Monday, April 21, 2008

the Sound of Weeping and Laughter

Ezra lived in exile. Ezra was a son of the defeated, humiliated Hebrew nation. He lived under the control of a pagan emperor who inherited the territory of Judah when it was a smoldering, ruined wasteland. The destruction that Nebuchadnezzar had brought down on that tiny nation before Ezra's birth was so very complete that today it has been called the Babylonian gap; a blank, uninhabited void in the history of the Jews, a desolate empty parenthesis when nobody lived there, and nobody settled there. The houses were burned, the gardens and farms were razed, the walls were thrown down, the palaces were obliterated and the temple was annihilated.

Worship - the link that was not so much missing as torn away from them. They could, of course, express themselves to God anywhere, and they strove to do so; yet at the same time, they could not. At least, not right away. Once the survivors and the exiles had straggled into the precincts of Babylon and settled down, they were asked for music. Their conquerors demanded a song. Can't these Jews, so famous for their singing, manage to whip up one quaint old hymn of theirs to perform for us? But the Jews knew, as all oppressed people know, that tragedy can overwhelm the impulse to sing. They'd had the music torn out of their souls. The symbol of their close relationship with God, the temple, was destroyed. While they lived through that impoverished waiting time, they learned what it is they had undervalued for too long. Life has a way of taking the things you hold too lightly, and it is still true that you don't really know what you have until you lose it.

So when they were permitted to return, naturally many of their children and grandchildren jumped at the chance. Imagine, finding that corner of the old city which grandfather told us about so many times when we were growing up! We'll build a fine home there; we'll be the first to return, we will be settlers in the land God promised to Abraham! It must have felt like the conquest of Canaan all over again. They left in groups and in caravans, disregarding the safety of the pagan empire for the adventure of re-taking their promised land.

Ezra made it there with them. He followed along at some point, confronting them with the failures of their forefathers and the primacy of worship. While he was there, under his constant encouragement, plans were made for rebuilding the heart of their nation and their religion: the temple.

A crowd was there the day they dedicated the ground anew to the Lord. Many of them had never been to Judah. They had been born as subjects. But there were others in the crowd who had spent their childhood in the days before the fall of Jerusalem. Old now, they were perhaps the few hardy elders who could not countenance one more day apart from the land of promise. They had been torn away, and the tear had never fully healed for them. So they took the perilous, unlikely gamble of travelling along with the youth, the young families, the adventurers and the discontent. And they were all together when the outline of the temple foundation was identified, and the rubble and grass and the brush were all cleared away. They reinforced the stones and inspected the joints and corners, perhaps even replacing beams which would form portions of the walls. And when the foundation was ready to hold the walls, when construction was about to begin, they came together to celebrate.

They were celebrating a new beginning, of course. They were wiping away the memory of God's judgment by building again on the basis of his promise. The very project was a living picture of grace (already finished in their imagination).

Here I see an attitude I recognize, for there are so many young people coming into the kingdom in this day and age. As they come, many of them are gravitating towards the newest expressions of worship, the most recent books, the most popular speakers - we Americans believe in the future! We look forward, not back! Perhaps there is something of the ruined, ineffective exile period in our recent Christian heritage. Didn't uncle Tozer say that the church in America was in a modern Babylonian captivity? We haven't lost our promise or our relationship with God, he observed, but we have surrendered the power of our independent subservience to the King of the Universe. We are waiting for a deliverance from apathy, fear and self-interest, he said. Many young people left the church because of what they witnessed in the adults they knew who professed Christ. I have spoken with teenagers who want to believe in God, but simply don't believe most of the Christians they've met! As many of those youth come back, they want to build something new for God. They want to create an edifice which faces the future - a new century and a new hope.

But we have to realize that the foundation is already there, and has been there for centuries. You can't build on nothing. The Jews who returned could build because they were not the first; the young believers of today are not the first either. I see ages and ages of holy men and women whose examples must continue to illuminate and model true faith down through the centuries. They have crafted our creeds and fueled our evangelistic endeavors. Their stories are more nourishing than a stadium full of newspapers and magazines filled with current events. Their lives and their sacrifices will (if we let them) enrich the very soil on which we build our little hamlets for God's glory. But those saints are gone, their lives and stories are finished.

