Postmode

“(One chemical company markets several pseudoscent formulas for training cadaver dogs—recently dead, post-decomposition, and drowning victim.)”
- Slate.com “Explainer” article

Note: The planned stuff that I had going for Psalm 31 will have to wait, as I have been assigned to a trial for my jury duty. Which means I may never even get around to doing any of the others (although one or maybe two are sitting in the draft stage).

I want to begin this little series of blog posts on the words of David in Psalm 31 with two comments from great men.

The dedication to the chief musician proves that this song of mingled measures and alternated strains of grief and woe was intended for public singing, and thus a deathblow is given to the notion that nothing but praise should be sung. Perhaps the Psalms, thus marked, might have been set aside as too mournful for temple worship, if special care had not been taken by the Holy Spirit to indicate them as being designed for the public edification of the Lord’s people.
- Charles Haddon Spurgeon, exposition of Psalm 31 in Volume 2 of the Treasury of David

A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party — a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is — or at least should be — all about health, wealth, and happiness silently corrupted the content of our worship? Few Christians in areas where the church has been strongest over recent decades — China, Africa, Eastern Europe - would regard uninterrupted emotional highs as normal Christian experience.
- Carl Trueman, “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” in The Wages of Spin

I have seen too many people get absolutely flayed on the cutting board of emotional-highism. It’s a horrible effect of all this “Happy Happy Joy Joy!” BS in our churches. I agree much with Spurgeon and Trueman that life is not always this way (very often it is not; that Christians in the west enjoy such prosperity is not the rule but the exception proving the rule) and I want to submit this: that the church in the West has glazed eyes disturbingly similar to those of 12-year-old girls with their stupid peddling for their fifteenth one-true-love boyfriends - those tragic victims of Disney-movie romanticism. That we have these glazed eyes is a symptom of the problem of having false joy. We no longer understand what it means to be Biblical sufferers. This is in complete contradiction to the worship of the Bible: when the Psalmist himself provides these lyrics to the chief musician, our first thought should not be directed to listing the ways in which he was wrong to give what he did; rather we should wonder first why we are so different and whether there might not be something wrong with us.

What we ought to, and hopefully will find is that we are drastically out of accord with Scripture. As John Piper taught in a recent sermon at Wheaton, it is not a question of whether but of when we will suffer. We will all suffer in our own ways and times, and it will be miserable and difficult. It will shake our faith, it will test our hearts, it will cut us to the core, chop up our insides and put it all through a meat grinder. I don’t mean to endorse Buddhism in any way here, but the first of the Four Noble Truths is just that, a truth: Life is suffering. We are born, we suffer. We live, we suffer. We die, we suffer. The great sin of the church in the West is that it has denied this truth, looking vainly in its own reflection. It says to itself, “Gee, I don’t like this suffering stuff. It would be really nice if we could stop that.” It is all the more unfortunate that our society has provided us with the means to eliminate much suffering, because we have come to this idea that we can somehow evade suffering - and for a large part we are successful, and have medicated much suffering out of ourselves, all to our own ruin since it only produces new kinds of suffering.

Don’t get me wrong: we shouldn’t be content with suffering. We shouldn’t look at our suffering and say, “I want to stay this way.” Suffering is not a good thing in itself. But our problem is that when we begin this process of self-medication, we begin to view suffering itself as the disease (it is not; sin is the disease and suffering can be responded to sinfully or righteously), and ourselves as the healers: we are in just one more domain setting ourselves up as gods. No longer do we give our importunate cries on the altar and beg God for salvation from our sorrows. We don’t do it individually, and consequentially we don’t do it corporately in our worship. This is sin and it needs to be confronted in the church. The pastors who would try to instill joy in their people without practically highlighting the reality and existence of suffering are murdering the hearts of their people.

I long for the day when people will refer to things such as people going crazy and women getting randomly pregnant as *gasp!* - “surprise!” sort of events. Because then I will be able to use the abbreviated form… Gasprise. I can already feel the movings of satisfaction rumbling in my stomach. Not at all unlike a gasprise.

Similar and similarly pleasing, although on a different plane, is the word dunsch, that companion to that old standby for a meal falling between the usual times for breakfast and lunch. It is much more pleasing to use it in this sense, though: “Would you like a steaming bowl of dunsch?”

The thought simultaneously makes me giddy and disgusts me.