The Triumph of God's Glory

The triumph is taking you now in.  [Christ] was buried, and he resurrected.  What does that do?  The death overcame the sin and the guilt and separation.  What did the resurrection do?  My goodness!  It delivers.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ...what happened?  The last enemy of mankind is death.  It makes men tremble.  It makes clever men weep.  It is the point of despair, the point of depature.... In the grip with that terrible enemy of mankind, he killed death, disarmed it, opened the grave....Jesus came out of the grave triumphant, glorious.

Do you think he came alone?  Not a bit!  He came with you!  The head came out, and so the limbs came with him.   You are there!  I know you despite yourself.  You say, "Bishop, look, I am not that type." I know you are not that type!  God knows you are not that type!  But Jesus knows very well he died for that type!  The kind of you, with all the things which make you tremble, with all your limitations of the human being, with all your repeated failures. Jesus took you when he rose from the dead, because when he died, he gripped you.  And so now you are in him as a limb, part of the body.

–Festo Kivengeri, in an address at Urbana 1976.

This is probably the most important sermon you've never heard.

Gimli and Christ

As some of you know, I'm a fan of The Lord of the Rings.

In each re-reading, I am struck by Gimli's reaction to being asked by Galadriel for what he would wish from her:  a strand of her hair, as an heirloom to treasure for all generations in honor of the Lady of the Wood.  In the story, he actually refrains from asking her for the gift, but names his desire at her request.  She is so moved that she gives not one but three strands.

At their parting, she foretells that he will be a dwarf over whom wealth will hold no power.  In a throw-away line, Tolkien says of Gimli that he was thinking of gold—not to enrich himself, but to imagine how it could be used to best display the gift Galadriel had given him.

This is powerful:  all of his desires were subjugated to his worship of the lady.  His people's penchant for the mining of gold and jewels was transformed from a thing of perhaps miserly interest into a service to be rendered to the true object of his desire.

All idolatry is misplaced and misdirected desire.  The materialistic fire is quenched not because we have learned to somehow discipline ourselves (thereby exalting the will above its proper value—and so asceticism is also idolatry), but because we have properly valued Jesus Christ.  When we properly value him, all that he has given to us becomes a tool for properly worshiping and honoring him:  its value rests not in what it can do for me personally, but for what it does to honor and exalt Christ, to make him more precious and valuable to others.

On the Exclusivity of Christianity

I had hoped to follow up with this post shortly after writing about the complexity of the tabernacle, but was derailed.  As a matter of addressing one of the more prevelant modern problems with Christianity that people have, I figured I could fill some empty space in the blog with a couple thoughts.

A reasonable starting question is this:  what if God isn't like you think he is?  It should give all of us pause—even the most convinced—since it is undoubtedly true that God is not exactly like I think he is.

I don't know how typical the objection is, but I have heard some say that God loves everyone so much that he couldn't possibly be so exclusive as Christians say he is—all that business about coming to God only through Jesus is nonsense.  If God really is so loving, we should be able to approach him as we please.  (Of course, the question posed initially should give us pause.)