Jason Micheli's Blog, page 82
March 20, 2023
Only Death Makes Possible an Economy of Scarcity
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John 11
The Gospels writers did not expect you to receive their testimony as discrete pericopes. Much like the apostle’s epistles, the evangelists intended you receive the gospel narrative as a narrative, beginning, middle, and end. The surrounding context around any passage is necessary for its intelligibility.
Take the upcoming Gospel text assigned by the lectionary, Christ calling Lazarus from the tomb in John 11.
Jesus raising of Lazarus from the dead seals Jesus’s own death as sure and certain.In the following chapter, Judas is at the supper table with the formerly four days dead guy when he grumbles about the recently deceased’s sister lavishing a Tesla’s worth of Chanel No. 5 on Jesus. Truly, 300 denarii was the rough equivalent to $45,000.00. “Why was this perfume not sold and the money donated to Make Israel Great Again?” Judas objects.
Make no mistake.
Judas’s protest is a political position.
In first century Israel, “poor” was a political category. The poor weren’t lazy or left behind. The poor were the oppressed. Money’s tight when you’ve got to foot the bill for your own military occupation— that’s why the Christmas story kicks off with a census. Just read your Old Testament— it’s not a minor theme in scripture— the poor were poor because they were oppressed. If you don’t understand the relationship between poverty and oppression you won’t understand Palm Sunday. You won’t understand how the Messiah they anticipate with shouts of hosanna produces first their disappointment and then their betrayal when the “Messiah” they get turns out to be the Messiah named Jesus.
Judas isn’t simply suggesting that this down payment’s worth of perfume should’ve been shared with the poor; he’s arguing that it’d be better spent on the cause. Judas isn’t griping that they should’ve given the money to feed the poor. He’s saying they should’ve used the money to free them. To free the poor. To liberate the oppressed.
Judas’s point is not just about charity. Judas’ point is about justice. After all, Judas is named for Israel’s most famous armed revolutionary. It’s a campaign contribution’s worth of cash Judas watches Mary rub into Jesus’ calloused feet.
Yet—
Even as Judas stews over the cost benefit analysis and political possibilities such a sum might realize, he’s sitting at the supper table across from a guy who just recently had been wormwood for over half a week. Judas had watched graveside as Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb, stinking with death and tripping over his burial clothes he was so surprised. In fact, Jesus had commanded him to be dead no longer, “Lazarus, come out!” From dust he came and to dust he returned and then, by the Word who works what he says, he returned again.
Judas has just passed the mashed potatoes to the once dearly departed Lazarus, but as soon as Judas sees Mary pull out some some five figure Himalayan Obsession he’s back to thinking in terms of scarcity.
This puts Judas in the same camp as Caiphas.
At the end of John 11— the verses the lectionary conspicuously and suspiciously omits— John tells us that a crowd of Jews, having witnessed Jesus speak Lazarus forth from the dead, began “believing into Jesus.”
Some of these bystanders, John says, went and tattled on Jesus to the Pharisees and the Pharisees went and tattled to the chief priests and the chief priests went and tattled to the Chief Priest, Caiphas.
And how does Caiphas respond to news of Jesus’s power over Death?“If we let him go on like this,” Caiphas worries, “everyone will believe into him, and the Romans will come and destroy our nation.”Sit with this for a moment—
March 19, 2023
God’s Office is at the End of Your Rope
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Genesis 32.1-32
All this time spent with Jacob, and I’ve neglected to make the fact explicit.
I like Jacob.
I like Jacob even though its not clear from the biblical witness I’m supposed to like Jacob. In a culture that prizes the eldest son, Jacob isn’t. In a religion whose exemplar, Abram, leaves everything behind to follow by faith when God calls, Jacob doesn’t. I like Jacob, but in a tradition where names mean everything, convey everything, foreshadow everything, it’s not clear from the name “Jacob” that we’re meant to root for this character.
When he was yet unborn, Jacob, who wrestles God in the dark along the riverbank, for nine months wrestled his twin brother in the dark waters of his mother’s womb. And when she gives birth to them, Esau first, the youngest comes out clutching at the leg of the eldest.
As if to say, “Me first.”
So Rebekah names him “Jacob.”
Which in 2023 is a little like naming your kid “Elon.”
In Hebrew “Jacob” means heel-grabber, hustler, over-reacher, supplanter, scoundrel, trickster, liar, cheat.
In a religion where names signify and portend everything, it’s not clear that I’m so meant but, nevertheless, I like Jacob.
It’s true scripture gives us plenty of reasons to dislike Jacob. More than twenty years before they meet face-to-face on the banks of the Jabbok River, Jacob took advantage of his brother. One afternoon Esau had returned from the fields, dizzy and in a cold sweat from hunger. Jacob pulled some fresh bread from the oven and ladled some lentil soup from the stove. When Esau asked for it, Jacob demanded his elder brother’s birthright in return.
As Jacob knew it would, Esau’s birthright seemed an intangible thing compared to hunger. Esau accepted the terms of his brother’s extortion. And even if Esau knew not what he’d just done, Jacob certainly did.
But I still like Jacob.
It’s true that his birthright isn’t the only thing Jacob poaches from his brother. It’s true that when their father, Isaac, was weighed down by age and his eyes were cobwebbed by years, when Isaac was dying and wanted to bless his eldest son- a blessing to be the most powerful of all, a blessing that couldn’t be taken back - the old man lay in his goat-skin tent waiting for his eldest son to appear.
After a while he heard someone enter and say, “My father.”
