John Koessler's Blog, page 20

Silent Night

Now that Advent has arrived, I suppose it is time for my annual Christmas lament. I am reluctant to speak. I am afraid of adding another shrill note to the year’s collective shriek. Everybody, it seems to me, is up in arms. Every word is an affront.  It is tempting to blame our national mood on the election, but I believe its roots go deeper. If the outcome of the election had been different, I do not think that the tone would have changed. It would only have meant that different voices would be singing the same parts. We are all outraged now.

Outrage, of course, is often appropriate. It was the chord struck by the biblical prophets. An ancient aphorism often attributed to St. Augustine says that hope has two daughters: anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain the same. Without a doubt there is much in the world that deserves outrage. But I am struck by how little modern outrage is able to accomplish. For all its heat and fury, it has not proven to be an especially powerful engine for driving change. Perhaps this is because we are really enamored of a different set of twins. Proverbs 30:15 declares, “The leech has two daughters. ‘Give! Give!’ they cry.” The cry of our age is not the cry of love or even of justice. It is the cry of “measureless ambition,” a voice which says “me first” and “I’m here now.”

I cannot help being struck by difference in Jesus’ tone. It was predicted by the prophet Isaiah who declared, “He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets” (Isaiah 42:2). Despite the shout of joy that Heaven uttered at His birth, Jesus came into the world in relative obscurity and deliberately refused the limelight. When they tried to make Him a king by force, He opted for the path of solitude and suffering instead (John 6:15). This was not because He shunned royal office. Jesus knew it was His by right. Rather, He took this route because He knew that the only way to put things right was to take the wrong upon Himself. The beauty of Christmas is not the romance of a babe in a manger but the mystery that poet Richard Crashaw celebrates when he speaks of  “eternity shut in a span.” It is the astonishing fact that God became flesh and lived among us in order to take our sin upon Himself, working justice by His own death and resurrection.

I realize how foolish such measures will seem to those who are focused on tales of power. Yet it is God’s own self-admitted folly, designed for those who would rather exclude Him from their world than make room for His definition of justice. As for me, I will kneel in silence with Richard Crashaw and wonder at the sight:

To thee, meek Majesty! soft King

       Of simple graces and sweet loves,

Each of us his lamb will bring,

       Each his pair of silver doves;

Till burnt at last in fire of thy fair eyes,

Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.

The Yoke of Rest

Jesus the carpenter would have been well familiar with the yoke as an implement of agriculture. A piece of wood shaped to fit over the neck of animals that have been drafted to pull a heavy load, the yoke seems a most unlikely metaphor to use in conjunction with the idea of rest. What could be more antithetical than to be compared to a beast of burden? As a farm implement the yoke was itself a burden and its function was to enable the animal who wore it to bear someone else’s load. No wonder the yoke is a common symbol of submission and oppression in Scripture (Gen 27:40; Ex 6:6-7; 1 Kings 12:4; Is 9:4; 10:27; Gal 5:1; 1 Tim 6:1).

The yoke, after all, was more than a tool. It was an instrument of exploitation. The yoke was the means the farmer used to gain full advantage of the animal’s strength. It is true that the beast received a kind of benefit from the yoke. It enabled him to bear the weight of the load. But the load itself was a burden the animal would never have taken up if not for the intrusion of the farmer. The farmer thinks nothing of it. To the farmer the only reason the animal exists is to bear such burdens. The animal thinks nothing of it either, since it is a brute beast and lacks the capacity to reason. But we are not animals. We do not want to be anyone’s beast of burden. Why would Jesus think such an image would appeal to us?

The answer is that we are already under a yoke. Wendell Berry is right: “We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.” It would be equally foolish to pretend that the church does not bear its stamp. When Berry contrasts the values of the exploiter with those of the nurturer, it is hard not to feel that the contemporary church lines up on the wrong side: “The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care.”9 The exploiter’s primary interest is return on investment. The nurturer is concerned about health. As a result, Berry explains, “The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, ‘hard facts’; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.”

