RCB Blog

Portraits of the Lamb: Worthy

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 21:41:44 GMT

Art and Poetry Inspired by the Book of Revelation

So, there is a group of us working through Revelation together. We've had a great time learning, listening, and exploring what God is doing in this strange and apocalyptic text. One of the things we've done together is to allow John's writing to inspire our imaginations. So, I plan to share several of our works of art here on the blog. I'll start with a poem that I wrote, inspired by Revelation 5, titled "Worthy." Enjoy!

- Josh

Worthy

I had heard of you with my ear, but now my eye has seen you

In my imagination, you still appear

As nordic Jesus—the blonde-haired one

With the piercing, gentle eyes

More Swedish pastor, with high forehead

And raised brows and full-headed

Lion’s mane hair. And tall.

Tall and charismatic, like a board chair

Or a CEO or an executive director

If he were pastoring, the church

Would be full to overflowing, based simply

On his height and hair and eyes

And on his lineage—his family

Would be pastors for generations, with

Lawyers and professors and company leaders

Thrown in for better measure. “Good stock”

We might say, or “deep roots and strong trunk”

“Capable” we might say, “the future is in good hands”

And when those hands take the scroll

He might tell an appropriate joke

To put us at ease—something knowing,

Both self-deprecating (he wouldn’t want us

To think that he thinks too highly of himself)

And capable (he wouldn’t want us

To think we’d put our trust in the wrong guy)

The Lion of Judah and Root of David

Would be more than capable of

Just such a joke

But I didn’t catch the joke, or

Didn’t understand it when you told it

And—can I speak without giving offense?—

Your coming didn’t exactly put me at ease

Instead of lowering my anxiety, your appearance

Gives me pause, leads to some questions

I see the scars, of course,

They might still be open wounds

Have you healed enough for this?

And after what you went through

Wouldn’t recovery and therapy be appropriate?

So as not to carry your trauma and pain

Into the throne room?

Your brown skin and black hair, matted

With hands that have worked—worked

The olive wood, the broken stones,

The earth, the humus, the dust

Carpenter, stonemason, gardener the roles

Those hands have dug in creation

I see your hands plunged into the earth

Breaking the clay, stirring soil, quickening roots

Your hands, worn and wounded, gently

Cultivating ground, planting seed, feeding its life

Those earth-covered hands reach to the throne

And I watch with wonder and…

(Oh God, I confess it!) with wonder and…

Dismay? Disappointment? Disgust?

Do I want the gardener or

The executive director to lead God’s remaking

Of the earth? The Lamb or the Lion?

And with the Revelator, I’m weeping as I see

That no executive director is worthy

And the hands that reach for the scroll

Are earth-heavy, brown and bloody

The blood from your own hands is become

The lifeblood of each root unto each leaf, unto each leaf

Your breath and living blood is become

Creation’s sustenance, alive again, alive again

And He shall reign forever and ever

Atonement Resources

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 16:01:50 GMT

Some followup resources to our atonement conversation

I recently preached on the atonement and talked about the idea that God wants to be one with us. Atonement ideas talk about the different images that Scripture uses to talk about how Jesus unites us with God. There are lots of different images that Scripture uses, and I talked about several of them: Jesus comes and dies in our place, Jesus is a ransom for sin, Jesus defeats the powers, Jesus is light that overcomes darkness, Jesus heals us, cleanses us, sacrifices himself for us. There are mountains of books written on this, so I just want to point ot several that have been helpful for me.

From the early church:

Irenaus (130-202) was a foundational early Christian thinker. He talks about Jesus as coming to be a second Adam, a new head of humanity (an idea that comes to be known as "recapitulation", which means "to re-head").

Gregory of Nyssa (335?-394?) is an early and important thinker on the atonement. He wrote about Jesus' work in several places, and you can find those. I find this resource helpful, as it selects quotes about atonement from his work intending to teach faith to others.

Athanasius (296?-373) is equally early and important. His work On the Incarnation is a classic in Christian theology and looks at how and why Jesus comes to earth to live and die and rise again. If you are interested, this is a great work.

Augustine (354-430) is always interesting, and has a lot to say. His work On the Trinity might be his clearest work on atonement (and--as an added bonus--is also very compelling theological work on the Trinity!).

Anselm is much later (he was bishop of Canterbury from 1093-1109), and is a hinge figure in atonement thinking. He develops the idea of a "satisfaction theory" of the atonement. For Anselm, Jesus comes to satisfy God's honor, which is offended by human sin. His work, Why Did God Become Man? is a groundbreaking atonement work.

From the Reformation:

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a great reformer who wanted to help the church more faithfully follow Jesus. He has a lot to say about atonement in various places, but here is a sermon that points to penal substitution, the idea that Jesus came to die in our place to pay our legal debt to God because of our sin.

Jean Calvin (1509-1564) is another of the great reformers and the father of what becomes Reformed Theology. His writing is foundational for lots of American theology, and much of what we assume about the atonement comes from his thought describing penal substitution. His Institutes are the best place to learn his thought, but (to be honest) I don't much like reading them. I wish I could find something that distills his thought a bit, and if you find something let me know.

More recent thinking:

PP Waldenström (1838-1917) is a key thinker in the founding of the Covenant (our denomination). He questioned the idea of penal substitution and argued that God is love and is constantly pursuing us in love, not with wrath.

Gustaf Aulén (1879-1977) was another Swedish theologian who questioned the hegemony of penal substitution. His book Christus Victor helped revive attention on the older view of God winning victory over sin and death.

René Girard (1923-2015) was a creative and important 20th century thinker. His views on mimetic desire and scapegoating helped us think about new possibilities in atonement thinking. I can't even begin to summarize his thought, which is very complex and sometimes difficult to follow. If you want to start down this rabbit trail, take a look .

Hans Boersma was a professor of mine at Regent College (he is now teaching elsewhere) and his book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross was another important work in the modern conversation around atonement. He argues that Christus Victor, Penal Substitution, and Moral Influence are all valid ways of describing what's happening in Jesus, and we need all of them. For Boersma, they all fit under Irenaus' Recapitulation theology.

The Anástasis Center is a community dedicated to rethinking atonement, especially focused around the idea of atonement as healing. Started by Mako Nagasawa, it is a movement to focus on God's justice as restorative and Jesus' work as healing. I am intrigued by what they are doing and recommend taking a look at their website .

Brian Zahnd, Fleming Rutledge, NT Wright, Peter Leithart, James Cone, and others are helping to frame our understanding of what Jesus has done. Take a look and see what helps you to watch and witness Jesus. (And forgive me for leaving out so many great thinkers and faithful Christians!)

On Scripture at RCB

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 21:46:35 GMT

How we listen to God's Word

This post expands on some things I said in a recent sermon on Exodus 16. I hope it can be helpful for you in understanding what we are doing at RCB.

Scripture is one of the ways that God provides for us. We receive God’s written Word as one way that God speaks to us and shares life and love with us. I want to cast a vision for the ways that we receive the Word at RCB, because we do it differently than lots of other church communities and I think that can cause some tension for those of us who have worshiped other places before. In what I’m saying, I don’t at all intend to say something negative about the ways that other church communities do things, it’s just that we believe that God has called us to do something different.

