Jason Micheli's Blog, page 85
February 5, 2023
Participating in Providence
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Genesis 28
Five years ago, three years after he should have been no longer alive, the esteemed New Testament scholar, Richard Hays, addressed those who had gathered to celebrate his retirement from Duke Divinity School.
At the top of his lecture, Hays said,
“I’m grateful to all of you who’ve come here this evening to hear a few reflections from me on the occasion of my retirement. I’m grateful for all your prayers over these past three years.”
They worked.
God answered them.
“I’m grateful for all your prayers. Most of all, I’m grateful to God for granting me a little more world and a little more time to think back on what has been and to ponder what is to come. The key note of all I have to say is gratitude. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
This is the day the Lord has made. That’s not a sentiment. It’s a claim.
“Most of you know…three years ago I received a devastating diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and I went on medical leave to undergo chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. When I left the dean’s office that July, I left in tears with my hair falling out. I took up the tasks of reviewing my will and writing directions for my funeral service. As I stand here tonight, I’m unexpectedly able to look back on that night, that year, of now done darkness. Chastened, hopeful, healed. I’m grateful for your prayers.”
A couple of year ago, I was in my truck, driving to the office, when a different Duke professor called me.
Over the years the theologian Stanley Hauerwas has become more than a mentor.
He’d been ill and had undergone surgery in England, and I’d left him a message inquiring about his health and spirit.
That morning on the way to church, he called me back and before I could even say hello, his gravely Texas accent barked out, “Jason I can’t piss, and it’s just so damn painful.”
As I pulled into the church’s parking lot, he described all the complications he’d suffered following what should have been a routine procedure.
I listened.
But I knew that Stanley is not the sort of Christian to be satisfied with a preacher who offers nothing but active listening.
So I said to him, “I’ll pray for you, Stanley.”
“You damn well better do it now,” he grumbled, “I’m miserable, in agony.”
I cleared my throat and was about to begin praying when Stanley interrupted me.
“And Jason?”
“Yes, Stanley?”
“If you’re not going to pray for God to heal me, then, hell, just hang up the phone right now already.”
I laughed and I prayed to God for just that and when I was done he said, “Thank you. I’m grateful for your prayers.”
After having dishonored and deceived his father and stolen his elder brother’s blessing, Jacob nevertheless receives a prayer from his father.
“May God Almighty bless you…” Isaac prays, “May God give the blessing of Abraham to you…”
With this prayer in his pocket and a staff in his hand, Jacob sets out for a life in exile on his uncle Laban’s estate. But no sooner has Jacob left his father’s home than God Almighty answers Isaac’s prayer. Jacob makes camp at Bethel, the very place where his grandfather had built an altar and called upon the name of the Lord.
Jacob picks out a stone for his pillow. He lays down to sleep. And he falls in to a dream. Jacob dreams of an earthbound exit off a heavenly highway jammed with angelic traffic. And then, after the dream, God Almighty answers Isaac’s prayer.
God appears to Jacob— for the first time to Jacob— and God says,
“I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac…Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
Notice—
In answering Isaac’s prayer, God says nothing to Jacob about Jacob’s sin, neither his trespass against his brother Esau nor his transgression against his father. It’s all just blessing and grace.
Jacob is addressed by God. Jacob is addressed graciously by God. And God addresses Jacob as a result of Isaac’s prayer for Jacob. No doubt Jacob is grateful for Isaac’s prayer.
Jacob meanwhile responds to the Lord’s address of him by himself praying. Jacob’s prayer at the end of Genesis 28 is a clear indication that we should not expect a person’s religious experience to change their character in any significant manner. The Jacob who prays after having had this mystical encounter with God is the same Jacob who conned a birthright from his brother and stole a blessing from his father. Jacob prays,
“Since you’re going to be with me, Lord, abiding with me and all, how about you take care of the groceries too? And I had to leave home in a hurry. I only packed a spare change of clothes. How about you take care of my wardrobe as well, God? And bring me back to my father’s house in one piece why don’t you? Keep Esau from killing me. If you’ll do all that, Lord, then, yeah, you can be my God.”
Jacob prays without tact, humility, or self-awareness.
And God does just as Jacob asks.
Jacob is clothed and fed and sheltered and reconciled.
Nothing that happens in the world happens apart from the free willing of God.Yet…God is persuadable.Several years ago now, I was at the infusion center to receive the Neulasta injection that bookended my every round of chemo. An old woman sat directly across from me, a red-orange tube running from a bag to her chest. She wore a blue scarf with peacocks on it around her small, bony head. Her face looked so sunken and her skin so stretched and translucent that guessing her age felt impossible. She greeted me—exhausted, her eyes only half open—with a distinct prairie accent when I sat down and cracked open my book.
I didn’t get past the first page.
She started to cry—whimper really—from the sores her chemo-poison had burnt into her mouth and tongue and throat. Beseeching the nurse, she pleaded, “make the pain go away.” She kept on like that, inconsolable, with no concern for what I or anyone else might think about her. In a different-size person you’d call it a tantrum.
Seeing her there, spent and defeated, I felt compelled to do the only work I could for her. I prayed. Quietly, under my breath, just above a whisper, my lips moving to the petitions. And when I finished, I made the sign of the cross over her.
“You religious?” the man in the next infusion chair asked me.
“Sort of, I guess.”
He went to wave me off, dismissively, but then remembered his arm was taped and tethered to tubes and the tubes to an IV pole. He’d been on the phone on work calls almost the whole time I’d been there. A gray tie that matched his hair hung loose from his unbuttoned collar.
“You really think that stuff works— prayer?”
He said it in a tone that suggested no believer anywhere at anytime had ever wrestled with such a question.
“Well,” I replied, “If prayer doesn’t work, then it’s entirely a waste of time.”
If prayer doesn’t work, then it’s entirely a waste of time.
He nodded seeming to appreciate that I had not evaded the stakes at the heart of his question.
“I’ve got a partner,” he said, “in my firm. He prays. He says he does it because it changes him. Like, he prays for patience and the practice of praying makes him more patient. Like meditation I suppose.”
I nodded and smiled wryly.
“You’d never know it from the way a lot of Christians talk about prayer,” I said to him, “But the content of prayer is not irrelevant to its benefit.”
The content of prayer is not irrelevant to its benefit.
He didn’t follow me so I said, “You’d be surprised how many people pray who do not believe in prayer.”
“A lot of them are ordained,” I added.
He laughed, and then he went back to his work.
A couple of minutes later he sat his phone down on his lap and raised his hands in a “What gives?” gesture.
“But how?” he said, “I mean, come on! You’re telling me that you think we can change God’s mind about God’s will?”
I smiled a wide and crazy smile.
“It’s totally crazy, isn’t it?” I said, “It’s tremendously preposterous— to say nothing of presumptuous— but that’s the claim. That’s the claim Jews and Christians make (at least the ones who haven’t lost their theological nerve). If the claim is wrong, then the gospel is a lie and prayer is nothing but a bunch of hot air.”
And then I pointed at the exhausted, whimpering woman across from me.
“The claim is not only that we can tell the Father what he ought to do about her; the claim is the Father will listen and may heed us.”
The old rabbis considered Jacob the father of faith.
How?
Jacob doesn’t know the promise of God so as to trust it. Jacob has not heretofore had any experience of God. If faith denotes a spiritual experience, Jacob has not yet had one. How is Jacob the father of faith? Jacob doesn’t even know the stories of the faith— he doesn’t realize he’s pitched a tent in the very spot Abraham called upon the Lord. How is he the father of faith? If faith is equivalent to virtue (like many of you imagine), Jacob has none.
Jacob is the father of faith, the old rabbis attested, because Jacob made a verbal reply to the God who addressed him.
He prayed.
He prayed a petitionary prayer.
He prayed, “Father, give me this, that, and the other, and you can be my God.”
The law commands faith.
The creeds describe faith.
Prayer is the act of faith.Prayer is the act of faith, and, put the other way around, a sure sign of a lack of faith is a reluctance to pray boldly.
Jacob is the father of faith because prayer is the most elementary act of obedience. It does not matter how many good works you do or how much you give. Alms to the poor do not substitute for prayer. Jacob is the father of faith because prayer is the most elementary act of obedience, and prayer is the most elementary act of obedience precisely because it is a correlative of the gospel.
The gospel is an address to you for you from the Living God. “This is my body given for you,” he says to you every Sunday. “In the name of my Son, your sins are forgiven.”“This is the word of God for the people of God.” Since God initiates a relationship of address, it follows that, in return, he wants to hear from you.
Prayer is the most elementary act of disobedience. Elementary but offensive.Just imagine—
Imagine an anthropologist from outer space, observing for the first time, Jews and Christians engaged in prayer.
What would she think?
Surely, she would conclude that we were engaged in dialogue with one on whom we are utterly dependent but one we could nevertheless influence.
It’s quite obvious.
Yet if asked a question like, “Do you really believe your prayer can change God’s mind?” many believers balk at the unambiguous implications of our practice.
Our evasions are not dictated to us by scripture.The God of the Bible hears the cries of his people as slaves in Egypt and is moved to deliver them. The God of Israel is talked off the ledge by Abraham, who convinces the Lord not to destroy every citizen of Sodom. The God of Abraham is persuaded by Jacob to go beyond the promise and also provide for Jacob’s room and board and meal plan.
The God of the Bible is persuadable.Prayer is elementary but it’s offensive.
Think about it—
When we bring God our petitions, we presume to advise the Maker of All that Is about how best to order the universe. That’s what we’re doing; that’s what we presume. We don’t pray simply because such prayers form us. We don’t pray to accrue any merit. We’re not practicing mindfulness.
No, we pray to tell the Creator how to govern his creation.
We presume that the cosmic course of history can be brought to respond to our concerns.Such presumptions are presumptuous.
Now to get overly philosophical or polemical but all of you have been shaped deeply by the Enlightenment’s conviction that we inhabit a mechanical universe whose processes (called nature and history) are immune to petition.
The great temptation, one which traditions like Methodism have largely fallen prey, is to reconstruct a God appropriate to this supposedly indifferent, mechanical universe.
Thus:
A God too impersonal and static, impassible and distant, to be pleased by our praise or persuaded by our petitions.
But if the gospel is true, if scripture is reliable, if faith is possible, then all of this is backwards.
This is the day the Lord is making.
If bold, presumptuous petitions are implausible in our world, then it is the world we misunderstand not God.
Which means, we’re worshipping an idol and we ought to repent and turn to the true God.
The Persuadable God.
In his recent book, Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers, Paul Zahl writes,
“I got a sincere but somewhat pathetic prayer request from an old friend last year, asking me to pray for her friend’s stage- four breast cancer. My friend asked me to pray for good medical care for the person, for patience and endurance for the person’s husband, for a sound mind among her family that would know when it was time to “pull the plug,” and for a loving exchange of ideas concerning the inevitable funeral. I wrote back, asking if the possibility of praying for remission in this case were on the table. She wrote back saying that it had not come up.
Then later, during the coronavirus pandemic, I received a series of prayers from the chaplains of the Episcopal prep school I attended. Not one of the prayers included a single note of supplication for the virus itself to be restrained or for healing to be given to any who had contracted it.
I used to be diffident about praying for the remission or healing of a physical illness, let alone of a mental incapacity or disturbance. I would pray for the sufferer’s acceptance and serenity much more often than for God’s intervention and victory.
I was wrong.”
Paul Zahl may have been wrong, but he is hardly alone.
When I first got cancer several years ago, I was astonished at the apparent unbelief in prayer by those who do it. Every person was sincere. It just goes to show how little sincerity has to do with discipleship.
“l’ll pray that God gives you strength,” people would tell me.
“I’m praying that God will give your doctors wisdom,” pastors told me.
“You’re in my thoughts,” far too many Christians told me.
Your thoughts? What in the hell good are your thoughts going to do? I’m dying. Why don’t you pray for God to make it not so?! Why don’t you attempt to persuade God to heal me?
Some did so pray.
And I am grateful for their prayers.
At the beginning of the Gospel of John when Jesus calls Phillip and Nathanel, Jesus reveals to them that he is the ramp Jacob sees laid down from heaven onto the earth. The Son of God, Jesus says, is Jacob’s ladder; that is— pay attention now, the Son is the means by which our communication with the Father is possible. This is Jesus’s point when he gives us permission to pray to his Father as our Father.
As Robert Jenson says, “This is to be taken seriously.”
We can dare address God with our petitions because Jesus has invited us into his conversation with the Father.
God is so gracious.
He hasn’t just made a decision about you in Jesus Christ. On account of Jesus Christ, he’s willing to listen to you. He doesn’t just allow he invite our views to be heard and weighed in his care of the universe, exactly as a parent listens to and considers seriously the views of their children.
“Our expressed opinion,” says Robert Jenson, “is an essential pole of the process of God’s decision-making.”
Because of Jesus, because you’ve been incorporated in to him, because you’ve been invited in, because his Father is now your Father too, the life of the Trinity is now like a parliament in which you are a member.
The life of the Trinity is now like a parliament in which you are a member.
God wants you to speak up. Make a motion. Voice your opinion.
The claim implicit in Christian prayer is astonishing. Most will not believe it.
Quite simply:
To pray to stake a claim over the care of creation.To pray is to presume co-determination of the universe.To pray is to participate in Providence.Any lesser claim evades the clear implications of scripture and makes prayer nothing but an empty practice of piety.
There is perhaps no stronger indictment of the Church in a secular age than the fact that this needs to be said clearly and without hesitation:
Prayer accomplishes things.When we pray for someone, when we petition God on their behalf, we intend thereby to accomplish something for them.
Prayer is the work grace gives us to do. It is our work in the world on the world. It is our work in the world for the world’s future.
Prayer pulls us into the working out of God’s governance of the world. Prayer is our participation in Providence. In Jesus, the Father has given you a say in how his history will come out.
So, let us pray.
Let us pray prayers that are big enough and bold enough that only God can bring them off.
Pray for the war in Ukraine to be ended. Pray for all its victims to be mended. Pray for the Lord to smite Vladimir Putin. Pray for a major health event to strike Donald Trump. Or Joe Biden if that’s your politics.
In either case, pray like prayer does work.
Pray for every racist cop to be unemployed. Pray for every homeless to be housed— not fed. Pray for me to be a better preacher. Pray for Peter to be a better dresser. Pray for the gospel to reach your unbelieving child. And gift them saving faith. Pray for miracles. Pray for your addicted loved one to be, inexplicably, set free. Pray for all professional Philadelphia sports teams to fail.
Pray for Gary to be healed.
Pray for Gary and Mike and Clarence and Denny and anyone else not yet on the other side of the “now done darkness” to be healed.
Prayer accomplishes things.
You can change the Persuadable God’s mind.
By the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection, Jesus Christ has invited you into the household called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Don’t tiptoe around quietly.
Don’t put your head down and your hands in your pockets.
Don’t keep your opinions to yourself.
Speak up!
SPEAK UP!
If the world knew what you know by faith, they would be grateful for your prayers.
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January 22, 2023
The Buck-Stopping Will
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Genesis 27.1-13
“Truly, thou art a God who hides thyself,” the prophet Isaiah exclaims to the Lord at the end of a long ecstatic utterance.
“Truly, thou art a God who hides thyself.”
In the Gospel of Luke some listeners interrupt Jesus’s lesson plan. He was just about to teach them the parable of the barren fig tree. They interrupt and ask him if he’d seen the news trending on Twitter. “Did you hear Jesus?” they ask, “Pontius Pilate killed a whole church full of Galileans. He had them struck down while they were in the middle of worshipping the God of Israel according to God’s law.”
Luke doesn’t report the rest of their questions. Luke needs not.
We can hear the questions in our own voices. Why? Why do bad things happen to (sinful) people? Where? Where was God when members of his flock were slaughtered like sheep? How? How do you explain this tragedy, Jesus? Was God punishing them? Is the Almighty an underachieving pretender? Is there a reason it happened?
Is there a will which willed it?
We desperately want Jesus to say, “No, shit happens.”
But the Lord Jesus doesn’t say “Yes” or “No.” He instead answers in a manner that certainly would bar him from ordination in the United Methodist Church. The Lord Jesus replies, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
God’s gonna do the same to you unless you repent.
That’s not a “No.”Nor is it a “Yes.”
“Those Galileans weren’t any worse sinners than the lot of you; God’s gonna do likewise to you unless you repent.”And then Jesus points to another news story on his Twitter feed.
“What about the eighteen folks who perished when the tower in Siloam collapsed. You think they were especially rotten in a manner different from you? Of course not, but I’ll tell you what. Unless you repent, God’s gonna do the same to you.”
