Ever tried to wish someone a Merry Christmas on January 2nd?  Or Happy Easter two weeks after Easter Sunday?

It can be pretty weird trying to follow the liturgical calendar in the context of pretty much everyone else around you following the American one.  At times I wrestle with the missional value of it.  Do I communicate nonsense if I’m talking about Easter when everyone else finished eating their chocolate bunnies three weeks ago?  Do I just look like a religious weirdo if I wish someone a Merry Christmas on January 2nd, and then have to explain, “No, really … Christmas is 12 days, and the Christian New Year isn’t January 1st, it’s Advent, and … nevermind.”

I don’t exactly follow it very well.  I didn’t get to a Maundy Thursday or to my own church’s Good Friday service this year (Sophia skipped her nap, meaning she’d have been a nightmare during the Friday evening service).  I didn’t give Lent much thought at all – something I’m rather sad about.  I’m in this weird paradox where on the one hand, I’d never want to give up the gospel to rules and regulations, and the binding of the conscience to certain observances.  St. Paul was pretty clear about that.  But on the other hand, I want a church to rigidly follow the Christian calendar and bind my conscience to feast days and fasts and celebrations.

We’ve thought about celebrating Christmas over 12 days with Sophia: stocking on Christmas morning, and one present each day until Epiphany.  But would that make her a weirdo when she goes to school?

Whatever my struggle with this issue, Easter has begun.  We’re not at the end of Easter because we’re at the end of Easter Sunday.  Resurrection is too big an event for one Sunday.  The Easter season has begun, and I very much hope to keep my heart fixed on it straight till Ascension Sunday.

Vain the stone, the watch, the seal, Alleluia!
Christ hath burst the gates of hell, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids His rise, Alleluia!
Christ hath opened paradise, Alleluia!

3:59AM.  That’s the time that I heard retching, then licking coming from the dog bed next to my side of the bed.  I hoped I dreamed it.  But a few minutes later, I was armed with Woolite pet-mess cleaner and a roll of paper towels.  The only thing left once I got back upstairs was a strangely-organized pile of small sticks and stones that Moses must have eaten the day before.

The Proverb says the dog returns to his own vomit, and we return to our own sin.  Sometimes it’s not our own sin we return to, but our distractions from the truth.  Today, Holy Saturday, the disciples decided they’d go fishing (in a couple days, of course; not on the Sabbath).  This wasn’t just a relaxing trip to get their minds off three years of a failed career change.  It was a deliberate return to their old career.  The Messiah thing didn’t work out.  Let’s head back to the boats.

I bet the disciples, whether or not they had vomiting dogs next to their beds, were probably awake at 3:59AM during the night between Good Friday and Holy Saturday.  I bet they barely slept at all.  They probably missed worship the next morning, though that would have had more to do with fear of getting killed than being too tired.  I usually skip because I’m too tired.

Most of life is Holy Saturday, despite the fact that for us, Sunday has come.  We all know resurrection is here, and we’re supposed to live in its victorious power every moment.  Or at least that’s what the zealous pastors and Christian self-help books tell us.  But I think the majority of our lived experiences, if we’re being honest, feels a whole lot more like Holy Saturday.  Resurrection came to the middle of history 2,000 years ago, but we’re still all groaning for its final realization across the entire universe – and in our own bones, which get woken in the middle of the night by dog vomit, cancer, lost loved ones, war, and sin.

Indeed, if Christ were not raised, we would of all people be most pitied.  Instead of going on under a delusion that all is well with the world (lots of evangelicals share this delusion, by the way), we’d experience our life-long Holy Saturday with no future Sunday.  All the glimpses we think we see of it would be creations of our own minds, and we’d live miserable lives and die.

Holy Saturday is the bridge between death and life.  Being already-but-not-yet resurrected fallen people, Holy Saturday is where we live.

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

   WE wear the mask that grins and lies, 
    It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— 
    This debt we pay to human guile; 
    With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, 
    And mouth with myriad subtleties.

    Why should the world be over-wise, 
    In counting all our tears and sighs? 
    Nay, let them only see us, while 
            We wear the mask.

