Retired Pastor Ruminates

In such sad times we look ahead
to futures yet unknown.
We pray amid the fear and dread:
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

We know you in our daily round,
at work and play and home.
Such advents come without a sound.
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

You meet us when we gather here
for Word and meal and song.
Your presence hallows every prayer:
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

The tasks we take on in your name
to let your will be done,
Apart from you are done in vain.
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

And at the end when life is past
and time itself is done;
We'll meet you face to face at last.
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

© 2001 Richard Lawrence Floyd

I wrote this hymn for my local church in the Advent following the 9/11 attacks.

In a conversation with my daughter (who is in divinity school) I was trying to explain to her the distinction between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity, in the context of my letter about the baptismal formula.

Those of us who have drunk deeply from the well of Karl Barth's theology are sometimes accused of taking things too seriously.  There is a quite mistaken but still lingering reputation that his theology is lacking in humor.  But just because Barth's theology is deadly serious doesn't make it deadly, and I often find passages that are downright playful.  So I was delighted to see this mention of Barth's humor in a 1986 editorial in Theology Today by Daniel L. Migliore:

“It is well to be reminded, therefore, that for Barth theology was not primarily a heavy burden but a joyful activity. While it is certainly correct to speak of his theology as Christ-centered, to say that it was rooted in a life-long, uninterrupted conversation with the Bible, and to note how important prayer was in his life and theology, all such characterizations of Barth's work would still miss something essential if they overlooked his remarkable freedom and playfulness. Laughter was deeply etched in Barth's theology and spirituality. He was a theologian with a rare sense of humor.

Humor often arises from the experienced discrepancy between reality and appearance, from the distance between what we pretend we are and what others know us to be, or between what others imagine us to be and what we know of ourselves. Humor thrives on incongruity, disproportion, the sometimes bizarre disparity between assumptions and facts, protocol and performance, the imagined past and the real past, the awaited future and the experienced present. The quality of humor-whether it is harsh or gentle, destructive or humanizing-depends on whether these contradictions and incongruities are held to be eternal and inescapable or provisional and redeemable.

If disproportion and incongruity are the stuff of humor, the life of faith and the work of theology are fields ripe for the harvest, a fact that seems to have been more readily apparent to the children of the world than to theologians. Witness Woody Allen's description of God as an underachiever; or the prayer of Tevye, the poor milkman in Fiddler on the Roof asking God kindly to bestow the undeniably high honor of election for once on some other people than the Jews; or the unlikely defense of God by Yossarian's lady friend in Catch 22 who, although herself an atheist, is so shaken by Yossarian's devilish indictment of God's ineptness or malevolence that she breaks into tears and retorts: "I don't believe in God, but the God I don't believe in is a good God."

As theologians go, Barth was uncommonly appreciative of the rightful place of humor in human life in general and in Christian life in particular. He wondered why the modern apologists for the uniqueness of humanity, who had forgotten the meaning of the creation of men and women in the image of God, had never even mentioned the fact that apparently human beings are the only creatures who laugh. For Barth, humor was a symptom of being human, and it frequently found expression in his conversations and actions.

As a preacher, Barth could acknowledge that some of his sermons were real clinkers, like the one on the sinking of the Titanic which he later noted was as great a disaster as the original event. In the midst of the German church struggle, indeed in the midst of his trial for refusing to practice the Nazi salute at the beginning of his classes, Barth suggested to the court that like Socrates many centuries earlier he actually deserved a reward rather than a punishment from his fellow-citizens. The gesture was of course a complete failure, as one might have expected in the dreadfully humorless world of Nazism.

Barth was also able to laugh about his work as a theologian, recognizing that every theology is a human endeavor with all the limitations and need of continuous revision which this implies. He remarked that when he got to heaven, he would want to have a long conversation about theological method with Schleiermacher-say, for a couple of centuries. He imagined that the angels giggled among themselves when they saw old Karl pushing his cart-load of Church Dogmatics.

Recalling Barth's humor is not a human interest ploy or a curiosity of merely biographical significance. It is certainly not intended to obscure or trivialize the thunderous prophetic criticism which Barth often directed against both church and society in the name of the Word of God. The point is that Barth had not only a sense of humor but a theology of humor, and it was of a piece with his whole theology and practice of Christian freedom in response to the grace of God. His theology of humor can be briefly summarized as follows. First, humor for Barth is often and perhaps primarily self-directed. "Humor is the opposite of all self-admiration and self-praise" (CD III/4, p. 665). There is, in other words, such a thing as Christian freedom to laugh at ourselves, to recognize the incongruity and disproportion between the sinners we still are and the saints we prematurely claim to be, and thus to recognize ever and again the miracle of our being graciously accepted, valued, and honored by God. When one can laugh at oneself, then one can also rightly laugh at others-never bitterly or cynically, never in the superficial spirit of carnival or the poisoned laughter that expresses hatred for, or superiority over, another.

Second, for Barth true humor, far from being an escape from the realities of suffering and evil in the world, is "laughter amid tears." True humor "presupposes rather than excludes the knowledge of suffering" (Ethics, 511). As the child of suffering, humor takes suffering seriously but refuses to give it the last word. It is remarkable, Barth observed, how fundamentally humorless the rich and powerful and self-satisfied of this world are, and how, by contrast, genuine humor often flourishes among the poor. The refusal to become resigned to the reign of suffering and death in the world has enormous personal and political significance.

