Disciple's Diary

Conversion or Catharsis?

2012-02-03T09:06:00.003-05:00

There’s a lot of debate in my denomination right now about the impact and influence of Calvinism, the theological legacy of the 16th century Swiss Reformer whose emphasis on human sinfulness and Divine sovereignty left an indelible mark on Protestantism in all its forms including Baptists. That debate has usually coalesced around the doctrine of election, or more specifically, predestination. But I don’t think Calvin’s doctrine of election is the real issue facing Baptists right now. Rather, I think it’s his soteriology (doctrine of salvation) and his insistence on a “regenerate church membership;” that is, that the church will insist on salvation actually changing a person rather than merely saying they’re changed when they’re clearly not. While most Baptists would agree with Calvin on the necessity of the regenerate life for the believer, actual church practice is often quite different. Talk to most pastors and they’ll tell you that the number one issue they deal with day in and day out is an unregenerate church membership - pagans masquerading as Christians and wreaking havoc in the church. A “salvation” that leaves me just as pagan as I was before I was “saved” isn’t worth the trouble.

To be sure part of the problem is language. I sometime hear pastors and evangelists brag: “Eighteen people got saved last night” as though (1) it was their doing; and (2) salvation were a momentary, ephemeral, and exclusively emotional experience, this despite the fact that Baptist theology (see The Baptist Faith and Message, Article IV) clearly describes salvation as an on-going process that involves regeneration (conversion), sanctification (maturing in one’s discipleship), and glorification (the final transformation achieved only at our death or Christ’s Advent). There are three problems with the language “Eighteen people got saved last night”: (1) it “front-loads” the entire experience of salvation and reduces it to “regeneration” while ignoring “sanctification” and “glorification;” (2) it smuggles in a pagan notion (catharsis) and substitutes it for the biblical idea of conversion; (3) ten years from now, put out an APB on those eighteen and many will be nowhere to be found; they will have moved on to the “next big thing.”

There was indeed in the ancient world the idea that “salvation” was achieved in a purely emotional “release,” but it was Aristotle’s not the Bible’s. Aristotle, in his Poetics, argued that the purpose of the theater was to draw the audience into an experience that achieved an emotional release he called “catharsis.” After the performance, everybody goes home feeling better but largely unchanged. That is not the biblical idea of “conversion” which has at its core the idea that a person is changed, transformed; indeed, left so different that one can never feel quite so “at home” in the world again. Note: it does begin in an event, a moment, an experience, but it does not end there. It takes a lifetime to track the transformation through the convert’s life.

Premier Chou En-Lai of China was asked once what he thought of the French Revolution. He paused for a moment and then said, “Too soon to tell.” He was bearing witness to the fact that the Chinese culture had been around for centuries and that perspective was needed to judge the impact of something as “ephemeral” as the French Revolution. That’s why when people say to me, “Eighteen people got saved last night,” I often think to myself: “Are you talking about genuine conversion or merely catharsis? If you mean conversion, too soon to tell. Give it some time; we’ll see.”

Ecclesiastical Orphans

2012-01-18T15:37:00.000-05:00

Preaching guru Fred Craddock, retired from Emory’s Candler School of Theology, often quips: “Anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan.” He was speaking about the postmodern penchant for individuality and concomitant lack of interest in history and context that tends to disconnect and detach us from any corporate, collective, or contextual sense of the self. We’re like orphans isolated and independent, experiencing the world without family, without memory, without history, without perspective. His point is that humans require context, historical perspective, to know who they are. We are not sui generis creatures, isolated, insular, independent. We are contextual creatures, connected in a nexus of relationships that includes both the living and the dead. Lose the context, forget those connections, and we forget who we are, what we’re about, why we’re here, and where we’re going.

When I was a boy one of my favorite memories was spending the night with my Granny Stacy. She was already succumbing to the glaucoma that would eventually snuff out the wick on her world, but she turned it into a game that both entertained me and educated me about who I was. After dinner, she’d take out the photo album and have me leaf through its pages reading the names and describing the scenes in the pictures (Uncle Buster, Granddaddy Stacy, Great Granddaddy Costner, and on and on). Then she’d tell me the stories behind the pictures, and slowly, inexorably I would position myself in the nexus that was “Stacy” and learn who I was and what I was about. When in the morning my father would arrive to collect me, he’d always ask what we did, and I’d tell him that we played “Stacy,” and he’d say, “I remember that game.”

I had a similar experience some time ago at a little church where I was doing a Winter Bible Study. A beautiful little church set out in the country, the forefathers and foremothers of the faith, though poor farmers mostly, thought it important to place stained glass windows in the sanctuary depicting events and persons of their biblical and communal heritage. It was interesting in that the windows mixed scenes both from the ancient biblical story and from their own congregational story with the result that you were surrounded by The Story that reached back to Abraham and Moses and Jesus and forward to today. The effect on the worshiper was unmistakable: You were positioned in a nexus of relationships and values and events that began long before you arrived and would, God willing, continue long after you departed. It was impossible in such a setting to feel “orphaned” when, as the writer of Hebrews put it, you were “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.”

The implications for the Church are far-reaching and broadly applicable, but nowhere are they more critical than in the way contemporary Christians handle the Scriptures. The proliferation of translations and “designer Study Bibles” has made many Christians think of the Bible exclusively as “my Book.” The only question contemporary Christians ever ask of the Bible is “What does it mean to me?” as though what it means to me is what it means. Unlike those Christians in that little church surrounded by a corporate ecclesiastical and biblical context, contemporary Christians have no sense of the Bible as a shared Book in which we are engaged in timeless conversations with Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Jesus, and Paul. We don’t care what it meant to Matthew, we only care what it means to me. There are all kinds of problems with this, not the least of which is the dilution of the doctrine of inspiration to mean nothing more than the pagan notion of the “muses.” Moreover, the Bible is reduced to a religious Rorschach inkblot where the only relevant question is, “What do you see in that passage?” – where the reader rather than the Bible is really being read. Don’t get me wrong. “What does it mean to me?” is an appropriate question, but only after one has positioned himself/herself in the Christian nexus, the Christian Story, the Christian family album and asked the prior question, “What did the inspired author mean?”

To do otherwise is to be an ecclesiastical orphan.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

2012-01-02T16:42:00.000-05:00

The new year always brings a deluge of decisions, doesn’t it. Is this the year I finally quit my job? Is this the year I lose that ten pounds? Is this the year I ask her to marry me? It’s amazing, isn’t it, how a simple act such as turning a page on the calendar can precipitate so many choices.

Or does it? According to Jerry Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago, there are no choices to be made, really. What we euphemistically, and somewhat quaintly, refer to as our “decisions” and “choices” are really nothing more than brain chemistry (see his op ed piece in USA Today titled “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will”). Working from the latest neurobiology, he argues that we are really just “meat computers” in which our brains are “...programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.” What we incorrectly call our “decisions” or “choices” are really just the way our brains happen to work, nothing more. There is no supra or extra biological or chemical consciousness warranted...or needed. Our will itself, Coyne argues, may be little more than an evolutionary trick played on us by our brain chemistry to help us to “connect the dots” of our actions which, in reality, are nothing more than unconscious biological and chemical processes. “The ineluctable scientific conclusion,” he writes, “is that although we feel that we're characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we're puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.”

Did you get that? “The ineluctable scientific conclusion....” The fact that he put the adjective “scientific” in front of the word “conclusion” doesn’t make it any less an inference rather than an empirically validated fact. Coyne is using reason to argue that reasoning is merely a material phenomenon. He’s trotted out the same old tired materialistic argument for thought, albeit with a neurobiological twist, that has been repeatedly discredited by thinkers for centuries. Let me put it succinctly. Coyne, like all materialists, argues that everything, including thoughts, are nothing more than effects of some cause. The universe, he argues, exists in a cause-effect nexus so that everything in it is the effect of some cause. Everything that happens, or is, is the effect of some cause which, in turn, becomes a cause producing a new effect, which becomes a cause producing a new effect, which becomes a cause producing a new effect ad infinitum. You get the picture. Hence, nothing that is could have been any other way. Everything in the universe has conspired from the beginning to produce this “effect” which could not have been any other way. Therefore, he argues, there is no free will, no decisions, no choices...nothing except causes which produce effects that become causes, and so on.

However, the materialist has already abandoned his materialism the moment he appeals to reason to prove his materialism. If reason itself is just the effect of some cause, just the byproduct of biological and chemical and electrical processes internal to the brain, then there is no “reason” to trust it. If all thought is merely material, as Coyne insists, then his own thought that all thought is material is also merely material and, therefore, cannot be trusted. The knowledge of a thing cannot be one of it parts. If it is, then it is the proof that proves there are no proofs! In order to think at all, I must claim for my thought validity that is not credible if thought/thinking is nothing more than the byproduct of the way my brain happens to work. The materialist always makes the mistake of exempting his own thought from his theory. “All thinking is pure biology...except my thought that all thinking is pure biology. That thought you can trust as truth.” How convenient.

All knowledge (except the purely sensual) is inferred via reason; and if I cannot trust my reason to give me genuine information about external reality, and not just the way my brain happens to function, then I can know nothing. As C. S. Lewis wrote: “If the value of our reasoning is itself in doubt, you cannot try to establish it by reasoning.” Yet, that’s precisely what Coyne, and all materialists, do.

The Theist (one who believes in God) says that all thinking is but a colony in the universe of the Divine Reason. The human mind, in the act of thinking and knowing, is illuminated by the Divine Reason; it is set free, in the measure required, from the mindless nexus of cause and effect to be determined by what it “knows.” Simply put, it chooses, wills, decides. Our reasoning, far from merely being the effect of some cause, is actually a “thinking the thoughts of God after Him,” as C. S. Lewis described it. That’s why we can trust it. And make no mistake about it, we all trust it, including Coyne who argues for materialism on...get it!...rational grounds! Deepak Chopra put it like this: “Life is to think God’s thoughts after Him; everything else is just detail.”

That’s why some of us this New Years will make resolutions, make decisions, make choices, will to do things differently in 2012 than we did in 2011. It’s part of the God-given power we all have to step out of the cause-effect nexus – which, to be sure, governs much, but not all, of life – to think thoughts not already predetermined by our brain chemistry, to choose paths not already chosen for us in some far-descended evolutionary chain of reality (whatever that means to the materialist), to make decisions that could indeed have been “another way.” That’s because, contrary to what Coyne “thinks,” thinking doesn’t just “happen to us,” we do it.

Of course, if you want to continue to believe that there is no free will, no choice, no decisions, only mindless effects of random causes, that’s your “choice.”

Which Jesus?

2011-12-05T10:50:00.005-05:00

Back in the late 60’s when I was a freshman in college I ran across a book that was one of those “eye opening” experiences for me. The book, by John Wick Bowman, was titled Which Jesus? It was Bowman’s attempt to provide the reader with what was, at that time, the current state of the research on the so-called Quest of the Historical Jesus. Albert Schweitzer had defined (though not begun) the “Quest” at the beginning of the last century with the publication of his book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). He was reacting to the publication (by scholars like H. S. Reimarus, Ernst Renan, D. F. Strauss, and Wilhelm Wrede) of what has been called the “Liberal Lives of Christ,” highly imaginative “biographies” of Jesus all of which minimized (or eliminated) his deity and magnified his humanity (as the German title of Schweitzer’s book made clear: von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, “From Reimarus to Wrede: A History of the Life of Jesus Research”). The sticking point in most of these “Liberal Lives” was the fact that the canonical Gospels consistently portray Jesus as a first-century Jewish apocalyptic prophet who heralded the end of the world and the advent of the Kingdom of God in his own life and ministry.

These liberal scholars found that apocalyptic Jesus to be far too bizarre, other worldly, incredible, and “irrelevant” to the modern world to be of much practical use, so they fashioned a “Jesus” more to their liking. They presented their readers with a “Jesus” who was, not surprisingly, very much like them – an erudite, elitist, liberal, pipe-smoking moralist (okay, so I made up the part about the pipe smoking) who advocated the “Kingdom of God” (defined in this-worldly terms) and the “Brotherhood of Man,” who went around spouting moral platitudes and preaching tolerance, justice, inclusivity, and peace. The problem is, you can only maintain that view of Jesus so long as you don’t open the Gospels and actually read them! "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). "If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). "You snakes, generation of vipers, how shall you escape the judgment of hell?" (Matthew 23:34). "I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of this world, even as I am not of this world" (John 17:14). I could go on. Schweitzer’s Quest all but ended the production of the Liberal Lives of Christ in that he proved, on credible critical grounds, that the Jesus of history (as preserved and defined in the canonical Gospels) was not the pious moralist the Liberal Lives had portrayed him to be but was rather an apocalyptic prophet foretelling (and forcing! Schweitzer argued) the end of this world and the advent of the next.

Bowman’s book was influential for me simply because I never knew, before reading Which Jesus?, that we even had a choice! I was naïve enough to think that the Jesus of the Gospels was the only “Jesus” there was, and that one either accepted him or rejected him. I never knew that, if you didn’t like the Jesus the Gospels give you, you could just come up with your own! How convenient! I dug deeper and read Schweitzer’s Quest only to find out, to my chagrin, that just about the time I had discovered that there was a “Quest for the Historical Jesus” it was over! Schweitzer had killed it merely by reading the Gospels and letting them speak for themselves. Once you do that, it becomes clear that Jesus was not a “pipe-smoking moralistic liberal,” but a counter-cultural, apocalyptic messianic herald of the Kingdom of God.

But Schweitzer apparently had underestimated the tenacity and temerity of the “Liberal Lives.” Toss them out the window and in they come through the back door, this time through the efforts and auspices of the so-called “Jesus Seminar.” The Jesus Seminar is a group of scholars who have, in their own way, taken up again the 19th century “Quest” to produce a “Jesus” more amenable and acceptable to contemporary persons (read: liberal, broad-minded moralist with no thoughts of “another world” beyond this one). They justify this perspective on the ground that, in their view, the Four Gospels are not credible historical sources for recovering the historical Jesus but rather preserve as much interpretation (read "opinion") of the early church as the authentic words and thoughts of Jesus. These “hyper-critics” would suggest that when you read the Gospels, you are not really gaining access to Jesus, but rather to his first interpreters (the early church understood as the first-century communities of faith that preserved the traditions about Jesus, applied them to their own contexts, and then re-wrote those traditions accordingly). The leading exponents of this hyper-critical school of NT study would be NT scholars such as Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Bart Erhman and the so-called "Jesus Seminar" which actually published a volume which they titled The Five Gospels (because they included the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas” as a legitimate Gospel!) purporting to list in red the words in the Gospels which, they believe, can be verified with absolute certainty as deriving from Jesus. Not surprisingly, they find very few! Several of them have actually undertaken to write new “Lives of Jesus,” perhaps the most well-known of which is Marcus Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision. You’ve got to give it to him, at least he’s honest. In Jesus: A New Vision Borg admits that he rejects the canonical “Jesus” who is portrayed as an eschatological, apocalyptic prophet of the Kingdom not because he doubts that this was who Jesus really was, but rather because he believes this “Jesus” to be incredible and irrelevant to modern and postmodern people! Not surprisingly, Borg’s “Jesus” resembles far more the Greek parapatetic philosopher spouting liberal moralistic platitudes wrapped in esoteric language depicted in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, the “darling Gospel” of the Jesus Seminar, than he does the “Jesus” of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This hyper-critical, revisionist view of Jesus and the Gospels has now been popularized (and even mainstreamed!) by the popular book and movie The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown openly admitting that he relies heavily on the "findings" of the Jesus Seminar.

But as much as I dislike the fact that the historical Jesus of the canonical Gospels has been assaulted by his enemies in the academic world (Note: not every scholar is an enemy of the historical Jesus!), he has not fared much better among his friends! There is an anti-intellectualism afoot in the church these days that regards thinking itself as an act of unbelief, even thinking about Jesus! For these “hyper-believers” any attempt to take Scripture seriously enough to ask questions of it is regarded as a threat to faith. “If you had enough faith,” they argue, “you wouldn’t have to ask questions; you’d just believe.” Besides,” they argue, “it’s all about having a personal relationship with Jesus, not about ‘studying’ him. I don’t have to know anything about the historical Jesus to have a personal relationship with him!”

While I agree that faith is not built on "absolute proof" else it would not be faith, I nonetheless submit that the trustworthiness of the Gospels in giving us reliable historical information about Jesus is essential for an authentic faith in him. The reason is that without the witness of the Scriptures, how can we ever be sure that the "Jesus" of our personal relationship is THE JESUS and not just a "Jesus" of our own devising and, therefore, just as much a “fraud” as the “Jesus” devised by the “Jesus Seminar”? One of the cautions of which I must constantly be aware is that the "Jesus" I hold in my heart MUST BE the same "Jesus" witnessed to in the Scriptures, else I have put my faith in a fraud.

What I'm saying is that as a believer I must always check my personal "Jesus" (the Jesus I hold in my heart) against the "Jesus" who is revealed in the Scripture to ensure that they are, in fact, one and the same. To put a finer point on it: If the "Jesus" I hold in my heart ever "tells me" to do something that is in conflict with the "Jesus" revealed in the Scriptures, I can be sure that "my Jesus" is not THE JESUS.

I am capable, if left to my own devices, of creating a "Jesus" after my own image who will (Surprise! Surprise!) vindicate everything I want to believe and think and do!

That's why the Word of God, not my personal feelings, is always the final arbiter of faith. And, of course, that makes it incumbent upon those of us who are believers in Jesus to engage in the difficult, demanding, but absolutely necessary work of being a serious student of the Word of God so that we, in its pages, will encounter (and cultivate a personal relationship with) THE JESUS rather than just “my Jesus.”

According to one of the canonical Gospels (Matthew 27:31), even the Roman soldiers at Jesus' trial, after their sport – after they had stripped him, mocked him, and beaten him – had the decency to put his own clothes back on him before they led him away to be crucified. I hope Jesus fares as well this Christmas in your church and mine.

Advent

2011-11-27T07:02:00.001-05:00

“God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God…who for us and for our salvation came down” is how one of the early creeds of the Church put it. “It,” of course, is Advent. From the Latin adventus meaning “coming,” the word describes a period of preparation, four weeks in length, during which for centuries the Church has remembered and reflected upon Christ’s first “coming” and anticipated His final “coming.” It begins today and culminates on Christmas Eve.

I observe, however, that we contemporary Christians are much better at celebrating the first coming of Christ than anticipating the final one. My, how we love the Baby of Bethlehem! He’s so sweet, so gentle, so cuddly lying there in the manger. We don’t need a Cosmic Christ splitting the sky and melting the universe like a dream. Like Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights, the Baby Jesus gives us all we need.

And when we do reflect on Jesus' final advent, it’s more often than not merely a matter of curiosity, sometimes complete with charts and diagrams and signs and portents. For a price, we'll sell you the books and CD's.

Others are too frightened to think about it. Already they’re planning on taking an incomplete, or perhaps calling in sick that day.

But it was not so for the first Christians. For them life was both difficult and dangerous, and Advent wasn’t just a time for remembering the Baby of Bethlehem; it was a time for hoping. For the earliest saints, all through the ages, His final coming was a matter of great hope and anticipation. Looking forward to it, going outside and searching the heavens for a star, listening to the children ask: “When Jesus comes, will he have supper at our house?” They prayed this, you know: “Come Lord Jesus.” Maranatha.

One of the earliest prayers in the New Testament (we know that because it's preserved in the Aramaic rather than translated into Greek), Maranatha was the way the first Christians ended every celebration of the Supper on the Lord's Day. At table, they remembered the words of their Lord Who told them after His Last Supper with His first disciples that He would not drink of the Cup of the Covenant again until He could drink it with them in the Kingdom of God (see Mark 14:25). And so the first Christians, in memory of that moment and in anticipation of that promise, ate the Bread and drank the Cup and prayed for His coming – Maranatha! (Our Lord, Come!).

Deriving from the Aramaic (the language of the first Jewish Christians), maranatha can be divided in one of two ways – either maran-atha or marana-tha. The former is a statement – "Our Lord comes." The latter is a prayer – O Lord, come!" Ironically enough, it was the Book of Revelation that taught us how those first Christians divided it. Revelation 22:20 closes the Apocalypse (and the Bible) with a prayer: "The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come.' And let the one hearing say, 'Come.' And let the one who thirsts say come, let the one willing take the water of life freely.... The One bearing witness to these things says, 'Yes, I come quickly.'" And then the Church responds: "Amen, Come, Lord Jesus!" But in the Church's original language, that prayer would be comprised of just two Aramaic words: "Amen, Maranatha!" It's not a statement; it's a prayer! For the first Christians, Christ's Coming was not just a curiosity; it was a necessity, a desperate hope, a passionate prayer.

And even today, in places like Cairo in Egypt, there are Christians who today will pray this Christmas for Christ’s coming in a way most of us could not imagine.

“Very God of Very God…who for us and for our salvation came (and comes) down.” Something to think about this year while you’re putting out the Nativity.

Maranatha,

R. Wayne Stacy

On Judgment and Grace

2011-10-31T09:07:00.002-04:00

I spoke on the Book of Revelation yesterday in a day-long study – taught, preached, taught. It was a long, tiring, but a very satisfying and enriching experience. The audience was receptive and engaged, and I enjoyed the exchanges that took place around this marvelous, but often misunderstood, New Testament book.

During the final Q & A, a very thoughtful and perceptive person who had been listening with care as I traversed the mysteries and metaphors of the Apocalypse asked a question that, quite honestly, brought me up short. Overwhelmed with “information overload” of images and scenes of final judgment and the reckoning “The End” inevitably brings, the individual asked, “But where’s the grace?” I perceived this person to be expressing their long-held but largely unexamined conviction that at bottom Christianity is about grace and that all the images of final judgment and reckoning and “score settling” that fill the pages of the Book of Revelation stood at some distance from what they had come to believe that Christianity was all about.

I tried to answer the question as honestly as I could. I reminded them that nobody lives in a world where there is only light and no shadows, that in order for God to be pa◊nta e∆n paÇsin, “all in all,” as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, He must fully and finally subdue all the “forces” that are destroying His world, that there is an eschatological dimension to the Christian faith that cannot be expurgated without doing violence to its very essence. Then I tried to be less theological and more pastoral and reminded the audience that no parent, worthy of the name, ever chooses between their moral standards and the ones they love. You lay before your children the highest ethical and moral standards you know, knowing full well that in due course they will violate them. But when they do, parents do an amazing thing. They don’t reject the child for violating the standard. “Out of my house, you little liar! I’ll have no liars in this house!” But neither do they reject the standard: “Well, I know I said lying was wrong, but what’s a little lying where there’s love?” No, the parent keeps both the child and the standard.

I did the best I could to try to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by the disconnect between what this person had believed Christianity to be all about and what they had discovered, after having actually read the Bible, that it was about.

Then I remembered something G. K. Chesterton said in Orthodoxy. In the chapter titled “The Suicide of Thought,” Chesterton points out that modernity (and even more so postmodernity) has distorted the essential virtues by isolating them from other virtues that were intended to be checks and balances on them. As a result, an unhealthy and destructive reductionism has taken place which distorts the meaning and purpose of the virtues. “Some scientists care for truth,” he says, “and their truth is pitiless.” However, he continues, “some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” Indeed.

In Christianity this moral reductionism has found expression in the modern penchant to reduce all Christian virtues to one – kindness or “grace.” God becomes the over-indulgent Grandfather figure whose love is always expressed in terms of “There, there, it wasn’t really important anyway.” In the view of some, Christianity is this wonderfully fortunate religion in which happy dispensation of our foolishness and wickedness and rebellion are dispatched with the syllogism: “God loves to forgive sins, and I love to sin! Hey, is this a great world or what?”

