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Hell for some would be Hell for all.

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On Sunday for a sermon on Romans 5.12-21, I preached on the church’s doctrine labeled apokatastasis, popularly known as universal salvation.

You can find the sermon here.

As Al Kimel writes, “Apokatastasis is but the gospel of Christ's absolute and unconditional love sung in an eschatological key.” Usually whenever I let slip that God in fact is gracious all the way down, I steel myself for the anticipated pushback. Paul says the law is written on our hearts and nowhere is this more true than our desire for God to deal with us according to grace but to others according to justice. Sunday surprised me, however. The proclamation of the allness of Christ’s obedience audibly freed hearers of more burdens than I dared guess that they were carrying.

Therefore, I think it’s worth pressing further into the possibility of an apokatastasis made available by the Son’s rectifying faithfulness and into the inanity of an everlasting torment given that God is the one this Son called Abba. Indeed hell’s eternity bears little logic when one remembers that just as the Son is not the Son without the Father, we are not ourselves without those whom we love and have loved.

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He Has Hazarded Himself

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Here is the prayer by Karl Barth with which we concluded our most recent session:

“We come before you to spread out everything that, according to our understanding, is difficult, unresolved, solved, and in our eyes needs help. We ask you in your grace to consider each of us and have mercy on each of us, who can do nothing without you, now and forevermore. Have mercy on your church on earth in its confusion fusion and scattering, in its weaknesses and errors! Have mercy on your people Israel in their blindness to the salvation that indeed came first to them and that indeed first went out from them! Have mercy on the heathen old and new, near and far, and on the godless and the idolaters, on whom your name has not yet, or not yet properly, shined! Have mercy on the governments and the nations of the earth, on their perplexed search for peace and justice; on all the confusion in our human efforts in science, training, and education; and on all the difficulties in so many marriages and families! Have mercy on the innumerable hungry and thirsty, the many persecuted and homeless, the sick, both in body and in spirit, both here and elsewhere, where, the lonely, the prisoners, and all those who are punished by other people! Have mercy on all of us in the hour of our struggle gle and death! Lord, because we believe and know that you have conquered and that, with you, we also have conquered, we call on you to show us but the first steps on the embattled path to freedom. Amen.”

Summary

The conversation explores the concept of double predestination and the fallen nature of humanity in relation to God's election. It delves into the idea that God chooses to be in fellowship with fallen humanity and the implications of this choice. The discussion also touches on the role of agency and freedom in making loving choices. The conversation emphasizes that God's love is unwavering and that the cross is the ultimate expression of God's love and election. It concludes by highlighting the importance of faith and trust in God's absolute decree to be the God of Jesus Christ. The conversation explores the theological implications of the concept of predestination and the role of faith in personal relationships. It delves into the fear and anxiety that can arise from the idea of being unable to escape God's love and the challenge of trusting in God's sovereignty. The conversation emphasizes the importance of faith as an engagement with reality and a recognition of the personhood of God. It also highlights the need to focus on the concrete yes of God's love and the freedom that comes from entrusting ourselves to that love.

Takeaways

God chooses to be in fellowship with fallen humanity

The cross is the ultimate expression of God's love and election

Faith and trust are essential in understanding God's absolute decree

God's love is unwavering and overrides human choices The concept of predestination raises theological questions about the nature of God's love and our ability to trust in His sovereignty.

Faith is an engagement with reality and a recognition of the personhood of God.

Fear and anxiety can arise from the idea of being unable to escape God's love and the challenge of trusting in His sovereignty.

The concrete yes of God's love gives us freedom and the assurance that we are known and loved.

Sound Bites

"God has chosen this man and fellowship with this man in the election of Jesus Christ."

"The cross is the yes of God as the election to be for us."

"The cross is going to be the removal of all that guilt and shame."

"What is so terrifying about an announcement, a gospel that says you cannot in life or death get outside of the love of God."

"Faith is to the world of personal relationships what science is to the world of physical being."

"The yes of God's love being for all through Christ's obedience is asserted before Paul works all the rest of it out."