Of course, we do not consider what we do in the church exploitation. We have more spiritual words to describe our values and behavior. We speak of our programs and our efforts at branding as positioning and contextualization rather than consumerism. Our congregational busyness is a way to activate the ministry of our members, not use them. We justify our actions by saying that we are only trying to be effective. Perhaps we are.

Yet God in his dealings with the church betrays a disturbing a lack of interest in effectiveness as we have defined it. He does not seem interested in numbers. The people he sends to us are not strategic at all. They are a rabble who look more like the laborers, hookers and marginal people that Jesus consorted with in the Gospels than the gifted individuals we had hoped would fill out our ranks. And they are far from effective. Their lives, if they are not a complete shambles, are at least in serious disarray. No wonder we prefer our elegant systems to the roughhewn implement Jesus offers. Jesus does not offer us a system or a method. He offers us a yoke (Matthew 11:28-29). The yoke of rest that Jesus offers can be taken, but it cannot be seized by force. We do not manage ourselves into it, acquire it by bargain or even attain it by discipline. Rest as Jesus describes it must be done for us. This rest is as relational as it is experiential. We come to Christ and he refreshes us. We do not come to Christ, receive our rest and then go our way. By offering us rest, Christ offers himself.

John Koessler’s latest The Radical Pursuit of Rest: Escaping the Productivity Trap is now available from InterVarsity Press. 

The Weight of a Soul

In 1901 a scientist named Duncan McDougall believed he could ascertain the weight of the soul. He tried to accomplish this by measuring the weight of six patients as they died. Based on his experiments, he concluded that the human soul weighed twenty-one grams. Unfortunately subsequent attempts to reproduce McDougall’s experiments were unsuccessful, leading scientists to conclude that his methods were flawed and the results invalid. Yet even if the soul is weightless, it is clear that it can be weighed down. Our personal experience is proof enough that such burdens are real, even if they cannot be calculated in grams or pounds.

The soul can be burdened by anxiety (Prov 12:25), a state of mind in which concern is amplified by fear. The concern itself is often legitimate, which is the very thing that enables fear to grow so easily. When Jesus warned his disciples not to worry about what they would eat, drink or wear in Matthew 6:25, he was not implying that such concerns were trivial. If we don’t eat, we die. Food is necessary to life. Clothing is necessary too, required by most cultures for both warmth and modesty. Even God recognizes this—food and clothing were among the first things he provided for those he created. When God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden, he gave him the freedom to eat of all the trees but one (Gen 2:15-17). After Adam and Eve sinned, God replaced the makeshift garments they had thrown together with garments of skin he crafted especially for them (Gen 3:21).

Jesus acknowledges that food and clothing are necessities in Matthew 6:32. And it is this very recognition that underlies his instruction to cast worry aside. Why shouldn’t we be anxious about such things? Because God already knows we need them. He always has. Anxiety as Jesus diagnoses it is not the result of misdirected concern so much as it is a consequence of misaligned confidence. We feel the weight of anxiety because we have placed our trust in the wrong thing. We depend on the means of production. Or we rely on the things that are produced. Jesus says all these things come from the hand of God. As he puts it, there is more to life (literally, the soul) than food and more to the body than clothing (Mt 6:25).

Jesus indicates that we have more important things to worry about. There is a life that is greater than physical life and a death that is worse than physical death. We have better things to pursue than food and clothing. It is the pagan who runs after these things; this is what people do when they have no God.

But more than anything else, Jesus’ words direct our attention beyond our daily concerns to one who is greater than they are. He redirects our focus from the concerns themselves to the one who is concerned for us. We do not need to be anxious about food and clothing because our heavenly Father knows we need them. Thus the weight of anxiety is the soul’s misapprehension. It is the thinking of people who see themselves as orphaned. Such anxiety is the anguished cry of a soul that has forgotten it has a Father in heaven.

