Pastor's Page: August 11, 2009

Greetings, friends! This is my last Pastor's Page for Faith Bible Church, where I no longer serve as pastor. It has been a privilege to write out for you my thoughts and meditations over these past six and a half years. Trust in Jesus Christ with living and enduring faith, and some day you and I will rejoice together forever in the paradise that I utterly fail to describe below. Grace and Peace to you, Paul Lundquist "He must become greater; I must become less." (John 3:30). ---

Imagining Heaven (Part 3)

Suppose that you and I were twin fetuses waiting to be born, and we could talk, and you got a chance to see the outside world for a while, and then returned and tried to tell me what you experienced.

What would you say? How would you describe things to me?

Keep in mind that I have never seen anything, never breathed air, never felt a mother's touch, never heard anything but muffled, indistinct sounds, never crawled, never tasted milk, never smelled anything. While accounting for all my limitations, describe to me what it is like to ride a horse galloping through a field of wildflowers while gazing at snowcapped mountains in the distance.

You can't even describe the horse! "What's a horse?" I ask. You say, "It's an animal that-" and I interrupt, "What's an animal?" You reply, "An animal is a being that breathes and eats and reproduces-" "Hold on!" I say, because now I'm really confused. "What is 'breathe'? What is 'eat'? What is 'reproduce'? And what is a 'being'?"

You quickly give up trying to describe anything to me, so I try to help you out with the simplest questions I can think of. "What kind of nutrition do we get through our umbilical cords out there? What's the temperature of the amniotic fluid that we float in? Do we float in any position at all, or only right-side up? Do we get to kick each other a bit (because that's my favorite thing in the world!)." And, of course, you find that you are not able to give a satisfactory answer even to the most basic questions that I can come up with.

I think that describing heavenly reality to earthly mortals is like that. One of the most common questions I get about heaven, for example, is whether our pets will be there. I suspect the answer is neither yes nor no, but, "That's kind of like a fetus asking about the function of his umbilical cord after he's born." The vital lifelines of our present existence - things we can't imagine doing without - will be superceded by the glorious and the unimaginable.

Speaking of glorious and unimaginable: Lisa my bride took my name on Saturday, and, like the blessed fetus above, I'm completely at a loss to express what it's like to be married to her. This is about the best I can do: have you ever been dead, and got to go to heaven, and then they revived you and brought you back here? It's like the part just before they revive you and bring you back here.

Pastor's Page: July 26, 2009

Imagining Heaven (Part 2)

When I compared Alice Sebold's and C. S. Lewis' visions of heaven last week, I wonder if any readers thought, "Why bother imagining heaven at all? Can't we just go by what the Bible says about it?" And that might seem like a simple and obvious thing to do. But the problem is that the Bible never gives a single coherent view of the blessed afterlife. What it gives instead is a variety of images that are hard to put together in a single frame. I would go as far as to say that our finite minds cannot assemble all the images meaningfully.

Sometimes heaven is viewed as a city (Revelation 21:2). Sometimes it is a country comprised of cities (Luke 19:11-19). Sometimes the scale is reduced, and it is viewed as a many-roomed mansion (John 14:2). Sometimes it is a serene countryside (Isaiah 11:6-9).

What will we be doing there? In Matthew 25:1-13 and Revelation 19:9 it looks like we're having a party in a wedding reception hall. In Revelation 4 and 5 it looks like we're worshipping in a great throne room. In Hebrews 4:1-11, I think we're just relaxing in a hammock under a shade tree.

So, which is it? Are we relaxing, dancing, or bowing? Are we in a room, or a great hall, or an open space? Are we in a city with a huge throng, or are we walking along grassy hills with lion on our left and a lamb on our right? And is Jesus at our side speaking words of love - or is he off in the distance, seated on a throne before which we lie prostrate?

Yes.

