Jason Micheli's Blog, page 140

Easter 6A: Brian Zahnd – In Whom We Live, Move, and Have Our Being

In this episode we continue our conversation with Brian Zahnd, author of Water to Wine, about the Eastertide lections.

This week’s lections include: Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66:8-20, 1 Peter 3:13-22, and John 14:15-21.

All of it is introduced by the soulful tunes of my friend Clay Mottley.

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You can find it on our website here.

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Do Not Doubt But Obey: Dialogue Sermon

This weekend Dennis Perry and I shared the sermon, dialoguing on John 20.24-29 about doubt and the shame of the cross, faith as obedience, and the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Here’s the sermon:

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Cancer is Funny: The Presbyterian Outlook Review

Here’s a review of my book for the Presbyterian Outlook. Disclaimer: the reviewer, Deborah Lewis, is a friend for which I’m exceedingly grateful to have as a colleague.

Parson: The go he made of it

By Deborah Lewis

Cancer is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Chemo

By Jason Micheli

Fortress Press (Minneapolis), 226 pages

Jason Micheli gets one thing wrong in his book Cancer is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Chemo: he is always a pastor. It’s not as if he tries to hide this, but he repeatedly makes the distinction between his life as a pastor before cancer and his “non-pastoral” life as an ordinary person with cancer. The fact that he can’t maintain the artifice of separate pastor and person identities results in a compelling story, underscoring precisely this flimsy distinction.

The word I keep coming back to is “parson,” the somewhat antiquated church lingo used to describe pastors. “Parson” means “person,” as in “person of the church,” a representative of the body of believers. The parson represents the rest of us.

Here’s where Micheli’s distinction both falls flat and makes his larger point. He’s not just any patient with cancer. He’s a pastor who has stood by the hospital beds of countless suffering patients and parishioners. He may be on a medical leave of absence from his daily duties but he’s unable and unwilling to leave behind his role as parson, the representative Christian. The very existence of his book is testament to his primary pastoral role of living life publicly and profession-ally. He never relinquishes this role.

With his status as patient comes the realization that his previous pastoral familiarity with death and suffering hasn’t inoculated him. As a pastor, he operated as if “I serve the suffering but I do not suffer” (p. 83). As a patient, he connects unexpectedly to the man whose friends lower him through the roof to be healed by Jesus (Mark 2: 1-12). Praying for his own healing, Micheli wonders “if my preacher’s reading of such stories wasn’t too cute by half…But you know what Jason the Patient on the mat discovered that Pastor Jason, standing in the pulpit, had not? Healing’s important, too – damn important. And, whether this thought is heresy or not, healing is no less a miracle than forgiveness” (p. 83-4).

It’s exactly this type of deft move that cements Micheli as our parson. He is not interested in making himself look good (as a pastor, husband, patient, or Christian) or in protecting God from our worst fears. His abiding, passionate interest is in following the gospel wherever it leads. If there is good news Christians are meant to share, then it has to be good news in the midst of life with cancer, too. Nothing is off limits. By the time Micheli allows himself to ask “Why is God doing this to me?” and offers, “here’s the go I made of it,” the reader knows she’ll get an unvarnished, real-life, hard-core gospel exploration of what is most often a clichéd and unexamined question, even among Christians (p. 192).

The gift of this book is its all-access glimpse into how a person does this. Any of this. Micheli is our parson, the one standing in for us as a person and a Christian with cancer, showing us what it looks and feels like to be scared to death and fearless at the same time, taking it all seriously but with a sense of humor inspired by God’s own joy.

*

Deborah Lewis is a United Methodist pastor and campus minister who writes at Snow Day (www.deborahlewis.net). Full disclosure: Jason and I were in Clinical Pastoral Education together, which means I have the goods on him, so he’s lucky this book was so damn good. 

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What to Say When There’s Nothing to Say

Here’s a piece I wrote recently for the United Methodist ‘Rethinking Church’ website. Here’s the original link.

I was in the emergency room, standing behind the paper curtain, holding a mother who wasn’t much older than me as she held her dead little boy, who wasn’t much older than my boys.

What do we do in these moments?

She wasn’t crying so much as gasping like you do when you’ve sunk all the way to the bottom of the deep end of the pool and have just come up for air. She was smoothing her boy’s cowlick with her hand. Every so often she would shush him, perhaps believing that if she could just calm him down then she might convince him to come back.

It was Opening Day. That afternoon my boys and I had played hooky to go to see the Nationals beat the Marlins. I still wore my Curly W Nats hat and had popcorn crumbs in my sweater and mustard stains on my pants. I didn’t look like a pastor or a priest.

The mother got up and went into the hallway to try and get hold of her husband. She left me with her boy — and when the chaplain stepped in to the room and saw the hat on my head and the mustard stains on my clothes and the tears in my eyes, she didn’t think I was a pastor or a priest. She just thought I was part of the boy’s family.