Third, and most decisively for Barth, humor is grounded in the grace, faithfulness, and promise of God. Humor is part of the freedom which is ours to exercise, thanks to the grace of God in Jesus Christ. It is a sign of liberation and release rather than bondage and resignation. Grace creates "liberated laughter," laughter made possible by the memory of God's faithfulness, the present foretaste of God's new creation, and the hope in the fulfillment of God's promises. To put this another way, humor for Barth is rooted in the glory and beauty of God and is an expression of the delight and pleasure which the God of the gospel evokes in human life. The grace of God in Jesus Christ is beautiful, and it radiates joy and awakens humor (II/1, p. 655).

Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between the time of humor and the time of unambiguous joy. Joy is experienced now, but not continuously or totally. "Joy is anticipatory," it has an "eschatological character" (III/4, p. 377). Humor, like art and human play generally, is oriented to God's future, and can only be properly understood in that context. In Jesus Christ, God's mighty Yes to us has been spoken, and this event signals the beginning of the end of the contradictions of Yes and No, of life and death, of friendship and enmity. Barth's humor points beyond irony or satire, and certainly far beyond ridicule or gallows humor, to the free laughter of children and friends in God's new creation.

So understood, humor is different from, though intimately related to, joy. Joy arises out of the partial presence of the promised Kingdom which has erupted in Christ and in the work of his Spirit. Humor arises out of the still partial presence of this Kingdom, leaving the undeniable incongruity and disproportion between what we and the world still are and what God's grace in Jesus Christ promises that we and the world shall yet become. Joy will find its fulfillment in God's new heaven and new earth; humor belongs to a world between the times. (Daniel L. Migliore, “Reappraising Barth’s Theology,” Editorial, Theology Today, April 1986)

If you have ever bought something on-line from Amazon.com, and you werern’t quite on the ball enough to check the box indicating that you don’t want them sending you e-mails giving you their personal recommendations of other books (or whatever ) that you might like to buy, then like me your in-box is jammed with these recommendations.

I don’t know if it is a human being that makes these picks or a computer (I would guess that latter) but sometimes they are amusing. As you may know I am an atonement scholar and buy most of the significant books (and some insignificant ones) about the atonement that come out to keep up with the field. So I get lots of recommendations about the atonement. Which is fine. But I buy even the atonement books from the people I don’t agree with, and they write other books which I also don't agree with, and so these other books are often picked for me too.

Also, the picker can’t seem to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction so Ian McEwan’s Booker Prize-winning novel Atonement is often one my picks.

I also have friends who are writers and I try to buy their books. So, for example, I bought Gretchen Legler’s engaging memoir of her time in Antartica On the Ice, and now my picks contain many polar explorer books, which are kind of fun to consider.

But the funniest pick ever came in my e-mail yesterday. This is going to be a bit of an inside joke for theologians and biblical scholars, but if the rest of you stay with me I think I can explain how weird it is.

I recently bought from Amazon.com my friend (and former teacher) George Hunsinger’s fine book from Cambridge Press The Eucharist and Ecumenism, a book I hope to say more about on this blog as I get deeper into it.

Just kidding. More likely The Onion will make you laugh, but that isn’t nearly as cool a title for a blogpost.  Looking over this month's posts got me wondering if I might be taking myself just a tad too seriously, so here's some comic relief.  My apologies to my international readers who may not find all of the American references quite as funny as I do.

So what is The Onion?  It began humbly enough as a satiric newspaper with only local distribution in Madison, Wisconsin. Founded in 1988 by two University of Wisconsin students, it was distributed free and had cut-out coupons for local Madison eateries.  From the beginning its genius was the send-up of the rich, famous and powerful with stories that were so funny that they were to good to be true, and, in fact they weren't true.  Think Jonathan Swift, Punch, early SNL, or the Colbert Report.

I know that in a recent post I quoted Marilynne's Robinson's displeasure at people getting their news from comics like Leno and Limbaugh, but the Onion is more than the arbiter of attitude about which she was speaking.  The Onion uses humor to deflate big egos, point out injustices, and generally humble the exalted.

Not that The Onion isn't cool. It is way cool, and that is why it spread beyond Madison.  From the beginning it had a near cult following on college campuses, and its availability quickly widened to other university cities, mostly in the Midwest.  Eventually it had a national distribution. The print addition is still distributed free in Madison and several other major cities, and is available by subscription and sold in bookstores.

The Onion added a website in 1996 and now has monster of a site that mimics such real news sites as CNN, ESPN, and C-Span with it ersatz replicas, namely ONN, O-Span, and OSN.

The Onion News Network (ONN) has video clips that look like real news stories.  They have actors playing politicians in solemn assemblies. They have down the look and sound of some of the more soul-deadening congressional debates. Take a look at this send-up of Congress in the clip “Breaking News: Bat Loose in Congress.”

Or this one, in which a Congressional hearing has the girlfriends of America arguing the economic benefits of cohabitation: “Nations Girlfriends Unveil New economic Plan: “Let’s Move in TOGETHER.””

Or my favorite, the Food and Drug Administrations first approved depressant drug for the chronically upbeat: “FDA Approves Depressant Drug for the Annoyingly Cheerful.”

