I could use lots of excuses: Summer. Travel. Workload. Posting a lot of back issues of New Wineskins to its site.

All of them have contributed to my delay in posting here.

But behind all of them is the problem of where to go next. You see, in the table meditations I’ve been trying to write in an order roughly following the timeline of scripture, we’ve come to that part of the Story of God and us in which we’ve sinned, heinously, and God has again put us into exile from His house … and His presence and despite our pleas and penitence, His response is pretty much silence.

For four hundred years.

That means “where to go next” is to the gospels, and to begin the story of the new covenant and the promises and prophecies coming true at last. It’s daunting. It’s the challenge of telling the Story of God and us in present tense, and first person – and He now has a name: Jesus.

It’s everything that the first part of the Story has been building toward.

He is the answer after the silence; the answer to the pleas and penitence; the response to the heinous sins.

Give me a little more time to prepare, and we’ll put our heads down and launch forward into the next part of the Story.

After the Pharisees failed to trap Jesus in his words about paying taxes, their rivals the Sadducees had their turn:

“That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. ‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?’

Jesus replied, ‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.’

When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.” ~ Matthew 22:23-33

Sometimes I wonder if we are often in error – even though we may know the Scriptures – because we do not know the power of God. Nor do we even try very hard to comprehend it. So we’re certain about things like:

• “If a person dies before he’s baptized – even if he’s heard and believed and repented and confessed and is on the way to the church and is killed in a car wreck – he’s lost and forever damned.”

  Really? The God who held the sun still in the sky for a day can’t prevent or delay the death of someone who wants to be immersed into Christ before he can do so? The Son of God who stilled storms and calmed lakes can’t forgive a broken, desperate soul who recognizes His divinity … even if he’s being crucified a few arm’s-lengths away?

• “If a person doesn’t understand that she is being baptized for the remission of sins, her baptism counts for nothing and she is condemned to an eternity in hell.”

  Oh? The God who knows the number of hairs on our heads and the number of IQ points inside them and the teachings we have been barraged with – for better or worse – by folks with the best of intentions teaching us at our churches … that God can’t credit the belief of such a faithful one (as He did with Abraham) as righteousness … or at least the deep desire for it?

• “If God is love and is not willing that any should perish, then eventually He will save everyone.”

  Are you sure? Then, the God who obliterated all the evil tenants of the earth in a flood, ordered the herem-extermination of child-sacrificers, and whose Son spoke in no uncertain terms of the fates of those on His left and His right … they were just joshing? That there is only kindness and no severity to those who will not believe? That He is merciful, but not just; loving but not righteous? He doesn’t really have the power to be perfectly both? Because, as I understand it, it is impossible for Him to lie.

We could go on and on. (Many have.) If we did, we would probably still be arguing as much from our ignorance of Scriptures as of the power of God.

But I think we especially underestimate His power.

And that may help explain why we so seldom pray and let Him work through us as powerfully as Paul did:

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. ~ Ephesians 3:20

Norman William Brenton
September 24, 1926 – February 25, 1993
Brazil, Indiana and Indianapolis, Indiana
From his three children, read at his funeral:

In the two and a half weeks since Dad’s heart attack, we have often found ourselves commenting on his fine qualities: his kindness, dry sense of humor, love of children and people in general, his efficiency and thoroughness–meticulous and logical in all areas; his gentle spirit. In fact, the “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22-24 and the admonition of II Peter 1:5-8 to “add to your faith, virtue, etc.” were reflected in his life. Perhaps most often in our thoughts and conversations, the Beattitudes of Matthew 5 came to mind, especially verse 9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Certainly our Dad is a son of God.

– Linda

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Sometimes when things just don’t seem right and we see no good in them, we need to stop and remember that God works all things together for the good. In our lives we experience what the Bible calls trials and sufferings, but when we are children of God, we are to consider them great joy. My father loved people like no one else I knew, except for God himself. He will continue to live through those of us who knew him and those of us who learned from his faithfulness to God our Father, and from his patience toward everyone. I pray we all will be worthy, as he was, to see Jesus Christ. He suffers no pain and no sorrow. He’s with our Father in heaven and that makes me joyful.

– Christy

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My father gave me life, of course; but you may not know that on at least two occasions, he also saved my life.

