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All of God’s People Say: “What the F@#%?”

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The lectionary this week skips right over the parable of the father who manages to alienate both his children to Luke 16:1-8 and a parable that will tighten your sphincter for sure.

Here is an old sermon of mine from our collection on the parables.

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“The Weaver-God, He Weaves”

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Romans 10.9-15

Hi Friends,

My therapist (a Catholic) recently quipped, “I never knew ministry entailed so much travel and ecumenical projects.”

Well…

The second year and second cohort of the Lily Endowment-funded Iowa Preachers Project kicked off Monday night at Luther Memorial Church on the Des Moines campus of Grandview University. I want to add that I’m incredibly excited to add two friends to the leadership of this new cohort, Chenda Innis Lee and Sarah Hinlicky Wilson. Here is my sermon for the opening service— it was (more than) good to lead worship with Chenda again. I’m excited to get to know e-friends and spouses of former cohort members this go-around. And, a la Top Chef, I keep hoping Ken Sundet Jones will manufacture an appearance of the Season One cast.

Okay, here’s the sermon:

Jack Graham is the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, a prominent Southern Baptist congregation in Plano, Texas. He served two terms as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention at the beginning of the century. I was unaware of Graham until a friend forwarded me an exhortation that the pastor issued in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk— well before any details were known about his assailant.

Jack Graham had tweeted:

“To all the preachers out there: this Sunday is an opportunity to speak to our congregations regarding the many questions they have regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the extreme violence in our culture. This is an opportunity to bring a message of hope and to strengthen our resolve and voice in our communities. Run to this battle, and don’t shy away for goodness sake. Do not be silent.”

I mention Graham’s missive not to besmirch the dead nor to trouble his grieving wife and children. I definitely do not wish to entangle myself in the ongoing hagiography of Charlie Kirk’s career. I call attention to Jack Graham’s exhortation because I think his summons for public proclaimers of the gospel to lean into such a tense, tightrope political moment underscores what the apostle Paul calls the foolishness of preaching.

Preaching is foolish not merely because the word of the cross is a scandal.Preaching is foolish because there is no such thing as a sermon.Preaching is folly because there is never a single, discrete sermon that is delivered by a herald and heard by every listener.

No doubt, the word I would have heard Jack Graham hand over on Sunday at Prestonwood Baptist Church and the word you would have heard from him and the word my black friends might have heard from him would all have been different sermons. At the very least, they would not have been the same sermon. Preaching is foolish because there is no such thing as a sermon.

Two Sundays ago, a young transgender worshipper came up to me at the coffee pot in the fellowship hall, laid their hand on my shoulder and let out long exhale.

“Thank you for your sermon,” they said, “You encouraged me to forgive my family, who doesn’t understand me, and to lean into my call to ministry.”

“Your call to ministry?” I asked, “Did you just walk in here from some other church? My sermon was about suffering and sovereignty. The blind man and Romans 8. I didn’t preach about transgenderism or God’s call at all.”

They laughed like I was joking, “Well, that’s what I heard Jesus say to me.”

Don’t tell the Lily Endowment, but you know this to be true.

There is no such thing as a sermon.

The theologian Robert Jenson says the way that scripture exercises authority in the church is by the preacher struggling to say what the scripture says, struggling in such a way that the gathered can hear it as God’s word for them. But actually preaching is even more difficult than wrestling to say what the scripture says because, even without the Bible complicating the exercise, human communication is a fraught endeavor. What I intend to convey with my words and what you receive in my words are, at best, tangentially related— don’t believe me, just ask my wife. The sermon I deliver is not necessarily the sermon you hear. And the sermon you hear is certainly not the sermon everyone else hears. Often what a listener loves in a preached word is not anything I uttered. Even more common, the part of the proclamation that triggers a person— I seen this happen with Chenda— is not in the sermon at all.

Whenever a parishioner mentions a sermon of mine, I have trouble recalling it— exactly we’re remembering two different sermons.

There is no such thing as a sermon.

Every pulpit is like a playground where children play the telephone game. Every Sunday there are as many sermons venturing forth from the preacher’s lips as there are pairs of ears in the room. In fact, now that I’ve been seeing a therapist for over a year, I know there are even more sermons than pairs of ears because preacher and hearer alike bring our multiple selves— complete strangers, even— to the sermonic encounter.

This is just the way sermons work.

And you would be right to wonder if they work, you would be right to worry that this messy mode of exchange is indeed hopeless folly— a self-justifying delusion— if you limited your focus exclusively to these assigned verses from the Epistle to the Romans:

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says…For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”

Paul’s logic chain sounds straightforward. But more and more, I have come to the conviction that we read not the scriptures but Bible passages— pericopes—and that, by reading it in such piecemeal fashion, we do not actually read the scriptures, certainly not with the discerning attention they demand. This is why, I believe, the plain reading of a passage is almost always wrong.

For example:

A few weeks ago I was reading the Bible (just for fun). It’s a good book; you ought to check it out. I was reading the Book of Genesis, from beginning to end, like I would a novel— I’ve read The World According to Garp at least eight times. Now, I have been a workaday preacher for twenty-five years. I have preached on the Binding of Isaac at least half a dozen times. But because I only read the passage which narrates it, I never before noticed how, after we see Isaac on the altar, never again in Abraham’s life does Isaac speak to his father. Their final exchange is when Abraham is standing over his child with a knife in his hand. Isaac disappears from the remainder of Abraham’s story. Genesis reports that Abraham then leaves Moriah and returns to Beersheba. Meanwhile— in the very next scene of story— his wife Sarah dies in Hebron, in the land of Canaan.

Not in Beersheba!

And later, as Abraham dies, he orders his servant to find a wife for his son. Again, Abraham must summon his servant because Isaac never came home from Moriah. Isaac, we learn when he meets Rebecca, has been living in his dead mother’s tent. Abraham’s story ends with Isaac and Ishmael reunited at the grave of their dead father.

Ram in the thicket or not, this is not a happy story!

But I had never noticed it before because I had only been reading passages.

Likewise, if you abstract these verses in the Letter to the Romans, lifting them out of their larger context in chapters nine through eleven, you will hear Paul making a claim about preaching that is contrary to what he in fact concludes.

As you all know, Paul wrestles in these chapters of his epistle with the grace of Gentile inclusion into the covenant and the mystery of Israel’s disobedience. Paul is attempting to reckon with this dialectic in light of the God who does not— cannot— break his promises. In verses nine through fifteen of this passage, Paul appears to make matters quite plain. How are you saved? You confess, you believe, you're forgiven, and you're saved. But how can you confess what you do not know? How can you believe what you have not heard? Get thee to a preacher!

Faith comes from what is heard.

What is heard comes through the word of Christ.

And the Word clothes himself on the lips of a herald.

Now, if we stop at verse fifteen, it sounds like the apostle Paul is making you all indispensable workers on behalf of my eternal salvation (talk about Law!). But such a takeaway is as misleading as supposing that Isaac went camping with Abraham the weekend after they went to Moriah.

Notice Paul’s next question:

“But I ask, have they not heard? For their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Again I ask, did Israel not understand? Moses says, I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation. With a foolish nation, I will make you angry. Then Isaiah is bold to say, I have been found by those who did not seek me.”

The plain reading of the passage appears to suggest that saving faith comes from what is heard and what is heard comes from the word of Christ and the word of Christ is dependent on you. But if you read further, you realize that Paul’s entire argument (about confessing and believing, being sent and preaching the gospel) is that God does not work that way!

God sent preachers to Israel, Paul writes. Israel heard those preachers. And they did not believe. Meanwhile, the prophet Isaiah announces, those who were not even seeking the LORD found him. This surprising shift builds to the first verse of chapter eleven, “I ask then, has God rejected his people?”

“By no means!”

It’s not surprising that we zero in on passages. Paul’s argument here in Romans is dense with citations and its logic is difficult to trace. Nonetheless the claim is bracingly straightforward. Paul is insisting that God calls Israel out of all the nations of the earth because he loves the Gentiles. Israel’s unfaithfulness is precisely what leads to the salvation of the Gentiles, and the inclusion of the Gentiles is counterintuitively what leads to the salvation of Israel.

In case you’re bad at arithmetic, that adds up to everybody.

Again—

Israel’s failure to hear and confess and believe the preachers sent to them is nevertheless how God brings about their salvation.

This is freaking good news for preachers! God is up to surpassingly more than your feeble attempts to proclaim a wild promise about a Jew who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly.

The Triune God is making himself findable to those not even seeking after him; simultaneously, he is busy not rejecting those who reject him.

In other words, preaching has permission to be foolish.

Every sermon can contain multitudes.

What I proclaim and what you hear can share but the slightest resemblance.

