Jason Micheli's Blog, page 57
December 14, 2023
The Artificer's Matchless Art
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Here is our recent discussion on sections 7-20 of St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Click the tab above for the transcript of our conversation.
If you would like to join us for our final discussion this coming Monday night, here is the link.
When it comes to Christ’s cradle and cross, we typically use words like '“goodness” and “worthiness” in a very specific way.
In a very particular direction.
Jesus is the (only) one who is good.
Jesus alone is worthy of God’s love and vindicating resurrection, making Jesus the only one who is worthy of our worship.
We— it need not be added but frequently is— are manifestly NOT good. We are sinners. We’re worthy only of God’s wrath, deserving the punishment we God mete(s) out on Jesus.
As the popular CCM song puts it:
Thank you for the cross Lord
Thank you for the price You paid
Bearing all my sin and shame...
Thank you for the nail pierced hands
Washed me in Your cleansing flow
Now all I know Your forgiveness and embrace
Worthy is the Lamb...
We are not good.
Like Wayne and Garth before Alice Cooper, we’re not worthy.This is the same acknowledgement most Catholics admit after they receive the host in the Mass:
We do not deserve the gift of salvation God offers to us in Christ. That’s the very definition of grace, right?
O Lord, I am not worthy
That Thou should'st come to me,
But speak the words of comfort,
My spirit healed shall be.
Maybe.
Maybe not (exactly).
In On the Incarnation, Athanasius begins hinting at a theme that will recur throughout the work. Of the many names by which Athanasius will refer to God, the first one he employs is “Artificer.”
The image of God as Artist and humanity as God’s art governs Athanasius’s understanding of the whence and whither of the incarnation.
ar·tif·i·cer
ärˈtifəsər/
noun- archaic
a skilled craftsman, artist or inventor.
God
Having been made “very good” by this Artist, who made us for no other motivation but as an expression of his Goodness, humanity fell into disrepair. The Artist’s original intent has been sullied. His art has been defaced. The effect of sin and death upon the Artist’s art is not unlike the grime that obscures the frescoes on Medieval church walls.
Notice—
The problem for Athanasius isn’t guilt, which must be punished. It’s corruption, which requires restoration.
So it’s not so much that you are a loathsome bastard who deserves the punishment Jesus, the only worthy one, bears for you, a la most CCM praise songs. Instead, for Athanasius, it’s more like you’re the Artificer’s exquisite art whose original beauty has been defaced and needs to be restored.
YOU are the Artificer’s exquisite art whose original beauty has been defaced and needs to be restored.
The art motif is not incidental in On the Incarnation for it provides Athanasius with the means to illustrate the logical consistency of the faith and its scriptural arc. In his treatment, what was once made by the Word and declared by the Word to be ‘very good’ remains good— if marred— because of the surpassing Goodness of the Artist.
Not only do we remain the Artist’s good creation, the Goodness of the Artist would be called into question if he allowed his art to languish without repair. No matter our appearance or condition, we remain precious art simply because of the Artist who made us.
Our provenance makes us worthy of reclamation.And if the Artist abandoned his matchless art, left it to waste away, then we would rightly judge the Artist no longer worthy of his title.O Lord, I am You would not [be] worthy
That If Thou should'st [not] come to me
The Mona Lisa, for example, remains a great painting even if today it retains a fraction of the original sheen DaVinci gave to it. Likewise, you’d never suggest that the Mona Lisa is undeserving of painstaking restoration. It’s too rare and precious a work of art. The Mona Lisa, in other words, is worthy of restoration. Indeed you’d likely argue that the art community was not worthy of the Mona Lisa if it turned its back on her and refused to restore her to her intended beauty.
Athanasius uses this image of God as the ultimate Artificer to turn our categories like “good” and “worthy” on their heads and, by doing so, Athanasius seeks to show how what God does in Christ isn’t a counter-intuitive surprise but is logically consistent with God’s very first creative impulse.
As he puts it:
“For it will appear not inconsonant for the Father to have wrought its salvation in him by whose means he made it.”
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December 13, 2023
Jesus is Not 2,023 Years Old
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John 1
On Sunday, following my church’s children’s Christmas pageant, I sat at the altar and answered the children’s questions at random. It’s a tradition I like to call “Midrash in the Moment.” Thankfully, no child asked me to explain the word virgin. A little girl, however, did ask me at the end a question whose answer ought to inspire still greater amazement and incredulity than Mary’s pregnancy ex nihilo.
Q: “How old is Jesus?”
A: “Eternal does not even capture the mystery.”
In declaring Mary the Theotokos (the God-bearer), creedal Christianity made a claim about Jesus far more astonishing than the church often appreciates. Mary, the Council of Ephesus decreed in 431, is the mother of the God-who-is-human; Mary is NOT the mother of a man, Jesus of Nazareth, who is united with the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. In whatever sense terms like “was” and “when” can speak intelligibly about the life of God, there never was when the Son was not.
Just so—
Jesus has a human nature before he has a human body.The incarnation is not the addition of a human Jesus to an eternal Son. A logos which exists apart from the human nature of Mary’s boy is, as even St. Athanasius insists, mythology.
Karl Barth addresses this mystery by exegeting the text assigned for the Third Sunday of Advent. Reading the prologue of John’s Gospel, Barth argued that the Son always possessed a human nature, antecedent to creation; therefore, a Word without a human nature never existed. Barth so argues by interpreting the second verse of the Gospel’s prologue forward, connecting it to John the Baptist’s confession of Jesus in verse fifteen, rather than interpreting it backwards as a redundancy of the opening verse.
Thus:
John 1.1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
John 1.2: "He was in the beginning with God."
John 1.15: "(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”)"
John 1.30: "This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’"
A man who ranks ahead of me because that man was before me.
For Barth, the dogma demands a reading of the prologue which identifies the he in verse two with Jesus.
“Jesus was in the beginning with God.”Hence, the he who was in the beginning with the Father is Jesus of Nazareth along with his human nature. The Logos in John’s first verse, then, is not a mystical, pre-incarnate Word— what the tradition calls the Logos asarkos. As Bruce McCormack summarizes Barth’s interpretation:
“There is no Logos as such, no Logos in and for himself. An 'in and for himself' which lacks the determination for incarnation is simply a myth.”
As we will rehearse on Christmas Eve, there was a specific time and place when the incarnation of Jesus occurred in his conception within the womb of the Virgin Mary (Logos ensarkos) but before this moment the Word was nonetheless Jesus of Nazareth who would— and always was going to— become incarnate (Logos incarnandus).
As novel and incredible as this claim will strike many Christians, it’s simply what Jesus self-attests in the same Gospel of John:
“Before Abraham was, I AM.”
The incarnation happens in eternity and in time. “The Logos is united to a human person in time, and in fact 'late in time', as Charles Wesley so nicely put it,” McCormack writes, “But the Logos is eternally determined for incarnation, yet to be united to the man Jesus in the womb of the Virgin. Thus, the issue has always had to do with his identity. . . . the Logos’s identity in eternity and his identity in time are the same: Jesus Christ.”
Obviously, it’s difficult to visualize Jesus having a human nature before his birth, but Barth insists this is just what the scriptures claim in proclaiming him, for example, "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” The challenge is time. With Aristotle, we think of time linearly. With Plato, we conceive of eternity as God’s immunity from time. The life of the Trinity can be plotted according to neither. As Robert Jenson comments:
Whether preexistent or walking about in Galilee, the Logos is always the person Jesus.“That Mary is Theotokos indeed disrupts the linear time-line or pseudo time-line on which we Westerners automatically – and usually subliminally – locate every event, even the birth of God the Son.”
The church father Irenaeus understood this clearly, writing in Against the Heresies:
“The Logos, who is the Savior of all and ruler of heaven and earth, who is Jesus, who assumed flesh and was anointed by the Father and the Spirit, was made to be Jesus Christ.”
Notice, Irenaeus speaks of Jesus having an identity prior to the assumption of flesh.
This is very same move the creed makes:
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
Though it’s difficult for us to conceive of Jesus having a human nature before he has a human body, this is precisely what the Old Testament demands we conclude. As Jenson points out, the most obvious preexistence of Christ attested by scripture is his active presence in old Israel: as the Glory of the Lord, the Angel of the Lord, and the Word of the Lord. For Karl Barth that Jesus has a human nature before Mary gives him a human body is simply an outcome of the divine nature. As Barth stipulates in the Church Dogmatics II.1, God is the act of his decision; God IS the act of his choice. In electing to be the Father of Jesus Christ from before all time, God is the Father of this Son from before all time.
“God in making this actual choice not only chooses that he will be the man Jesus,” Barth argues, “as the event of his electing, he is the man Jesus.”1God is the act of his decision; God IS the act of his choice.
Just so, the incarnation happens in eternity as the foundation of its happening in time.The incarnation is not a contingent event in history, hinging upon humanity’s sin “in the fullness of time.” Nor is the character revealed in Jesus Christ contingent upon the particular human born to Mary. Christ’s is the character of God from before all time.
In other words, that there is no Logos apart from Christ means that God is like Jesus.
God has always been like Jesus.
God is like Jesus.
And God will be ever thus.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app1Which suggests that Mary, too, is chosen for her role prior to creation.
December 12, 2023
Fleming Rutledge: Preaching It Like You Believe It
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“I feel sort of sorry for people who are mired in the world of did this really happen. I think it's a way of keeping the claims of scripture upon us at arm's length.”
Hello Friends,
For your Advent anticipation, here is a conversation I had about the season with Fleming Rutledge. The conversation is a couple of years old now, but Fleming’s wisdom is evergreen.