But virtues were never intended so to be abstracted and isolated from each other. Love without the concomitant virtue of justice to constrain and correct it produces a doctrine of forgiveness that makes forgiveness easy merely because there are no longer any “sins” to forgive.

Take it out of morality and move it to medicine and the destructiveness and myopia of this kind of reductionism becomes clear. Imagine going to a physician and, after the examination, she says, “Well, I’ve got good news and bad. First the bad news: You’ve got cancer. Now, for the good news: You don’t say anything about it, and I won’t say anything about it, and nobody will know!” Of course, that’s stupid. It isn’t knowing about the cancer that’s the problem; it’s the cancer that’s the problem. And sin is like cancer. It will destroy you even if nobody ever knows about it.

Or again, imagine going to your physician and she says: “Well, you’ve got cancer. Now, get out of my office; I’ll have no sick people in here!” Again, how absurd. Rather, the physician says: “You’ve got cancer; now, let’s see what we can do about it.” She both accepts you as a patient and rejects the cancer that is killing you and does her best to eradicate the cancer from your life. Funny, isn’t it, how her judgment sounds just like grace.

C. S. Lewis, Chesterton's long-time colleague and friend, put it this way: “It is the essence of love to perfect the beloved.”

Glimpses of Glory

2011-09-27T06:46:00.000-04:00

This is an edited version of a sermon preached at First Baptist Church, Forest City, NC, on March 6, 2011. The text is the Transfiguration from Matthew 17:1-13.

Jubilee Economics

2011-08-13T14:33:00.007-04:00

A lot of people who know nothing about the church or the Bible have recently taken to co-opting a biblical term and using it in the context of the current fiscal calamity that augurs what some suggest is our impending global economic ruin; namely, Jubilee. Nouriel Roubini, the Turkish-born, Harvard-trained, American economist who is a professor of international economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, suggested recently that the single most effective stratagem which the US could undertake to staunch the global economic hemorrhage would be to grant a “Jubilee” to the more than one-half of Americans who are currently underwater on their mortgages (who owe more than their home is worth).

The housing collapse, he argues, has triggered the global meltdown by eroding American wealth which was the largest driver of the global economic engine. Because Americans feel less wealthy than they did before their homes lost 30-50% of their value, they have locked up their wallets and have effectively ground the American economy to a halt. Moreover, because America is the economic engine that drives the global economy, when our housing bubble burst it created a vacuum which sucked the life out of the global economy as well. “Declare a Jubilee!” he says. “Write off or write down the debt on America’s housing shortfall. Just wipe the slate clean, turn the page, start all over again. Whatever your home is worth today is what it’s worth.” That largesse, he argues, would be the single biggest shot in the arm of the world economy that could be achieved because it would liberate Americans to once again lead the world in global economic recovery.

Jubilee. The word “Jubilee,” (yovel in the Hebrew), itself occurs 21 times in the Old Testament, mostly in the Book of Leviticus, chiefly in Leviticus 25. Significantly, the word also can mean “ram’s horn” which, in ancient Hebrew culture, was the instrument associated with repentance (shub in Hebrew), which signified a turning around, a starting over, a fresh start, a new beginning.

Both the word and the idea it signifies derive from the ancient Hebrew culture wherein every 50 years (7 years in Deuteronomy) God declared a “sabbatical year,” from the Hebrew word Shabbath which means “rest.” The entire nation and land would be granted a Sabbath Rest – all debts would be canceled (forgiven); slaves would be emancipated (liberated); prisoners released; the land would lie fallow, resting from the annual cycle of planting and harvest. It would be a Sabbath filled with Sabbaths, an entire year of Sabbaths, a year of release (Deut. 15:9), a year of Jubilee. The idea, as it takes expression in the Leviticus tradition, is that of a “Sabbath of Sabbaths.” That is, just as within the weekly cycle there is a “Sabbath day,” so also in the annual cycle there is a “Sabbath year.” Hence, after seven Sabbaths of Sabbath years (7 times 7 or 49 years), the following year (the 50^th year) would be declared a “Sabbath year,” a Jubilee Year.

Of course, then, as now, Jubilee was not welcomed by all. Provocatively, Deuteronomy’s version of the Jubilee says, “There will be no poor among you” (Deut. 15:4). Ah! There’s the rub. What was “good news” for some was “bad news” for others. The slave, the tenant farmer, the prisoner, the debt-ridden Am haAretz (people of the land) who eked out a living, living from paycheck to paycheck, welcomed the Jubilee as liberation, salvation, good news, “gospel,” if you will. But those with the most to lose, the landed gentry, the politicians, those who trafficked in slavery and servitude and serfdom, did not hear “Jubilee” as good news. Indeed, many of them went to great lengths to avoid Jubilee. This was the motivation behind a practice mentioned in the New Testament called “prosbul” (see Mark 7:11). The word derives from the Greek (pros meaning “to” or “toward” and bul from the Greek word Boule, meaning “council” or “court”). The idea was that as the Jubilee approached, you would declare your property “Corban” (dedicated to God). It would be ceded over to the Council (Boule; that is the Sanhedrin), for the period of time in which the Jubilee was in effect. Then, when the Jubilee had passed, the property would return to its pre-Corban owner, thus avoiding the necessity of canceling debts or freeing slaves, etc. It was a legal fiction tolerated by the Jewish religious establishment as a way of avoiding the consequences of Jubilee because, they believed, were Jubilee permitted to have its full effect, it would wreck the economy! It is against this practice that Jesus speaks when he criticizes the Pharisees in Mark 7:1-13 (see especially 7:9-13). That is to say, Jubilee was one of those commandments of God that everyone liked to talk about but no one actually did anything about. It was safer that way.

Which helps us to understand the harsh reaction Jesus received in Luke 4:16-30 when he went into his home town synagogue and stood up to preach. They gave him the scroll of Isaiah, and he read from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me in behalf of which He has anointed me (literally “Christed me”) to preach good news to the poor; he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives (prisoners) and recovery of sight to the blind, to send away the traumatized in release, and to proclaim the Year of the LORD’s grace” (that is, the Jubilee Year!) (my translation of the Greek). You will recall that when the people heard that Jesus was declaring the Year of Jubilee, they at first greeted him enthusiastically (“And all spoke well of him, and marveled at the words of grace which came from his mouth;” Luke 4:22). But when he clarified the context in which he meant that the Jubilee had come – Today! – and the community within which it was to be effected – all ya’ll – their “jubilation” turned quickly to castigation and then to assassination (“They rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill…that they might throw him down headlong”).

It’s a wonderful idea in theory, isn’t it? Year of Jubilee! Year of Release! Debts forgiven; captives released; fresh start; new beginning; turn the page; a Sabbath for everyone! Why, it almost sounds like “gospel,” doesn’t it? But remember, gospel isn’t “good news” for everyone.

I’d watch my back, Dr. Roubini, if I were you.

Moving

2011-07-30T20:54:00.002-04:00

Be back soon.

An Argument for the Antiquated

2011-06-24T07:03:00.000-04:00

Fred Craddock said that the mind is like a hallway in an art gallery with pictures hanging on it, and under each picture is a word identifying the subject of the picture. So that if I say a word, you get a picture. “Nun,” “Southerner,” “Doctor,” “Homeless.” The problem is, we don’t all have the same pictures hanging on the walls of our minds! Hence, we use words, thinking that we’re communicating clearly because we have a clear “picture” in mind of what we’re talking about, but the other person has a different picture.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that words, and the pictures they conjure up in our minds, are always accompanied by a story of some sort, a narrative matrix against which the picture is set, which gives the word context and meaning. Therefore, to exchange one word for another is not just to change the picture, it is to change the story within which the picture is set. That is to say, words don’t just communicate ideas; they also carry with them a common culture, ethos, values, and plot. Change the word and you’ve changed the story.

In an episode of the old television sitcom Home Improvement, Al’s mother dies and Wilson, Tim Taylor’s globe-trotting, Renaissance-man neighbor, agrees to conduct the funeral. At the funeral home, Tim is chatting with Wilson who, having donned clerical robe and stole, is looking over his notes for the service. Wilson reads through his funeral sermon notes to Tim and admits that he’s a bit rusty; that the last time he’d conducted a funeral was when he was a shaman on the island of Pago Pago. As he reads through his notes for the service, he comes to the part in the funeral where it says, “Dear brothers and sisters, we’ve come to pay our respects and to celebrate the life of (insert name), and to commend the soul of our beloved to the eternal keeping of the ________________,” and at this point Wilson says to himself, “Must remember to replace “Lizard King” with “Heavenly Father.” Audience laughs. They laughed because they instinctively knew that changing the words of the story changed the story itself. That is to say, while the narrative structure of the funeral service Wilson was about to do was identical in form to a Christian service (right down to the language of “brothers and sisters” and “commend the soul,” and “eternal keeping”), by simply changing the name for God from “Heavenly Father” to “Lizard King” a completely different story was assumed.

Some have suggested that because we now live in a biblically-illiterate and post-Christian world, the “ancient words” and their concomitant stories form a dis-connect rather than a connection with postmodern persons, and that in order to communicate the Gospel to a postmodern world, we must jettison the old, “ancient words” of faith (jargon, they call them, like “salvation and “sin” and “hell” etc.) and replace them with words more relevant, trendy, contemporary, comfortable, and comprehensible to a secular, postmodern, biblically-illiterate, post-Christian culture (words from the pop culture or business world or psychological jargon). The problem with this approach is that words come with an attendant context, values, ethos, and story. And so, to replace, for example, the biblical word “sin” with a postmodern, contemporary word that communicates effectively to a contemporary culture consumed with health and wellness concerns, one must choose a word from the therapy culture, such as “sickness,” or “pathology” or “dysfunction.” But that is not what “sin” means in our story. In the Bible, sin is not merely some unfortunate, no-fault, mindless mishap for which one is neither accountable nor responsible; it is intentional, willful disobedience to the One Who makes appropriate and legitimate claims and demands upon us. In our story, “sin” is not merely an “oops” or an “uh oh,” it’s a stubborn, intentional, recalcitrant “no!” that sets in motion irrevocable consequences and inescapable outcomes. And so, to exchange the word “sin” for “sickness” and “salvation” for “therapy” is not just to change the word; it is to change the story, or, as Paul says to the Galatians, to run the risk of proclaiming as “Gospel” something that is “no Gospel” at all!

Moreover, isn't it just a bit arrogant, provincial, and overweening to believe that words and a Story that have given life and meaning and hope to a people for over two millennia can, and should be, abandoned now just because the latest occupants of this planet find those words and that Story befuddling and bewildering? Why not just teach them what these words “mean” by teaching them what the Story that gives them meaning “says?”

It’s a little like marrying into a family and going to the family reunion of your spouse and suddenly meeting people with whom you have no history, hearing the names of people you don’t know, like Uncle George, and hearing stories in which you have not participated, and then announcing that you find that history “irrelevant” and these names “unnecessary” and those stories “off-putting” and that you forbid the family to speak of them again in your presence! Rather, you have your own history and some other names and some other stories with which you’re familiar, and that from now on, you want everybody at the reunion to talk only of them. Absurd? Of course. What you do is to listen carefully to their history and those names and these stories until you begin to learn who Uncle George is/was and what he is/was about. After a while, an amazing thing happens. “Uncle George” is no longer just a strange sounding name about which you know nothing. You begin to feel that you actually know Uncle George. And then, after a while, another, more amazing thing happens: “Uncle George” becomes your Uncle George! And finally, something even more amazing happens: In discovering your Uncle George, you discover yourself – that this is who you are; that this is your history; that this is your story!

That’s precisely what happens in the Bible. As the words of the people of God are spoken, the history heard, the stories shared, what had been strange and remote becomes familiar and one’s very own. That’s why in Deut. 26:1-11, the writer, composing centuries after Moses and the Exodus, instructs the people of God to bring their offerings to the temple and, before leaving them there, they are to remember their history; to speak ancient words and tell an amazing story:

A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the LORD the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

At the time Deuteronomy was written (or at least discovered and used as the basis of Josiah’s reform in 621 B.C.), not a one of those offering their “first fruits” to the temple had actually been alive during the Exodus, which had occurred 600 to 800 years earlier. But in speaking the “ancient words” and in re-telling that “amazing story,” that story became their story, and “they” became “us.”

Something to think about the next time some neophyte suggests scuttling the Story and the words we use to tell it in order to make room for something more “relevant” to the contemporary world.

Any News From Headquarters?

2011-06-13T20:41:00.001-04:00

Occasionally someone will say to me: “So-and-so is a really good preacher.” As one who has been interested in preaching for over forty years, that gets my attention. Sometimes I probe deeper: “Really? How so? What is there about his preaching that makes it good?” Typically that gets a blank stare, but when someone does venture a response, it usually comes out something like this: “Well, I found it relevant to my needs, where I am in my life, my home, my job, my family” and so on. That seems to be the sole criterion for “good preaching” these days – I found it relevant to where I am at this point in my life. Or, to say it another way, “It helped me to get along better in the world.” To put it succinctly, good preaching these days is defined as a spiritual “Dear Abbey” column, and a good preacher is a sort of “pious Dr. Phil.”

And some preachers have gotten the message! That’s why you get so many sermons these days on: “How to have a happy marriage” or “How to get your kids to do what you want and like it!” or “How to succeed in your job in ten easy steps.” Some critics of this kind of “relevant” preaching have pointed out that it aims exclusively at helping you be “successful” in this world – financially, personally, relationally. But is that the purpose of preaching? Is that what Paul meant when he said: “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:21)? I don’t much think so.

Preaching, at least the kind Paul was talking about, does not have as its purpose helping you and me to succeed in this world. Quite the contrary: Preaching, if it is Gospel preaching, points us to a whole new world Jesus called “the Kingdom of God” whose values and vision are so opposite from this world’s that when we hear it and heed it, we cannot be anything else but “odd,” one might even say “irrelevant,” to this world. That’s why it sounds like “foolishness” to those committed to, and invested in, this world.

Does that mean that Christians shouldn’t want to have a happy home? Of course not. Does that mean that Christians shouldn’t want to be good parents? Of course not. Does that mean that Christians shouldn’t want to do well in their jobs? Of course not. But these things are not the purpose of being Christian; they are merely byproducts of it. The purpose of being Christian is to live in this world as a citizen of that world Jesus called the Kingdom of God. The purpose of preaching is to teach you how.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, said it this way: “Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.”

And so, when you settle into the pew on Sunday, there’s a question you should be asking of the preacher. Not, “Do you have any advice to help me be successful in this world?” but “Any news from Headquarters?”

Faithful Thinking, Thoughtful Believing

2011-05-28T08:32:00.001-04:00

I don’t want to dance around this today, so let me just put it out there and see what you think: There is a deep, abiding, anti-intellectualism present among evangelicals in general and Baptists in particular that regards thinking itself as an act of unbelief. There, I said it. I feel better…I think. Some, eager to champion Christian orthodoxy, have smuggled in the notion that because critical thinking (which just means asking questions about your subject) has been the locus of liberalism’s attack on orthodoxy, they're determined never to be caught doing it! It’s as though Paul said: “We walk by faith, not by thought,” rather than, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). To “blind faith” we’ve added “dumb faith.” Faith doesn’t ask questions. Faith doesn’t think; it believes. Never mind that it was Jesus who commanded us to “love the Lord our God with our minds,” and not just our hearts.

I’ve struggled with this my whole life, feeling guilty, even “faithless,” when I asked questions or thought deeply about my Christian faith. It came to crisis in college when my adolescent, largely emotional, faith was challenged by professors who made me think about my faith. As I matured as a person and a Christian, I found that the feelings by which I had first come to know Christ were now competing with thoughts also trying to find their way to Christ. At first, I mistook them for enemies.

Then, a professor of English gently corrected me, and helped me to make peace between my head and my heart. She said: “Wayne, I’m a Christian for two reasons – because it makes sense and feels right. I wouldn’t be a Christian if it just felt right but didn’t make sense. Nor would I be a Christian if it just made sense and didn’t feel right. You see, in my Christian faith, my head and my heart have become friends.” That conversation was grace to me. For the first time in my life, I no longer regarded thinking as unbelief.

That was forty years ago now, forty years of hard, rigorous, disciplined thinking about my faith. My commitment to Christian orthodoxy is undiminished by all that thinking. I believe the same things I believed as a child of ten when my heart moved me to faith in Christ. It’s just that now I have thoughts as well as feelings that draw me to Him.

I think it’s called “growing up,” and we do that spiritually as well as physically. I often say to people: “Give as much of yourself as you can to as much of God as you can understand, knowing that both will change as you mature and discover more about both yourself and God.”

Please don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve got it all “figured out.” Does a snail ever “figure out” the cosmos? I just mean that joined to my credo (“I believe”) is my cogito (“I think”), and both inevitably, relentlessly, faithfully, thoughtfully lead me to God and to His Son, Jesus the Christ in Whom “I believe.”

The World is Ending Tomorrow! Absolutely...definitely...maybe...well maybe not.

2011-05-20T16:02:00.003-04:00

I can’t believe I’m doing this, but since everybody else is talking about it, I may as well. Harold Camping, who is president of the California-based (no comment) “Family Radio,” a Christian radio “ministry,” has caused quite a stir with his prediction that the “Rapture” will happen tomorrow, May 21, 2001, at 6:00 PM, Pacific time, I presume. There are billboards announcing the end of the world; people are putting their plans in order for their imminent departure; and those who hold Christianity and all things Christian in contempt are planning “Rapture Parties” for tomorrow to celebrate their having been “Left Behind.”

Let me say three things about it.

Rev. Camping’s credibility is not all that high since this is not the first time he has made such a prediction. Apparently, predicting the Rapture is not an “exact science.” In any case, the whole notion of the Rapture is not one on which all Christians agree. In point of fact, the New Testament passages that are typically used to make the case for a “Rapture theory” are few, not all that clear, and open to various interpretations.

Finally, and what is of most concern to me, the truly regrettable aspect of the current “Rapture mania” is that fact that all the silliness surrounding it merely serves to trivialize what is a central biblical affirmation; namely that God is Lord of history, and that some day, some way, at a time of His own choosing, God will bring the story we call human history to a fitting and appropriate end. As C. S. Lewis, with his typical British understatement, put it: “When the author walks on to the stage, the play is over” (Mere Christianity, “The Practical Conclusion”).

Meanwhile, there’s work to do. Will it happen tomorrow? I don’t know, and I don’t know who knows. I know this: When it does happen, it will be too late to feign righteousness and goodness and integrity if one hasn’t been practicing righteousness and goodness and integrity all along. There’s no point in trying to change sides and pretend, “I was with you all along,” when the flag is being run up in the square and there’s now no “side” to choose except His. The pious frauds will be apparent to all. About some we’ll say, “Oh no, not you!” About others, we’ll say: “Ahh, I knew it all along.”

Moreover, I also wonder if those who say they long for the Rapture to come really know what it is for which they’re longing. We have these idyllic and romantic and sentimental notions of what the end will be like when it comes, but I wonder…. Again, C. S. Lewis:

God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else – something it never entered your head to conceive – comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.

Meanwhile, for whatever “while” entails, there’s work to do – truths to tell; promises to keep; love to give and to receive; suffering for righteousness’ sake to be endured; the “peace which passes understanding” in which to live; and faith in what some dismiss and others deride to be believed. Perhaps, Lewis suggests, “God is holding back to give us that chance.”

But if it should come tomorrow, start the party without me. I don’t plan on being there…I hope.

And Teach Them

2011-05-13T15:09:00.001-04:00

We're grandparents! Well…kinda…sorta. We've been raising bluebirds at our house. We watched the mom and dad bluebird build the nest in our bluebird box, and then waited with excitement and anticipation for the eggs to hatch. Daddy Blue dutifully fed Mom Blue on the nest each day. When the eggs hatched, she joined him as they scurried back and forth to the box feeding the littles one. Life was good. Then, the unthinkable happened. We woke one morning to find Daddy Blue belly up on our drive - victim of some terrible fate, natural or otherwise we do not know, though we suspect “foul play.” In any case, now we had a crisis on our hands - a single mom trying to raise three little blueies on her own. We sprang into action. To Wild Birds Unlimited to buy meal worms. We fed her as she fed them. I'd call her every morning, and she dutifully answered and appeared at the feeder for breakfast. Same ritual at night. Then, yesterday morning when I went out to feed her, I noticed that she was not as friendly as she had been. Soon I found out why. The baby blues had fledged and she was trying to get them into the trees to safety. I went in and told Cheryl, and we congratulated ourselves on the successful “birth” of our new “grandbabies.” Little did we know that while our job was nearly over, hers was just beginning. Now Momma Blue had to teach them all the things they would need to know to succeed as bluebirds - flying, perching safely, roosting at night, and, of course, hunting food. In many ways, she's busier now than she was when they were in the bluebird box. Every day we see her shuttling back and forth from this branch to the next tending and teaching and training her little “pupils.” It's really something to watch. And it occurred to me: It never was her job to produce hatchlings or fledglings. It was her job to produce bluebirds, and for that she must teach them, not just birth them.

So, what does all that have to do with theology? Let me go out on a limb. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) According to Matthew's Gospel, virtually the last thing Jesus said to the church was, “Now as you go, make disciples of all nations” (28:19). The mission of the Church is clear and compelling: We are in the disciple-making business.

But the question is, “How?” How are we to make disciples? Well, the obvious answer is to continue reading in Matthew 28:19, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” And so, making disciples for Jesus involves a birthing process of sorts, setting out on the life-changing, transformational journey best symbolized in the beautiful and powerful symbol of baptism that signifies death to an old way of life and birth to a new.

Unfortunately, however, too many quit reading at that point, even though Jesus isn't finished talking! The rest of what Jesus has to say to the Church is this: “and teaching them to keep everything I have commanded you.” That is, making disciples involves not one thing (baptizing) but two - baptizing and teaching.

Too often, however, we Baptists (I'm a Baptist, so I'll address our idiosyncrasies) act as though disciple-making were finished in the baptistery. What if we treated our biological birth the same way we treat our spiritual birth? What if Blue Mom had abandoned the hatchlings as soon as they were liberated from the eggs? Imagine a couple finding out they were going to have a baby, going through the nine-month pregnancy with all the attendant excitement and expectation. Then, the big day comes and the baby is born. Pats on the back, balloons on the ceiling, birth announcements sent to friends and family; and then, incredibly, the couple goes home and leaves the baby in the hospital nursery! How absurd. Of course, birth is only the beginning of the journey not the end.

And so it is with spiritual birth. Baptism is the beginning, not the end. Disciples are made by two things, not just one: baptizing them and teaching them.

We celebrate the beginning of a new life in Christ in the waters of baptism. That's as it should be. But our work with the wet little converts, and indeed with us all, is far from finished. Becoming a disciple, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, or an ugly little bald hatchling becoming a beautiful bluebird, involves the total transformation of one into a completely new kind of person called “Christian,” and that will take of a lifetime of journeying with Jesus.

And so, lest we forget, the business of the Church is to make disciples…by baptizing them and teaching them. And in case you're wondering, there is homework.

Camo Christian

2011-05-01T20:40:00.000-04:00

Todd Brady, minister to the university at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, tells a story about driving around town with his two-year son, Jack, while Jack does the two-year old thing and “names” everything in sight. “Police car!” “Hospital!” “Water tower!” “Doggie!” “School bus!” Todd dutifully responds with the appropriate parental praise: “Yes, Jack. That’s right.” But things get a bit complicated when they pass a brick, ultra-modern, rectangular, nondescript office building, and Jack, thinking he recognizes it, shouts: “Church!”