Because the stakes are actually quite low.

He’s already borne your sins in his body on the tree.

“He’s got the rest in hand!” Paul says.

God's salvation does not ride on your perfection in ministry. No doubt, our listeners would appreciate more compelling preaching, but the gospel truth is that we are all free to be ordinary preachers. As my friend Sarah Hinlicky Wilson told our cohort last spring, sermons have permission to be forgettable. If you are faithful and obedient, struggling to say what the scriptures say, then the Lord can take that work and bring goodness into the lives of your hearers. But if you step into the pulpit flat-footed and fail miserably, God is able to use that too— no, Paul’s point is that God will use that too. Your performance changes only the way you participate in his work. It does not change the fact that God is working all things together for the Good that is our destiny in him.

Just as much as prayer, preaching is your participation in Providence.

As Robert Jenson writes, when we pray, we do nothing less than ask God to listen to our advice about how the world should go.” So then, when we preach nothing less is happening than that God is working in our speaking to make the world the way it should go. When we preach, God is working in our speaking to rectify the world; that’s why we should take this foolish endeavor with utmost seriousness.

Preaching is your participation in Providence.

If you trust that claim, it will not necessarily make your sermons more compelling. But if you do not trust that claim, it will make your sermons, worse than boring. It will make them, of all things, the most to be pitied.

Preaching is not God joining your work; it’s you being swept into his.

As Ishmael says in Moby Dick, “The weaver-god, he weaves.”

He weaves even using you.

God does not participate in your sermon. Your sermon participates in his Providence. Everything God has ever done with Israel has been out of love for the Gentiles, Paul says, and everything he has done among the Gentiles has been out of love for Israel. In the same way, everything God is doing in your life is because he loves the people around you—and everything he is doing in their lives is because he loves you. Always, in everything, God is at work from every side, on every level, weaving all things together toward his purpose for the world.

Even if you’re lonely and have lost your preaching voice.

Even if your church is up your butt for not giving them enough meat

Even if you’re struggling to pastor as you need pastoring yourself for the loved ones you’ve lost, for the marriage you’re nursing, for the new call you hate or the call you quit or the call you still have not found.

Even if you can barely come up for air much less preach, juggling kids or wrangling bi-vocational ministry or learning how to co-pastor with a spouse.

Even if you fail, Christ Jesus is not going to fail.

Even if you fumble, the LORD is at work from every side to turn it to good.

Even if you’re just coasting in your calling, God is nevertheless at work in everything, always, from every side and on every level, to bring his mercy to all.

This is good news!

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” Paul promises.

“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?”

Answer: The Living God.

“And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?”

Answer: Christ is risen indeed.

“And how are they supposed to hear without someone preaching?”

Answer: I don’t know; God has this in hand.

As some of you know, I’m typically a storyteller when I preach.

I work hard to hone an illustration so my precise point will not be missed.

But if what Paul promises is true, then you can take the sermon from here.

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Jesus, the Friend of Pharisees

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Luke 15.1-10

The second year of the Iowa Preachers Project kicks off tomorrow with a new cohort, and I am in Des Moines where I preached at Luther Memorial at Grandview University for Holy Cross Sunday. You can learn more about the Lily-funded project here, and I will post sermons from Ken Sundet Jones and myself here later in the week.

The Gospel passage assigned by the lectionary is the first third of a longer unit. The final parable breaks the pattern of the first two, ending not with the joy of a feast but with the father of two lost sons pleading with his resentful eldest child to join his brother’s homecoming. The scripture then is a passage which begins with grousing and concludes without a happy ending.

In seminary, homileticians train novice preachers that the form of the scripture text should determined the form of their sermon. Thus, if the scripture is from Lamentations then the sermon ought to be sorrowful or if the preacher is tackling a psalm she should aim for her preaching to be poetic. In this case, obedience in your pulpit means I should probably make some of you grumble and leaves others wanting to crucify me, which I suppose would make it a fitting sermon for Holy Cross Sunday.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Speaking of grumbling…

Back during our second war in Iraq, one week during Lent the LORD summoned me to preach about the use of state-sponsored torture. Newspapers had only recently begun reporting on the Torture Memos which documented the ghastly abuses by at the prison in Abu Ghraib. The images outraged the world.

In the face of such revelations, the churches in America were silent.

I was young and certain about my righteousness and preached what I took to be self-evident. So much so, I kept the sermon manuscript.

“Why is the church in America so quiet these days?” I exhorted my hearers.

I let question linger for an uncomfortably long silence before I continued

“Why are Christians so quiet about this particular issue? What is the matter with us? Why is the church instead consumed with culture wars. Has the church lost its nerve? Has the church forgotten we worship a crucified Lord? The defenselessness of a fetus is a central argument advanced against abortion. This conviction about defending the defenseless lies at the very heart of our faith. Yet we are silent, as quiet as all his followers who did not shout, “Do not crucify him!”

As soon as I handed over the benediction that Sunday, a church member upbraided me in the narthex. Sticking his finger in my chest, he hollered at me, “Just where do you get off preaching like that, preacher?!”

I stammered.

“Well, Senator,” I said, “It is Lent and the LORD was tortured to death.”

The Chair of the Armed Services Committee shook his head and waved his finger at me.

“You tell me, preacher— if Jesus was still alive do you honestly think Jesus would having anything to say about torture and the government?!”

“Um, well Senator, uh…I mean, he was crucified, I think...um...maybe he would have...” I started to say.

He shook his head and waved me off, “Jesus would be rolling over in his grave if he knew you’d brought that kind of politics into our church! Just where did you get the idea that your liberal politics has any place in the church?!”

“He doesn’t have a grave…it’s empty…” I muttered to myself.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Never mind.”

He narrowed his eyes and held his holler to a whisper, “If what you believe about Jesus leads to those sorts of views, I don’t see how you have any place here!”

I didn’t see him again until after Easter when he walked down the aisle to the table. Though he held his hands out like a beggar, there was no hint of shame or repentance on his face. What was there, I noticed, was an expression that suggested he was no more enthused to meet me at the LORD’s Table than I was to find him there.

“The body of Christ,” I murmured.

I placed the torn piece of loaf into his iniquitous hands.

“Given for you,” I said.

But as I watched him step beside me to the cup of salvation and as I watched him return to his pew and sit down next to his like-minded neighbors, I grumbled.

According to Luke, Jesus has just been teaching about the cost of discipleship and the uselessness of bland faith when the crowd of disciples sit down for supper. It’s when they’re sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at table that those drawn to Jesus are reminded of who else he keeps in his company. And the Pharisees grumble, “This man receives tax collectors and sinners and eats with them.”

When the Israelites grumbled in the Wilderness, the LORD provided them manna, quail, and water. In response to the Pharisees’ grumbling, Jesus gives them three parables about a lost sheep, a lost coin, and lost sons.

Likely, you expect this passage to beget a sermon that will dovetail neatly into the first verse of “Amazing Grace.” The self-righteous Pharisees, convinced of their own merit, resent keeping company with outcasts and waywards who have not earned their place with Jesus. To rebut their works righteousness, Jesus— the good Lutheran— responds with three illustrations of how God finds us and receives us and rejoices over us on no other basis but his one-way love.

“I once was lost but now am found.”

Those are usually good sermons.

I’ve preached some of those sermons myself.

The theologian Robert Jenson writes that “a text without a context is just a pretext to say whatever we want it to say— or what we think we’re supposed to say about it.”

Unfortunately, the context of this passage will not permit us to imagine ourselves the precious drachma in the Father’s feminine hand.

Jesus does not address these parables to prodigal sons and stray sheep. They’re intended for the shepherds and stewards of God’s People; they’re directed at the Pharisees. What’s more, Jesus states explicitly that these parables are about sin and repentance. A coin cannot sin. A sheep may be able to supply wool for your merino sweater but it cannot offer any repentance. An awareness of sin is not a part of ovine nature.

The parables are about sin and repentance. If Jesus intends for us to find fault in theses stories, the blame does not lie with an inanimate object or a dim-witted shearling. Like most of the parables, colloquial tradition gives these three parables misleading titles. They should be called, “The Shepherd Who Lost His Sheep,” “The Woman Who Lost Her Coin,” and “The Father Who Lost His Sons.” I am no Calvinist, but I sure hope the LORD, who knows the even number of hairs on my head, is sharper than the old lady who misplaces a tithe of her total assets.

Notice, Jesus does not hide the responsibility in his parables.

He says to the Pharisees, “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them…” According to Jesus, the sheep does not go missing; the shepherd loses it. And when the woman summons her friends and neighbors to her house to celebrate, she’s clear about her fault, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I lost.”

A text without a context is just a pretext for whatever we want it to say, or whatever we think we’re supposed to say about it.

