All Things New

To All People

2012-01-31T13:32:00.000-06:00

Paul has a right to be paid for his work as a minister. That's the essence of Paul's rather forceful argument in the first 14 verses of 1 Corinthians 9. Paul first cites the other apostles as precedent. They apparently were not only paid for their own work but were compensated well enough to have their spouses travel with them as well. Paul then cites other careers; soldiers, farmers, and shepherds all receive a reward for their work. Paul ups the ante a bit more by saying this is not merely a matter of human practice but a matter of the Law. He cites Deuteronomy 25:4 "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain." This meant that an ox was allowed to eat some of the very grain it was helping to prepare for human consumption as reward for its labor. Surely if the law takes care to make provision for a farm animal to receive the proper reward for its work then at least as much would be true for a minister of the gospel. Finally, Paul cites those employed in service in the Temple who share in the food from the sacrificial offering as reward for their work. Paul says "In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel." Right here in the middle of 1 Corinthians, Paul gives his best argument for a pastoral pay day. What pastor wouldn't love to preach from this passage of Scripture?

But then we keep reading and find out that Paul hasn't collected on this pay day and doesn't intend to do so. He says "But I have made no use of any of these rights, nor am I writing these things to secure any such provision." So then why this long argument for why he should be paid?

It seems that Paul, somewhat ironically, is actually defending his right to be paid in order to argue for his right to not be paid. Or to put it more precisely, he is defending his authority as an apostle in spite of not having taken any money from the Corinthians. It is important to remember that Paul as a preacher did not fit into a predefined role in his culture. There was no widely recognized office of "pastor" or "elder" at this point in history with accompanying expectations of financial compensation. Paul was a free lance missionary. In the Corinthians view, what Paul was doing was probably most like the teachers of philosophy or rhetoric of the day; the best ones found wealthy patrons to support them with a steady income while the rest had to move from student to student to find pay. The least employable teachers might have to take up a more menial task alongside teaching in order to bolster their income. Of course, this is precisely what Paul had done working as a tent-maker while also preaching the gospel. The Corinthians reasoned in reverse that perhaps if Paul had to supplement his income by such a lowly trade then perhaps he didn't really have much authority as an apostle or should not even be called an apostle. The point of Paul's argument then is to show that he has every right to be paid and he has not foregone payment because of any lack of authority. Instead, he has done so in order not to be a burden to the Corinthians.

But Paul's going without payment actually runs much deeper than merely avoiding financial burden for the Corinthians. It is an embodiment of the very gospel Paul preached to them. Repeatedly throughout Corinthians Paul has insisted that living out the gospel means not insisting on one's own status and rights but acting out of love for the benefit of others. Paul argues in the opening chapters of the epistle that this is what Jesus has done for us; lowering himself to be crucified on our behalf. Paul says his ministry fits the same pattern: "That in my preaching I may present the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel."

Now Paul is calling upon the Corinthians to do the same thing: to forego their rights and act out of love for the benefit of others. This is where we realize that this chapter is not an aside disconnected from what has gone before. In the previous chapter, Paul has just been exhorting the "mature" in Corinth to give up their right to eat meat in order to benefit those who are "weak" in their faith. Chapter 9 serves as a model of Paul having done that very thing for the Corinthians themselves. Although Paul may have moved onto the seemingly unrelated topic of his authority to receive payment, he does so in such a way that continues to address the Corinthians' fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel. He is reminding the Corinthians (and us) yet again that the gospel is not yet another tool to be used in our own self-advancement. It is actually about precisely the opposite of that. The gospel way of life is one of humbling ourselves for the benefit of others.

Paul goes on to talk about how he is so radically free in the gospel that he has made himself servant to all, so free that he is able to change for others for the sake of the gospel.

"To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings"

It seems to me that one of our favorite hobbies as Christians is to fight over really inconsequential things as if they were essential. As American Christians especially, we are pretty fond of insisting on our rights. What would the Church be like if instead of squabbling over every little detail to which we think we are entitled our language could sound more like Paul's? What if we were so free in the gospel we could say:

"To the liberal I became a liberal, in order to win liberals. To the conservative, I became a conservative.... To the foreigner... To the un-churched... To the skeptic...To the uneducated... To the weak... To the poor..."

What if we could say about everything we do "I do it all for the sake of the gospel."?

Knowledge Serving Love

2012-01-26T13:58:00.000-06:00

As Paul continues to respond to questions the Corinthians have written to him about, he addresses yet another issue in 1 Corinthians 8 that in itself is of virtually no relevance to us whatsoever - meat sacrificed to idols. In the first century, it was common civic practice for Roman citizens to eat meat that had been sacrificed to some Roman god. In fact, by many estimates it may have been nearly impossible in a thoroughly Greco-Roman city like Corinth to obtain any meat at the local market that hadn't been sacrificed to an idol. This was simply the way meat was processed in much of the ancient world. Additionally, participating in the ceremonies and festivals that produced this meat was an important civic duty. Abstaining from these feasts would have been seen as unpatriotic. For the wealthier Corinthians especially, the networking that occurred during these feasts was vital to their social standing. If they attended the feast but refused the meat offered then they would be seen as not being gracious toward their host and would be dishonored among their peers. If they avoided the feasts altogether then they would likely be branded as someone who was self-serving and didn't have the best interest of the city or the empire at heart.

But it seems that the congregation at Corinth was divided about whether or not eating meat sacrificed to an idol was acceptable Christian behavior . Apparently some felt that it was not acceptable and that it was equivalent to participating in the worship of the idol itself. Another group, probably the wealthier Corinthians who depended upon these feasts for their social standing, argued that this was non-sense. "After all", we can infer them arguing from what Paul has written, "we all know that there is only one God. These idols aren't real gods so they pose no real danger. Therefore, we should all eat meat sacrificed to idols to demonstrate our knowledge about God. Anyone who refuses to eat meat sacrificed to idols is simply weak in their faith and needs to mature so that they too can eat meat."

Its actually not a bad argument and Paul doesn't disagree with the logic itself. Its very likely that Paul actually agrees with the Corinthians who say there is no real danger in eating meat that has been sacrificed to an idol. But he does disagree with the foundation upon which they are basing their actions. We see this in Paul's profound words in the opening verses of this chapter.

"We know that all of us posses knowledge. This knowledge puffs up but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God."

Paul is agreeing with the meat-eating Corinthians in one sense, saying "Yes, you are right. We all have the knowledge that there is only one God and that idols have no real power." But then he immediately lets them know that they are using this knowledge incorrectly. Instead of using this knowledge to serve others and build each other up they are using it to puff themselves up and tear down others they consider weak. Paul essentially goes on to say that anyone who thinks they are "in the know" has actually missed the point entirely because the Christian life is not about being "in the know", it is about being known by God and loving as God loves. In a few short sentences, Paul has completely turned the tables on the Corinthians' logic. The meat eating Corinthians have built an ethic with knowledge as its supreme foundation. Everything else is forced to serve this knowledge. Paul says they've got it backwards because the Christian ethic is not built solely on knowledge (though its important) but has love as its ultimate foundation. Christian wisdom is meant to be employed in the service of Christian love, not the other way around. Furthermore, Paul reminds us that salvation does not consist in our knowledge of God but in God's knowing and loving us. We have not saved ourselves by finding God. It is God who has acted first and foremost to save us and the one who loves demonstrates this work of grace in their life.

As a result, even though Paul agrees with the meat-eating Corinthians in principle he tells them that they must stop eating meat sacrificed to idols because "by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died." Paul's language could not be much stronger. Paul is not talking about those who are "weak" merely "being offended" by those who eat meat. Paul is concerned that if those who are less mature in their faith are coaxed back into the pagan temples as a show of spiritual maturity before they are ready then they may not become more spiritually mature but instead may slip right back into their old life. (Paul's thinking is probably akin to what might happen if a group of Christians who were able to handle alcohol maturely were convincing a new Christian into going out for a drink with them not knowing that this new Christian was a recovering alcoholic.) In such a case the meat-eating Corinthians would quite literally be using their knowledge to destroy the very salvation that Jesus' death has provided for their brother in Christ.

Obviously, the issue of meat sacrificed to idols is largely irrelevant to us today but the larger issue of the role of knowledge in the Christian community certainly is not. Ever been in a Sunday School class that seemed to be little more than a contest to prove who had the most knowledge of the Bible? Ever heard a preacher who seemed to be more concerned with showing off than making disciples? Ever seen a "mature" Christian belittle the genuine questions of a younger/newer Christian? I have. A lot actually. In fact, I've been that person more times than I would like to admit. The truth is that this is yet another Corinthian issue that is still abundant in the Church today. We still find it much easier and alluring to be "in the know" than to be a people of love. Perhaps because knowledge can so easily give us a sense of self-importance and strength while love most often makes us feel vulnerable and even weak. So we end up establishing a pecking order of status in the Church based on Christian knowledge just like the world outside the Church might establish a pecking order based on wealth or success. But to truly be "in the know" in the Christian sense is to recognize that it is not about what we know but who knows us. And anyone who truly knows and is known by God is a person who knows and is known by grace and extends that same grace to others. Christian knowledge and wisdom are important but we have misused them if they ever serve any purpose other than building up our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Confusion from Corinthians: Part II

2012-01-11T16:49:00.000-06:00

So if Paul's advice to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 7:25-40 is very contextually specific and that context is not the same as our context and Paul was wrong in his assumptions about their context anyway, where does that leave us? In my post yesterday, I talked about the irony of preaching from any passage of Scripture but especially a passage like this one. However, I also mentioned that in spite of that irony, I still believe that the Spirit speaks through a text like this, even if that speaking is so intertwined with human speech that the two are seemingly indistinguishable. So the question now is "What does the Spirit have to say to us from 1 Corinthians 7:25-40?"

I think how we go about answering that question is important and I think my comparison of this passage to a counseling session from my post yesterday could be a helpful analogy. In reading this passage, we are essentially listening in on a pastoral counseling session; not the kind of session that explores deep seated psychological issues but the kind that involves giving spiritual direction and pastoral guidance about an important life decision. If someone came to me seeking such guidance there would basically be two questions I would have in mind: "What principles/values/criteria do you want to guide your decision making process?" and "What does it look like to act on those principles/values/criteria in this given situation?". Now let's imagine that I'm a really superb counselor and that the person leaves with principles and course of action in hand. However, a week later the person returns to my office, now unsure of the previously determined course of action because something about the situation has changed. In this instance, presumably the principles and values that guided the first decision would not have changed but the situation has so we would then discuss what living out those principles and values now look like in this new situation. It may turn out that the resulting course of action in completely different, maybe even polar opposite of the previously determined course of action but in this case that is fitting because of the change in circumstance.

I think we can approach Paul's pastoral counsel in this passage in a similar way. Paul is giving pastoral advice here based on assumptions about a specific context; namely the assumption that Christ's return would shortly follow his resurrection. We can plainly see that our circumstances have changed since Paul gave that advice but the "principle" on which he based the advice has not and is still relevant for us.

One difference here - and I think it is a substantial one - is that we as individuals don't decide what those "principles" are... at least not if we really want to submit ourselves to the text and hear the Spirit's voice rather than our own. If we really want to approach this text as Scripture and as a means of grace and not merely as just another piece of ancient rhetoric (which is always an option, of course), then we will not simply pick out the things with which we already agree and drop out the things with which we don't. Instead, our "principles" are the rule of faith, the Nicene Creed, the apostolic teaching, the themes that are consistent across all of Scripture, the shared beliefs of the historical Christian tradition, and the present community of faith. That is to say that we seek to hear the Spirit speak in this passage in fresh continuity with the places that the Spirit has spoken and continues to speak.

So then, what is the "principle", the theological foundation of this passage? What is it that transcends context and is consistent across Paul's teaching and that of the Church? It is what Paul states in v. 31: "The present form of this world is passing away." If Paul preached to us here 2000 years later, I expect he would revise his estimate concerning the speed with which it was passing away but would not recant the idea that the old order is indeed passing away. A new heaven and new earth, a new order, God's reign come to earth, is a central promise of the gospel message.

Fortuitously, we can return to part of the counseling analogy to consider what this meant for the Corinthians and what it means for us. In our oversimplified counseling scenario, let's imagine that the decision was about choosing between two jobs - one that allowed more family time and the other that payed more money. By the end of the counseling session the person decides that although family time is important the extra money could be more valuable at least until the economy gets better and more job opportunities open up. However, a few days later the job that allowed for more family time offers to match the other company's offer. Obviously, no one would consider it inconsistent or hypocritical to change's one mind in this scenario because the circumstances have changed.

This is essentially what Paul is communicating to the Corinthians and to us: "Your circumstances have changed!". The Corinthians are still making decisions based on the present form of this world that is passing away. Paul is saying don't get married or buy or sell or do anything the way you would normally do it because that way of doing things is fading away and soon there will be a new order, a new kingdom, a whole new way of doing things. Although this kingdom has not yet come, we still believe it is on its way and that the kingdoms of this world are on their way out. As a result, we are not called to abandon all ties with this world but to live in it in a way that shows we are part of another kingdom. We are to live knowing that our circumstances have changed.

This is essentially what repentance is about. In the gospel reading which the lectionary pairs with this passage, Jesus says what is programmatic for Mark's gospel: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel." That word "repent" has become such a religious word for us that we tend to associate it with hell fire sermons and tear-filled, guilt-laden trips to the altar. But it essentially means to turn around, to stop doing what you are doing and go in a different direction, to recognize that your circumstances have changed and to adjust your allegiances accordingly. That's why Jesus ties it to the announcement of his kingdom. The call to repentance is not a summons to a private religious confession. It is an announcement that a new world older has arrived and it would be wise to join this kingdom movement because one day it will replace all others. The Spirit is calling us to give up our allegiances to the kingdoms that our fading, powerful and alluring though they seem, and to pledge our allegiance to the kingdom of the crucified messiah.

Spiritual Powers of 10

2012-01-11T12:33:00.001-06:00

I have come to think of the Holy Spirit as being sort of a zero. That may sound heretical but stick with me for a couple of paragraphs before you bring out the torches and pitchforks.

Consider the role of the number zero in our mathematical system for a moment. Zero has no value. It represents nothingness; the absence of anything. As a result, it could be tempting to think that zero is unimportant. But it also serves as a place holder in our number system, reminding us that there is value represented by this number that has no value. What's the difference between 1 and 1,000,000? Nothing but a bunch of zeroes.... and 999,999 The reality is that without zero serving as a placeholder, our entire number system would fall apart. It would be meaningless. We would be unable to distinguish 1 from 1,000,000. Lacking the number zero wouldn't change the reality that there is a difference between 1 and 1,000,000. It would simply inhibit our ability to express that reality and therefore would limit our ability to carry out more complex mathematical computations. The number that means nothing makes all the difference.

It seems like the Holy Spirit sort of functions the same way in our theology. I believe that the Holy Spirit is active in my preaching, in the reading of Scripture, in the life of our community of faith forming us into the likeness of Christ. I believe that without the Spirit all of these things, even Church itself, would be meaningless. Yet have you ever tried to put your finger on the activity of the Spirit? When I preach, can we separate what was me and what was the work of the Spirit? When we interpret Scripture, which part of our interpretation is good scholarly research and which is the Spirit speaking? And when our church looks more like Christ, is that the Spirit moving or merely people being good people? The reality is that while we believe the Spirit is active and cooperates with our spirit in these things it also impossible to quantify the work of the Spirit of God... and for us it seems the temptation is always to think that saying something can't be quantified is the same as saying it has no value. Since we can't say exactly what the Spirit is doing its not long before we begin to think or at least act as if the Spirit's not really doing anything and that this Church stuff is entirely up to us.

But to speak of being the Church without the work of the Spirit is like saying 1 = 1,000,000. The difference between the Church in the power of the Spirit and whatever we call a random assembly of people singing a bunch of worship songs may appear to be nothing, a series of nothings, a series of unquantifiable happenings that appear to have no value. But that series of nothings means everything. It completely changes the equation. It brings exponential transformation while remaining virtually unnoticed itself.

Often as I listen to people verbalize their faith, I hear a lot of talk about God the Father and Jesus. The Holy Spirit seems to be the poor, forgotten step child of the Trinity, at least in the ways we often articulate our faith. Of course, lacking the Holy Spirit in our theology doesn't change the reality that the Spirit is at work in the Church. It simply inhibits our ability to express that reality and therefore limits our ability to more maturely understand who it is that God wants us to be. Without recognizing the work of the Holy Spirit, all kinds of heresies arise in our theological formulations. We begin to think that Jesus is merely an example to be imitated and that we can do that on our own so we don't understand why others don't just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like we did and become more Christ-like and as a result we become very un-Christ-like in our attempts to imitate Christ. Or we think that God's work is primarily about forgiving us through Jesus' death so all we have to do is accept that forgiveness and there is no further work of transformation to be done in our lives so its ok that we aren't like Jesus because we could never be that perfect anyway. Or we think evangelism and church growth is up to us and our programs...or on and on. Good theology doesn't guarantee good practice but it at least helps us know the kind of practices to which God is calling us. We not only need the Holy Spirit to be the Church. We also need the Holy Spirit to be prominent in our articulations about the Church. Without serious and deep reflection on the work of the Holy Spirit among us, our spiritual maturity will resemble the math skills of a child who can't count past 9.

Preaching Scripture and Irony

2012-01-10T15:42:00.001-06:00

A passage like 1 Corinthians 7:25-40 forces me to freshly confront again just how odd a thing it is I do every Sunday; this thing called preaching.

In these verses Paul is continuing to respond to the questions the Corinthians have asked him and now turns his attention to those who are engaged to be married. Paul says he has no command from the Lord on this matter but offers his own advice as one who is trustworthy in the Lord. That advice is "remain as you are". If married, stay married. If not married, then don't get married. But if you do marry, then you haven't sinned.

When you read a passage like this one, you can't help but recognize you are reading someone else's mail. In other passages of Scripture, even other parts of Paul's letters, its a little easier to forget this fact so we quickly elevate Paul's contextual advice to the level of universal maxim. The whole "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." sort of idea. But in this passage it is pretty obvious even to the casual reader that Paul is not making a statement that is meant for all people of all places at all times. He is giving pastoral advice to the Christians of 1st century Corinth based on how he understands their current situation. We are essentially reading over Paul's shoulder as he writers a letter that is not addressed to us; listening into a pastoral counseling session where we are not the ones being counseled.

And yet we are...

At least that is what the Church confesses when we call this letter Scripture. Even though Paul was not writing to us, this was written for us. Even though we are not the ones being counseled, this letter is for our counsel.

Not only is Paul not writing to us 21st century American Christians. One of the biggest assumptions that seems to inform Paul's advice to these 1st century Corinthians was .... well....just plain wrong. We can gather from Paul's letters that he expected Jesus to return and establish his kingdom very soon, probably within Paul's own lifetime. What is more, this assumption directly impacts the advice Paul is giving the Corinthians in this passage. It is, in fact, the very reason for it. He advises them to "remain as they are" precisely because he believes it would be foolish to enter into a new relationship when the whole world as we know it is going to be changing so soon. That seems like reasonable advice to me given the assumption of Christ's imminent return... but here I sit typing this blog post 2000 years later.

So here we have a text not addressed to us, answering a question we're not asking, and giving that answer based on an assumption that turned out to be wrong. In spite of all this, the Church confesses that God has something to say through these words to a congregation of people who will gather in central Illinois on a cold Sunday in January 2012. Surely, I'm not the only one who sees the irony here.

Despite the irony, on the aforementioned Sunday I will stand before the people with whom I share life and say of this text "Hear the Word of the Lord." I will do this not simply out of obligation or for the sake of doctrinal commitments but with a steady love and passion for Scripture to which only a handful of other passions in my life can be compared. I will do this not simply because I am their pastor but because over the course of my life I have experienced the reality of the Church's confession. I have found to be true what those early Christians who first called this letter Scripture also found to be true as they read what was not addressed to them: that this ink on paper, with all its humanity and imperfection, is one of the places where the Spirit of God speaks.

There are many, many passages of Scripture like this one where I wonder how God can be speaking through these words; Paul's words about slaves and women, the God-commanded genocide in the book of Joshua, or Psalm 137 just to name a few. It's tempting to simply ignore these parts, skip over them, or cut them out all together. But for some reason those early Christians didn't do that. For some reason, centuries after Paul wrote to the Corinthians when it was obvious that Paul had been quite wrong about the Lord's return, the Christians who were were deciding what should be included as "Scripture" didn't say "You know, we should really cut out that business about the time being short since Paul was obviously wrong about that." Instead, they let Paul's words stand and affirmed that God's grace could still be found in them.

Maybe this says something significant about the very nature of Scripture. Its just like us human beings (at least in the way Scripture talks about us) to think that in order for God to make use of something it has to be perfect, infallible. But think about all the other means of God's grace in our lives; the broken body of our Lord in communion, our death in baptism, our prayers, our preaching, the Church. Which of those aren't the very essence of brokenness? Which are infallible? Which aren't perfect and beautiful precisely because of their brokenness and fallibility? We have these treasures in jars of clay.

This was supposed to be a post about first 1 Corinthians 7 and I am now no closer to knowing how I will preach from this vexing passage than when I began. Nevertheless, I will sit before this text in all its vexation and I am confident that God's grace will meet me there once again. Speak Lord, for your servant is listening....

More Intimacy with Jesus

2012-01-04T14:07:00.002-06:00

Last week, I wrote about Intimacy, Mary, and Uninvited Guests. This week, as we begin the season of Epiphany, I am returning to the place in 1 Corinthians where we left off last Epiphany: 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, a passage that also speaks to intimacy - even a surprising kind of intimacy with Jesus.

Paul writes this portion of his letter to the Corinthians because they are apparently defending their right to go to prostitutes. It may be shocking to our modern Christian ears to hear that a church was openly defending its right to engage in prostitution. However, prostitution was not only legal in Roman society, it was probably a regular practice for most males in the gentile culture of the time. Therefore, the Corinthians are not arguing for something exceptional but want to continue what was typical in their context.

It even seems likely that they have argued for this right by way of their understanding of the gospel Paul preached to them. They're thinking probably went something along the lines of "Salvation in Christ is a strictly spiritual matter that has nothing to do with our physical bodies.". The slogan "All things are lawful for me" that begins v. 12 may even be something Paul himself said (sounds a lot like Paul's letter to the Galatians) that the Corinthians have now turned against him to justify their sexual practice. But Paul turns this slogan around to show the Corinthians that they are viewing the matter from the wrong perspective. "All things are lawful for me but not all things are beneficial. All things are lawful for me but I will not be mastered by anything." Sexuality (and the Christian life as a whole, for that matter) is not merely a matter of what is permitted but what is beneficial and to do everything I am permitted to do is not freedom but slavery to my own desires.

Similarly, the saying "Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food and God will destroy them both" may have been a twist on a stoic maxim that the Corinthians used to argue for the inconsequential nature of their physical actions since God would destroy the physical body anyway. The line of reasoning would go on to say that just as the stomach is for food so also the body is made for sex. But Paul interrupts this slogan by saying that "the body is not made for porneia (sexual immorality) but for the Lord and the Lord for the body"!

That surely had to be a twist the Corinthians didn't expect. The body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body?! Contrary to the Corinthians belief, the physical body is not inconsequential to God. Instead of destroying the body Paul says that God will raise us up, body included, just as Jesus was resurrected to new life.

Paul continues by saying that our bodies are also members of Christ. Therefore, for the Corinthians to go to a prostitute is the same as uniting the body of Christ to a prostitute. This is because sex is not merely a physical activity without spiritual ramifications. It is the uniting of two people as one flesh. Perhaps what is most fascinating here is that Paul uses the same word (kollomenos) to describe one's uniting with a prostitute as he does to describe the union between us and Christ in two statements that are clearly meant to mirror each other. "The one who unites with a prostitute is one in body with her". "The one who unites himself with the Lord is one in Spirit with him." That idea alone - that our union with Christ is somehow analogous to sexual union with a prostitute - ought to be enough to make us rethink sex and spirituality.

I don't imagine that I'll ever have anyone in my congregation try to convince me that engaging in prostitution is a suitable Christian practice but that doesn't mean we don't misunderstand sex and spirituality in many of the same ways. We too often see the gospel as a merely spiritual matter that has little to no consequences for our physical bodies. As a result, when the Church does teach that some physical actions are acceptable and other are not, as it does with sex, it seems forced - like an arbitrary list of rules that are leftovers from outdated cultural mores.

One of the things that I love about Paul in this passage of Scripture is that he doesn't simply impose a list of Jewish sexual norms on the Corinthians. He could have just pulled out a few chapters of Leviticus and said "Here. These are the rules you are supposed to follow when it comes to sex." but he didn't do that. Instead, he made an argument about how the Lordship of Christ informed the Corinthians' sexuality. Undoubtedly, the conclusions to which Paul comes regarding sex are shaped by his own Jewish heritage but he doesn't call on the Corinthians to simply agree with him by his authority as an apostle. He does call upon them to consider how the resurrection, their union with Christ, and the work of the Holy Spirit among them to make them the body of Christ all impact how they understand their physical bodies in relation to salvation.

Unfortunately, as Christians we often do exactly what Paul did not. We take some verses of Scripture, even Paul's own words, and say "Here are the rules for Christian sexuality" and expect them to be accepted simply by our authority as the Church. Rules aren't bad things. Sometimes, especially when we are young and immature, rules protect us from harm before we can fully understand the reason we need those rules. But at some point our faith needs to move beyond that and we need to begin reason about how the life, death, and resurrection of the one we call Lord radically changes our understanding of reality.

We might begin by asking what it says about sex that Paul can compare our union with Christ to sexual union. But perhaps the more rarely asked question is what it says about our relationship with Christ that Paul can compare it to sex. How is our intimacy with Jesus akin to sexual intimacy?

Intimacy, Mary, and Uninvited Guests

2011-12-28T14:36:00.000-06:00

The birth of a child is typically a supremely intimate and family oriented event. You can almost imagine concentric circles surrounding the birth of a child that indicate just how close those in each circle are to the new born child. Of course, the first circle includes really only the child and mother, as they have already been connected for months but very close to this circle is the one that also includes the father. Then the next circle might include siblings of the new born child and proud grandparents. In many instances, these may be followed by aunts and uncles and other extended family. It is usually only after this that very close friends of the family are allowed to see the child. Of course, not every birth works out just this way. The birth of my own children did not since we are so far from so much of our family. But even in the endless variations on this scenario, there is a strong sense that one must be invited into this intimate circle to see this new life and it would be considered very odd if a mere acquaintance showed up uninvited during this intimate family occasion.

Enter the shepherds. Can you imagine?! You've just welcomed your first child into the world, you are still gazing into the child's eyes, amazed at the wonder of this new life. You are still adjusting to this new reality that has been gifted to you. You want nothing other than to remain undisturbed, memorizing every feature of this child's face, responding to every little movement or noise. This is a still, quiet moment; peaceful in the deepest sense of that word. And all of a sudden a gang of smelly shepherds....SHEPHERDS!... straight from the field bust in and ruin the moment. And they are loud! They won't stop going on about some vision they've seen. They just keep yammering about how amazing it is! Then they come over and want to see the child; with their nasty, been working with animals all night hands and their ragged, dirty clothes, they want to see YOUR BABY; your weak, precious, helpless, fragile, new born baby. As if that's not enough, they start telling YOU how great YOUR new kid is going to be. THE AUDACITY! "I know how great he is, he's MY kid after all, thank you very much." Then they leave just as noisily as they came, still talking about the angels they saw and how excited they are about the birth of your child.

These shepherds are outsiders. They don't belong here. Don't they know they aren't part of the family? Don't they know they weren't invited? They've broken into a circle far more intimate than is their place.

But rather than rejecting the shepherds and having Joseph send them away, "Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart."

The truth is this was not the first and would not be the last time that someone would speak to Mary about her son in this way. Before Jesus was born, Mary's relative Elizabeth said "Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb!". Upon Jesus' presentation in the Temple, Simeon tells Mary "this child is appointed for the falling and rising of many in Israel." The same day, the prophetess Anna speaks about Jesus to those who were waiting for the redemption of Israel. One would normally assume that a mother is the expert on her own children but apparently there is much that Mary needs to hear about her son from others that barely know him.

In many ways, this is a foreshadowing of a larger theme that runs throughout the Gospel of Luke. Repeatedly, those we would not expect to find in those inner circles of intimacy with Jesus and his kingdom are precisely the ones who come bursting in and Jesus does not turn them away. In the parable of the banquet, those who were invited to the party refuse to come, so the lame, blind, and crippled are invited in their place. In the parable of the good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite who should be examples of holiness make their way to the other side of the road avoiding the man in need while a Samaritan (read: hated outsider) acts with the kind of compassion Jesus calls neighborly. In the parable of the prodigal son, it is the younger son who has lived foolishly and squandered his father's wealth whose return is celebrated in love while his older brother stands out in the field, filled with contempt. When Jesus heals ten lepers, it is only (yet another hated) Samaritan who returns to give thanks for what Jesus has done for him. This scenario plays out so frequently in the Gospel of Luke that one could argue these should not even be seen as anomalies or exceptions but the rule itself. Its not that a few outsiders happened to sneak in with the rest by accident but that the very way of God's kingdom is to make the outsider an insider. This is what grace is, after all; finding ourselves in a far more intimate circle than we deserve.

This should humble us in a couple of ways. First, we should be reminded of what we easily forget after 2000 years of Christianity; that as gentiles, we are all outsiders in the story of Jesus. We are the Samaritan, the younger son, the shepherds. We do not belong in this very Jewish story. We are only a part of this family because Jesus has graciously made room for us in his circle.

But now that the grace of Christ has provided a way in for us, we should remember a second thing; that just because we are now "in" doesn't mean that this kingdom has stopped being for those who are "out". To put it frankly, the temptation for any of us who have been Christians for very long is to see ourselves as closer to Jesus than others who are newer at church or don't do all the pious things we do or etc, etc. Then the next temptation is to let them know it; to let them know, however subtly, that we are spiritually superior, that they really don't belong in this intimate circle with Jesus like we do, and that they need to get in line and pay their dues before they can be a part of this family. But if Luke is right about Jesus and his kingdom, it would seem the exact opposite is true. It is the paradox of this kingdom that we find ourselves closest to Jesus when we are closest to those who seem furthest from him.

So we find once again that Mary is a superb model for us of what it means to participate in this kingdom. In a very significant sense we can say that no one has ever been closer, more intimate with Jesus than Mary. There is no human being who has a more rightful claim to being in the inner-most circle with Jesus than his own mother, no one who can presume to know Jesus better. Yet when lowly shepherds who know nothing of her or her family or her new born boy show up uninvited in her first intimate moments with her son, she does not shew them away but listens to the message they claim was spoken by angels and treasures up their words, pondering them in her heart.

