Jason Micheli's Blog, page 92

Preachers, Give Your People a Promise

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Guilt gets terrible press. And there are few pejoratives as distasteful to us today as “judgmental.” But sometimes we need to be reminded that our ideal self does not actually exist and the one that does exist, the one who just royally effed up a situation in his or her life for no rational or discernible reason (#sin), desperately needs to be told something more truthful than “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

In his wise and winsome book, Unapologetic, Frances Spufford argues that guilt— and the judgment that produces it— though long scorned by our therapeutic culture, is both emotionally healthy and a moral accomplishment. “If you don’t give the weight in your chest its true name, you can’t even begin,” Spufford writes, “it’s letting your guilt be guilt that at least stops you needing to accuse yourself.” Repentance usually gets translated by preacher types as “turning around,” and that’s all well and good so far as the original Greek goes, but, in real life, repentance is more akin to honesty.

If there’s one small prerequisite for receiving the gospel word of grace, it’s a modicum of self-awareness.

Far from being an unhealthy hang-up, guilt is the self-knowledge required for the word of grace to work what it says.

To make the point plain, Spufford cites John Newton, author of everyone’s favorite hymn, Amazing Grace.

Everyone knows Newton’s resume, slave-trader who turned Christian abolitionist.

Eventually.

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What many folks who select Amazing Grace for their funerals don’t realize is that John Newton wrote the song long before he relinquished his nasty revenue stream.

That Newton kept buying and binding and selling people for years means that, at the time of its composition, “wretch,” was an epically understated bit of self-description.

Presumably, those locked in chains below deck in dread and feces could’ve come up with more accurate adjectives to describe the man. Still— amazingly— Newton did come to know that wretch did not suffice to describe his situation before a holy God. His first glint of guilt sent him on a long, slow journey that ended with a genuine horrified sense of himself. “Newton’s guilt,” Spufford’s writes, “once found, wouldn’t leave him alone…eventually he could not bear the darkness of what he did daily, and gave up the trade, and ended his life as a penitent campaigner against it.”

What is the active agent responsible for Newton’s long strange trip from evil to abolitionism, sin to salvation? Not guilt, guilt simply opened the aperture so Newton could spy a clearer view of himself.  Come on, you know the song. “Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,” Newton writes in the second verse.

Grace.

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That is, the message of a mercy he did not merit transformed him, over time, from a godawful bastard to a God-fearing creature, “God-fearing” being grateful, flabbergasted awe of God.

It’s difficult to read Frances Spufford’s reminder of John Newton’s less glamorous, more time-consuming conversion and avoid pondering the kind of congregation that could midwife such a story.

Does the church today, I wonder, have the patience to tolerate such a grade-A shit bag in its midst?

How many preachers would’ve already cancelled him on social media before he darkened the parish doorway?

How many congregations trust that Sunday in and Sunday out, in word and sacrament, the gospel is working on such people, like waves over stones? I’d wager that today, if the modern equivalent of a slave-trader (let’s say, Mark Zuckerberg) got the nudge to go church shopping we could expect one of two outcomes. John Newton could easily find a church that simply reinforces the worldview that’s already allowed him excuse his nasty doings. Or, John Newton would wind up in a church where he receives a finger-wagging summons to change his ways and, in no time at all, he finds a way to slip out the back, with exhaustion, shame, and resentment added to his nascent, gospel-seeking guilt.

Grace always begins where we think it should end. Someone who shipped cargoes of kidnapped human beings seems to be just the person for whom the good news should be affixed with an asterisk, yet his hymn is enduring evidence that the message of the gospel changes lives (albeit on God’s apparent timetable) if we but trust it.

Grace always begins where we think it should end.

Remember, the song doesn’t go, “Twas the Law that taught my heart to fear.”

There’s nothing in the hymn about how the commandments really got his attention or how the specter of hellfire and damnation tightened his sphincter until he could bear it no more or how the example of Jesus inspired him to change his ways. No, God produced a genuine zealot for the cause of freedom from the most unlikely candidate not through exhortation but through the consolation of the gospel, the unjust, irresponsible news that his guilt had been born in full already by the Perfect One. Newton changed not because he’d heard messages about what he ought to do for God. Newton was changed by hearing of what God in Christ had done for him— when all sense of fairness suggests God ought not to have done it.

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Because none of us this side of the grave can prove that grace is true, the gospel is essentially a promise. And therefore the sermon, even if the sermon gives space for the Law to accuse us or exhort us, should always be promissory in its overarching nature. Every person in the congregation, Fleming Rutledge insists, should leave feeling that a promise has been made to him or her by the God who, unlike human beings, keeps his promises.

