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who is Jesus

August 24, 2009

I’m posting a series of essays as preparation for my upcoming ordination council. You can find these at http://bit.ly/1ps22J

Here is an excerpt from “who is Jesus and why does it matter?”

the king thing? We have no idea at all, even though Christ as sovereign Lord is where an understanding of who Jesus is must lead us in the end. This isn’t about Queen Elizabeth and Prince Henry, bound by Parliament and centuries of human reason and regulation. We’re talking Darius, with power of life and death, as less than a choir boy. Ultimately Jesus is the King (Revelation 17:14, 19:16) before whom the heavens and the earth will melt.

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A tale of three fathers

August 9, 2009

Personal influence on art and craft

(Note: there is a brief video of me lecturing on this topic on my professional blog. You can view it here.)

“In my beginning is my end.” T.S. Eliot

In his classic essay “Why I Write” George Orwell says we write for sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose, an observation with which I completely concur.

But this explains little about why we write the way we do. Clearly one aspect of this is the influence of other writers, writers who have moved us and awed us with the tangible delight of words on a page.

Their work becomes in some collective way a source of our craft, as argued so elegantly in Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer, a Guide for People who Love Books and for Those who Want to Write Them. Prose (what a happy name for such a task) argues convincingly for the value of reading literature closely for the necessary models for writing it well.

But our motivation and process are more likely influenced by people we actually know, like our fathers.

Take William Zinsser, for example. In his classic volume On Writing Well, he provides practical, useful advice for writers who want to write clearly and effectively. But in his final chapter, “Write as Well as You Can,” he points to the influences of his early life, including a mother who liked to clip thing out of the newspaper that delighted her for their style, wit or vision.

His dad, on the other hand, owned a company that made shellac and had been in the family three generations. He was a man who loved his business, an art “to be practiced with imagination and only the best ingredients, and who clearly expected his son to follow in his footsteps.

It was not from his mother’s love of literature, however, but from his father’s world of business that Zinsser inherited his craftsman’s ethic. He says “When I found myself endlessly rewriting what I had endlessly rewritten, determined to write better than everybody who was competing for the same space, the inner voice I was hearing was the voice of my father talking about shellac.”

The poet John Leax tells a similar story in Grace is Where I Live. He remembers visiting his home after his dad died. His dad, who bought and tamed four treeless acres outside of Pittsburg with woods and gardens and ponds, was not a poet at all. In fact, he once confessed to his son that he had never read a work of fiction.

He remembers his dad as one who seldom rose to self consciousness, who lived in the present and found pleasure in what he could touch, free, as it were, “of the burden of finishing that diminishes the working.” In such work Leax says his dad reached for holiness, “setting aside what one is to become what God wills.”

“My father was a craftsman who cared more for the act of making, for the assault on perfection, than for the finished product,” writes Leax, and this has become true of Leax himself, “although I work not in woods but in words.”

Fortunately for me, my own father’s craft was words. And wood. As a pastor, builder, artist, writer, he was in fact a multi-talented entrepreneur who taught me that words were powerful channels of vision and grace.

I learned much about craft from him, even before he used to edit my papers in college. He was an English major in college who always took words seriously and prepared sermons thoughtfully.

He was forceful but gracious in the pulpit, with a southern style that reflects the best possible understanding of the term. Think of the elegance of the King James version crossed with the plain style of a builder’s son and you have only begun to understand what it was like to hear him preach.

But what I learned from him as a writer was more about motivation than craft. Dad believed the gospel could change others because it changed him. He never gave up on people, and believed long after I had given up on them that they could be transformed by the truth of the gospel.

Understanding that what we say has the ability to change what others think and do is a great gift for one who writes. This was especially true of my dad, whose integrity and humility were framed by the biblical mandate that we “speak the truth in love. (Ephesians 4:15)”

I’m reminded of another preacher, the author of Ecclesiastes, who says in chapter 11:

The Preacher sought to find words of delight,
and uprightly he wrote words of truth.
The words of the wise are like goads,
and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings.

He goes on to say that “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness to the flesh.”

Writers understand that. That’s why in the end we are as concerned with the power of words as with their beauty, otherwise why would we do it? And if we write with passion and intensity, we focus on the why as well as the way.

It helps to reflect on those who have nurtured these things. Style may reflect a confluence of influences, but motivation is usually more personal.

And important.

