Dirge for Two Veterans

The last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finish'd Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.

Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.

I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key'd bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they are flooding,
As with voices and with tears.

I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.

For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father dropt together,
And the double grave awaits them.)

And nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o'er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin'd,
('Tis some mother's large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.)

O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.

The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.


-Walt Whitman

(we sang this the other day)

Don't slam the door

Don't.slam.the door.

dot com.

dot au.

The site doesn't exist, but the sentiment exists. In my head. Following the progress of my six year old through the room. Into the bathroom. And out again.

Breakfast.

Not everyone likes Bob Dylan's latest Christmas album

This reviewer, for example:

Oh I get it...Bob Dylan wanted to put out an album of traditional Christmas Songs, as sung by a drunken Kermit-The-Frog. Well, not exactly. What I think he was intending to do here was a collection of Christmas Carols guaranteed to drive your in-laws out of your house before you have to watch them stuff their faces on your Christmas bounty....Well maybe it was Bob trying to get back at every living Christian, for forcing him to convert from Judaism to Christianity and then back to Judaism again. No, I've got it...What Bob was attempting is an Album of Christmas music that could be used to interrogate detainees at Guantanamo Bay, until they spill their guts and reveal every terrorist plot ever conceived of.

That's from the Amazon website, where as always, the mighty Bob's latest album has succeeded in dividing the assembled masses.

Leaving Geneva dead

Speaking of Calvin, he wasn't that unique, nor did he want to be:

We need to remind ourselves that the one truly unique theologian who entered Geneva in the sixteenth century, Michael Servetus, did not exit Geneva alive. Unique or individualized doctrinal formulation was not Calvin’s goal.

From Richard Muller, "Was Calvin a Calvinist? Or, Did Calvin (or Anyone Else in the Early Modern Era) Plant the “TULIP”?


Download that sucker here. Thanks to Mark Earngey.

Selling air conditioners

Asked Alan, who sells air conditioners, about this yesterday. It was 38 degrees or so.

But he says you need three hot days in a row before people will start buying, so looks like it's back to square one today.

Calvin—yeah, baby!

Ooh, ooh, I'm so excited!

I was in at Moore College yesterday and ducked into the bookshop to pick up Calvin by Bruce Gordon.

All the cool kids—you know, people like Colin Bale and Mark Thompson reckon this is the Calvin bio to get.

And I've got it!

Be still my beating heart. I must remember not to read this while I'm driving, or on my pushbike.

Suppressing climate debate

The religion that climate change has become finds ways to advance its cause—in this case, by suppressing dissent:

A CSIRO economist whose research criticising emissions trading schemes was banned from publication said last night he had been subjected to harassment by the senior agency management.

Clive Spash also accused the agency of hindering public debate and trampling on his civil liberties by preventing the research being published in British journal New Political Economy.

That's in today's Australian.

Is gambling a problem for you?

Michael Kellahan explains why he won't be watching a big horse race.

If my memory serves me correctly, back in year 9 of high school I won 26 cents on the Melbourne Cup, after a 5c wager.

It was more profitable doing the ice block run to the school canteen, for a small commission. Or walking across the spillway of the school dam as a sponsored dare.

Hell and CS Lewis

Speaking of hell, here's John Piper observing that CS Lewis gets this wrong.

Jesus makes it clear that hell is a place of horror:

We should ask: How did Jesus expect his audience to think and feel about the way he spoke of hell? The words he chose were not chosen to soften the horror by being accommodating to cultural sensibilities. He spoke of a “fiery furnace” (Matthew 13:42), and “weeping and gnashing teeth” (Luke 13:28), and “outer darkness” (Matthew 25:30), and “their worm [that] does not die” (Mark 9:48), and “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46), and “unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43), and being “cut in pieces” (Matthew 24:51).

We must pray that our academic theologians would speak of hell as severely and terrifyingly as their Lord did.

No hell?

I read this post about hell and felt disturbed and concerned. The subsequent discussion has not completely reassured me, either.

I've done some posts on hell, and there are a bunch of links here.

