Washing Feet

When I finally finished my homily, the groom grabbed a chair. He brought it under the tent, placed it in front of his bride and offered her a seat. She sat.

He knelt down in front of her, grabbed a basin and a towel, and washed her feet, installing clean white sandals for her (she walked the aisle barefoot as she arrived).

When he was carefully and tenderly done, he took his place on the chair and his bride washed his feet, installing similar clean white sandals for him.

They stood up together, we began the exchange of vows, and the wedding service continued. But from that moment on --- two of us had cleaner feet. And all of us had witnessed a gentle moment in a private relationship between two servant-hearts that were uniting as one.

They leave tomorrow for their honeymoon: they're heading to a third-world country and all of us will be surprised if they don't find ways to serve and minister while there.

Meanwhile, we're just returning from Lanesboro, Minnesota -- Amish Country -- after performing wedding #350 for us. And despite what you might think, after three-hundred-plus weddings, every one of the services has been unique; each homily crafted for each couple, never anything generic.

Even after this many weddings, each one resonates as an individual, identifiable ceremony.

Yes we did a wedding in Switzerland. Stone chapel. No sound system or electricity.

Yes we did a wedding on an island in the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area. No plumbing.

Yes we've done weddings in most of the 50 U.S. states and in many other world areas.

Yes we've done weddings for every sibling within a family circle; but one at a time. :)

Yes we've done a wedding (just one so far!) for someone whose parents we married.

Our wedding march continues. Driving away from the rolling hills of southern Minnesota, we turned off the stereo and just talked. Thirty years together and we still haven't run out of things to talk about, laugh about, and explore for our future.

Heading away from wedding #350 we are moving forward, excited about God's direction for our lives and glad to be following Him, honoring Him, serving Him.

We are definitely imperfect, but we're moving in the right direction....

Stepping into Early Church History

Moments before this photo was taken, we stood in silence on the stone floor of an ancient chapel; the very spot where the Council of Sardica took place.

Standing on these same stones, the leaders of the emerging church debated doctrine and established the New Testament Canon. Here they affirmed the Nicene Creed, publishing their council proceedings in both Greek and Latin, the languages of the day.

Our visit was limited to 15 minutes; the original site is now an internal (largely unchanged) portion of a functioning Orthodox church in the capital city of Sophia, Bulgaria. Foreigners may visit briefly.

We were in awe; meanwhile bearded and black-robed Orthodox priests stood very nearby, hovering close so that we did not photograph anything or show disrespect for the site. Disrespect? Our response was the opposite.
Many artifacts from the period encircled us. "The rocks cried out."

Constantine was in this city often. Jerome writes of this very council. All of the early histories record the debates and discussions here. Right here: only a few meters from the place of the fountain, above. It was almost too much to assimilate in a quarter-hour; our hearts and minds overflowed.

In a hushed silence we emerged from the cool darkness of the chapel and stood blinking for a few seconds in the bright Bulgarian sunshine. We then walked the perimeter of the church's exterior, thinking about others who also walked here --- pensively wrestling with how to help us avoid error, how to think about questions of matter and spirit, body and soul, eternity.

As contemporary believers we inherit a well-documented faith; a tradition that has been argued, debated, discussed, clarified and re-thought since the very beginning. Seven Councils -- as the Christian community began to emerge in diverse places and languages -- sought a unified understanding of what core Christian belief and practice looked like, sounded like.

It is not inaccurate to say that Christianity has often been divided and at odds with itself in its two millenia of history. It is also not inaccurate to say that at its core, there is or should be agreement on the essential confession by which we proclaim our faith in the Risen Lord. Here in this place, that seminal affirmation was prayerfully and powerfully refined.

We who travel here rejoice; hoping our journey conforms to His own.


The Council of Sardica, one of seven in which the emerging church defined the New Testament Canon, refuted heresies, and decided church policies, was held in the 340's AD, circa AD 347.

Learning to Grow Up

We tend to view parenting as our chance to mold and shape young lives.
We look at parenting as the task of teaching our children, training them to make wise choices, and helping to form good character within them. There is much truth in this common understanding of our role.

Yet another truth is also at work here. Parenting changes us. Raising a child scratches and dents our theology, scuffs and scrapes our self-image, and drags us out toward the deeper end of the pool, whether we’re ready to go there or not. Parenting helps us grow up.

