If you read or see the two-part, Pulitzer-prize winning (and scandalous) play Angels in America, which takes place in the 1980s, during the Reagan Revolution, then you’ll get a good feel for how most liberals hated - really hated - Ronald Reagan.  He was everything bad about America, to them.  But now, more than 20 years later, and Barack Obama, new scion of the liberal elite, is calling him a great president.  What happened?  This Newsweek piece proposes to answer the question: Why are liberals finally loving on Reagan?

[H]e understood that you cannot govern this country if you’re a pessimist. Pessimism has always been a strand of conservatism-pessimism about human nature, pessimism about government. […] He said that when the American people are happy, good things happen: they invest, they save, they have children. So he thought that getting America back to cheerfulness was an intensely practical program.

So, that’s one reason.  And it’s a nice thought.  Of course, one can believe in a fallen human nature and be perennially happy.  In fact, one can only be truly happy if one understands the true character of creation, but only if one also understands that all this can be redeemed.  Reagan was an optimist, and a realist.  He was, after all, a man who called evil what it was.  Christians, too, should be optimists.

An Iran-made movie based on the Islamic version of the life of Jesus is stirring controversy among Christians for its portrayal of Christ as a tormented Judean prophet foretelling the coming of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim faith.

“Jesus, the Spirit of God,” claims Jesus was compassionate, performed miracles and spoke parables, but was not divine nor was he crucified and resurrected.

Some claim this movie is a step toward bringing more understanding between the two faiths. Director Nader Talebzadeh believes it will show the common ground between Muslims and Christians. He told AFP that he saw his movie as an Islamic answer to Western productions he sees as simply wrong, such as Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”

“I pray for Christians. They’ve been misled. They will realize one day the true story,” Talebzadeh told the LA Times. His film has been screened at international film festivals and is being marketed for wider release.

The film has certainly sparked dialogue, which is part of what Talebzadeh wanted. Bloggers have been disputing the film for months now. In January, one responded to an article about the film saying, “The Islamic-fascists will go to the ends of the earth, whether by blood or bombs, to try to delude their people with their Nazi like propaganda.”

But why be up in arms? Don’t Christians try to spread their version of Mohammad’s life and teachings? In a conversation about this film, one Christian blogger spouted that “Islam preaches hatred of non-believers. Muhammad was a pagan general who created Islam to unify his forces. He only picked and chose what he liked in Judaism and Christianity and added his violent outlook.”

Would Talebzadeh see these comments about his faith the same way Christians view his film? Or would he say they are worse since he at least portrays Jesus as a powerful and kind prophet?

As another blogger more recently commented, “Don’t we as Christians spend our time trying to prove that the beliefs of Islam are false? Don’t get me wrong, I totally disbelieve Islam and what it stands for but, in the same breath, to act as though we don’t try and silence them also is a bit naive. What makes our actions any better than theirs… other than the fact we believe in the true word of God but I am sure they feel the same way about their beliefs?”

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)

Saturday evening I went with friends to an Orthodox Christian Easter service. It started at 11 p.m., which suited the strangeness of things. I had never been inside their cathedral before, nor any like it, with its domed roof, iconography covering the walls and ceilings, the carved wood screen in front, the bishop’s throne to the right. My friend explained the meaning of all these things, the deliberateness of them. For the first time since childhood, I experienced a Christian service as an almost complete outsider.

I often make the things of God comfortable. I skim my Bible, having heard this story before, or not wanting to dwell on exactly how the calf gets carved up to suit God’s strictures. Like most Protestant churches, mine doesn’t place many demands on worshippers; we sing a bit, and sometimes there is a responsive reading, but mostly we sit and listen. Occasionally there is toddler duty, which I’ve found gets inflicted less when one asks if one is allowed to spank them. It’s easy to get comfortable. I suspect comfort may be the greatest danger to active faith.

So it was enlightening to view an entirely different kind of worship. The unfamiliarity of their worship made me consider how we Protestants have our own rituals, though in radically truncated form, and how maybe ritual can be a good thing. The Orthodox use, for example, voices in their service — the choir singing or chanting, actual chanters, the priests themselves, all of them blending tones to outdo even the most elaborate multi-piped organs. Hearing the bishop chant John Chrysostom seemed somehow more right than an entire congregation warbling the latest Chris Tomlin song.

