The Internet Monk Archives

Cast Your Vote for “The Greatest American…”

UPDATE: Here, at the end of good day of house painting with my family, I have added my votes to the post.

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Happy Independence Day in the U.S.A.!

Today, just for fun and discussion, between hot dogs, we’re taking your votes for “The Greatest American _____________ “ — in seven categories. Cast your vote for as many of the selections as you like and give your main reasons for so choosing. Vote early and often. You’ll need a break from the wiffleball game, anyway.

Without further ado, what is the greatest American…

Novel?
National Park?
Sport?
Film?
Classical music composition? Jazz music composition? Pop/Rock music composition?
City? State?
Regional Tradition, Characteristic, or Quirk? (You have a lot of leeway here. Have fun.)

Bonus Question:

Who would you consider your greatest American hero, past or present?

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Chaplain Mike’s choices for the greatest American…

Novel: The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird
National Park: With my limited experience, I would say Grand Canyon, but I’m pretty sure it will be Yosemite after I visit there.
Sport: Baseball
Film: It’s a Wonderful Life
Classical music composition?: Appalachian Spring (Copland). Jazz music composition?: Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin). Pop/Rock music composition? The Times They Are A’Changin’ (Bob Dylan)
City? Chicago. State? California.
Regional Tradition, Characteristic, or Quirk? Some of my regional food favorites: Vermont maple syrup, Chicago-style pizza, Chesapeake Bay crabs with Old Bay seasoning, Midwest corn on the cob, Boston’s Samuel Adams beer.

Bonus Question:

Who would you consider your greatest American hero, past or present? Abraham Lincoln.

A Modern Bestiary, Part One

The parking lot of a suburban Central Florida community college was the last place I ever expected to find a peacock, and yet there he was, picking about the dumpster like a rooster and gobbling down stray grains. Looking back in retrospect I probably should have called security and found out where the poor bird had escaped from. His long tail feathers (peahens have no such decoration) dragged along in the dust behind him. I was in an awful funk. I had been laid off the previous year and was struggling to make ends meet working in positions for which I was not well suited.

It was a very dark period in my life and that particular day was darker than most. I don’t remember now what had occurred to precipitate such a dark mood, but I do remember the peacock. At first, the bird paid no attention to me, continuing to pick out grains around the dumpster, but when I turned to look at him, he turned to look at me, opened his tail feathers in a magnificent fan, and began strutting towards me. After a few paces, I guess he figured out that I wasn’t a peahen, folded his breathtaking plumage, and returned to his supper. I went on to my class. The words of the Beatitudes presented themselves immediately to my mind:

For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried canadd a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.

It was if the illustrations concerning the birds of the air and the lilies of the field were accordioned together into this one gorgeous animal: I had nothing to fear, finally. I and mine would be taken care of, perhaps not in the style to which we had become accustomed, perhaps not in the way we were accustomed to expect, but we would be cared for.

Continue reading “A Modern Bestiary, Part One”

Selt Or Kelt?

This is more or less a rant on a personal bug-bear of mine. While I hope I am not quite attaining to the level of nit-picking as evidenced by Lynne Truss’s book on grammatical errors, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, I am about to relieve my mind as to why the use – or rather, the misuse and abuse – of the catch-all term “Celtic” has prodded me to inflict my opinions upon you.

In recent years, there has been a vogue for all things Celtic. Record stores are full of hastily-assembled compilation CDs involving anything moody-sounding with wavering synthesizers and a female vocalist warbling in the background. We have had the Celtic Tenors, yet another answer to the Three Tenors. Film scores have had Hollywood composers throwing together anything vaguely in the “diddley-eye” style. The worst example of this is the 2009 “Sherlock Holmes” film where the soundtrack composer selected the Dubliners singing “The Rocky Road to Dublin” for the pub fight scene, even though the film is set in London and there are no Irish characters involved at all!

