Gothic and sturdy it sits
Perched on a manicured mound
Strangely massive, given how small
Built by believers now long gone
Next door, the sprawling university hums along
Chemists create their cultures
Thespians play with the past
Engineers rewire the world
Meanwhile, the modest chapel overlooks it all
An older, wiser sister judging sibling frenzy
Her towered bell gently pervades next door
Each clang suggesting ancient tensions
How shall we mark the time?
chronos or chairos?
Better is open rebuke than hidden love. – Proverbs 27:5
Hidden love is surely akin to fat-free chocolate ice cream or voluntary taxes.
What's the point?
Love is, by Biblical definition, not a static feeling of veiled emotion but an active, outward engagement of the will. How Jesus felt about God's people is beside the point; the good news is that he up and travelled to the cross. So by "hidden love" Proverbs is not thinking here of the clandestine romantic lover, who holds his affection in secret for fear of rejection. (For more on that kind of love, see Song of Songs in the Old Testament. Wow—who knew that kind of stuff was in the Bible?!) No, the context for 27:5 is good old-fashioned, right as rain, everyday friendship—a kind of love to which we are all called in this Christian life (1 John 3:18).
Aside: Let us note, however, that friendship and romance do have something to do with one another: Lovers better be friends as well, else when all that heat chills for a time (and it will, quite naturally), without friendship they'll have nothing but old embers to keep them warm in the cold. Friends, however, see it through. Friendship undergirds most every other kind of relationship, including passion.
So Proverbs 27:5 says, in effect: It's better to have a friend who offers you constructive criticism in the open than a friend who never demonstrates any love in the first place. Words of correction (what the Bible calls "rebuke") must always be measured against history. If a strange bloke fresh off the street catches me after church and says "that was a bad sermon," I'm inclined to send him packing, opinions and all. But if my colleague and mentor Bill Youmans—a friend of 15 years—offers the same conclusion, I'll swallow my pride, listen closely, and take it to heart. The difference? Trust born of history. I know Bill loves me, so I'll heed his rebuke because his love has never been hidden over the years.
The reality is that there will likely come a day when your relationship will call for hard words of truth, justice, or concern. Such a correction will go down much easier if your friend (companion, coworker, cousin … whomever) has a history with you—an experience of your love. (When in Luke 13:34-35 Jesus dismisses the people of Jerusalem for their rejection of his ways, it is clear to the reader that his rebuke is born out of love, not hate. We can feel the pathos of "they should have known better." He's loved them all along.)
Bottom line: Don't hold back your love with those you love, either your words or your actions. Let it flow. Look for ways to bless your spouse, your children, your friends, with signs and seals of what they mean to you. Be brave and express and/or demonstrate it in whatever ways come naturally to you. I've never heard of a person who at the end of his life had regrets because he loved too much or expressed it too often. Make sure those you love know where they stand with you.
Come on out of your hiding, Christian, because waiting for the other to make the first move might just make it too late. Christ's love for you is all you need to love another in this way (1 John 4:19).
A pathetic looking bee
is trapped in my screen
His perpetual buzzing
bounce reveals a gene
All he longs is for escape
Freedom beyond a catch
Rest Then pound away
some more Never quits
Out of easy compassion I
spin a crank of salvation
Great Screen surrenders
There is an Exodus road
Still the pounding buzz
continues Not yet loose
Though a way now exists
the captive sees only bars
He presses ahead in vain
until rest reveals newness
There is open sky below
It had been so for a time
The happening matters little
until the ear hears the news
So many moods
And they change
By the hour, week
One day, all despair
Hope anew the next
Third, all is ordinary
Thank God there is a
God who if he bends
Bends only in grace
A modest bluebird perched on a standard stick
Engaged in a routine maintenance of feathers
Expert scratches interrupted by knowing looks
Off he goes to another post
In a timing obvious only to him
The mind of one who has understanding seeks knowledge, but the mouths of fools feed on folly. — Proverbs 15:14
I have a dear ministerial colleague who years ago ambled home on his collegiate spring break, eager to tell his family all the fascinating facts he was learning about the scriptures while earning his liberal arts degree. Visibly threatened by his progeny's new-fangled education, his grandfather protested loudly: "I don't need to know all that stuff. If the King James Bible was good enough for Paul, it's good enough for me!" Nice try, gramps.
I'm always just a little sadder when someone pits Christian faith against education and learning. To be clear, no one is suggesting that salvation can be found in knowledge alone (We're not Gnostics.); neither is anyone one endorsing a kind of "education" that simply goes around debunking faith for the sheer fun on of it. (We're not cynics.) But the attitude that all learning is a de facto threat to our Christ-faith—that's a position born mostly of fear, not of faith.
