Bad medical news

Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean

I used to work in the kitchen in college. There was a kind older African American lady named Pearl who worked there. Once I brought in a tape of old r and b songs and this song came on and she started and dancing and laughing and saying she hadn't heard the song in ages. She looked at me and said, "What's a white kid like you doing listening to music like this?" I think of her every time I hear this song.

The Rise and Fall of American Methodism

Thomas Kidd writes in this essay, The Rise and Fall of American Methodism, that one of the reasons for the shocking collapse of the Methodist church ( 11 million members to about 7 million in 40 years) is the politicization of the church. Fascinating article. It is a review of this book: Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century by Mark Tooley. Some bits from the article:

One is struck by the desultory quality of the Methodist church's political choices over the past century. Bishops reacted to one world crisis after another with lagging responses that often appeared designed to please political allies. Even occasional dalliances with communism (both Soviet and Chinese) were, at the time, regarded as prophetic and forward thinking. Now they seem shockingly short-sighted.




Tooley shows that the Methodists' high point of political power came in enacting what became the great failed policy of Prohibition. For the better part of the past century, some in the Methodist hierarchy have been scrambling to recover that lost political influence.




The American Methodists' experience of decline is a cautionary tale for all churches, including conservative ones. Evangelical church membership in America today is only holding steady, at best, and we may well look back in a generation and see a story of American evangelical decline similar to that which the mainline churches have experienced in the last forty years.



Especially those evangelical churches that position themselves effectively as a wing of the Republican Party might expect the same descent as the mainline. Obviously, there are politically-relevant doctrines concerning the biblical view of life, marriage, and sexuality that remain essential for evangelical Christian teaching. But seeking to fulfill the church's mission primarily through political advocacy appears to be a key historic ingredient in denominational decline.

Pistol Packin' Preachers

OK House Considers Bill Allowing Pastors To Use Guns In Church

OKLAHOMA CITY - The state house is considering a bill to allow pastors in their churches to protect themselves like citizens do in their homes, vehicles and businesses.
A state house committee approved the legislation Tuesday that would make it legal to use deadly defensive force if there's a fear of imminent death or bodily harm.

The representative who wrote the bill sited several cases of violence inside Oklahoma Churches in the last decade.

The bill now goes to the house floor for a vote.

We are the Lord's garments

If anyone asks what the Lord's garments, which
became white as snow, represent typologically,
we can properly understand them as pointing
to the church of his saints [who] . . . at the
time of the resurrection will be purified from
every blemish of iniquity and at the same time
from all the darkness of mortality.” Concern-
ing the Lord's garments the Evangelist Mark
remarks that ‘they became as bright as snow.
such as no bleacher on earth can make them
white.“

It is evident to everyone that there is
no one who can live on earth without corrup-
tion and sorrow. So it is evident to all who are
wise, although heretics deny it. that there is
no one who can live on earth without being
touched by some sin. But what a cleansing
agent (that is. a teacher of souls or some
extraordinary purifier of his body) cannot do
on earth, that the Lord will do in heaven. He
will purify the church, which is his clothing.
‘from all defilement of flesh and spirit,"

Bede, Homily 1.24 On the Gospels. in ACCS, NT, Vol. II, 118.

Ash Wednesday and the dirt

For whomever might find it useful ... here is an essay of mine published in the Concordia Theological Quarterly  last year (Vol. 75, 180-183). The CTQ publishes on its own peculiar schedule so it came out in September in the middle of the Pentecost season.  

The article connects the first chapters of the Book of Genesis and the role soil and dirt plays there with the application of ashes at the beginning of Lent. 

Ash Wednesday is the story of a marriage. It is the account of an unlikely union.  Humanity and the soil are the improbable partners. The tale of these Ash Wednesday nuptials stretches back to Genesis, chapters two through eight. The earth is the silent but crucial character in these opening chapters. The key to each of these stories and the key to Ash Wednesday is the dirt.

