One Question (Homily 56)

Priorities, son.

"...who is lord over us?" Ps. 12:4b

The question of lordship is still the most practical question you can ask anyone. For every person, the buck ultimately stops somewhere, and wherever it stops can tell you a lot about that person: what they believe, what they care about, and what they're willing to put up with.

Now, Psalm 12 mentions two kinds of people: the godly and the proud (vs. 1-4). The former are failing and fading while the latter are flourishing. The dichotomy is simple enough---there are those to whom God is their ultimate authority and those who are their own ultimate authority. That dichotomy is pretty well maintained throughout Scripture. There are those who "fear the Lord" and those who say "there is no God." Every human being can be boiled down to one of those two categories.

This is not merely a matter of God's existence. There are plenty of people who believe in God's existence that still live like atheists in day-to-day practical life. Rather, it is a matter of relevance, i.e., what is His relation to you and your life? Is he everything or nothing? That sounds like a false choice fallacy, but remember the dichotomy: if God is not everything to you, then He really is nothing to you, no matter how much you patronize Him. The greatest commandment is to love God with all that you are and got (Matt. 22:36-38), and he who transgresses one law is guilty of them all (James 2:10), and we all have transgressed the greatest law: we have not loved God (Ps. 14:2-3; Rom. 1:21-25, 3:10-11).

All sin and righteousness comes down to the one question Jesus asked his disciples: "Who do you say that I am?" (Matt. 16:13-16; c.f. Mark 8:27-29; Luke 9:18-20). The answer to that means everything, affects everything: what you live for and are willing to die for. Where the buck stops. Where the final line in the sand is drawn. Christian living, the life of faith, is the fight to recognize the lordship of God both in Christ and over your life. "You are not your own. You are bought with a price. Therefore glorify God" (I Cor. 6:19-20)---that is the way of life, and life more abundant.

The center is still the center.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Beyonder (as explained by an orthodox rebel)

"To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare unto Him? [...] 'To whom then will ye liken Me, or [to whom] shall I be equal?' saith the Holy One." Is. 40:18, 25

One of the main themes of Isaiah is God's war on hubris. A necessary correlation from that is the absolute incomparableness of God. Try as we might, and much to our chagrin, God is fundamentally (on principle) and essentially (in His being) beyond our categories. I say "beyond" rather than "outside" because the categories that we do have (as gathered by reason and received by revelation) can create an approximation to God, so that He is knowable to us. It is, however, only an approximation, and our knowledge, as always, is incomplete (I Cor. 13:8-9). True, yet incomplete. We will never get to the bottom of God, and all of our endless metaphors will never exhaust Him, never completely capture the fullness of His being. Thus, He is the "Holy One," i.e., the separate one who is absolutely, categorically different from us.

There is no worse hubris then that which assumes it has God figured out. Whether it is the atheist who figures out that God has no existence, or the believer who figures out that God has endorsed their personal preferences, the foundation is the same: God has become reducible to our finite categorizes. As I've said elsewhere, one of God's favorite pastimes is smashing all confident and comfortable assumptions about Him that did not come from Him. But there is another principle that we must realize here, and that is this: hubris is the dead thing, while humility is the living thing.

Hubris stagnates and rots because it has grown too big (or rather, its universe has grown too small) and it has nowhere left to go. Humility, however, recognizes and accepts its smallness, and thus it has nothing but room to grow; not itself, but its universe, and that is the key. It is not at all about us becoming bigger, but about God becoming bigger than our wildest dreams. God is not a philosophy that we figure out eventually; rather, He is the wild yet good adventure (a "comedy," as we used to call it) that we explore and enjoy forever. But hubris cannot enjoy and explore forever. It has nothing left to explore, and thus nothing left to enjoy. It has discovered all variants, understood and classified all unknowables, and dispelled all mysteries and surprises. It has nothing left but its own overbloated self in its own overbloated world, nothing more than a bubble waiting to be popped.

Rest assured, God will pop them all. He will implode all galaxies and shatter all vanities that have made no room for Him, piercing them through with shafts of Light and Truth. His Truth, the Truth about Himself, Truth unfathomable and uncontainable and inescapable. We may balk at this if we wish, but I far better fate (and life) awaits those who find good courage and take strong rest in the reality that God is greater, more loving, and more good than they could ever conceive.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Coward (The Six Shades of Sin, Part V)

"Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight!" Is. 5:21

You would not immediately think that pride is so very much like fear, but it is. Pride is a gnawing insecurity, a nagging doubt like a splinter in the mind. It covers your whole world in a deep darkness, with the unknown rising like walls around you. Panic sets in easily, and from panic comes the desire to end the panic, to disperse the darkness. Fear is the soil in which pride will bloom, for fear desires control, and what else is pride but the state of believing that you are in control: of your circumstances, your troubles, and other people's circumstances and troubles? The prideful are schemers and manipulators, puppet masters and control freaks, but they are not strong or brave. They think that they are strong and brave, but they are not. The prideful man or woman is the coward locked nine doors deep behind the infinite webbing of their cobweb castle. They have contingencies for every variable and defenses for every threat, not because they are strong and brave, but because they are weak and fearful and know it. Far behind that sneering veneer of smug self-sufficiency lies the timid weakling who dares not let anything out of their control. They declare themselves to be the wisest and the most prudent because they must be the wisest and the most prudent, for planning is everything with them, and without their precious little plans the wildness of real life (and the real God) will come crashing in on them, and they fear that they will not survive the collision.