While architecture is no fail-safe method of determining a church’s faithfulness to the Gospel, it can say a lot about who we think we are and what it is we believe we’re doing in there.

[Click here to read the recent USA Today story about the loss of the steeplejack profession because churches no longer have, or want, steeples on their buildings.] And that leads me to wonder why so many churches these days have gone out of their way not to look like a church or talk like a church or act like a church or behave like a church. In the interest of good customer relations disguised as “openness” and “relevance,” the mantra seems to be: “Come to our church! We don’t look Christian; we don’t sound Christian; we don’t talk Christian; we don’t think Christian; we don’t act Christian. You’ll feel right at home!” To reverse the old adage: “If it doesn’t look like a duck or walk like a duck or quack like a duck, maybe it isn’t a duck.” “Camo Christian” I could call it.

I know, I know: There’s more to being church than merely looking like church. And I too have been witness to the idolatry of building that masquerades as authentic Christianity. I’ll give you that. But that said, I can’t help but wonder why so many so-called contemporary churches go to such lengths to disconnect themselves from the two thousand year old stream of historic Christianity. Some chalk it up to the uninformed exuberance and missionary zeal of neophytes who confuse ignorance with innovation and think that because they’ve just discovered something for themselves it didn’t exist before they discovered it! You know, “How did the church survive until we got here?” Perhaps. But I sometimes suspect something less lofty – marketing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying, “Put a cross on it and it’ll be a church.” But it’s a good start. While the church must never be so “heavenly minded that it’s no earthly good,” in an increasingly postmodern, post-Christian, secular, consumer culture, the real challenge for the church is to be in the world while not being of it. You can't take the “odd” out of God.

I wonder: If Jack were to come to our place and watch us worship and listen to us talk and observe how we behave, would he say, “Look Daddy, Christians!” Just saying.

The Date of the Last Supper

2011-04-21T07:09:00.015-04:00

The date of Jesus’ crucifixion is a knotty issue indeed, but a new book by Professor Colin Humphreys of Cambridge (The Mystery of the Last Supper) claims to clear up the confusion by appealing to a little-known fact; namely, that Jews in Jesus’ day used two different calendars. Essentially, Humphreys argues that the constricted and contorted chronology of Holy Week that has been the staple of Church custom for centuries is based on two fundamentally mistaken assumptions: (1) that the chronologies of the Synoptic (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) accounts of Jesus’ final week can be harmonized with the Johannine account; and (2) that the biblical accounts of Jesus’ final week, with the Last Supper on Thursday, crucifixion on Friday, and resurrection on Sunday, derived from a single Jewish calendar that lies behind the biblical narratives. Humphreys argues that both assumptions are incorrect. He suggests that the events of Holy Week were more protracted than the attempt to harmonize the Gospel accounts would suggest, and that there is evidence that two, not one, Jewish calendars were in use in Jesus’ time.
Humphrey’s theory is fascinating but hardly new. It was first suggested back in 1965 by Annie Jaubert in a book known only to NT scholars titled The Date of the Last Supper. Jaubert, in an attempt to resolve the apparent conflict of chronologies between the Synoptics and John, argued that the differences can be accounted for based on the fact that official Judaism and sectarian Judaism employed different calendars for determining high holy days such as Passover. I first encountered the book back in the 1970’s in my PhD studies while writing a paper on the Last Supper for Professor George Beasley-Murray's New Testament seminar. Both Humphreys and Jaubert argue that the calendar is critical for unraveling the “Mystery of the Last Supper.” Let me explain.

In point of fact, all four Gospels indicate that Jesus was crucified on Friday, including John (see John 19:31ff.). The issue in dispute among the Four Gospels is not over the day of the week but rather the day of the calendar. The Synoptics describe it as “the day of Preparation” that is, for the Sabbath (Greek- hemera hen paraskeves, sometimes shortened just to paraskeve, as in Matthew 27:62). Among Hellenistic Jews of the first century this was the typical Jewish shorthand for “Friday” since Sabbath was our “Saturday.” (Keep in mind that the names of the days of the week we now use in the English-speaking world were not in use in Jesus’ time) The Synoptic Gospels also indicate that Jesus’ Last Supper with the disciples was a Passover (see, for example, Mark 14:12ff. where Mark says that Jesus gave his disciples specific instructions for preparing the Passover meal that they would eat together at the Last Supper). John, however, seems to suggest that the Last Supper was not a Passover meal (see John 13:1 where John says, “Now before the feast of the Passover....”). Moreover, when John describes the crucifixion, he points out that Jesus was crucified on the very day that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in preparation for the Passover Seder that would be eaten later that evening (see John 19:14), meaning that the meal Jesus had with the disciples in John 13 could not have been a Passover, and apparently indicating that Jesus was, metaphorically and spiritually speaking, the “Passover Lamb of God” who was being offered up for His people. This means, among other things, that the date and time of the Last Supper, at least in the Synoptics, was Passover (Nisan 14 according to the Jewish calendar), whereas the date and time of the Last Supper in the Gospel of John was at least 24 hours earlier (“Now before the feast of the Passover...”), and that Jesus’ last meal with His disciples was a “farewell meal,” but not a Passover meal. Which is correct?  

Perhaps both. Now that we have the Dead Sea Scrolls, we’ve discovered that apparently not all Jews celebrated Passover on the same day. The Essenes (a first-century monastic reform movement that protested the corruption of the temple and the Sadducaic priesthood presiding in Jerusalem over such things as Passover) in protest followed a solar calendar rather than the official lunar calendar observed in Jerusalem. This means that the Essenes did not observe Passover on the same date that the rest of Jerusalem did. It could be that the differences between the Synoptic accounts and the account in John may be nothing more than a difference in “point of view.” Mark, for example, depicts the Last Supper from an “insider's perspective,” that is, from the perspective of Jesus and His disciples who, like the Essenes, also protested the corruption of the temple and the priesthood (cf. Jesus’ cleansing of the temple), and in protest did not observe Passover with the rest of Jerusalem but instead followed the solar calendar and observed Passover earlier. John, however, seems to be telling the story from the perspective of official Judaism in Jerusalem who followed the official lunar calendar; therefore, according to John, Jesus’ Last Supper was not a Passover (official Judaism, unlike the Essenes, followed a lunar calendar and, therefore, observed Passover later). And so, from the perspective of John’s Gospel, Jesus did not celebrate a Passover with His disciples; rather He was Paschal Lamb, crucified at the very moment official Judaism in Jerusalem was slaughtering lambs for Passover. Hence, from their differing points of view, both the Synoptics and John are correct.  

Adding further credibility to this thesis is the fact that there are “Essene-like” allusions in Mark’s description of the Last Supper (see Mark 14:12ff). We now know that Essenes lived in the city of Jerusalem as well as out in the Jordan Valley at Khirbet Qumran. Archaeologists discovered a gate on the south side of the ancient city of Jerusalem near Mt. Zion dating from the time of Herod the Great which was known by Jewish sources of the period as “the gate of the Essenes.” This could have implications for understanding a rather enigmatic passage in Mark 14:13ff. In giving instructions to his disciples about making preparations for them to eat the Passover, Jesus sent two of his disciples into Jerusalem with the instructions:

“Go into the city, and a man will meet you carrying a water jar; follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says, Where is my guest room ( kataluma in Greek), where I shall eat the Passover with my disciples?’ And he will show you a great upper room (Greek, anagaion) already furnished and prepared; there prepare (it) for us” (Mk. 14:13-16).

This passage is striking for several reasons:

1) Why all the secrecy? It makes sense if Jesus and his disciples, like the Essenes, were perceived as something of a radical, eschatological reform movement opposed to the way in which official Judaism operated in the Holy City (cf. witness both Jesus' cleansing of the Temple and His Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem earlier in the week). The Essenes, in favor under Herod the Great, had fallen out of favor with Herod's son, Antipater (which is why they were forced into seclusion on the shores of the Dead Sea), and with Pontius Pilate, the Roman military governor who now controlled the city. If Jesus and His disciples were regarded by the authorities as something of an Essene-like group (the Teacher and His pupils), it would explain the need to skulk through the city to prepare for Passover.

2) How would the two disciples know which particular man carrying a water jar to follow in a city the size of Jerusalem? The answer is that men in that culture didn't carry water jars; women did, unless of course they were a monastic community in which there were no women, like the Essenes. A man carrying a water jar would have stood out in that setting like the proverbial “sore thumb.”

3) Jesus told them to say to the master of the house: “The Teacher says, Where is my guest room where I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?” The Essenes referred to their leader as “The Teacher.”

4) Finally, the gate of the Essenes on Mt. Zion is almost precisely located in the same place where tradition has preserved that Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples - the Upper Room (cenacle in Latin; anagaion in Greek).

(For a fuller treatment of this theme, see my book, Where Jesus Walked, Judson Press, 2001, pp. 121ff.)

Does all this mean that Jesus and his disciples were Essenes? No, of course not. But it may mean that perhaps Jesus and his disciples, like the Essenes, were perceived in their culture and day as something of a “protest group” of obedient Jews looking to purify a corrupt Jewish establishment. It also means that perhaps at least some of Jesus’ followers (like the master of the house who hosted Jesus and his disciples for Passover) may well have been converts to Jesus’ messianic movement from the Essene movement.

That Jesus was crucified on Friday is certain. Whether or not the Last Supper was a Passover is still debated, and how one answers is, at least in part, a function of whether one gives more credence to the Synoptic account or to John’s. Then again, as we’ve seen, one may not need to choose between them.

What I find most startling about the events we Christians remember on this day is the amazing metamorphosis of language by which we now call this Friday “Good.”

Was Luke a Gentile?

2011-03-25T05:43:00.000-04:00

Christian Symbol for Gospel of Luke

Consensus is a rare thing in New Testament scholarship, but if there is a scholarly consensus about anything, it is that Luke was perhaps the only Gentile writer in the New Testament. Sometimes scholars suggest that Luke was a Gentile because his Gospel reflects an interest in Gentiles, but, of course, so does Paul and no one argues that Paul was a Gentile. Others argue that Luke was most likely a Gentile because he wrote in excellent, fluid Greek, but, as anyone who has read him in Greek will attest, so too does Philo Judaeus, and no one argues that he was a Gentile.

But by far, the chief reason scholars argue for Luke’s being a Gentile is because of something Paul says in Colossians. Lea and Black, in their New Testament Introduction, voice the consensus when they write: “Luke is usually viewed as a Gentile Christian. In Colossians 4:10-11 Paul refers to Aristarchus, Mark, and Jesus Justus as Jewish believers. Later he sends greetings from Luke, apparently designating him as a Gentile.”

Let me say two things about that. First, it is an assumption that the “Luke” Paul mentions in Colossians as one of his traveling companions was, in fact, the author of the Third Gospel and Acts, since both Luke and Acts are, strictly speaking, anonymous. That said, I see no compelling reason to doubt that Paul’s “Luke” was also the author of the Third Gospel. Indeed, that assumption has recently taken on increased credibility as a consequence of the late Professor Martin Hengel’s work on titles in the New Testament. Until recently it had been assumed that the four Gospels had circulated anonymously until about AD 125, at which time the titles were formally attached to their works. Moreover, the titles, it was argued, were of limited historical value in that they were based on traditions held by the early church. Hengel, however, argues that, while the writers of the Gospels do not overtly identify themselves in the body of their works, there is no evidence that the Gospels ever circulated without a title in the form of a tag attached to the scroll. Far from the early Church having “made up” the traditions about authorship, the manuscript tradition actually supports the traditional authorial ascriptions. As a result of Hengel’s work, one can now argue that the titles themselves have merit in establishing the authorship of the four canonical Gospels. At the very least, the burden of proof shifts to those who would argue that the Gospel of Luke was composed pseudonymously.

Second, the idea that Luke (Paul's traveling companion and perhaps the author of the Third Gospel) was a Gentile is based largely on one particular interpretation of one passage of Scripture - Col. 4:14 which says: “Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas greet you.” The assumption at work in this hypothesis is that Paul in Col. 4 is identifying two different groups of colleagues: the former being Jews, “those of the circumcision” (Aristarchus, Mark, and Jesus Justus), and the latter being Gentiles, “those not of the circumcision” (Epaphras, Luke, and Demas). Hence, the belief that Luke was a Gentile is based solely on the assumption that Paul's phrase “those of the circumcision” means “Jew,” and therefore those excluded from that designation (including Luke) must have been Gentiles.

However, the evidence will not support such a view. if you look up every time Paul uses the phrase “those of the circumcision” (oi˚ o¡nteß e˙k peritomhvß in the Greek), you will find that he does not use this phrase to distinguish Jew from Gentile; rather, he means by this phrase those of the circumcision party, that is, Judaizers (cf. see Acts 15; Gal. 2:14). More precisely, Judaizers were Jesus-believing Jews of the early church who believed that pagans had to be circumcised and convert to Judaism (i.e., become proselytes) before they could become Christians. This was, as you know, the primary debate at the Jerusalem Conference of Acts 15, and Paul was clearly on the side that pagans did not first have to be circumcised and become proselytes before they could become Christians. But other Jewish “Jesus Believers” (it's anachronistic to refer to them at this point as "Christians" in the sense of a religion distinct from Judaism) took the opposite position and regarded conversion to Judaism as a “halfway step” on the road to becoming fully Christian. These were they Paul referred to as “the circumcision party” (oi˚ o¡nteß e˙k peritomhvß, literally, “the out-of-the-circumcision ones”). If this, rather than "Jews," is indeed what Paul had in mind when he referred to “those of the circumcision,” then those (like Luke) who were excluded from the list of the "out-of-the-curcumcision ones" does not mean that they were Gentiles, but rather Jews, specifically Jews who did not believe conversion to Judaism was a necessary “half-way step” to becoming Christian. That is, in Paul's usage both “those of the circumcision” and “those not of the circumcision” would have been Jews. Paul's normal term for “the Jews” was not oi˚ onteß e˙k peritomhvß, but rather the typical Greek word for the Jewish people; namely, Ioudai√oß, a word he clearly knows; he used twenty-six times in his letters.

Hence, Paul was likely not saying that Luke was a Gentile at all; rather, he was describing him as a Jew who, like himself, never believed that circumcision and becoming a proselyte were requirements for becoming a Christian.

Actually, this makes much more sense when you read The Gospel of Luke in the original Greek. Virtually all scholars have noted the heavy use of “Semitisms” in Luke’s Greek (Jewish idioms that don’t translate very well into the Greek), but haven’t known what to make of them. Why would one so obviously at home in Greek use Jewish idioms so pervasively in his writing? It makes perfect sense, however, if Luke was a Greek-speaking, Jesus-believing Jew who thinks (and writes) in Jewish thought forms and processes even though he is fluent in Greek, as the Greek of Luke-Acts makes clear.

Finally, the question I was asked by a scholar in New York at the American Bible Society where I read a paper I had written on this subject: “But what difference does it make?” Good question. In all honesty, probably not much, except for this. Everyone recognizes Luke’s advocacy for Gentiles both in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles. I submit that this advocacy would not have been very surprising (and perhaps even self-serving) if Luke were, in fact, a Gentile. But if he were a Jew...then his advocacy for his Gentile brothers and sisters in Christ becomes all the more surprising…and compelling.

Something to think about.

The Ides of March: A Sermon (Luke 13:31-35)*

2011-03-14T16:23:00.002-04:00

In Margaret Jensen’s book First We Have Coffee, there is the touching account of her Baptist preacher father’s being voted out of his church. She describes how the news reached her. Called to the dormitory phone, she heard her sister saying, “Margaret, this is Grace.” Long pause. “Papa’s been voted out.”

She goes on to write: “Unable to share the family disgrace with anyone, I went to class and failed the biology exam for which I was well prepared … I tried to figure out what could have gone wrong with Papa’s call. In my mind, the ministry had somehow been disgraced.”

For ten years he had shepherded and loved that congregation, but now they didn’t want him anymore. When Margaret arrived home, she found her sister Leona furious. She explained life as she saw it for the Norwegian immigrant pastor: “They wanted an American pastor, one more geared to the changing times.”

“What will we do now?” Margaret asked. Her mother, taking cups out of the cupboard never looked up: “God never fails,” she said. “But it will be interesting to see how He works this one out. But first, we have coffee.”

Rejection. Feel it?

Just how severe a blow rejection is, I think, can be measured in at least two ways. Look at the lengths to which we are willing to go to avoid rejection.

In a recent report, a consumer psychologist said that now that the American economy has entered what many have called "The Great Recession," Americans have had to learn how to shop all over again. In these tighter times, many American shoppers simply do not have the money any longer to pay “retail” for goods, and so this consumer psychologist was suggesting that Americans are going to have to learn to walk into an up-scale department store and offer the salesperson a price for a commodity that may be less than the sticker price. She went on to say that though many Americans will find this difficult to do, they can learn to do it. It is difficult for Americans, she went on to say, not only because they have never learned to do it, as people in other cultures have, but because Americans are terrified of rejection, even from a salesperson. And so this psychologist was suggesting strategies for this new generation of shoppers and encouraging them to “go ahead and try it.” “It’s not like being jilted by a lover,” she said. “It’s only a vendor, for heaven’s sake!”

And look at the reactions rejection touches off. Bo Jackson, whose athletic career ended sadly with an injury, spoke with venom in his voice about the decision by the Kansas City Royals to let him go.

“I gave them the best I had. I sold tickets for them they would not have sold had I not been playing. And what do they do? The moment I’m hurt, they give up on me! I wouldn’t play for the Royals I don’t care what they paid me!”

Rejection. Is any one a stranger to it?

Luke was certainly no stranger to the pain of it either. He writes to a church struggling with this very issue. Luke’s gospel was most likely written sometime around the mid-80’s of the first century A.D. Though the separation between the church and the synagogue was all but complete, dialog was continuing still between Jews and Christians. As a matter of fact, most early Christians were Jews, and many of them still retained ties to Judaism. The fact that as late as Acts 10 Simon Peter was still concerned about eating kosher is compelling evidence that the early Church regarded itself as a faithful community within Israel. But because these “Messianic Jews” called “Christians” also had some newfangled ideas about the law and about inclusion of non-Jews, they were rejected by the synagogue. And the charges against them were three: (1) you’ve been unfaithful to your heritage in Judaism; (2) you’ve been unfaithful to your own Founder, Who was a faithful Jew; and (3) you’ve been unfaithful to the Scriptures. And so, in part to answer those charges, and in part to encourage a Church caught in the cycle of rejection, Luke writes his two volume work, Luke-Acts, to remind his church that their Lord too suffered rejection and to invite them to “overhear” how He dealt with it.

And “deal with it” He did! As a matter of fact, our text is actually a part of a much longer section in Luke’s gospel, running from 9:51 - 18:14, in which Luke depicts Jesus as steadfastly journeying to Jerusalem and to the final rejection that awaits Him there. Luke’s so-called “travel narrative” foreshadows it: “And He set His face toward Jerusalem.”

And all along the way, as Luke tells it, Jesus encountered it — rejection. In His hometown synagogue at Nazareth, in the synagogues of Galilee, at a Samaritan village, and now, with Jerusalem looming large on the horizon, word comes from the Pharisees, of all people, that Herod Antipas is waiting for Him once He steps foot in Jerusalem. They appear on the scene, like the augur in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Beware the ides of March!” “Don’t go to Jerusalem!”

But Jesus does a strange thing. He tells them to go back to Herod and say: “Get the gallows ready, for Jerusalem has had a lot of practice putting prophets to death. You ought to know what to do with one more.” But then, instead of railing against the recalcitrance of the Holy City, He weeps over it: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood, and you would not.”

Do you see what Luke is doing? Do you see what he’s doing? By letting his church, in the throes of their own experience of rejection, “overhear” Jesus dealing with rejection, he reminds them of some things the people of God ought never forget — then or now. He reminds them, in the face of uncompromising rejection, of the steadfast love of God.

“I would … you would not!”

God’s love, Luke says, is not contingent on anything we do or fail to do. It’s not even contingent on our acceptance of it. It is unilateral, unconditional, unwavering. The synagogue may have rejected them, but God hadn’t.

And he reminds them that their Lord too had known the pain of rejection. Chapter 9:51 - 18:14 runs like a long, extended commentary on Isaiah 53: “He was despised and rejected of men.” And Luke wants them to notice: though rejected, He did not reject. Nor does He engage in self-pity, either: “You know, I just don’t understand why they don’t like me?” Motivated by a larger vision, “He sets His face steadfastly toward Jerusalem.” There’s more at stake here than feelings — even Jesus’. They could be sure that they were not now being asked to endure anything the Lord Himself had not endured.

But more than anything else, do you know why Luke wants his church to “overhear” this story? Because he wants them to remember what it feels like to be rejected lest they ever be tempted to do the same to others. To make sure they “get the point,” Luke follows this story immediately in Chapter 14 with four other stories that all take place “around the table.” The context is still Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem and the subject is still “acceptance and rejection.” This is no pleasant stop-off on the way to the Cross. For Luke, nothing is more serious than the table. Throughout Luke Jesus sits “at table” with all kinds of people, much to the dismay of His critics. “Jesus, why do you eat with sinners and publicans? Birds of a feather, you know …”

And in Acts, the issue on which the entire story of the early Church turns is precisely this: “Who will be admitted to the table?” “Can you eat with their kind and still be the Church?” To accept someone at table is to accept them. And to refuse to eat with someone is to reject them. Don't think so? Look over your own guest list at your home in the past year. The people who have sat at your table are the people whom you have accepted.

It was so critical for Paul, that he once told Simon Peter off right in front of the whole church over this issue. He and Peter had been eating with some Gentiles at a church supper in Antioch, and they were having a great time until some Jewish members from the church at Jerusalem showed up. When he saw them come in, Peter got up from the table, took his plate, and went over to join them, refusing to eat with the Gentiles in the presence of these folk from Jerusalem. And right in front of the entire church, Paul stood up and called him a “hypocrite. And you think you have some tense church meetings.

But Paul was right. What made the church the Church was the fact that only here would Jew and Gentile eat together.

“Can you not eat with their kind and still be the Church?”

Lose that…lose that, and you don’t have a church anymore.

And so Luke reminds his church, and ours, that we are a Fellowship of the Rejected Lord, set into a community called “Church” where each receives the other just as all have been received by Christ.

Fred Craddock tells a story about being invited to give some lectures at the University of Winnipeg in Canada. He’d never been to Winnipeg, so he asked his host, “How shall I come dressed, it’s the middle of October.” He said, “Well, it’s a little early for the bad weather, but you might want to bring a windbreaker.” Craddock took a windbreaker.

The first lecture was Friday night. When he came out of the lecture hall it was spitting a little snow. Craddock said, “No problem. It’s a little early. It won’t be anything.”

Next morning Craddock got up and looked out, it was up to the top of the window. It had blown against the door, up to the top of the door.

The phone rang. The voice on the other end said, “Listen, this town is shut down. We were taken by surprise, nothing is moving. We’ve canceled the lecture, the airport is closed, in fact, I can’t even come and take you to breakfast.”

Craddock said, “Thanks. What am I to do?”

He said, “If you can make it down to the corner, go out of your room, take a right, go down to the corner, take another right and in the middle of the block is a bus depot. There’s a little cafe in there and it might be open.”

