The Aviatrix -- now on YouTube

At the 2008 Rochester L'Abri Conference, in a workshop titled, "Inside the World of Movies," I interviewed film director Toddy Burton and showed her short film The Aviatrix. The conversation that developed was so lively it spilled over into the dinner period that followed. Now, after nearly a year of playing at international film festivals, The Aviatrix is finally available for viewing online through The YouTube Screening Room, a unique platform that programs short films from around the world.

It's the story of a girl, a galaxy, and the most surprising battle with cancer you've ever seen.  The Aviatrix is a short film that uses comedy and drama to explore the trials of brain tumors, lawn maintenance, and the far reaching borders of the human spirit. It's worth watching, discussing, and telling friends that it is now available.

Burton calls The Aviatrix "an intergalactic fantasy adventure cancer comedy romance." It's a delightful, creative, subversive short film by a young film director whose name we will someday see on the big screen.

For The Aviatrix web site, click here.

To watch The Aviatrix on YouTube click here.

To purchase a copy of the film, click here.

After you watch it, come back here and let me know what you think.

When Heaven & Earth Move in Concert

A homily given by Denis Haack for the ordination of David Richter

Trinity Presbyterian Church / November 9, 2008

 

In his wonderful story, The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien gives us a piece of advice: “It does not do,” Tolkien says, “to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” Isn’t that great? It should be common sense, but if you are like me, we tend to forget.

 

Keep that in mind as I read our Scripture for tonight because I’m going to come back to it. The text I’ve chosen is a Hebrew poem, a psalm composed almost 3000 years ago, but it could have been written yesterday. Though ancient it is not archaic, but finely tuned to the glorious but broken reality where we live out our lives. The text is Psalm 73.

 

Psalm 73 divides into 5 sections—in the English translation we’re reading tonight those divisions are marked by the repetition of the word “but.” I’ll point them out as we go along.

 

The psalm opens with a single verse in which the poet makes a statement of faith. This is what, in other words, he believes to be true. Listen as I read: Verse 1: Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. He believes God exists, is good, and is a personal God who is calling a people to be in personal relationship with him.

 

The next verse, however, begins with “But…” and marks our first division. He believes in a good and personal God, but that raises a serious difficulty. Life just doesn’t seem to work out that way. The poet lives, as we do, in a broken, unjust, and cruel world where often the goodness of God seems to be a very distant, even dubious proposition. Listen as I read: Verses 2-15: But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them. And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. If I had said, “I will speak thus,” I would have betrayed the generation of your children.

 

The poet’s faith that God exists and is good is challenged by what he sees day by day. If God is good, why is life so bloody unfair? If he is good and truly God, why does he not simply stop the unspeakable cruelty in Congo’s seemingly endless civil war where pre-adolescent soldiers and gang rape are systematically used as weapons to terrorize innocent civilians? If God is good, why do executives that led their institutions into bankruptcy sail walk away with golden parachutes while ordinary workers lose their jobs and pensions? If God is good, why does injustice seem to smirk every time we open the newspaper? Do you not feel this tension? Only someone who is dangerously out of touch with reality could possibly miss it. I believe God is good, but the world is horribly unjust…

 

And this brings us to the next repetition of the word, “But…” marking the next division. Listen as I read: Verses 16-27: But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms. When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you. Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold, those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.

 

Trying to sort it all out seemed to him “a wearisome task” he says. Day after day the evidence mounts, doubts rise, and the cynicism of our skeptical world seems to seep in at the edges of our consciousness. We believe God is good, but how does that square with the evidence of our eyes and ears?

 

A “wearisome task,” the psalmist says, “until”—“Until I went in to the sanctuary of God.” And it is here that something profound happens, it is in the sanctuary of God where he begins to see past the surface of things to the unseen foundations that lie beneath them. Life is not merely what it seems, but deeper than we can imagine, far richer than the details at the surface seem to suggest. There is, our poet claims, a hope that turns out to be far greater than our doubts and far more reassuring that our greatest confusion.

 

And this brings us to the final division of the psalm. Listen as I read verse 28: But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge that I may tell of all your works.

