Flags and the Sanctuary

After Matthew Milner posted this on his blog recently, I felt my former patrio-iconoclasm decay a little.

The issue of flags in the sanctuary begs some interesting questions about how design influences worship. Millner's point is valid, that, perhaps, in placing our flag on the "altar" of our respective church we are not worshiping the flag, but creating a visible reminder that if we love our neighbor we ought to pray for our country. This helps me come to terms with my church praying for the queen and singing the Canadian national anthem (once).

But surely there are times when the flag does become an object of idolatry. Where is the line? Why is a little flag next to the cross a helpful reminder while a large American flag in many evangelical churches seems so different?

Soon I think I will argue that this is an issue of ecclesiology as much as aesthetics, but this is enough for now.

The Place of Tradition in Hermeneutics

Among all of the controversies surrounding the Protestant reformation, one of the primary concerns was the proper appropriation of tradition. In Cardinal Sadolet's letter to the people of Geneva, he argues that Calvin and his contemporaries did not have the support of Christian tradition on their side. The reformers had a mere 25 years of tradition to the Roman Church's prodigious 1500 years. Calvin's response is cunning. He writes, “…the ancient church is clearly on our side, and opposes you, not less than we ourselves do.” (Calvin, John. “Reply by John Calvin to Letter by Cardinal Sadolet to the Senate and People of Geneva.”49). In responding this way he turns Sadolet's logic around and claims that the reformers are actually being more faithful to the tradition than the Catholic Church was. Thus, the appeal of the Protestant reformation was not meant to dispense with tradition. Rather, it was an argument against the way in which the Catholic Church had appropriated it.

The question then is this: What is the role of tradition in interpreting Scripture? The Catholic position appears to be that Scripture and tradition are to be held on the same level. The mainline Protestant reformers clearly hold up Scripture as authoritative (sola scriptura) without dispensing with tradition, but (perhaps problematically) leave the question of its proper position unestablished. The radical reformers seem to completely disregard tradition as irrelevant, professing that one can really read Scripture unassisted by tradition. The result of this lack of articulation on the part of Protestantism seems to be partly responsible for the fractious milieu that has become one of its hallmarks.

At the risk of muddying the waters of discussion, I will go ahead and say that, on this point at least, I think the radical reformers were more than a little naive simply because nobody is able to completely divorce themselves from their own context (cultural, historical, denominational, etc). Thus, even in the most deconstructed traditions, such as the Quakers, you will find them to be just that–– a tradition. But how does one interpret Scripture in continuity with all of Christian (and Jewish!) history? Can we just appeal to the early church without looking at the less flattering parts that follow? Should we go so far as the Catholic Church and put the two on the same level?

Our Membership

"This was our membership. Burley called it that. He loved to call it that. Andy Catlett, remembering Burley, still calls it that. And I do. This membership had an economic purpose and it had an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic. Joe Banion grew a crop on Mr. Feltner, but also drew a daily wage. The Catlett boys too were working for wages, since they had no crop. The others of us received no pay. The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come. In the long, anxious work of the tobacco harvest none of us considered that we were finished until everybody was finished. In his old age Burley liked to count up the number of farms he had worked on in his life 'and never took cent money'.

"...The members, I guess you could say, are born into it, they stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it..."

Taken from Hannah Coulter this Wendell Berry quote might well be mistaken for the book of Acts, thick with covenantal, ecclesiological, familial language.

Somehow we've made mutual generosity an event. Appealing for help is the crescendo of maxing resources, dead ends, burgeoning shame and awkwardness. Its broaching the sentence, "I can't..." And God-forbid never twice in one month. Meanwhile, fervency, outdoing, contributing, and seeking are the verbs marking love of Christians in Romans 12.

I long to raise Judah and Amelie in this Membership. Being "born into it", as they grow to pray, worship, and trust Christ, they will learn there's more to our faith than family devotions. Our family is flanked by other families as one Family. "They stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it..."

