Jason Micheli's Blog, page 101

Episode #217: Jeffrey Pugh — Send Them Back

“The truthfulness of Christian convictions can be known only as they are demonstrated through the lives of the faithful.”

Our guest this week is Dr. Jeffrey Pugh, Professor of Religion at Elon University. Jeffrey is the author of books such as The Devil’s Ink, The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to the End Times, and Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times. It’s his expertise on Bonhoeffer we turn to in this episode, asking him to reflect on the border crisis, how Christians are to discern when they’re in a “biblical moment” that calls for witness and resistance, the need for another Barmen-type confession.

He also gives the best answer to the “What do you want to hear God say when you arrive in heaven?” question.”

A: ”At least you didn’t fuck that up.”

If you’re getting this by email, you can find the audio here.

 

Follow @cmsvoteup

(Her)Men*You*tics: Wrath

We’ve been working our way through the alphabet one stained-glass word at a time, and today our word is everyone’s favorite Bible word:

Wrath.

Are we just sinners in the hands of an angry God?

Or is there something better, even good news, behind this five-letter scare word?

If you get this by email, you can find the link here.

 

 

Follow @cmsvoteup

God changes us through the ordinary means of “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you.”

Here’s an excerpt from my latest book, which, if you haven’t already (what’s the matter with you?!), you can get here.

The reason I insist that the couples over whose nuptials I preside are people of faith is because they need to believe that the call and response of repentance and forgiveness is the only way they will be changed. I use the passive voice on purpose. The call and response of I’m sorry/You’re forgiven is the liturgy of married life. It’s the back-and-forth of bride and groom by which God sanctifies us. 

Offering forgiveness freely and freely receiving it, we are made holy. We do not grow closer to God or grow more like God through improvement. The language of spiritual progress implies a gradual lessening of our need for grace the nearer and nearer we journey to God. Yet, the God who condescends to us in the suffering, humble, and humiliated Christ is not ever a God waiting for us to make our way up to him. The God who came down to meet us in crèche and cross continues to forsake his lofty throne. God comes down still. He hides behind unimpressive words like, “I forgive you.” 

God changes us through the ordinary means of “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you.” As much as water, wine, and bread, your wife’s free offer of forgiveness in the face of your sin is a sacrament of God’s transforming grace. The Beloved gets no closer to us than our bride or our groom. The Bridegroom has condescended to us whenever we see our sin in the eyes of our beloved yet hear instead words of unmerited pardon. God not only wears these words of forgiveness like flesh, God uses them to transform us. This is why, to every prospective husband and wife who gushingly tell me how they’ve found their soul mate, I’ve practiced responding, “Big deal.” 

We have so much in common. 

“Big deal.”

She’s just like me in every way.

“Big deal.”

We fit together like two puzzle pieces. [People actually talk like this.]

“Big deal.”

We’re so compatible. 

“Big deal.”

Don’t get me wrong, compatibility sounds awesome. The language of compatibility makes marriage sound easy. The problem my unimpressed “big deal” is meant to unveil is that, to the extent Christian marriage is meant to be a parable of God’s own love, change does not come through compatibility. Change, Christianly speaking, comes through collision. We are not transformed by seamlessly fitting another into our life. We’re not all puzzle pieces strewn across the great cosmic game table. Sorry, no one is The One for you. Another can only become The One for you as you are both made holy. And holiness comes through the rough-and-tumble process of having another reveal our true sucky self to us. 

Before we’re married, not only do we have an incomplete understanding of the other person. We have an incomplete understanding of our selves. We bring in to marriage a self-image that’s been formed by the judgments and praise of people who don’t know us as well as our spouse eventually will know us; consequently, as we live our lives with someone else, we discover that we’re not the same person we thought we were. And in a marriage, there’s not a lot of room to hide. You’re exposed. All the veils are pulled away. It’s not that there’s no secrets in marriage. It’s that there aren’t as many secrets as we want. 

It’s the inverse of what I like to call Jason’s Rule, which is really a cribbed version of Hauerwas’s Rule. Jason’s Rule states that You never really know the person you’re marrying until after you’ve been married to the person you’re marrying. The corollary to Jason’s Rule is that You are never as fully known as you are known by the person to whom you’re married.So once you’re inside a marriage, it’s not just the other person’s flaws and imperfections that are revealed. It’s your own.

But notice, it’s not your spouse who’s unveiling your flaws and imperfections. It’s marriage. This is what collared types like me mean when we call marriage “a means of God’s grace.” It’s a means by which God condescends to us to convict us and to change us. Our true self must be revealed through the painful process occasioned by the need to say “I’m sorry” so that through his word of free pardon, God can unveil, by degrees, our transformed self. 

Follow @cmsvoteup

Episode #216 — Thomas Lynch: Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living

Seldom do we hear about the burden our culture of mass-shootings places upon the undertakers who have to go about the painstaking work of putting the victims back together again for their loved ones to bury.

Friend of the podcast, Thomas Lynch, rejoins us to talk about his new book, Whither and When: On Lives and Living. Thomas is an undertaker and poet whose work has garnered numerous awards, including the National Book Award for his collection of essays The Undertaking: Notes on the Dismal Trade.

Follow @cmsvoteup

Everything You Need to Know You Didn’t Learn in Kindegarten

Luke 10.25-37

I’ve had it sitting in my sermon file for years, a review of the book,In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa, by the journalist Daniel Bergner, whose book documents the gruesome aftermath of the civil war in Sierra Leone. 

The title of Bergner’s book refers to the popular— desperate— belief in the region that certain rituals, going even to the extreme of cannabalism, will guarantee immunity to bullets. Hence, the term “magic soliders.”

What caught my attention in the review is the section that begins with this line:  “What is of value in this book is less what it says about Sierra Leone than about the human condition.” 

Specifically, the reviewer is referring to one human, Neall Ellis, whose story in the book says something offensive about the lot of us. 

Neall Ellis is a white avaitor from South Africa. After a brief stint in the Rhodesian Army, he joined the South African Air Force, where he was awarded the Honoris Crux in 1983, and later attained field rank. 

