Reposted with permission from Jonathan Aigner, Ponder Anew
• • •
Consider this comment I received on the “Modernized Hymns” post.
I have tried to avoid God my whole life. I wouldn’t know a traditional hymn from a modernized hymn. I’ve never even stepped foot into a church…until this past Sunday. The people on stage sang a song by David Crowder, and I began to feel the very presence of God. It was like nothing I ever felt before. Tears streamed down my eyes and right then, I bowed down and made a decision to surrender my life to Jesus. I ask you a simple question…wasn’t David Crowder’s song – guitars, modernized lyrics, and all – worth being written and sang that way?
• The person next to you in the pew
This type of appeal is quite common, both on this blog and elsewhere. I’ve heard it as long as I can remember. “We don’t worship like we used to because it doesn’t bring people to Jesus. You want people to come to Jesus, right? RIGHT?!? YOU BETTER WANT PEOPLE TO COME TO JESUS!!”
I heard one pastor say it this way: “When we aren’t willing to change how we worship so that our culture understands it, we’re telling the world it can go to hell.”
Yikes.
To make sure I don’t come across as mean or callous, especially to my evangelical friends and readers, I should explain something.
I do want people to come to Jesus.
But my answer to this commenter is, “No.”
For one thing, music doesn’t bring people to Jesus. Jesus does that work admirably enough through the Holy Spirit, certainly better than a brush with David Crowder’s beard.
But there’s an even deeper flaw in our thinking.
Worship is not an evangelistic tool.
We don’t worship together to attract unbelievers.
We worship together because God is worthy.
We worship together because this gracious God has called us into his story and grafted us together as covenant people.
We worship together because we desperately need to tell and retell and hear and rehear that story.
We worship together to be refocused, reshaped, renewed by God’s gifts. We need liturgy. We need Word and Sacrament.
We continue our reflections on David W. Peters’ memoir of his experiences as a military and hospital chaplain called, Death Letter: God, Sex, and War. Peters served as a battalion chaplain in Fort Hood, Texas from 2004-2007, which included a deployment to Iraq in 2006. After Iraq he also served as a chaplain clinician in the amputee, orthopedic, neuroscience, and psychological wards at Walter Reed Hospital.
After his deployment and subsequent divorce, David Peters entered a season of drinking, promiscuity, depression, and loss of faith. I am finding these chapters hard to read because they scare me. This is genuine existential wilderness. Peters lost virtually all landmarks and took paths that were not only dead ends, he knew they were dead ends and took them anyway. I don’t need to recount the details. The downhill slide covers territory that is well-traveled and familiar. It is the thoughts he records as he tumbles down the hill that most interest me. I simply quote some of them today.
. . . I am a man obsessed with my ex, and I still hope for the day when she will call and say that she wants to be married to me again. I am a man on a mission to hurt someone as bad as I have been hurt. I am doing everything in my power to protect my fragile psyche and it is working. It’s like I am immune to heartache. But I am enjoying this immunity too much. No one can hurt me like my wife hurt me . This is one thing I can be sure of in this uncertain world. I have paradise in my reach, but it is a feckless heaven. It is empty without her.
. . . Even though I’ve been back from Iraq for over two years, I am still there. I am alive there. I am depressed there. I am myself there. I am scared there. There is always a golden day before me when I will see my family again . Now there is nothing hopeful on the horizon. There is no magic day where all manner of things will be well. It is just an endless succession of seconds that will one day stop.
. . . We are all staying at a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee. I am told it is a freshwater lake that sits atop another layer of saltwater, way down deep. This fascinates me, the salt below the fresh. The pressure of the massive amount of fresh water pushing down on the saltwater, holding it in its place. There are things I cannot know. All I know is that deep down , there is a salty darkness inside of me that is starting to mix with the fresh water on the surface. I have kept it down all my life and now the war has taken too much of the fresh and left me with too much of the bitter. I keep it down with my jokes, my smiles, and “I was only there for a year.” But I can feel it coming up. I have touched the rage that lies beneath the thin veneer of what we call civilization . I know what is down below, so I turn from the lake and go to bed.
