Café Diem | coffee philosophy

If You Like It, Drink It

2008-08-08T11:13:00.000-04:00

As the two people who regularly read this weblog already know, I once-upon-a-time last year conducted a little exercise I called “Espresso Week.” Sort of an anti-fast, Espresso Week was seven straight days where I only made and drank espresso and espresso-based beverages. Wow.

I learned a couple of interesting things during Espresso Week, but first, a little background. I had a question asked by a commenter to my blog, wondering why I preferred press-pot coffee over espresso even though I claim to make and enjoy both. I gave a nice, long, rambling answer that (as often happens on blogs) didn’t really answer the question because I didn’t really know the answer. So I decided to do a little experiment. My Bodum French Press got tucked up into the kitchen cabinet, and replaced on the counter by my nice, shiny, La Pavoni Europiccola lever espresso machine.

Originally, I gave two answers to the question of why I prefer press-pot coffee to espresso. The first reason is that my press pot is bigger than my espresso machine, and therefore provides more coffee. Even allowing for the near-perfect extraction that espresso provides, the press-pot method gives me more of a good thing. I called this the “quantity-over-quality” reason ― I’d rather have a whole lot of good coffee than a little bit of perfect espresso.

The second reason is just simple laziness. Espresso is a lot of work, what with the measuring and the grinding and the tamping and the cleaning and all. As my brother put it, after watching me prepare, pull, and drink a shot: “all that work for that little bit of coffee?” It’s just easier brew a regular pot of coffee than to fire up La Pavoni for an espresso or two.

But now, looking back on Espresso Week, I’m not so sure either of those answers is completely accurate. Yes, I think quantity is sometimes to be preferred over quality. And yes, I’m still lazy. But I think the real reason I prefer coffee to espresso is simply this: I like coffee better.

Well, thanks, Chris. You really cleared that up. Stupid circular logic…

So much for Espresso Week, and on to the topic at hand: Good coffee.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography by saying that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it. I think he’s on to something there. After spending a couple of the most productive years of my life (and a great deal of virtual ink in my last article) fruitlessly trying to answer the question, “what makes a cup of coffee good?” I’m beginning to agree with him: I can’t write a definition of good coffee, but I’ll know it when I see it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Or the cup.

I have a whole list of things that might help your coffee taste better: fresh beans, clean water, the right atmosphere, a couple of friends, a nice solid mug, and plenty of time. But none of those things by themselves will do it. Is there something on that list I’m missing? Will three out of six do it, or is it all or nothing? Is there an elusive synergy at work here that’s just too subtle to detect?

I guess it’s possible. Maybe someone more type-A than I am will come up with a checklist of items in descending order of importance for the production of a good cup of coffee. But I’m guessing it’s not nearly so technical as that. I’m going with the old standby:

Q: What makes a cup of coffee good?
A: I’ll know it when I see it.

And so, like so many things in our modern American society, this question, too, boils down to one simple thing: it’s all about me. I get to pick. I choose whether I like espresso or coffee better, and I don’t even have to give you a reason if I don’t want to. I decide if the coffee’s good or not, and no one can question my appraisal of the situation.

Maybe if I want to be really “open-minded” (another cardinal virtue of our society) I might admit the advice, counsel, and opinions of a few other people. But if they end up disagreeing with me, it’s only because of our differing backgrounds or philosophies, and neither one of us is really any more right than the other one. Their opinion has no bearing on mine. I can praise and snub at will, and pesky little things like other people’s standards will never stop me.

But surely, even someone that relativistic has to admit that there are some cups of coffee that almost anyone will admit are good cups of coffee, just like there are certain spectacles which every Supreme Court Justice who has ever served on the bench will agree fit almost anyone’s definition of pornography.

Well, yes, of course I’ll admit that. But it doesn’t prove anything about the definability of good coffee or the identification of the constituent parts that make up good coffee. All it proves is that our individualistic, subjective opinions all happen to overlap at certain mutually acceptable points.

What this all comes down to is this: don’t get too fancy-schmancy and hoity-toity about your coffee, because sometimes beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I guess you are allowed to take a certain amount of pride in your workmanship, to enjoy a certain amount of highbrow delight in the perfect, scientifically-controlled roasting of your beans, the virgin pureness of your water, the refined exactitude of your brewing technique and the stylish brand-name cups in which you serve your world-class gold-medal coffee.

In the end, though, none of that really matters. As is the case in so many other aspects of our society, the objective standards by which coffee is measured and defined and quantified and hegemonized fade very quickly into a warm, fuzzy subjectivity that qualifies an experience not by what it is, but by what it means; not by what happened, but how we feel about it. It’s not about the coffee. It’s about my reaction to the coffee.

Here’s an example. I met some new people a while back. Same age as I am, same demographic, similar educations, interests, all that. It really was a good match. I was floating around this guy’s pool about midnight and the topic came up of what we did for a living. I mentioned my day job, then talked about the writing I do on the side. That, of course, brought up the topic of coffee, and I was quick to launch into my explanation of the benefits of home-roasting and a defense of my general level of coffee-snobbery. My new friend told me that he liked coffee, too, and told me about a new little machine he uses that makes coffee one strong cup at a time, really fast, using packaged pods of pre-measured, pre-ground, coffee beans. Then he observed that he probably drank “really bad coffee.”

Then I told him something that he probably didn’t expect to hear, something that would have made every subjective individualist from Harry Potter to Potter Stewart very proud. I said, “If you like it, drink it.”

If you like it, drink it. When I first started drinking coffee, I made fun of people who put cream and sugar in theirs. (Why don’t you just drink hot chocolate?) When coffee shops finally became trendy in the Midwest, I made fun of people who drank flavored coffee. (Raspberry truffle? Who does that?) I still make fun of students who tell me they “love coffee” and then talk about the latest creamed, fluffed, iced, syruped, little-bit-of-coffee-with-their-milk concoctions from the corner café. There was a time when I would have made fun of my new friend for drinking wanna-be espresso from a prepackaged coffee puck. But hey ― if you like it, drink it.

As for me, I know what I like: single-origin coffee with a strong, easy-to-discern varietal distinctiveness, roasted a little past Full City in my drum roaster, burr-ground by hand in my Turkish mill, steeped for two minutes and forty-five seconds, stirred twice (once at the beginning and once at the end), pressed, and served in the same thick ceramic diner mug I’ve been using since college.

But that might not be you, and that’s OK. There might be objective standards of taste that coffee professionals choose to adhere to, but no one says you have to like what they like. You might not enjoy the same coffee as your friends or your spouse or the next Supreme Court Justice, and that’s OK too. As I said last time, de gustibus non disputandum est ― there’s no arguing about taste. If you like it, drink it.

Now, this might put us on some rather shaky ground sometimes ― you can’t choose to obey the Law Universal Gravitation based on how you “feel” about it. There are other things that are true, whether we believe (or even know about) them or not. And it occasionally makes sense to base our opinions on reality rather than random whim. But whether this increasing subjectivization in society as a whole ― and in matters of religion, economics, politics, or anything else ― is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, is a conversation I leave to you and your friends over your next cup of coffee.

I bet it’ll be a good one.

De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est

2008-07-07T09:42:00.004-04:00

In real life ― that is, when I’m not writing articles about coffee ― I used to spend time trying to teach Latin to junior high school students. There is a famous Latin saying: de gustibus non disputandum est. As a Latin teacher I really appreciate the way that phrase illustrates a neat little grammatical construction that doesn’t really translate well into English. (None of my students ever appreciate it the way I do.)

At any rate, the saying loosely means “there is no disputing about taste,” as in: you can’t convince me to like broccoli, and I can’t argue you into believing that Renoir is the best painter ever to live. We can’t logically explain or defend our opinion on the matter, or convince others to like something they don’t. Saying, “Well, I don’t particularly like that,” usually puts an end to serious discussion. We like what we like, and that’s the end of it.

Well, we all like coffee, don’t we? You wouldn’t be on this particular blog, subjecting yourself to my drivel, if you didn’t. The question for today is, “Why?” Why do we like coffee? Well, that one’s answered easily enough: because it’s good. And therein lies the real question, the question of taste, about which there can be no disputing: why is coffee good?

What makes a cup of coffee good? Spend twenty minutes on the internet and the answer will become pretty clear. You’ll find tips for brewing great coffee all over the place, brewing appliances that will revolutionize your morning, beans and blends from all over the planet to raise your worship of the dark god to heights you never knew existed. What it boils down to (if you’ll pardon the pun ― we all know you’re never supposed to boil coffee) is probably one word: fresh.

“Fresh roast” has become a watchword in coffee, and with good reason: roasted coffee loses much of its flavor after about a week. “Freshly ground” is a must: the first appliance most people buy after a coffee pot is their own grinder, because even the most undiscerning coffee drinker can tell the difference between coffee that was ground thirty seconds ago and the stuff that came out of the bottom of the can that’s been open in their cupboard for the last six weeks.

After brewing, “fresh” is still the most important word in coffee quality. We’ve all had coffee that’s been on the burner too long, and it tastes as bad as it smells. Even green coffee roasters are usually encouraged to use freshly harvested beans, because green coffee can start to get “baggy” after a year or two.

Beyond the “fresh” requirement, the internet will tell you all kinds of other things about coffee quality. Good beans (usually the beans sold by the person hosting the website) are key. Good water is a must ― coffee being something like 99% water, if your water isn’t good how good will your coffee be? Brewing methods, extraction temperatures, even serving vessels can affect how good your coffee is. And I’m not even going to talk about espresso…

But my point, for now, is this: there are ways to help make sure you get a really good cup of coffee. There are things you can do to make your cup of coffee objectively better than the standard-issue mug of diner joe. No one in their right mind can drink a cup of coffee brewed four hours ago in a gas station and say it’s as good as coffee made from freshly-roasted Yemeni beans in a press pot right in front of their eyes. They just can’t. There are objective standards of quality in coffee, and there are even organizations dedicated to the recognition, understanding, and implementation of these standards for the good of us all.

However, back to the original question: what makes a cup of coffee good? Spend twenty minutes in a coffee shop, gathered around mugs of good coffee, asking the passing coffee aficionados that question, and the answers you get may surprise you. You’ll probably hear many of the same things you got on the internet, as people trot out their favorite beans and machines. You’ll hear about this guy’s water filter and that one’s vacuum brewer. You’ll hear how home-roasted is the Way and that corporate chains are Evil. Coffee drinkers are full of opinions, and most of them have never heard that the Romans said not to argue about them.

But after the standard responses have been aired, the answers might start to get a little more vague. Things like the atmosphere. The company. The ambience. The theme music. Your mood. Your desperation level. People with the time and inclination to pull up a chair and chat with you will probably thank you for asking the question and making them think. They will wax poetic about their first cup of coffee, or a particularly memorable one. Someone will probably remember a scene from a book in which the main character receives some huge revelation over a cup of coffee. They will start a little sidebar conversation about the definition of good.

After a half-hour or so, things will start to get even more subjective. Brewing temperatures and roasting times will have given way to anecdotes and remember-whens. Instead of the perfect brewing method, you’ll hear about these really cool mugs they have at this one shop, and that cool chick with the guitar that plays on Friday nights over at what’s-that-place-called.

So what makes a cup of coffee good? Is the goodness of coffee objective and definable, or is it, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?

There are certain standards that a coffee place has to meet before it even deserves to be called a coffee place. Most of those standards are measurable and quantifiable and most of them take place inside of the cup. But some of them aren’t, and don’t. Some are like the smile on the face of the person who hands you your mug. Some are like the mug itself, which isn’t a paper cup held between your knees as you steer through morning traffic. Some are like the couch you can sink into, and the coffee table you can put your feet up on, and the journal, left behind by customers who came before you to read while you’re waiting for your date to get out of the bathroom. And all of these things are part of the equation, part and parcel of your decision on whether or not to call this particular cup of coffee good.

So what makes a cup of coffee good?

Well, in a way, it’s all good. The cup of coffee that I brew for myself and my best friends on a camping trip in the middle of winter probably tastes like crap compared to the stuff that comes out of a high-end espresso machine at the hand of a world-class barista, but quite frankly my friends don’t care and I’ll probably get more thank-yous from them than will the barista from all of his business suit-clad trendy upscale downtown clientele. The cup of coffee that I buy at a gas station in the middle of the night on a road trip might objectively be swill, but if it gets me home awake and in one piece to spend Christmas morning with my family, then I guess that’s a pretty good cup of coffee too.

So what makes a cup of coffee good?

Is good coffee really all about the people with whom you drink it? Is it really all about the atmosphere in which you enjoy your coffee and your friends? Is it really that social?
Is good coffee really all about flavor essences and accurate extraction times and proper grinding technique and artesian well water? Is it really all about varietal distinctiveness and SCAA cupping scores and fifteen-seconds-into-second-crack? Is it really that technical?

I hope you said “no” to both of the above tirades. If you did, then you’ve just found yourself in the same boat I’m in: A virtual lifetime spent drinking coffee, and I’m still not entirely sure what makes it good.

I just spent three pages asking and then trying to answer my own question, and in doing so proved that, once again, the Romans were right. De gustibus non disputandum est. Maybe by my next article I’ll have come a little closer to an answer about what makes a cup of coffee good. For now, though, I’m off to do some “research”…

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Geopolitics from a six-year-old

2008-06-17T15:41:00.001-04:00

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I’ve been playing Civilization III again lately. Right now, I’m playing as Egypt on the easiest difficulty level, and my six-year-old is watching me play. Since it’s the easiest level, I’m light-years ahead of my opposition ― right now, it’s 1470 and I have paratroopers, jet fighters, and tanks. With that kind of firepower, it’s pretty hard to resist the temptation to go beat the snot out of one’s neighbors, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Anyway, the next big milestone in my Civ’s arsenal is nuclear weapons. Sean knows, from various trips to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, what a nuclear weapon is and what it’s capable of. The Cold War gallery even has a new display ― a giant screen showing a mushroom cloud, towering above the observer, and a ten-warhead MIRV, innocuously displayed at eye level.

But getting to nuclear weapons in Civ III is a long process. After you discover fission, you have to find some uranium. After that, you need to research the Manhattan Project (a Great Wonder of several hundred shields). Then, in order to deliver your warheads, you need Computers, Rocketry, and Space Flight. After that, you can finally build a Tactical Nuke or an ICBM. It’s a long process ― even longer if you’re six, and waiting for you dad to play turn after turn of trying to fight a war the “old-fashioned” way.

So Sean’s new strategy is this: “Hey, Chris ― why don’t we make a peace treaty with them so that they’ll leave us alone while we build our nuclear weapons? Then when we get them, we can start the war again and turn their cities into mushrooms.”

Pretty clever, I thought, for a six-year-old. He’ll be one to watch, especially since he’s started beating me in Go. I couldn’t help but notice the startling parallel to at least a couple of contemporary “civilizations,” and what many smart people assume are their own nuclear ambitions.

The really ironic part is my chief adversary in this campaign: Persia.

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Coffee Rhapsody

2008-06-13T14:55:00.001-04:00

It’s the second most traded commodity in the world after oil.

Its global industry generates over sixty billion US dollars annually.

Between ten and twelve billion pounds of it are consumed every year.

Over 25 million families in more than fifty countries rely on it as their sole source of income.

What is it? It’s coffee, and right this very minute it’s out there changing our world in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.

Ever since its semi-legendary “discovery” by dancing African goats, coffee has been the central player in a fascinating historical sidebar of thievery, intrigue, romance, and intellectual revival. Variously credited with spawning the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the storming of the Bastille, the scientific revolution, and Western-style democracy, coffee has also been blamed for helping further to tread on the already-downtrodden people of the New World by subjecting them to the evils of colonialism, commercialism, economic exploitation, slave-labor plantations, and chain coffeehouses.

Today the romantic-yet-complicated love affair we have with coffee still inspires passionate conversations from people around the world from every walk of life. Still young and fresh even after so many years, the coffee industry is pushing its borders, exploring (and exploiting) new markets, and challenging its own historical ways of doing business.
And all the while, the goats have not stopped dancing.

What is coffee? For every answer, it seems, there is an equal-but-opposite “re-answer,” that leaves you with the idea that no one really knows what they’re talking about. But that’s part of the joy ― the complexity and diversity, the hundreds of unique faces, the paradoxes and complications ― that all end up being Coffee.