After retiring from the SAAF, Ellis used his savings and retirement funds to pay the tuition costs for local schoolchildren in war torn Sierra Leone. 

He sent one young woman all the way to England, set her up with lodging, and paid her way through nursing school and, after nursing school, midwifery school. 

He covered all the expenses of another young man’s medical school education in Johannesburg, as well as the extensive plastic surgeries required by a young woman who had been badly burned during the conflict in Sierra Leone. 

And not just her— Ellis raised the funds to construct an entire burn hospital.

I’ve got a c-note that says it’s named after the Good Samaritan. 

Ellis told the journalist that he was building the hospital, “because right now there isn’t a place like that in the whole of Sierra Leone, nowhere a victim can go to get that type of treatment. Seeing such a need, I can’t just pass on by.” 

Admit it— you expect a sermon on this parable to segway into an illustration just like this of some real-life Good Samaritan making good on the lessons we all learned in Kindergarten.

Whenever you hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan, you expect to hear a story about someone like Neal Ellis. 

Well, here’s the rest of Neal Ellis’ story. 

After he retired from the South African Air Force in the 1980’s, Neal Ellis took a job as a mercenary for the government of Sierra Leone, piloting the sole combat helicopter the nation owned. 

He took the job not for the pay, he admitted to the journalist, but for the work. He loved the thrill of rocketing and machine-gunning from the air, confessing to Bergner:  “It’s better than sex. . . . There’s a lot of adrenaline going. You’re all keyed up, and when you realize you’re on target, that you’ve taken out the enemy, it’s a great feeling.” 

According to Human Rights Watch, they’ve documented dozens of dead and wounded civilians, women and children, in scores of towns that Neal Ellis attacked. The burn victims whose medical bills Neal Ellis covers— Neal Ellis is responsible for their condition. 

They’re in the hospital, because he put them there. 

Even after In the Land of Magic Soldiers went to print, Ellis emailed the author mentioning another civil war that had broken out on the continent and how he was “hoping for a possible contract.” 

Writing about Neal Ellis, journalist Daniel Bergner doesn’t call him a Good Samaritan. 

Instead, Ellis makes Bergner question if there’s any such thing as a Good Samaritan. 

Until the complexity of casting someone like Neal Ellis as Jesus’ protagonist in today’s parable has stuck in your craw, you’ve not really comprehended Christ’s answer to the lawyer.  

———————-

     We’ve all heard about the Good Samaritan so many times the offense of the parable passes us by.

     It’s so obvious we never notice it:  Jesus told this story to Jews. 

     The lawyer who tries to trap Jesus, the twelve disciples who’ve just returned from the mission field, and the crowd that’s gathered round to hear about their Kingdom, work. 

    Every last listener is a Jew. 

     And so, when Jesus tells a story about a priest who comes across a man lying naked, and maybe dead in a ditch, when Jesus says that priest passed him on by, none of Jesus’ listeners would’ve batted an eye. 

     When Jesus says, “So there’s this priest who came across a naked, maybe dead, maybe not even Jewish body on the roadside and he passed by on the other side,” NO ONE in Jesus’ audience would’ve reacted with anything like, “That’s outrageous!”

     When Jesus says, “There’s this priest and he came across what looked like a naked, dead body in the ditch, so he crossed to other side and passed on by,” EVERYONE in Jesus’ audience would’ve been thinking, “What’s your point? Of course, he passed by on the other side. That’s what a priest must do.”

     

     Ditto, the Levite. 

     No one hearing Jesus tell this story would’ve been offended by their passing on by.  

No one would’ve been outraged.

     As soon as they saw the priest enter the story, they would’ve expected him to keep on walking. 

     The priest had no choice— for the greater good. 

     According to the Law, to touch the man in the ditch would ritually defile the priest. 

     Under the Law, such defilement would require at least a week of purification rituals during which time the priest would be forbidden from collecting tithes, which means that for a week or more the distribution of alms to the poor would cease.    

     And, if the priest ritually defiled himself and did not perform the purification obligation, if he ignored the Law and tried to get away with it and got caught then, (according to the Mishna), the priest would be taken out to the Temple Court and beaten in the head with clubs. 

     Now, of course, that strikes us as god-awful. 

     But, the point of Jesus’ parable passes us by when we forget the fact that none of Jesus’ listeners would’ve felt that way. 

     As soon as they see a priest and a Levite step onto the stage, they would not have expected either to do anything but, exactly, what Jesus says they did. 

     So— 

     If Jesus’ listeners wouldn’t expect the priest or the Levite to do anything, then what the Samaritan does isn’t the point of the parable. 

     If there’s no shock or outrage at what appears to us a lack of compassion, then— no matter how many hospitals we name after this story— the act of compassion isn’t the lesson of the story.  

     If no one would’ve taken offense that the priest did not help someone in need, then helping someone in need is not this teaching’s takeaway. 

     The takeaway is the who, who is doing the helping.

The point of the parable doesn’t start with the what, but the who.

———————-

     Just like Neal Ellis, this Samaritan has a more complicated backstory. 

    In Jesus’ own day a mob of Samaritans had traveled to Jerusalem, which they didn’t recognize as the holy city of David, and at night they broke into the Temple, which they didn’t believe held the presence of Yahweh, and they ransacked it. 

Looted it. 

     And then they littered it with the remains of human corpses, bodies they dug up and bodies killed.  

     Whereas, the priest and the Levite would not touch a dead body in the ditch out of deference to the Law and it’s ritual obligations, the Samaritans made a mockery of God’s Law by vandalizing the Temple with bodies they’d robbed from the grave.

     In Jesus’ day there was no such thing as a Good Samaritan.

     That’s why, when the parable’s finished and Jesus asks his final question, the lawyer can’t even stomach to say the word “Samaritan.” “The one who showed mercy” is all the lawyer can spit out through clenched teeth. 

You see, the shock of Jesus’ story isn’t that the priest and the Levite fail to do anything positive for the man in the ditch. 

The shock is that Jesus does anything positive with the Samaritan in the story. 

The offense of the parable is that Jesus casts someone like a Samaritan as the protagonist.  

We get it all backwards. 

