Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. (Galatians 2:10)

Remember the poor? What a strange intrusion into this passage. What an unexpected burp in the narrative Paul has been writing to demonstrate his apostolic authority.

Paul knows everything else–and the apostles in Jerusalem know he knows. The gospel. The relation of the law to gentiles. About none of these things do they instruct him. Once he has “set before them” the gospel that he preaches, they see how much the Spirit of God has already led him to know without their tutelage. They respect Paul enough to divide the labor of pastoral care for the world with him, as with an equal: “they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.”

But they say one little word of instruction–one little thing–that he should remember the poor. And Paul already knew about that as well–but he mentions it in order to affirm their speaking. It follows that his agreement with them, his affirmation of the fact that they instructed him to do “the very thing I was eager to do” must also go to assert his apostolic authority. Just as their silent approval on all the points of doctrine and practice which he had set before them affirmed his authority, so their open instruction on this matter, and his open agreement, affirm his authority. What does this mean?

Surely it means that the instruction that was given–an instruction so important that Paul agreed it should be said even if he knew it already–was profoundly important. “Remember the poor.” Why? Why say it? Why does it need to be said? Two possible reasons come to mind:

(1. The apostles needed to say and Paul agreed that he needed to hear it, not because it was new content–something he had missed–in the gospel he preached. Oh no–instead, its significance at this time and in this context is to show its priority. Paul knew very well that the gospel was to all men–why, he understood that it was to gentiles, and that was a very progressive understanding in those days. But they still told him: “remember the poor.” What does this mean but “remember the poor especially”?

(2. It also needed to be said, because it was easy to forget or de-emphasize. Remember the poor? That’s something for your average Christian to do–not for an Apostle. They have the divine leverage to apply to high officials and important, influential persons–don’t waste their converting power on the poor, don’t waste their profound demonstrations of God’s grace or their profound explanations of his redemption in Christ to the poor when the powerful, the rich, the wise are also available to hear. Trickle down. You’ve heard of it.

No! “Remember the poor.” You have been called, you have been commissioned, Paul–don’t exercise your own human judgment about where your preaching will be most effective. Follow this one guideline: remember the poor.

And wasn’t this Paul’s most effective work? Certainly he spoke to princes and kings, to violent crowds and courts met to judge him–but the context of the majority of his letters is that he worked among the poor. He preached among the people. He founded churches and watered them from a distance. He remembered the poor and they grew rich.

Let those who call themselves conservatives remember the poor. Let those who call themselves liberals remember what will really make the poor rich.

I really think that we can participate in “Christian worship” in an idolatrous way. In prayer, in praise, the character of the God we turn toward alters the character of our worship. If that God is one shorn of all but a few attributes that we are comfortable with–love, forgiveness, and peace for example; or if that God is one whom we think will accommodate our whims or the whims of our culture–giving us wealth in exchange for allegiance, or comfort in exchange for commitment;–if that is the kind of God we worship, then we are idolaters.

In fact, it strikes me that worshiping the true God ought to be a profoundly uncomfortable experience. As I mentioned in the last post, that worship will always involve service and waiting. The service I hardly need expand upon–the cost of discipleship, however neglected, is well know to those who will listen; but the waiting really gets most people’s goat.

Waiting for the Son of God–what a humiliating notion. So much for bringing in the kingdom of God by our own efforts. And waiting, by the way, isn’t a passive activity. This waiting is watching–as many passages of Scripture point out–as the night-guard watches from the battlements, or the servants wait for the bridegroom. Preparation is key–and if the post-millenial world-neglectful straw man that stands for folk who really do intend to wait for the Son has wormed its way from caricature to worldview, then think again. Waiting for the Son of God is an eager night of preparation–it encompasses all the activities of evangelism, and culture-building, and justice-seeking.

But the difference in the evangelism, culture-building, and justice-seeking of the Christians who wait for the Son is this: uncertainty. We have no esteem-boosting assurance that our preparations will turn out the way we think. We wait and we wonder. We know not the time or the season. We are cast back upon the strength of Christ because of our own insufficiency for this hour or the future.

I invite you to hold up your worship with me and contrast it to idolatry.