Lisa and I recently spent three years learning from single parents while researching and writing our new book, Raising Great Kids on Your Own. We sat down with single moms and dads across North America and in many parts of Europe and Asia. We listened to them, learning about their struggles and also their strengths. Across differences of age, race, culture and worldview, we simply asked these parents: “What’s working? Have you found a way to make a difference?”

Our friend Molly didn’t plan to be pregnant at 16. Faced with difficult possibilities, she made a courageous moral decision: she chose to let her baby live. That complex and intentional act led to another tough choice: she decided to keep her child and raise it herself.

Molly was not alone, of course. Molly’s mom was available and willing to help. Molly had brothers nearby who would pitch in as often as possible. She had some friends at church, caring adults in a small community of faith that genuinely wanted to help if they could.

Six years after giving birth, Molly is one of the wisest people we know. She has learned to delay gratification, to make painful and difficult sacrifices, and to look out for someone else’s good, not just for her own. Our world is full of 40- and 50-year-olds who are not as wise as Molly is; they have advanced in age without moving forward toward personal maturity.

Molly grew up by raising her child. Torn between having fun and doing the hard work of parenting, she didn’t always choose the work. Yet as she watched the consequences of her own choices and as the miracle of childhood unfolded literally before her eyes, Molly realized that the meaningful things in life often require sacrifice, self-control, and generosity of spirit.

While her friends were playing, Molly was praying. She asked God for wisdom as she tried to shape and mold the thoughts and actions of her daughter. Meanwhile, as Molly raised a bright and inquisitive little girl, Molly herself moved consistently and powerfully toward maturity.

Parenting grows us up. We can divorce our partners, change jobs, and leave the state. We can walk away from our debts, ignore our commitments and choose to avoid reality, partying until we drop. But if we stick around and do the hard work of parenting, whether we’re single or in a committed relationship, a funny thing starts to happen. While we are raising a child, we ourselves are learning, growing, changing and becoming better adults.

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TURNING THIRTY

If we all popped out of the womb as unselfish people, marriage would be easy.

Instead, at least since Adam’s apple, we tend to be born doing a bad cover of the classic Sinatra tune: “I want it MYYYYYYYY way…………”

This makes marriage difficult.

In a couple of weeks our marriage turns thirty. As if --- we got married five years ago, maybe ten. We’re what, maybe late 20’s ourselves? We can’t possibly have been married for almost…..three…..decades.

Life is strange.

But marriage, which started out difficult, has gotten sweeter, closer, much more fulfilling, and in every way better. We fail, we fall short, we make mistakes, but we are saints-in-progress (and Lisa is making more progress than her partner).

Most of that progress can be described by Bonhoeffer, who talked about the primary invitation of Christianity as being “come and die.” He didn’t refer to a physical martyrdom (although he himself died opposing the evil of Hitler). Instead, Bonhoeffer referred to the death of selfishness; dying to “my way.”

That kind of death is absolutely life-giving in marriage.

After two or three years of struggle and challenge, Lisa and I somehow began to find our groove (obscure 70’s reference, forgive us, we married in ’78) as a couple. We each began to make genuine sacrifices for the other, bending our wills when it mattered, not just when we didn’t care or didn’t have an opinion.

We also began praying for each other while with each other. That daily bond and connection in prayer --- praying for each other, with each other --- is a principle we have taught to other couples also. It’s the number one source of relational glue for committed marriages. It builds a love that covers a multitude of sins.

Selfishness divides, but prayer unites.

It’s more than a bit surreal to watch our union turn thirty.

We’re planning to drive up the coast, hang out in Carmel (where it all began) and just generally celebrate our anniversary. There’s nothing we need to “accomplish” or “complete” or “achieve.” Well, maybe we'll try for a nice tan...

Mostly, we just want to thank God for thirty years together. We want to renew our commitment to him and to each other. We want to keep on dying (to self) so that our relationship can keep on living and growing, moving forward.

See you in another thirty, God willing…

A New Way of Seeing

Once upon a time I stretched out flat on a lawn chair, fully reclined, prone against the night sky, eyes wide open – waiting for the show to begin.

There were a dozen of us, maybe more, neighbors on aluminum cots, our friendship fueled by excessive caffeine and warmed by the remaining embers of a waning campfire. Patience was required of us, but we filled the pre-matinee vacuum with jokes and stories, boasting of the sort of long-ago adventures that become far better with each retelling.

