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Falling Apart In Prayer So You Don’t Fall Apart in Life

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted. I’m planning on using the blog in the new year mainly to clip and comment on quotes I accumulate (as was my practice in the past). Here’s one from Haddon Robinson. He makes the point that Jesus’ struggle in prayer at Gethsemane helped him to stand fast in his trial and crucifixion:

Where was it that Jesus sweat great drops of blood? Not in Pilate’s Hall, nor on his way to Golgotha. It was in the Garden of Gethsemane. There he ‘offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the One who could save him from death’ (Hebrews 5:7). Had I been there and witnessed that struggle, I would have worried about the future. ‘If he is so broken up when all he is doing is praying,’ I might have said, ‘what will he do when he faces a real crisis? Why can’t he approach this ordeal with the calm confidence of his three sleeping friends?’ Yet, when the test came, Jesus walked to the cross with courage, and his three friends fell apart and fell away.”

Empowertising = Depowertising

Andi Zeisler writes about advertisements catering to feminism. Quotes are from We Were Feminists Once.

On creating needs no one really has:

Here’s the thing we all know about advertising to women: the products aimed their way, from household cleaners to cosmetics to personal-care products, are pitched to solve a problem that in many cases the consumer might not ever know she had until she was alerted to and/or shamed for it (Wait, I didn’t know my armpits were supposed to be sexier!) (p. 25).

On selling back a movement to target groups:

Celebrating [feminist] ads themselves simply celebrates advertisers’ skill at co-opting women’s movements and selling them back [to] us – and then rewards us for buying in (p. 28).

Zeisler makes the argument that when the feminist movement began to gain steam, the corporate world jumped all over it – to sell feminism back to women in a repackaged, reshaped, and gutted form.

The movement’s success has rendered it irrelevant as something to be considered in shaping culture (p. 20).

I’m still working through this book, but the seeming thesis is interesting. If you apply her thoughts on the feminist movements to other movements in culture, including Christianity, here’s what you get. The corporate world co-opts a movement and tries to sell it back to those who are a part of that movement or who might be attracted to it. By the time the product goes through the mediator of the corporate world, it inevitably changes into something that is different from the original movement. In the words of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, every institution becomes its opposite.

It shouldn’t shock us that corporate Christianity, or as a writer/publisher I know calls it, “the Jesus business,” is a watered down mess. It’s gone through the wrong mediators. And now it’s being sold back to us in a gutted form that has no power to actually shape culture.

Anything that might give it to them

Mick wants a violin. She tries to make one. It’s pretty hard to make a violin. It doesn’t work out. She reflects:

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.

-Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, p. 51

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” – John 5:39-40

Image-Free Language

Robert Alter makes the point that modern English translations of the Bible tend to abstract physical imagery and metaphor. There are a number of examples of this. For instance, the translating of the word “seed” as “offspring.” Or the phrase “hot of nose” being replaced with “wrath” or “hot anger” (see Ex. 32:19, Lam. 4:11 as a couple of examples among many). Or the phrase “he who pisses against the wall” being replaced with “male” (see 1 Sam. 25:22, 34 among other passages).

Alter writes,

One of the most salient characteristics of biblical Hebrew is extraordinary concreteness, manifested especially in a fondness for images rooted in the human body. The general predisposition of modern translators is to convert most of this concrete language into more abstract terms that have the purported advantage of clarity but turn the pungency of the original into stale paraphrases

Gerald Hammond tartly observes, ‘eschew anything which smacks of imagery or metaphor – based on the curious assumption, I guess, that modern English is an image-free language.’

– Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, pp. xix, xx

One of the reasons I’ve found myself over the years struggling with metaphor, imagery, and imagination is that so much theological literature is devoid of it. This issue is compounded if our Bible translators follow the pattern. But if you look at the teachings of Jesus, and of the Bible as a whole, they’re remarkably full of imagery and metaphor. James Harleman imagines someone talking about Jesus’s sermons:

Why is this guy talking about a farmer? I wanted esoteric spiritual truths!

What’s this crap about mustard seeds?

Where are my bullet point steps for getting in good graces with God?

Why doesn’t this Jesus guy just give us an acronym with the keys for successful living?

-James Harleman, Cinemagogue, pp. 71-72

Jesus didn’t use image-free language. We need to learn how to go “on the body” (as minimalists writers put it) in our speech and how to understand such language in our reading and listening. Or else we may really end up saying, “What’s all this crap about mustard seeds?”

