The Burr in the Burgh

People who know me know that I am a fan of director Quentin Tarantino. We can argue about that later, if you like.

So it was almost a necessity that I go see the big Q's latest cinematic discharge: Grindhouse. I have strongly mixed feelings about this project, an ambitious double feature with Tarantino chum, fellow director, Robert Rodriguez.

Grindhouse is really two completely separate movies played back to back with a brief intermission filled with phony trailers. The first half of the double was Planet Terror, a zombie pic directed by R. Rodriguez. I hated it.

I don't mind horror or zombies in themselves. Some of my favorite movies are horror pictures and a couple of them feature zombies. But this one just took gross to a whole new level, a level I -for one- simply did not need. There was just nothing funny or cool about it to outweigh the yuck.

But the second half of the double feature was completely different, the one from Quentin. It was called Death Proof and is your basic pyscho-killer car caper. This movie was a blast of fun. Yes, it does have moments of profanity and titillation, but these are small and peripheral. There is also violence; one scene in particular was excruciating and literally knocked the breath out of me just to watch it. But mostly, it is a red-blooded car chase that sent my adrenaline to the moon. I have never spontaneously blurted, "WHOOAAA!!!!" out loud in a theater before. But I did this time.

I've tried to like Rodriguez films in the past, but have usually been unhappy. Desperado (1995) with Antonio Banderas was the only one of his projects I could bear to watch again. Sin City was OK, but the best parts of that were the story, dialog and visual style which came from Frank Miller. That and a killer cast. I'm not sure how much to credit Rodriguez since the credits list Tarantino as an assistant director. I'm inclined to think that what's good about Sin City came from Miller and the big Q.

Quentin (if you are reading this blog), re-release Death Proof as a single feature. Drop the Rodriguez disgrace. It's pulling you down. Like all of Tarantino's films, Death Proof needs to be watched over and over again (just like certain episodes of Sponge Bob). Everything Q does is a cult film. So if he won't cut himself free of the lousy zombie bomb, I'll have to buy my next Grindhouse ticket, go eat a burger and come back 90 minutes into it.

Premiere magazine lists the 100 Greatest movie lines. See here. Any of your faves that they missed?

Christopher Tolkien, the son of the famous father, has edited and released a "new" volume of the lore of Middle Earth. The Children of Hurin is based on a story the master first wrote in 1919. Tolkien fans know that he constantly revised and re-wrote his tales all his life long. What Christopher appears to have done is compiled the stories of this cycle and edited and conflated them into this new volume, never previously published.

The reviews are quite intriguing. See here. And here.

Third Week of Easter

April 25, 2007

Text: Acts 9:1-20

Before Paul was called Paul, he was known as Saul of Tarsus. Saul was a highly learned scholar, a Pharisee, an expert in the Law. He was also one of the earliest and more feverish opponents of Christianity. We know from the book of Acts and from Paul’s own writings that he had once been a persecutor of the church. He was personally responsible for arresting, harassing, and even murdering those who believed and followed Jesus Christ. It is Paul who writes about himself in one of his letters calling himself “the Chief of Sinners.”

I think it’s safe to say that Paul, while he was still known as Saul, was not a righteous man. He had a form of righteousness, to be sure. He was an avid follower of the Law of Moses. He knew which foods were kosher, which holy days to observe. He was strictly devoted to the outward forms of his religion while failing to comprehend the meaning behind it all.

But the type of righteousness I’m talking about here is not the type of righteousness which places us in good standing with God. A man could follow all the ceremonial niceties perfectly but still be as lost as a tax collector if he did not have faith in God’s Messiah.

Saul had an outward righteousness, a civic righteousness, you might even say a ceremonial righteousness. And none of that is bad. It’s just not sufficient. It’s only bad if you trust in it for salvation.

It’s the same way with us today. While none of us is probably all that worked up over things like circumcision, kosher diet, and animal sacrifices. We do get excited about outward righteousness in other ways. We care if a person is a good, decent person, a law abiding neighbor, a considerate person. For instance, a husband who is faithful to his wife, who is a spiritual leader in the household and provides for his family is what we would probably call a good man.

We’ve all gone to funerals where we hear people say things like “john was such a good person.” That always makes me cringe a little because Jesus said there is no one good except one person and that is God himself. And St. Paul wrote in Romans chapter 3: There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

So on the one hand, no human being, other that Jesus Christ who is God-in-the-flesh, can truly be called good. But even having said all that, we do sometimes use the word simply to refer to the outward behavior of a person. Who would you rather have as a next door neighbor, a peaceful, law-abiding family man who is kind and considerate of other people’s feelings? Or would you rather have an obnoxious, selfish neighbor who couldn’t care less about you or anyone else? You’d rather have the first guy because he’s a good person and the second guy is not.