Well, Craddock put on his windbreaker, it didn’t even work in the room, and got his little cap, and,…I’ll tell you the truth…what he did was roll up a lot of toilet paper inside his cap to keep his head warm, and out into the cold he went, down to the corner, turned the corner, and sure enough there was a little bus depot and sure enough there was a little cafe. Craddock went inside; it was packed, wall to wall. Every stranded traveler in the country was there. Somebody scooted over and let him sit down in the booth with them. A big man in a greasy apron came over.

“What do you want?” Craddock said, “May I see the menu?”

He said, “What you want with a menu, we have soup.”

Craddock said, “Good, I’ll have the soup. Soup sounds good to me. I always eat soup for breakfast.”

Soup. He brought the soup. The soup was strange looking soup. It was gray soup. It looked the color of a mouse, but it was hot. Craddock took the spoon and tasted the soup. It was awful. He didn’t know what it was; it was awful soup. He couldn’t stand it. He put the spoon down, put his hands around his little soup stove to warm himself and rail against the world, what a horrible fix to be in.

The door opened, somebody yelled, “Shut the door!” and she did. This woman came in, she had on a coat, nothing on her head. Somebody scooted over and she got in there and the big man in the greasy apron came over.

“What ya want?”

She said, “A glass of water.” He brought her a glass of water, took out his little tablet and said, “What are ya ordering?”

She said, “Nothing, just the water.” He said, “Order something!” She said, “Just the glass of water.” He said, “Lady you gotta order something.” She said, “Just the water.” He said, “You gotta order or get out. We got paying customers here.” And she said, “I just wanted water.” And he said, “Lady, order something or leave.” She said, “Well, can I stay long enough to get warm?”

He said, “Order or leave!” She got up, the other people at the table got up, other people around her got up, others got up, Craddock got up. He said he didn’t know why, he just got up.

They all got up and started towards the door and the big man in the greasy apron said, “Okay, okay, she can stay.”

And she sat down and he brought her a bowl of that soup. Craddock asked the people there who had let him sit with them, “Who is she?”

The man said, “I never saw her before in my life, but if she ain’t welcome, ain’t nobody welcome.”

Then all you could hear was the clinking of spoons as people ate that gray soup. And Craddock said to himself, “If they can eat it, I can eat it.”

And so he took the spoon and started again to eat the soup. He said it was pretty good soup after all. Matter of fact, he said he kinda liked that soup. Matter of fact, he said he’d never had any soup like that before. And Craddock sat there and ate that whole bowl of soup. He said: “I don’t know what was in it; I’d never tasted anything like it, at least I didn’t think so; but as I started out the door I remembered what it tasted like. It tasted like bread and wine.”

“It’ll be interesting to see how God works this one out,” she said. “But first we have coffee.”

Rejection. Feel it? I tell you the truth, it’s doubtful you’ll make it through the day without experiencing it in one form or another – as victim or perpetrator.

It may well be that right now you’re caught up in its vicious cycle. Brothers and sisters, listen to Luke: God loves you; Jesus understands you; and the Church has a place at the table for you.

Forget the danish! Try that with your coffee.

*I published this somewhere, but for the life of me I can't now remember where. It happens.

Translating the Scripture

2011-02-25T16:43:00.006-05:00

Artemis

People who know me and know that I use the Greek New Testament exclusively for preaching and teaching often ask me which translation is best. It’s a tough question in that translations are governed by multiple factors only one of which is accuracy and reliability.

In recent years perhaps no issue has been more of a factor in Bible translation than “gender-inclusivity.” Three recent translations, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), Today’s New International Version (TNIV) and the English Standard Version (ESV), were all motivated by concerns (supportive or otherwise) over gender-inclusivity.

Today, feminist biblical scholarship has entered the mainstream, as has the push for gender-inclusive translations of the scriptures. For example, the revision of the Revised Standard Version along gender-inclusive lines (1991) placed a gender-inclusive translation into mainstream Protestantism. The TNIV sought to do the same for mainstream Evangelicalism. Moreover, even the ESV, a self-described “conservative” translation makes some concessions and accommodations to gender-inclusive concerns.

To what degree should a translator accommodate gender-inclusive concerns? Let me articulate three principles I employ when translating the scriptures for preaching and teaching, seeking to be inclusive of all God’s people and also faithful to the original intention of the biblical writer.

First, the use of inclusive language when making references to persons when the referent is not specifically male or female is not only acceptable but desirable. The use of generic “man” or “mankind,” or “he” or “brethren” when what was originally intended was “persons” or “brothers and sisters” is not only unnecessary but indefensible. Though their conventions regarding gender were certainly different from our own, biblical authors did assume that they were addressing both men and women, and it is altogether appropriate for modern translations of the scriptures so to indicate. Therefore, when scripture clearly refers to both men and women, I employ gender-inclusive (“men and women” or “brothers and sisters”), or better, gender-neutral (“persons” or “human beings”), language in my translations.

Second, I avoid the use of gender-inclusive or gender-neutral language when it muddles the original intention of the biblical writer or eliminates the use of technical language without which the meaning of the text is obscured. An example is the NRSV’s translation of bar 'enash (“son of man” in Daniel 7:13) by the phrase “human being.” “Son of man” in Daniel 7:13 is a technical term referring to a heavenly, messianic figure. Jesus referred to this passage when He called Himself “Son of Man” at His trial before the Sanhedrin (cf. Mark 14:62). Inexplicably, the NRSV renders τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου in Mark 14:62 as “Son of Man” (the capitals indicating that technical language is used), but in Daniel 7:13 translates כְּבַ֥ר אֱנָ֖שׁ (Son of Man) “human being,” thus severing Mark 14:62 from its Old Testament moorings.

Third, I do not employ feminine language for God in my translations. Indeed, to describe what we call God as an “inclusive language” issue is to confuse anthropology, sociology and psychology for theology. I understand that for some women to employ exclusively male language for God makes them feel as though they have been left out of the conversation, or worse, conjures up images of an abusive father or other male. However, maleness is not the issue. God is neither male nor female. Both women and men are made in God’s image, not God in ours. Moreover, how biblical language for God makes us “feel” is not the issue. The Bible’s subject is God, not my feelings. The issue is whether when we talk about God we are talking about the God of the Bible - the God of Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Paul, rather than some other “god” we happen to prefer to the Bible’s God.

To be sure, the Bible does employ feminine language for God, but only in the form of similes (comparisons using “like” or “as,” e.g. “As one whom a mother comforts, so will I comfort you" from Isaiah 66:13), never metaphors (e.g. “Our Mother who art in heaven”).

Let me quickly dispense with one objection, often cited, that has no merit. A former colleague once objected that she, having graduated an English major at a prestigious Baptist college, was not taught such a hard and fast distinction between “simile” and “metaphor.” She was taught, she said, that analogies are analogies irrespective of the particular language employed, suggesting that I was making entirely too much of this distinction between “simile” and metaphor.” My response was that I don’t really care what you call them – you may call them “simile” and “metaphor” or “tweedledee” and “tweedledum” for all I care – but that two different kinds of analogies are intended is obvious to anyone irrespective of the nomenclature employed or the relative academic credibility of the institution at which one studied. “Men are like dogs” – simile. “Men are dogs” – metaphor. “My love is like a red, red, rose” – simile. “My love blossoms with crimson, thorny passion” – metaphor. Any questions?

The reason Israel eschewed feminine metaphors for God was not because Israel believed God to be male; rather, it was because Israel wanted to distinguish its God from the gods and goddesses of its neighbors who believed that a female deity had given birth to the world – nature religion, “Mother Nature,” etc. This view was characteristic of the pantheistic fertility religions against which Israel defended itself throughout its history. An example was Artemis, Roman Diana (pictured above), who was the goddess of nature and the hunt and was the most widely worshiped of the nature goddesses in ancient Anatolia. But Israel’s God (YHWH) was different from these pantheistic nature goddesses, and to remind itself of that Israel never permitted its God to be referred to by means of feminine metaphors lest its God be confused with the nature deities of the pagan world.

Another objection, frequently cited but equally without merit, is the notion that Israel’s language for God can be explained merely by the fact that Israel was a patriarchy. “Of course Israel thought about God exclusively in male terms,” so the argument goes; “men were running things!” Sorry, all of Israel’s neighbors were patriarchies too, and most worshipped female deities.

And so, if we are talking about the God of the Bible and not some other god, we are not free to make the Bible’s God whomever we wish Him to be, or to describe Him with whatever language that happens to garner a majority vote at any given time. He is that very specific personality that is rendered in the Bible, the one whom Jesus taught us to call “Father.”

In short, I support the use of inclusive language in translation when the subjects being rendered are persons, unless it violates the intention of the biblical writer to do so. However, what we call the God of the Bible should not be decided on the basis of inclusive-language concerns. In Bible translation God-language should be chosen on the basis of a theology appropriate to the “God” about whom we’re speaking.

A Theology of Love

2011-02-13T06:11:00.002-05:00

Let’s talk about love. May as well; tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and only the foolish and foolhardy among us dare forget it. Everywhere we turn (television, florists, departments stores, Hallmark) we’ll be inundated with the notion that love is defined as a romantic feeling that launches us on a quest to “acquire” someone to fulfill our personal desires. At least that’s the world’s definition of “love.”

But it’s not the Church’s.

C. S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves, points out that while the world has largely reduced the idea of love to the “romantic,” the word in the culture of the New Testament (Greek) is far richer. Actually, there are four different words for love in Greek – eros (romantic love), philia (friendship), storge (affection), and agape (charity). The world’s notion of love is defined exclusively by the first – eros. The other three hardly come in for notice. Actually, says Lewis, while there are four different words for love in Greek, there is fundamentally only two kinds of love – need-love and gift-love. The former, characterized by eros, is an acquisitive, acquiring, selfish kind of love. “It’s about me and what I want from this relationship, not you.” The other kind of love (characterized supremely by the NT’s use of the word agape) is a self-giving love, seeking nothing from the other except to meet the other’s needs.

Three comments: (1) the New Testament never (that’s right, I said never) uses the word eros (Do the math!); (2) eros is almost exclusively the world’s notion of love; (3) the New Testament’s idea of love is informed and defined by the word agape, the self-giving love with which God loves us and wants to teach us how to do as well. What I’m saying is that the world’s idea of love is really an “anthropology” (Greek for “human”) of love, whereas the Church’s idea of love is a “theology” (Greek for “God”) of love. It’s about gift-love, not need-love.

I must confess to being embarrassed when the best idea the Church can come up with when it wants to talk about “love” is to borrow the world’s understanding of love (eros) and then smear a thin veneer of piety over it as though this is what the New Testament is talking about when it says “love.” It isn’t.

John comes as close as any NT writer to giving us a definition of what the Christian means when we say “love”: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to take away our sins.” Then he adds the punch line: “Beloved, if God so loved us, then we ought in the same way to love each other” (1 John 4:10-11).

“Honey, the flowers should be arriving any time now!” (Hey, I’m not that foolish)

A Reasonable Alternative

2011-01-20T11:34:00.013-05:00

Back in the mid-90’s I was dean of a divinity school at a Baptist college near where I live. When I became dean, I led the faculty through a thorough revision of the curriculum in an attempt to try to make theological education more germane to what students actually do in the parish once they get there. I had spent considerable time as a pastor before becoming a divinity dean, and I was determined not to repeat the mistakes I had witnessed in my own experience with theological education. Chief among them was the complaint I heard from numerous students who, in one way or another, commented on their seminary experience with the indictment: “I had entirely too many professors trying to tell me how to be a pastor who had never spent even one day as a pastor themselves.” Can you imagine being in medical school and being taught by professors who had never actually practiced medicine?

The preeminent piece of the revision was the initial course in the curriculum which was titled “Introduction to Theological Education for Ministry.” In that course, we addressed issues that every student entering ministry should engage: the call to ministry; a commitment to a life of study and learning; a commitment to a life of prayer and piety; and a commitment to develop the critical thinking skills necessary to reflect seriously on God’s work in the world. As dean, I staffed the course but did not teach it myself…except for the critical thinking component. That I taught myself. Only having a week to give to it, and knowing that I could not teach logic in such a brief period of time, I devised a shorthand way of introducing the students to logic and critical thinking. I developed a system of reducing the principal parts of critical thinking to three things, all beginning with the letter “a” to make them more easily remembered. They were: assumptions, arguments, and authorities. By assumptions I meant the fundamental presuppositions you bring to the table without ever voicing them, or sometimes being aware of them, yourself. Arguments had to do with the fundamental “rules” that govern logical thought, what is traditionally taught as logic in college. While I did not attempt to get the students to learn all the names and definitions of the logical fallacies, most of which are in Latin (argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad populum, non sequitur, etc.), I did make sure that the students knew that there were “rules” that govern thinking, that there are “correct” and “incorrect” ways of arguing a case, that arguments can be either sound or specious. Authorities had to do with the authority to which one appeals to “settle” an argument or issue, and how credible those authorities are, authorities such as reason, experience, tradition, intuition, popular culture, etc. We engaged in some “argument evaluation” in which the students had to analyze and evaluate the credibility of certain arguments or discussions they heard in the news. It was both informative and entertaining…and I trust beneficial.

I left the school in 2004, but I sometimes wonder whether critical thinking is still being taught there, and if so, how the students would hear the contemporary arguments being offered up today. For my part, I hear essentially two different kinds of arguments being offered, especially in the world of politics: reasoning and name-calling. The former is characterized by an appeal to some “truth” that the arguer both accepts and assumes as valid for everyone. It is predicated on the assumption that truth is absolute and universal, not relative and individual. Three times three equals nine is not my “take” on arithmetic; it just is. That is, there are some things that are true and some things that are false irrespective of what you or I or anybody else may happen to think about it. We may disagree on what that is; we may disagree on how close we are to it; but we may not disagree that it is. The latter perspective assumes the opposite: that truth is relative (which, I would argue, so eviscerates the whole notion of “truth” so as to make it meaningless). In the words of the Postmodernist Manifesto: "Nothing is certain, not even this." Hence, if there is no “truth” to which one can appeal, then the issue shifts to power. For these people, it’s not about “right” and “wrong,” they believe in neither. It’s about who has the power, who has the microphone, who has the might. Indeed, for these people “might makes right.” They’re not into “right” and “wrong,” only “winners” and “losers.” This perspective is popularly referred to as “political correctness.” The word “political” here is merely a synonym for “power,” and that gives a glimpse into where their values lie. Power makes something “correct” or ‘incorrect” since there are no absolute truths or universal values. Of course, these people will shift the ground on you in a heartbeat if it serves their purposes to do so and appeal to reason or value or fairness as their ally. But they are just as quick to abandon them when they serve another’s argument. They justify this on the grounds that finally it’s about power not truth. The “winner” gets to make the rules and set the values and determine the truths. “Winner takes all.”

But why appeal to any truth or value or rule if you finally believe there are none? Because you and I are hard-wired for truth, even the purveyors of political correctness. As C. S. Lewis pointed out in Mere Christianity years ago, you can take a bat and beat each others’ brains out without a commonly-held set of absolute, universal values and truths, but you cannot quarrel. Quarreling assumes that there is a commonly-held standard to which both parties can, and must, appeal in order to prevail. It’s called “reasoning” and it’s different from name-calling. The only reason I can argue that my idea of Charlotte, NC is better than yours is that there is a real city of Charlotte. If there were none, the whole enterprise would be an exercise in futility and a waste of time. So it is with you and me. We argue and quarrel because there are real standards above us both, known to us both, and available to us both to which we can appeal for support. As the Christian moralists used to say, We have a sense of “oughtness” woven right into the fabric of our existence which can no more be violated with impunity than can the law of gravity. You may deny it; you may ignore it; you may evade it; but you won’t escape it. Your Creator hard-wired you for it. It isn’t a cultural “artifact;” it isn’t a “herd instinct;” it isn’t an accident of evolution. It is an invasion, and intrusion from the “outside.” To think at all I must claim for my thought validity that isn’t credible if my thinking is merely the product of some material or biological or cultural process. As Deepak Chopra said: “I am here to think God’s thoughts after Him; everything else is just detail.”

And so I issue a modest plea. Sure, we could use a bit more civility in public discourse. But incivility is neither new nor the unique province of any one constituency. Boors are boors and there will always be boors. What we really need is some critical thinking about the issues that vex and perplex us. Maybe if we wrestled with the issues a bit more, there'd be less wrestling with each other.

Better still, maybe we should spend more time wrestling not with each other but with God. I’m reminded of the monastic novice that approached the old monk and inquired of him: “Father, do you still wrestle with the devil?” To which the old monk replied: “Oh no, my son! I’m much too old and much too tired for that! Now, I wrestle with God.” To which the novice replied: “But Father, do you hope to win?” To which the old monk replied: “Heavens no, my son! I hope to lose!”

Glimpses of Glory: Using the Cinema in Preaching

2011-01-03T06:11:00.003-05:00

Imagine that it’s 11:40 A.M. Sunday morning, and you’re working hard in the sermon to help your audience understand the difficult and often painful work involved in being forgiven. “Forgiveness is hard,” you say, “because hovering over the broken relationship like a vulture are those deeds done you cannot undo, and those opportunities lost that can never be recaptured.” You made the point clearly and concisely, but in the minds and hearts of the audience, it is still just a “point,” not an experience. Then again, you could tell them a story…

Do you remember Mac Sledge, Robert Duvall’s character in Tender Mercies? It’s one of the most powerful stories of sin and judgment and grace and forgiveness I’ve ever seen. Mac had been a successful Country & Western singer and song writer out in west Texas until the bottle “laid him low.” Wrecked his life, ruined his career, ravaged his marriage.

In a moving scene, his eighteen year old daughter, whom he’d not seen since she was a little girl, came to see him one day. As she stood there in front of him, she seemed a parable of his sad, wasted life, the daughter he’d never really known. They awkwardly try to carry on a conversation, these two strangers, but the words won’t come. And as she turns to leave, she looks at her old, weathered, wasted Daddy whom she never knew, and summoning up a sacred memory she takes one more stab at it: “Daddy, do you remember that song you used to sing to me at night before I went to bed?”

“No, can’t say that I do.”

“You know, it went something like, ‘On the wings of a snow, white dove; He sent His...something, something love. . . .’ How’d that go?”

“I don’t remember.”

She leaves. But as she’s driving off, there’s old Mac, standing at the window watching his baby leave for the last time, and from somewhere he thought he’d buried forever he starts to sing: “On the wings of a snow, white dove; He sent his pure, sweet love; A sign from above, on the wings of a dove.”

Now, both make the point, but which would you rather hear? Moreover, notice: part of the power of the scene is the fact that both those who’ve seen the movie and those who haven’t experience the poignancy, encounter the pain, embrace the pathos: the latter for the first time, the former all over again for the very first time.

The purpose of this article, therefore, is to discuss and to demonstrate how the cinema can be used as a resource in preaching. I begin with a brief description of my homiletic, firmly positioning my preaching style within the so-called “new homiletic.” I will then proceed to a brief exegetical analysis of the biblical text of the sermon, followed by a brief description of the movie which serves as the “point of entry” for the sermon. Finally, I will present the sermon itself so as to demonstrate one preacher’s “take” on the utility of the cinema in sermonizing.

(To download and read the entire article, click here)

Telling Time

2010-12-31T08:52:00.004-05:00

Parochialism takes lots of expressions, but perhaps the least noticed is the way we tell time. Not everyone tells time the way we Americans do. The Chinese tell time differently. Their New Year begins in the spring rather than on January 1. Jews tell time differently too. Their New Year, called Rosh Hashanah (literally “head of the year”), is in the fall. A calendar is merely a way of organizing time for some purpose - social, cultural, commercial, administrative, or religious. How you tell time can be a telling indicator of what you value, what you think important, how you order your life.

That’s why, through the centuries, we Christians have developed our own unique way of telling time. For Christians, time-telling is a function of faith. Through the way we order our days we give witness to our faith that history is finally His-Story, and that the story of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ is finally the only story worth telling.

Our year doesn't begin on January 1st; it begins on the First Sunday of Advent with the birth of the Son of God and the beginning of the Salvation Story. It continues through Epiphany with the coming of the Magi (representing the larger, Gentile world) to worship before the Christ Child. Then in the spring for forty days called Lent through the long wilderness journey to the final week of His life we Christians join Jesus on the Way of the Cross. In early summer, on Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Spirit on the Church to empower us to be his witnesses “to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Then through the long hot summer months we trace our own journey with Jesus as his contemporary disciples by remembering how our fathers and mothers of faith in the Early Church dealt with difficulty and persecution and even death in their determination to be God’s people. Finally, in late fall we culminate the journey on Christ the King Sunday when we remember that Caesars come and Caesars go and Jesus is still King of Kings and Lord of Lords Whose Kingdom and coming are sure and certain. That's how we Christians organize our days and mark our time.

Incidentally, it is both an annoyance and an embarrassment to me that we Christians permit just about anyone and everyone to tell us how to tell time – Hallmark (It’s Grandparents Day!), the ecclesiastical denomination (It’s Radio and Television Commission Sunday!). Anybody, it seems, with an agenda can co-opt the calendar for their purposes (It’s National Car Care Month!). How you tell time is telling, isn’t it!

Christians celebrate New Year's as Christians by preparing all over again for the coming of the Christ into history - into our world, into our lives, into our hearts, into the Church, and into the new year. We start it not in January, but in late November by lighting candles for the Light of the World, singing songs for the One Who makes our hearts glad, giving gifts to honor the Gift of God, and telling stories – no, not just "stories," The Story – of the Word made flesh. We call it Advent (Latin for “coming”). It is the Church’s “New Year” celebration and a reminder that no matter what the New Year brings, for the believer it will bring Christ, just in the “knick of time.”

And so, a "belated" Happy New Year!

Through the Wardrobe with C. S. Lewis

2010-12-09T07:47:00.010-05:00

A lot of people got their first introduction to C. S. Lewis in December of 2005, when their kids dragged them to see the movie The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Today, the third installment in the series is released - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I paid a whole $1.95 for the book when I bought it!). The films are based on the children’s series Lewis penned called The Chronicles of Narnia. In the story four children travel through a magical wardrobe to emerge in the strange and mystical land of Narnia where animals speak and the world is locked in a perpetual Christmas-less winter while awaiting Spring that seems destined never to dawn.

My own introduction to Lewis, however, goes back to my college days in the 70’s when I studied English. A professor, knowing I was headed for seminary, suggested that I read Lewis as a model for the minister’s primary task of helping people to make sense of faith in their day-to-day lives. I devoured his writings voraciously, and he became for me a conversation partner with whom to discuss the “big issues.” Lewis’ writings have not only stood the test of time, but he himself has become for me, save Jesus of Nazareth, the single most important intellectual influence on my life.

And I’m not alone in this. This Oxford and Cambridge professor, though he died in 1963, continues to be for many a significant voice well into the 21^st century. His writings are more popular now than they were when he was alive. His non-fiction writings are for the most part all apologetic in character; that is, they are aimed at making Christianity credible to a thinking public. The most popular among them, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Four Loves, continue to draw countless readers into a conversation about life, faith, what it means to believe in God, and what it means to be a “mere Christian.”

Why is Lewis so popular among serious persons who want to think deeply about the “big issues” of life? Well, those who have found Lewis to be a reliable guide into these subjects will have to answer for themselves, but my own experience with Lewis points up three things that he just does better than anyone else.

First, he may have the finest mind I’ve ever encountered. His commitment to careful and correct thinking (logic) is relentless and unremitting. He will not abide sloppy thinking, and he will anticipate and expose it wherever he finds it. That is to say, if you’re not “into thinking,” don’t read Lewis. If, on the other hand, you want carefully argued reasons for believing what you believe, Lewis will gladly guide you.