Another doctrine that we are tempted to tone down and soft-pedal is the doctrine of sin. I remember in my first year of Bible college being starkly convicted by Peter Jensen's emphasis on our belief in sin and judgement as the only thing that would steel us for the ministry of gospel preaching to people who didn't want to be told about it.

UPDATE: link corrected, thanks Hon

Reconciliation

This poem by Walt Whitman, Reconciliation, was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly
wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world:
... For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

If you want to hear our choir sing this (and the whole work by Vaughan Williams), then the details of the concert are here.

It's this Sunday at 5.

We're also premiering a new work by Australian composer Andrew Schultz, Beach Burial. Flutes that sound like incoming missiles!

Here's a way for the government to increase happiness

It comes from Ross Gittins:

Many people may doubt whether personal happiness is a matter governments should or could get involved in. Just how would governments go about increasing national happiness?

Well, one good way is to reduce egregious instances of unhappiness. And I'm pleased to see that the Productivity Commission, which you might have thought of as a leading advocate of economic growth as the cure to all ills, agrees with me - at least in relation to one great source of unhappiness: gambling.

According to the commission's draft report, Australians spend - that's to say, lose - about $18 billion a year on gambling. This is about as much as we spend on alcohol and represents about 3 per cent of consumer spending.

Yep; the suggestion is to reduce gambling. Excellent idea!

When you put it all together and shake it up

Bill Mounce:

When you put it altogether and shake it up, the ESV felt (in line with its translation procedures) that “letter” was too difficult in v 27 and went with “written code.”

If you have even a teensy bit of understanding of New Testament Greek, Bill Mounce is going to help you with his weekly posts on Koinonia. Here's the latest.

You can work out whether his argument succeeds, but it helps understand why, time and again, the ESV footnotes make the ESV a translation worth preaching on.

Jonah 1 and the fear of the LORD

Have you ever noticed that Jonah 1 is chiastic? Start in verse 4 to pick it up

1:1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.”

3 But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.

*A* 4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.

*B* 5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god.

*C* And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep.

*D* 6 So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”

*E* 7 And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

*F* 8 Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?”

*G*9 And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

*G’* 10 Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them.

*F’* 11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. 12 He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.”

*E’* 13 Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them.

*D’*14 Therefore they called out to the Lord, “O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.”

*C’* 15 So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging.

*B’*16 Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

*A’* 17 And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

That is to say, A corresponds to A', B corresponds to B', C corresponds to C', all the way through to G.

The effect of this structure is to make the fear of the LORD the centrepiece, and invite us to compare Jonah's faith with the faith of the pagan sailors, who really do fear God.

Isn't that great?

Fear God!

Taking one year off in seven

Stephen Sagermeister:

Obama attempts press censorship

It seems extraordinary for a leader to define a news organization as not a news organization, yet this is what has happened. Obama is not a man who likes criticism.

This is so important

Here are the two most significant paragraphs in Peter Jensen's address to the gathered Anglicans in Sydney:

I do not doubt, therefore, that our commitment to conservative theology and to a high view of scripture is entirely correct. Only this will carry Christianity forward in a culture such as Australia in the next fifty years. However, I do see signs in our midst of a tension:

I think that some of us will more readily come to terms with culture for missionary
reasons, but not being as careful as we should be about the purity of doctrine, we will
lose the structure of the faith and become effectively Unitarian. The theological weakness will begin, I think, with an impoverished doctrine of sin. From this will come a semi-pelagian anthropology, an exemplarist soteriology and a humanistic Christology. It will probably develop two forms - a wet pietistic one which will still look for spiritual experience, and a dry intellectualist one which will embrace cultural respectability.

Discuss.

Spilt milk

Our friend Sarah's in the paper.

I AM still trying to work out how it happened. How did I buy all that milk and then not notice that it never made it to the fridge?

Spring cleaning

What a simply super idea.

So, once a year, you look around at the pigsty that your house has become.

You take action.

Biggest pile, out the door.

