Author Archives: Bo Grimes

Questions: Adam and Eve

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In his song “Could it Be,” Michael Card sings:  ”Could it be that questions tell us more than answers ever do?”  I often think so.  So I am starting a new category as a place marker for me to pose questions that I think can lead to interesting reflections.

First up:  What if Adam had told Eve not to eat the fruit and she had anyway?

It might be interesting to speculate on the outcomes, but I think it’s more interesting to speculate on the possibility.  I do not think this would have been possible.  I think in some mystical way that was lost after the Fall Adam and Eve were truly one.    It is important in today’s secular climate for Christians to remember that God instituted marriage before the Fall.

This is one reason why I believe the Catholic rational for marriage as a sacrament is not convincing.  Marriage was instituted before there was a need for sacraments.  All things were sacred.  Though I am Protestant and accept only two sacraments, even if one accepts the other 4 sacraments that Catholics have (not including marriage), I could not see the rational for including marriage.

One could argue that the other six–Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation, Penance, Anointing the Sick and Holy Orders–were instituted  ”by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.”  I don’t believe but two of them were, but God instituted marriage before there was any need for any “means of grace.”  God designed us for marriage and for families.

Before there was the need for a Savior, before there was a need for the Church, before there was a purpose for sacraments, when God and mankind dwelt in harmony and all things were sacred, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Marriage between a man and a woman was part of God’s original design for creation.  Had there never been a Fall, there would be no Baptism, but marriage would remain.  The most would could argue is that it is an attempted recovery of God’s original plan, but I’m not sure I would find that convincing.

Defending Polanski Badly

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In a  story this morning in “The Los Angeles Times,” Patrick Goldstein defends Roman Polanski on some empty specious grounds.  Basically he thinks that since it’s been so long, the victim has forgiven him, prisons are over-crowded, CA is having financial trouble, and Mr. Polanski has experienced tragedy in his life that he should be released.  He seeks to deflect anticipated criticism by saying ” In the coming weeks, the Polanski affair will no doubt become a tabloid sensation, with op-ed moralists, excitable bloggers and the Glenn Becks of the world noisily weighing in on the propriety of his possible prosecution.”

His own piece is exactly that, an excitable, noisy instance of op-ed moralism.  Comparing Polanski to Jean Valjean, Mr. Goldstein seeks to make a moral equivalence between stealing bread to feed one’s family and drugging a 13 year old with Champagne and Quaaludes before raping her. He offers only non sequiturs in Mr. Polanski’s defense. To take each in turn:

The tragic events that befall a person have no bearing on the disposition of the unrelated crimes he commits (e.g. his childhood and the murder of his wife). A victim’s forgiveness is a pure and wondrous thing, but for the public interest the state has an obligation to ensure that certain laws are enforced. Image a mother shot by her son. Her last words, said to a police office who arrives at the scene and said in the presence of multiple witnesses, are: “Please do not put my son in jail. I forgive him.” The state must still prosecute. Prison overcrowding is a real public policy and societal problem in need of a solution, but that solution must come primarily from legislation and it must be broad in scope as it addresses classes of crimes. One can not use it to argue for the non-prosecution of one specific case.

He considers the “real tragedy” in all of this to be that Polanski “will always, till his death, be snubbed and stalked and confronted by people who think the price he has already paid isn’t enough.” I do not think one can consider the consequences of fleeing from justice a “price” at all. Being snubbed and confronted isn’t even close to being a “real tragedy,” and I find it reprehensible that anyone can consider that not only comparable but somehow more substantial than the tragedy of being drugged and raped, even if the “real” victim is fortunate enough to be able to forgive and move on. But can we really expect more from someone who makes a moral comparison between a fictional petty thief and a real pederast and rapist?

If there is another tragedy involved in this at all, it is that a celebrity who drugs and rapes a minor can flee justice and have the media argue that this is not, now, worthy of prosecution when one of those poor people the media treats as rhetorical arguments rather than persons would have long, long ago been justly consigned to one of those over-crowded prisons, and not an inch of newsprint would have been wasted defending him. Is this what being a “watchdog” has come down to? Breathlessly lashing out at a DA in righteous indignation for prosecuting a rapist? Arguing that fleeing prosecution and staying free for years is payment enough because of snubbing?