Second, Lewis has an uncanny knack for knowing just the right example, model, or illustration to help you understand what appears at first sight to be a hopelessly complex idea. For example, in explaining how salvation is both God’s gift to us and our work to do, Lewis quips, “God is easy to please but hard to satisfy.” Then, he goes on to say that every parent joyously celebrates their baby’s first stumbling efforts in learning to walk. But that same parent will never be satisfied until their child can stride confidently across the room. In the same way, he says, God welcomes our most meager stumbling efforts to be the persons he created us to be, but will never be satisfied until we in fact become the persons he created us to be.

Finally, Lewis is a passionate writer. He believes what he’s saying, and it comes through. Agree with him, or disagree with him, but you will not read Lewis with indifference. He draws you in with careful reasoning and homey illustrations, and then, before you realize what’s happened, you’re hooked. That passion is in the service of his belief that God has really broken in and broken through to our world and revealed himself to us. That not everyone is aware of it is more a function of our closed-off, two-dimensional thinking than the credibility of God’s self-revelation. But for those who have the courage to “part the wardrobe,” a mystical and magical world awaits through which Lewis is all too happy to act as guide.

God Incognito (An Advent Sermon)

2010-12-04T07:30:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite Shakespearean plays is Henry The Fifth. The last of his great chronicle plays or histories, Henry The Fifth represents the zenith, the pinnacle of this genre for the Bard of Avon. In many ways, the play is more epic than drama. England and France, ancient enemies, engaged in mortal combat for national supremacy, testing the mettle not only of men but nations. And in that great engagement England is led by her last great hero-king, Henry, Prince Hal of Henry The Fourth, Parts One and Two, now king, with the fortunes of his nation weighing heavily on his shoulders.

My favorite scene in that marvelous play is Act IV, Scene 1, the speeches at Agincourt on the night before the great battle. “If these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it!” says Michael Williams, an ordinary private, sitting around the fire with three other soldiers, all musing about the battle first light brings. They don’t know it, but one of them is no ordinary private. One of them is King Henry himself, disguised as a common soldier so that he might pass among his men and talk with them of blood and battle, life and death – man to man, heart to heart without the constraint of office or ceremony to impede their candor.

It’s a powerful moment, and perhaps more than any other, helps to define the character of the King. Rex Incognitus, the King in disguise. Putting aside privilege and position, he moves among them as one of them, because they matter to the King. And though they don’t realize it at the time, these common soldiers have gained an access to the King that would not have been possible had he remained remote and distant from them.

Now I don’t know for sure, but I think that should the writer of the Fourth Gospel have had the opportunity to read that scene from Shakespeare’s play, he would have said: “Ah, that’s it!”

That’s his theology, Deus Incognitus – God in disguise – God walking among the troops bringing healing and hope and courage. He says it in a remarkable sentence right in the middle of an amazing poem that begins with the words: “In beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” But then, in verse fourteen, comes this startling sentence: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.” Deus Incognitus. God, Who is not what we are, became what we are, “pitched his tent among us” as the Greek puts it, sat down with us and warmed Himself by the fire. That’s a rather startling claim, if you think about it, God incarnate, the Word made flesh.

In the ancient world, there was much speculation about the dynamic principle behind life, the – what shall we call it? – impulse which began it all. Before the Big Bang “banged” and before the Solid State “stated” the ancients believed there was this dynamic, life-generating principle they called, for lack of a “better word,” WORD, logos in the Greek. Rooted in the idea that words are a form of power with a vitality all their own, quite apart from the speaker who gives them voice, it was common stock in the ancient world to identify this vital principle with the word, spermatikos logos, the Stoics called it, the “seminal word.”

And you can understand why, can’t you? To say a word is to create a world. Anyone who’s been around a child learning language knows what I’m talking about. For children, words still have mystery about them; square corners and rough edges and bright colors. They haven’t yet worn them smooth with overuse and undervalue. They haven’t yet learned that words are just…well, words. We’ll teach them that. Rather, the child points and says:

“Coooow.”

“Yes, very good! It’s a cow.”

“Coooow.”

“That’s right, Honey, it’s a cow.”

“Coooow.”

“Yeah. It’s a cow.”

“Coooow.”

“It’s a cow! It’s a cow, for heaven’s sake!”

They can drive you crazy learning to put words to things. Part of it, I’m sure, is that they’re fascinated with sounds; they like to hear the sounds things “make.” But in a real sense things don’t really exist for children until they can put a word to them.

Adam, in the Garden, is alone; really alone! And God says that it’s not good for Adam to be alone and makes helpers for him by forming every beast of the field and bird of the air. And then he does something amazing. He brings them one-by-one to Adam “to see what he would call them,” Genesis says. To see what word he would put to them. And Genesis pictures Adam standing before the mystery that is Creation, and pointing he says: “Cooooow!”

But then John says: “And this WORD became flesh and dwelled among us!” There’s the scandal of it! It’s one thing to believe that behind it all stands a cosmic, abstract, philosophical principle. “May the Force be with you!” “I’m not sure about this God-stuff; I’m into spirituality myself.” It’s quite another to believe that this WORD was born with a head so small you could crush it one-handed to a screaming woman squatting in a straw-strewn cave filled with steaming donkey dung. But there it lies, cradled in the middle of John’s poem. “And the WORD became flesh and dwelled among us.”

Deus Incognitus. And while we may never fully understand all that this startling revelation implies, of this much we can be sure. An incarnate God means that never again will there be any place safe from God. There is now no place to hide. The Hound of Heaven, as Francis Thompson once called Him, knows your name; knows where you live. Deus Prosecutus, the God Who pursues you. Moses, at the burning bush, was told to take off his shoes because the ground on which he stood was holy ground. Jesus of Nazareth means that all ground is now holy ground, because God not only made it, but walked, ate, slept, worked, and died on it. God is no abstract concept or philosophical proposition. He’s no “Unmoved Mover” or “Primary Cause” or “Ground of Our Being, or “May the Force be with you.” To the mystery of “Godness” Jesus gives Face.

When our son was small, I tried to help him learn his colors. I was teaching in seminary at the time and thought I’d dispatch this one rather quickly. I mean I was teaching graduate students; how hard could this be? His problem was that he could not seem to grasp that colors – like blue, red, or green – were portable qualities that did not reside in just one item. A toy could be blue and a crayon could be blue at the same time. He thought that if a certain toy were blue, nothing else could be blue also because “blue” was already “taken,” so to speak, by the toy. And so, I decided to employ one of the techniques I used to teach the concept of philosophical Idealism to seminarians. I told him about Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” and introduced him to philosophical concepts such as “blueness” and “redness” and “greenness.” Of course, what I was really doing was engaging in parental “out-of-touchness!” Mercifully, my wife realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere and took a different tact. She went and got some things with which our son was already familiar – a red ball, a blue book, a green toy, and then, pointing to each, said: “See, red; blue; green.” Then, she went and got three other items from his room that were red, blue, and green, and pointing to each said: “See, red, blue, green.” Well, you could see the lights go on almost literally as what had been a mysterious reality to the child – color – gradually began to make sense. When she’d finished, she looked at me and said: “Idiot.” But on reflection, it occurred to me: this was precisely what God was doing in Jesus of Nazareth. You see, what the red ball was to redness, and what the blue book was to blueness, and what the green toy was to greenness, Jesus is to God. You see, now we can point to Jesus and say: “Goooood.”

But while God Incognito means that there is now no place where we can hide from God, it also means that there is now no place where God can hide from us. Deus Vulneratus, the God you can get your hands on. Accessibility and vulnerability always stand in a one-to-one relationship. The more accessible you are, the more vulnerable you are. A thief can break into your home and steal your stuff, but your husband, your wife, your children can destroy you, because they have access to places the thief can’t go. “And the WORD became flesh and dwelled among us.” He comes to us in such a way that we can always say “no,” a baby with a head so small you could crush it one-handed, or nail him up to a cross if He gets too big for his britches, as Frederick Buechner put it.

In Guenther Rutenborn’s play, The Sign of Jonah, he tells the story of the Third Reich and the terrible desolation that ravaged Europe at the hands of the Nazis, and specifically, just where God was in all this destruction and death. The play opens with a group of persons standing around debating just who was responsible for the Nazi atrocities, trying to “fix the blame” for it all. Some said Hitler was singularly responsible; others argued for the German state itself; others said the world community was to blame for not acting soon enough to avert the tragedy. Then, someone gets up out of the audience and walks to the stage and says: “All this is pointless. You want to know who is really responsible for all this? I’ll tell you — God! Isn’t he the one who began this whole miserable experiment called ‘creation?’ Didn’t he turn all this awful power over to irresponsible humans and permit them to use it to perpetrate all kinds of evil on their fellows? The real culprit here is this irresponsible Creator who just doesn’t care what happens to his creatures!” It’s decided that this man’s argument has merit, and that God must be put on trial for his irresponsibility. The evidence is heard, and it’s compelling. Quick as a flash, God is found guilty of irresponsible and uncaring behavior by a Creator. And so the sentence is passed. The judge says: “The nature of the crime is so great that the punishment should be commensurate. I hereby sentence God to the worst of all possible fates — he must come and live in this miserable world he’s created as a creature himself.”

The three archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, are given the task of carrying out the sentence. Gabriel turns to walk away and muses to himself: “I’m going to see to it that God knows what it’s like to experience obscurity and shame. He’ll be born in a cave on the backside of nowhere, with a peasant girl for his mother. There will be suspicion of shame about his origins, and he’ll have to grow up in a Jew-hating world! That oughta’ do it.” Michael turns to leave and as he walks away, he too muses: “I’m going to see to it that God knows what it’s like to experience frustration and insecurity. He’ll undertake a task he can’t possibly complete. No one will understand him, not even his own kin. His closest friends will turn on him. He’ll wind up isolated, alone, with nothing and no one. That oughta’ do it.” Raphael turns to walk from the stage and says to everyone and to no one: “I’m going to see to it that God knows what it’s like to experience pain and death. He’ll be falsely accused, lied about, tried, convicted, and sentenced all unjustly. And then he’ll die like a common thief! That oughta’ do it!”

And then the house lights go out, and as you sit there in the dark, it suddenly hits you: God has already served that sentence.

And gazing up at a lonely figure, stretched out between heaven and earth as if neither wanted Him, we stand and stare and stammer: “Goooood?”

And so we gather here in Advent and behold in bone and blood and bile the “Word Made Flesh,” God Incognito, a God Who stretches out His arms to His creatures and says: “I love you this much.”

Merry Christmas, God. Welcome to our world.

A Thanksgiving Story

2010-11-19T06:23:00.001-05:00

Do you remember E. M. Forster’s classic definition of a story? Story, he says, is the difference between these two sentences: “The king died and then the queen died;” “The king died and then the queen died of grief.” The first, he says, is merely a recounting of events without attendant significance; the second is a story. That is to say, storytelling is a creative act; it assigns meaning to the events that make up our lives.

In Jay McInerney’s 1989 novel, Story of My Life, Allison is a young woman who lives a “grab all the gusto and never look back” kind of life in fast-paced New York. Her life is filled with events but devoid of meaning. She has spiritual and emotional Parkinson’s disease, lots of motion, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Numbed by it all, she shrugs off whatever life deals her with the quip “story of my life.” Her roommate steals her rent money and spends it on a present for a boyfriend: “story of my life.” She falls in love with a guy who dumps her for another woman: “story of my life.” No matter what happens, she shrugs it off: “story of my life.” The quip is an ironic commentary on Allison’s life – there is no “story of her life,” just an aggregation of disjointed events without meaning, without purpose, just one stupid thing after another.

That’s why Faith is such a good storyteller; it puts purpose and “plot” in our stories.

Stan Hauerwas of Duke has argued that the Christian story is most truthfully told when it is told as a “Thanksgiving Story.” It is, essentially, a story of what we’ve been given. “The self is a gift,” he writes, “and we need a story that helps us accept it as gift.” Hauerwas goes on to say that when we learn to tell our stories as the story of being given a great gift, we can then be truthful about ourselves. As long as we are trapped in telling stories about our power or our wisdom or our success, we’re dishonest with ourselves and with others, hiding our weaknesses and our impotency and our failures both from ourselves and from others. The truth is, our story is not about our power or our wisdom or our success; it’s about grace, and coming to terms with that is what sets us free to accept it all, the bad times as well as the good, as a gift from God, as our “story.”

There are, of course, lots of ways to tell the “story of your life”: “Of all the dumb luck!” “They’re just out to get me!” “Life is a box of chocolates….”

Long ago, our fathers and mothers of faith told ours as a Thanksgiving Story: “A wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, O LORD, have given me.” (Dt. 26:5-10)

Now that’s a story!

Worship That "Gets it"

2010-11-05T16:12:00.001-04:00

Those of you who read this blog know my profound misgivings about so-called “contemporary worship.” Even the phrase I find unsettling suggesting, as it does, that worship that is not sufficiently “up-to-date” or avant guarde is, thereby, suspect. [I love the retort C. S. Lewis gave to a similar criticism of his theology when he published his reappraisal of the Christian doctrine of evil and the devil, The Screwtape Letters. “I know someone will ask me, ‘Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil – hoofs and horns and all?’ Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns, But in other respects, my answer is ‘Yes, I do.’”]

So, as I’ve said before, there are many things that trouble me about the so-called “contemporary worship” movement afoot in our churches. Let me mention a few: (1) As I mentioned above, there is this notion that only the trendy and the avant guarde have value. Anything older than “yesterday” is arcane, out of date, and useless. To those who embrace that I have two words for you: leisure suit. (2) Then, there is the spiritual narcissism, egocentricity, and outright arrogance that reduces all spiritual value to the single criterion of “what speaks to me.” Sometimes called the “tyranny of felt needs,” it seems never to occur to such ones that at any given time in a congregation the “needs” are not only multiple but competitive! To satisfy one’s is to frustrate another’s. (3) Related is the infatuation with the ephemeral so characteristic of contemporary worship that cuts it off from the rich fecundity of 2,000-plus years of Christian liturgy and worship. It’s as though the worshiper exists on a desert island where they’re the first ever to have thought about, practiced, or experienced worship. Never mind that the Church of Jesus Christ got along quite well, thank you very much, without contemporary praise music or Power Point. There is no consciousness that when one worships in the Church of Jesus Christ, one has entered a stream that has been flowing for over 2,000 years and, God willing, will continue to flow long after I’m gone and forgotten. Such insular worship creates ecclesiastical orphans who can’t remember any farther back than their own birth, and what is more, see no need to do so!

But most disturbing is what I fear really drives the contemporary worship movement; namely, desperation and entrepreneurialism. The well-documented numerical decline of mainstream, and even evangelical, churches, particularly among that most desired demographic of 18-39, has led to the supplanting of the biblical mission and mandate of the church to be a community of the kingdom of God by the consumer church where “the customer’s always right” and where “whatever it takes” is the motto. Give the customer what the customer wants, or there’s always a “better show” down the street. To be sure, it’s rationalized by smearing a thin veneer of evangelism over it, but make no mistake about it; it’s driven by the desire for bodies and bucks. Not a hint in those “churches” of any awareness that the biblical mission of the church is enculturation – to enculturate people into the kingdom of God, a culture so utterly alien and peculiar to this world’s dominate culture that it takes a lifetime to “feel at home” in it. Not a clue in those “churches” of any awareness that becoming a Christian means enrolling in a Scripture-informed, Spirit-inspired, counter-cultural community that embraces a counter-value system captured in a counter-story that harbingers a new reality Jesus called “the kingdom of God.” Indeed, one rather suspects that such “churches” are more “club” than “church,” at least in the sense that Jesus meant it. If being baptized and joining the church doesn’t actually make one "Christian," that is, enroll one in this kind of Story and enculturate one in this kind of community, then we're just counting club members. Indeed, it’s more insidious than that. By enrolling new members into our “Christian club” and calling them “Christian” we inoculate them with just enough Christianity to keep them from ever “taking” the real thing.

That’s why I was so heartened this week to have coffee and conversation about church and worship with my friend, Tony Spencer. Tony is minister of music at First Baptist Church of Forest City, North Carolina. Cheryl and I attended there a few weeks ago and were pleasantly surprised at what we found; I told him so. The service was beautifully and meticulously crafted with the intention of being self-consciously theological, biblically faithful, and liturgically integrated so that the worshiper felt both a sense of the mystery and the majesty of the historic Christian faith. To be sure, the music was beautiful and well-presented, but that’s not what got my attention. Worship there wasn’t so much performance as participation in the stream of Christian liturgy that has bound the people of God together since the first Christians huddled in house churches 2,000 years ago. The ancient four-fold pattern was evident: the Gathering, the Word, the Table, the Sending. Moreover, there was an awareness that we had not “invented church” ourselves; rather, in the words of the writer of Hebrews, we were “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses” whom we had joined, with whom we shared faith in Jesus Christ, and from whom we had been entrusted a liturgical legacy and a holy hope. For an hour at least, I was called away and called out from the mundane muddle that is euphemistically called “the real world” into “another world” that can only be glimpsed with the eyes and ears of faith. And I was claimed by something much older, much larger, much deeper than merely “my felt needs” or “good customer service.” It was an experience I had not had in church in a while.

So thanks, Tony. I’m glad to know that someone out there still “gets it.”

"By Their Creator"

2010-10-23T09:19:00.000-04:00

During this election cycle President Obama cited the Declaration of Independence in a political speech and quoted it incorrectly. In speaking of his belief that all humans have certain “inalienable rights,” the president cited the Declaration as his authority for the assertion. That’s fine. But he quotes the Declaration as saying: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that each of us are (sic) endowed with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Remarks by the President at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Dinner in Rockville, MD). But that’s not what the Declaration of Independence says. It says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” My first thought was to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the president was merely trying to capture the essence of the Declaration and not necessarily quote it precisely. But then I checked the text of the White House press release. The phrasing was in the text of the president's speech. The omission is both telling and significant. Let me explain.

Christians believe that all life is sacred, and human life is specially so, precisely because human beings are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26). Christians believe that God’s image, like an image on a coin, has been stamped on human life, and that fact gives humans their special worth and value. Our value is not “inherent” or sui generis; it is not an “entitlement.” It is bestowed by God and endowed by the Creator.

The practical implications of that belief were brought home to me in something Phillip Yancey tells. Yancey, who is a supporter of Amnesty International, points out the internal inconsistency of an organization like Amnesty International believing in something called “human rights” when they don’t believe in a Creator who has endowed humans with those self-same rights. It came to a head in a meeting of a local AI chapter where Yancey was in attendance. He says: “There I met good people, serious people: students and executives and professionals who gather together because they find it intolerable blithely to go on with life while other people are being tortured and killed.” He points out that they engaged in their activities in support of keeping people alive with all the passion and fervor of religious zealots. But at their meetings, no one prayed, no one intoned God’s name in support of their “mission” because no one believed in God. Though originally founded on Christian principles, today AI is officially non-theological. And so Yancey, who rarely demurs, weighed in and asked: “Why do you believe that it is wrong to kill human beings and right to fight to keep them alive?” He said the response he got from the group resembled the reaction a heretic would receive from true believers. The answer took the form of axiom: “Life is good; death is bad.” But when Yancey pointed out that not all life comes under that axiom, even for AI members (not all are vegetarians!), and that to people like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, and all terrorists death can be a useful tool to accomplish political purposes, they looked horrified…and mystified. And then Yancey let the other shoe drop. He said: “Don’t get me wrong. I know why I believe that torture and murder are wrong and that it is good to keep people alive, I just don’t know why you do!” Yancey went on to say that he believed that keeping people alive is right and good because they were created in the image of God. In the words of the Declaration, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” “But is it possible,” Yancey asks, “to honor the image of God in a human being if there is no God in Whose image the person has been created?” Or turn it a round, and as the nihilist, Ivan Karamazov, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, puts it: “If there is not God, everything is permitted.”

When our son was small, I offered him two coins – a dime and a nickel. He chose the nickel. When I asked him why, he answered: “Because it’s bigger.” But when I told him that the dime was worth twice as much as the nickel, always of good mind, he inquired, “But why?” Good question. I was stumped. Why would the smaller of two coins be worth twice as much as the larger? And then it hit me. Because the Creator says so.

A Resurrection Story

2010-10-14T05:51:00.013-04:00

As did most of you, I watched the rescue of the 33 miners in Chile some yesterday. Truly amazing!

Last night on Bret Baier's newscast, he asked his "All Star Panel," Mara Liasson (NPR) and Charles Krauthammer (op-ed columnist for The Washington Post), for their "take" on the rescue. Two very different ways of telling the "story" of the rescue emerged. Krauthammer cited the now-famous comment from one of the miners (that he was caught in the middle of a battle between God and the Devil, and that God had won!) and said that the story here was more one of the transcendent and the spiritual than anything else: thirty-three miners in the bowels of the earth, dead and buried, as it were, for 70 days (a number of "biblical proportion"), and then, miraculously brought up from the grave in this amazing (what shall we call it?)…deliverance from death. It was at bottom, he said, "a resurrection story." But when Mara Liasson was asked to comment, she said that the story here was more one of the triumph of technology and the human spirit. I guess that's what you have left when you take God out of the story.

It makes a difference how you tell your story! Personally, I'll go with Krauthammer. I know that story. It's called "gospel."

In Search of the Sermon (Part Two)

2010-10-08T14:45:00.006-04:00

As I indicated in the previous post, my homiletic consists of three simple principles and four easy moves. Last time I talked about the three principles that govern biblical preaching; namely, interpret the text contextually, theologically, and experientially. But how to you get from principle to pulpit? I do it in four easy moves.

First a word of homiletical context. Preaching today is divided into two broad categories: the so-called “old homiletic” and the so-called “new homiletic.” The chief difference between the two is the sermon’s objective. The old homiletic understands the purpose of the sermon as being to inform, while the new homiletic understands the objective of the sermon as being to move. The old homiletic focuses on the cognitive domain, the new homiletic on the affective. The model for the sermon in the old homiletic is the essay or the lecture; in the new homiletic the model is story. The old homiletic aims chiefly for the head, the new homiletic for the heart. The old homiletic derives its methodology from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the new homiletic from Aristotle’s Poetics.

An example of the importance of this last statement can be illustrated with modern movies. I sometimes hear people say that movies are so predictable. There’s a predictable pattern to every plot: hero/heroine is introduced; hero has weakness; an unexpected turn of events occurs; launches a quest (the bulk of the movie) for something or someone to satisfy the weakness/need; hero hits rock bottom; a showdown occurs; happy (or at least satisfying) ending. “Why can’t Hollywood come up with something new?” they ask. Hollywood doesn’t come up with something new because you’re “hardwired” to expect this pattern, paradigm, plot in every story you hear. It goes all the way back to the ancient Greek theatre and the three-act play (setup, confrontation, resolution). Aristotle recognized the structure over 2,350 years ago in his Poetics and no one has improved on it since. It’s why we go to movies, watch stories on television, read novels…and listen to sermons that utilize this age-old paradigm. It's why, when Jesus wants to tell his audience about the destructiveness of greed and avarice, he doesn't say: "I want to talk to you today about greed, and I have three things to say about it, all beginning with the letter 'G.'" Rather, he says: "Watch out for greed!" And he told them a story (sometimes called "parable"), saying, "Once upon a time, the land of a rich man brought forth bountifully..." (Luke 12:13ff.). And so, when I say “new homiletic,” that’s what I mean. It is sermon as story rather than sermon as lecture; a sermon that utilizes this in-grained, “hardwired” structure in order to drive home the message of the Gospel.