    We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries 
    To thee from tortured souls arise. 
    We sing, but oh the clay is vile 
    Beneath our feet, and long the mile; 
    But let the world dream otherwise, 
            We wear the mask!

My favorite hymn is “The Church’s One Foundation.” If it came up for a vote, I’d vote to add it to biblical canon. I’m almost serious.

There’s one verse in that hymn that came to memory tonight as I sat with fellow believers and talked about the church, her flaws, her failures, and her struggles:

Though with a scornful wonder, men see her sore oppressed
By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed
Yet saints, their watch are keeping, their cry goes up “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song!

There’s a lot of wisdom in those lines. Samuel J. Stone chose his words carefully; he knew the church. “Scornful wonder” – how many times do we lament the church’s failures?

• “People accuse us of being hypocrites, so we need to stop to prove to them Jesus is real.”
• “What do we do when people point to all the church’s failures?”
• “I know someone who might consider believing in Jesus if it weren’t for the fact that the church is so messed up.

We respond very strongly to the scorn of the world. But do you notice what Stone has them scorning us for? Division. Heresies. In other words, inner conflict in the church. Stone takes it as a given that the church will be in conflict, not living up to what she has been called to be.

It’s shocking. It’s scandalous. But it’s true.

You’ll notice that Stone’s remedy for this is not, “Get better, do better, live better.” Those are exhortations we need to hear and heed. But Stone sees the only final hope as “the morn of song.” In other words, Christ’s return.

Quite plainly, Stone calls the New Covenant age “The Night of Weeping.” Tolkien called history “the long defeat,” in which we get occasional glimpses of the ultimate euchastrophe, the “sudden joyous turn” in the story which is the return of Jesus. All the time the Church is on earth doing her work imperfectly, messing stuff up but by the grace of God spreading the gospel as she stumbles along – this is the night of weeping.

This wisdom flies in the face of denominational hubris, which believes that if all the other believers would just sign on to our confession, the church would finally work as it should. It’s sadly ironic that Paul’s words about the church – that she is “the pillar of truth” – has been used to support claims to denominational and confessional superiority. The church is the “pillar of truth,” and by the church of course we mean our church, our magisterium, systematic theologians, confessions, whatever. But if you read how Paul actually defines the “truth” for which the church is supposed to be a “pillar,” you might be shocked to find that he’s not quoting the Pope, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, or Piper:

1 Timothy 3:16 Without question, this is the great mystery of our faith:

Christ was revealed in a human body
and vindicated by the Spirit.
He was seen by angels
and announced to the nations.
He was believed in throughout the world
and taken to heaven in glory.

It’s a “great mystery;” and it’s entirely about Christ. All the elders and deacons Paul writes about in the preceding verses are supposed to be upholding this confession. Christ: incarnation, death, resurrection, witness, gospel proclamation, faith, ascension and kingship. Surprise! We all believe this. Calvinists, Arminians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Catholics. We all uphold that confession of Christ; and when we add to Christ, making other things “absolutely necessary” in order to either be saved or to get the church functioning as it should, we’ve gone beyond Paul; and we’re murdering the phrase, “pillar of truth” if we think that quoting it justifies our exclusion of anyone who doesn’t jive with the finer points of our confessional documents. It really is all about Jesus.

Someone once told me that the Jesus who didn’t accomplish the Calvinist “limited atonement” is a “different Jesus.” That’s nowhere to be found in this confession.

This is the Night of Weeping. It’s not a competition. It’s not a battle over who’s got the real church. We can only really discuss those matters when we quit excommunicating each other over them. The real church, the real pillar of truth, is the one that confesses Christ as Paul did. If we don’t weep together during this prolonged Night of Weeping – and weep over our own divisions and schisms and sins against one another – and vow to love one another and uphold the confession of Christ together despite our inability to come to agreement on so many theological questions; if we keep to our own sidelines, pretending we’ve nothing to weep over except the other church’s seeming inability to see how right we are about this or that point of doctrine; if we can’t love one another until everyone who’s “wrong” has repented and signed our confessional document, then the weeping will be greater than it need be.

