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polyvalent presence: John 12

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on December 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Perhaps we read bare privilege a little too easily into Jesus words. Perhaps, in our quest for honor, we lose the breadth of his presence.

If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. (John 12:26 ESV)

The context John gives to this word is a somber one.

Indeed the words just previous speak of that death which is necessary in the Father’s strange design.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:24–25 ESV)

No blithe guarantees there.

Similarly the words that follow. Jesus finds his own next steps profoundly unsettling, even worthy of causing a total rethink.

Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. (John 12:27 ESV)

How then should we understand Jesus’ claim in verse 26 that ‘where I am, there will my servant be also’.

Abstracted from its context, it reads like a facile promise that the follower of Jesus will not become separated from his leader. There is, almost certainly, something of that in the statement.

But the follower of Jesus is not here addressed so much as an apprentice as he is engaged as a servant. In fact, the would-be servant of Jesus is rather warned of an obligation: he must go where Jesus goes. When we take the measure of the context, we catch more than a whiff of hard duty here. Indeed, Jesus next steps will take him precisely into the teeth of awful suffering, one from which he comes close to shrinking as he contemplates the horror of it.

It seems that Jesus’ word to his would-be servant here is at least principally a declaration of solidarity in unjust suffering as it is a prediction of Jesus’ own ubiquity in the life of the believer.

Yet the paradox of redemptive logic would have us choose not to reject the one in the recognition of the other.

For better or worse, we might conclude, we will be with Jesus and he with us.

Precisely here lies our plight, our predicament, our death, our glory.

 

 

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Must ‘yes’ also mean ‘no’?: Paul R. House, BONHOEFFER’S SEMINARY VISION: A CASE FOR COSTLY DISCIPLESHIP AND LIFE TOGETHER

Posted in missio dei, reseña on December 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »

418wR785imLPaul House’s passionately written exploration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s practice and aspirations for the training of pastors under the gathering cloud of Nazi terror makes for refreshing reading in this era of technology-will-solve-all-our-(seminary)-problems pablum.

House finds in the German martyr’s writings and his experience—the latter as reported by Bonhoeffer’s colleagues and students—a model for the same kind of intensive, life-on-life training of Christian pastors today. Without doubt, Bonhoeffer modeled all this and more. House has done us the service of explaining just how.

I come to this book as a lifelong seminarian who has known from within various roles the joy, enrichment, and occasional terror that the seminary is wont to offer up: as student, professor, dean, and president. So  I cannot but thrill to the promise that resides in such life together, all of which House is committed to teasing out of Bonhoeffer’s experience and laying before us.

Nevertheless, it appears to this appreciative reader that the author has chosen not to address a fundamental question about access.

Let me shape my concern as a somewhat cumbersome question: If I am fulfilling my vocation as a seminary educator and mentor to emerging pastors in, say, Mexico City, I am likely to have the privilege of nourishing a small number of lives into what one hopes will be greater rather than diminished capacity as servant leaders, even as shepherds of Christ’s people. For the sake of the argument, but also because I have yet to be convinced otherwise, I will agree with House that the very best preparation of pastoral leaders occurs in this kind of intensive, daily, full-contact, and dynamic environment.

Yet spread across this city of some 25 million souls are thousands of pastors, largely without the kinds of training to which I can lean my shoulder in my fictitious seminary context. These are bivocational pastors, holding down day jobs, tending their God-given sheep, most with some level of internet access and some limited margin in their saturated lives for occasional study-centered gatherings.

Farther afield in the Mexican state to which the capital and metropolis belong lie many thousands more, most of them faithful servants with limited or nonexistent coaching and no opportunity to reflect in the company of peers and a mentor upon Scripture, theology, their own context, and the Great Tradition of Christian presence and practice.

One wonders whether Bonhoeffer, were he availed of the tools we have today, would have insisted that only life-on-life training is valid because other forms of pastoral preparation do not fully measure up to what can be offered in such an intensive context. That is, does the existence of a ‘gold standard’ eliminate the urgency of thinking about ‘silver’ and ‘bronze’ options merely because they do not sparkle like gold? Must we leave unserved those who cannot have what we consider best?

