Summer Session
I hadn’t been outside in nearly two weeks! Oh, I went out to perform pastoral tasks or to go to the store, but I hadn’t been out to go out or be out for two weeks because of the insidious heat that has been ransacking the northeast and mid-Atlantic.
We had an extraordinarily harsh winter in Philadelphia. It was brutal for many but, for the Lacey family, it was like a warm womb, as my wife and I ministered to my terminally ill mother within the confines of our home.
I have rarely found summer to be palatable. Air-conditioning and the Boston Red Sox are the only things I actually like about summer, and I haven’t been attending to my beloved Sox this year - though I am thanking God for air-conditioning!
Summer, for me, has become, not so much a warm womb as a kind of inviting library. I read a lot throughout the torrid months. What else can one do? What else, in my case, would I want to do?
My world of reading is generally comprised of history, classic literature and theology. These are rather vast fields of thought and composition, so there is plenty to read now and more than plenty to read later, especially next summer.
The novels of Philip K. Dick have been occupying my attention as of late. Dick died in 1982 and has been increasingly recognized as one of the truly great writers of our time. The current title before me is from 1970 entitled, Ubik.
The story features a corporation that hires and utilizes and spies upon individuals with extraordinary abilities, such as seeing the future and altering the past. It might remind a lot of comic book fans of the X-Men, minus the super-hero motif.
These men and women tend to be misfits who, while having the capacity to affect history, can’t even keep their apartments clean or money in their pockets. Contracts must still be signed and coffee must still be made in the morning.
Oh, the glory and the squalor of it all! Every plan spawned by an idealized abstraction must always reckon with the more tawdry realities of life, but rarely do, which is why everyone one of them goes quickly awry.
It is also why legions of people get brutally killed, because they don’t fit the profile conceived in the Parisian garret or the Reading Room of the British Library. (Thank God that our Founding Fathers appreciated human frailty and fallenness!)
A line from a Woody Allen film captures the grim reality of which we speak. The main character is being carried along by a mob and declares, “I’m part of a plan and I don’t even know what it is!” Life’s realities get in the way.
This is not true of the Life. He who is Life didn’t get in the way. He came to reveal the Way, even amidst the unsavory realities of sinful people living in a corrupt world. His plan was to redeem unsavory people, not crush them.
The first chapter of John’s Gospel never ceases to amaze. It narrates and interprets the commingling of divine transcendence with earthly, earthy reality:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that Life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
“There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that Light, so that through Him all men might believe. He himself was not the Light; he came only as a witness to the Light. The true Light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
“He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him. Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed on His Name, He gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
“The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
“John testifies concerning Him. He cries out, saying, ‘This was He of whom I said, “He who comes after me has surpassed me because He was before me.”’ From the fullness of His grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made Him known” (John 1:1-18).
The Creator came amongst His creation. It was a corrupted creation, not the exquisite expression of His holy artistry. And they were a debased people, not the men and women designed and animated to reflect His glory and share His company.
But still He came. He found Himself rejected by His own people, the very ones for whom He had lovingly extended His hand throughout their history, a history made sordid by their sin but glorious by His grace.
Carl Sandburg defined beauty as “compassion for ugliness.” Such is the beauty of God: He manifests His holy and loving Presence even in the face of rejection and corruption. It is story that Philip K. Dick would have wished he had written.
It is a story to be appropriated by us today. The technological wonders of our day would defy, captivate and even stultify earlier generations. A mere handful of visionaries, such as Leonardo daVinci, alone might take a more prosaic view.
But a great many individuals with open eyes and ears would quickly recognize the dimensions of darkness that permeate the very air we breathe and the lives we live. Our technological advances have been paralleled by moral and ethical demise.
I have long counted Ronald Reagan and John Paul II as modern giants, let alone personal heroes. Ronald Reagan restored stature to the office of the Presidency and respect to the United States before the world.
But John Paul’s leadership was deeper still. The President was correct when he identified Soviet Communism as the embodiment of evil; when he called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” he was ridiculed by western academics and statesmen but praised by Soviet dissidents who were lingering in Soviet prisons!
The Pope was well aware of the evil of Communism, having watched his fellow Poles suffer at its hands; nevertheless, he recognized another evil at play: western materialism and its corresponding and multitudinous sins.
Conservative thinkers and politicians rarely recognize the commercial sins of our culture and liberal ones rarely acknowledge the moral ones, but both remain sinful in nature and debilitating in effects. Are we wearing blinders?
Well, it goes back to what the Gospel writer said: “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” And where it does understand it may very well be inclined to ignore or avoid or otherwise rationalize away the dark reality.