Fortunately, the ubiquity of John Newton’s hymn serves as a recurring reminder that, as counter-intuitive and offensive as it might sound, such a promise does indeed have the power to create what the Law is powerless to produce.

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No One’s Making a Docu-Series about Ordinary Churches

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I stood in my congregation’s cemetery yesterday and watched as an old man, weighing perhaps no more than one hundred pounds soaking wet— he’s battling cancer, finished filling the grave of the dearly departed. Wheezing from the effort, he dusted the mud off his pants and then quickly left to go package food at the church’s mission center. Mike was just one of a dozen or so volunteers who gave up the better part of their Thursday to get the dead guy where he needed to go and the living he left behind where they needed to be. None of them knew the deceased, a pastor who died after a century of living.

I thought of Mike later in the afternoon when the twitters pushed a promotion into my feed for the new Discover Plus documentary series, Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed. The trailer promised that the three-part account will expose the dark underbelly of the global megachurch made even more famous by celebrity congregants like Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, and Kevin Durant.

After Willow Creek, Ravi Zacharias, and the many disciples who toured the Capitol on January 6, it seems only a slight exaggeration to say that you could form an entire denomination with phony, grifting church leaders. Even the Oscar-nominated film, Nightmare Alley, draws an unsubtle analogy from carnival mentalists to gospel preachers. But no one is producing a documentary tell-all about the guy who volunteers to dig a grave for a stranger or the ladies who made lunch, gratis, for the hundred or so mourners in attendance. Just as serial killer programs give us an outsized fear of our fellow humans, the stories of glittering, grifting churches and the celebrity pastors who are really white-washed tombs obscure the everyday grace on the ground in ordinary churches.

Just last Sunday, for instance, I pointed out in my sermon that God’s speech to the exiles in Isaiah shifts suddenly to the second person singular, you. To make the point, I called out names from the pews. For example, “God says, “I love you, Janet.” After five or six names, I heard the homeless man in the front pew, tears in his voice, say, “Don’t forget me. Randy” Even more remarkable, Randy was sharing a pew with a man who makes a six-figure salary several times over. Tell me where else in America that happens? Truly, I’d be curious to know.

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Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed teases a story as familiar as it is addicting, abuses of powers and absences of accountability. And of course, sex. It remains an untested hypothesis whether or not we’d be as interested in these stories if they didn’t also involve sex. Hillsong has it in spades, from a pastor’s low-riding pants to ordinary infidelity, harassment, and coverups. Discovery’s forthcoming series arrives on the heels of the wildly popular podcast series by Christianity Today that documented, in investigative detail, the hypocrisy and cult-like habits of Mark Driscoll’s ministry at Seattle’s once-mega church, Mars Hill. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill at times felt like ecclesial torture porn, yet I admit I listened to Mark Driscoll receiving at least this measure of comeuppance with no small degree of schadenfreude. Nonetheless, I wonder if the zeal with which we consume these tales of the Church’s failures and fraud betrays an altogether different but still alarming impoverishment.

Superficial optimism about our ability to be good and holy breeds ultimate despair.

Contrasting a theology of glory with a theology of the cross, Gerhard Forde writes that a theology of glory’s “superficial optimism [about our ability to be good and holy] breeds ultimate despair.” There’s certainly an air of despair (it’s all a grift; it’s all meaningless) that attends the popular fascination with stories like Hillsong or Mars Hill. If Forde is correct, then such despair is the offspring of an assumption about Christianity that is itself a lie. Christianity, as Christians will remind themselves on Ash Wednesday— a lesson we’re constantly forgetting, is not about good people getting better but bad people coping with their failures to be good.

One of the contributions of the Church is that it keeps alive the knowledge that holiness is a gift not an achievement.

While it’s likely true that “Christianity suffers more casualties from faux faith than honest doubt,” it’s also true that Christianity’s own distinctive teachings on original sin and the bondage of the will actually encourages us to assume that our own faith is faux a good bit of the time, often for reasons that are a mystery to us. The great critic of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach, insisted that when humans speak of God they’re merely speaking of themselves in a loud voice, to which the great theologian of the Church, Karl Barth, replied, “Ja.” Ja, of course we return the original favor and create God in our own image.

One of the contributions of the Church is that it keeps alive the knowledge that holiness is a gift not an achievement and therefore, Christians never advance past the title, simultaneous-saint-and-sinner. The cynicism of projects like Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed, a cynicism which sees the sheen of power and success and expects to find “a nice slab on top, worms underneath,” is a cynicism that is not native to the world. It’s a creation of the gospel.