ONN also has a regularly scheduled show called Today Now that is a send-up of vacuous morning talk shows.  It has two attractive, clueless hosts, John Haggerty (played by Brad Holbrook) and Tracy Gill.  Brad Holbrook was actually a real anchorman on one of our local Albany TV stations for several years which gives Today Now an eerie believability.  He's definitely better at The Onion.

Check out the episode:  “Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids”  where a mom talks about stalking her son on-line.

Back in October I posted one of my favorite poems by British poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).  Here is another:

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,       
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion       
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

In the Autumn of 1994 there was a large gathering of United Church of Christ clergy at a church in the Metropolitan Boston Association of the Massachusetts Conference to discuss the use of inclusive language in liturgy, and especially in the sacrament of baptism. The United Church of Christ's Book of Worship had retained the baptismal formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” but there was increasing pressure for changing this usage, and indeed, a show of hands among the gathered clergy indicated that the vast majority of those gathered were already using alternatives on an ad hoc basis.  The most popular form was “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer,” but other ones were used as well.

That great theologian of the cross, P.T. Forsyth (1848-1921) was a persistent critic of a kind of precious religiosity that flourished in his day and continues into ours.  His Victorian and Edwardian version was Romantic and aesthetic, human-focused and “spiritual” in that vaporous sense so popular still.  This brand of religion sought to reduce Jesus into a heroic religious genius and to see his cross as the apotheosis of human sacrifice.  Forsyth was having none of it.  

Brevard Childs, who died in 2007, was Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale University, and to my mind one of the great Biblical interpreters of his generation.  He provided many pastors and teachers in the church with the interpretive tools needed to do their work, and he bravely challenged the ruling canons of his guild as to how biblical studies should proceed.

I have just finished re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought and I put it down with that peculiar brand of sadness that comes when you wish there was more of a great book in which you have been engrossed.

This is a great book. Who writes like this, especially about serious subjects like theology? Nobody, that’s who!

I first read this sometime shortly after it was published in 1998, and I must have been too busy and distracted by my pastoral duties to have properly taken in its achievement. This time around I took my time, which is what Robinson does. Last summer I read her novel Home as part of an on-line discussion group and some complained that she took too long to get to the point, but that is the point. In her novels events unfold much like in ordinary life, which also can’t be rushed, and she knows just what she is doing at all times. There is no filler.

Robinson employs English words to reveal her thoughts with apparently seamless felicity. If you have read her novels you know this. But these are essays, ESSAYS, about weighty matters yet one never feels weighed down by them.

I am hard pressed to pick out a favorite chapter, although her several in defense of John Calvin are hard to beat. She roughs up noted historians for misreading and misrepresenting him, and portrays him more as a French humanist than the tyrant of Geneva he seems to have become in the popular imagination. On this, his 500th birthday, one could find no better gift to give a thoughtful religious friend than this book.

Her essays on “Darwinism” and “Family” are so full of wisdom and common sense that you wonder where your own mind has been. Her reflections on Scripture in the chapter “Psalm Eight” should be read by every first-year seminarian who is scuffling with the documentary hypothesis. The writers of scripture were not merely witnessing to truth, but were creating art. Who knew?

A couple of times while reading her ultimate chapter “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion” I wanted to stand up and cheer, which is no small feat when you are reading in bed.

Her defense of liberalism as an idea, and criticism of it as a movement clarified my own tortured thinking on this. She writes, “As a principle, liberalism is essential to the sanity and humanity of this civilization. As a movement, it is virtually defunct. Those who have espoused it have failed it, in a way and to a degree that has allowed the very word to become a term of opprobrium.”

A little later in the same essay she uses her own Christian identity to illustrate her point: “The banishment of the word “liberal” was simultaneous with the collapse of liberalism itself. And however these events were related, the patient smile that precludes conversation on the subject means the matter is closed. To be shamed out of the use of a word is to make a more profound concession to opinion than is consistent with personal integrity.” She writes so pretty you hardly feel the knife go in.  “What is at stake?” she asks:

“Our hope for a good community. Liberalism saw to the well-being of the vulnerable. Now that it has ebbed, the ranks of the vulnerable continuously swell. If this seems too great a claim to make for it, pick up a newspaper. Trivial failure of courage may seem minor enough in any particular instances, and yet they change history and society. They also change culture.”

To illustrate this point, I will make a shocking statement. I am a Christian. This should not startle anyone. It is likely to be at least demographically true of an American of Euoropean ancestry. I have a strong attachment to the Scriptures, and to the theology, music, and art Christianity has inspired. My most inward thoughts and ponderings are formed by the narratives and traditions of Christianity. I expect them to engage me on my deathbed.

Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/ethical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool.”

How many of us can hum that tune exactly? And, finally, although she wrote this more than a decade ago, the following observation about our common life has not become the least bit shopworn in these days of Glenn Beck and Fox News:

“The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno and Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think. That is they short-circuit the functions of individual judgment and obviate the exercise of individual conscience. . . . A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.”

That is the final sentence of the book. I await the next one. In the meantime, if you haven’t read The Death of Adam, you must.