In the Gospel of John, the disciples ask Jesus about a man born blind.“Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind?”And Jesus very helpfully refuses to accept the premise that the man’s blindness has anything to do with anyone’s sinfulness. But Jesus rejects the premise for reasons that are even more offensive to our enlightened sensibilities than the original premise. Jesus says God made the blind man blind. God made him blind; so that, the work of God might be revealed in him. Again, Jesus would never get past the United Methodist Board of Ordained Ministry.
There are two conclusions we can draw from these responses by the Lord Jesus, one comforting and the other unsettling.
The Lord Jesus forbids us from conjecturing any causality between a person’s sinfulness and the suffering that besets them. Jesus won’t allow us to say this thing is happening to them because of that thing they did.
The Lord Jesus believes— and so we are compelled to believe— that there is a will that wills in the world, often in ways that shock and offend us.
“Unless you repent, God’s gonna do the same to you.”
Such a God appears even more mysterious when we insist on saying that such a God is one and the same with the Jesus who speaks of him.
“I am the Lord,” God declares to the prophet Isaiah in that same passage, “I make weal and create woe.”
And the prophet replies, “Truly, thou art a God who hides thyself.”
And the Lord does NOT correct him.
Notice—
It’s not, “Truly, thou art a hidden God,” as though the matter was God’s distance from us or our perception of him.
It’s not that God is hidden. It’s not an adjective. It’s a verb. God hides. God hides himself.
God is the hidden Lord of his own unhiding, says St. Gregory.
At the start of Advent, Maria Kamianetska mailed a photograph to her husband who had remained behind in their home village in Ukraine.
She attached a note, “You have a son.” In the picture, baby Serhii’s eyes were closed. On his head sat a little white hat. His tiny body was swaddled in a matching blanket. Maria gave birth to him in a city maternity ward in a region of Ukraine allegedly annexed by Vladimir Putin’s army.
After nine months of carrying her baby through a war zone, Serhii had come into the world at a healthy six pounds with three siblings anxious to meet him. They never did. After nursing him and lulling him to sleep and laying him in the crib next to her bedside, a Russian rocket crashed through the maternity hospital. Like that tower in Siloam, the maternity ward’s walls collapsed with everyone inside.
Serhii is the youngest casualty of Putin’s invasion. He did not live long enough to be issued a birth certificate. All of the nearly five hundred other children killed in the war thus far have been older than Serhii. Serhii was so young and so tiny that rescue workers picking through the rubble at first mistook him for a doll.
“That’s my son!? Maria, his mother, had shrieked.
Fifteen attended baby Serhii’s burial. Shelling rumbled in the distance of the cemetery as the priest placed a cross bigger than the baby into the casket and prayed the commendation.
Serhii’s siblings didn’t attend the burial. They knew their new baby brother wasn’t coming home after all but they did not know why. Because neither Maria nor her husband knew how to explain Serhii’s death to them.
Because, after all, what is there to say except, ““Truly, thou art a God who hides thyself.”
The hiddenness of God—
It’s more than an unmistakable fact of human experience. It isn’t merely a feature of the Book of Isaiah. It’s Christian dogma. As much as the doctrine of the incarnation or justification through faith alone, the hiddenness of God is one of the constructions with which we speak Christian. The contemporary American theologian, Robert Jenson, writes that when he first encountered the dogma as a young student, he said to himself,
“THIS about God’s impenetrable hiddenness is really great stuff! And, moreover, it surely must somehow be true.”But the dogma doesn’t assert quite what you assume.
God’s hiddenness does not name his metaphysical distance from us. Quite the opposite, the belief speaks to the problem of the character of God’s presence with us. If God were far off in some metaphysical distance, a cosmic butler in the great by-and-by, then we could exonerate God from the troubles and tragedies that befall our history.
But such a distant God is not the God of the Bible.
Such an aloof, hands-off God is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ nor is it their Holy Spirit who blows where the Spirit wills to blow. If God rules as his creation’s here and now Lord, if Jesus Christ sits at the right hand of the Father, then baby Serhii not only sits on his ledger waiting to be to be accounted but baby Serhii also masks God’s visage. Baby Serhii is an instance of God’s hiding.
“Truly, thou art a God who hides thyself.”
The prophet Isaiah utters that confession upon hearing God announce that God would use a pagan emperor, Cyrus, to deliver Israel from the exile into which God himself had originally sent them.
“God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform,” sings the hymn. William Cowper, the hymn writer, suffered from lifelong suicidal depression. He knew of what he sang.
“Truly, thou art a God who hides thyself.”
That God hides does not mean that God is only vaguely glimpsed.
You can’t put God in a box, some say. Never mind that God, having already put himself in tent and temple, placed himself in a space no bigger than Mary’s womb. The hiddenness of God does not mean we know God only partially. No, Jesus is the fullness of God. There is no knowability of God yet to be discovered that lies beyond Jesus. That God hides does not mean that God is not glimpse-able.
The hiddenness of God instead refers to the impenetrability of God’s moral agency.
The hiddenness of God marks the boundary beyond which we cannot discern a good or moral pattern to God’s providence.God is good (all the time), we profess. But, with scripture, we cannot say how. We cannot always— or even, often— say how God is good. This is what St. Paul is after when he cites Job and Isaiah and asks, “God’s ways are unsearchable…who has known the mind of the Lord?”
The way God is God seems to us morally problematic.That’s what the dogma claims.Throughout scripture, the hiddenness of God does not refer to the weakness of our knowledge or absolute uniqueness of God. It refers to God’s reality as a moral agent involved with other agents. It refers to God’s history with us. As Martin Luther once said,
“If we observe how God rules history and judge by any standard known to us, we must conclude that either God is wicked or God is not.”
Consider, for example, the continuing story of God’s promise in Genesis 27.
Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage is the only monogamous marriage in the entirety of the Book of Genesis, yet obedience to God’s promise (“The elder shall serve the younger…”) tears it apart. So much so, notice, Isaac and Rebekah never appear on stage together. Neither do Jacob and Esau.
We remember this story as Jacob cheating his brother out of his inheritance but that’s not the case. It’s Rebekah cheating her son by means of her other son. Jacob is a reluctant co-conspirator, “Look, my brother Esau is a hairy man, and I am a man of smooth skin. Perhaps my father will feel me, and I shall seem to be mocking him, and bring a curse on myself and not a blessing.”
And already in the narrative, Jacob and Esau are not young men.
They’re seventy-seven years old. Esau has two wives and children and grandchildren, all of whom are dispossessed by Rebekah’s deception of her husband.
The plot ends with the family ruptured and the cheated brother vowing to kill his twin.
Jewish and Christian interpreters alike have sought explanations to justify the theft and dishonor Rebekah and Jacob commit. Esau was a hypocrite, they speculate, he didn’t truly love his father. He loved his father for the prospect of his father’s wealth. Jacob was the virtuous, obedient child, they say, he gets the inheritance because he was the deserving one.
But none of that is in the text.
The text isn’t even really about them; it doesn’t tell us anything about their motives or character. The text is straightforwardly about God and God’s promise. The text is about the continuing forward of the promise, and the consequence of its continuance in this instance is a broken family and a vow of blood vengeance.
The tradition of squeamish interpretation aside, quite simply:
Esau is cheated.
All is house is disinherited.
Isaac is dishonored.
Jacob is exiled.
And Rebekah bears the curse of his transgression.
All because…this is the will of God.“Truly, thou art a God who hides thyself.”
It isn’t simply that God is involved in the messiness of our history.
God is, in some way we cannot comprehend, complicit in it and responsible for it. This is simply the flip side, the God side, of the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith. You are justified apart from any of your works, which means God justifies you by his will alone. It’s a strict implication of the doctrine of justification that whatever happens happens by God’s will— even those things we freely choose. God wills not what we freely choose but God wills that we freely choose.
Several years ago, shortly before his death, the theologian Robert Jenson agreed to be a guest on my podcast, and during the course of the interview he spoke about the hidden God:
“For example, when asked why some are healed and some are not, I answer because that is the will of the Lord. You know that I have Parkinson’s disease. Now that is degenerative disease. So that isn’t reversible. Nevertheless, I pray to be healed and one has to live with that. As to why there is so much suffering in the world, such evil, that’s the famous theodicy question, and in my judgment it’s the only good reason not to believe in God. To say despite all the suffering in theworld, all the suffering in our lives, God is good: that’s as far as can go and no further.”
When I was a college student, I often worshipped at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It was just off grounds so I could walk easily. Even better, St. Paul’s had a 5:30 service on Sunday afternoons, which fit nicely with Saturday nights.
I remember one Sunday during Lent. This lady was in front of me in the receiving line after worship. She looked to be in her fifties. I could tell just from her bearing that she was righteously livid. Her white hair was tightly braided. She wore wire glasses and plain slacks and a shirt that smelled of grass clippings. She poked the priest in the chest when he offered her his hand.
“How dare you!?” she exploded.
He looked genuinely flummoxed.
Unspoken words fell stillborn from his lips.
“How dare you take the word and the absolution away from us.”
Then I knew as quickly as the priest what she meant. For the season of Lent that year, the church had replaced— I kid you not— the scriptures with readings from Robert Frost’s poetry and they had decided to “put away the absolution” until Easter so that there was only confession of sin but no forgiveness.
“How dare you take those away,” she hollered in the way of someone who hasn’t yet realized they’re hard of hearing.
“I’m a social worker. Do you have any idea the hell I wade through every day? Just yesterday I was with a child with cigarette burns all over his body. You can probably guess who put them there. And Wednesday it was a mother too strung out to bother noticing her baby was malnourished. Most of my every days it’s like God’s nowhere to be seen. Don’t you dare take away two of the places he’s promised to be found.”
And the priest just nodded with an awkward smile like this was a worship planning suggestion. But she just stood there, as immovably determined as Rebekah before Jacob.
“Well,” she said.
“Well, what?” the priest asked.
“You need to absolve me,” she said, “In fact, you need to announce the forgiveness of sins to all of us. I’m not moving until you do.”
And she held out her arms like she was holding back a flood.
The red-faced pastor made the sign of the cross in the air and said, “In the name of Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven.”
The line of folks behind me in line mumbled in reply, “In the name of Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven.”
“Maybe I ought to go to law school,” I thought to myself.
The world is constituted by worse than deception. All due respect to Dr. King, the arc of the moral universe does not, on its own, bend toward justice. Everyone knows, firsthand even, the hiddenness of God. It’s a very shallow faith that has not wrestled with the fact of the hidden God.
If God can be judged by any standard known to us, we must conclude that either God is wicked or God is not.
Everyone knows God hides. Only Israel, only the Church, know that the self-hiding God can nevertheless be found in creaturely means like the word that absolves, the water that washes and the bread that is the God of the Passover’s own body. God hides, the dogma insists; so that, God may be found only in the promises through which he gives himself to us.
To say that Abraham and Jacob and Rebekah were justified on account of their faith in God’s promise— that doesn’t go far enough.
The claim is really that the Lord wants to be known and related to in no other way but faith.Why?Because, just like everyone else in your life, God doesn’t want to be used. That is, after all, the essence of idolatry.God doesn’t want to be used. And we are not neutral seekers of God’s majesties. God doesn’t want to be used. Like any other person in your life— and God is a person— God doesn’t want to be used. God wants to be trusted. And loved. And so God hides. In every way. Except in the places where he’s promised we will find him. In a word that says, “I will raise you from the dead.” In water that says, “You are mine.” In wine and bread that says, “You’re wondering where I am for you. I’m here, as near to you as your lips and your belly.”
Still, the fact that the God who hides has promised he can be found in, say, bread or the absolving word does not absolve God of, say, baby Serhii or whatever dread and suffering looms over you. If God is the buck-stopping will of history, then the buck stops with him. We’re still left with this apparent split in God’s image:
The God who is the absoluteness of the gospel promise is pure love. The will behind all events is not so easily apprehended as pure love or even as pure justice.
“This is my body, broken for you.”
“God’s gonna do likewise to you, unless you repent.”
What do we do about this apparent split in God’s image?
If God wants to be known and related to on no other basis than faith, then we have no other recourse but to abstain, abstain from any attempt to reconcile the apparent contradiction.
On the one hand, we admit that God is the ambiguous will behind all events, good and evil— that there is a will behind all events the gospel compels us to affirm.
On the other hand, we hear and trust the gospel of God as pure and personal and universal love.
And finally, we insist that these two images nevertheless constitute one and the same God but we dare not say how.
The how is the one fundamental truth reserved for revelation on the last day, when time ends, and all the jarring and dissonant notes of history are gathered together in God’s great fugue called creation.
What do we do with the hidden God? We abstain from any attempt to reconcile him with the crucified God. We admit God is the ambiguous will behind all events. And we trust the God of the gospel. But we abstain from saying how they are one and the same God.
The missing how is the darkness.
According to the Washington Post, it was cold the day they buried baby Serhii so Maria, baby Serhii’s mother, bundled up in a black winter puffer coat. On the back of the black jacket were the words,
“Everything will be fine. It will be even better every day.”
The words seemed to be an absurd contradiction to the artillery shelling that could be heard in the distance from the cemetery and the tiny coffin being lowered into the earth. But Maria’s black jacket is no different than what we do when we take bread, break it, acknowledge a world that would crucify him all over again, yet nevertheless look to that day when Christ will come back in final victory.
Faith trusts that, on that day, on the last day, in The End, God will all have told with his history with us not only a coherent story but a good one.“To say despite all the suffering in the world, all the suffering in our lives, God is good: that’s as far as can go and no further.” Actually, we can go a bit further. We can come to the table.
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January 15, 2023
Hope is the Child of History
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Genesis 25.27-34
“What then are we to say about these things?” the Apostle Paul writes at the crest of his epistle to the Romans. “If God is for us, who is against us?” Paul asks the church at Rome. For Paul, it’s not a rhetorical question. For Paul, it’s a question at the beating heart of the Bible.
If God is for us— all of us— if God is determined to reconcile and redeem all of us, then what could stand in God’s way? “What can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?” the apostle asks. And then, one by one, Paul proceeds to eliminate the possibilities:
Hardship. Check.
Injustice. Check.
Persecution. Famine. Check. Check.
Nakedness. Nope.
War. Not it either.
What then, in the end, can separate us from God? Not Death. Not Rulers. Not Powers. Neither things present nor things to come. Not anything in all of creation. NOTHING can separate us from what God wants to do with us. Except, the Apostle Paul does leave one possibility off his list; see if you can spot it:
Hardship
Injustice
Persecution
Famine
Nakedness
Peril
War
Death
Rulers
Powers
Notice there is one possibility missing from Paul’s list, one potential dis-qualifier lingers still.
You.
Can you finally separate yourself from the love of God?
Can I?
Have we been made with the ability to sever ourselves forever from the love of our Maker?
If Injustice and Persecution and War can’t leave our ledgers permanently in the red, can our Refusal?
Back in the day, when I worked as a chaplain at Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, part of my routine, every week, was to visit the inmates in solitary confinement. It was a sticky, hot, dark wing of the prison. Because every inmate was locked behind a heavy, steel door with just a sliver of thick plexiglass for a window, unlike the rest of the prison, the solitary wing was as silent as a tomb.
Whenever I visited solitary, the officer on duty was almost always a fifty-something Sergeant named Moore. Officer Moore had a thick, Mike Ditka mustache and coarse sandy hair he combed into a meticulous, greased part. He was tall and strong and, to be honest, intimidating. He had a Marine Corps tattoo on one forearm and a heart with a woman’s name on the other arm.
The Old Adam in me would described Officer Moore as an asshole.
Whenever I visited solitary he’d buzz me inside only after I refused to go away. He’d usually be sitting down, gripping the sides of his desk, reading a newspaper. I hated going there because, every time I did, he’d greet me heated ridicule. He’d grumble things like, “Save your breath, preacher, you’re wasting your time.” He’d grumble things like, “Do you know what these people did? They don’t deserve forgiveness.” He’d grumble things like, "They only listen to you because they’ve got no one else.”
“No, they’ve got someone other than me,” I’d tell him, “That’s why I’m here.”
Once, when we gathered for worship, I’d invited Officer Moore to join us. He grumbled that he’d have “nothing to do with a God who’d have anything to do with trash like them” and he refused to come into the service. He sat outside instead with his arm crossed. The locked prison door between us.
About halfway through my time at the prison, Officer Moore suffered a near fatal heart attack; in fact, he was dead for several minutes before the rescue squad revived him. I know this because when he returned to work, he told me. He tried to throw it in my face.
