Jason Micheli's Blog, page 32

Low Anthropology

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The lectionary Gospel this coming Sunday is from the letter Luther deemed “an epistle of straw.” Whether you think James is straw in the sense of lining Christ’s creche or, like Luther, worth no more than catching horse s@#$…

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Creation is Incarnation

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Romans 8.18-30

One of my favorite quotes comes from Julian of Norwich.

It’s a sentence “almost infinitely dense.”

Julian writes:

“God never began to love mankind.”

Julian— Julian of Norwich— was an English anchoress in the Middle Ages. Her writings, known as the Revelations of the Divine Love- or, Showings— are the earliest surviving works in the English language written by a woman. That you may not have heard of Mother Julian is an example of the perniciousness of the church’s patriarchy. In the middle of the fourteenth century, though she lived in seclusion in her monastic cell, the Black Death devastated Norwich. In May 1373, Mother Julian, lying on what she feared was her deathbed, received her revelation of divine love in sixteen “showings.” Twenty years later, she completed a lengthy reflection on these visions of Christ’s Passion, which the theologian Rowan Williams has called the most important work of Christian theological reflection in the English language.

In the thirteenth showing, which includes the best-known lines from her works, she admits to herself that she is troubled by how God has acted in time, vexed by the apparent failure of the providential order in making a world in which it is possible to sin and sin so grievously.

Julian writes in her reflection:

“I saw that nothing lead me but sin. And so I beheld generally in us all, and I thought: “If sin had not been, we should all have be clean and like to our Lord as he made us.” And thus in my folly before this time, often I wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not prevented. For then thought me that all  should have be well… morning and sorrow I made therefore without reason and discretion. But Jesus, in this vision then informed me of all that I needed, answered by this word and said: “Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

All shall be well.

And all shall be well.

And all manner of things shall be well.

When Christ revealed to Julian of Norwich that all manner of things will be well, what all did Jesus mean? Which things?

How many things exactly are included in his promise that “all manner of things will be well?”

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In 2011, the filmmaker Terrence Malick released his fifth film, The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain. Trained as a philosopher at both Harvard and Oxford, Malick taught at M.I.T as a young man. After establishing a relationship with Jack Nicholson, Malick transitioned to directing with the 1973 film Badlands.

On the surface, The Tree of Life centers on the joys and struggles of a nuclear family, the O’Briens, in 1950’s Waco, Texas. The early death—possibly by suicide—of one of Malick’s younger brothers informs the film’s plot. To the extent the film has a plot. Indeed to say that The Tree of Life is about a domestic family’s ups and downs in post-war Texas is a bit like saying the Book of Genesis is about a man named Noah. The impossibly wide horizon of The Tree of Life is precisely what frustrated many of the film’s audience.

The film offended viewers for refusing to offer them a linear storyline. Malick shows viewers miniatures of this family’s life—playing outside, working in the kitchen garden, learning to catch a ball— yet these glimpses of ordinary domesticity reliably transform into brilliant, even stunning, depictions of creation. “The delights of the ordinary and the magnificence of all creation,” Beverly Gaventa comments on the film, are juxtaposed with one another.” Just so, the heart of the film is found less in that nuclear family than in the relationship between the family and the creation which surrounds them. Or better yet, the heart of the film is the relationship between a single house of humans, the creation which surrounds them, and the Creator.

For many in the audience, the film’s unimaginably large context— its wide  cosmic scope: from a single human family to dinosaurs, from the death of a son to the Big Bang and the One who banged it— was simply too much for viewers to absorb.

Terrence Malick, the director, is not only a trained philosopher, he is a Christian. In fact, one reviewer called The Tree of Life “the longest and best sermon I’ve ever sat through.” In terms of scale and plot permutations, Malick’s fifth film The Tree of Life is not unlike Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

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Karl Barth said that a careful reading of scripture will always yield “much sweat and many groans.” Case in point: the pivot Paul makes in the middle of his letter’s eighth chapter.

Despite broad assumptions that Paul’s epistle concerns the work that God has done in Jesus Christ to save individual humans, in verse nineteen the apostle screeches the brakes to take an unexpectedly hard turn off the “Romans Road.”

Just as he has settled into exalted language about the inviolable inheritance for those in Christ Jesus— those whom the Spirit has liberated, Paul pivots to speak not of us and our anticipated glory but of creation.

All of creation.

All manner of things shall be well.

Like the director’s lens turning from a family in Texas to the foundation of the earth, Paul pans out from those baptized in Christ’s death. He widens the frame to include creation itself. As my teacher Beverly Gaventa notes, thus does “the cosmic, world-encompassing character of the epistle” come into view. The actions of God in Jesus Christ incorporate more than individuals. The cross Christ bears bears cosmic consequences.

As Mother Julian might put it, “God never began to love creation.”

The work of God in Christ Jesus involves more than individuals.

The apostle’s claim should not surprise us. Paul attests nothing more than Jesus stipulates to Nicodemus. In the Gospel of John, Jesus does not testify under the cover of night,“God so loved sinners that he gave his only Son…” No, Jesus makes the matter plain to Nicodemus that the object of the Father’s redemptive love is the world. And the word Jesus uses to describe the effects of the Father’s gift of the Son, belief and everlasting life— a word usually translate everyone, is the Greek word pas. It’s an adjective that again echoes Julian. It means “all things.”

Literally, Jesus informs Nicodemus:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that all things may believe in him and not perish but may have everlasting life.”

The work of God in Christ Jesus involves more than individuals.

Paul’s point should not surprise us, for “even the winds obey him.” The fish and the loaves listen to his word. Water turns to wine at his willing. He even teaches in his Sermon on the Mount that no less than the grass and lilies of the field exceed Solomon’s robes in their divinely-lavished glory. On Palm Sunday, as the begrudgers attempt to silence his disciples’ acclaim, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees. “I tell you,” Jesus says, “If these disciples were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

Evidently, on Palm Sunday the Lord intended more than personification, for when Paul pans out and widens the frame, we see that Christ’s cross and resurrection elicit cosmic consequences. In Romans 8 the vast horizon of God’s act in Jesus Christ comes into view with creation itself groaning in anticipation. All of creation groans, waiting.

Creation waits not for your final, realized redemption.

Creation waits not for my final, realized redemption.

Creation groans in wait for its own final rescue.

The very stones are crying out!

For themselves as much as for me or for you!

Paul’s pivot from those baptized in Christ to all of creation should not surprise us. We sing this news every Christmas, “He comes to make his blessings flow/Far as the curse is found!” And the carol’s first verse does not invite heaven and humans to sing in adoration of God’s arrival through Mary. The carol beckons all of nature— all things— to join heaven’s joy.

The Tree Of Life is a story of epic scale told on an intimate level. For example, the film opens, via memory and flashback, with Jessica Chastain learning that her oldest son R.L. has died in the service. While the film remains anchored to the O’Brien family in both and present, midway through the movie Terrence Malick diverts to a thirty minute mediation on the cosmos. Suddenly the family drama has become a 3D Space Odyssey. Malick shows the Earth’s conception, from Big Bang to the Ice Age and beyond. The events of O’Brien family are overlaid against the emergence of dinosaurs, evolution, and the forming of the land. The cosmic set piece ends with the birth of the O’Brien’s youngest son, Jack. The Tree of Life shows Jack learning to walk and learning to speak, trick-or-treating on Halloween and meeting his older brother for the first time.