C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, first published in 1942, still are as insightful and painfully funny as ever.  I revisit them from time to time, both in print and in the audio version with a deliciously wicked John Cleese playing Screwtape.  The premise of the book (which, let me be quick to say, is fiction) is that a senior tempter, Screwtape, is writing a series of letters to a novice tempter, his nephew Wormwood, to advise him as to the most effective strategies for procuring the soul of a man who is only called “the patient.”  One of my favorite letters is this one in which Screwtape has just learned that “the patient” has become a Christian, and he writes to Wormwood how this might not be entirely a bad thing and strategizes how to turn this against him.  The church doesn't come off looking too good.  This is mid-twentieth century Church of England, but making the necessary changes, you just might recognize your own:

I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed, in your better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we must make the best of the situation. There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a I brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes even our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His "free" lovers and servants—"sons" is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to "do it on their own". And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.

I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the next pew afford no rational ground for disappointment. Of course if they do—if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge-player or the man with squeaky boots a miser and an extortioner—then your task is so much the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question "If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?" You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won't come into his head. He has not been anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these "smug", commonplace neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE”

I never cared much for William Safire’s political views, and often skipped his op-ed pieces in the New York Times where he was for many years the token house conservative, but I loved his column On Language in the NYT Magazine and looked forward to reading it every Sunday. His death on September 27 came as a surprise to me since he had written a column just weeks before, and the paper just said he was on hiatus. I guess he was. I miss him.

I thought of him yesterday when I blogged about Republican Congressman Nathan Deal from Georgia asking to see the President’s birth certificate. In that blogpost I wrote: “I have many fine, smart, and knowledgeable friends who are Republicans, and wouldn’t call one of them a wing nut.”

I was immediately faced with the kind of issue Safire often addressed, how to spell a neologism, especially one from the world of politics. Should it be wing-nut, wingnut, or what I finally went with, wing nut? All three are in use.

The word, of course, originally refers to a piece of hardware, a nut with wings that can be turned without the use of tools.

I rarely step into the mucky ground of politics on this blog. For one thing, I don’t want to get hate mail and have my blog flamed. For another I am a person of generally moderate views and did most of my metaphorical bomb-throwing during my inflamed youth.

For the record I am a Democrat, but a lukewarm one, and I like it when there is some sensible opposition to my own party when they are in power, especially here in Massachusetts where Democrats are in a preponderance.

I have many fine, smart, and knowledgeable friends who are Republicans, and wouldn’t call one of them a wing nut. Well, maybe one. I read the New York Times with appreciation, but I don’t fool myself that it is particularly objective. I chuckle at the description of it as “the parish newsletter of self-satisfied liberalism.” I almost put “self-satisfied liberal” in the space next to political opinions on my Facebook Page. Instead I just put “yes.”

All this is prolegomena to what I am about to say, which is that I have never before seen an opposition party in this country ever so bent on the failure of their opponents at any cost as the Republican Party is now.  It makes me very sad.

I never liked the vitriolic Bush-bashing that I often witnessed for eight years, and never participated in it, despite my strong view that he was not good for the country or the world. Bashing G.W. Bush at a Massachusetts dinner party takes about as much courage as cheering for the Red Sox in a Kenmore Square bar. We are a nation of laws and not men, and I respect the office of President even when I dislike the incumbant.

I don’t take Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck any more seriously than I would the guy who breathes fire at the circus. They are entertainers, and the people who take their views from them are benighted. Democrats have John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who I admit are funnier and more ironic.

But I expect better from our elected officials than from our comedians. First it was Congressman Joe Wilson shouting out “liar” at the President during a speech to a joint session of Congress back in September.

Now, a few days ago, Congressman Nathan Deal, who is also a gubernatorial candidate in the Georgia Rebublican primary, announced that he is signing a letter to the White House with several of his Congressional colleagues asking for a copy of President Obama's birth certificate. Deal also wants to take away the Fourteenth Amendment's right for children born on American soil to be citizens.

I long for the days when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil could have a beer together.  Where is the loyal opposition, who could horse-trade and compromise and advance the good of the country. These people today really just don’t like each other, and will not work together, even if the country is harmed by it.

And the country is being harmed by it. We have numerous significant issues before us that will impact our common life and the world’s for years to come. There are honest differences of opinion between the parties as there should be. But this kind of red-meat pandering to the wing nut base erodes the commonweal.

You may rejoice to think yourselves secure,

You may be grateful for the gift divine,

That grace unsought which made your black hearts pure
And fits your earthborn souls in Heaven to shine.
But is it sweet to look around and view

Thousands excluded from that happiness,

Which they deserve at least as much as you,

Their faults not greater nor their virtues less?
And wherefore should you love your God the more

Because to you alone his smiles are given,

Because He chose to pass the many o’er
And only bring the favoured few to Heaven?
And wherefore should your hearts more grateful prove
Because for all the Saviour did not die?
Is yours the God of justice and of love

And are your bosoms warm with charity?
Say does your heart expand to all mankind

And would you ever to your neighbour do,
–
The weak, the strong, the enlightened and the blind -­

As you would have your neighbour do to you?
And, when you, looking on your fellow men
Behold them doomed to endless misery,

How can you talk of joy and rapture then?

