2. You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep my commandments.

3. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.

4. Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall not do any work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your ox, nor your donkey, nor any of your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates, that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as well as you. And remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD your God brought you out from there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

5. Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may be well with you in the land which the LORD your God is giving you.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, and you shall not desire your neighbour’s house, his field, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that is your neighbour’s.

- Moses, recapping the 10 Commandments to Israel in his final sermon in Deuteronomy 6: 6 – 21.

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD your God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”

- Moses, summarizing the 10 commandments in Deuteronomy 6: 4

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – one of the most foundational texts in my personal formation (both as a Christian and as a writer and critic) Reverend Hale, the man investigating the witchcraft accusations in Salem, Massachusetts, asks John Proctor, the only “good man” in Salem, to list the ten commandments. Proctor has not been going to church because he considers his priest corrupt, but feels he has been keeping the faith, even though he has been having an affair with Abigail, the ringleader of the girls accusing everyone of witchcraft. He’s going pretty good with his list, until he gets to the tenth one, which he can’t, somehow, remember. It’s a heartbreaking moment when his wife, Elizabeth, quietly reminds him what it is – the seventh commandment, against adultery.

I’ve used this device recently in a couple conversations, and it is very telling what comes at the top and the bottom of the list. It’s pretty fascinating, but for one person in particular, the first that he listed was a sin someone was sinning against him, and the last commandment he listed was the one he was breaking himself. I’m no psychologist, but there’s definitely some relation between the things we forget about God’s nature and the sins we end up mired in. What disturbed me, though, is that in almost no case (including when I make the list myself) do I get a list in the order set by God Himself, as related to Moses. The most common pattern is that the last five commandments make their appearance first – the simple “Do Not’s” – murder, adultery, theft, covetousness, lying. But surely there is a reason why these are the last five and not the first – and surely there is something sinister in the fact that we often think of the first five last. God is an orderly God – He doesn’t simply give us a random order of laws – in the priority there is meaning.

image source

The one which most often comes last in my recent conversations with people while on the road has been the Sabbath. And it is #4! Also note the huge chunk of elaboration God devotes to elaborating the first five, as opposed to the one-liners in the second half. But even before he gives us the first commandment, God’s first sentence is not about law, but about love:

“I AM the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”.

This statement of profound love, this establishment of the relationship between a people and their God – rather than an impersonal law, is what begins the ten commandments, and it is this statement which we leave out completely when we list out the ten commandments! For God loved Israel first, and therefore calls his people to account to return that love which he generously gave to an enslaved people. Moses’ summary is more telling – and there is no excuse, for those who would say we only got the greatest commandment in the New Testament, because here it is, right here in the Old:

“Hear O Israel! The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.”

It is thoroughly worrying that, from forgetting this beautiful relationship, we have slowly but surely devolved into a society that blithely dismisses the first five commandments as unimportant – we regularly swear in God’s name even if we don’t believe in Him, and worse, toss it around as a curse. We happily take up jobs that require us to work on Sundays, or worse, carry around blackberries and iPhones that ensure we are on the job 24/7. We imagine we can get along without our parents’ guidance, as we empty into the great metropolises as 20-somethings to work crazy hours, with no family support, no social network, no time to even go to church regularly, and then wonder why we have no friends or people we care enough about to spend time with. And from there we move to break the most insidious and important commandment of all – the first and greatest commandment: placing just about everything on the pedestal – prestige, financial security, material goods, romantic relationships, sex, drugs, partying, alcohol, travel, exclusive club memberships, networks, careers, art, marriage, children and our expectations for our children - except the Mighty God who gives us every breath of life, and who yearns to release us from our blindness and our bondage.

And then we complain that the God of the Old Testament is a kill-joy, only interested in banning us from doing fun things, like lie and cheat and covet and lust and hate and foul up our bodies – that he’s as controlling as some stern parent who doesn’t love us but expects us to conform to some completely unattainable perfect image. And then, exhausted and drained from not keeping the Sabbath, we wonder why we wander in the desert of despair, of depression, of egomania, of slavery to companies and industries and countries that will not care for us when we’ve lost our youth and health and beauty. And we wonder why our “friends with benefits” won’t commit to marriage, why our marriages fail after “living together” seemed to work out fine, why our serial hook-ups or on-the-side adulteries are less than fulfilling. We wonder why we are bad-tempered, insecure, anxious, drugged, running around like headless chickens and having quarter-life crises when we’re laid off when Wall Street crashes. We wonder why the degrees we have worked so hard – so desperately hard to get – do not assure us a lifetime of plenty and ease, do not cobble us into a perpetual motion machine of man’s making, when just across the Jordan lies a land flowing with milk and honey that we refuse to cross over to see, that we refuse even to consider. And we whine that God has forsaken us, when He simply stands across that river, arms wide open and filled with anticipatory joy, willing to part the waters for us to cross the moment we take our first baby step.

“Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments”

- Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 22: 37 – 40

In the appendix, Jack describes his “Bible talk” – his small group that would meet weekly to study the Bible. The members of the Bible talk – who come from all sorts of backgrounds – encourage each other, pray together, help the poor together, and invite friends and strangers to the Bible talk. Jack’s Bible talk, a group not more than twenty, has baptized three or four people into Christ every year.

This post, however, is not about Jack’s Bible talk, but about something Jack said after explaining how his Bible talk accomplishes what it does: “It’s not easy, but it is simple.”“It’s not easy, but it is simple.” It struck me as an observation that was both obvious and eye-opening.

What is Christianity about? Simple! Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Simple – just not easy.

How do I love God and other people? Simple! Praise God and give thanks to God in prayer. Meet weekly with other Christians for prayer and true fellowship. (That’s what Jack does.) Invite friends and strangers to your church or to your Bible study group – and, if you don’t have one, start one! Stop spending your money on yourself and start spending it on others. It is all very simple (really) – just not easy.

Too often, I can feel impotent to change myself or the world around me – and I am hardly alone in this matter. Christians around the world, and especially in the United States, are wondering how to recapture the heart of a society that is increasingly post-Christian. We are wondering how to read the Bible (it seems so stale) or how to pray sincerely (it seems so forced), how to bring people to Christ (they seem so hard-hearted) or how to serve the needy (they seem so beyond reach). We realize that our faith is not where it should be and that our lives are not Christ-like. And so, naturally, we ask ourselves, “What is the problem?”

At various times in my life, I have more or less believed that the problem was my parents, my sister, my youth ministry, my campus ministry, my church’s theology, my church’s preaching, my church’s music, postmodernism, fundamentalism, socialism, evolution, hip-hop…. And perhaps those are all problems.

The real problem, however, is generally my unwillingness to do the good and simple things that are staring me right in the face: being friendly to strangers (let alone sharing my faith with them), spending time with fellow Christians whom I do not know well, asking people for advice and correction, praying and reading daily (and, if that becomes too difficult, enlisting the support of friends to ensure that I do read and pray daily)…. These are not complicated things; they are merely uncomfortable. They are simple, but they are not easy.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” There is no mystery about any of the things I have mentioned. Not one of them requires a degree in theology or even a high school diploma. We know how to be kinder people; we know how to love genuinely; and not much more is required of us if we wish to seek first the Kingdom of God. (Christianity may not be so easy a caveman can do it, but it is so simple a caveman can do it.) The only thing really stopping us is us.

Christianity is about Love – and Love, though it is not always easy, is fundamentally simple. My prayer is that all of our philosophy, theology, and praxis – all of our fancy words – can be rooted in a simple, active, and overflowing love. Jesus demands nothing more and nothing less.

The film begins with a witty rabbity creation myth, then it really starts with Fiver and Hazel. Fiver is a little runt rabbit being bullied by the strong in his warren – he’s a tiny, sniveling thing, but he is also a prophet and a seer, disturbed by true visions. Fortunately for Fiver, Hazel, his elder brother, looks out for him and protects him. Hazel is a nobody in the warren – just an average rabbit. But he takes Fiver seriously when Fiver says there is something terrible about to happen in the warren, and they must evacuate or die. Of course, the chief rabbit will have none of it, and Hazel, placing his faith in Fiver’s vision, orchestrates a breakout. Several other rabbits join them, tired of the oppression of the warren’s system, believing in Fiver themselves, or just looking for a bit of adventure. In particular they are joined by Bigwig, a soldier in the Owsla (the soldier caste in rabbit political systems), who is fed up with the warren too – if not for his bravery in confronting his own general, they would never have made it out of the warren. Like Aeneas, Hazel leads his men to found a new warren in an ideal place – Watership Down. But they don’t know where they will find this promised land, they only have Hazel’s visions, Blackberry’s brains, Bigwig’s protection and Hazel’s common sense and mediation to go on.

