Digenis.org

Sometimes I like to think that John Piper’s current sermon series on marriage was divinely appointed to line up with Katya’s and my engagement. The series has included some great exegesis and unpacking of Genesis 2:18-25, Colossians 2:13-15, Colossians 3:12-19, and Ephesians 5:21-33.

In the most recent message Piper made an analogy between forgiving/forbearing and the compost pile:

Picture your marriage as a grassy field. You enter it at the beginning full of hope and joy. You look out into the future and you see beautiful flowers and trees and rolling hills. And that beauty is what you see in each other. Your relationship is the field and flowers and the rolling hills. But before long, you begin to step in cow pies. Some seasons of your marriage they may seem to be everywhere. Late at night they are especially prevalent. These are the sins and flaws and idiosyncrasies and weaknesses and annoying habits in you and your spouse. You try to forgive them and endure them with grace.

But they have a way of dominating the relationship. It may not even be true, but it feels like that’s all there is—cow pies. I think the combination of forbearance and forgiveness leads to the creation of a compost pile. And here you begin to shovel the cow pies. You both look at each other and simply admit that there are a lot of cow pies. But you say to each other: You know, there is more to this relationship than cow pies. And we are losing sight of that because we keep focusing on these cow pies. Let’s throw them all in the compost pile. When we have to, we will go there and smell it and feel bad and deal with it the best we can. And then, we are going to walk away from that pile and set our eyes on the rest of field. We will pick some favorite paths and hills that we know are not strewn with cow pies. And we will be thankful for the part of field that is sweet.

Our hands may be dirty. And our backs make ache from all the shoveling. But one thing we know: We will not pitch our tent by the compost pile. We will only go there when we must. This is the gift of grace that we will give each other again and again and again—because we are chosen and holy and loved.

Even a city boy can appreciate the strength of that analogy. I’m looking forward to the continuation of this series and hope that I can glean some application points for my future marriage.

McSweeny’s Short Imagined Monologues: Professor Richard Dawkins speaks at Fair Hills Kindergarten regarding Santa Claus, December 2, 2006. (via Kottke)

Ryan Ferguson performs a dramatic reenactment of Hebrews 9 & 10 (via ManSpeak)

BonoFatigue.com : It Could Happen to U2. Described as a place for Bono Vox detox, it’s a safe refuge for those who have overdosed on U2 music, Bono interviews, and all the AIDS/ debt relief hype.

I just today listened to a Timothy Keller podcast from his session at the Reform and Resurge Conference. His talk was titled Doing Justice and in it he had the following to say about Jesus’ miracles:

You know, if Jesus Christ really wanted to prove that he had divine power with his miracles, he surely could have done a better job than that. We live in a culture in which spectacular special effects are done strictly to be spectacular. And therefore when we see Jesus doing miracles our first response, our first reaction, is to say, “Oh, I know why he as doing miracles. he was doing miracles to prove that he had power… to say, ‘look what I can do. See, I’m the Son of God, I can do these things.”

But honestly, to show forth power, the bread thing, is that all that spectacular? Not particularly… Feeding the hungry? As wonderful as it is to heal a cripple… That’s nice, but those of us who’ve got a little background in marketing today, we could come to Jesus as a consultant and say, “Look, if you’re trying to get your power across through miracles you could really do a much better job. We could brand you much better than you’re branding yourself. So for example, fly into the air and do some loops over the Sea of Galilee.” Couldn’t he have done that?

And they would have said, “Lord, you are truly the Son of God.” Or he could have said, “Look, nothing up my sleeve.” And suddenly a ball of fire appears. He could have done this; he stilled a hurricane, he could do this. So here’s this ball of fire and he says, “See those trees over there?” And he throws it into the trees and they incinerate and everybody would get down.

But Jesus’ miracles are never ever, ever, ever like that at all. Why not? Because the point of his miracles is never to show the naked fact of his power. The point of his miracles is always to show the redemptive purpose of his power. When you and I as modern people think about the miracles of Jesus, we think that it’s a suspension of the natural order. It’s not. God didn’t make the world originally to have blindness, leprosy, disease, death, poverty and injustice. He didn’t make it that way. These things aren’t natural. These things aren’t original. And therefore, when Jesus feeds the hungry, when Jesus heals the cripples, when Jesus raises the son of the poor widow, he is not suspending the natural order so much as he’s restoring it. The purpose of his miracles is to restore the natural order and the purpose of his miracles is to say, “I’m here to get justice done.”

I suppose I’ve never really thought about how Christ’s miracles aren’t the showstoppers that we might have made them if it were up to us. All of the Lord’s miracles, including calming the storm, were meant to show his great compassion, not his might.

This past Saturday, May 13, 2006, one of this century’s greatest Christian intellectuals passed away. Jaroslav Pelikan, who served for many years as Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, wrote more than 30 books, including the 5-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine.

A few Pelikan quotes, in remembrance:

Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.

To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist’s instruments nearly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished–until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from “How shiny and beautiful they all are!” to “Get that damned thing out of my mouth!”

Dr. Pelikan’s life and accomplishments inspire us not to live a mindless Christianity. Rest in peace.