Jason Micheli's Blog, page 117

Why You Can Trust the Jesus Story: The Dirty Word on Jesus’ Lips

Read it again. The lectionary Gospel for this coming Sunday in Mark 7.

Jesus doesn’t just call her a dirty word.

At first, in Matthew’s version, he ignores her completely, like she’s worse than a dog, like she’s not even there.

And then, after the disciples try to get rid of her, Jesus basically says there’s nothing I can do for SOMEONE LIKE YOU. I don’t have any spare miracles for SOMEONE LIKE YOU.

For SOMEONE LIKE YOU I’m all tapped out.

And when she doesn’t go away, Jesus calls her a dog.

The bread (of life) is meant for the children (of God). For the righteous. For believers. For the right kind of people like me.

It’s not meant for DOGS LIKE YOU.

Jesus, the incarnate love of God, says to her.

And you can be sure that in Greek to her ears ‘dog’ sounded exactly like ‘witch’ with a capital B.

Just like in 1 Samuel 17.43 when Goliath taunts David with that word.

Just like in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus preaches that you ‘never give holy things to dogs nor pearls to swine.’

Now, like a pig, Jesus refuses to give anything holy to this woman and then calls her a dog.

Don’t you just love passages like this!

I do.

It’s because of passages like this one that you know the Jesus story is true.

has to be true. It’s too messed up not to be true.

Think about it- if the Gospels were just made up fictions, then this passage today would never have made it into the Bible.

Just imagine how that conversation would’ve gone.

Just imagine the pitch among the writers:

Hey, I’ve got this new idea for the story- whole new angle.

I was thinking we do a change of scenery, put the hero in Gentile territory, have him rub elbows with the undesirable type.

And then we have this woman come to him looking for his help. Just like the woman with the hemorrhage in the first part of the script.

But I was thinking…what if we go the other way with it? You remember how we had that first woman grab at the hem of his garment for her miracle?

And how he looks around for who touched him so he can reward her faith- because that’s how compassionate he is.

So this time I thought we could change it up. Have him ignore the woman completely. Pretend like she’s not even there.

But get this: we don’t stop there. I was thinking that after she refuses to go away- because she’s just so wretched and pathetic and everything- we can have him call her a b@!$%.

Yeah, a b@#$%.

Isn’t that a grabber? Keep the audience guessing. He’s unpredictable. Is he going to respond with the love and mercy tack, or will he turn a cold shoulder and throw down an f-bomb?

You see- that would never happen!

You know the Gospel is true because if it were just made up, this story- along with the cross- would’ve been left on the cutting room floor.

It never would’ve made it in the Bible.

There’s no better explanation: Jesus really treated this woman like she wasn’t even there, not worth his time, and then called her a dog.

So if he really did do it, then why? Why did he do it?

How do we explain Jesus acting in a way that doesn’t sound like Jesus?

It’s true that Jesus is truly, fully God, but it’s also true, as the creed says, that Jesus was fully, truly, 100% human.

So maybe that’s the explanation.

Maybe this Canaanite woman caught Jesus with his compassion down.

He’s human. It happens to all of us.

And it’s understandable given the week he’s had. Just before this, he was rejected by his family and his hometown friends in Nazareth. That’s rough. And right after that John the Baptist gets murdered. And everywhere he’s gone lately crowds chase him more interested in miracles than messiahs.

So maybe this Canaanite woman catches Jesus in a bad mood, with a little compassion fatigue. Sue him. He’s human.

Except the way Jesus draws a line between us and them, the way he dismisses her desperation and then drops a dirty word on her- it sounds human alright. All too human.

As in, it sounds like something someone who is less than fully human would do.

So how do we explain it?

You could say- as some have- that Jesus isn’t really being the mean, insensitive, offensive, manstrating jerk wad he seems to be here in this passage.

No, you could say, this is Jesus testing her.

He’s testing her to see how long she’ll kneel at his feet, to see how long she’ll

call him ‘Lord,’ to see how long she’ll beg and plead for his mercy.

He’s just testing her faith. You could say (and many have).

But if that’s the case, then Jesus doesn’t just call her a dog. He treats her like one too and he’s even more of jerk than he seemed initially.

WWJD? Humiliate her in order to test her? Somehow I don’t think so.

Of course, you could suggest that she deserves the treatment Jesus gives her, that she has it coming to her for the rude and offensive way she first treats Jesus.

After all, she comes to him- alone- a Gentile woman to a Jewish rabbi, violating his holiness codes and asking him to do the same for her.

Just expecting him to take on sin. For her.

So she gets what she has coming to her for bursting in on his closed doors; alone, approaching a man who’s not her husband, breaching the ethnic and religious and gender barriers between them and then rudely expecting him to do the same. If he’s rude to her, then you could argue that she deserves it for treating him so offensively first. And it’s true that her approaching him violates social convention.

It’s true: she not only asks for healing, she asks him to transgress the religious law that defines him.

All true.

But that doesn’t explain why NOW of all times Jesus acts so out of character. It doesn’t explain why NOW and not before he’s suddenly sensitive about breaking the Jewish law for mercy’s sake.

So, no, I don’t buy it.

Jesus ignores her.

Tells her there’s nothing he can do for SOMEONE LIKE HER. And then he calls her a dog.

A contemporary take on this text is to say that this is an instance of Jesus maturing, coming to an awareness that maybe his mission was to the whole world, Jew and Gentile alike. That without this fortuitous run-in with a persistent Canaanite woman Jesus might have kept on believing he was a circumscribed Messiah only. That she helps Jesus enlarge his vision and his heart.

I guess, maybe. But that doesn’t really get around the insult here.

Jews didn’t even keep dogs as pets- that’s how harsh this is. Dogs were unclean, scavenging in the streets, eating trash, and sleeping in filth.

And in Jesus’ day, ‘dog’ was a racist, derogatory term for Canaanites, unwashed unbelievers who just happened to be Israel’s original and oldest enemy.

Even if she helped him change his mind that doesn’t explain away his mouth. What’s a word like that doing in Jesus’ mouth?

How do we explain Jesus acting in a way that doesn’t sound like Jesus at all but sounds a lot more like us instead?

Of course, that’s it.

This is Jesus acting just like us.

To understand this passage, to understand Jesus acting the way he does, you have to go back to the scene right before it where Jesus has a throw down with the scribes and the Pharisees who’ve just arrived from Jerusalem to check him out.

Rather than attacking Jesus directly, they go after the company Jesus keeps. They take one look at the losers Jesus has assembled around him- low class fishermen, bottom feeding tax collectors and worse- and they ask Jesus the loaded question:

Why would a rabbi’s disciples ignore scripture?

Why would they eat with unclean hands (and unclean people)?

Their pointing out how Jesus’ disciples were the wrong kind of people was but a way of pointing out how they were the right kind of people.

Good people. Law-abiding people. Convention-respecting, morality-keeping, Bible-believing people.

And Jesus responds with a scripture smack-down of his own, saying that it’s not obeying the rules that makes you holy. It’s not believing the bible that makes you holy. It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles you, Jesus says. It’s what comes out of the mouth.

And whether or not what comes out of your mouth is the truth about what’s in your heart. That’s what makes you holy, Jesus says.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Except the disciples don’t get it. They think Jesus is just telling a parable, turning the tables on the Pharisees to show how they’ve got it all backwards; it’s Jesus’ disciples who are the right kind of people and the Pharisees who are the wrong kind.

