"Let not your hearts be troubled.  You believe in God; believe also in Me.  In My Father's house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you.  And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself,
that where I am, there you may be also." 

John 14:1-3

Jesus says, "Let not."  It's difficult to tell whether this is a command, an invitation, or both.  Certainly Jesus intended to comfort His disciples in view of His coming suffering, death and departure from them.  His words intend to bring us comfort as well.  Yet they also indicate that we have some ability to obey - or not.  "Let not."  Do not allow.  Do not permit it. We can choose, either to "let" our hearts continue to be troubled, or not to allow our hearts to be troubled.  How?  What is the mechanism by which we are to deal with the pain in our lives?

The rationale for choosing the path of "untroubledness" - the bridge over troubled waters, so to speak - is a belief in God which includes belief in His Son.  God is not just the majestic, eternal, all-knowing and fearsome Creator-God, distant and elusive; He is the God of love and compassion who condescended to take on human flesh and "move into the neighborhood."  He was here, walked among us, experienced what we experience, right down to the temptations we face - temptations to sleep in, to give in, to give up, to coddle ourselves, to justify ourselves, to condemn and criticize others, to "circle the wagons" and let the world go to hell - He experienced all that, but without giving in, without choosing to sin.  He did in fact keep the whole Law and it is a source of tremendous comfort that He did, for in His keeping the Law, He kept it on our behalf.

Most of us have read the poem, "Footprints in the Sand."  The gist of it is that an individual had a dream in which he and Jesus reviewed his life as represented by footprints in the sand.  His belief that Jesus always walked with him through life appears to be confirmed as he observes two sets of footprints.  However, he suddenly notices that during periods of the greatest difficulty, there is only one set of footprints, and his shocked reaction is that, in the moments of greatest need, Jesus left him alone.  The "punch line" of the poem is then delivered by Jesus, "The times when you have seen only one set of footprints, is when I carried you."

While this is a touching sentiment, it contains a glaring theological flaw.  The flaw is the notion that Christ only "carries" His people in their moments of deepest emotional need.  In fact, He carries us all the time.  In the economy of God, in the mercy of God, there is always, only, one set of footprints, and they are those of Christ.

So, as Jesus says goodbye to His friends, He says "Don't let your hearts be troubled.  Believe in Me."

"And because you believe in Me, because you believe in one set of footprints, I am going to also prepare an eternal dwelling for you.  This dwelling is not like your house on earth, no matter how nice it is.  No matter how much work you put into painting it, decorating it, no matter how much you adorn it with gardens and flowers and gold letters that announce its street address, no matter how many square feet you have, no matter whether you have wall-to-wall carpet or hardwood floors, the finest tile or linoleum, your house cannot compare with the one I am going to prepare for you.

"And it won't take long," He says.  "I'll be gone a few years perhaps, but in the timekeeping of eternity, it will only be a moment.  Actually, I'll be right back!  I'll be right back when the time is right for you, and I'll tell you that your place is ready, that you will be more comfortable - most comfortable, actually - in your new place, your new home, prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

"O yes, I knew you back then - before you were born, even before I was born on earth - you were in my mind, and I knew when you would be conceived, when you would be born, when you would take your first steps, when you would marry, where you would work, the struggles, the victories, the failures, the pain and heartache you would experience.  I knew them - intimately - for you see, they were mine as well.  I came to live your victories and to pay for your failures.  And, like Nathaniel, I saw you - when you were under the fig tree, or the apple tree, or the oak tree, even before  that - and I chose you for My own.  And because I chose you, you came, you followed, and your life has never been the same since.

"Together we have walked and talked and you have listened, some days better than others, but always - there have been but one set of footprints.

"So don't let your hearts be troubled.  Believe in Me, even when you can't see Me.  As I said, I'll be right back, and even while I'm gone from your sight, I'm not really gone.  I'm keeping my eye on you - not to criticize of condemn - but to bless you, and keep you, to make my face shine upon you, and to be gracious to you; to lift up My countenance upon you, and give you peace.  And I'll be back shortly, to take you to My Father's house, for good.  There - in a place that is more of a mansion than anything you have ever seen, or could conceive - you and I will walk and talk and live together forever and ever.  And oh, by the way, even in that day, in  that eternity in the forever of heaven, there will still be only one set of footprints!"

REFLECTING ON REFLECTIONS

Reflecting on yesterday's post, I could see where some might have gotten the mistaken perception that I might have been suggesting that difficulties - like the fire- only come to those 

who choose not to live near the Lord.  

Not at all!   

Trials come to all in this broken world, and some trials are huge and painful beyond describing.

 My point is that events are never out of control.  For those who place themselves under the loving authority and care of their Heavenly Father, He permits trials to mold and shape them in the likeness of His Son.