When I first viewed the The Tree of Life in the theater, the thirty minute turn from the personal to the cosmic— from the intimate to the all-encompassing— was more than many in the seats could tolerate. As soon as the film widened the frame to seventy-five million years ago and showed the maternal love of a dinosaur, I heard more than a few pairs of feet squashing spilled popcorn as they escaped in the darkness.

For many in the theater, the cosmic scale of the O’Brien’s story made for a bad film.For the story Paul seeks to proclaim, however, the wide horizon and cosmic scope is precisely what makes the gospel good news.

In my sermon last Sunday, I explained how scripture’s promises to those who are in Christ Jesus (and consequently have the Spirit of Jesus) are intelligible only in the context of Paul’s larger argument which begins back in chapter six. Simply, those who are in Christ Jesus and have the Holy Spirit are those whom God has baptized.

On Monday, a woman named Sandra sent me an email:

“Good evening Jason,

I am emailing you from New Zealand where I live. My young adults and I worship with your church online. After listening to your sermon, we wondered what you would say to the young man you mentioned in your sermon if he had answered your question differently. When you asked him if his dead sister was baptised, what if he had responded, “No. No, she isn’t baptised?”

We have a friend who lost her teen son in a drowning incident. He was unbaptised and didn’t know Jesus. Since then his Mum has been learning with us about Jesus. What can we say to her about hope for her dear son?

Thank you so much for any help.

May your church keep up their life giving work. It is so deeply needed.

In Christ,

Sandra”

In my quick reply, I promised Sandra that an answer would emerge as we watched the apostle Paul pan out and widen the frame.

In the same way that modern Bibles’s chapter and verse divisions can mislead readers, human egocentricity can also mask Paul’s intended meaning. For instance, if you come to the scriptures with the presumption that only human creatures can be the objects of God’s salvific work in Christ, then you may fail to notice that in Romans 8 the grammatical subject of verses nineteen through twenty-four is creation. Throughout, creation’s eager anticipation is the subject of the sentences. The we of which Paul speaks in the passage is all of creation. And when Paul writes of the Holy Spirit’s work on our behalf in verse twenty-six he refers back to the very same subject.

The us in “on our behalf” is not you and me.The us is you, me, and the earth beneath our feet and every creature therein.

The Spirit is at work in the present, interceding with the Father, for all of creation. The glory that is incomparable to present suffering, the glory that all things are inexorably if inexplicably moving towards, is a glory for human and non-human creatures alike— not just baptized believers or babies in utero but birds in the sky and dogs on your lap. All of creation waits, Robert Jenson writes, “or rather, it cannot wait. Though we cannot understand it, this waiting too is verbal. The prayers of creation, perhaps the only true and necessary speaking in tongues, are the Spirit’s.”

“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord,” the psalmist sings.

Breath includes many more than creatures like you or me.

In other words, C.S. Lewis was not being childish when he portrayed Mr. and Mrs. Beaver as eager to greet Narnia’s Redeemer. He was instead proving himself an astute reader of Paul and his scriptures. This is more than a fanciful interpretative insight. Failure to grasp the cosmic scope of Christ’s saving work— human and nonhuman creation— sends us right back to the epistle’s opening indictment. Paul made clear in chapter one that the origin of humanity’s enslavement to Sin lies in our refusal to understand ourselves as made by God, creatures like all the other nonhuman creatures. Creation, every earthly thing that is not God, encompasses both human and nonhuman life, all of which together groans in wait for the culmination of God’s redemptive action.

To see ourselves, then, as unique recipients of Christ’s saving work over against the lilies of the field and the birds of the air is only to replicate our originating sin. The blessing of the gospel does indeed extend as far as the curse is found.

The claim here that all of creation awaits the final result of cross and resurrection is no different than what the apostle will proclaim later in the letter.  “Because from him and through him and to him are all things,” Paul writes.

Not all people.

Not even all believers.

To him are all things; i.e., the destiny of everything is him.

The destiny of everything is Christ.

Paul likewise widens the horizon of the salvation story for the Corinthians. “Yet for us there is one God,” Paul writes, “the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” Meanwhile, to the Ephesians the promise is just as incomprehensibly cosmic in scope, “According to the Father’s good pleasure he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and all things on earth.”

What Christ revealed to Paul about the cosmic scope of his redemptive work is exactly what Christ showed Mother Julian in the Middle Ages. In the third showing she received from Christ, Julian of Norwich hears Jesus say to her, “full blissfully” (that is, brimming with delight):

“See, I am God. See, I am in all things. See, I do all things. See, I never left my hands of my works, nay never shall I without end. See, I lead all things to the end that I ordain them to, from without beginning, by the same might, wisdom, and love that I made all things. How should any thing be amiss?”

In my brief and hasty reply, I promised Sandra that the answer to her question would emerge as we watched Paul widen the horizon. But, just to be sure, I wrote her a response:

“Dear Sandra,

Thank you for your reminder that what Christians think and say matters for matters that matter.

You asked me what we can say, as Christians, to your friend about her son. No doubt, we all have friends who know not Christ just as we’ve all lost loved ones who have died without the certainty of faith that baptism provides.

First—

I would say to your friend that Karl Barth insisted that the only difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is a noetic difference. That is, Christians do not possess a favor or a future that belongs uniquely to us. Rather, Christians simply know what the non-Christian does not know about our future. Baptism is a visible word of God. The unbaptized do not lack the same future as the baptized. They lack a sign to know this future with certainty in the present. 

Second—

If your friend is curious, then I would point her back to the ancient church fathers. The greatest of these, Maximus the Confessor, summarized his predecessors’s teaching with the axiom, “Creation is Incarnation.” For Maximus and the fathers, Christ does not name a genus. Christ does not even name merely an individual, the boy born to Mary. Christ names all of creation.

As Maximus elaborates on his axiom, “The Word wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his Incarnation.”

Following Paul in places like Romans 8, the church fathers teach that in the Incarnation, the flesh of the world— i.e, all of creation— became the flesh of Christ in his humanity. “In the Incarnation,” says Maximus, “the entire world becomes Christ’s receptacle.” This is why Jesus can turn water to wine and still the storms. Everything is his flesh. And having his flesh, everything— all things: human non-human, living and dead— is moving, invisibly, towards the final transfiguration of the world.

To make it plain—

The Christian hope is not for our transfer from creation.

The Christian hope is for the transfiguration of creation.

All things are headed to Christ.

All things are on their way to becoming— fully so— Christ.

That’s Romans 11 but also 1 Corinthians 15: all things have their destiny in God. That means your unbelieving friend, yes, as well as her son. But just as surely it includes the fish and plankton with which he swam. And it includes too the sea that held all of them like things woven, giving them life and delight. Even the stars above that sea will one day sing Christ’s praise.