The disciples don’t get that Jesus’ whole point is that putting people into ‘kinds of people’ in order to justify ourselves is exactly the problem.

The scene starts with the scribes asserting their superiority and the scene ends with the disciples assuming their superiority.

Turn the page. What does Jesus do next? To drive his point home?

He takes the disciples on a field trip across the tracks. Into Canaanite territory, a place populated by people so unclean the disciples are guaranteed to feel holier than thou. And there this woman approaches them, asking for mercy.

She’s a Canaanite. She’s an enemy. She’s unclean. She’s an unbeliever. She’s all kinds the wrong kind of person.

But on her mouth, coming out of her mouth, is this confession: ‘Son of David.’

Which is another title for ‘Messiah.’

Which according to Jesus should tell you a bit about what’s in her heart.

But the disciples don’t even notice. The’ve already forgotten about what Jesus said about the mouth and the heart.

So what does Jesus do?

He acts out what’s in their hearts.

He ignores her because that’s what’s in their hearts.

He tells her there’s nothing I can do for SOMEONE LIKE YOU because that’s

what’s in their hearts.

And because that’s what’s in their hearts, he calls her a dog.

What comes out of his mouth is what’s in their hearts: I’m better than you. I’m superior to you. I’m holier than you.

Speaking of hearts-

That word on Jesus’ mouth is so distractingly shocking to us, we almost miss that she doesn’t even push back on it.

She owns it. And then she doubles down on her request for mercy:

‘Yeah, Jesus, I am a dog. I am a witch with a capital B. I am worthless. I am a loser. I am undeserving. I am a sinner. I am the wrong kind of person in all kinds of ways, but- hey- have mercy on me…’

Is how it reads in the New Revised Jason Version.

She embodies what Jesus says in Luke’s more white-bread Gospel, when Jesus says:

‘Who is justified before God? The religious person who prays thank you, God, I am not like that sinner, or the person prays Lord Jesus Christ, Son of David, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

You see-

That’s what Jesus points out by play-acting, what he wants the disciples to see, what he wants us to see when he praises her ‘great faith.’

She doesn’t put up any pretense.

She doesn’t try to justify herself over and against any one else.

She doesn’t pretend that her heart’s so pure or her life is so put together that

she doesn’t even need Jesus all that much.

No, she says: ‘Yeah, I am about the worst thing you could call me. Have mercy on me.’

After the scribes and the Pharisees have not gotten it and thought that it’s their fidelity to scripture that justifies them.

And after the disciples have not gotten it and just flipped the categories and thought that it’s their association with Jesus that makes them superior.

And after Jesus so plainly says that what makes us holy is whether or not what comes out of our mouth is the truth about what’s in our heart.

She tells the truth about her pock-marked heart and she boldly owns up to her need.

And Jesus calls that ‘great faith.’

‘I’m about the worst thing any one could call me, but Jesus Christ, Son of David, mercy on me.’

If that’s great faith, then what it means to be a community of faith is to be a place for sinners.

So the good news is-

If you’re not fine but feel like everyone else is If you’re selfish or petty or stingy

If you yell at your kids too much

Or cheat on your spouse

Or disappoint your parents

If you lie to your friends or stare at a loser in the mirror If you gossip about your neighbors

Or think the worst about people you barely know

If you drink too much, care too little, fail at your job

If you think any one who votes for the other party is an idiot

If you’re a racist or an agist or a homophobe

If you’re a barely tamed cynic who thinks you’re smarter than everyone else

just about all the time

If your beliefs are so shaky you’re not even sure you belong here

If you think the insides of your heart would make others throw up in their

mouths

If you think you’re worthless, the wrong kind of person in all kinds of ways,

that the worst thing someone might say about you would stick…

Then the good news is: this is the place for you.

Because Jesus Christ came to save sinners.

He came to heal the sick and open the eyes of the blind.

He came to take our pock-marked hearts and fill them with his own righteousness. To make us holy.

But he can’t do that until what’s on our mouths confesses what’s actually in our hearts.

‘I’m about the worst thing any one could call me, but Jesus Christ, Son of David, mercy on me.’

If this is what great faith looks like, then the good news is that to be a community of faith means that this is not a place where we put up pretenses, hide behind piety, pretend that we’re pure of heart, use our beliefs to justify ourselves over and against someone else.

If this is what great faith looks like, then the good news is that to be a community of faith means this is not a place to act self-righteous or judgmental or superior or intolerant or in any way at all that suggests we think we’re the right kind of people.

Of course the bad news is-

That’s about the last thing people think of when they hear the word ‘Christian.’

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Mortalism Not Moralism

I closed out our summer series through Ephesians by preaching on Paul’s epilogue in the epistle, 6.10-20.

Dear Aaron, Ryan, and Maddie,

There have been a lot of funerals in the news this week. In all the coverage of the funerals of the Maverick McCain and the Queen of Soul, I don’t want the news of your deaths to get missed. You heard that right. Mark this day down, kids. Sunday, September 2, 2018. 

This is the day you died. 

Hold up, kids. 

You’re probably thinking that writing and reading a letter is an odd way to deliver a sermon. Well, back in the day, believe it or not, this white boy was the teaching assistant for the professor of black preaching at Princeton, Dr. Cleophus Larue. 

And one of Dr. Larue’s maxims was that in biblical preaching the form of the scripture text should determine the form of the sermon. So, if the text is a poem, the sermon should be poetic. If the passage is prophetic then the sermon could be prophetic, and if the scripture was a letter then the sermon could be epistolary. 

Today’s passage is a bit of a letter, about baptism. 

So I’ve written you a letter about your own baptisms.

Aaron, you’re the only one your parents burdened with a biblical name so I’m going to pick on you a bit here.

The story that is your namesake, Aaron, isn’t nearly as sweet as the song we sang at your baptism, “God Claims You.” The story that is your namesake, Aaron— the story of the Exodus and the Red Sea— is either grim news or good news depending on your perspective. The God of the Exodus, the God who conscripts Aaron into his service, is a God who delivers and drowns. God, Aaron learns along with his brother and sister on the shore of the Red Sea, is a God whose deliverance comes by drowning.

God works likewise with us, kids. Deliverance by drowning. Killing to make alive.

Which is to say, I’m not the one who baptized you, kids. Nor is the Church who baptized you. God baptized you, kids.

God baptized you. 

That’s why it doesn’t matter if you can’t remember it years from now when you feel as though you had no say in the matter. Your cooperation with it matters not at all because God was the one who baptized you.

You kids at your baptism were no different than the rest of us grown-ups in that the only thing you contribute God’s salvation of you is your sin. And your resistance.

God baptized you today. The Church was just the beach from which we stood and watched as bystanders, like the original Aaron and his siblings, and then dragged you ashore after the drowning deliverance was all over.

Actually, Aaron, your name is perfect for a baptism, for “the chief biblical analogy for baptism is not the water that washes but the flood that drowns.”

Maddie, Ryan- take your brother’s name as your clue, for the life of the baptized Christian is not about growing towards glory. Faith is more fitful and disorderly than gradual moral formation.

With water, today, God delivered you by drowning you.  

And with the promises we make to you, we commit you to a life that is nothing less than daily, often painful, unending death.

