Jason Micheli's Blog, page 7

The Word Speaks Still, And When He Does Even the Waves and the Winds Remember Who They Are

If you appreciate my work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

Mark 4.35-41

I did not preach this weekend. I’m on holiday in the Galápagos Islands. Nevertheless (being a preacher), I have been reflecting on the scripture scheduled for this past Sunday of our series on the Miracles of Jesus.

There is a way of conceiving miracles as intrusions upon creation by the Creator, as interruptions of (allegedly) natural processes. This manner of construing the miraculous, I suspect, accounts for the reluctance of modern believers to affirm the miracles of Jesus as anything other than source material for ethical lessons. Perhaps you have endured, for example, a “sermon” asserting that the Feeding of the Five Thousand in the Gospel of John is really about the imperative to share our possessions. The little boy in John 6, in this interpretation, shames the masses with his willingness to share his five loaves and two fishes.

At first glance, Mark’s reporting of Christ calming the storm does indeed appear to be an instance of interference with a world of divinely-imbued secondary causes. This is problematic only to the extent that Jesus is precisely the opposite of what Mark and the evangelists believe, a man.

The Gospels, it is crucial to remember, exist for no other reason than to bear witness to Jesus as the God-who-is-human. The account of Jesus calming the storm, therefore, is not simply a supernatural interruption of natural processes. It is, properly speaking, an enactment of the gospel in visible form.

The miracle is not an intrusion upon the world.

The miracle is a visible word of the gospel— the good news about the incarnate God.

The calming of the storm, as Karl Barth puts it, is a performed proclamation. It is constitutive of the announcement that, in Christ, the world does not merely return to what it was; it becomes what it was always intended yet never before realized: a cosmos fully transfigured by union with God.

Miracles, then, are unveilings.

Revelations not exceptions.

In Church Dogmatics IV.1, Karl Barth insists that revelation is not a communication of abstract truths about God but the very act of God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ. “Revelation,” Barth writes, “is God’s act in which He makes Himself known and, in so doing, is Himself for us.” Because the gospel is witness not wisdom, the good news about a person rather than principles, revelation does not merely inform; it enacts.

Revelation is the event in which God becomes present as Lord.

Over sin, death, and chaos.

Understood in terms of Mark 4, the calming of the storm is altogether more than a display of supernatural power over the natural order. It is the disclosure of the deeper truth that creation itself belongs to the Word through whom all things were made. Mark 4 does not depict a scene of divine force imposed against nature but rather a display of nature’s proper relationship to its Creator— now made flesh and dwelling within it.

As visible words, enactments of gospel, miracles are thus not exceptions to the rule of the world but interruptions of the disorder that sin has introduced to the world. Fleming Rutledge notes wryly in a footnote in her most recent book that there is no location in creation not inhabited by the Enemy, the Powers of Sin and Death. There is no place in the world where the world is as the world is intended. Talk of “nature” is incompatible with the gospel. Just so, miracles are not violations of a world properly ordered according to divine, natural intent but revelations of creation’s true End.

Miracles are signs of creation’s aim.

If all of creation groans in labor pains, then the calming of the storm is not the suspension of nature’s processes but their rectification and reordering around the incarnate Logos.

Miracles disclose creation’s true order, yes.

But Maximus the Confessor insists on pushing even further than Karl Barth. For Maximus, the incarnation is surpassingly more than a repair job of a fallen world. Maximus takes the Apostle Paul at his word: Incarnation is New Creation. This is “the whole mystery of Christ.”

The incarnation is but the innovative completion of creation itself.

In calming the storm and walking upon the water, in multiplying loaves and going down to death for a father’s little girl, Jesus does not perform miracles as though they were parlor tricks or even pointers to his divine identity.

Christ is innovating creation.

Maximus argues that the Word becoming flesh is not a contingency necessitated by sin but the very purpose of creation from the beginning. The cosmos exists to be united to God, and in Christ this union is realized—not as a restoration to a primordial state but as an advancement, a transfiguration into something entirely new. This is nothing less than what the prophet Isaiah foretold of him.

As Jordan Daniel Wood summarizes Maximus:

“The Word’s assumption of flesh is not a reparation but a perfection of creation—an innovation by which the world becomes more than itself, exceeding itself in union with God.”

Back to the calming of the storm.

The miracle is not merely an act of the Creator reminding the sea of its original obedience. Far more so, the miracle is an instance in which the sea participates—even if momentarily—in the New Creation being inaugurated in Christ.

In calming the storm, we see Mary’s boy giving birth to a New Creation.

The winds and waves obey him because, in Christ, creation is being gathered into a more intimate, more perfect relationship with God than previously known. In the calming of the storm, in other words, we glimpse not a return of creation to Eden but of its End in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

Again, this is the problem with speaking of creation as “nature.”

Creation finds its true being only in consummation in Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.

The word consummation is not lightly deployed in Christian speech, for it properly denotes a relationship. The calming of the storm reveals that the created order—winds, waves, water—are not indifferent mechanisms governed by impersonal laws but are elements of a cosmos whose being is contingent upon, in relationship with, and fulfilled by, its relation to the Logos.

As Chris Green puts it:

“In the miracles of Jesus, the cosmos rehearses its own eschatological fulfillment.”

The calming of the storm does not merely show Christ’s power over nature anymore than the raising of Lazarus reveals only his power over death. Jesus wept. He did so because he loved Lazarus. Likewise, the calming of the storm reveals that nature itself is destined for communion with Christ.

The storm ceases not because Jesus overpowers nature.

The storm stops because in Christ creation hears its future.

If miracles, as Barth says, are “visible words,” what gospel do they proclaim?

They declare not only that God is for us, but that, in Christ, the world is being transfigured into what it was always meant to become. Miracles do not merely reverse the effects of the fall; they advance creation toward its ultimate destiny. Like Peter walking upon water, when Jesus calms the storm, the waters participate—however fleetingly—in their ultimate purpose: to exist in perfect communion with the Word through whom they were made.

The winds and the sea obey, not simply as servants to a master, but as creation responding to its perfection in its Maker.

Nothing less than this is the promise proclaimed by the doctrine of theosis.

Barth writes:

“The miracle is not that God has power over the world; the miracle is that God in Christ chooses to be God with and for the world, and that the world, in Him, comes to its true end.”

Much like what we say over bread and wine at the end of Great Thanksgiving’s epiclesis, episodes of the miraculous are foretastes of the Last Future. As such episodes, we should expect the miraculous to occur in our lives in ways every bit as ordinary but reliable as loaf and cup.

In this case, perhaps we should start by looking to the storms within us.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

“Perfectly free, servant of all.”

If you appreciate the work, beome a paid subscriber.

The lectionary epistle for this Sunday is Galatians 5:1, 13-25.

HERE is my book on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, and what follows is an excerpt from it.

Two stories:

Shane Clifton is a professor of theology at Alphacrucis College in Australia. In October 2010, Clifton suffered an injury while jumping a bicycle, an event he describes matter-of-factly as “a contingent event that is part and parcel for what it means to be a creature of the earth.” Such a matter-of-fact description is, in fact, quite terrifying, for Clifton’s everyday bicycle accident rendered him a complete (C5) quadripalegic. His memoir, Husbands Should Not Break, is a book in which the author resists writing what he calls “inspiration porn.”