And the old man, his eyes darkened by blindness, asked, “Who are you my son?”
Heeding his mother’s orders, the boy boldly lied and said that he was Esau.
And when the old man reached forward to the touch the face he could not see, the boy lied a second time. And when the boy leaned over to kiss the old man and the old man sniffed the scent of Esau’s clothes, just as Jacob knew he would, Isaac blessed him. Jacob lied to his father to steal from his brother the birthright that he coveted. If you’re counting at home, that’s three of the ten commandments, broken in one fail swoop.
Still, I’ve got my own reasons. I like Jacob.
It’s true that soon after Esau’s rage made Jacob a runaway, God spoke to him in a dream— gave him a vision of a ladder traveled by angels— it’s true that when Jacob awoke from the dream and marked the spot with an altar stone and prayed to God, Jacob didn’t pray for forgiveness. He didn’t confess his sin. He didn’t express any remorse or give any hint of a troubled conscience. Instead Jacob prayed with fingers crossed and one eye opened, a prayer that was really more of a deal, “If you stand by me God, if you protect me on this journey, God, if you keep me in food and clothing, and bring me back in one piece to my house and land, then you will be my God.”
Yet, it’s hard for me not to like Jacob.
I know it’s true that when he had nowhere else to go, his mother’s brother, Laban, took Jacob in and gave him food and shelter and work and, eventually, wives and a family. I know it’s true that after over fourteen years of Laban’s hospitality Jacob became a rich man— but not rich enough to satisfy Jacob who returned Laban’s good deeds by cheating his father-in-law out his wealth. I know it’s true that God, in his compassion, gave children to Leah because Leah’s husband Jacob gave her neither a thought nor a care.
If you’re still counting at home, that’s another couple of commandments broken (which still gives him a winning percentage better than the Washington Nationals are likely to have this season.)
Jacob’s a liar, a cheat, and a thief.
Jacob’s got a wandering eye and a fickle heart.
Jacob’s got shallow scruples and fleet feet.
Jacob’s always ready to run away from his problems.
Jacob’s not a Bible hero.He’s a heel.Still, I can’t help it. I like Jacob.You might not.
You might not like Jacob.
You might not be like Jacob.
Maybe you’re batting perfect when it comes to the commandments.
Congrats. Kudos.
Maybe you’ve never lied to your mother or your father or your husband or your wife. Maybe you’ve never watched idly by as a sibling or a friend or a neighbor wanders out of your life and in to trouble and then beyond your reach. Maybe you’ve never betrayed someone you should’ve honored and obeyed. Maybe you’ve never returned a good deed with a petty one, or turned to God only when you needed him. Maybe. Maybe your family’s never suffered such bad blood that it threatens to hemorrhage or maybe you’ve never let the wounds of a broken relationship fester through years upon years. Maybe you’ve never withheld forgiveness because clenching that forgiveness in your fist was the only control you possessed.
At every point, from his mother’s womb to Jabbok’s river, Jacob has worried about Jacob. Jacob has only ever cared about Jacob. Jacob has looked after no one else but Jacob.
Maybe you’re not like that. Maybe you’ve never been like that. Good for you. Gold star to you. Go ahead and turn your brown nose up at Jacob.
Just because I like him doesn’t mean you must.
Not everyone can relate to Jacob.
Not everybody can identify with someone who suspects his sins are eventually going to sneak up on him from the shadows of his past.
Check the text— Jacob sends his wife and his kids and his possessions packing before a stranger jumps him in the dark and fights dirty until dawn. Jacob ships them off across the Jabbok and then he just waits in the dark for a shadowy struggle he apparently anticipated but had no actual reason to expect.
In other words, the stranger in the shadows doesn’t surprise Jacob because Jacob was expecting that, sooner or later, the other shoe would drop, the bottom would fall out, and his ill-gotten gain would get him.
Maybe you can’t identify with someone like Jacob.Maybe your rap sheet is clean.Maybe your conscience is clear.Maybe your you-know-what really doesn’t stink and so whenever the you-know-what hits the fan it never occurs to you that you had it coming.
Maybe you’ve never clutched the covers at night convinced, “This is happening to me for a reason. God’s doing this to me because of what I’ve done (or left undone).” Maybe you’ve never wondered that this sickness or struggle is because of that sin. Maybe you’ve never harbored the suspicion that the darkness that’s enveloped you is what you deserve.
Lucky you if you can’t relate to Jacob.
Lucky you.
Lord knows I can.
I can.
But that’s not why I like Jacob.
I remember years ago I received a sympathy card with Jesus on the cover.
The card depicts Jesus from the rear. His cloak is piled around his ankles falling on the tile of a bathroom floor. Someone— maybe his mother, Mary— is holding his long, dark hair back away from his face.
He’s squatting.
You know it’s Jesus even from the rear because you can see his wounded feet tucked under his knees. And his pierced hands are gripping the sides of a toilet bowl with the lid up.
He’s about to hurl.
The speech balloon above Jesus’s head reads:
“Don’t listen to my friends. I never said my Father won’t give you more than you can handle.”
That’s why I like Jacob.
I like Jacob because after several years of living with incurable cancer, after eight rounds of stage-serious chemo, after more rounds of maintenance chemo than I can count, after one surgery and thousands of needle pricks and transfusions and panic attacks and thinking about that hour glass from Days of Our Lives, Jacob might be the one person who would never dream of sending someone like me a card that said, “God never gives you more than you can handle.”
Someone like Jacob would never cross-stitch a cliche like that onto oven mitts and leave them with a casserole at my front door.