In Plato’s Republic, Plato speaks of the different parts of society working together as one whole, using the metaphor of the body. This was a tradition that Paul probably picked up when he spoke of the church as Christ’s body – all parts working together as a whole, each equally valuable. Of course, Plato thought that poetry was terrible and dangerous and should be excised from the body altogether, so I don’t entirely agree with him, but he has a point – the different parts of society (government, military, civil society, artists and visionaries) need to work together in order to do anything of use and respond to any kind of crisis, mundane or spectacular. What is the role of leadership in this context? At least from watching Watership Down, I think leadership is the successful mediation between these different parts of the body.

Hazel doesn’t have any one particular gift that is outstanding. He’s of average build, unlike Bigwig, who looks every inch a chief. He’s not as smart as Blackberry, who discovers that wood can float and suggests they make a raft to cross a stream. He doesn’t receive visions like Fiver. But he’s not weak either. He’s calm, and considerate, and wise, and a good listener. He is a rock – solid, constant, utterly dependable. He understands the different kinds of languages that his people communicate in – so he can understand the portents and doom of Fiver’s vocabulary; he can motivate BigWig with militant galvanizing; he can tap into Blackberry’s inventiveness. Because if any one of these other rabbits were the chief rabbit, the new warren would err into one or another kind of tyranny. BigWig is too eager to leave the weak behind when they get to the stream and a dog is after them. Blackberry is clever but he’s not as kind as Hazel decides to be. And as for Fiver -

I have this special soft spot for Fiver, because he is a poet and a dreamer. He understands the power of stories, and evaluates situations in an intuitively analytical way. When the exiles reach a mysterious burrow with many empty warrens where a human feeds them carrots daily, it is Fiver who hears their fatalistic poetry and their rejection of the original rabbit trickster mythology and says, “I’ve had enough!” and leaves, even if he must do it himself. It is only then that Hazel takes him seriously and leaves to find him.

It turns out the warren is surrounded by snares – humans give them carrots in exchange for their deaths. I’m not entirely like Fiver, of course, and I am not always right (!) like he is. But one thing I share with him is a tremulous weakness and the terrible burden of insight, as well as a profound loneliness when no one understands or appreciates it. Fiver’s apocalyptic visions are a blessing and a curse – he is surrounded by death and hurt when he sees them, because sadly, the world is fallen and he sees this. He sees the skull beneath the skin – he can almost touch it when he brings his paws to his own face. He senses danger, but does not have the political power or clout or ability to do anything about it. He is paralyzed by his visions, quite literally convulsing in horror before the final battle when he prophesies about a dog loose in the woods.

If the world had its way, runts like Fiver would have been left in the dust long ago. It is only because of Hazel’s protection that Fiver exists at all – without Hazel, Fiver is as good as dead. He would be starved by the strong in his society; he would be ignored and his spirit crushed by rejection. But Hazel also cannot do without Fiver. Without Fiver, Hazel’s wit and bravery and even his worldly wisdom almost lead him to his own premature death. Realizing they needed does in the new community, he connives to free some domesticated hutch rabbits in a farm without consulting Fiver. (He’s just tired of Fiver being relentless and single-minded and insistent on his own way of doing things). Well, Hazel gets shot in the leg by the farmer for his bravado. This incident reminds me a little of Abram’s lame attempts in Egypt when he pretends Sarai is his sister and pimps her out, or any of Peter’s heartfelt but impulsive/poorly-conceived schemes to protect Jesus. They backfire. But there is space for grace – it is Fiver again, who instinctively knows that Hazel is not dead, because Hazel’s job is not done, who goes out to seek Hazel. His love for his brother makes him brave, and he heads out alone, past hills and dales, to find Hazel’s body, nursing him back to health.

So how does this all come together? Well, it is in the last war that Hazel finally gets the hang of it, and all the rabbits work together with their unique gifts towards saving their warren. The final war is between General Woundwort (a kind of amalgamation of Stalin and Hitler) of the tyrannical Alfalfa Warren and Hazel’s Watership Down. BigWig is sent into Alfalfa as a secret agent, in order to rescue some brave does and other oppressed political prisoners who are being tortured by Woundwort’s henchmen. Because BigWig is big and strong, Woundwort accepts him into his Owsla.

