A Grand Vision

It sometimes seems like my vision of what Christianity and Christian life are all about doesn’t exactly square with what many people (both critical outsiders and those within evangelical circles) suppose it to be. As I have read over the years, through seminary and into the pastorate, I have become more and more excited about the sheer scope of God’s work for his world in Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection.

For many people Christianity is narrowed down to the point of being something akin to “my own personal self-help” – good for me, but no better than exercise might be for another person or a successful career for someone else. For this reason, it’s often a very private thing, “my relationship with God” and “something that is my business and no one else’s.”

Certainly a personal relationship with God is an important thing to cultivate, a great gift providing great peace for which we should be full of gratitude. But God does not exist for my purposes; I exist for his purposes. Theologians emphasize the unnecessary nature of creation, the grace of it: God didn’t need to make the world in order to fill a certain emptiness within him; in other words, he didn’t make the planet and people because he was lonely. He made us for his glory, and invited us in to share his life and reflect his glory to the whole creation. Our lives are gifts given for the ultimate praise of God. For this reason (among others) we should care a little less about what God can do for us and a little more about what we were made to be for God.

Does this mean Christianity doesn’t offer benefits to those who come to faith in Jesus? As the apostle Paul might say, “By no means!” When we come to understand our proper place and start to realize just what we were made for, we will find a kind of fulfilment and satisfaction and peace that nothing else can offer. Our friend and teacher Jonathan Wilson always talked in his classes about becoming “truly human” and about God’s interest in “human flourishing.” But in a world where money and power and sex have such huge sway over our thinking and our ambitions, we need a new definition of what being human is all about. Psalm 8, with its resonances with the truly human life of Jesus, has been one of my great guides in relearning the nature of humanity as God planned it:

O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory

above the heavens.

From the lips of children and infants

you have ordained praise

because of your enemies,

to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

and crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands;

you put everything under his feet:

all flocks and herds,

and the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air,

and the fish of the sea,

all that swim the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

It’s a grand vision of God, beginning and ending with the majesty of the LORD, but within which humans have a very special place, below the heavenly beings but responsible for all the rest of creation. We haven’t kept our place very well, to be sure, but in Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, we see the fulfilment of this psalm, with the truly human one standing over creation, multiplying loaves to feed the crowd, calming the wind and seas, bringing healing and wholeness to a broken world. He is now exalted to the right hand of God, a human being ruling over this world, inviting us to participate in his life by his death and resurrection, through which he not only offered forgiveness of sins, but also overcame the power of sin that has enslaved us all our lives and made us fear death and struggle to live with this world’s brokenness.

When I think of this psalm and of the mission of Jesus, “the second Adam,” the one who through his faithful obedience to God reversed the problems that came from the disobedience of the first Adam in the beginning, I find that what Christianity and the Bible story as a whole offers is a beautifully vital vision of existence in this world: we are called to be those who have been brought “from death to life”, with hope in God’s final victory when he will set all things right.

In my upcoming blog posts I am planning to share some thoughts on the writings that have meant the most to me in shaping my Christian thinking over the past several years. I hope they can be helpful to anyone who might read them, but also anticipate that it will be a helpful exercise for me, to try to set down how I have come to look at Scripture and Christian life.

"Christian" Music

It's been over a month since I posted on the blog. We were on vacation in Nova Scotia for the last three weeks of August, and although I had lots of time to sit and visit with friends and read and even play the guitar, I didn't take any time to blog. Now it's been so long and so many ideas have been swirling around in my head that I thought I'd just post whatever came to mind.

We discovered a new (to us) group a couple weeks ago, called the Welcome Wagon. The group is a pastor (Vito Aiuto) and his wife (Monique) from a church in Brooklyn, NY, and their music is a nice combination of traditional sounding gospel songs and indie pop a la Sufjan Stevens (a friend of theirs - I presume that the "Vito" of Stevens' "Vito's Ordination Song" is this Vito). The album is called Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, and contains a couple of originals and a bunch of covers from everything from 60s rockers The Velvet Underground (their probably-tongue-in-cheek song "Jesus" becomes a beautiful sincere prayer here) to old spirituals ("He Never Said a Mumblin' Word," about Jesus' silence in the face of his trial and death on the cross) to hymn texts reset to fingerpicked acoustic guitars.

Best of all the covers, though, is probably the bizarre "Sold! to the Nice Rich Man", which imagines Jesus coming from heaven to earth to the cross as a rich man entering a town and messing with everything as he buys their wonderful world by "paying the price" in full. Greatest line about the ultimate and costly claim Jesus makes on our lives and our world's violent reaction to it:

"A rich man came to our town and changed our minds, took our things, took our knives...tonight we fight!"

The song was written by Daniel Smith of Danielson (another new artist for us, and another friend of Sufjan Stevens, and himself the son of Leonard Smith, Jr., the writer of the worship song "Our God Reigns"), whose music I've just started listening to in the past few days.

The song that has meant the most to us so far, though, is an original by Aiuto called "Up on a Mountain." The song is simple and relatively spare, and is all about the trip "all the way down" Jesus made for us, that results in our assurance that we are "not alone." After talking about Jesus' loneliness in Gethsemane and his fear on the cross (at least I think it's about the cross in the second verse) comes this final verse:

Up in the heavens our Lord prays for you
He sent his Spirit to carry us through
So it's true that you're not alone
Do you know he came all the way down?

With The Welcome Wagon and Danielson (more later on them!) and Sufjan Stevens (though his songs are less explicitly Christian on the whole) I feel like I've been introduced to a wholly different kind of "Christian music", not nearly as predictable and much more alive than most of the Christian music I have heard in the past. It has always seemed a shame to me that Christian music should seem to lack the creativity you find in the more interesting artists working today. I guess I can't say that anymore.