Kelly’s Blog

“Goldfish at church” story, from Cyberbrethren.  Agghh…

I recently added a new post to my CLEAR blog about some neat scrapbooking paper I found.  Does anybody read that blog still?

I won’t be posting all that much in the next couple of weeks, but we’re still here and doing well, although BabyK has been right snarky tonight.

1) Have you ever considered or would you ever consider cutting your hair and trying out a shorter style?    …….Yes, I actually consider that all the time.  But I chicken out, and besides, Alex likes it long.  I’ve got so many hair accessories, what would I do with them all if I had less hair?  :)  The stupid thing is, I almost never style my hair!  It just goes back in a plain old boring ponytail at the back of my neck to keep it out of the way.  When I get back to Baltimore this summer, I’m going to be looking for this book to see if I can’t try styling my hair a little more frequently.  If it doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll seriously consider going shorter, and I’ll stop looking like a 14-year-old.
2) What has been the most shocking realization you’ve had as a ‘new’ mom? ………Just one?  Umm… okay, I can’t do just one.  The first realization is that you suddenly understand a lot more about your own parents and you appreciate them more.  The second, for me personally, is that I’m actually capable of dying and it would really mess with the lives of my husband and daughter, and probably some other people, if I did. 
3) What is your current musical obsession? (take the term obsession however you like) ……..The Beatles.  I’ve been obsessed since I was about 10 or 11 and it hasn’t let up yet.  :)  I apologize for my predictability on this point…
4) What do you miss most about living in the states, family being a given? ……….Stupid little things, like American junk food, the proximity of so much cool stuff that I never bothered to go visit because I took it for granted (DC, cool museums, downtown Baltimore, etc), the fact that you seem to get more out of your dollar in the States… and warmth!
5) Favorite prophet? (yeah…kind of random, but I’m curious) ……….John the Baptist.  I like Isaiah, too.  And Elijah’s fun.

It looks good.  It’ll have to wait till some time after vacation though, assuming I have money left after vacation!

If anyone out there wants me to bring anything with me in particular when we go on our trip East, speak now.

In Sunday morning news, the great thing about a church that doesn’t revolve around biblical principles for living is that it’s not inextricably tied to the modern secular calendar.  The service was not about Father’s Day, how dads keep failing at their jobs and need to try harder to be better, more manly leaders.  (Anyone notice how this is inevitably the theme of Father’s Day sermons, where on Mother’s Day it tends to be more about gushy veneration of mommies?)  We actually looked at Romans 5 today.

On a vaguely related tangent, I realize now how much of interest in Israel among Christian evangelicalism is related to Zionistic dispensationalism, but I think there’s another factor which is purely aesthetic.  Christians in the world today are absolutely starved for beauty and ritual.  Churches are utilitarian and pop-culture, which means most of that they’re about is here today and gone tomorrow, like that hairstyle you’re embarrassed to see on yourself in your high school yearbook.  Those of a fundamentalist bent have eschewed all ritual in worship as evil (in theory, anyway), so when you’re beauty-and-ritual-starved and you’re trying to find specific examples of anything like that in the Bible, you’re mostly left with the ceremonial practices of the Old Testament.  And in trying to make it “contemporary” you end up with an interest in modern Jewish expressions of this worship, which is very much not the same thing.

And those are my thoughts for the day. 

…but life’s been busy. I’ve been watching BabyK this weekend while Alex was at the LC-C convention, having fun and drinking scotch with his buddies and meeting Gene Veith. Oh, and sitting in on meetings and stuff. He’s got some fun anecdotes from the event.

Other news: We got a new (used) van very recently, so I have leg room again before we attempt our big drive out east this summer. BabyK has learned a new and very amusing kind of goofy grin. Some recent good posts on Cyberbrethren include a post on this strange new premillenial/dispy end times website; also a good post on Lutherans and monasticism.

Issues, Etc. is coming back in a new form, for which we are all extremely thankful. Consider supporting Pr. Wilken and co. with your financial contribution.

I need to stop shopping for awhile.

My archery set is lots of fun.  I’ve been setting up a big cardboard diaper box out back and shooting at it.  (Analyze.)  At least I haven’t hit the cardboard baby on it.  That would make me feel sort of bad.  But yeah, lots of fun!!

Baby K. sort of stood without support today, at least for a couple of seconds.  She reportedly leaned back and away from the coffee table that she was clinging to, probably without realizing it.  Milestone!  She’s also been pretty much sleeping through the night in her crib for the past four days or so.  Yippee!!!

Going to see Prince Caspian soon to preview it.  We’re having a youth lock-in soon and we’re hoping to go see the movie as part of the festivities.  Maybe I’ll bring my archery set.

