Jason Micheli's Blog, page 73
June 13, 2023
All Things Happen by God’s Will
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Last week in an essay, I noted how the doctrine of predestination is simply the doctrine of justification in the active voice.
Predestination, then, is a hermeneutical rule for those believers who would speak gospel to another person. The passive voice: You are justified by God (in Christ, by grace, through faith alone). Put in the active voice: God alone justifies you (in Christ, by grace, through faith).
Because it’s a rule for proclamation, predestination is a work of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. As such, predestination does not name the pre-temporal sorting of fates, as many imagine. Rather predestination occurs in the present as the act in time of the Spirit-empowered proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection; that is, when someone speaks to you the promises made by Christ’s resurrection, that event is the event of God’s choice about you.
However, this move, shifting predestination from the first article of the creed to the third, does not guarantee the doctrine will no longer be a stumbling block to Christians and something worse than foolishness to unbelievers. The logic is simple and a strict corollary to the doctrine of justification. If God alone justifies and if God does it in the very announcing of it, then this God cannot be the distant clockmaker god of the deists.
God wills in the act of gospeling. Just so, God’s will encompasses all acts.To say that God’s love is unconditional is to say also that God’s will is absolute and unmotivated by any external contingencies. This is the claim implicit in the message that sinners are justified on account of Christ alone apart from works. Herein lies the problem for many modern people, for if the will of God for our ultimate fulfillment is indeed unconditional, as the gospel promises, then then will that acts in this promise must be a will that encompasses all events whatsoever. The God of the Gospel cannot be a passive observer of his people. If God’s will is not determining at any moment of reality’s history, then there will sometimes be valid responses to the gospel that begin, “Yes…but.”
As Robert Jenson puts the matter bracingly clear:
It is a strict corollary to the Reformation doctrine of justification: All things happen by God’s will.This is merely a restatement of Martin Luther’s insight in the Bondage of the Will:
“For if you doubt…that God foreknows and wills all things, not contingently but necessarily and immutably, how will you be able…to rely on his promises?”
Our discomfort with justification’s correlative reveals our functional atheism. Believers can abide a god who is a cosmic butler, swooping into our lives to clean up a mess when called upon. We can tolerate a god who is, for all intents and purposes, a genie without a bottle. But we take deep offense at the suggestion that our destiny is in no wise under our control but determined entirely by the one on whom we are utterly dependent.
Predestination does indeed remove us from the pedestal on which we place ourselves. God is God and we are not— at all. The very word God presumes a version of predestination. “If we interpret God as indeed God so that we are not God,” Jenson writes, “we thereby posit some mode of predestination.”
The word God marks the point where the metaphysical buck stops.Because the Bible testifies to the finite, linear nature of reality— just as creation had a beginning, it will have a Fulfillment— the End will arrive by way of a last word from God, a decisive choice by God, i.e., predestination. Ultimately, God will decide what to do with the history he has made with us. On this basis, fear of predestination, Jenson wagers, is actually fear of God.
Fear of predestination is fear of God.
While it is a corollary to the Reformation’s doctrine of justification to insist that all things happen by God’s will, this conclusion is not unique to Protestantism. Theologians in the Middle Ages worked out the matter subtle clarity.
Whatever God wills must indeed happen— and exactly as God wills it.
Thus, if God wills some things to happen as acts of human choice, then they will happen and happen in no other way but this way.
Romans is one such example in scripture God willing some things to happen by free choice:
“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts…”
This axiom makes it conspicuous that if the God of the Bible is the true and living God, then the free will of popular conception is a fiction. The notion that God’s will and my will stand in competition is unintelligible. The implications of this axiom are likewise unavoidable.
If every happening happens by God’s will, then the will of God soon appears morally suspect to us.Ironically, God’s will appears morally dubious precisely on the basis of his self-revelation in Jesus. Should God not be at least as nice as Jesus? Jenson does not shy away from the offense:
“If God wills all things, God in some way wills Auschwitz and the torture of the child in Ivan Karamazov’s fable, and the damnation of the damned if God chooses.”
How do we reconcile this absolute will with the crucified love of the God-who-is-human? If all things happen by God’s will, then evidently God has two— not obviously identical— wills at work in the world. The distinction between these two absolute wills is what we can know.
The will of God proclaimed in the gospel is absolute by the immutability of its known content: God’s gospel-affirmation of us is independent of all conditions. The will of God posited as the prius of all events, on the other hand, is absolute precisely by the absence of known content: whatever happens, God will it.Martin Luther spoke of these two absolute wills as the difference between the hidden God and the preached God. The naked God whose will is hidden behind the events of the world can only stagger us in terror or revulsion; therefore, we always ought to run to the preached God, the God who has clothed himself in the gospel promise. This seemingly split personality in the godhead has caused many to run away altogether from the problem posed by predestination.
Run away from the problems prompted by predestination, though, and you leave behind any real God afoot in the world.Rather than evade the question, Robert Jenson once again returns to the third article of the creed and the work of the Holy Spirit:
“We will only be able to rightly interpret the unity of God’s absolute will only if we make Spirit-discourse— rather than Father-discourse or Son-discourse— the primary locus of our interpretation.”
When we locate predestination under the first article’s doctrine of God, we end up postulating explanations for the world’s suffering and evil, so called “theodicies.” When we locate it instead under the third article’s work of the Spirit, we see the world’s suffering and evil as a matter of faith. Crucially, the Holy Spirit, as the one who raised the Son from the dead and who comes to us in the gospel from the last future where the Risen Jesus now resides, is the “Power of the future.”
The Holy Spirit is the Power of the future.
How the God of the gospel can be one and the same with the Will who wills all events is thus, necessarily, “the one truth about God reserved for the End, when we shall see God face-to-face.”
After all, as Hebrews puts it plainly, faith can only trust what is now hidden. If nothing of God was hidden, faith would having nothing to trust. By shifting predestination to the Power of the Future’s work and by relinquishing the attempt to know now how God’s two apparent wills are one, “faith becomes,” Jenson argues, “what it is in Reformation discourse— a desperate conflict within an encompassing hope”
For Christ’s sake, faith just is nothing other than trusting the God who rules this world, when all the available evidence suggests, as Woody Allen jokes, that God is basically an underachiever.
And because it’s a matter of faith, there is no guarantee it will succeed.
Faith is the reality that the hiddenness of God’s goodness may one day in fact defeat faith.As Jenson writes:
The Spirit, the Predestining God, is the Power of the Future. Short of the End, therefore, we cannot conceive how ________ (choose a tragic disaster) comports with the will of Jesus’s Father.“As seen in the gospel, God’s will is absolute because it is immutably determined as love. As seen in the total course of events, God’s will is absolute in that it is absolutely undetermined— what happens, happens because of God. Precisely the synthesis of these two determinations is the notion of the Spirit.”1
Until the Fulfillment, we’re left with the inextricable claims of the promise:
“God alone ordains your salvation” is a necessary form of the gospel.