. . . I remember when I had been divorced for only a few weeks and I went with my girlfriend to her church. It was a new conservative Presbyterian church in a hip neighborhood in Wilmington. No one owns cars here. It is time for the confession of sin, and I cannot say it. I cannot tell God that I have sinned against him in thought, word, and deed. I cannot be sorry and truly repentant. I can only think, I have nothing to confess. But you, Oh God, you have a few things to confess to me.
. . . This is the only way to protect my frail psyche. This is all I can do. I was hurt so bad that I am now immune from feeling any hurt. I am angry at women. How could my ex-wife have left me for that motherfucker? My anger doesn’t make sense anymore and I am afraid. I am afraid of being angry forever.
. . . I know I have problems. I know I weep uncontrollably sometimes. I have a restlessness inside me that all the running and sit-ups in the world cannot quell. I am a caged animal in an invisible cage. Every morning in the Psych Ward at Walter Reed the Charge Nurse goes around the room and asks everyone to state their name and their mood. Staff members, the sane ones, are supposed to state their name and their occupational specialty. The patients say, “Hi, I’m Jon and I’m feeling . . . mixed emotions today.” It helps that they have a laminated paper with a list of emotions on it. Above each word is a little round face that seeks to artistically capture the feeling. Some are better than others. Each staff member says, “Hi, I’m Dr. Smith, and I’m your attending physician.” I say, “Hi, I’m David, your chaplain , and I’m feeling anxiety and hope today.” Most days I feel like there is a thin line between the patients and me. I know that the feelings that I feel, if voiced, could land me in this place. I would stay for a few weeks and be medically retired from the Army. I wouldn’t have to worry about financial matters anymore. I could just be “troubled” and “dark.” I turn my head away from this bittersweet cup every time it presents itself. I want to be whole. I want to be okay. I want to be normal, even though I know I never will.
This is the voice in the wilderness.
Listen. It is all around us.
And how can the one who speaks thus find hope?
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves.
Nothing shuts down a person in pain like quoting the Bible at them. As I write that, I can hear the sirens of the Heresy Police surrounding my building. Yes, the Bible contains the words of life, the promises of God-with-us that have comforted saints and resurrected sinners. But the Bible can also be the ultimate conversation killer. It can be used as a tool for silencing people and for short-circuiting grief, hurt, and depression. Sometimes people use the Bible in a way that makes a hurting person feel like God is telling them to shut up.
I don’t like saying this, but it has been my experience that Christians are often worse at dealing with people in pain than others with different beliefs. Truth be told, I have chosen on many occasions to share my painful moments and emotions with non-Christians rather than Christians, because I knew I would be better heard. This saddens me. It seems to me that no one should run into the fire like Christians, because we follow a Savior who descended into hell. But we all know it is far less messy to stand over people in pain than it is to enter their worlds and risk feeling pain ourselves.
I once heard a ministry colleague say: “I’m going to be with a person in the hospital tonight. Time to speak some truth.” This idea prevails in many Christian circles, that preaching is the healing balm for suffering. Whether it’s sickness or divorce or job loss, a crisis calls for some sound Biblical exhortation. I have a number of issues with this. First, it assumes that the hurting person does not believe the right things or believe with enough fervency. They may end up receiving the message that their faith is not strong enough for them to see their situation rightly, or that something is wrong with them because they are struggling. Second, preaching to people in pain preys on the vulnerable. It’s stabbing the sword of truth into their wound, or doing surgery without anesthesia. Unwelcome truth is never healing. Third, “speaking truth” into situations of pain is distancing. You get to stand behind your pulpit, or your intercessory prayer that sounds strangely like a sermon, and the other person is a captive audience, trapped in the pew of your anxious truth. Suffering inevitably makes a person feel small and isolated, and preaching to them only makes them feel smaller and more alone.