Proverbs 18:12 teaches that "humility comes before honor."

Like a loving earthly father, our heavenly Father "disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. (Hebrews 12:10b).  In tenderness He promises to be with us in our trials, with the purpose of bringing us through the crucible of humility, that we might come forth refined and purified.  And those who have borne His discipline He will honor, that they may more perfectly serve and glorify Him.

Yet most certainly, "for the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant."  But our great confidence is that, "later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it" (Hebrews 12:11).

So then, those who suffer - and all will suffer sooner or later - are left to choose whether to try to tough it out alone, with those who choose to live apart from God; or with those who put themselves in His care, trusting in His pruposes for them, and His promise to do them good.

REFLECTIONS ON THE FIRE

from Psalm 148

Praise the LORD from the earth,

You great sea creatures and all deeps,

Fire and hail, snow and mist,

Stormy wind fulfilling his word!

Vs. 7,8

All the creatures and elements of the earth have a common call: to praise the LORD.  The animate and the inanimate are commanded to glorify Him: even the fire.   The LORD is sovereign over the fire, and it must obey His command.  As it does so, He is glorified.  As the stormy, raging wind obeys Him, which it must, it glorifies Him.  As He is exalted, man is put in his place, and we are reminded that God is God, and that we are not.  The raging elements, though they appear to be out of control, are not, but serve to remind us of our humanity, our mortality, our limitations, our dependence upon a Higher than ourselves.  They remind us to depend upon Him, to fear Him, to serve Him, and to labor together as His children to overcome the challenges of living in this temporal, fallen world.

He has raised up a horn for his people

Praise for all his saints,

For the people of Israel who are near to him,

Praise the LORD!

Vs.14

The fact is, God has His favorites.  Some people are near Him, some are not.  His hand is on His people.  No surprise there.  It has always been so.  There are some who are close to the LORD in their daily living, in their awareness of Him, in their fear of Him, in their obedience of Him.  They live under His authority, and under His mantel.  He loves them, He cares for them, He disciplines them for their own good, with the loving purpose that they may share His holiness.

There is another, larger group – and always has been – who are not close to the LORD.  Perhaps they give Him lip service, a tip of the cap - or not - but they  have no real interest in being under His care and authority.  They are the independent ones who might attempt a semblance of interdependence or community in order to survive or overcome the challenges of life, but their attempts bear only as much authenticity as does a statue to a living, breathing human.  There is no true life, no hope of discovering true meaning, purpose or fulfillment apart from a proper connection with the Living God.  We were made to live in a dependent relationship with Him.

LORD, I want to be among those who are near you, near you in truth.  I want to behold you, I want to gaze upon you, I want to live in communion with you and your people at all times.  As the fire has revealed only so clearly the very temporal nature of this world, which is passing away, I long for the eternal, the authentic, the true.  I am not saying I desire to die, but there is great hope in the thought of being eternally with you, though my finite self does not comprehend that.  As I observe the rage of nature and the fallibility of human systems, I realize there is no real hope in them.  My only confidence is in you.

Thinking Back, Thinking Present

My buddy, Ken, and I recently took a trip back through time.

Having grown up next door to one another in the '50's and '60's, then having attended the same college, and having remained friends ever since, we had often talked about going back to our old stompin' grounds together.  In October, we finally did it.  We visited the small town, Pennsylvania, street on which we grew up, and even got to tour Ken's family's house - now occupied by the son and grandson of another neighbor.  We poked around in the woods behind our houses, where we had so many adventures together.  Walked into town, where the buildings are the same although the stores are different.  Basically walked all over town and reminisced.  Remember sledding here on this hill?  And the Memorial Day parades, and the pet shows up here in the center of town?  Remember the fire that nearly burned my house down, and how you saved it - and me?  Boy Scouts?  The dentist whose name was Scull?  This old tree?  The one that's gone?  The one that fell on both our houses during Hurricane Hazel?

So many memories we share, and the recalling of them strengthened the bonds of friendship between us.

Reflecting on what we have often thought of as our "idyllic" upbringing, I realize there is much to commend it and much to be thankful for.  On the other hand, revisiting our haunts made me aware that it wasn't all great, and some of it I'd rather forget.  Ken's dad was fond of saying, "Boys will be boys."  I think maybe more to the point, "Boys will be sinners."  Reflecting on some of our shenanigans, I was faced with the reality that sin played a big role in both our motivations and responses, and in the influences to which we subjected ourselves.  I think the past wasn't so idyllic after all.

St. John had it right when he said, "Do not love the world, or the things in the world.  For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, are not of the Father, but of the world."  I recently reviewed a verse in Ecclesiastes 5:20, "He will not much remember the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart."  This made me realize that my relationship with God is to be such a "present" thing that the joy of it delivers me from idolizing a past I cannot recover, nor mourning because it is irretrievable.