Then the show began, quieting us, and we lay there side-by-side as a meteor shower shattered the silence of a South Dakota sky in mid August. Fireballs hurled by unseen gods thundered across empty space and blazed into infinity, ending not with bangs but with whimpers.

Nothing we watched was detonated by human hands, no careful mix of gunsmoke shot tiny balls of explosive arrays upward to awe our tiny crowd. We were caught in the grasp of the mighty Perseids, remnants of a long-ago comet, shattered and racing toward nowhere.

Philosophers love the sort of questions posed by that long-ago night. “If a meteor shower dances across the night sky, and no one lies down on a cot to see it, did it really happen?” Questions such as these help explain why so many promising students of philosophy end up as cab drivers, a noble and much-needed profession.

Some of us had not showered that day, but the meteors did. This objective display was set in motion long before our camping trip was dreamed or planned: it was our good fortune merely to arrive in the best place to see it. For that night at least, the Badlands were Good places. We did not imagine this, individually or collectively, but we were witnesses to a divine moment, hushed of our boasting by the kind of awe that places wee (sic) humans in perspective.

Annie Dillard talks about this in describing our search for God. Here is Dillard:

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

“Experience has taught the (human) race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates…You do not have to do these things – unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”
---- excerpts from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard

The Bible As History: Documents

There are more than 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament in libraries and private holdings around the world; by latest census the actual count is around 5,400. These are partial or complete manuscripts of portions of the established New Testament Canon.

I had the chance to study some of these documents in the 1980’s, working as a visiting scholar at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library which is located on the campus of St. John’s University. Deep within the basement of the library’s main building I spent many happy hours studying ancient illuminated manuscripts; my visiting scholarship is noted in the annual reports of the library during this period.

I was looking at texts and fragments of texts in many languages, laboriously copied by monks in caves and grottos, castles and monasteries. Some of these I examined by microfilm; priests from St. John’s were touring Europe during these years, photographing previously unseen documents from the earliest of times. (Monks hid these treasures from centuries of looters and spoilers, including the Nazis.) It is impossible to describe the beauty and majesty of these documents from so many historical eras, in so many languages, many of them decorated with intricate drawings, borders and pagination.

Archaeology is bringing us new treasures almost daily. More and more New Testament manuscripts are being discovered, some of them written on papyrus, an early version of paper. These papyri can be dated with high degrees of accuracy; among two examples are P52, which contains excerpts of John’s Gospel and is dated circa 100 AD, shortly after the time of Christ. Another lengthy papyrus, P46, contains 86 of the 104 leaves of Paul’s epistles, circa 200 AD or earlier; some scholars estimate late 1st century.

The four gospels of our New Testament Canon were in common use by the 100’s AD, mutually agreed as authoritative. Seven subsequent councils would eventually define, after much frank and open discussion, which books made the Canon and which did not, yet the four gospels were already established as authoritative.

Archaeology, historical study and literary criticism will never be able to confirm or affirm ‘faith in God’ as being valid. Such faith is a matter of personal choice, made in the heart of each believer. It is the same kind of faith that some of us exercise when we choose to believe that someone outside ourselves truly, deeply loves us.

Having said this, it takes no faith whatsoever to believe that there was a Jesus, that he lived, traveled, taught and died. The historical accounts are clearly substantiated and carefully documented. The surviving documents give us many witnesses, on the record, who state clearly their belief that Jesus performed miracles and that this same Jesus was resurrected by God’s power, appearing again to his followers, days after his very public and painful death. We can accept or reject these claims; either way they are part of history.

Ten of the eleven original followers of Christ were martyred for this stated belief: that Christ was both human and divine, that he healed and worked many miracles, that God raised him from death. After these ten, many others were also imprisoned, tortured and killed. The simple path “okay, maybe Jesus was just a nice teacher with good manners” was not chosen by these early believers; they died attesting to the truth of Christ’s power, authority, and victory.

We inherit their testimony, which can be validated with far more historical accuracy and consistency than say, the plays of William Shakespeare, a much more recent figure. We have thousands of pages of evidence; more are being discovered daily in the caves and hills and ruins of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

We cannot pick up our Bibles as blunt instruments and hit others on the head: “Ah, you see, there is a God after all!” Nothing in the Bible proves that there is a God, that He loves us, or that He gave His only son to redeem us and reconcile us to Himself.