One time, when I was about two years old, I had gotten hold of some hard candy, and had managed to get a piece of it stuck in my throat. Upon hearing me choke, Dad hauled me up by my feet and slapped my back until the candy was dislodged and I could breathe again.

Another time — when I was eight or nine, and we were on one of our vacation trips together — we parked on a lot overlooking Royal Gorge. The lot was marked off by big wooden posts threaded together by a chain. I hopped right over the chain, heading for a slope where some gorgeous quartz crystals had been dumped like fill dirt. The slope was about 45 degrees, and it ended in about thirty feet with a vertical drop of about a thousand feet to the Arkansas River below. The quartz crystals began to give way underneath me as I struggled back to the top. Dad started to vault the chain, too; but I yelled back “Don’t! The rocks won’t hold you.”

So, holding the chain in one hand, he stretched himself as far as he could and reached out to me with the other hand. I had to take the next couple of steps myself, but then I felt his hand grasp mine and he pulled me to safety.

Maybe Dad didn’t do anything that any father wouldn’t have done. But he taught me a powerful lesson through those two episodes. He taught me that God saves people in two ways.

One way is when you feel like you’ve been picked up and turned upside down and life is hitting you from behind. That’s God telling you there’s something stuck in your craw called sin and you’ve got to turn loose of it or it will kill you.

The other way God saves us is when he vaults the chain in the person of His Son and, holding firmly on with His hand of Justice, He stretches Himself as far as He can and reaches out to us with His hand of Compassion. We have to take the first few steps on our own; then we feel His hand grasp ours and pull us to safety.

– Keith

What if each one of us challenged our ministers and teachers to preach nothing but Christ and Him crucified for an entire year?

What might happen if our churches heard nothing but the pure, unadulterated gospel of Jesus the Savior for twelve months straight?

How many might come into a relationship – either for the first time, or an even closer one – with the God of grace through His only begotten Son and inspired by His Holy Spirit if their time of worship and learning revolved around the One whom the law and prophets anticipate, the gospels celebrate, the epistles inaugurate, and holy revelation consummates?

Suppose every message shared; every sermon delivered; every class taught came back to the life and death and resurrection of the Messiah who makes it possible for us to live again, too?

Would His presence in our assemblies become more tangible, more real, more perceptible?

Would His influence in our lives become more welcome, more obvious, more of a blessing?

I can’t make a challenge like this without being willing to take it up myself.

In 2009, I am resolved to blog nothing but Christ Jesus and Him crucified in this place. If what I write about here does not point to Him – directly or indirectly – it is not worth writing about here and I will not do it.

When I'm behind in my work – such as rewriting a 152-question online survey in a different scripting language.

When I'm behind in my work for New Wineskins' latest issue and The ZOE Group's newest album converted to high-quality downloadable MP3s.

When I have virtually no Internet access at home, and need to replace my worthless provider.

Or all of the above, which has been the case for the last several weeks.

Thanks for your concerns and prayers.

Sent from my iPhone

Imagine that you have been mentoring a new disciple of Christ. He/she has heard the good news about Jesus, believed on and gladly confessed His Sonship before others, truly and deeply turned away from a life of sin, and has been immersed through the waters of baptism into a new, Spirit-drenched life.

Imagine that this person asks you, “What are the next five steps in following Jesus?”

What do you say?

I seem to have two choices. Okay, there are a lot more choices for President, but among them only two men have a real chance to serve in that office.

I can vote for Barack Obama and pray fiercely that he will not enact laws that will make convenient abortion* more convenient while Christians are struggling to explain to a post-modern world why they believe it to be morally wrong.

I can vote for John McCain and pray fervently that he will not incite or perpetuate military action that will cause more wholesale death and destruction among lost people in other nations: men, women, children, babies.

Voting for either one, I will still need to pray with all my heart that a second Depression for our nation (and therefore, the world) will not be required to illuminate where true riches need to be sought, and that followers of Christ will still be up to the task of selling their possessions and seeing to it that no one is in need.

Okay, there are lots more issues at stake than these, and if you have read my blog for any length of time, you will know what else I will be praying for. And you can really boil most of it down, weed out the selfishness, and it would be: “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

So I will continue praying, right up to the moment that I pencil that dark splotch next to the name of a Presidential candidate and his running mate on November 4.