When your parents were married, the pastor likely began the ceremony by telling both Joe and Caroline to remember their baptisms. Marriage, the wedding liturgy implies, flows from your baptism, which makes death and drowning a sort of synonym for the married life. Trust me, when you’re married yourselves one day, kids, that won’t strike you as odd as it does today.

What we do to you with water, kids, St. Paul says, it is itself a betrothal.

In baptism, St. Paul says, through our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, our old self is not only drowned and killed but we also are clothed with Jesus.

By the water of baptism, whether our faith is as mighty as a mountain or as meager as a mustard seed, we wear Jesus Christ himself. Just as Reverend Peter prayed over the water, in baptism you are now clothed with Christ.

In the New Testament, the language of clothing is always the language of baptism. 

At the end of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul tells us to put on the whole armor of God; that is, to clothe ourselves in faith and truth and righteousness. To a mostly Gentile audience, St. Paul is simply alluding here to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, who promised that the Messiah would come forth from the root of Jesse. 

This Christ, Isaiah prophesied, would kill with the truth of his word. 

This Christ, Isaiah foreshadowed: would be girded with righteousness and faith. 

And remember, kids, though “put on the armor of God” sounds like something we do (have more faith, speak more truthfully, live a more righteous life, put on that armor) every Roman citizen among Paul’s listeners would known what we so often miss about this passage. 

A Roman soldier’s armor was not something the solider could put on by himself.

It was too heavy. The armor had to be put on you by another. The helmet laid on your head by another. The belt cinched tight behind you by another. 

The armor of God isn’t about something you do. 

The armor of God is about something done to you.

The armor of God (faith, truth, righteousness) is none other than Jesus Christ. To put on the armor of God is to clothe yourself with Christ. To put on the armor of God is to be baptized. To be baptized is to have God outfit you with Christ’s faith and righteousness.

You are dressed, in other words, kids, in Christ’s perfect score. That’s what that word ‘righteous’ means. You have been clothed in Christ’s perfect score. His faith has reckoned to you as your own faith.

Permanently. 

You got that? 

Permanently.

No amount of prodigal living can undo it. 

You might keep your mom and dad awake at night in high school, Ryan, but nothing you do henceforth can erase what God has done to you with water and his word.

Maddie, you are now clothed with the armor that is Christ himself, and, as such, you will always forever be regarded by God as though you were Christ. 

Pay attention kids-

By your baptism, what belongs to you is Christ’s now (your sin, all of it). And by baptism, what belongs to Christ is yours now (his righteousness, all of it).

That might not sound like a big deal to you now, kids. Wait until you’ve lived some and have sinned alot (against the people you love the most) and you’ll find out it’s exactly what the Church has always called it. It’s good news.

Because of your baptism, kids, you have an answer for anyone who ever asks you that terrible question: “If you died tomorrow, do you know where you’d spend eternity?” You can just tell them you’ve been baptized; therefore, you’ve already died the only death that matters. 

You see, kids, Christianity isn’t about moralism (though that’s the impression you’ll get a lot of time in a lot of churches).
Christianity isn’t about moralism.
Christianity is about mortalism. 

By dying with Christ in baptism, you never have to worry about how much faith or how little faith you have because by water you permanently possess the only faith God will ever count. 

You have Christ. 

Christ’s faith. 

You’ve been clothed with it. 

Despite how often we throw that word “Gospel” around, kids, it’s a word that’s often misunderstood, intentionally I think, by tight-sphinctered, self-serious pious types, religious folks who get nervous about the freedom the Gospel gives us.

Well, truthfully, I think they’re nervous about the freedom the Gospel gives to other people.

“For freedom Christ has set you free,” the Bible declares. But what you’ll hear instead, Aaron (most often, I should point out, in the Church) is that the freedom of the Gospel is really the freedom for you to be good and just and obedient. If you ever take a pyschology class in college you’ll learn the ‘freedom to be obedient’ that’s called cognitive dissonance.

You’ll hear these pious types too say things like “Yes, grace is amazing but we mustn’t take advantage of it.” Or else…they seldom finish that sentence but they make sure you catch their drift. They’ll imply as well that God’s forgiveness is conditioned upon the character of your life henceforth.

Aaron, Ryan, Maddie- 

Laminate this and tack it to your wall if you must.

The Gospel of total, unconditional, irrevocable freedom and forgiveness may be a crazy way to save the world, but the add-ons and alternatives you’ll often hear are not only nonsense, they’re the biggest bad news there is. 

We like to quote Jesus’ brother, James, and say that “faith without works is dead” but seldom do we stop to notice that just before that verse James also reminds us that if we have failed in any one part of the Law we are held accountable for all of it (and thus, before the Law, we stand condemned, dead in our sins). Under those conditions, faith with works required doesn’t sound like such good news, does it?

Christ is the end of the Law. Only that grace, given to us by baptism, makes our works anything other than futile. 

Hell yes, the wages of sin is death. But today, Sunday, September 2, 2018 in a grave of shallow water, you died. Thus, there are no wages left to be paid for any of your sins. As St. Paul says in Romans 8- the lynchpin, I think, of the entire Bible: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

No condemnation.

And thus, no conditions. 

Think of it this way, kids: all your sins from here on out are FREE.

All your sins are free. 

There is no cost to any of your sins (other than what they cost your neighbor).

You can dishonor your father and your mother, if you like. You can forgive somewhere south of 70×7 times. You can begrudge a beggar your spare coin. You can cheat on your girlfriend or your boyfriend. You can persist in your prejudice. I personally wouldn’t commend such a life but such a life has no bearing on your eternal life.

No matter how you regard your life, it has no bearing on how God regards you because you’ve been buried with God-in-the-flesh, Jesus Christ, and you’ve been raised to newness in him. 

Of course, the world will be a more beautiful place and your life will be a whole lot happier if you forgive those who trespass against you and give to the poor, if your love is patient and kind, un-angry and absent boasting. But God loves you not one jot or tittle less if you don’t do any of it.

“It rains on the righteous and the unrighteous alike,” Jesus teaches in the Gospels. And, imagining ourselves as the former instead of the latter, we always hear that teaching as the “offense” of grace. But turn the teaching around and you can hear the offense as Jesus intended it: 

God will bless you even if you’re bad.

The god who dies in Christ’s grave never to return is the angry god conjured by our angry hearts and wounded, anxious imaginations

I thought it important to write to you, kids, because Pat Vaughn keeps saying I’m not going to last long here, and as you grow up you’re bound to run into all sorts of quasi-Christians inoculated with just enough of the Gospel to be immune to it, and I don’t want them to infect you with their immunity.

They’re easy to identify, kids. 

Just look for the people who seem bound and determined to fill Christ’s empty tomb with rules and regulations. Such inoculated quasi-Christians come in all shapes and sizes and colors, but they’re not difficult to spot.

They’re the ones who make Christianity all about behavior modification, either of the sexual kind (on the right) or the social justice kind (on the left), making you mistakenly believe that God is waiting for you to shape up, to wake up, to do better, to be a better you or to build a better world.

Our building a better world or becoming a better self is all well and good, but that’s not the good news God attaches to water or wine or bread.

Someone named Aaron should know better.

St. Paul says in Ephesians 5 that the Devil gets at us primarily through deceit. Piggy backing on Paul, Martin Luther wrote that the Devil’s chief work in the world is to deceive us that this sin we’ve committed- or are committing- that sin out in the world that we’re just too busy to combat- disqualifies us from God’s unqualified grace.