Here’s the list of things I was vaguely confused about on the topic of baby dedications/blessings:

1. People can bless or dedicate all sorts of things/people in church and out of it, I’m cool with that.  Obviously, I’m less cool with stuff being invented to fill the hole left by refusing baptism to the youngest among us, but I just wanted to acknowledge that blessings themselves are good things.  But… 
2. Is a blessing during an infant dedication believed to accomplish something spiritually beneficial for the child receiving it?  Lutherans, who believe in the sacramental nature of God’s Word, would probably say that any spoken blessing is a delivery of God’s Word to a person, and benefits that person (any person) when it is received in faith.  Those who dedicate infants usually do not believe that infants can have faith, so what exactly is a spoken blessing meant to accomplish?  Among infant dedicaters, baptism itself is considered to be ineffectual and is clearly taught as not being a means of grace or divine favor, so infant dedication would seem to follow the same line of thinking.  As far as I know, people are never urged to have a baby dedication ceremony for their children; it’s optional, and since it’s not commanded in Scripture it pretty much has to stay that way.  But anyway, what would such a blessing “do”?  Is it not really a blessing, but strictly Law (i.e., rather than a promise from God to child/parents, it’s an offering and promise from parents to God)?
3. And if that’s the case, what do people think was the point of Jesus putting his hands on children and blessing them, if such a blessing was bound to be ineffectual since the babes that parents brought to him weren’t exactly giving their expressed consent to the blessing?  What about all the people Jesus touched, healed, resurrected, and had their eyes of faith opened who were incapable of willing themselves to be blessed in these various ways?  Is it really so inconceivable for God to do good to people without their written permission?
4. “Dedication” of an infant is sometimes encouraged as being a good thing to do as a way of following Jesus’s example.  “He was dedicated as an infant, not baptized.”  This is probably the most baffling to me.  I mean, of course Jesus wasn’t baptized as an infant; it wasn’t required by the Law of Moses.  What was required was circumcision, and the dedication of firstborn sons which involved sacrifice at the temple.  To suggest that a modern baby dedication ceremony remotely resembles Jesus’s example here is kind of wacky.  It would be like inventing a modern church rite which we called “circumcision,” but with no actual circumcision involved and no covenant promises attached– and believing that by doing this “circumcision” we were doing something good by following Jesus’s example– and ignoring what Paul says about believers and circumcision.
5. There’s awkwardness and confusion over the nature of the children being dedicated.  Are they Christians?  Believers?  Unbelievers?  “Sort-of” Christian but not “born again”?  I’ve heard people refer to them as “pre-Christian” or “potential Christian” (???)  What does this mean, and how can parents taken comfort in such vagueness?  I suspect that this is one reason why baby dedications tend to shift attention away from the child and onto the laundry list of parental duties and responsibilities.

Today is Pentecost Sunday.  Pentecost is one of the “big three” of high Christian holy days, the others being Christmas and Easter.  Although sadly, the secular calendar overrides the church calendar in all three of these instances (even so much so that many Christians are actually less likely to be in church on these great festival days!), we rejoice in the celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit, the birthday of the Church, and the work of the Holy Spirit through his chosen means and instruments today.

The Third Article: Sanctification

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

What does this mean?
I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith. In the same way He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith. In this Christian church He daily and richly forgives all my sins and the sins of all believers. On the Last Day He will raise me and all the dead, and give eternal life to me and all believers in Christ. This is most certainly true.

I’ve been meaning to share some musings from Genesis, which is the book that Alex and I are in the process of reading through for evening devotions.  There’s so much that’s ponder-worthy, so I’ll just throw out a couple things that jumped out from the first several chapters.  Feel free to jump in with some discussion.

1. Was the tohu va bohu world, with the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters (there’s another Pentecost image for you), in a state of perpetual “evening” before God created light, so that the “evening then morning” of the first day was simply completed by God through the creation of light, or would it be more accurate to see the separation of light and darkness the beginning of the first substantial “evening”?  This is more in the realm of idle speculation, but I guess I’d just been so accustomed to thinking of the creation of light as “morning and thus day” in a Western rather than Jewish sense.
2. A lot of people think of God in the OT as being a distant sovereign.  I was amazed in this read-through of Genesis just how incredibly intimate God is with his people.  Certainly there’s the inaccessible holiness and wrath over sin.  But we also have these other amazing descriptions.  After sublimely speaking the world into existence, God decides to do a bit of gardening.  God chooses an especially pleasant and cool time of day to take a stroll in his garden.  God’s heart is filled with pain as he regrets having made man.  God comes down to check out how building progress for the Babel tower is going.  God makes a personal visit to Sodom and Gomorrah in order to verify just how accurate this outcry about the cities is. 
3. When we hear about the animals being brought to Adam to see what he would name them, God had already stated that he was going to make a helper for Adam.  So it’s nice to remember that Eve wasn’t just an afterthought because none of the animals seemed to make the cut, which seems to be a misreading of the passage (although an easy one to make).
4. The serpent talks.  We all know it, but it’s still just really weird.  It’s hard not to want to engage in even more idle speculation about demon-possessed creatures, or an animal speaking from what seems to be its own thoughts (Balaam’s donkey).  Ultimately it’s going to be a fruitless discussion, but I won’t go there.  But isn’t it strange?
5. Not only is God intimate with his people, he also seems almost bend-over-backwards gracious.  This aspect coming out is no doubt a product of reading Genesis with Lutheran glasses (”Christ on every page,” salvation by grace through faith, God’s grace towards his people being central, etc)… but I’m astonished how long I’ve gone reading Genesis without seeing it.  Those of a Reformed background will read Genesis and see God’s sovereignty and how he demands obedience.  I know I’ve read Genesis before and seen nothing but that, and now it seems barely there.  God is out-0f-the-way kind to the especially undeserving– Cain, Hagar, and Lot’s family standing out.  And he even makes special promises to assure people of his favor.

