Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 95

Screaming Goat Scandals

One of the important lessons that Christians must learn in the face of sin and failure is honest confession and repentance. This means naming sins biblically. Confession literally means to “agree with God.” This must be done simply, straightforwardly, and cheerfully. At the same time, one of the other lessons that must be remembered is that the enemies of the gospel love to exploit Christian repentance for their own purposes. And the enemies of the gospel have no sense of proportion. They know that Christians must be sorry for sin, confess it, and turn from it. Most importantly they know that Christians tend to be very tender and therefore easily manipulated when they are down. Sometimes this is calculated, but sometimes it’s the sum total of a culture’s apostasy leaning heavy on a situation even through the good intentions of good people.

So when good men are accused of sin or failure in some fashion, thoughtful Christians need to examine the whole situation carefully. Part of this examination should include the integrity of the accusers. Another part of the examination needs to be the context of the story we’re in. And there’s a great episode in the gospel that helps illustrate this point. On one Sabbath while Jesus and his disciples were walking through a grain field, his disciples picked some heads of grain, rubbed them together in their hands, and ate it. Apparently some of the Pharisees were close at hand, army-crawling through the bushes with binoculars and night vision goggles, and when they saw this scandalous miscarriage of justice, they called in the SWAT teams and bellowed through their bullhorns, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” (Lk. 6:2). Jesus refers the Pharisees to the story of David and his men eating the showbread from the tabernacle at Nod, recorded in 1 Samuel 21. There’s a pile of interesting things to notice in the story, but for now I only want to point out three things. First, notice that Jesus was the kind of threat that inspired such lugubrious scrutiny. When you and your ministry are under the microscope of the world, welcome to following Jesus. Surely some of the disciples were dismayed and discouraged at this state of affairs and decided to find a new rabbi when they realized it was going to be this kind of fun. Some folks still think that they can follow Jesus and not be harassed by Pharisees, but rearranging the furniture can’t fix this. Second, notice that the Pharisees were wrong about Jesus and his disciples despite whatever rules and regulations they had cooked up in their traditional Sabbath guidelines manual. Just because somebody accuses a Christian of something super-duper, double-whammy bad, doesn’t mean it really is. And sometimes it may be a careless mistake but it isn’t the screaming goat scandal they want to make it out to be. And third, the Pharisees’ hyper scrutiny lines up with a character named Doeg the Edomite who turns out to be a spy in Saul’s service who ultimately leads the execution of all the priests of Nob and their families: men, women, and children (1 Sam. 21:7, 22:18-19). Jesus is not only exonerating his men, he is also implying that the Pharisees are evil spies, scrutinizing Jesus and his men like a Doeg in the service of some new Saul.

And let me back up and make one more global point. Bad guys don’t wake up one day and decide to be bad guys. The Pharisees didn’t wake up one day and decide that Jesus needed to be killed. Injustice builds momentum. Mobs are avalanches that begin with trickles of dishonesty. It’s easy to read a Bible story like the one about Doeg or the Pharisees and just imagine them dressed in black with fierce snarls permanently etched on their faces. But they were just people, like us. They had families. They had hobbies. And they got caught up in their circumstances. The logic of their actions and arguments caught them and pulled them to places and events that they probably would have never dreamed. And the same thing still happens today. Words and actions have consequences. Because we are made in the image of God, our words are magic; they have gravity and they pull us in particular directions. They create momentum. And this brings us full circle to the necessity of honesty in confession and repentance.

Our culture has completely abandoned all pretense of Biblical fidelity. We have enshrined in our highest law codes a belligerent defiance of the God who made this world and His Word and His Messiah. We have covenantally defied the God of Heaven. We have taunted Him and dared Him to come down. We have done this by our blatant disregard for His Word, His justice, His truth. And in its place, we have proclaimed ourselves gods. We have insisted that God has not made us, and therefore we are not His. We have made ourselves, and therefore we belong to ourselves. Thus, men can be women, and women can be men. And marriage is whatever we want. But this means simultaneously that we are also demanding the right to proclaim what is evil and what is sinful. Ethics always works this way. There is a corresponding evil for every enshrined virtue. You can’t push the lever at the top and require it not to move at the bottom. It’s all connected. If you insist that it is righteous for two men to defile one another, then you must also outlaw those who say it is evil. But at the same time, this lever that we are brandishing is nothing more than our whims. The sum total of all of this results in a corporate judicial blindness and confusion. We have no way to measure proportions. We have no way of dealing out biblical justice. We have thrown out the scales, and now we will inexorably find ourselves at the mercy of the mob.

This has resulted in a situation where despite our demands for unlimited sex with anyone anywhere at anytime, we still have an irrational demand for pedophiles to be burned at the stake. Whether this can hold now that old men can insist that they are actually young girls remains to be seen. One of the only other unforgivable sins in our culture is academic fraud. And don’t get me wrong: pedophilia and dishonesty and theft are all evil in God’s sight. But justice is concerned with making things right, and actually putting things right. This is what repentance and restitution are all about. But if we will not listen to God’s word, we will be left to the mercy of the mob. What do they demand? We are back to the capricious blood lusts of the pagan deities of old. The high priests of the holy shrines will run our questions through the entrails of aborted babies and let us know what the gods demand. If we do not submit to the God of Heaven, we will find ourselves at the whims of the gods of the earth.

