They (we) are those who love God, who believe (most of the time) in the story of Jesus, but who struggle with doubt. And they listen to those who narrate God’s divine moments almost as if it’s a foreign language. In some ways, that confident play-by-play makes them feel second class. “What’s wrong with me?”

I’m reading Jason Boyett’s O Me of Little Faith: True Confessions of a Spiritual Weakling, and I’m welcoming it as a gift for all those doubters.

After describing his embarrassment as a twelve year old at how little he could lift in gym (just the barbell with no weights!), he writes:

“Now a couple of decades later, I wonder if that weakness transferred from the outside to the inside. Some days, when it comes to faith, I can’t bench press much more than the bar. I’m spiritually scrawny. I don’t measure up to the power-lifters in the weight room.

“The problem is that I can’t describe my own faith that way. It doesn’t feel right. It makes me uncomfortable. When I’ma round people who do talk that way, it’s seventh grade all over again.”

At this point, I pause to remember Randy Harris saying, “I’m not upset at them. I’m just upset that I can’t get in on any of that.” Boyett is trying to be generous, but it’s clear that this whole “I’m plotting God’s course” language feels unattainable and foreign.

“But the God-whispering-in-my-ear thing doesn’t seem to happen for me. If I hear my conscience, I’m pretty sure that’s because I’m familiar enough with the teachings of Jesus that I feel guilty when I’ve failed in some way. If I wake up in the night, I’m more likely to believe it’s because my dog made a noise than to assume God wants me to pray for someone. (And why does God need me to pray for something so badly that he has to wake me up, anyway? Can’t he just wait until morning? Or, you know, answer the prayer without me? Am I a soulless twit to even ask?)

“If my flight gets canceled, perhaps it’s just the result of a backlog of delayed flights thanks to a major storm somewhere. I’m seriously hesitant to assume a master evangelistic plan behind flight delays, but many well-meaning Christians really do place so much value on a single soul that they have no problem believing that God whipped up a thunderstorm over the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, piled stress on airline employees, and inconvenienced hundreds of travelers for the purpose of engineering a conversation of eternal significance. My honest assessment of most ‘divine appointment’ language is that it is self-centered. Especially if your divinely appointed evangelism is at the expense of a bunch of other people who just want to get home in time to tuck in their kids. (Right: I’m a soulless twit.)”

But there’s more in this rant:

“If I feel an optimistic swell of ‘the Spirit’ during a specific song at church, maybe it’s just that music has a powerful pull on my emotion — a well-timed minor 7th tends to have that effect. Or maybe it’s the sound of hundreds of voices singing in unison that gives me chills. Is there any chance that I’ve been conditioned, in the subtle Pavlovian anticipation of what happens at church, to view this feeling as the presence of God — as God ‘showing up’? (Anyway, isn’t God omnipresent? Can an omnipresent deity ever really ‘show up’ anywhere?)”

Ok, enough.

If this quote is making you angry, then the book probably isn’t for you.

But if you’re smiling, nodding, and feeling like someone has recorded your most secret thoughts . . . if you have grown weary with play-by-play narrations of God’s healings and promptings and with language of “God put it on my heart” and “God showed up” . . . well, you might want to check it out.

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

Those were the words of Michael Pollan that struck a chord a few years ago in the New York Times. He suggested then — and carries it further in his wonderful new little book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual — that the diets that rocket to fame and then flame out aren’t helpful. What’s helpful is a disciplined approach of eating that learns how to enjoy food.

In Food Rules, he offers 64 “policies” to help people enjoy their food rather than be owned by it. Here are a few of the suggestions:

SECTION 1: What should I eat? (Eat food.)

Rule 2 – Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (She wouldn’t recognized most of the complicated food products in the grocery story that have chemical additives and are designed to push our evolutionary preference buttons of sweetness, fat, and salt.

Rule 7 – Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

Rule 13 – Eat only foods that will eventually rot.

Rule 21 – It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)

SECTION 2: What kind of food should I eat? (Mostly plants.)

Rule 24 – Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals]. (Note: this is my least favorite of the rules. But I at least appreciate that he isn’t insisting on cutting out meat — just eating less of it. Same thing my doctor says.)

Rule 36 – Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

Rule 43 – Have a glass of wine with dinner.

SECTION 3 – How should I eat? (Not too much.)

Rule 47 – Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

Rule 57 – Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.

Rule 60 – Treat treats as treats.

And, importantly, RULE #64: Break the rules once in a while.

I just finished Tom Long’s provocative Preaching from Memory to Hope, which I’d recommend to every minister. (I know, I know, why am I still reading books on preaching? I can’t help myself!) Much of the book is Long’s material from his 2006 Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale Divinity School.

In the first section of the book (chapters 1 and 2), Long recounts the reemergence of narrative preaching — especially through the provocative messages of people like Fred Craddock, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Frederick Buechner.

But recently, there have been attacks launched against narrative preaching: from the right, from the center, and from the left. Curiously, Long’s example of an attack from the right is from James Thompson of ACU. Though James does raise some potential problems in Preaching like Paul, it hardly represents “an evangelical perspective.”

