No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known. And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for wholeness and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me. When you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
God is my salvation. I was born, premature and frail, the son of a young New Jersey family doctor and his wife not terribly far from Philadelphia – unremarkable, respectable middle-class folks. My father was Presbyterian like his father before him, and so before my first words and along with another boy born eight days earlier to close friends of my parents, I was baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
I am told I was mostly a good child, entertaining and challenging just as all good children should be. Although my mother was raised Methodist, my family was now a good Presbyterian family, and we attended Sunday services regularly at the comfortable and mildly-conservative Elmer Presbyterian Church, average weekly attendance c. 120. My parents made me go to Sunday School before church every week, and there I was taught all the important Bible stories: God told Noah to build an ark to save all the animals from the flood to wipe out the wickedness, and the rainbow is his promise to never again send those waters. Adam and Eve were in a beautiful garden where they had delicious fruit to eat, but they were tricked by the Snake and had to leave – this made God sad. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego got in trouble with the king and were thrown into the fiery furnace, but God sent his angels to protect them. Jesus was preaching in a building, and some people lowered a lame man on his bed through the roof so that Jesus could heal him, which he of course did. They told me that God is good, that God loves me and will protect me, and that I should be good. All I needed to do was pray to him and have faith in him. And we sang fun songs with neat hand motions, made crafts, played games, sometimes even ate snacks. We did much of the same things in the sanctuary, but we sang hymns instead of bouncy songs, and without hand motions. And the pastor would pray a lot more often, and for much longer. Generally, most of the sermon was far beyond me, but it usually boiled down to God loving us and forgiving us. And I knew he did – my Sunday School teachers and parents would be proud: God is good. Mostly, I liked church. But they wouldn’t let me eat when they passed around the bread and the grape juice; I was upset. I liked juice.
Outside of church, I was good at school. Because I was premature with a late September birthday, by parents decided it would be best to start me back a year in developmental kindergarten. The other boy I was baptized with did not. Here I had fun, played games, but did little actual learning, at least, not that I knew. It was not a big class, but I remember not knowing most of the other kids, and I don't believe this much bothered me. While I was not one of the bad kids, I was bright and unchallenged by school, and this sometimes manifested itself in creative ways, including a rubber frog on my teacher's chair. I had only a small handful of friends, and my three siblings were triplets three years my junior – too young and too numerous for me to do much with them. I took piano lessons and played soccer. I loved to read and liked to write. It never much occurred to me to pay much attention to or compare myself with my peers. When I was bad, I was disciplined sternly, so I tried to avoid being bad, but more importantly, being caught; I was decent at both.
A few years later, things began to change for me. By this point, I had realized that I was not like most of my peers. The friend with whom I had been baptized was now in my grade, having failed a year. I was first clarinet in the school band, good at art, good at science, read quickly and wrote well, and stayed out of trouble. But school still bored me. Weekly church and Sunday School attendance was still expected but not exactly my favorite activity. I know now that by this point, our church had already well-begun its descent into a leaden complacency. With neither spiritual nor intellectual motivation I was all but completely unchallenged in any facet of my life. I was arrogant, contemptuous, and depressed. There were points when I could see no reason why God was still keeping me on this miserable planet. I saw no purpose for my life – no passion, no vision, no direction; questions of identity went unanswered. The happy faith of my naïve childhood was disconnected from my life. All the inspirational Bible stories that were supposed to give moorings to my life were meaningless to me. I still very much believed in God, believed the Bible stories, believed that somehow God loved me, believed in a heaven which I would eventually enjoy. But these beliefs were so far removed from the experience I knew of as my life that they meant nothing to me. Granted, these things are all quite mild, but the reality was still that I was living a life far removed from communion with God. No one had ever warned me about the valley I was passing through or instructed me on how I might deal with it. I questioned God, that distant King who had forgotten about me, and heard nothing. I thought myself unimportant, unremarkable, valueless, someone who would not be missed.