This is all to say that Christians have a grave duty in the face of this kind of chaos and confusion not to be swayed and manipulated by the demands of the mobs. We must own our sins. We must confess them. But this means that we must agree with God about them and not their idols. We must apply His justice and His blood to them, and we must not give into their demands to let them medicate us with their witchdoctor tomfoolery. Where God gives us principles of restitution we must apply them fearlessly. But this is the thing: despite all the shrieks we routinely hear from our enemies that the God of the Bible is so mean and petty and bloody, it is simply not true. The picture that emerges as we search the Scriptures is actually a God who limits the bloodshed, who insists that you may only take one eye for one eye and no more. And if you have taken something, you must give it back and pay for any damages. And if you accidentally damaged something you must merely replace it. What we find is a remarkably gracious God. It is the Baals and Asherahs that demand blood for everything. They demand disfigurement for theft. They demand a pound of flesh for accidents.

But we will not serve their gods. We will not bow to the shrines of their deities. We are Christians. We were bought with the precious blood of Jesus. And it is precious. And therefore we will not be moved by demands for more blood. Because the good news is that it is finished.

The Foam Sword of Relativism

One of the questions I’ve received several times in response to my recent post on modern liberalism is the objection that this assumes that Christians can’t be “liberals” or if they are, they must be really bad Christians.

So several follow up thoughts.

First, I did qualify my original post in two ways. I stated very clearly that I recognized that there would be a spectrum of views in liberalism just like there is in the Christian faith itself. One version of liberalism doesn’t define liberalism absolutely for everyone who dons the label. Got that. I also made the distinction between classical liberalism and modern liberalism. In classical liberalism, people are still trying to carve out space for freedom as a transcendent ideal, and therefore, they are assuming other absolutes besides equality. This really is important and significant. Depending on what their standard is for determining freedom, we may not actually be as far apart as it may seem.

But let’s walk this out a little further. Can a good, sincere Christian be a “liberal” in modern America? Yes, of course, but in so doing he must be a bad liberal. If he is a good liberal then he must be a bad Christian. And what I mean is that a faithful follower of Jesus may not participate in modern liberalism, as represented by the hard left demand for the silencing of all opposing view points by means of mobs, threats, fines, and internet temper tantrums. Neither may a faithful follower of Jesus go along meekly with those tactics. Now if your name is Kirsten Powers and you are busy critiquing your own side of the aisle and arguing vigorously for actual discussion and debate, then I’m not talking about you. But the current orthodoxy in liberalism is this hard leftist fundamentalism, and if you’re even a little bit vocal about protecting the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience of conservative Christians against this leftist hazing and shaming, you will quickly find yourself on the outs of the liberal project. It doesn’t matter if you’re a registered democrat or support Obamacare, if you’re pro-life and have the guts to call Obergefell anything other than a victory for civil rights and progress, then you’re an enemy of liberalism. You’re a bad liberal. This is not me saying that you’re a bad liberal; this is the liberals who are running the show saying they don’t want you.

And that should raise the obvious question: Why? 

The answer has to do with fixed standards. Absolutes. In modern liberalism, absolutism is synonymous with extremism. When people believe in absolutes they fly passenger jets into buildings. When people believe in absolutes, they go on shooting rampages at abortion clinics. At least that’s the concern, the fear. This is why the enemy of freedom is absolutism (i.e. extremism), and consequently why relativism is the path to liberty. Relativism promises to make room for differences. The gospel of relativism is that when we do not take our differences so seriously, we will be nicer and more respectful to others and everyone will have a chance to be happy and free. When people believe in absolutes, and believe they are absolutely right, they impose those absolutes on others and people start getting killed.

Of course the liberals are talking about something that is partially true. If you take Allah and the Koran seriously, absolutely, you will be “radicalized” as the lady on NPR told me the other morning about the husband and wife from San Bernardino who went on the shooting spree. The liberal concern is that absolutes tend to radicalize people, and radicals frequently turn violent. This helps explain the Planned Parenthood shooting narrative as well. Robert Lewis Dear goes on a rampage at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood because of the extreme rhetoric of the pro-life movement. When you believe in absolute truth and ethics, it leads to violence. See?

So what do we say to this? At least two things. First, there is no evidence that secular relativism or liberalism can guarantee a less violent society. Arguably liberalism has given us the riots in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, not to mention Robes Pierre and the French Revolution. The hard leftist turn that Powers documents in her book may not be completely radicalized yet, but it’s well on its way. In other words, absolutes are inescapable and relativism is fully capable of being radicalized. Relativists that don’t see this happening are either extremely naive or insincere. Will you make room for white supremacists? Will you make room for the Indian custom of Sati? What about female genital mutilation? Even the most ardent relativists and multiculturalists must enforce certain norms and punish certain sorts of behavior.

All of this is related to the fundamentalism of materialistic evolution as well. Explanations for existence, cause and effect, or even progress must remain materialistic or else we are giving into the demands of unseen, unmeasured, uncontrolled theories of morality, righteousness, and inevitably, absolutes. According to modern social liberalism, transcendent virtues and meaning are part of the threat to freedom and liberty. While there may be a spectrum of views within the evolutionary milieu, there’s at least this “moral” ground by which many may resist all creationist protests. If creationism depends upon the unseen and untestable presence of an immaterial God, then science (it is feared) can also become the tool for radicals and extremists. Better the humility (humiliation?) of evolution and the clear relativism inherent in the theory. Better finding an immediate, relatively shallow meaning to life that is not transcendent, not ultimate, not absolute. It’s better for everyone that way. But is it really?

Historically, conservatives have defended various traditional orders or hierarchies. Many of those orders come and go, and some of them really needed to go. And some of them still need to be dismantled. But the primary one that gives any of them any semblance of plausibility is the order of reality, traditionally summarized in the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. If you believe that there is such a thing, welcome to the land of conservatives. We’re a motley crew, and we have many divergent ideas and convictions. And some of them are really quite bad. But the primary thing we believe in is reality and meaning that transcends this moment in time, that reaches back into the past and forward into the future. Many of us believe this because we believe that God created the world in the beginning, and He sent His Son Jesus Christ into the world to take away our sins and remake all things. In other words, because we believe in God and He has spoken to us in His Word and in the natural world, there is a standard to appeal to. And therefore, we have hope that even our bad ideas will be exposed and put away. But for the modern liberal, it is that very idea — that there is a standard — that is in the process of being put away and banned from the public square. And the unfortunate thing is that this is the banning of all accountability, the excising of the possibility of finding goodness and truth.