I don’t have time (or space) to tease this all out here, but if you’re interested, see my article titled “Glimpses of Glory,” in Review & Expositor, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Winter 2002), 71-87. In it, I have a section on “The Old Homiletic and the New Homiletic.” I also include a new homiletic sermon that illustrates and employs the three simple principles and four easy moves I’ve talked about in these two blogs. A professor of preaching at one of the CBF-related seminaries emailed me some time ago to say that he had never understood the “new homiletic” until he read the article. Apparently, it’s helpful. Check it out.

And so, utilizing the new homiletic and this hard-wired plot structure, my take on the new homiletic involves what I call “Four Easy Moves.”

Move 1: The Gathering Move. The average listener will give you no more than five minutes to “gather” them to the text and the sermon. In that five minutes, you have to call their names; give them a reason to listen; or as Fred Craddock puts it, get them to buy a ticket on the train. Once they “buy the ticket,” they’ll take the trip. The preacher’s task, therefore, is to create either a point of contact or a point of conflict with the listener so that s/he will either think: “I’ve thought that myself!” or “Wait a minute! Not so fast! That’s not right!” Either way, you’ve got them. You’ve generated a “gotta know” in the congregation that will keep them “turning the page” in the sermon.

Move 2: The Biblical Move. If done well, Move 1 will not only have gathered and captured the audience, but will have created some cognitive dissonance, some dramatic tension, a “gotta know” that launches the sermon (and the congregation) on a quest to surface and satisfy the tension. And, of course, in a sermon, the primary place one goes to satisfy that tension is the Word of God, the Scripture. The distance between the 21^st century (your audience’s context) and the 1^st century (the New Testament’s context) is quickly overcome by the commonality of the human. After surfacing some issue, some problem, some crisis that affects everyone in the audience so that they have “boarded the train” with me, the “first stop” I make is the text: “You know, Jesus was faced with something similar when he….” And you’re off and running in the sermon. “All aboard!”

Move 3: The Theological Move. Because every sermon…every sermon…is first and finally about God (else it’s not a sermon, just a little “self-help talk” or something), the primary freight the sermonic “train” carries is theological. I usually try to capture it in as few words as possible and write them large on the top of the page on which I’m working on the sermon. Big, large, grand, God-words like “grace,” “judgment,” “forgiveness,” “hope,” “salvation,” etc. Everything in the sermon serves that central, governing theological idea. That’s the “point” of the sermon, if you’re used to thinking in terms of “points.” I don’t think in terms of “points.” My sermons don’t have “points;” they have a plot. But my sermons do make a “point;” and it is always a singular point, and it is always a theological point. I call this the sermon’s Governing Theological Theme or “GTT.” It’s the “gatekeeper” that determines what gets into the sermon (every story, every illustration, every bit of information) and what doesn’t. If it doesn’t serve the sermon’s GTT, then it’s out. Period.

Move 4: The Homiletical Move. Just as Aristotle in his Poetics aimed more for the heart than the head, more to move than to inform, so also does this final move in the sermon aim to drive the GTT home to the heart. As Fred Craddock says: “The longest journey anyone ever makes is the journey from the head to the heart.” And so in the final movement of the sermon I use story that gathers up and draws in and drives home the message to the congregation’s hearts. I intentionally try to create an experience that moves the sermon from mere “idea” to existential reality. If the GTT is about, say, “grace,” I don’t want them to “understand” grace; I want them to experience grace. I want them to leave “graced.” Most of the stories I use in Move 4 are my own (rather than stock stories) simply because only that which has happened to me will likely happen through me. I keep a journal and computer catalogue of such stories (hundreds after 40 years of preaching) so that finding just the right story is always within reach. Of course, you can always lie and tell someone else’s story as though it happened to you (see my blog “May I Drop a Footnote”), but I don’t recommend it.

Well, there it is. “Preaching: Three Simple Principles; Four Easy Steps.” If you find it helpful, I shall be grateful. If when I come to hear you preach, you preach like this, I shall be back!

In Search of the Sermon

2010-09-14T10:03:00.003-04:00

I concluded my intentional interim a few months ago, and now my wife and I are faced with a dilemma: Where do we go to church on Sundays when I'm not preaching? I recognize that for most people, this is not such a dilemma. They either attend the church nearest them (because that’s where their friends go) or they attend the church across town (because they like the show there better, or because they like the people there better). But I don’t go to church for either of those reasons (the “show” or the camaraderie). Let me be frank: I go for the sermon. I get up on Sundays and get dressed and drive, sometimes considerable distance, in the desperate hope that I will hear today a word from God which the preacher discovered in, and delivered through, the Holy Scriptures. To paraphrase Bill Clinton in the presidential campaign of a few years back, “It’s the sermon, stupid!”

But alas, the sermon has fallen on hard times. I don’t mean by that that preachers aren’t preaching; I just mean that it’s not a sermon. I used to tell my homiletical students: The difference between a sermon and a speech is the text. Without a serious engagement with the Scripture, it’s just a speech. And I’ve heard a lot of speeches masquerading as sermons lately! There was the one about…well, I shouldn’t go there lest the preacher be reading this. It’s a rare thing these days to hear a sermon that actually engages the Scripture in the service of the sermon. Most preachers begin not with a text but with a topic, and then pillage the Scripture for a text with which to prop up and support what they’ve already decided they’re going to say; in which case the text is not the basis for the sermon, it’s merely the excuse for it. It’s too bad, really, because most preachers spend as much time on their topical “speeches” as they would a sermon had they actually developed one. It’s not a matter of time; it’s a matter of location. Start with the text! Let me explain.

When I teach preaching, I teach a homiletic that was hammered out not in the classroom but in the congregation. It’s not some “preaching project” or research paper done for a homiletics class and then immediately forgotten. It’s what I did, and do, each week when I preach. I call it Preaching: 3 Simple Principles; 4 Easy Moves.

The principles are these:

(1) Interpret the text contextually (both historical and literary contexts). The underlying assumptions for this are that the author’s meaning of the text is the meaning; the preacher’s task is to score the same point with your audience that the original writer scored with his; and how a writer says something is as important as what he says (pay attention to the text’s genre).

(2) Interpret the text theologically. At the end of the day the text is finally (and always) about God. A sermon is not a little “pep talk” or “self-help session.” It’s a word about God, and if it isn’t, they why am I listening? Find the theological “freight” the text is carrying and make it the “freight” of your sermon. I call this the sermon’s “Governing Theological Theme” or GTT.

(3) Interpret the text experientially. A sermon should take the congregation somewhere, not just give them a few little “talking points” to remember. A sermon is an experience, not a lecture. It happens in the heart as much as the head. (For those who have studied preaching, the first half of the sermon’s history was dominated by Aristotle’s Rhetoric; this new kind of preaching, sometimes called the “New Homiletic,” grows more out of Aristotle’s other major work, Poetics.). To achieve this, the preacher should think more in terms of plot rather than points. The sermon identifies some “plot tension” (issue, problem, question) that exists either explicitly or implicitly in the text and then launches a quest to surface and satisfy that dramatic tension.

The moves are…well, I’ll talk about those next week.

Something Better

2010-08-28T10:25:00.010-04:00

I’m teaching Hebrews again this term. Haven’t taught Hebrews in a while, and I’m having fun getting back into it. Had forgotten how elegant the writer’s Greek is. It’s not just that he uses hapax legomena (literally, “once spoken,” words that occur nowhere else in the New Testament), but it’s also his beautiful way of forming his syntax. He just puts words together elegantly. He uses inclusio (ending a thought where he began it); chiasmus (ordering thoughts in an “X” pattern); asyndeton (combining words or ideas one after the other without benefit of connecting conjunctions); and anaphora (literally, “born up,” referring to the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive clauses), just to mention a few.

Moreover, Hebrews presents what is, without a doubt, the most thorough-going homiletical commentary (called midrash in Jewish, and Jewish-Christian, thought) of the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) anywhere in the Bible. He is thoroughly at home in the Old Testament scriptures, and he expects his audience to be as well (which is no small part of the difficulty contemporary audiences have in understanding Hebrews!).

But as impressive as his Greek is and his knowledge and use of the Old Testament scriptures, that’s not what strikes me about Hebrews. Rather, it’s his pastoral theology. To be sure, Hebrews employs theological models and metaphors not frequently found in the New Testament: Christ as High Priest; the Christian life as journey, athletic contest, and pilgrimage; Christ as Pioneer; Christ as Yom Kippur sacrifice, again to name a few. But all of this high-flown language and complex theology is pressed into the service of a single pastoral concern: There ought to be a difference between “church” and “culture.” The refrain throughout Hebrews is “something better” (kreitton ti). Though we don’t know for certain what all the issues were among the believers to whom Hebrews was written, this much we know: They were experiencing hostility, alienation, ostracism, and even outright persecution from the dominant culture (the paganism of the Roman Empire) simply because they were Christians. Apparently, the price for being Christian in the culture had become so great that some were no longer willing to pay it. They longed for the good ole days when they were part of Judaism, enjoying the protection of the Roman Empire. Some, apparently, were contemplating a return to Judaism, abandoning Christianity altogether. Being Christian had made them “outsiders” and “strangers” and “foreigners on the earth,” and they didn’t like it (see Hebrews 11:13).

This is a consistent theme, not only in Hebrews, but in several New Testament documents from the same period (Ephesians and 1 Peter to mention two). It seems that once Christianity had sufficiently distinguished itself from the parent religion (Judaism), the Roman Empire, correctly perceiving the new religion as a threat to the culture, started to come down on the young movement in both subtle and overt ways. Many Christians, uncomfortable with this “resident alien” status, adopted the old adage, “In order to get along, just go along.” They blended in, fit in, accommodated, adapted, assimilated…so much so that for some Christian communities, one couldn’t really tell where “culture” stopped and “church” started. And for the writer of Hebrews it raised a question: Do “church” and “culture” really refer to the same people, just in different settings? (Fred Craddock commenting on Hebrews 11).

It was a good question. Still is. Cultural assimilation is always the challenge for the church when it tries to hold in tension being “in the world” but not “of the world.” Moreover, the church has always chafed at being a “minority movement.” Everybody likes to be popular. To be sure, we couch it in the language of evangelism (“We’re just doing whatever it takes to win people for Christ”), but the real motivation for cultural assimilation, one suspects, is survival – numerical, political, economic, cultural. And so the church settles in and settles down and snuggles up to the popular culture convinced that the only way to make it in “this world” is to look just like the world. (Elsewhere I've called this "consumer church." See my blog The Purpose-Driven Church) We assimilate, accommodate, acculturate, emulate. “You got day care; we got day care. You got Starbucks; we got Starbucks. You got a kickin’ band; we got a kickin’ band.” We’re afraid that if we ask too much, people will stop coming…and giving. Besides, there’s always a better “show” down the street if we demand too much. “Come to our church; we’ll ask nothing, demand nothing, change nothing, require nothing. Matter of fact, we look and feel just like the world out there! Come on in; you’ll feel right at home.”

Do “church” and “culture” really refer to the same people, just in different settings? And if so, what’s the point of going to church anyway? If the church is just Starbucks with a thin veneer of Christianity smeared over, why not just go to Starbucks? They’re open longer hours and take American Express.

And yet, we still go to church. We still suffer through all those shallow, silly, sophomoric Sundays hoping that maybe today might be the day when “church” emerges from “culture” and reminds us of the difference it makes to be Christian in the world. Some of us, it seems, still want something more... “something better.”

Baptist to the Bone

2010-08-14T15:45:00.007-04:00

A reliquary (stone box containing sacred relics) was discovered last month on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan off the coast of Bulgaria. Inside were eight pieces of bone, including pieces of a skull, face, and a tooth. Because there is a monastery on the island which claims John the Baptist as its patron saint, the excavation leader, Kazimir Popkonstantinov, suggests that the bones might belong to the Baptist. The possibility is strengthened, he suggests, by the fact that found alongside the reliquary was a small sandstone box with a Greek inscription that said, “God, save your servant Thomas. To St. John. June 24.” June 24 is the date celebrated by Christians as the birthday of John the Baptist, and the inscription suggests that a pilgrim had come to the monastery to seek the Baptist’s blessing in the place where, he believed, John’s bones resided. (Click here for full story)

There is, in fact, a long history of “cult of relics” in which relics, including the alleged bones of saints, were collected and kept in sacred locations – sometimes in religious centers such as Rome or Constantinople (if you’ve been to Istanbul, modern Constantinople, you’ve no doubt seen the humerus on display at the Topkapi alleging to be John the Baptist’s), and sometimes at the sites associated with the saint. Of course, it’s impossible finally to vindicate these claims by modern evidentiary standards. As Popkonstantinov put it: “As far as I know there is no database with DNA profiles of the saints.” Nonetheless, because these associations are generally quite early, some as early as the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries AD, one cannot simply dismiss them as without historical value. While ancients were unencumbered with our notions of empirical evidence, they nonetheless established their own “chain of evidence” of sorts in that they erected shrines or houses of worship or monasteries or other religious structures at holy sites. The fact that these structures came to be associated so early with the person or event thereby honored or remembered constitutes physical evidence of a sort for the claim. “Of all the places they could have chosen, they chose this one,” goes the reasoning. Hence, it is probable (and when it comes to historical evidence, “probability” is the best we can ever do) that the associations are not without some merit.

The bigger issue at stake is whether, and to what degree, faith requires evidence or proof to validate it. Generally, the “group think” on this subject is both binary and polar, if not polarizing. Some say that because Christianity is a historical religion making historical claims, then if it can be shown that any one of those claims is fraudulent Christianity itself is in ruins. Others go to the other extreme and suggest that not only does faith not need evidence or proof to validate it, but the search for evidence and proof is itself counterproductive, an act of unbelief. Rudolf Bultmann, the chief proponent of this latter view, was alleged to have said: “Were they to find the bones of Jesus, my faith would be wholly unaffected.”

But faith and reason need not be enemies. It is only human to want some physical, tactile connection with the object of one’s faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Letters and Papers from Prison, made this very point when, writing to his parents to thank them for a package of cookies and sweets they had sent him in Tegel, he wrote: However certain I am of the spiritual bond between all of you and myself, the spirit always seems to want some visible token of this union of love and remembrance, and then material things become the vehicles of spiritual realities. I suppose it is rather like the need felt in all religions for sacraments.

While archaeology and historical research cannot and will not convince the skeptic, that fact in and of itself does not invalidate the effort. Moreover, it was Christ himself who enjoined us to love God with our minds, and not just our hearts. To be sure, proof and evidence can only take us so far down the road to faith. And it seems to be true that for him who will believe, final proof is unnecessary; but for him who will not believe, final proof is never final. But the distance between the believing heart and the doubting mind need not be as great as some suspect…or fear.

Of course, if they’d found a heated baptistery and a pair of waders….

The James ossuary (pictured above) was on display at the Royal Ontario Museum from November 15, 2002 to January 5, 2003.

Church Family

2010-08-11T17:18:00.003-04:00

One day, a religious “know-it-all” approached Jesus and asked him to choose among the 613 commandments enjoined upon the religious of Jesus’ day (613 = 365 – one for every day of the year, plus 248 – one for every bone of the human body). Jesus captured it with two simple obligations: Love God; love your neighbor. In this claim, Jesus was reaching back to the teachers of Torah (Ex. 20:16f.; Lev. 19:18), and stretching forward to the teachers of the Church (Paul – Rom. 13:9 and James 2:8), in affirming the solidarity and unanimity of biblical voices calling for a “good neighbor policy” as an essential characteristic of the life of faith.

In Jesus’ culture, where there were no governmentally sanctioned support systems to ensure the ethical treatment of strangers, hospitality (“loving one’s neighbor”) was not just a courtesy, it was a vital part of the social fabric. I have a Christian Palestinian friend who lives in Beth Jala, a small village near Bethlehem. Every time I visit in his home, he embraces me, kisses me on both cheeks, and says, “My home is your home; my possessions are your possessions; they are yours; do with them as you will, for you are not a stranger in my house.” Of course, he doesn’t mean that literally (Don’t try to make off with his television set!), but he does mean that seriously. It is a part of his faith in God that He turns us from “strangers” into “neighbors.”

And so it is in the church of Jesus Christ. I note that one of the most frequently cited adjectives in church literature is “family.” “Come join our church family,” we’re told. “We’re like a family here,” they say. “Where you’re a member of our family,” some claim. When a congregation these days is referred to in collective fashion, it is most usually with the phrase “church family.” We mean by that, I presume, that our relationships have been formed and forged by a common history that binds us together in ways not easily accessible to those who have not shared our history and story. Two observations: (1) I find it ironic that the contemporary church should prefer this familial language for self-description in light of the fact that one of the most frequently cited critiques of the early Church by the Roman Empire was that it was anti-family. That’s because the Christian claim upon the people of God was so complete, so radical, so absolute that it often set father against son, mother against daughter, brother against brother. In the early Church, family was not a “drop-in affair;” (2) there is no place so lonely as a family reunion when you’re not “family.” Is that why the concept of “neighbor” is so important in the Scriptures? Perhaps so.

I know this: As Christians we are commanded to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” What does that mean for the church, for you and me? I don’t know for sure. But I think it means moving out of our familiar and familial comfort zone looking for new “neighbors” to know and love, rather than huddling with our own all the time. I think it means that. I think it means inviting the stranger inside the “inner ring,” as C. S. Lewis called it. I think it means that. I think it means a warm smile, a firm handshake, a welcome pew, a place at the Table, and the kind of “inclusive love” that turns stranger into neighbor. I think it means that.

Edwin Markham’s (1852-1940), Outwitted, puts it this way:

He drew a circle that shut me out/Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout./But Love and I had the wit to win:/We drew a circle that took him in!

Sabbath*

2010-08-05T20:13:00.006-04:00

We’d been looking forward to it for weeks – our weekend getaway to the mountains to recharge our batteries and rejuvenate our souls. After a while the business of life, no matter how necessary or otherwise rewarding, just gets redundant, repetitive, routine. We needed a break; we needed some perspective; we needed a Sabbath.

When we get that way, we usually head to our favorite place – the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The former hunting lodge of George Vanderbilt, the Inn has the rustic charm and scenic beauty that is for us a place of Sabbath – rest, refreshment and rejuvenation. It refreshes our souls…“re-souls our souls,” as the Hebrew of 2 Sam. 16:14 puts it. I love the language of that passage. David, fleeing his son, Absalom, who had usurped his throne, abandoned Jerusalem and trekked to the wilderness of Judea, most likely the oasis of En Gedi. And when he arrived at the Jordan, bone weary and dog tired, the text says, “and there he refreshed himself.” But that hardly does justice to the original Hebrew which says, “and there he re-souled his soul (Heb. vaynaphesh, nephesh being Hebrew for “soul”). That’s what the Parkway and the Inn does for us – it “re-souls our souls.”

But when we arrived on Sunday afternoon, the fog on the mountain was as thick as pea soup. You couldn’t see a thing! No driving on the Parkway visiting the scenic overlooks; no photographing wildflowers; no picking wild blueberries – just gray pea soup. We checked into our room, had dinner, and then retreated to our balcony to “enjoy the view.” We knew the mountains were there; we just couldn’t see them. For two days we stumbled around in the fog trying to gain our footing and our perspective. Then, on Tuesday morning the fog lifted and there they were – the mountains in all their regal splendor. They had been there all along. And it occurred to me that this cloudy confinement was just what we needed – vayanaphesh. It was for us Sabbath. We sat and talked and reflected with no agenda, no lists, no deadlines. The coerced confinement had enabled us to rest in the deep, biblical sense of that word – to “re-soul our souls.”

As I sat there in the foggy tranquility of a Sabbath Sunday, I couldn’t help but think of David’s song of solitude (Did he write it at En Gedi?) in Psalm 37:7:

Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for him.

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently…

Be still before the LORD and wait…

Be still before the LORD…

Be still…

Be….

*For more on this concept, see Don Postema's Catch Your Breath: God's Invitation to Sabbath Rest

Jesus' Baptism*

2010-07-30T07:19:00.009-04:00

“Ancient Site of Jesus’ Baptism a Cesspool” screamed the headline. A recent story documents the fact, widely known among those who have spent any time in the Holy Land, that the likely site of Jesus’ baptism has become so polluted that it is no longer safe for Christian pilgrims to enter the water. The site, known as Deir Mar Juhanna, or the Monastery of St. John, is about a kilometer or so south of the el-Hajlah ford of the Jordan River. Near the place where the once mighty Jordan emptied into the Dead Sea, the Jordan now has shrunk to a trickle, most of its water drained off further up-river to irrigate crops in the Jordan River Valley. Almost no water now makes it all the way down to the Dead Sea (which is why, incidentally, the Dead Sea is drying up). What little water remains at the ancient site where many believe John the Baptist baptized Jesus is a putrid puddle polluted by untreated sewage from nearby Jericho. For this reason, Israeli authorities have banned Christian baptisms on their side of the river. There is, of course, a mirror site on the Jordanian side that likewise attracts Christian pilgrims, which at this point has not been closed.

The vast majority of Christians who travel to the Holy Land, however, will not be affected by the closure. Most Christian pilgrims never visit Deir Mar Juhanna. Rather, their experience of being baptized in the Jordan most likely takes place miles up-river at a place called Yardenit.

Yardenit has been a Christian holy site since ancient times. Owing to the fact that the Jordan is readily accessible there, Yardenit has long been the place where Christian pilgrims have come to be baptized in the waters of the Jordan. A nineteenth century painting depicted Christian pilgrims gathered at Yardenit to be immersed in the Jordan River. Since then, it has been a favorite spot for Christian baptismal services.

Today, Yardenit is maintained by a nearby Jewish agricultural commune known as a kibbutz. Kibbutz Kenneret has transformed Yardenit into a modern, well-maintained, if somewhat touristy, setting for Christian baptisms. Most any day one will see scores of Christians of all stripes from all around the world wading into the Jordan at Yardenit to be baptized, some for the first time, some to reaffirm their original baptism, some merely curious, some deeply moved. It is indeed a multicultural mosaic of Christian traditions. Yet, despite the diversity of languages, cultures, and liturgies, the baptisms witnessed at Yardenit have a curious familiarity about them irrespective of one’s particular tradition, the wet-haired converts seeming more like brothers and sisters than strangers.

People choose to be baptized in the Jordan for all sorts of reasons. But many will attest to their desire to be baptized in the place where Jesus was baptized.

Jesus, however, most certainly was not baptized at Yardenit, or nearby for that matter. Though we cannot say with certainty, Jesus, who was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan in identification with John’s prophetic movement, was probably baptized some fifty miles or so south of Yardenit near the mouth of the Dead Sea. It was there, rather than up in the Galilee, that John the Baptist practiced his ritual cleansing immersions, called mikva'ot, as preparation for the coming of the Kingdom of God, which he believed to be imminent. According to the gospels, “the entire region of Judea and all the Jerusalemites” went out to the “wilderness” where John was baptizing in the Jordan River (cf. Mark 1:4ff.). The reference to the wilderness of Judea places the location of John’s activity, and therefore Jesus’ baptism, nearer to Jericho than Yardenit. If indeed the local population went out to the wilderness to be baptized by the prophet, one would presume that John would have situated his place of baptism near the point on the river where people most frequently crossed it. In Jesus’ day, the major path from Jerusalem to Jericho would have been through Wadi Qelt which terminated at the Jordan at the ford in the river known today as el-Hajlah. It was most likely here that John performed his mikva'ot. The area today is part of the “no man’s land” between Israel and Jordan and is, therefore, inaccessible to most tourists and pilgrims. And so, the Christian today really cannot be baptized where Jesus was baptized.