Of course, most churches today don't shew away visitors. But many do a pretty good job of letting them know where they stand. We greet people with an enthusiastic welcome, inviting them back next week and all is great until they do something a little different that intrudes on our intimate time with Jesus and changes what has made this place comfortable for us. Then we let them know (often subtly and unintentionally but sometimes bluntly) that this this is our church, that we are the ones who know how things are done around here, that we are the ones with the gospel answers, and they can conform or leave. What if instead we recognized that Jesus wants us to make room for them (which may make things a little less comfortable for us) just as Jesus made room for us? What if we considered that they might be able to tell us something about Jesus just as those shepherds did for Mary? Maybe rather than seeing them as intruding on our intimate time with Jesus we could treasure them, not merely as an addition to our church but as people, and ponder what it is that Jesus might be teaching us through them.

Unanswered Questions

2011-12-12T13:57:00.001-06:00

Psalm 89 begins with the words of a cheery tune we sang often in the church I attended growing up.

"I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever, I will sing.... and with my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations."

Those words are basically the whole song. It was a simple and upbeat chorus that led us in praising God for all the ways he had blessed our lives and the life of our church. Although it begins with these same words, Psalm 89 is really anything but simple and upbeat. It is actually one of the longest and most sobering of all the Psalms.

The first 37 verses of the Psalm continue with these words of praise. V. 3-4 celebrate the covenant that God has made with David while v.5-18 praise Yahweh as the Lord of nature and history. God is declared to be great both by the heavens and earth he has created as well as by his faithfulness to the people of Israel. Then in v. 19, the Psalmist returns again specifically to God's covenant with David. He recalls the promise that God has made to Israel through David that one of David's descendants will always be on Israel's throne (v.29, 2 Samuel 7). But in v.38, the Psalm takes a dark turn.

"But now you have cast off and rejected; you are full of wrath against your anointed."

The following verses go on to describe the king's crown being defiled in the dust and the city walls laying in ruins. Israel's foes are exalted while Israel itself is scorned and plundered. V. 46 asks the oft repeated question of the Psalms:

"How long, O Lord? Will you hide your face forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire?"

It is very likely that this Psalm refers to the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem and the removal of the Davidic king of Israel that results. This is a time when the people of Israel would have suffered military defeat and the political powerlessness and economic exploitation that would naturally accompany such a defeat. But Psalm 89 makes clear that this was more than just a political or economic problem; it was a theological one.

The deposing of the Davidic king was a theological problem for Israel because it directly contradicted the promise of God that a descendant of David would always sit on Israel's throne. This in turn seemed to leave Israel with limited options in its beliefs about Yahweh; either God was powerless against the might of the Babylonians or God simply didn't bother to keep his promises.

I imagine that most of us have faced similar circumstances; perhaps not the invasion of an army and the destruction of our city but nonetheless circumstances that cause us to wonder what God is up to. We pray and pray and nothing happens and we wonder aloud to God "Are you incompetent or do you just not care about me? Are you hiding from me, God? How long will this go on?" Sometimes we even try to soothe ourselves with simple answers like "God has a plan" or "God is testing me". There can be a degree of truth in those statements but part of what is interesting about Psalm 89 is that it doesn't offer any answers. This Psalm ends with a series of unanswered questions and cries for God to remember his people.

Is there room in our faith for unanswered questions? As I think about our gospel reading for next Sunday, I have to imagine that Mary had a few unanswered questions after her angelic visitation. She did, of course, have one question answered: "How will this be, since I am a virgin?"... yet another instance of God's promise seeming to contradict current reality. Gabriel responds that the Holy Spirit will come upon her. To me, at least, that seems like the kind of answer that only leads to a lot more questions.

Of course, we know how the story goes. We know that Mary will give birth and that Jesus will minister, be crucified, and resurrected. So the temptation for us is to have all the answers, to skip ahead and say everything all at once. It is, after all, a story worth telling. But what if the waiting for the story to unfold is a critical part of the story? What if by rushing to the end with all our reasons and explanations we've actually failed to hear the story rightly? What if we left church this Sunday recognizing that most of our lives don't fit into neat pre-packaged answers and instead realized how often we find ourselves in Mary's position; finding our faith in the midst of unanswered questions, clinging to the promise that in all of our uncertainty the power of the Most High will overshadow us.

The Hope of a World Set Right

2011-11-28T14:11:00.001-06:00

Psalm 85 bears a lot of resemblance to the Psalm (80) from which I preached last week. Both are Psalms in which the Psalmist cries out to God for deliverance. Both ask how long it will be before God restores the people of Israel whom he has punished for their sin. Psalm 85, however, adds an element that Psalm 80 lacks. Whereas Psalm 80 ends by repeating its cry for deliverance, Psalm 85 ends by describing the characteristics of the deliverance for which Israel hopes. In order to describe this deliverance and restoration, the Psalmist makes us of some of the richest and most deeply meaningful words in all of Israel's theological vocabulary.

Hesed: Often translated mercy, steadfast love, faithfulness, loyalty, loving-kindness. This word reflects a profound sense of faithfulness, often even a faithfulness beyond what might be expected under normal circumstances. There is a sense that someone who exhibits hesed is one who has willingly bound themselves to the fate of another. As a result, it is most often used to refer to God's continuing faithfulness to Israel, a faithfulness that continues even in the midst of Israel's unfaithfulness (thus the connotations of mercy and kindness). It is sometimes used to describe human faithfulness lived in accordance with God's faithfulness.

Emet: Often translated faith, faithfulness, truth. This word carries a connotation of firmness or standing fast in the face of adversity. Since it can also be translated faithfulness, it obviously has some overlap in meaning with hesed. However, emet is more often used describe human faith/faithfulness in response to God's faithfulness which is usually described as hesed. Emet is probably the closest Hebrew equivalent to the Greek word pistis which is translated as faith/faithfulness in the New Testament.

Tsedek: Usually translated as righteousness. In its most basic sense, this word carries the meaning of moral uprightness. However, its use throughout the Old Testament demonstrates that it does not refer to some universally recognized moral code. Instead, it more specifically refers to uprightness in regard to God's covenant with Israel. The perfect example of this is the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38. In that story Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute in order to get her father-in-law Judah to sleep with her, obviously an act we would consider morally reprehensible. However, she does this because her two previous husbands (both sons of Judah) had died before she had any children. According to the laws of Israel, the third son was supposed to raise up offspring for his dead brothers with Tamar. However, seeing that his first sons did not fare well with Tamar, Judah holds back his third son from Tamar, fearing that he may die as well. Judah thereby violates the law of Israel. Tamar, in contrast, goes to great lengths to fulfill the law, posing as a prostitute so that she will still become pregnant by a relative of her dead husbands. While we may find this story odd, it illustrates the meaning of righteousness as loyalty to God's covenant law at any cost because by the end of the story when Judah realizes what has happened he concludes "She (Tamar) is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Selah." Since much of Israel's law had to do with one's covenant obligations to the poor and oppressed, tsedek also took on a strong connotation of justice (mishpat in Hebrew) without being reduced to a mere synonym. This can be seen even more clearly in the New Testament where the Greek word usually translated as righteousness (dikaiosune) shares a root with the word for justice (dikaios). In its deepest and most profound sense, this word speaks to God's ability to accomplish his purposes in the midst of our broken world; God's setting right a world gone wrong.

Shalom: Usually translated as peace. This peace can mean safety or absence of strife but it often describes more than just an absence of danger or war. Shalom speaks to completeness, wholeness, harmony, fulfillment, and even health. To be at shalom is to be in right relationship with God, neighbor, and one's self. That is why Shalom is so often paired with Tsedek in Scripture. To live in accoradance with God's covenant law (tsedek) is to be in right relationship with God and others. Conversely, an absence of open conflict in which injustice is perpetuated is not shalom but simply another attempt at human manipulation and control. True righteousness is the only way to true peace.

In the final verses of Psalm 85, this abundantly rich vocabulary is meshed together. Hesed and emet meet. Tsedek and shalom kiss each other. Emet springs up from the ground while tsedek bends down from heaven. The Lord gives what is good and the land produces its fruit. Its as if we are to picture God's righteousness raining down from heaven causing human faithfulness to spring up like a great harvest in response to that rain. This is how the Psalmist describes Israel's hope, the hope of what God can do in our world. It is found at the crossroads of justice and peace, at the intersection of God's faithfulness and faithful human response to God's righteousness. It is the hope that God's overwhelming mercy can set us right and set right our world as well.

Of Fast Food and Advent

2011-11-21T14:00:00.001-06:00

"Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved." Psalm 80:3

This is the resounding cry of Psalm 80. It is a cry of deliverance repeated again in v. 7 and 19. In between those verses the Psalmist recalls God's faithfulness to Israel. God took his vine, Israel, out of Egypt, cleared ground for it, planted it, provided for it in every way and this vine grew and filled the land. But now, the Psalmist says, God has broken down the wall that protected his vine and any passer-by or wild boar can pluck away or trample its fruit. So the Psalmist cries out to God to restore Israel, wondering how long it will be until God hears this cry.

It seems likely that this cry of deliverance is in regard to the attack of the Assyrian army on Samaria in 721 B.C. (since only Northern tribes are mentioned in v.2 and the Greek version of this Psalm even includes "on account of the Assyrians" in the title). If that is the case then the answer to the Psalmist's question of "How long?" is a really long time, longer than the Psalmists own life. That's because the people of Israel were not delivered from the Assyrian onslaught. Instead, they were taken into exile and did not return home until 538 B.C. Although it's impossible to say for sure when this Psalm was written in relation to Israel's exile, I think its fair to say that the "How long?" of this Psalm was being asked and prayed by the people of Israel for all of those nearly 200 years.

There is a sense in which this cry for deliverance must also be the Church's cry, especially in this season of Advent. This is to be a season of waiting and hopeful expectation for us; a season in which we remember Israel's long, painfully long wait for deliverance as expressed in this Psalm. And yet, how can this be our cry? In a culture of I-want-what-I want-and-I-want-it-now, where I can have a hamburger in minutes or any book or movie in the world displayed on the screen in front of us in seconds and when it doesn't work that way we wonder what's gone wrong, how can we learn to wait on God? Shouldn't God's answers be at least as fast Google's?

I'll be the first to admit that I enjoy these advances in technology as much as anyone. But that is precisely why the need for the Church to take up this cry is all the more pressing. The idea of having the world at our fingertips is so seductive that its not long before we begin to act as if anything worth having should be immediately available to said fingertips and if its not then its not worth the time it takes to find it. The truth is that the Church is already a part of this culture of instant gratification. We already expect God to conform to these standards and when he doesn't we usually just give up looking and satisfy ourselves with whatever else is more immediately available and easily manipulated to our own needs.

So the Church must take up this cry for God to deliver us precisely because we ourselves are so immersed in this sea of instantaneousness that only God can pluck us out, we can not save ourselves. We must recognize the long term costs of our fast food spirituality and seek sustenance around the Lord's table. We must pray "Restore us, O God, to be your people of patience and trust; let your face shine that we may be saved from our own ingenuity in meeting our own needs." And then we must wait ...and pray...and wait.... and perhaps in waiting for God's deliverance we will find that God is delivering us in our waiting.

King of the Least

2011-11-14T13:52:00.001-06:00

Matthew 25:31-46 fascinates me for a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is that in this scene of final judgment where Jesus describes himself separating the sheep from the goats, that is, those who will inherit his kingdom from those who will not, there is no mention of faith in Christ. So often when we talk about final judgment, heaven and hell, etc., the first criteria that is mentioned is believing in Jesus as the Christ, trusting in Christ for our salvation. But in this passage, faith, trust, and belief (which are all really the same word in Greek, pistis) are never mentioned. Instead, the separating is done based on how the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, and imprisoned were treated. No other criteria is brought to bear in this judgment. In this passage, it is solely a matter of how those being judged treated "the least of these".

I'm not suggesting that salvation is really earned by our works after all or that we should throw the language of faith, trust, and belief out of our theological vocabulary simply because it is not used in this passage. But I do think it is more than noteworthy that Jesus is able to talk about the final judgment without using those terms; something most evangelical Christians seem incapable of doing. I am suggesting that a passage like this one should cause us to pause and reconsider what we mean when use words like faith, belief, and trust.

Even though the word faith (pistis) is not used in this passage, I think Jesus' (and Matthew's) audience still would have recognized pistis in the examples of compassion that Jesus mentions. That's because pistis not only means faith but also faithfulness. One is the other. There was no need for two separate words because they are not two separate things. Faith is faithfulness. To really believe something is to live like it. To place our trust in Jesus is to live like Jesus lived and if we are not living like Jesus then we do not really have faith in him, regardless of what we think about the inner life of our minds and hearts. To think, as we often seem to in the Church, that "believing" (by which we usually mean something having to do only with thoughts and attitudes) is the critical element to being Christian while serving the least of these is just an optional add on for really saintly people is to divide in two something that is really one. It is to misunderstand what the New Testament writers mean by the word "faith".

The other aspect of this passage that fascinates me is the equation of Christ the King with the least of these. It is Christ who says "I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger....". The righteous are surprised by this, saying "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink...?". And Jesus says "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the lease of these my brothers, you did it to me." What we do (or don't do) for the least of these is what we do for Christ. I often feel that if I could get this single idea through my thick head and dull heart, I would live very differently. If I could only see Christ in each person I encounter, no matter how much they frustrate me or hurt me, regardless of their appearance or need, it would make all the difference in the way I relate to people. If in every conversation and interaction I could stay grounded in the reality that the person before me is an image of God...

Mother Theresa, who knew something about living this passage, said "When you touch the poor, you touch Christ. When you are touched by the poor, you are touched by Christ." Do you really long to know Christ? Spend time with the hungry, sick, immigrant, and imprisoned and Christ has promised we will find him there.

Thieves, Comfort, and Security

2011-11-07T14:56:00.002-06:00

In 1 Thessalonians 5, Paul writes about how "the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night". Here, Paul uses the phrase "day of the Lord" to refer to the return of Christ. However, it is worth nothing that this is not a phrase Paul simply made up. It is one used regularly in the Old Testament (see Isaiah 13:6, Ezekiel 13:5, Joel 1:15, 2:1, 2:31, 4:14, Amos 5:18, Zephaniah 1:14, Obadiah 15, Malachi 3:1-2) to speak of a day of judgement and God's justice being fulfilled. The coming of the Lord is often pronounced as a fearful message for those who have opposed God but it is a hopeful one for those who have heeded his commands. This is the case because the day of the Lord means the establishment of God's reign and righteousness which in turn means the defense of the needy and the casting out of the oppressor. Paul believes that all the promises/curses associated with the day of the Lord will be fulfilled by Jesus when establishes God's kingdom in its fullness.

I mentioned briefly last week that Paul's description of the day of the Lord being like a thief in the night does not mean that it will be secret, it will not come and go stealthily unnoticed. Paul's words in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, as well as the descriptions of this day by the prophets, make it very clear that it will be an obvious and publicly observable event. Instead, this metaphor speaks to its suddenness and unexpectedness and its demand for constant watchfulness. One never knows when a thief might try to break in. Additionally, while we might take reasonable precautions to keep thieves out (locks, gates, alarm systems, etc) any of those precautions might be defeated by a thief that is determined enough. There is no advance preparation that can be guaranteed to keep out the thief and provide complete safety and invulnerability. The only fail safe is to keep constant vigil. Paul says the day of the Lord is like this; there is no time for sleeping or drunkenness, no time in which we can rest on the merits of what we have already done. The Christian life demands continual watchfulness; a constant seeking after God.

Paul continues to strike at this illusion of security in 5:3 when he says "While people are saying "There is peace and security then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman...". Commentators on this verse will point out that other historical documents of the period suggest that "peace and security" was sort of a slogan of the Roman Empire. It was Caesar and his empire who had provided peace and security for the world. Paul, then, seems to be undercutting not only the Thessalonians individual attempts to provide peace and security for themselves but also their attempt to do so by finding their identity with the Roman narrative. Paul is challenging them to trust in a crucified messiah rather than placing their trust in a vast empire that had spanned the known world and promised to provide everything for everyone.

Such a challenge is ripe with implications for the Church in America. The world has never seen a group of Christians as comfortable as we are, who have enjoyed as much peace and security as we have. The problem with being comfortable is that it makes it very easy to fall asleep, very difficult to remain watchful. What is worse is that most of us have bought into the narrative that it is our nation that has provided these things for us. Paul calls us to a different narrative; a story where we find our peace and security in God alone, even when that peace and security may not provide comfort, and to keep watch, constantly being vigilant for the Spirit's leading.

New Podcast

2011-11-03T15:58:00.001-05:00

I wanted to make sure that my many, many faithful listeners know (all 3 of you) that my sermon podcasts have moved. Mypodcast.com is ceasing operation Dec. 1 so I've moved my podcast over to podomatic. The new address is allthingsnew.podomatic.com. The good news is I think this podcast site works better with iTunes than my old one did. Enjoy.

Resurrection Rather Than Rapture

2011-11-02T14:51:00.000-05:00

The content of Paul's writing in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 suggests that one of the primary reasons for Paul's letter to the church at Thessalonica was because of their concern for those in their congregation who had died. Repeatedly in these verses, Paul speaks of "those who have fallen asleep". It seems there was a concern among the Thessalonians that those Christians who died before Christ's return might have missed out on the salvation they had been promised. This leads Paul to reassure the Thessalonians that those who die in Christ will be raised from the dead just as Christ was raised. Paul describes the coming of the Lord this way:

"For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord."

These verses have often been used to support an idea known as "the rapture". The rapture refers to the idea that before Christ's return to earth every Christian in the world will suddenly be taken up into heaven. It has been popularized in my lifetime by the Left Behind book and movie series in which a pile of clothes is the only thing left of Christians who have been raptured by God to heaven to be with the Lord. This is usually thought to happen secretively; without any warning, every Christian will simply vanish. There are a number of reasons I don't think rapture is a biblical or theologically sound idea but for now I'll limit myself only to why I don't think this passage from Thessalonians is speaking about rapture.

One thing is very clear in this passage; there is nothing secretive about Christ's return in itself. Those who think of the rapture as a secretive event where everyone will wake up the next morning and notice that all the Christians are gone are often thinking of Paul's language in the next chapter of Thessalonians where Paul compares Christ's return to the coming of a "thief in the night". However, the purpose of that metaphor is not to say that Christ's coming will be quiet and unknown but that the timing of his coming is unknown. No one knows when he will come just like no one knows when a thief might break into their house. However, Paul's language in chapter 4 makes it clear that when Christ comes it will be an event that can not be missed: a cry of command, the voice of an archangel, the sound of God's trumpet, the raising of the dead. Those all seem to indicate a very public event that can not be ignored. This holds true even if these images are a metaphor like the "thief in the night" imagery since the point of the metaphor is that something easily observable and unmistakable is taking place. In fact, if we take 2 Thessalonians into consideration along with this passage, it seems very clearly that much of the intent of Paul's language here is to reassure the Thessalonian Christians that the Lord's coming is something that will be obvious and that they can't miss. While Paul may not be able to describe the return of the Lord exactly or say when it will be, he assures the Thessalonians that they will know when they see it.

But what of Paul's language in the next verse where he speaks of being "caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air"? Doesn't that sound like Paul is talking about rapture? It probably does if we already have the idea of rapture in mind when we come to this verse. However, it seems unlikely that Paul's audience would have understood him that way for at least two very significant reasons. First, the idea of rapture is a young one in the history of the Church. It was first widely published by a man named John Nelson Darby in the mid-1800's. If rapture is the obvious way of understanding this passage then its difficult to see why the all the Christians who lived in the 1800 years of Christianity prior to Darby didn't understand Paul this way.

Even more significant is that the words translated as "to meet" (eis apantesin in Greek) in the phrase "to meet the Lord in the air" are not just generic for any meeting of any kind. It is a technical phrase that was used in Greco-Roman culture for the meeting of a city delegation with a VIP or dignitary who was visiting that city. In this custom, the delegation of important and influential people from the city would go outside the city gates to meet and welcome the visiting dignitary. The purpose, of course, was to welcome them into the city, not remain outside of it or go somewhere else. The very reason for the delegation was to honor this great person as they entered their city. It seems very likely that as people living in this Greco-Roman culture that the Thessalonians would have heard Paul making an allusion to this specific practice. In that case, the purpose of the meeting with the Lord in the air is not so that Christians can continue on to heaven but so that they can welcome Jesus to earth where his reign and kingdom will now be established in its fullness.

What is most important, however, is that we recognize that Paul's theological reflection on Christ's return in these verses is not mere speculation about the future. Instead, these are words of comfort to those who are grieving in the midst of death. Paul is not helping the Thessalonians make a timeline chart of the end of days. He is writing to a people who have been confronted with the death of their loved ones and are wondering how that death relates to their new faith in Christ as Lord. Interestingly, Paul's words of comfort say nothing of heaven or going to a better place. Instead, Paul's hope for those who have died is that the same power which raised Jesus from the dead will raise them as well so that they can participate in the kingdom of righteousness and peace which Jesus will establish. The Christian hope is ultimately not that we will escape the evils of this world but that God will purify this world of its evil and make all things new.

Blameless in Holiness

2011-10-24T16:54:00.001-05:00

Although Paul praises the Thessalonians for their exemplary faith, it is also very clear from the rest of the letter that their faith is not yet complete, they have not "arrived" in spite of their "faith that has gone forth everywhere." Paul urges them on to something more.

In 2:12, Paul reminds the Thessalonians of his own presence along with Silvanus and Timothy among them. "we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God who calls you into his own kingdom and glory". "Walk" is used almost as a synonym of "live" in scripture. When Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to "walk in a manner worthy of God" he is saying that the Thessalonians whole lives should reflect the holiness of the God who has called them.

Throughout chapter 3, Paul is expressing his desires to be with the Thessalonians so as to continue to encourage them in their faith. In 3:10, he says specifically that his desire to be with the Thessalonians is so that "we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith", again implying that there is something the Thessalonians are missing. This chapter concludes with a prayer that God may make the Thessalonians "increase and abound in love for one another and for all... so that we may establish your hearts blameless in holiness".

In 4:3, Paul again urges this need for holiness upon the Thessalonians saying "For this is the will of God, your santification..." ("santification" coming from the same Greek root as holy, holiness). Again in 4:7, "For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness." Finally, in 5:23 Paul prays, "Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Clearly, Paul is concerned for the holiness/sanctification of the Thessalonians throughout his letter to them. But what does Paul mean by these words? To answer that question thoroughly would certainly take more than a single blog post. But there are a few things that stand out about Paul's use of those terms in Thessalonians.

1)It is God who sanctifies and make holy.... Paul's prayer in 3:13 and 5:23 is not that the Thessalonians would make themselves holy but that God would establish their hearts blameless in holiness and sanctify them completely. Holiness is not a human accomplishment but an act of God.

2).... but we also have a responsibility to our holy calling. Even though it is God who makes us holy, Paul makes it clear in his admonitions to the Thessalonians that we have a responsibility to live in step with what God has already done.

3)Our sanctification is our salvation... We often talk about being "saved" (by which we usually mean having our sins forgiven) and then later being "sanctified" (by which we usually mean being freed from the power of sin). But Paul talks about sanctification as something God does as the beginning of our salvation. To be saved is to be set apart for God's purposes (which is the most common meaning of sanctification in the Old Testament). In 1:9, Paul describes the Thessalonians salvation as having "turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God", echoing the language of Ezekiel 36 in which Israel is cleansed from its idol worship in order to return to Yahweh. Holiness is not something added onto salvation. It is the very means and purpose of salvation.

4)...but it is also more than just having our sins forgiven. Although our sanctification begins with the forgiveness of our sins, Paul clearly expects more than simply this for the Thessalonians. Paul prays that the Thessalonians will be sanctified entirely, indicating that Paul expects that God can do something more in the lives of the Thessalonians than has already been done.

5)This sanctification is bodily.... Sanctification is often talked about as something God does in the heart. That is certainly true. But in saying it that way, we shouldn't miss the fact that this "heart-cleansing" has very physical implications. When Paul describes sanctification as the will of God in 4:3, he immediately goes on to talk about sexual relations - the most bodily, physical of acts. The point here is that if we think holiness is only about "good intentions" or "the spiritual" or what's "on the inside" to the neglect of what we do with and to our own bodies, the bodies of the others, or our material resources then we haven't yet understood Paul's (and God's) call to holiness. Sanctification is a work of God in the heart but it is a work that leads to very physical consequences.

6) ...and communal. Holiness is not merely (or even primarily) individual in nature. It is worth noting that as Paul is discussing sexual relations in 4:3-8, in 4:6 the reason he gives for abstaining from sexual immorality is so "that no one transgresses and wrongs his brother in this matter". Paul's concern here is not merely inappropriate sexual relations in themselves but that such relationships will tear at the fabric of the community of faith. Likewise, when Paul prays for the Thessalonians holiness in 3:13, it is intertwined with the prayer that their love would abound for "one another and for all". While the call to holiness certainly has consequences for an individual's lifestyle, Paul's emphasizes that holiness concerns our life together. The holiness and love of God is reflected in our relationships of holy love with one another.

Born out of Weakness

2011-10-17T15:20:00.000-05:00

Paul begins his letter to the Thessalonians with great praise for what God has done among them. He rejoices over the Thessalonians "work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ". He also recalls how the Holy Spirit came among them with power and conviction; evidence that they had been chosen by God to receive the gospel. Furthermore, the Church at Thessalonica appears to have been the model church of the region as Paul says they "became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia" and that their "faith in God has gone forth everywhere".

Remarkably (but not surprisingly if one is familiar with Paul's pattern of ministry), this incredible Church was founded in Paul's weakness and humiliation. Paul writes in 2:2 that he and his co-ministers had come to the Thessalonians after suffering and being shamefully treated in Philippi. It seems likely that this refers to the episode in Acts 16 where Paul is imprisoned, freed by God through an earthquake, baptizes the jailer and his household, and then demands to be escorted out of the city by the magistrates. Acts 17 then tells us that Paul went on to Thessalonica only to face much opposition there as well. The picture of Paul's preaching in Thessalonica, then, is one of a man who has been repeatedly rejected and humiliated but refuses to stop preaching.

And a church, a healthy church, an exemplary church is born out of that preaching. No glitz. No glamor. No big production or impressive display. Quite the opposite. The power of God's Word is made all the more evident by Paul's weakness. Paul says his preaching among the Thessalonians was gentle, "like a nursing mother taking care of her own children". This nurturing image continues in the next verse as Paul says "we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves."

Perhaps the second of these is the harder of the two for many Christians these days. I know many people in my church are eager to share the gospel. I'm not share how many of us are eager to share ourselves; to give up our free/family time to spend time with a neighbor, to get tangled up in our co-worker's complicated problems, to see the drunk down the street as a person rather than a threat.

To keep sharing the Word and sharing ourselves. Can Church really be so simple? It may be a testament to just how far we have gone astray to think that it had to be anything else.

Blessed Possibilities

2011-10-03T15:57:00.000-05:00

Matthew tells us in chapter 5 of his gospel concerning Jesus "Seeing the crowds, he went up on a mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them...." This begins what is often referred to as The Sermon on the Mount. It is in this sermon that we hear Jesus repeatedly say "You have heard that it was said....but I say to you..."; again and again Jesus references a command of Jewish law only to add to it an even more strict command. "Don't murder? Of course! But don't be angry either. Don't commit adultery? Don't even lust!" Scholars tell us that Matthew's portrayal of Jesus ascending a mountain and speaking a new law is meant to remind us of Moses who ascended Mt. Sinai and received the Law from God. Matthew is using the example of Moses to help us understand who Jesus is. Jesus is the new lawgiver, or more precisely, Jesus is the lawgiver he has always been because he is the God who gave the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai who has now taken on human flesh. He is the one who will "fulfill" the law as he says in v. 17.

But Jesus "fulfilling" of the law seems to take it to a level that is impossible to keep. Not only does Jesus command us not to be angry and lustful. He also says "that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery". And later he says "You have heard that it was said 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." Jesus then sums up this new commands by saying "You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect."

Jesus can't be serious about this, can he? Divorce and re-marriage is adultery? Don't resist evil and violent people? Be perfect? Surely Jesus realizes that he is asking the impossible, right?

I actually think Jesus does realize the impossibility of what he is commanding in these verses... though probably not in the way we might expect. Objections to the idea of living out the Sermon on the Mount almost always stem from the impractically of such a life. "Lust and anger are just part of being human. How can two people who are miserable stay together? Doesn't Jesus know what would happen if we didn't fight back against evil people? That's just not how the world works!" And so Jesus is written off as an idealistic dreamer (or in significant portions of the Christian tradition as the giver of the impossible law which drives us to his mercy).

I think Jesus knew quite well that his words in the Sermon on the Mount didn't describe the way the world works. In fact, I think he knew it so well that he knew the workings of the world would result in his own crucifixion. In the world as it stands, the commands Jesus gives would indeed be impossible which is why I believe Jesus is doing more in the Sermon on the Mount than giving a "new law". Jesus is announcing a new world.

I believe that is what Jesus is doing in the verses commonly called the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-11). We often approach these verses as if they are law as well. We interpret them to mean that if we want to be blessed then we must be poor in spirit, mourning, meek, merciful, pure in heart peacemakers who hunger and thirst for righteousness. So we make the Beatitudes a list of Christian virtues. But these verses are not imperative. They are indicative. Jesus is not commanding anything. He is proclaiming.

In fact, Jesus is proclaiming in these verses things that seem to be contrary to reality. Those who mourn are blessed? The poor, the meek, and merciful are blessed? It seems those are precisely the kind of people who aren't blessed in our world; the kind of people who are constantly taken advantage of. And again, that's precisely the point! Jesus isn't describing the way the world works. Jesus is describing how his renewed world will work. Jesus isn't describing the kingdoms of the world. He is proclaiming his own kingdom; a kingdom that turns power and influence upside down, a kingdom where those who mourn will be comforted and those who are merciful will be shown mercy. This is not command. It is promise. The beatitudes are Jesus' promise that the world will not always be as it is now; that might will not always make right, that the weak will not always be mistreated but that one day Jesus will rule over a kingdom marked by genuine justice and peace, a kingdom where the not-so-blessed of this world will be blessed.

But in the meantime, in this time between the times, in the tension of the "Blessed are...for they will be...", Jesus calls upon us to to be a community where the impossibility of the Sermon on the Mount becomes a reality. Not because we are especially moral people who try harder. Not because we've discovered that Jesus' commands are really practical after all. But because of the resurrection. Because the one who gives this law is also the one who accomplishes our Exodus. Because in the raising of Jesus from the dead, God has said "Behold, I am making all things new." Because the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is able to make us new as well. Because we believe there is a kingdom that is coming that doesn't play by the world's rules and that kingdom is already being made a reality in us. Because we are by virtue of what we will be.

