E-note 4/15: Anchor of Hope

Dear friends in Christ,

Samuel Hopkins who studied divinity under his brother-in-law Jonathan Edwards spoke these, his last words, in 1803: "My anchor is well cast, and my ship, though weather-beaten, will outride the storm." Let us board Hopkins' ship and pilfer a copy of those words for our dear departed brother, Captain Roland Smith. Roland's actual last words to me earlier that day were "I love you," but as a genuine sea captain and brother to our Lord Jesus Christ, I think I shall also remember him in Hopkins' terms. In the sweetness and necessity of divine Providence, which is never arbitrary nor without benefit to the saints, this Sunday our own Peter Flowers will preach, "The Anchor for Hope" from Hebrews 6. I will miss being with you all as you worship and mourn with one another, but I have every confidence that as the elders lead worship you will be satisfied with the only satisfaction we can give one another, Jesus, crucified and risen and coming again.

A few other housekeeping matters. For those in the InterGenerational Sunday School class, Peter Flowers will be your teacher there also at 9:30am. For the next two Sundays he will get you thinking and interacting over some material from Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century pastor-theologian. Bring your thinking cap and be ready for a robust discussion of good theology. Men, there is a monthly breakfast on Saturday. John Wilmot, deacon of grounds, requests you attend with a rake for a little outdoor clean-up afterward. There is no lesson planned so you might enjoy one another by remembering Roland. As you know Roland's memorial service is Wednesday, April 28 at 2:00pm. Christi-Lynn Brown is organizing things on the food end. If you e-mailed me already about helping (thank you!), she will be responding to you shortly. If you are still wishing to help, please e-mail: Christi-Lynn.B.Martin@Hitchcock.ORG. If you intend to send a card to Tish Smith, her mailing address is 24 Union Street, Lyme, NH 03768.

The Hartleys will be gone from the house by 5:00pm today. I will periodically be checking e-mail and will only respond if necessary. I will be back in the Study on Tuesday morning, 4/27. I hope you all have a great week and two wonderful Sundays together exalting Jesus Christ in worship. Yours in Christ, John

E-note 4/8: Let us pray

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Last night at Pioneer Clubs we began the last unit of lessons and skills before the summer break. As usual Craig and Christi-Lynn Martin did a wonderful job leading the kids in singing and crafting. I am so thankful to God for them and their loving care of these kids each week. Please remember Craig and Christi-Lynn in prayer as they go into the summer months expecting their first baby in September and waiting on the Lord. Wonderfully and wisely the last unit of Pioneer Clubs is all about the Church. A topic so close to the heart of Christ and so providentially in the spotlight later this month in the Upper Valley (the "God's Heart for the Church" conference is 4/24). Please pray for the nine children who regularly attend and their families. May God do a work of grace in all, giving more understanding and greater love for Jesus.

This has been a difficult week for our brother Roland. He has been having trouble breathing all week long and yesterday his oncologist had him admitted to DHMC. He was given a CAT scan at 2:00am. He was mighty tired this morning as he waited to hear the results. By noon he heard that all was clear, the cancer has not spread. His lungs, however, are still a problem and something of a mystery to doctors. He will stay under hospital care for another day or two. How do we pray for Roland? The way we pray for all Christian family who are sick. We pray that Roland will have such gospel peace that he will be anxious for nothing, knowing that nothing can separate him from the love of God in Christ. We pray that in this affliction he would not fall into temptation, particularly the temptation to charge God with wrongdoing and the temptation to abandon faith, hope, and love. We pray that he will even rejoice for this "light momentary affliction is preparing for [him] an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." And we pray, that if it pleases the Lord, our brother lives on in the body so he might bear fruit to the praise of God. We pray these things, not just thinking about praying them. We pray these things for our God has ordained that his purposes unfold upon the prayers of the righteous.

There is much to pray about in this life isn't there? We groan inwardly as we await the redemption of our bodies. We have great sorrow and anguish in our hearts over the unbelief all around us. We have much anxiety for the churches here in the Upper Valley and around the world. Let us pray. Yours in Christ, John

What do you think?

Cremation and a New Kind of Christianity
Originally posted by Dr. Russell D. Moore at http://merecomments.typepad.com

“As hellfire receded, there advanced the literal fires of the crematorium.”

So writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in the concluding chapter of his massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. The history ends with a chapter on “culture wars,” the ways Christianity is experiencing change and tumult as it enters the twenty-first century. In the conclusion, MacCulloch traces out many of the controversies one might expect: from the challenges to Orthodoxy in a post-Soviet world to the Anglican sexual debates to the American fights over abortion and secularism and liberalism.

