Criminal Under My Own Hat

You may be familiar with G.K. Chesterton and his famous character Father Brown. Chesterton was a prolific British writer at the turn of the 20th century. Some consider his most famous work to be Orthodoxy  which is a defense of the Christian faith. A must read for anyone who believes or is interested in the Christian faith.

 Chesterton wrote his first series of stories about Father Brown in 1911. He based the character on Father John O'Connor (1870–1952), a parish priest in Bradford who was involved in Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism in 1922. Father Brown is a humble priest as well as a very cunning detective. There are close similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. The creators of both were contemporaries and good friends.

At one point, Father Brown describes his approach to finding the criminal. The key is not the cleverness of a well trained sleuth, but humility.

I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. . . . Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer. 

No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.

Singer-songwriter, T-Bone Burnett captures this well in his song - Criminals. It also reminds me of John Owen's quote, "The seed of every known sin is in my own heart."

Listen to the song and scroll down to read the lyrics.

I've seen a lot of criminals
I've seen a lot of crime
Doing a lot of evil deeds
Doing a lot of time

We speak of these men as aliens
From some forbidden race
We speak of these men as animals
We will lock in a cage

But there's one man I must arrest
I must interrogate
One man that I must make confess
Then rehabilitate

There is no other I can blame
No other I can judge
No other I can cast in shame
Then require blood

I see him in the shadows down the hall
I see him in the plaster on the wall
There is no crime he cannot commit
No murder too complex
His heart is filled with larceny
And violence and sex

His heart is filled with envy
And revenge and greed
His heart is filled with nothing
His heart is filled with need

He's capable of anything
Of any vicious act
This criminal is dangerous
The criminal under my own hat

Copyright © 2014 Timothy S. Lane. All rights reserved.

Heaven: Better Than Sex?

An imaginary conversation:

Jesus, you have to help me out. Are you really telling me that there is something better than sex?

Jesus: Is your imagination really that limited? Your fantasy life is dull and boring. Let me tell you about something far greater than sex.

Luke 20:27-40 are sobering and life-giving verses. They are a breath of fresh air that rescues sex from the hype and melodrama of our culture. So what exactly does this passage teach us about sex and heaven?

The passage teaches us that we, like the Sadducees, misunderstand the nature of heaven.

Jesus challenges both the Sadducees and our understanding of the afterlife by saying something utterly shocking. In fact, this is one passage that ought to convince you of the Divine authorship of Scripture. No human author or mere human being would say something like this. Yet Jesus is not a kill-joy. He wants to introduce you to something that is far more joyful and ecstatic than any marriage or sexual experience. Something to which sex points. In so doing, he redeems sex and marriage by putting them in their proper place. Marriage and sex are temporary blessings that pass away with the old order of things when the new heavens and earth are ushered in.

No other world religion that affirms an afterlife talks like this as far as I know. Islam and Mormonism speak of sex in the afterlife. Modern Judaism is vague at best. Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism speak of heaven as a bodiless impersonal state. The goal in this life is to gain control over one’s desires. Christianity, alone, speaks of a bodily resurrection and yet says that there will be no marriage or sex in heaven. This is not because Christianity has a negative view of the physical world. The Bible affirms the goodness of marriage, sexual union and pleasure within the context of marriage!

Like us, the Sadducees viewed heaven as a bland, indefinite continuation of this life. Jesus, in taking marriage and sex out of the equation, is actually saying that life in heaven is so much more than a bland continuation of this life. However great or horrible marriage or sex may have been for you, heaven takes us into a dimension where one is called to imagine the unimaginable. Only C. S. Lewis could capture this amazing comparison in such a simple way as he does in the following quote,

I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer “No,” he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it.                                                            C.S. Lewis, Miracles, 166-167

This quote from Lewis points us clearly in the direction of Revelation 21 and 22. Here we are given a glimpse into the nature of heaven and the world we were truly created for.

Copyright © 2014 Timothy S. Lane. All rights reserved.

Sex and Heaven?

What is there to talk about in the New Year? How about a complicated passage of Scripture that says some really odd things about sex, the resurrection and heaven? Here’s the passage from Luke 20:27-40.

27 Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. 28 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless.30 The second 31 and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. 32 Finally, the woman died too. 33 Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

34 Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. 35 But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, 36 and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.37 But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ 38 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” 39 Some of the teachers of the law responded, “Well said, teacher!” 40 And no one dared to ask him any more questions.

For some, the thought of not having to deal with sex in heaven is just fine. It may even be a relief due to your past experiences. Shame, abuse, negative teachings that have left you guilt ridden will be gone and you won’t have to deal with this creepy subject ever again. Heaven is your great escape from something you loathe.

For others, you wonder if this passage really teaches what it seems to teach. You may try some hermeneutical tricks to make the passage say something else. No sex in heaven is not a relief but a supreme disappointment. 

Whichever the case may be for you, we must admit that we live in strange times. Sexual images are all around us and easily accessible in ways that no other culture has ever seen. We are truly a walking example of how voracious the human appetite can be. Satisfying it is futile. The more you feed it, the more it wants. The more it wants, the more you feed it. Sin truly is a vicious cycle. I am fond of this quote from Malcolm Muggeridge who writes towards the end of the 20th century as an older man. He brings perspective to our culture and how it worships sex.