The Beauty of Submission

2011-09-28T12:33:00.000-05:00

"....submittingto one another out of reverence for Christ." - Ephesians 5:21

Submissionhas become sort of a dirty word in our culture. We often associate it with phrases like "being beaten intosubmission". In other words,submission is seen as something that is forced on a weak person or group by amore powerful person or group. Onegender, race, or group is told they must submit to another. Submission is seen as synonymous withoppression and injustice or at the very least, support of the status quo.

But the truthis that submission, when it is rightly understood not as something forced uponus but as a willful choice to put another's needs ahead of our own, is anessential part of every relationship. Think about the relationships in your own life. They are all built, to varying degrees, uponmutual submission. Our best friendshipsare often those in which we find a person who is often thinking of our needsbut for whose sake we also are happy to put our needs aside. Usually, a friendship in which one person isalways submitting and the other is always getting their way doesn't last longas a friendship. Likewise, therelationship between a husband and wife is a constant give and take with eachspouse mutually submitting to the other, each working to accommodate theother.

Of course,if the couple has children, they both learn to submit their own needs to theneeds of the children. This is not asubmission forced on the parents by a more powerful party. In fact, the child is too weak and helplessto make anyone do anything. The parentssubmission of their own needs to that of the child is not coerced but is doneout of love and a recognition of their responsibility as parents. Of course, as the child grows older, they toomust begin to learn that the world does not revolve around them, that there aretimes when they will need to put someone else's needs ahead of their own. In fact, it might not be an overstatement tosay that the journey from childhood through adolescence to maturity is amovement from self-centeredness to submission.

Churchesare like any other relationship in this way. We can only exist as a community as we are willing to submit to oneanother, putting what we want aside to give others the opportunity to grow inChrist. This doesn't mean that oneperson or group should always get their way, expecting others to submit butthat we should all be mutually submitting to one another, each giving upsomething that is important to us so that others might be able to share in thislife with Christ. In fact, just as themature parent is the one who submits willingly to the needs of a child out of lovefor the child, the mature Christian is not the one who demands that things beendone his or her way. Instead, Christianmaturity is exhibited by those who are willing to submit and sacrifice the mostfor the sake of another's growth in Christ.

Perhapsmost telling is that Paul says that this submission to one another is done out of reverence for Christ. Our submission to one another in the Churchis not merely a principle for getting along with one another. It is a testimony to the love of Christ atwork in our lives. To put it simply: tobe a part of a community of faith means things will not always be done as wewould like. However, as we continue tolove and participate in that community, submitting our own preferences to theneeds of others, we testify to the reality that, as the Church, we are morethan merely a collection of individuals. Instead, we are called to be a community that is faithful image of God'slove.

Rejects Turned Gatekeepers

2011-09-26T14:56:00.002-05:00

"There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower..."

"Ah yes, Isaiah 5." thought the religious leaders to themselves. "We know it well. Israel is God's vineyard; a vineyard in which God has invested heavily, giving it every chance for success. God has provided Israel with Torah, a land to live in, and the Temple to nurture its growth much as a vineyard owner might invest in his vineyard."

"...and leased it to tenants and went into another country."

"Finally, Jesus is recognizing our authority a little bit. We are those tenants. God has entrusted his vineyard to us and we are caring for it by making sure radicals like this Jesus don't come in a destroy the harvest which God intends to reap and which we have worked so hard to protect."

"When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another."

"What? Wait a second. We wouldn't do that! That's how the pagans treat us!"

"Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. Finally, he sent his son to them, saying 'They will respect my son.'"

"Yes, the Messiah will set things right just like David did. He'll teach those pagans to mistreat servants of God like us!"

"But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and his inheritance. And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him When therefore, the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?"

"He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons!"

"Have you never read in the Scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes?"

"Why, of course, we've read Psalm 118. We've been reciting it all week in preparation for the Passover along with the other Hallel Psalms. Israel, faithful Israelites like us, are the stone which the nations rejected but which God chose to build into a holy nation. Why would Jesus bring that up?"

"Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits."

When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard this parable, they perceived that he was speaking about them. They realized that they were the tenants after all as they had thought and that Jesus was calling himself the Messiah. Jesus was aligning himself with the long line of prophets, God's servants, that Israel had rejected because he would be rejected like them. But Jesus believed that God would vindicate him and those faithful Israelites who stood with him, taking the stone which the religious leaders had rejected and making it the chief cornerstone of his kingdom. Jesus' claim made the chief priests and the Pharisees mad enough that they wanted to arrest him, ironically demonstrating that they were ready to act exactly like the tenants he had just portrayed them to be. However, they were kept from doing so at the time because they feared the crowds who held that Jesus was a prophet.

In the Church, we also call ourselves the rejected whom the Lord has saved, that is, sinners saved by grace. But the story that Jesus tells turns Psalm 118 upside down. It shows how easily those who regard themselves as "the stone the builders rejected" can become the very ones doing the rejecting. Jesus declares that when we treat the grace we have received as mandate to become gatekeepers, then we have failed to bear the fruit he desires and the vineyard will be taken from us and given to those who will produce its fruit.

Taking a Hatchet to the Church

2011-09-19T14:38:00.001-05:00

The religious authorities come to Jesus while he is teaching in the Temple and ask him a question we would likely ask in their situation. "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?". Read here: "Who do you think you are?!" I say we would ask this in their situation because Jesus has just been in the Temple overturning the tables of money changers (Matthew 21:12-32). He had done this on top of breaking Sabbath rules and spending time with religious misfits. What would we say to someone who came in our church and just started ripping up pews and overturning coffee tables? "Who do you think you are? What do you think gives you the right to do this?"

Jesus responds by saying that he will answer their question if they will answer a question of his own first. "John's baptism: was it of God or merely human?" The religious leaders are politically calculating in their response. They know if they say from heaven then they should have believed John but if they say merely human then they will lose popularity with the crowds that regard John as a prophet. So they answer simply "We don't know." Jesus refuses to answer their question either.

If the story stopped at this point, then we might assume that Jesus was simply using the question about John to avoid the questioning of the religious leaders. But interestingly, Jesus doesn't drop his line of questioning when the elders and chief priests demonstrate their captivity to popular opinion. Instead, he tells a story of a Father who asks two of his children to go to work in his vineyard. The fist child says no but later goes anyway. The second child says yes but doesn't go. Jesus asks "Which of the two did the will of the Father?" The answer is clear. The first child did even though they said no initially. Jesus now brings the conversation back to John the baptist again.

"Truly I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your minds and believe him."

What is it that is so important about John's baptism to this question of Jesus' authority? For one thing, John was always pointing to Jesus. John's message was about one who was coming after him that was greater than him and who would baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Therefore, a large part of what Jesus is saying in Matthew 21 is that if the religious leaders had accepted John's message then they would have accepted Jesus as well. Jesus says that is why the tax collectors and prostitutes go ahead of the chief priests and elder into Jesus' kingdom; they accepted John's baptism and the religious leaders did not. However, I think there is a little more going on here. In Matthew 3, we hear this about John's message and baptism

"But when he saw many of the pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them 'You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves , 'We have Abraham as our father, for I tell you God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."

John's message is one of repentance and bearing fruit in keeping with that repentance. In other words, John is calling people away from the typical ways of doing religion (after all, he is dunking people in a dirty river out in the sticks away from the Temple and the holy city with all of its accepted religious institutions) and calling them to live lives that bear the fruit of God's love. Furthermore, he says that any tree which does not bear this fruit will be cut down.

What is fascinating about this is that in Matthew 21, right between Jesus' overturning of the tables in the Temple and his conversation with the religious leaders about his authority to do so, is a story about Jesus cursing a tree because it wasn't bearing fruit! Jesus actually wasn't evading the question of authority at all. He was pointing back to John's message of repentance because that was the key to understanding why Jesus exercised his authority as he did in the Temple. The Temple was a religious tree that wasn't bearing the fruit of God's love as God had meant for it too. So Jesus took the hatchet to it just as John had said he would.

We probably wouldn't be too happy with someone who came into our church and started turning everything upside down but the truth is that this is precisely what Jesus wants to do. There area all kinds of trees in our churches that aren't bearing the fruit of God's love and Jesus is more than willing to chop them down in order to make room for his house to be a house of prayer once again, for it to be a place where the blind and the lame are healed, a place where children sing "Hosanna to the Son of David!". Are we prepared to have Jesus take a hatchet to our church if that is what it takes to truly be his disciples?

Kingdom of Grace

2011-09-12T15:00:00.000-05:00

A wealthy man comes to Jesus asking what he must do to have eternal life. After the man says that he has kept all the commandments since his youth, Jesus tells him to go and sell all his possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus. This causes the young man to go away sad because he had great wealth.

While the disciples marvel at Jesus' words about the extreme incompatibility between wealth and being his disciples, they also seem to be sort of encouraged by it. Peter replies in Matthew 19:27, "See, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?" In other words, Peter recognizes that he has done the very thing that Jesus told this wealthy man to do. So he wants to know what reward he will receive in return. And Jesus doesn't rebuke Peter for his thinking here. He doesn't tell Peter that his focus is on the wrong things. In fact, Jesus says that the twelve apostles will sit on twelve thrones with Jesus in his kingdom and that everyone who has left family and possessions for Jesus sake will receive a hundred times what they have lost and receive eternal life. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

But then Jesus tells a story....

Its the kind of story Jesus seems to be fond of telling, the kind that gets under our skin.

The story is one about a landowner who went out to hire workers to work in his field. He hired some first thing in the morning and agreed to pay them a denarius for a day's work. The landowner went out again around 9 a.m. and again around noon and 3 p.m. each time agreeing to pay the workers a wage that was just. He finally went out around 5 p.m., when one would think the work day was nearly done, and made the same agreement with even more workers. At the end of the day, the landowner instructed his foreman to pay the workers in reverse order. As it turned out, the foreman paid those who had come at the end of the day a denarius. When those who had been working all day saw this, they expected to receive more. But they too received a denarius.

These workers grumbled against the landowner and who could blame them? Doesn't he know how this works? Who of us, if we had been working faithfully in a career for many years and saw someone fresh out of college who had never done anything receive the same salary as us their first day of work, wouldn't be furiously upset by the injustice of it all?

There are obviously a lot of good reasons why hard work and a lifetime of experience should be rewarded in the work place. The only problem is most of us have to spend so much time in that kind of environment that we begin to think that everything in life should work that way...even the Church. Sure we want new Christians in our congregation but only as long as they realize that the Church runs by our rules because we are the ones who have been here for decades and worked hard to make this place what it is.

But Jesus says that his kingdom isn't like corporate America. His kingdom is like this landowner. It is a kingdom determined not by our hard work and long tenure, although those will be rewarded, but a kingdom determined by the compassion and mercy of its king. It is a kingdom of grace.

Confessing in Caesarea Philippi

2011-08-15T13:20:00.000-05:00

It is probably not coincidence that it is in Caesarea Philippi that Jesus questions his disciples about his identity. The name itself tells us quite a bit about this city. It bears both a name from Roman government (Caesar) and Jewish royalty (Philip, son of Herod the Great). In it, stood a temple built for Caesar by Herod the Great. It is a city that represents not only power, but specifically Rome's seemingly unconquerable power and the collusion of Jewish leadership with it. In other words, this city is probably representative of just about everything that 12 Jewish men might be hoping a Messiah would deliver them from. And it is here that Jesus asks "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"

The disciples share with Jesus a quick synopsis of public opinion regarding him. "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." While we often think of these as the wrong answer as compared to Peter's confession two verses later, they are actually instructive in themselves. Jesus' ministry looked very much like those of these prophets. He went around speaking God's word to the people of Israel much like Jeremiah and the prophets, performing powerful signs and miracles like Elijah, and living an unsettled existence somewhat like John the Baptist. Jesus often compares his own ministry to the prophets in that he will be rejected as they were. So its not that these answers are so much wrong as incomplete. Jesus is certainly "a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people" but he is also more than that.

Jesus now turns the question to the disciples themselves. "But who do you say that I am?" Peter, probably eager to distinguish himself, answers "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Now what was incomplete in the crowds understanding of Jesus has been made complete in Peter's confession. Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Son that God has chosen to be Israel's deliverer. Peter's confession has hit the bull's eye of Christ's identity; so much so that Jesus says this was revealed to Peter by God, not by human deduction. Indeed, Jesus proclaims that Peter (whose name means "rock") is the rock on which Christ will build his Church, a Church so powerful that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (If you are a fan of Lord of the Rings, just picture Aragorn and his army standing before the gates of Mordor.) This Church, of which Peter is the foundation, apparently even has the ability to impact heaven through its earthly ministry (whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven...).

But for all that Peter gets right (and Matthew's certainly wants us to see that his confession really is significant), there is still much he does not understand. The very next thing that Jesus does after affirming Peter's confession of him as the Christ is to begin to talk about his suffering and death. Understandably, Peter takes Jesus aside to remind him that he can't talk like this. After all, it was just settled that Jesus was the Messiah which means he is a conquering hero, not someone who will suffer and die. But Jesus knows he is going to be an entirely different kind of Messiah, one who will look much more like Jeremiah than David. So he tells his disciples not only that he will die but that if they truly want to follow him they must deny themselves and take up their own cross as well.

Monuments to power fill our own world. Often these powers are so overwhelming that we feel our only hope is either collusion or open conflict. In the midst of these monuments of power, Jesus question to us is whether or not we know him. Of course, we think that we do. While our culture may label him as merely a prophet like others, we know that he is more, that is the Christ the Son of the living God. But then the real challenge when Jesus wants to show us what he means by that word "Christ" and what he means when he call us "disciples". This Messiah and his followers will not be defined but yet another monument of power but by one of a weakness. To truly confess Jesus, to truly know who Jesus is, is take up our own cross, our own denial and follow him in a life of sacrifice and service.

The Pattern of Promise

2011-08-01T16:04:00.000-05:00

Throughout the book of Genesis, God's promises, which is to say God's plan of redemption for our world, have been continually at risk. God's promise first came to Abraham in Genesis 12 as a promise that Abraham would be the father of a great nation and that God would make his name great and make him a blessing. In the simple reality of Abraham's aging, this promise comes to be at risk for Abraham grows old without having an heir. It's difficult to become the father of a great nation if you aren't even the father of one child. But out of the deadness of Sarah's womb and Abraham's old age, God brings forth life, a son, and therefore new possibility for his promise.

The promise is set at risk again as God calls upon Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, this very same son who was so graciously and miraculously given. There is no hint in this story that it has a forgone conclusion. It is only after Abraham shows he is willing to sacrifice Isaac that God says "now I know that you fear God". What if Abraham fails to trust God? Will that nullify the promise of God? What if Abraham does trust and actually kills his son? How will God fulfill his promise with Isaac dead? But out of this conflict between God's command and God's promise arises a new future in which God's promise can continue.

Abraham's son Isaac marries Rebekah and they have two children, Esau and Jacob. Perhaps we begin to think now that the promise is well on its way; the family lineage from Abraham is continuing and gaining strength. However, the relationship between Esau and Jacob is characterized by struggle and conflict even within their mother's womb. We come to know Jacob as a deceiver and con-artist whose only real goal is self-preservation and advancement. As such, Jacob poses a new kind of challenge to the promise of God. Can God really fulfill his promises to Abraham and Isaac through a person like Jacob? If the fulfillment of God's promise earlier depended so much on Abraham's obedience, will not Jacob's complete lack of moral character and total inattention to God force God to find someone else to work with, thereby abandoning his promise to Abraham? Apparently not. God makes the same promises to Jacob that he made to Abraham and Isaac and God keeps those promises despite Jacob's character (or lack thereof).

Twelve sons are born to Jacob, who is now renamed Israel, and so the picture of Israel as the mighty nation promised to Abraham begins to come into view. These twelve sons are the patriarchs of Israel. But rather than the promises of God being established firmly in these twelve, the promise now faces what might be its greatest risk yet. For this is a family torn apart, even driven close to murder, by favoritism and jealousy. Joseph is Jacob's favorite son and he makes no attempts to hide this favoritism but actually flaunts it by giving him a special robe that was more than just a piece of clothing; it was a designation of this son's status. Add to this the fact that Joseph was the second youngest of the twelve sons (and for some time the youngest since it seems Benjamin was not born until much later) and Joseph's propensity for grandiose dreams in which he played a role superior to his brothers, it becomes easy to see how Joseph's brothers "hated him and could not speak peacefully to him." As a result, Joseph's brothers begin to plot his death, only swerving from that plan because they decide it would be better to profit from their brother than to simply kill him and so they sell him into slavery. Again, the promise of God is in serious trouble. God had spoken to Joseph in dreams just as he had spoken to his father Jacob in dreams but now instead of those grandiose dreams being fulfilled, Joseph had become a slave. Moreover, how was God to raise up a great and holy nation out of a family like this one; a family willing to sell their own brother into slavery?

And yet, in the attempt of Joseph's brothers to kill his God-given dreams, they have actually put the fulfillment of those dreams in motion. Joseph's being sold into slavery is what will bring him into Egypt which, through a series of events involving more dreams, is what will ultimately allow him to become known to Pharaoh and thereby become the powerful man he dreamed he would be. By Genesis 45, the story has come full circle. The same brothers who sold Joseph into slavery now come to him in a position of humility, needing the grain which only he can supply. Joseph aptly sums up his story in Genesis 50:20 by saying to his brothers "you meant evil against me but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive". One again, the promise of God has not failed.

Even with Joseph in charge, the promise of God does not rest safe and secure. For Joseph will eventually die and the eighth verse of Exodus tells us that "there arose a new king over Egypt who knew nothing about Joseph." This will lead to the entirety of Joseph's descendants being enslaved, again causing us to wonder if this where the promise of God will come to an end. But like the story of Joseph himself, the enslavement of his descendants is only setting the stage for God to bring life where their seems only death, for God to create a new future for the people of his promise. God delivers the people from their slavery in Egypt and thereby makes them the nation he had long ago promised to Abraham. The story of God's promise is the story of God making a future that seems impossible in the present. That is, in fact, why it is promise at all. It is not merely an accumulation of human events. It is God's speech made real in our world.

Thus the Joseph story is especially adept at highlighting a theme that has run through Genesis and continues on through the rest of scripture: that God's promises will be kept, God's will will be done. Which is NOT the same thing as saying that God's will is always done in every circumstance or that everything that happens is the will of God. All kinds of things happen in our world that are not willed by God. God does not will slavery, rape, famine, and genocide. No, what the story of Joseph and many of the stories in Genesis teach us is not that God willed everything that happened but that God will accomplish what he desires one way or another in spite of all that happens against his will. There is nothing in scripture that indicates that God willed Jacob to be the kind of man he was or that God willed the jealousy and hatred that existed among Joseph's brothers but God was able to work through it to bring his promises to fruition in spite of those things. This is not determinism but, in fact, its opposite: hope, a hope that God can bring wholeness even out of our brokenness and faithlessness. It is a hope that where our past and present seem impossible the word of God can speak a new future into existence in which God's promise can prevail.

Wrestling God

2011-07-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

Jacob has heard that his brother Esau is on the way to meet him with 400 men. Considering how Jacob and Esau last parted ways, with Esau planning on killing Jacob because of his deception, this is not good news. Jacob, as always, seeks to gain an advantage in this situation. For one, he begins to pray. But this is no pious prayer that God's will be done. This is an urgent pleading that God will remember his promises to Jacob. Jacob knows he is in trouble and he hopes that God will help him in a situation that he is not sure he can manage on his own. Jacob hedges his bets though in case God doesn't come through for him. He divides all that he has into multiple gifts for his brother while Jacob himself stays behind hoping to ameliorate Esau's anger before they meet face to face.

However, Jacob will have to meet a much more serious opponent face to face before he meets Esau. Not unlike the story of Jacob's ladder in Genesis 28, God again shows up in Jacob's life during the dark of night. We hear that they wrestle each other all night and that this God in human form must throw Jacob's hip out of socket in order to win the fight. Even then Jacob will not let his opponent go. He demands a blessing from his opponent before he will let him leave. As always, Jacob is seeking gain for himself. In fact, he even asks his opponent his name, yet another attempt to grasp control since knowing one's name was thought to be a form of power in the ancient world. God refuses to give his name but does give Jacob the blessing he seeks.

This story in Genesis 32:22-32 has to be one of the most intriguing stories in scripture. It raises all kinds of questions that our often simplistic, stale, black-and-white, easy answer approach to scripture can not answer. The most obvious question this text raises is how it is that Jacob, a mere man, is able to wrestle with God at all, much less all night and apparently wrestle God to at least a draw if not an outright victory for Jacob? Who is this Jacob who can pull off such a feat?

But I wonder if the most significant statement in this story is not one about Jacob but one about God; not that Jacob is able to wrestle with God but that God would wrestle with Jacob. This is a man who has shown no interest in God until confronted with the fear of seeing his brother Esau again. In spite of that, God keeps trying to get into his life. God blesses Jacob. He appears to him in a dream and binds himself to him with the same promises he made to his father and grandfather. But still Jacob is content to be blessed by God rather than really know God. But now, God wants to get into Jacob's life so badly that he shows up in human form and physically wrestles with him. Here is a God so desperate to get into Jacob's life that he is willing to take on human flesh and even be defeated in that flesh in order to be present in Jacob's life. Who is this God who would pull of such a feat?

Here we are, a people who are often less than righteous, less than completely honest, a people often seeking our own gain, going about our daily business, just trying to survive, seldom turning to God except in times of fear and desperate need. Into the darkness of our world steps a man whose identity we question only because we lack the light to see him for who he is; a man from whom we demand blessing, signs, and miracles only to have him remind us that it is we who need a new name and the transformation that comes with it. It is only after he wrestles with us, in our flesh and all its brokenness and weakness, even being willing to be defeated by us on a cross, that we come to realize that it is God himself with whom we have been striving and supposedly prevailed.

The God who wrestled with Jacob, who is Jesus Christ, is the God who continues to strive with us even now. Even as we are blessed by him, we often ignore him. Even as we ignore him, he still wants to get into our lives. So he waits for the quiet and still, maybe even those dark and fearful moments of our lives, and in the inky blackness the Spirit of God strives with our Spirit. Even as he grips our soul and we grasp blindly at him seeking blessing for ourselves, he remains hidden and unrecognizable, unable to be boxed in by our propensity to name and label and thereby limit, define, and control. Even as we seek to subdue this mysterious stranger who dares to insert himself into our life in this way, he reminds us that it is not more blessing but a new name, a new existence, a new birth that we really need. Like any birth, this one involves pain and even some scarring. Such an encounter with the living God will surely not leave our walk unchanged. It may even cause us to limp. But we will come away knowing the God who strives.

Results or Relationship

2011-07-21T12:11:00.000-05:00

Genesis 29 tells the story of Jacob meeting Rachel and eventually marrying her and her sister, Leah. In some ways, this story sounds similar to a story just a few chapters earlier in Genesis 24. In that chapter, Abraham sends a servant to find a wife for his son. The servant meets Rebekah at a well and knows that she is the one for Isaac when she draws water for him and his camels. Rebekah and Abraham's servant then go and report all that happens to Laban (Rebekah's brother and Rachel's father). Likewise, the story of Jacob and Rachel's meeting takes place at a well, the watering of animals is significant to the story, and the meeting is ultimately reported back to Laban. However, it seems the similarities in these stories really serve to highlight the differences of these two characters.

Abraham's sending of his servant is a story of trust. Abraham states that the Lord "will send his angel before" his servant in order to guide him and ensure that he finds the proper wife for Isaac. The story, indeed, unfolds in this way. The servant's prayer is answered, Rebekah willingly goes with him, and the story concludes by noting that Isaac was comforted by Rebekah's presence.

These elements of trust in God to provide are absent from the story of Jacob. Instead, Jacob is portrayed as taking matters into his own hands. Rather than waiting for the right woman to come along to provide water, Jacob provides water for Rachel's flocks. (This is a clear demonstration of strength on Jacob's part since he rolls away from the mouth of the well by himself the stone which the other shepherds say they can not move until all the shepherds have gathered to move it together.) Jacob also does not propose the matter of marriage with Rachel to Laban as guidance from God. Instead, he offers it as a business contract; Jacob will work seven years for Rachel. When those seven years are complete, Jacob demands that Rachel be given to him as if he has earned her. Of course, things don't turn out quite that smoothly. Instead, Laban shows that Jacob is not the only one capable of deception. He throws a party and gives his oldest daughter, Leah, to Jacob instead of Rachel. Somehow Jacob manages to have intercourse with her without noticing that it is not the woman he has been pining over for seven years. In the morning, he realizes it is Leah and he becomes angry with Laban who says he must work another seven years if he wishes to marry Rachel as well.

At this point, it would be easy for me to say that this story demonstrates yet again why we should trust God instead of trying to be in charge of our own lives. It's tempting to say that if we will trust God as Abraham did then things will always go smoothly for us as they did for Abraham's servant and if we try to carry out our own agenda then we will run into problems as Jacob did. While there is probably some truth captured in that statement, it is not a whole truth. It doesn't do justice to the experience of those who have placed their trust in God and find that things still often do not go so smoothly. And I don't think it does justice to this story in its context either. After all, even though Isaac is initially comforted by Rebekah's presence, it is this same Rebekah who will incite Jacob to steal his brother's blessing, causing Isaac tremendous discomfort in his old age. Likewise, while Laban and his daughters will cause Jacob tremendous anxiety along the way, they (and their maidservants) do ultimately give him 12 sons (as well as some daughters) which would have been counted as a tremendous blessing in this culture. Additionally, these 12 sons are the fulfillment of the promises God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they are the 12 patriarchs of Israel.

So here's my crazy conclusion from all that. The primary difference between Abraham and Jacob wasn't the results of their lives but their relationship with God. Or to put it another way, the results of their lives were not a measure of their relationship with God. Abraham's closer relationship with God didn't automatically mean he was more blessed than Jacob. Jacob was actually blessed by God tremendously despite the fact that he showed no interest in having the kind of relationship with God that his grandfather had. Abraham knew God, walked intimately with God, knew the presence of God and that was its own blessing much greater than than any blessing Jacob would ever know. Jacob, on the other hand, knew the blessings of God but never really seemed to know God and seemed to be perfectly content with that.

I think this is a point worth making because I think most Christians and churches in America today are much more like Jacob than we are like Abraham. We too often equate God's blessing with knowing God himself and experiencing his presence. We assume that if an individual is blessed or a church is growing then "they must be doing something right". We assume that God would not bless a person or a church unless they really knew God but the story of Jacob demonstrates that this is not always true. Indeed, Jacob shows us that God can bless and bless and bless a person and that person still not be drawn any closer to God. They simply go on enjoying the blessing but they miss out on the relationship, the intimate presence of God that Abraham came to know in his life. As the Church, we have to ask ourselves whether or not really knowing God, experiencing his presence, being in intimate relationship with him is actually more important to us than whatever blessing God might pour out on us along the way.

Reflecting on NYC

2011-07-15T16:29:00.000-05:00

Twelve years ago I went to Nazarene Youth Congress in Toronto, Canada as a student entering my senior year of high school. In addition to being a lot of fun and an overall spectacular event, this was a time when God spoke to me. It was one of the first of many nudges toward a call to ministry.

Last week, three of our teens, our NYI president, and myself attended Nazarene Youth Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. Although I had shared with others several times how impactful NYC had been in my own life and how I believed it would do the same for our teens who were going, I had no such expectations for myself this time around. After all, I figured, this was a teen focused event and I am now nearly 30. I have experienced 7 years of theological education, 4 years of pastoral ministry, and ordination as an elder in the Church of the Nazarene since I was a student at NYC, not to mention the normal growth and maturity one expects to gain from 12 years of life, 8 years of marriage, having 2 children, and living in 4 different states. Not that all of this makes me "old and wise" by any stretch of the imagination. It is simply to say that there are many ways in which I am not the same person I was 12 years ago. This was a teen event and I am no longer a teen nor am I especially in tune with youth culture. My sole purpose in going was to be present with our teens and to see what God would do in their lives.

But I guess when God decides he is going to show up and work in the lives of those who are present, it doesn't really matter if you are part of the "target audience". My expectations no longer mattered. The event organizers' expectation didn't matter. It only mattered that God was present. And God was present. For some brief, sweet, almost dream-like moments the glory of heaven was manifested in a basketball arena in Louisville, KY. I went for our teens. I left having experienced God's presence in a way that I have not for a very long time.

Much like 12 years ago, this NYC was more a nudge down a path where God has already been leading than it was any kind of final word. I was not given a blue print for the rest of my life or some radical new direction for my congregation. I simply got to experience the intimate presence of God and that was enough. For months now, I have been begging God in prayer to pour out his Holy Spirit in fresh and undeniable ways on our congregation; to make his presence among us evident. I'm honestly not even sure what I expect that to look like. I just know I am hungry for God to show up and do something, to transform lives in the way I believe it is possible for only God to do, to demonstrate that God's Word and God's Spirit really can create and shape a holy people. I have been longing for something to happen that can not be attributed to me or the work of our church but only to a movement of God, something that can only be called revival. I believe that is what I witnessed in Louisville last week. This certainly hasn't satisfied the longing I've had for God to do something in our church and our town. Instead, it is yet another nudge down the path to trust that God can and will work among his people if we will continue to seek.

I suppose that in my moments of greatest honesty I would admit that at the center of my low expectations coming into last week was a fear; a fear that runs much deeper than the realization that I'm not quite as a young as I used to be. It was a fear that perhaps I was more naive 12 years ago than I would like to admit; that maybe 12 years ago it was more the hugeness of the event that was talking than the voice of God, that maybe there was more "smoke and mirrors" than I remembered and that now 12 years later I would see through the smoke and mirrors and be disappointed. At this point in my life, my faith can not be a blind one. I have seen too much in the Church that is fake and disingenuous. I've had too many moments that caused me to roll my in eyes disgust and frustration at our attempts to be puppeteers rather than prophets. As a result, I've sometimes become slow of heart to real and genuine movements of God.