Evolution and relativism may promise a brief and bland equality, but it can and will radicalize on its own. You cannot ban absolutes from the world without authorization, without authority, and ultimately, without force. But then how can liberalism promise us a better world than ISIS?

Ultimately anyone committed to transcendent truth and goodness recognizes that there is much good and truth to conserve from the past, but there’s also a lot of junk to jettison. Commitment to truth and goodness isn’t some kind of mindless obsession with old stuff. Lots of old stuff is worn out, broken, and was foolish to begin with. Everything comes down to believing in real value. Real value remains real. Something of real value in 1445 still has real value in 2045. Gravity is still a valuable reality. The love of a man and a woman bound by vows is still valuable. The forgiveness of sins still makes things right. But you can’t throw out real value and then expect people to value what you think or believe. And while it may appear noble to brandish the foam sword of relativism, in the end it’s no use against the bombs and bullets of radical Islam. The only thing strong enough to protect all of us is to find something fixed and absolute that really is absolutely good and true and beautiful. The conservative impulse is to believe that the reason our hearts long for that is because He is really there and He is goodness all the way down.

The Brave Face of Nihilism

Modern social liberalism really is something of a Grinch worldview. It is very much like the grown up in all the movies that doesn’t believe in Santa Claus and thinks that fairy tales like that are really bad for children. The reason they’re bad is because they aren’t true and even more importantly they cause disappointment. And frequently, we find out that those same grownups were once children who experienced some deep disappointment. In the movies, it usually includes not getting what they most wished for one Christmas. The Grinch, we learn was mistreated and despised and rejected, and so now, he thinks he’s actually helping everyone by taking away the lights and candy and gifts. Reality is harsh. Reality is severe. So stop believing in all this goodness and happiness and joy. I think there’s something deeply true about that phenomenon in our modern culture. The false gospel of secularism and evolutionary thought is trying to put a brave face on nihilism. Let’s all seriously face the facts that life is meaningless and don’t try to make more of it than there really is. That will only cause disappointment and depression when bad things happen. At the heart of it all is a loss of faith in goodness. There may be momentary sensations of goodness, but you can’t count on it, they say. At the heart of this world is not goodness but nothingness, meaninglessness, disappointment, loss.

And that’s why the Lord knew we needed this meal. At this table, the Lord reminds us week after week of two things. First, that He has not ignored our disappointments. He has not ignored our hardships. He has come for us. He was mistreated, despised, and rejected for us. And second, that He went down into the meaninglessness of life, the deep disappointment of death, and He came out the other side with a great haul of meaning and truth. We do not believe in some kind of bland humanistic goodness that we somehow gin up for ourselves. We believe in the goodness of God, the goodness that God made, and the goodness that God is determined to remake. We are not good, but we believe in the goodness of God. And we are not sentimentalists who pretend that everything is easy or fun. But we are realists who have discovered that all who put their trust in Jesus will not ultimately be disappointed. So come, and bring all your disappointments and failures and lay them down here. And taste and see that the Lord is good.

The Gospel of Modern Liberalism

“Know that the Lord, He is God! It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves. We are His sheep, and the sheep of His pasture” (Ps. 100:3).

This is one of the most fundamental realities in the world. If there is a God who made us, then we are His. We belong to Him, and it is nothing but gladness to serve Him. But if there is no God, then we essentially made ourselves and therefore we belong to ourselves. If God has not made us, we are not His, and we may do whatever we please.

This is why the doctrine of creation matters so much. And this is why evolution is one of the sacred cows of our culture. If we admit that we are made then the Maker determines meaning and truth. But if there is no god, meaning and truth are flexible, malleable. The hope is that if people don’t think they have arrived at some absolute, transcendent truth – the hope is that they won’t become radical and violent. People who think they have found the truth often become extremists, we are told. But the trouble is that truth is a stubborn thing, and people have this stubborn desire to live a meaningful life.

The false gospel of modern social liberalism is that if nothing means very much then we can all get along and be happy and free. If no one thinks they are absolutely right, people will respect one another more. But this (at best) sacrifices a meaningful existence to a peaceful existence, and it’s very much doubtful that nihilism (meaninglessness) will actually give us peace. When people have nothing to live for, they do not tend to be helpful contributors to society.

The Christian gospel announces the good news that there is a God who made us, and He has come for us. Not only did He make us, but we are His. And because we belong to Him, we have value, we have meaning, we have purpose. If your meaning and value is up to you, you will quickly become stressed, depressed, and angry. But it is good news to know that the Lord, He is God; it is He who has made us and not we ourselves.

Rejoicing in the Dust

Third Sunday of Advent: Is. 12:1-6, Phil. 4:4-7

Introduction

I said last week that we aren’t particularly good at being serious because we’re concerned about being thought of as grumpy or difficult. There’s a similar dynamic with joy. Depending on who you are, you might gravitate toward a certain censoriousness and resent all the smiles. Our fathers in the faith knew these temptations and recommend that here in the midst of meditating on the serious business of Advent, we also do some meditating on the serious business of rejoicing. Why are we suspicious of joy? Because it feels like we’re not taking the horrors and evils of the world seriously. Perhaps it feels like we’re not taking pain and loss seriously. It can seem unkind, unfeeling. This is why true Christian joy does not rise from ignorance or naiveté. Christian joy rises from the comfort God gives: “I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, that you might comfort me” (Is. 12:1).

