A Time to Laugh

While the difference between mortal and venial sin seems obvious, don’t be fooled. There is more to this than meets the eye. What is really bad and what isn’t? And who decides?

Here is a routine situation that every Catholic of my generation had to deal with: You are at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium on a Friday night in June 1950. Catholics are forbidden to eat meat under penalty of mortal sin. But you want a hot dog. Now, just considering eating meat on Friday is a venial sin; wanting to is another. You have not moved in your seat and you have already sinned twice. What if you actually ate one? Aside from the risk of choking on forbidden food and getting punished right on the spot, have you committed a mortal sin or a venial sin? Well, if you think it’s mortal, it may be mortal; and if you think it’s venial, it still may be mortal. After much thought, you decide it’s venial. You call the hot dog vendor, you take the money out of your pocket, and you buy a hot dog. This is clearly an act of free will. You figure you can go confess your sin to the priest on Saturday night. But wait! Does a venial sin become mortal when you commit it deliberately? That’s a chance you take. What if you’ve forgotten it’s Friday? In that case, eating the hot dog may not be a sin, but forgetting it’s Friday is. What if you remember it’s Friday halfway through the hot dog? Is it a venial sin to finish it? If you throw it away, is wasting food a sin? Within five minutes you have committed enough sins to land you in purgatory for a million years. The safest thing to do is not to take any chances–stay away from Yankee Stadium on Fridays.

The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning

It might be funny if it didn’t sound so familiar.

I’ve taken my own sort of vow of poverty. I’ve participated in endless cumin-dividing discussions about the fine arts (as if “fine” had more to do with its size than character). I’ve “done devotions” with every sort of program, cutesy name, and innovative strategy since early elementary school. I’ve been lured to strive for that “higher life” monastic upper-class known in my world as “full-time Christian service.” I’ve endured endless preaching where justification by faith is just a brusque bro-hug that gets you in the sanctification-by-works club. And we think we’re so different from the “Romish” church?

The crazy-making internal conversation cum tailspin that Manning describes is the life of a fundamentalist. That’s it.

What stuns me is how we do it together.

Just like the Shakers. Really. The Shakers’ individual (tail)spinning and twitching developed over time (due to outside criticism) into a full-fledged communal performance. I look at that picture and imagine how easy it is to get swooped away into the spin. The individual must persist with the dance because well . . . people are watching, and it’d be a bad testimony for . . . the group. You wouldn’t want to be “ungracious.”

I got shoved out of the spin. But I’m not sitting in the crowd watching on the left either. I don’t know yet where I am, but I’m kind of amazed at how many people keep calling me back to the dance. Or back to the prison, as Steve Brown would say.

Okay. I’m a weeper. Yeah, that’s me. So if you hear sobbing in church, it’s most likely me.

Sorry about that.

I did it again this past Palm Sunday.

Growing up, we never really did anything for Palm Sunday. I heard the story of the Triumphal Entry, of course. I remember seeing all the Catholics (well, they might have been Lutherans or Methodists or even — eegads! — Presbyterians, for that matter. But to my Baptist eyes, they were all Catholics.) at the Beefcarver for lunch that Sunday, and they all had their little label-pin palm frond. My dear mom explained the custom to me. It was as mysterious as the ashes on the forehead a few weeks before.

But this past Palm Sunday — my first one really outside fundamentalism — I got it for myself. And I cried for joy.

Because the children led us in worship. They. Led me. To Jesus.

I’ve said it over and over — that one of the biggest reasons for our departure was because of the poor “theology” of the child. I don’t even know if that’s the way I’d say it, but that’s becoming a big phrase for our fellow believers across the pond. The children are treated as lesser. “One anothering” is good for everyone, but the wee. The Gospel counts for you only if you can understand it, otherwise you get Law and Order! Which is really ironic because none of us really understands it, and, in fact, Jesus Himself said that the little ones get it better than we grown-ups do! A dear friend described her similar epiphany when she realized on the mission field that she was kinder to those she was trying to win to Christ than to her own children.