But last week was different. Yes, the music was exciting. Yes, the worship services were technologically impressive. Yes, there were emotionally charged moments. Yes, the speakers were gifted communicators. Yes, we were often tired and overworked. And yes, I'm sure there were teens more concerned with members of the opposite sex than with what God was doing. These are all things of which I am normally a little wary in worship, especially worship involving teens, since I think it can leave them vulnerable to emotional manipulation rather than the leading of the Spirit, a "worshiping" of the worship experience rather than worshiping God. But last week was different. While all of those elements were present, I believe God's Spirit was genuinely present as well. There was no sense of pretension, no goal to whip the crowd into an emotional frenzy, no sense that if a certain number of people didn't come forward to pray then the night wasn't a success. From the outset there was a freedom and depth of worship calling us to a life of service and sacrifice that said this was a movement not merely of light and sound and charged emotions but of the living God. Quite in contrast to looking through smoke and mirrors and finding disappointment, last week I looked through the lights and loud music and found the face of God, the same God whose voice I heard 12 years ago. Thanks be to God for showing up in Louisville, Kentucky last week and for letting this pastor be there to witness it.

Heaven in Unlikely Places

2011-07-15T11:48:00.000-05:00

It is only three verses after the birth of Jacob and Esau that we begin to here about Jacob's conniving and self-serving ways. Genesis 25:19-26 tells of the birth of Jacob and Esau. Verses 27-28 give us a short summary about Esau and Jacob. Verse 29 begins the story of Jacob bartering for Esau's birthright. Jacob's story has barely gotten started and he is already portrayed to us as someone who is looking out for his own gain, trying to find the best angle to better himself. His brother is hungry and rather than treating him as a brother he sees Esau as someone who has something he wants. He refuses to share food with his brother until his brother gives up his birthright as the firstborn. Of course, this trend continues in Genesis 27. Jacob deceives his father Isaac in order to receive the blessing that should fall to Esau as the firstborn. Isaac, being too old to see well, was easily deceived when Jacob put on his brother's clothes and used goat skin to make himself feel hairy like his brother. So Jacob succeeds in obtaining both his brother's birthright and his blessing through questionable means. Surely Jacob is not the kind of person through whom God plans to fulfill his promise to Abraham. Surely God will look elsewhere.

As the story moves to Genesis 28, there has been no mention of any remorse or repentance on Jacob's part over what he has done. In fact, his only concerns seems to be his own survival. His mother has made up an excuse about him looking for a wife so that he can get away from home in order to avoid his own brother murdering him out of anger. So in this chapter one who is a proven deceiver and con-artist and fleeing from his family out of concern for his own self preservation finds himself in a "certain place" that is so unimportant as to be unworthy of a name at this point in the story and the only reason he has stopped in this place is to get some rest. There is nothing sacred about this person or this place or this journey or this activity. Jacob could not be any less interested in God. There is no reason for God to show up here.

But as Jacob sleeps, he has a dream about a ladder that reaches from earth to heaven with the angels of God ascending and descending on this ladder. And this is not just any dream filled with wishful thinking. Scripture tells us that God speaks to Jacob in this dream explaining the meaning of the vision. This is the God of Abraham and Isaac and this God is now extending the same promises to Jacob that he promised to Jacob's father and grandfather. God promises to be with Jacob and to keep him until the promise of inheriting this land on which he sleeps is fulfilled. God binds himself by these promises to a con artist who has spent no time or energy seeking God. Heaven has come to earth in this most ordinary of places. It is only after the dream of promises made by God that Jacob in turn promises himself to God, binding himself to be faithful to God if God will keep his promises.

Naturally, we wonder why God would do this. Why make promises to a man who has only served himself? Why should God reveal himself to one who was not even seeking? Why bind yourself to a man who felt no bond even to his own brother? What does God have to gain in this endeavor? While it may be difficult to answer those questions in a satisfactory way, we do find that this is a pattern with God. God is constantly showing up in places where we least expect, not least in the person of Jesus Christ.

The end of John 1 tells of Jesus' call to Philip and Nathanael. Jesus calls Philip first who then goes and tells Nathanael about Jesus of Nazareth. Nathanael is skeptical asking "Can anything good comes from Nazareth?" However, upon meeting Jesus, Nathanael is quickly convinced of Jesus' messianic qualities. But Jesus says to him "You will see greater things than these....Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man." Jesus is letting Nathanael know that just as heaven came to earth in that unlikely place where Jacob dreamed now heaven has come to earth in a whole new way in the unlikely place of this man from Nazareth. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God who makes a habit of bringing heaven to unlikely places.

God Provides ...Again

2011-06-29T15:38:00.000-05:00

In Genesis 24, Abraham sends his oldest, most trusted servant to find a wife for his son Isaac. He commands this servant to go to Abraham's homeland to find this wife and not to choose a wife for his son from among the Canaanites. This naturally raises a question for Abraham's servant: "What if the women doesn't want to come with me? Must I then take your son back to the land from which you came?". Abraham's response is adamant. He knows that God called him from that land. His son must not go back there. Instead, Abraham trusts that an angel of God will go with his servant and insure the proper outcome. If the woman will not come back with him, then Abraham says that the servant would be released from his oath.

Interestingly, there is no mention of this angel of the Lord anywhere in the rest of the story. In fact, there is no real action by God narrated in this story. God is mentioned numerous times by the individuals in the story. Abraham's servant prays to God before meeting Rebekah and then thanks God afterward. He testifies to Laban about God's faithfulness to Abraham. Laban and Bethuel agree that God has been active in these events. But nowhere in this chapter are God's actions described by the narrator. We are not explicitly told that God speaks, acts, or sends an angel anywhere in this story even though all the characters in the story seem to assume these things.

I appreciate that a story like this one is included in our scripture. I appreciate it because it is just so mundane, so everyday, so seemingly human. The story takes place in the space where most of us live most of our lives; among everyday concerns and motives. This is in sharp contrast to the story we heard just last week from Genesis 22. That story, in which God commands Abraham to kill his own son, is exceptional and dramatic. It is anything but mundane. It's point may be easy enough to understand but its drama difficult to wrap our minds around because it is so "other", so different from our everyday experience. How can we really comprehend what was commanded of Abraham?

But as different as these two stories are, they share a common theme. In both, the Lord provides. In one, God provides through the dramatic and timely intervention of his angel. In the other, God provides in ways so subtle that they are not even narrated. Even though God's actions are not narrated, we are clearly meant to assume that God is at work in what could appear to be merely human actions. The same Abraham who trusted God in the drama of nearly sacrificing his own son also trusts God to provide a family and a future for that son.

I appreciate stories like this because I am thankful that God can be involved in the everyday routines of our lives just as much as the dramatic incidents. Everyone loves to hear a story full of drama and suspense and those stories are often formative for our faith. But if our faith had to be constantly one moment of crisis after another in order to draw closer to God, we would all wear out pretty fast.

Of course, this doesn't negate what I talked about last week. God doesn't stop being a God of risk just because he is also involved in the mundane. The God who provides a wife for Isaac in Genesis 24 is the same God who called Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22. God hasn't stopped calling Abraham to risk and trust in just two chapters. Its just that this risk and trust doesn't always come in the form of sacrificing one's son...or a call to be a missionary to Africa...or to suffer persecution in the name of Christ (though we must never forget that our calling includes these kinds of things as well; we can't have Genesis 24 without Genesis 22). Sometimes this risk comes in the form of trusting that God's grace will be enough to keep our children from inheriting every weakness we exhibit as parents. Sometimes it means trusting that there will be enough time in an incredibly busy week even if we will be faithful in setting aside time for prayer and study. And sometimes it means shutting down your computer and walking across the street to check on a neighbor...an urging from God I've been ignoring for some time now... so with that, may the Lord provide.

God of Risk

2011-06-20T14:39:00.001-05:00

"Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son." - Genesis 22:10

Often when I read scripture, I come away wondering where most of us get our notions of Christianity from, myself included. How do we hear the kinds of stories that make up what we call the Word of God and come away with the impression that God just wants us to be nice people and that if we will do that he will bless us and make us happy? How does the story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son, his only son, translate into us getting dressed up and getting into our nice new cars and driving to our nice comfortable building where we see people we are comfortable with and sing music we enjoy and then tell the pastor what a great job he did? How can we hear this story that calls us to a life of sacrificing what is most precious to us in obedience to God and then complain when our church varies in the smallest way from what we think it should be?

But even that last sentence doesn't do this story justice because we are expert rationalizers, masters of justifying our own actions. To say that the story of Abraham and Isaac's journey to Moriah is "really about" sacrificing what is most precious to us in obedience to God is to take Isaac's very human, very boyish face off of the matter. It is an abstraction. It is an escape hatch that allows us to say that this story is about "something else". It is to make this story less threatening by saying "A loving God would never actually have me kill my own child. This is just an illustration," And such words would not be untrue. I don't believe the God revealed in Jesus wants anything to do with child sacrifice. I do believe God calls us to sacrifice what we value most in life to him. But the great speed with which we move to our explanations and rationalizations of God's command reveal just how uncomfortable they are for us. It is easy to explain what this story "means". It is much harder to hear the confusion and fear of Isaac's weak and cracking pre-teen voice as he wonders aloud to his father where the lamb is for the sacrifice. It is easy to say "God is the most important thing in my life." It is much harder to put the face of our own son or daughter on that claim. God is great...as long as he knows the limits of our relationship with him.

The irony of the story in Genesis 22 is that it is actually very much about God testing the limits of his relationship with Abraham. God doesn't seem to know just how far Abraham is going to let him into his life. Inasmuch as this is a story about Abraham's trust it is also a story about God putting himself at risk. It is tempting to think that this is all fixed from the outset, that God knows what Abraham will do, or at least that there is really nothing at stake for God in the matter. It is simply a test for Abraham to pass or fail; to move up or fall down a rung on the spiritual ladder. This is another way we attempt to "explain" the story, to make it more comfortable, to empty it of any real risk.

But as the story is told, the test of Abraham involves risk for God as well. After all, this is not just Abraham's son, this is the child of the promise. Isaac is the one through whom God is to fulfill the promise that Abraham would be the father of many nations. If Isaac is dead, how will this promise be fulfilled? Or to put it another way, if Abraham fails to be obedient to this command, then where will God be? God has bound himself to Abraham by making these promises to him. If Abraham fails this test of trust, then God's promises fail also, don't they? If Abraham refuses to offer his son, then does God start over with someone else? Nor is God sitting comfortably by as all this goes on, for in v. 12 the angel of the Lord says "Now I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me" implying that God didn't know it before hand. The outcome was in question. The promise of God was genuinely at risk. God's plan, at least in its present form, depended on Abraham's trust.

Abraham trusts. God provides. This epitomizes so much of what our relationship with God is/should be about. And yet it bears repeating; it is easy to talk about trusting God to provide but to say "The Lord will provide" is to do what Abraham did. It is not some general notion of faith where we sit back and wait for God to throw good things our way. It is not exchanging our belief for God's blessing. It is to allow our fate to be bound up with God's. It is to step out in real, concrete action that could cost us dearly. It is to allow God to test the limits of our relationship with him when even he doesn't know for sure what the outcome will be. It is to know that the God of Abraham is a God of risk.

Rivers of Living Water

2011-06-08T14:54:00.000-05:00

"On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified." - John 7:37-39

There were many feasts in ancient Israel but three of them stood out as especially important; Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths/Tabernacles. The Passover Feast celebrated the deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. Of course, this feast continues to be a significant day for modern day Jews and also for Christians since the "last supper" Christ had with the disciples was a passover meal. The Feast of Weeks was a harvest celebration and is so named because it was celebrated seven weeks (a week's worth of weeks) after the beginning of harvest. In Greek speaking Judaism, this festival also came to be known as Pentecost, the "pente" denoting the 50th day, the first day after the seven weeks mentioned above. This festival also has enduring significance in Christianity since Acts 2 describes the outpouring of God's Holy Spirit on the apostles on Pentecost, which we celebrate this coming Sunday, seven weeks after Easter.

The third important feast in Israel was the Feast of Booths (a.k.a Tabernacles). This feast was also connected to the Exodus story. During the seven days of this feast, the people of Israel were to dwell in booths, small tent like structures, to remind them of their dwelling in tents in the wilderness after God delivered them from their slavery in Egypt. However, over time this feast began to take on other meanings and significance as well. By the time of the prophet Zechariah, the Feast of Booths had also become connected to rain. In last chapter of Zechariah, God says that rain will only fall on those nations that come to Jerusalem and keep the Feast of Booths (Zechariah 14:16-19). By the first century, a practice of pouring out libations at the altar of the Temple had also been added as part of the festival's observance. Water would be gathered from the Pool of Siloam, carried to the Temple, and poured around the altar, perhaps as a symbolic act of the prayer for rain.

It was likely after this water drawing ceremony that Jesus stands up and says "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, "Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water." Jesus' first sentence here seems to be an allusion to Isaiah 55:1. "Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price." This verse is a part of God's promise to Israel that they will be restored from their exile in Babylon.

The other part of Jesus' statement, about rivers of living water, is a bit more difficult to pinpoint to any particular verse in the Old Testament, especially since the river is flowing "out of his heart". However, one passage where a river of living water takes center stage is Ezekiel 47. Like Isaiah 55, Ezekiel is also conveying a promise of Israel's return from exile. However, Ezekiel's vision speaks not only to Israel's historical return from Exile but also has a kind of supernatural quality to it in which the actual land of Israel itself is restored and teems with life. Ezekiel describes a stream that flows from the base of the Temple, past the altar (where the libation for the Feast of Booths were poured) and toward the Dead Sea. On its way to the Dead Sea, this stream becomes a mighty river despite having no tributaries and when it arrives at the Dead Sea, it turns the salt water fresh. The Hebrew here literally says that it "heals" the water of the Dead Sea allowing the once lifeless body of water to teem with life. This is literally a river of living water.

But this river flows from the Temple. Why then does Jesus say "out of his heart"? Many English translations make this sound like a reference to the heart of those who believe in Jesus. However, the "his" could just as easily be referring to Jesus himself. Additionally, the Greek word in this verse is not heart (kardia) but gut or belly (koilias). The verse would then read "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and whoever believes in me drink. As the Scripture has said, "Out of his gut will flow rivers of living water." The image of water flowing from Jesus' gut or side should not be lost on those familiar with John's telling of Jesus' crucifixion. Water and blood will indeed flow from Jesus' side when the soldier pierces him with a spear as he hangs on the cross.

So what does all this mean? It means these few simple verses are a profoundly in depth but succinct summary of John's understanding of Jesus. All of this takes place in the midst of a festival which reminds those gathered of the Exodus; God's greatest act of deliverance for his people. This festival also reminded them of God's continued sustaining of creation with rains. Jesus then alludes to two verses which remind those gathered of another of God's greatest act of restoration; return from Exile. But Jesus does not simply remind the people of this. He says he is now the source of deliverance, sustenance, and restoration. "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me." Jesus is the source of living water because he is the God who did all these things now made flesh. The water and blood which will flow from Jesus' side at his crucifixion are the beginning of Ezekiel's vision of a river of life which will restore the land of Israel, healing it and giving it life.

But this is not only a statement about Jesus. As a statement about Jesus' death, it is also a statement about the Spirit. John says as much in the very next verse. "Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified." In the Gospel of John, Jesus' glorification refers to his crucifixion. John repeats several times throughout his gospel what he says here; the Holy Spirit can not come to the disciples until Jesus has been crucified. That is why Jesus' death is the beginning of Ezekiel's vision of new creation. It means the outpouring of the Holy Spirit who will carry out this work of restoration and renewal. The Holy Spirit is the river of living water which renews and sustains all that it touches.

This is the essence of Pentecost which we will celebrate this Sunday; God's Holy Spirit, God's river of living water has been poured out on those who place their trust in Jesus. This is why we expect lives to be transformed, attitudes to be changed, and the chains of sin to broken. This is why we expect that these old creatures that we are and this old creation that we live in can both be made new. This is why we believe there can even be such a thing as church. Because in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we believe that God has opened up a spring of water right here in the midst of our otherwise very dry world and from that spring flows a river that brings life to everything around it. May we see that river flowing through our church this Sunday and may we who are thirsty come and drink.

Child-like Faith

2011-05-30T13:48:00.000-05:00

"And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said 'Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 18:2-3

It is often said that as followers of Jesus we must have a "child-like faith". Sometimes this is taken to mean that we should have a child-like trust in God; just as a child must depend on their parents to provide for them, so we should depend upon God to provide for us. Other times "child-like faith" is interpreted as a kind of innocence. Still others might say this means our faith should be simple and not too complicated.

While there might be a number of ways we can compare our faith to the life of a child and some of those comparisons might even be instructive for our spiritual health, there is one aspect of children to which Jesus is drawing attention here; their lack of status.

Even in our own 21st century American culture, children are more or less powerless. They can not vote or hold political office. They usually do not have the means to acquire wealth or wield influence. And yet, they are at least recognized as people with certain rights. As a result, there are numerous laws to protect children from harm or abuse by those more powerful than them. By contrast, children in the first century Greco-Roman world had no such laws to protect them. They were essentially the property of their parents, equivalent to or of barely higher status than slaves, who could treat them however they pleased without any legal repercussions. It was not an uncommon practice for female babies to simply be abandoned to die because they were not seen as bringing any value to the family. In the ancient world, children had no rights, no power, no status.

It is in response to the disciples' question "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" that Jesus places a child in front of them and says that they must become like children. Then to make the point even more plain, in v.4 Jesus says "Whoever humbles himself like this child is greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Matthew doesn't tell us this story to show us that Jesus was good with kids or to call us to a simple, trusting, innocent faith. This is a point about Jesus' kingdom and those who participate in it. This is an upside down kingdom where the first are last, the least are greatest, and the crucified is king. When Jesus' calls us to child-like faith it is a call to humility, to emptying ourselves, to being a people of no status.

And Christian humility means much more than simply being modest (and certainly something other than having a low self-esteem). It means actively receiving, caring for, serving these "little ones". Jesus says in v. 5-6 "Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." Obviously, "these little ones" refers to the children to which Jesus has just been referring. However, many scholars believe this might be a reference to "little ones" within the congregations to whom Matthew's gospel is addressed. In other words, Matthew is calling upon those in his churches to humble themselves to the point of caring not only for children but to humble themselves by caring for anyone who has been marginalized, anyone who is of low status like a child. Jesus says whoever receives these marginalized outcasts is receiving Jesus himself and whoever does not receive them would be better off being dragged to the bottom of the sea by a large stone! I think it is safe to say that Jesus means for us to take this admonition seriously.

The Way, The Truth, and The Life

2011-05-16T17:09:00.000-05:00

"Jesus said to him, "I am the way and the truth and the life." - John 14:6

Some of the most well known words in the Bible. But what do they mean? If you had to put these words of Jesus into your own words, what would you say? I think for many people these words are synonymous with...

"Believe in Jesus and you'll go to heaven when you die."
or
"Christianity is the one true religion."
or
"If you don't live like Jesus then you are going to hell."

Before I say anything else, let me make a few things clear. I believe Jesus with all my being when he says that he is the way, the truth, and the life. I have committed my life to that belief. I believe heaven is real. I believe in the resurrection, the new creation, and the coming of the kingdom of God and longingly await them in hopeful expectation. I believe that something awful, whether we call it hell, Sheol, hades, the lake of fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth, or the second death awaits those who oppose Jesus and his kingdom. I believe it is only through Jesus that anyone can receive salvation. I believe Jesus is the image of the invisible God and that it is only through him that we can truly come to know God. I believe that the Church is the body of Christ in the world and that we are called to follow and imitate Jesus and that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to do so.

But I also believe in nuance. I believe, not in making things unnecessarily complicated, but in appreciating inherent complexity when it is there. I believe in paying attention to what the writers of scripture actually said and paying attention to the context in which they said it. I believe in holding our doctrines, opinions, worldviews, and practices up to the Word of God and seeing where they need to be reformed rather than making Jesus' words fit into our preconceived notions. I believe that sometimes we think we know exactly what Jesus is saying so much so that we actually stop listening to his actual words and as a result we substitute our own thoughts where the Word of God should be.

So when Jesus says "I am the way and the truth and the life" I think it is important for us to hear what Jesus is actually saying as well as what he doesn't say. Jesus doesn't say Christianity is the way, the truth, and the life. He doesn't say that he came to bestow a new set of doctrines on us that will get us into heaven or four spiritual laws that will keep us out of hell. He does't say go to church and pay your tithe and live a good life and you'll be set for eternity. He says "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one come to the Father except through me" This is a statement about knowing Jesus himself, about being in relationship with Jesus, about being personally led by Jesus and thereby coming to know the God he calls "Father".

If somehow we make this into a statement about one particular religion over others then we are actually hearing the very opposite of what Jesus intends to say to us. Jesus isn't calling the disciples to a new religion but to a new relationship. He doesn't say "I'll show you way" but "I am the way". It's not "I'll teach you the truth." It's "I am the truth." He doesn't promise us the good life. He promises that he is the resurrection and the life. He is the good shepherd. He is the bread that came down from heaven. He is the light of the world. He is the true vine. Jesus is the one who reveals the nature and character of God, the heart of the Father to us.

It is this truth around which the rest of the conversation in John 14 revolves. In v.8, Philip says to Jesus "Lord show us the Father and it is enough for us." Jesus responds "Have I been with you so long and you still do not know me, Philip? How can you say 'Show us the Father.' Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" Jesus didn't come to establish a new religion or moral standard. He came to show us the Father in his own life, in his own person, his very existence in human flesh revealing God to us. The way is not a path but the guide. The truth is not the teaching but the teacher. The life is not a cure but the great physician himself. The way, the truth, and the life is not a thing, a practice, or a belief that can be possessed or mastered but a person, namely the person of Jesus Christ.

The Gate Is the Shepherd

2011-05-09T15:52:00.000-05:00

In John 10, Jesus proclaims "I am the good shepherd." Clearly, this image would have had immediate significance to those who lived in the agrarian society of Jesus' day. All kinds of apt comparisons can and have been made throughout Christian history between the shepherd/sheep relationship and that of Jesus and his followers. However, it is important for us to recognize that when Jesus chooses to describe himself in this way, he is not pulling just any old metaphor out of the culture that surrounds him. He is using imagery that has been central to Israel's thinking about itself, its leaders, and its relationship with Yahweh.

Of course, Psalm 23 stands out with the well known "The Lord is my shepherd"; a reminder that God is ultimately the shepherd of his people. However, shepherding imagery was also used to describe the kings and priests of Israel. These leaders were meant to be God's shepherds of his people as well. In Jeremiah 23, God says through the prophet "Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!". God promises to remove these shepherds and replace them with new ones who will care for his people. Again in Ezekiel 34, God accuses the shepherds of Israel of feeding themselves instead of feeding the sheep and of allowing the sheep to be carried off by wild beasts. Therefore, God promises to rescue his sheep from the very shepherds who are supposed to be rescuing them from these wild beasts.

Jesus' declaration "I am the good shepherd" is not only a metaphor drawn from agrarian society, nor is it only an image drawn from Israel's history. It is also said in response to the action of the Pharisees in John 9. Jesus statement in John 10 follows immediately on the heels of the story about a man who was born blind whom Jesus had healed. Throughout chapter 9, the Pharisees are trying to make sense of how it is that Jesus, whom they regard as a sinner, could possibly have healed this man's blindness. When the man who has been healed of his blindness refuses to change his story about Jesus, they cast him out of the synagogue.

It is easy for us to hear this story and regard the Pharisees and "the Jews" (John's name for those who oppose Jesus even though Jesus and all of his followers are Jewish as well) as legalistic. After all, John doesn't spare any trouble to paint them in an entirely negative light. However, we should recognize that the Pharisees are simply carrying out their role as Israel's shepherds. They didn't set out to be legalistic. (I've yet to hear anyone proclaim that as a personal life goal.) But they have heard those passage from Jeremiah and Ezekiel all their lives. As the religious leaders, the "pastors" of their day, they see themselves as the shepherds of Israel and they take that responsibility very seriously, as they should. After all, it was the shepherds of Israel whom God faulted for Israel's previous collapse when they were taken into exile. They are simply trying to avoid the mistakes of their ancestors by making sure that God's Law is lived out in Israel and that means casting false prophets (like Jesus) and their followers (like this blind man) out of their midst so that Israel may remain pure.

It is in response to these actions by the Pharisees that Jesus says "I am the good shepherd". Actually, Jesus uses two metaphors to describe himself in this chapter. He also says that he is the door or gate by which the sheep enter the fold. On one hand, we can see this as a very confusing mixture of metaphors. In one verse, Jesus is the gate and in another he is the shepherd. On the other hand, this mixture of metaphors is a very accurate theological depiction of Jesus; he is both the way into the flock and the one who leads and cares for the flock, both images are appropriate. In fact, Jesus may even be drawing on a common practice of the day in which the shepherd would lay down in the opening of the sheep pen, thereby actually serving as its gate. Either way, we have an image here of what Jesus says later in the Gospel of John: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." The purpose of this statement is not to declare one religion better than every other. Its purpose is to say that the way to God is not a religion or a morality or a belief system or a set of practices; the way to God is a person; namely Jesus Christ. The gate is the shepherd. The way is a person. The essence of the Christian faith is nothing other than knowing, following, and being in relationship with the God made flesh in Jesus Christ and having our lives transformed by that relationship. All of our doctrines and practices only serve the greater purpose of guiding us in that relationship; they are not a replacement for the relationship itself.

The Pharisees mistake isn't that they are legalistic while Jesus is lenient. It is isn't that they take sin and holiness and the Law too seriously and that God doesn't really care much about those things any more. The Pharisees mistake is their failure to recognize that the Lord who is their shepherd is standing right in front of them in the person of Jesus. The religious leaders became so accustomed to functioning as shepherds and even gatekeepers that they forgot their own role as sheep. They were so busy "caring" for the sheep that they forgot to listen for the voice of their own shepherd and they eventually became so deaf to that voice that even when he stood among them they no longer recognized him as shepherd. Jesus proclamation of himself as the good shepherd is at least in part a challenge to the Pharisees to recognize that in their attempts to be good shepherds they have failed to be good sheep.

This is the danger for many life-long Christians as well. As we grow and mature in Christ, we are rightfully expected to take on roles of leadership and discipling others. We become shepherds to others in the faith. As we spend more time and energy teaching others the beliefs and practices of the Christian faith, we become accustomed to our role as shepherd, so much so though that we forget we are also sheep. In all the shepherding of others, there is a danger that we will fail to listen for the voice of our own shepherd and so eventually become deaf to the sound of his voice.

This is part of the beauty of Psalm 23. David is the shepherd of God's people. He is the king. He has reached the pinnacle of earthly power and he knows that it is God who has put him there. He knows he has been appointed by God as shepherd and yet he still says "the Lord is my shepherd". There is a recognition that even as the ultimate earthly shepherd he is still a sheep and there is still a higher shepherd for whose voice he must listen. As followers of Jesus, we are first and foremost a people who hear and follow the voice of our shepherd.

2011 Annual Report

2011-05-08T21:49:00.003-05:00

My annual report as delivered to the Clinton Church of the Nazarene on Sunday, May 8, 2011.

My brothers and sisters in Christ,

It is truly an honor to stand before you today and give my fourth report as your pastor. I know it is customary for me to begin my report by saying how much I love and appreciate all of you but I hope that you know that it is more than just a custom. My appreciation for all of you, for your faithfulness and dedication to Jesus Christ, continues to grow.

My appreciation for you has grown much in the same way that a young couple’s love might grow for one another after a few years of marriage. After all, the relationship between a pastor and a congregation can be a sort of marriage; my family has been wed to this church family for a time being. And while this relationship is certainly not of the “until death do us part” kind that a real marriage is, we do promise to share life with one another “for richer for poor, in sickness and in health”. We have bound ourselves to one another promising that we will be there for each other in the good times and the bad because we believe it is not just our own preferences but the will of God which has brought us together.

Of course, we all know that honeymoons are not marriages. There comes a point where the sheer bliss and joy of being newlywed begins to fade and the couple must get about the nitty-gritty, everyday challenge of being in relationship with one another. That love which at first was reflected mostly as emotion, must now be manifested in the hard work of compromise, sacrifice, patience, and faithfulness.

After four years of ministry together, I think it is safe to say that the honeymoon is over for us. While there may be a bit of sadness with this reality, it is also a good sign that our relationship is maturing as it should. It means we now trust each other enough to be honest with one another. It means we can be less concerned about whether or not this relationship will work and more focused on how we will continue to work within it for the mission of the Church and the glory of God.

It is in that deeper, fuller, more mature sense of appreciation that I wish to say to you this morning that it is a privilege to minister with all of you, to live along side of you, to see the parts of your life that perhaps few others get to see simply because I am your pastor. The more I minister with you and the more I reflect on our relationships with one another; the more God reveals to me that He knew what he was doing when he brought us together. In short, it is not just a blessing to be a pastor but specifically to be your pastor. I continue to give thanks to God for allowing me to be a part of the ministry of the Church of the Nazarene in Clinton, IL.

It is also a blessing to be a part of this church family because of the ways that God is continuing to work among us. Over the past year, we have successfully given a maintained focus to two areas of ministry: (1) Greater involvement in the lives of our children and teens and (2) outreach.

Our focus on involvement in the lives of our children and teens began with Baby/Children’s day last year which also served as the kickoff to our VBS which was every Sunday throughout the summer instead of just one week. I personally thought that VBS was a huge success this year both in the discipleship of our children and in meeting this goal of greater involvement. Many of us who might not otherwise be involved in VBS or children’s ministry participated in VBS this year and many of us who had participated in the past gave even more time this year. In addition to VBS, several people have also stepped up to help out with Children’s Church as well. Over this past year, several of our kids have memorized Psalm 23, the Lord’s Prayer, and Philippians 2:5-11 in Children’s Church. The scriptural knowledge of our children and teens has also been enhanced through Bible quizzing. In March, several of us stepped out of our comfort zones and into children’s and teen’s Sunday School classes in order to be more involved in their lives. In addition to all of this, there have been children’s events and several teen outings which many of us have hosted or chaperoned. And perhaps the largest contribution of all to the lives of our teens hasn’t even happened yet. In just a few months, Lance and I will be going with three of our teens to Louisville, KY for Nazarene Youth Congress; an event which was important for me when I was a teen as I wrestled with my own call to ministry. This would not be possible if it were not for the generous contributions of time and money by many people in this room.

These acts of discipleship are not small or inconsequential things. I know that visiting a child’s Sunday School class or hosting a teen event may not seem like world-changing stuff but when it is done in the Spirit of Christ, it can be. Making disciples of Jesus Christ is our mission as the Church, it is what God has called us to. We do that when we spend time with our children and teens and show them what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus. I have no doubt that the things our kids and teens have learned over the past year, the examples of Christ-likeness they have been shown will stick with them for many years to come, enabling them to be faithful disciples of Jesus themselves.