Comfort in the Ashes

There was a man named Job who was a great king in the east. He was wealthy and his family was happy and he was well respected. And one day the Lord let a horrific series of calamities fall upon him. A raiding band stole his 500 oxen and 500 donkeys and put his servants to the sword. Fire consumed his 7000 sheep and the servants that cared for them. And another raiding band surrounded his 3,000 camels and carried them away, putting those servants to death as well. And finally, a tornado struck the house of Job’s oldest son who was hosting a great feast for his six brothers and three sisters and their families, and everyone was killed. When Job heard these things, he “arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ (Job 1:20-21). Then a few days later, the Lord allowed Job to be struck with painful, agonizing sores all over his body, and he sat in the ashes scraping himself with a pottery shard (Job 2:7-8). If anyone had the right to be bitter, it was Job. If anyone had the right not to rejoice, it was Job. And while Job is full of pain and misery, and he is not shy about it, the center of his defiant lament through the rest of the book is a plea to speak with God. And when the Lord finally does appear at the end, Job says that even though he despises his life, he is comforted in the dust and ashes (Job 42:6). This is the soil where Christian joy grows.

The Joy Command

It’s interesting that Isaiah’s prophecy is of a time in the future when the people of Israel will give thanks to God and call everyone to rejoice with them (Is. 12:1, 4-6). In that day, they will command all their neighbors and friends to “shout and sing for joy” (Is. 12:1, 6). What day is that? When is that? The immediate context indicates that “that day” is when God brings Israel back from exile in Assyria (Is. 11:16). I think if we’re honest, Paul’s command in Philippians may seem a little overdone. Rejoice always (Phil. 4:4)? Do not worry about anything (Phil. 4:6)? How is that possible? But this seems to be exactly what Isaiah foretold. He said that a day was coming in which God’s people would know beyond all doubt that God’s anger was past and they would be comforted by Him (Is. 12:1). And in that day, they would trust in God and not be afraid because God has become their strength and song and their salvation (Is. 12:2). In that day, they would command God’s people to sing praises, to shout, and sing for joy because God, the Holy One of Israel, has come into their midst (Is. 12:4-6). Paul is insisting that Isaiah’s prophecy has come to pass. He is insisting that the Lord has come near (Phil. 4:5), and that the peace of God is right there and ready to guard our hearts and minds (Phil. 4:7). This is why Paul is bold to command us to rejoice. He is bold because God’s anger has been completely satisfied in the death of Jesus, so that we may be comforted. And if that is the case, then we must rejoice. But we still must be commanded because it doesn’t come easily or naturally. And when we are commanded to rejoice always, joy is frequently something we must fight for.

Lord of It All

Ultimately we rejoice in the dust and ashes of life because Jesus is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus is Lord of the dust and ashes. The command to rejoice is the command to pay Jesus homage, to submit to His reign. Is Jesus King? Then praise Him in the dark. Christians rejoice always because Jesus is King always.

Christian joy carries within its soul the sharpness of the fallen world. But for the Christian, every dark night of the soul carries within it the joy of knowing the One who rules all things. In fact, you really can’t have one without the other. There is no Christian joy that does not simultaneously mourn over the lost, the broken, the hurting, and there is no Christian sorrow that does not simultaneously fight for joy.

Many people feel that they must choose either joy or sorrow. Some people are afraid of facing the darkness and pain, and they put up a wall against it, preferring to remain in the land of superficial smiles. Others are afraid of dishonoring the reality of pain and loss. It may feel like joy and gladness don’t take the pain seriously enough. So they build a wall against joy, deciding to remain in the house of mourning. But Jesus is King of all these things. He stores up all your tears, and at His right hand are pleasures forevermore. You may not know how to rejoice in the dust and ashes, but God does. He is Lord of it all. He was born into our dust and ashes in order that we might draw water from the wells of salvation with joy (Is. 12:3).

Conclusion: Joy in the Plural

It’s striking that Isaiah’s prophecy is in the plural, and so is Paul’s command. All of you rejoice. Let all the inhabitants of Zion sing and shout for joy. Let your gentleness be know to everyone. Let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God will guard your hearts and minds. Plurals everywhere. This is because God delights to be known and experienced in community. And therefore Christian joy does not primarily spring up from a solo effort. Christian joy grows out of shared grief and shared comfort in Jesus Christ.

The Serious Business of Advent

Second Sunday in Advent: Mal. 3:1-4

Introduction

We are not very good at seriousness. We are not very good at seriousness because we frequently mistake being cranky or in a bad mood for seriousness, either in ourselves or others. So we tend to opt for and prefer levity, laughter, and we often praise people for not being too serious. Of course humility doesn’t take oneself too seriously, but it isn’t kind not to take others seriously. When a friend faces tragedy, it isn’t comforting to laugh it off. Or perhaps levity becomes a sort of coping mechanism, a cover for deep wounds and heartache. In other words, by embracing levity and laughter, you can actually ensure that you won’t be happy. What I want to argue this morning is that the serious business of Advent is first of all the announcement of seriously bad news. And it is only when we face this message honestly and seriously, that we are opened up to the possibility of serious joy.

Who Can Stand?

Malachi announces that God is coming. And He asks, “Who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears” (Mal. 3:2)? And the implied answer is: No one. The prophet describes God’s coming: “For He is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver… For behold the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze” (Mal. 3:3, 4:1). Or hear the Prophet Joel, “Blow a trumpet in Zion; sound an alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming; it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness there is spread upon the mountains… Fire devours before them, and behind them a flame burns… For the day of the Lord is great and very awesome; who can endure it?” (Joel 2:1-3) Who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears? No one.

Why No One?