In context, Jesus aims these parables at the Pharisees.

They’re about sin and repentance, Jesus says. Which is to say, they’re about responsibility and the failure to discharge that responsibility. The parables are his way of saying to the Pharisees (and to us), “You have lost relationships you need to tend. These tax collectors who turn your stomach, they’re members of the flock you should have been shepherding. These sinners at whom you turn your nose up, they’re treasure you should’ve safeguarded.”

In other words, Jesus says in story form what the prophet Ezekiel proclaims:

“Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.”

Will Campbell was a white Baptist preacher from Mississippi, whose memoir Brother to a Dragonfly won the National Book Award in 1978. Even though he grew up in a home where the family Bible was emblazoned with a Ku Klux Klan insignia, Campbell advocated for desegregation during the Civil Rights movement. He quickly became an irritant to people on both sides of the issue, however, for the company he kept, befriending both black activists and white racists. Conservatives and liberals alike ostracized him for the company he kept.

Will Campbell was present in 1998 for the Mississippi trial of Sam Bowers for the murder of several people including Vernon Dahmer, a local leader in the voter registration effort. Bowers had been the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Klan. He was tried a third time in 1998. It was the first time his trial would not be a sham trial. Will Campbell attended the trial every day.

One day he would sit on the prosecution’s side with the Dahmer family, offering comfort and praying with them.

And then, the next day he would sit on the defense team’s side, comforting the klansman and praying with him.

Day after day of the trial, Campbell alternated sides, ministering to the family of the victim and then the victimizer. Like a shepherd who cannot spare the loss of even one percent of his flock.

Chris Green writes of the scriptures:

“The more we’ve praised the virtues of the Bible and insisted on its authority, the less we’ve given the scriptures the careful, discerning attention they demand. As a result, we’ve tended to convince ourselves that we know the sacred texts much better than we do.”

His diagnosis is especially true of the passages most familiar to us, such as these parables. For example, at best, we tend to treat the Pharisees as plot devices. At worst, we regard them as supervillains. But we cannot give this passage the discerning attention it demands, if we fail to realize there is a legitimate reason the Pharisees recoil at the company Jesus keeps.

Every text has a context, and in the Gospel of Luke “sinners” is not a generic, all-inclusive category of people. In Luke— like the man in fine linen who ignores the destitute Lazarus at his gate— “sinners” refers specifically to wealthy people who have not attended to the poor. “Sinners” are the rich whose wealth insulates them from both responsibility and accountability. Meanwhile, tax collectors were collaborators with the Roman occupation. Tax collectors extorted their fellow Jews for money in order to pay for the armed troops in their streets. Zaccheus may have been a “wee little man” but he was a very big traitor to God’s People.

By contrast, the Pharisees attended studiously to the law of Moses as their way of rejecting King Herod’s corrupt temple system and in order to maintain their distinct identity in the face of an empire that wanted them to recognize no other LORD but Caesar.

The Pharisees are the good guys. And the sinners and tax collectors are actually quite bad.Which makes it all the more remarkable that the Pharisees do nothing more than grumble at the table.All they do is grumble.And chew.

When the trial of Sam Bowers was over, a flummoxed New York Times reporter approached Will Campbell and asked the offensively nonpartisan pastor, “Mr. Campbell, why do you seem to be on both sides?”

And Campbell answered, “Because I’m a God-damned Christian.”

Because that’s what a good shepherd is supposed to do, Jesus says, responding to the Pharisee’s grumbling with the first of his three parables.

Years after he accosted me in the narthex, Senator Roberts of the Armed Services Committee came to me, inquiring about baptism. The Lord had not saved him through water and the Spirit, and he was at an age where it nagged at him. In the intervening years, I’d grown on him and he had learned to trust me. To be honest, me getting cancer helped him to take a shine to me. We were talking about baptism in my office, when all of a sudden he changed the subject.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his bald head with his sleeve.

And he said, “All those years ago, when I got angry with you for your sermon. You let me walk away. You didn’t pursue me or follow up with me. Why?”

And this time I was sitting but I resumed my stammering, “Uh…”

He shook his head and put his elbows on his knees, leaning forward.

“Was what you said about the Bible true?” he asked me.

“Yes, I think so— I mean, I believe so.”

He nodded like I was a witness in a committee hearing.

“And was what you preached about Jesus true, so far as you understood it?”

I nodded.

“Then why for God’s sake did you let me walk away? Why did you let me stay away for so many Sundays?”

I felt my cheeks flush red.

“You should’ve come after me,” he reproached me, “I’m your brother.”

According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus taught nothing except by parables, yet, Mark says, Jesus only explained their meaning behind closed doors. Few of these private explanations have been preserved. So we don’t know how Jesus might tweak our interpretations of his stories. What we do know for certain is that, despite their grumbling, Jesus persistently shows up at the table with these Pharisees. They keep eating with tax collectors and sinners as they eat with Jesus. If you count the luncheon of fish and the loaves, this is their fifth meal together in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus practically eats his way to the cross; in fact, they’ve just come from a dinner at the home of the leader of the Pharisees.

The Pharisees may grumble.

And they may be right to grumble.

But they keep on chewing.

And then move on to their next meal with Jesus.

Just before he eats at the home of their leader, the Pharisees covertly hasten to Jesus in order to save his life. “Get away from here,” they warn, “King Herod wants to kill you.” And just after they grumble at this table, they acknowledge his authority, asking Jesus a question only God can answer, “When will the Kingdom of Heaven come?”

Every text without a context is just a pretext for whatever we want it to say.

This is the third time they’ve grumbled at his table. Notice again how Jesus responds to their rude resistance to his grace. He tells them three stories. That’s it! Jesus does not rebuke them. Jesus does not shame them. Jesus does not shun them. He does not invite them to leave his table or cast them out of his company or put them outside his kingdom. He tells them three stories— stories that are not against them but for them. He gives them three parables to reawaken in them an appreciation of their vocation.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes:

“An idol is a God who is mine but not yours, that serves me instead of you, that cares about me more than he cares for you.”

Jesus is no idol, as much as we might like him to be one.

Notice too how none of the twelve disciples respond to the Pharisees’ grumbling with condemnation or antagonism. The twelve don’t ask them to leave the table or even shush them. Because Jesus treats the Pharisees in such a manner the twelve know that being rid of them is not an option.

Christ never treats the Pharisees the way we do!

Even when he calls them hypocrites, the next thing Jesus says to them is “Pass the mashed potatoes.”

Jesus never treats the Pharisees the way we treat them. They are not foils for Luke’s parables.They are not enemies of the gospel of grace.They are not villains in Jesus’ story.They are his friends!

As much as we love to think of Jesus as the Friend of Sinners, we forget. Jesus is the Friend of Pharisees too. And since most of you (I’m willing to bet) are boring, garden-variety sinners, this is good news! The gospel doesn’t require you to pretend you’re worse than you are. Relax!

Christ is the Friend of Sinners and the Friend of Pharisees.

Unfortunately, one cannot be his friend without befriending the other.

When you think about it, this passage in Luke is one long miracle story.

It’s a miracle that Jesus manages to draw such opposites to himself.

It’s a miracle that there is room in Christ for sinners and righteous both.

Back in August, President Donald J. Trump called into a Tuesday morning episode of “Fox and Friends.”

During the call, the president revealed his newest motivation for brokering an armistice in Ukraine. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” Trump explained. He then elaborated, proving he needs more Lutherans in his religious entourage. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well [regarding heaven]. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this [peace agreement] will be one of the reasons.”

Later that morning I received a fundraising email from the president that would make even Pelagius blush.

The subject line read, “I want to try and get to Heaven.”

The appeal asked me to donate the modest sum of fifteen dollars to help his work so that he get to heaven.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when I read the email.

And I grumbled.

“Heaven?

For him?

He’s a grifter with gilded towers in his name. He’s a con artist who’s inflated his wealth and deflated his debts. He’s stiffed contractors and treated wives like disposable accessories. He’s boasted of sexual assault and consorted with prostitutes. He’s mocked veterans and prisoners of war. He’s stoked racial resentment and winked at white nationalists. He’s sent soldiers into the streets of my city and sent immigrants who look like my children to a gulag in El Salvador. He’s cozied up to dictators and turned a political party into his own private trough of money. He’s a convicted felon. Even if he didn’t off Jeffrey Epstein, he’s broken nine of Ten Commandments.

“I want to try and get to heaven.”

He lied about the election. He hid the truth about the pandemic. He broke his oath of office— he fomented an insurrection. He said there were very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville. He said Obama was a Muslim. He said when you’re famous they let you get away with anything— and so far, he’s right. Every day he turns up the temperature and makes our nation more combustible with his reckless, Us-versus-Them rhetoric. Even now he’s scamming money off his supposed interest in heaven.”

