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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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The Road to Hell is Paved with Preachers

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Matthew 7.15-23

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”

Back in September, on the holy day when the Russian Orthodox Church commemorates the birth of the Theotokos, the God-bearer, Patriarch Kirill proclaimed not the Son of Mother Mary but the Fatherland. The patriarch's comments during his sermon came amid nationwide protests over the Kremlin's announcement of a partial mobilization to replenish Russian forces fighting in Ukraine as well as rising anger over the nearly one hundred thousand lives lost in Russia’s feckless invasion.

Labeled “Putin’s altar boy” by Pope Francis, Patriarch Kirill has been an enthusiastic pulpiteer and propagandist for the Kremlin. In his September sermon, the patriarch equated retreating from Ukraine with retreating from faith, and even as he exhorted his hearers not to view the Ukrainian people as enemies— indeed he implored them to forgive their Ukrainian brothers and sisters— he once again blessed the war as a holy war and insisted that Russian soldiers who killed Ukrainian civilians were doing a heroic deed.

The shepherd of the Russian Orthodox Church went even further in his sermon:

“If someone, driven by a sense of duty, the need to fulfill an oath, remains true to his calling and dies in the line of military duty, then he undoubtedly commits an act that is tantamount to a sacrifice. He sacrifices himself for others. And therefore we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.”

Notice—

It’s so subtle it’s easy to miss what the preacher did there.

He claimed that it was the solider’s sacrifice of himself for Russia that washes away all his sins.

In the name of Jesus, the patriarch preached that a sacrifice other than the sacrifice of Christ, blood other than the blood of Jesus, a death offered at the altar of the nation rather than for the whole world, can absolve us of our sin.

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”

Last week the Guardian featured an expose on the ReAwaken America tour as it completed its seventeenth and final rally in Branson, Missouri where over three thousand people packed into an overflowing auditorium for what the journalist describes as part Stop the Steal rally, part charismatic religious service, part QAnon and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory all rolled into one.

The ReAwaken America tour is the creation of Clay Clark, a former wedding reception DJ from Oklahoma turned podcaster who came to prominence protesting Covid lockdowns.

Clark launched the ReAwaken America tour with General Michael Flynn in the spring of 2020.

During the Branson rally, the three thousand attendees raised their hands in the air and closed their eyes as a preacher from South Africa, narrating the voice of God, declared:

“Hear me today, for I have found a man after my own heart and he is among you. I have the whole thing planned out. I have looked for a man who would restore the fortunes of Zion.”

After a day of hearing from the former national security advisor and the My Pillow guy and Sherri Tenpenny, who claims Covid vaccines have killed twenty million people, the ReAwaken American tour culminated with hundreds of attendees lining up by a swimming pool for a full-body immersion baptism.

“I feel more confident now,” Joanna Grassia said as she emerged dripping from the ice-cold water. “My eyes have been opened.”

Just two years ago Joanna Grassia had been a member of a church in Philadelphia. But at the ReAwaken America tour she was baptized in the name of a different trinity.

Literally: “In the name of the Lord, the spiritual, and the political.”

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves…Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven…”

In other words—

False teachings lead to false saviors, which is a big problem because false saviors cannot save, and all of us— even the best of us— require saving.

False teachings lead to false saviors and false saviors cannot save.

False teaching is not a new problem.

In the Book of Acts, Paul warns the believers in Ephesus:

“Some even from your own group will come distorting the truth in order to entice the disciples to follow them. Therefore…I commend you to God and to the message of grace, a message that is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance.”

False teaching may be more ubiquitous today thanks to cable television and Twitter, but false teaching is not new. However, it would be a dangerous error to think that false teaching is always so easy to identify as a Q-flavored baptismal formula or a priest’s promise that war can wash away sins. False teaching comes dressed in sheep’s clothing, Jesus says; that is, false teaching has the patina of orthodoxy. It sounds Gospel-ish.

Craig Parton is an attorney who serves as the United States Director of the International Academy of Human Rights based in Strasbourg, France. In his book, The Defense Never Rests: A Lawyer’s Quest for the Gospel, Parton describes his often frustrating and exhausting journey from unexamined atheism to faith in the Gospel that gives us Christ. Soon after converting to Christianity, Parton says he was dismayed to discover that so many Christian preachers and teachers were actually amiable wolves in sheep’s clothing and that much of modern American Christianity is really a treadmill of personal self-improvement, striving to fulfill laws and rules, or a roller-coaster ride chasing one spiritual high to the next, always seeking but never fully satisfied.

Parton writes:

“I experienced what happens when the Law and the Gospel are not understood and thus not distinguished. My Christian life, which truly had begun by grace, was now being “perfected” on the treadmill of the Law. My pastors told me to yield more, to pray more, to give more, to care about unbelievers more, to read the Bible more, to get involved with the church more, to love my wife more, to love my kids more.

Not until some 20 years later, did I understand that my Christian life had come to center [not on Christ but upon me] on my life, my obedience, my yielding, my Bible verse memorization, my prayers, my zeal, my witnessing, and my sermon application.

Allegedly, I had advanced beyond the need to hear the Gospel preached to me anymore. Of course, we all knew that Jesus had died for our sins, and none of us would ever argue that we were trying to “merit” salvation. But something had changed. God was a Father all right, but a painfully demanding one.

I was supposed to show that I had cleaned up my life and was at least grateful for all the gifts that had been bestowed. The Gospel was critical to me at the beginning, critical now to share with others, and still critical to get me into heaven, but it was of little other value. The “good” in the good news had gone missing.”

According to Jesus, the test of true teaching is not how the teachers seem but how you seem after you’ve given your all to their teaching. For Parton, the fruit   ultimately born in his life by these so called gospel messages was exhaustion and weariness. To Do List Christianity and Self-Improvement Spirituality burnt him out.

It left him hating himself for the ways he fell short and the times he relapsed, and it made him critical and self-righteous towards others whose discipleship did not measure up to his own. As a result, he was less content and more unkind than he had been before he became a Christian.

False teachings are like short beds and narrow blankets.They might look like the real deal, but they’re not enough to give you rest.

Just before, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned that the door that is him is narrow to enter and hard to find. Now, at the end of his sermon, we discover that Jesus thinks the reason people like you will miss the gate, the reason people like you won’t go through the door, the reason people like you will fall off the path, to the left or to the right, is because of people like me. Jesus says the reason people like you will fail to enter through the narrow gate is because of people like me.

“Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,”will enter the kingdom of heaven…On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you lawless ones.”

Go away from me— he’s talking to people like me.

For Jesus, the question is not “Shall all be saved?”For Jesus, the question is “Will any preachers be saved?”

You can know the false prophets that Jesus has in mind have been teaching a false gospel because when they stand before the judgment seat they don’t say, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner.” No, they cite their own works, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?”These preachers are false preachers because they’re banking on the deeds they did to get them right with God so, presumably, this is what they were teaching as well. But not a one of us will stand before the Judge banking on anyone’s works but Christ’s alone.

Apart from Christ, even our best deeds are mortal sins.

In typical fashion, Martin Luther summarized this passage with a blistering wisecrack:

“Hell is paved with preachers, and no one is deeper in hell than preachers.”

Luther sounds hyperbolic, but it’s an assertion consistent with the New Testament.

Whenever Jesus or Paul use warning phrases like “severed from Christ,” “fallen from grace," “shipwrecked your faith,” “accursed,” and “thrown in to the fire,” such language is always reserved for those who add to the Gospel of grace; therefore, such language is always reserved for preachers and teachers of the Gospel.

No matter what you read on the dark reaches of the internet, the greatest danger facing Christians is not persecution but false preachers.

This I know because the Bible tells me so.

The greatest danger facing Christians is never persecution but always false preachers because you are justified before God only through faith and faith, scripture insists, comes by hearing. Which is to say, faith comes by means of a preacher, whether that preacher is someone who stands in a pulpit or someone who sits in a pew. The greatest danger facing Christians is never persecution but always false preachers because your justification as a sinner before a holy God depends upon your hearing and trusting not any message but a particular promise.

And no one can self-apply this particular promise of the Gospel.

You can’t look yourself in the mirror and declare the forgiveness of your sins. You can’t self-apply such an unbelievable promise. You know yourself too well. You need a preacher.

In a sermon on this text in 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached that

“God one day [on judgment day] will ask us solely about the everlasting gospel: Did you trust and believe the gospel? God won’t ask whether we were Germans or Jews, whether we were Nazis or not, not even whether we belonged to the Confessing Church or not. God will only ask if we believed the everlasting Gospel.”

Bonhoeffer preached that sermon at the underground seminary he had established at Finkenwalde in 1933 after the German Church officially endorsed Nazism.

The seminary existed exactly to resist the false prophets of a new nationalistic Christianity, yet Bonhoeffer did not let his resistance lure him into becoming a false prophet of his own by adding the work of resistance to the Gospel of grace.

God’s never going to ask you if you were a Republican or a Democrat, progressive or conservative, black or white, rural or urban, woke or MAGA. One day, on the last day, God’s only going to ask whether you put your trust in the everlasting Gospel.

Which means two things—

You need a shepherd in sheep’s clothing; you need a preacher.

And you need to be able to discern whether or not that preacher has handed over the goods to you or instead given you an altogether different gospel that, scripture says, is no gospel at all.