They bring off the escape beautifully by utilizing Blackberry’s idea of escaping on a boat. But Woundwort hounds them to Watership Down, and they are surrounded and outnumbered. Woundwort assumes that BigWig is the chief, and when he comes to the warren in order to confront and destroy it, he ignores Hazel when he runs out of the burrow in order to find the dog Fiver sees in his paralyzing vision. “There’s a dog loose in the woods!” Fiver cries, convulsing. Fiver senses death, but not whose death – he senses danger, but he is so terrified and seized by his vision he can do nothing. It is Hazel who interprets and mediates this vision. Hazel goes to the farmyard where he had seen a dog tied up on a leash. At terrible risk to himself, he sneaks out of the burrow, leaving BigWig and his men to do battle and hold off Woundwort as long as possible. Hazel realizes that he must free the dog into the woods – he is the fulfillment of the prophecy. And yes, he unleashes danger, but he does it with a prayer to Frith, the god of this world – “My life for theirs, Lord,” he says as he runs towards the doghouse, bites through the rope and tears away, leading the dog straight to his own warren.

The dog, it turns out, is their salvation. Because Hazel tears into the secret burrow he had dug, and while General Woundwort is doing bloody one-on-one battle with BigWig, the dog worries Woundwort’s footsoldiers and scatters them. Woundwort is furious! He charges at BigWig, but BigWig stands his ground. “My chief told me to defend this warren to the death!” he says. Woundwort is startled. “Your chief?” – he is suddenly terrified. If this strong general, every inch a chief, is not this warren’s leader, then what kind of terrifying rabbit must he fight now? Woundwort leaps out of the burrow, only to meet head on with the ravenous dog. And like a true megalomaniac, he leaps and attacks the dog one on one -

And it is in this way that Hazel-Rah and his followers establish Watership Down. Hazel-Rah lives to see it prosper, to see it generate little bunnies, and he is satisfied. One fine day, he meets the black rabbit of death, and this time the black rabbit is familiar – he wears Hazel’s own face, and is dear to him. He offers him rest (for he is weary), and a place in his Owsla (for he is brave, an elder among rabbits). Lying down to sleep, Hazel dies a good death, a good and faithful servant.

I am becoming more and more convinced that Christianity is a balancing act, that following Christ requires the grace of a dancer as well as the grace of God. Danger, for the Christian, lies on all sides – for he lives behind enemy lines. The Christian must be doctrinally sound, but not dogmatic; wise but not detached; zealous, but not reckless; obedient, but not legalistic; righteous, but not self-righteous. He must love all men and hate all evil, live in the world but be not of the world; he must be a soldier and a peacemaker, a shepherd and a prophet, a meek revolutionary and a submissive rebel.

It is a tall order – indeed, the tallest of all orders, for we are called to perfection. What are we to make of it?

We are all in a war between good and evil. This war is at least as old as Adam, and all men know it firsthand. What all men do not seem to know is that the war began as a war between good and good – between God’s command and man’s desire for wisdom. The root of evil, as St. Augustine observed, was not evil itself, but disordered good; idolatry does not begin with the worship of Satan but with the worship of the secondary: family, country, comfort, romantic love, the Law… Lewis’ example is instructive: It is not a sin to love a dog; it is a sin to love a dog more than one loves one’s fellow man. And a man has not understood himself until he has identified his dog.

Thus, in the history of the Church, we see Arius sacrifice Christ’s divinity for the sake of his humanity; we see Calvin sacrifice free will for the sake of God’s providence; we see the sinfulness of the flesh become the heresy of original sin, and the Bible’s call for justice become liberation theology. We see movements that are too moralistic, and movements that are too worldly; movements that dream of the past, and movements that dream of the future; movements that have forgotten Heaven in their quest to bring it to Earth, and movements that have never given a thought to Earth in their anticipation of Heaven. The centuries are littered with ascetics and materialists, fideists and rationalists, sinners and clumsy men who never learned to balance.

This is not an issue only concerning doctrine and history; it is not even an issue primarily concerning doctrine and history. Every church and every man today and forever walks upon a tightrope: the Lord himself assured us that the way was narrow. Our modern Christianity can be too individualistic – but it can also neglect the centrality of personal faith. We can forget that we have freedom in Christ – and we can also forget that we are slaves to righteousness.

