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God is Not Nowhere in the World

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Matthew 5.7

About a month ago, a former parishioner of mine, Dave, emailed me and asked me to respond to a theological question: “Why doesn’t God intervene in the world? There’s a senseless and horrific war waged against Ukraine. There was yet another mass shooting— 21 kids murdered! You know it’s just a matter of time before another black man is gunned down by racist cops. Why doesn’t God act in the world?”

Dave is a persistent guy. When I was his pastor, Dave was always on my case to register for an Emmaus retreat weekend or volunteer with Kairos Prison Ministries. Admittedly, there’s something about his persistence that brings out my Enneagram 8 obstinance. Whenever Dave asks me to do something, my initial, reflexive response is not to do it.

So I didn’t reply to his email.

But also, I didn’t respond because it’s not the kind of question that can be adequately addressed by typing out a quick answer on a smart phone.

I never answered him, but I did make several attempts that remained unfinished and filed in the drafts folder of my inbox.

Dear Dave, my first stab at a response begins.

I apologize for the belated reply. Then again, you no longer pay my salary so you’re at the mercy of my timetable. As a pastor who’s baptized more than a few stillborn babies, I can certainly identify with the pathos that provokes such a question. And as someone with incurable cancer, I’ve had more than a few moments of feeling sorry for myself and, even when I don’t, every day nevertheless feels like Ash Wednesday, which is to say, you’re not the only one to question the Almighty’s job performance. It’s like the Woody Allen line, “If there’s a God, he’s basically an underachiever.”

But is he? I’m not so sure.

Or rather, I’m not certain that God is the one who has failed to live up to the demands of the job description.

Now that I’m no longer appointed as your pastor, I can confess to you that you bring out the contrarian in me. I’m tempted, therefore, to answer your question by heeding Annabeth Schott’s advice to Leo McGarry in episode one of season seven of the West Wing. Annabeth tells the Chief of Staff turned Vice Presidential candidate, “If you don’t like what they’re asking you, don’t accept the premise of the question.”

The question “Why does God not intervene in the world?” is a question that reflects the presumptions of a post Constantinian understanding of Christianity. I realize “post-Constantinian” is a mouthful, but I’m doing this pro bono. You’ll have to do some work too. Constantine, you may recall, is the Roman emperor chiefly responsible for the creed we profess in worship— a creed, you may have noticed, that omits a single mention of the sole subject of Christ’s message and ministry, the Kingdom of God.

Read the Gospels again. Christ seldom ever speaks of himself in the Gospels. In word and deed, Christ is nearly always announcing the Kingdom, yet the creeds make no mention of the Kingdom. This is not an accidental omission. In the fourth century, Constantine realized it would behoove his hold on power to establish Christianity as the religion of the empire. Whereas prior to Constantine it took significant conviction to be a Christian, after Constantine it took considerable courage not to be a Christian. Thus, what had been an alternative way of life in the world became, with Constantine, a religion that awaited the life to come. Witness got transmuted to inwardness. Salvation got transferred from a material reality to a  spiritual realm. Jesus got transfigured from Lord to Secretary of Afterlife Affairs. And faith got translated from public obedience to the Kingdom Christ had brought near to private belief for access to the Kingdom of Heaven.

I know you asked a theological question and I’m instead giving you a historical answer, but it’s crucial you understand that your question about God’s apparent absence in the world is historically and politically determined. After Constantine, once the empire was allegedly Christian, the Church’s vocation as God’s visible alternative in the world was no longer intelligible. Constantine made it possible, in other words, for followers of Christ to ask questions like “Why doesn’t God act in the world?” without appreciating that they themselves are the way God has elected to act in the world.

We’re about to begin a long sermon series through the Sermon on the Mount. We mishear Christ’s sermon and we misunderstand the nature of discipleship exactly to the extent we fail to notice that for Christ in his sermon the visibility in the world of the community of disciples just is the visibility of God in the world.

Notice how the Old Testament never asks the question in the manner we so often ask it. Israel does not ask the generalized question we so often ask, “Where is God?” Israel does not ask such a question because Israel understood— their very existence as Israel was a perpetual reminder to them— that they were the way God had chosen to be at work in the world.

I recently read the memoir of F. Kefa Sempangi, who founded the Presbyterian Church in Uganda during the years when the dictator Idi Amin was in power. Following an Easter service in 1973, a number of Idi Amin’s Nubian assassins followed the preacher back to the sacristy and closed the door behind them. “We are going to kill you for disobeying Amin’s orders,” said the captain. “If you have something to say, say it before you die.”

“From far away I heard a voice, and I was astonished to realize that it was my own. “I do not need to plead my own cause….I am a dead man already. My life is dead and hidden with Christ. It is your lives that are in danger, you are dead in your sins. I will pray to God that after you have killed me, He will spare you from eternal destruction.”

The leader stared at Sempangi without speaking. Then he lowered his gun and said, “Will you pray for us now?”

“Yes, I will pray for you.”

And he did.

“When I lifted my head, the men standing in front of me were not the same men who had followed me into the vestry. From that day forward, converted by the mercy of Christ, the gunmen vowed to protect me from Amin’s assassins.”

In no small part, Dave, the work of faith is to discipline ourselves by approaching every question from no other place but God’s self-disclosure in Christ. This means we answer a question such as your question not by appealing to general principles or philosophical speculation and not even by turning to the Bible broadly. We start with Christ. It may not yield as thorough or as satisfying an answer as you would prefer, but what we discover in Christ is that we possess no answer to the question about God’s intervention in the world apart from lives like F. Kefa Sempangi— apart from lives, I should add— like yours and mine.

“Peace,” I wrote, “Jason Micheli.”

(Mount of Beatitudes)

I thought it not a half bad response to Dave’s question. I even thought it was true. I was about to send my reply back to Dave when I received another email from Dave— I told you he was persistent— reminding me that Dave still had not received an answer to his theological question. Being the wise, spiritually mature pastor you see before you, I mumbled to my computer screen, “I don’t even work for you anymore.”

And I filed the email in my drafts folder instead of sending it.

When I came back to Dave’s question about a week later, my first response felt stale to me, the sort of incomplete cringe-factor I feel over every old sermon. Rather than edit what I’d already written, I attempted to start over again. I began this time with a story— not the story of F. Kefa Sempangi but the story of Tomás Borge.

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Dear Dave, I began again.

I apologize for the belated reply. I must’ve missed your initial email.

Actually, I did see your email and I even wrote you what I thought was a pretty sharp response but then I decided not to send it. You know how Paul says the Law elicits the opposite response from what it exhorts?

You might have the same effect on me, Dave; bless your heart :)

I was just reading a remarkable story about man named Tomás Borge. He was one of the original founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. In 1976 soldiers loyal to the Somoza dictatorship captured Borge and his wife and severely tortured them for two years. Years later, after the overthrow of the regime, Borge was serving as the Minister of Interior when he left his government office and walked past a prisoner being brought to trial. Borge immediately recognized him as the man who had tortured him.

Borge looked the guard straight in the eye and asked him: “Do you recognize me?”

The guard answered: “No.”

Borge insisted: “Look at me! I was one of those you tortured! And now you will see what the Revolution will do with people like you. Shake my hand! I forgive you.”

In his book Christianity and Revolution, Borge writes, “I remember that when we captured these torturers I told them: “The hour of my revenge has come: we will not do you even the slightest harm. We will show you mercy.”

No doubt you will think Borge’s story an odd way to go about answering your question, but the most faithful way I can think to begin to answer your question is by reminding you that what sets Christians apart is our conviction that God has intervened in the world in the most immediate manner. We call God’s intervention incarnation. We believe God put on skin, came among us, and spoke his will to us through the sun-chapped lips of a first century Jew from Galilee.

That the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Jesus means that God wants to be worshipped in no other way but as Jesus. And this means God wants to be known in no other way but as Jesus. Therefore we approach every question, Dave, including your question about God’s activity in the world, not from first principles but from the particular child born to Mary.

By starting with Christ, we quickly discover that, as Christians, we do not have answers or explantations for the suffering and evil of the world. We instead have a God who suffered the evil of the world. And this God has us, the community he creates from the followers he calls, the followers he calls to be his mercy in a world of hostility, to be his peace in a world of war, to be hope in a world without it.

Just as God assumed a particular body in Mary’s womb so too does God continue to assume a particular body, the Body called Church. By starting with Christ, then, we’re left with no more truthful answer to your question than that the Church is God’s intervention in the world. We’re not playing around when we say, “This is the word of God for the People of God” or “The body of Christ given for you” or “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.” Notice the way Jesus puts the beatitudes in the present tense. That Jesus announces that the merciful are blessed not they will be blessed signals that the transformed world has begun. The Kingdom has come near, which means that in his Sermon on the Mount, Christ is not issuing general advice for all people anywhere. He’s creating the form his body will take after his resurrection and ascension.

I’ll say that again in case you glossed over it:

In his Sermon on the Mount, Christ is creating the body he will incarnate in the world, which means we should see members of that body, witnesses like Tomás Borge, not as saints so much as sacraments— tangible, visible incursions of the crucified God into a suffering world. This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer means when he writes, “The primary confession of the Christian before the world is the deed which interprets itself.” Here’s a fact you may not know: when the ancient church fathers wished to explicate the incarnation, the word they used was economy.

Christ and his Body the Church are God’s economy.

That is, we are the way God manages the world.

I wasn’t quite sure where to go from there in my response or how to end my email to Dave so I filed it away in my drafts folder, determined to come back to it later that day. But then Dave pinged me again that afternoon to RSVP his attendance at a mission team dinner at my house. “PS,” he added, “I still have not received a response to my theological question.” And being the wise, spiritually-mature person you see before you, I mumbled some four-lettered obstinance and decided to leave the draft unfinished.

I came back to Dave’s question a couple of weeks ago. He’d signed up to join our mission team, and I knew I would see him on the reservation at Fort Apache. There would be no way to avoid his question there so I figured it would be easier to get a response out of the way.

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Dear Dave,

I’m terribly sorry for the belated reply. I was going through my spam folder just now and discovered your emails. I regret having missed your messages.

For some reason your question made me think of Judy Scott. There have been many such stories so you may have forgotten the name. Seven years ago Judy Scott’s son, Walter, was shot in the back by Charleston cop Michael Slager eight times as Walter fled from the officer. Judy Scott’s response to her son’s murder made headlines.

Remarkably, on Anderson Cooper 360, Judy Scott told the host that in spite of her deep grief for her murdered son, she had nothing but mercy for officer Michael Slager.

“I feel forgiveness in my heart,” she said.

I think the incarnation teaches us that we have no answer to questions about God’s activity in the world apart from disciples like Judy Scott embodying for the world Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. According to Bonhoeffer, this is what it means to be set free from the Law. To be freed from the Law does not mean we’ve been given license to do whatever we want but rather now our obedience is to a person. We obey the Living Christ who calls us to concrete acts of witness.

You might be surprised to discover that the New Testament never uses the term discipleship as a noun or an adjective. In every instance, discipleship is a verb. It’s always, “Follow after me.” This means that discipleship can never reduced to a self-selected lifestyle or tradition. It can never be a program or practice we choose for ourselves. Discipleship, Barth says in the Church Dogmatics, is always an event. It’s always a particular response to the here and now, concrete call from the Living Christ. This is why Barth preferred the language of vocation instead of sanctification.

Discipleship is an event because the call— vocare— is an act of God.

The secret of the merciful-hearted is that of the One who calls them and creates their hearts of mercy. And because discipleship is an event, it’s also a kind of performance. Barth puts it better than I ever could:

“The world which sighs under the Powers of Sin and Death must hear and receive and rejoice that their lordship is broken. But this declaration cannot be made by the existence of those who are merely free inwardly. If the message is to be given, the world must see and hear at least an indication, or sign, of what has taken place. The break made by God in Jesus must become history. This is why Jesus calls disciples.”

As much as Jesus summoning Peter, James, and John to drop their fishing nets, Christ works in our world by calling people to follow him. Once you realize our discipleship is no less an event than it was for the first disciples, you see it’s a profound mistake that we should ever suppose that what will be required of us along the way will be something less or easier or more comfortable than what was required of the first ones.

“Grace cannot have become more cheap today,” Karl Barth warns us, “It may well be more costly.”

He could have been writing about Judy Scott.

In other words, Dave, I believe the most faithful way to respond to a question like “Where is God in the world?” is to ask a different question, “Given the world, what is Jesus— who is not dead— calling me to do?”

You may think such an answer avoids the heart of your question, but for Christians there’s simply no answer to your question that avoids the necessity of our obedience.

In fact, the cynic in me sometimes suspects we ask so many questions about God’s alleged absence in the world as a way to avoid hearing Christ calling us to a particular obedience in that world.

That last line about how we use our questions about God as a way to tune out Christ who calls— I stand by that line but, still, it struck me as a little grumpy so I did not click send. I filed it away in my drafts folder with the other incomplete answers to Dave’s question.

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I didn’t have time to return to it before I left for our mission trip to Fort Apache. One day on the reservation, during lunch, Dave and I started talking about a mutual acquaintance, another former church member, a parishioner who was always a thorn in my side, an obstacle to my sanctification, about whom I often complained, “I love Jesus; I just can’t stand his friends.” This guy brought complaints about me to the church council, trolled me on social media, wrote me long, threatening emails, and, when that didn’t work, appealed to the bishop’s office— don’t you all get any ideas.

Dave and I were chatting about this guy and all of sudden, almost off handed, Dave said, “Yeah, he’s living with me now. He was in a bad way. He didn’t have anywhere else to go so he’s living with me now.”

Being the wise, spiritually-mature person you see before you, I hollered at him in all caps, “YOU BROUGHT HIM INTO YOUR HOUSE?! ARE YOU INSANE? DO YOU KNOW WHAT HE SAID…”

And Dave shrugged his shoulders like a world-weary rodeo clown and said, “He didn’t have a place to stay. What was I supposed to do? I got…CALLED.”

I didn’t say anything. It’s best to shut up when God shows up.

“You know,” Dave said, leaning across the table to me, “You never did answer my theological question— about God intervening in the world.”