If Luther’s right then the Devil is no place more active than in Christ’s Body, the Church, and the Devil’s primary mode of attack comes at us through other believers, through those freedom-allergic believers who take our sins to be more consequential than Christ’s triumph over them.

In the face of such attacks and second-guessing of our sins, Luther admonished us to remember our baptism.

Remember-

You’ve already been paid the wages of your sins. You’ve already been given the gift of Christ’s righteousness. There is therefore now or ever any condemnation for you. All your sins are free.

Aaron, Ryan, Maddie-

To those inoculated Christians I warned you about, this sort of freedom will sound like nihilism. They’ll fret: If you don’t have to worry about incurring God’s wrath and punishment by your unfaithfulness, then you’ll have no motivation to be faithful, to love God and their neighbor.

Without the stick, the carrot of grace will just permit people to do whatever they want, to live prodigally without the need to ever come home from the far country.

As easily as we swallow such objections, I don’t buy it.

For one thing, scripture itself testifies that the Law is powerless to produce what it commands (Romans 7); in fact, all the oughts of the Law only elicit the opposite of their intent. Exhorting another to be more compassionate, for example, will only make them less compassionate. 

I guarrantee you, kids, your parents know this to be true. 

Telling kids what to do is a good way to make kids not want to do it.
The mistake we grown-ups make in Church is in thinking we’re any different than children when it comes to what the Law tells us to do. 

The oughts of the Law only elicit the opposite of their intent. Only grace- only free, unconditional, for always, grace can create what the Law the compels. The hilarity of the Gospel, kids, is that the news that all your sins are free actually frees you from sinning. That’s why the Church can never afford to assume the Gospel and preach the Law instead. That’s why the Church gathers every week to hear the Gospel over and over again- because the news that all your sins are free is the only thing powerful enough to set you free from sinning. 

Skeptical? 

Take, as Exhibit A, Jesus Christ: the only guy ever on record convinced to his marrow of the Father’s unconditional love. And his being convinced that God had no damns to give led him to what? To live a sinless life.

Still not buying it?

Your dad is a chef and your mom a musician. Both of them work with scales and measures, kids, so let’s put a number on it. Make it concrete. Let’s say you had one thousand free sins to sin without fear of condemnation. What would you do? 

Would you hop from bedroom to brothel, like a prodigal son or a certain president? Maybe.

What’s more likely is that if you had a thousand free sins all your own then you’d stop being so concerned about the sins of others. You’d stop seeing sin everywhere you looked. You’d stop drawing lines between us versus them. You’d stop pretending, and you’d take off the masks that bind you to roles that kill the freedom Christ gives you. 

You’d take off the masks you think you need to wear. 

I mean, you’re already wearing armor.  Adding anything else onto you just sounds…heavy, a burden. 

Such a scenario, kids, 1K free sins- it isn’t the stuff of a hypothetical life. It’s the baptism we invite you to live into.

All your sins are free.

Don’t get me wrong, kids.

It’s not that the good works you do for the poor and oppressed don’t matter.

Rather, it’s that even the best good works of a Mother Theresa are a trifling pittance compared to the work of Christ gifted to you by water and the Word.

And even the poor and oppressed need this work of Christ gifted to them by water and the Word more than they need the good works of a Mother Theresa.

Look kids, brass tacks time:

Christianity isn’t about a nice man like me (I’m not even that nice) telling nice people like you that God calls them to do the nice things they were already going to do apart from God or the Church. If it’s just about the Golden Rule go join the Rotary Club, it’ll cost you less.

Christianity isn’t about nice people doing the nice things they were already going to do apart from God. Someone this week asked me why I keep repeating that message in sermon after sermon, and I replied: “I’ll stop preaching it just as soon as you actually start believing it.”

Your Mom is in the Navy, she knows: the world is a wicked and hard place.

And, in it, you will fail as many times as not.

You need only read the story that is your namesake, Aaron, to know that the world needs stronger medicine than our niceness and good works, particularly when our supposed goodness is a big part of the problem.

Your baptism, therefore, is not like soap. 

It doesn’t make you nice and clean.

It makes you new.

After first making you dead.

As you grow up, Aaron, you’ll discover people asking questions about that story whence comes your name, the Exodus story. Usually in between what philosophers call the first and the second naiveté, they’ll wonder: “Did God really drown all those people in the Red Sea long ago?”

And you, Aaron, and your brother and sister, because of today, will be able to answer them rightly: “God kills with water all the time.”

 

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Episode #168 – John Nugent: The Proper Sense of the ‘Prophetic’

“It’s a misuse of the word ‘prophetic’ to describe any speech Christians proclaim or exhort to unbelievers. It’s non-biblical. Only those who haven’t read the prophets would so describe ‘prophetic.’

“Protest that precedes prayer is theologically disordered.

“It’s pastorally cruel to exhort unbelievers who do not have the gift of the Holy Spirit to live up to scripture’s standards of justice.”

”There’s no urgency in either Testament for God’s People to get involved in the politics of the Principalities and Powers.”

”The Gospel is a gift. Christians cannot coerce the Kingdom, mandating its values upon the nation.”

”The prophets preached against injustice to fellow believers not to the unbelieving nations.”

John Nugent is professor of Old Testament at Great Lake Christian College and the author of Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church.  

In this episode John Nugent lays down all kinds of tweet bombs as he talks about preaching and politics, the proper role of prophetic preaching, and the current immigration crisis in America.

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. 

 

 

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If There’s a Reason for Everything, There’s No Reason to Worship

About a year ago, I spoke to a Dad whose 3 year old boy somehow climbed inside his truck in the Texas summer heat and couldn’t get out again. Dad was asleep taking a nap after church. Jacob was supposed to be down for a nap too.

His Dad still speaks of him in the present tense.

First, it broke my heart to hear his grief and guilt held barely at bay by the willful flat tone in his voice. Later, it pissed me off- filled me a mushroom-cloud-laying fury- to hear how the preaching and teaching of his upbringing- supposedly ‘biblical’ theology- did him damage by telling him that his little boy cooking inside his car could be chalked up to divine sovereignty.

“God has a plan” they told him.

“There’s a reason for everything.”

“Bullshit,” I told him, “a world where everything is the direct and immediate unfolding of God’s will is NOT the world as the New Testament sees it.”

For as often as we read it at funerals, we forget: the reason Paul works to reassure in Romans that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus is because there are Powers and Principalities in the world contending against God and working to separate us from him. The Apostle Paul reminds us of this fact in the epilogue of his letter to the Ephesians where he points to our baptisms as our armour in our world where our antagonist is not flesh and blood but the Enemy, the devil, the Power of Sin behind our present darkness.

Calvinists of a certain stripe often exult in the ‘mysterious’ ways God ordains tragedy to bring about ‘good,’ humble his creatures, display his sovereignty, and call all to repentance and faith.

Listening to Jacob’s Dad speak of Christians telling him to see in his son’s tragic death the ‘good news’ of God’s sovereign plan reminds me of Aristotle who cautioned, in so many words: If the happy expressions on your face don’t match the godawful sentiments coming out of your mouth, you’re batshit crazy.

Or a moral cretin, Aristotle would say.

Worse, the God conjured by such espousals of ‘sovereignty,’ the God who would will a little boy’s death for any reason, eternal or otherwise, is, quite simply, evil.

