Jason Micheli's Blog, page 87
September 25, 2022
Total Eclipse of the Son
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Matthew 5.23-26
I understand that as liberal, mainline Christians, you assume it’s my job to deploy my expensive seminary education in order to explain to you how Jesus doesn’t really mean what it sounds like Jesus so clearly says in his Sermon on the Mount. Or rather, you want me to tell you what Jesus would have said had Jesus enjoyed the advantage of a Master of Divinity degree. But instead of me protecting you from Jesus, how about we allow the enormity of the Lord’s demand to sit with all of us for a brief moment:
Don’t you dare drop a dime in the offering plate if someone in your life has got a righteous grievance against you. Does that sting? Anyone?
Don’t think about adding your hot air to any hymns or Hillsong hooks, if you’re nursing grudges and resentments in your heart. We’re all innocent, right?
Don’t bother signing up to serve at the Mission Center or assist with a funeral reception or teach children’s Sunday School. There is no merit to it AT ALL if you have let fester any of the wounds you have inflicted. Ouch.
When you come up to the table at which I am the host and if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave. And go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and only then come and receive.
Look, I am officially a teacher of preaching at Duke Divinity School, which means I’m a competent enough con artist to fool people into thinking I know what I am doing.
So I know at least this much:
Remember, Jesus is still at the top of his Sermon on the Mount.
This is not a savvy way to begin a sermon.
You’ve got to charm your hearers into listening. You can’t wallop them straight out of the gate. I don’t know why Jesus would start out by laying such a heavy law on nice, well-behaved people like you, but I do suspect Jesus may have been thinking about King Saul when he said it.
You probably didn’t learn this story in children’s church.
In the first Book of Samuel, the Lord summons King Saul to strike down the Amalekites for the city had refused to welcome the refugees God had delivered from suffering in Egypt. The word of the Lord comes through the prophet Samuel to Saul, “Go and strike down Amalek and offer up as a sacrifice of praise all that they possess. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman…ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
King Saul mobilizes two hundred thousand men on foot and ten thousand men of Judah. Coming to the city of Amalek, King Saul and his army lay in wait in the valley. Saul defeats the Amalekites east of Egypt, yet he does not obey the Lord’s orders. He does not offer all up in praise of God. He takes the king of the Amalekites alive along with the best of the city’s sheep, oxen, and fatted calves.
That night the word of the Lord comes to the prophet again, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and he has not performed my commandments.”
The next morning the prophet Samuel arrives at the Israelites’s camp. He finds King Saul in the midst of worship.
“What have you been doing?” Samuel asks Saul.
“I have just been carrying out the commandments of God,” Saul answers.
“If you have been carrying out the commands of God,” replies Samuel, “what is the meaning of the bleating of the lambs and the lowing of the cattle which I am hearing now?”
“I decided to spare some of them,” says King Saul.
I decided.
And then the prophet brings down the hammer of the Law— and not just on Saul:
“Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey the Lord is better than worship, and to heed to his commands is more pleasing than any offered gift.”
In other words, to put self-imposed limits on the Law is to disobey the Law.
To think our acts of devotion and worship can make up for our failures to follow the Law fully only negates those acts of devotion and worship.
“Behold, to obey the Lord is better than worship.”
If I had to choose between the Lord’s command to Saul or the law Christ lays down on us, I think I might start sharpening my sword. According to the twenty-third thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation, the Law always accuses (Lex semper accusat). You know it’s important when Protestants bother putting it in the Latin, Lex semper accusat.
Like Samuel to Saul, God’s first word, the Law, never comes to you and finds you following it, obeying it to the full.
Lex semper accusat.
The Law always accuses.
I’ve been a pastor for over twenty years, and in all that time I’ve only ever withheld or threatened to withhold the sacrament from a parishioner on a few occasions. One occurred in my second appointment. A matriarch of the church— and the chair of the local Democratic Party— continually railed in her hoarse smoker’s voice against an interracial marriage I had performed in the parish.
In keeping with Christ’s command in Matthew 18, I confronted her about her racism and invited her to repent and seek reconciliation with the couple. Later, leaders in the church did as well. She remained prideful and resistant. I was just a new pastor and had not learned yet that the unspoken goal of United Methodist ministry is to be what Stanley Hauerwas calls “a quivering mass of availability and acquiescence.” I therefore told June that I would no longer serve her the bread and the wine of the eucharist if she stubbornly insisted on receiving them unfaithfully.
“But you can’t do that; I’m in charge of the altar guild!” she laughed a raspy laugh. She stopped her raspy laughing when she realized I was serious.
“Yes, I can do that. And I will. Exactly what do you think my job is here? I’m not a maitre d’ or a cruise ship director. I’m responsible for your salvation.”
She rolled her eyes and snarled sarcastically, “Aren’t you Mr. High and Mighty,” she said, “Just who the blank do you think you are?!”
“I’m the preacher,” I said.
“Yeah, and haven’t you, preacher, stood in the pulpit in the same sanctuary and shared about your unreconciled relationship with your father? Maybe I missed it. Maybe I was absent the Sunday you stopped short of breaking the bread, set the bread back down on the table and then scurried out the side door to go and make right with him. What Sunday was it you did that, pastor?”
And I thought to myself, “Bless your heart.”
But of course…she was right.
Lex semper accusat.
“Behold, to obey the Lord is better than worship.”
I’m sorry—
The Lord does not say we might consider reconciling with a brother or sister before we come to the altar. Nor apparently is the Almighty interested in our special circumstances, our personal excuses, or our particular, self-imposed limitations. He straightforwardly says we must reconcile before we come and offer and receive. Unfortunately when you put Christ and his word first in your life, you soon realize that Christ makes primary the people in your life— especially your enemies and those with whom you’re on the outs.
The New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner calls this the “first little step of the New Obedience.” That someone could consider this a “little step” makes me feel like even more of a phony and a failure than I do on an average day; nevertheless, he’s exactly right that it’s about obedience. Notice, this commandment about reconciliation is the correlative to the antithesis that comes before it. If you violate the sixth commandment by harboring an angry thought against a brother or sister, then you uphold the same commandment retroactively when you work to put things right with that same person. Therein is the rub. This is why the command sits so heavy upon us.
If hatred in our hearts is the equivalent of blood on our hands, then when we come to the table refusing to reconcile with a brother or sister, we approach the altar not as Abel but as Cain.“The Risen Christ is the host of this table and he invites all of you to come.” I give that invitation every Sunday. And I’m not a liar. It’s all true. If Jesus gives Judas a seat at the Last Supper, I’m not going to refuse you service. At the very least, you are no worse sinners than Judas. All are welcome to the table of our Lord. And yet, according to that same Lord, when it comes to approaching the altar some of us must take a more circuitous journey.
Will Willimon tells the story of a church in Africa that took this command in the Sermon on the Mount with earnestness. Every week on Sunday morning the church members would wake up early in the morning, sleep still in their eyes, and drag their waking bodies down a dirt road to worship. Every Sunday morning, at the bottom of the steps leading into the small sanctuary, the pastor would be waiting, greeting everyone as they came forward towards the church. Grinning from ear to ear, the pastor’s welcome in Christ’s couldn’t have been more invitational and open. Nevertheless, every Sunday morning the sanctuary doors stood shut. Every Sunday morning the church remained locked, the pews remained empty, the organ kept quiet. Every Sunday morning the crowd would grow and grow until everyone from the village was present, anxiously waiting outside the church.
“Look around you,” the preacher’s voice would echo, “with whom do you need to reconcile? Who have you betrayed since we gathered last Sunday? About whom have you been gossiping? Towards whom do you harbor resentment? Who have you grown to hate? Go and find your brothers and sisters. Obey your Lord. Make peace with one another. The table is open but these doors are locked until you do.”
Every Sunday morning, for about twenty minutes or so, the entire congregation slowly milled about the crowd fessing up and asking for absolution and giving grace. This was a small town where you could just stand around and pretend that everything had been perfect since last Sunday. Everyone knew everyone’s business, which meant their Passing of the Peace had to amount to more than a mumbled “morning.”
Without reconciliation, the pastor instructed the people, they had no business entering the church to worship God. And only after he was satisfied that the service of mercy and forgiveness had been offered did the pastor unlock the doors and open church for its service of worship and praise.
I told a longer version of Will’s story in a sermon several years ago. In the narthex after worship a few folks told me they felt challenged by the holiness of such a church’s discipline. More than a few groused to me that the story and the sermon itself struck them as hopelessly holier-than-thou and not a little harsh.
“Wow, we can’t possibly keep a command like that one,” my lay leader, Steve whispered only half-joking, “Most of these people work in politics. Anger and antagonism are what butters their bread.”
But then a man named Rick approached me from the back of the line.
“I found that scripture passage incredibly comforting,” he said to me, shaking my hand.
“Comforting? Uh, were you sitting in the same worship service as me?”
“I think it’s comforting,” he said, “That Jesus has to give us instructions for what to do about the relationships we’ve effed up suggests that Jesus doesn’t expect us to ever be very good at relationships.”
I stared at him, suddenly irritated that this introverted actuarial appeared to be on the verge of a far better sermon than I had just preached.
“Think about it. The rule is also a kind of permission. The command is also an acknowledgment that we’ll never be anything more than broken people following Jesus. I think it’s freeing. It’s like you said, pastor, we don’t have to be perfect people. We just have to be people who put our trust in grace.”
“I said that?”
“Yeah, that afternoon in your office.”
And then I remembered.
Rick was about my age but his two kids are much younger than my own. He’d married late and relatively recently. A month or so before that Sunday he’d asked to meet with me. He’d wanted my counsel. “I don’t know how to break the truth to my wife,” he’d told me nervously in my office. Turns out, he’d never told her that before they’d met he’d hit bottom. Nearly all his money gambled away.
He’d never told her about his addiction.
Then they got married.
And then the MGM Casino went up just across the river.
“I drive past it every day just to get to work,” he told me, “It was just a matter of time.”
“How bad is it?” I asked him.
“It could be worse, but it’s not good. What should I do?”
“Tell her the truth. Confess. Put your trust in grace. Even if she can’t show you mercy, even if it kills your marriage, trust that we have a God who loves to raise things from the dead.”
Notice the direction this command takes.
It’s not directed at those with the upper hand.
It’s not: “If you have something against someone, go; seek them out and reconcile with them.” Which, let’s be honest, would really amount to “Go; seek them out and make them pay for what they did to you.”
The command is not given to those with the upper hand. The command is aimed at those in the position of weakness and transgression. It’s: “If someone has something against you…” Think about it. To confront someone and confess, to confront someone who may not even know what you’ve done to them, and then ask for their absolution, that would be mortifying. The command is really an invitation to die. First, you die to the Law. That was the previous text where Jesus says if you’ve even had an angry thought about a person, you’re guilty of murder.
First you die to the Law then you die to the other:The person you trespassed against.The one on whose mercy you beg.You see—
The command takes the form of the Law but it’s really about grace.
It’s about putting your trust in grace. It’s about opening up every aspect of your life to grace to be at work. After all, why do you avoid confronting the people you’ve sinned against? Because you expect them to deal with you according to the Law. If you confess the truth to them, they’ll make you pay, you assume. With this command to those without the upper hand, Jesus is saying, “No.”
It’s not that we believe in grace in the church but Law everywhere else in the world.
The one-way love of God in Jesus Christ eclipses all our ways and works in the world.
As Paul Zahl writes, “Grace has no space for boundaries. Grace has space for everything except boundaries.” To be a person of faith is to trust the grace of God to be at work in every part of your life. And where it’s not, where the Law kills you, you still trust the God who raises the dead to new life they don’t deserve. Every sin you’ve sinned against another is a sin that Christ has already carried in his body on the tree; therefore, you are free. Free not to hide. Free to amend what Christ has already atoned. Free to trust the grace of God to be at work in a real way in your everyday life. Otherwise, grace will remain a staid idea about a past act of God in history. The one-way love of God will forever remain a sterile concept if you don’t lean into grace and let go.
This law is about putting grace into practice.
It’s about opening ourselves up and allowing grace to be applied to our lives.
If we don’t— if we don’t put grace into practice; if it’s just grace in here but law out there— Luther says:
“It amounts to slapping God across the mouth and calling him a liar with his words.”
I remember a few years ago, shortly after I returned from medical leave, I was serving communion at the Saturday evening service. When I placed the host in Shirley’s outstretched hands, she grabbed ahold of my hand, smashing the bread inside our fists. To be heard over the band, she leaned towards my ear and said:
“Wait. I can’t. Not until I apologize to you. It’s been weighing on me.”
“What I asked?”
“All those years ago when He Who Must Not Be Named passed that petition around to get the bishop to move you. I got caught up in all his gossip and I signed it. And I tolerated all kinds of terrible insults he and others said about you, and I never uttered a word against it. I was wrong about you and I was wrong to do that to you. I’m ashamed of it. I should’ve apologized earlier but I thought it’d about kill me for you to know I’m the kind of person who would do such a thing. I just felt like I couldn’t take communion from you one more time without telling you. I’m truly sorry.”
“Behold, to obey the Lord is better than worship.”
It’s hard to bear a grudge when you’re holding the body of Christ in your hand so I said to Shirley, “I forgive you.”
I swear, just then she looked like a burden heavier than Lazarus’s grave clothes had been lifted off of her; and likely, just as astonished as the formerly dead guy in the discovery that grace is real.
This command—
It’s not law.
It’s an invitation to live no less vulnerably in the world than Jesus Christ.And there’s no better practice to learn to so live than to come to the table with your hands outstretched like a beggar before the first person in your life who has something against you.
Each and every time he gives you more than mercy.
In the bread that is his body and the wine that is his blood, he gives you himself.
So whether you come straight up here or whether you take a more roundabout way, come to the table.
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September 21, 2022
The Poor Man’s Name Means ‘God is on My Side’
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This Sunday’s lectionary Gospel is Luke 16.19-31.
Years ago, another Year C in Ordinary Time, I officiated at the wedding of a friend of mine in Farmville, Virginia. After the marriage ceremony was over, I was standing on the sidewalk outside the church, shaking hands with people, when this middle-aged woman with horn-rimmed glasses rushed up to me, thrust her hand out and began pumping my arm up and down
“Reverend, that was so wonderful!” she said. “Your sermon was so warm, lovely and uplifting. Most of the preaching I’ve ever heard is either about money or its all fire and brimstone. Do you know what I mean?”
