"...like a tree..." (Notes to a Vagabond Generation)

"Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly.... [rather] his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by a river.... The ungodly are not so but are like the chaff, which the wind drives away." Ps. 1:1-6

The bogeyman of my generation.

All the counsels of the ungodly wither. They are without substance, for the counsel of God alone is all-substance. This is another one of those radical, rebellious notions that offend the finer sensibilities of my vagabond generation. We prefer to "keep our options open," avoid ruts, and escape "comfort zones." We fear stagnation; we fear petrification. We fear consistency and coherence, and what is more stagnant and consistent than a tree? It spends its whole life in one spot, gripping tighter to its beloved safe zone. It will never know the freedom and personal growth of the uprooted life. Of course, an uprooted tree no longer grows at all, but that is hardly the point to us. Carpe diem is the point, and we shall seize it even with our dying breath.

"Viva la freedom!"

All our romanticized idealism over "freedom" or "liberation" or "openness" does not change the hard, common sense fact that an uprooted tree is still a dead tree. You can replant it with each uprooting, but the continual upheaval will be enough to kill it eventually. Trees are meant to stay put, to take root where they are. The stability of its location, the consistency of its nourishment, the coherence of the operation of its parts---all this "stagnation" is its strength, its very life. If that is stagnation, then perhaps we should all be a little more "stagnate."

"All the earth and sky are mine."

It is not stagnation, however, and that is the single greatest error made by my generation: we equate stability and consistency with stagnation and death rather than life and strength. God certainly sees it as life and strength. That is why He uses the image of a tree in this psalm, and it is a perfect image. A tree is a paradox. It never moves, and yet it's always moving. It remains where it is planted, yet it consistently grows further upwards and downwards, gripping the earth tighter and tighter with a myriad of brown fingers coiling from a great knotted fist, and stretching into the sky higher and higher with a multitude of branches unfolding like outstretched hands holding a rich supply of leaves and seeds and fruits and flowers. It grows simultaneously more entrenched and more outrageous, outrageous because it is entrenched.

Dante visits "the liberated."

That same tree-paradox is the life of those who build them- selves on the true, substantive counsel of God. The more they entrench themselves in the truth, the more substance they gain, and the more outrageous and lavish and wondrous their life grows. Our vagabond generation does not understand this. We prefer to hobo it from one patch of ground to the next (in order to superficially "experience its culture" or whatever), and in the end our rootlessness leaves us tossed about by every wave of doctrine or thought or fashion. Like chaff on the wind, we are unceasingly restless and aimless, never finding home.

And all the while, we who are rootless cast a pitying eye to those who have been planted in God's truth, assuming that their immobility will be their destruction; but that assumption will be our destruction, for immobility can be a proof of life just as much as of death. Proof that the tree has been planted by a river. Why should it move? Why would it move? "To whom shall we go?" said Peter to Jesus. "You have the words of life" (John 6:68). By His words we are fed, and by His words we sink deep into infinite earth and stretch high into infinite sky. Again, why would we move? We have found the source of life.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

"...death is swallowed up...." (Eschatological Vision, Part III)

Beyond the doors of night...

"Instead of bronze I will bring gold, and instead of iron I will bring silver. Instead of wood, bronze; instead of stones, iron. I will make your overseers peace and your taskmasters righteousness. Violence shall no more be heard in your land, [nor] devastation or destruction in your borders. You shall call your walls Salvation and your gates Praise. The sun shall no more be your light by day, nor for brightness will the moon give you light, for the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory. The sun shall no more go down, nor the moon withdraw itself, for the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your days of mourning shall be ended." Is. 60:17-20

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.... Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and He will be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." Rev. 21:1-4

"Oh, death is swallowed up. / It owns nothing in me." -My Epic

Oh, the agony and the ecstasy...