I’ve got a thick, hardcover Index to all fourteen volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. The Index is intended as an Aid for Preachers, and it’s one of the books I consult on a weekly basis for sermon preparation. Because I go the Index every week before I come to you with a word, I stuck a letter in it that I received from a congregant several years ago.

She had not attended worship for several weeks so I sent her a note one Monday morning to check in with her and to say that she was missed.

Her reply taught me an important lesson I hope never to forget.

“Dear Jason,

Thank you for your kind note. You’re right. I’ve not been to church in over a month. There is no reason for my absence other than to say that I simply could not do it anymore. I felt like, for my own good, I had to stay away.

Some background might be helpful:

After my son graduated from high school, we discovered he’d been abused for years by someone close to our family. It tore us apart. My son lashed out with anger and alcohol. I blamed myself for not knowing, not seeing it, not being able to stop it. I nursed my own guilt with alcohol and pills. With a lot of help, he’s healing slowly and putting his life back together. When he was a boy, he was so happy. Icould easily have shot the man when I first found out. That’s not all.

My daughter married her high school sweetheart, whom, she did not discover until too late, was an alcoholic. He was a respectable-looking accountant who first just slapped her around a bit. When he finally really hit her, she left with our grandson but only after he’d spent all. the money she’d saved.

Here’s why I have stayed away from church. I know that, as a Christian, I should forgive those men. I know I should forgive myself too. I know that I should at least be working towards forgiving them. But I can’t. And, believe me, it’s not because I haven’t tried hard.”

And she underlined hard three times.

Maybe it’s not fair to you, but it feels like every time I came to church I wasn’t being told what God has done for me in Jesus.

I was told instead what I needed to do for God, to do what I already can’t find the strength to do; namely, forgive them. Church just somehow became another place in my life where I felt like a failure, and you, though you seem like a nice person, you became another man in my life who was devouring the parts of me that remain.”

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”

She ended the note with a postscript:

“I’ll be back and give it another try. But a word of advice, since you’re a new preacher: I don’t need to be reminded every Sunday of what I ought to do as a Christian. Believe me, knowing what we should do is not the problem for any of us. Every day, though, I need a reminder that God has met me in my failures— God has met me in my failure to forgive— and God forgives me.

That’s the Gospel, and it seems to me I have a right to expect you to give it to me each and every week.”

She was right.

When it comes to preaching, the Gospel is Law.

Christ’s warning to you at the end of his sermon— it’s also a kind of authorization for you to demand a certain sort of sermon.

That you are to avoid false preaching presupposes that you have the right to expect true preaching.

You have the right to demand that I hand over the goods.

You have the right to insist that I place the pearl of great price in your earballs just as surely as we will place it in your hands when you come up to the table. You have the right to expect to receive from me not my ideas, not my opinions, not my politics, not my wisdom, not my spiritual experiences, not my personal struggles, and not my theological questions.

Christ’s warning to you is also his authorization for you.

You have the right to demand that I hand over to you the only thing you will ever need before the judgment seat of the Lord, the everlasting Gospel. You have the right to hear that week in and week out, Sunday after Sunday, in as many ways as the Holy Spirit can help us convey it to you.

Never forget because preachers seems to forget all the time.

The Gospel isn’t just news. The Gospel is good. If what you hear from up here, doesn’t sound like good news, watch out.“Beware.”

In this place, the Gospel is our Law.

This semester I’ve been co-teaching a course on preaching at Duke Divinity School with Will Willimon. After class one day a United Methodist pastor from Tennessee confided to me.

“I really try to stick it to my people,” he said to me, “exhort them to live out their faith, put some skin in the game, and stand up to the injustice in the world.”

“And?” I said, wondering where he was going.

“Last Sunday after worship this fellow comes up to me, mad as hell, and he gripes at me, “Look preacher, I work three jobs to put food on the table. I’ve got more problems in my own family than I know what to do with, and I’m just barely staying on the wagon. Some Sundays it feels like I had to crawl across broken glass just to make it to church. All I want is a word of comfort.” I didn’t know how to respond to him.”

And he looked at me for an answer.

“You know— and trust me, I’ve learned this lesson the hard way— his is not an unreasonable request.”

Just in case I haven’t yet made it clear, let me hand over the goods.

After all, Jesus warns that I’m going to meet with a bad end if I don’t give you the goods.

So hear the good news:

Despite of your track record and mine, if you but believe in Christ and him crucified, if you only trust that Christ died for your sins and was raised for your justification, you will be saved.

We live by grace or we do not live at all.

False teachings lead to false saviors and false saviors cannot save. But the real one can. And he has. He has washed you in the waters of baptism. He has declared you righteous. He has opened the Kingdom to you and forgiven you of all your sins. And, in the event you have a hard time believing this particular promise today, Christ comes to give himself to you all over again, in word and wine and bread.

So come to the table.

No one will enter the Kingdom because they said, “Lord, Lord…”

All of us may enter because the Lord says, “This is my body broken for you.”

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The Narrow Door is Thin

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Matthew 7.7-14

The last name on our All Saints necrology belongs to Nancy Sayre. We buried Nancy outside under the fall leaves the day before yesterday. A few years ago Jesus appeared to Nancy at the foot of her bed— remember, he’s not dead.

The Risen Christ stood in the moonlight by the bedrail before Nancy and he assured her that everything is going to be okay.

“I have a place for you. Don’t be afraid. Everything is going to be okay,” Jesus told Nancy.

The door from this life to the life to come isn’t just narrow.

It’s thin.

In an essay for First Things, my former teacher, David Bentley Hart, reflected on his childhood friends Angela and Jacob. Fast friends through their teenage years, their contact became intermittent as the three went their separate ways for university. Two years after their last get together Angela was killed when a drunk driver struck her car in an intersection; she was alive for several hours after the collision, but never regained consciousness. Hart writes,

“I learned of her death three days after from Jacob. I won’t  bother to say how the news affected me, but I will remark that I had had what in retrospect seemed to have been a premonition of it. On the night of her death, Angela had suddenly, for no discernible reason, come into my mind, attended by an inexplicable sense of aching melancholy, which at the time I simply took for acute nostalgia. Jacob, though, had had something that seemed like much more than a premonition.

On the night of Angela’s accident, apparently during the hours when she was lying in the hospital unconscious but still breathing, he had had a particularly vivid dream in which she and he had spoken to one another in a strange house that, after the fashion of dreams, was also somehow a garden. Their conversation, which had been pervasively sad, concerned her imminent departure for somewhere far away; and it seemed to Jacob that it was understood between them—in that way in which, in dreams, many unspoken things seem simply to be presumed—that she was leaving on a journey from which she would never return. She told him, he recalled, that she had come only to say good-bye.

Now, these things—my vague intuitions, Jacob’s haunting dream—may have been merely coincidences; but, frankly, I can’t make myself believe that the universe is quite large enough to accommodate coincidences of that kind.

What was most extraordinary about our experiences, however, is that they were not that extraordinary at all. That is, it is rather astonishing how common these encounters with the uncanny really are. You may not recall any yourself, but it is quite likely that you need only ask around among your acquaintances to discover someone who does. I myself have had at least two others, one utterly trivial, one of the most crucial importance, and both together sufficient to convince me that consciousness is not moored to the present moment or local space in quite the ame way that the body is.”

The door from this life to life everlasting is narrow.

Of course its narrow.

It excludes every last one of your good works.

But the door from this life to the life to come— it isn’t just narrow.

It’s thin.

We’re just too thick to recognize it most of the time.

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I remember, years ago now, we were sitting in his battered, red F150 when he asked me, “Will I be able to pray for them? After I’m gone?”

We were parked in front of the mud-brown elevation sign at the Peaks of Otter overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Four-thousand feet, the sign said.

 We were sitting in the cab of his truck, both of us looking straight ahead, not at each other, a position I think is the only one in which men can be intimate with one another. Looking at Bedford County below us, neither of us had spoken for several minutes until he broke the silence by asking me, "Will I be able to pray for them? After I’m gone?”

David was (is) one of the saints in my life, and not because of any remarkable feat of his or his exceptional religiosity. David was just good and kind, a Gary Cooper-type without pretense. What you saw was what you got, and what you got from David was very often the love of God condensed and focused and translated into deceptively ordinary words and gestures. Not long after I’d been assigned to his church, David let me know that he’d like to spend an afternoon with me.

He wanted to get to know me better, he said, because he thought I’d likely be doing his funeral. David was only a few years older than me. He’d lived every day of his life in the same small town and wouldn’t have had it any other way. He’d been baptized and raised and was now raising his own two kids in the church I pastored. Ever since graduating from high school, David had worked in the local carpet factory and had survived as the captain of the volunteer fire department, despite his slight frame. But when I first met him, David hadn’t worked for over a year. Not since his Lou Gehrig’s Disease had begun its monotonous mutiny against his body.

At first I’d suggested to David that we grab some lunch, but he blushed and confessed that the stiffness in his jaw and hands would make eating distracting for me and embarrassing for him.

“Let’s go for a drive,” he suggested.

He picked me at the church. He was wearing jeans that his wife had sewn an elastic waistband into and a t-shirt that was much too big for him but was just big enough for him to be able to dress himself. I could tell he was proud that even though he could only awkwardly grip the steering wheel he could still drive his truck. We switched places when we got to the edge of town; he couldn’t navigate the steep, winding roads that wound their way up the mountain. But we switched back again when we got to the top.

