Jason Micheli's Blog, page 123

Day 1 Preaching – A Sheep without Verbs

Peter Wallace at Day 1 Radio invited me to preach for their nationwide program, and my sermon for this coming Sunday of Eastertide and last Sunday are posted on their website and airing on stations now.

The Day1 radio program was launched as The Protestant Hour in 1945 by an association of denominations and schools. Previous guests include C.S. Lewis, Fleming Rutledge, and Billy Graham so it’s obvious they’re scratching the bottom of the barrel after all these years by inviting me.

Anyhow, here’s the sermon for this coming Sunday based on the lections from John 10 and Psalm 23. If you listen to the broadcast, incidentally, you’ll hear my interview with Peter as well as the sermon itself.

Click here.

 

 

 

 

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Scott Jones: Believing Thomas

Why do we always negate a person’s good attributes to hone in only on the bad? Why do we not call him Believing Thomas? After all, Thomas confesses his need and the Risen Christ supplies him with what he requires.

My friend Scott Jones, host of the New Persuasive Words podcast, preached this Eastertide sermon. You can follow Scott on Facebook and Twitter by connecting to his website.

A Jersey native, Scott is a graduate of Pittsburgh Seminary and did his PhD work in theology at Princeton. Here’s his Eastertide sermon on Doubting Believing Thomas.

 

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Punch Drunk Love

We’re doing a sermon series through John for April. Here’s my sermon on John 2.1-11.

Ali had texted me, asking me to stop on the way home and pick up a package of tampons.

So naturally, I did what any mature, poised, self-confident man would do. I texted back: “Sure honey, no problem at all. Need anything else while I’m there?”

And then I drove to the grocery store, driving past the little Soviet Safeway just down the street, driving an extra 4 miles and through 1 cellphone dead zone and 2 red lights, in order to get to the BIG SAFEWAY at Belle View because the BIG SAFEWAY HAS SELF-CHECKOUT.

What am I, an idiot? I’m not going to risk some checkout clerk announcing into that little microphone “We need a price check on tampons.” I’ve seen Mr. Mom. No thank you. the self-checkout was designed for the expressed purpose to spare husbands like me exactly that sort of shame.

Is it any coincidence that the increase in protected, safe-sex among young people coincides with the creation of self-checkout by Howard Schneider in 1992 for Price Chopper Supermarket in NYC?

     You think Magic Johnson made a difference in the fight against AIDS?
He’s got nothing on Howard Schneider whose invention gifted the world with a less awkward way to buy prophylactics.

So there I was at the BIG SAFEWAY, standing in the self-checkout queue, like a dutiful knight securing his queen what she requires, the feminine hygiene products discreetly hidden in my basket underneath a 6-pack, the latest issue of Garden and Gun, and a bag of potato chips.

Sure enough, as if to prove my hypothesis about Howard Schneider and the purpose of the self-checkout, I watched as the guy at the front of the line scanned and beeped from his basket the following items:

1 jar of kosher pickles

1 bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos

2 boxes of Trojans and

1 package of Vermont Maple Syrup-Flavored Breakfast Sausages.

 “If you can do that after eating that more power to you,” I said, not as quietly as I’d intended judging from the look he shot me. 

As he did, the cart behind me hit me in the ankles for the third time. The cart belonged to that lady who dresses as Martha Washington at Mt. Vernon.

I know it was her because she was dressed like Martha Washington, her hoop skirt that would make Sir. Mix-A-Lot salivate knocking into the candy bar rack.

I turned around and glared at her again and then looked down into her cart. She had berries and sugar and flour and butter. She’s making a pie, I thought to myself, of course she’s making a pie.

What else would Martha Washington being doing besides white-washing indentured genocide?

Baking a pie- how wholesome is that?

And then I noticed that underneath the berries and the flour and the sugar and the butter, Martha Washington was also buying a copy of the National Enquirer. And, Star Magazine.

Martha caught me looking into her cart, like a Peeping Tom.

     “It’s bad manners to be nosy.”

“Lady, people who live in glass houses with slaves shouldn’t throw stones.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

The guy in front me had started to scan and beep the items from his basket. He was wearing khakis and a distressed blue blazer. Standing out against his ruddy complexion was a neatly trimmed white beard.

Sunglasses were perched on top of his curved orange Orvis cap, and his feet inside his boat shoes were bare.