Clifton speaks candidly about the depression and despair that attended his seven-month rehabilitation in Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney and the dark night of the soul that soon followed. About the time immediately after his discharge, Clifton writes:

“Eventually I arrived home, and entered a house bedecked with balloons and streamers, to the cheers and tears of my wife and children. We were all excited but, although we didn’t voice our concerns, we were also a little nervous—like newlyweds on a honeymoon, in love, but tentative. Not long after I arrived, Elly looked my way, smiled, and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. Looking on, the boys joined in spontaneously, a five-person hug that expressed our love and constrained our fear. There was one problem. I had forgotten to turn my wheelchair’s power off, and with Jacob accidentally leaning against my joystick, we were propelled like a rugby scrum into the kitchen table, which in turn smashed through our rear window, spraying shards of glass in every direction. It put an end to our cuddle, but did give us something to laugh about.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that this event would turn out to be symbolic.”

To be sure, Husbands Should Not Break tells a harrowing story, yet it also tells a surprising story. It does not tell a story of Shane Clifton negotiating a life of challenge and struggle but nevertheless finding something approximating happiness. It instead tells a story of how Shane and his wife eventually find a deeper and more abiding happiness than the happiness that had constituted their life prior to paralysis.

Under the conditions of his new, changed life, Clifton discovered a happiness he had not previously known, a happiness that is discovered not in spite of his struggles but because of them. To be disabled, Clifton writes, is to be in a near constant state of sheer vulnerability before others and absolute dependency upon God and neighbor. Such dependency usually strikes us as an ordeal to be avoided at all costs, but, through it, Clifton received a life he would not trade for any other life.

“Paralysis liberated me,” he says.

That’s the first story. The second story you might’ve seen in the news.

Irwin Bernstein, a retired Air Force veteran, was recently serving a second, postretirement stint on the faculty at the University of Georgia. When the fall semester began last week, Professor Bernstein made clear to the students enrolled in his psychology class that he would not make any exceptions to his mandatory mask policy.

“No mask, no class,” the professor wrote on the white board on the first day before handing out the syllabus. Bernstein explained to the class that he had come out of retirement to teach them and that, because of his old age and underlying medical condition, he expected his students to respect his rule. He suffers type two diabetes and high blood pressure, and contracting the coronavirus could very easily be lethal to him. If anyone suspected that perhaps the professor of psychology was conducting his own real-time psychological test, those suspicions were dashed by the next class.

On the second day of class, a student, Hannah Huff, defiantly showed up without a mask. When handed a mask by a classmate, the student put it on but refused to wear it over her nose. When Professor Bernstein asked her repeatedly to wear the mask properly, she ignored him, pretending not to hear him.

Finally, Bernstein stopped pleading with her and announced to his seminar students that he was resigning. On the spot. He gathered up his briefcase and books and walked out of the classroom. Later, the professor told the campus newspaper that whereas he had risked his life to defend his country while in the Air Force, he was not willing to risk his life to teach a class with an unmasked student during this pandemic. Professor Bernstein, who’s nearly ninety years old, says he’s received many, many messages due to his decision to retire, with some expressing support for his decision but many others expressing anger and using profane language over the way the professor impinged on the “liberty” of his student.

When asked about her refusal to wear a mask, Hannah replied with pride that she can do what wants. If she doesn’t want to wear a mask, she should not have to wear a mask. It’s a matter freedom, she insisted.

I begin with these two stories about freedom because one of these stories is about what Christians mean by the word “freedom” and the other of these stories is about the opposite of what Christians mean by “freedom.”

Read more

Jesus Changes Everything

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.
1 Peter 2:11–12

The social thrust of the gospel, and thus the aim of Christian social ethics, is not primarily an attempt to make the world more peaceable and just. Put starkly, the first task of the church when it comes to social ethics is to be the church. Such a claim may well sound self-serving or irrelevant until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. As such, the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.

The church is where the stories of Israel and Jesus are told, enacted, and heard, and as a Christian people there is literally nothing more important we can do. But the telling of that story requires that we be a par­ticular kind of people, if we and the world are to hear the story truthfully.

This means that the church must never cease from being a community of peace and truth in a world of mendacity and fear. The church does not let the world set her agenda about what constitutes a viable social ethic; the church sets her own agenda. She does this first by having the patience amid the injustice and violence of this world to care for the widow, the poor, and the orphan. Such care, from the world’s perspective, may seem to contribute little to the cause of justice, yet unless we take the time for such care, neither we nor the world can know what God’s justice looks like.

The scandal of the disunity of the church is even more painful when we recognize this social task. For we who have been called to be the foretaste of the peaceable kingdom cannot, it seems, maintain peace among ourselves. As a result, we abandon the world to its own devices. And the divisions in the church are not just those based on doctrine, history, or practices, important though these are. No, the deepest and most painful divi­sions afflicting the church are those based on class, race, and nationality that we have sinfully accepted as written into the nature of things.

Again, the first social task of the church – the people capable of remembering and telling the story of God we find in Jesus – is to be the church and thus help the world understand itself as the world. The world, to be sure, is God’s world, God’s good creation, which is all the more distorted by sin because it is still bounded by God’s goodness. The church, therefore, is not anti-world, but rather an attempt to show what the world is meant to be as God’s good creation.

The world needs the church, but not to help it run more smoothly or make it a better and safer place for Christians to live. Rather, the world needs the church because without the church the world does not know what it is nor who God is. The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something that is an alternative to what the world offers.

Without such a “contrast model” the world has no way to know and feel the oddness of its dependence on power for survival. Because there exists a com­munity formed by the story of Christ, the world can know what it means to be a society committed to the growth of individual gifts and differences, where the otherness of the other can be welcomed as a gift rather than a threat.

A striking fact about the church is that the story of Jesus provides the basis to break down arbitrary and false barriers between people. This story teaches us to regard the other as a fellow member of God’s kingdom. Such regard is not based on facile doctrines of tolerance or equality, but is forged from our common experience of being trained to be disciples of Jesus. The universality of the church is based on the particularity of Jesus’ story and on the fact that his story trains us to see one another as God’s people. Because we have been so trained, we are able to see and condemn the narrow loyalties that divide us from one another.

Like the early Christians, we must learn that under­standing Jesus’ life is inseparable from learning how to live our own. That means being the kind of people who can bear the burden of Jesus’ story with joy. We, no less than the first Christians, are the continuation of the truth made possible by God’s rule. We continue this truth when we see that the struggle of each to be faithful to the gospel is essential to our own lives. I understand my own story through seeing the different ways in which others are called to be his disciples. If we so help one another, perhaps, like the early Christians when chal­lenged about the viability of their faith, we can say, “But see how we love one another.”

The church provides the space and time necessary for developing skills of interpretation and discrimination sufficient to help us recognize the possibilities and limits of our society. In developing such skills, the church and Christians must be uninvolved in the politics of society and involved in the polity that is the church. The challenge of Christian social ethics in our secular polity is no different than in any time or place – it is always the Christian social task to form a society that is built on truth rather than fear.

So our response to an issue like abortion is something communal, social, and political, but utterly ecclesial – something like baptism. Whenever a person is baptized, the church adopts that person into a new family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant fifteen-year-old, “Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.” Rather, it is our problem. We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be.

More importantly, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church, to honestly examine our own convictions and see whether or not we are living true to those convictions. She is seen by us not as some pressing social problem to be solved in such a way as to relieve our own responsibility for her and the necessity of our sacrificing on her behalf (for our story teaches us to seek such responsibility and sacrifice, not to avoid it through governmental aid). Rather, we are graciously given the eyes to see her as a gift of God sent to help ordinary people like us to discover the church as the body of Christ.

The most interesting, creative political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to policymakers, or increased funding for social programs – although we may support such efforts from time to time. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is to be the church. Here we show the world a manner of life that it can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

“This Had To Be Done”

Thank you to the surprisingly large audience who joined live for our conversation with Rabbi Joseph about the U.S. joining Israel’s war against Tehran.

Here is the article from the Times of Israel:

Power is not the answer to all problems. But neither is restraint. If you have the power to prevent the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism from developing nuclear immunity yet fail to use it, then disarm, embrace pacifism, and prepare to suffer the consequences.