Driving through the Blue Ridge, every now and then, David would stop at places as though he were turning the pages of a family photo album. He stopped at the spot he’d gone hunting with his Dad just before he died. He stopped and showed me the woods he’d snuck into as a teenager with his friends and snuck his first beer. He coasted the truck and pointed to a ridge with a clearing where he’d proposed to his high school sweetheart; he said that was the best spot to see the stars at night. And he stopped and showed me the place he liked to take his kids camping.

It was at that stop that he asked, with the V8 idling, my advice on how to tell his kids, who thus far only knew that their Dad was sick, that he walked and talked funny now, not that he was dying.

David parked at the Peaks of Otter overlook and turned off the engine, and all of a sudden the pickup took on the feel of a medieval confessional. Staring straight ahead, David faked a chuckle and told me how he’d rushed into burning homes before without a second’s hesitation but that he was terrified of the long, slow death that awaited him. He pretended to wipe away something in his eye besides a tear, and I pretended not to notice.

Then he told me how he’d miss his kids. He told me he worried about them; he worried how they’d do without him. He was quiet for a few minutes, evidently thinking because then he asked me, “Will they be able to talk to me? Pray to me? Will I be able to pray for them? After I’m gone?”

It’s a good question.

I don’t think David would’ve known or would’ve cared for that matter, but in so many words his was a question that’s been a bone of contention between Christians ever since Martin Luther nailed his 95 protests against the Catholic Church into the sanctuary doors in Wittenberg 505 years ago this week:

Can we solicit the prayers of the dead?

Can we ask the saints to pray for us?

The instant David asked me his question I felt glad that we were sitting in a pickup staring straight ahead instead of in my office or over lunch facing one another. I was glad we were sitting in his truck because, with tears in his eyes, I wouldn’t have wanted him to see the confusion in my own, to see that I didn’t know how to answer him. My first impulse was to sidestep his questions, to ignore the questions about the saints departed, about what their life is like, what they do, and what we can ask of them. My first impulse was to sidestep those questions and just offer David the reassurance that Kinnon and McKayla would be fine. And I could’ve gotten away with it, I suppose.

But David didn’t just want reassurances about his kids.

He wanted to know if he’d still have a relationship with them.

He didn’t just want to know if they’d make it after he died; he wanted to know that even if he did not, would his relationship with them survive death?

Could they speak to him after he was gone?

Would he be present to the living even though he was dead?

Likely, David had heard all the evangelical cliches before, how praying to anyone but Jesus Christ is idolatrous, how devotion to anything else, saint or otherwise, detracts from our devotion to Christ, how we are saved through faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone, who is our Great, High Priest and therefore we don’t need any other priest, confessor or saint to mediate our prayers.

But David wasn’t asking about the limits of orthodoxy.

He was asking about the communion of the saints.

Before I had the gumption to answer his question, David turned towards me in the cab of his truck and he said,

“I hope you keep my kids in church. I hope they stick close to Jesus.”“Why?”“Because that’s where I’ll be, right? In Jesus. Sticking with him is the best way they can stay close to me after I’m gone.”

The door from this life to the life to come— it isn’t just narrow.

It’s thin.

We’re just too thick to recognize it most of the time.

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Fortunately, every year All Saints forces us to remember that Jesus Christ has made all the world a thin place between the living and the dead. Saints are not simply the dead in Christ. Saints, the New Testament makes clear, are any believers who have been baptized into Christ. It’s a distinction that applies to the living as much as to the dead. To believe in the communion of the saints, therefore, is to believe that Jesus Christ has forged a bond between the baptized that stretches not only throughout the globe but across time.

The door is more than narrow.

It’s thin.

It’s so slight it’s not even like a door or a gate at all anymore. It’s more like a veil because Jesus Christ has bridged the greatest barrier that divides human beings.

Death.

Death— not culture or color, not language or class, not political parties or opinions of Elon Musk— is the divide that splits every human being into one of two categories, living or dead.

On All Saints, we remember that the Body of Christ is the most inclusive community imaginable upon the earth not only because it’s for sinners (which means you’re included) but also because it’s a community comprised of the living and those who are now alive, for the time being, only in Christ. In other words, it’s a mistake to think the Golden Rule in our text applies only to those on this side of the narrow door. Because Jesus Christ has destroyed the power of Death, you have more neighbors than you can scarce count.

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As it turned out, David was wrong. I wasn’t the one to do his funeral.

As it turned out, David was just as strong and determined as everyone believed him to be and stronger than he gave himself credit. He lived longer than the doctors expected and by the time he died I was serving a different church. But even though I wasn’t the one to preside at his funeral service, the script— the ancient script— was the same.

Draping a white pall over his casket, the pastor proclaimed:

“Dying, Christ destroyed our death. Rising, Christ restored our life. As in baptism David put on Christ, so now is David in Christ and clothed with glory.”

     Then facing the standing-room only sanctuary, the pastor held out her hands and for the call to worship voiced Jesus’s promise,

“I am the resurrection and I am life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, yet shall they live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”

  And then at the end of the service, after the preaching and the sharing and the crying, the pastor laid her hands on David’s casket and prayed the commendation,

“As first you gave David to us, now we give David back to you. Receive David into the arms of your mercy. Receive David into the fellowship of your departed saints.”

When we baptize someone, we baptize them into Christ. By water and the Spirit, the Father gifts to every believer an unevictable place in the Son. And so Death does not alter in any way our fundamental location. We’re all already in him.

This is why, from the very beginning, Christians have used the word “veil” to describe death, something so thin you can nearly see through it.

Baptism is a bond that cannot be broken by time or death because it’s an incorporation into the Living Christ.

The dead in Christ don’t disappear.

The door is narrow.

It’s exactly the dimensions of Christ and him crucified.

The door is narrow.

But it’s also incredibly thin.

The dead in Christ don’t disappear.

Therefore—

Our fellowship with the departed is not altogether different from our fellowship with the living.

That’s what we mean when we say in the Creed, “I believe in the communion of saints…”

We’re saying, “I believe in the friendship between the living and the dead in Christ.”

So, yes, we can pray and ask the saints to pray for us.

Not in the sense of praying to them, not in the sense of giving them our worship and devotion, but if we believe in the communion of saints, living and dead, then asking the departed saints for their prayers is no different than Sherri, Paul, or Bill— in this congregation— asking for my prayers for them this week.

It’s not, as Protestants so often caricature, that the saints are our way to Jesus Christ.

Rather, Christ is our way to them.

Because we (living and dead) are all friends in Jesus Christ we can talk to and pray for one another.

I can ask Ray Wrenn, who certainly knew more about pastoring than I do, to pray for my own ministry.

I can ask Tina Svenson, who endured MS far longer than I’ve suffered cancer, to pray for me.

I can ask Frida Hill, who had more patience for you all than I can sometimes muster and who never let her own complicated family steal her joy, I can ask her to pray for my own forbearance and hope.

I can ask Les Brownlee to pray for Ukraine, for he certainly understood war better than I do.

The dead don’t disappear from us.They are in Christ.Therefore, they are as real and present and available to you as bread and wine.

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“You never answered my question,” David said, as he pulled the gearshift into reverse, “Will I be able to pray for them?”

I turned in the passenger seat and, violating the man code, I looked right at him and said, “I hope you’ll pray for me too.”

I was still a novice pastor at the time. I didn’t know whether it was a good or right answer. I do know, though, that I think of David every time I stand behind a loaf of bread and a cup of wine and pray, “…and so with your people here on earth and all the company of heaven, we praise your name and join their ending hymn…”

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I was in Texas on Saturday speaking at a conference.

Passing through Denton on the way to Oklahoma City where I preached last Sunday, I suddenly felt compelled to reach out to a childhood friend who lives in the area. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him since my wedding day. I don’t even have a phone number or email for him. I messaged him on Facebook.

“You suddenly popped into my mind and I thought I’d reach out and say hello.”

The rolling text bubble appeared instantly on my phone.

“Mom’s been in hospice for a while now,” he typed back, “She died only a minute ago.”

The universe is not large enough to accommodate coincidences of that kind.

The narrow door is incredibly thin.

Marcy, Ray, Jane, Beverly, Paul, Sue, Loretta, Freda, Les, James, Tina, Nancy— these are but the names of saints the church lost this past year.

But all of you, surely, have lost others you love.

Hear the good news:

Those you’ve lost are not gone.

Not only is the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead determined to give them all back to you, in the meantime they are closer to you than you are to yourself.

Because the promise of the Gospel is that those who are baptized are in Christ and Christ himself promises, “Lo, I am with you always to the end of the age.”

Those who die in Christ are in Christ.

The same Christ who shows up today to say to you, “This is my body broken for you…this is my blood poured out for you…”

Therefore, the departed are not far off from you in an eternal distance, darning angel wings or tuning harp strings.

They are as close and present to you as Christ is in word and wine and bread.

It’s not simply that Christ is truly present in the sacrament.All those you’ve loved and lost are present here too. At the table.

Stick to him.

And you are with them.

So come to the table.

Christ may be the host.

But he brings friends.

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Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Guilty

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Here’s my talk from the Mockingbird Conference in Tyler, Texas last week.