The third and final element in the Christian eschatological vision is the unstoppable redemption. This final piece gives to the vision the balance of truth. Here the optimism is fully balanced with the pessimism, which is the way it ought to be, for there is incomplete truth in both positions: things are as dark as you think they are, but there is still hope. And not just any hope, but an unstoppable hope, an inevitable, irrevocable hope. The culmination of the Christian eschatological vision is a glorious future where God and all good things ultimately triumph over all things dark and evil and sad. If it sounds like a Disney movie, then you're not far from the mark; all good (and even campy) stories have an inkling of this truth in them. Good will triumph over evil. It will be a long dark road, a long dark night of every soul, before it happens, but it will happen. There is no stopping it.

Like a light bomb, sucka.

Evil-doers and seducers will wax worse and worse, and worse still, and darkness will spill out and over all without measure, filling the heights and depths with its horror and ennui, until the very sun burns out and the moon burns red. Then the winepress of wrath will bleed much blood. Then the final invasion will commence, the final strike of the rebellion, the final movement of the symphony. The Word who spoke all things will return to un-speak them so that He may re-speak them, the sword of His mouth dividing asunder the very joints and marrow of existence so that they may be reset and refitted. The Light of lights will come crashing through, shattering the very dome of the universe like the shell of a rotten egg. Then all beauty will be awakened and the death curse revoked; then all street-rats and paupers will be made princes, and every mad and greedy oppressor hurled into howling isolation; then all things will become as a star, burning with the brightness of His glory, with those who are one with His glory enduring to the end. And they all will live happily ever-after, to the end of days and beyond.

All our colorful metaphors, from Scripture to Saturday morning cartoons, are trying to point us to one truth: victory is coming. It is inevitable; all things are moving towards this purpose because all things were built for this purpose: redemption, renewal, glory. This is not mere optimism, where everybody will wax better and better (with slight hiccups here and there) until we all flourish in the final enlightenment and eternal hug-fest of tolerance. Nor is it mere pessimism, where evil will wax worse to no end, until every star burns out and all energy is expressed and entropy works out its final corrosion, and the only "peace on earth" will be in the deathly static and silence. This, my friends, is the Christian story, the story of the Great God who made all things, of finite man ruining all things, and of that same God redeeming all things. It is the best of all stories put together into a perfect picture, which is how you know it is true; and not just true but beautiful also. For there is nothing more beautiful then the vision's ultimate refrain: "Death is swallowed up in victory, and shall be no more." Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

P.S. For thoughts on how to practically live within this eschatological vision, start here, here, here, and here.

Advent Homily: Salvation is of the Law (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; He will save us." Is. 33:22

Here we see two simple yet staunch truths, one offensive and the other startling (and perhaps even more offensive). The offensive truth is that God, far from being a mere authority, is revealed as the absolute authority (of Israel specifically and by extension all things). The titles that He is given in this verse form a pattern that shows His authority to be all-encompassing.

As the "judge," He is the one who enforces the law: He passes sentence either to vindicate or punish, to deliver or destroy. As the "lawgiver," He is the one who makes the law: He (literally in Hebrew) "engraves" the law on tablets of stone, declaring forever what is right and wrong, just and unjust. And as the "king," He is the Law: He embodies its very essence and is its very reality, for the law is not the result of His arbitrary whims but the reflection of His perfect character. In sum, He is all-in-one the application of the reflection of the will that made and maintains and runs and rules all things. He is the one who is greater than us: greater than our notions and nations, greater than all our fads and fashions, greater than all our meta-narratives or private interpretations, and greater than all our Sin.

That last phrase points to the more starting truth: "He will save us." What's startling about this is that His identity as Savior is a direct result of His identity as the Absolute Authority. To put it simply, He can save us because He is in charge, because He has the power and the right to do so. Now, we often treat salvation as a category unto itself: God does save us, maybe not in spite of Himself, but at least in isolation from Himself, as though God took a holiday from His other attributes. ("Despite His sense of justice and holiness, God saved us anyway.") Scripture shows such well-intended thinking to be false: God's role as Savior is right in line and in accord with all His attributes, viz., His role as Absolute Authority. It is all linked together in one brilliant pattern that is God.

