Why I Am Reformed: Overview

Months ago, I promised to do a series of posts on why I belong to the section of Christianity that calls itself Reformed. And then I slipped into the world of fevered children and adult root-canals (there's a post on that coming soon), and this blog became a no-man's land.

I kept meaning to post. As an added nudge, I've been asked to teach a Sunday school class this fall on Reformed theology. Then this week I read another post about an abusive church that called itself Reformed and I decided I shouldn't put this off any more.

So where to begin? As I worked on this post, I realized I was trying to write a one-paragraph description of the reasons for the Protestant Reformation. If you've never tried that, don't. The experience made me nostalgic for those root canals.  I could tell you the Reformed church is the branch of the Reformation that clustered around theologians like John Calvin, Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger and Ulrich Zwingli. Or I could talk about the different historic emphases between Calvin and Luther, or Calvin and the radical Reformers like Menno Simons. But I don't want to write that post, and you don't want to read it.

So I'll go for too simple, rather than too complicated. Reformed theology is an understanding of Christianity that emphasizes the omnipotence of a merciful, holy God. God's power over all things - often called his "sovereignty" - is systematically affirmed in whatever theological issue is under discussion. All goodness is seen as the result of God's action, not human effort. Even the good things we do are ultimately caused by a sovereign God.

In Reformed theology, God is the one who acts. I receive the grace and mercy of God. I don't achieve it or earn it. Even the part of me that acts to receive it, is in fact God moving in me to allow me to receive. Reformed theology is an expression of Christianity organized around the persistent reminder that things ain't up to me.

If I were to sum up why I am Reformed in something short enough to fit on a t-shirt, it would say, "I'm here for the Sabbaths." I mean that figuratively (though literal Sabbaths are pretty great too). The Sabbath is the day of rest. In the Sabbath we acknowledge that our labor, whatever we may tell ourselves, is not necessary to the running of the world. In the Sabbath we submit and receive rest, even when a thousand insistent impulses are screaming out to us that our work is essential. I make my home in a Reformed church (see that little c in church? That's important. I'll write about that another day) to worship the Lord of the Sabbath, who gives my soul rest. I stay here because of the freedom and joy I have found in knowing it doesn't depend on me.

Next post in Why I Am Reformed: Original Sin! Why a phrase that makes you feel doom and puritanical gloom comforts and encourages me.

If I wrote this in hieroglyphics, she'd be interested

I am writing this with a nine-year-old in my lap. Nine-year-olds do not easily fit into a lap, and rarely want to. However, I have been trying to spend more time writing, and this nine year old is feeling a little neglected. So here she is, insisting that I write around her. I am reading this aloud as I do, and she is giggling helplessly. In fact, she's laughing so hard, she is sliding out of my lap.

This may be the most effective way to remove her.

She came into the study to show me what she has been making. My girl is fascinated by ancient Egypt, and has drawn and cut from cardboard the funerary amulets used in the mummification process. She tells me the names of them (scarab, wedjet eye, ankh, djed pillar, Nephthes, Isis, and the four sons of Horus: Imseti, Duamuteph, Hapi, Qebesenuef). I have a graduate degree in ancient near eastern history, but she already knows more about ancient Egyptian burial customs than I do.

My mother asked her the other day if she was still interested in ancient Egypt. "Aren't you over that stuff yet?" I don't know if this was teasing or not, but my girl insisted there was nothing wrong with loving ancient Egypt, so she was unfazed by Grandma's prodding. Maybe this will be a lifelong love for her; maybe not. But I love the joy she brings to it, the way new books and new facts and new photos light up her eye.

(It sure beats her other love: Star Wars. She's never even seen the movie. I know. Nine-year-olds.)

Last spring, she took cardboard and popsicle sticks and made a senet game, the ancient board game we know from paintings and texts. She and her sister still play it. I have not played once.

"Grown-ups do not understand children whatsoever," she tells me, "Even though they're both human beings." Because what endeavor does she see me devote myself to? What interest does she see me cadge moments for? Only writing. And here she is, in my study, insisting I write around her.

Children don't understand grown-ups at all.

My Creative Parenting Solution and How It Failed

My girls do not like to clean their room. Shocking, I know. But last week, when I sent them to their room to clean it, they were even worse than usual. After two hours of whining and "cleaning," their room still looked like this:

I particularly like the snow boots lying around in July. 

I had been warning them all summer that if they did not clean up when I asked them to, I was going to take away their stuff. This was the day I would follow through.

My sister had told me about a friend of hers who devised a creative punishment for her daughter's disrespectful behavior. She took away all the clothing from her fashion-loving girl except for a t-shirt and a pair of sweat pants. Her daughter could earn back her clothes piece by piece, with good behavior. It worked. 

The secret parenting grapevine has given me many good ideas. I thought this could be another one.

So I calmly (well, mostly calmly) informed the girls that refusing to clean their room yet again had triggered these draconian measures. I would pack up all their clothes and toys. They would be allowed one shirt, one pair of pants, one pair of shoes, and one toy for two weeks. (No restrictions on underpants. I am not crazy.)