But all that will come later in a larger tome.

When the children entered the sanctuary that Palm Sunday morning waving their palm branches, they sang:

Hosanna, loud hosanna,
the little children sang,
through pillared court and temple
the lovely anthem rang.
To Jesus, who had blessed them
close folded to his breast,
the children sang their praises,
the simplest and the best.

From Olivet they followed
mid an exultant crowd,
the victor palm branch waving,
and chanting clear and loud.
The Lord of earth and heaven
rode on in lowly state,
nor scorned that little children
should on his bidding wait.

“Hosanna in the highest!”
that ancient song we sing,
for Christ is our Redeemer,
the Lord of heaven our King.
O may we ever praise him
with heart and life and voice,
and in his blissful presence
eternally rejoice!

I burst into tears. Jesus welcomed the praise of the forgotten and the less-than. Just like He accepted the extravagant perfume foot wash from a prostitute. Or met the tax-collector after hours. Or talked with the Samaritan woman by her watering hole.

But there it was: a regular ecclesiastical practice as part of the liturgical calendar. Children were included. Children led us to praise Jesus the King.

Look at how Matthew describes events after our King’s entry:

Jesus went straight to the Temple and threw out everyone who had set up shop, buying and selling. He kicked over the tables of loan sharks and the stalls of dove merchants. He quoted this text:

My house was designated a house of prayer;
You have made it a hangout for thieves.

Now there was room for the blind and crippled to get in. They came to Jesus and he healed them.

When the religious leaders saw the outrageous things he was doing, and heard all the children running and shouting through the Temple, “Hosanna to David’s Son!” they were up in arms and took him to task. “Do you hear what these children are saying?”

Jesus said, “Yes, I hear them. And haven’t you read in God’s Word, ‘From the mouths of children and babies I’ll furnish a place of praise’?”

Jesus our Hero-Redeemer comes in on that donkey to the praise of “infants,” kicks out corruption, and makes room for the broken, sin-sick people to get to Him. When the religious leaders scoff at the children, Jesus stops them cold: the kids were fulfilling prophesy!

That’s when I am just sick when I hear more sniping Pharisee than loving King in our talk with and about the children. Just as one example. . . . in Fundamentalism, I heard a preacher insist that he must explain to his preschooler, while she was coloring, that her picture was meaningless to a great and powerful God.

I understand what he was trying to say: that God exists and He’s big. But that’s not what came through. What came through is that we adults, like God, don’t care much for child-like things.

It’s all very pagan, to be honest.

Where did we get this stuff? How easily we  become so egocentric! Augustine would have words for us. He would remind us that actually we adults are “better” sinners than our children because we’re sneakier about it. So it only proves his point that these critiques of children’s egocentrism are so blazenly egotistical.

No, we need a reminder. We need a regular reminder every year of how Christ included children. We need Palm Sunday.

Humans are human because they are conscious of living within a community. When the sense of fellowship is lost humanity is lost.

Giambattista Vico

Symmetry works for me. Not a Jeffersonian kind of decorating symmetry where the left side of your house matches the right. But a symmetry of feeling. It’s almost a smell. A color.

I felt that this week. I haven’t felt that symmetry in awhile — after all the upheaval we’ve endured. I found Monkey Joes — that white-noise-and-air-filled indoor playground over on the Motor Mile. Wednesdays are half-price. The food looks lousy. The clerks seem numb. The TV is always on the Food network which only makes the food look lousier. They have massage chairs you have pay to be nice to you. Wi-fi is free though.

The boys play hard there. Happily jumping and sliding and pretending. If you’re ever there, my children are the ones with the pool-noodle swords. They are always the children with the swords. How can a warrior — even a wee warrior — leave home without his sword?

And I read. I read so much the last two visits that I actually feel like a scholar again. I have about 50 pages of notes on that reading and an outline floating around my head for another book. It’s been bliss.

