Jason Micheli's Blog, page 115

Episode #175 – Charlotte Getz & Stephanie Phillips: Unmapped

“The Gospel gets a bad rap sometimes because it says you have to die before you can live. That can be a bitter to swallow when you didn’t want to take a pill in the first place.”

After getting lost at sea— I mean, stuck in editing queue— two longtime Mockingbird writers, Charlotte Getz and Stephanie Phillips, have written a book that features a patchwork of personal essays, pocket liturgies, and pseudo-fictional plays, and not a dull moment between them.

Sisters from a different mister, Stephanie Phillips and Charlotte Getz never expected to raise their families anywhere but home, in the American South. But then…life happened.

Quirky, hilarious, and (mostly) true, UNMAPPED is the tale of two long-distance friends who found home—together and apart—in unexpected exile. This spiritual memoir duet is unlike anything you’ve ever read.

Stephanie and Charlotte had the misfortune of being interviewed on the night I packed up my office to move to a new church. Do not take the delay in releasing the podcast as a sign of what to expect. I thoroughly enjoyed their book and their candor and wit in the conversation about it.

But wait! Before you listen, help us out. This goodness is free but it ain’t cheap— help us out:

Go to Amazon and buy a paperback or e-book of Crackers and Grape Juice’s new book,
I Like Big Buts: Reflections on Paul’s Letter to the Roman. 

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

 

 

 

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(Her)Men*you*tics: Prayer

The posture of prayer, total dependence upon God, is a sign of the maturest of faith. I can say that because I’m s@#$ at prayer.

With Teer in jail without bail for indecent exposure and disorderly conduct, Johanna and Jason discuss an extra P-word: Prayer.

Go to Amazon and buy a paperback or e-book of Crackers and Grape Juice’s new book,
I Like Big Buts: Reflections on Paul’s Letter to the Roman. 

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

 

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Letter to My Godson – On the Second Anniversary of Your Baptism

Happy Baptism Day, Elijah—

Other than giving you verboten soda when your Mom isn’t looking, my role as your godfather appears to come down to these daft, dutch-uncle letters, explaining once a year what the hell we did to you by drowning you with water and word. 

I saw you just the other day, little man, and I was blown away by how much you’re talking now. Per your age, you’ve advanced from saying our names to attaching demands and imperatives to our names: JasonAliIwantmoremacuncheeeese.  I suppose, given the locquaciousness of your Dad, that you’re fated to talk people’s ears off. Your Dad will want the previous sentence to be a lesson to you. That was an example of the pot calling the kettle a motormouth.  

Before the macuncheese, you were playing with a toy car at my house, a Lightening McQueen I bought Gabriel back when he was your age. Telling me about it, you showed it to me. Unwisely, I grabbed it from you. I wanted to appear as though I was appraising what you were apprising me of.

JasonJasonJasonthat’sminegiveitbacktome—-please. 

Your Mom corrected you (that’s what they do, little man). 

You said IsorryJasonhereyoucansee.

And I replied: “I forgive you.”

I said it matter-of-factly, Elijah, but now, considering the anniversary of your baptism, it occurs to me that it was really a matter of faith, the matter of faith. Strip away the lace gowns, ornate liturgy, and lukewarm water, the faith into which we baptized you all boils down to how you receive the selfsame promise: you are forgiven. 

It’s a promise with your name attached to it: Elijah, you— your sins— are forgiven.

Actually, the promise goes all the way back to your name Elijah. Folks in the Gospels mistook John the Baptizer for the prophet by whom you are named.

The difference between the baptism with which John baptized and the baptism into which you’ve been baptized is often misunderstood in churches or missed by Christians altogether, but the distinction couldn’t be more critical, Elijah. 

John invited people to repent of their sins, get their act together, turn their lives around, and be baptized. John’s baptism was a work we do- we’re the active agents in John’s baptism. 

John’s baptism was a work we do in order to solicit God’s pardon.

Our baptism is a work God does. Our baptism is not a work that solicits God’s pardon. It celebrates the work God has already done to pardon us. John’s Baptism was a baptism of repentance. Our baptism is a baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection; therefore, it’s a baptism of righteousness— a gifting of righteousness not a giving of repentance.

Let me put it another way, little man. 

To answer the rich young ruler who queries, now that you’ve died with Christ, Elijah, here’s what you must do in your Christian life: _______________.  

Nothing.

As Paul insists in Galatians— and give it time, Elijah, you’ll soon enough discover we’re all Galatians deep down: Christ + Anything Else = No Gospel at All. 

We’re all born lawyers, Elijah. We do better with conditions and contracts. We’re not good at remembering such math. Like lawyers, we’re better with contracts. Conditions make sense to us not the unbalanced equation called grace. We prefer to parse our piety in if/thens, not realizing that, in doing so, we sound like satan in the wilderness. 

Because God baptized you in to what Christ has done— his death (for sin) and resurrection (for justification)— there’s nothing you need to do now Elijah. In Christ, everything has already been done. You are forgiven, it’s full and finished— full stop. In that same letter to the Galatians, Paul says that in dying with Christ by our baptisms we have also died to the Law, to our religious doings. The good news, Elijah, is that you are not the good news. Because Christ won, you can never lose the freedom to lose. 