This is the point where I should have heard ominous background music.

First of all, my kids have a lot of stuff. Four kids, even after I keep their clothes pared down to only the things they like to wear, still have piles of clothes. I knew it would take me days to pack it all away. But it was worse: to pack it all away, I would first have to make space in my storage areas.  So now I was into a task that would take days.

It would be worth it if it worked, and they learned to clean their room. The kids have actually improved this summer at keeping the common areas of the house clean.  We started a weekly Bible study at our house this summer, and are keeping things more orderly for it. Because cleaning the living room and dining room is a less difficult task, the kids have been cheerful and useful when it needs to be done. I wanted to see them master this for their bedroom too.

When the four-year-old saw her empty closet, she cried. She loves her pretty dresses, and sobbed because she believed I was giving them all away, like I do with the clothes she outgrows. I explained to her that she would get her dresses back when she shows me she can keep her room clean. At that, she stopped crying and stopped caring.

The other girls were a little upset at first, but quickly found the bright side. "We'll be just like cartoons!" exclaimed the six-year-old. "They wear the same outfit every day too!"

Uh-oh. This was not really working out as a punishment.

But the worst was the toys. I thought allowing them only one toy for two weeks would be the part they hated most. Instead, they spent a blissful hour as a group, discussing the finer points of their toys, and which one qualified as their one, true, best-beloved. They luxuriated in this. The kids seems to believe that the conditions I had set had finally allowed them to give their favorite toy the accolades it deserved. At last, their favorite would understand how much they really loved it. And it was all thanks to Mommy's great idea.

At bedtime the first night, the kids took off their one outfit and handed it to me in exchange for a nightgown. I had had the foresight to make sure their outfits could all be sorted in a single load of laundry. But this still meant I had to wash, dry and fold them each night before I went to bed. And this was on top of the big new task I had given myself of packing away everything else. More work for me, when I rarely keep up with all my regular work.

The next day went on much as the first. Their closets were cleaned out, but I still had a mound of dirty clothes I'd picked off their floor, and nowhere to put them once they were washed. At bedtime the second night, the kids cheerfully handed me their clothes. "I like this!" said the eight-year-old. "It's so much easier."

Easier.

By day three, my commitment to this project was lagging. To make it work, I really needed to be supervising a brief cleaning of the bedroom each day, but I was too swamped. We planned to go swimming this day with grandma too, so now I had to find the swimsuits in the clothes I had folded. I was pulling out the swimsuits when the worst happened.

A stomach virus hit.

I will spare you the horrifying details. I will just say that with only one pair of pants, and all the others packed away, my children began to... uh... desperately need to change their clothes. The trip to the bathroom stretched to twenty-six miles long, and my girls were running that marathon several times an hour. Sometimes unsuccessfully. I dragged the top-bunk mattresses onto the bedroom floor (at least there was room now) so that precious seconds were not wasted climbing down the ladder on the way to the Room of Necessity.

My most loathed household task is unnecessary laundry. Washing clothes the children leave on the floor for days without ever having worn it makes me howl in frustration. Now I was in the world of frantically necessary laundry.  Those single favorite toys now needed the washing machine too ("he's going to the spa!").

Now here we are, one week into our experiment, and I think we can all pronounce it a failure. The little kids are running around in their underwear, and the big girls are fending for themselves with whatever they can find from the dryer. The virus appears to be done with us, but not all the children have had it, so I am nervous about taking them out of the house. There was very little warning last time it struck.

So my plan has not worked. They have not learned to keep order in their room. But I think they have learned that they don't need as much stuff as they thought they did. When I look at how they clean the common areas, I realize that they work more diligently at that because they have hope they can finish it. The task is accomplishable. Their room has so much junk, cleaning it feels overwhelming.

So when I throw in the towel this week and put all their stuff back, I am not putting it all back. They don't need as many clothes as they have. I am simplifying even more to something they can manage.

But until I find the time to do that, the only orderly kids' bedroom I have will be on Pinterest.

No one lives in this room.

You know what I hate? When someone promises you a blog series and then disappears for over a month. I hate that.

The children have been sick for weeks. Make that months. One disease would pass through the family, and as soon as they were over it, there would be another. They've had the flu, ear infections, eye infections, scarlet fever (we think - doc wasn't sure), ringworm, and until yesterday, an unidentified, explosive gastro-intestinal virus. I did not know we could be sick so much. The doctor started ending our visits with, "Hope I don't see you next week!"

Today two of them have colds, but that feels like nothing.

So here I am, slowly digging out from under the pile of laundry (OH THE LAUNDRY) and poking my head up to say hello. Now that life feels less like struggling through waist-deep mud (or even less appealing substances), I hope to be back and writing soon.

See you then.

Why I Am Reformed

The other day Sherri Edman called me the nicest Calvinist she knows. I smiled at that, because I've known Sherri and Peter long enough by now to hear a little subtext to that description. It's one of those statements that is not entirely a compliment.