The transcript is copied below, but here is her prayer at the end:
Almighty God, creator of the universe:
Creator of the stars, sun, moon, planets, galaxies, infinite reaches that we cannot even conceive of.
Grant that we may be mindful of the way in which you came to Earth, emptying yourself, Lord Jesus, of all your glory, all your power, all your imperial reign... Your Majesty...leaving it all behind you, entering into our corrupted, polluted, tragic life, the life of Adam, fallen.
Let us remember this with awe and wonder, the awe and wonder of children, little children, and with the awe and wonder of the adult who has passed through the time of unbelief and skepticism and come out into the glorious wonder of your gospel truth.
Lord, in this time in our country, when truth and falsehood and fantasy and self-seeking and self-gratification...and heedlessness and anger, and sometimes real hate but also fear, a time in which fear seems to predominate among us. Lord, work a miracle for us this Christmas.
Let large numbers of Christian believers see what you have done for us, what you are doing in us and through us, and what you will do and you're coming again.
Please Lord, help the church to resist the fear, the lies, the BS. Help us to resist evil. Help us to resist intolerance. Help us to resist indifference. Please, Lord, call the international community to account for the Syrian refugees. Teach us what to do about helpless people who seek our shores. Help us not to be defeated and discouraged and weary and give up. Strengthen and confirm God and direct all those Christians around the world who are already serving in humility, in sacrifice, in dedication to those who are suffering in the most extreme way. And through them, Lord, glorify the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and call more of us, many, many more of us, to the service of this terribly suffering world.
Free us from fear, Lord. Keep us focused on the star ahead of us, the light, which is the word of God, in the beginning, the word made flesh, dwelling among us, full of grace and truth, in his precious and glorious name.
We pray. Amen.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the appHere is a rough transcription of the conversation as well:
When he asked me, did that really happen? I didn't know what to say and I don't think I said anything very helpful. I think it was a wash. But what I wish I had said, I guess is, I guess I wish I had bypassed the question, did this really happen? And said something like
Isn't this a wonderful story? Isn't it marvelous that God helps His servants when they are in despair? God will help you too when you're afraid and when you are in trouble. And Daniel prayed to God and God responded to him or something like that. Something that a child can understand in the case of children to start saying well what happens when prayers are not answered and what is the problem of suffering and what is the answer to the problem of evil and things like that children who are seven years old or not i think that you have to be eleven i think eleven is the age when children begin to think abstractly and people who understand the way that children's minds work always say do not try to explain the biblical stories to children so it's a fine line between explaining the story and allowing the story to speak.
But you see what I'm getting at, I think. There are many stories in the Bible where we do tend to ask, did that really happen? And that brings us into the realm of the discussion about fact.
And I personally, I feel as if I operate in two different worlds at once. And I think that a lot of people do. What do you mean by that? Well, I'm going to try to explain. I come from a family of historians. And my mother and father were passionate about factual truth and research and tracking down events on historical people and my parents were really very bent on that and would correct us if we said something that was short of being exact and so I have an enormous perhaps overdone respect for fact but at the same time i come from a literary family in which fairy stories and poetry and drama and novels and fiction in other words played a huge role and i think that's the best way to be to have both of these going on at one time to be a poet and a historian at the same time uh...truly who excuse me people who are purely interested in history tend to lack the imaginative dimension that produces great literature even the very best books of history and i've read some of them and love them but even the very best ones cannot do what the writer of fiction can do they cannot show you the person's inner life. They don't have any access to the person's inner life, no matter how good the biography is. It's always something that's going to be hidden from the biographer. So people that spend their whole lives, as many men particularly do, reading history and biography, they're going to miss something. They're going to miss that extra dimension that fiction and poetry can give you. And so I think that we need in our training of preachers and our training of um... clergy and our training of lay leaders, teachers we need to cultivate this ability to think in terms of fact and in terms of imagination simultaneously or at least alongside one another so that you can shift back and forth stopping to think. But that does, I think, require a kind of immersion in reading various types of writing. And so the whole idea of genre is very important. I never was very interested in that, but I can see now how important it is if you know that the book of Jonah is the genre of fable, if that's correct, then you read it somewhat differently than you would if you were reading it as a story that is literally factual. If you read the story of Jonah as literally factual, you're going to miss the point. And you're going to mispreach the point too, I think. What? I think you...
It's not just reading it, it's the preaching of it too. I get skewed. The preaching of it, yes, exactly. When I preach stories that have been questioned, biblical stories that have been questioned. I've suspend the question. I've often told the story about how when I was a much younger preacher, just getting started really, and I was preaching in Richmond, Virginia, which was where a huge congregation of my former classmates, my husband's former classmates, my cousins, my mother...people from my hometown. There's just dozens, if not scores, of people who I knew and had a connection with. And my mother was sitting, but also there were lots of people who were just members of the congregation, didn't know who I was. And my mother was sitting out there in the congregation, and I preached on something like maybe the raising of the daughter of Jairus, Jesus' miracle.
I think that is what preachers should do. And just set aside the question of did this really happen.And my mother heard somebody say, she preached that as if she believed it. And I've often remembered that because I committed myself afresh when I heard that, to preaching as if I believed it.
You can believe that Jesus Christ raises the dead and proclaim it the way the New Testament proclaims it by telling stories about how he raised the dead without getting off on this parallel track of did it really happen. I feel sort of sorry for people who are mired in the world of did this really happen. I think it's a way of keeping the claims of scripture upon us at arm's length. Oh, without a...and but not necessarily intentionally. A lot of people just have literal minds. They think literally mindedly and it's not their fault. I think it's a loss, but it's definitely not a defect in their personality or anything like that. They probably just didn't have a whole lot of poetry in their childhood. But also there's something somewhat there's something ineffable about it. We don't know why some people in one sibling will be poetic and the other one will be prosaic, and we don't know why that is. They both had the same parents. But anyway, now getting to the situation that we find ourselves in now politically.
Here's where the historian mentality, I think, has to come into play. Because if someone is just recklessly inventing so-called facts, partly because to do so attracts attention and gains adherence and ramps up the level of commitment to whatever the program is that's being extolled or whether it is simply lying is an important question. A lot of people are referring to the book called About BS, which is taking on a new life. I think it was published about 20 years ago and now it's being referred to constantly.
And for the benefit of your readers, I mean your listeners, you see how literary I am. Your listeners.
The definition put forth by the author of B.S. I can't remember what his name is. He's a professor of something or other. And he makes this distinction. A person who tells a lie knows what the truth is, even as he or she tells the lie. But BS has no relationship to the truth at all. That's a good distinction. And that's what we're seeing here, I think, today. It doesn't really matter to people who are speaking in the public forum, whether it be on Facebook or on Twitter or...into a microphone in front of a live audience, there's this sense that if it's entertaining and if it's arousing and if it somehow moves your gut, it doesn't really matter whether it's true or not. And people are not asking, is it true? They're just responding to it. That's BS.
An outright lie can be tracked to its source and proven to be a lie. But BS is, it doesn't really matter in a lot of cases, whether it's true or not, the point is being made somehow. If it is believed by large numbers of people that thousands of Muslims were dancing on the rooftops in New Jersey on 9-11, is that a legend that's become fact or a fact that's become legend, or is it important to keep saying that never happened, that never happened?
I think it is very important to keep saying it, but we have to realize that there are going to be millions of people who are always going to believe that it was true.
And what does all this mean for preachers? It's a delicate matter, as I've tried to show in some of my prior illustrations. I do not believe that preachers should be in the business of lying. And I certainly don't think preachers should be in the business of BS. Many are, though. Which would be worse but i do think we need to think deeply about how we present the biblical material above all we need to be completely grounded in the historical fact of Jesus' crucifixion. If anything in the Christian story is a historical fact, it is that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And somehow that anchors, well not just somehow, it does. It anchors the story in historical particularity.
And we've all heard the phrase, the scandal of particularity, and that's at the center of the Christian proclamation, the scandal of particularity. That the eternal Godhead became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth in a specific place, at a specific date in history publicly executed by the Romans outside of the walls of Jerusalem in an identifiable year.
That's fact. Even the skeptics, most of them at least, admit that that's the fact. Now there are some people who think it's a fact that Jesus never existed at all. I think that's preposterous.
So we're in a complex discussion here. Once we've anchored Jesus of Nazareth in his specific place and time under the specific Roman procurator, then what do we say?
What do we say about the resurrection?
Well, here again, we're in the…and I'm not going to call it a gray area. I do not think it's a gray area. I think there is light in the story that can be seen from several different angles. The angle of fact and the angle of trans-historical occurrence. I guess that's what I would call the resurrection event. The crucifixion was a historical event. I don't think that the resurrection can be anchored in history in the same way that the crucifixion can, because the resurrection was seen only by those who believed.
And that in itself was the work of God. God is the protagonist all the way through. God is the one who chose who would see the risen Christ, because Paul, Saul, Saul was not only an unbeliever, he was a fanatical unbeliever as we know, and yet God chose to turn him around. It was God who did that so that he became a believer who saw and heard the voice of the risen Christ. It was a trans-historical, transcendent event but much of Jesus' ministry does read as history in certain ways. And yet if you read the New Testament as though it's history, then you're gonna miss the whole thing.
If you read the story of Jesus walking on the water, say, and you are consumed by the question, did this happen or did this not happen? You'll never understand what the story is telling us. And yet, having said all that, I still have to come back to the importance of factual truth in the public square. And I do think that every human being
Every human being can understand what it would mean to be unjustly, unfairly and untruthfully accused of something. I can't imagine any human being who would not protest, but that's not true. That didn't happen. That's not the way it was. And that's what the courtroom is focused on with the opposing lawyers trying to establish what the truth is. I do think people can relate to that, even if they are willing to listen to all kinds of BS from the rostrum. People do have an underlying sense that certain things did or did not happen.
