praegustum terrestrium

Sitting around your table
as we did, able
to laugh, argue, share
bread and wine and companionship, care
about what someone else was saying, even
if we disagreed passionately: Heaven,
we’re told, is not unlike this, the banquet celestial,
eternal convivium. So the praegustum terrestrium
partakes—for me, at least—of sacrament.
(Whereas the devil, ever intent
on competition, invented the cocktail party where
one becomes un-named, un-manned, de-personned.) Dare
we come together, then, vulnerable, open, free?
Yes! Around your table we
knew the Holy Spirit, come to bless
the food, the host, the hour, the willing guest.

Madeleine L’Engle

in the midst of them all

From Albert Barnes’s commentary on Matthew 28:20 (emphasis mine):

There am I in the midst of them – Nothing could more clearly prove that Jesus must be omnipresent, and, of course, be God. Every day, perhaps every hour, two or three, or many more, may be assembled in every city or village in the United States, in England, in Greenland, in Africa, in Ceylon, in the Sandwich Islands, in Russia, and in Judea – in almost every part of the world – and in the midst of them all is Jesus the Saviour. Millions thus at the same time, in every quarter of the globe, worship in his name, and experience the truth of the promise that he is present with them. It is impossible that he should be in all these places and not be God.

where two or three (hundred?) are gathered

“He who has ears let him hear.” With that admonition, a Christian leader in the region of central Maine (who shall remain nameless) recently posted a link to a call for churches to defy government mandates, which comes from John MacArthur and the elders at Grace Community Church. Putting aside the fact that, according to said leader, this 2000-word blog post is too lengthy for most of us and too truth-laden for anyone but the elect to appreciate, and putting aside the cringe-worthy problem of equating “what the Spirit says to the church” with what is, despite MacArthur’s disclaimer, ultimately a defense of the First Amendment masquerading as biblical authority, and also putting aside the enormously problematic argument from MacArthur that government limits on large gatherings “in principle” prevent the church from being the church—I see little connection between anything MacArthur says and the scripture he references; and I see no connection between the scripture he references and our current situation. None.

I don’t deny that there can be problems with government mandates. Nor do I deny that the church “must obey God rather than men.” But what that obedience looks like and what it requires of us as citizens is not easy to nail down, and certainly hasn’t, to my understanding, been well represented here by MacArthur. I also affirm the truth of every verse MacArthur links to. But as I see it, these scriptural passages, rather than being representative proofs, seem more than a little politically abused and parenthetically imprisoned on the page: open them up and they fly far, far away from MacArthur’s exhortation, as the context of Acts 5:29 alone should suffice to show.

Perhaps most alarmingly, MacArthur makes a point of saying that “the Lord may be using these pressures as means of purging to reveal the true church.” Maybe. It could very well be a chance to reveal the “true church.” Who knows. But if it is, I highly doubt that the litmus test will be the refusal of the true church to consider public health (i.e. love of neighbor) over its accustomed form of “worship.” More likely, the reason will be that the true church knows how to meet and to worship and to serve its Lord outside of a building, and it will likely be too concerned with emulating the true spirit of Christ in the world to be very concerned with signing some confused petition or to complain about the church’s “right” to meet in large, medium, or small numbers.

That said, I think this response from Jonathan Leeman is eminently (if not excessively) gracious. I really do envy the humility in his grammatical voice and his meekness in simply saying, “Four things are worth mentioning.” They are. And they are certainly worth reading, which is more than I can say for MacArthur’s clarion call.

Things that matter

A unique individual is not someone who has a single undivided view of the world and speaks with one voice on every subject. In fact, the most certain sign that someone has anesthetized individuality in service of some ideology or party line is that he has a consistent, unequivocal answer to every question. Individuality is a continuous process of arguing against your own beliefs—an argument that is sometimes a friendly intellectual debate, sometimes a passionate emotional battle…. Everyone knows that fictional characters in novels debate different points of view with each other. What is less obvious is that, behind the scenes, unheard by the characters, the author’s inner voices are also arguing with each other over which story to tell and how to tell it. This is not a sign of weak-mindedness or inconsistency, but of intellectual flexibility and strength. The authors refuse to be satisfied by simple or straightforward explanations of complex things, and they repeatedly correct the flaws of one explanation by exploring a different one.

Edward Mendelson, The Things That Matter

Interestingly, that’s one of three books on the shelf with almost the same great title, all worth reading: The Things That Matter, Things That Matter, and Things That Count. And a potential fourth: Leading Lives That Matter. All of them seem to echo—and, if I could remember, they probably quote—Socrates’s famous line in Plato’s Republic: “We are discussing no small matter, but the right conduct of life.”

in medias res

To quote the great Jerome Lester Horwitz: “I’ll take the end in the middle.”

This has to start somewhere, so why not start with a personal favorite.

Do we want to be strong?—we must work. To be hungry?—we must starve. To be happy?—we must be kind. To be wise?—we must look and think. No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour, nor making of stuffs a thousand yards a minute, will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. And they will at last, and soon too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing….We shall be obliged at last to confess, what we should long ago have known, that the really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.

John Ruskin, The Moral Landscape