Next biggest pile, out the door too.

Keep going, keep going.

Then when you get to the pile with the Stradivarius and the old stamps, have a break.

Then come back next year, and do it again.

Don't do too much inbetween, and especially, don't buy anything.

The stuff that goes out the door, make sure that the charity of your choice gets first go at it.

"Hello, is this [charity of my choice]?"

"Yes."

"I put some stuff out the front of my house, including the violin that didn't get made by Stradivarius, but by his brother Nokov. Could you come and take it away by Monday please, except for what you don't want?"

"Yes."

Then you sells the rest on eBay, or the council comes by and removes what you couldn't.

You need never clean again, until next time, or until the Lord returns.

A new blog for ministry wives

Nicole Starling and two of her friends have started a new blog for ministry wives, In Tandem.

May our Lord prosper your work!

The art of losing

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

This is a beautiful, shocking poem. Read the whole, here.

by Elizabeth Bishop.

Atheists are fools

Good on you Chappo:

‘The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”’ (Psalm 14:1)

Psalm 14 knows nothing of political correctness. With disarming clarity it states that the person who claims that there is no God is a fool. I find this a wonderful relief. The atheists I have met always appear to be so sophisticated and clever. I am tempted to feel inferior in their presence and I have been encouraged to hear God’s assessment of them. They are fools.

That's John Chapman speaking in the latest Australian Church Record. Download it and you can find a great, short article by the man himself.

Let's people smuggle

Buried in the last few paragraphs of Miranda Devine's opinion piece in today's SMH is a great idea from Fred Nile:

If Rudd really wanted to show compassion he would back the audacious plan of the Christian Democrat Fred Nile and go into the people smuggling business.

Hosting a meeting yesterday at NSW Parliament House for Christians from Egypt, Iran and Iraq, the upper house MP said he was worried about the plight of Christians in the Middle East, who were desperate to come here and make good migrants. In Iraq, says the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, there are only 400,000 Christians left, down from 1.4 million in 1987. Australia has a special responsibility for the Iraqi people, and from a self-interested viewpoint, Christians are likely to settle more easily into a Christian country than Muslims.

"It's a desperate situation," said Nile. "They're being told 'convert or die'."

Seeing how free and easy the Government has become with boat people, Nile has hatched a plan to bring a boat of 2000 Christian asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. He wants donations and he dares the Government to stop him.

So how about it?

A small victory for Roman Catholicism

Mark Thompson notes a small victory for Roman Catholicism:

But the word 'Catholic' literally means 'according to the whole'. The alternative to 'Catholic' in the early centuries was one or other of the schismatic groups — 'Donatist', 'Arian' etc. — which had broken from 'the whole'. (There is, of course, a tremendous public relations coup in the Roman Church labelling itself the 'Roman Catholic Church'.)

Old songs

Phillip Jensen's latest blog entry has a great twist.

You can either click here and read it, or look at the quote below, which ruins the surprise but saves you time:

But there is another lesson that we can learn from this advertisement. It is to have more confidence in our own Christian culture. So often we ape the world and its culture, instead of confidently asserting our own. Here is a song that if we were asked to sing in church, Christians would complain: ‘It is too old fashioned’, ‘does not communicate with the modern age’, ‘is musically very limited’, etc. Yet the world of big advertising budgets listens to that song and hears such a powerful communication possibility, that they make it central to their promotion.

This is what we'll be doing soon.

http://vimeo.com/6712657

The Dutch did it

In 1983 Australia won the America's Cup.

I remember waking up early to watch this historic victory.

Now it turns out we lied to make it happen, and Alan Bond (who was behind the effort), was a crook in this matter as in many others.

4:1 Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. 2 And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. 3 But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

4 Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.

(Ecclesiastes 4)

They used to believe the world was flat

No they didn't.

(Justin Taylor)

Sick leave

I'm on sick leave with erratic computer access for a week or so, so business on blog and facebook will be slow.

Jesus—all about advertising.

Or something like that.

I have a wee bit of a rant about it on the Sola Panel, here.