“God alone ordains all” is its necessary correlative.
If the supposition that we cannot reconcile the two on this side of the End is so dissatisfying as to be offensive, then it is at least sober and straightforward about how much faith, in this world, demands of those who dare it.
Read Tamed Cynic in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app1How the Holy Spirit as the Power of the Future addresses the traditional concerns of theodicy will have to be a post for another day.
June 12, 2023
"You Had Me at Karl Barth"
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My podcast partner, Teer Hardy, and I recently sat down our new bishop, Sue Haupert-Johnson to talk about her faith without using stained glass language. Let’s just say she had me when she mentioned her fondness for Karl Barth and Flannery O’Connor.
Bishop Sue talks with us about her conversion experience, finding friends of faith while clerking for a federal judge, giving up the life of a fancy lawyer, and the Risen Jesus who interrupted the plans she’d had for her life.
A little biographical information:
Bishop Sue Haupert-Johnson was elected bishop by the 2016 Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference (SEJ) of The United Methodist Church and consecrated July 15, 2016. Her first assignment as bishop was to the North Georgia Episcopal Area beginning September 1, 2016. She was assigned to the Virginia Conference at the 2022 SEJ Conference.
A Florida native, Bishop Haupert-Johnson (or “Bishop Sue”) is a graduate of the University of Florida (B.S. in Business Administration), University of Florida College of Law (J.D.), and Candler School of Theology at Emory University (M.Div.). She was a federal law clerk and a litigator with the Tampa law firm of Carlton, Fields before she answered her call to ministry.
She graduated summa cum laude from Candler School of Theology at Emory University.
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June 11, 2023
Because He Lives, We Can Describe Tomorrow
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Revelation 21.1-6, 9-27
On Tuesday, just after Huguenot High’s graduation ceremony at the Altria Theater in Richmond, a friend of mine from high school marked herself safe on social media. Shanea had just survived a mass shooting that killed two and injured several others. All told, seven victims were shot.
There is so much bad news in the world.
On Tuesday Shanea became the fourth person I have known who has been involved in a mass school shooting. One was a cross-country coach in Parkland, Florida. Another was an agriculture student at Virginia Tech. Still another was an undertaker who went to Newtown, Connecticut to put parents’s babies back together for their burials.
Four people I’ve known— it’s easier than the Kevin Bacon game.
I suppose it’s not surprising statistic given that guns are the leading cause of death in America for children and teenagers.
Tuesday was the two hundred and fourth mass shooting this year.
There is so much bad news in the world.
Since 2001, the suicide rate for youth ages ten to nineteen rose by forty percent while hospitalization for self-harm increased by eighty-eight percent. “The kids are not all right,” writes one columnist, “and neither are the adults.” As religious observance has declined, deaths of despair have ticked up sharply across every age cohort and demographic group.
And maybe self-medicating despair is the sanest response to the world.
After all, there is so much bad news.
Sea temperatures are the hottest on record. Siberia is suffering through a heat wave— Siberia. Thanks in no small part to a warming planet, much of Canada burns in a blaze, the wildfires choking much of America with a toxic haze. Sixty-three percent of Democrats believe Republicans are immoral. Seventy-two percent of Republicans believe Democrats are crooked. Majorities in both report that violence against the other might be necessary in the near future, and, if necessary, justified.
There is so much bad news.
Vladimir Putin has stolen sixteen thousand Ukrainian children. Eighteen thousand of those children’s parents have been killed in action. For no real reason.
“We are safe,” my friend posted on Tuesday evening, “but we are not ok.”
There is so much bad news.
Sometimes it seems like bad news is the only news.Except—We do have good news: He is risen.In a world without much of it, we’ve been given good news.
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
And on the basis of that good news, we can do what no one else in the world dare. We may make promises about the future. Even better, we may give content to this future. We may describe the future.
We can describe now the not yet future.Because Jesus lives with death behind him, because Jesus rules from the Father’s right hand, because Jesus will come again, consummating what he has accomplished upon the the cross, the outcome of history will be different than it would be otherwise. And because the one who lives and rules and will return is Jesus, we can make promises about history’s outcome.
We can tell the future. We don’t need even need a crystal ball or tarot cards. We just need three little words: He is risen. Armed with the gospel alone, I can tell your fortune.
Skeptical?
Watch me:
Your future— your destiny, in fact— is inclusion in the triune life.
Your future is Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and you. Your future is inclusion in the triune life by virtue of the Son— that’s the work of baptism— and, just so, incorporation into a perfected human community. The future is Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and you and you and you and you…ad infinitum. This is what Paul straightforwardly says to the Colossians:
“You have died [with Christ, through baptism] and your life right now is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him.”
How? Where?
“In glory,” Paul writes.
Because he lives, we can describe tomorrow.
As Luther put it, the future for the baptized is “to have all he is and has.”Your future is to have all God is and all God has— that’s a good fortune. The promise of the gospel— the promise promises that one day, in the fullness of time, on account of Christ alone, God will include you in his glory. And not just you. Yes, there is much bad news in the world. But your future— the Future, the last future— is to share in the glory of God. That’s The End.
Here’s the rub.
No creature has ever beheld the glory of God. Uzzah, in Second Samuel, brushed up against the glory of God on accident and it struck him dead. Moses had to hide his face in the cleft of a rock when God’s glory passed by him and it still disfigured him.
Hence our future is a glory none can yet see.Therein lies the paradox. Because he lives, we may describe tomorrow. Yet we can only describe what, in our mind’s eye, we are able to see.And how can we possibly picture what Moses himself was not permitted to glimpse?
The last future that is your future is your inclusion into the eternal life of the three person’d God. Look, it’s hard enough to ponder how God can be three persons yet still one. It’s altogether impossible to riddle out how the Three-Who-Are-One can also accommodate an infinite number of Jesus’s friends into their everlasting life.
Can A.I. even generate an image for it?
How do you paint a picture of such a promise? How do you imagine what is, by definition, inconceivable? How do you describe what is, essentially, ungraspable?
“All things are yours. And you are Christ’s. And Christ is God’s. This is the Fulfillment,” the ancient church father Basil says.
Says.
How do you see it?
Because he lives indeed, we can tell the future, but how do we illustrate it?
I remember the first time as a rookie pastor someone asked me to sketch a picture of the last future. You know how the phone tree works. Someone in my little congregation in New Jersey knew someone whose child had just been in a car accident, someone who had faith but, for whatever reason, no church home. I know you all think I’m contrary, but I tend to do what I’m asked to do and so about fifteen minutes after getting the call I hustled off campus and drove the ten short miles to Princeton Hospital.