“He…”

And then I stopped mid-grumble.

“…is exactly the sort of person Jesus invites to his table.”

And whatever else salvation entails for me, whatever else my sanctification involves, it includes Jesus making it so that a Pharisee like me can’t wait to find Donald at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

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Preachers, the News Cycle Should Not Be Your Lectionary

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Karl Barth only made one mere mention— in passing— of Hitler’s regime from the pulpit. “Do not make the little man in Berlin more interesting than the LORD Jesus Christ!” Barth warned the students in his Preaching Exercises course. Barth issued that counsel immediately after Hitler was elected to office. And still Barth’s preaching was sufficiently faithful to the gospel to get him exiled back to Switzerland.

It’s difficult for me to overstate how wearied I am by preachers who chase headlines like lawyers do ambulances, thinking that every event that merits a chyron necessitates a comment from the pulpit. Charlie Kirk, of whom I was only vaguely aware prior to his assassination this week, is but the latest example. For too many preachers, the news cycle is their lectionary.

The week’s events and the din on social media— in the absence of any actual details— reminded me of this article in Christianity Today by Chris Nye.

Chris is the author of several books, including most recently, A Captive Mind, which explores Christianity's relationship to ideologies. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and various other publications. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon. To connect further, visit chrisnye.co.

Chris was a guest on the podcast several years ago to discuss his article.

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Sheep are Found In Order to be Offered

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The lectionary Gospel reading for Sunday is Luke 15.1-10, a text that likely should not be read in isolation from the longer parable which follows it. More and more, I have come to the conviction that we read not the scriptures but passages and that, by reading it in such piecemeal fashion, we read the Bible badly. For instance, the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin are unintelligible apart from the two pericopes which precede them in Luke 14 about the cost of discipleship and the worthlessness of salt that has lost its saltiness. Moreover, the two parables in Luke 15.1-10 provide the interpretative cipher for the sad parable which follows it. This is but another reason why, as Chris Green says, “The plain reading of a passage is almost always wrong.”

These are not simply parables about lost sinners being found by prodigal searches.

The chapter opens with a provocation. Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, and the Pharisees grumble like Israel in the wilderness, “This man welcomes [tax collectors and] sinners and eats with them.” Notice, the Pharisees and the scribes have also been welcomed by Jesus and are eating with him. Like the Israelites, they complain about what they have received and long for more. In response, Jesus tells three parables—the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost family. Again, the first two set the stage for the third, and in each the rhythm is unmistakable:

Something is lost.

It is sought.

It is found.

And then there is rejoicing.

Yet take a closer look at the first two parables, especially at the celebrations which follow. They each contain a paradox. The joy is not without cost. The single sheep is returned to the fold, but the shepherd’s rejoicing (we can infer from the third parable) will now require the roasting of a lamb from his flock. He’ll be back down to ninety-nine.

The woman recovers her lost drachma to the purse where her other nine safely remained. Again, she responds by throwing a party for all her friends, which would require spending from that very same purse.

“We have to celebrate!”

And the celebration must require sacrifice of the very thing that had been found.

The plain reading of scripture is almost always wrong.

In these parables Jesus gives us a glimpse into the strange economy of discipleship; namely, what is found is only truly found when it is given up in love.

What is found is only truly found when it is given up in love.

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God Glorifies Himself in the Human

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God’s Unity with Himself was at Stake in the Cross

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Hi Friends,

We will gather tonight at 7:00 EST to continue our study of Bonhoeffer’s “Lectures on Christology.” Josh cannot make it so my friend Dennis will join us.

Here is the link to join us.

Here are the pages we will cover:

Bonhoeffer Reading 42.46MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

Robert Jenson concludes his book on the basic flaw in ecumenical theology, Unbaptized God, by pointing to the eschatological nature of the church. He praises Anglican-Orthodox dialogue its willingness to say out loud what the church has too often and too long left as an item in footnotes. Namely, the church is not only the deposit of the fathers, the church is the foretaste of the future— the Last Future; that is, the church is not just an echo of the past, she is an anticipation of the End. The Father gives the Son “for the life of the world,” the Spirit sets up camp in the world incarnation prepared for it, and the church thus draws her life not from sentimentality but off of that divine movement. We literally feed on this sustaining love by faith, from Sunday to the next.

This means the church itself lives “for the life of the world.”

If this is true, Jenson writes, then the church’s very tradition—its prayers, sacraments, preaching, polity, even our persistent arguments with one another—is not primarily about preserving the riches of the past nor is about holding the line against creeping cultural decay.

The tradition is alive, a force in motion.

When the Holy Spirit shows up, it is the presence of the Risen Jesus— as he lives now in the Last Future. Thus the Holy Spirit always breaks into our now as the presence and power of God’s not-yet. Which is to say, the presence of Christ’s Spirit is always eschatological. The Holy Spirit’s presence just is the Future breaking and entering our present. This means the church is not primarily a museum curated for the movement begun by the dead Jesus.

The church is anticipation. We are who we are not because we cling to what was, but because we live toward what shall be.

The Spirit, Jenson says, is the one who keeps the church the church, who makes us both dynamic and yet still ourselves, who renders our identity across time something more than nostalgia. The whole eucharistic, liturgical, institutional life of the church—warts, cringe, and all—is where that continuity happens, because the Spirit keeps making it happen.

Now if Christ is present to us eschatologically by the Spirit, then the church does not merely remember the incarnation as a founding event of the past. The church, as the Anglican-Orthodox dialogues dared to say, is equally founded on what has not yet happened, on the promised future.

Just so—

Continuity is not about clinging to the past. Continuity is about the church making the Future intelligible.

The church is identical with herself through time precisely because in every “now” she is anticipating the one End.

If the dialogue between East and West managed to make this claim clear, it’s because both need to learn it, Jenson argues. All other ecumenical disputes do not much matter if the church misses this central point. Once again, Jenson lays the blame on the church’s half-baptized Hellenistic philosophy, which prevented her from ridding herself of her most stubborn idolatries.

The religion of Plato, Jenson writes, told us that eternity meant timelessness and being meant persistence. God was the one immune to the threats and opportunities of time. This picture of deity despite the church’s gospeling. Christianity half-exorcised it, but not fully. The result, Jenson judges, is a Christology that limps and an ecclesiology that knows not how to conceive of history.

Instead, if we actually trust that the Holy Spirit is fully God with the Father, then we would repent of imagining eternity as a static, unchanging plateau. We would start to see eternity as the dramatic mutuality of Father and Spirit, the origin and the goal. God’s being would no longer be persistence; it would be anticipation.

If we understood God’s being as anticipation, then, as Jenson posits, the church would see her foundational identity not in resisting change but in faithful change, in living open to what must come. This signals a seismic shift in the church’s self-understanding. However, if the gospel is true, Jenson argues, it is the only choice available to Christ’s bride.

The church’s foundational identity is not in resisting change but in faithful change, in living open to what must come.

This is the radical move Jenson presses:

It is not enough to say the Spirit has initiative in God’s saving work. God’s very being is this initiative.

Too often we treat the Holy Spirit as the caboose on the triune train. By contrast, Jenson insists the Spirit is the goal, the liberator, the one who makes Father and Son not static “hypostases” but living persons. Tradition extols the Father as the fountainhead of the Trinity, yet if the tradition remains there we end up with Plato’s unbaptized God— celebrating beginnings, persistence, security. Jenson asserts that we have to add: the Holy Spirit is the unsurpassed one, the liberator.

In other words, according to Jenson:

The Father is not really Father unless the Spirit frees him from being just Cause. The Son isn’t really Son unless the Spirit makes him more than just Begotten.

This means the church’s liturgy, her preaching, her whole practical church life has to stop treating Pentecost as a postscript. The Spirit is not merely “also God.” The Holy Spirit is God’s own Future. And until we see this, we’ll keep organizing our theology like a flowchart that only runs one way—from Father to Son to Spirit, all active voice on one side, all passive voice on the other.

Until we see that the Spirit is God’s own Future, we’ll keep organizing our theology like a flowchart that only runs one way—from Father to Son to Spirit, all active voice on one side, all passive voice on the other.

Jenson warns that this “flowchart of deity”may be the single greatest shaper of how we actually live as church. And, unfortunately, it’s pagan. Because it imagines eternity as safety rather than freedom.

What happens, Jenson wonders, if we actually believe what we preach?

What happens if we dare to trust that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, that God is in himself as he revealed himself to be in the scriptures and vice versa?

Jenson does not shirk.

He insists we have to venture a claim as bracing as this:

God’s unity with himself was at stake in the cross. The Father’s world, the Spirit’s Future, collided in Jesus’ fate. The unity of God is not—was not— a timeless given. It was executed in the resurrection.