“Actually,” I thought, “I think you just answered your own question.”

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Declaration of Dependence

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Fourth Sunday after Pentecost: Matthew 5.6

When I was about to begin serving as a pastor for the first time two decades ago, I decided to ask one of my seminary professors, Dr. Jim Stewart, for advice on what to do when starting out in a congregation.

You might’ve already guessed from observing me these past four years that how to pastor a congregation is not actually something they teach you in seminary.

Dr. Stewart looked top heavy with his mop of curly white hair on top of his short, heavyset body. He wore thick, brown glasses, which when removed revealed that Dr.. Stewart was a dead ringer for the actor Charles Durning who played Doc Hopper in the Muppet Movie.

After class one day, I walked up to Dr. Stewart as he was stuffing papers into his leather satchel and I asked him for advice on beginning my ministry in my first, full-time congregation. He answered so quickly I almost thought he was responding to someone else’s question, “Don’t do or say anything provocative. Don’t ruffle feathers. Don’t upset anyone. Don’t rock the boat. Be as inoffensive, un-opinionated, and ordinary as possible.”

Obviously, it’s advice I’ve yet to heed.

Dr. Stewart slid more papers into his leather satchel as I processed what sounded to me like an insult in the form of counsel. He looked up at me and smiled and said: “Don’t worry, that’s not a comment about you. I give the same advice to every new pastor. And don’t forget the most important advice of all— Don’t change ANYTHING for the first 6 months. Earn their trust.“

I can’t speak for the other denominations whose clergy Dr. Stewart has advised over the years, but I can say that his words are frustrated by the fact that United Methodist bishops appoint their pastors to churches during the last week of June and first week of July. So in the United Methodist Church new clergy are making just their first impressions over Independence Day weekend, a time when most folks skip church and those who do come to worship often do so in order to give their thanks and praise to America and not the Lord.

I packed Dr.. Stewart’s advice along with my books and my belongings and I took it with me to my new church.

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On Day One, my secretary first walked me through the church directory. Second, she gave me the skinny on church gossip. And third, she informed me that, as the new pastor in town, I was scheduled to preach the sermon at the annual, ecumenical Independence Day Service.

“But Independence Day isn’t even a Christian holiday,” I said in a tone of voice that was equal parts exasperation and naïveté.

Barbara, my secretary, just stared at me, saying nothing, as though she were a tarot card reader foreseeing both my imminent, self-destructive implosion.

“Bless your heart,” she said and patted me on the shoulder.

Like all things Independence Day, the ecumenical service was held outdoors in a city park. It may surprise you to hear that I arrived early for the service. I parked my car and could hear that the compact disc of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” was skipping on the second verse as it boomed through the speakers.

“If you can’t get that CD to play,” I said to the parking lot greeter, “just let me know— I’ve got a Dixie Chicks album here in the car we could use.”

The man with the beer-belly and the salt-and-pepper mustache started at me like I’d just given him smallpox.

When I got to the pavilion area, I spotted a large, wooden cross in the center of the stage— the kind of cross you’d see on the side of the highway next to a barn adorned with election conspiracy signs. But this cross, that day, had a large, car dealership-sized American flag draped over the horizontal beam.

I swear, in that instant, Dr. Stewart appeared to me like Yoda to Luke Skywalker. And starting at old glory covering up the old rugged cross, I heard Dr. Stewart’s advice ring in the air, “Don’t ruffle feathers. Don’t betray an opinion. Be as inoffensive and ordinary as possible.”

I walked up to a guy who looked like the master of ceremonies, a Pentecostal preacher it turned out. I introduced myself and then I said, “Say, maybe we should take the flag off the cross before people show up for the service and get irate that we’re committing idolatry. I mean, Moses sure didn’t like coming down off the mountain and finding everyone with their hands in the air for a Golden Calf, am I right?”

“Bless your heart. Why would anyone get upset?” the preacher laughed in condescension, “We’ve got the Christian flag here too.”

He gestured towards it and I looked over and saw a limp, yellowed flag that looked to stapled the handle of an industrial broom.

I nodded to him.

“My wife’s in law school,” I said to him, “and so I’m learning all kinds of new things. For instance, did you know that according to the U.S. Flag Code no other flag— not even the Christian flag at a Christian worship service or in a Christian sanctuary— can have a place of prominence over the American flag?”

The preacher stared at me like, I imagine, Darwin once marveled at the creatures he discovered on the Galápagos Islands. And then an expression crept over his face and I couldn’t help but think it bore a striking resemblance to the tarot card reader’s face that Barbara had flashed in my office just the the other day.

I was about to respond at least as colorfully as the stars and stripes, but then I saw Dr. Stewart appear in an angelic haze, like Obi Wan to young Luke, and I heard Dr. Stewart say, “Don’t upset anyone.”

So I said nothing more.

A couple hundred people gathered for the ecumenical Independence Day Service, which began with a greeting by a Brethren pastor. Before we realized what was happening, the Brethren pastor had slid from words of welcome into a “Fatherwejust” prayer— a prayer that needed not Jesus to be prayed. His prayer was a confession, a lament, of all the ways America has absconded from the Christian values of its founding. His lament was exhaustive and exhausting, and all the while I gripped my Bible and sighed, trying to conjure the image of Dr. Stewart.

After the prayer, we sang “America” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which, in hindsight, were the high points of the service.

And after the “glory, glory, hallelujahs,” the local Episcopal priest got up and offered another prayer.

The priest’s prayer, which also did not need Jesus to be prayed, thanked,  God that we live in a nation where we’re free to pursue what sounded to me like policy positions from the Democratic Party platform. Again, I sighed and death-gripped my Bible, waiting for someone— anyone— to invite Jesus to this service we were allegedly offering in his name.

But it never did.

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Next, the Master of Ceremonies, the Pentecostal preacher, stood in front of the flag draped cross and read the Declaration of Independence, and when he finished, he said, “Now, I’d like to invite the new Methodist pastor, Rev James MacChelly, to come up and preach for us.”

I’d come that day armed with a few pages of a sermon on serving your neighbor, a harmless, vanilla homily I could’ve easily delivered at a Kiwanis meeting as at a worship service. But walking up to the outsized cross that bore a flag instead of Jesus’s body, I discerned a different message was needed.

I chose to change gears and improvise.

I called an audible.

I decided I should trust the Holy Spirit not to let me crash and burn.

And I’ve preached from a manuscript ever since.

First, I read not from the Golden Rule as I’d planned, but from the Apostle Paul, “God raised Jesus Christ from the dead and exalted him to sit at the right hand of the Father and given him the name that is above every name; so that, at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

When I finished reading from Romans, a few people muttered “Amen,” which I foolishly took as a promising sign.

And then I began:

“I know a lot of you are expecting me to speak about America or politics or patriotism. And there’s nothing wrong with those things. But I’m a preacher. The Risen Christ called me— as real as you are to me right now—  to proclaim not America but him, his Lordship.” 

I thought it was an incontrovertible beginning, but just then I looked out in the crowd and saw Dr. Stewart sitting on a lawn chair near the third row.

He was shaking his head and mouthing the words, “Don’t rock the boat.”

But I ignored him.

“Christ Jesus called me not to give lip service to “We the people” but to preach the Gospel,” I hollered into the handheld mic, “and the Gospel is that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Suddenly they all appeared like tarot readers appraising the ten of swords card I’d auspiciously drawn.

“The Gospel isn’t that Jesus is going to be Lord one day,” I preached, “The Gospel isn’t that Jesus will be Lord after he returns to Earth to rapture us off to the great bye and bye. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father, is Lord. Here and now. The Gospel isn’t that Jesus rules in heaven; the Gospel is that Jesus Christ rules the nations of the world from heaven.”

Dr. Stewart sat in his lawn chair, giving me a sad, “it’s-not-too-late-to-turn-back” look.

But it was too late.

Or rather, I was as stubborn then as I am today.

So I doubled-down.

“You see,” I said, “to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord is to profess that something fundamental has changed in the world, something to which we’re invited to believe and around which we’re called to story our lives and for which, if necessary, we’re expected to sacrifice our lives. To confess that Jesus Christ is Lord is to profess that, at Easter, God permanently replaced the way of Caesar, the way of the world, with the way of Jesus, a way that blesses the poor, a way that comforts those who mourn, a way that wages peace, a way where the pursuit of happiness is not to choose whatever you want to do but to hunger and thirst for justice— God’s justice. And God’s justice, made flesh, is Jesus Christ.”

I looked out and saw my new secretary, Barbara, forcing a fake, shotgun wedding smile across her face before she gave me two thumbs up.

“I was commissioned to preach the Gospel,” I said. “And the Gospel— the Gospel of Paul and Peter and James and John and Luke and Mark and Matthew— is that Jesus Christ is Lord. And in their day the Gospel announcement had a counter-cultural correlative, Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not.”

I could tell from the crinkled brows in the crowd that they could not yet tell if or how I was subverting their expectations.

So I decided to make it plain, “And in our day, the Gospel has a counter-cultural correlative to it too. Jesus is Lord, and “We the people” are not. Jesus is Lord, and the Democratic Party is not. Jesus is Lord, and the Republican Party is not.”

Just then, a lady in the front row, wearing a tricornered hat and a t-shirt that said, “Gun Control Means Using Two Hands,” stared daggers at me.

I looked at her and said, “Jesus Christ is the Lord of Time. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last. And America, though it’s deserving of our pride and our commitment and our gratitude, is nevertheless part of what scripture calls the Old Age. And by Cross and Resurrection the Old Age is passing away.

“God bless America!” someone in the back shouted out in defiance.

I nodded, somewhat conciliatory.

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“As wonderful as this nation is,” I said, “we are not God’s Beloved because Jesus Christ is God’s Beloved and his Body is spread throughout the world, which makes every Christian an exile in their homeland and every church an embassy— sovereign territory in the nation of another nation.”

Every church is an embassy, sovereign territory within the nation of an altogether different kingdom.

The crinkled brows in the crowd had turned to crossed arms and angry faces, and a few people got up and left. The Lee Greenwood CD, idling on pause, yawped awake with “At least I know I’m free.” Dr. Stewart was now sitting in his lawn chair mouthing the words, “I told you so.”

I’d lost them.

“Bless your hearts,” I muttered into the microphone.

“What was that?!”

“Uh, nevermind.”

I knew I had to steer this wreck of a sermon off the road as quickly as possible.

So I said, “Independence Day Weekend is as good a time as any to remember that as baptized Christians we carry two passports. We have dual citizenship, yet God is a jealous God and his Son is a Lord who does not share sovereignty.

You may not worship a Golden Calf, but I’m willing to wager a whole lot of you are at risk of giving too much of your fidelity to elephants and donkeys. For Christians, what’s dangerous— spiritually dangerous, what jeopardizes your salvation— is not your patriotism per se but the color of it (Red or Blue).”

Even the Episcopal priest, wearing a rainbow stole over his clergy collar, looked at me like I’d just given him heartburn.

“But America is a City on a Hill— Ronnie Reagan said so,” someone shouted at me, “We’re a Christian nation.”

I ignored it.

“Independence Day is as good a time as any to remember that as baptized Christians, our politics are not determined by Caesar or Rome or Washington. As baptized Christians, our politics— our way being in the world— are conformed to the character of the crucified life that God elected to raise from the dead. Independence Day is as good a time as any to remember that you can be a proud American. You can be thankful for your country. You can serve your country. But if you’re baptized— if your head as been wet with the promises of God— then you’ve pledged your allegiance to Jesus Christ, and your ultimate citizenship is to his Kingdom. Even as you celebrate the thirteen colonies’s independence, don’t forget that your primary duty as the community of disciples is to colonize the earth with the way of Jesus Christ. That’s what we pray when we pray, “Thy Kingdom come…”

I thought that sounded like a good place to end so I quickly said, “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

And the gathered crowd responded with “harummphhhhhhhhhhhhh…….”

I looked up in the crowd and saw that Dr. Stewart, along with most of the crowd, was gone.

No doubt, his is the better sermon, but Jesus on the Mount of Beatitudes makes the same point I attempted to register in my own. At his baptism, like Israel in the exodus, Jesus has crossed the Jordan River. Like the Israelites, Jesus has sojourned in the wilderness where he learned to live by faith alone in his Father.  And now he’s on a mountain, like Moses, issuing a description of the life that shall characterize God’s pilgrim people.

By calling twelve disciples from the crowds, Jesus is reconstituting the People of Israel, which means Jesus is not only creating a distinct people within the Empire but an alternative nation within the nation of Israel.

He’s constituting a nation within the nation. 

A nation within all nations.

It’s here in the beatitudes.

As Stanley Hauerwas writes:

“We misunderstand the beatitudes if we understand them as a scheme of performance. One cannot simply, by making up his mind, set out to mourn or to be persecuted for righteousness’s sake. Jesus is rather saying, “There are some who hunger and thirst for righteousness: good for them! For the Kingdom is at hand and they shall be filled. There are those who make peace; good for them, for the Kingdom is at hand and it shall be known that they are God’s children.”

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It’s not Law. It’s Gospel.

It’s not prescriptive. It’s descriptive.

Of the community Christ is calling to bear witness to the Kingdom.

After the ecumenical Independence Day service ended, the pastors formed a receiving line to shake hands with folks as they left.

I was at the far end of the line. Not wanting any guilt by association, the other pastors had left ample buffer space between them and me. Most people just walked by me and glared at me like I was a payday loan salesman (or a Howard Dean supporter).

A couple of people joked, “I wouldn’t unpack my new office just yet if I were you Rev. MacChellee.” Finally a man in his sixties came up to me. He had a high and tight haircut and was wearing a Hawaiian print shirt and a Marine Corps tattoo on his forearm.

And he said, “Preacher, I just want to thank you.”

“Thank me? For what exactly?”

“I never have understood how Jesus got himself executed by being nothing more than a first century Mr. Rogers, telling us to love our neighbors and what not. But listening to you today, I think I understand why people wanted to kill him.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. It’s in my nature to be contrary. I should’ve listened to Dr. Stewart.”