Nevertheless, Long admits that the critics have a point: not all narrative preaching is gospeled:

“What has been for the last thirty years called narrative preaching has too often devolved into a hodgepodge of sentimental pseudoart, confused rhetorical strategies, and competing theological epistemologies. Preaches have larded sermons with silly stories of their pets and their children, told anecdotes from the playground to illustrate Golgotha, told hundreds of stories about certain kinds of people and shut out others, and crafted shifty trapdoor plots to keep the listeners amused. If the effect of the recent critiques is to burn away this kind of story stubble, then burn, baby, burn.”

The answer, however, is not gimmicks or the wholesale rejection of narration:

“Some megachurch preachers have seemingly noticed, or perhaps intuited, an increased presence of episodic listeners and have, in response, begun fashioning ‘antinarrative’ sermons . . . sermons that are built as a series of stand-alone ‘bullet points.’ (We have perhaps returned in a digital age to the old ‘three-points-and-a-poem’ style, except it’s now ‘eight bullet points and a video clip.’ As one critic quipped, ‘When all you have are bullet-points, your ammunition is pretty quickly spent.’) Hearers are invited to browse these sermons as they would a Web page, skipping here and there as interest would allow. Such preaching is immediately engaging to many people, but it tends to reinforce the fragmented, nonnarrated character of contemporary life, and it works, at a deep level, against the gospel.”

What is needed, he insists, is narrative preaching that is “theologically smarter and more ethically discerning in its practice.” Messages where God is the main character, where we’re not just dispensing little bits of advice about parenting, balancing the budget, or being nice. “The presence of God is not a commodity to be packaged in a sermon. It is an even to which we give testimony.” Long goes on to help imagine what such preaching might look like.

The second section of the book (chapters 3 and 4) is a frontal attack on the neognosticism that Long says is plaguing the church. What is the response of ministers to the growing number of people who have left the center of the Christian message for other versions that are both new and old? He insists, as he responds especially to Marcus Borg, that he’s not on a witch hunt. But he’s convinced that “gnosticism today leads people, as it always has, into a theological, spiritual, and ethical cul-de-sac.” I thought Long was very effective in rebutting the revisionist history of Christianity that has been popularized by Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown that pictures powerful church leaders sneaking away at church councils to pull a big one on the poor commoners of the church.

The last section — and these are “sections” as I discerned them not as they’re laid out in the book — is about preaching and eschatology. To me, this was the strongest piece. I loved the opening paragraph:

“The comedian George Carlin, in one of his marvelous standup routines, expressed astonishment over those opinion polls on television networks like CNN and Fox, where some debatable question is posed and people are invited to phone in and vote their views. ‘Did you ever notice,’ Carlin said, ‘there’s always, like, 18 percent who vote “I don’t know”? It costs a dollar to make those calls,’ Carlin said, ‘ and they’re voting “I don’t know.”‘ Carlin imagined some guy seeing the question of the day on the TV screen and saying to his wife, ‘Honey, give me that phone!’ He shouts ‘I don’t know!’ into the phone and then says proudly to his wife, ‘Sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe you’re not sure about.’ Carlin went on to speculate that these same people probably call 1-900 numbers for $3.00 a minute to say, ‘I’m not in the mood.’”

So what does it mean to preaching eschatologically?

1) It means “to participate in the promise that the fullness of God’s shalom flows into the present, drawing it toward consummation.”

2) It means affirming “that life under the providence of God has a shape, and that this shape is end-stressed; what happens in the middle is finally defined by the end.”

3) It means “helping our people know that the eschatological and apocalyptic language of the Bible is not about predicting the future; it is primarily a way of seeing the present in the light of hope.”

I’m knee deep in Ken Gormley’s new book, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.

Why? Well, certainly Ken Starr’s new appointment as president of Baylor University makes it relevant in this part of Texas. But it’s much more than that. The overlap with my own life is huge: the Church of Christ . . . Arkansas . . . Harding College.

Kenneth Starr’s father was a Church of Christ minister in Texas. His first two years of college were at Harding — a decade before I was a student there.

Here are the passages about Harding:

“. . . [President Clinton] knew that Starr had grown up in the ‘hard-scrabbled’ part of North Texas, where the religious right had first planted its seeds, and then attended Harding College in central ARkansas for two years. Everyone from Arkansas, Clinton said, lifting his eyebrows, knew what ‘Harding’ stood for at that time: ‘Well, it was an ultraconservative Church of Christ school that in the fifties had a president who was a leading, militant anti-Communist. And was rather well known in those super anti-Communist circles around America.’ The Church of Christ believed in ‘the saving grace of baptism’ and was ‘steeped in the New Testament teachings of Jesus.’”

[Correction: We were steeped in the New Testament teachings of Paul -- many of our churches considering the words of Jesus less important.]

“Harding was initially a good fit for Starr, incorporating many of the building blocks that came to define his adult life. His freshman yearbook included a prominent picture of Harding’s president pointing to a pyramid that had written at its foundation, FUNDAMENTAL BELIEF IN GOD. Above that was situated a block that represented THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, and atop that a smaller block, THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE: OUR FREEDOM, with an American flag flying at the pinnacle.”