I didn’t say anything one way or the other. I just smiled and moved on to shake the next hand, but I could’ve said:
‘Excellent! You should come to my church next weekend- Aldersgate UMC in Alexandria. Next weekend we’ll be talking about money and hell.”
Did you know: Jesus talks about Hell more than Paul, Peter, Isaiah, Daniel and Ezekiel combined? Did you know that in St. Luke’s Gospel Jesus is constantly talking about money?
To understand the parable you need to know that it’s not told in a vacuum. This isn’t just an isolated, independent story. It has context. You need to know who Jesus is talking to here. You need to know that Jesus tells this story to the Pharisees, the wealthy religious leaders who have been standing on the sidelines, sneering sarcastically. By the time you get chapter 16, they’re openly mocking and ridiculing Jesus.
Now, to really hear this parable you also need to understand how the Pharisees read scripture. For the Pharisees, wealth and possessions and material prosperity were signs of God’s blessing and favor. Today we call their way of thinking the ‘prosperity gospel.’ If you can picture the Pharisees as a bunch of grumpy-faced Joel Osteens- minus the capped teeth- then you’ve got the right idea.
For the Pharisees, if you HAD it was because God gave it to you…because you deserved it. So if you didn’t have it was because, well, in God’s eyes you didn’t deserve it. In other words, for the Pharisees money was not a means to some other good, it was a good in itself. It was a possession. It was a sign that God had found favor with you. Money was not a means to further God’s Kingdom it was instead a sign that God’s Kingdom had blessed you over others. And, as you can do for anything else, the Pharisees found plenty of scripture to justify themselves.
And then this Jesus comes along, and he doesn’t conform to what they think a religious person does or what a rabbi looks like. And they hear this Jesus say things like:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God will be yours, but woe to you who are rich for you have already received your consolation.”
“Whoever would follow me, first go and sell all that you own.”
“Do not worry about your wardrobe or your budget or you house or your groceries. Worry only about furthering God’s Kingdom and God will take care of everything you need.”
“If your wealth’s not serving God’s Kingdom, then you’re serving your wealth. You can’t serve both of them, Money and God.”
And that’s when they start to sneer. You see, for the Pharisees, Jesus wasn’t just different, he was dangerous. It’s not simply that Jesus didn’t conform to their expectations; it’s that he would change everything about the way they lived their lives. Jesus would invite God into parts of their lives where they didn’t want him.
So in verse 14, the Pharisees start to mock Jesus, ridicule him, hoping to diminish him in the eyes of the crowd. And Jesus, since he’s Jesus, responds by telling a story.
I normally hate people who explain stories, but Jesus’ parable is too pregnant with subtlety and meaning to do otherwise. So, humor me and pull out your bibles and turn to Luke 16.19 and I will try to unpack this for you.
Verse 19- “There was a rich man…”
The parable Jesus tells is actually a storied version of what he preached in his sermon on the plain: ‘Blessed are you who are poor/Woe to you who are rich…You’ll get the Kingdom/You’ve already gotten your reward.” Jesus begins his parable by laying a trap for his hearers. He says: there was a rich man who wore the kind of clothes you can’t find in a store, clothes only Paris Hilton can afford. This rich man ate extravagantly every day.
And already Jesus’ listeners- the Pharisees- already they don’t know where Jesus is going with this. They would hear Jesus describe this man’s threads and his dining table and, just based on that, they would say: ‘This guy has made it made. This man is blessed. This man is righteous.’
Verse 20: “And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus…”
Like many wealthy people, this man has isolated himself from the rest of the world, from the needs of others. Jesus says the rich man lives in his very own gated community. Outside the rich man’s gate, lay a poor man. The word your bibles translate as ‘lay’ actually in Greek means ‘dumped.’ This poor man outside the rich man’s gate was dumped there by someone else. So not only was he poor, he was probably crippled too.
You will see that Jesus sets up the poor man as a mirror contrast to the rich man. The rich man is covered with fine linen, the poor man is covered with open sores. The rich man feasts opulently every day, the poor man begs for what falls from the rich man’s table- and Jesus doesn’t just mean scraps of food. In Jesus’ day, the wealthy would eat with their hands and then, rather than a napkin, they would wipe the grease off their hands with a piece of bread. Then they would dump the piece of bread onto the floor. The poor man’s not begging for leftovers or scraps. He’s literally begging for the rich man’s trash. Instead Jesus says dogs from the alley treat him like garbage, licking his open wounds- which, just to add insult to injury, makes the man ritually impure. Evidently, the poor man is too weak to even scare off the dogs.
The poor man is a contrast to the rich man in every way. As much as the rich man has, the poor man lacks that much more. Just as the Pharisees would’ve assumed that the rich man was blessed, this poor man- they’d say- was cursed. He must have done something to deserve his life.
But Jesus sets up an even more striking contrast. Notice: the rich man doesn’t have a name, but the poor man does. Lazarus. The poor man’s name means ‘God is my helper.’ You can even translate it: ‘God is on my side.’
In all of Jesus’ parables, in all four of the Gospels, Lazarus is the only character with a proper name. The rich man has everything, but he doesn’t have a name. The poor man has nothing, but he does have a name. What’s Jesus getting at?
The rich man is nothing more than his possessions; what he has is all that he has. He’s built his identity around his possessions so that he has no identity apart from them. This is Jesus saying that if you don’t build your primary identity around God, you don’t really have a ‘you.’ You’re defined instead by your stuff, success, things, title, job, or rank. Like any story, Jesus wants you to wonder who you are in the story. Do you have a name? Do you have an identity rooted in God? Is there a you beneath your material life? Are you about something bigger than you?
Verses 21-22: “The poor man died…”
Death comes to both men, Jesus says. No one tries to save Lazarus’ life, but neither can the rich man’s wealth protect him from death. The rich man is buried because he can afford it. Lazarus is not because he cannot. Probably his body just lay abandoned in the alley until it was scavenged by dogs, burnt or carried off to a dump. In Jesus’ day, not to receive a burial was considered a mark of shame, a sign of being cursed by God.
Instead of shame, Lazarus is carried off by angels while the rich man, Jesus says, goes to Hell.
Verse 23- “In Hell, where he was being tormented…”
I imagine this is the point in the story where Jesus really had the Pharisees’ attention. I love that Jesus talks about Hell just as many churches are gearing up for stewardship campaigns.
Sometimes people will ask me:
‘You don’t believe in a literal Hell, do you? With literal flames and physical torment?’
And to be surly, sometimes I respond by saying: ‘Oh no, I think Hell is much worse than that.’
This parable gets at what I mean when I say that. Probably, most of you all have in your minds a caricature of Hell. Hell, you probably think, is a place God sends people against their will for some sin or lack of faith they committed. Hell, in other words, is where God sends such people and shuts the door and closes off any chance for them to repent. And maybe you even think God enjoys the justice of it.
Now compare that to Jesus’ parable. According to scripture, no one’s trying to get out of Hell- that’s what makes it Hell. According to scripture, you’re only in Hell as long as you choose. Hell according to Jesus isn’t a place God sends people. Hell is us holding onto our freely chosen but false identities. Look at verse 24 to see what I mean.
Verse 24- “Father Abraham have mercy on me, and send Lazarus…”
So, he’s in Hell. Notice what the rich man doesn’t ask for:
He doesn’t ask to get out.
He doesn’t ask for forgiveness.
He doesn’t ask for God’s presence.
What does he do? He says: ‘Father Abraham, it’s kind of hot here. Send Lazarus to bring me some water.’ Those of you who are perceptive, close readers will notice something: the rich man knows Lazarus’ name. It’s not that Lazarus was hungry and begging outside the rich man’s gate and the rich man was ignorant of his need. No, he knows his name. The rich man ignored him. It’s not that he didn’t know. He didn’t see Lazarus as someone worth the expense of his time or his wealth.
‘Father Abraham,’ the rich man says, ‘send Lazarus to bring me some water.’ Even in Hell, the rich man still sees Lazarus as an object, as someone who should serve him. In other words, he doesn’t see Lazarus at all because, even in Hell, the rich man still clings to his false, material identity. He still thinks his stuff makes him something above others.
Verse 27-28: “…send Lazarus to my father’s house…”
Skip down to verse 27. The rich man still shows no repentance. He still doesn’t ask to leave. He still sees Lazarus as someone who exists only to serve him.
“Send Lazarus to my father’s house,” asks the rich man, “send Lazarus to warn my brothers so that they won’t end up here too.” Now the rich man is worried about his brothers, but he has yet to realize that his problem, his sin, is that he never saw- still doesn’t see- Lazarus as his brother. The rich man goes to Hell not because he’s rich but he’s let his wealth pull down the shades on his brother’s need.
Actually, the rich man’s not really concerned about his five brothers either. Look again at what the rich man says in verses 27-28: “Send Lazarus to warn my brothers so that this doesn’t happen to them.” What’s the implication of the rich man’s request? He’s saying: ‘I didn’t know this was going to happen to me. This isn’t fair. My judgment’s unjust.’
Verse 29: “They have Moses and the prophets…”
In effect, in verse 29, Abraham replies to the rich man: ‘You don’t need special signs from God to know what God wants with you in the world. What are you waiting for? God has told you again and again, in Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Amos and Hosea and Micah and Zephaniah and Malachi and Isaiah and Jeremiah. God has told you over and again that you’re to care for the poor. You’re to lift up the lowly and bring your brother to the Table. That’s what the Kingdom of God looks like.’
Verse 30: “…if someone goes to them from the dead…”
But the rich man doesn’t give up. He says: ‘Still, if you send Lazarus back from the dead, then you will get my brothers’ attention and they’ll repent.’
Verse 31: “…neither will they be convinced…”
You know…some people are scared of fire and brimstone.
But scares me…what’s terrifying about the way Jesus ends his story is his warning that we can believe more in the worth of our material lives than we believe in what God finds worth in.
What scares me is Jesus suggesting that we can get so caught up in ourselves, in the importance of our stuff, our possessions, our self-made, false identities- we can get so caught up in our material lives that not even a message from someone who died and rose again will get us to change. That, sounds like Hell.
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September 18, 2022
No Room to Maneuver
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Matthew 5.21-22
In September 1951, the Saturday Evening Post ran a shocking expose entitled, “I Walked to the Gallows with the Nazi Chiefs.” After five years of silence imposed by the allied intelligence services, who were alarmed over how a still angry public might react to such a story, Rev. Henry Gerecke recounted his remarkable ministry to journalist Merle Sinclair. Gerecke pastored as the Protestant chaplain at Nuremberg Prison in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Once a farm boy from Missouri, the International Military Tribunal requested the services of the Lutheran pastor because, of all the active duty chaplains, he had the most experience doing prison ministry and because he spoke adequate German. In keeping with the standards of the Geneva Conventions, the Tribunal ordered Gerecke to “offer Christian comfort and counsel” to the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg Trial. Rather than make a mockery of the Gospel by offering mercy to monsters, Gerecke’s commanding officer at the time pressed the pastor to take advantage of his eligibility to return to the inactive reserves.
Gerecke accepted his orders though when the prison psychologists assured him that the defendants were not exceptionally unique or uniquely wicked. Rather, they were ordinary men who had fallen prey to gross prejudice, cultural resentment, and the cunning manipulations of a master rabble rouser. The prisoners may have once been like ordinary men, but they were not ordinary Nazis. Albert Speer was an architect by trade who had designed the German war machine. Hermann Goerring had been Hitler’s Reichsmarshal and thus one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany while youngest of the prisoners had been the leader of the Hitler Youth. Gerecke told the Saturday Evening Post that his partner, the Catholic chaplain at Nuremberg, would joke, “‘At least we Catholics are responsible for only six of these criminals. You Protestants have fifteen chalked up against you.’ But most of the time we certainly didn’t feel like joking.”
When he first arrived at Nuremberg Prison, Reverend Gerecke walked from cell to cell, introducing himself, offering his hand to each prisoner with the peace of Christ, and inviting them to worship. “I have been criticized for offering my hand to these men,” Gerecke told the Post, “Don’t think it was easy for me. But I knew I could never win any of them to my way of thinking unless they liked me first. Furthermore, I was there as the representative of an all-loving Father. The gesture of grace did not mean that I made light of their malefactions. They soon found that out.”
Former Field Marshal Keitel, Hitler’s pet general, was reading a Bible when Gerecke first visited him. The war criminal welcomed the pastor heartily. “I know from this book that God can love a sinner like me,” he told the suddenly uncomfortable chaplain. “A phony,” the chaplain thought, but then the prisoner said that he had been about to begin his daily devotionals and invited the pastor to join him. “This I wanted to see!” Gerecke told the reporter.
“He knelt beside his cot and read a portion of Scripture. Then he folded his hands, looked heavenward and began to pray. Never have I heard a prayer quite like that one. Though I cannot break confessional confidence to share it, I can say that he spoke penitently of his many sins and pleaded for mercy by reason of Christ’s sacrifice for him.”
The military tribunal had cordoned off the regular prison chapel to use for questioning witnesses so the chaplain set up up an improvised sanctuary by knocking out the wall between two cells. A former SS Officer volunteered as an organist. For months, Chaplain Gerecke led the war criminals in worship and Bible study. He urged repentance upon them and prepared them to receive the sacrament of holy communion. He accompanied them to their sentencing and stood with each of them as they received the judgment that sealed their fate. After many months of earning the prisoners’s trust, the defendants caught wind of a rumor that the older officers of the United States personnel would soon be allowed to return home. Pastor Gerecke was fifty-four at the time.
One day not long after, the chaplain’s wife, back home in Missouri, received a letter written in an almost illegible German script with an accompanying English translation, which read, in part:
“Your husband has been taking religious care of the undersigned…We have now heard…that you wish to see him back home after his absence of several years. Because we also have wives and children, we understand this wish of yours very well. Nevertheless, we are asking you to put off your wish to gather your family around you….Please consider that we cannot miss your husband now….It is impossible for any other to break through the walls that have been built up around us…We shall be deeply indebted to you…”
The chaplain’s wife airmailed a brief reply to her husband, “They need you.”
By the end of his ministry at Nuremberg Prison, Christ’s shepherd had found most of the lambs that become lost. Only one of the war criminals shouted “Heil Hitler!” with the noose draped over his hooded head. Another committed suicide. “I particularly want to emphasize,” Gerecke told the Post reporter, “that most of the twenty-one defendants were able to come to their moral senses and repent. They asked God for forgiveness of their sins against Him and humanity…They did so in a spirit that convinced me that their repentance was true. I have had many years of experience as a prison chaplain and do not believe I am easily deluded by phony reformations at the eleventh hour.”