The admirable Thessalonians, by their wholehearted conversion, have strengthened the church–because the apostles, having strengthened the Thessalonians to believe by preaching the gospel and living among them, are being strengthened in return by the witness of their newborn faith.

This morning this question occurred to me: Does the witness of the Thessalonians faith come, at least in part, from the fact that they used to serve idols, and that they clearly understand the difference between idol worship and God-worship? In this context, the two major themes of the letter resonate with them–the themes of serving God and waiting for Christ.

For us, on the other hand, the idea of serving God and waiting for Christ is often muddied–sometimes is indistinguishable from worship of an idol. But how could any sort of worship directed at God be idol-worship? Because idol-worship is not worship.

Serving. To serve an idol is not to serve. We pick our idols; our idols do not pick us. Do you feel as if you have “picked” or “chosen” to serve God, as if you were selecting a sandwich at a restaurant? Then your worship of him has an element of idolatry in it. And as this example makes clear, idolatry is a worship of self, or at least a decidedly self-oriented worship. Regardless of how wholeheartedly one gives oneself up to the imagined instruction of one’s idol, it is always because of a prior decision based on felt needs.

Waiting. To wait for Christ is a profound thing. One does not wait for an idol. Whatever one finds in an idol or “receives” from an idol came from oneself. To wait for an idol is to wait for oneself. But to wait for Christ is harder and greater than this. We may be ready for him to come, but he doesn’t. We may see the world situation as ideal for his return, but he doesn’t. Waiting for Christ prostrates us in a true worship that can only thrive by self-forgetfulness.

Serving and waiting preclude idolatry, ultimately because they acknowledge the inscrutable Providence of God as the governing principle of life, rather than the sinful demand to be made whole according to one’s own lights.

I noticed that I have begun to lose the purity of purpose with which this particular blog started–the purpose of writing a devotional blog post every morning, and providing resources helpful to Reformed Christians. A certain amount of cultural reflection got mixed in right from the beginning, and I begin to have almost daily urges to write about political subjects as well. But I understand that the readers who subscribe to and frequent this blog are primarily interested in the devotional aspect.

So I have created two separate blogs to host my political and cultural reflections, reviews, and rants. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can find them by clicking on the new SITE MAP link to your right. If you’re not interested in that sort of thing, you will be happy to hear that you won’t be receiving notices in your feed reader about things that don’t interest you–and you will be further happy to hear that I intend to resume my practice of morning devotional blogging. The impediments to that habit have died down once again.

As always, thanks for reading this blog and don’t ever hesitate to comment if you have anything to say!

I found the place of blogging as described in the following section of the article to be fascinating, mainly because it utterly contradicts my view.

The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that “the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it’s all ‘gotcha’ commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible.” David Frum complains that “the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are … absorbing.” David Brooks laments, “People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.”

What amuses me in the accusations hurled by the likes of Alan Wolfe, David Frum, and David Brooks, is how easily and thoughtlessly they conflate a medium and specific uses of it. They would never think to condemn novels because they’ve read a few silly, petty, or contentious ones; they would never think to condemn poetry because so many people write such large amounts of it so wretchedly.

Let us dwell on the possibilities for this medium. Blogs are growing in popularity and influence all the time. I suspect that truly masterful examples of the art of blogging will soon burst onto the cultural scene in ways as unexpected as the first novels, or political serial publications, or radio broadcasts. The medium will give birth to its own breed of genius. Let’s consider two inherent features of blogging, and just imagine the kind of literature to which these features could give rise:

(1. The push-button nature of publishing on a blog. This is one of the chief arguments adduced against blogging: thoughtlessness and foolishness are the natural results of its ease of use. And I will grant the truth of the accusation. I have been guilty of posting before I thought just as much as the next blogger. But this is a problem with individuals, not one inherent in the medium. The fool speaks before he has considered–in whatever fashion he speaks. The positive side of push-button publishing is that it achieves a quality only available–previously–in published diaries, or narratives written as they were experienced. There is a sense in which life recorded contemporaneously imprints itself on the page, rather than commemorating itself. Careful prediction of the future or judicious reflection on the past both have their place–but they are both inevitably selective, excluding what we do not want to occur or what we would rather forget. So, although experience can never truly be captured in any form other than life, it can be more nearly captured in a medium with the peculiar possibilities of a blog.