But the same letter to the Galatians amply illumines our proclivity to confuse this crazy good news for a bitter pill we refuse to swallow. 

Just wait until you have a truly close friendship, Elijah, or a lover or spouse. You’ll find out soon enough: to have your debt paid, gratis, is to grapple with a different kind of owing. Forgiveness is not a monotone word. Forgiveness is a word that kills as much as it makes alive, for accusation always precedes pardon in our ears. To hear “I forgive you of your sins” is to hear that you’re a sinner. We rush to respond to our forgiveness-ness in order to right the scales and to restore the balance of power. The Old Adam in you, Elijah, supposedly was drowned and killed in your baptism, but the Old Adam, as the adage goes, is a mighty strong swimmer.  And a system of merits and demerits, a quo for every quid, comforts the Old Adam in us who is addicted to control.

The Word who takes flesh gives himself to our flesh in particular words. The presence of the Word is in the words of grace promised to us. Instead, like Eve and Adam, we go looking for other words to trust. They’re usually the ones we tell ourselves with forked tongues: Do your best and God will do the rest. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Forgive but don’t forget.

Look it up in the Action Bible we gave you, Elijah. Looking for other words to trust is the very heart of sin.

Since I worry that your Dad is a closet pietist, let me make sure you’ve got the necessaries down, Elijah. Only after 15 in the years the pulpit did I realize I’d assumed the main thing— grace— and instead had been majoring in the minors every Sunday. Turns out, most church folks love singing “Amazing Grace” and will surely sing it with gusto at funerals but ask them to articulate the doctrine behind it and their music-making will turn to mumbling. Forgiveness, Christians say, comes to us solafide, by faith alone.We receive God’s forgiveness not by anything we do but by (not so) simply trusting God’s declaration that everything has already been done. We’re justified as a gift from God, Paul preaches.

God’s non-accusation of us is actual. 

It’s not something we achieve. It’s already been accomplished by Jesus. We only apprehend it by faith. 

Alone. 

What the Church has called the Great Exchange, Elijah, Luther compared to the exchanging of rings at a royal wedding where by her “I do” all that belongs to the bride becomes the groom’s possession, fully and irrevocably, and by the groom’s unconditional “I do” all that is his becomes the bride’s. The bible refers to the Body of believers as Christ’s bride; therefore, as Paul puts it, our sin becomes Christ’s irrevocable possession and his righteousness becomes our irremovable wedding garment. Jesus is the fattest groom ever having ingested all our iniquity and imperfection. There is nothing you need to do for this to be true of you. 

Like your Dad at a wedding, it’s simply pronounced, declared true of us, and not one of us nor any of our sins can tear it asunder. 

Nor can any of our our right-doing improve upon it. 
And very often our right-doing can tempt us to forget our perpetual need for it.

Despite all the evidence otherwise available to your eyes, Elijah, you are not only forgiven, you are perfect in God’s eyes because your imperfect record has been reckoned onto Christ— your rap sheet, however long or short it is by the time you read this, is forever his and his perfect record has been credited as yours. There is nothing for you to do to improve your relationship with God. 

Your trust is all you have to offer. Now, at first, this sounds like a crazy lopsided deal, right? Christ gets all the bad shit we’ve pulled and all the shit we ever will pull; meanwhile, we get all the good he accrued. And all we’ve got to do is trust that it is so?! 

It’s not called good news for nothing, Elijah. But the rub about “news” is that news necessarily comes from outside of you. News is a report of what another has done that impacts your life without you having done a thing. News might effect you but it isn’t about you, and if you’re not the content of the news then neither are you in control of it. As much as the ticker tape headlines that scroll across the CNN screen, this news of your forgiveness that’s received by nude faith— it can leave you feeling vulnerable. 

It’s no wonder Christians are never satisfied with the answer to the question “What must I do to be saved?” There is now no condemnation, the Apostle Paul promises. Nevertheless, to trust that promise alone is an enormous risk because it requires you to take the giver of that promise at their word. If there is any possibility of condemnation whatsoever, then nude faith, trust alone, is an outrageous, irresponsible gamble. 

Frankly, little man, it’s not until you’ve had this sort of free forgiveness practiced on you by another in your life that you realize how the forgiveness offered by God leaves you naked and utterly empty-handed.

To receive forgiveness by trust alone is to shove all your chips to the center of the table, go all in, betting not just the house but your eternal home, wagering that the one offering you free forgiveness is trustworthy. 

To do nothing but trust another who tells you your ledger is in the black is to trust that tomorrow or the next day or the day after next Wednesday, depending on what you do or what you leave undone, they’re not going to waylay you with a red ALL CAPS past due notice. Like Lady Justice wearing her blindfold, to receive free forgiveness by trust alone requires you to shut your eyes to the gauge on the scales and believe that the forgiving one will be faithful to their word. 