As a preacher, I am all too aware how impossible it is to communicate a hope so incomprehensibly cosmic in scope. All I know to say after all these years, after hundreds of burials, and several brushes with my own death— all I know to say— is that the gospel is not just good news for some. The gospel is good news with no exceptions. The gospel is good news without remainder. The gospel is good news for all creatures of our God and King.

Finally—

Tell your friend that God never began to love creation.

Just so, creation will never cease to be the object of the Father’s love, for now and forever the world is the flesh of his Son. And whether they like it or not, that body includes both your friend and her boy.

In Christ,

Jason

“Just as you did it for one of the least ones,” Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “you have done it to me.”That’s neither sentimentality nor moralism.It’s the gospel truth.All things are Christ.All things are becoming Christ.

Therefore—

Today you have less reason to shy away the table than you did yesterday.

After all, the mystery is not simply that creatures of bread and wine can become the body of God. The mystery is that all creatures— even you: sinful, unbelieving, religious but not reliable you— are being transfigured into Christ.

You see—

The promise is that Christ is for you in a much bigger way than you can possibly comprehend.

And, I’ve come to the end of my ability to communicate this hope.

So come to the table.

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Minus Six More

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In the wake of last weekend’s murder of six Jewish hostages, my friend Father Kenneth Tanner joined my regular, ongoing conversation with Rabbi Joseph.

Show Notes

Summary

The conversation explores the conflict in Israel and Gaza, focusing on the recent killing of six hostages by Hamas. The guests discuss the lack of criticism and amplification of Hamas in the media, the fear and trauma experienced by the Jewish community, and the complexity of addressing violence from a nonviolent perspective. They also touch on the role of religious leaders and the need for interfaith dialogue. The conversation highlights the need for critical reasoning, perspective, and shared decency in discussing and understanding the conflict. The conversation explores the courage to engage in the midst of misunderstanding and the importance of caring for the Jewish people. It delves into the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the demands of the Israeli government. The protests in Israel demanding negotiation and the prioritization of hostages are discussed. The conversation also touches on the significance of the Shema prayer and the blowing of the shofar during the month of Elul.

Takeaways

The lack of criticism and amplification of Hamas in the media is a concern, as it perpetuates a one-sided narrative and fails to address the root causes of the conflict.

The Jewish community experiences fear and trauma due to the intentional acts of terrorism by Hamas, and it is important to acknowledge and address these emotions.

Addressing violence from a nonviolent perspective is complex, and it requires discernment and a commitment to protecting the innocent while avoiding the misuse of force for personal or political gain.

Religious leaders have a responsibility to engage in interfaith dialogue and promote critical reasoning and shared decency in discussions about the conflict.

The complexity of the conflict and the fear of being misunderstood or associated with extreme views make it challenging to have open and honest conversations about the issue. Courage is necessary to engage in difficult conversations, even when there is a risk of being misunderstood.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex, and the demands of the Israeli government play a role in the ongoing tensions.

Protests in Israel have called for negotiation and the prioritization of hostages.

The blowing of the shofar during the month of Elul is a significant practice in Jewish tradition.

Sound Bites

"Hamas, an eliminationist Islamic radical terrorist organization, knows that about us."

"Hamas and their propaganda identical to everything used by Goebbels, Himmler, identical has not let Israel take control of the narrative at all."

"We have lost that basic fundamental ability to assume we're safe."

"We want to be in between to engage."

"If you are a Christian and believe that Jesus has risen and ascended, that means you should give a shit about his people."

"The lack of American outrage at the murder of Jews is both disturbing and revealing."

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Why Did the World Not Burst Into Flame at the First Pentecost?

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In meditating on the second half of Romans 8, particularly the way in which Paul portrays (personifies?) creation, I turned once again to The Bride of the Lamb by the great 20th century Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov.

First a bit of historic trivia to explain why this Barth enthusiast is enthusiastically reading Bulgakov— the latter’s book on John the Baptist is one of my favorites.

In September 1930, the greatest Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, met with his Orthodox interlocutor, Sergius Bulgakov—met in the Kornhauskeller in the Swiss capital, Berne. Although an elegant restaurant today, the Kornhauskeller was a famous drinking hole in a vaulted cellar hall then, especially popular among students. This seemingly insignificant encounter nevertheless revealed common ground for ecumenical dialogue. As Bulgakov put it in a letter to Nikolai Berdiaev of June 7, 1933:

“Parallel spiritual lines, which do not meet in Euclidean space, will meet beyond Euclidean space, where ‘in the Father’s house are many dwellings.’”

Meanwhile, we know from Barth’s correspondence that the only lecture he found “fairly interesting and in its way plausible” at the Second East-Western Theological Conference in Berne was Bulgakov’s on “The Nature of the Russian Church.”

Barth described him as a storybook Russian “pope who spoke with remarkable passion and not without speculative momentum,” and Barth “received further peculiar insights about the divine Sophia and other Russian theologumena.”

In The Bride of the Lamb, Bulgakov asks surprising questions.

“How was the first Pentecost of the Holy Spirit possible? How did the world withstand the descent of the Holy Spirit? Why did the world not burst into flame from the fiery tongues of the Holy Spirit? Why did the universal fire not start then, the fire that is to come at the end of the world?’

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The Church: A Guide to the People of God

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Here is a conversation with Brad East on his new book The Church: A Guide to the People of God.

Brad is associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. He is the author of The Doctrine of Scripture and The Church's Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context.

Show Notes

Summary

Brad East discusses his book 'The Church: A Guide for the People of God' and the importance of understanding the church as the body of Christ. He explains that the book is part of a series of catechetical books and discusses the structure and chapters of his book. East emphasizes the role of baptism in joining the elect people of God and the importance of the Old Testament in understanding the church. He also addresses the contemporary ethos of individualism and the challenges and failures of the church. East explores the concept of holiness and the freedom of God's people, highlighting the bi-directional nature of freedom. The conversation explores the imagery of the church as the bride of Christ and the importance of understanding the church as more than just a building or institution. It discusses the role of the church in God's plan and the significance of the communion of saints. The conversation also touches on the aesthetic beauty of the church and the lives of the saints as a means of attracting people to the faith. The book, 'The Church: A Guide to the People of God,' is described as a love letter to the church and emphasizes the need for a robust ecclesiology.

Takeaways

Understanding the church as the body of Christ is essential for Christians

Baptism is the means by which individuals are added to the elect people of God

The Old Testament is crucial for understanding the church and its role in God's plan

Contemporary individualism and the failures of the church can lead to a lack of appreciation for the church

Holiness is a result of God's action and grace, and Christians should not expect perfection in this life

The freedom of God's people is both freedom from oppression and freedom for covenant, righteousness, worship, and God The church is more than just a building or institution; it is the bride of Christ.

Understanding the church as the bride of Christ helps us grasp the divine intent behind its existence.

The communion of saints includes not only the present members of the church, but also the faithful departed and the angels.

The aesthetic beauty of the church and the lives of the saints can attract people to the faith and help them see the reality of God's beloved people.

Having a robust ecclesiology is essential for understanding the role and purpose of the church.