During the seven years I preached at the College Church in Searcy, Gov. Clinton had close connections with Harding. (He became governor at the age of 32 in 1978, the year I graduated. He lost reelection in 1980, but won again in 1982 and kept the position until 1992. We moved to Abilene in 1991.) I remember one time when he spoke on campus. Jim Bill McInteer also spoke, and his humor cracked up the governor so much he pulled out a pen and paper to take notes. Diane remembers another time when Mrs. Clinton came to a small event for Associated Women For Harding — especially the moments they had alone visiting when Hillary encouraged her as a mother of a mentally-handicapped daughter and gave her a crash course on opportunities for special needs kids in Arkansas.

Kenneth Starr returned to the world of the Church of Christ for the past six years as dean of the Pepperdine Law School and as a member of the Malibu Church of Christ. (I think he and his wife technically “kept their membership” — whatever that means! — in their previous church in Virginia, but they attended the Malibu C of C when in town.)

Gormley is doing a great job of balancing his account of both men. Was Kenneth Starr “Satan” (as Susan McDougal suggested), or just an honest, at-times over-zealous prosecutor? (Those who’ve worked with Mr. Starr at Pepperdine wouldn’t even recognize the man described by the harsher critics — compared to the generous, competent man they’ve known the past six years.) And Bill Clinton? Well you can imagine that the opinions are all over the page!

Very interesting read, though. So much that happened came during our dark years of grief. The events that were in the headlines of the nightly news just floated in the background as we tried to survive.

An interesting note is Starr’s statement that if he ran into President Clinton at an out-of-the-way barbecue join, where they could speak without microphones preserving everything, he would say, “I’m sorry that it all happened” — “not in the form of an apology, but really as a reflection.”

The short version of that “gospel” is this: God is wrath-filled because of our sin yet we are helpless to do anything about it because we can’t keep the Law/law perfectly. But Jesus died as a penal substitute for us, and when we put our faith in Jesus (Arminianism: because of our choice; Calvinism: because of God’s preordained choice), his righteousness is imputed to us.

Those who follow current studies in Paul have met serious responses to this reduction through the works of Richard Hays, N. T. Wright, Ben Witherington, Scot McKnight, Douglas Harink, etc. (See, most recently, Wright’s insightful Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.) But in this new tome, Campbell has thoroughly exposed the weaknesses of “justification theory” — its textual weaknesses, as well as its intrinsic and systematic difficulties.

Here’s a taste of what Campbell was hoping to accomplish:

“It is very important to appreciate that this analysis is consequently not an attack on the gospel but an attack on a version of the gospel, and one that I maintain Paul himself would view as false. It is therefore a thoroughly evangelical discussion in both method and purpose. Moreover, the solution that I am aiming toward is deeply Protestant if not Lutheran. To put things at their simplest, only if my rereading is true is it possible to affirm coherently Paul’s slogan that ‘God justifies the ungodly,’ since he means by this that God delivers the wicked from their enslavement to Sin, when they cannot deliver themselves, and thereby demonstrates his unconditional grace and love. . . . [Paul's] description of deliverance and cleansing ‘in Christ,’ through the work of the Spirit, at the behest of the Father, the entire process being symbolized by baptism, is the good news. It requires no supplementation by other systems.”

Here’s what Michael Gorman, author of some of my favorite recent works on Paul, has written about Deliverance:

“I blurbed Douglas’s book and was possibly the most positive of the five who did so:

This means, more bluntly, that in my estimation Douglas is both profoundly right (’his overall thesis is persuasive’) and simultaneously off the mark (’One may disagree with parts of the analysis, or take a somewhat different route to the same destination’). Fortunately, he is terribly right where it really matters: in his perceptive characterization of the liberative and participatory character of justification in Paul. Unfortunately, the relatively narrow topic of this panel’s review—the book’s treatment of Romans 1-3—is where Douglas is, I think, off the mark.”

I loved what McKnight wrote about it: “It would be a fantastic vacation read or summer read for pastors; it is a must for professors and I believe should be read by seminary students as a primary text on Paul — whether one agrees with it or not.” If I were not a reader of McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog, I’d think that he needs to better understand what vacation reading is!

While I am still rethinking his proposal about Romans 1-3 (and am not convinced), this is a valuable and welcome contribution to a discussion that sits right at the center of the church’s mission. And I’m quite convinced that Campbell’s suggestion that “justification theory” is a computer virus that, “having infiltrated a system, overwrites some of its key commands with a foreign code from another programmer and then goes on to execute a series of embarrassing and even destructive actions, often losing original material in the process.”

If the book could help steer us away from having our thoughts dominated primarily by God as Judge and by retributive justice, that would be a nice start.

More coming as I continue to blog about justification, “faith of Christ,” and the book of Galatians.

Which of the following, on average, would you guess is the second highest paid position in football (behind the QB)?

a) Wide receiver
b) Left tackle
c) Running back
d) Middle linebacker

The answer is (b): the second highest paid position in the NFL is the left tackle. Why?

1. Because of Bill Walsh. You could say, more generally, the West Coast Offense. But there were two versions of the West Coast Offense: one went deep and the other (Walsh’s version) went wide. Spread out the field. Send four or five receivers out for shorter passes, raising your completion percentage and extending the run after the catch. Sending more people out, however, left the quarterback more vulnerable.