Moreover, contemporary Christian baptism not only happens at a place different from where Jesus was baptized, but also has a meaning profoundly different from his. The gospels interpret the significance of Jesus’ baptism as more coronation than conversion. The voice from heaven (Bath Qol in Hebrew) declared Jesus to be both Son and Servant of God (cf. Mark 1:9-11, par.), Son giving to Servant a sense of identity, and Servant giving to Son a sense of purpose.

For the Christian, however, baptism signifies a dying and rising with Jesus so as to embark on a whole new life and a whole new way of living in the world which the New Testament describes as the Kingdom of God. It is formation, not coronation, that the Christian’s baptism signifies. It signifies an orientation to life so radical, so counter cultural, so “against-the-grain,” that the New Testament can only describe it as “death to an old way of life, and birth to a new.” As Will Willimon (The Intrusive Word) put it: “Because the gospel is a way of thinking and being in the world that does not come naturally, we must be born again, and again.” So radical an event did baptism signify in the early church that the convert was stripped as naked as the day they were born, publicly immersed in the presence of the community of believers, and then, emerging from the “watery grave of baptism,” given a new robe as a sign of their new status as members of the community of the baptized, and a new name to signify that the old person had died in the waters of baptism, and that the person who thus emerged arose to live a whole new life.

*Portions of this blog were excerpted from chapter 7 of my book, Where Jesus Walked (Judson Press).

Parables

2010-07-05T14:14:00.010-04:00

Preachers who take their sermon texts from the Revised Common Lectionary are in for a treat over the next few months. This is Year C in the Lectionary cycle, and that means that the Gospel lessons come from Luke. While all of the Gospels (save John) preserve and pass on to their respective audiences some of Jesus’ parables, Luke’s parables are among the most unique and beloved: The Parable of the Good Samaritan; The Parable of the Prodigal Son; The Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, to name a few. And so, I thought it might be helpful here to say a few words about the nature, character, and purpose of Jesus’ parables in order to provide the preacher with a bit of context and framework to facilitate the weekly exploration into these surprising stories.

It is often said that the parables are “earthly stories with heavenly meanings.” That’s true enough as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go quite far enough. Parables are analogies - a way of talking about one thing by means of something else. We usually do that because the thing we really want to talk about is too complex and/or difficult to discuss directly, and so we resort to analogies to try to help the listener get a grasp of our real subject.

And therein lies the dilemma. In the case of the parables, the “thing” about which the analogy is being made is always the Kingdom of God. But what in this world can you point to in order to compare it to the Kingdom of God? The Kingdom is so eschatological and counter-cultural that any attempt to point to anything in this world and thereby say: “The Kingdom is like this” would be fraught with misunderstanding and unintended associations. Hence, what Jesus does is to tell a story (parable) the purpose of which is to invite the listener into a world that only looks familiar, safe, natural, and normal. Then, when your defenses are down, he turns the whole thing upside down and disorients your whole perspective. Everything you thought you knew, you now know you do not know! It’s a teachable moment, a discovery moment. Hence, a parable is indeed “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning,” but it’s not “simply” that. It’s a story with a “hook” in it – something not right, something out of place, something that’s so shocking, so unsettling, so disturbing that it causes you to re-think everything you thought you knew about God and His Kingdom. So radically different from this world; so competitive with it; so counter to it; so at cross-purposes with it (pun intended!) is the Kingdom of God, that Jesus must resort to these special kinds of analogies called parables in order to describe it.

Perhaps an illustration from George Macdonald will help. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the room in which you currently reside is the only room in the whole world, and the people with whom you occupy that room the only people in the world. There are no windows or doors in your room; hence, you have no concept of anything outside your little “world.” Indeed, the word “outside” doesn’t exist in your language. You would be forgiven, in such a situation, for believing that your room and the people with whom you occupy it were the entire universe. However, unbeknownst to you, there is another floor above your room where other people are living other lives and doing other things. You are not aware of them, because you’ve never been outside your own little “world,” but they’re there nonetheless. Suppose somehow a hole were torn in the ceiling of your “world,” the floor of the “world” above, so that for the first time you were to become aware of this “other world” just above you. And suppose some in your “world” began to call up to the people in the room above, interacting with them, learning about all sorts of strange and wondrous things, things utterly inconceivable in your “world.” Indeed, you discover, to your amazement, that the people in the room above live their lives according to entirely different “rules” than those which govern life in your “world.” In the room above, the poor are not regarded as a drain on the system, but are precious and prized; the old and the sick are honored and valued rather than warehoused and discarded; in this “world,” if one makes a promise, one keeps it, even when inconvenient or difficult; and in this “world,” it’s okay to suffer for doing the right thing. Some in the “world” below find themselves strangely drawn toward this “world” above. Indeed, a few are so captured by this new “world” and its new way of living, that even though they still live in the “world” below, they start to think of themselves as really belonging to the “world” above. Though they are still in your “world,” they are no longer of your “world.” The knowledge of the room above, having broken through into their “world,” has changed them forever (for a fuller treatment of this theme, see my “Introduction to the Thessalonian Correspondences,” Review & Expositor Vol. 96, No. 2, 175-194). That’s what Jesus meant when he described the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God in his life and ministry, creating a new community which he called the “church” (cf. Mark 1:15; Matt. 16:13ff.).

And so, when Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he is not talking about this world at all; he’s talking about an “alternative reality” that can only be glimpsed through the eyes of faith. That’s why he has to use analogies (parables) to describe it, and that’s why there is an element of shock and surprise in every one of Jesus’ parables intended to grab the hearer and shake him from his complacency so that he can look at life from a radically different point of view - the view from the Kingdom.

The best modern example of the parables of the New Testament, in my judgment, are the stories the late Rod Serling told on the old television series, The Twilight Zone. My favorite was an episode called “The Eye of the Beholder.” The story takes you into a hospital room where a woman is lying in bed, her face all bandaged from recent surgery. As the episode unfolds, so does her story. She had been born hideously disfigured and had come to hospital for reconstructive surgery. As she shares her story with the hospital staff who tend to her (whom you see only from the shoulders down, never their faces), you hear the pathos and tragedy of her pathetic life – ostracized as a child, shunned in school, unable to have a meaningful relationship – all because of her horrible disfigurement. Her hopes are at last buoyed by the prospect of a normal life, once the bandages come off and her disfigurement corrected. Finally, the big day comes, and the doctor comes into the room to remove her bandages. The doctor slowly removes the bandages, but when her face is finally revealed, you hear the doctor gasp, “Oh no!” and shrink back in horror. She gets up, walks over to the mirror, and looks at her face for the first time since the surgery. “Oh my God!” she shrieks, and then buries her face in her hands sobbing, the surgery obviously having been unsuccessful. Slowly she pirouettes so that for the first time we see her face – Donna Douglass, Ellie Mae Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, hardly a grotesque countenance. “Wait a minute!” you say to yourself. “What’s going on here? I thought she was supposed to be hideous!” And then, slowly the camera for the first time reveals the faces of the others in the room, the doctor and nurses and hospital staff all bearing the same horrible hideous disfigurement. And then you hear Serling’s baritone voice overtone: “What is ugly? What is beautiful? Perhaps beauty really is in ‘the eye of the beholder.’” Now, that’s a parable!

And so, when you read a parable, look for the hook – something out of place, something not right, something so unsettling, disturbing, troubling that it causes you to reexamine what you thought you knew. That’s what parables do.

One example. In the Synoptic Tradition, Jesus tells a story about the Kingdom of God in which he likens it to a farmer going out to plant his fields – The Parable of the Sower. “Listen!” he says. “A sower went a-sowing. And while he was sowing, some (of the seed) fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. But other (seed) fell upon the rocky soil where there was not much earth, and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered. And still other (seed) fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it gave no fruit. But still other (seed) fell on the good ground, and it gave fruit growing and increasing, producing thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold” (translation mine).

Now, that’s the parable. And remember, the subject is the Kingdom of God. Jesus told this parable in the context of his ministry of preaching about the Kingdom of God, a ministry that had started out like gangbusters, but had lately fallen on hard times. The crowds were enormous at first, when following Jesus meant that their needs were being met (for food, for healing, for restoration of various sorts), but when Jesus started to speak of the demand of the Kingdom of God – that it is, as he says elsewhere, a “pearl of great price,” but a pearl that will cost you everything to acquire and possess – the feckless folk withered in the noonday sun. And the disciples, hoping for a “bumper crop” of converts, started to get discouraged (the validity of the message being determined by the responses it receives, they believed). And so Jesus told them this story to encourage them.

But it doesn’t take much of a Bible scholar to pick up that this story was not very “encouraging.” Three out of four of the seeds the farmer had hopefully planted failed to produce a thing! Do the math! That’s a 75% failure rate! And Jesus’ disciples, I’m sure, thought (if not said), “Gee thanks! That’s encouraging! So the point of your little story is, ‘Most of what you do for the Kingdom of God will fail!’ Got any more stories, Jesus?”

But Jesus said: “You didn’t listen. I told you to listen! Yes, three out of the four seeds you planted with such hope failed to produce a thing, but one did! And that one produced a harvest so bounteous that it made the whole planting enterprise worthwhile! Because you see, this is God’s seed, and it’s really good seed! Because God is one who can do just about anything with just about everything, no matter how meager the sower's gifts or modest the soil. So stop your whining and just sow…sow…SOW...and leave the rest to God.”

It’s called a “parable.” He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

July 4th Sermon

2010-06-28T10:29:00.002-04:00

If you're looking for a sermon for July 4th, here's one I'll be preaching at FBC Tryon, NC. Just click on the graphic to the left.

A Modest Plea for Bible Reading

2010-06-21T16:39:00.003-04:00

From time to time people who know of my appreciation for C. S. Lewis will ask me if I’ve read some recent book about Lewis. I always say the same thing: “No. I don’t read books about C. S. Lewis; I read Lewis.” There is this idea afoot that secondary literature (writings about other writings) is somehow as good as, or even perhaps more valuable than, primary literature (the writings themselves). And so, as a result people read biographies or “studies” of C. S. Lewis, thereby intending to understand his “thought,” rather than going straight to the “horse's mouth,” so to speak, and reading Lewis’s own writings themselves. “You’ll learn more Plato from the ‘experts’ than by reading the Symposium; you’ll learn more Homer from the textbook on ancient Greek literature than by reading the Odyssey.” I don’t much think so.

I’m sure some of it is merely the result of feelings of inadequacy. “How could I possibly know as much as the experts about Homer or Plato or Lewis?” Some, no doubt, is the result of indolence. It’s easier to let the experts do the hard work and boil it all down to a few “scholarly paragraphs” which can then be lifted and dropped in an appropriate context as if I had done the work myself.

But nowhere is this tendency more pervasive and insidious than in reading the Bible. Years ago, I was teaching at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, and I had gone home to South Florida for a holiday. While I was there, at church one Sunday someone came up to me and, knowing that I was a seminary professor, asked what I thought about Experiencing God (a “Bible study” course popular in the churches at the time). I said: “I don’t have an opinion; I haven’t read it.” The person looked shocked and said: “What do you mean you haven’t read it? Why, I thought that’s what you’d be teaching in the seminary!” Said I, “No, we still teach the Bible in the seminary.”

I’m constantly amazed at the lengths to which Christians will go to avoid reading the Bible, preferring just about any “study” or “exposition” or “inspirational writing” to the Bible. You go to a “Bible study” these days and there is precious little reading or study of the Bible itself going on at all! They’re studying Rick Warren or Beth Moore or whoever is perceived to be “trendy” or “relevant” at the moment. I observe that many, appropriately enough, don’t even call them “Bible studies” anymore. “I’m attending a Beth Moore study.” Precisely. Again, in my judgment the causes are the same: inadequacy and indolence. Some feel inadequate to move into a collection of writings composed in a world and a culture so vastly different from our own, so they look to the “experts” (credentialed or self-styled) to negotiate the distance for them. Others just don’t want to work that hard.

But the real tragedy is that the Bible, when given a chance, is not nearly so inscrutable as many seem to think. If one would just sit down and read a Gospel from beginning to end as one would any other story, the plot, the characters, the setting, and the message come through with surprising clarity. Even Paul’s letters, which Peter said were “difficult to understand” (2 Peter 3:14-16), nonetheless speak with striking relevance across cultures and through centuries when given a chance to speak for themselves.

And so, here’s a novel idea! Why not, at your next Bible study, actually study the Bible, rather than books about the Bible? Leave the “experts” and the “inspirational speakers” standing out in the hall and instead invite Matthew and Paul and John and Luke to your Bible study. Just read the Bible and see if it doesn’t make more sense than all those books about the Bible that are trying to “explain” it to you. I dare you!

Bird in the Grill

2010-06-17T13:57:00.000-04:00

My late teacher, affectionately known as Dr. George, never tired of telling stories about his grandsons, Ben and Luke. They were the joy of his life. And among the stories he liked to tell was this one.

When Ben was about four and Luke two, their parents were returning from a trip with the boys when, during the drive home, a bird flew out in front of the car and the car hit it, killing it. They did not know it at the time, but the bird got stuck in the car grill. When they arrived home, they found the bird stuck in the grill, and Ben, being a sensitive and soft-hearted sort, was grief-stricken at the sight of the bird. He insisted that they had to bury the bird and have a funeral for him right on the spot.

So his dad went into the garage, got a shovel, and dug a grave for the bird in the backyard. Ben very respectfully took the lifeless little bird and placed its body in the hole, and then slowly filled the hole with dirt mounding it over the grave. When he finished, with tears in his eyes, he patted the mound of dirt and began to pray: “Dear God,” he said, “We’re sorry we killed this bird. We didn’t mean to; he just flew right into the car. He was a good bird, and I know he’s in heaven with you. Amen.”

When he finished, his dad asked little Luke if he wanted to say anything, and Luke thought for a minute, patted the ground, and said: “And that’s that.”

For some people, that is precisely what life is – just a series of events and circumstances through which we live, good or bad, and then when it is over, “That’s that.” We’re like a bird in the grill, a victim of dumb luck or bad judgment; but mercifully it comes to an end and “that’s that.”

Of course, when put that way, no one wants to believe that about themselves, but they live as though it were true. They either slog through life without ever having a serious thought about anything, meeting life as it races at them as just a series of meaningless events, or else they try to live a “happy little life” in which life is good, the kids are safe, the job secure, the marriage uneventful if not fulfilling, and the test results came back “normal.” But sooner or later both kinds of people will “hit the wall,” and when they do, no one…no one wants to believe that “that’s that.”

Tommy, a CPA who lived his life as though it were “one big party,” called me when he lay on his deathbed terrified that despite how he had lived his life “that most certainly was not that.”

“I want to be okay when I meet my maker,” he told me. “Is it too late to make it right?” Death is the great simplifier. There was precious little chitchat between us that day. Tommy didn’t have time for chitchat. He had work to do, and he wanted me to get to it. He needed to make his peace with God. We talked, Tommy and I, about dying, about faith, about life and death and resurrection. We talked about the fact that we’re all terminal. The mortality rate is 100%. Tommy just had the advantage of having a more precise “delivery date” than most. We talked, and then we prayed, and Tommy opened himself up in faith to God. And on that day, February 1, 2006, Tommy professed faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior of his life and claimed his promise of eternal life on the other side of the grave. And so, I baptized him. He was much too sick to do what we Baptists usually do. We dunk you, you know. And so, I improvised. We Baptists can do that. His wife brought me a chalice of water to serve as a makeshift baptistry. I looked at Tommy and said: “Tommy, do you now openly and publicly, in the presence of God and in the company of fellow believers, profess your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.” And he looked at me with level gaze and said: “I do.” And I dipped my finger in the water, raised my right hand heavenward, and said: “As a confession of your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, I baptize you my brother in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Sprit,” and I made a watery cruciform on his pale, weak forehead.

Less than a week later they gathered, his family and friends, to say “goodbye” to Tommy. They remembered the Tommy I never knew – happy-go-lucky Tommy, fun-loving Tommy, not-a-serious-bone-in-his-body Tommy. “Life was one big party for Tommy,” they said. But when I saw Tommy, “the party was over” and he desperately wanted to know, needed to know, had to know, that “that was most certainly not that!”

We all have a date with the dirt. What it means to be Christian is to live on this side of the dirt as though you will live on that side of the dirt, and as if “that is most certainly not that.”

God and Government (Luke 20:20-26)*

2010-06-06T18:45:00.005-04:00

I love Sundays. And I love the Fourth of July. Sundays and the Fourth of July; I love them both. That’s why I’m always a bit puzzled by the ambivalence I feel when they share the same square on the calendar as they do this year. I love them both – Sundays and the Fourth. Why the queasiness when they occupy the same space on the calendar?

I don’t know, really, but I think it might have something to do with the birth of our son. I was a pastor in southern Indiana at the time, First Baptist Church of Austin. It was the summer of our nation’s Bicentennial. It was also the summer after I had just completed my M.Div. degree and was about to begin my PhD studies at Southern Seminary. I don’t know what came over me – I guess I had too much time on my hands – but I came up with the idea that our church should hold Sunday services outside that year, in honor of the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, which fell on Sunday, just as it does this year. And so I talked the deacons of the church into moving our services outside for the day. Thought it would be kinda neat to do something different on Bicentennial Sunday. It’s a trick we preachers use when we really don’t have anything to say. We use “smoke and mirrors” to distract you – use a gimmick – put balloons on the ceiling or pull out some other bag of tricks – and hope you won’t notice that we really don’t have anything to say! One of the deacons, Albert Thormyer, had a farm about twenty miles or so out of town, and he said that he’d mow the pasture, pull out a hay wagon for a chancel, and people could spread their blankets on the grass, and we could hold services there. After services, we would have an old-fashioned dinner on the ground, and I do mean ground, and then we could have an old-fashioned Gospel sing in the afternoon. Sounded like a plan.

Then again, they didn’t have a wife who was nine and one-half months pregnant at the time. The baby was already overdue, and Cheryl was getting more miserable with each passing day. And it was hot! The whole Midwest had been sweltering under a heat wave for weeks that summer, and the forecast for Bicentennial Sunday was temps in the mid 90’s with humidity to match. When I told Cheryl we were going to the Thormyers’ farm for outdoor Bicentennial Sunday services, she said: “Do you know how hot it’s gonna be on the Fourth? And with me overdue? You are so dead!” I said, “Not to worry. The baby will surely come before then.” He didn’t. And so out to the farm I traipsed with my wife great with child (to use the biblical idiom). I spread a blanket for her at the foot of the only tree on the property, and one of the women in the church, Margaret Harrell, agreed to sit with her and try to keep her comfortable while I conducted services. Well, because it was Bicentennial Sunday, the services went longer than usual, all the music and such, and by the time I got up to preach, the sun was almost directly overhead. Did I tell you it was hot that day? All hope of shade had vanished in the noonday sun, and there sat my wife, on a blanket under a tree producing no shade, nine and a half months pregnant. Before the sermon, I stole a glance at her and Margaret, and Margaret looked at me and mimed the words that sent a chill up my spine, she mouthed: “You are so dead!”

After the sermon, the women of the church told Cheryl that she should get up and walk; would help the baby come quicker. And so there she was, a woman under each arm, waddling around the pasture in the sweltering heat. Did I mention it was hot? They brought her by where I was holding forth with a group of men telling stories, and glaring at me, she whispered: “You are so dead!” My son has no idea just how close he came to being fatherless when he was born.

To this day I still get a bit queasy when the Fourth of July and Sunday share the same square on the calendar. Maybe that’s it.

Or maybe it’s because of something Jesus once said about the relationship between God and government. He said it in the temple in Jerusalem during the final week of his life. According to Luke, the religious leaders who had the most to lose by Jesus’ popular messianic movement because they were in cahoots with the Roman occupational army, attempted to discredit him before the people before whom he was teaching every day in the temple. They did it by asking him “trapping questions” designed to discredit him with one of the many popular religious factions of the day no matter what he answered. But Jesus deftly sidestepped first one question and then another, refusing to be snared in their trap. Then, Luke says, they “sent spies, pretending to be sincere, to exploit his answers and deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor.” Don’t you just hate that – pious frauds trying to stir up trouble to their own benefit? “Teacher,” they asked, “is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” It’s a “Gotcha question.” If he says, “Well, of course we should pay taxes to Caesar,” then he’s discredited in the eyes of the people who wanted liberation from the Romans. But if he says, “No, we should not pay taxes to Caesar!” he’s guilty of treason, and the governor will have him arrested. And so, when the question was put to Jesus, everybody leaned forward and listened carefully for His answer.

And answer He did. He asked one of His interrogators to reach into his pocket and produce a coin. Then He asked: “Whose image is on that coin which, I might add, you took out of your pocket?” “Caesar's.” “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s!”

He did not deny the legitimacy of Caesar’s claim. Indeed, He reminded His interlocutors that Caesar’s claim was ubiquitous. They carried Caesar’s money in their pockets; they walked on roads Caesar had built; they enjoyed Caesar’s protection against would-be invaders. It was utter nonsense to try to claim that one could live in Palestine and have nothing to do with Caesar. But, what He did not say but clearly implied was: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s, but never give to Caesar what is God’s!”

What did He mean by that? Just what is God’s that is never to be given to Caesar? Well, I don’t know for sure. But C. S. Lewis, in his book, The Four Loves, has, as usual, helped me here. Lewis argues that when Jesus defined the fundamental obligation of every person in terms of “You shall love the Lord thy God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself,” He was laying down a double commandment. We are to love God in one way, “with all our heart and soul and mind and strength;” that is, with complete and unqualified devotion. But we are to love neighbor, and by implication, everything else, “as we love ourselves;” that is, with something less than the total, unqualified devotion. This we reserve for God alone. Lewis calls the first kind of love “worship-love,” and the second “nurture-love.” Only God is already perfect and complete in Himself, and the devotion I give to Him, Jesus says, should be of the kind that is appropriate to such a Reality, “…with all my heart and soul and mind and strength,” that is, Worship-love. But everything else, including myself, my neighbor, and my country, merits a different kind of love, a love that is nurturing and developing and which recognizes the “not-yet-completeness” of myself, my neighbor, and my country. Nurture-love. Get it? Both “worship-love” and “nurture-love” are proper for the Christian, but the former is always reserved for God alone!

I do love my country, and I’m reminded of it every time I travel overseas. I guide groups to the Holy Land with regularity and have done so nearly every year since the 1980’s. When I went to Gardner-Webb some years back, I teamed up with the president who also loved to travel to the Middle East and, like myself, had been doing so for many years. He had a little game he played with me called “Let’s take Wayne somewhere in Israel he’s never been before.” He tried diligently every year to find some place off the beaten path where the tourists did not go, but it never worked. In the 80’s I had stayed in Israel studying for an extended period of time, and hardly ever went where the tour groups go. “Been here?” he’d asked. “Yep,” I’d say. And he’d huddle up again with our Palestinian guide to try to find a place where I had never been. I’ve been to Israel so many times through the years that it almost feels like home…almost. And then I board the plane to fly back to the States. When I finally land on US soil and present my passport at Passport Control, the agent looks at it, looks at me, stamps it, hands it back to me and says: “Welcome Home!.” I can’t tell you how that makes me feel! No matter how many times I hear those words, my heart swells with pride and a chill travels down my spine. “Welcome home,” he says.