May God withhold such cruel joy from me!
That none deserve eternal bliss I know:
Unmerited the grace in mercy given,

But none shall sink to everlasting woe

That have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven.
And, O! there lives within my heart

A hope long nursed by me,

(And should its cheering ray depart

How dark my soul would be)
That as in Adam all have died

In Christ shall all men live

And ever round his throne abide

Eternal praise to give;
That even the wicked shall at last

Be fitted for the skies

And when their dreadful doom is past

To life and light arise.
I ask not how remote the day

Nor what the sinner’s woe

Before their dross is purged away,
Enough for me to know
That when the cup of wrath is drained,
The metal purified,

They’ll cling to what they once disdained,

And live by Him that died.

(On this Five Hundredth anniversary of John Calvin's birth, many of us who proudly claim his tradition would want to repudiate the doctrines of double predestination and limited atonement so closely linked to his legacy.  Here Anne Brontë, the parson's daughter, graciously does so in verse.)

The Trinity is not a secondary way of talking about the Christian God within the framework of monotheism, but is in fact the very identity of the Christian God. Robert Jenson even argues “that the phrase 'Father, Son, and Holy Spirit' is a proper name for the God whom Christians know in and through Jesus Christ,” and I think that is right.

So in my view monotheism is not a very good starting point to think about the Christian God, although it has often been done. The Western theological tradition has often fallen into a residual Monarchianism, “a tendency to resolve a doctrine of the Trinity in the implicitly unitarian direction of a single and inscrutable divine sovereignty.” (The quote is from John E. Colwell's Promise and Presence referring to his teacher Colin Gunton's book The One, The Three, and The Many. And Gunton was a student of Jensen, so there is an intellectual lineage at work here).

The Trinity, in my view, is an inference from the Trinitarian shape of the Gospel narratives, and therefore (although never named as such in scripture) the most biblical of doctrines, even if it took centuries to develop. My friend Willis Elliot, in an e-mail to me about the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, affirms that even the process itself is Spirit-guided:

“From first-stage subordinationism to final stage trinitarianism is a long stretch, too long for Arius and most Christians until after Nicea AD325CE, the council at which Athanasius' Greek-language Bridge to the Trinity won the day and persuaded Constantine to decide against Arius. It would have been a bridge too far for Augustine's Latin unaided by the Latinization of Athanasian metaphysics: like Hebrew and Aramaic, Latin did not have the capacity to receive and convey the orthodox Christian doctrine of God. God's choice of Greek as the founding vehicle of the Christian mind was itself revelational.”

But why a Trinity? Well, if God is God then obviously every form of dualism must be rejected. But God is also love, and love requires some manner of plurality within the divine unity. The Gospel story is a love story among the persons, a love spilling out beyond itself for us. Perhaps this is best apprehended in liturgy, where we pray “to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.”

“We pray our prayers to the Father ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord,’ because it is through his Son made man as Jesus of Nazareth that God has shown himself to us. In the words and deeds, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus we know what God's attitude towards us is and that he is prepared to reclaim and remake us for himself. That is why Christians worship God not as a remote and distant mystery shrouded in the glory of his deity, but as the one who in his love has come to us, lived among us, died for us and triumphed over our enemies.”(The Forgotten Trinity, p. 5-6)

So the Gospel story is not merely the story of Jesus, but rather the story of Jesus' relatedness to the Father through the Spirit, and the Father's relatedness to the Son through the same Spirit. As Colwell puts it:

“The words and actions of the Son are the words and actions of the Father mediated by the Spirit. There is no action within the narrative that is not an action of the undivided Trinity. There is no action within the narrative that is not an action mediated by the Spirit. The Father's love and calling to the Son is mediated by the Spirit at Jesus' baptism. The ministry of Jesus is a demonstration of the Father's kingdom in the power of the Spirit. The sacrifice of the Son is mediated to the Father by the Spirit. The Father's raising of the son from the dead is mediated by the Spirit. At every point the Spirit is the agent of mediation between Father and Son.” (Colwell, p. 37)

This peculiar way we Christian's have of thinking about and speaking about God is yet another “scandal of particularity.” Which is why interfaith dialogue (which I'm all for) that uses monotheistic commonalities as the starting point typically sells out Christianity's particular understanding, and settles for a kind of a “theism plus Jesus.” But that view pervades our churches, too, so its not just outsiders who have trouble with the Trinity.

We teachers in the church share some blame for that. Nevertheless, the one God's Triune self-relatedness is the true grammar of a Christian theology that would do justice to the Gospel narrative and give true definition to the language of grace. The Christian God really doesn't make much sense without it.

OK, so I’m showing off just a little here with the homemade pasta, but you really don’t have to serve this sauce over fresh pasta. It is equally delicious over dried pasta such as Rigitoni or Penne. But if you are going to work all day on the sauce, use good quality imported dried pasta like De Cecco.

But if you have the time, homemade pasta is a wonderful thing, and it’s not really hard to make, but, trust me on this, it does take time. When my children were little, and my wife, Martha, who is a nurse, had to work at night, I would muster my little force and the kids would “help” me make fresh pasta. It kept them busy for hours, and at the end of the process we had lovely Tagliatelle hanging from all kinds of drying racks and everybody (and the kitchen) was covered with flour, and Mom didn’t even have to see it.

I have made this pasta several ways: with just a rolling pin and a sharp chef's knife, with the pasta extruder on my Kitchen-Aid mixer, and with a stainless steel hand-cranked pasta machine. I like the latter best myself. I bought mine at the First Church tag sale many years ago, and it has made a lot of pasta at the Floyd household.

