Jason Micheli's Blog, page 83
March 10, 2023
Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics for Everyone
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Our guest this week on the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast is Marty Folsom.
Marty Folsom received his PhD, the University of Otago in New Zealand, where he has taught biblical studies and theology as well as in several Seattle area schools over the last three decades. He is author of the Face to Face trilogy and has published articles in a variety of journals including the Scottish Journal of Theology.
Marty’s latest project is Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics for Everyone, A Guided Tour of One of the Greatest Theological Works of the Twentieth Century.
Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics is considered by many to be the most important theological work of the twentieth century and for many people reading it, or at least understanding its contents and arguments, is a lifelong goal. Yet its enormous size, at over 12,000 pages (in English translations) and enough print volumes to fill an entire shelf, make reading it a daunting prospect for seasoned theologians and novices alike.
Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics for Everyone, Volume 1--The Doctrine of the Word of God helps bridge the gap for would-be Karl Barth readers from beginners to professionals by offering an introduction to Barth's theology and thought like no other. User-friendly and creative, this guide helps readers get the gist, significance, and relevance of what Barth intended for the church... to restore the focus of theology and revitalize the practices of the church.
March 9, 2023
True Inclusiveness
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Romans 5
The last event at my church in 2020 before we shuttered our doors against the advent of the covid-19 pandemic was a gathering of regional clergy to learn about what was then the latest proffered divorce settlement in the “United” Methodist Church.
In the brief worship time at the top of the meeting, I preached on this Sunday’s lectionary epistle text from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
I began:
“Shame on us if we think politics and sex are more interesting than the Gospel message that the lectionary has on the docket this week, “Therefore, since we are justified by our right interpretation, we have peace with God through our Lord...” Sorry, that’s not quite it. “Therefore, since we are justified by the wokeness of our social positions, we have peace with...”No. The Word with which the Living God addresses us is, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.””
Grace, given at the rock bottom price of absolutely free, through faith makes us compatible before a holy God.
Christianity cuts against the grain of every other religion.This is why at the top of his letter to the Romans, Paul has to preemptively stipulate that he is “not ashamed of the Gospel.” Every religion the world has ever known is predicated on getting ungoldly people to turn to religion so that through religion they might become godly. And if they don’t turn to religion, if they don’t cease being ungodly, there is no good news for them. For Paul, the Gospel is something else entirely.
Near the end of his life, the British biblical scholar F.F Bruce was interviewed about the relationship between his academic study and his faith.
“What does it mean to be a Christian?” the interviewer asked him, “What does it mean to have faith— in what does a Christian put their faith?”
And Bruce responded:
“A Christian is someone who believes in the God who justifies the ungodly. To believe in him who justifies the ungodly, and nothing more and nothing less, is to be a Christian.“
For Paul, the justification of the ungodly is the Gospel in most radical form.
Paul says later in Romans that the whole Bible has been building to this revelation, and by revelation, Paul means that we could never have arrived at the justification of the ungodly on our own. It had to be disclosed to us.
It had to be revealed to us that God is not just a God on the side of the poor and oppressed, the covenant-keepers and the Law-obeyers— that’s what every religion believes.
The Gospel makes the offensive and audacious claim that God is also on the side of the irreligious, the immoral, and the unjust.
March 8, 2023
Q: Does God Exist? A: No
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My podcast posse of Dr. Johanna Hartelius and Teer Hardy recently rebooted our show Hermeneutics by recording a conversation on atheism. Thinking about the intersections and dissonances between popular religion, classical theism, and biblical dogma, I decided to revisit and finally finish a catechism I began writing a decade ago. Thanks to a long vacation called cancer I never completed it.
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. Using the catechism of the Catholic Church as a basic skeleton of categories, my own responses will be an incestuous amalgamation of Karl Barth, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Jenson, Stanley Hauerwas, Martin Luther, Augustine, and all my other theological crushes.
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. It's important for people, in and out of the faith, to see that ours is a faith which isn't afraid of doubt even as it takes the reasons for doubt with moral seriousness. 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…what the hell?!
Here’s a teaser.
And thanks Father Kenneth Tanner for giving me the push to return to the catechism.
Part I ~ The Father1. Does God exist?No.
To say something exists is to suggest that it had a beginning in time, that it is an object in the universe, but God is without beginning or end, is outside time and is not an object within the universe.