But for the Christian, no matter how much we love our country, no matter how much it feels like “home,” there is one home, and it’s not the USA, no matter how much we love it or take pride in it. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. But never give to Caesar what is God’s alone!” God alone is our origin and our destiny; God alone is our heart’s true home.

But if Jesus is to be our guide in this matter, one thing more needs to be said: While Jesus did not deny the appropriate place of government and the proper devotion to it, He also made it clear that His ultimate hope for humanity was not in government, anybody’s government; it was in the Kingdom of God! I find it intriguing that Jesus gave no public policy or offered any “social reforms” during His life and ministry. To be sure, He did champion the cause of the poor and the marginalized, but He never did so out of a concern for social policy or political system. He did so always in the context of His proclamation of the Kingdom of God! He did it because, at bottom, Jesus believed that all systems, no matter how altruistic and noble, were provisional. His hope for social justice and human welfare was inexorably tied not to what man could do, but to what God would do!

And sometimes even we Christians forget that and have to be reminded. That’s why the Early Church gathered at Table each Lord’s Day – for fellowship, for support, but most of all, to remember both who and Whose they were. They called their gathering The Supper. To be sure, they gathered at Table for fellowship and communion and forgiveness and grace. But they also gathered as an act of Hope, eagerly awaiting the Day when their little Supper would become a Feast, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb and His Bride, the Church. And when they gathered, they remembered what Jesus had said: “I’ll not eat or drink with you again, until I do it in the Kingdom!” They prayed this, you know! Maranatha – “Our Lord Come!” And so they sat at Table and ate the Bread and drank from the Cup and reminded each other that empires rise and fall, Caesar's come and go, but when the smoke clears and the dust settles, God alone is our Hope; God alone is our Home.

There’s a story about Billy Graham that, while I don’t know if it’s true, it certainly sounds like something he’d say. The story goes that when Ruth Graham died, the aging, frail Billy Graham insisted on attending her service and even surprising everyone by delivering her eulogy himself, despite the fact that his Parkinson’s disease had made standing and speaking nigh unto impossible. It was said that when the long ordeal was over and Dr. Graham was finally transported back to Montreat to rest and recover, Franklin escorted him inside the house that had been their home all these many years. And once inside, he turned to his father and said: “It’s good to be home, isn’t it Dad.” To which Billy Graham reportedly replied, “I’m not home yet.”

*This sermon is doing "double duty." It was prepared both to preach on July 4th of this year (which happens to be a Sunday), as well as serving as a "sample sermon" for a preaching workshop I am conducting for the Greater Cleveland County Baptist Association on June 7, 2010).

Why I Use the Lectionary

2010-06-01T13:21:00.003-04:00

When I teach preaching I always encourage my students to use the Common Lectionary (in one of its many variations) in planning their preaching schedules. Being a Baptist and, therefore, firmly ensconced within the free church tradition, my predilection for a worship instrument that constrains the preacher may require, in the minds of some, an explanation.

First, a word about preaching in general. I often get questions from preachers about which “kind” of preaching I prefer. I presume they mean by that one of the many monikers used to distinguish various types of contemporary preaching, such as expository, narrative, inductive, confessional, etc. However, these tend to focus more on the form than the content of preaching, the “vehicle” rather than the “freight.” Irrespective of the style one employs, if one’s preaching at the end of the day is not, in its truest sense, “biblical,” then one is not preaching; one is merely giving a speech. What distinguishes a sermon from a speech is the biblical text and the way it is employed in the sermon.

By my way of thinking, therefore, there are only two approaches to preaching: topical or textual. Either you start with a topic and then choose a text that "supports" what you've already decided you're going to say anyway; or you start with a text and then let the text dictate your topic. I do the latter for reasons that should be obvious, with a moment's reflection. But let me state them nonetheless.

There are five reasons, chiefly, why I use the Lectionary when planning my own preaching.

The Lectionary alleviates the preacher’s perpetual pressure of wondering what to preach on Sunday. It’s comforting and reassuring to know on Monday that my text for Sunday is already selected and waiting for me. I need only settle in for my weekly journey into and out of the text listening for a word from God to share with His people.
“To Lectionary or Not To Lectionary” is not the question anyway. Every preacher will utilize some sort of lectionary. The only choice is whether to use a lectionary of one’s own devising, or one which the church has shaped and honed for centuries. I often tell my preaching students: “Just look through your sermon file for the past ten years, and you’ll discover the shape of your lectionary.” I prefer to use the one which the church, in its collective wisdom, has fashioned through centuries of experience with corporate worship.
The Lectionary forces me to preach the whole Bible, and not just the parts I happen to like. That is to say, the Lectionary is based on the entire canon of the Scriptures, and not on some truncated, eviscerated canon comprised exclusively of my “pet passages.” On more than one occasion, I have climbed into the pulpit and begun my sermon with the words: “I would not have preached this sermon today had the Lectionary not made me.”
The Lectionary is based on the Christian calendar and the church year. I like that. Of course, that’s not the only option for the preacher. There are multiple “calendars” all vying to dictate the preacher’s choices. For example, culture’s calendar will tell you that last Sunday was “Memorial Sunday” rather than “Trinity Sunday.” The denomination also has its “calendar” and will, if you let it, dictate what you call a given Sunday and what you preach – “Right to Life Sunday” or “Religious Liberty Sunday” or “Denominational Headquarters Needs a New Roof Sunday.” Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the point. The church calendar, on the other hand, is based on the Gospel (now, there’s a novel idea!) so that over the course of the year the preacher preaches the Gospel Story from Christ’s Coming (Advent) to Christ’s Coming (Christ the King Sunday). I like that.
The Lectionary provides a larger perspective when, on occasion, a sermon seems mordant or harsh. When people tell me that the message of a particular sermon seemed to them harsh or difficult or judgmental, I typically remind them: “Please remember that this is but one word from God in an ongoing conversation. I have preached other words; I will preach other words. But this is one word which the church, in its wisdom, thought we needed to hear. Be patient. Judgment this week, grace the next. It is the way of things with the God of this Book. Besides, I do not attempt to preach all of the Christian faith in every single sermon, for which we shall both be grateful.”

To be sure, the Lectionary isn’t failsafe or foolproof. There are some Sundays when I scratch my head and ask: “Why did they pick these texts?” And there are some preachers for whom even having a text in advance is no necessary advantage! But that said, using the Lectionary helps me keep my preaching biblical so that even when I mess up, I mess up about much more important issues than I would if left to my own devices or choices.

The List

2010-05-29T07:12:00.002-04:00

Went to Ingles the other day with a “list” for Cheryl. Why she sends me to those places I don’t know. There is a strange logic that governs supermarkets that only women can discern. She sent me to fetch a package of walnut halves to use on a pie. Sounds simple enough. Well, that just shows how much you know. I wandered through the wilderness of boxes and packages and cans for 40 minutes desperately looking for walnuts. Nothing. Not even a pillar of fire by night!

Turned down aisle five and ran into Dan and Ron, two retired guys at the church where I served as interim pastor, hunched in a hopelesss huddle both with their own lists! I joined them.

“Where do you suppose they keep the birdseed?” Dan asked.

Ron and I both looked at each other, looked at our own lists, and said in unison: “Search me!”

“Where do you think the nuts are?” I asked. Sometimes, it’s just too easy.

“I think they’re right here looking at these stupid lists,” Ron said.

“Well, this is the blind leading the blind,” said I.

Dan said: “I’m gonna find me a woman!”

Oh yes. The walnuts. They were on aisle seven – with the baking goods!!! Who knew????

And every woman out there is thinking: “Idiot!”

Ministerial Formation

2010-05-24T13:14:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I spent the day at Kendalls Baptist Church in New London, NC, teaching the Book of Revelation. Billed as a “Day in Revelation,” I taught the combined Adult Sunday School classes, preached on Revelation at the 11:00 service, taught again at 4:00, broke for a light supper at 5:00, and concluded with a final session from 6:00 to 7:00. It was a long, but very rewarding, day.

It was rewarding, in large part, because it enabled me to reconnect with one of my former students, the Rev. Chris Fox, who is pastor at Kendalls. Chris was a student of mine at a divinity school where I was dean. It was a pleasure to be with him and to catch up on what has been going on in his life in the intervening years…and a lot’s been going on in his life! When I knew Chris as a student, he was not married. Married to Jamie now, they have two beautiful daughters, Madison and Hannah. Chris has settled into marriage and fatherhood very well, I would say. It was a joy to watch him with his daughters. He’s a good husband and a good father; and while I take no credit for that, I nonetheless took considerable joy.

I do, however, take some credit for the polished, mature, poised pastor he has become. Watching him with his people, leading in worship, listening to his vision and dreams for the congregation and community, I beamed with satisfaction. He’s a fine pastor with a deep sense of calling and commitment. I’d like to think I helped in that…at least a little bit. He studied preaching with me while I was his dean. I told his congregation, “If you like his preaching, just remember that I taught him everything he knows. If you don’t, well, what can I say? I did the best I could with what I had to work with!” They laughed, then later told me, “He’s a good preacher. He works hard at it, and it shows.” One said: “He makes it worth the trip here on Sundays.” I like that.

Teaching is, in some ways, like carrying a baby you never get to see delivered. We teach; we nurture; we form; and then they go off to God knows where to do God knows what and we never know how they turned out. That’s why yesterday was so satisfying for me, watching Chris “do his thing” with such poise and passion and presence. “Congratulations! It’s a minister!”

The Pool and the Church

2010-05-08T09:06:00.007-04:00

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, but in the calendar of the Church it’s the sixth Sunday of Easter. One of the scriptures for this Sunday (there are usually four choices each week) is the story of the healing of the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda in John 5:1-9. The story is intriguing in many ways, but it also provides a rather dramatic example of the value of biblical archaeology in recovering the history of the Intertestamental Period and in vindicating the historical reliability of the New Testament.

In the 1960's archaeological excavations done by the Roman Catholic White Fathers actually discovered on the northeast corner of the ancient Temple Mount the pool of which John speaks. That discovery proved that there was indeed an historical tradition underlying the Fourth Gospel which is independent of the Synoptics but no less credible.

John's description of the Pool of Bethzatha in John 5 is quite specific, and for years skeptical scholars scoffed at his claim that such a pool ever existed. Intriguingly, John says: “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool called in Hebrew ‘Bethzatha,’ having five porches (stoa in Greek) at which a multitude of the sick, blind, lame and paralyzed lay.” Now that’s pretty precise information! It’s a little like saying: “on the corner, next to the Post Office, there’s a MacDonald’s.” Presumably, anyone living in Jerusalem at the time would have known immediately the place of which John was speaking. The problem is that no other ancient writer ever mentions such a pool, and no such pentagonal-shaped, five-sided structure, which would seem to be demanded by John’s description, is referenced in any writing from antiquity. John’s credibility was suspect. And yet, his description is so specific that he seems to assume that everyone reading his gospel would know exactly the pool to which he was referring. Now, we know they would.

John’s mention of the “sheep gate” is precise. Actually, the Greek says, “Now there is in Jerusalem, at the sheep______ a pool.” The word John used was probatike (dative for the word “sheep”), and is here used as a substantival adjective, literally, “at the sheep (place).” Presumably, anyone from Jerusalem would have known what “at the sheep (place)” meant. A reasonable hypothesis was that the reference was either to a sheep gate (so RSV), or to a sheep market (so KJV). More likely, however, is that both were intended in that a gate leading outside the city, just beyond which lay a sheep market, would have come to be known as the “sheep gate.” Locals tell me that up until recently (within the last fifty or so years) there has been a sheep market in the area. Indeed, a sheep gate was mentioned by Nehemiah (3:1; 12:39), which, from the descriptions given in the passages, seemed to have been situated on the north city wall just outside the temple area, the very location John described.

The pool near the sheep gate John called Bethzatha, “Bethesda” in English. In Hebrew, Bethzatha means “house/place of pouring,” and so, by extension, “pool.” The existence of a pool called Bethesda in the city of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus has now been confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the famous Copper Scroll from Qumran (3Q15 11.12-13), written sometime prior to A.D. 68, a list of places in Jerusalem is cited, among them this one: “At Bethesda (Beth Eshdathayin), in the pool where you enter its small(er) reservoir. . . .” What is even more striking about the Copper Scroll’s reference to Bethesda is the spelling – it uses the Hebrew dual form (thayin). Note also that the Scroll describes the pool as having a “smaller” reservoir, and, one presumes, a larger. Hence, the Dead Sea Scrolls attest to a pool in Jerusalem known at the time as Bethesda, the “House of the Two Pools.”

In their excavations in the 1960’s, twin pools surrounded by covered porches (stoa) is precisely what the White Fathers found. Two pools rectangular in shape, a larger pool to the south and a smaller to the north, separated by a dike of stone nearly twenty feet in width, were discovered. The pools were situated in a small valley, now filled in, which ran diagonally to the Kidron Valley. No doubt, the pools were thus placed so as to act as reservoirs, just as the Copper Scroll described, to collect runoff rainwater on its way to the Kidron. The pools may have also been supplied by a spring which intermittently bubbled up to the surface, thus accounting for the legend of the angel who “troubled the waters” to which some manuscripts of the Gospel of John refer (see John 5:4). Excavations have revealed numerous columns, capitals, and bases indicating that the pools were surrounded by five colonnaded porticoes or porches (one each around the perimeter of the pools and one on the dike through the middle), just as John described. The pool did indeed have “five porches;” it just wasn't pentagonal in shape as scholars had assumed. For the full story, see my book, Where Jesus Walked (pp. 150-165).

Finally this. Next door to the archaeological excavations of the pool is a small chapel with a long history of its own. Built by Roman Christians in the Byzantine period, it was destroyed and rebuilt several times finally taking the form in which it appears today. The chapel has been known historically as the “Church of St. Anne” because tradition holds that the site was the birthplace of Mary, Jesus’ mother, Anna and Joachim being Mary’s parents, Jesus’ grandparents. According to tradition, Joachim, Mary’s father, was a shepherd, and so their association with the sheep market in the area was a natural one.

Right next door to the chapel is the Pool of Bethesda. And while it’s just tradition, I can imagine Jesus on more than one occasion visiting his grandparents in Jerusalem and watching the pathetic picture of a pool that promised, but could not deliver, healing for a man who had lain there crippled for thirty-eight years. Intriguingly, John rather casually remarks, “Jesus knew that he had been lying there for a long time” (John 5:6). Now, how could Jesus have known that? Perhaps, just perhaps, because when he visited his grandparents, who lived right next door to the pool, he’d seen that pathetic old figure lying there year after year, hoping against hope that he would be healed. And I can just imagine that the young Jesus, taking note of that man (remember, the Gospels say that not even a falling sparrow escaped his attention!), said to himself: “You know, one day I’m gonna do something about that.” And one day, John says, he did.

Creation Day

2010-04-22T09:54:00.001-04:00

Today is Earth Day, and there’s a common hypo-narrative (story beneath the story) running throughout. Briefly, it is this: “The earth was once a place of pristine beauty and harmony and peace; that is, until humankind came along and messed up things. If we’re going to save the earth, we must return it to its pre-human state by minimizing, and even eliminating where possible, all human interference and influence on the planet.” The metanarrative beneath this hypo-narrative is a theology of an eternal, sui generis, independent Nature which, for reasons of its own (the best and brightest among us suspect “survival of the fittest”) has produced creatures all of whom live in perfect balance and harmony with Nature save one, humanity.

The church, by and large, has accepted the hypo-narrative and adopted the metanarrative, but has done so, I would suggest, without critical reflection or attention to the issue of whether or not these narratives are, at their core, either logical or Christian. Something of the illogic of the above got played out in my own home recently. My wife and I had been eagerly awaiting the broadcast of the highly advertised Discovery Channel series called Life. When the first episode aired, however, my wife’s enthusiasm waned rather quickly. Said she, “It was not what I expected.” I said: “Why?” She said: “I guess just didn’t expect all the gore and gruesomeness.” Said I, “Well, that’s Nature! You’re either the mauler or the meal!” Nature, when we get beneath the hypo-narrative, can be brutal and cruel by human standards. The alpha lion systematically kills the cubs sired by his rival when he assumes control of the pride. Whatever this goddess called Nature is, she is anything but sweet.

That’s why Christians have a different metanarrative. We don’t believe in an eternal, sui generis, independent “Nature;” rather, we believe in creation. “In beginning God created….” We Christians believe in an eternal, sui generis independent “Creator” who has created things other than Himself, including what we call “nature.” Humanity is regarded in our metanarrative as the Creator’s special “creation” in that He put a bit of Himself into humanity (that’s not to say that God has not put something of Himself into creation; rather, it is to say that creation resembles God as a building resembles its designer, but humanity resembles God more like a child resembles its parent). Now, before you rush in and accuse me of providing cover for the crowd that treats the earth with contempt, let me quickly add that the biblical mandate is that humanity has a God-given obligation to act as “stewards” of that creation. Especially in the Old Testament (see the creation narratives in Genesis which are then reflected upon in places such as Psalm 8 and elsewhere), humanity has a responsibility (given the fallen nature of Nature) to tend and care for and “husband” creation in behalf of its true “Owner,” namely, the Creator. What that means practically speaking is that Christians do not consume more resources than they need; Christians work for the health and wholeness of the creation; and Christians do not destroy or otherwise desecrate (the use of the sacral word is intentional) God’s creation. I believe in recycling; I believe in reducing our carbon footprint; I believe in reducing our consumption of resources (of all kinds) wherever possible; I believe in doing everything in our power to reduce pollution on the planet. But I do not believe in these things because I think that by doing them we can somehow “save the planet,” still less because I owe some obeisance to a goddess called “Nature.” I believe these things because I am a Christian, and that’s what Christians do. It is an expression of my stewardship of God's creation as one of His creatures specifically charged with that sacred obligation and privilege.

In the New Testament, this theology of nature takes an eschatological turn. I said above that the biblical theology of nature is that creation, not just humanity, has “fallen” and, as a result, finds itself at odds with its Creator. Consequently, Paul moves the Old Testament “stewardship theology of creation” a step further when he says that “all creation groans in eager expectation for the revelation of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). You see, creation itself has a stake in humanity’s making peace with the Creator, and so Paul holds out the hope (the eschatological hope) that one day Christ (the “Man” who gets it right and undoes the Fall) will become pas en panti, “all in all.” The author of the Revelation caught a glimpse of that same hope when, far from the belief in some sort of eternal sui generis Nature, he envisions a day when there will be a “new heaven and a new earth...for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21).

But meanwhile, this is our “home away from home,” and no one likes a sloppy housekeeper.

Only a Few Things Really Matter

2010-04-20T16:24:00.005-04:00

Back in the mid-80’s I served on the faculty of Midwestern Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. At Midwestern in those days, it was our practice to invite pastors to campus whom we felt would be good pulpit models for our students. In what we called "A Week of Preaching" these model pastors would preach each day in chapel, guest lecture in our classes, and have both formal and informal conversations about ministry with students and faculty. The speaker one particular week was Dr. John M. Lewis, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Raleigh, North Carolina, from which he was shortly to retire. I had no inkling at the time that I would someday succeed him in that pulpit.

I still recall the impression he made on me. He had just lost his beloved wife, Jean, and was obviously in grief, but that did nothing to diminish the quality of what he did on our campus that week. His sermons were brilliant and beautifully crafted; his classroom lectures were both practical and profound; and his conversations with the faculty in the Faculty Lounge were memorable and disarming. I recall one in particular. A group of us were in the lounge picking John's brain when I asked him if he could summarize for us what he had learned in over forty years of ministry, nearly thirty of which with one congregation. He thought for a moment, looked at me and said: "I guess I would say that after forty years of ministry I've learned that only a few things really matter."

That was twenty-five years ago, a quarter of a century, and I stand now where John was then. I turn sixty this year, and fulfilling a promise to my beloved wife, I have “retired” from full time ministry. That doesn’t mean that I’m just “sitting and rocking.” I still teach for Liberty University Online, but I don’t have to get up and get dressed and go somewhere to lecture, as I did all those years in seminary and university teaching. And I also still carry a speaking schedule. The difference is that I used to have to preach because it was Sunday; now I only have to preach when I have something to say.

I have a list, I hope it’s not a “bucket list,” but who knows? I have several books to write that got put on the back burner by more immediate obligations. I hope to get to them now. I took up nature and wildlife photography some years back, a concession to mutinous menisci that rebelled from my being a thirty-mile-a-week runner for thirty years. My wife thinks I’m actually pretty good at it, but she loves me, and so her judgment is suspect. I want to do more with that. I used to play piano but gave it up years ago when other obligations crowded it out; I plan to take it up again. I love to travel, having guided groups to the Middle East for twenty-five years, but I’ve missed some of the most beautiful places in the world right here in the US. I hope to correct that.

But most of all, I want to spend time with Cheryl, my wife of forty years. She was a “church widow” for much of my career, though she never complained or groused or whined about it…okay, she whined once or twice. I’m embarrassed that it took me forty years to discover that only a few things really matter. I take some comfort, I guess, in the knowledge that better men than I struggled with that too.

“So what have you learned, “ I asked, “after forty years of ministry?” Who knew that I was both asking…and answering…the question?

An Ecclesiastical Time-Out

2010-03-28T15:40:00.006-04:00

Today I concluded a two and one-half year intentional interim. In every way you choose to measure, it has been a good experience, both for the congregation and for me.

The interim process is designed to provide a congregation in transition with something of an “ecclesiastical time-out.” Too many churches believe that the primary purpose of an interim period is to collapse the distance between the departure of the former pastor and the arrival of the new pastor to as brief a time as possible. That is almost never a wise strategy. When a church loses a pastor for any reason, the congregation gains a valuable opportunity to re-think its identity and mission, re-dream its vision, and re-imagine its future. In my experience, if a church fails to take an “ecclesiastical time-out,” it just perpetuates and passes along to the new minister whatever dysfunction and pathology that plagued the last pastor’s tenure. Let me say it more bluntly: A church that doesn’t call an interim pastor and go through an “intentional” interim period of self-examination and evaluation will very likely make its next pastor an un-intentional interim.

That’s why it was so gratifying to watch this congregation come together over the past couple of years, re-think its identity and mission, and re-dream its future. It was fortuitous (or providential?) that during this period the congregation also celebrated its centennial, providing a natural juncture for such an evaluative enterprise. The church is now healthier than it has been in years. And last Sunday, when the Pastor Search Committee presented its candidate for church approval, the congregation responded by calling their new pastor with a 99% overwhelming consensus vote (that’s about as close as Baptists ever get to unanimity).

As for me, this is my seventh interim, and it’s always gratifying to be used of God to heal a wounded congregation and to help move them farther along toward becoming a healthy congregation, and by that I mean the Body of Christ, again. It’s some of the best work I’ve done in ministry.

For churches in transition, I recommend the process. Intentional Interim Pastors move into and among the congregation and lead them to reflect on five fundamental areas that define and determine the life and health of the congregation: heritage, mission (read "purpose"), connections (read "denominational relationships), leadership (read "church administration" and how the congregation makes decisions and gets things done), and future (who and what is the congregation to be, going forward?). The Intentional Interim has no stake in the outcome of these discussions (he’s not staying anyway); rather, he leads the congregation through a process whereby they examine these issues and come to conclusions and decisions that are right for that particular congregation (no “one-size-fits-all” model of doing church is brought in and imposed on the congregation; what works in one place won't necessarily work in another). The process is both therapeutic and empowering.

If you’d like more information about the Intentional Interim Process and what it can do for your church, contact the Center for Congregational Health at www.healthychurch.org.