Whatever I can desire or imagine for my own comfort I look for not here but hereafter.

Dan Kimball says one of the common complaints he hears from those who like Jesus but not the church² is how Christians rail on about the afterlife. It’s all about getting to heaven. I do look forward to the next life but also believe that I’m called into a new way of life right now and that this life is not devoid of joy. It is true that this life has hardship and pain but I can’t go so far as to say that there is no comfort nor any delight whatsoever in this life.

For if I alone should have all the world’s comforts and could enjoy all its delights, it is certain that they could not long endure. Therefore, my soul, you cannot enjoy full consolation or perfect delight except in God, the Consoler of the poor and the Helper of the humble. Wait a little, my soul, wait for the divine promise and you will have an abundance of all good things in heaven.

True enough. At least for me, one day this present life will cease, along with it all the joys and sorrows as I presently experience them.

If you desire these present things too much, you will lose those which are everlasting and heavenly. Use temporal things but desire eternal things. You cannot be satisfied with any temporal goods because you were not created to enjoy them.

What! Was God’s creation not good?³ We’re we not given stewardship of creation to care for and enjoy?⁴ Is this life and all of creation a prison doomed to destruction that we must escape? This thinking leads to the concept that we are saved for heaven rather than for God. I think rather that we are being called into a new way of life that includes both now and later.

I’ve been making forays into the culture. It might look a bit wild to those inside the Christian sub culture. See this video of an evening on the terrace at University of Madison.

The fellow dancing is one of the professors at the university. He was not a hippie nor was he at all inebriated. He was definatly having a good time. We had a nice chat after the set. I also chatted with another professor, a hair stylist who enjoys hang gliding and sky diving, and a bunch of other people who I’d never meet inside a church. There were about 1500 people out on the terrace that night. I’m thinking more and more about how I must be more missional and must therefore intentionally make forays into the culture. By the way, it was a lovely evening.

I shall teach you those things which are right and pleasing to Me. Consider your sins with great displeasure and sorrow, and never think yourself to be someone because of your good works. You are truly a sinner. You are subject to many passions and entangled in them. Of yourself you always tend to nothing. You fall quickly, are quickly overcome, quickly troubled, and quickly undone. You have nothing in which you can glory, but you have many things for which you should think yourself vile, for you are much weaker than you can comprehend. ¹

And so on, etc., etc., etc. I am determined to get to the end of this book, but this is pretty depressing stuff. I question how helpful it is to engage in extended self scrutiny and abasement. This is essentially omphaloskepsis in search of sanctification.

Consider your sins with great displeasure and sorrow, and never think yourself to be someone because of your good works. You are truly a sinner. You are subject to many passions and entangled in them. Of yourself you always tend to nothing. You fall quickly, are quickly overcome, quickly troubled, and quickly undone. You have nothing in which you can glory, but you have many things for which you should think yourself vile, for you are much weaker than you can comprehend.¹

Perhaps you prefer:

When you are tempted to get discouraged, remind yourself that according to God’s word, your future is getting brighter; you are on your way to a new level of glory. You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.²

Or this:

Be more splendid, more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.³

Me? I’ll go with this:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. (Rom 15:13 ESV)

Some (most?) give out of duty. We give because we must. Most of us get more joy out of deductions than paying taxes. Many give out of a genuine sense of loyalty and commitment. Tithing, supporting aging parents, children in trouble, missionaries, politicians, universities, the local radio station, and other causes we believe in represent this kind of giving. Some giving results from coercion and trickery. I will say no more on this to keep out of trouble.

Some people, like my wife, give for the joy of it and the desire to do something nice for someone else. Some of us really enjoy giving. Some of us give grudgingly. Most of us don’t have tons to give. Some do. Why does my wife find it so easy to give? It’s not because she has a ton of cash. Bill and Melinda Gates have become famous for giving away money. Lots and lots of money. So has Bono. Gates used to be famous for starting Microsoft (some spell it Micro$oft) but is becoming better known for his philanthropy. It is interesting that he really got into this after he got married. Maybe Melinda has more to do with this than meets the eye. He was so successful for so long at making lots and lots of money. I wonder if he’s a lot happier now that he’s giving it away. I think Ray is, or at least that’s what the article lead me to assume.

I must confess that I don’t find it easy to give money away. I do give it away and at least it doesn’t bother me too much when I do so. But I don’t give it away like my wife does. What’s her secret? Someone said, ‘In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’”‘ (Acts 20:35). Many recognize these words but perhaps are not aware of the context. Paul said this as he was getting ready to depart for Jerusalem probably on a relief mission. It was also going to be his last. Paul knew how to give money away. He’s famous for starting churches but should really be more famous for collecting money. Paul believed in the redistribution of wealth. He got that from Jesus. The verse from Acts refers to these words: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay” (Matt 10:8). You might think that’s easy for him to say. He had no car payment, no credit card debt, no house, no kids to put through college.

