The Lord's Supper: toasting each other's forgiveness

And he took the cup and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, "Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the forgiveness of sins." (Matt 26:27-28)

Whenever we receive the Lord's supper, we receive Christ's pledge that our sins are forgiven. Many times we comfort ourselves with this -- that our sins are forgiven, that here in communion we have Christ's pledge sealed with his own body and blood.

So how is it possible for our feuds to continue? Haven't we all come together to take the same bread and wine? Haven't we all shared the same cup, and raised the toast of "forgiveness"? When we celebrate our own forgiveness, we celebrate our brothers' and sisters' forgiveness as well. Everyone who has taken that bread and wine has shared in the forgiveness of sins. Do we still keep a record of their wrongs, when God has forgiven them? I think we must be offending against Christ, to come for our own forgiveness based on his sacrifice, and refuse to forgive our brothers who have come for that same forgiveness.

The Lord's Supper is not just a fresh start for each of us personally. It is also a fresh start for all those in Christ. There is a power in that, that all the evil that has worked throughout a congregation might be undone by a single worship service. By coming together just once fully embracing what God has done not just for one of us, but for all of us together, layers on layers of resentment can be washed away in a single morning. It must be a grave insult to evil that all its work can be undone so easily, by bread and wine and Christ's forgiveness. Evil's power must be nothing next to God's, that years of bitterness and strife can be undone in a single hour.

What is the Christian response to backhanded compliments?

Sometimes in our world we receive backhanded compliments. Some of them are basically "sugar-coated insults" to borrow a phrase that I found this morning. I wonder whether the deliverer would be laughing to themselves if I actually said "Thank you"; that depends on how much the insult was intended, I suppose. Receiving a backhanded compliment puts you in a situation where you have to decide, and usually right on the spot, whether to accept the "compliment" and therefore accept the insult and thank them for it. Ever find yourself in that situation? So this morning I found myself googling, "gracious response to backhanded compliment." It's something I've needed to work on for awhile.

The basic responses I found on-line were:

1. Return with another backhanded compliment (this one didn't really fill the bill, as it's not particularly gracious)
2. A polite call-out of the backhanded nature of the "compliment", for example "That's not really a good thing."
3. An acceptance with a polite call-out, for example "I'll accept your left-handed compliment with my right hand, thank you."
4. An acceptance with positive attention to the target of the implied insult, for example "Thank you! I think (x) was pretty good too / wasn't bad either!"

To me, #2 and #4 are the best approaches so far. I'd be interested in hearing how you all deal with backhanded compliments. I think there ought to be a way to apply what Jesus said about returning good for evil, so I think somewhere is a better solution than these. In the meantime, these are keepers even if just until a better way becomes clear; they're better than what I had done before.

Update with related post, roughly 2 years later: Christian response to backhanded compliments: Reprise.  

The worries of this world: a call to prayer

It is impossible to be worried and thankful at the same time. One will overshadow the other, pushing it to the side. "I'm thankful, but ..." something steals the joy from us, and our thankfulness is shallow. Or, "I'm worried, but ... " I have things to be thankful for. Still we speak with thoughts that are clouded with worry.

Jesus warned us of this. "The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is he who hears the word -- and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, and it becomes unfruitful." (Matt 13:22, see also Mark 4:19, Luke 8:14)

As followers of Jesus, we take this seriously. I have heard many Christians speak about Jesus' call to watch out for wealth, for the love of money, for its deceitfulness, for the divided loyalty it brings, for the threat and temptation that it poses. We may not see as clearly that Jesus says that worries -- the cares of the age and of the world -- stand beside the deceitfulness of wealth as an enemy, no less an enemy than the love of money. They are just the same in effect: a thorn or a thistle, a thing using up our energy and choking off the new life that Christ has planted in us. The cares of this life are a snare to the faithful just like drunkenness (Luke 21:34). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls us to set aside worry.

Matthew records Jesus saying twice that the Father knows what we need: once in telling us not to worry (Matthew 6:32), and once in urging us to pray (Matthew 6:7-9). Jesus' repetition of this key fact -- that the Father knows what we need -- forges a link between our worries and our prayers.

"Cast all your cares on God, for he cares for you." (I Peter 5:7)

Jesus urges us to pray to God without useless repetitions. We should not be tempted to think that our prayers earn some reward by a show of devoutness, or imagine that God did not know what we needed before we prayed. Instead, we are urged to pray based on the confidence that God already knows what we need -- and loves us.

