Spilling Over: The Fluid Mechanics of Grace

MP3 here

There is a long standing college tradition to head south for the vacation that happens in March or April …some people like to call it (air quotes) “Spring Break”. Apparently the way this tradition goes, you are supposed to go to a beautiful place...


...with beautiful people...


...and do things that you will almost certainly regret...

…and of course the pictures end up on facebook.

Now, even though I have had a full time job for over a decade, I have been continuously enrolled at one university or another for over 15 years…but had never actually experimented with this tradition. So this year, when spring break rolled around, I got on a plane and I headed south.

But I’m not sure I did it right…because 91% of Latin American countries have beaches…but I went to one of the two that don’t…I went to Asuncion Paraguay…and while I was there I averaged 12 hour work days…It began to occur to me that perhaps I missed the point of this tradition.


But, really, how much can you expect of an Engineer on Spring Break. Well, except maybe for these guys.

“Engineers Gone Wild”[1]

(I don’t know what I am going to do for images when Frank graduates.)

But the cool thing about doing your Spring Break travel for work is that you don’t have to pay for it. My trip was paid for by one of the biggest slabs of concrete in the world…the Itaipu dam. It is 5 miles long, 640 ft high and produces more power than any dam in the world. Each one of those spillways releases more water than Niagara Falls.


But as I stood in the bowels of this almost comically immense structure, watching one of the penstocks turning water into power, I was reminded of my favorite themes in 2 Corinthians.

We talked about a number of great topics this year from the pages of 2 Corinthians: including stuff like comfort, joy, thankfulness, reconciliation, generosity. But you see, one of the great puzzles in life is how to tap into these things in a regular and sustained way.

What is the process that gives us sustained access to these things? How are they most fully and consistently experienced?

Many of us have had fleeting or episodic encounters with joy or comfort. Most of us have flirted with generosity and thankfulness. But…I don’t know about you, but more often than not, I find these things elusive. They seem like they are harder than they should be. Which is why I perk up when one of the Biblical authors gives us a clue about how they work. In 4 different places in 2 Corinthians Paul uses a metaphor to describe our experience of these things…and it has struck me that maybe things like joy and comfort and generosity elude us because we don’t entirely understand how they were meant to work. So we have spent 13 weeks over the course of the year studying this book and it has exhorted us to a bunch of helpful stuff. But I just want to wrap up this series and anticipate an evening of worship by asking one final question:

How do we move our experience of these things from episodic events to consistent lifestyles?

How do we experience these things more consistently.

And, it turns out, that for this talk, my expertise as a hydraulic engineer is useful for the first time ever here at college life…or actually, for the first time ever outside of my cubicle. Seriously, being an engineer is not really that interesting at dinner parties. One of my best friends is a wine maker, that is a great job to talk about at parties. When people ask me about my job, I try to change the subject as quickly as I can to keep the icy grips of boredom from taking control of the conversation. But, being a water engineer happens to matter tonight, because Paul actually uses a hydrologic metaphor, when he talks about how things like comfort and joy and generosity and gratitude work in our lives (Joy mechanics sight gag)…which is why it came to mind in the dark depths of that huge dam. The metaphor he uses to describe how we are supposed to experience these things: overflow. Look at four verses with me from different places in the book.

2 Cor 1:5 “For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.”

2 Cor 4:15 “All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.”

2 Cor 8:2 “Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty, welled up in generosity.”

2 Cor 9:11 “This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God.”

There are two aspects of this metaphor that I find interesting and that I want to briefly talk about tonight. If the dynamics of joy, thankfulness, comfort and generosity in our lives are best described by a metaphor of ‘overflow’ then there are two implications for tapping into these things in a consistent rather than episodic way. You need to:

1. Look for Opportunities to Spill Over
2. Hook into a Reliable Source

First, If you want to really experience joy, comfort, thankfulness or generosity you need to look for opportunities to spill over

Usually, when we think of something that we want more of, we see ourselves as a control volume, with a deficit. Say that our joy levels are at 30 units of joy and we need to acquire another 70 units of joy to fill up. And essentially, to keep joy levels up the sources of joy have to exceed the sinks.

But the implication of this ‘overflow’ language is that stuff like comfort and joy and gratitude and generosity are not things that you can really possess. They are only things you can experience as they pass through you.



This is the first way that the things God offers us are like the Itaipu dam. The dam doesn’t do any work by simply storing water. Water only becomes power when it passes through the dam.

Comfort was never meant to be just received. Joy is not a private exchange between you and God. These things do not really become what they are, until they pass through you on the way to someone else.

We are not designed to be receptacles of the things God gives us, we are meant to be conduits of these things. We are not vessels – we are superconductors.

And this is why Christianity is not a private faith. This is why Christianity is only Christianity if it is built around mission and in community. Essentially, joy, gratitude, generosity, comfort…these things we want from God…they cannot be stored. We can’t fill up on joy and then use it over the course of time. You don’t get to hoard joy. It has to pass through you to do its best work. The only way to get a sustained effect is to pass it around.

In Cory’s passage from a couple of weeks ago, Paul compared the stuff we get from God to the mana of the Exodus narrative. In this story, as God’s people wandered the desert, God essentially made it rain bread every morning. But it couldn’t be stored.

If they tried, it got moldy and wormy and, just plain gross. After one day, it looks like a container of mashed potatoes that had been hiding in the back of “The Bulge” fridge for six months. Joy is like Vitamin C…It doesn’t matter how much you consume today…I mean you walk out of here, go to the DC and flat out OD on 24 grapefruits… you will still need it tomorrow. You are going to need new joy and new generosity tomorrow… which means you are going to need to tie into a reliable source.

And this leads to the second insight from this overflow metaphore.

Second, If you want to really experience sustained joy, contentment, thankfulness or generosity you need to You need to hook into a reliable source

The ‘overflow’ metaphor is apt for our experience of joy, comfort, gratitude and generosity because if these things have a short residence time in our hearts. They don’t stay long. Our hearts generate entropy against them. So, we need to find a reliable constant external source.

You see, the Itaipu dam is not the biggest dam in the world – the Three gorges dam in China is bigger – but the Itaipu dam produces the most power because it is fed by rain forests and has new water flowing in year round. The water source for Three Gorges is mountainous which means it is flashier, more episodic and less reliable.

You could look at it this way: the overflow metaphor connects worship with community/mission. And this is why I am talking about this on a worship night. If joy is maximally experienced by passing through you to others – in the context of community and mission – then you need to tap into a consistent, reliable source of joy. And that is why worship is at the center of so much Christian theology and practice.

Now before I talk too much about worship, let me take a second to say, this thing we do, where we stand here each week, turn down the lights and sing for a while…it can be a little awkward. Some of us have been around the church long enough that we have just forgotten that it’s weird. But for some of you it is a little bit like a bad Family Guy gag (click)

that goes on just a little longer than you are comfortable with…

(Peter emerges from the copy room)

and then just keeps going.

I mean the aggie pack guy is raising his hands…he should have more dignity than that…well, unless UCD is beating Sac state.

And if you are a little confused about the purpose of this, well you are not alone…Google has demonstrated that they are a little confused about sung worship – and you can tell by their seemingly misguided attempt to monetize it.

I’d like to believe that this is highly misguided.

We get it…its weird. And I’d also like to be very clear that the musical expression of worship is a very small part of what Christians mean when we use the word ‘worship’…but it is the emphasis of tonight so let’s run with it. Though culturally strange, we do not apologize for sung worship. This Christian practice has a very specific and valuable purpose. Artfully rehearsing truths about God and the gospel - together with others who have also experienced these things, but without the distraction of what the people around us are wearing or who they are looking at...this is one of the ways we ‘tap into’ the sorts of things that we want to pass through us.