As always, I enjoyed my time with the good folks in Tyler and with the tribe of grace-centric friends at M-bird. Check out the rest of the ministry at www.mbird.com and sign up to go to their NYC Conference in the Spring. It’s worth your time, truly.

The World is Not a Machine

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Matthew 6.16-34

Dear Elijah,

By now, with your new first grader haircut, you’re old enough to know why I’m writing you a letter instead of FaceTiming you. Six years ago this time in Kingdomtide, you were baptized. I wonder, have you gotten used to the fact of your baptism yet? I hope not, for it is a wonder indeed.

Elijah, you and I both live in America, the part of the world that the theologian Karl Barth once derided as “the place where they believe in the freedom of the will.” Nevertheless, neither you nor I had much say in the deed God did all those days ago— by my count, over two thousand days ago. Six years ago, you were baptized. And I was made your godfather.

Notice, padwan, in those sentences we are both the subjects of passive verbs. We were not the active agents. Your Mother and Father made me your godfather (I couldn’t really say no) and, God baptized you.

God baptized you, Elijah.

And, maybe you’ve learned by now, God does not take “No” for an answer. God turns our every “No” into an empty grave. So six years ago today, without the alleged free will of either of us being duly respected or consulted, you were baptized.

To paraphrase the ancient liturgy with which the deed was done:

With water and the Spirit you were made an unevictable squatter in the body of Christ.

Unevictable!

If this was baptism’s only gift, you’d be sitting pretty with a straight flush and a free cocktail on the way.

But wait, there are still more gifts:

With Spirit and water, little man, you were also clothed with an irremovable suit of forgiveness.

Irremovable!

All your sins wreaked between October 23, 2016 and the date of your (second) death, whenever that day might come, are forever free. No matter the parts of you you’ll one day come to worry are eternally unmentionable, Elijah, by the deadness of Christ’s human mind, your absolution is absolute. This is a gift that’s as offensive as it is awesome. And be warned, the species of people most prone to baptism’s offense are called church people.

Finally:

At the font you were incorporated into “the mighty acts of God.”

As a baptized Christian, you are not only a witness to the mighty acts of God.

On this Sunday six years ago, you became a moment in them.

You were made a moment in the mighty acts of God.

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One day you’ll discover, Elijah, that some people think the problem with miracles is whether they are possible. Such people are not Christians; or rather, they’re not very smart Christians.

The true problem is not whether miracles are possible but how we can distinguish them from events in general.

Baptism is one of the ways we mark such a distinction. Because, of course, God is not some First Cause that got it all going back in the very beginning of everything. God holds all that is in existence at every moment of its existence. Once you understand that, you realize it’s all miracle. This Halloween you will dress up as Luke Skywalker from Episode VI so let me put it this way. God is not the cold, distant, impersonal Force that was the best George Lucas’s imagination could conjure.

God is more like a magician with an impossible number of hands who keeps an infinite number of plates spinning and spinning and spinning without ceasing.

You might question or quibble with how he’s doing with one or two of the plates, but, gosh, Elijah, just step back and look at the marvel of the whole magic trick. He should get a standing ovation.

That is, the world is not a machine.

Language matters when it comes to matters that matter. And when it comes to the world, it makes all the difference that Christians do not call the world nature. We call it creation.

The world is not a machine.

The world is a moment to moment miracle.

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At the very center of his Sermon on the Mount, Elijah, in rapid succession, Jesus dishes on prayer and fasting, the dangerous lure of money and the failure of faith that fear and anxiety name. These subjects are not unrelated. Our accrual of wealth and our worries about tomorrow, Jesus says, are ways we attempt to live in the world as something other than creatures. Petitionary prayer and abstention from food, meanwhile, are disciplines through which we are made to remember that we are creatures not altogether different from the birds of the air or the lilies of field. We’re all the present-tense products of the mighty acts of a Maker who makes not simply the basic necessities of our lives but the beautiful things in our lives as well.

Prayer and fasting, petition and charity, facing tomorrow with a trusting, open hand rather than a clenched and frightened fist, these are all ways, Elijah, that Jesus gives us to protest against the purely material, mechanistic view of the universe. This is an important protest because a good many people, a good many Christian people, worship like theists but they act in the world like functional atheists. They might believe God exists but that they don’t live as though God has died to be in a vital relationship with them. “I think prayer changes us not God,” such people will sometimes say. As Jesus makes very clear in his Sermon on the Mount, the God so named is not the God of the Bible. What is around us, Elijah, is not iron, impersonal fate but an omnipotent conversation between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that baptism has opened up to you. Because you are in the Son, through the Spirit, the Father listens to you. Why should we ever think the Father is less interested in each of us than you are in your new sister?

You were created by a word from beyond you, little man.

To be is to be spoken of by God.

To be the creature you were meant to be, therefore, is to hearken after what is beyond you. Which is to say that while you are a creature like a flower or a sparrow, you are also different from all the other creatures.

You are more than a talking animal. You are a creature addressed by God. You are a creature enabled and ennobled to respond. You are an animal who can pray. Prayer puts you back in paradise, in a rightly ordered relationship between creature and Creator. However, one other distinguishing characteristic of human creatures is that we are the only creatures who know not how to be the creatures we were created to be.

By virtue of your baptism, Elijah, you belong to those whom Christ speaks today with this so-called comfortable command: “Be not anxious.” But to understand that you are addressed by this law is not to know how to accomplish it. How are you supposed to live as a lily blooms? “Be not anxious” is a simple enough command, even a child can understand it. Yet even a child will know it’s easier understood than brought off. Just ask your parents, Elijah, or your Aunt LP and Uncle Mike who all anxiously awaited the arrivals this year of your new sister, Phoebe, and your new cousin, Finley. They were not foolish for their fretting. The journey from my head to my heart is the longest road in the universe; I can no more control my fears and anxieties than I can keep myself from falling in love.

Speaking of new births, Elijah:

That we refer to baptism as a second birth, suggests that you being human has less to do with you having emerged from your mother’s womb and more to do with Jesus being born of Mary.

We don’t naturally know how to be human.

Only Jesus, who is also fully divine, is fully human.

No other human being in history has been fully human.

Only Jesus knew how to be the creature we are created to be.

Only Jesus is fully human.

And notice, Elijah— surely you know some of the stories by now: from time to time, even Jesus blinked at the day ahead of him. Before the tomb of Lazarus, his friend, Jesus does not keep calm and carry on. He weeps and grows “greatly disturbed.” On the cross he sounds far worse than anxious and afraid for the future. He sounds like he’s convinced there is no future, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” The Jesus who commands us to “be not anxious” is the same Jesus who, later in Matthew’s Gospel suffers anxiety. In Gethsemane, Matthew reports, Jesus confides to his disciples that he is “depressed and confused.” “Remain here with me and stay awake, for I am so depressed I could die,” Jesus says.  And then, according to Matthew, Jesus can manage only a few more steps before he throws himself down on the ground, and the Greek word Matthew uses— it means to shudder in horror, stricken and helpless.

“Be not anxious,” Jesus commands us on the mountaintop.But then in the garden, he is scared out of his mind.

And from the garden he’s taken in handcuffs to the palace of Caiphas, the high priest, where he was tied and bound and lowered down through a shaft some thirty feet into a jail cell cut out of solid rock in the palace dungeon. I visited that dark place a few months ago, Elijah. I can tell you you, once Jesus was down there, inside the pit, it would be only human to fear there was no way out, no one, no hope. Certainly, Jesus suffered there something more than anxiety.

What conclusion may we draw from this apparent disconnect, Elijah?

Does Jesus, in his human nature, fall short of the very command he issues in his divine nature?

If that’s the case, then Jesus— noble, enlightening fellow he may be— is something less than a vicarious savior. In which case, you reading this letter, Elijah, and everyone who hears it doubling as a sermon are, in Paul’s words, the most pathetic people in the world. If Jesus is but a teacher who cannot live up to his teaching, then you and I and damn near everyone— no, everyone— remain dead in our trespasses and sins. And we should get comfortable there; we’re not going anywhere.

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Remember, Jesus alone is the true human. And what does Jesus do when dread and anxiety beset him before the tomb of his dead friend? Jesus not only weeps. Jesus prays. “Father, I thank you for hearing me,” he prays.

And when depression overwhelms him in the garden, while the disciples sleep off their wine, Jesus prays, “Father, if it be your will, please let this cup of suffering pass from me.” The same Jesus who cries out in fear on Calvary nonetheless follows that shriek of forsakenness with the prayer, “Father, into your hands…” Though the Gospels do not record it, I’m willing to bet your Dad’s Lego collection that, all alone in the bowels of Caiphas’s dungeon with the cock crowing thrice just outside the prison walls, Jesus prayed.

I’ll even wager that Jesus prayed Psalm 88:

“O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night

before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine

ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles: and my life

draweth nigh unto the grave. I am counted with them that go

down into the pit.”

Another crazy good gift of your baptism, Elijah, is that, through water and the Spirit, you’ve been reckoned Christ’s own permanent perfect record, gratis. That Jesus fulfills all the Law for you means Jesus also fulfills this particular law that he himself lays down, “Be not anxious.”

If the one who cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” nevertheless fulfills the command “Be not anxious” then the command does not mean that you must avoid fear and anxiety. (How could you possibly avoid feelings and emotions you cannot control?)