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old flames

August 1, 2009

I’m not much of a “what if” guy. I never spend a lot of time thinking about what would have happened if I had made other choices. It’s probably the Calvinist in me. But sometimes I run across things that remind me of what those choices were.

I reconnected with an old college crush on Facebook, recently, or rather she reconnected with me. We chatted briefly, but I couldn’t place her. After 40 years, we don’t look like ourselves. Finally I just came out and typed, “Did I have a crush on you?”

“You still make me laugh,” she responded. I was a freshman in college and she was on the rebound and didn’t want to get involved. But I remember her eyes, gentle eyes, often softened with tears. A guy could swim in eyes like that. Or drown.

And then today I came across an old scrapbook, with a collection of notes and things from or about former flames, like a picture of my cousin Marsha who I had a crush on in junior high. And a note from Linda, my steady girlfriend in high school.

What were we thinking? So much angst. Perhaps it was just puppy love, but it’s real love if you are a real puppy. Our parents were at odds in a church split, but she played the piano and I played the organ. We would look at each other while we played and cry, certain that we were the only ones who understood what was going on. In the middle of a crisis of faith we found each other.

And then Sherrie, Kathy, Dawn, Nelle, Cat, Lyn. I clearly didn’t know what I was doing in college. But what guy can actually keep track of all the girls he ever liked or be honest about what it actually meant or know what they really thought of him? Of if they thought of him at all?

I don’t have pictures of any of these women, but don’t need them. They are not images but impressions, of lessons learned and weaknesses revealed. I’m grateful for each of them and glad I married someone else.

Of all these, Dawn was the most sensual, and the most Southern. I would drive from Chattanooga to Atlanta where she worked as a nursing student so we would make out in the parking lot.

But Lyn was the most intellectual, and the most Northern. We were going to college in East Tennessee and we would sit on some huge rock in the mountains and talk about poetry. I drove to her home in Ohio to see her one summer and she broke up with me.

I wrote the worst poem ever about this, and still read it to my students sometimes as an example of what not to do. Good poetry is not therapy, it’s craft. But even in our youthful passions we sometimes treasure a useful metaphor, and Lyn gave me a copy of a Rod McKuen poem that fall while I was still trying to understand what happened.

His was much better than mine, as was her handwriting that still evokes the memory of her:

Every living thing runs from the rain
animals and birds
people
children in the fields with paper kites

I’m no hero
my kites are made of paper too
unmendable if they get wet

I began by loving nobody
& then every body

then only u
& now I’ll go away and love
nobody again

Her own poetry was better than mine, and I hope she is still writing. And I hope she found somebody again. I know I did.

This is when Katie came into my life, listening to my ideas, laughing at my jokes, her blue eyes drawing me into a pool of wisdom and stability. I’d known her since I first started college and she had become my friend. She went away to another school and I missed her.

We never made out in a parking lot or read poetry on a rock. Instead I told her I loved her and asked her to marry me.

I wrote a poem about our engagement, almost as bad as the one I wrote about breaking up with Lyn, filled with stretched rhymes and uneven meter.

Talk about bad choices. I wish I had thought of something as graceful as paper kites in the rain, but instead settled on a comet named Kohoutek, which was visible at Christmas in 1973 when I asked her to marry me and is not due to return for 75,000 years.

(I may have been on the right track here. “In Celebration of the Comet – The Coming of Kohoutek” is a album by Pink Floyd and the comet forms the basis of a metaphor for a romantic relationship in an R.E.M song by the same name on the record Fables of the Reconstruction. But of course it was also the foundation of a doomsday cult called Children of God.)

So, with apologies, an excerpt from my poem for Katie, where I managed to misspell the name of the comet:

All thing whatsoever bring glory to Him
Long after our lives and comets are dim,
And long after Kahouotek comes by again
Our hearts will praise Him for all that has been.

I still feel that way, although I hope I’m learning to say it better.

Posted in fifty, marriage, poetry | 3 Comments »

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For Ian, on his graduation

July 7, 2009

When I first met you, you were an infant on a blanket in the basement of the lodge at Kimball Camp. Your mother was taking notes at a workshop I was leading for home school families and your dad was upstairs on the payphone, working a deal.

So many things have changed since then. For one thing, cell phones actually work at Kimball Camp now. Your mom uses email. Your dad takes you down town to play music on the sidewalk.