Sound Bites

"The book is a tracking of the story of God's people, i.e. Israel. And we don't get to Christ until chapters eight and nine, when I ask, like, so why does Christ come?"

"We are gathered around body and blood of Christ, but what makes us one with him is baptism."

"For many Gentile Christians, the Old Testament is a quote unquote problem. And its presence in the canon is a scandal and a difficulty."

"The church as the bride of Christ is a neglected image."

"God created the world in order to provide a spouse for his son Jesus Christ."

"The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ, who God is and what he has done in drawing near to us."

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The Grace of the Gospel

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In June, I delivered a lecture for the Gospel Freedom series at the Lutheran Church of the Master in Corona Del Mar in California.

Here’s the video of the presentation. The text is pinned to the main page.

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Jesus is the Blaze that Did Not Burn Up the Bush Before Moses in the Desert

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The lectionary epistle for this coming Sunday is James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17.

Along the way and over the years, there have been certain game-changing moments that have forever altered how I've understood and performed my ministry. For example, there was the time when I decided to preach off the cuff, without notes. Just shoot from the hip. And I got animated and agitated and argumentative as I'm want to do. And what shot out of my hip and into my congregation's ear balls was a certain four-letter word.

Let's just say the word was not Yahweh. Nor was it, as the bishop made clear to me, holy. In order to tame my tongue, I've preached from a manuscript ever since. Along the way, there have been moments.

For example:

There was the holy Thursday at my first parish in Princeton when kindly old ladies with good intentions but palsied hands insisted on filling those ridiculous little personal -sized communion cups themselves. And when they insisted on carrying those stacks of tiny cups in their kindly but shaky hands from the basement sacristy to the upstairs altar the night before.

Because I'm a nice guy, I said, sure thing, ladies. I didn't realize that the grape juice would spill, sealing the heavy brass lid to the heavy brass trays of cups. Neither did I realize that when I presided at the table the next evening and solemnly attempted to lift the lid from the blood of our savior for a chilling second or six seconds, I would lift the lid along with all five of the brass trays locked by the sugary seal of the spilt grape juice. They all came up together, lid and brass trays, in one terrifying motion. And then, just like that, the seal broke. The trays fell. The off -brand Welch's grape juice poured out like that elevator in The Shining. And though Good Friday was still another 24 hours away, the table looked like I had just desanguinated Jesus Christ on that altar.

Let's just say that was another time for a certain four-letter word.

And I've double checked the Lord's Supper before the worship service every time, and I am strict about who gets to serve on my altar, Gale Dallas.

Along the way, have been moments.

For example:

There was the Lent, when I thought it would be a good idea as a fundraiser for the church's mission project, a sanitation system in Latin America. I thought it would be a good idea to shoot a series of videos of me wearing my clergy collar, sitting on a toilet, talking about the importance of sanitation in rural Guatemalan villages. We've got to make sanitation sexy, I told our mission committee.

Let's just say I went from safe anonymity to the bishop's shit list so fast you'd swear I had a flux capacitor strapped to my back.

And I've kissed the bishops you know what ever since.

Along the way, there have been moments that have hijacked me and how I understand my ministry. For example, there was the Atlantic article I read a while back. It was the article's headline that grabbed me, “Listening to Young Atheists, Lessons for a Stronger Christianity.” In it, the author Larry Taughton described how his nonprofit organization, the Fixed Point Foundation, conducted a national survey of college students. They canvassed students from campus groups like Secular Student Alliance and the Free Thought Society, atheist equivalents to Campus Crusade for Christ. To the foundation's surprise, thousands upon thousands of students from all over the country volunteered to share their journey into unbelief. Almost all of them, the author noticed, almost all of them were former Christians. Not former Muslims, not former Mormons, former Christians. Let's just say the findings from the survey surprised the Fixed Point Foundation. According to Larry Totten, the Foundation's director, the overwhelming majority of those young people who now identify as former Christians, they attribute their lost faith to the fact that the teaching of their churches was soft.

The overwhelming majority of those young people who now identify as former Christians attribute their lost faith to the fact that the teaching of their churches was soft.

Vague. These students heard plenty of messages encouraging social justice, community involvement, and being good. But they seldom saw the necessary relationship between that message and Jesus Christ or the Bible. They didn't see why the church was necessary for those messages which they heard echoed everywhere else in the culture.

This is an incisive critique.

These young atheists, former Christians, seem to have intuitively understood what the church often doesn't understand about itself. Namely, that the church does not exist simply to address social ills, but to proclaim a message, Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection. Because that was missing in their churches, they sought little incentive to stay.

Church does not exist to address social ills but to proclaim a message, Jesus Christ's death and resurrection. We would hear this response, Taughton writes. We would hear this response again and again. That's in the Atlantic, which is not a Christian or even a religious magazine. Well, let's just say this article convicted me. And ever since, I've been lot more cognizant of how I speak up here.

And when it comes to the letter of James, everyone always wants to rush to the end of chapter 2, where James writes to the church in Jerusalem that faith without works is dead. And clearly, can see from what Claire read today, you can see at the top of chapter 2 that the church in Jerusalem needed to be convinced that faith without good deep doing is dead. And they were messed up. The church needed to be convinced.

Do we? Do we? According to the survey in the Atlantic, not only does the church in America not need to be convinced about the goodness of good deed-doing, no one in America needs to be convinced. Social justice, community involvement, doing good, it's in the ether. Even secular schools require community service hours, right?

Not only do we not need convincing about good works, survey says, our always rushing to the end of James chapter two has undone God's work of faith in young people. Our words have consequences, James tells us in chapter three. All our words about good works, the survey says, have had consequences for faith.

All our words about good works, the survey says, have had consequences for faith.

The survey says that by stressing the effects of the gospel, good works, rather than the gospel itself, we've starved people's faith on the vine.

The survey says we don't need to remind anyone that faith without works is dead. The survey says we need to remind Christians that Christ is not dead. Jesus Christ, crucified for your sins, is not dead. He has been raised for your justification, for you to be in the right with God. There is therefore now no condemnation. That is the faith. That is the faith whose fruit is good works. We follow the logic. If the former dies, the latter disappears.

If He is the vine and we are the branches and good works are the fruit, then works without faith? They're like apples on the ground. They're not gonna last long. And so I don't wanna rush to the end of chapter two today. I wanna point you to the very top of chapter two. And I don't wanna exhort you to do good works. You don't need me to tell you that. I said I wanna make an argument to strengthen you in the faith.

I want to make an argument to strengthen you in the faith.

In the first verse of chapter two, James refers to his half-brother Jesus as our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.

That's what Claire read to you. That's the translation you heard. Except in the Greek, it's not adjectival.

In the Greek, what James actually writes is, “our Lord Jesus Christ, the glory.”

In Hebrew, it's called Shekinah.

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On Not Giving Politics the Last Word

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My friend Will Willimon has a new essay in the Journal for Preachers.

Since Will dropped my name in the footnotes, I thought I’d share a preview of the piece here as well as a link to the full article below.