Mr. Goldstein laments the fact that the DA doesn’t seem to have better things to do with his time. One might wish that reporters had better things to do with theirs.

Related Stories: Dodgy Old Men, Amy Davidson, “The New Yorker”

Stephanopoulos Blinked

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Rarely do the press actually ask President Obama any hard questions, but yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” George Stephanopoulos actually did.  He challenged President Obama’s support of the individual mandate within health reform legislation as a tax.  Obama was having none of it.  Here’s a relevant part of the transcript.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.

OBAMA: No. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.

People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy…

OBAMA: No, but — but, George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase. Any…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Here’s the…

OBAMA: What — what — if I — if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that’s not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don’t want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then…

STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no, but…

OBAMA: …what you’re saying is…

STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.

OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that.

Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…

It most certainty is a tax increase.  “The Wall Street Journal” has a good analysis of this, but rather than follow through Stephanopoulos pulled his punch.  The key part of the exchange was here:

OBAMA: George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.

At this point, Stephanopoulos should have said: “No, Mr. President.  The fact that I looked it up indicates that I am not just ‘making up the language,’ as you said,  but that I am using the word correctly.”  Instead Stephanopoulos blinked and put it off on Obama’s critics and gave the President an out that allowed him to once again mischaracterize his political opponents.

Related Stories: Obama’s Media Offensive, Karl Rove, “The Washington Post”

The Offering as Worship

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A Temple Talk on stewardship I gave today at church.

My talk this morning is on giving as an act of worship.  These talks are structured around Mark Allen Powell’s wonderful book: Giving To God, the first chapter of which is “An Act of Worship.”  I can’t recommend this book highly enough, but I don’t want to recite to you what he said; I want to tell you about my reaction to the first chapter and my interaction with God through it.

I do want to give you an organizing quote, though.  Powell writes: “The Sunday offering is a worship event that provides us with the opportunity for expressing our love to God in the purest way imaginable, by giving up something that we value.”  I’ll come back to that.

Some years ago, [my wife] was reading “Our State” magazine when she saw a photo of the NC mountains in fall that she just loved.  It was a shot across rolling hills full of vibrant wild flowers.  I researched the photographer, found his web site, scoured through his prints and couldn’t find it.  I called him.  He had only recently taken the photograph, and had never made prints for sale.  He made, framed, matted and sold me a 20 x 24 print and shipped it.  I gave it to [my wife] for Christmas, and she has the first and maybe only one.  She delighted in the receiving and I in the giving.  Both our lives were enriched.

When I read that quote, “The Sunday offering is a worship event that provides us with the opportunity for expressing our love to God in the purest way imaginable, by giving up something that we value,” I thought about that picture and how excited I get about giving gifts to those I love, but I hate to give money.  I stopped to talk to God about that.

I told Him, “That’s just it God.  We put everything in terms of money today, and it’s so boring.  I wish I had something precious to give you like the Magi or that picture I gave Kerri, but I have nothing you need.” Now, don’t go call the paddy wagon and send for a straight-jacket.  I don’t see burning bushes or hear voices, but at that moment I sensed God telling me: “But, Bo…I don’t need your money either.”

We don’t give to God because He needs what we have.  All we have is already His, and He wants to give us more.  Sacrificial giving as an act of worship is one of the ways in which God allows us to exchange rusty, moth-infested rubbish for treasure in heaven. Now, please don’t misunderstand me.  When Jesus told us to store up treasure in heaven He was by no means suggesting that we could earn our way in.  Just as with our family and friends we do not give gifts to earn another’s love; likewise, we are not earning anything by giving to God.

