October 31
Happy Halloween.
Time for the annual link to Jim Jordan’s essay on re-thinking Halloween. If you don’t quite know what to do with the dire warnings about the evils of Halloween that are common in many Christian circles, read this. It’s not long.
We went to Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. There’s not much to say about it except that it is very clever and very funny. I am always impressed at the wide range of facial expression they can get from basically a lump of clay. Gromit has nothing but two eyeballs and a brow ridge, and with only that, the animators evoke some very subtle and nuanced expressions. How do they do that?
This is also a movie that will benefit from some stop-action viewing with a DVD. Every frame is packed with detail, and it just goes by too quickly to catch all the good stuff.
Busy week. Presbytery in Olathe Kansas Friday-Saturday, and I’m preaching at Zion on Sunday.
link to this post…
October 28
G. K. Chesteron in The Dumb Ox
“If salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” …. If the world grows too worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world. Therefore it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.
Our Adult Fellowship Community had a pot-luck social after church on Sunday. As a theme, the organizers chose “Pastor Appreciation Month” and contrived to surprise me with the honor, since part of my Associate duties at Zion put me in charge of AFC3. So during the meal, they had a projector running and showed some video of past events, such as the Red Green Show imitation we did at Zion in 1997 for the Spring Banquet, with yours truly as Red Green. Very silly. They also came up with a video of a project I worked on in 1997 for the Sacred Arts Council – Lincoln, The Tragic History of King Saul. I had the idea that Saul’s story contained all the elements of a good Elizabethan tragedy (the ruin of a good king, growing madness, a witch, a ghost, a climactic battle, a suicide…) so I set about to whip off some iambic pentameter and wright a play. We ended up producing “scenes from” and staged parts of Act 1, 2, and 5. From time to time I think about digging out that old script and actually finishing it.
But like the feller said, the difference between the dream and the reality is a deadline.
Thomas Nelson. “Entrusted with the Gospel. Indistinguishable from the World.”
Not only is this ghastly, it is even more frightening that there are Christians who actually think this is not a really really bad idea. Are you ALIGN ed?
link to this post…
October 27
Fall Back. My favorite morning is just a few days away.
Antony and Cleopatra is a hard play to endure, because there’s nobody to cheer for. Antony is a pathetic louse from the first page of the play, thoroughly ruined by his involvement with Cleopatra. Cleopatra is a spoiled brat of a queen, entirely selfish. That they both die is not felt as a loss. It strikes me that there is a lot of talk about “noble” thisguy and “honorable” thatone, all the while there is a complete absence of anything noble or honorable among any of them.
I guess maybe that’s the point. Ugh. We tremble at the judgment, I guess, and learn to despise the sin in ourselves that we recognize in others. God have mercy.
Two sides of the gospel
John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:35 The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.
From the human side, the gospel is the message of our salvation through God’s gift of his only Son. But from the divine side, the gospel is an expression of the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for the Father. Because the Father has from all eternity loved the Son and wants to glorify him, he gives all that is his to the Son. And because the Son has from all eternity loved the Father, he wants to glorify him, so he redeems the world and renders the kingdom back to the Father.
In that sense, the rest of us are just along for the ride.
I have recently noticed that some of these posts have been linked to from other blogs, which is not easy, since this blog isn’t done on a proper blog server that provides comments, links, and archives automatically. Anyway, to make life slightly easier for those who are interested, I now provide a link to the posts for a day. Copy the link to an email or a blog entry and it should take you to the top of the day you want:
link to this post…
October 26
There’s a new “Blogther” in the right-hand column on this page. Rich Bledsoe is one of those brainy coves with a size 14 hat and who eats lots of fish. He is a sometime contributor to an online discussion forum that I follow and has for many years been a pastor in Boulder Colorado. He has an astonishing ability to reflect profoundly on the dynamics of the church in society and the action of the gospel among sinful man. I’m always inclined to drop everything when I see a post from him to listen to what he has to say. On days when I think I understand him, I’m pretty sure I agree.
For instance, in today’s blog, Rich considers the prospects for a gospel renewal in post-Christian societies like Europe and Boulder, Colorado. Can these bones live?
