Glad Tidings of Great Joy

It is amazing that Christmas often turns into a moralistic affair. What I mean is that Christians often don't really receive it! We are inspired by it. We are motivated by it. We try hard to do good because of it, volunteering at this or that charity, giving, feeling, hoping that humanity will be inspired to be better because of it. But who really merely sits passively and receives it?

In the end, Christmas isn't about Jesus inspiring us to be our better selves, stirring in us the better angels of our nature. Christmas is about an act of the Triune God to send the second person of the Trinity into the world, robed in the frailty of humanity, divested of the privileges associated with His deity, in order to do one thing! He came on a mission that only He could fulfill. He came to die at our hands, for us, to redeem us, to be for us what we could not be! Jesus' mission was not to join us in some commune of equals, each taking up his place in some great moral cause for the improvement of humanity. Jesus does not save by leading. Jesus leads by saving.

Christian, please this Christmas take the right posture! You are not first to be inspired to do better next year because of Jesus. You are first to sit stupefied that the God of the universe would give you so extravagant a gift. Raise your empty beggarly hands to heaven and receive, for that is all you bring to this great day; this day that fractured open the universe at the entrance of the divine into the human world.

And what exactly is the gift that God has given you? In the great Triune counsel, the plan has always been that The Father would present before you His perfect Son. And the Son would add to himself a human nature so that in His great condescension and vulnerability He could be the human being in whom God could be well pleased. Note well that He is not pleased with any other human being! Jesus was righteous and good and kind and true and everything good that you are not! More than that God has declared that the goodness of this only good man He will give to you, as though it were your own, when you simply receive Him by faith. More than that The Father declared, and Jesus agreed, that Jesus would go to a miserable wooden cross to bear upon himself the punishments that you deserve for your many sins.

Where are you in this grand equation? You are a helpless, empty, shattered soul that gives precisely nothing to God. And yet He has not given you simply enough to raise yourself up and start to be good again. He has not supported you or come along side of you or given you therapy until you are strong again. He has made the dead person alive! He has already given you everything! He has made you whole, gloriously perfecting you in the foreign righteousness of the Incarnate Son! If you will set aside the foolish project of thinking that you can do it with His help and instead accept that He has done it for you, in spite of you, because you can do nothing, then everything the resplendent Son is will be counted as yours.

Glad tidings of great joy indeed!

Our Vows

I wanted to provide a place where I could share these vows easily with my girls and friends, as well as a place to easily find them to remember the solemn promises we have made to each other and to the kids.

Here are the vows we wrote for each other:

6/16/18

To each other:

I promise to exalt you above all others. 

I will fight against the forces that would tear us apart, and cultivate our union deliberately and passionately. 

I offer you my imperfect life and promise to pray for God’s sustaining grace to love you well.

I promise to receive you as an invitation to worship the giver of all good things, and to treasure you as the best of the good things He has given. 

I will share my happiness with you as well as my sorrows as we turn our gaze to The Lord in all things. 

By God’s grace, I promise to discipline my mind and spirit towards a chosen habitual love, even when I struggle to feel love.

Knowing our days in this life are numbered, I will not waste the privilege of being in love with you. 

Amy to girls: 

Trinity, Charity, and Felicity, I promise to hold you close to my heart, to accept you as God’s treasured girls, and to love you as His gift to me. I will rejoice when you rejoice, and mourn when you mourn, and experience this grace-filled journey with you. 

Bo to girls: 

My girls, I love you and have loved our life together. Today as we invite Amy into our family, I promise to keep you close, protect you, and provide spiritual guidance for you. I will look to God, together with Amy, to provide a home rich with love and joy for each of you. 

Someday

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2 Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. 3 When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”6 Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.[a] 7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim.8 And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. 9 When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.12 After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers[b] and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days.

I am to be married soon, to a woman who makes this passage come alive to me! Why did God give me such a remarkable woman? The answer is the same as the answer to the why question provoked by this passage. The quick answer is that God is the author of pleasure, a feasting God, a God who loves love, and loves to give good gifts to undeserving people! And there may be no other reason for what transpires at this wedding, or mine!

Jesus scolds his mother about the impracticality of the requested miracle. As I see it, Jesus makes it clear that the time is not right for His public ministry to begin. There is no ministry benefit to such a miracle, and so the question is clear: Why does Jesus do it? Was he guilted into it by his mother? My theory is that Jesus did it simply because it increased the pleasure of this great celebration of marriage. He did it to miraculously magnify the merriment, to enlarge the dimensions of the feast to supernatural proportions. 