The offering is not a free market exchange process in which we exchange labor for pay and pay for goods and services. It’s an organic, ecological process of growth.  We are like potted plants that the master gardener is preparing for a special and beautiful place in a new creation He is planting, and giving as an act of worship is part of the process by which God nourishes and feeds us so that we may grow into a plant ready to be taken from the pot and deeply rooted in good soil.

In the tangible realm we are still part of the old decaying creation.  The blessings God has given us in this world are indeed good and useful for life, and love and re-creation, and we should offer thanks for them, but unless we want to become root bound in this pot of flesh we must cease clinging to those things which are impermanent and exchange them for permanent things.

We give gifts to our children that are appropriate to their maturity.  It is in the act of giving to God in worship that He matures us and enables us to put away childish things so that we can receive even greater things.  It’s as if He is continually taking us from smaller pots and putting us in larger ones.  The seed He planted in baptism He nurtures and cultivates and nourishes in worship, all of worship from thanksgiving and confession, praying and listening, eating and drinking, giving and serving.

When we cheerfully and freely give back to God what He has first given to us we are telling Him “I get it!”  It’s a humbling, joyful and hungering process.  It’s humbling because we first have to understand that we don’t deserve any of it, not even the most simple, essential gifts necessary to sustain physical life.  It’s joyful because once we understand that we deserve none of it we don’t have to struggle to earn any of it, because we know we can’t, and we don’t have to fight to keep any of it because…we know we can’t.  It’s hungering because once we’ve had a taste of God’s grace we want more, and we want it fully, in greater measure; we humbly and joyfully thirst for it like a deer panting for water.

In giving we grow to want the things we cannot earn but which we can keep, eternally.  We give to God not because we have anything He needs but because He has everything that we will ever need, in this world and the world to come. In giving we become imitators of Christ.  It is precisely through imitation that children learn and grow.  When we do not freely and cheerfully give we are not keeping anything from God; we are keeping God’s grace from fully maturing in ourselves.

And yet, we all know that the most precious gifts we have to offer are not tangible.  Imagine a relationship in which we never gave those we love our attention, approval, or affection.  But, being the frail creatures of the tangible world of sense that we are, when we freely and joyfully give tangible gifts to one another—be it a photograph, a hug or love note—we are able, by doing so, to also give them intangible gifts.

While the offering is not a sacrament it does share this in common with them: The offering is one of the worship events in which the tangible intersects with the intangible. In giving our tangible gifts to God as an act of worship we open ourselves to receive the intangible gifts of His grace and love, and in doing so we grow, we are transformed more and more into His likeness until we are ready to be taken from our pots and planted in a garden that will glorify Him.  Thanks be to Him to whom all glory is due, now and forever.  Amen.

Steyn on Kennedy (or Why I Tend to Be Non-Progressive)

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In general I would like to change the overall tenor of my blog away from the more polemical, reflections on the news-of-the-day, culture war sort, but something Mark Steyn recently wrote about Edward Kennedy summed up a lot of things for me.   Steyn is acerbic, clever and hilarious, the closest living writer we have to a Twain (in his journalism and travelogues (not fiction)).  I have debated with myself for years if an H.L. Mencken (whom I love though I don’t share his worldview) style of rhetoric and writing is appropriate for a Christian.  At one time I read a lot about Muggeridge, though I have only dipped into him, and have the sense that he may have pulled it off.

Steyn wrote: “If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular?”  While I really do find that I tend to adopt mediating political and theological positions, though that does not make me a moderate, I am a thorough orthodox Nicene Christian with strongly held beliefs, and though I dislike hubris on either side, I tend to believe political conservatism (for all its faults, failures and excesses) tends to do less harm to humanity.  Basically it’s a slower descent on the road to hell.

Steyn’s quote above nails it for me.  Progressives care deeply about the Poor, and less about the poor.  They are more concerned with Environmentalism than they are the environment.  They love Humanity and hate man.  Jesus Christ was the opposite.  His life and ministry showed an unparalleled concern for concrete humans, and His death showed that that deep care was extended to all Humanity.  This is the arrow of love–it moves from the particular to the general–and without that focus on the concrete, historical person before you; that is, our neighbor, we can not truly exhibit compassion for humanity.