“I don’t know who Dr. Stewart is,” he replied, “But I’m serious. People say freedom means we’re free to do whatever we want, but doing whatever I want sounds like hell to me. Take it from alcoholic: you living in a world where freedom means I can do whatever I want is surely hell. If what you said is true— about Jesus creating a peculiar people amidst we the people— then I’ve been given something to do and being given something to do feels like a gift. Thank you.”

“That’s a shorter, clearer sermon than I managed to preach,” I told him, “and it has the added benefit of being the gospel.”

“You could maybe stand to preach more succinctly,” he agreed, “Still you helped me see something for the first time; or maybe, I saw something in spite of your sermon.”

“See what?”

“I’ve always thought of Jesus’s cross and resurrection as some kind of exchange between himself and God, but that’s always felt to me like God’s just playing games with himself and we’re just left— what— believing in it. If what you said is true, then Jesus’s cross and resurrection make us agents in the world, agents in God’s history, agents of reconciliation. For the first time, I think I know understand what words like faith and grace mean.”

“What do you think they mean?”

“To be taken up into this Story I didn’t get to choose for myself.”

“Oh, um, well clearly that was what I was attempting to do in my sermon,” I lied.

He laughed and nodded, “Isn’t it funny how Jesus makes it so we can’t find our way in that Story without depending on one another. That must be part of what it means to be saved. Well, anyway, thank you for the sermon.”

“Thank you for your sermon,” I mumbled.

“And a word of advice. You’re new and all. Maybe shoot for a little less in-your-face-offensiveness for the first six months or so.”

“What novel advice,” I said as he walked away and disappeared, like the sower’s seed, into the crowd.

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The Tonto Principle

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“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

Notice how unlike the first two beatitudes, the promise of the third is not the Kingdom of Heaven but the earth. It’s not a pie in the sky sentimentality. It’s a politics. The meek shall inherit this earth. Later in Matthew’s Gospel, when calling his followers to take up his yoke and carry his burden, Jesus describes himself as the meek and even predicts that imitating his meekness will be the cause for the world’s hatred of his followers; meanwhile, St. John the Revelator prophesies of the day when the lamb, who was slain from the foundation of the world, will return to the earth to rule as its true Lord and King, it’s Alpha and Omega. One day the One who is our Beginning will be our End, and only means commensurate with him who is that End are justified. It follows therefore that the trajectory of time, belongs to those who abide in the gentle, non-coercive way of the cross.

“Blessed are those who are meek unto the cross, for they shall inherit the earth.”

It’s not piety.

It’s a politics.

That this third beatitude is not piety but a politics can be seen clearly by putting Jesus’s promise in the inverse: The earth— this world— will not ultimately belong to those who wield power and coercion. Those who now possess the earth by any means necessary will one day lose it, and those who now renounce all other ways but the gentle, self-giving way of the way of the cross will one day share in the Lamb’s rule over the new earth.

Not only is it a politics not a pie in the sky piety, it’s a promise that makes the Son sound much like Mother Mary who, despite her troubled, shameful pregnancy, declares upon the news of her unborn baby’s advent, “the Mighty One…has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Blessed are those who trust the truth of Mary’s claim and so do not themselves resort to power or greed, violence or coercion, to make history come out right— the meek. No matter how things may appear today, one day the Lord will bequeath the earth to them.

It’s a politics.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer notes in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, “with each successive beatitude Jesus deepens the breach between the people and his disciples.” As a result, obedience to Christ’s call makes his disciples more and more visible. By calling forth followers out of the crowd, Jesus is creating an alternative community, a witnessing minority— a light to the nations, as Jesus puts it in the sermon—whose way of life in the world will augur the world that is still but is nevertheless surely to come.

It’s a politics.

The community of discipleship is Christ’s politics.

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In addressing the need for Christians to make discriminating political judgments, the theologian Stanley Hauerwas appeals often to what he calls the “Tonto Principle of Christian Ethics.”

Once upon a time, Tonto and the Lone Ranger found themselves surrounded in the Badlands of South Dakota by 20,000 Sioux. Seeing the grim odds stacked against them, the Lone Ranger turned to Tonto and said, "Gee, this looks pretty tough, Tonto; what do you think we ought to do?" And Tonto replied to the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean “we,” white man?" The Tonto Principle of Christian Ethics critiques the culturally determined assumption that our reaction to political events should be a response that combines the American “we” with the Christian “we” when, in fact, the two represent distinct peoples as Tonto and the Lone Ranger.  Like Tonto surrounded with the Lone Ranger by scores of vengeful Sioux, we Christians are called to discern political events in a manner that is different— unique— from a response shaped by American presuppositions. Whether the issue is gun violence, the war in Ukraine, or abortion, we Christians should sound different than the Americans on MSNBC and FoxNews. Moreover, we have to step back and ask what we Christians have done that we find ourselves so implicated in the world that we cannot differentiate our response as God’s people from the American people’s response.

Just as Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount distinguishes between the crowds and his followers, the fundamental task of discipleship is very often to distinguish the American “we” from the Christian “we.”

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Though I’d read about the Tonto Principle years before, I don’t think I truly understood it until I was a student in seminary and serving as the pastor of an ordinary, humble church outside of Princeton, New Jersey. It was already nearly sundown and I was in the sanctuary, changing the paraments to purple for the season of Advent. Irma was tinkering with the organ which she played every Sunday as though it was an emphysemic kitten. In addition to being the volunteer organist, Irma was the lay leader, the church council chair, the Sunday School superintendent, and the head of the visitation team. Her hair was the color of the cobwebs that hung from the neglected sanctuary lights and her face was creased with the lines and crows feet that attended a lifetime of worrying over and caring for others. Their last pastor had looked like Abraham Lincoln and had been nearly as old; thus, Irma frequently lingered around me, their rookie pastor, as though she was my set of geriatric training wheels.

I’d just changed out the white altar linen when a middle-aged woman wandered inside the sanctuary. I did not know her nor did I recognize her. She fingered the seam on her purse, nervous, and asked if she could speak with the minister. I was wearing a black Strokes band t-shirt so she looked dubious when I announced myself as the pastor. I looked over and saw Irma’s thick-soled shoes sticking out from under the organ as though she was a mechanic changing a muffler. Because the small church did not have an office for the pastor, I gestured to a pew and invited her to sit down. I could tell she was uncomfortable about all of it— being in a church, sitting in a sanctuary, speaking with a pastor. I could tell too that she was exhausted and that she had been crying. After an awkward silence, like it leaked out of her, she said, “We don’t what to do.” Then she burst into tears. Once she had gathered herself again she proceeded to tell me about her teenage daughter, Rachel.

Rachel had a drug and alcohol problem.

Rachel had dropped out of school.

Rachel was pregnant.

Just then the organ let out a moan. Irma, I knew, was stuck to me like a pair of training wheels. And she was eavesdropping.

Rachel’s mother cried and shared how confused and overwhelmed she felt. Rachel was her only family. She had no one to whom she could turn. Rachel, she knew, was not able to raise a child and, given her addictions, she worried what would be the resulting health of Rachel’s baby. Rachel’s mother suddenly asked me if it was wrong for her daughter to get an abortion. “Does the Bible say it’s wrong?” she asked me.

And then I moaned to myself, feeling wholly inadequate for my calling.

I sometimes think pastors in the mainline church act as though they’re terrified they’ll be caught having a conviction and maybe I suspect as much because I know that’s how I felt that afternoon. I stammered and cleared my throat. I determined to avoid saying anything that might offend her. I started to offer her some vague but generally unhelpful gibberish about God’s love and forgiveness when Irma spoke up. I turned around and discovered that with the stealth of a ninja Irma had crept over to us and was standing directly behind me.

“We’ll help you two,” she said, “You three,” she added, correcting herself.

“What?” Rachel’s mother asked, assuming she’d misheard Irma.

“What?!” I thought to myself, knowing I hadn’t misheard her.

“We’ll take of you, the church here. If she has the baby, we’ll take care of you all like you were our family.”

“Take care of them!?” I screamed in my head, “It’s a good Sunday if we’ve got fifty people here. How are we going to take care of anybody? I couldn’t even get a volunteer to change out the paraments.”

Rachel’s mother just started at the old woman standing before her in her black podiatrist shoes and smiling her gray wrinkled face.

“Tell me,” Irma asked, sitting down in the pew between us, “What do you think is the best thing can happen for the three of you?”

Rachel’s mother wiped her nose and thought for a moment. “I guess— I suppose it’s the reason I’m here— I just want us to be at peace.”

And Irma nodded like this was not the first conversation of this sort she had stewarded. “And tell me, what is the worst outcome? What do you fear the most?”

She answered immediately, “I’m afraid Rachel will have this child. I’m afraid it will have defects. I’m afraid our family will be ashamed. I’m afraid our friends will fall away. I’m afraid we’ll be left all alone. I’m just so afraid.”

Irma straightened the pleats on her tan pants and nodded. “You know,” she said, “You really have come to the right place. If what you want is peace and what you fear is being left alone, then what you need is the church.”

Rachel’s mother stared at her looking as dumbfounded as me.

Mention of the word “church” must’ve triggered some reflexive response because Rachel’s mother replied, “I always thought the church was against abortion, that the church said people who have abortions are going to hell.”

Irma ignored her comment and put her hand on the woman’s shoulder.

“Dear, look at you right now. It’s not about rights or choices, laws or— goodness— damnation.” And Irma giggled at the immaturity of such a word.

“All those people with their certainties and self-importance, where are they right now? They might be sincere in their beliefs— certainly some are. It just goes to show what little difference sincerity makes at the end of the day. Such folks have left someone like you and your daughter all alone. You’re alone with this decision and no doubt you’ll be alone months from now when you need more help than you do even now. All alone, with no one to help you and no hope for the future, of course a medical solution seems the most sensible to you.”

Rachel’s mother looked shocked to be hearing such candor in a church sanctuary.

“But take it from an old woman,” Irma continued, “your true problem isn’t one that termination will remedy. Your daughter and you need people who won’t leave you by your lonesome. You need a promise of the future that doesn’t depend on you getting your present life right. You need people around you who will make your life beautiful even if your life is not happy.”

And Irma held out her hands towards the sanctuary like she was unveiling the grand prize on Wheel of Fortune.

“You need the church. This church has raised three children not our own and, as followers of Jesus, we’re always ready to do it again.”

“But is it right?” Rachel’s mother asked, returning to her presenting question. “I know she has the right to…”

Irma waved her off.

“There you go again. Rights.”

And Irma leaned towards her and stared at her intently.

“Don’t go and let America limit the possibilities you can imagine for your life.”

Irma might as well have said, “What do you mean “we,” white man?”

There’s a difference between making the Constitution your bible and making the Bible your constitution. The former says, “You do not have the right to…” The latter says, “We’ll take care of you— we must.”

Rush hour horns honked at the traffic light outside. I stared at Irma in her homemade blouse and taped together spectacles. She was completely at ease with the situation thrust upon her; as though, all the earth was her possession. When Rachel’s mother got up to leave, Irma tapped me on the stomach with the back of her hand.

“I think we handled that pretty well, didn’t we?”

“Uh, yeah, I think we both handled that just swell.”

“I think so,” Irma said.

And she said it again ten months later when we baptized Rachel’s baby.

Rachel named her Leah.

And thanks to the people called church they are on their way to a hard but happy ever after.

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Commenting on the third beatitude in his book Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that in the community of Jesus the End time is already sown into this world’s time. A sign is given. Already the poor in spirit, those who bear suffering by mourning, the meek who wreak the weakness of the cross, those who wage peace, and the children who are pure in heart are already given a piece of the earth. They have the church.

In other words—

Discipleship is not about what works in the world.

Discipleship is about bearing witness to the world that is to come.

Discipleship is not instrumental.

Discipleship is teleological.

That is—

It’s not a means to an end.

It’s a mode that points to the End.

At stake in the Tonto Principle is a simple question about the nature of the church.

I think it’s one of the most important questions.

Do you think Jesus was seeking to create an order for society that enabled people to live their regular lives?

Or, do you think Jesus was providing such a challenge to society that it would be almost impossible for a follower of his ever to live a normal life?

If you choose the first option, then it’s easy to see how so many Christians make the Constitution their bible and outsource discipleship to the United States government.

But if you choose the second option, then the Bible— specifically, the Sermon on the Mount— is your constitution.

And it is not the constitution of the nation.

It is the constitution of the light to the nations.

The community of disciples. 

The church.

Such a vision of the Christian “we” might strike you as impossible or impossibly idealistic, yet not only is it the kind of community Jesus envisages in his Sermon on the Mount, it’s the character of community that first caught the attention of the wider Roman world. Don’t forget, in the first and second centuries Christians were a small, inconsequential sect of Jewish schismatics. Rome cared not at all how Christians understood the doctrine of the Trinity or how the church parsed Christ’s status as fully divine and fully human. But we know from the first century Jewish historian Josephus, for example, that Christianity first caught the attention of the Empire because of a peculiar practice that set them apart in the wider world.

What turned the eyebrows of the empire was the church’s discipline of rescuing unwanted newborns who were abandoned in fields by pagan parents.

It reveals the limitations of our modern presumptions that we somehow think abortion is a contemporary issue. In fact, the Didache, a manual for Christian witness that is older than any document in the New Testament and dates to as early as the middle of the first century, stipulates that “Christians should not murder a child by abortion nor should you kill one who has been born.”

So when the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church state that “Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother” they are merely reaffirming a position literally as old as the holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Christians have no illusions about how difficult much of life can be. Such illusions are an impossibility if Christians are truly engaged in ministry alongside the kinds of people named by the beatitudes. Nevertheless, Christians persist in welcoming children because it’s most precisely with those we cannot control or anticipate that we best learn how to love.

As Stanley Hauerwas writes:

“Children, the weak, the ill, the dispossessed provide a particularly intense occasion for such love, as they are beings we cannot control. We must love them for what they are rather than what we want or wish them to be, and as a result we discover that we are capable of love…the difference between the non-Christian and the Christian is only that what is a possibility for the non-Christian is a calling for the Christian.”