Darrien was a senior in high school. When I got there I saw that his dark skin was broken across his temple. They were a poor family with little money and no airbag.
There is so much bad news in the world.
The ER stall was filled with family members and hospital staff whose laggard motions told me it was just a matter of time. I prayed. I held his mother’s hand when I wasn’t letting her cling to me like a rescue buoy. kept vigil with them.
As Darrien’s time ran out, I squatted down next to him and prayed the Lord’s Prayer into his busted, bloody ear. When I got to the petition asking for earth to be made like heaven, his mom interrupted my piety and asked me:
“What’s it like? Heaven? The Kingdom? I never thought much about it before, but now I need to know. I need to see it.”
I looked up at her and realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
She wanted to know.
So I answered her in my way wise and pastoral way, “Uh…”
I fumbled it.
Fortunately, an old man I took to be Darrien’s grandpa rescued me. He let go of the hand clasping his hand. He wiped his eyes. He sucked at his teeth like he was about to spit. And then he nodded his head and he said:
“Whatever heaven is, it sure as hell it ain’t this.”
Whatever heaven is, it sure as hell it ain’t this.
I looked up at him. My knees were tight and sore from squatting next to Darrien’s bed like a catcher behind home plate.
“That’s exactly it,” I said, It’s the opposite of all this.”
I looked over to Darrien’s mother. She nodded almost imperceptibly. The small promise was somehow sufficient for her.
Whatever heaven is, it sure as hell it ain’t this.
He said.
That’s exactly it; it’s the opposite of all this.
I said.
At the time, I had no idea how right we both were.
Near the end of the first century, when the John the Beloved Disciple— the disciple to whom Jesus entrusted his mother— is an old man on the prison island of Patmos, put there by Rome during a period of imperial persecution, the Holy Spirit— the Spirit of Jesus— carries John up into a series of cycles of prophetic visions. This last vision is the conclusive vision. We begin at the end, therefore, because the prior visions have their meaning only in relation to this End. Because what the Spirit of Jesus gives John to see is inconceivable, the Spirit reveals to John using the only Bible the apostles knew; that is, the scriptures of Israel.
Revelation is simply the Latin translation for the Greek word John himself uses, Apocalypse, which means not cataclysm but simply “unveiling.”
The Unveiling to John is perhaps the best title for the book at the back your Bible.And the Spirit unveils to the seer using a frenzied pastiche of patterns and pictures and promises from the Old Testament. It’s arguably the most Jewish book of the New Testament, and it’s on those terms that it demands to be heard. And— no less than Romans or Mark— the ear is exactly the means by which John intends you to receive it. It’s addressed to seven specific churches; thus, John’s Apocalypse not meant to be an impregnable puzzle. John expects you to grasp it even as the visions unveiled to him grab ahold of you.
It’s scripture— no less than Exodus or Ephesians. It’s scripture so it is not set forth to provide a happy hunting ground for people with pet theories about present day politics and precise timetables concerning the End. There is too much bad news in the world to get this good news wrong. When it comes to John’s Apocalypse, leave Left Behind behind. John’s Apocalypse is scripture, and, as scripture, its subject is absolutely none other than the God of the Gospel. About scripture, the church father Origen compares the books of the Bible to the many locked rooms of a house. Origen writes,
The keys that unlock the room called Revelation are keys labeled Ezekiel and Daniel, Isaiah and Genesis, and Jesus’s own apocalyptic preaching.“My Hebrew teachers said that the whole divinely inspired Scripture may be likened to many locked rooms in our house. By each room is placed a key, but not the one that corresponds to it, so that the keys are scattered about beside the rooms, none of them matching the room by which it is placed. It is a difficult task to find the keys and match them to the rooms that they can open. We therefore know the Scriptures that are obscure only by taking the points of departure for understanding them from another place because they have their interpretative principle scattered among them.”
Thus, note how the first portion of this final vision describes the New Jerusalem by what is absent from it. “Death will be no more,” John hears the Spirit say, “mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” The sea, the biblical symbol for chaos, will be no more. The church of John’s day, the church under the thumb of Nero and Domitian, had been beset by the mourning and crying and pain and death that persecution occasioned. Thus, this promise to John.
Whatever heaven is, it sure as hell it ain’t this.
And the form of this promise follows a pattern throughout Israel’s scriptures. The prophet Isaiah, for example, abides by the same pattern when he prophesies the coming of Christ. In the future, Isaiah declares in a text we read during Advent, the presence of the messiah will mean the absence of violence and destruction. Why? Because Israel’s history was one long history of suffering invasions and exiles. “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain,” the Spirit promises the prophet. The Spirit that spoke to Isaiah follows the same pattern with the Beloved Disciple.
Mourning and crying and pain will be no more forever.
In scripture, the promise of the future is always the negation of the present.School shootings will be no more.
Salvation is always the contrary of already experienced damnation.What scripture gives humanity to hope for ultimately is always what humanity lacks presently. The new creation is the inversion of this old world with so much bad news in it.
I remember, over twenty years ago now, I was working in the mailroom at
Princeton before my late-morning class. My supervisor, Vince, was on the phone with his wife, who was in the hospital dying of cancer. She told him to find a television and then, he said, the line went dead. The nearest television that September morning was mounted in the corner outside the dining hall. The TV was on mute. And for a while all of us standing there, staring up at the buildings, we were on mute too.
Until the first tower fell and the silence became a chorus of whispered “Oh my Gods.”
The first time I preached was the sermon for the following Sunday. I’d just been appointed by a bishop who was desperate to fill a vacancy at a small, clergy-killing church and who had scoured the seminary for a United Methodist student. I made the mistake of trying to say too much in my sermon that Sunday, as though God needed defending.
Fred was a quiet, elderly African American who served as the patriarch of the congregation. I didn’t know it at the time. Fred’s son always attended service with his Father, but Fred sat alone that Sunday after the eleventh and every Sunday thereafter. His son’s office had been in the second tower.
Just a few weeks later, I was making my way from a coffee shop to campus and I stumbled upon Fred standing in a crowd on Nassau Square. Fred was holding a sign that had a wooden paint-stirrer taped to the back.
The sign was sky blue and in a bold white font it read, “Christians Against War.”
“I didn’t peg you for the protesting type,” I said to him.
And he looked at me with an intensity that unnerved me.
“I’m clinging to the hope I’ll see my boy again,” he said to me.
I looked around at the demonstration, wondering how what he said explained what he was doing.
The future is Jesus.“I saw the notice for this gathering, and I figured, if the future is Jesus, if the kingdom and the king are one and the same, then if I want to see my boy again, I ought to get more acquainted with Jesus today.”
