Repost: In praise of seashells and coffee too

John Piper, more gnosticism, and works righteousness

Fellow pilgrims,

This week is a vacation for me. I’m re-posting this piece, which I originally published here last October. I’m heading to the beach, and I plan to praise the maker of seashells and remember that I can’t waste my life, because my life is God’s.

Last October, John Piper took to the app formerly known as Twitter to help everyone get ready for church by cancelling coffee.

While I don’t love a cup of coffee in the sanctuary, I hardly think this is the meaning of the text from Hebrews. This got me thinking about Piper’s noted “seashells” sermon.

It begins with two stories. First, a story Piper deems “not a tragedy.”

“Three weeks ago, we got word…that Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards had both been killed in Cameroon. Ruby was over eighty. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: to make Jesus Christ known...Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing eighty years old, and serving at Ruby’s side...

The brakes give way, over the cliff they go, and they’re gone—killed instantly.

And I asked my people: was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great vision, spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ—two decades after almost all their American counterparts have retired to throw their lives away on trifles...No. That is not a tragedy. That is a glory.”

Next, Piper pulled out this powerful rhetoric:

“I’ll tell you what a tragedy is. I’ll read to you from Reader’s Digest…‘Bob and Penny…took early retirement…Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their thirty-foot trawler, playing softball and collecting shells.’

That’s a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream…The American Dream: a nice house, a nice car, a nice job, a nice family, a nice retirement, collecting shells as the last chapter before you stand before the Creator of the universe to give an account of what you did: ‘Here it is Lord — my shell collection!’”

Then, his commanding line:

“Don’t waste your life.”¹

White Shell with Red, 1938, Georgia O’Keeffe, via the Art Institute of Chicago

I’m not saying there’s no truth in Piper’s move here. It is the case that a shallow, capitalist, and racist² “American Dream” can erode the beauties of the Christian life. It is the case that advertisers and corporations want us loyal to that empty dream. And so, it’s no wonder that people caught a vision from this sermon, a vision for a different kind of life, lived in and for Christ in ways that find satisfaction and meaning, not in that vacuous dream, but in the gospel.

But.

You don’t beat capitalism by telling people to try real hard, and I’ve got some serious theological worries about Piper’s pitting Ruby and Laura against Bob and Penny, which devalues all four lives and life itself.

The rhetoric is gnostic.

(I wrote, here, about gnosticism in Piper’s complementarian claims. I’m not using the word “gnostic” in a historical sense. I’m using it to point to a conceptual problem, in which the material and bodily is devalued, and the spiritual is pitted against the material. Christian theology recognizes this as a heresy, because God made the whole creation, both material and spiritual, and called it all “good.” Against a heretical gnosticism, I want to embrace a Christian holism, which sees all creation as good and purposeful.)

The seashell sermon is gnostic, first, because of the easy way it plays with the lives of four real people—Ruby and Laura and Bob and Penny—reducing them to make a point tinged with the self-righteousness of the judge, who knows, with no hint of doubt, which story is “glory” and which “tragedy.”

The deaths of Ruby and Laura are brushed over, no room for grief.

(Because of the resurrection, death is not the ultimate tragedy, but it is still a grief, and human grief still matters. Death is the wage of sin. We’re allowed to cry against it. It’s not, “the valley of the shadow of death is a great place;” it’s “even though” we walk that valley, God is with us (Psalm 23:4). It’s not, “don’t mourn!” but “blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4), and it’s not, “you may not grieve” but “you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).)

Ruby and Laura matter. They matter, body and soul. They are beloved of God, and their deaths are grievous. God bless those who knew and loved them, who mourned their loss even as they were used as a sermon illustration. God bless Ruby and Laura, resting in hope of resurrection.

Bob and Penny fare worse. They get no acknowledgement of their personhood. They get no questions.

(Did they retire early because of illness? Did they spend their lives on love? Are they living on that boat because they sold the house to put a kid through rehab? It’s not that they have to answer any of these questions to merit the status: “lives unwasted,” but the habit of asking a few questions can go a long way towards subtlety and sympathy.)

Bob and Penny get condemnation; the preacher mocks these people and their shells.

But Bob and Penny matter. They matter, body and soul. They are beloved of God, and it’s not their job to make their lives matter, certainly not to make them matter on John Piper’s terms. Their lives matter because God made them and loves them, even if they’ve been sucked in by a broken dream. God bless them.

