The reason for the coming

On this first Sunday of Advent I've been thinking about 1 John 3:8. Actually, just a fragment of the verse. "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil." I love that! Succinct and to the point. The Reformation Study Bible connects this to the first glimpse of the gospel in Genesis 3:15, sometimes called the protoevangelion "first gospel."

The opposition between Christ and Satan was foretold as early as Gen. 3:15. Satan used the righteous law of God as a tool to hold sinners captive to the fear of death and condemnation. By accepting in His own Person the penalty due to sinners under the law, Christ took away the foundation of Satan's plan (Heb. 2:14-15).

Satan's "greatest" work is sin, and sin is death. The revolutionary message of Christmas is nothing less than the triumph of life over death. I'm struck anew by the mystery of the Incarnation. The child born to Mary in a smelly backwater of the Roman Empire was the promised Messiah. "Him who is and who was and who is to come...Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth." (Rev. 1:4-5) And he's coming again. There will be a second Advent.

A prayer song

Last Saturday I was blessed to join with the saints of Orthodox Zion Primitive Baptist Church and many other churches in our county for a service of racial reconciliation and unity. One of the blessings of this service was being led in musical worship by the terrific choir at Orthodox Zion. This was the third time I'd heard them and I can say that there isn't a church choir I'd rather listen to than the one from OZPBC. They have a spirit of reverent passion. It's not simply a performance. They sang Glenn Burleigh's "Order My Steps" and the words have been running through my mind all week. "Order my steps in Your Word, dear Lord, lead me, guide me everyday." For the Christian, there's not a better prayer than that. Here are the complete lyrics.

Order my steps in Your word dear Lord,
lead me, guide me everyday,
send Your anointing, Father I pray;
order my steps in Your word,
please, order my steps in Your word.

Humbly, I ask Thee to teach me Your will,
while You are working, help me be still,
Satan is busy, but my God is real;
order my steps in Your word,
please, order my steps in Your word.

Bridle my tongue let my words edify,
let the words of my mouth be acceptable in Thy sight,
take charge of my thoughts both day and night;
please order my steps in Your word,
please order my steps in Your word.

I want to walk worthy,
my calling to fulfill.
Please order my steps Lord,
and I'll do Your blessed will.
The world is ever changing,
but You are still the same;
if You order my steps, I'll praise Your name.

Order my steps in Your word.
Order my tongue in Your word.
Guide my feet in Your word.
Wash my heart in Your word.
Show me how to walk in Your word.
Show me how to talk in Your word.
When I need a brand new song to sing,
show me how to let Your praises ring,
in your word

- Glenn Burleigh

Thanksgiving in New Canaan, CT (circa 1973)

The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)

Tools of the trade

Shannon snickered when I said I wanted another coffee machine for Christmas. She teases me about all the coffee-related paraphernalia I have (as you can see). I admit it. I love coffee and I'm a bit fetishistic about the process of making it. When I'm at Starbucks I have to resist the urge to look over the barista's shoulder to make sure he's making my tall double-shot latte just so. If I could, I'd grow the beans and roast them myself. The fabulous cups of coffee I've enjoyed stand out as milestones in my mind. There was that perfect café con leche at a lunch counter in Old San Juan that came out of a machine that looked like it could have been there since the Spanish-American War, and the cup of bold joe at Krispy Kreme in Clarks Summit the morning I got married (tasted better for some reason), or those well-crafted lattes from Paris Bakery & Cafe in downtown West Palm best enjoyed on brisk South Florida Saturday mornings accompanied by the bells of First Presbyterian from across the street. I could go on.

Of course, all the technology in the world won't do you any good without quality beans. Lately I've been getting my beans from Impact Coffee Company or Electric City Roasting. You can't beat their product and I have personal reasons for wanting to support them. The first is a micro-enterprise run by kids from Urban Youth Impact, a local ministry that Shannon and I support, and beans from the second are roasted a few blocks from where Shannon grew up in Scranton, PA! In a pinch I'll buy Seattle's Best at the grocery. When it comes to espresso I usually buy Café Pilon, but once in a while I treat myself to this.

Yes, coffee (and the stuff to make it with) is one of God's good gifts.