The other area on which we focused this past year was outreach. Once again, the outreach committee has done a tremendous job of organizing events to give us opportunities to reach out to others. We repeated some of the events we had in the past such as block parties, refreshments for the 4^th of July fireworks viewing, the Kid’s Carnival, handing out water at Apple and Pork, and Trunk or Treat and those events have continued to be successful ways of interacting with our community. We also participated in several events for the first time this past year such as May Days, the 175^th anniversary of our town, and the concerts on the square.

In addition to reaching out in these community events, we also did several new things here at our church. We’ve started having fellowship nights on the second Sunday night of every month, not only as an opportunity for us to fellowship with one another but also as an opportunity to invite others who do not attend church to come and fellowship with us as well. We’ve also hosted three “friend days” throughout the past year as specific opportunities to invite someone who does not attend our church regularly. In December, we hosted “A Taste of Sunday School” after our children’s Christmas musical which gave the opportunity to socialize and connect with a large number of visitors, thereby planting a seed for Christ. And just in these last few weeks we have started a new outreach ministry open to anyone but designed specifically for those who attend our 4^th Wednesday meal. These are workshops which will teach a series of life skills such as cooking, gardening, managing finances, and other similar topics. In addition to teaching these skills, it also gives us a chance to get to know some of those who can get lost in the crowd of 4^th Wednesday on a more personal level, hopefully beginning a redemptive relationship that may ultimately lead them closer to Christ. I believe we have continued to take some very significant and positive strides as a church in the area of outreach over this past year.

Of course, the most obvious change in our church over the past year in the area of outreach has been our change in service times. A year ago, we decided to place Sunday School after Worship in hopes of making stronger connections with our visitors. The thinking in this change was that a visitor might make a stronger connection with a small group of people in a Sunday School class than they would in a crowd of people during worship and therefore would be more likely to return the next week. Obviously, we have already participated in evaluating this change together to some extent this morning in the poll that we took together earlier. However, I would like to share with you just a few of my own very brief observations. This is not necessarily an attempt to persuade you to share in these opinions. It is simply to share my perspective with you as a part of my report.

First, while the change in service times may not have had precisely the impact for which we were hoping, it has been statistically positive nonetheless. In comparing Sunday School attendance for the 34 Sundays from May – Decemeber 2010 to the same Sundays in 2009, there were nineteen Sundays which had an increase of five or more in attendance from the previous years. There were eight Sundays that had little or no change and only four Sundays which had a decrease in attendance of five or greater from the previous year. In other words, Sunday School attendance saw a significant increase on well over half the Sundays in that time period without a corresponding decrease in worship attendance. Obviously, these numbers are not the whole story or even the most important part of the story. I only share them so that we can be aware of them.

Second, I think the change in service times has been positive simply because it has broken up some of our routine as a church. I remember when the grocery story that I worked at when I was in high school changed the layout of the store. Of course, at first all the customers were confused because they couldn’t find the products they were looking for where they had always found them in their years of shopping at the same store. However, the reason the store did this was because research had found that this caused shoppers to see new products that they normally didn’t notice. In other words, when you know where everything is, you go right to that spot and get it and don’t pay any attention to anything else along the way. But if you actually have to look for what you need then you notice new things along the way and might buy something you otherwise would not have noticed. I believe our change in service times has worked like that for us as well. We had a set routine when we came to church. For many of us, that meant heading straight to our Sunday School classes as soon as we walked in the door and then straight to our seats in the sanctuary. As a result, we were so stuck in our routine that we often failed to notice anyone new. I believe that now, even though we might feel a bit more confused and out of sorts ourselves, our eyes are more open to when someone new walks in our doors.

My third and final observation has very little to do with the change itself and more to do with our attitudes about the change. I trust that we all recognize that the health and future of our church does not rest on something as insignificant as when we meet for worship. So whether we continue as it is now or at some point decide it would be better to go back to the old way doesn’t really matter a whole lot. After all, it is God who is building his Church, not us by deciding when to meet for worship. However, what does matter a whole lot is the kind of attitudes we exhibit as we discuss these matters. Essentially, what I am getting at is what Jesus was getting at when he said “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” Likewise, the Church is not an institution that exists to serve us and our preferences. We are the Church called to serve the Lord in reaching our lost world. We are not here to simply consume a religious product and to have our needs met. We are here to carry out the mission that God has given us. We can have vigorous disagreements about the best way to carry out that mission but we must settle those disagreements not based on our desires and opinions but by seeking first his kingdom and his righteousness and trusting that all of these things will added unto as well.

Finally, however, I cannot give a complete and meaningful review of this past year without sharing with you what God has been doing in me personally. It is difficult to describe exactly what it is that God has done and is doing except to say that it is undeniable that God is teaching me to trust him in new ways. Of course, most of you know how much of a theology nerd I am so it will come as no surprise to you that this transformation began with a book. About a year ago I began reading The Works of John Wesley. While God has often used study as an important spiritual discipline in my life, God was especially present somehow in my reading of Wesley. As I read Wesley’s journal, where he records the significant episodes of his years of ministry, I was struck by Wesley’s remarkable trust in God. Wesley exhibited this amazing confidence that as long as he did his part, he knew God would act. So he preached, no matter how small or how large the crowd, whether it was an attentive crowd or a mob, even when he got hit square in the forehead by a stone, Wesley kept preaching because he believed that if the Word of God was proclaimed then it had the power to change people in any circumstance.

While I was still reading Wesley, we also started to work through the book of Ezekiel here on Sunday mornings. Similar themes arose out of this prophetic book as well. God calls Ezekiel to proclaim the message God has given him while also telling him that the people won’t listen to what he is saying. Ezekiel’s job was simply to proclaim the message regardless of the results. In chapter 37 especially, we get this incredible image of God’s Word at work so powerfully that it can raise up an army of audience to hear Ezekiel’s message where previously there had been only dry bones.

Throughout this same time, God had also been speaking to me about having more accountability and consistency in my prayer life. It wasn’t that I wasn’t praying. I just wasn’t making it a consistent priority; it wasn’t central to my identity and ministry as a pastor. Janet Crawley was the first to help move me in this direction by meeting with me on Monday mornings for prayer. Last fall, I also committed to having a time of prayer and scripture every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as well. I know that many of you cannot make these times because you work and several others have attended these prayer gatherings at some time or another and I thank you for your presence there. However, this morning I would like to specifically recognize Shirley DeJaynes, Myra Stroud, and Marie Blue for their continued faithfulness in meeting with me for several months now for this time of prayer. Their faithfulness has helped to bring me closer to Jesus and I believe it will yield fruit for this church as well.

Even in more recent months, God has continued to remind me of this same theme. After reading Wesley, I began to read a theologian named Karl Barth who was one of the few pastors in Germany who opposed Hitler’s regime. Wesley and Barth are not at all similar theologically and yet Barth’s systematic theology began with this same theme I had seen in Wesley; the power of the Word of God. Barth wrote forcefully about how all our words and actions as the Church are basically useless unless God himself is at work among us revealing himself to us. However, if God is revealing himself to us then we cannot be left unchanged. Around the same time, I was preaching from the first chapter of Ephesians and the first five chapters of 1 Corinthians and those chapters seemed to be stark reminders as well that it is God who is building his Church. It was not Paul or Peter or Apollos or the Corinthians and it is not us but God who calls his people by his Word and his Spirit. On Sunday nights, in the book of Revelation we have seen over and over again that it is God who sits on the throne and only asks that we be faithful; indeed, we are conquerors and overcomers not by bigger and better accomplishments and ministries but simply by being faithful. Even in this recent season of Lent, God spoke to me about trust through the stories of Abraham, Moses, David, and again Ezekiel.

When I look over this past year, I am utterly astounded by the singularity of this theme. Whether it has been through Wesley or Barth, Paul, John, or Ezekiel, or even through some of you in this congregation, It is as if God has been saying the same thing to me every week for the past year. God’s single message to me has been this: “Just trust me. My Word and My Spirit are enough. My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.” My brothers and sisters, this is my testimony to you this morning; that God has done a gradual but undeniable work in my heart over this past year. I testify to you this morning that God’s Word and God’s Spirit are still enough to transform us as his people.

With all of that in mind, I have known for several months now that God is calling us to something new and radical as a congregation. For the longest time, I wasn’t sure what it was but I knew that God was going to call us to really take a step of faith and place our trust in him in ways that we had not before. God kept saying to me over this past year “Trust me.” And I kept asking “Trust you for what? What is it that you want us to do? What is this huge step of faith you are going to call us to, Lord?” But God just kept saying “Trust me.” I thought maybe God was calling us to some new ministry we had never done before or to do something completely new and unexpected, maybe even something we would think was crazy.

Finally, all of this came into clearer focus for me just about a month ago at a district event in Sherman, IL. At first, I wasn’t even sure I really had time to go to this event but I eventually decided I needed to be there and so I made the time to go. The speaker at the event turned out to be a man some of you know from a summer internship he did here at this church several years ago. His name is Corey Jones and he now pastors a church in Texas. He spoke that day about the struggles that he had been through with his church. It was a very small church with just a few families and Corey had been the pastor there for three years and things were just going nowhere. To make a long story short, Corey went away on a trip one week thinking that when he came back he would resign as the pastor of this church but when he got back he felt like God was calling them to commit themselves to prayer in a new way. Corey shared this with his church and when he did the last tithing family in the church walked out saying that they prayed enough already. Nevertheless, those who stayed committed themselves to simply seeking God together and today Crossroads Tabernacle is a thriving community of faith. Don’t get the wrong idea. They still aren’t the largest church in the neighborhood. This wasn’t about just finding another church growth strategy. They sought God simply for the purpose of drawing closer to God and Corey shared with us story after story of lives that were transformed as a result.

I left that event feeling like God was saying to me “This is an example of what I’ve been talking to you about. This is how I have been calling you to trust me; to trust me enough to just seek me as your God and know that everything else will be taken care of.” So, my brothers and sisters, we have only one goal, one focus area for this coming year. We will seek God through corporate prayer and the reading of God’s Word.

Now maybe your first thought is similar to what mine was: we already do that. Maybe you are thinking this isn’t that radical at all, this isn’t anything new or crazy. How is just praying and reading our Bibles some amazing act of trust in God? Or maybe you are wondering “How this is going to help our church at all? What difference is praying and reading our bibles going to make? How is this going to get any more people in our church’s doors? We need to be out doing more outreach and getting people to come to church!”

But I think that is part of the irony of what God is calling us to. God is calling upon us to stop worrying about all that other stuff, to stop worrying about whether or not we have “enough” people in our pews and to just seek him because he is God and he is worth seeking regardless of how many other people are seeking him with us. And that is how things as simple as prayer and reading scripture can become radical acts of trust; because in prayer and scripture we are simply seeking God for the sake of seeking God and we are trusting that God will provide everything else. We are trusting that God’s Word and God’s Spirit are enough. We are trusting that it is God who is building his Church and not us.

This morning I am calling us as a congregation not simply to more prayer and Bible reading in some general sense but specifically for us to commit to times of corporate prayer and individual study of Scripture. (If the ushers would come forward, I have two sheets of paper I would like them to pass out to you.) One of the two sheets you are receiving says “Seeking God through Corporate Prayer”. I know that we all pray individually and that we pray corporately for a few minutes when we gather for worship. However, I believe the time has come for us to set aside an entire service in which we pray together as a body of believers. By that, I don’t mean that we will sing some songs and then pray for a few minutes at the end or have a devotional and then pray. I mean that we will come and do nothing other than seek God in prayer together during that time. You can see there are several options from which to choose. I encourage to mark as many of these time as you will commit to attending but please do not circle a time unless you plan to be here at that time on a regular basis. You can give these sheets back to me after we have concluded service this morning and I will present them to the church board and we will discuss together where God is leading us from there.

The second piece of paper you are receiving says “Seeking God through the Reading of His Word”. This sheet has several different Bible Reading plans listed on it to help you stay in the Word over the next year. I would encourage you to prayerfully consider which of these plans will work best for you. You don’t have to turn this into me today if you need more time to think about it. If you would like to follow one of the plans on this sheet, you can circle it and print your name on the back of the paper and give this paper back to me and I will get the details of that reading plan to you in the next week or two. You’ll see there that you can also go online and find reading plans over the internet or for your smart phone if that is easier for you.

This is only the beginning. In addition to these two initial steps, I will be working with our newly elected leadership to make sure that prayer plays an even more central role in our workings as a church board than it has up to this point. I will also work with all of our leaders in the coming year to see how we can make seeking God through prayer and scripture more central to everything we do as a church. However, please recognize that this is not just up to those who are elected to church office this morning. It is a call to every single one of us to commit ourselves to gathering here with our brothers and sisters in Christ to seek our Lord and savior.

Of course, I hope it goes without saying that this doesn’t mean we are going to just drop everything else we do as a church. Obviously, the discipleship of our children and teens, reaching out to our community in Christ’s name, serving others; these things are a part of who we are and do not change. However, it is my hope that in this coming year we will simply seek God for the sake of seeking God like we never have before as a church. I believe, due to my personal experience over this past year, that if we will simply seek God and trust that His Word and His Spirit are enough, then everything else will be taken care of. I believe that if we will commit ourselves to prayer and to the Word then years from now we will be able to look back over this time and say with those disciples on the road to Emmaus “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” and we will know that our Lord is not dead but alive and that he wants to give us life in his name.

Respectfully submitted,

Your pastor and brother in Christ

David Young

Impossible Faith

2011-04-25T17:11:00.001-05:00

I can't read the words of John 20:19-23 without thinking of this blog post by my friend and fellow pastor, Jeremy Scott. While I'll repeat some of the same ideas in this post, his post is worth reading in its entirety.

In this passage, we are given a picture of the disciples on the evening of the same day in which Mary Magdalene discovered Jesus' tomb to be empty. Peter and the beloved disciple have seen the empty tomb as well. Mary Magdalene has even seen and spoken with the risen Christ himself and reported this conversation to the other disciples. In spite of that, John tells us that the doors were locked where the disciples were "for fear of the Jews".

This is a confused and scared group of people. They don't yet know what to make of their friend and teacher's death, much less of these reports about the empty tomb and of Mary speaking with him. An empty tomb could mean a lot of things, least likely of all Jesus being alive. And could Mary's report really be trusted? After all, women weren't considered to be reliable witnesses for legal purposes in the ancient world. And besides, Jesus had delivered Mary from demon possession. Maybe now that Jesus was dead that demon had come back to her and caused this hallucination. Either way, there simply wasn't enough evidence to suggest that it was safe to be openly milling about in the streets or the markets. The same people who had crucified Jesus might decide it was a good idea to get rid of his closest followers too, especially if rumors started to spread about Jesus being a live again. So the disciples lock themselves in a room "for fear of the Jews".

Then Jesus appears in the midst of that fear-filled, locked up prison of a room and says to the disciples "Peace be with you." On one level, this is exactly what any good Jew would expect. Peace, shalom was and often still is a customary Jewish greeting. It was so customary that Paul uses it along with "grace" in everyone of his letters. Perhaps, we are also to imagine that it was so customary that the disciples may not have even noticed it, simply dismissed it as a "hello" or "hey guys".

"When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet." I imagine at this point in their encounter with Jesus, the disciples would be like a parent reunited with a kidnapped child. The first reaction is "Oh, thank God you are OK." or in this case "I can't believe it, Jesus. You are really alive." But that thought of thankfulness for safety would quickly to turn to the anger and revenge of "Now lets punish the monsters who did this to you." As the disciples, observed the wounds of their Lord and savior, their thoughts would have naturally turned to the pain and rejection he had experienced. As Jeremy so aptly says in his post:

Again, let’s pretend we’re the disciples. We’re fearful and angry that our savior has been killed. And he shows up, alive, breathing, right in front of us. He has risen from the dead, conquered death. This guy’s alive and now I definitely know that nothing can take him down! What’s my response?!?
…Let’s go find Pilate.
…Let’s go find the chief priests.
…Let’s go find the guys that held the hammer and spear.
We’ve got something to settle. Let’s go get ‘em.

But before that thought can go any further Jesus says again "Peace be with you." as if to say "Hang on, my greeting was more than a greeting. It's your mission. I'm not just wishing you peace and well-being. I am bestowing the very shalom of God upon you and you are to live it out in everything you do." As if to hammer this point of mission home, Jesus continues "As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you." Then Jesus breathes on them and says "Receive the Holy Spirit." The God whose breath gave life to the first man and woman, the God whose breath raised up an army of an audience from a valley of dry bones, now fills these disciples with new life, with a new Spirit so that they might carry out the radical mission that Jesus has given them. And just so we don't miss the point, Jesus says "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld." In other words, this new Spirit that resides among the disciples empowers them to forgive the Pilates, the chief priests, those who seem to be unforgivable. Jesus has not been resurrected to revenge. He has been resurrected to bestow on these disciples a Spirit of peace and forgiveness so that they might carry out the mission of Jesus in the world.

In v. 24-31, we find that Thomas, one of the twelve disciples, was not present when Jesus appeared this first time. The other disciples reported to Thomas "We have seen the Lord". But Thomas responds to them "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe." As a result, most have come to know this disciple as "doubting Thomas".

But what if that's an unfair moniker for Thomas? We often hear Thomas's words as a willful refusal, a rejection of the other disciples' report without evidence. We see Thomas as the rigid empiricist who won't accept anything without proof. But what if we are hearing him incorrectly? Maybe these words from Thomas aren't so much refusal as they are confession; more admission of weakness than demand of evidence. Perhaps they are like the man in Mark 9 who says "I believe. Lord, help my unbelief!" Perhaps Thomas isn't saying "I won't believe" but "I want to believe but this is simply too much for me to handle. Not only am I supposed to believe that a crucified man was raised from the dead but also that he now wants us to forgive the people who did that to him?!. That is humanely impossible! I can't possibly believe that, much less be faithful to that belief unless I encounter the living Jesus myself!"

If that is indeed what Thomas is saying, then he could not have uttered a more correct understanding of himself and the whole human predicament. We can not possibly believe, we can not possibly forgive the unforgivable, we can not possibly be faithful to the mission of radical peace that God has called us to in this world, if we have not had an encounter with the risen and living Jesus. It is simply too difficult. It is simply too much to ask of mere human beings to live out this kind of peace and forgiveness...unless....unless the resurrected Jesus shows up among us in the midst of our fear-filled and locked-door prisons where we have barricaded ourselves in to shield us from all the pain and dissapointment of life and he breathes new life into us and gives us his Spirit and allows us to see that the crucified Lord who still bears the mark of his torture and death is alive, is victorious, and will reign in us if we will only let him. Eight days later, Jesus appears to Thomas and gives him the faith that he knew he couldn't possibly muster up for himself and Thomas answers with what is probably the greatest and most accurate confession of faith in the entire Gospel of John, "My Lord and My God!"

But it doesn't end there. Jesus says to Thomas "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." So often we hear this as a reprimand of Thomas as if Jesus were saying that Thomas should have had enough faith to just believe without seeing Jesus. But I don't think that is what Jesus is saying here. I think Jesus is saying that encounters with him didn't stop with those who could see him in his physical body. Jesus is saying that it is still possible for us to come to know him in all of his life and fullness, to receive that same Spirit which was breathed on the first disciples, even though we can not see Jesus as Thomas did. We can still encounter the living Christ. And just to make sure we don't miss the point, John, the writer of this gospel, inserts himself into the story in v.30-31 and says the same thing. John interrupts the narrative flow of his literary masterpiece to make sure we can't miss this point. He says all of this was written "so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." Through the presence of the Spirit and the scripture that witnesses to Jesus, we can still have an encounter with the risen Lord and have this impossible faith and have life in his name.

He Still Calls Our Name

2011-04-20T16:07:00.001-05:00

I'll be preaching from John 20:1-18 this week. As I've read over this passage this week, I've been surprised by the number of possible connections with other stories in the Gospel of John. Allusions to other parts of John's Gospel seem to run throughout this resurrection narrative. But perhaps the most compelling of these comes from the very first chapter of John.

In John 1:35-42, we hear of Jesus' first disciples beginning to follow him. These two disciples heard John the baptist's testimony that Jesus was the Lamb of God and they began to follow Jesus as a result. However, upon beginning to follow him, Jesus asks them a question: "What are you seeking?". To which they reply "Rabbi, where are you staying?".

Often in the Gospel of John, conversations take place on two different levels simultaneously. Usually, there is one very literal level for the characters within the story itself. The other is often a more metaphorical/theological level in which the character's words carry a sort of double meaning which is instructive for John's audience concerning Jesus' identity and what it means to be his disciple. The classic example of this is John 3 where Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born from above but Nicodemus hears Jesus saying that he must be born again. (The Greek word anothen can mean either "again" or "from above".) On one level within the story Nicodemus is confused because he can not understand how a person can literally be born again from his mother's womb a second time. On another level, Jesus word's are instructive for John's audience. Those hearing John's gospel understand what Nicodemus does not; that Jesus is speaking about a completely new source of life within this life.

The conversation in John 1:35-42 works similarly. On one level, the disciples are simply asking Jesus where he is staying. Jesus tells them to come and see and they stay with him for the night. On another level, the disciples are making a much more serious request. They are asking to abide with Jesus. Later in John 15, Jesus will use this same term, abide (meno in Greek), to describe the character of his true disciples. In John 15:5, Jesus says "I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing." To abide with Jesus is to be his disciple. Therefore, when the disciples answer Jesus' question "What are you seeking?" with "Rabbi, where are you staying?" they are doing more than just answering a question with what seems to be an odd and unrelated question. In fact, they have given precisely the right answer to Jesus' question. John is giving us a model of what it means to truly be a disciple of Jesus. It doesn't mean seeking something from Jesus. It means we seek to abide with him, to follow him wherever he leads. These two disciples follow Jesus to where he abides and then they go and invite others to abide with him as well.

In John 20, Mary Magdalene, a woman about whom the gospels tell us very little, is making her way to the tomb of Jesus. Presumably she goes to anoint the body of Jesus with spices. We should recognize the act of love that this is on Mary's part. John tells us that she went early while it was still dark. She is eager to care for the body of this one that she called teacher and Lord. She had loved Jesus, she had followed Jesus, she had abided with Jesus. But now Jesus' body abides in a tomb and she will go there to abide with him, to care for him one last time.

However, when she arrives she finds that the stone covering the entrance of the tomb has been moved away. She doesn't even look into the tomb to see what has happened. She doesn't need to. After all, there is only one logical explanation here. Someone has stolen Jesus' body. It wasn't enough that he died the most shameful death of crucifixion, those who hated him did not even want him to have the dignity of a proper burial. Mary enlists the help of Peter and the beloved disciple. They find the tomb empty as well. However, they notice the linen cloths in which Jesus was buried have been left behind; an odd thing for grave robbers to leave behind.

The disciples head back to their homes but Mary is still at the tomb weeping. As she is weeping, she looks into the tomb and sees two angels sitting where Jesus' body had been. Even then, Mary still has no thoughts that something extraordinary has happened here. When the angels ask her why she is weeping she repeats "They have taken away my Lord, and I do no know where they have laid him. Then Jesus himself appears and asks Mary the same questions he asked those first disciples in John 1; "Whom are you seeking?" But even face to face with Jesus, Mary can not see what has happened here. Her vision is too clouded by the harsh reality of crucifixion she witnessed just days earlier. Her world is one filled with death and disappointment. In one sense Mary would love nothing more than to answer Jesus' question as those first disciples did. Mary desperately wants to abide with Jesus. "Where is Jesus?" is the very question she has been asking through this entire passage. Even now, supposing he is the gardener, she asks Jesus himself "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away." Mary is desperately seeking to abide with Jesus in the only way she knows how but she is exasperated and grief-stricken by her search because she seeks to abide with Jesus as though he were dead when, in fact, he is alive. It is only when the Word of God made flesh speaks her name, "Mary", that she recognizes the voice of her shepherd and responds with the same response as those first disciples "Rabboni!". And just as those first disciples recruited more disciples, Mary goes and announces Jesus' resurrection to his disciples.

Mary is a picture of so many of us, of so much of the Church. I think if most of us were asked in church "Whom do you seek?" we would answer "Jesus." And I don't think it would be a disingenuous or pretentious answer. Like Mary, most of us really do love Jesus. We know that Jesus changed us somehow and that we owe everything to him. In fact, we long to abide with Jesus, so much so that we get up early on the first day of the week and come looking for him.

But I also think that, like Mary, despite all of our love for Jesus, we sometimes go about seeking him as if he were dead. We come to church, we pay our tithe, we study our Bibles and say our prayers and we do all of these things because we genuinely love Jesus. But we also do them not expecting anything to change, not expecting anyone, including ourselves to be transformed. In fact, we'd probably rather things not change because at least things are comfortable the way they are now. At least, this way we know what to expect. And its not that we are bad or unloving people. Its just that, like Mary, we've been hurt. We've experience more intense pain than we could ever have imagined. We've seen our hopes and dreams crucified, our beliefs about what God could do in this world nailed to a cross. But we remain faithful. Even in the midst of all that, we still love Jesus, we still want to abide with him. We've just come to doubt that he can actually change anything. And so all of our genuine acts of love for Jesus become nothing more than spices prepared for his buried and decaying body and our church begins to feel more like an empty tomb than a place of resurrection.

But, like Mary, even as we seek Jesus among the dead, the risen Lord continues to call to us. Even when the empty tomb and grave cloths are not enough to cause us to look elsewhere, even when angels can not change our perception of what is possible with God, even when our pain and confusion so cloud our vision that we can not even see Jesus right in front of us, the risen Lord still speaks. He still calls our name. And that is enough to allow us to abide with him in all his resurrected glory.

Discipleship: More Than Palm Waving

2011-04-14T08:58:00.000-05:00

Scholars debate who it is that is speaking in Isaiah 50:4-9 and the rest of the so called "suffering servant" passages. Is this Isaiah speaking? Is it a prophetic successor of Isaiah? Should we understand this as the collective voice of Israel as a nation that suffers as God's servant? Is this a prophecy about the coming Messiah, about Jesus?

Obviously, for those of us who believe that Jesus is the Messiah, it is easy to jump to that last option. So many of the images found in Isaiah 49-53 seem to fit Jesus so well. While I am not convinced that Isaiah (or the disciple of his who wrote these words) had Jesus in mind, I am convinced that Jesus must have often had these words in mind throughout his life and ministry, especially as he drew nearer to the cross. In other words, I don't think it is so much that Jesus perfectly fulfilled some pre-existing expectation of what it meant to be Messiah (in fact, I am quite certain he was constantly exploding the pre-existing notions of Messiah) as much as he found his understanding of who he was as the Messiah in places where no one else was looking. While others were looking for Moses, Elijah, and David all rolled into one, Jesus found his Father calling him to stand in the line of rejected prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

It is fitting then that Isaiah 50 is one of the texts for Palm Sunday. Those waving their palm branches welcome Jesus into Jerusalem as that Moses/Elijah/David figure. But this celebration only lasts as long as the crowd fails to see Jesus as he sees himself, as long as they see him as one who has come to save by power when, in fact, he has come to save by suffering and weakness. It takes less than a week for the chants of "Hosanna" to become chants of "Crucify him".

The role of prophet and disciple as described in Isaiah 50 and as modeled by Jesus in his journey to the cross serves as a sharp contrast to the fickle crowds of Palm Sunday. The crowds celebrate only as long as things are going their way. In contrast, the prophet/disciple has a face set like flint, a determination that can be compared only to the solid, steadfastness, and unwavering nature of rock. The prophet/disciple is certain that the Lord is his present helper even when he is struck and spit on. The prophet/disciple is confident that he will be vindicated even as everyone goes against him because he hears and is sustained by word of the Lord every morning.

Krispy Kreme and Water from a Rock

2011-03-21T16:44:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, Jess, the kids and I were headed home from having dinner with some friends and we decided to stop for Krispy Kreme donuts along the way. As we were making our way through the drive-thru, before we had even arrived at the window and received our box of sugary goodness, Hannah pipes up from the back seat with a bit of urgency/panic in her voice "Daddy, I want a donut too!" Of course, I had no intention of ordering a dozen of the most delicious things on this earth and not sharing them with my children. However, the tone in Hannah's voice conveyed to me that she was not so sure of this.

While this trip through Krispy Kreme's drive-thru didn't exactly provoke some kind of deep existential angst about my parenting ability, it did cause me to wonder why Hannah's first assumption was that I wouldn't share with her. Didn't she remember that this was her daddy she was talking to? Couldn't she just rest in the knowledge that I would share any good thing with her and that if didn't I share it with her it was because I thought it wouldn't be good for her? And yes, in the few seconds that these questions were shooting through my mind I also remembered that she is only 3 and that such calm in the presence of such a strong desire is too much to ask of a 3 year old.

The truth is it often seems to be too much to ask of most adults as well. In Exodus 17, the people of Israel are grumbling against Moses because they don't have any water to drink. They say to Moses "Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?" On the face of it, that's actually not a bad question. After all, no water in the middle of the desert is a pretty seriously problem. I'd probably be grumbling too. But what makes this grumbling so sad, so short-sighted is that the people of Israel have already seen what God can do. God just delivered these powerless slaves from the most powerful nation on earth. God just displayed his complete sovereignty over creation through powerful plagues of hail, frogs, gnats, blood, darkness, and even the firstborn of every Egyptian family. Then God provided pillars of cloud and fire for guidance, made a path in the Red Sea for crossing, and provided manna from heaven for eating. In fact, this wasn't even Israel's first grumbling specifically about water. Just two chapters earlier God empowered Moses to turn the bitter waters of Marah sweet so that the people could drink. One might think that after the Israelites had seen God handle all of that they wouldn't be too worried about a little water shortage. They might reason "Hey, we don't have water but God has taken care of bigger problems than this. He'll take care of us again." Nope. Just more grumbling.

Of course, we often don't do much better ourselves. God has provided for us over and over again. So many of us have never even known real need, the kind of need one might experience without water in the wilderness. But when even a hint of trouble shows up, when just the chance of our standard of living being lowered comes along we fret. We worry. We grumble and complain. In those times I have to imagine that God wants to say to us "Don't you remember that this is your daddy you are talking to? Doesn't all your past experience tell you that I'll take care of you?"

As we awaited our treats in the Krispy Kreme drive-thru, I decided to tease Hannah about her uncertainty as to whether she would receive a donut. I turned to her and said in a mock seriousness "What kind of daddy do you think I am? Did you really think I was going to order a whole bunch of donuts and not let you have one?" Hearing my serious tone she got kind of a worried look on her face which then began to fade away as she thought about what I had actually said. Then realizing that I was obviously going to share with her a big smile came across her face and she said "Nooo" as if what moments ago had been such a major concern to her was now the silliest and most absurd thing she could think of. Shortly thereafter we were all enjoying these little, round frosted wonders together.