Like a dam turns water into power (video)…you were designed to turn worship into contagious joy and surplus thankfulness. You were constructed to generate generosity, service and reconciliation from the raw materials of worship.

Postscript

But let me say one more thing about this overflow metaphor. So far we have talked about being an agent of overflow. But, every mature Christian I have ever met, and nearly all of the great theologians and mystics that constitute our 2000 year old tradition, they agree that for some reason, it is impossible to maintain a full time connection to the gushing source of joy, gratitude, generosity that is our God.

The Christian life is cyclical. Now, to unpack the hows and whys of this, it would take another talk. But, let me just assert that if you stick with Jesus, there will be days that he will be more real to you as than person sitting next to you, and there will be days where you will wonder if he called in sick to the whole ruling the universe thing. And there are theological reasons for why he seems to prefer to interact with us in this way. But part of the provision for this is ‘overflow.’ If we are in a worshiping community, then there will be days in which we are the overflower and days in which we are the overflowee. Essentially, the way God worked it out, there is always enough joy to go around, but that it is not always evenly distributed. If you are tapped into it, you spill it over into those you love…and if you are not getting it directly from the primary source, it is entirely legitimate to get it indirectly, from a secondary source. In addition to worship, meaningful Christian community is your rain forest. It keeps you flush with comfort and joy and generosity even when worship is hard work.

God intended for us to spill his goodness over into each other. And this is true with respect to psychological states like thankfulness, joy and comfort…but it is also true about material resources like time and money, which is why the ‘overflow’ metaphor shows up in the chapters on generosity that Cory covered. We toss around the phrase ‘God provides’ all the time…but the truth is that God does not provide on the level of the individual. God provides on the level of the community. He expects us to overflow into each other.

So, there are really just two things I want you to get out of my favorite hydrologic theme in the Bible. First, if you want to experience the things God offers, you have to be tapped into the source of these things. We call that worship. And while we recognize that some of our cultural expressions of worship are odd, we do not apologize for them. While our cultural expression of worship is somewhat arbitrary…the fundamental need to be worshipers is at the heart of our world view.

And second, God provides these things to a community, not necessarily to individuals. Even as a consistent worshiper, you will not experience the consistent joy or contentment that God wants for you alone because you will you will have no one to spill them into…and you won’t have anyone to spill them into you when you go dry. For you engineers, the control volume isn’t drawn around the individual, it is drawn around the community.

So, let me wrap up by unpacking this separately for Seniors and underclassman. First, Seniors, You have been an epic CL class. I count many of you as friends. Many of you have repeatedly overflowed grace into my life. And most of you have left it on the field. But even the most spiritually mature and theologically prepared of you are in for an enormous challenge . Making the transition from CL to a local church is probably going to be harder than you expect it to be. It is simply harder to find these meaningful friendships in an intergenerational local church. We have friends who have squandered their twenties trying whining about how the church is not like college ministry. So yes. It is going to be harder when you have a 9-5, and aren’t living within 100 yards of 50 Christians. But it’s possible…and it’s on you. If there isn’t a compelling structure set up for you to share your lives deeply with people you respect…make it happen. Don’t wait for someone to set up a compelling community for you…build one.

But most of you are underclassmen. Which is awesome, because it means that you have more years to represent Jesus on this campus. But if you are on the margins of this community make it your goal over the next 5 weeks to start build something that you want to come back to in the fall. The problem with a community this size is that it is hard to break into. And as much as Tuesday nights are the highlight of my week, you cannot find community at a gathering this size. If you want to connect with this community…if you want to find lifelong friends that you can spill over into and who will spill over into you – you have to eventually get into a growth group…or…COME ON RETREAT! There simply isn’t a better, more efficient way to you’re your people in this community to spill over into and that will spill over into you, than to come with us on retreat this weekend. If you have found Tuesday nights intriguing but look around the room and there still aren’t people who are spilling over into you…don’t leave Geidt tonight without filling out that little yellow sheet. But take some steps to put yourself in situations to know some of these really remarkable people sitting in this room.

You need people to spill your joy and gratitude over into and you need people that will spill over comfort and generosity into you. That is the way the system was set up. Do what it takes to find those people.



[1] The pictures got better than this…but I thought I’d limit the internet post to this one.

The Mission and the Message: 2 Cor 5: 14-21

MP3 (coming soon)


Most people are surprised to learn that I applied to colleges as an art major. I didn’t last long. I ended up switching to physics during orientation. But in retrospect, this was an excellent decision for one very important reason… my art was terrible. I mean my art, made Napoleon Dynamite look like Caravaggio.

But throughout my undergraduate education, I would often stop by little gallery in the basement of the union where the art department displayed their work to see what my alternate life might have been like. One day, I walked in, and there, in the back of the room, in the position of honor, was a little 3 inch sculpture of Jesus on the cross. What made this sculpture memorable was that it was constructed entirely out of cigarette butts.


Now I was pretty new to the Jesus following thing and to be honest, it startled me. But years later I learned that it was not that different than the earliest depiction of Jesus ever found. The first image we have of Jesus is not sympathetic. It is a caricature that was found on the wall of a Roman prison. It pictures him on the cross, with the head of a donkey, with the inscription: “Alexamenos sebete theon”


Alexamenos worships his god.



Two different artists, two thousand years apart, the same idea. A dying God is absurd.


A lot of people find this aspect of Christianity weird. I was talking to my friend Mark, a couple years ago. He told me that he found out that he shared a name with one of the books of the Bible, so he decided to read it. So I asked him what he thought. His comment was striking to me. He said, “Honestly, it kind of bummed out. It turns out that’s the one Jesus dies in.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him, that it was just one of four that Jesus dies in. But I kind of get that. We can deal with the picture of Jesus as a baby – I mean, it’s a little weird, but we’ve kind of gotten used to it. We can deal with Jesus as a teacher; that one is easy, that is what we expect out of our religious figures. But there is a kind of indignity even an immodesty to Jesus stripped naked and nailed to a cross bar until his lungs fill with blood and his heart explodes. It can seem incongruous with the rest of the story.



So if you are going to understand Christianity, you are going to have to come to terms with the question: “Why did Jesus die?” Why is the cross at the center of our iconography? What’s the point?




Today’s passage takes that question on. I have often considered the second half of 2 Corinthians 5 to one of the clearest articulations of the central ideas of Christianity.[1] If you are looking for the cliff notes version, of this big book, If you are trying to get your head around the big message…you came on the right night. This passage argues that the death and resurrection of Jesus are the heart of the Christian message and the Christian mission. These events are the primary motivation of what we believe and what we do.


I. The Message


The first thing you need to know about the death of Jesus is that it somehow confers a benefit to people. Look with me at the first verse. At the center of the Christian message is the message that: one died for all.


Jesus’ death was purposeful. It was for me and it was for you. But you already knew that…because it seems that Christians feel inclined to write something to this effect in the strangest places…


And sometimes with less skill that the task calls for…






The cool thing about this passage is that it unpacks the details of that idea. It answers the questions: why did we need him to die for us and how does this work. First Why? Look with me in verses 18 and 19


1. Why: to reconcile us to God


“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them”


The point of Jesus’ death is reconciliation. His mission was to make things good between you and God. Of course, there is a countercultural assumption built into that answer. It assumes that you and God aren’t already good. It assumes that things between you and God are not cool. Reconciliation assumes a starting point of enmity. And this is what the Bible means when it talks about sin.