To those who blame President Trump for abandoning the JCPOA, Barrack Obama’s deal with Iran, consider this: Had the JCPOA still been in effect, its“sunset clause,” allowing Iran to produce advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade level in a matter of weeks, would be coming into effect around now. At the same time, the JCPOA would have permitted Iran to continue developing nuclear warheads and delivery systems.

And had the economic sanctions ended, Iran would have benefited from a massive infusion of funds, immensely strengthening the regime and its terror proxies. Iran would have become the regional power in the Arab world; a nuclear Iran would have been virtually unstoppable.

For the last 40 years, the Iranian regime has consistently expressed, in rhetoric and policy, its intention to destroy the Jewish state. Yet the international community took those threats and actions in stride. There has been little or no outrage from governments, human rights organizations, or religious leaders at the genocidal threat aimed at Israel. Most of all, the UN accepted as a given the violation of its own charter, which states that a member state may not threaten the existence of another. The moral burden for the current crisis is not on Israel but the world.

There will almost certainly be painful repercussions to America’s attack. We shouldn’t minimize the Iranian potential for retribution, especially through global terrorism. Israelis are paying a painful price for this war. And Jews around the world are now even more vulnerable. Israel – and “the Jews” – will be widely blamed, by both right and left, for “dragging America into war.”

But there are moments when leaders need to decisively deal with an existential threat and not allow fear of the consequences to paralyze them.

We will deal with the consequences as they unfold.

For those spreading dire predictions of a “forever war,” the precedent of America’s failed wars in the Middle East is sobering. But it is not the knock- out argument its proponents believe it to be. Had Israel listened to the warnings of some of its well-intentioned friends not to go to war on October8, we would still be surrounded on most of our borders by terror entities committed to our destruction. Israel’s stunning achievement in breaking that vise refutes the pessimists.

Israel’s strike on Iran is the culmination of the war that began on October 7. Hamas’s massacre of Israelis was not an expression of an oppressed people revolting against occupation, as much of the world believes; it was the latest phase of the radical Islamist war against Israel’s existence. What began on October 7 was the Israeli-Iranian war. For the last 18 months, we have been fighting Iran’s proxies. Now, finally and inevitably, we have taken the war to its source.

In the past, in warning against a nuclear Iran, Israel and its supporters invoked the Holocaust: A Holocaust-denying regime obsessed with the destruction of Israel could not be permitted to go nuclear. Since October 7, though, our frame of reference has shifted to the Middle East, where it always belonged. What we learned that day was never to minimize the intentions of genocidally-minded enemies. When they promise to slaughter you, don’t dismiss them.

The banners hung along Tel Aviv’s highway – “Thank you, President Trump” – speak for most Israelis. As for Prime Minister Netanyahu, he deserves our gratitude for his decades-long courageous campaign against a nuclear Iran, withstanding ridicule and accusations of “warmongering” and now bringing that effort to fruition.

That historic achievement doesn’t absolve him of his responsibility for corrupting the soul of Israeli politics. Appallingly, he has failed to accept any responsibility for October 7, refused to establish a commission of inquiry into the events leading up to the disaster, or to curtail the endless incitement among his most fervent supporters against political opponents even during war. History will judge him as both savior and destroyer.

Another word of gratitude belongs to the two spiritual fathers of Israel’s Irandoctrine. The first is Menachem Begin. His attack against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor established the doctrine that Israel’s enemies cannot be allowed to attain nuclear capability.

The second is Yitzhak Rabin. In September 1993, just after signing the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, Rabin explained in an interview his rationale for seeking an agreement with the Palestinians. Israel was surrounded by two rings of threat, he said. The “inner ring” – the enemies along our borders – didn’t pose an existential threat to Israel. The real threat, he said, would come from the “outer ring” – Iran. Israel needed to try to make peace with the Palestinians, the Jordanians and the Syrians to neutralize the threats along its borders and instead concentrate on preventing a nuclear Iran. Rabin predicted that a showdown with Iran was inevitable. Israel’s Iran policy, then, was jointly established by leaders of the right and of the left. That bipartisan legacy is playing out today in the virtual consensus among Israelis for the attack on Iran.

A word, as well, about the American organizations – AIPAC and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, among others: They led the domestic fight against a nuclear Iran, braving accusations of dual loyalty and even treason.

For the Jewish people, this is a time for courage and resolve. Whatever one’s opinion on the Gaza war, there should be no disagreement among us about the imperative of preventing the nuclear capability of a regime obsessed with the destruction of Israel. We know that an obsession with the Jews usually ends in mass murder. That possibility has now been thwarted.

In 2007, Michael Oren and I wrote an essay in The New Republic warning against a nuclear Iran. We ended with these words: “A Jewish state that allows itself to be threatened with nuclear weapons – by a country that denies the genocide against Europe’s six million Jews while threatening Israel’s six million Jews – will forfeit its right to speak in the name of Jewish history.”

Today, I am as proud as I’ve ever been of the Jewish state and grateful to our truest ally, America.

Share

Leave a comment

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

When Jesus Speaks, Even Death Listens

If you appreciate my work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

Matthew 8.5-13

A couple of years ago, I was in my truck, driving to the office, when Stanley Hauerwas called me. Over the years the cantankerous theologian has become more than a mentor. He had been ill and had undergone surgery in England, and I had left him a message inquiring about his health and spirit. That morning on the way to church, he called me back. Before I could say hello, his Texas drawl growled through the phone: “Jason, I can’t piss, and it’s just so damn painful.”

As I pulled into the church lot, Stanley thanked me for having called him “long distance.” Then, through grunts and four-letter words, he narrated his post-op hellscape. I listened.

But Stanley’s not one for bedside manner Christianity. As he says, “Active listening is just so passive.”

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

“You damn well better do it now,” he said. “And Jason? If you’re not going to pray for God to heal me, then just hang up the damn phone. Just say the damn words.”

In the early fourth century, the Roman Emperor Diocletian spearheaded the final and most intense period of persecution against Christians, ordering a series of edicts aimed at the growing Christian population. The Great Persecution entailed the destruction of churches, scriptures, and icons. It stripped Christians of their rights as Roman citizens, including their right to own property. And until it ended in 315 AD with the Edict of Milan, the Great Persecution included torture, imprisonment, and execution.

In the face of such brutality many believers recanted their faith and renounced the LORD Jesus Christ; consequently, once the Great Persecution had ended, the question arose in the church about what to do with preachers who had failed to hold fast to the faith. The crisis was acute in North Africa where a schismatic sect was led by a bishop named Donatus Magnus who argued— straightforwardly, logically— that the holiness of the Body of Christ depended upon the holiness of its members and that the holiness of the Body’s believers relied upon the holiness of its leaders. Thus the Donatists asserted that sermons preached and sacraments celebrated by “surrenderers” were not efficacious. Laity whom those clergy had served were bereft of the gospel’s benefits. The gospel on the lips of an unfaithful preacher is not the word of God. If the priest failed, then the absolution failed. If the pastor shirked martyrdom, then the baptism didn’t count.

Saint Augustine, a bishop in the North African city of Hippo, regarded the Donatist Controversy as a theological emergency that threatened to undo nothing less than the Christian kerygma itself. God is the active agent of our salvation, Augustine argued. The LORD saves sinners entirely apart from human merit, including the demerits of its preachers. The word of God is not a mortal word. Just so, the creatures to which the word attaches— water, wine, and bread— are not mortal goods. “We believe in one baptism for the forgiveness of sins,” the creed confesses, exactly because baptism is not our act. Sermons and sacraments are not magic conjured by holy men. They are the means by which God elects to reveal himself.