I’m not exactly sure what Rich is doing nowadays. In the past year he has moved out of his pastoring role; he is working on a doctoral degree; he is still in Boulder; he is doing some city-wide ministry among the pastors of the city.
Well, he’s always an interesting read.
link to this post…
October 25
Not only are feminists laughable theologians, they are bad poets. A nice riff on neutering the church’s hymns here.
(of interest, perhaps, if your church still sings hymns …)
As the Roman Empire unraveled, the church became the new center of the social order. Kings and armies and cities and warlords and barbarians… the empire’s decay left widespread chaos, while the church was the only strong institution left standing.. That was generally a good thing. The church preserved learning and fostered social order, until eventually new nation states emerged.
But the church was able to bridge the gap only because it was basically united. Until the Great Schism in 1054, there was essentially One Church. But following 1054 and especially following the breakup of the Western Churches in the Protestant reformation of the 1500’s, the church has never been able to present itself in any useful sense as One.
Which makes me wonder what will happen as the American empire declines and falls apart. If things remain as they are, there will be no united church on hand to serve as the incubator for the next society. So when the current political order finally falls into chaos because of it’s sin against God, where will the church be?
High on our list of priorities should be finding a cure for our schismatic ways. We are so schismatic, it doesn’t even bother us. We are comfortable schismatics. We are proud sectarians. We consider separation a virtue instead of a scandal. At the first sign of trouble or disagreement, our impulse is to withdraw. “I just can’t fellowship under these conditions.”
Well excuse me, where’s that in the Bible? (Hint: it is not “come out of her my people” Rev 18.4) The New Testament has no notion of separating from the church in a city because of doctrinal differences or personal offense. In the Old Testament, there was always only one game in town. Even if the high priest was corrupt and the sacrifices perfunctory and the people wholly compromised, there was never any sense that God expected the remnant of the truly faithful to separate themselves and make a clean start somewhere else.
I don’t see how there can be any possibility of a unified church until we get the idea that God is pleased with the faithfulness of his remnant even as they remain in a church that has large unsolved problems.
link to this post…
October 24
Sahara If you don’t expect too much, you can have fun watching this movie. The premise is unbelievable, the action sequences are impossible, and the story is predictable. So just sit back and enjoy it already. Steve Zahn does a great job as the sidekick. If you enjoyed him as Lenny in That Thing You Do, you will be glad to see him again here. If you haven’t seen That Thing You Do, you should postpone Sahara, because you have an even bigger treat awaiting.
Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Silk Stockings … or whatever it was Sunday night on PBS. Very disappointing. We watched only part of it. Not only is the storytelling about as flat as it could be, but the story isn’t even part of the Conan Doyle corpus. Instead, the writers project some icky sexual deviancy crimes back into the Holmes setting where they just don’t fit. I kept hoping something would happen to redeem it, and was reluctantly ready to let it finish it’s hour until I discovered that it was a 2-hour show, and that settled it. No more.
About all you can say for Rupert Everett’s Holmes is that he is nice and tall.
Moonstruck. We had been watching Moonstruck when we stopped the tape (TCM letterbox) to look at the Sherlock Holmes thing. I really like Moonstruck. Every performance is spot on.
link to this post…
October 22
“Doré’s a Jolly Good Fellow …”
Well, a little more snooping around has shown me that Doré did more Bible illustration than I have in my set of 210. But the general dark and grotesque tone still prevails. Though that was characteristic of much of his illustration, not just his Bible works, so the point I was working on below is not as simple a one as I was trying to make it…
Gustave Doré was one of those incredible 19th century book illustrators whose work stands somewhere between serious art and the comic book. There are some very interesting online collections of the illustrators of that era; my favorite is Coconino Classics HERE…
Somewhere along the way, Doré did a series of Bible illustrations. A set of these came into my possession along with the miscellaneous material bundled on on of the first Bible CD-ROMs I bought. They are pretty low resolution, but still give you just enough to be interesting. I made a Flickr set of the 29 pictures for Genesis.