The pastor walked each of them to the gallows.
On the short, dreadful journey, Wilhelm Keitel told his pastor, “I thank God for you and for those who sent you.”
As he stood over the trap door, his hands bound and his head hooded in black, an American officer asked the prisoner if he had any last words. He responded, “I place all my confidence in the Lamb who made atonement for my sins. [For the sake of Jesus Christ] may God have mercy on my soul.”
Then, turning toward the man who had been the shepherd of his soul during his incarceration, the criminal said, “I’ll see you again [in Paradise].”
Then he dropped, out of this world and into the Kingdom of God.If that assertion makes you uncomfortable, I’m with you.
But the true scandal of the Gospel is not simply that, on Christ’s account, God would admit such repentant war criminals into his Kingdom. Nor is the scandal of the Gospel merely that God so loved even those Nazis that while they were yet God’s enemies, Jesus Christ died for them.
The real scandal of the Gospel is that, measured against God’s Law, Jesus Christ says you are no different than them.You are not appreciably better than them.
As a preacher of Christ and him crucified, I’ve got to admit that I’m frequently jealous of Buddhists. Not only does the Buddha look better fed than our Lord, the Buddha just sits there, silent and smiling. The Buddha doesn’t say anything as offensive as Jesus. And, sure, like you, I’d love to jettison these verses by dismissing Jesus as just another enlightened teacher like the Buddha, but the grammar of the Gospel won’t allow for it. “You have heard it said,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “But I say to you…” He’s talking about Moses. He’s saying, Moses might’ve reported to you what I said about this, that, and the other, but I’m here now, in the flesh, and I say to you.
With these six antitheses in his Sermon on the Mount, Christ claims for himself the authority of the One who first revealed the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Absolutely these are the authentic words of Jesus because they are such a radical rupture from the accepted orthodoxy of Jesus’s day. The Old Testament Law makes distinctions. In the Book of Exodus and Deuteronomy, the commandment against killing refers to intentional manslaughter outside the context of warfare. Meanwhile, anger does not appear to be a significant concern in the Old Testament.
Have you read the Psalms lately?
“O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who take your babies and dash them against the rock!”
That’s Psalm 137.
What about 2 Kings? Have you read it recently?
“Some small boys came out of the city and jeered at the prophet Elisha, saying, ‘Go away, bald-head! Go away, bald-head!’ When Elisha turned round and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.”
Even Jesus throws a temple tantrum, and Jesus murders a fig tree that had actively offended no one. Nevertheless, in his Sermon on the Mount Jesus reveals that he would be the most irresponsible therapist in the world.
An enraged thought is the equivalent of a murderous act?
Come on, Jesus.
Who hasn’t harbored an angry thought or uttered an insult or lusted in their heart? Some of you call me a fool on a daily basis, but I wouldn’t dream of tossing you into the brimstone.
“As long as you don’t act on your malicious thoughts,” I always counsel people, “that’s what matters.”
Wrong.
Evidently, Jesus never took any pastoral care classes in seminary.
If you are PO’d with a brother or throw shade on someone you will be liable to the judgement, and if you call someone an idiot? Hellfire and damnation for you!
You might not guess it from my sarcastic, surly demeanor, but I made all A’s in my pastoral counseling courses. As our lay leaders always says, I’m a solid Ct pastor.
I would never say anything heavy and unyielding and inflexible like this to you.The question is— Why does Jesus?The Gospel promise did not transform all of Hitler’s wolves into Christ’s lambs. Hermann Goerring, Hitler’s Reichsmarshall, confessed to the prison psychiatrist that he only attended worship in the chapel in order to get out of his cell. Once, while supervising a visit with the Reichsmarshall’s family, Chaplain Gerecke asked the man’s daughter, Edda Goering, “a woman of considerable grace and charm,” if she said her prayers.
She replied, “I pray every night.”
“And how do you pray?” The pastor inquired.
“I kneel by my bed and look up to heaven and ask God to open my daddy’s heart and let Jesus in.”
Her prayers did not avail against her Father’s heart.
Chaplain Gerecke described the final weeks and days during which the war criminals awaited their certain fatal sentences as “feverish work.” Each of the prisoners called the pastor to their prison cell four or five times a day.
On October 15, 1946, the last day, the tension was terrific, Gerecke recalled, as he went from cell to cell, hearing confessions and offering absolution and praying with once powerful men brought low by the judgment that awaited them. Around 8:30 that night, Chaplain Gerecke had a long session with Hermann Goerring, the former Reichsmarshall. All his defenses and explanations and self-justifications had done nothing to remove the accusations against him. Still, in his last hours, Goerring was proud and unrepentant, determined to find his own way out of his predicament. In his final session with the pastor, Goerring mocked scripture’s story of creation. He ridiculed the notion that the Bible could become the living Word of God. He flatly denied particular Christian convictions; specifically, the claim that God became incarnate in Jewish flesh, that salvation was through the Jews, or that the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth would esteem the powerlessness of a Jew from Nazareth.
Nonetheless, to the pastor’s astonishment, Goerring asked the chaplain, “How do you celebrate the Lord’s Supper?”
“You claim membership in the church. You must be familiar with its sacraments,” Chaplain Gerecke reminded him, “only those who know themselves to be sinners in need of a savior should partake in the eucharist.”
“I have never once been refused communion by a German pastor,” the offended Reichsmarshall replied.
But this pastor did not budge.
Because the Reichsmarshall was stubbornly deaf to the Law’s accusation of him, because he would not accept that, according to the Law, he was dead in his trespasses and sins, the Gospel— in word and wine and bread— were useless.
The Gospel can only make alive those whom the Law has killed.“I cannot with a clear conscience commune you,” Chaplain Gerecke told the angry Reichsmarshall, “Because you deny the Law’s condemnation of you, you deny the very Christ who instituted the sacrament.”
Unmoved, Reichsmarshall Goerring insisted that he wanted to receive the sacrament, “Just in case there is anything to this Gospel business of yours.”
“You remember what your little daughter said?” The chaplain asked the criminal.
“Yes, she believes in your Savior,” he said slowly.
“I’ll take my chances,” he snarled at the pastor.
And so the chaplain left him. Two hours later the guards summoned the chaplain back to the Reichsmarshall’s cell. He was dead, a tiny cyanide capsule lay on his chest. According to the chaplain, the man died determined to live life on his own terms; that is, he was determined to the end to be his own god.
The last time I preached on this text one of you called me that night while I was catching up on an episode of Better Call Saul.
“But pastor,” you exclaimed breathlessly into the phone, “I’ve got angry thoughts all the time. I can’t control the thoughts that run through my head. If what Jesus says is true, then the you in that passage means me.”
“Exactly,” I replied, “If it wasn’t for Jesus, you’d be screwed.”
My friend Jono Linebaugh writes:
The Law is “an ecstatic fire at once reducing to ashes all hopes anchored in human worth even as it kindles a hope that even disobedience and death cannot burn away.”
In other words—
The reason I am so radically grace-centric as a preacher is because— I’ve been doing this for a while now— I believe any straight, unvarnished reading of scripture shows us that the Law of God is inflexible and total. “Do your best and God will do the rest” is not in the Bible nor is any promise of an “A for effort.” If you do not accept Christ’s fulfillment of the Law for you, it can only accuse you. Jesus says so himself in John’s Gospel.
The commandments are not meant primarily as a manageable To Do List. I mean— “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” How’s that working out for you?
This is what St. Augustine and the Protestant Reformers called the theological function of the Law or the Second Use of the Law. The commandments are not meant primarily as a doable Honey Do List from your Heavenly Father. The commandments instead intend to drive you out of your sinful self-sufficiency. Sinful self-sufficiency— that’s a redundant phrase. and into the arms of a Merciful Savior. This is why a bland, garden-variety, inoffensive message like “God is love” cannot make anyone Easter new because it does not first crucify and kill.
Christ raises the dead. Christ does not improve the improvable.As the Apostle Paul says— You, the patient, must be dead on the table before the Great Physician can make you well.Whereas the Old Testament only cared about your actions, here in the antitheses Jesus adds your intentions to the Law; in other words, it’s not just the blood on your hands, it’s the murderous thought in your head that matters.
But we all harbor angry thoughts!
None of us suffers fools easily!
Who hasn’t lusted in their heart?
Exactly.
Here in the Sermon on the Mount, but especially in the antitheses, Jesus magnifies the Law to its absolute. He ratchets the degree of difficulty up to impossible. He expands its jurisdiction infinitely so that its accusation will be all-inclusive.
When it comes to the Law, Jesus gives us no room to maneuver.
Either we cry uncle and pray, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Or like the Reichsmarshall Goerring we laugh and put our trust in our own performance in life and under the Law, over and against our neighbors, and we say, “I’ll take my chances.”
The former is the Gospel of grace.
The latter— to trust in yourself and your own righteousness, whether you swallow a cyanide capsule or not— choice is suicide.
Seldom did Chaplin Henry Gerecke speak of the excuses he might’ve proffered for refusing the Tribunal’s summons. When the orders first arrived, his initial reaction was that his own profound and personal anger would be an obstacle for any effective Gospel ministry. “I had been at Dachau concentration camp,” he recalled, “where my hand, touching a wall, had been smeared with the human blood seeping through. In England, for fifteen months, I had ministered to the wounded and dying from the front lines. My oldest son had been literally ripped apart in the fighting. Our second son suffered severely in the Battle of the Bulge. Our third and youngest had just entered the Army.”
Given the tremendous loss he had both seen and suffered, when his orders to report to Nuremberg Prison first arrived, Chaplin Gerecke admitted that he badly shaken. “How could a one-time Missouri farm boy, make any impression on disciples of Adolf Hitler? Given my bitterness and anger, how could I summon the Christian spirit which this mission demanded of a chaplain?”
Pastor Gerecke reported that for the next few days he prayed over his decision, and, at some point, his anger and rage gave way to pity and compassion.
“I prayed harder than I ever had in my life,” he remembered, “Slowly, the men at Nuremberg became to me just lost souls, whom I was being asked to help— IF, as never before, I could hate the sin, but love the sinner.”
“You have heard it said, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you say, “You fool,” you will be liable to the hell of fire.”
A former teacher of mine, the theologian Robert Jenson, argues that if Christ is risen indeed, then every text of scripture, not just the Ten Commandments or the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, functions as both Law and Gospel. That is, every scripture text and every sermon on every scripture text functions as both an accusation against our present and our past but functions also as a promise of the future.
Every scripture text functions as both Law and Gospel.
Every biblical passage works on us as both accusation and promise.
Every scripture accuses us for who we are or who we have been.
But every scripture also gives us a promise of the future.
The gospel is a promise of the future.
Jenson says every preacher like me should ask themselves, “What does the text promise and what may I promise about the future that can be true only because Jesus Christ lives?”
In light of the scripture text today, here’s the promise.
Here’s Christ promise.
And, make no mistake, it’s for you.
One day all the anger you bear against the people in your life— the anger that already has been forgiven by the Father in the Son— will be forgotten by you. One day there will no longer be any discontinuity between the person you are on the outside and the person you are on the inside. One day the voices in your head will be forever muted as the grace of God allows you to find mercy for yourself. One day your tongue won’t get the best of you; all the insults and injuries you wield with your mouth will cease as you see from the light of resurrection that we are all equally lucky that in Jesus Christ God came aboard our ship of fools.
And if you are someone for whom the act not the intention is where the Law accuses you today, some sin you committed not in your head but with your hands, then take heart. Take it from Christ. We’re all in the same boat. So, like Peter on the water, be bold and call out to him, “Lord, save me!”
And then, step out towards him.
He’s right here waiting for you, in word and water and wine and bread.
He’s here, for you, to take hold of him.
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September 12, 2022
Grace in Practice
If the gospel of grace is the righteousness of God, as Paul announces in Romans 1, then, before it’s about anything else, discipleship is a matter of applying grace to our everyday lives and to the people in our lives.
Starting in October, I’ll be leading a study of Paul Zahl’s book, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life. We’ll have a regular panelists of friends; in addition, this time around we will start each week with thoughts and questions from lay participants.
It’s a profound and profoundly clear book that I know has significantly impacted the lives of many people I personally know and trust.
You can sign up for the study HERE.
More on the book:
Paul Zahl’s Grace in Practice is a challenging call to live life under grace -- a concept most Christians secretly have trouble with. Paul Zahl pulls no punches, contending that no matter how often we talk about salvation by grace, in our "can-do" society we often cling instead to a righteousness of works. Asserting throughout that grace always trumps both law and church, Zahl illuminates an expansive view of grace in everything, extending the good news of grace to all creation. Conversationally written and filled with fascinating insights, Grace in Practice will reward any Christian who seeks to understand the full measure of God's grace and the total freedom it offers.
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September 11, 2022
From God’s Lips to Your Ears
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Matthew 5.20
Scripture concludes with an apocalyptic vision.
A revelation.
St. John, a prisoner on the Roman penal island of Patmos, is taken up to the Kingdom of Heaven and there placed before the throne of God the Father.
And John sees. In the right hand of the Almighty, John spies a scroll “written within and on the back and sealed with seven seals.”
As soon as he sees the scroll, St. John beholds a mighty angel who suddenly proclaims with a thunderous and terrible voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll? Who is worthy to break its seals? Who is worthy for the Kingdom of heaven?”
Just then the angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven respond with silence.
No creature replies with any names or nominations.
Not an angel in heaven nor any saint on earth.
Not Gabriel or Michael. Not Moses or Mary or Mother Theresa.
Not the prophet Elijah or Queen Elizabeth.
No one from the past and nobody in the present.
Neither Wayne nor Garth.
Not you— certainly not you; certainly not me.
“No one,” John laments, “in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll and look into it.”
John doesn’t specify, but the search for a worthy and righteous candidate to unlock the scroll must’ve been exhaustive and conclusive because John confesses that in the moment of coming up short he broke down.
“I began to weep loudly,” John reports, “because no one was found worthy to open the scroll and its seven seals.”
No one was found worthy.
No one was righteous enough.
No one had enough enoughness for the Kingdom of heaven.
This semester I’m co-teaching a course on preaching at Duke Divinity School.
Believe me, my students seem as suspicious as you about my qualifications.
I fear it’s like that Woody Allen line: “Those who can’t do teach.”