It is dirt out of which God creates Adam. He emerges from it, is lifted by the creative hand of the Lord and is enlivened by the divine breath. The Lord makes humanity the masters of that earth of which they are a part. Standing upon the ground, they tread upon it as kings and lords. They tower over the earth while still attached to it. They relate to the dirt as a husband, as the one who plants seed, as the one who gives work and care and waits for the soil to give birth, to respond with the fruits that keeps humanity alive. It is a curious balance, this dance of fertility which the Lord establishes. On the one hand Adam and Eve are exalted, distinct, reaching toward the heavens, bearing the image of the Lord who made them. Yet they are still made of dirt and attached to it. They must stoop to it for sustenance, even in that pristine paradise. They must push seeds into the dark and tend and water and love the ground so that it may be become pregnant and fruitful and bear food for them. The two, made of the same stuff, must be one, united in the bountiful union of seed and fruit and harvest.

Sin warps this strange and wonderful mixture of betrothal and mastery. Adam and Eve sin but it is the earth that is cursed. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” Adam and the earth are one flesh and the dirt, the flesh of Adam, receives the divine word of judgment. Thorns and thistles replace the garden. The earth is transformed from humanity’s wife to humanity’s enemy. Sin demolishes the beautiful joining of opposites. Adam, man of mud, who stood high above the earth yet was tied to it in a relationship of planting and giving birth, now knows that the earth will devour him. Not only seed will be thrust into the earth, human beings themselves will be planted. The sentence is pronounced: humanity will return to the dust. Mother earth will greedily consume her spouse. The dirt becomes master. The balance is lost. The vertical blessing bestowed by God to Adam is transformed into a horizontal return. The marriage bed of the soil where Adam thrust his seed, the womb of the earth, becomes the death bed, the tomb.

The story of the two brothers that follows the story of the fall also pushes the ground to the forefront. The unspoken subject of the narrative is the marriage of humanity and the earth, still intact but twisted, an angry sullen romance. Cain is a farmer, one who embraced the soil for his livelihood. God snubs his his offspring, his harvest. Cain, toiling in the sin cursed ground, gives to the Lord what his seed has produced and the Lord turns his face away. So Cain returns to that ground and plants a horrifying, different kind of seed. He spills upon the earth the blood of his brother. It is from the ground, recipient of Cain’s violence, that the blood cries out. Though Cain has struck Abel, the ground is also a victim.  The ground is now filled, not with seed, not even with the drops of toiling sweat which fallen humanity must shed to get food, but with the warm stuff of life, discharged in murderous hate. God punishes Cain by divorcing him from that very ground from which he was made, of which he was still a part, from which he had labored to gain nourishment. Cain, married to the earth as one who planted seed and tended crops and received its fertile response, must now wander on the earth and never be joined to it as husband and giver. 

The story of humanity’s conjugal connection to the dirt continues in the account of the flood. People become so evil that God repents of ever making them. And while his anger is focused on those he made in His own image, that anger once more is unleashed upon the ground from which they came and to which they are still joined. God strikes man by striking the earth with the waters of death. To destroy mankind God must wipe clean the earth itself. Mankind and the soil are one flesh. It is the earth which must accept the judgment of God for man’s sin. The two partners go down together, drowning in waters of the Lord’s wrath.

This narrative of the union of man and the earth is played out liturgically on Ash Wednesday. It is a quick, repetitive  moment of ritual: ashes, the motion of a cross, and a few words. Yet by it, we are placed directly into the foundational narrative of humanity. This imposition of ashes is not pedagogical. On the first day of Lent, we are not “told” about creation or taught the doctrinal import of the fall or the story of Cain. In fact, the appointed readings for the day ignore the opening chapters of the Jewish Bible. What Ash Wednesday does is place us in the story. We become actors in the narrative. The story happens to us in a visceral, tactile way.

At that moment, all our modern pretensions are cast off. We lose our pretend advancement and our clean, digital disconnection from things dirty and primeval. We are thrust once more to the soil. We do not sit in the pew learning ancient Palestinian stories. We are physically marked with ashes. Words are spoken over our bodies. We are addressed personally and individually. We become Adam and Eve and Cain and the recipients of the flood and what is true about us, about our bodies, our relationship to our maker, is tossed out into the open.

