Creeps Like Me

I’m preaching this weekend on the book of Ruth.  For such a small book, it has an amazing amount of depth.  Most basically it is a courtship story, but it also shines important light on Israel’s history, linking the time of the Judges to the monarchy.  One aspect of the book that has caught my interest is how it functions as a kind of Old Testament nativity story.  I don’t think my speculation about this should go in a sermon, so I thought I would mention it here.

When you start to compare Ruth with the nativity story of Jesus Christ, the contrasts and similarities are interesting.  At the most basic level, the book of Ruth is a nativity story because it ends in a birth, that of Obed the grandfather of David.  There is the obvious geographical similarity of Bethlehem as the place of birth.  Naomi experiences a sort of barrenness (like Elizabeth), and the conception of Obed is somewhat miraculous though not quite so miraculous as the conception of Jesus.  There is a father who leads his family out of Israel - Elimelech in rebellion but Joseph in obedience.  There is the fulness that Naomi experiences at the site of Obed which is simliar to the fullness of Anna at the site of Jesus. And there are royal genealogies.

The stretch of course is that Ruth doesn’t directly document the birth of David, but the birth of his grandfather.  So perhaps the similarities between the two nativity stories are not quite as significant as I am making them out to be.  Still, I find it interesting.

I’d be interested to hear some reactions to the following.  I find it a bit scary, convicting, and oddly inspiring all at the same time.  From an article by Dr. Russell Moore:

The reason we have made peace with the sexual revolution is because we are captive to the love of money.  Southern Baptist men and women want to live with the same standard of living as the culture around them, and, as the Spirit warns, we will grind our churches and our families to pieces to get there (James 4:1-4).

Why does the seemingly godly deacon in a conservative Southern Baptist church in north Georgia drive his pregnant teenage daughter to Atlanta under cover of darkness to obtain an abortion? Because, however he votes his “values,” when crisis hits, he wants his daughter to have a “normal” life. He is “pro-life” with, as one feminist leader put it three exceptions: rape, incest, and my situation.

Why do Southern Baptist parents, contra Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 7, encourage their young adult children to delay marriage years past the time it takes to discern whether this union would be of the Lord? Why do we smilingly tell them to wait until they can “afford” it?

It is because, to our shame, we deem fornication a less awful reality than financial ruin. Why do Southern Baptist pastors speak bluntly about homosexuality and X-rated movies, but never address the question of whether institutionalized day-care is good for children, or for parents?

It is because pastors know that couples would say that they could never afford to live on the provision of the husband alone. And they are right, if living means living in the neighborhoods in which they now live, with the technologies they now have. Christian pastors know that no godly woman will ever say on her deathbed, “If only I had put the children in daycare so that I could have pursued my career.”

But do Southern Baptist pastors ever ask whether it might be better to live in a one-bedroom apartment or a trailer park than to follow this American dream? Rarely, because it seems so inconceivable to us that it doesn’t even seem like an option.

When confronted with the challenge of a counter-cultural, family-affirming–but economically less acquisitive–life, too often we see what our inerrant Bibles define as the joyful life, and then we walk away saddened like another rich young ruler before us who wanted eternal life but wanted his possessions more (Luke 18:18-30).

Here Southern Baptists could stand to listen to some of our liberal critics, who deny a biblical understanding of the family but who seem to understand the connection between the whirl of familial destruction and the corporate culture we take for granted.

After all, they are not usually Greenwich Village bohemians in tie-dye shirts or eco-feminist Marxists with Darwin fish on their Volkswagen vans who are producing the cultural pornotopia that America is exporting around the world, and right into our churches.

They are more likely to be conservative Republicans in three-piece suits, and some of them know some Fanny Crosby songs by heart and know what a baptistery looks like from the inside. They vote their values too. Southern Baptists assume that consumer culture is morally neutral, and that American corporatism must be godly, since it is opposed so strongly by the culture warriors of the Left.

But the counter-culture there is an illusion. Both left and right in the American mainstream are captive to the ideology that the appetites are to be indulged; the heart wants what it wants, by whatever system will do it most efficiently.

Philosophers Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter are correct that the counter-culture and the consumer culture are symbiotic. As they put it, “In the end, it is just people fighting for their right to party.”  We should ask, then, whether Ralph Nader (yes, that Ralph Nader) is right that television advertising is a threat to the family order, since “corporations have decided that kids under twelve are a lucrative market, and they sell directly to them, subverting parental authority.”

Could it be that Ronald McDonald and digitalized talking “Christian” vegetable cartoons are just as erosive of the family as the cultural rot we are accustomed to denouncing? Could it be that the consumer culture we mimic in our own church and denominational programs is, in reality, just as hedonistic as a truck-stop “peep show” booth, and for the same reasons?