Evil is not good just because God is supposedly the One doing it.
Better to say- God cannot do evil exactly because God is good.

The ancient Christians believed that not even God- who is goodness itself- can violate his eternal, unchanging nature. God cannot, say, use his omnipotence to will violence, for to do so would contradict God’s very nature.

For God to be free and sovereign, then, is NOT for God to do whatever God wills. For God to be free and sovereign is for God to act unhindered according to God’s nature.

Those who claim “God has a reason for______” suppose that God has no eternal nature which limits, controls or guides God’s actions. God is free to do whatever God wants, and those wants are not determined by anything prior in God’s character. If God wants to will the death of a little boy trapped inside a hot car, then God has the freedom to will Jacob’s death, no matter how inscrutable and unnecessary his death seems to us.

To which I say as I said to Jacob’s Dad: bullshit.

Jacob’s Dad asked for book suggestions. What theologians could he read to find a different God than the god who supposedly willed his family guilt and grief for the shits and giggles some call ‘sovereignty.’

I told Jacob’s Dad about my teacher during my days at UVA, David Bentley Hart.

In his little book The Doors of the Sea DBH recalls reading an article in the NY Times shortly after the tsunami in South Asia in 2005. The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife  and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent any of his four children or his wife from being swept to their deaths.

In the article, the father recounted the names of his four children and then, overcome with grief, sobbed to the reporter that “My wife and children must have thought, ‘Father is here….he will save us’ but I couldn’t do it.”

In the Doors of the Sea, Hart wonders: If you had the chance to speak to this father, in the moment of his deepest grief, what should one say? Hart argues that only a ‘moral cretin’ would have approached that father with abstract theological explanation:

“Sir, your children’s deaths are a part of God’s eternal but mysterious counsels” or “Your children’s deaths, tragic as they may seem, in the larger sense serve God’s complex design for creation” or “It’s all part of God’s plan.”

Hart says that most of us would have the good sense and empathy not to talk like that to the father. This is the point at which Hart takes it to the next level and says something profound and, I think, true:

“And this should tell us something. For if we think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them.”

And if we mustn’t say them to such a father we ought never to say them about God.

Hart admits there very well could be ‘a reason for everything’ that happens under the sun that will one day be revealed to us by a Sovereign God in the fullness of time. He just refuses to have anything to do with such a God.

Like Ivan Karamazov and evidently unlike too many of the Christians Jacob’s Dad encountered along the way, Hart wants no part of the cost at which this God’s Kingdom comes. Hart’s siding with suffering of the innocent is a view profoundly shaped by the cross. It seems to me that his compassion for innocent suffering and disavowal of ANY explanation that justifies suffering comes closer to the crucified Christ than an avowed Christian uttering an unfeeling, unthinking platitude like ‘God has a plan for everything.’

Contra the false teaching of the “God has a plan…” variety:

The test of whether or not our speech about God is true isn’t whether it’s logical, rationally demonstrable, emotionally resonant or culled from scripture.

The test is whether we could say it to a parent standing at their child’s grave.

To preach a sovereign God of absolute will who causes suffering and tragedy for a ‘greater purpose’ is not only to preach a God who trucks in suffering and evil but a God who gives meaning to it.

A God who uses suffering and evil for His own self-realization as God is complicit in suffering and evil.

The Gospel, that Easter is God’s (only) response to suffering and death is something far different.

As Hart writes:

“Simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel — and none in which we should find more comfort — than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.”

“Yes, certainly, there is nothing, not even suffering and death, that cannot be providentially turned towards God’s good ends. But the New Testament also teaches us that, in another and ultimate sense, suffering and death – considered in themselves – have no true meaning or purpose at all; and this is in a very real sense the most liberating and joyous wisdom that the gospel imparts.”

“The first proclamation of the gospel is that death is God’s ancient enemy, whom God has defeated and will ultimately destroy. I would hope that no Christian pastor would fail to recognize that that completely shameless triumphalism — and with it an utterly sincere and unrestrained hatred of suffering and death — is the surest foundation of Christian hope, and the proper Christian response to grief.”

In other words,
if there is indeed a reason for everything,
if there is a reason for why Jacob was lost to his Dad and his Mom,
then there is no reason to worship God.
Not because God does not exist
but because he is not worthy of our worship.
I asked Jacob’s Dad what he wanted to hear God say to him when he arrived in heaven. He paused, hedging against the hint of sacrilege, and said “I’m sorry.”  Far from sacrilege, it struck me as the most faithful of responses.
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Episode #166 – Live Podcast: Q&A with Kendall Soulen and Johanna Hartelius

During our recent live podcast event in Hampton, Virginia we were able to open the space up for questions to our guests Dr. Johanna Hartelius and Dr. Kendall Soulen. In their responses they address kinship language, the fullness of God, proper names, true freedom, and what it means to be the church.

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. 

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Getting Off the Treadmill of the Law

 

“The Law says, “do this”  and it is never done. Grace says, “believe in this” and everything is already done.”

– Martin Luther, Thesis 26, Heidelberg Disputation

During his time at Union Seminary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously remarked that Protestantism in America had never gone through the Reformation; that is, the dominant ethos of American Christianity was pietism. Even in a post-denominational age, the Protestant Reformation continues to be relevant because Bonhoeffer continues to be correct.

Pietism continues to be the dominant key in which both Evangelicalism and Mainline Protestantism perform the Gospel, preaching the Law without distinction from the Gospel in ways that manifest as either moralism on the one hand or turn-and-burn brimstone, which forgets Christ has already closed the abyss between God and us, on the either.Neither version of pietism reflects the Reformation’s recovery of the Gospel of justification through faith alone by grace alone in Christ alone.

Against Martin Luther, evangelical pietism in America, in its best forms, posits a continuous self and focuses not on how God works to condemn us as sinners and justify us for Jesus’ sake but instead on faith as a program for greater spiritual self-improvement.

The emphasis on spiritual self-improvement is the root that all too often flowers into Christianity as behavior modification.

Mainline Protestants, meanwhile, tend to be what Mark Mattes calls “secular evangelicals” who’ve undermined the evangelistic thrust of the Gospel by instead working “to use the Church at the national level to pressure governmental agencies to conform to its particular version of peace and justice.” 

Put simply, what most Protestants hear proclaimed week in and week is one of two flavors of pietism.
From Evangelicals it’s Become a Better You.
From Mainline Protestants it’s Build a Better World.

Mainline Protestants hate Joel Osteen, I suspect, because he’s but the inevitable product of a shared theology.

The assumption conveyed in congregations is that, yes, Christ died to cover your sins (if sin language is even used) but now we have a responsibility to play a part in salvation and the moral progress of self and society. This emphasis on our agency and ability to choose God and the good by our nature is called Pelagianism. Not only is it ripe for self-righteousness, it was condemned as a heresy 1500 years ago, a form of it, Semi-Pelagianism, is confused as our kerygma, our proclamation, by many Christians.

This is a far cry from the Reformation’s reclamation of the announcement from the Apostle Paul that, apart from any of our religious doing (Law), God has shown us sinners grace in Jesus, given us Christ’s righteousness as our own, and gifted this to us through a faith predicated on his faithfulness alone.

Instead I think what many Protestants experience is what Craig Parton describes:

“My Christian life, truly began by grace, was now being “perfected” on the treadmill of the Law.