So, here’s the different thing that we do: we want you to receive the nourishment of God’s Word in several different ways, corresponding to some ways that people learn and grow, and we don’t tend to focus on the sermon as the heart of that nourishment.

First, the heart of our gatherings and the primary way that we collect the nourishment from God’s Word in Scripture is our Emmaus Group time. That’s where we watch Jesus directly, paying attention to what Jesus did during his life—how he walked, who he talked with, who he argued with, how he led, those he healed, the ways that he loved, and then his final days, his death, and then his resurrection from the dead. We want to wrestle together, to learn to ask good questions together in community, and to learn to listen to God speak to us in Scripture and in one another given the actual questions that we have. This is a kind of discovery learning, where we discover the information together, rather than receiving the information from an expert who has done all the work beforehand.

Next, we also have tried to emphasize the reading of Scripture , so that we have direct access to it. We aren’t trying to do less Scripture here, we are trying to do more, but more of that is read and less of it is explained. I don’t want you to have more of my voice in your head, I want you to have more of God’s voice. So, almost every worship service Sunday, we read from the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Psalms. Every Emmaus Group Sunday, we read from the Gospels. So, we hope that we are all receiving from God’s Word in the Scriptures. And then, we also do occasional Reading Services, where we will spend a lot of time just listening to the Scripture read because that’s the way that it was first heard in community: Paul wrote letters that were then read as whole letters in one sitting. The Gospels were meant to be heard out loud, all in one sitting. The Scriptures were written to be read, heard, and lived.

Finally, we have sermons that help us to see Jesus from other places in Scripture. Like this one: last week we saw Jesus provide food in the wilderness, so this week I’m picking up on what Jesus did in last week’s passage and looking for how Jesus fulfills an Old Testament passage where God provides food in the wilderness. And we are exploring–what is God’s character like? How is Jesus expressing God’s character? And how do we apply all of that to us today?

We have decided to change the relative emphasis between small groups and the sermon for a variety of reasons, but not because we think sermons are unimportant or ineffective. I love a good sermon and I enjoy preaching. But here are several reasons that we feel called to change the emphases:

First, not everyone listens or learns well from preaching. In fact, we know that lecture-style teaching is good for some things, but not that great for most of us. If you look at studies of how we learn, you see that discovery learning is far more effective for helping people learn. I’ve found that when I preach, I learn a lot more than anyone listening to me can learn. Preaching is a good way to help the preacher learn, but it’s not always a great way to help the community learn. Preaching is okay at passing along information , but it’s not great at formation in the way of Jesus, which is our goal.

That leads me to my second reason that we have changed the relative emphases. We live in a time when we have access to nearly infinite amounts of information. So, the time when the sermon was the most important way of communicating the truth is past. You have more access to great information and teaching on Scripture than anybody from 100 years ago. And more and more of that information is free and accessible. The BEMA podcast is so informative; the Bible Project has classes, really accessible videos for kids and adults, and a really nerdy podcast; you can get all of Tim Keller’s sermons online; Esau McCaulley, Efrem Smith, Kaitlyn Schiess, Beth Allison Barr, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Brenda Salter McNeil, Osheta Moore, Rich Villodas, on and on—you can get any number of great teachers to you anytime, anywhere. What a gift!

But with the gift of infinite choices comes choice paralysis, uncertainty about which options are good or helpful or best right now. So, I don’t feel that my job is information, but to participate in God’s work of formation—of serving what God is doing to form us in the way of Jesus. When it comes to great information, I would love to be a resource so that we have wisdom, grace, and discernment about how all these teachers and the information lines up with what we see in Jesus. I’m especially concerned about formation in wisdom—are we living as individuals and as a community in ways that look like Jesus?

And formation in wisdom does not come primarily through sermons. Sermons are decent at passing along information, and for forming us to be consumers of that information. But there are better ways to work toward formation, and so we are working to focus on those kinds of things: small group discussions where we are learning to watch Jesus, listen to Scripture and to one another, and ask better questions of each other and of the Bible; trainings that help us learn and practice loving one another in conflict; learning race history and other practical steps toward living out love for neighbors through justice work. These kinds of things are formative; they form our hearts, imaginations, bodies, and souls so that we can watch Jesus, do what he calls us to do, and be an outpost of his Kingdom in the world.

A final reason we have rethought the place of the sermon at RCB is because of the role of the pastor in a community. We have seen and heard too many stories of abusive pastoral leadership, and while I certainly hope that none of you is coming on Sundays expecting to be abused, the structure of Sundays can set up a power dynamic that can be dangerous for the pastor and for people in the community. I don’t want to be the expert up here that creates a power differential. We want to develop a flat-ish structure that gives voice and power to everyone in the community. My role is to watch Jesus, listen to the Spirit, and empower you.

So, as we are trying to be the community that God is inviting us to be, I hope you will join us! Come with us as we seek to live the way of Jesus for our community by watching Jesus, doing what He calls us to do, and being an outpost of His Kingdom in the world.

In Christ,

Josh

Lent, Week 5

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 16:39:28 GMT

This is a subtitle for your new post

You ever wake up and just feel off? I have vivid dreams, like 4k-style dreams, and sometimes the dreams are so real I wake up with residual thoughts and emotions. I’m not a jealous person, but I remember waking up mad at Jamie one morning because she talked to some guy in one of my dreams. I turned to her and said, “I’m mad at you…you were flirting with some guy in my dream”. I was able to laugh it off with her as we laid there.

“When the servant of the man of God got up early the next morning and went outside, there were troops (enemy), horses, and chariots everywhere. ‘Oh, sir, what will we do now” the young man cried to Elisha.” (2 Kings 6:15).

Last week I woke up as if I was surrounded by the enemy. My dreams were not only vivid but also very intrusive. I had never experienced thoughts like this before, I was struggling… Like the servant of the man of God, I was scared, I was crying out to God. I went to bed just fine and now I am in this space where I’ve never been—what do I do?

“Your kingdom come,

Your will be done,

On earth,

As it is in heaven”

God’s kingdom, God’s will... Our culture is guilty of having an individualistic mindset, and because of that, we tend to read and interpret Scripture through that lens. God’s kingdom and God’s will, while it is made up of individuals, is meant to be lived out in community. Lent, while it’s an individual practice, is still being practiced as a community. And the more we engage with God’s will and walk closer to Christ, the more the enemy will try to detour us. Even though I knew this, I still woke up feeling exposed, threatened, and afraid as I sensed being surrounded by the enemy. For almost 2 days, the mental, emotional, and spiritual battle waged.

“Don’t be afraid!’ Elisha told him. “For there are more on our side than on theirs!” Then Elisha prayed, “O Lord, open his eyes and let him see!” The Lord opened the young man’s eyes, and when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire.” (2 Kings‬ 6:16-17)

On Thursday, I was vulnerable and authentic with two loving friends. They listened, provided a safe space, and prayed. They prayed over me, prayed for my mental/emotional health, and also for any spiritual attack I may be facing. God’s will is for us to listen, provide a safe space, and pray for one another as the Holy Spirit reveals the kingdom and invites us to walk faithfully. Praise God for people who pray for and over us so that God opens our eyes revealing His presence during this Lenten season.

Lent, Halfway!