God just is; therefore, the subject and the predicate of the statement ‘God exists’ are identical.
So God does not ‘exist’ in our sense of the term, rather God is the Source of existence itself in that everything which exists owes its existence to God.
2. Do human beings exist?
“God said to Moses: “I Am He Who Is.”” - Exodus 3.14
"By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" - Hebrews 11.3
No.
A ‘being’ is someone who is still, someone who doesn’t change, someone constant, someone who’s always true.
Human life isn’t really being in that sense. Only God is a true being. The only being who can act without changing identity is God.
Everything else in creation is a “becoming,” a creature or thing that’s in constant process of changing. Everything else acts in such a way that it closes off some of the possible options and thus reduces the potential of their existence. God alone acts in such a way that there is no loss, just being.
So, no, human ‘beings’ do not exist. Human ‘becomings‘ exist. To speak of human ‘beings’ is only possibly by our incorporation into God’s Triune Being through the incarnation of the Son.
"For you [God] created all things, and by your will they existed and were created." - Revelation 4.11
“For in God we live and move and have our being.” - Acts 17.28
March 7, 2023
Transfiguring Identity
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Here is session 3 of our online discussion with Chris about his new Lenten devotional, Being Transfigured. Once again, Chris is both wise and vulnerable. If you have a question for Chris for future sessions, leave a comment or shoot me an email.
Meet Cute at the Well
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John 4
The first time farm-boy Wesley says to Buttercup, “As you wish,” you know how the story is going to end. And because you know how it will end, you know Wesley the farm boy is not dead. You know he’s really the Dread Pirate Roberts. And even when he’s mostly dead, you know he’s not gonna die because you know that’s not how true love stories go.
And when John tells you that Jesus meets a woman at a well, this Sunday’s lectionary gospel text, all the stories of scripture, all the Old Testament reruns, they all lead you to expect…a wedding.
Just as surely as you know how its going to go as soon as Billy Crystal ride shares his way back to New York City with Meg Ryan, all the storytelling conventions of scripture tell you what to expect when John tells you that Jesus meets a woman at a well.
Abraham’s son, Isaac, he went to a foreign land and there at a well he met a woman who was filling her jar. And guess what Isaac said to her? “May I have some water from your jar?” And Rebekah said to him, “Yes, and I’ll draw water for you camels too.” And just like that, before you know it, they’re getting married.
Their son, Jacob, he went east to a foreign land, and in the middle of a field surrounded by sheep he comes to a large, stone well. And there approaching the well, Jacob sees a shepherdess, coming to water her sheep, Rachel. And this time Jacob doesn’t ask the woman for water, he goes directly to her father and asks to marry her. And before you know— well, after laboring for her father for seven years— they’re getting married. When Moses fled Pharaoh of Egypt, he goes to a foreign land and sits down by a well. And there, says the Book of Exodus, a priest of Midian comes to the well with his seven daughters and their flock of sheep. A group of shepherds gather at the well too and they start to harass the priest’s daughters. Moses steps in to defend them and quicker than, ‘You had me at hello,” Moses is getting married to one of the priest’s daughters, Zipporah.
Ditto King Saul.
Ditto the lovers in the Song of Songs.
And so on and so forth.
It’s a type scene, a cliche, a contrivance, a storytelling convention.
Isaac, Jacob, Moses and all the rest— they all meet their prospective wives at wells in a foreign land.
When John opens his scene in chapter four, he’s banking on your reaction being, “I’ve seen this story before.”A man comes to a foreign land and there he finds a maiden at a well. He asks her for a drink. She obliges and more so, and then, faster than Faye Dunaway falls for Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor, the maiden runs back to get her people to witness and bless their union.
This is the way the words always run.So when John tells you that Jesus goes to a foreign country, Samaria, and meets a woman at a well and asks her for a drink, you might as well cue up the jazz flute baby-making music because all the scenes of scripture have prepared you for what to expect. Meeting a woman at a well— it’s as reliable a clue as when Jim first talks to Pam at the front desk of Dunder Mifflin. You know they’re going to get married!
By the way, don’t forget the first miracle, sign, Jesus performs in John’s gospel in chapter two is in Cana where Jesus is a wedding guest. And how, right before this passage, in John three, Jesus refers to himself, cryptically so, as the bridegroom. And now here in chapter four he’s in a foreign land, at a well, asking a woman for a drink of water.