New Age enthusiasts have jumped on the bandwagon with abandon, producing such historical inaccuracies as “Celtic Runes” as a divinatory medium (despite the fact that runes have nothing to do with the Celts but are associated with the Norse) and the “Celtic Year” which melds together Irish, Scottish and Welsh mythologies into a calendar of feasts that modern Wiccans may celebrate but which have little or nothing to do with traditional folklore.

The title of this essay derives from the fact that when the whole notion of “the Celt” became popularised in the 19th century, there wasn’t even agreement on how it should be pronounced in English – “Selt” or “Kelt”? This uncertainty on so basic an element as pronunciation symbolises the two contradictory attitudes taken towards defining the characteristics of the Celts: the militant or the mystical, as demonstrated respectively by the “Sherlock Holmes” soundtrack and the New Age appropriation.

Continue reading “Selt Or Kelt?”

Let’s Discuss: Needing the Whole Body of Christ

I thought we might have an open discussion today on some thoughts by Brian Zahnd. As one who has served in “charismatic flavored evangelicalism,” he found that he had become “arrogantly sectarian,” and that he “needed the riches of the whole church” if his life was to be fully formed in Christ. Click on the title below to access his entire piece.

Here’s a paragraph that well states what he’s come to learn and how he has changed. Read it, think about, and then let’s talk about it.

Above all, I’d like to know what you think about the following question. I know there is a multitude of angles and perspectives by which we might address this, and I’d like to hear as many as possible. What place is there for a “Premodern Sacramental Eclectic” and where might he or she find a home and suitable place to minister in Christ’s Church?

From my vantage point I’ve come to think that Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Evangelical expressions of Christianity generally have the same amount of truth — it just depends on what areas of truth you want to focus on. Yes, I actually believe this! I honestly don’t think evangelicalism has a greater claim to Christian truth than Catholicism. It’s true that I’m not entirely comfortable with the Catholic view of Mary and the practice of a male-only celibate priesthood; but I’m also not entirely comfortable with the Protestant view of Sola Scriptura and the emphasis on radical individualism. Another way of saying it might be like this: we need the whole body of Christ to properly form the body of Christ. This much I’m sure of: Orthodox mystery, Catholic beauty, Anglican liturgy, Protestant audacity, Evangelical energy, Charismatic reality — I need it all!

– A Premodern Sacramental Eclectic
by Brian Zahnd

The Homily

Come, everyone who is thirsty—
here is water!
Come, you that have no money—
buy grain and eat!
Come! Buy wine and milk—
it will cost you nothing!
Why spend money on what does not satisfy?
Why spend your wages and still be hungry?
Listen to me and do what I say,
and you will enjoy the best food of all.

(Isaiah 55:1,2, GNT)

Jesus: When you host a dinner or banquet, don’t invite your friends, your brothers, your relatives, or your rich neighbors. If you do, they might invite you to a party of their own, and you’ll be repaid for your kindness. Instead, invite the poor, the amputees, the cripples, the blind. Then you’ll be blessed because they can never repay you. Your reward will come from God at the resurrection of the just and good. (Luke 14: 13,14, The Voice)

Last week I shared a word about God’s grace that upset most of you. Well, I said that it would. Most of you missed the point dramatically. You focused on the telling of the story instead of the moral of the story. The moral of the story is this: We cannot buy food at God’s table. It is only available to us if we receive it as it is offered: free for all. Isaiah proclaimed this clearly. I have repeated last week’s Old Testament reading again this week. I recommend you meditate on these words this morning.

And since you didn’t like my story, I thought I would share one from my favorite author, Robert Capon. I am going to let him doing the preaching this morning. You may not like his illustration of grace any better. As a matter of fact, if you were upset by Brandi of Batavia last week, you will probably also be upset by the party host Capon refers to as Arthur this week. Nevertheless, I will give it a try once again. Yes, God’s grace is scandalous and not respectable. It requires nothing from you but to simply believe. And so many cannot get over that. But let’s try, shall we?