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 22:26:02 GMT

In the Marine Corps, part of our physical fitness test was a 3-mile run. If

you’ve ever seen me, you know I’m not built for distance—short-leg

syndrome. While running, there was often a person at the halfway mark

informing you of your run time. Most of the time, I wasn’t too concerned

with pace, I was just excited to hear that I was halfway done…the finish was

near.

I don’t know if you are happy or sad that we are at the halfway point of

Lent, however, the end is near. For some, you have been diligent in keeping

to your fast or new practice, for others you have been more sporadic, and

maybe for some, it lasted a good couple of days. Wherever we find ourselves

on this journey, let us remember, that it is not about how “good” we are

doing, but rather the posture of our heart.

“Your kingdom come,

Your will be done,

On earth,

As it is in heaven”

One of the characteristics I love most about God is his constant inviting

nature. Which is understandable and needed since we are so easily swayed

and distracted from our walk. Jesus’ prayer reminds us that we are invited

and inviting God to position our hearts toward His will, His kingdom. Lent

lasts but a season, our worship is everlasting.

“Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will

give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am

humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my

yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”

May the second half of our Lenten worship be restful as we continue to

position our hearts toward the One who holds them gently and eternally.

Lent, Week 3

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 17:10:10 GMT

an invitation to the pain

There is a response from God that I don’t like, and when I say “I don’t like it” my genuine feeling is probably closer to hate. It’s not because I disagree with it, or don’t find it to be true. Quite the opposite, I find it to be annoyingly true. The truthfulness I have found in God’s response is not because I believe the Bible to be true or inerrant, rather God has allowed me to experience His response to be true.

“Your kingdom come,

Your will be done,

On earth,

As it is in heaven”

God’s word is not just to be read or recited, but to be experienced. Jesus invites us to experience the kingdom through His will on earth. His will…his will is painful. We have made allegiances, believed “truths”, and given authority to systems, people, addictions, etc., that have devalued us, defaced us, and deformed our image.

God’s will is that we pledge our allegiance to Him, believe and experience His truth, and live in salvation by His power through the Holy Spirit. Lent is an opportunity, an invitation for Jesus’ prayer to be experienced, however painful that may be. As Dominique Dubois Gilliard writes, “the cure for the pain is in the pain”…it would be ignorant for us to think otherwise.

Jesus invites us into pain? That can’t be right! How can someone who loves us invite us to endure hardship and pain? How can someone who loves us, want us to hurt? What about love? What about grace? What about His goodness?

Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time he said,

“My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.”

It hurts to let go and repent of the allegiances we have made. It hurts to realize the “truths” we believed were lies covered in fear that looked like flowers. It hurts to surrender to God’s authority when we want control. I really dislike God’s response to Paul! I love that it’s true, that He is present, and that’s what I cling to—God is faithful!

Christianity and CRT Review

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 02:41:19 GMT

A review of Christianity and Critical Race Theory

Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation

By Robert Chao Romero and Jeff M Liou

Ta-Nehisi Coates has built a reputation as a brilliant writer whose descriptions of the Black experience in America offer plenty of pessimism and little hope. When asked by Colbert in 2019 whether he had hope, Coates said “No, but I’m not the person you should go to for that. You should go to your pastor….” Clear-eyed about the brutality, fear, and oppression Black Americans face, Coates does not see a redemptive arc to the story. Like Coates, Critical Race Theory (CRT) gives us the ability to see things as-they-are without pointing toward a brighter future. CRT is a set of tools designed to analyze, name, and uproot racism within systems; CRT can see realities that Americans have been trying to unsee. But, as Robert Chao Romero and Jeff M. Liou point out in Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation, CRT does not have a lot of hope to provide. Where CRT shows us the evils of the past and present, Christianity can point to redemption in the future. Coates was right: providing hope is the role of the church. We need the combination of the two; we need to see reality around us well, and we need hope that there is a better future in Christ.

In some ways, I may be late with this review. CRT took over from “Woke” as the enemy of certain conservatives a couple years ago, but DEI appears to have already become the target of 2024. So, the broadsides have moved on from CRT. Which is really too bad because I am just now ready to talk about it. As late to the game as this review is, it also feels right on time. As we enter 2024, we need training, examples, and opportunities to participate in the work of listening, deep reflection, and charitable engagement. In this political season, with church divisions, amidst pain and animosity, we need a more Christianly way of existing in disagreement.

Enter Christianity and Critical Race Theory , which puts CRT in conversation with Christian practice and theology. Romero and Liou model a helpful and faithful kind of dialogue, just the thing for us in our divided time and place: they try to deeply understand their subjects, interpret with grace and generosity, find places of agreement, explore ways to learn and grow from the conversation while taking note of disagreement and looking for ways that the Christian story fulfills and redeems the brokenness of CRT’s outlook. This looks to me like the way of love and truth-telling, it’s a set of skills that we need to see practiced more often, and it fits within a long and faithful tradition of Christians in dialogue with non-Christian sources, from Justin Martyr, Origen, and Augustine in the early church to James KA Smith (Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?) and others today. The way forward is attentive and generous listening, not easy categorizing and bomb throwing.

Romero and Liou listen and interact well. They structure the book with an introduction and conclusion around four chapters, each of which examines a key tenet of Critical Race Theory and puts it in conversation with Scripture and Christian theology. Chapter 1, “Creation: Community Cultural Wealth and the Glory and Honor of the Nations” looks at “communal cultural wealth”, the CRT idea that every community has a kind of wealth to bring (as opposed to a default perception that communities of color come with a “cultural deficit”). This fits, say the authors, with the biblical story of nations bringing their treasure into the New Jerusalem, in Revelation 21. All people, as God’s image bearers, have something unique and beautiful to express of God’s character and glory. In chapter 2, “Fall: Sin, Racism, and the Ordinary Business of Society”, Romero and Liou explore the doctrine of sin alongside the CRT idea that racism is ordinary. Sin has infected us all and racism is an insidious kind of sin, common and ordinary, yet destructive. Racist rejections of image bearers who are different fill the history of human relationships. The authors also take note of the fact that modern American doctrines of sin tend to focus on the individual; they redirect us to see that sin—including racism—is also structural and systemic. In chapter 3, “Redemption: Critical Race Theory in Institutions”, Romero and Liou describe the reality of increasing diversity, ask how Christian institutions might best respond to that reality, offer a couple of CRT suggestions (counterstories and voices of color), and critique CRT for its lack of hope. If institutions maintain racism, how can they be redirected as tools for redemptive change? In chapter 4, “Consummation: The Beloved Community”, Romero and Liou focus on eschatology: is there hope? They describe how some Christian perspectives lead us to remain blind to both the good (for instance, the contributions of non-Christians) and the evil (such as the ongoing violence and brutality of racist systems) of those around us. At the same time, they reject the materialism and gloom of CRT. The two perspectives can gain from one another and, at their best, can help provide a pathway and a vision for beloved community.

As helpful as I think the book is, and as much as I respect and appreciate watching the dialogue between Christianity and CRT, I wonder if Christianity and Critical Race Theory can reach the people who would most be helped by it. Who are the fence-sitters and genuine questioners when it comes to either Christianity or CRT? I found it helpful as a pastor, and I like its tone and posture, but I was already inclined to like the method and content. This is the reality we are in, in Idaho in 2024: our bubbles are pretty well established. I feel a bit like Coates: not a lot of hope for change. It’s here where I need and invite the refreshing of the Spirit: the power that raised Jesus from the dead can surely overcome a few media and perspective bubbles.