In my own life, I see my healthy skepticism sometime devolve into cynicism. I see my hunger for righteousness become an implicit belief in salvation through righteousness. Maintaining my balance – not squelching one good out of love for another – is a delicate task. In fairness to myself, I am hardly alone in this matter; everyone around me runs similar risks. The introverts think that Jesus was an introvert, and the extraverts (unsurprisingly) disagree. Surely, he was a Republican – unless he was a Democrat. Christians ought to pray more, read more, evangelize more, be stricter, be more tolerant, be bolder, be more open-minded, be more merciful, be holier, be more reverent, be more joyful, and so on. We each overemphasize our pet virtues and pet vices (which generally reflect, respectively, our strengths and weaknesses), neglecting other virtues and vices until we have distorted the faith entirely. Thus do we make our God in our own image, and thus is the Body broken – for if its members cannot balance, it will be torn apart in every direction.

The problem, then, is a failure to balance. What is the solution? I am no prima ballerina, but I do have a few suggestions.

The first is simply to recognize that danger lies in more than one direction – that virtually any good can be taken too far. The second is to maintain always a sober judgment about ourselves (something impossible, by the way, with pride). The Church is a Body, and the foot is useless if it does not understand that it is a foot. In the same way, every Christian must see his idiosyncrasies, biases, and prejudices – see and understand his predispositions, inclinations, and preferences. In doing so, he will inevitably begin to recognize the ways in which he is tempted to trip and fall; that is, he will begin to recognize his spiritual center of gravity.

The corollary is to remember the importance of unity: “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4.3, NIV). Once the foot achieves a sober self-judgment, it cannot help but see that it desperately needs the rest of the Body. The Church is not the Church until She is constituted of the whole motley crew of mankind: the traditionalists and the progressives, the jocks and the geeks, the cautious and the firebrands, the loudmouthed and the shy. A Church composed only of feet is not just weak and unfruitful, but creepy.

My most important suggestion, however, is to meditate upon this one simple fact: We will only ever achieve balance if we fix our eyes upon Jesus – a master of grace in every sense of the word. A King and a Shepherd, a Lord and a Servant, a Lion and a Lamb, he transcends every tired party line, and truly is an everlasting man. If we set our sights on being conservative, we will fall; if we set our sights on being liberal, we will stumble; if we set our sights on being Lutheran, Calvinist, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or Evangelical, we will surely fail. Aiming for evangelism or prayer or Bible study or social justice or peace or sound doctrine is not enough; we must aim for Jesus Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. After all, how can we balance if we do not know where the tightrope is? And how can we know where the tightrope is if we do not follow the only man who ever successfully navigated it?

Yet we are so easily distracted. Lewis writes, “There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.” The same could be said of any other good that has turned men away from the Good. How easily we act in the name of Christianity or of world peace, toleration or tradition, when we should act only in the name of Jesus Christ!

Our Lord’s words have never rung more true: “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14.6; emphasis added). If we truly seek to follow him, we just might be blessed with balance. ]]> http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2010/06/balance/feed/ 3 http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2010/05/the-myth-of-individual-christianity/ http://www.harvardichthus.org/fishtank/2010/05/the-myth-of-individual-christianity/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 13:00:26 +0000 J. Joseph Porter http://www.harvardichthus.org/?p=3328

I once heard a friend of mine claim that he believed in “individual Christianity.” He was not talking to me, so I do not know if he offered any elaboration of what he meant. however, I suspect that his meaning was clear enough: He was a Christian, but not particularly invested in any particular church, nor did he see any real need for such an investment.

Belief in individual Christianity must be extremely widespread, given the vast disparity in America between belief in Christianity and church attendance. Based on those numbers, anywhere from 30% to 60% of Americans could be considered individual Christians – people who believe in Jesus Christ but sleep in on Sunday mornings.

The problem is that individual Christianity is a contradiction in terms.

How are we supposed to be united with other Christians if we never see them?

The motivations underlying the popularity of individual Christianity are clear enough. Spirituality is personal; organized religion has left a bad taste in many people’s mouths; churchgoers can be pretty annoying; sermons can be pretty boring; late Saturday nights don’t work well with early Sunday mornings.