Ex opere operato, Augustine summarized his argument, “by the word worked.” That is, in and of itself, the Word of God possesses the power of God to effect what it says.

A few years ago, Betsy Clevenger shared with me how a stranger wandered into the church’s mission center one afternoon while she was there sorting food. He’d walked for over two hours to arrive at what he thought was a church. He wanted— he needed, he said— to confess his sins.

Betsy says she was reticent at first, “I’m not a pastor. There’s no preacher or priest here. Maybe if you call and schedule…”

The stranger was undeterred, “I need to confess.”

So Betsy relented and said, “Alright, I’ll listen to you.”

And then this stranger spilled out into her ear his secret burdens and his most troublesome sins. After he was finished, Betsy says, he peered up at her expectantly.

“Does this mean I’m forgiven? Does God forgive me?”

Betsy replied, “Well, I’m not sure. Who am I to say whether or not God forgives you? I can’t speak for God.”

When Betsy told me how she had answered the stranger— we were standing on the church steps after worship one Sunday— I responded in my typical sensitive, pastoral manner, “Betsy! No!”

“I should’ve told him he’s forgiven? But I’m not someone who can speak such a promise. If you knew some of the unflattering aspects of me…”

“I already know the unflattering parts of you,” I said a little too loudly, “But you’re baptized, Betsy. As much as it is mine, it’s your vocation to speak promises only God can promise. Those promises just are the power of God.”

In the Gospel of Mark, as Jesus passes along the Sea of Galilee, he sees Simon and Andrew casting their fishing nets into the water. Without introduction, Mary’s boy utters a word to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” And Mark reports, “Immediately they left their nets and followed him.”

They did not consider it. They did not discuss it. They did not solicit more information. “Immediately,” they dropped the implements of their livelihood. They followed as they were summoned.

The word worked what it said. Mere syllables on the lips of Jesus bequeathed upon them a new identity.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus arrives at Bethany only after his friend Lazarus has been dead four days in the tomb. Jesus weeps for his friend and prays to his Father and then shouts into the grave, “Lazarus, come out!” And—there’s that word again, “Immediately, the man who had died came out.”

Jesus only speaks.

And death listens.

The word works what it says.

"Get over yourself,” I told Betsy outside on the church steps, “The gospel is the power of God. Neither your limitations nor your sins can stymy the Holy Spirit. If you just say the words, the Word will do its work.”

She looked at me skeptically.

“It’s not magic,” I insisted, “But neither is it wishful thinking. It’s that we’ve got a God who is eager to reveal and to heal. It’s not a mechanism. It’s the Spirit’s generosity.”

“I just don’t know that…”

I cut Betsy off.

“You taught math,” I said to her, “You can promise a person that all their sins are forgiven. And, as surely as 1+1 = 2, in the saying of it, it is so.”

“You make it sound like I’m capable of miracles,” she laughed.

“Sort of— yes. Absolutely.”

Augustine won the ancient argument. The church now remembers Donatus as not just a strict sanctificationist but a heretic. Even still, we miss the scandal of the gospel if we fail to grasp the soundness of Donatus’ judgment. If the word of God is not “living and active” then the character and fidelity of the church’s witnesses absolutely makes all the difference. If the tomb is not empty, then of course your pulpit should be filled by a proclaimer whose character cannot impeach the preaching. If Easter is untrue, this pulpit should certainly be filled by a preacher with fewer sins than me. A believer who recanted his faith and renounced Christ is a poor herald indeed if the LORD Jesus is not alive to speak for himself.

Donatus was right! The medium is the message. You cannot let a charlatan speak for the Son of God unless Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is not dead. In which case, I am not the medium at all. Nor are you.

As the Book of Psalm anticipates the gospel mystery:

"They cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He sent out his word and his word healed them, his word delivered them from their destruction.”

Here in the Gospel of Matthew, no sooner has Jesus concluded his Sermon on the Mount than an anxious centurion besets upon him as he enters Capernaum, “Lord, my child is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.”

The only person more unclean in all of Israel than this centurion is a leper.

Rome brought peace to the world the way a graveyard brings quiet.

The centurion may be a father, but he is also a man with blood on his boots. He is not just a Dad. He is an enemy. On officer for the despised colonial-imperial occupying power, the centurion is the leader of one hundred (a century) foot soldiers. He has pledged allegiance to an emperor he believes to be divine. But— like a masked, badge-less ICE agent kneeling before a migrant child— the centurion kneels before this penniless rabbi and appeals to Christ’s cosmic authority.

He calls him “LORD.”

“LORD, my child is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.”

Like the leper Jesus heals in the preceding scene, the centurion does not even petition Jesus. He simply states the fact of his situation, “My child is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.” In other words, merely telling the LORD about our lives is enough to set his saving work in motion.

We forget— God loves being our God.

Part of the problem we perceive in the alleged “problem of miracles” is our deficient memory. We forget that God loves being our God.

As Frederick Dale Bruner comments on this passage:

“The LORD we worship is almost inordinately ready to meet our needs.”

This willingness extends even wider than those who are counted as God’s people. Though the centurion, a Gentile, is barred from entering the LORD’s house— that is, the Temple in Jerusalem— the LORD Jesus eagerly offers to come to his home.

Immediately, Jesus responds to him, “I will come and heal him.”

Jesus does not speak truth to power. Jesus does not indict his enemy. Jesus does not shout his mother’s song about the mighty being made low. Jesus ignores the Caesar insignia on this man’s chest, and Jesus meets him with mercy. Jesus responds to this storm trooper's duress with a flagrant willingness to offend scruples, to cross boundaries, and to heal. Blessed are those who are not offended by a love this wide, Jesus had preached in his first sermon at Nazareth— before his listeners attempted to kill him.

“LORD, my child is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.

The centurion says.

“Sure! I’ll come to your house and heal him.”

God says.

But the centurion waves Jesus off with words the church later weaves into the communion liturgy, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.” Whether the centurion confesses his own unrighteousness or seeks to keep the peace by not trespassing Jewish law the passage is not clear. Or rather, the scripture is deliberately vague. In either case, the centurion knows the Great Physician does not need to make house calls. The Great Physician does not need to take your temperature or hand you a prescription. The Great Physician has no need for latex gloves, a thermometer, or a stethoscope. Why would he need them? He does not need to make a house call anymore than he needs you to pay for an office visit.

The Great Physician does not need to make house calls.

His word alone is sufficient. “LORD, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof,” he replies, “but only say the word, and my servant will be healed.” By the Holy Spirit, this centurion intuits not only Christ’s authority and goodness but also the power of his word. As the church father John Chrysostom preached on this passage, “The first four words of verse eight are the key to the story: alla monon eipe logo.”

But only say the word.

Just say, “Let there be” and it will be.

The healing of the centurion’s child is the first long-distance miracle in the Gospels.

“Pray for God to heal me. Just say the damn words,” Stanley implored me, “Pray for a damn miracle.”

Despite being a five hour drive away from him, he believed my words had the power to work what they say. As though if I could but speak, even death would listen.

Five hundred years after Augustine dealt with Donatus, Maximus the Confessor distilled the ancient church fathers into a culminating synthesis. Much like Augustine, Maximus defended Christian dogma during a time of fierce theological controversies, disputes which concerned the nature and work of Christ.

In synthesizing the church fathers, Maximus discovered that the scriptures provide an account of the mystery of Christ that in turn illumines the miracles of Christ.

So, for example, when the Logos descends into creation at the incarnation, Maximus teaches that the Word assumes not merely Mary’s flesh but penetrates all things. Christ can heal all of creation because Christ’s incarnation extends to every item of creation.

As the theologian Sergius Bulgakov writes, “It is totally incorrect to liken the world to a mechanism.” The world is not a machine. It is a living organism. It is a living organism exactly to the extent Christ inhabits all things.