Calvin on common grace (or all truth comes from God)

Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God's excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in such slight esteem, we condemn and reproach the Spirit himself. What then? Shall we deny that the truth shone upon the ancient jurists who established civic order and discipline with such great equity? Shall we say that the philosophers were blind in their fine observation and artful description of nature? Shall we say that those men were devoid of understanding who conceived the art of disputation and taught us to speak reasonably? Shall we say that they are insane who developed medicine, devoting their labor to our benefit? What shall we say of all the mathematical sciences? Shall we consider them the ravings of madmen? No, we cannot read the writings of the ancients on these subjects without great admiration....Those men whom Scripture calls "natural men" were, indeed, sharp and penetrating in their investigation of inferior things. Let us, accordingly, learn by their example how many gifts the Lord left to human nature even after it was despoiled of its true good.

John Calvin, Institutes 2.2.15 (as cited by Michael Horton, "A Shattered Vase: The Tragedy of Sin in Calvin's Thought" in A Theological Guide to Calvin's Institutes, ed. by David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback)

Why the "verse for the day" is not enough

As a whole the Scriptures are God's revealing Word. Only in the infiniteness of its inner relationships, in the connection of Old and New Testaments, of promise and fulfillment, sacrifice and law, law and gospel, cross and resurrection, faith and obedience, having and hoping, will the full witness to Jesus Christ the Lord be perceived.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

The Savages (2007)

In his book Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith, Eric Jacobsen argues that "our sprawling car culture" is a contributing factor to the outsourcing of the elderly. "When people get too old to drive...they must be driven to doctor's appointments, on shopping trips or to visit their family. The practice of putting the elderly into retirement homes is a relatively recent phenomenon." In other words, for all the benefits of independence provided by the prevalence of automobiles and suburban sprawl, their rise has coincided with increasing generational segregation and lack of independence for our parents and grandparents. It's no coincidence that "retirement communities" were unheard of before the 1950s. In the old days an elderly person could stay in the neighborhood where essentials of life were within walking distance, and there was a family and/or community to look out for them. Jacobsen notes, "it's ironic that our love for independence has led us to create dependent classes among our citizenry."

I thought about Jacobsen's thesis while watching The Savages, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, and starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as adult siblings forced to deal with the onset of dementia in their father (Philip Bosco). The movie doesn't directly critique the above trends -- though the title must be a wry comment -- but it provocatively yet compassionately portrays the dilemmas faced by so many. At the least, I think it will cause most viewers to conclude that there must be a better way, that community and family mean something more than this.

Jon and Wendy Savage aren't exactly failures, but they're not shining examples of success either. 42-year-old Jon teaches theater in Buffalo and is writing a book about Bertolt Brecht (this leads to the prettiest musical cue in the film -- Lotte Lenya singing "Salomon-Song" from The Threepenny Opera). 39-year-old Wendy works for a temp agency in Manhattan while trying to get funding for her "subversive, semi-autobiographical play" about her childhood "Wake Me When It's Over". She's also having an affair with a married man, Larry (Peter Friedman), who brings his oversized dog along for trysts in Wendy's tiny apartment. Jon is romantically involved with a Polish emigre (played affectingly by the lovely Cara Seymour) but can't find it in his heart to make her his wife and thus spare her from having to return to Kraków when her visa expires. As will become clear, it's a familiar paradigm of relational dysfunction being passed down. Dad is just as complicit as the kids in this unfolding mini-tragedy. Which brings us to Lenny.

Leonard "Lenny" Savage has lost touch with Jon and Wendy (and vice-versa) since moving to Sun Valley, Arizona with his "companion" Doris. They live in a pastel-colored house overlooking the eighth tee, but neither of them is in any shape to be swinging a club anymore. This retirement dream has turned into a tragicomic nightmare. The film begins with Lenny resisting Eduardo, the home health aid, with pranks of a, shall we say, scatalogical nature. He ends up in the hospital, and it's then that this mutual voluntary estrangement of parent and children ends with a phone call (as it often does) from Doris's daughter. Turns out dad may have Parkinson's. Whatever it is, life is about to change for all of them. Shortly after, Doris drops dead while getting her nails done, and Lenny is left homeless since the house goes to Doris's kids. There follows an effectively poignant scene -- as Wendy stuffs her father's belongings into a suitcase, a realtor tempts another group of retirees with the beautiful views of the eighth tee. Ah, vanity! an ancient sage once said.