At some point in those darker days, I remember my mother telling me the secret to living a happy life: pray for Jesus to come into my heart; that was all I needed to do, and my life would be joyous. This didn't sound like a radically new idea, and I think I had heard it before, or at least, something to that effect. But I tried praying that prayer anyway. What had I to lose? It was a prayer I repeated time and time again. And a year later, maybe more, maybe less, I remember responding to a sort of altar-call at some summer day-camp program at a neighbor's house, and with tears in my eyes, I again prayed the ‘sinner's prayer’ so that I might be saved, just in case it didn't work the first time around. I don't remember any difference for any of them.
I passed through the challenges of those years, or as it may be, the doldrums of those years, and as I approached high school, I found myself drifting toward a curious sort of religious fundamentalism. Although I had gone through the confirmation process and officially joined our church a few years earlier, the religion I had known from my youth I no longer found completely satisfying. By the influence of one of my friends, I became incredibly interested in young-earth creation science, the only logical alternative to naturalist evolution in my mind, and I began frequenting the church of my girlfriend, an extremely conservative independent Baptist congregation. I saw in that church a certain curious passion and energy which we lacked in my ‘frozen chosen’ congregation five minutes in the other direction, a respectable, established mainline church where all things were done decently and in order. At times I was disturbed by some of the things I heard from the pulpit and the pews in that church, but they challenged me in ways that Elmer Presbyterian never did, mostly in areas of faith rather than doctrine. I was concerned, however, that I could not give the date on which I was saved. Would I use the date of my altar-call (or more accurately, my porch-call) even though I didn't know the date? Perhaps the earlier time my mother told me about asking Jesus into my heart? Was there an earlier time I didn't remember, or perhaps it was somewhere between the two when it finally clicked? Or (and this was most disturbing of all) maybe I never really got it right and was, like that minister in the Left Behind novels, currently headed straight to the fires of Hell? That is, unless I had the good fortune of realizing my situation by not being taken up in the rapture with all the true evangelical Christians.
My relationship with my own church was also beginning to strain. I was beginning to recognize the shallowness in our congregation, in the sermons, in our dumbed-down music, in our liturgy, in the booklets we used in our adult Sunday-school course, in the lack of enthusiasm for mission. I had been ordained as a deacon for the last year and a half I was in Elmer, but those duties consisted mainly in helping with the fellowship hour the first Sunday of every month following Communion. Outside of one elderly woman, a friend of the family for as long as I can remember, I was not close to really anyone in my church outside of family, and there were precious few members under forty. This was not an authentic manifestation of the Body of Christ. Cynicism was something which always came easily for me, and I found this turning on both my church and the evangelical church as a whole. My infatuation with fundamentalism began to relax, and I looked forward very much to an opportunity to leave my school, church, and home for the promised land of Houghton College. I thought this small Wesleyan institution nestled in the gentle hills of western New York would be the perfect haven for me to grow as a Christian composer, a retreat into a safe place for four years of formation, training, and learning before I would be released upon the world, a starry-eyed idealist out to make a difference for Christ.
What grand plans I had! How God would be pleased with what I would accomplish for him! And then one day before school as I sat alone by a stream in the wilderness, I listened intently for the voice of God. For a full day I sat there watching the water rush around the rocks, listening to the song of the birds, swatting at insects, and waiting for God to appear to me in glorious revelation, or at the very least in a clear whisper. There was nothing.
It was the perfect opportunity for God – I was alone, doing nothing but sitting and waiting for his revelation, fully prepared to heed his call, and he was silent. I was upset. Did God not see that I was listening for his voice, his instruction, his direction? Why would he be silent at such a time as then when I so wanted him to speak? He had spoken to others, so I had read, so I had been told. Did he not hear me? Did he not exist?
I realized from God's silence that day that the fault lay in my own spiritual sloth. When forced to be honest with my own fallen being, I saw that I was not truly seeking him for direction or communion. I was awaiting some unmistakable theophany, but one which did not require travel to the mountain of God. Like in the darker days of my more youthful days, God again felt distant. The past eighteen years at Elmer Presbyterian had taken their toll on my spiritual vitality, and I wanted it to change.