But one thing has not changed. You were loved then, and you are loved now, by parents, siblings and friends who prayed for you and cared for you.

Ian Atilla

Ian Atilla

]At that workshop I was talking about having goals for our children and the metaphor I used was of a bowstring, which we pull tight as we aim our arrows at a target. Our children are a heritage from the Lord, the Psalmist tells us. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.

If we are going to have a quiver full of arrows we will have to be intentional about what we do with them, I said. And your parents were thoughtful and intentional, and that is part of what we celebrate today.

For your mom and dad you were not just a baby, you were a blessing¬— a gift to be nurtured, an arrow to be aimed. And I suspect what they wanted at the time was a son who was sensitive and honest, thoughtful and obedient, committed to serving others and obeying God. They wanted a gentleman, and they got what they wanted. You are not just a polite young man. You are gracious and hospitable in remarkable ways for one so young, and a blessing to many.

This is the result of purposeful parenting, the kind of parenting that sent you on mission trips and drove you to rehearsals, that modeled compassion and obedience and that challenged your attitudes and behaviors, always aiming at the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

But they got more than they wanted or imagined. No one looking at that baby on that blanket knew you could become the model of a modern major general, or the lion of Narnia, or the master of Thornfield Manor. No one expected the quiet intensity or the brooding caution that defines you as a young man, an artist who seeks the will of God with passion and serves an audience with care.

These opportunities were not accidents, but appointments. That’s because God has a mark of his own and is aiming you toward it. He has a purpose for you beyond our imagination or understanding. It may not be acting or performance of any kind. You may not know what his target is until after you hit it.

But whatever his purpose is it will require the discipline you have learned and the sensitivity you have displayed. And as you reach it you will touch the hearts of others and point them toward a great God and a greater good.

So as we celebrate your achievements and anticipate your future, allow me to offer two admonitions, not so much about what steps to take but how to take them.

First, I encourage you to be more of what you are. Cultivate the graces of a godly man that have already been planted.

Psalm 112 says

Light dawns in the darkness for the upright;
he is gracious, merciful, and righteous.
It is well with the man who deals generously and lends;
who conducts his affairs with justice.

You have become gracious, merciful and righteous. Let this define you and guide you. Be hospitable, generous and just. Make others feel welcome, as your father has taught you. Give your time and energy to those in need, as your mother has shown.

Do these things over and over and over, until the light dawns in the darkness and people around you see the glory of God in the conscientious and consistent life of a true gentleman.

We have enough celebrities and narcissists. What we need are gentlemen, men who fear God and delight in His law.

We need men like Timothy, of whom Paul says, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first [in your case in your mother and father] and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well. For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.

Which leads to my second admonition: Be braver than you have been, because God has not given you a spirit of fear.

I expect you remember learning how to come off Crystal Mountain on your bike without riding the brakes. You will have to learn to take your hands off the brakes more often, and not just for the thrill my son Pilgrim was encouraging.

I think you were able to do this that day because you were able to trust Pilgrim and try something new, which is just a shadow of what God now requires. Some days God will require you to take your hands off the brake and the steering wheel, trusting wholly in his marksmanship, if I may mix the metaphors a bit.

Going back to Psalm 112 we find the righteous man will not be moved.

He is not afraid of bad news;
his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.
His heart is steady; he will not be afraid,

Obedience is one thing, and is not all that difficult. But obedience rooted in faith is something else entirely. This is the kind of obedience where we take our hands off the brakes, obeying God when we don’t know the outcome. Faith is the evidence of things not seen.

All of us are comforted by our routines and feel safe when we are in control. But God is not as interested in our comfort as we might like. In the next few years he will push you and challenge you and make you very uncomfortable, because he wants you to trust Him and not be afraid.

There is another side of being a godly man. We are not just gentlemen but warriors. Verse 8 says the righteous man looks in triumph on his adversaries and verse 9 talks about caring for the poor.

This call to triumph, as a warrior and a champion, is not for the timid. Godly men must battle injustice, with hearts that are firm, and steady, rooted in our willingness to trust God. They can not be afraid.

I can’t tell you what this battle will look like for you, and neither can your parents. If we could, you wouldn’t have to trust God at all. But I can tell you this. You will have to be braver than you have been while you become more of what you are.

Your parents are stepping aside and God is pulling back the bowstring, aiming you at some target of his own. You are more precious to Him than you are to your parents, as hard as that is to imagine. He is wiser and stronger by far. There will be more tension in the string because he wants to send you farther and straighter than we can see.

