The Warrior Priest Podcast

An old man was doing his daily walk along the beach one morning, when he spotted a young boy crouched by the water, scooping something up from the sand and throwing it into the sea. The beach was normally empty at this time of day, and so the old man stopped to watch for a while. He noticed that the boy kept on shuffling a little further down the beach, then repeating this same action again and again – stopping, scooping, throwing, moving. “What are you doing there, boy?” the old man asked, walking closer. “I’m saving these starfish that are stranded” replied the boy, “if they stay on the beach they will dry out and die, so I’m putting them back into the ocean so they can live.” The old man was silent for a few seconds. “Young man” he said, “on this stretch of beach alone, there must be more than one hundred stranded starfish. Around the next corner, there must be at least one thousand more. This goes on for miles and miles and miles – I’ve done this walk every day for 10 years, and it’s always the same. There must be millions of stranded starfish! I hate to say it, but you’ll never make a difference.” The boy replied “well I just made a difference for that one”, and continued with his work.

There's only one thing, one person, who makes you a Christian, and it's not you. It's Jesus Christ alone through the work of the Holy Spirit because the Father wants it. That's the only thing that translates sinners into Christ's kingdom.

In this episode, I ruminate on what it's like to get old, and what that means for training and life. 

...without Jesus Christ, you would be right to revile God for evil. In that case, you should try to run out of this world and find some better god. But your mistake was to run to what you imagined was a god while the true God was coming into the world to end evil.

When Christians confess together their belief in the forgiveness of sin, it's like pinching themselves to make sure that what they heard isn't a dream. Absolution seems somehow illicit, frightening, and joyful all at once. Can this be true? May God just forgive me? Can a word of promise accomplish what's promised? Is it right? Is it binding? Will it last? Is it legal? Is it even possible for the God who knows all things and counts the hairs on our heads to forget something, especially something as obvious as our selfishness?

In his fictional world of Middle Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien has adapted old world ideologies by removing the parts he deemed to be un-Christian and in doing so created a warrior’s code for the new world.

Deliver us from evil, we pray. That's what Jesus taught us to pray. But, in Greek, the petition in the Lord's Prayer is this: Deliver is from the evil one. Evil is not an abstract concept. It's not an outdated, old-fashioned idea like swinging a dead cat over your head to ward off evil. Evil is personified and personalized as the work of the evil one. The devil, Satan, the father of lies, the Prince of Darkness masquerading as an angel of light.

For the Anglo-Saxons, a man’s value to society was dependent on his ability to take his place in the social order: to pledge unshakeable loyalty to his lord and in return for the lord to prove his value as a leader by rewarding loyal warriors with gifts and status. This transaction is what imbued a man with his “worth”, or weorð in Old English, and this was what constituted honor. The warrior class separated themselves from “ordinary” folk based on a sense of honor, defining themselves as the geweorðode or those “made worthy”.

What you need redeeming from, deliverance from, is your slavery. You are in bondage. You are in a pickle. And I tell you, soberly, you are in a big pickle. In the end, there's no escape. But there is deliverance. There is redemption. There is a way for you to get into the wedding feast.

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” – Epictetus, Discourses