I suspect that we do not like this. Of course, we do not like the idea of absolute authority, but how much less will we like the idea of absolute authority being the grounds for heroism? It is bad enough that we have a king, but now we find that only the king can save us. And why? Because we have broken the law. Rebellion will not save us; rebellion is what's killing us. It is the height of idiocy to say that we must rebel against God in order to be free. We have rebelled against God, and we are not free but instead are enslaved to other masters, ones armed with cruel hate: the Devil and Sin and Death. It is vain to speak of questioning authority; we have questioned it. It is vain to speak of transgressing the boundaries; we have transgressed them. We have breached the wall, we have scaled the city, we have cast down the thrones of universal law, and we have paid for it with our souls, for in Adam we all died (I Cor. 15:22a), and all our talk is the rigor mortis setting in further and further and further. This rot will be purged with wrath, and we will be consumed in the purging, for the wages of Sin is death (Rom. 6:23a).

The only one who can save us from the wrath of the law is the Law Himself, the Law-giver and Law-applier, the only one who knows how to satisfy it. And He did satisfy it. He breached the walls of our insurrection to satisfy it. He mingled with the dust so that He might rebel against our rebellion. For this He was manifested: that He might destroy the works of the Devil (I John 3:8), the scheming, lying, son of perdition, whose trick have wasted the world. The King of kings met our anarchy with a little Anarchy of his own: the anarchy of righteousness against evil, of light against darkness, of order against chaos. That is the meaning of Christmas: the Law is our Savior, the King is our Hero. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Homily 42: The Boast of God (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"He will swallow up death in victory...." Is. 25:8

Death has dominated the thoughts of Western man. From the ancient Greeks to post-modern existentialists, it is considered the final fate of all (including the gods). It is the one constant, the one absolute, the one hard, stubborn thing that no sophistry or private language can break or dispel. Consequently, the quest to escape death has also dominated the thoughts of Western man: from Gilgamesh searching for the immortal flower to modern science fiction theorizing over various modes of technological and evolutionary transcendence. The desire is insatiable: death must be outrun.

Such kind illusions never stick, though. The flower is lost by accident, and the technology or evolution only produces horrors rather than salvation. But the desire to escape this dread foe, our last enemy, remains burned into our souls and skulls. So we continue to lull ourselves to sleep with daydreams, only to waken once again with nightmares. If we stay awake long enough, then the best we can hope to do is face death with dignity, which is a hard ideal to reach. Death is the great darkness, and before it we are all children, all afraid of the dark.

The Bible says two radical things about death: it is the primary means that the Devil uses to torment humanity (Heb. 2:14-15), and it has been defeated by God in Christ (I Cor. 15:53-57; Heb. 2:8-15). The latter notion is of particular note for two reasons. The first is that it echoes all the desires and hopes encapsulated in the mythology of humanity; yet just like other things in Christianity (viz., the Incarnation), this myth is true. It is not just another echo; it is the voice of origin, the archetype to all the ectypes.

The second reason has to do with the scale of the defeat. In Isaiah, it is said that God will swallow up death in "victory" (some modern translations say "forever"). The Hebrew word for "victory" literally means "the goal," i.e., the furthermost point that you can reach. Inherent in this word is the idea of "going all the way" or "reaching completion". In other words, for God to swallow up death in "victory" means that God has swallowed up death completely, absolutely, and to the uttermost extent. The same sentiment (and language) is expressed in Heb. 7:25, where God is able to save "to the uttermost". It is total victory. There will not be one inch remaining that the dark can reclaim.