Obviously, I would be a pretty immature parent if I had taken Hannah's lack of faith in me personally and prevented her from having a donut because of it. Yet, it seems that is how we often think of God. If God were really as simplistic as some theologies make him out to be then he would have simply punished the people of Israel for their grumbling and lack of faith. Instead, God does just the opposite. God provides for the people of Israel once again in spite of their immaturity and failure to trust. This passage points us toward the reality that our relationship with God is just that: a relationship, a nuanced, sometimes complex, always mysterious relationship with the almighty God of the universe. What it certainly is not is a system of rewards and punishments for good or bad behavior. It is a relationship where God sometimes provides for us even when we fail to trust him and one where God sometimes asks us to trust him when it seems like he is not providing for us at all. God faithfulness often overcomes our own unfaithfulness but he also asks to place our trust in him and not in the things he provides.

The Lord said...so Abram went

2011-03-14T16:40:00.000-05:00

The call of Abram is recorded in Genesis 12 but in order to understand the context of that call we must take note of the final verses of Genesis 11. We hear in these final verses of Genesis 11 that Abram is one of three sons of Terah who lived in Ur of the Chaldeans (southern modern day Iraq). One of Abram's brothers, Haran, died while the family still lived in Ur. Abram's other brother, Nahor, was married to Milcah, Haran's daughter (so his own niece). Abram was married to Sarai who we are told was barren and had no children. In a culture where family and maintaining one's lineage was tremendously important, this is not a promising situation for Terah's family line. One son is dead, another's wife is barren, and another is married to his dead brother's daughter with no mention of any children of their own. Terah took this family of his and intended to move them to the land of Canaan but he never made it. Instead, they settled in Haran (north of Iraq in eastern Turkey, interestingly bearing the same name as the son who has died) and Terah died there.

"Now the Lord said..." begins Genesis 12:1. Into this bleak and unpromising situation, God speaks. This is the God whose words create and give life. This is the God who only a few chapters earlier was speaking all of creation into existence. And his word will bring life into this situation as well. God tells Abram to leave his country, his kindred, and his father's house to go to the land that God will show him. God promises that if Abram will follow that command then this will not be the end of the family line but, in fact, just the opposite. God promises to make Abram into a great nation and to bless him and all the families of the earth through him.

But as powerful as God's word is, as much creative and life giving force as it has, it does not work apart from Abram. Here God does not speak and it become immediately so as in the creation story. Instead, these words take the form of a promise to be fulfilled, a promise that Abram must continually choose to live by. "So Abram went, as the Lord had told him..." says v. 4. "The Lord said.... so Abram went." If there is any arguing, any complaining, any hedging of bets on Abram's part, we are not made privy to them. God commands and Abram goes.

At 75 years of age, with only his wife, his nephew, and his possessions, Abram went. Some commentators point out that Abram's family had always lived a nomadic existence so this move would not have been an unusual one for him. Still, the simplicity of the text is striking; "the Lord said ...so Abram went." There must have been some substantial temptations to stay. Abram's family was weak and vulnerable, its future in question. Perhaps if they could stay near some relatives they could work together to ensure their family's future. Whatever the temptations to stay, God speaks and Abram goes.

The payoff is not immediate either. God will bless Abram throughout his life and God will give Abram a son but he will never see the promise of land and "a great nation" fulfilled. This will not occur until many generations after Abram's death. Still, God's promise became the defining quality of Abram's life.

Haran is an easy place for us to get stuck. After all, its not Ur. Its not the starting point or the place of our loss. We can look back over the path from Ur to Haran and say "Look, how far we've come" and pat ourselves on the back because we trusted God to come this far. But its also not Cannan, its not the unknown, its not living by faith. It is familiar and comfortable. In a world where we feel threatened, where our future is in doubt, Haran seems like a safe place.

But the good news is that God still speaks...even in Haran. And wherever God speaks, God's words can still create and bring new life. But we must hear and obey the word that God speaks; "Go!". Go away from what is familiar and easy and enter unknown territory and trust that I, God, will bless you and guide your steps. We must go understanding that we may never see the promise fulfilled. The real blessing may come generations after we are long gone but we go because it is the God who speaks life into existence who has called us to go.

Dust Thou Art...

2011-03-10T12:35:00.000-06:00

Last night, I shared death with the group of people with whom I share life. I reminded them that we are all headed toward the grave. As I marked each of their foreheads with ashes, it occurred to me what an odd gathering this was; what an odd privilege my role in it was. What other group of people pays someone to remind them of their mortality? A lot of people get paid for just the opposite; to help others deny death, put it off, pretend its not on its way. But here were these people coming to me willingly leaning forward to be marked with dirt and hear the words "You are dust...".

Then I had to mark my own wife, my own children with these same ashes. It is one thing to mark a group of people for death who are mostly older than you, many of whom are already so pained with varying ailments that they are in little need of being reminded of their own mortality. It is another to mark the one to whom you have bound yourself for as long as you both shall live. It is yet another to mark these little ones whose death you pray you will never see. But even in these little bodies that are so full of life and vitality, the decaying corruption of this world is already sown. Even these are gifts from God who must come to know the way of the cross. Even these can not be held back from the God who demands that we trust him with everything if we claim to trust him at all. The imposition of these ashes was a three day journey to Moriah without leaving the sanctuary of our church.

Prior to our Ash Wednesday service yesterday, I took a half day journey through Weldon Springs. This time of year, this place that is normally teeming with life and beauty was filled with the browns and grays of decay; too late in the year to be blanketed by snow and too early to show many signs of spring. While I walked through the decomposing leaves and lifeless brush, one thought seemed to occur to me repeatedly: "In spite of the appearances, no one doubts that the new life of spring is on its way." It might not come as fast we'd like but we all take it for granted that spring is near. I had come to the park expecting the dull lifelessness of late winter and that is exactly what I saw. And yet, all I could think about was the life that would soon surround this lifeless trail.

As the Church, we are not called to be a merely optimistic people but a hopeful people. What I mean is that we are not a people who simply ignore the death and decay of our world believing that its not really that bad or that it will work out somehow. Instead, we are a people who mark ourselves with dirt, who gather around a table and meal that commemorate a painful and unjust death, who put the cross at the center of our existence precisely because we recognize just how bad it is and that things will not simply work themselves out unless God intervenes. But while we are not merely optimistic, we are hopeful because we have no doubt that the new creation is on its way. It might not come as fast as we'd like it to but we all take it for granted that God's redemption of our world is near, that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. We are a people recognize the undeniable gravity of the tomb but who also look into its darkness to find it in empty. We are a people who acknowledge that we are dust but who also believe that the God who originally formed us from that dust of the ground can also raise us anew after we have returned to it.

Trust and Obey

2011-03-01T12:56:00.000-06:00

If you've grown up in church, Genesis 3 is one of those passages of scripture you have heard so often that it becomes difficult to hear at all. One's inclination is to quickly read over thinking "Yeah, yeah, I know all of this. Let's get to something more interesting." Additionally, it is one of those texts that has had all kinds of tradition and centuries of theological debate poured into it. We designate this passage as "the fall" and we're off to the races discussing the doctrinal of original sin before we've even heard the Word of God. But before we assume that we already know that this is a story about the devil tempting Adam and Eve to fall from their created glory, let's pay attention to the details of what these verses actually have to say.

First, it is worth noting that the serpent in the story is never equated with Satan by scripture itself. Later Jewish and Christian tradition will certainly make that equation and it may not be a wrong conclusion to come to it but it is not one that we will find in the book of Genesis.

Second, many translations describe the serpent as "more crafty" than any other animal. We thereby assume that the serpent is a schemer, a deceiver, one who intentionally outsmarts the man and the woman arguing and persuading them into sin. Again, that may not be entirely wrong. Later in the chapter the woman will accuse the serpent of deceiving her and God does not argue with her assessment and punishes the serpent accordingly. However, craftiness does not necessarily convey the idea of deceitful scheming. It can simply mean wise, resourceful, and sensible. It can carry a meaning similar to that of the steward in Luke 16 whom Jesus commends in his parable for being cunning in his use of unrighteous wealth, an example he calls upon his followers to imitate.

Third, the conversation between the woman and the serpent is not presented to us as in anyway unusual. The serpent does not contradict God's command and never says something that is blatantly false. The serpent simply asks the woman questions and not unreasonable ones at that. We could read this story as nothing more than an innocent theological discussion, the world's first Bible study. The serpent and the woman are simply discussing God and God's commandment. In fact, if either of them is twisting God's command it is the woman who adds the prohibition "neither shall you touch it" (3:3) whereas God had simply said not to eat from the tree.

Finally, when the man and the woman do eat from the tree which was forbidden to them they do in fact have their eyes opened. The serpent was right! The man and the woman gained knowledge; knowledge which apparently God had been keeping from them.

So what went wrong here? There doesn't seem to be some grand sinister scheme here. This all started out as a simple conversation and it ended with a gaining of knowledge.

But somewhere in the midst of this story was a serious breach of trust and obedience. God had provided everything for this man and woman. He had placed them in the midst of this luscious garden that provided food for them. They had no need of anything. And the only thing that God asked for in return was for them to trust him; to trust that he could provide for them, that he knew what was best. God had given them every reason in the world to trust him and all he asked for in return was that they obey this one commandment, avoid this one thing, and thereby show that they trusted God. But somehow along the way the woman and the man failed to see God as someone they were in trustful and obedient relationship with and instead began to see God as something to talk about, an object of discussion. They began to think that they knew better than God did, that they could make decisions for themselves instead of trusting in their creator and so they tried to become their own gods, the rulers of their own lives.

The rest of Genesis 3 describes the disastrous consequences of that human attempt to be gods. The man and woman's lack of trust in God's command obviously harms their relationship with God. While previously humanity had enjoyed a meaningful fellowship with his creator, now the man says to God that he hid himself because he was afraid. The previous relationship of trust and obedience is replaced with one of fear. But it is not only the relationship with God that is impacted. Our relationships with one another immediately begin to degenerate as well. When God asks the man if has eaten from the tree the first thing he does is lay the blame on his wife and when the woman is asked the first thing she does is pass the blame on to the serpent. The relationship between humanity and creation is corrupted as well, the earth no longer bearing fruit effortlessly as it once did. Finally, this damaged relationship with God even impacts our relationship with ourselves. Prior to eating from the tree, the man and the woman walked naked and proud through the garden. Their bodies were creations of the almighty God, nothing of which to be ashamed. (I get a pretty good representation of this when Malachi manages to get away from Jess or I in the middle of changing his clothes. He proudly streaks through the house as if to say "Look at me! I'm naked and its fantastic!) But now the man and the woman are so ashamed of their bodies that they have to make impromptu clothing out of fig leaves in order to cover their shame.

This story is a microcosm of Israel's and of all humanity. God also created Israel as a nation, graciously delivering them from their slavery. God gave them manna and quail in the wilderness and led them into an abundant land in which to live. God provided everything they could possibly ask for and gave Israel every reason to trust him and all that God asked for in return was that trust and obedience. But repeatedly the people of Israel act as if they know best, they want to be in charge, they want to make the decisions, they want to be gods for themselves. There are a few glimmers of hope along the way; individuals like Abraham, Moses, and David who exhibited remarkable trust in God but at times even they failed to trust God completely. The story of scripture is that God keeps calling us to place our trust in him. God promises that he will provide, he will defend, he will protect, if only we will trust and obey but instead our response is often "No thanks God. I think I can do better on my own." Over and over again, our story is a failure of trust...with the exception of one man. There is one man to whom God said "just trust me" and he did no matter the circumstances.

In the gospel reading for this week (Matthew 4:1-11), we hear a story that sounds eerily like the one in Genesis 3. Jesus is praying and fasting in the wilderness and the tempter shows up to have a theological conversation with him. In this conversation, the devil makes some very reasonable, we might even say sensible and crafty suggestions. Each of these suggestions is essentially an alternative to the cross. The devil is saying "Hey look, if you are really God's Son, the rightful king of the world, then you shouldn't have to go through the messy and painful business of a crucifixion in order to inherit your rightful kingdom. Surely there is an easier way. If you can turn stones into bread, that will surely get the people excited. If you jump off the Temple and survive, that will get people talking and you'll be king no time. Or let's just cut straight to the point, just bow down to me and I'll give you everything." And nowhere along the way can we say that the devil has said anything blatantly false. In fact, we know that Satan was right to say that most people will follow whoever can produce food and miracles. The devil even quotes scripture in this conversation.

But at stake in this story is the same thing at stake in Genesis 3. Will Jesus trust his own judgment when he sees an easier path to the same result or will Jesus trust his Father? Will Jesus grasp at power as Adam and Eve grasped the fruit of the tree or will he cling to his Father's direction no matter where it leads him? And we shouldn't turn a blind eye to where this path leads; straight to the cross and into the gaping jaws of death in a stone sealed tomb. But Jesus chooses trust and obedience over his own life. Jesus trusts his Father even to the grave. Jesus believes that his Father can provide even on the other side of death.

Paul tells us in Romans 5 that Jesus' trust and obedience has undone the impact of Adam's lack of trust and disobedience. He says just as sin and death spread to all of humanity because of what Adam, so also life and righteousness have come to all because of what Christ has done. Our broken relationship with God, our broken relationships with each other, our broken relationship with creation, even our broken relationship with ourselves can be mended because Jesus trusted his Father and that trust transformed our world.

The essential element of our faith hasn't changed from Genesis 3 to the life of Jesus to our own day. God is still calling us to trust him. God's call is still for us to obey his commands because we believe that he is God and we are not and therefore he knows what is best. God's call is for us to be a people who live in faithful obedience no matter the circumstances because we believe in a God who raises the dead.

A Passover People

2011-02-23T11:39:00.000-06:00

In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul is urging the Corinthians to take action regarding a sexually immoral brother within their midst. Paul tells us that this person is engaging in a relationship that is not even condoned among the Greco-Roman culture of the day: a man is with his step-mother. It seems from what Paul writes that the Corinthians are not only condoning this behavior but actually boasting about it. While we may find this to be an odd thing for a group of Christians to boast about, it fits with the picture of the Corinthians we have gathered from the first several chapters of this letter. This is a congregation that thinks of themselves as so spiritual that they have been liberated from any sexual norms. They consider themselves to be "beyond" something as merely physical as sexuality. They likely regard this perverse relationship as proof of just how advanced they are in the ways of the spirit.

Paul says to the contrary "Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?" This saying was probably a popular proverb in Jewish culture similar to our saying "A bad apple ruins the whole bunch." Instead of seeing this behavior as something that the Corinthians can be proud of or even something that can simply be ignored, Paul says that it is a spiritual corruption which will spread throughout the entire community if it is left unchecked. It is worth noting here that Paul's address is to the church at large rather than to the immoral individual. This reinforces the notion that this immoral relationship is not merely an individual matter. It involves the health of the entire community.

However, Paul is not only making a point about the communal nature of their salvation. He is also making a point about the age or season, the epoch of history in which that salvation is taking place. Paul goes on to say "Clean out the old leaven in order that you might be a new lump of dough, just as you are unleavened. For Christ, our passover lamb, has been sacrificed." What does leaven have to do with Christ's death? The imagery here is that of the passover feast. Every year faithful Jew celebrated the passover meal as a reminder of God's deliverance of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt. One of the main parts of that meal was the eating of unleavened bread. It was unleavened as a symbol of Israel's hurried exit from Egypt... they had to be ready to go at a moment's notice, unable to wait around for bread to rise. Since unleavened bread was a part of the passover meal every year, it was an important custom to entirely cleanse one's house of all leaven before beginning to prepare the passover meal.... a kind of original spring cleaning. If you didn't, then there might be leaven on the surface where bread was prepared and the bread that was to remain unleavened might be contaminated with leaven.

By saying that Christ, our passover lamb, has already been sacrificed Paul is, in effect, telling the Corinthians that a new season in their lives has already begun but they have failed to carry out the appropriate cleansing in their lives for which that change in season calls. Christ's death and resurrection has inaugurated a new age in history, a new exodus, in which those who trust in Christ are set free from their slavery to sin. The Corinthians, however, are still living with the leaven of the old age in their lives by way of their boasting and sexual immorality. They must cleanse themselves of these old way of doing things in order to truly join in the celebration of their deliverance from the old way of life.

All of this leads Paul to make a clarification about something he said in an earlier letter to the Corinthians (now lost to us) which relates to the matter at hand. In that letter, Paul had told the Corinthians not to associate with sexually immoral people. It seems some in Corinth took this to mean that they couldn't have any contact whatsoever with anyone who didn't believe and behave as they did. Paul says that such a notion would be truly absurd; it would mean that you have to remove yourself from this world entirely. Paul now clarifies that the Corinthians should not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother and is sexually immoral - precisely the situation he is addressing in this chapter.

This chapter concludes with a statement which is an exceedingly apt principle for the Church to ponder today. Paul says "For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the Church you are to judge? God judges those outside." In short, Paul's principle is this: hold those within the community of faith accountable for their actions but leave all other judgment up to God. Unfortunately, too much of the Church often does the exact opposite of this. We judge the culture around us for not living up to our values while we ignore and excuse those within our own fellowship who openly reject the life Christ calls us to while still calling themselves "Christian". If we are to be a people of this new season, this new exodus where we have been set free from the way of the old age by Christ's death and resurrection then we must not turn a blind eye to the sin and spiritual laxity within our midst.

Only God Can Judge Me... Sort Of

2011-02-14T14:13:00.000-06:00

Only God can judge me. That is essentially Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 4:1-5. The Corinthians have been judging Paul. More specifically, they have judged Paul as inadequate to be their leader and teacher in the faith. They believe that they have outgrown his weak preaching and humble presence. In these verses, Paul scolds them for this attitude. He tells the Corinthians that their judgments mean very little to him because he is not their servant. He is God's servant and as a result it is only God who can judge him as to whether or not he is a trustworthy servant. Paul says that even his own judgments of himself don't mean much because even if he considers himself to be guiltless, what is that before the judgment of almighty God?

But wait a second. Isn't Paul judging the Corinthians? Isn't that what he has been doing throughout this whole letter; judging their behavior? And doesn't he actually encourage them to judge one another? In the very next chapter of the letter when Paul urges the Corinthians to remove the sexually immoral from their midst, isn't he urging them to make a judgment about that person's behavior? Is Paul just encouraging a double standard here where he judges the Corinthians and encourages them to judge one another but they are not allowed to say one bad word about him since he is their father and leader in the faith?

I think it is often tempting for us as Christians to take precisely that attitude where we want to tell other people what they are doing wrong but as soon as anyone speaks to us about something our attitude becomes "You can't judge me. Only God can judge me." Or "That's between me and Jesus." Obviously, there is some truth to that idea. If there wasn't, Paul wouldn't have spoken of it here. There is a very real sense in which we will one day be judged only by God and no one else. Perhaps some of us could even use a little more of that kind of attitude; that is, we could care a little more about what God thinks of us and a little less what others think about us. After all, who among us hasn't failed to proclaim the gospel in one way or another at some point in our lives because we were afraid of what someone else might think?

But we can only fully understand what Paul is saying here by reading it along side his larger body of writing and the rest of scripture as a whole. Paul does constantly exhort, not only the Corinthians, but all the churches to which he writes concerning their behavior. In fact, that is usually the very purpose of his writing; to correct something he sees as an error in their life together as a community. Of course, Paul is not alone in this. The other letters in the New Testament carry much the same task. Jesus himself condemns the entire religious establishment of his day and in doing so stood in a long line of Israel's prophets who called upon the people of God to correct their ways and turn back to God. So we can be sure that when Paul says "only God can judge me" he is not saying that brothers and sisters in Christ can not correct each other in the faith.

Instead, what we must recognize is that there is a difference between accountability and correction on the one hand and the kind of judgment that Paul is talking about on the other hand. Accountability and correction are absolutely essential aspects of the Christian life and what it means to be the Church. We must be willing to speak the truth in love to one another, pointing out our sins and weaknesses to one another within the Church as the Spirit leads us. And if we use an attitude of "only God can judge me" as a shield against our brothers and sisters holding us accountable in the faith, then we have deeply misunderstood what Paul is saying and the nature of our faith as a whole. Such an attitude will certainly lead us away from Christ.

The Corinthians, however, were not calling Paul to account for a specific behavior that they regarded as sinful. Instead, they had simply judged Paul himself as inadequate and irrelevant. They had judged him as too weak and lowly to be their teacher and leader. They were ready to toss him aside so that they could move on to bigger and better things. This is evident not only from what we have seen earlier in the letter but even in what Paul says in these verses. In v.5 Paul says "Therefore, do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes...". It seems that the Corinthians were not merely calling Paul a lousy preacher. Instead, they were trying to pronounce God's judgment on Paul in God's place as if Jesus had already returned, God's kingdom had already come, and Paul had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

It is that attitude that causes Paul to say that only God can judge him. Paul is, in effect, saying "I don't care what you think of me as a preacher and spiritual leader. My task isn't to impress you. Instead, God has entrusted me with proclaiming the mystery of the Gospel and I am going to do that even if it doesn't win me any popularity contests. And in the end, only God can judge whether or not I have been faithful to the task that God himself gave me as his servant and steward."

As the Church, we are called to what can be a difficult and sometimes awkward task. We are undoubtedly called to hold each other accountable. We must point out to our brothers and sisters what we see as sin in their lives. God wants us to help each other grow in righteousness and holiness by correcting one another. But nowhere in Scripture are we ever called to make a judgment about someone's eternal standing before God. That is an attempt to be God ourselves, to take God's place and make judgments that only God is entitled to make. On the flip side, we also must be willing to be held accountable ourselves for our own sin. We must have the humility and love that allows others to correct us where we have gone wrong. We can not use these verses as a shield for our own un-Christ-like behavior. To say that only God can judge us is not an excuse to turn a deaf ear to the prophetic voices around us. But neither should we be held captive by mere popular opinion. We must imitate Paul in his robust confidence, proclaiming the Gospel even if we are regarded by others as weak and lowly in the process.

The Temple of God

2011-02-07T12:05:00.000-06:00

There are at least two things that are exceedingly important for understanding Paul's profound statement concerning the Church in 1 Corinthians 3:16. The first of these is grammatical in nature. In English when we address someone in the second person we use the word "you" whether we are addressing one person or a group. The word "you" is both the singular and plural form of the second person address. Likewise, the form of the verb "to be" does not change from the singular to the plural form. In both instances, we would say "you are". This is not the case in Greek in which there is one pronoun and verb form for addressing a single individual and another for addressing a collective group. The closest parallel we have in English is the southern variation of "ya'll" used to distinguish an address to a group from an individual. In 1 Corinthians 3:16, Paul uses that plural form of the second person Greek pronoun and verb. In other words, Paul is not saying in these verses that each of the individual Corinthians are themselves God's Temple (although he will say something like that in 1 Cor. 6:19). Here Paul is saying, in effect, "Or don't ya'll know that ya'll are the Temple of God in Corinth and that God's Spirit dwells among ya'll?" That is to say, that Paul's statement here is, in fact, a statement about the Church and not about individual believers. The Church is the place where God's Spirit dwells.

The second thing we must recognize in order to appreciate Paul's statement here is the vast significance of the Temple to 1st century Judaism. The Temple in Jerusalem represented the presence of God with the people of Israel. This was God's house. The very place where God's Spirit dwelt. It was the salvation of the Jewish people that God had chosen to make his dwelling among them. It is difficult to overstate just how meaningful the Temple was to Paul and his contemporaries, how much it signified God's presence with his people. This was so much the case in Jeremiah's day that it seems some believed that no harm could possibly befall Jerusalem as long as the Temple still stood because, it was thought, God would not allow his holy dwelling to come to ruin. The Temple = God's presence.

So when Paul tells the Corinthians "you are God's Temple", he is making a bold statement about the Church. Paul is telling the Corinthians that the Spirit of God is no longer limited to dwelling in the Temple. God has actually made his home, his dwelling among the Corinthians themselves. This is the significance of Pentecost; that God's own Holy Spirit has been poured out on all those who place their trust in Jesus Christ. While that Spirit certainly works in each of us individually, here Paul is emphasizing that it is in the Corinthians relationship with one another that God's Spirit dwells and is at work. It is in their coming together as a unified community of faith that they are God's Temple. When we call ourselves the Church we are saying nothing short of claiming that God's Spirit resides among us as a people.

Of course, this serves well the point that Paul has been making all along. He has been telling the Corinthians for three chapters now that they must be unified rather than fragmenting themselves into different groups centered around different leaders. Here, Paul reminds them they are all together the Temple of God. Therefore, if they destroy their relationships with one another then they are destroying God's Temple. Paul is telling them that their lack of unity is actually destroying the very place where God's Spirit wishes to make his dwelling. The Corinthians are destroying the house of God by destroying their relationships with one another. This means that disunity in the Church is more than people just not getting along. It is a driving out of the Spirit of God; the very thing that makes us who we are as God's people. It is a failure to be the Church at all.

Paul finishes this section by reminding the Corinthians (again!) that human wisdom is not God's wisdom. Therefore, they should not boast in men (or human leadership). And he goes on to say "For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present of the future- all are yours, and you are Christ's and Christ is God's". I think what Paul is essentially saying to the Corinthians here is that they have taken to small and narrow a view of things. Here the Corinthians are striving after mere men, mere human leaders and their positions of honor and authority and Paul is saying "Why would you strive after those things. As followers of Christ, as the Temple of God, everything already belongs to you. You have already been given everything you could ever ask for. God's very own Spirit has made you his home. The Spirit of the almighty God and creator of the universe is at work in your relationships with one another and you want to strive after merely human positions of honor? God has given himself to you and you want to trade that for human leaders who are nothing but servants of that very same God!"

But, of course, this is what we continue to do. God has given himself to us, made his own Spirit to reside among us, and all we can seem to think about is "if we just had a little more money... if we just had a little higher attendance...if we just had a few more young able bodies to do the work...if we just had....". We have the Spirit of God among us! What else do we need to do the work God has entrusted to us when God has entrusted his very self to us? Paul encourages us to take a larger view of things; encourages us not to dream so small that we go after these merely human things but instead to remember that we are the Temple of God and that in itself is a truly miraculous things. God's Spirit has made his dwelling among us.

On Unity, Leadership, and the Gospel

2011-01-31T10:44:00.000-06:00

In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul says that he still can not address the Corinthians as spiritual people. Instead, he says they are fleshly, mere infants in Christ. By saying that the Corinthians are fleshly and not spiritual, Paul is not saying that the Corinthians aren't Christians. After all, he describes them as being in Christ and in the previous chapter he said that they have the mind of Christ. Paul acknowledges the Corinthians as the body of Christ. He knows that they received the Spirit. In saying that he can not speak to them as spiritual, neither is Paul saying that the Corinthians aren't religious enough. He is not saying that the Corinthians need to focus more on their "spirituality" as opposed to their every day physical needs. Instead, Paul is driving home the same point that he has been making throughout the letter up to this point: the Corinthians have the Spirit of God among them but they don't yet fully understand what that means for their behavior.

As we've seen in the previous passages in 1 Corinthians, the problem in Corinth is not a lack of zeal for the Spirit or spiritual things. Paul almost certainly uses the term spiritual here to describe what the Corinthians are not precisely because that is how they saw themselves; as deeply spiritual. So when Paul says that the Corinthians are not spiritual but fleshly, it is not so much a comment about the quantity of the Corinthians spirituality as its quality. Paul is not saying that they are unconcerned with "spiritual" things but that they are approaching the Spirit in the wrong way. They are seeking to use the Spirit for their own advancement just like they would use any other tool or philosophy in life. Paul is telling them that even though the Spirit of God is among them they are still acting like the world acts by striving to exalt themselves. Their spirituality is fleshly, that is, immature.

Paul says that the evidence of this fleshly, immature spirituality are the divisions and strife that exist among the Corinthians. If the Corinthians had a mature understanding of the wisdom of God revealed in the cross of Christ, they would realize that a genuine spirituality would mean submitting to each other in unity and common mission. Instead, they are allowing themselves to be fragmented by attaching themselves to different leaders. In all likelihood, the Corinthians were doing this because they saw those leaders as more "spiritual" and more "wise" than Paul so they thought they could advance further in the faith. This in turn causes Paul to address what it means to be a Christian leader.

For Paul, to be a Christian leader is actually to be a servant. He says in v.5 "What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed". Whatever authority Paul or Apollos have, they are ultimately still nothing more than servants of God. As servants, they are each given different roles within God's mission. Paul says that he planted the church and Apollos watered it but it always ultimately God who causes the growth. Only God can grow and mature his people. That is not a human task. Paul says "neither the one who plants or the one who waters is anything but only God who gives the growth." Therefore, Christian leadership is not a matter of exalting oneself. It is not a matter of gathering as many followers as you can. It is not even a matter of growing your church since that is something only God can do. The task of Christian leadership is nothing other than submitting oneself to God as a servant, ready to do whatever work God calls us to in his field.

Of course, this is really more than Paul's view of leadership. It flows from his view of the Christian life as an imitation of the pattern that he sees in Jesus; that paradigm which is summed up so well in Philippians 2:5-11. Christ, who is God and had every reason to exalt himself, instead chose to humble himself taking the lowest of low positions, even death on a cross. "Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth to the glory of God the Father." Paul believes this is what all Christians are called to; this humbling of oneself. This is very thing Paul has been referring to as the wisdom of God.

Of course, this is such a difficult pattern for us to incorporate into our lives because it runs contrary to everything we know. Everything in our world from the corporate ladder to school to the military to sports to social gatherings to kid's karate classes is about "moving up", advancing, being the best we can be, being of higher rank, getting ahead of others around us. This is simply the way the world works. How high can you ascend in the pecking order?

But Paul tells us that this is the root of the Corinthians' problems. They lack unity because they strive after "more spiritual" leaders and they strive after those leaders because they misunderstand the role of Christian leadership within the Church and they misunderstand the role of leaders because they misunderstand the real meaning of spirituality in the Christian life. The root of all the problems Paul will address in this letter is that the Corinthians have failed to recognize that the gospel of the crucified messiah which they believed calls upon them to be a people of humility, sacrifice, service, and submission, a people whose wisdom is not of the world but is ordered and shaped by the cross of Christ.

Proclamation in the Spirit

2011-01-24T16:10:00.000-06:00

In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul continues with much the same point that he had begun in the second half of chapter one. There, Paul reminded the Corinthians that God's wisdom was not human wisdom. While the world's wisdom consists of wealth, power, and influence, God wisdom consists of righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. This wisdom has been revealed specifically is the scandal and foolishness of a crucified messiah, namely Jesus. However, Paul also says in chapter one that it is revealed in the Corinthians themselves; that is, many of them were weak, lowly, and despised when God called them but God's Spirit worked them in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, their lowliness.