My next bunch of musings will probably be on the subject of baby dedications, because the more I think about them the more confused I get.

No, not the ones with the silly puns on them.  When we drive through Carman on the way to Winnipeg, we often see the signs on this one Reformed church.  They seem to be quite bold, not really caring whether people find their theology offensive.  There’s something to respect in that, I think.  It’s much better than a church that seeks to be user-friendly by hiding everything about themselves to the public on their signs and publications, including their church affiliation and thus their confession of what the Bible teaches.  Mind you, the theology of this church really is quite offensive and (I humbly submit) wrong.  A recent sign we saw said something to the effect of “Christ died for the elect.”  Which says to the passers-by in their cars:  “Jesus paid for the sins of a lot of our church members, but probably not for your sins.  Have a nice day.”

Recently the church had up a sign for their Ascension Day service (which was Thursday), and I missed what the sign said, but this quote from Gene Veith is worth a ponder, anyway:

“It’s odd that the significance of Christ’s ascension is taken in two opposite ways: The Reformed say that it means Christ is ABSENT, no longer on earth, so that His real presence in the sacrament is impossible. Lutherans say that it means Christ, at the right hand of Power, His human nature assumed into the Holy Trinity, can now be omnipresent, so that He CAN be on every altar.”  -HT: Cranach.

Anyway, I do respect churches which are straightforward about the specifics of their confession of faith.  Next time your pastor or Bible study leader pulls out a study series of his own, or a book to look at or teach out of, ask them what theological underpinnings the material has; where the author is coming from, what his presuppositions are theologically.  Beware of the line, “We’re just going by what the Bible says,” which is generally nonsense.

…to write anything too intelligent at the moment, although for days now I’ve been wanting to write up some new observations out of Genesis, which Alex and I are in the process of reading through for evening devotions.  It’s funny how texts you think are familiar can take on a whole new light so often, like you’re reading it for the first time.

Artwork-wise, I just finished the portrait of me with BabyK.  I’ll probably be emailing out a photo of it soon.  It’s this year’s submission to the juried art show.  I’ve also been working on scrapbooking stuff and more recently, BabyK’s “first birthday” stuff, like party invites and her b-day card.  I’m going to end up as one of those moms. 

But until I can collect my thoughts, here’s another nice post from Josh S, this time on distinctives of Lutherans and church– how it comes down to “Who are we?” and “What are we doing?”

…And Alex and I were there!

Howard Shore’s award-winning score to The Lord of the Rings:  The Fellowship of the Ring was performed last night in Winnipeg by the WSO, along with chorus and soloists.  It was fantastic.  And I’m not just saying that because I’ve seen the movie over 20 times in theaters alone…

The fact that the music of the film was brought to the forefront, while the action on the screen behind the orchestra was somewhat relegated to “second place,” made for a really interesting experience.  Alex and I were both noticing bits of music and details that we’d never noticed before, like the hammer dulcimer used in the Shire music, the prevalence of the children’s choir in certain key moments of Boromir’s role, and so on.  Even with a movie screen, the fact that the music was live gave the entire event the emotional impact of a live epic musical.  And the movie/live dynamic made for some fascinating bits of interplay, like Legolas in Lorien observing from afar the lament for Gandalf (and us seeing the lament being sung right in front of us).

What could have been better…?  Only one or two cues were missed, most notably when Aragorn crashes into Lurtz to keep him from shooting Boromir at close range (the silence lingered and the active music started up some seconds after impact).  Mysteriously missing from the precedings was “Flaming Red Hair,” the hobbit party music, so you see all these hobbits dancing and partying to the “music in their heads.”  :o)  Finally, several people drove me crazy by getting up and leaving as soon as the movie screen went to black, though the orchestra, choirs, and soloists still had about 5 minutes of performance.  This deprived these performers of getting their proper credit and applause.  Grr.

But it was a fabulous show!!!