About ten years ago, I was leading a church-wide study on Christian perspectives on ethical issues. During the session on abortion, I told the same story about Irma that I told you. After the evening session, we were stacking chairs in the fellowship hall and a woman about my age came up to me. She looked both righteously PO’d and desperately earnest.

“I saw the blurb about the class on the church sign out front so I thought I’d check it out.”

“Oh really?” I said and silently congratulated myself for my savvy church marketing. “It’s great you came.”

“Not really,” she replied in a flat tone, her voice just below a tremble. “Maybe it’s because you’re man, it certainly doesn’t help your that you’re a man,” she said, “But I think it’s because you’re a pastor.”

“Um, I don’t know that I follow…”

“The only church you ever attend is your own church, am I right?”

“Uh, I guess so. Yeah.”

“Well then— I mean, damn, you couldn’t possibly know, could you?”

“Know what?” I asked, genuinely flummoxed.

“You can’t possibly know how rare is that lady and her church is.”

The tears had started to well up in her eyes.

“I had an abortion five years ago. I went to dozens of churches before and since and I’ve never once found the kind of community you described.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, lamely.

She shook her head.

“I’ll tell you what’s bad, pastor— bad for your argument anyway. I discovered more grace and forgiveness, more compassion and companionship, more hands-on support and unconditional acceptance of my brokenness in the abortion clinic than at any church who claimed to welcome me.”

I just stood there, silent.

Red-faced.

Unsure which of my go-to excuses I should choose.

“It seems to me,” she said, “there would be a lot less need for abortion if the church was half as good at its job as the clinic is at theirs.”

And then she shook my hand and walked out without even realizing that the earth was her inheritance.

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For Christians—not for Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, men or women, Americans— abortion is not fundamentally a question about law or medicine but about what kind of people we are to be as the church because, of course, Christ’s aim in the Sermon on the Mount is to insure that he himself cannot be known apart from the lives of his disciples. The purpose of Jesus’s sermon is to make it so that the world cannot know Jesus without witnesses.

Like Irma.

Like you.

Like me.

It seems like a terrible gamble to me but take it up with Jesus.

I was flying home on a plane last night. I boarded early and I had my Bible and laptop open on the tray table when the man assigned to the adjacent seat sat down. It’s usually functions as a sign that says, “Leave me alone.” He looked at my Bible and said for our whole section to hear, “I’ve never believed any of that make-believe.” Excellent, I thought.

About an hour into our flight, I started to read the front page of the newspaper.

“What do you think we can about it?” He asked me, pointing to the headline about Friday’s decision.

“What do you mean we?” I asked.

Our task— our calling— is the same today as it was yesterday.

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An Offered Checkmate

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Matthew 5.1-3

When I first met her, I asked her point blank (I am an Enneagram 8, after all, why waste time dickering), “So who the hell are you? What’s your story?” Kara chuckled and replied, “Who am I? Well, I think the best and most determinative answer is that I am a sinner saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Everything else about my life flows from there.” Kara is the canon theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, a priest at Trinity Episcopal Church, and a faculty member at Princeton. Her first PhD, however, is in mechanical engineering from Duke University with a speciality in non-linear dynamics; that is, how complicated systems under stress behave. Her expertise in non-linear dynamics led her into aerospace science— satellites, drones, and rockets.

When she graduated from Duke the first time, the federal government recruited her to work at the NASA research facility in Hampton, Virginia. She started working at NASA’s rocket laboratory in January 2001. Nine months later planes took off from the same facility, flying past her office window. The chain of command had dispatched them to shoot down Flight 93 somewhere over western Pennsylvania before it reached Washington DC. In the days after September 11, 2001, Kara began to intuit that the nature of her work would quickly change. Space exploration, she rightly judged, would no longer be the government’s priority for her research (if it ever truly was in the first place). America would need drones, rockets, and satellites in other places and for a much different purpose.

Kara shared with me how she struggled, knowing that, as a follower of Christ, and her expertise would soon serve ends she had heretofore failed to countenance:

“I grew up in the Church. But in the years after 9/11– with the invasion of Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, and the surveillance of Americans— I started wrestling for the first time with the question, What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? To put a finer point on it, What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus who is doing this particular work? I’m a sinner saved by the grace of Jesus Christ, of course, but also— more so— the Jesus whose grace saves me is the same Jesus who brought the Kingdom of God near to us in time. Over and over again, I would be at work and I would find myself asking myself, “Is this really okay? Should I be doing this?” I endured in that way for over five years. But the work I was doing kept bumping up against the faith I was professing. I discovered that the disconnect had made my life personally destructive, and I feared it had also made my faith unintelligible. How could I claim in any meaningful way that I worshipped the Prince of Peace if I knew my work led directly to civilian casualties?”

As a result of the stress, her personal life fell apart.

She left NASA.

“I lost a lot,” Kara told me, “but the balancing act proved unsustainable. I couldn’t keep serving two different kingdoms. If Jesus has brought the Kingdom then I need to live at home in it.”

Now compare Kara Slade to Pastor Sean Moon, founder of the Unification Church and Rod of Iron Ministries. The estimated three million members of Rod of Iron Ministries believe the AR-15 is the Rod of Iron mentioned in the Book of Revelation, and the Church uses the rifle in their liturgical ceremonies. They’ve also put the AR-15 on their church flag and Pastor Moon keeps a gold-plated AR-15 on his desk. “The Lord is a warrior,” he explains, “ and in Revelation 19 it says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A mighty warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe … I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies because he’s coming back as a warrior carrying a sword.” He added to this claim that the sword of which Revelation speaks is not a literal sword but the AR-15, and that the Second Amendment as a teaching that came from Jesus.

Pastor Sean Moon is especially fond of the Florida’s gunmaker, Spike’s Tactical, who makes an AR-15-style rifle called the “Crusader.” Spike’s Tactical chose the name intentionally, carefully, explaining on their website: “Spike’s Tactical created a balanced reliable rifle that would bring an excellent fighting rifle to people of all abilities and resources. The every man fighting rifle. We named it Crusader and engraved Psalm 144:1 on the lower receiver to hoist the flag of our faith and to make a statement, reminding our customers that we are with you. The war is here. We have a Christian duty to defend our homeland and our way of life with force. The rifle features an engraved Templar shield logo opposite the psalm, and has three settings on it (safety, single fire and semi-auto) but named, “Pax, Bellum, & Deus Vult,” or “Peace, War, and God Wills It.

Peace, War, God Wills It— that was the battle cry of the First Crusade.

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The distinction between Kara Slade’s story and Sean Moon’s “ministry” is more than a contrast in politics. It is a difference over how to interpret Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. More determinatively, it is disagreement about time. Kara Slade and Sean Moon exemplify two divergent ways of conceiving the time in which we live as followers of Jesus Christ. It’s a question of what time is it.

Either we live in the time after the time when Christ our Lord has brought the Kingdom of God near in himself and therefore the Kingdom determines how we, as disciples, live our present lives.

Or, we live still in a time of advent in which the cross of Christ was not the turning of the ages and therefore the Kingdom of God can be nothing more than a hopeful, burdensome ideal in the present or a possibility for the eschatological future but regardless it has no authoritative bearing upon our present lives.

It’s a difference in telling time.

It’s a question of the time in which followers of Jesus live.

If you think I’m in danger of making the first beatitude, which sounds rather simple and straightforward, needlessly philosophical, then I invite you to turn to the passage which immediately precedes the Beatitudes and thus provides the interpretative key for the entire Sermon on the Mount. The very reason Jesus has attracted crowds who have followed him up the Mount of Beatitudes is that, having been tempted in the wilderness for forty days, Jesus inaugurated his ministry by making the audacious claim, “The Kingdom of God has come near.” Note too, for example, how Christ conjugates the first beatitude not in the future tense but the present, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”

Is not will be.

Christ can announce the Kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit because the Kingdom has already come. In him. He has brought the Kingdom in himself for in Christ the One who announces the Kingdom and the Kingdom itself are one; such that, to be in Christ is now to belong to his Kingdom. Unless we understand what time it is according to Christ— that is, unless we know the Kingdom has already been brought near by Jesus— then we are bereft of the resources to understand, much less live, the Sermon on the Mount— which, by the way, are the same thing. That the announcement of the Kingdom precedes the Sermon on the Mount means that the Sermon on the Mount presupposes the existence of a community committed to living as though we are already at home in the Kingdom of God.

In other words, the Sermon on the Mount is not a prescription. It’s not, Become a peacemaker and you will inherit the Kingdom. It’s not Law; it’s description. It is the characterization of the community called out from the world and gathered around Jesus. This is why, for example, Matthew makes a point in verse one to distinguish between the crowds, whose curiosity about Jesus has led them up the mountain, and the disciples, whose commitment to follow have led them to venture further up the mountain to Jesus.

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But I can’t do what Kara Slade did, you may be thinking— just as you may be thinking that Sean Moon is perhaps an exaggerated example of a way in the world that nonetheless makes sense given the way of the world. Again, the Sermon on the Mount is a description not of an individual disciple but of a community committed to living the Kingdom that has come near in Christ.

The Sermon on the Mount is not simply directed to a community of disciples; it requires a community of disciples.

As Stanley Hauerwas writes, “To live in the manner described by the Sermon on the Mount requires learning to trust in others to help me so live.” Jesus has just announced the nearness of the Kingdom and called the twelve to it. He’s gathering a distinct, particular community from the world. The aim of the Sermon on the Mount is to create dependence among us. It’s purpose is to force us to need one another. I can’t do what Kara Slade did, but maybe you can and, together, we can equip one another to bear witness to the Kingdom Christ has already brought near. Discipleship then is not about the goals it seeks to reach but the Lord it seeks to reflect.

This means the Sermon on the Mount cannot be read rightly by those not formed into a community of discipleship. No matter how much alleged sense the golden rule might make to an unbeliever, Christ’s teaching that we should love our neighbor as ourselves is nevertheless unintelligible apart from the conviction that in Christ God became our neighbor and loved us while we were yet his enemies. Or take the first beatitude.

An unbeliever may assume they can guess what Jesus might mean by a person who is poor in spirit.

Only a believer, however, will know that the Sermon on the Mount is first of all the self-interpretation of Jesus.

Poor in spirit is an attribute that distinguishes him, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” You must first be a member of a community of discipleship before you can know that to be poor in spirit is to look upon the world and weep— weep like Jesus before Jerusalem; weep “for they do not know the things that make for peace.”

What’s true of any sermon is all the more the case with Christ’s sermon. The sermon cannot be isolated from the congregation to which it’s preached. The Sermon on the Mount requires a community of mutual dependence. This is the reason the Sermon on the Mount often functioned as a catechism in the ancient Church for converts to the Gospel. If you are to interpret the Sermon on the Mount properly, you must already be a member of a people shaped by habits that those who do not follow Jesus cannot be expected to possess.

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One late summer Sunday in my first church—

The assigned scripture that Sunday was Matthew 18, the passage where Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" And Jesus answers, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.””

After the worship service, the postlude was still playing on the organ and I was standing outside on the church steps ready to greet folks. A woman about my mother’s age at the time marched out of the sanctuary with three kids in tow and elbowed her way in front of an old man with a walker. With absolute fury in her eyes and loud enough for everyone in line to hear she said: “Do you mean to tell me I need to forgive my ex-husband for cheating on me and then walking out on me and the kids?”

You all know me by now. You know how good I am in these situations. So when she hit me with her question, I replied eloquently, “Uh....”

And I qualified and equivocated: “Well...um...Jesus was just talking to Peter not all of the disciples and...Jesus doesn’t say that in every single Gospel...and— you know how preachers are— often Jesus speaks in hyperbole to get his point across...I’m sure Jesus understands how you must feel...”

But she just kept staring at me.

And I stammered some more. Until finally I surrendered and said, “Um, uh, well, I suppose, yes, I think Jesus would... probably... tell you to forgive him...I guess.” I expected her to storm off, seething, and maybe send me an email the next morning reiterating all the ways I was an idiot. But she didn’t. She just looked me square in the eye and said, “Good. That sounds like it will take me somewhere other than the place I’m in right now.”

I smiled, relieved. I wiped the flop sweat from my forehead and waited for her to move on her way, but she kept standing there, peering at me.

“Can I help you?”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How am I supposed to forgive him?”

“I don’t have a damn clue,” I said. But then I looked down the sanctuary aisle at an old, gruff woman named Dot, a survivor of domestic abuse.

“I don’t have a damn clue, but there’s someone here who knows the way.”

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Just as a sermon cannot be abstracted from the congregation so too the sermon cannot be separated from the one who preaches it.  When we approach the Sermon on the Mount with supposedly realist assumptions, asking questions like “Do I really have to give to everyone who begs of me?” or “Does he mean turn the other cheek, literally?” we obscure the fact that the preacher of the sermon is Jesus. The identity of the proclaimer makes all the difference for how we hear the Sermon. In this case, the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount is the proclaimer of the Kingdom. And Jesus is not only the proclaimer of the Kingdom, he is the advent of that Kingdom and we must hear his Sermon according to the new time— the time of the Kingdom— he has inaugurated.

In his twelve page footnote on the Sermon on the Mount, the theologian Karl Barth analogizes our time in the Kingdom to “an offered checkmate” in a game of chess wherein one player has all but one won but the other player may wonder for another moment or two if there is not the possibility of avoiding the other’s victory. Barth writes:

“The reign of the Kingdom of God seems not yet to have come, or merely to have drawn near, or merely to beckon…as a future possibility. The Sermon on the Mount reckons with this powerful and fatal appearance by saying of those who are poor in spirit that theirs is the Kingdom now….because they hope for it, they already have it; because they know that it has come, they are already called to live as citizens within it. The chess game is actually already There are only one or two moves left and the outcome is determined in God’s gracious covenant love. The Beatitudes witness to this reality, and summon us to celebrate it by living into the reign of God.”