Jesus is who we confess; He is the truth. Jesus is what holds us together despite our disagreements during the Night of Weeping. Jesus is the one who will return to show us how foolish all of our tightly-reasoned systems of theology were…but when he shows us how foolish we were, graciously and mercifully, there will be little time to weep over it, for the “Morn of Song” will have dawned.

Note: This is probably the last thing of any great length I’ll write here until the end of May. The manuscript for my book on Harry Potter is due May 25, so I need to focus exclusively on that. At the end of May, I’ll most likely be changing names/domain names. It may seem silly, but I’ve hated “restless reformer” for some time, and now that “Young, Restless, Reformed” is getting applied to all the obnoxious cage-stage Calvinists, my name has been hijacked, and there’s no rescuing it.

There will still be consistent activity at The Hog’s Head, my Harry Potter site. 

I wrote some time ago about the unpredictable God, wrestling with the concept of a God who doesn’t work according to transactions, who decides not to answer prayer, who allows and creates disaster, entirely messing up my own comfort.  Some better reflections on the theme come from two places:

First, iMonk writes about hitting a wall, and abandoning belief in the God who guarantees anything other than the steadfastness of Christ.

Then, Mark (aka “grub”), reflecting on that essay, writes the following at the BHT:

As stopped relying on Him to fix my problems, keep my family safe, and make all my infertile friends have babies, I had a frightening realization: I had always relied on God to produce results, now I was going to have to trust not in His results, but in the process of Him working in me.  That’s harder, much harder.  Instead of my friends becoming fertile, I was going to have to learn to be a comforting friend.  Instead of my family having a ‘hedge of protection’ around them, I was going to have to grapple with death and violence.

Thanks, Mark…I was trying really hard to keep the conversation on important things like gardening, and you have to go and be all spiritually challenging…

After a pretty lengthy discussion at the BHT on race and several posts here, I decided to try to root myself in some Christian thinking on race, and it’s been helpful. This discussion is so multi-faceted and complex that it’s difficult enough to get all the assumptions on the table in the first place, let alone gain understanding.

I’m finding that John Perkins et al (the CCDA folks) do what I’m attempting to do (though they, of course, have actually lived it for decades, whereas I’m just starting that process), and that I’ll have a lot to learn from them: they take contemporary sociological thinking on race and put it into a Christian context with a Christian solution. I’ve written before of “color-blind racism” and the impossibility of not seeing color in a society so marred by racism. That I learned from Bonilla-Silva, in an essay that is sadly no longer freely available through Google scholar.

But Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice make the point well in their essay on racial reconciliation in Restoring At-Risk Communities. This part of the essay is Rice, who is white:

But a new twist on the definition [of race] was introduced…in those years. Though four hundred years of the old, overt racism is gradually disappearing, a subtle but lethal strain of the disease remains. While its effects are still separation and distrust, its symptoms are not as obvious as lynchings, forced segregation, or telling ethnic jokes. We call it passive racism. And we need to learn how to detect it in ourselves and in our institutions.

Passive racism is a way of looking at the world that is much like wearing racial blinders – not bothering to see and understand the effects of race because we don’t have to in order to survive…

Probably the most glaring example of White blinders is the fact that as the majority culture, we don’t have to deal with race. We say “I don’t see color,” but the reality is we don’t have to see color. I can walk away from…Black people and the whole mess of race any time I like. I can cross town tomorrow and enter the White world and know I will be treated well and not be denied opportunities because of my color. But my Black friends don’t have that option. (p. 116-17)

There’s great discussion on “passive racism” in Beverly Daniel Tatum’s book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? But the work of Perkins and Rice here in this essay gets at some of the same themes being talked about even in Critical Race Theory, but set within a Christian context of thinking.

Both analyses are needed. We cannot get beyond race problems without rooting ourselves and our identities in God’s story, but neither can we bring the message of the gospel to our contemporary racial issues without deep understanding of how sin has manifested itself specifically in racism, specifically in our culture.

For those following this series: thanks for sticking with it and offering your comments as I struggle through it.