The arrow has no strength or purpose of its own, but relies solely on the skill of the archer who will give you a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.

So become more of what you are. Become braver than you have been. Fly straight, go far and trust God.

And the Lord will rescue you from every evil deed and bring you safely into his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

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more mystery

May 24, 2009

wedding
Photo by Jennifer Buehrer.

I had the privilege of officiating at my son Michael’s wedding last week. Here is what I said.
_____

Karina, we knew you before you knew Michael, and we loved you even then. You would have been remarkable, even if you did not like grits or laugh at my jokes. From the start we knew you as a gracious, diligent woman, a credit to godly parents who taught you to work hard and obey God.

And Michael, you came into our life speaking in full sentences at 18 months, articulate and sensitive beyond your years—Michael Joel Metts, the prophet of the day of the Lord, we called you.

So first of all, I’d like to say how honored I am that you asked me to perform this ceremony. In fact, you have both honored your parents in every way, so that you arrive at this moment with our full blessing and to our great joy.

Together you now embark on a grand adventure, one through which such honor will mean more and more, as you honor each other in ways you have yet to understand and for reasons you can not yet comprehend.

You will learn about each other’s strengths, and you will accept each other’s weakness. Each day you will be conformed more and more to the image of God’s own Son. You will not be conformed at the same rate and in the same ways, however, so you must be patient with each other and gracious to each other.

But you cannot expect to get through the hard times by trying harder. You cannot overcome the challenges merely through the grace you give each other and receive from each other, despite your many gifts. Michael you can see things see things the way they are and you can see them as they should be. And Karina, you are generous and good, a delight to behold.

But of the many gifts you have received, including churches to nurture you and families to love you, this marriage will be the greatest of all, save that of Christ himself.

For marriage, like every blessing, is a great gift. Like every good and perfect gift, it comes down from the Father of lights in whom is no variableness or shadow of turning. Your marriage can no more succeed through your effort than you can save yourself or change yourself outside of the free and abundant grace of God.

That’s because in every aspect of your lives together, God is glorified, both in your strengths and in your weaknesses. You must find your contentment in Him, your purpose in him, your strength in him and your joy in him. To try and find these in each other is idolatry.

Marriage is after all just a picture of greater truths. A mystery we are told. God’s faithfulness to His people, Christ’s sacrifice for his church—these are the things we understand and appreciate as we learn to love and serve each other in marriage.

Thus every single success brings God glory. The strength, the courage, the wisdom we exercise in marriage comes from Him, just as does the faith to believe Him and the will to obey Him. And when we fail, we learn the things we need to learn- humility, patience and grace. This too is his gift and this too his glory.

You have been taught to rest in the sovereignty of God and to glory in the grace of God. But these are truths you will forget a dozen times before the week is up. And when you forget, the solution is not to try harder, but to seek mercy and ask for forgiveness.

You will learn to do this with each other as you learn to do it with God. Or you will learn to do it with God as your learn to do it with each other. The order doesn’t matter, you will learn to do it one way or the other. For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.

This is how we are sanctified through marriage, just as we are sanctified in Christ. We get over ourselves, we surrender our pride, we lay down our life, we rest in his grace. And when we do all these things, we finally understand that we did none of them. That Christ did them in us.

In this then our praise is perfected, our joy is complete, our worship is accepted and our God is glorified.

Michael, this woman is God’s gift to you. You must lay down your life for her, as Christ loved the church. Every sacrifice is an act of worship. As you learn to love her, God is glorified in you and before all.

Karina, this man is God’s gift to you. You must honor him, as Sarah did Abraham, whose daughter you are. Every obedience is an act of worship. As you learn to respect him, God is glorified in you and before all.

Now blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,…. In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. Ephesians 1

Posted in celebration, faith, family, marriage | 3 Comments »

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the mystery of marriage

April 18, 2009

We have a night of blessing for young men in our church when they get married, and we had everyone over last night to spend some time with my son Michael, who is getting married in a month.

It’s a great time of fellowship, with a healthy blend of jokes, advice and prayer. One part of this event is a blessing by the father for his son, and here is what I had to say:

————————————-

When you were 18 months old, I taught you to say you were a poet and a philosopher. And I was pretty close.