2. Because of rule changes in 1978. No longer could a cornerback “bump-and-run” with a receiver all the way down the field. Now he’s limited to five yards. And offensive linemen, who formerly were forced to block looking like clothes hangers, were suddenly allowed to use their hands.

3. Because of Lawrence Taylor. If you still wince when you hear the name “Joe Theismann,” then you’re probably a football fan. Taylor was a QB-destroying machine. The new profile for the blind side pass rusher became that athlete who is large, fast, and violent. In other words, someone not easily blocked by a running back.

Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game tells the story of why the left tackle, the person who guards the blind side of the quarterback from the Lawrence Taylors of the world, has become such a valuable position.

The new profile for an NFL left tackle is what Lewis says the scouts call “a freak of nature.” He’s tall (6’4″+), big (320+), quick, and has a wide butt, long arms and big hands. Think Orlando Pace or Jonathan Ogden.

Like Michael Oher, now a left tackle for Ole Miss. Much of this excellent book tells his story.

It’s the story of Memphis — a city with an invisible Berlin Wall between white and black. Lewis talks about the Christian academies that sprang up quickly with forced integration so wealthy white children wouldn’t have to go to school with black children. He talks about the pilgrimage east — as far away from the problems of West Memphis as possible.

But this story is specifically told through one young man: Michael Oher. He was a child who seemed to have no hope.

He was one of ten children of a crack cocaine-addicted mother. At times they had no shelter. When asked what he remembers about his first years of life, Michael says: “Going for days having to drink water to get full. Going to other people’s houses and asking for something to eat. Sleeping outside. The mosquitoes.”

For a few years they lived in Hurt Village — a community of about 1000 with no — count them, ZERO — two-parent families. Seventy-five percent of the adults there had some mental illness. Drug lords waited with crack in hand at the first of the month when welfare checks arrived in the mail.

By the time he was 15, Michael Oher hadn’t been to school much. He’d been tested, and his IQ came out to be 80.

But all that changed. I’ll leave the details for you to enjoy the book. But the short story is this: he fell victim to the love and nurture of one wealthy, white family in East Memphis. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy (a former basketball player and a former cheerleader at Ole Miss) welcomed him into their family. He suddenly had a family, including a sister his age and a younger brother. He had a school to attend — Briarcrest Christian School. He had clothes and food. His IQ rose from 80 to 110.

Whether you’re a football fan or not, you’ll love the chapters on the recruiting of Michael Oher. Every college coach in the country began salivating when he saw tapes of Oher treating large opponents as if they weren’t there. In one game Briarcrest played, every offensive play consisted of giving the ball to the running back and telling him to stay behind Oher’s butt until he heard a whistle. They destroyed their opponent on that one play.

This is a hard book because of the despair. You realize that most people in the Hurt Villages of our inner cities don’t have a Tuohy family to help them.

But it’s also an inspiring read because this one family — this one white, wealthy, Evangelical family — brought a monstrous kid into their lives before anyone knew he had athletic super-talent. He was lost, and Leigh Anne Tuohy was going to care for him.

I don’t turn to my Frederick Buechner books often any more. But I treasure how they accompanied me and guided me through a challenging decade of my life — from about 1985 – 1995. They sit on my shelf as trusted friends — friends who pointed me again and again to mystery, to faith, to scandalous grace . . . to God.

Here’s a taste:

“Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves . . . Deep within history, as it gets itself written down in history books and newspapers, in the letters we write and in the diaries we keep, is sacred history, is God’s purpose working itself out in the apparent purposelessness of human history and of our separate histories, in the history, in short, of the saving and losing of souls, including our own. A child is born. A friend is lost or found. Out of nowhere comes a sense of peace or foreboding. We are awakened by a dream. Out of the shadowy street comes a cry for help. We must learn to listen to the cock-crows and hammering and tick-tock of our lives for the holy and elusive word that is spoken to us out of their depths.”

I loved his spiritual biographies: The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, and Telling Secrets. As I read through them, I realized that his assumption was correct: “that the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.” His honesty taught me to look for the joy, the sorrow, the God-ness of my life (that is now reflected in my journals through those years). I learned this: “There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly.”

I appreciated the wisdom of Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC and Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized. (They’re full of these pithy insights: “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”)

Then there’s the gift to every single preacher: Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. “The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn’t see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn’t see it, and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims also to see as the invisible presence of God in the world? Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. Let the preacher preach the Gospel of their preposterous meeting as the high, unbidden, hilarious thing it is.”

There are wonderful sermons — and some exquisite ones — among the collections in The Magnificent Defeat, The Hungering Dark, and A Room Called Remember. Add to this the profound insights of The Longing for Home: Reflections at Midlife and The Son of Laughter.

Admittedly, I tried his fiction and it didn’t work for me. But that probably says more about me than about Bebb/Buechner.

Thanks, Frederick Buechner, for opening my eyes, for teaching me this:

“Strange things happen. Again and again Christ is present not where, as priests, you would be apt to look for him but precisely where you wouldn’t have thought to look for him in a thousand years. The great preacher, the sunset, the Mozart Requiem can leave you cold, but the child in the doorway, the rain on the roof, the half-remembered dream, can speak of him and for him with an eloquence that turns your knees to water.”

