Uncle Roy and the Prodigal Nephew

My parents took a trip to the Ozarks when I was a boy and they left me with my aunt and uncle for a week. Aunt Jody was and continues to be a delightful southern belle. Her only discredit in my mind at the time was that she was married to a scary, mysterious man with a penchant for rules and ridicule. This did not mesh well with my default settings. I thought he must have won her in some kind of shady speakeasy poker game. A usually rambunctious if not obnoxious boy, I was often the recipient of Uncle Roy’s displeasure at family gatherings. Luckily, I was also often able to avoid him due to the sheer massiveness of our family.

Now I was going to live under his roof for a week with not a room in the house outside his jurisdiction. Fortunately, this was during the school year and in good weather, so I spent the majority of my time out from under the Shadow. The only catch was that my weekly behavior report would be coming back to him this week. I shuddered at the thought of his calling me to account for the offenses which were to be inevitably listed. However, at the end of this particular week, I had been a saint. My teachers were baffled. I brought my report home to Aunt Jody, whose pleasure was palpable. But while her approval was pleasant, it had not been the motivation behind my perfect performance. My motivation had been to circumvent a conversation with Uncle Roy.

Pastor Timothy Keller gives a definition of sin that seems to hit closer to the truth than the traditional “breaking God’s rules.” Instead he points to Jesus’ story about the prodigal sons, one of whom ran away from the father’s love by breaking his rules while the other ran away from the father’s love by keeping all the rules. Both sons were guilty of avoiding true relationship with the father, though their hearts’ intentions were manifested in polar opposite ways. Thus Keller’s definition of sin is simply, “running away from God.”

I lived under Uncle Roy’s roof and I obeyed his rules, but I did not behave as one of his sons. I instead did everything I could to avoid any kind of relationship with him. I wonder how many of us live under God’s roof, obeying His rules while clinging to orphan identities, afraid or unwilling to let Him know us warts and all. For what it’s worth, I discovered years later that I had been wrong about Uncle Roy. Have we been wrong about God, too?

Reruns and Encores

On Saturday mornings when we were children, my sister and I would wake up early and run to the living room where we would consult the oracle TV Guide as to what viewing glories awaited us. Occasionally, we would be disappointed by that dreaded symbol next to one of our favorite programs: the letter "r." You may be familiar with the MPAA rating, but I assure you the TV Guide "r" was much, much, worse. It meant the this episode was a rerun, and, being connoisseurs of cartoons, we would inevitably have already seen it. A toddler's tragedy.

This week, as we partake in communion at Christ Church, I can't help thinking that many of our congregants will open the bulletin and view the liturgy with the same underwhelmed spirit as those forced into sitting through a re-run. "Again? I feel like we just did this." Even if we concede that the sacrament and liturgy are are deep and powerful (which I assure you they are), one might be understandably wary of falling into a repetitive rut by doing something too frequently. After all, we wouldn't want to simply go through the motions and risk not getting anything out of it.

The problem with the rerun mentality is that it puts us on the couch when we belong on the stage. We are the players in this reenactment of the pinnacle of God's love for us. Of course the actors know the lines and can recite them from heart; perhaps they occasionally become so familiar they lose meaning in the speaker's ears. But memorization is only the beginning. The actor's ultimate work is the pleasure of the audience, (of which we are not primarily a part).

God is the Writer and Director of a masterpiece; the Author and Perfecter of our faith, and He loves to see His actors celebrate His passion with fervor of their own. As I think back to my time in the theatre, I remember with clarity the cast's desire to please our director, a man who watched the same cast perform the same show night after night after night. He delighted in our passionate effort and we in His pleasure. How much more so when the script itself recounts the very foundation of our own hope and future? This week, let's try to think of communion less as a television rerun and more as our encore performance of the greatest masterpiece ever created.

His Kingdom; My Castle

It just occurred to me that it never occurred to me to ask God where He wanted me to live. Last year, my wife and I found out we were pregnant, and so we decided it was time to grow up, move out of the 3rd floor apartment, and buy a house in a neighborhood closer to work. We knew that buying a house is one of the biggest and safest investments one can make, and so we did what came naturally: we looked for the best house in the safest neighborhood we could afford. It was practical, it was normal, and it was a reflection of our culture's habit of ignoring God's will in our decision-making processes.

Why is it a given that whenever we decide for whatever reason to relocate, that we immediately look for the "best" we can afford? Unlike our choice in automobiles or appliances, our choice of residency is not a private affair; it has much deeper implications than one's own preferences. Where you decide to live is not just your retreat and shelter; it is also a choice about the base of operations for our ministry to the world.

I have repented this comfort-centered attitude, but even if I wanted to reconsider now, we will not be in a position to relocate again for a long while. I'll never know if God wanted us somewhere else and we chose comfort instead. I'll never know if God would have used our family to be a light to desperate people whom we will now never meet. The flip side is, I'll never know if our neighborhood isn't exactly where God would have called us if we had surrendered our will and asked Him. He doesn't give us that insight. Perhaps he would have called us into a less comfortable community, but as my friend Michelle says, "Everybody's neighbors need Jesus; ours just happen to be poorer than yours."