The God who has an executioner dwells in all things.

In his two-volume work entitled Ambigua, Maximus the Confessor writes:

“All things exist and move and are preserved in Christ, the one Logos of God….Christ achieves the unity of the universe by fully uniting all things to himself…The Word of God, by becoming human, has made human nature, even creation itself, a vehicle of divine energy.”

Maximus arrives at this astonishing claim by trusting scripture to mean what it says. “In Christ,” Paul proclaims to the Colossians, “all things hold together.” “God the Father set forth the Son,” the Epistle to the Ephesians announces, “in order to unite all created things in him.” “That which is not assumed is not healed,” the church father Gregory of Nazianzus writes. And the scriptures make clear it is not only the sons and daughters of Eve who need salvation but all of creation. Therefore, as a consequence of the incarnation, all of creation becomes as Mary’s womb—filled with God, bearing his presence into the world.” This is what the apostle Paul means when he proclaims to the Athenians that in Christ “we live and move and have our being.”

Thus— pay attention now:

Jesus does not violate nature when he performs miracles.

Jesus does not violate nature when he performs miracles. Water into wine, loaves and fishes into a feast fit for the masses, cancer arrested—Jesus does not violate nature when he performs miracles because, as a consequence of the incarnation, Jesus already inhabits all of nature.

The infinite and the finite coincide not only in Christ’s flesh but in all flesh. All things.

The word can work in the world what it says. Jesus can but say the word and heal a storm trooper’s child. You can “just say the damn words,” and the words will do what you say because there is no place in creation— no one in creation: no quark, no cell, no tumor— where he is is not. Because he dwells in all things, there is no such thing as a long-distance miracle.

The Great Physician does not need to make house calls!

Because every where he might go, he is already there.

Not only is the healing of the centurion’s child the first long-distance miracle in the Gospels, this is the first instance of the LORD commending the faith of a believer. And for those convinced Jesus is a mere teacher or simply a truth-telling prophet, see how Jesus does not reject faith placed in him. Jesus does not see faith in him as contradicting faith in God. But notice! What Christ specifically credits is the centurion’s nude faith in the power of the Word to work it says. “Truly, I tell you,” Jesus says (surely offending everyone else within earshot), “with no one else in Israel have I found such faith.”

Even more bewildering, Jesus not only extols his Roman adversary’s faith, Jesus makes that faith the operative power of the child’s healing.

“Only say the word!” the centurion pleads with Jesus.

But what Jesus says is that the word does not need to work what it says at all. He does not tell the father, “My word has made him whole.” Jesus does not even inquire about the status of the child’s faith. He does not ask, “Does your son believe in me like you do?” or “Has he confessed his unworthiness?” “Has he repented and submitted to baptism?” On the contrary, Christ replies that the centurion’s faith is the power which has healed his child.

“It is done for you as you have believed,” Jesus tells him.

“And the child,” Matthew reports, “was healed at that very moment.”

The child is healed through another person’s faith.The child is healed through another person’s faith.Where faith speaks, even death listens.

But how?

How can my faith work miracles? How can someone’s faith work miracles for another? How can faith do what is Christ’s alone to work? As Frederick Dale Bruner presses the problem, “Isn’t the fountain more important than the channel, the source than the means?”

Last week, when my oncologist judged my monthly blood work and body exam to have been sufficiently encouraging to justify cancelling my upcoming PET scan, he snapped off his latex gloves and, in his thick Serbian accent, he said “These drugs are a miracle.”

He looked surprised when I said, “Amen.”

In response, he raised his eyebrows at me, “What— your faith has made you well?”

““It is done for you according to your faith.” And at that very moment, the servant was healed.”

But how?

How can faith heal?How can faith move mountains?How can faith work what only the Word can work?

The answer to the question comes by way of another question. The decisive and distinctive teaching of the Protestant Reformation, the principle message that Martin Luther recovered from the apostle Paul, is that sinners are justified by faith alone apart from works.

The Reformation slogan begs the very same question.

How does faith make us righteous?

As Robert Jenson writes, “Justification of the sinner is a mystery but it is not a paradox or a fiction.” Faith truly does fashion us into righteousness. When God declares those who hearken to the gospel in faith righteous, this is a judgment of fact not fiction.

But how can faith do such wonderful things?

Jenson answers:

“It is a theological maxim that God’s person and his attributes are the same reality. Therefore the forming of the soul by God’s righteousness is a ruling presence there of God himself. And since the gospel is the Word of God-in-Christ, God’s presence in the soul is specifically the presence of God-in-Christ. Thus Luther made it a principle of his theology: In ipsa fide Christus adest, “In such faith, Christ is present.” Faith makes us personally and actually righteous because faith is a transforming and ruling presence in us of the Righteous One himself.”

The incarnation extends to all of creation. The Son of God assumes not merely Mary’s flesh but all things. Including faith.

The centurion’s child is healed, yes.

But the fathomless mystery, the immeasurable miracle, is that the child’s father possesses Christ. The LORD standing before the centurion already simultaneously dwells within the centurion— by faith. In his simple faith, he has Christ. Faith can heal because the LORD Jesus Christ heals. Faith can move mountains because Jesus moves mountains. Faith can work what only the Word works because in faith the Word himself is present.

This is the miracle.

Not that Jesus heals from a distance.

But that faith makes Jesus present.

That through faith the Righteous One dwells within you.

That even if all you’ve got is a mustard seed’s worth of faith Christ is living like a squatter within you.

If it took every ounce of your faith just to show up here— even death will listen!

“What— your faith has made you well?” My doctor asked, his dubious expression lifting his eyebrows above his glasses, “Or maybe God has done it.”

“There’s no difference,” I said.

And once again he looked surprised.

Years ago, when Stanley asked me to “just say the damn words,” I did.

And we both believed that Christ heard us.

Not because of who I was. Not because of who he is.

But because Christ was already there.

In us.

And when Jesus speaks, even death listens.

It is not always so.

There are twenty names on our congregational prayer list, and now there is a war in Iran added to it. The cup does not always pass from us. It did not pass from him. Not every storm listens. Not every cancer clears. Not every prayer is answered—at least not in the way we dared to speak it.

It’s not magic. It’s not a transaction. There’s no formula, no spell.

But it is a miracle.

It’s a miracle because Christ is present.

In ipsa fide Christus adest.

Even in faith as small as the one that dragged you here today, Christ is. Even in a whisper, he’s there. Even in doubt, he's near. And where Christ is, the Word is, and where the Word is, there is power.

Power to call dead things out of tombs. Power to give life to what you thought was beyond reach. Power to make even your shaky, mustard-seed faith a means of mercy for someone else.

So, no—it’s not always that the cup passes.But it is always the case that when you pray, you don’t pray alone. When you believe, you don’t believe in vain. When you dare to speak the word, the Word is already in you, eager, like the Son to the centurion, saying: “I will come. I will heal.”

This is the miracle.

Not that God answers every prayer just as we plead it.

But that when we pray, when we believe, when we say the damn words—

The Father and the Son and the Spirit listen.

And when God listens, even Death does too.

So come.
Come to the Table.

The loaf and the cup—they are not magic.
But don’t be fooled by the absence of spectacle.

They are miracle.

They are the miracle that the Word who made all things took flesh and hasn’t let it go.
They are the miracle that the Word who spoke galaxies into being now nestles himself in bread and wine, into the hands of sinners and saints, into lips that confess and lips that tremble.

They are the miracle that Christ, in all his mercy and might, dwells in you.

You!

Not because you are worthy, but because you are willing to come. Not because you are holy, but because you dare to speak, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word…” That word— that same word spoken by the centurion, the same word we speak every time we come to this meal—that word still works what it says.