We see this in 1 Timothy 3.  An overseer should be gentle, temperate, faithful, self-controlled and hospitable, among others, all qualities that relate to specific, real, tangible human beings we are in family or community with.  We find an awful lot in Scripture about how to treat persons and not so much about how to treat peoples.  We find almost exclusively teachings on how individuals should relate to individuals and how communities of faith should relate to individuals (e.g. Matthew 18:15-17).  I can not think of a teaching off-hand that deals with our responsibility to our neighbor, family or community mediated through the government, unless it’s Jesus’s teaching to reconcile with another before it lands in court, suggesting, at least, that judicial intervention is a valid and necessary, if undesired, process.

It’s interesting to me that Jesus, Paul and Peter all addressed our obligations to the government, especially when the government they were referring to would be intolerable to us today, as long as it wasn’t in conflict with our obligations to God.  Nowhere I am aware of do they delineate the obligations of government to the individual or the individual’s obligation to other individuals through the government.

Don’t get me wrong; I cherish representative democracy even if it is “the worst form of government except all those others” (Churchill) which contains the “seeds of its own destruction” (Robert Welch)[1], and ours is sliding into an insidious individualism with a destructive bent towards self-gratification and consumerism.  However, nothing we can do will remove the consequences of original sin.   When we try to “fix” problems, especially on a grand scale, we tend to make them worse–the more grand the proposed solution the less grand the outcome.

So, I tend to be generally more conservative politically and more radical (in the sense of the Sermon on the Mount, not French Revolution) personally. Conservatism should be about conservation (and I should say I tend to an older pre-Reagan conservatism, one that at one time would have embraced thinkers like Wendell Berry), and the best way to conserve is to plant.  If democracy does indeed contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction, as all human Babels must, then at least it takes longer for the weeds to flourish because there are just so many vibrant, beautiful plants growing.

Governments do indeed have positive roles to play; some problems (e.g. toxic waste, highways, defense, education) need resources, regulations and direct intervention, but governments deal with people in the aggregate and abstract, and this leads to care for Humanity and carelessness towards humans.  It creates a situation in which people can advocate for health care as a positive right while denying life to millions.  Medical treatment guaranteed to the sick by governmental legislation is not as  legitimate a function of government, if at all, than protecting the innocent or defending those who can not defend themselves.  Because the unborn have been abstracted to fetuses, we have decided they are not human and have no rights.  The first right a government should protect is the right to life.  Even liberty itself comes after that!

It is not progress to medically treat a person with the flu in the same hospital where an unborn baby is deprived of her life and where another baby is born and another is operated on in the womb.  (While most abortions are done in specialty “clinics,” there are still hundreds of hospitals that perform them, and even if they were not, it’s not progress to treat those who were born while killing others. The hospital was a useful, but unnecessary, comparison.)  Yes, of course, I think the conditions which drive some women to abortion need to be addressed.  That’s why we adopted two older, special needs children out of the public adoption system after they were removed from their mother.

Desipte what Obama said in his address before Congress on September 9th, don’t be fooled into thinking that if we get a national public option we won’t eventually get tax-payer funded abortions.  They already have them in Canada.

Render unto Caesar, but love your neighbor.

  1. No I am not a member of the John Birch Society and know very little about it [↩]

Quantum Sovereignty

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God is sovereign. Of this I have no doubt. I have no more doubt of it than I have that the Word of God is inerrant, but for me inerrancy is not a very useful word, and neither is sovereignty. Of course God is right, but do I understand His meaning? Of course God is sovereign, but do I truly understand what that means?

I do not question salvation by grace through faith or the authority of Scripture or even God’s sovereignty. It’s just that we are not saved by the doctrine of justification, so we are not saved by the doctrine of sovereignty or predestination or any other teaching. We are saved by the cross, not the doctrine of atonement.