I know that I am a bit of misfit. I am the Square Peg who never fits in the round hole. And I’ve decided that despite what my previous world told me (that such oddity is probably the result of sin), this is how God made me. I’m supposed to be this way. I’m supposed to not fit. I have the gift not of making people comfortable (hospitality) but of making people uncomfortable. I’m a gadfly.

I sat at the Monkey Joes’ desk right near the action. I scattered my books across the top, got out my colored pens, and my legal pad. I had overstuffed my purse with random thoughts scrawled on post-its. And even though I was periodically interrupted by a runny nose or a lost Pooh hat, I read the whole time!

It felt just like my early months at Indiana University. I was not accepted into their Ph.D. program because my recommendation letters were “a little strange” (they were!) and because I was from an unaccredited school. While Grant was actually in a program, I was just a “continuing non-degree student” — neither fish nor fowl. Another Square Peg.

I didn’t have a study space on campus to call my own back then, so I’d sit in the Union in that beautiful limestone alcove that overlooked the Rhetorical Studies building. I had my articles and stacks of books in my overstuffed leather bag, my colored pens, and my legal pad. And I was occasionally interrupted by a friendly prof or classmate. It was bliss. Because I was doing what I knew I was plumbed to do. Nobody else knew it just yet though.

Now that I’m an “independent scholar” — another liminal fishy-fowl — it feels pretty much like it did then. Stealing moments to read and compare. Finding myself in my own head while my dearest examples of humanity spin and leap around me. This feels familiar. And very, very good.

So my idea is this: Even while Gen-X and Gen-Y fundamentalists reject the term “fundamentalism” qua fundamentalism, the separatist rhetorical forms persist in conservative Evangelicalism. Having reified the American ideal of individualism into a doctrine, these sectarians have shattered any sense of community in conservative Evangelicalism. They attempt to rebuild a notion of the community with their discourses of “biblical” living in order to woo and contain, but these attempts simply mask the egocentric and splintering rhetorical forms. They have become too individualistic to be fully human.

Or something like that. Does that irritate you? . . . Good.

If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.

Socrates, The Gadfly

You’re Blessed

When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside. Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said:

“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.

“You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.

“You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.

“You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.

“You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.

“You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.

“You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.

“You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom.

“Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.

Salt and Light

“Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage.

“Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.”

Matthew 5:1-16

Destroying Your Life From Within

1-3 And a final word to you arrogant rich: Take some lessons in lament. You’ll need buckets for the tears when the crash comes upon you. Your money is corrupt and your fine clothes stink. Your greedy luxuries are a cancer in your gut, destroying your life from within. You thought you were piling up wealth. What you’ve piled up is judgment.

4-6 All the workers you’ve exploited and cheated cry out for judgment. The groans of the workers you used and abused are a roar in the ears of the Master Avenger. You’ve looted the earth and lived it up. But all you’ll have to show for it is a fatter than usual corpse. In fact, what you’ve done is condemn and murder perfectly good persons, who stand there and take it.

7-8 Meanwhile, friends, wait patiently for the Master’s Arrival. You see farmers do this all the time, waiting for their valuable crops to mature, patiently letting the rain do its slow but sure work. Be patient like that. Stay steady and strong. The Master could arrive at any time.

9 Friends, don’t complain about each other. A far greater complaint could be lodged against you, you know. The Judge is standing just around the corner.

10-11 Take the old prophets as your mentors. They put up with anything, went through everything, and never once quit, all the time honoring God. What a gift life is to those who stay the course! You’ve heard, of course, of Job’s staying power, and you know how God brought it all together for him at the end. That’s because God cares, cares right down to the last detail.

12 And since you know that he cares, let your language show it. Don’t add words like “I swear to God” to your own words. Don’t show your impatience by concocting oaths to hurry up God. Just say yes or no. Just say what is true. That way, your language can’t be used against you.

Prayer to Be Reckoned With

13-15 Are you hurting? Pray. Do you feel great? Sing. Are you sick? Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master. Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet. And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven—healed inside and out.