---

Our beloved dog, Gus, has recently undergone a trial-by-knife, or more accurately, a trial-by-clippers.  You see we finally decided to get him a proper haircut, but the results were devestating.  Let me begin at the beginning.

We have had a great deal of trouble finding a good groomer in our area.  We had felt that the Petsmart groomers had mislead us, or at least witheld information, and the Petco groomer seems to always be booked for weeks.   I won’t go into detail about the Gemini Groomers fiasco, except to say that their little “building” was almost certainly once part of an automobile of some kind.  Finally, I found a place near my office called “Pet Styles.”  They are located on a busy street, next to a Vet’s office in a strip center.  For some reason these facts made me feel that they had some level of credibility.  So I made an appointment for last Friday, dropped Gus off on my way to work, and left what I thought were clear instructions for how I wanted our Schnazuer groomed.

Essentially I wanted him to have the same “hair style” that he had when I brought him in, just with everything a bit shorter.  Apparently this is difficult to communicate.  Groomers are so insistent that Schnauzers get the “Schnauzer Cut,” that they are unable to comprehend any further information.  I think goes something like this:

Groomer: Do you want the Schnauzer Cut
Customer: No, I want…
Groomer {thinking}: What an idiot
Customer: Blah blah blah blah blah….

Needless to say, I was shocked and horrified when I picked Gus up at lunch time.  When I got him home, I checked his teeth (he has a few extras) and made him do his tricks to verify that he was indeed the same dog.  You’re just going to have to see for yourself:

Gus Before: Hairy but Cute

Gus After: A Mexican Hairless Schnauzer

It is hard for a photograph to capture just how weird he looks with this skinny legs and furry head.  Most disturbing is how closely they shaved his white hind end, but I’ll spare you of that.

Gus, if you’re reading this someday, know that we still love you, mostly, and we will love you much more once all your hair grows back.

How do you describe the action of beginning to read a book that you have attempted to read in the past but haven’t? Do you say that you are rereading the book, or does that imply that you have already finished the book at least once? It’s important that I figure this out since this is what most of my reading consists of. In the last few months I’ve done this with Diarmaid McCullough’s book on the Reformation, a Walker Percy novel, and Volume 1 of Herman Bavincks Reformed Dogmatics. As you can see, the list of books I have almost read or begun to read is very impressive. I think this all began for me with the book Charlotte’s Web. I started that book many times, but never actually read the entire thing. I read and enjoyed E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan and Stuart Little, but I could never finish Charlotte’s Web. So what do you call this? I suppose I will say that I have restarted X or Y from now on.

The point of bringing this up is that I’d like to offer a quote here from a book I’ve recently restarted. The book is Greg Wills’s book on Baptist church history called Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South 1785-1900. I met Wills once when he visited the Capitol Hill Baptist Church, and I was really impressed with him at the time. Around the same time I was introduced to his writings about church discipline. He is a church historian at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a friend of Mark Devers, who is the reason I became acquainted with him.

Wills concludes the introduction to his book (which I’ve read at least twice now) with the following statements:

Until about 1830, much of Georgia was a frontier society, with all of the lawlessness, vice, and social chaos frontier conditions could engender. Even after 1830, Georgians, like other southerners, were prone to frequent outbursts of drunken brawling, replete with eye gouging and knife play. People in the church disliked the disorder as much as other law-abiding Georgians, but they did not see it as their chief duty to do the sheriff’s job. They had the Lord’s work to do.

In fact, the more the churches concerned themselves with social order, the less they exerted church discipline. From about 1850 to 1920, a period of expanding evangelical solicitude for the reformation of society, church discipline declined steadily. From temperance to Sabbatarian reform, evangelicals persuaded their communities to adopt the moral normals of the church for society at large. As Baptists learned to reform the larger society, they forgot how they had once reformed themselves. Church discipline presupposed a stark dichotomy between the norms of society and the kingdom of God. The more evangelicals purified the society, the less they felt the urgency of a discipline that separated the church from the world. (10).

I find this historical fact to be very instructive to us today. Today, we are almost 100 years removed from the time Wills was writing about. But we live in the age where society at large has begun to reject the moral norms of the church. Some talk about this as if it is a grave evil and a sign of the church’s impotence in the culture, but I wonder if it could be exactly what the church needs to take up seriously the practice of church discipline. As Wills puts it, to be more concerned with reforming herself than reforming society at large.

I really appreciate Wills scholarship in this area, and I think the church would do well to learn from the history he is uncovering. To read one his articles on this subject, “The Church: Baptists and Their Churches in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” click this link. If you’d like to listen to some of his lectures, click here.

Happy Memorial Day weekend to all you creeps out there.  Being a good blogger, I am forced to assume that you readers are all part of a vast Creep Nation who have developed other blogs to keep track of my every move, meticulously catalogue my nuggets of wisdom, and create a variety of shrines to my genius.  Which reminds me, I need to get started on that Creeps Like Me call-in radio show where we begin every conversation with, “Hello, you’re very creepy.”