We cannot know whether the adventurous Bonhoeffer would have chosen not to serve a wider constituency of the kind I am imagining in these lines. House, it seems to me, comes perilously close to doing so.

Yet this admittedly dubious stance I have sketched for myself does not eliminate my sincere appreciation for the counter-cultural defense of a seminary that is shaped by something other than the fickle, if hurricane-strength, winds that blow against the seminary today. She makes—this venerable, limping institution of ours—a decidedly soft target. I, for one, welcome all credible defenders.

Paul House has (re-)captured in words some of the magic that happens within her walls—I use the description advisedly and in deference to House’s preferred residential model—when a learning community like Bonhoeffer’s Finkenwalde, House’s Beeson Divinity School, or any one of a thousand lean-and-mean seminaries across the globe gets it right. House finds Bonhoeffer worthy of study, in part because even in the least promising conditions he ‘believed the German church’s future rested in the quality and commitments of its pastors’. House abbreviates Bonhoeffer’s vision for the seminary as ‘a community of faith’ that ‘live(s) for Christ and for one another’, ‘offer(s) encouragement to former students who have entered the sometimes-harsh world of church ministry’, and calls without apology upon the courage of ‘teacher-pastors in seminary education’ to engage their task with ‘sacrificial’ service, ‘given the inherently personal, incarnational, and visible nature of ministerial preparation’.

To this vision—Bonhoeffer’s and House’s—this reader can only offer his ‘Amen!’ and ‘Hear, hear!’, even as he hopes that the eminent blessing that adheres in our most privileged forms does not dull our energy for widening the tent pegs to shelter others who will for reasons missional and mundane never tarry for long in the holy city itself.

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silent word, quiet life: Isaiah 8

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 4, 2017| Leave a Comment »

One of the many paradoxes that the book called Isaiah places before us lies almost hidden in the binary choice that the prophet declares in the book’s eight chapter.

And when they say to you, ‘Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,’ should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living? To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn. (Isaiah 8:19–20 ESV)

It might seem, even to a reader who is committed to the view of things that the biblical text advances, that the choice here is that of living, breathing, even activist religion over against a reliable deposit. That is, between a religiosity that is brewing with live mischief although patently opposed to YHWH’s way over against an orthodox faith that is solid, if a little inert.

It might seem to others, perhaps less inclined to look with favor on ‘what the Bible teaches’, that the most advantageous choice is not exactly an easy one to discern.

Yet the prophet’s language here, upon slow reading and closer inspection, shows that the field of play is not quite so ambiguous. The choice, when things are seen as they are, is not a difficult one to decide.

Here is paradox, indeed, but not much ambiguity.

In fact, the prophet fills the left column of his legal pad with all things deathly, the right with all things alive.

The chirping and muttering of the necromancers, the presumed rumination of the mediums, are for all their apparent vocal dexterity nothing more than death dressed up in the ‘got-your-attention-didn’t-I’ robes of death itself. Isaiah considers the consultation of them a sit-down visit with darkness and decay. People who engage in such doomed conversation ‘have no dawn’.

On the other side of the page, the ‘life’ column fills up with ‘God’, with ‘the living’ themselves, and then—this is where we might stray off course when tracking the prophet’s logic—with ‘the law and the testimony’ and with ‘this word’.

Let’s suppose for the moment that ‘the law and the testimony’ and ‘this word’ roughly abbreviate the accumulated declarations of the prophet in YHWH’s name. More than this is likely insinuated, but we can do without that complication for now.

The prophet aligns these written-down words not with stultifying tradition or a ‘dead letter’, but rather with a God who is very much alive and—the detail is critical—aligned with and active among ‘the living’ who surround the prophet and who are in this terrifying moment scared a little witless.

In the prophet’s view, YHWH has spoken—through him and others—an accumulated deposit of reality that can be declared in street or temple but in awful moments of imminent doom like this one can be written down, consulted, whispered aloud, and treasured.