Back when America was preparing to anoint Joe Biden in the election that loser Donald Trump denied, a worshipper emerged from Duke University Chapel, smirking, “You were the fourth guest preacher in a row to condemn Trump and his deplorables. Wow. The guts it must take to stand in the pulpit of an unfailingly, uniformly liberal university and virtue signal your support for an aging, liberal Democrat. How I admire you courageous preachers!” Shut up, I replied, in love. About the same time, I received a pitch for a new book by Eric Metaxas: “Can it really be God’s will that His children be silent at a time like this? Decrying the cowardice that masquerades as godly meekness, Eric Metaxas summons the Church to battle. Silence is not an option … God calls us to defend the unborn, to confront the lies of cultural Marxism, and to battle the globalist tyranny that crushes human freedom. Confident that this is His fight, the Church must overcome fear and enter the fray …” This is no time for counterfeit meekness! Outshout the opposition! A turbulent, politically vociferous time such as this calls for a dose of Karl Barth’s peculiarly political homiletics. Barth preached during two political convulsions otherwise known as World Wars I and II. Back during Barth’s first days as a small town pastor, he picked up the newspaper and read a statement signed by his most revered professors, all stepping into line behind the Kaiser. Young Barth was aghast. In an instant Barth saw that the theology he had been taught at the university— all that psychological pap about the “inner Jesus” who puts us in touch with our feelings and connects with our existential anxieties (why am I thinking about many of the mainline sermons I hear and some that I preach?)—was bogus. Then and there Barth began working on what was to be his bombshell of a book, The Epistle to the Romans. Rather than read the newspapers, let’s hear some real news delivered by Paul. What God may be up to in the hic et nun is so much more interesting than our anxieties about the Kaiser’s future.

Though Barth openly said that the war was both a disaster for German culture and the just wages for nationalistic sin, in the pulpit he rarely mentioned the war. In a turbulent time we must not allow world events to determine the content of the church’s proclamation. World history is being determined, not by European cataclysm but by Christ. Barth repeatedly preaches that we are privileged to be living in “a unique time of God” not because of the war, but because God refuses to leave us to our own devices, especially in turbulent times.1 God has thrust us into an exceptionally apocalyptic age of unveiling in which the folly of our Promethian myths are self-evident and our dependency upon God is undeniable. In a world of lies and disinformation, God has given us not only the way and the life but also the truth—Jesus Christ, our judgment, our deliverance. If God is not the one who meets us in Jesus Christ, if Jesus Christ is not Lord, there’s no hope. Rather than talk about a return to normal, or how the economy might dig out of this disaster, Barth coached his congregation to ask, in effect, “What’s a gracious God up to in this unique time and how can we be part of what God is doing?” Just three decades later, now as a professor in Bonn, Barth watched the German church step into line behind National Socialism. Sure, we may not approve of everything the Nazis say and do, but the oppressed German people have spoken. Church is where we come to lick our wounds and overcome the trauma inflicted upon us by the unjust armistice terms of the Allies. We have a sacred responsibility to step up and do our bit to help make Germany great again, MGGA. Germany was a tense, conflicted, hyper-politicized place in 1932. The July 31 elections were a triumph for Hitler who won an unprecedented 38% of the vote and saw the victory as a confirmation of the inevitability of the power grab that he had been projecting since 1930. Yet the November 6 election results were a political setback for Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Nazi share of the vote dropped to 33.1% as the Communists and antifascist parties surged. (Hitler himself spoke of suicide during the last weeks of 1932.) Amid this seesaw uproar, Barth urged preachers not to be jerked around by events of the moment but rather to be tethered to a peculiar “politics”—Jesus Christ and his church. Barth asserted that we preachers know less about the significance of current events or the future course of history than we know and can say about the relentlessly revealing God who meets us in Jesus Christ. Anybody can see why Hitler is a threat to everything that Christians hold dear, said Barth. More difficult to see how our idolatry, our failure to worship, our confusion of German culture with Christianity, our timid, liberal biblical interpretation, our docile church, flaccid preaching, and self-pity made the collective delusions of National Socialism possible. Christ is God’s answer to what’s wrong with the world. The church is called to be a showcase of what God can do when God commandeers a group of sinners to tell the truth that the world can never tell itself. This truth arises not from within us but graciously comes to us. Truth is a person with a name, it’s an external address, an invitation to come forward and be part of God’s grand, but not always apparent, inevitable retake of history—Jesus Christ. Barth’s Peculiarly Political Homiletic In 1935, the University of Bonn faculty and students fell eagerly into the hands of the Nazis. Barth was Swiss and had signed an oath to refrain from political organizing as a condition of employment in Germany, still Barth felt compelled to make a political statement. What’s the most important political act for a theologian in the present moment? Offer preaching classes, “Exercises in Sermon Preparation.” Without asking the permission of Bonn’s aging, Nazi-sympathizer homiletics professor, Barth began his preaching lectures (later published as Homiletics.) Irrelevance in preaching can be defeated only by a fresh, strict, and urgent attentiveness to the biblical text—the remedy for the bourgeois blather, urbane paganism, and sentimental nationalism that infects too many sermons is Scripture. The text liberates us from modern theology’s preoccupation—analysis of our human experience of God followed by prescriptions for better human behavior—so that we can do the main business of the church, daring to listen to and to talk about the jealous God who is, rather than prattle about the culture’s more accommodating godlets. To the uniformed Nazis who stood at the back of the lecture hall taking notes, Barth quipped jovially, “I didn’t know that Herr Hitler had an interest in preaching.” That spring, a number of congregants walked out of Barth’s sermon in the university chapel in which he fiercely asserted the church’s complete freedom to preach what Christ tells the church to preach and the church’s utter dependence upon Israel and God’s promises to God’s elected people, the Jews. Barth sent Hitler a copy of the sermon.

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This Dove has Claws

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Romans 8.1-17

Earlier this summer, I counseled a young adult in the congregation.

Dane is twenty-two. He has autism. He told his mother he wanted to meet with me because he did not know what to do with his grief. His sister, only thirty years old, had suffered a stroke. Soon thereafter she died.

Thinking about how I might counsel a parishioner who is cognitively impaired, I realized the extent to which the church has psychologized pastoral care. Seeing no other choice, I determined not to be confused with a therapist. I decided to be a preacher. I sat at a ninety-degree angle from him to avoid the eye contact that discomforts him. And after listening to a few spare details about the Jordan he loved, I told Dane— I proclaimed to him.

“Jordan is dead, but Jordan is not gone,” I said to him.

“She’s not?” genuine astonishment creeping into his voice, “Where…?” and his voice trailed off.

“Her life is hidden with Christ in God,” I said.

“So she is gone.”

“No,” I said, “She’s in God and God is closer to you than you are to yourself— than I am to you right now. That means Jordan is nearer to you right now than I am close to you.”

He started to smile.

“And if your sister is hidden in God, then whenever you’re feeling sad— or just whenever you feel like it— you can talk to her while you talk to God.”

“I can talk to God?” the absurdity of the notion hit up against his literal mind.

“Sure you can! We call it prayer. And every time you do it, you can do it, knowing that Jordan’s listening too because she’s right there with him.”

“But how?” he asked me like I had just told him to free climb the Washington Monument.

