Rewriting History

      For 25 years I’ve wondered what the Speedway class of 1976 put in their time capsule at the town hall.   What did that class intentionally try to remember?  If I’m alive in 2026, when they plan to open the capsule on our nation’s 250^th anniversary, I want to watch.   A generation’s collective memory is a holy thing.

      Thomas Jefferson’s declining health prevented him from attending the 50^th anniversary of his Declaration of Independence. In fact, by July 1, 1826 he was on what would be his deathbed.  Nevertheless, he rousted himself to receive Henry Lee, whose father had written a popular memoir critical of Jefferson. 

      The younger Lee had told the former president that he’d like to issue another addition of his Father’s memoirs, revising some parts that were objectionable to Jefferson if the ailing man could provide additional documentation. 

     Jefferson desperately wanted to get his version of events to the public.  Chief Justice, John Marshall, who had exclusive access to George Washington’s papers, had written a history of the Revolution which Jefferson believed drew the wrong moral and political conclusions.  Getting the history of the American Revolution retold was foremost in the dying president’s mind, so  with only three days to live, the sage of Monticello spent several of his last coherent hours trying to rewrite history.

      That’s what healthy people do.  

      Folks who are growing older need to tell their story in order to make sense of the present.  From the distance of fifty years the class of 1976 will be able to see how much of what occupied their time around the bicentennial ended up being trivial, while other barely noticed events will now loom large.  That’s not “Revisionist history,” or “playing loose with the facts.” It is in such retelling of stories that we acquire wisdom.

     One thing is for sure, if there is no such thing as transcendent Wisdom to be discovered, then all our story-telling is just a cynical attempt to selfishly edit other people’s memory.

Pretext

      One of the treasures of having lived in Speedway over the last 25 years has been the opportunity to reflect with Professor Gerald Janzen, a brilliant Anglican scholar from Canada, who has been a fixture at Christian Theological Seminary for years.

      In his commentary on Exodus Janzen tells the story of his teenage son coming down to the kitchen late one morning, groggy from too much sleep. The youngster opened the refrigerator and started complaining about why there was never anything for breakfast.  When told that it was nearly lunch time, he returned to the fridge and replied,

     “Oh, well, I will look again under a different pretext.”

      When the Israelites found themselves victims of oppression in Egypt, they began crying out for help.  But the fertility god of their nomadic ancestors didn’t seem relevant to their new situation in a sophisticated, beaurocratic state.  Wanting a liberator, Israel felt it had outgrown the God of nursemaids.

      A similar experience has befallen many Americans.  Recently I spoke with Krista Tippet, now the host of the religious National Public Radio program, On Being.  She says that at one time the God of her rural Oklahoma upbringing made no sense to her.  Many Americans, likewise, have closed the refrigerator door on Christianity because it is not serving up their kind of breakfast.

      God’s response in such situations is to reveal himself as Yahweh, which means “I will be who I will be.”  It turns out the God of ancestral tradition was much broader than what Israel’s assumptions about God had allowed.   God was free to defeat Pharaoh and send bread from heaven, which the Israelites needed, but which they had not yet learned to crave.  Yet, this God of self-sustaining Fire refuses to be carved, in the image of his people’s breakfast appetites. 

       God’s invitation is for us to open the door again to ancestral Wisdom, this time under a different pretext. We may discover in that storehouse what our grandparents once saw, and experience with surprising freshness, that it is now time for a heavenly lunch for which we thought we were not looking.

Dunkirk Moments

     I made the mistake of subjecting my wife’s poor ears to the IMAX version of the movie, Dunkirk last week.  The background music, more than the German bombing, left us both rattled.   I think I’ll enjoy this movie of the British escape in 1940 more on DVD with reduced volume and the subtitles.

      Movie watchers my age grew up accustomed to historical features assuring us of the story’s wider historical background and significance for future generations.  Times have changed.

      In fact, Dunkirk’s strength is the way it thrusts the viewer into the immediate time of three separate stories: a week-long attempt of a British soldier to escape France, a day-long effort of a fishing boat owner to rescue drowning troops, and a one-hour flight of an RAF pilot trying to cover the withdrawal.  All of these characters choose to sacrifice themselves without any assurance that their efforts will do any good.

      Like Gary Cooper in High Noon, characters in Dunkirk have legitimate excuses to do nothing; nevertheless, they make dangerously sacrificial decisions in real time.  Fishermen are not obligated to go with their civilian crafts into a war zone.  Pilots are even ordered to turn back before their gas reserves expire. Nevertheless, pilots choose to die or be captured rather than leave hundreds unprotected.  A blind man, who would be exempted from service by all, nevertheless insists on being at the docks to greet returning soldiers with a blanket.

     Such courage is not lost on us here in Speedway.  Saturday I watched a man fall unconscious as his van narrowly missed one pedestrian, crashing at high speed through a concrete block garage.  Within a minute there were a dozen people trying to care for him and give comfort to his passenger granddaughter.

     People congregate at accidents because they sense a spiritual need to help in a way that transcends themselves. There is a profound urge to matter to others.  Often the tragedy at such scenes is that folks, who want to help, seem insensible to the spiritual and emotional emergencies going on all the time.  It doesn’t require a war, flood or accident to seize moments in which to give ourselves to our neighbor.

Dreamer's Prayer

Oh Father of the alien and stranger,

we confess that we often act as insular bunches of home boys,

Fearful and protective of what we pretend is our turf.

Comfort us as we receive and practice the forgiveness of sins,

welcoming the gifts of others

in holy fear for our souls.