Rather, the command instead means that you dare not attempt to navigate your fears and anxieties alone, as if there is no a Mighty Actor in the world who graciously stands  ready to hearken to you.

To be not anxious, therefore, is not to go through life unafraid or nonplussed.It’s to trust that no matter what Sin, Death, and the Devil throw at you, God’s office can always be found at the end of your rope.

To be not anxious, little man, is simply to be, like Jesus, always ready to pray the most important prayer, “Help.”

Of course, if all my teaching to you, Elijah, could be summed up by saying something as Kindergarten as “Be like Jesus,” then I would be the cruelest of godfathers. Because as wonderful as Ali and I find you, the truth is you can’t be like Jesus.

Underline this: You can’t be like Jesus; that’s why we have Jesus.

You can’t be like Jesus, at least not for very long and, honestly, no other person should have to suffer your attempts to be a full-time Jesus doppelgänger. What’s more, advice like “Be like Jesus” contradicts the very nature of the sacraments. What sets baptism and eucharist apart from all the other mighty acts of God is that they are tangible, visible signs that come with promises attached to them.

Take note, little man, a promise presumes a plot.

Promises can only be made in a relationship that is going somewhere (“From this day forward…”). Promises are unintelligible if life, reality, existence is not a plotted story.

You see, Elijah, the world is not a machine; it’s a Story.

You inhabit a Story, a Story much bigger than your own story. Even better, the story of your life is not your story to bring off to applause. There is a Storyteller. This is good news and great comfort because, despite my good advice, there will be many times when you are anxious and afraid. And there will be almost as any times when you do not cry out to God for help but instead attempt to carry the world on your shoulders.

Take it from me, kid. I know in ways that still make me blush. It is in these precise failures that you will wonder if maybe you don’t deserve to be cut from the cast of the Storyteller’s Story. Maybe you’re just summer stock material. These moments of failure and folly, you can’t set your watch by them, but you can certainly hop over to the casino across the river and bet on them. They are a sure thing.

It’s in such moments, Elijah, that you can remember your baptism and be thankful. For when questions about your place in the Story and your performance of the Story become serious, your only assurance is that you belong to God’s permanent cast, and your only assurance of that is the fact that God made you so through water and the Spirit.

Because God baptized you, made you one of his distinguishable miracles, you are now a necessary and irrevocable plot device.

You cannot now, or ever, go back from the church into the world; you can only leave the church for the world to come.You cannot now even say no to your part in the Story, for you have been baptized you into the Son.And, in the Son, the Father has already always chosen your rejection of him as his means of redeeming you.

Elijah, a worshipper once accused me on their way out of church, “You speak of the sacraments as though they’re magic!”

“Yes,” I said, “It’s just important to remember that they’re God’s magic.”

Elijah, you are a rabbit that God pulled out of a hat six years ago today.

Remember, nothing you do or leave undone can reverse God’s magic trick.

Love,

Jason

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Hitmen and Midwives: Session Three

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Here is the audio from my third talk on Grace and Proclamation for the Anglican Church of Canada’s Bishop’s Clergy Conference:

Attempting to retrieve the promissory, sacramental nature of preaching, Robert Jenson proposes a bracingly simple preparatory question for proclamation: “What does the text promise and what may I thus promise that can be and only can be because Christ lives? What future, possible and certain on account of Christ, may I promise my hearers by the leading and authority of this text?”

Everlasting Twaddle

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Matthew 6.5-15

Back in the spring, I celebrated a wedding in Landsdowne. On my way home, I stopped at the store to pick up some groceries for dinner. I got out of my truck and walked a few yards through the parking lot.

And then I saw her. More importantly, she saw me.

Because of the wedding, I was wearing my clergy collar underneath my charcoal suit. Great, I thought, if I don’t let her lighten the load in my wallet then I’m stuck playing the bad guy in an updated version of Jesus’s most famous parable. “A United Methodist pastor in a fancy suit saw the woman in the ditch and passed by on the other side.” I cursed the Lord for his sense of humor and walked the rest of the way through the parking lot.

She was maybe thirty with dark hair tied in tight braids. She was sitting on the sidewalk by the steps leading up to the sliding glass doors of the supermarket. Her back was against the brick wheelchair ramp and her legs were crossed. On her lap she had a cardboard sign made from an Amazon delivery box. In black Sharpie, the sign had the usual tearjerker shakedown which may or may not have been legit.

“Look,” I said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t have any cash on me.” And I opened up my wallet so she would see that while I may be a professional Christian I’m at least no more hypocritical than your average one.

“Tell you what,” I offered, “if you tell me what you’d like, I could go inside the store and buy you some food with my card.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No, really, I don’t mind,” I lied.

“It’s okay,” she said again.

“It’s okay?” I asked.

“It’s okay,” she explained, “I take Venmo.”

“You take Venmo?”

She nodded.

“But if I send you money on Venmo, then you’ll have my phone number,” I said, and didn’t add, “And then I’ll be pulled into a relationship with you and who knows what in the world you’ll demand from me next or what sorts of problems I’ll get sucked into.”

“Yes,” she replied matter-of-factly.

Grocery carts rattled down the ramp and the sliding glass doors whooshed open and shut as I struggled to negotiate the app on my phone and send her some money. It wasn’t as much as the samaritan forked over for the man in the ditch but it was more than it would’ve been had I been carrying some hard currency. I slid the phone back in to the breast pocket of my suit, nodded to her, and took a step towards the doors when she said to me, “You can pray.”

“What was that?”

“Pray. Will you pray?”

“You want me to pray?”

She nodded, “Anyone can give me money or food. You should pray.”

“Like, here? Right now? With all these people around? Look lady, I like to keep work at work.”

She ignored me and held out her hands, forcing me to kneel down in front of her. I took her hands and hoped she wouldn’t notice that mine had started to sweat. I began with the garden variety pastoral patter and then decided to pivot to her.

“Lord,” I said, “in your mercy, I ask that you would hear this woman’s prayers…” and I squeezed her hand to signal that it was her turn to speak.

“Help,” she said.

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“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us our bread for tomorrow. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

That’s it.

That’s the whole prayer.

It’s just thirty-eight words in Greek.

Jesus doesn’t even trifle with an amen at the end.

In the Gospel of Luke, the prayer the Lord commands us to pray comes not in the context of the Sermon on the Mount but in response to a question, “Lord, teach us to pray.” John the Baptist taught his followers prayers to pray, they say. Teach us how you want us to pray. It’s the only time in any of the Gospels that the disciples ask Jesus for a teaching. And Jesus responds by giving them a prayer that is distinctive only in its dearth of content. Luke’s form of the Lord’s Prayer is far shorter even than Matthew’s version, almost twenty words trimmer. Just as in Matthew where Jesus gives his prayer as an alternative to the ways the pagans pray, in Luke Jesus teaches the prayer in order to distinguish his Gospel from John the Baptist’s fire and brimstone. “His winnowing fork is in his hand,” John had preached, “and he will thoroughly clear his threshing floor; and he will gather his wheat into the barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” Remember John’s entire message had been turn or burn: repentance from sin, moral uprightness, righteousness and holiness according to the straight and narrow of the commandments.

John preached the Law.

Uncut, undiluted, one hundred proof Law.

You can imagine the Prayer School taught by a preacher who wears a camel hair coat, carries nothing but locusts in his lunchbox, and has only a single harrowing arrow in his sermonic quiver. Judging from the alternative Jesus offers the disciples, John taught his followers to pray in a manner commensurate with his unyielding message.

For someone like you—

If prayer is to have any hope of working it must be work.

Roll up your sleeves.

Put your back into it.

Wade into the woe-is-me.

Fess up.

Throw yourself on God’s mercy.

Beg, plead, bargain.

And do not bother getting up until you’ve worn holes in your prayer rug. The Holy and Righteous God is not in the mood to shower favor upon a sorry sinner like you. The Lord’s going to require some convincing.

By contrast, when the disciples ask Jesus for an alternative way to pray, Jesus gives them not only a prayer that is the barest of bare bones, he gives them a prayer that is centered in and premised not on the Law but on God’s grace. “Whenever you pray, say this,” Jesus instructs them, “Our Father in heaven…” You don’t need to crawl your way to the throne, heaping divine appellations and biblical flattery upon him. From your first breath, you are free to address the Maker of Heaven and Earth not as One with whom you must earn or deserve a relationship but as One to whom you are related already by virtue of the Son. Because of the Son, the Mighty One of Israel is now for you more like a Mother. You are more than creatures of God. You are the Father’s children, brothers and sisters of the only begotten.

The Lord, therefore, is NOT A RELUCTANT LISTENER!

Because of the Son, he is your Papa. Because he’s your Papa— maybe (like me) the only good one you’ve ever had—  he is already predisposed to show you love and mercy and favor. You are his beloved; you don’t need to bargain. He is your Parent with a capital P; you don’t need to plead.

Don’t be coy. Don’t be shy. Don’t dicker around. Just come right out with it. Tell him what you need. He wants to hear from you and to help you. In fact, Jesus says, just as a reminder to you that the Lord is a cheerful giver, whenever you pray, say this, “Give us our daily bread…forgive us our sins…do not bring us into trials.”

Notice, those are imperatives: give, forgive, bring not.

Those are all imperatives. They are commands.