Anyways, last Sunday morning I flew down to Durham for an intensive week of classes.
Sure enough, no sooner had I set my phone to Airplane Mode than the man seated next to me on the tiny plane asked me the question every professional Christian hates to hear from a stranger.
In fact, I’d just then been praying silently, “Lord Jesus, I know you’re busy in Ukraine and elsewhere, but if you’ve got a second of your omnipotence to spare, please keep this guy from asking about you.”
But, dammit, Jesus has a sense of humor: “So, what do you do?” he asked, looking down at the legal pad and notes and books on my lap.
He was a baby boomer with a bald head and a close-cropped beard and a Tar Heel blue polo stretched over a modest beer belly.
Normally, in such situations I shift into George Constanza mode.
“I’m an architect,” I reply.
“Who me? Oh, I’m a marine biologist,” I’ll say.
But my normal, go-to responses struck me as dangerous fictions to spin on the way to the Research Triangle.
“What are the odds this guy is a marine biologist,” I wondered, “Or married to an architect?”
So I came clean with it: “I’m a…uh…ahem…[cough]…a preacher.”
Immediately I steeled myself to hear how the nuns ruined his faith Catholic School or how he connects with God on the golf course or how he wants to know what happened to all the evangelicals who used to believe that character counts.
Instead he said to me, “I’m not very religious, but I think Christianity boils down to being a nice person and doing good for others. Don’t you think? Don’t you think that’s enough?”
Wow, that’s amazing.
Did you come up with that all on your own? You must have a PhD. How many years did it take to work that out? Hold on, let me ask the stewardess for a pen. I need to write that down. I don’t want to forget it. Now, run that by me again: “It all boils down to being a nice person and doing good for others.” You should do a TED Talk. And here I spent seven years and tens of thousands of dollars Joe Biden’s not forgiving on a theological degree when it all just comes down to an episode of Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood.
I thought.
But what I said was— I was thinking of what Jesus says today— “No, it’s not enough.”
I remember, years ago I preached the baccalaureate service for West Potomac High School.
Seeing as how he’s the only young adult so described in the New Testament, I took as my text Jesus’s exchange with the rich, young ruler.
You know the story.
The blue-blooded, honor roll brat asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit the Kingdom of heaven?”
After replying to Jesus that he’s kept all the commandments since his youth— he actually thinks he’s kept them all— Jesus tries to being the well-heeled kid to his knees.
“Go,” Jesus says, “Liquidate all your assets. Empty out the attic. Sell the timeshare. Get rid of it all. Give the money to the poor and then come follow me.”
During the reception in the fellowship hall, the father of one of the graduating seniors approached me nervously.
“Let me get one thing straight, preacher,” he said, smacking cake frosting in his mouth.
“Sure thing,” I said, “What’s on your mind?”
“Jesus only said that to the one guy, right? He only said ‘sell everything you own’ the one time, right? To that one guy? He didn’t, like, say that to everybody did he?”
Here in his Sermon on the Mount Jesus puts us in an even bigger bind, and unlike the rich, young ruler, this time he is speaking to all of us.
If heaven is your hope, Jesus declares, then you need to out scribe the Scribes and beat the Pharisees at their own holiness game.
How’s that working out for you?
And in case there’s any confusion, in the event you mistakenly think Jesus has come to lower the bar for us or to make the law in any way less stringent in its demands upon us, Jesus pivots here in his sermon to the authoritative first person voice.
He started the sermon in the third person, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…”
Then he shifted to the second person, “You are the light of the world…”
But now it’s “I…”
From God’s lips to your ear.
“I tell you,” Jesus announces, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and the Pharisees you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven.”
Never.
Just so you understand what you’re up against, it’s only fair and decent that you know what Jesus’s first listeners knew about the Scribes and the Pharisees.
The Scribes were dedicated to teaching and preaching the law.
They gave their entire lives to the task.
That Jesus had a scroll to preach from in the synagogue is their doing; they copied them down by hand.
The Pharisees meanwhile responded to imperial occupation and temple corruption by living set apart lives in visible obedience to the entire law of God.
Thanks to the Scribes, the Pharisees had calculated that the law contains 248 commands and 365 prohibitions and they set out to obey them all, all of the time.
If you all want to have a prayer in hell of getting into heaven, you’ve got to outdo them, Jesus says at the top of his sermon, There is no hope for you unless you are like them.
Even worse, for you, the Pharisees went beyond the 248 Do’s and 365 Don’ts.
In his Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, Jesus notes how the Pharisee fasts twice a week, which is precisely 103 more times than the law requires.
The Torah commands God’s people to fast only once per year.
Twice a week— you’ve got to be better than that guy!
Otherwise you will no wise enter the Kingdom of heaven.
248 + 365 +1…does that sound like you?
Or, are you closer to the prayer of Thomas Cranmer that we prayed earlier in the service, “We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone?”
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“I began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll and its seven seals.”
Earlier this week I met with a young woman— she’s barely out of college— to plan the funeral for her father.
Her mother, his ex-wife, wants nothing to do with the affair.
Mary is a rookie law enforcement officer.
Her Dad, Henry, worshipped at my former parish.
After over a year of aches and pains and doctor visits and elusive diagnoses, a couple of weeks ago Henry learned he had stage four bone cancer.
Only ten days later he died of massive organ failure.
In his last days and in the days since, his twenty-four year old daughter has been left to get the dead where he needs to go and the living where they need to be.
I knew Henry’s face and name.
I knew his youngest daughter, Rachel, was in my son’s class.
But I didn’t know much else about him.
I didn’t know what Mary told me on Tuesday.
After running a successful campaign in his home state of Michigan, Mary told me, her Dad had come to DC to make his living in politics.
And for a time, he was more than six-figures-successful.
But he lost his position at a policy firm during the Great Recession, and in the years that followed he refused to take any job that would pay him less than what he was making before.
He disengaged at home.
He started to drink.
He circled the drain.
And he ran up debts no career comeback could ever settle.
Seven years ago he was discharged from the hospital after a minor illness.
He came home to find his wife finally had made good on her threat to change the locks.
His belongings were on the sidewalk next to old, wet newspapers.
“It was fall, but he lived in his car for the next six months,” Mary told me, blowing her nose, “After that we never did find out where he’d gone. Where he was living. We’d see him every couple of months. He’d come by the house to take us to dinner or the movies. Eventually, it was just the two of us. My sister didn’t want to see him. She’s too young. This version of Dad is the only version of Dad she can remember. Honestly, maybe it is the only version of Dad.”
She wiped her eyes with her fists, a gesture that reminded me she’s barely older than my son.
“His cellphone was unlocked,” she told me, looking at the carpet. “I sat with him at Fairfax Hospital, and while his organs failed, I found his landlord’s phone number. I called it. All these years he’s been living in a tiny room in a house not far from here. He had fewer belongings than bills and letters from debt collectors. The landlord said that none of the people who’ve lived with him the past seven years knew anything about him, ‘probably not even his name.’”
“I’m just so sad,” she said and started to weep.
“Sad that he won’t be able to walk you down the aisle? Sad that he won’t meet his grandchildren? Sad that he’ll miss those sorts of moments?
“No. Well, yes. But no. No, I’m sad that this is the balance of his life. His life didn’t amount to anything but pride and shame and loneliness and— gosh— so much debt and even more regret.”
Now I’m hardly a perfect pastor, but even I sensed she hadn’t said what she really wanted to say so I waited and I kept my mouth shut.
Then she spoke: “I tell people, ‘At least he was a good father.”
And her breathing grew shallow as she fought off the tears.
“I tell people, ‘At least he was a good father, but not even that is true. He wasn’t. Isn’t. He only let me in at the end because, in the end, he had no one to be with him for the end.”
I stared at the soberness of her.
“I’m really just sad that he had nothing to his credit.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
And she looked at me and shook her head.
“No, it’s true. He wasn’t even a good father.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, “I meant it’s not true that your Dad had nothing to his credit.”
“What the lousy car he was apparently driving for Uber?”
“No,” I said, “faith— whatever else you can say about him, your Dad had faith. I know that much about him. People with no faith don’t weep when they come to the table with hungry hands and hear, ‘The Body of Christ broken for you.’ I remember your Dad cried just about every time I put Christ in his mouth and in his ear. That’s faith. He had faith.”
“That’s something, I guess.”
“No,” I said, “That’s everything.”
One of the principles of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura is the conviction that scripture interprets scripture; that is, we should hear Christ’s declaration about righteousness in light of the prophet Isaiah who testifies that “all our righteous deeds are no better than filthy rags.”
We should interpret the Sermon on the Mount in light of the Apostle Paul who writes, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God…there is no distinction among any of us…none are righteous…no, not one.”
In other words, when Jesus tells us that our righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, he’s saying, Good luck with that. If you think you’re going to enter the Kingdom on the basis of your righteousness, I’ve got a camel and a needle to sell you too.
Which means, by the way, the Sermon on the Mount is not a program by which we earn salvation or accrue any meaningful righteousness.
Scripture interprets scripture.
And the scripture that unlocks Matthew 5.20 is Romans 1.16-17:
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith…For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, The one who is righteous will live by faith.”
This could not be more important so I’m going to make it plain.
The very definition of righteousness and our ability to access it changes at the cross.
At the cross, the meaning of righteousness changes from how even Christ uses the word in his Sermon on the Mount.
On the cross, it’s not just Jesus who dies so too do all our a priori definitions of righteousness.
No longer does righteousness refer to the active righteousness of doing the law and obeying the commandments, accruing merit and growing in holiness.
No—
Now, because of the cross, righteousness refers to the passive righteousness of faith.
Faith receives a righteousness that is given freely in the gospel word of the cross. Jesus Christ died for you, a sinner.
Grasp ahold of that promise by faith— Sunday after Sunday, moment by moment, in word and wine and bread— and in it you receive a righteousness that far exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees, the righteousness of Christ Jesus our Lord.
That’s everything.
The gospel is a merciful surprise whereby God works in grace and power from the nothingness of human capacity and worth.
The gospel does not promise the possible.
The gospel delivers the impossible.
The gospel gives what the law demands.
To you, right now, just sitting there hearing it, half paying attention maybe, for free, by faith— the merciful surprise is that the gospel gives you, gratis, what the law demands.
As Martin Luther put it,
“God accepts no one except the abandoned, makes no one healthy except the sick, gives no one sight except the blind, brings no one life except the dead, and makes no one righteous except sinners.”
Walking out of my office, she asked, “Do you think you’ll have anything to say at his service, anything to say for someone like him?”
“If I don’t have anything to say for him, then there’s no hope for any of the rest of us because that would mean the gospel is not true.”
She nodded. Then she stopped in the hallway, turned to look at me and said, “Random question: Do you think there are bad people in heaven?”
I smiled and said, “You must not have been paying attention in confirmation. There are no good people in heaven; or rather, there is one.”
“Then I saw by the throne of heaven,” St. John reports, “a Lamb standing as if it had been butchered…and suddenly the whole company of heaven began to sing a new song: ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals…”
The man sitting next to me in 21D looked askance when I answered him, “No, it’s not enough.”
“You don’t seem particularly pastoral,” he said.
“Look,” I replied, “There’s nothing wrong with being a nice person and doing good for others. I’m all in favor of it. Some days my wife might even say I’m a nice person and do good for others. There’s nothing wrong with a message like that; it’s just not message for which Jesus Christ had to die. If Christianity is reducible to the Golden Rule, Christianity has no need for the one who taught the Golden Rule.”
“Are you this aggressive in all your opinions,” he asked.
“Hardly ever,” I lied.
“Look,” I said and turned towards him in the narrow coach seat, “Jesus Christ died for the whole world— that means you. Whether you want to trust it or not is your business. You’re free to live your life. What you can’t do is turn the message into something it’s not. The gospel is “Christ and him crucified” not humanity and it improved.
I saw him turn the words with their odd locution over in his mouth, Christ and him crucified.
“I’m not sure I understand what that means.”
“It means Christianity is not primarily a mandate to be good and do good. Christianity is a promise there is mercy and absolution for you when you have failed to be good and do good.”
“If that’s true,” he laughed, “then you’re never going out of business. Christianity will never disappear because people are never going to stop being failures to others and disappointments to themselves.”
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel,” Paul writes, “for it is the power of God.”
Notice—
The gospel is God’s word.
It’s a word God’s given to say to you.
Whether you think you need this word or want this word or might benefit from this word, does not matter at all in the first place.
It’s the power of God; that is, it’s a word God wants spoken to you.
Just as when God said ‘Let there be light’ God didn’t first consult the darkness to ask if the darkness thought it needed the light; likewise, God hasn’t bothered asking your opinion first.
God’s not interested in your own self-assessment of your needs.
God just wants to spring this merciful surprise on you.
So hear the good news, this word God wants said to you, this little word in which Christ wraps himself as a gift for you.
From God’s lips to your ears today:
On account of Jesus Christ, you are more than forgiven.
You are righteous.
You are justified.
You are enough.
For the life to come.
And if the life to come, then you’re certainly enough for thid life.
More than enough even.
Receive this word in faith and you have everything.
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August 31, 2022
Don’t Look Back: Livestreams
Hey Friends,
My friend and mentor, Bishop Will Willimon, has a new book coming out at the end of the month, Don’t Look Back: Methodist Hope for What Comes Next.
If you’re tired of passively watching the slow drip, drip, drip of the Methodist divorce proceedings and would like to participate in a hopeful conversation about the future, this is the book for you.
Will has graciously agreed to do three live-streamed sessions with us on the book, and we’d love to have you join us and share your thoughts and questions.
We’ll do them at 7:00 EST on 9/5, 9/12, and 9/17.
If you can’t join us live, you can catch the audio and video later by signing up.
You can find Will’s book here.
You can register for the sessions here.
Whether you’re a Methodist or not, it’s worthwhile to think about how we can be the church in a fractured, secular age and there’s no better conversation partner than Will.
Join us!
August 21, 2022
Being the Light in an Empire of Lies
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Matthew 5.13-16
“Jesus Christ [not the Bible] is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death…Jesus Christ is God’s vigorous announcement of God’s claim upon our whole life.”
Those lines constitute the opening salvo of the Barmen Declaration, the Confession of Faith written by the pastor and theologian Karl Barth in 1934 on behalf of the dwindling minority of Christians in Germany who publicly repudiated the Third Reich. Barth wrote the whole document while his colleagues slept off their lunchtime booze. “We reject the false doctrine,” Barth wrote, “that there could be areas of our life in which we do not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords…With both its faith and its obedience, the Church must testify that it belongs to and obeys Christ alone.”