It is no accident that the Church placed the centurion’s words into the liturgy of the Table.

This Table is Capernaum.

This is where the boundary between heaven and earth thins. This Table is the place where Jesus comes under the roof of our unworthiness. This Table is the place where faith speaks, and Christ responds, “I will come. I will heal.”

So come.

Take.
And eat.
Speak the Word.
Or simply hold it in trembling faith.

Because whether the Word dwells on your lips or burns in your heart—
the Word works what it says.

And what that Word has said—finally, fully, and forever—is, “It is finished.”

That is not resignation.
That is resurrection.

That is Christ, risen, ruling, and real. In this bread. In this cup. In you.
By faith.

So come.
Receive the miracle.

Not that your cancer is gone.

Not that your prayers get answered as you hope.

Not that you get out of life alive.

But that when you dare to say the Word, the Word is already in you.

Already listening.
Already healing.
Already risen.

Already speaking!

And when Jesus speaks—even death listens.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

"Grace is the destruction of the world’s antimonies"

If you appreciate my work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

The lectionary epistle reading for this coming Sunday of ordinary time is Galatians 3.23-29. Here is a passage on the text from my book A Quid without Any Quo: Gospel Freedom According to Galatians— get it!

And be on the lookout for my upcoming book, The Tonto Principle: Studies in the Sermon on the Mount.

Read more

"Not in His Wrongness"

If you appreciate the work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

To be blunt, but I sometimes wonder if an ailment afflicting Christ’s body is that too many of her public proclaimers appear not to like their hearers.

At some point during the inaugural year of the Iowa Preachers Project, I commended Angela Dienhart Hancock’s wonderful book Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic to the cohort of preachers. Hancock provides a historical account of the “preaching exercises” Barth taught his students off-line in 1932-1933. For such endeavors, Adolf Hitler eventually exiled Barth back to Switzerland. Barth’s underground lectures on preaching became the powerful, little book entitled Homiletics. He offered the exercises simply because the Professor of Homiletics at his school had been an early adopter of National Socialism.

Hancock’s research provides helpful— sobering— context to the sort of preaching dominant in the Protestant churches prior to their capitulation to Nazism. For example, most Protestants in Germany during the last years of the Weimar Republic were accustomed to the same sorts of sermons prevalent in the American churches today— thematic sermons aimed at practical “Christian” living that often had only a single verse of scripture as their text.

Having been weaned off the Word of God, it is little wonder, Barth judged, that such preachers and hearers lacked the resources to “know what time it is.”

To my surprise members of the IPP cohort heeded my advice and read Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic; just so, I’ve been revisiting the pages I dog-eared and the paragraphs I underlined and the comments I scribbled in the margins.

In Session 7 of his preaching exercises on June 27, 1933, Barth departed from the theology of preaching to the actual design of the sermon. Here Barth infamously eschewed the sermon introduction as both unnecessary for practical reasons and anathema to belief in the Holy Spirit.

“Why do people come to church?” Barth asked his students.

“To hear a word from the LORD,” Barth answered.

Thus preachers do not need to lure their listeners; they’re already invested in the undertaking. And because their presence already evidences their investment, “the whole worship service already leads into the sermon!” After dismissing sermon introductions that seek to establish a point of contact with contemporary events or our modern time, Barth warns his students against “the negative introduction.”

A familiar rhetorical move in the preaching of his day, the negative introduction is one which “indulges in the description of the sins and weaknesses of humanity so the Word of God can shine all the more brightly against this background.” Barth has in mind a sort of reflexive Law vs. Gospel preaching that renders Luther’s distinction between command and promise into a mere trope. We might call such a homiletic today “fire and brimstone preaching.”

Barth’s admonition against such a starting point is instructive both to preachers and those who endure them. As Stanley Hauerwas likes to say— a lesson learned from Barth, “To know yourself a sinner is an achievement. You only know sin on your way out of it. The Gospels are told retrospectively from the vantage point of the empty tomb.” Saul only understood his grave, gross error after the Risen Christ encountered him on the Road to Damascus. The good news begins not with sin but with resurrection, and the one the Father and Spirit raised from the dead is the Son who died for the ungodly.

If sermon introductions are theologically problematic, the negative introduction is especially so, for in the name of eliciting their hearers anxious attention, preachers risk nothing less than the gospel itself.

Barth instructed his students:

“We are not permitted to greet the hearer with a cold shower. For then the great danger develops that we use the word of the Bible only as a club, which we swing with growing passion against these sinful people.”

In session 7, a student responded to Barth by suggesting that a preacher might “aim at the old Adam in people and then oppose to this old Adam the great “But!” of God.” Whether he knew it or not, the student was appealing to the logic of Law and Gospel preaching, or, as the New Homiletic trend of the late twentieth century framed it, Problem and Solution.

Barth more or less said, “Nein!”

He responded:

“A preacher should not see their hearer primarily in his/her wrongness. Their wrongness then becomes the secret theme of the entire sermon, regardless of the biblical text. Instead, let the Word itself show the way.”

“A preacher should not see their hearer primarily in his wrongness.”

Again—

Barth offered these underground lectures in 1932-1933. He warns his students of preaching not to view hearers through the prism of their wrongs during a time of totalitarian propaganda, widespread complicity, and ecclesial fracture. To catch the prophetic offense of Barth’s counsel, insert more timely characterizations such as partisan antagonism, ICE raids that terrorize immigrant families, and a looming potential conflict with Iran. To understand the gravity of Barth’s teaching, one must first grasp the stakes of his context. The Confessing Church stood against the co-opted “German Christians,” a movement that had bent the knee to Hitler’s nationalistic theology. Barth’s homiletic project, formed in the crucible of this ecclesial emergency, was neither abstract nor sentimental. The preacher stood before congregations divided, some enthralled by Nazi ideology, others terrified, and many complicit through silence.

What should be said to such a people?Barth’s answer: the gospel.

Barth’s answer to his own question, as Hancock documents, is not to begin with the listener’s error, even when that error is manifest and dangerous. Instead, preaching begins with the proclamation of God’s Word— God’s claim, God’s promise, God’s reconciling action.

She summarizes Barth’s seventh lecture:

“The preacher is not to fixate on what the hearer has gotten wrong...the preacher’s fundamental stance is not to expose the sinner but to announce reconciliation.”

For Barth, the pulpit is not the throne of judgment because the One we proclaim is the Judge Judged in Our Place. Barth resists the preacher’s temptation to exhort, condemn, and finger-wag. “Let us” sermons can also amount to fire and brimstone preaching. Barth’s lesson is not a call to ignore sin, but to relocate it— to preach through it, not at it.

And this is where Barth the Theologian meets the Barth the Homiletician, for he is summoning preachers to an act of faith— trust, not in the hearer’s innocence but in the Word’s power.

I recommended Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic precisely because Barth’s logic flies in the face of contemporary preaching trends, especially in a time of entrenched polarization. In the United States today, many pulpits function as platforms of tribal reassurance or as tools of moral indictment. Most of what passes for gospel is but glawspel— the gospel mixed and muddled with the law.

All the cultural and ecclesial incentives tempt preachers either to coddle the like-minded or to excoriate the other side.

Yet Barth, through Hancock’s careful reading, offers a third path— not silence, not appeasement, not prophetic bombast but proclamation.

Barth insists:

“Preaching is not a moral lecture. It is the announcement of God’s action. It does not ignore the wrongness of the world, but it refuses to reduce the hearer to that wrongness.”

Barth’s point is thoroughly theological; the gospel starts with resurrection.We are not first of all sinners!We are first creatures, created and reconciled in Christ.

In a sermon that is truly theological, no side is affirmed uncritically.