God sovereignty is only one aspect of his nature. Scripture never says God is sovereign in the same way—the same grammatical construction—that it says “God is love.” An aspect of God’s nature is his sovereignty, his power. But his nature is love, and divine power is rooted in love.

God’s power is limited by his nature. He has no power to sin, and not just by some semantic twist of words whereby because he’s good everything he does is righteous. Doing flows out of being, God’s as well as man’s, and as God is, so he does, and he has not the power to do otherwise. What’s truly amazing about that is that God can not choose not to love.

God owes us nothing, indeed, but he couldn’t not love us. He has no more power not to love than I do to turn water into wine. In the reformed tradition they act as if what God does is right because he does it. What God does is right because he has no choice but to be who he is. He can’t not love us.

The reformed tradition puts demands on God. “Because I understand the Bible this way, God must be that way.” I have had people challenge my views with “if God is not supreme in all things is he worthy to be praised?” God is worthy to be praised, period. I will set no condition upon it.

But I believe sin has real power; it’s not just perceptual. I believe that the “law of sin and death” is every bit as real as the laws of physics. Sin causes. It has real world consequences apart from our perception. In other words, sin won’t disappear if we just look at it differently. It’s true that sometimes what we perceive as sin isn’t. It’s also true, however, that sin really exist. The power of sin and death is every bit as scriptural as sovereignty. Satan and sin have power in this world. Satan is called the “god of this world.” (1 Corinthians 4:4), and he has power.

Just as God is sovereign over the laws of nature, but does not often interfere with them (at least as far as we can tell), so the law of sin and death also operates as a real force in the natural world. God can and does intercede in nature with miracles, and He also intercedes in the law of sin and death through the redeeming work of His Son and transforming work of His Spirit.

However, just as He does not “cause each and every leaf to fall to the ground” (as Luther asserted) , so He does not cause each sin related event, such as abortion (which would make abortion part of His plan for the aborted child.)[1]

In the classic view of God’s sovereignty there can be no randomness whatsoever. Any randomness could result in an outcome that might lead to God losing control of the world, at least according to this view. That means that in a game of Russian Roulette God determines exactly when the single bullet stops spinning one chamber before the hammer. That means that for every deck of cards that has ever been shuffled, God has determined the order of the cards because many outcomes have rested upon the shuffle the deck of cards and the toss of a coin, outcomes God can not allow to be left to chance if He planned it all out from the beginning, down to the individual leaf.

For a long time, Newtonian mechanics was seen as a perfect explanation for how the universe works. Ultimately it began to break down, or rather, not break down so much as begin to show its incompleteness. Quantum mechanics replaced Newtonian mechanics with a more complete understanding of how the universe works, but it too is still incomplete.

I believe that the Medieval mindset conceived God’s sovereignty in a mechanical way, much like Newtonian physics. I think that it is incomplete, and I think it’s time for a shift to a more quantum understanding of God’s sovereignty.

Here’s a syllogism: Everything God wills is Good. Nothing happens outside His will. Therefore, everything is good.

Therefore what is there to be redeemed or restored? It make nonsense of the concept of redemption. Everything that has and will happen has happened or will happen according to His will. (Remember Luther, quoted above, there is no contingency, period.) Where is the need for redemption, for restoration, for re-creation? It’s all good. It’s our faulty perception of “accidents” that cause us to think otherwise, right?

We, of all beings, are made in His image. God gave us power, too. Does that mean that in some precious way he truly imbibed us with a degree of sovereignty? John 1:12 tells us this power is for all who believe. He has given us the power to be His children. This means we alone of all creation can also create because we alone are created in His likeness, and we alone are His children.

(Evil can not create. It can only destroy. Just as there can only be heat, and cold is the loss or absence of heat, but it still has a real experiential effect, so evil is the loss or absence of good. Evil is experienced by us a real, like cold, but it is not creative; it is destructive. That’s why Satan has the power of death but not life.)

The Reformed tradition limits God’s power and sovereignty. He planned it all out and made it happen exactly the way He intended so that not a single leaf falls to the ground without His decision, no randomness, no contingency? God is way more sovereign than that. Yes. That’s what I said. God is way more sovereign than that.