The problem then becomes, all right, so Fleming Rutledge was hit by a taxi on 4th Avenue and 10th Street in New York City in 1986. The witnesses, some witnesses said I was walking west to east, and other witnesses said I was walking east to west.
They all agreed I'd been hit by a tax.
So, witnesses are notoriously undependable, and I myself have learned that my memories of certain things are erroneous, which has been quite a shock to me. I have quoted things that were never said, and I thought they had been said, but apparently they never had been said. So, this is a murky discussion.
But at the same time, every Christian believer is committed to the statement of Jesus that He is the truth. He is the truth. And when all is said and done, at the end of the age, everything false will be swept away as though it had never been. And only the truth in Him will remain.
And so I think it's part of our obligation as preachers and teachers of the faith to continue to hold to our conviction given us by God that Jesus and the story of Jesus and the promise of Jesus is the truth.
Speaking of the end of the age, I'm wondering how would you connect what you're saying with the season of Advent? It's funny that you asked that because I was just thinking that was the next thing I wanted to mention. I mean, is, because the not yet-ness of God's world is part of the Advent season and is one of the ways we anticipate Christ coming again is by...calling BS as BS in the world and insisting upon the truth? Oh, I think so, absolutely. I think it's one of the most important things. It's a way, it's a form of resistance. Hmm, hmm, better word. And that word is increasingly more important to me and it's associated so much with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But there have been so many resists in the history of Christianity and...not enough, not enough resistors, but...
Wherever the word of God is truly preached, that is resistance in itself. William Strangfell talked about that all the time. The word that demolishes all untruth and exposes all pretence and brings down all false powers, the word of God. But as far as Advent is concerned, I've been sort of playing around with the idea that whereas Advent is usually described as the in-between time of waiting and the time of hope, and that's right, that's absolutely right, but I think more and more today, I think more and more of Advent in terms of promise and the one who promises.
So many promises are worthless. People promise things all the time and break it the next day or the next week or the next decade. Think of all the broken promises, good Lord. So to know the one who promises is the truth and that the one who promises is God in three persons, the creator of the universe and the one who will come to be our judge and that the promise of the judge is that those who put their faith in him will be vindicated.
That promise is what really lies, I think, at the center of the entire Christian life. And I don't know that we hear enough about that. I have often urged preaching students or people who ask me about preaching, always make sure that your sermon contains a promise not an exhortation but a promise. That would transform a lot of preaching. Yeah. But it has to be God's promise and not some kind of human promise. So if you were preaching this Christmas Eve.
What would you preach from it?
Well, actually, I'm not going to preach on Christmas Eve, but I am going to preach on the 21st of December. Okay. I'm going up to Cooperstown, New York, which is one of the most beautiful towns in the United States, and it has the Baseball Hall of Fame, and it has the renowned Glimmerglass Opera Company, and it has the whole James Fenimore Cooper legacy, and one of the most beautiful lakes in the United States. It's an absolutely exquisite little town, but it's in the middle of nowhere.
And so there we're going to be on December 21st, the winter solstice, the shortest night of the year, the darkest night of the year, the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle and I'm preaching the sermon for the institution of the new rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Cooperstown. Now, I don't want to give away too much, but I'm going to wind up, I think, with the promise that God made, that Jesus made to Thomas. Do you believe me, Thomas, because you have seen?
Blessed are those who have not seen and still believe and the evangelist goes on. These, Jesus did many things that are not written in this book, but these are written in order that you may believe in Jesus Christ our Lord. That's not quite it. It's a little bit different from that. I'm not good at memorizing. That part of John has always driven me crazy, the idea that there's things left out. Such a tease. Oh, really? That's interesting. I don't give a second thought to that. I know I'll know it someday. We know what we need to know. I won't be able to quote that properly. Just give me a minute to look it up.
The whole idea of the darkest and longest night of the year, that was an inspired choice, I think, for Christmas to come at that time. And...
The fact that it coincides this year with the feast of Thomas, it really gives me an opening, I think. Let me read that verse, the way it's supposed to be read.
This is the end of chapter 20, which is the original ending of the gospel. Many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name. That's what I should have said.
That's the promise. The promise is that belief in Jesus means life in His name, eternal life in His name, with all that goes with that. And it's all...
it worked out by God that we should believe through hearing the word. And that the proclamation of the word generation after generation would bring new believers into birth. I don't think most preachers in the main lines anyway have any idea that that's what they're doing. No, and it calls attention to your point that I mean if life in His name is mediated by the word, proclaiming the word truthfully without lies or BS is essential for salvation.
Yes.
But a lot of preachers that I hear, and I do travel around the church a great deal, there is a confidence lacking, passion is lacking. It's as if the preacher is backing away from the very power of what the text says and the way the text says it. It's as if we're afraid of our own scripture.
Yeah, it's... We're part of the power of our own scripture. I think a lot of us give talks rather than preach or proclaim.
Exactly, exactly. I don't want to sound overly critical because I don't think preaching is taught very well in most locations. I was just really, really blessed because the combination of my homiletics professor Edmund Stymely, the great Lutheran preacher, the combination of Stymely and me was one of those things. We never became friends unlike all of my other favorite professors who became friends. I never knew Edmund Steinway as a person at all, but he had, he's the person who made the difference between my being an ordinary, mediocre preacher and a really important preacher. He's the one that made the difference. And he talked to us about the importance of the, oh, we didn't talk about narrative. He always talked about story, he didn't talk about narrative. Now we talk about narrative all the time. But the
But the sermon should be a narrative. It should be a narrative of God's, as Barth says, the journey of the Son of God into the far country. It's a narrative. The word narrative is taken on all sorts of negative connotations in some circles, because a lot of good Christian teachers still think in the way of the modernist era, where reason and rationality range supreme and a lot of people still think that way. Although we've long since moved out of that in general, where narrative has become the controlling notion. And so the people who think in terms of rationality and provable reality and so forth are very suspicious of narrative because your narrative is yours and my narrative is mine and there's no place to anchor anything. Whatever works for you is the idea that so many evangelical preachers are fighting against. Rightfully so, I'm fighting against it too, but I want to fight against it in a different way, not by recalling people to exactly except the fact of jesus and his crucifixion but and certainly not calling people back to rational facts as though the christian faith could be proved that way that's where i part a little bit i know that ccs louis uh... the mere christianity is book uh... that's a very modernist book i think and I don't particularly resonate to it anymore, I used to, but I don't now. I like his space trilogy best. I do too. That's where I think he's really taken wing. But Me of Christianity continues to convert people. It does, yeah. College students in particular. What kind of students? College students, I think, resonate with it a lot. Uh-huh. Well, more power to him. But I do think some of the arguments sound quite dated
I'd rather they read them the Narnias and the Space Trilogy. I even like the last volume in the Space Trilogy, which is generally disdained, but I have a little group of friends that we all agree that one is just terrific. Do you know that one? Yeah, I read them, I think I read them in high school. Right, when I first became a Christian I read all of
I think that the space trilogy stands up really well. It's got the middle one, what is it, Paralindra. Paralindra is the best definition of predestination that I have ever read. I quote it all the time. Well, Fleming, I think this is good. I think this is very good and helpful for me as I think about closing out Advent and Christmas in particular some sort of advent encompassing prayer? I'll try. I'm beginning to feel very much called to my metal about this praying because I don't think of myself as a very good prayer at all. Certainly a very irregular prayer and a very slothful prayer, but since you say that people like to hear the prayers, I'll try.
Thank you.
Let us pray.
Almighty God.
creator of the universe.
Creator of the stars, sun, moon, planets, galaxies.
infinite reaches that we cannot even conceive of.
Grant that we may be mindful of the way in which you came to Earth.
Emptying yourself, Lord Jesus, of all your glory, all your power, all your imperial
Reign... Your Majesty...
leaving it all behind you.
entering into our corrupted, polluted, tragic life, the life of Adam, fallen.
Let us remember this with awe and wonder, the awe and wonder of children, little children, and with the awe and wonder of the adult who has passed through the time of unbelief and skepticism and come out into the glorious.
wonder of your gospel truth.
Lord, in this time in our country, when truth and falsehood and fantasy and self-seeking and self-gratification...
and heedlessness.
and anger, and sometimes real hate.
but also fear, a time in which fear seems to predominate among us. Lord, work a miracle for us this Christmas. Let large numbers of Christian believers see what you have done for us, what you are doing in us and through us, and what you will do.
and you're coming again.
Please Lord, help the church to resist.
The fear, the lies, the BS.
Help us to resist evil. Help us to resist intolerance. Help us to resist indifference. Please, Lord, call the international community to account for the Syrian refugees. Teach us what to do about helpless people who seek our shores. Help us not to be defeated and discouraged and weary and give up.
strengthen and confirm God and direct all those Christians around the world who are already serving in humility, in sacrifice, in dedication to those who are.
suffering in the most extreme way. And through them, Lord, glorify the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and call more of us, many, many more of us, to the service of this terribly suffering world.
Free us from fear, Lord. Keep us focused on the star ahead of us.
the light, which is the word of God, in the beginning, the word made flesh, dwelling among us, full of grace and truth, in his precious and glorious name.
We pray. Amen.