The Aloof Leader: How a visionary-good looking-motivated-pragmatic-broken-aloof man really screwed it up

Israel’s first King is a great example of what not to do in ministry, but unfortunately he is an example of what often happens. Through the character of Saul and his relationship with God and Samuel we see many of the marks of a leader confronted and challenged. Saul is qualified, called, pragmatic, visionary and broken.

In the 8th chapter of 1 Samuel we find that Israel demanded “a king to judge us”. Things were bad, there was crooked leadership, it was time for a new era. Put together a search committee! Samuel gives his best, “don’t say I told you so” speech, they insist (Give us Barack, sorry, I meant Barabbas, perhaps a instances of democracy in the bible ought to be explored here).

We meet Saul as a handsome young man from a family of nobility, taller than all the rest. You can almost hear some kind of musical theme, like when we first meet Luke Skywalker at his Aunt and Uncle's moisture farm. When we're introduced to Aragon as the "ranger from the north" or even Simon before he is lays dead in the water. This introduction to Saul appears to be similar to many of the hero stories that makeup summer blockbuster movies. However, the bible is incredibly contemporary here, we have not a hero story, but the anti-hero. Saul is a failed and flawed version of our [capitalist] hopes and ideals. But, that's getting off track, I'll save Old Testament narratives and deconstruction for another blog... After a series of events Saul is appointed King over Israel. He strikes out in three significant ways, each meaningful for pastors today.

First Saul was to wait for Samuel at Gilgal (1 Samuel 13:8ff), Samuel didn’t come at the time he was supposed. Saul was confronted with a dilemma. Though not ideal Saul decided he should go ahead and do it himself. Saul even claims that “he forced himself” to do such a thing. Samuel sternly rebukes Saul and tells him his kingdom will not endure.

Secondly, after some long days and hard fought battles Saul, seeing the exhaustion and lessening of morale, decides to make an oath, to cast a new vision forward. Saul commands that no one in the camp eat until this battle is won. Saul’s crazy oath that he imposes on the people burdens the people’s conscience and drives them to “eat with blood” (14:33). This oath gets lots of underfed men killed. Saul then learns that his son Jonathan had broken this oath, concerned there is some kind of mutiny Saul pronounces a curse over Jonathan’s kingdom, “if I’m going down your coming with me”.

Thirdly, Saul engages in a battle with Amalekites and takes prisoners and war booty.

Samuel had had enough. By the prompting of God, we read that, Samuel came to Saul to let him know he’s not the man for the job. Perhaps in this moment the allusions to contemporary leadership issues come to surface.

(please pardon the cheesy dramatic dialogue)

Samuel: why did you do what was evil?


Saul: I was obedient, I fought the good fight, but the people... I can’t control them You know what, your right. I have sinned. I gave into peer pressure, please forgive me, I need to go and worship. All this time I was going astray and thought I was great. Thank you for being so understanding, please forgive me. let's pray.


Samuel:I don’t think your getting it, your not the man for the job, it’s over.


Saul:(grabbing his clothes) PLEASE, forgive me, I’m so broken. You have helped me to understand my own sin, please forgive me.


Samuel:God has taken this job away from you. It’s over. It’s going to someone who is better than you. Your time is up.


Saul:I have sinned, please don’t embarrass me like this in front of the people and the elders.

What we see in Saul is a guy who is aloof. He’s out of touch with his people, with God and even himself. When he tries to place the blame on his son Jonathan the people speak up, “are you kidding me? this is the only guy whose doing anything right around here and you want to get rid of him?”. What Saul perceives to be a threat and a mutiny could have been the greatest asset to his leadership. We read in chapter 14:52 that any strong or valiant man, Saul attached himself to him. Saul is so insecure and blinded by it, he recruits people to be a part of his staff, not even to build up a big kingdom but to build himself up. He parades as being sincere, even pious at times (i.e. sacrifice at Gilgal) but inside is confused, detached and out of sync with reality.

When Samuel comes to Saul, he doesn’t understand that he can’t feel-bad his way out of it. He apologizes, says he has sinned and demands to be restored. He is clearly out of touch with God and his commandments. This leads me to think that the outrage that the prophets and Jesus proclaim against the leaders of God's people has more to do with us and our confession/tradition keeping pastors than we would like to think.