If this meet cute at a well is a biblical trope, then why doesn’t Jesus follow the script? It’s not hard. It’s like swiping right on Tinder. In scripture all you have to do is ask a girl at a well for a drink of water and someone’s practically already shouting mazel tov.
If that’s what John has cued up for us, then why does Jesus go from asking for a drink of water to talking about Living Water? And why does this woman, who according to the convention is supposed to be a maiden, instead seem to have more baggage than Princess Vivian in Pretty Woman?
March 5, 2023
God is Roomy
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Genesis 31.1-19
Death is a big part of what I do.
There is no Easter acclamation without a grave. Resurrection requires what St. Paul calls the “Last Enemy.” Ministry— mine but also yours— is part of what my undertaker friend calls the dismal trade. Because, “in the midst of life…”
Every day is Ash Wednesday for somebody.
I spent Monday standing vigil with Gary Sherfey’s family as his time ran out. His death was both unsurprising yet shockingly swift. Together we accompanied him through the dying that is the last part of living. Laying hands on him and holding hands around him, I listened as each of us gave thanks to God in concrete terms for the gifts God gave to each of us through Gary— spoken them into the only part of him that was still working, his ear. We gave thanks and then I prayed and declared the absolution that is unconditional on account of Christ.
An hour or two later, as the nurse removed the respirator from him, I watched— no, I witnessed— how Pat, Gary’s wife, kissed him ferociously as the moments of their life became minutes. Like the picture Jesus paints of God as a Mother Hen wrapping her brood in her wings, their sons leaned down and enveloped both of them in their arms.
As his breath became air, I gathered them once again around him, around them, and I prayed the commendation. And before we prayed the prayer Jesus taught— taught as though he knew we would struggle to find words, I promised Gary that the next voice he heard would the Lord Jesus calling him in the resurrection.
Like Lazarus.
Gary, come out!
Having stewarded him so, we all stayed with him for a long while. When I finally left his hospital room, I was thinking a great many thoughts.
Chief among them was this thought:
It makes all the difference that the gospel promise I’d given to Gary, the gospel promise those around his bed all believed, is true.
It makes all the difference that the gospel is not a good thought or a comforting message or a hopeful sentiment. It makes an absolute difference that what I had proclaimed and what we had prayed is true.
As true as 1+1 = 2.God did raise Jesus from the dead having first raised Israel from slavery in Egypt.It makes all the difference that what I had proclaimed and prayed is true, a true promise from the true God.
“If you died tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity?”
When I was younger— before I got cancer— I thought it was a reductive question. Of course, it’s intended to be a reductive question, but that it is a reductive question does not make it a bad question, especially not when it’s more or less God’s own question.
As God asks Ezekiel at the Valley of the Dry Bones, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Standing there at the Ground Zero of Israel’s grief and despair, Ezekiel answers, “O, Lord God, you know.”
And then the Lord says to Ezekiel,
“Mortal, these bones are the whole people of God. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” [But] I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back… And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live again…”
Such an eternity is not automatic.
Eternity is not automatic.
Only the true God can gift you such a future. Which is to say, it makes all the difference who is the God on whom you’ve hung your heart, a heart that Calvin warns is “a perpetual idol factory.”
Calvin could have had Rachel in mind when he rendered that judgment.
In Genesis 31, Laban has gotten a taste of his own medicine and Jacob has worn out his welcome. Jacob’s enriched himself by turning the tables on his father-in-law’s grift, leaving Laban impoverished and enraged. “
And Jacob saw that Laban did not regard him with favor as before,” verse two puts it understatedly. And so the Lord Jesus warns Jacob to return with his harem to the land of his kindred. “I will be with you,” the Word promises him.
Genesis reports then that as Jacob is grabbing his go bag and strapping his sons into carseats and driving his newly acquired livestock towards Canaan, his wife Rachel “stole her father’s household gods.”
The little detail in verse nineteen is like discovering a dirty bandaid in the hotel sheets.
It spoils the story.
The Hebrew word for these “household gods” is t’rafim, pocket-sized figurines that represented the pagan deities which looked out for the well-being of Laban and his household.