Bill Kristol, neocon par excellence (if you can even use the word “excellence” when talking about a neocon, which you can’t…I’m still irritated that the NYT picked that guy as the “conservative,” though I’m not surprised. It is the NYT, after all.) has written an abysmal response to Obama’s speech. In the first few paragraphs, Kristol noted that he “didn’t shudder” at all the things that he considered disingenuous political positioning on the part of Obama (accusing him of not addressing difficult questions, using “ridiculous and unfair comparisons” to make a point, and “doing a disservice to the best” in the black community). No, none of those things bothered Mr. Kristol. That’s politics as usual, and that’s how he’d like to keep things. Here’s what really bothered him:

The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: “But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.”

Allow me to paraphrase: “Please, Mr. Obama…stick to politics as usual. Lie, propagandize, whatever. Just don’t make us talk about race. We need to ignore that discussion.”

Allow me to sarcastically dissect the rest of this piece:

As soon as I heard that, I knew what we’d have to endure. I knew that there would be a stampede of editorial boards, columnists and academics rushing not to ignore race. A national conversation about race! At long last!

“Endure.” Oh, poor Mr. Kristol. You’ll have to “endure” a discussion on race. What will you do? How will you survive?

Of course, memories are short. In 1997 President Bill Clinton announced, with great fanfare, that he intended “to lead the American people in a great and unprecedented [if he did say so himself] conversation about race.” That conversation quickly went nowhere. And just as well.

Phew! We dodged a bullet that time. Hopefully we can do the same this time.

Alright, I’m not going to go through the entire rest of the article. But, look. Mr. Kristol is, I’m sure, weary of the political positioning of the left, which has done every bit as much to perpetuate racism as (and perhaps even more than) many on the right. The answer to not having the conversation at all is NOT doing another rehash of the liberal side of the conversation.

Here’s what bothers me: he cites Moynihan in 1969 – which is, what, 5 years after Civil Rights legislation? – saying that “the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect,’” and says Moynihan was right.

Folks, that is shocking. Let’s do a quick review of American history up till that point – White Europeans showed up here a few hundred years before, and then stole and enslaved countless Africans in the process, many of them dying along the way, the rest being treated as less than human to varying degrees until, at least legally, 1964. By just five years later, a white guy in power was saying, “It’s time to stop talking about race now, isn’t it?”

Over forty years later, the effects of hundreds of years of racism continue, and folks like Kristol are just weary…why do we have to keep talking about this? Come on, we white folks made everything equal back in the 60s.

I’m a libertarian. I look forward to and pray for and hope to work for a time when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “dream” is fulfilled. But you can’t do that by not talking about the problem, or pretending it’s gone. You can’t do it with a welfare state, either. What I’m suggesting is that there is a different option available to us – something other than either a welfare state or a “color-blindness” that has to be just as blind to the ongoing walls of racism that still exist. Even Kristol admits, “problems remain” (though I’m wondering if he’s ever taken the time to think about and write about those problems with the passion with which he writes against any discussion on race…or perhaps he’s too busy plotting American Empire…). If “problems remain,” then we still need to talk. I’m kindly suggesting that it’s a lot easier for a white man like Kristol to say, “We don’t need to have that conversation.” It’s a lot harder for a poor black man to say the same thing.

I’ve been reading John Perkins, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that, because I’m looking for a distinctly Christian way forward – one which eschews the welfare state but still recognizes a deep, ongoing racial problem in the U.S. that needs to be addressed. Perkins seems to be the man for that discussion.

This is a very controversial piece, and I freely admit I may have to rethink some of this as discussion moves forward. Additional Point: One of the things I’m trying to do with this series is to demonstrate that one can agree with “liberals” or “progressives” (for lack of better words) on the causes and definition of racism without it becoming part of the Republican vs. Democrat power-play divide (”racism” vs. “race card”) on this issue (and also, one can agree on the causes and definition, while proposing a different solution to the problem).