Every cup of coffee begins its life within a thousand miles of the equator. All of the coffee-growing land on earth is contained in that “belt” called the tropics. But keep your eye on that belt as you spin a globe, and you can imagine the incredible diversity you find in the coffee-growing world. From the lowlands of Vietnam where a million and a half pounds of coffea robusta were produced last year, to the mountain heights of Jamaica where specialty farmers grew only 5,800 pounds of the world’s most celebrated Arabica beans, from coffee giants like Brazil and Colombia, who together make up almost half of the world’s production, to nations like Zambia, whose coffee is just now gaining recognition in the world of specialty coffee, the origins of coffee are as diverse as the people who drink it.

But the diversity only starts there…

In Colombia, a grower carries his freshly-picked coffee fruit to the local mill, where it is washed, bagged, and shipped to a commercial roastery to be blended with millions of other beans from thousands of other farms from around the world.

In Yemen, the hot Arabian sun beats down on stone rooftops, where coffee grown on ancient trees on terraced hillsides is spread out to dry in the same way it has been for five hundred growing seasons.

In Paris, a woman sits at a table in a sidewalk café, nursing her coffee and scanning the passing crowd for the familiar face of her lover.

In Ethiopia, a guest is welcomed into a dirt-floored hut, where he sits in a circle by a fire with his host’s family while the coffee is roasted, ground, brewed and served in a hospitality ritual dating back hundreds of years.

In Guatemala, a peasant earns four cents a pound to harvest his crop.

In New York City, a businessman pays four dollars for a three-quarter-ounce espresso ristretto.

A specialty-roaster in New Zealand only sells premium organic shade-grown coffee.

A housewife in Finland scoops coffee grounds from a metal can.

A restaurant in Peru serves instant coffee with evaporated milk.

A barista in Japan earns his college tuition by pulling shots of espresso in a trendy café.

And yet, somehow, in spite of ― or perhaps because of ― all of these differences, coffee manages to unite people around the world. Coffee manages to bring together all of these paradoxes and put them into the simple cup that finds its way onto your breakfast table every morning. All of the legends and stories, all the varieties and flavors, all the people, origins, economics, habits and social issues distil out of the beans in your coffee pot into the mug that warms your heart, opens your mind, and gets you ready to face each new day.

Enjoy!

I'm not dead yet...

2008-06-09T16:10:00.001-04:00

Well, after taking basically a year off from my blog, I think I might be on the verge of coming back.

In case you’re wondering what I’ve been up to, the short answer is "no good." I've spent a lot of time bloviating on this website. I also wrote a thousand words a week last year on a devotional project for school (which I'm hoping turns into a real, live book). I wasted copious amounts of time, doing whatever it is people do when they're not being productive. And I also taught full time and stuff.

But I think I’m almost back…

Someone I wish I had known

2008-03-04T08:20:00.001-05:00

Carlos Martin

Sweet New Functionality - Thanks, Blogger!

2007-08-17T21:06:00.002-04:00

If the new poll feature ever comes online, you should be able to register your preferred coffee breweing preference for all the world to see. This should be interesting.

PS -- there should be a whole bunch of choices listed, ending with something facetious about making someone else do it. If there are only 4-5 choices, the poll is still jacked up.

PPS -- it didn't occur to me to include an "I don't drink coffee" choice in the poll. This is not to exclude my non-coffee-drinking readership, but to protect myself from being saddened.

Update -- I took the poll down, because it was ugly, and it stopped being fun to play with my page layout.

If It Rhymes, It’s A Rule

2007-08-06T10:42:00.000-04:00

I have long been a fan of the card game euchre. One of the few pictures of me in my high school yearbook shows our little group of friends gathered around the traditional lunch-with-euchre table. I have stories and anecdotes about crazy or marathon games of euchre, strange places I’ve played (such as “gringo corner” in the Costa Rican airport for six hours) and awful mistakes I’ve made, the worst of which was misdealing when my partner had a lay-down loner (sorry, Denny).

Anyway, euchre is one of those games that features a lot of local variations. I’m sure there’s an according-to-Hoyle way to play, and I’m also sure that we don’t play it. One of the more shocking examples of regional variance is that while most euchre players use a 6 and a 4 to keep score, players from Michigan use…two 5s. Crazy.

Two of the house rules that my friends use to play euchre are “a card laid is a card played” to prevent picking up an incorrectly-played card, and “ace no face” to get a misdeal due to an inordinately bad hand. These two rules have given way to the general tenet of “if it rhymes, it’s a rule.” We even reject such nonsense as the idea of “partner’s best,” partly on the grounds that it doesn’t rhyme.

The problem, of course, with “if it rhymes, it’s a rule” is that it doesn’t rhyme. There’s a little bit of alliteration, sure, but it doesn’t even come close to rhyming. So, if “if it rhymes, it’s a rule” is a rule, then it makes itself illegal. And if it’s not a rule, then it’s not a rule.

So until we come up with a rhyming version of “if it rhymes, it’s a rule,” I guess we’re stuck with Hoyle.

A few weeks ago, my family was able to worship at a church of a completely different denomination. The pastor’s sermon that week, conveniently enough, seemed to be centered on the denominational distinctives of his church body ― what they believed, why they believed it, and how they were different from other Christian denominations. (I say “conveniently” because this is one of the things I’m most interested in when I meet people of other denominations, and it was just handy that the sermon answered many of my questions before I even had to ask them.)

I don’t have the time to go into the whole gamut of ways in which this church body differs from my own. I will share that I learned that the “-ian” at the end of “Christian” stands for “I Ain’t Nothin’” because Christ is all there is. I didn’t know that before.

The other interesting thing I learned is that this particular denomination doesn’t use instruments in its public worship. I thought when Brother Billy stood in front of church and led the congregation in their many hymns with his clear, powerful voice, he was doing it because they didn’t have (or couldn’t afford) a piano or an organ. Turns out, he was doing it for doctrinal reasons.

It seems that this particular denomination follows the general principle, “if it’s not specifically mentioned in the New Testament, you shouldn’t use it in public worship.” They can’t find any specific examples of instrumental music in the New Testament, so they don’t use any instruments in their worship. (Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 don’t count, because, despite what you can infer from OT worship practices, the NT only specifically mentions the human voice.)

Now, there’s a whole lot a person can say about this idea, but the one thing I’m going to say is this: it doesn’t rhyme.

Seriously, where in the NT is the general principle “if it’s not specifically mentioned in the New Testament, you shouldn’t use it in public worship”? It’s not even close to something that you might call a NT worship principle ― in fact, it seems to run counter to the principle that Paul articulates in Colossians 2:16-17, 1 Corinthians 10:31, and Galatians 5:1. The rule disqualifies itself. It doesn’t meet its own standard. So, if “if it’s not specifically mentioned in the New Testament, you shouldn’t use it in public worship” is a rule, then it makes itself illegal. And if it’s not a rule, then it’s not a rule.

So until we come up with a rhyming version of “if it’s not specifically mentioned in the New Testament, you shouldn’t use it in public worship,” I guess we’re stuck with a pipe organ.

Not-Quite-Devastating News

2007-07-26T15:46:00.000-04:00

From FoxNews:

Starbucks to Raise Coffee Prices (gasp!)

Three observations:

1) Why is it news that a company is raising its prices? Doesn't that happen all the time?

2) Granting that this is an out-of-the-ordinary price hike, one might speculate that if milk weren’t the primary ingredient in most of their beverages, they wouldn’t be having this problem, would they? The moral of the story: Drink Black Coffee!

3) Read the article carefully, especially the quote from that Dan guy who put a buy rating on sbux. I’m not an economist, but how is raising prices going to help sales go forward?

Just a couple of thoughts as I keep my fingers on the pulse of the global coffee industry for you.

Doing Something

2007-07-18T22:54:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, sitting around talking about stuff is really important. A lot of people these days do things without talking about them first, which rather implies that they haven’t thought much about them either. And doing things without thinking/talking them through can be ill-advised at best. (A related problem is people who say things without thinking about them, too...)

Talking about things gets other people’s opinions into the open. It also opens up one’s own thought processes to public scrutiny, kind of like having someone proof-read a paper before it gets turned in. With a few friends, a favorite beverage, and a couple of hours, there’s almost no problem that can’t be “solved” ― at least, to the satisfaction of those in the room.

Sometimes, however, sitting around talking about stuff is less-than-constructive. It may even give the illusion that “something is being done” about a problem or concern when, in fact, nothing is happening. At such times, action is required rather than mere words. One can’t help but be reminded of the P.F.J. meetings in Monty Python’s classic Life of Brian ― “this calls for immediate discussion!”

At any rate, I have opened another blog to deal with both of the above situations. I’m calling it What Are We Going To Do About It?, or WAWGTDAI? for short. I’ve decided that the form, style, and content will vary enough from the vague, comfortable, lukewarm vapid-ness that characterizes this blog that it’s best to host those discussions elsewhere, and I’m hoping that posting to WAWGTDAI? doesn’t adversely affect my already-atrocious writing schedule at Café Diem.

What Are We Going To Do About It? is, above all, a place for me to talk about news, politics, and other current-events stuss that is important to me, with the hope that family, friends, and a wider community of readers might find what I have to say interesting, helpful, thought-provoking, and perhaps paradigm-shifting. I invite all of you to drop by often, read what I have to say, form an opinion, comment, etc. But even more than just talking, as the blog’s title indicates, the goal of this new blog will usually be some kind of action.

Sometimes, the action will be nothing more than staying informed and helping others to do the same. It might not be a specific action right now ― as a teacher, I’m quite used to imparting information that won’t get used for a long time into the foreseeable future ― but eventually, if I am faithful enough in writing, there will come a time when we will be called upon to do something.

¿Qué hiciste durante las vacaciones?

2007-07-09T16:00:00.000-04:00

Una pregunta muy común entre los estudiantes en los primeros días del año escolar es, “¿Qué hiciste durante las vacaciones?” Todos los amigos quieren saber qué hay de nuevo, o si algo interesante te pasó cuando no estabas en la escuela.

Pues, doce jóvenes norteamericanos tienen una respuesta muy interesante a esta pregunta. Su respuesta a la pregunta “¿qué hiciste durante las vacaciones?” es: “Dios me regaló la oportunidad de cambiar la vida de una persona.”

Cambiar la vida de una persona – es una cosa muy bonita hacer durante las vacaciones. Pero, ¿cómo? ¿Cómo puede cambiar una vida en una semana? Déjenme explicar…

Cada año, por los últimos siete años, un grupo de jóvenes viene a Sonora de Wisconsin Lutheran High School, una escuela secundaria en Milwaukee, Wisconsin, en el norte de los EE.UU. Los estudiantes vienen con un poco de español, un poco conocimiento de la cultura mexicana, y mucho amor en sus corazones por Jesucristo. Vienen para compartir algo de sus bendiciones físicas, en la forma de ropa o zapatos o vitaminas o juguetes. Vienen para compartir su amor, en la forma de conocer a los niños mexicanos en los pueblos. Y vienen para compartir su fe en las buenas nuevas del Evangelio de nuestro Señor Jesucristo, en la forma de historias bíblicas y canciones espirituales.

Yo tengo el privilegio de ser un maestro a estos jóvenes norteamericanos. He venido cinco veces a los pueblos de Sonora con Misión para los Niños con grupos de estudiantes. Muchos de Uds. ya me conocen – soy el pelirrojo alto que no habla muy bien el español. Creo que es un gran regalo de Dios que él me permite hacer este viaje cada año. Es un gran regalo conocer a todos Uds. y trabajar junto con Uds. en el Reino de Dios (y también disfrutar a mucha comida muy rica). Realmente es un privilegio inestimable hacer lo que puedo hacer.

El año pasado, una de las señoras en uno de los pueblos me dijo que los jóvenes estudiantes con quienes viajo están en una época muy difícil en sus vidas, pero que “es muy bonito que pueden venir aquí. Es bueno verlos trabajar por Cristo.” Recuerdo ese comentario muy bien, porque es la razón que vengo. Es la razón que venimos.

“Trabajar por Cristo.” No hay una cosa más bonita, ni más importante en todo el mundo. Los estudiantes, como los apóstoles, abren sus ojos y ven que los campos están sembrados, y la cosecha está madura. Quieren trabajar por Cristo, para recoger “el fruto para vida eterna” (San Juan 4:35-36). Quieren ser mensajeros de la gracia y el amor de Dios, quien envió a su Hijo Único para salvar al mundo. Quieren compartir el mensaje simple y importantísimo, “Jesús te ama,” a cada persona que les escuche.

“Trabajar por Cristo.” Ellos trabajan con la oración que cuando los niños mexicanos miran a ellos, que ven el amor de Dios que es el motivo de todo que hacen. Recordamos las palabras de Cristo: “Les aseguro que todo lo que hicieron por uno de mis hermanos, aun por el más pequeño, lo hicieron por mí” (Mateo 25:40).

Vinimos a Sonora. Visitamos a los pueblos. Enseñamos las lecciones. Jugamos y charlamos. Conocimos a muchas personas fantásticas. Recibimos una hospitalidad sin igual. Y después, en muy poco tiempo, tuvimos que regresar otra vez a nuestras casas y familias en el norte. Cuando regresamos, y empezamos de nuevo otro año escolar, siempre hay esa pregunta: “¿Qué hiciste durante las vacaciones?” Y la respuesta siempre es lo mismo: “Dios me regaló la oportunidad de cambiar la vida de una persona.”

Pero la persona de que hablamos no es un mexicano, aunque tal vez pudimos hacer algo pequeño por otra persona. No – las vidas que cambiaron son nuestras. Nosotros somos las personas que cambiaron, que crecieron en la fe, que conocieron el amor de Jesús, mostrado en las vidas de la gente de Sonora. Vinimos a sus pueblos y a sus casas y nunca seremos lo mismo.

Muchas gracias.

(originally written for the newsletter for Mission to the Children, Tucson AZ / Sonora Mexico)

One Cup More

2007-03-24T10:15:00.000-04:00

By Chris Pluger

Once upon a morning dreary, as I stumbled, weak and bleary
Down the stairs of my apartment from the upper floor.
While I staggered, nearly tripping, suddenly there came a dripping,
As of something sliding, slipping, dripping down onto the floor.
“‘tis my faucet,” then I muttered, “dripping down onto the floor
only this and nothing more.”

Ah, and then began I fearing, that the sound that I was hearing
Was not merely water dripping out my sink onto the floor.
My eyes were open, heart was racing, fast into the kitchen pacing
Afraid of what I would be facing, facing once I crossed the door
Oh, disaster without measure, struck me as I crossed the door.
It was as I feared, and more!

Deep into the darkness sinking, now I stood there, wondering, thinking,
“Whence the coffee I’ll be drinking? Whence the coffee?” I implore.
I began to breathe much faster ― what mechanical disaster
Fain would try become my master as this myst’ry I explore?
Oh, let me find the pot unbroken as this myst’ry I explore!
Oh, be unplugged, and nothing more!

“Strange,” I said as I approached it, and although I oft reproached it,
this machine had served me well for time and time before.
But today it was not making; not a drop would I be taking
From this pot, which me forsaking, soon began to vex me sore.
This foul pot, which in its breaking, broke me as I begged and swore,
“Can’t you give me one cup more?”

Water from its cistern leaking, electric sparks around it leaping,
Every joint and member creaking, creaking yet to creak some more
First I begged and then I pleaded: it was coffee that I needed!
But my cries now went unheeded. It was deafened as before.
My despair with silence greeted; it ignored me as before
As I begged for one cup more.

Down into the basement running, oh, I tried with all my cunning
Now to fix this problem with a volume of forgotten lore.
But the manual was silent, in my mem’ry I defile it!
And at last I became violent, returning up the stairs once more,
Returning with an angry portent, running up the stairs once more ―
“Now I’ll give you one chance more!”

I pressed the switch, I flipped it madly, begging, whining, saying sadly,
“Can’t we work together, happy, as in saintly days of yore?”
Bowing not to my request it made no noises as I pressed it,
Sat silently as I redressed it, and my wrath I did outpour.
Choking on the dregs of anger ― oh, what wrath I did outpour!
“You must give me one cup more!”