She put her hand on my shoulder and, after a few moments, she said to me: “It’s going to be all right.”

“What the hell did you say?” I asked, stunned.

I’ve been a pastor for 16 years.

And in that time I can’t tell you how many ERs and funeral homes I’ve been in, how many hospital bedsides and gravesides I’ve stood at and heard well-meaning Christians say things they thought were comforting but were actually the opposite.

Even destructive.

I know people in my congregation who’ve been told — by other people in my congregation — that God must’ve given them cancer as punishment or to bring them closer to God.

I know peoplewho’ve been told by well-intentioned Christians that a spouse’s or child’s death must be part of God’s plan.

I know people who’ve written God off entirely because when their life got sucky some Christian tried to console them with talk of “God’s will.”

Most of us don’t know what to say when there’s nothing to say. We don’t know where God is when life sucks or suffering comes, so we say ignorant things or offer empty platitudes.

There’s a long folk tale in the Old Testament in which a character named Job loses every one of his children. He loses his health, his last dime and maybe even his marriage. Worse, he loses it all at once. His life disintegrates faster than a dream.

For days, Job is mute with disbelief. His friends show up — no small gesture — and sit with him in silence.

Until Job finally does speak. Then, his friends discover, they aren’t ready for the pain he voices. They can’t go there.

Anyone who’s been with someone whose grief is raw and immediate, whose despair seems to open onto an abyss, anyone who’s been in that situation knows the temptation to put a lid on it. And very often our speech about God is the way we put a lid on it.

Questions like “Where is God…?” or “Why is God doing this…?” can become the means by which we silence a vulnerability too harrowing to bear.

Sometimes the vulnerability we wish to quiet with questions is our own.

So we resort to clichés. But just like one-size-fits-all clothes, one-size-fits-all platitudes never fit.

For Job’s friends there’s disconnect between what they think they know about God and how Job describes his experience. So they feel the need to correct Job’s experience, to explain and give answers for it. They offer platitudes.

But if love, as Jesus says, is laying down your life for another, then that also means love is a willingness to lay down your assumptions for a friend — to care more about them than your understanding of how God or the world works.

What do you say when there’s nothing to say?

Instead of saying, “God must be teaching you a lesson,” how about saying, “Tell me what you’re going through. There’s nothing you could say that will frighten or offend me. I’m here. I’m listening.”

We don’t need to protect God from our feelings. From the cross Jesus, the Son of God, screams at God, “Why have you forsaken me!?” And God responds to that cross, which we built, with an empty tomb. God doesn’t need protecting, especially not from our candor or feelings of forsakenness.

As much as anything, faith entails the knowledge that you do not need to protect God. We don’t need to protect God because God is not to blame.

Platitudes and reasons suggest God is behind the suffering and the suck in our lives. They suggest a world without randomness, a world where everything is the outworking of God’s will. But that is not the world as scripture sees it. As St. Paul describes it, the world is groaning against God’s good intentions for it (Romans 8:22). In the language of scripture, suffering is a symptom of our world’s rebellion against God; it’s not a sign of God’s plan for our lives.

Maybe we conjure a different world, a world of tight causality, because the opposite is too frightening.

Maybe it’s frightening to think that our lives are every bit as vulnerable and fragile as they can sometimes feel. They are.

Maybe it’s too frightening to think that the question “Why?” has no answer. It often does not.

Maybe it’s too scary to admit that things can happen to us without warning, for no reason, and from which no good will ever come. They can and they do.

It’s understandable that we’d want there to be a plan for each of us, a reason behind every pitfall in our lives, but think about it: The logical outcome to that way of thinking makes God a monster. Such a god is certainly in charge kind of god, but such a god is not worthy of our worship.

Truth is, God doesn’t use or deploy suffering. God is present with us in suffering. In fact, in Jesus’ cross we witness that God, too, suffers in the brokenness of the world.

So, what do you say when there’s nothing to say?

For God’s sake, don’t say, “God has a reason.” Try saying, “There’s no way God wants this for you any more than I do.”

The chaplain in the ER lifted her hand from my shoulder when I glared at her and said: “What?”

She blushed and apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say,” she said. But I wasn’t in the mood for sorry. I wiped my eyes and said, “When his mother comes back in here, don’t. Say. Anything.”

At first Job’s friends do the exact right thing. They just sit in silence with their friend and grieve with him. The trouble starts when they open their mouths.

And the scary thing for us?

What’s scary is that at the end of the Book of Job, 38 long chapters later, after Job has cursed the day he was born, cursed God, questioned God’s justice, complained about God’s absence, accused God of abuse and indicted God for being no better than a criminal on trial — at the end of the book, when God finally shows up and speaks, Job isn’t the one God condemns.