Christians are called to see reality with clarity and honesty while also pointing toward the hope of a better future reality. We follow the One who died on the cross in full identification with those experiencing the deepest and darkest realities that evil could call forth. He never avoided or minimized the brutality or violence that humans do to one another or to creation. More than any of us, Jesus is a realist of the highest degree. But his realism does not leave him in despair. The One who cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” also cried in triumph “It is finished!” He who suffered the worst violence that humanity can offer also looked forward to a future resurrection, where even suffering can be redeemed and death is defeated. Romero and Liou have given us a helpful guide: they have modeled good reading and helped us to see that CRT is not a boogeyman or a scare tactic but a tool that is best fulfilled in Jesus.

In Christ,

Josh

Consumerism and Christianity

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 18:32:27 GMT

Some thoughts on some Christian thinkers on Consumerism

I was listening to The Holy Post on the way to the office this morning, and Phil, Skye, and Kaitlyn were reflecting on market forces in American Evangelicalism, taking off from a Russell Moore piece in Christianity Today, which was working from a book by Dr Leah Payne. That's a lot of launching points from within Christian media, and actually will help me make the point I want to make.

The Holy Post reflections pointed to the ways that American Evangelicalism is driven primarily by the market (Skye even tells a story about meeting a market executive who predicted the end of the Emergent Church movement of the early 2000s because it was a movement made up by marketers who no longer had any use for it). Evangelical fights, music, books, etc are all driven by marketing and money, which are developed through a mix of what we want and what marketers want us to want. Toward the end of the conversation (which goes from roughly minute 13 to minute 53 of the podcast), Kaitlyn makes a really important point about how desire works in us: we think we want things that will make us feel good, but those wants are often pointing to or masking deeper desires in us that would get us closer to the things we actually need. But we spend money and tend to make decisions based on our shallow wants, not our deepest desires.

Add to that the fact that marketers and publishing companies and business executives are in the business of noticing and then creating new wants in us, so that we add layers and layers of wants to keep us from searching after our deepest desires. The stuff that would fulfill us is free, but the consumer markets cannot sustain their appetites by telling us that, so they are constantly creating new wants in us. This is the way consumerism works, outside and inside the church.

Again, the stuff that fills our deepest longings is all freely available to us in Christ: identity, grace, purpose, acceptance, belonging, God's presence and life in us, our life and presence in Christ. We don't need the markets, they need us. But they convince us to keep spending by pretending and confusing us into thinking that we need them and their products. My prayer as a pastor is that we can continue to see, notice, and find freedom from consumerism, which is a reason that we've set up RCB in the ways that we have. One of my driving concepts as a church planter is to work toward an anti-consumerist model.

And, it is not lost on me that I started these reflections by listening to a consumer media outlet talking about a magazine article talking about a book. I'm trapped in the consumerist markets as much as anyone. The church is trapped in Babylon, and one of the key questions for us is whether or not we are learning to love Babylon more and more, or are we learning to follow and love Jesus? Are we finding ourselves freer of Babylon, or more and more entangled? Are we in the world and not of it, with all the complexity of living in that way, or are we becoming more one with the world systems?

During this Lent season, I invite us to seek after ways of life that draw us to our deepest desires, by learning to listen less to our appetites and distractions, and instead allow God to speak to us in hunger, in quiet, in rest, in silence.

Jesus, draw our eyes and ears to our deep longing for You, and help us attune to what You are doing in us and in the world around us. Set us free from the bondage of consumerism and help us to find our firm foundation in You.

Blessings in Christ,

Josh

Lent, Week 2

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:07:44 GMT

Lent and Spiritual Blessing

Over the last several days, a word has taken hold of me as I reflect and engage with the Lenten season—privilege. Privilege can be a trigger word, a concept to be argued, a status to behold, or a reality to live and contend with. Whichever of these you relate to, I do not know, nor am I trying to convince you otherwise. What I know of myself, is that I experience and live in privilege. The One who holds all things together—holds me.

“Your kingdom come,

Your will be done,

On earth,

As it is in heaven”

Paul says in Ephesians 1, “All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ.” I am privileged to live and be united with the One who has blessed me with every spiritual blessing. I am invited, accepted, and held in unity with the One who was, and is, and is to come.

As I look forward to the cross, it is “every spiritual blessing” that empowers each step. It is “every spiritual blessing” that holds the cross. It is “every spiritual blessing” that utters, “I entrust my spirit into your hands!”

Lord, may every spiritual blessing you have given me, be a reflection of your kingdom, your will, so others will know, believe, and be united with You.

Welcome to Lent

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 22:21:23 GMT

This Lent, may Your Kingdom come and Your will be done

This is how I remember Lent as a kid: go to mass on Ash Wednesday (I have no memory of any sermon, lol), vow to give up something (that lasted as long as a New Year’s resolution), and eat Long John Silver’s fried fish on Fridays (their hushpuppies and crunchies…mmmm). We didn’t eat meat on Fridays (unless we forgot, but we prayed, so it was ok); it was something everyone in the church did, right? I knew it was leading up to Easter--other than that, I had no real understanding or connection to it.

Lent was taught more like an obligation rather than an opportunity. An opportunity to reflect, rejoice, rest, repent (what other “r” words can we think of?) on Christ’s journey to the cross. The next 40 days is an opportunity, an invitation to draw closer to the Giver of Life. For some, this might look sacrificial (giving something up), for others it might be a genesis (starting something new), or it can be a combination of the two.

“Your kingdom come,

Your will be done,

On earth,

As it is in heaven”

Our Lord doesn’t just teach us to pray, he embodies prayer. He inaugurates God’s kingdom on earth through his presence with us; through his faithful obedience, we get to see and experience heaven on earth. This does not come without temptation, and trials, and wandering astray at times—yet our loving God invites.

He invites us to remember, to reengage with the One who creates and holds all things; He invites us to lay down our lives and pick up our crosses. We want to invite you to participate with RCB, as we journey with Christ to Calvary, praying for the strength to be obedient…

Your kingdom come,

Your will be done,

On earth,

As it is in heaven.

The Post-Church Church

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 17:09:17 GMT

A book review of The Post-Church Church

( First, I need to acknowledge that Peter Sung is a friend and a mentor within our denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church. Second, I need to also acknowledge that when I first heard Peter talk on this topic, I immediately asked him when there would be a book and if he would come speak to our community. I was an early fan of the ideas that eventually became this book and I make no claim to objectivity. )

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, I was down with mono. I was dealing with internalized shame, with ministry burnout, and with unresolved church conflict. And then I was diagnosed with mono. When the pandemic hit, I felt like the world was slowing down to the pace I had been stumbling at for the previous two and a half months.

When the pandemic ended, I was involved in a new church plant with new ministry partners and a completely deconstructed understanding of ministry. Very few of my previous categories were going to work. Our team has been feeling our way toward celebrating Christ’s rule in unfamiliar ways. We’ve been relying on a combination of Spirit-led intuition, creative invention, and leaning on ancient traditions. We’re trusting Scripture and trying to keep our eyes on Jesus, but we’ve found almost no guides who can help us to incorporate the lessons of the last several years. Who has integrated what we need to know after the pandemic, the Trump-evangelical phenomenon, the 2020 racial justice movement, and The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast (and other stories of moral failures and abuses from powerful men in church leadership)?