 

Here is the wonder of it. The psalmist has discovered there is a far better solution to his doubts than just having answers for them. After all, doubts and challenges can multiply faster than answers. He hasn’t sorted out all the difficulties that living in a broken world presents, because he can’t, just as we can’t. Instead, he discovers something far more profound and satisfying. He is reassured that justice will out in the end, that the story of history is not yet completed and is not swirling out of control. God is good, and promises that all things are in his hands and that the ending of the Story will be far better than we could possibly imagine in our wildest dreams. That’s the reassurance the psalmist finds in the sanctuary, a hope worth living for, even though it doesn’t stop the horror unfolding in the Congo, nor does it allow us even a glimpse of how the gross unfairness of life fits into the good plan of an almighty God. We are left standing at the edge of mystery.

 

The final answer we are left with is not a philosophical insight, or an airtight argument to forever unpack the mystery of God’s providential plan for justice in human history in this broken, unfair world. The final answer, instead, is God’s personal presence, and the evidence of his goodness down through all the centuries. Because it is here, and only here, that I have a deep reassurance that just because I cannot see a reason for suffering, that does not mean there isn’t a reason. Just because I cannot make full sense of things does not mean that everything is senseless. God exists, he is good, and as long as that is true, my smallness is swallowed up in the immensity of his grace and the incomprehensibility of his being. And make no mistake: this is not an escape from reality, it is escaping our limited finiteness to rest in his ultimate reality.

 

“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” Doubt about a good God in an unjust world is merely one of the dragons we must face. If we had the time, we could name more of the dragons that lurk nearby. Most of the time, though, like the hobbits in Tolkien’s story we prefer to ignore them, acting as if we can stay safely out of their clutches, behind the carefully constructed walls of our homes, schools and churches. Dragons do not, however, stay buried in their caves, and our refusal to keep them firmly in our calculations is one reason Christianity seems so irrelevant, superficial, and inauthentic to the postmodern generation.

 

The Hebrew poet found relief from his nagging doubts in the sanctuary of God. It was within the meeting of God’s people, before God’s face, captured by his love, and in the hearing of God’s word that grace could be found. “But for me it is good to be near God.”

 

In Christ, God entered human history—our personal history—the same history that seems to make such a mockery of our belief that God exists and is good. Not only did he enter human history, he embraced the unfairness and injustice of that history so intensely that no suffering is now foreign to him. When we are near him, we are near the God who not only exists, and is good, but who knows the injustice with which we struggle not because he is divine and so knows everything, but because he walked through it and his body is ravaged with the scars to prove it.

 

I don’t know how it will get sorted out. I have no idea. But here is the good news. The One who has promised that it will be made right has made Christ the judge. In other words, in contrast to every other religion, Christianity claims that the God who walked through the injustice himself is the one who, in the end, make justice flow like a river until righteousness covers the earth like water covers the sea. I don’t know how he will accomplish that, but here’s the deal: when Christ was on the cross he tore down the barrier keeping us out of the sanctuary so that now we can have a personal relationship with the God who exists and who has proven his goodness in history.

 

Tonight we set apart a man to take his place—metaphorically speaking—in the sanctuary, who will now minister to those of us who believe, but who find it hard. It’s not that our statement of faith is incorrect or weak; it’s because we live, day by day, near dragons. The apostles tell us in the New Testament that one of the gifts God has given his church are leaders who listen before they speak, who know when to teach and when to remain silent. Leaders like David and Kelly who are so generous in offering their lives and home as a sanctuary, a safe place where people can find grace for wounds and doubts. Leaders who have not slain all the dragons, but who walk alongside us, assuring us that even little hobbits have significance in the cosmic scheme of things. That the dragons of doubt, or skepticism, or consumerism that sap our souls can be defeated, not because we are such great stuff, but because we have a champion who has gone ahead of us, has faced down death and come out the other side alive, forevermore.

 

Tonight, in a very special way we are given a chance to see beyond the surface details of things. Not because we are in a church building for one more service, but because we are about to witness something extraordinary. An ordination to ministry is actually a very auspicious event. It is a matter of church polity, true, but it is far more than that. It has legal ramifications in that after this David can baptize, marry, and bury people, but it is more than that, too. It has personal meaning for me, since in a few minutes when I join the other elders of the church to place hands on David to set him aside as a teaching elder, it will be for me a highlight in a long friendship I cherish as precious. But it is more than that, too. Mark my words: tonight heaven and earth will move in special concert, though so few of us have eyes trained to see beyond the surface of things that most of us may fail to notice the cosmic shift in reality.