From The Radical Pursuit of Rest by John Koessler now available from InterVarsity Press.

Resurrection and the Worrier

I have mixed feelings about the future. I know I am supposed to look forward to it, but experience has shown me that the future is not always an improvement on the present. My health can decline. My dreams may dissolve into regret. I do not really know what lies before me, and even when I do, it sometimes turns out to be something I dread. Even Jesus shuddered as he contemplated the looming shadow of the cross in Gethsemane.


It is hard to deal with the anxiety that comes hand in hand with the future. We cannot plan for it. We do not seem to be able to overcome it by sheer force of will. “You do not get over being afraid by trying not to be afraid,” Stanley Hauerwas warns. “Indeed we usually find that attempts to will our way out of being afraid only make us more fearful.” According to Hauerwas the most effective remedy for fear is to replace it with a different kind of fear. This sounds counterintuitive. But commonplace fear is really only a lower order experience of what in a nobler form we refer to as awe.

This was what Jesus meant when he warned, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). On the surface this sounds as if Jesus is merely replacing one threat with another. It is as if he said, “You think it’s bad that they can kill you? Just wait until you see what God can do!” But when we look beyond the sad events of holy week to the shining hope of resurrection, we see his words in a different light. We can be killed but we cannot be dispossessed. No earthly power can remove us from the sheltering love of God. The one who has power to do more than our enemies has also numbered the hairs of our head. He does not forget the sparrow that is sold for small change. He will not forget us. We have nothing to fear from the future.

Now That Christmas is Gone

Now that Christmas has come and gone, I have a confession to make. I am happy to see its back. Christmas is one of those guests who look better from a distance than then they do close up. The holiday is resplendent in its approach, drawing near in garments that speak of transcendence. But upon closer inspection they prove to be threadbare and garish. More gaudy than gaudia. Christmas is a high maintenance guest with an extravagant diet. It takes over the whole house, declaiming like the duke and dauphin in The Royal Nonesuch.

Don’t get me wrong. There are moments of transcendence. But they come at awkward moments during the holiday and in unexpected situations. They are more likely to occur when Christmas drops its guard. They show up in the grace notes more often than they do in the melody line. They are more liable to happen in the car than in church. The glory manifests itself the silence of familiar companionship more than in the buzzy conversation of celebration.

I confess that I am relieved when Christmas finally departs. I watch it trundle off with all its packages and my anxiety subsides. But I suppose I should not blame the holiday for the stress. The fault is my own. I am the one who is distracted. The expectations are mine. I am the one who thinks that one magical day can wipe away my disappointments and reset the years. Now that it is past, I can lower my expectations. Everything can go back to normal.

At least for a while. In a few days we will have another visitor. It is that insufferable brat New Year Year’s Day, which will announce its arrival with fire crackers and dissipation. But at least New Year’s Day is less demanding than Christmas and departs more quickly. In a matter of hours I will have forgotten all about it. And begin counting the days until Advent approaches once more.

 

Still Wonderful

A popular song calls Christmas the most “wonderful” time of the year. But some pastors might be tempted to use a different word to describe the season. Christmas is to churches what Black Friday is to retailers. It is the busiest time of the year, when attendance reaches its peak. Church’s Christmas services are viewed as the most important of the year. Pastors feel pressured to exceed last year’s numbers and to tell the familiar story in a way that is bigger and better.

Unfortunately, this often leaves us feeling exhausted, depressed, and cynical. Attendance may reach a high point at Christmas, but when January comes it dips again. The visitors who showed up at Christmas will not reappear until next December. The heady excitement generated by families coming together at church is mixed with a dash of melancholy for many pastors who serve at a distance from their own extended family. Consequently, we go about our business grumbling like Scrooge, reciting Paul’s warning in Galatians 4:10 about observing special days, and reminding people that Christmas wasn’t actually celebrated by the church until the fourth century. Humbug!