So if you have the better part of a day to hang out in the kitchen this can be a great project on a cold day. Your simmering sauce will fill the house with lovely aromas. And the ragu itself isn’t very hard to put together, although it takes a certain vigilance over many hours. But the nice thing about it is that during that time you can make the pasta, and at the end of the day you will have a lovely comfort food dinner that will delight everyone at the table.

For the Ragu

4 tbs butter

2 tbs extra virgin olive oil

¼ lb. pancetta, finely chopped

1 medium yellow onion chopped fine

1 carrot chopped fine

1 celery stalk chopped fine

½ cup dry white wine

½ cup whole milk

1/8 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

1 28 oz can good whole Italian tomatoes with liquid

2 pounds lean ground beef

1 oz. dried wild Porcini mushrooms

Salt and pepper to taste

The pancetta is hard to cut fine enough by hand, so I cut it into small chunks and finish it in the food processor with the onions, carrots, and celery, and that keeps it from sticking to the blade.

Cover the porcini mushrooms with hot water and let sit while you do the next stages.

Heat oil and butter in a large heavy-bottomed skillet or casserole, and when the butter foams add the pancetta, onion, carrot and celery and sauté over medium high heat until it takes on some color and is beginning to brown.

Turn the heat down to medium and add the beef. Cook, breaking up the pieces and stirring, until the pink goes out of the beef, but don’t brown it. Add the white wine, turn the heat back up a bit, and let all the wine evaporate, stirring now and again. Turn the heat back down to medium and add the milk and nutmeg, and cook until the milk evaporates, stirring from time to time.

Add the tomatoes, squeezing them between your fingers into the pan. Pour the mushrooms through a sieve lined with cheesecloth (or a coffee filter) into a bowl and retain the liquid. Chop the mushrooms coarsely and add to the pot along with their liquid.

Bring it all to a very gentle simmer, partially cover, and literally put it on a back burner for as many hours as you can, stirring from time to time and watching your heat so it doesn’t start boiling. If you are gentle with this sauce it will reward you. How long? The one I made yesterday had at least six hours, but I would say at least three. It should reduce into a thick rich sauce. Taste and adjust for salt and pepper.

When you are ready to serve it, toss your pasta with just enough of the sauce to moisten it (it’s really rich) and serve bowls of sauce along with it so people can add more if they choose. Top each plate with freshly grated Parmegianno-Reggiano cheese and you’ve got a little bit of heaven on a plate. A salad and some crusty bread will round out this meal.

For wine, a good Tuscan red or a Nebbiola-based wine will make you smile.

For the Tagliatelle

Do not be afraid to try this. The dough for this pasta has only two ingredients, flour and eggs. Some people are dogmatic about using pasta flour, but I just use King Arthur All-purpose Flour and extra-large eggs. For six servings I use three cups of flour and four eggs.

Put your flour on a clean counter or pastry board and make a well with it. Then break the eggs into the center of the well (see photo below) and with a fork beat them, while drawing small amounts of flour from the edge of the well. Don’t be impatient; you can do this! Just keep beating the eggs and drawing flour into them until you have a nice soft dough.

Put the dough aside and scrape off your board. Put flour on your hands and on the board and knead your dough for about 10 to 15 minutes. Add extra dough a little at a time until the dough is soft and pliable. When you stick a finger in the dough it shouldn’t be wet, but not too dry. You’ll know.

It is now ready for the pasta machine. The pasta machine has two parts, a set of rollers that rolls the dough, and the actual blades that cut the pasta into ribbons. Set the rollers on your machine for the widest width. Cut a piece about the size of a large egg, and put the rest under a towel so it won’t dry out. Run the piece through the rollers 6 or 8 times until the dough is smooth and isn’t sticky. Adjust the roller to the next smallest setting and repeat the process. Keep adjusting the rollers smaller until you get the dough to about 1/16 of an inch, then put it through the cutting blades and make your ribbons of Tagliatelle. You can put the pasta on a rack, or nest it into a small bundle (see photo below). Then start again with another piece and follow the above procedures until you have made pasta from all the dough. This takes some time, but is strangely calming.

When you are ready to cook the pasta, bring a good-sized pot of water to a boil and cook pasta for only about three minutes, then sauce with the ragu. Yum. This is why my kids call me the “Pasta Emeritus!” Enjoy.

(Photos: R.L. Floyd)

My son Andrew is a steadfast Minnesota Vikings fan, and sent me this hilarious You Tube Video where some cheesy Hitler bunker movie is given subtitles about the Fuehrer's distress over Brett Favre becoming the quarterback of the Vikings.

For my non-American friends I offer this hermeneutical key:
Football is American NFL football, not the kind with the round ball that we call soccer.

I am not a Baptist, but I struggled with infant baptism early in my ministry, partly because of Karl Barth’s influence, and partly because of my pain at the casual way it was often regarded in the culture Protestantism of much of New England Congregationalism, where I labored.