The fact of redemption in a believer's life leaves no room for regret. God does not desire that I dwell in the guilt of what I could have done differently until I can be my own savior by fixing my own mistakes. Instead, He simply wants me to recognize my need for Him and my place in His kingdom, surrendering each following step to His will and for His glory.

A Theory of Atonement (Or so it seems to me...)

I've been trying to make sense of the atonement in my own mind for many years, wrestling with two very difficult intellectual hurdles, both of which I believe I am on the way to overcoming. As far as theology is concerned, I am only a moderately educated layman. With that in mind, I submit to you some ideas I've been working on which are now, I believe, developed to the point of peer review. If I have wandered into heterodoxy, please rebuke me kindly.

The problems are these:

1.) How can substitution be truly just? I've heard many times the story of the wise judge whose own son's case is brought before his bench. The judge rules his son guilty and then takes off the robe to pay the penalty on the behalf of the guilty. Fine. But payment with a federal reserve note and payment with blood are hardly comparable. The former can transfer hands easily and the latter can not. It does not appear fair that a guilty life can be replaced with an innocent one. If one's reply is that it's grace, then why require payment at all?

2.) How is one death satisfactory payment for many errors? Even in cases when a serial killer is put to death, justice is not completely served. It's only as close as we can get unless the condemned is a cat who has killed less than ten people.

The responses are these:

1.) My response to the first problem comes from the idea of corporate culpability. Many Old Testament examples come to mind of individual sins meriting corporate condemnation. God seems to view people in perhaps less of an individual sense than the average Westerner does. It seems to me that if one man's sin can be in some ways another man's condemnation, then the reverse must be true. Christ can fairly pay for a man's sin if He, as a member of mankind, is victim to its consequences. Thus, corporate culpability makes subsititutionary atonement logical. Or so it seems to me.

2.) My response to the second problem comes from the idea of infinite personhood. One finite person dies a finite death. But one infinite person would die an infinite death. An infinite death could theoretically be a more than sufficient replacement for any possible number of capital offenses. Thus, infinite personhood makes a single act of atonement satisfactory. Or so it seems to me.

I foresee some objections, but I'll let someone else bring them up instead of battling straw men of my own creation...

An Excersise in Situational Ethics

Prompted by my annoyingly intelligent friend Jon Vowell's prodding regarding my thought in a previous post, I have a few questions.

1.) Is it better:

• a.) that a man thoughtfully holds a door open for a senior citizen out of compassion because he sees that the elder is disabled, or

• b.) that a man thoughtlessly holds a door open for the same senior citizen because he has trained within himself a general respect for his elders?

2.) If one is better than the other, is the lesser wrong? (If you say no, I win)

3.) If yes, is it possible to live within what is popularly called God's "perfect will?" (If you say yes, I seriously question your grasp on reality.)

4.) If no, why do we even talk about it?

Loathing No Country

Here, I will give a poor attempt at explaining my distaste for the Coen Brothers' highly acclaimed film, "No Country for Old Men."

Several years ago, I had a conversation with my then-roommate about the movie he had just made me watch, entitled "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." He asked me what I thought, and I told him point blank and unequivocally, "I hated it." He then kindly attempted to correct my obvious ignorance, because clearly I had not understood the film. He explained to me that it was an uncanny reflection of the downward spiral of licentiousness. He assured me that this was a very accurate representation of how each of these drugs alters a man's consciousness. I took his word for it.

I'm sure that the same kind of thing could be said for "No Country." A very compelling and well-crafted account of the apparent blind forces that bring fortune and misfortune into one's life, shot with a keen eye for southwestern sense and sensibility. Masterfully and subtly acted. Etcetera. I will not argue this point.

I will, however, ask myself what the point of a story is when evaluating a piece of fiction. Not that individual story, but stories in general. Why are they told? Why should they be told? C.S. Lewis mentioned in his essay "On Stories," his astonishment at the sheer volume of work regarding style, order, and the delineation of characters in stories when there was scarce written regarding the ontology of stories themselves.

A story (in my opinion, to which I am entitled), should give us a fair glimpse into the eternal so that we may be better worshippers of God. It should not be merely a nearsighted snapshot of a single aspect of reality separated from the whole. Even if the snapshot is a very accurate one. The Bible would be the penultimate example of a story. Our culture has a way of celebrating the individual, the special case, and the deviant with no regard to the part they play as members of the whole. Altered states of consciousness and sociopathic homicide may be facts, but they are not truths when disconnected from judgment and/or redemption. Case studies are not stories. They are rarely worth mentioning, and never masquerading as entertainment or in any way a helpful social commentary when separated from their ultimate and inevitable ends.

Unfortunately for the Coen brothers' souls, missing the telos from the outset made No Country for Old Men a very well-crafted waste of time.

A Thought

Wisdom is found not in distinguishing right from wrong, but good from best.