 

Since I began with the words of J. R. R. Tolkien, I will end with his words as well. They are words of hope—the sort of words we discover when we carry our doubts and fears, bloody from stumbling upon a dragon, into the sanctuary to be near to God. They are words to hold onto, because they capture something of what it means to live in the in-between time, between Christ’s first coming to announce the arrival of his kingdom and his second coming when he arrives to consummate it. Hear them, beloved of God, and be filled with hope:

 

            All that is gold does not glitter,

            Not all those who wander are lost;

            The old that is strong does not wither,

            Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

            From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

            A light from the shadows shall spring;

            Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

            The crownless again shall be king.

 

From Middle Eastern espionage to church potlucks

In Ridley Scott’s action film, Body of Lies, the key moment comes not in an explosion (though plenty of bombs go off) but in a rather quiet moment of dialogue. C.I.A. agent Roger Ferris (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) meets Hani (played superbly by British actor Mark Strong), the head of Jordanian intelligence. Ferris has come to ask Hani’s aid in tracking down terrorists that have established a safe house in the Jordanian capital. Hani agrees, but insists on one condition. “Never lie to me,” he says.

 

On the surface Body of Lies exposes the dark underbelly of our dangerous world. Of how, if former CIA Middle East agent Richard Baer is correct in See No Evil, America’s intelligence agency has begun depending far too much on technology and far too little on developing human assets that can provide eyes and ears on the ground around the world. Of how much more dangerous the 21^st century is compared to the decades of the Cold War.

 

On a deeper level, though, Body of Lies is a study of trust. The same element that disappeared in the world of high finance, and suddenly solid Wall Street firms crumbled like a house of cards.

 

“Most people are against lying,” Sallie Tisdale says in, "Tell Me the Truth," a wonderfully insightful essay on salon.com, “at least, they claim to be. Who knows if they’re telling the truth? Perhaps the only thing we can really agree on about lying is that everyone does it sometimes. The person who claims otherwise has simply told you the first one.” For Christians the stakes are high, because we claim to follow not simply the One who insists his followers tell the truth but that we seek to incarnate the One who claimed to be The Truth. Tisdale continues:

 

Certain lies are oil in the social machine, the ritual courtesies of daily contact. A little exaggeration, casting careful shadows and flattering light upon ourselves, upon each other. There are ordinary lies I’ve never told. I’ve never lied about my age or pretended my hair color was natural. I’ve never cheated on a test. But other lies come quickly. I've always found it hard to say, “I made a mistake,” and would exaggerate to protect my fragile self-esteem. Most of us lie in just this way: little deceits and quick dissimulations to spare ourselves from some impending small doom—social embarrassment, parental anger or spousal punishment.

 

These lies, the ones we claim to engage in for the sake of other people, are often meant to save ourselves from a little discomfort. No more, no less… So many ways to fail here. We lie by commission, by omission and with silence. We lie to get and to avoid having to pay the various prices extracted from us, to punish others and to avoid punishment. We lie to stay safe. Everyone lies.

 

When my good friend Ed Hague first showed me Tisdale’s piece my initial reaction was to ask whether she isn’t overstating the case. Everyone lies?

 

Church potlucks are an occasion for lying, I think. We ask one another “How are you doing?” and reply, as expected in this social ritual, “Great.” Sometimes that isn’t really true—the truth would be to say, “I’m not doing well, actually, but you aren’t a safe person to explain that to.” The real brokenness here is probably not the social ritual response which hides the truth but the breakdown of trust that sadly infects us so deeply.

Christian contentment in an election year

I don’t remember—no, scratch that. I was going to say I don’t remember when I’ve received so many fear-full emails from Christians as in the past couple of weeks leading up to this year’s election. But I do remember the last time. There were two times, actually: they were in the months leading up to Y2K and in the weeks leading up to Bill Clinton’s election. Now, my memory might be faulty, but as I remember, in neither case did the dreaded scenarios come to pass. But once again, the emails have been burning through cyberspace, warning of all sorts of horrible outcomes if we vote incorrectly.