Because God is holy, and we are not. When the Prophet Ezekiel saw a vision of the Lord, He saw a “human appearance” that was like “gleaming metal” with the “appearance of fire enclosed all around” and “there was brightness all around,” and Ezekiel says, “Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face…” (Ez. 1:26-28). Or Isaiah, when he saw the Lord, high and lifted up on a throne with angels surrounding Him covering their faces and shouting to one another “Holy! Holy! Holy!” and the whole house was filled with smoke, and Isaiah said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Is. 6:1-5). The temptation for conservative Christians is to think that we are somehow safe and clean and unaffected by the massive injustice and evil in our world. Our parish group just finished the book we read together this Fall: Defending Marriage by Anthony Esolen. As the book went along, I grew more and more uneasy. I began to feel sick to my stomach. It wasn’t so much that he pointed out the evils and the sexual confusion in our culture. It was the growing realization that it is simply not possible to point across the street or across the political aisle or the denominational divide and say, “that is their problem over there.” No, this is our problem right here. It was the chapter about male friendship that most broke my heart. Because I realized that it was true. That what we have allowed in our nation by turning our backs on God and His Word is the kind of massive confusion that has stolen and is stealing something as simple and good as friendship from our children, from one another. And if you are honest about what we are up against, all kinds of other evils are already in the air we breathe, in our families, down out streets. We are all infected with sin. No one is righteous; no, not one (Rom. 3:10-19).

The Gift of Gravity

This is why the Prophet Malachi says that nobody gets to avoid the fire. The fire burns all. The fire consumes all. In fact, the Bible says that when a culture gets to this point of public and judicial confusion, the fire is already kindled. When people and nations turn away from God, He gives them up to their lusts (Rom. 1:24). He gives them up to their dishonorable passions (Rom. 1:26). He gives them up to a debased mind (Rom. 1:28). This is the wrath of God revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18). It’s not just that God’s fire is coming; His fire is already here. But Malachi says God is like a refiner’s fire and fuller’s soap. He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and purify them like gold and silver (Mal. 3:2-3). A little further he says: “Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of Hosts” (Mal. 3:7). Or when the Prophet Joel says that God is coming with fire to devour the people, he says, “Yet even now, declares the Lord, ‘return to me, with weeping, and with mourning, and rend your hearts and not your garments.’ Return to the Lord your God for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster” (Joel 2:12-14). The point is that we can’t fix this. Only God can. And only when you take the fire and darkness seriously, are you able to turn to Him.

Conclusions

Facing death is perhaps the most serious thing we face in this life. And it is the gift of God to bring us face to face with our sin and His holiness. Why is it a gift? It allows us to honestly assess ourselves and our situations in light of a holy God and eternity. Constant levity won’t pause and consider death, judgment, heaven, and hell. But the coming of God, the Advent of God, the judgment of God is His holiness, His fire arriving in history, in our lives, in our world. You can try to shrug it off. You can try not to take it seriously. But then what will you take seriously? What can you afford to take seriously, if not Your Maker? But this serious business of Advent is the path to serious joy because it gives us the ability to bear up under the hardships of life and the impossibilities of the world around us. We are sinners and rebels, and God is holy and just. There is no escaping this reality. Our only hope is in Jesus. Because God took our sin seriously, He sent His beloved Son to enter into our darkness, our insanity, our sexual confusion, our political scheming. Because God took our sin seriously, so can we. If turn to Him, He will turn to us. If we take the Advent of Jesus seriously, He will purify us and make us shine like gold.

The Sound an Empty Ketchup Bottle Makes: A Brief Anatomy of Liberalism

There doesn’t seem to be a week that goes by in which there isn’t some cultural event or tragedy that exposes the deep divide in our country between liberals and conservatives. There are deep spiritual forces at work, so that isn’t a simplistic party-line endorsement of anybody. But in so far as the divide causes us to see one another as aliens from different planets with less and less in common, we can do worse things than try to provide interpretations of our values in hope of actual communication.

So what follows is me trying to sketch something of an interpretive key to liberalism. While I offer some criticism and interaction below, my primary aim is to try to understand and explain how the liberal worldview works. The dominant worldview in the West is liberalism, and if conservative Christians are to be faithful witnesses of Jesus in our culture, we need to understand this worldview. If we are to understand what is going on with school boards requiring boys be given access to girls’ locker rooms, the furious demand for “marriage equality” for sodomites, or even the bleeding heart appeals for the necessity of tax supported access to abortion for women’s rights, we need to understand the liberal worldview. Like any religion or worldview, it’s adherents are not monolithic. You cannot pin up a picture of Pope Francis or Billy Graham or a Westboro Baptist and insist that this represents all Christians everywhere. But admitting a spectrum and variation doesn’t obliterate our ability to generalize truthfully.

So what is liberalism? Modern liberalism is faith in the power and supreme goodness of equality. Equality is the absolute virtue and for a growing majority of adherents the only absolute. Classical liberalism sought to hold freedom and equality together as twin virtues, even functioning to balance one another out, but as the prescient Alexander de Tocqueville foretold in regard to the American experiment in general, equality has gradually won out. As Kirsten Powers outlines in her recent book, many within the liberal world are learning the hard way that sola equality is the new orthodoxy. The older liberal sympathies for freedom of speech and freedom of religion and the like must be subordinated to the ultimate ideal of equality. In reality, modern liberals would not say they have abandoned the goal of freedom altogether, but it has for all intents and purposes been subsumed under the heading of equality. In modern liberalism, equality is freedom.

So what are the tenets of liberalism?