This week in Creepy land, the Mrs. Creep has come down with a bad case of missing four of her teeth.  She voluntarily surrendered the teeth to a local oral surgeon and is now convalescing with hydrocodone.  We buried the teeth in a tiny coffin in the back yard, just like on Fried Green Tomatoes.  Who knows what those evil, modernist doctors would have done with them.  We want to make sure that Lindsay has her full compliment of teeth in the resurrection.  Overall, she is doing very well.  I am left largely to my own entertainments, which involve reading my blog feeds, reading actual books, accompanying Gus on his trips out of doors, and now writing this blog.

In other news, our dog, Gus, has begun to bark at other dogs (including himself when he catches his reflection).  I knew this time would come, but I hoped that it wouldn’t. Now every night he waits in the backyard for other dogs to bark so he can respond.  I try not to be too hard on him in case he is an important link in the Twilight Bark and is passing on important messages to other dogs.

Today I’ve also been cleaning up our computer a little.  My dad gave me his old iMac several months ago, and I have finally gotten around to de-Dad-ing it.  For several months now we’ve been getting these iCal alarms for when Dad is supposed to pay his bills.  I would just press the ignore button and move on, but I’ve finally gotten rid of them all.  (Dad, hopefully you transferred these over to your new iMac, or you may be a little behind on just about everything.) The plus side is that I inherited many audio books that he downloaded and The Beatles album of number one hits.  As I result, I am writing this on a Mac.  That probably explains that cool, hipster vibe you have right now.

I just remembered what I had intended to blog about, but now there is no room left in this post and the book I was going to quote is in the bedroom where the patient is sleeping.  Oh well, this will give you all time to fully digest the profundities of the preceding paragraphs.

It appears that nothing brings out the greed in me more than the knowledge that at any moment, hundreds of dollars could spontaneously appear in my bank account.  I can hardly stand the suspense.  Any of you old people out there, has this kind of thing ever happened before?  Will we one day tell our kids about this? “Back in ought-eight, George Dubya gave us all a bunch of money.  That was right before the bread lines and the riots….”  We will all sound like characters from Dr. Zhivago.

Speaking of things we will tell our children.  I wonder if the next generation of human beings will have any concept of what actual wooden furniture looks like.  In my office at work, there are three different kinds of particle board furniture, all with their own imitation-wood stickers.  If it weren’t for Lindsay’s grandmother, we would not own any real wood furniture, I don’t think.  It makes me wonder if eventually  wooden furniture will be completely gone.  All that our children will know are the fake wood things.  They will see something real and think, “Man, that looks so terrible.  The grain is so inconsistent.  Look at this bookshelf I got from Ikea.”

Of course if the Dr. Zhivago scenario holds true, they will be living 20 to a house and burning that fake wood furniture in the fire place to stay warm.

Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago: I told myself it was beneath my dignity for arresting a man for pilfering firewood. But nothing ordered by the party is beneath the dignity of any man, and the party was right: one man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic; five million people desperate for a bit of fuel will destroy a city. That was the first time I ever saw by brother, but I knew him and I knew I would disobey the party. Perhaps it was the tie of blood between us, but I doubt it. We were only half-tied anyway. Indeed as a policeman I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was the better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol.

I am listening to the podcast for the New York Times Book Review (which I would recommend), and they have just interviewed Pamela Paul.  She is the author of a new book called Parenting, Inc, which seems (from the brief review I’ve heard) to take on some of the recently formulated but widely accepted conventional wisdom about babies.  I really don’t know if everything she says is good or true, but something about it is ringing true with me.   One article she’s written on Babble.com questions the idea that teaching your baby sign language will make it smarter in the long run.  And she is generally skeptical of all of the “educational” baby toys.  But perhaps my favorite quote is on Baby toys in general:

“the less the toy does the better…. Parents have misunderstood, ‘interactive.’”

This fits right in with my conviction that toys today make too much noise.  If the Tonka Truck already goes “vroom”, then little Henry doesn’t have to.  Henry’s “vroom” brain cells will now be easy prey for becoming addicted to Teletubbies a few years down the road (scientific verification of this theory forthcoming).

But what i think may be more important about a book like Paul’s is to help us realize that a bizarre kind of child idolatry has crept into our culture and our churches.  Perhaps this is because of the confusion of the Christian Right and Family Values with Evangelical orthodoxy, but at the very least it is because it is part of our sinful nature to pervert God’s good gifts.  Now before you take this as the angry rant of a DINK (Dual Income No Kids - a term I learned from my sister-in-law), I am very pro-children.  I firmly believe they are a gift from God, a blessing, and a sacred trust that God gives to parents.  We should encourage each other to take parenthood seriously, not to shy away from the responsibility, and not to participate in the Western selfishness that sees them as a nuisance.  But we also need to avoid the other currently popular trend that views children as some sort of uber-hobby, the ultimate project, or the most fashionable accessory.

