Fatherhood’s Collapse, Love’s Destruction

  • September 8, 2015
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  • Park Forum

1 Corinthians 13.13

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. 

There are few ways to understate the brokenness of fatherhood in our culture. The Washington Times reports that 11% of kids grew up in a home without a father in 1960. Today that number is over 33%.

“The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of. There has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer.” — Lawrence Tone, Princeton Historian

Paternal absence is so high — near pandemic — that we have barely began a public conversation on quality or character of fathers. For many, it wasn’t a father’s absence, but the character and quality of his presence that left the deepest wounds.
While Scripture uses many images for God, few of them create the mixed emotions of talking about God as Father. The effects of this reaction cannot be underestimated. Our view of love is anemic because our view of fatherhood is so damaged. It is God’s fatherhood that gives the depth, intimacy, and love we desire most.

If God is only a teacher, we miss the relational depth we need. If he is only creator we lack intimacy with him (he is like a watchmaker). If he’s only a judge he can love the law, but isn’t required to love the one in his courtroom.

The Christian view of God as father does not simply take the characteristics of earthly fathers and polish them up a bit. God as our Father creates a new image of a good, true, and perfect Father.
But where is this fatherhood rooted? The Bible says God is love. Not just that he has love or shows love, but that his very nature is love. In this sense, 1 Corinthians 13 could be paraphrased:

Dad is patient. Dad is kind. Dad does not envy or boast. Dad is not arrogant. Dad is not rude. Dad does not insist on his own way. Dad is not irritable. Dad is not resentful. Dad does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Dad bears all things for his kids. Dad believes all things about his kids. Dad hopes all things for his kids. Dad endures all things for his kids. Dad’s love never ends.

Today’s Reading
2 Samuel 2 (Listen – 5:07)
1 Corinthians 13 (Listen – 2:23)

Humor’s Moral Purpose :: The Weekend Reading List

  • September 4, 2015
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  • Park Forum
“Laughter has been implanted in our soul, that the soul may sometime be refreshed.” — John Chrysostom
Stephen Colbert taking over the desk of The Late Show this coming Tuesday is the crescendo of the past two decades of comedy. Modern comedy’s cocktail of political satire, tongue-in-cheek commentary, investigative reporting, nonsense, and Roonian rants — neatly packaged to go viral online — is now firmly rooted in prime time.

Scripture instructs believers to pray for “kings, and all who are in high positions.” Praying for those in government is often talked about; praying for cultural influencers (those “in high positions”) is often overlooked.
“For however often Jon Stewart and Colbert dismissed the notion that they had any mission beyond the (very difficult) one of telling great jokes, they had become a portal through which viewers made sense of American insanity. Their shows served as dense clouds of satirical antimatter.” — Joel Lovell
The Atlantic observes that “there are two broad things happening right now—comedy with moral messaging, and comedy with mass attention—and their combined effect is this: Comedians have taken on the role of public intellectuals.”
“Amy Schumer on misogyny, Key and Peele on terrorism, Louis C.K. on parenting, Sarah Silverman on Rand Paul, John Oliver on FIFA … these are bits intended not just to help us escape from the realities of the world, but also, and more so, to help us understand them. Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.” — Megan Garber
Long before the comedic pundits of today, G.K. Chesterton asserted that, “Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.” While not all comedians are truth tellers, we can’t overlook the nuance and depth of work in those trying to integrate faith, truth, and goodness into satire.
GQ called Colbert “one of the country’s few public moral intellectuals.” The fashion magazine’s cover story highlights his faith as a core component of both the comedian’s worldview and work. At his previous show, Colbert had a quote from Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin taped to his screen: “Joy is the most infallible sign of the existence of God.”
“That impulse to be grateful, wants an object. That object I call God. Now, that could be many things. I was raised in a Catholic tradition. I’ll start there. That’s my context for my existence, is that I am here to know God, love God, serve God, that we might be happy with each other in this world and with Him in the next—the catechism. That makes a lot of sense to me. I got that from my mom. And my dad. And my siblings.” — Stephen Colbert
As Colbert alludes, modern comedy may continue to influence culture and belief, but faith is handed down from family and cultivated by the church.
Martin Luther believed that “You have as much laughter as you have faith.” Because of grace Christians are free to enjoy satire. The firm foundation of faith allows us to laugh at our sometimes absurd world while also trusting a God whose love, grace, and justice transcend our momentary realities.
Today’s Reading
1 Samuel 28 (Listen – 4:04)
1 Corinthians 9 (Listen – 4:04)
This Weekend’s Readings
Saturday: 1 Samuel 29-30 (Listen – 6:13); 1 Corinthians 10 (Listen – 4:04)
Sunday: 1 Samuel 31 (Listen – 2:03); 1 Corinthians 11 (Listen – 4:20)
The Weekend Reading List

TBT :: Let Us Use Our Freedom for the Benefit of Others

  • September 3, 2015
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  • Park Forum
1 Corinthians 8.1, 9
“Knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up”…. take care that this right of yours (freedom in Christ) does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

By Saint Polycarp c. 125 C.E.

I rejoiced with you greatly in our Lord Jesus Christ… though you did not see Him, you believe with joy unutterable and full of glory; unto which joy many desire to enter in; forasmuch as you know that it is by grace you are saved, not of works, but by the will of God through Jesus Christ.