Certainly you are articulate beyond your years, and always have been. People treated you like an adult when you were a child because you sounded so grown up.

Like any poet, you have a gift with words and a greatness of heart. You feel deeply and care passionately, and it shows in your relationships, your art and your faith.

You’ve managed this depth of emotion by becoming a philosopher as well, thinking carefully and arguing endlessly about words and the ideas behind them. Sometimes this allows you to process your feelings. Sometimes it allows you to escape them.

You can be completely transparent and you can be extremely guarded. You are still learning when to do which. And you will learn much more about that in the next two years with Karina than I could teach you in ten.

But you have learned much in many areas, and have been faithful as a friend, a brother, a teacher, an artist, a writer and now as a lover. There are so many things about you that bring me joy. I am grateful to call you my son.

But I am also grateful to call you by your name, Michael Joel Metts. These are not only the names of your godfather and my grandfather. They are strong, significant biblical names. Michael Joel, the prophet of the day of the Lord, a messenger of God and his work among us.

I suppose when you were small I should also have taught you say you are a prophetl, at least in the sense that every man in this room tonight who follows Christ should proclaim the truth of God.

I’m not sure how this will play out in your life. You may report this truth, or photograph this truth, or preach this truth. But you must proclaim it. We all should.

I make no apology for giving you a name, as I did your brothers, which calls you to higher purposes and ideals. My prayer for each of you is that you will aspire to be elders in the church, godly men who lead your families and others into faithfulness. Your mother and I long for this and rejoice in the faithfulness you have already shown. This is our prayer for you, and our deep desire.

But tonight we celebrate your choosing not to take this journey alone. I congratulate you on choosing Karina Lynn Mora to be your bride. She is a woman of character, beautiful on the outside and the inside. Your mother and I cherish her, and pledge to love her as our own flesh.

Scripture says he who finds a wife finds a good thing, and this woman your love is good and virtuous and strong. Together you will learn lessons I cannot teach you, lessons are only learned in marriage.

“This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and his church.” This is what Paul says in Ephesians 5 when he says we are to love our wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it.

We are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones, and it is for this cause that a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.

There are 50 men here tonight, and none of them can tell you what this means. We have all of us only scratched the surface of this mystery. No poet or philosopher or prophet has fully plumbed its depth or understood its power or known its joy.

Part of it I think is that in this mystery we get a glimpse of the joy that is set before us. I can sit on the porch in the afternoon with your mother, sipping a cup of tea, content in ever way. Moments like this show us something about what it is like to rest in God and experience his presence. Certainly it is but a touch of transcendence, but it is enough to make us desire more, and to long for our true home.

Another part of this mystery is that we learn to be like Christ as we learn to love our wives as we love our own bodies. And I can tell you this, we do love our own body. We might feed it or starve it; we might discipline it or indulge it. But we think about it all the time.

Now, I know you already think about Karina all the time. I know this because you no longer hear us when we call you, or acknowledge us when you are on your way to see her. You just walk out the door, thinking of her.

Imagine then that in every moment Christ thinks about his church in this way. We are never out of his mind or out of his heart. He longs for us and wants to be with us, and in this way he sanctifies us and purifies us and presents us holy and blameless before the throne of God.

In our best moment we can not love our wives as well as Christ has loved us on our worst days. You can not love Karina more than Christ loves you. And you must not love her more than you love him. Marriage is not just a way we understand this; it is the thing that must be understood.

All your best times will be mere shadows of the glory that will be revealed in Christ. Enjoy them, but contemplate them, and in these moments you will see the grace of God and find his mercy. Find your delight in him, and this frees you to find more delight in her.

There are many things that might blind you to the lessons God wants you to learn through your marriage to Karina, and I admonish you as your father and as an elder in Christ to avoid them. Here are three of them:

First, do not give you heart to another woman. You sometimes have too much confidence in your ability to resist sin. We all do. But the woman who might destroy your marriage is not a beautiful one, but a needy one. You are sensitive and thoughtful, and some woman in pain will want you to be sensitive to her and thoughtful about her problems. Do not give your heart to such a one.

Drink waters out of your own cistern, and running waters out of your own well.
Let your fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of your youth…..
Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy you at all times; and be ravished always with her love. Proverbs 5:15-20

Second, do not spend more than you have or desire more than you need. This again is a temptation we all face, but everything you own must be cared for and everything you owe must be paid for. Caring for stuff and paying for stuff can distract you from caring for her and spending time with her. It will also distract you from serving God or spending time with his people.