Free forgiveness can cut us down to a size we spend our whole lives posturing against. To be in the right with another you’ve got to do right by them- seek restitution, make reparations, repair the damage you did— that makes sense to us. It’s how we’ve arranged the world. It actually gives us more control than does the free offer of forgiveness. To be in the right with another is to do right by them might put you on somebody’s shit list but it at least leaves you in the driver’s seat for what will follow. Whereas to be in the right with another is to be declared right by them takes away everything from you and leaves you empty-handed. 

Faith alone in your promise of forgiveness is a total and complete disavowal of your own performance to merit it. 

If I have to earn your forgiveness, for example, then at least I’ll accrue evidence external to either of us to which I can point and justify myself later that I did all I could or which I can use as leverage against you should you withhold forgiveness. Look at all that I did to make it up to you and still it wasn’t enough, I’ve griped to more than just my wife. If forgiveness is free though then, like on my wedding day, I’ve got absolutely nothing to hold onto but you. I’ve got nothing to hold on to but my trust in you. To trust that you forgive me is to have faith you won’t use my debt later to burn me. 

Forgiveness isn’t cheap. 

It’s free. 

Yet, the bitter irony is this free forgiveness could cost you everything. 

Your Dad preaches about holiness often so I’ll end there. 

We are made holy, Elijah, we become more nearly the creatures God originally intended, not by ascending up to God in glory by way of our spiritual progress or pious practices or right-making doings. 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 flesh of 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 and comes down still, hiding behind ordinary, unimpressive words like “I forgive you.” 

The words which justify us are the very means that sanctify us. 
God does not change us by means of our religion. 
God changes us- makes us holy- through these particular words.

We never advance beyond being sinners who are declared by God to be forgiven, gratuitously so. Holiness is our getting adjusted to our justification. By returning daily in myriad ways to this news of our abiding sinfulness and God’s free forgiveness, we become holy. 

Or Paul puts it in a different letter, the holiness we already possess in Christ’s gift of perfect righteousness— it’s unveiled to us one degree at a time as we trust those words: you are forgiven. All is forgiven.

Your Aunt is an artist so she probably knows how Michelangelo famously said of his David statue: I just chipped away all the stone that wasn’t David. 

Likewise, God is the Artificer who, by his justifying word that convicts and forgives, blasts away all the bits of you that do not conform to the blueprints. 

For my money, though, Ali and I think you’re perfect.

Love,

Your Godfather

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Episode #174 – Luke Norsworthy: God Over Good

Compared to Luke, I feel like genetic garbage so I don’t know what he’s crabbing about in his new book God Over Good.

Luke Norsworthy is known for a few things: amazing hair, a CrossFit body most dads dream of, and a keen awareness that what we say about God has implications that go beyond the cliché. In his new book, ‘God Over Good,’ Luke explores what it means to save your faith by letting go of the expectations we place on God.

An excerpt from the book:

“God doesn’t always seem to be what we would call good. A good father wouldn’t make it so difficult to get to know him, would he? And if God is all-powerful, wouldn’t God ensure that we never suffer? Either our understanding of God is incorrect, or our definition of good is inadequate.

In a world that is messy and a church that is imperfect, it’s easy to let our faith be lost. But that doesn’t mean we have to lose God. It means we must consider that perhaps our idealized expectations are wrong.

With transparency about his own struggles with cynicism and doubt, pastor Luke Norsworthy will help you trade your confinement of God to an anemic definition of good for confidence in the God who is present in everything.”

Luke Norsworthy (MDiv, Abilene Christian University) is the senior pastor of the 1,500-member Westover Hills Church of Christ in Austin, Texas. A frequent speaker at universities, retreats, and conferences, he is the host of the popular Newsworthy with Norsworthy podcast on which he has rubbed shoulders with some of the brightest and most prominent voices in theology, including N. T. Wright, Barbara Brown Taylor, Mirsolav Volf, Walter Brueggemann, John Ortberg, and more. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.

http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/god-over-good/390350

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(Her)Men*you*tics: #32 — Priesthood

It is often said that one of the GREATEST ideas to come out of the Reformation was the priesthood of all believers. But what does that actually mean? Come to think of it what does priest and priesthood actually mean? Plus, Johanna doesn’t want a man telling her what to do.

Here’s the latest installment of (Her)Men*you*tics, working our way through the alphabet one stained glass word at a time.

Go to Amazon and buy a paperback or e-book of Crackers and Grape Juice’s new book,
I Like Big Buts: Reflections on Paul’s Letter to the Roman. 

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

 

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God is Not a Pharaoh

I continued our fall sermon series The Questions God Asks Us by preaching on Exodus 4 & 5: “Moses, what’s in your hand?”

With immigration and dreamers and children separated from their parents and a border wall still looming in the news, it would be easy to preach a certain sort of sermon on this scripture text. 

     It would be easy to preach a certain kind of sermon on this scripture. If you were draw a Venn Diagram between our world today and Pharaoh’s world, there’d be a lot of uncomfortable overlap in the middle. It’s hard to read the first chapters of Exodus and not hear the contemporary resonance. 

     Context is always key: the Exodus story starts out- what provokes the plot in the first place- is an immigration crisis. 