The joy of the Lord's fellowship thus delivers me from both "past-worship" and from bitterness with present realities.  In a sense, the present will always fall short of the past, because I tend to fantasize about the past, remembering only the best of it, and forgetting much of its pain.

It's kind of like married men who fantasize about Victoria's Secret models - people with whom they are not, nor ever will be, in touch.  They can conveniently overlay all kinds of preferred personality characteristics on them, such that - in their minds - these women are always cheerful, always willing, always affiming, never tired, moody, grumpy or imperfect in any way.  How can any wife hope to compete with such a fantasy?

So it is with the past.  Its reality was much closer to that of the present than we'd like to admit.  I believe it's all tied to our tendency to be discontented, and to focus on ourselves, rather than to be both thankful and worshipful toward God Himself - who deigns to be the center of our universe, and rightly so.

Can an Unraveling Society Be Rescued? (Part 2)

Reversing the Decay of London Undone
(Part 2)

By JONATHAN SACKS

There are large parts of Britain, Europe and even the United States where religion is a thing of the past and there is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it, because you're worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is "Thou shalt not be found out."

Has this happened before, and is there a way back? The answer to both questions is in the affirmative. In the 1820s, in Britain and America, a similar phenomenon occurred. People were moving from villages to cities. Families were disrupted. Young people were separated from their parents and no longer under their control. Alcohol consumption rose dramatically. So did violence. In the 1820s it was unsafe to walk the streets of London because of pickpockets by day and "unruly ruffians" by night.

What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men's institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of society—much of it driven by religion.

It was this that the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw on his visit to America in 1831. It astonished him. Tocqueville was expecting to see, in the land that had enacted the constitutional separation of church and state, a secular society. To his amazement he found something completely different: a secular state, to be sure, but also a society in which religion was, he said, the first of its political (we would now say "civil") institutions. It did three things he saw as essential. It strengthened the family. It taught morality. And it encouraged active citizenship.

Nearly 200 years later, the Tocqueville of our time, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, made the same discovery. Mr. Putnam is famous for his diagnosis of the breakdown of social capital he called "bowling alone." More people were going bowling, but fewer were joining teams. It was a symbol of the loss of community in an age of rampant individualism. That was the bad news.

At the end of 2010, he published the good news. Social capital, he wrote in "American Grace," has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it then, Robert Putnam is saying it now. It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good.

One of our great British exports to America, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, has a fascinating passage in his recent book "Civilization," in which he asks whether the West can maintain its primacy on the world stage or if it is a civilization in decline.

He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.

It was the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave the West its restless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today. The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

China has learned the lesson. The question is: Will we?

—Lord Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.

Can an Unraveling Society Be Rescued?

Like many of you, I have a longstanding interest in our parent nation.  So it was with some astonishment and with huge sadness that I observed in the media the rioting in London a couple of weeks back.  I suppose I should have seen it coming, but naively thought that perhaps the British were just too sophisticated and too appreciative of their heritage for such behaviors as we saw in France two years ago.  This morning I read a piece by Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintigration of England, in which he delivers some important warnings for all of us in the West.  I present it for your consideration in two parts.

Reversing the Decay of London Undone

By JONATHAN SACKS
It was the same city but it might have been a different planet. At the end of April, the eyes of the world were on London as a dashing prince and a radiant princess, William and Kate, rode in a horse-drawn carriage through streets lined with cheering crowds sharing a mood of joyous celebration. Less than four months later, the world was watching London again as hooded youths ran riot down high streets, smashing windows, looting shops, setting fire to cars, attacking passersby and throwing rocks at the police.

A priest and an imam join with the local community to pray as they begin to clean up the damage in the London borough of Hackney. In the 1800s, in Britain and America, religious and community organizations 're-moralized' those countries.

It looked like a scene from Cairo, Tunis or Tripoli earlier in the year. But this was no political uprising. People were breaking into shops and making off with clothes, shoes, electronic gadgets and flat-screen televisions. It was, as someone later called it, shopping with violence, consumerism run rampage, an explosion of lawlessness made possible by mobile phones as gangs discovered that by text messaging they could bring crowds onto the streets where they became, for a while, impossible to control.

Let us be clear. The numbers involved were relatively small. The lawkeepers vastly outnumbered the lawbreakers. People stepped in to rescue those attacked. Crowds appeared each morning to clear up the wreckage of the night before. Britain remains a decent, good and gracious society.

But the damage was real. Businesses were destroyed. People lost their homes. A 68-year-old man, attacked by a mob while trying to put out a fire, died. Three young men in Birmingham were killed in a hit-and-run attack. While it lasted, it was very frightening.  It took everyone by surprise. It should not have.