So Saul of Tarsus, later to be renamed Paul, was one of the good guys. At least on the surface of it. He obeyed the law. He kept the commandments as best he could. So there is a sort of outward righteousness, an outer goodness to him.

But on the inside, not so much. Do you remember what Jesus called the Pharisees? He called them whitewashed sepulchers. A sepulcher, of course, is a tomb. And a whitewashed sepulcher is just a thing filled with dead rotting stinking filth that happens to be nice and shiny and white on the outside.

Are you a whitewashed sepulcher? In the end, it doesn’t matter what people see when they look at you. They may all say at your funeral, “Oh, what a good person she was.” But God alone sees the inside. He knows what lies on the heart. He is not tricked by our brightly polished outward appearance of goodness. He sees the selfishness, lust, greed, and pride. The outer righteousness I’ve been talking about is good for this life, for this world. It makes for good neighbors. But it is totally worthless when it comes to salvation.

The only righteousness which counts before the judgment seat of God is the righteousness of Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus said that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:20). Jesus is the only truly righteous man who has ever lived.

How then can any of us ever be saved? If being a good decent person is not good enough, and if you have to have perfect righteousness and if Jesus is the only man who was ever perfectly righteous, what will happen to us? It’s a fair question. Here is the answer. You will be saved because God credits the very righteousness of Jesus Christ to you. Jesus is righteous but you get the credit. And that’s because it went the other first on the cross: you are the sinner, but Jesus took the blame. It’s what might be called an alien righteousness because it comes from outside of you. To all who trust in Him, to all who have faith, God credits the righteousness of Jesus Christ. That’s what we mean when we emphasize that salvation is a gift from God. There is nothing you can ever do to earn His merit or favor. But you don’t have to. Christ has merited it for you.

On his road to Damascus, on the way to go capture and persecute more believers, the post-resurrection Lord appeared to him. This was shortly after Easter and after the Ascension. So the Jesus whom Saul encounters is the exalted Lord in all of his radiance and light. And you’ll notice that Saul is struck blind from the experience. Or was he?

Before he encountered Jesus, he could see, yet he was spiritually blind. He didn’t need anyone to help him walk around, but he was in the dark when it comes to the things of God. He was devoted to keeping the law and placed his faith in the power of the law to save him. But while the Law of God is powerful to do a lot of things, the one thing it cannot do is save a sinful man. The Law may help us achieve a certain sort of outward righteousness like I’ve noted, but this is simply not good enough. For God does not look only at the outside of a man, but at his inside, the most intimate thoughts and desires of his mind and heart. And on this basis, at the very least, we are all condemned and lost.

A fellow pastor likes to use this illustration. Think about what a very terrible thing it would be if they ever invent a mind-reading machine. What would it be like if scientists were to actually create a device that would enable other people to see and read your thoughts? I think masses of people would be jumping off of cliffs if that were to happen. Do you really want your spouse, your children, your parents, your boss, your pastor, your neighbor to know everything that goes on inside your head? Wouldn’t you be ashamed? I confess that I would be.

And yet, we know that God knows our every thought and it hardly concerns us in the least. We act as if we are more afraid of what other people will think of us than with what God will think of us.

Saul could see and yet he was blind to the most important realities of life. And get this; it wasn’t until God made him blind that he could really see things as they truly are. Only after Saul was struck blind by Jesus on the Damascus road did he come to understand that Jesus Christ is Lord. Only after Saul was struck blind did he begin to see that the Messiah had to die in order to pay for the sins of the world, like a sacrificial lamb. Only after Saul was struck blind did he understand that people are not reckoned just in God’s sight on account of their obedience to the law but on account of the obedience of Jesus Christ.

This is how it is with God. You have to go blind before you learn to truly see. But more than that, you have to die before you can truly live. And you die to sin daily through repentance, through humbling yourself and confessing your faults, through admitting your shortcomings, through acknowledging your failure to obey God’s commandments in thought, word and deed. And it is on the other side of this daily dying to sin through humble repentance that God will raise you up from the dead. He will resurrect you, not just spiritually but also in your body on the last day, just as He raised Jesus bodily on the first Easter.

You could say that Saul was struck blind by Jesus. Or you could say that he was given sight for the very first time.

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now am found.

Was blind, but now I see.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.

One of the most delightful customs in our beloved Lutheran church body is what takes place at the seminaries each spring. In April, our students receive their vicarage (internship) assignments and the graduates receive their call placements.