Now sin is a word that has ceased to have meaning. For most people I know, the only real concrete thing that sin corresponds to is the derivative of cos.

For other people, it is shorthand for a simple indulgence…things are sinfully delicious or a couple who is living together will smirk that they are ‘living in sin’…It is a simple shorthand for fun.

Chuck Klosterman kind of got at this idea in his brilliant book: Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs – A Low Culture Manifesto. One of his essays is on the book Left Behind, a book that was written from a theological perspective that believes that God will eventually take Christians out of the world. He writes:



But the Bible means something much more fundamental when it uses the word “sin.” It argues that we each have a fundamental tendency to make ourselves the center of our lives, in the process, revolting against God’s right to occupy that position. It is more than just a few mistakes, it is a condition of enmity. If you don’t understand this, the cross will seem absurd. If you operate from the perspective, “well, I’ve made a few mistakes, but no one is perfect and God will overlook it” – the cross will seem absurd. But if you get a hold of the idea that our attempts to forge our own lives for our own happiness and our own advancement is a rebellion against God’s claims to direct our lives based on the fact that he made us…the cross starts to make more sense.


The problem isn’t a few mistakes that God needs to overlook, it is a fractured relationship that needs to be healing. You and God are not ok. Me and God, we’re not ok either. We all need to be reconciled. We have knowingly or unknowingly made ourselves into God’s enemies. In a sense, our lives represent a mutiny. God designed our lives with a purpose and a destination…but have taken over the ship and are sailing it wherever we want. We are in a state of fractured relationship


The good news is that he has taken the initiative to bring healing to this fractured relationship. Jesus. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are the mechanism of reconciliation…the means by which you can be restored to God. The passage, says that because of Jesus, people’s sins, their rebellions, are not counted against them.


So, that is the why. Why did Jesus die – to reconcile us to God…But how does that work? How does Jesus dying end up with your sin not counting against you? It sets up a cosmic exchange.

2. How: By exchanging our rebellion for his innocence


5:21 “We implore you, on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin, to become sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”


I remember the summer that aluminum cans became recyclable. I was twelve. In NY, where I grew up, they do recycling a little differently. You pay 5 cents a can when you buy them and can get 5 cents a can by bringing them to any grocery store. So my brother and I went to a memorial day parade in a little town called Theresa NY they passed the recycling law. Now Theresa is a little rural town that is 3 blocks long and has 3 bars and a liquor store…so let’s just say that not only were there discarded empties everywhere, but a substantial fraction of them were 40’s. Nic and I were skeptical, but we got a bag and started walking around collecting empties. Now you have to remember, no one used to do this. Up until that summer, we just threw cans out. And we got some strange looks from the very gentlemen who were discarding the empties. The whole thing was kind of humiliating. But eventually, we walked into the Big M grocery store with an overflowing bag of cans. We were embarrassed and smelled of sweat and Pabst Blue Ribbon. But then, in our little pre adolescent minds, something magical happened. We handed the lady at the register a bag of trash, and she gave us money. It felt like stealing.



That is how the cross works. It's an unfair exchange. It’s an exchange in which we had over the trash of sin, self-absorption, and compromise, and we receive the cash of forgiveness, new life, and adoption into God’s family.


"God made him who had no sin, to become sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."


Jesus, who was himself, in a fundamental but confusing way, God himself, and was totally innocent, totally without sin died the death of a rebel and a traitor. But this made way for a cosmic exchange…where we can trade our sin for his righteousness (to use the language of the passage). Or to use other language, we can trade our rebellion for his innocence. We can trade our estrangement from God for his intimacy with God. Our indifference to the poor for his generosity. Our lustful objectification of women for his loving respect for women. Our self centeredness for his God-centered and other centeredness.[2] This transaction does not make us good, but it makes us as if we were good in God’s eyes, and then we try to live like God sees us.






He identified with our brokenness and we were cosmically associated with his goodness and his justice. We are not good…not really, we are not really just, we are not really generous, we are not really loving – we dabble in these things…and you might even be able to talk yourself into thinking that these things define you, but the results are always tainted with self interest and mixed motives. But in this cosmic exchange, we can be considered just, good and generous, and, in exchange, Jesus takes on our pettiness, self centeredness and bigotry.


And God’s offer of reconciliation is universal. It’s for absolutely everyone. Look with me in the text:


v. 14 – “one died for all”


v. 15 – “he died for all”


v. 19 – “God was reconciling the world to himself”


But it has to be appropriated. He does not force reconciliation on anyone. As it stands it is just an offer, and unless you accept it you remain in the ambient state…of fractured relationship with God. Which brings us to Paul’s punch line in verse 20:


“We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.”


If you had to choose 4 words to summarize the message of the Bible, these four would be a pretty good choice. “Be reconciled to God.” Appropriate the reconciliation Jesus made available to you.


So, the Message is that Jesus died and raised so that we could be reconciled to God through an exchange of our sin for his goodness. But, surprisingly, this passage also contends that the death of Jesus not only motivates the Christian message, it also motivates the Christian Mission:


II. The Mission


You see, the cross is not all about you. I mean, it is clear, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have the opportunity to be made right with God. Because of those events, your sin does not have to count against you. But there is another level of this. Look at v 15.


“And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”


Reconciliation re-establishes the correct order where you no longer live for yourself but for God. Now, on the face of things, this seems like a cost. It sounds like Jesus is saying “Listen, I’ll make things good between you and God…but then I own your ass.” But it is actually part of the rescue. Jesus not only saves us from the consequences of our self involvement, he saves us from our actual self involvement. You were not designed to live for yourself. Living for yourself is a psychological cul-de-sac. You end up obsessing over your desires and neurosis. Part of the rescue that Jesus brings is a new mission of living for Jesus which manifests as living for others. Here is the thing, the reconciliation Jesus brings does not make you reconciled. It makes you a reconciler. There is no intermediate state where you receive the benefits of reconciliation but do not reorder your life to pass them on to others:


18 "All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation"


19 "And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation."


20 "We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
What Jesus offers is not just a rescue, it is a rescue into a mission."


So before Battlestar Galactica put the Syfy channel on the mainstream map, they made their living off the stargate series. In Stargate Atlantis, there were two characters Tayla and Ronin, who were part of the team that was trying to save the Pegasus galaxy from a malevolent, oppressive, ruthless enemy. But the interesting thing about these two characters is that they had both been enslaved by this enemy. So when they were freed, they immediately joined the mission of resistance and rescue. They weren’t just rescued to move on with the rest of their lives. Neither of these characters could conceive of being squandering their rescue on themselves, they had to use it to become agents of rescue. They were rescued into the mission. And that is the way Christianity works. We are not just made good with God so we can move on with the rest of our lives for our selves with the God box checked off. We are reconciled to become reconcilers.





One of my soccer buddies from high school went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study Mechanical Engineering. So I ended up doing numerical modeling of rivers and he ended up designing submarines…but we found that these very different fields converged on a shared passion. We both loved fluid dynamics. He told me the story of his fluid dynamics class. Apparently the professor offered two exams. Everyone had to show up for the first one. If you passed, you got a B. Those that passed, could call it good, or they could show up the next day for a harder test, which would give them a shot at an A. What surprised him was how few people showed up for the second exam. But I feel like this is how a lot of Christians view the gospel. That accepting the reconciling exchange of the cross to make us good with God is like the mandatory B exam…but becoming agents of reconciliation is extra credit. It is the optional A exam for the overachievers or the nerds who want to go to Grad School.


