Coming Up For Air

I'm rereading The Fifties by the late, great David Halberstam. Navigating the new prosperity in which Americans were awash early in that decade, Halberstam speaks to more than that point in time. He says, evaluating the allure of the next purchase that we tend to associate newness with perfection. He also sees a cultural transition still having an impact in the shift by which younger Americans willing to go into debt their parents avoided did so because they believed the future was now. How much faith do we implicitly put in that next purchase? How much hope do we invest in the comfort with which it will temporarily surround us? The deification of novelty is itself not new. Paul calls it out in his letter to the poor church at Philippi, in case his listeners are envying prosperity and beginning to believe that they suffer by comparison. The enemies of the cross of Christ, He begins as Philippians 3:18 concludes, are those whose God is their belly and whose glory is their shame, ...

"Let the house of Aaron now say, "His mercy endures forever." Psalm 118:3, New King James Version "I dare not shirk," declares Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass , "any part of myself." This includes, in the anthem of Scripture, the evidence of need for God's mercy in my life and in the lives of my forbearers. Who can demonstrate this better than Aaron from the resolved lips of his descendents? He and his line could have been forever marked by what Aaron tries to pass off as the happenstance by which the golden calf was formed. Yet, the Levites repented and were used in the purification of the Lord's work. By the alchemy of God's grace, the ashes of Aaronic repentance are turned to the imperishable gold that allows his heirs to declare God's glory to succeeding generations. What about us? Can we look at the weaknesses, even the depravity, of our historical forbearers and incorporate them as the base undergirding our worshipful assur...

Pat Conroy laments in Beach Music , "You think your childhood teaches you all the traps you need to worry about. But that's not how it works. Pain doesn't travel in straight lines. It circles back around and comes back to you. It's the circles that kill you." Thus, centuries before Conroy's justifiable wariness, the biblical believer gets a contrary heritage, a dueling nature that is more than a match for every reminder of our ancestral and present brokenness. Isaiah 54:17 voices this hereditary resilience, proclaiming, "No weapon formed against you still prosper and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn. This," he says to Conroy's awareness of perpetual vulnerability, "is the heritage of the servants of the Lord. Their righteousness," he veritably trumpets to the ages, "is in me, says the Lord." In his exquisite sermon on the verse, Charles Spurgeon calls this confession of reliance on the rig...

Yesterday I deviated from my introverted routine just enough to ask an acquaintance how he was doing as I passed him in the lunch crowd. That's all it took for him to pour forth the crisis he was going through. After what amounted to no more than a few minutes of listening and a suggestion that he write down his feelings toward impacted parties before acting on them, he thanked me. He thanked me specifically for noticing that he was going through difficulties and for asking about them. He must have mistaken me for Joseph from Genesis in the Bible. I've always admired the way in which this patriarch while still a young man looked beyond the injustices and impositions thrust upon him and noticed that others were troubled. I often revert to that Scripture when I admire a similar capacity God has given to other people in my contemporary sphere. Some empathize, and some don't. Some have a flypaper memory for other people's details, a phrase describing John F. Kennedy in Th...

A year ago contemplating the changes that would come with a new job, I read George Orwell's perception of the hotel kitchen in Down and Out in Paris and London . He wrote, ""Anyone coming into the basement for the first time would have thought himself in a den of maniacs. It was only later, when I understood the working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos." The job adjustment continues along lines similar to those Orwell described, although I would rather be circumspect on those details. Since impending adoptive, first-time parenthood of a 14-month-old in our own middle age is what's on the immediate horizon for my wife and myself, that is another area in which to see the truth in Orwell's perception. Anywhere adaptation is going to be required, it seems, we first see the chaos. We see what's different than the routine and the assumptions to which we have become accustomed, and there is at least some urge to panic and protest. Then, we persis...

Tim Keller's complaint in prayer was a good one. In Songs of Jesus , he pled in the devotional, "Lord, how easily I get shaken. Criticism, a sense of failure, changes and losses – all these things rattle me. Help me to live in the “kingdom that cannot be shaken“ (Hebrews 12:28). I'm not there yet. I don't have that indomitable perspective, and I want it more than ever. The state of my heart as reflected on my face is going to have a compounding impact worth so much more than the latest criticism, or failure, or changes, or losses now that my wife and I will be joining Team Parenthood. The child we have been privileged to raise won't be able to filter through the day's events to mine out the evidence of God's overarching goodness toward me. She hasn't my bulging file of the evidence of the faithfulness of God. She will experience life moment by moment, and very often my countenance will be an indicator to her of whether life as God allows it will provi...

Oh, satisfy us early with Your mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days! Psalm 90:14, New King James Version I was recently reviewing somebody's list of the best episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation . One of their choices was an encounter in which Captain Picard was dropped onto a strange planet with a representative of another species whose language he didn't understand. The other figure kept repeating a single mantra to Picard's frustration. Eventually, Picard figured out that the other being was orienting himself and trying to reach out in communication with his culture's basic storyline or metanarrative. Psalm 90:14 has been my version of this lately. It's the standard I first fly on social media, communicating outwardly and inwardly that it is my desire to be satisfied in Christ and for that satisfaction to change me. Where disaffection is already evident, and it usually is by the time I hit the floor each morning, this has been my sermon to my...

From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope, 2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. 3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is faith. 5 now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, 6 from which some have strayed and turned aside to idle talk, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm. 8  But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 9 knowing this: that the law is not made for the righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the unholy and the profane, for murderers of fathers and murderer...

From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope, 2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. 3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is faith. 5 now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, 6 from which some have strayed and turned aside to idle talk, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm. 8  But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 9 knowing this: that the law is not made for the righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the unholy and the profane, for murderers of fathers and...

From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope, 2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. 3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is faith. 5 now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, 6 from which some have strayed and turned aside to idle talk, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm. 8  But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 9 knowing this: that the law is not made for the righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the unholy and the profane, for murderers of fathers and...

From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope, 2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. 3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is faith. 5 now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, 6 from which some have strayed and turned aside to idle talk, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm. 8  But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 9 knowing this: that the law is not made for the righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the unholy and the profane, for murderers of fathers and...

From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope, 2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. 3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is faith. 5 now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, 6 from which some have strayed and turned aside to idle talk, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm. 8  But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 9 knowing this: that the law is not made for the righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the unholy and the profane, for murderers of fathers and...

"Do not keep silent, O God of my praise! For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful have opened against me; They have spoken against me with a lying tongue." Psalm 109:1-2, New King James Version "People in what feels like a hostile environment," discerns David Brooks in a New York Times editorial from September 1, 2017, "often reduce their many affiliations down to just one simple one, which they weaponize and defend to the hilt." Brooks sees this narrowing sense of self undermining a desirable consensus, and he's right. There is biblical benefit in being able to speak one another's dialect to build a sense of community in order for meaningful sharing of the Gospel to take place. Yet, the psalmist penning Psalm 109:1-2 under extreme duress helps us to see the benefit in the streamlining that Brooks describes. The psalmist reduces life to its essentials as he, in effect, weaponizes his most important identity as a person of prayer. ...

From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope, 2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. 3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is faith. 5 now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, 6 from which some have strayed and turned aside to idle talk, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm. 8  But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, 9 knowing this: that the law is not made for the righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the unholy and the profane, for murderers of fathers and murderer...