What if Pharaoh had won?

What if Jesus had succumbed to the Tempter’s lure?

What if Pilate’s stone had remained fixed in the mouth of the tomb?

If we say those outcomes were metaphysically impossible, then we have simply gutted the gospel.

God’s identity, Jenson insists, is at risk in the story he tells with us, in the history he is making with us. That’s how seriously God takes time. Which means, the Son is not just the middleman between the Father’s Beginning and the Spirit’s End. The Son’s death and resurrection are the actual turning point where Beginning and End become one. Of course, this is the straightforward announcement of the scriptures.

The Logos is a Story.

God’s unity isn’t a principle.

It is a narrative word, told in flesh and blood, in crucifixion and resurrection.

The resurrection, like Aristotle’s definition of a true story, is the unpredictable that afterward proves inevitable.

It turns out God is the only one who has ever really told such a story.

This is why Jenson refuses to leave the Eucharist as just another sacrament on the list. The Eucharist is the church’s participation in the Son as the reconciliation of Beginning and End. It is the sacrament of the one good story, the story that is God’s life and therefore our own. In the Eucharist, the church is at the center of history and the end of history, both at once. We remember precisely the Future. We taste the kingdom not as a far-off hope but as bread and wine today.

The Eucharist is the sacrament of God’s narrative identity.

And the church is the community that lives by telling and retelling that story.

Just so, Jenson ventures that our true ecumenical difficult is not in settling technical theological disputes but rather whether our liturgies, our calendars, our preaching actually honor Pentecost as much as Easter, the Spirit as much as the Father, anticipation as much as memory.

Jenson’s wager is that the church’s divisions and immobility all stem from how we’ve clung to an unbaptized picture of God. We imagine him as persistence instead of promise, as immunity to time instead of faithfulness in time.

Until this changes, our divine flowchart will keep shaping us more than gospel.

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God is Not Useful

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Mark 8.22-26

During the first year of his captivity in a Nazi prison, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a number of works of fiction, including a novella entitled “Sunday.” In the story one of Bonhoeffer’s characters grouses about the miserable sermon she had heard that Sunday morning. The scripture for the sermon was the Gospel’s account of Jesus performing a miracle on the Sabbath.

About the preacher and his preaching, she gripes:

“He wanted to preach about plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath and about the verse, “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.” Instead of saying that Christ may do things because he is Christ but that doesn’t give us the right to do them by any means, and that if Christ keeps the Sabbath by breaking it, then we first have to learn how to keep the Sabbath holy in earnest, by keeping it—instead of saying that, he babbled on about the freedom of all human beings, and that people may do whatever they think is right, and that we should spend Sunday out in nature rather than in church, and that it doesn’t matter so much at all because the dear Lord is so kind and sweet and good that he isn’t even capable of wrath. My dear Frau Direktor, did it escape you again that the pastor said what you wanted to hear; but didn’t preach the word of God?”

Christ may do these things because he is Christ.

In other words, it is not enough simply to read the scriptures; it is how we read the scriptures that matters. It t is not enough to believe in God. You have to know God; that is, you have to know God rightly. After all, it is possible to believe fervently but believe unfaithfully. It is possible to have sincere faith but sincerely trust a lie. Consequently, it is possible to have hope (or even expectations) for God to perform a work in your life that God will never do because that is not the God he is!

It is not enough to believe in God. You have to know God— as he truly is and does. And this is especially critical when it comes to the miracle stories in the Gospels because, like the devil quoting scripture in the desert, nothing tempts us into false faith and frustrated despair, nothing lures us into misunderstandings of God and misapprehensions of his promises, nothing makes us more susceptible to idolatry— nothing makes us more prone to what we want to hear rather than what God speaks to us— than miracle stories.

Miracle stories can be dangerous.

Rowan Williams is likely this century's most significant theologian. Twenty-four years ago, while he was leading the worldwide Anglican Communion as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams visited Holy Trinity, Wall Street in New York City. Spiritual directors from across the nation had invited Williams to offer an address on “the shape of the holy life” at 74 Trinity Place on the morning of September 11, 2001. Holy Trinity Episcopal Church is less than a hundred yards from Ground Zero.

Rowan Williams and his audience had gathered for his lecture on the twenty-second floor of the Trinity Institute when a plane struck the World Trade Center’s north tower just after nine in the morning. The theologian’s host, Reverend Fred Burnham, sprang to his feet and cried out, “Some cowboy has just cracked through the sound barrier!”

They could not see fully what had happened.

But then a scream followed. A secretary working on the same floor had seen what had happened. When the second plane struck struck the second tower, their murmurings of an accident turned to panic over an attack. “Suddenly we could see things clearly,” Reverend Burnham later recalled, “We knew we were in the middle of a war zone and this was not a happy day.”

Maintaining his composure, Archbishop Williams led the frantic gathering in prayer, gently lifting up to God the specific anxieties of each individual in the room. After he prayed, he found blankets in the church nursery, which they tore into strips and moistened with water to serve as impromptu face masks against the increasingly suffocating air. “The air is even worse outside,” Reverend Burnham remembered thinking, “I don’t know how much longer we can tolerate this, maybe we’ve got fifteen minutes.” Just then, Elizabeth Koenig, a professor at New York’s General Theological Seminary, laid her hand on Rowan William’s shoulder and said, “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather die with.”

Deciding they faced better odds outside the church building, Archbishop Williams led them through the elephantine cloud of smoke— he even went back for a woman on Holy Trinity’s staff who was paralyzed by fright. He put his arm around her and carried her through the dark fiery plumes. When they reached the Staten Island ferry terminal, a construction worker— an evangelical with a strong faith— decided that the huddled mass of survivors all needed to turn to the LORD whose judgment and wrath had certainly been visited upon the city. Convinced the terrorist attacks were the judgment of God, the construction worker led the group of survivors in prayer.

It is possible to believe fervently but believe unfaithfully. It is possible to read the scriptures but not read the scriptures rightly. And it is possible to pray to god yet not address him whom Jesus calls Father.

At the end of the afternoon on the eleventh, Rowan Williams returned to his hotel room to work on a brief article for the journal Church Times. “My mind shies away from the slaughter,” he wrote, “I’m obviously very glad to be alive, but I also feel deeply uncomfortable with the word I’ve heard invoked over those of us who survived, miracle.”

A decade ago, after a long, arduous year of emergency surgeries and kitchen sink chemotherapy that nearly killed me, my oncologist handed me a copy of my most recent bloodwork and my latest PET scan.

“Clear as a bell, my friend,” he said and, laying his hand on my shoulder, added, “You’ve made it through the fire.”

And for a brief moment, I heard his words— I received them— as a miracle. But no sooner had he laid his hand on my shoulder than I heard an anguished cry erupt in the exam room across the hallway from mine. The peal of shock was followed by a sob too deep for words. It came from the young mother I had gotten to know in the infusion lab over the previous weeks and months. I think her name was Jennifer. As a pastor, I recognized the faulty-ripcord sound of her disbelieving grief. It was the noise that almost always follows the news that there is nothing more that medicine can do.

When I arrived home that afternoon, I discovered a sympathy card in the mail. A clergy colleague’s name greeted me on the upper left corner of the envelope. Inside, on the front cover, a spare, pen-and-ink drawing illustrated an IV bag hanging on a wheeled stand. Its tube was connected to a woman, depicted from the rear, who was kneeling on a tiled floor in front of a toilet. Jesus, wearing a crown of thorns, held the woman’s hair away from her face as she leaned over to puke.

I opened the card.

Above the messy signature were four black words whose script matched the artwork, “God is in control.”

According to Mark the Evangelist, they thought they knew exactly who Jesus is and what he does. As soon as Jesus and the twelve come to the town of Bethsaida, they not only bring to Jesus a blind man they provide the prescription.

They tell Jesus, “Go on— touch him."

They believe Jesus is useful.

And who can blame them. St. Luke reports that the residents of Bethsaida had witnessed Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim “perform mighty works.” Jesus fed over five thousand with merely a meager amount of bread and fish in the region of Bethsaida. When Jesus walked on water in the fourth watch of the night, it was on the way to Bethsaida. They have seen what the Son can do. Having seen him work, they assume they know who he is and how he can be useful to them. So they bring their blind friend to Jesus and they tell the LORD what to do.

“Touch him, Jesus. And he will be healed.”

Take note of how Jesus responds to Bethsaida’s impudence.

Mark writes that Jesus removes him from their care, clasping the blind man’s hand in his own and taking the blind man all the way out of the city. Once they are no longer in Bethsaida, Jesus spits in the blind man’s eyes. Then Jesus lays his hands on the man. And as though he’s not sure of his own effectiveness, Jesus asks the blind man, “Do you see anything?”