Far from being inert, we are to understand this ‘law (better, ‘instruction’) and testimony’ as life-containing and life-giving. If other sources of supposed counsel require the dead and lead only to death, this ‘instruction and testimony’ hints at new growth, at fresh eruptions of life, at possibilities still unknown. Though quiet and even silent in this moment, this little reservoir of truth holds the promise of shouting, of dance, of song when the night has faltered and the dawn has come.

If this is how things really are, then why should a people consult the dead on behalf of the living?

Just so.

 

 

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daddies fret, mommies worry: Isaiah 54

Posted in Uncategorized on November 25, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Our parental angst rises from an inexhaustible well.

We can worry about anything that touches upon our children’s future, and we probably will. We are capable of outlasting any promising fact and every reassuring word.

Yet such fear for our children’s shalom is in pious circles too easily dismissed. Our longing for an ongoing legacy—to put things in the most self-interested way—has itself a long pedigree. And our maternal and paternal desire that children and grandchildren might live long and well is a creational impulse that encourages us against considerable odds to take the long view when après moi le déluge might have seemed the handier parental slogan.

It is telling that the Isaianic redemption song includes a stanza or two for the little ones.

O afflicted one, storm-tossed and not comforted, behold, I will set your stones in antimony, and lay your foundations with sapphires. I will make your pinnacles of agate, your gates of carbuncles, and all your wall of precious stones. All your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children. In righteousness you shall be established; you shall be far from oppression, for you shall not fear; and from terror, for it shall not come near you. (Isaiah 54:11–14 ESV)

Because the prevailing context depicts the construction or re-construction of an enduring city, we should probably read the dual sentence about children as referring both to children as young ones and as offspring now ‘all growed up’.

The doubts of the ‘Afflicted One, Storm-Tossed and Not Comforted’ do not stand alone.

The forlorn cry of the eunuch, that man who is definitionally incapable of both family and legacy, is heard and requited just two chapters away:

Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’; and let not the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree.’ For thus says the Lord: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’ (Isaiah 56:3–5 ESV)

To say nothing of the brute fact that the very prophetic oracle that lies before us is initiated by the worst fears of a woman who regards herself as childless:

‘Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married,’ says the Lord. ‘Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities.’ (Isaiah 54:1–3 ESV)

Indeed, it is impossible for the biblical story of redemption to speak singularly for longer than a paragraph or two. Family, clan, tribe, and nation eventually interrupt such relative singularity and resume their central place in the narrative. Only the most stubbornly individualistic reader can rattle on for too long about the solitary man or woman in his or her crisis of faith before finding himself crowded by jostling next of kin.

Some of these are children: those who already cling to at a mother’s breast, those jostling the healthy old folks in restored Jerusalem’s streets, those imagined by a future that suddenly looks like more than smoke and ashes and family trees cut short.

The Isaiah text before us reassures that the wellbeing of the children will grow from the inside out.

All your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children. (Isaiah 54:13 ESV)

All your children will be taught by YHWH, itself an exceedingly broad and unmediated picture of formation and instruction, assures us that truth and reality will have become internalized and therefore organic in the lives of those who may still bear even our name. Perhaps in consequence, their shalom shall root itself deeply and extend to the margins of a remade city, and beyond.

We daddies and mommies find such promise ludicrously unreal. Redemption always looks that way from a distance. Only close up, when YHWH of Wonders has once more shown the meaning of his name, does clarity come clear. Then praise displaces worry, and nearly everything else.

 

 

 

 

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long and strong (enough): Bag For Less PREMUIM QUALITY Black Garment Travel And Storage Breathable Bag 26” x 55 x 5” With Zipper & Metal Eyehole And Carry Handles For Folding For Suits, Tuxedos, Dresses, Coats & More

Posted in Uncategorized on November 24, 2017| Leave a Comment »

81BoDnpucYL._SY679_After three or four road trips with this very long garment bag, I’m a fan.

My routine with it has not included turning it over to airline baggage handlers. Under these less than rigorous back-seat-of-the-car conditions, I find that the bag exceeds expectations. I can carry significant numbers of shirts and suits, the first choke-point being how many of the protruding hanger-tops I can comfortably handle as I make my way from car to hotel room.