In other words—

You can so rest in the Gospel, you can be so confident in the promise of God’s grace, that you can speak to God in the language of the Law.

You can lay demands on him.

You can exhort him.

You can command him to act on the basis of his grace for you.

Give us what we need.

Forgive us what we’ve done.

Do not leave us to be sorely tried.

And that’s it.

Jesus ends the prayer there.

It’s just thirty-eight words.

There’s no plaintive pleadings. There’s no prayer rug persistence or contrite persuasions. There’s no piling on the praises. You don’t need to be a supplicant or a sycophant.

Whenever you pray, Jesus teaches, pray like this:

Call him Daddy. Tell him what you need. That’s it.

It’s as if prayer is not much.

Not much more than staking a claim upon the promise of God.

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“Help,” the beggar woman with the cardboard sign on her lap prayed in front of the supermarket.

I waited a few beats for her to continue.

And then I peeked through my closed eyes to see if she was searching for the right words or waiting on me— she hadn’t squeezed my hand.

The sidewalk dug into my knees.

“Um,” I whispered to her, “Do you want to say more? Elaborate? Add anything else to your prayer.”

She smiled and nodded like she was foolish for having forgotten something.

“Help me,” she prayed.

And then repeated it, “Help me.”

She squeezed my hand.

So I said, “We offer this and all our prayers to you, Lord, with the words you taught us to pray.”

She prayed Jesus’s prayer all right along with me.

She said debts instead of trespasses.

Two days later she messaged me, “Pray for me?”

“What should I pray?”

“Pray for God to help me.”

I didn’t know to what she referred.

She seemed confident God knew.

A couple of days later she asked me to go to Fairfax Hospital, to the Pediatric ICU, to pray over her daughter.

“Help her,” her text message read the next night.

It wasn’t until this week that I realized that was basically a perfect prayer.

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“Prayer,” Martin Luther says, “does not cause hard work.”

In both Gospels in which it appears, Jesus gives this model prayer as an alternative to the ways that religion misconstrues the practice of prayer. As familiar as it has become, the Lord’s Prayer is an attack on the misconception of prayer that there must be MUCH of it in order for it to work.

The pagan rule of prayer— and, we can presume, John’s rule of prayer— was MUCH.

By contrast, Jesus’s anti-rule of prayer is NOT SO MUCH.

Not so much— because the One in heaven is your Father.

Not a lot— because the Son has made you a child.

Call him Daddy.

Tell him what you need.

That’s it.

You’re free.

Get in. Get out.

Unless, of course, you want to say more.

In which case, you’re free.

One of the most valuable lessons a reader can glean from the four Gospels is to notice what is missing from them.

For example, there are no prayer times in the Gospels.

Neither Matthew nor Luke, neither Mark nor John, report an instance of either Jesus or the disciples adhering to Israel’s prescribed daily prayer regimen.

As good Jews, Jesus and the disciples should be praying the Amidah, the Eighteen Benedictions:

Blessed are You, O LORD our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, the great, mighty and awesome God, the most high God, Who bestows  grace and creates all, and remembers the kindness of the Fathers, and brings the Redeemer to their children’s children, for His name’s sake with love.

O King, Helper, Savior and Shield, Blessed are You, O LORD, Shield of Abraham.

That’s only only one of the Benedictions.

There’s seventeen more.

In total, they’re longer than this sermon thus far, and Jews in Jesus’s day were required to pray all eighteen of the Amidah not once but three times a day.

In addition, the Law requires Jews to pray the Shema twice a day, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. And as for you, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” On top of the Amidah and the Shema are the three obligatory table graces for each meal of the day; so, nine in total, along with relevant doxologies. And don’t forget the three psalms they were expected to pray every day too.

That’s a lot of time and oxygen and memory muscle to expend on prayer.

It tells you everything you need to know about John the Baptist’s project that he evidently thought it a good idea to add to it.

But Jesus appears to have observed none of it.

“When you pray,” Jesus instead teaches, “pray like this…” and he gives them just thirty-eight words.

Fifty-seven in Matthew.

Jesus brings freedom.Jesus brings freedom even to prayer.

As New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner notes, “The people of God in Jesus’s time were confronted by Jesus not as a prayer-less community but as a people overburdened with prayer.” In other words, we get the goodness of God by grace not by activity. We get the goodness of God not by the number of our words, the sophistication of our vocabulary, or our grasp of the scriptures but by grace of Christ and him crucified.

Therefore, the Protestant Reformers said, the only rule for prayer is that our prayers be “brief, frequent, and intense.”

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”

“Lead me not into trials.”

Brief, frequent, and intense.

“God,” Luther preached, “has no need for your everlasting twaddle.”

Instead the foundation to prayer, Jesus teaches, is not how or how much but grace.

Because the One in heaven is your Father, the care-package you need is already in the mail. And there is no return address. You don’t need to convince him.

When it comes to praying, Jesus says, you don’t need to do much because

A) The Father’s already shamelessly, hopelessly, irrevocably for you and

B) He already knows your need before you name it.

Jesus brings freedom even to prayer.

Jesus frees you from needing to worry about the form your prayer takes or the time you spend in prayer or the information you relay in prayer.

Because the Father is good, the MUCH of prayer is not required.

Because the Father is God, the information is not necessary.

Because the Father is good, the MUCH is not required.Because the Father is God, the information is not needed.

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Several years ago, upon release of her memoir, Lit, the Paris Review interviewed the poet Mary Karr.

“Do you have any writing rituals, things you have to do in order to write?” the interviewer asked Karr.

And the poet replied:

“I pray. I ask God what to write. I know that sounds insane, but I do. I say: What do you want me to say? I have a sense that God wanted these books written. That doesn’t mean they’re meant to be bestsellers. Nor am I hearing voices.

But a lot of times I’ll get stuck and I’ll just say, Help me.

A nonbeliever might think of it as talking to my superego, or some better self. But I do have a sense of being guided…

Otherwise, I do a lot of begging. I just beg, beg, beg, God, beg like a dog, for myself and those I love. And I do the cursory, “If it’s your will . . .” but I’m not fooling him with that “If it’s your will” shit.

God knows that I want everything when I want it. He knows I’m selfish and want a zillion bucks and big tits and to be five-ten.”

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To make sure we refrain from hearing his prayer in the wrong register, in terms of Law instead of Gospel, in Luke Jesus hasn’t even put a period on the prayer before he launches straightaway into a parable— a parable of grace— that serves as Christ’s interpretation of his prayer.

Let’s say you have a friend a few doors down, Jesus says, and around midnight you knock on your friend’s door.

The in-laws have shown up at your house unannounced and your wife’s old man informs you in his unsubtle way that he’s hungry from the roadtrip. But your stock is empty and your shelves are bare so you knock on your friend’s door and ask him if you can borrow the fixings for a charcuterie board or a pastrami sandwich.

Look, the friend says, I’m half-asleep. You woke the baby and now I’m going to need to let the dog out too, but, fine. Whatever, your friend says as he rummages in the fridge and looks in the crisper. Here’s a nice block of Manchego, a stick of Soppressata, and a nice bottle of Chianti. That should make the old man forget that he wished his daughter had married a doctor.

Your Father with a capital F, Jesus tells the disciples, your Papa in heaven is an even better friend than that friend at midnight.

There’s no cajoling or caterwauling or guilt-tripping necessary. You don’t need to ask and ask and ask. You don’t need to seek and seek and seek without end. You don’t need to bloody your knuckles knocking on his door.

Just ask, seek, knock.

Just once.

Like the prodigal father sitting on the front porch rocker waiting for his son to show on the horizon, this Father, your Father, is always ready to hop out of bed in socks and boxers to do you a solid.

So what’s stopping you?

From praying?

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For his recent movie, Father Stu, the actor Mark Wahlburg gave an interview in which he shared that he attends Mass every morning and talks to his priest in Boston at least once a week.

In the interview he said, “Yeah, Father Joe, I just built him a gymnasium at the Catholic School where I was a student.”

The reporter asked him, “How did you decide to be such a devout Christian?”

Mark Wahlberg replied, “I didn’t get to decide. Father Joe made me do it.”

And the reporter responded, “Oh, well, tell us more about it.”

“I grew up kind of rough. On the streets. When I was sixteen, some of my buddies and I stole a car. We went out in that car and we wrecked it. The police got us. So there I was in court, and my parents were so embarrassed they didn’t even show up in court for me.

The court had assigned me some attorney who couldn’t even remember my name. When it came time for the judge’s verdict, this attorney leaned over to me and said, ‘Son, you’re going to prison.’

It was just awful. I was sitting there just terrified.

And the judge said, ‘Now…’ and just then a voice from behind me said, ‘Your honor, could I approach the bench?’

And the judge looked up and said, ‘Oh, Father Joe.’ I looked around. The only person in court was Father Joe, and he was there for me.

Father Joe went up to the bench and said, ‘Your honor, you being a Catholic— though, not a very good Catholic— surely you know our Lord Jesus believes in mercy. This young man— no good is going to come from sending him to jail. He messed up bad, sure. But I’m telling you, judge, give him to me. Let me have him. I’ll make sure he never ends up here in this courtroom again.

And the judge said, ‘Alight, Father Joe. If you’re going to take responsibility for him and watch over him, I’ll agree to do that.