I suppose if you wanted to insist on a literal fulfillment of all the images you could gerrymander a way to do it. Like this: on Tuesdays in heaven we exit our condo units at the mansion and walk over to the big worship center for some angel-led praise. Wednesdays we drink and dance and stuff ourselves at a party. Thursdays we tour the cities we've been assigned to govern and take care of administrative duties that have piled up during the week. Fridays we frolic with wolves and lions by a viper's pit (and give thanks they're all vegetarians now). Saturday, hammock. Sunday your choice. Then Monday is the day everybody looks forward to, because, since Matthew 22:30 says we are like genderless unmarried angels, we get to indulge in that mysterious thing God has prepared for us that we all find better than sex.

Or we can let the literalisms go and recognize that the images given to us are just that - images. They are word pictures designed to communicate the incommunicable. None of the pictures are false - they are simply inadequate for the task of conveying even a little bit of heavenly reality to us.

For a while it intrigued me (I'm not sure I could say it bothered me) that, while I preferred to see heaven as beautiful open countryside - the Rocky Mountains! - the Bible more often saw it as a city. I don't like cities, especially crowded ones. Why does the Bible give me such an inferior picture?

Then a couple things occurred to me. First, the "wilderness" known by ancient Israelites simply wasn't all that beautiful. They didn't have a Glacier National Park, or a Grand Canyon, or even Smokey Mountains. (Of course, I must confess I've never been to Israel and have not been able to evaluate the scenery there. But I have seen pictures. Meh.)

Secondly, Israelite wilderness was not a lush vacationland but a barren, hostile threat. Their wilderness was the place where you could die of thirst, find no food, maybe be set upon by thieves or foreign soldiers. It was the city, your city, where you found refuge, safety, food, comfort, fellowship. So of course, to such a people, heaven must be pictured as a city. That is the best place they knew. But I wonder, had Revelation been written in 21st century America, if urban terminology would have been used at all. To me, at least, the very word "city" conjures up no thoughts of heavenly delight but rather of crime, noise, blight, honking horns, crowded subways, unpleasantly overwhelmed senses, and the smell of car exhaust.

I think the main thing we need to understand about heaven is that we will be with Christ and we will like it. Beyond that, it's a little hard to see. Paul said once, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). And when he caught sight of heaven, he wasn't even allowed to talk about it (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). Some things about heaven will remain unseeable and unknowable until we get there.

I'm getting married in 11 days. That's pretty heavenly.

Pastor's Page: July 21, 2009

Imagining Heaven (Part 1)

A friend loaned me Alice Sebold's best-selling novel "The Lovely Bones" and asked me to comment on the author's view of heaven.

The book is narrated from heaven by Susie, a 14-year-old girl who was murdered on earth. In the afterlife, Susie finds an adjustable reality that is personalized to her wishes. It takes her a while to understand this. "When I first entered heaven," she writes, "I thought everyone saw what I saw." They don't. There's some overlap, but the people there, like her friend Holly, are all adjusting to their own heavens. Susie explains, "We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams. There were no teachers in the school. We never had to go inside except for art class for me and jazz band for Holly...; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue." Holly, a Vietnamese girl, spoke perfect English because, in her heaven, "she wanted no trace of an accent".

After five days in this paradise, Susie and Holly tell their intake counselor, Franny, "We're bored." Franny asks, "What do you want?" and Susie says, "I don't know." Then Franny helpfully explains how heaven works. "All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why - really know - it will come." So Susie and Holly imagine themselves a duplex and get one.

What stunned me in reading these pages was the similarity to the afterlife depicted in C. S. Lewis' novel The Great Divorce. But there is a key difference. Lewis perceives that the post-death place where you get whatever you want is not heaven but hell! That's one reason why hell seems so big to those inside it. "You see, it's easy here," a damned soul explains to the narrator of TGD. "You've only got to think a house and there it is. That's how this town keeps growing."

Sebold's heaven grows the same way. Commenting on her friendship with Holly, Susie writes, "Our heavens expanded as our relationship grew. We wanted many of the same things." Wants, desires, are what dictate the size both of Sebold's heaven and Lewis' hell.

The residents of Lewis' hell don't have to remain in their ever-expanding world of met desires. They can tour heaven if they like, and some do. They can even move there and stay permanently. But most, finding they cannot own, change or contaminate heaven - cannot adjust heaven to their personal satisfaction - wind up taking the bus back to hell.