Wine is an important biblical symbol of pleasure and community. During the passover seder, Jews consume four glasses of wine. The imagery of abundance everywhere in Scripture includes wine as a central instrument of the pleasure associated with abundance. But there is no more central passage on both the symbolism of wine and its role in pleasure than John 2. Here Jesus supplies the wine, no doubt the finest ever made upon the earth, and here He does it for the sake of love and pleasure and for no other reason! One could perhaps say that He does it to magnify His glory, but that glory is not separated from pleasure here. In other words, He is glorious in this context because there is no greater vintner on the planet and no greater founder of the feast! He must be exalted as the author of pleasure! 

"You have reserved the best wine until now." It is so unassuming a line that one is tempted to ignore it as irrelevant, but it is profound to me in these days beyond my ability to express it. Anyone who has been wine tasting knows what the master of the feast is saying here. When one goes wine tasting, one notices the subtleties and elegant complexities of the wines being tasted, until the third or fourth winery. After awhile, one's senses are dulled by the wine and can no longer appreciate the subtle artfulness of the wines served at the end. People know this at dinner parties and will bring out the worst wines if people choose to keep drinking to the point of revelry. 

And here is Jesus, supplying a wine that stuns the master of the feast. He wants to know why a wine of this quality and depth is given to buzzed people at the end of the feast. Think of the last wedding you went to, where some wines of decent quality were perhaps served for a few hours, then imagine that the master of the feast brings out cases of Chateau Petrus (a wine that goes on auction for $4000 a bottle) for the remaining guests at 10 o'clock. Surely Jesus' wine was at least as good as the best of Bordeaux! It was probably so good that even in a stupor the guests were shocked by it's power into silence and moved to appreciate its beauty. They probably had tasted nothing like it, and the taste of all other wine was cheapened by its singular excellence. 

Why has he saved the best for last? Because that is what God does! He saves the best for last! This first miracle is a foretaste of things to come, especially the telos (end/purpose) of Jesus' ministry, which is to lead sinful people to the great wedding feast of the lamb, where our work of bold penultimate wreckage of the world is answered at last. This beautiful story is yet another in the collection of stories that God tells of His final word! Indeed the whole universe languishes in misery, broken because of the enervating effects of human sin, but God will see to His glory in the end! And this story tells us that included in His glory is the fact that He is the author of all joy and pleasure and feasting, pleasures we hold now with trembling hands in the knowledge they cannot last. But God's answer to this is that all the pleasures of earth are mere shadows of things to come for His people. They exist to train us to love what we ought to love, and to cast our eyes ahead in hope to the source of all good. 

The theme of my wedding to the incomparable Amy Dobson is a word that early became important to us. That word is "Someday." What we mean by it is that one can trust that God will save the best for last, and that He will give peace and patience while we await His timing. Misery will never be an end for God's people. It may be a winnowing, a pruning, but it will always be temporary. Perhaps it is simplest just to say that I waited a long time for my fiancé. I say this because my noble, lovely and true fiancé is the Wine of Cana for me. She is the best that God has reserved until now for me! Just as the attendees of the feast of Cana didn't possess the rational equipment or imagination to think wine could be so good, nor could they anticipate God's timing in providing it, so I didn't possess the rational equipment to visualize a woman of such complexity, beauty, intelligence, and spiritual depth. Behind the appearance of a gentle woman of soft words, modest dress, and kind eyes is a universe of  soaring, exultant attributes at the extremities of human expression. She is a luminous masterwork that God saved and lavishly gave to this miserable sinner at the age of forty-seven. 

God indeed has reserved the best wine until now!

Falling In Love

One runs the risk of causing others to involuntarily gag when talking on such a topic, but I promise to try to make this of general interest.

The first thing to note about falling in love is that it shows us that we are not purely rational beings. That is not to say that one should allow one's heart to override one's mind, but it is equally true that one's mind should not quash the heart either. And in truth, when the mind and heart are working together in the matter of love, the heart's portion is greater, not less. In other words, if the heart's infatuation makes sense, then its infatuation is magnified. What is one to do when one finds another in whom resides every sublime quality that could exist in a woman? How can the heart resist a woman that the mind has assessed to be luminous in every meaningful way? Philippians sums up the list with "noble, lovely, and true." Is it appropriate for the mind to release its authoritarian hold for a season so that it may be trained by the heart; trained not merely to assess what is good, but to abandon all in pursuit of what is good?