In those few seconds we live out the primordial series of events that defines us even now. We remember our creation from the dirt, that our bodies are real and tangible and we remember with it that the Lord breathed His Spirit into us and that we are formed by his hand. Even more we remember the awful mortality that comes. We will return to the dust. We die. We sin. We are Adam and Eve. We are married to the earth. We cannot escape the ground upon which we walk. That earth gives birth to us, we plant our seed in her, are fed by her. And she will greedily consume our flesh someday soon. No matter how far we have supposedly progressed, we are dirt.  

With the mark on our foreheads, we stand in the place of Cain. The ground cries out on account of the evil we have done. The blood of our brothers and sisters cries out for vengeance. We all murder Abel, we all have spilled his blood on the ground through neglect, hatred, envy. We rage and fulminate in our hearts.  And it by it, we are divorced from creation. We live out the sentence of Cain. Not rooted in one spot, we wander aimlessly, unable to connect to one another, unable to find God in that which he has made. We are forever on pilgrimage and we never arrive.

The last piece of Old Testament story that Ash Wednesdays thrusts us into as participants is the most drastic: the flood. There is, of course, no water in the Ash Wednesday ceremony just muddy splotches on wrinkled foreheads. But the flood is there in all its destructive and saving fury. It appears in the shape of that protective Cainite mark placed upon us: a cross. It is here where we stand on the earth and feel the awful deluge of God’s anger over our disobedience, that the imagination of our hearts is only evil all the time. On Ash Wednesday we stand on the earth that God thrashed and pummeled with water: it is the same earth that the cross of Jesus Christ was planted in. The ground from which Adam was formed, the ground which was cursed by sin, the ground which drank the blood of Cain’s brother, the ground which soaked up the furious deluge is now the ground that bears the weight of the Son of God, is splashed with his divine blood and waits to receive his lifeless body.

On Ash Wednesday we are marked with that cross, and it is a cross of baptism. That we are marked with the cross of Christ in our baptism and that we are so marked on the day of ashes and death and sin and shame is no accident. For that cruciform sign of death and the words of burial that accompany it are only washed away by the waters of baptism which is in turn nothing else than the cross of Christ. We are baptized into his death. With the baptismal floodwaters we go down into that earth with Christ. The waters bury us in the ground with Him. It is there finally that death loses its grip on us. Christ is the seed planted in the earth that the greedy grave cannot digest. Christ is planted as seed and the earth must do what God intended it to do before the fall, before the curse, before Abel’s blood stained it. It must give birth to life. It must feed Gods children. It must give birth to the tree of life, with healing fruit for humanity.  

In this Ash Wednesday moment, balance is again restored between humanity and the earth from which we spring. Creation and fall and burial and murder and wrath are wrapped in that sign of our baptism. The burial and resurrection of Christ become the restoration of the connection between the earth and humanity. It marks the soil’s return into the scheme of God’s giving to humanity. The earth once more serves humanity as mother, as giver of life as it disgorges Christ. As Mary did at his birth, the earth gives birth to Christ and hands him over to us. Ash Wednesday marks the reconciliation of creation and humanity. In the death and resurrection of Christ, in our baptism, once more we are bound together in fruitfulness to the earth receiving her harvest for our life. 

Random Lyrics 1

Confirmed in the eyes of the kids, emphasized with their fists.


Anyone want to guess where this is from?

The doctoral thesis of Rowan Williams on the theology of Vladimir Lossky

The audience for this post is sure to be overwhelming .... The doctoral thesis of Rowan Williams on the theology of Vladimir Lossky is available online for free. Quite interesting. Get it here. Thanks to Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth for the tip.

The ears alone are the organs of a Christian

God no longer requires the feet or hands or any other member; He requires only the ears ...

For if you ask a Christian what the work is by which he becomes worthy of the name "Christian" he will be able to give absolutely no other answer than it is the hearing of the Word of God, that is, faith.

