"If there is ever a “Yes, but…” with which we may answer a promise of God, it is over with faith and faith’s God.”

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Two notes, friends:

Session Two with Chris E.W. Green will be posted here later this week. I’ve been distracted (see: #2).

I recently sent this letter to my congregation regarding the recurrence of my cancer. When I first was diagnosed, I attempted to write about the experience as we went through it. I believe that was the right decision for that time. I wish to do this next leg of the (hopefully shorter and easier) journey as privately as possible. If needed, and as appropriate, I will offer the church and this community updates, but will keep it off social media and keep it out of the pulpit.

“The gospel, to be sure, does not mitigate God’s hiddenness; it redoubles it.”

While the scriptures begin with law, a declaration of moral intent followed by obedience (“Let there be…”), the New Testament’s nativity accounts begin with promise. In the case of Matthew’s Gospel, “She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” The New Testament begins with promise exactly because doubt in the LORD’s promise is what occasions the Fall, “Did God really say…?”

Doubt about the God who makes promises is at the very heart of faith.

In the 19th and 20th theses he prepared for Heidelberg in 1518, Martin Luther asserted:

“The true theologian does not come to see the invisible things of God by reflecting on the creation. The true theologian reflects on the visible and hinder parts of God, having seen them in sufferings and the cross.”

Luther’s point is that proclamation is not speculation.

True theology, according to Luther, begins with seeing God, in that God intrudes himself as one of our objects— as a word in our earballs, bread in our hands, wine on our tongues, a baby in Mary’s womb. In other words, despite the frequency and ubiquity with which “believers” speak of their spiritual journey, God is not at the end of our reflective enterprise. The true God is necessarily the starting point. Just as Luke and Matthew so begin, God— Jesus— is the starting point.

God is the starting point of our religious journey not its End.

And because God is the starting point we never do journey beyond the starting point to Elsewhere.

God always will remain the boy in Mary’s belly and the man on Pilate’s tree.

Speaking of the way the scriptures upend the religion of Plato, Robert Jenson writes that with the incarnation, “the reversal is precise.” That is, the incarnation does not satisfy our need for a path to God; it obviates it. The quest endemic to religion is empty for no other reason than that God is not missing. What Jacob realized on his way from Beersheba is true for everywhere, “Truly, the LORD is in this place and I did not know it.”

God is in the manger.

God is on the cross.

God is with the loaf and cup.

Thus—

The true God is not the God of speculation.

The true God, first of all, is the God of promises.

The incarnation does not satisfy our need for a path to God; it obviates it.

For Luther and the first Protestants, that God makes promises is the fundamental proposition of the scriptures. The starting point of all understanding is that God makes absolutely reliable promises, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” As Jens writes, “The gospel, to be sure, does not mitigate God’s hiddenness; it redoubles it.” For instance, the promise present in Mary’s womb, the answer to Israel’s longing for a deliverer, raises yet more questions.

Most notably:The God who is a Promisor and whose promises are absolutely reliable must be an utterly free will for whom no contingencies can frustrate his intentions.

As Luther writes in the Bondage of the Will:

“If you doubt that God foreknows and wills all things…immutably…how can you believe his promises?”

A promise frees its recipient from a future that would be otherwise, “I will make you well.” To make a promise is to claim to be able to be free to do this. To say that there is a promise-making God and that he is God precisely by making promises is to say that there is a Promise-Maker whose freedom encompasses all contingencies. Just so, the God who is able to promise to Mary that her womb will the ark is a God whose freedom guarantees no other reply but Mary’s, “Let it be with me, according to thy Word.”

To make a promise is to claim to be able to be free to do this.

As Jens writes:

“If any created contingency can intrude between God’s knowledge and his will, if there is ever a “Yes, but…” with which we may answer a promise of God, it is over with faith and faith’s God.”

Seldom during Christmas do we pause to consider the implications of there being no possibility of the promises posed to the Holy Family failing to come to fruition. Though, Matthew’s nativity does just that by juxtaposing the birth of Jesus with Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

The God who is a Promise-Maker and is God in that he makes promises is therefore “a will who moves and acts in all things.” Thus the promise to Mary and Joseph yields not only joyful carols but the anguished question to which Luther returned again and again. As Jens paraphrases it, If all things are impelled by the will of this Promise-Maker, then— given what actually happens in history— it looks bad for God’s character.

Luther put the challenge of faith with brave bluntness:

“For God so governs this corporal world in external matters, that if you follow the judgment of human reason…you must conclude that either God is wicked or God is not.”

The promise of a birth so that no more may die, as the carol sings, is a promise that belies any pagan notion of God’s powerlessness in the present. Precisely in this way, Mary’s child is our ultimate hope; that is, we can only hope and trust that in the End the vexing questions of history raised by this Promise-Maker will resolve in a manner continuous with the God hidden in Jesus Christ.

In the kingdom that is him, we will finally see how the Promise-Maker’s majesty and love are one.

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