My pastors did not end their sermons by demanding I recite the rosary or visit Lourdes in order to unleash God’s power; instead, I was told to yield more, pray more, care about unbelievers more, read the Bible more, get involved with the church more, love my wife and kids more.

Not until…some 20 years later, did I understand that my Christian life had come to center around my life, my obedience, my yielding, my Bible verse memorization, my prayers, my zeal, my witnessing, my sermon application.

I had advanced beyond the need to hear the cross preached to me anymore. Of course, we all knew Jesus had died for our sins, and none of us would ever argue that we were trying to “merit” our salvation. But something had changed. God was a Father all right, but a painfully demanding one. I was supposed to show that I had cleaned up my life and was at least grateful for all the gifts that had been bestowed…

The Gospel was critical for me at the beginning, critical now to share with others, and still critical to me into heaven, but it was of little other value. The ‘good’ in the good news was missing.”

Alot of ink has been shed to discuss the decline of worship attendance in America and the rise of the Nones and the Spiritual But Not Religious. As a pastor in a new parish, I meet folks regularly now who introduce themselves with the disclaimer “I used to attend that church.”

More often than not though the reason they give me for putting their church participation in the past tense is not changed beliefs but burnout.
They’re not Nones. They’re Dones. They’re exhausted from the treadmill of the Law

All over America, in red and blue churches alike, Mainline and Evangelical both, we’re exhausting people on the treadmill of the Law, exhausting them with expectations that, by their very nature, grate against the good news of the Gospel that they are justified by grace and reckoned righteous through Christ alone.

And always.

Maybe Bonhoeffer’s characterization of Protestantism in America was less an observation and more of a recommendation. Perhaps the Church would do well to heed Luther’s thesis from 500 years ago this April:

The Law says, “do this”  and it is never done. Grace says, “believe in this” and everything is already done.”

 

 

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Joel Osteen is Right- Go Ahead and Pray for that Parking Space

We prepped to record an episode for the podcast on prayer, which got me to thinking…

For all the grief I give Joel Osteen for his toothy grin, his Dapper Dan hair, his swarmy, snake-oil salvation sales pitch and his dilution of the Gospel to the basest of our American prosperity-driven desires, I have to admit Joel Osteen gets exactly right what so many other ‘enlightened’ or ‘faithful’ Christians get wrong.

Prayer.

If what you really want in your heart of hearts is to happen upon an empty parking space or to receive that promotion at work, then Joel Osteen thinks, by all means, go ahead and pray for the rock-star parking spot outside Nordstroms. If that’s what you really want, you should pray for it.

Pray for whatever you really want, Osteen says.
And I agree.

As a pastor in a mainoldline Protestant tradition, I know more Christians who are reluctant to pray than are ready to pray, and I’ve found that one of the primary reasons people find it hard to pray is that they pray for the wrong things.

That is, they pray for the things for which they think they’re supposed to be praying. They pray for ‘spiritual things,’ rather than the things they actually want.

Too often people feel they ought to want a cure for cancer or the end of 3rd world hunger when really they want a nice bonus at work so they can buy that new flat screen and so they pray for the former when the latter is who they really are.

But it would selfish and unChristian to pray for a TV instead of the hungry being fed, right?
No.
Joel Osteen doesn’t think so. And I don’t think so.

And neither did Hebert McCabe, the late Dominican philosopher.

Herbert McCabe, said that the distractions people experience in prayer are really their real wants and concerns breaking in their feigned, bogus wants and concerns that we think are the only proper ones for prayer.

“When you are really praying for what you really want you won’t be distracted” McCabe writes, “the prayers of people on sinking ships are rarely troubled by distractions.” 

Because all prayer is an entering into the life of the Trinity through the Spirit, McCabe taught that prayer is a matter of bringing ourselves- in the form of our wants and needs- before the Father.

If we don’t bring our authentic, flat-screen desiring selves to God but instead pretend to be altruistic, pious saints then we don’t really make contact with God at all.

As McCabe writes:

“Prayer of petition is a form of self-exploration and at the same time self-realization. If we are honest enough to admit our shabby infantile desires, then the grace of God will grow in us…it will slowly be revealed to us, precisely in the course of our prayer, that there are more important things that we truly do want. But this will not be an abstract recognition that we ought to want these things; we will really discover a desire for them in ourselves.” 

I have my doubts about syrupy Joel O’s authenticity; nonetheless, his angle on prayer is spot-on.

If parking-space wanting you is the genuine you then pray for the damn parking space instead of peace in the Middle East.
As in most things so with prayer and discipleship, you’ve got to start with where you are.

You can only become someone else, through grace, if you begin with who you really are.

Herbert again:

“We will never grow in the life of prayer if we begin by imagining that we are St John of the Cross. We have to begin with our own infantile imperfect grasping state. All that the Father requires of us is that we recognize ourselves for what we are. He will attend to the growing. He will grant the increase. Children will never mature if they are treated as adults from the age of two.” 

So maybe there’s a reason Joel O’s books and preaching are pablum. Maybe, just maybe, he recognizes what his audience does not- what more ‘sophisticated’ mainoldline Christians do not:

Just how childish we really are.

True prayer begins with owning it.

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Christian Century Article: Can Christians Really Transform Culture?

Here’s an article I wrote for the Christian Century Magazine, reviewing James KA Smith’s new book Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology. Here’s a snatch of it:

It’s not that Christian engagement with culture fails to result in transformation. It’s that Christians often are the ones who are transformed as the culture, controlled by the enemy, baptizes them through its own liturgies of false worship and disordered love…

 

Formed by the loves of the earthly city, we infiltrate the heavenly city’s outpost, where we, as culture crusaders, transform the church. This explains theologically what I’ve intuited as a workaday pastor: Christians’ primary loves and convictions are not formed by the church. Instead, secular liturgies, which are both omnipresent and effective, form the primary loves and convictions that Christians then bring with them to church…

 

People select churches based on the convictions in which the culture has already formed them. Those formed primarily by the liturgy of the flag will choose a Southern Baptist church where they know their values will be mirrored, while those formed primarily by the liturgy of individualism will opt for a mainline church where they know inclusiveness will be a shared value. We choose churches the same way we choose political parties. This is why so many Christians know so few Christians who disagree with them. It’s why our ecclesial culture so neatly replicates the polarization in our wider culture. And it’s why so few mainline pastors thought it odd that, when the Festival of Homi­letics was held in D.C. this year, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker spoke but no Republican politicians did…

 

Full disclosure: I’m a card-carrying member of the Hauerwas mafia. I’m moved by his vision of the church forming Christians into a contrast community. But I’m also sufficiently appreciative of Smith’s work to concede a point that he doesn’t make explicitly but that necessarily follows from his work: we the church are not anywhere near sufficiently forming Christians to achieve either Kuyper’s or Hauerwas’s proposal for public theology. We’re playing chaplain and cheerleader to people whose faith is being formed elsewhere, shaped by another who just might be the enemy.

Click over to read the rest. Here’s the link: https://www.christiancentury.org/revi...

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Captive Captivity

I continued our summer sermon series through Ephesians by preaching on Ephesians 4.1-14. 

“He didn’t realize the war was over, his battle posture in vain, and that what he thought was reality had been a fiction.”

Pay attention to the passive voice there- “…what he thought was reality had been made a fiction.” 