Jesus isn’t inviting us to see ourselves as the bringer of aid to the person in need. 

I wish. 

How flattering is that? 

It says a lot about our privilege that we automatically identify with the rescuer in the story.

    We get it backwards. 

     Jesus isn’t saying that loving our neighbor means caring for someone in need. 

Of course, loving your neighbor means caring for someone in need. 

But that’s not what Jesus is doing here. 

———————-

 

Not only do we forget that every last listener in Luke 10 is a Jew, seldom do we notice what prompts Jesus’ story in the first place. 

What does Luke tell you? 

Luke reports,  “The lawyer, wanting to justify himself, asked Jesus:  ‛Who is my neighbor?’”

This lawyer is attempting to establish his enoughness before God all on his own. 

This is what Jesus is picking apart with his parable. 

Jesus shows you what St. Paul tells you in Galatians— that, if justification could come through our keeping of the commandments, (if it was as easy as this lawyer supposes), then Christ died for absolutely nothing.

So, what does Jesus do to this lawyer and his self-justification project? 

To this expert in the Law, Jesus tells a story where the hero is the personification of unrighteousness under the Law. 

Jesus skewers the lawyer’s good, godly self-image by spinning a story starring an ungodly sort like Neal Ellis. 

And then, like Jesus does in the sermon on the mount, Jesus amps up the expectations to an impossible degree. Jesus overwhelms the lawyer by crediting to the Samaritan a whopping fourteen verbs worth of compassion and care, count them up.

And finally, in order to blow the lawyer’s self-righteousness to smithereens, Jesus lowers the boom and says, “Go and do likewise.”

Pay attention. 

This is where our reading of this passage tends to run off the rails. What Jesus is driving at here with his, “Go and do,” is heavy, and the demand is the same for me, and it’s the same for you too. 

Go and do like that Samaritan, Jesus is saying, help every single person in need who comes your way, regardless of how busy you are. 

No matter the circumstances, no matter the cost, no matter the safety. Book them a room. Give the front desk your Amex Gold Card and put no restrictions on room service.   

And do it, Jesus is saying, like that Samaritan. Do it with the purest of intentions, with no thought about yourself, without any expectation of recriprocation or promise of reward. Do it spontaneously, provoked solely by the love of God alone, and do not be disappointed when they recidivize. 

Do it just like that— spend fourteen verbs on every single person. Do it no matter if they’re wearing a “MAGA” hat or a “Black Lives Matter” tee. 

Do all of that, perfectly, from the heart, and on your own, all by your lonesome, you will be justified.

How’s that working for you?

This parable is not about helping people in need. 

This parable is about helping you recognize your need. 

For a savior.

YOU’RE THE ONE IN THE DITCH!

And while we were yet enemies, when there was “no health in us” and we were as good as dead in our trespasses, the Son of God condescended to us— he took flesh— and he got down into the ditch with us and he loved you, his neighbor, more than himself, carrying you in his body, lavishing upon you his every last verb, sparing no expense, until his love for you drove him to fall among thieves, bloodied and beaten and ditched by a world too busy to do anything, but pass him by. 

———————-

In his book,In the Land of Magic Soldiers, journalist Daniel Bergner  doesn’t call Neal Ellis a Good Samaritan. 

He calls him “a haunting figure…haunting, because the strange blend of compassion and cruelty in his life is a reminder of what we all carry within us. He’s a reminder of how fragile is our human predicament and of how we are all in need not only of rescue, but also repair.”

Or, as the Apostle Paul puts in Romans, rectification. 

We’re in need not only of rescue, but also rectification.

———————-

We’re the ones in the ditch. 

But before Jesus Christ departed us by Death and Resurrection, he left us not his Discover Card, but his Holy Spirit. 

He left us his Holy Spirit to nurse us back into health. 

He left us his Holy Spirit to rehabilitate us. 

To rectify— to make right— the image in which God, the Father Almighty made you.  

Before he left, he left you his Holy Spirit. 

And his Holy Spirit, the Apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians, is the deposit that guarantees the inheritance this lawyer was inquiring about with Jesus. 

Eternal life. 

The Holy Spirit is the deposit of eternity in time.

The Holy Spirit is the present-tense downpayment of the future life this lawyer seeks.

That’s this lawyer’s other error; he thinks eternal life can only begin somewhere down the line past the present. 

As Karl Barth liked to joke—what sort of eternal life would it be if it begins after something else? If eternal life is eternal, it cannot come after anything.

Because it’s eternal, it’s always already and always ongoing, and though it is always also still not yet, the Holy Spirit is the deposit of it in the here and now. 

The Holy Spirit is the deposit of the not yet in the now.

The practices of the faith, therefore, the work we engage in the Spirit:

The sandwiches you make at the mission center;

The tutoring you contribute to at-risk kids;

The service you offer to our neighbors;

The shelter you provide for the homeless, and

The support you send to churches along the border.

They are not ways we in Christ’s stead help the poor. 

They are the ways that Christ’s Spirit uses the poor to heal us. 

They are not ways we rescue the needy stranger. 

They are ways the Spirit rectifies the stranger in need that you call “you.”

They are not ways we go and do likewise— there’s only one way for us to be justified. 

The practices of the faith— they are not ways we go and do. 

They are ways we are done to. 

Done to by the Holy Spirit. 

Until the Holy Spirit has rendered us likewise.

———————-

We’re all born lawyers. 

We need to be made Christians. 

So hear the Good News:

While we were yet enemies, Christ died for your sins and was raised for your justification to be given to you not as your wage for what you go and do, but as an unconditional gift, no matter where you go or what you do. 

By grace through faith, you already possess irrevocably what that lawyer pursued.

Your justification.  

But your rectification?

For that, our Rescuer has left his Spirit. 

So all you lawyers, lay all your doings down. 

They can’t cure what ails you still. 

Lay all your doings down.

And come to the table. 

Come and be done to.

Come and be done to by the Spirit of our Good Samaritan. 

Come, and with bread and wine, be done to by the Spirit of the Samaritan, who is determined not only to rescue you from the ditch of Sin and Death, but to bind up all your wounds, heal your every affliction, and strengthen you in your weakness until you are what you eat.  

