Jason Micheli's Blog, page 25
November 29, 2024
The Light's Winning
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Every year, as Fleming Rutledge asserts, Advent begins in the dark.
November 28, 2024
Special Spatchcock Episode
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Hi Friends,
In the busyness of the holiday and the turn into Advent, I don’t want to intrude too much on your time. But I do want to take a moment to all of you who make this little community such a helpful and encouraging ministry for me.
According to the report, there are about seven thousand of you from all over the world who make time here every day, and many of you email me questions and feedback that informs the next thing.
Thank you.
I’m grateful for you.
Here is a conversation for the podcast that Teer Hardy and I had with our friend Jacob Smith several years ago. Give it a listen while you wait on the turkey and avoid your in-laws. Jacob Smith is a contributor to Mockingbird Ministries and is the rector of Calvary-St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York City.
And, as Jake would say:
Enjoy Your Forgiveness!
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November 27, 2024
"A Whole Person is a lot to Swallow"
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We talked with Adam Morton recently about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the culture war over the new biopic film, and how to think critically and charitably about figures of history. A friend from Mockingbird, Adam is the Teaching Associate in Christian Theology, Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.
His thoughts on the Bonhoeffer film which prompted our conversation:
Show Notes
Too many people write, speak, opine about the guy (now me included). There are too many bad reasons to take him up (needing to find a 'good German' in the disaster of the Third Reich, wanting martyr fairy dust for one's arguments, finding his still developing theology easy to cherry-pick for a range of positions) that easily overwhelm the good ones. Yes, he's intellectually interesting. That's not why you know his name.
Consider what would have happened if he'd survived the war - he likely becomes a significant figure in postwar German theology, as subject to suspicion as the rest of them. Aside from those of you who are actually into 20th century German theology in a big way, you'd never have heard of him.
All that makes me think that the overwhelming bulk of the power of Bonhoeffer as a name is not in his theology or in what little resistance he mustered, but in our psychological and spiritual need to confirm that if we ourselves were ever put in an untenable situation like that, we could come out virtuous and heroic. I guess I find that sort of self-soothing dangerous rather than inspiring. Well, it is inspiring, in a way - but not in a way that I'm confident comes from God.
All that is to take nothing away from the man, and what his life and work were. (It's also no shot at the people who've done good work on him.) But if it were up to me we'd impose a 25 year moratorium on the Bonhoeffer Industry, including its academic side, and once that's run its course we could check and see where we're at with the guy and what role we actually need him to play in our theological universes.
Summary
The conversation delves into the complexities of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology and legacy, particularly in light of recent cultural interpretations and the release of a new film about him. The speakers discuss Bonhoeffer's historical context, his theological development, and the implications of his martyrdom. They also explore how Bonhoeffer is often misinterpreted or oversimplified in modern discussions, especially in relation to contemporary culture wars. In this conversation, the speakers delve into the complexities of historical figures, particularly Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and how their legacies are interpreted and utilized within the church. They discuss the importance of understanding the multifaceted nature of these figures, the challenges of navigating cultural differences, and the nuances of patriotism in a global context. The conversation emphasizes the need for thoughtful engagement with history and theology, encouraging listeners to approach these topics with care and depth.
Takeaways
Bonhoeffer's legacy is often oversimplified in modern discourse.
Understanding Bonhoeffer requires a deep dive into German Lutheranism.
His martyrdom leaves us with an incomplete theological picture.
Cultural context is crucial for interpreting Bonhoeffer's actions.
Bonhoeffer's resistance was complex and morally ambiguous.
The use of Bonhoeffer in culture wars can distort his message.
His writings reflect a developing theology that was cut short.
Bonhoeffer's context was vastly different from American evangelicalism.
The film about Bonhoeffer raises questions about historical accuracy.
Engagement with Bonhoeffer's work should be nuanced and critical. No historical figure is pristine; they are complex and multifaceted.
Bonhoeffer's legacy belongs to the church, not just his family.
It's important to speak truthfully about historical figures without idealizing them.
Understanding Bonhoeffer requires knowledge of his time and context.
Cultural differences can shape our perceptions and experiences.
Clergy should avoid censorship and engage thoughtfully with culture.
Getting to know historical figures is a slow and nuanced process.
Patriotism can be complicated, especially in post-war contexts.
The church must be the ultimate arbiter of theological interpretations.
Engagement with history requires time and careful consideration.
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November 26, 2024
The Sinners's Christmas Pageant
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I know, I know…Advent is the season of the Second Coming. But, if the best way to prepare for the parousia is to be dead (in your sins), then perhaps this recollection of a Christmas Pageant past is a way to be an Advent people.
Here is my offering for the Mockingbird Tyler Conference in 2022:
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November 25, 2024
Will It All Turn Out Right?
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Here is a sermon on John 18 for Christ the King Sunday at Zion Lutheran Church by my friend Dr. Ken Sundet Jones.
Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Today we come to the end of the lectionary year, our calendar of assigned worship readings from God’s Word. The year winds down, not like a child’s wind-up toy that slows with fewer, and fewer rotations until it finally dies, but instead goes out with a bang with this final festival Sunday. On Christ, the King Sunday, it’s appropriate to have Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus on the matter of the Lord’s sovereignty as our gospel reading.
We tend to think of Pontius Pilate as a fairly powerful person in first-century Judea. As governor of Judea, Pilate did have some power, after all, he was the representative of the Roman emperor (in this case, Tiberius Caesar) and commanded Roman forces, occupying the Judean territory. He could mint coins, and distribute funds. He collected taxes. And most importantly in the gospels, he had the authority to bring down a death sentence on any criminal. Jesus had been arrested at the behest of the religious leaders in Jerusalem and tried before them. Now he’d been brought to Pilate the governor for sentencing.
In the last week, my wife and I have discovered a television series on Max called My Cat from Hell in which a cat behaviorist does house calls with people whose feline pets are destroying their lives. One of the things he helps him understand (and that I have taken on with our own cat) is the importance of daily play with your cat. Cats, including our own beloved Lemon, are inveterate hunters. They love cat toys. We can tempt them with strings and feathers and fur that they can swat at and claw. Our cat grabs a fake bird on a string and believes she is toying it to death.
In our gospel story Pilate seems to believe he can toy with Jesus, that he can play around with this Jewish preacher, accused of seditious behavior, insurrection, and treason and have mastery over him. Pilate believes he wields some power over the Lord, and has some authority to determine his future. In his Gospel, the evangelist, John loves to recount these kinds of extended conversations with people like the Pharisee Nicodemus comes under cover of night or the oft-married Samaritan woman at the well. And every one of those conversations, Jesus is in control. The same is true here in Pilate’s palace. But where Nicodemus in the Samaritan woman are the beneficiaries of their chats with Jesus, here the Roman governor’s attempts to steer the conversation don’t give him what he seeks.
Pilate uses his sneering questions about Jesus’s kingship as bluster or even mockery. He knows, of course, as any governor of occupied territory would, about the background of this land, and the people Rome had subjugated. He would know about Jewish kings of the past and the people’s hopes for a new king. But Pilate can’t imagine such a king arising. Rome’s power, and hegemony, and geographical reach are too strong to think such an alternate future could ever be. Thus, he can order a sarcastic sign placed over Jesus‘s head on Golgotha reading Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum or “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews. And in this story from John he can bat around unserious questions about kingship and truth.
Notice, though, how Jesus cedes no territory to Pilate. he doesn’t give an inch. Jesus, after all, is Lord of all from the foundation of the world. If Pilate knows the history of both Rome and Judea, Jesus knows the history of human nature, human power, and human sin. He knows how the arc of human experience bends. He is aware of the rise and fall of kings and empires. He knows the limits of personal autonomy and political posturing. Where Pilate believes in an everlasting and secure establishment of Roman power, Jesus knows the empire’s underbelly, and that of all human striving. And he is determined to do something about it.
Hamlet was right in Shakespeare’s play that there was something rotten in Denmark, and there’s something rotten at the core of the realm that Pontius Pilate administers on behalf of the emperor. But even if Judea had not been occupied by Rome and the zealots fighting for removal of Roman forces had had their way and were able to make Judea great again, Jesus is fully aware of how feckless Israel’s kings were and how faithless the people showed themselves to be. He was well aware of wars and rumors of wars, of Ahabs and Jezebels, and golden calves a-plenty in Jewish history.
From the very start in Genesis, where, in the beginning the earth was a formless void, a chaotic mass, and Jesus’s Spirit moved over the face of the deep, God has worked to bring order, safety, security, and peace where there was none. Even in the face of the destruction of Jerusalem, the razing of the temple, and the exile of the Israelites into enemy territory in Babylon, God had sought the salvation and redemption both of what he created and of the people he had chosen. Jesus, standing before the Roman governor is at the verge of all the strands of history coming together, and the hoped–for future being made secure. Jesus’s secure place as king, both before Pilate and for eternity at the right hand of God, as the one who, as the Apostles’ Creed declares, will come to judge heaven and earth, and as the wonderful counselor and prince of peace, who executes divine mercy, is the kind of proclamation that is especially important to hear any time chaos threatens to hold sway in our world.