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The critique so many bring to bear today against Christianity is itself a Christian critique. The story of Christians failing is a story first told by Christians. What’s remarkable about the Old Testament is its character as a kind of ruthless diary of Israel’s own unfaithfulness. The New Testament is no different in this regard. Not only is Christ’s Church built on a fool named “Rock” who tried walking on water, the apostles showed no inclination to expunge their spotty record  from scripture. They denied him. They betrayed him. They abandoned him. Later, Paul attempted to kill them, the same Paul who confesses to the church in Rome, “The one thing I want to do, I do not do; the one thing I do not want to do, I do.”

The story of Christians failing is a story first told by Christians.

It’s this realistic pessimism about our ability to be good and holy— a frankness that Luther called a theology of the cross— that frees us for the opposite of despair.

I remember a few years ago I went to the hospital to visit a pain in the ass parishioner who had only recently passed around a petition to have me ousted by the bishop. I walked into his room only to discover a lay leader, who liked the parishioner even less than me, helping the man hold his Johnson so that he could pee into his bed pan.

Only the gospel, the news of our collective culpability and God’s ridiculous refusal to cancel us, can produce such an act of humility. No Discovery Plus series will ever capture such a moment on film, but it’s not because such moments are rare. I’ve been a pastor a little over twenty years and I have enough grace sightings to fill all the Sundays for as many years. I think of such moments not only when I see trailers for shows like Hillsong but also when the Apostles’s Creed asks me every Sunday, improbably but not without firsthand eyewitness evidence, to believe in the Church.

The outrage that follows every story of clergy abuse is surely holy, and the indignation from which Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed profits is proper. Still, as Frances Spufford puts it in his book, Unapologetic, if we’re waiting for the Church to clean up its act and be nothing but good, do nothing but good, we’re going to be waiting for ever. I know this to be true because the Bible tells me so.

So we don’t wait because, Spufford writes:

“We don’t, in fact, believe the church is precious because it is good or does good or because it may do good in the future. We care about its behavior, but we don’t really believe that its muddled and sometimes awful record is the only truth about it. We believe that the church is precious because it embodies something that the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up in general and our sins of complicity in particular cannot destroy. Something which already exists now, despite our every failure, and which consequently always has existed for Christians, right through all the dark centuries when slavery and tyranny governed the world, and the church too…For us, you see, the church is not just another institution. It’s a failing but never quite failed attempt, by limited people, to perpetuate the unlimited generosity of God in the world.”

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This is Tamed Cynic by Jason Micheli , a newsletter about Tamed Cynic.

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New Website: Jason Micheli Dot Org

Thanks to a generous fan, Jim Burns, who also happens to be a web developer, I’ve got a new website in process and will now be posting all new content there.

Check it out!

www.jasonmicheli.org

The archives here will remain while old content is transferred over.

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New Book for Lent— Amazing Disgrace: The Seven Last Words on Calvary

Check it out friends, all proceeds go to a good cause called Crackers and Grape Juice!

Just in time for Lent, we’ve put together a little book of homilies by yours truly on the seven last words of Jesus from the cross.

You can order the book, hard copy or digital here.

From the Amazon Description:

The reticence of the New Testament to explain the mechanics of salvation leaves us with questions: Does Jesus die for us? As in, does Jesus die in our place? As a substitute for you and me? Or does Jesus die because of us? As in, is death on a cross the inevitable conclusion to the way he lived his life? Does Jesus die because our sinful lust for power, wealth and violence kills him? As though our world has no other reaction to a life God desires than to eliminate it? Does Jesus die to destroy Death and Sin? As in, does Jesus let the powers of Sin and Death do their worst so that, in triumphing over them, he shatters their power forever? Does Jesus die with us? As in, does Jesus suffer death as the completion of his incarnation? Is death the last experience left for God to be one of us, in the flesh? Was it necessary for Jesus to die? Or was his incarnation, his taking our nature and living it perfectly, redemptive in itself? Did Jesus have to die on a cross? And how does Easter relate to Good Friday? Such questions are possible, indeed they get asked all the time because the New Testament never singles an answer to how Mary and Joseph’s son lives up to his name. For over a century, Christians have recalled the crucifixion of Christ’s death on Good Friday by reflecting on Jesus’ seven last words from the Cross. In this tradition, for Lenten prayer and reflection, Jason Micheli offers seven homilies connecting these questions and contemporary events to the final words of God’s Son from the Cross.

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Episode #250– Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: A Revolution of Values

Fresh off Donald Trump blaspheming at the National Prayer Breakfast and dismissing Christ’s Sermon on the Mount to nary a complaint from the evangelical pastors in attendance, we’ve got Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove on the podcast to talk about his latest book, A Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good.