“It’s all a sham,” he grumbled at me one afternoon.
“I was dead for three minutes. Dead. And you know what I experienced? Nada. Absolutely nothing. I didn’t see any bright light at the end of any tunnel. It was just darkness. Your god? All make believe.”
“Bless your heart," I thought.
"Maybe you should take that as a warning,” I said, “Maybe there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for you.”
He grumbled and said, “Don’t tell me you, Mr. Grace and Forgiveness, believes in hell?”
“What makes you think I wouldn’t believe in hell?” I asked.
“Oh, and since I don’t believe in your Jesus, I’m going to hell? Is that it?”
Officer Moore pushed his chair back and fussed with his collar.
He suddenly seemed uncomfortable. His eyes took a bead on me.
“So what the hell is hell like then?’ he asked, smirking, “Fire and brimstone, I mean, really?”
“No,” I said, “fire, brimstone, gnashing of teeth, those are probably all metaphors.”
He let out a sarcastic sigh of relief.
So then I added, “They’re probably metaphors for something much worse."
That got his attention.
“Your loving God sends people to a place worse than brimstone just because they don’t believe in him?" he asked.
“Who said anything about God sending them there?” I replied, “No, I think hell is like a prison where the door is locked from the inside.”
He looked at me, suddenly no longer with contempt.
“It’s like C.S. Lewis said,” I told him, “In the end, there are only two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Your will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Your will be done.”
But, I wonder. Is that right? Is it even possible? Do sinners possess the stubborn strength to fight God to an everlasting draw? Can we separate us ourselves from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?
On the one hand, it appears we are able.
After all, scripture is unwavering in the sole qualification for salvation.
“Christ is the end of the law of righteousness,” the Bible says, “for everyone who believes.” “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord,” says scripture, “and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” The bar is the same in the Old Testament too. The Book of Joel says quite clearly, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord [in faith] will be saved.”
Can we separate us ourselves from the love of God? On the hand, it certainly seems so, for unfaith abounds.
On the other hand, though, Paul insists that the word of God cannot fail.
“My word will not return to me void,” the Lord tells the prophet Isaiah. The word of God can only work what it says, do what it decrees, accomplish what it announces. And the word says clearly, the Lord’s not content with just you and you and you. God wants all of you.
For the apostle Paul, this question is no theological abstraction. The reason that famous passage in Romans is so impassioned is because Paul is agonizing over the fact of Israel’s unfaith. The God of Israel has raised his eternal Son from the dead, yet the Israel of God believes not these tidings.
“Does this mean God has rejected his people?” Paul asks at the top of Romans 11. The grammar of the question gives away the answer. As soon as Paul refers to Israel as God’s possession he’s already shown his tell. “By no means!” Paul answers immediately. After all, God made a promise, “I will be your God and you will be my People.” And if God can break his no-strings-attached, unconditional, promise, then God is the very troubling answer to the question,
“What can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?”
Does this mean God rejects those who do not believe?
By no means!
For all the ink Paul spills in his anguish, the problem can be put rather simply:
God desires all to reciprocate his love and mercy— made flesh in Jesus Christ— with faith, alone.
Many— but especially the Israel of God— do not so believe.
Finally— here’s the kicker— God’s word can no more fail than God’s promise can be broken.
In wrestling with this sorrowful conundrum, Paul looks to the past and there he discovers a pattern that enables him to predict a hopeful future. Specifically, Paul considers the twin sons of Rebekah (you were wondering when I was going to get around to our text). Jacob attempted to swindle his older brother at a moment of acute vulnerability while Esau foolishly was willing to forsake his entire inheritance in order to satisfy his appetite.
Neither of Rebekah’s children prove exemplary; nevertheless, both Jacob and Esau are chosen by God while they’re still in Rebekah’s womb. God’s election happens in utero. The promise was spoken to Rebekah, Paul writes of Jacob and Esau:
“though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad— in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls— Rebekah was told, “The older shall serve the younger…” So then it [the purpose of election] depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.”
As Paul dwells on his fellow Jews’s apparent rejection by God, Paul sees a pattern behind the way God has worked in the past, election and rejection.
Abel over Cain.
Sarah instead of Hagar.
Moses against Pharaoh.
David to the exclusion of Saul.
Israel rather than any other nation of the earth.
In each and every case, God’s choosing “neither corresponds to nor is contingent upon prior human difference.”
Jacob and Esau are twins.There is no difference between them—that’s precisely the point!God’s choice creates the difference.God elects for the promise to go through Jacob not Esau, and God elects Jacob not Esau before either Jacob or Esau could do any bad or any good. Therefore it is a choice God makes irrespective of merit or demerit. It’s a choice premised on the providence of God not on the performance of either Jacob or Esau.
What’s more, Paul notices that this pattern of election and rejection, faith in some and hardness of heart in others, is an inextricable part of the history God makes with his world. What looks like God’s rejection of some in scripture always serves God’s redemption of the whole. The Father seemingly rejecting the Son, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” even that forsaking is for all.
Hope is the child of history.
Paul’s hope for the future, his hope for those who do not believe, is a child of this history, election and rejection. “Has the Israel of God stumbled so as to fall away forever?” Paul asks before he answers in the very same breath, “No!” Instead Israel’s unfaith, what appears to be God’s rejection of them, it is a choice God has made for the reconciliation of the whole world, Paul says. “For God has consigned all to disobedience [the Gentiles’s their ungodliness, the Jews’s their unfaith],” Paul writes, “so that he may have mercy on all.”
God has consigned some to unbelief; so that, God may have mercy on all.The failure of some to believe is, in fact, the means by which God is working even now to show mercy to all.
In other words— pardon the cliche— it’s all a part of God’s plan.
God’s predestination.
It’s not surprising that Paul concludes Romans 9-11 with God’s plan. Paul began with predestination too. Just before Paul wonders, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Paul reminds us that those whom God predestines— the whole world— God calls. Those whom God has chosen according to his plan (ie, all of us) God calls, and God calls— specifically— with his justifying word (ie, the Gospel).
That’s Romans. Chapter eight. Verse thirty.
That’s the word of God.
Predestination.
It’s not a primordial choice that makes you no more than a bit of code in the Almighty’s matrix. It’s a present-tense call. That is, God applies his predestination in the here and now through the handing over of the goods of the Gospel.
Like Jacob and Esau, God makes choices.
God has consigned some to unfaith.
Why?
So that, those who do not believe might be summoned into faith by the handing over of the goods.
By you.
By Christ’s own word on the lips of the likes of you.
As scripture says plainly, “faith [which saves] comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
Predestination is not abstract.
It’s auditory.
Predestination is not speculative.
It’s spoken.
The God of an idea, like universalism, that says “God loves everybody,” such a God never gets around actually to saying it to anyone.The God of predestination, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, wants to say to everyone, a creature at a time, “I love you. I forgive you. You’re mine.”Is that clear, I wonder? Predestination isn’t a divine decision that hovers a thousand miles above us and a billion years behind us. Predestination happens, here and now, in the gospel word on the lips of a sinner to another sinner.
As Paul writes to the Corinthians, “For it pleases God to save…”
How?
“It pleases God to save through the folly of proclamation,” Paul says.
In other words, it please God to save the whole world through such foolishness as you and your words.
A couple of months ago, Betsy shared with me how a stranger wandered into the Mission Center one afternoon while she was there sorting food. He’d walked there, for two hours, all the way from the other side of Woodson High School. He wanted— he needed, he said— to confess his sins.
Betsy says she was reticent at first, “I’m not a pastor. There’s no preacher or priest here. Maybe if you call and schedule…”
The stranger was undeterred, “I need to confess.”
So Betsy relented and said, “Alright, I’ll listen to you.”
And this stranger spilled out into her ear his secret burdens and his most troublesome sins. After he was finished, Betsy says, he peered up at her expectantly.
“Does this mean I’m forgiven? Does God forgive me?”
And Betsy says she replied, “Well, I’m not sure. Who am I to say whether or not God forgives you?”
When Betsy told me how she had answered the stranger— we were standing on the church steps after worship one Sunday— I initially responded pastorally, “Betsy! No!”
“I should’ve told him he’s forgiven? But I’m not a pastor…”
“You’re baptized, Betsy,” I may have said a little loudly, “You’ve been called to put just such a word in the ear of any person God sends your way.”
Now, it’s not Betsy’s fault.
She hadn’t yet heard this sermon.
The rest of you, however, will be without any excuse because you’re about to hear me announce that you have been called.
You have been called.
What do you mean I’ve been called? I was just a baby when I was baptized!
So what? Jacob was even tinier.
The Lord God desires to save all. And the Lord God has elected to show mercy upon all through those whom he has called. And just as surely as God chose Jacob over Esau, he has consigned some to unbelief so that unbelievers might hear God say— hear God on your lips say, “I love you. I forgive you. You’re mine.”
By virtue of your baptism, you have been called to a particular, peculiar task.
The baptized are authorized to do the mighty acts of God’s predestination. Your baptism commissions you, therefore, to speak not about God. Talk about God never comforted any conscience. Talk about God has yet to save a single soul.
Your baptism authorizes you to speak not about God but for God. God wants to hide on your lips in a word like, “Your sins are forgiven” or “Christ Jesus will raise you from the dead” or “The Devil has no power over you because Christ Jesus has saved you.”
God wants to hide on your lips in the promises he’s given us.
So, the next time it happens to you you’re without any excuse. You have been called to speak for God, to apply his predestination in the present. And if you’re dubious that you’ve been called, baptism notwithstanding, I can remove all grounds for doubt right this very moment, “In the name of Christ Jesus, I summon you to speak for him.”
There.
You’ve just been called again by God.
You see how it works?
The Holy Spirit lives in the promises he’s given us to speak.
The purpose of the doctrine of predestination is not speculation.The purpose of the doctrine of predestination is proclamation.The purpose of the doctrine of predestination is to give you a platform on which you can stand. It’s to give you certainty. It’s to give you an actual message, a concrete promise to deliver, because, by the doctrine of predestination, you can know without any doubt that if someone comes to you with unfaith, if someone comes to you burdened by their sins and regrets, if someone comes to you fearful of death or feeling forsaken by God, then it’s because the Lord God has sent them to you.
The Lord God has sent them to you— you, whom he has called to speak for him. God has chosen them and sent them to you. This is how God’s plan plays out. It’s not how I’d plan the salvation of the whole world, but give the Big Guy credit.He himself calls it folly.
Therefore—
When God sends someone like this to you, you don’t speculate.
Well, I think God probably forgives you. I guess we’ll see.
When God sends someone like this to you, you don’t settle for empathy, which is easier.
I’m here for you. You’ll be in my prayers. This is what worked for me.
When God sends someone like this to you, you don’t make appeals or exhortations. Give it over to God. Pray on it. Invite Christ into your heart. Repent and believe.
No, no, no.
You hand over the goods.
The Lord God in his predestination has set this creature before you. In that very moment. You don’t invite them to church next Sunday or entreat them to read their Bible or encourage them to talk to a pastor.
No, you’ve been called. You proclaim to them. You speak a promise over them. You deliver a promise that scripture authorizes you to promise.
I’m absolutely serious.
You can say— you must say— to the person burdened by shame or sin, “The Lord has chosen you and sent you to me so that I can say to you, “In the name of Jesus Christ, all your sins are forgiven.”
You promise the loved one who’s fearful and dying, “The next voice you hear will be the voice of Jesus Christ calling you, like Lazarus, straight out of your grave.”
To the person feeling forsaken by God, you say, “You were bought with a price. You belong to Christ Jesus. He’s got you. And he’ll never let you go.”
Every other time I went to the solitary unit at Trenton State, as always, Officer Moore would balk at buzzing me inside. He’d grouse about how I was wasting my time with “these losers,” and he’d snarl about how the gospel is so much foolishness. “A whole lot of nonsense,” he’d grumble, inspecting for contraband the bibles I’d brought with me. In the words of Paul, he remained “consigned to disobedience.” Locked up in unbelief.
Because I’d never bothered to use the keys Christ had given me. Officer Moore’s unfaith is on me. It’s my fault.
The trouble with thinking predestination is a divine decision that hovers a thousand miles above us and a billion years behind us is that it lets us off the hook.
It leaves no place for proclamation.
I sometimes spoke with Officer Moore about God but I never ponied up and spoke for God. I never dared to wave away his unbelief and say to him straight-up, “Christ Jesus has sent me to you to summon you to faith in him. Trust and believe.”
Can anything separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?
As it turns, the “No” depends on you daring to do what he redeemed you to do.
Which makes it all the more imperative that I remind you that Christ is the host of this table.
Christ is here to give himself to you, not just in words but in wine and bread, so that you will take him at his word when he says to you, “I love you. I forgive you. You are mine.”
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January 8, 2023
The Faithful Deceit of Laughter's Wife
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Genesis 25.19-28
Tom Radney was an Atticus Finch like fixture of Alabama politics during the crucible of the Civil Rights movement. Upon graduating from the University of Alabama Law School, Radney first served as an Army JAG officer during the conflict in Korea. After the war, Radney returned to Alabama. He married the daughter of a prominent state legislator, and he opened a law practice in Alexandria City, the seat of Tallapoosa County where he also became a lifelong member of First Methodist Church.
The trouble started when, through his civil and criminal work, Radney became better acquainted with the injustices of the Jim Crow status quo. Radney then realized he’d been on the wrong side of the race issue. The threats and attacks, though, began when Radney volunteered to run for the Alabama Senate a year after Selma’s Bloody Sunday. In response to his advocacy, the Klan called his wife and made death threats. They burned crosses on his front yard for his children to see.
They intimidated his secretary before fire-bombing his law office.
Shortly before his death, Radney told the story of how, sometime during those frightening days, he was at work on a case in his office when his secretary knocked softly on his door.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “I told him you were busy and didn’t wish to see anyone but he insisted “He’ll see me.””
Radney said, “Alright, let him in.”
An imposing man with a square head and horn-rimmed glasses and hair parted down the middle stepped into the office and stood over the mahogany desk.
“Mr. Radney,” he said in a North Carolina drawl, “I am your bishop, Kenneth Goodson.”
Radney stood up and offered his hand.
“Of course, pleased to meet you. What can I do for you?”
The bishop stood there, not taking the hand, like he was there for too important a purpose for mere pleasantries.
“I believe I’m here to do something for you.”
Radney sat back down at his desk and stared at the strange, serious man.
“When I was consecrated as bishop and sent to Alabama,” he said, “the Lord told me— the Lord promised me— that I was being sent here to bless those doing his righteous work to undo Jim Crow. And when I heard about your work and the hardships that have come upon you in the course of it, I knew I’d been sent here to bless you.”
“They threatened my children,” Radney said, his voice caught in his throat.
The bishop nodded but then asked a non sequitur, as though such dangers, toils, and snares are simply part and parcel with following a Jesus Christ.
“Can I assume,” the bishop asked the attorney, “The Methodist Church is responsible for the work you do?”
Radney chewed on the question— he’d never reflected upon the cause of his conversion— and answered, “I suppose probably so; I’ve been a Methodist my whole life. Of course, George Wallace and Bull Connor are both Methodists too so maybe my change of heart owes more to miracle than to Methodism.”
As though he had already arrived at exactly the same conclusion, Bishop Goodson said to him, “Rise.”
“And I stood up immediately,” Radney said.
“Come here,” the bishop ordered him, “Stand before me.”
“And I did as I was told. He laid these heavy hands on my head and looked at me intensely and said, “I’m going to bless you— that’s why I’ve been sent here, to you. Kneel.”
And Radney recalled, “So I got down on my knees there on the carpet at his feet.”
“Tom Radney,” the bishop prayed, “In the name of Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, I bless you with the strength and protection of the Almighty Father; so that, you will remain steadfast and never shrink from the holy task he has set before you.”
“And then he said, “Amen,” and he left,” Radney remembered, “My secretary wondered what in holy hell had happened because when she came into my office, she found me curled up in a fetal position on the floor, weeping like a baby. It was one of the most pivotal moments in my life. Somehow he knew to be there, right then, for me, with that promise from the Lord.”
As a way of avoiding the Bible’s authority and downplaying its coherence, critics often will insist that the Bible is not one, unitary book but, in fact, a library of books. And within that library called the Bible, critics will point out, there are many literary genres: histories, legal codes, gospels, liturgical prayers, primeval myths. There’s even a steamy, erotic poem.
The Bible, such critics contend, is like your Amazon Kindle; it’s a device with many different, possibly unrelated books on it.