Heaven in TGD is astonishingly beautiful, but it won't budge an inch to the efforts of hellish souls to manipulate it. Lewis symbolizes this idea by representing the heavenly nature as perfectly hard. His narrator wanders about beautiful scenery, and writes, "Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn't break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn't twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like a diamond." The beautiful river into which he longs to dive has a surface like glass. He can walk on it, but cannot swim in it.

But if he stays, he is told, he will eventually become more solid. The grass will bend under his feet, and he will bathe in rushing waterfalls, and he will eat the golden apples that trees joyously shed. A mighty angel tells him, "The very leaves and the blades of grass in the wood will delight to teach you."

Why would anyone turn away from such bliss? Because it requires yielding to God and his desires rather than to oneself and one's own desires. As the narrator's guide and mentor explains, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done."

While I don't believe that the real heaven bends at all to our wishes (if we go there, we must bend to its reality!), I certainly believe that descriptions of heaven accommodate - necessarily - our limited understanding of the perfect and the good. My favorite imaginative depictions of heaven are in TGD, and the last few chapters of The Last Battle (book 7 of The Chronicles of Narnia), and the penultimate chapter of Leif Enger's modern classic Peace Like A River. I hope Lewis and Enger got it right. I hope heaven looks like Grand Teton National Park. But if it doesn't, I know it will be because it is so much better, and I trust by God's grace to adjust to that. Heaven forbid that I should expect it to adjust to me.

VBS: Wildwood Forest!

Calling all families!
Join in on a high energy week of vacation bible school with Faith Bible Church!
Learn about God's creations by going on a journey through the Wildwood Forest with crafts, snacks, singing, and fun.

Date:
July 27th to 31st,
6:30pm to 9:30pm

Who can come?
Everyone!
Children before kindergarden all the way to those in highschool are able to participate.
Adults are free to drop by during the week and watch the excitement.

Pastor's Page: July 14, 2009

Maybe I'll Get To Recant Something!

A friend told me how a friend told her that she had read something in one of my Pastor's Pages that she disagreed with, and that got me very excited. Experience has taught me that great things result from disagreements between thinking Christians. I may soon have to refine, correct or disambiguate something I wrote, and I relish that opportunity. Or maybe I'll stand my ground with holy zeal and persuade this friend to see something differently. Or, maybe - it could happen! - I'll find that I'm wrong and need to recant.

I do recant from time to time. Back in 2004 I wrote a Pastor's Page that turned out to be based on bad information - I've deleted that essay and have kept it out of bound volumes. About 10 years ago I foolishly said in a Bible study that, while the Old Testament forbids slander and false testimony and oath breaking, Scripture does not forbid lying per se until you get to the New Testament. Then somebody showed me Leviticus 19:11: "Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another." Oops. My bad. You're right. Forget what I just said. A year ago in a sermon I made some idiotic point about St. Paul being a servant of God, not the church. Then a few days later I remembered 2 Corinthians 4:5: "ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake," and so the next Sunday I had to spend a few minutes retracting that observation. And I can think of two Scriptural interpretations my mother espoused 25 years ago where I strongly disagreed with her until I got older, and wiser, and discovered that best evangelical scholarship confirmed what she knew instinctively. Mom 2, Paul 0.

Thankfully we Christians have a ground for settling disputes: Scripture. Scripture Scripture Scripture Scripture Scripture. When Martin Luther was threatened with nasty things by the church of Rome (which had burned his predecessor John Hus), he said, "Show me in Scripture where I'm wrong." In a memorable exchange with his opponent John Eck, Luther said, "When Christ stood before Annas, he said, 'Produce witnesses.' If our Lord, who could not err, made this demand, why may not a worm like me ask to be convicted of error from the prophets and the Gospels?" Eck blustered hopelessly: "Your plea to be heard from Scripture is the one always made by heretics." Luther responded,

"Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason...my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen." Words to carve in stone.

Some time ago I was - at least in my own mind - cruelly wronged by a fellow minister. In my wounded fantasy I marched into his office with a Bible - several Bibles, including a Greek New Testament - dumped them on his desk and challenged him with, "Here, make your case against me with these, you miserable twit!"