Some of these excuses are more legitimate than others. A difficult experience with a church can be emotionally and spiritually crippling, and the guilt often lies with the church, whose love is supposed to be proof of discipleship (John 13.35). There certainly is a personal (and individual) component to faith; Jesus, after all, prayed by himself (Matthew 14.23).

Yet the solution to a problem with a church is not abandoning the Church, just like the solution to a problem with a school would not be abandoning one’s education altogether. Jesus did indeed pray by himself – but he also prayed that “[believers] may all be one, just as You, Father, are in me and I in You” (John 17.21). Jesus calls us to a unity comparable to the unity of the Trinity – a unity that transcends race, culture, wealth, and age.

For the earliest Christians, this was not just a unity “in spirit.” On the contrary: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts” (Acts 2.44-46; emphasis added). Indeed, the writer of Hebrews exhorts us to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10.24-25).

The clear implication is that it is virtually impossible to do any of the things that we are supposed to do for our brothers and sisters – encouraging them, rebuking them, confessing to them, and so on – without meeting together with them. Likewise, our walks with God will be completely stunted without the advice and perspective of other Christians: “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27.17). Sin, by nature, deceives us, and we cannot un-deceive ourselves; only our fellow disciples can do that.

This is hardly a uniquely Christian concept. Sports teams that are successful practice together. Committees that are unified and effective meet together. The writer of Hebrews is advocating the will of God, but he is also advocating common sense. We need each other, plain and simple.

The Church is a Body – an organism, if you will – and, like any body, She will not survive if She is dismembered:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. [...] If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor…. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Corinthians 12.12-26).

The fact of the matter is this: Individual Christianity is not Christianity at all. A Christian who is not committed to the Body of Christ is a Christian in name only.

This does not mean that the ultimate objective is 100% attendance on Sunday mornings. The ultimate objective is deep relationships that allow us to change those around us and to be changed by those around us. The ultimate objective is openness, accountability, honesty, and repentance. The ultimate objective is spiritual unity.

I could say a lot more about the importance of fellowship with other Christians. (I have said next to nothing, for example, about the centrality of communal worship to Christianity.) I will end, however, with a plea to “individual Christendom”:

I need you. The Body needs you. Christians need you, and the world needs you. Within the Church, there are worship ministries, youth ministries, campus ministries, and other ministries that need your support and wisdom. There are new Christians who need strong examples, old Christians who need zeal, congregations who need elders, evangelists, teachers, and deacons. Outside the Church, there are the hungry to be fed, the sick to be healed, the sinners to be saved. I have been given a mission, and I cannot complete it alone; you have been given a mission, and you cannot complete it alone.

Please come back.

Photos courtesy of Eunice Lee. These photos and more can be found on the facebook album here.  Thank you for sharing this amazing testimony of what happened these past 3 days. If you came to the prayer room, please email your testimony to eklustaATgmailDOTcom. My next post will hopefully include some testimonies from the room!

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked way , then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14

Glory to the Lord! More about this with pictures and photos, hopefully, to come….

Update: A final call from the Prayer Room!

Time-lapse Short! from Will Huckle on Vimeo.

Spring… and a young woman’s fancy lightly turns to *ahem* thoughts of love.

It is unfortunate that while our culture is steeped in images of sex and continual allusions to sexuality, our idea of sex, whether Christian or not, tends to be inextricably linked to things which are taboo and sinful – very rarely can we talk about sex without sniggering, or without embarrassment. There is something profoundly sad about this – Christians, who are supposed to be Christ’s body on earth and bring about His kingdom in the world – feel this uncomfortable about sex, which is after all one of the prominent things bodies do. It is the origin of new bodies (at least in this world), it is one of our strongest, most important drives, and it is vital, necessary, and beautiful. The Christian authors and speakers whom I have read or heard have a tendency to talk about the beauty of sex, and then, perhaps too embarrassed to dwell upon this beauty for too long, move quickly on to its sacredness to marriage. This leaves the single, sexual being wholly unsatisfied, and, I think, sadly unacknowledged – as though we believe we are sexual beings if and only if we get married, and that our sexual awakenings all coincide with our wedding nights. Perhaps in cultures in which marriage coincided roughly with puberty this was actually so (remember, Mary was a teen-aged mother…) but this is not realistic or helpful in our culture, in which marriage is being delayed later and later, and in all likelihood for my particular demographic, well into our thirties.