It’s Job’s well-meaning, religious friends.

I’ve stood at enough bedsides and gravesides to know that in our attempts to comfort and answer and explain we sometimes make God an anathema, an entity of distrust and spite.

In trying to locate where God is in the midst of the suffering and the suck, we can push people away from him.

For the last two years, I’ve battled my own incurable cancer. I know of what I speak: The only thing worse than suffering with no reason, no explanation, would be to suffer without God, for God is with us in our suffering, just as we are called to be with others in their suffering.

As both pastor and patient, then, my advice: When there’s nothing to say, say nothing. Or, do as the Psalms so often do.

Lament.

Rage.

At God.

If faith entails knowing you do not need to protect God, then faith is also a kind of protest against God, who still has not yet made good on his promise to redeem all of creation.

“Where is God in the midst of this suffering?” is a question best turned around and posed to God, defiantly so. “What’s taking you so long, God?!”

Only a God whose power is suffering love could appreciate the irony: faith that looks to any outsider like doubt or, sometimes, even despair.

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Episode 93 – David Fitch: “The Fitch Option”

With so many talking about Rod Dreher’s bestselling book The Benedict Option, we turned to friend of the podcast, author and professor David Fitch, to talk about “The Fitch Option”or the “Saint Patrick Option.”

Fitch talks to the Benedict Option by way of his fantastic new book Faithful Presence: Seven Discipline That Shape the Church For Mission. The opposite of the Benedict Option, David offers us disciplines that will shape the church for its mission.

Be on the lookout for our own conversation with Rod Dreher about the Benedict Option too.

Stay tuned and thanks to all of you for your support and feedback. We want this to be as strong an offering as we can make it so give us your thoughts.

We’re doing a live podcast and pub theology event at Bull Island Brewery in Hampton, Virginia on Thursday, June 15th. If you’re in the area, check it out here.

Clay Mottley will be playing tunes for us and Jeffery Pugh is our special guest.

You can download the episode and subscribe to future ones in the iTunes store here
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Savage Love

My friend Scott Jones wrote the following essay on love, sex, marriage, and why is that infidelity is the only sin that forever defines someone as a failure, the sin for which there is never grace.

Scott is a pastor in the Philly area, a Princeton alum like myself, and a (much better than me) podcaster, hosting Give and Take and New Persuasive Words. Check out the conversation he references below here.

All you need is love, love is all you need.

That is so true on face value that it almost needs no unpacking. Its meaning can also be elusive, even opaque. As with all things, context is king. Where and when we read the above sentence will inevitably shape what we make of it. What I’m making of it today is shaped by a conversation I had last Thursday with Dan Savage.

Dan is a world famous sex columnist. He began his column “Savage Love” decades ago as a kind of joke. He thought it would be hilarious as a gay man to give sex advice to straight people with a tone of suppressed “ewwwwwww-ness” that colors the voice of most straight people (mostly straight guys) when they talk about gay people and gay sex. What started as a lark become an incredible success. He became a sort of celebrity, one who scandalized gays and straights alike. My friend Mark Oppenheimer wrote a book about Savage, one he begins with an interesting observation. We’ve had a lot of gay celebrities in late modern American culture, but Dan Savage was the first to start “out”. Elton John, George Michael, Melissa Ethridge…the list goes on, but they all began their public life in the closet. Even if people suspected they were gay there was a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy before the policy enacted to deal with gays in the military that seemed to govern public life, at least where celebrities were concerned. Everything was handled with a wink and a nod.

A Lutheran minister who wrote a think piece on Savage a few years ago claimed that he saved more marriages than a successful pastor at a prominent church could do in decades of faithful work. The same minister summarizes the secret of Savage’s success as follows:

Underlying all of Savages principles, abbreviations, and maxims is a pragmatism that strives for stable, livable, and reasonably happy relationships in a world where the old constraints that were meant to facilitate these ends are gone. Disclosure is necessary, but not beyond reason. Honesty [is] the best policy and all, he advised a guilty boyfriend, but each of us gets to take at least one big secret to the grave. Stuck with a husband whose porn stash has grown beyond what you thought you were signing up for? Put it behind closed doors and try not to think about it. Who knows how many good relationships have been saved and how many disastrous marriages have been averted by heeding a Savage insistence on disclosing the unmet need, tolerating the within-reason quirk, or forgiving the endurable lapse? In ways that his frequent interlocutors on the Christian right wouldn’t expect, Savage has probably done more to uphold conventional families than many counselors who are unwilling to engage so frankly with modern sexual mores. A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted, he advised one very uptight spouse, all leavened by the occasional orgasm.