Now, I assume that my set includes all the pieces Doré did in his Bible illustrations. By that I mean that if instead of the 210 illustrations I have, Doré actually did 500, then my observations here are meaningless. But assuming I have the whole set, then the thing I wonder about is “why these choices?” If you decided to illustrate 29 moments in the narrative of Genesis, which 29 moments would you choose? Doré selects points in the narrative that heavily favor the dark and dramatic. (He would not have been happy working for Disney.) I mean, we have three pictures from the flood that include piles of the dead and dying outside the ark. God’s judgment on Adam and Eve PLUS the expulsion from the garden. Cain’s rejected sacrifice PLUS Cain standing over his slain brother. Noah’s curse of Canaan. Lot’s wife. Hagar and Ishmael sent away PLUS Hagar ready to die in the wilderness.
Well, these are an illustrator’s choices, not a theologian’s. The illustrator needs a dramatic, visually interesting scene, and God’s call to Abram in Genesis 12 probably doesn’t yield itself to an interesting visual composition. Surely if you lead with your theology, your art suffers. Think of the evangelical schlock that dominate the shelves at stores that used to be for Christian books, or the devotional Mary bric-a-brac on the Catholic side.
Nevertheless, one finishes the sequence of Doré’s illustrations with a definite feeling of darkness and heaviness that makes me wish Doré’s theological sense were as clear as his artistic vision.
link to this post…
October 21
I finally put up some pictures of recent events.
Anne’s vocal music concert last Saturday in Auburn.
Joe’s LHS marching band competition in Lincoln.
Neither set is much of a set, but it’s something.
Every church does a liturgy. The only question is, what kind will you do?
Dis church:
Dat church:
Minister: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
Minister: Good morning.
People: Amen
People: (mumble)
Minister: I was glad when they said unto me, We will go into the house of the LORD.
Minister: (smiling) Oh, let’s try that again. I said, “Good Morning!”
People: Good morning.
Minister: Let us humbly confess our sins unto Almighty God.
Minister: That’s better. Well, God has given us such a beautiful day,
(or: It’s great to see so many of you here in spite of the (cold, heat, rain, snow))
… and we just want to worship him together. So just forget about that Husker game for a while and let’s just worship the Lord together.
Charlie, what do you have for us this morning?
People: ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind In Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.
Minister: ALMIGHTY God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live, hath given power, and commandment, to his Ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the Absolution and Remission of their sins. He pardoneth and absolveth all those who truly repent, and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel. Wherefore let us beseech him to grant us true repentance, and his Holy Spirit, that those things may please him which we do at this present; and that the rest of our life hereafter may be pure and holy; so that at the last we may come to his eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Charlie: Well this is a new chorus the Lord gave me while I was (name of activity). Just listen the first time through.
I just hope Paul doesn’t screw up the PowerPoint slides…
People: (laughter)
Charlie: Listen to the words …
You just make me feel so wonderful
You just make me feel so wonderful
You just make me feel so wonderful
Wonderful
You’re Awesome.
Oh yeah
…
link to this post…
October 20
For all those whom I love who still think God doesn’t want the church to baptize the babies he gives us, the always-interesting Doug Wilson makes a nice point, which concludes thus:
The question for our baptistic brethren is this. Are you prepared to maintain that an infant brought to your congregation (formally and covenantally excluded) is in the same position as an infant brought to a believing synagogue in Jerusalem in AD 52? Not only would the believing synagogue not exclude such an infant, I believe that they would have difficulty even comprehending the concept of excluding the infants. And if there was such a generation-long uproar over the inclusion of the Gentiles, what would the commotion have been if the apostles really were teaching the Jews that not only must you start admitting the Gentile adults, but you must start excluding your own children? I have trouble believing that this would not have caused the Mother of all Theological Controversies. But there is not a word about such a controversy in the New Testament.
You may wish to read the whole thing.
Monday night I was miserable sick with a cold and fever. Very little sleep.
Tuesday did a lot of moaning and lying around. I did find a conference speaker among those on my iPod whose very even, low-energy speaking style combats wakefulness.
Wednesday I slept all morning and then decided to nap a good deal in the afternoon. I finally got up and showered and dressed and felt good enough to go do the Joyful Noiz thing. Next week is our last Wednesday, and then we’ll sing on Sunday October 30th.
