Month: July 2011

The Dream of the Alabaster Coffin

Posted on by CM

The other night I had a dream and have written it down here so that you can help me understand what it means.  In the dream I saw a knight riding upon a white horse.  He was riding between trees that looked like columns, holding up the sky.  The knight came within sight of a castle with its drawbridge down.  Without a stop his steed thundered across the bridge, causing the bricks of the castle to tremble.  He crossed under the portcullis and expected to enter into the courtyard.  Instead the gate led directly into a tunnel of rough-hewn stone.  The farther this tunnel went on the closer together the walls came and the ceiling and floor to each other.  Soon became so low that the knight had to dismount from his horse and walk.  Where it headed he knew not, but it went straight and slopped slowly downward as if heading for the very heart of the mountain.

The tunnel was not void of like as you would expect.  Rather the rocks had their own pale light which did not come as a reflection from any outside source.  Because of the narrowness of the passage the knight was finally forced to abandon his horse.  He followed it sometime alone.  It was only just wide and high enough for him to fit through, as if made for him and him alone.

After traveling an hour he came steadily to see a white light ahead of him which grew as he traveled towards it.  It was not the bluish light of the rock, but the color of sunlight.  After first he disbelieved his eyes, believing himself to still be in the depths of the mountain.  However, his mind was not playing a trick on him.  He finally entered a wide cavern in which he could not see the opposite wall.

In the middle a single beam of white light was cascading from the ceiling to the floor.  In fact that was all that could be seen in the cavern and he stood contemplating it for a while.  As if waking from a dream, he suddenly realized how thick the place was with enchantment.  How do you describe the feeling of enchantment to one who has not felt it?  It is an unearthly silence with seems to rise from the earth.  The air you breathe feels heavy, making it hard to breathe.  To call it an electric feeling would be close to the truth.  All the while there is an expectation that something is going to happen.  The longer you stay there more is builds and builds until you can hardly stand it.

Looking to where the light was falling the knight saw a smooth alabaster stone on the floor.  The beam was pouring over and through it.  Walking down to it he discovered it was long and rectangular.  The knight sat on it and began passing his hand over its milky surface.  In doing so he discovered that you could almost see into it.  He peered into its depths and thought he could just make out a lump in it, like a ribbon of opaque stone.  He looked deeper, contemplating the flaw in the stone, until he realized that it wasn’t a flaw, but a figure, encased in the alabaster stone.  It was the figure of a woman or a young lady.  He could see the figure, ill-defined as it was, through the translucent rock, but there could be no doubt there was a person encased in the stone.

The lady in the stone appeared to be looking upward along the beam of light coming down on her.  Curious, the knight leaned over and looked along the beam too.  Instead of blinding white light he saw something else.  It was the blue sky.  He saw the moon in her noon day journey, caught in the green leaves of a tree.  How far the light had traveled to meet his eye he didn’t consider.  He simply enjoyed the light.  This was what the lady in stone beheld in the dark heart of the mountain.  When the knight had finished looking along the beam he considered the lady.

How long had she lain there was something the knight could not guess.  As this was an enchanted place, he wondered if she were once alive.  Perhaps she was still alive! A prisoner encased in this alabaster coffin by some spell.  What was the cause of her coming to lie there and what was the way to free her?

At this point I woke up in a bit of a daze.  I tried hard to fall asleep and return to the dream but it was no use.  The dream was gone.  I could only contemplate what had happened in the dream, not experience the dream itself.  If, perhaps, you know the meaning of the dream let me know.

Orthodoxy and Doctrine

Posted on by CM

It seems that many modern churches shy away from talking about doctrine.  Perhaps they have seen it abused in the past with frivolous doctrinal debates and the teaching of graceless dogma.  Then again there is a whole trend towards “seeker sensitive” services which are geared towards making the unchurched feel comfortable at church.  To that end sermons are much more focused creating a certain kind of experience and are more self-help oriented.  Doctrine is avoided because it is the dry, lifeless stuff in the background.  I think this is really a shame because the doctrine is really some of the most exciting stuff.