One of the teachers from whom I learned Barth’s theology is Dr. George Hunsinger. Professor Hunsinger has a thick, white beard and usually wore reading glasses perched precariously at the end of his nose. Often his wife would sit at the back of the classroom and signal to him when it was time to wrap up so prone was he to lecture on and on, oblivious to the time.
I remember we were discussing Barth’s Barmen Declaration in class one morning, and Dr. Hunsinger, uncharacteristically, broke from his lecture and took off his reading glasses. His jovial countenance turned serious, and he said, seemingly at random though not random at all, “just outside the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria, immediately outside the walls of the concentration camp, there was and still is a Christian church.”
It was an 8:00 class but suddenly no one was fighting off a yawn.
“Just imagine,” he said, “the prison guards and the commandant at that concentration camp probably went to that church on Sunday mornings and even Wednesday evenings. Every week they walked from gas chambers and gallows, through razor wire, and past cattle cars to the church where they confessed their sins and received the assurance of pardon and prayed to the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ, and then they walked out of the church and went back to the camp and killed scores of Jews not thinking it in any way contradicted their calling themselves Christians.”
“How does that work?” someone joked, trying to take the edge off.
“It happens,” he replied, “when you reduce the Gospel to forgiveness and you evict Jesus Christ from every place but the privacy of your heart.”
His righteous anger was like an ember warming inside him.
“Whenever you read Karl Barth,” the professor told us,” think of that church on the edge of the concentration camp. Think of the pews filled with Christians and the ovens filled with innocents and then think about what it means to have been called by Christ our Lord.”
Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount with metaphors so familiar to us— salt and light— that it’s easy for us to miss the tone of ridicule, contempt even, with which Jesus preaches: “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket…” How many parents have nailed boxes into the walls around their children’s nightlights? Who turns on a floor lamp and then wraps it in a quilt or puts duct tape over the end of a flashlight? Just because “bushel basket” strikes us as a more biblical object, it does not make the image Jesus conjures any less ridiculous.
Unlike Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Plain, Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount does not include Christ’s list of woes: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you…” Jesus does not issue any such woes in Matthew’s Gospel, yet it was clear to the ancient church fathers that Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount with this same tone of scorn and derision.
Quite simply, Jesus obviously thinks it’s ridiculous that his disciples could ever think that they can live in a manner no different than anyone else or never dare speak of the hope that is within them.That the community of disciples could be indistinguishable from the world, that the life of the Church could look no different than the ways of the world, is as absurd and risible as hiding a desk lamp in the dishwasher, as preposterous as planting a church next to a concentration camp. It’s Nicodemus who scurries to Jesus in the dark anonymity of the night. Disciples are those whom Christ has summoned in the clear light of day, saying, “Come and follow me.” If we are truly following Jesus, the contrast between us and those who do not follow Jesus should be as self-evident as light in the dark. Discipleship cannot help but make us visible to the world and distinct from the world.
The saltiness of salt and the luminescence of light are their essential qualities without which they become useless; likewise, a private, hidden commitment to Jesus Christ— a faith which can only be inferred— renders you useless. It renders you useless precisely because a public, visible obedience to the Kingdom Christ has brought near is the very reason Jesus has called disciples and constituted a contrast community called the Church.
I may be justified by faith alone, but faith alone does not make me a Christian. It makes me useless. Being light— it’s not about eternity; it’s about utility.As the famous British preacher of the last century, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, put the matter plainly in a sermon on this text, “As I understand it, and it seems to me to be an inevitable piece of logic and interpretation, there is nothing in God’s universe that is so utterly useless as a Christian in name only.” Scripture makes the same assertion with even less elegance when he writes that such so-called Christians have “the form of godliness but deny the power thereof.” Or, to paraphrase Paul, if Christians are not distinct from everyone else in the world, we are of all people in the world the most to be pitied.
The community of disciples should be different from the world because the Church is the difference Christ has made in the world. Our calling as a community is not to make the world a better place; it’s to be the better place Christ has made in the world. We can’t obey that calling if we’re all merely covert Christians or if we’re all more comfortable identifying as members of a congregation than as belonging to Jesus Christ. A hidden, private commitment to Christ is a ludicrous contradiction just to the extent that discipleship is straightforwardly how one behaves if it’s true that the one who preached the Sermon on the Mount is not only not dead but Lord of Heaven and Earth.
Some time ago, as part of the NLI process, the district staff asked us to distribute a self-assessment called the “Real Discipleship Survey.” To my delight— and I count it as a fruit of my preaching— a fair number of you rebelled at participating in the assignment. Actually, the number of people who rebelled against it nearly equaled the number who completed it. I found the survey problematic for two reasons. Firstly, I do not think discipleship can be— or should be— measured according to practices that Jesus himself does not include in his Sermon on the Mount. Bible study is important and edifying, of course, but Bible study is not a practice Jesus commands us to do in his Sermon on the Mount. Spiritual practices might be helpful to you, but the only prayer Jesus commands us to pray in his Sermon is the Lord’s Prayer. Secondly and more importantly, because we are all sinners, we are remarkably adept at self-deception. Therefore, I believe I am the last person in a position to assess the depth and genuineness of my discipleship. You are the least reliable person to measure your own level of faithfulness. Not even Pam Jones should trusted to evaluate the discipleship of Pam Jones. If we really wanted to gauge accurately the character of our commitment to Jesus Christ, we should distribute such a survey to the people in our families, to our friends— our non-church friends— to the teachers in our children’s schools, to our coworkers and neighbors and the poor in our community.
If someone ever asks you if you are a Christian, your only response should be something like, “I don’t know. Here’s a list of my enemies. Ask them.”
Ask them.
They shouldn’t be asking you.
It’s not about what’s in your heart. Don’t invite Jesus into your heart. There’s nothing in your heart but sin and cholesterol. Jesus doesn’t want your heart. Jesus wants the whole damn world. The sign they nail above his head on Golgotha is ironic, but it is not wrong: King. He wants to rule. And for whatever reason, in this meantime before he comes again, he has elected to inaugurate his reign by calling ordinary, unimpressive people like you and me to live according to the Kingdom he has brought near.
In other words, I cannot claim to be a Christian and live a life of functional atheism. I have no choice but to attempt a life that makes no sense, no sense at all, if God has not raised Jesus from the dead. And I have to live out my commitment to Christ and his Kingdom in a sufficiently visible manner that those who do not share my commitments will hold me accountable to my convictions.
I thought you were a Christian, Jason.
Don’t you all have a problem with violence?
I thought you were a Christian, Jason.
Don’t you people believe in forgiving those who’ve wronged you?
I thought you were a Christian, Jason.
What happened to being a partisan for the oppressed instead of for power?
I have to live out my commitment to Christ visibly enough that the expectations of others hold me accountable to my counterintuitive, cruciform convictions. Which means— here’s the bad news— I have it easier than you all do. I have to talk about Jesus at least once a week. People are never not evaluating me. But you— you can get by under the radar. It’s easier for you to be an undercover Christian. To hide the light. And make a life in the darkness of the world.
Early one Sunday morning in December 1996, Judith and Martin Markovitz were awakened by the sound of shattering glass in their Bucks County, Pennsylvania home. Anti-semites had crept across their front lawn and smashed the large window in their living room in order to destroy the electric menorah that the Jewish couple had kept lit through the night for the celebration of Hanukkah. According to the NY Times reporting at the time, word about the incident spread quickly through the Markovitz’s neighborhood, a neighborhood where they were the only Jews. By nightfall the following day, the final night of Hanukkah, all the other homes on Water Lily Way— eighteen of them— were lit with their own electric menorahs.
“More families would have put menorahs in their windows,” the article reports, “if local stores had not run out of them.”
A thirty-six year old woman named Margie Alexander came up with the idea to distribute and light menorahs of their own across their community. When asked what motivated her to respond in solidarity with the Markovitz’s, Margie answered “I’m a Christian— a Roman Catholic.”
“We can’t just give in to the world’s darkness,” she said when asked about the possibility that her home and her own family would become a target next.
She then described to the reporter how it was not easy to find electric menorahs at the end of the Hanukkah season was not easy. Neighbors spread out and searched BJ’s Wholesale Clubs and Thrift Stores. One of Margie’s neighbors persuaded a pharmacist to comb through the store’s computer inventory to find electric menorahs at other pharmacy locations. As darkness fell, Margie Alexander was able to distribute eighteen menorahs throughout the neighborhood.
''I am shocked that so many people think we’ve done something unusual,” Margie told the reporter, “Of course we would respond in a way like this. We had no choice. Most of us— we’re Christians.”
Margie Alexander went to say that she intended to display the menorah the next year too. “I will put the light out for the rest of my life,'' she said.
Ask them.
If a Real Discipleship Survey had been mailed to Judith and Martin Markovitz, they would’ve been able to answer, “Yes, Margie Alexander is a Christian.”
It’s about visibility.
A covert, undercover Christian is an oxymoron.A commitment to Christ that is hidden and private is not a commitment to Christ exactly because the light we are to shine is the Kingdom Christ illuminates in his Sermon on the Mount.The light we are to shine is not a feeling, a sentiment or an emotion. To let your light shine does not mean that you are to be joyful. It’s not like the Care Bear Stare. Remember, Christ is the Light of the World; for you to be the light of the world means that you attempt to live visibly in the world in conformity to Christ and his Kingdom. That to do so risks conflict and confrontation is implied in Jesus’s use of the word “world.” Whenever the New Testament wants to express something positive about our world, it uses the word creation. The word Jesus uses here in the Sermon, kosmos, refers exclusively in the New Testament to the territory occupied by the Powers of Sin and Death, Satan, the Prince of Lies. In commanding us to let our light shine before the world, therefore, Jesus has not summoned us to a risk-free endeavor. Nor does Jesus allow us to imagine that it’s no big deal if we look more like the world than we resemble him.
To hide the light is to be in darkness.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes of this passage in the Sermon on the Mount,
“[Having been called by him] the followers of Jesus are no longer faced with a decision. The only decision possible for them has already been made. Now they have to be what they are, or they are not following Jesus. The followers are the visible community of faith; their discipleship is a visible act which separates them from the world— or it is not discipleship. And discipleship is as visible as light in the night, as a mountain the flatland. To flee into invisibility is to deny the call. Any community of Jesus which wants to be invisible is no longer a community that follows him…the community that has stopped being what it is will be hopelessly lost.”
Bonhoeffer goes on in Discipleship to suggest that the visible community often hides its light for three primary reasons:
We fear our obedience to Christ will provoke conflict with those who do not follow Christ (or those who think they do).
We love the people in our lives more than we love Christ and so we’re unwilling to speak the truth of the Kingdom to them.
We assume the nation in which we live is essentially if not officially Christian such that the Church is no longer summoned to live as a visible alternative to it.
I don’t know about you, but I feel seen by all three.
Back in the winter of 2021, just after the insurrection, Fleming Rutledge sent me a text message. As many of you know, she’s a retired Episcopal priest and author and, I think, one of the Church’s best preachers.
“If this is not a status confessionis, I don’t know what is,” her first text read.
The term status confessionis goes back to Bonhoeffer. It refers to certain circumstances in which the true Church can take only one position, rejecting the alternative.
“If this is not a status confessionis, I don’t know what is. If this is not a time for courage in the pulpit, I can’t imagine what that time would be. From the sermons I’ve watched online, all I have found is studious avoidance of the Big Lie. Jason, you must risk not being liked and take seriously your responsibility to the Lord to preach and teach the truth in this Empire of Lies. If we continue to live in an Empire of Lies and never speak out, never bear witness to the Kingdom, never dare to live the difference Christ makes, we are no better than liars who’ve hidden our light under a bushel basket.”
Again, I felt seen.
No sooner had I read her text message than another one dropped below it.
“Although,” she wrote, “you’ve never seemed especially preoccupied with whether people like you or not.”
And then she followed that text message with an eye-wink emoji and then a kissy-face emoji.
Looking back at my sermons after Fleming grabbed me by my virtual lapels and shook me, I think “studious avoidance” captures my preaching better than “courageous.” I certainly wasn’t bold enough to dare use a phrase like “Empire of Lies.”
I was not who she had reminded me that I am to be.
Why?
Because, despite what Fleming thinks, I want you to like me.
What’s more, I love you all.
I didn’t want to provoke conflict.
So I hid the light.
Stanley Hauerwas says, “The world cannot survive Christians pussyfooting around in the expectation that redemption and justice will arrive as a matter of course. Neither can anyone claiming to be Christian.” That is, Christianity cannot survive Christians pussyfooting around in the expectation that redemption and justice will arrive as a matter of course. Christianity has suffered more causalities from the faux faith of its adherents than the honest doubts of atheists. The problem appears rather easy to identify; namely, the problem is the people that Christ continues to call to be Christians.
When I look at the world and our Empire of Lies, it certainly seems like there are far more bushel baskets on fire than there are faithful followers bearing the light that is Christ and bearing the consequences of it.
I don’t know about you, but if I were God this is not how I would do it. I would not have the Kingdom come through people like me. I would not work the reconciliation of all things through people like you. I suppose the good news is that Christ could only afford to be so patient, he could only have the luxury of wasting time on unfaithful, frightened people like us, if the outcome was assured. If he had the win in the bag already. He could only afford to call ridiculous, basket-wearing people like us if what he says is already true, “I have overcome the world.”
So come to the table. Here the Son once again summons us to step out of the shadows. And here, in creatures of bread and wine, the Son gives himself to us; so that, we might be capable of attempting lives that remove the veil from the Father’s face. Here, through bread and wine, Christ has promised to nourish us with himself; so that, we might be able to to love the world so much that we refuse to look like the world.
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August 14, 2022
Premature Exclamation
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Matthew 5.14
I’ve ad libbed words like it for more years than I can recall. A couple of weeks ago, with water and the Spirit, Peter and I drown little Bailey Arrington in the promises of Christ, washing away her sin and clothing her in Christ’s perfect righteousness. And then, having anointed her with oil, I held Bailey in my arms, lit the baptismal candle, lifted it up before her and said words I always say.
I told Bailey that there is a story in the Gospels where Jesus is on top of a mountain surrounded by a motley crowd of people every bit as unimpressive as the people who gather here in his name. Jesus looks at this ragtag group of losers, I told Bailey, and, despite all appearances to the contrary, he announces to them that they are the light of the world.