Dr. Seuss wrote some classic stories, but he also gave some classically bad advice: “Don’t cry that it’s over. Smile that it happened.” Your role as a listener is, by all means, to let them cry that it’s over. Don’t be the Grinch who stole grief. Be a witness to their tears. Each falling tear carries pain and it’s the only way to get it out.
A hurting person is in a storm. They are cold, wet, shivering, and scared. Preaching, platitudes, and advice will not get them out of the storm. Don’t tell a person in a storm that it’s a sunny day. There will likely come a day when the clouds part, but it is not today. It’s not your job to pull them out of the storm. It’s your job to get wet with them.
• • •
This is an excerpt from Adam’s forthcoming book, The Listening Life (IVP, October 2015)
Note: the link will take you to Adam’s blog, and to a post in which he talks about the book.
The Old Wild West in the New Middle East IM Review of “American Sniper”
The title of this review reflects a line from American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s reverent biopic of Chris Kyle, a sniper during the Iraq War credited with 160 kills, the most in American military history. It also reflects iconic films from Eastwood’s career. He, of course, is famous for his roles in westerns, portraying lone dispensers of justice in a world beset by evil. “In the universe of his films,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, “— a universe where the existence of evil is a given — violence is a moral necessity, albeit one that often exacts a cost from those who must wield it in the service of good.”
The narrative goes like this:
People are besieged by pure evil in the form of villains with no conscience who will stop at nothing to destroy what is good.
Most of the good people are impotent to stop the evil ones.
One man rises up (or rides into town) with extraordinary gravitas and courage to take a stand. He will not be persuaded to do otherwise.
Evil does its best to compromise or destroy him.
However, the good man is better and more skilled at dispensing violence, and thus evil is conquered.
He is also able to come to terms with himself and the impact evil has made on him.
American Sniper is, at its heart, a cowboy movie. It’s a great one too, a well-acted, gripping old-fashioned shoot-em-up that will have you cheering when the good guys win and the bad guys bite the dust. Its morality reflects pure black and white. It’s a hero pic with hordes of faceless enemies and one grand villain (though he is not characterized beyond a few mentions of his backstory). The dusty streets and rooftops could pass for the wild west, Kyle has a “posse” of faithful sidekicks, and his woman waits nervously at home, wondering if he will ever make it back to her.
Pharisee and Publican, engraving printed by Emile Petithenry, Bonne Presse
Note from CM: 2015 will mark five years since the death of Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk. Today, we continue our “Sundays with Michael” series with an excerpt from post that was originally published in January 2008.
Folks did not always respond with words of sweetness and light when Michael wrote. Here is an example of how he used what might be called “prophetic sarcasm” to answer them. He tagged this with a “laugh or else” category designation back in the day. I think you’ll agree, however, that the humor here has more of a bite than some of the lighter comedic posts he wrote.
• • •
Several years ago, when a major reformed blog decided to make me their feature attraction, I first heard “I’m praying for Michael Spencer” from somebody who 1) didn’t know me at all and 2) didn’t like me based on what they did know. (See first comment.)
Since that time, not a month goes by without some blogger somewhere giving some version of this little speech: “I can’t say what I think about Michael Spencer. It’s just not appropriate for a Christian, so I’ll just pray for him.” This generally follows after I’ve 1) disagreed with a favorite preacher or 2) distanced myself from some theological position they believe is equal to true Christianity, like reading A.W. Pink.
For 16 years, I’ve work with about 150 Christians on the staff of a large ministry. I’ve worked in large churches for years before that. I’ve been listening to Christian-ese — the special dialect of Christians — for half a century. I speak it fluently in several versions: Charismatic, Baptist, Calvinist, Youth Worker. I’m studying Emerging. And I am certified to translate.
Based on extensive research, let me say with all the smarmy spiritual phoniness I can muster, that this kind of pious prayer announcement is bovine manure.
Inspired by my recent pilgrimage to sit at the feet of a curmudgeon hero, I’d like to finally get off my chest what I’ve wanted to say to these prayer posers for a long time. Bail out now if you are the sensitive type.