I grabbed the pot’s black plastic handle, smashed it like and angry vandal
Smashed and crushed beneath my sandal, wreckage on the kitchen floor.
“Cursed thing,” at last I muttered, while the fuses popped and stuttered,
and the water slowly sputtered, dripping out onto the floor.
I laughed and taunted, taunting, laughing, mocked the glass upon the floor,
“Now you can’t give one cup more!”

Now I sit here, sadly weeping, now a vigil I am keeping
And in silence, still am sleeping, sleeping yet to wake no more.
Now I lay in silence, turning, and my soul within me burning,
Longing still to be returning, from this night’s Plutonian Shore.
But this veil of tears is on me, laying heavy as before,
And shall be lifted― nevermore!

With apologies to Edgar Allan Poe, and a nod to the various internet versions of “Abort, Retry, Ignore.”

Praying with Understanding

2007-03-12T16:38:00.000-04:00

My four-year-old is starting to get interested in the liturgy. He generally stands up and sits down when he’s supposed to. He checks to see what page we’re on, and holds his hymnal accordingly. He looks to see what color the paraments are. Sometimes he hums along with the hymn melodies. He’s learned the ending bit of the Psalm, which goes, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit…” He also knows the Lord’s Prayer.

Yesterday, as we were standing together praying the prayer the Jesus taught us, along with everyone else in church and every other Christian on earth and throughout history, I started thinking. (Yes, I know. I should have been thinking about the prayer I was praying, but…)

Lots of people are down on memorized prayers. I actually had a student once that asked why I was teaching the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish, since, after all, don’t prayers only “count” if they’re spontaneous and from the heart? Worse yet, I’m guessing, would be the “vain repetition” of a four-year-old who was saying a bunch of words he doesn’t even understand. Trespasses? Hallowed?

But then it occurred to me, as it has probably occurred to many parents throughout history: what difference does that make? How much does it really matter that Sean doesn’t understand what he’s praying for? After all, how often do I pray for things I don’t really understand either?

Do I have some lofty and vaunted claim to having prayed a better prayer just because I can define all the words I used?

Do I really know what it means to pray “as we forgive those who trespass against us”? Do I have any idea what I’m saying when I pray “Thy will be done”?

Is the prayer of a 32-year-old prayed with any more real understanding than the prayer of a 4-year-old? Am I really that much closer to understanding the transcendent sovereign creator of the universe, just because of a paltry 28 more years on this spinning rock? Are my words any more “genuine” or “meaningful” than his just because I think I can understand what I’m saying?

I’m not saying that rote memory and verbatim regurgitation of set prayers is all that’s necessary for a healthy prayer life (because the Holy Spirit will just fill in the blanks, right?). I’m just urging caution, that before we look down on (or worse ― patronize) the “cute” little prayers of a small child, we come to grips with the fact that our own prayers are often said with the same lack of understanding and naïveté that we see in kids just learning to pray.

And that maybe that’s how God wants it, after all.

An Analogy: How many Kevin Bacon movies?

2007-02-09T22:00:00.000-05:00

Pretend that technology is frozen in approximately the same place it was in the early 1980s. Video Cassette Recorders are just making their way into people’s houses. DVDs are unheard-of. There is no such thing as the internet. There are really no such thing as video stores, either. About the only way to watch a pre-recorded movie on your brand-new VCR is to buy one of the few movies released on video (for a small fortune) or to watch a movie that had been recorded from TV onto a blank video tape (hopefully by someone who paused out the commercials).

Further pretend that, back in this dark age of home entertainment technology, someone asks you a question: How many Kevin Bacon movies are there?

How would you answer that question? For the sake of this analogy, pretend like there are no books or magazines that list every movie Kevin Bacon ever starred in. There’s nothing like the IMDb. The only resource you have is your VCR and your collection of video tapes, and every video tape you can beg, borrow, or steal from someone else. How do you answer that question?

It seems to me like the best way to answer that question is to get together all the Kevin Bacon fans that you can, and have them bring their video collections. When you do, you’ll probably find that there are four different kinds of Kevin Bacon movies that come up.

The first kind of Kevin Bacon movies would be the obvious ones. These are the movies that everyone remembers, that people can quote from, that immediately come to mind when you say “Kevin Bacon.” Even people who haven’t seen them for themselves know that these are Kevin Bacon movies. These movies are easy to count.

The second kind of Kevin Bacon movie that might come up (remember, this is an analogy) are the obviously forged Kevin Bacon movies. Maybe someone with crude video-editing machinery has spliced together scenes from a Kevin Bacon movie together with another film to try to make it look like Kevin Bacon, instead of Jimmy Stewart, was the hero of that movie you see every Christmas. These movies are easy to count, too - you just throw them out.

The other kind of Kevin Bacon movie is a little tougher. Remember, in the early 80s, most people’s movie collection was made up of copies of copies of copies of someone else’s copy. Picture and sound quality weren’t the best. So there might be some grainy images, some stretched tapes, maybe even some that are incomplete or half taped-over with someone’s sister’s ballet recital. Is that the Kevin Bacon, or just some guy who looks like him? You bring your grainy, incomplete copy to the movie convention and see what the other fans have to say. Maybe others have clearer copies of the same movie, and you can tell it really is Kevin Bacon. Maybe someone has a tape of a Late Show interview where Kevin Bacon talks about that movie, thus proving your guess. Maybe, in spite of a similar hairstyle, you determine it’s not really Kevin Bacon at all. Maybe no one else has that movie, but a couple of people have heard that the guy looks a little bit like Kevin Bacon. Either way, other people will help you make that call.

The fourth kind of movie would be the most exciting of all. Imagine the excitement at a Kevin Bacon fan club meeting if someone brought in a good, clean copy of a rare early Kevin Bacon film that was never released in theaters. It wouldn’t matter that no one had ever seen it before - Kevin Bacon is unmistakable! After they watched it, and thanked the person who had brought it, what would everyone else at the convention do? Copy it, and pass it on, and add it to their collections.

I hope the parallels between my analogy and the formation of the New Testament are obvious, even as I hope you will overlook the shortcomings inevitable in any analogy.

Most of the books of the New Testament, like the “famous” Kevin Bacon movies, were quickly and readily accepted as part of the canon. God’s fingerprints, as it were, were all over these books. God’s inspiration and authority, and the authority of the Apostle who wrote the book, were obvious, evident, and well-known.

Likewise, the forgeries and would-be books were quickly recognized for what they were: either outright fakes, or more usually books written by men - fine and well-intended - but lacking in apostolic authorship and divine authority.

The books about which people had questions, which some people for a time even spoke against, are like the grainy movies where the subject isn’t as clearly seen, or where the movie isn’t immediately recognizable because we aren’t familiar enough with the work. In those cases, we watch closely. We ask questions. We compare our experience to that of others until the truth finally comes out. Notice that the early Church didn’t “make” Jude a canonical book any more than a viewer can “make” a movie a Kevin Bacon movie. Either it is, or it isn’t. It’s the Church’s job to recognize God’s Word for what it is, and we give thanks that they did such a careful, diligent job.

The fourth kind of movie mirrors the experience of every Christian congregation every time they acquired a fresh copy of a letter they had never seen before. Imagine the joy at discovering there are two letters of Paul to the Corinthians, or of finally receiving a copy of John’s Gospel that you’d been hearing so much about.

It also mirrors the experience of every human being who reads God’s Word for the first time. Imagine the joy at discovering that you don’t have to atone for your own shortcomings with a complicated set of rituals, or of finally realizing that there’s a purpose to your life beyond the accumulation of stuff and fond memories.

Open your Bible, and read it. It doesn’t matter what page you turn to ― you’re reading God’s words to you. There’s absolutely no question that what you’re reading is a book of the Bible, one of God’s Holy Scriptures. His fingerprints are all over it.

All that’s left is to read it, learn it, share it, and live it.

(this rather tortured analogy was birthed from two weeks of ruminations about the assembling of the canon of Scripture, ruminations which also resulted in three slightly more coherent posts: How Do We Know the Bible is the Bible: part 1, part 2, part 3.)

A Hidden God?

2007-01-13T19:26:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, God makes himself obvious and evident in our lives. He is almost tangibly present, and acts in ways that we can almost physically feel. He answers our prayers in powerful ways. He steps in and averts disaster. He gives us a blessing, or blesses our efforts beyond what we could hope or imagine. He speaks authoritatively to us through his Word, or through the advice of a friend, and our life is changed for the better. Sometimes it seems easy to “practice God’s presence,” as a popular book encourages us to do.

At other times, however, God seems hidden and veiled. We can’t see or feel him. He is distant from us, absent, apart. Frustratingly, it seems like there is no rhyme or reason for his sudden “disappearance” ― our life is going the same as it always has, we have been doing what we have always done. And just as frustratingly, it seems like the more we try to “find” him ― even when we are looking in all the right places ― the more hidden he becomes. Isaiah spoke a truth that many of can identify with when he wrote, “Truly you are a God who hides himself” (Is. 45:15).

But as one of my favorite books points out, “hidden” does not mean “absent.” Hiddenness, in fact, implies presence ― albeit in a way that we can’t discern as readily as we would like. We would like a God we can see and hear at all times, who makes his will unmistakably clear to everyone on earth. We would like a God who shows himself, in ways that we expect and predict. We would like a God who “performs” on command. We would like...

But frankly, who cares what we would like? Perhaps that’s the most important thing to think about when we think about God’s “hiddenness” and his “visibility”: Visible in what way? Known by what criteria? Obedient to whose standards? Who gets to decide how God is supposed to act?

We know the answers to those questions, don’t we? As much as we would like God to obey our rules, meet our expectations, and conform to our will, we know that the reverse is true. It is we who need to obey God’s rules, we who need to meet God’s expectations, and God who gets to conform to his own will. We can’t say to God, “If you really love me, you will do this.” God is the one who gets to set the standards, and our God is a God who, at times, chooses to hide himself.

Well, if God is a God who hides himself, where does he hide?

Every day, God hides in plain sight, in the beauty of the creation he has made (Acts 14:15-17). We are supposed to look at creation and praise the Creator. God is also hidden in the needs of other people. Christ himself says, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). The reverse is also true: God hides himself in the ministry of others, who help us and meet our needs. Who of us hasn’t seen Christ in a fellow believer who brought physical help or a word of comfort at the right time?

God even hides himself, in a way of speaking, in Jesus Christ: True God hidden in the form of True Man, the almighty creator of the universe who empties himself to lie in a food trough and die on a cross so that we might be remade in his image and share heaven with him someday. Jesus became a human like us, and yet he says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:6-10). In Christ, God is both hidden and revealed.

God is also hidden in the Gospel, the Word of God itself. The message of forgiveness of sins through Jesus is the place where God is most “hidden,” exactly the place where God acts most contrary to the expectations that human beings have about “how a proper God should act.” St. Paul says it best in the first chapter of First Corinthians:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to
us who are being saved it is the power of God ... God was pleased through the
foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand
miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a
stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has
called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18-24).

Finally, last but certainly not least, God is hidden in our suffering. In our darkest moments, though we might not see or feel him, God is there ― not to remove our suffering or take us out of it ― but to go through it with us, and bring us through to the other side of it. There is nowhere, says Psalm 139, that we can go that God isn’t already there with us, not even the “depths” of the grave. Even death itself is somewhere that Christ has been. It is as though divine footprints lead all the way to the tomb, and out through the other side.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor martyred by the Nazis, wrote, “Only a suffering God can help.” A suffering God, a hidden God, is the only God whose existence is not made laughable by the suffering and evil in the world. A suffering God, a hidden God, is the God of those who are suffering (sometimes suffering at the hands of the rich and powerful, who claim a rich, powerful, triumphant, visibly successful God as their own).

A suffering, hidden God is the God spoken of by the prophet Isaiah: “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4,5).

The Jews expected the Messiah to come as a king, to ride a white stallion swinging a sword and kicking the Romans out of their land once and for all. They got a humble rabbi riding a donkey. Sometimes we expect God to act in big amazing, fantastic ways, too: heal the sick, right the wrongs, answer our prayers the way we would like them answered. Do away with social injustice. Legislate Christian morality. Establish his kingdom on earth. Give us success and achievement in the world because we are his disciples. We expect power and strength and success and glory. We get a weak and humble Savior, dying on a cross.

In the poem “Nondum,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins explores the theme of the hidden God, a God who does not meet the expectations of human beings. Read the poem. Hear the poet’s cries of anguish, and listen to the imagery of God’s reply ― an empty room in which the lights are on, but no one’s home; silence; night; a vacant maze; a host of enemy; the destruction of the weak (“pity bleeds”); even death and dying.

But still, in the end, he says to God, “Thou art, and near.” “Hidden” does not mean “absent” ― God exists, and he is near to help his people by bearing their suffering with them until the consummation of the world on the last day.

At the end of the poem, the poet prays for patience to wait, confidence that removes the fear of the unseen unknown, and hope in the joy that awaits us. What is God’s answer to that prayer? What is God’s answer to the prayer that he reveal his hiddenness?

It is in the title of the poem: “Nondum” is Latin for “Not Yet.”

NONDUM

God, though to Thee our psalm we raise
No answering voice comes from the skies;
To Thee the trembling sinner prays
But no forgiving voice replies;
Our prayer seems lost in desert ways,
Our hymn in the vast silence dies.

We see the glories of the earth
But not the hand that wrought them all:
Night to a myriad worlds gives birth,
Yet like a lighted empty hall
Where stands no host at door or hearth
Vacant creation’s lamps appal.

We guess; we clothe Thee, unseen King,
With attributes we deem are meet;
Each in his own imagining
Sets up a shadow in Thy seat;
Yet know not how our gifts to bring,
Where seek Thee with unsandalled feet.

And still th’unbroken silence broods
While ages and while aeons run,
As erst upon chaotic floods
The Spirit hovered ere the sun
Had called the seasons’ changeful moods
And life’s first germs from death had won.

And still th’abysses infinite
Surround the peak from which we gaze.
Deep calls to deep, and blackest night
Giddies the soul with blinding daze
That dares to cast its searching sight
On being’s dread and vacant maze.

And Thou art silent, whilst Thy world
Contends about its many creeds
And hosts confront with flags unfurled
And zeal is flushed and pity bleeds
And truth is heard, with tears impearled,
A moaning voice among the reeds.

My hand upon my lips I lay;
The breast’s desponding sob I quell;
I move along life’s tomb-decked way
And listen to the passing bell
Summoning men from speechless day
To death’s more silent, darker spell.

Oh! till Thou givest that sense beyond,
To shew Thee that Thou art, and near,
Let patience with her chastening wand
Dispel the doubt and dry the tear;
And lead me child-like by the hand
If still in darkness not in fear.

Speak! whisper to my watching heart
One word-as when a mother speaks
Soft, when she sees her infant start,
Till dimpled joy steals o’er its cheeks.
Then, to behold Thee as Thou art,
I’ll wait till morn eternal breaks.

―Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

(This essay also appears, in altered form, here, at the website of Resurrection Evangelical Lutheran Church. It is also the proud recipient of a Golden Aardvark Award.)

Links

2007-01-13T19:25:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the long delay in posting anything . I haven’t been completely slothful, however; I have been regularly posting “eDevotions” at my church’s website here.

Also, a directory of Lutheran blogs has chosen to list me. Find their interesting and helpful directory here.

I’ve been published again. Check out my latest Forward in Christ article here.

Finally, my good friend Denny has managed to quit his job (again!) and has resumed regular posting at his Worldview weblog. Pay him a visit, too. You’ll get more regular stuff from him than from me.

Odi Et Amo

2006-11-16T20:21:00.000-05:00

God “hates the sin but loves the sinner.” Agree or disagree?

Well, God surely hates sin. No question about the attitude of a holy God towards sin.

God also surely loves sinners. After all, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” and “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…”

So we agree with the two statements, while at the same time we feel we need to add a third statement: “God hates the sin and hates the sinner and loves the sinner.”

Does God hate sinners, as opposed to just hating sin? On the basis of the clear words of Scripture, the answer has to be yes.

Consider these passages:
· Psalm 5:5, “The boastful shall not stand before Thine eyes; Thou dost hate all who do iniquity.”