We got out of the courtroom and we were standing on the front steps and I choked up, ‘Father Joe, that was the most wonderful…no one’s ever done that for me…that was the first time in my life anyone’s ever looked out for me…anyone offered to help me…

Just then, Father Joe caught me right on my left jaw. He hit me and I fell down on the steps. And he said, ‘You sorry little brat. You ever pull a stunt like that, I’m going to kill you. Just remember, I own you. What I did for you…you’re mine. You belong to me forever.’”

Here’s my point:

God is just like Father Joe.

You are his. You belong to him. He owns you.

Therefore:

No matter what you’ve done, when you pray, whenever you pray, with the confidence of a child of God you can be so bold as to say, “Father…help me.”

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Hitmen and Midwives: Session Two

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Here’s the second session (and Q/A) I offered on Grace and Proclamation recently at the Anglican Church of Canada’s Bishop’s Clergy Conference.

Here’s the nub of my argument:

Preaching needs to be more than theological or even kerygmatic. For grace to heal, preaching needs to be eschatological. Yes, God is on the move, at work in the world, but the one place God has promised to be found in the world is in a particular word that first spells the death of you. The sermon must be an existential crisis, an address that ends you yet makes you Easter new, and for that event—encounter— to occur you need not a word about God but a word from God. The actuality of revelation, what Karl Barth emphasized as an antidote to liberal anthropology, must be actualized in the lives of people who hear and believe. Sermons that are simply about God are sermons still stuck in the third person. Rather than using the texts to talk about what God might doing in the world, preachers must do the text to their hearers, for this is a doing that God has promised to be up to in the world. The pulpit is not a platform. It is a doing. It is a doing of God just as surely as if God had torn a hole in the roof of your church and lowered the listeners down to you, one by one, on a stretcher. For sermons to be eschatological, for preaching to rise to proclamation, preachers must make themselves the subject of the sentence and dare to utter an unflinching promise on behalf of the God who has called them. Such a first person promise requires the absolute conviction that though “I” am the speaking subject the active agent at work is altogether not me.

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Hitmen and Midwives

Thanks for reading Tamed Cynic by Jason Micheli ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I recently enjoyed the opportunity to present a series of talks on Grace and Proclamation for the Anglican Church of Canada’s Bishop’s Clergy Conference.

Here is the first session’s recording.

I’m incredibly grateful for their hospitality and thoughtful questions and conversation. I left feeling inspired by the hard, faithful work of so many and looking forward to what God will bring from those new friendships.

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We're All Camels Headed Towards the Eye of a Needle

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Matthew 5.38-48

Back in February 2019 I was sitting in the press box, officially credentialed as a member of the new media, waiting for the opening gavel of the quadrennial waste of money known as General Conference. The global gathering of the United Methodist Church always makes me recall Martin Luther’s crack about the institutional church:“The Church is a whore but she’s my mother!”

In the naive hope that God would miraculously grant a fruitful gathering among one thousand antagonists and ideologues who had nothing in common except for their cross and flame lanyards, the Council of Bishops moved to open the Special Sex Conference with a time of prayer. Almost all of the prayers were the tedious, anodyne type of religious speech you would expect from church bureaucrats; in other words, the kinds of prayers that need not a Living God for you to pray them. Some prayed for openness to differing points of view. Many prayed for unity in essentials and communion in Christ. More than one bishop prayed for “holy conferencing,” the absolute most hilarious lie that could ever be used to describe a denominational gathering. In total contravention of the all the meetings that had preceded the Special Sex Conference, some cruelly optimistic bishop appealed to the Lord for generous spirits, gracious ears, and open minds.

I’d nearly fallen asleep completely when Bishop Will Willimon actually dared to trust the Lord with an honest, truthful prayer:

“Lord, please melt the hardened hearts and smite every tight-sphinctered, self-righteous traditionalist who intends to vote against workable, sane compromise. Dash the troublesome, homophobic Maxie Dunham with a debilitating health event and compel several of Keith Boyette’s grandchildren to come out of the closet to him before he casts his  vote. And while you’re at it, Lord, slay all those on both sides who think having the right position on sexuality will somehow save the United Methodist Church from our gospel amnesia.”

Up in the press box, a representative from the Institute on Religion and Democracy— a traditionalist lobby that seems not to understand the Handmaids Tale is a dystopian story— reacted with shrill, feigned horror: “That’s completely inappropriate! Irresponsible! Unchristian! He can’t say those things! How dare a bishop— of all people, a bishop— pray for the destruction of his opponents!”

I looked over at him and replied, “Maybe you all should spend more time with scriptures other than the Levitical Codes. You might not have liked it, but it sure sounded an awful lot like a biblical prayer to me.”

He looked at me and sneered, “Another unbiased member of the media, huh?”

“Hey, it’s a podcast,” I said.

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“Pray for those who persecute you,” Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount.

Of course, not only is Jesus fully divine— God from God, light from light, begotten not made, by whom all things were made— Jesus is fully human. Mary’s son is a Jew and, as a Jew, Jesus has in mind very specific prayers for the persecuted to pray. You’ll remember that Jesus always had particular prayers in mind. “Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples ask— the only time they ever ask Jesus to teach them something. “Alright,” Jesus agrees, "When you pray, pray like this. Don’t just we wing it. Pray this way: Our Father, who art in heaven…”

Whenever Jesus commends the practice of prayer, he has particular prayers in mind.

“Pray for those who persecute you,” Jesus says today, and, as a good Jew, Jesus probably could’ve suggested a few of them from his people’s prayerbook.

We began today’s worship service by praying one of those prayers. Well, not exactly. You may have noticed how the United Methodist Hymnal chops up Psalm 139. We prayed only the familiar, comforting part of the psalm. The United Methodist Church doesn’t trust you with the rest of Israel’s prayer, the part that sounds like Jewels’s monologue in Pulp Fiction.

After praising the Spirit of God abiding in all places and the intricate handiwork of the Lord’s creation and the weighty thoughts of the God who knew all our days before the beginning of any of them, the prayer takes a jarring, fist-shaking turn.

“O that you would kill the wicked, O God,

and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—

those who speak of you maliciously,

and lift themselves up against you for evil!

Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?

And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with perfect hatred.”

Those not very nice thoughts are not in your hymnal; in fact, so far as I can ascertain no denomination includes an unexpurgated psalter. No denomination trusts you with all the prayers the Bible seems untroubled entrusting to you. John Wesley said that there are some psalms that are simply not suited for good Christian ears.

“Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God!

Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?

I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.”

Maybe this is why it feels like every Vacation Bible School lesson is about Zacchaeus, the wee little man in the tree. I mean, these are TMI, TV MA thoughts.

Worse, if you’ve spent any time in Israel’s prayerbook, you know that this brash, unseemly psalm is not an outlier. A good many of Israel’s prayers are imprecatory psalms, prayers invoking judgment, calamity, and curses upon your enemies.

Don’t believe me?

I brought a list:

Psalm 5

Psalm 6

Psalm 11

Psalm 12

Psalm 35

Psalm 37

Psalm 40

Psalm 52

Psalm 54

Psalm 56

Psalm 57

Psalm 58

Psalm 59

Psalm 69

Psalm 79

Psalm 83

Psalm 94

Psalm 109

Psalm 137

Psalm 139

And Psalm 143

Plus a few others.

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As C.S. Lewis writes, there are times when you read the prayers of God’s people and “the hatred hits you in the face like the heat of a white hot furnace.”

Perhaps it’s even more disquieting to us that these feelings of rage and vengeance find expression in the psalms we most cherish. Take Psalm 139— It begins so appropriately, predictably, safely spiritual, like something you’d stick on a prayer card for a loved one’s wake. It waxes elegantly about how God knit you together inside your mother’s womb, but then midstream, like a bitter former Christian attempting to sit through that same funeral, as if the psalmist can’t stomach pretending to be pious and sanctified for a single second longer, he blurts out what he’s really feeling:

“Look God— stop underachieving. It’s time to live up to your Almightiness. There is a clear and obvious— and might I add just— solution to Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression and war crimes in Ukraine. Eliminate him. Eradicate him. Annihilate him. Make him mysteriously fall out of a window. Send a Hurricane Ian down on the lot of them. And, while you’re at it, Lord, send that white-washed tomb, Patriarch Kirill, to the hell he so manifestly deserves.”

Or, as the psalmist prays in Psalm 69: "Pour out your indignation on those who persecute me, and let your burning anger overtake them.”

“Pray for those who persecute you,” Jesus commands.

Pray like this when you pray for your enemies.

The United Methodist powers-that-be left all of Psalm 109 out of your hymnals, in which the psalmist prays against his brother,

“May he be convicted by an unjust judge;

May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.

May his children wander about and beg;

May the creditor seize all that he has;

May there be no one to do him a kindness,

Nor anyone to pity his orphaned children.”

Then there’s the infamous prayer in Psalm 137 that pleads for the Lord to take the babies of Babylon and dash their tiny heads into the the pavement.

Even the most beloved prayer in the entire Bible, Psalm 23, takes a turn towards the grisly. “The Lord is my Shepherd…” that sounds Sunday School safe.

“He leads me beside the still waters…” still waters are better than troubled waters, good.

But then: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”

As familiar as the words are to you, I doubt many of you imagine the scene as King David pictured it, as a feast laid out on a field strewn with bodies and grass stained with blood.