When Saul made the rash oath, I think it was not too far off a pastor who looks at his staff sees that morale is low and decides that something needs to be done to put the wind back in the sails. He casts a vision to excite and entice people to follow where he’s leading. Unfortunately for Saul, the only thing taking the wind out of people’s sails was him.

Saul was the kind of guy who got stuff done. He didn’t sit around and wait, uncertain, ambivalent, passive. You might call him wild at heart? When he saw that Samuel wasn’t there he decided it was time to do the sacrifice himself. Men in the church today are sometimes honored for a kind of "man vs. wild" approach to issues of ministry. This a caution to many that being pragmatic/self-motivated and getting shit done isn’t always a virtue to praised.

If there is a lesson to be learned, perhaps it is not a list of qualifications for leaders and elders but a disembodiment of these characteristics. A searching of life to shed these qualities, to put them to death, to invite people to point them out when they are seen, to ask the unbearable question "would this ministry be better without me?". The reality that sometimes a man needs to be fired. Sometimes what looks like a leader is really a disaster. What looks like a qualified guy is evil in the sight of the Lord, what looks like a broken man is a man without a job.

Mild at Heart: A not-so-nice-guy Review of Wild at Heart

As I was unpacking and organizing some books, trying to find some I could sell on Amazon, I came across Wild at Heart. Seeing it sparked all sorts of memories of reading this book as a senior in high school with a group of guys like it was some kind of Ouija Board unlocking who I was meant to be. This is a blog/review/response/critique/rant of the book and the subsequent movement it sparked.

John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart (Thomas Nelson, 2001) ran through the heart, but unfortunately not the bowels of evangelical America just a few years ago. A book that as Chuck Swindoll states in the opening endorsement, “should be read by every man and his wife and mother of a boy”. In the preface we find Eldredge asking for “permission” for men to be what “we are – men made in God’s image”. He proposes three aspects of this manliness: battle to fight, an adventure to live and a beauty to rescue. Not unlike most things evangelical publish, the questions they raise are good, the answers, not so much.

Today in the mail came The Devil Reads Derrida: and other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics and the Arts by James K.A. Smith (Eerdmans, 2009). As I flipped through the table of contents one essay grabbed my attention, just as I was getting ready to write this. “Are we really Wild at Heart?”. Some of what I have included in here is inspired and prompted by it, most is my own ramblings.

So, what’s so mild about Wild at Heart? He goes-with-the-flow culturally and has an idea of gender identity that has more in common with Jean-Jacque Rousseau than Jesus of Nazareth.

Eldredge states that men are hard-wired to fight. Smith points that the bible has the history of humanity beginning and ending in peace, in harmony. It was at the fall when sin, strife, conflict and war entered in. What is so counter-cultural about telling guys to find the warrior within? Eldredge’s observations of boys making guns with sticks, his son rappelling out a second story window and box office sales of Braveheart is testimony enough to the fact that men are created for war. Without getting into a discussion about pacifism, its hard to justify that we are created for war when the example of our faith is a man who “though they reviled him he did not speak”. This notion of a warrior runs throughout the book. Claiming to buck against the emasculated 9-5 man. Worse than the emasculated man is the picture of women he paints. The distinctly feminine characteristics he identifies are the desires to be fought for. Positively citing the paintings of women on the side of B-17 bombers in WWII. it gets worse, “she seduces him, uses all she has a woman to arouse him to be a man”. The context of women he has already cited only endorses the objectification and oppression of women all too common to our culture. As Smith points out “Eldredge’s recipe for female fulfillment hardly diverges from the makers of the Barbie Doll or the franchisers of Hooter’s restaurants”. Eldredge got his gender theory from nondescript action movies of the 90’s and sold millions calling it biblical.