Basically he looked like someone who stills shells out money for Jimmy Buffet concerts.

He had a sticker stuck to the end of his finger.

It caught my eye, and I watched him. He pulled a package of steaks out of his basket, stuck the sticker on it over the one that was already on it, and scanned the steaks, a package of 4.

$4 and change appeared on the screen.

Next, he took out a can of off brand coffee, scanned it, and set it not in the bag but on top of the candy bars and instead from his basket he drew out a bottle of red wine and put it immediately, unscanned, into his shopping bag.

I looked over at the self-checkout clerk who appeared to have the mental acuity of R.P. McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

He was oblivious; meanwhile, I was transfixed, staring like you do at a car accident or the Trump White House.

Next, he took out a package of shrimp, a couple of pounds it looked like, and he didn’t scan it. He set it down it on the scale instead and then he entered the code for bananas. He did like that for a number of other items too- let’s just say he bought a lot of bananas. Then he clicked “Finish and Pay.”

And, as he pulled out his wallet, he looked sideways at me and he winked: “Surf-and- Turf.”

“That’s the most affordable surf-and-turf I’ve ever seen,” I replied.

He shrugged his shoulders and gestured at the self-checkout machine: “If they’re going to make me work at their store, then I deserve to get paid, right?”

And no joke, my first reaction, my immediate reaction (I’m not proud; I’m a sinner) was: “Huh, that’s a good point.”

———————-

     This happened several months ago. I’d forgotten all about it until I read an article entitled “The Banana Trick: And Other Dark Arts of Self-Checkout Theft.” Apparently using the code for bananas or a bunch of grapes and then socking a more expensive item of similar weight into your shopping bag- apparently that’s a thing, people.

Apparently that’s such a thing, so common a thing, the entire supermarket industry has a name for it: The Banana Trick.

The industry has other names for other ways customers con the self-checkout. There’s the “Pass-Around,” the “Switcheroo,” and the “Illy” (named for the expensive brand of expresso…basically a version of the Banana Trick).

According to the article: “Beneath the bland veneer of your friendly neighborhood supermarket lurks something dark and ugly.”

It’s you.

The industry estimate is that over 20% of all self-checkout customers shop-lift. Steal.

Actually, the supermarket industry prefers to call it “External Shrinkage,” which sounds like what happens to me after I go swimming in a chilly pool but never mind.

20% steal. 1/5 of you all.

And of those 20% over 50% do so because it’s unlikely they’ll get caught.

What’s revealing is that most of these people aren’t thieves (ordinarily) nor are they so much thrill seekers. They’re just ordinary people like you. Says Barbara Staib, the Director of Communications at the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, most self-checkout shoplifters:

“are in fact law-abiding citizens. They would chase behind you to return the $20 bill you dropped, because you’re a person and you would miss that $20. A robot-cashier, though, changes the equation. It gives the false impression of anonymity.”

In other words, the anonymity afforded by the self-checkout reveals our true selves. Without the threat of consequence (or the promise of reward- being thanked for returning that $20) even the best of us do not reliably obey the law.

For this very reason, police departments, such as the Dallas Police Department, now refuse to respond to self-checkout shoplifting calls.

“Of course people steal when they think no one is watching,” one cop commented.

“The Law,” the cop said- pay attention now, “doesn’t change us. The Law can’t change our human nature. The Law can keep us from doing bad, but it doesn’t make us good.”

———————-

     And that brings me to my first point. See, you were starting to worry I didn’t have any point. I’ve actually got 3.

What the cop says in that article is what John wants you to see in this sign at Cana: that the Law cannot change us. This wedding shows us what the Apostle Paul tells us about distinguishing between the Law and the Gospel. Jesus in John’s Gospel doesn’t do miracles. Jesus in John’s Gospel performs signs- only 7 of them.

Each of these 7 signs serves to foreshadow what Jesus will do fully in what John calls Christ’s “hour of glory.”

And in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ hour of glory is paradoxically his humiliation, hanging naked and accursed on the cross.

This is why John decorates this first sign, the wedding at Cana, with so many on-the-nose allusions to the cross and resurrection:

Jesus and the disciples arrive to the wedding party on the third day just like Mary Magdalene will arrive at the empty grave on the third day.


When Marry worries: “They have no wine” Jesus responds “My hour has not yet come,” which basically means: It’s not time for me to die.


Jesus calls his Mother “Woman” just like he will- the only other time he will- from the cross: “Woman, behold your Son.”