First, there is faith in the inherent goodness of man and (related) a belief in progress and inevitable improvement of the human species and all natural life. Speaking of which, liberalism is largely a naturalistic and materialistic worldview. This is one of the primary problems with the virtue of freedom, it has a pesky tendency to transcend particular circumstances. But transcendence is a form of hierarchy, absolutism, and therefore is a threat to true equality. Equality is immediate, material, right in front of you. Equality at least has an appearance of measurability. Freedom is more evasive, harder to define, and therefore, harder to measure and quantify. But if freedom is equality, then you can judge a man’s freedom by his relative sense of equality.

This necessarily means that liberalism is a highly subjective worldview. It values the perceptions and feelings of individuals highly. And to the extent that individuals or communities or cultures feel marginalized, unheard, undervalued, liberalism believes that true freedom and progress cannot be made until every voice is heard, and therefore all inequalities must be counterbalanced. This is the feminist project, the black power project, the multiculturalism project, affirmative action, homosexual marriage, abortion rights, the special treatment of Islam, welfare and government aid programs, as well as enthusiastic government regulation, especially in economic matters. The common thread holding them all together is the commitment to equality. The dominant race, the dominant voices, the dominant money, the dominant religions must be counterbalanced by the marginalized. The victims of the dominant voices must be afforded special protections, additional opportunities, special grace. And this is why Christian florists and bakers can be sacrificed to this common good of equality. This is why some freedom of speech can be sacrificed to the freedom of equality. The powerful can afford to lose some of their influence for the sake of the underprivileged.

Because liberalism is materialistic it has an inherent tendency toward anti-intellectualism. Note well, I say a tendency — but because the image of God is not easily obliterated, it is not entirely anti-intellectual. This tendency can be seen in the gradual sublimation of freedom into the virtue of equality. Liberalism places a great deal of faith in science in so far as it prizes the immediate, physical evidence, but generalizations (also part of science) are viewed suspiciously because they cannot account for the margins, the exceptions, the anomalies, the minorities (obviously). But this is precisely what reason and logic are all about. They are inherently tools of generalization. Thus, again, while Kirsten Powers and others seek to carve out room for a more classical approach to liberalism they are finding themselves at odds with absolute equality in so far as they trace a more nuanced narrative than insistence on equality now, equality alone, sola aequalitas. Freedom requires more reasoning, thoughtful analysis, over time, generalizing, etc, but that very process would threaten the freedom of anyone who doesn’t want to be defined by those definitions or generalizations. So there we are.

When reason and logic tend to be viewed suspiciously, when rational argument and disagreement and debate are seen as tools of the enemy, weapons of the hierarchy for oppression and prejudice, what you are left with are various forms of emotional appeal. At it’s most benign, it’s the teary-eyed appeals of the gay couples sincerely insisting that they just want what their heterosexual neighbors have. At worst, it’s outrage and mob tactics whether on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in the inner city of Twitter, or the bald authoritarian fiats from men in black robes. And any rhetorical infelicities can be forgiven when the aim is equality, subverting the dominant voices and paradigms and giving voice to their victims. Materialism admits some broken bones and bloody lips. Progress always requires some sacrifices. And no need to explain. Equality covers a multitude of sins.

Finally, perhaps you can see why relativism is so central to liberalism. All absolutes (other than equality) are generalizations that suppress equality. All claims to absolute truth, absolute goodness are claims to power, claims to authority, and therefore they are threats to the inherent goodness and value of individuals and therefore threats to their equal opportunity to happiness and fulfillment in this world. And to the extent that individuals feel undervalued or lack the same privileges as others, we are all suffering from their lack of contribution. Relativism, therefore, is the liberal ethic of freedom. It seeks to ensure that no paradigm or value may dominate another. It insists that all values be submitted to the primacy of equality. All views, all experiences, all values, all traditions must be allowed a place at the table, and those views and personalities and values that have tended to be influential and dominant must be regulated or penalized to level the social playing field. According to liberalism, this is freedom.

We really must do more thinking and praying about how the gospel speaks into the liberal worldview. This is the dominant worldview now, and even among many professing Christians elements of this paradigm have permeated their thinking. One reason for that is that there are some overlapping concerns. Jesus did preach the gospel to the poor, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the lepers, the marginalized. Jesus did condemn the rich and powerful. The gospel does proclaim freedom and equality. So how does Christianity differ from liberalism? Why can’t liberalism deliver on its promises of equality and freedom?

Ultimately, I believe modern liberalism fails (and will fail) because it doesn’t account for the fullness of human experience. Front and center is the problem of sin and evil and justice. If everything is just matter, atoms and chemicals doing what atoms and chemicals do, then there is no meaning to our actions, no meaning to the pain you feel, no meaning to that guilt, to that shame, — and that deep yearning for justice, that overwhelming sense of forgiveness you long for, that relief that washed over you that one time? Yeah, that was about as meaningful as the sound an empty ketchup bottle makes. Liberalism sucks the grace out of life. It ultimately denies human beings the gift of anything meaningful and transcendent and truly beautiful. But the truth will out. The truth sets men free. And those of us that have tasted true freedom and grace can afford to patiently plead with our neighbors to come taste and see that the Lord is good.

What Is A Christian Marriage?

What is a Christian marriage? Is a Christian marriage one where the man and woman both attend a Christian church, are members, or were baptized once? Is it where the individuals in the family try to be good and kind and follow the teachings of Jesus?

Many marriages and families participate in churches and perhaps even aim for Christian morals – which are not actually distinctively Christian. In fact, even though true Christians do worship regularly, are baptized, and seek to be good and kind and follow the teachings of Jesus – those things are actually all secondary. They aren’t the first thing, the primary thing.

The first thing, the fundamental thing is Jesus Himself. You don’t have a Christian marriage, a Christian family, or even a Christian church unless Jesus is there, unless Jesus is present with you. 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” (Jn. 15:5). Apart from Jesus, you can do nothing. You cannot love your wife as you ought. You cannot respect your husband as you ought – without Jesus.