December 11, 2023
Mary Only Gets Her Boy's Mission Half Right
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This coming sabbath marks the third Sunday of Advent when the lectionary will demand that we once again hear a song that should tighten our collective sphincters. When Mary reaches the home of her cousin Elizabeth, herself pregnant with John the Baptist, the God-bearer exclaims:
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty…”
As Samuel L. Jackson’s Jewels tells Tim Roth’s Pumpkin in Pulp Fiction:
“If you heard it, that meant your ass.”No wonder many churches persist in hiring cantors to sing it in gilded Latin— better to secure the song safely away in a dead language. If we’re bold to venture honesty, to hear that rich folks (like most of us) will be sent empty away does not strike us as good news of great joy. The Lord showing us the strength of his arm (against folks like us), toppling us from our privileged perches, does not much sound like the Jesus we think we know.
I’m not sure what it might mean for us who are prideful to be scattered in the imaginations of our hearts, but I’m fairly certain that when such a scattering comes, I’d rather you go first.
Mary in Luke’s first chapter seems to be the source material for her boy’s Beatitudes. Stanley Hauerwas says of the Beatitudes, “They are not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus.” The Kingdom, as Jesus breaks it down— and, he should know since he IS the Kingdom— belongs to those who do not really resemble you, dear reader.
Just as with the Beatitudes, the Magnificat begs still another question:
Can the poor and the oppressed nonetheless also be unrighteous? Are the poor blessed by virtue of being poor, possessing an inherent righteousness?Or do they not also need atonement made? Can a victim of systemic sin still be a sinner in need of forgiveness?And speaking of victims, what about victimizers? If God’s preferential option is for the former, can the latter be justified? After all, seldom do we include in our manger scenes or Christmas celebrations the last song sung in Luke’s nativity wherein Simeon calls the baby Jesus “Salvation” and foreshadows the heartache Mary will suffer as a result of her son’s sufferings, for our sake.
“For us and our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed confesses it.
Sure enough— mark my words and your calendar— this coming Sunday Mary’s fist-shaking protest song will be dispatched to lay Law rather than proclaim Gospel.December 9, 2023
Comfort, O Comfort: We have a Loquacious Lord
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Isaiah 40.1-11
The Old Testament lectionary text for this Second Sunday of Advent is from Isaiah 40:
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins. A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken." A voice says, "Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?" All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!" See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him.
He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.
As has long been recognized, the Book of Isaiah is not a single book but a collection of three different books compiled by three distinct prophets whose prophetic callings span centuries of the history of the People of Israel. After the Psalms, Second Isaiah, the central section comprising chapters forty to fifty-five, is the book of the Old Testament most often quoted by the New. Indeed so central to understanding were they to understanding the person and work of Jesus Christ that the ancient Church Fathers referred to these chapters of Isaiah as the Fifth Gospel. My friend and mentor Fleming Rutledge refers to Second Isaiah as the “operating system” of the New Testament and as “the matrix” through which the apostolic gospel should be interpreted.
Between the conclusion of First Isaiah and the beginning of Second Isaiah there is a long pause of one hundred and sixty years during which time Israel’s history moves from the precipice of God’s impending judgment to the brute fact of the judgment of God. Isaiah 39– the end of First Isaiah— concludes with the prophet staring into the abyss of Israel’s life and faith. For the People’s unfaithfulness— Jerusalem will be taken away, its people will be carried away to Babylon, and there “they will be made eunuchs in the palace of its king,” the prophet preaches.
And then, it happens.
The words of the prophet comes to pass.Or rather, the Word of the Lord works what it says.Josiah, the good king of Judah, is taken by death. The City of David is devastated. The Temple is razed to the ground. God’s People are scattered, expelled by an invading empire. It’s between First Isaiah and Second Isaiah, between chapters 39 and 40, that Israel sings laments such as Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.”
“I will be your God and you will be my People,” the Lord had promised Moses near the banks of the Nile, but by rivers that belonged to a different pharaoh that promise appeared to be every bit broken. Over a century and a half pass between the end of First Isaiah and the beginning of Second Isaiah, which means God’s People do not suffer simply exile. God’s People suffer God’s silence. After the Word of the Lord comes to First Isaiah, God’s Word comes not at all, for almost two hundred years.
Until, through no earning or deserving on the part of God’s People, the Word of God comes again, to this anonymous, no account prophet who speaks words of comfort and incomparability.
Realize how ridiculous the prophet Isaiah must appear to anyone who has not the eyes of faith. He’s an exile in a pagan empire.The “battering rams of Nebuchadnezzar” had destroyed his nation and reduced its expelled population to a subjugated remnant. Whoever is this prophet we call Second Isaiah, he belonged to a tiny, beleaguered community of hostages living in a decadent city dominated by statues of the goddess Tiamat and temples to the god Marduk.
As Fleming Rutledge says:
You’d have to be a fool not to conclude that the God of Israel had lost his might— or, worse, forsaken his promises to his People. And here comes this solitary prophet from a ghetto of disgraced and defeated captives and he has the chutzpah to turn towards the armies and edifices of an empire, to dig in his heels, and to hurl in their faces the Word of the God of Israel.“The humiliated Israelites were a people of no consequence in the presence of the world-dominating presence of the Babylonian Empire.”
Joseph, son of Jacob, may have had a dream. Joseph, husband of Mary, may have had a dream. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may have had a dream. But the Holy One of Israel does not dream.
The God of the Bible does. The God of the Bible acts. The God of the Bible speaks.December 8, 2023
On the Incarnation
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SummaryIn this conversation, Josh, Todd, Kelly, and I discuss the book On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius. We explore the background and significance of Athanasius, the importance of reading old books, the meaning of Advent, the connection between the incarnation and creation, the divine dilemma, the role of repentance and restoration, and the concept of the whole Christ and the church. They emphasize the need to understand the true nature of Christianity and the transformative power of God's grace. The conversation explores the themes of the haunting past, the power of love, healing and transformation, the incarnation and corruption, spreading the medicine of incarnation, and the emotionally healthy presentation of the Christian story and promise. It concludes with a reading from 'On the Incarnation'.
TakeawaysReading old books, like 'On the Incarnation' by Athanasius, can provide valuable insights into the history and theology of Christianity.
Advent is a significant time in the Christian calendar, marking the beginning of the Christian year and focusing on the anticipation of Jesus' coming.
The incarnation is not just about Christmas, but about the larger theological concepts of creation, redemption, and restoration.
Repentance is important, but it is not enough to restore our fallen nature; it is through God's grace and the work of Christ that true restoration occurs.
The church is the body of Christ, and through participation in the church, believers become part of the totus Christus, the whole Christ. Our past can haunt us, and we cannot outrun it. However, love and acceptance can lead to confession and healing.
Monica's love for her father in the play illustrates the power of unconditional love and acceptance.
The incarnation of Jesus helps identify and combat corruption in the world.
The incarnation spreads the medicine of healing across creation, providing a way for us to be healed.
Reading old texts like 'On the Incarnation' can offer a more emotionally healthy presentation of the Christian story and promise.
Remember, you can join us live on Monday at 7EST as we discuss paragraphs 7-20 of the book: LINK for Studio.
Here is a free copy of the book.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the appChapters (If you want to scroll ahead)00:00 Introduction and Background
05:34 Who is Athanasius?
13:36 Importance of Reading Old Books
14:00 The Significance of Advent
18:04 The Incarnation and Creation
22:30 The Divine Dilemma
31:46 Repentance and Restoration
38:53 The Whole Christ and the Church
45:57 The Importance of Reading Old Books
50:42 The Haunting Past
52:03 Monica's Love
53:26 Healing and Transformation
54:25 The Incarnation and Corruption
55:22 Spreading the Medicine of Incarnation
56:44 Emotionally Healthy Presentation
57:47 Reading from 'On the Incarnation'
December 7, 2023
Light Two Menorahs on Hanukkah: One for Those Still in Darkness
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Here is the Hanukkah edition of my series with Rabbi Joseph (The video recording cut out before the end so scroll down the post for the YouTube version, in which Rabbi Joseph lights the Menorah and prays three blessings).
Firstly, here is the story and video of testimony from released hostages that Rabbi Joseph references in our conversation.
Secondly, here is an excerpt from a piece Rabbi Joseph sent me, How to Live Like a Cynic:
Improvise your life: A Cynic, in the ancient sense, does not have fixed ideas about what their life will or should be like, and for this reason will be more prepared to adapt to circumstance.
Live shamelessly: The sense of shame or embarrassment that rule-breakers feel is the last and most intimate bind that produces and maintains us in a state of servility, enslaved to laws we might otherwise wish to question and rebel against. The Cynic confronts this situation by embracing humiliating experiences and so finds ways to overcome or become immune to those who would wish to shame them into submission.
Push against all boundaries: Not all rules, prohibitions or social conventions are explicitly stated. We live most of our lives according to a set of expectations and inhibitions that remain tacit or unstated, and which are for that reason hard to see, and even harder to challenge. A Cynic seeks to push against these boundaries to discover where they are and lay them open to challenge.
Act with courage; refuse to owe respect to the powerful. The Cynic remains
impassive or unaffected by people in positions of power, authority or influence. This helps the Cynic remain incorruptible and ensures they are prepared to offer up uncomfortable truths, even when the act of speaking out may place them in jeopardy.
Give up everything you can. Material possessions are treated with suspicion based on the idea that we are at risk of becoming enslaved to them, or at least, that we are at risk of becoming enslaved to all the activities (seeking promotion, sucking up to the boss, etc) that help secure wealth and prosperity and guarantee a comfortable life. By refusing the enticements of material culture, the Cynic is better able to escape its enlistments, its enforced servitudes.
Finally, below is the *unedited* transcript of our conversation.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the appJason
Rabbi Joseph, welcome back to our Wednesday morning.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Thank you, Jason. And it's my hope today to do much more than I think we can accomplish in our easy going manner on our weekly podcast. There are people who've taken the time and effort to comment, to send you concerns about our conversation. And I'd like to begin there. And I need to go back and affirm. with as much clarity as possible. I participate in interfaith dialogue as an ongoing model of pluralism.