But here’s the thing, it is impossible to disentangle the message of reconciliation and the mission of offering that reconciliation to others. Paul speaks of them together. They are the same thing. I went through the passage and marked the parts that talk about the message and the parts that talk about the mission…and there is no tidy sequential separation. They are intertwined:
Reconciliation doesn’t just make you reconciled…it makes you a reconciler.



Now the immediate context here refers to offering the Message of reconciliation to anyone who is interested. And that is the primary meaning. Most people only have the vaguest understanding of the Message of God’s reconciliation mission in Jesus, and so we should offer the story to anyone who is interested. But in the broader scope of the Scriptures it can also include acts of care and justice…acts of practical good that demonstrate God’s intent for a restored creation. This is one of the reasons I really like the “Ambassador” language this text uses. An lives in one country but their primary allegiance is to a different country. Their primary mission is to deliver the message from their home. But they also live and work for the practical good of the people they live among out of a general affection for them and to demonstrate offer of peaceful relations between the two nations.


These are not primarily programmatic sorts of thing. You just need to be constantly on the lookout for opportunities to be agents of reconciliation, both in terms of offering the message and, what we refer to in our mission statement as practical ‘creative acts of courageous love.’ But there will be some community wide opportunities coming up. Next week Layeah will be talking about global opportunities and the week after Alyssa and Mike will be talking about local opportunities to be agents of reconciliation.


So, we say all the time here that our hope is that this gathering would be a place for two kinds of people. We hope that it is a safe place where those of you who are spiritually curious could investigate and experiment with Jesus and Christian community. And we hope that it is a place where those of you who have made a commitment to Jesus could come together and figure out what that looks like. And so it would seem like this talk divides[3] along those lines. For those of you who have experienced and continue to experience intimacy with God because of the reconciliation of Jesus, you were reconciled to become reconcilers. The Mission of the Cross is to become agents of reconciliation. For those of you who are checking Jesus out: The Message of the cross is pretty simple. Take Jesus up on the offer to exchange his goodness for your brokenness…“We implore you on Christ’s behalf: be reconciled to God.”


___________________________
[1] This text is exceedingly full of matter, and might require many treatises, and even multitudes of folios, to bring forth all its meaning. Holy Scripture is notably sententious. Human teachers are given to verbiage; we multiply words to express our meaning, but the Lord is wondrously laconic; he writeth as it were in shorthand, and gives us much in little. One single grain of the precious gold of Scripture may be beaten out into acres of human gold leaf, and spread far and wide. -Spurgeon
[2] Reconciliation is an act of remaking – it is an innocence infusion. Like a medical procedure where contaminated blood is exchanged for pure blood
[3] But it is actually not as tidy as that. You see, for the spiritually curious, The Mission is the fine print. We, like Paul, sincerely hope that you will decide to accept the reconciliation with God offered to you in Christ, but you need to know the implications of that is a massive priority change.
And Christians need to recognize that The Message of the Cross is not just for the spiritually curious. We do not graduate beyond the gospel. The minute we think we are good with God based on our own goodness, we become self-righteous, religious prudes. We are tempted to exchange self-centered hedonism for a self-centered moralims, which is a little more refined but just as broken. The exchange of our sin for Jesus goodness happens once and for all, but we keep bringing sin to the table. The gospel is for Christians. That is what keeps us from lapsing into self righteousness, when things work right…because the righteousness is not ours. The more often and the more deeply we recognize that our relationship with God is not based on our goodness but Jesus’ the less likely we are to be condescending jerks to those who don’t accept the Christian story.

'as a madman': The Life of Francis Xavier

MP3 of this talk is here

Once upon a time, before the internet was cool, “The Onion” was just a little satirical Midwest newspaper and you could only get it if you lived in Madison, Wisconsin… fortunately, I did. You could literally hold it in your hands…it was adorable.


So one day I picked it up and found the following headline on the front page.

A previously unknown and unexplored land mass discovered between the New York and California coasts – here is what the article said

A U.S. Geological Survey expeditionary force announced Tuesday that it has discovered a previously unknown and unexplored land mass between the New York and California coasts known as the "Midwest." The Geological Survey team discovered the vast region while searching for the fabled Midwest Passage, the mythical overland route passing through the uncharted area between Ithaca, NY, and Bakersfield, CA.

"I long suspected something was there," said Franklin Eldred, a Manhattan native and leader of the 200-man exploratory force. "I'd flown between New York and L.A. on business many times, and the unusually long duration of my flights seemed to indicate that some sort of large area was being traversed, an area of unknown composition."

I think of this article every time I teach historical theology like we have done the last few weeks. You see, I feel like a similar headline could be written about contemporary evangelicals that might go something like this:

“A previously unknown and unexplored time period appears to have elapsed between the writing of Revelation and Blue Like Jazz”


But we are part of something bigger than ourselves. We are just a small part of a continuous story that God has been fashioning with the pen of his Spirit on the materials of human hearts. And both Dan and I have found that studying the lives and events that comprise that story have been helpful and nourishing component of our Christian lives. We have found that CS Lewis was right and wise to say:

“I have lived nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamored of either as to not desire a glimpse beyond them.” C.S. Lewis

So that is why we have done this little series. We design the teaching so that if you come to CL for 4 years you will get teaching on a gospel, a NT book and an OT book, but we also wanted to give you some exposure to the benefit we have gotten from what Malcolm Muggeridge called ‘The Third Testament’ – the continuing story of Jesus making something beautiful out of broken lives and deeply flawed individuals.

Tonight is the final part of this series. But to introduce you to our last character, I first want to tell you a little bit about my family. I have 2 daughters who I adore…but they were impossible to name. Amanda and I had a boy name since well before we had kids but we can’t seem to agree on girls names. So when we found out we were having a third kid, we started working on a third girl’s name. Charis didn’t seem to understand the problem. She thought naming that there was a totally obvious name for our third girl. From day one she has insisted that regardless of the gender the new baby should be named “Christmas Tree.”


But as it turns out, we don’t need another girl name. We are having a boy. We finally get to use that boy name we have had cued up for years. We will probably name him Xavier. And tonight I am going to tell you why. You see, Francis Xavier, like Pascal and Bonheoffer, is a complicated guy. His story is scarred with bad choices, unfortunate alliances, and personal brokenness. He is associated with colonialism, which modern people from the east and west alike see as a period of enormous injustice and a sympathetic biographer once said: “Never were the Cross and the sword more blandly or shamelessly identified than in those days.”

Even the most admirable Christians in an era like this will come away tarnished. And there is a lot about Xavier that I do not wish for my son. But that is the really remarkable thing about Christianity. Christianity is the condition that allows heroism in despite brokenness. Christianity is the absurd hypothesis that a human does not have to be defined by his or her failures. There are dark chapters of his life and embarrassing moments in his story…which makes him like Pascal, Bonheoffer, and you and me. But Jesus was able to utilize him in truly remarkable ways in spite of this. And that is the story I want for my kids…that despite the brokenness and failures they have in front of them, Jesus will still use their lives to tell a beautiful story.


So here we go…Francis Xavier grew up at the beginning of the sixteenth century in a family of quasi-nobility. The Xavier’s had their own castle in north Spain…which I mean, come on, is pretty cool. His youth was pretty unremarkable. He wandered through it but had access to a good education. And in his early 20’s he found himself at the University of Paris, the premier European university at the time. He spent over a decade at college getting a Masters in philosophy and working on a doctorate. He was a descent student but was mainly affable and popular and mostly known for his wit and athletic accomplishments.

I mean, I’m not sure if you can picture this….