If Jesus is the promised Christ, if he has brought the future Kingdom near, if his cross is the turning of the ages, then to hear the Sermon on the Mount as a naive or idealistic ethic is think according to the old age of sin and death, an age that, on account of Christ is already passing away. If the Gospel is true, then Christ has made it possible through his death and resurrection for us to live in accordance with the way of life described by the Sermon, for the Son has demonstrated for us a way of faithfulness that trusts in nothing less than the Father’s vindicating love.

After all, it’s less obvious to us today perhaps, but when Matthew’s initial audience first heard Matthew’s Gospel their immediate reaction would have been to recognize that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount had, incontrovertibly, suffered and died while living in exactly the manner envisaged by the Sermon. Precisely because Christ is risen we can know that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount is not one who extols a way of life never tested or tried. The crucified Christ is risen indeed; therefore, we know as unmistakably as an empty grave that the new age has begun and that we can, by depending upon one another, live at home in it.

If Christ is risen, the way of life described by the Sermon on the Mount— the Kingdom of God— is not an impossible ideal.

It’s reality.

It’s the realest reality in the world.

And what we take to be “the real world,” the world of sin and poverty, violence and greed, is, in fact, the unreal world destined to pass away because in Christ it already has passed away. In Christ, the real world of the Kingdom already belongs to the poor and the meek and the peacemakers.

I know talk about time and the turning of the ages can sound abstract, but just Thursday night I was watching the January 6 hearings on my tablet. Once again, I was struck by the ubiquity of the Christian flag in the video footage Liz Cheney showed of the mob at the insurrection.

The world desperately needs more disciples willing to venture beyond the crowd, a people who know what time it is. The Church needs more followers who believe the Kingdom has been brought near and who attempt to live at home in it.

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Sixteen years ago, in a small Amish community in Georgetown, Pennsylvania, twelve-year-old Emmanuel King left his home around 5:30, as he did most mornings, to help a neighboring Amish family milk their cows. He rode his scooter out his family’s mile-long farm lane and turned right onto Georgetown Road. As he rounded a slight turn, an oncoming pickup truck crossed the center line, struck little Emmanuel and threw him to the far side of the road. The truck hit a fence post and sped away.

The next day, a reporter covering the hit-and-run accident went to Emmanuel’s home, but what the reporter found was not what he had expected— a gracious spirit toward the woman whom police considered and later confirmed to be the hit-and-run suspect. Emmanuel’s mother was grief-stricken but nevertheless wanted to convey a message to the woman. “She should come here. We would like to see her,” she told the reporter. “We hold nothing against her. We would like to tell her we forgive her.”

When the driver read the newspaper headline,  “A Boy’s Death, a Family’s Forgiveness,” she did a surprising thing. She went to the King family home to receive their words of forgiveness. She returned again for Emmanuel’s viewing and again for his funeral. Over the next several weeks she came back three more times and, later, she bought a new scooter for the children on what would have been Emmanuel’s thirteenth birthday.

When a reporter asked a family member why they would forgive the woman who killed their son and left him dead in the ditch, the reporter was told, “Because that’s just the way the real world works.”

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Letter to My Goddaughter

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Dear Elin,

You already know your colors and your words have come in a rush since I visited you just over a year ago. By the time you’re able to read this letter for yourself, you hopefully have learned the word “Pentecost.” It’s the Greek word for the Jewish festival called Shavuot. Pentecost comes every year fifty days after Easter. It’s on Pentecost, St. Luke reports, that God the Holy Spirit falls upon the pilgrims in Jerusalem like tongues of fire. For this reason, you may have noticed, every Pentecost churches (the altar guild cosa nostra) adorn their altars with paraments as red as the watermelons on your spring dress.

On Pentecost three years ago God made you a Christian, and your parents made me your godfather. No, you did not have a say in either case. This speaks volumes about the nature of discipleship. On the first Pentecost, Elin, the Holy Spirit overwhelms Peter and, as your Mom might say, the Living Word has its way with him. Peter preaches the first Christian sermon; or rather, the Lord speaks through him. “This Jesus whom you crucified,” Peter announces, “God raised him up, and we have all been made witnesses.” That the Gospel requires witnesses, Elin, is the reason you’ve been stuck with me as your “Bonus Dad,” for, as often you might hear the phrase “cradle to grave Episcopalian,” there are no second generation Christians. Christians are made not born. The Church is sustained not through children but by witness. Your parents made it a part of my own vocation to bear witness to you; so that, you might one day learn how to speak Christian or, even better, live in a way that makes no sense if God has not raised Jesus from the dead.

Many Christians, you may have already noticed, perhaps most Christians, instead live as functional atheists. There’s a reason. It’s hard to be a Christian in Christendom.

God should make you odd.

For example, your baptism commits you to struggling with some odd, inconvenient choices. “Will you serve the Messiah or Mammon?” is one such dilemma. “Will you study hard to get as far up the ladder as you can or will you attempt the posture of servant?” is another question that’s the stuff of the right kind of nightmares. “Will you trust that happiness is what can be captured in a filtered, homogenized Instagram pic or will you cross your fingers and trust that happiness is found among those who, let’s say, hunger and thirst for God’s justice?”  They’re inconvenient choices because in every case the choice your baptism commits you to goes against the grain of both country and culture. Therefore, if the Church is faithful to its promises to you (and consigning you to the cry room balcony augurs a poor beginning) your baptism made you not just a Christian. It’s made you odd.

By the time you read this letter, Elin, you’ll likely be the age when “odd” is about the last thing you’ll want to be. By the time you read this you’ll be an age where what you want most is to conform, blend in, be normal, a desire that afflicts even us grown-ups. I won’t be shocked then if you’d like to register your complaint with me for what we’ve done to you in baptizing you. But, truth be told, you should take your gripes up with your parents too. They were more than just accessories to the crime. Your baptism? They did it without your consent. They did it against your will even. They didn’t wait until you were old enough to “understand,” whatever that may mean. They didn’t postpone your baptism until you could choose it for yourself, and in that your parents may have done the boldest thing they could ever do for you.

Elin, I can guess what you’re thinking: it was just a bowl of H2O. True, but trust me. Your baptism may be the most counter-cultural act your parents ever commit. By baptizing you into the way of the cross BEFORE you can make up your mind for yourself your parents prophetically, counter-culturally acknowledge that you did not have a mind worth making up. Even as I write this letter to you, you still do not have a mind worth making up on your own.

Again, this is the wisdom behind that Pentecost word, “witness.”

None of us have minds worth making up until you’ve had your mind (and your heart and your habits too) shaped by Christ. The God-Man who is both Mary’s boy and Mary’s Maker” Who both died and was before time? This not the sort of thing you can choose for yourself as you would between berries and bananas on the way home from preschool. How could you possibly make up your own mind? Choose for yourself?  After all, what it means to be free, Elin, to be fully human, is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself just as Jesus loved. So how could you ever make up your own mind, choose for yourself, until after you’ve apprenticed under Jesus? I realize telling you that you don’t have a mind worth making up on your own sounds offensive. If it sounds like I’m being offensive in order to get your attention it’s because I am. Indeed I have to be offensive. We live in a culture that thinks Christianity is something you get to choose (or not), as though it’s no different than choosing between an iPhone or a Droid.

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Surely, in Texas you will have noticed how no one in our country thinks it unusual to raise their children to love their country, to serve their country and even die for it. But people do think their kids loving God, serving God and possibly suffering for God should be left up to their own “choice.” It’s just such a prejudice that produces nonsense like the statement, “I believe Jesus Christ is Lord...but that’s just my personal opinion.” When engaged couples tell me they’re going to let their children choose their religion for themselves when they’re older, I often reply to those couples that they should raise their kids to be atheists, for at least that would require their children to see their parents held convictions.

Our culture teaches us to think we should get to choose the Story of our life for ourselves. But notice how this is, in itself, a Story none of us got to choose, which makes it not just a Story but a fiction.

A lie.

It’s a lie to suppose that the choice is between religion or no religion.

It’s a lie to suppose that the choice is between faith or no faith.

It’s a fiction, to believe the choice is either the Christian Story or No Story.

On this day three years ago we baptized you against your will, before you could make up your own mind or choose a Story for yourself. We did so because if we do not make you a participant in the story of Christ then another rival Story will soon and surely takes its place over your life.

The Story or More.

Or Might.

The Bible refers to those stories as the gods of Mammon and Mars.

They’re barren deities.

Three years ago today, by immersing you in a Story not of your own choosing, your parents went against the grain of the culture. It was prophetic act that’s made all the bolder when you pause to consider that in baptizing you your mother accepted that one day you may have to suffer for her convictions, the convictions that brought you to the font. Maybe you’re wondering, Elin, how in the world the convictions we mediated to you could lead you to suffering. After all, you might be thinking, “Christianity is about a personal relationship with God. Faith is private, a matter of the heart.”

Context is always key.

When much of the New Testament was written, Christianity was a small, odd community amidst an empire antithetical to it. Christians were a nation within a nation. Christianity represented an alternative fealty to country and culture and even family (just look up the crazy things Jesus said about hating your father and mother). Baptism then was not a religious seal on a life you would’ve lived anyway. It was a radical coming out. It was an act of repentance in the most original meaning of that word: it was a reorientation of everything that had come before.

To profess “Jesus is Lord” was to simultaneously protest that “Caesar is not Lord.” As I hope you’ll learn in confirmation— or in old episodes of the pod I’ve done with your Mom,  the words mean the same thing, Caesar and Christ.

They both mean King.

Lord.

You cannot affirm one with out renouncing the other. This is why in the early church and for centuries after when you submitted to baptism, you’d first be led outside. By a pool of water, you’d be stripped naked. Every bit of you laid bare, even the naughty bits. And first you’d face West, the direction where the darkness begins, and you would renounce the powers of this world, the ways of this world, the evils and injustices of this world, the world of More and Might. Then, leaving that old world behind, you would turn and face East, the direction whence Light comes, and you would affirm your faith in Jesus and everything that new way of life would demand. In other words, baptism was your pledge allegiance to the Caesar named Yeshua.

If that doesn’t sound much like baptism to you, Elin, there’s a reason for that. A few hundred years after St. Paul wrote his letters, the Caesar of that day, Constantine, discovered that it would behoove his hold on power to become a Christian and make the Empire Christian too. Whereas prior to Constantine it took significant conviction to become a Christian, after Constantine it took considerable courage NOT to become a Christian. After Constantine, with the ways of the world ostensibly baptized, what had formerly been renounced became Christian-ish.

Consequently, what it meant to be a Christian changed.

It moved inside, to our heads and hearts. What had been an alternative way in the world became a religion that awaited the world to come. Jesus was demoted from Risen Lord of the Earth to Secretary of Afterlife Affairs. Faith became synonymous with beliefs or feelings.

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Elin, I apologize for the historical detour, but I do want you to see how it’s the shift that happened with Constantine that makes it possible for us to assume that when scripture speaks of faith it’s intends more than our personal beliefs or private feelings, or that when the Bible mentions “salvation” it merely has life after death in mind. Nothing could be further off the mark because the word for faith in the New Testament is best expressed by our word “loyalty.”

Allegiance.

I mentioned Shavuot, Elin, the other name for the day when you were baptized. It’s the holiday when Jews celebrate Yahweh giving the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, St. Paul says that Jesus is the end of the Law, and the word Paul uses for end is telos. Think of a telescope or a telegraph. He means that Jesus is the aim or the goal of all that God spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai. All those strange kosher laws in Leviticus? They anticipated the day when Christ would call his disciples to be a different and distinct People in the world. “Eye for an eye?” It was meant to prepare a People who could turn the other cheek. The “You shall have no other gods” command was given so that we could recognize that kind of faith when it finally took flesh and dwelled among us.

When Paul writes that Christ is the telos of the Law, he simply dittos what Jesus himself says to kick off his most important sermon: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”Another way of saying that is how Paul puts it in a different letter when he writes that “Jesus is the eikon of the invisible God.”

He means— and, Elin, trust me; this is everything: the life of Jesus displays the grain of the universe.

And that’s why being loyal to Christ can be so difficult and complicated, Elin, because if the life of Jesus displays the grain of the universe then Christianity entails a hell of a lot more than believing in Jesus. It’s about following after Jesus. It’s about immersing ourselves in the way of Jesus, which by the way is what the word “baptize” means. Immerse.

Elin, what scripture intends by calling Jesus God’s telos is the same claim with which we wet your head: that the truth of the universe is revealed not in the grain of the judge's walnut gavel, not in the grain of the banker's mahogany desk, not in the grain of the oval office’s mahajua floor, and certainly not in the fake grain of an AR15’s laminated stock. The grain of the universe is revealed in the pattern of life that led to the pounding of nails into wood through flesh and bone. If you’re tracking with me that can sound like bad news as often as it sounds like Gospel.

Because if Jesus reveals the grain, the telos, of the universe, then that means:

The way to deal with offenders is to forgive them.

The way to deal with violence is to suffer.

The way to deal with war is to wage peace.

The way to deal with money is to give it away.

And the way to deal with the poor is to befriend them.

The way to deal with enemies is to love them and pray for them.

And the way to deal with a world that runs against the grain is to live on Earth as though you were in Heaven.

Perhaps now, Elin, you’re beginning to intuit how what we did to you today three years ago— if we follow through on our end— will make you a lot more dysfunctional in our world than you otherwise would have been. It’s no wonder our culture— Christians included— would prefer us simply to “believe.” Believe in a generic god. Or just believe in the freedom to believe. The “beauty of nature may lead you to declare the glory of God,” as the Psalmist sings, but the beauty of nature won’t ever lead you to a Jew from Nazareth. And you can be safe and damn certain it won’t ever lead you to a cross.

But the way of the cross is the path to which we committed you.

If I’m honest, a part of me feels as though I should say I’m sorry, for if you stay true to that path you’ve no reason to suppose it’ll turn out any better for you than it did for Jesus. On the other hand, I recall enough from middle school Shop Class to know that whenever you work against the grain, even when that seems the easiest, most obvious thing to do, eventually you’ll run into difficulty. And ultimately the fruit of your labor will not be beautiful. Perhaps as much as anything that’s what it means to have faith in Jesus, the telos of the universe. It’s to trust that in the End the shape of his life will have made yours more and more beautiful than it could have otherwise been.