As I read those words and reflected on my conversation with Dan a passage from Paul Zahl’s Grace In Practice remained perched in the forefront of my mind:

“Ministers see no evil, and yet they see everything. This is the reality of imputation. Pastoral care is not “proactive,” a big word in our lives today. Pastoral care observes, yet decides not to see. This is the essence of grace in practice. You look out on a group of people on a Sunday morning and observe bickering mothers and daughters, sullen and resentful sons, sexually ually frustrated men and misunderstood wives. You feel the rising infidelities ities and the hurt feelings and the palpable mourning for mothers and fathers thers who are no longer present. You see all this if you have an eye to original sin and total depravity. Yet you speak the word of imputed righteousness: teousness: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). The blanket of condemnation that the discerning eye cannot fail to see is replaced by the “garments of salvation” (Isaiah 61:io)…This means that pastoral response is always the response of listening and passive reception. It is not the response of trying to fix things. Every conversation you ever have in ministry is a piercing conversation from the standpoint of the pastoral listener. He or she has heard it all before, many, many times. Yet it has to come out. It has to be heard with full acceptance, even sorry acquiescence. Grace never tries to fix, but trusts God to do this. Grace listens.”

Dan said something early on in the conversation that I am still unpacking. He said that fidelity in the context of monogamy is the only thing that if you fail once at defines you as a failure. You can be a world class tennis player and make a few unforced errors at Wimbledon and you’re still a world class tennis player. You can be the winner of Top Chef and then burn an omelette and your still a chef, and regarded as a good one. In fact we celebrate the failures of someone who has dutifully done their 10,000 hours and become proficient in some skill that we need to make this thing called modern life going. We can even sometimes romanticize failure, but not where infidelity is concerned. Dan is at heart a conservative and a traditionalist and he thinks this glaring inconsistency ruins a lot of salvageable and even salutary relationships, ultimately eroding the quality of our shared public life.

One needn’t agree with everything Dan Savage says about sex or the nature of monogamy to get his point. And I think our celebration of failure often is only when we see it as part of a success story. Past failures get baptized retroactively because they are attached to clearly revealed current success stories. We often praise failures of successful people at the same time derisively scorning the same failures when they confront us attached to stories of people who we’d rather not look at or be around, let alone admire. Perhaps our approach to infidelity actually masks our intolerance for any failure, be it in ourselves or others. If we can just keep this one rule maybe it will be the deeper magic that wipes away the rest of our transgressions. The sensibility of this kind of rationalization is only surpassed by it’s silliness.

Hans Ur Von Balthasar describe the agonizing end ecstatic nature of human love in his masterful little book Love Alone Is Credible:

But though all of this may point the way, it does not accomplish the journey, for there are other equally strong, or stronger, powers that set a limit to love’s movement: the fight for one’s place under the sun; the terrible stifling of the individual by the surrounding relations, the clan, and even by the family; the struggle of natural selection, for which nature itself provides the strength and the arms; the laws of time’s decay: friendships, once thought to be forever, grow cold, people grow apart, views and perspectives and thus hearts too become estranged. Geographic distances create an additional burden, and love must be strong and single-minded in order to withstand it; pledges of love, meant to be eternal, get broken, because the rising wave of eros gave way and another newer love came in between; the beloved’s faults and limitations became unbearable, and perhaps even worsened because the finitude of love seemed to be a contradiction: Why love just one woman when there are thousands that could be loved? Don Juan poses this question as he shakes the cage of finitude, driven by a fundamental intuition no less valid, perhaps, than Faust’s. But if the very meaning of love slips past the don in the surfeit of women, Faust fails to hold onto the eternity he thought he could pin down in the surfeit of “moments”.

Given the fragile, faltering and fallen nature of human love it’s astounding that God chooses marriage as a primary metaphor to tell the sacred story of his journey with his people. A few years ago Ray Ortlund wrote a book called Whoredom: God’s Unfaithful Wife In Biblical Theology. He attempts to bring to the forefront a metaphor which, despite it’s biblical prominence, has gotten short shrift in the church’s preaching and teaching. He concludes the book with the following words:

If we perceive the Rorschach pattern of life as a lonely fight for survival without the consolations of divine succor, so that we barricade ourselves within the apparent safety of the self, we discover too late that the lock on the door operates only from the outside. All we have left is an endless reconfiguring of the autonomous self, and we are incapable of release into the light and freedom of God’s larger conceptual world. But, in the mercy of God, the biblical gospel intrudes its way into our prison as a blessed subversive agent, alerting us that that larger world really is out there and that God is able to break the lock of our self-imposed confinement…

Perhaps our borderline obsessive focus on infidelity as the only sin that merits a permanent scarlet letter thinly veils our own awareness of the infidelities that characterize more of our lives, public and private, than we’d care to admit. But the realization of our own human ineptness and infidelities is always the occasion for God’s invitation to rest in faithfulness that can only be described as divine. God’s love is a savage love, the kind that civilizes and shapes us for an eternal feast, the Wedding Supper of the Lamb that is the City of God.