If we inherit our tendency to worship false gods from Rachel, it’s hardly a recessive trait. When the Israelites left Egypt, Moses needed to warn them to cease worshiping goat demons. Ezekiel blames the exile, hundreds of years after the exodus, on the fact that Israel never forsook the idols of Egypt. When Joshua’s an old man, he has to repeat his predecessor’s warning, “Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt.” Nor is false worship a proclivity unique to Israel. When Paul specifies the occasion of God’s wrath against the Gentiles, he names only one thing, idolatry.
In both testaments, the Bible judges God’s people first, last, and foremost for idolatry.Israel understood religious pluralism better than we do and constantly they were tempted to deal with it the way we do; that is, by attempting to worship all the candidates at once.
Rachel has lived with Jacob as his wife for twenty years. She knows the true God, the God of Abraham and Isaac. She believes in the true God. After Rachel gives birth to Joseph, Rachel praises the true God and prays for the true God to give her yet another son. Nevertheless, at the outset of a dangerous journey, Rachel pockets her father’s idols— just in case— so that they might watch over her family along the way. Rachel has faith in the true God. She simply wants the Lord and whatever protection the pagan deities might also provide.
The Lord and something else— that’s the problem.
The Lord and anything else— that’s the sin.
The first command is a demand to choose amidst “the religious smorgasbord of putative gods.” “Choose me and eschew all the rest,” are the first words of the Lord’s first word, the law. And in issuing the commandment, the Lord stipulates that jealousy is not merely the first of his attributes. It is the first of his proper names. As the Lord says to Moses on Mt. Sinai, Jealous is my name.”
Not to worship the Lord only is to worship him not at all.Not to worship the Lord only is to worship another god.The question that animates the Bible is not the question we so often ask. The question at the heart of scripture is not, “Is there God?” The question on which all of scripture hangs together is, “Which god is God?” As Robert Jenson writes:
“The notion that all gods are more or less alike, or that there could God-in-general, is a piece of childishness born of religious provincialism.”
The meaning of the title “God” depends upon the identity and history of the one who bears it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the deity of the right wing’s Blood and Soil, Blute und Boden. The God of Israel is not the Invisible Hand of capitalism nor is he socialism’s Dialectic of History. The God who justifies the ungodly is not the god worshipped at the Church of Social Justice. The God of the Red Sea and the Resurrection is not the vague deity invoked on the idol you may be carrying in your pocket, “In God we trust.” That god is more likely to be Mammon than Yahweh. There’s a reason why when Jesus answers the begrudgers’s question about paying taxes to Caesar, he has to ask for the coin in question. He’s not carrying one.
Unlike us, Jesus doesn’t have any idols in his pocket.Not to worship God only is in fact to worship another god entirely.
And do not be fooled. Just because Rachel’s rival gods had been fashioned into figurines, inanimate objects, does not mean that every alternative deity is so obvious or obviously born by us.
As Martin Luther famously taught in his Large Catechism:
Whatever you hang your heart on, that is really your god, your functional savior.
Notice— a possibility presents itself in Luther’s aphorism: the prospect that we may hang our hearts on something that cannot bear the weight.
A couple of weeks ago, following a different hospital visit to see Gary and pray with him, I was standing in front of a pay station by the parking lot elevators, waiting for the machine to process my ticket.
Behind me I heard a woman shout softly, “God dammit!”
I didn’t turn around. Then I heard her kick the machine and smack it with her hand like it was a boyfriend who’d cheated on her. Then I heard her start to cry.
“Can I help you?” I turned to ask her.
Snot was already running out of her nose. She was thin and expensively-dressed and looked to be in her early sixties. She was an attractive woman.
“It’s this damn machine,” she stuttered, “I’m putting it in like it says but it keeps spitting it back out. I’VE HAD IT!”
Then she braced the machine with both hands and shook it like it was a recalcitrant vending machine.
“Let me try for you,” I said, taking the ticket and credit card from her hands.
She stood next to me as I inserted the ticket arrow side up.
“That’s what I’ve been doing and it just won’t work and it’s got me so upset,” she cried.
I handed the ticket and card back to her and I looked at her and I said, “I think maybe you’re not upset about the parking ticket machine.”
Like a stone popping out of a dike, she fell apart, the tears flooding out of her.
“I’ve spent our whole marriage working seventy— eighty— hour weeks, telling myself we’ll have more time for each other when we retire, but now he’s just got weeks.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
And I was. I felt sorry for her. She’d been carrying an idol in her pocket. I don’t know the particular god’s name. Money maybe. Prestige perhaps. It could’ve been Success or Security or Enoughness. It might have been Family, Children. Jesus warns those are the most dangerous gods of all. Whichever the god’s name, it ultimately could not bear the weight of her heart.