In short, the thing that we have desired to be done has been done and will be done, and that beyond our wildest dreams. The last enemy has not been defeated momentarily but utterly. Its impotence is paramount, for it could not hold Christ, and it will not hold those who are one with Christ. In Heaven's war room there are many trophies, chief amongst them being the very hide of death, which hangs nailed to the cross. That is the boast of God forever. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Homily 38: A Day of Days (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"Then comes the end, when [Christ] shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God the Father, when He shall put down all rule, and all authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death...." I Cor. 15:24-26

The ancient Middle-eastern concept of a "redeemer" had several different facets to it, and Christ (being the great Redeemer) fulfills them all. As a "kinsmen redeemer," He has come and completely purchased back His people from Sin, making them a Church widowed by the Cross and being made spotless and pure until He returns for her and takes her away to His Father's house. As a "property redeemer," He has purchased back all of creation that was sold under Sin, and He will deliver it back up to the Father as a kingdom renewed by redemption. These two facets of a "redeemer" are the two we hear the most often about, and we ought to continue hearing about them, for they are for our joy and strength.

There is one other facet of a "redeemer," however, that Christ also fulfills and yet doesn't get nearly as much thought. In light of recent tragic events, it would do us good to hear it again: that of the "blood redeemer," the one who avenges their family and loved ones against those who have harmed them. We find much comfort in the "gentle" Jesus of the gospel narratives, but have we forgotten the mighty Jesus of "the end"? There He is no longer the suffering savior but the blood redeemer, coming for vengeance with red sword in hand.

Understand this: the first time Jesus came it was for the redemption of His beloved; the next time He comes, it will be for the redemption of His beloved's blood against all her enemies. I am not speaking of temporal institutions or powers (though they will have much to answer for as well), but rather her greater enemies: Hell and all its malicious guile, the Devil and all his cruel hate, and Death, the last and greatest enemy of them all, the one whose mindless travesties have broken every heart including the heart of God (John 11:33-35). Vengeance on Hell and the Devil would be vengeance enough, but how sweet will be that final vengeance? Vengeance against the last enemy? There is coming a day when death will answer for its many crimes: for all the loved ones lost in agony and fear, for all the millions consumed in disaster or atrocity. The end is coming, where death will have neither power to stand nor any place to hide. Christ, death's great nemesis, will return in splendor and with purpose. He will claw death's wretched frame from out of the very fabric of existence, hold him up against the blood-red sky, look him in the eye and say, "Now is the day of my vengeance."

What a day it will be, a day of days, when the problem of evil will be answered at last, for Christ the mighty Blood-Redeemer will take the scoundrel death and smite his ruin against the wrath of God.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Boil to Rags, Part 7: The Last Enemy (a devotional series by an orthodox rebel)

(See the first post in the series here.)

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish...." John 3:16

Everything dies.

Everything fades, fails, burns out, and runs its course. Even secular skepticism cannot deny this one unalienable truth, this last absolute left to willful unbelief. Everything is perishing. Even as we speak, men and animals and plants and planets and stars and all things are moving faster and faster towards a static equilibrium, a silence and stillness and dark and cold. Long after every living things is a corpse, the universe itself will rot away leaving behind dead planets and empty voids, the skull and bones of existence. To those who do not have God, or redemption, or any other hope outside of this material deathtrap called Nature, death alone is crouching at the door, and its open maw will be satisfied with much blood.

We think very little of death until it's coming for us or those we love, until we discover that every place wherein our soul has trod is its hunting grounds. Then it is no longer a morbid abstraction. It becomes an enemy: a living, breathing, calculating enemy. An enemy with all the advantages: inescapable and unstoppable. It takes at will and seemingly at random, stealing young and old and friend and foe. Many today laugh and mock the "simple" view of a being whose ways are malicious and meaningless beyond all imagining. But let them taste of death, let their lives be stained by its horror and great darkness, and they will never be so naive again. We have a great foe, the last enemy left to mankind, who touches all of our lives on a relentless day-to-day basis, and he does not have red horns and a pitchfork but a black hood and a scythe. Indeed, the power of death is the Devil's for a season, but in the end even he will have to give up the ghost before that infinite dark.