Missing two days at work also meant that I was late seeing daughter Kate’s email request for some banking activity in Nebraska connected to her account in France. She’s tying to gather resources for some travel during their mid-term break. I kinda don’t think my trip to Wells Fargo this morning was in time for what she wanted. Bon chance, ma pauvre…
I think a good blog name would be Maison d’etre. (Did I already say that? Well, I still think it’s got a certain je ne sais quoi …
link to this post…
October 17
Busy weekend. Planning breakfast Saturday for the Children’s Christmas musical. Then Foodnet. Then out to see LHS band march in a competition. Saturday evening we went to Auburn to see daughter Anne’s students in her first concert with them.
I’ll put up some band and concert pictures tonight.
Sunday I preached in Omaha, had a picnic lunch with my sister at a nearby lake, and then stopped on the way home at the Holy Family Shrine off exit 432 (Gretna) between Lincoln and Omaha. It’s a beautiful building in a great setting. You can see it up on the hillside from the interstate. I’ve always wanted to take the time to go take a look. I keep wondering why it’s the Catholics who build such pretty places. I have a few photos in my Flickr pages.
Then we had a Session meeting from 4:00 to 8:30. I missed a flute recital I had planned to attend, which by all accounts was marvelous.
link to this post…
October 14
Son Joe is in the LHS production of Dracula, which opened last night. He plays the captain of the ship that Dracula takes from Transylvania to London, and his crew members die off mysteriously until only Joe remains. He dies on page 17.
It’s a pretty straightforward version of the tale, full of victims and screams and blood on the one hand, and wise Dr. Van Helsing with his garlic and crucifixes and spikes through the heart on the other. It certainly has only slight connections with Christian truth, but this story is possible only in a Christian world, what with the power of the cross over the evil one and the only way to free those who are under the power of the evil one is that they must die. Or something like that. I had a roommate in college who would scare himself silly watching vampire movies as a kid, and he told me seriously that it was a great encouragement to his childish faith when the vampire always had to fall away before the power of the cross.
In this post-everything world, however, the way we relate to the horror story has changed. I’m not sure we have the innocence required to consider the true horror of what it would mean to live in hopeless un-death, bound eternally to the devil. Or for that matter, I doubt that anyone in the audience last night paused to consider that such is the condition of all without Christ.
In other words, the main point of a good horror story is to scare the hell out of you. But I suspect these stories have now essentially lost that power.
link to this post…
October 12
A Winter’s Tale is one of the plays on Shakespeare’s “B” list. The king is overcome with a completely unjustified suspicion that his wife has been unfaithful with his best friend. His friend barely escapes with his life, the king takes his queen to trial, and in spite of the lack of any evidence, pronounces her guilty. She collapses and is pronounced dead. Her son the prince likewise dies. And the king sends away his infant daughter, whom he is convinced is not his issue, with instructions that she be exposed to the elements to die.
Then Time himself makes a wonderful cameo appearance, explaining that sixteen years have passed.
The infant daughter has been discovered and raised by some rustic shepherds and she happens to fall in love with the son of the king’s estranged friend. They elope (he being strictly forbidden to marry a (supposed) commoner), and are advised to seek refuge from his father’s wrath with the king, who has grieved mightily for his sins, lo these many years. The hopeful couple arrives, telling the king that all is forgiven with his old friend, and he receives them gladly.
But just here everything gets very interesting. The young man’s father has pursued the couple in his anger, and at this moment arrives, sending a messenger ahead to tell the king to have the couple arrested. At the same time, the old shepherd who raised the girl has been carrying around of chest containing tokens that will establish the girl’s true identity as daughter of the king. As one turns the page, one is prepared for a scene of many discoveries and astonishing reunions.
But Shakespeare didn’t write that scene. Instead, the whole reconciliation happens offstage and is reported by some guy who happened to be there to see, telling those who missed it, “Then you have lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of.”
No kidding.
My first reaction is “well Will, that’s an odd choice.” I mean, why not give the audience the scene they’ve all been waiting for?