· Psalm 11:5, “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and the one who loves violence His soul hates.”

· Leviticus 20:23, “Moreover, you shall not follow the customs of the nation which I shall drive out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I have abhorred them.”

· Isaiah 63:10, “Yet they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit. So he turned and became their enemy and he himself fought against them.”

· Jeremiah 12:7-8, “I will forsake my house, abandon my inheritance; I will give the one I love into the hands of her enemies. My inheritance has become to me like a lion in the forest. She roars at me; therefore I hate her.”

· Proverbs 6:16-19, “There are six things which the Lord hates, yes, seven which are an abomination to Him: Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that run rapidly to evil, a false witness who utters lies, and one who spreads strife among brothers.”

· Hosea 9:15, “All their evil is at Gilgal; indeed, I came to hate them there! Because of the wickedness of their deeds I will drive them out of My house! I will love them no more; all their princes are rebels.”

Sin is a terrible thing. It separates a person from God. God hates sin. But there’s more to it than that. Sin cannot be separated or dealt with apart from the sinner. We are moral beings ― what we do affects who we are. The passages above make no distinction between the sin and the sinner; God hates them both. It seems like some pretty tight philosophical hair-splitting to try to separate what we do from who we are.

God doesn’t send sin to hell, He sends sinners to hell. God didn’t punish the sins of the world on the cross. He punished Jesus. Look to God’s Word and read how serious He is about sin. Look at the cross of Christ and see how serious He is about sin.

At the same time, however, countless passages in the Bible teach us that God dearly loves the world of sinners, and every individual sinner too. He has provided full and free, unconditional and seriously-offered pardon and salvation for each sinner and for all sinners. The promises of God in the Gospel are for everyone at any time.

God loves sinners enough to send his only Son for them. He shows his love for sinners in that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. That is his word of Gospel for all of us sinners, which is never to be treated lightly or dismissed but only trusted in Spirit-wrought faith.

The reconciliation of God’s Law and Gospel, God’s hatred of sinners and His love for them, may be found in only one place: at the foot of the cross of Christ. Jesus Christ bore the divine hatred for a world of sinners and Jesus Christ perfectly displayed the divine love for all sinners. See in the cross the justice and mercy of God.

How can this be? How can such two contradictory feelings exist in the heart of God at one and the same time? I have no idea. But I rejoice that God’s Law calls me to repentance and faith when I begin to think of myself more highly than I ought, and I rejoice that God’s Gospel in Christ graciously promises me complete forgiveness when I begin to despair of my own sinfulness.

How can this be? How can such two contradictory feelings exist in the heart of God at one and the same time? I have no idea. But I read in God’s Word that it is so, and I take God at His Word.

“Lord, I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24)

Comments?

(thanks to Deb for asking the question, and several random websites for their guidance in answering it.)

Black Coffee

2006-10-07T12:23:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday, for reasons that don’t need to be talked about on a public forum like this, I really needed a cup of coffee. So I pulled off of the highway and into a McDonalds, which, as you know, sells something mostly resembling the beverage we call “coffee.”

After an excessively long wait in line due to several larger families ordering huge amounts of pre-soccer breakfast items, I got to the counter and ordered my large coffee.

“Would you like that black?” the order-taker asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

She printed out my receipt and pointed me to the spot where people languish while waiting for their orders to be filled. I noticed my receipt had BLACK COFFEE emblazoned on it in large, friendly letters.

Several minutes later ― a wait made longer by the fact that I really needed this particular cup of coffee ― another teenage PBTC looked at my receipt and began to fill my order. She looked stressed and harried, like someone who really didn’t know her way around her work area yet, and like most teenagers took no great pains to verbally and non-verbally express how stressed and harried she was.

She looked over at the coffee station. Two full pots of decaf (orange handle) were sitting on the burners. There was also one almost-empty pot of regular (black handle), the coffee still sloshing a bit from just being set down by another PBTC. My girl looked again, disgustedly, at my clearly-marked receipt and asked me:

“Does it have to be black coffee?”

“Yes,” I replied.

She sighed loudly, reached for the almost-empty black-handled pot, and started to pour.

“Do you need cream and sugar?” she asked. (You’ll recall that McDonalds has recently started offering “gourmet” coffee, which to them means that they’ll add the cream and/or sugar for you at no extra charge ― another thing to stress and harry the PBTCs.)

“No.” I said. Then, because I really really needed the coffee, not-so-patiently explained: “That’s what ‘black’ means: no cream, no sugar.”

She rolled her eyes and fixed me with a glare I suppose she intended to be withering. Then she set my coffee on the counter and turned away.

As I walked away trying to figure out how to open the seamless plastic lid, I heard her yell to her co-workers, “I need more black coffee.”

Well, I thought, that makes two of us.

…

Post Script:

About 50 miles down the road it suddenly hit me: to this poor, benighted teenage PBTC, “black” coffee is coffee that comes from the pot with the black handle, and has nothing to do with cream and/or sugar.

Caveat emptor: If you are ever traveling in the area of Allenton, Wisconsin and find yourself in need of decaffeinated coffee, make sure to order “orange” coffee, so as not to confuse the locals.

Huh?

2006-09-16T17:48:00.000-04:00

Just for the record, I’d like to say that throwing hand grenades at churches to express your outrage at being referred to as violent is rather self-defeating.

Shameless Self-Promotion

2006-08-19T15:44:00.000-04:00

Check out Lutheran Carnival XXX.

(In case you're worried, those are Roman numerals, not a reference to porn.)

Six Feet Under

2006-08-12T21:50:00.000-04:00

I went scuba diving today. It was pretty cool. The experience I had was just an “intro to scuba” kind of thing, a chance to “get my feet wet” (pun intended) in the sport. We dove in a specially-designed swimming pool at the local dive center and stayed in the six-foot section, so it hardly counts as scuba “diving.” More like “swimming around underwater breathing through a tube.”

All of which got me thinking, as I sat on the bottom of the pool with my inner-ear pressure equalized and my breath coming in Darth Vader-like rasping breaths: I think Maslow was on to something. Food and water comes before a nice car, and a dry place to sleep comes before the motivation to pursue a doctorate, and the freedom not to get blown up in your sleep comes before the freedom to crusade for environmental causes. Ever had a toothache? That stupid tooth consumes your entire life ― you can’t even think clearly enough to watch American Idol, and we all know how much brain power that takes. It’s the same thing with air, only worse. Enclosed in that scuba mask, stiff rubber valve clenched tightly in my teeth, my own heartbeat pounding in my ears, I became incredibly aware of how important air is. It’s a stupid thing to say, of course, as anyone who’s ever been choked can tell you (been there, done that too), but your mind gets a chance to wander a bit six feet under water.

And hey. I bet Abraham Maslow never went scuba diving, so maybe I’m the first one to add “air” to his silly little hierarchy.

At any rate, scuba diving was a blast. The first five breaths or so were kind of panicky, and the sense of neediness towards my breathing regulator never really went away, but it was an incredible experience. The mind-paralyzing obsession with air eventually diminishes enough for you to realize how glutted with sensation and sensory input we are here on the surface. There’s no such thing as background noise underwater. No visual distractions (it helped I couldn’t wear my glasses). We couldn’t even move fast ― the “underwater Frisbee” was comical, a slow-motion parody of normal human locomotion.

Underwater, everything matters.

Especially air.

Try it.

Innovations

2006-08-06T21:32:00.000-04:00

I woke up this morning, used a bathroom with indoor plumbing, heated water in a kettle with no visible fire at the touch of a button, brewed fairly-traded coffee grown by an ecologically-sensitive Latin American farmer, read an email message that someone on the other side of the planet sent me during the night, checked some up-to-the-minute news headlines from around the world, ate food from a box, drove myself to church in a conveyance with no visible means of propulsion, listened to pre-recorded music from a device no larger than a human hand, arrived at a church building that was cool and comfortable despite 85-degree humid summer temperatures, and participated in a liturgical Christian worship service that did not include Holy Communion.

Of all the modern “innovations” of which I have availed myself today, which would be the most surprising to the average, run-of-the-mill, fourth-century Christian?

That was rhetorical, by the way.

(Before I get drummed out of the WELS on some sort of heresy charge, see Rev. J. Micheel’s essay The Church Offers Holy Communion pp. 13-29.)

As it has often been observed, the proper question isn’t whether Athanasius (or Chrysostom, or Luther, or Jesus, or whoever) would have belonged to my church, but whether or not I belong to theirs.

The Right Van

2006-08-05T09:56:00.000-04:00

I’ve spent parts of the last four summers in the desert of northern Mexico, working with students from Wisconsin Lutheran High School as they travel to a town called Altar to do mission work with Mission to the Children, a para-synodical organization based in Tucson, AZ.

There are a lot of interesting things down there, but one thing you can’t miss are the shuttle busses that run between Altar and a smaller village called Sasabe. They’re everywhere, beat-up vans and vintage school busses, waiting on street corners and in parking lots around Altar, collecting people. When they’re full they make the run, driving like madmen on a treacherous dirt road up to Sasabe on the border. Then they come back. Day after day, trip after trip.

The first time I was in Mexico wanted that job so bad: Altar-Sasabe shuttle bus driver. What a great way to earn some extra pesos over the summer, practice my Spanish, have some awesome conversations with some very interesting people, and probably have some really cool stories to tell in the fall. Last summer, too, I just fell in love with the driving, and decided that if I couldn’t buy a Jeep and drive to Guatemala that I definitely wanted to give taxi-driving a shot. Altar-Sasabe. Sasabe-Altar. Rice, beans, and tortillas. The good, simple life.

Then, this summer, driving down that long long road for the third time, I came to a horrifying realization, a paradigm-shifting moment that almost made me pull over right there in the desert and cry. There was always something weird about those shuttles, those overcrowded vans whizzing by at 50+ mph on roads that weren’t very safe even at half that speed. But finally, after three years of glorifying that life, of idealizing something that is really pretty far from ideal, I realized what was really really wrong with this picture. The vans headed north, from Altar to Sasabe, are always filled to capacity. Young guys, mostly, but an occasional older man, wearing jeans, boots, and a hat, some with button-up cowboy shirts and some a little dingier. The northbound shuttle is always full, taking those bumps on springs that are about to give and trying to pound out one more run on a set of bald tires. The kids are always amazed by how many people can fit in a van.

But here’s the thing: the southbound shuttle is always empty. Nobody ever makes the run from Sasabe to Altar. Just the driver, maybe one or two people, and maybe someone he brought along to keep him company and collect the fares. Nobody ever goes south. The vans make those runs in record time, riding high on the road and flying over the bumps.

It’s not like dozens of people a day, hundreds a week, are moving to Sasabe. Sasabe is something of a ghost town, at least in comparison to Altar. It’s more like an Old West town, springing up next to a gold mine before the tracks get laid and the iron horse brings wives and ministers and sheriffs and law and order. Except that there’s no gold in Sasabe. All those young men, all that potential, an entire generation of Mexico’s future aren’t hopping the next shuttle to get a job at the new factory.

They’re trying to cross the border. They’re putting their hopes and dreams, their families and their futures, their very lives on the line in a desperate effort at survival. Their most valuable possession is a jug full of water. They pray to whatever God is listening for the luck of a dark moon, a straight path, and a job on the other side that doesn’t ask too many questions. The only thing in their life that has any meaning is whether or not their legs have the strength to make it three days across the desert, so they can get an awful job for meager wages in an expensive foreign country where people don’t speak their language, understand their culture, or value their existence, so they can scrape together enough money to send something, anything, home to their family so they don’t have to watch their children die of malnutrition. “With God as my witness,” their silent eyes say with more determination than Scarlett O’Hara could ever dream of, “Let me go hungry so my children don’t have to.”

All of which realization dropped on my head like a ton of bricks as we got passed by about the fifteenth empty Sasabe-Altar bus on the first day of the trip. All those guys in all those vans. Of the twenty-plus men in the northbound van we were just meeting, in a week’s time most of them would probably be back where they started from, deported, even poorer than they had been a week ago (if that were possible). A few, maybe, would be dead, perhaps because they misread the map marking the water stations, perhaps because the water station had been discovered by the Border Patrol and closed down, or perhaps because the God they prayed to had simply run out of luck to give that night. One or two might have even made it, finding that job with their cousin’s wife’s friend in Tucson, sending back money and love and hope for dozens of others to get on tomorrow’s Altar-Sasabe shuttle and try to make the trip.

But instead of pulling over and weeping in despair, after a minute’s reflection I tightened my grip on the wheel and kicked it up another 5mph. We were doing the right thing. We were driving the right direction. The 1400 lbs. of donations in the back of my van were going to make life a little easier for someone in some village, maybe give them enough hope that they wouldn’t have to make the run, at least not this month. Let them stay home with their kids. Help them help themselves, so that life in Mexico is possible for them. The 12 kids in the van behind me were going to teach those people’s children about Jesus, who would give them Hope enough to know that their ultimate home wasn’t Altar, or Sonora, or Mexico, or even the USA, but heaven. The things we were bringing were needed, needed in a way that people like we, Americans, can’t even understand the word need. So I reined in my imagination and stopped wondering what it would be like to drive the Altar-Sasabe shuttle. I realized that today, I was driving the right van.

EW+2

2006-08-01T13:02:00.000-04:00

Well, Espresso Week has come and gone, and with it my faulty assumption that man cannot live on espresso alone. I did indeed live through an entire week without coffee from my French Press, and in fact I would venture to say I prospered by the experience.

I’m now into my second day back into my old habits, but tellingly the Pavoni has not yet been removed from the kitchen counter (much to the chagrin of my wife). In fact, as I sit and type this I am enjoying an afternoon pick-me-up cappuccino that nicely compliments (rather than competes with) my morning pot of “regular” joe.

Faced with an extended, involuntary trip to an electrified desert island with a regular supply of fresh coffee beans, I’d still choose the Bodum as my one means of regular caffeination, but I’ve learned to appreciate the effort and process of home-crafted espresso drinks as well.

So, like so many fine things in this world, it is not a question of “either/or,” but of “both/and.” Now I just need a UN resolution to justify my annexation of 3 additional square feet of counter space.

Espresso Week, Day 5

2006-07-28T15:36:00.000-04:00

My shots (all 5 of them) were nothing short of amazing this morning, if I do say so myself.

Still, I think I'm going to come back to what I wrote in the post that started this whole sillyness - it's a quantity-over-quality issue. 32 ounces of French Press goodness over 1.25 ounces (x5) of espresso heaven.

There are a few things in life in which a little bit of "absolute perfection" might be traded for a superabundance of "pretty darn good." I'm thinking coffee might be one of them.

Others, anyone?

Espresso Week, Day 3

2006-07-26T16:17:00.000-04:00

Well, at the very least, I am becoming a much more deliberate coffee drinker. Not “deliberate” in the sense of “not accidental,” but rather in the sense of “intentional; undertaken with care and forethought.” It’s pretty easy to press out a liter of wonderful coffee from the French Press and suck it down without noticing. But the work I have to put in to getting a quality ounce or two from La Pavoni makes me stop to admire/appreciate the finished product a bit more.

Now, if only this lesson rubs off on the rest of my life. I could use a little more deliberation, and a little less random, aimless, chaotic wandering. Ever “wake up” at the end of a day and realize you did everything automatically? That’s what I’m talking about. Or rather, that’s what I’m talking about not doing. Whatever.

Coffee-in-hand: Classic Italian cappuccino

P.S. ― Everyone who cares about coffee should go here and here.

Espresso Week, Day 1

2006-07-24T13:52:00.000-04:00

Well, I pulled 3 shots this morning after I rolled out of bed. I drank 2 straight (the first was better than the second), and I made a nice frothy cappuccino out of the third, which I drank on the porch with Sean.

It wasn’t nearly enough caffeine. The up side is that I didn’t have to pee nearly as much as I usually do.

I’m off to make more (espresso, that is).

Espresso Week, Day 0

2006-07-23T23:14:00.000-04:00

Well, everything is ready.

I roasted two batches of Puro Scuro this afternoon. The Pavoni is out, polished, and freshly cleaned. The Bodum is put away for the week. I've got the espresso grind dialed in on my Solis Maestro Plus.

