I told my son about a problem I was having with his younger brother, and he said, “Why don’t you give him a compliment sandwich.” My most laconic offspring then left me alone to grapple inductively with the concept, and here is what I came up with:

The “compliment sandwich” is what the Apostle Paul served up when he also was having trouble with the brothers. On either side of the ham of rebuke or salami of exhortation, he would present the bread of encouragement, the better to make the meal more palatable. Here was Paul’s style:

• You guys are terrific! I’m always boasting to the other churches about you! I have such confidence in you!
• Here are ten things you need to change immediately.
• I can’t wait to see you! I have such confidence in you! I love you!

Consider his first letter to the Corinthian church:

• I keep thanking God for you; your speech and knowledge have never been better! (1:4,5)
• You’re fractious and partisan and divisive (1:10-17). You’re carnal and jealous and immature (chapter 3). You’re arrogant and lacking in meekness (chapter 4). You put up with sexual immorality (chapter 5). You’re lawsuit-happy (chapter 6). Cut it out!
• I can’t wait to see you! I have such confidence in you! I love you! (chapter 16).

Everybody needs to be told when he’s doing something right — even if it’s just a little something, and if on balance it’s pretty messed up.

I can gauge my spiritual life by the degree to which I poeticize the Bible. An instance of that came to light today. I learned that someone I had deeply offended had refrained from telling me my offense until he could deal with it sufficiently in his own heart to avoid sending me a hurtful letter.

I was immediately reminded of Paul’s identical motive in his words to the Corinthians:

I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia….Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to the flesh, ready to say ‘Yes, yes’ and ‘No, no’ at the same time….But I call God to witness against me — it was to spare you that I refrained from coming again to Corinth….For I made up my mind not to make another painful visit to you. (2 Corinthians 1:16,17,23; 2:1)

Like Paul, my friend chose to bless me when his baser self wanted to hurt me back. In order to pull off that soul transaction, he had to suck up the pain himself, take on my debt himself rather than handing me the bill.

All of which made me take a second look at something Paul said later in the same letter:

[We are] always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also my be manifested in our mortal flesh. (4:10,11)

Nothing poetical or romantic about that.

If you had a bit of spinach stuck between your teeth, or body odor so bad your co-workers were snickering around the water cooler, would you want someone to tell you? Then if you know hell is real, and you know people who are headed to a Christ-less eternity, should you not tell them?

That’s how my friend Jayne Clark introduced the three-day topic of the Judgment at our women’s retreat at Harvey Cedars Bible Conference in New Jersey last weekend — and I couldn’t escape the logic of it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a sermon on hell. I mean one that lingered there and let you smell the sulfur, not just a passing poetic reference.
There is, of course, that famous Jonathan Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” And I’m ashamed to say that, like old Barnabas, who “was led astray” by peer pressure in an unrelated matter (Galatians 2:13), I was slipping into the camp of people who say nice things about Edwards in spite of that little trip to woodshed in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8,1741.

But Jayne helped me remember how I myself got saved. This Christian guy at L’Abri took a fancy to me, and didn’t fancy me being damned, and kept saying, “Andree, please become a Christian.” It was as unsophisticated as that.

“Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation….’Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountains, lest you be consumed’” (Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”).

Every church has a temperature. It is the subtlest of things. A church’s temperature is not identical to its doctrine, its creeds, or even the sermons or the hymns — which may be biblical enough. Neither is it articulated outright, but is nevertheless somehow well understood. It is, I would say, a silently collective agreement about the degree to which God is who he says he is; an unspoken consensus of what it is we really believe around here. And it is, for all its tacitness, remarkably specific.

I liken it to the way a child learns language. The outsider to that language group will observe it best perhaps — the way the mastery of a person’s mother tongue is not some general mastery but a mimicry perfected to the most infinitesimally precise imitation of inflection.

So with a church’s or denomination’s culture. We in any given culture have discerned from a thousand subtle cues how much to believe in Jesus and how much not to. That is, how far to go, and how much farther would be fanatical. We imagine all the while that we are holding to the whole counsel of God. But in fact, we have our chosen texts, verses, and emphases that we carefully stay within and keep recycling.

For instance, our church’s woman’s Bible study once did the book of James. When we came to chapter 5, we taught on verses 1 through 13 but skipped over 14 and 15 before completing the rest. No one noticed. It was not a conspiratorial thing, nor a cynical omission. Just a temperature, I would say.

Out of curiosity I drove around town on Sunday to see which businesses were open.

Pathmark (open). Eastern Beer Distributors (open). Michael’s Restaurant (open). Glenside Post Office (closed). Wachovia bank (closed). Hollywood Video (open). Granny’s Sewing Den (closed). Mattress Giant (open). Sally’s Beauty Shop (open). SEPTA ticket office (closed). Hollywood Tans (open). Dovetail Artisans (closed). CVS (open). Giancarlo Upholstery (closed). Away We Go Travel (closed). Keswick Jewelers (closed). Orthodontics (closed). NAILS (closed). Beaver Opticians (closed). Taste of Philly (open).

I remember when our family furniture store crossed the Rubicon and started opening Sundays — because the competition was opening on Sundays. I expected that was the camel’s nose under the tent, and that in a few decades there would be absolutely no visible difference between the sun rotation cycles —- just one endless day.