Doctrine is the sharp, piercing sword behind belief.  It gives what otherwise could be a cloudy faith some teeth and a backbone.  It creates a line that says, “You shall not pass.”  It is in its own way romantic and marvelous.  Orthodoxy doctrine proclaims that Jesus was God and man.  He was God that walked on the earth.  To really understand this is to realize how offensive it is to all other religions and beliefs systems in the world.  Further is to realize how much like a fairy tale or great myth it sounds like.  If we don’t feel its weight it is likely because our understanding of God and our understanding of man is shallow.

Orthodoxy doctrine proclaims our fall.  In the words of G.K. Chesterton we are the survivors of a golden ship that went down.  From unimaginable greatness we have fallen through a curse.  How many stories are about an ordinary person who discovers they were really royalty or someone great?  (Star Wars anyone).  We are such, incapable of breaking free on our own.  We need a Deliverer to come free us from the slavery and bondage we are in.

Doctrine presents something old and ancient.  All of us want to be part of something older and larger than ourselves.  Orthodoxy presents one long root, reaching back into the past, which we can be a part of.  It provides something to ground ourselves with in a world which is always shifting and changing.  We become a part of the same unbroken line as Peter, Augustine, Athanasius, and Martin Luther.

If you look back at the past you will see a curious thing about orthodoxy Christian doctrine.  People are always proclaiming its death, only to die themselves.  Marx’s communism is crumbling all over the world while the opiate for the mass is strong as ever.  Nietzsche is dead and Freud’s religion of wish fulfillment is wish fulfillment.  Even the New Atheists will eventually find themselves old, while orthodoxy Christianity will continue to be alive and fresh in each new age.

Love and Free Will

Posted on by CM

One aspect of our being that God guards the most is our free will.  Naturally, we had no choice about being given free will, but once it was given to the first human beings by God he has respected it.  Nowhere is this more evident than in his love for us.

As the writers of the Septuagint were translating the Hebrew Old Testament into a Greek version they chose to use the Greek word agape to describe God’s love, rather than the more common word eros.  Eros was the more typically word used for the love of the gods for human beings, but it described a love that was unlike that of the God of the Old Testament.  It was the love that Zeus might display to a mortal woman.  A glimpse of his radiant glory and she would be completely consumed by his burning love, unable to resist.  It was the equivalent of emotional rape.  Whether one wanted to our not, they had to accept the eros of the gods.

The God of the Old Testament, though clearly having this ability, never used it.  He was content to offer his abundant love, but never demanded that is must be requited or returned.  Obedience yes, love no.

The nature of free will is that one always has the option of saying no.  When God gave Adam and Eve free will he knew that they had the potential, and in fact would, use it to disobey him.  I think it is fascinating that God affected the curse when they ate from the tree.  He could have chosen not to.  Instead, he valued their free will so much that he gave them the freedom to experience the consequences of their actions.  In this he was showing his love.  To withdraw his punishment would to be to negate their freedom, to have their wills consumed by his will.  When someone’s will ceases to be their own they begin to become a part of, or one with, the one who holds their will.  In a sense they lose part of their ability to be an individual human being.  God wanted to not only love Himself as he does in the Trinity, but to love something outside himself and to be loved back.  Only individuals with free will can do this.

It is one of the reasons why I believe, in addition to the Biblical evidence, that there is no universal salvation.  If God saves people whether they want to or not, he has denied their free will and destroyed their ability to freely love him.  Love is no longer love.  As odd as it may sound, there will be in the end people who do not want to spend eternity with God.  Hell is not where they are forced to go against their will, but their preference, a truly terrifying place.  God can go up to the very knife edge in trying to motivate us to come to him but he not push us over, that is a step we have to take.

Of course when we cross over we face a life of daily giving over our will to God.  It is a constant surrender of our ambitions, desires, goals, and dreams.  We pray that our will will become his.  This is where an odd thing happens.  All this time God has been careful not to force himself on us or break our will.  Now we hand our will over to him like a bent bicycle tire which will not travel straight.  It is one we have been trying forever to return to the right shape.  He takes it and disappears in the back for a while and then returns with the tire completely fixed and hands it back to us.  “Here this is yours now, I have fixed it,” he says.  Our broken and bent will has been made straight so that they point to him.  When we voluntarily give them up to him, he gives them back to us.  Only by giving our will over to God will it truly become our own, free from the effects of the fallen life in which we live.  This is something that must be done constantly in every crack and crevice of our lives and in more formal language is called sanctification.  Only in this way will we finally be able to return his love of our own free will, untainted by any impure motives.