All I have to do now is go to sleep, so I can wake up and start pulling shots.

It's going to be a good week.

French Press vs. Espresso

2006-07-22T12:49:00.000-04:00

Solarblogger has asked me the same question twice now, in comments made to posts. I decided it was finally time to answer, and that the answer deserved a post of its own rather than an unceremonious burial as a reply to a comment about an old post. It also gives me something to write about ― as you can see, my summer material has been rather thin.

Anyway, the question was twofold: 1) How do you make good coffee in a French Press/press pot? 2) Why do I prefer press pot coffee to espresso?

To part one, mostly out of laziness (more on that later) but also to give a link to the man who got me all started, see Mark Prince’s sweet tutorial on coffeegeek.com. His lengthy, precise, and accurate description of the scientific art of preparing wonderful press-pot coffee (complete with beautiful photos) is an edifying joy to study and practice. For me to try to duplicate or summarize his instructions would be just silly.

To part two, well, here we go…

The first reason I prefer press-pot coffee to espresso is a quantity-over-quality issue. I drink a liter of press-pot coffee every morning, partly out of comforting habit and partly out of caffeine necessity. I don’t know what the caffeine ratio of pressed coffee vs. espresso is, but I imagine that it would take quite a few shots of espresso to achieve my minimum daily dosage requirements. Making shot after shot in my Pavoni would chain me to the kitchen for the majority of my coffee-drinking time. There’s something about languidly sipping a hearty mug of joe while reading email or sitting on my back porch that just can’t be equaled by tossing back a few shots of espresso while standing at my kitchen counter. It feels like the difference between a long, relaxing home-cooked meal vs. a quick bite wolfed down over the sink on the way out the door. I guess I think I prefer a nice pot of coffee ― if I drink espresso, it’s over too quickly.

And as to quality ― yes, I make great press-pot coffee (imho, if I do say so myself). But espresso is just one step higher on the necessity-for-analness continuum than even press-pot coffee. It’s a step I haven’t been able to consistently take, yet. I can get away with a press-pot made from slightly substandard beans (even ― gasp ― pre-ground beans) from time to time. I don’t have to be quite the cleaning nazi with the press pot that I do with the espresso machine (but don’t get me wrong ― a clean press pot in a good thing). Maybe it’s just my hyper-refined palate, but if I mess up a shot of espresso even a little bit…yikes. Milk-based drinks are a bit more forgiving, yes, but even the traditional cappuccino that I have been known to drink now and then requires a darn good shot of espresso behind it, or its just not worth drinking.

But the more I write the previous two paragraphs, the more I can sum up my preference for press-pot coffee to espresso in one simple word: laziness. I’m simply too lazy to go to all the trouble to grind, tamp, pull, froth, mix, drink, clean and repeat five or six times to get the same coffee goodness that one simple grind-wait-press-drink gets me in the ol’ Bodum. I’m simply too lazy to roast up fancy espresso-blended coffee three or four times a week, when a once-a-week session with my trusty single-origin standbys will do. And I’m too lazy to change my morning ritual just because I have a really spiffy machine that sits in my kitchen cabinet and only gets broken out when I have company to impress. Sad, I know, but true.

However, in spite of recently turning 32, I wish to prove that I am not yet a dog that is too old to be taught new tricks. Therefore, I am throwing down a gauntlet for myself. All next week, 24-30 July, I will drink only espresso (or the occasional espresso-based drink). The press-pot will be relegated to the back shelf, and the Pavoni promoted to kitchen-countertop status. I’ll be as fussy as I need to be to produce the finest espresso in all the land.

And I will enjoy myself thoroughly.

I’ll let you know how this turns out.

Fellowship, and a Lukewarm Bucket of Spit

2006-07-06T17:17:00.000-04:00

I write the following not as a justification or explanation of myself (as if that were possible), but as an earnest solicitation of opinions, counsel, and commentary from those who have such to give on this rather delicate topic.

On a separate note, I apologize without explanation or excuse for my excessive laziness in posting this summer. Thanks for still reading!
~c.p.

“Sometimes we have trouble applying the Gospel to our lives not because we don’t understand the Gospel, but because we don’t understand our lives.”

How true! Not to say that there aren’t tricky passages in the Bible, or that any person with a second-grade reading level can become a top-notch theologian, or that everyone who reads the Bible will get the same message out of it (more on that later). And certainly not to say that I’m a top-notch theologian or that I have every passage and doctrine in the Bible worked out. Nevertheless, the clarity of Scripture is a certainly a doctrine that gives us much comfort as we wrestle with difficult passages, struggle to unravel complex subordinate clauses and look carefully at various shades of meaning for unfamiliar technical Greek vocables. Despite the ambiguity inherent in some passages of Scripture, we can always rest assured that the unus simplex sensus of the message is sounded forth loud and clear in other passages, bringing the whole counsel of God together in that glorious revelation we call the Analogy of Faith.

If only our life were the same. If only we had a promise of God that everything that happened in our lives would make sense, or that every situation in which we found ourselves would come with a well-defined set of Scriptural instructions to follow, or that every question we asked or were asked would have an unambiguous answer “straight from God’s brain to our mouth.”

One example: God’s word is abundantly clear on the matter of perseverance vs. preservation of the saints. The Bible contains promise after promise that those whom God has called (and He wants all to be saved!) will never be snatched away from him, that Satan has no ultimate power over those who have faith in Christ, and that our eternal security rests in the objective facts of Jesus’ perfect life, atoning death, and victorious resurrection. God’s word is likewise abundantly clear on the matter of falling away from the faith. The Bible contains warning after warning that those who despise preaching and the Word are in danger of weakening in their faith, that those who neglect the Sacraments are starving themselves to death spiritually, and that those who regularly allow themselves to fall into temptation will end up being led by the Tempter into faith-destroying sin and unbelief.

The tricky part of this doctrine is not actually the doctrine, but its application. To whom do you apply the sweet comforts of the Gospel? To whom do you prescribe the harsh warnings of the Law? To the soul in distress, who is weak in his faith and wondering if the promises of God apply to him, you apply the Gospel, pointing the struggling person to Christ and what He has done in our place. To the proud, arrogant, or carnally-secure soul, you preach the Law in all its fury, reminding that person of the very real danger of falling away from faith, not because of a lack of faithfulness on God’s part, but through our own willful sin. Warnings or promises? Threats or comforts?

The problem is magnified exponentially when you’re dealing with yourself. When do I need the warnings? When do I need the promises? The Bible verse that brought me so much comfort last week might be the “excuse” I need this week to click on that naughty web link. The warning that curbed my sinful appetites yesterday might cause me today to try to put too much emphasis on myself and my own “good” deeds and forget that Christ is both the Author and Finisher of my salvation. Warnings and promises. The doctrines are clear; God’s word is unambiguous on both counts. It’s not hard to understand the Word on this point. What’s hard is understanding our lives enough to apply the Word correctly. What’s hard is understanding my life.

Nowhere is this distinction more difficult to draw (for me at least) than in the doctrine that Lutherans call “fellowship.” The Bible unambiguously promises that the Last Days will bring people who teach false doctrine, wolves in sheep’s clothing who mix the truth of God’s Word with the lies of men and who corrupt people by giving them what their itching ears what to hear. The Bible is likewise clear when it tells us to avoid such false teachers and their lies, and also calls upon us to give clear testimony to the truth. Understanding the Gospel (taken in the broad sense as the entire message of Scripture) on this point is not the problem.

Understanding my life, however, is not so easy. Like the perseverance/preservation distinction made above, the application of a specific doctrine depends as much on my situation as on the doctrine itself. Is the situation in which I find myself one where the Lord calls me to separate from those who are teaching false doctrine? Or is my duty to remain in the situation in which I find myself and give a clear testimony to the truth in the face of opposition? The history of Lutheranism in America is full of such vexing situations, and my own life (like your own, I’d wager) is similarly thorny at times. Which message should I preach? Sometimes the clearest message I can send is an appropriate Bible verse, doctrinal explanation, or a clear witness to the truth. Sometimes the clearest sermon I can deliver is to simply walk away.

Jesus asked in his High-Priestly prayer that believers would be made “one,” just as Jesus and the Father are One. There truly is “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” against which the gates of hell will not prevail. We “believe in” it using the same words we use when we say we “believe in” the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Sadly, due to sin and sinful men, the earthly church has fractured into thousands of different denominations, each smaller and pickier than the last. Even more sadly, those denominations have in the past few decades started to shed their pickiness (and therefore their distinctiveness) and ban together, trying desperately to find a shred of common ground, no matter how small or generic, on which to stand together. It’s like a thousand glass bottles were smashed onto a concrete floor and the scattered shards tried to fit themselves together; green joins blue, and the two of them find a yellow, they take in a few stray slivers of brown and a jagged bit of clear, and pretty soon they fancy themselves a stained-glass window. The problem is that the result is neither useful like the bottles were, nor is it particularly pretty as a stained glass window, because the only light that manages to come through is a sickly shade of off-grey.

Today, there are groups teaching false doctrine, groups teaching pure doctrine, and groups teaching no doctrine (which is really the falsest doctrine of all). A person might be Methodist, Pentecostal, “non-denominational,” or even Lutheran, and may or may not believe the same things as others with the same denominational appellation and may actually be closer theologically to those who consider themselves members of “differently-branded” churches. What happened to “One” Church? A better question yet is, “what should a believer do about it?”

Should an earnest Christian with a zeal for the truth continue to separate himself further and further from those who do not believe the truth as he understands it, in order to protect the doctrinal heritage that he has been given? Jesus’ Parable of the Talents suggests that this might not be the correct attitude to have. “Sir, we know that you are a harsh master,” complains the lazy servant who takes his talent and buries it, and the Master reprimands the servant for not putting what he has been given to work, earning interest. Similarly, I believe the call to us is not to jealously hoard the sacred trust passed on to us, but to “invest” it, share it with others, plant it so that it might bear much good fruit. We Lutherans have arguably the best car on the road of American Protestantism. Let’s not stand beside the racetrack sipping coffee and saying, “Yup, we could beat them, them, and them.” Let’s take our theology out for a spin and see what it can do.

But should an earnest Christian with a zeal for the truth dive headfirst into the midst of those false teachers and try to win them all, by hook or by crook, back to the pure Biblical theology of the Reformation? The Apostle Paul’s words to us in Romans chapter 16 suggest that that is not the correct attitude to have. We are to “mark and avoid” those who teach false doctrines persistently, and to separate from them in order to give clear testimony to the truth and to avoid having our message and faith corrupted by their errors. Our car won’t long stay the best on the road if we continually give it the bland pabulum of generic “evangelicalism” and park it on the street in the winter. Let’s treat our theology with the honor and jealousy that it deserves.
Where is the balance? How can/should I decide which Scriptural injunction applies to me? The balance can only be struck when I understand my life enough to know what side of the line I fall on.

Am I in danger of losing my distinctive “Lutheranness” in the tasteless lukewarm bucket of spit that mainline Protestantism has become? Am I in danger of being mistaken for part of that wanna-be stained-glass window that the ecumenical movement is trying to foist upon America and the world? Am I in danger of letting someone think that our theological differences are just about “silly stuff” and encouraging them to ignore the Biblical Jesus in search of a relativistic and subjective “personal relationship” with the Jesus of their self-help fantasies? Am I in danger of allowing someone to misunderstand Lutheranism as one of those “we all believe the same thing” theologies that end up being “least common denominator Christianity,” rather than true “mere Christianity?” If so, then I need to heed the warnings of Romans 16, et. al., and give a clear testimony to the truth by separating myself from error.

Or am I in danger of being so focused on abstract doctrinal purity that I forget that Christ called us to serve real, live, non-theoretical people in this life? Am I in danger of a having pharisaical mindset that says the WELS has it right and everyone else can (and will) go to hell? Am I in danger of becoming too proud of my doctrinal books and catechisms, my Concordia Self-Study Bible and the degree on the wall of my pastor’s study to imagine that there are things to learn and be shown (even theologically!) outside of our little circle? Am I spiritually or intellectually lazy? Unconcerned about the fate of others? So afraid of falling away that I dare not expose myself to even the slightest bit of theology without the 2929 imprimatur? So insecure about my critical-thinking skills that I think I won’t be able to distinguish truth from error? If so, then I need to pray for guidance and strength, keep close to the Word daily, and dig up my talent and put my money where my mouth is.

One of the major reasons for the “strict” fellowship principles to which the WELS adheres is to avoid giving the impression of agreeing with an error, or saying that doctrinal differences are not really that important. When I am put into a position where I am working side-by-side with other Christians as Christians, I need to be careful that our joint efforts are not seen as a joint declaration of faith. This is simple honesty: we don’t actually believe the same things about everything, and it’s dishonest to let people assume that we do. But it’s also more than that: it’s love. If I truly believe that what my church body believes, teaches, and confesses is true (and I do!), then by definition some of what other Christians’ church bodies believe, teach, and confess is false. And by any definition, false teaching is sin. In love, then, I seek to speak the truth about what the Bible says, and not allow misunderstandings and misinterpretations to weaken or endanger the faith of others. But again, I am confronted with choices: should I simply not work together with other Christians as Christians, or should I do so with the careful deliberation outlined above?

Confession time. I teach at a non-denominational Christian school (gasp!). I started teaching there knowing that I would be in a position every day of working side-by-side with people who believed differently than I do about very important theological issues. But the reason I finally signed the contract is that it was made clear to me that those differences would be respected, that complete conformity was not expected, and that no assumptions were made about agreement in doctrinal issues. No one sees me in faculty devotions and assumes I believe everything the leader believes. No one sees me standing in the back of chapel and assumes that we all believe the same thing because we’re all in the same room together. I do my best to avoid that false impression, and I daresay that some of my colleagues are already getting tired of hearing about how Lutherans are different.

Yes, it’s quite possible that I’m violating a “fellowship principle” or two by teaching where I do. I bow my head and say a prayer with a fellow Christian whose beliefs I do not completely share. I listen to a word of instruction from a person whose theological grounding is a bit shaky. I work together with people who believe that faith in Christ is enough to unify people for a common purpose. But I also direct a troubled soul to the cross of Christ and His empty tomb, instead of their own decision and piety. I give a clear testimony to the efficacy of the Sacraments to a student who asks why Lutherans baptize babies, which turns into a full-blown discussion on justification by faith alone. I have chance after chance to give an answer to people who ask me, “are Lutherans the same as Christians?” and then tell them why.

Am I correctly applying the Gospel to my life? Honestly, I’m not sure. Maybe I misunderstand the Gospel in this situation. Maybe I also misunderstand the situation itself. After a year, and as I start thinking about next year, I’m beginning to think I’m doing the right thing. Perhaps I’m wrong. We leave it to God, as we do all things.

Coffee-in-hand: Starbucks House Blend (hey, it was a birthday present…)

Hooray!

2006-06-22T16:29:00.000-04:00

So, upon arriving back from Mexico, I was honored to discover that I had received a Golden Aardvark for this post about cultural behavior norms. Oh the sleepless nights of lying awake, wondering if I would ever be counted worthy for such a prestigious honor…

Not Wrong, Just Different

2006-06-05T11:57:00.002-04:00

I think I taught somebody something today. It’s sad that that’s a sentence worth writing; after all, I am a teacher. But on most days, I’d be really surprised to learn that I had taught someone something that they remember and use appropriately ― even more so if it has anything to do with the subjects I teach. But what makes the fact that I taught something today even more amazing is that school’s out for the summer. I’m not even officially “on duty.”

Here’s what happened: My mom took my son and I out to a buffet restaurant. We were shown to one of those little areas that’s supposed to look like a dining room ― you know, divided off from the restaurant so it doesn’t look like you’re eating in an airplane hanger. Anyway, besides us there were three other occupied tables: a small table with a young-ish couple, another with two older ladies, and a huge table (must have been at least a fifteen-top) full of a happy, raucous, and quite boisterous Mexican family speaking Spanish. The kids were singing and picking on each other, the adults were enjoying each other’s company, and the abuela was just soaking it all in. Occasionally a grown-up would say something to one of the kids, but the others would just chortle at them and the games would continue.