Follow @cmsvoteup

Episode #215 — Joel Goza— America’s Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics

“Racism is the ideological building block of our nation. Our current politics, our prisons, our inner cities— our system produces exactly the results it seeks by design.”

As we celebrate Independence Day weekend and Democrats re-debate bussing and a new strain of birtherism gets directed at another candidate of color, we talk with with Joel Goza who is a Duke Divinity School alumni and now works as a church planter and for a non-profit in the 5th Ward. His new book is an important one, especially on Independence Day weekend. It’s titled America’s Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics. 

Our awesome producer, Tommie, has also spliced in a couple of tracks by my favorite band, The Drive-By Truckers, one song on Trayvon Martin and another about Charlottesville, as both come up in the course of our conversation with Joel.

Before you listen, help us out. Go to www.crackersandgrapejuice.com and click “Support the Show” and become a patron of the pod for peanuts.

You can also go to Facebook and ‘like’ our page, share something. Or, find us in iTunes and give us a rating and review. Every little bit helps other folks find the program.

Follow @cmsvoteup

(Her)Men*You*tics: Water

God kills and makes alive and through no more frequent means than water. What unsettles us about the Noah story is what God does every time God baptizes, drowning us into Christ’s death and resurrection.

We’re working our way through the alphabet one stained glass word at a time…here’s the latest on Water.

If you’re so inclined, help us out. Go to www.crackersandgrapejuice.com, click on “Support the Show” and become a patron for peanuts. Otherwise, go to our Facebook Page and like it and share something. We’d love it too if you go to iTunes and leave us a rating and review.

Follow @cmsvoteup

Go and Sin Some More

Luke 18.9-14 — The Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican

At the first unsuspecting church on which a bishop foisted me— we staged a Christmas pageant during the season of Advent. 

During dress rehearsal that final Sunday morning before the performance, stomach flu had started to sweep through the heavenly host. 

When it came time for the angelic chorus to deliver their lines in unison: “Glory to God in the highest” you could hear Katie, a first-grade angel, vomiting her breakfast into the trash can over by the grand piano.

The sound of Katie’s wretching was loud enough so that when the other angels should’ve been proclaiming “and on earth peace to all the people” they were instead gagging and covering their noses.

Meanwhile, apparently bored by the angels’ news of a Messiah, two of the shepherds—both third-grade boys and both sons of wise men— started brawling on the altar floor next to the manger.

Their free-for-all prompted one of the wise men to leave his entourage and stride angrily up the sanctuary aisle, smack his shepherd son upside the ear and threaten: “Boy, Santa won’t be bringing Nascar tickets this year if you can’t hold it together.”

Truth be told, the little church had neither the numbers nor the talent to man a lemonade stand much less mount a production of the Christmas story; nonetheless, a brusque, take-charge mother, who was a new member in the congregation, had approached me about staging a pageant.

And because I was a rookie pastor and didn’t know any better— and honestly, because I was terrified of this woman— I said yes.

The set constructed in the church sanctuary was made to look like the small town where we lived. So the Bethlehem skyline was dotted with Burger King, the local VFW, the municipal building, the funeral home and, instead of an inn, the Super 8 Motel. 

At every stop in Bethlehem someone sat behind a cardboard door. Joseph would knock and the person behind the door would declare: “Sorry, ain’t no room here.”

The old man behind the door of the cardboard VFW was named Fred. He was the oldest member of the congregation. He sat on a stool behind the set, wearing his VFW beret and chewing on an unlit cigarillo.

Fred was almost completely deaf and not a little senile so when Mary and Joseph came to him, they didn’t bother knocking on the door.

They just opened it up and asked the surprised-looking old man if he had any room for them to which he would respond by looking around at his surroundings as though he were wondering where he was and how he’d gotten there. 

Because, of course, he was wondering where he was and how he’d gotten there. 

For some reason, be it haste, laziness, or a dare involving some sum of cash, the mother-in-charge of the pageant had made the magi responsible for their own costumes.

Thus, one wise man wore a white lab coat and carried a telescope. 

Another wise man was dressed like the former WWF wrestler the Iron Sheik. 

And the third wise man wore a gray and green Philadelphia Eagles bathrobe and for some inexplicable reason had aluminum foil wrapped around his head.

King Herod was played by the head usher, Jimmy.

At 6’6 and wearing a crown and a white fur-collared purple robe and carrying a gold cane, King Herod looked more like Kramer as an uptown gigilo than he did a biblical character.

When it came time for the performance, I took a seat on the bench in the back of the sanctuary where the ushers normally sat and, gazing at the cast and the production design from afar, I briefly wondered to myself a question you all cause me to ask from time to time too. 

Why didn’t I go to law school?

I sat down and King Herod handed me a program.

On the cover was the title: “The Gift of Christmas.”

On the inside was a list of cast members’ names and their roles.

As the pageant began with a song lip-synced by the angels, the other usher for the day sat next to me.

His name was Mike. He was an insurance adjustor with salt-and-pepper hair and dark eyes. He led a Bible Study on Wednesday mornings that met at the diner. He delivered Meals on Wheels. He chaired the church council. He supervised the coat closet. He mentored kids caughgt in the juvenile justice system. He was the little church’s most generous donor. 

And he was more than little officious in his righteousness.

Mike never liked me all that much.

Mike sat down, fixed his reading glasses at the end of his nose, opened his program and began mumbling names under his breath: Mary played by…Elizabeth played by…Magi #1 played by…

His voice was barely above a whisper but it was thick with contempt. 

Of all the nerve.

I knew immediately what he was implying or, rather, I knew what had gotten under his skin.

There were no teenage girls in the congregation to be cast. So Mary was played by a grown woman— a grown woman who was married to a man more than twice her age.

She’d married him only after splitting up his previous marriage.

The Holy Mother of God was being portrayed by a homewrecker. 

Of the three magi, one of them had scandalized the church by ruining his father’s business to fund his gambling habit. Another wise man was separated from his wife, but not legally so, and was living with another woman.