Even the abundance of wine: Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the Psalms- all of them prophesy that the arrival of God’s salvation will be occasioned by an abundance of the best wine.

All 7 signs in John’s Gospel, then, point to the Gospel, to what God does in Christ through the cross, and this first sign is intended for you to see how the Gospel Christ brings is distinct from the Law.

Right before the wedding at Cana, John tells you- he telegraphs it- “The Law indeed was given through Moses, but Grace and Truth came through Jesus Christ.”

And then immediately after this wedding at Cana, Jesus cleanses the Temple in Jerusalem, hollering to all who can hear that his crucified body will be the New Temple. In other words, the truth that was thought to reside in the Temple has arrived in Christ, and the wedding which comes before his Temple tantrum shows how grace has come in Christ. And grace, the Gospel, is not the Law.

That’s why John gives you this seemingly random detail about the 6 stone water jars.

There amidst the wedding finery and the china and everyone dressed to the nines and filled with dreams of happily ever afters, the water jars are a reminder of the “dark and ugly truth” about us.

According to the Law, the water in the stone jars was used for washing away sin. The jars were made of stone not clay because clay is porous and the water would get dirty in clay jars and the whole purpose of these jars is to remove impurity. As the wedding guests would arrive, the servants would cleanse the guests’ hands with the water from the stone jars; so that, the wedding festival would not be sullied by sin or shame.

The water in the stone jars was for the washing away of sin and shame, but it didn’t work.

And you know it didn’t work because John tells you there were 6 stone jars, and 6 (being 1 less than 7) is the Jewish number for imperfection.

On top of that little detail, John tells you that the wine at the wedding feast has run out, and, in an honor-based culture like first century Judaism, running out of wine was more than a party foul. It brought great shame upon the bridegroom and his family.

So what John shows you with these six stone jars and this one family in shame is that the Law (commandment-keeping, the rituals of religion) is powerless to produce what it prescribes.

     The Law might give you clean hands.

The Law might compel you to charity.

The Law might keep you from stealing.

But the Law cannot free you from sin and shame nor can it make your heart glad.

And the problem, St. Paul says, isn’t with the Law. The Law, Paul says, is holy, righteous, and good. Love thy enemies, do not steal, forgive those who trespass against you. Those are holy and good commands. The problem isn’t the Law. It’s us. The dark and ugly truth about us, our sin, is deeper than where water can wash it away.

What John shows you here is what the New Testament Book of Hebrews tells you: that all our religion and rituals, all the ways we try to be all we can be for God, “can never make perfect those who practice them, and, as such, they only remind you of your sin.”

Just as Jesus announces in the second half of chapter 2 that he fulfills and replaces the Temple, here in the first half of chapter 2 he signals that he fulfills and replaces the Torah, the Law.

He answers his Mother’s urging by telling the servants to take these stone jars, symbols of the Law, and then, the One who a few chapters later will call himself Living Water, he tells them to fill the jars with it.

To fill them to overflowing.

In other words:

     Jesus fills and fulfills all the commands and demands of the Law by his own perfect faith and life.

When they draw out the wine that had been water, it’s no 3 buck chuck. It’s top shelf and it’s already aged. And there’s an abundance of it. I did the math. At a minimum, it’s 2160 glasses of wine- that’s more ridiculously extravagant than a Scott Pruitt pool party.

See what John wants you to see in this sign:

Out of these stone jars

Out of the means by which we attempt to cleanse ourselves of sin and make ourselves right and good and acceptable before God

Out of the Law is drawn the Gospel: the wine of salvation.

Wine, which Jesus says in an Upper Room, is his blood poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

     He transforms what we do for God into a sign of what God does for us.

This sign shows what that cop says.

The Law doesn’t change us because the Law cannot take away our sins. Only the Lamb of God can take away our sins, as John the Baptist declares at the very beginning of John’s Gospel.

     ———————-

     You’d never know it from the prodigal way he doles out salvation that Jesus is about the only person NOT drunk at this party.

And that’s my second point-

Just as Jesus distinguishes the Gospel from the Law, so too his grace, his gift of salvation, is not karma.

Grace is not karma.

According to the Mishna, Jewish weddings in Jesus’ day lasted 7 days. And under the Law, it was the obligation of the bridegroom and his family to provide a week-long feast for the wedding guests.