I was enjoying listening to them, trying to learn some new words, and appreciating the energy and life they brought to the room… but I’m sure you can imagine at this point how the two older ladies were feeling and acting. I caught them rolling their eyes at each other at every imagined peccadillo of the niños, clucking their tongues at the overly permissive parents who would allow such behavior, and generally bemoaning their sorry luck at being placed in the same dining area as the noisy foreigners.

Then the Mexicans left. With besos and abrazos they headed out en masse, talking about how they’d see each other on Sunday for lunch. A dad told his daughter she wasn’t allowed to bring her bowl of helado with her, so she quickly spooned the rest into her mouth as she scurried after her brother. (I did not envy her the headache she was about to have.) Cousins got in parting jibes with each other, and someone diligently helped abuela out to the car. And then everything was very quiet.

I heard the waitress say to the old ladies (after she pocketed the generous tip the Mexicans had left, btw), “sure is nice and quiet in here now.” To which one of the ladies responded, “It’s about time.” More disparaging head nods followed, and the waitress left.

A few minutes later, she came back to find me gently scolding my son for making spit noises at the table. She told me sweetly, “Oh, don’t worry. He’s so much better behaved than some children. I can just imagine the kind of discipline that goes on in that house.”

I couldn’t help myself. I said, with the same tone of voice I use to correct my know-it-all seventh graders when they don’t actually know it all, something like, “No, you really can’t imagine the kind of discipline those kids get. Those parents just have different standards of what’s acceptable behavior, that’s all.”

She looked at me with skepticism and disdain, as if I were a “bad” parent about to start letting my kid run naked through her section. But she didn’t say anything, so I continued. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Spanish-speaking countries, and you’d be surprised how culturally different we are. What we see as loud and rude and making a scene, they see as being sincerely friendly and enjoying each other’s company whole-heartedly. And what we see as polite, well-mannered and with proper respect for others’ privacy, they see as rude and cold and stand-offish. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Maybe it’s just a matter of perspective.”

I heard one of the old ladies hmmph, but I think the waitress was starting to get it. I saw the young couple start to pay attention too. The waitress made some sort of comment, along the lines of, “I never thought about it like that before.” The dining room was even quieter than before as she left to keep doing her job. The old ladies in the corner continued their job, too, and started whispering to each other as if I wouldn’t notice.

Well, the waitress must have kept thinking about it like that, because ten minutes or so later she came back. “Were you in the service?” she asked me. “How did you get to travel so much?”

I told her I was a Spanish teacher. She gave me the same look that a person who has just said a swear word gives a clergyman they didn’t realize was standing right in front of them, like I was going to rip her apart right there on the spot. Instead, I gave her one of my many “multi-cultural misunderstanding” anecdotes.

“I was raised to eat everything on my plate,” I told her, and she nodded to say that she had too. “But I visited a country once where cleaning your plate is considered rude. Cleaning your plate implies that you haven’t been given enough to fill you up, and your hostess, feeling inadequate and very embarrassed, will promptly fill your plate again even if you’re completely stuffed. So you’re supposed to leave a little bit, as if to say, ‘that was amazing, but I can’t eat another bite.’ Then your hostess feels like she’s given you enough to eat and you haven’t insulted her.”

“I understand,” she said, and then she repeated the magic words that every teacher wants to hear, even if they come from a middle-aged waitress in an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant instead of the kids you get paid to educate: “I never thought about it like that before.” We ended up chatting for a few more minutes, but the thing I will try to remember from that conversation is the glimmer of hope for the future of our country that I saw when that waitress realized that her previous customers hadn’t been wrong, just different.

[The ironic footnote to this touching story of multicultural-diversity-awareness-training is that Sean ended up pitching a huge fit because he hadn’t eaten enough of his food to get to have dessert. I had to drag him out of the restaurant kicking and screaming and crying and fighting. So the old ladies got to see what a poorly-behaved white kid looked like as he learned the cultural importance of eating everything on his plate.]

A Headless Creation?

2006-06-02T08:38:00.000-04:00

The following is a devotion based on Psalm 8.

Take a look outside tonight, and as soon as it gets dark you will understand Psalm 8. The night sky, the moon and the stars (and the quasars and black holes and galaxies and all the stuff we can’t see) all declare the praises of God. All of those things show God’s glory and power as Creator of the universe.

Listen in on a children’s Sunday school class some Sunday morning, and you will understand Psalm 8. The praise of God rolls off of the lips of children and infants, and out of the mouths of their teachers, as they learn about what Jesus has done and how to praise him. The mouths of his creatures declare God’s glory and love as Savior of the universe.

Psalm 8 is a song of praise to our Creator-God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Psalm 8 reminds us of God’s glorious creation, that even modern science is barely beginning to understand. Psalm 8 reminds us that the praises of children are a joy to God. Psalm 8 reminds us that as huge and vast as the universe is, God still showed his greatest love and his most awesome creative power in making human beings in his image and likeness. Psalm 8 also reminds us that man is the crown of God’s creation. God gave Adam dominion over all the animals, birds, and fish. God put everything in creation under man’s feet. Man is the head and the crown of God’s creation.

And if that were all there was, you could quit reading right now, content in your “First Article” knowledge of God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

But there’s more. Think about what happens in your life on a daily basis, and Psalm 8 doesn’t quite make as much sense as it did at first. Turn on the nightly news (or check the latest updates on your RSS feeds) and you’ll find some things that seem to contradict Psalm 8. Take a look:

The enemies of God aren’t yet silenced. Day after day atheists and followers of false religions stand up and proudly disparage the name of God. They slander God and persecute his people. And all the praises of all the children have yet to silence the foe and the avenger.

Mankind seems to be losing its battle for dominion of creation. Animals kill people. People kill each other, twisting chemicals and atoms into ever more powerful weapons of destruction. Our God-created bodies are constantly threatened by viruses and bacteria. Nature itself seems to be in rebellion against us, as tsunami and earthquakes, hurricanes and droughts kill thousands of people each year.

Even God’s providential care of the human race might be called into question. Why does he allow these things to happen? Faced with the almost insurmountable threats of disease and famine, war and pestilence, as we daily struggle with the assaults of Satan and our fellow men, we wonder if we are so insignificant that God doesn’t care for us anymore.

So what now? Is the Psalmist right to praise God, or isn’t he?

Mankind is the crown of God’s creation, the head over all things. But what happens to creation when the head is cut off?

Well, that’s exactly what has happened. Read Genesis chapter 3, the story of the fall into sin, and Psalm 8 will begin to make sense again. When Adam sinned and fell away from God, he lost the perfect image and likeness of God in which he had been made. Sin caused a separation between man and God. Because of that sin, Adam and all of his descendants had to die. What’s more, the entire universe, God’s perfect creation itself was cursed. The head was cut off (or rather, cut itself off) and now the corpse thrashes around on the ground waiting for death. Every day, we see the horrible effects of that first sin. Every day, we add our own sins to the wretched heap of pollution poisoning the world.

And then, Jesus came. The Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God begotten of the Father from all eternity, became man. Incarnate, the God-Man. He didn’t just become a man so that he could die. He became a man so that he could fight man’s fight for him, so that he could conquer the forces of evil to which Adam fell prey and which have enslaved mankind ever since. He became man to be the crown of God’s creation, to restore fallen humanity to the place it occupied before the Fall. Jesus Christ became the new Adam, the new Head of all creation, the new Head of the renewed human nature which is His body. Using the word of an ancient Church Father, Christ “recapitulates” mankind ― literally, “re-heads” us ― by doing for us what we through our sin had stopped doing.

Psalm 8 only really makes sense when we see that Christ is at the center of it. Christ was “made a little lower than the heavenly beings” at his incarnation, his state of humiliation when he declined to make full use of his divine power. At his resurrection, he was “crowned with glory and honor,” in his state of exultation, where he lives and rules at the right hand of God the Father, fully God but still fully man. He is the Head of all creation; “everything [is] under his feet.” In the great resurrection chapter, Corinthians 15, St. Paul reminds us that “everything” includes even death.

Adam’s sin brought death to all people. Our sin brings death to us. But now Christ’s victory brings life to all people. Adam lost dominion over creation, but Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man, is right now ascended in heaven ruling over all things for the benefit of his people. He is the head, crowned with glory and honor, and we are the body, sharing in his blessings now and for all eternity.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Amen.

Why Denny Hitzeman Hates American Idol

2006-05-25T09:40:00.000-04:00

Since all I seem to have time to write lately is devotions for Wednesday Vespers and final exams for my students, I guess I’ll have to content myself with linking you to this really cool post from my good friend Denny.

After exams, and Mexico, and VBS, I should be back to my usual long-winded self.

Coffee-in-hand: Uganda Bugishu

Four

2006-05-22T09:15:00.000-04:00

I don't usually like blogs that post family news and stuff, but this picture was irresistable. It's my son on his fourth birthday serving as ring bearer in my brother's wedding.

Sorry/Enjoy!

Forget the Border...

2006-05-17T13:43:00.000-04:00

Read this article.

I think I’ve been saying this for a long long time. I'll have more to say on this topic later.

Praying and Staying Together

2006-05-12T09:16:00.000-04:00

(a devotion based on Acts 4:23-33)

“The family that prays together stays together.” Have you ever heard that saying? Do you think it’s true? I do. I mean, there are statistics and surveys and studies that show how church-going, Christian couples are happier and have lower divorce rates, better-behaved kids, and all that jazz. The family that prays together stays together ― it’s true. But why is it true? It’s not true because of some vague psychological closeness that may (or may not) last in this world, because “shared religious experience” is so important to human relations. It’s true because of a real, objective, spiritual closeness that we have with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. When we are all close to Jesus, then we, almost by default, are also close to each other in love and faith.

The apostles in Jerusalem had a problem. They were being persecuted by the chief priests, the elders ― the very people who were supposed to be God’s witnesses and ministers on this earth. Peter and John had just spent a night in jail and received a “stern talking-to” from the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high-court, and now they were back with the other believers. They had a problem, so they prayed. They prayed to the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and he listened to them and granted their request, almost word-for-word.

Why was their prayer answered? It wasn’t answered because of the good deeds and piety of the apostles. It wasn’t answered because it was such a pretty prayer. It was because their prayer was in accord with God’s will, which is what we mean when we conclude our prayers with “in Jesus’ name.”

It’s not so much that we pray, it’s to whom we pray. It’s not how we pray, it’s the God who hears our prayer. And it’s not our faith ― it’s the object of that faith, the powerful Word of God that testifies to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. He answers our prayers in his own time and in his own fashion, according to his perfect holy will. We trust God’s character and his promises.

And so we pray together as a family of believers. And because we pray together, under the blanket of protection and forgiveness that God provides for us in Christ, we will stay together ― now, perhaps, but even more importantly in eternity. We will stay together under Christ our Good Shepherd, who promised in Sunday’s Gospel reading that he will find the other sheep, who are not of his sheep-pen, and bring them into the fold where there will be one flock, one Shepherd.

The Church is God’s family. We are the bride of Christ, his family. In an even closer metaphor, we are the body of Christ and he is our head. Is it any surprise that those early Christians were “one in heart and mind?”

Well, to be blunt, it should be. When I look inside myself, I see that I am far from being “one in heart and mind” with anybody, much less everybody. When I look around, I see fraction and faction, divisions and divisiveness. We are all believers ― why aren’t we one in heart and mind? The answer, of course, is sin ― our sins against one another, against our brothers and sisters. Our sinful selfishness and pride. That oh-so-American virtue of self-sufficiency (as if anyone could actually make it on their own). Our dubious quest for ‘privacy.’ We look around and see the results of sin and its destructive effects in our lives and in our hearts.

But look to the cross and the empty tomb. The glorious fact is that we are one in heart and mind, not just with each other, not just with those who are “walking together” with us in the WELS, but with every Christian who has ever lived. One in heart and mind with Peter and John, with these Christians in Acts. One in heart and mind with Jesus himself, as Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 2, “we have the mind of Christ.”

Our text tells us that the believers were “filled with the Holy Spirit.” And so are we. We were filled, individually and personally, with the Holy Spirit at our baptism. We are filled collectively with the Holy Spirit as we gather together around Word and Sacrament, which is how the Spirit promises to work and where Jesus Christ promises to be.

The Christians in Jerusalem were one in heart and mind. They were so united that they shared everything, and didn’t consider anything to be their own. That doesn’t mean that socialism is the answer for the world’s problems, or that it is the only God-pleasing economic system for Christians to live by. What it means is what it says ― the disciples shared everything they had out of love. Especially look at what the very next verse says ― the most important thing they had in common: the testimony of the resurrection, which they shared boldly. That is certainly a treasure worth sharing.

The apostles prayed together, to Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior and the Lord and Savior of the Church. And they stayed together ― under God’s protection and blessing, one in heart and mind, sharing what they had, boldly proclaiming Christ and his resurrection in the face of people who opposed that teaching.

We, too, who pray together in the holy house of God will stay together as well. Not necessarily here on earth. Certainly not because of the fine words of our prayers, the beautiful music of the piano, or the ancient songs of the Church which we join. Definitely not because of our sincere hearts, our upright and blameless lives, or our whole-hearted walking together here in this sinful world.

No. We have the Holy Spirit’s testimony of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The testimony that our sins are forgiven and that eternal life is ours from God as a gift by grace alone. We receive that gift in the faith God creates and strengthens in our hearts, and we cling to the Word of God with its gracious promises of eternal life for the certainly of our salvation. That’s where our sure and certain hope is founded, that we, the family of God, who pray together will stay together.

“With great power, continue to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and may much grace be upon you all.” Amen.

Carnivale!

2006-05-09T08:39:00.000-04:00

Well, even though they misspelled my name, I’m proud to say I made it into Lutheran Carnival of Blogs XXIII. Enjoy!

PS ― did you know that “carnival” is from the Latin words “Carne” and “Vale,” which means, when put together, “Farewell to meat.” As in, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Martes Gordo, Meatfare, preparation for Lenten fasting? Neato.

Silver Dollars

2006-05-01T15:55:00.000-04:00

My father-in-law is a man of many stories. One of his most memorable was told to me as we drove together through the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. He had been stationed at Walker AFB just outside Roswell back in the 1950s. Walker AFB was the biggest SAC base in the country, was home of the famous atomic-bomb-dropping 509th, and later became home to a squadron of ICBMs during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It turns out that the people of Roswell weren’t getting along very well with the Air Force people back in Harry’s day. You military people probably know the story ― the military guys were a drain on the economy, disturbers of the peace, bad for the town. The base commissary and exchange was unfair competition for local merchants. Young, irresponsible airmen disrupted the normality of life, corrupted the girls, ran out honest folk, etc. I guess at one point people even marched in the streets protesting the Air Force presence in their town.

One week, the base commander at Walker (in the 50s, as I gather, base commanders were basically God) decided to show the town a thing or two. So he paid all of his airmen their entire paycheck in silver dollars, encouraging them to spend their money as usual.

At the end of the week, the base commander personally went from shop to shop up and down the main street of town, asking shopkeepers how many silver dollars they had in their tills. Of course, you can guess what he found. The airmen at Walker, like most airmen at most airbases, spent lots of their money in town. Some of it was at the bars and liquor stores, yes. But also the grocery stores, hardware store, dry cleaners…just about everywhere the other residents of Roswell spent their money. Far from being a drain on the economy of Roswell, the Air Force base was an almost indispensable part of it.

Is what is going on today across the country a macrocosm of this little event? (Read one of the many stories here.) I personally hope that it is; TCS columnist Lee Harris has a slightly more pessimistic view here. I hope and pray that this attention-grabbing stunt, which has been treated with some disdain even by those in the Hispanic community, is only that: a stunt. The Walker base commander made his point with little or no disruption, and I think that the immigrants’ point can be made effectively with a one day show-of-force as well.

Yes, there is an “immigration problem” in this country. No, kicking out all the illegals isn’t the answer, and neither is legalizing all of them. Yes, the problem needs solutions. No, the solutions aren’t as easy as a fifteen foot wall and machine gun nests and mass deportations.

Not to over-simplify, but at the root of all of this are two related issues. First, there are several parts of the world in which making a sustainable living is simply impossible. There are places on this planet where the inhabitants are faced with the choice to move or starve. It’s not always the case that people are climbing fences and swimming rivers to get to the US, it’s that sometimes people are floating across the ocean in boats and stowing away in railroad cars to get away from their home, because they can’t live in their homes anymore. And that’s sad.