Full of Books and Worrying

Portia describes her father:

I feel sorrier for him than anybody I knows. I expect he done read more books than any white man in this town. He done read more books and he done worried about more things. He full of books and worrying. He done lost God and turned his back to religion. All his trouble come down to just that.

– Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, p. 49

“My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” – Ecclesiastes 12:12-13

We’ve added this book to our ‘recommended reading’ page.

A Rationale for Their Misery

Formerly, if men were miserable, they went to church so as to find a rationale for their misery; they did not expect to be happy — this idea is Greek, not Christian or Jewish.

– Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 38

I heard this quote paraphrased by Carl Trueman in an interview recently. It resonated. Why? Because of my own testimony of how Christ called me to himself. It’s good to remind yourself of the mighty works of God in your life. So indulge me.

I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. My parents were divorced in my early teens. My dad and I were basically two bachelors trying to figure it out. I wasn’t ready for college life at 18. I failed big-time. And it was my own fault.

After a year of partying, skipping class, and getting put on academic probation, I came home with my tail tucked between the limbs I walk on. But, in God’s providence, I came home to find that my grandmother was ill. I came home in May. She died the following October. She asked me to come to her house and visit as often as I could that summer. She knew she wasn’t going to be around much longer.

I never heard my grandmother talk about Jesus. But I knew she went to church. I knew she read the Bible. She told me at some point that summer that she read the Bible through each year. She had a Bible reading plan. She was weak. Would I please read to her? So I did. Several times. It got my attention.

I didn’t know anything about the Bible. But now I wanted to read it for myself. So I started reading it on my own. What else could I do but begin at the beginning?

Again, I knew nothing about the Bible. But I remembered that when I was a child, my family took a trip to Natural Bridge, Virginia. While we were there, we went to their ‘creation’ show. They still do this. You can find it on YouTube. It involved a man and a woman playing the parts of Adam and Eve, with someone reading Genesis 1-3 over the public address system.

I remembered that, hearing those early chapters of Genesis, I asked my dad, “Why didn’t they know they were naked?” He didn’t know how to answer the question. He just shrugged and it was never spoken of again. [Note for parents: no how to explain sin to your child].

Fast-forward to something like twelve years later. I’m reading Genesis 3: “their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked.”

It was like sticking a paper clip into an outlet. Electricity. I understood it instantly. The Bible was talking about shame. For the first time, Adam and Eve experienced shame. And reading that, it was the first time I truly experienced shame. It gave a name to all that I had been feeling but couldn’t put into words or apply to my heart. It changed me on the spot. I was in church the next Sunday.

I had a lot of baggage from my parents’ divorce that I didn’t know how to deal with. I had a lot of pain from some things that happened in high school. And I was partying my way through those things. I was numbing myself. I was acting like an idiot. Only I didn’t know this. Reading that Adam and Eve realized that they were naked and hid themselves from God made me realize that I was naked and hiding myself too. I was looking for a covering for my shame.

Genesis 3 gave me a rationale for my misery. It cut open my chest and exposed the guilt and shame of my heart. Did joy come from this? Yes. Because it led me to Christ, who is my joy. But I needed my miserable condition explained to me. I needed to understand why I did the terrible things I did (and do). I needed to understand how sin, guilt, and shame were abiding in my soul and how to confront them. I needed to know that I was naked before Christ could clothe me with his righteousness.

People who downplay the necessity of talking about sin see it as something negative; something that will get people down and depress people. On that day in the summer of 2000, I saw it as the explanation for all that was going on in my miserable soul. It made sense of everything – my feelings, my actions, my confusion, my mistakes. It was a supreme act of God’s blessing that he showed me my guilt. It was a positive thing that God showed me my sin, guilt, and shame. It wasn’t a downer. It wasn’t depressing. It was the thing that made sense of my whole life.

I am a pastor now, but I still go to church each week seeking a rationale for my misery. I need God to remind me week by week that I am deeply sinful. And then I need him to show me what Christ has done as the ultimate remedy. Then I need him to show me how I am still continually rebelling against the lordship of the one who saved me. And I need to be reminded that indwelling sin is the cause of that rebellion. Then I need to be reminded of Christ’s cross once again.

And it’s only through this – the rationale of my misery – that I am driven back again and again to the rationale for my joy – the love of Jesus Christ. Skip the rationale for misery and you have no rationale for joy.