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The Gospel is the Opposite of the Hippocratic Oath

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Heads up!

We’re resuming our Adventures in Barth group this evening at 7:00 EST. You can join us here. We will be discussing pages 145-150 of the PDF:

Cd 221MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

One option for the Old Testament lectionary passage this Sunday is 1 Kings 19:4-8:

But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die, "It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors." Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, "Get up and eat." He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He ate and drank and lay down again. The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, "Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you." He got up and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.

For a brief moment in 1 Kings, it appears God’s wayward Israel is back on track. The word that struck like a fever into the heart of the earth has broken and the judgment that had parched the promised land for three years is over. The barren deity Baal has been disgraced and his false prophets have been dispatched. Ahab has departed from Mt. Carmel, with the Man of God running out ahead of him as a herald of Israel’s king and the Lord’s covenant with Israel renewed. Alas, the very same word of the Lord that had induced faith in Israel, “Yahweh indeed is God; Yahweh indeed is God,” arouses opposition from Israel’s queen.

Like Pharaoh before Moses, when she learns what Yahweh has done, Jezebel’s heart hardens. Realizing she’s on the wrong side of the true and living God’s work in the world, Jezebel neither repents nor relents. She resorts to wrath. Whether or not the Lord is responsible for the slaughter of the four hundred and fifty prophets false prophets, Jezebel clearly believes she has been addressed by Yahweh in the killing of her prophets.

The Lord’s word to her is the piece of news that propels her act.

And Jezebel vows to make Elijah one of the corpses floating in the wadi, a brook flowing red with blood. No sooner has success come to the Man of God than God’s enemies pick a fight with him.

Commenting on this passage and comparing it the similarly hostile reactions to the ministries of Jesus of Nazareth and the apostle Paul, the theologian Peter Leithart asks, “Why do the church’s enemies have to pick a fight just when things get rolling?”

“The answer,” Leithart insists, “is they don’t. The church does.”

The church’s enemies need not pick a fight.But the church must always pick a fight.

Peter Leithart writes:

“Jesus does not come to bring peace but a sword, to set brother against brother, mother against daughter. Following its master, the church likewise provokes the hostility, hatred, and resentment of the world at every turn. This is not the result of some flaw in the church’s ministry, but the opposite.

When the church is faithful, it announces judgment of this world (John 12:31), the universal corruption and disorder of humanity (Rom. 1:18–32), and the overthrow of the prince of this world (John 16.11).

We do not need Nietzsche to tell us that we are dominated by lies and violence, motivated by pride, envy, lust, wrath, and vengefulness. We do not need Foucault to teach us that the world languishes under the dominion of the dark powers, principalities, and wickedness in high places. We do not need Critical Theory to teach us that our systems and institutions are not immune from the contagion of original sin.

We proclaim Christ and him crucified. Inherent in the gospel is the condemnation of this world, and when we preach such a gospel, we cannot help but pick a fight.”

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All Means All

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Romans 5.12-21

Before he became a celebrated New Testament scholar, Ernst Käsemann was a Lutheran preacher in Nazi Germany. Knowing full well that undercover agents and Gestapo officers sat in his church’s pews, one Sunday in 1937 Käsemann nevertheless dared to preach the day’s scripture passage. He took it straight-up, Isaiah 26, “Lord, our God, other lords indeed rule over us besides you but we invoke only you and your name.” Only a few minutes into his sermon, Nazis pulled the preacher from the pulpit, dragged him down the sanctuary aisle, and threw him into a Gestapo detention facility.

Nevertheless!

Every evening during his imprisonment, Käsemann invited the governor of the prison to enjoy a cigar with him. And every Sunday afternoon, members of Käsemann’s flock— mostly coal miners— gathered outside his prison window to sing with a brass band. Pointing to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Käsemann later brushed aside any characterization of his preaching as courageous or his congregation’s witness as valiant. Käsemann had no other choice but to be hospitable to his captor. His congregation had no other recourse before them but to respond to their pastor’s predicament with winsomeness. They had no option but to be so “bold,” Käsemann insisted, given the fact that grace now reigns over all. “Grace reigns now not over some but over all and thus for all,” Käsemann explained.

