If you liked Kanye’s Jesus is King, you’ll love the 1972 live recording Amazing Grace featuring Aretha Franklin and the Southern California Community Choir. Listening to one of the greatest talents in human history sing gospel for an hour-and-a-half to a live audience that not only believes every word of it, but is obviously drawing strength from the music to live faithfully in the midst of a society that explicitly marginalizes them, is an experience you owe yourself.
Motions of Grace
Intersections of scripture and life
Page 2 of 4
I had the privilege of baptizing five new believers today. In preparation for today, I’ve been reflecting throughout the previous week on the reality that baptism reenacts (or enacts, as many Christians believe). The foundational declaration of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth is the crucified and resurrected Lord; then, secondly, that we can participate in his death and resurrection – not as a quasi-existentialist metaphor, but as sober truth. This real death and resurrection is what baptism is all about.
We tend to say that being baptized means dying to sin. This is true, but not the whole truth. Baptism means dying, full stop. Baptism is not so much about changing lives as it is about ending them.
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” – Blaise Pascal, Pensées no. 425
Contrary to popular belief, the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal did not coin the phrase “God-shaped hole,” at least not in so many words. The quotation above, drawn from his fragmentary work Pensées, is the closest he comes to doing so. Arguably, though, the “God-shaped hole” of the vernacular and Pascal’s “infinite abyss” express the same idea.
In a previous paragraph, Pascal declares that “all men seek happiness,” even “those who hang themselves.” They employ a bewildering variety of means to achieve happiness (including, apparently, cabbages – go read it yourself), but “without faith,” these are all doomed to failure. Only an infinite object, after all, can fill an infinite abyss.
“Mo money, mo problems,” a philosopher once said. Or, to be more precise, moving up the socioeconomic ladder creates (or uncovers) problems that are more sophisticated.
I recently came across a relatively minor but telling example of this phenomenon. Towards the beginning of this year my wife began developing digestive complaints; after some doctor appointments and research, she decided to make some specific dietary changes. These included buying “sensitive recipe” pasta sauce made without onion or garlic, which can be hard on the small intestine.
One evening I was tasked with going to Schnucks* and picking up a couple jars of this sauce. There happen to be two Schnuckses in our general vicinity, which I’ll respectively call Working Class Schnucks (WCS) and Middle Class Schnucks (MCS) based on the following data pulled from the 2017 American Community Survey:
WCS zip code median household income: $32,851
MCS zip code median household income: $52,224
A week or two before Christmas 2016, a man in his mid-to-late thirties stopped by the office of the church where I was working at the time. He had several Walmart bags full of princess dolls, Disney coloring books, other toys for young girls. By some clerical error, a church in Granite City, IL (about thirty minutes away) had donated them to him even though he didn’t have daughters of the right age to enjoy them. He wanted to hand them over to our church’s own Christmas toy drive, which he had somehow heard about.
I thanked the man and we talked for a few minutes afterwards. Feeling the need, I imagine, to explain why he was the recipient of toy drive donations in the first place, he told me that he had been laid off eleven months earlier by the U.S. Steel plant in Granite City. The year had been very difficult, he said, “but God makes a way for you to get through it.” Then he smiled and left.
Mockingbird Ministries was kind enough to post one of my pieces, entitled “Adam Smith and the Nature of Heaven.” It delves into how the popular idea that “good people go to heaven” kind of misunderstands what heaven actually is. You can check it out here, and make sure you browse through more of the awesome content Mockingbird has to offer. Thanks!
Christchurch, New Zealand | Getty Images
There is no one explanation, and perhaps no real explanation, for why someone would walk into a public space and gun down dozens of people he’s never seen before. In some cases, like the terrorist attack in Christchurch, we can appeal to “ideology” in an attempt to make sense of what has happened. Put very simply, an ideology is a set of beliefs about the way the world should be (i.e., a set of ideals) coupled, almost always, by an account of why the world is not that way. And such an account usually involves “those people.”
“Those people” ensure that the world remains a middling-to-bad place because of their own ideologies, behavior, or even their very existence. “Those people” oppress the proletariat; they undermine family values; they maintain the heteronormative patriarchy; they’ve come here to take our jobs.
“One of the things that held me back from Supernaturalism was a deep repugnance to the view of Nature which, as I thought, Supernaturalism entailed. I passionately desired that Nature should exist ‘on her own’… the thought that she had been manufactured or ‘put there’, and put there with a purpose, was suffocating…
To find that all the woods, and small streams in the middle of the woods, and odd corners of mountain valleys, and the wind and the grass were only a sort of scenery, only backcloths for some kind of play, and that play perhaps one with a moral – what flatness, what an anti-climax, what an unendurable bore!”
– C.S. Lewis, Miracles
There’s an early episode of House, MD in which the good doctor describes a personal near-death experience. Although he generally makes something of a hobby out of ridiculing religious belief, in this case House doesn’t immediately dismiss a colleague’s suggestion that he had made contact with eternity. There’s no way to know, he admits. Nonetheless, he chooses (his word) to believe that what he experienced was nothing more than the last chemical reactions of a brain closing shop, because “I find it more comforting to believe that this [life] isn’t simply a test.”
A couple of weeks ago, the Christian Post published a piece I wrote on the “deaths of despair” epidemic afflicting the white working class in the US. You can find it here.
Last year I served as volunteer chaplain at a hospital in Saint Louis. One afternoon, in the course of my rounds, I visited a black patient with an extra-large King James Version Bible situated prominently on his tray. I asked him about it, and he immediately asked me what I thought about salvation. Giving the standard grace-through-faith-in-Christ answer, I quickly found myself on the receiving end of an increasingly aggressive declarations that Jesus was, in fact, a black man. At first I voiced disagreement, but then I realized discussion was useless and instead asked the patient why this belief was so important to him. He ignored my question and continued to explain that the apostles were black, as was Moses, as were the people of Israel (it seems that modern Jews are impostors).
As he continued pontificating on the all-black cast of biblical characters with growing vehemence, I felt my heart beating fast and my blood pressure rising. Eventually I interrupted him and repeated my question: “Why does this make such a difference to you?”
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