This wedding is only on day 3. They’ve got 4 more days to go. Unless Steve Larkin was at the party, there’s no reason they should’ve run out of booze so soon.

The bridegroom and his family simply failed to do their duty under the Law. They deserve the shame in which they stand under the Law. They do not deserve what Christ does for them.

And notice, not only do they not deserve what Christ has done for them. They get the credit for what Christ has done. As though, they had done it themselves.

The party planner tastes the wine that had been water, John says, and he chalks it up to the bridegroom’s extravagance.

Grace is not karma.

Karma says that what you put in is what you get out. Karma says that as you give so shall you receive. Karma says that what goes around is what will come back around. Karma says that what God does for you is based on what you do for God.

     Karma is how most of you try to speak Christian.

It’s karma not grace that says this horrible nightmare in my life must be happening to me for a reason.

It’s karma not grace that says God must be doing this to me- this diagnosis, this disease- because of that sin I did.

It’s karma not grace that says if I just do my part (pray, serve the poor, go to church, give to the church) then God will do his part and bless me.

Karma is not Christianity.

When all is said and done, there’s really only been 2 religions in the history of the world.

On the one hand, there’s all the religions that tell you what you must do for God and for your neighbor (or else). That’s Karma.

And on the other hand, there’s the Gospel of grace, the news of what God has done for you and your neighbor despite your failures to love him or them.

You can’t speak Christian with Karma because God doesn’t give you what you deserve. God gives you infinitely more than what you deserve. God gives you the credit Christ alone deserves. Or, as John puts it here in this sign: “The master of the feast said to the groom- not to Jesus- you have saved the best wine for last.”

———————-

     And that brings me to my final point-

     This grace

This gift of salvation is true for you

It’s true about you whether you appreciate it or not.

Jesus responds to Mary’s alarm that the already drunk guests have run out wine by making more wine. And he makes not Boone’s Farm but he makes the best wine for drunk people to drink.

    He makes the best wine for people already too drunk to appreciate drinking it.

As the master of feast says to the groom: “Everyone brings out the best wine first and then the cheap wine after the guests have gotten drunk, but you have saved the best wine for now when they’re drunk.”

In other words, he’s saying: “It’s a waste.” Their taste buds are shot. They’ll probably just spill it all over themselves. And you can be sure they won’t even remember drinking it come morning.

    His punch-drunk love is such that he sheds his wine for people too far gone to appreciate it.

If this at Cana is the first sign of his hour of glory, and if his hour of glory is when we behold him bleeding and dying on his cross, then his grace, his one-way love, his gift of salvation it’s yours.

     Whether you appreciate it or not.

Whether you give him thanks and praise for it or not.

Whether you know about it or not.

Whether you change your ways because of it or not.

None of that changes what he has done: He has drunk from the cup he prayed would pass him. He has poured himself out to give you the wine of salvation.

     He’s served salvation up for a world too far gone to give two rips about it.
But whether you do or whether you don’t, what he has done- it’s as real and undoable as a hangover.

All is forgiven. Salvation is served. You don’t need to come up here in an altar call for it to be true for you. And you can’t backslide your way out of it either.

We forget-

The rich, young ruler who asked Jesus “What must I do to be saved?” asked him that question before his hour had come.

But the hour has long since passed.

And now, thanks to his punch drunk love, the answer to that question (“What must I do to be saved?”)…the answer is “Nothing.”

You don’t have to do anything.

Because everything has already been done.

The wine’s been served.

The party’s already started.

And the music has been raging since the first third day.

The only thing there is for you to do is what those disciples in Cana do.

Trust and believe.

———————-

     According to the article, “The Banana Trick: And Other Dark Arts of Self-Checkout Theft,” the Criminology Department at the University of Leicester audited self-checkout cameras where, over a year, the transactions totaled $21 million, a million of which, they found, left the store without being scanned or paid for.

As a result, the article noted how many stores, such as Albertsons and Big Y Supermarkets, are cancelling out their self-checkout programs.

They just can’t afford the loss, the article says.

The economy of Easter, though, is different.

As Frances Spufford says, grace, the gift of God to us in Jesus Christ, is “love without cost-controls engaged.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Episode #147: David Bentley Hart – The Gloves Come Off

What happens when you read the Easter story in the present tense? What can we learn about Paul’s personality in the original Greek? Who put together the worst translation of the New Testament? These questions and more on this episode of Crackers and Grape Juice with David Bentley Hart who responds to another giant, NT Wright, over whose translation of the NT is right.