Not— they may one day become the light of the world.
Not— they will be the light of the world once they’ve been properly discipled and the Holy Spirit has descended upon them and the Risen Christ has dispatched them to the ends of the earth.
Not— they ought to be or they should be the light of the world.
It’s not command; it’s promise.
It’s not an imperative; it’s an indicative.
You are the light of the world.
Neither is it exclusive.
It’s not some of you— the ones who truly believe, who go the extra mile and follow the law to the letter— are the light of the world.
It’s all-inclusive: you all are the light of the world. Already, you are the light of the world. Right now. Having done nothing, contributed nothing, earned not a thing. Right now, already, at this very moment these sinners, Jesus inexplicably announces, are the light of the world.
And, by implication, you are too. Even if this is your first time here and you possess not one iota of faith, even if you’re only here for the wrong reasons— and, for the record, Pam Jones’s hugs are not a wrong reason, even if you too have classified nuclear secrets in your mudroom closet, you are the light of the world.
Matthew reports that most of the crowd gathered there on on the Mount of Beatitudes are there only to witness this Jesus of Nazareth work mighty deeds and miracles; nevertheless, Christ calls them too the light of the world.
After the Sunday service, out in the atrium, one of you ambled up to me, looking as skeptical as the last laborers to show up for work in the vineyard.
“How in the world can he call them the light of the world?”
I was about to answer, but then he shifted tenses, “How in the hell can he call me the light of the world?”
I learned long ago that if I practice what’s called a ministry of presence and don’t answer your questions too quickly, then you’ll impute to me a wisdom my wife knows I lack in spades. So I didn’t say anything. And he repeated it, softer, not wanting anyone to hear but this time he marked the emphasis on the me, “How in the hell can he call me the light of the world?” Then he leaned towards me and almost whispered it to me, “My wife doesn’t even know I lost my job…” His voice trailed off for a moment. “…because of the drinking.”
I almost responded but then shut my mouth, chastising myself for forgetting that no one who comes to worship Jesus Christ does so for no reason.
“Most days,” he said, “I drive from Harris Teeter to the ABC store, and then I find a parking lot and sit in the darkness of my SUV and drink until I’m drowsy and as good as dead to the world. How in the hell am I the light of the world?”
There in the Galilee the light of a lamp can cover the distance from Tiberius all the way to Capernaum, but even that is too modest an analogy for Jesus.
You are the light of the whole world.
And notice— it’s not a possession.
It’s your person.
It’s you.
Despite how Martin Luther interprets this text, it’s not you point to the light of the world. It’s not you proclaim the light of the world. It’s not even you bear witness to the light of the world. It’s not something given to you, learned or earned. You just are it.
Jesus reckons you, your very being, as no different than him.
The light of the world.
How?
“Light of the world?!”
Even if that motley crowd of unimpressive losers and hangers-on barely know their scriptures, they’ve got to know “light of the world” is no anodyne, throwaway line. In the Book of Daniel, the light of the world is the wisdom of God. This gaggle on the mountain ain’t that. According to the prophet Isaiah, the light of the world is synonymous with the justice and salvation of Yahweh. Peter and Andrew still smell like their fishing nets they’ve followed Jesus for so brief a time. You think they somehow measure up to be mistaken for the justice and salvation of God? John in his first epistle says that Jesus is the light [of the world] in whom there is no darkness at all, and in his Gospel, John declares that Christ’s life is the light [of the world], light no darkness can overcome. Later in the Gospel, “light of the world” is the ascription Christ applies to himself, “I AM the light of the world.” Just a few beats later, Jesus adds, “If you know me, you know the Father as well.”
It’s like a philosopher’s syllogism:
I am the light of the world.
You are the light of the world.
The Father and I are one.
The Father and you…
You are the light of the world.
Not only does Christ claim God’s identity as his own, he applies his own self-designation to you. To be light to the world is to be as God to the world, holy and righteous and good. I know I’ve only been here four years, but is that you?
Holy and righteous and good— is that you?
He who speaks directly and audaciously of himself as the light of the world, says just as clearly and even more ludicrously, “You are the light of the world.”
“How in the world can he call them the light of the world…How in the hell can he call me the light of the world?”
It’s a good question.
For as many baptisms as I’ve done, for as many times as I’ve recalled those words of Jesus, I’d never stopped to consider that Jesus should not be allowed to say what he says here at the start of his Sermon on the Mount. After all, Christ has only just emerged from his trial in the wilderness. He’s only just begun his ministry. Those gathered on the mountaintop to hear him do not even know who he is much less have faith in him. Peter won’t stumble upon Christ’s true identity for another eleven chapters, and here in Matthew 5, he has yet to call all twelve of his apostles.
How on earth can he call them the light of the world?
They’ve not been trained to be the light of the world. For that matter, other than describing those who constitute the blessed in the Kingdom and comparing the community to salt, Christ has not yet taught them anything at all. They’re no different now than they were before they followed him up the mountain. Not a one of them has confessed trust in him. Not one of them has pledged allegiance to him as Lord and Savior. Not a single person has done any repenting whatsoever or committed themselves to his Kingdom way.
This should be a problem, right?
Every one of them is a sinner.
Every one of them has fallen short of the glory of God.
Not a one of them is righteous— no, not one.
Nevertheless!
“You are the light of the world.”
They should all be dead in their trespasses and sins not reckoned as though they were the light which gives light to everyone.
Jesus tells Nicodemus that the “true light has come into the world but the people preferred the darkness over the light because their deeds were evil.” Of course he’s talking about them. He’s talking about the very same people gathered before him on the mountain. They too are the people who prefer the darkness over him who is the light.
Nevertheless!
Christ imputes to them what he is alone.
How on earth can he call them the light of the world? Matthew’s Gospel has only just begun. Matthew himself isn’t even yet a disciple. How can any of them— even the best one among them— already be counted as though they were Christ himself?
This is a premature exclamation.
Maybe it’s risks stating the obvious, but Christ has not yet died for them. How can they already be counted as Christ when they are not yet on the empty grave side of the cross? Jesus has not yet carried their sins in his body upon the tree. Jesus has not yet offered himself, once for all, as a single oblation for iniquity.
The Great High Priest has not sat down.
It is not finished.
The Lamb of God has yet to take away the sins of the world.
Not only has Christ not yet suffered for them the penalty owed for their failures to live according to God’s Law, Christ has not yet lived a life of perfect obedience under the Law. Jesus has not yet earned his permanent, perfect record; therefore, he possesses no credit that can be reckoned to them already.
Light the world?!
They are the ungodly for whom Christ has not yet died.
Not only can they not stand before the world as God, they cannot even stand before a holy God.
So how?
How in the world can they be light to the world?
Almost a decade ago, I was part of a team that planted a new church in Kingstown. By God’s grace and good humor, it’s still active and doing ministry in the community. New church starts attract all sorts of people from different religious backgrounds and with every type of spiritual baggage. One Sunday morning in the cafetorium at Island Creek Elementary School, I baptized two baby boys, twins named Tyler and Parker.
After the worship service, a visitor about my age charged up to me as I stood in front of the stage next to the vending machines. He almost looked like a private school student with his navy polo tucked tightly into his khaki pants. He was holding a thick, heavy Bible in one of those zippered, leather carrying cases with a handle.
“You must not be a United Methodist,” I said, pointing at the Bible.
He just blinked at me vacantly.
“Most Methodists don’t bring one to church. We give them one in the third grade and that’s as close as they ever get to it again.”
He didn’t laugh.
“Of course I brought my Bible,” he said, “I don’t want to ever be without the word.”
Oh boy, bless your heart, I thought.
“I have a question,” he said, “Or, I need clarification.”
“Sure,” I replied, “How can I help?”
“What you did with those two kids— that was just a dedication, right? That’s what it’s called in other churches I’ve been a part of.”
“No,” I said, “That was no dedication. Dedication is what they do with Simba in the Lion King. Tyler and and Parker were baptized.”
“But…” he started to say before I cut in.
“And what’s more, we didn’t do it. God baptized Tyler and Parker. We were just witnesses and accomplices. God did it.”
And then, because I knew it would throw him for a loop and because we all know I’m a word even I can’t say in church, I said to him, “Baptism is how God applies his predestination to us.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“There’s no better illustration,” I said, chuckling, “of God’s unmerited grace and one way love than when it’s given to someone who is drooling and wearing a dirty diaper.”
“But I was sitting in the front,” he said, “I could see. One of them— Tyler or Parker— wasn’t even awake. How can they be baptized before they even know the Lord or give their lives to Christ? They have no faith. They haven’t even obeyed a single commandment. How can they be baptized?! That’s like saying God has made a decision for them before their walk ever even begins.”
“Like?” I said, “Not like. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Baptism is the outward and visible sign that before you were— before the world was— God made a decision for you.”
He walked off, shaking his head, before I could confess to him that I’d stolen that line from Athanasius, the ancient church father, who wrote, “The incarnation was prepared long before we ourselves or even the world was in being.”
“How in the world can he call them the light of the world?!”
Connecting this verse from the Sermon on the Mount to the Prologue of John’s Gospel, Karl Barth calls the incarnation of Jesus the lumen electionis, the light of election. That is, by taking flesh in Jesus Christ God brings to light his own eternal, unchanging divine decision. When John’s Gospel announces to us that “in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God…” the Gospel is staking the claim that in the beginning— before the beginning of all things, before the word worded anything into existence— there was a choice.
Would God be a God of justice?
Or would God be a God of mercy?
Would God be a God whose love requires reciprocity?
Or would God be a God of one way love?
Would God be a God whose grace was expensive? Or just costly?
Or would God be a God whose grace was rock bottom free?
In the beginning— before the Big Bang even— there was a choice.
Would God be a Judge who demanded atonement for sin?
Punishment for sinners?
Or would God be a Judge who elects to be judged in our place?
Barth says we don’t understand the word “God” and we certainly don’t comprehend the title Father, Son, and Holy Spirt if we don’t realize the Trinity names this eternal, divine determination of God to be no other God than the God who is for us in Jesus Christ.
God’s not angry with you!
Not now. Not ever. Nor will he ever be!
God’s election of humanity is a predestination, Barth says, not only of humans but of God. Barth goes on:
“The election of grace is the eternal beginning of all the ways and works of God…In the beginning, before time and space as we know them, before creation, before there was any reality distinct from God…God anticipated and determined within Himself that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the fact that in the Son He would be gracious towards man…this choice was in the beginning.”
In other words, when Christ enters the world, he does so with each of you already in him simply because from “before the foundation of the world” God had decided not to be God without you. From before every beginning, it was already true that there is nothing you can do to make God love you more and there is nothing you can do to make God love you less.
You can’t carbon date the Gospel!
The good news is older than creation!
Christ can call the crowd on the mountain the light of the world.
Even though they’re sinners.
Even though they know him not.
He can call them the light of the world.
He can count them as himself, as righteous.
Because they have been justified.
Already.
Justification is a past-tense, historical, actuality. As St. Paul writes in Romans, nothing in the world can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The world has been justified.
We are justified not by our good deeds, which makes justification merely a future potentiality. We are justified not by our decision to believe, which makes faith its own kind of deed and makes justification only a present possibility. We are justified not by human deeds or decisions. We are justified by the divine decision already present at creation, Barth says.
Cross and Resurrection do not change God.
Cross and Resurrection do not change how God regards a sinful humanity.
Cross and Resurrection only illuminate God’s eternal choice.
To be the Judge judged in our place.
So why not, Jesus?
Go ahead and call them the light of the world.
A couple of weeks ago in my Sunday School class, out of the blue, a woman exclaimed to the group, “I know that when I die I won’t be with God. I’m not going to heaven. I’ve made peace with it. I’m resigned to it.”
When I asked her why she thought this, how she was so sure, she replied, “I’ve not done very many good things. I’m not a very good Christian. And I don’t have all that much faith.”
Hearing her, I thought to myself, “ARGH! WHAT?! WHY?! HOW?! How have we managed to hide the Gospel from you? How have we kept you in the dark?”
You see—
We can never assume that simply because someone has gotten themself here that they’ve gotten it.
So hear the good news:
You are the light of the world.
You are.
Right now.
No matter who you are or who you’ve failed to be.
You are shining with the righteousness of Christ.
Not because you decided to follow Jesus.
Not because of anything you’ve done or abstained from doing.
But because in Jesus Christ God decided not to be God without you.
As Gerhard Forde writes,
“God has made a decision about you:
“He hasn’t waited to find out how sincere you are, how devout or religious you might be, or how well you understand the Bible. He hasn’t even waited to find out if you are interested or willing to take this decision seriously. He has simply decided.
God made this decision knowing full well the kind of person you are. He knows you better than anyone else could — inside out, upside down, and backwards. He knows where you are strong and where you are weak, what you are most proud of and what you would most like to hide. Be that as it may, God’s decision is made.
He comes straight out with it: “I am the Lord your God.” This is the decision: God has decided to be your God. For God wants to be as close to you as your next breath, to be the one who gives you confidence and value, to open a future to you in the freedom of the Word. God wants to be the one to whom you turn for whatever you need. He has said this before, many times. He first announced this decision about you when you were baptized. “You,” God said, as the pastor spoke your name, “are baptized in my name. I am your God and I will never let you go.”He has said it since your Baptism, too, speaking on the lips of those who have loved you, whether they were part of your family, a teacher, or one of your pastors. In fact, God is saying it again in these very words: “You, the one who is hearing this, I am your God. How do you like that?”
You are the light of the world.
Right now, no matter how much you prefer the darkness or how dim your life feels, you are shining with the righteousness of Christ.
But don’t take my word for it.
Come to the Table were Christ’s promise to you (“My body broken for you…”) is older than time.
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August 7, 2022
Salt Life
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Matthew 5.13
On September 2, 1982, Helen Woodson was arrested for pouring blood— her own blood, carried in her baby boy’s bottle— onto the Presidential flag, the U.S. flag, and the Presidential Seal during a White House tour. It was an odd, offensive, seemingly ineffective act. A self-described “Christian resister-mother,” at her trial, Woodson shared these words to the judge:
“For the past 18 years my life has been children— one birth child, 7 adopted children, and 3 foster children. We also share our home with a paraplegic Cuban refugee and with ex-prisoners and others who need shelter. All of these people are considered of little value by society. They are of no value in a society based on competition, profit, and war, yet it is these useless people who have taught me what I know of the preciousness of human life that transcends damage and imperfection…
Death in war is preventable. It can happen only if we allow it, and if we allow it, we will come for judgment not before the Superior Court of the District of Columbia but before Christ and the murdered innocents.