And then the future biblical scholar supplied his skeptical audience with the chapter and verse, “Romans 5.21.”

“Grace reigns now not over some but over all and thus for all,”

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“Where sin abounded, grace abounded more exceedingly; so that, as Sin reigned in Death, even so might grace reign through Christ’s righteousness.”

Weak.

Sinners.

Godless.

Enemies.

The apostle has just deployed disturbing language to describe us, the objects of God’s justifying work. And Paul has done so in the first-person plural, placing both himself and the Roman Christians alike under the burden of such impeaching epithets as, “While we were yet his enemies, Christ died for the ungodly.” To insure his audience understands that they too are included in that we, to foreclose any possibility that readers will exempt themselves from scripture’s indictment, Paul subsequently reaches all the way back to the disobedience of the Old Adam to demonstrate how the twinned powers of Sin and Death catch us all into their rebellious rule.

In a sermon on this text, the New Testament scholar Richard Hays cleverly imagines Romans 5.12-21 as a student paper for a course at Duke Divinity School. Hays jokes:

"If the apostle Paul had turned this passage in to me as a short theological reflection paper, I would have told him, “Get thee to the writing tutor.””

He’s not wrong.

For starters, Paul begins his argument with a sentence fragment:

“Therefore, just as Sin came into the world through one man, and Death through Sin, and thus Death spread throughout the human race, with the result that all sinned—“

Paul sets out with an incomplete sentence before wandering off into several digressions on the law, Sin and Death, the original trespass that opened the door to them, and the grace-gift that is their ultimate and everlasting undoing. In spite of his many detours, the apostle nonetheless repeats himself several times; for example, five times he uses the construction “One man’s trespass led to…” Even the repetition, however, cannot hide the awkwardness of the logical transitions from one digression to the next.

They’re nearly non sequiturs.

Hays muses:

“If the apostle Paul had turned this passage in to me…I would have called up the Duke Writing Center and told them, “This guy Paul has some weighty ideas, but you really need to help him with this essay…It looks like he was trying out different formulations on his computer, and then just turned in his rough draft without going back to edit it. Finally, he could really use some illustrations to help us follow the point he’s trying to make. I hope you can straighten him out so that he can pass my course on Greek Exegesis of Romans.”

We need a story to understand the point Paul is desperate to communicate.

Some years ago, I co-officiated a burial at Arlington National Cemetery. My co-officiant was a megachurch pastor who was famous for his pithy radio spots, “Not a sermon, just a thought.”A fundamentalist member of the immediate family had insisted on the participation of a pastor “from a Bible-believing church.” When parts for the brief liturgy were doled out, this pastor told me, “I’ll just say a few words.”

The deceased man had died much too early and far too slowly of cancer. After I prayed and read from the apostle Peter about the promise of an imperishable inheritance, my co-officiant stepped to the head of the casket and, after acknowledging the deceased man’s bravery and accomplishments in Afghanistan, he informed us that the dearly departed had nonetheless “failed his most important mission.”

I looked up from the hole in the ground to see if I had misheard him.

“Dan’s lost forever to us,” the preacher lamented, “Dan’s lost forever to us and to God because he never accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and savior.”

I could feel my face immediately turn as red as every alternate stripe on the flag that lay draped over Dan’s casket.

Having pronounced the deceased’s demise, the pastor then invited all of us gathered by the grave to “treat this tragedy as God’s way of giving you an opportunity, an opportunity not to die in sin yourselves.”

I almost rebutted him then and there, but I bit my lip instead and set my mouth into a frown.

“Dan’s death is really God’s gift for you,” he announced with a frightening absence of awareness of the cruelty he’d just uttered.

And I wondered whether the horror that was suddenly stricken on the widow’s face was directed at this pastor or at the God of whom he spoke. The sight of the shudder that wrenched her body was like watching Dan die all over again.