I want to end this with a little reflection on our own love for each other.  Where God is carefully not to cross the line, we humans often rush across.  It is common for human love to become the consuming eros.  This occurs when we love someone so much (in reality not enough) that we try to control them and make them something they are not.  It happens when a parent tries to conform his or her child to a certain vision or future they have for them.  It is motivated by a loving parent who truly wants the best for their child.  However, if he or she tramples the child’s will then it is not love, rather it is a consuming love, making the child’s will become a part of their own.  It happens too with jealous and controlling husbands and wives who try to make their spouses into something or someone they are not.

God’s love for us is a better picture.  The child freely submitting to a parent who is engaged in the delicate process of helping them become the unique person that God has designed them to be.  In the marriage relationship the couple mutually submitting their wills to each other, becoming one person, and thereby becoming more uniquely their own than they could have been separately.   God’s love provides the model.

No Compromise

Posted on by CM

As much as I admire Bob Dylan’s music I also admire Bob Dylan the man.  He constantly threw off attempts to fit him into a mold, much to the frustration of his fans and critics.  As a young musician his music was adopted by the protest movement of the time and he became their hero.  They constantly tried to squeeze him into their own image, a common experience for heroes.  However, at the height of his fame he changed musical directions, to the outrage of his fans.  Other protest singers accused him of giving in to the system.  At the time it looked like a stupid career move for anyone wanting to make a name for him or herself.  Ironically, whenever I listen to Peter, Paul, and Mary or Joan Baez now I smile at a picture of a time gone by.  Whenever I listen to Bob Dylan I think.  You see Bob Dylan is the one still writing and performing while the protest singers are the ones stuck in time.  His music is relevant and challenging, theirs is nostalgic.

What I think set Bob Dylan apart was that he had a singular vision or aim.  He was focused on making good music, the music he wanted to make, not on being relevant or popular.  Of course he paid a heavy price for it with booing fans, who oddly still went to his concerts.  The same occurred with his so called Christian period.  When he was rejected and made fun off.  However, it is Bob Dylan and his music that have endured, not his critics.

Why I think this is significant is that I see a lot of churches acting like those infamous protest singers.  The church is always doing a delicate dance between being different from the culture and being relevant, sometimes both.  The Fundamentalists defined themselves by being different from the surrounding culture.  (If you don’t know who they are think of churches which still use the KJV).  Ironically they have become entirely embedded in the culture of the 1950’s, just like poodle skirts.

The Contemporary Christian Music movement tried the opposite approach, using the music of the time to sing about Christianity.  The paradox of this is that when you try to be relevant to the shifting culture of your era you become irrelevant as soon as the next trend comes.  Case in point, I seldom listen to the Christian music of my adolescence, except for fun now.  To stay relevant you must continually pay catch-up.  Pursuing relevance becomes self-defeating.

As I said above, I think Bob Dylan achieves relevance and avoids being trapped in time because he had a higher aim than both.  So with the church, their aim is not primarily protesting the culture or relevance, it is the pursuit of Christ.   By not pursuing to be relevant of counter-cultural you often become both.  By pursuing both, you become neither.  This shouldn’t be to us surprising since to save your life is to lose it and to lose your life for Christ is to save it.  Besides I think when you try to “make” Christ relevant you already have a problem.  He is timelessly relevant just the way he is.

What you are probably thinking now is, “Can you be a little more concrete?”  I will try to be but there is a part of this where it is a matter of Christians living Christ, through the Holy Spirit, in a way that is as unique and individual as they are.  Take, for instance, planning a sermon series.  Think not what is relevant at the time, but what the Scripture present as most relevant to life.  Odds are that it will be relevant in a deeper way than what is currently popular in the culture.  The truth of Christianity is that the world is broken and we are unable to fix it because we too are broken.  In my opinion this plan of action is that it is not likely to grow your church instantly or make it go viral.  Like Bob Dylan it may look like career suicide.  However, you must ask yourself what you want to be doing fifty years from now.  Do I want to be preforming reunion concerts for my aging fans or still be rocking?