Only then, in the light of that Word, does our sin come into view. Only then can it be judged as that which has already been overcome. Such a stance does not lend itself to partisan manipulation. In a sermon that is truly theological, Barth argues, no side is affirmed uncritically. Everyone is placed under judgment. And yet, astonishingly, everyone is also placed under grace. This is not a message that can be co-opted by any ideology—not by the left’s pursuit of justice, nor the right’s appeal to order and tradition.

For Barth, the sermon is not where we confirm our side is right and theirs is wrong.

It is the place where God speaks a new world into being.

Not to be blunt, but I sometimes wonder if a problem afflicting Christ’s body is that too many of her public proclaimers appear not to like their hearers. The preacher must not take the hearer, Barth says, “by the scruff of the neck” and hold him over the fire. Instead, Barth teaches that the preacher must speak to the hearer as one already claimed by God’s grace.

Even the masked, faceless, badge-less agents arresting people off the streets.

Even the chicken-hawkish senators.

Even the progressive mayoral candidates in NYC normalizing anti-Semitism.

This is not to let anyone off the hook—it is, in fact, a more radical indictment. It says, “You are not your sin. You are not your politics. You are God’s.”

For Barth, this also reshapes what the preacher is for.

The preacher is not an agent of critique, but a herald of reconciliation.

The preacher is not an advocate for one side, but a minister of Christ’s new humanity.

Barth’s homiletic gives no quarter to neutrality or passivity; but it insists that God—not the preacher—does the convicting. The preacher announces what is true in Christ, and then lets living word to have its way with us.

I commended Angela Hancock’s reading of Barth to the cohort of preachers because I find it pastorally vital. At a time when— seemingly— every issue is a litmus test, every cause a cause to change our profile picture, and every sermon a potential landmine, Barth calls preachers back to the simplicity and scandal of the gospel.

Preach not first against your hearers’ wrongness, but announce their reconciliation.

See your hearer not primarily in their distortion, but in their rectification.

Name the wrong— certainly, but name sin only as forgiven sin.

Point out trespasses only because they are already overcome in Christ.

Again, if the gospel of the justification of the ungodly has been preached, then no side is affirmed uncritically but neither is any side condemned ungraciously.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

Jesus Changes Everything

If you appreciate my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Here is the most recent discussion of Stanley Hauerwas’ new collection, Jesus Changes Everything.

And here is an excerpt from Stanley’s commentary on the Gospel of Matthew:

The procedure outlined by Jesus in Matt. 18 is how and what it means for his disciples to be at peace with one another. Jesus assumes that those who follow him will wrong one another and, subsequently, they will be caught in what may seem irresolvable conflict. The question is not whether such conflict can be eliminated, but how his followers are to deal with conflict. He assumes that conflict is not to be ignored or denied, but rather conflict, which may involve sins, is to be forced into the open. Christian discipleship requires confrontation because the peace that Jesus has established is not simply the absence of violence. The peace of Christ is nonviolent precisely because it is based on truth and truth-telling. Just as love without truth cannot help but be accursed, so peace between the brothers and sisters of Jesus must be without illusion. Yet we must confess that truth is about the last thing most of us want to know about ourselves. We may say that the truth saves, but in fact we know that any truth, particularly the truth that is Jesus, is as disturbing as it is fulfilling. That is why Jesus insists that those who would follow him cannot let sins go unchallenged. If we fail to challenge one another in our sins, we in fact abandon one another to our sin. We show how little we love our brother and sister by our refusal to engage in the hard work of reconciliation. Peter, the stumbling block, understands the implications of what Jesus requires. He asks, “If another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

We cannot help but be sympathetic with Peter’s question, because it simply seems contrary to good sense to offer unlimited forgiveness. What kind of community would be sustained on the presumption that forgiveness is always to be offered? Peter’s question presupposes that he is the one who has been sinned against. He assumes that he is in the position of power against the one who has wronged him. But Jesus’s reply reminds Peter that he is to learn to be the forgiven. Jesus tells him not seven times, but “seventy-seven times.” There is no limit to the forgiveness offered by the Father through the Son. If there were a limit to the Father’s forgiveness, then Peter would no longer be a disciple.

The demand that Christians learn to forgive one another presupposes that we are a people who have first been forgiven. “Seventy-seven times” echoes Lev. 25:8 and the establishment of the jubilee year. The forgiveness to be exercised in the church is possible because the jubilee has come in Jesus. Accordingly, the forgiveness that marks the church is a politics that offers an alternative to the politics based on envy, hatred, and revenge. This is the politics that Jesus taught when teaching us to pray by asking that our debts be forgiven as we forgive our debtors. The new age has begun unleashing into the world a new people, a new politics called church determined by the forgiveness wrought in this man Jesus.

The political character of Jesus’s response to Peter is made clear by Jesus’s parable of the servant who, having been forgiven his debt by his king, refuses to forgive a fellow servant his debt. The king of the unforgiving servant, on being informed about his servant’s behavior, has him tortured until he would pay his debt. And so, we are told, our “heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” We must remember, if we are to be peacemakers capable of confronting one another with our sins, that we have first been forgiven and we are, therefore, members of a community of the forgiven. As the parable makes clear, the forgiveness that makes peace possible is not without judgment. The question is not whether we are to hold one another accountable, but what is the basis for doing so and how is that to be done.

To be sinned against or to know that we have sinned requires that we have the habits of speech that make it possible to know what it is to be a sinner. On only this basis do we have the capacity to avoid arbitrariness of judgment that results from the assumption we must be our own creator. That is why it is so important that the church continually attend to the language necessary to name sin as sin. Lying, adultery, stealing are not just wrong or just mistakes. They are sin.

Throughout his ministry Jesus teaches us what it means to be a disciple. Our task is to learn how to be for one another exemplifications of what he has taught. This includes our ability to speak the truth in love, which is made possible only by our having no sin to hide. Jesus is now on his way to Jerusalem. Along the way he will continue to instruct the disciples on matters dealing with divorce, possessions, and hierarchy. We should not be surprised that he does so, because he has called into existence a community capable of living truthful and, thus, reconciled lives.3

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

In a World Without Stories, Miracles are Just Anomalies

If you appreciate my work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

Miracles are not simply about divine power overcoming natural resistance; miracles are the revelation that nature itself is destined for transformation.

On Sunday, I began a long sermon series in which I will preach through the miracles of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. In no small part, I want to help my hearers think theologically about the miraculous. My sense, after twenty-five years in ministry, is that believers tend to treat the New Testament’s miracle stories as narrative devices, non-literal illustrations or, as John frames them, signs that point to the identity of the LORD Jesus. But those same Christians have no qualms about submitting names for their church’s prayer list.

This is a problem.

For the problem of miracles just is the problem of prayer.

To petition the Father in prayer is nothing less than to ask for a miracle.

So I’ve been thinking about miracles.

Not everything in my notes thus far made it into Sunday’s sermon.

In an essay originally published in the journal First Things and now included in his book Revisionary Metaphysics, Robert Jenson asserts:

“In a world without stories, miracles are just anomalies.”

By stories, Jens means Story with a capital S. Without a narrative which posits an Author and so coherence to the events of history, time is just one damn thing after another and miracles are mistaken as random, fortuitous events. Without a meta- narrative, miracles are, at best, anomalies—events that appear to interrupt the normal course of nature but lack explanatory coherence. At worst, they are dismissed outright as premodern illusions or manipulations.

Thomas Jefferson, founder of my alma mater, exemplifies modern discomfort with the claims of the scriptures. Beginning in the Enlightenment, the modern world tends to view nature as a closed, autonomous system governed entirely by impersonal physical laws. Correlatively, the modern world— even the default Christianity of most modern believers— views God not unlike Jefferson’s distant Clockmaker, who having once created the universe now relates to it in a hands-off manner. Thus the God of most modern “belief” is immune to time; just so, the God of most modern “belief” is the god of the religion of Plato— immune to time. So understood, miracles are nothing less than divine intrusions into time.