But it was the form used by my tradition and so I followed it. Over the years of pastoring I came to embrace it and love it. Nevertheless, I exercised a kind of tough-love discipline around it, requiring parents or sponsors to have a real church connection, and for this, let me say candidly, I sometimes experienced a different kind of pain (as Paul said, “I bear on my body the marks of Christ.”) I firmly believe there must be faith for there to be a baptism, whether it is the faith of the baptized (as in believer baptism) or the faith of the parents or sponsors. But try to explain to your loyal congregant grandparents that you won't baptize their grandchild because the parents want nothing to do with the church or its faith, when all they want is a nice “Christening” with a party to follow.

I found the Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (BEM) document from the World Council of Churches to be very useful in thinking about baptism. It speaks directly to variations of form and usage around baptism and tries to find ecumenical consensus where it exists, for example on the prohibition against re-baptism, and to raise issues for conversation where consensus does not.

And some of you will not be surprised to learn that I also have found P. T. Forsyth’s writings on Baptism, chiefly in his book, The Church and Sacraments, to be very useful in my ministry over the years.

Forsyth suggests that both forms (believer and infant) have their inherent emphasis and along with them certain temptations. In the case of believer baptism a temptation is to think it is about me, my faith, my experience, and in infant baptism, the temptation is to a kind of magic. He asks rhetorically,

“Would Christianity really be reformed if it abolished infant baptism? Can that now be hoped for? Is that the only way to keep the magic out? Would it not be burning the house to roast the pig? Would it not reduce the church to the permanent condition of a missionary Church only, amid a quite pagan society?”

For Forsyth, who proposes that both forms be offered and recognized, “What makes baptism real is God’s changeless will of salvation in Christ and the Church. It testifies chiefly to this, and not to a subjective attainment of confession, which might change. Sacraments are modes of the Gospel (not of our experience), and that is what the Gospel reveals.”

Writing about infant baptism he says,

“Baptism is incorporation, not into Christ, but into the body of Christ, with its moral, spiritual, social influence on the soul. The child is not given the Spirit, but placed where the Spirit moves. It must make much difference to a young soul whether it is taught to believe it is a member of Christ’s body, and takes its disciplines as a child of the house, or whether it is taught to regard itself as an outsider, spectator, and by-product of the Church’s grace.”

Now that I am a pew-sitter and not a celebrant I have witnessed several baptisms in a variety of churches and forms and I am moved each time by the power of this gracious sacrament, however it is administered.

In today’s ongoing culture war between the advocates of various forms of creationism and various forms of scientism, we could well ask if each side represents the best in both religion and science?

The great British writer, polymath and wit G. K. Chesterton wondered just that during the infamous Scopes Trial over the teaching of evolution in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. He wrote:

“But there is another aspect of the case, which illustrates the real truth in the rather rustic Puritanism of the people who made a fuss about Darwinism in Dayton. To some of us it seems strange that such very antiquated Protestantism should be supposed to represent religion. It seems stranger that such very antiquated Darwinism should be supposed to represent science. But as a matter of fact the protest and prosecution on that occasion did represent something. It stood for a strong popular instinct, not without justification, that science is being made to mean more than science ever really says. An evolutionary education is something very different from an education about evolution. Just as a religious school openly and avowedly gives a religious atmosphere, as a scientific class does sometimes covertly or unconsciously give a materialistic atmosphere. A secularist teacher has just as much difficulty as a priest would have, in not giving his own answer to the questions that are most worth answering. He also is a little annoyed at not being allowed to put the first things first. He tends more and more to turn his science into a philosophy.” (The Religious Aim of Education)

I wish he had used “priggishness” instead of Puritanism (as Marilynne Robinson has suggested) lest he perpetuate the commonly received fallacies about our noble forebears. Nonetheless, he was spot on that it is often neither religion's nor science's best representatives who enter these fractious debates.

It seems to me that both fundamentalist religion and the more extreme forms of scientism share a certain lack of humility in the face of mysteries that lie beyond human knowing. The need for certainty and control makes strange bedfellows of these seeming antagonists. And how ironic that they deny to the other the same kind of certainties that they hold for their own views.

I am reminded of Hamlet's words to his friend on the ramparts: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Abraham is the one who received the promise from God. God's promise is that Abraham will have his own land and have many descendants, and through his descendants all the peoples of the world will be blessed. This is not only a big promise, but also an astonishing one, given that Abraham is a landless nomad and a childless old man, and his wife Sarah is barren.

Nevertheless, Abraham believes God's word of promise and the promise is kept. Sarah becomes pregnant and bears a son, whom they name Isaac, which means laughter, for Sarah laughs when God tells her she will have a son. Young Isaac is now the bearer of the promise, but in today's story the promise is threatened.

As with many biblical stories, we know more than the characters do. We know that God is testing Abraham, but Abraham doesn't know this. God commands him to take his son, his only son whom he loves, to the land of Moriah to sacrifice him. The form of the command from God echoes the original promise to Abraham. So the God who made the promise seems to be putting the promise in jeopardy. Abraham hears God's command. He has already lost his first-born son, Ishmael, whom he sent away into the desert with his mother Hagar, so the loss of Isaac will be the end of Abraham's family, as well as the end of the promise.

Israel would have heard this story as their own story, for in their story the promise is always threatened. And the threat to the promise is the threat to their continued existence. Yet Israel would also have heard it as the story of how, though the promise is always in jeopardy, somehow God “sees” that the promise is kept, that the story continues.