Jesus is saying, ‘Listen, you are absolutely mired in your scorekeeping, bookkeeping lives. You are so busy trying to hold the world together by getting your accounts straight that you hardly have time to notice that it’s falling apart faster than ever. Why don’t you just let go? Thumb your nose at the ledger! Drop dead to the accounting! Because it’s not just one more thing that can’t save you; it’s the flypaper that catches everything else that can’t save you and leaves you stuck with it forever. Look, I’m on my way to Jerusalem to die so you can be saved, free for nothing. I’m going up there to give you a dramatic demonstration of shutting up once and for all on the subject of the divine bookkeeping. What’s the point, then, of your keeping records when I’m not?’

Do you see? He who was sent not to judge the world but to save the world (John 3:17) will not count our records against us. What the Son will offer the Father at the last day is the silence of his death on the subject of our sins and the power of his resurrection on the subject of our life. Therefore we are to stop – right now – living as if we could have the least influence on that happy outcome by fussing about who owes what to whom. That, if you will, is why Jesus tells his host to invite people who can’t invite him back: to get him to stop doing everything in his life on the basis of debit and credit and to open his eyes to the way God does business. Jesus says to him: ‘Forget about making a social buck by inviting the right people – and forget about making a spiritual buck by doing the right thing. Invite the wrong people! Do the wrong thing! You want to have a dinner party? Have a stupid dinner party! You want to have a life? Have a loser’s life! Spit in the eye of the accounting department! Invite anybody you don’t like and be anything you don’t like; but don’t for a minute mess with anything that isn’t last, lost, least, little and dead. Because that’s where the action is, not in your Guinness Book of Spiritual Records.’

At the end of his speech to the host, Jesus specifically ties this condemnation of bookkeeping to the resurrection. ‘You will be happy,’ he tells his host in verse 14, ‘precisely because these losers and deadbeats you invite won’t be able to repay you.’ He says, in other words, that happiness can never come in until the bookkeeping stops, until the hand that clutches at the dance goes dead and lets the dance happen freely. And he says that the place where that happy consequence will burst upon us is at the resurrection of the just. And the just, please note, are not stuffy, righteous types with yard-long lists of good works, but simply all the forgiven sinners of the world who live by faith — who trust Jesus and laugh out loud at the layoff of all the accountants.

And the unjust? Well, the unjust are all the forgiven sinners of the world who, stupidly, live by unfaith — who are going to insist on showing up at the resurrection with all their record books, as if it were an IRS audit. The unjust are the idiots who are going to try to talk Jesus into checking his bookkeeping against theirs. And do you know what Jesus is going to say to them — what, for example, he will say to his host if he comes to the resurrection with such a request? I think he will say, “Just forget it, Arthur. I suppose we have those books around here somewhere, and if you’re really determined to stand in front of my great white throne and make an ass of yourself, I guess they can be opened (Rev. 20:12). Frankly, though, nobody up here pays any attention to them. What will happen will be that while you’re busy reading and weeping over everything in those books, I will go and open my other book (Rev. 20:12, again), the book of life — the book that has in it the names of everybody I ever drew to myself by dying and rising. And when I open that book, I’m going to read out to the whole universe every last word that’s written there. And you know what that’s going to be? It’s going to be just Arthur. Nothing else. None of your bad deeds, because I erased them all. And none of your good deeds, because I didn’t count them, I just enjoyed them. So what I’ll read out, Arthur, will be just Arthur! real loud. And my Father will smile and say, ‘Hey, Arthur! You’re just the way I pictured you!’ And the universe will giggle and say, ‘That’s some Arthur you’ve got there!’ But me, I’ll just wink at you and say, ‘Arthur, c’mon up here and plunk yourself down by my great white throne and let’s you and me have a good long practice laugh before this party gets so loud we can’t even hear how much fun we’re having.”