The religious Right taught America to misread the Bible. Christians have misused Scripture to consolidate power, stoke fears, and defend against enemies. But people who have been hurt by the attacks of Christian nationalism can help us rediscover God’s vision for faith in public life. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove explores how religious culture wars have misrepresented Christianity at the expense of the poor, and how listening to marginalized communities can help us hear God’s call to love and justice in the world. He highlights people on the frontlines of issues ranging from immigration policy and voting rights to women’s rights and environmental stewardship. Through these narratives, we encounter a recovery of values that upholds the dignity of all people. Rediscover hope for faithful public witness that serves the common good.

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Episode #4: Preaching As Though We Had Enemies

God is using this time to remind the Church that Christianity is unintelligible without enemies. Indeed, the whole point of Christianity is to produce the right kind of enemies. We have been beguiled by our established status to forget that to be a Christian is to be made part of an army against armies. It has been suggested that satisfaction theories of the Atonement and the correlative understanding of the Christian life as a life of interiority became the rule during the long process we call the Constantinian settlement. When Caesar becomes a member of the Church the enemy becomes internalized. The problem is no longer that the Church is seen as a threat to the political order, but that now my desires are disordered. The name for such an internalization in modernity is pietism and the theological expression of that practice is called Protestant liberalism.

In the latest installment of You Are Not Accepted, Johanna gets hot and bothered over Stanley’s address, “Preaching as Though We Had Enemies.” Originally delivered to the homiletics guild, this address is found in his collection, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified, and also at First Things: https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/05/preaching-as-though-we-had-enemies

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Militant Grace

1 Corinthians 2.1-12, Matthew 10.1-16

The first clergy meeting I ever had, I made the mistake of attending.

I was a first-year student in Seminary. I had just begun pastoring a small congregation when I received an email notifying me of that month’s Clergy Meeting.

I was only a rookie pastor. I didn’t know any better. So, I actually went to the meeting.

It was held at a church in downtown Trenton, in a rough neighborhood. The church had chain-link fence covering the stained-glass windows.

A blue vinyl banner hung down against the stone wall of the church. On the banner was a photograph of a man in dreadlocks praying.

The banner read, “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors: The People of the United Methodist Church.”

An ironic slogan then as much as now.

Assembled for the clergy meeting were fifty or so, mostly older, pastors.

The agenda belonged to a woman who worked in the Office of United Methodist Communications.

She’d come to the meeting that day to preview for us some of the commercials the United Methodist Church was planning to air on television and on the radio.

The commercials were part of a multi-million dollar “Igniting Ministry” advertising campaign designed to attract new and younger members.

The woman was dressed like a Talbots mannequin. Her eyes lit up and her smile was wide. She was brimming with excitement to be the first to show us what she obviously thought were the best commercials we would ever see in our lives this side of the Super Bowl.

She rolled a TV cart out to the center aisle of the sanctuary. With much ado, she pressed “Play” on the VCR.

The opening shot of the commercial had rain dribbling down a window set against a grey, gloomy sky. A voice-over narrator said, “Today is my fortieth birthday, and I don’t know where I’m going.”

And then, some more rain dribbled down a window set against a grey, gloomy sky. Then it said, “Come to the United Methodist Church. You’re welcome.”

When the commercial was over, she pressed “Pause.”

I looked around and, to my surprise, I saw pastors nodding their heads.

Nearly all of them were smiling.

“That’s great,” some of them said.

“That will really speak to young people.”

The woman from UM Communications was beaming. “Any other thoughts?” she asked.

I’d like to think that back then I wasn’t as cynical and contrary as I am now, but my wife, who was my fiancé at the time, says otherwise.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

And everyone turned and stared at me.

“What don’t you get?” she asked with a frown.

“Well, I mean, the commercial doesn’t mention, you know, Jesus.”

“Young man,” she said through a forced smile. “These commercials are designed to appeal to seekers, to people who are afraid that their lives don’t have meaning or significance.”

“But, what’s the problem with mentioning Jesus?” I asked.

She bit her bottom lip and said,“Our market research showed that specific references to Jesus would make the advertisements less effective.”

“Well, what happens if these commercials actually work?” I wondered aloud.

She just looked at me, confused.

“What happens if these commercials work and people show up at church looking for a little meaning in their lives and what they end up with, instead, is Jesus?”

“Why would that be a problem?”

“Any honest Jesus commercial should be like those pharmaceutical commercials,” I said. “You know— the ones that promise an amazing, life-changing medication, but then with rapid-fire warnings, side effects may include wheezing, vomiting, fever, diarrhea, memory loss, heart attack, stroke, and, maybe, death.”