The innkeeper at the Super 8 Motel— he was a lifelong alcoholic, alienated from his grown children and several ex-wives.

Reluctantly shepherding the elementary-aged shepherds was a high school junior. He’d gotten busted earlier that fall for drug possession. 

His mother was dressed as an angel that day, helping to direct the heavenly host. Her husband, her boy’s father, had walked out on them a year earlier.

Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, was played by a woman who was new to the church, a woman who often wore sunglasses to worship or heavy make-up or who sometimes didn’t bother at all and just wore the bruises given to her by a boyfriend none of us had ever met.

The man playing the role of Zechariah, the husband of Elizabeth and father of Jesus’ cousin John, owned a construction company and had been accused of and charged for fraud by several customers in town, including a couple in the congregation. 

He’d bilked them out of thousands and thousands of dollars.

Zechariah— his name was Bill— every first Sunday of the month, Bill began to cry, tears streaming down his sunburnt carpenter’s cheeks, whenever I placed a piece of bread in his rough, calloused hands and promised him, “This is the Body of Christ broken for you.” 

Maybe more than anyone in that little church, he depended on the promise that when Christ says “This is my Body broken for you” you means me, too.

“There’s no conditions,” I’d told him once after the you-know-what with his business hit the fan. 

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. For all of us, that you means me. The forgiveness— it’s for you. You’ve got to take Christ at his absolving word or you’re calling God a liar, which is alot worse of a sin than any you’ve committed. The truth about you is never what you see in the mirror— good or bad— the truth about you is always found in the broken piece of bread placed in your hand. You’re no different than anyone else here.”

Mike, the insurance adjuster, held the program in his hands and read the cast members’ names under his breath. 

Then he rolled up his program and he poked me with it and, just when the angel Gabriel was delivering his news to Mary, Mike whispered into my ear:    

“Who picked the cast for this? Who chose them?’

And because I’m not a brave man (and because I didn’t much like her) I pointed at the mother-in-charge. 

“She did. She cast them all. Blame her.”     

He shook his head in disgust and then he gestured towards Zechariah, pretending now to be struck mute, and he said: “It’s one thing for him to even show his face here Sunday after Sunday without mending his ways but…this?! Do you really think he’s the sort of person who should be sharing this story with our church and our community? What in the hell have you been preaching to him, pastor? Go and sin some more?!”

The narrator for the Christmas pageant that year was a woman whose name, ironically, was Mary. 

She hadn’t had the energy for any of the rehearsals. She just showed up at the worship service when it was time to perform the pageant pushing a walker, from which hung a black and green oxygen tank.

Mary was old and incredibly tiny, no bigger than the children that morning wearing gold pipe cleaner halos around their heads. Emphysema was killing Mary a breath at a time. 

She had to be helped up to the pulpit once the performance began. I’d spent a lot of hours in Mary’s kitchen over the time I was her pastor, sipping bad Folger’s coffee and listening to her tell me about her family.

About the dozen miscarriages she’d had in her life and about how the pain of all those losses was outweighed only by the joy of the child she’d grafted into her family tree. About the husband who died suddenly, before the dreams they’d had together could be checked-off the list. About her daughter’s broken marriage. And about her two grandsons who, in the complicated way of families, were now living with her.

As the children finished their lip-synced opening song, and as the shepherds and angels and wise men took their places, and as Billy climbed into his makeshift throne, looking more like a Harvey Keitel pimp than a King Herod, Mary struggled up to the pulpit.

With the walker resting next to the pulpit, the tube to her oxygen was pulled almost taut. Her fierce eyes were just barely visible above the microphone.

With her hands bruised from blood thinner, she spread out her script and in a soft, raspy voice she began to tell the story, beginning not with Luke or with John but with Matthew, the Gospel of Matthew.

I wouldn’t have chosen Matthew for a Christmas pageant, but again I was terrified of the mother-in-charge. 

The cadence of Mary’s delivery was dictated by the mask she had to put over her face every few seconds to fill her lungs with air: “She shall bear a son…(breath)…and you are to name him Jesus…(breath)…for he will save people from their sins…(breath)…”

Except—

That morning Mary didn’t start by narrating the Christmas story. 

She went off script. 

I don’t know if she went off script because she hadn’t been at the rehearsals or if in her old age she was confused and rambling, or maybe she was just filling time while she tried to locate her spot in the script. 

I like to think she’d heard the scuttlebutt about Mike and his righteous indignation over the likes of the people who populated the parish’s pageant. 

She began by introducing the passage. 

“The Bible tells us about God being born as Jesus,” Mary said, “only after a long list of begats.” And she took a breath from her oxygen mask. “Emmanuel…God-with-us…(breath) comes from a family tree every bit as knotted as ours (breath) a family of scoundrels and unbelievers (breath) rapists and hookers (breath) cheats and those consumed by their resentment over being cheated upon (breath) all the way back to Abraham (breath) who wasn’t righteous (breath) but was reckoned so on the only basis any of us are so counted, faith, alone (breath). Christ comes from a family just like us,” she said and took a breath.  

“He comes from sinners for sinners.”

And I looked over at Mike, who’d been standing in the narthex passing out programs. In addition to everything else, Mike was the head usher too. 

When the pageant began, Mike’s ears had been beat red and the vein in his forehead throbbing so outraged and incredulous was he that we were “telling the story of our savior with those kinds of people,” but, hearing that tiny little women with her Gospel promise, he suddenly hung his head. 

He looked embarrassed— as though, God the Holy Spirit had just smacked him upside the head. 

Humility is only ever something we discover because humility is something done to us.

Katie in the heavenly host nearly made it through the Christmas pageant in the clear, but when the wise men showed up delivering their gift-wrapped boxes she ran to the trash can in the choir loft to deliver into it the last of her breakfast. 

Mary never made it to the next Christmas. She died that spring clutching the same promise she’d preached to us that Sunday in Advent. 

Zechariah left the church shortly after I did, and he became a preacher in a storefront start-up church, preaching the promise that whether we mend our ways or not, when it comes us,  God never mends his ways. No matter what, God will deal with you tomorrow exactly as God dealt with you yesterday, by grace. 