It never quite happened. And the fact that it didn’t is instructive to me. Something there is in man that wants this rhythm of one in six, work and rest. Even when people try to declare independence from their Creator, they can’t seem to wrest free completely of who they are created to be.

“Six days you shall labor and do all your work….” (Exodus:9).

“Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed” (John 20:6-9).

If you skimmed that verse quickly you missed the great philosophical debate of the next two thousand years of Western civilization: what constitutes “evidence”?

Let’s have an instant replay of the scene: It’s dawn and two men are racing. John outruns Peter (perhaps he is younger) and reaches the crypt first; he does not enter. Peter arrives second and, being Peter, barges in. He takes in the following brute data at a glance: linen cloths lying; Jesus’ head-covering apart from the linens, folded up. No body. (A reporter would have scribbled notes, perhaps looked for signs of struggle, foul play, forced entry.)

John crossed the threshold second. We are told he “also went in, and saw and believed.”

You might think, “Wait! Wait! John is skipping too many steps! What about this possibility, and that possibility?” And you proffer a dozen theories to explain the missing corpse, and each generation after you generates a dozen more.

When I was on the threshold of becoming a Christian, in the early 70s, pestering Christians with objection after objection, a patient man named John finally said calmly: “You know, Andrée, there comes a point where you have to stop accumulating evidence and decide.”

Of making many books there is no end. In the final analysis, there is this: the linen cloth neatly folded, the empty tomb, and your choice.

First-class postage is going up to 42 cents on May 12^th, so since I was at the post office mailing a package anyway, I decided to buy the “Forever” stamp.

The question was how many to buy. No one would have imagined, in olden days, devoting much deliberative energy to such a purchase. But everything’s about fuel prices now, and so my daily musings to Michigan are suddenly touching on world issues.

Not to exaggerate the current national financial stresses, but I felt the compunction to “lock in” at 41 cents for a few years, with the same urgency that made me jump on 5% interest rates for refinancing my home a while back, or the steely acumen of a hedge fund holder who sells short.

On the other hand, Christ could return any day now. I don’t want to be stuck holding all these stamps if He comes back this year, and I could have spent the money better. That would make me like the guy who up and died with an embarrassment of riches in his bloated wheat barns (Luke 12:20).

I confess I really did factor all these considerations in the moments before I plunked down my credit card and asked for fifteen sheets of the stuff. Which told me two things about myself, one bad and one good — first, that I’ve been affected on a deep level by the current global financial paroxysms; and second, that the imminent return of Christ has become an operational, and not just formal, part of my psyche.

First I read, maybe a year ago, about hardship in Mexico over the doubling of the price of corn tortillas. It meant nothing to me. Then, months later, a couple lines about fistfights in a bread queue in Egypt. An isolated incident, I thought. One small factoid in a sea of news stories.

It was in fact the handwriting on the wall. It was the child’s marble that rolled off a table in the movie Titanic, chilling omen of what was coming.

When Afghan farmers plow under their poppy fields to grow grain because cereal is becoming more lucrative than heroin; when The Wall Street Journal suggests “it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food” — and they’re not smiling; when CNN reports that “riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world’s attention”; then this is the world’s big story.

Here is the coalescing of many news stories that were seen only piecemeal and separate till now — the rising cost of fuel, the teetering of financial institutions, the groaning of the planet’s ecosystems, corruption in government, the rage of disadvantaged nations against wealthy nations, the casting off of all private morality and headlong plunge into debauchery.

The prophet’s question echoes in my ears: “But what will you do when the end comes?” (Isaiah 5:31). Suddenly, most of the things I’ve been worrying about seem very shameful.

An unsuspecting high school freshman walks into practice in the basement of Hugh’s house, where my son’s team meets outside of school hours.

“So, where were you Monday, Riley?” asks Coach Yaller.

“I was with my family; it was a special occasion.”

“Oh, what was that?”

“My birthday.”

(A fearful groan sweeps the room, as the other wrestlers begin to slink away and hide their faces.)

“Oh, it was your birthday, huh? Well, happy birthday, Riley. Let me tell you something: The day of Hughey’s birthday, we wrestled. The day Hughey got married, we wrestled. The day Hughey’s father died, we wrestled. What in the &#^%$^& do we care about your birthday!”

Okay, coach Yaller is not Jesus. But the incident did remind me of something:

“…someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Yet another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God’” (Luke 9:58-62)

“For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong” (H.L. Mencken).

Take biofuels, for instance. As a solution to greenhouse emissions and the salvation of the universe, it sounded so good, so noble, so elegant. So Congress jumped on it like a duck on a june-bug and passed a bill last December mandating huge increases of the stuff. It was a political freebie: it made the environmental lobby happy, and conferred eternal job security on the agricultural industry. Farmers would make corn and lawmakers would make hay, and all would be right with the world.

Turns out the bill wasn’t fueled by science so much as popular political winds. The studies touting benefits of growing more corn, soy, and grasses to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and our dependence on fossil fuel neglected to factor land use into the equation. 25% of U.S. corn now goes to make ethanol. Since we still need corn for eating, and for feeding cows to make meat, we need to find the extra land somewhere, and we’re cutting down forests to get it.

When you cut down forests, you’re burning up all that carbon stored in the soil, and releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — more than you’re diminishing by using ethanol in your automobile’s tank.

Tim Searchinger of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson school says “For every mile you drive with biofuel, you’re actually doubling greenhouse gas emissions.” Put that in your car and smoke it.