Notice how the Beloved Disciple’s language shifts as he attempts to describe what the Spirit had showed him. The New Jerusalem that is the new creation is a city but by the next verse it’s a bride and in the verse after that it’s the tabernacle that had traveled alongside the Israelites during their exodus. Then in the final portion of this last vision, the Spirit of Jesus carries John up to a great, high mountain and shows him a vision of the New Jerusalem similar the vision the Spirit had shown the prophet Ezekiel. The city is adorned with twelve jewels. It rests on twelve foundations and twelve gates encompass it. Its length is the same as its width, measuring 12,0000 stadia in every direction.
That’s 1,500 miles in every direction.
That’s a freaking big city.
That’s— not coincidentally— the breadth of Nero’s empire.
In every direction.
The details are dizzying.
Jasper and onyx and pearls.
Cornelian and amethyst and beryl (whatever that is).
It’s a kaleidoscopic, seizure-inducing array of Old Testament images. One after another after another after another. But their sum is simpler than their number. For they all merely add up to the four words Fred told me on Nassau Street those many years ago.The future is Jesus.Don’t believe me?
It’s right there in the details.
The City of God, the Lamb’s Bride— notice— it’s a perfect cube. “It lies foursquare,’ John reports, “its length the same as its width.”
A perfect cube— just like the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Jerusalem temple, the dwelling place of God.
A perfect cube— just like the Holy of Holies, made absurdly and unimaginably bigger so as to accommodate those who have been made heirs with the Father’s only Son through water and the Spirit.
John’s Apocalypse—
It’s not a secret cipher to be decoded so that we can predict the future.It’s scripture.It’s aim is none other than to point to the Triune God's primal promise, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”On Tuesday, across the street from the Altria Theater in Richmond, dropped diplomas and abandoned caps and gowns and tassels littered the grounds of Monroe Park. In the immediate, chaotic aftermath of the Huguenot High shooting, a car whose driver was simply attempting to escape danger struck a nine year old who had gotten lost in the melee.
For a time on Tuesday, my friend couldn’t find her son, Parker. He has no cell phone so they couldn’t contact him. “Until we found him hiding in the theater,” she said, “panic and prayers were all we had. We feared the worst.”
And why shouldn’t she fear the worst? Why should any of us not expect the worst? There is so much bad news in the world. As Paul says simply but bravely, if this world is all there is, we ought to be pitied.
Fortunately—
Because Jesus lives, his old friend John can describe tomorrow.
And like an artist armed with a portfolio of pictures, John’s here to show us.
A better world is on the way.
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June 9, 2023
Hitmen and Midwives
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My podcast partner Johanna Hartelius and I recently continued my series of conversations on homiletics with Dr. Ken Jones. Of our 9.5 Theses on Preaching, we discussed Thesis #6.
You can find the previous conversation HERE.
And Thesis #4 HERE.
Here’s Thesis 6:
The gospel preached in its truth and purity has no relevance to those who are self-made or self-sustaining, but for those who exist under judgment and pain, loss and death, it is life itself.
As a good exemplification of what the thesis asserts, here is Ken’s sermon for Pentecost:
Pentecost Sunday: Luther Memorial Church, Des Moines, Iowa
Grace to you and peace my friends, from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Happy Pentecost and happy birthday to Christ’s church. This day was an important day even before the one that Acts tells us about. For the ancient Jews, including Jesus and his disciples, this became the day to remember how God gave the Law and Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai, from “You shall have no other gods” to “You shall not covet your neighbor’s manservant, maidservant, cattle or anything else that it your neighbors.” The Law and Commandments were such good things. They were a way to know how and where you stood: In or out? Righteous or unrighteous? Vaccinated or unvaccinated? 2
To this day we still like that Law stuff. In fact, it’s absolutely embedded in our consciousness without our thinking about it. Here’s a quick quiz for you. We’ll see how much Law you know. Complete the phrase:
▪ An object in motion [tends to stay in motion unless acted on by another force or object.]
▪ For every action there is [an equal and opposite reaction.]
▪ There’s no such thing as a [free lunch.]
▪ Pull yourself up by [our own bootstraps.]
▪ A stitch in time [saves nine.]
▪ A penny saved is [a penny earned.]
▪ What goes around [comes around.]
▪ Click it or [ticket.]
▪ Just [do it.]
See how good you are at this? We could go on and on, couldn’t we? Yet this is plenty to remind you that you know exactly how the world works and that your life is conducted under the assumption that all these things are true. The pre-Holy Spirit Pentecost is a celebration of all this stuff, and there’s not a one among those unpronounceable hordes in Jerusalem who doesn’t operate under that same assumptions as you. Which makes it downright hard for them to figure out what’s what when the disciples wander into their midst. Imagine dishing up the potato salad at your family’s Fourth of July picnic and Aunt Bertha, who’s rarely been out of Iowa let alone gone abroad, starts speaking Mandarin Chinese or Hindi or Swahili to the folks at the next picnic table. If you knew she’d never spoken that language before, you’d try to make sense of it somehow. Maybe she isn’t really speaking it. Maybe she’s just goofing on your picnic neighbors. Maybe she’s had a stroke. Or maybe she’s gotten into the cooler a little early and downed a few too many bottles of hard cider.
That’s exactly what those folks in Jerusalem did when they saw and heard what was happening with the disciples. Those fellas were Galileans. No way could they speak Greek. Everyone knew that Galilean peasant fisherfolk could hardly speak their own Aramaic dialect, let alone fancy schmancy Greek. So what are the options if you want to make sense of things? You might decide you didn’t hear right and just imagined you heard them speak your language. You might think your mind was playing tricks on you. Or maybe, just maybe, you might think, “These guys are blitzed to the gills.” And then you’d look at your hourglass or sundial, look down your nose, and think, “Oooh-whee. Drunk at this time of day?” The multiple-language-speaking disciples don’t fit into their categories, so spectators in Jerusalem find one that fits: public drunkenness. The crowds know the world works according to the law, commandments, structures and powers. Their reaction to the disciples shows how truly strange living by faith looks to the world. Something incredible has happened to the disciples, and the crowds just don’t understand it.
But what happened to those twelve guys isn’t just tongues of flame and foreign languages. For a few hundred bucks you can buy a week of campfires at Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota and have your flames and foreign tongues. The miracle of Pentecost that the crowds didn’t understand goes much deeper. What the disciples experienced with the gift of the Holy Spirit is part of the mystery and wonder of their relationship with Jesus.
