Jason Micheli's Blog, page 17

Brute Facts, Buoyant Faith

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

I closed out our sermon series on the twenty-third psalm this morning. Blame it on the chemo brain, I misplaced the last half of my sermon manuscript. The text below therefore does not match up with the audio. Just in case anyone was bothered by the discrepancy! Apologies to Josh Retterer who labors as my editor gratis.

Transfiguration — Psalm 23

After I graduated from seminary, I worked as a chaplain in the Children’s Hospital at the University of Virginia. One night I was on call, attempting to catch some sleep by lying on top of a conference table in a dark office. It had been a busy shift. My hands reeked of sanitizer from visiting so many patient rooms. I was laying on the table, when my pager went off just after three o’clock in the morning.

It summoned me to a delivery room.

“The family is requesting a baptism,” is all the nurse managed to tell me.

The couple were from West Virginia. The husband— the Dad— was wearing a blue and yellow Mountaineers hoodie. A woman I intuited was his mother-in-law was sitting in the chair beside the bed, patting her daughter’s shoulder. She was wearing the pajamas she’d had on when she got a the call not much earlier than me. The mother was holding her swaddled, stillborn daughter in the crook of her arm, shushing her and smoothing her few fine hairs with her hand.

She turned her gaze from her daughter.

“We’d like you to baptize her, “ she said.

“Of course,” I mumbled nervously.

I fumbled about for a moment or two, finding a clean bed pan and a pitcher to fill with water. Slowly pouring it into the bed pan, I invoked the Holy Spirit so that the water might be a cleansing washing and a saving flood— a different sort of labor and delivery.

Then I took the tiny child and rested her in my arm.

I don’t remember their names, but after all these years I do remember hers.

I looked at her parents and asked, “What name is given this child?”

“Megan,” the girl’s mother spoke, “We want to name her Megan.”

And I looked down at her calm face, still splotchy from birth, and I said, “Megan, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Three times I cupped my hand, scooped it up, and watched her tiny hair wave in the water. Then I handed her back to her mother, pulled out the little vial of oil I carried in my pocket, dabbed my thumb with it, and anointed her forehead with the sign of the cross.

“Megan, receive the Holy Spirit,” I pronounced.

And then Megan’s Mother looked up at me, “Preacher, can you read the Twenty-Third Psalm for us?”

Oblivious to the looming danger, I pulled my pocket Bible from my lab coat and turned to David’s prayer. The grandmother clutched my hand like she was standing at the end of a plank. I read.

All was good— until I got to the final verse, “And I will dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long.”

Before I could get the amen out, Megan’s grandmother shot me a question, “What the hell was that?!”

“Um, it’s Psalm 23— like you wanted.”

“No it ain’t,” she replied, “We wanted to hear the dwelling in the house of the LORD forever one.”

“This is the New Revised Standard Version,” I replied limply.

And then she smacked me across my face, “How dare you take away their hope!”

I was about to apologize, save face, but she interrupted me, “God didn’t even let King David build that Temple in Jerusalem! Why in the hell would he be praying about the Temple? Don’t you know the scriptures?! I thought you were a preacher! Are you saying it doesn’t promise forever?!”

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus leads three of his twelve up to the top of Mount Tabor wherewith, without preamble or announcement, the LORD unveils to them the true identify of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. “Jesus was transfigured before them,” Mark reports. Just as Christ’s crucified body is the lamp whose uncreated light cast shadows in the valley of death, Peter, James, and John see Jesus ablaze with the kabod YHWH— the glory of the LORD. In other words, there is one who is other from God but is simultaneously God— a second divine identity.

Thinking they have trespassed upon majesty, the disciples react in terror. Peter is so scared he cannot keep from speaking, offering to construct a House for the Lord atop the mountain.

Neither Jesus nor Moses and Elijah respond to Peter.

Instead God the Father answers.

The Cloud of Presence, which had accompanied Israel through the wilderness day-by-day for forty years, appears and covers their eyes from the glory too luminous to behold. The cloud that is God’s presence surrounds the disciples. Likewise, at the conclusion of his prayer, David finds that for all of his life, across the entirety of his experiences, he has been surrounded by God.

Admittedly, this is not obvious in the English.

As Old Testament scholar Richard Briggs gripes, the final verse of the twenty-third psalm is the most consistently mistranslated portion of David’s prayer. For starters, the verb of the first two subjects (“to follow”) is an especially weak translation of the Hebrew verb rādap, which means to pursue, to chase, to go after, or to hunt down. Follow makes it sound like goodness and mercy can barely keep up with you; quite the opposite, you are the object of their determined questing.

Moreover, the two subjects of the verb, goodness and mercy, are not generic nouns for prosperity and pardon. The first noun in Hebrew is ṭōb, as in, “The LORD commanded, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was ṭōb.” Good— good for the covenant. The second noun in Hebrew is ḥesed. When the LORD renews his covenant with his people after the exodus, he appears in a pillar of cloud and pledges to Moses, “The LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in ḥesed.”

Steadfast love.

Tov and Hesed.

These are not generic adjectives. They are covenantal nouns. They are attributes of God. And, as Thomas Aquinas notes, because there is no distinction between God’s attributes and God’s very self, when David takes his gaze off the path in front of him and looks over his shoulder, he professes that he is being pursued relentlessly by God. Which is a straightforward enough confession of faith except of course for the fact that the Shepherd is also simultaneously in front of him, leading him.

God is both bow and stern, fore and aft.

What Mark shows you on the Mount of Transfiguration is nothing more mysterious than what David invites you to pray in this psalm.

God the Shepherd is in front of David, guiding him.

And One who is other than God but is also identifiable with God is at one and the same time behind David, like a sheep dog, driving him to the Shepherd’s chosen destination.