His eyes still wet with spittle, the blind man shakes his head.

“I see men, as trees, walking.”

He is neither blind nor seeing.

Does Jesus fail? Or is he deliberately ineffective? When Jesus came to the city of Nain, all he had to do was touch a boy’s funeral bier and— presto— the mother’s dead son was restored to life. All the bleeding woman in Capernaum needed to do was touch Jesus’s jacket incognito and immediately she was healed. Jesus managed a long-distance healing for the centurion’s child. When Jesus encounters a man born blind, he mixes his spit on the ground and he applies it to the blind man’s eyes. And he does not require a do-over.

Jesus is the humanity of God. If he so elected, Jesus could have healed this blind Bethsaidan in an instant, with a thought as much as with a touch. But Jesus does not immediately remedy the man’s suffering. And notice, the blind man recognizes trees. He knows what trees look like. He was not born blind; he was blinded. Still, Jesus does not alleviate his affliction forthwith.

As David Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached on this passage:

“Here the LORD acted with great deliberation. Jesus always had a reason for varying his technique. In other words, all our LORD’s miracles are more than events; they are parables. This is especially true of this one. He healed the blind man the way he did to proclaim a word about himself. Indeed it is a terrible message.”

Back to Bonhoeffer’s question, “Who is this?”

A God who does not immediately heal suffering upon request.

The morning after the attacks Rowan Williams was walking from his hotel at seven in the morning to deliver a lecture at St. John the Divine Cathedral. Crossing the city street, an airline pilot walked up to the collared archbishop and exclaimed in exasperation, “Where the hell was God?”

Calmly— soberly, the theologian replied with what was surely heard as a terrible message, “God is not useful.”

I have no doubt the artist who created it was sincere in their belief, but in order to speak Christian, the sympathy card I received should not have said, “God is in control.” Because that is not the God Jesus calls Father.

Christians do not believe that God is in control.

Christians believe God is sovereign.

And those are not equivalent assertions. To say God is sovereign is not to say that God is in control. For God to be in control, God would have to act in such a way that would make creatures other than the free creatures God has made. Control takes your creaturely freedom away from you and takes God's freedom and forces it on to you. If God is in control, then you do what he wills, not what you will. In which case, God himself may as well have flown the planes into the Twin Towers.

God is not in control.

God is sovereign.

So much of our anger at God, so much of our frustration with faith, so much of our impatience with life is based on a misunderstanding of who God is and what his promises actually are.

I begged you, but you did not take this illness from me. Why God?!

The anger and the frustration and the impatience is rooted in disappointment. But the disappointment is due to bad expectations. The Father does not run creation like a television producer, watching us on a screen and pushing— or not pushing— buttons. The Holy Spirit is not like Superman, swooshing into our lives if we but cry out with sufficient volume.

God is not in control.

When we profess that God is sovereign, we mean that while God does indeed act in this time, until the End of everything God never does everything God can do. God acts in the world— yes, but until the End God never acts fully. This is the straightforward teaching of the scriptures, “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” The apostle Paul means that God’s work in the world is no more clear to us than the men who appeared as trees to the blind Bethsaidan.

We’re all still in the middle of what Jesus is working!

According to Paul, in everything that happens in this world, to everybody everywhere, God is active but God is not yet doing everything God can do. God has acted and is acting, but there is still more for God to do that has not yet been done, and we are living between what God has done, is doing, and what God is yet to do.

“Now we see through a glass darkly, in the future we will see face to face.”

But we did see face to face.

We did see Jesus.

In other words, Paul is saying that God has not been God fully yet— except in Jesus Christ. The only place we have seen God do everything God can do is in Jesus.

This just is what makes us Christians.

As my friend Chris Green puts it:

“What makes us Christians is that we look at Jesus and say “When our God does everything God can do, it looks like that. It looks like a man who is born miraculously and brings life and hope and joy and peace and comfort to everybody who's around him, who speaks truth, who corrects the wrongs that he sees, who saves that woman from being stoned, who raises that child from the dead, who even when he dies, passes out of death into a whole new life. Because when God does everything God can do, it looks like Jesus' relationship to God.””

God is not in control.

God is not responsible for every heartache and tragedy in your life. God is not the author of the evils you have suffered. God does not punish you in order to teach you a lesson. God did not give me a miracle but deny one for the mother across the hallway from me. Such a god would be a devil.

God is not in control.

God is sovereign.

And what it means to have faith is that you trust that when God is through being God— when God is finally fully God— every wrong will be put right and every sad thing will come untrue.

That is our hope.

That is the promise of the gospel.

That and nothing less.

In the meantime, like the man who sees his neighbors as trees, we are all waiting on God to finish what he started. And faith looks like this half-blind man who does not walk away from Jesus when Jesus does not immediately work in the way he wanted. Faith sticks with Jesus even in his half-finished work.

No wonder Bonhoeffer says we prefer to search the scriptures for what we want to hear rather than the word of God. Is David Lloyd-Jones not correct to call this “a terrible message?” Why must we wait in God’s unfinished work? Why must we pray prayers that seem to go unanswered? Why must you not get the “miracle” another receives?

Why must we suffer?

Notice.

When Jesus and the disciples arrive in Bethsaida and the blind man’s friends bring him to them for healing, Jesus purposively takes the blind man by the hand to lead him out of the town and away from their ability to witness his work. The relocation from Bethsaida is a rebuke of Bethsaida.

Why?

Jesus supplies the answer in his blistering judgment sermon in the Gospel of Luke:

“Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more bearable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you…You shall be brought down to Hades.”

Sodom will have a better day in the LORD’s courtroom than Bethsaida, Jesus hollers. In other words, more than any other place, Bethsaida has seen Jesus perform miracle after miracle. But the miracles have not changed them! They saw Jesus transform loaves and fish into a feast for five thousand, but witnessing the miracle did not transform them.

Miracles have not changed their character.

The miraculous has not made them any holier.

Christ’s miracles have not made them more Christ-like.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his novella “Sunday” for his fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer. Around the same time that he started writing “Sunday,” he wrote a letter addressed both to Maria and to his best friend Eberhard Bethge. At that point, Bonhoeffer had been Hitler’s personal prisoner for about three months, and the occasion of his letter is his realization that his captivity could end in martyrdom and that he very well may never see his fiancé or his friend again.

Despite this grim awareness, Bonhoeffer makes a surprising comment, writing to the two of them, “There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us. And one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure the suffering. At first, that sounds very hard, but at the same time, it is also a great comfort.”

The suffering of such absence is also a great comfort because it is how Christ takes on greater presence in us.

Just as Jesus is deliberate in how he goes about healing the blind man from Bethsaida, God has a purpose in not being fully God yet.

To the church at Rome Paul makes the astonishing claim that he rejoices in his sufferings. To the Philippians Paul puts an even sharper edge to it, saying, “You have been graced to suffer.” That is— strangely— suffering is a gift. In fact, throughout the New Testament there is this terrible message that Almighty God can do anything; and yet, suffering is at the very heart of the life of faith. So much so, Paul summarizes the Christian life as “present suffering.”

It is possible to have strong and sincere faith but strongly, sincerely trust a lie. Here is the truth. God is not going to save you from suffering. Because God is saving you in suffering. Suffering is the site of your sanctification. Suffering is how salvation takes place. Paul’s proclamation to the Romans continues, “We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope and hope does not put us to shame for that is how the love of God is poured into our hearts.”

Thus—

Any promise of the gospel, any form of the faith, any version of Christianity that does not train you in patience is not true.

Hear me.

I would not be here if God did not at times intervene in our lives. I certainly would not have been called to preach and I probably would not have lived past this Christmas. I am not saying that God never works miracles. I am saying that if that’s what you expect, all the time, you will never suffer. And if you never suffer, you will never learn patience. And if you never learn endurance, you will never grow into the likeness of Christ. The only way in which Christ's character is going to be formed in you, in me, is as the LORD lets us live in the midst of endurance. There is no other way for his character to be instilled in us. God does give sight to the blind, yes. God does open deaf ears, certainly. God does heal, of course. He can move in miraculous ways, absolutely.

The LORD can answer your prayers.

But the LORD answering your prayers is never how he is formed in you.

Blessing and miracle, healing and prosperity and gift— they happen. They do happen.But they are never how holiness happens in you.

Suffering produces patience.

Patience produces character.

Character produces hope.

And hope is how the love of God is poured into your heart.

Put more succinctly:

The experience of suffering is what nurtures the love of God in you.

God does not make you suffer. God does not send suffering upon you. God is not in control. God is sovereign.