Such a comparison is as common as it is incorrect.
By adding the story of Jesus Christ (the Gospels) and their story with Jesus Christ (the Epistles) to Israel’s scriptures, the ancient church made the assertion that the now Christian Bible tells a fundamentally connected and coherent story.
Lengthwise, from beginning to end, the Bible hangs together christologically; that is, according to Christ, who, before he is Mary’s baby, is the second person of the Trinity, eternal and pre-existent, by whom all things were made.
The Bible hangs together as a single christological story or it does not hang together at all.Therefore, Jesus Christ is the hermeneutic— the interpretative lens— by which all the Bible can be read.
Take, for example, the opening of the Jacob narrative in the Book of Genesis.
Like her mother-in-law, Sarah, Isaac’s wife does not become a mother until she is an old woman. For twenty years, the text tells us, Rebekah’s husband “prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren.” Isaac— his name means “Laughter,” remember— pleaded with God for two decades, so long that his desire for a child went from no laughing matter in the beginning to what must’ve felt like a joke near the end. No one shops for maternity dresses or packs a hospital go-bag after they’ve received their AARP card in the mail.
The Israelites, whom God rescued from slavery in Egypt only after they had cried out to the Lord for generations, were the ones to write down these memories of their patriarchs and matriarchs. Surely they could resonate with Rebekah’s and Isaac’s prayers receiving a reply on such a tarried timetable. Not for nothing is the most common prayer uttered in the psalms, “How long, O Lord?”
Laughter is sixty years old when Rebekah conceives.
Rather than a normal quickening, the Hebrew says the children “clashed together within her womb.” Only, Rebekah knows that she’s pregnant with twins. Rebekah knows only that something is amiss. At her age, it would be odd not to fret.
The wife of Laughter grows afraid.
And so she prays. She prays maybe the most common prayer ever prayed by absolutely everybody, “Why?”
“Why is this happening to me?”
And the Lord answers her!
Deus Dixit— And God spoke.
First, God gives Rebekah an explanation, “Two nations are in your womb.” But explanations are not what makes scripture hang together, and if you’ve come here today looking for answers you’ve come to the wrong place.
God gives her an explanation for the commotion in her belly.
Notice, the Lord also gives her a word about the future; that is, the Lord gives her a promise. A promise that offends an ancient people’s sense of justice. A promise that turns the kin and kingdoms of their world upside down. A promise that surely sounded like foolishness and a stumbling, for it is a promise that contradicts the eternal, natural law of primogeniture.
“The elder shall serve the younger,” the Lord promises Rebekah.
You know the story.
The twins are delivered from her, one after the other, the younger clutching his hairy elder’s heel. Just so they name them, Hairy (Esau) and Heel (Jacob). But long after Rebekah last held her boys in her arms, she still held onto this promise from God, “The elder will serve the younger.” According to the text, at least forty years pass. Her children are grown men. Esau’s a married man. And everything remains as the world would have it, according to the law.
Rebekah’s an old woman, still with this promise from God socked away like a ball of rubber bands or a cigar box of old movie stubs.
Then one day, Genesis 27 remembers for us, Laughter is a very old man and very blind and very much dying. Isaac summons Esau. It’s time. Isaac must put the law into action; the eldest will not assume the father’s place.
When Laughter’s wife hears her husband aims to bless Esau, suddenly she knows.
She recognizes the time has arrived for her to apply the promise.
She sees God gave her the promise all that time ago— forty years— in order for her to apply that promise now.
Rebekah realizes that the promise isn’t simply a word God gave.Rebekah realizes it’s a word that needs giving.No matter how much it will upset and offend.
Even though it will violate the law. Despite the cost.
So she conscripts her youngest into a scheme to fool Isaac into blessing him, insisting to the skeptical Jacob, “Let your curse be on me, my son…” She takes on to herself the scorn and punishment that will justly fall upon the child for his transgression because she knows— by faith, she knows— the promise God had spoken was now seeking its moment of application. Surely she knows too that it’s a promise Jacob in no way merits. Actually he’s already earned the opposite of such a promise.
The Bible hangs together christologically.
A month ago in Paradise, Texas, Tanner Lynn Horner was charged with kidnapping and murder. A FedEx driver, Horner snatched seven year old Athena Strand, who was in the care of her stepmother. He kidnapped her while he delivered packages to their address. Her body was found two days later. The justifiable rage in the community is such that his trial likely will be moved to another county or district.
Yet—
Athena’s grandfather, Mark Strand, acknowledging his anguish and what he would want to do were he allowed five minutes alone with his granddaughter’s murderer, issued a public declaration of forgiveness:
“This flesh, this man that I am, is bitterly angry, but there’s a gentle voice that continues to tell me I need to forgive him…if you stood that man before me right now…I would probably kill him…there’s not an ounce of me that wants to do this or say this but there is mercy in Jesus Christ even for him, even for him or not for any of us. Either we live by the grace of God in Jesus Christ and his shed blood or we do not live at all. I don’t want to do this or say this, but my spirit has heard God’s voice so right now I declare publicly that I forgive— and I will work on forgiving— this man, this monster. I pray that by my public declaration others will hold me accountable to my pledge. I do this to honor our precious Athena who knew no hate…”
Quite understandably, Mark Strand’s declaration of forgiveness offended and outraged members of his community as well as his own family. When asked how he could possibly offer forgiveness to a man who manifestly does not deserve it, Mark Strand replied:
“I’ve been hearing the Lord’s promise of the forgiveness of sins and the justification of the ungodly my whole life. I think now I was being prepared— the Lord was preparing me— to put that promise into action in just this terrible circumstance.”
The promise given to Rebekah in Genesis 25 leads to Rebekah’s deceit of her husband two chapters later. Rebekah’s deceit has long preoccupied interpreters. Can the covenant rely upon a lie? What about bearing false witness? Honoring thy husband? Does this mean we’re free from the obligation to truthfulness? The Protestant Reformers, however, were untroubled by this text.
Luther called it “the faithful deceit.”
Faithful because faith follows the promise not the law.
You obey a command. You trust a promise.
You can keep a rule without having any relationship with the rule-giver.
You can keep the sabbath. You can give to the poor. You can avoid cheating on your spouse. But it doesn’t make you a Christian. It makes you obedient. Or worse, “good.”
You can keep a law without having any relationship with the law-giver.You cannot trust a promise without having trust in the promise-maker.And you can only trust one whom you know and love.
Faithful deceit.
Faith follows the promise not the law.Faith follows the promise.
Even when, precisely when, it conflicts with the command.
Faith follows the promise.
Even when, particularly when, it offends: “How could you forgive that monster?!”
Faith follows the promise.
Even when, especially when, it upends: “The elder will serve the younger?! Our entire society is built on the first being first and the last being last.”
Faith follows the promise.
Even when, exactly when, it makes no sense whatsoever: “What do you mean because one man died to sin, all have died? Not only are we very much alive, we’re also still very much sinners.”
Faith follows the promise.
Rebekah puts the promise (“The elder shall serve the younger…”) above the law (“The elder will be served by the younger…”).
Day by day by day, year after year, for four decades, she clings to the promise until its moment of application arrives.
Says Luther:
“Rebekah gave thought to how she might be able to deceive her husband Isaac; her son Esau, and all who were in the house; for now she not obeying the rule or the law. Now she is obeying God, who transfers and dispenses contrary to the law. Therefore, Rebekah did not sin.”
Indeed, under the promise, the lie that would be sin becomes faith. Exactly because faith follows God’s promise and not the law, faithfulness can sometimes appear as a strange obedience.
Faith attaches itself to a thing (a promise— in word, water, wine, and bread).
Faith attaches itself to a thing that is still yet an utter nothing (word, water, wine and bread).
And faith WAITS.Until everything promised comes about.This is precisely what it means to walk by faith and not by sight or sense or commonsense. To walk by faith is to be carried through the present, by means of a graspable promise, towards a future that is yet hidden but nevertheless certain.
To walk by faith is to be carried through the present by a promise towards a future that is as good as guaranteed.
Many months after that afternoon when the bishop paid him a visit, Tom Radney was climbing up the courthouse steps for a civil rights case in which he was the advocate. Racists and rabble rousers crowded the stairs. They taunted and jeered and threatened him.
“Tom Radney we’re going to get you!”
“Tom Radney we’re going to make you pay!”
“Tom Radney we’re going to make you wish you’d never done this!”
Radney stopped on the courthouse steps, in the midst of them, and he remembered the promise the bishop had prayed over him, the promise of the Lord’s strength and protection.
“Tom Radney, we’re going to kill you!”
Tom Radney remembered the promise, and he turned to the mob.
“No, you ain’t. I’m going to be fine.”
Then he walked into the courthouse. And into an unseen but assured future.
Faith follows the promise.
To walk by faith is to grab ahold of God’s promise and let it carry you through your present days towards a certain future you cannot see.
And you’re no different than Rebekah.
There is no distinction between the world of the Bible and our world. There’s just the world and the God who from before the creation of the world elected not to be God without the world. There is no distinction between the world of the Bible and this world.
Like Rebekah, God speaks promises to you too.
We said just a bit ago, “This is the Word of God for the People of God.”
We don’t mean that as, like, a metaphor.
The Almighty Father who spoke a promise to Rebekah still speaks, by his Holy Spirit, through the Son who is his Word. The Living Lord is loquacious, and he loves to speak promises. To Rebekah and Jacob. To Tom Radney and Mark Strand. To you.
Based on his word in Genesis, the Lord’s promise to you today might be:
Yes, you have prayed for weeks upon weeks or years upon years, you have prayed holes in the carpet, you have prayed for healing or reconciliation, for sobriety or children or faith, to no apparent avail.
To you, today, the promise may be that, no, the Lord’s ears are not shut to you. The Lord who heard Laughter’s prayers for forty years hears your prayers too and likewise he will heed them. He is just waiting for you to let go; so that, he is the only solution to your problem.
Or, based on this word, the Lord’s promise might be:
Like Rebekah, you’ve committed some deception. Maybe even, like Rebekah, that lie was against your spouse. And perhaps, like Rebekah, you caught your children up in it too. But unlike Rebekah, yours was not a faithful deceit.
To you, today, the promise may be that if God chose Jacob in utero for salvation, before Jacob could do any bad (or any good) then it’s true indeed that in the God of Jesus Christ there is no condemnation.
Or, based on this word, God’s promise today could be:
Like Laughter and his wife, you’re old. The life you’ve had is not the life you wanted. You’re worse than past your prime, you fear. You’re past your purpose.
To you, today, the promise is that God loves to commandeer people like you just as much as he likes to call sinners. And the good news for you is that you’re both. So, more so than anyone, you should watch out.
Or quite possibly, you don’t think this business has anything to do with you.
Well, neither did Esau.
Therefore, the promise is that even you— unbelieving, unwilling you— are a necessary character in God’s drama of salvation.
Faith follows the promise.
To walk by faith is to grab ahold of God’s promise and let it carry you into the future, free and unafraid.
And today, as with every day, the promise the Lord speaks to every last one of us, whether we are old or unbelieving, the promise he makes tangible so that we can grasp ahold of it and take it and eat it and drink it— the promise from God, today, to you, for you: your sins are forgiven.
All of them.
Even that one.
So come to the table.
Grab onto a pardon that is better even than the promise of the Lord’s protection. But before you come to the table, beware. The Lord doesn’t give you a promise without expecting you to apply it when the time presents itself.
Even as you come forward to the Lord with hands held out, be ready.
The Lord is surely coming with the moment for you to say, “I forgive you.”
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January 1, 2023
God Gives a Feck
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Luke 2.21-35
In Martin McDonagh’s recent film The Banshees of Inisherin, actor Brendan Gleeson plays Colm Doherty, an amateur musician in the clutches of a crippling melancholia and existential dread. Colm lives on a a sparsely populated island off the coast of Ireland, close enough to the mainland to hear gunshots traded during the early years of “The Troubles.” Gripped by despair over the fleetingness of time and the meaninglessness of life, Doherty hopes his music somehow will justify his existence and insure that the future will remember him.
Thus Colm vows to waste no more of his precious time in the company of his kind-hearted but “dull” friend, Pádraig. Colm, literally, spites himself in order to cut off his former friend. Colm’s shocking ultimatum leads inadvertently to the death of Padraig’s last remaining companion, his pet donkey Jenny. While Colm shows no remorse over the cruel way he suddenly shunned his former pub mate, Colm does regret that his despondent tantrum killed Jenny the donkey.
Genuinely vexed, Colm confesses his transgression to a feckless priest who comes to the fictional island on Sundays in order to dispense the sacraments.
"How's the despair?" the priest asks Colm.
Colm replies it's been not so great lately.
”But you're not going to do anything about it, right?"
Colm replies that no, he's not going to do anything about it.
But the reply hangs in the air.
Later Colm confesses to Jenny’s accidental killing.
Deaf to Colm’s spiritual desolation, the priest loses patience with Colm’s contrition and coldly dismisses him, blurting out the question:
“Do you really think God gives a feck about a miniature donkey?”
Colm looks over at his confessor.
And with sincere and absolute alarm on his face, Colm replies:
“Father, I’m terrified that he doesn’t.”
Do you actually think the Almighty cares about a single creature?
On the lips of the film’s indolent priest, the question shocks. In the mouth of anyone else, the question deserves a hearing.
According to the National Zoo, there are 20,000 miniature donkeys in this country alone. The National Wildlife Federation says scientists have identified 5,400 different species of mammals; meanwhile, the World Bank estimates the global population, as of 2021, at 7.837 billion. I cannot even do the math— that’s an awful lot of people for the Lord to number every hair on every head.
Sure, God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everywhere.
But all-caring?
All-involved?
It’s no wonder the possibility terrifies Colm. The priest’s position makes more sense. The only downside is that what could be said of Jenny could be said of you. You might be the single creature for whom God does not care.
Do you really think the Eternal One gives a feck about a single miniature donkey— there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them?
It’s a good question. It’s one of the most important questions. It’s a question, I believe, that gets at the heart of our scripture text from the Gospel of Luke.
According to the Lord’s command to Abraham in the Book of Genesis, Mary and Joseph have their baby circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. In so doing, the child becomes an official participant in the people of Israel and receives his name, Yeshua— the name first given to them by the angel Gabriel.
Thenceforth, the Holy Family travels nine miles from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, up to the temple to fulfill two obligations prescribed by the Torah. First, Mary and Joseph must redeem their firstborn son. Because every firstborn child and every firstborn creature belongs to God, they needed to be redeemed from God. Clean animals, such as sheep or goats, would be sacrificed. Unclean animals, like donkeys, would be redeemed by offering a clean animal in its stead. The redemption price for a firstborn son, according to Numbers 18.16, was fixed at five shekels. It’s one of the only prescribed offerings in the Torah that’s not scaled according to wealth or poverty.
After making Jesus a participant in the people of Israel by means of circumcision, Mary and Joseph venture to the temple in Jerusalem in order to make Jesus a participant in their family. They make an offering so that God’s child might become their child. The second obligation Mary and Joseph perform in Jerusalem is purification. Bearing a son meant that Mary— and anything Mary touched— was ritually unclean for seven days. To avoid defilement from his wife, Joseph needed to immerse himself daily in the temple’s miqveh. Having given birth to a son, the Torah also forbid Mary from handling “holy things” (for example, alms for the poor or a tithe to the temple) for a period of thirty-three days. At the end of this period, Mary could come to the temple with an animal offering. As set out in Leviticus 12, the sacrifice required of a poor woman was two doves.
So thirty-three days after his birth and twenty-five days after his redemption from the Lord, Mary and Joseph journey through the massive colonnaded courtyard that marked off the Court of the Gentiles and walk up to the animal vendor stalls set up alongside the towering outer wall of the temple. They purchase two doves, walk through the Court of the Gentiles, past the low wall through which only Jews were permitted, and up the steps to the inner courts of the temple.
Taking her two doves in one arm and her month-old baby in the other arm, Mary enters the Court of Women through a side door where a Levite waited to take Mary’s offering to a priest who waited for it in the Court of Priests. At some point, as they rove from the chaotic Court of the Gentiles to the busy vendor stalls to the crowded Court of the Jews and finally to the Court of Women, Mary and Joseph, their baby and doves in tow, bump into Simeon. Not only has the Holy Spirit led Simeon to this encounter, the Holy Spirit commandeers Simeon’s lips and the old man prophesies that in their baby God is making good on his promise of consolation first given through Isaiah. That Torah did not permit Simeon to enter the Court of Women meant that Mary encountered him just before her sacrifice; in other words, Mary entered the Court of Women and made her offering with Simeon’s words still ringing in her ears that somehow she carried in her arms not just two doves and more than an ordinary baby.