The Bible does not prove these things: it only states them for us. On the record, in so many voices and languages, dating from Old Testament prophets who were stoned and drowned, through New Testament apostles who were tortured and killed. On the record, written not only in various inks but also, figuratively, in blood.

For some of us, the poignant reality is that many deaths took place so that we could read, reason, understand and believe --- all in our own language. And for some of us, the even more poignant reality is that one death took place so that we might live.

"In his disciples’ presence Jesus performed many other miracles which are not written down in this book. But these have been written in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through your faith in him you may have life.”
--- St. John’s Gospel, Chapter 20, Verses 30 and 31

The Resurrection as History: Witnesses

After years of oppression by the Romans, Jews at the time of Christ were ripe for revolution. They were tired of slavery; ready to assume their destiny as free people.

Since within the Jewish doctrine fewer ideas are more entrenched than that of the coming Messiah, many sprang up claiming "I am the Messiah: Follow me!" and they drew a few followers by doing so. It was, for those alive at the time, a widely known cultural phenomenon. (Not unlike California in the 1960's, by the way.)

This is one reason why, as the ministry of Jesus grew and spread, the Roman leaders at first reacted by thinking "oh, we get it --- another one of those people." They thought of Jesus as yet another 'crazy person' with a Messiah complex, drawing followers out to the wilderness ---- or in some cases, actually plotting revolution. The Roman government was annoyed by these types, but didn't feel threatened. A few crazy people here and there, with or without followers, do not bring down an army and a government as organized as the Roman Empire.

There is a wide range of extra-Biblical material about the culture and its many Messiah wannabes; and the Scripture also comments. Gamaliel, a Jewish leader and teacher, mentions two of these "Messiah types" by name: Judas of Galilee (led a revolt, circa AD 6) and Theudas (led about 400 followers at his peak). Find Gamaliel's comments in Acts 5:35-39. Gamaliel's hearers 'got it' --- they had seen the same phenomenon.

Acts 21:38 refers to another of these leaders, who assembled a militia, four thousand strong, and led a failed revolt. This leader was Egyptian but is left unnamed. Later, circa AD 70 John of Giscala and Simon bar Gioras also led followers into battle. These are several of the more prominent persons, among many examples of the type.

Ultimately these revolutionaries failed, as did their movements. In part these leaders failed because the power of God did not support their 'ministry' --- that is, no blind people saw, no lame people walked, no dead people came back to life. The absence of God's presence left the followers uncertain, divided, and ultimately unsuccessful. These leaders were great at stirring up rumors, but couldn't produce the results!

In stark contract with these many wannabes, Christ's ministry was accompanied at all times by the kinds of 'signs and wonders' that drew crowds and made history. In public and on the record, miracles happened. People were amazed: anyone would be!

Christ could have capitalized on all of this free publicity and led a powerful revolt against Rome; many hoped He would do so. He could have had an impressive career in politics. Instead he maintained a steady humility that pointed His followers to God alone, and to God's Divine purposes. Christ humbled himself and walked the path of obedience all the way to death, His death on the cross (Philippians 2).

The story, beautiful and interesting as it was, might have ended there, except that God decided to vote again. God raised Christ to life; Christ then began appearing to His former followers --- who literally at first could not believe it was him. Would you? Dead people don't walk. In the days following His resurrection Christ appeared to more than 500 persons, "in the flesh" --- fully alive and very much Himself. (I Corinthians 15; see also Josephus among other historians.)

Many of these witnesses later died for their insistence that they had seen Christ alive after His resurrection. It would have been simpler (and a real life-saver) to simply admit that they were mistaken, or they had 'seen a ghost' or 'had a vision' or maybe even 'dreamed it all up.' Instead these witnesses told the truth --- and for their faithful witness they were tortured in horrible ways, and killed --- as were many later, also.

Good people live and die. Some of them attract followers. Some of them leave us their best ideas in printed books; many do not. What transforms the history of humanity is something unique and much more powerful: a dead man walking.

When you greet one another on Easter Sunday with a simple "He is Risen!" and its response "He is Risen Indeed!" you are continuing a witness that has carried down through 20 centuries of oppression, persecution, and hostility, staying faithful to the 'facts on the ground' at Golgotha. It is the Resurrection which establishes Christian faith as an enduring cultural phenomenon to this day, and which will do so tomorrow.