How wonderful it was to watch these highly dedicated men being sent to serve God's people in places such as Capistrano Beach, CA; Boulder, CO; Snohomish, WA; Wheaton, IL; Greensboro, NC; Midland, MI; Yuma, AZ; Kibera, Kenya; Plano, TX; Topeka, KS and many others.

If you're interested, you can see the list of names and places for our vicars, our deaconess interns, and our candidates.

Ever wonder what you'll look like in old age? Or what if you were a different race, or sex? Ever wonder what you'd look like in a painting by El Greco or Botticelli? Well, wonder no more. Go and enjoy the Face Transformer website.

HT: SouthCon

Sign seen in a church in California. What?! Why don't we want the cats to get in? I want the cats to come in.

So in tonight's Conan O'Brian, his monologue had these two funny jokes:

A clothing designer has announced the development of a new swimsuit for Muslim women. They're calling it the burkini. It's a burkha made into waterproof clothing. The announcement stated that it's perfect for the Muslim women who love to swim but hate getting stoned to death.

And, this from the Pittsburgh zoo. A polar bear had an infected tooth so the zookeepers gave it a root canal. Zoo officials are describing the bear as stable and they're describing the dentist as handless.

When I have to fly, I like to have a fun novel to occupy my mind. Boy, did I win the lottery with my latest. It's called Replay and it's by Ken Grimwood. What a fascinating book. The premise is that a man dies in 1988 and instantly re-awakens as himself back in 1963 while he's a freshman in college. The whole world is still his oyster and his life still lies before him. He has the opportunity, essentially, to re-live every major aspect of his adult life and can choose to do things differently. What would you do?

But then when 1988 hits again, he dies like before and returns once more. What lessons did he learn from his last attempt? This time around, he makes completely different choices, always in the chase for that elusive prize: Happiness.

Like most consumers of pop culture, I've read numerous books and seen films about time travel or other fantasies about alternate lives (Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, Groundhog Day etc.). But this one is certainly one of the most entertaining, substantive and thought provoking. I'm about 75 pages from the end and I'm dying to see how it concludes. If Grimwood spins as satisfying a conclusion as he has a body of the story, this will make my list for favorite books read this year.

Even though The Burr no longer resides in the burgh, part of his heart remains in good 0l' southwest Pennsylvania. Here are some terrific photos of our former home town.

I am continually dumbfounded by how gullible people are when it comes to anti-Christian hype. Anyone who bothered to do five minutes of research could have debunked that ridiculous "Jesus' Tomb" business from James Cameron recently. But we don't want the facts to interfere with our Christian-bashing.

Not surprisingly, now many of the experts cited in Cameron's silly film are saying they were misconstrued, misquoted, etc. See here.

Certainly, the big media will saturate the airwaves with these corrections just as they did with the original sensational and preposterous claims . . . NOT!

I'm curious. What is your favorite dystopic vision of the future in books, television or film? Why? Here are some that come to mind.

Brave New World
Escape from New York
Buck Rogers
Terminator
1984
Children of Men
Minority Report
Soylent Green

We never stop looking at the cross, but sometime you have to look beyond the cross to see the empty tomb. A couple of years ago, I took a little survey after church one Sunday asking my congregation's opinions about the movie about the Passion of the Christ. And one person wrote this comment: “I was worried about the gore ahead of time, but knowing about the resurrection got me through it.” You know, somehow I think that is what Jesus Himself was probably thinking at the time. I was worried about the gore ahead of time, but knowing about the resurrection got me through it. "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2)." The message of the cross would be unbearable if we didn’t know about the resurrection.

Perhaps my favorite service of the liturgical year is the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. It is a powerful bridge from the grief of Good Friday to the joy of Easter. The service begins in darkness and gradually transforms into the brilliant light of the resurrection. There are so many things going on in the service that it's not possible for me to do it justice in a blog: the service of light, the readings, the baptisms, the Eucharist. It's all there.

And I must add that our pastor did an especially knock-out job with his sermon. I'm hoping he puts it up soon to our church website.

Our church, together with a couple of neighboring Lutheran congregations, held a Tre Ore ("three hour") service today.

Why a church service three hours long? It is a custom to wait with Jesus from noon til three on Good Friday because it was during those hours that darkness covered the earth while Jesus hung dying.

He was actually on the cross for six hours, beginning at about 9 a.m. His "trial," you see, had taken place over night and in the wee hours of the morning.

But at noon, the sun hid it's face until our Lord expired at about 3 p.m. Even the earth and stars could not bear the horror of Christ's death.