The acts through which I serve life at home are considered exemplary and noble; my nonviolent witness at the White House is considered criminal. After more than two years of prayer which preceded my civil disobedience and after the seventy-six days I have spent in the DC Jail, I cannot, in all good conscience, see the difference between the two.”
Years later, while serving out her twelve-year prison sentence, Helen Woodson told a Washington Post reporter, “I am not surprised that you have not heard of me. For the most part, the media is not interested in the only true power at work in the world— the non-violent acts of faith that witness to the Kingdom.”
The world, she said, is not much interested in the salt of the earth.
To be sure Helen Woodson is an extreme exemplification of what it might mean for Christians to constitute the salt of the earth, yet she’s a helpful reminder that who Jesus would have us be is far more radical than many of our Sunday School songs suggest. “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” makes it sound like Jesus merely wants us to set good personal, moral examples when, in fact, salt and light are terms Jesus employs to show that those whom he has called have been conscripted into a clash of cultures.
A former teacher of mine, David Bentley Hart, writes that when he finished translating the New Testament the work left him with a deep sense of melancholy along with the suspicion that most of us who go by the name “Christian” ought to give up the pretense of wanting to be Christian.
Notice the distinction.
He didn’t say we should give up the pretense of being Christian.
He said we should give up the pretense of wanting to be Christian.
“Would we ever truly desire to be the kinds of people that the New Testament describes as fitting the pattern of life in Christ?” he asks. Barnabas, for example, on becoming a Christian, cashed in his 401K and handed over all the money to the body of Christ. Just imagine, the character a community would need to exemplify in order for a stranger to trust it with all of their needs.
Thus, David Bentley Hart notes:
The first Christians were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent.
They were rabble, a disorderly crowd.
They lightly cast off all their prior loyalties and attachments: religion, empire, nation, tribe, family and safety.”
They did so, Hart argues, because one thing that is in remarkably short supply in the New Testament is common sense. The Gospels, the Epistles, the Book of Acts, Revelation—all of them, Hart says, are “relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism” in which there are no comfortable medians, no areas of shade, for everything is cast in the harsh and cleansing solvent of their conviction that Christ had made them the salt of the earth. The first Christians may have been a rabble; nevertheless, their difference from the world was powerful to change the world.
For example—
In 361, Flavius Claudius Julianus rose to the imperial throne. The Church remembers him by the name Julian the Apostate. The nephew of Constantine, Julian had been raised a Christian, but as a young man he repudiated the faith, recommitted himself to the paganism of his forefathers, and dedicated himself “to claiming back from Christianity those who had abandoned the ever-living gods for the corpse of a Jew.” Upon ascending to the emperorship, Julian toured the region of Galatia in 362 and quickly lashed out, enraged at the decay he found in every pagan temple: walls with flaking paint, statues crumbling to pieces, altars unsplashed with blood.
Julian searched for a reason to explain why an inferior Galilean superstition had triumphed in the people’s hearts over the true gods of Rome. “How apparent to everyone it is,” Julian complained, “and how shameful, that our own people lack support from us when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well.” The blame, Julian concluded, lay with the pagan priests themselves. They had failed to devote themselves to the poor and the needy whose comfort was their charge. To that end, Julian developed a welfare program out of his own funds for the pagan priests to distribute. The old worship might be enlivened, Julian thought, if the people realized that care for the weak and unfortunate had always been a concern of Rome’s gods. “Teach them that doing good works was always our practice of old,” Julian instructed his priests in sending the welfare funds.
That the gods cared for the poor came as news to the priests of those gods.
They wrote back to Julian that the gods cared nothing for the poor and to think otherwise was “airhead talk.” The heroes of Rome’s former devotion had scorned the weak and the downtrodden. As the pagan priests put it to Julian, he may have been quite sincere in his hatred of “the Galilean’s teachings” and their impact upon his empire, but he was blind to the irony of his plan to combat Christianity: it was itself irredeemably Christian.” In other words, by the middle of the fourth century Christ’s rabble had transformed the values of the empire not through arms or affluence but by being what Christ had made them— the salt of the earth.
Much like the way the culture of a new minority community mingles with and ultimately changes their host culture, the followers of Jesus had made a difference in the world by being bold enough to be different from the world.This notion that a minority subculture can profoundly shape and reshape its host culture is key to rightly interpreting the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the indicative with which Christ begins the sermon proper, “You all are the salt of the earth.” You may not know their names or dates, but I imagine you would not be surprised to discover that not soon after Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount theologians and biblical scholars began finding ways to explain how Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount does not actually apply to those who follow Jesus.
For instance, one interpretive tradition qualifies our Lord's Sermon on the Mount as a so-called interim ethic; that is, the Sermon describes a manner for the community to live in the meantime between the Old Age that is passing away and the New Age inaugurated by Christ. However, though he is perfect and without sin, Jesus was not so good with telling time. It turns out— according to this interim ethic interpretation— Jesus was wrong to announce an imminent end of the world. If the End is indeed near, if the clock’s ticking, then it’s reasonable to bear witness by loving your enemies, laying down the sword, and forsaking your attachments to Mammon. After all, would you bother stocking your pantry with purchases from Costco if you knew the second coming was coming in a matter of days? If the apocalypse is now, then we can put up with being persecuted for a time, knowing that our persecutors will get their comeuppance soon and very soon. But, now that we know Jesus and the early church were wrong on the timing, then the Sermon loses its moral force— or so this interim ethic tradition interprets Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.
Another way of establishing that Christ did not mean in the Sermon on the Mount what Christ clearly says in the Sermon on the Mount is to posit that Jesus is not providing a pattern for how the community of disciples are to live before the unbelieving world but rather Jesus is only recommending how disciples should engage as individuals with other individuals. With the Sermon, Jesus is not constituting a nation within nations, a contrast community, or an alternative politics. Jesus is instead speaking in spiritual and individualistic terms. This is the so-called two kingdoms doctrine with which Martin Luther taught Protestants to read Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. If you want to learn how you as a Christian should engage your Monday through Friday work, Luther taught, then you should read your job manual not the Sermon on the Mount. A Christian who is a mechanic has no need for the Sermon on the Mount in order to be a Christian mechanic. The Sermon on the Mount, this way of reasoning goes, is not telling us what we should actually do (that is, to love our enemies or trust God to provide or pray for those who persecute us). The Sermon on the Mount instead teaches us the attitude we should have in our hearts. Thus, if you're a Christian who happens to be an executioner in a penitentiary, well then, you have no choice but to kill the condemned. But you can love him in your heart while you kill him with your hands. You don’t actually have to give to the panhandler at the intersection— give even more than he begs from you, as Jesus says— but you should have compassion for him in your heart.
Such is the way the two kingdoms doctrine interprets the Sermon.
If Jesus is wrong about anything it’s not telling time; it’s in his choice of friends.
The history of the Church demonstrates that we are inexhaustibly creative in finding ways to insist that Jesus did not mean what Jesus said.Years ago on PBS Bill Moyers produced a series on Religion in America. During the episode devoted to so-called Christian fundamentalism, Moyers interviewed a pastor in Boston who attempted to illustrate the character of his congregation by sharing a pastoral situation with one of his parishioners. The parishioner's wife had committed adultery. She had repented of this sin and had even confessed it publicly to the church. After a long and intentional discernment process marked by appropriate penitential discipline, the church had received her back into the fold, forgiven.
Her husband, however, was not so keen on pardoning the wife who had cheated on him and balked at the idea of receiving her back, into his home or his church.
The pastor responded to the husband, saying,
"Who the hell do you think you are? You weren’t born again into a vacuum. You were born again into a community. The world’s already full of people who won’t forgive the people who did them wrong. This is what it means to be salt of the earth. You don’t have the right to reject her, for as a member of our church you too must hold out the same forgiveness that we as a church hold out. Therefore, I'm not asking you to take her back, I am telling you to take her back."
No doubt such an example strikes fear in all our liberal hearts, yet I think it reveals the presupposition behind all our attempts to set aside the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. After all, the PBS series presented this pastor and his community as curiosities— so odd and extreme in their obedience to Christ as to be irrelevant in the modern world. I take that fear to be behind all our attempts to set aside the demands of Christ’s Sermon. We fear taking Christ at his word because we fear by doing so we will have no relevance to the “real world.” If we actually follow Jesus, living in a manner that exemplifies his Sermon on the Mount, we fear will get trampled by the world or be irrelevant to it, unable to change the world for the good.
Yet this is the great irony of Christ’s Sermon, for in the Sermon, Jesus teaches us a different way of making a difference. Jesus is teaching us the way the Church is to make a difference in the world, not the way the Powers and Principalities make a difference.
It's not the way the mighty make a difference. It's not the way the wealthy make a difference. But it is the way of the Kingdom Christ has brought near.
The Christians in the days of Julian the Apostate never set out to transform the world. They were in no position to change the world. They were never more than rabble. They weren’t trying to make history come right.
They were simply trying to lives that made no sense if the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount is not the Risen Lord.Thus, they cared for the poor. They comforted the needy. They welcomed the stranger. They freaking invented hospitals. And through their patient obedience to Jesus, pagans like Julian discovered the world had been transformed.
As Karl Barth says of this part of the Sermon on the Mount:
The difference the community of discipleship makes in the world is its difference from the world.
Discipleship is about difference. It’s about being the difference Christ has made in the world. That’s all the word holy means— different.
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The Powers and Principalities— the same Powers which crucified Jesus— lure us into thinking that simply by being the kind of people Jesus calls us to be— chaste, truthful, peacemakers, lovers of enemies, seekers of justice and righteousness first and foremost— that this kind of people cannot make much of a difference in the world.
At best, such a people are dangerous because they refuse to support the Powers.
At worst, such a people are no better than parasites, living off the freedom, peace, and prosperity made possible— by others— through through power and wealth and the sword. This is why the early Church provoked such ferocious hostility. Rome rightly suspected Christians of being bad Romans. After all, Christians had limits other Romans did not possess. Christians refused to work for the common good of Rome by any means deemed necessary. And Christians maintained that their most important task in Rome was not to be Romans but to be the Church.
This perspective especially provoked the ire of Celsus, a second century pagan philosopher, who took the followers of the crucified Galilean to be unbelievably arrogant. Christians reminded Celsus of maggots in a dunghill saying,
"Look at us! Look at us! We know better. We know more than you. God has revealed all things to us!"
Stanley Hauerwas tells the story of a high school guidance counselor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina who, in the early ‘90’s caused a stir in the community for attempting to persuade students, especially those interested in the armed forces, from pursuing a position where they might find themselves in the situation where they would be required to kill. In reprimanding him, public school officials told the guidance counselor that he must be objective in how he engaged his students and their interests.
The guidance counselor responded by saying,
“I am being objective. I don’t know how I could be more objective. After all, the one who preached the Sermon on the Mount is Lord of all— that’s not my personal opinion; how could that possibly be a personal opinion?”
That’s not what the world sounds like. That’s what the salt of the world sounds like.
Never forget— not all who gathered on the mountain to listen to Christ’s Sermon were his disciples.
Discipleship requires boldness, for it requires boldness to be the salt that Christ is pouring onto the wounds of a broken world.The world is not much interested in the salt of the earth, Helen Woodson observed to the Washington Post reporter; the trouble is, the followers of Jesus are more often interested in resembling the world than being the salt that saves it.
The world is a broken place.
And hardly anyone wants salt poured in their wounds.
Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson is a poet and professor of English at Kent State University. She’s about my age. She was born into the Yankton Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. When she was young, during a period of difficulty in her family on the reservation, Kimberlee’s mother sought help from the local foster care services. Her mother thought she was entrusting her daughter to a short-term respite care program. Kimberlee Medicine Horn was instead taken across the border and given to a white Catholic family in Canada where she was raised.
A little over three years ago, she spoke at a church— an ordinary, unremarkable church, in the region where such indigenous assimilation practices had been committed by both Canada and America. The community listened to her testimony. No one flinched from her pouring salt on their wounds. They all received her story and repented of the sin in which they were all, actively or passively, complicit.
And at the end of her testimony, she reminded them that the love of God, revealed to us fully in Jesus Christ, is patient and kind. Therefore, she said, your sins are forgiven. And they said back to her, your sins are forgiven.
It was just an ordinary church. It was no more than an ordinary practice like confession and absolution. But it’s exactly how we maintain our saltiness so that we might be for the world an alternative to the world.
Hear the good news:
Christ begins his Sermon on the Mount by declaring that his first disciples, no more impressive than, say, you all, are the salt of the earth. He does not preach that they ought to be the salt of the earth or that they should be the salt of the earth or that possibly, one day— if they but try hard enough, they will become the salt of the earth.
He simply announces that they are the salt of the earth solely by virtue of him having called them to follow.
Which means— the good news— you don’t have to be anyone other than who are you in this moment, someone— a sinner— called by Jesus Christ.
What’s stopping you?
The preacher for the Sermon is Lord.
Death has been defeated; Sin has been overcome.
You’re justified— your life is already hid with Christ in God.
All time is the time Christ has gifted us to bear witness to his Kingdom.
So why not be bold rather bland?
The stakes literally could not be lower.
It’s funny.
Ever since Jesus preached his Sermon, people like me have attempted to protect people like you from his Sermon out of concern that, if you followed the Sermon, you’d be ground up by the world— walked over, stomped on, thrown out, cast out as fools.
But there’s the other irony.
Jesus says it’s those who fail to be what he’s already made them— salt— who will be trodden underfoot.
So come to the table.
And through word and wine and bread, be consumed by what you consume; so that, you might become what you already are.
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July 31, 2022
Preferential Option for the Persecuted
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Matthew 5.10-12
“I am a Christian.”
This is the sole explanation offered by an otherwise anonymous second century disciple who, upon his baptism, took the name Sanctus; meaning, holy. According to his account in Acts of the Christian Martyrs (a collection of trial records older than much of the New Testament), Sanctus gave no other testimony to the imperial inquisitors who were charged with torturing him in order to induce a refutation of his devotion to Christ the Lord. Asked about his birthplace, his nationality, his rank, his pagan name, Sanctus yielded no answer except, “Christiana sum.” Though no doubt lost on his interrogators, Sanctus’s stubborn response was but a way of insisting that every trace of his previous identity had been forever washed away, subsumed by the waters of baptism, such that Christ superseded every other possible explanation for his odd way in the world. No part of Sanctus’s past was as determinative as the fact that his life was now hid with Christ in God.