Perhaps this is a good time to remind ourselves of Jesus’ affectionate reproof to Martha in Luke 10:42: “Only one thing is needed!” The wonder is not in the day or in the season but in the birth that they commemorate. We do not need another extravaganza. We do not need to tell the old story in a new way. There is enough wonder in the story of Christ’s first advent to last for eternity. Perhaps we have grown jaded because we have co-opted the story for our own purposes and turned it into a marketing tool. We have allowed our voice (and our interests) to drown out the song of the angels. This Christmas, do not be afraid to say it simply and to say it again: “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).

Shepherding the Suffering

When I was a pastor I thought it was my job to make suffering people feel better. I was dismayed at how unsuccessful I was at it. I counseled the hurting and prayed for the dying, Yet people seemed no better when I left than they were when I arrived. Their condition had not significantly improved, at least as far as I could tell.

In time I came to see that it was not my job to make suffering people feel better. That is God’s job. My job was to remind people of God’s presence. Most of the time pastoral ministry in the context of suffering is the ministry of presence not the ministry of repair. We may sit in silence or we may speak words of promise but we do not fix. We cannot. The problems are too great. They call for a remedies that are far beyond the scope of our skill or ability.

In the moment of suffering this ministry of presence seems terribly inadequate. We leave the hospital bedside confounded. Or we feel a mounting sense of panic as the counseling session progresses and we realize that we have no simple solution to recommend.

Days, months or even years later, when some someone reminds us of the crisis and thanks us for being such a help, we are astonished. “What did I do?” we ask in honest wonder. With a gentle smile they answer in kind, offering truth for truth: “You were there!”

Black Box

By now most of us are too familiar with what is euphemistically referred to as a “black box.” It is that piece of technology which searchers have relied upon to try and locate disappeared Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. In the long days that have followed the mysterious disappearance of this flight, our hope for survivors has given way to a methodical search for wreckage and then finally to desperate listening for the fading sound of a ping from the plane’s flight recorder.

There is something in this experience which is as human as it is profoundly sad. The desperate desire to find the black box answers our longing for an explanation. We want to know what went wrong. There is obvious wisdom in this. Such knowledge could prevent disaster in the future. But it won’t do anything for those who might have gone down with the plane (if it did go down). Despite this, family members and friends of the passengers on Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 still want searchers to find the black box. Its discovery will at least provide some closure for them.

I have been meditating on the black box as a metaphor in organizational leadership. It occurs to me that what we really need as leaders is a black box which analyzes disaster as it is happening and provides the information we need to correct our course. Even better would be a black box that reads the signals, trajectory, and speed of change in advance. That way it can warn us so that we will avoid the event horizon altogether.

I suppose there already is such technology, when it comes to planes. That’s what the buzzers and warning lights are all about. But even they cannot do anything about the human dimension. If the pilot chooses to fly the plane into the sea, no buzzer will stop him. Some might say that the Bible serves a similar function in human relations. But it often seems that its whistles and warning bells are just as easily dismissed.

Perhaps prevention is not the objective. Maybe there are times we need the painful experience of wrong choices and epic failure. I am, of course, only speaking metaphorically about human experience and leadership here, not about flight MH370. Nobody wants to see a plane go down. But in the world of human relationships and organizational leadership, some disasters can only be understood after the fact. What is that pinging noise I have been hearing all morning?

Easter and My Fear of Death

I am afraid of death. I know that I am not supposed to be. Hebrews 2:15 tells me that one of the reasons Jesus shared my humanity was so that He could “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb. 2:15). I believe that this is true and I am still afraid. I know some Christians who are afraid of dying. But they fear the crossing, not the destination. It is death itself that I fear.

Perhaps that is why, as far as Christian holidays go, Easter has always seemed to me to have a more somber tone than Christmas. Christmas is about life. It celebrates the birth of the Savior. Easter is about life too. It celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. But in order to get to resurrection, you must first face death.