I like Jacob because Jacob, whom God leaves lame and limping and bruised below the belt, knows that the good news is NOT “God never gives you more than you can handle.”
Jacob has the scars to prove it.
The good news— the only good news— is that God meets us in the very midst of that which we cannot handle.
I spent last Tuesday at the infusion center receiving my latest monthly maintenance chemo to keep the cancer at bay. I’ve been to the infusion center so often my iPhone recognizes the “Cancer Specialists” WIFI network.
Before my chemo infusion, my oncologist felt me up for lumps and red flags. Like he’d done at all my previous visits, the doctor flipped over a baby blue hued box of latex gloves and, with a sharpie, sketched out the standard deviation of years until relapse for my particular flavor of incurable cancer.
Cancer didn’t feel very funny staring at the bell curve of the time I’ve likely got left. Until. When the doctor was done feeling me up, my nurse came to poke around for a vein big enough to handle the chemo. It sounds pathetic but you get to the point where you’re just tired of being sick and stuck all the time with needles.
One of the two TV’s in the lab every commercial break— I’m not exaggerating— featured an advertisement from Lexington Plastic Surgeons, who, according to the voiceover pitchman, have more offices around the country than Skynet.
“Do you think I’d look good if I got a Brazilian Butt Lift?” I asked my nurse as she clamped the needle down into my arm.
She raised her eyebrow at me.
“Um…maybe?” she replied, “You’re not really my type, butt lift or no butt lift.”
The other TV in the lab was playing Rachel Ray’s cooking show.
Every commercial break of Rachel’s show featured a spot selling Rachel Ray’s own line of boutique dog food, which if you’re counting at home is reason #93 to hate Rachel Ray.
“Do you think it strange that in between recipes for people food Rachel Ray is also selling dog food? I mean, are those transferable skills?” I asked my nurse.
She laughed as she hung my bag of pre-meds.
She had short buzzed hair that she’d dyed turquoise that matched the gem stud in her nostril and complemented the purple cat-eye glasses on her nose.
Looking at the tattoo on my arm, she told me that her girlfriend was a tattoo artist.
“We’re thinking of getting married, my girlfriend and me,” she said, “You’re a priest, right? You probably think we’re sinners?”
She was asking, I noticed, not accusing.
“If you’re going to ask me these sorts of questions, I think you should return my copay.”
But she just sat on the wheeled stool next to me, waiting on me.
“Sinners? Yes.” I said.
And then added: “But no more than me.”
She looked confused, like what I’d said wasn’t as bad as she’d feared and not as good as she’d hoped.
“Look,” I said, “Christians have a simple formula:
People are sinners. Christians are people. Christians are sinners.
“So yeah, no more than me.”
She nodded and flicked the tube to start the drip.
Another commercial from Skynet came on the television, this one for breast augmentation and eyebrow lifts and wrinkle removing along with a lie about defying time and aging.
“It’s kind of a waste of their ad budget to have their commercials played in here, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s kind of obvious and unavoidable here that nobody is getting out life alive but that’s exactly what they’re promising.”
She handed me a little plastic cup of pills (meds to minimize the tremors the chemo causes) and she said:
“Can I ask you, since you brought it up, if you died— or, when you die— do you know where you’ll go?”
“What are you?” I asked, “Some sort of undercover lesbian evangelist?”
She smiled just a little.
“No, I’ve just never been that religious and I don’t know how you know, you know, that you’ll go to heaven or be with God or whatever.”
I nodded a yes.
“You’re really certain?” she asked me.
She was studying me, the way she did at the end of infusions to make sure I was okay to drive home.
She was studying me so I said it, “Yes.”
“How can you be so sure? How can you have that much faith?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I am certain,” I said, “but I don’t know that it’s any great faith. I’m sure because, well, because God told me so last Sunday.”
This is my body broken for you.
She narrowed her gaze, trying to determine if I was punking her. She must’ve decided I was playing it straight because, as she smoothed out my crinkled chemo tube and she asked me, “Do you ever wonder where God is…considering…” and she looked around the room and back to me and the chemotherapy bag.
Now it was my turn to stare and study her.
“You see a lot of people lose their faith in a place like this,” she said, “I guess it can be hard to believe there’s a God somewhere in the universe when there’s places like this in it too.”
I shook my head.
Your problem,” I said, “is in thinking that God is somewhere other than right here in a place like this.”
I don’t just like Jacob; I think we need him.
Martin Luther said that, from Adam onwards, you and I are addicted to what he called the “glory story.” That is, we’re hard-wired by sin to imagine that God is far off in heaven, up in glory, doling out rewards for every faithful step we take up towards him and doling out chastisements for our every slip-up along the way.It’s the glory story that produces cliches like, “God never gives you more than you can handle” and “Everything happens for a reason.”
It’s the glory story that provokes questions like, “Where is God in the midst of my suffering?”
The glory story prompts those kinds of questions and cliches because it gets the direction of the gospel story backwards. The gospel story, the story of the cross, is not the story of our journey up to God but God’s journey down to us. The story of the cross is a story of God’s condescension not our ascension. And the story of the cross isn’t a story that starts with Jesus. Rather the God who comes to us in the crucified Christ is the God who has always condescended. Indeed, that’s why the first Christians believed it was the Lord Jesus Jacob wrestles here in the dark of the night. This angel in the darkness is the Second Adam who has the authority to (re)name God’s creatures.
And so I don’t just like Jacob; I think we need him.
We need Jacob to inoculate us against the glory story and all the unhelpful questions and cliches it begets.