His understanding of who we are as human beings finds its origins in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau wrote about what he called the “noble savage”. “Society has entrapped and restrained the true identity of man” so Rousseau would say. Sound familiar? Rousseau saw indigenous tribes not effected by western culture to have a purer life. He longed to be "newborn" like they were. Paul Gauguin, a french painter, moved to Tahiti to live the life of the noble savage. His paintings are indeed an unleashing of his desires and identity. I think these paintings serve as the kind of embodiment of the Wild at Heart life. Eldredge wants men to shed the layers of feminization forced upon them by society unsympathetic to true identity of masculinity. Growing and maturing as a Christian takes a little more creativity than going into the woods to release your id.

One last complaint with Wild at Heart. There is a very narrow type of person that Eldredge is writing for. Not every man can or should own a big blue ox, drive a truck, watch Braveheart and be married to a voluptuous mindless woman (who stands in as a beauty to fight for). His idea of what it means to be a man looks more like a rural American stereotype. Not very countercultural. Where does meekness, love, joy, patience, peace, kindness, gentleness fit in? Wild at Heart cleans up some of the worst stereotypes of our culture, tries and attempts to baptize them. What Eldredge serves up really is, pretty mild.

Review of David Bazan's Curse Your Branches

I don’t know what to make of David Bazan’s new album Curse Your Branches (Barsuk Records 2009). Bazan’s September 1st release is a sober 10 track exploration of one man’s questioning and, as one review put it, break up with God. Bazan seems to say “I don’t believe help my belief”, inverting the famous one-liner of a solider. The opening track, “Hard to Be” might be more aptly titled, “Hard to Believe”. Curse Your Branches is more thoughtful than most post-evangelicals claiming that the “church burned me”. Bazan stares himself straight in the eyes, sharing the most unflattering family portrait of a daughter and wife who “stare me down, watch me fall/ what makes a man realize/that he’s about to lose it all” on “Please, Baby Please”. Bazan lacks the arrogant anger that characterizes Jenny Lewis’ solo albums. This album, though filled with jabs at the notion of original sin and hell, is more a personal memoir of a man who is a bona-fide agnostic. Perhaps that it is harder to be than to believe. Rather than a conversion, Bazan appears to have had a diversion, one can only infer that he is speaking of his previous “pseudo-CCM” career implying on “Lost my Shape” that he wants to see it all burn. The predominate tone throughout the album is melancholic, Bazan sings with a weight that is convincing and more honest than most want to know particularly on “Curse Your Branches, Lost my Shape, and In Stitches”.

This is by far Bazan’s strongest effort to date. Curse Your Braches is incredibly well produced. Bazan’s vocals at their strongest. Percussion and programming rather than a conventional drumset on most tracks take the album to the next level. While guitars are not as full frontal as previous Pedro the Lion albums, he still retain his signature tube-driven-tele sound as well as some other instrumentation like the pedal steel. Poppy at times, the jams are near impossible to not start bobbing your head side to side.

If dissent is the greatest form of patriotism, Bazan has demonstrated that he takes his faith more serious than many of the devout. This album is a masterfully complex consideration on more than can be said here. Not for the casual listener, Curse Your Branches polarizes the listener demanding answers or at least a response to questions and confusion. Bazan seems self-admittedly haunted about the prospect that he might not believe anymore. The closing track “In Stitches” Bazan sings as if you can still smell the Jim Beam on his breath. Drinking away God.



“I need no other memory

of the bits of me I left

when all this lethal drinking

is hopefully to forget about you

... The crew have killed the captain

they still can hear his voice

a shadow on the water

a whisper in the wind

on long walks with my daughter

who is lately full of questions about you”


On the Healthcare Question: A Rejoinder

I always apologize for doing this, but why? So here is another shameless link to another blog post written by a doctor– and not one of those doctors from the fifties who told us smoking is healthy for us (and who is apparently still telling John that snuff is good for him). Even if you won't agree with him, Eric Chevlen offers a good cross-section of the situation and some factors that may not be readily visible.

One word of warning: it's a bit on the long side, so you may want to pull up a rolling stool, don a hospital gown, grab a decanter of good 20 year old rubbing alcohol, and make yourself comfortable.

Confessions of a Health Care Rationer


My favorite line? "People love honesty, but they hate the truth," Ah, how deep our depravity runs!