This summer, we're preaching our way through the Old Testament book of Proverbs. Of the many threads of wisdom running through this inspired collection of sayings, one of them is this: The wise believer is eager to learn, "to seek knowledge," to grow not only in heart but also in mind. Foolish persons are satisfied with "folly," with whatever pedestrian madness is in vogue on this day or that. But the wise one is hungry to learn, to know more, to scratch the surface of things, and to dig a little deeper. And note that this hunger is not in spite of faith, it is because of faith: If God has made the world, then there is an order and purpose to things, and the wise person searches to know and understand that blessed order better. The president of my Christian liberal arts college used to say in chapel that we should use our minds to inquire deeply into all things, precisely because we are Christians. We should strive to learn in the confidence that "there was no rock we could turn over from which something would surface and devour God."
An intelligent mind acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge. — Proverbs 18:15
One of the features I most enjoy about the gospels' accounts of Jesus' ministry is how Jesus seems always one step ahead of his disciples. He is frequently leading them somewhere (Mark 9:2), usually leaving them with more questions than answers (Matthew 13:13), and often tuned in to realities they have not yet perceived (John 20:14). While Jesus is much more than a teacher (Messiah, Lord, Beloved of God, etc.) he is no less than a teacher, and a consummate one at that. He is always out ahead of his disciples, teaching them faith, hope, and love in the Father. The gospels make it clear that one cannot be a follower of Jesus and stay in the same place.
Indeed, long before disciple took on extra Christian weight, it simply meant student, or one who receives instruction from another. Thus to follow Jesus throughout our lives is to not only believe in him as Lord but also to learn from him as teacher—to grow in understanding, maturity, and insight. Although sin is surely a sign we are off of the Jesus-path, so perhaps is boredom. Christ not only saves our soul, he also renews our minds (Romans 12:2). One who follows him to the Father is promised "speech and knowledge of every kind" (1 Corinthians 1:4-7).
A scoffer seeks wisdom in vain, but knowledge is easy for one who understands. — Proverbs 14:6
A few weeks ago, one of our senior church members bounced into my study and, with the giddiness of schoolgirl, announced that she had "just finished the most marvelous book!" You could hear in her telling her joy concerning all the new insights and fresh thoughts that this book had disclosed to her. I was deeply moved: It was clear that one is never too old (or young!) to keep asking and learning, seeking and finding. Although our Christ-faith should satisfy our deepest hungers for salvation, it should also make us hungrier to learn, to see, to know. Saying "yes" to Christ is only the glorious beginning to a lifetime of new insights about the ways of God's world, the ways of God's people, and the ways of God.
Presbyterians, I urge you: keep reading, keep wondering, keep learning for as long as you live. Don't have much time? Read and ponder and learn when you can, where you can. Small bites are better than no bites at all. Devour the scriptures (Revelation 10:9) and hold them in your mind as you ingest others bits of wisdom along the way. Keep looking to learn all you can, until at last in a time still to come, what we see now only dimly will be made clear as we see face-to-face (1 Corinthians 13:12). The old hymn O Word of God Incarnate prays for us all:
O make Your church, dear Savior,
A lamp of purest gold
To bear before the nations
Your true light, as of old;
O teach Your wandering pilgrims
By this our path to trace,
Till, clouds and storms thus ended,
We see You face to face.
Matthew 17 tells the extraordinary story of a father who brings his possessed son to Jesus in order that he might be healed. As he hands Jesus his boy, he also hands him this report: "I brought him to your disciples, but they could not cure him." Jesus mutters something about the faithlessness of his followers and then—mercifully!—heals the boy in a flash. What interests me just now in this tale is what happens a little later: "The disciples came to Jesus privately and said, Why could we not cast it out?" (v. 19)
Private why questions—along with the disciples, most of us have them. There exist for many of us persistent questions about ourselves, our lot in life, or about the nature of things, questions that we only reveal under the blanket of assured privacy, if then. The disciples had failed the boy publically, so they must query Jesus about their bankruptcy privately. Not dissimilarly, many a Christian seems to feel a great burden to wear a cool, confident and consistent faith out in the open, but in private is quite riddled with questions and uncertainties. More subtly, I notice pastorally how often someone precedes their heartfelt, quite legitimate question of faith with the self-deprecating sidebar, "I know this is a stupid question, but …" Even more troubling: "I know we are not supposed to question things, but …" (I hear this one most often around matters of grief and sorrow.)
But a pastor must ask: When did why questions become off limits for the people of Jesus-faith? When did the earnest query become a marker for doubting disbelief? When did trusting Christ as Lord and Savior stop meaning that one is a "steward of God's mysteries" (1 Corinthians 4:1, emphasis mine) and start meaning that one must have all matters of reality, justice, and truth sown up tightly in one's understanding? It just seems to me that a person who never has a why question is a person either no longer living or no longer paying attention. Of all the things circling around Blacksburg these days, only weeks after the terrible events of April 16, certainly some of them are questions of why? And I would hope that the Christians of that village are leading the way in those prayers, even as they also minister to many hurts.