 

About which I have a few reflections.

 

Reflection #1. We are a highly politicized people. I agree that Christians needs to be responsible citizens—that is a part of faithfulness as we live under Christ’s Lordship. But we must not be politicized—by which I mean grant the religious importance to politics that is common in our secularized society. Voting is important, but God remains sovereign. Our calling remains unchanged, and our gospel remains the power of God regardless of who is in the White House.

 

Reflection #2. We should work faithfully for just policies and vote for good leaders, without for a moment allowing our hope to rest in either. Or, to put it another way: Christians should never be either pessimistic or optimistic about politics (or about anything else in a fallen world, for that matter). We should remain hopeful, instead, whether the policy we seek to enact succeeds or fails, and whether the one whom we believe is the best candidate wins or loses.

 

Reflection #3. Even if you think you have a gift of prophesy, be humble about predicting the future. And if you claim to have that gift remember that the biblical standard is that all prophets whose predictions were less that 100% accurate in every single tiny detail were to be stoned.

 

Reflection #4. Know that fear—like guilt and shame, other common motivators in the emails I’ve received—are not how Christians should seek to persuade one another concerning what faithfulness looks like. Remember, we live before a watching world. If we are fearful over an election—an election! for goodness sake—what does that witness to our confidence in the sovereignty and grace of our heavenly Father?

 

Reflection #5. Cultivate Christian contentment so that it infuses, shapes, and informs every aspect of your citizenship—and our emails on the topic. “Christian contentment,” Jeremiah Burroughs (1599-1646) says, “is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious, frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.” [The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment].

 

Deciding who to vote for, take two

A lovely comment arrived from Sue in response to my post titled, “Deciding who to vote for” which included a thoughtful piece by James Skillen.

 

Thanks so much for sharing this piece. I found it very helpful and very refreshing in a time when so much political dialogue is embedded in fierce partisan loyalties. I can engage with Skillen's ideas without feeling like I've got to wear armor.

 

But ... I shared the link with a group of acquaintances, thinking that it was a good model of civil discourse and might inspire some useful dialogue. Well, what it inspired was (in their own words) "a hornet's nest." According to them, the entire article is a pro-Obama, pro-Democrat, pro-second-exodus-narrative (and therefore anti-American) diatribe. One person responded, "I didn't know Francis Schaeffer was a socialist or communist." I was flabbergasted.

 

So ... I've long admired your patient responses to similar off-the-charts reactions to articles that you believed were well-measured critiques, but I'm wondering, how do you personally decide when to offer clarifications, further discussion, etc., and when to just say, "Hmmmm, there's not much point in continuing this discussion"? How do you graciously end a fruitless disagreement?

 

That’s a great question, Sue. I can’t tell you how often I’ve faced similar responses to things I’ve shared or said or taught. It can be very discouraging especially when these responses are coming from people who claim to be the people of God. Bertrand Russell used to say, “People would rather die than think; in fact they do.” He was correct, and sadly, it applies even to those who claim that following the Truth is central to their lives.

 

I think there are several reasons why this occurs. (I don’t know if your friends were Christians or not, but since the Francis Schaeffer comment sounds like it came from a Christian, I’ll assume they were believers here.) First, many Christians have come to believe that conformity is a measure of commitment—in other words, that believers should necessarily share not just identical doctriness and ethics, but opinions and activities. However, having a Christian mind does not mean that there is a “Christian line” on every topic. Life and reality are far richer and more nuanced than that. Second, many evangelicals, having decided that a conservative ideology embraces their political leanings, begin to confuse conservatism with Christianity. It’s a subtle process, but also a deadly one, since no ideology should be infused into the gospel. Third, few understand that political ideologies are not neutral, but are, to use a biblical theological category, idolatries. Each one, conservatism included, takes one aspect of created reality and elevates it to a position where it defines the rest of life—making it into a god, a sovereign. (For a thoughtful and fascinating study of this, see Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies by David Koyzis.) And finally, I am convinced that Russell was correct. Thinking is hard, listening is difficult, sorting through competing claims takes time and energy, while skating through life is far easier. So, people tend to read authors they agree with, hang with people like them, and react defensively (angrily, fearfully) when anyone says anything that doesn’t seem to line up with their own prejudices and opinions.