The second, related, problem is that for too long the US has made it too easy to get here and work here illegally. People, like pressurized water in an espresso machine, take the path of least resistance. Lax enforcement of untenable laws has done the job of enabling millions of people to live and work here at great social and economic cost to the legal residents of this country.

And not to over-simplify, but to me the problem has a threefold solution. First, on an individual level, human decency and Christian charity compels us to help the poor, the weak, the fatherless, and the widow. I think that must extend to the poor in other countries, especially considering Jesus’ injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves. If their homes are more livable, many of them won’t have to make the hard choice to come here.

Secondly, on a national level, the problem of illegal entry can’t be controlled at the border. I think it needs to be controlled at the place of employment. Higher fines and stricter enforcement of existing employment laws must be part of the answer ― if the demand for illegal labor goes down, the supply must inevitably decline as well.

Hand-in-hand with that must be a “guest worker” program that actually works. It needs to be simple enough to be easier than the illegal alternative. It should probably use some sort of fee or special income tax to pay for itself. Basically, the program needs to be structured in such a way that anyone who wants to (who’s not a felon, drug dealer, or a terrorist) can enter this country decently and in order to work, pay taxes, send his money home, and not die of dehydration on his way through the desert.

It seems like some people are taking an unwisely “liberal” view of this problem, the same view people take on Iran, Social Security, and so many other world problems: if we ignore it, maybe it’ll go away (or at least not bother us). Just give them all amnesty and forget about it. Some are taking a heard-heartedly “conservative” view, a view that didn’t work for the US before either of the world wars and a view that won’t work today: throw up the wall, man the barricades, look to ourselves and let the rest of the world go to hell. As usual, somewhere in the middle is the answer, and answer that takes seriously our duty as both responsible citizens of this country, responsible members of a global economy, and forgiven sinners in a God-redeemed human race. Pray that this country find that answer, soon.

I don’t have all the answers. I might not even have any of the answers. But I’ll be surprised if, at the end of this controversial day, I don’t have a silver dollar or two in my cash register.

The Reunion

2006-04-26T09:50:00.000-04:00

I was at the airport the other day to pick up my grandma. Like most people, I love watching people at airports.

That night, there was a really pretty girl waiting at the end of the concourse. She was beautiful in an understated and undramatic way. She wore her clothes with a comfortable easy grace, and her hair was done in that style that looks like she didn’t do anything to it, but probably really involved lots of time ― a studied informality.

She was hanging around with us where people come out from their flight, but unlike the rest of us she wasn’t staring expectantly down the concourse. In fact, she seemed so distracted, so disinterested, that I began to wonder if she was waiting for someone or killing time before she went through security.

Then her cell phone rang.

To say that someone’s face “lights up” is something of a tired metaphor, but in this case it seems to apply. Her face lit up as she had her brief conversation, and after she hung up her entire attention was focused down the hallway of offloading passengers. She seemed to be willing the face she was looking for to come into view.

And then she saw him.

He was a tall, gangly, funny-looking guy who, except for those characteristics, looked nothing like me. He wore tired, casual clothes and carried a big hiking backpack with a lot of miles on it. I’m pretty sure he had a Nalgene bottle hanging off somewhere. He also had a flower wrapped in cellophane in his hand, which he held out to her with a funny little smile as she dashed into his arms.

They kissed each other, not in that desperate-passionate-get-a-room sort of way, but in the I’m-so-happy-to-see-you-I-want-to-be-as-close-as-I-can-to-you sort of way. They were still smiling as they let go. She tried to take his bag, but all he wanted was another hug. Her flower kept getting in the way, but they didn’t care.

He was at least 6’6” and she couldn’t have been taller than 5’4”. But somehow they fit together.

He didn’t have any checked luggage, so they walked out of the airport hand-in-hand, still hugging each other.

I imagined his impatience as he sat, diligently following the airport rules not to use his cell phone until the door had opened. I imagined his walk up the concourse, wondering where she would be waiting for him.

I saw her joy when she got the call, and saw her impatience as she waited for him to come into view.

I’m not really sure why I felt compelled to write this, but that moment seemed like something that deserved to be remembered.

Coffee-in-hand: None. But I was leaning against the Boston Stoker kiosk as I watched the scene unfold.

“The Century War”

2006-04-10T21:01:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, my friend Denny (read his blog here) sent me this story from the website of author Dan Simmons. I don’t think it’s saying too much to say that you have to read this story. On its face, it’s a tight, well-written short story, the kind of stuff that (if other things about it weren’t true) would give it a place in short story collections and creative writing textbooks for years to come.

At the very least, almost the entire story is a conversation that takes place over a couple of glasses of single-malt scotch. That, in itself, makes the story worth reading, imho.

[Spoiler Warning: the rest of this post assumes that the you have read and enjoyed (or at least been challenged by) the story at hand, and will therefore discuss and disclose plot elements without regard for your “right to be surprised” or your “right to have an opinion even though you don’t know what the hell is going on.” So read the story already. Then come back.]

Perhaps now you see why I’m not so sure this story, as technically good as it is, will ever find a place among “regular” short stories in an anthology. There are at least two reasons for that, one good and one horribly and inexplicably awful: either he’s wrong (that’s the good one) and Mr. Simmons’ story will fade quietly into history along with Y2K, “the world will end on dd/mm/yyyy”, and so many other almost-but-not-quite catastrophes. Or else he’s right (this is the bad one) and people will read his story a decade from now with that uncomfortable feeling you get at the end of Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor (that’s the one where the guy flies a passenger plane into the Capitol Building during a State of the Union address). A third possibility exists, of course: that in ten years no one will read it because no one will be allowed to. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

The main theme of this piece is: we have no idea what we’re up against. A “Category Error” he calls it; a mistake of epic proportions so catastrophic that we’re doomed to failure from the start. We’re so far off base we don’t even understand what game we’re playing. We’ve mis-defined (perhaps under-defined) the problem so badly that we have no hope of ever solving it. It’s like watching a flooded river rise closer and closer to our house and being worried that our sump pump won’t be able to keep the basement dry. Like being buried alive a thousand feet underground in the pitch-black bowels of the earth and feeling upset because the debris from the cave-in scratched our reading glasses.

Are we really guilty of such a miscalculation? Of such gross underestimation of the world around us? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Another theme then follows from the first. If we really are guilty of this Category Error and are therefore ignorant of the correct solution to our problem, then what is the answer? The answer, in the words of the Time Traveler, is that we aren’t “ruthless enough.” We are “too timid… too fearful… too decent… to match the ruthlessness of [our] enemies.” In his essay “Fear of Confrontation,” TCS Daily columnist Arnold Kling writes, “Unfortunately, large segments of American society no longer have the ability to confront real evil. People lack the confidence and moral clarity to stand up to intimidation.” We are playing hopscotch and arguing about whether Jimmy stepped on the line. Meanwhile, a 900lb gorilla smashes his way across the playground, scattering the broken bodies of our playmates behind him on his way to tear out our throats. What we need to do is invest in a big enough gun to drop the gorilla in one shot, splatter his brains all over the monkey bars (pun intended) before he does the same to us. And if the big loud gun hurts Jimmy’s ears, so be it ― he was cheating anyway.

Is that sort of ruthlessness really necessary? Do we really have to be so… so brutal? Again, I’ll leave that for you to decide.

A third theme, and then I will end my analysis with an open question. At one point the narrator complains that “the world is a complex place. Morality is a complex thing.” And while he’s right, to an extent, in a matter as clear-cut as the problem in the story, “the world, as it turns out, is not nearly so complex a place as [our] liberal and gentle minds sought to make it.” The narrator (and us, by extension) hides behind an artificial and self-made complexity, falsely blowing things way out of proportion in order to excuse our inaction. A homeless man on an exit ramp asks for a dollar. We drive past. How do we know what he’ll spend that dollar on? Is he really homeless? He should get a job; giving him money only enables his cycle of dependence… The guy needs a dollar. Turns out that’s not as complex as we make it out to be.

Is the world really this black-and-white? Do we just need to educate, to bring those peoples still locked in their constricting, archaic worldviews up-to-speed, catch them up on the moral development of the last century or so? Or is it we who need the education, a sharp slash to cut away the shades of gray to see things again as they really are? Is it time to reduce the complexity and ignore the rhetoric? A question, again, for you to decide.

And finally, at the end, why does the narrator get mad at the Time Traveler? Yes, he’s telling him bad news about his grandchildren. Yes, he’s painting a bleak picture of the next 15-20 years. But why does he get angry enough to draw a gun on the man who interrupted his New Year’s Eve to tell him these things?

And how do we feel at the end? Fearful? Bored? Incredulous? Scandalized? Angry that no one told us these things already? Lazy enough to roll over, flip on the new episode of CSI, and hope it all goes away?

Is there hope for us? I pray there is. I pray that Dan Simmons’ story does its job, sounds its clarion call, and then fades into history as another near-miss. Near the end of the story, the Time Traveler quotes a Greek philosopher who says that all human behavior is guided by three motives: fear, self-interest, and honor. It’s high time, in my opinion, that we start giving due consideration to all three. I pray that God will grant us a healthy and realistic fear, a godly sense of self-interest (for ourselves and those over whom he has given us charge), and a virtuous sense of pious Christian honor. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

[Still wondering what the heck I’m babbling about? Amazed I could write this entire post without once actually naming the subject in question? Go back and read the story! Here’s the link again, you lazy slacker.]

Drink-in-hand: Yellow Tail Merlot (all the single malt is at Denny’s)

Dying to Live

2006-04-07T14:29:00.000-04:00

I’ve been reading again. Not that I’m not always reading something, it’s just that a book has grabbed my attention in a surprising way. I’m reading Dying to Live: the Power of Forgiveness by Harold L. Senkbeil.

I’m trying to decide if I like the title or not. Well, I like the title, but I’m not sure it fits. It’s a bit about dying, a lot about living. It’s got a ton of stuff on forgiveness (God’s forgiveness of us, rather than our of others). And of course, all that’s really powerful. So the words all fit. But I’m still not sure…

Above all, it’s a great big three-cheers for Word and Sacrament. Rarely has a book so thoroughly explored what it means to be a baptized child of God. Pastor Senkbeil drives home Holy Communion, too, and Absolution (the preached Word) gets its due, but the phrase “drenched in the waters of baptism” certainly describes this wonderful exposition on truly sanctified living focused on and by the truths of Holy Baptism.

Recommended for all the Lutherans who stumble across this post, all those who want to know more about Lutheranism, and all those who wish they were Lutheran but don’t know where to start.

An interesting bit of synchronicity ― the guest pastor on Wednesday night was preaching about the “hiddenness” of God’s important things: you know, stumbling blocks and folly and all. Anyway, he mentioned how the passers-by on Good Friday wouldn’t have noticed anything special going on. Maybe a little more crowded, but still, you’ve seen one crucifixion, you’ve pretty much seen them all. Something he said made me sit up and listen extra closely, and when I got home I checked the chapter I had just finished reading. Sure enough, he had either quoted Senkbeil or channeled him unknowingly.

Here’s the quote:
“They had seen it all before. There was a sordid routine to every execution under Roman rule: first the stripping, then the flogging, finally the nailing. In the end every crucifixion looked much the same.”

It was the word “sordid” that caught my attention. How many of us use that in daily discourse?

Here’s how Senkbeil finishes the section, and where the pastor’s sermon basically ended up, too. May we keep this in the forefront of our minds as we enter this most Holy of weeks.

“The jeering mob thought they had the last laugh: ‘He saved others,’ they shouted, ‘but he can’t save himself.’ But he didn’t come to save himself. He came to save us. This was his determined purpose: to give his life for the life of the world. ‘For the joy set before him,’ the Apostle reminds us, ‘he endured the cross, scorning its shame’ (Hebrews 12). Gladly he laid down his life. Willingly he bore our sin. Joyfully he embraced our shame. And that is the heart of the matter.”

Coffee-in-hand: Kenya AA (hot as a pistol)

Burning Bridges

2006-04-04T14:48:00.000-04:00

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” ― Tom Stoppard

I found this quote on Google the other day and was arrested by it. I’m not sure exactly why, but it had the ring of truth to it, the ring of other favorite quotes that I’ve ended up absorbing into my vocabulary. So I copied it down, mulled it over, wrote it on my board to see what the kids would have to say, and floated it around a bit. Here are the fruits of a couple of days of rumination.

[Disclosure: I just now discovered that the quote is from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The following is based on not knowing that, and is not intended to be any sort of commentary or interpretation of that work. Any (mis)representations made here are entirely mine.]

It seems to me that this quote can be taken two ways. Optimistically, the mindset described here is a sort of carefree, guilt-free, worry-free existence, almost childlike, the very essence of carpe diem (there’s that phrase again…) “Burning our bridges” is a severing of connections to the past, a sort of “forgive and forget” (remember, we’re being optimistic here). No guilt follows us out of the past, no ghosts can sneak up behind us. Our rear is secure, so to speak. The closets have been purged of skeletons.

Furthermore, still speaking optimistically, we “cross our bridges when we come to them” ― that is, and not before we come to them. No worries. No dread of an unknown future. We are well-fed, clothed, and happy right now, and we’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. What an appealing mindset in a world concerned so much about the next plague, war, recession, CSI episode, or sports upset.

It’s good to be optimistic. Living life free from guilt is one of the greatest blessings of Christianity. “There is now no condemnation,” and all that. Our past sins do not condemn us; “the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1). Likewise, living free from worry is a great blessing as well. Our heavenly Father provides all that we need and then some. “Give us this day our daily bread” we pray, not asking for a week’s supply all at once. Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount remind us that “each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6). In Christ, we are free from worry over the future (crossing our bridges) and guilt over the past (burning them behind us), and free to live in the “day of salvation.”

I’m not sure this quote is really all that positive, however. I don’t think the chord it struck in me was blind optimism; rather, I’m afraid it was the opposite.

“We cross our bridges when we come to them.” We don’t plan ahead or give any thought to the future, until the future is today. We refuse to make connections between current actions (or inactions) and future repercussions. We live for the moment, eating, drinking, making merry, until the cold winter comes and we, like the grasshopper, are dependent on the goodwill of others. It’s fine to cross your bridges when you come to them, but what if we arrive at the toll booth with no money to make the crossing? There is a line between worry and preparedness; sometimes at the risk of doing the former, we fail to make even the smallest effort at the latter.

“And burn them behind us.” Living free from guilt is one thing. Refusing to learn from (or even admit to) your mistakes is completely another. A person who has burnt all his bridges has nothing to fall back on, no line of retreat, no foundation on which to build except the dangerously shifty subjectivity of his present circumstances. And we therefore “have nothing to show for our progress.”

“Once our eyes watered.” We vaguely remember that our actions caused us discomfort, but as long as that’s only a vague memory, we think we’re good–to–go. How many times must we cry the same tears before we learn our lessons?

Most haunting of all is the imagery built on the sense of smell. “A memory of the smell of smoke.” As we blindly grope our way thorough each day’s problems without the trustworthy wisdom of past lessons learned, a lingering olfactory memory silently suggests to us that our current problems are all our fault.

Are they? I think they are, and I think Tom Stoppard (or Rosencrantz or Guildenstern) are right in their diagnosis of our malady.

What do you think? Log on, post a comment, and join the discussion!

16886'

2006-03-31T13:43:00.000-05:00

OK, so maybe it’s bragging.

But I’d like to think of it as evidence.

How Do You Say "Twenty" In Italian?

2006-03-30T22:26:00.000-05:00

So I’m at a national chain franchise coffee shop, located in a national chain franchise bookstore (I bet you can’t guess what franchise I’m talking about). I cautiously approach the counter, carefully examine the menu, and prepare to make my selection. The following conversation ensues:

Person Behind The Counter: May I help you?
Me: I’d like a medium cappuccino. (what can I say? It was after dinner...)
PBTC: You mean a Venti cappuccino?
Me: No, I mean a medium cappuccino. The one in the middle. I believe you call it a “Grande.” Venti is your largest size.
PBTC: Right...

I mean, come on, people! If you’re going to act pretentiously stupid and try to get me to use your national chain franchise trademarked lingo, at least try condescendingly to get me to use the right vocabulary.