Full disclosure, while I’m a committed Protestant and DBH is an aggressively evangelical Orthodox, David was my first theology teacher in college at UVA and he turned out to be a gateway drug to taking this Christianity crap seriously enough to give one’s life to it. I now count him a mentor, a friend, and a fellow baseball fan.

His new New Testament translation is really a wonderful read, bracing and fun in its surprises. If you’re a lay person, check out his short book The Doors of the Sea. You can find them here.

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Easter is Not Good News without the Cross

     It’s vogue in the mainline Christian tribe to insist that “the Gospel is really all about the resurrection not the cross.” I had umpteen emails say just that after my Easter sermon this year.

Never mind that St. Paul in his rundown of the Gospel kerygma in 1 Corinthians 15 links inextricably cross and burial and resurrection, what reveals resurrection alone to be deficient as Gospel is the one feature common to all the Gospels’ Easter narratives. Mark and Matthew, Luke and John- the Gospels all agree: the very first reaction to news of the resurrection is fear.

The soldiers guarding the tomb faint from fear.

The women, come to anoint the body, run away. Terrified.

The disciples lock the door and cower in the corner.

The first response to the news “Christ is Risen” is not “He is Risen indeed!”

It’s panic.

Fear.

Terror.

The word itself makes them white-knuckled afraid. That word, “resurrection,” was enough to provoke not just awe but frightened shock.  Before you get to the New Testament, the only verse in the Old that explicitly anticipates resurrection is in Daniel 12. Not only was Daniel the last book added to the Hebrew Bible, it was the most popular scripture during the disciples’ day.

For their entire history up until Daniel’s time, the Jews had absolutely no concept of heaven. When you died, you were dead. That was it, the Jews believed. You worshipped and obeyed God not for hope of heaven but because God, in and of himself, was worthy of our thanks and praise.

But then-

When Israel’s life turned dark and grim, when their Temple was razed and set ablaze, when their Promised Land was divided and conquered, and when they were carted off as exiles to a foreign land, the Jews began to long for a Day of God’s justice and judgement.

If not in this life, then in a life to come.

And so the resurrection the prophet Daniel forsees is a double resurrection. Those who have remained righteous and faithful in the face of suffering will be raised up by God to life with God. But for those who’ve committed suffering, they might be on top now in this life but one day God will raise them up too, not to everlasting life but to everlasting shame and punishment.

So, in the only Bible those disciples knew, that word ‘resurrection’ was a hairy double-edged sword. Resurrection was about the justice owed to the suffering and the judgment that belonged to God.

     In the disciples’ Bible, if you were long-suffering, resurrection was good news.
If you were good.
If you weren’t, resurrection was hellfire and damnation.

You can imagine, then, how those disciples heard that first Easter message. If God had raised Jesus from the dead- Jesus who was the only Righteous One, the only Faithful One, as St. Paul says- then that must mean God was about to judge the living and the dead.

The disciples are afraid of the Easter news not because they fail to understand resurrection but because they do understand.

They knew their scripture, and they knew they’d abandoned Jesus. They’d denied ever knowing him. They’d turned tail, turned a blind eye, washed their hands of his blood. They’d scapegoated him into suffering, and stood silently by while others mocked him and taunted him. They’d let the world sin all its sins into him and then left him forsaken on a cross. 

For sinners like them, resurrection could only mean one thing: brimstone.

What’s so surprising about the Easter news isn’t just that the tomb is empty but that hell is empty too. It’s shocking that the Risen Christ doesn’t encounter his disciples and indict them:

I was naked and you were not there to clothe me.

I was thirsty and you were too long gone to give me something to drink.

I was a prisoner and you stood in the crowd pretending to know me not.

I was hungry for justice, wretched upon the cross, and I remained a stranger to you.

The shock of Easter isn’t just the empty grave it’s that God comes back from it and doesn’t condemn the unrighteous ones who put him there. All of them- while they were yet sinners, God comes back from the death they’d consigned him to and he doesn’t pay them the wages their sin had earned. He forgives their sin. He spares them the everlasting judgment and shame they had every reason from their Bibles to expect.  What should’ve been terrifying news becomes good news.