These followers for whom things exploded on Pentecost had been hand-picked by our Lord. Not a one among them was someone to be reckoned with. They weren’t people of power or position. All they were was a group of guys who heard Jesus say, “Follow me,” and couldn’t resist him. At first, they thought they’d gotten in on the ground floor with someone who was going to make it big, like meeting the winner of American Idol way back at the initial auditions. But instead they wound up following Jesus’ path to the cross. They saw how our Lord’s utter faithfulness and devotion to God freed him, how it gave him power to heal and forgive, and how the sum total of his worldly success was a sarcastic scrawl on a board over his head on the cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” These disciples were bound up in a relationship with the Son of Man who lived in full faith, and they saw exactly what it got him. Giving yourself up in devotion to God and in service to your neighbor attracts the world’s scorn, the condemnation of the powerful and the religious, and the shame of an execution by crucifixion. You see, to be the Christ (and also to be a Christ-follower) means chucking your power into the ditch, snipping the apron strings that tie you to comfort and status, pinching off the shoots of success, and, plainly, dying to your own control, glory, and carefully planned and managed future. For our Lord, true living means dying.
But if you think a few flickers of fire and speaking the language of the Phrygians and Medes is something, what happened to the disciples’ Lord was too much to believe. When it comes to blowing minds, that old LSD advocate of the 60’s Timothy Leary has nothing on Jesus Christ. Our Lord lay dead in a borrowed tomb. It looked like his program of bringing in the Kingdom of God was a bust, a complete failure. His followers had fled. And his dying words were a cry of abandonment by God. And yet. And yet. What happened two days later changed everything. The dead, crucified Jesus was alive with a new resurrected body. God’s raising him up said yes to the very path that looked like the end of all hope. The resurrection confirmed that Jesus’ path to the cross is the path, the only path of faithfulness.
The first part of the true miracle of Pentecost happened somewhere in the seven weeks between the Resurrection and this Jewish festival day. It happened as God’s own word in scripture worked on these lowly followers of Jesus. When Cleopas and his friend walked their grief off after seeing Jesus crucified on the road to Emmaus, they didn’t recognize the risen Lord. They didn’t understand anything about what Jesus meant, what he signified, what difference he made in the end. And they certainly didn’t recognize him. But there Jesus is, risen and new, bringing them the exact same stuff he’d given them all along. He taught them the scriptures, told them the why, what, and wherefore. And when they sat down to eat with him, they knew who he was and what he had been up to. These followers had a relationship with Jesus that came to be defined by his path to the cross. It was confirmed in the Resurrection. And now with the word, it came clear.
Have you ever watched one of those Texas Hold-‘Em poker games on T.V.? There inevitably comes a time when a player puts down the cards, pushes every single chip into the center of the table, and says, “I’m all-in.” The player has such a great hand or such a great bluff that she’s willing to risk everything. What these followers of Jesus had experienced, learned, and now were filled with, is the hand the Holy Spirit dealt in the promise of the resurrection to a ragtag bunch of losers. And here on Pentecost Sunday, these guys couldn’t help themselves. They had been released into an all-in life that risks everything for the only thing that lasts. Those tongues of fire were just the sparkly tip of a whole new life that had already begun when Jesus called them to follow him. The flames were the tip-top flickering of a relationship with the Lord who won’t and can’t stay dead, the Christ whom power and religion can’t eradicate, Jesus our brother, savior, high priest, good shepherd, treasure and hope. And now the followers became the forward picket, the rolling edge of the storm of faith.
And what about the Parthians and Medes, the people from Phrygia and Pamphylia, and all the rest? They were not to be left behind in their plodding allegiance to power, in their stuckness on what was comprehensible, reasonable or plausible. Those guys from Galilee weren’t drunk like they thought. It was, after all, only nine a.m. And Peter stepped to the fore to let loose a torrent, and that’s where the second part of the true miracle of Pentecost happened. Peter preached. The one who denied even knowing Jesus now couldn’t help the proclamation of the risen Lord from flowing trippingly off his tongue. He announced the truth of the situation to them, and did it by blasting both barrels: “You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.” In other words, even a display of our worst inclinations, most awful intentions, and unoriginal sin isn’t enough to keep God in Christ from being your Lord.
And then the third part of the real miracle of Pentecost happened. The crowds in Jerusalem that mid-morning sabbath in Spring heard this word, this preaching, this ministry of the true gospel…and they believed. They asked Peter how the unvarnished truth of their complicity in Christ’s death might be dealt with. He told them, be steeped in the promise of forgiveness that comes in baptism. And three thousand of them came to believe that very day.
It turns out that that part of the miracle wasn’t a one-off affair. It was the beginning of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing breaking-in and breaking-open of sinners closed to hope, love, and mercy. What this means for you, my fellow sinners, is that you are about to be included in that last part of the Pentecost miracle, for God has sent this preacher to you today. For I, too, have been given a relationship with the crucified and risen One. I have been given the gospel word and called to deliver it to you. And I have been given a tongue to speak to ears that the world’s judgement, demands, and condemnation have made ready to hear.
This is the word for you, sinner, broken one, unbeliever. Listen closely. Jesus, dead for your sin and risen for your hope and joy, has made himself your Lord. He is given to you from the foundation of the world, that you, even you, might know God’s mercy. Not only that, but he has grafted himself to you so that his new life might be yours as well.
And if you wonder what you ought to do with that, well, there’s water in that font. There’s no reason to put off having God’s word of promise be attached to the water and have the kind of cleansing bath that only God can give. And if you’ve known that promise of Christ in the water, there’s also a meal that’s been cooked up to sustain those dripping wet from their divine bath. It’s a meal of simple bread and wine, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. It is Jesus’ body and blood. It is the whole relationship he’s established with you, tied up in a handy little, material world package.
Instead of leaving you harping on the implausibility of it all or slapping a label on the purveyors of this unlikely miracle, today I pray the Spirit gives you the faith that frees you, sustains you, and gives you eternal life. I pray God so works in you that the world may look at you and say, “Humph, drunk,” and that that will be your chance to say, “No, not drunk. But let me tell you about my Lord.” And in that moment, when you follow your ancient forebears in delivering the good news to another person, the real miracle of Pentecost will still be alive and new and true – for you and for the world. Amen.
And now may the peace which far surpasses all our human understanding keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, the living Lord of whom the Holy Spirit eternally speaks. Amen.
June 8, 2023
All Must be Saved Because We are Who We Love
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The smell of chicken thighs browning in a cast iron skillet with olive oil and garlic, onions, and peppers sautéing next to them, reminds me every time of my grandmother. Every old guy who walks out of church on Sunday morning smelling of Old Spice recalls my grandpa. My handwriting, down to the same black felt tip pen, is his careful square engineer’s script. The musty air of every Goodwill recalls my first parish in New Jersey and its lay leader, Irma, who steadied my hand and encouraged me to trust that maybe Jesus had in fact called me to preach.