We should not rush to judge her for whichever pagan deity she’d pocketed.
After all— the Bible tells me so:
It’s easier to fashion a false god from Biblical and Christian material than it is to invent one out gold or stone.Last week Military.com began a series examining how extremist groups target veterans for recruitment and radicalization.
The first article profiled Ken Parker, who had been out of the Navy for two years, struggling to find a good job, when he went to his first Ku Klux Klan rally. Frustrated by his job prospects in a lousy economy, Parker attended what was billed as a "family event for whites only" with a cross-burning at dark in a small North Carolina town. The event featured Chris Barker, a KKK leader in North Carolina, who litters his racism with near-constant references to Scripture. Barker preached to the gathered crowd that night that all Jewish people represent Satan and should be killed.
Ken Parker confided to the journalist that he hadn't realized that the KKK was antisemitic, but that something clicked for him:
”I was like, I'm gonna get my Bible and prove this guy wrong and change the way he thinks on that topic, but everything else seems OK so far. But, you know, within a matter of weeks, I was reading my Bible trying to cherry-pick things out to hate Jews.”
The true God cannot be whatever we choose to make him because the true God has already elected to be the God of Israel.
God cannot be anything because God cannot be otherwise than the Father of the Lord Jesus.A year ago I toured Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. The whole way through I trailed behind a group of Hebrew School kids. At one point, in the middle of the tour, I stood next to the school kids as we looked at black and white photographs in an exhibit. You could just make out our reflections, Gentile and Jew, staring back at us in the display glass case. Behind our reflections was a picture of two soldiers— Gentile soldiers— posing proudly in front of a cattle car filled with Jews.
The exhibit noted how the inscription on the soldiers’s belt buckles— the inscription on all German soldiers’s belt buckles— read: “Gott mit uns.” Which is German for “Emmanuel.” Which is Hebrew for “God with us.” The buckles on their belts are absolutely no different than the figurines in Rachel’s pocket.
Those Nazi belt buckles are a perfect illustration of what the Church has always taught; namely:
Idolatry is equivalent to unbelief and both are the primary mode of sin.This is Paul’s Letter to the Romans in a nutshell.
Sin is the incurvature of the soul upon itself. Curved in upon itself, the soul seeks to use deity for our ends (idolatry) and so doing we end up inventing gods to suit our purposes (unbelief).
Idolatry is not an accident.
It’s not as though some of us mistakenly land upon the wrong candidate for deity. The Not-God is born, Karl Barth says, when we attempt to use deity for our own ends. To bless and baptize our bias. To imbue our politics an Absolute seal of approval. To ratify and reify our culture or station or status quo. To get out of God anything— even a good thing— other than God himself. The Not-God is born when we attempt to use deity for our own ends.
Rachel pockets her father’s household gods, why? In order that they may protect her family on a dangerous journey. Why does she turn to them? Why doesn’t she just pray to the true God? Because Rachel knows, she knows what Adam and Eve discovered in the garden, the true God can appear arbitrary. Unreliable even. The true God is persuadable. But the true God is often not persuaded. You know— the true God does not always do what you want him to do.
If I had told you the god in Rachel’s pocket would heal Gary, you’re telling me there’s no chance you’d not have taken a chance on it?
Biblically speaking, it really is that simple.
Apart from pure nihilism, there are only two possibilities:
Faith in the word of God or turning away from it to whatever else, however much that something else may cite scripture or purport to be Christianity.
One of the astonishing aspects of the Bible is that it is seldom interested in denying the power of the false gods to bestow benefits on those who worship them. The Israelites continually relapse into idolatry, for example, because they receive a spiritual experience from the worship of Baal that their devotion to the true God does not give them. It’s the very same reason the Galatians preferred the false teachers to Paul. Just so in our day, Q Anon and political organizations on the fringes of both left and right clearly bequeath their adherents a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives that Church and Synagogue do not give them.
Scripture seldom denies that idol worship bestows benefits.
Scripture simply insists that idol worship is false.
Because it is misdirected.
