Diary of the Blue Ridge

For my blog. DiaryOTBR is headed for the greener pastures of Upsaid.com, and can now be found at http://www.upsaid.com/joshuaseth/. I hope my loyal readers (all five of them) will follow me there.

Peter Leithart, preaching on Psalm-singing. In the midst of our all Christian sub-culture's obsession with writing newer and cooler praise songs, his sermon points out the irony of all this...not only are we largely ignorant of the Church's hymns, but we don't even have a clue how to sing its oldest prayers. My grandparents have spent the last decade helping to found a PCA church in their county - it is a delightfully "irrelevant" church, and one of the best things they do is sing a Psalm every Sunday. It is usually a haltering, awkward process - no one really knows how it should sound, but week after week they work their way through the Psalter. It is a beautiful picture of the Church slowly growing into maturity; every week they sing the ancient songs with more confidence, as God increasingly blesses their obedience in this unfamiliar, but correct, path.

Since the time of David, Psalm-singing has been the center of prayer and singing for the people of God. That is obvious in Judaism, for from the time of Solomon'’s temple, through the Second temple” period after the exile, and into the period of the New Testament, the Psalter was THE hymnal of the church. The same is true of the early church. Psalms were chanted and sung in churches during the early centuries; monks chanted through the entire Psalter each week during the Middle Ages; and one of the great liturgical achievements of the Reformation was the development of Psalms that could be sung in congregational worship.

We are seeing something of a revival of Psalm-singing today, not only here in Moscow but also in various places around the country. In some cases, people have visited Moscow, been overwhelmed by our Psalm-singing, and gone home to organize Psalm-sings in their home churches. But, since familiarity often breeds incomprehension, it'’s important to remind ourselves continually of why we are doing this.

First, we are doing it above all because it is well-pleasing to God. God requires Psalm-singing. “Sing and make melody in your heart, in Psalms, and hymns and spirit-songs, Paul says. I do not believe that God forbids hymns, and the church has a great tradition of church music. But those hymns must be secondary to Psalms in the church'’s worship and piety, since Psalms are God'’s own hymns, which He commands us to sing. Refusing to sing Psalms would be as much a violation of God'’s commandment as neglecting the celebration of the Lord'’s Supper. But the Psalms are not only commanded by God but PLEASING to Him. Yahweh is the Hero of the Psalms, and He enjoys hearing His exploits sung by bards. He delights in our praises, and He particularly delights when we praise Him with the songs He has given.

Second, we are learning Psalms because our Psalms provoke God to act for us. I mentioned in the communion meditation last week that the Supper is a memorial, and that means it is presented before the Father to “remind” Him of His covenant. God does not forget, for His throne is surrounded by the rainbow. But just as He acts in response to prayer even though He knows what we need before we pray, so also He responds to our “memorials even though He remembers His covenant before we remind Him. And one way we remind Him to act in accord with His promise is in song. Chronicles tells us that song is a memorial before the Lord, and as we sing of God'’s great acts, we are calling on Him to do it all again. We praise Him for cutting Rahab in pieces, and we want Him to do it again; we celebrate the gift of manna in the wilderness, and we remind Him to provide for us in the same way; we sing of David'’s many dangers and many deliverances, and we remind God of His promise to rescue us from all evils.

Third, we are learning Psalms to prepare us for war. Singing Psalms is itself an act of war, because we are calling on Yahweh, the Divine Warrior, to fight for us. But singing Psalms also empowers us for battle. It is simply a fact that vigorous singing heightens our spirits, increases our energy, makes us ready for action. Armies throughout the centuries have known this, and every great army has had fight songs, and sports teams know this principle too. Here especially we need to make sure that the Psalms are dominant in our singing, for, sadly, many of the hymns of the Christian church have been hymns for retreat rather than battle, hymns of withdrawal rather than Psalms of advance.

It is also important to be reminded of HOW we should sing. Take time to learn the Psalms at home with your children, and take advantage of the Psalm-singing opportunities we have. And when you come here to worship sing even the Psalms we don’t know all that well. Don'’t sit silently waiting for a familiar tune. And sing vigorously. The acoustics in this room are terrible, but don'’t let that inhibit you. The Lord will hear and notice, and someday Lord willing we will sing in better circumstances. Paul says that we are filled with the Spirit to sing Psalms and hymns and spirit-songs, and the Spirit is always, always an energizing power. Psalm-singing at the temple was part of Israel’s replication of Sinai: The smoke of hundreds of sacrifices rose from the altar and enveloped the temple mount, as the smoke and cloud enveloped Sinai. And that rising smoke was accompanied by singing and shouts from thousands of priests and worshipers, by the crashing of cymbals, by stringed instruments and trumpets, music that mimicked the deafening and thunderous voice of God when he came to Sinai. So, do your best to make the walls and ceiling shake, and we can be confident that the Lord who made the ear will hear and will make Moscow shake.