“Start by calling out to him— just like Jesus prays, address him as “Father.””

“And he’ll hear me?” he asked, the incredulity rising in his throat.

I nodded.

“He’ll hear you as surely as he listens to his Son.”

“Can you,” he wasn’t sure if it was an appropriate request, “Can you teach me?”

“Nothing would make me happier,” I said.

And we prayed— and he prayed, talking to the Father and Jordan both— for twenty minutes. When we were done, he asked if I would teach him again in case he forgot how.

I started to stand and show him the way out of my office, but he remained fixed on the sofa, his astonishment turning to anxiety as he puzzled again over his question, “But how?”

I started to repeat myself but he shut his eyes against the tears and shook his head.

“But how do you know— how do you know she’s in God? How do you know she’s with Christ?”

“There is therefore now no condemnation…” but not for everyone. The absence of condemnation does not include all. Note the subordinate clause: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

Just so, Dane’s own question lingers at the pivot point in Paul’s epistle.

How do you know?

How do you know if it applies to you?

How do you know if you are in Christ Jesus?

Thus far in the Letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul has twice announced the turning of the aeons that has occurred as a result of Christ Jesus rescuing humanity from the clutches of Sin and Death. Now Paul shifts to the present tense in order to describe what God’s liberation looks like, first in the case of his auditors and second in a creation-wide, cosmic context. Whereas the Lord’s antagonist Sin has dominated the drama in the letter’s first seven chapters, with this shift in chapter eight God’s Enemy exits the stage. Paul scarcely mentions Sin in the remainder of his correspondence to the Romans. In Sin’s place, Paul now introduces a character only seldom mentioned heretofore, the Holy Spirit.

The consequence of God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ is not simply exoneration but new creation, not merely “no condemnation” but “life in the Spirit.”

But again—

Pardon and the Spirit’s power are not the possessions of all creatures.

They redound only to those creatures who are new creations.

They are “for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

They are for those who have the Spirit.

How do you know?

Chapter eight not only marks a shift in tense and topic, it is also the Bible’s most sweeping apprehension of the Holy Spirit, gathering up all of the New Testament’s elements into a single argument about the new eschatological change wrought by Jesus Christ.

Previously, Paul wrote to the Romans about God’s love “poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Now, Paul depicts what it looks like when those who are in Christ Jesus receive the Holy Spirit.

Verse 6: The Spirit’s presence in those who are in Christ Jesus means life and peace.

Verse 7: The Spirit’s presence in those who are in Christ Jesus means that they please God (while those who are not cannot).

Verse 11: The Spirit’s presence in those who are in Christ Jesus means that just as the Spirit raised Jesus from the dead so too will the Spirit raise them from the dead.

Verse 14: The Spirit’s presence in those who are in Christ Jesus means they have a new name (“children of God”), and thus a unique status (brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus).

Verse 15: Those who are in Christ Jesus the Spirit adopts into the triune family such that we may address the Father of Jesus as our Father and enjoy as our own the inheritance the Father has destined for the Son.

Behind Paul’s exhaustive yet astonishing description of the radically altered situation of those who are in Christ Jesus lies an even more bewildering claim.

Verse 9: Those who are in Christ Jesus have the Holy Spirit of Jesus.

Indeed the language Paul uses for those who have the Spirit mirrors the language of possession (oikeo) that he used in chapter seven when recounting Sin’s occupation of the law. The Holy Spirit inhabits those who are in Christ Jesus. As Karl Barth observes in his commentary on the passage, to refer to those in Christ Jesus is to simultaneously refer to those in whom Jesus Christ dwells. This is so because the only gift the Spirit gives is himself. According to St. Augustine, since scripture always only speaks of the Holy Spirit as being given by the Father or the Son, “The Holy Spirt is God given by God.” Those who are in Christ Jesus, in other words, have God in them. Augustine  merely echoed the assertion of the church fathers, such as Basil the Great: “The illumination the Holy Spirit bestows is himself.” Admitting that Paul’s epistle produces an “audacious doctrine,” Augustine writes, “The Holy Spirit’s gift is nothing other than the Holy Spirit…the love which is of God and which is God is specifically the Holy Spirit; by him God’s love is diffused in our hearts, and by this love the whole Trinity indwells us.”

But again—

By us Augustine does not mean all.

By us Augustine refers to those who are in Christ Jesus.

By us he means those who have the Spirit.

How do you know?

“There is therefore now no condemnation…”

As good as Paul’s gospel pivot sounds, the predominant theme of his argument is nonetheless that “the penultimate outcome of God’s act in Christ is the existence of two kinds of people, those still in the situation before the great change and those in the new situation, those who live “according to flesh” and those who live “according to the Spirit.””

In other words—

There is therefore now— still— condemnation for some.

How do you know?

Sometime in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s, fellow authors took the fiction writer Flannery O’Connor to a dinner party in New York City. At some point in the meal, the table talk turned to the sacraments— Eucharist and Baptism. An avowed Christian, O’Connor later reported an incident from the dinner to her friend and correspondent Elizabeth Hester in a letter dated December 16, 1955.

O’Connor writes:

“I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. . . . She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.

I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if [the sacraments are symbols, to hell with [them]."”

Reflecting on her retort, O’Connor wrote to her friend, “That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about [the sacraments], outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

That is, all the rest of life is expendable if the water and loaf and the cup are not the center of existence.

“For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

Martin Luther writes that the cry “Abba! Father!” is the only sound God hears. “That cry rings out,” Luther says, “it pierces the clouds, fills heaven and earth, rings out so loudly that the angels when they hear it think they have never heard ought at all before, in fact that God Himself hears nought else in the whole world but this sound, “Abba! Father!”” But how do you know if you are one of the children to whom the Lord listens?

Notice— this is crucial.

When Paul addresses the Christians at Rome, he assumes that they already are in Christ and have the Holy Spirit of Jesus. This is an odd supposition. After all, the apostle neither planted the church nor met any of its members. They are all of them strangers to him. He knows only a handful of their names. He does not know anything about the character of any of them. He has not reviewed their resumes. Paul could not tell you who has taught Sunday School for twenty years or who manages the volunteers at the homeless shelter, who forgave her husband or who raises their hands high during worship. Paul could not distinguish between the church member who believes in her bones that Jesus lives with death behind him and the church member who shows up out of habit or as a hedge against loneliness.  On what basis then can Paul presume that they are all already in Christ and have his Holy Spirit? It’s not as though it applies to everyone.

How does he know?

How can he so address them?

In the Book of Acts, well before he sails for Rome, Paul travels through the inland country of Asia Minor and arrives in Ephesus where he stumbles upon some self-identified disciples.

The first question in Paul’s interrogation of them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit?”

The would-be disciples reply, “No, we have not heard there is a Holy Spirit. Who is that?”

The second question in Paul’s interrogation, “Into what then were you baptized?”

And they answer that they were baptized into John the Baptist’s baptism of repentance. Paul responds by shaking his head, searching for some water, and baptizing them in the name of Jesus, but their baptism is not complete until Paul lays his hands on them and invokes the Holy Spirit to inhabit them.