You can pocket any number of pagan deities that will confer upon you joy, calm and peace, guilt relief, liberation, empowerment, hope and well-being. Really, it’s a matter of deciding which of their salvations you want and making your choice. Yes, of course, the gospel can elicit in you joy, calm and peace, forgiveness, liberation, empowerment, hope and well-being. But what the gospel chiefly does— what the gospel does for all of you who are not Jews— is introduce you to the true God, the only true God. And this God is not as interested in the services the false gods feature.
This God is single-mindedly determined to preserve your identity through eternity.The true God promises communion more so than forgiveness. The true God promises incorporation not mere uplift. The true God promises fellowship that time cannot erase nor death undo,
“Tell me, O Mortal, can these bones live?”
None of the other gods on offer have room in them for others.They may make you feel forgiven, or enlightened and inspired, or they may make you feel like you’re enough. But not one of the barren deities can bless you by taking you into himself.
The true God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is roomy.Gary’s last words to his wife were, “I love you.” You have to know Gary— no, you have to know Gary and Pat— to know that’s the perfect ending to a story that is not over. And I know it’s not over. As surely as I know 1+1 = 2, I know it’s true that it’s not over.
I know because every week, Sunday after Sunday, the true God contravenes our tendencies to idolatries and confronts us directly with himself so as to render our attempted manipulations of him and our journeys to him moot.
The true God encounters us himself.
In word and water and wine and bread.
And that same God who says so reliably, “This is my body, broken for you” is the same God who promises, “I will raise you from dead” and “I go to prepare a place for you” and “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Gary’s “I love you” is the perfect ending to a story that is not over because God is roomy.
March 3, 2023
How Pastors Practice Priesthood
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This past week I conferred the absolution and commendation on a congregant who had become a friend. A fellow cancer sufferer, his death was both expected and all too swift. That his wife had been reading my book made me feel somehow culpable for his mortality. Time will tell if his sudden leave taking was a mercy. Standing vigil with his family as his time ran out, I thought of this short piece I wrote years ago:
I spent the day with a couple nervously standing vigil by their boy's bedside in the PICU. Their son, confirmed by me years ago, is only a few sizes and grades ahead of my eldest. I can’t say much more than that, pastoral privilege and all.
What I can reveal:
Right after I left that family, I collected my youngest son, Gabriel. We got in the car. Closed the doors. Buckled our seat belts (‘I beat you Daddy’). I turned on the ignition. Looked in the rearview mirror at Gabriel behind me; he was wearing my faded UVA hat and smiling. And I started to cry, suddenly feeling like I’d gotten into my car wearing someone else’s shoes.
Life is so infuriatingly fragile.This isn’t something my boys have taught me.
My boys have no notion that while God may be good and gracious, life is seldom fair or forgiving.It’s not a lesson my boys have taught me. It’s more like a lesson my job has taught me, a lesson I wasn’t in a position to learn until I had children. It’s more like now that I have skin in the game my vocation won’t let me forget just how fragile are my boys’ own skin and bones.
They’re here today…(down in the basement playing Legos, actually).
But tomorrow? The day after tomorrow?
I bring my work home with me.
I watch my boy turn his bike out the cul de sac for the first and I close my eyes to wait for the inevitable sound of screeching brakes.
I can’t drive by a car accident without imagining my own impending, parallel nightmare.
Standing in line at a roller coaster with my son, I can’t look at the twists and turns of the track without imagining my boy in the statistical margin for error.
Death is a big part of what I do.March 2, 2023
Without a Loquacious Lord, You've No Basis to Believe God Loves You
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The Old Testament assigned for the Second Sunday of Lent is God summoning the pagan, Abraham: “Now the Lord spoke to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you...” Once again, God creates through speech.
A few years ago in an article Wall Street Journal entitled “Revelation Revised.” Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, wrote:
“Any claim of revelation is preposterous. It presumes that God exists, that God speaks, and that all is not lost when human beings translate that speech into ordinary language.”
Stephen Prothero’s rejection of revelation reflects a skepticism which many people— many church people, in fact— share. It’s one thing to hold religious beliefs like “God is love,” to practice religious disciplines like prayer or charity, or to support the church with your gifts and your presence, but it’s another thing altogether to believe that God is a talkative God. It’s one thing to be on a spiritual journey. It’s quite a different matter to believe that the Living God journeys to you through the Holy Spirit and by the word of God addresses you.