And the way God sovereignly cares for the world, scripture says, is not by pushing buttons like a television producer or swooping in like Superman but by the character of Christ taking shape in his risen body, in you. “All of creation is waiting with eager longing,” Paul proclaims, “on the manifestation of the sons and daughters of God.”

Again notice—

All of creation is waiting not for God.

The whole world is waiting on you to become Christ.

The answer to the world’s prayers is not God; it’s you. That sounds like heresy, but it’s Romans— chapter eight, verse nineteen. We think we’re waiting on God. But in fact everyone and everything is waiting on us because we are meant to be co-laborers with him, joint heirs with Jesus; so that, every blessing the Father intends for the Son, the Father intends for us also. And every responsibility the Father entrusts to the Son, he entrusts to us as well. The gospel does not set us free from the obligation of being Christians!

Every responsibility the Father entrusts to the Son, he entrusts to us as well. We share everything with Jesus. We share everything with him whose name is the Man of Sorrows. And the whole world is waiting on us to take up our inheritance.

Listen: our inheritance is service to and intercession for this world.

God is not in control.

God is sovereign.

Through you.

When Rowan Williams arrived at St. John the Divine Cathedral the morning after the towers fell, he found approximately three hundred people had gathered in the sanctuary for an impromptu Eucharist. Preaching off the cuff, Williams unpacked his response which had shocked the pilot, “God is not useful.” Williams preached to the congregation, “God didn’t cause this but God is not going to stop it because that is not who God is and, just as importantly, that is neither how God has chosen to sanctify us nor how God has chosen to save the world.”

In a slender book on his experiences at Ground Zero, Williams reflects further on his conversation with the pilot.

He writes:

“What do you say? That God has made a world into which he doesn’t casually step in to solve problems is fairly central to the Christian faith. God is sovereign in no other way than in what we do and say and pray. I do believe this, but I don't think you can say it with much conviction outside the context of Christians actually doing the action and offering the prayers…

The young pilot was a lifelong Christian believer, but for the first time it came home to him that he might be committed to a God who could seem useless in a crisis. Perhaps it's when we try to make God useful, though, that we take the first steps towards the great lie of religion: the god who fits our agenda.”

If we have a god who fits our agenda, then we no longer have a need to be co-laborers with Christ. And just like that, the world is bereft of hope.”

God is not in control.

You are the sovereignty of God.

No doubt this is not what you want to hear.

It may even sound to you like a terrible message.

But this is the truth.

This is God’s word for you.

God is not useful.

But he is available.

Like the blind man in Bethsaida, we are all waiting on God to finish his work; but in the meantime, Christ is with us. Jesus does not leave the blind man until he is finished with him. So too he is with us. At present, we only see through the glass dimly, but in the cup we have him fully.

So come to the table.

Receive him.

So that you may be him.

The whole suffering world is waiting on you to claim your inheritance.

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Deconstructing Deconstruction

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The question: What is theology?

If we refuse the philosophic a-priorism of the competing religions of Plato and the Enlightenment, a handful of axioms suggest themselves.

1. Theology is simply the thinking of the church in its service to its gospel message that Jesus lives with death behind him.

Theology is the church’s maintenance of the particular evangel, Christ is risen. Because it’s a message, it must be conveyed from one person to another— a speaker must gospel someone. Theology therefore requires a community of tradition and interpretation, i.e., the church. Just as there is no salvation outside the church, there is no theology outside it. “Church” and “Theology” are as mutually determinative terms as “Gospel” and “Theology.”

Clearly, the gospel’s community has no way to copyright her labels for herself and her activity. Some may use the term gospel to describe an alien or variant message while others may purport to be doing theology with an object other than the God who raised Jesus from the dead but this is not theology as the church has defined her practice. As the ancient church has stipulated the rule: lex orandi, lex credendi. That is, our theology (lex credendi) conforms to our liturgy (lex orandi). Thus, what we say of and to God in prayer and praise and petition takes priority in our thinking about God.

Straightforwardly, then, theology cannot be done outside the church.

And because the church is the only proper place from which to do theology, theology can never start from the general, “God,” and move then move to the particular. Theology begins by saying “Jesus Christ.”

2. Theology is hermeneutical not speculative.

Theology is an act of interpretation. As an act of interpretation, theology begins outside of myself, independent of my assumptions and convictions. Theology begins with a received word and issues a new word only on the basis of the old word.

Thus, theology requires that our metaphysics be accommodated to the biblical drama rather than, as happened in the modern era, the reverse.

3. Theology is a communal activity.

Hence, theology is a communal activity. One may deconstruct their received theology but one cannot detach oneself from Christ’s body and still be doing theology.

Theology is for proclamation.

And theology is with precisely those we wish Jesus had not called friends.

4. Theology is neither anthropology nor ethics.

Just as theology revises received philosophical assumptions in order to conform them to the biblical drama, theology (precisely because it is thinking about the message of the Incarnate God) must not make history subservient to being.

What the Greeks called “Ousia” (Being) is not in charge.

For example, early in its mission to transmit the gospel to the part of the ancient world shaped by the religion of Plato, the church hit up against that religion’s commitment to the notion that God is immune to time, incapable of pathos, and uncontainable in the finite world.

But the eternal God of the scriptures, who will be whosoever he will be, is manifestly not a god to whom time does not matter.

As Jewish theologian Peter Ochs notes, the effort to conform the biblical drama to antecedent philosophical assumptions displaces the God of history with the generic study of “religion.” Rather than maintenance of the message of God’s mighty acts in Israel and her servant Jesus, theology thus becomes anthropology and ethics.

This is how the gospel gets perverted into glawspel and Christianity reduced to the golden rule.5. Theology is normed by the biblical drama.

Virtually every theological sin, says Gerhard Forde, and false formulation of the faith can be traced to the intrusion of the pagan notion of timelessness into the scene. Instead any onto-theological claims (e.g., “God does not act in history” or “God is not a human” or even “God does not wreak weal or create woe”) are derivative of what we already know about God. And we know God only by way of his revelation in historical time called the Old and New Testaments.

Scripture need not be “inerrant” or “infallible” to be nevertheless the means by which the true God identifies himself.

Thus, theology is normed by the biblical drama because we are capable of no true knowledge of God until God reveals himself to us in time and history. And the biblical drama is the memory of those incarnations.

6. Theology is trinitarian discourse.

If theology is normed by the biblical drama, then, just so, theology is  trinitarian discourse because God is a colloquy. God’s being is a being in history and this history is a story with a dramatis personnae— what the church father Gregory of Nyssa called God’s “temporal infinity.”

Once again, therefore, God’s being in history— scripture’s narrative of Father, Son, and Spirit— is not derivative to a priori convictions about God’s being. Contrary to all ontological foundationalisms, the true God is known only by self-revelation. And when the true God unveils himself fully, we discover the One is three person’d.

The biblical drama recounts the history by which God identifies himself— the happening of God.

As Gregory of Nyssa put it:

“The triune event is temporal infinity. God in Christ is infinite over the past and infinite over the future. The triune life is God of the past, the present, and the future.”

Thus—

Trinity is not a philosophic construction.

Trinity is a proper name.

Because trinity is a proper name, theology must be trinitarian discourse. A theology which speaks only of “God” in the general or abstract speaks of a god other than the Colloquy that is God.

Because God is triune, God’s identity is inseparable from the story of Israel and, thus, an abstracted, universal theology is an assault on the identity of God. Worse still, if God has not so entered into time and made himself an object in Mary’s arms or in Israel’s temple, neither can he be an object of our knowledge.

7. Theology has more than one audience.

(And one audience is more important than the other.)

Once again the lex orandi, lex credendi.

Theology is maintenance of the church’s message that the God of Israel has raised Jesus from the dead, having first raised the Jews from slavery in Egypt.

Directed outward to the world, this message is the stuff of promise. But the world is not the only hearer to whom we speak— the world is not even primarily the listener we address with gospel. In Jesus Christ, God the Son makes his Father our Father too. We’re invited into the Colloquy that is God.

Directed to the world, the gospel is promise.

Directed to God, the gospel is prayer and praise and petition.

Theology that is not firstly in service to prayer is not theology.

Just so, a theology so deconstructed that prayer no longer does anything, theology that posits a God who is no longer persuadable, is a theology unmoored from the ancient rule, lex orandi, lex credendi.

As Robert Jenson writes:

“When the universal rule from prayer is not followed, theology slips from its object, for it is in the church’s prayer and praise, in their verbal form and in the obtrusively embodied form called sacrifice, that the church’s discourse turns and fastens itself to God as its object. And it is the ineluctably trinitarian pattern of the church’s prayer, its address to the one Jesus called Father, with Jesus who thus made himself the Son, in their common Spirit, by which the church’s discourse grasps the resurrection’s particular God as the object finally given to it.”