In other words—

From tranquil waters to the valley of death’s shadow, from the presence of enemies to the persecution occasioned by his oily anointing; before him and behind him, all this time, all along, always— even on his worst day; even if he doesn’t realize it until he turns to look back— David has been surrounded by God. David has been both led and pursued by God— by the stubborn if inscrutable tov and hesed of the triune God.

Four weeks ago, I preached for the funeral of a friend. Sam was my favorite old guy in my former parish. A fellow aficionado of standup comedy, ten years ago Sam escorted me and my fifth grade son to a Lewis Black show at the Warner Theater. Lewis Black may be explicit in his vocabulary and hyper-partisan in his politics but he’s a relatively clean comedian. Thus, Sam said he felt comfortable bringing along a boy who probably should have stayed home and watched the Magic School Bus.

But for the show at the Warner Theater, Sam hadn’t factored the opening act into his expectations. I don’t recall the name of the comedian, but I know that he had a ukulele and that his first bit was a song about Gwyneth Paltrow’s…let’s just say it rhymed with regina. After the fourth verse of the song, Sam leaned over my son Gabriel and whispered into my ear, “Don’t tell my granddaughter about this.”

When I met with his children to plan his service of death and resurrection, his daughter said to me:

“Over the years, Daddy had a lot of hard, trying times. The two wars, Korea and Vietnam, left him with scars beyond healing and nightmares without consolation. My mother’s illness exhausted him. And then the strokes and all that rehab. But when he looked back on his life— Daddy told me so just before he lost his power to speak— all he could see was the hand of God.”

If the final lines of David’s prayer are the most consistently mistranslated of the psalm, then the modifier at the beginning of verse six is but another instance of an interpretative stumble. Often translated as “surely,” the Hebrew work is ʾak. The modifier is both intensive and restrictive. It means not surely but only.

Only goodness and mercy are in pursuit of me.

Just as the Shepherd is before me, only God is behind me, questing after me.

Astonishingly— offensively, perhaps— David looks over his shoulder and back on his life and confesses that he can see the goodness and the steadfast love of Jesus Christ in every single circumstance of his life.

As Old Testament scholar Dale Ralph Davis summarizes the verse, “The expression is remarkable. There is a certain chemistry in believing faith that can combine brute facts with buoyant faith.” Or, as David prays in Psalm 119, “You are good and do good.”

Only good.

God’s goodness and steadfast love have you surrounded.

Of course, most renderings of Psalm 23 hedge. Instead they read surely not only. They do so, quite simply, because modern translators balk at affirming what the scriptures so straightforwardly attest; namely, God is the will which wills in all things.

Providence is the word Christians use for this hidden, ordered provision guiding our lives and all of history to God’s desired End. “All things are subject to divine providence, Thomas Aquinas writes, “not only in general, but even in their own individual selves.” Absent the Lord’s hand, the whole universe would be meaningless. Lacking all order, it would have no rationale or telos. Apart from God’s providence, the very act of prayer would be pointless.

As Robert Jenson explains the stakes in the psalm’s closing claim:

“Behind all the nihilisms of modernity is the vision of our world as a deaf and dumb apparatus, within which we live but to which our converse is irrelevant.

We have turned our society and our individual psyches into alien and silent prisons. In its participation in this self-alienation much of the American church has become simply unbelieving, disguising its abandonment of faith by doing other things— meditation, self or group therapy, activism and community organizing etc. and calling it Christianity. Our “progressivism” and “conservatism” are but the atheist branches of the same capitulation before a dead universe.

And it is all a delusion.”

If everything is not within the LORD’s providential grasp, God would be unable to save us. Either God’s providential love has us surrounded, leading and pursuing us. Or our redemption is in jeopardy.

Thereupon David’s prayer raises the inevitable question. Does the LORD’s providence exclude our personal willing? Quite the opposite. After all, David’s assault against Bathsheba trespassed the LORD’s will for David, but they did not permanently interrupt God’s providential guiding and pursuit of him.

David is neither a pawn nor an automaton.

As Jenson explains the dynamic of divine providence and creaturely will:

“The history God is making with us has the freedom of a good story, and it is a freedom that is there even for the Father and the Son, and therefore is a story full of turnings and detours. As we live in that story, we may be sure of the character of its outcome, but we do not know where God may be hiding around the next corner.”

And then to illustrate his point, Jenson points to the Parable of the Good Samaritan:

“The Samaritan does not expect a beaten-up Jew in his way nor the Jew a Samaritan benefactor. [After he has providentially arranged their encounter] the one hiding on the side of the road to see what will happen next is God.”

God is waiting to be surprised by what we do next.

Just so—

Faith in God’s providence does not nullify our works or our willing.

Faith in God’s providence begets perseverance.

“Providence,” my friend Brad East writes, “is a secret whispered from one martyr to another until the end of time.”

He continues:

“Providence, in short, makes a promise. It says that your life may sometimes seem like one long crucifixion, but at the end of it lies an empty tomb. A belief in providence takes God at his word no matter how dark life becomes.”

Providence takes God at his word.

Which word?

“The LORD your Shepherd is in front of you, and only tov and hesed— nothing else— are chasing after you.”

No matter how life looks, the three person’d God's got you surrounded.

A few days after I baptized Megan, her parents made use of the business card I’d stuffed into their go-bag. They called me. Despite what her grandmother may have thought about me as a priest or a preacher, the family had neither to bury their baby.

And so the following week I followed 64 West across the border to a graveyard near Summersville, West Virginia. In the place where a headstone later would be placed, the parents had pressed into the soil a photograph of themselves with Megan, holding her in the delivery room. You could not tell from the picture that anything was amiss in the world.

