I attended one of the most special weddings I'll probably ever witness last weekend. One of my elders, David, who I think is in his eighties, married a Vietnamese lady, Mae, whom he has been seeing for a year or so. Prior to the wedding, they spent a number of weeks together in pre-marital counseling in joint sessions with our pastor and hers.
The ceremony was held in the Vietnamese church where she is a member. The sermon, an exhortation about love, was given by her pastor, mostly in English, but at points, he seemed to translate for her, including the vows. Mae's English still needs much work, let alone my elder's Vietnamese, but the pastor emphasized the triumphant universal language of Christ's love. Our pastor pronounced their marriage and permission to "kiss the bride".
David has outlived both of his two previous wives. Mae also used to be married. Apparently it is not customary for Vietnamese in their second marriage to have a marriage ceremony. Her pastor had to "coach" the congregation to come to the wedding. It must not have been too controversial. Our congregation was probably outnumbered 7:1.
It was interesting watching Mae's face during the wedding. She doesn't seem to express much emotion. Perhaps she was a little nervous? The next morning at church, however, she seemed to be all smiles. :)
Well, I have a number of other friends getting married in the next few weeks. My friend Jonathan Brack, a friend from church camp, is marrying his beloved next Saturday in Dallas. This weekend I'm planning to attend my friend Phil Bassett's wedding in Jackson, MS. He's a brother I've also grown to know from church camp over the years. Also this Saturday, my former roommate Wayne Lin will marry some sweetheart. Apparently Wayne cited me as someone who helped him to become more assertive and marriage oriented in his potential relationships. Now if it would only work for me! :-)
Imagine a world without mirrors. Imagine what it would be like to walk around without ever knowing what your face looks like. With a good imagination, you might be able to morph together in your mind some permutation of the face of your mother, father, and a few of your siblings. Okay, imagine you were adopted. There are no photographs or photographers, portraits or painters, no reflective materials. Life is one continuous game of Indian Poker with your poker face being the dealt card.
Mirrors are everywhere. It's hard for you to imagine knowing who you are without them. The irony is that more often than not we use mirrors to forget who we are. The disciples once asked Jesus, "Lord, show us the Father and it will be enough." To which he replied, "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? We are mirrors made, not for the sake of our own image, but to reflect the glory of God. Face it. When our Glory comes in all His glory, you won't forget who you are. You won't forget Him.
Till then, I'll leave you with some Scripture for your reflection.
If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. -- James 1:23-25Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. -- 1 Cor 13:12
Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we will be like him, because we shall see him as he is.. -- 1John 3:2
They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. -- Revelation 22:4-5
Since I'll be devoting the next week or so preparing (coram deo) for my Theology and Secular Psychology final exam, I thought I'd leave you with a couple more papers I submitted to that class this semester: An eye opening movie with some pizza food for thought. Behold and bon appetite.
The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:22-23)
“What is wrong with these people!?” Thus says Sy “the photo guy” Parrish speeding off through a stop sign to execute the next stage of his plan to purge evil from the family he had obsessively dreamed to belong to. Sy’s sincere question is humorous because most viewers have been wondering the same thing about him. That’s the crazy and curious irony of the movie. Sy, a one-hour photo developer for the Yorkin family, had been nurturing a secret obsession for years to be included in their family pictures. To be captured as ‘Uncle Sy’ in their pictures would, in a sense, mean to belong forever to a picture perfect family. But when Sy discovers the adulterous, secret love life of Will Yorkin, the family’s husband and father, he realizes his picture perfect family is trying to survive by its own fantasy, neglecting to face the deep violence being committed to their own family. So, the movie asks the viewers, “Which is the greater evil: Sy’s clinically obsessive stalking behavior leading to violence against Will Yorkin or Will Yorkin’s neglect of his family?” The end of the movie reveals the producer’s sympathies lie with Sy Parish: the last scene fades into a family photo showing Sy with Will Yorkin’s arm around him with his wife and son. Thus, though Sy is left alone at the end in a police interrogation room, he has earned an eternal place in the family, since through Sy’s violent action, (we imagine) the wife regained her husband and her son his father. Sy’s actions, rooted in the sexual pornographic abuse he suffered as a child, showed he cared for the family more than it cared for itself, oddly enough.
We might be disturbed to think that someone might seem to know so much about our lives without our permission; someone who has been carefully piecing our lives together as through snapshots. Our families have natural boundaries, the sacred “privacy of our own home” that should not be crossed by strangers. Strangers who desire to cross those lines, may like Sy, be living in a socially unstable fantasy. But a family that thinks it can be true to itself by maintaining its family image alone is likewise imagining things, and is no less unstable. God knows and cares for our families more than we care to allow. He is no respecter of personal privacy, though he does often patiently permit us to indulge ourselves as if we could do such things in private. Like Sy, God violently broke into our hotel room, and exposed our adulterous affair against him, forcing us to face the shameful nature of our actions. What we imagined was a harmless secret fling, he exposed as a public pornographic profession. All these things God has showed us through the naked exposure of his son on the cross, in order that the creation might be cleansed from our violence and his glory to shine forth as His family reflects his image.
Sadly, Sy falls short of that image and family. We can sympathize with his past experience with child abuse; we can admire his penetrating prophetic recognition of family neglect as one of the worst forms of human violence; we should resonate with his desire to belong to a picture perfect family that is true to its own picture. Belonging to God’s “family picture” does go against the expectations of society and established authorities. Paul, for instance, preached the gospel to the whole world from prison (Acts 28:31). But as far as we can tell Sy never recognizes any wrongdoing on his part; rather, he blameshifts, lies, and denies his transgressions. Sy is portrayed above all human authorities, but not under God’s authority; a god in his own right. But justice in a world without God through His Son in the Spirit is nothing more than matter of competing fantasies; images we can never live up to; images that will never tell truth about us.