16-18 Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with. Elijah, for instance, human just like us, prayed hard that it wouldn’t rain, and it didn’t—not a drop for three and a half years. Then he prayed that it would rain, and it did. The showers came and everything started growing again.

19-20 My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.

James 5

Let him begin by treating patriotism . . . as part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the “cause,” in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce. . . . Once you have made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.

Screwtape on How to Ruin a Believer’s Faith in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters

I just finished David Kuo’s book Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. In essence, he writes to remind himself and fellow Christians that Faith can never be a means to a political ends. He wants to foil Screwtape’s plan.

Several things struck me. I did notice his keswidispicostalistic soteriology here and there, but that’s not really a big surprise. His story of identifying with an ideology, being dazzled by its powerful sparkle, ignoring obvious ethical dilemmas in favor of power, enduring his own surprising and life-changing personal crisis, and chucking it all (when termination was inevitable anyway) was so familiar. I saw myself in his words.

He worked for the Christian Right in the 1990s-2000s — for Bill Bennett, Ralph Reed, and John Ashcroft. He wrote speeches and created talking points. Eventually, he became a big part of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”

As a speech writer for the Christian Right and the Republicans, he admits that he propagated flat-out lies about Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he determined to apologize to them personally for that slander. He really didn’t want to, but he knew he should. Then God dropped the opportunity into his lap. It was awkward, halting, and impromptu. Completely uncomfortable. Read:

His apology didn’t make huge, long-lasting political waves. It was just a brief, forgettable sound bite the next day. There were no law suits afterward. But that’s not why Kuo did it. He apologized because it was right, because he was being true to his Faith, and because it was a reminder to him and to those around him about who God is and how much we need Him.

It’s also a way to infuriate Screwtape.

Kuo brings up Bob Jones University several times. My heart sinks every time he does. He describes it as the “ultrafundamentalist” place where “compassionate conservatism” died — where George W. Bush’s catering to the microcultural elements of the Christian Right was more klutzy than “stealthy.” Kuo explains W.’s election strategy: convince Evangelicals that making him President was the only way to advance their social conservatism. “He was born again. He loved Jesus. He hated abortion and loved the family.” But the only way to actually get him into office is by downplaying that religious conservatism.

In other words, W. said to the theo-cons, “Hey, I’m just like you, but I have to play the ‘moderate’ game so that I can get you what you want when I’m in office.” And, according to Kuo, the nation saw that strategy naked and bald at Bob Jones University in February 2000.

It’s chilling to see that event through the eyes of a fellow believer but a BJU-outsider.

The effort at Please-Reconcile.org is coming upon its first milestone. This Wednesday they are sending the letter to the BJU Board and Administration with 400+ signatures of BJU alumni and friends and neighbors imploring the current administration to reconcile their past racist policies. Read the list of signees and their comments. These people are earnest, careful, and prayerful. None of us would be signing if we didn’t care deeply about Bob Jones University’s ministry and its people.

I’ve read the documents at Please-Reconcile.org, and I am stunned and grieved. I’ve said it before — I really had no clue, but that is exactly the problem. Again, I’m sorry.

So if you’ve graduated from, worked for, attended, or been taught by anything Bob Jones University, if you know someone from BJU or if you’ve purchased a book from their Press, if you have ever read about, written about, or heard about that place, if you’ve ever choked on institutional racism, if you’ve ever had to clarify misconceptions about Christ because of BJU’s interracial dating ban, please prayerfully consider signing the letter.

Many theo-cons are working to foreground racial reconciliation as a conservative value in order to heal a very broken GOP. As tempting as it is to emphasize this pragmatic and political reason for reconciling the sin of racism, I can’t forget David Kuo and C. S. Lewis’s admonition. It’s not about the politics. It’s about reminding ourselves that we are each full of sin and that God is faithful in spite of us.

We confess. God takes care of the rest.

If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—make a clean breast of them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God.