Circumcision is the sign of the covenant that the Lord makes to Abram, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” Circumcision is the sign of the “covenant in your flesh.” The rituals for the redemption of a first born child and the purification of its mother are acts of fidelity to that covenant. Luke tells you five times that Mary and Joseph did everything in obedience to the Torah. Meanwhile, according to Simeon, their child is the fulfillment of that covenant.
Everything in this passage is about the covenant.Circumcision is the sign of the covenant. Redemption and purification are acts of obedience to the covenant. Jesus is God’s commitment to the covenant made flesh.
The postpartum particulars, the shekels and miqveh, doves and defilement, may strike us as strange today. So much so, we miss entirely a far stranger feature of the Bible and fail to ask a most basic question.
What kind of odd God makes a covenant?Almost twenty years ago a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame conducted the National Survey of Youth and Religion. It was the largest and most exhaustive assessment of the religious beliefs of teenagers in the U.S. The results of the survey revealed that the vast majority of Christian youth, especially white Mainline Protestants, were incredibly vague and inarticulate about their faith. Indeed the religion these youth practice is so unrecognizable from historic Christianity the authors of the survey gave it a new and distinct name. They called it Moral Therapeutic Deism.
The basic tenets of Moral Therapeutic Deism hold that:
1) a God exists who once ordered the world but now watches over life from a far remove.
2) God wants people to be nice.
3) The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.
4) God is not involved in the world or in my life
5) Good people go to heaven when they die.
Contrary to the myth of teenagers rebelling from the religion of their parents, the researchers at Notre Dame discovered that most of the teenagers subscribe to Moral Therapeutic Deism exactly because that is what their parents believe about God.
God is a kind of Cosmic Butler. Unseen, uninvolved. Distant and dispassionate.
In other words, the God in whom most Americans believe is not a Covenant Maker. Needless to say, the pagan deities of the first century as much as the twenty-first would not, could not, make a covenant. God is omniscient and omnipotent, transcendent and sublime, self-contained and self-sufficient, ineffable and impassible. No God worthy of the title God would deign to enter into time and make a covenant, the pagans of antiquity believed.
A covenant is a promise.
To make a promise, the promise-maker must address an other.
But to so address an other means the promise-maker is interested and invested in the other’s existence. What makes the gods God is precisely the absence of any such personal concern. For Aristotle, God is the Unmoved Mover. God doesn’t send rain when you pray for rain; God established systems whereby secondary causes may or may not bring rain. For Plato, God is simply the One. For Nietzsche, there is such an infinite qualitative difference between Creator and creature that to suggest God loves Jenny is analogous to you claiming you cherish the ant crawling under the pew at your feet. For pagans, today and in antiquity, it’s blasphemy to imagine God speaking to Abraham or wrestling with Jacob or showing Moses his backside. Pagan religion, then and now, cannot abide communication between Creator and creature; therefore, there can be no covenant. Without communication, there is no promise.
What kind of odd God makes a covenant?
A covenant is a promise addressed to an other.
To make a promise to an other, the promise-maker must have an other.
But for God to have an other to whom he can address a promise, God must be a God who creates. By contrast, the Greeks believed creation was eternal, that it had always existed. A God who makes a covenant must be a God who instigates an other other than himself.
This is why Jews point to a tiny Hebrew word in the Genesis account of creation, tov.
“And God saw that it was tov.”
Not simply good.
Tov means “good for.”
Creation is good for covenant.
God creates for the purpose of making a covenant.
As the second Book of Esdras puts it unabashedly, “It was for us that you created the world.” Believers sometimes get up on the how or the when of creation without realizing that the why of creation is the entire reason scripture bothers to proclaim the story in the first place.
As Karl Barth writes, “Creation is the outer basis of the covenant and the covenant is the inner basis of creation.”
The whole reason for light and darkness, morning and evening, sky and stars and every creeping creature upon the earth is for God to deliver the consolation of Israel in Jesus Christ. Everything is made for the baby in Mary’s arms and for us to be in him.
What kind of odd God makes a covenant?
A covenant is a promise the binds the promise-maker to an other.
To make a promise to an other, the promise-maker must acquire a shared history with the other.
But for God to inaugurate a joint history with an other, God must accept no other future than with this other. A covenant is like a wedding vow.
The promise creates a shared history and a mutual future that would not have been apart from the promise. Which means— pay attention— the promise makes God an actor in the history God authors.
This joint history and shared future is why the God of the covenant is simultaneously both the author of the history he makes with creatures and one (or more) of the dramatis personae of that history. A God who makes a covenant is not unlike Martin McDonagh, the writer and director of Banshees, showing up in scenes as one of the actors. As the theologian Robert Jenson summarizes, “Israel’s scriptures are rife with figures that are actors in the history determined by the Creator yet who turn out to be the same Creator God.” Think of the “Angel of the Lord” on Mount Moriah who stays Abraham’s hand from cutting Isaac’s throat. In the story, the Angel of the Lord turns out to be the Lord himself just as the pillar of fire that accompanies the Israelites in the wilderness is none other than the same God who met Moses in the Burning Bush, the same God who sits invisibly above the cherubim throne.
“God is in heaven and you are on earth,” Solomon waxes in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Not exactly.
In making a promise, God commits himself to being both the author of history and an actor with us within that history.
Trinity is nothing more than a shorthand way of narrating the fact that there is no other God but the God who acts within the very history he authors.
God acts as Father, God acts as Son, God acts as Holy Spirit.
The good news of great joy is that God is not abstract deity.
God is a participant in his own Providence.The true God is not immune to time; but rather, God’s faithfulness to his promise is the how of God’s eternity.
As Robert Jenson says, “God is roomy.”
God has room to accommodate all your stories within his story, casting himself as a player in all your lives.
Take Luke’s conclusion to the nativity as a case in point.
As Mary and Joseph approach the Temple in Jerusalem, the Shekhinah of the Lord dwells invisibly in the holy of holies, yet, at the same time, there’s God the Holy Spirit taxiing Simeon to the exact spot where he will encounter Mary and Joseph with words the same Spirit will lay on his lips about the child in her arms. The baby in Mary’s arms also happens to be the eternal Son of God made flesh.
In making a promise, God commits himself to being both the author of history and an actor within that history.
Because now— because of the promise— God has as much stake in your future as you do.
Therefore, the story in Luke’s Gospel of Mary and Joseph and Simeon is no different than any of our stories.
Because God is a God who makes covenant, there is no distinction between the world of the Bible and our world.
God is invisibly enthroned above and beyond, the author of your story, yes.But God is also with you, a cast member in your story, graciously—sometimes painfully— in ways seen and unseen, driving your story to the future God desires for us all.A couple of days before Christmas, I got a request from a stranger named Bob to meet in my office. He had a large bequest he wanted to gift to the church before the end of the year, but he said he wanted to deliver it to me in person.
“If you’re really giving us that much money,” I said into the phone, “I’ll meet you in Kiev. Or, Cleveland even.”
He laughed. He thought I was joking. The next day I met Bob in my office. Sitting down and starting to tell me his story, I could see that he was already crying.
Bob told me how he was a part of the congregation here until about ten years ago. During his time at the church, Bob befriended an older widower named Ralph who came to worship with his daughter Helen.
Bob and his late wife had had three children. Two of them predeceased Ralph. All three of Ralph’s children had special needs. Helen, his only surviving child, had autism. At some point over the course of their friendship, Ralph, who had no other family or close friends, asked Bob if he would serve as the executive of his estate.
Bob accepted the role without realizing the obligation he would assume. When Ralph died, Bob became responsible for Helen.
“Her autism,” Bob explained to me, “Her autism was such that if she flushed the toilet in the middle of the night and the toilet ran for longer than twenty seconds, she thought it was busted and she’d call me.”
He doubled down to make his point, “In the middle of the night!”
And then he chuckled and wiped his eyes.
He took her to all her medical appointments and covered her errands.
“Eventually she needed more serious care,” Bob continued, “So I got her set up at a nursing facility, but she’d still call me to take care of anything she got it in her mind needed taking care of. I had no idea what I was saying yes to when I said yes, but I guess it was all part of a plan.”
When his story was finished, he held out his palms like he’d just handed something over to me and now they were empty.
He had handed something over to me.
“That’s a remarkable story,” I told him, “Thank you.”
“I don’t know that it’s all that remarkable,” he pushed back, embarrassed.
“No,” I said, “You just bore witness. You bore witness to a woman with special needs who would not have been cared for apart from a friendship made possible by the church.”
He chewed on that idea for a moment. Then he looked up at me and smiled.
“I guess the church being the Body of Christ isn’t a metaphor,” he said.“No, it can’t be a metaphor,” I said.“It can’t be a metaphor,” I didn’t add, “because God has made a covenant. God has no other choice now but to be an actor in the very Story he’s unspooling.”The name that Mary and Joseph give to their child is Yeshua.
But the name of God is Trinity.
And at the end of the day that is our only answer to the question the feckless priest asks the despairing Colm, “Do you really think God gives a feck about a miniature donkey?”
Yes, God gives a feck.
We know so because the only true God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In fact, God so gives a feck he’s promised to show up here, for you, even you, the consolation of Israel made flesh in creatures of word and wine and bread.
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December 24, 2022
Veiled in Bread, the Godhead See
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Christmas Eve: Isaiah 9.2-7, Matthew 2.1-18
The gospel story begins with the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, but the gospel message began with the news of his resurrection. So:
Alleluia, Christ is Risen!
He is Risen indeed!
Now— this is important— I do not believe that God resurrected Jesus. I do not believe that Mary’s child is alive just because the gospels report it. I believe Jesus is Risen, I believe Christ is alive, because I’ve met him. I’ve met him. I know God raised Jesus from the dead because I’ve met the Risen Jesus; therefore, I trust the gospels’s testimony. Likewise, I trust Matthew and Luke and John when they bear witness to his advent into our world.
When it comes to the gospels, I apply what biblical scholars call a hermeneutic of trust; nevertheless, such trust in the stories of the incarnation does not make it any easier to convey the mystery of the incarnation. St. Anselm of Canterbury, a medieval monk, lamented in his famous book, Cur Deus Homo, “The unbelieving ridicule our lack of sophistication and accuse us of dishonoring God when we say God was born of Mary…” In his Church Dogmatics, the theologian Karl Barth warned preachers,
“At all costs we must make it clear that an ultimate mystery is involved here. It can be contemplated, acknowledged, worshipped, and confessed as such, but it cannot be solved, or transformed into a non-mystery. Upon no consideration must it be treated in a such a way that the mystery is resolved away.”
A teacher of mine, Robert Jenson, writes that “the mystery of the incarnation can only be expressed in paradoxical language.” Meanwhile, in his Small Catechism the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther instructs preachers,
Incarnation: Two what’s in a single who.“Whatever is presented to us in words must be reduced to pictures, for without a picture we can neither think nor understand anything. That is how Christ everywhere in the Gospel carries out his ministry. He taught people the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven by means of pictures and parables.”
The finite containing the infinite.
The humanity of God.
Eternity taking on time.
Mary giving birth to her Maker.
There is simply no way to capture and convey adequately the mystery of Christmas. All we can do, Luther insists, is paint pictures and tell stories. Nor can we merely retell the ancient text. Exactly because the gospel is a present-tense promise, it can never be proclaimed in the same way today as yesterday. The everliving gospel must always be proclaimed anew, but when it comes to the mystery at the heart of the gospel, the best we can do is draw pictures and tell stories.
Here’s a story.
It’s a story that shows what is terrifyingly and horrifyingly wrong about our world. Yet it is also— you’ve got to trust me— a Christmas story; or rather, it’s a story that helps us glimpse, as though through a glass dimly, the mystery of Christmas.
Tonight, at the top of the twenty-four story high-rise in North Kensington, West London, a banner— six stories tall— wraps around all four sides of the building.
The banner reads, “Grenfell: Forever in Our Hearts.”
Grenfell Tower is still clad in white plastic sheeting. Five years ago, on June 14, 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower. It was England’s deadliest residential fire since World War II. Seventy-two residents and fire fighters lost their lives. The fire spread with haste due to the lax building regulations which allowed builders to use an especially flammable material for the tower’s facade. An American company, Arconic, sold the material to the construction company despite knowing the risks their product posed. High rents, a lack of affordable housing, and inadequate public housing meant that Grenfell Tower was overcrowded with occupants.
Edward Daffern, a retired activist who had lived in Grenfell Tower for seventeen years, told the NY Times, “This was a whole community that was being treated with injustice and discrimination.” For instance, the tower, whose residents were primarily working class and immigrants, had only a single staircase and no sprinklers and fire alarms. The sole elevator in the high-rise had been broken for as long as anyone could remember. Forty-five year old Natasha Elcock lived on the top floor of Grenfell Tower. After the fire, she says, she was left all alone, forced to fend for herself as the local government had taken no measures to provide temporary housing. Another resident, Bellal El Guenuni, who lived in the tower with his wife and three young children, explained to a reporter that “in low income housing, I think there’s an element of ‘Be grateful for what you’ve got. Keep your mouth shut and don’t rock the boat.’”
On the sidewalk far below the banner that reads “Forever in Our Hearts,” a square canvas sign hangs in the middle of a memorial to the victims. In the center of the sign it reads: “72 Souls.”
Graffitied around the number seventy-two are questions:
“Why do we the poor have to suffer once again?”
“How dare they?!”
“What gives them the right to put money before our lives?”
“It was like time stood still,” said Marcio Gomes. Gomes lived on the twenty-first floor of Grenfell Tower with his pregnant partner and their two little girls. After attempting to call 999 five times to no avail, Gomes and his family climbed down the stairs through the heat and the smoke.
Gomes remembers that as they left their apartment he turned around to see the ceiling fall in and fire consume the manger— I mean, the bassinette— he’d just bought for his coming baby.
The Gospel of John does not proclaim the mystery of Christmas with dreams and nightmares as Matthew’s Gospel does. John does not speak of angels and shepherds like Luke. The evangelist John ignores Luther’s advice altogether and doesn’t tell a story or paint a picture. John keeps it theological,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being…And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
Take note—
John does not proclaim, “The Word became human.”
Anthropos.
John proclaims, “The Word became sarx.”
Flesh.
Here’s what you may not know.
In the New Testament, flesh is not at all a positive word. Flesh is not even a neutral word. All across scripture, flesh refers not to humanity generally or generically but to humanity under the judgment and verdict of God.“Flesh,” says Barth, “is the concrete form of human nature marked by Adam’s fall.” Flesh refers to humanity in opposition to God, humanity in rebellion from God, humanity as adversary against God. In other words, in Jesus Christ, God condescends not to the world that he created; but rather, at the incarnation God enters the world that we have made in our image.
A world of avarice and indifference.
A world of despots, of Herods and Putins.
A world where innocents are killed in places like Bethlehem and Bucha.
A world where you’re never very far from a place like Ramah.
A world where you can always find a Rachel weeping for her children.
If you can stand to listen.
A world of deep darkness.
And tramping warriors.
And garments soiled in blood.
God enters that world.
The Word comes to flesh.
And God comes not as a warrior. God comes as Jesus Christ— and not as a fully-grown, self-reliant Jesus. God comes as a newborn too weak even to hold up his head, too vulnerable to left alone. The Infinite comes in this most finite of creatures.
Incarnation.
It’s a “prime mystery,” Karl Barth says, “a datum with no point of connection.” All we can do is paint pictures and tell stories.
As fire crews arrived at the Grenfell Tower blaze, they quickly assessed the situation before them and the odds against them. The building could easily collapse. Their oxygen tanks lacked the air supply necessary to climb up to the top floors of the high-rise. Anything could wrong. They were as likely to die as save anyone. Nevertheless, not one of the firefighters flinched when it came to going in, going up. Many climbed up several times.
Knowing the danger they were accepting, understanding the risks they were assuming, seeing the sheer vulnerability they were entering, the firefighters all took a moment and wrote their names on their helmets (so that their bodies could be identified), and then they all hugged one another tightly, a frantic, fearful embrace because few of them believed they would make it out alive.
Now—
Imagine, paint a picture in your mind, the three persons of the Godhead wrapped in a similarly tight embrace.
Imagine Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a desperate, fearful grasp of one another in the moments just before the Father’s only begotten Son becomes incarnate in Mary’s belly.That danger, that risk, that absolute vulnerability— that’s what the Gospel wants you to hear in that little phrase about a tiny baby, “And the Word became flesh.”Surely at least one angel in the heavenly host protested, “Are you crazy?! They’re liable to kill you!”