It's been a crazy week for my family; first our cousin dies, and then the house burns down.

They basically lost everything that was in the house at the time of the fire; clothes, computer, dishes, old family furniture, kid's artwork, toothpaste, scotch tape, Valentine's cards - everything. Insurance will cover the rebuilding of the house, probably in four or five months, and the cost of the lost possessions, which is a blessing, but there are of course things you can't replace. God is good, though; the church (Covenant Pres. of Richmond) has been overwhelminingly supportive, as have friends and family. I think Rose (my five year old sister) has been given more dolls and stuffed animals in the last week than she ever owned in her life.

The bottom line though, is that my family has already laid up its treasure in heaven, where rust does not corrupt and thieves do not steal; losing all their worldly possessions is simply another chapter in the increasingly good and interesting story of how God is displaying His glory and building the kingdom through their lives.

It's a cheesy story, the kind you find forwarded into your inbox, but when it's your life, your stuff, it's a little more complex, a little more true. After the firemen finished knocking holes in half the walls and quenching the last of the fire, they told my mother it was safe for her and dad to go in and see if they could salvage their valuables -- and my mother laughed. It was a gospel chuckle, a profoundly biblical giggle, a real Romans 8 guffaw; for all that was valuable to her was already safe, and even if they had indeed perished in the smoke and flames, even death could not keep them dead.

So this then, for this week, is faith: to watch your house burn and laugh.

Please pray for my family, who was displaced from their home in Richmond, VA after it burned Thursday morning. The structure stands, but smoke and fire damage were extensive, and we're not sure what (possession-wise), if anything, will be able to be salvaged. No one was hurt.

Death seems to be winning. My cousin Pamela, only 42, died this week after an eight year battle with cancer. Her body, which only weeks ago was still healthy, now lies in a graveyard east of Richmond, in the same plot where my great-grandparents both rest. Each of them followed a Christ who promised life, and yet their bodies lie dead.

But the story is not finished. The Word did not put on flesh simply to send our souls to heaven. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, and that same Richmond graveyard is the site of a future battle that will be won by our Messiah King, when those who now sleep will finally be changed. On that day we will chant and sing "O death, where is your victory?; O death, where is your sting?" for it is death who will die, and we who live. And Pamela will come back out of that grave we put her in, and she will lead the cry with a shout, for all will finally have put to right. Maranatha.

The gospel is a paradox; it is not the strong who will win, but the weak, and not the rich who are blessed, but the poor. The death of a saint is not therefore reason to despair, but rejoice, and reaffirm our faith in what is as yet unseen. So it is that, on this miserable, cold day in February, we look anew for resurrection of the dead, and wait with even more longing for the life of the world to come.

Bob Dylan, on the passing of his friend, Johnny Cash.

Of course, I knew of [Cash] before he ever heard of me. In '55 or '56, "I Walk the Line" played all summer on the radio, and it was different than anything else you had ever heard. The record sounded like a voice from the middle of the earth. It was so powerful and moving. It was profound, and so was the tone of it, every line; deep and rich, awesome and mysterious all at once. "I Walk the Line" had a monumental presence and a certain type of majesty that was humbling. Even a simple line like "I find it very, very easy to be true" can take your measure. We can remember that and see how far we fall short of it.

Johnny wrote thousands of lines like that. Truly he is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English...If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all, and he'll never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet -- especially those persons -- and that is forever.

Dylan and Cash are throwbacks to an earlier age; in the world of modern pop music, they seem, well, medieval. Though neither fit into America's Christian sub-culture, both men publicly identified themselves with Christ, and ironically sang from a far more biblical worldview than the average CCM artist. Both understood deeply the twisted nature of their hearts, and more importantly, the relentless love of their God. In 1969 they collaborated on a song which Cash recorded during his concert at the San Quentin prison, and its title, Wanted Man, captures perfectly the worldview from which both men sang. That is, they knew they were guilty, and they knew they were pursued by one greater than themselves.

Courtesy of Little Geneva, in an article in the December 29, 2003 issue of Newsweek, the hero of the evangelical political world is quoted when speaking to an Iraqi muslim leader during his surprise Thanksgiving visit, "Dr. al-Rubaie, I want you to convey this message to Mr. Sistani [the elusive Shiite cleric]. Tell him that I pray to the same god he prays to... Tell Sistani I have nothing but praise for your religion. I have many millions of Muslims in my country back home."

Given that there has been no missive from the White House challenging Newsweek's article, I think we can safely assume Bush stands behind his words, meaning that this is the second time he has publicly affirmed that the Holy God of Israel and the false god of Islam are the one and same. But there is only one God, and He is a jealous God.