Why must an event only have meaning if it’s part of some plan? Why can’t the God of all creation, who created ex nihilo, daily create anew with the corrupted things of this world? Why can’t He create meaning from meaninglessness, create purpose from purposelessness, create sense from senselessness?

Rather than something having some purpose because it was part of a plan before the foundation of the world, why couldn’t God’s plan be to show His power and glory by taking what we, in our genuine freedom and power, destroyed and re-creating it.

So, I could die a perfectly senseless death tomorrow. I have no hope that I won’t. What I do have is the hope that if I do, God can take my death and give it meaning. God is able to build straight with the “crooked timber of humanity.” That crookedness is real, and not part of His will or plan, but He can take it and make it something new. For me, this is what it means for Him to be Creator God. His creation wasn’t over on the sixth day.

In John 5:17 ” Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working.’” My Father is working… working? What reason? It was all done on the 6th day. There is no contingency. There are no accidents. It’s all part of a plan.

It seems clear to me that after the Fall He went back to work re-creating.

Before the creation of the world there was nothing. God created. After the Fall, dare I say it, there was nihilism. That is Satan’s goal, to take the meaning out of creation in the same way making something cold is really taking the heat out of it. God’s power is such that He can create as well out of nihilism as he can out of nothing. That is the redemption of the world, a redemption and restoration out of nihilism.

We don’t grasp God’s sovereignty fully because we don’t grasp the Fall fully. The Fall was absolute and total. It was an authentic act of freedom by those created in the image of the Creator. It had real consequences, and still does as the law of sin and death is at work, but Creator God can manifest His sovereignty and power by creating life from death.

Quantum sovereignty!

I fear I belabor this point, but imagine this. God is the Potter. Made in His image, His plan was for us to be potters, creating alongside Him, with Him and through Him. He gave us the freedom and power, though, to create on our own. It was necessary if we were to be made in His image. We did, and we botched it, badly. Each of us makes a mess of our earthly vessel, but when we offer it to God He doesn’t fix it; He re-creates it as it should have been all along, as if we had never botched it.

Quantum Sovereignty!

God can give us true and real power, freedom and control because it is impossible for us to do anything which He does not have the power to redeem. It’s OK for us to really have the power to do things against His will even if it’s not right when we do because He is so sovereign that he can weave His purpose from randomness, accident, sin, error, mistake and disobedience.

One reason our faith is weak is that we image that God does everything (no contingency, no randomness). What if there is nihilism? That too is what is being redeemed. Why is the thought that God has “made us little lower than the heavenly being and crowned us with glory and honor” so scary. Is it because that would mean we bear eternal responsibility?

The Bible is full of talk of God’s plans, purposes and will as though they are distinct. Why can’t he create the structures, both physical and spiritual, whereby His ultimate redemption of the world works as planned without Him dictating which kid dies getting on a school bus?

  1. “[W]ith God there simply is no contingency, but it is only in our eyes. For not even the leaf of a tree falls to the ground without the will of the Father.” Lectures on Romans, Works Vol. 25, p. 373 [↩]

Congressmen: Help Us to Help You

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Years ago talk of term limits was all the rage when discussing the restoration of American democracy.  I think it’s time to bring such talk back.  Much of the current economic crisis can be laid at the steps of the Capitol building, but we keep electing them over and over.

Just this morning on the way to take the kids to school I heard on NPR that Obama  is definitely going to nominate NH senator Judd Gregg as commerce secretary.  Of course this speculation has been in the news and the hold up was that Gregg did not want his seat to go to a democrat.  Apparently they worked out a deal because both NRP and the AP are reporting this morning that:

Nevertheless, it’s all but certain Lynch will choose a Republican, probably Bonnie Newman. She is a veteran of the Reagan White House who served as Gregg’s chief of staff during his House tenure. Under such a plan, Newman would not run in the 2010 election for the Senate seat. [emphasis added]

NPR added that the reason Newman would not run in 2010 was so that a democrat would have a chance!