So I will attempt the rather daunting task of trying to illustrate the beauty of sexuality – not just married sexuality, but human sexuality in general, and also that murky, often-danced-around territory of chaste sexuality (NOT an oxymoron, if you think about it for a bit) – through a simple analogy, which will make the Tennyson misquote above less gratuitous and hopefully somewhat address this unfortunate ellipsis.

I had watched this video years ago, and although I think it says many profound things about time, perspective and human relations with the environment, the most powerful message to me was the frank, fresh sexuality of flowers it depicts. Yes, you read that right: the sexuality of flowers. The use of time-lapse photography taps directly into something of God’s perspective, lets us peek briefly at the true meaning of that profound insight – that “one day [is] with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8 KJV) – to watch flowers bloom and fade on their own time, rather than through our woefully short human attention span, reveals a mysterious, alluring side to them. Suddenly, all the springtime allusions of the love poets make a more literal and vivid sense – these creatures are sexual, just as all nature is sexual: their delicate cups unfurling, their petals growing turgid and flaccid, their stems rising and falling with the floods and droughts of Spring. They are beautiful and rigid, beautiful and open. They are dark, and powerful, and beautiful, existing in the earth, blooming into the sky; creatures of the day and of the night – damp and dark and sacred. I think if we could just imagine, in the Garden of Eden, what it must have been like to be as frankly sexual and unashamed of beauty and nakedness as one of these, we may finally have a glimpse into what it means to be sexual and whole. The flowers are beautifully purposeful, yes – biology would reveal the immense, intricate purpose of every one of those cells towards reproduction, but quite apart from that, whether or not a bee or butterfly alights on one of these, whether it successfully generates offspring or not, there remains its startling, singular, magnificent beauty that is utterly undeniable for its brief life.

It’s hard to think of human genitalia as beautiful – simply because we have been constantly conditioned that it is not, or that it is funny. And I am a great proponent of the idea that our sexuality is funny, and indeed, our sexual organs have a comic side to them – CS Lewis himself observed this, that there seem to be equal parts solemnity and comedy about the act itself – but whoever said the funny and the beautiful are mutually exclusive? So many examples I can raise without even thinking very hard of this delightful combination – the giraffe, the chicken, the cow, and my favourite, the elephant – that most sagacious of beasts, humble enough to be funny and princely enough to be beautiful. Why should the naked human not belong in this very noble company?

Harvard has a tradition of doffing its clothes for a madcap run around the Yard at midnight before finals period every semester – the infamous “Primal Scream”. I have, of course, attended. I remember my freshman roommates anticipating a sexy eyeful of the flower of Harvard College, but then being pleasantly surprised by the innocence, the exuberance of it all. There was something wonderfully free, something liberating in the combination of nakedness, madcap yelling and furious, cold-defying running: self-consciousness dropping away, feet icily hitting the uneven tar, lungs giving out in that primal yowl – nakedness, de-contextualized and demystified – somehow, the people who ran were wholly, unashamedly them – poetry in motion. A glimpse of heaven, perhaps, in a most unlikely place…

There must have been learning in the Garden of Eden, not just stasis. How could we learn the character of you, if we did not transgress? How would we understand? So much mercy and justice, already in that strange and secret fable – how you clothed us in skin still smoky from that first death, and sent us on our way – out into the world, into the long, long path where you had to take thousands, thousands of years to present us with the perfect human, and then only through direct intervention because nothing we could do: not advancement, not education, not evolution, could produce him.

So this  is my wilderness, and my promised land. I lean on you, my rod and my staff, I lean on you, heavily and wearily. This is what we were meant to be, cripple and stick, in this version of things. You want to own all my love, and that is utterly fair enough, because my tiny heart is already too small and mean: how could it produce enough love? Only when I love you with my whole heart, my whole soul, my whole mind will I ever be able to radiate you. And then I would be purely love. You are, after all, extravagant. You are like the sheets of rain, pummeling on the zinc roof of my heart. You have guarded my childhood in the bright-curtained room. You have sung in the wind past my window, you have littered your leaves on my grass. My whole childhood has been sitting on a stool, trying to peek at what meal you are preparing in the pot, for me, with only the smells that fill the air for a clue. You were entirely gentle to me, lifting me in the arms of my father when I tripped home and he swung me round in an almost perfect circle. Oh yes, you were present in every corner of my heart, present but unsuspected, present but not consciously bidden, from the sweet toffee rolls I loved to sneak out to buy, to the dark green shade of the pong pong tree. You were the legs I hugged and the shelves I climbed, reaching for that slightly out of reach, slightly battered paperback. You were the quiet corner I cried in in the cold blast of the library, you were in the gurgle of the school fountain. You were the whitewashed wall I stood attention by, silently waiting for me to turn to you. You were the perfect circle I approximated with the twirl of a ribbon on a string in the courtyard in the sun; you were the perfect balance of the plastic dragonfly, bobbing up and down gracefully on my finger.