I John 1:8-10

Ever since being officially described as “Reformed” (with the adverb “dangerously” unofficially attached) a year ago, I’ve tried to figure out what that means.

So when I was researching the term a year ago, I stumbled across the corrective “post-reformed.” If Reformed means to give the Sovereign the final benefit of the doubt, “Post-Reformed” further foregrounds that humility. Here’s one list of post-Reformed tenets:

• Being PostReformed means laying aside a dogmatic application of a particular reading of the Reformed Confessions that keeps one from appreciating and fellowshipping with brethren from other traditions outside of Reformedom.
• Being PostReformed enables one to see the Bible as God’s grand story of the ages and not to view it as a repository of propositions and factoids. It’s not a Tommy-gun that we load up with pet proof texts…to blast other Christians with. It sometimes gets mysterious and messy but the PostReformed man is comfortable with that and doesn’t feel the necessity to correct God via better formulations and propositions.
• Being PostReformed allows one to ask, “who can I work with” rather than “who can I not work with” in ministry opportunities outside of one’s immediate church, denomination, or tradition. This puts things in positive rather than negative terms and frees one to find allies instead of drawing an ever more exclusive circle of “orthodoxy.”
• Being PostReformed means that when one arrives at a roadblock in one’s tradition, a roadblock created by traditions that attempt to interpret tradition, one is free jump into another road altogether. The PostReformed are not afraid to borrow from another tradition’s formulation of an issue, or to leave a particular point to ambiguity. He is able to clearly see he is bound by God’s Word and that tradition must serve it. He is a man in full.
• Being PostReformed means that you are sometimes not persuaded when the majority of current scholarship in your tradition agrees on something. They may be blind to the fact that they have arrived in a self-referential cul-de-sac. Jumping out of the cul-de-sac to see what another tradition says or to access earlier formulations from your own tradition isn’t something to be afraid of.
• Being PostReformed means you regard Arminians, Emerging Churchmen, and Roman Catholics as Christians…and treat them as such. You work vigorously to build unity, without compromising truth, to demonstrate the visible unity of the Body of Christ, wherever you can, to the watching world. The PostReformed man takes the Beatitudes seriously with great longing in his heart: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God.”
• Being PostReformed means having enough confidence in your Reformed theological convictions that you can interact substantively with Christians in other traditions without fear. The fear that often masquerades as dogmatism is replaced by a love for the truth and your brethren.

They say that you either love him or hate him.

Well, put me in the love column. I know that Martin Luther has his warts, his intense prejudices, and his blind-spots. I think that’s what makes him even more appealing. He’s fully human, and he acts in faith in spite of it.

Thanks to Luther, none of us in the Western world will ever know what it’s like to stand so alone again. Imagine — he was the first cleric in his memory to be married! That’s why he looked at the so-called mundane but gracious gifts of God with such wonder.-

How can you not love a guy who could say this:

Although I know this [i.e., that I am to rejoice in the Lord and expect good of him], I am of a different mind ten times in the course of a day. But I resist the devil, and often it is with a fart that I chase him away. When he tempts me with silly sins I say, “Devil, yesterday I broke wind too. Have you written it down on your list?” When I say to him, “You have been put to shame,” he believes it, for he does not want to be despised.

Or who celebrated our humanity without the baggage of gnosticish pseudo-piety:

I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people happy; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance and the like. Next after theology, I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor.

He looked at simple things and saw God:

Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat! All his thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat. Otherwise he has no thought, wish, or hope.

God writes the gospel, not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.

Sure, Luther was no Philip Melanchthon whom, he said, “stabs, too, but only with pins and needles. The pricks are hard to heal and they hurt. But when I stab I do it with a heavy pike used to hunt boars.” He takes no prisoners when it comes to religiousity:

Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback; set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the other.

Sin doesn’t harm us as much as our own righteousness.

Nothing good comes of violence.

I think I need a bigger dose of Luther in my life. For me, his words cut right through religious aristocracy.