Where were you born?
I am a Christian.
Where are you from?
I am a Christian.
What’s your status? Are you a citizen or a slave?
I am a Christian.
What’s your name?
I am a Christian.
Sanctus maintained this spare, simple testimony even as he underwent horrific brutality, his abused body “being all one bruise and one wound, stretched and distorted out of any recognizably human shape.” The grisly details of his end conclude with understatement, “He too was accepted into the ranks of the martyrs.”
“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Another disciple among the first generations of the Church, Polycarp was arraigned by a Roman governor before a crowd gathered for the gladiatorial games. Possibly out of pity, the governor implored the Christian to show some common sense and to face reality. “Have respect for your situation,” the governor pleaded with Polycarp, “Recant. Say, “Away with the atheists!” Again, recall that into the fourth century Rome regarded Christians as atheists for having renounced the very existence of Rome’s gods.
“Have respect for your situation. Recant. Say, “Away with the atheists!””
But Polycarp no longer took the givens of the “real world” as given. As a follower of a risen Lord, Polycarp knew the way the world is is not the way world need be. The real world is the one revealed through cross and resurrection not the judge’s gavel or the hangman’s noose. Therefore, in an instant, as though he was not the powerless one at all, Polycarp stole the words of his accusers and wielded those words back against them. According to the historical record, Polycarp glanced soberly at the mob in the arena and, slowly turning across the circumference of his audience, he shook his fist at them and shouted, “Away with you atheists!”
“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you…”
Likewise, Speratus was one of the Scillitan martyrs who refused to accept the definitions Rome gave to terms like lord, king, and emperor. On trial for following Jesus, Speratus rejected the auspices of his inquisitors’s authority: “I do not recognize the empires of this world. Rather, I serve the God whom no man has seen, nor can see, with these eyes. I have not stolen; and on any purchase I make I pay the tax. Yet, I acknowledge only one Lord— my Lord and my God— who is the emperor of kings and King of all the nations” Rome took Speratus’s life but they could not determine the meaning of his death. And that spelled doom for Rome.
“Blessed are you when people say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Speaking of heaven—
The New Testament culminates in a vision of the saints robed in white, surrounding the throne of the Lamb who was slain. The image asserts in no uncertain terms that the Lamb’s exercise of dominion is inseparable from and unintelligible without the witness of those disciples who have followed their lord even unto death.
Put another way— put the way Jesus puts it in the Sermon on the Mount— if Christianity had no martyrs, there would be no Christianity.
The martyrs are every bit as necessary to Christianity as the empty tomb.
If the community of discipleship is constituted by those who suffer persecution on account of Christ, then a community without those who so suffer is a community without true discipleship. In other words, if following Christ is easy and without cost then it’s but an indication that you’re not following Christ.
We are only able to be Christian by the sacrifice of the martyrs.Just like the sanctuary doors of many churches, the paraments on the altar are red not only because the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost as tongues of fire but also because the new community of discipleship that the Holy Spirit creates is a Church built upon the blood of the martyrs. The essential prominence of the martyrs for the reality of the Church may be an assumed element of Christian dogma; nevertheless, as followers of Jesus Christ and as citizens of his peaceable Kingdom, I think it crucial to ask the question, “Is this good?” Is it good new that martyrdom is a constitutive characteristic of the community of discipleship? Over two thousand years later, in a world beset by a variety of extremisms and their violence, is it yet a good to confess that without the blood of martyrs there is no Body of Christ?
Are the martyrs just a macabre part of the Church’s tradition?
For instance, after the bloodied and beaten Sanctus offered his inquisitors no reply other than “I am a Christian,” he returned to the public amphitheater for a second round of torture. According to the trial record, Sanctus appeared “cooled and strengthened” by having made his confession of faith and “to the men’s complete amazement, his broken body unbent and became straight under the subsequent tortures; he recovered his former appearance and the use of his limbs. Indeed the second trial by the grace of Christ proved to be not a torture but rather a cure.” Is this not a romanticizing of suffering, a mythologizing of violence— is this not the very sort of religious radicalism the world would be better off without? I mean, it’s one thing to give up your life for your country— that’s patriotism, right?. It’s another thing entirely to lay down your life for the Lord— that’s fanaticism, we think.
Are the Christians who walked into the mouths of lions while praying the Lord’s Prayer substantively different than the zealot who ignites an IED in a crowded marketplace?
Is it still good news that we profess that the Church is built on the blood of the martyrs?
Just this Friday, I was drinking coffee and people watching in the Istanbul airport. A couple walked by me carrying a shopping bag from one of the many designer stores. They were in the twenties or thirties. She was draped in black with only her dark spectacled eyes visible. It so surprised me I had to do a double-take: he was wearing a worn, cream-colored t-shirt. On the chest was a cracked and faded screen-printed image of one of the twin towers with a plane about to strike it. Presumably to shock someone like me, the caption was written in English, “God is great!”
Before I confirm any of your prejudices with that story, here’s another story:
Just last week the Turning Point USA conference— a pep rally for right wing college students— in Tampa featured members of NatSoc Florida—as in “national socialism,” Nazism. They posed on the convention center steps, their faces obscured by dark sunglasses and white neck gaiters. Their gaiters and red shirts said “NSF,” with the “S” written as Nazi SS lightning bolts. They carried a Nazi swastika flag and a Black Sun flag along with signs that said, “Free the J6 Political Prisoners.” Meanwhile, inside the convention, a member of congress, using the Christian nationalist language of apocalyptic struggle and armed violence, declared, “There is an identity crisis in America today and the only place you’re going to find that identity is in Christ…as Christians we are in a fight for the battle of our nation.”
This is the world in which we live. In such a world is it still part of God’s care for the world that the Church in the world confesses that it is built not on the blood of heroes but of martyrs?
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the great and impassioned enemy of the Christian faith, wrote in his treatise the Antichrist:
“It is so little true that martyrs prove anything as to the truth of an affair, that I would fain deny that ever a martyr has had anything do with the truth.”
Was Nietzsche right?
Does martyrdom have nothing to do with the truth?
I realize you likely did not come to worship today to hear about the tortures with which someone like Polycarp met his end; however, the witness of such martyrs is not the abstraction we should like it to be for Christ not only concludes his beatitudes with the expectation of suffering and persecution, the ninth and final beatitude is the only beatitude that Jesus puts in the form of direct address. Notice, the announcement of blessing is in the second person plural.
It’s not them: “Blessed are those whom people revile and persecute.”
It’s you: “Blessed are ya’ll when people utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”
It’s you. It’s all of us.
According to Jesus only some in the community of discipleship are peacemakers.
Not every disciple is merciful or hungers after justice.
But everyone in the community of disciples should expect to be rejected by the world.
Suffering, persecution, martyrdom even— they’re an ever present possibility not for some of Jesus’s followers but for all. That the beatitudes culminate with the anticipation of persecution should not surprise us. A community constituted by those who have renounced prosperity, happiness, rights, honor, vengeance, and violence is a community where all should expect to meet with ridicule, slander, and possibly much worse.
For example:
In the ancient Church, when a Roman solider converted to Christianity the Church required the new Christian to find a new job. The new Christian did not need to leave the military but the new Christian did need to secure a role where they would not be in the position of taking another’s life, whether taking that life was justified or not.
Just imagine how suspect Christians in America would immediately become if the Church in America exercised those kinds of expectations for what it means to follow Jesus in America. Just imagine the reaction if Christians could not be counted upon to kill on behalf of America. Whether or not you’re in the military, you would all be guilty by association. None of you could be trusted as good Americans.
Can you feel it?
This is why Rome persecuted the first Christians. It wasn’t because Christianity was a sin management system. And it wasn’t because Christians believed God had made Jesus the Secretary of After Life Affairs.
Rome persecuted Christians because the way of Christ made Christians unreliable Romans.
Perhaps this is why we instead put flags in our sanctuaries and speak of America as a Christian nation. It’s a way to avoid that all inclusive “you” with which Jesus concludes the preamble to his Sermon on the Mount.
We are not all called to martyrdom.
But we are all called into a community whose way of life is so offensively counter-intuitive that we should expect some may die on account of it.
Still, to announce that martyrdom is a possibility to be countenanced is not also to claim that martyrdom is a good to be celebrated. So the question remains: are the martyrs really good news for us today? Or is Nietzsche right? Do they have nothing to do with the truth? God is a God of mercy and love. Jesus said he has come so that we might have life and have it abundantly? How is it good to extol suffering and death? How is it good news that the Church is built on the blood of the saints?
Until recently Richard Lischer taught homiletics at Duke. In doing research for a book on the preaching of Martin Luther King Jr, Lischer interviewed listeners who had been present when Dr. King would rush to the scene of a church bombing or a Klan demonstration or a police riot and preach in the still smoldering ruins. Over the course of his interviews with listeners Lischer discovered that hardly any of the famous preacher’s hearers could recall what he had said. But, Lischer writes, every single one of Dr. King’s hearers said they would never forget where he had said whatever it was that he had said.
They could not recall the what.
But they could not forget the where.
That is, what they remembered is that King had so loved them as to place his life in danger and speak the truth.
We exist in a sea of words, Lischer says, where much of our speech is debased. Thankfully, God continues to call some, like Dr. King, to preach the truth of the Gospel with their lives.
Celsus was an ancient Greek philosopher and a bitter opponent of Christians. Celsus was the Nietzsche of the second century. Prompted by fellow believers, the church father Origen responded to the pagan’s attacks in a treatise entitled, Against Celsus. Yet even at the beginning of his long response to Celsus, Origen admits that he is reluctant to answer the philosopher’s attacks with his words or his wisdom.
Christ himself was silent in the face of his accusers, Origen writes, “and even now Jesus continues silent before these things, and makes no audible response, but instead places his defense in the lives of his genuine disciples, which are a pre-eminent testimony.”
The only utterance the silent Christ offers to his inquisitors is the lives of those whom he calls to follow him; that is, those who proclaim his Kingdom with their lives.When a Roman proconsul asked his Christian prisoner, a believer named Pionius, “Why do you rush towards death?” the disciple replied matter-of-factly, “I’m not rushing towards death. This just is the way, the truth, and the life.” Later, according to the trial record, after he had been nailed to a cross, the executioner made Pionius an offer in an attempt to persuade the crowd that Pionius’s convictions were all a lie. “Change your mind and the nails will be taken out.” Pionius responded by bearing witness in a winsome manner, “I feel the nails are there to stay.” To recant his faith, he insisted, would be to love his body more than he loved his Lord. To alleviate his own suffering, he argued, would be to love himself more than he loved his neighbor for his neighbors needed to see that the promises of Christ can be trusted at any time or place.
Before he was nailed to a cross, Pionius protested to the temple inquisitor, “You have been ordered either to persuade us or to punish us. You are not persuading us. So, inflict the punishment. And let your punishment be my means of persuading.”
It’s about persuasion.
It’s about peaceful persuasion.
Put another way, martyrdom is always a necessary eventuality for any community that refuses to take life.Nietzsche could not believe that the martyrs could have anything to do with the truth because Nietzsche refused the possibility that the truth could be the nonviolent love of a crucified God born by Mary.
The Christian martyr is not like the terrorist.
The Christian martyrs are not those who in their zeal for the Lord seek to lose their lives (or sacrifice the lives of others). The Christian martyrs are those who in their zeal for the Lord love their neighbor even though such love might mean giving up their lives. The martyrs are those who were willing to die to those who persecuted them rather than run away in apostasy or retaliate with violence. As Karl Barth says, the martyrs are those witnesses who are able to see even in their darkest most frightful hour the possibility for “a radical moment of reconciliation.”
Because Christ has destroyed Death, they believed the resurrection set them free to inhabit stories in which they were not the heroes, stories in which even their deaths could be used to bear witness to the God who loved his enemies as himself.
The martyrs, therefore, are intense exemplifications of what is true of the whole community of disciples. They show us that no event or determination can bring an end to the story in which Christians find themselves. Like an improv troupe, the martyrs are disciples who are always able to move the story of Christ forward. They are able to live ad hoc according to the way of Christ, improvising the next faithful step no matter the situation the world thrusts upon them.
Nor are such witnesses relics of antiquity.
According to Oxford University, from the first century to the end of the twentieth century, approximately 70 million Christians had been martyred for their faith— 65% of those martyred died in the twentieth century alone. In the twenty-first century, an average of two hundred and seventy Christians worldwide die every day on account of Christ. Oxford projects the total number for the year 2025 at 210,000. And to think some take gay school teachers in the classroom or “Happy Holidays!” at Starbucks to constitute persecution.
Despite the hysteria in some dark corners of our media, most of us will not die martyrs’s deaths; nonetheless, the martyrs are grace to us.
They are a gift we do not deserve, for in the part of the Gospel story that you and I call “the present day,” you and I can follow Jesus further and more fully than we would ever dare imagine if we had not the witness of the martyrs.
The demonstrate that, when it comes to following Jesus, our reach nearly always exceeds our grasp.
We make so many excuses for why we cannot follow Christ in the manner Christ clearly thinks we are able to follow him. Sometimes we even so construe grace that it seems as though Christ came to set us free from Christianity. We make so many excuses. I know I make excuses. Thank God that God has given us the witness of the martyrs for they are proof that we need not be Christ in order to be Christians.
We need not be Christ in order to be Christians.A friend of mine, Venció López, is an agronomist in Guatemala. Though a scientist, he works for the Catholic Church with the Archdiocese of San Marcos, in their office of environment and justice. The bishop of San Marcos has been a fierce and stubborn advocate for the indigenous communities whose land and homes and water have been damaged by mining companies from Canada and the United States. Venció works to document pollution to communities’ s water supply, birth defects due to the mining runoff, as well as mud slides and toppled homes caused by seismic dynamiting and drilling. Because of his persistence, Venció has had multiple attempts on his life. His wife and children were nearly kidnapped and disappeared. He’s been smeared and threatened. He’s followed constantly. He’s always changing his phone, and the last time we spoke in person he’d switched cars three times to get there in safety.
When he told me about switching cars, I replied in my standard pastoral tone of voice, “Are you crazy? You can’t fight back. Why don’t you stop? Quit what you’re doing. Get away. Do something else. Your children are going to suffer for your convictions.”
Venció shrugged his shoulders and said— as though it was the most robust explanation possible for his life, “I am a Christian.”
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