Some of the pastors chuckled.

They all thought I was joking.

———————-

Take today’s Gospel—

Exactly how would you turn today’s scripture passage into an effective advertising campaign?

Instead of rain dribbling down a window, maybe you could film a pack of angry wolves with red stains on their teeth? Torn wisps of blood-spattered wool littering the ground?

“What are you doing this Sunday?” the voiceover narrator could ask, “Would you like to get crucified? Come to the United Methodist Church, we’ve got a cross that’ll fit your back.”

Caveat emptor.

Would anyone show up if they knew ahead of time that Jesus intended to deploy them, without qualifications or training, to do battle with the devil?

You caught that part today, right?

The part where Jesus sends us, like Mike, Lucas, and Dustin, into the Upside Down.

———————-

“Cure the sick,” Jesus commissions His fishers of men. “Raise the dead and cast out demons.”

Lest you think that’s a one-off, the devil is implied again at the end of the passage where

Jesus says, “Behold, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

As much as we all love the comforting, pastoral imagery of the 23rd Psalm, that’s not the part of the Old Testament where Jesus gets the image of Himself as our Good Shepherd.

He takes it from the Book of Jeremiah, where the prophet says, “Hear the word of the Lord, O nations, ‘He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.’ For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.”

Redeemed him from hands too strong for him.

The word redeemed in both testaments is a martial term.

It presumes the existence of an enemy.

God’s People, says the Lord to Jeremiah, are in bondage to a Power who is not God that is too strong for them.

We’re sheep captive to a Wolf.

The Apostle Paul in our text today refers to that Power as “the rulers of this age.” And Paul just expects you to know he doesn’t mean Pontius Pilate or King Herod.

He means the Devil.

He means Satan, Lucifer— evil personified— what Paul calls in Ephesians the Principalities and Powers. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul calls it the Power of Sin and Death. At the end of this letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives it the overarching name, “The Enemy.”

“Cure the sick, raise the dead and cast out demons.”

“I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves…”

Flannery O’ Connor, the Gothic Southern fiction writer, was an ardent Christian and an astute reader of scripture.

In a letter to a friend, she wrote: “Our salvation is played out with the devil, a devil who is not simply generalized evil but an evil intelligence— evil has an agency in the world— and is determined on its own supremacy.”

The reality of the one Jesus calls the Adversary is presupposed in every book of the New Testament. Quite literally, the story of Jesus Christ no longer makes sense once you’ve removed one of its main characters from the stage.

In all four Gospels, from the first day of Christ’s ministry to His last day on the Cross, Jesus is depicted as contending against the powers, demonic powers.

The Devil is all over the details in your Bible.

Luke mentions Satan twenty-five times in his Gospel, more than once per chapter.

Here in Matthew, for his one and only lesson on prayer, Jesus commands us whenever we pray to pray, “Deliver us ha poneros.”

Not from evil, from the Evil One.

John in his Gospel puts the mission of Jesus Christ as plain as the nose on your face.

John says, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the Devil’s work.” Period, full stop.

In the Book of Acts, when Peter explains who Jesus is and what Jesus does, he says to the Centurion, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power…to save all who are under the power of the Devil.”

That’s the same Peter who writes in his first epistle, “Be sober, be watchful. Your Adversary, the Devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”

Even the Christmas carols most often describe the incarnation as the invasion by God of territory held by an Enemy.

How does the first verse of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” go?

God rest ye merry, gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray

Some of us have so sentimentalized our Christianity while others of us have so politicized the Gospels, we hardly notice that the Biblical drama of salvation has three characters, not two.

It’s not God and Humanity.

It’s God vs. God’s Enemy for God’s Captive People.

The language of Satan so thoroughly saturates the New Testament, you can’t speak proper Christian without it.

You end up with a Son of God who rescues us from his angry Father, instead of a loving Father who in the Son rescues us from the Enemy that has bound us in a grip too strong for us.

The exorcisms Jesus and the disciples perform— they’re not individual episodes within a different, larger story.

They’re episodes indicative of a single, larger captivity.

In case you think I’m overstating it— Jeffrey Burton Russell, an historian at the University of California, argues in his five-volume work on the Devil:

“The Devil of the New Testament is not tangential to the fundamental message, not a mere symbol. The saving mission of Christ can be fully understood only in terms of opposition to the Devil. That is the whole point of the New Testament: the world is full of grief and suffering, but beyond the power of Satan is a greater power…In the New Testament there is complete consistency on this essential point: the new age brought by Christ is at war with the old age ruled by Satan.”

Count the verses. More so than He was a teacher or a wonder worker. More so, than a prophet, a preacher, or a political revolutionary, Jesus is an exorcist.