There were other things, like the way they all crossed themselves at the drop of a hat. And the way they knew when to respond with a phrase like “Lord have mercy,” or even exclamations in other languages. The fact that they stood for almost the entire service. How they kept their arms crossed as they went up for communion, and almost knelt for the bishop to drop it into their mouths, many of them carrying sleepy children who also received communion. All of it — even the rituals I didn’t understand or care for — felt holy, if one is allowed to feel one’s way to holiness.

There were a thousand things for a dutiful Calvinist to get irate about, I suppose, but what struck me was the earnestness of this gathering, all shouting “Indeed He is risen!” at the top of their voices at 2 a.m., when the service ended. Afterwards, almost nobody went home, because there was a feast in their fellowship hall. People brought baskets of the things they’d forsaken for Lent, and the party began.

I ate too, because the bishop made clear that all faithful are welcome at Christ’s banquet table. And even though I had already celebrated Easter, I left feeling full, not just with food, but with the sense that, though their rituals are not mine, I have 300 million brothers and sisters (the estimated size of the worldwide Orthodox Christian congregation) stumbling and grasping their way to God as I do, as I suspect many of you do.

He is risen.

A friend from church hosts a women’s Bible study in her home every week, and makes an effort to invite women from outside her immediate circle of friends. One of these women, after attending a few meetings, came to her, troubled. “Are you saying,” she asked, “that Jesus is the only way to get into Heaven?” The poor woman felt that in this stricture the Lord was being a bit exclusionary. What about well-meaning Buddhists and kind-hearted Muslims?

This woman is a member of a large and well-known Christian denomination, which in recent years has taken to marketing itself as the church with open doors and minds. Thinking it still adhered to the Nicene Creed, however, my friend urged the woman to ask her pastor if she wanted confirmation of this basic tenet.

The woman met with her pastor, and came away with the impression that yes, Heaven’s doors are wide and accommodating. This Jesus thing is all well and good, but what really matters is the love in your heart/how much you give back/[insert inoffensive pop psychological aphorism here].

So the woman stopped attending the Bible study. Apparently her open mind can handle anything but closed mindedness. There’s no telling what her pastor actually said to her. At the very least, we can surmise that his teaching ability is less than adequate. I’m sure it has a pleasant tickle, though.

I find, when I think about some muddle-headedness like this long enough, that I am frequently just as guilty of it. So I began to sum up all the ways I put conditions on God, just as this woman did. Don’t ask me to do that, Lord. Please don’t expect me to believe this. Let’s be reasonable.

But the shaper of the earth, the whisperer amidst the storm, the redeemer of fools and bull-headed sinners is anything but reasonable, it seems, at least by my standards. If it were all just a hoax, it would seem that the fashioners of this religion would have done a bit to smooth down its rough edges. But it seems the early church fathers did precisely the opposite, with all this talk of bodily resurrection and a divine trinity and other such unreasonable notions.

I suppose we’ve left it to their weak-willed and marketing-minded inheritors to make it all more palatable, lest we run anyone off, as if their belief were up to us in the first place.

Last time I wrote about how my pastor referenced in a sermon the subtitle to Gary Thomas’s book, Sacred Marriage: What if God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? My pastor saw a connection to Christianity in general, and I think he’s on to something.

It does seem that many people view religions as ice cream flavors, and we the grubby children clutching our dollars and trying to decide which best suits our tastes. Many of us have an expectation that religion exists, like antibiotics and air conditioning, to make our lives more comfortable. This is certainly how social scientists write about it, with their analytical and precisely wrong-headed treatises on man’s religious impulses. Even neuroscientists get in on the act, trying to identify the part of the brain that is pleasantly stimulated when a person “practices spirituality.”

In that worldview, it is only the logic-wedded atheist who refuses the tonic, choosing to see the universe for what it is, an indifferent mass of elements in which by chance we have been situated. That’s a self-serving explanation of non-belief, of course, because if the atheist really does have only the here and now, the rational thing to do would be to take the tonic, and allow himself to be persuaded of a pleasant afterlife. Eating, drinking, and being merry, in other words, would logically include a self-delusion about the coming paradise.

The reason the atheist doesn’t allow this notion, however, is because even the most watered-down stories of God dethrone the Self. We are prone to fancy ourselves princes and princesses, after all. So the atheist does not bow down to God because his knees won’t bend — yet. For some this leads to a great sadness and searching, but for others it leads to self-adulation for their clarity of thought, as if the razor-sharp scientists, philosophers, and theologians of centuries past, who shaped the ideas on which even the atheist depends, were all muddle-headed fools.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to consider God as John F. Kennedy admonished us to consider our country. That’s a scary thought, to ask what we can do for God, rather than what he can do for us, because it suggests perilous paths. All this business about tending to the sheep and spreading the word tends to get one crucified, in one way or another. Isn’t there a sweeter flavor of ice cream in the freezer?