If you have any interest at all, right now I am not inclined to vote for John McCain. As President, he would be Commander-in-Chief of military forces which can be sent anywhere in the world at any hour of the day or night to do anything he orders, and Senator McCain has expressed an interest in – I am sorry to have to put it this way – attacking first and negotiating later. And while he might have an opportunity to appoint new members of the Supreme Court, this body has not heard a case in 35 years that has moved it to overturn Roe v. Wade, and its current cast of characters is relatively youthful.

I am inclined to vote for Barack Obama. As President, there is not a great deal that he could do on his own to worsen the existing deluge of women choosing to have abortions – not without the help of Congress, which should have its hands full investigating the nation’s economic meltdown and taking measures to keep it from getting worse. On this matter, Senator Obama’s plans seem to favor a greater number of disadvantaged Americans without relying only on the generosity of the insanely wealthy to voluntarily redistribute income by employing them, which corporate America seems loath to do.

Given the remarks of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan before the House of Representatives today, it is only astounding to some people that the reason a free market economy must have some legal, restraining factors is common, ordinary, anyone-can-have-it-rich-or-poor greed.

I know this pragmatic choice will offend many people, including many dear brothers and sisters in Christ – some of whom believe with all their hearts that there is one and only one issue upon which their vote must be based.

But, with all due respect to them, voting is only one choice and it is an easy one and it ultimately doesn’t really solve the question of rampant, convenient abortion. Solutions usually come as the result of really hard choices.

One really hard choice we are called to make is to reach out, gracefully explaining Christ’s selfless nature to women who would choose convenient abortion whether it is legal or not.

Another really hard choice we are called to make is supporting women who choose to keep their babies or to offer them for adoption – supporting them emotionally, spiritually and financially.

Still another really hard choice we are called to make is the one made by eleven couples at my home church, electing to serve as foster and adoptive parents for babies – many of them of a different race – which are born to mothers who might have otherwise chosen abortion.

Now those are hard choices – as well as pragmatic ones – and they make a difference.

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_{*I use the term “convenient abortion” to differentiate it from medically-necessary abortion – and even abortion resulting from rape, though there are those who have valiantly avoided the latter. Scripture does not anywhere suggest that any kind of abortion is the unforgiveable sin (after all, there are spontaneous abortions that no one chooses), and I have to suspect that God has good reasons for that. Abortion that is sought to avoid difficult consequences of foolish actions is what I define as “convenient” – and completely selfish.}

I must confess that I really like stories of the Yule season that are tainted with the bittersweet flavor of the macabre, much more than the sugar-saturated milk chocolate Santas of mainstream entertainment.

I can understand the self-absorbed, self-made miser who needs to be haunted by a departed partner and led to the cemetery that is the natural conclusion to his ungenerous life.

I can identify with the building and loan patron saint who has been robbed and defrauded, despondent and in need of rescue by a third-class angel sponsored by eerie-sounding disembodied friends.

I even like brief moments such as the glimpse of a huge Christmas tree in the background with a young wizard apprentice poignantly sitting mostly alone in the Great Hall of Hogwarts while his classmates go home for the holidays … the well-timed appearance of the holiday saint in the world of the wardrobe to give gifts that are weapons of war to children who will need them … the fall from the rooftop of the current jolly old elf and his subsequent demise, requiring the recruitment of a new one.

I’m especially fond of tales like the latter, old or new, of unlikely souls filling the shoes of a missing Santa.

So it was a foregone conclusion that I would enjoy Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (rentable at most Blockbuster locations), the 2006 made-for-British-television 189-minute two-parter. The story takes place on Discworld, which is a great flat stone of a planet, gliding through space on the backs of four elephants who are, in turn, on the back of the great sea turtle A’Tuin. That’s not particularly germane to the story, but serves to let you know that you are definitely elsewhere.

On Discworld, the pooled belief of its denizens can actually cause a real person to exist, personifying such concepts as Death, or the Bogeyman, or the Tooth Fairy. Dark forces have gone to the twin cities of Ankh-Morpork and have hired a professional assassin from the local guild to eliminate the local version of Father Christmas, who is known as the Hogfather. The assassin, Mr. Teatime (pronounced Tay-Ah-Tah-May), has an ingenious plan. His foil is Death – the classic Grim Reaper – who, while making his rounds on Hogswatch Eve, has become aware that the Hogfather is missing in action, due to the disbelief of children everywhere.