You will be surprised at how little she wants and you will be amazed at how much she requires. So do not try to make her happy. You will fail in this. You must each find your contentment in Christ. You can not be for her what only Christ can be for her. But you can point her to his sufficiency, partly by what you say and mostly by what you do. Rest in Him and find joy in Him, so that she can rest in you and find joy in you.

If the text in Ephesians says anything at all to us about this mystery it is that it leads to holiness, not happiness. Cleanse, sanctify, cherish, nourish. Holy, blameless, pure. Great words, but in this longest and most direct text about Christian marriage, there is not a single word about our happiness.

What happens when you chose the thing that will make you or your wife happy over the thing that will make you or your wife holy? And what happens when you make this choice over and over again, day after day?

The mystery of marriage is diminished, and you have a relationship not unlike that of any pagan. If this becomes your goal then you are without authority and without respect and learn nothing about who God is and how he loves us.

I am not saying you should be trying to make her unhappy, nor am I saying that you will not be happy together, sometimes for days and sometimes only for moments at a time.

I’m just saying this is not the goal. Christ did not lay down his life to make us happy, even though we often find in him abundance and joy.

Among the joys I’ve found, you are one.

So before these men I honor you as one committed to understanding grace and knowing truth, as a son who has been obedient, and whose maturity and judgment are, by the grace of God, equal to the task that lies before you.

May you learn more than I ever did,
and sooner than I ever could,
how Christ loved the church.

And may your marriage reflect it,
To Karina first, and then to us.

May your children and their children,
Both in the flesh and in the spirit,
Find peace in your home
And strength in your story.

And may the glory of grace change you,
The mystery of marriage amaze you
And the truth of God sustain you,
‘till death alone do you part.

Amen.

Posted in celebration, family | 1 Comment »

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Serious draw-er is serious.

March 31, 2009

This is our granddaughter. She is cute. She calls me Santa.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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filling a void

November 7, 2008

…so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
Isaiah 55:11

Some friends in Tennessee sent us a card today, one of many, many cards offering prayer and support in the recent loss of my mom. It’s been a little overwhelming actually. I get emails from people I never speak to, and cards from people I can’t remember.

The card today was the fifth one we have received from someone who donated Gideon Bibles in her memory. It made me smile.

About seventy year ago mom stole a Gideon New Testament from the closet in the basement of the Methodist Church in Naples, Florida. They kept them there as a gift for kids in Sunday School on their birthday, and of course she didn’t realize a Gideon would give her one any time she asked.

Her dad, who was still struggling with the loss of her mom in an automobile accident on the way home from church, had rejected faith. Mom herself was in a coma for several days, and they held up the funeral, thinking she and her mom would be buried together. Mom had a brother who was mentally handicapped as a result of the wreck, and still lives in institutional care.

332388549_68fd6b3685_m1In the middle of all this loss she stole the Bible and hid it in a palm tree on the beach. At the base of the palm frond is a small pocket, where it connects to the tree and she put the Testament in a plastic bag to protect it from the rain and hide it from her dad.

There is no way to calculate the value of that stolen Bible in her life, or in mine. One day she read about Jesus looking up and having compassion on the multitudes, and she believed then and for the rest of her life that he could have compassion on her too. She needed a friend, and Jesus was it.

Later she introduced him to my dad, a seventeen year-old drifting through town looking for his alcoholic father. And later she introduced him to me, when she was a young mother far from home and often alone.

Finding comfort in the Scripture, and in the Christ it reveals, was important to her all her life, and it has been the place I’ve turned in the days she was dying and in the days since.

But the Scripture has provided more than comfort; it transformed a family and turned us toward grace, anchoring us in our losses and our failures, pointing us toward the hope of redemption.

Paul tells us (Romans 8) that “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

“In this hope,” he says, “we were saved.”gideon-bible31

I wouldn’t know about this hope if it weren’t for that Gideon New Testament, just one of the 1.3 billion they have distributed since they started 100 years ago in 1908.

And so I smile, praying that someone somewhere will hide their Bible in a palm tree. And in their heart.

(You can give Bibles here.)

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being led, 4

October 22, 2008

Excerpt from funeral message based on Psalm 23, part 4.

And today she sits at the table he has prepared for her. What a joy and consolation.