The Gospel of grace is the end of religion, the final posting of the CLOSED sign on the sweatshop of the human race’s perpetual struggle to think well of itself. For that, at bottom, is what religion is: man’s well-meant but dim-witted attempt to approve of his unapprovable condition by doing odd jobs he thinks some important Something will thank him for. Religion, therefore, is a loser, a strictly fallen activity. It has a failed past and a bankrupt future. There was no religion in Eden and there won’t be any in heaven; and in the meantime Jesus has died and risen to persuade us to knock it all off right now. . . .

The Reformation was a time when men were blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late Medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace — bottle after bottle of pure distillate Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel — after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps — suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started. . . . Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.

Robert Capon as quoted in Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel

I’ve never actually celebrated Reformation Day before. Not formally or corporately, at least. Hearing the pipes this past Sunday actually made more sense than it has in years. Up until now, there’s been very little from the British Isles that is recognized in our home. Oh sure, we have a Westie. And somewhere in the world there’s a bolt of tartan with my (married) name on it (literally!). But I’ve never heard my own heritage in that drone. Now I get it. Now, as a Presbyterian.

I got called a “Neo” the other day. No, no, it’s not a super-cool Matrix reference (I wish!). It’s short for “Neo-Evangelical.” Evangelicals never actually call themselves “Neo-Evangelicals” anymore. Now it’s always a devil-term lobbed from a Fundy toward an Evangelical.

It’s an old term too. Like calling a Hillary Clinton a “libber.” At the very root, “Neos” are people who support Billy Graham. ::gasp::

I’ve never understood the Fundy fear and trepidation for Graham. My grandma listened to him back in the day. He does preach the Gospel — albeit a very Moody-esque, Keswickish, revivalistic Gospel which is identical to BJU’s, so that’s not the problem. As I read primary documents from his early days, it’s interesting to watch the falling out. I mean, my alma mater sent students to sing at his Hour of Power! But all of a sudden after 1952 (after he integrated his crusades maybe?), Graham is persona non grata.

Strange.

And because my current church supported Graham back in his 1966 Greenville Crusade — two years before I was born — it, too, is a persona non grata to my previous employer. So that now makes me a “Neo” too, I guess.

The practical difference between Fundies and Neos, according to the Fundies, is preferred Bible translation. Or a strict insistence that women wear modest clothes. Or music. For BJU fundamentalists, music is the big boundary marker that includes a continuous and mysterious harangue about how things over here are drastically different and superior to things over there.

So in my now-Neo church a scandalous NIV translation is the pew Bible. I wear “immodest” pants to worship. ::shudder::

But the music? It. is. exactly. the. same. In fact, some of the very same musicians accompany the congregational singing. And my darling hubby hums along with all the choir numbers. I love hearing the tenor part perfectly and quietly in my ear.

Well now, there are a couple of musical differences. Their corporate singing of “And Can It Be” sounds more like a dance than a march. And in all my years of singing “Amazing Grace,” neither my Masters-in-Church-Music husband nor I have ever learned this verse:

The Lord has promised good to me,
His Word my hope secures;
He will my Shield and Portion be,
As long as life endures.

Where has that been? That promise of God’s goodness? Why was it missing? I, like all my fellow Fundies, know very well how to change the words in Newton’s last verse. But why was this verse so easily dropped? We messed up Old Hundreth too!

The differences between my previous worship life and my current one really struck me Sunday as we celebrated the Reformation. For all the talk about Machen’s Warrior Children, these people don’t seem as jingoistic. Maybe their fight is older. Maybe they’ve moved on. Maybe I just can’t perceive it yet.

Maybe there’s a robust enough culture that the more irenic themes are still organic:

You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time.

John Knox

Either way, I’m going to have to get some Lewis plaid ties for my little Reformers for next year.

Another voice joins the chorus of Heaven! You’ll be missed, Papa. But we know you’re enjoying your time with Jesus and with old friends and family — some of whom you’ve never even met until now. We love you.

Thank the good Lord that it is not death to die.