It's not unusual. When people talk about "Calvinists" or "the Reformed," there is often a tinge of suspicion. My non-Presbyterian friends direct certain expressions of bafflement my way. It's somewhere between "Gosh, you're smarter than I expected for a Nascar fan" and "I never expected anyone as pleasant as you to torture small animals for sport."

 One of the lovelier consequences of Reformed theology is that you don't have to be concerned with changing people's minds. Very freeing. But since I am trying to get back into the swing of blogging regularly and I am casting about for subjects, it occurred to me that a series of posts about why I 'm Reformed might shed some light on a subject that you've wondered about.

So if everything you know about Reformed theology comes from your high-school reading of The Scarlet Letter and you're wondering how high our congregation's pillory is, or if the word "predestination" sends fatalistic chills up your spine and you can't reconcile that with the way I'm always jabbering on about love, stop on by for the next week or two. I'll try to put a friendly face above that Geneva collar.

More than being right

Pick one: 

A. God is good.

B. Look at those people over there who don't believe that God is good. We must resist them before they ruin everything.

I spent some time reading arguments in the blogosphere this week. This is the junk food of Christian theology. Chest-thumping, testosterone-fueled debates in which clever people try to convince you that those people over there are threatening everything. They will be the downfall of the church! I almost stopped being a Christian because of them! Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party!

I used to think that this style of faith-as-conflict was strictly a male phenomenon. God, in his mercy, used the internet to correct my sexism. That tricksy God. Won't even let me keep my smug little prejudices.

There is a particular bent to these arguments, reflected in the choice above. You can say a true thing, or you can portray a war in which you, brave warrior, are marshaling the forces of good against the forces of evil. The particular occasion of the conflict almost doesn't matter. What matters is that people observe you leaping into the fray, being right.

There are people who love the truth, and there are people who love being right. While anyone who has ever been married knows that sometimes we can belong to either group, the nature of internet arguments often encourages one over the other. One makes better theater than the other.

One of the reasons I love Ann Voskamp's blog is how thoroughly she refuses to engage in option B. Her faith is expressed in the small particularities of an incarnate life, not in trouncing designated enemies.  It is lovely, and ultimately does more to create a solid sense of the good than the endless wrangling of the arguers ever accomplished. It has been an example to me more than once.

The argument I read this week was over the Problem of Evil, an irresolvable debate if ever there was one.  How can a good God allow evil to happen? Why do good people suffer unjustly? The attempts to resolve this are no more successful than they've ever been. One group redefines evil to mean good, apparently believing that will let God off the hook. The other redefines God to be something smaller and less responsible, an affable spirit buddy who means well, but can only do so much. Nobody solves the problem in the terms given, because no one can.

But there is no passion like the passion of someone convinced that their inadequate solution is better than your inadequate solution. Grab the popcorn, watch the fireworks. Call him a sociopath and call her a sinner in rebellion. Bronze your humilities and mount them on the wall; point at them to show  you're better than your opponent. Someone must surely win (won't they?) and it's important it be you. Everything depends on it.

Job lost everything, and he cried out to God. His friends argued for days, certain that the rightness of the world was threatened by Job's questions. But their arguments blew away on the wind, and the  answer to Job's cries - the only satisfaction - was the presence of God.

I don't have an answer to the problem of evil. But if Job was answered by the presence of God, then the only thing we can offer is to be the presence of God in someone's life. The quiet, loving friend, the tender mother, the faithful wife. It doesn't solve the insoluble, and it won't make anyone applaud you for being right or winning a war. Nobody becomes president of a seminary or makes the best-seller list by holding the hand of someone in pain.

But it says that God is good. Here, here is goodness: baked and covered in this casserole dish, shining in this stack of clean laundry, ringing in that phone when you're lonely. God is good, my letter says, even if the words aren't printed on it. God is good, I hear in that familiar joke from a much-missed friend, who suddenly stopped by. Not watch me win, but God is good.

That's all I want to say.

Malingering

The flu doesn't die easy. I told my feverish five-year-old a few days ago that there was a war going on in her body. She had been invaded, and her white blood cells were inventing weapons that very minute to bash the bad germs. Soon they would be experts at beating those germs, and her sickness would go away.

And it worked. We are all much better. Sniffling and coughing still, but well on our way to wholeness. The doc has cleared the children to return to school, and our naps are getting fewer. A sore throat lingers for me, though, and I asked my husband to make me a hot toddy.

My husband's hot toddies are dangerous. They taste good, they soothe the throat and ease the coughing. But they are deceptively powerful. One means I am in for the night. Two means it will be an early night.

So I am nursing my toddy and watching the fifth season of The West Wing. Unlike the toddy, it is absolutely awful. Hard to believe that show could tank so badly and still go on for two more seasons. Now that I mention it, it's a lot like this virus. Bad television as flu experience. I'm seeing medical schools showing the last three seasons of The West Wing to teach sympathy for infectious disease patients.

We have church tomorrow, but I will probably need to stay home. I'm not quite ready to trust this coughing body to the public. I'm a forty-year-old mother of four and... I don't need to explain, do I? Let's just call it The West Wing Effect.