In terms of quality of build and fit-and-finish, the bag represents well-constructed value at a low price point. I estimate it will last me several years for the kind of use I’m describing.

The bag is significantly longer than the average suit, which means it may accommodate dresses or a user who prefers to hang trousers ‘the long way’ rather than bent over a hanger.

Two nice-sized handles at either either hand mean I can bend the bag double, hold both end-handles plus the protruding hanger-heads in one hand, and walk the last ten yards (or one hundred …) to check-in while pulling a suitcase with the other.

Nicely done.

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all the pros and cons of a compilation: Dave Barry, Dave Barry is Not Taking This Sitting Down

Posted in reseña on October 5, 2017| Leave a Comment »

51M8EG+gmgLIf you like Dave Barry’s brand of juvenile humor (as I do), you’ll find this a handy compilation of some of the man’s now quite dated columns.

The reader should self-select. Dave Barry Fans, pick up and read. It’s the same-old same-old, which in this case can be a very *good* thing.

Readers who wish to take their first whack at the Miami-based humor columnist’s work might start with a more recent title.

Still, don’t overthink this. Barry’s guy humor never goes out of style. Just enjoy.

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we had no idea: Proverbs 24

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on September 30, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Biblical wisdom probes inconveniently into our multi-tiered strategies for bailing out.

If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength being small; if you hold back from rescuing those taken away to death, those who go staggering to the slaughter; if you say, “Look, we did not know this”— does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it? And will he not repay all according to their deeds? (Proverbs 24:10–12 NRSV)

Awash in a sea of refugees, newly awake to working-class seething of long standing beyond our earshot, bombarded by raw evidence that racial peace is not the settled shalom we had imagined, it is nice from time to time simply to look away.

The biblical witness follows us to our corners, asking nagging questions.

The wise are toned for the day of adversity, it insists. It is when their memorable work gets done.

Neither does a probing Watcher accept our pleas of ignorance. He discards the defense that we were busy elsewhere.

Where were you when … ? What did you do in that hour … ?

We might have saved some who were staggering to the slaughter.

Oh, here they are again. Through my window, just across the way.

 

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gritty heroism from an unsung corner: Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee, AND IF I PERISH: FRONTLINE U.S. ARMY NURSES IN WORLD WAR II

Posted in fortus in arduis, reseña on September 25, 2017| Leave a Comment »

51j-zWJ4EUL._SS300_Evelyn Monahan’s and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee’s And if I Perish is an exceptional—I am tempted to say ‘must-read’—book for two reasons.

First, the story of U.S. Army nurses in World War II’s European theatre is largely an untold tale. Who knew that these women, for whose work almost no forethought paved the way, played such a critical role in the Allied forces’ campaigns in North Africa and Europe? Once told, the story seems both inevitable and obvious. Yet it is alarming how much one can read about and ponder World War II history without ever giving a thought to the nurses who saved so many lives and provided final comfort to those whose bodies could not be repaired.

Second, the story is told in exceptional style. The authors weave in military strategy in unexpected volume, which provides a welcome context for the self-sacrificing labor of this nearly all-volunteer cadre of frontline nurses. One of the book’s virtues is that it is not a ‘soft’ history over against the ‘hard’ history of soldiers and generals. The result is compelling history and a very fine read.

I purchased and read this book as a small means of honoring the legacy of a nurse from my Pennsylvania hometown who died on the Anzio Beachhead. The poignantly tragic way in which Carrie Sheetz and too many others perished is told movingly in these pages.

Others lived, who perhaps reluctantly and nearly always self-effacingly relieved themselves of the burden they carried in late-in-life interviews with the authors.

The Greatest Generation was comprised of both genders. We have grown to know and honor the stories of the generation’s soldiering men. We are only now learning the deep debt we owe to our mothers and grandmothers. Daughters and sisters belonging to that same generation, they are no less great for the shadow in which they labored, sacrificed, died, and healed.