Turns out, he was a good preacher too— only those who know they’re not good realize that the promise is too good not to believe.

After the worship service that Sunday in Advent finished, I stood outside near the front door to the sanctuary, shaking hands as the bell rang and the organ groaned out the last notes of the postlude. Mike was one of the last to leave. In addition to everything else, he always cleaned up the pews after worship and vacuumed up the communion crumbs from the floor. 

His hand felt hot and sweaty in the December air, like he’d been wringing his hands in consternation. 

“We’ve all fallen short of the glory of God, but I guess that doesn’t stop us from measuring distances does it?” 

But I didn’t catch his meaning because as he started to walk home down the sidewalk, I thought to myself (and remember, this is a long time ago in a county far far away, back in my pre-sanctified days): 

“Thank God, I’m not a self-righteous, holier-than-thou, bookkeeping hypocrite like him.” 

  Two men went up to the temple to pray one Advent Sunday morning, the first a Methodist preacher— a professional Christian— the second a modern day Pharisee named Mike. 

The latter, not the former, went back down to his house justified. 

———————-

But on some other Sunday?

You know as well as I do. 

Under a different set of circumstances, it could just as easily be the former not the latter. Come next Sunday it could just as easily be the tax collector ubering home whilst congratulating himself that he really gets how God’s grace works unlike that holy-rolling bookkeeper who makes himself the subject of all his prayers and gets caught red-handed in his self-righteousness.

All of us— we’re always, if not simultaneously then from one Sunday to the next, at once, sinners and saints. We leave church tax collectors enjoying our forgiveness, yet as soon as we get into the fellowship hall or log into Facebook we’re back to being Pharisees. 

They’re two different characters in the parable, but they’re both in us. 

No matter how hard you try, you will go and sin some more.

That’s why (this might sound obvious to some of you, but I promise you it’s not self-evident to many) the Gospel is for Christians. 

The Gospel is even for Christians. 

The Gospel is especially for Christians. 

We tend to think of the Gospel (the promise that while you were yet hostile to God, Christ died for your sins and was raised for your justification)— as though it’s for non-Christians. 

Street-corner evangelists stand on street-corners not in church parking lots.

We tend to think of the Gospel of grace as a doorway through which we pass to get into the household of God; so that, we can then get on with the real business of living like Christ and doing as Christ for our neighbors. 

But thinking of the Gospel as prologue to your Christian life, nothing could be more unbiblical. 

The Bible teaches that Christ comes to dwell in our hearts by what exactly? 

By faith. 

And the Bible teaches that the faith by which Christ gives himself to us comes to us how?

Not by doing. 

By hearing. 

Christ gives himself to us by faith that comes to us by hearing the word. 

And not just any word, the Bible teaches, a specific word. 

The promise of grace. 

The Gospel word. 

The Gospel gives Christ himself to us the way a wedding vow gives a bride her groom. 

The Gospel, therefore, is for Christians too not just potential converts. 

The Gospel is for Christians especially because the Gospel that gives you Christ, the Bible teaches, is the same Gospel that grows Christ in you. 

The way to grow in grace is to cling to the promise of it, to return to it over and again. 

Living a grace-filled life is like learning a song by heart— this song.

Because we don’t ever stop being a tax collector one Sunday and a Pharisee the next, we don’t ever stop, we don’t ever advance past, we don’t ever level up beyond needing to the hear the Gospel. 

This good word, the Gospel of Christ— just as Jesus said— it’s the Living Water without which first we get thirsty and then we get exhausted before finally our faith dries up, and we die in our sins. 

The Gospel word that gives Christ to you is the Bread of Life that keeps on feeding Christ to you— that’s what he means by calling himself Manna. 

The Gospel is the Bread of Life, and we’re always one meal away from starving.

And, without that meal, without the Gospel, we have nothing to offer our neighbor, we have nothing to offer the poor and the oppressed, we have nothing to offer them other than what the world already offers them and how the world offers it. 

Which is to say, thank God. 

God has not made us like other people. 

God has made us Christians. 

We are different from other people. 

We are the particular people God has put into the world who’ve been set free by the Gospel to admit that we’re just like other people. We’re publicans and Pharisees all. We’re worse than our worst enemy thinks of us, yet we’re loved to the grave and back.

Thank God, we’re not like other people. 

We’re different in that we have this Gospel that frees to confess that we’re no different. 

And that difference—

A people set freed to know and own that we’re no different than other people…

That difference is the difference Christ makes in a world of Us vs. Them.  

Follow @cmsvoteup

Scripture and Sexuality Study— Session Five: Romans— Against Nature? Against Grace?

Here’s the final session to our church-wide study on Scripture and Sexuality where we took a look at Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Note, the lecture below and the audio from the class are complimentary but by no means the same. And, you’ve totally got to listen to it because…how often do you hear the Doxology sung to the Mary Poppins’ tune?

Where We Are 

Last week, we started to delve into the good stuff, also known as the “clobber passages.”  We discussed how the naming of them as such also names the powers that hold us captive insofar as we engage the passages to harm our neighbor.  The Sin, the Devil, the Enemy, he cannot be dealt with until we acknowledge that he is indeed at play and at work.  Part of the aim of last week’s session was to try and turn us towards a new understanding of those passages, such that we can attune ourselves to the ways we misconstrue them at the cost of the Church.  

A Note on Purpose and Method

It may not be entirely obvious why I have structured this class the way I have.  I want to clarify this, and in doing so clarify also what my purpose in this class is.  

I wanted to start by rethinking how we read the Bible.  So much of what we discussed in the earlier sessions was meant to frame why the Bible, the Church’s unifying document that teaches the narrative of God’s grace in and for the world, can become such a source of antagonism, dis-grace, division, and rupture for the Church.  I want to urge us towards a deeper understanding, both of Sin, and of Faith, as given in Christ.  By rethinking how we read the Bible, and thus impressing on you the need to re-read it, I want to show what the Bible makes evidently clear: sinners are the only people reading it.  That statement, as obvious as it may be, seems to disappear when we approach the Bible, with all its intricacies and difficulties.  Despite what we may think, the Enemy is always at work in the world, even (and perhaps, especially) when we try to read the Bible.  

