nice deal on iPod Shuffles a week or so back, and I thought, hey, why not.

It's no replacement for my fossilized main unit, but at least it's a portable music thingy that I own on which I can change the songs, which is more than I've had for about a year. I loaded it up with four Sigur Rós albums, giving me my first-ever opportunity to listen to that band in a portable capacity.

This has been a fascinating experience thus far. Imagine, if you will, listening to the segment of the following starting at about 7:00 while standing in the checkout line of a big soulless supermarket:

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anniversary

2008-10-11T03:02:00.002-05:00

This was one year ago today.

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elinor and marianne

2008-10-07T05:37:00.004-05:00

So the third of my recent fiction purchases was an acknowledged classic - Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility. It's a bit strange to read these sorts of books and then attempt to comment or reflect meaningfully; it seems hardly possible that there's anything to say about them that hasn't been said already, in a more informed way than I'm capable of simulating.

My non-movie exposure to Austen outside of this last read is limited to Pride & Prejudice. I suppose, by way of comparison, I'd call P&P the better romance of the two and S&S the better study of the tangles love and loss tie us in - the former is a better fantasy, the latter a better voice of sympathy to the lovelorn.

I suppose, for all its pedigree as a classic work of English literature, the great qualification of Austen's novel for enduring appeal is its power to evoke some variation of the reaction, "Oh, good - it's not just me."

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sidewalk gold

2008-10-06T08:57:00.002-05:00

I swear the trees hoard the long light of summer so that they can throw it all back into the October air when they realize how little time remains to them.

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oh man

2008-10-04T14:03:00.000-05:00

simulate my recent lifestyle in four easy steps

2008-10-04T08:58:00.003-05:00

1. Drink too much coffee.

2. Walk around gazing wistfully at the falling leaves and scowling.

3. Spend your semi-hard-earned cash compulsively on books because your mind has been too much in the same place these days.

4. Listen obsessively to The Decemberists, which you should be doing anyway, you fool.

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