His story doesn’t really get interesting until he’s been at school for 9 years. He’s 28 and still in grad school when he got a new roommate. Ignatius of Loyola, moved in with Xavier.
Ignatius was a soldier, also from Spain, and had fought in a battle opposite Xavier’s family. In his final battle, he took a cannon ball to the leg. That’s gonna leave a mark. During his convalescence he did a bunch of reading and praying and had a pretty dramatic conversion experience. After he could walk made a pilgrimage to Israel and then returned to Paris and started college at the age 33, convinced he needed a theological education to prepare for a life dedicated to bringing the message of Jesus to anyone who would listen.

Another friend, who lived with them at this time, later said “Xavier was not at first very much taken with Inigo.” And there was no reason these two should become friends. Xavier was a bright but under-motivated student, essentially a trust fund kid from an affluent background hoping to luck into a professorate so he never had to leave the university. Ignatius was a soldier from a rival family turned religious zealot. He was, so possessed by his new faith and his single minded goal to tell people about Jesus that most people found him abrasive and annoying to be around. But they both spoke the same relatively rare language and ended up living together and, within six months, they were inseparable.


At that point things started to happen fast. Xavier, Ignatius and five others begin to meet regularly and formed a little group that dedicated themselves to purposeful Christian community. They called this little group ‘the society of Jesus’ which would later become the Jesuits, one of the most significant missional movements in the history of Christianity. It all started with two guys that didn’t like each other sharing a sqalid[1] dorm room. They became the perfect partners. Ignatius was a charismatic leader and forward looking visionary, while Xavier was a man of action and limitless energy.

Despite their passion to serve Jesus in the world, they all stayed in school for two more years to finish their education. And over the course of the next two years, they spent time praying together and separately about what God would have them do. Here is how one biographer described the little group:

“They ate in one another's rooms, compared their college notes, and discussed plans for the future. Once a week they confessed and communicated. It was during those months that Francis Xavier cemented the strongest and tenderest friendships of his life. The expression of this great affection for the fellow-members of his company, and above all, for Ignatius, runs like a thread of gold through his letters from the East.” Edith Anne Stewart

I just want to pause here and note, that this is how the vast majority of major world changing Christian movements begin…with a small group of Christains living together in non-trivial Christian community purposefully praying together. These years will set a trajectory for your life. If you are living at the margins of Christian community, dive in. And if you are surrounded by Christians but not sharing experiences like prayer and confession and discussing your studies together…you are not getting everything you can out of your time here. The people who I prayed with in college are scattered around the globe serving Jesus in a variety of ways today…and these are some of the most influential people in my world.

After they graduated, they decided that the way they could optimize their usefulness was to go Rome, showed up at the Pope’s flat and offered to do whatever he wanted done. This seems weird because we are moderns and mostly Protestants…but their reasoning was pretty convincing. They thought: “This dude has the best vantage point of all the needs and is most likely to put us to work at the most needed tasks.”

As they put it: “To do anything which will help Jesus Christ, that is our business.”

The Pope is cautious at first, but as they prove to be theologically orthodox and willing to do literally anything, he starts sending them on some of his craziest missions. They become a sort of ‘special forces’ unit for Jesus. Now about this time, a priest who had spent time in South Asia hears about these guys and convinces the King of Portugal to make a direct request some of the society to go to the Portuguese colonies in India. The Pope hesitated. He said that he could not command anyone (even these fearless young meant) to take such a dangerous journey, but that they were free to go.

Francis immediately wanted to go, but Loyola who was running the growing operation from Rome, felt like he needed Francis’ near him…but the other guy got sick, so 24 hours before the boat left he called Francis and assigned him to South Asia. Xavier replied:

““Well, then, forward! Here I am!””


At that time less that 60% of the people who made the trip from Europe to India made it. Xavier’s journey was difficult; it took a year, twice as long as the standard trip. But he gave away his quarters and spent his days caring for the sick and dying and his nights sleeping in the anchor rope.

They finally landed in Goa, the principle Portugese community in South Asia. Xavier was horrified by what he found. There was no justice or accountability for the Portugeese. There was a shared harem of indigenous women and rampant theft from each other and the South Asian people. It was a place of excess among the wealthy and suffering among the poor. He immersed himself in the lives of the suffering. He wrote to Ignatius in his first letter home,

“Here in Goa I have lodged in the hospital.”

Which meant, that he spent his nights sleeping on the floor next to the dying so he was available to be of comfort to them if they woke in the middle of the night. He cared for the sick in the hospital and tried to raise some money from the wealthy Portuguese to care for the leper communities and the slums. He visited the prisoners and preached in the streets. And in the churches, he taught Sunday school and had over 300 people began to show up. Before he left he had convinced the governors to set up a seminary and it already had 60 Indian students by the time he left. This seminary would become part of his work for the next decade…as each new place he went and set up churches, he would bring back promising young Christians to train at the Goa seminary and replace him. But Xavier was always looking for the next big risk he could take for Jesus.

He heard that 20,000 Indians had become Christians on the Fishery coast but that had been mostly abandoned. And so he went to the South Indian coast worked in these communities for years, teaching the gospel and serving the poor, training people to replace him. But before he felt like he could move on, he needed to find some money to support the people who would replace him. So he wrote a letter to the Queen of Portugal suggesting that she send annually the $ that she spends on shoes for the care and instruction of the children of the fishery coast, writing:

She sent the money, and sent it again every year after that even after Xavier’s death. Brought several of the most promising young men to the school in Goa to replace himself.

Next he went to Malaysia and did the same. He served and taught in several communities that had aligned themselves with the Christian faith…with the same effect. Churches grew and started to become self sustaining and, once more, sent promising young Malaysian leaders to Goa, to prepare them to lead and care for these churches. But in Malaysia, he had mostly reached the end of the Christian world. And Xavier had found that despite his love for the Church he was not principally a pastor to Christians – he thrived surrounded by those who did not believe.

Now, for some of you, this is an uncomfortable idea. We have been intellectually bullied so often and for so long that we many of us have come to believe that any attempt to offer someone an alternate world view is an act cultural imperialism…We might be tempted to project our modern standards to look back across the centuries and judge Xavier as being an inexcusable imperialist. But this is one way in which Xavier speaks to our generation by simply living out something we have forgotten. At the heart of Christianity is the idea that if Jesus is worth crossing an ocean for, he is worth telling people about. There is a temptation to admire Xavier’s acts of justice…as he stood up to colonial powers on behalf of the local people and his acts of service as he wore himself out serving the sick and poor…but to look at this preaching the gospel as a quaint cultural artifact. But these things cannot be separated. The only reason Xavier served and fought for justice was because Jesus is fantastic…and if Jesus is that fantastic, it would be absurd not to share him with anyone who will listen. And so he started to go to places where people might not have heard.

He had heard that in Indonesia there were some Christian communities, but the crass wickedness of the Portuguese traders and politicians had caused most to reject the new faith and in one place in particular del Mor – they had actually poisoned all the missionaries. So, of course, this was, precisely where he wanted to go next.

The land of Moro is very dangerous, because its people…put poison in food and drink. So the people who should have looked after them…stopped going there. I hope within a month to go to an island where those killed in war are eaten.

In Indonesia he saw things that he had never seen –active volcanoes, tropical rain forests – his letters home captured the European imaginations.

He was able to reestablish the church in del Moro and quipped that it would be better to call them “The Islands of Hope in God" Ten years later, del Moro, most established Christian community in the region.

While he was Indonesia, he met a young Japanese man. This young man was interminable curious and eventually became a Christian. Xavier was extremely impressed with him and set his sights on making it to Japan. Plus, he was tiring of having to overcome the example of the Portuguese colonists with the message of Jesus. He was finding that the islanders were having trouble accepting any world view that the Portuguese professed. So Japan made a lot of sense to him, as the Portuguese had not really made it there yet.