For that reason, the lesson on discernment and Bible-reading as a churchwide endeavor seemed the obvious next step.  As individuals approaching the text, it is much harder to identify and see where Sin is working in and through us.  The Church serves this function of accountability.  As a community, we can hold each other accountable to the grace given through the cross of Christ.  The Church is the place where we can learn, teach, and discern the work of God in His grace.  Thus, reading the Bible as a community formed in the image of Christ is the best defense against the Enemy, because the Church is the people through which the grace of God is shown to be at work in the world, by bringing sinners and strangers into communion with each other.  

Only with such an understanding of the depth and difficulty of the task of reading could we begin to approach the Bible anew and afresh, with the openness to hear the Spirit speak.  In reopening the Bible, I am not seeking to convert or evangelize.  Despite what the WCA says about me, I am not part of the gay mafia, and I am not trying to push a liberal agenda.  

Positively speaking, I am trying to get us to realize that, as a Church called and formed by grace, I am seeking simply to show that it is possible to live in community with others who think differently than us.  The work of discernment is how we open ourselves to God, such that, through our baptism, we allow ourselves to be in communion with each other.  

 

Romans 1: 18-32

Last week, there was one text we left out of the discussion of the “clobber passages”: Romans 1:18-32.  The reason I did not include Romans in our discussion is that it does not particularly fit into the category of “clobber passages” in the same way as the others do.  As we saw, the “clobber passages” are notable for the ease with which they occupy our ideological language.  The “clobber passages” are those with which we can effortlessly and comfortably, fundamentally attempt to excise God’s active work in the Church, while also being persuaded that what we are doing is God’s work.  

This is a diagnosable problem on all sides, from the most conservative to the most leftist.  To throw Sodom and Gomorrah at someone, without regard for who they are made to be in light of the cross (physical, embodied symbols of God’s grace), functions in the same way as blinding someone with the colors of the rainbow, disregarding that the Church holds true that it is the cross that makes us equal (in our sin), not the terms of secular ideology.  It is not by chance that Paul’s focus in Romans 1 is also on the work of the cross, cutting against our attempts at self-righteousness.  

Romans 1.18-32 is the key scriptural text that Christians on both sides of this debate must wrestle with when it comes to homosexuality. It is the only passage in scripture that treats the subject in more than an illustrative fashion, and it is the only passage in scripture that reflects on it in theological terms.

No matter what you conclude about this passage and its understanding of homosexuality, the theological context is crucial. That is, we have to understand what Paul is doing, not just in these verses, but in the first chapter of Romans, and the epistle, as a whole.  In the first chapter, Paul is attempting to demonstrate how the Gospel, rather than a set of philosophical precepts or moral teachings, is the power of God active in the world and, in fact, acting to overturn the world (the incarnate God is not an apolitical agent – though his politics are not like our own).

The Gospel, for Paul, is where the very righteousness of God is present.  And if it is present, it is active.  That is, Paul understands God’s righteousness not as a noun or adjective, but as a verb.  The Gospel – the story it tells about the work of God in Christ on the cross through the Spirit – is God’s way of making righteousness present and at work in the world.  

Thus, Paul sees that Jesus is the active embodiment, the incarnation, of God’s righteousness, and in chapter 1 of Romans, he is taking it as his task to detail the vast difference, the abyss between the righteousness of God disclosed in Christ, and the particular unrighteousness of fallen humanity.  Paul’s work in Romans is to diagnose the theological problem that makes the world the world.

Verses 19-32 serve for Paul as his exhibits of the evidence for the unrighteousness of the fallen world. Paul catalogs homosexuality as part of his thesis. Homosexuality’s inclusion in this series of illustrations should not obscure Paul’s larger rhetorical point. As verse 21 indicates, the cited sins all fall under the more general, and more damning, indictment that these fallen sinners have failed to honor God and render him his due thanksgiving. The sin Paul is zeroing in on, in other words, is idolatry.

In what way does Paul understand homosexuality as idolatry?

A majority of biblical scholars and cultural historians concur that Paul has in mind not monogamous homosexual relationships as we might know today, but heterosexuals in the wider Greco-Roman culture who engaged in homosexual acts purely for the sake of sex. That is, his focus is not, say, marriage.  His focus is, instead, sex taken from its place as a unitive and reflective theological motion.  This means that Paul is critiquing those who have made sex an end in itself, unattached to any sacred or intimate relationship of trust. In Paul’s mind, sex has become (or, is one example of) an idol.  

It is also necessary that readers do not miss Paul’s larger argument and the implications it bears for how we think of homosexuality. Paul, in chapter 1 of Romans, is not warning his readers of God’s wrath to come if they should engage in such sinful, idolatrous acts.  Paul’s point is, rather, that the world has already come under (and been delivered from) God’s wrath.  The presence of the idolatry of sex is not cast as a sin deserving of God’s wrath, but rather as proof of God’s wrath.  This may sound harsh, and it would be so, if not for the cross.  

God’s wrath, displayed in the death of Christ (of Godself) on the cross, exposes sin for what it is.  For Paul, then, the inclusion of the language of homosexuality is not meant to single out homosexuals as particularly deserving of God’s wrath (which is, by the way, exhausted on the body of Christ).  Rather, in diagnosing the theological condition of humanity, Paul sees the idolatry of sex, of which unfaithful homosexual acts are an illustrative example, as proof of God’s wrath.  Again, the indictment here, as I see it, is not against homosexuality proper, but against.

While this may be cold comfort to gay Christians, it should preclude Christians from singling out homosexuals as peculiarly deserving of God’s wrath. Indeed, if one is faithful and literal to the text of Paul’s argument, homosexuality is no more grave a sin than those who are “full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” 

Paul, quite intentionally I think, provides an exhaustive and all-inclusive list. After all, his point is that all of creation is groaning in rebellion to God and we are all victims of and participants in unrighteousness.