Jason
Okay.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
This is not late sixties kumbaya, we're all going to be happy. The pluralism I speak of is complex, messy, and requires people to juggle multiple truths at the same time. So I affirm in your presence and with gratitude for our conversation that you minister through the grace and blessing of the Christ Jesus as savior. I don't add the relativizing idiom for you.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
I take the risk of saying that truth must be true.
In return, I ask for the risk of saying that God is the source and continual defining covenantal reality through my Jewish identity and the way Jewish life continues to observe and engage and destined.
Jason
Yeah, that's, I think that's important because I think at least for Christians. You know, we posit that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that's potentially historically falsifiable. And so, you know, at the very least, Christians should be open to entertaining the possibility that maybe they're wrong.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
And I'm not venturing there. I'm saying that on this day, on the 6th of December, 2023, I come back based on this risky, messy, complex proposition. Both of us as clergy, as thinkers, community leaders are attempting to hold
Jason
I know you're not.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
to equal truths simultaneously.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Analogically, I continue to affirm the dignity and destiny of the Palestinian people. I have, over the 50 years of my rabbinate, personally engaged in supporting that dignity and destiny. In the early 80s, when HIV AIDS was just beginning, I made sure that American educational materials were sent via then to rabbinic students that I helped. And I personally paid for that material to be translated into Arabic and made sure it was given to not yet existent AIDS activists in the Palestinian community. I did it for multiple years, knowing that I would not wait for the Israeli Ministry of Health to do.
I have mentored and engaged individually with Palestinian students, one of whom had been president of Students for a Free Palestine, but was harassed by those faculty leaders. When he needed help for his brother who lived in Bethlehem to receive care for cancer, I called several friends in Jerusale and he was later seen at Hadassah Hospital. He sat in my home in Minneapolis for Shabbat dinners and shared in Passover seders. I was invited to his wedding. I was unable to go, but friends who I introduced him to did go. So I am a lifelong Zionist who does not support the current Israeli government and has not. But as a lifelong Zionist, my identity begins with a commitment to a unique Jewish state.
There are some who would prefer no Jewish state. Some strange utopian bi-national, let us all live together. That might have been possible as Zionism was beginning at the turn of the 20th century. Martin Buber at one point opted for that. That is not true today, 75 years later. I share with those who believe in a two-state solution in which the dignity and destiny of the Palestinian people must be fortified.
Israeli policies and protocols that have made the occupation since 1967 horrific. I do not agree with nor do I justify. I have supported rabbis for human dignity, Truwah, another rabbinic organization, for a open progressive to state Israel. All of that.
For those who ask, why is your rabbi not empathetic about the destruction of what is occurring?
I don't know how to express more clearly that the devastation of Gaza is horrific. I don't know the words that will push aside issues of justification, proportionality. I don't have that vocabulary, Jason.
When we began our conversation, it began shortly after October 7th.
October 7th will become, and we are beginning to acknowledge it as, a moment in which Jewish life as we knew it has now been permanently changed.
I can't even explain what I just said, but I intuit that as a reality that will absolutely become a shared communal certainty.
Jason
And I want to emphasize this point, Joseph, because it's not the case that October 7th is an event in the past that will live in the memory of Jews and Israelis. It's that it's a threat that exists.
Today, so just two days ago, Ghazi Hamid said, we will repeat the October 7th massacre again and again until Israel is destroyed. We are a nation of martyrs and are proud of it. We'll sacrifice as many Palestinian lives as it takes.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
So then we are left with the following question.
Even with what I have stated and my behaviors of the past, how can I convince anybody that the destiny and dignity of Palestinians is part of my moral quotient? When a terrorist organization, not the Palestinian people, a uniquely justified, self-defined terrorist organization that committed a horrific massacre on October 7th, threatens to do it again until their stated purpose, the elimination of the State of Israel, is achieved.
So here we are, we're in a painful dark period.
And people want to be supportive while simultaneously looking at pictures, hearing reports, hearing part truths, manufactured truths, manipulated truths, and carefully say, I need to know if the rabbi cares about innocent Palestinians.
I do.
Do I care about innocent Palestinians to the exclusion of the survival of the Jewish state?
That's a question for which no good answer comes.
Jason
Well, and it's, I mean, that the burden of proof is on you as a Jew and a rabbi to prove that you care about innocent lives in Palestine. I mean, there's a, there's a foundational antisemitism that lingers behind even that expectation.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Well, you said it, I didn't. I don't, it never works when Jews play the quote victim card. Um, there are now significant reports of what hostages who have been freed are now telling the Israeli government. And they went and they demanded to see the prime minister and the work cabinet. And what they told them, we must all listen to must listen and then ask, I ask, is the concern for the innocent Palestinians equal? Not greater than, equal to the 150 yet remaining hostages. Because the hostages who have been freed are coming and saying, this is what happened to us. We need to get the rest out.
Jason
So just in case people haven't been following the news that closely, give us some examples of some of the hostages testimony.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Well, I want to add a category to that, and that is the assault on women and rape on October 7th, which was ignored, which was horrifically denied by silence by global feminism, until just this past week.
So.
Hostages saying, we never had enough water, guns were held to our hand, Hamas, inappropriately touched girls, which goes back to the unimaginable acts of rape and assault and murder, the bodies of which were found on October 7th and 8th.
There are still kidnapped hostages. So while the world is demanding a ceasefire, where is the equally loud, painful, enraged demand for surrender, giving back all the hostages, the elderly and ill men, and yes, then finally the IDF.
Men and women.
Can the last two days before the truce ended, negotiations were made in which Hamas demanded, we'll give you the three bodies and the father of the family destroyed and four other hostages give us all the women prisoners.
I'm trying to equate that with any reality of any family attempting to understand kidnap.
How do you negotiate with a vulgarity will give you dead bodies for live prisoners. All of the women.
Because Hamas knows that the remains, the bodies, are considered sacred by the nature of the Jewish community. So, can we listen to the hostages who've come back and said, they drugged us before we were freed. They drugged us in order that we would look, not afraid and not be aware.
They told us there was no more Israel. They would never give us any source of health care.
So there are still hostages, hostages taken for the calculated purpose of getting Israel to free Palestinian prisoners. Let's not get distracted by the protocols that put those Palestinians into Israeli prisons.
If we engage with terrorists, then all of us are vulnerable to kidnap any of us, not just Israelis, this becomes a critical leverage of human agony beyond description goes all the way back to the Bible and rabbinic period.
For seven weeks, the world did not reckon with the rape that was done on October 7th. Uh, the Americans lie. They manufacture things. Now the UN admits it.
Again, determined and calculated behavior by a group that defines itself still as eliminationist.
So when Israel offers a permanent ceasefire, what is it that we're offering? That this group will simply now with its partially destroyed infrastructure, but not all its top leadership removed, will, as the leader said this week, we will do it again.
Jason
No community, no nation would tolerate the ability of such a group to just hop a fence and come murder and kidnap and kill hundreds and thousands of people. The Palestinian and Israeli situation is unique, sure, but no place on earth would tolerate that.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
And among those who helped in the planning were Palestinians from Gaza who had been workers in the kibbutzim, accepted into the homes of many who were slaughtered.
So as yesterday, presidents of three of the most elite universities, not just in America, anywhere in the world, attempted to answer the question, does free speech on campus include the expression of seeking another group's elimination? And remember.
On the first time we talked, I suggested we begin by reviewing Hebrew-Israelite, Jew-Israeli. There are no more Hebrews, there are no more Israelites. They're in Scripture.
Jews and Israelis are not identical. Not all Jews are Israelis, and certainly not all Israelis are Jews. But why should Jews who go to a university be challenged with statements about, now, if you support Israel, now, you too should answer.
A student from MIT, doctoral student, a classmate in her group, threatening her by saying, the women who were killed at the music festival deserved it. They had no business being on stolen land.
No, I said threatened her. Yes, because a Jew at MIT has no way of responding to the random selection of Jews and non-Jews at a music festival in the south of Israel.
Will those three presidents ultimately find limits?
Does the school of social work at Columbia University that attempted to have a program about the counter offensive of liberation on October 7th. What does that?
Jason
Yeah, I saw that the Columbia said that their social work department didn't have anything to do with that, that students had used the name, an image without permission, but they were a little slow in clarifying that.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Right, but there you go.
So when I served on the faculty at St. Cloud State University, I am reminded of the then president who countered when I said they are having a protest outside using an Israeli flag, baiting me to go and get the flag. And he said, that's the marketplace of ideas, Professor Edelheit. Oh really?
Marketplace of ideas, I see. Tell me, what would you do if I got several of my students to dress in drag and have a pride flag? That's not funny. It's the marketplace of ideas. What if we dressed up in blackface? Stop it, he said.
Jason
That is a good, you know, you began talking about pluralism at the top. Um, these examples you're giving here, I do, I do think they show, um, the difference between, um, kind of a commitment to liberal democracy and the freedom of speech and a commitment to what, uh, the commandments demand of choosing Christians.
Um, because you, you may be, you may be free to do whatever you want in the marketplace of ideas, but the, the Torah does not allow you to, to treat like your neighbors in such a manner.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
I'm trying to imagine post George Floyd, a group of whites deciding to protest Black Lives Matter in a way that the African American community experienced as a threat.
Could, and we saw this in Charlottesville, could those people marching with torches, that went all the way to court, a horrific example of terror in America, all that was missing were, quote, white sheets.
Are we saying that is permissible?