I don’t know how anyone could deny the reality of this summer’s torrid temperatures. I would imagine it to be impossible. I know of no one who sticks his or her head in the sand and acts as if it isn’t actually hot.
I prefer the cold, even very cold temperatures, but I don’t deny the fact that it’s cold. People ask me if I ever get cold and, truth be told, I feel it, but I like it; that is the difference. There is no foolish denial of reality.
Yet we deny sin and we deny evil. Poverty and ignorance are cited as the sources of personal discontent and societal malaise, notwithstanding the fact, for instance, that the monsters who flew jumbo jets into the Word Trade Towers of New York were middle- to upper-middle class Arabs with degrees from higher-learning institutions.
Notwithstanding the fact, too, that the most educated society in the world up to its time was Nazi Germany, and the most educated society today, with gobs upon gobs of money being poured into its educational apparatus, is the United States of America, she of the massive importation of drugs and exportation of promiscuity.
Notwithstanding the fact that the church in America, endowed by God with great riches and freedom, maintains segregated houses of worship, inclines towards comfort and organizational structure and minimizes prayer. Talk about denial!
The Apostle Paul warns the Church to be wary of those who “have the appearance of godliness, yet who deny its power” (2 Timothy 3:5). Who has the appearance of godliness? Church-goers, one is sorry to observe!
I know plenty of professing Christians who deny the power of God. Sometimes I am one of them when I allow my faith to ebb and my attention to the message of the Bible and the Presence of God’s Spirit to grow dim.
Those are the times when we are more inclined to place our trust in religious personalities, money, ecclesiastical structures, gimmickry and gadgetry, etc. The golden calf that Moses encountered when he came down from Sinai has nothing in comparison with its modern counterparts.
One church I know (which is, in all other respects spiritually solid) stated that they would never be anything until they had two large video screens in their sanctuary! Another placed a king-sized bed on its altar, from which the pastor preached a series of messages on sex! I don’t have the stomach to cite further examples.
Well, one more. I read a job description drafted by a church as it sought for a new pastor. He needed to be well-educated, experienced, personable, able to raise large sums of money, a good preacher and teacher and good-looking. You read it right!
I wish that I had read it wrong. I would never pass muster. I do have over 20 years of experience, and I am personable, but I’m no good when it comes to money and the closest thing to good-looking I get is by way of watching Cary Grant movies.
Now read what the Apostle Paul said to the Corinthian believers regarding their status. It defied the societal norms of that ancient day, as well as today:
“Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things – and the things that are not – to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before Him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God – that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord’”
(I Corinthians 1:26-31).
Paul himself may have been a brilliant intellect, but he was a very unimpressive in appearance and, by his own admission, not a very good speaker. Peter would be, in all probability, very awkward at a cocktail party (if he ever went to one!).
I always feel a bit out of place. I have white-collar interests but blue-collar instincts, so I never quite know where I belong, save for the fact that I belong in Christ and find my confidence on Him.
It is true to say, for instance, that when I am called to conduct a funeral I always feel like the most important person present in the funeral home. Why? Because I am God’s man on the spot, one entrusted with the most important message amidst the ultimate moment in every person’s life.
Yet put me in a party and I am practically a wall-flower, or at least I feel like one. There is a reason why God chose me, and it is not due to the fact that I can recite historical dates or know something about Jane Austen novels.
Scripture teaches us to have a sober judgment of ourselves (Romans 12:3). We are nothing if we think we are something, but if we know we are nothing apart from God then we may rest secure that we are somebody – the people of God!
Think of what Peter declared: “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:9, 10).
You know, I always feel like a fish out of water in summer. It’s not my element or my ethos. I happily ensconce myself in whatever hermetically-sealed environment I can find in which air-conditioning is the dominant feature.
But I will go wherever I may find or share the Light of Christ. His light is sobering, neither denying the reality of evil nor giving favor to the best, brightest and most beautiful. I qualify, but only because of the all-sufficient merit of my Savior.
We should joyfully give thanks to God, “who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:12-14).
It is refreshing to contemplate, even more to experience. It will parlay a summer session such as this into an eternity of resplendent reality. It makes waiting for fall seem rather cheap and tawdry by comparison. Grace and peace be with you.
Bradley E. Lacey
July 30, 2010
The World’s Greatest Message with Pastor Brad Lacey is heard on Philadelphia’s WHAT 1340am every Sunday at 9am. Please pray for our listeners and for the finances needed to maintain this faith-based ministry. Your support is invaluable.