———————-

C.S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” In other words, Lewis would argue, the fact that the subject of this sermon today is a tough sell for a good many of you enlightened liberal Protestants is itself the Devil’s doing.

In his book, The Death of Satan, Andrew Delbanco says our culture is now in crisis, because with these terms we’ve cast aside as superstitious, the Bible names a bondage that remains an inescapable experience for all of us.

Yet now, we are without a common language to describe it.

Satan, Sin and Death, the Powers, the rulers of this age.

With these terms, the Bible names a bondage we all know.

A captivity from which Christ comes to set us free.

Let me talk about the Devil this way and in the first person:

Before the bishop appointed me to Annandale, in what turned out to be my last act of ministry in my previous parish, I confronted a parishioner— a good friend of mine, actually— about his addiction problem.

His wife had asked me to confront him. “Talk to him, please,” she texted me, “Maybe what’s got a hold of him will shake loose. If he isn’t freed…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

A bicycle accident a year or so earlier had led to surgeries on his shoulder and hip. With surgery came pain killers. And sooner than you’d ever guess, he was hooked.

“I see you driving,” I said, after I’d sat down at his kitchen table. “You shouldn’t be driving in your state, especially with the kids.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted. His speech slurred, he was bumping into drawers and cabinets as he unloaded the dishwasher.

“You’re not fine, and we’re all worried about you,” I said.

And he laughed like I was the dumbest person in the world— a laugh that didn’t sound like him at all. As if to demonstrate my stupidity, he pulled a bag of bottles of pills from deep inside the kitchen cabinet and showed them to me.

I spend enough time in hospitals, as a patient and a pastor, to know— they were all painkillers prescribed to him from at least three different doctors.

He then proceeded to tell me that he did not have a problem.

In fact, he had a tumor on his brain.

He told me the mass was what was causing his slurred speech, but he didn’t want to tell his family and worry them.

As soon as I’d called out his lies, he erupted like a man possessed and then stormed out (as best as he could).

A few minutes later, realizing he was in his own house instead of mine, he stormed back inside and threw me out.

Later, he lied and told his wife we’d never spoken.

“It’s like a monster has invaded him and is eating him from the inside,” she told me.

I still haven’t shaken the dust off of that one yet.

Sheriff Bell, the moral center and a sort of homespun theologian in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men, says at one point in his fruitless struggle to contain the drug traffic along the border:

“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”

———————-

“Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” Jesus promised his disciples when he called them.

“Fishers of men,” we’re so accustomed to hearing that phrase we don’t hear it.

There is no word in Hebrew for “fish.”

Hebrew has only a general word for all sea-creatures. There is no specific word for fish, fishing, or fishermen, because fishing was primarily a Gentile trade.

And because fishing was associated with Gentiles, it became a signifier for the end of history when the Gentiles would be brought into God’s People.

At the end of time, when God’s enemies were overthrown once for all, Jews believed the Dead Sea would be replenished and filled with fish.

Therefore, when Jesus calls his disciples and says he’s going to make them “fishers of men,” he’s using a loaded apocalyptic phrase.

He’s enlisting them into the very same work to which He dispatches them today, to cast out the demonic.

As we say at baptism, He’s recruiting them in the war effort against “the spiritual forces of wickedness and the evil Powers of this world.”

Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

He’s drafting them— without any education or qualifications and less than five chapters worth of training— into an army.

And today, He sends them out into contested territory against an Enemy who will not easily yield His Position.

———————-

Lisa was in her forties. She’d had an abusive husband who’d left her. According to the grape vine in that church in the Blue Ridge, the jury was still out on Lisa’s new boyfriend.

I knew Lisa to be a quiet, pensive and timid person. She didn’t have any kids. She worked a clerical job, tucked away in a cubicle somewhere in an office park.

I felt sorry for her.

Leaving church one Sunday, she came up to me and said, “I need to talk.”

So later that week she came to my office.

Imagine my surprise when she began by asking me if we had any African Americans in the congregation.

“Uh, yeah… Why?” I asked.

“Because, I aim to start bringing my boyfriend to church. He’s good to me, but he’s racist as hell, just awful,” she said. “It’s like the Devil’s got him with hate and ain’t it our job to get it out of him? Doesn’t Jesus say that, preacher?”

“You mean, like an exorcism?

She nodded like an exhausted teacher.

“You mean, you don’t take that metaphorically?”

And she just squinted at me.

“Um, sure, okay…how do you propose we do that?

She looked at me like I was the sorriest excuse for a preacher she could imagine.