Be compassionate, merciful towards all men, turning back the sheep that are gone astray, visiting all the infirm, not neglecting a widow or an orphan or a poor man: but providing always for that which is honorable in the sight of God and of men, abstaining from all anger, respect of persons, unrighteous judgment, being far from all love of money, not quick to believe anything against any man, not hasty in judgment, knowing that we all are debtors of sin.

If then we entreat the Lord that He would forgive us, we also ought to forgive: for we are before the eyes of our Lord and God, and we must all stand at the judgment-seat of Christ, and each man must give an account of himself.

Let us therefore so serve Him with fear and all reverence, as He himself gave commandment and the Apostles who preached the Gospel to us and the prophets who proclaimed beforehand the coming of our Lord.

Let us therefore, without ceasing, hold fast by our hope and by the earnest of our righteousness, which is Jesus Christ who took up our sins in His own body upon the tree, who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth, but for our sakes He endured all things, that we might live in Him.

Let us therefore become imitators of His endurance; and if we should suffer for His name’s sake, let us glorify Him. For He gave this example to us in His own person, and we believed this.

— Abridged and language updated from The Epistle of Saint Polycarp to Phillipi.

Prayers from the Past
You created everything, sovereign Lord, for the glory of your name. You gave food and drink to men for their enjoyment, as an occasion of thanksgiving and to us you have given the blessing of spiritual food and drink and eternal life through your Child. Above all we thank you because you are powerful.

— Anonymous, excerpt from one of the oldest eucharistic prayers, in Didache 9-10.

 

Today’s Readings
1 Samuel 27 (Listen – 1:59)
1 Corinthians 8 (Listen – 1:54)

How Shall We Live?

  • September 2, 2015
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  • Bethany Jenkins

1 Corinthians 7:31
(From now on let) those who deal with the world live as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. 

Each of us has only one life. This is it. Our time is valuable and our face-to-face meeting with the Lord is imminent and real. As Paul writes, “The appointed time has grown very short … For the present form of this world is passing away.”

How shall we live?

Mourn as Though We are Not Mourning
We mourn. We are sad over great losses – e.g., family, friends, health, dreams. Yet we mourn as though we are not mourning because we know that we cannot lose our ultimate treasure – Christ’s love. Thus, our losses don’t destroy us. We say, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Our losses are modest. We lose now, but win in eternity.

We rejoice. We take joy in the thousands of good gifts from God. Beautiful weather. Great food and friends. Art and music. Yet we know that these things cannot satisfy our souls. Only Christ can. Even our present fellowship with him is a mere foretaste: “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” Thus, our joys are modest. They give us tastes of what is to come.

We buy things. We don’t withdraw from commerce. Yet business doesn’t possess us. We don’t love money. Our cars, homes, e-readers, iPhones – we hold them loosely. If they are taken, we sense that they were never really ours because Christ is more valuable than anything money can buy. We’re not here on earth to own things; we’re here to lay up treasures in heaven.

Deal With The World as Though We Have No Dealings With It
We engage with the world. We don’t avoid it or approach it with spiritual dichotomies. Yet we don’t ascribe final greatness to it. We know that there are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. We work with all our hearts, but our full passions belong to the heavenly kingdom.

Prayer
Lord, our lives are short and precious. Let us, therefore, live in death’s inevitability so that we mourn and rejoice and buy and engage as though we are not mourning or rejoicing or buying or engaging. Grow us deep in you as our ultimate treasure. Amen.

 

Today’s Readings

1 Samuel 26 (Listen – 4:30)
1 Corinthians 7 (Listen – 6:09)

The Weight of Sin

  • September 1, 2015
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  • Park Forum

1 Corinthians 6:13
The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

Evil is insidiously multidimensional. In one regard its presence degrades our hope in others — especially those we look up to for their authority or celebrity. Such was the case over the past two weeks in the wake of the Ashley Madison data hacking; the celebrity names associated with Christianity came first.

The problem is not that celebrities have let Christianity down, but that far too many have counted too much on celebrities to validate their faith.

Yet another dimension of evil is its ability to victimize even perpetrators. We sometimes try to dismiss this for fear that understanding a person’s reason will justify their actions. Relativism has led us here — because evil in the face of truth and goodness cannot be explained into feasibility.
Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman regularly gloated over a “1:1 male/female ratio among the under 30-set.” The reality of the hacking data revealed just 15% (5 of 35 million names) were women.
The Daily Telegraph reports that, “(FBI) examinations of the database suggest many of the female profiles on the site were created by a relatively small number of individuals.” Ashley Madison effectively acted as a sexual predator to entice and seduce men in order to extract money (membership dues).

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. — C.S. Lewis

Evil’s final act in this moment will be to destroy the lives of victims and perpetrators alike — through divorce, job loss, depression, anxiety, and suicide. It is savage and vile. But we are not left to ourselves. We are not without hope. Evil cannot eclipse the multifaceted beauty of good.

Ultimately the Christian sexual ethic is not about less sex, or even regulated sex, but more integrated sex. Sex that flourishes and fulfills on every level of the marital experience.

In his book Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis provides the contrast, “The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.”

 

Today’s Readings

1 Samuel 25 (Listen – 7:12)
1 Corinthians 6 (Listen – 3:03)