Casting earth upon her tiny casket, I commended her to the LORD, saying from the Prayerbook:

“Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your child Megan. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock…Receive her into the arms of your hesed .”

By way of benediction, I read the twenty-third psalm— the “forever in the house of the LORD” one. Afterwards, as we walked back to our cars, Megan’s grandmother said to me, “Thank you for praying the right version, preacher.”

I smiled, “I think it’s a distinction without a difference.”

She crinkled her brows like I had uttered nonsense.

I said:

“Think about it. The LORD disallows David from building the Temple because God wants to remain in the Tent of Meeting until he guided history to the appropriate point for his House to be built. David knew— a God so in command of our lives…you might as well pray in the here and now as though the promised future has already happened.”

Again, she just started at me, still skeptical of the groggy, rookie chaplain she’d seen at work in the delivery room.

“Think of it this way,” I tried, “Pray right now like you’re already playing in the Father’s House with a toddler named Megan. Because the LORD is after us and there isn’t a damn thing that’s ultimately going to keep God from getting what he wants.”

Then she grabbed ahold of me and cried tears that were not altogether sad.

A month or so after we buried her, Megan’s parents found me in the hospital cafeteria. They had come to Charlottesville because they wanted me to know that they were trying to become pregnant.

There is a certain chemistry in believing faith that can combine brute facts with buoyant faith.

“Megan would want a little brother or sister,” Megan’s mother told me over coffee, “She’ll be anxious to meet him or her.”

God is waiting to be surprised by what we will choose to do next.

As my friend writes, the doctrine of providence does not make our lives easy to interpret. The doctrine of providence makes the living of our lives endurable.

Endurable.Some sermons are aimed at the one who preaches.

I spent part of this week in a hospital in the Blue Ridge Mountains where we own a home. We’re preparing to list the house for sale. I was in the midst of a short, simple task when a thunderclap headache waylaid me— the third such one this week. Concerned, I checked my blood pressure which had spiked to Chernobyl levels, well past the edge of a stroke. My head felt like it was about to crack apart like plastic Easter egg.

Fun fact: High blood pressure and brain hemorrhages are a side effect of my chemotherapy.

When I complained to my oncologist on Friday about the treatment’s rigor, he replied candidly, “The plan is to do this until it stops working so buckle up; the alternative is death.”

He’s from Belgrade; I can only assume his bedside manner gets lost in translation.

Look—

If I had the power to choose, this is not how I would script my life. Nevertheless! I trust that it is not a story without a plot. And trust me, I get it. I know that if you’re only looking at what’s right in front of you— in your life, in the news, in the world—if you’re only looking at what’s immediately before you, it can be hard to see the tov and hesed of God.

But when I alter my gaze and widen the frame, when I look further out on the horizon to the future— the Father’s House— and when I look over my shoulder at all that is behind me, I’m with David.

It’s all— somehow— only the goodness and steadfast love of Jesus.

Sure, I may have a turd in my lap right now.

Nonetheless, God’s got me surrounded.

The doctrine of providence makes the living of our lives endurable.

Such perseverance is the reason Mark fixes the Transfiguration at the pivot between Jesus’s ministry and his inexorable march to the cross. The LORD reveals Jesus— as he truly is— to Peter, James, and John; so that, they might persevere through his Passion.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer preaches:

“It is a great gesture of grace that the same disciples who are to experience Jesus’s suffering in Gethsemane are now able to see him as the transfigured Son of God, as the eternal God. Hence the disciples go to the cross knowing about the resurrection. In that sense, they are exactly like us. We should bear the cross in the same knowledge of the End.”

The doctrine of providence makes the living of our lives endurable.

This is why the LORD gives us a similar vision, week after week, Sunday after Sunday. The LORD grants us a glimpse not of Jesus leaking glory but of Christ incarnate as loaf and cup. He is here, with you; so that, you can endure, moving forward in your story and trusting that one day, in the Father’s House, you will live happily ever after.

Don’t believe me?

Skeptical maybe?

Then step forward in faith, and come to the table. Bread and wine are our altar call. Here, it’s all only goodness and mercy on the menu.

Come.

Sure, some of us are hurting. In a ditch. Waiting for rescue. Or just help.

Come.

If we are the Body of Christ, then God’s got you surrounded.

And he is waiting to be surprised by what you do next.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

“Sir, we would see Jesus.”

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

Tomorrow the season of Epiphany closes with the Gospel’s account of the Transfiguration. Seeing the uncreated light of God’s glory spill forth from Christ, the three disciples on Mount Tabor see Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim as he truly is.

My dear friend and mentor, Fleming Rutledge (a subscriber here on SubStack!) reflects upon the Transfiguration in her wonderful recent book, Epiphany: The Season of Glory.

You should get a copy here.

And here is a conversation we had with Fleming last Epiphany about her book:

Tamed Cynic Live with Fleming RutledgeTamed Cynic is a reader-supported publication. If you appreciate the work, consider joining the posse of paid subscribers… Listen nowa year ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Jason Micheli and Josh Retterer

Here is an excerpt from her chapter “The Mountain:”

“Those who listen to a reading of the transfiguration narrative on the Sunday before the beginning of Lent will respond to the way it is presented. Conscientious readers of Scripture will submit themselves to the passage as its servants, not “acting it out,” but offering it as those who are themselves addressed by it. The reader should pray to be enabled to convey the sense of wonder and awe that the evangelists intend. When the person preaching on that day is similarly struck by the force of what is being manifested in these events, there will be transfiguration of Christian believers. Those who are appointed to read aloud from the Scriptures in worship need to be apprised of the effect that their reading is meant to have. All too many untrained people go through their paces as if they were unaware of the glory of what they are reading. On rare occasions I have heard readings where the text seems to escape from the page with transforming power, but this only happens when readers subject themselves not to their own facility or talent, but to the power of the living Word of the living God.