At North Kensington in West London, the fire crews climbed up into the unknown.In Bethlehem, the Love with which we are loved came down.Love came down into a situation every bit as precarious and risky. He can’t even feed himself much less defend himself.
Here God is:
In the hands of poor, inexperienced parents, soon to sneak across the border.
At the feet of dumb, clumsy animals.
Under a ramshackle roof.
Exposed to the elements.
Approached by strangers.
Hunted by a despot with a cosmic authority problem.
It could’ve gone wrong in a thousand different ways. It’s a miracle he made it to the terrible twos. God imperils his very self in order to be cradled in Mary’s arms.
God risks everything in order to be not just the Subject of our lives but the object of our love, to be God-with-us.Only—
God doesn’t come down in the flesh as an answer to a 911 call.
According to Ephesians, it is God’s choice “from before the foundation of the world.”
The incarnation isn’t an emergency response.
According to scripture, it is God’s choice, “The mystery of his eternal will…set forth in Christ…just as to unite all things in the fullness of time.”
Christmas isn’t God’s Plan B.
According the Bible, God’s gracious election of us in Jesus Christ is
“the beginning of all the ways and works of God.”
I’m going to say that again because it’s absolutely everything.
God’s decision to be with you and for you is the beginning of all the ways and works of God, before the Big Bang even.It’s as though far above the disaster zone called this world of flesh, there is— indeed, there has always been; there has never not been— a banner hanging from the Trinity’s penthouse in heaven that reads, “You are in our hearts forever.”
At Christmas, the Church makes such an astonishing assertion that it robs everyone of the possibility of neutrality on Christianity.
This is the claim:
There is no other God but the God who has determined himself not to be God without you.
Which means, the good news of great joy isn’t that God was with us in Jesus Christ. The good news of great joy is that God is with us in Jesus Christ because there is no other God than Emmanuel and he has no other identity than God with us as Jesus.
The good news tonight is not that God was with us in Jesus Christ. The good news tonight is that God is with us in Jesus Christ.As real and visible, tangible and embodied, as the baby at Mary’s breast.
Two Sundays ago, after the Christmas Pageant, one of the children in the cast came up to me in the fellowship hall.
“I have a question,” she said.
“What’s your question?”
“So…Jesus is alive?”
I nodded. She thought about it for a moment. Clearly this hadn’t been her question.
“Well, if Jesus is alive, then how come we can’t see him?”
I knelt over and leaned in towards her and I whispered, like this was a secret too special to share.
“Actually,” I said, “you can see him; in fact, you did see him just last Sunday.”
“I did?”
I nodded.
“Yes, of course,” I said, “He was that bread on the table and the cup next to it. Jesus is alive and that’s the form— one of them, anyway— his body takes now.”
She nodded.
“Oh, cool,” she said.
And then she ran off as quickly as a magi from the manger.
The Risen Jesus himself promises, “Lo, I am with you until the end of the age.” How is he with us? “Take and eat,” Jesus instructs us, “This is my body…” With you. For you.
I know what you’re thinking.
“Would Almighty God really let his body be pushed around on the Supper’s table, or handed over to sinners and all sundry who come?”
The question is logically ironic. To answer “No,” (No, God wouldn’t assume such ordinary creatureliness and give himself over to those who take him for granted) is already to posit a God other than the one held in manger, the same one who will hang upon a tree.
God has a body— still.“Bethlehem” means “House of Bread.” The Son still lives in bread.
Like Gandalf says to Frodo about the ring of power, he wants to be found. God wants to be seen and heard and held. God wants to be touched and tasted, born by you as much as by Mary.
God wants to be your mercy and your righteousness. You don’t have to live a perfect life; his perfect life is right here for the taking. God wants to be your righteousness. God wants to be your pardon and forgiveness. God wants to be your comfort and joy. God wants to be your companion amidst loneliness, your calm against fear, your hope in the face of grief. God wants to be your crutch for whatever weakness— ailment or addiction— hobbles you.
You are the reason why the Son of God comes down and becomes incarnate in word and wine and bread again and again and again.
Which is to say, God wants you.
Veiled in bread, the Godhead see.
How can the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, be a Jew who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly?
How can the baby born in Bethlehem be here now, be ubiquitous in fact, incarnate in creatures of bread and wine?
It’s a mystery.
All we can do, Luther says, is tell stories.
And paint pictures.
So just imagine for a moment, suspended above the altar and the table, the three persons of the Trinity wrapped in a fierce embrace, clutching at one another expectantly, waiting to see if you will respond to their call and come down and receive him, to taste and see the goodness of God; so that, Mary’s child— who is your Maker— might lodge in your heart forever.
*artwork by Ivanka Demchuck
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December 16, 2022
In the Aftermath of the Annunciation
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Her hands kept shaking even after he departed from her.
She gasped and only then realized sheʼd been holding her breath, waiting to see if heʼd reappear as suddenly as heʼd intruded upon her life. His words had lodged in her mind just as something new was supposedly lodged inside her.
He must have seen how terrified she was.
“Donʼt be afraid,” heʼd said to her.
In those moments after he departed, she just stood there, looking around her bedroom. The posters on the wall, the books on the shelf, the homework on the desk, the dirty laundry on the floor in the corner. In the aftermath of an angelʼs glow, it all seemed very ordinary. It was an unlikely place for a “visitation.” There was not anything there in her bedroom to confuse it for a holy place. It was just ordinary.
Looking around her room, she caught a glance of her reflection in the mirror. And so was she, ordinary. She was not anyone that anyone else should ever remember or notice, not someone youʼd pick out like a single star in all the sky. Yet, thatʼs just what heʼd told her.
Sheʼd been chosen. An election, it had sounded, somehow older than the stars. Somehow, in the days ahead of her or already right now, God would come to exist in her belly.
The thought made her shake again.
She looked out her window up at the multitude of stars in the night sky.
“Do not be afraid,” heʼd told her.
Those same words, she knew, had been spoken long ago to Abraham.
“Do not be afraid,” Abraham had been told in the moments before God pointed to the stars in the sky and dared Abraham to count them, dared Abraham to imagine and believe that for as many stars as there were in the sky so his descendants would be.
She liked the thought, as unbelievable as it sounded, that through baby the whole world would be blessed.
Still, she knew enough scripture to know that the angelʼs words, “Do not be afraid,” were auspicious words. She knew the child promised by God to Abraham and Sarah was the same child whose sacrifice God later required. She knew the story. It was the sort of story you canʼt forget even if youʼd like to. How God one day told Abraham that the promised son would have to suffer and be sacrificed on top of a mountain. How the son obeyed and followed his fatherʼs will all the way up the mount, carrying wood. How they built an offering place up there. How the son was spared only when it was clear how far the father would go.
She used to wonder how God could ask anyone to give up something so precious. But now, looking out at the stars and rubbing her belly, she wondered about Sarah, Abrahamʼs wife, the boyʼs mother, and what Sarah would have done if God had asked her to follow her boy to his death.
The wondering made her shake again.
“Donʼt be afraid,” she whispered to herself.
As the late night turned to early morning she resolved to leave home. A part of her wanted to see for herself the truth of the angelʼs words growing inside Elizabeth. A still bigger part of her knew the angelʼs news would make her a stranger now in her own home, perhaps a stranger forever.
Nazareth was a small town; in a town that size thereʼs no room to hide.And she didnʼt want to be at home when her body started to change, when the neighbors started whispering questions about legitimacy. And she didnʼt want to remain at home and face her fiance, not yet. The angel could say nothing is impossible but she knew, chances were, everyone would suspect the worst about her before theyʼd believe the truth.
With haste, she packed her belongings into a duffel. She folded her jeans and some blouses and wondered how long sheʼd fit into them. She zipped her bag shut and sadly glanced at the wedding dress hanging in her closet. Seeing it, she knew it would be too small on her wedding day, should that day ever come.
“Favored one,” thatʼs what heʼd called her.
Favored one. But now, hurrying before anyone else in the house awoke, it seemed more burden than blessing.
“Favored one.”
She hadnʼt known what to make of such a greeting when she first heard it. Hannah had received that same greeting. Hannah, who hadnʼt let the gray in her hair or the crowʼs feet around her eyes stop her from praying ceaselessly for God to fill her barren womb with a child. Eli, the haggard priest, had called Hannah “favored one” just before he spilled the news of her answered prayer. But packing the last of her things and clicking off the bedroom lights she recalled that even for Hannah a blessing from God wasnʼt so simple. Even for Hannah the blessing was also a summons.
Hannah had prayed holes in the rug for a child but as soon as Hannah weaned her son, God called her to give her boy to Eli, the priest. Hannahʼs boy was to be consecrated. Tiptoeing through the dark hallway, she wondered how Hannah had explained that to her husband. She wondered what it had been like for Hannah, who lost out on all the memories a mother counts on: his first words, learning to walk, the first day of school, homecoming and his wedding day.
Everything Hannah had wanted when sheʼd wanted a child sacrificed for the purpose God had for her boy.
Hannah— sheʼd been called “favored one” too.
Leaving her house in the cold moonlight, she thought that Godʼs favor was also a kind of humiliation, that Godʼs call was also a call to suffer.
“Let it be with me according to your word,” sheʼd told him when she could think of nothing else to say. But if she prayed now for God to let this cup pass from her, would he?
“Let it be with me according to your word,” sheʼd said.
Standing out under the streetlight and looking back at the house where sheʼd grown up, she realized it wasnʼt that simple. Things would never be simple again.
Elizabeth lived in the country outside Jerusalem, several days journey from Nazareth. Sheʼd stop in villages along the way to draw water from their wells. She knew what others must have thought: a young girl, a single woman, resting at a well all by herself raised eyebrows. It was in those moments with men and women staring at her, making assumptions and passing judgments, she wondered if the angel knew what sort of family her baby would be grafted onto. Names like Rahab and Ruth leapt out, a prostitute and a foreigner. Not the sort of family youʼd expect to be chosen. She wondered what that said God. And what her boy would one day make of it.
At night she camped out in the fields along the road where the only noise came from the shepherds and their flocks. She got sick for the first time out there in the fields. It was then she began to wonder about the stranger she would bring into the world.
“Who will this be?” she thought, “Here is something that is most profoundly me, my flesh and my blood, the sheer stuff of me, depending on me and vulnerable to me. And yet not me, strange to me, impenetrable to me.”
Sheʼd asked him there in the room how it would happen. She hadnʼt gotten much in the way of explanation.
“The power of the most high will overshadow you,” is how heʼd answered.
“Overshadow,” was the word heʼd used.
She was sure of it. She still didnʼt know how that worked exactly. She hadnʼt felt anything. But she knew that word, “overshadow.”
Itʼs what God did with the ark of the covenant when David brought the ark to Jerusalem with dancing and jubilation and not a little bit of fear. The power of the most high overshadowed the ark. And before that when God delivered Israel from bondage and led them to freedom through the wilderness, in the tabernacle, the presence and power of God overshadowed. Now, the most high had overshadowed her, and, if the angel could be believed, God was about to deliver on an even bigger scale.
Sleep came hard those nights on the road. Sheʼd look up at the sky and rub her nauseous belly. It made her dizzy trying to comprehend it: how she could carry within her the sign and the seal of the covenant, as though her womb was an ark; how the hands and feet sheʼd soon feel pushing and kicking inside her were actually the promises of God.
Made flesh.
As soon as she saw Elizabeth in the distance she knew it was true. All of it. Seeing Elizabeth, it hit her how they were immeasurably different. Elizabethʼs child will be seen by all as a blessing from God. Elizabeth will be praised, the stigma of her barrenness finally lifted. But for Mary, as soon as she started to show, it would be different. A young girl, engaged, suddenly pregnant, with no ring on her finger, no father in sight and her fiance none the wiser? That invited more than just a stigma. She could be stoned to death.
She could see from the end of the road the beautiful contradiction that was Elizabeth— the gray wiry hair, the wrinkled face and stooped back, and the 6 month pregnant belly.
To be sure, Elizabeth was a miracle but it was not unheard of. Sarah, Hannah…Mary had grown up hearing stories of women like Elizabeth.
Mary knew hers was different.
An unexpected, miraculous birth wasnʼt the same thing as a virgin birth.
With Mary, it was as if the angelʼs message— Godʼs words— alone had flicked a light in the darkness of her womb.
Life from nothing— that was the difference.
Not from Joseph or anyone else.
From nothing God created life.
Inside her.
From nothing.
The same way, she thought, God created the heavens and the earth: from nothing. The same way God created the sun and the sea and the stars. The same way God created Adam and Eve.
From nothing.
As though what she carried within her was creation itself. The start of a new beginning. To everything. A Genesis and an ultimate reversal all in one.
As she walked up Elizabethʼs driveway, she considered the costs that might lie ahead, and with her hand on her stomach she whispered to herself, “The Lord has done great things for me.”
* Icon is “The Annunciation” by friend, the Ukrainian artists Ivanka Demchuk— check her work out.
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December 15, 2022
Nice Girls Don’t Change the World
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One day, years from now, when the promise in her belly is all grown up, Mary will sit down in the grass along a hillside, her knees too tired and old and stand. She’ll sit there unnoticed, anonymous, among a multitude of seekers who’d come out of curiosity and outcasts and riff-raff who’d come seeking something much more specific.
If the sea of people had anything in common it was all that of them, like her, were poor. Many of them were sick or troubled. Most of them were weary of the world as it was and just wanting a chance to have a touch at him. If they’d already had all the answers, they wouldn’t be there on the mountainside. If life was already everything they’d ever dreamed, they wouldn’t be there, among the crowd, listening to a different dream.
One day Mary will sit in the hillside grass and listen to her boy- her first, most unusual child- grown up now. And grown certain in his vocation. Her youth now turned to middle age, Mary will sit and listen to her boy teach this fragile people:
“Blessed are you who are poor, yours is the Kingdom of God. And blessed are you who hunger now for your bellies will be filled…but woe to you who are rich for you have already received your comfort and woe to you who are well-fed now for you will go hungry.”
And Mary will watch this desperate crowd listen to the Word’s words, listening as if his words themselves had the power to change their circumstances, listening as though his words alone could fill them and their emptiness, as though his words were him. And if people asked where her boy got such teaching, he might say, “The Holy Spirit has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” Or, he could confuse them with some cryptic language about how he and the Father were one in the same. Or, he could say simply, for it would be true, “My mother taught me.” And the lines from his mother’s song would come streaming back to him, “He has filled the hungry with good things/and sent the rich away empty.”
One day, years from now, long after her wedding veil has been stored away and her hair grays, Mary will notice her boys’s followers— first the twelve and later the masses— all praying the same way. Always the same prayer. Always beginning with “hallowed by thy name. Considering everything he could do— calming storms, restoring sight, restoring the dead— his followers would never guess, never imagine, that the one they called “Lord” had learned to pray like many of them had.
From his mom.
Mary was the one who taught the boy messiah the importance of beginning every prayer, every burst of praise, by glorifying, magnifying, rejoicing in God the Savior.
“Holy is his name” Mary had taught him.
When you pray, always start with that, she no doubt taught him.
One day, years from now, when her smooth girl’s face has taken on the lines of worry and knowing burden, Mary will be at home in her meager house or she’ll be shopping in the market, and she’ll overhear news of that boy from Nazareth. The carpenter’s son.
How he’d had the nerve to tell a rich man he first had to sell everything he owned before he’d let him follow. How he’d had the audacity to heal a Canaanite woman’s daughter though she was neither pure nor one of them. They’d whisper and gossip about how her boy had been seen with prostitutes and lepers. How he’d interfered with a perfectly just and legal stoning of a woman caught red-handed in another man’s marriage.
Mary would see them raise their eyebrows at the speculation that he persisted in giving ambiguous answers when questioned about paying taxes to Caesar. And how he’d impertinently offended all the HAVES by lauding a poor widow’s offering over their own.
“Who the hell does he think he is?” they’d indict when they didn’t think she could hear.
“Where does he get off saying such things?” Mary will overhear them asking with no small amount of indignation.
And without thinking, Mary will find herself humming, in a voice grown deeper with age, that song she’d taught him as a child:
“He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts/he has brought down the powerful from their thrones/and lifted up the lowly…”
Humming, Mary will remember what she told him when he was just a boy, what she’d said to her cousin Elizabeth when she’d first sung it, that “Nice girls don’t change the world.”