“You train some people of color to serve communion. I figure if anything can draw that demon out of him, it’ll be getting handed Jesus’ body and blood from hands darker than his.”

I looked at her and I marveled.

When she’d first stepped into my office, I’d seen a loser, a broken, frightened victim.

I saw someone whose life was unremarkable and whose potential was limited.

I saw someone who was probably afraid her life had no meaning or significance. But Jesus looks at people like her (people like us) and Jesus sees someone who can beat the Devil.

And that should scare the hell out of us.

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Episode #247: Jennifer Powell McNutt— Rehabilitating Calvin

What if we reconsidered Calvin and Calvin’s prioritizing of God’s power and sovereignty from the perspective of what Calvin was, a refugee, and from the hermeneutic of what his context makes his work, liberation theology?

Our episode today is with a classmate of Jason’s from Princeton, Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt.

The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt is the Franklin S. Dyrness Associate Professor in Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College, a Fellow in the Royal Historical Society, and a Parish Associate at First Presbyterian Church of Glen Ellyn. Dr. McNutt received her Ph.D. in History from the University of St. Andrews (Reformation Studies Institute, 2008), M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary (2003), and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Westmont College (2000).

She is the recipient of several academic awards including the Overseas Research Student Award (Universities, U.K.) for her doctoral research and the Sidney E. Mead Prize (American Society of Church History) for her first published article. Her first monograph, Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlightenment, 1685-1798 (Ashgate, 2014), was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize by the American Society of Church History. In 2013-2014, Dr. McNutt was awarded Wheaton’s Leland Ryken Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities (2013) for exemplifying excellence in the classroom, a deep commitment to inspiring students to realize the ideals of careful scholarship in their own work, and the integration of the Christian faith and learning in the Humanities. In 2017, Westmont College honored Dr. McNutt with an 80th Anniversary Alumni Award for her work as a professor at Wheaton in cultivating “thoughtful scholars, grateful servants and faithful leaders for global engagement with the academy, church and the world.” In 2017, she was one of the Reformation experts interviewed for “A Call to Freedom” documentary that was produced to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. In 2018, that documentary was awarded three regional Emmys including Outstanding Historical Documentary.

Dr. McNutt’s research specializes in the history of the church and Christian Theology from the Reformation through the Enlightenment with particular expertise in John Calvin and his clerical legacy, the Reformed tradition, the relationship between Christianity and science, and the history of the Bible and its interpretation. Current contracted projects include co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and the Reformation (OUP) with Prof. Herman Selderhuis and editing the 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude volume for the Reformation Commentary on Scripture series (InterVarsity Press Academic). She recently published the co-edited volume, The People’s Book: The Reformation and the Bible (IVP, 2017), for the Wheaton Theology Conference series. She is currently researching and writing two monographs: the history of the French Bible from the early-modern period through the Enlightenment and a social history of John Calvin’s thought. Her research has received international grants including the Andrew Mellon Research Fellowship (2015-2016) at the Huntington Library and the Huntington Trinity Hall Exchange Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2015-2016). Her publications include academic journal articles and book chapters as well as popular ecclesiastical pieces for Christianity Today and Christian History Magazine. In 2017, Dr. McNutt was awarded first place in Christianity Today’s essay contest for her article on how clergy during the Enlightenment contributed to the advancement of modern science.

Dr. McNutt is also an ordained Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and is co-president of McNuttshell Ministries, Inc. with her husband, Rev. Dr. David McNutt. She enjoys preaching at churches and on college campuses, writing for popular outlets, and conducting podcast and video interviews.

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The Sermon on the Mount, Karl Barth, and the (Already-Fulfilled) Law that Does Not Accuse

This Sunday’s lectionary Gospel raises the question of how Christians are to understand the law Jesus lays down in his Sermon on the Mount. Is Jesus a New Moses? Or, is Jesus the Faithful Israelite who perfectly obeys the law for the rest of us who cannot? Karl Barth wrestles with the relationship between the law and the gospel in volume II.2 of his Church Dogmatics, saying ““the doctrine of the divine election of grace is the first element, and the doctrine of the divine command is the second.” By prioritizing election (God’s choosing of humanity in Christ) over command, Barth reverses Luther’s distinction between the law and gospel in what becomes his gospel-law thesis. 

Because of his experience watching the German Church incapable of maintaining its Christian distinctiveness during the world wars, Barth was wary of permitting human experience to be the starting point or the interpretative lens into revelation. Barth believed Luther’s distinction between the law and the gospel did just this, privileging the subjective experience of the individual when confronted by the accusing demand of the law and the gospel promise of its fulfillment for you. Instead Barth reversed the ordering of law and gospel, prioritizing the electing God whose decision to save us from sin precedes creation itself.