(2. The community-level regulation of credibility and reputation. Another accusation against blogging: it frequently descends into silly in-fighting, because people have no self-consciousness when they’re behind a keyboard. This is merely a negative manifestation of the blogosphere’s chief distinction. At this point in its development, the “establishment” of the blogosphere is a natural meritocracy. Clusters of authority and community censorship have yet to emerge with their mission to suppress dissent or ingenuity. So I honestly believe that, as the medium now stands, the true artists within it will naturally rise to the top of the pile.

These two features of blogging excite me. In my own line I see immense uses for the medium in pastoral work,–and, in a larger sense, as a new platform for public intellectuals… What an exciting time to be a writer.

2. It’s small. The student body is extremely tiny. But this means that classrooms are incredibly intimate, and a student who was seeking to study hard, and tended to be full of questions for a teacher (like myself) could thrive on the intimacy of the interaction.

3. It has a big view of history. I honestly got the impression while I was there that students are encouraged to view themselves as inheritors of the riches of all the reformed confessional standards. I heard the Heidelberg catechism, the Westminster standards, the Canons of Dort, etc., praised for their distinctive merits, and quoted as familiar documents. I like that very much. Especially after my stint here at Dordt, I have come to appreciate the more continental reformed emphases, and am excited about a seminary that combines them with a healthy respect for the confessional standards that I originally made my own.

4. It has an incredible focus on the word of God as preached. It is the quintessential preacher’s seminary, I believe. While it focuses on developing the whole man for a robust pastoral ministry, it clearly aims primarily to develop powerful preachers of the truth. In just the two classes I sat through, I noticed frequent pastoral asides about the implications of Old Testament History and Systematic Ecclesiology for the preacher. Very stimulating.

Second, check out this interesting historical note from the Scriptorium Daily, regarding the author of The Church’s One Foundation: Lyra Fidelium.

Third, consider these thought-provoking quotations in One Issue Politics from Miscellanies.

Finally, check out this absolutely excellent website: Andy Crouch’s Culture Making.

In the silence and darkness I felt like I was floating.

Out in the miles around the fire-tower hill, lights twinkled from isolated RV parks and rippled across the waters from lakeside villas. In a few moments I would continue up. When I reached the top of the tower, I would wait for my friends. When they had joined me, we would all flash our lights in unison to the west, where another group of friends sat on a boat in a lake to flash their lights back at us. The adventure was my idea, a throwback to my childhood of make-believe. But for the moment all that context disappeared and I felt something we just don’t feel very often anymore.

I felt nature. I felt it big and impersonal. It was a world that did not know me and would not remember me, because I was part of it—much as I don’t know and won’t remember any individual cell in my body. We were just one living organism, the night and I. I understood, for just one moment, those philosophers I read about in class. I understood the old Emperor Marcus Aurelius, alone in his tent on the cold winter night with the barbarians camped just beyond the next ridge. I understood how he could write, “the matter of the Whole is docile and adaptable, and the reason that controls it has in its own nature no ground to create evil, for it contains no evil.” He was feeling what I was feeling. A totally pagan feeling, perhaps, but a seductive one. He was feeling the huge moral indifference of a nature that contained him as just one more category of life.

I have difficulty kneading such experiences into my “Christian” perspective. In church they tell me nature always sings of God’s presence and speaks of his grace. The implication is that I shouldn’t have to look very hard to see those things.

“What’s wrong?” Asked Travis, coming up below me on the ladder. He startled me out of my trance.

“Nothing. Just resting for a second.” I said. I reached forward to the cold rungs again, and resumed my climb.

Earlier that morning I’d had another moment that didn’t fit my paradigm. Rain had fallen most of the night. So when I went outside at dawn, I found a refugee camp of worms. They were lying around on the deck like thin pieces of raw meat. I’ve never seen that many worms above ground. The sun rose slowly, but the worms were even slower and by afternoon most of them had dried to death. Birds gladly ate the corpses. Something about it horrified me. Worm life may be low on the great chain of being, but sometimes it’s the little things that mess with my worldview.

Do the heavens have to declare the glory of God just by looking nice? What about when you can’t see the heavens because a cloud of dust is obscuring them—dust where there should be rain, and your crop is drying up and blowing away, and your family is starving, and you can’t afford medical attention for your sick little girl? Do the heavens declare the glory of God then? Not if they can only declare it by looking pretty. What do the heavens declare?