Love,

Jason

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The Fellowship of the Crucified

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Father Christian de Cherge was a French Catholic monk and the prior in charge of the Abbey of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria. He was beautified four years ago.

Christian De Cherge had served there as an officer in the French army during the Algerian War and, shortly after his ordination to the priesthood in 1964, he returned to the country to minister from the little abbey to the poor, mostly Muslim community of Tibhirine. De Cherge’s father viewed his son’s vocation with unmeasured disappointment. After all, their son was brilliant. He’d graduated at the top of his class and his future could have been bright, pursuing any career he chose.

Instead de Cherge felt called.

Along with his fellow monks, de Cherge toiled in relative obscurity for three decades, winning the trust of the poor and befriending leaders in the local Islamic government. When Islamic radicalism spread to Algeria in the early 1990’s, to the consternation of their superiors in Rome and to the anger of their families in Paris, de Cherge and his fellow monks refused to leave their monastery, because they refused to cease serving the community’s poor. To meet a violent end, they knew, might simply be the consequence of constancy to the Lord who had called them to such a place.

On January 1, 1994 a premonition came over de Cherge, a vision of his own impending murder. Indeed he and seven of his brothers from the Abbey were kidnapped and eventually beheaded by terrorists calling themselves the Armed Islamic Group. Anticipating his own murder, Christian composed a final testament and posted it to his family to be read upon his death.

In it, de Cherge wrote:

“If it should happen one day—and it could be today—that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church and my family to remember that my life was not taken. My life was GIVEN to God. Indeed this ending had its beginning in my baptism.

I ask them to accept the fact that our Lord was not a stranger to this brutal departure.

I would ask them to pray for me: for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?

I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity.

My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value. In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood.

I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems to prevail so terribly in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.

I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.

I could not desire such a death. It seems to me important to state this.

Obviously, my death will appear to confirm those who hastily judged me naive or idealistic: "Let him tell us now what he thinks of his ideals!"

But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free.

This is what I shall be able to do, God willing: immerse my gaze in that of the Father to contemplate with him His children of Islam just as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.

For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything.

In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, my friends of this place, along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families -- you are the hundredfold granted as was promised!”

Finally, remarkably, at the end of his letter de Cherge addresses his executioner with absolution:

“And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing:

Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this Adieu to be a "GOD BLESS" for you, too, because in God's face I see yours.

May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.

AMEN! INSHALLAH!

— C
Tibhirine, 1st January 1994

On receiving the news of her son’s beheading, Christian de Cherge’s mother opened his sealed letter and read his testimony on May 26, 1996.

It was Pentecost Sunday.

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As it turns out, Pentecost was a fitting feast day to read her son’s final adieu for the red paraments of Christian altars and the red doors of many churches have always symbolized not only the God who comes like tongues of fire but the blood of the martyred saints. Indeed the Church has always been sustained and nourished by both the Holy Spirit and the blood of the saints.

As Stanley Hauerwas writes:

“Put simply as I can, I think it true that if there were no martyrs there would be no Christianity…we are still only able to be Christians by the ongoing sacrifice of the martyrs.”

In fact, it’s on Pentecost that Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, preaches the first Christian sermon in which he declares, “This Jesus whom you killed God raised up and of that we have all been made witnesses.” And that word, witness, in the Greek it’s martyras.

This Jesus whom you killed God resurrected and we have all been made witnesses. We have all been made [potential] martyrs.

The word witness and the word martyr are the same word in scripture.

Not witness and crusader.

Witness and martyr.

It’s sewn into the meaning of the word that to bear witness to God’s mighty acts in Jesus Christ is to elicit hostility and confrontation from the world— even that word, world, has sinister connotations in scripture.

In other words, to be incorporated into Christ and his Kingdom is to be conscripted into conflict, for the Lord of the Kingdom of Heaven is the Christ whom the world crucified. You can see the conflict announced in our scripture text today, an earlier appearance of the Holy Spirit. By preaching on the banks of the Jordan River, John symbolically recapitulates Israel’s exodus from Egypt into the promised land, which itself is a prophetic critique that God’s people have not lived up to their vocation to be a light to the nations. Instead, like all the other kingdoms of the world, Israel has chosen to worship at the altars of the false gods, Mammon and Mars, Greed and Violence.

That John calls God’s People to repentance in the wilderness of Judea not at the temple in Jerusalem is a rebuke of Israel’s entire temple system. It’s a righteous rejection, as unsubtle as his camel hair coat, of Israel’s priestly caste, all of whom— in the name of peace and stability—actively collaborate with Caesar whose evil empire is built— like all empires— on fealty to Mammon and Mars, Greed and Violence. This is why John calls the priests who have come from Jerusalem to Judea to investigate him a “brood of vipers” who are ripe for the wrath of God and he refuses to baptize them.

Jesus signals his agreement with John’s unyielding critique of the kingdoms of this world by electing to begin his ministry with John’s own message.

All of the Gospels go to lengths to report that Jesus initiates his work of announcing the Kingdom of God by joining John’s prophetic critique of the kingdoms of this world. This is why Jesus submits to John’s baptism even though Jesus is without sin and has no unrighteousness that requires repentance. Jesus begins his work of announcing the Kingdom of God by submitting to John the Baptist’s baptism in order to signal his concurrence with John’s message. It’s not just an act of humility; it’s an act of solidarity. In other words, by accepting John the Baptist’s baptism Jesus announces that the Kingdom he brings will be an alternative to the kingdoms of this world. He’s not bringing advice for how his followers can negotiate life in the kingdoms of this world. He’s not bringing insights to add to the kingdoms we build in this world. He’s bringing an alternative. He’s calling forth an alternative community.

As Jesus came up out of the water, Matthew reports, the sky was torn asunder and the Holy Spirit appeared as a dove, alighting upon Jesus.

Now remember, Matthew’s writing to people who knew their scripture by memory. So when Matthew identifies the Holy Spirit as a dove, he expects you to know that no where in the Old Testament does scripture depict the Holy Spirit of God as a dove. No, Matthew expects you to remember that the image of a dove is from the Book of Genesis, where God promises never to redeem his creation through violence. Matthew expects you to know that applying the image of a dove to the Holy Spirit means something new and different. And keep in mind, Matthew’s Gospel wasn’t composed for us but for the first Christians, still living in the empire that crucified Christ. So when Matthew depicts the Holy Spirit as a dove, he expects those first Christians to think immediately of another, different bird. The Romans, Matthew assumes you know, symbolized the strength and ferocity of their kingdom with the king of the birds, the eagle. It was as ubiquitous a symbol in the Roman Empire as it is in the empire called America. The eagle sat atop imperial banner stands, its talons gripping with the letters SPQR. Rome etched the eagle into monuments, sewed it into flags, and stamped it onto currency.

In all four Gospels, the ministry of Jesus begins with this symbolic, visual clash, Dove vs. Eagle.

A collision of kingdoms.

That’s what Matthew wants you to see, but that’s not all Matthew wants you to see because in the very next verse God declares, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well-pleased.” The Father’s declaration over the Son is a direct quotation from the second psalm, an enthronement psalm that anticipates the coming of God’s Messiah, who would topple rulers from their thrones and be enthroned himself over all the kingdoms of this world:

“The Lord said to me, ‘You are my beloved son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’”

Matthew expects you to know Psalm 2.

Just as Matthew assumes you know that the prophet Isaiah quotes it too when God reveals to him that the Messiah will upend kingdoms not through violence but through self-giving love.

There’s a reason we started a series on Matthew 5-7 in Matthew 3. The order in which the Matthew arranges his Gospel is constitutive of Matthew’s message. Matthew starts you not at the temple in Jerusalem but at the Jordan River in Judea. Matthew shows you a Dove not an Eagle. Matthew reports to you the Father calls the Son “beloved.” Matthew informs you that next, immediately after his baptism, Jesus encounters the devil in the wilderness, who tells Jesus that the kingdoms of this world are the devil’s possession to give. And finally Matthew tells you— chapter five— that, having been tempted by the Ruler of this world,  the very first words out of Jesus’s mouth announce an alternative Kingdom, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”

The Sermon on the Mount is the constitution of the Kingdom Christ brings. The Beatitudes are the preamble to the constitution of the Kingdom Christ brings. And baptism is the passport that makes you a citizen of the Kingdom Christ brings.

This is why, for instance, Matthew makes explicit that Jesus does not direct his sermon to the crowds who have gathered from the Galilee on the Mount of Beatitudes to listen to him. The crowds may hear him, but Jesus addresses not the crowds but his disciples. In the Sermon on the Mount, therefore, Jesus does not provide principles according to which anyone can or should live. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not  offer a general teaching that is intelligible apart from following him.

And in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus does not give the Church a strategy to make the world a better place.

Rather, the Sermon on the Mount is Christ’s description for how the community of the baptized will be the better place he has already made in the world.

In other words, Jesus doesn’t teach that after we welcome the stranger the stranger will cease being strange to us or that our differences are insignificant. Jesus doesn’t teach that by loving our enemies our enemies will cease to be our enemies. Jesus doesn’t teach that by visiting the prisoner we’ll convince the prisoner to swear off crime. Jesus doesn’t teach that in feeding the hungry the hungry will show appreciation to us or that in caring for the needy we won’t find the needy a burden to us or that in forgiving a sinner the forgiven sinner will suddenly become a more forgiving person.

No, in a world of violence and injustice, in a world of greed and despair Jesus creates a people— through water and the Spirit, Jesus creates witnesses— who welcome strangers and love enemies and bring good news to prisoners, feed and cloth the poor, care for those who have no one, and forgive those who do not deserve it. To bear witness to the Kingdom of Christ in such a world is to invite conflict, to risk offense, and to expect suffering.

The Sermon on the Mount is the constitution of the Kingdom of Christ.

The Beatitudes are the preamble to the constitution of Christ’s Kingdom.

And baptism is the passport that declares to whose Kingdom you ultimately belong.

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Nico Smith was a South African Afrikaner minister, a prominent opponent of apartheid, and a professor of theology at the University of Stellenbosch.

Eventually in the mid-1960’s, Nico Smith began aggressively challenging apartheid in his classes, which provoked conflict with his superiors who wanted him to give his students the theological material without shaping them in a particular direction. “Teach theory, not conclusions,” they ordered.

Smith didn’t heed them. He also joined public protests against the government’s bulldozing of squatter shacks in Cape Town. Summoned before a church commission to justify himself, Smith decided to resign his professorship. Instead, he left the pro-apartheid Dutch Reformed Church and joined its colored branch. In 1982 he undermined the apartheid regime by preaching in an area of Pretoria designated for non-whites only. And in 1985, he and wife moved to that community to live.

Nico Smith attributed his peculiar and dangerous witness to an encounter he had with the theologian Karl Barth in the early 1960’s. A staunch supporter of apartheid at the time, Smith attended a lecture by Barth and the two spoke afterward. Smith describes the key moment of the exchange as follows:

“Barth then looked at me and said: “May I ask you a personal question before you leave? Are you free to preach the Gospel in South Africa?”

“Of course,” I replied, “I’m completely free as we have freedom of religion in our country.”

Barth immediately responded by saying that that was not the type of freedom he had in mind.

He wanted to know whether I, if I came across things in the Bible that were not in accordance with what my friends and family believed, would be free to preach about such things? Or would I temper the demands of obedience?

I was once again embarrassed and said I really did not know as I had never yet had such an experience.

Barth then leaned a little forward in his chair, and said, “But you, it may become even more difficult. You may discover things in the Bible that are contrary to what your country is doing. Will you be free to preach about such issues?”

Once again, I had to say, “I really did not know.”

Barth then just said, “It’s OK, you may go.”

In the tram back to the city center, I thought about Barth’s questioning of me, and I said to myself, “I’m sure Barth thinks we in South Africa are Nazis and he wanted to warn me against apartheid. Barth had had the courage of his convictions, the courage to make me suffer, potentially, for his convictions. With his gentle but somewhat rude questioning and in so many words, he had shaken me by the collar and said, “Remember, your baptism!”

Barth had reminded Nico Smith of the passport he carried.

The story of Christian de Cherge and his fellow monks’s martyrdom is depicted in the award-winning film Of Gods and Men, and the movie makes explicit their deliberations during the years just prior to their deaths. The brothers of Tibhirine did not take extraordinary precautions to secure their safety. They did not cease their practice of welcoming the poor off the street to sleep in their abbey or of inviting strangers— possibly radicalized strangers— to eat at their table. They did not screen those they sought to serve. They did not fortify their abbey with defensive measures. They did not take up arms. They determined simply to continue giving God to the poor in their community in the same manner God gave himself to us in Christ, in meekness and in humility. They did not seek martyrdom but rather they understood martyrdom will always remain a possibility for those who live in this world as citizens of Christ’s Kingdom. They did not seek to die in such a manner in order to earn righteousness but rather, having been clothed with Christ’s righteousness in their baptisms, they could imagine no other intelligible manner in which to live.

They were not attempting to earn the Kingdom.

They were simply attempting to exemplify it.

To bear witness.

In the increasingly dangerous months before his martyrdom, Christian de Cherge’s mother accused her son of foolishness, insanity even.

“No,” he insisted in a letter to her, “I’m simply living out— living into— my baptism.”

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In a few moments, through water and the Spirit, Graciella and Leah will be made witnesses. One is still a child while another is an adult. For both though, no matter their ages— baptism into the way of Christ is a cruelty if that first Christian sermon preached by Peter on Pentecost is wrong. To baptize anyone of any age into a cheek-turning, enemy-loving, trespass-forgiving way is cruel if that way ends only with a cross. If God has not raised the crucified Jesus from the dead, if the Holy Spirit has not come to continue the work of establishing Christ’s Kingdom, then the way of Jesus will always end with a cross.

And we should not impose it upon anyone.

Much less baptize them into it.

But the good news today is that, for the first time in the story, Peter is not wrong.

Christ is risen indeed.

Heaven has been torn asunder.

And the Spirit has been loosed.