So then, the Easter expectation given to us by Daniel brings us back to the necessity of Paul’s Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15 where Christ’s return from the grave is linked inextricably with his death for our sins. If Paul is wrong, and Christ did not die for our sins (in accordance with the scriptures), then the disciples are right to run away in fright.

That the crucified one is alive again is NOT GOOD NEWS unless it’s true he was crucified for ungodly us.

Neither is it Good News that the Jesus, whom we crucified, is Lord unless we know by his bleeding and dying that he’s for us.

Those who want to focus on the empty tomb as the good news to the exclusion of he cross actually have it backwards.

Only the latter makes the former Gospel.

     Without Good Friday, we should all on Easter make like the eggs and hide.

 

 

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(Her)Men*You*tics: Kerygma

In this episode, we consider what the event and content of preaching means. Are we talking about a narrative of events, exegesis of scripture, or God? All of it? Also, what about the listener, do they play a role? This and more on (Her)Men*You*Tics.


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No, He Never Stops Being Your Substitute

     Even after Good Friday.

The first Easter wasn’t just a day. The Risen Jesus hung around for 50 days, teaching and appearing to over 500 people. 7 days after the first Easter Day, Jesus appears again in that same locked room as before and Jesus says ‘Peace be with you.’ And this time, this time Thomas is there.

     Jesus offers Thomas his body: ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ And Thomas reaches out to Jesus’ body. And Thomas touches Jesus. And Thomas grabs at the wounds of Jesus. He grasps Jesus’ wounded feet. He holds his hands against the holes. Puts his hand on Jesus’ pierced side to see the proof for himself…

Actually…no.

He doesn’t.

That’s the thing- We assume that Thomas touches Jesus’ wounds. Artists have always depicted Thomas reaching out and touching the evidence with his own hands. Duccio drew it that way. Caravaggio illustrated it that way. Peter Paul Rubens painted it that way.

Artists have always shown Thomas sticking his fingers in the proof he requires in order to believe.
And that’s how we paint it in our own imaginations.

Yet, read it again, it’s not there.

The Gospel gives us no indication that Thomas actually touches the wounds in Jesus’ hands.

John never says that Thomas peeked into Jesus’ side. The Bible never says Thomas actually touches him.

No. That’s got to be important, right?

I mean, the one thing Thomas says he needs in order to believe is the one thing John doesn’t bother to mention. What Thomas insists he needs to see is the one thing John doesn’t give you the reader to see. Instead John tells us that Jesus offers himself to Thomas and then the next thing we are told is that Thomas confesses: ‘My Lord and my God!” 

     Which- pay attention– is the first time in John’s Gospel that anyone finally and fully and CORRECTLY identifies Jesus as the same Lord who made Heaven and Earth.

“Doubting” Thomas manages to make the climatic confession of faith in the Gospel. After so many stories about the blind receiving sight and those with sight stubbornly remaining blind to who Jesus is, “Doubting” Thomas is the first person to see that the Jesus before him is the God who made him. And “Doubting” Thomas makes that confession of faith without the one thing he insists he needs before he can muster up faith.

———————-

     St. Athanasius says that Christ, as our Great High Priest, not only mediates the things of God to man but Christ also mediates the things of man to God. Including- especially- faith.

We think of faith as something we have, something we do. We think of belief as something we will, mustering it up in us in spite of us, despite our doubts. Believing is our activity, we think. Our act. But- If we think of faith as something we do or possess, as an autonomous act within us, we’re not speaking of faith as scripture speaks of it.

In scripture, faith- our faith- is made possible only through the agency of God: “Lord, help my unbelief” the father in Mark’s Gospel must beg Jesus, as we all must beg.

Jesus doesn’t just put on our flesh and live the life we live. He puts on the belief, lives the faith and trust in God we owe God as creatures of God.

     Jesus doesn’t just stand in our place when it comes to our sin.
He stands in our place when it comes to faith too.
     What holds Good Friday and Easter together, what makes cross and resurrection inseparable, is that Jesus never stops being a substitute for us, in our place, on our behalf.

The Risen Christ remains, even here and now, every bit a substitute for us as the Crucified Christ. Our faith, our belief, is made possible by him. It’s his work not ours, and like a parent’s hand grasping a little child’s, our faith, such as it is, is enfolded within his perfect faith; so that, in him, enclosed within his faith, our faith is mediated to God the Father. That’s what the New Testament means by calling Christ ‘the author and the finisher of our faith.” The faith we possess is the work of the Son within us not our own, but the faith by which the Father measures us is the Son’s not our own.