THE MAGIC EYES – A Little Fable

In the village of Faken in innermost Friesland there lived a long thin baker named Fouke, a righteous man, with a long thin chin and a long thin nose. Fouke was so upright that he seemed to spray righteousness from his thin lips over everyone who came near him; so the people of Faken preferred to stay away.

Fouke’s wife, Hilda, was short and round, her arms were round, her bosom was round, her rump was round. Hilda did not keep people at bay with righteousness; her soft roundness seemed to invite them instead to come close to her in order to share the warm cheer of her open heart. Hilda respected her righteous husband, and loved him too, as much as he allowed her; but her heart ached for something more from him than his worthy righteousness.

And there, in the bed of her need, lay the seed of sadness.

One morning, having worked since dawn to knead his dough for the ovens, Fouke came home and found a stranger in his bedroom lying on Hilda’s round bosom.

Hilda’s adultery soon became the talk of the tavern and the scandal of the Faken congregation. Everyone assumed that Fouke would cast Hilda out of his house, so righteous was he. But he surprised everyone by keeping Hilda as his wife, saying he forgave her as the Good Book said he should.

In his heart of hearts, however, Fouke could not forgive Hilda for bringing shame to his name. Whenever he thought about her, his feelings toward her were angry and hard; he despised her as if she were a common whore. When it came right down to it, he hated her for betraying him after he had been so good and so faithful a husband to her.

He only pretended to forgive Hilda so that he could punish her with his righteous mercy.

But Fouke’s fakery did not sit well in heaven.

So each time that Fouke would feel his secret hated toward Hilda, an angel came to him and dropped a small pebble, hardly the size of a shirt button, into Fouke’s heart. Each time a pebble dropped, Fouke would feel a stab of pain like the pain he felt the moment he came on Hilda feeding her hungry heart from a stranger’s larder.

Thus he hated her the more; his hate brought him pain and his pain made him hate.

The pebbles multiplied. And Fouke’s heart grew very heavy with the weight of them, so heavy that the top half of his body bent forward so far that he had to strain his neck upward in order to see straight ahead. Weary with hurt, Fouke began to wish he were dead.

The angel who dropped the pebbles into his heart came to Fouke one night and told him how he could be healed of his hurt.

There was one remedy, he said, only one, for the hurt of a wounded heart. Fouke would need the miracle of the magic eyes. He would need eyes that could look back to the beginning of his hurt and see his Hilda, not as a wife who betrayed him, but as a weak woman who needed him. Only a new way of looking at things through the magic eyes could heal the hurt flowing from the wounds of yesterday.

Fouke protested. “Nothing can change the past,” he said. “Hilda is guilty, a fact that not even an angel can change.”

“Yes, poor hurting man, you are right,” the angel said. “You cannot change the past, you can only heal the hurt that comes to you from the past. And you can heal it only with the vision of the magic eyes.”

“And how can I get your magic eyes?” pouted Fouke.

“Only ask, desiring as you ask, and they will be given you. And each time you see Hilda through your new eyes, one pebble will be lifted from your aching heart.”

Fouke could not ask at once, for he had grown to love his hatred. But the pain of his heart finally drove him to want and to ask for the magic eyes that the angel had promised. So he asked. And the angel gave.

Soon Hilda began to change in front of Fouke’s eyes, wonderfully and mysteriously. He began to see her as a needy woman who loved him instead of a wicked woman who betrayed him.

The angel kept his promise; he lifted the pebbles from Fouke’s heart, one by one, though it took a long time to take them all away. Fouke gradually felt his heart grow lighter; he began to walk straight again, and somehow his nose and his chin seemed less thin and sharp than before. He invited Hilda to come into his heart again, and she came, and together they began again a journey into their second season of humble joy.

First, I loved Mark Hamilton’s On the Mountain With God:Freedom and Community in Exodus. This is a great book that would be perfect either for personal enrichment or for a study group. It reminded me of a couple books that James Thompson wrote several years ago: one on 2 Corinthians and one on Hebrews. Like those books, Hamilton’s work is the fruit of a serious scholar’s labor — but presented in a way that non-scholars will be blessed. That’s a great gift to the church!

I especially liked the playful way Mark conducted “dialogues” between the Reader and Author. It’s in these sections that some of the most serious questions — like why God allowed slavery! — are addressed.

- – - -

The other new book is by Josh Graves, the new minister for the Otter Creek Church in Nashville. It’s a solid, insightful, inspiring first work, entitled The Feast: How to Serve Jesus in a Famished World. It’ll challenge you to rethink scripture, mission, and basic discipleship. Here is a short clip about it:

You can find it at Christian Family Stores — or (if you’re like me and get queazy in most Christian bookstores) you can ask for it at your favorite bookstore.

Kevin Roose, author of The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, helped me understand. Roose decided to do a “domestic study abroad,” leaving Brown University to attend Liberty University, the bastion of Jerry Falwell’s brand of Evangelicalism.

To do that he went undercover — taking on the identity of a born-again Christian. He went to prayer meetings, joined a spring break campaign (more on that below) — even sang in the Liberty Baptist Church choir.