Saturday Ramblings 6.29.13

It has been a week, iMonks. We hit triple digits for the first time this summer here at the Tulsa wing of the iMonastery. People will say, “But it’s a dry heat.” Yes, and so is my oven, but I don’t like to hang out there. The older I get, the more thankful I am for conditioned air. There is also a special seat at the heavenly banquet table for the inventor of the ceiling fan. Just sayin’… Now, if you will give me a second to refill my glass of iced tea (Earl Grey iced tea), then we will ramble …

The courts were busy this week. SCOTUS (isn’t it just cute as can be how we are all referring to the Supreme Court of the United States as SCOTUS? Sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel.) made a ruling that has proponents of gay marriage shouting for joy. Even Bert and Ernie seem to be happy about it. Jonathan Merritt collected Christian leaders’ responses, and—surprisingly—they were fairly measured. And Cathleen Falsani has a one-word answer to the whole thing. Can you guess what that word is?

Continue reading “Saturday Ramblings 6.29.13”

Reconsider Jesus – The Message of the Kingdom

The following is an excerpt from Michael Spencer’s upcoming book: Reconsider Jesus – A fresh look at Jesus from the Gospel of Mark. For the next number of Fridays, we will be giving you a “sneak peek” into this devotional commentary. Your thoughts and comments are welcome. (Note: There are some edits still to come, but if you do notice something particularly egregious, feel free to send me an email about it.) If you would like to be contacted when Michael Spencer’s book is available for purchase, drop us a note at michaelspencersnewbook@gmail.com.

The Message of the Kingdom

Mark 1:14-15

14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” – NIV

What is the gospel? What is the “good news”? I think it’s telling that the two most prolific evangelism programs in evangelicalism both approach their audience with questions that Jesus never used.

“Do you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?”

“If you were to die tonight, and God was to ask you, why should I let you into my heaven, what would be your answer?”

Jesus, on the other hand, did not approach his world with a question at all, but with a proclamation of the arrival of the reign of God. Evangelicalism is a religion of decisions and transactions, and although there are decisions to be made, reducing the Gospel to a decision to accept “God’s plan for my life” or giving the right answer to the question of how to go to heaven seems to have moved well past what Jesus was doing in his earthly ministry.

You see, when Jesus speaks of the gospel, he is proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God. At the heart of this are two things that are fairly challenging to all of us in the materialistic, prosperous west. The statements recorded here are the first statements that Jesus makes in the Gospel, and as such it sets the tone and direction for the entire book. You could even say that they summarize Jesus’ entire mission and message.

1. “The time has come – The kingdom of God has come near.”

2. “Repent and believe the good news!”

In this chapter we will look at the first of these two statements: The announcement that a climactic time has arrived, and the present age has come to its fulfillment point.

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Summer Sounds from CM: That Sunny 60’s Sound

Since it is officially summer in the good ol’ U.S.A. now, I have been listening to some of that happy music that used to play on AM radio when I was a kid, the great summery songs that played over the sound system at the pool. It spoke of freedom, romance, and the idealism of youth. It rarely dealt with subjects any more serious than whether that cute girl would consider going steady with me. There was a sweetness, an innocence, an melodic exuberance that just made you feel good.

It has been hard find album-length examples of this kind of music for a long time. Last year, the Beach Boys put out a wonderful record, That’s Why God Made the Radio, which was the first album they had made with Brian Wilson in 16 years. Jeff recommended it last summer and you can also read the wonderful in-depth Rolling Stone review here. Actually, this album is probably best suited for the end of the summer, because it contains a marvelous combination of the songs of innocence and experience that have always marked the best Beach Boys’ records, ending with a fade to sunset.

This summer, I’m enjoying the sun-bathed sounds of She & Him Volume 3. The duo of M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel has put together a breezy program of infectious melodies that is unabashedly retro. It is one of the most fully realized reproductions of the pop sound of the 1960’s that I have ever heard. The arrangements, instrumentation, and Ms. Deschanel’s alluring young girl voice are pitch perfect and delightful. She wrote most of the songs on this album, and she inhabits them, joyfully re-creating that pastel 60’s world I can still see in my imagination.