That’s Acts 19.6.

Luke reports in verse seven that Paul baptized “about twelve of them in all.”

  A dozen who now were in Christ Jesus.

A dozen who now had his Holy Spirit just as permanently as the dove that alighted upon Jesus in the Jordan River.

Remember— the epistle’s chapter divisions are misleading. Paul wrote one letter which he expected to be heard aloud in a single sitting. Paul did not number his sentences anymore than you number the lines in your emails. The chapter divisions in your New Testament were added by a lecturer at the University of Paris at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Paul did not write a “chapter seven” and a "chapter eight.” The chapters are not discrete units but component parts of a single argument. And this part of the argument does not begin in “Romans 8.1” but all the way back at the beginning of “chapter six.”

As my teacher Beverly Gaventa writes in her commentary, the locative sense of those who are in Christ Jesus originates in Romans 6.3:

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his [through baptism], we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him [through baptism] so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died [through baptism] is freed from sin.”

Thus, the liberation described in Romans 8 is the consequence of the baptism into Christ and his death described in Romans 6. That baptism is what accounts for the Roman Christians being in Christ and having the Spirit, and this explains why Paul says nothing at all in Romans 8 about faith as a condition.

You don’t believe your way into Christ Jesus.

You don’t get the Spirit because you got faith.

You are in him and have him because God baptized you.

Baptism makes a creature a child.

As Jesus himself says at the end of Mark’s Gospel, “Baptism saves.”

I was halfway between sitting and standing over my office chair.

His eyes still shut, Dane shook his head and repeated his question, “But how do you know? How do you know she’s with God? How do you know she’s in Christ?”

I sat down and crossed my leg, hoping the nonchalant body language would convey my certainty.

“Was Jordan baptized?” I asked him.

His head shaking turned to nodding.

“Well, there you go,” I said to him, “That’s how I know. At her baptism—  whenever it was, wherever it was, however tiny or unbelieving she was— the Holy Spirit promised, “You are mine; I’ll never let you go.”” And trust me, that dove has claws.”

After Jesus hijacked me as a soon-to-graduate high school student, I went to the pastor of the church where I worshipped— Woodlake United Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia— and I told him that I wanted to respond to the faith Jesus had gifted me.

“I want to be baptized,” I told him.

He shifted in his leather arm chair, “Have you already been baptized?”

I nodded and told him how during the first week of Advent in 1977, two weeks after the theatrical release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a pastor from Immanuel Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod drove his way cautiously through an early winter blizzard to Lima Memorial Hospital in northwest Ohio.

Like Nicodemus, the pastor came in the dead of night.

In secret.

A small determined grandmother met the pastor at the elevator outside the maternity ward. Spying the clerical collar beneath his winter coat, she introduced herself and then led him back to the new mother’s room.

With a small, silver pitcher and a pink, plastic bedpan— he’d brought the one, a harried nurse had provided the other— he had prayed over the water before pouring it over the thin hair of my pink head.

“But I don’t remember it,” I argued when the pastor told me the church does not re-baptize.

“You think you need to remember it for God to have done it to you?” he parried, “Whether you remember it or not, God baptized you. You’ve been in Christ this whole time even if you only met him this year. So really all I can say to you is, “Welcome home.””

Sunday after next, Stephen and Lindy will bring their son, Lyle, to the font for God’s visible word of baptism, a promise God says that we can all see. And during the sacrament we will pray an invocation first uttered by the church father Hippolytus of Rome almost two thousand years ago:

“Almighty and everliving God, who have chosen to give new life to this your servant and to forgive all his sin, send your Holy Spirit— the Spirit of Jesus— upon him: The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and strength. The Spirit of knowledge and true godliness and of your holy fear. Mark him, O Lord, to be yours forever, in the power of your cross and resurrection.”

Therefore, there will be no condemnation for Lyle.

Not only will he have a permanent place in Christ Jesus, he will have the Holy Spirit. Or rather, the Holy Spirit will have him— and that dove has claws.

The promise is not too good to be true.

But it is too good to believe easily or reliably.

Therefore, come to the table.

God speaks another visible word.

With creatures of bread and wine, the Spirit of Jesus repeats what he said at your baptism, “You are mine; I’ll never let you go.”

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“Our expressed opinion is an essential pole of the process of God’s decision-making”

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A friend, a priest whom I hope will become a closer friend, recently learned he has stage four pancreatic cancer. It’s the sort of frightening diagnosis that prompts a Christian to ponder exactly what we claim when we text a person, “You’re in my prayers.”

A couple of year ago, I was in my truck, driving to the office, when the theologian Stanley Hauerwas called me. He’d been ill and had undergone surgery in England, and I’d left him a message inquiring about his health and spirit. That morning on the way to church, he called me back and before I could even say hello, his gravely Texas accent barked out, “Jason I can’t piss, and it’s just so damn painful.”

As I pulled into the church’s parking lot, he described all the complications he’d suffered following what should have been a routine procedure.

I listened.

But I knew that Stanley is not the sort of Christian to be satisfied with a preacher who offers nothing but active listening.

So I said to him, “I’ll pray for you, Stanley.”

“You damn well better do it now,” he grumbled, “I’m miserable, in agony.”

I cleared my throat and was about to begin praying when Stanley interrupted me.

“And Jason?”

“Yes, Stanley?”

“If you’re not going to pray for God to heal me, then, hell, just hang up the phone right now already.”

I laughed and I prayed to God for just that and when I was done he said, “Thank you. I’m grateful for your prayers.”

In Genesis 28, Jacob prays without tact, humility, or self-awareness. Jacob makes unseemly requests of God. And God does just as Jacob asks: Jacob is clothed and fed and sheltered and reconciled.

Nothing that happens in the world happens apart from the free willing of God.Yet…God is persuadable.

Several years ago now, I was at the infusion center to receive the Neulasta injection that bookended my every round of chemo. An old woman sat directly across from me, a red-orange tube running from a bag to her chest. She wore a blue scarf with peacocks on it around her small, bony head. Her face looked so sunken and her skin so stretched and translucent that guessing her age felt impossible. She greeted me—exhausted, her eyes only half open—with a distinct prairie accent when I sat down and cracked open my book.

I didn’t get past the first page.

She started to cry—whimper really—from the sores her chemo-poison had burnt into her mouth and tongue and throat. Beseeching the nurse, she pleaded, “make the pain go away.” She kept on like that, inconsolable, with no concern for what I or anyone else might think about her. In a different-size person you’d call it a tantrum.

Seeing her there, spent and defeated, I felt compelled to do the only work I could for her. I prayed. Quietly, under my breath, just above a whisper, my lips moving to the petitions. And when I finished, I made the sign of the cross over her.

“You religious?” the man in the next infusion chair asked me.

“Sort of, I guess.”

He went to wave me off, dismissively, but then remembered his arm was taped and tethered to tubes and the tubes to an IV pole. He’d been on the phone on work calls almost the whole time I’d been there. A gray tie that matched his hair hung loose from his unbuttoned collar.

“You really think that stuff works— prayer?”

He said it in a tone that suggested no believer anywhere at anytime had ever wrestled with such a question.