Or can we say, as we express pluralism, you know there are limits. Pluralism requires accepting multiple truths. But you and I agree, there's no such thing as a Messianic Jew.
There are limits.
Maybe what October 7th is about is understanding there are limits. This was intended. How does Israel defend itself from the ongoing presence of Hamas? Okay, let's open that conversation. I can't beat that conversation.
Jason
And the strategic and bitter irony is that October 7th baited Israel into a response that made it more difficult for Israel to make peace with its neighbors.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Correct. And that was intended. Hamas did not want a normalization. Saudi Arabia, anywhere else. We don't want Israel on the map. We want to destroy Israel. Part of that destruction is the world demanding that Israel stop hurting the innocent victims of Palestine.
Okay, what will you do with the terrorist organization embedded among the innocent Palestinians?
Jason
I think it shows just how most Americans do not pay attention to foreign affairs to begin with in global events. The US and its allies completely destroyed Mosul in order to free it from ISIS.
There doesn't seem to be an awareness that we did that. And there wasn't similar protests against the US government, the US military. You can debate the rightness or wrongness of those actions, but they're there in the past as an equivalent act. But Israel receives criticism that is unique to Israel.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
We fought a unique terrorist organization, ISIS. We fought that organization, al-Qaeda, that attacked the United States of America. Those were attacks by Islamic terrorist organizations. Our fight against them was not a fight against Islam or Muslims.
Israel is fighting Hamas. It is not a fight against Palestinians. Yes, I know Palestinians are dying
That is part of the complexity of the times in which we live. Want free speech? Great. Limits can't say anything to anybody anywhere.
I'm painfully confused about where interfaith dialogue will go in five years. I don't know what my younger colleagues will do with the necessity of these conversations.
Jason
And well, part of the difficulty I have had with interfaith and ecumenical organizations that I've been a part of through the churches I've served is that what really united the people who gathered with those organizations was a political ideology. And so they might have all been from different churches and denominations and religious groups but they were all united by a kind of center-left understanding of the world. And I'm sure there's center-right groups as well. And so I wonder if what will come in the future is just a deepening of that ideological sorting.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Yes, maybe. I don't know. I am.
I'm just tired right now of trying to find a ledge which is wide enough, long enough. So much has changed in the 50 years I've served. And I really had hoped and prayed that after 50 years I would see the appreciable growth of people giving each other a margin listening, waiting, learning.
And since October 7th, I am sadly horrified. Few had told me that an op-ed in the New York Times by a Jewish op-ed writer, Brett Stevens, would be solely about the assault on Israeli women and the silence of the world.
And that would come on the same day as multiple articles about the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn engaged in congressional hearings. If you told me that is what would occur the day before Hanukkah in 2023, I just, no, you're seeing something that won't happen.
But here it is.
And we continue to look with faith. I admit I'm doing it based on faith now, Jason. For a shared common moment, simply we have the same God. Can't we just be present to that truth?
Jason
You mentioned Hanukkah. You sent me a story that I was going to send you that it caught my eye because my son is a junior at William and Mary. And so there was, there's other examples of this story around the country, but, you know, the town of Williamsburg for their annual winter festival or whatever they call it, moved to remove the menorah lighting.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
I'm sorry.
Jason
um, from their festivities this year. Um, and I just want you to think through that for us.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Part of me, an old part of me, would have said, yeah, I don't want the Hanukkah menorah out there with the Christmas tree. Doesn't belong. Bad comparison.
Another part of me says, you know, there are Jewish students on campus and we need to give them a part of their identity to share. Put it out there. Let them have this.
The post October 7th, 77 year old Rabbi is not surprised that Jews at a small private liberal arts college, historic. Excuse me.
Jason
Public.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Where John Stewart went, I believe.
You can't have a Hanukkah menorah because it makes a unique statement about a identity that is not merely religious. It's identity that transcends that university and links it to Israel.
And now if you put a menorah at a public university's winter festival, there will be people who see it as support for what Israel is doing in Gaza. How did we get there? Yes, it's just a menorah.
Does a Christmas tree link itself to all Christian nationalists? Does a Christmas tree link itself to every Catholic priest who ever abused?
Jason
The analogy I was going to use.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
What? What are we doing?
Jason
Well, and I thought about this. So the restaurant in Zahav in Philadelphia that was surrounded by, so I'm a big fan of that restaurant. And the blanket equating of Jews with Israel is the kind of just gross and general prejudice that is behind something like the Muslim ban that Donald Trump wanted. Um, that, you know, if you're one of these, you're, you're necessarily one of this group. Um, and therefore you're to be feared or loathed.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
And anyone and everyone coming from Central America is automatically a gun toting drug infested part of the cartel.
We've got to figure out how to take the time to be a bit more critical in our understanding of symbols and language. It's a menorah, a nine branch candelabra used for eight nights in the Jewish community. It isn't about the Israel Defense Forces, Bibi Netanyahu's government.
And if that's the only way you see that, then you're anti-Israel, not pro-Palestinian. You're anti-Israel is a direct anti-Semitism against me.
Jason
I wonder, you mentioned the complexity of war earlier. I wonder if, if one of the challenges that we're experiencing is, is that, um, war with all of its complexities just will not fit neatly into, um, the ideological camps that we choose for ourselves. Um.
We can't make our prior ideological commitments fit neatly into something like what's going on in Gaza.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
If we roll back the tape to not 9-11, but 9-12, 9-13, then President Bush misused the word crusade.
No, no, no
Life is far too complex today to assume that you can take the visual impact of disaster and equate that with an intentionality don't know how to disengage Hamas and at the same time not kill Palestinians.
That's what we all want. How do you do that? While listening to the freed hostages who also now want another truce, so more hostages will come out. And Israeli military who say, you won't get the negotiations you want until we hurt them more. Not a part of how I understand the world.
I have to listen because I don't understand. That's what I'm asking. Can we admit to each other when we don't understand?
Jason
And, and part of what you're commending isn't just listening. Um, it's, um, a healthy cynicism. You sent me this, this article that I love, uh, cause one of my favorite books is leaves from the notebook of a tamed cynic. Um, and so you sent me this piece, uh, called how to live like a cynic. And there are six, uh, points to that. Uh, one is improvise your life. Uh, two, live shamelessly, three, push against all boundaries, four, act with courage, refuse to owe respect to the powerful, five, give up everything you can. So five, not six. So talk a little bit about cynicism and how it can be a helpful antidote to wade through these things.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
I suppose I would frame it back into an idiom I use as a recurian, the hermeneutic of suspicion, that we look at tradition, we look at the past, and we neither immediately assume, because it is the tradition, we accept it, nor immediately discount it because it is the tradition. So the cynic, the skeptic, the person who reads with suspicion, who engages the values we want to keep, but we live in a world in which those values are 2000 years old, 500 years old, a day and a half.
I want to be in conversations with people who take the past seriously, but don't take the past as their catechism.
I want the past to be respected. And then let's negotiate about the perspective with which we engage the past.
Jason
Or even I would add, maybe we apply a hermeneutic of suspicion, not just to the tradition, but to our present. And the movements in politics we attach to ourselves too, in the moment.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Always. That goes without saying.
Look, I think our current environment, and it will get darker and angrier and more divisive as we move closer to a presidential election, that environment is toxic. It truly is literally a toxic dump site. How do we talk about anything experience anything without first taking some kind of shower that removes what we just saw on X and I'm not on X or on whatever the other platforms are.
Maybe we need now, not what you just said, that we look at the contemporary with the same hermeneutic of suspicion. Maybe we need a new, just for now, hermeneutic of suspicion.
I want hope. When I send birthday greetings to anyone, I say health and hope.
Both of us understand the wish to strengthen our health.
And our mental health, our emotional health, is the source that sustains our hope.
I don't know how this is going to work right now. And I worry about it a great deal. For my adult children, for my grandchildren, how do you make sure at any given day, hope, hope and health?
Jason
Joseph, I didn't prep you for this, but liturgical Christians are in the season of Advent now. And the second Sunday of Advent, the lectionary normally presents us with John the Baptist, who importantly never becomes a disciple. He continues his Jewish ministry of calling people
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Some say that Elijah the prophet, one of two figures in the Hebrew Bible that doesn't die, Elijah the prophet is said by the rabbis to be the harbinger of the Messianic age. We will hear Elijah come in order to warn us that the end of days is now.
Jason
Well, Joseph, not to put on airs with the comparison, but in Elisha, God gives Elijah a friend and God has given me one in you. So thank you.
December 6, 2023
Why Does the Forerunner Not Become a Follower?
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Every year, the church in her wisdom will not allow us to make our way to the manger without first hearing once again from the Messiah’s Forerunner:
“John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."“
John the Baptist is a prominent and essential character not only in the Gospels but in the church’s liturgy, art, and iconography. Like a familiar painting that has hung on the wall so long its beauty and detail no longer elicit astonishment, during Advent the church often rushes past John the Baptist without attending to the remarkable implications of the evangelists’s presentation of him.
The fact is as simple as it is straightforward, yet the church seldom notices it:
John baptized Jesus. But John did not become a disciple of Jesus.John the Baptist had a different vocation than discipleship.
December 5, 2023
An Advent Conversation with Fleming Rutledge
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Hi Friends,
Glad Advent!
Here is the second installment of a conversation I enjoyed with my mentor and muse, Fleming Rutledge, a few years back.
The transcript is below, but here is the prayer she prays at the end of our time together:
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility, that in the last day when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead we may rise to the life immortal. Through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. And oh Lord, on this day, as many people hear these words, grant to us the power to discern your works in the midst of us and to go where you are, where you are, on the frontier between Satan and all his works and the oncoming future of the God who is able. In His name, God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen.
