Labours of the Months: March, stained glass c. 1450-1475
There is a forgotten truth that what made land valuable was human labor. It’s all there in the ground, food, airplanes, computers, mansions, it just requires human effort. The same concept applies to every area of our lives, human labor creates value. In America we mostly depend on others to provide this value. Mexicans labor on our land and we have appointed others to think for us. This might seem humble, I think it’s just fear. Christians have become so timid we are afraid to be creative. It starts with pastors so fearful of ‘getting in the way of the ‘gospel’ ‘ and progresses to milquetoast fathers afraid to lead their families. But without labor, what good is the land? What good is a sermon? What good is a life?
Labours of the Months: June, stained glass c. 1450
This is the way God made it. He put us on this earth with two hands and one mouth and told us not to steal. The hands need to work so the mouth may eat. And we all work differently, we are a reflection of the variety of God’s diversity, three and also one. We are created in his image, an image of creativity. From the very first when God set Adam to the task of naming the animals, man was putting his stamp on this earth. And God loved it. You can see him watching his child with excitement wondering what he would come up with next. But recently, we have gone a different way. Our culture is saturated with ‘equality’ and multiculturalism and a fear of ‘judging’, to the point that asserting an opinion is considered abuse. And if you assert an opinion more than once you are probably a ‘bully’ with a list of ‘victims’ a mile long. Christians seem to have the worst of it, living under a soft tyranny, lest anyone suggest that we are forcing their religion on someone. But this is all crazy. Having a culture and doing it the best you can is not a crime, it’s humanity.
Labours of the Months: July, stained glass c. 1450
Just because you create a culture with ideas, styles, language, music, art etc and fight for it, does not make you some sort of ‘ist’. Just because you do something does not mean you are rejecting they way everyone else on the planet does it, or that you hate them. I know this is horrible, and even worse than having a culture is borrowing your culture from the past. “OMG I know, like how could anyone want anything from the past? Gross!”
But, living our lives is an art and all good art borrows from the past. Treating our lives as a science is pure evil, we are not machines, we are the individual creations of God. Going off the other direction does us no good either, pretending that we are hyper individual and that we have to do every thing–totally–uniquely ‘us’. But somewhere in the middle, where most of humanity has lived throughout all of time, there is a normal view of human culture. Now we are in this huge mess because modern though was in total rebellion. Since crazy French philosophers began remaking the world in their own image, humanity has been confused. We might search the pages of the New Testament for help, and suppose that is says nothing about any of this. But that’s because rather than undermine the gospel, Satan has undermined humanity. He didn’t have to lie about our heavenly father, he just destroyed the concept of fathers. He didn’t have to destroy the idea of a heavenly king, he just taught us that kings are evil. He didn’t have to ban the bible he just undermined education until we couldn’t read. I don’t happen to think it’s all that creative, just a by product of his rebellious chaos, but it is very effective.
Labours of the Months: August, stained glass c. 1450
But we would be wrong to think that the New Testament has nothing to say about these fundamental building blocks of culture. Wrong because we forget that the New Testament is mostly the footnotes for the Old Testament. Why would you retell the way God interacts with the world and his people when the Old Testament lays it out just as God intended? Why would the New Testament be written for us when we wouldn’t exist for 2000 years? We might look at the gap in the gospel narrative between Jesus’ birth and his ministry as an oversight. But what would have been the point? He was raised the same way as every other Jewish kid of the time. They knew how to raise kids. What they needed to hear was what was special about this kid. But we don’t know how to raise kids. We need to hear about how to raise kids, how to have a society. The evidence is all around. Divorce is rampant. Children are raised by the government, well the ones that survive abortion. Parent’s are too interested in fashion and vacations, or drugs and video games to waste time raising their kids. That’s for the professionals. Well it’s not working out for us. And it should be the church leading the way to fix it.
Labours of the Months: October, stained glass c. 1450
This mantra that such things ‘get in the way of the gospel’ is pure foolishness . We are supposed to be the light of the world, we are supposed to have it together. Don’t you know we will judge the angels? We are supposed to be the judges, sorting out right from wrong for the world. We are suppose to lead in marriages, family life, child raising, and all that is humanity on this earth. We have the answer, we are no longer dead to sin. We are victors with Christ. We are no longer under the yoke of sin. We can move mountains. We can endure persecution and all that they can throw at us with singing. We are not to be timid but bold in our faith. We are his people, we are his sons and daughters, we will inherit the new earth. We have the tradition, in the west and in this country. We shouldn’t be afraid to practice the art of living as a Christian on this earth. That great art of taking the past and remaking it into something ours, something new yet old. This is the blessed state of childlike faith. We have fallen into a maturity which boasts of what it knows rather than seeing everything in this world as if it were the first time. This is the power of art. We can take the gospel story and retell it a thousand ways, as our story. A story of what Christ did in our lives, but also in our imaginations as we paint, sing, write, dance, cook, decorate, build, garden, parent and politic. This is the power of fairytales, they can take us to a world we forget is our own and reintroduce us as if it were the first time. So don’t be afraid Christian. Put your hand to the plow, you might plow crooked and you might fall, but I’ve seen the end of the story, we win. Now it’s up to you to make a hell of a story out of it.
Labours of the Months: December, stained glass c. 1450 This is a victory celebration.