I think Shakespeare had a dramatic problem, because his story has yet another climax and resolution to come. So if he puts the discovery of the Shepherd’s evidence, and the old friends’ reconciliation, and the blessing of the couple’s marriage right on the stage in front of us, then that will feel like the end of the play, and the second resolution yet to come will feel like a mere appendix. And what Shakespeare really wanted to give us was the full repentance, forgiveness and restoration between the king and his queen, because, you see, she didn’t *really* die at the trial, but has been living in seclusion all these years, waiting for Act V.
Well, like I said, it’s on the B list.
(But of course, even Shakespeare’s B list is pretty good.)
link to this post…
October 11
Thomas Howard is the brother of Elisabeth Elliot, whose husband was one of the missionaries martyred in Ecuador in 1956. Elisabeth has written a ton of books, had had a radio and speaking ministry for many years, and is highly regarded among evangelicals.
Her brother Thomas grew up in the same evangelical home. But he is famous for converting to Catholicism. I finally got a copy of his book Evangelical is Not Enough to see what his point is.
Chapter 1, in which the author recounts all the benefits and good things he received growing up in a faithful evangelical home. (So far, so good.)
Chapter 2, in which he observes that God has made us both spirit and flesh, and the evangelicals are wrongly suspicious of the physical, as evidenced by many things, such as their plain worship halls. (Yes, Thomas, no argument here.)
Chapter 3 in which he bemoans the reductionist worship in evangelical churches: the sermon is all, while the sacrament is normally absent. (Amen, Thomas, I’m with you.)
Chapter 4 in which he points out that the extemporary prayers of the evangelical are usually just as formulaic and repetitive as the composed prayers of the liturgical churches, only without the benefit of the forethought and purpose that go into the written prayers of the liturgy. (Right you are, Thomas.)
Chapter 5 in which he notes that the Bible says all generations will call Mary “blessed” and that she was the instrument of an absolutely mind-blowing act of God, which the evangelical is shy of contemplating. (Point taken, Thomas, but while you’re pointing at scripture, where’s the verse about praying to the saints?)
Chapter 6 in which he extols the richness of ritual and ceremony, properly observed. (Okay, now I’m with you again.)
Chapter 7 in which he argues that the sacrament of the table should be celebrated every week in the church. (No quarrel from me, Thomas.)
Chapter 8 in which he describes each stage of the Eucharistic Liturgy. (Generally I agree: there is a dramatic through-story to the well-tuned worship service.)
Chapter 9 in which he reviews the liturgical year, arguing that the observation of a church calendar is a good and helpful thing. (Uh, Thomas, you left out Mother’s Day and The Fourth of July (which are religiously observed in the evangelical churches) … ‘s’matter? ain’t you a Merrican?)
So the point of the book, as it’s subtitle suggests, is the Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament, which, as he urges, has much to commend it over against the bare bones “Good morning” liturgy of the typical evangelical church.
Okay, okay, Thomas, all very good. And I can see why you wouldn’t want to pitch your tents among the Episcopalians of the U.S. variety, what with their silly priestesses (of both genders). But you act as though the only solution is the Roman Catholic one, which means you have to swallow all those un-Biblical accretions: the immaculate conception, prayers to the saints, the whole Mary cult, the reservation of the host and all the idolatrous bowing to the bread …
Okay, I’m not among those who say the Roman Catholic denomination is a total loss, but it does have many deep problems in need of major reform. For anyone who is not already in that church to enter it from the Protestant side … Thomas, you need much stronger reasons than any you’ve described here. Besides, there are many evangelical churches of the reformed catholic variety that do a much better job with rich, liturgical worship than the churches of your youth. You write as though you’ve never heard of them.
I don’t get it at all.
link to this post…
October 10
Once a year in October, our senior pastor hosts an all-church Fall Fest at his acreage south of town. They have done some very nice updating to an old farmhouse; they have dogs, cats, geese, and some horses. There is a woodsy area, a barn and some old out buildings, a barnyard, and some open pasture. We eat, talk, the kids throw the football in the pasture and climb around in the barn. There is a bonfire and some singin’. Then we go home. There were probably 200 there last night. We park in an adjacent field, recently harvested.