It became common, in the shift of emphasis in the mainline churches after the upheavals of the late sixties and beyond, to preach about the transfiguration in a remarkably tone-deaf way. Instead of focusing on Jesus’ appearance in uncreated light and the voice of God the Father glorifying him, the preacher will pass quickly over the Moses and Elijah appearances and change the subject, going on, sometimes at length, about Peter’s wish to stay in place on the mountain, thereby turning the story into an exhortation to the people in the pews to stop looking for mountaintop experiences and get down into the valley of hard knocks. Such interpretations ignore the carefully crafted passages in the Synoptics. An overview of the parallels is instructive; all three emphasize that the disciples “fell on their faces” (Matthew 17:6), that they were “exceedingly afraid” (Mark 9:6), and that “they were afraid as they entered the cloud” (Luke 9:34). Without this holy fear, the scene loses its power and there is nothing to lift the hearers into a dimension where they might experience the manifestation of the glory of the Lord. The transfiguration scene is given great emphasis in all three Synoptics and appears in a Johannine form at the crucial turning point in the Fourth Gospel. It can serve as a summation of all that we have been saying about the glory of Jesus Christ during his earthly life as he approaches his Passion…

The new human being described in the Beatitudes is the one who has been brought into the presence of the transfigured and risen Lord, to whom “all authority in heaven and on earth” is given. The transfiguration of human nature depicted in the Sermon on the Mount is not achieved by human means. It is the gift of God, whose voice from the “radiant cloud” (nephele photeine—Matthew 17:5) identifies his Son, and it is the trajectory of the “therefore” in Romans 12:1-2 (NRSV).

This is the glory of the Epiphany season, and a charge to preachers and teachers of the Christian faith. Telling stories about Jesus, what he said and what he did, is an essential part of spreading the gospel. But without the doxa, the glory as of the only Son from the Father, it is an incomplete gospel. This is not only a summons to preachers and teachers but also to members of congregations. Those who listen to sermons and teachings can demand more than they are getting. “Sir, we would see Jesus.”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

"He appears to each as is expedient for the beholder."

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber!

Thanks to all of you for your prayers and your encouragement. I am no longer in the hospital and I am slowly recovering from this bout with my chemotherapy’s side effects. He who would save their life must lose it, I suppose.1

This Sunday marks the threshold between Epiphany and Lent. Appropriately, the Transfiguration always marks the transition between the seasons, for the Transfiguration— especially in Mark— is the pivot from Christ’s Kingdom proclamation to his journey to his throne that is the cross.

I first read the second and third century church father Origen as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, under the teaching of David Bentley Hart. Once again of late, he has been a resource constantly at hand.

Here is a passage on the Transfiguration from his Commentary on Matthew:

Concerning the Transfiguration of the Saviour.

“Now after six days,” according to Matthew and Mark,“He taketh with him Peter and James and John his brother, and leads them up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them.”

Now, also, let it be granted, before the exposition that occurs to us in relation to these things, that this took place long ago, and according to the letter. But it seems to me, that those who are led up by Jesus into the high mountain, and are deemed worthy of beholding His transfiguration apart, are not without purpose led up six days after the discourses previously spoken.

For since in six days—the perfect number—the whole world,—this perfect work of art,—was made, on this account I think that he who transcends all the things of the world by beholding no longer the things which are seen, for they are temporal, but already the things which not seen, and only the things which are not seen, because that they are eternal, is represented in the words, “After six days Jesus took up with Him” certain persons.

If therefore any one of us wishes to be taken by Jesus, and led up by Him into the high mountain, and be deemed worthy of beholding His transfiguration apart, let him pass beyond the six days, because he no longer beholds the things which are seen, nor longer loves the world, nor the things in the world, nor lusts after any worldly lust, which is the lust of bodies, and of the riches of the body, and of the glory which is after the flesh, and whatever things whose nature it is to distract and drag away the soul from the things which are better and diviner, and bring it down and fix it fast to the deceit of this age, in wealth and glory, and the rest of the lusts which are the foes of truth.

For when he has passed through the six days, as we have said, he will keep a new Sabbath, rejoicing in the lofty mountain, because he sees Jesus transfigured before him; for the Word has different forms, as He appears to each as is expedient for the beholder, and is manifested to no one beyond the capacity of the beholder.

Another piece of moving patristic exegesis is from Timothy of Antioch. He affirms the following based on the Father’s declaration on Mount Tabor:

Jesus is unique. . . . This who is of one substance with me, his Father, in every way—he is not like those whom some heretics have reduced to a slave! This one pre-existed along with me, before the ages. This one put the world together by his Spirit. This one shaped Adam, when he and I together planned to make human beings. This one took mud from the earth and formed the human person. This one transported Enoch in a marvelous way from human company. This one is seen and understood. This one exists with me, and stands on the mountain. This one has walked in your company, and is not separated from the one who begot him. This one is without time, without beginning, without successor, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, ineffable beyond thought. This one is; he did not come to be, he was not created. He is by nature, not by grace.

He is, without having his being in time.

He is, for he also was and existed before. For I did not become Father in time, but I always exist as Father. And if I am always Father, then this one is always Son, and the Holy Spirit also always is—who is adored along with me and with the Son, and glorified along with us, always and to the unending ages of ages. Amen.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

1

Taylor Mertins

Private Faith is Atheism

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

The chaotic transition of the ̶o̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶s̶i̶d̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶ Elon Musk has lured me into revisiting Protestantism’s founding understanding of Christian vocation and political witness. The lectionary Gospel passages the last two Sundays from Christ’s Sermon on the Plain have elicited a number of especially bad hot takes that muddle the gospel with the law into a kind of glawspel.

