Nielsen’s Nook

I am at one of my favorite cafes in Dallas preparing for the sermon I am preaching tomorrow.  While waiting in line I looked up and saw a man walking into the bathroom that looked just like Dustin Salter.  He was tall and had the same sort of bend to his neck (the difficulty that tall people seem to have living in a world full of us shorties).  He was wearing the same Teva sandals I used to see Dustin wear when auditing classes at Westminster.  I did not know Dustin well, but he made such an impression on me that this "sighting" gave me pause to consider again the loss of a good man, pastor and father a little more and to pray for those whom he left behind. That is mainly why I am posting this, so that those of you who are familiar with the Salters, would continue to pray for Leigh Anne and the Salter children, who I would imagine are still picking up the pieces and need our prayer.

Just a thought I had at the office today, doing a most ordinary thing:

One may do the ordinary in such a way as to prevent ever approaching the extraordinary.

A few days ago, I was prayerfully reflecting on Psalm 70 and wrote out a prayer that was intended as a private post, in which I lamented over the holes in the bucket of my life (i.e., my rickety old bucket). So you can imagine my alarm when my statistics meter listed that post as visited by someone in Plano, Texas.

In the prayer, I did not say anything I would regret, thankfully; however, this morning as I have reflected on this (and my blood pressure has come back down), I found it an interesting thing to contemplate. In the prayer there was a paragraph in which I laid out an insecurity that I wrestle with in a present situation. I think that paragraph made me most squeamish, but why?

On the one hand, the idea of other people of unknown disposition to me knowing something that stirs insecurity in me makes me nervous. And yet it’s out there now and in a way it is quite liberating. Someone else has seen a bit of the bucket that no one else apart from the Lord was thought to have seen. Perhaps, it is much like how the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz must have felt when the curtain is thrown back and Dorothy and company all see the very little man in his hiding place.

The world does not need to read all my prayers, and I am certain that there are those who would not be gracious to me if given the chance and an advantage. So I have privatized the post in question as I had originally intended. But I leave you with this question that I have been entertaining: Would we pray in such a way that we might not like the world to know? If so, I believe that in our vulnerability with God and his power in our lives to bring repentance and correction we have hope for growth and change. On the other hand, if we do not pray or do not pray over those areas that are rickety or unseemly, then how do we expect to grow and change?

Yesterday I had the privilege of preaching to a congregation in Northwest Dallas. They are relatively young, composed of mostly hispanic and some anglo people. In preaching on Psalm 70, I made the mention that it was a prayer that should be prayed on our mountain tops and in our darkest valleys and everywhere in between.¹

A mother of three, with whom I spoke after the service, made mention of the strain that she often felt in having a moment where she might pray at all. Her goal, as I understood it, was to prayerfully mother her children. As I have learned, this seems to be an idea that has monastic virtue. Many, including myself previously, had thought the monks were those who wanted nothing to do with the world. Some, of course, were more hermit like. However, generally, monks would withdraw for the purpose of engagement with the world. They would retreat to advance. They would worship God with hoe in hand. What a beautiful connection this mother of three had made. As she tends the fertile soils of her children, she retreats to advance, tending their little lives, worshiping Christ with hoe in hand.

This seems to be something the Apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote, μάρτυς γάρ μού ἐστιν ὁ θεός, ᾧ λατρεύω ἐν τῷ πνεύματί μου ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ (God is my witness, whom I worship in my spirit in the gospel of His Son). Apparently, Paul is making great contrast with the Greek idea of worship that emphasized “geographical focus and physical activity”³ and in this sense seems to coalesce nicely with the mother of three, who, like Paul, has more on her plate than often seems manageable; and yet, both worship God with hoe in hand, as they would go along in their respective vocations.

² author’s translation, Romans 1:9.

³ N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 422.

I am preaching on Psalm 70 several times over the next month. This is a psalm that was referenced by many Eastern writers in the third and fourth centuries as a great aid to prayer. In fact the monks included it in their “hours” of prayer. It does seem to be a prayer that one is wise to pray always, whether at the heights of faith or at the depths of despair. No one stays on the mountaintop. We are broken by sin and will take the blessing of God’s presence and grow content. Indeed we are all poor and needy.

It is precisely this idea of repetitiveness that the Enemy uses to torment Christ’s sheep. We fall and fall and fall. We find that we wrestle with the same stinking stuff every day. Satan would have us believe that the struggle is a sign of death and infidelity. Christ has declared that it is a sign of the new Life beating back sin and death in us. So John Calvin comforts those who will hear:

Although I was miserable and poor, God did think upon me. As according to the extent in which any one is afflicted, so is he despised by the world, we imagine that he is disregarded by God, we must, therefore, stedfastly maintain that our miseries in no respect produce on the part of God a feeling of weariness towards us, so that it should become troublesome to him to aid us.¹

Preface

A poem I jotted down today during a break between sessions on a staff retreat. I have been studying Deuteronomy for a sermon series I am preaching at an area church and was overwhelmed at the manifold ways in which my own heart breaks the first commandment to have no other gods before the LORD. I was amazed at oft quoted verses in 2 Chronicles, “If my people, who are called by my name, will turn to me … I will heal their land…”. The problem with preaching that as a call to repentance is that it glosses over the fact that Israel, the original audience, never turned to God and yet salvation from God is bigger than they imagined. Often God takes us into desert places not to punish us but to reveal more of himself to us. Then we become complacent because of the great blessing of his presence and the process starts over again. Ezekiel 8 teaches us that God is one who goes into exile with his people, into Babylon. While Babylon has historically been the symbol of apostasy, it is not so here. It is the desert place of discipline where God reveals himself to his people even in the context of great suffering. If that is where Jesus is, then that is where I want to be. I don’t want to be like those Ezekiel rebukes who remain smug at home in Jerusalem, failing to recognize that the Glory of the LORD had left the temple and gone into Babylon with His people whom He disciplined.

Thank you for silence
a most rare and precious jewel
that fills the room with angst and awe.
A subtle gray light growing hot white.

As it illumines, my heart falls faint,
lunging, longing that the bulb would fuse
and in the darkness still and noisy
might I, in my sin, bemuse
its hiddenness and stealth.

But oh God! would you drag me out to Babylon,
for I, your son, am want to turn.
Burst these bonds of religion-steel cast
that bind my heart in pious farce.

At least in Babylon, hands now free to embrace
you, my Lord - to yourself exile me.
My many gods crushed and hubris rent
from these hands that formed countless idols,
hewn from the quarries of Old Man bent
deep in deviance and divorce.

But you, O Lord! have renewed.
You have become my last and lasting word
that redefines and reforms - even suffering.

Oh that Babylon would be mine
if more of you would be had there.
In humiliation might I find the Humble One.

In suffering the dross is dropped.
In the desert place the God of Abraham
would in my heart and soul and mind
be finally unstopped.