Let me talk about white preaching for a minute.
It took me years and years and years to learn to get myself and my own concerns out of the way. I was a convert out of the segregated South and being converted by Martin Luther King's dream speech live. I saw it live. I'm that old. I was a young mother in Richmond, Virginia and my black housekeeper who came once a week to clean the house was in the house. And something prompted me to say, come on in here, you might like to hear this. So the two of us watched live the dream speech. And all I'd ever heard was that Martin Luther King was a communist. People don't realize that. We were taught in the South that Martin Luther King was a communist. And so were a lot of other people in the civil rights movement, because they had gone to a camp in South Carolina, I can't remember, or North Carolina, I can't remember the name of it, it's a very famous socialist camp, and therefore communist and wicked. And a lot of the civil rights movement received teaching from that camp that people went to learn about social action. During the Dream speech, live, I emphasize live, I had never, no one had any idea what he was going to say. I certainly didn't. You can't recreate this astonishment of hearing that lie. Well, it completely changed me 100%. I became an advocate of civil rights after that and lost some of my friends and upset my family. And so I was very self-righteous. I had seen the light and all you people out there in the pews, you haven't seen the light. Actually, I hadn't been ordained then, but I hate to think of the tone of my sermons that I've been preaching during those days. The self-righteousness of it is the thing that's so threatening to the gospel.
Now I tell the same stories over and over. I'd love to have some new stories, but I can't change the stories of how I was transformed. I've often referred to Will Campbell, who I only met in life once. I communicated with him frequently, but we didn't meet in person except once in New York City, of all places. He with his famous black hat on and walking down Fifth Avenue, as I recall it, with Will's black hat looking very odd. And I told him that my father was a racist and he said, Fleming, we're all racists. Not many people would have the authority to say that. Yeah, yeah. Will Campbell is one of the very few people who have the authority to say that. That has shaped me ever since. I began as a self-righteous convert to social action and social causes and I belonged to a church that set itself over against the other churches in town in that regard, making me even more self-righteous. But then as I moved out into the larger church and became more mature and saw more clearly the racist feelings and just general bad feelings in nature, in general about people and things that happen, recognizing in myself this tendency to privilege myself over other people.
But that began to shape my preaching over a long time though. It took a long time, long time, took about 15 years really for me to come to understand that above all, we want people to hear themselves included in whatever promise we're making. We want the people in the pew not to feel threatened, but to feel the sense of God working for good in them, working from inside them. Is that where justification as declaration and justification as rectification intersect? The idea that God is doing things in you despite you? Absolutely. The only way I know to help people see this is to tell a story. The story should not dominate the sermon. The text should dominate the sermon, but the story can illustrate the thrust of the text.
I do have a lot of examples stored up, but I think the one that people will most readily recognize is the way that the members of the church in Charleston were prepared, long years of preparation, prepared to look at him, what's his name, in the eye, say, I forgive you. That is such an overwhelming thing to witness.
I think it would have to be a very cold-hearted Christian who would not feel some movement of the spirit upon hearing that. We need, and I have, I just am not remembering them right now, I have a lot of other examples, I have a whole file on forgiveness and the way that forgiveness changes the situation in people's hearts. I use these examples not just to urge people to forgive each other but as vehicles through which I hope the spirit will move, however inchoate a way to see beyond and through the hateful feelings of the moment and the hateful realities of the moment, to see beyond them and through them to what God is able to do. That's another favorite saying in the black church is that God is able. I've never heard that before until a black nurse in the hospital said it to me when my father was sick. And I was upset because I thought my father wasn't going to be able to come to my ordination. This nurse looked at me right now and said, God is able. And I never heard that before. It has stayed with me ever since. It speaks of God's power. It speaks of God's promise. It speaks of God's ultimate purpose. As it turned out, my father was able to come to my ordination.
But if not, the Lord is still able.
The Lord can do things that we cannot even imagine.
That's in Ephesians, power, things that we cannot even ask or imagine God is able to do. The task of the preacher is to try to convey that promise and that power in a way that will not simply make people feel hectored or judged or exhorted, but the stirrings inside of maybe this is even happening to me. Maybe God is able even to change my heart. Maybe God is changing my heart. Maybe God will change my heart. Speaking directly to the promise that every person can seek, avoiding exhortation, avoiding the kind of, we are called to do this language that preachers use all the time. We are called to do this, that, and the other. But people don't feel called to do it. The people that are called to do it are already doing it. The people that are sitting in the congregation feeling discriminated against or exhorted to do things that they don't feel that they can do or don't want to do, they're the ones that we should have foremost in our minds when we preach. We want to preach for their liberation. And in doing so, I'm preaching for my own liberation.
The congregation and the preacher are in the same boat. The water's rising all around us, but the water's not just rising for the righteous or to swallow up the unrighteous. We're all the unrighteous. When the preacher's not doing that, it's not really the gospel. It's a form of exhortation, which only works when it's in the context of the gospel. That's very important to remember about Paul. People are always saying,
Well, but Paul uses language of exhortation all the time. Yes, he does, but he never does it unless it is embedded in the uniquely Pauline proclamation of the power of God to make right what has been wrong. There's a reason the exhortation usually come at the end of the letter. That's very true with the word therefore preceded. There's the word therefore, therefore. You're the one who taught me to make that distinction between hortatory and proclamation. And I don't know that anyone learns it.
Well, I wouldn't know it either if I hadn't been taught it over and over and over again at Union Seminary of all places. Over and over and over again. And it didn't click in until about 15 years later. I know people get tired of me beating that horse now, but since you helped me make that distinction, I see it everywhere. Yes. And so the sort of basic rule, if you want to speak about rules, I've really done it I guess, but the basic guideline.
in preaching in that regard is, are you using the imperative or the indicative? Are you telling people what they ought to be doing? Or are you showing them, yes, this might even be possible for me. God being my helper. God being my helper, anything might be possible for me, but only God being my helper, not human possibility.
I was taught by Lou Martin never to use the word possibility in connection with God. That's why the black community doesn't say all things are possible with God, although of course Jesus says that, and I'll go back to that, but they say God is able. The context of Jesus saying all things are possible with God is very important because it's preceded by with men, with human beings, it is impossible.
We use the term possibility thinking to talk about human possibility. Jesus says all things are possible with God. He is contrasting that sharply and directly with human possibility, with human potential. The language of human possibility and human potential does not belong in Christian theology. It's the possibility of God. It's the potential, potens strength. It's the potentiality, the strength the power of God that is the subject of the sermon. And the best black preachers know that. They may not know it in those words, but they know it because they do it. The good black preaching is empowering more than it is anything else. The dream speech was empowering. My Lord, it empowered me for my life. It raised me out of my sinkhole of segregationists to a completely new vision of what God would do. It's about what God is doing. It's not Martin Luther King exhorting us to be better. He is seeing God's future, and he's bringing us into it. I'm getting choked up here because it's recovering that emotion I felt when I listened to it. You can't recreate that today because we've all heard the sermon a thousand times.
And we haven't heard it in its original context where he starts talking about bringing the uncashed check to the government. It starts out quite political, but I've heard very often and I think it's true that after he went on like that for a while, Mahalia Jackson, who was sitting behind him said, Martin, do the dream. And he sailed into that like a ship caught by a wind. He hadn't planned it, I'm told. It was so a great movement of the Spirit. Ideally, preaching should always be like that. It won't be world historical like that. But we should hope for and ask for and pray for the Lord to use our preaching, blow the wind of the Spirit into our preaching so that people will be caught up. But here's where the word dream fails us. It's been used a lot today. It's become common. Two Episcopal presiding bishops in a row have used the word dream, really with God.
Constantly. And Michael Curry, who is very admirable in many ways, Michael Curry talks about the dream of God too. When Martin Luther King says, I have a dream, it's not a hortatory use of the word. It's a vision. It's an eschatological vision, an apocalyptic vision. The curtain is drawn back. It's like the great story in 2 Kings where the servant of Elisha looks out of the besieged city and sees chariots of fire and horses of fire all around the city. And he says, those that are with us are more than those that are with them. The unseen hosts of God, the horses and the chariots carry Elijah into heaven. The unseen heavenly host of God. Martin Luther King really did, I think, for us, he drew the curtain aside and revealed to us the horses and chariots. He saw like Moses, I've seen the mountaintop. I haven't been there, but I've seen it. And you want your people to see it too. That's the thing. You aren't calling them to go out and do something. You're calling them to see. Apocalyptic transvision, I call it, to see through the realities of today, including the realities of our own imprisoned souls, spirits, psyches, to see through that into what we will be. As in 1 John, little children, it does not appear what we shall be, but we shall be like him. That doesn't yet appear, but it appears apocalyptically, that is to say it appears proleptically in the sermon. When Martin Luther King gave his last sermon the night before he died and he said, I've been to the mountaintop, I may not get there, I won't get there, but I've seen it.
It's much more powerful than I'm remembering. You have to have the exact cadence that he uses when he talks about, I'm not fearing any man, and he was going to be killed by a man the next day. I said, I'm not fearing any man because I've seen what God is going to do. It's not just God's dream. It's what God's going to do. See, that's the difference. When you talk about God having a dream, it makes it sound as if the dream can't come true unless we do something.
That's not the way it works. The dream, I don't even like to talk about the dream of God. The promise of God, the purpose of God, that is already coming to pass. And it comes to pass in these little things that people do that are, by God's grace, redemptive. So in the sermon, we want to give lots of examples over the years of preaching that we do. Lots of examples in which something redemptive happens in people in spite of themselves.