In Inside Out, Dr. Larry Crabb anecdotes his trip to the pizza restaurant to support one of the main points of his book: “our desires though energizing a complex variety of sinful directions are related not only to our fallenness but also, and more profoundly, our humanness.” So, when Dr. Crabb looks inside himself to discover the basis of his intense anger against his wife for offering obvious directions to his favorite pizza restaurant, he discovers the basic God-created desire to be treated with respect. Adam was created to accomplish important tasks in God’s world; Adam was “built to matter” and so were all men in him. Dr. Crabb’s wife “stepped on his toes” and truly hurt him, because she did not respect his ability to accomplish a simple task. That hurt reminds him of how thirsty he is for what Adam lost in the fall: a perfect life that fully recognizes its important purpose in a perfect creation, so that in the gospel we will find hope for that restored life in the future coming of Christ.
Dr. Crabb’s interpretation is helpful in that it connects the motive of human sin to God’s story of creation and the purpose of our existence. Sin is not simply moral vices, social evils, the doing of things that God told us not to do, or not doing what He told us to do. Sin is taking what was meant for good (desires, creation, relationships) and using them for means to achieve goals apart from God’s expressed will. Thus, under the distortion of sin lies some expression of God’s truth and His intentions for humanity from the beginning. God’s general revelation is so pervasive that acts of reprobation are concerted efforts to “suppress the truth in unrighteousness”.
Crabb’s illustration and subsequent analysis, however, falls short of the glory of God in that 1) it completely separates what is sinful in his response from the truth it distorts and 2) it separates truth about humanity from what that truth is intended to tell us about God and his glory. A self-referential analysis (what I desire), ultimately does not give God his due respect, and tries to fit God into meeting our own desires, rather than the reverse. Dr. Crabb expresses elsewhere that his intention is not to make God out to be a candy dispenser for humanity. Nor does the gospel in truth teach us to simply “accept ourselves as we are”. But diagnosing sin as the symptom of an injured humanity that causes thirst for the respect and personal significance that Adam was created for, seems to abrogate personal responsibility from irreducibly idolatrous and God dishonoring responses.
The anger in Dr. Crabb’s heart was a sin not only against his wife but against God who had made him to be her loving husband. His thirst for self-respect was a self-oriented desire, and not a God glorifying, God respecting one. It may be true that his wife could have exercised more wisdom in respecting her husband’s responsibility to get them to their favorite pizza restaurant. But instead of being concerned to feed her husband the self-respect he idolatrously thirsts for, acting like she trusts him when for whatever reason she does not, she should be trusting God who governs all things for her good, and respecting Him who gave her husband to be her head “submitting to him as unto the Lord.”
Adam was built “to matter” from the beginning, but our sinful lusts are not simply arising out of what he lost for us, but also the manner in which he lost it. Adam thirsted to obtain more personal significance for himself prior to his eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. And while his desire for ‘more’ could have been submitted to God for good (in prayer, asking for such wisdom like Solomon did), that desire became a consuming lust to replace God’s authority with his own. Adam’s desires were intended for God’s desires and His glory. The natural desire to be invested further with a future glorification remained God honoring, only insofar as it was appropriate to his God ordained responsibility to bear God’s image and likeness for the rest of creation to see God represented in him. But because good desires can become so radically twisted by sin to self-glorifying ends, Jesus says,
If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30)
One does not need to take too deep an inside look to figure the ‘natural’ desire being used by sin. Sin will most likely tell you what ‘good’ and ‘valuable’ thirsts it is seeking to fulfill, to exploit to their God-given fullest potential. Sin recognizes the value of the right eye and the right hand. Once sin has corrupted these desires, they cannot be directly recovered by recognizing their original God-intended value and purpose, and thus reinterpreted or stripped from sin into legitimate longings. Good desires infected by sin are no longer good. They must be dismembered before they take control over the whole body. Thus, we are taught to kill our ‘best’ of intentions, before God will make them new again. We must give up satisfying all sin infected thirsts, before we will truly thirst for Christ and kingdom righteousness.
How would we expect Dr. Crabb’s conversation with his wife to go based upon his analysis? “Honey, please forgive me for being overly angry with your driving suggestions. But please understand that my anger comes from my God given desire to be respected as a human built to matter, and so when you don’t respect me to carry out simple tasks, you hurt me. I’d rather that you trust me even when I behave foolishly, but when you don’t, that’s okay, because I’m okay with feeling hurt. Through such painful experiences, God makes me more mature and dependent on Him, more desirous of heaven and the future Christ will bring us without sin and suffering.” This sounds more like an excuse than a true apology and seems to send the mixed signal of whether or not he holds his wife responsible, and whether he wants her to change. It seems more self-centered than God glorifying.
Alternatively, accepting full responsibility for the idolatrous nature of one’s desires would result in different confession: “Honey, please forgive me for being angry with you. My pride was hurt by your driving tips, because they imply that you do not worship me as God who has everything under control. I selfishly desired you to trust me rather than Him to get us where we are going. I wanted to express my anger in words, but held my tongue out of the fear of man. I wanted to turn right when you told me to turn left, but I turned left more out of my love for pizza than my love for you. Let’s pray before we start on our journeys to orient ourselves to worshiping and honoring God as Lord who plans the best paths for us.” By glorifying God, rather than seeking to justify his own need for respect, his wife in turn will, by God’s grace, grow in wisdom and respect for her husband, as he reflects and reminds her of always living under God’s wisdom, love, and trustworthiness, even on the road. If her direction observations came from motives of insecurity on the road, of wanting to appear to be helpful in front of others, or of wanting to take disrespectful control over her husband’s actions, God will reveal that to her heart and lead her to confess any sin on her part in the matter.