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Easter 5A- Brian Zahnd: Farewell to Mother’s Day

The danger in celebrating Mother’s Day in worship is that it can lull you into forgetting that singleness is the first form of the Christian life and, therefore, the Church is your primary loyalty.

Obviously, Taylor hates Mother’s Day.

For this latest installment of Strangely Warmed we look at the 5th Sunday of Eastertide readings with Brian Zahnd, pastor of Word of Life Church and author of A Farewell to Mars and Water Into Wine.

This week’s lections include: Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5 & 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, and John 14:1-14.

All of it is introduced by the soulful tunes of my friend Clay Mottley.

You can subscribe to Strangely Warmed in iTunes.

You can find it on our website here.

Help us reach more people: 

Give us 4 Stars and a good review there in the iTunes store. 

It’s not hard and it makes all the difference. 

 

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God Isn’t Up for Grabs

     Here’s my sermon from this Sunday. I guest preached at the Kingstowne Communion for their series on the Apostles Creed. My text was Philippians 2.1-11.

Not long ago, USA Today featured a story about perceptions of God in America, and how a person’s perception of God influences their opinions on issues of the day.

The research can be found in a book by two sociologists at Baylor, the Baptist University in Texas. Their book’s entitled: America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God and What that Says about Us.

The researchers identify four primary characteristics of God. They are: Authoritative, Benevolent, Critical and Distant. Based on surveys, they have come up with percentages of what American people believe about God:

Authoritative 28%:

According to the authors, people who hold this view of God divide the  world  along good and evil and they tend to be people who are worried,  concerned and scared. They respond to a powerful, sovereign God  guiding this country.

Distant 24%:

These are people who identify more with the spiritual and speak of finding  the mysterious, unknowable God in creation or through contemplation or in elegant mathematical theorems.

Critical 21%:

The researchers describe people who perceive a God who keeps a critical  eye on this world but only delivers justice in the next.

Benevolent 22%:

According to the researchers, their God is a “positive influence” who cares for all  people, weeps at all conflicts, and will comfort all.

Benevolent.

Distant.

Critical.

Authoritative.

Along the way, their research nets some curious findings.

For instance, if your parents spanked you when you were a child, then you’re more likely to subscribe to an Authoritative God view. If you’re European, then in all likelihood you have a Distant view of God.

If you’re poor then, odds are, you fall into the Critical view.

My wife only seldom agrees to spank me but presumably if you’re into adult spanking then you subscribe to a Benevolent God view.

United Methodists meanwhile- proving we can’t make up our minds about anything- tend to be evenly distributed among the four characteristic views.

The book is several years old now so I was surprised to discover that the sociologists’ survey is still up and running online.

As people take the survey, the percentages change.

You might be interested to hear that right now the Distant God is now pulling ahead in the polls, as the Authoritative God falls behind, and the Benevolent God gains a few points.

———————

     When I discovered the website not long ago, I decided to take the survey, all twenty questions of it. I was asked to rate whether or not the term “loving” described God very well, somewhat well, undecided, not very well, or not at all.

Other divine attributes in the twenty survey questions were “critical, punishing, severe, wrathful, distant, ever present.”

I was asked if I thought God was angered by human sin and angered by my sin. I was asked if God was concerned with my personal well being and then with the well being of the world.

In order to capture my understanding of and belief in God, maker of heaven and earth in whom we live and move and have our being, according to my watch, the survey took all of two minutes and thirty-five seconds.

Or, roughly 10,078 minutes faster than God managed to create the world.

After I finished, I was told what percentage of people in my demographic shared my view of God (college educated men under the age of none of your damn business).

You may be interested to know, but no doubt not surprised, that the survey says that this pastor maintains a perception of a Benevolent God.

It was only after I answered all the questions, only after I saw my results, only after I saw how I measured up against other respondents….only then did it strike me how the Baylor survey never asked me about Jesus.

The survey asked me to choose if I thought God was Authoritative or Distant or Critical or Benevolent, but it never asked me, it was never given as an option, if I thought God was Incarnate- in the flesh, among us, as one of us.

I’m no sociologist.

Presumably,

‘Do you believe that God, though being in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself  taking the form of a slave being born in human likeness and being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on the cross…’

Presumably that’s a lousy survey question.

Even still, it struck me that I’d just taken a supposedly thorough survey about my belief in God, and Jesus was not in any of the questions nor was he ever a possible answer.

I even tried to go back and undo, invalidate, my responses but it wouldn’t let me.

The problem with the survey is that, whether I like it or not, God’s not someone I get to pick with just the click of a mouse.

———————-

     I’m a Christian. How I conceive of God isn’t optional. It isn’t up for grabs.