Here’s the song, “I Could’ve Been Your Girl,” from a performance on Conan.

Some Thoughts on Our “Reformation” Conversation

Monday, we considered the June 17, 2013 document, jointly published by the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, called “From Conflict to Communion.” I have decided to make this last post in the series, and in it I want to make some comments about how we discuss matters like this.

An Admission of Disappointment
I have to say this: I was disappointed in much of the discussion on Monday. Most of the critical comments were either cynical dismissals of the idea of ecumenical dialogue or statements based on Ad hominem arguments. Very few of the comments gave evidence that the commenter had actually read the documents being presented. They were mostly opinions (many very well considered, by the way) that people already held and brought to the table but they failed to seriously engage the actual language of the statement produced by the Catholic church and the Lutheran World Federation.

A large number of the comments reflected this kind of reasoning:

The Catholics and Lutherans have issued a joint statement about a unified commemoration of the Reformation.
We know who the Catholics are and what they really believe from their history and past statements.
Therefore, no matter what they say in this document, we don’t believe them.
Besides, look at all these other practices [not brought up in the post], which prove our suspicions.

Now, I don’t expect our readers to download a 100-page document and read it thoroughly in order to participate in a single blog discussion. However, I do expect us to read what is actually included in the post, and if anyone has a question, to either ask it or look at the fuller document for more information.

For example, a lot of statements were thrown around about how the Catholics really don’t believe in justification by faith and use slippery language that sounds good but doesn’t mean what Protestants mean. Some said point blank that Catholics don’t believe the gospel. However, in the post itself was this statement:

Together Catholics and Lutherans confess: “By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works” (JDDJ 15). The phrase “by grace alone” is further explained in this way: “the message of justification…tells us that as sinners our new life is solely due to the forgiving and renewing mercy that God imparts as a gift and we receive in faith, and never can merit in any way” (JDDJ 17).

It would have been nice if someone had responded to words like these from the post, rather than talking about the Council of Trent, or communion, or marriage/divorce/annulment, or some other such topic. These are all legitimate topics in a broader discussion of Protestant/Catholic relations, they just weren’t pertinent to the subject of our posts.

I would have loved to have heard from more Roman Catholics, because they know best what has changed and what hasn’t on the ground level in their churches.

As for those of us who are Protestants, I continue to suspect that most of us remain largely ignorant of the dramatic changes in the Roman Catholic Church brought about by Vatican II. We are 50 years out from Vatican II — a very short time in historical perspective — and what we see today are merely fragile green shoots emerging from the soil of that church council. We Protestants may dismiss the provisional discussions or changes we see along the way, but it is also possible to take a position of good faith, trusting that God may indeed may be doing something new among his people.

If you don’t buy into the idea of ecumenical dialogue, you may have very good reasons for that and perhaps we will explore them in a post devoted to that subject. But I urge you to take the long view and to realize that lasting results from current ecumenical dialogue will probably only be seen long after our lifetimes. It seems short-sighted to me to simply dismiss the process.

As for our own discussions, I encourage us to exercise patience and grace, as well as the willingness to be engaged in fruitful interactions with the actual material in the posts rather than conducting arguments based on Ad hominem thinking.

Though he excoriated the Roman church’s leadership, false doctrine and practices in his day (especially late in his life), Martin Luther nevertheless conducted his reforms and wrote with an understanding that the Catholic church is a true Christian church. He acknowledged his debt to her. Pretty gracious thing to do for someone who had been given a death sentence by the leaders of that institution.

We on our part confess that there is much that is Christian and good under the papacy; indeed everything that is Christian and good is to be found there and has come to us from this source.

For instance we confess that in the papal church there are the true holy Scriptures, true baptism, the true sacrament of the altar, the true keys to the forgiveness of sins, the true office of the ministry, the true catechism in the form of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the articles of the creed.