One of the people in my constellation of memories is the theologian David Bentley Hart. My first theology teacher at the University of Virginia, he opened up to me a breadth and depth of Christian thinking that flummoxed me, captivated my imagination as a new Christian, and fortuitously set me on a different path than the one I had anticipated. Because I know his public reputation among some readers and critics is contrary, I should note that I have, over the years, found David Bentley Hart to be a warm, winsome, compassionate, and thoughtful mentor. He has been unfailing in following up to inquire about my health. He often ribs me good-naturedly about the deficiences of National League baseball and how my Washington Nationals would scarcely be more than a bottom feeding team in the AL. The passion of his prose and the ferocity of his humor stem from an authentic zeal for the good and the beautiful. He can be uncompromising with sloppy thinking because theology isn’t merely an academic abstraction but can and often does have monstrous consequences for how we conceive of God and our neighbors, especially the poor and the vulnerable.
The person I am is literally inconceivable apart from him or the others who have taught and formed me. They are good examples of how none of us are persons in isolation from others.
My point:We are who we’ve loved.That I am not my self in isolation from others bears directly upon this self’s eternity.From this incontrovertible axiom follows an equally incontestable assertion:Hell for some would be hell for all.June 7, 2023
The Good News of Predestination
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I’m about to begin a long sermon series on the last book of the Bible, John’s Apocalypse. I’ll start at the end of Revelation with God unveiling to the prophet our ultimate eternal destiny in the City of God that is simultaneously God’s own self. That the New Jerusalem is the destiny of all the baptized has me thinking about the doctrine of predestination.
June 6, 2023
The Stars are the Light of the World
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Romans 4.1-5
Several years ago, over Memorial Day weekend, I joined a thousand people from around the world for the Taize gathering at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Taize is a monastery in Burgundy, France. Every week the brothers of Taize welcome thousands of pilgrims to their monastery in France to participate in the rhythms of their communal life. Once a year some of the more than a hundred brothers take their community somewhere else in the world for a pilgrimage gathering.
That year the brothers were invited by the Lakota Nation to welcome pilgrims to Pine Ridge. Just as pilgrims do at the monastery in Taize, we spent our time at Pine Ridge worshipping three times a day, sharing simple meals, and sharing our faith stories in small groups. On Saturday of the pilgrimage weekend, after morning prayer and breakfast, we were assigned small groups to reflect on the morning scripture lesson. I was told our small groups were assigned according to the order in which we’d registered for the pilgrimage, but I swear it was due to some some cruel, cosmic joke I can’t be sure.
The seven of us in my small group sat down in a circle in the dry, prairie grass. Directly across from me in the circle sat a white-haired, tie-dyed Episcopal bishop from Berkley, California. Next to the lady bishop sat a gay Episcopal priest from San Francisco. Next to him sat a Unitarian lay person from Boulder, Colorado. Next to him, a Catholic civil servant from Paris, France. Next to her, a women’s studies PhD candidate from Barcelona, Spain. Next to her, on my left, was a man who looked like a shorter, plumper, balder, older version of me- except he was dressed sloppy and had an unkempt beard. His green Velcro sneakers, red tube socks and Trotsky eyeglasses screamed “European Socialist.”
And finally in the circle, there was me.
We began by going around the circle, introducing ourselves. I went second to last. As I’m want to do, I tried to charm them with self-effacing, sarcastic humor. “I’m a Methodist pastor from Virginia,” I began, “and I just gotta say my congregation back home would be shocked to hear that I could be the most conservative person in any group.”
No one laughed, which, I suppose, just proves how liberal they all were.
“You didn’t tell us your name,” the Bishop said with a tone of voice that suggested what she really meant was, ‘I’d prefer not to make your acquaintance”
When I said “Micheli,” the shorter, plumper, older, balder version of me shouted: “Micheli! Italiano!”
He shouted, “Ciao!”
And then got up and embraced me like Gepetto rescuing Pinocchio from the Island of Lost Boys.
He rubbed his sweaty beard across my face as he man-kissed me on both my cheeks, and then he began ticking off the names of people he insisted I must be related to back in “Roma.”
Wiping his sweat from my face, I gestured for him to introduce himself.
He adjusted his glasses and said in a thick accent, “My name is Tomaso.”
Tomaso told us he was a scientist, a geologist, from Rome. And then he laughed nervously and said, “I am not a Christian. I am not a person of faith.”
Both times the accent landed heavy on the not.
Our Bible study felt forced. Everyone in the group kept deferring to the bishop and, being Episcopalian, the Bible seemed somewhat unfamiliar to her. The bishop said the types of knee-jerk things you’d expect an Episcopal Bishop from Berkley, California to say. And, initially, at least, I bit my tongue and didn’t respond with any snarky comments. That is, until I remembered she wasn’t my bishop.
In truth, I wasn’t really interested in our Bible study- because, really, I was dying to ask Tomaso, the paisano to my left, why he’d flown all the way from Italy, driven all the way from Denver, agreed to sleep in a horse pasture, and go without running water and spend four days with Christians and celibate monks if he was NOT a person of faith.
When our Bible study wrapped up, I grabbed Tomaso by the elbow and I said: “Tomaso, call it professional curiosity, but what are you doing here if you’re not a person of faith?”
And, a bit anticlimactically, he said, “Because my wife made me come.”
“Well, that’s nothing new. Half the men in my church are there because their old ladies force them to come.”
Tomaso chuckled and grabbed his book- a science fiction novel- like he was about to leave, but I said, “Tell me— why don’t you consider yourself a person of faith?”
He smiled like a professor who’s not sure how to water down his material for a freshman class, and then he launched into what sounded like a well-rehearsed litany. His reasons against faith.
“I am a scientist,” he began, “and there is no scientific explanation for a seven day creation, for an incarnation, for a resurrection.”
“Gosh, there isn’t? I guess it’s a good thing scripture doesn’t try to explain them scientifically then, huh?”
My sarcasm apparently didn’t translate because he just kept ticking off his reasons for not believing.
How the virgin birth is based on a mistranslation. It might be.
How faith is just a psychological crutch. It is, thank God.
How the Gospels don’t always agree with one another. They don’t.
How the Church has been responsible much evil and injustice. Yep.
How St Paul endorses slavery and sexism. He’s no progressive.
How Revelation is about Rome not the Rapture. True.
How scripture is not the literal Word of God but instead bears all the messy fingerprints of people like you and me. Sure does.
His list was surprisingly long and surprisingly unoriginal. And when he got to the end, he held out his hands like a magician, whose just disappeared his assistant, and he said, “See, mi amico, there’s nothing left for me to believe. There’s nothing left for me to be a person of faith.”
