Servants Indentured and Beggars Relieved

"Each man is a slave to his own spirit."

During the days of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, hard work was the high moral, the principle behind the Greatest Commandment of the spirit of the age.  The Classical Era has been cited as a time when beauty was held in highest reverence.  Tolerance and equality command the pens of today's historians, and we think in terms of ourselves.  And how could we not?  

The great issue of all time has been personal liberty, and it has never been achieved, nor (praise Heaven) will it be, in the modern sense.  The list of totalistic libertarians stretches from Adam to Judas to me, and yet each man (including my students, with little prompting) can recognize the fact that he is enslaved.  The high vocabulary includes "success" and "adventure" and "love," but each of these has taken on a personal meaning and lost its value.  Should I be a slave to any of these things, as many are, indeed, my life will be an enslavement to my own selfish spirit.

When I discussed this with my students, they said that we choose our masters.  I didn't bring up God's sovereignty with them, because they mostly aren't Christians and are being evangelized to.  That'd be like saying, "Become a Christian; you might do it anyway."  However, I feel that a short mention of it is appropriate here.  Will we indeed be slaves to God of His choosing?  I certainly believe so!  For I cannot change my blemished spirt for His Holy Spirit.  The desire to do so doesn't even originate in me.  But I am an indentured servant to the Man of the Cross, doing His work and set free to exist as is right.  

Mundane?

What a gift it is to be a Christian, to be saved, to be free!  To live out a story of infinite adventure among people of infinite value wherein the real Protagonist is infinitely good, that is what I want to be a part of.  And I am!  Hemingway covers the idea this way:  "All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."

Now, I don't think that ol' Ernest is being postmodern or is executing historical philosophy here, but I do think he's saying something about the reality presented in the great stories.  These are the ones where we feel deep connection, where we long for the ultimate defeat of the bad guy, and where we stand alongside the hero.  When we admire Beowulf, when we despise Voldemort, when we observe the heroic end of Arthur, we are seeking deeper realities than mundane, scheduled life.

Today, in Life of Christ, I was introducing my students to the calling of the disciples.  If only they could see that these stories are just colorful blips on the radar of our stories, what then? Going on from there, if we'd realize that our stories are just pixels on the IMAX screen of God's story, how much more joyful, more essential, more alive would each of our actions be!

At least I'm learning something...

According to my government students, I must be the best Bible teacher ever.

According to my Bible students, I might not even teach Bible.

I'm not too worried about that, though.  I really am enjoying working through the life of Christ and giving my 10th grade students mini-sermons that I think are synoptically snazzy.  I was teaching about the baptism of Christ today, and I really learned a lot from it.  I'm not sure if they did or not, but the homework pretty much reiterates the whole point, so whatever.

I was talking about how baptism has its roots in the Jews baptizing Gentiles into the Promise, which has its roots in the Jews passing through the Red Sea.  Now, I've argued fairly thoroughly with Ben Johnson about baptism, whether babies should be baptized or not, and, as I told my students today, I'm not terribly worried about that question compared to the understanding of the symbolism.  Let's take a quick look at the ol' passage through that Arabian body of water:

The Jews were coming out of Egypt, where they were in slavery, led by Moses, the soon-to-be lawgiver, into the Promised Land (if only they'd go in).  What would this possibly picture on a deeper level?  Well, I thought about it in the way I figured Jud Davis, my New Testament professor would, and I came up with something that seems fairly legitimate.  Passage from slavery through the law into the Promise.  That's what goes on.  Now, Moses doesn't get people into the Promised Land, because they're too scared to enter.  However, the Fulfillment of the law brings everyone into the ultimate Promised Land.

Get it?  Jesus' baptism is a picture of our salvation!  I don't think I did any sketchy Bible work to see that; the picture is slavery to promise, and as John the Baptizer says, Jesus' baptizes us not with water, but with the Holy Spirit.

Well dip me or sprinkle me, but I want some of that.

Runner's High for the second time.

Last night, I went for a run, following the setting sun into the Western frontier and all that, and the sky was just beautiful.  The colors here, as Amy and I marvel at time and again, are consistently unbelievable (sounds like an oxymoron, I know).  As I ran, I noticed that I'd reached a point where I didn't feel the pain anymore, and I recalled the first time that had happened.