     ———————-

     So often preachers make the point of the story of Doubting Thomas a kind of permission for us to have our doubts, that its okay we’re all like Doubting Thomas, that “doubt is a part of faith” goes the cliche. But John would not have you see here simply Gospel approval for your doubts. This is the freaking climax of the Jesus story where someone finally and fully and correctly calls upon Jesus as his Lord and his God.

     “…but its okay to have your doubts too.” 

What kind of crappy whimper of an ending is that?!  That’s not the takeaway John intends Thomas to leave with you. No. John wants you to see Jesus, the Risen Lord. John wants you see the Risen Christ bringing into existence in Thomas, who had insisted unless I can touch his hands and feet for myself, a faith that can confess Christ as Lord and God.

Doubts are okay, sure. I’ve got plenty of doubts and, I’ll bet, I’ve got more reasons to doubt than you do. Sure, you’ve got doubts. Big deal. That’s not very interesting.

If faith is Christ’s work in us then doubt is just our natural human disposition, like Adam and Eve wondering in the Garden “Did God really say?”

Thomas’ doubt is not what John would have see.

     What John would have us see:
Is that Thomas’ faith-
It’s the work of the Risen Christ.

The Good News is NOT that you are saved by faith. Think about it: that puts all the onus on you. It makes faith just another work. Your work. It empties the cross of its saving significance and it makes his substitution in your place partial. Imperfect because its incomplete with out your faith.

The Good News is NOT that you are saved by faith. The Good News is that you are saved by faith by grace. By the gifting of God. By the agency of God. By the mediating activity of the Risen Christ. Who is every bit as present to us now as those 10 disciples hiding behind locked doors.

You are saved by faith through the gracious work of the Risen Christ, who can compel you- against your natural disposition to doubt- to call upon him as your Lord and your God. Such that whatever of the Gospel you are able to trust and believe, whatever Word from the Lord you can hear, whether your faith is as meager as a mustard seed or as mighty as a mountainside-

Your faith is NOT

YOUR doing.

It is a miracle. Grace. An act of the Risen Christ.

In you and upon you and through you. And it makes you- even you! It makes you exactly what Thomas insisted he required. It makes you proof that he is risen. He is risen indeed. You’re why John ends his Gospel the way he does. You’re the reason John doesn’t need to write down everything Jesus did among those disciples. Because Jesus is neither dead nor disappeared from this world. He’s alive and still doing work among his disciples. And for proof you need look no further than your own faith, your own ability to call him your Lord and your God.

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Episode #146 – David Finnegan-Hosey: Christ on the Pysch Ward

Sharing from his own journey, David Finnegan-Hosey puts into words how faith communities can be present alongside those suffering from mental illness and crises in Christ on the Psych Ward.

David Finnegan-Hosey currently serves as a chaplain-in-residence at Georgetown University, having previously worked with campus ministries at American University and the University of Hawaii. He holds an M.Div from Wesley Theological Seminary. In 2011, David was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after a series of psychiatric hospitalizations. He now speaks and writes about the intersections among mental illness, mental health, and faith.

You can read more of his writing on his blog, Foolish Hosey. David lives in Washington, DC with his wife Leigh and their dog Penny Lane.

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All Lives Matter & Low Anthropology

Thanks to saturation coverage of what feels like a Foggy Bottom edition of Jersey Shore, you’re forgiven if you didn’t get word that today Christians et al marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s murder by marching on the National Mall to end racism. A friend asked if I’d be participating today. While I joined the Million Minister March in the fall, I could do so today.

“I’ll write a blog post instead,” I joked.

Then it occurred to me that, more than a lazy man’s excuse, it could prove more productive to write a post for the contrarians rather than to march with the like-minded, to reflect on why Black Lives Matter matters for the All Lives Matter masses.

I recall how it was sometime after the Ferguson shooting, the images of a militarized police and a rioting black citizenry in the papers, that I first noticed the All Lives Matter flags draped from front porches and over hedges here in the neighborhood. Facebook comments and threads followed.

And, of course, all lives do matter.

But the incontestable obviousness of such an assertion is exactly what makes rebutting it so fraught.

Black Lives Matter.

All Lives Matter.

It took my theological muse Stanley Hauerwas, who is not only white but poor white trash (proudly so), to point out that story is exactly what is at stake. 