In times like these it may be especially necessary, before we can give thanks, that first we give God our worries and unload all of our cares.

"Cast all your cares on God, for he cares for you." (I Peter 5:7)

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - and a problem with the modern world

The modern world has its own wonders. But they are very different from the wonders of the ancient world. The modern world has created wonders of invention, of efficiency, of communication, and of discovery. But, unlike the ancients, we have no wonders of beauty. Even an ancient wonder like the pyramid -- some in our cynical age might call it a monument to the ego of a tyrant -- even it has a beauty and symmetry that stands the test of time. I once read a description of the ancient pyramids in the days before centuries of looters; they were covered with white stone and capped with gold. They were beautiful. The hanging gardens of Babylon, again one of the wonders of the ancient world, was not only a marvel of engineering in its day, it was also an earthly paradise.

The ancient wonders highlight some things that our world has lost, things that our age does not value. There is little intent to create beauty, little respect even for the thought of it. And one distinguishing mark of the wonders of the ancient world was exactly a sense of wonder -- that is, these things were created to be marveled at, to bring delight or awe or even a sense of the holy and transcendent into this world. Our "wonders" are entirely secular wonders, or to be more exact, wonders produced by a world that only recognizes the secular as valid. When was the last time our world's cultures produced a work of true beauty, a wonder in the ancient sense?

As the vision of paradise fades from the minds of men, the intentional beauty fades from the things we create. One of the most obvious marks of secularism is a kind of desert in the culture.

Some people speak of a zeitgeist, a spirit of the age. Just as it is possible for a person to have a personality that is not well-rounded, I think the zeitgeist of secularism -- the spirit of our age -- has a very one-sided personality, one that is efficient but has forgotten warmth, beauty, and kindness. For anyone interested in psychology, I wonder: is the zeitgeist, that spirit of our times, effectively the same thing as our superego, the voice of our conscience? If so, then a distorted spirit of the age leads directly to the same thing being echoed on down through each personality in the age, and being transmitted as the new normal to the next generation.

It remains for us, then, who find our times to be shallow and cynical to do something about that. It remains for us, who are uncomfortably squeezed by the narrow and bitter spirit of our times, to stake a claim in our age for kindness and decency, for beauty, for holiness, for paradise, and for wonder. These are the echoes of Eden, these are the things that have been systematically chased out of our age, and these are the things of the kingdom of heaven on earth. People find it very easy to scoff at religion in an age where all the people -- even Christians -- go along with the cesspool of cynicism that is modern news and politics, the routine fraud and injustice in government and economics, the institutionalized mediocrity that is education. The job falls to us to create lasting families and deep friendships that are the stuff our world is starved for, to re-create the concept of fellowship in our age, and to re-introduce the holy and the beautiful into this world.

"Prepare the way for the Lord" -- it is our job to make every valley exalted, and every mountain bowed down, to make straight in this desert a highway for our God. John the Baptist did not build literal roads; he built a spirit of readiness for God.

Reflection on a funeral - and a perspective-check for militant atheists

This week I went to my aunt's funeral. My uncle lives out of state, so I was glad to see he had a huge group of people who were there for him.

My aunt's health had failed in a long and drawn-out process that so often happens with cancer. At the memorial service I was glad to hear that some of the people there -- people from my aunt and uncle's Bible study group -- had been able to come over and sit with my aunt while my uncle ran errands when she had become too weak to take care of herself. After her death, they had helped to pick the outfit my aunt would wear for the viewing; I was glad my uncle didn't have to do that alone. When all the relatives from out-of-town came for the viewing -- and all the people who loved my aunt came for the viewing -- there was a remarkably large group of people there. At the funeral home on the night of the viewing, their church Bible study group coordinated and brought enough food for everyone to have a meal, which was no small thing given the number of people. The next day after the funeral service, again the church Bible study group coordinated and brought enough food for everyone to have a meal.

The whole time I was impressed by their kindness, their gentleness, their thoughtfulness. They went out of their way to include me and make me feel welcome. They shared one good story after another about my aunt. I never lacked for someone there for me, and neither did my daughter, even though the majority of them had never met us before. And coming back home, I didn't doubt for a minute that they would be there for my uncle -- because they were already there for him, unasked, and had been there for him all along.