Not content to leave us speculating about an abstraction like lostness, the megachurch pastor proceeded to induce our collective reflection and elicit our earnest repentance. He did so by iterating in grisly detail the eternal suffering that was now the deceased man’s just reaping. Apparently, colon cancer along with the grief of a young widow and three small children were not torments sufficient to satisfy this preacher’s righteous God.

Only later did it occur to me that nothing— literally no thing— this pastor had said to us about God and hell’s eternity had been scriptural. It had sounded religious to be sure, but none of it came from the Bible he’d waved in the air with authority. By contrast, the ancient liturgy I had celebrated from the Book of Worship was really nothing more than a pastiche of promises straight out of scripture, beginning with the very last of Christ’s words on the reign of his grace, “I died and behold I am alive forever more, and I hold the keys of hell and death.”

After the benediction had been spoken and the flag tightly folded, after the casket was lowered into the earth and the line of rifles shot into the air, the preacher lingered graveside to take me to task.

“Son,” he said with a patronizing air, “I don’t know what it is you were trying to accomplish. If I hadn’t been here, you would have left all their souls in jeopardy.”

“In jeopardy?!” I exploded like one of the guns that had just cracked in the air, “In jeopardy?! YOU’RE NOT THEIR SAVIOR!”

He smiled, bemused.

“I know that, son. I was only trying to present the gospel to them.”

“How was that the gospel?” I fired back, vaguely aware that I was shouting, “The gospel cannot be given at the end of a gun. You spent more time talking about Dan, whom you did not know, than you spent talking about Christ, whom you should know but gave very little evidence of any acquaintance.”

“I did talk about Christ,” he objected, “Christ is the one who makes it possible to avoid everlasting condemnation.”

“Possible?!” I yelled and, without realizing it, I stole Käsemann’s line, “Grace reigns now not over some but over all and thus for all,” If Jesus only makes salvation a possibility, if God’s gift does does not reign over all without exception, then grace is less powerful than Sin.”

“I think you might need to take another look at your scriptures, son.”

“No, I really don’t need to do so,” I hollered at him, “I’ve read them— have you? When Paul says “all” he means all.”

He stared at me.

I darted my eyes at our unintended audience.

“Not a sermon,” I said, “just a thought.”

Ernst Käsemann preached the sermon for which he was arrested under the charge of treachery mere days after over seven hundred dissident pastors had been sent to concentration camps. Käsemann’s choice of biblical text was itself provocative. The Nazi regime in 1937 had been pressuring the church to throw out not only the Old Testament but also the epistles of Paul. The Aryans objected to the former’s Jewishness while they despised how the latter contradicted their ideology of God’s favor being only for some.

The allness of the apostle’s gospel offended them.

To the Nazis, the offense of the gospel was not merely its Jewishness.

To the Nazis, the offense of the gospel was its all-inclusiveness.

One of the reasons a professor might dispatch Paul to the university Writing Center is that the apostle’s entire argument would still hold if he proceeded straightaway from verse twelve to verse twenty-one, omitting altogether verses thirteen to twenty. God’s power to redeem all exceeds even Sin’s power to lure all— twelve and twenty-one. Grace reigns over all; this is Paul’s entire point. All the verses in between are unnecessary unless what Paul is desperate to communicate is so startling and so seismic he feels no other choice but to keep turning the claim over in his hand like a glittering, uncut gem.

God’s power to redeem all exceeds even Sin’s power to lure all.Where sin is excessive, grace is super-excessive.

No wonder Paul’s paper is so poorly written!

The good news is literally too good to be true!

Notice what Paul does not toss into his cluttered reflection paper. There is here no language whatsoever of our trust, our faith, or our repentance. We are present in this passage only as the objects of two disparate, world-rending acts. It’s entirely a contrast between one world-encompassing event versus another cosmic work— the one man’s trespass versus the right-making obedience of Christ Jesus.

God’s grace-gift in Jesus Christ is all-encompassing.