African-Americans, Stanley noted to me over his shrimp and grits, have a particular, peculiar story to tell that can be neither lost nor obfuscated if America (or, even, the Church in America) is to be a truthful people.

Black Lives Matter matters because it recognizes how African-Americans share not only a common story but a story which reminds them how they need one another and need each other to remind them of the Enemy they face.

The problem with All Lives Matter is that it emerges from no peculiarly shared, community-bound story.

All Lives Matter, at best, is a universal principle.
As people who worship a God who took particular flesh in a specific crucified Jew, Christians refuse to speak in terms of generic universal truths.

Because it emerges apart from any particular shared story, All Lives Matter can only imply that white Americans should feel threatened by the African American imperative to remember and retell their own story. The felt threat is a symptom of our inability as Americans to grapple truthfully with how we are a slave nation. The harmless hagiography we teach our children about Martin Luther King is but another symptom, yet another is our denial over the many unseen ways in which racism still grips us. As a father of two hispanic/indigenous Mayan children, I’m often taken aback by how my own racism blinds me to how they’re seen and perceived.

That many feel threatened by Black Lives Matter and do not how to locate themselves within that particular ugly story, opting instead for the generic unthreatening alternative All Lives Matter, demonstrates, I think, how conversations about race and racism become unintelligible to the extent they get abstracted away from the particular language of sin and redemption.

Without the ecclesial language of the Church, and the low anthropology with which it views the old Adam that abides in every one of us, we’re left instead with the American myth or moral progress as our alternative.

The presumption that we’ve overcome racism thus becomes a part of how we understand ourselves as Americans; All Lives Matter thus threatens our self-understanding. As Joe Winters argues in Hope Draped in Black, the narrative of progress- or, as Gerhard Forde would term it, the glory story- is not only a false narrative it is, like all lies, a pernicious narrative, for it’s “truth” relies upon minimizing conflicts and contradictions. Black Lives Matter agitates against the myth of moral progress and requires the telling of stories in tension with it.

The story-less mantra All Lives Matter reveals, how there are only two options in dealing with a wrong so wrong, like slavery and racism, it seems nothing can be done to make it right. The first option is to forget it, which the glory story of American moral progress unintentionally invites us to do. The only other option is to frame the story of the wrong with in the story of sin and redemption. In other words, white Christians in America, who ought to be confessing their badness every Sunday, should be the last white people in American offended by the notion that they too might be racist in ways visible and invisible. White Christians possess their own particular story, not the generic story of All Lives Matter, but the story of the One who rose from the dead for our justification.

That is-

White Christians possess a story which punctures the stifling myth of moral progress by insisting that we are always at once, simultaneously, sinful yet reckoned in the right only according to God’s gratuitous forgiveness.

While Christians possess the very story that should gird us to engage the difficult truth-telling and truth-hearing required by a conversation about race and racism, the problem is that the pernicious myth of moral progress is more than merely an American myth.

The glory story, with its high anthropology, is the story laid over top the Gospel story every Sunday in countless churches.
Black Lives Matter thus militates against not only the self-understanding we receive in the public square but from the pulpit as well.

As Hauerwas argues:

“Racism is a sin that can only be dealt with by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. If slavery is a wrong so wrong there is nothing you can do to make it right, the only alternative is to be drafted into a history of God’s redemption that makes confession and forgiveness a reality. Only those who are willing to be forgiven are those who can seek reconciliation with those they have harmed.”

For American Christians to be a truthful people, white and black Christians must share their stories with another, testing their testimonies against the truthfulness of the cross. Just as God’s siding with the enslaved Israelites is part of God’s rescue of his entire creation, so too white Christians in American should have the courage of their convictions to see how the particular story represented by Black Lives Matter is a story that includes their redemption too.

The theologian Gerhard Forde argues that the way we make any moral progress as Christians- the only way to sanctification- is by a daily dying; that is, by returning over and again to our justification, the news that we’re sinners graced by God.

To the extent then that white Christians shut our ears to the painful and angry stories of Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter we risk not only truthfulness but our own holiness.
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Scott Jones: Easter Sermon

My friend Scott Jones, host of the New Persuasive Words podcast, preached this Easter sermon on Mark 16. You can follow Scott on Facebook and Twitter by connecting to his website.

A Jersey native, Scott is a graduate of Pittsburgh Seminary and did his PhD work in theology at Princeton.

 

 

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