Of course unbelievers try all the time. There are plenty of secular counselors and marriage books. And there’s decent, human advice found in many of them. But the problem is that we are not decent human beings. If we are honest, which is actually one of the fundamental problems we have (we don’t like being honest), we are constantly doing things we aren’t proud of, regret, and feel ashamed of. We try to be kind, and it comes out rude. We try to tell the truth, and we spin it and lie. We say we forgive, but we’re still festering full of bitterness inside. Jesus wasn’t just speaking in some of kind spiritual sense. He literally meant that we can’t be good and kind or follow His teachings without Him. It turns out that all the good advice in the world is about as helpful as giving a corpse tennis lessons. No matter how hard you try, they just can’t get it.

There’s a word in the Bible for the presence of Jesus in someone’s life. It’s the word “grace.” Grace is one of those words we use so frequently we can easily miss what it actually means. Grace can mean favor or mercy or kindness. But all of these words are still begging for definition. Who determines what favor is? Who defines mercy? What do we mean by kindness? Sometimes people define mercy as killing elderly people or aborting children with disabilities. Or maybe kindness is defined as letting people do whatever makes them happy despite the great harm it can do to themselves or others.

When the angel Gabriel appeared to the young virgin Mary, he greeted her and said she was highly favored or full of grace. This isn’t because Mary was special on her own. Gabriel said that it was because the Lord was with her, and He explained that the Holy Spirit would very shortly overshadow her and conceive in her womb the Son of the Most High. Mary was full of grace because she was to be full of Jesus literally developing inside of her. Gabriel says that with God all things are possible. And a short while later, Mary entered her cousin Elizabeth’s house, and the baby in her womb leaped and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. And Elizabeth cried out, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! … And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (Lk. 1:42, 45). Elizabeth says that the grace inside of Mary is contagious. And when her baby heard Mary’s greeting, he leaped for joy. And Elizabeth says that all of that blessing is due to Mary believing what was spoken to her from the Lord.

About thirty years later, the young rabbi named Jesus would preach a sermon, and He would proclaim that this same blessing is available to all: Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are the sorrowful. And He said this: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. And He said, if you only love those who love you, what grace is that to you? Or if you do good to those who will do good in return what grace is that to you? But love your enemies, do good and lend, expecting nothing in return, and you will be sons of the Most High, for He is kind to the ungrateful and evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Jesus, the Son of the Most High, says that His grace is available to all. This blessing is available to all who believe in His grace.

Jesus was no pacifist. He sent His disciples to disciple every nation, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all of His commands. Those are either the words of a megalomaniac or the rightful king of the world. But unlike all other world conquerors, Jesus intends to conquer the world by His grace, by loving His enemies to death – quite literally. Which He ultimately did by taking their guilt upon Himself. By being betrayed, mocked, scorned, and convicted of crimes He didn’t commit, and then being stripped naked and nailed to a cross to suffer and die in excruciating pain. And at the very point where we, along with His own disciples, give up all hope, assuming that this must be the triumph of evil, Jesus screamed with His dying breath, “it is finished.” And what He meant is that He had won. He had triumphed. Evil has been overcome by good.

A Christian is someone who has been conquered by that grace – it’s the grace of the God who dies in the place of sinners, in the place of His own enemies in order to win them back into His friendship and fellowship. And this is necessarily what a Christian marriage is, what a Christian home is, what a Christian church is. It’s a place where the former enemies of God gather. It’s a place where forgiven sinners gather. A Christian marriage is the union of two former rebels, two former enemies now pledging to live with and for one another in that grace.

Josiah, Jesus called you to Himself years ago, but He calls you today in the sight of these witnesses to follow Him by taking Elise to be your wife. This calling to love Elise like Jesus loves the Church is not something different from following Jesus. Today it becomes one of the central ways that you follow Jesus. The Lord Jesus is giving you a specific assignment to love this woman with all of your might, to lay your self down for her needs, to sacrifice for her, to bless her, to encourage her, to make her more lovely by your love.

Elise, you are likewise being commissioned by Jesus to follow Him by embracing this man as your husband. Submitting to this man, respecting this man is not something different than your submission to the Lord Jesus. Today, this assignment is becoming one of the central ways you will follow Christ. Jesus is issuing you an order this day to stand by this man, to serve the needs of this man, to encourage and exhort this man so that he might become stronger, bolder, and more honorable every day you minister to him.

But Josiah and Elise, you cannot do this. Apart from Jesus, you can do nothing. Apart from Jesus, all of your efforts will fall flat. All of your good intentions will come out sideways and backwards, full of pride and selfishness and manipulation. When God calls a man to love his wife like Jesus loved the Church, it’s like God calling a virgin to conceive. When God calls a woman to serve her husband, it’s like God calling a virgin to conceive.

Which means, Josiah and Elise, Jesus is assigning you to do something that is utterly impossible unless He is with you. You can’t conceive this love within you. But the gospel, the good news is that the Holy Spirit overshadows those who believe and turns them into sons of the Most High. So we are assembled here to proclaim this blessing over you and your new family, and it’s your job to believe. We proclaim the blessing of the presence of Jesus upon you, the grace of the living God upon you. This is the grace of forgiveness to sinners, the grace of the kindness of God to enemies, the grace of the mercy of God to traitors. May your home be a place where the promises of God are believed, where the Holy Spirit overshadows you, and the presence of Jesus constantly fills you and infects everyone you greet with the joy of the Spirit.

In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

A Staircase of Grace

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, and who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (Ps. 103: 1-5).