That was true for a man named Charles Jennens in England in 1739. Jennens was a wealthy landowner, the owner of one of the best art collections in Britain, and a patron of musicians. In addition, Jennens suffered from what in his day they called the malady of melancholy. In other words, he regularly faced bouts of depression. The hopeless and endless gloom that clouds a person’s thinking in the midst of depression wasn’t helped by what Jennens saw in the world around him. In his lifetime he had experienced the beheading of his king, the takeover of England by the Puritans led by Cromwell, the restoration of the monarchy under Queen Anne whose reign and personality were shaky at best, and a knock-down-drag-out fight over her successor worse than our latest presidential campaign. The kingdom waged war against France, and the seas were rife with battles between the two countries’ navies. In Jennens’s day, a third of babies born in England died before they were 15. Pandemics of smallpox and outbreaks of cholera arrived with some frequency. English life expectancy was 36 years, which was higher than most other countries, but you couldn’t count on that if you were part of the under class, living in the slums of London, the greatest city on earth.
I’ve been reading a new history book titled Every Valley, in which Jennens plays a major role. The author Charles King describes what Jennens saw beyond his own fog under the noonday demon of depression. He says, “Jennens’s own outlook … was a ledger book of worries. By the time he reached adulthood, whatever opinions he held about the future arose from one unshakable conviction: that his life coincided with a wrong turn in national affairs and the initial stages of his country’s inevitable decline. On any street, in any town, the fetid churn of modern living was on ready display: men whittled down by politics and faction, country girls painting themselves into city courtesans, public executions, animals tortured for a laugh, wailing children abandoned to their fate. To anyone really paying attention, Jennens sometimes felt, the sum of public life — political conspiracies and scandals, economic scheming, one foreign war bleeding into the next, and all of it amplified by sensational reports in things that printers had recently named ‘News-papers’ — amounted to an ironclad argument in favor of despair.”
No matter where you stand politically, it probably sounds pretty familiar. And it’s entirely possible and completely reasonable in our current polarized and politically unstable culture that anyone would begin to feel hopeless. On top of that, it seems like there are forces in the world that have some pernicious glee over the hopelessness and disarray, and use it in their quest for some kind of empire that holds sway in the face of weakness, licentiousness, corruption, and way too many reality TV programs (My Cat from Hell included). How can anybody imagine a future of peace and security? Where is hope to be found?
King tells us what Jennens did in the face of his hopelessness and despair: “One troubled season, surrounded by what had become one of Britain’s finest repositories of human creativity, Jennens started pulling down books from his library shelves. He spent days poring over them, scribbling notes, filling up fresh sheets of paper with a sharpened quill. He copied down quotations from the sacred scriptures, some from the Psalms and the Hebrew prophets, some from New Testament epistles. He linked up one passage with another, editing and rearranging them, tying together themes that leaped out at him from the text — the whole of it not so much a story as an archaeology of ancient promises, dug up and dusted off for the present.”
Charles Jennens looked to Scripture’s promises of the anointed king, the meshiach in Hebrew and the christos in biblical Greek, who would make it all come round right. His string of Bible passages came to be known by that Hebrew word for anointed king. Jennens passed the list to a German composer who’d become a British citizen. The composer, now toward the end of his career and too worried about his own fortunes to pay it much attention, stuck the list of Bible passages in his chaotic filing system almost to be forgotten by the ages. But when the composer was pressed for time to write something for a commission to be performed in Dublin in less than three weeks, he pulled out Jennens’s hope-bestowing litany of verses about the anointed king who stood before Pilate as the longed-for Messiah.
The composer, of course, was George Frideric Handel, and his oratorio was Messiah. Handel, of course, rightly gets the praise, and you can’t look down on a guy who wrote the thing in less time than there is between now and Christmas. But I’d argue that it’s what Charles Jennens did in compiling his list of Bible passages for the sake of his own sanity and faith that is the reason Messiah is performed year after year by symphonies in large cities and sing-along community groups in small towns. Messiah is sublime music, but its text gives us something that is balm to our deepest longing.
The story of Jesus before Pilate is retold on Christ the King Sunday because it focuses on the question of kingship, that is, on whether there’s anyone we can look to for help in the face of the swirling chaos of our lives. Political promises to save democracy or to return our country to greatness are nice words, but their speakers have never had the power to make good on them. The shackled prisoner before the Roman governor in Jerusalem has strength and wiles that Pilate is unaware of. In just a few hours time Jesus’s last word from the cross will be “It is finished.” To the question “Will it all turn out right?”, Jesus’s response will be “Not for me, but for you I’ve got it all in hand. I’m gettin’ ‘er done.”
For all of us Charles Jennens types in the world, shaken by political events, knocked down by family dysfunction or financial blows, stricken by disease or aging, the Newtonian physics at play in an accident or the paralysis of watching TikTok videos when you should be productive, the declaration that the second person of the Trinity, Mary’s baby boy, and Pilate’s victim is king is both fighting words against the powers of chaos and the planting of hope. It’s because this king, your king, is the crucified and risen one who rules with both strength and mercy. All things are placed at his feet because he’s raised on a cross and pulled from a tomb.