In January 1972, 2 American hunters encountered Shoichi Yokoi in the jungles of Guam. Yokoi was setting one of the fishing traps that had kept him alive for 30 years when the hunters happened upon him. A sergeant in the 38th regiment of the Imperial Army of Japan, Yokoi had been stationed on Guam in February 1943. When American forces captured Guam a year later, Yokoi and a handful of other Japanese soldiers resisted surrendur and retreated deep into the jungle whence they would emerge on occassion to attack their (former) enemies. 

The 2 American hunters who happened upon Yokoi 3 decades later marched him at gunpoint to the nearest police station where the sergeant told incredulous cops his story. 

Turns out, Yokoi knew all along Japan had surrendured to the Allies in 1945. He knew the war- it was finished. 

He knew he was free to live in a new world. 

He just didn’t want t o. So he resisted.

Instead he hid for 30 years, living in a cave in the jungle and surving on fish and fruit, snails and frogs. A tailor by training, Yokoi wove clothes from tree bark. “I chose to live,” he told police, “as though the hostilities were still raging.”

Yokoi was returned to Japan, but what was meant as a hero’s welcome for him was marked instead by ambivalence. Many Japanese were embarrassed by him. Younger Japanese in particular saw him as pathetic and mocked him for stubbornly sticking to a false reality. 

Yokoi himself, though he lived until 1997, was never at ease in the new, changed world. 

Again and again, he returned to Guam, visiting the cave in which he’d hid for decades. He even took visitors to see it. Back in Japan, Yokoi taught survival lessons. He taught others how to live in the world as he’d chosen it. 

The discovery of Shoichi Yokoi in 1972 sparked a Pacific-wide search for other soldiers who either hadn’t heard that the war was over or who, like Yokoi, hadn’t accepted that it was over. 

A couple of years later another soldier in the Imperial Army, Hiroo Onoda, was found living in a cave in the Phillipines. 

Onodo had just turned 83.

Unlike Yokoi, Onodo hadn’t heard the happy news that the war was over. 

As a Manilla newspaper said of him: “He didn’t realize the war was over, his battle posture in vain, and that what he thought was reality had been a fiction.” 

Onoda had such a difficult time believing the news and adjusting to it that, rather than return to a home he no longer recognized, he emigrated to Brazil where he lived out his last few years.

———————-

Our arranged marriage called Methodist itinerancy is a month old this Sunday. I’ve been here long enough now to know what you’re thinking at this point in the sermon. 

What does this have to do with the scripture text, Jason?

I’m glad you asked. 

In order to understand what Yokoi and Onoda have to do with what the Apostle Paul tells us today about Christ making captivity itself a captive and what he tells us before that in verse 3 about “maintaining our unity in the bond of peace,” you must first understand what Paul means by the s-word. 

Sin. 

Only when you understand that s-word can you begin to appreciate what St. Paul means by that other s-word, salvation. If your understanding of the former s-word is too small, your awe over the latter s-word will be too slight. Now, the rap against St. Paul, as everyone already knows, is that the dude talks a lot about sin. It’s true. Paul talks about sin more than anybody else…except Jesus. 

Everyone knows Paul spills a lot of ink on sin, but few stop to notice the way in which Paul writes about sin. Few notice how Paul conceives of sin. Across his letters, approximately half the time Paul uses the word sin, hamartia, he does so as the subject of verbs. 

I’m going to say that again so you get it:

Paul makes sin the subject of verbs.

He makes sin not the verb we do. 

He makes sin the subject of verbs. 

He makes sin the doer of its own verbs. 

Listen:

“Sin came into the world…”

“Sin increased…”

“Sin dwelt…”

“Sin produced in us…”

“Sin exercised dominion…”

And the word Paul uses there for ‘dominion’ in Greek is the same word Paul uses later for Jesus, kurios. It means ‘lord.’ 

“Sin exercised lordship over us…”

Despite how we most often think about it and speak of it, in the New Testament sin does not primarily describe human behavior. 

Sins, scripturally speaking, are not  misdeeds or misdemeanors- sin is not missing the mark. 

In the New Testament, it’s Sin. 

It’s singular, and you will understand it best if you give it a capital S. 

In the New Testament, Sin is not a problem we possess. 

Sin is a Power that possess us- a hostile Power.
 A Pharaoh, that stands over and against God, enslaving us in captivity. 

If I teach you anything in my time at Annandale Church, then let it be this interpretive key. In the New Testament, all our little s sins- our avarice and our rage, our begrudging and our deceit, our violence and our self-righteousness and our racism- are but ways our captivity to the Power of Sin manifests itself. They’re the ways we clank the chains to which a Power who is not God has clasped us.

As my teacher Beverly Gaventa puts it:

“Sin is an anti-God Power, synonymous with the Satan, Death, and the Devil, whose defeat the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has already inaugurated.”

The cross, as St. Paul understands it, is not just about Christ bleeding and dying for your little s sins. The cross, as Paul sees it, is a cosmic battle- a battle God wages for you against the Power of capital S Sin. This is why Paul so often uses militaristic imagery, especially at the end of Ephesians where he talks about the armor of God. 

Sin isn’t just a mark on your rap sheet. 

Sin is an Enemy with a captial E, an Enemy with a resume all its own. 

If you don’t get this you don’t get it:  If you think of sin as just your problem instead of an Enemy from whom God in Christ rescues you, then it’s easy for you to end up with a god who seems to have a forgiveness problem. 

Sin isn’t just a mark on your rap sheet. Sin is an Enemy with a resume all its own, an Enemy that ensnares even God’s own Law, has taken God’s own commandments hostage, so as to enslave us. No matter what we’ve done to soften it or obscure it: the love of God in Jesus Christ, as scripture testifies, is not sentimental. It’s a love that invades enemy territory to rescue you from captivity to a Pharaoh, a Caesar, called Sin. 

It’s this understanding of capital S Sin that St. Paul has in mind when he tells us, earlier in Ephesians, that in Christ God has put an end to the hostilities between us. 

And it’s what Paul means here in verse 8 when he says that Christ our King has made captivity itself (i.e., the Power of Sin) his captive. 

Paul means here what Christ says from the cross: “It is finished.” 

Paul means here what St. John says in Revelation: “Jesus Christ has thrown the dragon down.” 

Paul means here…the war is over, the battle’s won, the enemy has been defeated- like Pharaoh and his army, the Enemy has been drowned in the baptism of Christ’s death and resurrection. 

Listen- here’s the shock of the Gospel Paul’s proclaiming: all the ways our enslavement to the Enemy still exhibits itself, the hate and the hostilities between us, they’re not really real. 

They’re not really real.

———————-

What we take to be reality, the hostilities and acrimony among us, has been made a fiction, which makes us who choose to live abiding that fiction as tragically comic as those Japanese soldiers hiding their heads in caves. 

“He made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.”

The Apostle Paul is quoting there from Psalm 68- that’s why he introduces it with “Therefore it is said…” Psalm 68 is a processional hymn, a victory song, the bookend to the Song of Moses. Psalm 68 sings of Yahweh the King taking up residence in the Temple as the culmination of the Exodus. They sang Psalm 68 because the goal of God redeeming his people from captivity had been accomplished. 

Only, Paul changes it. 

He changes it, Psalm 68. 