When he went, about his only impression of the school was what he knew about Falwell, whom he dubbed “the arch-conservative televangelist with the least effective brain-to-mouth filter in the English speaking world.” He’d been struck by the irony of how Falwell had reprimanded Martin Luther King in 1965 for getting involved in politics. “Preachers are not called to be politicians but soul-winners,” Falwell had insisted.

Through the semester, his stereotypes about his fellow students fell apart. He came to realize that they all shared secret doubts about the take-no-prisoners form of faith. They were kind. They really did care about one another and about the world (for the most part anyway; he was stunned by the amount of overt homophobia). Throughout the book, he goes out of his way (probably to the point of surprising and offending some of his old friends) to talk about the good things he found on the campus.

Classes posed a challenge. So many of them stereotyped others (outside of that brand of Evangelicalism) as unfulfilled, relativistic, flimsy, immoral, unloving, and hedonistic. They constantly attacked evolution, presenting instead a creationist biology (young earth and all!).

In chapel and at church, he even grew to appreciate aspects of the larger-than-life Falwell. He would just groan and smile at his hacky political jokes. (“Chelsea Clinton was interviewing a marine coming back from Iraq, and she asked him what he was most afraid of. He replied, ‘Osama, Obama, and your mama.’”) Through the campus newspaper, he even conducted the last interview with Dr. Falwell before his sudden death.

Here’s a taste of his writing on a number of subjects:

ON SPRING BREAK CAMPAIGNS TO THE BEACH:

“Cold turkey evangelism provides the shortest, most noncommittal conversion offer of any Western religion — which, I suspect, is part of the appeal.”

“Why not go somewhere where Jesus would be an easier sell? Like Islamabad? Or a Christopher Hutchens dinner party?”

ON THE HOMOPHOBIA:

“This semester, I’ve developed a numbness to homophobia. I don’t like it, but it’s unavoidable when you’re in a climate like this, where homosexuality is talked about at near-Tourettic frequency. Every day, I’ve heard someone worrying about gay people, praying for gay people, talking about the scientific evidence against the alleged ‘gay gene.’ I’ve heard ten times as many conversations about homosexuality at Liberty than I ever heard any place where gay people existed in the open.”

ON CHURCH:

“The stage lights, the one hundred-decibel praise songs, the bright purple choir robes,the tempestuous bellowing of Dr. Falwell — it’s an hour-long assault on the senses. And all you have to do is sit back in your plush, reclining seat, latte and cranberry scone in hand, and take it all in. It’s Church Lite — entertaining but unsubstantial . . . .”

“I used to define church as a series of events — the sermon, the worship music, the collection, the altar call. Now, when I think of church, I think of George, the elderly man in the choir who greets me with a ‘hello there, Mister Kevin’ every week. I think of Mac, the sixty-five-year-old tenor who always updates me on his son and daughter — an engineer in Gary, Indiana, and a sales representative in Charlottesville. On Wednesday nights, I think of Campus Church as the guys I sit with — Jersey Joey, Paul, Eric, Zipper — instead of the laser light shows or the fog machines.”

ON POLITICS AT LU:

“It’s hard to imagine a more receptive audience for this speech [by Sean Hannity] than the LU student body. After a few sincere remarks about the Virginia Tech tragedy, Hannity — who looks a lot more like Fred Flintstone than I remembered — cracks a few Ted Kennedy jokes, then veers into a lengthy assault on liberalism paired with a drooling paean to Ronald Reagan. It’s not a particularly inspired speech, but with this crowd, Hannity could draw an encore by reciting his grocery list. When he mentions FOX News, everyone cheers. John Kerry, everyone boos. (‘See why I love Liberty?’ he says.)

- – - -

This is a seriously good read by someone who’s just 21. It helped me a lot to imagine what my Bible class (and our church assemblies) must seem like from “the outside in.”

For those who are super-serious about ALL THINGS CHURCH, trust me: this isn’t for you. But for those who can smile at our own foibles, Philip Gulley’s stories about the Harmony Friends meeting will be quite enjoyable.

The church is Quaker, but you’ll swear he’s been sitting in on your own congregation. “The trouble with belong to a religion founded on rebellion is that the spirit of rebellion is never exhausted” — true about Quakers and Restorationists!

Sam Gardner, the novel’s pastor and narrator, wound up back in his hometown of Harmony, Indiana (named for the Bible passage that says to “live in harmony with one another”) after leaving another church for health reasons: “I was sick of them and they were sick of me.” He began praying for a new job when the pastor of harmony Friends died suddenly. With a family history of heart problems, he’d begun jogging. And that’s when he was hit by a truck right before Easter. “For a minister, that was pretty inconsiderate of him to go and get killed during Lent,” according to the president of the Friendly Women’s Circle.

Sam loves Harmony despite its imperfections. His philosophy is a good one: “There’s danger in thinking joy is a matter of location. If we can’t find joy where we are, we probably won’t find it anywhere.”

There are unforgettable characters: Dale Hinshaw, who knows “just enough Scripture to be annoying but not enough to be transformed” and is a constant pain; Bob Miles, Sr., who’s begun praying loudly about the growing liberalism of the church; Billy Bundle, the World’s Shortest Evangelist, who comes for the June revival.