“Well,” I replied, “If prayer doesn’t work, then it’s entirely a waste of time.”

If prayer doesn’t work, then it’s entirely a waste of time.

He nodded seeming to appreciate that I had not evaded the stakes at the heart of his question.

“I’ve got a partner,” he said, “in my firm. He prays. He says he does it because it changes him. Like, he prays for patience and the practice of praying makes him more patient. Like meditation I suppose.”

I nodded and smiled wryly.

“You’d never know it from the way a lot of Christians talk about prayer,” I said to him, “But the content of prayer is not irrelevant to its benefit.”

The content of prayer is not irrelevant to its benefit.

He didn’t follow me so I said, “You’d be surprised how many people pray who do not believe in prayer.”

“A lot of them are ordained,” I added.

He laughed, and then he went back to his work.

A couple of minutes later he sat his phone down on his lap and raised his hands in a “What gives?” gesture.

“But how?” he said, “I mean, come on! You’re telling me that you think we can change God’s mind about God’s will?”

I smiled a wide and crazy smile.

“It’s totally crazy, isn’t it?” I said, “It’s tremendously preposterous— to say nothing of presumptuous— but that’s the claim. That’s the claim Jews and Christians make (at least the ones who haven’t lost their theological nerve). If the claim is wrong, then the gospel is a lie and prayer is nothing but a bunch of hot air.”

And then I pointed at the exhausted, whimpering woman across from me.

“The claim is not only that we can tell the Father what he ought to do about her; the claim is the Father will listen and may heed us.”

The old rabbis considered Jacob the father of faith.

How?

Jacob is the father of faith, the old rabbis attested, because Jacob made a verbal reply to the God who addressed him.

He prayed.

He prayed a petitionary prayer.

He prayed, “Father, give me this, that, and the other, and you can be my God.”

The law commands faith.

The creeds describe faith.

Prayer is the act of faith.

Prayer is the act of faith, and, put the other way around, a sure sign of a lack of faith is a reluctance to pray boldly.

Just imagine an anthropologist from outer space, observing for the first time, Jews and Christians engaged in prayer.

What would she think?

Surely, she would conclude that we were engaged in dialogue with one on whom we are utterly dependent but one we could nevertheless influence.

It’s quite obvious.

Yet if asked a question like, “Do you really believe your prayer can change God’s mind?” many believers balk at the unambiguous implications of our practice.Our evasions are not dictated to us by scripture.

The God of the Bible hears the cries of his people as slaves in Egypt and is moved to deliver them. The God of Israel is talked off the ledge by Abraham, who convinces the Lord not to destroy every citizen of Sodom. The God of Abraham is persuaded by Jacob to go beyond the promise and also provide for Jacob’s room and board and meal plan.

The God of the Bible is persuadable.

Prayer is elementary but it’s offensive.

Think about it—

When we bring God our petitions, we presume to advise the Maker of All that Is about how best to order the universe. That’s what we’re doing; that’s what we presume. We don’t pray simply because such prayers form us. We don’t pray to accrue any merit. We’re not practicing mindfulness.

No, we pray to tell the Creator how to govern his creation.

We presume that the cosmic course of history can be brought to respond to our concerns.

Such presumptions are presumptuous.

Now to get overly philosophical or polemical but all of you have been shaped deeply by the Enlightenment’s conviction that we inhabit a mechanical universe whose processes (called nature and history) are immune to petition.

The great temptation, one which traditions like Methodism have largely fallen prey, is to reconstruct a God appropriate to this supposedly indifferent, mechanical universe.

Thus:

A God too impersonal and static, impassible and distant, to be pleased by our praise or persuaded by our petitions.

But if the gospel is true, if scripture is reliable, if faith is possible, then all of this is backwards.

This is the day the Lord is making.

If bold, presumptuous petitions are implausible in our world, then it is the world we misunderstand not God. Which means, we’re worshipping an idol and we ought to repent and turn to the true God.

The Persuadable God.

In his recent book, Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers, Paul Zahl writes,

“I got a sincere but somewhat pathetic prayer request from an old friend last year, asking me to pray for her friend’s stage- four breast cancer. My friend asked me to pray for good medical care for the person, for patience and endurance for the person’s husband, for a sound mind among her family that would know when it was time to “pull the plug,” and for a loving exchange of ideas concerning the inevitable funeral. I wrote back, asking if the possibility of praying for remission in this case were on the table. She wrote back saying that it had not come up.

Then later, during the coronavirus pandemic, I received a series of prayers from the chaplains of the Episcopal prep school I attended. Not one of the prayers included a single note of supplication for the virus itself to be restrained or for healing to be given to any who had contracted it.

I used to be diffident about praying for the remission or healing of a physical illness, let alone of a mental incapacity or disturbance. I would pray for the sufferer’s acceptance and serenity much more often than for God’s intervention and victory.

I was wrong.”

Paul Zahl may have been wrong, but he is hardly alone.

When I first got cancer several years ago, I was astonished at the apparent unbelief in prayer by those who do it. Every person was sincere. It just goes to show how little sincerity has to do with discipleship.

“l’ll pray that God gives you strength,” people would tell me.

“I’m praying that God will give your doctors wisdom,” pastors told me.

“You’re in my thoughts,” far too many Christians told me.

Your thoughts? What in the hell good are your thoughts going to do? I’m dying. Why don’t you pray for God to make it not so?! Why don’t you attempt to persuade God to heal me?

Some did so pray.

And I am grateful for their prayers.

As Robert Jenson says of Christ inviting us to piggy-back onto his own prayers to the Father, “This is to be taken seriously.”

We can dare address God with our petitions because Jesus has invited us into his conversation with the Father.

God is so gracious.

He hasn’t just made a decision about you in Jesus Christ. On account of Jesus Christ, he’s willing to listen to you. He doesn’t just allow he invites our views to be heard and weighed in his care of the universe, exactly as a parent listens to and considers seriously the views of their children.

“Our expressed opinion,” says Robert Jenson, “is an essential pole of the process of God’s decision-making.”

Because of Jesus, because you’ve been incorporated in to him, because you’ve been invited in, because his Father is now your Father too, the life of the Trinity is now like a parliament in which you are a member.

The life of the Trinity is now like a parliament in which you are a member.

God wants you to speak up. Make a motion. Voice your opinion.

The claim implicit in Christian prayer is astonishing. Most will not believe it.

Quite simply:

To pray to stake a claim over the care of creation.To pray is to presume co-determination of the universe.To pray is to participate in Providence.

Any lesser claim evades the clear implications of scripture and makes prayer nothing but an empty practice of piety.

There is perhaps no stronger indictment of the Church in a secular age than the fact that this needs to be said clearly and without hesitation:

Prayer accomplishes things.

When we pray for someone, when we petition God on their behalf, we intend thereby to accomplish something for them.

Prayer is the work grace gives us to do. It is our work in the world on the world. It is our work in the world for the world’s future.

Prayer pulls us into the working out of God’s governance of the world. Prayer is our participation in Providence. In Jesus, the Father has given you a say in how his history will come out.

So, let us pray.

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