The icing on the cake is that I overheard her “training” the “barista” on how to “properly” make a cappuccino. “Always use skim milk for a cappuccino,” she says, “Whole milk gets too fluffy.”

Entire generations of Italians are rolling over in their graves.

It wouldn’t be so bad, but this is the second time I’ve had a similar conversation with a similar PBTC from the same national chain franchise.

Coffee-in-hand: Cold, over-extracted cappuccino. Stiff foam, no body, paper cup. But it’s my own d*mn fault, I guess...

P.S.- Happy Birthday, Janine!

Abide With Me

2006-03-30T14:40:00.000-05:00

Last night at our Lenten Vespers service, we closed by singing Abide With Me (CW 588). I’m guessing that hymn makes just about everybody’s top 10 hymn list ― everyone who actually has a top 10 hymn list, that is. It also happens to be one of my favorites.

My paternal grandfather, William Pluger, was a faithful churchgoing man who raised his children (and, by extension, his grandchildren) in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6). One of his many favorite hymns was also Abide With Me. As an elder in his congregation, he helped establish the tradition of singing it on New Year’s Eve. What a great hymn to sing as the old year is remembered, confessed, forgiven, and the new year is welcomed with all the blessings of God. I’m guessing he was especially thinking of the stanza:

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Grandpa died in 1984. I was ten. At his funeral, my cousin and I made a deal that we weren’t going to cry ― for some reason, we didn’t think it was right to be sad. Maybe we felt it was inappropriate, considering he was in heaven. Whatever, we were missing the point, and clearly forgetting the example of Jesus himself. At any rate, I was doing OK through the entire service: Psalm 23, the sermon, Jerusalem The Golden, and all the Lutheran funeral stand-bys. Until Abide With Me. Grandma had explained to us how meaningful that hymn had been to grandpa, what an important part of his faith-life it had been. And knowing that made it impossible to sing these words without completely losing it (in a good way):

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

Grandma outlived grandpa by a good number of years. She saw her little congregation through many ups and downs, the calling of another pastor, and about fifteen more New Year’s Eve services. And in her own faithful way, she upheld the memory of her husband and his belief in God’s faithful gracious presence by gently and quietly making sure that Abide With Me still made it into the service every New Year’s Eve. Grandma died in December of 2003, from complications following a heart attack she suffered while cooking Thanksgiving dinner for her family. When we buried her on Christmas Eve morning, Messiah Evangelical Lutheran Church sang Abide With Me one week early.

I need Thy presence every passing hour;
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

In the summer of 2004 I took six of the best students I’ve ever had to Peru. We spent 12 days driving around the Andes mountains, traveling from village to village teaching Bible stories to little children and old men, doing crafts, singing songs, and learning more about faith and hope and love than we ever could have possibly taught. (You can read more about our trip to Peru here.) It’s hard to have an experience like that and not be changed forever, but when you get back it’s even harder to pinpoint what, exactly, about the trip so affected you. One moment, though, stands out above all the emotions and experiences of that odyssey. We had woken up early on our “free day” and gone to climb a glacier. We rode horses. We climbed and climbed and climbed. I fell in a little. We made it to the top ― 16,886 feet above sea level (which is really really high). Then we walked back down, and ate the best sandwiches any of us had ever eaten. Then we drove about three hours down the worst road ever. We were all bone-tired but no one could sleep. So we sang. Lifetime Lutherans all, we knew our hymnody pretty well. We started at the beginning, Advent, and worked our way through the Church Year. We did a pretty good job (I could try to remember all the hymns that we sang, but it would spoil the moment). We could usually get at least the first and last verse of any hymn anyone could remember at least the first line of. Eventually (remember, it’s hymn 588) we got to Abide With Me. Everyone knew it, of course. The memory of a van full of tired, happy, young missionaries singing a cappella as the sun set slowly behind the snow-covered peaks of South America still brings a smile to my lips and puts a lump in my throat. Simply beautiful…

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide!
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Which finally brings me back to last night. The sermon text was “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23). Jesus’ words from the cross, from his hours of excruciating agony, were words of pardon and forgiveness. We, who manage to be thrown into a rage at the slightest provocation, whose words are a rain of curses when being cut off on the freeway, could learn much from the words of the God-Man as he was being cut off from the land of the living.

But Jesus’ ministry on earth and his trip to the cross were more than just exemplary, to show us how to live. If Jesus’ ministry were primarily to give us an example to follow, “we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Corinthians 15), because no one could even come close to perfectly following his example.

No. Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross were not exemplary, rather they were primarily substitutionary. Jesus hung on the cross so I wouldn’t have to. Jesus suffered the Father’s wrath so I wouldn’t have to. Jesus paid for my sins so I wouldn’t have to. Try as I might to do the right thing, try as I might to make up for my sins, the fact of the matter is that I “don’t know what I do.” It’s all Jesus’ work that I am saved. Salvation is completely outside of me.

“Father, forgive them,” Jesus said, talking about me as much as about the Roman soldiers who were nailing him up. “Father, forgive them,” Jesus said, talking for me as my perfect substitute. “Father, forgive them,” Jesus said, talking to me with words of promise that I am forgiven, because he lived and died for me. “Father, forgive them,” Jesus said, talking to all who would believe in him, calling out to us and looking forward to Easter morning. “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14).

And so our prayer, last night and every night until the end of the world, is the prayer that points us to Christ, always to Christ:

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

There Can Be Only One?

2006-03-22T09:50:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday night after Lenten service, I was out on my porch roasting coffee. It was beautiful, crisp and clear. The moon was almost full and huge in the night sky.

I always think it’s cool to imagine who else is looking at the moon at the same time as I am. Famous people, world leaders, long-lost family members, old friends. Lovers enjoy each other under the same moon that shines on the poor, the forgotten, and the persecuted. And me, roasting coffee, enjoying a gift from the hand of God.

There are something like six and a half billion people in the world. Only about half of them, I guess, can see the moon at any given time. Most of the people under Sister Moon are probably inside, sleeping or eating or watching CSI or enjoying their family or trying to scrape together some kind of existence on this often unforgiving planet.

Is this as close to alone as I will ever get? Is it really possible that I was the only person on earth roasting coffee under the full moon last Wednesday?

Coffee-in-hand: Colombian Popayan

The Two Faces of St. Patrick’s Day (part two)

2006-03-17T09:06:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of a tombstone at the hilltop fortress monastery called the Rock of Cashel. The Rock was a stronghold of Irish royalty and Christianity from the fourth through the eighteenth century, and is now, like most of the history of most countries, relegated to the ignominious position of tourist attraction.

There is a legend about St. Patrick in connection with the Rock of Cashel. Once upon a time, Patrick was conducting a coronation ceremony for a king at the cathedral on the Rock. As part of the ceremony, he pounded his bishop’s staff on the ground (perhaps as many as three times, one for each member of the Trinity). At any rate, he somehow missed the ground and drove his staff into the top of the king’s foot. The king, however, took it like a man, assuming this was some sort of Christian ascetic practice, perhaps reminiscent of the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion. Oops.

Anyway, here’s a prayer attributed to the “Apostle of Ireland.”

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

Kinda gutsy, if you think about it. Quite a claim to make for one’s self. Appropriate for a man who got away with impaling a monarch’s foot, but not so much for the rest of us.

“Christ in every eye that sees me?” Hardly. The chances that someone is going to look at me and see something Christ-like going on are actually pretty slim.

“Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me?” Wow. I might make a good first impression, but I doubt that the lasting image I leave in people’s hearts is an icon of Christ.

But in a very real sense, St. Patrick’s adage is true for every Christian always. Not just when we feel like it, not just when we’re acting particularly holy, and not just the two seconds after receiving Holy Communion before we pump out our next sin. Every Christian. Always.

How can this be? “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us.” Jesus, the sinless Lamb of God, was made to be sin in our place. The substitutionary, vicarious death of Christ means, as the rest of the verse says, “that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus becomes our sin, and we receive his righteousness. Romans 6 explains that we who were baptized into Christ are alive to God in Christ. Galatians 3 says it even more clearly: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”

“Put on Christ.” We are clothed with Christ. We wear him like a garment. He covers our life with his. We are “partakers in the divine nature,” as St. Peter writes. We are washed clean from every sin ― not just when we confess and receive absolution, but continually. A friend of mine says that God’s grace isn’t like an occasional bath that washes off accumulated dirt, but like standing in a rainstorm, continually being washed and renewed and refreshed. No dirt sticks to us; “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8).

So whether we preach to the Irish or punch a timecard, whether we drink a pint of Guinness or stab royalty in the foot, Christ is with us, before us, and behind us. Even more importantly, Christ was on the cross for us. He is in the every eye that sees me, and even more importantly, Christ is in God’s eye when he looks at me.

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” (Galatians 3)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Coffee-in-hand: Java from Java (thanks, Aaron!)

The Two Faces of St. Patrick’s Day (part one)

2006-03-17T08:46:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of my son’s first Guinness. It was taken at a pub in Blarney in March of 2004, just before his second birthday. Because Guinness is such an acquired taste, Sean didn’t much care for it. So his daddy bravely and selflessly stepped up to the plate and finished it for him. Aren’t I great?

Here’s to all the pints that will be hoisted today, and all those who will hoist them.

Sláinte!

Lengthy Posts

2006-03-16T14:14:00.000-05:00

One of my faithful readers commented today that blog entries don’t have to be book-length.

So this one’s for you, Andrew.

Café Diem: what’s in a name?

2006-03-15T15:06:00.000-05:00

I titled my blog “Café Diem coffee philosophy” with great deliberation. Here’s a little explanation of the terms.

First, “Café Diem” is obviously a pun/play on the famous phrase carpe diem, which is supposedly Latin for “seize the day.” Actually, carpe is from the Latin verb carpō, which, according to Lewis’ An Elementary Latin Dictionary means “pick, pluck, cull, crop, or gather,” and a bunch of other harvest-related metaphors. It’s kind of like, “gather as much of the day as you can,” or, “get as much out of today as you can.” A Spanish-speaking janitor once told me, “Hay que aprovecharse del día.” That about says it.

Anyway, carpe diem comes from Horace (ode I.xi), one of my favorite Latin poets (mostly because he’s easy to translate). The key line is, “Even while we speak, envious time has passed: pluck the day, putting as little trust as possible in tomorrow!” It’s rather Epicurean, if you think about it, and not quite synonymous with Jesus’ words, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself” (Matthew 6). I’m working on a novella that touches on this incongruity; stay tuned for further developments. But the phrase works, in a sense, as a good motto for some people.

The reference to carpe diem is supposed to make you think about “taking enough time to enjoy the coffee,” or “savoring the moment” or something like that, while at the same time suggesting the literal translation “coffee of the day.” Of course, café doesn’t mean “coffee” in Latin (at least not classical Latin), and even if it did, diem doesn’t really mean “of the day.” But that’s OK, too. I don’t mind the inconsistency, and neither do the people who have decided to name their coffee shops Café Diem.

Which brings me to the topic of originality. Back in 2001, when I first started work on the aforementioned novella, I thought I was being terribly clever when I invented the name Café Diem for the coffee shop at which the narrator stops in the course of his allegorical road trip. Back then, search engines weren’t what they are now, and I wasn’t the computer-savvy techno-whiz that I’ve become, and so a cursory inspection of the internet revealed that I had indeed thought of something original on my own. Imagine my chagrin when I found that other people have simultaneously come up with my idea! But for the record, I thought of Café Diem before I heard it from anywhere else, and even if I didn’t come up with it first, I at least did it independently. So there.

Almost every book I’ve read in the past three years had a subtitle, and I thought my blog should be no different. I was playing a silly truth-or-dare-style game a while ago and the question was, “If you could have any job title printed on your business card, what would it be?” I picked coffee philosopher. I think it has as nice ring to it, and it sort of stuck. So this blog won’t always talk about coffee (although sometimes it will). It won’t always be philosophical (although occasionally it might be). And every once in a while it might have some coffee-related philosophical thoughts (although usually I’ll save those for my column in Coffee Magazine). Nevertheless, since I can’t think without coffee, the drivel coming out of this blog is probably aptly subtitled “coffee philosophy.” Consider it giving credit where credit is due.

So, there you have it. A wordy and overbearing explanation of the title “Café Diem coffee philosophy.” Someday I hope to open my own coffee shop and name it Café Diem. I hope no one will have stolen my name by then, at least in Dayton.

Then I’ll finally have time to stop and smell the beans.

One Tree Hill

2006-03-15T10:45:00.000-05:00

File this under, “You learn something new every day,” I guess…

It bugs me that this show that all my kids seem to watch (for some reason) is named after a U2 song. But I also assumed that the U2 song is named after something else, too, a little deeper and more significant. So I Googled “One Tree Hill.” After wading through dozens of pages of WB schedules, fan sites, actor biographies, and various pop-culture tripe, I discover that One Tree Hill is a place in New Zealand, a volcanic mountain outside of Auckland that is/was sacred to the indigenous Maori. There’s some interesting history here about how there used to be one tree on the hill, and then there were two, but now there aren’t any. But it’s still called One Tree Hill.

So far so good. But what’s the connection between the song and the place? Turns out that Bono wrote this song, and dedicated the entire Joshua Tree album, to a close personal friend of the band Greg Carroll, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1986. Carroll was from Auckland, and a Maori, and met the band in New Zealand; hence the close connection between One Tree Hill, the band, and Carroll.

Let’s take a look at the lyrics:

And in the world a heart of darkness
A fire zone
Where poets speak their heart
Then bleed for it
Jara sang - his song a weapon
In the hands of love
You know his blood still cries
From the ground.

Bleeding poets? Jara? Song a weapon? Hands of love? What’s that all about? The answers surprised me. Victor Jara was a Chilean poet and folk singer who was arrested by Pinochet. Different versions of his death abound, but the most poetic version is this: put on trial/exhibition in a soccer stadium, Jara refused to silence his protest song. His torturers had his hands cut off and he bled to death, a witness to the cruelty and tyranny of Pinochet’s regime.

A witness…a martyr. In the Bible, Genesis 4, God reproves Cain for the slaying of his brother Abel. How does God know that Cain has done this? “The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground” (verse 10). Abel’s blood is the witness against Cain. Jesus himself calls Abel the first martyr as he speaks against the Pharisees in Luke 11.

And what about the blood of these martyrs, these witnesses? To whom are they witnessing? The writer of the book of Hebrews explains it like this (Hebrews 12): they are witnesses of Jesus, who was not a martyr but a victim, a spotless Lamb who was killed for our sakes, murdered like Jara in front of hundreds. Jesus’ blood cries out to God from the ground as well, but it is not a cry for vengeance like Abel’s, or a voice of condemnation like the words against the self-righteous legalists. Jesus’ blood cries out to God for our forgiveness, to write our names in heaven, to enroll us as members of the new covenant of grace. Jesus’ blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel, the words of Jara.

And speaking of heaven, look at the last verse of the song:

I'll see you again
When the stars fall from the sky
And the moon has turned red
Over One Tree Hill

When will the stars fall from the sky? When will the moon turn red? Bono knows what St. John saw revealed to him by God ― these things will happen, literally and figuratively, on the last day. The full moon will become like blood, and the stars will fall to the earth like leaves to herald Christ’s coming (Revelation 6). Remember that this is a song for Bono’s friend, who preceded all of us into death. Abel, and Victor Jara, and Greg Carroll are not gone forever. We will see them again, when we see these signs, and more. When we see a new heaven and a new earth. When we see Christ himself, descending from the clouds in glory.

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he. (Zechariah 9)

Maybe you already knew all of this. Maybe, like me, you didn’t.

But even if you did know this already, isn’t it nice to be reminded?

Coffee-in-hand: Faculty Lounge Swill.

2006-03-14T10:35:00.000-05:00

Isn't this one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen?

I took this picture to have something to include with my article(s) on coffeegeek.com, but it turns out they didn't need it. So here's to all the potential of a full pot and two empty cups...

Welcome

2006-03-14T09:30:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Café Diem.

"Spend an hour, spend the day. Don't forget to stop and smell the beans."

Coffee-in-hand: Ethiopian Yrgacheffe