And there certainly is, there always is, because man specializes in sweet nothings. But what if Christianity really isn’t about making us happy? What if it really is about holiness? Not the self-righteous holiness practiced by those who think their Sunday suits disguise their stench, but the holiness that is separateness in spirit, combined with closeness in flesh, the famous in but not of the world that we Christians so often get completely backwards?

It’s a frightening notion, and an exhilarating one at the same time.

A lot has been said and written about Barack Obama’s “bitterness” remarks. Writing from a Christian theological perspective, Albert Mohler delves into what he calls “the real issue” here:

“… Sen. Obama has given us a near-perfect expression of a functional view of religious belief. In other words, Sen. Obama said that “religion” is a coping mechanism for hard times — lumping religion with other issues his audience members were presumably to find strange and alien.

A functional view of belief assumes or “brackets” the question of whether the beliefs are true. One who holds to a purely functionalist view of religious conviction is not concerned with the truthfulness of these beliefs, but only with the effects the beliefs have on the believer, both privately and in social contexts.

No one but God knows Sen. Obama’s heart, but we are left with his words. In this case, the words are very similar to what is so often heard from political figures. When speaking of their own faith they often speak of how it functions. Sen. Clinton spoke this way at the “Compassion Forum” at Messiah College on Sunday night, but we must note that Republicans often speak the same way — valuing “faith” as if faith has no object.

Read Dr. Mohler’s entire post here.

The Church of England connotes liberal theology and everything bad that’s happened to the church since man divorced himself from God in the Enlightenment.  But one bishop of England stands against his own church.  His name is Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, right behind the Bishops of Canterbury, York and London.  He is the Church of England’s “leading evangelical theologian.”  Most shockingly of all is that he believes in the literal truth of the Resurrection.

It is actually what the New Testament is about […] An awful lot of western Christians have just accepted that when they say ‘the resurrection of the body’ they think, ‘You don’t really mean body. That’s just the way they put it in olden days.’ They don’t realise it is actually the key thing. We are talking about a good physical world which is to be remade, not a bad physical world which is going to be trashed in favour of a purely spiritual sphere.

Well, that is good news.

In the recent past, I’ve posted on notable, contemporary books in the “Christian” canon and which ones we liked, and didn’t like, to read.  One of those we discussed was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship.  Today is the 63rd anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s execution by the Nazis for his role in the attempted assassination of Hitler.

Today is a day to remember the cost of discipleship:

“Suffering then is the badge of true discipleship. The disciple is not above his master. . . . That is why Luther reckoned suffering among the marks of the true Church. . . . If we refuse to take up our cross and submit to suffering and rejection at the hands of men, we forfeit our fellowship with Christ and have ceased to follow Him. But if we lose our lives in His service and carry out cross, we shall find our lives again in the fellowship of the cross with Christ. The opposite of discipleship is to be ashamed of Christ and His cross and all the offense which the cross brings in its train.” The Cost of Discipleship (1937)

We are not above Christ.  He served and suffered.  So must we.

At their home opener yesterday, the Boston Red Sox celebrated their 2007 World Series championship. Joining in the festivities at Fenway Park were a number of Boston sports heroes, including the Celtics’ Bill Russell, the Patriots’ Tedy Bruschi, the Bruins’ Bobby Orr, and 88-year-old Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky, who helped hoist the 2007 championship pennant. But there was another participant, someone who has been known as something less than a hero in Beantown: Bill Buckner.

It was Buckner’s error in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series that led to a rally by the New York Mets, an extension of Boston’s long string of seasons not winning the World Series, and Buckner being labeled as the “goat.” When Buckner was introduced to the crowd yesterday to throw out the first pitch, he was given a lengthy standing ovation, which brought tears to his eyes

“It was hard for me to do,” said Buckner about his return to Fenway, adding that he initially wanted to decline the invitation but prayed about it and decided to accept. “I really had to forgive, not the fans of Boston per se, but I’d have to say in my heart I had to forgive the media for what they put my family through.”

Thank you, Bill Buckner, for reminding us that we should be willing to forgive those who have wronged us, just as our Father in Heaven has done for us.