This is why in verse seventeen and beyond the apostle never identifies the they in such a way as to eliminate any category of human beings. The they is we— all of us: “…as the trespass of one brought all people to condemnation, so the righteous act of one brought all people to justification, that is, to life.” Of course, through the centuries many readers have assumed that the all in these verses refers exclusively to all who believe. St. Augustine, for instance, argued implausibly that the word “all” in verse eighteen refers not to every human being throughout the whole of time, as Paul clearly believes, but solely to the limited number of those elected for salvation.

Yet as easily as we might assume that salvation applies only to those who believe, notice how such a limitation undermines Paul’s very argument. According to Paul here in Romans 5, Adam’s act makes the whole of humanity prey to the twinned powers of Sin and Death. If Paul then contrasts Adam’s act with that of Christ but restricts the efficacy of Christ’s act to believers only, his argument falls apart, for it implies that Adam’s trespass is more powerful than Christ’s obedience, since Adam influences all people and Christ only some.

As New Testament scholar Beverly Gaventa notes, when Paul uses the word “many” in this passage it necessarily means all.

Moreover, a salvation that extends only to some and not to all is not an account of redemption capable of eliciting the astonished question which immediately follows this passage at the top of chapter six, “Does this mean that we may continue in sin so that grace may abound?” In other words, “Are you saying salvation is so certain in fact, so cosmic in scope, so all-encompassing in reach that we can do whatever we want without fear of undoing what Christ has done?” For Paul, the good news is so good that it can only produce a dumbfounded response like, “Does this mean we can do whatever we want?”

Paul’s argument moves in a direction far more universal than we might dare imagine. Just as Adam’s trespass infects all people, Christ’s obedience implicates the whole of humanity. Even if only some now experience the gift of faith, all are nevertheless already ensnared in Christ’s redemption.

We need a story to understand the point Paul is desperate to communicate.

Dan’s widow showed up my office three weeks after we committed his body to the ground. She knocked shyly on my open door. I tried to hide my surprise and gestured for her to sit down in front of my desk. She thanked me and dabbed her nose with a tissue.

“I wanted to come by and say thank you,” she said.

“Thank me? For what?”

“For that argument you had at Dan’s burial.”

“Oh, right,” I said, blushing at the memory, “I’m sorry I raised my voice at him.”

“Don’t be,” she replied, “If you hadn’t shouted at him, I doubt I would’ve been able to hear you. But I did hear you, and I wanted to say thank you.”

“For what exactly?”

She bit her lip and clutched her purse.

“I guess it’s the Christianity I grew up in,” she said, “But I’ve spent the last twenty years thinking God was mad at me. Then I heard you yell at that preacher that God loves us so much there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Amen,” I said and smiled.

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The apostle Paul is desperate to convey what is necessarily incomprehensible; thus, it’s not surprising this text cries out for the tutelage of the Duke Writing Center. Or, at the very least the passage could stand for a clear, concise thesis statement.

Here’s one:The Father is not less merciful than the Son enjoins us to be.Here’s another:The Last Adam is more powerful than the First.

Because Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their thinking to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear and unambiguous element of the faith, it can come as a surprise to learn that for the first half millennium most Christians believed— based on canon and creed— that in the End all will be joined to God in Christ. Indeed Christian “universalists” were so numerous a majority in the ancient church that St. Augustine referred to them as misericordes, the merciful-hearted. The fourth century church father Basil of Caesarea once observed that, in his time, a large majority of his fellow Christians believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all in the End would attain salvation. Frankly, it is difficult to convince most Christians that the picture of hell with which they were raised is not actually on display in the pages of scripture.

As my teacher, David Bentley Hart writes in his book That All Shall Be Saved:

“It is my conviction, you see, that the misericordes have always been the ones who got the scriptural story right, to the degree that it is true at all…If Christianity taken as a whole is indeed an entirely coherent and credible system of belief, then the universalist understanding of its message is the only one possible. And, quite imprudently, I say that without the least hesitation or qualification…

There is a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament; and yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive.

The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus, as even the thinnest shadow of a hint. Nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts…On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul’s writings, that instead promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms…

If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.”

And the first passage he quotes (out of twenty-three citations) is this text from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, “So, then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all.”