And this day he tells you the truth Pilate asks after, the one little word from Luther’s Reformation hymn that wrenches not just his kingdom but you personally from those powers that seek to “take your house, goods, honor, child, or spouse.” Though life itself be wrenched away, God’s promise to you remains sure. It’s given on Calvary and sealed on Easter. In baptism you’re covered in it like a pile of mashed potatoes covered in the richest turkey gravy on Thanksgiving. In the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper it comes as the fullest feast in the tiniest of comestibles. And week in, week out, you have a faithful pastor called and set apart as the Muscatine town crier for this king, sent to declare to you, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Your king is coming. Your warfare is accomplished. Hallelujah! And amen!” King? He’s more than king. He’s your king. Amen.
And now May the peace which far surpasses all our human understanding take your hearts and mind from the woes and ills of this world and keep them instead on the man before Pilate, your king, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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November 24, 2024
The Twist at the Tail
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Christ the King: Romans 16.20-27
When I was a student in seminary, I took a course on the New Testament taught by Dr. Donald Juel. I’d call the experience a conversion if Jesus hadn’t already hijacked my life. Dr. Juel was a tall, terribly thin professor with a Minnesota accent. One afternoon in one of the first classes, Dr. Juel read the Parable of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Luke.
You know the story:
The Fifth Commandment be damned, a spoiled youngest son wishes his Dad dead and guilts the old man into cashing out half his pension and giving it to the punk, who promptly burns through it on activities which would not pass muster at a Senate confirmation hearing. After the kid Venmo’s his account empty, he reasons that he could always go back home to Florida and try his hand at actual work. And no sooner does the old man recognize the boy's gait walking the horizon line than the father runs like a fool to his son. With tears streaming down his cheeks, he throws his arms around the loser. Before you know it, the kid— who’s learned no actual lesson, mind you— is better off than before he departed for the far country. Still smelling of swine, he nevertheless is wearing the father's robe and ring. And somewhere a calf, all fat for Thanksgiving, starts to curse the kid’s name.
“We have no choice but to party!” the father shouts to all who have ears.
In case you missed it, it’s all one way love.
The Father restores his sinful child without the sinful child showing an iota of repentance. The Father offers more than mercy in spite of the son’s disobedience. The Father promises grace apart from the demand of the law.
When the older brother comes back from pulling a double-shift in his brother’s absence, he hears all the happy chatting and china clinking. Curiosity turns to indignation. The Father once again condescends to make an embarrassing gesture, leaving the party to plead with his oldest boy. But the boy seethes, “All these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command. But when this son of yours comes back, this son— who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you kill the fatted calf for him?”
The parable ends with the elder brother’s arms crossed, refusing to be party to the party.
Dr. Juel had been reading the story in a flat, prairie, matter-of-fact way. He had no affect on his face or haste about his manner. When he got to the end of the parable, he closed his Bible and he paused for moments that felt stretched to their breaking point. And then he bounced on his toes like he was about to take off into the air. He gazed at us wide-eyed, like he was about to say the most important thing of our lives.
He was.
At the top of his lungs— lungs which an immune disorder were slowly constricting unto death— Dr. Juel hollered at us in a high-pitched yawp.
“He's right! The elder brother— he's right! He's absolutely right. Every word, he's right! You don’t even need the commandments. Where does God get off?! Common sense tells you that he’s right!”
Hunched over his lectern, Dr. Juel paused a minute more, his intense eyes surveying his listeners. Finally he stood up, straightened his tie and the part in his thin hair, and then he spoke with astonishment in his voice, like he was cracking open a secret for the first time:
“Maybe now you understand why they killed Jesus. Because in
spinning such parables, Jesus asserted, offensively so, that no one
speaks for the life-giving LORD but him. Amidst all the competing
claims about God in the world, Jesus insisted that the LORD is
found nowhere— nowhere else— but in him.”
As if to prove the professor’s point, a half dozen hands shot up in the air so fast you would think he had just uttered blasphemy.
“The grace of our LORD Jesus be with you.”
Thus the apostle Paul ends his epistle with the very claim with which he began, “Grace to you and peace from…the LORD Jesus Christ.” Just as it signaled more than a greeting, Paul culminates his letter with much more than a benediction.
Indeed it could easily be reckoned as blasphemy.
There is a twist at the tail.
Paul forgoes a less contentious conclusion. He does not sign off to the churches at Rome by saying, “The grace of God be with you.” He does not bless them under the all-inclusive auspices of the Maker of Heaven and Earth. Paul affixes to Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim the appellative for the NAME too holy to be spoken anywhere but from the Burning Bush.
Adonnai.
LORD.
God— Theos— is not a name; it is a common noun, like car or beer.
Paul does not bless them, “The grace of Theos be with you.” Paul writes, “The grace of the LORD Jesus be with you.” LORD, the appellative for YAHWEH. That is, the NAME that is above every name, the NAME that will bow every knee in creation and loose every creature’s tongue, the NAME revealed to Moses— barefoot and astonished in the wilderness— is identical with Jesus.
There is a twist at the tail.