And seashells matter.

Every bit of creation—angel to amoeba, star to sludge—proclaims the glory of God.

Delight in the Lord of the seashells, which we humans have noticed for their beauty from ancient times.

Wonder at the King of the mollusk, who wrapped that soft bit of meat in calcium carbonate; love is an exoskeleton, of all the things.

Pray, as you trace a shell’s logarithmic spirals, admire its tessellations, or set it on a windowsill to observe its translucence, both to light and to the creator.

“O LORD, how manifold are your works!
    In wisdom you have made them all;
    the earth is full of your creatures.
  There is the sea, great and wide;
    creeping things innumerable are there,
    living things both small and great” (Psalm 104:24-25). 

Though the world is the Lord’s, Piper sets that world against a life lived for God, encouraging a “wartime mind-set” (DWYL).

Piper paraphrases a bit of Paul thusly:

“‘I will not waste my life! I will finish my course and finish it well. I will display the Gospel of the grace of God in all I do. I will run my race to the end’ - Paul” (DWYL).

Given Piper’s confidence, it’s easy to forget that Paul doesn’t say anything about wasted lives, that this is an interpretation resting on Piper’s assumptions. Paul does talk of pouring himself out, but there is no dichotomy between wasted life and spiritual life, no hint that his life could come to nothing if he fails (see in and around 1 Timothy 4).

Here Piper’s gnostic thinking has him stumbling into the trap he most wants to avoid: works righteousness. The unwasted life is the try-hard life.

Against this, I’ll try a little Pauline paraphrase myself:

Did you receive the Spirit by making your life count or was it by trusting in Christ?

(See in and around Galatians 3.)

We’re co-heirs with the Son, beloved children of the Father.

Who among you, when your child shows you their seashell collection, will dash it to the ground as if it were nothing?

(I’m paraphrasing Jesus now, which, I’ll admit, is rather gutsy of me, but I’m so convinced he has shown me the character of the Father, I’m going for it. See in and around Matthew 7.)

We don’t have to work to make our lives matter. They matter because God made us and loves us. Life is a miracle.

Getty Villa, via Wikimedia Commons

In his book by that title (Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition) Wendell Berry invites us into mystery:

“I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.”

Berry condemns messages which urge us to make our lives meaningful and extraordinary:

“This degrades and impoverishes ordinary life, ordinary work, and ordinary experience.

Life is a miracle, and that frees us to bear witness in a tiny community or a small church, to give up on grasping to become celebrity pastors who preach to 40,000 and get nice book deals.

Life is a miracle, and that frees us to love messy kids in the middle of the messes kids make, to give up on crafting a social media version of that life, where the babies never spit up, the heritage chickens never poop, and the followers can be monetized.

It frees us to do “secular” work, because the world is God’s, and it frees us to rest, to go slow, to rely on others and to pay attention to the small, because God is the God of sabbath.

Jesus paid it all, my friends, and so—thank Goodness—we don’t have to make our lives count. They do matter, but they can’t count. Jesus did all the counting, once for all. And life isn’t short; no clocks are ticking; life is everlasting in Christ our Lord.

So, we’re freed to love and to serve, even in the midst of our no-count weakness, smallness, and brokenness. We’re freed to have a cup of coffee, if we want it. I’d prefer a Coke.

We’re freed to attend to the glory of God in the world around us, in enjoying a beverage with friends or watching crabs skitter and little mollusks burrow into the sand.

Shell shaped baptismal font in St Peter's church, Prickwillow, Cambridgeshire. James Yardley, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I pray, for you and for me, for freedom from Piper’s anxious call, “Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion” (DWYL).

Significance is already ours in Jesus; we don’t need to try to whip up any other eternal significance.

With the poet Edward Hirsh,³ we can turn our backs on that furious hamster wheel and take a walk on the beach.

There, we may find we are “so small” we’ve become “a tiny seashell/that has secretly drifted ashore”

"and carries the sound of the ocean
surging through its body.
I am so small now no one can see me.
How can I be filled with such a vast love?"

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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1. Don’t Waste Your Life became the title of his subsequent book, with over a million copies sold. I’ll abbreviate quotations from the book with the letters DWYL.

2. See Ta-Nehesi Coates’s Between the World and Me for his critique of that dream.

3. Edward Hirsch, “The Widening Sky” from Lay Back the Darkness, 2003; the full text of the poem is available at the poetry foundation, here.