For example:

I recently saw a number of colleagues on social media sharing a quote attributed to James Forbes, once the pastor at the historic Riverside Church in Harlem:

“Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.”

The assertion is rhetorically powerful, quite obviously.

Of course it is compelling: lex semper accusat— the law always accuses. But such an assertion, torn from Jesus’ hard teaching, merely recapitulates the anxiety-producing Christianity Luther’s preaching movement attempted to reform.

Which is to say, “Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor” is not the gospel. The poor person from whom every believer already possesses a letter of reference is Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.

On account of Christ, by means of baptism’s saving flood and cleansing washing, we are justified. “Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor” is an instance of the modern liberal Christianity privileging the Jesus kerygma over the Christ kerygma.

Back to the matter at hand.

Read more

“The only alternative to the muzzle of a shotgun is the foot of the cross.”

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

I spent yesterday in a hospital in the Blue Ridge Mountains where we own a home.

We’re preparing to list the house for sale. I was in the midst of a short, simple task when a dizzying headache waylaid me— the third such one this week. Concerned, I checked my blood pressure which had spiked to the edge of a stroke. I drove the block to the ER where they poked and prodded me before scanning my head and later pronouncing the all-clear. A side effect of my twice daily, self-administered chemo— probably— they concluded.

Given my week and in light of my work in the Psalter during this Epiphany season, I thought I’d repost this section from the book I wrote during my first bout with Mantle Cell Lymphoma, Cancer is Funny (I hope to get the rights back to the book in order to change the title, which I did not previously choose!). In the meantime, you can pray for me and my family. Once again, the LORD invites us to participate in his providence. Perhaps that God truly does listen to our prayer requests can account for his inscrutable governance of the history he makes with us.

Read more

Forty Facets of the Ascension

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

My friend and former classmate Sarah Hinlicky Wilson joined us for a conversation about her forthcoming book, Forty Facets of the Ascension.

Sarah's new book, is coming to Kickstarter in mid-March!

Sign up now to be notified the moment it launches.

In this Sarah, Ken Sundet Jones, and I discuss whether Jesus was a rocket ship, a hot air balloon, a cosmonaut... or maybe just the risen Lord whose bodily existence is integral to gospel proclamation. We look at some of the differences between Luke 24 and Acts 1's version of the Ascension (be prepared for some surprises) and the many things Luke had to argue against in order to argue for Jesus. If the Ascension has left you perpetually perplexed or scientifically stressed, fear not! This book is for you.

1. Once again, folks, that's Forty Facets of the Ascension coming to you on Kickstarter in mid-Marcy 2025!

2. Also, Transfiguration is sneaking up on you soon (March 2)! If you didn't already get Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration, you can get it instantly in ebook or audiobook, or order a print copy right now.

Show Notes

Summary

This conversation delves into the theological significance of the Ascension, exploring its connections to the number 40, the resurrection, and the role of the Holy Spirit. The speakers discuss the implications of the Ascension for understanding Christ's presence in the world and its importance in Christian preaching and theology. They also touch on the cultural aspects of the Ascension, including its celebration in Germany, and the challenges of interpreting biblical texts in light of historical context.

Takeaways

The number 40 is significant in the context of the Ascension.

The Ascension is depicted in both the Gospel of Luke and Acts.

Understanding the Ascension helps connect resurrection and exaltation.

The Holy Spirit's role is crucial after the Ascension.

Ascension challenges the notion of a disembodied Christ.

Cultural celebrations of the Ascension vary, such as in Germany.

The Ascension has practical implications for preaching.

The body of Jesus remains essential to Christian faith.

The Ascension raises questions about Christ's omnipresence.

Biblical interpretation must consider the Old Testament context.

Sound Bites

"It's always been there and I missed it."

"Himmelfart is a huge festival in Germany."

"The Spirit has particular Holy Spirit jobs."

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

No Ordinary Rabbi

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become paid subscriber.

Hi Friends,

First, I wanted to say thank you.

With encouragement from some of you, I started this SubStack three years ago. Here is my first post. Your questions and comments since then have become a valuable piece of my discernment process each week as I prepare to preach.

Speaking of anniversaries:

As you know, my cancer returned this winter after a ten year hiatus.

Those of you who have become paid subscribers to this platform have helped alleviate the financial burden occasion by its relapse, and I wanted to convey my gratitude to you.

There, I shared my feelings.

I hope my therapist will be proud.

Now on to the Bible…

On the liturgical calendar, this coming Sunday is Transfiguration Sunday.

Here is an old sermon from the vault; actually it is the last in-person sermon I preached before the pandemic shuttered our doors for a season. In addition, be sure to check my conversation with my friend Sarah Hinlicky Wilson on her recent book, Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration.

You can find our conversation here.

Read more

Bound Prayer

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

Psalm 23

In the Gospel of Matthew, the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world spins a yarn about a single lost sheep who wanders off from the flock of ninety-nine. A lost sheep is a dead sheep. The shepherd responds by breaking all the rules of responsible sheep-herding, abandoning the flock to search out the single sheep in danger. “It is not the will of my Father in heaven,” Jesus concludes the parable, “that even one of these little ones should be lost.”

We forget how the parable of the lost sheep is Jesus’ way of responding to the disciples' attempts at elbowing each other out of the way in terms of importance. The parable is how Jesus addresses their anxiety about their value, worth, and eternal security.

The parable is his answer to their question, "Who is the greatest in the house of the Lord?”Answer: You’re all worth the search party.

The Father wills that not one of you should be lost to him; therefore, nothing can separate you from the love of God (which is everything).

So be not afraid!

