Category: Sundried Sundries (Page 1 of 2)

Every now and then, I’ll use my lunch break to sit on a park bench. It’s regenerative on multiple levels. I’ve managed to see a couple of blue-gray gnatcatchers. I knew to look for them because an app on my phone heard them in the area. Likewise, I wasn’t surprised when a couple of hikers passed by on the path. That’s what I’d expect to see in a park on a lovely April afternoon.

As I tried to knock out my “morning pages” in my notebook, I glanced over onto the ground and there, sitting on a little rock, was a metallic green beetle. It had symmetrical white spots on its sides. With the dark magic of AI, I was able to identify it as a six-spotted tiger beetle. In my limited experience with tigers, I’ve yet to come across a bright green cat, but this is what the science caste chose to name these bugs.

After reflecting on the pros and cons of its three-year lifespan and wondering where this little insect was in that journey, it occurred to me that I was genuinely surprised to see this tiger beetle. Though common in our state, it was a first to me. I wasn’t expecting to see it and, had I not looked down, I probably would not have seen it.

David Brooks has a book called To Know a Person. I’m still reading it, but I passed a chapter where he tries to define personhood. I have no idea what his metaphysical commitments are, but at least one of the moves he makes is “constructionism”. It’s the theory in cognitive science that every single person actively builds their own perception of reality. We are embodied points of view. Our brains are constantly predicting and making comparisons and filling in the gaps with what we are seeing.

Brooks talks about the video of basketball players on a court. A text prompts the viewer to count how many times the team wearing white passes the ball. I remember seeing this video in college. At the end of the video, the researchers ask the viewer, “Did you see the gorilla?” Upon second watch, you can clearly see a man in a gorilla suit stroll through the game and pose for the camera before walking off screen. But you weren’t expecting to see a gorilla, so why would you look for one?

This is far from his point in the chapter or the book, but I can see the immediate application to the supernatural and paranormal phenomena. Just as I didn’t expect to see a shiny, verdant insect on the ground, I don’t expect to see anything out of the ordinary. Most days, at least. In fact, Modernism has so drained the West of its magic and mystery that we don’t notice the materialistic air we constantly inhale.

You’re not expecting to see a Civil War soldier patrolling in the woods behind your house, so why would you actively look for it? But the first time you do, you expect to see it again and again. It’s not that you’re manifesting or attracting it. You’re noticing it. Now, sometimes that can breed a reciprocal attention that one might not want. But my point is simply that we have been taught, by word and by example, that this world is all there is. The world of spirits, let alone the Lord of spirits (Jesus the Christ), is the last thing we expect to actually experience day to day.

And so we don’t.

Everyone knows the Internet is bad for our powers of concentration. The Internet, in its current state, is full of chaos energy that pulls and pushes us in a billion different potential directions. Hyperlinks, recommended videos, “if you like THAT, you’ll love this” – the algorithms learn what we want and feed us accordingly.

Ironically, it was one of the few sane voices on X (forever in my heart, Twitter), https://x.com/SketchesbyBoze, that changed things for me recently. He was posting about the pleasure of reading Middlemarch by George Eliot. It sounded so sublime and challenging that I shortly thereafter picked up a copy.

Within the first three pages, I had to look up about six words. I like to consider my vocabulary robust, but this book had my number. And it obviously wasn’t flexing on me. She was just writing in her own voice as a brilliant late nineteenth century novelist. I read the first chapter of the first book (she had originally published it as eight little installments) and I was exhausted.

Maybe exhausted isn’t the right word. I felt like I needed to recover. It felt like I had just lifted a personal record with the barbell or set a new pace for the mile. Winded, sweating, and flooded with endorphins. I could tell that it was obviously beautiful prose. It was lucid and insightful and wonderful and just fun to read. It was fun to be challenged.

But even as I finished that chapter, mentally huffing and puffing, I wondered if I had received any new emails. What was happening on Instagram? What new ads was I missing on Facebook? Sirens, the lot of them. I can still hear them calling me.

Detox will take time. I know that. Guardrails will have to be put in place. I still “need” my phone for some basic things. But I’m going to try and recapture my ability to focus. Slow pace. Progressive overload. At least, until I can lift and run with the giants.