Art made by a person you know may not be more aesthetically valuable than a similar piece by a stranger, but it does usually allow you to understand it a bit better; and sometimes gives you insight into the person themselves. I think that when poetry, and especially modern poetry succeeds, it is when the deeply personal is communicated in such a way that the reader understands the emotion and makes it their own. Whitman was the first to realize this, and American poetry since has often been a quest to translate the intimately personal into an universal language. The Psalms are much the same way; when Christ quotes King David's 22nd Psalm he is allowing the poet to speak for him in his moment of terror --and by crying "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he is pointing toward David's closing lines, which read,

For God has not despised or abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted,
and he has not hidden his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.

While I don't really know Claudia Emerson, she was a visiting professor for one of my undergraduate poetry classes, and I at least know something of her story. Her poem, Frame, an Epistle is an instructive example of a personal grief translated into an universally accessible emotion. It begins, "Most of the things you made for me--blanket- / chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker--I gave / away to friends who could use them and not / be reminded of the hours lost there, / not having been witness to those designs, / the tedious finishes. But I did keep / the mirror, perhaps because like all mirrors, / most of these years it has been invisible, / part of the wall, or defined by reflection-- / safe--because reflection, after all, does change." While her background story is only implicit in the poem, Emerson's husband died fairly suddenly several years ago from cancer, and she has since remarried. This knowledge accentuates the final lines, which read,

I hung it here in the front, dark hallway
of this house you will never see, so that
it might magnify the meager light,
become a lesser, backward window. No one
pauses long before it. But this morning,
as I put on my overcoat, then straightened
my hair, I saw outside my face its frame
you made for me, admiring for the first
time the way the cherry you cut and planed
yourself had darkened, just as you said it would.

The work of poetry is the same as Adam's, when he took the animals and gave them names; poetry's work of taking dominion is naming mankind's story, and Emerson's poem broadens the language, makes another name for another story--in the same way David's story named Christ's.

In the good to know category, some legal analysis on what would happen if Roe v. Wade were at some future date overturned. Basically, states would each determine the legality of infanticide within their own borders. That's comforting. I'm so glad kids my age are getting shot and blown up to spread American liberty and democracy. It really is "God's gift to humanity." (G.W. Bush)

Though I do not support John Kerry, the fact that he seems (at this early hour) to have at least a 2 or 3 to 1 chance of being our nation's next President, a recent Atlantic article examining the then Lt. Kerry's service in Vietnam is worth considering. The portrait that emerges in the (doubtless not agenda-free) article is that of a courageous and sensitive leader, one who was prepared to sacrifice his life for the men he led (and nearly did on several occasions) but at the same time was attuned to the complexities and fuzzy morality of America's involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Most revealing is when the article quotes from Kerry's own young and occasionally wise letters and journals.

"I know that most of my friends felt absolutely absurd going up a river holding a loaded weapon that was supposed to be used against someone who had never really done anything to you and on whose land you were now trespassing," Kerry wrote. "I had always felt that to kill, hate was necessary and I certainly didn't hate these people." In truth, he added, scanning the shore for suspicious movements to shoot at made him "feel like the biggest ass in the world." Kerry had explored similar feelings in a letter to his parents in December of 1968. Describing the sight of American soldiers and their Vietnamese girlfriends strolling down the streets of the U.S. rest-and-recreation-center city of Vung Tau one sunny afternoon, he reflected on the crucial difference between occupiers and liberators of war-torn places. "I asked myself what it would be like to be occupied by foreign troops—to have to bend to the desires of a people who could not be sensitive to the things that really counted in one's country," Kerry wrote in that letter. He had been considering Germany's occupation of France during World War II, he added, when "a thought came to me that I didn't like—I felt more like the German than the doughboy who came over to make the world safe for democracy and who rightfully had a star in his eye."

Less than three months later experience had brought him to another melancholy observation. He wrote in his war otes, "It was when one of your men got hit or you got hit yourself that you felt most absurd—that was when everything had to have a meaning in order for it all to be worthwhile and inevitably Vietnam just didn't have any meaning. It didn't meet the test. When a good friend was hit and perhaps about to die, you'd ask if it was worth just his life alone—let alone all the others or your own."

"But the ease with which a man could be brought to kill another man, this always amazed me," he went on. Even more troubling to him was the imprimatur the U.S. military accorded this coldheartedness. To illustrate his point, he referred to the messages that would come in from the brass at Cam Ranh, praising the Swifts' gunners whenever they had killed a few Vietcong, and ending "Good Hunting": "Good Hunting? Good Christ—you'd think we were going out after deer or something—but here we were being patted on the back and receiving hopes that the next time we went out on a patrol we would find some more people to kill. How cheap life became."

Simply judging him on the merit of those words, this is a man I could support for President. But, to read Kerry's words now, with his full scale support of abortion on demand, lines like "the ease with which a man could be brought to kill another man, this always amazed me," takes on a whole other meaning.