One day, years from now, after her husband has been laid to rest without having seen the angel’s promise come completely true, Mary will find herself in Jerusalem. She’s always gone there, every year, to celebrate that meal which remembers God’s rescue of her people. Passover.
But one day, in one of those years, the sacrifice won’t be a lamb. Instead the holiday will end with Mary standing amidst an angry crowd, her lips trembling and tears welling up in her eyes, as she watches her boy outrage the chief priests and elders for the last time. She’ll watch as he stands with torn clothes and a bloody face and tells Pilate that he’s actually the One with power and wisdom and authority. And maybe, standing there with the mob, Mary will wish she never taught him that song:
“He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts/he has brought down the powerful from their thrones/and lifted up the lowly.”
Because she never guessed then that this is where the angel’s promise would lead.
One day, years from now, another of Mary’s boys— this one a disciple of her eldest— will write a letter to those who gather and worship in his brother’s— his Lord’s— name.
“Don’t just listen to God’s word,” he’ll write, “do what it says.”
“What good is it if you claim to have faith but do no deeds? Faith without action is dead.”
“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
“Listen, you who are rich, and wail because of the misery coming your way.”
And Mary’s boy, James, won’t say so in the footnotes, but his mother’s fingerprints are all over his letter. Mary had taught him her song too.
Before she bears a son, she bears a message, for Mary’s God does not simply have a word for us, he is his word for us.Before Mary is a mother or a bride or a saint or an icon (or even an adult), Mary is a prophet.
After the angel Gabriel interrupts her life and her wedding plans, Mary makes the long trek to visit her cousin Elizabeth, already pregnant with John the Baptist. Maybe Mary goes to test the truth of the angel’s words or maybe she goes to be with someone else whose pregnancy would’ve set gossipy tongues to wagging.
When she gets there, in the middle of Elizabeth’s greeting of her, Mary erupts with this song, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Maybe Mary composed it on the long journey to her cousin’s house. Maybe it’s a sudden, spontaneous burst from the Holy Spirit. But I would bet it’s a song Mary has been waiting to sing her whole life, whether or not the angel had ever singled her out for a special calling.
Every line of her song is laden with the scripture Mary would’ve learned as a girl.
Except Mary takes all the future-tense instances of the word will from her Bible and she makes them past-tense.
Has.
She takes all those old promises from her scripture and sings of them as though they were as good as done. She takes the hopes of her people and sings of them as having already been accomplished:
“He has shown strength with his arm…”
She sings not because God has given her a child but she sings because of what that child will mean. She praises God for cracking open the heavens and pouring out justice upon a world thirsty for it. She sings because her son will be the One to relieve the proud and powerful of their swelled self-importance and he will be the One to fill the poor with more than money can buy.
Just as she risks being accused of adultery for her unwed pregnancy, Mary’s song is dangerous too- dangerous because there are plenty on top who won’t want her son or his Kingdom to turn things upside down.
It’s a dangerous song.
It’s a seditious song.
It’s a cry from the bottom of the social ladder.
Protestants tend to give Mary the short end of the stick in a number of ways, but this is important: she’s only just conceived him in her belly, but Mary is the one who frames what Messiah means.
It’s as if all of Israel’s vocation was to bring history to the point of Mary’s yes and Mary’s song.Too often we make Mary nothing more than an emblem of femininity or we reduce her to being a passive figure who does nothing than give birth to something more important. And we miss what could most guide us in our own faith. We miss that she was so obviously a woman who yearned for God’s justice. Yearned for it enough to give her life and her body and her future to it.
Too often we praise Mary for her faith in saying “yes” to the angel Gabriel and we miss the clear content of her faith as she sings it here.
NT Wright says that Mary’s song is the Gospel before the Gospel.
I would go one step further— a step permitted by the Chalcedonian mystery— and say that just as much as Christ gets his Gospel from his Father in Heaven, he learned it on his mother’s lap.
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December 4, 2022
Cosanguinity
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Sister Rose knocked on the office door with the toe of the navy work shoes that matched her modest nun’s habit. I could see through the glass door that her hands were full. Braced against her chest, she held a basket filled with plastic Christmas ornaments in one arm. In her other hand she carried a three foot artificial tree by the treetop. Her navy polyester pants, I noticed, were dusted with the fake tree’s artificial snow.
It was the week before Thanksgiving, and I was serving as a chaplain at Trenton State Prison in New Jersey. Sister Rose was my supervisor. Forget the stereotype of the imperious, officious nun rapping students’s knuckles with the ruler in her hand and wearing a habit as black as her mood. Sister Rose could have easily been wearing a gaudy holiday sweater and teaching preschool. She was playful and innocent, both an ill-fitting fixture of the prison and absolutely perfect for it too.
She was constantly shushing inmates to use their inside voices and the most pedestrian obscenity flushed her cheeks with crimson.
“Sister Rose— she’s like Mister Rogers without the Land of Make Believe,” one of the inmates told me during my orientation.
I got up from my desk in the chaplaincy office and opened the door.
“What do you got there?” I asked her.
“Some volunteers from the Baptist Church donated it to us so that the boys could put up a Jesse Tree for Advent.”
Sister Rose always called the inmates boys, like it was her stubbornly gracious way of imputing to them a goodness they had lost.
“A Jesse Tree?” I asked, “What’s a Jesse Tree?”
Not having grown up in the church, I immediately and irrationally thought of Jesse Katsopolis, Uncle Jesse, played by John Stamos in Full House.
“I didn’t know either,” she replied, “But the Baptist folks said it was a way of “Putting Christ back into the Christmas tree.””
“Oh boy,” I thought.
“How so?”
“Well, during bible study every day, we’ll invite one of the boys to choose an ornament from the basket. See— each one is decorated with a name and each name is the name of a family member from Jesus’s family tree. We’ll have to do several each bible study if we’re going to hang all the ornaments. Matthew lists forty-two generations in his genealogy of Jesus.”
“Three sets of fourteen,” I added, incapable of resisting the urge to show-off.
She nodded.
“We’ll have them take turns picking an ornament, placing it on the tree, and then reading the biblical passage that corresponds to that ancestor of Jesus. The Baptist folks didn’t really give me any more instructions, but it sounds simple enough. What could go wrong?”
The answer to her question arrived only a couple of hours later when we gathered in the intake and orientation room. A few of the inmates had already arranged two dozen metal chairs into a circle and placed a paperback bible on each one. The men arrived wearing their beige jumpsuits. After the opening music and a simple, sincere prayer offered by an inmate who had arrived only that morning, Sister Rose explained the Jesse Tree to the boys. Barone threw us a bone by volunteering to go first. Barone worked in the chaplain’s office. He’d been the head chef in a prix fix Italian restaurant until he got busted running drugs out of the kitchen. Barone rubbed his nose, sauntered up to the Christmas tree, and pulled a plastic ornament out of the basket. It hung by green yarn on his index finger as he peered at the name on it.
“Ruth,” he read aloud, “It says Ruth.”
“Hmmm,” Sister Rose said, suddenly discovering a complication in her plan, “We don’t have time to read the whole Book of Ruth. Perhaps we can summarize it.”
“I’m Catholic,” Barone said, “They don’t teach the Bible in the Catholic Church. I don’t know any Ruths.”
Sister Rose frowned at the Catholic dig and then turned to me.
“Pastor Jason, why don’t you briefly tell us about Ruth?”
I sat up, silently praising God that Barone had not pulled the ornament labeled Abijah.
“Well,” I said, “Ruth is the grandmother of Jesse so she’s King David’s great-grandmother. She was a Gentile actually, a Moabite.”
“A what?” the inmate named Hector asked.
“A Moabite. Ruth was from Moab.”
“Mowhat?” the newly arrived inmate asked.
“Moab— it’s where Jordan is today. It means “from Dad.”
“From Dad? That’s a stupid name,” said Barone.
“It’s named after the son of Lot,” I explained, “After God destroyed Sodom, Lot and his two daughters hid in a cave. Nine months later Lot’s eldest daughter gave birth to Lot’s son. She named him, Moab— from Dad.”
“Damn, he should be in here with us,” Christopher with Cornrows said.
“I been with Christopher’s Mom— what’s that called in Hebrew?” another inmate shouted. The boys all laughed.
“Christopher’s Mom visited me yesterday.” another inmate joked, “What’s that called in Hebrew?”
“Conjugal” another answered.
Sister Rose’s cheeks flushed as she guided Barone’s hand to the tree, hung the ornament, and gestured for him to return to his seat.
“Why don’t we have a volunteer to pick another ornament for the Jesse Tree?”
An older inmate named Grady got up. He put one hand on his lower back as he leaned over and slowly selected an ornament like it was an orange he was inspecting at a fruit stand.
“Tumar,” he said.
“Tamar,” Sister Rose corrected him.
“Tamar,” Grady repeated, “Who’s he?”
“It’s a she,” Sister Rose corrected him again.
Perhaps sensing Grady’s limited literacy, she looked at me and said, “Pastor Jason, you did such a thorough job with Ruth why don’t you tell us about this other person on Jesus’s family tree.”
“Um, Tamar is the daughter-in-law of Judah, Jacob’s son,” I said.
“And? Barone said.
“And what?”
“What’s her story? Telling me she’s somebody’s daughter-in-law isn’t a story.”
I bit my lip and pressed ahead.
“Okay— so she’s Judah’s daughter-in-law but Judah’s son is dead. She’s a widow. Her husband had been struck down by the Lord for practicing coitus…never mind. Anyways, she disguised herself as a prostitute and slept with her father-in-law. When Judah hears Tamar had prostituted herself, he orders her to be burnt alive. Only at the last minute Judah discovers that he had been Tamar’s client and that her baby, Perez, was his son. Matthew mentions him too in Jesus’s family tree, Perez.”
They all stared at me silently for a couple of beats not sure if I had just concocted such a wild story.
“How could you not recognize a prostitute was your own daughter-in-law?” an inmate named Jalen pondered aloud.
As it turned out, it was a question the congregation at Trenton State felt they possessed more than ample expertise to debate.
“This one time…” Barone started to say before Sister Rose stared daggers at him.
“I can’t believe Jesus has a prostitute in his family!” another inmate marveled.
“Two actually,” I said, “Ruth’s husband’s mother was a prostitute too— she was also a traitor.”
You could tell from the expression on Sister Rose’s red face that whatever was running through her mind it was not the Christmas spirit.
Barone elbowed my arm and laughed, “I think those Baptists were punking Sister Rose with this Jesse Tree bit.”
“I didn’t even mention how Ruth convinced Boaz to marry her,” I said to Barone.
“How’d that go?” Barone asked.
And somehow, by some miracle, I resisted the urge to analogize to Monica Lewinsky.
Desperate to rescue the moment, Sister Rose pleaded: “How about we sing “Away in the Manger?”
“We need to do one more ornament,” the newly arrived inmate said.
His name was Steven. He was strung-out skinny with a faraway look and a thin mustache.
“You said we’d do three today,” the Steven said.
Still blushing, Sister Rose nodded and gestured for him to come up.
“Abraham,” he read.
“Surely, many of you know about Father Abraham, right?” Sister Rose said like a preschool teacher announcing nap time. She looked relieved the rookie had chosen a run-of-the-mill name.
“Yeah, Abraham,” Deion said, “He’s the one who passed off his old lady as his sister, had a kid with his slave girl, and would’ve slit his son’s throat if an angel of the Lord hadn’t stopped him.”
“Man, I thought my family was messed up! JC’s family tree is jacked up!” an inmate shouted, a declaration that kicked off a cacophony of four lettered jokes and testimonials about their own seedy families and sordid relationships.
The child of Mary is the Lamb that lies down among wolves.
Mary’s boy, the one upon whom God’s Sprit rests with the fullness of the Spirit’s gifts, whose word kills and makes alive, who himself cut down and cast into the fire of death, he comes from the family of Jesse.
As a shoot sprouting from the knotted scar left by an axe, Mary’s child comes forth from the stump of Jesse.
Jesse was such a piss poor parent that when the prophet Samuel traveled to Bethlehem to find and anoint the next king of Israel, Jesse completely forgot about his youngest child. Just imagine forgetting one of your children. Jesse paraded his seven sons before the prophet.
“No, no, no,” the prophet said to each of the men.
“Got any more?” Samuel asked.
Then, almost as an afterthought, Jesse said, “Oh, yes, I forgot. There is one more, now that you mention it. He’s out with the sheep.”
Almighty God could’ve chosen any family.
But God chose this family.
Jesse’s son David was a power-hungry peeping-tom who should’ve been #MeToo’d out of the story of salvation. David spied on Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop one evening. Presumably David didn’t stop there because he promptly arranged for her husband, Uriah, to be murdered.
Bathsheba— she’s another name on the Jesse Tree. Actually, not her name exactly. The way Matthew puts it in his Gospel: “And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.”
Ouch.
Their grandson, Rehoboam, lost most of the kingdom David had established. He lost his kingdom through vanity and greed. It’s no surprise the prophet Isaiah refers to their family tree as a stump. It’s one story after another of bad fruit and faithlessness. From the very beginning even— Abraham wasn’t righteous at all but was reckoned so only on the basis of faith.
The line of Jesse winds its way to Joseph.
Joseph, who the Bible makes no bones to hide, wasn’t the father of Jesus at all. He was just the fiancé of the boy’s mother, Mary, the teenage girl with a child on the way and no ring on her finger.
Her child, Jesus— his very pedigree proclaims broken humanity’s need for a mighty savior and a gracious God.
“Man, I thought my family was messed up! JC’s family tree is jacked up!”
Sister Rose’s cheeks were as red as Santa’s suit so I spoke up and attempted to rescue the unruly situation.
“Jesus didn’t belong to the nice clean world of Tom Brokaw or Oprah Winfrey. Jesus didn’t belong to the honest, respectable world of the NY Times or the Trenton District Attorney. Jesus belonged to a family of murders and cheats and cowards and adulterers and liars and garden-variety sinners.”
“He belongs to people just like us,” Barone said, suddenly serious.
I nodded, “He comes from sinners for sinners.”
“How the hell does that help me?” Steven, the newly arrived inmate asked, “How does that help any of us?”
His faraway look had receded. He appeared like he was waking up into a nightmare and help was exactly what he was seeking.
“I’ve done some real bad things, preacher. How does Jesus coming from people like me do anything at all for me?” And he pointed at me, “Your family might be a hot mess too but that doesn’t help me at all.”
“Yeah,” Grady added, “If Jesus is just like us, no different than us, then he’s in the same situation as the rest of us. That don’t help me. That he belongs to people like us— it’s a nice thought but it ain’t good news.”
“It’s a good point,” I conceded.
This Tuesday I got a call from someone who worships with us online. Debbie told me that her ninety-seven year old father was in Mary Washington hospital in Fredericksburg. After several days of unresponsiveness he’d woken up at five that morning and announced unexpectedly that he wanted to speak with a Methodist minister.
I took the train down on Wednesday morning to avoid the traffic on ninety-five. When I got to his room, I discovered that Merle is almost completely deaf. His daughter had a stack of index cards and a supply of black sharpies.
She introduced us. Because his hearing loss made our communication necessarily one way, at first I listened to him. Merle’s initials are “MF” and he’d always liked that his initials implied that he was a bit of a hard-ass and a stoic. The persona suggested by his initials went with the purple birthmark on his bottom lip that made him look like he’d just walked away from a fight. Indeed, he told me, he’d fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam before settling down to carry mail.
I listened as he told me about his life and his regrets, the chief one being a wife he left for another.
“I don’t know whether or not I’m fit for heaven,” he said to me, “Do you?”
I smiled and immediately thought of that verse from the Christmas carol: “And fit us for heaven to live with thee there.”
Notice, the final verse of “Away in the Manger” is addressed to Jesus.
We’re not the ones fitting ourselves for heaven.
“I don’t know if I’m fit for heaven,” Merle said to me.
“Do you know?” he asked me.
I nodded.
And I mouthed, “Yes.”
Taking that as my cue, I moved to apply the certainty of faith to him. But because of his deafness, I had to write out all my priestly parts.
The words had to take flesh. Like Sheriff Rick Grimes in Love Actually, I wrote it all out by hand in clear block letters with thick black ink, and then I numbered them, and then, standing next to his bedside, I held them up to him, one at a time, to read.
“#1— Merle, do you repent of all your sins?”
And he nodded as earnestly as anyone I’ve ever seen.
“#2 — Do you put your whole trust in Jesus Christ and his grace alone?”
“I do,” Merle said like he was promising a wedding vow.
Cards #3 and #4 said, “Merle, in the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority alone, I announce to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins.”