     This is important: the Israelites didn’t begin as slaves in Egypt; they became enslaved by Egypt. Pharaoh’s quandary wasn’t what to do with the dreamers, the children of illegal immigrants. His quandary was what to do with the children of the dream-reader, Joseph. 

     Between the Book of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus, famine- which in an agrarian society meant not only hunger but economic hardship- forced Joseph’s people, the Israelites, to migrate, as refugees, crossing over the border to their north in search of opportunity. 

    Sound familiar? 

Like I said, a certain sort of sermon almost writes itself. 

    When the Book of Exodus opens, Joseph the dream-reader has died and with him the favor he curried with Pharaoh. It’s not long that Jospeh’s in the ground before there’s grumbling about his people: 

Those immigrants…they have so many kids…they’re overrunning the place.

     That’s Exodus 1.9

Those illegals…they don’t assimilate…they should learn the language…they’re a drain on the system…they’re changing what made Egypt great.

     That’s Exodus 1.10 (Anne Coulter Paraphrase Edition) 

     So what’s Pharaoh do? 

     He doesn’t ask them to self-deport. He enslaves them. 

     He doesn’t build a wall. He forces them to build pyramids and cities. 

     Again- the Israelites didn’t start out as slaves in Egypt; slavery was a strategy to slow their birth rate. 

About 18 months ago— thanks to a spontaneous conversation with my mom and the help of ancestory.com I discovered I’m actually Jewish (which explains why I’m so funny). So as a Jew, I can tell you- it’s hard to keep our libido down. 

     Enslavement didn’t work as population control so then Pharaoh tries infanticide, ordering the abortion of Israelite boys mid-delivery- that’s how baby Moses ends up in an ark on the Nile. 

     And when abortion didn’t work, Pharaoh resorted to making their work cruel and arbitrary, forcing them not only to make bricks but to gather the materials for them without adjusting their quota a single brick.

     A certain kind of sermon almost writes itself. 

     It would be easy to preach a certain sort of sermon on this scripture. 

     I could easily unpack the context beneath this text, and I could connect it in an obvious intuitive way to contemporary issues from DACA to the wall to the refugee crisis, from sex-trafficking to the slavery stitched into your clothes to the number of black men killed by cops without a conviction. 

     And I could localize it for you, telling you about the dreamer in our own congregation or about the woman who worships here who works for Just Neighbors helping immigrants with their legal status.

     It would be easy to preach that sort of sermon on a scripture like this, and the imperative in that sort of sermon is obvious too: God is for them. 

     The oppressed, the enslaved, the marginalized; the immigrant and the refugee- God is for them. 

     In the Catholic Church, it’s called God’s preferential option for the poor. 

     In other words, God is on the side of the least, the lost, and the left behind. God does not forget them. God hears their cries. God does not forget them. 

     God is for them and- here comes the imperative- as God’s People you have a duty. 

     You have a duty to be for them too. You have a duty to stand up, to speak out, to resist, to persist against systems of inequality and exploitation and oppression. You have a duty to stand up and, like Moses to Pharaoh, say: “Thus says the Lord: Let my People go..” 

     It would be an easy sort of sermon to preach. 

And if I did, some of you would complain that I was preaching politics. You’d feel judged for being on the wrong side of the issues. 

Others of you would congratulate me for preaching bravely, which of course just means I was preaching what sounded like your politics. You’d feel justified that you’re on the right side of the issues.

     Of course, it’s not your politics or your politics but God’s politics. It’s God’s Law, God’s commands. It’s God’s Law that we are to treat the illegal immigrant on our land as a native born. Love them as yourself, God commands, for once you were an alien in Egypt. 

     It’s God’s Law that we love our neighbor as ourselves. 

     It’s God Law that we forgive the debts of the poor. 

     And Jesus gives us his own Law. 

     Jesus commands us to work for justice. 

     If someone asks us for a handout, Jesus commands us to give them that and more. Jesus commands us to feed the hungry as though the hungry were hm. And what’s even worse, Jesus doesn’t just command those actions. He commands that you do them for the right reasons. God judges not the deeds of your hands but the intentions in your heart, Jesus says, right before he says “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” 

     It would be easy to preach that sort of sermon on this scripture. 

     God is for them. 

     You have a a duty to be for them too. 

     Like Moses to Pharaoh, go and do likewise. 

     It would be easy to preach that kind of sermon and back it up with a list of God’s Laws. It wouldn’t be wrong to preach that sort of sermon- that sort of sermon gets preached in most churches most every Sunday. I’ve preached that sort of sermon myself.

     It wouldn’t be unbiblical to preach that sort of sermon- God’s commands are clear and uncompromising. 

It would be simple to preach a certain sort of sermon on this scripture, but I wonder- would it be the Gospel? 

Or would it- Would it take the good gift, the grace, that is the Gospel and turn it into a burden?

Would it turn the Gospel into a work of forced labor that leaves you exhausted and full resentment?

Would it leave you thinking of God as a kind of Pharaoh, with the same complaint for him on your lips as Moses at the end of chapter 5: “Why have you brought this trouble in my life, Lord?”