“Abraham believed the Lord,” Paul writes in this week’s lectionary epistle, “and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
There may be no other sentence in the Old Testament that has been more significant to followers of the New. And more misleading.God told Abraham that he and his wife, Sarah, would have millions of descendants— as many as the stars in the sky. Abraham believed God and that was enough for God to credit Abraham as “righteous.” Ever since Martin Luther, the Founding Father of Protestantism, Father Abraham has served as Exhibit A for what we think it means for us to have faith.
Abraham did not lift a finger to be saved.
Abraham did nothing to earn or deserve it.
Abraham simply believed God.
Abraham was justified by faith.
Alone.
At least that’s what we think Paul means in Romans 4.
But here’s the problem:
When we reduce Abraham to an example (for us) of someone who has faith in God and is rewarded accordingly- we lose the biblical plot of what God is doing IN and THROUGH Abraham.
And when we lose that plot, the seam of Paul’s entire argument in the Book of Romans unravels. Because the argument Paul is weaving from Romans 1 to Romans 16 is that what we discover in Jesus Christ is God making good on a promise first made to Abraham.
Because when you go back to the Book of Genesis, you notice:
It doesn’t say Abraham believed IN God.
It says Abraham believed God.
It doesn’t Abraham accepted God as his personal savior. It says Abraham believed God.
That is, Abraham accepted something God said.Abraham believed a single thing God said.A very specific thing God said.Abraham believed the promise— the promise that his children would be like the stars in the sky.But this promise, it isn’t simply about God providing Abraham with progeny.
The promise is that THROUGH Abraham God would create a new and distinct People in the world.
The promise is that the way God would pick the world back up from its Fall, the way God would heal the world’s sin, the way God would bring forth a New Creation would be by creating a New People.
The promise is that through Abraham God would create a People who would do what Adam failed to do, a People whose trust in God and trust in one another would provide an alternative to the ways of the world.
The stars God promises to Abraham— they’re meant to be a light to the world.That’s the unconditional commitment God promises and that’s what Abraham believes.And God, scripture says, reckons that to Abraham as “righteousness.”Now God’s “righteousness” is a specific biblical term that refers to God’s commitment to undo the injustice of the world and usher in a New Creation, then Abraham being ‘reckoned righteousness’ means Abraham was credited, acknowledged, signed up as a participant in God’s New Creation work.
Abraham didn’t believe everything he could possibly believe about God; in fact, plenty remained that Abraham still struggled to believe. Abraham lacked faith that he and his wife’s old bodies could produce new life. Abraham doubted the events in his life would pan out as God had predicted. Abraham questioned God’s justice and mercy.
But despite his doubts, despite his questions, despite those parts of God’s Word he scratched his head at and crossed his fingers through, what Abraham always believed, what Abraham always had faith in, what it always meant for Abraham to be a person of faith, the person of faith, was his faith in this single promise:
The promise that God so loved the world, God would not give up on what he had made.That just as God’s first creation began with God calling into the void “Let there be light,” God’s New Creation would begin by God calling a People who would be a Light to the world.
That Sunday afternoon, a group of us there for the Pilgrimage weekend made another pilgrimage. To Wounded Knee, the place where the US Army, without provocation, slaughtered over 300 Indians, little more than a hundred years ago. 2/3 of the victims were children...with their mothers. In 1973 Wounded Knee became the site of a standoff between Lakota Indians and the Federal Government. Resulting in more violence.
Wounded Knee remains a festering reminder of suffering and injustice that persists to this day.
So that Sunday afternoon, in reverent silence, we loaded on to 3 school buses. And silently we rode the 30 minutes to Wounded Knee, riding past shacks and trailers and the kind of poverty that seems to fit a third world nation better than this one. When we arrived at Wounded Knee, the brothers put on their gleaming, white-as-light, monastic robes and then they led us all, silently, down the road and up the hill to the graveyard. Some locals from the reservation were there, loitering, sitting on top of rusted, broken down cars and squinting at us with justifiable suspicion.
There’s a church there by the graveyard. It had ‘F$#% you white people’ spray-painted on the sanctuary doors.An old woman was in the graveyard planting flowers by an old tombstone while a young woman tamped down the dirt of a freshly dug grave.
The mass grave, the hole where the victims bodies had been dumped, is at the center of the cemetery.
Brother Alois, the head of the monastery at Taize, motioned silently for us to make a circle around the mass grave. I glanced around the circle at all the people, literally, from all over the world, from as many nations as there are stars in the sky. Then Brother Alois held out his hands for us to take hold of one another’s hands. Then Brother Alois bowed his head and so did we.
And then we prayed.
Silently.
For a long time.
Silently- because how else do you pray when some of the people you’re holding hands with share the same names as the bodies you’re standing on top of and still suffer the consequences of so many empty words? As Brother John, another monk, had told us the previous morning, we were going to Wounded Knee:
“…as people of faith, to a place of broken promises, to be a silent, visible sign of a different promise, the promise that the God who made the world in love will, with us and through us, redeem it.”
Many of us kept the silence as we rode the way back from Wounded Knee. After we’d returned to our campsite, I ran into Tomaso. Both of us were coming out of adjoining Port O’ Johns and reaching for the hand sanitizer.
“If it isn’t Doubting Tomaso,” I said.
“Mi amico, how are you?”
“I’m not sure. I just got back from Wounded Knee.”
“How was that?”
“Did you not go?”
“To pray?” and he laughed like it was a ridiculous notion.
“No, I stayed here and read my book.”
And he held up his science fiction novel.
“Like I tell my wife, faith is the easy way out in this world.”
I thought to myself:
“Easy? How can someone with a PhD be so stupid? Jesus has done a lot of things in my life but made my life easier is definitely not one of them. Faith hasn’t been my way out of the world; faith has thrust me into the world: to places I’d rather not go, to pain and poverty I’d rather not have weigh on my conscience, to people towards whom I’d be happy not to feel any responsibility.
Easy way out? Are you a complete idiot? Most of the time, to believe in God is to feel heartbroken over all the places you see God absent in the world. I just watched and prayed as a 20 year old Indian girl wept over a mass grave beneath her and a hopeless future in front of her. Faith isn’t an escape from the world’s problems; it’s a summons to wade waist deep into its problems. I know you’re a geologist, Tomaso, but does that mean you have rocks in your head?”
But instead I squirted some Pure El into my hands and I said— the only thing I said
“Easy way out? That’s and interesting indictment coming from someone who spent the afternoon relaxing in his tent, reading a trashy novel.”
Doubting Tomaso laughed and said, “Like I said, there’s too many things I don’t believe ever to be a person of faith.”
“Tomaso, you don’t seem to understand that, being a pastor, I’ve heard all the reasons not to believe before and, as a Christian, I struggle with all of them myself.”