To be sure, I can appreciate what folks are worried about with why questions. No one wants to get stuck in an endless loop of disheartening uncertainty. Furthermore, there is a kind of questioning of God that is not so interested in answers as it is in entrenching doubt. Frigid, encrusted questions shot at heaven out of cynicism or despair; questions born, not of faith, but of spiritual frostiness. When a scoffer asks a believer, "Why would a good God allow this to happen?" it is important to determine if she really wants to know or if she is simply hoping it will make you squirm. We Christians are sympathetic to the former, but not the latter.
And of course neither do I have in view here the kind of questioning that assumes one has a leg up on God. Our prayers are not about the business of trapping God, as if such a thing were even possible. I suspect one reason people sequester their why questions is to avoid provoking God's very righteous reply. No one wants to be old Job, who has to endure God's billowing responses from the "whirlwind" to his queries (see Job 38-40). I once asked someone if they were struggling with any why questions after a personal tragedy. "I have them, but I'm not asking them. I am afraid I might get an answer." Fair enough.
But there is a kind of why question that is a deep prayer of trust and hope, not a threat either to our faith or to God's infinitude. I notice in the Psalter that why questions appear almost three dozen times (Ps. 2:1; 10:1, 13; 22:1; 42:5, 9, 11; 43:2, 5; 44:23f; 49:5; 52:1; 68:16; 74:1, 11; 79:10; 80:12; 88:14; 114:5; 115:2). The Psalter—that canonized collection of prayers intended to be the language we borrow to engage the living God. That the whys would be canonized in our Old Testament suggests remarkable permission to pray in a mode that asks God what in the world is going on—literally. Furthermore, I notice that the disciples fervently ask Jesus why he was a sleeping during the horrendous storm in Mark 4, and I notice a dozen other examples of the disciples bringing their queries to the Lord (Matt. 13:10; 17:10, 19; 26:8; Mk. 9:28; Jn. 4:27, to name a few). Bottom line: I believe it is permissible to join the psalmist and the disciples in making our why questions a matter of deep prayer and pondering.
Why, O Lord, did the Tech shooter have to take so many lives down with him? How can a person become so lost, so ill as to undercut your indelible gift of life? Why do these events always feel so hopelessly random? Why are these actions allowed to transpire at all? Why must tragedy transpire in order for people to rise to the calling of community and compassion?
To pray in this way is not to "question" God's power or providence, it is in fact to trust very deeply in it. I heap up all my whys to the living God because I know that the Godhead is the proper place for them. I heap them to God, already aware that there are in fact answers to my questions—in God's life, if nowhere else. The one who gives me life, and life abundant in Christ Jesus, is surely the only proper one to receive and hear my pleas for understanding and wisdom. Furthermore, if the church is indeed a priesthood of all believers, then that priesthood moves in two directions: yes, the more obvious mediating of God's word to one another and to the world, but also the mediating of the world's questions of why (along with everyone other kind of prayer on behalf of others). It is because of our trust in God that we ask, not because we doubt God's goodness or grace in the first place.
As a child asks why to a parent in order to grow in understanding and wisdom, so the church prays why in order to mature as God's covenant people, and to be better stewards of our witness to Christ and his presence among those who suffer. After a tragedy that shakes our confidence, the chief difference between a God-scoffer and God-child is not so much the content of our questions as it is the disposition of our heart, the posture of our prayers. The derider might be asking why to distance himself from God; I'm asking why to draw even closer.
Will answers come to our questions as we pray them? Maybe not. Some questions run as deep and long as the history of humanity. But then again, maybe they do. I can bear witness to the truth that earnest prayer, coupled with diligent reading of the scripture, bathed in a mode of worship and praise, can in fact ferret out new insights and a palpable peace. (Once, while wrestling in my mind over the state of the world's madness, overcome with worry, I stumbled onto 1 Peter 3:9. Suddenly, I was swept up in a certain new peace. Even more, I found new insight into what the Lord might be up to in allowing the creation to languish a little longer: Had the Lord not delayed this long, you and I would not know God's grace.) Yet even if answers do not come so readily, our prayers and ponderings are still important. First, to squelch our genuine questions is not only to hide them from God—impossible!—but also to hide them from ourselves. It's just good to be honest with ourselves, lest our faith become mostly about convincing ourselves we are in control and less about trusting God alone. But second, it's good to the keep the channels open, the pathway cleared between the church and the Triune God. Praying is simply what we do, and our ponderous questions about the nature of things are but one way we open our ourselves before the reality of God. Whether we pray …
Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love. (Psalm 44)
or
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me. (Psalm 23)
… either way, we are praying to the Lord alone.
Sisters and brothers, we look forward to a day when God will be all in all, when the troubles and trials that threaten the church and creation are subdued by God's lasting peace, and when our why questions of God (Why do these things happen?) will fully and finally give way to God's why questions of us (Why do you look for the living among the dead?). The day of resurrection, the day of the Lord—God's final answer to all our pressing questions.