No doubt, Professor Prothero did not intend it as such, but those two sentences in his article are the perfect distillation of biblical faith. As Karl Barth taught, the question the Bible answers is not, “Does God exist?” The Bible threatens us by answering a more disarming question, “What has the God who exists said? What does God speak to us?”
According to Barth, all of scripture and the entire Christian faith hang on the veracity of three little words from our text today, “And God said...”
Everything we believe as Christians follows from those three words, and if we do not believe those three words, then, as the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians, “our faith is in vain and we are of all people the most pitiful.” These three words, “And God said,” are the grounds on which the Apostle Paul can insist that, like Abraham, we are justified not by what we do, but by what we trust. It’s not that what you do for your neighbor is unimportant nor is it that the Risen Christ will fail to enlist you in his Kingdom work. Rather, Paul’s point in Romans 4 is that the God, who is able “to speak into existence the things that do not exist,” has spoken to us a promise. “I will be your God and you will be my people,” a promise made flesh for us in Jesus Christ, therefore there is no other means for us to take hold of a promise, except by trusting it.
“I’m going to do this,” God said, leaving us no other response but to believe it or not believe it.
The only basis on which Paul can proclaim that faith is reckoned to us as righteousness is the veracity of those three words at the heart of biblical Christianity, “And God said...”You don’t have to believe those three words, but you can’t kid yourself that the entire Christian faith does not hang upon them.
Your justification is by belief, not behavior, because the Living God is a loquacious God who speaks to us a promise.The syntax of salvation begins with “And God said...”
Think about it— without a loquacious God, you have no basis whatsoever to believe (much less, bear witness to such a belief) that God loves you. You have no way of knowing that Almighty God loves you unless God has really truly said so.
I remember—
Years ago, a worshipper came up to me after service and introduced himself. “Hi, I’m John Bobo,” he said. “I’m new here, and I want to talk to you about transferring my membership to this congregation.”
“Really? What makes you want to join this church?”
“The preaching,” he replied.
“Oh,” I said, as I felt my head swell a little bigger. “You think the preaching’s pretty good, do you?” And I elbowed the choir director standing next to me.
“Good? No, you’re not very good, sorry. But, you do preach like you really believe God said all this stuff. That’s what I want. That’s harder to find in the church than you might guess.”I’ve never forgotten his judgment.
March 1, 2023
Jesus's Whole Point to Nicodemus:
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The gospel text for the second Sunday of Lent is John 3.1-17, a text of gospel that often instead functions as the severest law.
“I’ve seen the signs you do,” Nicodemus says to Jesus. “Tell me, who are you?”
And oddly, Jesus answers with that verse which tightens the sphincter of every mainline liberal:
“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again.”Apparently, Nicodemus knows what he doesn’t know. Nicodemus must suspect his faith is somehow inadequate and lacking; otherwise, Nicodemus— a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin even— would not take the great risk of coming to Jesus under the cover of darkness. Sure, it’s only chapter three, but here in John’s Gospel, Jesus has just thrown his temple tantrum and already he’s made himself public enemy Number One.
To the Pharisee’s question, Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, doesn’t do anything at all to mitigate whatever spiritual crisis has led Nicodemus to Jesus. Jesus doesn’t bother to comfort Nicodemus or reassure Nicodemus or do anything to relieve whatever existential tension has brought Nicodemus to Jesus.
Notice how Jesus tightens the screws.
Jesus doesn’t do what most pastors are trained to do. Jesus doesn’t let Nicodemus off the hook with some blessed assurance like, “It’s okay. Don’t worry, Nicodemus, be happy. God loves you.” Jesus doesn’t offer Nicodemus a non-anxious presence and say, “Your faith is fine just as it is, Nicodemus. We’re all on a journey. There are many paths to my Father.”
No, Jesus sticks his thumb in whatever ache Nicodemus is nursing and raises the stakes absolutely, “If you want to see the Kingdom of God, Nicodemus, you must be born again.” Oh, and FYI, he’s not just talking to Nicodemus. Jesus dials it up to DEFCON ETERNAL for all of us, because that “you” in “You must be born again,” is plural.
I know the last thing many Christians want is to be reckoned among those kind of Christians, the ones who wield this text like a tablet of stone, but, like it or not, we are swept up in that you.
It’s: “You all must be born anothen if you want to see the Kingdom of God.”No exceptions. No loopholes for raking your neighbor’s yard or never missing a Sunday service.