If incumbency is such a powerful force that in 2 years time a person would have a lock on a seat–which is basically what happens each time a new person is elected to the House–then we have a problem, and that problem must be part of the nature of democratic elections.

Perhaps there’s some political mechanism embedded into the very structure of democratic elections the way certain people have biological mechanisms which predispose them to addictions.  I don’t know, but it is a political fact that elections advantage the incumbent.

It’s also self-evident that the temptations inherent in power are so strong that few are ever able to resist them for long.  From Richardson to Geithner to Daschle it is clear that we won’t have change in this administration; we won’t have reform.

We can’t because just as the addict becomes controlled by his addiction the politician becomes controlled by a self-interest to remain in power.

Meanwhile, we have Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger who safely crash lands–or should that be crash floats?–a plane into the Hudson and then calls the library to tell them he can’t return the book on professional ethics he had borrowed.

That’s the kind of person we need in office, but it would be wrong to leave him there long.   Human nature is such that no one can avoid corruption, even in a decent and well-structured system.

Many of our elected representatives are honorable, decent women and men who go into politics with a genuine and noble desire to serve the people.  We owe them gratitude and honor (in the same way we owe it to the men and women in uniform), but we rarely give it because they overstay their welcome.  But, just like those who go into combat need respite and relief–and still will never fully heal emotionally and spiritually even if they are never wounded–so our elected representatives need to be helped by relieving them of the temptation to power.

Someone who day after day exposes himself to a toxin for the good of others can not walk away if that toxin is compelling and addictive.  George Washington was able to do it, but he was the exception who proves the rule.  The rest of them need our help.  They can not do it themselves.

We need a Constitution amendment.  Congress has to propose it.  “Ay, there’s the rub.” They have to commit political suicide, and just like with Hamlet it may be  “a consummation Devoutly to be wished,” but the dreams that may come when they have shuffled off their political coils give them pause.  And so, “That makes calamity of so long a [political]  life.”

There must be enough of a grassroots outcry that they are forced to deal with their addiction.  We need a national intervention for their sake and ours.

Greatest Salesman in the World?

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There’s a story in “The Washington Post” this morning about President Obama’s meeting with House Republicans yesterday.

As the president met with House Republicans yesterday in the Capitol basement, Rep. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) got out his BlackBerry and started to Twitter. “President Obama is speaking to House Republicans right now on Democratic stimulus bill,” he wrote on the social networking Web site. “Good salesman, bad product.”

Flake, stopped in a basement corridor as he departed the room, expanded on his Twitter report. “He’s reaching out, he’s genuine about it,” he said of the new president, but “it’s like trying to sell a Ford Pinto.”

That’s an apt description.  Obama is an exceptional salesman pushing a horrible product and millions are lining up to buy it.  In politics, the losing side is always claiming that they didn’t do a very good job of communicating their message.  It never seems to occur to anyone that we understood the message loud and clear; we’re just not buying.

That’s because in our over-commercialized society we believe everything is about sales.  I can’t count the times in my life when I mentioned to others that I am not interested in Sales and they say something to the effect that “Everything is Sales.”

Some years back I got into a heated debate with a friend in Sales who told me that if a product failed it was the fault of the Sales team.  I agreed that it could be but that it didn’t have to be.  VCRs didn’t die out because of an ineffective marketing strategy, for example.  In fact, VHS beat Beta in the video format war for a variety of reasons, some having to do with marketing strategy, but it wasn’t marketing that caused VHS to decline; it was for the same reason you don’t see buggy whip factories anymore: Obsolesce.

Superior salesmanship will only bolster a bad product for so long.  In our everything-is-sales world there is a phenomena that doesn’t fit.  It’s like “the structures of scientific revolutions” in which anomalies that don’t fit the model add up and eventually lead to a paradigm shift.  How do we account for the fact that sometimes growth happens with bad salesmanship?

While there is much that is useful in the various movements that help church growth using more modern techniques, the church is in desperate need of a paradign shift.  The Gospel never becomes obsolete, and it’s not a product to be sold.  It is a relationship to be lived.