I’ve said at various points that I’m convinced that God called me to the ministry because I’m the kind of fool who needs to be reminded of God’s grace constantly. Some men have uncontrollable desires to preach. Some men are called from very early ages, others have fairly dramatic experiences where God grabs their attention and calls them to shepherd His people. But my experience has been far less dramatic and far more humbling. I’ve had all of my most important experiences at the bottom of pits I dug for myself. I’ve drawn the closest to God in the dark, but that’s not really something I’m proud of. And now for the last nine years of my life, I’ve been preaching and counseling and teaching and baptizing and serving men and women and children the bread and wine of the Eucharist. But the only way you actually love and shepherd sheep is by entering in to their struggles, their pain, their sin, their loss. And the Lord has seen fit to continue to give me and my family hard things. And I’m still a serious piece of work.

Sometimes I imagine what it’s like to read the Bible and understand a lesson and then apply it to my life. That must be a real gift. I’m the sort of fool who has to have God set His Word in sharply-raised braille-like letters on a long, spiral staircase and shove me down the stairs hitting my head on every single step along the way, until the point is engraved in high relief in the knots and bruises and scars on my face. I’m that sort of fool. That’s how I have learned grace.

I’ve ask the Lord about this arrangement, and I feel quite sure He’s fully capable of teaching me His ways of grace in other ways. But so far, He seems to be saying the same thing He told Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor. 12:9)

So with Paul, all I have is this kind of grace to boast in. All I have to boast in is my weakness because that’s the only way I’ve ever known the power of Christ (2 Cor. 12:9). “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).

As I look around at my life, all I see is grace piled upon grace, blessing piled upon blessing, and the really crazy thing is that the only way I can tell it all apart is by the shadows of my sin and weakness. I supplied the shadow, Jesus supplied everything else. All of the best stuff, my wife, my children, my family, my friends, my congregation — I get to enjoy all of it in the rearview mirror. That’s not their fault; I’m just that kind of slow. And I see myself in the rearview mirror too. And God’s grace is there too. I see His grace enabling me to do what seems impossible, close calls, near misses, and sometimes even shining victories. And I can’t do the math. It feels like I’m a blind man driving down the highway doing eighty in Seattle traffic, and all I can see is what’s behind me and somehow there aren’t skid marks and pileups everywhere. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t really know how to explain it. If you’re watching and wondering, let me assure you that I’m just as confused as you. All I know is that as long as I can remember when I have felt lost, alone, afraid, ashamed, guilty, Jesus has always been there – in the dark, in my blindness. It isn’t me. It’s Him.

So, looking in my rearview mirror this morning, I see my wife. She’s smiling slyly, like she does. She’s also probably been chatting me up. And I’ve probably missed three questions and two important suggestions while I’ve been wondering how I ever convinced her to marry me. I see my children. They are probably singing or dancing or chasing each other in the living room. I love their antics. I love their quick wits. I love their tender hearts, their loyalty, their smiles. I see my other part-time children with them, a daughter and a son, with the bright morning sun of the Savior burning the dark shadows behind them all away. I see my own parents smiling, affirming, pointing me to Jesus, and my brothers and sister and their families eating and drinking, singing and laughing. I see my congregation loving, serving, encouraging, praying, and yes, they’re laughing too.

And I’m laughing because it really is hilarious. Bless the Lord, O my soul and forget not all His benefits. And I’m holding up my bucket that’s more like a sieve full of memory holes in this downpour of grace, trying not to forget all His benefits. And now my face is twitching a little. I lift my eyebrows and move my mouth around and take a deep breath. I sort of get the feeling that I’m on a landing, staggering forward with my hands out in front of me. And I grin a little because the first step down always takes the wind out of me.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. And see you at the bottom.

Cast to Trust

Almost seven weeks ago, my wife and I brought a baby home from the hospital. We had been expecting for about twenty-four hours. He’s staying with us temporarily until a permanent home can be found for him. But as each day passes, the realization that we will say goodbye to this little friend settles upon us. What a strange sensation to realize that this is part of what it means to “visit orphans” in their distress. It means giving, loving, bonding, and then releasing, sending away, saying goodbye.

I can imagine situations that are so difficult, so challenging that attachment is more difficult, and the thought of commitment being temporary might seem relieving. But this isn’t one of those situations. It wasn’t even a question. In God’s providence, this is a friend that has captured our hearts. He will always be in our prayers. We will always consider him one of the children the Lord gave us, if only for a number of months.

But why do this? And what exactly are we doing? It’s going to hurt us, but what about the baby? What about the trauma of attaching to a “mom and dad” and then being removed and placed into a new home?

I’m reminded of David’s prayer in Psalm 22: ”Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts. On you I was cast from my birth, and from my mother’s womb you have been my God.” (Ps. 22:9-10)

The reality is that we are all cast on God from birth. God takes each one of us from the womb, and we come face to face with a broken, uncertain world. Sometimes that uncertainty is found in the brokenness of our biological family. Sometimes the uncertainty is in the historical circumstances we come into. We are all born into a sinful world full of turmoil and tumult, violence and disarray. David was no stranger to abuse and scorn and neglect and loss. And he says, “Yet you are he who took me from the womb…” God is the one who brings us into the world in whatever circumstances He sees fit.

And why? He brings us into the world in order that we might learn to trust Him at our mother’s breast. What is God doing when an infant cries for milk and is comforted? What is God doing when a little one opens his tiny eyes with a furrowed brow and tries to focus on your face? God is teaching him to trust Him.

This is what we are always doing with our children, all of them. But this is particularly highlighted in foster care, especially in the temporary care of very little ones. What are we doing? We are teaching them to trust God. We are holding them close, kissing their cheeks, keeping them warm, filling their tummies with milk, smiling and praying over them, telling them over and over again in as many ways as we can, that even though the world is a dark and uncertain place, they are not alone. They have been cast on the One who made them, the One who holds all things perfectly under His gracious and sovereign care. They have been cast on God, and we are teaching them that they can trust Him.