In that great celebration, Ezra tells us that the sound of rejoicing rose up over the crowd because of the newcomers who saw only the future. Mingled with it, and indistinguishable from it, was the sound of weeping as the elders remembered the former glory. Perhaps no other verse so perfectly embodies the current state of the church in America, for we see every reason to hope as we go through transitions and metamorphoses - yet we have every reason to weep for the effectiveness we abandoned during a crucial and dark period in our nation's history. We can remember the giants who stood out from the crowd once upon a time, who are now merely history; we can remember the institutions they built out of nothing but faith and sweat; we can still read the books with which they shook the world; we can remember the songs that have lasted for centuries; the devotions thoughts they were considerate enough to record for our benefit; the impetus given to evangelism and the force of their work for the Lord...

Some of us think that the world has yet to see, in this generation, anything equal to the greatest saints who went before us. And maybe we can be forgiven for the tears we shed when we look at the potential of the present, and remember the glory that used to be. It could be that God will raise up something even more glorious, but for the moment the sound of laughter mingles with the sound of weeping, and nobody can tell the two apart, for both of them are equally true.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

The Naked Prophet

I know why Isaiah preached naked. In Isaiah chapter 20 it says that God told him to take off his clothes and preach to the people – which is a little odd. After all, public nudity is (mostly) illegal, and for good reasons. The Bible associates it with shame and humiliation. It is not a spectator sport or a healthy pastime. So why would the greatest prophet of the Old Testament preach that way? If I were to do that on a Sunday morning, I’d be presumed insane and replaced by a pastor who was less inclined to exhibitionism. So why Isaiah?

I think I know. The preacher’s lot is a hard one, and it gets harder all the time. Imagine with me now… it falls to you to find ways to tell people what God’s word means and what God is saying to your generation. A very few of the people you know actually want to hear it. A few others want to hear it, but they believe you have gotten it wrong and they want to tweak things until they are comfortable. A small number of people actually hate what you are trying to do; they regard the precious and magnificent promises which are your breath and blood as nothing more than indulgent, mythological self-delusion, effectively undermined by every branch of science and every intellectual since at least 1703. These folks are actually attacking your efforts, drawing people away from the glory that God has shown you.

But by far the largest segment of people you deal with simply don’t care; and this is the cruelest reality of all. What if you were a doctor (you wonder) and victims of malaria didn’t care about the medication you offered them to prevent the disease? What if you could plant in some young heart a love for the greatest classical music ever written, but they are simply uninterested? To be hated is one thing; to strongly disagree is another; but to be disregarded – to be simply ignored as if the Creator and His message are so terribly dull – this cuts deep. Too deeply, sometimes.

One of the most successful preachers of all times was Charles Spurgeon. In the midst of a ministry which spanned decades and drew thousands of listeners, he once said: “In this world, is it not a weary business to be a minister of Christ today? If I might have my choice I would sooner follow any avocation, so far as the comfort of it is concerned, than this of ministering to the sons of men, for we beat the air. This deaf generation will not hear us. What is this perverse generation the better for years and years of preaching?… The world is not worth preaching to.”

No wonder Isaiah was willing to strip, if only it would cause people to SIT UP AND TAKE NOTICE! How far will I go to get people’s attention, to get them to care? Well, not as far as Isaiah (for now, at least… but I’ve only been at it for five years.) But I know why Isaiah was willing to do what God asked. The message is everything. The messenger is nothing. He threw his pride and dignity aside and walked among the laughing, pointing crowds shouting his warning upon the winds, his voice carried far away. Did they hear his cry?

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

TaxTime

In honor of Uncle Sam and his indecipherable tax code, we offer this gem from Robert Frost:



Never Ask of Money spent
Where the spender thinks it went
Mortal man was never meant
To remember or Invent
What he did with every cent


Thank You.