“I am almost fleeing to Japan,” he said, “not to waste any more time."

So it was back to Goa with young men from the islands to train at Goa and then he set out for Japan. However, the very thing that made Japan attractive to him, made it difficult to get there. There were no ships going that way. So we get to one of my favorite details in his story. At this point, to make it to Japan, Xavier and his little team, catch a ride with Pirates. Now, I want you to imagine this scene. Xavier is sitting on the deck reading his little book of scriptures and praying, watching the sun go down and enjoying the quiet presence of God which fueled him…except this was going on. (Enter Pirates).

Francis Xavier's letters from Japan were the earliest first-hand reports of that country to come to Europe. Japan was really difficult at first. Initially he was welcomed in an eastern province, but as soon as a few people became Christians the governor made becoming a Christian punishable by death. So Xavier made a 3 month journey to the capitol by foot, through the mountains, with little food or shelter, through snow and several war zones. He would later write to Ignatius that in the future, those selected to serve in Japan should come from Scandinavia and Germany because they would be accustomed to the cold. But when he got to the capitol he found it in ruins from war and the emperor refused to see him. He expected a “Paris of the East” but found the capitol so war torn that he estimated that nearly half of the residences had been destroyed. And they turned around and walked back. The emperor never met with him and he was told that it didn’t matter, because there was the political landscape was so fractured that his permission would not carry far. And they turned around and walked back. Most of Xavier’s biographers consider this the most discouraging moment of his story, but his companions said that he was singing a psalm as they walked out of town.
Things turned around in the Southern Coastal towns. They were able to plant churches in several towns and in one in particular, Yamaguchi, 500 people became Christians. One of these converts was a blind, poor street performer. He talked often with Xavier and had a lot of questions. But Xavier noticed in these conversations that he was startlingly intelegent and had a disarming wit. He became the first Japanese member of “the society of Jesus” and grew the church by over 1000 people after Xavier left.

Once the young churches were stable, Xavier again traveled back with young leaders to train at Goa, this group included two young samurais. But while he was in Japan he found that many of them held the philosophy and religion of China in high regard. One question he repeatedly got was, “If this is true, why did the Chinese not know about it?” So he decided to go to China.
Now China was not just unvisited by the Portuguese, it was hostile to them (and, honestly, rightly so). The only Portuguese in China were rotting in their dungeons for their attempts to land in Chinese ports. So he hatched a plan to meet a Chinese trader who would smuggle him into China (so no Chinese people would be implicated in his entrance)…then he would show up at the door of the Palace and ask to see the emperor. He waited on an island just outside of Canton for the merchant to show up. The agreed upon date came and went. He waited. Then one day, he got sick…and within a week he died…waiting to knock on one more door to offer Jesus to one more people.

His last words: “In you O Lord, have I hoped; let me never be confounded.” Ps 71:1

So what is it about this story that has captured my imagination so much, that I would want to name my son Xavier? What is there in this story that I hope for my son? Well let me wrap up briefly with 3 things I see in Xavier, that I hope for my children…and for myself…and for all of you:

1. He lived a Life of Abandon for Jesus

We are living in a time that values safety and comfort above almost anything else. Xavier’s story shakes us free of that myopia. Like his brother Dietrich Bonheoffer, Jesus had domesticated death for Xavier and somehow made suffering a friend. Xavier believed that Jesus was worth it. And I want that for my kids, and for myself, and for you.

2. He had a Global Worldview

He realized that if a world view is going to be valid, it has to be global. He took Jesus seriously when Jesus told us to tell ‘all nations’ about him.

“Many times I am seized with the thought of going to the schools in your land and crying out there, like a madman…telling those…who have a greater desire for learning (and ecclesiastical position) than desire to prepare themselves to produce fruit with it…(to give up their small ambitions and come east to preach the gospel of Christ).”

The lesson here, don’t just assume that God is calling you to life in the American church. Really seek him out to see if he has some global task for you. Many, even most, will be called to stay. Each one of you needs to ask Jesus, very seriously, if he has something for you outside of the safe and comfortable confines of North America. In a couple of weeks, Jerrod and Laeya are going to present overseas Missions opportunities that will be available to you this summer. Don’t just assume that that is the kind of thing someone else does. Ask Jesus.

3. He Spoke Truth to Power

Finally, Xavier was not intimidated by power. He utilized the Portuguese infrastructure for his service of Jesus, but they never owned him. He repeatedly wrote scathing letters to the King of Portugal about the evil and injustice he saw at the hands of the Portuguese colonialists. He saw:

To the King of Portugal: “Those who have been added to the Church (have been) wrenched from it…because they have been offended and terrified by the many wrongs and grievous injuries they have endured, especially from your Highness’ servants…(do) not continue to delay and procrastinate any longer, for no matter how swiftly you act, your diligence in this regard will always be late."

“…help them in their needs by speaking to them who have power and authority…”

I think one of the lessons we can learn from Xavier’s courageous stand against the colonial powers as well as from some of his emberresing associations with their policies is that we cannot let Jesus be co-opted in someone else’s quest for power. Both political parties would like to use Jesus to give them power…they want to co-opt the church. We need to not only resist aligning too closely with structures of power and …but we need to stand against injustice and the marginalization of people.

Now I want to finish with one final quote from Xavier. Because lets face it, Xavier was a high capacity person. None of us are going to have a life like this. And it can be exhausting to hear about a life like this while you are all working really hard at your studies and many of you, in addition to carrying substantial ministry loads. Xavier got that. Listen to what he says:

I fear that the enemy is disturbing some of you by suggesting that you would be performing great and arduous tasks in the service of God if you were in some other place than where you now are. The demon contrives all this in order to make you sad and troubled because you are not reaping fruit within your own souls or in those of your neighbors in those regions where you presently are, making you think you are wasting your time. This is a clear, common, and manifest temptation for many who are eager to serve God…resist it…Each one of you should therefore diligently labor where you are…being convinced with regard to yourself that nowhere can you serve God so well as where you have been placed by obedience. 302-3

Faithfully serve those who have needs and articulate the gospel to those who show interest as you go through this great opportunity of a UC Davis education, and remain proactively open to things God might have for you after college.

__________________________
[1] And Erasmus writes of it :
the beds were so hard, the food so meagre, the labours so exacting that many youths of splendid promise, after the first years of their sojourn in this college, became mad or blind or leprous, if
they did not die. Some of the bedrooms, because they were close to the lavatories, were so dirty and infected that none of those who lodged there came away alive, or without the germ of some grave disease . . . Oh, how many rotten eggs I ate there, and how much mouldy wine I drank ! http://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofstfrancisx00stewrich/lifeofstfrancisx00stewrich_djvu.txt

The Life and Thought of Blaise Pascal

MP3 Here

All of history’s greatest scientists were playing hide and seek one day. Several of them were extremely good at this. Schrödinger was particularly good at this. He kept hiding in a sealed box with a cat who didn’t seem at all happy about the arrangement.[1]



Heisenberg just climbed on a giant triple beam balance every time…because as long as he was making a precise measurement of his mass it was impossible to detect his location.[2] Now you can understand how Sir Isaac Newton finally got tired of losing to these guys. So finally, while Einstein was counting, he just stood in the center of the room and used a piece of sidewalk chalk to carefully draw a box around himself. When Einstein finished counting he looked up and saw Isaac standing in the middle of the room. He said, “Dude, I found you.” Newton responded, “No you didn’t. You found Pascal. I’m a Newton per square meter.” [3]



So this is how I got interested in Pascal. I was in grad school for engineering, and I had written down the abbreviation for this guy’s name roughly 1000 times (giving me a kilopascal) and heard he had written an insightful and accessible work of theology, so I picked it up.