See, now, why the Gospel is good news. It is not because another sage has taught us morality. It is not because a martyr died for a cause. It is not because a humble rabbi rebelled against his superiors. It is because whosoever believes in Christ shall never die. Death may claim a body, but it will find it a hollow treat, for the soul belongs to death's Great Enemy, the imperishable and incorruptible God-man. When long ago death met the Being of Life and the Life of Being face-to-face in a man, what else could happen but its power crumble like a hollowed-out house before an earthquake? When death swallowed Christ, it was as if a corpse swallowed a live coal and in turn was swallowed up with fire unquenchable. That is the Gospel: the immortal God has scattered the immortal dark. Christ died and rose again, and death has been swallowed up in His victory, and every soul surrendered to that victory shall not perish, for death owns nothing in them anymore.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Boil to Rags, Part 5: Behold the Man (a devotional series by an orthodox rebel)

(See the first post in the series here.)

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son...." John 3:16

What can God give to man? What haven't the gods given to us already? Favor and apathy. Blessings and wrath. All arbitrary, all done before, and all very wearisome. By the noonday life of the Roman Empire, the world had grown weary of playing favorites with the gods. Their wills had grown old like the gods. They had altars aplenty. They had hedged every imaginable divine bet that they could find. So what of this one God? What could that Incomprehensible Dance give to comprehensible man? What could that Majestic Infinite give to the fallen finite? What was there to give that could outdo and outstrip all the false deities of the human mind and heart? Nothing less than Himself, for all that He gives is Himself, for there is nothing greater that can be given.

What offensive mystery is this? The incomprehensible becoming comprehensible. The infinite becoming finite. The Word becoming flesh. Many gods have made worlds, and many more have made men and walked amongst them, but only one has dared to play the man. Many gods scheme and plot and plan as though they were playing a game with mankind, but only one chose to play the game Himself and keep all the rules. He was born in blood and filth like us, raised by imperfect parents, lived in poverty under the heel of tyrants, and watched the dead formalism and religious hypocrisy of His people's faith. He tasted the bitterest cup that humanity has to offer: of sorrow and pain and death. Yes, the incomprehensible has comprehended death as intimately as we all will one day. Life more abundant was swallowed by the grave so that he might swallow it up in return. Let the world say what they will about this God, but let their lips be silent on this one point: we have not a High Priest who is untouched by our infirmities. God knows our frame and pities our frame because He made and has been our frame.

Yet this is only half of the gift, only part of what has been given. For though the Almighty God has played the man in every way, yet He has done what we cannot. In older times, holy men wrought miracles of all kinds by the power of God, even raising the dead. But none of these men could ever end death. When faced with that awful darkness, the last enemy before whom even Satan himself will succumb, all men have fallen. All men, save one. One who was like us and yet not like us. He was man, and He was God. And when Death killed the man, it found the God, and against that unrelenting Light and Life and Love pouring forth with ravenous splendor and strength, what else could Death do but die?

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Homily Magnus: On Death and Life (as proclaimed by an orthodox rebel)

"...for why will you die...?" Eze. 33:11b

Our world is made of antitrust. Over one-hundred years of unchecked, rampant skepticism has corroded away the image of trust. Suspicion is our new religion, forged on the altar of self-deification. All other things, whether they be friends or family or strangers or institutions or traditions or customs, are a threat to our own self-actualization. We must hold all others, however dear or precious, at arms length, taking with a grain of salt everything that they say or give. They must not be allowed to shape or dominate us. They must never own or conscribe any part of us. So we retract into ourselves in recesses beyond thought, in dark lairs of corners of our minds, and in those dungeons deep we forge in secret our master self, pouring into it our will with which we thwart all others. Our selves are always sword and shield, never true open arms and welcoming embrace. Something will always be held back, something no one is worthy of in our eyes, i.e., our real self, made only by the hand of God and the Fall. Such is the lonely, oh so lonely narcissism of our fragmented world.

