Coming Up For Air

"Woe to Assyria, the rod of My anger and the staff in whose hand is My indignation." Isaiah 10:5 "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets has in these last days spoken to us by His Son…" Hebrews 1:1-2a Myth, says George Lucas, is always located just over the hill. So it is that God uses various people and stories, myths not in the sense of being untrue, to point to Himself. He kept the people of His covenant looking just over the hill for the revelation to come. In times of good kings, He showed them aspects of His forbearance. In times of correction, like the use to which He put the king of Assyria as referred to in Isaiah 10:5, He used human rulers to point to the ultimate reckoning before Him that was just over the hill. The opening of the Bible's book of Hebrews would keep us from making too much of these types. They are, as John the Baptist himself said, forerunners of the One, but they are not...

From 1 Corinthians 1 – 23 But we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. In the quest for the social ideal, C. S. Lewis admits in Mere Christianity , "Most of us are not really approaching the subject  in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party." To this kind of purposefully partial perspective, Paul thunders in 1 Corinthians 1:23-24. Christ's righteousness, His glorious reputation, confronts each society's sense of scandal. His Gospel calls for individuals to come out from that society, for the Jews to be willing to stumble over there pride of appearances on the way to Him, and for the Greeks to be able to embrace a faith they can't entirely reason out beforehand. What of us? Where do we approach Christ for neg...

From Philemon – 4 I thank my God, making mention of you always in my prayers, 5 hearing of your love and faith which you have toward the Lord Jesus and toward all the saints, 6 that the sharing of your faith may become effective by the acknowledgment of every good thing which is in you in Christ Jesus. 7 For we have great joy and consolation in your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed by you, brother. 8 therefore, though I may be very bold in Christ to command you what is fitting… On the television show Madam Secretary , the Secretary of State's husband has recently been asked to serve as an ethical advisor to the President of United States. In this role, he confronts the President's Chief of Staff for an unwillingness to convey ethical concerns to their mutual boss with full force. When the Chief of Staff assures him that the President is getting the message and takes offense, the ethical advisor redefines. "It's not WHAT you say, but how you ...

 "I love You, Lord, my strength." Psalm 18:1 “Gratitude is not something we give to God because he wants to make sure we know how much trouble he went to over us," distinguishes John Ortberg Jr. in When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box . Instead, he proclaims, "Gratitude is the gift God gives us that enables us to be blessed by all his other gifts, the way our taste buds enable us to enjoy the gift of food. Without gratitude, our lives degenerate into envy, dissatisfaction, and complaints, taking what we have for granted and always wanting more.” So it is, then, that a Psalm 18:1 state is a work of His grace. Without that perspective, needing and finding strength part from my own is disconcerting, even dis-embodying. I've been taken over, my flesh will rankle. Here I go again, my introspective measures will complain. Maybe soon, I aspire, I'll have built up the character to boast in my own brand. In place of that pride, the psalmist has le...

"Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" Esther 4:14b Separate observers in the Ken Burns Baseball series style Babe Ruth as a parade all by himself and as erupting like an Everest in Kansas. But before there was the Babe, there was the brother. When the boy George Herman Ruth was declared incorrigible and consigned to St. Mary's reform school, Burns relates that his family rarely visited him. His classmates derided him with pejorative labels. But then there was Brother Matthias. Ruth biographer Robert Creamer channels a little of the priest's apparent enthusiasm when describing him. Creamer says brother Matthias was a big, strapping Irishman whose skill at hitting a baseball with a shimmy stick seemed to inspire his young charge when little else in his life did. The priest seems to have been Ruth's first window on a sense of positive possibility. I doubt skill at and passion for baseball were laid out alongside poverty, ...

From Psalm 16 – 4 Their sorrows shall be multiplied who hasten after another god; Their drink offerings of blood I will not offer, nor take up their names on my lips. 5 O Lord, You are the portion of my inheritance and my cup; You maintain my lot. 6 the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; yes, I have a good inheritance. Sheryl Sandberg wrote in Option B of her husband's unexpected death in middle age, "While grief would have to run its course, my beliefs and actions could shape how quickly I moved through the void and where I ended up." The psalmist in that songbook's sixteenth chapter could identify with that future-focused resolve. He is grieved not by personal loss but by the indignity his God suffers as the humans made in His image pervert the religious instincts He placed within them. They hasten to other gods, he observes accurately. They drink offerings of blood and call them pleasing to God. He states fallenness as it is, but then he pivots in his...

From Titus 2 – 11 For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, 12 teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, 13 looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. Sweet regard and wonder, says Dante in The Divine Comedy , were the cause of holy thoughts. Just so, as Paul coaches Titus in the letter's second chapter what to deny and avoid, he doesn't stifle wonder, but feeds it. Look backward, Paul says in Titus 2:11, and focus your thoughts on the evidence of the grace of God you've already known. Look forward with the holy longing of Titus 2:13 to the blessed hope and glorious appearing of the eternal communion with Christ for which we were created. Even in the narrow scope of our own lives as Christians, we can with a Titus 2 focus, feed wonder. Honest reflection reminds us that the grace of God isn't an abstract conc...