Even though a consensus stretching back to the primal church judges verses twenty-one and forward to be a later edition to Paul’s original letter, verse twenty-seven concludes by registering the same astonishing confession, “To the only wise God, through Jesus the King, to whom be the glory forever. Amen!” Throughout his Letter to the Romans, Paul regularly moves with bewildering ease between the one God and Jesus the LORD and King. Yet this final verse closes with teasing ambiguity.
To whom belongs the divine glory?
Which person does Paul mean?
The LORD?
Or Jesus?
Yes!
There is a twist at the tail of this letter.
Earlier this year I received an email from a former parishioner who has since retired to North Carolina. When I first met him, Mike was steeped in the civil religion of his upbringing and the Christian nationalism of his military service. He sang in the choir. He served on the trustees. He led a stewardship campaign. But the God he worshipped every Sunday was simply God.
Theos.
In his email, Mike wrote:
“Jason,
I was just listening to your talk with bishop Will Willimon, critiquing the notion that words cannot capture God. Toward the end, Willimon tells of asking a Duke student whether or not he was Christian. The student objected that the question was personal— that it "crossed a boundary." And, of course, it is personal and it does indeed cross many lines of etiquette.
But Willimon nevertheless responded: "I'm a Christian; this is what we do!" Well, in my experience, not many do. And those that do, don't do it very often. But you did, back in my Aldersgate days. And you do now, I'm sure. Thanks for being that kind of Christian.
Coming across as rude and offensive doesn’t seem to be a concern that troubles you. Still, if you hadn’t taken such a risk, I might not have ever realized the God I had been worshipping was not the LORD.
God is an empty category. We can fill it with our own values, aspirations, and prejudices. And I did, even blessing war and justifying torture in his name.
The LORD Jesus, however, is a NAME that eliminates all other claimants to the throne. And because it’s a NAME, it sharpens what we can say about God.
The kid at Duke was right. This is uncomfortable stuff. If Jesus is the LORD, then talk of God that obeys the manners of a secular culture can’t help but be blasphemy.”
“The grace of our LORD Jesus be with you.”
The polemical edge on which Paul ends this epistle is in no way unique to the scriptures. The entire New Testament is written in the face of competing claims about God. For example, when Paul proclaims to the Corinthians the revelation that “the LORD was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, Paul simultaneously posits the correlative, “the LORD was reconciling the world to himself in no other way— through no other person, at no other place, in no other religion.”
For those raised in a culture where Christianity was the de facto established religion, it can be difficult to see: the New Testament is driven by controversy, and the controversy is precisely around the unique status of Jesus as the sole revelation of the true God.
The polemical edge on which Paul ends his letter is present from the very start of the Gospels.
As John announces in the Prologue to his Gospel:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus the King. No one has ever seen God. It is only the Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made the LORD known.”
Shortly thereafter in John’s Gospel, Jesus’s unprecedented claims to divine authority not only provoke charges of blasphemy they galvanize the plot to murder him, “For this reason they were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.”
Jesus responds to their outrage by sticking his thumb in the wound, claiming that he is the life-giving LORD to whom the Father has given all power to judge.
A mere chapter later, with loaves and fish, Jesus asserts that he is the LORD’s life-giving bread and that to feed on him by faith is to do the will and work of the true and only God who spoke to Moses.
His claim elicits more controversy.
As that teacher of mine, Donal Juel writes:
“The New Testament is written to convince (or confirm) that life comes exclusively through faith in Jesus the King. That argument is made in the face of competing claims, in particular the claim that the Creator is known through the law— natural law or revealed law. For the New Testament, the claims are incompatible. God is experienced as gracious either in Jesus or elsewhere. Everything in the New Testament is written in the face of alternatives. The creeds likewise presume other contrary candidates for God. Any gospel proclamation in our own setting must take seriously other forms of theism as well as atheism.”
Even after Pontius Pilate has interrogated Jesus and had him flogged, Christ's opponents cannot abide the absolute assertions he has made about himself, which prompts their demand for his murder. “We have a law,” they say to Pilate, “and according to that law Jesus ought to die because Jesus has claimed to be [the LORD].”
“To the only wise God, through Jesus, to whom be the glory.”
To who?
One afternoon almost five years ago, a young woman wandered into the church. The hijab wrapped loosely around her head was as brightly colored as her MacBook was covered in stickers.
“I'm looking for a preacher,” she said.
I’d been standing in the atrium, and I greeted her as the pastor.
She introduced herself as a student at George Mason University.
“I'm enrolled in a comparative religions class,” she explained, “As part of our final paper, we're supposed to interview religious leaders about how their communities worship and why.”
Her name was Adila.
I showed her around the sanctuary. I told her how the first Christians built their sanctuaries in the shape of a cross and oriented them to face east, the direction of the rising sun. I showed her my alb, and I added how in John Wesley's day, preachers would wear a white surplus over top the black robe, like our acolytes do, as a visual reminder of baptism clothing us in Christ's righteousness. I showed her the lectern and the pulpit.