Death puts on the Hogfather’s empty red-and-white fur cloak and resumes making deliveries from the boar-driven sleigh -including a humorous public appearance or two. At the same time, he recruits his granddaughter-by-adoption Susan, to become a reluctant warrior in the pursuit of Teatime – operating in the one place where Death cannot go. Susan is a governess to two children who have reached the end of their faith in the Hogfather, but are perplexed that their imaginary fears have become quite real monsters in closets, which Susan has become skilled at dispatching with a hearth poker.

It requires the help of a thinking machine created by the bumbling wizards of the Unseen University to compute that the lack of faith in the existence of the Hogfather has been responsible for the surplus of belief creating unexpected monsters under the bed and bathroom elves and sock-eaters and oh-gods of hangovers. Ultimately, while Death is filling in for the Hogfather, it is up to Susan to stop Teatime and his employers, and rescue the swine-saint from nonexistence.

Absurd? Of course. But what incredible production values for a made-for-television miniseries!

And an incisive insight or two from a very humanist writer. (Though I completely disagree with his choice of words. What he calls the great lies – justice, for example – are in fact the great, though intangible, truths without which society cannot exist.)

In fact, I would say that most of the recruited Santa stories I like so much are based on the very humanist presumption that it is culturally necessary for a loving and generous Santa to exist; therefore, we have created him. And that within us is the innate ability to become that Santa when called to the task.

Which is, of course, completely backward from the truth: that there is a loving and generous God who exists; therefore, it was necessary for Him to create us … then to rescue us from our selfishness, not with an old saint who brings tangible gifts, but with an Infant Son in a manger who will bring eternal gifts to all who will take them and become them.

That’s the short version, to be sure.

Yet it’s not a stretch to say that the original Christmas story has that dark bittersweet flavor of truth. Some time after the Infant was born, an evil king learned of it through Magi and saw a threat to his throne, ordering the slaughter of all baby boys in Bethlehem. The path from the manger would lead to a cross – but it would not stop there.

The battle was engaged: the battle between self and selfless, between greed and generosity, between despondence and hope.

It continues, every moment, every year, every season – Halloween or All Saint’s Day; Dia de los Muertos or Christmas. And if there are not warriors, reluctant or willing, who will take up the spiritual hearth poker … then the great irony of Hogfather is that our planet will also become a world where assassination is a highly-respected, guilded profession.

Tonight is the last of the Obama/McCain presidential debates.

I wish I had thought of it sooner, but it occurred to me that I could probably have made a fortune earlier in the campaign by having these yard signs made up and selling them on eBay:

After all, why shouldn’t I have made some buckage off of unrepentant racists and mysoginists?

Our economy is faltering because it is based on two things that should balance each other: faith and greed.

They are out of balance because greed got the upper hand; because financial institutions preferred to go bankrupt rather than refinance loans that they should not have made in the first place. They had faith that they could satisfy their greed by making loans to people who could not repay them, and those people had faith in the economy to grow so that they could earn more and pay more on ballooning loans so they could satisfy their greed for a home they could not afford, and employers had faith that they could satisfy their greed by being more loyal to stockholders than they have been to their employees or even to their customers.

Now that faith has been betrayed – by nearly all of us – and the ripples have begun to spread outward from those assets dropping into the tank, and chaos is beginning to result from the interaction of the ripples.

Last week, the stock market plummeted.

Today, the stock market skyrocketed – probably as much because people saw the opportunity to satiate greed at good prices as it was the result of any decision or policy or rescue.

Neither movement fixed anything that was broken. And more chaotic undulations are likely before balance is regained.

There are many solid, Christian writers who have adequately pointed out where (that is, in Whom) we should have had our faith, and I won’t bother to echo their wisdom.

What’s important now is to decide where we go from here.

What’s important to realize is that nothing has essentially changed with regard to the basic, real assets that this nation and the world have at their disposal: energy, innovation, natural resources, manufacturing capability, skilled labor – and all of the other good things with which God blessed this unique planet.

I don’t agree with all of the observations and policies of John McCain (nor his opponent Barack Obama), but if this is what he meant when he said that the fundamentals of the economy are sound, I could not agree more.

But if those fundamentals are to include greed and self-interest completely unbalanced by faith in God’s providence and in each other, then things get out of whack and assets get dropped and economies tank and ripples collide.