The most endearing person I met in Harmony was Miriam Hodge. Here’s a description of what happened when her influence was felt by the eldership:

“We nearly ruined Miriam Hodge. We appointed her to serve as the head elder after Dale Hinshaw nominated himself to the committee. We put her in charge to offset the ‘Dale Hinshaw Effect.’ The Dale Hinshaw Effect is simply this: if there is a bad idea to be thought, Dale will think it.

“Paint they can talk about. It’s personal confession that throws them for a loop.”

My favorite chapter in the book — one that strikes home like chapter-after-chapter in Jeff Berryman’s Leaving Ruin — is about Miriam and her husband, Ellis. They walk together through the fears of Miriam’s breast cancer. At the end, Sam says:

“To look at Miriam and Ellis, you wouldn’t think there was anything special about them. But love has a way of making ordinary people seem remarkable, and in that sense, Miriam and Ellis are the most fascinating people I know.”

It’s the only novel in the series I’ve read. Others will have to tell us in the comments section about the rest.

Fast forward to a hut in Africa. After accepting a position as president of World Vision kicking-and-screaming, he wound up in this hut. There he met a thirteen-year-old boy who was raising his younger siblings because both their parents had died of AIDS. Turns out that was quite common in that village. AIDS had wiped out much of a generation.

Then Stearns realized: very few Christians even cared about this tragedy. A few rock stars and Hollywood actors seemed to care — enough to even go over and hold some of these children and to raise money on their behalf — but the church, especially the church in America, didn’t seem too upset.

Life was too good. These problems were too far away.

This is what Stearns calls The Hole in Our Gospel.

There is a “hole” in our gospel because too often we have dumbed down the good news to mean little more than personal salvation and cool worship services. We have failed to grasp the impulses of the message that launch us into a desperate world. To follow Jesus is to offer ourselves for God’s purposes in this world.

Here are a few select quotes from this book I highly recommend.

“On Sunday morning, safe in our church pews and surrounded by friends, it can be all too easy to leave the world’s violence, suffering, and turmoil outside — out of sight, out of mind.”

“Those words from the Lord’s Prayer, ‘your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’ were and are a clarion call to Jesus’ followers not just to proclaim the good news but to be the good news, here and now (Matt. 6:10). This gospel — the whole gospel — means much more than the personal salvation of individuals. it means a societal revolution.”

You’re going to want to get your hands on a copy of Randy Harris’s new book, “GOD WORK: Confessions of a Standup Theologian.” It’s a collection of some of the material Randy has presented all across the country. One of the delights of reading it is that you feel like you’re listening to Randy. You’ll smile as you read it, hearing his voice:

“My friend Augustine died in 430 (most of my friends have been dead for several hundred years; I’ve found that makes the friendship much easier).”

“Here’s the theme of the book of Revelation: God’s team wins. Pick a team. Don’t be stupid.”

“My friends refer to me as the Dead Sea of e-mail. I receive and I receive but I do not give.”

It’s worth the price of the book for the chapter called “The Card Game of Life,” which is an insightful look at the question, How is God working in the world? In a later chapter he writes:

“I’m not a Calvinist. I do not think that everything happens in the world directly because God has caused it or desired it. I’m tempted to suggest that that makes God a monster. Nor am I a deist. I’m not one of those who think God wound up the world and hasn’t done much of anything since the closing of the last book of the Bible. What I am instead is a panentheist, which is one who believes that in all things God is working — in death as well as life, in sickness as well as health, in disaster as well as rescue.”

It’s also worth the price just for his prophetic words in the final chapter, “America or Christianity?”

“Loyalty to country, loyalty to family, loyalty to friends — all of those strike me as commendable things. The problem is when patriotism becomes nationalism. Now this is a different matter. Nationalism is always evil because it is idolatry. It is the point where we confuse the nation with God, where our primary loyalties become aimed at the nation instead of God. This is always bad news. And nationalism is often lurking just under the surface of much of what we do.”

He follows with a seven-question “test” to see whether one is following the values of the kingdom of the values of America. I can’t say I passed with flying colors, unfortunately.

I was asked to write something for the back cover. I’m putting it here as a tribute to my friend:

I first heard Randy Harris speak in 1982 when we were graduate students in Memphis. I’d known him for five years (in both undergraduate and graduate schools), and, frankly, I was surprised he was speaking in chapel. He was the library guy — likely the brightest guy around — but not someone you expected to get in front of an audience to speak.

Randy is one of the few people about whom I can say, paraphrasing Paul, “Follow his example, as he follows the example of Christ.”

I have my library (the one at work — not counting books at home) down to about 1750. I know I need to keep trimming, but it’s painful. These books have been my tools, my companions, my guides.

Many, of course, will stay with me until I’m six feet under. I’m guessing that about 1500 will survive the move to my new office this summer.

Some of them probably need to go. I haven’t used them in years. I have old commentaries that aren’t helpful — long since “replaced” by better ones (not better because they’re newer). I have old homiletics books that I’ll never refer to; I have some old books that are just plain silly.