Right ground, wrong attitude. The Holy Scriptures are indeed our guide and arbiter in all disputes. But we make our appeal to them with calm humility, careful thought and gentle admonition. When Eck debated Luther, he wanted stenographers out of the room because "taking them into account would chill the passionate heat of the debate." Luther's colleague Philip Melanchthon responded, persuasively, "The truth might fare better at a lower temperature." The stenographers stayed, and Melanchthon was proved right. Cool Scriptural truth prevailed over hot unscriptural rhetoric. May it always do so.

Pastor's Page: July 7, 2009

A Man Of Substance

There's a story I've shared from the pulpit but never on this page, and today I'd like to write it out.

Sometime around the year I was born my father painted the church basement. He donated his labor. Mr. Lemm, a wealthy man, gave money to buy the paint, and dad did the work. After painting all day on Saturday dad was exhausted and so naturally fell asleep during the sermon on Sunday. (Which is why, to this day, I don't mind it if people fall asleep during my messages. Dad did it: it must be ok.)

Dad was snoozing away when the offering plate was passed, and the usher foolishly nudged my 13-year-old brother Dave and chuckled as he pointed to the slumberer, inviting my brother to share in the joke at his father's expense. Dave wasn't amused. He was still seething over the fact that Mr. Lemm had been publicly thanked from the pulpit for his generous gift while dad's contribution of labor had gone unnoticed.

Afterward Dave spoke to dad and unleashed some of his anger. He asked dad if it bothered him that Mr. Lemm was thanked and honored while all his hard work was ignored. Dad said simply, "Dave, my reward is not here."

After my father passed away suddenly when I was 17 (and began immediately to enjoy his great reward), my brother took me aside and told me that and several other stories that illustrated dad's wisdom and faith and integrity. Though I had known, for example, that dad lost his job in his mid-fifties, I hadn't known that it was because he refused to defraud clients as his corrupt boss insisted. Nor had I known about his boss's deliberate attempts to humiliate him, nor how dad not only endured that disrespect but kept amazingly quiet as he covered for the fool's mistakes behind the scenes.

About 20 years later my niece happened to meet a man who had known dad, and when he learned who her grandfather was he sat down and teared up and said, "Lowell Lundquist was the most honest man I ever knew." I told that story at our church's recent graduation banquet, and concluded by imploring our young people to maintain absolute integrity at all times, so that, 80 years from now, maybe long after they're dead, somebody will tear up at the mention of their name and say, "Jonathan Luk was the most honest man I ever knew."

I selected Jonathan's name at random - he was one of our 8th grade graduates - but afterward found out that the pick was providential. A few minutes later Jonathan came up to me and told me that earlier that day when he picked up some Baker's Square pies, he gave the cashier a $20 and a $5 for a $24.95 bill and received $15.05 in change - as though he had paid with two $20s. He returned the $15 to the cashier, telling him, "You gave me too much." The stunned cashier explained that he could lose his job for mistakes like that, and said to Jonathan, "You're my hero." I rejoiced too with Jonathan and told him, "That's the man you want to be for the rest of your life."

In the film "Almost Famous" there's a great scene where a mom played by Frances McDormand confronts a rock star, Russell Hammond, who has befriended her 15-year-old journalist son. She challenges the musician's lax moral code and flexible ethics with angry vigor, and warns him not to corrupt her boy. But then she relents and says, "Now go do your best. It's not too late for you to be a person of substance, Russell."

Those words appeal to me: "It's not too late for you to be a person of substance." That is a message I want to get across to the younger generation as I find myself plodding through middle age. These days in particular I'm wondering how to get that message across to a couple young men whose mother is a lying, faithless, perverted soul who made them her sworn confidants as she plotted secret betrayals of those who loved her dearly. How, after being morally abused like that, will they not grow cynical of the values of faithfulness, honesty, self-denial and purity? Only by God's grace. This morning the contrast hit me with the force of a thrown rock: my father - his memory be blessed! - humbly hid his virtue from his sons; whereas the mother of these boys coldly employed them as shields under which she hid her vice.