God is able, therefore, to give himself to us in an ordinary creatures like water, wine and bread, and words thereby making our lives more than they otherwise would be.

God does so by making us members of one another, joining our lives to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the “fellowship of the crucified;” that is, the baptized are those pledged to live according to a truth that can only be known by God raising Jesus Christ from the dead; namely, that the truth of the universe is revealed not in the grain of the judge's walnut gavel, not in the grain of the banker's mahogany desk, not in the grain of the oval office’s mahajua floor, and not in the grain of an AR15’s laminated stock. The grain of the universe is revealed in the way of life that led to the world to pound nails into wood through flesh and bone, the way of life we’ll soon wet the heads of Graciella and Leah as they join the fellowship of the crucified, the community called by grace to bear witness to a truth that can only be known because the tomb is empty and the Spirit is here— the truth that the grain of the universe runs not with those who build crosses but with those who bear them.

Leaning Heaven Towards a World with Too Much Hell in it

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Grace UMC — Acts 1.1-11

One of my friends, a member of my former church, spends half his year in Florida. He coaches cross-country at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He was on a group text thread with his runners as the coaches and runners messaged each other pleas for help and advice for where to flee as they attempted to escape the school shooting in 2018. He messaged me that night to give me the names of his kids who were still in surgery, and the name of the murdered bus driver who drove the team to all their meets. He asked me to add them to the church prayer list.

“Pray for Maddie,” he messaged me, “She has a collapsed lung. She was shot in the arm and the leg and the back. Her ribs are shattered. I’m not in denial or shock. I’m not depressed. I’m just angry. I’m just really, really angry. The SOB pulled the fire alarm so he could shoot the teachers and the children as they exited. And I’m angry at the thought that the Church has nothing else to say except we’re called to forgive Nikolas Cruz for what he did. Those who would forgive apart from all his evil deeds and America’s sinful indifference being put to rights have substituted themselves for God. Whatever happened to judgment? If Christianity is nothing more than an apparatus of absolution and forgiveness, then it’s positively immoral. If that’s blasphemy so be it.”

It’s not blasphemy.

And he was not wrong.

If the name of your church, Grace, is all there is to the Gospel, if forgiveness is all there is to Christianity— forgiveness without judgment, absolution apart any justice, love without any reckoning with sin— then Christianity is immoral.

The New Testament scholar Reginald Fuller registers the very same point in his book Interpreting the Miracles.

“Forgiveness,” Fuller insists, “is too weak a word for what God does.”

Forgiveness is too weak a word for what God does.

Grace doesn’t go far enough to describe the purposes of God.

The day after the Parkland massacre he messaged me again:

“Thoughts and Prayers?! WTF?! What’s even more galling is that as the nation grieved last night, just hours after the massacre, the NRA contracted the same operatives who circulated conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook and committed funds to an attempt to spread allegations that the Parkland student protesters— my kids— were child actors. I gotta tell you Jason, when the majority of American Christians believe that two people of the same sex kissing each other is a bigger problem than gun violence, I really can’t identify as being a Christian anymore.”

And…he doesn’t.

Grace didn’t go far enough for him in order for the Gospel to sound like good news.

Like Jesus today disappearing behind the clouds, Bob left.

But if forgiveness is too weak a word for what God does, what is the better word?

Ask the average American churchgoer to describe God and he or she will almost certainly first describe God as “loving.”

This is not wrong.

It’s thin.

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American Christians also commonly characterize God as compassionate, merciful, welcoming, accepting, and— of course— inclusive. Very few Americans however— very few white Americans— will think to respond to such a question by describing God as just. This is both odd and unfortunate because the revelation of God as a God of justice is such a recurring theme in the Old Testament that we should regard it as the keystone of Israel’s faith and thus at the center of the mind of Christ. Anyone who prays the psalms for any length of time will note their relentless lament that without judgment, without justice, nothing can else flourish.

The centrality of God’s justice is to be found as early in the scriptures as the Book of Genesis where Abraham appeals to the Lord, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” If there’s a single, overriding message of the Old Testament prophets, a message we believe Jesus makes flesh and carries in him to the cross and today takes with him to the right hand of God the Father— if there’s a single, unrelenting refrain in scripture it is, “Something is wrong and must be put right.”

Indeed, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 21, the holy scriptures bear witness that the predicament of fallen humanity is so serious, so grave, so irredeemable that nothing short of divine intervention can rectify it.

Rectification— that’s the better word.

It’s the word the Lord proclaims to the prophets, like when the Lord declares through Isaiah to those held in bondage, “Hearken unto me, O house of Jacob, I bring near my righteousness; it shall not be far off, it shall not tarry.”

I bring near my righteousness; it shall not be far off.

The Apostle Paul takes up this loaded Old Testament word, righteousness, when he announces that in the coming of Jesus Christ the righteousness of God is being unfurled. Whenever we reduce the Gospel to a cliche like “God is love” or to a cliff note like “Christianity is about forgiveness, “ it’s the righteousness of God that is missing.

God is Love. The Gospel is about grace. Christianity is about forgiveness. But love and grace and forgiveness are too weak of words for what the God of the Bible purposes to do.

For Paul and the prophets, absolutely central to their message is the righteousness of God. Nevertheless, the English word righteousness is so antiquated and religious, it’s easy for us to miss entirely the radical scope of the biblical message.

Pay attention— Drew assured me you all were sharp enough to keep up; Milton wasn’t so sure.

The words translated variously in your Bibles as righteousness and justice and judgment and justification and deliverance and rectification— in Hebrew and in Greek, they are all the same word. Dikaiosoune in Greek.CTzedek in Hebrew. Now, righteousness is a noun in English, but in both biblical languages it functions as a verb.

Righteousness is not simply an attribute of God. Righteousness is the activity of God. Righteousness is more than who God is. Righteousness is what God does. And it’s meaning in the Bible is manifold.

God’s judgment is God’s justice, and God’s justice is God’s righteousness and God’s righteousness is God’s justification— it’s all God’s rectification; it’s all God’s work of putting God’s world to rights.

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Last month, as part of a pilgrimage to Israel, I toured the tunnels only recently excavated beneath the Western Wall of what remains of the Temple in Jerusalem. Far below the Wailing Wall, where believers pray aloud and stick notes to God in between the stones, archeologists have uncovered intricate drainage systems, elaborate mikvahs, and even a Roman theater. It’s a massive and impressive structure— some of the stones in the Temple wall weigh more than two Airbus 320 planes put together; nonetheless, when the Second Temple was unveiled and the ribbon cutting commenced those who could remember the first Temple did not join in the celebration.

They wept.

Standing in the shadows under the Wailing Wall, our tour guide asked us what sounded like a simple Sunday School question, “Why did they weep when they saw the new Temple? Why did the Second Temple not compare to Solomon’s Temple?”

Being an Enneagram 8, I started to raise my hand in the dark, but he didn’t wait for an answer.

“The new Temple wasn’t as good as the old Temple,” he explained, “because the Jews who returned home from exile were poor and uneducated— the C students. They didn’t have the smarts or the shekels to restore the Temple to its former glory. Meanwhile, all the educated and elite Jews made peace with their situation and remained in exile. They gave up on their God and they gave in to their enemy. They accepted the scourge that afflicted them and settled for this world, the world the way as it is, as the only possible world and thus they made their home in Babylon.”

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up at heaven?”

Every year the Great Fifty Days of Easter ends with Jesus, who was high and lifted up on a cross for the forgiveness of your sins and raised up from the dead for your justification, taken up to sit at the right hand of the Father. Every Easter season ends with the Ascension. Every Easter ends with angels asking us, “Why do you stand looking up to heaven?”

Why?

We look for the Kingdom of Heaven because we live in this world.How could we not look for the Kingdom of Heaven?

This world is not yet what God declared of it at the beginning.

Things are not as they should be nor are they yet what God has promised they will one day be.

Though we often forget it, as they did again this Tuesday, the Powers of Sin and Death have a habit of rudely reminding us: this world is not yet once again “very good.”

Nor are you.

Nor am I.

So the answer to the angel’s question is an easy one.

Why do we stand looking up at heaven?

Because— bigger than grace, more than forgiveness— the promise of the Gospel is that a better world is on the way.

A better world is on the way.

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With this picture in the Book of Acts of Jesus high and lifted up beyond the clouds, St. Luke shows you what Paul and the prophets tell you with that word,  rectification. The good news of the Ascension is not that Jesus was raised to sit at the right hand of the Father. The good news of the Ascension is that one day, from the right hand of the Father, Jesus will return to this world, bringing heaven with him, and all that is broken will be mended. From the Father’s right hand, Christ will come again and make all things new.

God forbid that we ever get so comfortable with this world. God forbid that we ever grow so comfortably numb to this world and its cut-and-paste tragedy that we stop looking up to heaven.

This is what the theologian Karl Barth meant when he wrote, “What other time or season can or will the Church ever have but that of Advent.”

Whether the calendar say it’s Easter or Ascension or just an ordinary Tuesday, no matter what the headlines say, no matter how good you feel about the face in your mirror, every day is Advent.

Every day is a life of waiting in this world for the better world that Christ Jesus our Lord promises will come.

Every day is Advent. Every day we’re waiting for the return of the King. Waiting for him to put the world to rights. Waiting for him to rectify all that is wrong and, seemingly, irredeemable.

Rectification— not just forgiveness, more than simply love, bigger than grace.

Rectification— that is the word for what God purposes.

Rectification— that is the far reach of God’s Gospel promise.

Rectification— one day all who’ve been lost will be raised up and mended, mourning and crying and pain and DEATH will be no more.

And every wrong will be put to rights.

Rectification— that’s the word that should keep Wayne LaPierre awake at night; that’s the only word that is good enough to be heard as good news in a place like Uvalde.

Today is Ascension Sunday, sure, but every day is Advent. 

In the meantime, do we just wait?

Do we do no more than stand still, looking up at heaven?

On my way home from the Holy Land last month, I read a story in the New York Times about Andriy Zelinskyy, a Jesuit priest who serves as the coordinator of military chaplains for the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Having just returned from the front, Father Zelinskyy explained his role as a representative of the Church amidst so much violence and injustice:

“We priests must help the soldiers choose good, seek truth, contemplate beauty, and pursue justice not only because these are all essential to preserving their true humanity but because goodness, truth, beauty, and justice describe the world that is to come. The Kingdom Christ promises that he will bring when he returns. In a sense then, I see my role as helping lean the Kingdom of Heaven towards the soldiers.”

You may not wear a collar like Father Zelinskyy or a stole like Pastor Drew, but for all of you who have been born of water and the Spirit, your vocation is not appreciably different.

The baptismal font is a time machine,  a summons to live as though you’re from the future, tipping tomorrow out onto today.

And it’s not the tall, impossible task it might sound.

Notice—

Father Zelinskyy never set out to land himself in the pages of the New York Times. He never determined to be a hero or a saint. He’s not doing anything different today than he was doing ten years ago when he first became a priest and a chaplain. When the extraordinary moment met him, it discovered him doing the same ordinary work of the Church he had been doing before:

Hearing confessions and absolving trespasses.

Proclaiming the promise of the Gospel.

Offering Christ in bread and wine.

Clothing sinners with Christ’s own righteousness by water and the Spirit.

Leaning the Kingdom of Heaven towards this world.

My friend—

He may have left Christianity Inc, storming off in a cloud of righteous anger. But he’s never stopped submitting prayer requests. “Pray for Alyssa,” he messaged me this week.

“She was one of my runners. She’s an advocate now, eloquent and impassioned, but she’s still got wounds that can’t be seen and will never be healed. I’m sure those wounds are aching right now. I’m still angry and I’m not coming back to Christianity, I will ask you to pray. I don’t have any choice. If there’s a better world on the way, it’s clearly not going to be one that we build. It can only be one that is brought to us— one we absolutely do not deserve.”

He left.

But he still wants the Church to pray.

The challenge of faith in this time of Advent is not to discern what we ought to do to respond to extraordinary, difficult moments.

The challenge of faith in this world is to trust that when the moments meet us we’ve already been given the work we must do.

As the angels say at the Ascension, “Why bother looking up to heaven?

When the Kingdom finally does come, it’s going to come in the same unimpressive way it did before— it’s not going to look any different than the life he’s already shown you.

In other words, it’s not on us to make the world a better place. That’s an impossible task. We can’t do what only God can do. We’re not called to make the world a better place. Rather, in this time of Advent, we’re called to be the better place God has already made in the world.

So fear not.

Because we’re never not in the time of Advent, our task today is the same as our task yesterday and it will be here for us tomorrow too. At your church and mine.

As your own pastor put it after the mass shooting in Las Vegas:

“It’s the task of the Church to be the reason someone— not everyone, someone— no longer owns guns.

It’s the task of the Church to be the reason someone— again not everyone, just someone— is no longer a member of the KKK.

It’s the task of the Church to be the reason someone has a friend outside their race.

It’s the task of the Church to be the reason someone who voted Democratic invited a Trump supporter to coffee.

It’s the task of the Church to be the reason a real estate developer built affordable housing in the same neighborhood they themselves would be willing to live, why someone has a roof over their head when their family kicked them out of the house, why a child of abuse is not destined to become abusive, why someone was forgiven, and not cancelled, why someone was imprisoned, and not killed, why, in the moment just before someone died from a gunshot wound, they were unafraid.

As the world once again works its liturgy of Death, let us abide the liturgy that’s been gifted and tasked to us: the liturgy of Life and Life Everlasting.”

In this ongoing Advent, our task is simply to be the Church, to tip tomorrow out onto today, to lean the Kingdom of Heaven out onto this world with far too much Hell in it.

Our task is to be the Church until our ascended King comes back in final victory.

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Expecting Rachel, Finding Leah

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Thanksgiving for Marriage: Genesis 29

Drew and Allie—

I did not preside at your wedding ten years ago, but if I had the question I would have had asked you then is no less relevant today. Quite possibly, it’s an even more timely question now that your marriage has some mileage on it. What were you thinking?

Are you crazy?