So Abraham does as God has commanded him. He prepares for the sacrifice, takes Isaac and heads out to the land of Moriah on a three-day's journey. After three days Abraham looks up and sees the place from far away. Father and son climb the hill and Isaac asks Abraham, “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham answers “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”

God will provide. The word providence itself derives from this passage, and also from verse 14, after God has produced a ram. Then Abraham called the place, “The Lord will provide” or “The Lord has seen:” Jehova Jireh.

And God does provide. He produces a ram. Abraham passes the test. He is prepared to sacrifice his son, and with him Abraham's own prospects as the carrier of the promise. But God doesn't require the sacrifice of Isaac.

It is a disturbing story. It raises any number of troubling questions, and from the beginning interpreters have tried to figure out its implications, from the ancient rabbis to Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In our own time a psycholoanalyst has suggested that the story is a story of child abuse, and has burdened our religious heritage with a climate in which abuse is tolerated (see Alice Miller, The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1990, p 139). A tradition can be misused, of course, but let us leave the psychological and philosophical interpretations aside today and look at this story within the larger Biblical story of the promise.

In its own context within Genesis this episode is the climax of the larger story of the promise. It is a story about human faith, but above all, about divine providence, about the way God keeps his promise from generation to generation in the lives of these ordinary people.

Notice how few details we are told about God. In this story there is no burning bush, no ladder to heaven, just the simple command of God. Does Abraham see God? Does the command come in a dream, in a voice, in a cloud? We don't know. Although God is the chief actor in the drama of promise and fulfillment, he remains in the background, speaking from mystery, his intentions not fully known.

In comparing this story with the Odyssey of Homer, literary critic Eric Auerbach notices that, unlike the Greek god Zeus, who is comprehensible in his presence, the God of the Bible is not; “It is always ‘something of him’ that appears, he always extends into depths.” The Greek narratives with their gods take place in the foreground, while the biblical narrative with its God remains mysterious and is ‘fraught with background.’ Here in Genesis we are not told everything as Homer would tell us, we are only what we need to know. Homer's poem is almost photographic in its detail, but here we have few details. We don't know what Abraham was thinking, what Isaac looked like, what kind of day it was. We are not told of inner states of mind. The narrative is spare. And it is not Abraham's character, courage or pride that is decisive for the story, but his previous history, as the one to whom God has made the promise. (Eric Auerbach, Mimesis, p 12)

The story keeps us off balance. Its outcome is not predictable. And the spareness of the biblical narrative means we have to look for clues to discern what is going on. One of the clues here is the idea of seeing. Throughout the Genesis story there is the motif of seeing, the human characters seeing, and God seeing. For example when Hagar is told by an angel of the Lord that she will give birth to Ishmael. She says, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”

The human characters see, but only now and then, little bit by bit. Seeing is never complete. They see, to use Paul's phrase “through a glass darkly.” The characters see only part of the way. But seeing seems to be essential for faith. The characters need to see, at least in part, what God is up to. They need to see how the promise is fulfilled. They won't see completely, they must act in faith, and perhaps it is faith that lets them see as much as they do.

So Abraham travels for three days and looks up and sees the place for the sacrifice. And when he is about to sacrifice Isaac he looks up and sees the ram. Was the ram already there? Had God prepared for the sacrifice in advance? Could Abraham only see the ram when he trusted the Lord and met the test? We don't know.

In any case “God says, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son from me.’ And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by the horns. Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide.’” The Hebrew means “The Lord will see.”

So God also sees! But this Hebrew verb “to see” is a “warm verb,” so God is not merely a passive seer, but an active doer in response to what he sees. Providence means not just that the Lord sees, but that he “sees to it.” In the Latin, “to see:” Pro video. God will see to it!

So Question 27 of The Heidelberg Catechism:

“What does thou understand by the providence of God? Answer: The almighty and present power of God by which he still upholds and therefore rules as with His hand heaven and earth and every creature, and that leaves and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and unfruitful years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty and all other things do not come by accident but from his fatherly hand.”

The Lord will provide. He both sees and “sees to it.” Divine providence has often been understood as foreseeing, but that is only half of it. So Karl Barth writes:

“. . . The God who so wonderfully foresees and provides is not a mere supreme being but the God who, in this happening in which Abraham was to spare his son, acted as the Lord of the covenant of grace that Abraham was promised and given his successor Isaac, that he had then (as a prophecy of the One who was to come) to separate and bring him as an offering to God, but that he had not to die but to live as a type of the One who was to come and give life through His real death, a substitute being found for him in the form of a ram.” (Karl Barth, CD 3.3,35)

I am convinced that the earliest Christians were prepared to interpret the death of Jesus as an atoning, sacrificial act by God because they knew this story of Abraham and Isaac. As good Jews they trusted the identity of God as the One who both sees and “sees to it,” and so the crucifixion and resurrection were seen as the ultimate act of divine providence, doing for us what we could not and can not do for ourselves, saving us from sin and death.

A son climbs a holy hill with wood on his back for a sacrifice. They recognized that story! They knew it was a terrible story. But they were able to see in faith that God sees, and in Easter light, they saw with the clarity of 20/20 hindsight, that God did provide the sacrifice, that the promise was kept and the story continues.

(I preached this sermon at the Tabernacle at Craigville, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, on June 27, 1999. It is also a chapter in my book When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement, Pickwick, 2000).