     In “The Strange Persistence of Guilt,” an article in The Hedgehog Review, Wilfred McClay, who is a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, argues that the modern world prophesied by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has not obeyed the script written for it. 

     Nietzsche, McClay reminds us, was confident that once God was functionally dead in western civilization and western culture was liberated from the slavey of religion then the moral reflexes we’d developed under that system of oppression would disappear. 

     We would be free, Nietzsche predicted. 

     After the West’s exodus from religion generally and Christianity particularly, all would be permitted as the bonds of the old morality were broken, especially, Nietzsche predicted, the bonds of guilt. 

     With the West’s exodus from Christianity, guilt would disappear. 

     Nietzsche believed guilt was an irrational fear promulgated by oppressive systems of religion and erected in the name of a punitive taskmaster God, McClay writes. 

     The modern secular age, Nietzsche promised, would usher in freedom, freedom from guilt. 

     He was wrong. 

     Strangely, McClay says, guilt has persisted as a psychological force in the modern world. Guilt hasn’t disappeared as Nietzsche augured. Guilt hasn’t even lingered. It’s metastasized, McClay writes, “into an ever more powerful and pervasive element in the life of the contemporary west.”

     Guilt hasn’t disappeared with the rise of secularism; it’s gotten worse.  It’s metastasized because of what McClay calls “the infinite extensibility of guilt, which is a byproduct of modernity’s proudest achievement: it’s ceaseless capacity to comprehend and control the physical world.” 

     In other words, McClay is saying what Uncle Ben says to Peter Parker: “With great power comes great responsibility.” 

     And in the modern world, we have more power over the physical world than we’ve ever had and, with it, we’ve discovered what Uncle Ben didn’t bother to mention to Peter Parker: “With great responsibility comes great guilt.”

    McClay puts it more eloquently than Stan Lee: “Responsibility is the seedbed of guilt.” 

     And this sense of responsibility and accompanying guilt, McClay argues, is exacerbated by a connected, globalized, 24/7 world. In such a constantly connected world, he writes, “the range of our potential moral responsibility, and therefore our potential guilt, steadily expands.” 

     What Friedrich Nietzsche couldn’t foresee is how the interconnectedness of all things- available to us at our fingertips- means there is nothing for which we cannot be, in some way, held responsible. 

     It’s not just that you can’t go to Walmart without getting hassled by the panhandler at the light; it’s that now in this constantly connected world you can’t swipe your debit card at the supermarket without the screen asking you to give money to end childhood hunger or cancer or _________. 

     Says McClay: 

     “I can see pictures of a starving child in a remote corner of the world on my television, and know for a fact that I could travel to that faraway place and relieve that child’s immediate suffering, if I cared to. I don’t do it, but I know I could…

Either way, some measure of guilt would seem to be my inescapable lot, as an empowered person living in an interconnected world. 

Whatever donation I make to a charitable organization, it can never be as much as I could have given. I can never diminish my carbon footprint enough, or give to the poor enough, or support medical research enough, or otherwise do the things that would render me morally blameless…

In a world of relentlessly proliferating knowledge, there is no easy way of deciding how much guilt is enough, and how much is too much.”

     McClay goes on in his article to suggest that the reason our collective fuse is so short, the reason we’re so quick to blame and scapegoat and demonize and point the finger and virtue-signal, the reason we’re so easily outraged and offended, the reason we’re so eager to hide in like-minded tribes and jump down the other side’s throats is because we’re prisoners. 

     We’re captives to guilt. 

We’re pervasively desperate “to find innocence through absolution.” 

     But…he says

     As a culture, we’ve lost the means to discharge our moral burden. 

     We’ve lost the means to find forgiveness. 

     If McClay is correct- and I think it only takes a few seconds on social media to confirm that he is- then the sermon that would be easy to preach today is not the sermon you need to hear. 

     The other sort of sermon, the go and do sort of sermon- 

     It wouldn’t be wrong; it just wouldn’t be the Gospel. 

     It would be the opposite of the Gospel. It would be the Law not the Gospel, what the Book of Romans calls the way of death because it ends in guilt and frustration and, ultimately, despair because you can never do enough. 

     It’s true-

     God’s Law commands us to love our neighbor as ourself, no matter their skin color or immigration status. 

     God’s Law does command us to love the refugee among us. 

     God’s Law does command us to love our enemies and pray for them, to treat the poor and the desperate as through they were Christ, and to welcome the stranger. 

     And some of you live up to those commands better than others, but do you do so all the time? 

     For the right reasons? Because Jesus says if you’ve done his commands without your heart in it, it’s no different than not having done it all. 

     St. Paul says the purpose of the Law, the purpose of all those expectations and exhortations in scripture, is to shut your mouth up (Romans 3.19), to convict you that you are not righteous and on your own you cannot stand justified before God. 

     Martin Luther paraphrased that part of St. Paul as lex semper accusat: The Law always accuses. 

     That is, the purpose of the Law is to convince you that you’re a sinner in need of a savior. 