In the Gospel of John, Jesus advances a similar claim when he announces to those gathered on Solomon’s Porch at the Temple in Jerusalem that he is the Good Shepherd promised to the prophet Ezekiel. The assertion elicits anger among Christ’s audience, many of whom reach for rocks with which to stone him.

Just before they stoop down to scoop up implements of murder, Jesus says:

“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand. The Father and I are one.”

Notice the parallel to the parable. Jesus says that what the Father has given him (that is, you— the Bride of Christ, the Spouse of the Father’s Only Begotten Son) is greater than everything else. You are worthy of a search party. And, Jesus insists, no one can snatch you out of his hand precisely because he is safe in his Father’s hand.

What is his is his inalterably— no circumstance can undo it.Nothing is going to break God’s grip on you!

So—

Do not fear.

Only after we have heard these two promises from the Gospels can we rightly pray the pivot in Psalm 23, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”

You can endure the journey to the Father’s House because you are in the LORD’s unsnatchable grip.

Be not afraid!

Exactly ten years ago last month, the Islamic terrorist group ISIS kidnapped twenty-one men who were working construction in Sirte, Libya. Twenty of the abductees were Coptic Christians from poor villages in upper Egypt. The lone unbeliever was a man named Matthew who was from Ghana. A persecuted minority in Egypt and a part of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Copts are one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. They trace their lineage all the way back to the Good Shepherd’s initial flock. For nearly fourteen centuries, the Coptic Christians have lived under Islamic rule. In the best of times, their faith has made them second class citizens. In the worst of times, aggressive persecution has been visited upon them.

It is a felony for them to gospel their neighbors.

In February 2015, ISIS released a video recorded in Libya, on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. In February 2015, I was laid up in the hospital, my belly having recently been opened up to remove a tumor the size of all the Chronicles of Narnia. I was in the middle of my first round of chemotherapy, and I was channel-surfing on the television when I saw the image flash across the screen. Originally, it had been uploaded to YouTube with the title, “A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross.” The caption at the bottom of the video read, “The people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church.”

In the video, after leading the captives along the beach, a hostage-taker attempts to compel the twenty-one men, all in orange jumpsuits, to recant their faith in Christ Jesus. Kneeling in the sand, the sea lapping at their knees, remarkably every single one of them refuse. They would not be snatched out of the LORD’s hand.

Rather than renounce their LORD, they called upon the power of his NAME.

They prayed.

Ya Rab Yasua: O LORD Jesus.

They were not afraid.

One of them, named Girgis, his lips moving patiently, prayed from the Bible’s prayerbook, “The LORD is my Shepherd…thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me…he makes a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”

Since they could not be snatched from the LORD’s hand, the masked men, dressed all in black, took their places behind the twenty-one and, one-by-one, took their heads.

“Oh my God!” my nurse on the cancer ward said when she stepped into the room and spied me watching the gruesome video on CNN. Knowing I normally wear robe instead of a gown, she pointed at the the television screen and asked the obvious question, “Where is God?!”

Just after the LORD anoints his head with oil, David finds himself in the Valley of Elah where the Philistine warrior named Goliath has been challenging the Israelite army for forty days. Still much too young for battle, how does the anointed boy end up across a bloodied field from Goliath, whose screams demand “Give me a man to fight!”

David ends up there because his father Jesse had sent his youngest son to the front lines— pay attention— to feed his brothers.

Jesse said to David:

“Take this ephah of roasted grain and these ten loaves of bread for your brothers and hurry to their camp. Take along these ten cheeses to the commander of their unit. See how your brothers fare and bring back some assurance from them.”

David prepares a table for them in the presence of their enemies.

Or rather, since it’s the LORD’s anointing that inserts David into salvation history, the LORD is the one who prepares the table in the presence of their enemies.

Despite our propensity to hear them as comforting, the images which follow after the table are no less unsettling, “You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”

David’s story opens with the LORD anointing his head with oil. And immediately, David suffers persecution. As though, David is anointed in order to suffer. Immediately, the evil spirt that possesses Saul attacks David. Immediately, his brothers ridicule him. “You’re the King of the Jews!?” Immediately, he must battle against the dark powers of the world.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer comments on the Book of Samuel:

“The anointed David cannot escape being hated and persecuted because of his anointing. The period after his anointing is one of ongoing hostility toward him from every quarter. He is disdained and hated by the world because of the anointing. He does not even have a place to lay his head.”

And though David is a man after God’s own heart, David nonetheless must drink the cup of wrath the LORD sets before him.

Even the LORD’s anointed one must pay the wages of sin. At the end of his life David’s sins are repeated in his sons, and they are the undoing of his house. His cup overflows. But David accepts this punishment and, as curses and weeping are heaped upon him from the scornful crowd in Jerusalem, he bears the curse to outside the city gates.

Sound familiar?

David risks forsakenness. David risks sin and death having the last word on him because yet does he trust the promise of his anointing, Nothing can snatch you out of my hand!

Facing judgment, David does not fear.

Lecturing on the twenty-third psalm, Martin Luther registered dis-ease with the transition from Shepherd to Host. “I would have thought,” Luther expounded, “that the LORD should have prepared before him a strong wall or a mighty bulwark, deep ditches or armor, whereby he might be sure before his enemies and discomfort them. But instead God prepares a table.”

The table is how David ends up in a duel-to-the-death with Israel’s enemy. But David trusts the promise given in his anointing. “The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear,” David declares, “will save me from the hand of this Philistine.”

“Nothing can snatch you out of my hand!”

And because David trusts that promise, he lets his life play out. He goes into battle without any weapons, defenseless, armed only with his faith in God’s unflagging grip on him.