But even the latter ones carry meaning in my life. They mark a time in my journey. I just picked up one that is completely devoid of humility — a book that claimed through syllogism to solve every possible question about divorce and remarriage. The tone is clear: anyone who disagrees is either an idiot or doesn’t care about obedience to God. The book is absolutely worthless to me. And yet . . . even it marks a time in my life — a time when I was influenced by people who were confident that WE are right because WE believe in the Bible (unlike others) and because WE have removed the hokey-pokey emotions and have gone with the science of proper interpretation and reasoning

Most of the books, though, are there because they have taught me — because they have sparked thoughts or stretched me. Some have been read again and again.

It would help make space in my new office if I’d quit ordering so many books.

Now . . . I wonder when my Amazon box will arrive?

“Because of its location — close to the Roman frontier, but just far enough beyond it to avoid heavy-handed interference — Mesopotamia or Iraq retained a powerful Christian culture at least through the thirteenth century.”

“Iraq was through the late Middle Ages at least as much a cultural spiritual heartland of Christianity as was France or Germany, or indeed Ireland.”

When we look at our maps of early Christianity, they tend to go from Jerusalem to the West. For in our imaginations, Christianity is basically about the Middle East and Europe.

But that presumption is completely wrong, as Philip Jenkins (author of the earlier The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity) has shown unequivocally in The Lost History of Christianity.

This book is worth getting and digesting. I plan to whet your appetite with a few posts in the coming days.

Though my study of Asian and African Christianity is deficient, I was exposed to it through a class I audited with Jeff Childers, a world-class Syriac scholar and early church historian, a few years ago on evangelism in the early centuries. Since that class, I’ve joked with Jeff about how we all know that the heart of Christianity is Edessa.

As it turns out, that’s not far off. There was a vibrancy in the churches of Asia and Africa that has often been overlooked — a vibrancy that lasted well into what we ignorantly call “the Dark Ages.”

As Jenkins points out, Semitic Christianity hardly died in the first few centuries, as many imagine; rather it flourished for over a thousand years. “The Syriac churches represent the ultimate lost Christianity.”

Often the minority in the East (Asia Minor, Iraq, Iran, India, China), these Christians engaged in meaningful dialogue with Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism — as well as with Judaism. “These believers were well accustomed to a modern idea of Christianity as a minority faith operating far from centers of power, usually suffering official discrimination, and facing the recurrent danger of persecution.”

“[The 8th/9th century Christian leader] Timothy lived in a universe that was culturally and spiritually Christian but politically Muslim, and he coped quite comfortably with that situation. As faithful subjects, the patriarch and his clergy prayed for the caliph and his family. . . . Eastern Christians dominated the cultural and intellectual life of what was only slowly becoming the ‘Muslim world,’ and that cultural strength starkly challenges standard assumptions about the relationship between the two faiths. It is common knowledge that medieval Arab societies were far ahead of those of Europe in terms of science, philosophy, and medicine, and that Europeans derived much of their scholarship from the Arab world; yet in the early centuries, this cultural achievement was usually Christian and Jewish rather than Muslim. It was Christians . . . who preserved and translated the cultural inheritance of the ancient world — the science, philosophy, and medicine — and who transmitted it to centers like Baghdad and Damascus.”

Tragically, somewhere in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Christianity suffered a severe blow in Asia and Africa. Between 1200 and 1500 the number of Asian Christians fell from 21 million to 3.4 million. This “brutal purge of Christianity” by oppressive politics left Europe as the only base of expansion for Christianity.

Christianity was “severed from its original context,” he notes. It would be as if Muslims were wiped out of Arabia and the Middle East and forced to relocate in SE Asia, with scriptures translated into Malay and Bengali.

What changed? A sort of jihad mentality among Muslims. Jenkins works hard to show that this isn’t necessarily in the DNA of Islam (noting the generous nature of Muslim rule for many centuries) and that this isn’t unique to Islam (pointing out similar military theologies among Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists).

The fourteenth century was filled with “a crescendo of violence and discrimination.”

“Around the world, in fact, the years around 1300 produced an appalling trend toward religious and ethnic intolerance, a movement that must be explained in terms of global factors, rather than merely local. The aftereffects of the Mongol invasions certainly played their part, by terrifying Muslims and others with the prospect of a direct threat to their social and religious power. Climatic factors were also critical, as the world entered a period of rapid cooling, precipitating bad harvests and shrinking trade routes: a frightened and impoverished world looks for scapegoats. For whatever reasons, Muslim regimes and mobs now delivered near-fatal blows to weakened Christian churches. Even today, jihadi extremists look back to the hard-line Muslim scholars of this very era as their role models in challenging the infidel world.”

An interesting piece of this history is that while Christianity was killed off in many areas (except for the powerful force of “Crypto-Christianity” — covert and clandestine believers!), the faith continued to thrive in the Coptic churches of Egypt. Why there and not in other places?

“The key difference making for survival is rather how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far the religion became part of the air that ordinary people breathed. The Egyptian church succeeded wonderfully in this regard, while the Africans failed to make much impact beyond the towns. While the Egyptians put the Christian faith in the language of the ordinary people, from city dwellers through peasants, the Africans concentrated only on certain categories, certain races. Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial.”

More later . . . .