We don’t get to define God according to whatever generalities we’d prefer instead when we confess Jesus Christ is Lord we profess that God has come to us with the most particular of definitions.

The problem with the survey is that I don’t believe God is Authoritative, Distant, Critical or Benevolent.

I believe Jesus is God.

Christians are peculiar. Maybe it takes a survey to point that out.

When we say God, we mean Jesus.

And when we say Jesus, we mean the God who emptied himself, the God who traded divinity for poverty, power for weakness, the God who came down among us and stooped down to serve the lowliest of us.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, said that if God had wanted to God could’ve been Sovereign. If God had wanted to God could’ve been All-Powerful or All-Knowing. If God had wanted to God could’ve been Holy or Righteous.

But instead, said Wesley, God chose to be Jesus.

You see- it’s not that God’s power and glory and divinity are somehow disguised behind Jesus‘ human life. It’s not that in Jesus God masquerades as someone he’s not already.

The incarnation isn’t a temporary time-out in which God gets to pretend he’s a different person.

Rather, when we see Jesus in the wilderness saying no to the world’s ways of power, when we see Jesus- the Great High Priest- embracing lepers and eating with sinners, when we see Jesus stoop down to wash our dirty feet, when we see Jesus freely choose death rather than retaliation, when we see Jesus pour himself out, empty himself, humble and humiliate himself we’re seeing as much of God as there is to see.

In the Son we see as much of the Father as there has ever been to see.

Just look at today’s scripture text.

The song Paul quotes here in Philippians 2 is a worship song, older even than the Gospels themselves.

Don’t forget, the believers who first sang that song- they were good synagogue-going Jews; as such, they could worship only God alone.

To worship any one other than God was to break the first and most important of commandments.

But here their song praises Jesus as only God can be praised, lauding him as Lord to whom, the song concludes, has been given the name above every name.

Of course, the name above every name is the name that was too holy for Jews to utter or even write.

The name above every name is the name that was revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush.

     The name above every name is the name of God.
     And now that name’s synonymous with Jesus.

———————

     After I completed the Baylor survey, in less than three minutes, a window popped up on the screen to tell me, conclusively, that I had a perception of a Benevolent God.

For me, the survey said, God is a positive influence on people. I suppose that means God is like Anderson Cooper or Donald Trump.

The survey results also explained how my particular perception of God likely impacted my worldview, in other words, how my belief in God played out in my positions on contemporary issues and politics.

But the survey never mentioned anything about a community.

According to the survey I’m just an individual person who has a certain perception of God and that perception influences my opinions on political issues. It never said anything about a community.

I told you it was a terrible survey.

———————

     This past Thursday a couple asked to meet with me. Even though I emailed and texted them beforehand, they wouldn’t tell me why they needed to meet with me so urgently.

Great, I thought, they’re either PO’d at me and are leaving the church, or they’re getting divorced. Either way, I’m going to be late for dinner.

When they came to my office, I could feel the anxiety popping off of them like static electricity. The counseling textbooks call it ‘active listening’ but really I was sitting there in front of them, silent, because I had no idea where or how to begin.

The husband, the dad, I noticed was clutching his jeans cuff at the knees. After an awkward silence and even more more awkward chit-chat, the wife, the mom, finally said: “You and this church have been an important part of our lives so we wanted you to know what’s going on in our family and we thought we should do it face-to-face.” 

Here we go, I thought. They’re splitting up or splitting from here.

“What’s up?” I asked, sitting up to find a knot in my stomach.

And then she told something else entirely. Something surprising.

She told me their daughters, youth in the church about my oldest son’s age, had both come out to them.

“They’re both gay” she said.

“Is that all?!” I asked. “Good God, that’s a relief. I was afraid you were going to tell me you were getting a divorce! Jesus doesn’t like divorce.”

They exhaled. I could see they’d been holding their breath.

“This church has been a big part of our lives and we wanted to make sure you knew that about them” she said.

“But also…” her voice trailed off and then her husband spoke up. “We also wanted to make sure that they’d still be welcomed here.” 

“Of course. Absolutely.” 

I could see the hesitation in their eyes, like I’d just tried to sell them the service plan at Best Buy so I said it plain: “Look, I love them. This church loves them. And God loves them. Nothing will ever change that.”

“You don’t think they’re sinners?” she asked.

“Of course they’re sinners” I said “but that would be true if they were straight too. Besides, it doesn’t change my point. Jesus loves sinners.”

We talked a bit more.

About how this “issue” is playing out now in the larger Church. About how you can know your kids but still they can be a surprising mystery to you too. About how it can be hard to adjust to picturing your kids’ future as something different than what you’d always imagined.

“You guys baptized and confirmed them here” the dad said by way of example. “I’d always pictured them getting married here and you performing their wedding.” 