Jon did a Google Reader share yesterday (Google Reader rocks, by the way) of the new video circulating of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright (whom I’ve defended here previously), and many of his inflammatory statements about race (and a few on terrorism) in America. No doubt this is going to cause a firestorm. The Clintons will have to tread carefully here, as they’ve recently run into difficulty over the Ferraro gaffe. They’ll probably use it as part of their new “Obama is unelectable so you should nominate Hillary even though she lost” plan. Conservative pundits – though likely not McCain himself, who won’t want to revisit his “gooks” statement of 2000 – will be all over it in the general election.

Just for the record, watching rich white conservative men react with righteous indignation at Wright’s claim that rich white men run the country is, well, kind of appalling. ‘Cause whatever else you think of Wright, he’s, you know, right on that one.

The politics of all this makes it impossible, once again, to actually talk about racism. I’ll note that it is amusing (and by amusing, I mean “really sad”) the way this plays out. It goes sort of like this:

• White conservative person makes a statement about the effect race has on a vote.
• Liberal person claims “Racism.”
• White conservative accuses liberal of “playing the race card.”

And we never actually talk any deeper about whether or not racism was involved (or what racism even is). Ferraro’s comments are a good example (I know she’s not a conservative, but it illustrates the point). Ferraro’s statement that Barack is winning because of his race is a matter of sociological opinion/discussion, of course. I’d disagree with her (I think if Barack were running the same campaign as a white man, he’d have had this nomination wrapped up a month ago), but that’s a legitimate conversation of . But the question that many are unwilling to address is why Ferraro made the comment and what its effects are, and the answer to that seems to me to be – it’s an attempt to inject a racial element into the contest prior to PA’s primary, in order to favor Clinton.  So whether or not her statement was “racist” or “bigoted,” its effects are to use race in order to achieve a certain end (power for Clinton).

Here’s what I like about the fact that Jeremiah Wright is getting attention in this election, despite the fact that he’s over-the-top and there’s much he says with which I disagree: with a candidate like Obama in play, we might actually end up having a discussion about racism. It won’t happen in the media, but it just might happen across America anyway.

What I’m trying to do here is not to have the typical middle-class-white-man disingenuous “righteous anger” at someone like Wright, and to give his thoughts, as a representation of the black community, a fair and challenging hearing (this is America, right?). We tend automatically to deflect the arguments of people like Wright and never to really think about them. So, implications for political campaigns aside, here are the discussions about Jeremiah Wright’s views that I want to have (these are real questions, not simply rhetorical). I’ll show my hand right off the bat by putting my responses in brackets.

• Is Jeremiah Wright incorrect to say that since its founding, this is a nation that has favored whites at the expense of blacks? [No, not at all...and this is the fundamental conversation that needs to be had when it comes to defining and understanding racism in America.]
• Is Jeremiah Wright incorrect to say that America is an arrogant nation? [In some ways, we are humanitarian and do a lot of great things around the world, no question about it; but yes, we're an arrogant nation. That's standard as far as empires go.]
• Not taking Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” statements entirely out of context (”damn” was set up in contrast to “bless,” he’s talking about judgment/cursing), are his statements that America is deserving of judgment for its sins incorrect? [No, of course not. The point of his statement here is a good one: American leaders assume and invoke the blessing of God while doing things that He abhors. It's the sin of presumption Wright's getting at here. I don't think Wright or anyone else wants American destroyed in a cataclysmic judgment from God.]

Mark 1:14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

Some observations:

• Jesus states that the time is fulfilled, not that it will be.
• Jesus preached the gospel itself; this runs contrary to the idea that we didn’t really get the gospel until Paul wrote Galatians or Romans. In other words, the gospel was being preached before the cross.
• The good news is that the kingdom of God is at hand. Jesus’ call was to believe this was true, and to join it.
• This lends credibility and a much more natural reading to the concept that the gospel is the proclamation that Jesus is Lord (hence the “kingdom” language), and that individual salvation is a part of, but not the whole picture, of the overarching story of redemption.

“Perhaps evangelism would be more effective and more biblical in some settings if Christians would have a beer, smoke a cigarette and use coarse language once in a while.” ~ Ra McLaughlin