1) If you really do love me, and you genuinely want to pray for me, then by all means do so. Write me and I’ll give you the prayer need of the day. I never run short. If you don’t want to do the email, just pray I’ll be less of what I am by nature and more what Jesus gave himself for me to be. Pray I love my wife like Christ loves the church. Pray for the fact that I’m a coward. Pray for my laziness. Pray for my preaching. Pray for my teaching. Pray for my counseling. Pray for my leadership. Pray for my writing. Pray for my besetting sins and struggles. Pray for my daily devotions. Pray I’ll love God, love his word, and follow his Son. Pray I’ll hate sin’s influence and be busy killing it. Pray I’ll be useful, joyful and filled with the Spirit. That should cover the next five minutes.
2) If you have a problem with me where you are the one who is angry, you don’t like me at all, and you want do bad things to me, pray for yourself, not me. Don’t say you’re praying for me when you’re obviously the one with the problem. (I’ve got plenty of problems, but yours is what you should be talking about. Not mine.)
3) Listen carefully: If it really makes you angry that someone in the world actually typed — IN PRINT!! — something critical of a preacher or a denomination or theology you like, then pray for yourself. You’ve got the issue. Everyone doesn’t agree with you and never will. Get out of your hole and wake up. Do you actually believe in a God who wants you to pray that I’ll become a good ________________. (Fill in the blank with your team.)
4) If you don’t think I’m a Christian, then please say so, and invite other Christians to pray for my conversion. If you don’t know if I am a Christian or not, then say you are praying for that. If you believe I need to be evangelized, then evangelize me. It’s your duty, unless you’re a hyper-Calvinist or have some insight into my reprobation. If you think I’m an apostate, then say so and say why. Others deserve to know. Whatever the case, quit hiding behind the generic prayer request. If you think I’m going to hell or I’m an instrument of Satan, it’s serious and you should say so.
At least Ken Silva said I was “the spirit of the antichrist.” Attaboy. Let’s get some spine here people. I once had a woman pray that God would “remove me” if we didn’t stop singing hymns in chapel and go to all contemporary choruses. There’s someone who should get a “What would Luther do?” bracelet.
5) If you believe I am spiritual poison, don’t just pray for me, and quit mumbling. Pray for those who read me. Be specific that refusing to use the word “inerrant” or whatever your concern happens to be isn’t just a difference among brothers and sisters, but it is a soul-endangering error and heresy. The modest “I’ll pray for Michael Spencer” bit is not the right response if I’m the equivalent of a spiritual contagion.
6) If that prayer request was put forward to make you look ________________ (fill in the blank), then it’s a show, not a prayer. It’s just another version of prayers said for an audience, similar to “I thank thee Lord that I am not like other men . . . such as Spencer over there.”
7) I’m a big fan of the Psalms. Consider the imprecatory Psalms if you are at a loss for words. Who can object to “Lord, I hate and detest those you hate?”
8) If you are one of those people who say “Well, at least it’s a prayer,” I’m sorry to say I don’t believe in that kind of superstitious idea of accumulating words directed toward the ceiling and calling it prayer. A prayer is sincere. It’s real. Even if it’s one word, or if it’s angry words or grieving words. Prayer is honest and it’s not playing games with God or those we pray for.
As I said, if you care about me, then please pray for me.
But if you don’t — if you dislike me and everything I’m doing on here — then find an honest place and pray what you really believe.
First, some sporting news. The Superb Owl is set: The Seattle Seahawks will attempt to defend their crown from the New England Patriots. The Patriots had a little controversy after their blow-out over the Colts: Deflate-gate (hey look, a”gate” controversy that actually rhymes!) The NFL is looking into whether the Patriots illegally deflated the balls they used on offense (which would make them more catch-able in the rain). Later in the week Coach Bilichick said he was “shocked” to learn that 11 of the 12 footballs were deflated. On a completely unrelated note, this is one of my favorite movie clips:
Okay, I’m just being silly. I have no idea whether this was all done intentionally or not. And I actually don’t really care who wins the Superb Owl this year. But I am apprently in the minority. Not only do most Americans have a favorite team (harmless enough) but one in four believes that God intervenes in the outcomes of the game, and 53 percent agree God “rewards athletes who have faith with good health and success,” (wow).