Jesus’ experience of death was different from ours. Most of us do not seek death. Death finds us and when it finds us it always comes as a surprise. To me this is one of the proofs that death is an intrusion. Romans 5:12 says that sin entered the human race through sin. Death was Adam’s gift to the human race, the fruit of his disobedience.

But in Romans 5:15 the apostle Paul also writes that the gift of God that comes to us through Christ is not like Adam’s trespass: “For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!” Death did not come to Jesus. Jesus ran to meet it. Jesus pursued death and defeated it like a champion.

Still, that doesn’t mean that Jesus treated death lightly. There was certainty when Jesus spoke of His own death but no flippancy. Matthew 26:37-38 says that on the night of His betrayal Jesus entered the Garden of Gethsemane with His disciples and “began to be sorrowful and troubled.” He said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” The savior’s distress is a comfort to me.

It is a comfort because it means that Jesus understands my fear. The fact that Jesus did not take death lightly means that He will not dismiss my fear of death. Because He knows what it is like to be sorrowful and troubled at the prospect of death, Jesus will treat my fear with compassion by providing grace to help in the hour of my need.

But more than that it is a comfort because Jesus faced death and defeated it on my behalf. My fear of death is personal and individual. It is my death that I fear and when I die it will be my own fear that I feel. But Jesus’ death was different. There was a corporate dimension to Jesus’ death. Jesus faced death but not for Himself. Jesus experienced death but not for His own sake. Christ died for us. Christ died for us so that whether we live or whether we die, we may experience life with Him.

And this ultimately is what makes Easter different from Christmas. This is why the early Church celebrated Easter instead of Christmas. Christmas is about life. It is about the birth of Christ. But the life of Christ would have no real value, if it were not for Christ’s death. At the same time, the message of Easter is not merely that Christ died. It is that Christ died and rose again. Both facts are fundamental to understanding the significance of who Jesus was and what He did. Both facts are foundational to my hope.

Does this mean that my fear of death automatically dissolves when I place my faith in Jesus? While this may be true for some, it has not yet proven to be true for me. I still have moments when I am gripped by the fear of death. Does this mean that my faith has failed me? Not really. I believe that God’s grip on my soul is far greater than the fear that often takes hold of me.

What is more, we should not be surprised if some of us feel ambivalent about death. The Bible itself is ambivalent when it speaks of the believer’s death. On the one hand, the apostle Paul describes death as “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor. 15:26). Yet when writing about the prospect of life and the possibility of his own death in Philippians 1:21-24, Paul also said that he was torn between the two explaining: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

I confess that while I do not always share Paul’s enthusiasm at the prospect of my death, I do share his hope. I know that in the hour of my death this same Christ, who boldly strode out to meet and face death like a champion, will rise up to welcome me as a friend. In that moment all my fears will be forgotten forever.

Breaking Silence

Somewhere in my family history I learned to communicate by interrupting. It is rude, I know. I try to moderate but I am not always successful. To be honest, I should probably say that I am rarely successful. I try to wait for a lull in the conversation. But I cannot contain myself. The thoughts that have been collecting within me burst forth like shaken soda on a hot afternoon, usually with more force than the ideas actually warrant.

I have often wondered why it is so hard for me to hold my peace. Perhaps it arises from the conviction that I am right. But I can’t possibly be as right as often as I think I am. Even if I am right, the truth can wait. I will be just as right when there is space enough in the conversation for me to speak.

No, I think the real reason I feel compelled to speak out of turn is out of a fear of not being heard. This has little to do with being right. My interruptions are merely a symptom of a greater existential crisis. I want to be heard because I mistakenly think that being heard is equivalent to being known.

The foolishness of such an equation is evident to me as I write this in solitude. But I know that when I am in conversation and in the company of others, I will see it otherwise. I will break my silence, whether in the heat of the moment or in the tedium of dull discussion. And I will probably regret it later.