We need Jacob to remember that:
If we are to find strength from God it starts with searching for him in our weakness.
If we hope to find wholeness from God it begins by seeking him out in our wounded-ness.
If we dream of finding healing from God we first must look for God not up in glory but down in the shadows of our sufferings.
Without Jacob, when we cry out to God for help and healing we are liable to point our mouths in the wrong direction. Up into glory rather than down in to the darkness and out into the shadows that surround us.
So I don’t just like Jacob; I think we need him.
Because it’s not just that the power of God is revealed in the weakness of Jesus Christ, it’s that the grace God gives to us in Jesus Christ— the healing grace God gives to us in Jesus Christ— can only be received in a weakness like Jacob’s.
Only in our weakness and wounded-ness do we realize our true helplessness and only in helplessness can we discover the healing power of his blessing— that’s not just the Jacob story that’s the gospel story.
That’s the one way love of God called grace.
That’s what we mean when we say that you are saved in Christ alone through trust alone; we mean that you alone— by your lonesome— do not have the strength to save yourself. You are as helpless as Jacob, hobbled over with his hip out of joint. That’s why the bread is broken and why you come to the table with the open, empty hands of a beggar.
It’s only when you realize you have nothing to offer that you’re ready to receive what God has to give.As she pulled the needle from my arm, I said to her, “Your problem is in thinking that God is somewhere other than right here, in a place like this. You’re making a mistake that goes all the way back to the beginning of the Bible. God isn’t up somewhere in glory. The true God isn’t anywhere but here in the shadows and the darkness and the suffering. The true God leaves behind wounds because he meets us in our struggles.”
But I could tell from the squint behind her purple glasses that she didn’t follow me so I said to her:
“Look, since you’re the lesbian evangelist nurse, this might come in handy the next time you see someone on the edge of unfaith. Tell them, “God didn’t give you cancer, but if God is to be found anywhere it’s in your experience of cancer.” Tell them, “God makes his office at the end of your rope.””“Which means,” I added, “the question for faith is not “Where is God in the midst of my struggle?” As though, God is absent. The question for faith is “What is God up to in the midst of my struggle?””
What is God up to?
To all of you who are just hanging on, to any of you who are in the thick of what you can barely handle, to those of you with toes already out over the edge on the precipice of unbelief, hear the good news: the God who came down to jump Jacob in the darkness of his guilt and sin— he sneaks up on you too.
He’s come down as low as he can go.
He’s no higher than a tabletop.
He’s right in front of you.
In loaf and cup.
He’s biding his time, waiting for you, with whatever struggle you’re wrestling, to grab hold of the graspable God.
Come to the table with whatever wounds or worries you are bearing and demand from him the blessing that is Christ Jesus himself.
The body and the blood— they are the edible promise, Christ’s last testament, that one day the Lord Jesus will say to you too, “You have struggled with God and prevailed…”
Because this is his body broken for you, because you have been baptized into his righteousness, one day Israel will be your name too.
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March 18, 2023
Hitmen and Midwives: Talking Preaching with Preachers
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Back in the fall, I gave a series of talks on grace and proclamation to a clergy conference for the Anglican Church of Canada. I titled the talks, “Hitmen and Midwives,” taking the idea from the Word’s self-description in the Book of Deuteronomy:
“I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal.”
Just so, preachers are like Hitmen and Midwives, killing the Old Eve and Adam in hearers in order for God to create faith and, through faith, a new creation.
You can find the audio of those talks here on the site.
As an extension of those talks, I am beginning a series of conversations on preaching with preachers and those who listen to them.
First up, my friend Ken Jones, in true Lutheran fashion, has sketched out 9.5 Theses on Preaching. Also, in true Lutheran fashion, Ken has neither a shortage of opinions nor a fear of polemic.
In this conversation, Ken and I converse about Thesis #1:
The task of preaching is the delivery of the free and immutable gift of mercy on account of Jesus, crucified and risen, to all who have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Ken and I discussed the importance of understanding that word “delivery” as well as how faith depends on those other words, “free,” “immutable,” and “mercy.” If you enjoy this conversation and would like to listen in on the future ones as well as learn the remaining 8.5 Theses, be sure to subscribe to receive the future installments.
Hitmen and Midwives
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Back in the fall, I gave a series of talks on grace and proclamation to a clergy conference for the Anglican Church of Canada. I titled the talks, “Hitmen and Midwives,” taking the idea from the Word’s self-description in the Book of Deuteronomy:
“I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal.”
Just so, preachers are like Hitmen and Midwives, killing the Old Eve and Adam in hearers in order for God to create faith and, through faith, a new creation.
You can find the audio of those talks here on the site.
As an extension of those talks, I am beginning a series of conversations on preaching with preachers and those who listen to them.
First up, my friend Ken Jones, in true Lutheran fashion, has sketched out 9.5 Theses on Preaching. Also, in true Lutheran fashion, Ken has neither a shortage of opinions nor a fear of polemic.
In this conversation, Ken and I converse about Thesis #1:
The task of preaching is the delivery of the free and immutable gift of mercy on account of Jesus, crucified and risen, to all who have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Ken and I discussed the importance of understanding that word “delivery” as well as how faith depends on those other words, “free,” “immutable,” and “mercy.” If you enjoy this conversation and would like to listen in on the future ones as well as learn the remaining 8.5 Theses, be sure to subscribe to receive the future installments.
March 17, 2023
Face to Face with God: Christ as Priest and Mediator
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Our guest this week for Crackers and Grape Juice is Dr. Desmond Alexander, author of the new book, Face to Face with God: A Biblical Theology of Christ as Priest and Mediator.