Signaling back and forth with flashlights from a distant tower to a lake would have made more sense if any of us knew Morse Code. None of us did. So we signaled meaninglessly. After a while we got tired of that. My group climbed back down the ladder.

We walked over to the four-wheelers that we had driven out to the fire-tower. I climbed onto the back of one. My knee struck the corner of the rack. As I settled down it throbbed painfully. Travis jumped on his seat, started the engine, and we tore off along the narrow, twisting trail that led back to the cabin where we were staying. I lay back and watched the dim undersides of leaves rush above me. I couldn’t hear anything but the wind and our engine roaring in my ears. My imagination went to work. I imagined that I was a missionary fleeing some group of violent rebels—the other four-wheeler behind us. I imagined that I had been wounded—my knee throbbed helpfully. I imagined what I would be thinking and feeling on such an occasion—it was very real to me in my imagination.

All I could imagine myself thinking in this terrible situation was how very near God seemed in the silvery flash of those dim leaves.

I can not find the glory of God in nature by waiting for the heavens to declare it to me. What do the heavens declare? Sometimes I can only find out by asking, “what do I declare about the heavens?”

Nature surrounds me and puts to me the challenge of the fire-tower: “Where is God in this vastness?” Or it puts to me the challenge of the worms: “Where is God in this brutality?” Can I find signs of his presence and proof of his grace in both the deep hues of a flower and also the unraveling rope half-melted in a fire-pit? In both the sunset trail across the lake and also the grime and bubbles where the lake washes the shore? In both the reflective rain-drops on fallen leaves and also the dried worm corpses on the dry deck?

My temptation is to fall back on Marcus Aurelius. “Wrong question,” I want to say. “Stop grappling with the contradictions of the Whole.”

But in this the heavens declare themselves. What morally indifferent nature could provoke such questioning in me? What absence of God could I sense unless he was usually there? What brutality could be meaningless that so offends me?

When we arrived back at the cabin, I waited until everyone else had gone to bed and then I went back outside. I walked down to the lake and out on the dock. The water was so still that I could not distinguish between the starry sky and its reflection. The dock hung in the heavens. At the end of that dock I stood just a few yards from where the boat had floated to signal at us on the fire-tower. I peered into the night, trying to make out the tower in the distance. I couldn’t see it. But I knew it was there.

Imagine, he suggested, that you want to get a classroom full of middle-school boys to learn math. They refuse to pay any attention. So you consider all your alternatives and finally settle on a plan. You hire an attractive female teacher–in her twenties–and have her stand at the front of the classroom and teach the boys math while wearing a two-piece bathing suit.

You will have their attention, he pointed out. But they still probably won’t learn any math.

Our outreach and evangelism–on the church and individual level–tends to follow this worthless strategy. We are embarrassed, first, as a church, to portray ourselves as primarily existing to present the gospel. Instead we make ourselves attractive and dress up in a two-piece bathing suit by offering a false front of programs, concern for social justice, mental health improvement, ecclesiastical clubbing, intellectual entertainment, or even moral superiority.

Instead, we should be portraying the truth of spiritual things, as we have been entrusted to know them, as plainly as possible. Otherwise the people who attend our churches will graduate sooner or later from life, and discover that the classes they have been offered by the church presented its gospel-subject in such an attractive, diverting way, that they never noticed what that subject was or learned anything from it at all. Can we bear that on our consciences?

On the individual level, I think, we use the same diversionary tactic. For example, there’s an attitude among us, that if we really want to evangelize people, all we have to do is form relationships with them. There’s something to this as an antidote to unappealing, harsh, gospel-down-throat-shoving. But it can also be a handy way to avoid any real evangelism at all. Live for Christ, and if necessary use words–we all love St. Francis for this. Partially because he’s right–partially because he strokes our frightened little inner-children who would rather not talk about the gospel if that’s all right with you.

So my challenge–to me and you this morning–is to examine our own efforts at evangelism and ask ourselves: Am I presenting the gospel or leaving people with the idea that Christianity is just a set of manners, a cultural milieu, a church-building, an empty moralism, a psychological wellness regimen, or a private hobby?