Here are some pictures.
We made it to and fro Audubon Iowa for a wedding on Saturday afternoon. A pretty little town with a square. In the car, we read aloud from Encore Provence and thought of Kate. Joe stayed in Lincoln for an LHS band competition. Anne went to Crete with her students for All State choir auditions.
link to this post…
October 07
How to Catch a Mouse Without a Mousetrap….
Some people are just pretty darn clever.
Esquivalience.
If you look up the meaning of this word, you shouldn’t find it in any dictionary except the New Oxford American Dictionary whose editors put this bogus word in their dictionary as a copyright trap. The idea is that if “esquivalience” appears in other dictionaries, those dictionaries will have crossed the line between research and, well, theft.
Notice: The following blog piece will prove offensive only to those who actually need it.
To serve or to be served?
Once again news has reached my ears of someone who left Church A and is now attending Church B because the folks at Church A just weren’t loving enough. To such a person I say that I have known many of you over the years in churches A, B, and C and through the whole alphabet. So let me take this occasion to tell you a few things. I address the whole lot of you as one. This complaint about the church not being loving enough is very common and — lemme be uncharacteristically offensive here — completely phony.
You are a whiner. Now, I realize that by telling you this truth clearly and directly, you may very likely feel terribly offended and if you attend my church, you will probably feel inclined to leave and you will also feel justified in so doing. Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, but you know what? Big Loss. You would have left sooner or later anyway, because whiners are a takers, not givers, and therefore they will NEVER feel really at home in ANY church, because the the church is not about taking. Takers are constitutionally unable to fit in the church.
We are all born with an infinite capacity to be loved, and if you do not find that love first, last, and forever in the bloody pools at the foot of Jesus’ cross, you will CONSTANTLY be looking for it everywhere else. But you will never find *enough* of it anywhere else. Only God can love you infinitely, and you will always fail when you look away from him.
And so, at every church, you gradually discover that the people just aren’t friendly enough, or interested enough, or helpful enough, or kind enough, or patient enough, or sympathetic enough, and therefore your needs are not being met. You stay away for a few Sundays, and guess what, NO ONE CALLS you. Proof that they don’t care, right? And so you drift on to another church where they are friendly and welcoming — at first, anyway, because you are a newcomer.
But after a while, you don’t get involved in the life of that church either. You don’t start pouring out your life for others, and so you become a “high maintenance” person. You have your own needs that aren’t being met, while somehow you just can’t find the time or the opportunity or the “right fit” to start actually serving anybody else.
Please think about this: Jesus said that he did not come to be served, but to serve. And you and I are supposed to be transformed so that we are more and more like him. That means that more and more you and I don’t care about getting our needs met and being served, because more and more you and I are just too dang busy serving others.
So when you miss church for a few weeks and no one notices or calls? You know what that means? It means YOU HAVEN’T BEEN DOING ANYTHING that anyone misses. You weren’t helping in the office or cleaning the Sunday School rooms or helping with the sound system or singing in the choir or taking your turn in the nursery or volunteering on the nursing home team or working in the food pantry or making calls on the prayer chain or visiting with the evangelism team or writing emails to the missionaries or collecting materials for VBS or meeting with your weekly prayer group or visiting shut-ins, or the jail, or the city mission, or planning Sunday School socials or updating the church web site or making coffee or bringing treats for the kids or giving alms or visiting the widow and the orphan in their distress or anything at all. Nothing. Zero.
Well, I’m sorry. I really am. I wish I knew how to help you get plugged in and active and using your gifts and responding in obedience to fill the place where God has set you in the local church. Because there are lots of places in the church, but they are all shaped like servants, not like whiners.
Your whining is not the problem. You whining is a symptom. And the diagnosis is you have come not to serve, but to be served.
Well, … good luck at you new church.
link to this post…
October 06
Stopped Clocks.
Once in a while I smile when I pass someone on the street for whom the style clock stopped long ago. For one reason or another, this person got trapped in a style zone and just hasn’t cared to make any changes. I see evidence of style clock stoppage most often in hairstyle. So here’s a woman who is still doing the extreme stand-up bangs from the 80’s, or here’s a guy well into his sixties who is doing a ducktail. There’s a woman doing her hair like Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas. There’s a refugee from the sixties who has his long hair in a pony tail.