“Like a stone on the surface of a still river / driving the ripples on forever, / redemption rips through the surface of time, / in the cry of a tiny babe.” - Bruce Cockburn

It’s winter in the Blue Ridge. The leaves have long since turned color and fallen, blue smoke is funneling out our chimney, and the wood pile is starting to thin. A couple Saturdays ago, on the last really nice day of the year, Ami and I were working outside breaking kindling and splitting wood when the sky was suddenly carpeted with hundreds of hawks heading south.

In many ways, this year has been a season of death and ending for our young family. Symbolically, we’ve died to our old life of singleness as we joined ourselves to each other; literally, our marriage has been colored by an encounter with physical death, as Ami’s brother Doug passed away suddenly this fall, adding to the earlier deaths of both of my maternal grandparents; and vocationally there has been death, as I recently lost my job at The Rutherford Institute due to budget cuts.

Superficially, despite the recent hardness in our lives, there is good reason to keep a stiff upper lip–we are young, bright, and well-educated, most of our lives lay before us, and surely the light years will outnumber the hard when all is said and done. But profoundly, there is reason even to rejoice. For we do not live, like those unfortunate Narnians, in a land where it is always winter and never Christmas. Rather, we, like you, dwell in a reality that was irrevocably changed by the God who, for his glory and our pleasure, put on flesh, proclaimed his kingdom, and kicked down the doors of Hades along the way. For in Christ, there is not winter and there is no death; there is only and always resurrection.

And so we go to Lowe’s and use our wedding gift card to buy a big fat Douglas Fir. We cram it into the Pontiac and take it home and string it with lights and icicles and snowflakes and angels, we make chocolate chip cookies and mail cards to friends and family, we throw another log on the fire–not to put a good face on tragedy and hardness, but rather, to celebrate the deeper and only lasting reality; that is, in December of 2003, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. So let us rejoice. For Christ’s birth is not the end of the story, but merely the beginning–Israel has found her King, we live in his kingdom, and there are so many chapters still to be written; indeed, it will take all of eternity to tell of the wonders we will see. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. A very Merry Christmas from Scottsville.

Courtesy of 40 Bicycles--

One of the great triumphs of the film The Lord of the Rings, it seems to me, is that it takes precisely the opposite line [to existentialism], urging us to find our true selves by following and staying loyal to the vocation that we wouldn't have chosen, that comes to us from outside. - N.T. Wright

What Wright names is why the films (and books) are so counter-cultural, and it is also I think why they are so popular. We live in a post-Christian society, but we still long to be redeemed, to know the gracious law of God. We don't know how to be good, but we remember goodness when we see it in Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo and Sam, because it is beautiful.

Peter Liethart reports on an interesting book which purports that schoolchildren don't play enough (and no, they don't mean video games), arguing that children who learn through play are actually better students than those who are chained to their desks for hours at a time. I'm a big believer in this - my first five or six years of home education consisted of something like, "read a book, do your math workbook, read another book...and play outside." I think there's a great deal of wisdom in this (though it probably could a little more structured than my experience was).

Leithart comments:

No doubt there's some trendy pomo anti-authoritarianism in this, but it also rings true. Yahweh, after all, trained his people not only through instruction in the Torah but also through "playful" rituals and festivals. Sacraments are more than drama and play, but they are that as well.

More spiritual weirdness from our President, though it happened about a year and a half ago. Evidently Bush visited Japan in 2002 and thought it'd be a good idea to be a sensitive multi-cultural president and visit a Shinto shrine to worship the idol of a dead Japanese emperor, where he and Laura supposedly bowed before the idol and "clapped their hands to awaken him." I don't remember any American evangelicals raising a peep about this, but it did get some Korean Christians riled up.

According to the BBC, "in its purist form the Shinto faith reveres nature." Well, isn't that nice and harmless. If I was of the dispensationalist persuasion, given Pres. Bush's seemingly obsessive attempts to pay homage to all religions, I think I might be ready to call him the best current candidate for the anti-Christ. Especially considering the way he has most evangelicals duped. But being a good Reformed Presbyterian, I think George W. Bush, like most of the politicians our country has been cursed with, is afflicted with a desperate fear of man and is consequently constantly mocking the one true God. But God will not be mocked.

Come, Lord Jesus.

It's a bad week to be an Arkansas Pine Bluff basketball fan, after they lost to Oklahoma 94-24 Tuesday night.

ESPN reports that the Golden Lions trailed 48-9 at halftime, and the partisan Oklahoma crowd broke into cheers in the second half when they cracked double digits. That's pretty humiliating. Meanwhile, APB player Chris Parker put up numbers that are reminiscent of my all-too-long high school basketball career: 23 minutes, 0-5 shooting, 8 turnovers. That's what I'm talking about. I always liked practice a lot better than the games.