God has a word for such self-centered isolationism. He has a strong, simple term for our sad division: Sin. It is from Sin that we cut ourselves off from all things. It is Sin that lifts high the banner of self as the flag of the world. It is the sin-sick soul who sings, "I am a god. I sit in the seat of God in the midst of the seas" (Eze. 28:2b), "My river is my own, and I have made it for myself" (Eze. 29:3b), and "I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will be like the Most High" (Is. 14:13, 14). Our narcissistic fragmentation is not a result of postmodern liberation and deconstruction, nor of heroic and idealized self-assertion, but rather the monstrous pride that sets the self at the center of all things. Our exaltation of self, having degraded and degenerated into a horrid and absolute skepticism, eventually collapsed from a hyper-individualism where we are the only star in our lonely little universe. There are no gods or kings or even man; there is only me. No man is an island, but every man dreams of a private island, and no island is more private than the island of self-love.

We all have been drawn away by our own lusts for our will and way and self above and against all others, even God Himself; and when that lusts conceives, it brings forth sin, and when sin is finished it brings forth death (James 1:15 KJV). The soul that sins shall die (Eze. 18:4b). There is no other alternative. It is a law of existence just as much as gravity is a law of nature. It is the only reason and explanation for this living death that we are in: our noise and insanity, our fashions and futility, our callousness and frigidity, our decadence and apathy, our lusts and lunacy, our ugliness and horrible, horrible depravity. We are the hub of a lone wheel, trapped in the mud, spinning endlessly in an infinite rut, digging our own graves as we whirl in maddening stillness.

Hear now the word of the Lord who made the heavens and the earth and your self: "Why will you die?" Life is never found in the self; rather, it is found when the self is finally forgotten, given away, killed outright for the sake of another; and God is the ultimate Other: "He who loses His life for my sake shall find it" (Matt. 10:39). Herein is life, not the uncompromising worship of our self, but the unconditional surrender of the self into the love of God. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His only Son to save us from the dark tyranny of Sin that makes the self a god, so that we might know the only true God, know in the most intimate and sacred of ways. As Father and child. Friend and friend. Lover and lover. It is only when we take that first step, that first step of trust in the God who made us and loves us, that first step off of our lonely precipice to fall headlong into the infinite ocean and drown therein, only then will our sad division cease.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

"We all are lonely, Maker -- each a soul

Shut in by itself, a sundered atom of thee.

No two yet loved themselves into a whole;

Even when we weep together we are two.

Of two to make one, which yet two shall be,

Is thy creation's problem, deep, and true,

To which thou only hold'st the happy, hurting clue."

-George MacDonald (from Diary of an Old Soul)

The Dance and Death (an Advent devotional by an orthodox rebel)

There is stillness in God, but not as we understand stillness. In God is the highest life and energy. In Him and from Him is all movement, as Dante would describe it. In Him is the Great Dance, as Lewis would say. With God there is no ceasing of activity, but rather the perfecting of activity, because the activity is no longer wild and aimless and weary from wandering. It has found its object, its mark, its "resting" place. It has come home, and that is the stillness of God: the inward peace in finally becoming one with God's life and energy, of becoming one with the Godhead's triune dance. The peace of God, the stillness of God, is in the soul coming home at last, where God turns our mourning into dancing (Ps. 30:11).

There is stillness in Sin, and it is exactly as we understand stillness. Decay. Corruption. Moth and rust destroying. The sinful soul is the derelict soul. The soul that sins shall die (Eze. 18:4), and death is the final stillness, the final ceasing of all energies. Whenever a soul sins, it has turned itself away from God, away from the movement to the frigid static, away from the dance into the outer dark. For Sin is the calcification of the self onto anything that is not God. All other things of creation (even if they are good and noble) are dumb, lifeless idols whenever they try to take God's place, and their worshipers become just as dumb and lifeless. In the holiness that is the worship of God, in that grand dance and symphony, is life everlasting; but in the sin that is the worship of the self, or any other created thing, is the petrification of the soul unto death.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

The Unnatural Sin (a cultural engagement by an orthodox rebel)

I remember a year ago I was watching the last Rambo movie because my cousin told me it was awesome (for the record, it wasn't). Right before character creation and subtlety were jettisoned out of the airlock and replaced by scene after scene of ever-increasing violence, there was a brief moment of profundity. John Rambo, living in exile somewhere outside of Burma, is asked by a group of Christian missionaries if he would take them to their mission inside of Burma, despite the country being a "war-zone" (i.e., there's crazy people with guns running everywhere). Rambo grudgingly agrees to go and ferries them up river.