Commenting on this passage, Hart writes much more clearly than Paul:

“The Judge judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days—and so now, no matter how far any soul may venture from God in all the ages, Christ has already gone further out into that far country, has borne all the consequences of anyone’s alienation from God and neighbor, and has eternally opened the way back into the sanctuary of the Presence. In this way, then, the risen Christ truly is himself already the Temple restored, as his words foretold.”

In the last interview before his death in 2017, the theologian Robert Jenson rebutted a popular cliche about Christ’s obedience and hell’s eternity.

The interviewer said to Jenson, “One of my friends likes to say that there is a hell, but you have to fight your way through the love of God to get there.”

And with a mouth made uncooperative by Parkinson’s Disease, Robert Jenson replied:

“Can you do that? Is the love of God ever finally defeated? I don’t think so. Sometimes I have said, “Well, sure, there’s a hell; it’s just that there won’t be anybody in it.””

In other words, preeminent among the misericordes is God himself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Dan’s widow started to rise up out the chair but then sat down again.

I waited.

Finally she said:

“Dan’s cancer— it was all so horribly slow but it all happened so fast too. He was afraid at the end. I don’t know if that means he didn’t have faith. Anyways, I wanted to say thank you for making it plain to me that Dan’s doubts and sins are no match for God’s grace.”

“Not a sermon,” I said, “just a thought.”

And I watched her smile like she’d just remembered how.

In some ways, if I have been faithful to this biblical text, then you would like to say to me too, “Get thee to the Writing Center.”

If such is the case, then hear the good news:

The promise of the gospel is so surpassingly good its assurance can only leave you asking a question, “Are you saying salvation is so certain in fact, so cosmic in scope, so all-encompassing in reach that we can do whatever we want without fear of undoing what Christ has done?”

And the answer to the question is an invitation.

Come to the table.

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A Few Quotes on the Allness of Salvation

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Every week there are quotes and passages that never make it from my sermon notes into the pulpit. In preparing to preach on Romans 5.12-21, I scrawled these nuggets into my Moleskin. It’s too early to tell if they’ll be left on the cutting room floor, but they’re too good not to share:

“The judge judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days—and so now, no matter how far any soul may venture from God in all the ages, Christ has already gone further out into that far country, has borne all the consequences of anyone’s alienation from God and neighbor, and has eternally opened the way back into the sanctuary of the Presence. In this way, then, the risen Christ truly is himself already the Temple restored, as his words foretold.”

— David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved

“If a man be in Adam, he is an old, fall, imprisoned creature: if he be in Christ, he is a creature, new, reconciled, and redeemed. There he dies, here he enters into life. But these two worlds do not exist side by side, nor do the old and the new man compose two men. For the possibility of the one involves the impossibility of the other, and the impossibility of the one involves the possibility of the other. Regarded from the point of view of the first world, the second ceases to be a second. And from the point of view of the second world, the first ceases to be. The distinction between the two worlds exists therefore only when this world is dissolved by the dissolution whereby it is established. Where the two roads go apart, they also meet. But we cannot stop here: there is no falling from God in Adam, no judgment of death visible to us, except at the point where we are reconciled to God in Christ and assured of life.”

— Karl Barth, Romans

“As a consequence of the righteousness of Christ, there comes a justification of life unto all men and women. Here is the negation of all negation, the death of Death, the rending asunder of all fetters, the clothing of all with their habitation who is Christ. Fo all, Death is swallowed up in victory and mortality is swallowed by life…We can comprehend this only in terms of hope; we stand only at the threshold. Yes! But we do stand there!”

— Karl Barth, Romans

“Grace is not grace if he that receives it is not under judgment. Righteousness is not righteousness if it be not reckoned to the sinner. Life is not life if it be not life from death. And God is not God if he be not the End of men and women.”

— Karl Barth, Romans

“It is the soul, then, and not God that lights hell’s fires.”