“Desi” is senior lecturer in Biblical Studies and director of postgraduate studies at Union Theological College, Belfast, Northern Ireland. The author of many books and articles, Desi is a former chair of the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical and Theological Research, and his research interests lie primarily in two areas: the Pentateuch and Biblical Theology.
Timely for the last weeks of Lent, Desi joined us to talk about how the New Testament, specifically the Book of Hebrews, understands Christ as our Great High Priest.
March 16, 2023
Sigmund Freud was Right, Sheep are Lame
The lectionary psalm is only fifty-five words, but I’d wager Psalm 23 is the most beloved— certainly it’s the most familiar— text in the entire Bible. “We cling to life through it,” my former teacher Ellen Charry says, “when the angel of death stalks our path.” The metaphor at the heart of the twenty-third psalm is an image that recurs throughout scripture. Fully half of the books of the Bible liken God’s relationship to us to that of a shepherd and his flock.
Jacob, who knew better than most what it means to wander and stray, is the first person in scripture to call God his shepherd. John frames his entire Gospel around the metaphor, beginning with John the Baptist’s acclamation “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” and ending with the Risen Christ commissioning the formerly lost sheep, Peter, as a shepherd.
The very reason the image of God as Shepherd is such a refrain in scripture perhaps makes its cherished status somewhat ironic. Chances are, you’ve heard these lines about “thy rod and thy staff” recited or prayed or sung so many times you no longer hear the oddity of Psalm 23 or the offensiveness of it.
The Lord is my Shepherd.
It’s not “The Lord is my Guide; I shall not fail to follow his way.”
It isn’t “The Lord is my Teacher; I shall not disobey.”
Nor is it “The Lord is my Guru; I shall not ignore his wisdom.”
The Lord as our Life Coach casts us in a more flattering position. But the Lord as our Shepherd? To profess that the Lord is your shepherd is to confess that you are a sheep.
Sigmund Freud was correct; sheep are lame.Sheep most often appear in scripture as hapless dolts. Even when they end up on the winning side of the divide, as in Jesus’s yarn in Matthew 25, they come off as dumb as rocks, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you?” To profess that God is your Shepherd is to confess that you are no more capable or impressive than an animal who is easily and happily domesticated for food.
Less familiar than Psalm 23 is the forty-fourth psalm that Paul quotes in his Epistle to the Romans:
“You have made us like sheep for slaughter, and have scattered us among the nations…Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”
Translation: Clarice Starling notwithstanding, sheep are such stupid, helpless, self-involved animals that they are blissfully and absolutely ignorant of their surroundings, incapable of sensing danger and thus easily, happily led to their own slaughter.
Scripture says, “That’s you.”
Which is to say: Sheep need a shepherd.
As Ellen Charry writes:
The frequency of the shepherding motif in scripture owes less to Israel’s semi-nomadic origins and more to their lived experience that God’s people need to be led, cared for, and helped by someone more intelligent, able, and sophisticated than oneself.
March 15, 2023
Q: What do we mean by calling God “Creator?”
Hey Friends,
I just want to say thank you to all the many folks who reached out to encourage me into revisiting, revising, and completing this project.
And thanks to all of you for subscribing and supporting my platform here. No one wants to get more email so I hope you can get some value out of this one. In either case, I appreciate the privilege of inviting me into your inbox and, I hope, your headspace.
If you have ideas about what you’d like to receive in future posts and projects, drop me an email or leave it in the comments.
If you missed the Kick-Off Catechism Post last week, here’s the intro:
I recently decided to revisit and finally finish a catechism I began writing a decade ago, which, thanks to a long vacation called cancer, I never completed. My plan is to rework what I had written, as God has made otherwise than who I was back then, and to write new entries for the questions that I left unaddressed.
Originally, I began writing it because I became convinced it is important for the Church to inoculate our young people with a healthy dose of catechesis before we ship them off to college, just enough so that when they first hear about Nietzsche or really study Darwin they won't freak out and presume that what the Church taught them in six grade confirmation is the only wisdom the Church has to offer. What I’ve realized since then is that adults— more specifically, Christians—also need this kind of catechesis. There is a long tradition in the historic church, especially in the Reformation, of distilling the faith down into concise questions and answers with brief supporting scriptures.
As Luther intended his own Small Catechism, the Q/A's of a catechism are, really, the pretense for a longer dialogue, in Luther’s case a conversation between parents and their children. Given the post-Christian world in which we will live, I think it's important to outline the faith such that people can see— and learn— the philosophical foundation beneath it. Ours is a faith that has ancient answers for modern questions, a faith that will always rely upon God's self-revelation but it is not irrational for all truth is God's truth. In other words, ours is a faith with the resources to tame the cynicism of a post-Christian culture.
I’ll post one every Wednesday so if you’ve not yet subscribed to the Substack…WTF?!
3. Is God knowable?In a certain sense.
As Being that supplies existence to all created things in the universe, God is knowable for God is literally closer to us than we are to ourselves.
However, as Creator, God is necessarily greater than his creatures’s apprehension of him. Our knowledge of God is never full or perfect. We can know that God is but never know what God is.
Therefore we know God only analogically; that is, we can know what God is “like” but we do not know God in his essence.
"I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them of things that were not; and so was mankind made likewise."
- 2 Maccabees 7.28
“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.”