Jenson cuts to the heart of this impasse.

Jenson insists that the problem of miracles (and thus petitionary prayer) is not with miracles per se, but with the modern world’s loss of narrative. For Jenson, creation is not a neutral arena of events, but a dramatized sequence authored by the triune God. Miracles are not exceptions to the world’s order, but disclosures of its true telos.

Since Jens lives rent-free in my head, readers will know already that central to his theological vision is the claim that God is identified by the story of Israel and Jesus. “The God of the gospel,” he writes, “is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ.” For Jens, divine identity is not abstract or static; it is revealed narratively, as a movement from promise to fulfillment. This movement is not outside time but internal to it.

As he writes:

“God is not timeless. He is the one who keeps his promises.”

Put differently, the ontology of God is narrative; creation itself is storied.

Time is not the residue of past divine activity but the medium of God’s self-communication. If creation is storied, then miracles are no longer violations of the universe’s structure but its truthful appearances. “Miracles,” Jens writes, “are the intrusive visibility of the real world’s truth in a world that denies it.”

Far from being anomalous, the miraculous is revelatory.

Miracles, answers to prayer— they signal the in-breaking of the eschatological future, the Last Future where the Risen Jesus lives as its first resident, into the present. There is a reason he titles his book Revisionary Metaphysics. Jens’ claim that the world is a story stands in intentional conflict with the Enlightenment view of nature as a mechanistic system. Jefferson et al presumed a world of isolated causality, where the laws of physics and biology function deterministically; A.I., it should be noted, relies upon the very same view of creation— it assumes that Jesus is not alive so as to be able to surprise us.

But if Jesus is alive, then miracles are neither irrational nor intrusive, for the the world is not a closed system. If creation is teleologically shaped by the God who raised Jesus from the dead—then miracles are not anomalies but signs of the world’s actual grammar.

Jenson, as well as, for example, the theologian Sergius Bulgakov, regard the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the paradigmatic miracle. Easter is not merely one event among others; it is the climax of the divine narrative within history. “The resurrection,” Jens writes, “is the eschaton within history. It is God’s final word spoken early.” The resurrection reveals the world’s true End—reconciliation, not decay.

All other miracles— even those which precede it in Israel’s scriptures— participate in the miracle that is Resurrection.

As Bulgakov stresses:

“The resurrection is the triumph of the Holy Spirit, not as suspension of death’s law but as the unveiling of life’s deeper law.

The risen Christ discloses the world’s true End: not entropy, but theosis. All miracles, understood in this light, are akin to the Transfiguration: present-day anticipations of the Last Future.

Jenson thus reframes the meaning of miracle.

It is not simply about divine power overcoming natural resistance. It is the revelation that nature itself is destined for transformation. And this where the alleged problem of miracles is but the problem of petitionary prayer. They both rely upon providence. That is, miracles are not exceptions to divine governance; they are— in concentrated form— expressions of it.

As the providence of God made flesh, it is no wonder then that miracles follow Jesus as much as outbreaks of the Spirit.

For Jens, prayer is nothing less than participation in providence, and the miraculous is but the LORD’s response to our petition. Just so, miracles are integrally linked to human participation. Jens argues that prayer is not an attempt to influence an otherwise deterministic system— this is exactly how many Christians imagine prayer. Prayer is rather participation in the shaping of time by God.

He writes:

“To pray is to be drawn into God’s own providential ordering of time.”

In other words—

Because creation is storied, the world is governed not merely by causality but by promise.

As the people called to proclaim that gospel promise, the church is thus not simply the body that remembers miracles. She is the sphere in which miracles continue to occur.

Because the church knows the Story, she is the body who knows to notice miracles.And to name them as such.

Starting with the ordinary miracles of loaf and cup, word and water.

As Jens puts it:

“The Church the miracle of time’s healing.”

The sacraments and the gospel word that attaches to them are reminders that miracles are not irrational intrusions into an impervious material order. They are manifestations of a deeper rationality—a divine logos that orders all things toward communion.

In a world with a Story, miracles are not anomalies.

They are announcements.

The Author is risen indeed.

And his Spirit yet speaks.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

Help Us: Prayers of Fleming Rutledge

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

In advance of the celebration for Fleming Rutledge this past week, Teer Hardy and I compiled and transcribed the prayers Fleming has prayed on the podcast over the past many years. We’ve put them into a collection along with a transcription of the online Bible study Fleming led for my church in the early days of the pandemic. Sadly, it wasn’t ready for me to give her a hard copy last week.

You can get the collection here .

Here is the Foreword Teer wrote for the collection.

The Word Still Speaks: On the Prayers of Fleming Rutledge

There’s a danger in writing forewards like this. You can end up sounding like you are handing out a lifetime achievement award, or worse, offering a eulogy for someone who is very much still preaching, teaching, and correcting the Church with more gospel clarity than most of us dare to attempt. So let me just say this: Fleming Rutledge changed my preaching. Not because I wanted to be a better speaker or needed more literary illustrations to impress the pew, but because I finally heard what it sounds like when the Word of God is proclaimed without apology, sentimentality, or self-help strategies masquerading as grace. Fleming taught me to stop writing “Let us” sermons. You know the ones: “Let us be more generous,” “Let us love more boldly,” “Let us live into resurrection.” On the surface, these statements sound like an invitation. They can be inspirational but end up as another version of the law, placing the burden back on the hearer to accomplish what only God can do. Fleming’s preaching and prayers refuse to let us get away with that. She does not give us a checklist. She gives us Christ. Crucified. Risen. Coming again. She gives us a promise. This collection of prayers is soaked in that same Christ-centered conviction. These are not performative petitions or polite liturgical filler. Each one was spoken spontaneously—without script or rehearsal—at the end of a podcast episode, and yet they reveal the depth of Fleming’s personal faith and theological conviction. These are the prayers of someone who trusts that God is not just listening but acting. Consider the prayer that cries out: “Dear Lord, we don’t know how to say what you want us to say… But you know, and it’s your will, to speak through the most unexpected people at the most unexpected times” (Episode 121). That is a word for every preacher who has stared down a pulpit with nothing but a blank page and a desperate hope that the Spirit will show up. Or take this, a benediction disguised as lament: “Oh Lord, let us never forget that we are part of the problem… Save us from ourselves over and over and over again, as you have always done” (Episode 95). Fleming does not flatter the Church; she intercedes for it. And as one who has spent more time in the pulpit because of her encouragement, I can testify that these prayers are a gift for preachers and anyone clinging to the hope that the gospel is true. Even her prayers for the nation refuse to traffic in cheap civic religion: “Do not let the hope of the world in the United States become lost. Please do not let the Statue of Liberty’s torch become meaningless” (Episode 51). These are not abstract theological meditations. These are honest prayers offered for real people in real pain. Her voice is both prophetic and pastoral, unafraid to name the darkness but even more insistent on proclaiming the light: “Make us citizens of that kingdom, Lord… Turn our face to the light, the light that comes at the end of all time… the hope that places all its resources in the promises that you have made to us in your beloved Son” (Episode 185). To read these prayers is to overhear a preacher who actually believes this stuff. And more than that, someone who trusts that God is still at work in pulpits, pews, podcasts, and even in people like you and me. So if you are looking for a collection of eloquent sentiments, you may be disappointed. But if you want to encounter the living God, through the trembling voice of one of his most faithful heralds, listen closely. Fleming is still preaching.

Thanks be to God.

Soli Deo Gloria

Eastertide 2025