(I should talk about hair. I buzz mine as short as it will go, to match my cool bald spot.)
There’s nothing wrong with stopping the style clock. Hey, if it works for you, do it. Maybe you are doing your hair the way you did it when it really looked good at a really great time in your life. Go for it with my best wishes.
But another kind of stopped clock concerns me more: the brain clock stoppage. Also known as The Closed Mind. This can be relatively harmless, as in the case of a guy who heard a good answer once and has latched on to it, so that now, whenever the question arises, you can count on him to quote the same old answer. It may take the form of wit. Let someone complain about his Ford, and the guy will immediately say, “You know what ‘Ford’ stands for don’t you? ‘F.ix O.r R.epair D.aily.'” Topics of conversation are like buttons on a jukebox. You push the topic, he plays his song. Nothing new has been added for a long time.
Stopping clocks is high trouble theologically. Creeds and confessions were not produced to give final answers; they were generally aimed at defining one aspect of the truth against a schismatic or unsound doctrine that was current at the time. On the one hand, I will contend hotly that we do great harm to depreciate or discard the creeds. My own ordination vows bind me in a special way to the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. But on the other hand, I have no sympathy for the guy who chains his thinking to his creed and nails his brain to 1647 (or 451, or 787, or 1530), as if there were nothing else to learn and any new thinking is not only unnecessary but dangerous.
You can’t really stop the clock, and if you try, you may end up looking quite foolish.
For another take on this, see James Jordan on The Closing of the Calvinistic Mind.
Sign on a grocery store billboard: “Our Apples and Oranges Don’t Compare!”
link to this post…
October 05
I recently got a copy of Taming of the Shrew on the Arkangel Shakespeare label. I can’t speak for the whole series after listening to one play, but this is a very good audio production. It’s available on cassette tape or CD; I got the CD version and forthwith ripped it to MP3 for my iPod.
I have collected some of the other Shakespeare plays on audio through the years, and have 12 of the plays. The two main labels are BBC Radio (which also appears as BBC Modern Library?), and Caedmon, which is a division of Harper. These are both good series that I am happy to own, but they have been around for some time.
The Arkangel series is a fresh effort that offers all 38 plays, intended for libraries, but also sold to individuals. I saw some of the singles at Barnes and Noble.
Back to Shrew: this is a very good production. One thing about audio Shakespeare: what does the director do with music and sound effects? The Kenneth Branaugh Romeo and Juliet is liberally festooned with a score produced on a synthesizer that probably sounded pretty cool in it’s day. The Paul Scofield Midsummer Night’s Dream does some dreamy voice echo effects to distinguish the fairies from the mortals. Both of those plays are actually a bit harder to listen to because of those production extras. Adding FX is a chancy effort.
But this Shrew production has very nice acoustic guitar between scenes, plus door slams, horse snorts, fading footsteps and the like, all done with a careful touch. I also have enjoyed the choice of giving the Hortensio character a comic stutter. One of the challenges in an audio production is keeping track of which character is speaking, especially when the scene includes several speakers. This audible “costume” is a good idea.
Anyway, I’m very happy with it.
I put a new set on my Flicker account: pictures of Saint Cecilia’s in Omaha. I wish Presbyterians would build cool stuff like that.
link to this post…
October 03
Sister Peggy hit a milestone birthday last week and came to Lincoln from Texas to celebrate over the weekend. Sisters Marilyn and Martha planned the events.
In the photo above, I like the way the candle light bounces off the pearls in the necklace and the spoons in the rack on the wall. (I also like the way my camera takes pictures IN CANDLELIGHT.) The number of candles on the cake = the number of pearls in the birthday necklace she was made to wear, with the signification that “Peggy” = “Margaret” = “pearl.” (When Marilyn does a party, you don’t just wear a party hat — everything *means something.*)
The party included travels around town to places of historical significance, such as the house where we lived when we were all little kids, and the elementary school we attended.
I have short a photo set of the events on my Flickr account.
The Presbyteer 