And I get back home and the message boards and propaganda publications with the militant atheists are all the same: Christians are dangerous and imbalanced and vicious; raising your children that way is abusive; religious people are a threat to civilization and decency everywhere. And all I could think is, "What the blazes is wrong with you people?" How can you heap that much nastiness and abuse on some of the kindest people on the planet? Or have you seriously never met religious people in real life, and are forming your opinions mainly based on prejudice and propaganda? Make no mistake, the people who behave the way these people did are the real and devoted followers of Jesus Christ. And if someone can look at those good, kind, down-to-earth people who have devoted their lives to going out of their way to help others, and think they're warped and malicious and dangerous, then what the blazes is wrong with this picture?

The reason for Eve

Adam already had paradise. God had already created a good world. What was the point of Eve?

In Genesis, the point of Eve is that even paradise is better when there's someone to love -- and even a perfect world would be lacking something without them.

In memory of my aunt, d. 11/07/2010. I'll be in Kentucky for the next couple of days for the memorial and funeral, & won't be checking comments again until Friday.

Haiti's homes, Mexico's colonias, America's unemployment, and learned helplessness

I'm not sure I can imagine an earthquake. I can't even begin to fathom what it would be like to have a major city devastated as happened in Haiti at the beginning of this year. Immediately afterward, the news covered large populations living in tents.

Recently with a storm named Tomas going towards Haiti, there was news that people in the tent cities were refusing to evacuate. Tent cities? Still? It has been a little over nine months since the earthquake.

Once, before the "modern world" came upon us, many families built their own homes. They may have enlisted their neighbors' help, but the job got done. The homes may not have been fancy homes, but they were better than tents. I'm sure many people around the world still live in homes they or their families built with their own hands. On my father's side, I think my great-grandparents probably built their own home. These days it would probably be illegal for them to even try.

These days we expect better. We expect concrete slabs, electricity, plumbing, windows, insulation -- everything meeting the proper building code. I wonder, how much of that applies in Haiti? Is the insistence that people have better homes -- with all the right permits, and all the right contractors, and properly inspected -- is that part of what's keeping them in tents? How many attempts to solve problems have to be blocked before people give up on solving their own problems?

I look at the people who live in the colonias around the Texas/Mexico border. Their ancestors built pyramids that the archaeologists travel to study, quietly paying their respects to the greatness of the culture that was before. Our own culture has no monuments to match that. Now their descendants live in cardboard boxes made into rough shelters. What happened? Conquerors, bad governments at times in history, modern drug lords and drug wars and governments still widely rumored to be either thoroughly incompetent or thoroughly corrupt ... or relatively powerless against the better-armed and more powerful drug lords. Mexico has had it rough. How long before people stop trying?

I think part of it is something called "learned helplessness" by the psychologists. If someone is prevented from solving a problem for long enough, they can easily give up on trying. If someone does not see how they control things in their own lives, they stop making any attempt to affect the outcome. Even if circumstances change so that it becomes possible to make a difference, that may go unnoticed. Too many things have failed before.

When psychologists first started studying learned helplessness, the original animal experiments were an exercise in cruelty to animals. Not to put too fine a point on it, the animals were systematically abused. Those experiments could be sub-titled "Why PETA was ultimately necessary." And now, whenever I see people showing learned helplessness on a massive scale, I tend to look for some kind of problem with the system -- where someone is deliberately doing something that makes the problem worse or prevents escape. It's even possible for someone to have good motives, and still be part of the problem.

In the United States, unemployment has become something of a "learned helplessness" problem, in that some of the unemployed have given up on trying to find work. Much like the animals in the old psychology experiments, it's hardly their fault. Jobs that were once our jobs have been systematically shipped overseas for many years now, or a blind eye has been turned while those jobs went to our friends from the south, regardless of whether they were here legally. I mean, we could spare the jobs, right? Or we could at the time. And every session of congress, or of the state legislature, or of the city council, adds layers of regulations intended to make things always safer, always more orderly, always more beneficial. And always more difficult to satisfy all the legal requirements. For a "free country", we sure have a huge number of restrictions.

The immigrants without legal paperwork, and the employers who are hiring without legal paperwork, have shown one thing: it is certainly possible to get work still. But there may not be a way to get work legally. And if the way to get work is illegal, that does seem to mean that the laws are part of the problem. Or as others have noticed before, the laws create the black market. The size of the black market is a comment on how much real supply and demand is being prevented by the laws.