The service at Redeemer was exhausting, to be sure, but quite wonderful. The music, the liturgy, the ceremonies, the texts, everything was amazingly powerful.

If you went outside and conducted a poll asking the man on the street this question: “Why did Jesus die on the cross,” what kinds of responses do you think you’d receive?

I think some people would say He died on the cross because one of His followers betrayed Him and the Jews and Romans conspired together to have Him killed. And that would be true. That is what happened, but why did it happen? Why did He have to die on the cross? It’s not good enough to just say that some people didn’t like Him and they rejected Him and had Him murdered. That is only part of the answer.

I think some other people would say that Jesus died on the cross to show us how much He loves us. And that’s kind of true too. Jesus Himself said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that He lay down His life for His friends.” But again why did He have to die on the cross to show us His love? Couldn’t He have found a more pleasant way to do it? I love my wife and family and I would be willing to die for them, but I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to. If all Jesus was trying to do was give them a sentimental expression of His affection, then I think He could have just washed His disciple’s feet and left it at that.

And I am sure that some of the more perceptive respondents would say something like, “Jesus had to die… in order to save us.” And you’d say, “Bingo. Right on the nose.” But then follow up on that and ask, “How does the death of Jesus do that?” and you might get a blank stare.

A related question to the first one (Why did Jesus die on the cross?) would be this question (Who was responsible for the death of Jesus?) And maybe by answering the second question first, we will be answering the first question as well. Who is responsible for the death of Jesus? And why did Jesus die?

Throughout history there have been those who have thought about the Passion of Jesus and become angry at the Jews and blamed the Jews for the death of Jesus. It is a fact that sometimes Christians would chase the Jews out of their villages and burn down their synagogues for being Christ-killers. And since today everyone is so oversensitive about these things, there is now a movement to remove any references to the Jews’ involvement with the death of Jesus for fear of causing another anti-Semitic groundswell. Passion plays that have been performed in Europe and North America for a hundred years are now being revised for the first time to remove any derogatory mention of the Jewish leaders. And when you respond to the cultured despisers that you are just following the text of the Gospels, they tell you that the Gospels themselves are anti-Semitic documents and should be classified as hate speech.

Jesus doesn’t need us to defend Him. He didn’t need His disciples to draw their swords against the temple guards or the Roman soldiers. He could have summoned armies of angels to come to His aid, but He didn’t. And far from asking His followers today to avenge His death by burning synagogues, Jesus prayed for His persecutors saying, “Father forgive them. They know not what they do.” It was Jesus who taught us that we should love our enemies and to pray for our persecutors.

But then there are the people who like to sympathize emotionally with Christ. They weep and wail over Him because He was so innocent. They think “look at poor Jesus,” and “don’t we feel so sorry for Jesus.” They are like the women who followed Christ from Jerusalem crying loudly as He carried His cross. Jesus rebuked them. He told them that they should not weep for Him. They should weep for themselves and their children (Luke 23:28). What did He mean by that? Why should we weep for ourselves and our children when we think about the death of Jesus Christ?

Because God does not want your pity. The better response, I think, is to say, “Look what my selfishness has caused to happen. My impatience, my stinginess, my lust, my greed, my folly.”

So Martin Luther wrote, “You should deeply believe, and never doubt, that in fact you are the one who killed Christ. Your sins did this to Him. Therefore, when you look at the nails being driven through His hands, firmly believe that it is your work. Do you see His crown of thorns? Those thorns are your wicked thoughts.”

To illustrate, let’s say that you are going about your daily business when an evil person comes along and kills an innocent child in front of you. You would feel angry at the murderer and sorrow for the child. But then what if you found out later that it was actually something you did or said that was responsible for the death of that child. How would you feel about that? Now you’re not just sympathetic. Now you feel responsibility. Now you feel remorse. Now it’s personal.

Someone once said that the Good Friday liturgy is like a funeral for Jesus. Perhaps that is true, but like a Christian burial, we do not mourn for the one who is deceased. We don’t mourn for Jesus this day. If we mourn today, we mourn for our sins.

This is almost so outrageous, I'm tempted to think it's a jest. It seems that some British schools are starting to drop certain topics from their history curriculum for fear of offending the Muslim children. Which topics, you ask? Namely the Holocaust and the Crusades.

The reason, according to the Daily Mail, is because some of the things taught in the normal state curriculum contradicts what is taught in the local mosques. Things specifically pertaining to the Holocaust and the Crusades.

Gee, I wonder if the same schools are teaching things that might contradict what is taught in certain local Christian churches. Why would the opinions of Muslims receive such special respect?

After the Holocaust, the world said, "Never Again." Yeah. Right.