Stay tuned for future posts on this, like “Why Toys Should Be Metal with Sharp Pointy Bits,” and “How To Teach Your Kids They Are Less Important than You Are.”

I haven’t updated you on Gus lately.  I have all but given up on the scientific pictures of record.  You wouldn’t believe all of the pictures I have that include half of my arm, half of Gus, and the tape measure.  But here are a few that chronicle the things he has been up to as he’s grown.

At some point a few weeks ago he was finally able to jump on the couch with ease, and his expedition led him to conquer the end table as well.  He hasn’t done this in a while, but we are still trying to break him of the couch thing.

One day I broke out the My Smart Puppy dog training DVD, and Gus showed himself to be a keen student.

My favorite thing to do with Gus is play fetch.  He’s getting pretty good at dropping the ball on command, though lately his drive to retrieve is often overcome by his drive to stop and eat twigs and grass.

This was one of his most prized treasures for a few days.  I had to throw it over the fence after he tried to bring it in the house a few times.

Here I am maxing out the zoom on my digital camera to catch Gus in action.

Getting ready to jump…

Our back yard has a lot of slope, so Gus could catch some mad air off the back patio.

Lately Gus has taken to taking books and movies off of the lower book shelves.  I don’t have any photos of this because I am too busy trying to salvage my books.  His favorite movie to chew on is The Princess Diaries and his favorite book is The Zone Diet. (Both of these were part of Lindsay’s contribution to our library).  He’s also shown a taste for The Kingdom of Christ and a booklet called Judging Others.

Preaching
I preached last Sunday at Mills Road Baptist Church on Psalm 88. If you’re not familiar with it, this Psalm falls within the category of “Psalms of Lament,” but it is unique because it doesn’t have the expression of hope or confidence in God found in most other similar Psalms. Nothing reminds me of my seminary professors more than preaching, and on this one especially I feel indebted to three of them.

Carl Trueman, professor of Historical Theology, wrote a little article several years ago called “What Do Miserable Christians Sing?” The article argues that one reasons that Evangelical Christians neglect the Psalter is that it is full of lamentation. Here is a key sentence, “A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party — a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals.” This article struck a chord with me, and helped me to realize why I have found so much of Christian worship to be deficient (Someone has reproduced the article on their blog here, or you can buy the book in which it appears).

Doug Green, who is an Old Testament professor at WTS, is sort of a strange combination of a sarcastic Australian ex attorney combined with a passionate preacher. What I picked up from Doctor Green was the way that Jesus is the true Psalm-singer and we, his children, can sing the Psalms with him. I would occasionally get a little lost in Dr. Green’s meandering style, but the picture he painted of the Bible’s story was breathtaking. Plus he has earned a special spot of honor in the Creep’s hall of fame by publicly admitting in the entry way of Van Til Hall that he enjoyed reading this blog, not to mention the fact that he helped me pass Hebrew. You can find some of Dr. Green’s lectures and sermons here.

Vern Poythress taught us Hermeneutics, and most of the time I think he was either flying too high above the clouds for me to understand him, or trying so hard to simplify things that they seeemed obvious. But one thing that I will always remember was the elegant way he taught us to interpret the Psalms. First to see them as representing the corporate voice of Ancient Israel in worship, then to see them as being sung by Christ, the true Israelite and true Davidic King. Finally, as we are in Christ, the Psalms represent the songs we sing as Christians (many of Dr. Poythress’s articles can be found at his personal web site).

Since I’ve brought Westminster up, please pray for WTS, as I understand they are going through some difficult times. I do not know enough about the situation to say more than that, but they are godly men trying to make godly decisions. Pray that they will, and that God will continue to use that seminary to bless and edify his church.

Race & Racism
If you are an American, and especially if you are an American Christian, then you need to grapple with what pastor Thabiti Anyabwile has to say about race, especially in regard to the recent speech by Barak Obama. His most recent blog post includes this provocative paragraph: “‘Race’ does not exist. We’re engaged in a collective delusion. We are like men in the woods of Alabama sitting in a tree waiting to shoot the next unicorn that comes along (no offense to Alabamians). We’re certifiable. The only thing that keeps us out of the institution is that we’ve agreed, contrary to God’s word (Acts 17:26), that we like this strong delusion called ‘race.’ We think it’s useful. And we may be on the verge of agreeing that we’d rather sleep with the devil we know (’race’ and all its entailments) than hazard a new world where this most basic assumption about ourselves is brought into the light, questioned, re-examined, and re-defined.”

Also see this recent interview he did with Christianity Today.