The table David had in mind may have been the high flatlands of summer pasture, which the shepherd would scout out, pulling up poisonous weeds, looking for signs of wolves and bear. Sheep never think about all the preparation it takes to be led safely to pasture and back again, and David was probably not thinking about life after death.

But we are. When we read this, we also think of the table as our Lord’s table, and the communion of saints around the body and blood of Christ. This is a modest meal that points to the grand banquet of eternity, a feast he has indeed prepared. We come to the Lord’s table in remembrance of him, but also in anticipation of Him.

Mom is seated at His table now, and we are all glad. Much of our joy is in our assurance that she is beyond pain, in perfect peace, reunited with her husband and her mother.

But I can tell you this, none of that means very much to her right now. Her true joy is to be in the presence of Christ himself. Her face shines with the radiance of his glory, more than Moses’ did when he saw a sliver of God’s back on Sinai. She can see all of it, and that’s all she wants to talk about, or will ever want to talk about. There is no gossip in heaven. There is no recrimination. There is only the glory of God, and the grace of God, and the peace of God.

We can scarcely comprehend this, and we project on heaven the limitations of our own flawed imagination. But Scripture assures us that at this moment she is in fact just like Jesus, because she can finally and truly see him as he is.

We know so very little about this, but one eyewitness, Paul, who was caught up into heaven, said later that he was determined to know nothing among us, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. In a single moment last Saturday mom understood more about the Shepherd and His Sacrifice than she accumulated in a life time of ministry or suffering.

Part of what she understood perfectly is that she does not sit at the table with the righteous because she was righteous, but because Christ is righteous and bore our sins in his body on the cross. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. She knew that. Now she understands it.

This fact is so amazing and humbling she may not even think about dad for a hundred years. She may not think about her pets ever.

In a single moment last Saturday mom understood how much greater her sin was than she imagined. Confronted with the glory of God, she cried, like Isaiah did, “Woe is me, for I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

And in that same instance she also understood complete forgiveness and overwhelming grace, grace that is greater than all our sins. She stood up on strong legs once again and then prostrated herself before the throne of God. It was a moment of intense, blinding, ecstatic glory.

If she ever slighted you, in that moment her love for you became as pure as Christ’s. If you ever slighted her, her forgiveness became as deep as her Lord’s. If she ever blessed you in any way, it was a mere shadow of the grace of God she now enjoys. Like Paul, she wants you to know nothing except Christ crucified and glorified.

And yet we are still here, clinging to our sin and anger and fear while a flood of grace is upon is.

This is the great depth of the still waters. We pause here and are awed. We confess our sin and cry Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts.

In this truth alone the oil of gladness runs down our cheeks and our cup runs over. If we get this, goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our life, and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

We will say with David, and with Mom:

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

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being led, 3

October 22, 2008

Excerpt from funeral message based on Psalm 23, part 3.

He leads us beside the still waters.

He also leads us through dark valleys. For mom this was the loss of loved ones, both physically and emotionally. Sacrifice and suffering are our lot, and we are not alone. But the truth is, we are led there.

This is a truth we often miss and seldom understand. Our shepherd is with us in these dark times, but he also led us there. He glorifies himself in our pain. We minister to others through our suffering, and because of it.

Dad once wrote a book about this, which the publisher called The Brighter Side. But I liked dad’s original title better. He called it the Blessings of Affliction. In this study of 2 Corinthians, dad says we cannot know the comfort of God if we do not suffer, nor can we comfort others. He says how we suffer is part of our heritage. And he points to 2 Corinthians 1:9 where Paul tells us “we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.”

We can look at mom’s life as a widow with many diseases, with all the emotional distresses she experienced and we can know that she was led there, and sustained there, by that great Shepherd of the flock, Christ himself. In leading her there, and in leading us there, we know the comfort of God and reveal the glory of God.

And yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for he is with me; his rod and his staff, they comfort me.

Thanks be to God.

I wish I could tell you mom faced this last great valley without fear, but I can’t. She grieved her own death in her own way and she worried about her children and her grandchildren, all of them. But she did so with a measure of grace and courage. She asked everyone who came in the room if they knew Jesus, and the last day she spoke at all she thanked those who turned her and bathed her, acts of simple faith in a faithful shepherd who led her beside still waters and through dark valleys.

And today she sits at the table he has prepared for her. What a joy and consolation.

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