     The oughts of the Law (you ought to love your neighbor as yourself) are meant to reveal are all your cannots, that no matter how ‘good’ you are you fall short fall short. 

     The reason Jesus adds intention to action (God judges not the deeds of your hands but the intent in your heart), the reason Jesus ratchets up the degree of difficulty all the way to perfection (Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect) is so that we’ll have no other resort but to throw ourselves on the mercy of him who was perfect in our place. 

     “Christ,” Paul says, “is the end of the Law.” The Law’s obligations have been fulfilled by him. By his faithfulness all the way unto a cross. And there on the cross, your failures to follow the Law have been paid by him.

     The Gospel is not a list of demands that you have a duty to fulfill or fear failure. God is not a Pharaoh.

     The Gospel is the good news that on the cross God has met you in your failure and forgiven you. 

     You don’t need Christ to tell you that you should love your neighbor as yourself.
Every religion tells you that you should love your neighbor as yourself.
That’s not news.
That’s moralism.

     What is news; what is unique to Christianity alone; what is the Gospel-  Its the message that in Jesus Christ God became your neighbor and loved you as himself even though you loved him not. The Gospel is not a list of demands that you have a duty to fulfill or fear failure. 

    The Gospel is the news that God has met you in your failure. God has met you in your failure to love your neighbor as yourself. God has met you in your failure to give generously to the poor.  God has met you in your failure to be a good mother. God has met you in your failure to be a loving husband, to be a patient sister or a compassionate son, or an understanding daughter. 

      God has met you in your failure and God has forgiven you.

      This never stops being true for you. 

      No matter how many times you drive past the panhandler on the corner. No matter how many times you press ‘No’ on the supermarket checkout screen. No matter how many times you click through the latest outrage you know you should care more about. 

     God has met you in your failures and by his own blood said “I forgive you” so that your sins become his and his righteousness becomes yours, permanently and forever. 

     Your sins and failures of faith- they’re not just forgiven, they’re erased. “Your slate is more than clean. It’s brand new, perpetually so.”

     It’s true that God hears the cries of the oppressed and the exploited. It’s true that God does not forget them. But the Gospel is that when it comes to your sins, God does forget. The absolution that is in Christ’s blood is a kind of divine amnesia, a forgiving and forgetting of all your failures to be faithful. 

     This is true for Moses, who killed a man and buried him in the sand. 

     And it’s true for Pharaoh, whose heart was already hard on his own.

     And it’s true even for you. It’s God’s grace. It’s the gift we call the Gospel. And it’s not a cheap gift. It’s not even an expensive gift. It’s free. It’s free.

     Professor McClay concludes his essay with this assertion: 

“For all its achievements, modern science has left us with at least two overwhelmingly important, and seemingly insoluble, problems for the conduct of human life. First, modern science cannot instruct us in how to live, since it cannot provide us with the ordering ends according to which our human strivings should be oriented. In a word, it cannot tell us what we should live for.

And second, science cannot do anything to relieve the guilt weighing down our souls, a weight that seeks opportunities for release but finds no obvious or straightforward ones in the secular dispensation. 

  Instead, more often than not we are left to flail about, seeking some semblance of absolution in an incoherent post-Christian moral economy that has not entirely abandoned the concept of sin but lacks the transactional power of absolution. What is to be done? 

One conclusion seems unavoidable. Those who have viewed the exodus of religion as the modern age’s signal act of human liberation need to reconsider their dogmatic assurance on that point. Indeed, the persistent problem of guilt may open up an entirely different basis for reconsidering the enduring claim of Christianity.”

     That’s a history professor, not a preacher. 

     Translation:

     The certain sort of sermon that would be easy to preach on a scripture like today’s text- it’s not the message the modern world needs to hear. The world doesn’t need more moralism. The world needs the Gospel. 

     Standing up, speaking out, resisting systems of injustice and oppression- those are needful, noble acts.
But they are actions that don’t need the Church. 
The Church is not the only people standing up and speaking out for social justice.
By contrast, the Church is the only People on earth commissioned by God with the authority to announce, to victims and victimizers alike, “Your sins are forgiven.”
That’s our unique vocation.

“What’s in your hand?” God asks Moses. And what God places in Moses’ hand— it’s purpose—God says its so that the people may believe what has been revealed. And the work God puts in our hands— it’s purpose— its so the world might believe the gospel that has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. 

     Just as the Old Testament declares that God called Moses to be his ambassador to Pharaoh to announce “Let my people go,” the New Testament declares that God has called you and I, by our baptisms into his Holy Church, to be ambassadors of the Gospel.

     And the Gospel is not the Law. 

     The Gospel is not a list of demands you have a duty to follow but the news, the good news, that in Jesus Christ you have been delivered from what you deserve. 

     Your slate is isn’t just clean; it’s new every morning. 

     The God who does not forget his People does forgive and forget their sins. 

     The Gospel is not “Go and do…”; the Gospel is “It has been done.” 

     This news- 

     This news of what has been done, this news of the free gift of God- this alone makes the “Go and do” possible. 

     You can go and do only when you know it has been done (because no one deserves for you to go and do to them out of guilt, no one deserves to be the object of your self-justification). 