Oh Christ, victor over evil in high office,

we confess aged resentments over systems that favor the proud

subsidize evil, and addict those disadvantaged at birth.

Redeem us from Pharaoh’s wisdom

that we may serve in the power of your weakness

With loving patience—full of hope.

Oh Spirit of power, love and self-discipline,

we confess that we are often timid young girls,

fearful of not belonging, vainly trying to prove our worth.

Forgive those with social power over us

that we may be truly free from sin, doing your will

until all knees bow in but one shared home.

She Took My Hand

    

   Twenty-year-old, Alexis Fulbright, had more to complain about than most.  I preached her premature funeral a year ago.  But recently I found a note about her I’d recorded seven years previously.  I wrote that I was nervous, but suspected it was one of those "now or never" moments when I needed to be bold.  So, I reached across the pew and offered Alexis my hand…

    At age 14 she was a beautiful, yet smaller than her younger sisters, who did not have cystic fibrosis. Periodically Alexis’ lungs filled up.  She became susceptible to the infections that eventually took her from us. Yet, her ill-health made it easier for her to pay better attention to the story of creation than other kids. 

      The story goes that God formed Eden as a small temple compound where life could thrive.  Outside it was scorching barrenness and surging breakers of death. Yet, God erected floodgates that put limits beyond which such chaos could not travel. Still, these forces seemed maddeningly resurgent; so much so that Hebrews 2:8 says, “presently we do not see everything subject to [God]."

     Biblical creationism would not have us boast that "everything happens for a reason." Cystic fibrosis is not part of God’s inscrutable eternal plan.  Insurance companies are wrong to call natural disasters "acts of God.” The floodwaters of the Sea do their damage in defiance of God's creative will. The scholar, Jon Levenson, says that scripture never explains why evil exists; evil just needs "blasted."     

     We are tempted to speculate about why God allows injustice to persist, but these partial answers will be unsatisfying until we remember we are only in the middle of the story of creation. The story ends with death, itself, destroyed in the lake of fire.  One day there will be no more reckless Sea. Injustice will get blasted. God will make evils like cystic fibrosis right.        

      And so, I tell you that it was no small joy that as I began thanking God for his resurrection victory over death, young Alexis reached up and took my hand.  And God saw that this was good.

Love's Secret is Secret Love

      A couple weeks ago I shared that while I recently fixed my neighbor’s fence, I still needed prayers about my learning to enjoy doing so. 

      Somebody took up that prayer challenge, because when I went back to my house a week later, I discovered that the sidewalk on my side of the fence had been carefully weeded.  Somebody blessed me in a far bigger way than I had blessed my neighbor!

       This is the secret to freely loving others.  Rather than feeling cheated, we experience ourselves as a recipient of even greater love.  Jesus says that he who thinks he “has been forgiven little, loves little." But the person, forgiven much, loves much.  “We love because he first loved us.”

        The problem is that a lot of us have not known anything but counterfeit love.  In Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, the religious leaders of a school for orphans so mistreat orphan Jane that it’s obvious they don’t care about Jane as much as they do about appearing benevolent in front of potential donors.  Real love isn’t attention seeking, like this. Love is not a come on.  It’s not always a fundraiser.  It doesn’t want anything in return.  Love weeds our yard anonymously.

      The story of our age is one of loved-starved people trying to be nice in order to get other love-starved people to love them. But this isn’t love.  It’s manipulation.  The genius of Bronte’s novel is that it shows those of us, who have been scarred by manipulation, that we are not respecting ourselves by continuing to seek love in the wrong places.  We can be filled up by God’s love so we escape neediness and stop making manipulative demands of already depleted people.

      We find love from others when we quit demanding it.  We find our lives by secretly giving them away. Filled with Christ, we enjoy mending others, asking nothing in return.  It’s then that it is far more likely we will find ourselves married to the person who secretly weeds our sidewalk for no reason other than they love us. 

   

On Moral Dependance

       I took the week of the 4^th to read one of those books which American intellectuals talk about but seldom still read.  Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals is a 1929 effort to construct a set of values to guide public policy in an age that rejects Christian faith.  Lippmann writes for people who have become perplexed by their own irreligion:

   “Prisoners who have been released [from religion]…ought to be serene and composed. They are free to make their own lives.  There are no conventions, no taboos, no gods, priests, princes, fathers or revelations they must accept.  Yet, the result is not as good as they thought it would be. The prison door is wide open…yet they stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun.”

    Lippmann’s description was as prescient as it was poetic.  The illicit experience of being morally adrift, which haunted Harvard a hundred years ago, has now ravished and defiled the American countryside. Once severed from tradition, people discover there’s still no shortage of folks who tell them what to do.  The government, the boss, the bank and the insurance companies collude to keep a better stranglehold on them than the church ever did, but now these institutions lack moral authority, and people do not have anything but their inarticulate rage with which to criticize them.

      Lippmann’s proposal was for the educated elite, unburdened by “popular religion,” to grow up—to learn to discipline their desires according to their own original conscience.   

      Yet, I wonder if even smart people might not benefit from some Transcendent help in disciplining their desires.  It’s rather burdensome to whip up moral vision from scratch.  Honestly, this age of moral experimentation doesn’t seem to be stumbling onto many digestible social recipes.  The ones on the menu appear to be the kind of arbitrary solutions our Founders rebelled against.

      American Independence works if it is thought of as independence from arbitrary power. But when traditional moral authority is thought to be arbitrary, too, and we become independent from long-established claims on one another, then democracy will descend into the chaos our founders feared. Our ongoing independence requires dependence on God.  Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.