— David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved

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Luther and the Gospel: Two Kinds of Righteousness

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Summary

The conversation explores Luther's famous sermon 'Two Kinds of Righteousness' and its connection to the freedom of a Christian. Luther clarifies his position and refutes accusations of being an antinomian. He emphasizes that righteousnes…

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Grasp This...It Will Lift You Up to Heaven

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John 6:24-35

The lectionary Gospel this Sunday is one of Jesus’s I AM sayings in John’s extended account of the miracle of the loaves and fishes:

So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" Jesus answered them, "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal." Then they said to him, "What must we do to perform the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent." So they said to him, "What sign are you going to give us, then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."

They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

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If You Know Hunger

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Here is a sermon for the Lutheran Church of Tokyo preached by my plus-one Dr. Ken Sundet Jones:

2 Kings 4:42-44

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our Old Testament reading this morning about the miracle of Elijah feeding a hundred people with twelve barley loaves and a few stalks of wheat foreshadows the. Oracle of our Lord feeding thousands in the gospel reading. The committee that put together our assigned calendar of readings, the Revised Common Lectionary, decided to use the Elisha story to provide background to Jesus’ miracle. But I think that the story has integrity all on its own and that, even though he’s not mentioned explicitly, Jesus’ fingerprints are all over the narrative in 2 Kings. In fact, Elisha’s oracles make more sense if you know who Jesus is.

Elisha was the young follower of the great prophet Elijah during the time after King Solomon when God’s chosen people, the Israelites, were ruled over by wicked and faithless kings. These kings had let the Israelites drift into worship of false gods like Baal, and God called out prophets, not to tell the future, but to tell the truth.

Before he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire, Elijah literally placed his mantle on Elisha’s shoulders as a sign that his calling as prophet and his miraculous abilities as a channel for God’s word and power was being handed on. In this section of Kings, we see evidence that God is indeed present and accounted for in Elisha

But if God is indeed the one speaking and acting through Elisha, then this is the same God who created order out of the shapeless chaos “in the beginning.” This is the same God who promised a nobody from the banks of the Euphrates River that he would give him an heir, a land, and descendants — all so they could give witness to his glory and might. This is the same God who cleared the way to bring those people out of enslavement in Egypt into the freedom of the land promised to them, all so they must get worship him. And this is the same God of whom Moses sang in Deuteronomy 32 (:39),  “See now that I myself am he! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.”

The God who works through Elisha is the God,who consistently and faithfully executes his will not with worldly glory and power but instead in the face of weakness, indignities, grief, and death.

This is what each of the stories in this section of 2 Kings has in common with the others and with Jesus’ miracle of feeding the hungry crowds. God puts on his work gloves and steel-toed boots to go to work in the low places that Mary sang of in the Magnificat. God makes his own face known where human power is exhausted, where human resilience and grit no longer suffice, where all things bright and beautiful are taken away. God comes to bring life in the midst of death.

This runs directly counter to the way the world and we sinners expect and even demand that God should work. The late Episcopal writer Robert Capon, in his books on Jesus’ parables, talked about right-handed and left-handed power. Right-handed power functions like Isaac Newton’s laws of physics, where force is wielded to produce results. It works by coercing the creation and human creatures into doing God’s will through the law’s demands. But this method, while effective for making Tokyo’s trains run on time or getting people to put things in proper Japanese recycling bins, cannot create love or change people’s hearts.

But left-handed power is the kind of power that empties itself for the sake of another. When my wife and I first met, I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, though I’d tried to exert my will power to quit many times. I’m no longer a smoker, not because my wife told me to quit that nasty addiction. Instead of right-handed power, she came at me with left-handed power. I quit smoking, because she said three little words: “I love you.”

In the same way, in the miracles in this section of 2 Kings, God works this kind of self-giving power not to show mastery over the elements, but to show up in life’s “thin places” where hunger, fear, and death are the order of the day. A destitute widow fears her creditors are coming to enslave her sons as payment on debts owed. The only things has to her name is a small cruet of oil. She has no more options, and the situation is killing her. Elisha bids her to collect every jar and jug from her own household and from her neighbors. He tell her to port he oil from her small jar into the bigger jugs, and the oil lasts until the very last receptacle is full. Now she can sell the oil and have a life.