The Savages is really a road-trip movie. The journey from Sun Valley to Valley View nursing home in Buffalo is full of portent and symbolism. For Lenny, it's the end of the road. For Jon and Wendy its a chance for some hard-won reconciliation. New beginnings? You can decide. Some of what follows may remind viewers of the overrated Little Miss Sunshine, but this is a vastly better and more satisfying film than that one. I wasn't familiar with Tamara Jenkins before, but I'm a big fan now. Of course its hard to go wrong with two actors as talented as Linney and Hoffman. I don't think either is capable of a bad performance. They thoroughly inhabit their characters, so important in a character-driven piece like this one. Usually, a dramatic comedy (or is it a comedic drama) of this size and scope is visually rather pedestrian. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't want the "wow factor" of the camera work to get in the way. The biggest surprise and a bonus of The Savages is how beautifully and inventively it was shot. Kudos to DP Mott Hupfel and Ms. Jenkins. There are many visual moments that linger in my mind, including one sun-drenched shot at Niagara Falls.

Good art should inspire constructive introspection. The Savages does this. How does one "honor thy father and thy mother" in cases like this? Off the top of my head I can think of several friends and co-workers who are heroically trying to care for an elderly or sick parent or grandparent who can't care for themself. And as my wife and I look forward to the birth of our son, I wonder, how will he care for me if the time comes when I can't care for myself? Will he do it out of obligation, or love? Or not at all? I'm guessing that a lot of that depends on the job I do as a father. In the film, it's clear that Leonard Savage was far from a model father. As Jon angrily asserts to Wendy, "we're taking care of the old man a lot better than he ever took care of us!" Jon and Wendy don't come off looking like heroes, but whether motivated by guilt or obligation, they try to do right by the old man. Some might say they treated him better than he deserved. It's complicated. It's a family thing.

Happy birthday Jodie Foster

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

"Postmodernism" we can believe in

R. Scott Clark:

This essay argues that, because of it’s core convictions reflected in its doctrines of revelation, God, man, creation, sin, Christ, imputation (federalism), predestination, and the church, confessional Reformed theology is not only, in some sense, postmodern, but more precisely, it is consistently anti-modernist.

AND

The emerging and emergent movements seek to be “postmodern.” In fact, to the degree that they begin with human autonomy, with versions of rationalism (e.g., in their denial of the atonement), in subjectivism (e.g., in their hermeneutic and quest for the immediate encounter with God) they are not postmodern as much as they are, as Mike Horton likes to say, “most modern.” To be truly postmodern would be to embrace the historic Reformed faith. It would be to become anti-modern, to repudiate the assertion of the sovereignty of human choice or of human experience or of human rationality in favor of the the sovereignty of the mysterious Triune God, of the two-Adams, of unconditional grace, faith, and the church instituted by Christ himself.

As always, I heartily encourage you to read the whole thing.

The Ordo Salutis ("the order of salvation") and life beyond judgment

The fact that God has passed judgment upon us once and for all in Christ profoundly changes the character of the moral life. At creation, God gave his law to Adam and commanded him to obey it. If he obeyed, he would live and if he disobeyed, he would die. In short, Adam had to carry out his moral obligations and then God would judge him on the basis of how he did. This is precisely what happened, as Genesis 3 records. After the Fall, God's law still comes to all people. Some people hear the law as proclaimed in the Scriptures, but all people at least know the basics of God's moral requirements through the natural law and the testimony of the conscience (Rom. 2:12-15). That law continues to inform people that God requires (perfect!) obedience and that he will judge them on the basis of their works (e.g., see Luke 10:25-28; Rom. 2:12-15; Gal. 3:10; 5:3). Thus, people who are without Christ continue to have moral obligations and to know that God will either justify or condemn them depending upon their performance.

But this entire reality has been radically transformed for those with faith in Christ. Christians are not called to do good works and then to be judged, but have been judged (that is, justified) in Christ and then called to do good works. The work of Christ has reversed the order. Instead of judgment following the moral life, now the moral life follows judgment. Instead of working so that we may be justified, we are justified so that we may work. To put it somewhat crassly, instead of striving for holiness so that we may get on God's good side, God has graciously placed us on his good side so that we may strive for holiness. The fact that Christians enjoy a judgment-already-rendered rather than face a judgment-yet-to-be-rendered changes the whole character of the moral life. Roman Catholics have often claimed that the Protestant doctrine of justification leads to apathy about leading a holy life, because it kills incentive. Why strive after holiness if God has already justified you? But Protestants should reply by claiming, with Scripture, that we love much because we have been forgiven much (Luke 7:47), that we serve in the newness of the Spirit because we have been released from the law (Rom. 7:6), that we serve one another in love because we have been set free (Gal. 5:13). A person really cannot understand the sanctified Christian moral life, therefore, without the ordo salutis. God judges us and then, in response, we live the Christian life. Justification is prior to sanctification.

David VanDrunen, Life Beyond Judgment (Modern Reformation October/November 2008)