One of the primary changes in Christianity the historian sees, however, would probably surprise most Americans as being a “culture war” issue at all: cremation and burial.

Increasing rates of cremation in the West, MacCulloch writes, are surprising because cremation “is the abandonment of a key aspect of Christian practice since its early days.” MacCulloch demonstrates that a primary feature of the early Christian church was as “burial club.” He shows how “universally archaeologists are able to detect the spread of Christian culture through the ancient and early medieval world by the excavation of corpse burials oriented east-west.”

The historian also shows the roots of contemporary cremation in protest against historic creedal Christianity, including, in its modern form, by Italian liberal nationalists.

MacCulloch, no conservative, establishes that the unanimous voice of the church, in every sector, was for burial over against cremation, and concludes the traditionalist case (that cremation is a pagan practice inconsistent with historic Christianity) is “unanswerable.”

For MacCulloch, there are several implications of the skyrocketing cremation rates. The first is that the theological and doxological claims against it, once held with unanimity, are not even discussed by cremation proponents. Arguments instead focus on public health, cost (and I would add the American evangelical response: “why not?”).

“The removal of a corpse’s final parting from a church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to a crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death” is a liturgical evolution of massive proportions, MacCulloch suggests.

Moreover, he argues, cremation also has profound doctrinal implications.

“Death is not so much distanced as sanitized and domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society,” he writes. “The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I’ve written here in Touchstone and here in Christianity Today about why I oppose (with the twenty centuries of the great cloud of witnesses) the practice of cremation, and here (again in Touchstone) about why burial is so essential to Christian witness. I’m not interested (right now) in re-debating that. I just find it interesting that this new history marks out the cremation move as a significant shift. I agree.

Sometimes the “culture wars” that really matter aren’t the ones you’re screaming about with unbelievers in the public square; they’re the ones in which you’ve already surrendered, and never even noticed.

E-Note 4/1: Flesh of my Flesh

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

In his fifth century letter to Honoratus, another Bishop of the early Church, Augustine describes why Jesus is crying out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." In the ninth hour the Lord transfers to himself, Augustine says, "the voice of this infirmity of ours." What is our infirmity? Death. In death the wages of sin are fully paid for those who are slaves to sin. In death body and soul are separated from the presence of God forever. Death is the final forsakenness of God from sinners. This is where Augustine makes a profound observation that exalts the strength and love of Christ before us.

Referring to Jesus becoming forsaken by God in his righteousness (Psalm 22), Augustine says: "The benefits of the old covenant had to be refused [by Christ] in order that we [the Church] might learn to pray and hope for the benefits of the new covenant. Among those goods of the old covenant which belonged to the old Adam there is a special appetite for the prolonging of this temporal life. But this appetite itself is not interminable, for we all know that the day of death will come. Yet all of us, or nearly all, strive to postpone it, even those who believe that their life after death will be a happier one. Such force has the sweet partnership of flesh and soul."

If I am reading Augustine right, he is saying that Jesus refused the benefits of the old covenant, the covenant of works, when he was the only man who could rightly lay claim to them. Remember the old covenant said, "Do this and live." It is a covenant of works that if fully obeyed would result in continued life in the flesh. Jesus' perfect obedience permitted him to lay claim to what no other man could lay claim to: a deathless life. Yet, as Augustine said, Jesus refuses the benefits of the old covenant. Jesus, through the Spirit, offers himself unblemished to God in death (Hebrews 9:14). While still among the living he deliberately presses in to suffer the agonies of death. He presses in to the impending separation of soul from flesh and the separation of both from God. This is why Matthew reports that "being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground." Man of sorrows indeed!

We who deserve death spend years and great effort striving to keep the "sweet partnership of flesh and soul," and we only know it as sweet because we live and move and have our being in the nearness of God in creation (Acts 17:28). Yet Jesus, the eternal and true Son, who deserves life, who is Life, spends great effort to take on the very separations we deserve so we might receive the benefits of a new covenant made by his blood: the forgiveness of sins and the forever partnership of soul and flesh in the presence of God.

How does Jesus accomplish this great salvation for us? Through the incarnation he forever united himself to our flesh and humanness. Through the crucifixion he united his flesh to our sin by becoming a curse for us: the curse of the law, the curse of our transgressions - death. And through his resurrection, having now been raised from the grave, he has brought our flesh and humanness for the first time into the Kingdom of God. In his triumph and victory we see the hope and destiny of all flesh who are united to him by faith. Praise God we have such a brother as this! Yours in Christ, John