Upon my arrival at Houghton, I was not much disappointed. The solidly Christian atmosphere was quite refreshing for a soul-weary traveler such as I, and I had as many opportunities to grow and be challenged musically as I had spiritually. With the credits I was able to transfer in from my high school studies, after my first year I only ventured out of the music building for select theology and philosophy courses of my choosing, and these along with guidance from various other teachers and sources (among these I number Dallas Willard, Marva Dawn, and the work of such theologians as Robert W. Jenson, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Eberhard Jüngel), I was greatly challenged in my understanding of God and worship and my outlook on life. The fundamentalism I came so close to embracing only a few years earlier evaporated, and I found myself looking back to my Presbyterian heritage with a new appreciation for Reformed theology. God was moving again in my life, guiding me, shaping me, creating in me something new.
I was also better coming to terms with my own identity even as it was being shaped by those around me. Those whom I most respected and with whom I spent the most time shared much of my cynicism regarding the state of the contemporary evangelical church and subculture without sacrificing their love of God, and I fed on this. I went so far as to write an anthem for my church choir back home, something with musical and theological substance that would be different than the garbage they had been singing for the past several years. It was my hope that if given something they could actually sink their teeth into, they would rise to the occasion, renew their effort and focus, and bring to Elmer Presbyterian something that would address a terrible want. These were my brothers and sisters with whom I had sang for several years; surely they would appreciate my effort. Instead they spurned my work and rejected my sacrifice; I now hold little hope for the future prospects of that congregation, and I am sad for the small handful of persons left there for whom I actually have a degree of respect. They have, like so many others, I fear, traded in their divine birthright for thin spiritual stew.
God also saw it fit to provide me in my development with the opportunity to explore a bit of postmodern thought and expression within a Christian framework, which I found quite intriguing. As I read and discussed more, I realized how refreshing it was to hear various theorists and writers articulate things that I felt true but was unable to see or say. Of course, there was also much garbage, but oh how liberating it was to see that my religion need not remain enslaved to modernity! The unattractive faces of evangelical Christianity which frustrate me, anger me, those which grate against my soul – they need not be my faith!
Synthesis was now, and still is, my challenge – how do I go about incorporating my postmodern tendencies as a 21st century Christian and composer with a fervent devotion to God and allegiance to classical Christian beliefs, traditions, and practices? How indeed. But God is my salvation, and I will always remain a work in progress. To answer the question about the lack of a date on the front cover of my Bible, to answer the one who asks, When were you saved? I say, well, I am still very much being saved, and I still have an eternity to go before I get there. But if you still want a date, here, you may have this one: it was on a Friday afternoon, A.D. 33, on a hill just outside Jerusalem.
God is my salvation, the strength of my heart and my portion forever. He has revealed himself to us, and it is he who saves us. I know him to be the ultimate Creator of all things, and although our world is permeated with sin and its effects, in the end through the sacrifice of Christ and bond of the Holy Spirit all things will be made new, and we will live with our resurrected bodies in the wholly redeemed creation in the joyous presence of the Triune God. He desires for me joy and holiness and all manner of good things, that I might have life and life abundant. In this present age, I know him as the font of all beauty, truth, and goodness, and my highest goal is communion with him.
In my darker days, I was wrong about my value. I saw no purpose, meaning, or direction for my life. That which I had been taught was far removed from my experience; God seemed so distant. But I was wrong. In his mercy and grace God guided me through those years and steered me through many curious waters to where I am now, and in his wisdom his hand has not left me alone to my own devices. I have a much fuller appreciation for my own identity – an identity that has as much to do with those around me as it does with my own person, an identity found in Christ. I have purpose and direction as a disciple of Christ in the world of composition, and I trust that he will continue to guide me so that I may glorify God and enjoy him forever.
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
attacca