The original line doesn’t read as it does here in verse 8: “…he gave gifts to his people.” The original line in Psalm 68 instead reads: “He made captivity itself a captive; he received gifts from among his people.” 

Paul changes it from God receiving gifts from us to God giving gifts to us.

What gifts? 

You’ve got to go back to the top of the text. It’s not just that God has redeemed us from our captivity to the Power of Sin. It’s that God has replaced our bondage to the Power of Sin with bonds of peace. 

“…making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Maintain, Paul says. Notice the admonition. 

It isn’t to work for peace and unity in the name of Christ. It’s to maintain it. It’s not to advocate on behalf of, build towards, strive for peace. It’s to preserve it. The exhortation is not to aspire for that which is not yet. It’s to abide by that which is already: Peace and unity among us is not the fiction. 

Martin Luther King Jr famously said: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” 

But St. Paul today might tweak MLK to say instead: “The love of God in Christ Jesus is the force that has transformed enemies into friends.” Maintain, Paul says to the Ephesians. Hold onto what is already true.”  

And actually maintain is a bit pedestrian a word by which to translate it. In Greek, the word is axias. It means “to safeguard” or “to treasure.” 

It’s the word the chief steward says to Jesus at the wedding in Cana: “Everyone else serves the good wine first, and then the cheap wine after the guests have gotten drunk. But you have axias the best wine for now.” 

Axias, treasure. 

It’s the word Jesus uses about his own words: “Very truly I tell you, whoever axias my word will never taste death.” 

Axias. 

It’s the word Paul uses in another letter for how we should regard our betrothed: “…treasure her…” Paul says. 

Alright- 

I realize I’ve already devoted more attention to the scripture text than your average United Methodist can tolerate so if you’re about to nod off here’s the quick Cliff Notes version to Paul’s Gospel:

By the cross and resurrection of Jesus Chrsit, we have been redeemed from bondage to the Power of Sin, and God the Holy Spirit has replaced those bonds with bonds of peace between us. 

Axias it. 

Safeguard it. 

Treasure it. 

Maintain what the “real world” will tell you again and again is a fiction. 

———————-

     I know what you’re thinking- 

     What does this have to do with real life? 

     What does this look like lived out?

     I’m glad you asked. 

Daryl Davis lives just up the beltway near Bethesda, Maryland. I met him at a conference last fall. By trade and training, he’s a rock-n-roll piano player. He’s toured with Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. 

He’s acted too, on stage and on TV, in Roseanne and the Wire. 

In addition to music and acting, for 30 years Daryl Davis has had an odd hobby. 

     Odd for a black man. 

     For 30 years, Daryl Davis has befriended high-ranking members of the Ku Klux Klan. 

In his memoir, Daryl Davis explains how it all began. He’d been playing a gig at a honky tonk night club when a fan from the audience came up to him to strike up a conversation during which the (white) fan volunteered that he was a member of the KKK. 

And Davis recalls responding to this revelation with (pay attention, now): “How can you hate me?” 

     How can you hate me? 

     In other words: 

     We’re free. 

     He’s made that captivity his captive. 

     You hating me is impossible now. 

     Daryl Davis resisted. 

     He refused to believe in the reality of hostility between them. 

     He resisted. 

     He insisted on axias-ing the peace and unity that was between, already.

So that night in the honky tonk, Daryl Davis decided he would make friends with the klansman, and, in the weeks and months following, he’d call up the klansman and say things like “I’m headed to Home Depot, you want to come with me?” 

And the klansman did and would. 

Believing that the peace between them was not aspirational but had been accomplished aleady- it afforded Daryl Davis the patience to discover it and to give grace in the meantime along the way.

Again and again, Daryl Davis would just make up reasons for them to spend time together so that “the reality of their friendship could be revealed.” 

That friend, the klansman from the honky tonk, eventually became the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, the national leader of the klan, but today- his white robe and his hood, they’re just down the beltway from here. In Daryl Davis’ guest room closet. The racist gave all his robes and hoods and paraphenalia to Daryl Davis when he quit the klan.  

     -Play Video: 

There’s a reason there’s documentary about him. 

After that night in the honky tonk, Daryl Davis has since converted something like 200 racists- racists of the worst kind- out of the klan

He was down the road in Charlottesville too, a year ago this weekend, wandering around the other side of the barricade, walking right up to racists and saying ‘Hey, how can you hate me? Want to talk?’ 

One news story from Charlottesville showed Davis being screamed at by nearly everybody: white progressives with their hate has no home here signs and anti-fascists and cops calling him crazy stupid and bigots calling him boy. 

You tell me who’s living in the real world. 

All of us who scream at each other with signs and social media, who hate on each other with hashtags, who nurse grievances and grudges by getting up when a preacher we don’t like speaks.

-or-

Daryl Davis and his slow, gentle, patient insistence that the hostility between us, is in fact, a fantasy. For all of us with privilege, maybe it’s a tempting Westworld sort of fantasy but a fiction nonethless. 

You tell me who’s living in the real world. 

Because when I think about Daryl Davis and then catch my own reflection in a window, you know who I see staring back at me? 

     Shoichi Yokoi. 

     Someone who’s heard the news but refuses to abide by it. 

     As Daryl Davis says:

The peace between us, already

The unity between us, already

The absence of hostilty between us, right now

It’s like Jesus say it is-   It’s like a treasure, an axias, hidden in a field, buried in your backyard. Just because you don’t realize it’s there. Just because you refuse to believe it’s there. Just because you won’t risk looking like a fool and go digging up your yard

It doesn’t mean it’s not there. It doesn’t mean it’s not real and true. It doesn’t you’re not already sitting on a fortune and could be living out of those riches.

Right now.

If you would but trust Paul’s Gospel promise that what you think is the real world- it’s been made a fiction, and the resentments between us- in our politics, all over your marriage, at your office, on your Facebook feed, across the pews- no matter how loud our chains sound, the hostilities between us are his now. 

His captive.

And our trust- our faith, alone- in the Gospel is the only key we need to unlock the handcuffs with which we bind ourselves.

Let me make it plain-

A lot of people like me will like someone like Daryl Davis because not only does he inspire, he let’s us off the hook (we think).

If only African Americans could be as amiable to oppressors as Daryl Davis, then all our problems would be solved (we think). What’s a little slavery between friends, right? I mean, come on Chenda- why can’t you be more like Daryl?

But to hear it that way is not to have heard St. Paul’s Gospel announcement this morning.

Daryl Davis doesn’t let us off the hook.

He compels us to come out of hiding in the comfort of our caves.

He compels us to come out into the real world and say to whoever we need to in our lives: How can you hate me? Or, more likely: How can I hate you?

The war is over, the battle won.

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Episode #165 – Live Episode with Kendall Soulen and Johanna Hartelius

Earlier this summer, Crackers and Grape Juice hosted a Live Podcast in Hampton, Va at Bull Island Brewery. Over 100 folks came out for our guests theologian Kendall Soulen from Emory University and Johanna Hartelius, Professor of Rhetoric at University of Texas Austin. Johanna and Kendall helped us reflect on what we talk about when we talk about God.

Frankly, Kendall giving preachers caution about how easy it is to preach our politics rather than attending to the Word and Johanna’s decontruction of ‘inclusive language’ were worth the night- as was (I’m biased, she’s my best friend) her talking about praying with her son. Part 2 of the Live Podcast will post next week.

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. 

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