“How do you decide what passage to read?” she asked me, “How do you decide what to preach?
“Well,” I said, “for instance, this coming Sunday, it's the Parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke's Gospel.”
And I saw her sounding out the word prodigal on her lips like she'd never heard it before. And so I summarized the story Jesus tells about the father who’s meant to be a stand-in for himself, the LORD.
"What happens when he comes home?” Adila asked with an interest that, to be honest, I am unaccustomed.
“As soon as he reappears from the far country, his father runs out to embrace him,” I said.
“And then what happens?” Adila asked, her voice on the edge of her seat.
So I narrated a bit more of the LORD’s story.
“But wait,” Adela said, “Hold up, didn't his son apologize? Make amends? Do something to restore his father's honor?”
“No,” I replied, “No, the father forgives him without an ounce of repenting."
“But surely his father punishes him in some way?”
“No.”
“All right, but tell me he pays back the inheritance he squandered?”
“Nope.”
She looked at me with something shy of contempt.
“Well, he does at least learn his lesson, right? Change, become a different, better person?
“Jesus never says,” I told her, “Besides, to add that detail would sort of undo the whole story.”
“I think he should have at least mentioned it,” she said, shaking her head, “I don’t understand why Jesus would tell such a terrible story.”
“He tells the story in order to say, “God the Father is like that father.””
“Well, I think Jesus was wrong. How did he know God is like that? He was just a man— a prophet maybe, but still just a human.”
I smiled
“No,” I said, “That man is God— the LORD.”
She frowned, quickly recovered, and smiled politely, like I had just uttered nonsense and decorum compelled her to humor me.
“The grace of our LORD Jesus be with you.”
The entire New Testament refers to God as Creator only eight times. The New Testament refers to God as Maker of Heaven and Earth a mere six times—fourteen total, and in many of these instances, the creative agent is the Son or the Spirit. By contrast, the New Testament refers to God as Father (of Jesus the LORD) two hundred and sixty-one times.
The numbers literally tell the story.
We put all the emphasis on believing in God or following God, but the scriptures— Old and New— are instead most concerned with identifying God, the true God.
In the ancient world, much like today, it was in vogue to honor the divine by heaping a plethora of names upon deity. All names, the ancients supposed, were ultimately equivalent names. But the Bible makes the opposite move. There is a NAME that is above every name, and identifying that NAME is the Bible’s central plot.
The proper NAME of the only true God is what the Bible reveals.
If you go to the scriptures searching for answers to a great many of the questions that vex us, you will not often find a clear or singular response.
How does Jesus save us? The scriptures offer multiple motifs.
Which is more redemptive, cross or resurrection? It depends on whose Gospel you read.
Is divorce prohibited or permitted? The Bible’s answer is uneven.
Can women teach in the church? There are as many positions as churches planted by Paul.
Did Christ die on Passover or the day before? Even on this key item, John does not agree with Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Some view the Bible’s conflicting commands, inconsistent details, and irreconcilable propositions and they despair that the scriptures lack all clarity. But if the question you ask instead is “Which god is God— and what is he like?” then there are no other answers than “the LORD Jesus.”
The twist at the tail of Paul’s letter is, in fact, the spinal cord of the scriptures. The way the whole Bible hangs together is as a single, coherent narrative that discloses the proper name of God.
And the fact that we can name this NAME— that we know who God is— it is exactly what Paul calls it.
Grace: a sheer gift.
As the theologian Robert Jenson says, The new thing that is the content of the gospel is that the true God, out of all other putative candidates, now can be known in the LORD Jesus.
After Adila recovered from her frown, to notion that the LORD could have both a mother and an executioner she said to me, “That’s why I could never be a Christian.”
And then she walked away.
I mentioned Adila in a sermon three years ago; upon which, a listener recoiled and pushed back, “Does that mean that young woman and people of other faiths will not be saved?”
“Of course it doesn’t mean that,” I replied, “It means that to the extent that she or anyone else is saved, it’s the LORD Jesus who will save them.”
“I don’t think they’d like that answer,” the listener replied.
“No one ever has.”
Except I was wrong.
After service, on one of the last Sundays he was able to attend worship before he died, I spoke with Mike Moser over coffee. Mike’s relationship with his son was not all that different from my own relationship with my father. And so Mike did not need to say more to me than he did.
“You know, Jason. It’s not always the son. Sometimes it’s the father who gets lost in the far country.”
I looked at him and nodded.
That’s all the response Mike needed from me to know I understood.
“I suppose that’s what made me a useful sponsor for AA.”
He took a sip from his coffee and took a longer pause. Finally he said, “But I have so many regrets from my sojourn in the far country.”
I put my hand on Mike’s shoulder so he’d look away from his mug and into my eyes.