“Their wedding photo might look a little different than you’d imagined it, but I’ll still be in it. I’ll still do it” I said. “But, let’s wait until they’re out of high school.” 

“Isn’t there a rule against you doing it?” the mom asked. “Wouldn’t you get in trouble?”

“There is and I might” I said “but what am I supposed to do? I serve a God who says his Kingdom is like a wedding to which all the wrong kinds of people get invited. He’s the only rule I’ve got to obey.”

They laughed a little, but then he said, with absolute seriousness:

     “I guess we came here because they want to know, and we want them to know, that God still loves them.” 

———————-

     Maybe it was because I’d just filled out that silly survey, but after they left the church office I thought about sort of God it is that could produce the conversation we’d just had.

What sort of God is that?

Authoritative? Distant? Critical? Benevolent?

Or is it Jesus? Is it the God who trades away his divinity so that he might be with us?

Is it the God who takes flesh to welcome outcasts, embrace lepers, and feast with sinners?

What sort of God could produce the conversation we’d just had?

Authoritative or Distant or Critical or Benevolent or the God who is with-us, while all of us were still sinners with us, with us through the grief and joy and confusion of our lives?

With us such that to be faithful and obedient to this God we must be willing to be with one another no matter what?

What sort of God could produce the conversation we’d just had or the kind of community capable of such a conversation?

Benevolent doesn’t even scratch the surface of the God who took flesh, became what we are; so that, what we are- male or female, black or white, gay or straight- we are in him so that all of us must treat every one of us as him, as precious as him.

All of us must treat every one of us as Christ.

     He became what we are.
     What we are- black or white, male or female, gay or straight- is in him.

All of us therefore must regard everyone of us as though we were him.

Distant. Critical. Benevolent. Authoritative.

Tell me what sort of God other than Jesus Christ could produce that posture?

What sort of God could produce the conversation we’d just had?

Sure, there’s scripture verses that could’ve taken the conversation in the opposite direction, but we’re Christians.

We believe Jesus, not scripture, is the Word God speaks to us because we believe Jesus is God.

Maybe if our God was Authoritative or Critical or Distant even, maybe then we could throw around scripture words like abomination but we believe Jesus is God.

Jesus is God and, in Jesus, God refuses to cast stones. God says to the woman caught in adultery “I do not condemn you” even though scripture condemned her.

God forgives those who know exactly what they’re doing. God eats and drinks with sinners, and to the thieves by the cross God gives the first two tickets to paradise.

And speaking of the cross, God responds to the crosses we build with Easter. With resurrection.

Only that sort of God could produce the conversation I’d had with those parents.

Even more importantly- only that sort of God could produce the community that produced those parents that produced our conversation.

     Only that sort of God could produce the community that produced those parents that produced those girls who yearned to hear that God loved them.

———————-

     After they left my office, I emailed the Baylor sociologist responsible for the survey:

     Dear Dr. Bader,

I’m a United Methodist pastor in Alexandria, Virginia. Having read about your book and your research in USA Today, I just completed your survey online Since I was unable to cancel or otherwise invalidate my responses I felt I should share a few comments with you.

First, let me take issue with the four views of God that you group responses into. I don’t deny there is a diversity of religious belief in America. It’s just that, as a Christian, I was surprised to find that the God whom I worship isn’t to be found in any of your questions or categories. I believe Jesus of Nazareth is as much of God as there to see.

Authoritative, Distant, Critical, or Benevolent therefore are not sufficient categories to describe the God who empties himself of divinity, takes flesh, lives the life of a servant and turns the other cheek all the way to a cross. Perhaps you think my definition of God is too specific. The trouble is in Jesus of Nazareth God couldn’t have been more specific.

Second, your survey suggests that believing in God is primarily a matter of having a particular worldview that then influences one’s opinions on issues. I can’t speak for other religions, but as a Christian I can say that if Jesus Christ is Lord, then it’s not a matter of opinions.

Before the creed is a profession of our beliefs; it’s a pledge of our allegiance. If Jesus Christ is Lord then faith in him means faithfulness to him.

His life is the pattern to which we must conform our lives.

And “must conform” is the right wording, for if Jesus is Lord, then he’s owed not our belief but our obedience.

And obedience for Christians means imitation. Imitating Christ.

So, you see, Dr. Bader, Jesus expects a lot more from us than having the right positions on issues.

Finally, I just came from a conversation with parents of two teenage girls who just came out of the closet.

And during my conversation with them it occurred to me.

In all of your questions on your survey, you never asked if I believed that God loved me. Postulating a loving God in the abstract isn’t the same thing as believing that God loves me, ME, no matter what.

You never asked that question, and that’s the most important question. For those parents whose fear of God’s rejection I could see in their eyes and for their girls who’ve already been baptized into Jesus Christ- for those girls and for their parents, I thank God that in Jesus Christ the answer is yes.