When the Devil makes his offer (always open, incidentally) of the kingdoms of the earth, it is the bordellos that glow so alluringly to most of us, not the banks and the counting houses, the board rooms and the executive offices. We can easily resist becoming millionaires or privy councilors, but to swim away on a tide of sensual ecstasy, to be lost in another body, to fly as high as the ceiling on the wings of the night, or even of the afternoon—that, surely is something. The imagination recoils from the prizes, or toys of a materialistic society. Who but some half-witted oil sheik or popular actor can go on desiring sleek yachts or motorcars or white villas perched above yellow sands? But what about the toys in living flesh? The Barbie dolls that bleed? The Hefner Playmates that move? The celluloid loves forever panting and forever young. Sex is the mysticism of a materialist society, with its own mysteries—this is my birth control pill; swallow in remembrance of me! And its own sacred texts and scriptures—the erotica that fall like black rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, blinding us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life. So we have ventured on, Little Flowers of D. H. Lawrence (p. 63 Jesus Rediscovered, Malcolm Muggeridge).

What a contrast between what Jesus is teaching and what our culture celebrates. For our culture, this teaching in Luke 20 is a terrible shock and potential disappointment. It is spoken by the very person who created and affirmed the physical world (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16).  He also wanted us to keep the physical world in proper context and perspective.

It appears that this passage is as relevant today as it was when it was first spoken. We may not immediately put sex and heaven together, but Jesus does. In so doing, he has much to teach us.

Copyright © 2014 Timothy S. Lane. All rights reserved.

Love is a Country

I have a few songs about love and relationships that I really like. My wife will tell you that I am no romantic. I am a forthright person and “love,” for me, is not sentimental. Now, that can get me in trouble sometimes! That is probably the reason I am drawn to any love song by Bob Dylan. No sentimentality; just plain complexity, joy, heartache and sometimes redemption.

I am fond of Bruce Cockburn's Lovers in a Dangerous Time , U2's Get on Your Boots , Dylan's  Sara and  Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Wilco's  Reservations and Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails. Okay, I’ll stop. This is the stuff of popular music culture. The better side of pop culture as far as songs about love, romance, hurt and redemption are concerned.

Jakob Dylan captures the fight that is involved in love. By fight, I mean work. Here are a few lines from his song Love is a Country that evidence deep maturity:

The hardships of marching they’ve only just begun
Love is a country better crossed when you’re young

            Love is a country better served with someone

Unfortunately but realistically, it seems that this song is pointing to a love that did not last:

Now her ring’s on the seat riding shotgun next to my hat. With her name on the window where fog settles down on the glass

Love is a country you leave and not welcome back
You leave and not welcome back

Yet it ends with a celebration that all is not lost even within the ruins. There is still redemption.

Love is a country that won’t be overcome
That won’t be overcome.

Hospital for Sinners

The Church is a hospital, not a museum of saints.

I often talk about the church being either a country club or a hospital. It appears that metaphor may have a very rich history. After doing some research, some attribute this saying to several possible sources including St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom. The metaphor is a good one and is consistent with Jesus’ teaching in Mark 2:17, where he says, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

What would you think if you saw someone at the country club on a gurney with an IV in their arm? You would immediately conclude they have the wrong address. They belong at the hospital. I wonder how many people show up in our churches on a given Sunday thinking they are coming to a place of care and healing only to discover that they have the wrong address and are instead at the country club. A country club is where socially, well-adjusted people gather to chit chat and take a break from the cares of the world. You don’t go there if you are deathly ill or your arm is broken.

Jakob Dylan, front man of The Wallflowers penned these words in a song entitled, “Hospital for Sinners.”

Some have crosses bells that ring
Most have angels painted with wings
Old men and blind ones can find their way in
Got statues and apostles and other godly things
In desserts they build them of mortar and clay
In barrios they stick them by fire escapes
They outlast the setbacks of earthquakes and plagues
They burn them like haystacks and another one is raised

In the backwoods of the country and the empire state
Wherever there's somebody at the crossroads that waits
At the junction of right now and a little too late
You'll see one before you with wide open gates
It's a hospital for sinners ain't no museum of saints

There could be a casket, bums on the steps
A baby in a basket being left
It's a good place to shuffle when you've gone through the deck
It's the closest to heaven on earth you can get

It's a shelter a poor man it'll humble a great
It's where derelicts and outlaws can hide for a day
The worst hearts you've known can be salvaged and saved
In the same room that lovers' vows are exchanged
It's a hospital for sinners ain't no museum of saints

You'll sin till you drop
Then ask to be saved
If it's a comeback you want
Then get your hands raised

There's more than a few on nearly every map
More than a couple alone on this path
You ought to be in one when you beg your way back
Cut off at the knees at its feet you'll collapse
It's a hospital for sinners ain't no museum of saints
It's a hospital for sinners ain't no museum of saints

If you were to take a straw poll of visitors to your church, how do you think they would describe their experience? I don’t know about you, but a hospital describes just the kind of church that I need.