“All of that— all of it— is already forgiven,” I said to him.
He narrowed his eyes and frowned every so slightly, “I cherish the thought, Jason, but how do you know?”
“I know,” I said, “because I know who the LORD is and therefore I know exactly what he’s like. So trust me when I tell you, you are forgiven.”
When I realized that it was one of the last things I ever said to Mike at the tail end of his life, I remembered all over again Professor Donald Juel, with the urgency of a drowning man, impressing upon us the claim in Jesus’s NAME.
Commonly, it’s called the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Yet prodigal means extravagant, and it’s the father who lavishes grace upon his youngest son and is ready to do the same for his eldest. So really, the parable Jesus tells is about all three. It’s about a father’s family.
It’s about the Father’s family.
And unlike the son who comes back from the far country but for whatever reason does not go out from the party to fetch his brother, you are sent out— armed with no power or persuasion other than this NAME— to add partygoers to the Father’s feast.
It can seem a rude invitation to extend.
Therefore—
It’s no wonder the closing line to Paul’s letter is not simply a benediction.
It’s a blessing, a bestowal, a giving over of what it says.
Just so:
May the grace of the Lord Jesus be yours. If you’re going to put this NAME above every name, you’re going to need it.
So come to the table.
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November 23, 2024
Following Him Now is Following Him Through the Kingdom Door
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Hi Friends,
Here’s the latest in our study of Jens’ work on the Last Things.
Join us Monday night live here. We will finish the this essay from a collection:
Jenson The Great Transformation862KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadAnd don’t forget, for the Mondays of Advent, Chris E.W. Green will join us as we talk our way through the theologian Karl Rahner’s little devotional, Encounters with Silence. You can get it here to join us. It’s tiny!
Show NotesSummary
The conversation delves into the themes of the Kingdom of Jesus, the nature of resurrection, and the interim state between death and final resurrection. It explores the livingness of the saints, the political implications of the Kingdom, and the role of eschatology in faith. The discussion also touches on the concepts of deification and transformation, the common good, and social justice, emphasizing the importance of understanding these themes in relation to the person and work of Jesus.
Takeaways
The Kingdom of Jesus is characterized by small, enduring things.
Understanding the interim state between death and resurrection is crucial for comfort in grief.
The saints are not gone; they are present with Christ.
Eschatology is integral to understanding the Christian faith.
Deification is about participating in the divine life of Christ.
The common good is a central theme in Christian ethics.
Social justice must be rooted in the person of Jesus.
The political nature of the Kingdom calls for active engagement.
Faith in Jesus brings the future into the present.
The livingness of the saints offers hope and connection beyond death.
Sound Bites
"The end will be deification."
"Jesus is still alive."
"The common good continues."
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November 22, 2024
The LORD is the Father of Jesus, the King
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Christ the King
The Christian year ends this week with Christ the King Sunday, a relatively recent addition to the liturgical calendar. Few pay notice to the redundancy of the day’s name, and this is the precise reason why revisionist alternatives to the term king/kingdom (e.g., “kin-dom,” “queen-dom”) fail to ameliorate the original. Christ is merely the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew mashiach of which caesar is the Latin term.
King.
The biblical ascription King, like Father and Son, is often judged to be offensively contextual, an artifact from a hierarchical and patriarchal past. This is true. And this is necessarily so for a faith which posits that one of the triune identity is Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. To break from naming God in such incarnate terms is to depart from revelation into religion.
It is well-established that Father, in its biblical usage, is not a general term, but refers specifically to the relations of the triune identity. Less well-known is that the scriptures inextricably link the terms King, Father, and Son together; that is, they are coherent only in connection to one another.
Because Mary’s boy is King, God is the Father of this Son, Jesus. You cannot call Jesus King without also simultaneously God Father.As J.N.D Kelly writes in Early Christian Creeds:
“Patristic exegesis found that Father refers almost exclusively to the special relation of the First to the Second Person of the Trinity. The Father was the Father of the eternal Word. As early as the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem was explaining, in his discussion of the creed, that FATHER properly belongs to God in virtue of His relation to the Son, the very word suggesting the idea of a son to the mind; it could be taken as describing His fatherly relation to humankind, but only by a misuse of language.”
The terms King, Father, and Son are examples of the way biblical studies can provoke the fragmentation of the faith rather than provide a foundation for it. Rather than the norm which norms, scripture becomes a problem in need of a remedy; for instance, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” becomes the (a-scriptural) “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.”
“It could be taken as describing His fatherly relation to humankind, but only by a misuse of language.”
If it is well-established that Father is not a general term for God in the scriptures but is one revealed only through Jesus calling God Abba and commanding his disciples to address his Father as our Father, the church seldom calls attention to the fact that the terms Father, Son, and King are interconnected in Israel’s scriptures.