That you— it’s all of us.
“You all must be born again.”
And Nicodemus, he’s a Pharisee.
He’s super religious, so he responds— like we religious types always respond— with what he’s supposed to do. “How do I do that, Jesus…?
And then Jesus says:
Pay attention to the verbs Jesus uses on Nicodemus.“Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You all must be born again.”
The verbs are what makes this passage that’s normally bad news for Christians like us good news for everybody.
Unless you all are born again, Jesus says, you will never see the Kingdom and you will never enter the Kingdom of God.
Apart from our being born again, we can neither see nor can we enter God’s Kingdom.
That is, when it comes to God and God’s Kingdom, on our own, we’re powerless.
We are born— naturally— spiritually blind and spiritually paralyzed.When it comes to God’s Kingdom, we are born dead.Therefore—Whatever Jesus means by you being born again, he’s not talking about something you do.The dead don’t make decisions.Let me make it plain—
Being born again is not “making a decision for Jesus Christ.”
We are born anothen. The Greek can also be translated from above.
It’s top down.
You don’t come to Jesus to get born again— corspes can’t get up and go anywhere— Jesus must come to us and deliver us.
We get so hung up on what Jesus says to Nicodemus in the dark of night that we close our eyes to what John in his Gospel tries to show us.Just think about how John begins his Gospel, not with a nativity story but with an intentional echo of the Book of Genesis, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things came into being through Him and not one thing came into being without Him.” In other words, this Gospel of Jesus Christ, says John, is about the arrival of a New Creation. And next, right here, Jesus tells Nicodemus and you all, that in order to see the Kingdom of God you’re going to have to become a new creation, too.
By water and the spirit.
Skip ahead.
To Good Friday, the sixth day of the week, the day of that first week in Genesis when God declares, “Behold, mankind made in our image.” And what does John show you?Jesus, beaten and flogged and spat upon, wearing a crown of thorns twisted into his scalp and arrayed with a purple robe, next to Pontius Pilate. And what does Pilate say? “Behold, the man.” And later, on that sixth day, as Jesus dies on a cross, what does John show you? Jesus giving up his spirit, commending his Holy Spirit. And then, John shows you Jesus’ executioners, attempting to hasten his death they spear Jesus in his side, and what does John show you? Water rushing out of Jesus’ wounded side. Water pouring out onto those executioners and betraying bystanders, pouring out— in other words— onto sinful humanity. Water and the spirit, the sixth day. And then Saturday, the seventh day of the week, the day of that first week in Genesis when God rests in the Garden from his creative work- what does John show you? Jesus being laid to rest in a garden tomb.
Then Easter, the first day of the week. And having been raised from the grave, John shows you a tear-stained Mary mistaking Jesus, as naked and unashamed as Adam before the Fall, for the what?
For the gardener, what Adam was always intended to be.
Later that Easter day, John shows you the disciples hiding behind locked doors. This New Adam comes to them from the garden grave, and like a mighty, rushing wind, he breathes on them. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says to them.
Water, Spirit, Wind blowing where the Spirit wills, the first day.He breathes on them. Just as God in the first garden takes the adamah, the soil of the earth, breathes into it the breath of life and brings forth Adam, brings forth life, this New Adam takes the grime of these disciples’ fear and failure, their sin and sorrow, and he breathes upon them the Holy Spirit, the breath of life.
They’re made new again.
They’re anothened.
February 27, 2023
Transfiguring Death
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Here’s the second session for our online Lenten study with Chris Green on his new book, Being Transfigured.
A couple of key quotes from the section:
“[In Jesus] God suffers, but God does not suffer the fact that he suffers.”
— Robert W. Jenson
“Jesus has accepted death. Therefore, this must be more than merely a descent into empty meaninglessness. He has accepted the state of being forsaken. Therefore, the overpowering sense of loneliness must still contain hidden within itself the promise of God’s blessed nearness. He has accepted total failure. Therefore, defeat can be a victory. He has accepted abandonment by God. Therefore, God is near even when we believe ourselves to have been abandoned by him. He has accepted all things. Therefore, all things are redeemed.”
— Karl Rahner
Here’s the Nick Cave piece Chris mentions in the session.
Thanks for participating! If you’ve got questions for follow-up with Chris, shoot me an email or leave it in the comments.
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