Even after a decade of practice, how can you be ready to offer such promises to each other? As Robert Capon wrote, with their marriage vows bride and groom give each other a dangerous dose of self-confidence.

Trust. Fidelity. Intimacy. Self-denial- forever!

These are enormous, outrageous promises to make. To call it a leap of faith is an understatement. Marriage is risky business, for a life lived together can— strike that— will expose the worst in people, all the intricate flaws and foibles that come with human nature. Let’s just name the elephant still in the room shall we? What if you’re not the right person for the other? I mean, I know Drew at least well enough to question Allie’s judgment. I usually tell engaged couples that it’s called “Jason’s Rule” only Drew knows it’s really Hauerwas’s Rule:

“You never marry the right person…

because you never know who it is you’re marrying.”

In other words, ten years ago today the two of you said not just “I do” to the person standing next to you; you also said “I do” to whomever or whatever that person is going to become, something that is still unknown and yet unseen to the both of you.

And if that sounds scary, just consider that Hauerwas’s Rule has an even more frightening corollary: You are never as fully known as you are known by the person to whom you’re married.

Marriage isn’t just a process in which you discover who the stranger is that you’ve married.

Marriage is a process in which you discover who the stranger is that you call “you.”

If the fullness of what it means to love is to know the other with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, then to be loved means that our heart and mind and soul and strength are fully exposed and seen and known by another.

Even, eventually, by your children (just wait until Hannah’s fourteen).

And by God, it’s scary.

Because it’s not often that our heart or mind or soul or strength measure up to our own estimation of them.

Maybe now you’re able to guess why I read this strange Jerry Springer story from Genesis 29. It wasn’t just because Drew is an aficionado of Old Testament typologies for Christ. Those of you not from the Bible Belt might even be surprised such a tawdry story is even in the Bible. Of course, I can’t speak for the Almighty Himself, but allow me to do so anyway.

This trashy story is in the Bible because you can’t understand God’s cosmic plan for the overcoming of Sin and the healing of the world apart from the particular lives through which that plan unfolds.

The God of the Bible works through ordinary people like you and me, like Drew and Allie. The God of Jesus Christ works through ordinary families like yours and mine, warts and all. This odd, cringe-worthy story in Genesis 29 about intense romantic love and even more intense duplicity and deception is bound up with God’s most important work and ways.

That’s why it’s in the Bible.

Why did we read it today?

Because that’s what happens when Drew leaves the selection of the scripture up to a smart-ass like me.

Leave it up me and I’ll choose 1 Corinthians 13, with its pablum about love being patient and kind, never out of 10 times.

I chose this passage, and I did so because I believe it not only belongs in scripture, but I believe it belongs to the sacrament we call marriage.

For those you who, like the FBI agents in Raiders of the Lost Ark, forgot your Sunday School, Jacob is the grandson of Abraham, who along with Jews and Muslims, Christians claim as a father in the faith.

To put it more than a little euphemistically, Abraham is a guy whose story is not free from moral complexities. Abraham has moments of great faith, breath-taking faith. I mean, I’d rather build ten arks or interpret the dreams of a dozen pharaohs compared to what God asks of Abraham. But Abraham has moments of stark doubt, grave hubris, shifty opportunism and bald deception. Jacob appears to have inherited Father Abraham’s opportunistic and deceptive genes. His opportunism eventually alienates him from his brother, and he has to flee the household and make his way in the world on his own.

This is the Jacob we discover in Genesis 29.

Jacob heads East knowing he has an uncle and some cousins that way. Eventually he finds some shepherds who know his Uncle Laban and things begin looking up.

Then it happens.

Over the horizon, Jacob sees “her,” Rachel, looking almost as beautiful as Allie today.

All he could ever want in a woman and more, or so it seems. And Jacob doesn’t just see Rachel. He sees sheep. Now, don’t get any strange ideas about the sheep. There’s no banjo music in Genesis 29.  Jacob doesn’t have a strange fascination with farm life, it’s clearly the woman he’s attracted to here.

But the sheep are an important detail. In the ancient near east, livestock represent wealth. It’s as if he sees this woman with a truck of cash in tow. And she’s even tending the sheep. She’s productive, not a bad thing in any age. Jacob’s life seems to be taking a turn for the better.

Like a top-of-his-class William and Mary graduate, Jacob makes a bold first move here.

First he rolls away what is clearly a pretty heavy stone all on his own, showing Rachel a feat of strength no vocal major could muster. Then Jacob goes and kisses her, a move which is followed by a passionate outburst.

This is a dramatic love story. It gets even more romantic when we overhear the conversation between Laban and Jacob. Jacob wants Rachel’s hand. “No problem,” says Laban, “it’ll just cost you seven years of hard labor.” A little more difficult than online dating or swiping right. But to Jacob seven years of hard labor seemed like a day, so love struck was he by Rachel. Now at the end of this prolonged engagement, Jacob appears ready, willing, and able to consummate this marriage. He asks for his bride, a request Laban honors, or so it seems.

There’s a wild party, probably like the one you’re wishing we could on with today. In the tradition of Christ at Cana, Jacob probably has a few drinks more than he should, and then has a few more. Then, likely inebriated, Jacob enters the honeymoon suite, I mean, the marital tent. Things take their course, and in the morning Jacob rolls over and there is.....LEAH!

Confused and enraged Jacob goes to Laban wondering what is going on here. Laban’s retort silences Jacob immediately. “I don’t know where you’re from, but around here the older isn’t superseded by the younger.”

And Jacob shuts up, his own sin having been thrown in his face. Jacob, after all, was the younger who had stolen his older brother Esau’s inheritance.

Jacob still gets Rachel, but in the process he gets a lot more than he bargained for: a second wife who he doesn’t find nearly as attractive or alluring and seven more years under Laban’s thumb.

It’s not exactly Happily Ever After. But, truth be told, it’s not The End.

The story of this young couple (or young triangle rather,) is far from over.

Jacob would have a great future and a great legacy, one that would forever change the world. But it wouldn’t come through that vision of beauty which inspired so much passion in him at the beginning of the story.

But all of that would come to Jacob instead through the one with “weak” eyes, the one less lovely, maybe less love-able, and certainly the one harder for Jacob to love.

Yet, virtually all of Israel’s priests, a good portion of her prophets, and many of her best and mightiest kings all come from the womb of Leah, through her sons Reuben, Simeon, Judah and Levi. And most importantly, Israel’s hope and consolation, Jesus the Messiah comes through Leah, not through Rachel.

God’s work in Jacob’s life, work that leads to the redemption of the world, is contingent on Jacob making a place for Leah, on his learning to live with, to love and cherish her, as well as his first love Rachel.

Why this story, for this occasion?

Because, surely after ten years, Drew and Allie have learned what they could not have possibly known this day a decade ago.

This story is the story of every marriage.

Take it from me, the difference between happy marriages and the marriages that get torn asunder is that the former know this is the story of every marriage and so they don’t freak out and leave when this story becomes their story.

This odd story is the story of every couple crazy enough to pledge I do to the stranger whom they love.

One day you wake up, and you expect to find Rachel, the person that made you say and do things you never thought you’d do or say, the person who you dreamed dreams about and dreamed dreams with, and what do you find: Leah.

     Someone strangely unfamiliar.

     Someone who surprises you.

     Someone who shocks you, maybe even scares you.

     Someone who disappoints you.

But there’s been no bait and switch, no midnight chicanery. The fact is that you married both of these people. You married their best self and their shadow side. You married the person who melts your heart, and the person who will break it. You married the person whom you deeply admire, and the person with whom you will often be deeply ashamed. You married the person whose admirable qualities shine in the light, and the one who hides their flaws and foibles in the darkness. And they married you.

This reality is inevitable because of the Gospel’s only empirically verifiable doctrine: original sin.

It’s why everyone in this story participates in duplicity and deception. There are no moral exemplars in our text. Just broken people with broken lives whom God has chosen to redeem that they might be a blessing to the world.

The good news is that God still works through broken people just like those in our text, just like each one of us gathered here today.

I didn’t know you then, but I can tell you who got married ten years ago today: two sinners.

And that’s who you still are today.

But, you are sinners saved by grace.

You are sinners for whom your Redeemer lives.

That’s not to say you’re not wonderful people. Allie at least is a wonderful person. And I believe your marriage is destined to be a great one. Not because you’re both attractive, though you are. Not because you’re both bright and interesting, though you are. Not because you come from wonderful families, though you do. Not even because you are committed to the hard work of knowing and being known by one another, as wonderful as that is.

I think your marriage is destined to be a great for decades to come because you two know what it means to be forgiven. You know what it means to be saved by grace, and to live and stand, day by day, on that grace.

Show that grace to one another, knowing that Leah will come, knowing that your shadow selves will emerge.

But remember it’s through Leah’s womb that Jesus comes, and it’s when you are Leah to one another, when the self you’ve practiced hiding away emerges, that Jesus will be born most deeply in and through your life together.

It’s when you make space for Leah that the shadow self can step into the light and be conformed the image of Leah’s son: Jesus the Lord.

When your shadow selves emerge, when you are Leah to one another, remember that you know a different bridegroom.

He’s a son of Jacob but in many ways he couldn’t be more different than Jacob, at least the Jacob we find in this story.

Remember you’ve got a bridegroom that labored not in the field with sheep but on a hill with a cross and in the darkness of a tomb.

And he did it for Leah, not for Rachel.

He loved the self that you don’t show to many people if you can help it, the self you’re even squeamish to show each other. He loved and labored for your shadow self that it might come into the light and be transformed by the power of His resurrection life.

That’s what Jesus did for you.

Let the true bridegroom’s work be the foundation of your marriage, and your marriage will become a foretaste of the wedding supper of the Lamb.

That will be a feast to end all feasts, a party that never ends.

The good news is that we’re all invited, invited to a party where forgiven sinners can forever dance in the light of love. AMEN.

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God Damn It

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Like you, I’m heartbroken over a story that never stops unwinding, shootings in so many cities and schools its hard to keep the names straight to say nothing of the children and teachers and, even, the gunman burdened by monsters we’ll never understand. I’m also angry at what feels like muscle memory and scar tissue we’ve all built up over the course of America’s “copy and paste tragedy.” As soon as the headlines break, we know the hot takes we’ll read on social media and the talking points our tribes will turn to on television and on Twitter. Many rightly deride expressions like “Thoughts and Prayers” as a way to avoid political engagement or confess our collective culpability— it’s sentimentality not faith.

Yet prayer need not be nothing at such times when you remember that a good portion of the prayers recorded in scripture are furious, fist-shaking laments.

Over one-tenth of the psalms, for example, are imprecatory prayers. Prophets like Isaiah look at the state of their nation and cry out for God to earn his job title, “Oh that you would tear open the sky and come down!” The prophet Amos curses the housewives of Bashan for their indifference to the suffering around them “whilst saying to their husbands, “Bring me something to drink!” Often in scripture the anger is God’s own, “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your worship assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept your prayers…Take away from me the noise of your songs; the melody of your harps I will not listen.” Again, it’s the people’s indifference and apathy that provokes the Lord’s righteous anger.

Prayer need not be nothing at such times, but faithful, biblical prayer at such a time as this sounds less like, “God be with the victims of…” and more like, “God damn it— damn all our avoidance and posturing and hand-wringing, damn all our indifference and apathy, and by your Spirit shake us awake.”

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I’m not a lawyer though I almost went to law school. I’m not a politician though I’m a politics junkie. And as a Christian, I don’t feel at home in either party our politics offers us. So I’m not interested in talking about policies or laws here. Politics and law are not my area of expertise. I’m a preacher. The Bible is my area of expertise.

As a professional interpreter of the Bible, I can say without qualification that a society that tolerates the ongoing slaughter of children in the name of rights is not a free society but an idolatrous one.

And notice I didn’t specify which right because the indictment is true in both cases. No right given by the Founders trumps a commandment issued by God. Not only is life a gift given by God, every life is one for whom God in Christ died. Life is neither ours to take nor ours to dismiss with indifference when it is lost.

In fact, the indifference that masks itself as impotence to effect change violates the fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s not a commandment merely to refrain from killing; it’s a commandment to care. As the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe puts it in his book on the Decalogue:

“The rest of the ten commandments are a kind of definition of the idolatrous society out of which we are called by Yahweh. You shall not kill: the idolatrous society is the society of violence. The word used here is not quite the same as the English word “kill.”

Hebrew has special words which are normally used for killing in battle and for putting a man to death. It’s not these that are in question here. Nor, however, can we translate it by the word murder, for the word is used to cover accidental killing too.

The commandment “You shall not kill” then says not merely that you must not actually murder, but that you must CARE that people get killed.

You must not be indifferent to blood. You must not carry on the traditional respectable life, absorbed in the worship of your gods, while throughout the world people are being killed by the horrible pain of hunger and the diseases that go with it or as the “collateral damage” of war and violence.”

We’re commanded to care.

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Such care, I think, starts as simply as praying with the kind of righteous anger the Bible itself models for us. And because we are a people who believe in incarnation, I believe we should pray not in the abstract (“victims”) but concretely, with names and faces, so we do not ourselves become like the indifferent housewives scorned by the prophet Amos. Only by so caring can we expect God to make us a people capable of change. My friend and mentor, Stanley Hauerwas, offers the kind of prayer that is not nothing:

“Dear God,

We pray for the end of killing…Make those who die and those who kill real for us, that we might join one another on that long mourners’s bench called history. Make us incapable of “getting used to it.” Make us burn with the passion of your peace; fire our imaginations with your love. May we learn to fear you more than we fear one another and, so fearing, become for the world your trust.”

Making the world a better place is an impossible task. Luckily, it’s not our task to pursue. We’re the Church. It’s simply our task to be the better place God has already made in the world. Embodying that better place begins by caring and by praying in concrete ways for it’s concrete, specific flesh our Lord assumed in the womb of Mary, another mother who would learn the painful lessons of mourning a son lost to a cruel and indifferent world.

(Xavier Lopez, 10)

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I have no other words

A society that tolerates the ongoing slaughter of children in the name of “gun rights” is not a free society but an idolatrous one.

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