As noted, address or description of the LORD as Father is exceedingly rare in the Old Testament; critically, the exceptions are found in Israel’s messianic passages. Israel’s royal tradition establishes the precedent for employing Father/Son language to speak of the King.
The terms Father , Son , and King are interconnected in Israel’s scriptures.
Four key examples:
II Samuel 7.14
1 Chronicles 17.13 and 22.7-10
Psalm 2.7
Psalm 89.26
In these passages, the LORD is addressed as Father exactly because the King is his Son (these passages appear in the New Testament, in places such as Nathan’s confession in John 1.49).
Israel’s royal tradition establishes the precedent for employing Father/Son language to speak of the King.
Just so—
Because Jesus is confessed as Christ, scriptural language appropriate to the King may be employed to speak of him and, by virtue of him, the LORD.
In at least three biblical passages critically important to the early church, the King is called God’s Son.As my teacher Donald Juel puts it:
“Christians made use of the father/son designation as a way of attesting to the extraordinary authority Jesus commanded— the authority of Israel’s King, an authority vindicated when God raised him from the dead.”
The order of operations is quite opposite from what we suppose:
— Jesus is King, as the sign above his cross and stone rolled from his tomb both attest. — Because Jesus is the Christ, he is God’s Son.— Therefore, the LORD is the Father of Jesus, the King.Given the redundancy in its name, Christ the King Sunday could just as easily be called God the Father Day or Jesus the Son Sunday.
Once again, those who argue that words like King, Father, and Son are contextual to a particular time and place and that they might offend some in other times and places are not wrong. In fact, the incarnation could not avoid such a problem even if God had taken flesh in a more “enlightened” time.
Nevertheless, as Juel suggests:
“The scriptures, the creeds, and the tradition of the church commend a particular way of speaking about God: God the Creator is first and foremost the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That is the norming image from the scriptures and the tradition. How to deal with the offense in the hearing of it is the task of pastoral theology.”
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November 21, 2024
Calvin for the World
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My friend and former teacher Ruben Rosario Rodriguez joined us to talk about his new book, Calvin for the World.
Show NotesSummary
In this conversation, Ruben Rosario discusses his new book, 'Calvin for the World,' exploring the enduring relevance of John Calvin's political, social, and economic theology. He highlights Calvin's experiences as a refugee and his advocacy for social justice, drawing parallels to contemporary issues surrounding immigration and refugees. The discussion delves into Calvin's theology of public life, his influence on liberation theology, and the implications of his ideas in modern political contexts, particularly in Latin America and South Africa. The conversation concludes with reflections on how Calvin's teachings can inform our understanding of marginalized communities and the need to differentiate between Calvin's original ideas and later interpretations of Calvinism. In this conversation, Ruben Rosario discusses the complexities of John Calvin's legacy, particularly in relation to urbanization, social welfare, and the infamous case of Miguel Servetus. He emphasizes the importance of understanding historical context and encourages critical engagement with theological figures, advocating for a nuanced approach to reading and interpreting their works. The discussion also touches on the relevance of Calvin's ideas in contemporary society and the need for ongoing reflection and retraction in theological discourse.
Takeaways
Calvin's experience as a refugee informs his theology.
The state should be a vehicle for God's kingdom.
Calvin's theology emphasizes social justice and public life.
Calvin's ideas influenced liberation theology in Latin America.
The anti-apartheid movement drew on Calvin's teachings.
Calvin recognized the importance of cultural diversity.
Calvin's legacy is often misrepresented in modern contexts.
Understanding Calvin requires historical context.
Calvin's doctrine of the imago Dei affirms human dignity.
Distinguishing Calvin from Calvinism is crucial for accurate interpretation. Urbanization in the Reformation era led to new social issues.
Calvin's reforms were not innovative but a response to existing problems.
The case of Miguel Servetus highlights the complexities of Calvin's legacy.
Historical context is crucial for understanding theological figures.
Critical reading allows for a balanced view of past thinkers.
Future generations may look back and question our current beliefs.
Engaging with historical texts can reveal unexpected connections.
Theological education should encourage wrestling with difficult ideas.
Calvin's social welfare initiatives were compassionate and systematic.
Understanding the mystery of faith is more important than explaining it.
Sound Bites
"Calvin was a refugee, political refugee."
"If French blood must be spilled, let it be mine."
"The state becomes the vehicle for building God's kingdom."
"Calvin built a whole system of social welfare networks."
"Calvin did not hold public office."
"Context is everything, right?"
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November 20, 2024
Christ is Not the One on Trial; We are
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When Pilate suggests to the soldiers that they take Jesus away and judge him according to the Jewish law, they tell Pilate, “Unfortunately, it's not legal for us to put anyone to death.” But here's the big Bible fact: That's a lie!
Of course the law gives them the authority to put a transgressor to death. Here in John's Gospel, they've already attempted to stone Jesus twice.
John 18
In light of the liturgical calendar, here’s a sermon from Christ the King Sunday, 2020.
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