Why does it seem hard to give money away? No doubt part of the problem is our addiction to consumerism. But there’s something more fundamental. I think it may have a lot to do with our need to feel secure in the present. We don’t really think too much about the future, the past is over with and can’t be changed, but we become fearful in the present, for this is where we live, and our security seems most vulnerable right now. Something bad could happen any moment. Of course, something good could happen any moment too. But the world has a lot of bad people in it and a lot of bad things are going on all the time. In the same issue of Time is this quote: “Those who at times are not good, let them for just four weeks be good,” Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa, speaking of hope for peace during the World Cup and desire that evil people would take a break for just four weeks.

So what if the times are not good and there are bad people out there. Naked we came into the world and so we will leave it, or at least we won’t take anything with us when we go. In the meantime we will probably make it to tomorrow in about as good shape as today, whether we give anything away or not. It is even possible that we’ll make it to tomorrow fine if we give something away today. We might even enjoy it. That’s the best reason to give. A pastor friend says we should give not out of duty but out of joy.

I love the elegance of a well crafted one-liner. One can pack a lot of stuff into one line if one is creative. And when you can make it look good, even beautiful, no make that elegant, well, there’s something really satisfying in the endeavor. Of course there are pithy one-liners that have nothing to do with code, though you might be right in suggesting that compressing a lot of meaning into a few words is a kind of codifying. Putting words together in an elegant and compact way that expresses something substantial is both an art and a craft. One-liners done well can express significant values, persuade one to belief and action, and can overwhelm a book full of words.

C.J. Mahaney recently blogged an article titled “Keep Reading.” A colleague rang me up the other day and we began talking about it. I had recommended a book titled “How To Read A Book (in programming the preceding might be called a circular reference) by Mortimer Adler and my friend had just picked up a copy when he read Mahaney’s article. Mahaney quoted a bit of an old post by John Piper titled “Quantitative Hopelessness and the Immeasurable Moment” where Piper said:

What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this. It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don’t begrudge the 99%.

Thus the power of one-liners. You too can reduce an entire book to a sentence. That was said tongue-in-cheek as this is not a post to critique reductionism. Actually, I’m in favor of one-liners. I also forget much of what I read. I’m lucky to get one good sentence out of a book sometimes and get it lodged somewhere in my memory so that I can actually recall it and use it later. Since I ran across three gems in the space of two days, I decided to post them. I especially love it when there is a bit of humor in the one-liner. I must confess that some of this is going to go a bit over the one sentence rule, but I believe it stays within the spirit of the challenge. Here they are.

The first one is from a book dealing with difficult people in the church.

When attacked by dragons, our normal response is to become upset or defensive, and when we feel threatened, we usually wind up dousing the fire with gasoline.¹

This next is from Calvin’s Institutes (3.9.4) speaking of those who are not overly concerned with this life and have their hopes fixed on the next (of which he approves highly):

I confess, indeed, that a most accurate opinion was formed by those who thought, that the best thing was not to be born, the next best to die early.²

This last is from the famous pitcher turned preacher Billy Sunday. Sunday was really famous for his one-liners. This was supposedly offered near the end of his colorful life:

“I’m against sin,” he once said. “I’ll kick it as long as I have a foot. I’ll fight it as long as I have a fist. I’ll butt it as long as I have a head. I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m old and fistless and footless and toothless, I’ll gum it till I go home to Glory and it goes home to perdition.”³

I wish I could write like this. Maybe I can a little bit, even if it’s mostly in code.

The next two are just audio from Black Messiah. See this for more info. By now, Cannonball had moved out of hard bop and into early fusion, just like Miles. His pianist is George Duke.

Conspiracy of Silence –
In most every scholarly commentary John 8:1-11 is a source of genuine controversy. Conservative scholars agree that this incident is part of the original manuscript; but they can’t agree on where it belongs in the Gospel record. It seems that at the end of the first century or in the early part of the 2nd, some overly zealous Christians thought that this account made Jesus look soft on sin. As a result, there was a widespread conspiracy to expunge it from the record. “The reason probably is that in a day when the punishment for sexual sin was very severe among Christians this story was thought to be too easily misinterpreted as countenancing un-chastity.”² Inspiration preserved the text, but some feel that it originally belonged to Luke’s Gospel.³

The idea that the verse numbers, or horror of horrors even which gospel, might be in question as to the proper placement of this passage could be a cause of great anxiety among us moderns. We forget that chapter and verse is a pretty late addition, as in the 1500′s for our English bibles. The controversy, to my mind, is more revealing of our problem over a “soft on sin” Jesus than which page, if any, this story belongs on.

The REB does include this story. It places it at the end of John’s gospel with this footnote:

This passage, which in most editions of the New Testament is printed in the text of John 7:53-8:11, has no place in our witnesses. Some of them do not contain it at all. Some place it after Luke 21:38. others after John 7:36, or 7:52, or 21:24.

I’m glad the story wasn’t missing after all. It’s an important story. Too bad that it was so embarrassing that it got shoved to the end of John’s book. It is kind of clumsy to place it there, but then again, to close John’s gospel with “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more” is more poignant than reminding us that there’s more to Jesus than fits in a bunch of books.