Similarly the pope admits that we too, though condemned by him as heretics, and likewise all heretics, have the holy Scriptures, baptism, the keys, the catechism, etc. […]

I contend that in the papacy there is true Christianity, even the right kind of Christianity and many great and devoted saints.

– On Rebaptism

Michael Spencer was also a good example for us in speaking about our Roman Catholic brethren. Though he ultimately decided to remain in the Protestant world, he studied Catholicism seriously and interacted with Catholics often, gaining a great appreciation for the tradition and recognizing that we are all part of the one true holy and apostolic church. As he once wrote:

I have decided to wish the Roman Catholic Church well. I have decided to accept the kindnesses shown to me and to enjoy the status given me in the new Catholic Catechism — separated brother. As much as I can, I won’t be separated. I am part of the church Catholic, and I pray that the new Pope will be a shepherd and teacher of all Christians.

I believe one can be wrong about much doctrine, yet still trust Christ, know Christ, show Christ and belong to Christ. Chesterton. St. Francis. Augustine. Merton. John Paul II. Many of my Catholic friends. I expect to see them all in the Kingdom, and in the meantime, I count them as my friends here on the pilgrim way.

The Apophaticism Of Persons

I discovered the yellow, fading newspaper clipping at the bottom of a box of my father’s papers after he passed away. “Local Kissimmee girl wins Beauty Pageant.” The clipping was from the Orlando Evening Star from March 1947, and it stated that Miss Emma Mae Scoggins of Kissimmee, Florida won a local beauty pageant and was awarded a $50 scholarship to some school in the area. There was a picture of Miss Scoggins, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and pretty in that unselfconscious way that all women in the 1940s were pretty but probably wouldn’t be considered so today. There is nobody left in my family who knows anything about the relationship of my father with Miss Scoggins. My mother knows nothing about her. Neither does my father’s younger brother. Maybe Miss Scoggins, in her eighties by now, might know, but I wonder if she would remember him. He was mustered out of the Navy in Jacksonville after World War II, that much I do know. I also know that he enrolled in college as a freshman in the fall of 1946, so whatever relationship my father had with Miss Scoggins, it must have been very ephemeral. Perhaps sending the newspaper clipping was an attempt by Miss Scoggins to keep it from being so.

Anyway, the ebb and flow of circumstance deposited my family in Miss Scoggin’s hometown of Kissimmee, Florida at the cusp of the new millennium. More people visit the outskirts of Kissimmee than visit the actual city itself. In 1974, the Walt Disney Corporation transformed several hundred square miles of Florida swampland into the primordial American dreamtown and Kissimmee changed overnight from a town of citrus farmers and cattle ranchers to a bedroom community for The Show That Never Ends. Kissimmee became a municipal appendage to a sovereign self-governing state-within-a-state owned by a large media conglomerate with dictatorial powers over the chunk of real estate over which it holds sway. The part of Kissimmee we moved to, however, was twenty minutes from the Mouse That Roared, and probably didn’t look much different than it did when Emma Mae Scoggins was enchanting the hearts of the local swains and perhaps, my father.

I doubt there was a mosque in the neighborhood when Emma Mae lived and flourished amidst the flat-roofed, stucco-bedaubed ranch homes. The mosque was a recent addition to the Kissimmee religious landscape, and those who frequented it were definitely not Television Muslims ™, who if you believe the media look and act very much like Presbyterians with a Middle Eastern accent. No, these families were Not-Us with a capital N and a capital U. The men were fiercely bearded, clothed in kaftans and skullcaps. The women wore veils over their faces. Several families lived in close proximity to the mosque they were building and it was apparent that Islam was the focal point of these families’ lives. After work, it was common to see the men laboring well into the night hammering boards into place or hanging windows or doors. Their children were indistinguishable from the many Puerto Rican kids that lived in the neighborhood, but they played apart, never mixing with them, or with our children.

Continue reading “The Apophaticism Of Persons”