- Psalm 139.6
March 14, 2023
Transfiguring Obedience
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Here is Session #4 of our online discussion of Chris E.W. Green’s new book Being Transfigured. If you’ve got a comment or question on this or any of the sessions, leave a comment!
March 13, 2023
A Covert, Undercover Christian is an Oxymoron
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Ephesians 5
“Jesus Christ [not the Bible] is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death…Jesus Christ is God’s vigorous announcement of God’s claim upon our whole life.”
— The Barmen Declaration
Those lines constitute the opening salvo of the Barmen Declaration, the Confession of Faith written by the pastor and theologian Karl Barth in 1934 on behalf of the dwindling minority of Christians in Germany who publicly repudiated the Third Reich. Barth wrote the whole document while his colleagues slept off their lunchtime booze.
Barth continued:
“We reject the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we do not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords…With both its faith and its obedience, the Church must testify that it belongs to and obeys Christ alone.”
One of the teachers from whom I learned Barth’s theology is Dr. George Hunsinger. Professor Hunsinger has a thick, white beard and usually wore reading glasses perched precariously at the end of his nose. Often his wife would sit at the back of the classroom and signal to him when it was time to wrap up so prone was he to lecture on and on, oblivious to the time. I remember we were discussing Barth’s Barmen Declaration in class one morning, and Dr. Hunsinger, uncharacteristically, broke from his lecture and took off his reading glasses. His jovial countenance turned serious, and he said, seemingly at random though not random at all:
“Just outside the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria, immediately outside the walls of the concentration camp, there was and still is a Christian church.”
It was an 8:00 class but suddenly no one was fighting off a yawn. “Just imagine,” he said, “the prison guards and the commandant at that concentration camp probably went to that church on Sunday mornings and even Wednesday evenings. Every week they walked from gas chambers and gallows, through razor wire, and past cattle cars to the church where they confessed their sins and received the assurance of pardon and prayed to the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ, and then they walked out of the church and went back to the camp and killed scores of Jews not thinking it in any way contradicted their calling themselves Christians.”
“How does that work?” someone joked, trying to take the edge off.
“It happens,” he replied, “when you reduce the Gospel to forgiveness and you evict Jesus Christ from every place but the privacy of your heart.”His righteous anger was like an ember warming inside him. “Whenever you read Karl Barth,” the professor told us,” think of that church on the edge of the concentration camp. Think of the pews filled with Christians and the ovens filled with innocents and then think about what it means to have been called by Christ our Lord.”
The lectionary epistle for the coming Fourth Sunday of Lent is from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, in which the apostle echoes like Christ preaching on the mount:
“For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, "Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you."
The luminescence of light is its essential quality without which it becomes useless; likewise, a private, hidden commitment to Jesus Christ— a faith which can only be inferred— renders you useless. It renders you useless precisely because a public, visible obedience to the Kingdom Christ has brought near is the very reason Jesus has called disciples and constituted a contrast community called the Church.
I may be justified through faith alone. But faith alone does not make me a Christian.March 12, 2023
Outlaw God
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Genesis 31.22-42
A dozen years ago the Vatopedi Monastery, an Orthodox monastery on Mt. Athos in Northern Greece, loaned to Vladimir Putin and the people of Russia an artifact believed to be the belt of the Virgin Mary.
When Russia received the ancient relic and put it on display in a glass-enclosed reliquary, hundreds of thousands of Russians stood in line and waited over twelve hours in the winter cold, to pay homage to and to receive blessing from the Mother of God. The only person who did not wait in line, first in line, as the spiritual head of his people, was Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He sought out the holy relic so that the Mother of God could bless Russia with children to serve in Russia’s army and to bless Russia with success in their bombing missions in Syria.
“For surely,” Vladimir Putin commented, “God is on our side.”
This certainty of divine favor is on display also in Russia’s Cathedral of the Armed Forces.
Built in only 600 days, the government reportedly covered half of the six billion ruble cost; so that, it would be complete and ready to unveil on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany, May 2020. The sanctuary and adjacent chapels accent iconography commemorating Russia’s past military triumphs. The Cathedral of the Armed Forces forsakes the elegant domes of a traditional Orthodox cathedral to resemble instead nuclear missiles. It’s perhaps an appropriate likeness given that Russian Orthodox priests have, under Putin’s regime, written an entire liturgy for the purpose of blessing Ukraine-bound Russian munitions. The domes are not the only alteration to the traditional Orthodox architecture. Rather than the typical two dimensional apse mosaic of Christ, the Cathedral of the Armed Forces features a three-dimensional sculpture of Mary in the likeness of a Tsarist Queen.
This past fall Vladimir Putin coordinated a conscription order to coincide with the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, at which time he delivered a fiery speech accusing the West in general and America in particular of “outright satanism,” and of having turned liberal secularism into a religion at odds with the God of the Bible. At the same time, Patriarch Kiril, the bishop of bishops in the Russian Orthodox Church, promised believers that “sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty [in Ukraine] washes away all sins.” It is not surprising then that when Russia unveiled the Cathedral of the Armed Forces almost three years ago, visitors noticed that the sanctuary also featured open display space, intentionally left blank to later one day visually celebrate Russia’s “liberation” of Ukraine. Already artists have been working on a mosaic of Mother Mary hurling a cluster bomb at a maternity ward. Amazingly, this will be only the newest not the first mosaic at the cathedral which depicts Mary as an advocate for and even participant in Russian warfare.
“For surely, God is on our side.”
Meanwhile, on the other side, a different image of Mary has emerged.