I had never read a book by a dead guy and was a little skeptical. I wondered if it could possibly have any contemporary merit. Interestingly, I found that Pascal had anticipated this concern:


You see, there are two temporal fallacies when it comes to our quest for insight and wisdom. The first is traditionalism. Traditionalists prefer ancient wisdom to modern insight. Ideas with more history get more weight. Until approximately the time of Pascal, most cultures held to this view. A new idea could only prevail with difficulty because ancient wisdom was generally trusted and novelty was received with skepticism. However, in Pascal’s time (around the fifteen century) things began to change. There was a flourishing of optimism in human ingenuity and science. And there this led to a relatively sudden cultural reversal. Ancient ideas were suddenly viewed with skepticism in favor of novelty. The fallacy of Traditionalism was supplanted by fallacy of Modernism. The Modernists fallacy was to allow modern insight to uncritically trump ancient wisdom. CS Lewis calls this, “chronological snobbery.”

Tonight, and over the course of the next two weeks, we are going to test Pascal’s hypothesis that wisdom is a middle path between these fallacies. We are going to test the hypothesis that while novel ideas and contemporary reflection have a lot to offer us, powerful minds that have been silent for centuries have something special to offer our age, because they can speak free from our paradigms and prejudices of our time.[4]

Tonight we are going to briefly tell Pascal’s story and then look at just two of the principle ideas of his philosophy.

Pascal lived through the middle of the seventeenth century. He was a contemporary with Descartes and just before Newton and Spinoza. This meant he occupied one of the most turbulent eras of intellectual discovery and ferment in western intellectual history. It was ‘the enlightenment’, ‘the scientific revolution’, ‘the age of reason.’ And he was lived in Paris, which was the heart of the action.

Pascal’s story starts with tragedy. His mother died when he was three, leaving Blaise and his two sisters in the care of their eccentric father who was, essentially a Paris tax collector. His father decided to home school and despite the fact that Blaise showed uncanny early potential he was forced to studied classics (Greek and Latin) because his father believed that “mathematics was too intoxicating for a young mind.”[5] Though something came across my facebook last night that made me wonder if he wasn’t on to something.



This kept up until (as Blaise’ older sister reported later) his dad walked in on him deriving Euclid’s principles alone in his room – you get the picture of a dad walking in on his son looking at porn. So his father relented, and he began to study math. When he was 17 he published his first major publication. By 19 he had invented the first calculator (in order to help his father with his job). This should not be underestimated:

I realize how this could be underwhelming to an Iphone/Droid/blackberry generation – I mean it is just a single function device. But listen to what Douglas Groothis said about this: [6]




In his early twenties he turned to physics and performed a series of experiments on hydrostatics (which is why we use his name as the SI unit for pressure). This was the beginning of his tendency to champion unpopular views, as he argued for the possibility of a vacuum, which most of his contemporaries believed could not exist. This debate put Pascal head to head with Descartes himself, but, Pascal was, of course, correct. The vast majority of our physical universe is in fact a vacuum.

Now despite these early achievements, he was sick most of his life, and began to really suffer from his illnesses in his 20s. His doctor told him that he needed to spend less time on stressful things like math and science and more time on social diversions. Now I want you to imagine this. You are a 24 year old dude in the world’s most fun city and the Doctor officially prescribes more partying.



Let’s just say he was extremely contentious in medical compliance. He was introduced to Parisian high society and was very well received. Even though as the son of bureaucrat he was not really in their social class, there were two reasons this was generally overlooked. First, Scientists and Philosophers were the celebrities of 17th century.



Descartes was Tom Cruise and Spinoza was Russell Crowe. A couple years ago it came out that people pay Paris Hilton to show up at parties to make those parties successful. Pascal turned out to be a seventeenth century version of this…except he was also clever, articulate and witty. You do not have to spend very long with his writings before you can imagine that he could be highly entertaining. The second reason he climbed socially was a simple matter of mathematics. Many of his friends were gamblers and some of his early work in probability stemmed from his attempts to solve gambling puzzles.

But he found that a life of diversion was fundamentally unsatisfying. His life was full of anesthetic. Diversions did not make the big questions of the universe or the human condition go away, it just made him forget they were there. Later he wrote:

“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things…That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment…”

“The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”

Peter Kreeft who wrote a fine commentary on Pascal’s writings wrote “The word “boredom” does not exist in any ancient languages. It first appeared in the 17th century.” 187
Pascal came to believe that the reason boredom had become so intolerable, the reason
there were so many ways to occupy their minds with insubstantial things, was because bordom makes mental space for dread of a vacant universe. The realities of a vacant universe and our true condition are too dreadful to allow it to maintain our attention.

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us (from) seeing it.”

About the same time Pascal’s father broke his leg. He hired two amateur bone setters to help him heal and rehab and they lived with the family. They were simple men whose lives revolved around their Christian faith, and Pascal found himself drawn to them. This is one of my favorite details of the story, because these were very simple, unassuming men. They were not in the intellectual ballpark of the precocious young Blaise, but he would eventually adopt their worldview. And this is one of my criterions for evaluating a worldview. Does it have generality across the human condition? Is similarly compelling and useful to simple tradesmen and world class intellects?

For the next few years, these two influences, the Jesus of the bonesetters and the high life of the Parisan cultural set each pulled at him. We only know how that resolved in retrospect. He did not let anyone in on the final decision as far as we know. But when he died, his family found this document, dated Nov 11, 1954 (which would make him 31) sewn into the lining of his jacket (as though he had resolved to always have the reminder of this night close to his person).



“The year of grace 1654.
Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement
From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past midnight.
FIRE.
The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
Not of the philosophers and intellectuals.
Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace.
The God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Forgetfulness of the world and everything except God.
One finds oneself only by way of the directions taught in the gospel.
The grandeur of the human soul.
Oh just Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have separated myself from him.
They have abandoned me, the fountain of living water.
My God will you leave me?
May I not be separated from him eternally.
This is eternal life, that they may know you the one true God and J.C . whom you have sent.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have separated myself from him. I have run away from him, renounced him, crucified him.
May I never be separated from him.
One preserves oneself only by way of the lessons taught in the gospel.
Renunciation total and sweet.
And so forth.”

This changed the trajectory of the last decade of Pascal’s life. He began to study theology and take an interest in Paris’ poor. His last big project was to implement the first public transportation system in the Western world. He used his own money to set up a series of omnibuses with prescribed routes and public time tables with the intent of giving Paris’ poorest citizens a way to get around the city. He also started to write his major work of philosophy, collecting fragments in a shoe box. Pascal never finished the book. He died before he turned 40. The autopsy revealed at least 3 terminal disease so advanced they couldn’t tell which one killed him. But his sister fond the shoe box published the fragments as she found them, under the title Pensees (simply the French word for ‘thoughts’). Now for not being an actual book, Pensees is one of the great works of history. It is easily one of my five favorite books. IT is a shockingly raw and subversive dissenting opinion to the rest of the triumphalistic philosophy that came out of that age. In some way, a non-traditional work was appropriate legacy for Pascal. Kreeft says: “To ask such a man to write an ordinary book is like asking lightning to sit for a portrait.”
At his funeral there were eminent scientists, members of Parisian high society, renowned members of the religious community, but the account reports that the much of the church was full of the Paris’ poor that he had assisted following his conversion. And I think that sums up his life pretty well, and I think that scene alone, makes his writings compelling. What kind of world view generates a life like this?