You were the drains I ran down, followed by a flood of paper boats.
You were the geometry of trees I walked past.
You were the overhead bridge I walked over every morning.
You were the sunshine spilled on the asphalt.
You were the the fresh bright air I breathed in the mornings, you were everything I have truly loved – and you alone know what those things are, because of that, even my own heart does not know.
You are my best heart, the only good I’ve ever done

was done in childish mimicry of you.

This is an idea for a brief sermon I hope to deliver to an actual audience someday – hopefully at Harvard.

Two years ago, most of our campus was swept away by the election of President Barack Obama. The night he won, it sounded like everyone in Cambridge was outside my room shouting, dancing, celebrating, and going crazy. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the excitement surrounding Obama’s election.
Why were people so excited? The answer’s pretty obvious: They – we – wanted change. We saw that our world was messed up, and we wanted to fix it. We wanted something to believe in.

Barack Obama’s presidency may turn out to be good for America. But I don’t believe that Barack Obama is the person who will ultimately bring change. I don’t think Sarah Palin is, either – or, for that matter, Adam Smith or Karl Marx or anyone else. Instead, it is my firm belief that true change – change we can believe in – is found only in the person of Jesus Christ.

Things have certainly changed a lot in the past few hundred years. We’ve gone from horses to cars, from telegrams to the Internet, from Beethoven to rock and roll… Brave men and women have fought and sometimes died to bring us democracy, freedom, and equality that would have been pipe dreams just centuries ago. In many ways, things have changed completely.

In other ways, however, things really haven’t changed at all. We know happy people and sad people, poor people and rich people, greedy people and generous people, humble people and prideful people. Art has changed, technology has changed, culture has changed, politics has changed – but people haven’t changed. The basic facts about human nature are just as true today as they were thousands of years ago, which is why an ancient work of literature like the Iliad or the Bible can resonate with us thousands of years later. Truly it was said that there is nothing new under the sun.

It seems, then, that we have learned how to change everything except ourselves. The problem is that changing ourselves is all that matters; changing laws and countries doesn’t mean anything if you don’t change people. As Solzhenitsyn said, the battle-line dividing good and evil is drawn, not through states or through classes, but between every human heart – and through all human hearts. The problem isn’t “the system” or “the man,” but our hearts.

I believe that Jesus changes hearts. I don’t believe that because the Bible tells me so or because my mommy told me so; I believe it because I have seen it with my own two eyes. I know Christians on the verge of suicide who now lead hopeful and purposeful lives. I know Christians who were once drug dealers and gang members who are now gentle, kindhearted men, Christians whose marriages and families have been healed. I know Christians who were once slaves to drugs, or porn, or women, or selfishness, who have now been set free.

Are there non-Christians who have changed in similar ways? Of course. Are Christians perfect? Of course not. And yet I cannot deny my impression that most (if not all) the people I have known who were seriously committed to changing themselves have been Christians. Lots of people want to be good; very few people want to be better, to own up to and confront the darkness that invariably exists within them. I cannot deny my impression that there is something about the community of Christians quite unlike anything else I have ever seen. I hear a lot of talk about self-improvement and making the world a better place, but the bulk of the change I have witnessed has taken place among unassuming Christian men and women who simply cheat less, gossip less, covet less, lie less, and hate less than they otherwise would.

My point isn’t that I’m better than you or that Jesus is the only way. If you’re like most people, you’ve heard plenty of that before, and you’re probably sick of it. My point, rather, is this: If you are serious about changing the world – if you want to make the world a better place – if you want to make yourself a better person – consider Christianity. Read the Bible, talk to a friend, do anything but ignore it.

It has already changed the world – it might just change your life.