8. Theology is a listening as much as an utterance.

Deconstructing conventional Christianity (Christianity accommodated to culture) is holy and good; it is the church reformed, always reforming. Deconstructing— so as to detach from— traditional Christianity (the faith of the church fathers) is destructive; the deposit of the saints just is what God has said and done. If God has not so said and done in the past, we have no reason other than sinful pride to suppose that God speaks or acts amongst us in the present.

In which case, there is no Future.

Therefore—

In theology, the golden rule and greatest commandment apply across the veil of death.

Love of neighbor includes our dead neighbors whom the church calls saints.

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“There is more to the Holy Spirit’s work than pointing toward the memory of Christ’s once for all work.”

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“Western teaching that the Spirit proceeds “and from the Son” is the failure to acknowledge the saving work of the Spirit as the Spirit’s own new and particular initiative.”

The Nicene Creed celebrates its 1700th anniversary this year. However, for more than half that timespan the church in the West has not professed the creed in identical fashion with her ancient brothers and sisters. The four little words which the West added to the Nicene Creed approximately a millennia ago matter for all things that matter.

In his book on the basic flaw in ecumenical theology, Unbaptized God, Jenson argues that the conception of God in the Western imagination remains essentially unconverted by the gospel. Once again, the title distills his thesis. The God in whom most Christians believe is neither the Nazarene who submits to John’s baptism of repentance nor the one he called Father who entered into time to affirm his relation by the Spirit.

Speaking of the sense of futility that besets ecumenical discussions, Jenson writes:

“The repeated achievement of convergences never adds up to convergence, something deep in the conceptual-spiritual structure of the church’s life seems endlessly to pose and enforce choice between polar positions.”

The reason conversation between Christians from East and West, and, within the latter, Catholics and Protestants, feels pitted according to polarities is that we share “an incompletely christianized interpretation of God.”

Since the ninth century, the church in the Eastern church has diagnosed a failure of the church in the West to apply the gospel fully to its doctrine of God. The tiny clause which the West inserted into the Nicene Creed (“…who proceeds from the Father and the Son…”) is the root of deep distortion. The so-called Filioque Clause, Robert Jenson concedes, is not an embellishment— a bit of interior design— added to the creed so much as an un-permitted addition to the foundation of the faith. The result, Jenson argues, is a church that can’t find its center.

Forget God the Holy Spirit and you end up seesawing between two bad poles.

“Either the church as institution is detached from the genuine event of salvation,” Jenson suggests— ie, the church is not the miraculous creation ex nihilo of the Spirit at Pentecost— or the institution itself is regarded as sacral, as a direct result of Christ’s commission.” The church as the human voluntary association of believers (much of the Protestant Church) lies at the end of the first pole while the church as divinely-sanctioned authority (the Roman Catholic Church) lies at the other pole.

The latter pole begets rigid institutionalism.

The former produces hyper-individualized spiritualism, where every believer is their own pope, and every new idea comes stamped with the Spirit’s supposed approval.

Jenson cites the Orthodox theologian to diagnose the deficiency in both:

“The institution of the church is not seen as a charismatic work of the Spirit.”

In other words, we’ve turned the Spirit into a kind of divine assistant, tethered to the Son, instead of recognizing the Spirit’s free, personal agency in the Triune life and, by extension, the life of the church.

Jenson asserts that the Orthodox Church in the East is correct in their critique of the Western body of believers. Pentecost is not simply an event that happens after the conclusion of the story of redemption at Ascension (which is exactly how the church often proclaims God’s salvific work). Pentecost is the Holy Spirit’s “new and particular initiative” in the life of God and in the life of the world. Pentecost is not a memory; it is a miracle, according to which alone can the church account for her existence.

When the church earlier professed that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father,” she safeguarded the Spirit’s personal freedom. The alternative, the Filioque Clause now confessed in the West’s redaction of the Nicene Creed, collapses the Spirit’s work into Christ’s work, as if the Spirit is only there to remind us of something Jesus already did, long ago, in a Galilee far, far away.

There is more to the Holy Spirit’s work than pointing toward the memory of Christ’s once for all work.

And when that happens, when the Spirit’s work collapses into the work of the Son, Jenson suggests, the church can no longer identify miracles, she loses her prophetic voice, and she reduces the gospel either to authoritarian nostalgia or to an anxious scramble to reinvent the church to every perceived need for relevance. By contrast, when the church understands herself to be the creation of the Holy Spirit, tradition is no longer the static archive of the past but the dynamic, living ways in which the Spirit has made history with her.

As Jenson writes:

“Tradition is a living actualization of the past, a true anamnesis, a synthesis between what is transmitted and present experience, brought about by the Invocation of the Spirit.”

And because the Holy Spirit is “the power of the Risen Jesus,” every eucharist and baptism, every proclamation of the Word, every communal prayer just is the Spirit knitting the church’s “then” to the church’s “now” and pulling the church toward her “not yet.”

Tradition, in this sense, is the Spirit’s choreography, the continuity of God’s people across time because “the Spirit continuously creates it.”If this is true, then the church is never just a human project. Nor is the church ever merely a historical society founded by something Jesus did once upon a time.

The church is, in Jenson’s words, “the continuing creation of the Spirit.” Again, Pentecost is not a memory. Pentecost is the first labor pang of new creation, making Jesus’ Risen Body— the church— a community animated moment by moment by the Spirit’s presence.

This means the things we often pit against each other—the institutional versus the charismatic, the hierarchical and the spontaneous— are not opposites at all.

As Jenson explains:

“The office is charism, since the Spirit, the living Giver of life, is the source of the church’s office. Office and gift, structure and freedom, belong together because the Spirit is free to breathe both into Jesus’ body.”

With this, Jenson makes his boldest but most characteristic claim, connecting the Holy Spirit to the Last Future where Jesus now lives as its first resident. Jenson insists that the Spirit does not merely make the church continuous with its past (eg, an episcopacy established by apostolic succession), the Holy Spirit also makes the body of believers continuous with its End.

The Holy Spirit makes the body of believers continuous with its End.

Jens says:

“It is an implication of a “pneumatological” Christology, that the historical present of Christ is eschatological. Where the Spirit acts, he makes history enter into the last times, bringing to the world the foretaste of its final destiny.”

Just so, once again— every eucharist and baptism, every uttered prayer, every act of witness…it is not just about maintaining continuity with the past; it is about anticipating the Future. Quite literally, in all these acts the Holy Spirit pulls the community forward into God’s promised Future. This is why Jenson says the church’s continuity through time is eschatological. The church is eschatologically self-identical through time, identical with itself in each present in that in each present it anticipates the one end.

Why do four little words added to the church’s dogma matter?

According to Jenson, the difference— the takeaway— is as unsettling as it is exhilarating.

God has not stopped speaking.

The Spirit has not stopped acting.

The church is not the kingdom movement begun by the dead Jesus.

That she is his risen body, animated by his Spirit, is no mere metaphor.

The same Spirit who hovered over the waters in Genesis, who overshadowed Mary, who fell like fire in Jerusalem, is the Spirit delivering the church even now into the promised Last Future. Forget this item of dogma, and you’re left with the insufficient polarities which beset the church in the West.

On the one hand, a sterile bureaucracy incompatible with a message that just is a promise about the Future.

On the other hand, a free-floating individualism that is anathema to the gospel of Mary’s boy and Moses’ LORD.

But remember this dogmatic claim—recover the Spirit as the Spirit—and suddenly the church stops being a relic of the past and becomes what it was always meant to be: a people animated by God’s future, living signs of the kingdom breaking in.

This is why Jenson keeps pressing on his title phrase. Our problem is not just a matter of language; it’s a matter of imagination. As it turns out, the Holy Spirit is our unbaptized God. We left our pneumatology on the shore of the Jordan River, unconverted to the gospel. And until we let the Spirit be the Spirit—personal, free, and eschatological—the church will keep spinning its wheels, caught between nostalgia for what was and anxiety about what might be.

According to Jenson, here is the good news. Like the Dude, the Holy Spirit abides.

He writes:

“By the term Holy Tradition, we understand the entire life of the church in the Holy Spirit… dogmatic teaching, liturgical worship, canonical discipline, and spiritual life… together they manifest the single and indivisible life of the church.”

The ordinary life of the church is charismatic. To be a charismatic Christian, a believer need do nothing more than listen patiently when a lector invites him or hear, “Listen for the Word of the LORD.”

Put differently, forget the Holy Spirit and you no longer can see her at work in the ordinary life of Jesus’ body. In this, we are of all people the most to be pitied, for we have blinded ourselves to our reasons for hope.

The offices are gift.

This is good news of great joy.

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