Paul continues this argument in chapter 2 by saying that his own preaching fits precisely this same bill. Paul did not come to the Corinthians preaching with high and mighty flashes of rhetoric or with worldly wisdom. It wasn't because Paul was an especially skilled speaker that the Corinthians believed. Instead, he spoke in weakness and in fear and in trembling. It wasn't that Paul offered persuasive arguments that the Corinthians couldn't logically refute. Instead, Paul says that he resolved to know nothing among the Corinthians except Christ and him crucified and that it was because of demonstrations of the Spirit and power that the Corinthians believed.

This word that is translated as demonstration (ἀποδείξει) is a term that Paul borrows from the art of rhetoric. It means something like a convincing proof that follows logically from the premises that have been argued. Paul's use of this word here then is full of irony. Rhetoric, the study of speech and persuasion, was a highly regarded body of knowledge in the Greco Roman culture of Paul's day. It seems pretty obvious from what Paul has said in this letter that it was highly regarded among the Corinthians as well. But Paul says rhetoric, persuasive words of human wisdom, are precisely how the gospel did NOT come to the Corinthians. But the gospel did come with its own convincing evidence; not flashy speeches or well respected philosophies but with powerful acts of God's Holy Spirit which transformed the Corinthians and confirmed the truth of Paul's preaching among them.

In v.6 and the following, Paul goes on to fine tune and summarize the point that he has been making all along; the gospel is indeed wisdom but not according to the worlds standards. Paul says that if the wisdom of humanity was compatible with the wisdom of God, then the rulers of the world would not have crucified the Lord of glory. If they had known God's wisdom, then they would have recognized Jesus as that wisdom and not put him to death. Paul then says that this is just as it is written "what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, what no human mind has conceived, the things that God prepared for those who love him". It is widely debated as to what exactly Paul is quoting here since there is no Old Testament reference which matches these words exactly. It could be a conglomeration of Old Testament texts or a reference to some writing now lost to us. However it is worth noting that it closely parallels the idea of Isaiah 64:4 which is an appropriate context for the point Paul is making. Isaiah 64 is a call for God to "rend the heavens and come down" and thereby set the world right according to God's righteousness. This is, of course, precisely what Paul believes God has done in Jesus. God has come down to earth, setting the world right by the righteousness of God; only God is doing it in a way that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, in a way that no human being could have possibly thought up, by God becoming human, a crucified human.

Paul says that God himself has revealed all of this to us by his Spirit. And this is a decisive point in Paul's argument; that we can not learn these things on our own. The mystery of God's wisdom is not something that we can just figure out, it is not something we can logically deduce. If we could, it would be just like every other form of wisdom and the Corinthians would be right to approach it that way. Instead, Paul says, God's Spirit must reveal it to us. After all, who can possibly know the mind of God? Paul says by analogy we can't even know the thoughts of another human being unless they reveal them to us. How much more with the infinite and immeasurable God? We can't possibly come to recognize the crucified messiah as the manifestation of God's wisdom unless God's Spirit reveals it to us as such.

Fortunately, God's mystery does not remain a mystery. God does reveal it to us by his Spirit. Paul ends this section of his argument by saying "but we have the mind of Christ". Paul's point in this passage is not that the Corinthians are ignorant of the mystery of God but only that they did not come to know it by their own ability. The Corinthians do indeed have the mind of Christ but this is only the case because of what God's Spirit has done among them.

The Church would do well to remember this. The Word is not something given to us to do with as we please. Nor is our faith something of which we can logically convince those around us. We could not and would not ourselves have come to know God through the mystery of the crucified messiah were it not for the revealing work of God's Spirit among us. As a result, all of our proclamation, all of our words and actions as the Church mean precisely nothing if God does not make them his own words and actions by the power of His Holy Spirit. Our preaching, our reading of scripture, our worship, our evangelism, our discipleship, all of our practices must be done within the power of the Holy Spirit or they are mere babbling about nothing.

Foolish Wisdom

2011-01-19T15:54:00.000-06:00

I mentioned last week that it seems likely from reading Paul's correspondence with the Corinthian Church that they (or at least a group within the Church at Corinth) thought pretty highly of themselves and their own spirituality. It seems that at least part of the reason for this was because the Corinthians were approaching the gospel as a form of sophia, that is, wisdom. The gospel is, of course, God's wisdom but not in the way the Corinthians were considering it. Instead, they were approaching it as a form of worldly wisdom, a system of truth, a philosophy. As a result, they saw it as a teaching they could master for their own advancement. For them, Jesus was just another self-help guru. In 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, Paul confronts that thinking head on. He goes so far as to call the gospel which he preaches foolishness and a scandal.

Paul says that Jews ask for signs which is precisely what we see in the gospels. The religious leaders are constantly asking Jesus to validate his authority as messiah by performing some kind of sign or miracle. They believed that the messiah would be a mighty leader who would be able to expel the dirty Romans from Israel. But instead it was the Romans who killed Jesus. Therefore, the idea of proclaiming that this Jesus who was crucified was the messiah is nothing short of a scandal.

Paul says that Greeks seek wisdom. One of the trademarks of Greek culture was its philosophers and its constant search for wisdom. And a basic tenet of Greek philosophy was that God could not suffer, that God could not even change. This is because God, by definition, was perfect, and if he changed then, by definition, he would have to become something other than perfect. Therefore, the idea of God becoming a human being, and even more so, the idea of God dying was an absurdly foolish idea to any Greek philosopher or seeker of wisdom.

In contrast these ideas about God, Paul says "But we preached Christ crucified!" As modern day Christians, we also often forget how scandalous this proclamation is. We have come to see the cross as a religious symbol. It adorns our jewelry and our sanctuaries as a symbol of hope because we have come to associate it with the resurrection and the power of God to give us new life and save us from the power of sin (assuming, of course, that we haven't further reduced it to a mere trinket among other symbols of sentimentality). As a result, we forget that this was a state sanctioned instrument of torture, cruelty, and death. This is the electric chair. This is the gas chamber. Crucifixion was the death reserved for criminals but not just any criminals. It was for those convicted of rebelling against the rule of the Roman Empire. We have a word for those people today: terrorists. Jesus was convicted and sentenced to death on a cross as a terrorist, an enemy of the state, a threat to Roman superiority.

Paul reminds the Corinthians (and us) "Remember, this is the gospel in which you believed. And you think that is something that you can pursue as worldly wisdom, as a philosophy on how to get ahead in life, as a self-help manual? How absurd!" Paul says "We preach Christ crucified! A crucified messiah! Have you forgotten that? Have you forgotten how absurd the gospel you believed appears according to worldly standards of wisdom? No worldly system of wisdom believes in a crucified messiah!"

But Paul says that this word of the cross which is foolishness to those who are perishing is the power of God to those of us who believe. God's foolishness is wiser than men's wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than men's strength. Paul says that the Corinthians themselves are evidence of this. Paul reminds them that when God called them to be his Church not many of the Corinthians were wise, powerful, or well born. In fact, Paul says, this is how God works all the time. God is constantly choosing the weak, the lowly, the things that are not in order to shame the wise, the powerful, and the things that are. God doesn't choose the powerful and wise to display his power and wisdom. God chooses the weak and lowly so that then it will be evident that it is God who has done the powerful work and not us. Only a truly powerful and wise God could display his power and wisdom in the weakness and foolishness of a crucified messiah.

Therefore, Paul admonishes the Corinthians to stop their boasting. There is no room for boasting in a truly Christ-centered spirituality because it is God who has done the work. We have not saved ourselves. We have not mastered a new form of sophia. Instead, Paul urges the Corinthians to understand that Jesus Christ, that crucified messiah that is so shameful, scandalous, and foolish in the eyes of the world, has become wisdom to them. Jesus is God's wisdom revealed to us.

It is easy to see the end of verse 30 as simply a list of four things that Christ has become to us; wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. However, in Paul's Greek, it seems more likely that he intends the last three to fill out the content of the first: "Christ, who has become to us the wisdom of God, which is righteousness, sanctification, and redemption." God's wisdom as revealed to us in Jesus is God's covenant faithfulness (righteousness) which sets those who believe free from sin (redemption) so that we might live holy lives to God (sanctification). Of course, this comes as no surprise because this is precisely what God has been about throughout the story of scripture; redeeming the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt, making a covenant with them at Sinai so that they could be set apart and learn to be in right relationship with God and each other, living lives of holiness to God. It is that God who was revealed at the Exodus and at Mt Sinai who is also revealed in Jesus and who has set us apart by his Holy Spirit. It is that God of deliverance and covenant who in His wisdom has extended deliverance and covenant to us by way of the foolish idea of a crucified messiah.

Is Christ Divided?

2011-01-10T16:20:00.000-06:00

Paul's first appeal in 1 Corinthians is concerning the discord that he has heard about in the church at Corinth. Paul says that some in Corinth are saying that they are "of Paul" while others are saying that they are "of Apollos" or "of Peter". We can guess from the rest of the content of the letter that these divisions are connected to the spiritual arrogance of the Corinthians. (Consider the divisions Paul addresses concerning the Lord's Supper and spiritual gifts later in the letter). It seems likely that they are each claiming the leader they see as being the most spiritual. The really spiritual, of course, say that they are "of Christ".

Paul will address these themes as they touch other problems throughout the letter but he begins here by asking the Corinthians three questions that are meant to remind them that they have been bound together in Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified on your behalf? Or were you baptized into the name of Paul? Each question reinforces the others. Christ is not something that can be divided up among a few believers. Instead, it was Christ who crucified on behalf of all the Corinthians. Therefore, all the Corinthians have been baptized into Christ. That is to say that Christ is not something to which any of them can lay claim over and against the others. Instead, their lives, their identities are defined by their baptism into Christ and this is an identity that all the Corinthians share.

Of course, the Church today still divides itself and thus divides Christ in this way as well. We say we are "of Luther" or "of Calvin" or "of Wesley" while others claim to be the only ones who are truly "of Christ". Then there are all the other labels that threaten to divide us as well: black, white, Hispanic, rich, poor, educated, old, young, and every other label the world gives us or we give ourselves. Paul reminds us that in Christ there is more that unites us than divides us. That doesn't meant that we all have to become the same but it does mean that as the Church we must demonstrate a unity of love with one another even in the midst of our diversity.

It is telling that Paul begins this passage on unity by addressing the Corinthians as brothers. This simple address in its own subtle way is also a reminder to the Corinthians of their common bond together. They are brothers because they have the same Father. It is this Father who has bound the Corinthians together by the crucifixion of his Son and the empowering of his Holy Spirit.

What Makes a Church

2011-01-05T16:15:00.000-06:00

Based on 1 Corinthians 1:1-9, the church at Corinth sounds like an ideal church. Just listen to the way Paul describes this church. Paul says they were:

sanctified in Christ Jesus (v.2)
enriched in every way in Christ Jesus in all speech and knowledge (v.4)
not lacking in any spiritual gift (v.7)
awaiting the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ (v.7)
guiltless in the day of the Lord (v.8)
called into the fellowship of the Son (v.9)

This church is holy, wise, spiritually gifted, patient, guiltless, and enjoying good Christian fellowship together. What more could anyone ask for in a church?

But then we read the rest of the letter...

Immediately, after Paul describes the Corinthians as being called into the fellowship of the Son he says "I appeal to you brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment" (v.10). Paul has heard reports that there is quarreling and divisions among the Christians in Corinth. Later in chapter six, we find that this disunity is so serious that some in the congregation have actually been taking each other to court. What happened to the fellowship of the Son?

Near the end of chapter one and into chapter two, we hear that this church which Paul describes as being enriched in all speech and knowledge is made up of people who actually weren't very wise according to worldly standards, nor very powerful or well respected in society (1:26). Paul even goes on to describe them using terms like weak and lowly.

Then, in chapter 3, we find that the ones Paul described as not lacking any spiritual gift, he now can not address as spiritual. In fact, he says they are mere babes in Christ who are not ready for solid food. Paul has to keep giving them milk, going over the basics of the faith with them again and again (3:1-2)

In chapter 4, Paul says that those who were waiting so patiently for the revealing of our Lord Jesus are actually boasting as if they have already arrived. They are acting as if they already have everything for which they hope and have already become rich, acting like kings as if Jesus had already returned and God's new creation had already come. (4:7-8)

In chapter five, we hear that this church which Paul describes as sanctified and guiltless, is actually sexually immoral. And Paul says it is a sexual immorality that the common culture doesn't even condone; a man is sleeping with his step-mother! And what is worse, the Corinthians think this is something to boast about. They think that they are so spiritual that the normal confines of sexuality do not apply to them (5:1-2).

So what's the deal? Why does Paul say all of this stuff about the Corinthian church if none of it seems to be true? Was Paul simply buttering them up to get their attention? Was he being sarcastic when he said all of that nice stuff about the Corinthians?

It is evident from Paul's letters that flattery and sarcasm were certainly both part of his rhetorical arsenal but I think there is something else going on in these opening verses of 1 Corinthians. Interspersed between these statements are one's about God's grace, God's faithfulness, and God actions. The first thing for which Paul gives thanks is the "grace of God that was given to you in Christ Jesus." It is because of this grace that Paul says the Corinthians were enriched in knowledge and not lacking in any spiritual gift. Paul says God will sustain the Corinthians in the day of judgment because God is faithful.

In other words, the Corinthians aren't sanctified because they are exceptionally moral people but because God has set them apart for his holy purpose. They certainly aren't guiltless because they haven't done anything wrong but because God will sustain them until the day of judgment. They aren't full of wisdom and spiritual gifts because they are superstar Christians but because God has made them His people. Paul's opening words in 1 Corinthians aren't about listing a whole bunch of accolades about the Corinthians. Paul is reminding the Corinthians who they are; the Church, God's people set apart, made holy, and gifted for God's purposes in this world. Paul is thankful for the Corinthians not because they are doing a great job compared to other churches because they weren't. Paul is thankful for the Corinthians simply because they are the Church, they are a people among whom God has acted. And before Paul says anything else, he wants to remind the Corinthians that their identity is found in God and what God has done among them.

I often think that the greatest challenge the Church faces isn't outreach or discipleship or serving others even though those things can be pretty challenging and sometimes it feels like we do a miserably deficient job at them. I think the greatest challenge we face is simply remembering who we are, remembering what it means to be the Church. We constantly want to compare ourselves to other churches and we feel like we aren't really a church unless we have a certain attendance or we are in on the latest trend. We turn Church into a competition to see who can be the most spiritual, much like the Corinthians did. But then Paul comes and reminds us that we're not a church because of what we've done but because of what God has done in us.

A Call to the Church to Grow Up

2010-12-29T15:51:00.000-06:00

Most of us who have become disciples of Jesus have probably done so, at least initially, because of what we thought Christ and his Church could offer us. We found a community that cared for us in a way that no other had. A friend shared with us the work that God had done in their life and the joy they felt. We thought going to church would make our parents happy or make our children more well behaved. Or maybe we just thought heaven sounded better than hell. As a broken and sinful people our initial reasons for seeking God will likely be mostly selfish so those reasons aren't necessarily a bad place to start but they would be an awful places to stay.

In his letter to the church at Ephesus it seems most likely that Paul is not writing to Christians who are just getting started in the faith. According to Acts 20, Paul spent three years ministering among the Ephesians "declaring the whole counsel of God to them". These are not babes in Christ. Paul has instructed them thoroughly and has left behind a faithful and well established church. Therefore, when we read the letter to the Ephesians we should recognize that we are not dealing with milk but with solid food. In it is not only the gospel message but instructions about the consequences of that message for one's life. Ephesians is for the Christian who is ready to mature in the faith. Ephesians is a call to grow up.

That call begins with the first words after the letter's obligatory greeting, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ". Those words begin a sentence that is so long that it must be broken into multiple sentences in our English translations but in Greek runs continuously from v.3-14. In that one long sentence a theme is repeated:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
who has blessed us in Christ
just as He chose us
He predestined us
according to His good pleasure
into the praise of His glorious grace
in whom we have redemption
according to the riches of His grace
which he lavished on us
making known to us the mystery of his will
according to his good please
which he planned
in whom we have an inheritance
having been predestined according to his plan
so that we might be to the praise of his glory
in whom also you heard the word of truth
in whom you believed and were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit
to the praise of His glory

Repeatedly, it is God who acts. God is the author of our salvation. It is God who is to be blessed. God set the plan of redemption in motion. Twice we are told that God did all this according to his good pleasure. Three times we are told everything that God has done for us is "to the praise of His glory". There is no question we receive many benefits in the salvation that God has provided for us in Jesus Christ, many of which are listed in these verses. But salvation is not primarily about us. It is all about God. All the benefits we receive in salvation are only meant to turn more honor, glory, and praise to God. The mature Christian recognizes that salvation and the Church and growing up in Christ are about giving glory to God.

But how many of us actually approach Church that way? Sure, none of us would be so bold as to actually say that Church is all about us but just think about the ways that we talk about Church. Think about the reasons why people, and not just any people but people we assume to be mature Christians because they have been in church for decades, leave a church: they don't like the worship style, they don't get along with the pastor, they don't like certain changes that were made. And then they go shopping for a church that suits them and their own personal preferences: one that will keep their kids entertained, sings the right songs, where the pastor doesn't preach too long, and they are never asked to get too involved or sacrifice too much.

I'm not saying there is never a legitimate reason to leave a church. I am saying that I think as Americans we are extremely skilled consumers. We are quite efficient at getting what we think we need at minimal cost to ourselves. In fact, I think we are such talented consumers that we begin to approach all parts of life that way, seeing things for what we can get out of them. So we treat churches not so differently from grocery stores; we'll go to the one with the best service and the lowest cost until they raise their prices or change something we don't like and then we'll go to the one across town. And we think there is nothing wrong with that because we think that churches, like grocery stores, are here to meet our needs, to serve us, and to do whatever they can to win and keep our loyalty which is really no loyalty at all.

To the Church in America, to my brothers and sisters in Christ, to my own congregation, hear God's call through his Word: GROW UP!

This is a call to be reminded that salvation, the Church, and growing up in Christ are not about us, not about what we like and don't like, not about our comfort, and not about how we can better be served. It is about us serving God and serving others with his love so that we might bring honor and glory to the holy God who created us and redeemed us for himself. Church is not about you and it is not about me. It is about the blessed God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ...

Two Kingdoms

2010-12-20T12:07:00.000-06:00

In Matthew 2:13-23, we are given a story that none of the other gospel writers tells. It is the story of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary fleeing to Egypt and it gives a unique window into Matthew's understanding of Jesus right at the beginning of his gospel.

Matthew tells us that an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and told Joseph to flee to Egypt because king Herod was about to search for Jesus to destroy him. Joseph obediently follows the command and flees to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. Matthew then adds the comment that "This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet 'Out of Egypt I called my son.'"

This quotation comes from Hosea 11 and in that context has nothing to do with Jesus or the expected Messiah. In fact, the "son" that God speaks of in Hosea is Israel whom God delivered from Egypt in the Exodus. In Hosea 11, God speaks through the prophet about how he delivered these people and how he loved them. God loved Israel like his own child but the more that he loved them the more they turned away from him. In fact, they kept turning away from God so much that just like a father would discipline a child he loves so God also has to discipline Israel to get their attention. So God allows them to be defeated by Assyria and to be made slaves once again.

Not coincidentally, the other Old Testament quotation in this passage in Matthew comes from precisely that time period in Israel's history. Jeremiah 31:15 speaks about the people of Israel weeping over the destruction of their land and their families. They have been laid waste by Assyria and Babylon. All God's people have been taken into captivity and they face a hopelessness in their exile, a fear that they will cease to exist as a people. And in that circumstance, God comforts them and says that he will one day restore them and not only that but he will one day make a new covenant with them where he will write his law on their hearts so that they won't be rebellious any more.

And Matthew tells us that this prophesy from Jeremiah was fulfilled when Herod ordered all the children in Bethlehem under the age of two to be murdered. We can see in both the quotations from Hosea and Jeremiah that Matthew does not use these prophecies in a merely predictive way. Matthew is not saying that Jesus meets some kind of prophetic checklist for what it means to be Messiah. Instead, he is saying "Look, this story is like that story. What God is doing in Jesus is like what God did in those times." In other words, by telling us that Jesus' family fled to Egypt and that God called his Son out of Egypt, Matthew wants us to see a parallel between the Exodus, the great deliverance of Israel, and what God is going to do in this child Jesus. And by quoting Jeremiah's words about the exile, words which are followed by God's promise of deliverance from that exile, Matthew wants us to see a parallel between what God did in the deliverance of Israel from exile in Babylon and what God is going to do in this boy Jesus. Matthew is hinting to us right here at the beginning of his story that this new born child is going to deliver Israel from its slavery just as God did in the Exodus and the return from Exile. This infant is going to be the new king of a new Israel.

There is just one problem with all of that. There is already a king in Israel. His name is Herod and he doesn't think Israel needs delivering. In fact, he is quite happy with the way things are since he is the one in power and he would like to keep it that way. The last thing Herod needs is some upstart kid trying to step in on the power that he has worked so hard to gain and keep. Herod will do whatever is necessary to hold on to the power that he has... even ordering every male child in the little town of Bethlehem to be murdered in cold blood. In fact, other historical records tells us that Herod even had three of his own sons killed so as to insure his continued reign as king. Of course, Herod was not especially unusual for his time. Many in the Roman Empire acted this way, doing whatever they had to in order to insure that they kept the power they had.

And so, right here only two chapters into Matthew's gospel, before Jesus has even had a chance to grow up, we find that his kingdom is already in conflict with, already threatening the kingdoms of this world. Matthew presents to us these two kingdoms and we must choose one or the other. On the one hand, we have Jesus and his kingdom which stands for all of those things that we talk about this time of year; peace, love, joy, hope. And all that sounds very nice and appealing to us. But on the other hand, we see that there is this other kingdom. The kingdom of Herod, the kingdom of this world. Matthew lays bare for us that this kingdom is built on nothing other than fear, violence, greed, and power lust. This kingdom is built on the murder of innocent children. We are repulsed by this kingdom and yet part of us finds it necessary, pragmatic, realistic, whatever you want to call it because we can see that this kingdom holds all the weapons, all the power, all the influence. So we are confronted with a choice: the kingdom of the helpless infant or the kingdom of the savage Herod?

From any rational, human perspective, it seems absurd to pledge or allegiance to anything other than the Herod kingdom. As much as we are repulsed by its method, we know that it holds all the power in this world. After all, how can you possibly build any kind of kingdom on an infant who himself is fleeing from Herod? In fact, I think John describes the situation well for us in Revelation 12. There John describes a sign he sees in heaven: a pregnant woman giving birth to a male child, "one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron". And there standing before the woman is a great dragon who is waiting to devour the child the moment the woman gives birth. Undoubtedly, this imagery in Revelation is multifaceted in its meaning but at the very least we can hear the parallel between the dragon who wishes to devour this woman's child and Herod who hopes to devour Jesus by the sword.

John and the churches to which he was writing knew this tension between these two kingdoms well because they constantly lived in the war between them. They had pledged their allegiance to Jesus, to the kingdom built on this male child who would rule the nations but on the other hand they had to continue to make a living in that other kingdom, the Roman Empire with its Herods and Red Dragons and all the violence they could create. I'm sure there were times when these early Christians felt like they were the child about to be swallowed by the great red dragon; that Israel their mother had given birth to the Church only to have them gobbled up by the power of the Roman empire.

The truth is, we face the same dilemma, the same tension. While we may not face the persecution that John's church's faced, we certainly face the same pressure to compromise with the kingdoms of this world. We see the kingdom of Jesus and we want to follow that way. Maybe we have even pledged our allegiance to it but then we see all the power that Herod and his kingdom hold and we feel like our faith is about to be devoured by a great red dragon.

Or to bring it back to our story in Matthew, we find ourselves in a position like that of Joseph. I have to imagine that Joseph must have said "You want me to what?!" more than once to the messenger of the Lord that appeared to him repeatedly. It wasn't enough that Joseph was instructed to take responsibility for a child that he knew wasn't his own, now he had to flee all the way to Egypt to protect it and he could only come back when God told him it was safe? Have you ever thought about how differently this story could have gone? Joseph could have reasoned this wasn't his kid anyway, taken him to one of Herod's men, said here is the one you are looking for, just take him and you don't have to kill all the other male children in Bethlehem. Not only would Joseph no longer have the social stigma of having a child that everyone else thought was illegitimate, he would also have the continuing gratitude of all the other mothers in Bethlehem for saving their sons and maybe Herod would have even thrown him some kind of reward for being such a loyal subject. Instead, Joseph repeatedly trusts God even when it sets him at odds with the vast might of the Roman Empire. Joseph chooses the kingdom of this helpless little boy over the kingdom of this world. God calls us to this same radical trust. He calls us to pledge our allegiance to the kingdom built on Jesus even while the Herods of the world do all the destruction and violence they can. As I said before, from a merely human perspective this call will always seems like a foolish and naive one. But in the rest of Revelation 12, John gives us the heavenly perspective on the matter. There John tells the churches of Asia Minor and tells us that the dragon and his angels have already been defeated. A loud voice in heaven proclaims

"Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death."

John goes on to tell us that when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth he pursued the woman who gave birth to the child and when he is unable to capture her he goes off to make war against the rest of her offspring, "on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus." John acknowledges that in this world the dragon has power to inflict all kinds of pain and violence on the saints of God but John is in essence telling us that all the pain and violence Satan can bring is actually good news for us. It is good news because it represents the death throes of his kingdom. Satan thrashes about so violently in our world because he knows he has been defeated and wants to inflict whatever damage he can in the short time that he has left. In John's view, things like Herod's slaughter of innocent children, things like the holocaust, things like the genocides of Rwanda, Congo, and the Sudan, tragedies like Haiti, the pain we feel in our bodies, the illnesses and deaths of loved ones that we so painfully mourn, while undeniably tragic are also sure signs of Satan's defeat. They are signs that the days of the dragon, of the Herods, of the kingdoms of this world are numbered because the kingdom of that baby boy born in a manger has already prevailed.

God With Us

2010-12-08T11:42:00.000-06:00

The words of Isaiah 7:14 are probably some of the most well known in the book Isaiah.

"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel."

This is almost certainly the case not because of their original context in Isaiah but because Matthew quotes them in the first chapter of his gospel to refer to the birth of Jesus. However, if we read Isaiah 7 as a whole we can see clearly that this prophecy is not one that Isaiah expected to be fulfilled hundreds of years later. It was a prophecy for his own time. Isaiah was speaking about a child that would be born very soon.

Isaiah 7 begins by telling us that King Rezin of Syria and King Pekah of Israel marched against Jerusalem the capital of Judah where Ahaz was king and Isaiah a prophet. Isaiah doesn't give us any details as to why the kings of Israel and Syria wanted to make war with Judah but considering the historical context of the time we can make a guess. The mighty nation of Assyria was a threat to all of three these nations but was likely a more immediate threat to Syria and Israel due to their geographic location. So its seems likely that Rezin and Pekah were trying to intimidate Ahaz in to forming a political and military alliance with them against Assyria, something Ahaz had been hesitant to do.

Whatever the reason for their advance, Isaiah tells us that Ahaz and the people of Judah were exceedingly fearful, their hearts were shaken "as the trees of the forest are shaken by the wind", when they heard that these two armies were approaching their capital. Isaiah tells Ahaz that however intimidated he may be, God's command is not to make this alliance with Syria and Israel. Instead, Ahaz is to stand firm in his faith and trust that God will deliver him. In fact, God even offers Ahaz a sign through the prophet Isaiah as assurance of what God has promised. Ahaz refuses the sign claiming that he doesn't wish to test God but Isaiah says that he will be given a sign anyway. That sign is the child that is promised in Isaiah 7:14. Isaiah says that this child will be born and before he is old enough to understand right from wrong the two nations which Ahaz fears will be laid waste. This child is given the name Immanuel because his birth was a sign that God (el) was with the people of Judah (Immanu meaning "with us").

Of course, Matthew was not unaware of all of this when he decided to quote Isaiah 7:14 in his writing of the gospel. He knew that the child of which Isaiah spoke was one that would be born in Isaiah's day and not his own and Matthew was not trying to negate that original meaning. Nor do I think Matthew was simply looking for any Old Testament prophecy about the birth of a child which he could then use to show that Jesus' birth was really predicted hundreds of year earlier, regardless of the original context of that verse.

Instead, by quoting this verse, I believe Matthew wants us to see the story of Isaiah and Ahaz in the story of Jesus. Matthew's quoting of Isaiah 7:14 is not about prediction or proving that Jesus is the Messiah. It is Matthew's way of saying this story is like that story; this story I am telling about Jesus is like that story of God delivering Judah from its enemies, it is a story of "God with us". In Isaiah, the birth of Immanuel served as a sign, a real physical reminder of God's promise to deliver his people if they would trust in Him. In Matthew's gospel, he wishes to show us that the birth of Jesus is a sign, a real physical reminder of God's promise to deliver his people if they would trust in Him.

Of course, Matthew will go on to show throughout the rest of his gospel that he means the quoting of this verse from Isaiah in ways even more radical than this. Matthew reveals to us that Jesus is not merely a sign of God with us as Immanuel was only a sign in Isaiah but that Jesus himself is in fact God with us, the very presence of God himself in human flesh. As God was with the people of Judah to deliver them from their enemies, so God became even more present among us by taking on our own flesh in order to deliver us from our worst enemies; sin and death.

What Won't Save Us

2010-11-29T15:45:00.000-06:00

As I was eating lunch today, I was browsing the most recent TIME magazine. It's one of those typical end-of-the-year issues. It contained several articles that looked over significant events of the last several years and tried to assign some significance to them. The one article I had the time to read was about the election of President Bush in 2000. It recounted the details of just how close that election was; so close that it seemed the margin of error in counting the votes would always exceed the margin of victory by either candidate. How the votes were counted depended on who counted them and their interpretation of what constituted a legal ballot cast.

Of course, the articles go on to discuss other important events of the last several years: 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, and the recent economic meltdown. As I read this article and pondered these events, one question kept resounding in my mind:

How much more evidence do we need that democracy and capitalism, politics and economics are not our savior?

Don't get me wrong. Really, please don't assume I'm saying something that I'm not as so often happen with these topics. I think government and economic policy are important; very important. They have their place in our world and we should continue to work to improve our policies and laws as a nation. I'm even mostly convinced that democracy and capitalism are the best forms of government and economics that we've come up with so far as a human race.