The substance of real things is in paradox, and here we find another: whereas the "strength" and "bravery" of the prideful is all smoke and mirrors, so the truly brave and strong may seem to be weaklings (or at the very least fools). They have no plan, or at least no thoughts of a full-proof plan. They have no delusions of grand schemes to order all things, nor are they obsessed with the poisonous notion that they can control their circumstances. Consequently, they neither desire nor seek domination: not of their surroundings, or lives, or the surroundings and lives of others. They acknowledge their own smallness before all things and have accepted it. They also acknowledge the reality of things greater than they and thus submit to that fact. They cannot change their birth, nor whom they meet, or what comes in a day, or any of the endless surprises of ordinary life, and they do not attempt to change them.

As pride is the product of fear, so only humility can produce bravery. If you every think yourself to be greater than your circumstances, you will become controlling rather than brave, digging yourself deeper and farther away from real things. However, the instant that you acknowledge (and take joy in) your own smallness, you realize that fear profits you nothing, for it can neither add one cubit to your stature nor save you. No man takes his life into his own hands, for our lives belong to the hand of someone greater, and herein lies one of the secret beauties of Christianity. Many a pagan culture believed in the smallness of their own lives, and although it made life beautiful in a sense, it was a beautiful tragedy, full of random chaos and ending in death. For the Christian, however, life is a comedy, the deep comedy of God, and it is on that joyous rock that we live and move and have our being. Humility is not found in bowing down before the inevitable, impersonal mutability of all things but rather in resting in the love of the personal, immutable God of all things. There can be great bravery in acknowledging your own smallness; there can also be great despair. But there can be nothing but a bountiful supply of bravery and joy for those who acknowledge their smallness before the God who loves them and is for them (Rom. 8:31-39). It is the way of Christ, who, being God, made Himself small, humbling Himself before the will of His Father; and in the strength of that fundamental humility, He became obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Phil. 2:5-8), the cross that only the brave can bear (Matt. 16:24-25).

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

The Idiot (The Six Shades of Sin, Part III)

"Woe unto those that draw along iniquity with cords of vanity, and [draw along] sin as it were with a cart rope, who say, 'Let Him make speed and hasten His work that we may see it, and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come that we may know it.'" Is. 5:18-19

Impiety is a stuffy sounding word to most, but in truth it is and has always been one of the greatest sins of humanity. Even ancient pagan cultures knew it: to fear the gods was the height of virtue (and common sense), and impiety was warned against. The impious rage of Achilles brought only death and sorrow, while the pious wiles of Odysseus brought him safely home (to slay the impious suitors). The point was simple and practical and yet profound: there is a moral order to things that is higher than and greater than you, and it behooves you to align yourself (as best as you can) with it.

That is the true idea behind piety: not arrogant or pompous self-righteousness, but humility. Piety is found in the humble realization and acceptance of our own smallness before something that is legitimately greater than us. Wisdom teaches us the truth of our smallness, and embracing that smallness is even further wisdom, for "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Pro. 1:7).

If piety is humility produced by and producing wisdom, then impiety is pride produced by and producing idiocy. The pride is obvious, but the idiocy should be even more obvious. To claim superiority over the One who holds your very breath in His hand is the height not only of arrogance but also absurdity. There is no greater farce than to see a spark speak blithely to its fire, or to watch a leaf rustle defiantly against its branch and tree, yet this is precisely what we do.

It is bad enough that we often plan in spite of God, but worse still is when we plan out of spite for God. Our schemes and dreams are no longer excusable indulgences but rather open acts of rebellion. Our utopic visions and agendas degrade from innocent ignorances to spitting in the eye of the Trinity. Our movements and politics and sloganeerings cease to be mere acts of dedication and devolve into acts of desecration. This is the point where the ignorance of fallen humanity gives way to the idiocy of human hubris. We do not believe, and we want no help for our unbelief. Without faith it is impossible to please God, for without faith there is only the slobbering stupidity and horror of humanity pleasing itself. All of human history (right up to this very day) can be summarized under a single declaration: "We will have no other gods before us."

Chesterton once said that if we are to have a large universe then we must make ourselves small. What he meant is that humility produces clarity, while pride can only produce a contracted delusion. If impiety is the greatest kind of pride, then it also produces the greatest delusion. If we are to see the truth of real things, to see reality as it is and not as we make it, then we need humility. We need piety. We need a return to the radical notion that there is something higher and greater than ourselves, our nation, our party, our denomination, our status (in both secular and religious circles), and our way. We can only kick our insane habit of hubris when we acknowledge (day by day, moment by moment, instance by instance) that God is and that without Him we are not. He is the foundation and center and energy of all things. He is the ultimate source and ground for all movement, even the movement that runs away from Him. He is the one who knows better than we, for without Him there would be no grounds for reason, or minds to reason, or brains to house minds. The point is simple enough: unless God (and nothing else) is the highest in our life, then everything is in vain (Ps. 127:1). That is the fear of the Lord. That is piety, and wisdom, and the only way to walk safely and sanely through this world.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012