“If when we die we just go back to the dirt, well, then nothing matters. But if the Christian story is true — that Jesus died and rose again — then everything matters,” says the Newsboys’ lead singer Peter Furler.

If Jesus died and rose again it means every one of us is heading for one of two destinations, according to C. S. Lewis: being “immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

My friend Greg Davis lost his battle with esophageal cancer this week. But he won a more significant campaign. Greg loved Jesus. And Greg lived as though he weren’t just returning to dirt. He lived as though he were destined to become an everlasting splendour.

I’ve known few people as gifted in so many areas — and so unwilling to trumpet his abilities. Raised in Liberia by missionaries from the U.S. (his dad was a bush pilot), Greg responded to God’s call to the nations by equipping himself for ministry and going to Ireland as a missionary. When his marriage fell apart and he found himself a single dad, he took up counseling. His pastoring was characterized by an unusual capacity to care for the discarded and ignored — thus, I think, our mutual love for French artist Georges Rouault.

Along the way Greg found he had a knack for photography and for wordsmithing — so he published a book of his photos and poems, Windows of the Heart: Poetry & Photographs (Writers Press, 2002). Because nobody else around him seemed to understand how to make their computers work, he learned “information technology” (even figuring how PCs work — to Greg, that anybody would use anything but a Mac was proof of radical depravity). Though he felt his IT ability was as much a curse as a gift, he gave himself selflessly to helping others use digital technology (“Well, the basic reason your computer’s not working is that it’s not plugged in”).

A couple of months after I started leading worship at Orangewood, I felt it was time to bring a little art into our “sanctinasium” (sanctuary/gymnasium/school auditorium). It’s one thing for reformed people to have a lean aesthetic — but gym aesthetics are beyond lean. I’d say more like off-puttingly utilitarian — without even the hauntingly mysterious potential of catacombs. In support of lyrics that particular Sunday I projected some art I use in classroom teaching, and I did so with a singular set of fears: that the congregation would find the art helpful but me unable to find the time to provide the art from week to week. “Lord, I offer this to you — but if it’s going to be more than a one shot deal, you’re going to have to do something.”

No sooner did the service end than a short, bald, bearded guy walked up to me: “Hey, I just started working at the church part-time in IT … but my real interest is art … if you have any interest in doing more of what you did this morning, I think I might be able to help.”

Little in ministry has given me more pleasure over the last four years than brainstorming with a gifted and godly worship team about how readings, segues, songs, prayers, sacraments and sermons can complement each other — and then sitting back to watch Greg create slide backgrounds, videos, poetry, and handouts to make a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. See his corpus at writeclik.com. His visual point of departure might be a Vermeer or a Rembrandt or a Rouault or a cathedral or a train station or a worked-metal cross atop an Istanbul church or a neon-lit cross in front of an Orlando rescue mission. His imaginative capacity and theological depth and biblical breath were astonishing. And his friendship irreplaceable.

A week before his death we sang, “Be Still My Soul,” and I could barely get through it because I knew my friend would soon be departing:

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on your side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
leave to your God to order and provide;
in ev’ry change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: your best, your heav’nly Friend
through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul: your God will undertake
to guide the future as He has the past.
Your hope, your confidence let nothing shake;
all now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know
His voice who ruled them while he dwelt below.

Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart,
and all is darkened in the vale of tears.
Then shall you better know his love, his heart,
who comes to soothe your sorrow and your fears.
Be still, my soul: your Jesus can repay
from His own fullness all He takes away.

Be still, my soul: the hour is hast’ning on
when we shall be forever with the Lord.
when disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past,
all safe and blessed we shall meet at last.

The second most enjoyable thing I’ve done in the last two years (the first was gator hunting last year) was going to the U2 Vertigo concert in Miami as Greg’s guest (thus the “vintage” post elsewhere on this site, “BB&BB: The Beat Goes On”). So I know the sign-off Greg would prefer is from his favorite Irish theologian, Bono:

Grace
It’s a name for a girl
It’s also a thought that changed the world.
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things.

The Athenians waived their claim in the interest of national survival, knowing that a quarrel about the command would certainly mean the destruction of Greece. They were, indeed, perfectly right; for the evil of internal strife is worse than united war in the same proportion as war itself is worse than peace. It was their realization of the danger attendant upon lack of unity which made them waive their claim, and they continued to do so as long as Greece desperately needed their help. (Herodotus, Histories 8.2)

Following the deaths of the Spartan King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the various Greek city-states decided they needed to pull together. Xerxes’ gargantuan army and navy were poised to overwhelm Greece, indeed the whole of Europe. At the eleventh hour the Greeks realized they needed each other.

Traditionally, Greece looked to Sparta for leadership on land and to Athens for leadership on the sea. But in this case there were misgivings about giving Athens command of the city-states’ combined fleets (despite Athens’ contributing the largest number of ships). Herodotus isn’t clear whether the reluctance was due to lack of confidence in or envy against Athens, or due simply to a recognition of Sparta’s moral capital.

The point is: Athens “got it,” to quip Herodotus: civil war in the face of an external threat is suicide.

Or, in Facebook-speak: mutual defenestration means self annihilation. When the enemy is at the gate, that’s not the time to be throwing each other out the window.

Rather than lobby for their traditional right to command, Athens accepted Spartan command of the navy as well as of the army. The result: two brilliant victories — one by Greece’s combined navies (at Salamis) and one by Greece’s combined armies (at Plataea) — and one huge and final retreat by Xerxes. The result: daughters of neither Athens nor Sparta were exported to harems in Persepolis.

There are times that call for a sense of measure and proportion — times when you need not to be doing a smack down on each other. Fifth century B.C. Greece it figured out. Will we?

On one front, we face militant Islamists who have declared a reverse Crusade on us, demanding we either grovel before a disincarnate cosmic monad, or die.

On another, Mormons, arguably the fastest growing religion on the planet, knock on our doors with their terminal niceness (with, as Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven chillingly recounts, notable exceptions) and their uber-Disney promise that not only can you wish upon a star but you can get your own star where you’ll be a god or goddess.

Then there are the angry atheists who grouch about the immorality and intellectual suicide of faith. And just wait until this Christmas season’s (how deliciously ironic) release of the movie based on Philip Pullman’s vision of anti-Narnia: The Golden Compass.

Meanwhile, mainline Western churches languor under the sway of pre-pagan eros and post-Christian heterodoxy, embodying in a way that couldn’t be more precise Jude’s prescient warning about “ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).

It’s an extraordinary time for evangelicals to rediscover the stability of the Bible’s meta-narrative of creation, fall and redemption —  the one true and enduring story that puts the lie to the false stories of jihad, of self-deification, of autonomy, of faux Christianity. A stability that allows us to read each other’s odd takes on the story with sufficient grace to account for the Grace that took on flesh to cover all our inadequacies.

In the end, much more is at stake than when the beneficiaries of the sacrifice of King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” took stock of the price that had been paid for them. Nothing less than the opportunity to embody an answer to the prayer of the Second Person of the Trinity: “May they all be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you: may they be in us that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21).