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in "The Closing of the American Mind": "I am the Lord Your God: Relax!"

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. In Britain today, more than 40% of children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of child poverty that serious government spending has failed to cure. In 2007, a Unicef report found that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result. But there are others.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women—91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data—is practically absurd and morally indefensible. By the time boys are in their early teens they are physically stronger than their mothers. Having no fathers, they are socialized in gangs. No one can control them: not parents, teachers or even the local police. There are areas in Britain's major cities that have been no-go areas for years. Crime is rampant. So are drugs. It is a recipe for violence and despair.

That is the problem. At first it seemed as if the riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs.

This was the bursting of a dam of potential trouble that has been building for years. The collapse of families and communities leaves in its wake unsocialized young people, deprived of parental care, who on average—and yes, there are exceptions—do worse than their peers at school, are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, less likely to find stable employment and more likely to land up in jail.

The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.

What has happened morally in the West is what has happened financially as well. Good and otherwise sensible people were persuaded that you could spend more than you earn, incur debt at unprecedented levels and consume the world's resources without thinking about who will pay the bill and when. It has been the culture of the free lunch in a world where there are no free lunches.

We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital. Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. And even Freud, who disliked religion and called it the "obsessional neurosis" of humankind, realized that it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that trained people to control their appetites.

END OF PART I

East Coast Earthquake: A Minor Shakeup with a Divine Message?

About 1:50 p.m. yesterday, I felt and heard a tremor run through the floor and walls of our house.  At first I thought it was someone walking heavily on our less-than-rock-solid floor joists.  Then, a few seconds later, I felt it again, this time longer and more intense.  After a few more seconds passed, there was an unmistakeable and more powerful shaking which made me realize that, here in sleepy central Pennsylvania, we were indeed playing host to an uninvited natural guest.

As news of the East Coast Earthquake of 2011 spread yesterday, as friends, relatives and co-workers jammed the cell phone networks, it became obvious, to everyone's relief, that this seismic event, though widespread, was relatively mild as earthquakes go.  Still, it gave news commentators something to talk about for a while, though by last evening they - and talk show hosts as well - were making jokes about it.   But for those who have never experienced the heaving of the earth beneath their feet, it was a pretty scary experience.  California folks are used to such things; here on the East Coast, not so much.

But today, the trains and planes, delayed yesterday for safety checks, are back on schedule, and most East-Coasters have moved on with their lives.  Yet, upon closer examination, it is clear that there was indeed some residual damage, even in our nation's capital, where things are supposedly built to withstand such events.  I find it curious that there was, through this relatively mild movement of tectonic plates, significant damage to two of our most treasured national symbols:  the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral.  And I am left wondering if God, who claims sovereign control over all creation, might have been sending us a message.  If so, what message would it be that He is conveying, and was there a reason He might have put His divine crosshairs on these two symbols of things which, in our past, have always been best about America?

As a student of history, I believe I am on safe ground in saying that America has always stood for freedom.  And who epitomizes our national struggle for independence more than our "founding father," for whom the 555-foot obelisk on the National Mall is named?  And what place - at least in concept - more eloquently communicates by its very existence our national declaration that our freedom is both limited under the authority of our Divine Creator and Judge, and that it is also a gift from His hand, upon Whom we depend for our past, present and future success as a witness to the world of the benefits of that freedom? 

Yet, lately we seem to be increasingly content to go our own way, even trivializing the essentiality of religious faith in general, and of our Christian heritage in particular.  The public mention of Jesus is out of vogue, and people who would hold to biblical principles are increasingly labeled as "haters."  The historic and God-ordained nature of one-man, one-woman marriages is routinely challenged, and God's notion of "family" has been so distorted in our national psyche as to allow that virtually "anything goes" in domestic arrangements.  We have devalued human life - the centerpiece of His creation - to the extent that as of this posting, the blood of nearly 50 million helpless, unborn human beings is on our collective, if not individual, hands, even as we spend millions in precious dollars to preserve various animal species from encroachment.  It seems clear that not only have we failed to "love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our minds, with all our souls, and with all our strength," but we have outright ignored - if not mocked - His prescription for living in community, and forgotten His just place in the founding and sustaining of this great nation.

If we are to put any confidence in the Bible as the expression of God's intentions for humankind, the Almighty cannot be pleased with all this.  So when the earth shakes the East Coast a little, and our national symbols corrupted as a consequence, I can't help but wonder if perhaps our Sovereign is rather gently but firmly reminding us that we are not self-sufficient, that His laws are not to be ignored, nor His people oppressed, lest He shake us more violently, or even reduce us once again to servitude and humiliation.  He has done it to nations in the past.  Yesterday He made it clear that He can do it at will.

Just some musings this morning.  I welcome your thoughts.