 

So, knowing that, I try not to be discouraged when I find Christians shutting down conversations. I try to keep from reacting myself, which is hard. Sometimes, I will say something like, “Why does it feel like you don’t really want to listen or talk about this winsomely?” Or, “Do you think Christians should be able to talk about this without it being a hornet’s nest?” I try to be a good listener, and calmly ask good questions. (The calmly part is the hard part, of course.) Sometimes, I just remain silent, knowing that their minds are closed to truth and that they need the gospel far more than they need help thinking about politics.

 

The saddest part to me in all this is not that your friends are unable to discuss such topics without defensiveness, nor that they misread Skillen, nor even that they are so closed-minded about seeking after truth with others. What is saddest to me is that they are so unsafe to talk to. Margie and I have long prayed our home would be the safest place in Rochester, where people can explore ideas without fear and where they can be themselves without being treated dismissively.

 

Anyway, be safe, Sue. Not in the sense of keeping out of danger (though I wish that for you, too), but in the sense of being a person who, like Jesus never compromised but with whom people understood they could be with, without having to wear armor. As you do, remember that some walked away from him angrily after stirring up hornet’s nests, too.

 

And thanks for your kind words.

 

Surgery on whaling ships

Visiting the home of my oldest daughter, Marsena Konkle, is a delight for all sorts of reasons. One is that being a novelist, her house is amply stocked with books, many of which I do not own and a few of which are the sort not found in many living rooms. On this visit I happened upon Rough Medicine, the story of how surgeons plied their trade on whaling ships in the 19^th century. It’s a miracle any of the patients survived.

 

One story comes from a seaman, William Davis, who tells of an unlucky sailor who got tangled in the lines that secured the thrashing whale to the ship. The captain, James Huntting of Long Island, a large man (six and a half foot, 250 pounds), was notorious for refusing to use grog to deaden the pain of surgery. When the sailor was finally heaved back on board ship, “it was found that a portion of the hand including four fingers had been torn away, and the foot sawed through at the ankle, leaving only the great tendon and the heel suspended to the lacerated stump… Saved from drowning, the man seemed likely to meet a more cruel death, unless some one had the nerve to perform the necessary amputation… But Captain Jim was not the man to let anyone perish on [such] slight provocation. He had his carving knife, carpenter’s saw and a fish-hook. The injury was so frightful and the poor fellow’s groans and cries so touching, that several of the crew fainted in their endeavors to aid the captain in the operation, and others sickened and turned away from the sight. Unaided, the captain then lashed his screaming patient to the carpenter’s bench, amputated the leg and dressed the hand.”

 

“Another stirring tale is told of a Captain Coffin, who was hurt so badly in a whaling accident that it was obvious that his leg would have to go. Being the master, the medic, and the patient all at once, he knew the situation was complicated, but he was more than equal to the task. He sent for his pistol and a knife, saying to his mate, ‘Now, sir, you gotta lop off this here leg, and if you flinch—well, sir, you get shot in the head.’ Then he sat as steady as a rock while the mate went at it with the knife, holding the pistol unwaveringly until the operation was completed. No sooner was the stump wrapped up and the leg cast overboard than both men fainted.”

 

Source: Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail by Joan Druett (New York, NY: Routledge; 2000) p. 130.

On rest, work, time, and life

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” [Mohandas Gandhi]

 

“I don’t know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest awhile.” [Max Forrester Eastman]

 

“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” [Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes]

 

“Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” [“Pooh’s Little Instruction Book”]

 

“To sleep is an act of faith.” [Barbara G. Harrison]

 

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under a tree on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water; or watching the cloud float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” [J. Lubbock]

 

 

While sitting in my daughter’s home, looking out her living room window at the lake surrounded by trees adorned in their autumn colors, I noticed a small book on her coffee table. It confirmed what I have long believed—that naps are a gift of grace, too seldom received with gratitude and embraced without guilt. Demonstrating this truth in our skeptical world is, I believe, a witness to the existence and mercy of God.

 

Source: Cat Naps: The Key to Contentment (Portland, ME; Ronnie Sellers Productions) p. 8, 13, 45, 87, 88, 102.