Peter Sung has. The Post-Church Church: The Shift from Program and Place to People and Practice comes to us just when we need it. For those with eyes to see, Sung’s book will help orient us into the way of being that the Spirit is calling forth from this moment.

Sung centers the book on the idea that the pandemic acted as a wildfire, burning down old models and ways of doing church, and, as a superbloom follows a wildfire, so will there be new life to emerge in the wake of the pandemic. While we’ve seen many church communities try to “just get back to the way things were”, the Spirit is drawing God’s people into new ways of being, as has happened at key moments throughout Christian history. This is a moment! And if we are prepared ground, open to the Spirit’s new work in us, we will have the joy of participating in the abundant new life springing up around us.

Sung organizes the book in three parts. The first two look at what has been burned away and why; the third explores some ways that the church might step into the new landscape and join in the superbloom. In Part 1, Wildfire in the Church, Sung notes the decline that had been underway in the church for years—suggesting that it’s been time for a new paradigm for a long time—and explores how the pandemic brought about the needed paradigm shift, noticing the revealing, accelerating, forcing, flattening, focusing impacts of the pandemic on churches. In Part 2, `Wildfire in Society, Sung looks at the societal disruptions that have led to the paradigm shift and describes a theory that explains why things are changing. I found Part 2 helpful as a primer on what kinds of diseases needed to be removed from the church and how they were exposed. The three disruptions Sung notes are Trump’s presidency, the pandemic, and George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests. The theory of change that Sung describes is the breaking of the white bubble, the move from a white-majority culture to a minority-majority culture. The shifts all deal with power, and so Sung invites the church to move away from power in the way of Jesus.

The heart of the book—and the chapters that moved my soul and stirred my imagination—are in Part 3, Recommended Shifts for the Church. In chapter 5, Renegotiations, Sung looks at four fields in which the church needs to explore change: construct (that is, our model of doing church), meaning (where we find meaning—in numbers and programs, or in people and practice?), theology, and power. The final four chapters look at ways of orienting our renegotiations. Chapter 6, Essential, centers church theology on Jesus, the cross, and the resurrection, rather than trying to be and say everything about everything. Chapter 7, Relational, describes attunement and casts a vision for a church that finds meaning in being attuned to ourselves and those around us. Chapter 8, Humble, points to the kind of leadership and church community that lives out power as Jesus did. Chapter 9, Supernatural, invites us to welcome God’s leading and power rather than our own, old resources. Part 3, then, helps us to pay attention to what has been burned away and then to shift our eyes and work toward cultivating the new life that the Spirit is causing to grow.

I have several favorite moments. I was grateful to see that Sung predicts humble leadership as the way forward for pastoral ministry, as CEO models of ministry die out. I am challenged to think about how relational attunement might remain a key pastoral practice. And I value the move toward essentials. Christians keep losing focus on Jesus and leaders aren’t helping by distracting us from our mission, pulling up our roots in the cross and resurrection to lead us toward a power-seeking politics. Sung is constantly tilling the ground and inviting us to imagine how the church that follows Jesus might operate in our time.

Sung is an expert in leadership, organizational psychology, church planting and coaching, and brings an immigrant perspective to America’s church culture. More than anyone I know, he is perfectly positioned to see what is happening in the American church and to explore ways forward. He is both part of the landscape and a keen observer of it. And with Post-Church Church, he has given us a resource for participating in the work that the Spirit is doing to cultivate the ground and bring new life out of the mess of the last several years. He writes clearly, making his points effectively and then moving along. He incorporates resources from all his fields of expertise, with plenty of research and insights from others, and weaves together his observations into a straightforward and intuitive story, held together by the metaphor of wildfire and superbloom. And his insights land like the bursting of a new field of flowers in a charred landscape. As is often the case when I catch a beautiful vision, when I finished Post-Church Church , I found myself seeing more clearly, with new imagination, and excited to follow Jesus into this new moment.

My struggles with the book: first, it has no table of contents, so I had to write out my own in the blank pages at the back. It would have helped me organize my thoughts. I appreciated the brevity of the book, but a table of contents seemed like an unnecessary cut. Second, and related to the content, I have questions about what counts as “essential”. I agree with the focus on essentials, with a shift from trying to say everything about everything and from pastors to try to speak expertly outside of our vision and training, but I don’t know where those lines land. How do we think through the relationship between politics and gospel? What about our racialized culture and gospel? Or Jesus and sexuality? I think there are ways for church communities to be engaged in the conversations—and I suspect that Sung would agree—without stepping out of our lanes but I don’t have more clarity on where the lines are from Post-Church Church .

All that said, this is an extremely timely and helpful resource for a church that appears to be trying to figure out how to move on from crisis. While a lot of church leaders are working to go back to old models and ways of being—back to an old forest full of diseased trees—many of us want to see the Lord glorified in new growth. Sung has given us a gift. I pray that we might follow the Spirit’s leading into a church that is essential, relational, humble, and filled with God’s supernatural power, moving from old dying models into the superbloom. For church planters, church leaders, and those disillusioned with the church as it has been, The Post-Church Church feels like the buds of new life, like spring after a long, hard winter.

Jesus Is Born!

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 13:30:00 GMT

Jesus Is Born! Merry Christmas!

John 1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light. That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his Name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.

Advent Love

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:30:00 GMT

Jamie's Reflections on Love

In 2021, we shared some reflections throughout Advent. We want to make these available on the blog and share them with you! We pray that you are blessed by them as you enter into the waiting of Advent.

Amor (love)

Us & Jesús

He was named Jesús, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived. The angel said, “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” —Luke 2:21

Nuestro padre nombra a sus hijos y sus propósitos con amor. Usted, mí, Jesús—todos nosotros nombrados a propósito y nuestros propósitos proclamados mucho antes de nuestro llegada a la tierra.

Our father God names his children and their purposes with love. You, me, Jesús— all of us purposefully named, and our purpose proclaimed, long before our arrivals earthside.

What must it have been like for those of us who witnessed the birth and naming of the messiah in real time?

Our savior’s manger birth declared God’s plan with sovereign certainty even as our ancestors faced the waves of uncertainty that come when a world turns upside down.

The shepherds witnessed firsthand the new way unfurl through the night, as the world began to break free from the shackles of sin that bastardized the intended beauty of Eden. But most people fell asleep in one world and woke up in another, communally experiencing the tension of discovery and disbelief that everything had changed. Their familiar became foreign, and there was no going back. No había vuelta altrás.

Did Adam and Eve’s trauma from walking out of the garden and into the world’s first instance of uncertainty reverberate through time, triggering communal reactions of heartbreak and despair, fear and rage, hatred and divisiveness?

Did those whose comfort, power, and status were threatened by Kingdom dynamics concoct wild conspiracy theories about whose theology could be trusted and which political power would fulfill promises of prosperity?

Did the young mother Mary pray to her maker to make it all make sense?

In December of 2021, the Christmas story reads a little differently than it would have just two years ago, as the trauma of living outside the garden continues to manifest in our communities and our own experiences with uncertainty continue to develop.

However, the Christmas story allows us to be certain in times of uncertainty:

We have been named by a loving Father. We, too, have been called into purpose.