     This news alone, attached to wine and bread, liberates us to stand up for justice and work against oppression. This news alone—only the Gospel—has the power to transform duty into choice and slaves into children. 

 

     

     

     

     

 

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Episode 173 – Natasha Robinson: A Sojourner’s Truth

Natasha S. Robinson joins the podcast to talk about her new book, ‘A Sojourner’s Truth.’ Natasha is a Naval Academy graduate, served in the United States Marine Corps, was the Senior Diversity Admissions Counselor in the Office of Admissions at the Naval Academy, and is a graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Charlotte.

The journey of one of us is the journey of all of us. In these pages we are drawn into the journey of a young African American girl from South Carolina to the United States Naval Academy and then into a calling as a speaker, mentor, writer, and teacher. Intertwined with Natasha Sistrunk Robinson’s story is the story of Moses, a young leader who was born into a marginalized people group, resisted injustices of Pharaoh, denied the power of Egypt, and trusted God even when he did not fully understand or know where he was going. Along the way we courageously explore the spiritual and physical tensions of truth-telling, character and leadership development, and bridge building across racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender lines. You are invited to bring along your story as well – to discover your own identity, explore your truth-revealing moments, to live unafraid, and to gain a deeper sense of purpose. You can find her work here:

http://www.natashasrobinson.com/books/

Before the interview…Help support the show! 

Go to Amazon and buy a paperback or e-book of Crackers and Grape Juice’s new book,
I Like Big Buts: Reflections on Paul’s Letter to the Roman. 

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

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(Her)Men*You*tics: #31 – Pentecost

After a summer hiatus (the trouble when 1/3 of your podcast posse is from Sweden), the (Her)Men*You*tics ‘channel’ of Crackers and Grape Juice is back. We’re working our way through the alphabet, one stained glass word at a time. We left off with the letter ‘P’ so we’ve got ‘Pentecost’ for you this week and ‘Priest’ next week.

What’s the difference between spirit and the Spirit? What’s the role of religious experience and is religious experience by virtue of being a religious experience the work of the Holy Spirit? How do so often miss that Jesus teaches the Holy Spirit’s chief function will be to convict us of our sin and convince us of what scripture testifies about him?

Before the interview…Help support the show! 

Go to Amazon and buy a paperback or e-book of Crackers and Grape Juice’s new book,
I Like Big Buts: Reflections on Paul’s Letter to the Roman. 

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

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If Paul Can Contradict Jesus on Divorce, Why Can’t We Reevaluate Paul on Homosexuality?

This coming Sunday’s lectionary Gospel reading from Mark 10 gives us Jesus’ teaching on marriage and divorce:

2Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” 5But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

10Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; 12and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

Catch that?

According to the incarnate Lord, the one Word of God in the flesh:

Divorce = Adultery

Amidst the current conflict over sexuality in the United Methodist Church, it’s difficult to read scripture passags about marriage and not think of the pressing debate and potential schism. In light of the lectionary text, I can’t help but wonder:

If Paul can contradict Jesus on divorce, why can’t we reevaluate Paul on homosexuality?

In his essay, Reading and Understanding the New Testament on Homosexuality, biblical scholar (and my former teacher) Brian Blount advocates the position that certain biblical ethical prescriptions may be modified by the contemporary church, and, in their modified form, they may more faithfully reflect Paul’s own theological perspective.

Let me say that again-

We can modify certain biblical ethical prescriptions and, in modifying them, more nearly model the St. Paul’s own theological posture.

Blount cites Paul himself as the precedent for the ethical re-evaluation of homosexuality.

For example, Blount points out, the Gospel writers are all unanimous in their presentation of Jesus’ views on divorce.

Jesus, according to the Gospels, is unambiguously against divorce.

Only in Matthew’s Gospel does Jesus allow the stipulation of divorce in cases of sexual infidelity (5.31-32).

In his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul acknowledges Jesus’ teaching on this matter (1 Corinthians 7.10-11).

Nonetheless, in that same passage, Paul claims his own apostolic authority and allows for a reevaluation of Jesus’ teaching based on the context of the Corinthian congregation.

In other words, when it comes to divorce, Paul offers up his own ‘You’ve heard it said (from the lips of the Word Incarnate) but I say to you…’

The church at Corinth was struggling to apply their faith in a thoroughly pagan culture. Aware of the destructive effects pagan culture potentially posed to an individual’s and a church’s faith, Paul changes Jesus’ tradition and allows for divorce in the case of Christians who are married to unsupportive pagan partners.

In light of the Corinthian’s cultural context, and even though it stands in contrast to Jesus’ own teaching in the Gospels, Paul believes this ethical modification to be consistent with his larger understanding of God’s present work in and through Jesus Christ.

Such ethical deliberation and re-evaluation is not dissimilar to the process of discernment that the Christian Church later undertook with respect to scripture’s understanding of slavery.

Just as the Holy Spirit guided Paul to re-evaluate Jesus’ teaching in light of a different present-day context, Brian Blount posits that the Holy Spirit can and does lead Christians to re-evaluate Paul today.