Witness John the Baptist.  People flocked to this gaunt, bearded, wild looking man of the desert dressed in camel hair.  What was his message? “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.” (Matt 3:2)  He goes on to say in Matt 3:11-12  “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Speaking of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, the Messiah, not the Great Salesman, what was His message?  In Luke 14: 26-27 Jesus proclaims “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Whoever does not hate his family can not be my disciple!  Whoever doesn’t carry his cross—keeping in mind that in the context of Roman occupation, this meant going to your death—whoever does not carry his cross can not be my disciple!  Whoever doesn’t give up all of his possessions can not be my disciple! (14:33)  Give up the things you love, the people you love and go die.

No wonder G.K. Chesterton once observed that “Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and left untried.”  Give up the things you love, the people you love and go die.   Maybe we should put that on our marquee and watch the crowds come pouring in.

But the thing is, if we take a look at the verse before all this (14:25) we find: “Now large crowds were traveling with him.”  This is a jarring incongruity to the modern media and market driven mind.  Can you imagine a Nike campaign that said “Our latest shoe will pinch your toes, rub your heels and cost a lot of money”?  No one would buy it, and yet people flocked to Jesus.

What was Jesus offering that was so good that people wanted to follow Him if that was His message?  He was offering them nothing less than Himself.  They wanted to be near Him.  They wanted to hear Him.  And they wanted to be like Him.

In the words of Bruce Carroll: “Wounded people everywhere, and when they look at us, do they see Jesus there? Who Will be Jesus to them? Who’ll show the love that restores them again?”

Let us not forget that it was through a rag-tag band of fishermen, tax collectors, lowly outcasts that Jesus changed the world, not a crew of highly trained executive account managers and salesmen.

Obama can pitch a bad product with style and poise, charisma and charm.  Let the Church keep pitching a Carpenter for King no matter how awkward, ugly, incompetent and old fashioned we may be.

Obects of History

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Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked On-Line, wrote what is probably the most perceptive essay on the Obama phenomena that I have seen:

So there was a dual historic element to the inauguration: there was the real history of it, but more powerfully still there was the projection of a yearning for history on to it, the semi-official and on-the-ground transformation of the inauguration into a clear, unambiguous, internationally recognisable dividing line between then and now, between the old cynical order and something new, between who we were yesterday and who we are today. Ironically, this intense Historification of the inauguration, driven by people’s desire for a sense of purposeful destiny, ended up exposing the absence of genuine history-making today. In the past, people tended to tell stories about what they did during major historic events (as captured in the age-old question ‘What did you do in the war, daddy?’), while the question of ‘where were you?’ was confined to one-off, freak occurrences that took us by surprise (‘Where were you when Kennedy was shot? When Diana died?’). Today, the rush to ‘participate’ in Obama’s inauguration simply to say ‘I was there’ captures the view of history as something that we observe, something that is done on our behalf by other people, something we can be at but not really part of.

Indeed, watching the inauguration yesterday – both the historic and Historic versions – one could be forgiven for forgetting that it was the American people themselves who made this event happen. Increasingly, Obama is discussed not as someone who was elected by the masses, mandated to govern the United States, but as someone who ‘arrived’, who ‘came’, who ‘emerged when we most needed him’. As Maya Angelou put it, ‘And out of [our] great need, I believe he came. Barack Obama came’. There is a religious twist to this view of Obama ‘coming’, and it also strikingly reveals the absence of, or at least the weakness of, a sense of human agency in the Obama phenomenon. The inauguration confirmed both that millions of people want meaningful change but also that they feel incapable of bringing such change about – so they invest all of their hopes and aspirations on to one man instead; one man who, as a woman in DC said when interviewed by a journalist on what Obama should do next, is expected to ‘do everything’. Fundamentally, and contradictorily, Obama represents both people’s urgent and positive desire for a new way of governing, and also their feeling of atomisation, their sense of being the objects rather than the subjects of history.