Naming & Knowing

Naming is a powerful declaration of purpose, a two-sided statement about what the named is and what it isn’t. Names are about identity. Names are about being known and being called.

We’ve been named by the Most High. Our identity as beloved has been declared and our assigned purpose is to love others in a way that brings glory to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As a Christian community, how are we doing with living into this identity? Or, to put a Christmas star point on the question—are you currently known by your love? Am I?

Let’s not answer too quickly, lest we lose the opportunity to hear from the one whose words speak life and healing, truth and grace, power and mercy to the world.

The world continues spinning in uncertainty, waiting hopefully for the future and desperate for God’s people to be clear about their calling, their names, and their purpose. We cannot be the ancestors who stand idly by in uncertain times or surrender when the enemy comes with accusations and lies. We must instead stand firm in our faith, remembering that our Father calls us and believing that he has placed us purposefully in these times to get our jobs done.

And then, we must get on with it. ¡Tenemos que actuar!

We must follow the lead of our ancestors as envoys of the never-ending kingdom; we must answer the call to upside down the world around us with love, messy work though it may be, for that is our inheritance.

Que el mundo no conozca por nuestro amor, especialmente en tiempos de incertidumbre.

May the world know us by our love, especially in times of uncertainty.

And, may each generation continue to labor for the glory of God, calling the kingdom of Jesús more and more into our world with each act of love.

Y que cada generación continue trabajando por la gloria de Dios, llamando al reino de Jesús cada ves más a nuestro mundo con cado acto de amor.

Resources & Inspiration

Diana Gameros

The Porter's Gate "Let It Be Known"

Advent Joy

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 15:30:00 GMT

Greg's Reflections on Joy

Joy

The people walking in darkness

have seen a great light;

on those living in the land of deep darkness

a light has dawned.

You have enlarged the nation

and increased their joy;

they rejoice before you

as people rejoice at the harvest,

as warriors rejoice

when dividing the plunder.

Isaiah 9:2-3 (NIV)

In storytelling, there’s a rule that no individual moment means anything by itself. What matters is how each moment fits inside the larger story of which it is a part. What comes before it? What comes next? The way we answer these questions has the power to change the whole story’s meaning.

Imagine, for example, a woman sitting alone in her living room, glancing repeatedly at the front door. Maybe she’s expecting a visit from an old college roommate, and this is just the first scene in a heart-warming story about lifelong friendship. Maybe she’s in the middle of an action thriller, and she’s just gotten off the phone with a cryptic FBI agent who told her, “I’ll be over in five minutes.” Or maybe this is the final scene in a story of heartbreak: maybe her husband of fifteen years just walked out that door for the last time, and she’ll grieve his departure until the credits roll.

The moment by itself only has meaning once we understand the bigger story it fits into.

In Luke 2, we meet a group of shepherds watching their flocks in the night. In a world before electricity, without constant light pollution, the darkness is deep enough to display a vast expanse of stars. The shepherds rely on those stars—and whatever portion of moon is available—to see the sheep and fields around them. Their eyes are adjusted to the dark, their pupils dilated to make the most of what little light they have.

And then, without warning, a light brighter than the noonday sun shatters the darkness. An angel of the Lord, blazing with God’s own glory, announces that a Savior has been born. This Savior is nearby, close enough for the shepherds to go and see him for themselves.

Suddenly that one angel is joined by thousands more—a collection of light so overwhelming the very idea of darkness feels impossible. A heavenly choir praises the newborn King, singing, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (v. 14, NIV).

The shepherds immediately abandon their flocks to find this newborn Savior. Once they see him, they can’t help spreading the word about him to others. At last, after a busy night’s work, they return to their flocks. They’re still caught up in worship, “glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told” (v. 20, NIV). The angel choir might not be visible anymore, but the shepherds continue heaven’s song of glory and praise.

The fields look just like they did a few hours earlier. The deep starlit darkness has returned. The sheep are still bleating. To the outside observer, this moment is identical to the moment before the angels’ arrival.

But for the shepherds, everything has changed.

The countless nights they spent with those same flocks in the years before Christ’s birth—and the countless nights they will spend in the coming years—have suddenly become part of a much bigger story. Those fields that beheld the shepherds’ own worry and fear and boredom and anxiety have now beheld the declaration of the redemption of God’s people. In a glorious burst of light, the meaning of the darkness is transformed.

When the prophet Isaiah anticipates this moment, he describes the joy of God’s people by comparing it to the joy of harvest and the joy of warriors dividing plunder. In each case, a single moment of narrative fulfillment gives meaning and purpose to the preceding moments of struggle and hardship and uncertainty. When the harvest comes, every hour of backbreaking work to plow and plant and tend the crops is proved worthwhile. The farmer’s fears about droughts or pests ruining the crop are finally laid to rest. And when the warriors divide the plunder, their victory is a certainty written into the history books, not just a dream prayed for in the heat of battle.

Joy doesn’t just change one moment in the story. It changes the entire story, making even hardship and sorrow part of a much bigger story that is ultimately about redemption.

Maybe you’re in the middle of a story right now that feels heavy with grief and pain. Maybe you’re facing heartache or uncertainty, anger or shame or alienation. Maybe you’re deep in the darkness of night, surrounded by bleating sheep, and it feels impossible to imagine a choir of angels filling the empty sky.

The Advent invitation to joy is not an invitation to ignore our current circumstances. It is, instead, an invitation to see ourselves as part of a much grander story that God is telling. Joy calls us, even in the moments when the darkness feels deepest, to remember the victory already won on our behalf and the grandness of our promised happy ending. Joy makes us see our present moments differently, because we see them through the eyes of our past and future.

The light has come and conquered the darkness. One day, the light will finally make all things right. This story is our story, transforming our humble starlit darkness into a scene of unspeakable joy.

Advent Peace

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 15:30:00 GMT

April's Reflections on Peace

“Virginity is Cool.”

I did a double take when I saw the young man’s t-shirt as he walked by me at the mall. Sure enough, that’s what his shirt said: Virginity is Cool.

I chuckled to myself as I walked past, thinking about the guts it took to wear a shirt like that in the 21st century and knowing I never would have worn that as a teenager. Of course, there’s always the chance he was wearing it ironically, but I chose to believe he was in earnest and setting an example for the people around him.

Of course in 2021, sex isn’t as culturally taboo a topic as it once was. Still, it’s not often you see a person wearing a sign advertising their level of sexual activity. Unless, of course, that person is pregnant. Then there’s no question.

In Mary’s first century Jewish community, a betrothed woman who turned up pregnant would be considered an adulteress, the consequence of which was death by stoning. Additionally, Mary and Joseph were oppressed members of the peasant class in a community fraught with nervous political tension, as were all Roman colonies of the day. So, I can imagine the fear she must have felt when she heard those words, “You will conceive and give birth to a son.” There she was, barely a teenager, betrothed to Joseph, in a place marked by political tension, and now she was to be inexplicably pregnant. She wouldn’t need to wear the t-shirt. Her burgeoning belly would soon give her away.

“Do not be afraid,” the angel had said. Yeah, right.