Creed (Not Just an Amazing Band) and Sola Scriptura

I had the privilege of helping to teach a small group at our church this summer. It’s perhaps my most favorite thing to do and I don’t get enough chances as a retired pastor. For my part, we spent the first five weeks looking at the Nicene Creed at a high level. But we first had to ask the question, “Why do we need creeds today?” Isn’t it enough that we have the Bible and the Holy Spirit? Christians can probably figure things out on our own without anyone else’s help. What could be harmful in that approach?

If you’ve spent any amount of time studying the Protestant Reformation, you’ve probably come across something called the five solas (or solae – they’re in Latin because everyone in the 16^th century was writing theology in Latin): solus Christus (Christ alone), sola fide (faith alone), sola gratia (grace alone), soli Deo gloria (glory to God alone), and sola scriptura (Scripture alone).

In the last century, these were used as summary statements to express what the Reformation was trying to emphasize and call the Church back to. Now, with respect to sola Scriptura – the Bible alone – this does not mean that we as Protestants believe the Bible is our only source of authority. I’ll say that again – Protestants do not believe that the Bible is our only authority. We never have. When the Reformers appealed to the Scriptures to explain why they were renewing the Church catholic, they did not do so in a vacuum. They appealed to reason, yes, but they also appealed to church history – to the creeds and councils, to our early church fathers. It was not the Bible alone that was their only authority. It was the Bible alone that was their highest authority.

When you read Martin Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), John Calvin’s Institutes (1560) or John Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England (1562), these men are constantly appealing to the creeds of the early church and what we might call the first seven ecumenical (or global) councils of the Church. In their historical moment, they were looking back at St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom and Basil the Great and were saying, “They actually agree more with us than with Rome.” Protestants have always insisted on reading the Scriptures through the lens of the Church. Creedal Christianity is simply Christianity.

Creed as Anchor

Do you have to understand everything in the Nicene Creed to be a Christian? No. I would argue that no one can understand it fully! Some of what you’ll read in the creed is a mystery. And I mean that as an actual category: mystery. I don’t mean that as a cop out to say, “who knows, can’t explain it”.

Can you not understand some things in the Nicene Creed and still be a Christian? Yes. Can you reject anything in the Nicene Creed and still be a Christian? No.

In other words, if you take any statement in the Nicene Creed and say, “No, I don’t believe that”, you have left biblical Christianity behind. And therein lies the powerful help and guardrail that is the Creeds. I’m grateful to be at a church that believes in the great creeds of the faith (the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds). But she believes in the Nicene Creed not because the Creed has any binding authority in and of itself. But our church believes in the Nicene Creed because it is a summarization and an explanation of the truth of the Scriptures. The creeds anchor us to Jesus.

Does the Nicene Creed address everything? No. The Creed was written to answer very specific questions that we’ll discuss tonight, but it doesn’t summarize absolutely everything in the Bible. But in the Creed contains the essentials – the gospel essentials – that tell us who God is, who Jesus is, who we are, and who we can become. The Holy Spirit used his Church and guided her into two councils that produced this one document, what is perhaps the most beautiful and concise expression of the gospel that exists today.

Creed as Guardrail

Some Christians (particularly those churches influenced by the Stone-Campbell movement, the Restorationist movement from the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) will say that we should have no creed but Christ and no book but the Bible. But as soon as you ask the question, “who is Jesus”, you need the Creed.

I’ll go further, as soon as you show up on a Sunday morning and start singing a worship song to Jesus, you need the Creed. Because if Jesus is less than completely divine and we’re worshipping him, we are all idolators and need to stop immediately. If the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force, if the Spirit is an “it” and not a “he”, then we need to stop doing baptisms the way we’re doing them – in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If Mary was not the mother of God, then we are still dead in our sins because a mere human tried to die for us, and it didn’t work.

If we don’t believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church then we are completely alone without community, without sacraments, without the word preached on a Sunday morning and we’re better off trying to do this all on our own. The creeds anchor us to Jesus. That’s why we need the Creed as the Church.