The sacred image representing resistance to authoritarian Russia, the Virgin of the Passion, first appeared among the Orthodox Christians who found themselves on the losing side of the Crusades. In this symbol of defiance, angels hover above Mary, who holds her toddler son in her arm. The child, who is looking up, looks frightened. The Mother has her head turned, toward the viewer, as though she’s appealing to you to act, to do something, to help them, for— can’t you see— the angels hovering above her boy carry the instruments of the Passion—the cross, spear, and sponge.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago, this icon, the Virgin of the Passion has appeared with Ukrainian priests celebrating battlefield masses. It’s been carried by frightened children into Kyiv bomb shelters, and packed hastily in the luggage born by refugees on the way to Poland. This Mother of God reminds those who take up weapons in her Son’s name that weapons were similarly deployed against God, and those weapons ultimately guaranteed the victory not of the aggressors, but of the aggrieved. The sad and frightened Virgin of the Passion gives hope to the war’s victims, for surely Mary’s son and Pilate’s victim is on their side.
God is on our side.Quite obviously, both cannot be right.
But if we obey the Bible, if we attempt to say only what scripture permits us to say, then neither can both be wrong.
Neither can both be wrong.
One of them is correct.
The God of Israel is not a God who refrains from taking sides.God’s partisanship is baked into the very name he reveals in the Book of Genesis. “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” is synonymous with, equivalent to “I am the God who has taken a side.”
Our text, Genesis 31, is but a small example of a pattern upon which all of scripture hangs together; namely, the true God is a God who chooses sides. Just as Jacob’s exodus from home began with a sword hanging over his head so too does it end with Jacob’s life endangered. Jacob’s cruel and conniving father-in-law was off shearing his flocks of sheep when the Lord warned Jacob that he could no longer trust Laban.
“Pack it up and return to your father’s home pronto,” the Lord warns Jacob, “Scram before Laban decides to kill you.”
Jacob and his haram sneak away and Laban does not learn of their exodus from the east until the third day.
“What have you done?!” Laban rages when he realizes he’s finally been deceived.
“What have you done?!”
It’s the same accusative question that Jacob had screamed at Laban when he realized he’d been conned into marrying the wrong sister. Jacob has stolen Laban’s daughters, Laban’s livestock, and Laban’s gods. It takes a week for Laban and his lynch mob to catch up to them. Heretofore in the narrative, Laban has shown no scruples whatsoever so we should not be naive about his plans.
Laban intends to murder Jacob. Only, on the seventh day, the Lord speaks to Laban in a dream, warning him, “Be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad.”
Remember, God has made a promise to Jacob. “Behold,” the Lord promised Jacob at Bethel, “I am with you and will keep you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” In other words, on account of his promise, the Lord has guaranteed Jacob’s safety.
The Lord’s warning to Laban, therefore, should be heard as a threat.
“If you say anything, good or bad, to Jacob— if you do anything to him, watch out!”
As Jacob puts the matter plainly at the end of the text, the Lord thwarted Laban’s first degree designs because:
“The God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac— he [is] on my side.”
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, wrote an essay called "Meditation on the Divine Will,” the kernel of which later appeared in his Second Inaugural Address. Wrestling with the fact that believers of great and genuine faith fought on both sides of the bitter conflict, Lincoln wrote,
“In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for and against the same thing at the same time…... in the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.”
The God of Abraham Lincoln is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Unlike the mythologies we’ve constructed around the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln was actually a churchgoing Christian and the Calvinists with whom he worshipped taught him well how to read the Bible.
The God of the Bible is not like the Greek religion of Plato or the Dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent. The God of Israel is not immune to time but enters into it.The God of Israel authors history rather than stands above and beyond it.Therefore, history is not one damn thing after another; history is what is determined by the Lord’s decision-making.
In 1864, Lincoln wrote a letter to a Kentucky newspaper editor who had lodged an inquiry as to why the President had changed his mind on the subject of emancipation. Lincoln put it in terms the Old Testament writers would recognize,
History is what happens as God enters into time and takes sides— even if the side God takes is exclusively his own inscrutable side.“In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years' struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”
And as Lincoln knew firsthand, more often than seldom casualties are the consequence of the Lord’s choosing. Since Cain, the fallen world is precisely a world of violence. That being the case, the Lord cannot take sides in such a world without, as it were, getting blood on his hands.
This offends us.
Of course it offends us.
Most of us have enough wealth and security not to need such a God.
According to the historic Passiontide liturgies of the tradition, the beating heart of the biblical narrative is the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of the Book of Exodus. The Easter Vigil liturgy, for example, makes clear that cross and resurrection are the culmination to these chapters and not their contradiction. In Exodus 14, as the escaping Hebrews see Pharaoh’s army approaching, they cry out in terror to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?“
With boldness, Moses replies to them:
“The Lord will fight for you!”“Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still.”
In the following chapter, after the Red Sea has swallowed up the Egyptian troops, Moses’s sister, Miriam, sings in triumph,
The Lord is a Man of War.“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song… The Lord is a man of war…”
The claim that God is on one side of a conflict strikes us in the modern world as not only a despicable error but as exactly what is wrong with much of our modern world; ie, Allahu Akbar.
Nevertheless, if Jesus Christ is Lord, then we must let him be Lord of our metaphysics too.Straightforwardly, the God of Jacob fights for his people. As God is to Laban so God is to all of the enemies of his Israel, often resorting to violence to accomplish his promises to them. The God who fights for Israel even fights against Israel, sending Babylon, the “worst of the nations,” to chasten his chosen people for their unfaithfulness. As the prophet Ezekiel laments, “The Lord takes the field against his own people.”