“Why do you care so much about me anyway?” Tomaso asked, “Do you care about my salvation?”
He said it with sarcastic air quotes.
"That’s just it,” I said, “it’s not about you and your salvation— not just. Ever since Abraham, it’s never just been about you, you selfish coward. It’s about God calling— God needing— people to be light for the world.”
He finished wiping the Pure-El into his hands and said, “Ciao.”
And then he walked back to his tent, and with the world just a little bit darker for it.
(icon: Khrystyna Kvyk "Ecclesia")
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June 5, 2023
The Moral Claim in the Triune Name
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This Sunday the church culminated the three part drama of Lent-Easter-Pentecost with Trinity Sunday. With the Son sending his Spirit at Pentecost, we discover what was disclosed at Jesus’s own baptism. The unutterable name of the true God— revealed to Moses at the burning bush— is mysterious exactly because the one God is three-person’d.
HaShem is triune.
By naming God Trinity, the church ventures two dogmatic claims.
The first claim concerns revelation.
The true God, the creeds insist, is none other than the history he makes with us as the Father of Israel’s servant Jesus along with their Spirit. Correlatively, the true God is known by nothing other than precisely this history; that is, there is no Godness of God hidden behind the history so named as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is just to say, along with scripture, that in the God-who-is-human, Jesus Christ, the entire plenitude of God was pleased to dwell.
The canon reliably reveals the character of God.The second claim concerns relationship.
The true God is triune because Jesus is the God-who-is-human. God is this Son because the Father raised him up from death into his own life. God is the Holy Spirit because the Son promises to send the Paraclete as his own abiding presence. The occasion for the debates in the church’s first seven centuries, which culminated in the ecumenical creeds, was precisely the task to puzzle out the paradox of the oneness of God given the fact of the human one’s divinity.
Recall— we know from both scripture and history that Jesus’s Jewish followers began worshipping him as Lord soon after his crucifixion.
We know from the Jewish historian Josephus, for example, that Jesus’s own brother James, who was not a disciple prior to Easter— he thought Jesus was crazy, was condemned by the Sanhedrin for worshipping his brother as Adonai.In bald fashion, their act of adoration violated the first commandment, unless this Son was indeed inseparable from and identical with the Father.
By naming God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the church registers still another claim.
There is a moral claim in the triune name.As Trinity, God is antecedently a community of love, perfect and without lack or potential. There is in the triune God an eternal exchange between lover and beloved, with a third to bear witness to their mutual love.
Thus, creation is not a work of necessity. It is a work of gratuity.Unlike pagan god Marduk, for instance, the true God creates without using any preexisting material. Unlike the religion of Plato, the cosmos is not eternal and pre-existing. It’s creation not nature. It’s spoken into being by a triune fellowship who has no need for it. This is not merely a cosmological or metaphysical claim but also an eschatological claim and therefore a moral one.
Just as the Father, in raising him from the dead, identifies himself— all the way down— with this Jesus and the history named by him, in speaking creation into being God simultaneously binds himself to creation’s condition and destiny. Creator and creation are ontologically distinct but they are morally inseparable.
June 4, 2023
The Exodus is Our Genesis
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Trinity Sunday — Genesis 1
June 9, 1993:
For some reason the date sticks in my memory.
The opening date of Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park film. At the point in the movie when the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld gets his face eaten by a whatever-raptor, at that point in the movie on June 9, 1993 I leaned over and whispered into my date’s ear, “Of course, it’s all a hoax. Dinosaurs never actually existed.”
When it comes to the Book of Genesis, when it comes to creation, it seems like dates are always at the heart of the matter.Dates like November 24, 1859:
The date Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species and threw the Bible-believing world for a Copernican loop.
Dates like July 21, 1925:
The date a jury in Dayton, Tennessee found high school teacher, John Scopes, guilty of violating the Butler Act, the state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.
When it comes to how and when it all began and how that beginning squares with the beginning of scripture, it seems like the debate’s always about dates.
Dates like 4.5 Billion:
The number of years ago, according to scientific consensus, the earth was born with a bang.
Dates like 2.5 Billion:
The best scientific guesstimate for when life first opened its eyes in the primordial ooze.
It’s always about dates.
Dates like 6,000:
The date that creationists say God first flicked on the lights and started it all according to the step-by-step sequence in scripture.
Dates like May 28, 2007:
The date that the $27 million Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky, a museum where visitors can find a life-sized T-Rex, who apparently forgot he was a carnivore, cavorting in the Garden with Adam and Eve.
It’s all about dates.
Dates like June 5, 2023:
As in, tomorrow. The date I’ll likely get a handful of emails angry at me for lacing my comments about that museum with sarcasm.
Dates are everything.
Dates like April 1992:
The date I portrayed William Jennings Bryan in the Governor’s School production of Inherit the Wind, the stage version of the Scopes Monkey Trial (Yes, that was a thing I did back in the day).
April 1992— that was almost exactly three years before I became a Christian.Playing William Jennings Bryan, the famed biblical literalist, I had to learn to say:Yes, I believed Joshua literally commanded the sun to stop.
Yes, I believed there literally was morning and evening before God created the sun on the 4th Day.
Yes, I believed the Earth was literally only thousands of years old not millions or billions.
April 1992:
Three years before I became a Christian, that was the date I became convinced that in order to invite Jesus into your heart you literally had to check your brain at the door.
That is when I became convinced that believing in God required you also to believe that centuries of science were all a deliberate hoax.
Or, worse, God deliberately deceives us.
And in April 1992 I decided that such a God literally wouldn’t be worth believing in.
When it comes to the Book of Genesis, when it comes to how and when it all began and who or what was behind it, it seems like dates are always at the heart of the matter.
Which is funny.
Because there’s one date that seldom gets mentioned.
1849— 10 years before Charles Darwin spoiled everyone’s fun.
1849:That’s the date Austen Henry Layard excavated the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal in Mosul, Iraq. In the ruins of that library, Austen Henry Layard discovered the original creation story.Maybe you know it.It goes like this:
In the beginning, when the earth was without form and chaos and dark waters covered the face of the deep, god brought forth life.
On the first day, there was light. Light that emanated from god and god separated the light from the darkness.
On the second day, god created the firmament; god created a dome to push back the waters and god called it sky.
On the third day, god gathered the waters in one place so that dry land could appear.
On the fourth day, god created the sun and the moon and the stars in the sky and named them.
And day six god created humankind to do god’s work and on day seven god rested and exalted in celebration for what he done.
Sound familiar?
June 3, 2023
The Augustine Way
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How did St. Augustine defend the faith in late antiquity and how does his approach to engaging the culture have great significance for the church’s witness today?
I sat down recently with Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen about their new book, The Augustine Way.
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