During the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994, a woman named Cancilde lost her husband and five of her seven children. A Hutu militia member butchered them with a machete. The murderer was their neighbor, a young man named Emmanuel. A year after the One Hundred Days of Carnage, authorities arrested Emmanuel and sentenced him to prison. After his release in 2003, Emmanuel sought out Cancilde. Ashamed of his crimes and dreading the cup of righteous wrath he would have to drink, Emmanuel begged the mother and wife to have mercy on him and forgive him for his terrible trespass.

Unbeknownst to Emmanuel, Cancilde attended a weekly Bible study with other women who had been made widows by the genocide. It was through the scriptures that Cancilde learned that when God baptizes a creature he makes a promise to it, “You are mine; I’ll never let you go.” Just so, when she was confronted by her family’s killer, Cancilde summoned the courage to ignore the advice of her neighbors and friends. Instead she trusted God’s grip on her and took a chance. She did not fear.

“Yes, I forgive you.”

The absolution was not the end. Twelve years later another survivor, Denise Uwimana, visited the region to conduct research for a book about the genocide and its aftermath. She met Cancilde and Emmanuel who told her that, astonishingly, Cancilde’s pardon of Emmanuel had been but the beginning of a deep, familial friendship.

Uwimana recounts their conversation:

“Cancilde has become like a mother to me. When I need advice, I go to her. Before I got married, I talked over the details with her. She is the local official who authorized my marriage. Cancilde broke in, “Emmanuel is the one I ask for help when my house needs repair. He comes any time I ask, to replace a window or mend the roof. If my cow has problems, I call him. He is my son! Therefore, he knows he’s always welcome to share a meal at my table in my home with me. We pray together at this table; whenever we do, the LORD is with us.”

“Oh my God!” my nurse on the cancer ward said as she walked into my room ten years ago. And then she pointed at the television hanging above the dry-erase board that showed the names of my caregivers for the day.

“Where is God?” she asked in a tone that suggested God is like Superman, swooping in just in time to avert disaster.

“Where is he?” she repeated.

“In this place,” I said, “that can’t possibly be the first time that question has been raised.”

But she didn’t respond. Her eyes remained fixed on the screen. Like she was concentrating on taking my blood pressure, she stared at the scene of the crime. I was about to mumble some religious bromides when, in the video, one of the twenty-one seemingly answered the nurse’s question for her.

“Do you reject Christ?” one of the ISIS executioners demanded.

And in the moment before he was beheaded, Matthew Ayairga, the only one not from Egypt, answered strangely on his knees, “This God is my God.”

This God is my God.

Unlike the other twenty, Matthew Ayairga was not raised as a Christian. Until those moments on the beach, kneeling in the sand alongside “the people of the cross,” Matthew had been an unbeliever. But witnessing their faith and their lack of fear— hearing them pray in the power of the NAME of Jesus— he received faith just before he lost his life.

Notice—

To the executioner’s question, he did not answer, “Jesus is Lord.”

He did not say, “Christ is my Savior.”

He did not reply, “The Father and the Son are one with the Spirit.”

He didn’t even offer a simple no, “No, I do not reject Christ.”

He did not make a declaration; he made an identification.He named a location.“This God is my God.”As though, the LORD Jesus was right there, kneeling with them in the sand and praying the twenty-third psalm right along with them.This God— this God here— is my God.

When the prophet Samuel anoints David in Bethlehem, the Spirit of the LORD rushes upon David. The Holy Spirit is the power of God’s future. The one who lives in the Last Future is the crucified and risen Jesus. Just as the Father is the Father of Jesus, the Spirit is the Spirit of the LORD, Jesus.

As the church father Irenaeus of Lyon writes:

“The Holy Spirit is Christ’s Spirit so that Christ may give himself again.”

That is, it is Jesus who rushes upon David as his head is covered in oil. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it, from that day forward David has the crucified and risen Jesus “in his loins.” The reason so much of David’s story sounds like the Gospel story is because Christ is in him; consequently, the New Testament reads the words of the psalms of David as the words of the prayers of Jesus.

He is the me in this prayer.

The one who prays “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies” is the one who sat down in an upper room at a Passover meal and handed a piece of bread to Judas and Peter, saying, “Take and eat. This is my body given for you.”

The one who prays “You anoint my head with oil” is the one upon whom Mary of Bethany lavishes expensive ointment on the precipice of his passion. When the disciples gripe about the expense, Jesus replies, “She anointed me to prepare me for my burial.”

The one who prays “My cup overflows” is the one who, stricken with dread in the Garden of Gethsemane, prays “If it be thy will, let this cup pass from me.”

Christ is the supplicant in the Psalter.

Indeed if Jesus alone permits us to address his Father as our Father, then Jesus is the primary supplicant in every prayer.

He alone makes prayer possible; such that, he is the primary speaker in all our prayers. This God is God. This is nothing other than the straightforward teaching of the scriptures, “We do not know how to pray, but the Spirit [of Jesus] intercedes with us with sighs too deep for words.”

As Bonhoeffer puts it in a 1935 lecture entitled “Christ in the Psalms:”

“The essential difference between Christian prayer and all other prayer is that Christian prayer is mediated prayer, mediated by Christ. It is not simply a religious given that we can come to God in prayer but rather it is made possible alone through Christ. No prayer can find the way to God that our intercessor Jesus Christ does not himself pick up in his hands and pray for us.

Our prayer is thus bound prayer, bound to Jesus Christ.”

In other words, what David prays in a different prayer is true of all prayer:

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your right hand will clutch me fast.”

Whether you pray from a place of sorrow or dread, whether you pray from a place of hopelessness or unbelief even, whether you pray from a place of anger or shame or doomscrolling exhaustion, there is no place from which you can pray that the LORD Jesus is not already with you.

Even if words fail you, the Word is nevertheless there, with you.