Yup, that’s me. The summer of 1981. The photos were taken on the front lawn of my house in Peterborough, Ontario. I think more than a few laws were broken to take the picture on the left! The pictures represent the culmination of a story, a story of how I ultimately came to trust God. The recent posts about life in the military brought some memories flooding back. What happened to me while in the military has been without question the series of events that led to my most significant spiritual moment.
All stories have a beginning, and there have been many other significant spiritual moments. It was on that same lawn at age five, that a worker with Child Evangelism Fellowship, told us the story of the wordless book. Although I never told her, I decided at that moment that I wanted what she had, and I prayed along with her to “receive Jesus into my heart.”
When I was eleven, our family rented our house out to friends, and moved to Zimbabwe for over three years. When I was thirteen, a Missionary and writer named Les Rainey was preaching his last sermon in our church before returning to North America after decades of service. He challenged the young people to make a deeper commitment to Christ. I realized that I did need to make a deeper commitment. Several weeks later I was baptized, and participated in communion for the first time.
A year later I had another significant spiritual moment when attending a Youth For Christ camp in South Africa. At an all night prayer meeting I experienced the Holy Spirit visibly moving for the first time. I commented on this in an earlier post that this event was one of the factors in becoming a “quiet” charismatic.
However, by far the most significant moment for me occurred after I joined the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves. When I was seventeen, and living back in Canada, an announcement came over our school intercom that the Militia was hosting a job information session at lunch. I went to see what was going on. It sounded interesting, and so, with the permission of my parents, I applied and was accepted.
We here at Internet Monk are committed to continuing Michael Spencer’s legacy of what he called “Jesus-shaped spirituality.” I am always happy to shore up our understanding and practice in this area, as one of our commenters suggested in last week’s post about what conversations we should be having in 2015. If you follow the link above, you will arrive at Michael’s classic post on the subject, which includes a list of characteristics of what he means by the term.
Today, I’d like to take a different tack. I am assuming that Jesus is to be the center and focus of our faith. Also, that the goal of spiritual formation for us as individuals and congregations is to be shaped in heart, mind, character, and action so that we resemble and represent Jesus among our neighbors in the affairs of daily life. Given that, today I would like to share eight practices that have helped me keep Jesus in the center. I’m not saying I am consistently faithful engaging in these practices. But they have become part of my devotional DNA, and I find Jesus in them.
Owen Strachan has written a piece at his blog thoughtlife called “Cultural Capitulation to Homosexuality is Not Courageous.”Strachan is Assistant Professor of Christian Theology and Church History at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the President of the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. Those connections tell you pretty much what you need to know about where he stands theologically and culturally. Like others in his circles, Strachan believes that “the church–and all evangelicalism–finds itself in a battle for its very soul,” and that “Courage is conditioned by faithfulness to God’s Word, not by capitulation to the culture.” This is unambiguous culture-war language, and he justifies speaking with “heightened tones” because his conviction is that “to call good what God labels an abomination is to place oneself in mortal jeopardy.” He agrees with Mark Dever that we are moving ever more rapidly toward “the suicide of the church.”
Strachan is responding to a recent article by Elizabeth Dias in TIME magazine: “Inside the Evangelical Fight Over Gay Marriage”.He think Dias gets two things “precisely, center-of-the-bullseye correct”:
The heart of the issue for evangelicals is the authority of God’s inerrant Word.
Acceptance of LGBT lifestyles is directly linked to adoption of egalitarian gender roles.
Strachan then proceeds to give four points of response to the article and the issue:
Capitulating to the culture is not courageous.
Confessional churches are best-positioned to weather this storm.
The debate over “gay Christianity” is most assuredly theological.