Such a God offends us.
The assertion that God can be wrathful when rebelled against and even jealous of his people’s love, further offends our modern, pagan prejudices.
As Robert Jenson writes,
“We may try to escape by the popular supposition that God in the Old Testament could be wrathful and that the New Testament changes all that. But this notion cannot survive slightest acquaintance with the texts.”
After all, this God who so offends us does not offend the Lord Jesus, who not only worshipped this God but called him “Abba,” Daddy. I hear so many would-be Christians question how the Old Testament can be Christian scripture the point bears repeating.
Jesus does not have any of the problems with his scriptures that we do.To accept him is to accept them, and to reject them is to reject him. Jesus literally stakes his life on the Old Testament God, trusting the Father’s election of him to triumph even if over the grave. Nor was the Old Testament an affront to the apostles who knew it only as the Bible and for whom it served as a reliable narrative that leads intelligibly into the story about Jesus of Nazareth, who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly.
Pay attention to the way the words run.
Jesus does not simply pray to the Father. Jesus is in the Trinity. He is “of one being with the Father.”
That means—
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel— these are not simply the people from whom Jesus descends, as though it could have been any other random assortment of names. These are the people through whom the Father chooses to make his way forward to Mary. These are the people through whom the Father charts his inexorable path to the incarnation. As Karl Barth puts it, Jesus Christ is the beginning of all the ways and works of God.
Therefore, every decision God makes and every side God takes he does so as the contingent twists and turns on the way to Mary’s womb.To be sure, this raises hard and disturbing questions:
Is God a God of violence?
Does God deal death and suffering to those who take the field against him?
Does God’s election entail also rejection?
No honest reading of scripture will permit us to wash God’s hands of the consequences of his partisanship, his preferential option for Israel.
Indeed if such a redaction of scripture were possible, none of us would be here today.
There would be no Israel; and if no Israel, no Christ; and if no Christ, no redemption of the world, if the Lord had sat on the sidelines and allowed the Egyptians or the Philistines or the Moabites or whoever to overwhelm and destroy his people Israel.
Quite simply—
There would have been no Man of Sorrows had God not been a Man of War.Or, as the logic of the Trinity requires us to say, Miriam’s Man of War is of one being with Isaiah’s Prince of Peace.
As Robert Jenson writes, these are “the facts on the ground. We cannot ignore them in the name of an idealistic pacifism.”
God is a Living God, not a philosophical abstraction.
His name is YHWH, and he is both wildly passionate and deeply partisan.
A year ago this week, Father Ioann Burdin, a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, provoked the ire of the president of the Russian Federation as well as the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Shortly after Vladimir Putin made opposition to the war in Ukraine a crime, made it a crime even to call the war a war, Father Ioann, uncowed, stepped into his pulpit on March 6 and to a small congregation of a dozen elderly worshippers he preached a short, simple sermon.
He insisted that “Christians in Russia can no longer close our eyes or continue calling black white and white black. The blood of our brothers and sisters in Christ will be on the hands not only of the leaders who orchestrated this war and not only on the soldiers who carry out their orders but on the hands of all of us who stood silent and refused to take a side.”
For his dangerous homily, Father Ioann was questioned by the police. Later, he was arrested and put on trial where his parishioners were forced to testify against him. Rather than prison, he was fined a month’s salary. His congregation, unhappy with the attention, pushed him out of his pastorate. The patriarch responded by informing Father Ioann that if he could not find another parish to hire him within a few months then he would be defrocked from the priesthood. In speaking with a reporter from the NY Times, Father Ioann appeared embarrassed by the admiration his actions had inspired in the West and expressed regret to have put his parish through what could have proved a far worse ordeal.
When asked if he had done the right thing, taken God’s side in the conflict, Father Ioann refused to presume. “I don’t know if God is on my side,” he said:
“Thinking God is always on your side is the lie of the false prophets that led to the destruction of Judah in the Bible. I don’t know if I’m on God’s side. I only know that God is not impartial in his judgments.”
I only know that God is not impartial.
The true God is an Outlaw God.He does not obey religion’s rules for who God can be. He does not obey religion’s rules for what God can do. The Greek religion of Plato decreed that God must be impassible— without emotions, but the true God rages at his Israel even as he romances her. All other religions insist that God must be immune to time, but the true God defines himself according to the history he makes with us. All religions assume God rewards the righteous and punishes the unrighteous, but the true God not only sometimes wields the sword, he suffers our violence in order to declare righteous the ungodly. Religion asserts that God is transcendent, above it all, but the true God’s boundless personal investment in his creatures is his most determining characteristic.
That is, the God of Israel is not above the fray.
Indeed, as Robert Jenson writes,
“We must hope the Lord is not above the fray for if God does not fight the forces of evil, they [will] triumph incrementally. Surely, after the twentieth century’s oceans of shed blood and the beginning of the twenty-first century’s even more threatening prospects, we can no longer entertain modernity’s great illusion, that our creaturely good intentions are a match for sin’s energy and cunning. Moreover, in the conflicts of actual history, there is never a moral equivalency, however flawed and infected both sides may be; and we must hope that God fights for the better side. For if he does not, then [the best we can expect for the future] is a long dark age.”
We must hope the Lord is not above the fray.
Actually, we need not hope.
We need only to come to the table.
For the bread that is the Man of Sorrow's body and the wine that is the Man of War’s blood is not merely the edible promise of the forgiveness of your sins, it is also a visible word, “Lo, I am with you still [in the fray] even to the end of the age.”
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