Happy Friday,
Our Father who art in Heaven…
Jesus, The Lord’s Prayer
Matthew 5
Much has been made of Jesus teaching his disciples to call God “Father.” Though the Jews recognized the Lord of Heaven as “the Father of the Nation of Israel,” no one called him Dad. Christ’s suggestion that they do so was not just cheeky; it was scandalous and heretical. But there is more going on here than that. Jesus did not say, “This then is how you should pray, My Father who art in Heaven… give me this day my bread.” The word was not “My” but “Our.” Our! Our! Our! In a society that celebrates zealous self-sufficiency and hyper-autonomy, we must not forget this. We are in this together. We are a communion of saints — a family — and we must never act or think otherwise.
A 60th Anniversary: Next Wednesday — November 22, 2023 — will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the deaths of John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley. If you can find a copy of Peter Kreeft’s Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death, in which he imagines the three debating the merits of humanism, theism, and mysticism as they wait to find out what comes next, I recommend you read it. (BTW, if this literary format inspires you, I’m still waiting for someone to write a book leveraging the fact that Mother Teresa and Princess Diana both died in the same week.)
Looking Past T-Day: One of my goals this year is to rescue Christmas from itself. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I know it includes less hurry and more Jesus. I invite you to join me in that pursuit.
Without Comment: 1)Moody downgraded the US’s credit outlook to negative, citing political polarization and the deficit; 2) Wendy’s is redesigning its restaurants to have smaller dining rooms and separate drive-thru windows for delivery drivers (Grubhub, Doordash, etc.); 3) Israel is the only Western country that has a birth rate above replacement; 4) The WAPO did a big piece on the explosive growth of homeschooling, noting that it continues to grow after COVID; 5) This piece claims that our heightened awareness about the importance of sleep is causing some people to lose sleep; 6) This survey of 8,000 people across 16 countries — including the US, Mexico, and India — shows that 56% of people get most of their news from social media.
WOTW: Honorable mention goes to revangelical (those who return to faith after an earlier deconstruction of the same), polysubstance (a description of those oppressed by multiple addictions), and Ignatian indifference (the idea “of being detached enough from things and experiences to be able to take them or to leave them depending on whether they help us ‘praise, reverence, and serve God’”). Full honors go to news desert, the name for the one-fifth of the US operating without access to local news due to the collapse of over 2,000 local newspapers.
1,000 Words: 1)Click here to see a chart showing the correlation between attending religious services and depression, mortality, and divorce; 2) Click here to see a single-picture argument for capitalism over communism; and 3) Click here to see a chart displaying our declining happiness.
IS2M: 1) Anticipation is as good a single-word definition of leadership as I have heard; 2) Though we’ve failed to be moral since Genesis 3, it seems that our aspirational objectives have been declining. The slide has moved from morality → immorality → amorality → anti-morality.
Not for Me: I recently tried to read Kevin Kelly’s The Silver Cord, a nearly 500-page graphic novel about angels who download their “essence” into AI-enhanced robots. It was clever — and there were some moments of significant theological insight — but after 300 pages, I waved the white flag. I’m apparently not a graphic novel guy. Who knew?
Lord of the Flies: I recently had a chance to ask a Harvard professor about the mood on campus. After noting the 10,000 percent increase in “middle administrators” and “the drift from ‘a society of inquiry to a society of activism,’” he referenced The Lord of the Flies. He also said that while he wasn’t optimistic that it would turn around, he would not have been optimistic in the 60s either.
A Classic: In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage; but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
WISHKBDN: Words I Should Have Known But Did Not will not regularly stand alongside Word of the Week (WOTW) or It Seems to Me (IS2M), but I’ve started fielding emails that begin, “I’m embarrassed to say this, but until recently I did not know what XYZ meant. Recent entries include pogrom and Steel Man. FWIW, until just recently, I thought those who were talking about kah-tar and those talking aboutCutter were talking about two different countries.
An Explanation: If my single-picture argument for capitalism left you guessing, the picture is an aerial view of the Korean peninsula. It shows the lights that are on in the South compared with the darkness of the North.
Resources: Click here to listen to last week’s sermon on Exodus 17:1-7, a remarkably important and powerful passage that shows Jesus at work in the Old Testament.
Closing Prayer: O Lord God, in whom we live and move and have our being, open our eyes that we may behold your fatherly presence ever about us. Draw our hearts to you with the power of love. Teach us in nothing to be anxious; and when we have done what you have given us to do, help us, O God our Savior, to leave the issue to your wisdom. Take from us all doubt and mistrust. Lift our thoughts up to you, and make us know that all things are possible to us, in and through your Son our redeemer, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.(Brooke Foss Westcott, 1825 – 1901)