Well with the time I have left I just want to briefly look at two of the organizing ideas of his world view. To understand Pascal’s world view and why it was so radically different than the others of his time, you have to understand how he answers two of the big questions: “Who are we?” and “How do we know stuff?” or his anthropology and his epistemology.

First: Who are we? (Pascal’s Anthropology)

Pascal was fundamentally an empiricist. In the debates about a vacuum, he put the emphasis on experimentation and data over theory and principle. And he felt like, if you are going to achieve a stable view of the meaning and purpose of life, you first have to take some data on what it means to be human. So he undertook a new study later in life. He called it his study of “The Human Subject.” And he concluded that there were two fundamental and paradoxical things that any world view has to reconcile about the human condition:

“The more enlightened we are the more greatness and vileness we discover in man…” (613 – p51)[7]

“What sort of freak then is man? How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!” (131 - 107)

He argues that if you are going to try to answer the question “Who are we?” your answer has to account for two very different stories. First, you have to account for the capacity gun down 5 perfect strangers (including a 9 year old) outside an Arizona grocery. But you are also going to have to account for an 18 year old that used her college money to start an orphanage in Nepal and by the age of 24 was the sole caretaker of over 40 children, sharing her bed with a fussy infant.[8] You are going to have to account Stalin and Teresa, for our tendency to destroy and our tendency to create, our darkness and our beauty.



Pascal felt like the Christian story made the most sense of this paradoxical data. He argued that we are all metaphysically valuable but morally flawed. We are fundamentally good but existentially broken.

“(Human) greatness and wretchedness are so evident that (a successful world view) must necessarily teach that there is in (us) some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions…It must acknowledge that we are full of darkness…(and) teach us the cure for our helplessness.” (149 – p65)

The great irony is that most contemporary world views invert this. They argue that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about us, we are just carbon and chemicals, the accidental animation of cosmic dust, yet, we are all basically good at heart. We are intrinsically valueless but morally good. [9] Pascal says:

“What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at (their) own weakness…” (33 – 106)

Someone once asked Ravi Zacharias, a notable South Asian Christian for the primary reason he followed Jesus. This is a particularly fair question for him, as he grew up in India, one of the few places on earth where all of the major religions are well represented. He responded, “I follow Jesus Christ because he diagnosed my condition most precisely.”


Second: How do we know stuff? (Epistemology)

What Pascal demonstrated in the vacuum debates was that he was interested in data than theory. And he felt like, if you are going to achieve a stable view of the meaning and purpose of life, you first have to take some data on what it means to be human. And he concluded that there were two fundamental and paradoxical things that any world view has to reconcile about the human condition:

“Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason…Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that.”

And this is why we have to understand Pascal’s anthropology before we can understand his epistemology. His answer to “Who are we?” informs his answer to “How do we know stuff?…and so does yours. If we fit Pascal’s picture of beautiful brokenness, there is a reason to be skeptical about our ability to penetrate reality ourselves.

He found that despite the immense power of his own mental faculties, that reason and the senses are helpful but slippery guides. “I found myself so often making unsound judgments that I began to distrust myself and then others…I realized that our nature is nothing but continual change.” (520 – p93)

Even the greatest minds will have trouble differentiating between their reason and their passions.

“The internal war of reason against the passion has made those who wanted peace split into two sects. Some wanted to renounce passions and become gods, others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beats. But neither side has succeeded, and reason always remains to denounce the baseness and injustice of the passions and to disturb the peace of those who surrender to them. And the passions are always alive in those who want to renounce them.” (410 – p97)[10]

Pascal anticipates the existentialists and the post-moderns (even as modernism itself is just getting started) by arguing that there is no ‘view from nowhere.’ All knowledge is perspective and fundamentally self interested.

“The aversion for the truth exists…in everyone to some degree, because it is inseparable from self love.” (978 -150)

He found dogmatism unsatisfying but was skeptical about skepticism. He needed a world view that allowed him to use his mind but also recognized the limitations of our equipment.[11]
Pascal believed that because we are beautiful and broken, it distorts the way we perceive reality. Like looking into a shattered mirror. We see some aspects of reality exactly right, but the big picture eludes us. And this state is supposed to supposed to lead us to look outside ourselves for the interpretive key that pulls the story together.



“You cannot be a skeptic without stifling your nature. You cannot be a dogmatist without turning your back on reason. Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.” (131 – 109)

Disillusioned with the capacity of his powerful mind to penetrate reality, he looked for help. And he found a tutor who seemed to see it all clearly.[12] He found someone who had a fundamental understanding of how we work and how the world works that fit Pascal’s empirical . He found Jesus.

“Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.”(417 -313)


Concluding Thought:

Let me just wrap up with a couple words on how Pascal’s mentorship has enhanced my experience of the University and the reflective life.

Letting Jesus inform your interpretations of your sense data does not have to devolve to dogmatism. But in the end, I have found the same thing Pascal found, the Christian story makes the most sense of the cloud of paradoxical data I have encountered in my studies. However, I am far more curious about science and philosophy, about how the world works and how we work, than I was without Jesus.

“I believe with (our) curiosity changed into wonder (we) will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to investigate them with presumption.” (199-122)

Pascal’s Jesus provides a robust approach to the academic life. Study hard, enjoy the accumulation of facts and the evaluation of ideas, develop your powers of reasoning, observation and experimentation. But instead of leading to arrogance, let them lead you to wonder. Consider the possibility that the one who made all this wants to walk with you through your discovery of it. And consider the possibility that if Jesus describes the human condition with such precision, that you might want to look to him for the solution.

____________________________
[1] “Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar…and doesn’t” My friend Zach
[2] My friend Steve brainstormed a bunch of these:
Schrodinger could hide in two boxes at once and when a box is opened/observed he could "collapse" to the unopened box (maybe leaving a dead cat behind?).
Einstein could change himself into energy and travel at the speed of light (since he would be massless) and then change back to matter.
Plank could hide inside of a really, really, really, tiny distance.
Feynman could be particularly good at finding people by making a diagram of every possible path the other scientist might use to try and hide.
[3] You English majors will just have to take my word for it…these jokes are hilarious.
[4] They are, no doubt, restricted by the prejudices and assumptions of their own age, but these are easy for us to sniff out. What makes looking to past figures for insight particularly valuable is that they do not have to dance to the fiddler of our moment and can provide an ‘outside’ opinion. Rather than musty, their ideas are often fresh because they would never occur to us.
[5] Seriously, you’ve got to love the seventeenth century – where they say stuff like this. Sometimes I hear would-be-hippies bemoan that they were born in the wrong decade…that their natural temporal home would have been the sixties. Well sometimes I sympathize…sometimes I feel like I should have been born in the sixties too…the 1660, when people talked like this.
[6] Douglas Groothuis On Pascal, p 17.
[8] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504464_162-20027569-504464.html
[9] Kreeft: “Psychopaganism is infinitely inferior to existentialist nihilism because it does not even rise to the dignity of despair.”
[10] “One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason. Some men run counter to these three principles, either affirming that everything can be proved, because they know nothing of proof, or doubting everything, because they do not know when to submit, or always submitting, because they do not know when judgment is called for.” (170 - 236) 3 kinds of fanaticism
[11] He actually believed that the cloudiness of our cognitive equipment and our inability to see things clearly was a gift from God to point us to our need for an external interpretive key.
[12] “Let man both hate and love himself, he has with him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.” (119 p61)