All of that is very, very much Advent, living according to the promise. The book of Revelation, I suppose you could say the book of Revelation is like seeing the dream, but that's different from saying that God has a dream. That's not the same thing as saying, I've seen the dream. In a sense, the book of Revelation is like that. In Revelation, God permits us to see through the suffering of the present time into what we shall be by His power. By my spirit, says the Lord, not by any human power, but by my spirit, says the Lord. I get kind of carried away myself when I talk about these things, because this is what empowers me to keep going. There are plenty of times that I just don't think I have it anymore. You do. I have to preach several times in the coming two months, and I'm very worried that I don't have it anymore. So I'm glad to have a chance. But I like to have new examples. I do keep telling these same stories over and over because they were so powerful in my own life, but I want people to see these things happening in their life. I want people to have experiences like hearing Martin Luther King live. There are things being said now live that we need to hear. I think we live in a time that is choking on self-righteousness. Yeah, the church is very guilty of this, I'm afraid probably is that we have two churches that sort of existing alongside each other, not speaking to each other. We have the liberal, so-called liberal churches who emphasize social action and speak of specific issues all the time. And part of me wants to do that. But we have this other church in which preachers never even mention anything that's going on in the news, never even mention it, partly because they're afraid of their parishioners, I realize that, but also, and perhaps more important, because they're not used to thinking this way. They're used to thinking in this boxed off environment where the Bible speaks, but it's as if the Bible speaks only in a certain voice. And once you stray outside that voice into current events, people seem to be afraid that they're going to lose the voice of God. But I was very fortunate. I was trained in a tradition that's different from what many people are facing as choices now most people are facing choices if they want to be trained to preach they can go into a seminary or an environment whether it's online i'm against online learning but anyway if you're an environment where everything is exhortation then that's what you'll learn to do if you're living in an environment where social justice issues are never brought up but only personal sin, then that's what you're gonna learn to do. But I was so fortunate, but I was trained in an environment where it was everything, including social justice issues, was seen through the gospel. And in context of the gospel, I just was so blessed in that regard because I had these teachers, Paul Layman, Lou Martin, Raymond Brown, Cyril Richardson, Edmund Steinway, Samuel Terrien, names that are colossal names, but that people don't, people always want a heart back to Ronald Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, but those are not the best names in my education. I was taught, trained by people who could see all of this at once through the lens of the scripture. Personal sin, adultery, and social sin, races all through the lens of the scripture, all judged by God.
All of us judged by God, all of us, no matter how much we're on the barricades, we too are judged by God. And we too, we too are objects of God's love and God's justification. Is that what the church does at Advent? Does it say, God's judgment is coming and we'll go first? I need you at my right hand all the time. That's exactly what God is saying in Advent and always, but Advent is such a good opportunity. But you know when you're not in a church that a liturgical church and you're not, and I'm speaking here to your listeners, whoever they are, when you're in a liturgical church it's much easier to do Advent. I think it would be very difficult to do Advent in the way that I'm talking about if you have never been in a church where Advent is observed in a very special way and where the lectionary is not used.
I have mixed feelings about the lectionary, and if I had to do over again, I would do a lot more preaching just from specific books. But on the other hand, the way that the lectionary unfolds the meaning of the church year, and Advent in particular, is very precious. And I was formed by that, no question. It would have been more difficult for me to come to terms with Advent, well, for Advent to come to terms with me, if I had not been in a liturgical church.
So I want to caution my listeners out there, Jason's and my listeners, those of you who are not in liturgical churches and are not used to Advent. Advent is not about putting on a purple stole. Advent is not about an Advent wreath. Advent is not about an Advent calendar. All of those things are nice, but Advent is theological. It is about probing into the heart of a great number of passages associated with the season and meditating on and reflecting on and working on for sermons the passages of judgment that are used in the season of Advent. And I'm talking now about Advent seven weeks, not just four weeks. This is becoming more and more understood. You have to go back to All Saints Day. That's when Advent really begins with the readings in the Lectionary about judgment and the movement toward the Day of Judgment.
And then John the Baptist comes in Advent and more judgment, but also this beginning of the expectation, the promise. But it's not really oriented so much toward Christmas until the last week. It's oriented to the last things. Death, judgment, heaven, and hell. The four last things of Advent. Well, Fleming, speaking of last things, I need to depart here. And I was wondering if you could pray us out.
I forgot about that. I was going to ask you if I could just, for those of you who are not in the Episcopal Church, I would like to read to you the great Advent prayer. Just a minute. That's great. This is the prayer that everyone in my tradition grew up with during Advent. We used to read it every Sunday in Advent and at all the weekday services too. I don't know why they changed that, and I wish they hadn't, because hearing it every Sunday and every evening prayer and every morning prayer, it really, you memorize it. Let us pray.
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility, that in the last day when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead we may rise to the life immortal. Through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. And oh Lord, on this day, as many people hear these words, grant to us the power to discern your works in the midst of us and to go where you are, where you are, on the frontier between Satan and all his works and the oncoming future of the God who is able. In His name, God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen.
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December 4, 2023
Jesus Takes Away the Time John Gives Us
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Mark 1.1-8
The lectionary gospel text for the Second Sunday of Advent comes from the opening of the Gospel of Mark, a passage in which we find the word gospel in the very first verse followed by the prophecy of Isaiah on the lips of John the Baptizer:
“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,'" John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”
For those who know their Bibles, Mark’s trying to get your attention.
Mark is not (completely) quoting Isaiah.
Mark instead cobbles together a composite of quotes from Israel’s scriptures:
“Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the land I have prepared for you.” - Exodus 23.20
“Behold, I dispatch my messenger to make a way before me.” - Malachi 3.1a
“...a voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” - Isaiah 40.3
Critically, Mark changes Malachi’s vision of the coming Day of the Lord in two ways:
Mark adds a verb: “construct” (prepare). This is Mark’s way of saying Jesus teaches no path but is himself the new way being forged in an old world.
Mark lops off the rest of Malachi 3.1, which prophesies that “...the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple...”
Mark lops off the Temple portion of the prophecy and— notice— in its place adds the citation from Isaiah 40.3 about the Lord’s Day appearing in the wilderness.
For the Christians, the Old Testament ends with the prophet Malachi. Thus, the New Testament begins where the apostles’s Bible concluded. Jews in the first century believed prophecy had ended with Malachi. God had gone silent. This quote plus Mark’s use of the word “arche” (“In the beginning…”) is Mark’s way of proclaiming that the Loquacious Lord is about to speak again, appear again, do something extraordinary.
And God would do so not in the Temple in Jerusalem but in the wilderness— the place where YHVH had sojourned with Moses and the Israelites following the exodus; the place where Elijah had found sanctuary when he was threatened by political authorities.
In just a few sentences, then, Mark introduces the competing symbolic spaces that will thread the rest of his Gospel:
Temple vs Wilderness
Jerusalem/Rome vs the Refugee Camp
Center of Powers vs the Periphery
Along with these competing symbolic spaces, Mark provides an initial contrast between the prophet John who, like the prophets of old, exhorts his hearers to repentance and “Jesus Christ, the Son of God” who is not like the prophets who augured him.
Much like Mark the evangelist, Robert Jenson begins his first mature work, Story and Promise, with a compact summary of how God does God to us in Jesus Christ:
“Since shortly after the execution of Jesus the Nazarene, a certain communication has passed through history and through the world. A few in each generation have told the story of this Jesus, and of his people Israel, as a message of destiny—of the destiny, indeed, of each new set of speakers and hearers. This story, its messengers have claimed, is the encompassing plot of all men’s stories; it promises the outcome of the entire human enterprise and of each man’s involvement in it. Let me try a premature summary formulation of the story and its promise, at some risk of ambiguity: “There has lived a man wholly for others, all the way to death; and he has risen, so that his self-giving will finally triumph.”
Simply:
The gospel is a story and a promise. The gospel is a story with a promise. The gospel is a story that is promise.In other words, the gospel is necessarily more than the communication of certain facts about a person who lived two thousand years ago. As a story, the gospel includes “facts,” for Jesus was a man who lived and died in human history, but from the beginning these facts have been presented in a specific way—as eschatological pledge for the future of humanity. In the opening of Story and Promise, Jenson describes Christ as a human being who lived fully and completely for others. Like Bonhoeffer, Jenson refers to Jesus as “the man for others;” that is, the life of Jesus was perfectly determined by love—by love of God, whom he addressed as “Father,” and by love of his sisters and brothers, for whose sake he embraced crucifixion in obedience to his Father’s atoning will.
The shorthand “the man for others” is a subtle but essential way in which Jenson distinguishes Jesus the Nazarene from other eschatological prophets. After all, it would be easy to confuse Jesus for a prophet just like John the Baptist.
As Dale Allison summarizes:
Amos and Micah, Jeremiah and John could also fit this prophetic description. Indeed all of Israel’s prophets called God’s people to repentance as John the Baptist does at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. They likewise proclaimed the Day of the Lord and the turning of the ages. What is the difference Christ makes?“Jesus the Nazarene was a wandering preacher, a semi-rabbi. He went from place to place proclaiming the coming of the “Kingdom of God.” “Kingdom of God” was a summary name for the fulfillment of all the promises which Israel’s history with Jahve had left with her. With John “the Baptist,” prophets were, surprisingly, again on the scene; also Jesus was a sort of prophet. He said: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Turn your lives around, and trust the good news.””
“The time is short. The judgment of God is at hand. The kingdom is almost upon us. Change your lives now, before it is too late. If you do, you will partake of the goodness and blessings of the reign of God; if you do not, you will know only tribulation and condemnation.”
Jesus also preached in this register.
How is Jesus different than John?
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