When it comes to the matter of homosexuality, Blount argues that Romans 1 understands homosexuality as one symptom among many of the fallen world’s idolatry. That is, Paul does not view homosexuality as a sin deserving of God’s future wrath; Paul views homosexuality as a sign that the world is already suffering God’s wrath.

Our contemporary situation is different, according to Blount.

If it is possible for contemporary Christians to concede that a homosexual person need not be an idolater, then Paul’s chief complaint may be removed, opening the way for Christians to re-evaluate Paul’s ethical prescriptions in a faithful manner.

It becomes possible then, Blount says, for Christians to conclude that faithful, monogamous, homosexual relationships can be consistent with God’s present-day redemptive activity.

It’s possible for Christians today to say faithfully ‘You’ve heard it said (from Paul) but, with the Spirit, we say to you…’

 

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His Wife Knows the Worst about Him

Sitting here at Starbucks, I’m working on a funeral sermon. Everyone— from the moms in their yoga pants to the middle eastern-looking guy making deliveries— is talking about it.

“Do you think Kavanaugh’s wife knows those terrible things about his past?” the college girl at the table behind says to her study partner.

I looked over at them and outed myself as an eavesdropper:

“I’m sure she knows even worse things about him. She’s married to him after all.”

While the truth behind the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh yet eludes us, this much we can know for certain. His wife knows far worse things about her husband than any of the allegations against him.

All wives do of their husbands.

All husbands do of their wives.

There’s a trashy, cringe-worthy story in the Bible about an intense romance and an even more intense deception. In fact, I love to read it at weddings because I think it’s the story of every romance that results in rings and vows. Leave it up me and I’ll choose 1 Corinthians 13, with its pablum about love being patient and kind, never out of ten times. Leave it up to me and the story I’ll choose is the story of Jacob and Rachel (and Leah!) in the Book of Genesis. In the tradition of Christ at Cana, Jacob probably has a few drinks more than he should at his wedding to Rachel, and then he has a few more. Then, drunk, Jacob stumbles into bed.

The morning after:

Jacob rolls over in bed. Lying next to him is not Rachel but Laban’s other daughter, Leah, the less lovely, maybe less love-able, and certainly the one harder for Jacob to love.

Jacob’s is the story of every marriage.

One day you wake up, and you expect to find Rachel, the person for whom you fell, and you instead discover Leah, someone unfamiliar and maybe disappointing to you.

Jacob’s is the story of every marriage.

Like Jacob, we marry Rachel and Leah.

Like Jacob, one day you wake up and you realize you married not only your spouse’s best self but their unlovely, unloveable self too.

You married the person whom you deeply admire, and the person with whom you will often be deeply ashamed.

You married the person whose admirable qualities shine in the light, and the one who hides their flaws and foibles in the darkness. And they married you.

All of us bring an unlovely, and maybe, to our mate, even unloveable, Leah to the marriage bed. Married or not, adults and kids, we’re all simultaneously at once Rachel and Leah.

Give it time, your marriage will cast your shadow self out into the light. All the old arrangements of bed and board then will have to be rethought or thrown out altogether. Every relationship is fraught and folly because we never fully understand another person. Every person brings to the relationship both a lovely and loved “Rachel” as well as an unlovely and possibly unloveable “Leah.”

The philosopher Alain de Botton insists in The Course of Love that “Expectations are the enemies of love.” Expectations are the enemies of love, de Botton says, because expectations, born as they are by infatuation and passion, pop songs and princess weddings, overlook one central fact about people in general.

Everyone has something substantially wrong with them once they become fully known.

Every spouse sure enough knows what the Church already learned long ago. We remain, simultaneously so, Rachel and Leah. We are always the self we present and its shadow, sinner and saint. Were it otherwise, we wouldn’t need God’s grace.

Fortunately (or, depending on your point of view, offensively), the Gospel isn’t about what we in our secret selves do. The gospel is about what’s declared of you.

The reality is that you’re already and simultaneously several someone elses and all of them, in Christ, are loved and justified. The gospel isn’t about becoming. There’s no becoming necessary. The gospel is the message: You are now, already and forever, holy and righteous.

You are a saint though you be a sinner. You’re Rachel and Leah both, at the same time.

And at the same, both of the yous you call you are loved without condition.

This means the trick, when it comes to relationships, is to learn how to love the people in your life, their Rachel and their Leah, according to that same grace. It’s only when you’ve seen all that is unloveable in another, yet choose to love them anyway that you’ve loved in the way Christ loves us— Christ, who, as St. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, does not count our trespasses against us but became all of our wrongdoing so that we might become his righteousness.

Who knows what the ongoing investigation into Dr. Blasey Ford’s allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, but every Christian knows what every spouse already knows: the human heart— his in particular— is a more complicated ying/yang of sinfulness and sanctity than our black and white headlines can afford.

The way Kavanaugh’s story gets parsed in our partisan, politicized culture we’re led to believe— naively so— that he’s either an upstanding choir boy or a hypocritical villain. Only his wife knows that, to some still not yet known extent, he’s both.

As, to some extent or another, are we all.

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