I was running to work one morning in Rwanda, my iPod in my ear, looking pretty outlandish to the locals, and it was shuffling from one song about the Gospel to another.  I was getting pretty excited, and I remember thinking "I don't think I can usually run this fast, this long."  Well, I did.  And I passed Kim and Trigger as they were walking, and I said something that made them respond in a way that said I was not acting normal, especially for someone running in the morning that close to the Equator.

The same things was going on this time.  Ipod in, Jars of Clay blasting my eardrums, and I was thinking about the chapel presentation I'm giving tomorrow.  But I was listening to these songs about running away from Someone who just wants to love me, and I kept thinking, "Why do I always concentrate on the harshness of the Gospel?  The truth is grace and freedom!"

I don't think it's just because I was having runner's high for the second time that I thought that; I think God was really trying to remind me that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath:

Eternity is a gift for us, and that truth is fundamental to understanding before you start thinking about sacrificing all of yourself.

In Suriname, by Providence

In Suriname, by Providence, my restive strength was beached.

What was the lesson, Providence, You fore-ordained to teach?

I seek to own, by charity, whatever You bestow

For all from You is charity, since You came here below.

Pray, break me through, Omnipotence, that I no longer dream

Of aught but You Omnipotent; remove my optic beam.

When all that's left is faithfulness, Your own image divine

Will fly forth from my faithfulness, because it is not mine.

So I will aid in Suriname as acts Your church commutes,

Until, when they say "Suriname," I hear Your attributes.

And yes, that is a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic heptameter.

The Christian Goal of the Eight-Fold Path

Today, I practiced a learning exercise that really does a lot for me: teaching. I did teach six times today, actually, but there was one main point at which I was really getting something from what I said. Hopefully, the students found my insight more valuable.

In world history, I covered the foundations of ancient India and China. This required a little on the Indo-Aryans, a little on the Huang river, and a lot on Hinduism and Buddhism. I was particularly interested in teaching this as I have a student whose mother is a Hindu, which is the basis for her own "faith." Well, I explained the basic teaching of the fragmentation of the Brahman and the karmatic cycle of reincarnation and the caste system and did a decent job of laying out the rudiments in the time I had. I went on to Buddhism, and I was talking about the "Noble Eight-Fold Path" when I said something I hadn't thought of before:

"See, the whole point of the eight-fold path is to get rid of desires. You can compare this to the Christian doctrine of dying to self."

Whoa, whoa, hang on, Conner. I'd just stumbled upon the idea that the main ethical teaching of Buddhism is comparable to salvific and sancitific principles in Christianity. But the whole point is totally backwards.

In Buddhism, the goal is to lose oneself in the One, the Life Force, the Brahman. To become nothing. In Christianity, the goal is to unite with the One, the Godhead, the Christ. To become whole.

While both religions teach a strange sort of brokenness (fragmentation in one, fallenness in the other), one teaches total annihiliation as the ultimate good, and one teaches total glorification as the ultimate good. Huge.

New blog

First things first: Amy and I now have a blog with current events in our lives. This way, you can see what's going on without having to muddle through all my thoughts on this blog. The URL is: http://connerandamyarmstrong.blogspot.com/

And now to the thoughts that you're welcome to muddle through.

My subject today is all my hope and yet I feel like I'm only reconciled to it, not really hoping in it: Heaven.

"When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it." Matt. 13:46


I talked about this passage in my Bible class yesterday, mainly because I have one student in there who thinks that the Bible is plausibly true but is not going to throw his life into it, at least not yet. As you and I are well aware, this is problematic. You can't think the Bible is true and not put your faith in it. As Sheldon VanAuken writes in A Severe Mercy, "No one is incidentally a Christian." No, this pearl is not for putting on the shelf and looking at. It is the thing for which we get rid of all others to own. He sold everything so he could own a pearl of infinite value. He gave it all up.

And that's our calling. My calling is to forget my dreams and dream a better one. As I wrote in my poem, a few blogs below, "There are higher mountains in Heaven than the ones you've missed." But the ones I've missed here on earth on the ones I feel for. My calling is to admit the ache I have for the things I sojourn with on earth and pass them by for the Pearl of Greatest Price.

I don't understand why it's so hard to choose Something that's better anyway.