Therefore, the ears alone are the organs of a Christian.

Luther, LW 29: 224. (Thanks to Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology, p. 21)

The church’s present obsession with success guarantees its eventual irrelevance

This guy is a Methodist but he is right on target. Some things here sway Methodist not Lutheran but on this topic he has many wise things to say. 

From Christopher P. Momany on the United Methodist Reporter

Some take aways then the whole thing is below.

1. The church’s present obsession with success guarantees its eventual irrelevance.

2.  The church is not in decline because of the gospel’s timeless truths. The church is in decline because we are afraid to live the gospel, and that gospel is about unconditional love.

3. The series of ideology-trumpeting customer service models and business-style “coaching” lacks theological vigor and depth. Customers receive services for a price. There is nothing wrong with this when it applies to legitimate economic transactions, but it is hardly the logic of grace.

4. Most of the trendy approaches to revitalization of the church are inherently conditional—meaning people are valued as long as they advance the agenda of someone in power. That just doesn’t sound like the gospel.

5. The fixation on outcomes, metrics and measurement distorts our theology and gives it a very conditional quality. In an attempt to grow the church, we risk losing the truth our world craves.

6. They believe the gospel and (like me) are desperate to throw themselves upon the power of something more substantial than business theory.

The whole thing: 

The church’s present obsession with success guarantees its eventual irrelevance.

I know, movements that are threatened with extinction tend to chase fads. It sounds proactive, bold and edgy, but a lot of these so-called leadership initiatives are little more than warmed-over tripe from the business world. Additionally, much of the “latest” thinking among the church has already been discredited in the business world.

My critique may sound like sour grapes—the rant of one imprisoned by the past, one unwilling to change or face the future. The opposite is the case. The church is not in decline because of the gospel’s timeless truths. The church is in decline because we are afraid to live the gospel, and that gospel is about unconditional love.

We should think very carefully before giving ourselves to ideas that dominate corporate culture. Instead of demonstrating foresight and courage, the series of ideology-trumpeting customer service models and business-style “coaching” lacks theological vigor and depth. Customers receive services for a price. There is nothing wrong with this when it applies to legitimate economic transactions, but it is hardly the logic of grace.

Most of the trendy approaches to revitalization of the church are inherently conditional—meaning people are valued as long as they advance the agenda of someone in power. That just doesn’t sound like the gospel.

Sure, we can write off this analysis as retrenchment, but before we do, let’s consider a beautiful irony. Only by living with abandon for the Lord of unconditional affirmation will we grow. The fixation on outcomes, metrics and measurement distorts our theology and gives it a very conditional quality. In an attempt to grow the church, we risk losing the truth our world craves. By losing ourselves in unconditional love, we will find a church bursting with people and grace. As I recall, Jesus said something like that (Matthew 10:39).

I work as a college professor and chaplain. I live among the self-styled hip and au courant. Young adults do not ask me if I am following some method for growing the church, implementing “best practices,” or demonstrating worth according to a bottom line. I am asked about the nature of love, the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, the value of all people. And I am swamped with young adults who want to get in on the action. They believe the gospel and (like me) are desperate to throw themselves upon the power of something more substantial than business theory.

We have a saying in our ministry: People possess an “intrinsic worth” regardless of performance, usefulness, mistakes or accomplishments. In other words, the worth of all is unconditional. We did not make this up. Our indigenous source of inspiration can be found in the personal papers of Adrian College’s founder, Asa Mahan.

The “Old Doctor” (as students called him) was a philosopher and teacher of ethics who helped lead the Underground Railroad and the mid-19th-century movement for women’s rights. His 150-year-old notebook underscores the worth and dignity of everyone. Few would dispute his claim, but that does not mean we always live according to his insight. I actually thought this emphasis might have been overplayed in our chaplaincy until I received a surprise gift from a huge crowd of college students.

The gift? A custom coffee mug imprinted with the words: “intrinsic worth.” They get it. I hope the rest of us will before it is too late.