Later, a childless Shunammite woman well past child-bearing age welcomes Elisha into her home. With no son, she’ll have no security when her husband dies, so Elisha promises her a son. She tells him not to get her hopes up, but a year later she has a babe in her arms. Later, when her beloved boy dies and her hopes are dashed, Elisha returns and raises the lad from his deathbed, quelling the mother’s grief and anguish.

Then, when there’s a famine, the people are starving and children cry out for bread, Elisha makes a stew out of plants everybody knows are poisonous. The people cry out, “That’s a pot of death you’re trying to feed us.” But Elisha promises otherwise. The people eat, and not only is no one harmed, but they eat their fill and have life.

Finally, our miraculous feeding of a hundred in 2 Kings brings the same message: God works best where our need is great and our power exhausted. So it is with Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the 5000. The focus is not on the Kord’s ability to manipulate the first century equivalent of soba noodles and unagi, but on his spending himself for the powerless, the weak and heavy-laden, the hungry and the dying.

So for you today—If you know hungerIf you cannot make life workIf managing life’s is beyond youIf you know the limits of your own powerThen Jesus lays another self-sacrificing meal before youAnd bids you to come and be filled.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. You lowly, you lost, you lame and limping souls, be lifted up by his mercy, by his pouring himself out for you. Experience the miracle that the Almighty God makes himself present for you in bread and wine, that you might eat and live. Amen.

And now May the peace which far surpasses our human understanding, keep our hearts and minds and bellies on our Lord Jesus Christ who will not dash our hopes but give us everything needed for life. Amen.

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The Ten Utterances

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Here is my latest conversation with Rabbi Joseph Edelheit.

We discussed this piece on the public posting of the Ten Utterances:

A Christian Nationalist America: U61.3KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadShow Notes

Summary

The conversation between Jason Micheli and Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit covers various topics including dialogue in Ireland, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Christian nationalism, the Ten Commandments, and the future of US-Israel relations. The conversation highlights the challenges of engaging in dialogue when there are deep ideological differences and the importance of critical thought and conversation in addressing complex issues. It also explores the nuances of religious values and the need for a broader understanding of scripture. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the division within the American Jewish community and the potential impact of the upcoming election. In this conversation, Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit and Jason Micheli discuss the current political climate and its impact on society. They express concern about the potential deepening of extremes and the lack of leadership values displayed by both Trump and Biden. They question how future generations will view these leaders and the choices made during this time. They also discuss the division within the American Jewish community and the implications of a second Trump term for Ukraine. They explore the fragility of institutions, the role of religion in offering consolation, and the disillusionment and rage felt by many. They emphasize the importance of critical thinking, honesty, and accountability in leadership and the need for meaningful conversations to address these issues.

Takeaways

Engaging in dialogue can be challenging when there are deep ideological differences

Critical thought and conversation are essential in addressing complex issues

Religious values should be understood in a broader context and not imposed on others

The American Jewish community is divided and facing uncertainty

The upcoming election may have implications for US-Israel relations A second Trump presidency may deepen extremes and lead to more isolation, marginalization, fear, and loneliness.

Both Trump and Biden have shown a lack of leadership values, which raises questions about their suitability to lead future generations.

The American Jewish community is divided and requires careful and critical conversations to address the divisions.

The fragility of institutions and the disillusionment and rage felt by many highlight the need for honest and accountable leadership.

Religion should offer consolation and translate the eternal into immediate action, but the current leaders are not fulfilling this role.

There is a need for critical thinking, meaningful conversations, and a focus on values such as honesty and accountability in leadership.

Sound Bites

"How do you engage in conversation when the two worlds in which each of you come from have nothing to do with each other?"

"Even if we could get back to the deist clockmaker god of Thomas Jefferson, that's still not a Christian god."

"You want religious values taught. Who's under whose authority?"

"A second Trump presidency will in fact deepen the extremes."

"Critical thinkers are going to demand of each other. So you chose to use transactional values. You chose silence."

"The Ukraine circumstance, very different than the Israel, finish what you're doing and be done with it."

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