Hear what I am saying: as Christians we are called to work to improve the laws and policies that govern our world while also constantly reminding ourselves that they are not the ultimate answer. So often we become so impassioned about these things that you'd think all of our hope rested in them. But shouldn't the events of just the last decade be enough to convince us that these things will ultimately always fail us? However great democracy is, everyone still laments the current character of our politicians. Whatever merit capitalism has over other economic systems, it can not inhibit a greed powerful enough to collapse entire economies. I am not suggesting we all become anarchists. I am suggesting that while we need good laws and policies to help curb the systemic injustices of our world, ultimately all those injustices, all those evils that laws are meant to prevent arise from the human heart. At the end of the day, we don't need more laws, we need God's Law written on our hearts. We need ourselves and our world to be transformed by a God who is greater than us. In other words, the genuinely Christians politic has more to do with sacrifice and faithfulness, our economy one of mercy and grace.

I think Isaiah 11 expresses this truth well, though in a much more poetic and eloquent manner than I have done here. The people of Israel and Judah certainly knew the importance of good government. They had prospered under the rule of David and Solomon but since then they had become divided and weakened by the poor leadership that followed. Now Assyria stood on their doorstep and Isaiah was already prophesying that God's people would be reduced to a smoldering stump (see Is 6:13), a once mighty tree of a nation reduced to an almost nothing people sent into exile.

But in chapter 11, Isaiah says that out of that stump of Jesse, that kingly family that had been cut down by the foreign nations, a shoot would come forth and a branch would bear fruit. However, as Isaiah goes on to describe this new king, it becomes clear that he can not be a mere human being. Just another king who can be corrupted to play in the politics of power will not do God's people any good. So while Isaiah longs for this new king; he also recognizes there is need of something more than simply improved politics. The reign of this king must be the reign of God himself. Isaiah tell us that the Spirit of the Lord will rest upon him, giving him the wisdom to judge justly and righteously, to uphold the cause of the poor, and to effortlessly defeat the wicked merely with the breath of his mouth. Similar to last week's sermon text, this passage tells us that the king's just reign will lead to a radical peace. Here it is a peace so complete that it is not limited to human relations but extends to all of creation. Natural enemies, the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the goat, the lion and the calf lay down harmlessly together. Infants play near cobras and adders without fear or harm. This is a peace possible only when God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

Of course, we understand Christ to have fulfilled this role as the one just judge and righteous king. He is the one on whom the Spirit of the Lord rests, who was not blinded by power and influence, and who attended to the poor in his earthly ministry. He is the one who we believe in his return will fully establish his reign as king and bring about the kind of complete justice and radical peace that is described in Isaiah 11. It is not surprising then that John picks up the language of Isaiah 11 to portray the establishment of this kingdom in Revelation 19. There Christ is portrayed as the one sitting on a white horse who is called faithful and true, who judges and makes war in righteousness. He has the armies of heaven at his side but he does not need them because "from his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations" which is to say that, like the kingly figure in Isaiah 11, his words, the mere breath of his mouth is enough to defeat all the enemies of God's people. While the imagery of Revelation 19 is undoubtedly violent, it speaks to the peaceable kingdom that will finally be established when Christ's reign is made complete. It is that kingdom which we await in the season of Advent. It is the politics of that kingdom which are the organizing force of our lives even while we wait for it to be established in all its glory.

Celebrating Advent

2010-11-27T21:59:00.001-06:00

I'm sure I am not the first and won't be the last preacher to lament the status of this time of year in our culture. Nevertheless, as I reflected on the reading from Isaiah this week, I couldn't help but think (again) about how little our practices in these December weeks have anything to do with the things we claim to value as the Church. On Sunday, we are hearing about a savior who will bring a peace to our world so radical and complete that it will render weapons so useless and void of value that they will be melted down to be used in farm equipment. And we celebrate and anticipate that peace with more shopping/consuming/stress/materialism/busyness/obligation? Sounds like the opposite of peace to me. Anyway, here are few practices, however small, I thought might help us anticipate the radical peace that our scriptures promise during this Advent season at our church. It's not a comprehensive list by any means. I'd be interested in hearing any ideas you might add to the list.

· Schedule moments of silent reflection throughout the month of December

· Agree with a loved one to forgo giving each other another gift that neither of you really needs and give the money you would have spent to a charitable organization

· Give your time to someone who may be lonely this holiday season

· Read a chapter of the Gospel of Luke with your family every day in December. If you start on Dec. 1 and read a chapter a day you will finish on Christmas Eve.

· Sign up to ring the bell for the Salvation Army on Saturday, Dec. 4.

· Figure up the amount of money you spent on your largest shopping day and add that amount to your tithe one week in December.

· If stress and busyness are a problem for you this time of year, then commit now to saying no to at least one social obligation this holiday season.

· Spend at least 15 minutes praying for peace and justice in our world for every hour that you spend shopping.

· In place of giving a gift to the pastor and his family (who already know how much you love them) give a gift to a child or teen in our church you don’t know very well (so that they will know they are loved as well).

· Don’t use a credit card for your holiday shopping. If you can’t afford it now, then don’t buy it.

· Ask others for a Nazarene Compassionate Ministries Gift Card as their Christmas gift to you.

Trust, Justice, and Peace

2010-11-22T17:25:00.000-06:00

The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the LORD
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be lifted up above the hills;
and all the nations shall flow to it,
and many peoples shall come, and say:
"Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths."
For out of Zion shall go the law,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide disputes for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.
O house of Jacob,
come, let us walk
in the light of the LORD.

-Isaiah 2:1-5

These words poignantly capture the vision and hope of what Israel was called to be. The city of Jerusalem is described here as a sort of lighthouse to all the nations. It is lifted as a beacon to which all the nations flow like a river. As the people of the world make this pilgrimage to Jerusalem they state the reason for their journey; that they may learn the ways of Yahweh. In this way the highest of hopes Israel, God's express purpose for creating Israel, is fulfilled; God's law is not limited to his chosen people. Instead, all the nations see the worth of Yahweh's teaching and therefore want to participate in it. As a result, God's law goes out from Jerusalem and God himself acts as judge over the whole world. The image of God as judge is a hopeful one because God is one true and just judge who will always rule righteously. God's judgment is, in fact, so thoroughly just that it eliminates war. The justice of God brings a peace so radical that the instruments of war, swords and spears, are no longer useful so they are converted into plows and pruning hooks, instruments that cultivate food and therefore, life. Having been taught by Yahweh, the nations no longer have need to learn war any more.

In a world like ours, it is tempting to see words like these as overly optimistic, even fanciful, unrealistic. We all long for peace but isn't this a little naive?

It is worth noting that these words were written at a time when swords and spears were prevalent and an immediate danger to the people of Judah. While it is difficult to date these words with precision, they were surely uttered in the shadow of the threatening menace of Assyrian power. In comparison to the Assyrian superpower, Judah was a relatively weak and helpless nation, no match for Assyria's armies. In Isaiah's day, it would have seemed that the only reason to say "that all the nations shall flow in to it (Jerusalem)" would be if the armies of the nations were flooding into the city gates to conquer and pillage it.

In contrast to that fearful situation, Isaiah reminds Judah of what they have been called to as the people of God: a people who walk in the light of the Lord. This vision of what all the other nations will one day do concludes by reminding the house of Jacob what they must do now. They must walk in the light that they have been given and trust God. With the mighty Assyrian army on the doorstep of Jerusalem, it was tempting for God's people to grasp at any available political alliances that might save them. Instead, Isaiah urges them to trust God to deliver them, to walk in his light, and have faith that God could accomplish the vision promised in these verses.

In our world that kind of faith and trust will always seem naive. There is really no denying that. As long as we hold to the belief that trust in God is more powerful than tanks, we will not be counted among the sensible. But Isaiah's vision is not one that fails to take into account the harsh realities of our world. It simply goes on to also take into account the God who is mightier than any army. It is ultimately this God, not our military and political intrigues, who will bring lasting peace to our world. Trusting in that promise, we are called to be a people who walk in God's light whatever the circumstances.

Christ Alone

2010-11-17T11:31:00.000-06:00

It seems it is always a temptation for the Church to make the gospel about Christ AND something else. We know Christ is important (if we didn't, we wouldn't even bother with the title of "Christian") but it seems we often want to set something else up along side of Christ. Paul corrects the Galatians for making it about Christ and works of the Law, the Corinthians for making it about Christ and their spiritual gifts. While it is difficult to say exactly what the situation was in the Colossian church, it seems Paul is facing a similar problem there as well. In this letter, Paul says things like

"See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ." - 2:8

"Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath... Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God." -2:16, 18-19

Paul goes on with similar admonitions in the verses that follow. This seems to indicate that the Colossians have doubts about whether or not Christ alone is really sufficient for their salvation. Paul's answer to those doubts is the magnificent Christological statement of Colossians 1:15-20.

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn from all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and trough him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross."

Many scholars believe that these verses were an early Christian hymn which Paul did not write but has used here to remind the Colossians of the foundation of the Christian faith. Paul is in essence saying "Remember, this is what you believe: Christ is God. He is the invisible God made visible in human flesh. As God, he is the creator and redeemer of all people." As such, the God who is Christ is sufficient for our salvation. As Paul says in v. 13-14

"He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins."

Of course, this is Christian Faith 101. We know that to be Christian is to confess Christ as Lord and Savior. Yet one might ask how deeply we have allowed this truth to pervade our lives. Is Christ really sufficient for us? We, too, often want Christ AND something else; Christ AND success, Christ AND happiness, Christ AND the respect of others, and the list goes on. How many of us can really claim to have decided, as Paul said he did, "to know nothing ...except Christ and him crucified"?

A River of Life

2010-10-25T14:03:00.001-05:00

Last week, we heard of God's promise to return to and restore the Temple in Jerusalem. However, God's work of restoration does not end with the Temple. Instead, the Temple is a kind of epicenter of God's restorative work. The return of God's presence to Jerusalem brings life and health to the entire land. The final chapters of Ezekiel go on to describe the restoration of the priesthood, feasts, sacrifices, the city, and the entire land of Israel.

As a part of that restoration, Ezekiel 47 narrates for us the last of Ezekiel's guided tour like visions. Ezekiel's guide takes him back to the door of the Temple where Ezekiel sees water trickling out from underneath the threshold of the Temple. From there, we are told several of the properties of this babbling brook which indicate to us its supernatural character. This small stream of water turns so as to avoid the altar then continues on outside of the Temple complex. It flows directly east, the same direction from which Yahweh had come to return to to the Temple. It seems the flow of this stream is not determined by geographical factors. In fact, as it flows further east, its get deeper and deeper despite there being no mention of any tributaries flowing into it. What started as a trickle eventually turns into a rushing river which flows through the desert region of the Arabah and runs into the Dead Sea. We are told that this sea, so full of salt that almost nothing can survive in it, will be "healed" by this river which flows from the Temple, its densely salted water turned fresh so that it will teem with life. We are told it will be a place for "the spreading of nets" from Engedi to Enelgaim. While the location of these two ancient towns is not absolutely certain, it is thought that Engedi was on the western shore of the Dead Sea and Enelgaim was on the southereastern shore, meaning that the entire Dead Sea will be good for fishing. However, we are told in v.11 that the swamps and marshes will be left as salt water presumably so that there will still be a source of salt in the area for seasoning and preserving food. On both sides of the river are an abundance of fruit trees which remarkably are never out of season. Their leaves do not wither and they bear fruit every month of the year. Furthermore, their leaves will have healing properties.

Clearly, this vision Ezekiel sees goes well beyond a promise for Israel's historical return from exile. It is a promise not only that Israel will be restored to its land but that the land itself will be restored and renewed in a dramatic, other-worldly kind of way. As Ezekiel has made clear in his other prophecies of restoration, a simple return from political captivity is not enough; a cleansing, renewing work of God that frees from the captivity of sin is needed to keep his people from falling back into their same old sins. They need to be sprinkled with clean water and given a new heart and a new Spirit. These dry bones need the breathe of God to raise them to new life. A new creation is needed.

John picks up this idea in Revelation 22 as he describes the new creation which God is going to bring about. In this new creation, there is no need of a temple since God dwells directly among his people. So John sees this river issuing out not from the Temple but from the throne of God and the Lamb. This river flows down the middle street of the new Jerusalem and the tree of life grows on either side of it yielding its twelve fruits twelve months of the year. The leaves of this tree are for healing as well but not only for Israel but for all the nations. What Ezekiel saw as God's promise to make Israel new, John sees as a promise to heal all peoples and all of creation.

The Promised Temple

2010-10-18T16:37:00.002-05:00

Over the course of Ezekiel's prophetic writings, we have been shown the full gamut of Israel's ugliness and sin. In chapter 8, we heard of Israel's worship of other gods and Israel's complete lack of trust in Yahweh. Chapter 16 described Israel as an unfaithful whore, actively pursuing everyone except the God who rescued her. It is all of this sin and unfaithfulness which causes the glory of the Lord to depart from the Temple in chapter 10. God is driven out of his own home by the filth of his people's idolatry. As a result, in chapter 1, Ezekiel sees God not in the Temple in Jerusalem but in his chariot-throne on the banks of the Chebar Canal in Babylon. Much of Ezekiel's writings portray Israel as a sinful and forsaken people.

But in the later chapters of the book, we are reminded that even Israel immense sins are not beyond God's healing power. In chapter 36, God proclaimed that he would restore those in captivity to their homeland and make them clean for the sake of his own reputation. In Ezekiel 37, God gives Ezekiel a vision of an army of dry bones coming to life, a promise of the life that God is about to breathe into this dead people.

Chapter 43 is the climax of these prophecies of restoration. In the opening verses of this chapter, we hear that God is returning to his Temple. Ezekiel sees the same vision of God that he saw on the banks of the Chebar except now the Spirit of the Lord is approaching the Temple from the east, away from Babylon and back to Jerusalem. The Temple will once again be God's throne and God's footstool. His permanent dwelling will once again be with his people.

But the final chapters of Ezekiel are not only about Yahweh's return to the Temple. It is about the restoration of the Temple itself and all that restoration symbolizes. When Ezekiel sees this vision of the Temple and God's return to it, there is no Temple. It has been destroyed in the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. Chapter 43 comes in the midst of several chapters which meticulously describe every aspect of this new Temple, much like the meticulous description of the old Temple in earlier parts of the Old Testament. However, whereas those earlier descriptions served as instruction, this description is one of promise. There are no commands to build this Temple that is envisioned. Indeed, there is no opportunity to build since those receiving the vision are still in exile. Instead, Ezekiel is simply told to convey the vision to the people of Israel, in all of its detail oriented glory, so that "they may be ashamed of their sins." Strangely, the designs of this building plan are also God's design for his people's repentance. This building will stand as a physical reminder of God's faithfulness which can only remind Israel of all of its own unfaithfulness.

Of course, the New Testament writers will repeatedly use the Temple as a metaphor for the Church. Whereas in the past God's Spirit had dwelt in a building, the Church believed that Spirit which also empowered Jesus now dwells in Jesus' followers making the Church God's new temple. Ezekiel's vision is especially apt for our understanding of ourselves as the Temple since it is a blueprint for a promised building that can not yet be completed. Likewise, the Church is to be a kind of blueprint for the new creation, God's final restoration of all things. Undoubtedly, contemplating this final vision of God's restoration will remind us of all the ways that we fall short. Nevertheless, we are also called to be a physical reminder of God's faithfulness and the promise of restoration which God intends to fulfill.

Preaching in Death Valley

2010-10-08T14:38:00.000-05:00

And he said to me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" and I answered, "O Lord God, you know." Then he said to me, prophesy over these bones and say to them, "O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord." - Ezekiel 37:3-4

God called Ezekiel to do a lot of absurd things. This one takes the cake. At least the strange sign-acts for which God commissioned Ezekiel were in front of people who could see, hear, and have some chance, however small, to respond. Not so here. Here Ezekiel stands to preach the message he has been given by God but instead of a congregation of willing and responsive listeners, Ezekiel finds that his figurative pulpit has been placed in front of a bunch of skeletons. And he is commanded to preach to these skeletons as if they were living people. "O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord." At least there will be no complaints about the length of the sermon.

What preacher, at least on some rare occasion, hasn't felt like they were doing what Ezekiel does here? What preacher hasn't at some time or another felt like they were speaking to a congregation as lifeless as a valley of dry bones? At some point we've all felt like our sermons were addressed to spiritual zombies who carry on as if they were alive but whose attitudes and actions say "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are indeed cut off." (Of course, some of our own sermons and spiritual practices are themselves responsible for turning them into zombies but that's a post for another day.)

This is not some underhanded, back door way to complain about the spiritual failures of my own congregation. This blog post is not a reflection on some current frustration with my own church people. In fact, this is a bit easier to write this week because this past Sunday was one of the most alive and responsive services we have had since I've been the pastor here. This is not to say that we don't have our own spiritual deadness. It is simply to say that I will confront that deadness on Sunday morning when I preach and in our continued life together as a community of faith rather than in a blog post.

The point is, that as pastors, God has called us to prophesy to these dry bones of a people and as we do God asks us the same question which he asked Ezekiel and which is already running through our own minds. Is it really possible that these dry bones can live? Is this preaching, all this ministry doing any good? I've said the same things over and over again and not only has nothing changed but it doesn't even seem like they've heard what I've said.

Like Ezekiel, we are probably hesitant to give an unambiguous answer. Can these dead church people be made alive again? Well God, only you know the answer to that question (...but I have my own opinions on the matter). Then comes the command that demands trust: "Prophesy over these bones...". Keep preaching. Don't let the spiritual deadness of your audience prevent you from proclaiming. Even to dry bones continue to say "Hear the word of the Lord". This is all Ezekiel is called to. It is not his task to make alive what is dead. It is his task to be obedient in proclaiming the word of the Lord, even in the valley of death where it appears there is no one able to hear.

When we preach to those dry bones over and over again, it is tempting to bring our puppet strings; to find something that will make these skeletons dance and play; to use anything we can find that will make those dry bones look and feel more alive. At least then we would have the illusion of having an audience worthy of our preaching. But inasmuch as we become puppeteers rather than prophets we reveal what we really believe about that question that God asks us. "No Lord, I don't believe that you can make alive what is dead so I will do my best to give death the appearance of life."

But then, probably when we least expect it, probably when we've become so accustomed to the deadness that it doesn't even feel strange to preach to skeletons anymore, perhaps when we've began to feel like enough of a skeleton ourselves that we no longer have the strength to hold up the marionette, then the bones begin to rattle together and the breath of God floods in from every direction and there is suddenly life where there once was not. We are reminded that if we will keep proclaiming as we've been commanded then God is more than able to raise up an army of an audience to hear his word. To continue to prophesy in the valley of dry bones is an act of trust that says to our God "I believe these bones can live again".

Can These Bones Live?

2010-10-04T15:24:00.000-05:00

Defeat, death, and decay are the colors of darkness that fill Ezekiel's vision in chapter 37. There has been a battle in this valley but the victors have long since moved on leaving the bones of the dead and defeated behind to rot. In fact, by the time Ezekiel sees them, they are done rotting. These bones are dry. Their defeat so long past, so complete, so utterly irreversible, that there are not even remnants of flesh on these bones. They belong to an army not only defeated but also seemingly forgotten, their sacrifice unappreciated, as they are left for the birds to pick clean and the elements to smooth over until one day they will be erased completely, no memory of them left on the earth.

In the midst of this yawning abyss, an absurd question is asked; "Can these bones live?". A question so absurd that even Ezekiel seems hesitant to offer as an answer what he can only hope. Instead, he throws the question back to the questioner; "Lord, you know." And so God begins the work of reversing the utterly irreversible, breathing life where there was once death.

It is not until after the vision is complete that the identity of these bones is revealed. One might have concluded easily enough that these were the bones of those who lost their lives defending Jerusalem against the Babylonians onslaught. But v.11 tells us otherwise. "Then he said to me: "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.'" It is those who have survived that see themselves as dry bones. This is a vision for those whose bodies are alive but whose situation is so defeated and hopeless that they feel like nothing more than dry bones. This is a vision for the living dead.

For the exiles in Babylon, this is a promise that they will one day return home. Their exile is not endless; their destruction is not complete. But it is also more than that. It is a demonstration to Israel concerning the kind of God that they serve; the kind of God who reverses the irreversible, the kind of God who can rattle dry bones to life; the kind of God who raises the crucified.

Often we find ourselves asking the same question of ourselves, our churches, and our world; "Can these dry bones live?" Can those who seem dead to all spiritual counsel ever be spiritually alive? Can the old, aching bodies that have served Christ for so long still render faithfulness to their Lord? Can those who have suffered immeasurable loss ever be made whole? Can a church which has declined in number for two decades be made alive again? Can a world so full of death and sin ever know life and peace?

Can God raise the dead? Everything hinges on this. If the answer is no, then we are to be pitied more than all people. But if the answer is yes...

God's PR Team

2010-09-27T14:54:00.000-05:00

God has a PR problem.

As God's chosen people, Israel was to represent to the world the God who delivered them from slavery. Instead of revealing himself to all people, God had chosen to reveal himself specifically to one group of people, one nation, Israel. In turn, the Israelites were supposed to be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, revealing God to all the other peoples of the earth through the holy, distinctive way of life to which God had called them. Israel was, in essence, God's public relations team.

However, one of the major themes of the book of Ezekiel is how badly the people of Israel failed in this PR task. God's chosen people have badly misrepresented Yahweh to the nations with their syncretism and idolatry which is so severe that Ezekiel describes his own people as a prostitute who gives herself out to everyone but her husband. As a result, God's name has been profaned among the nations. Instead of Israel bringing honor and glory to Yahweh, they have tarnished God's reputation, bringing shame upon the name of the God that they serve.

Anyone else who found themselves in this position would simply find new representation. Any celebrity or politician would quickly fire their agent or campaign manager if they couldn't do any better than this. And, in a way, that is what God does too... for a time. God does allow Israel to be taken into exile because of their unfaithful representation of him. Israel has to know that God will not tolerate his name being dragged through the mud in this way. But even this is only for a time.

In Ezekiel 36, God promises to bring back the people who have misrepresented him so badly. However, God makes abundantly clear in this passage that he is not doing this for their sake but for his own. Having failed so badly at their task, there is nothing that Israel could do to deserve God hiring them as his representatives once again. There is nothing that Israel can offer God. Instead, God says that he will deliver his people once again so that God himself will be honored and vindicated, so that his holiness will be known. God is doing this so that all the nations will know that God does not abandon his people and that God is powerful enough to save, even more powerful than the mightiest nations on earth.

However, God also will not allow these people to represent him as they are. He will not deliver them back into their old land which he gave them just so that they can go back to their old prostituting ways. No, God promises to cleanse his people and make them holy (even though they have not asked God to do this, of course, how could such an unholy people make such a holy request in the first place). God even says that he will perform a heart transplant, replacing their heart of stone with a heart of flesh. God is going to give this people his own Spirit so they will follow his Law and live the life God had always called them to live. This is the only way for the perpetual cycle of sin to be broken; to have God's own Spirit at work within us.

As Christians, we believe that this promise has been fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. We believe that the Spirit of God resided in Jesus, empowering his life and ministry, and that this same Spirit was poured out upon his followers, the Church, the New Israel. We believe that even though God knows our often whorish ways, he continues to call human beings to be his representatives in the world. God calls us to be made clean and to allow his Spirit to work in us so that we might truly represent him in all of his holiness.

Of course, we also know that all too often God still has a PR problem today. So many people claim the title "Christian" and by doing so claim to represent God in their thoughts, words, and deeds. But somehow none of those thoughts, words, or actions seem to look much like Jesus and so God's name ends up being dragged through the mud once again. Perhaps at the root of all this is our forgetting that what God does in us is not primarily about us but about God. We shouldn't think for a minute that this is for our sake, for our happiness, for our own self-fulfillment. After all Jesus taught that our first request in any prayer is for God's reputation to be honored; "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...". We have been called to honor God in all that we do and it is for that task that God says he will make us clean, give is a new heart, and place his very own Spirit within us.

The Watchman

2010-09-20T13:46:00.000-05:00

The beginning of Ezekiel 33 reiterates an idea found earlier in the book in chapter 3; that Ezekiel is a watchman for Israel. The watchmen was like a military scout, the ancient version of an early warning device. It was the watchman's job to be on the lookout for an approaching enemy. If an army was approaching, the watchman was to sound the alarm so that the people would have enough time to get inside the city walls before the enemy was at hand. Obviously, many lives depended on the attentiveness of the watchman. If he failed to carry out his duties responsibly, it could cost a lot of people their lives. On the other hand, if for some strange reason the inhabitants of the city were to ignore the warning of the watchman and then died as a result, this would not be the watchman's fault since everyone had the choice whether or not they would heed the watchman's call.

The watchman is indeed an apt metaphor for Ezekiel's role within his community and the role of any prophet in any community really. In Ezekiel's context, the very real, literal army of the Babylonians has already come and carried Ezekiel and many of his fellow Israelites into exile. Nevertheless, Ezekiel's role as watchman continues even within the exiled community, warning those around him of the consequences of unfaithfulness to God. But like the watchman, it is only Ezekiel's job to warn. He has no power to enforce the warning. As long as Ezekiel issues his prophetic warning then he has done his job and it is up to those who hear the warning to respond accordingly.

As a pastor, this is one of the responsibilities I hold within this community of faith and it is one of the most difficult of those responsibilities. Especially in a culture where someone can easily find another church to attend if they don't like what you have to say, it seems almost impossible to speak words of warning like these in a way that is edifying and beneficial when someone is on the wrong path. Perhaps what is worse though is the powerlessness I have felt when I have uttered those words of warning. Such words are difficult enough when they actually lead to repentance but so often they actually lead to rejection and strife. While I continue to pray that God will give me wisdom and humility in these matters, I have also began to learn the truth that not everyone heeds the watchman's warning. Often we must simply speak the truth in love and leave the rest up to God.

Of course, it is not only my responsibility. The entirety of the Church has a prophetic role to play and therefore it is a task left to all of us to speak words of truthfulness and warning to our brothers and sisters in Christ. We are called to be watchmen to each other, reproving each other when we are not living up to the holy life to which we have been called. It is my prayer that God will give us the courage to speak what needs to be spoken and the wisdom and humility to speak it well.

Obsessive Reading Disorder

2010-09-18T21:41:00.000-05:00

My name is Dave. I'm a readaholic.

I recently entered a 12 step program to help me address this issue.

Step 1: Finish school and thereby finish all required reading.
Step 2: Become pastor of your first church.
Steps 3-12: Have children. Its not that these last ten steps mean you have to have 10 children. Its more metaphorical than that. Instead, these ten steps can represents the ten months you will go without sleep. Or they can represent the ten times you will be woken up every night. Take your pick.

Of course, its not like I hadn't dabbled a bit here and there over the last several months. There was the reading for sermons and Bible studies. But that's stuff that anyone could justify.

But then God decided to test me by allowing my children to actually sleep occasionally. The more my children slept the more rested I was and the more free time I had. It wasn't long before I started to slip back into my old habits.

I started seeing a counselor. No, its not what you think. I don't actually know of any counselors trained to treat obsessive reading disorder. I was seeing this counselor to help me be a better counselor in my role as a pastor. Little did I know the path this would lead me down. He actually assigned reading for me as a part of my training.

So I started reading again. It was slow at first. But then something here or there would catch my interest. The book I was reading on counseling was a kind of gateway reading. It led me to reading a book on family systems therapy which led to reading a book on grief which led to reading C.S. Lewis.

But even at this point I think there still would have been hope for a quick recovery if it hadn't been for my wife. She too had abstained for a long time because of our life circumstances which was part of what helped me to stay off the sauce. But now someone had loaned her the Harry Potter series. (I always knew those books were evil.) She got a taste and it was all downhill from there. She always had a book in her hand, reading everywhere; on the couch in front of the TV, in bed, in the middle of the day! It was awful. The housework was neglected. Children were left in my care for long periods of time. It wasn't pretty.

Of course, what they say is true. Its always the kids who suffer most. I can already see how my wife's reading habits are impacting our children. Hannah plays with letters as if they were toys and she is constantly asking me to read to her. Malachi is not even a year old yet and he stares longingly at books as you turn the pages for him as if he can't wait for the day when he will be able to drink in their magic. Poor kid.

But even with all the destructive effects of reading laid before me, I still couldn't help myself. And so, after nearly a year without any binge readings, I picked up The Works of John Wesley, Vol.1.

And now its seems that things are worse than they were before. That was less than a month ago and somehow I find myself already half way through volume 4. I've even experimented with a few other books between volumes. The worst part is that I can't stop thinking about when my next reading will be or what I'll read next. Just the other day we were all in the van on the way to church and I pondered out loud to myself "I wonder if I should starting reading Luther in between volumes of Wesley so that I can compare them or if I should wait until I've finished all 14 volumes of Wesley so that I don't get them confused." Jess was quick to point out to me that she didn't think this was a question that very many people asked themselves which I am pretty sure is just her way of telling me how special I am. But just in case I was wrong, I decided not to tell her that I was already calculating in mind how long it would take me to get to Calvin and Barth too.

My addiction has become so severe that, as of late, I've actually tried to step back and reflect on where this compulsion for reading comes from. For a long time, I could justify my addiction easily enough. I was in college. I was in seminary. Everyone else was doing it. I was just working hard to prepare for being a pastor and I could quit whenever I wanted. I've even considered the very real possibility that my compulsion to read stems from having too much of my self-worth wrapped up in intellectual achievement. (I probably have the psychology reading I did to thank for that one.) But the truth is, while all of those statements have some truth to them, none of them completely exhausts the compulsion I feel for reading.

The irony is (cue the serious part of the post) that as obsessive as my reading habits are I really do believe that this is one of the primary ways that God has chosen to work in me. Perhaps that sounds like the ultimate crutch; like the alcoholic or drug addict saying "I can't help it. This is just the way that God made me." but it is, in fact, what I believe about myself. That's not to say that I don't have to be careful about how much time I spend reading, especially in a profession where my use of time is largely self-directed and there are many important things to do in addition to studying. I readily confess that it will always be a temptation for me to study to the extent that I neglect other important aspects of my role as a pastor (and as a husband and father). I also recognize that when I find what I think is a good balance between reading and other aspects of life there may be others who do not agree with that assessment.

In spite of all that, I still believe that reading and study are and will likely always be one of the primary means of grace in my life. This is about more than having answers or being prepared. This is about how God is shaping me as His servant. I believe this because I know how God used my time at ENC and NTS to transform me as a person. I believe this because I know that now, as I've dedicated larger amounts of my time to studying once again, I feel God working in me in new ways again. These last few weeks that I've spent reading Wesley have been some of the most intense time of spiritual formation I've experience in the last couple of years. God has spoken to me about weaknesses and blind spots in my life and ministry while also helping me let go of some burdens that I've been holding onto for quite some time. I'm looking forward to finding out what else the Word can work in me through the written words of others in the months and years to come.