Contrary to what one might expect, Mary says to this angel, “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.” Mary responds with unswerving trust. She is full of faith, to be sure, but I also wonder if the Prince of Peace was already starting to do a work in her heart. Mary was invited to accept the gift of Jesus; in response, she offers herself as a dwelling space, invites Jesus to be born into the world through her, and she is graced with peace only Jesus can provide.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

John 14:27

Mary is further encouraged when she visits Elizabeth. I imagine Mary was anxiously hopeful that Elizabeth would understand and believe her about this “virgin impregnation.” Not only does Elizabeth believe her, but unborn John, in all his fetal glory, is moved by the Holy Spirit to start doing womb-style acrobatics from within Elizabeth. Elizabeth calls Mary blessed, and Mary again shows herself to be a woman of faith, knowledgeable of the history of Israel and Scripture, through the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).

As Mary’s pregnancy progresses, we are given very little in the gospels about the details. What is notably absent, however, is any indication that Mary freaked out. This would have been understandable given her unconventional pregnancy, the inevitable stares and whispers she would garner, the political unrest, and the demand that she and Joseph travel to Bethlehem ridiculously close to her due date. Still, all records indicate that Mary’s peace held.

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

John 16:33

The name Mary literally means “their rebellion.” How apropos. Everything about Mary’s pregnancy feels subversive. She’s a virgin. In a lowly place. Not rich. On paper, really not all that special. Yet, she was chosen. She gives birth to a son who will bring forth a kingdom, but not the politically powerful kind people are expecting. His will be an upside down kingdom of resistance and shalom. It makes sense that Mary would be full of peace in the face of trauma; what a fitting form of spiritual defiance.

For many of us right now, all is not calm and all is not bright. The end of 2021 finds us worn. COVID-19. Civil unrest. Racial injustice. Family drama. Broken friendships. Church hurt. Physical and mental health challenges. Loss. Grief. It doesn’t feel very shalom-y.

Shalom is the Hebrew word meaning peace, harmony, wholeness, completeness, prosperity, welfare, and tranquility. Osheta Moore defines it as “God’s dream for the world as it should be, nothing missing, nothing broken, everything made whole.” (1) And this is precisely what Jesus offered Mary and what he offers you and me.

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

Matthew 11:28-30 MSG

Not only does Jesus offer us personal peace through his unforced rhythms of grace, but he invites us into the holy work of bearing and restoring the image of God, of bringing perfect peace to our communities. What a rebellious act in this chaotic world. As we lean into the peace that surpasses all understanding, we can boldly embrace and help usher in a place of full shalom, what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Beloved Community: “But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.” (2)

Pursuing shalom in the Beloved Community. Now that’s something I would wear on a t-shirt.

Resources & Inspiration

Some resources that you may find helpful as you pursue peace in this season...

3 Minute Peace Retreat

Peace Playlist

Reflect… How does your body feel when you’re at peace? How do you know you’re pursuing the lasting peace of Jesus and not the counterfeit peace the world offers?
Ruthlessly eliminate hurry, ala the book by John Mark Comer: Turn off the news. Choose the longer line. Get in the correct lane early. Put away your phone. Remember, Jesus was busy, but he was never in a hurry.
Practice silence. Set a timer for 5 minutes and just be still. Work up to longer amounts of time.
Read and meditate on Colossians 3, paying particular attention to verse 12-14 wherein Paul tells us the attitudes we need to “put on” to be a people marked by peace.

A Prayer from St Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in the giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it in in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

Footnotes

1. Osheta Moore, Dear White Peacemakers (Virginia:Herald Press, 2021), 30.

2. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Facing the Challenge of a New Age" (NAACP Emancipation Day Rally, Atlanta, Georgia, January 1, 1957).

Advent Hope

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 15:14:19 GMT

Grace's Reflections on Hope

Zechariah & Elizabeth

We learn only a few things about Zechariah and Elizabeth in the first chapter of Luke. We learn Zechariah is a priest and Elizabeth is shamefully barren. They are also well along in years. But we know “they were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly.”

Disgraced and faithful.

In hope and faithfulness, Zechariah and Elizabeth persisted.

As the story is told, once when Zechariah was serving as priest before God he was chosen by lot—by chance!—to go into the temple to burn incense. And God, through the angel Gabriel, met him there.

“Do not be afraid, Zechariah! Your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord.”

Many of us know how the rest of the story goes. Zechariah questions Gabriel. (I mean do you blame him?) and I imagine Gabriel sighing and shaking his head. “Zechariah man, I am flipping Gabriel the Angel. I stand in the presence of GOD! And He sent me to you to tell you this good news. And you don’t believe me! So now you won’t speak until the day you see I was right.” (My paraphrase.)

Lo and behold, Elizabeth gave birth to a baby boy and Zechariah’s tongue was loosed the minute he wrote the boy’s name, John, on a tablet. And he was immediately filled with the Holy Spirit and praise poured from his lips.

In hope and faithfulness, Zechariah and Elizabeth persisted. And God met their hope through the coming of John.

Advent & Esperanza

Last year during Advent I was introduced to the Spanish words for hope and wait through a comment on an Instagram post. The word for “wait” in Spanish is “espera” and the word for “hope” is “esperanza”. When you put them side by side, the word for wait is written into the word for hope. There is no hope without wait. Waiting is hope in action.

Advent is all about waiting for Christmas. But sometimes our seasons of advent and waiting are long- months, years, decades even. It’s hard to hold on to hope when our advent is dark and we don’t know what day Christmas will come.

None of us are strangers to the fact we have been in a dark season of advent. We are two Christmases in to a global pandemic and all the upheaval the last years have wrought. Our communal grief is great. And for some of us, our personal grief even greater. Whether by death or division, or both, we have all lost much. It’s tempting to lose our hope as well.

Where is our hope to be found then in this “month of endless night?” What is the nature of our hope? Is it rooted in the impending change of our circumstances? Or is it rooted in the sheer confidence in what we know to be true about God, that he will ultimately prove victorious?

Our ultimate act of rebellion in Advent is our hope. Our waiting is our hope in action.

Like Zechariah, and Elizabeth, we may be disgraced, but faithful. And in our faithfulness we persist. We wait. And in our waiting we hope, for our hope is not fulfilled without waiting.

We hope because we have a God who chooses the weak and lowly things of this world to shame the strong. We hope because we have a God who chose an unwed teenage mother (Mary) and a barren old lady (Elizabeth) to bring us good news. We hope because God chose the births of these miraculous, yet helpless babies to remove the shame and disgrace of their mothers. Like Zechariah and Elizabeth, we can be confident that God hears our prayers. And we can be confident because our hope is in a resurrected, victorious Jesus who came to us as a baby.

(And here is a podcast from Esau McCaulley, which inspired some of this reflection. Blessings!)

Resources on Israel-Palestine

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 20:58:50 GMT

Some Resources for Your Reflection

We want to collect some resources so that we can learn, lament, pray, and reflect together about the conflict in Israel-Palestine. We don't agree with everything in these resources, but we want to make them available. If you find other things that can be helpful for us, please email us at resurrectionboise@gmail.com. Thanks. May the Lord give us insight and courage to love our Palestinian and Israeli neighbors. Blessings,

UPDATE (12/5/2023): Here is a video with some really thoughtful Christians who care about justice discussing the current conflict.

Prayer

Our Mennonite friends have made a prayer for peace available.

Our Jesuit friends have collected prayers .

Lament

Our Prayer of Lament , from a couple weeks ago.