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back in the day: Elizabeth George Speare, THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND

Posted in Americana, reseña on September 25, 2017| Leave a Comment »

51-77jM2bAL._SS300_Elizabeth George Speare’s fine novel of a Barbados-born teenager who lands in chilly New England—a bit frosty in more ways than one—makes for fine young adult reading. It was also a treat for this comparative geezer, who will soon live near Wethersfield, Connecticut, the principal location in which this novel’s drama plays out.

I would recommend this novel to any young reader. It packs in enough layers of real life without the added burden of tedious ideological pleading.

Even as it entertains, the book provides a helpful narrative introduction to America’s pre-Revolutionary life in the northeast corner of these colonies and even to some of our once-upon-a-time and enduring political dynamics. Instruction like this goes down sweetly.

 

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teaching Phil: Ephesians 4

Posted in denkschrift on September 25, 2017| Leave a Comment »

There is one in every class.

In my experience, this student is almost always a man, a slightly needy eagerness written across his face from the first minute. His name might be Carlos. Or Abdel. Or Phil.

He talks a lot. Too much, to be honest.

His hand is darting upwards in the middle of too many of my sentences as I try to craft the class, to shepherd a cohort of minds in the same conceptual direction, to establish an environment in which contributions from all parties are welcomed, even expected.

Nervous looks become meaningful glances as Carlos, or Abdel, or Phil speaks up for a third time and a fourth. Then we lose count.

There is a strong argument, advanced most firmly by this student’s fellow students, for shutting him down in the interest of the entire class. The learning experience of all, after all, outweighs the needs of the one to be heard, even to curry favor from the prof.

They have a point. I feel it deeply as Carlos, Abdel, or Phil unconsciously steers the class towards being his own session of self-esteem therapy.

Still, I choose gentle persuasion rather than pulling rank, no matter how just and community-minded the latter approach might sound.

Let me explain.

Carlos makes up his comment as he goes along, not sure at the beginning what he intends to say. Abdel is regularly hindered by a poor upbringing, sometimes involving an absent or belittling father. Phil is a tortured soul, needing someone—it’s even better if a captive audience is listening in—to tell him that he’s doing well, that he’s insightful, that he’s just asked a great question.

But here’s the thing: These guys and their future are not defined by who they are today, in my classroom. In our classroom. They are on their way to something else.

Sometimes it’s a remarkable good place. Even a fruitful place, from which we will be hard pressed to recall the immaturity that is awkwardly evident in my classroom—in our classroom—today.

I’m betting on that future, or at least on allowing it a space to take shape.

This means I’ll pay the political cost in our little class of directing Carlos gently towards an appropriate participation rather than shutting him down, even at the cost of optimal classroom dynamics.

It’s a moment, as I see it, for professorial humility. If that’s a thing.

I take some courage from the apostle Paul’s instructions to the Christian community at Ephesus, which—we might wager—had its own awkward members.

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Ephesians 4:1–3 ESV)

I don’t mean to trump all push-back against my classroom logic by quoting Scripture. I just think the shoe fits.

Because, over the decades of teaching and learning—the walls of which are spattered with some spectacularly boring failures and a small, bread-crumbed trail of minor successes—I’ve watched a knot of former students to which Carlos, Abdel, and Phil belong grow into life-long friends, thoughtful writers, and respected leaders.

Who knew?

So I discipline myself, or try to do so, to deal gently with these needy men who could take my best-laid classroom plans with them into a roadside ditch. As best as this sometimes self-absorbed old professor can, I bear with them in love. I see them as they might become, rather than as they quite painfully are.

I risk the class. Indeed, I place their fellow students’ experience at some degree of calculated risk, on that hunch that it may just be worth it.

Someday, Abdel may be in my church’s pulpit, week on week shaping the heart and mind of a community whose weal and woe are my business. I may be devouring every incisive word that Carlos writes. Pastor Phil may stand at my hospital bedside, a steadying presence as my weakening pulse tells family and friends that goodbyes are imminent.

No one will remember, then, their unpromising start.

You never know.

 

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