Somewhere along that magical ferry ride (after Rambo uses one pistol to kill no less than five bad guys at once), Rambo gets to talking with one of the missionaries. She asks him why he has been so grumpy about what they are doing. Rambo's response is interesting. Apparently, he thinks that the missionaries are all wasting their time. "You're going against what's natural," he says, referring to their pacifistic (and somewhat pretentious) brand of Christianity. "When you're pushed, killin's as easy as breathin'." Judging by the missionary's reaction, she saw his viewpoint as highly defeatist. I saw it as closer to the truth, but not quite.

The problem with the Christian missionaries in the film is their barely implicit denial of original sin (as well as their smugness about that denial). They seem to think that if they "turn the other cheek" by refusing to defend either themselves, their friends, or even the people that are under their care, then the crazy, genocidal militiamen will just throw down their arms and sing "Kumbaya". Or perhaps God will rain down fire upon them (which He sort of did, only the fire's name was Rambo). Of course, the exact opposite happens. Just as Rambo off-handedly predicted, the mission is sacked, the men killed (or taken off to be tortured), and the women raped. Rambo is unsurprised to hear this news, because he had taken and continues to take into account an important fact: the heart of fallen man is deceitful and desperately wicked (Jer. 17:9), and expecting sudden mercy and compassion from those who have let human depravity swallow them whole is a fool's dream.

There is a problem with Rambo's near-miss assessment, however, and it is in his use of the word "natural".

Oswald Chambers once said that if a man looks seriously at life, at the whole of existence as it really is, then he will find that it is fundamentally tragic rather than logical. Something is not right with the world, something that regularly and effectively upsets all our best-laid plans, hopes, and institutions. Something called Sin. It has wrecked us and the whole of creation with death and all its damnable incarnations. Since the Fall, it has been a part of our existence, a deep and interwoven part.

As deep a part as it may be, however, it is by no means "natural". It is easy to mistake it for such, but it is still not so. It may be commonplace and widespread, but that does not make it "natural". Despite ignorance to the contrary, Sin and death have been and always will be unnatural: abnormalities, deformities, aberrations, what ought not to be. Aberrations do not cease to be such simply because they are prevalent; a disease does not magically become health because it has taken over the whole body. Likewise, just because something is abundant enough to be called "common" does not in any way suddenly make it natural, normal, or moral.

This is a very ancient yet relevant fact. The creation is what it is; but whatever it is, it was not meant to be thus. There was a time before the Fall, where creation existed as it was intended to be, an existence it may yet be again. Until such time, however, we wander through the suffering waste and grim, where the saturation of aberration has become so complete that we stop noticing it. Furthermore, many without and even within the Christian camp would say that certain aberrations are actually natural and as God intended. This is how far the disease has spread: the body no longer sees it as such and instead welcomes it as health.

Rambo had taken into account the one great fact of life: the reality of sin. The problem is that there are two great facts of life, and the second is this: the reality of redemption. Sin may be real, but it is never "natural". There are no "natural" sins; all sin is unnatural. That is what the reality of redemption teaches us; and without that reality, sin is not only real but also all that there is. What's worse, its prevalence could become so accepted that no one calls it sin anymore. They call it "natural," normal, the way things are and thus ought to be. Without the reality of redemption, we have no motivation or means to pierce the darkness; we can only succumb either to despair or blindness, to a hopeless nihilism or an ignorant optimism. Rambo was the former. The Christian missionaries were the later. The Christian Faith is neither.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011