Card #5— “You’re home safe in Jesus Christ. Trust in his grace.”
And then I prayed with him, shouting it straight into his earball.
And then I made the sign of the cross on him and I blessed him.
When I left him, he was clutching those cards like they were his ticket for a journey.
Here’s the thing— Grady was right.
None of what I inscribed on those index cards is true if Jesus is but another name in the long line of Jesse.
Even if Jesus is the most exceptional one in Jesse’s line, even if he’s the only righteous one on that family tree, if he’s just like us— if he’s merely human— none of the promises I made to Merle are true.
The forgiveness of all your sins?
Jesus can’t do that if he’s just like us. And I certainly can’t promise it. Indeed making such a promise is a sin in its own right if Jesus is just flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.
Fit us for heaven?
He could be a mighty prophet or a great high priest or a teacher par excellence and bringing you home safe, fitting you for heaven, is still too tall an order if Jesus is not Lord.
He is not our savior if he is not also God.So hear the good news.
It’s right there, hiding in plain sight, on the lips of the prophet Isaiah:
“In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a banner for the peoples…”
Notice— Isaiah’s prophecy, which begins with the image of a shoot sprouting up from the stump of Jesse, ends with the image of the root of Jesse.
Isaiah’s prophecy, which begins with the image of a shoot sprouting up from the stump of Jesse, ends with the image of the root of Jesse.
In other words, the prophetic word disclosed to Isaiah is not Mary’s child will be from Jesse’s line. That’s not news. David himself already knew as much. No, the bottomless mystery, the unfathomable wonder, the good news is that the child of Mary who is the fruit of Jesse’s tree is also simultaneously, paradoxically the root of Jesse.
Jesus is not only an offshoot of Jesse’s tree. He is its source. The son of David is the root of David’s father. That is, Mary’s child is also Mary’s creator.Though we’re counting down the days to his birth, the truth is Mary’s boy has no beginning.
As Karl Barth says, whatever else God may be, God is the man who arrived announcing, “You are forgiven.”After the gray-haired inmate Grady had registered his critique of the Jesse Tree, Sister Rose had been about to press play on the cassette player and move us along with caroling.
But she turned around from the blue boombox and she took a deep breath and she smiled at them all.
And she said,
“Never forget, boys. The genealogy of Jesus is also the historicity of God. Long before God is for you in Jesus Christ, God chose to be with— from— people just like you. Think about that boys— the love that moves the sun and the stars wanted to be with people just like you. Whether it’s his family tree or the tree on Golgotha, the message is the same. God is grace, all the way down.”
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November 20, 2022
The Love that is God
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Matthew 7.21-29
“And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority.”
Several years ago now, USA Today featured a story about the various and often contradictory perceptions of God in America, and how a person’s perceptions of God influences their opinions on political issues of the day. The research came from a book by two sociologists at Baylor University in Texas entitled America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God and What that Says about Us. The four characteristics of God as defined by the researchers are Authoritative, Benevolent, Critical and Distant. Based on the surveys they conducted, the researches extrapolated the percentages of what American people believe about God.
Authoritative 28%
According to the authors, people who hold a view of God as Authoritative divide the world along good and evil.
They tend to be people who are worried, concerned, and frightened.
They take comfort and refuge in the concept of a powerful, sovereign God guiding this country.
Distant 24%
These are people who identify more as spiritual but not religious.
They speak of finding the mysterious, ineffable, unknowable God in nature, through contemplation, or in elegant mathematical theorems.
Critical 21%
The researchers describe people who perceive a God who keeps a critical eye on this world but only delivers justice in the next.
Benevolent 22%
According to the Baylor professors, those who understand God as benevolent believe God is a “positive influence,” who cares for all people, weeps at all conflicts, and will comfort all.
Benevolent. Distant. Critical. Authoritative.
Along the way, their research netted some curious findings. For instance, if your parents spanked you when you were a child, then you’re more likely to subscribe to an Authoritative God view. If you’re European, then in all likelihood you have a Distant view of God. If you’re poor then, odds are, you fall into the Critical view. United Methodists meanwhile, proving we can’t make up our minds about anything, tend to be evenly distributed among the four characteristic views.
Their research doesn’t mention anything about adults who like to be spanked and how that impacts their view of God but I’ll leave it to you to speculate.
The book is several years old now, but I was surprised to discover that the sociologists’s survey is still up and running online. As people take the survey, even now the percentages change. So you might be interested to know that, like they were horses at the track, the Distant God is now pulling ahead in the polls, as the Authoritative God falls behind, and the Benevolent God gains a few points.
When I discovered the website a few years ago, I decided to take the survey, all twenty questions of it. I was asked to rate whether or not the term “loving” described God very well, somewhat well, undecided, not very well, or not at all. Other qualities in the twenty ratable questions were “critical, punishing, severe, wrathful, distant, ever present.” I was asked if I thought God was angered by human sin and angered by my sin. I was asked if God was concerned with my personal well being and then with the well being of the world.
In order to capture my understanding of and belief in God, according to my watch, the survey took all of two minutes and thirty-five seconds. After I finished, I was told what percentage of people in my demographic shared my view of God (college educated men under age forty-five). You may be interested to know, but probably not surprised, that the survey says that this pastor solidly maintains a perception of a Benevolent God.
It was only after I answered all the questions, only after I saw my results, only after I saw how I measured up against other respondents, only then did it strike me how the Baylor survey never— not once, nary a single question— asked me about Jesus.
The survey asked me to choose if I thought God was Authoritative or Distant or Critical or Benevolent, but it never asked me, it was never given as an option, it was never preferred as a possibility, if I thought God was like Jesus.
And Baylor is a Baptist University, but the researches had zero questions along the lines, “Do you believe God is a Jew who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly?”
Benevolent. Distant. Critical. Authoritative.
But not: Incarnate
Obviously I’m not a sociologist though I have pretended to be one at law firm Christmas parties. I’m not a social scientist but presumably, “Do you believe that God, though being in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself taking the form of a slave being born in human likeness and being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on the cross…” is a lousy survey question.
Nevertheless, it struck me that I’d just taken a supposedly thorough survey about my belief in God, and Jesus was not in any of the questions and he was never a possible answer.Now, I’ve been accused in the past of being prejudiced against both Texans and Baptists so it should surprise no one when I say that I think the Baylor survey is— to use a precise theological term— a bunch of crap.
I even tried to go back and undo, invalidate my responses but it wouldn’t let me. I even emailed the Baylor sociologist to share my opinion of his survey (and by the way it’s Christopher_Bader@Baylor.edu). The problem with the survey is that, whether I like it or not, God is not someone I get to choose with either the click of a mouse or my own speculative thoughts.
As the atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach correctly pointed out two centuries ago, most of the time when human beings speak of God we actually are speaking about ourselves in a loud voice. Human beings, Augustine said, are incurvatus in se, bent in on ourselves— sinful from birth.
We can’t possibly be trusted to speak of God with any accuracy at all unless God first has spoken to us.Unless Jesus is what God has to say to us.All our God talk is wrong without revelation.All our religion is idolatry apart from incarnation.We don’t get to define God instead God has come to us in a way that confounds and upends and overturns all our definitions. The problem with the Baylor survey is that I don’t believe God is Authoritative, Distant, Critical, or Benevolent. I believe Jesus is God. I don’t have any choice.
Just look at the Sermon on the Mount—
When Jesus warns his hearers that false preachers will get their comeuppance (“Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven…”), pay attention to the fact that Jesus is the one sitting on the judgment seat of God (“On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name?”). And notice that when Christ comes to the end of his sermon, the crowd reacts not to the content of the preacher’s teaching but to his person. They're astonished by the authority he assumes. They’re unsettled and offended that Jesus taught as one with the authority to determine what is authoritative. They react to his preaching the same way they react to his miracles, “By what authority does he forgive sins? Where does he get off? No can forgive sins but God! Who died and made him the Maker of Heaven and Earth?” And don’t miss how Jesus stacks up the first person pronouns at the conclusion of his sermon: I, me, my, and mine.
Not only does Jesus assume for himself the place that heretofore the Law had occupied, he puts himself in the place of God.Maybe this is why throughout the entire sermon only one character opens his mouth.
As New Testament scholar Dale Allison notes, from Matthew 5 to Matthew 8:
“There is no dialogue, there are no questions, and there is no vocal response. Jesus’s words are ringed in silence. This focuses all attention on him while it also implicitly impresses upon his great authority: when Jesus speaks, Jesus is alone and by himself” in a singular way analogous only to the Almighty himself.
Authoritative, Distant, Critical, Benevolent, Jesus.
Christians are peculiar. Maybe it takes a survey to point out just how odd.
When we say God, we mean Jesus.And when we say Jesus, we mean the God who emptied himself, the God who traded divinity for poverty, power for weakness, the God who came down among us and stooped down to serve the lowliest of us.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, said that if God had wanted God could’ve been Sovereign. If God had wanted, God could’ve been All-Powerful or All-Knowing. If God had wanted, God could’ve been Holy or Righteous. But instead, said Wesley, God chose to be Jesus. You see— it’s not that God’s power and glory and divinity are somehow concealed behind Jesus‘s human life. It’s not that in Jesus God masquerades as someone he’s not already. The incarnation isn’t a temporary time-out in which God gets to pretend he’s a different person. Rather, when we see Jesus in the wilderness saying no to the world’s ways of power, when we see Jesus— the Great High Priest— embracing lepers and eating with sinners, when we see Jesus stoop down to wash our dirty feet, when we see Jesus freely choose death rather than retaliation, when we see Jesus pour himself out, empty himself, humble and humiliate himself we’re seeing as much of God as there is to see.
Jesus is God without remainder.After I completed the Baylor survey, in less than three minutes, a window popped up on the screen to tell me, conclusively, that I had a perception of a Benevolent God. For me, the survey said, God is a positive influence on people. I suppose that means God is like Joel Osteen or Taylor Swift. The survey results also explained how my particular perception of God likely impacted my worldview, in other words, how my belief in God played out in my positions on contemporary issues. But the survey never said anything about a way of life. The survey never mentioned a community. According to the survey I’m just an individual person who has a certain perception of God and that perception influences my opinions on political issues.
Right after I completed that survey, the very same week, two events occurred in the life of the church I served.
One—
I celebrated a funeral service for a man who died much too young and much too suddenly, leaving behind his two nine year old twins.
During the sermon and all through the eulogies, if I’m honest, I only half-listened. And instead I sat up here at the altar table and I peeked around the specially-ordered flowers and I looked at the deceased’s fourth grade son, slumped in the pew and sitting in the crook of his mother’s arm. And I watched him again after the funeral service during the reception in the fellowship hall. He looked tired and red-eyed and uncomprehending. I watched him. And I thought about the questions he must have, the questions he will undoubtedly have as he gets older. I thought about the burden of grief he will carry. I thought about the anger that will come over him.
And maybe it’s because I’d just filled out that silly survey in the morning but as I watched him I thought about what sort of God it is that I want him to know.
I thought about what sort of God it is that makes it possible for a boy to mark his father’s death with worship of all things.I thought about what sort of God it is that produces a community of people who can be the love and presence of God to a boy who’d just lost his Dad.What sort of God is that?
Authoritative? Distant? Critical? Benevolent?
Or is it the God who trades away his divinity so that he might win us?
Is it the God who takes flesh and shares in the grief and joy and pain of our lives in order to redeem our them? Is it the God who stoops down to serve us so that we might learn how to serve one another? Is it the God who gets his hands dirty so that we might be made clean? Who judges us by suffering in our place? Whose mercy is as wide as a cross and as deep as the grave?
After the funeral, I met with a couple— parents.
Even though I emailed and texted them beforehand, they wouldn’t tell me why they needed to meet with me so urgently.
Great, I thought, they’re either PO’d at me and are leaving the church, or they’re getting divorced. Either way, I’m going to be late for dinner.
When they came to my office, I could feel the anxiety popping off of them like static electricity. The counseling textbooks call it “active listening” but really I was sitting there in front of them, silent, because I had no idea where or how to begin. The husband, the Dad, I noticed was clutching his jeans cuff at the knees. After an awkward silence and even more more awkward chit-chat, the wife, the Mom, finally said:
“You and this church have been an important part of our lives. You baptized and confined our daughters so we wanted you to know what’s going on in our family and we thought we should do it face-to-face.”
“Here we go,” I thought, “They’re splitting up or splitting from here.
“What’s up?” I asked, sitting up to find a knot in my stomach.
And then she told me something else entirely. Something surprising. She told me their daughters had both come out to them.
“They’re both gay,” she said.
“Is that all?!” I asked. “Good God, that’s a relief. I was afraid you were going to tell me you were getting a divorce! Jesus doesn’t like divorce.”
They exhaled.
I could see they’d been holding their breath.
“The church has been a big part of our lives and we wanted to make sure you knew that about them” she said.
“But also…” her voice trailed off and then her husband spoke up. “We also wanted to make sure that they’d still be welcomed here, that there’d be a place for them.”
“Of course. Absolutely.”
I could see the hesitation in their eyes, like I’d just tried to sell them the service plan at Best Buy so I said it plain:
“Look, I love them. This church loves them. And God loves them. Nothing will ever change that.”
“You don’t think they’re sinners?” she asked.
“Of course they’re sinners,” I said, “but that would be just as true if they were straight too. Besides, it doesn’t change my point. Jesus loves sinners and Jesus is as much of God as there is to know.”
After the funeral and after the meeting with the girls’s parents, I was in a contrary mood so I decided to emailed the Baylor sociologist responsible for the survey.
Dear Dr. Bader,
I’m a United Methodist pastor in northern Virginia. Having read about your book and your research in USA Today,
I just completed your survey online.
Since I was unable to cancel or otherwise invalidate my responses I felt I should share a few comments with you.
First, let me take issue with the four views of God that you group responses into.
I don’t deny there is a diversity of religious belief in America.
It’s just that, as a Christian, I was surprised to find that the God whom I worship isn’t to be found in any of your questions or categories.
I believe Jesus of Nazareth is as much of God as there to see. Authoritative, Distant, Critical, or Benevolent therefore are not sufficient categories to describe the God who, while we were yet his enemies, become our neighbor and died for us.
Perhaps you think my definition of God is too specific.
The trouble is in Jesus of Nazareth God couldn’t have been more specific.
Second, your survey suggests that believing in God is primarily a matter of having a particular worldview that then influences one’s opinions on issues.
I can’t speak for other religions, but as a Christian I can say that Jesus doesn’t seem interested in giving me a worldview.
He instead gives me an office.
He gives me the authority to be just as profligate with grace and mercy and forgiveness as him.
So, you see, Dr. Bader, Jesus expects a lot more from us than having the right positions on issues.
Finally, I just came from a funeral service for a fourth grader’s father.
And after the funeral I met with parents worried that God no longer loved their daughters for the way God had made them.
It occurred to me today especially, therefore, that in all of your questions on your survey, you never once asked if I believed that God loved me.
Martin Luther— maybe you’ve heard of him even though you teach at a Baptist University— said that’s the difference between the Naked God and the God who clothes himself in Jesus Christ.
Postulating a loving God in the abstract (the Naked God) isn’t the same thing as believing that God loves me, no matter what.
You never asked that question, professor, and I know in my bones that that’s the most important question.
For that little boy’s sake, and for his Dad’s, for those girls and their parents, I thank God that in Jesus Christ the answer is yes.
No doubt the harsh tone of my email will lead you to conclude that I score in the Authoritative God category.
Not so, even though my mother did spank me as a child.
No, I rate solidly in the Benevolent God category.
So I hope you will believe it’s in a spirit of benevolence when I say, for lack of a better expression, I think your survey is crap.
Blessings...
I don’t care what the survey says. I don’t give a rip what individual Americans say about God. Jesus is what God says to us.
So hear the Good News:
Benevolent?
Jeff Bezos is benevolent. God is better than Bezos. God is gracious. And his grace isn’t cheap. It isn’t even expensive. It’s free.
Critical?
Critical. Yeah, God takes your sin and your injustice and your little white lies and your comfortable compromises and your can’t-be-bothered apathy, all your hate and all your resentments, God takes all of it into his body and bears it on a tree. You can’t get more critical than a cross.
Authoritative?
The true God is so mighty he exercises his authority with just four little words, “Your sins are forgiven.” “By what authority?!” By the authority of God.
Benevolent, Critical, Authoritative, Distant.
Distant?
No.
God is not distant at all.
God is as close as the two little Gospel words “for you.”
Which means God is so close to you as soon to be in you.
So come to the Table.
The Love that is God is here.
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