Complementarianism really is the last dam holding back the waters that would sweep over evangelical churches.
We continue our reflections on David W. Peters’ memoir of his experiences as a military and hospital chaplain called, Death Letter: God, Sex, and War. Peters served as a battalion chaplain in Fort Hood, Texas from 2004-2007, which included a deployment to Iraq in 2006. After Iraq he also served as a chaplain clinician in the amputee, orthopedic, neuroscience, and psychological wards at Walter Reed Hospital.
War
Sometimes before a mission, the Soldiers say they are glad I am going with them because now they will be all right. I tell them the founder of my religion was killed about 500 miles from here and I do not expect my life to be any different. They all laugh. Sometimes I think leaders should give the troops more hope, even if it is a false hope. But the Soldiers understand why I say this. They know the crazy calculus of death can’t be written in chalk on the blackboard. It can’t be written in a book in ink. It can’t be carved on the wall of a stone church. Shit happens. Death happens. Love happens. That is all we hope for in the hot Iraqi night.
After spending time in Iraq David Peters learned that “the most certain category of humanity” is death. He writes of baptizing stillborn babies, gathering with a group of grieving soldiers who had just lost comrades in an IED explosion, counseling a young soldier who was in shock after the first time he shot and killed an Iraqi, making visits to troops at two in the morning who are shoveling garbage off the streets so that the enemy can’t hide lethal bombs in it.
Peters records that some soldiers were carrying bandanas with words from Psalm 91 on it because of an Internet myth about a unit in World War II who carried the psalm with them into battle and none of them were killed.
You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday.
A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.
I remember hearing this psalm read at a funeral service for a young man who died, not in war, but in a battle with cancer in his own body. A woman who had been deeply touched by his death and who had a very literal kind of evangelical faith came to me in tears afterward, unable to reconcile her perspective on the “promises of God” with what had happened to her friend. How much more might this be true for those who have the grisly task of retrieving the boots, helmets, and body parts of their fellow soldiers? What can you say about God to a young person who is holding a bag in which is held the finger of a friend, wedding band still intact?
I went into the business of religion so I could understand death. I wanted to see life and death and I wanted to do something about it. I went to college and then to theological seminary where I learned to translate Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic into English. I also learned about theology and stocked up on an impressive set of conclusions and beliefs. I was not ready for what I would face in war. I did not know there would be so much death and that I would see most of it with my own eyes and touch it with my hands. In the valley of the shadow of death there are only metaphors and mysteries.
Love
It was his own wedding ring and thoughts of his wife and family that kept David Peters going and gave him hope as he lived and ministered amidst the death of war.
I write to my wife Anna and call her every day. When I am in the backseat of a Humvee rolling down a Baghdad street I think of her. She is the happy place I go when I can’t stand the heat, the exhaustion, or the boredom. Every day when I kneel down to pray in my room, I think of the ways I have not been a good husband to her. I think of my failures big and small. When I return, I will buy her the minivan she has been saying we needed for three years. She has the most thankless job of war. It is her responsibility to tell the world how I am doing when they call her. I know that we will emerge from this war with a passion for one another that will be worthy of the World War II couples that are memorialized forever for their long-distance relationships.
Alas, it was not to be. Among the least publicly acknowledged casualties of war are the families that die because of it. And so it was for David Peters. Three months home, he realized his wife was having an affair with their neighbor, a Major and a friend. This initiated a relational landslide that eventually led to divorce. That which had been Peters’ strength and hope slipped away fast and left him bereft and devastated.
I am not sure what to do so I drag myself to work during the day and wander the streets and parking lots at night. My stomach fills with a sickening nausea and I lose about thirty pounds because I no longer want to eat. I lost so much weight that I could probably go on TV as a spokesperson for a weight-loss product but only I know that it came at the price of heartbreak. I never knew that heartache was physical until I felt it in my chest.
Welcome to chaplain school.
Welcome to the real world, where all’s unfair in love and war (and everything in between).
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