But it is not too late, I choose to believe it is not too late, for them to be men of substance still.

A prayer for all who waver between honesty and lies, faithfulness and betrayal, purity and perversion: "God, grant by the power of your Spirit that we be men of women of substance whose characters will be found to be full of solid light rather than weightless darkness. Thank you for the blessed example of moral giants who went before us and never compromised their integrity. Give us grace both to honor their memory and walk in their steps, for the glory of your Son Jesus. Amen."

Pastor's Page: June 30, 2009

What If You're Not Being Fed?

A couple days ago I explained to some young people that it is the duty of all Christian believers to attend church services regularly. To refuse to do so is to defy God, reject his commandment to assemble together, and deny him the worship that is his due.

I dared to set myself forth as an example. On Saturday August 8 - by God's grace - I will be wed to my beloved, and on Sunday, August 9, my bride and I will rise from the marriage bed and go to a church and worship the Lord in the company of his people. Why not? Why should the Lord's Day following our wedding be a day when God is less worthy of praise? Will we really be that tired?

One of the youths asked me, "But what if, at the church you're attending, you're not being fed?" That is an excellent question and I'm afraid I flubbed the answer, so I thought I'd take some time to think it over and craft a better response. Here's what I think:

It is definitely the duty of every minister to feed his congregation. Jesus said to Peter, "Feed my sheep," and pressed that obligation onto him by repeating it three times (John 21:15-17). Peter himself passed it along to the elders he trained: "Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care" (1 Peter 5:2). Shepherds must see to it that their sheep are fed with all that's good for them.

What's good for Christians is the Word of God. As a minister I have no other food to give. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). "I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word" (Psalm 119:16). "Like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation" (1 Peter 2:2 - NASB).

So I would urge Christians to flee churches where the Word of God is not on the menu very much. This would include churches on the far left and the far right that pursue political agendas more than the Word; it would include large swatches of the trendy middle that base sermon series off of hit TV shows and current movies; and it definitely would include an abomination like the church of Joel Osteen, who manages occasionally to drop a Bible verse into his message like it was a bay leaf in a tub of spaghetti sauce.

A long-standing frustration of mine is that widespread biblical ignorance on the part of evangelicals means that, whenever I point out that some favorite Christian phrase is not in Scripture (e.g. "God's unconditional love"; "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ"; "forgiving yourself"; "affair-proofing your marriage"; "pre-trib rapture of the church"; "the five love languages"; "forgive [rather than discipline or shun] the unrepentant") - and why I believe that such sloppy phrases lead to sloppy thinking and bad doctrine - you would think, by the look on the faces of my dear Christian brothers and sisters, that I had just stomped on their puppies. You have no idea how many times I've contemplated how much easier my job as a shepherd would be if the preachers my flock had been listening to had just preached the Word, fed them the same old boring Word, on its own terms, rather than invent evangelical catch-phrases and perform inspiring riffs on them.

But if your minister is faithfully preaching the Word of God Sunday by Sunday, verse by verse, then you are being fed. You may not like it, and it may not excite you, and you may not even realize that you are being nourished. But the Word faithfully proclaimed is what you need to chew on and swallow and digest. Jeremiah 15:16: "When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's delight."

Having said that, there are still two important points to make:

First, keep in mind that you don't go to church mainly to get fed. You go to worship God. Sunday morning worship is not about you getting your spiritual sustenance (we must get our eyes off ourselves!), but about God getting the glory, honor, praise and thanks that all creatures must render to him. You can do that, you can honor God, even when there are no morsels for your starving soul to feed on, and even if you leave the service hungrier than when you began. You go to church for God's sake, not yours.

Secondly, I believe the only Christian believers who have a right to "complain" about not being fed are new Christians, those who have only known Christ for a few months at most. The rest should not only be able to feed themselves, but should be doing what they can to feed others. The writer of Hebrews admonishes veteran believers on this point, saying "by this time you ought to be teachers" (Hebrews 5:12). A baby Christian might legitimately ask, "What if I'm not being fed?", but the better question for the older Christian is, "What if, at the church I'm going to, I'm not feeding anybody?"