No doubt the harsh tone of my email will lead you to conclude that I score in the ‘Authoritative God’ category.

Not so, even though my mother did spank me as a child. No, I rate solidly in the ‘Benevolent God’ category. So I hope you will believe it’s in a spirit of benevolence when I say, for lack of a better expression, I think your survey is crap.

Blessings…

Jason Micheli

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Worship is the Only Cure for Homosexuality

The Church’s acrimonious impasse on the issue of sexuality is not without victims. The fight has alienated gay Christians from living out their baptisms by out and active participation in congregations, and it has mired the Church in expensive and time-consuming legalities that undermine the scope and effectiveness of its larger mission to make disciples.

Do I even need to f@#$%^& point out the kids I’ve baptized and confirmed over the years in this one congregation who now wonder if the church that baptized and confirmed them loves them enough to let them live out their baptism in this church?!

Another victim of the Church’s unreconciled and possibly unreconcilable domestic dispute is St. Paul. Specifically, Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

We’ve gotten so accustomed to going to Paul’s letter to answer or address individual questions, particularly about the issue of homosexuality, that we ignore the overall development of Paul’s logic in Romans, which, remember, was intended by Paul to be announced to the faithful in a single beginning-to-end reading. We turn to Romans for points of doctrine when, in fact, what Paul is up to in Romans is worship.

For example-

Opponents of the inclusion of gays in ministry frequently turn to Romans 1.18 as Exhibit A to evidence their argument. Romans, unlike Leviticus say, is not compromised by being a fulfilled Old Testament law. Yet, as my former teacher Beverly Gaventa notes:

“…just as shining a spotlight on a stage leaves the rest of the stage in near darkness, putting a huge spotlight on one verse has obscured the rest of the passage. Indeed, directing that spotlight toward this verse distorts even that verse since it tempts readers to think that Paul’s only real concern is with sexual conduct.”

Intense and solitary focus on Romans 1.18 obscures that Paul’s focus is not on sexual conduct but worship.

Not only is sexual conduct but one sin in a list so comprehensive not one of us is excluded- for no one is righteous, not one- it is referenced here by Paul as the product of a more fundamental sin: withholding right worship.

The practices in 1.18 then are not stumbling blocks frustrating us from right worship of God. They’re not stumbling blocks for which we must repent so that we can worship God rightly. Interestingly, Paul NEVER uses the word repentance. Rather, they are practices that result from refusing to worship God; that is, sexual misconduct, greed, gossip, etc. they are practices produced by idolatry.

Paul’s point, the point which our no holds barred arguments over homosexuality has veiled, is that worship is formative.

Right worship of God forms us in the virtues such that repentance of our vices is possible.

Wrong worship forms us in vices and makes repentance an impossibility.

Proper worship of God, therefore, is the only condition for right conduct. So then, following the logic of Paul’s larger argument, those who are concerned about homosexuality and see it as a sin should be the last people working to exclude homosexuals from the worship life of the Church. To alienate them from the Church and push them from it, to follow Paul’s logic, is only to push them into false worship, idolatry, for outside the Church there is no salvation just to the extent that outside the Church, without the Church, we are all every day preyed upon by idolatrous ideologies like nationalism, materialism, individualism.

The very text most often deployed by traditionalists to push gays out the Church is, in fact, the very text that should compel traditionalists to welcome them into the Church and worship with them.

If you think homosexuality is a vice, inherently sinful- and I do not, follow any of the tags on this blog- then worship is the only “cure.”

 

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Episode: Robert Jenson – Don’t Thank Me, Thank the Holy Spirit

For this episode we deployed podcast regular Kenneth Tanner, along with Chris Green, to interview Robert Jenson.

A student of Karl Barth– there aren’t many more of those left- Jenson is a legend.
Count yourself lucky and color yourself grateful that C&GJ snagged this for your audiological pleasure.

Jenson was described as the greatest living theologian by Stanley Hauerwas, and as “one of the most original and knowledgeable theologians of our time” by Wolfhart Pannenberg.

Jenson’s two volume Systematic Theology is a classic. His latest book, a series of lectures delivered at Princeton University, is Can These Bones Live: A Theology in Outline. Jenson, who recently entered hospice, suffers from MS so you’ll have to exercise some patience and hospitality as he responds to our questions.

Stay tuned and thanks to all of you for your support and feedback. We want this to be as strong an offering as we can make it so give us your thoughts.

You can download the episode and subscribe to future ones in the iTunes store here
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Help us reach more people:  Give us 4 Stars and a good review there in the iTunes store. 

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Oh, wait, you can find everything and ‘like’ everything via our website. If you’re getting this by email, here’s the link. to this episode.

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