The Word that is Jesus Christ is prior to God speaking creation into being; therefore, the gospel always comes before any demand of obedience from God to God’s creatures.

Not only is the gospel prior to the law for Barth, the two are one inseparable word, for the giver of the Sermon on the Mount is the word who was with God, who is God, and through whom all things were made. To begin with the gospel means to begin with the doctrine of election: “The doctrine of election is,” according to Barth, “the sum of the gospel.” In election, God wills to be for humanity and for humanity to be with God as his covenant partner. Election makes a claim on the one elected in the form of the law.

As David Hunsicker writes in The Making of Stanley Hauerwas:

“The problem, for Barth is that Lutheran theology overdetermines the difference between law and gospel in a manner that results in the eventual emancipation of ethics from dogmatics. 

Barth’s insistence that the gospel and the law are the one in- separable Word of God is a self-conscious determination to keep dogmatics and ethics together. Barth is concerned that establishing the law as a separate Word of God apart from Jesus Christ means that you can have competing claims to what the Word of God commands: one based in universal laws and represented by worldly ordinances such as civil magistrates and the other based on God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

A law independent of the gospel and an ethics independent of dogmatics threatens the freedom of the gospel itself, leaving us subject to “the worldly ‘ordinances’” and “the ‘competence of experts.’”

This was what Barth and the Confessing Church movement had specifically rejected eight years prior at Barmen:

“Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear, and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”

Says Hunsicker:

“Luther sows the seeds for what will be eventually known as “the introspective conscience of the West.”The second use of the law, as Lutherans would later call it, acts as a judgment on all our sinful doing and leads us to the truth of the gospel, that is, that our being is determined by our passive (nondoing) reception of God’s grace. Human action becomes obsolete with regard to the question of human being. In this regard, personhood is now reconstituted along the lines of a sort of “inside-out” Cartesian dualism.

In contrast, Barth’s insistence that the law and the gospel are the one in- separable Word of God registers as a strong protest against inside-out dualism. For Barth, the person is constituted as a being-in-becoming, or a being-in-action. Barth’s actualistic ontology means that human being is self- determined by human doing as it corresponds to divine action. God acts toward humanity in the gospel. Then, in a corresponding action, humans act in receiving the good news and responding with obedience to the law.

The result is twofold.

First, humans are given a real agency with regard to the gospel. Obedience to the law does not lead to God’s grace, but it does arise as a genuine human response of gratitude to God’s grace.

Thus Barth’s refusal to separate law from gospel grounds his claim that ethics cannot be independent from dogmatics. This move immediately affects questions related to Christian social witness and divine and human agency. For Barth, both sorts of questions must begin with the subject of Christian dogmatics, the covenantal God who determines to be for hu- manity and who elects humanity to be with him.

This brings us to the two remaining components to the gospel-law thesis: the priority of the gospel to the law and the law as the form of the gospel. Both components differentiate the gospel from the law in the larger context of the unity they share as the one Word of God.

To say that the gospel is prior to the law is to affirm that “the very fact that God speaks to us, that there is a Word of God, is grace.”
In other words, to place the gospel before the law is to say that humans always encounter the Word of God in the context of the covenant of grace.

Even when the one Word of God is law, it is law as the form of the gospel. That is to say, the law always confronts us from the perspective of what has been accomplished by Jesus Christ on our behalf. In this respect, the already-fulfilled law does not hang from our necks like a millstone. Unlike Luther’s second use of the law, it does not accuse us or drive us to repentance; instead, it demands that we “allow [Jesus’] fulfillment of the law . . . to count as our own.”

Jesus’ fulfillment of the law, however, does not mean that Barth forecloses on human agency. To the contrary, the reversal of law and gospel “is at heart motivated by a desire to register a place for human agency.” Above I noted that a law which is separate from the gospel as a second Word of God risks appeals to competing sources of divine revelation. Similarly, a law that precedes the gospel always threatens to become an independent law (e.g., natural law) that points to an idol instead of the true God. 

The law that is rejected is the law that suggests “we must do ‘something’ to make the gospel apply to us,” while the law that is affirmed is the law that expects humans to do something on account of the fact that the gospel already ap- plies to us. This is why Barth’s recharacterization of the law as the form of the gospel avoids Luther’s original concern: works righteousness.

Luther’s solution is to suggest that humans are utterly passive; humans do nothing, God does everything. For Barth, this solution is problematic,“What is wrong about works righteousness is not the fact that the human does something, so that in her passivity she would be in concordance with the grace of God. The wrong thing is that human action stands in contradiction to grace, competes with it rather than conforms to it.”

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