On the other hand, and to be fair, Paul’s theological point in Romans also gives grist to the argument that many Christians make, that homosexuality violates God’s creative intent for humanity. I do not want to skirt by this; after all, my aim here is not to convert anyone to any particular view.  While gay Christians may feel that they were created so, readers of Paul can make the theological claim that homosexuality is a sign of how Sin in our fallen world has distorted God’s aims in creation. Nothing in creation, some might posit, presently resembles what God intended in the beginning.

Readers must remember, as well, Paul’s claim in 2 Corinthians 5.17, that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”  That is, the old narrative of creation is left behind.  The creation and intention of God for creation is not only made new, but is made right through the rectifying power of God’s righteousness, incarnate in Christ. 

Paul’s writing in Romans is dense and difficult. Readers should not forget that Paul’s argument is a theological one, not a moral one. To be faithful to the text, the arguments and conclusions one makes about homosexuality, at least in terms of Romans, should be theological ones, and they should be theological ones couched in the exhaustive list of sins Paul enumerates in verses 29-31.

Another word of caution to those who debate these matters, and the word of caution comes from Paul. As Paul’s reasoning continues into chapter two of Romans, Paul warns that, “You have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things” (2.1). 

The Grafting of Gentiles

In his book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Richard Hays acknowledges that the New Testament provides no definitive, applicable “rule” on homosexuality. The New Testament, as in the case of Romans 1, offers only theological principles against homosexuality, yet Hays stresses that scripture’s negative prohibitions regarding homosexuality be read against the larger backdrop of the male-female union, which scripture presents as the normative location for love and intimacy. 

However marginal or unclear are the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality, the scriptural canon clearly and repeatedly affirms that God made man and woman for one another. Any contemporary discernment over homosexuality must struggle with this positive norm that is the overwhelming witness of the scriptural narrative

There is, however, another way of thinking about homosexuality that can serve to help balance our present discernment in the bounds of scriptural cannon and tradition.  We should remember here the advice of David Fitch: grounding our discernment in the stories of real people, in the reality and complex materiality of sexuality.  And we should also heed the advice of Luke Timothy Johnson, who notes that, “The burden of proof required to overturn scriptural precedents is heavy, but it is a burden that has been born before. The Church cannot, should not, define itself in response to political pressure or popularity polls. But it is called to discern the work of God in human lives and adapt its self-understanding in response to the work of God.”

To those who would worry that this advocates turning the Church into a replication of modernity, fear not.  Johnson’s advice is not advice to rush ahead and simple acquiesce to culture at every turn.  What Johnson gives us is the possibility of a hermeneutic of openness within the Church.  That is, Johnson’s advice is to maintain a posture of humility to being open to listening to the stories of God’s people with intent, grace, and the full armor of tradition.

Because scripture consistently adopts a negative view of homosexuality and affirms the heterosexual norm, we should listen to Hays, who argues that any change to the Church’s traditional teaching must come only “after sustained and agonizing scrutiny by a consensus of the faithful.” 

This agonizing is not dissimilar from the work Paul does in all his corpus, but especially in Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians to understand theologically the grafting of the Gentiles into the body of Christ.  As in the famous line, Paul writes that in Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile” (Galatians 3.28).  That is, in Christ’s death and resurrection (and the grace and salvation poured from there), the distinction between opposed groups is abolished.  For Christians, that means that each person in the body of Christ becomes an occasion for grace.  

Referring back to our notes on marriage, relationships are made possible by such work along Christological lines.  Relationships, of which marriage is the pinnacle, are opened to the work of Christ, precisely because God has made the relationship of the Trinity accessible to us in the incarnate Body of the Son.  

Eugene Rogers takes this to be the foundation on which gay and lesbian Christians in monogamous relation with one another, can be grafted into the body of Christ.  He posits that the relationship into which we are grafted through our baptisms is precisely the relationship Paul highlights in the adoption of the Gentiles into God’s salvific work, noting, “The sting is this:  In saving the Gentiles, God shows solidarity with something of their nature, the very feature that led the Jew Paul to distinguish himself from them.”  

The nature with which God shows solidarity to the Gentiles is the same nature with which God shows solidarity with the Jews: their sin and excess.  It is on the basis and mutual affirmation of our sin that God shows solidarity in adopting us into the life of the Trinity.  On the grafting of the Gentiles, Rogers writes:

The baptismal formula is not merely descriptive of the eschatological community, but normative…the salvation of almost all Christians, those who are not ethnically Jews, and do not observe the Torah, depends on taking [Romans 11:21-2] seriously, not only because it reflects on the cause of their salvation in God’s gracious grafting of an unpeople into God’s people, but also because it regulates relations within God’s people.”

Rogers, in analogizing this to the grafting of gay and lesbians Christians into the Church, concludes that it is only by affirming our baptismal relationship to each other that we can seriously think through the issue itself.  Our baptismal relation, which unites us in our death, allows us to discern the relations we ought to affirm and engender in our own community.  

Conclusion

Rogers also offers a simple question for us to ponder: how can we deny the Spirit, when it moves right in front of our eyes?

What Rogers is implying with this question is that we open our eyes to the work of the Spirit in gay relationships.  What he means by the work of the Spirit is the opening of grace to two sinners called into mutual life together in monogamous marriage.  If marriage is a site of grace, then the Church ought to consider whether gay marriage can also be such a site.  The grace of God in Christ knows no bounds.  What the Church needs to consider is whether, given all that has been said, we ought to affirm grace in the relationships of gay Christians.  

Follow @cmsvoteup

Episode #213: Live Podcast: Jeff and Steve Mullinix: BJ Unity

For the fourth year in a row, the podcast posse hosted a live pubcast to kick-off annual conference, this time at Ballast Point Brewery in Roanoke where we had over 200 folks attend. Our guests were Jeff and Steve Mullinix, who shared with us their story of growing up in the closet, attending Bob Jones University, and eventually finding one another and marrying. Jeff is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and Steve is a teacher. As Steve told us in an earlier podcast, “I am incompatible with Christian teaching because of my relationship with another man; his name is Adam.”

If you’d like to get your own “Incompatible” glass that we passed out to partcipants that night, go to our website www.crackersandgrapejuice.com to order your own.

While you’re there, click on “Support the Show” and become a patron of the podcast.

Follow @cmsvoteup