The second thing to notice about falling in love is the investment. One really does feel that one could lay down one's life for the beloved, without the slightest hesitation. There is almost an instinctive self-sacrifice when one really falls in love. It comes out in pre-meditated service, the sacrifice of sleep, attentiveness to the needs of the other. One wants to give away time and treasure for the sake of the beloved, and the simple reason is that the lines that separate begin to blur. It is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

The third thing to notice about falling in love is that it is oddly painful. In my recent experience--and I truly had forgotten this, perhaps had never really experienced it before--the feeling of being in love is almost like some thrill ride or risk taking adventure. It feels like you are dying a little while also feeling so alive, so energized, so heightened to everything. You are operating on the margins of yourself, the extremities. The pain comes from the risk involved. Lewis once said, "why love when losing hearts so much?" Indeed that thought must come to all lovers in the intensity of the season.

A fourth thing is something profound to me and perhaps not to any readers. The great problem with promiscuity, or the generic lust for variety, prized by so many men in our sexually indulgent culture is that they never really learn to see a woman. They only learn to see the traits they want to see in every woman. They look for one or a few fungible parts in all woman. They come to see the same color in great numbers of women. They are one dimensional; or more to the point, they make all women one dimensional. But falling in love as I have in these days has taught me to see the infinite colors in one woman. Just the other day, the light at dusk caught her features as I've never seen them before. The day before that she wore a sweater that accentuated the subtle green at the interior rim of her eyes. Recently I noticed a kind of elegant glide to her walk. She is always changing. She really is a thousand incarnations, limitless in the various manifestations of her glorious beauty! It occurs to me that men who seek out multiple women have never really seen one as I see this one extraordinary woman!

Another comment about beauty: The other day I was in a winery and saw a group of young women come through on a Bachelorette party. They were all dressed the same, showing every attribute with bold--and in some cases unwarranted--confidence and crass neglect of their subtler qualities. It occurred to me that many men are attracted to a blatant hedonistic display of flesh, but I was simply put off by the whole tottering, drunk, preening, nails-clicking-against-phone-screens, selfie-taking, college-educated-stripper routine! Their beauty was propped-up, artificial, and superficially sophisticated. It was all tight, short, plunging, made-up, faked-up, flattering, giggling clonery. They all apparently sent a text to each other about the false eyelashes.

But the woman I've fallen in love with is truly beautiful, in the most thoroughly authentic sense. And yes, I am speaking about the physical alone here, not the cheap slogan that she is "beautiful inside," which she is. She is more beautiful physically than all because what is seen is who she is, from her simple make-up, which is just enough to accentuate naturally beautiful features, to her healthy and flawless skin, which she only displays modestly, in the subtlest hints. She is fashionable, but restrained. She is fit, but not a show off. There is mystery in her various fashions and displays of her body. She possesses the brightest eyes and smile, and radiates an energy that elicits a chivalrous response. Men can see that she is lovely, perhaps among the loveliest creatures they have ever seen, but also that she is so pure in her beauty that they cannot offend against her beauty. Men react to the women in the winery with cat-calls and gawking. Men react to my girl with hushed reverence. That is the difference between the false beauty of the age and the beauty of an authentic beauty.

And finally, I must comment that falling in love has taught me about the powerful vulnerability of an intimate kiss. It really is peculiar, but sex can be merely animalistic, driven by one or both partner's need for pleasure. A kiss never seems to be about mere pleasure. You can know that intimacy has gone out of a relationship not when a couple stops having sex, but when they no longer kiss meaningfully. The souls of two people touch when they kiss, especially in a passionate way. Of course, the great travesty about sex is when two people turn it into something less than it should be. It is still a great sin, and in fact is seen as a sin when acted upon prior to marriage where an intimate kiss is not. My point is limited in this regard. I'm only suggesting that it is easier to make sex about pleasure alone, thereby corrupting it, than it is to corrupt an intimate kiss. It is a strange thing that an intimate kiss is less risky in the sense of making one vulnerable to sin, but more risky in the sense of opening one's heart to the beloved. Think of it thus: Who is more wounded emotionally at a break-up? The couple who never intimately kissed, had some fun having sex a few times, then parted ways; or the couple who kissed deeply and intimately a few times, never had sex, and then broke up? Does it not seem obvious the the latter would suffer more at the break-up than the former?