What are we supposed to do with all of this vengeance and desire for violence? Leave it out? Censor it? Redact it? Ignore it, and convince ourselves the Bible is a safe, respectable religious book about flying straight and eating your vegetables. But if we really do believe that this is the word of God for the people of God then we the people have no choice but to take seriously these words.

Or, another way we can handle these nasty bits of the Bible— explain them away.

We can say to ourselves, “The man who wrote that prayer, invoking the murder of Babylonian babies, was a primitive, superstitious, uneducated man who was not nearly as kind, enlightened, and sophisticated as believers are today. We’re not like him. We don’t dash babies against the rocks. We just allow them to be shot up in their schools even while we fire drone strikes at other people’s babies from the faraway comforting confines of what looks like a video game console.”

Let’s be honest.

Let’s be as straightforward about ourselves as the Bible is honest about us. It’s not at all a mystery why there is such blind wrath and rage, knee-jerk anger and disproportionate violence in the Bible’s prayerbook. The desire for vengeance creeps across almost all of Israel’s prayers because that same desire constricts each of our hearts.

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In order to pay for law school, a parishioner of mine in my previous appointment signed on to serve as an Army JAG. Back when he was still studying torts and constitutional law, he expected he would one day be dealing with divorces and drunk and disorderlies. He never dreamed he’d find himself in the middle of the worst of the second Iraq war, daily navigating land mines and IEDs and suicide bombers.

He’s still in shock.

Leaving worship one Sunday, after hearing a scripture passage not unlike our passage today, he described to me in a frightened but dispassionate affect the anticlimactic sound a human head makes when a homemade suicide vest ignites.

And without stopping his story, he then said to me, “That’s the problem with you, preacher.”

“The problem with me?”

“You talk about loving our enemies, but you don’t get it. You don’t understand. You’re starting from the wrong place. You start with us too many steps down the board. Where I’m at— I don’t even want to want to love my enemies.”

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“Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God!

Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?

I hate them with perfect hatred."

The problem is not with the Bible.

The problem is in you.

In me.

As John Calvin writes, “the psalms are the anatomy of the whole human soul.”

This is the truth of us.

Every time there is an event in the news like the murder of George Floyd or the insurrection on the Capitol or the latest mass shooting, our politicians stand before cameras and microphones and assure us that, “This is not us. This is not who we are.”

And the prayerbook of God’s people replies, “No, Joe. This is exactly who we are.”

It’s no wonder the same psalm that celebrates the wonder of humanity also ponders the mystery of our depravity.

Scripture’s not like Instagram. It doesn’t come with any filters.

Only the Bible dares to speak about us with such unflinching candor.

Maybe you’re sufficiently sanctified and further along the road to perfection. Maybe you’ve never really had the urge to bash in someone’s teeth— you must not be a Verizon Wireless customer. Maybe you have. But in many unseen and smaller ways we do assault people. Verbally. Mentally. Emotionally. We nurse our resentments. We lick our wounds. We curse our neighbors. We lash out at those we love. We yearn for the day when God will finally set the world to rights and the wicked will get what they deserve— what we know they deserve.

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Just before Thanksgiving in 2020, I met with one of the teachers in our preschool program, an African American woman about my age.

Afterwards, she and I were walking out Door #2 to head home when a sun-faded car screeched to a stop in the visitor’s spot of the parking lot. The car needed a new muffler but not another partisan bumpersticker. The driver leaned across the passenger seat and rolled the window down with her right hand— I didn’t recognize her— and yelled at me. She was visibly irate.

“Do you go to this church?!”

“Um, sort of, I guess.”

“And do you know the minister at this church?”

“Uh, well, um…Yes, I do know the pastor. His name is Peter Kwon, look him up.”

“Well, you tell that radical, leftist, SOB Peter Kwon to take down that racist, sacrilegious trash before a good, god-fearing patriot takes matters into her own hands.”

With her hand extended towards the windshield, she was pointing at the Black Lives Matter display an artist and a few church members had erected in our yard over that summer.

You may remember it.

It’s since been showcased at churches all over Northern Virginia.

The exhibit is a series of multicolored doors anchored on giant easels and adorned with corroborating  verses of scripture. “Black Live Don’t Just Matter,” the doors say, “They’re Sacred.”

“ALL LIVES MATTER,” she shouted at us, flipped us off, and sped away.

For a few moments neither of us said a word, shocked at the gall of the woman and the ever-present, simmering (racist) rage in her. Finally, the teacher at my side, who’s African American, said to me:

“You know, we toss around terms in church like “racial reconciliation” as though we are people different than who we are. You put someone like me in charge of the world— I’m so angry at white people. I don’t think I can be trusted with racial reconciliation.”

“We’re all camels headed towards the eye of a needle,” I replied.

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“Love your enemies and pray for them,” Jesus commands in the Sermon on the Mount.

Only, through the very discipline of praying the Bible’s prayers for my enemies I am confronted by the uncomfortable claim that I am not someone who can be trusted to deal with my enemies.

If thus far you’re feeling disappointed or un-flattered by today’s sermon, don’t worry, I can make it worse.

A little later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus sizes each of us up and shakes down the state of the world with a parable. According to Jesus, it’s really an allegory.

Living in the Kingdom, living with me, Jesus says, it’s like this:

A farmer sowed good seed in his field, wheat.

Every which way you look over his acreage its amber waves of grain.

But then one night, while his farmhands are fast asleep in the bunkhouse, the farmer’s enemy slips through the barbed-wire fence and scatters bad seed.

The enemy sowed weeds among the wheat.

And the word Jesus uses for weeds is zizania.

It’s scientific name is Lolium temulentum.

In English, it’s darnel, an annual grass that, with its long, slender awns, or bristles, looks so much like wheat you could scarcely distinguish between the two.

When the plants come up and mature and the farmhands discover the fields aren’t as pure and unsullied as they had assumed, they go to the boss and say, “Sir, did you purchase, did we plant, bad seed? How come your fields are covered in weeds?”

“An enemy hath done this,” the boss answers rather cryptically.

“Alright then,” the farmer’s hired hands respond, “I suppose it’s our job now to go and pull up the weeds in your fields.”

“No, no, no,” the farmer replies, “Don’t you dare lift a finger where the weeds are concerned. You boys don’t have nearly the eyes you think you. You start in there trying to pull up the weeds you’ll tear out the wheat too without realizing it and before long the whole farm will be ruined. You just leave the weeds alone. Leave the bad seeds to me. Let the wheat and the weeds grow up together. I’ll take care of it at the harvest when I give the reapers a ring.”

Commenting on this parable, Robert Farrar Capon writes,

“What does this say about the Kingdom and the evil of our enemies in the world? Well, it seems to me to say that programs and pogroms designed to get rid of evil are, by the muddleheadedness of the world and the craft and subtlety of the enemy, doomed to do exactly what the farmer suggests they will do.

Since the only troops available to fight the battle are either too confused or too busy to recognize the real difference between good and evil, all they will accomplish by their frantic pulling out of the weeds is the tearing up of the wheat right along with them.

Worse yet, since good and evil in this world commonly inhabit not only the same field but even the same individual human beings— since, that is, there are no unqualified good guys any more than there are unqualified bad guys— the only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody.”

Take note—

It isn’t the case that vengeance is not righteous, holy, and good.

“Vengeance is mine, and recompense,” the Lord declares in the Book of Deuteronomy, “Their foot shall slip in due time; For the day of their calamity is at hand, And the things to come hasten upon them.”

“Give place to wrath,” Paul writes in Romans, "for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.”

By my count, there are sixty-three other verses like that in scripture.

Gandhi was wrong. An eye for eye doesn’t leave everyone blind. It leaves the scales of justice balanced.

It’s not that vengeance is wrong.It’s that you and I are not ones to be trusted with it.The only weapons the Bible trusts us to wield against our enemies are words:

“Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God!

Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?

I hate them with perfect hatred."

This is the underside of grace.That while we were yet his enemies, God justified the ungodly means that not one of us is a reliable arbiter of justice.The weeds and the wheat bear a striking resemblance to each other and neither looks much like the farmer.Your enemy and you are closer in kind than either of you are to Jesus Christ.Which means, if we’re going to avoid tearing up the whole field, our zeal for justice must always be balanced with a frank inventory of our own sinfulness.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus commands in the Sermon on the Mount.

In other words:

“I don’t trust you people to do anything else with your enemies. I don’t even trust you to be able to distinguish between your enemies and your friends and neighbors. Your eyes and your judgment are both equally bad so just tend to them like they’re all the same.”

Vengeance belongs to God.

That means the fate of the world is not your burden to bear. It’s not your responsibility to purify the planet. Making history come out right is not your charge to keep. It’s left to God.

Not to offend you, but you can’t be trusted with such awesome responsibility.

How can we be expected to set the world to rights when we can’t even correctly identify God when God takes flesh and walks among us in this world?

We thought we were just tearing up another weed; turns out, we killed the Farmer. We took the field into our own hands and we picked up a hammer and we nailed the Farmer to a tree. Thank God his prayer for his enemies is so unlike the prayers pray, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

And just in case you have any worry over whether his prayer was answered in the affirmative, come to the table. He is risen indeed. And he is here to say to you, whether you’re a good seed or a bad seed, “This is my body broken for you…”

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