All prayer is bound prayer.

The terrorist’s YouTube video cut back to CNN.

My nurse wiped tears from her eyes and turned her gaze to the floor.

She said, “I don’t know how they could pray in a situation like that.”

I replied, “What if they weren’t the ones praying?”

We speak of praying to God. But if God is Trinity and if one of the triune identities is Jesus, then we use the wrong preposition.

We pray with God.

Just so, “to pray is to enter into a community we cannot control.”

Samir is the father of Girgis, one of the twenty-one Coptic Christian martyrs. He lives in a poor, remote part of Egypt. With contemporary icons, Samir has erected a chapel in his son’s memory.

On the ten year anniversary of his son’s martyrdom, Samir told a reporter:

“Girgis is with Jesus. I know because Jesus is with me whenever I pray; and so, my son is also with me whenever I pray. A year after he died, my son told me— a year after he died, my son told me— to forgive the militants who killed him. It was a difficult thing to ask, but you are never in charge when you pray.”

Because prayer is a way opened only by Jesus, we should not be surprised it is a way that leads us through suffering, leaving behind the tranquil waters, taking us through the valley of death’s shadow, guiding us into the midst of enemies, acquainting us with the cost of both our anointings and our sins.

We should not be surprised that prayer is a way that leads us through suffering, for Jesus wants to give us not a good life— and certainly not what we’ve been told is a good life— but a share in God’s life. And he is the only one who can gift it. As Jesus himself says, there is only one way to the Father’s House. And it is cruciform. Goodness and mercy may be chasing you, but the cross always lies ahead.

But, that Jesus at last gives up the Spirit upon the cross means he did not journey that path alone. And neither do you. All prayer is bound prayer. The very act of prayer refutes any suspicion you might harbor that you are alone. The simplest, most desperate and doubting prayer proves Christ is with you.

As Chris Green writes, “No doubt you’ve been told that the world does not revolve around you. And that’s true. But Jesus does.”

He revolves around you. Like Jonah in the whale, so long as you pray you are inside his unsnatchable hand.

Therefore, be not afraid!

Be not afraid!

And come.

Goodness and mercy are in front of you not behind you.

Once again, the LORD Jesus has prepared a table for his unreliable followers. And as the host of this table, the Good Shepherd is not only the supplicant in all our prayers, he is also an object in our hands; so that, just as you are inside his unsnatchable grip, he can be inside of you.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

"Thou Shalt Not Kidnap" vs. "Love Thy Enemy"

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber!

Rabbi Joseph and I decided to start a series of our conversations on our respective weekly passages— the Torah portion for Jews and the Revised Common Lectionary for Christians.

Rabbi Joseph loves to get your feedback so be sure to leave a comment for him!

Show Notes

Summary

In this conversation, Jason Micheli and Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit explore themes of loss, grief, and the ethical implications of scripture in the context of modern violence and trauma. They discuss the importance of justice and compassion as outlined in the Torah, the challenge of loving one's enemies, and the need for ethical reflection in a complex world. The dialogue emphasizes the significance of community, memory, and the interplay of faith and politics in navigating contemporary issues.

Takeaways

Loss and grief can be overwhelming and difficult to process.

The Torah emphasizes justice and compassion for the vulnerable.

Modern violence challenges our understanding of innocence.

Scripture must be engaged with in the context of current events.

Loving one's enemies is a profound challenge in today's world.

Faith communities must navigate complex social issues together.

Historical trauma shapes our ethical imperatives today.

Divine justice is complex and often difficult to comprehend.

Action in faith is essential for understanding and belief.

Hope is necessary amidst despair and chaos.

Sound Bites

"I cannot begin to understand this loss."

"How do we find a way to share scripture?"

"We need to uphold the hope."

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

Grace vs Gnosticism

If you appreciate the work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Here is the latest discussion of Robert Capon’s The Mystery of Christ. Joining us for this session was Jamie Howison.

Jamie Howison struck up an unlikely friendship with the irascible Robert Farrar Capon just before Capon’s death, and he’s on the podcast to talk about it, ministry, Cornel West, and John Coltrane.

https://mbird.com/2018/04/the-man-who-ate-with-capon/

Jamie Howison is a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada and the founding pastoral leader of Saint Benedict’s Table in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His most recent book is I Will Not Be Shaken. His book God’s Mind in that Music: Theological Explorations through the Music of John Coltrane had its genesis in an essay written for the Collegeville Institute summer 2008 writing workshop.

You can listen to a previous podcast interview I did with Jamie here.

Show Notes

Summary

In this conversation, Jason Micheli and guests discuss the works and influence of Robert Capon, particularly focusing on his book 'The Mystery of Christ.' Jamie Howison shares his personal journey with Capon's writings and the impact they have had on his theological understanding. The discussion explores themes of grace, the end of religion, and the playful nature of Capon's theology, emphasizing the importance of engaging conversations about faith in everyday settings. The guests reflect on Capon's unique voice, his approach to complex theological issues, and his legacy in contemporary Christian thought.

Takeaways

Robert Capon had a profound influence on contemporary theology.

Capon's writing style is engaging and playful, making complex ideas accessible.

The conversation emphasizes the importance of grace in Christian theology.

Capon's approach to theology encourages playfulness and openness.

The discussion highlights the distinction between Gnosticism and resurrection in Capon's work.

Capon's legacy continues to inspire clergy and laypeople alike.

The guests reflect on their personal experiences with Capon's writings.

Capon's voice resonates with those seeking meaningful theological discourse.

The importance of respectful and caring conversations about faith is emphasized.

Capon's works are recommended for their insightful perspectives on theology.

Sound Bites

"You see what love has done?"

"Christianity is the end of religion."

"This is about grace."

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app