Psalm 40 .

Context

A short podcast from Ezra Klein about what it's like to be a Jew while having concerns about Israel's response.

A much longer podcast from our friend Preston Sprinkle, interviewing Daniel Bannoura , a Palestinian Christian who gives history and perspective.

Reflection

Mae Elise Cannon shares a reflection on how we might respond as followers of Jesus.

Beth Felker Jones helps us think about how peacemakers might think about Israel.

A Lament for Israel and Gaza

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:47:18 GMT

A Prayer of Lament, for the violence

Prayer of Lament for Israel and Gaza

Our God, do You see? Do You know what is happening? Are You going to do anything?

Creator, Father of all nations, God Who is Love, we can see the events in Israel and Gaza, and we are grieved and horrified. Children and women and men made in Your image have been killed and kidnapped, their lives destroyed by violence, homes ruined, women raped, children executed, men killed, families ripped apart. Your children—Israelis, Palestinians, people from other countries, including this one—Your children are suffering brutal violence, being treated in inhuman ways, being used as pawns and targets to advance the ideologies of power-seeking men. Those You love—Your beloved children, whom You sent Your Son to die for, people with dignity and value—people You love are being abused and killed in a war that has no end or hope for resolution that we can see. Father, we are watching the destruction of Your children.

Lord, have mercy.

Jesus, You came as a Jew, in a time of occupation, born in a town south of Jerusalem, which is now in Palestine’s West Bank. You lived in northern Israel, and were brutally tortured and executed in and around Jerusalem. You suffered vicious attack, violence meant to terrorize You and Your people, occupation, betrayal by Your own people, and execution by those occupying Your people’s land. You know the pain and loss and terror of our Israeli neighbors, and the grinding fear and devastation of our Palestinian neighbors. You faced terrorism and occupation, dislocation and torture. Jesus, we can again see the evil of the violence that humanity inflicted on You in the violence that humanity is inflicting on our neighbors today.

Christ, have mercy.

Holy Spirit, You have brooded over chaos before, and there You brought order. You have been in the middle of violent hearts and bloody wars before, and You brought peace. We saw Your power in our crucified and dead Lord, and You brought life. The terrorism and violence we are seeing are offenses against Your work in the world, against the life and encouragement that You bring, against the unity and love that characterize Your activity throughout creation. Holy Spirit, we are aware that these terrorist acts and this war are opposed to the ways You bring order and peace and life.

Spirit, have mercy.

Father, Son, and Spirit, Your creation needs You to act.

We need Your power, Your love, Your peace, Your reconciling presence, in Gaza, in Israel, in Ukraine and Russia, in Afghanistan, in the DRC, in Myanmar, in our country and neighborhoods, all around the world. Creator, who made the world out of nothing, bring life, for the sake of the children You created and love. Jesus, Your death defeated the powers on display in the world today; bring Your rule of righteousness, justice, and peace. Holy Spirit, show Your power, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.

We cannot solve this violence and horror but You can. O God, act!

May Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. For Yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Power in Weakness Book Review

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 02:29:44 GMT

A review of Tim Gombis' look at Paul's pastoral theology

On Tim Gombis’s Power in Weakness: Paul’s Transformed Vision for Ministry (Eerdmans, 2021)

I’ve had opportunities to read what feels like an unnecessary number of books on pastoral ministry, on leadership, and on Pauline ministry and theology. Very few of them have influenced my understanding of my own ministry work and how the gospel integrates into the life of the church more than Tim Gombis’ Power in Weakness: Paul’s Transformed Vision for Ministry. I don’t recommend the book for everyone, but for those pastors or ministry leaders who want to think deeply about the place of power in ministry contexts, who are ready to be challenged about the ways we maintain our images rather than follow Jesus, or who want to understand how to learn to pastor—and not simply preach or manage— in Christ-centered ways, this book is for you.

Gombis’ goal is to describe Paul’s journey in ministry and explore how Paul’s conversion and redeemed theological imagination provide a foundation for Kingdom ministry. He looks at Paul’s journey, his theology, and how to apply his theology to pastoral ministry today. It’s part biography, part academic theology, part New Testament scholarship, and part pastoral theology. But it’s also personal, as Gombis takes us through his own story and wrestlings in pastoral ministry (he is a New Testament scholar and pastor). And, in the interest of locating him on the theological map, Gombis is a creative pastor-theologian influenced by NT Wright, Michael Gorman (who wrote the Foreword), Bruce Longenecker, and Marva Dawn, among others. If you know these writers, you’ll rightly anticipate that Gombis won’t advocate for leadership as power, or push us toward the megachurch model.

Instead, Gombis wants to show us how Paul moved from seeking power as a way of working toward the Messianic Age to seeing Jesus’ death as inviting the power of God in the resurrection; and, he is inviting pastors today to follow Paul’s shift from power-seeking to cruciform (that is, cross-shaped) ministry. The first chapter, “Paul’s Unconverted Ministry”, sets the stage by describing Paul’s vision for the Kingdom pre-conversion. Gombis describes Paul’s mission of bringing the resurrection into reality through exercise of power. This led Paul to use coercion, to compete, to identify with power, to protect his image, and to pursue agenda over people.

Chapters 2 and 3 detail the conversion of Paul’s understanding of resurrection and of ministry. Chapter 2, “Conversion of Paul’s Resurrection Imagination”, explores how Paul comes to understand following the cruciform life of Jesus as the way to invite resurrection. Chapter 3, “Conversion of Paul’s Ministry Imagination”, describes what that new understanding of resurrection means for Paul’s ministry and ministry identity. To follow the cruciform life of Jesus in ministry implies a rejection of power and image and instead a pursuit of weakness and an identity as a sinner. Gombis’ discussion of how ministering out of our weakness and shame unleashes God’s resurrection power was one of my favorite early sections of the book. As Paul learns to love and follow Jesus, he wants to identify with him in his shame and suffering, which is terrifying and feels like the only honest way to follow Jesus. When Paul is renewed in the Gospel, God unmakes and remakes his whole vision for life and ministry in Jesus’ image.

Chapter 4, “Pastoral Ministry in Cosmic Perspective”, feels a bit like an appendix to the central argument of the book, though I can imagine that, for Gombis, this is really the beating heart. I can’t finally decide whether I love its place here or wish Gombis had placed it elsewhere (as a first chapter to set the stage for the rest of the book? as an appendix to provide some additional context? as part of a different book on Paul’s cosmology?). In its current location, Gombis wants us to see how Paul’s remade vision for life and ministry plays an important role in the cosmic battle that God is waging against the powers and rulers of this evil age. Ministry as Paul had done it pre-conversion serves the rulers of this age; cruciform ministry in the way of Jesus invites the resurrection power of God and provides hope to an enslaved world. I do love that this chapter elevates the cosmic significance of life and ministry while pointing to the cruciform, resurrection-inviting way of Jesus. Our lives are involved in the heavenly battle, and the way we enter into that battle matters more than we want to believe.

Chapters 5 through 8 explore the practical implications of Paul’s converted imagination for ministry today. In “Cruciform Ministry and Image Maintenance”, Gombis recognizes pastors’ tendency to try to develop and control our images while inviting us to follow Jesus in allowing ourselves to be seen as weak. In “Cruciform Ministry and Credential Accumulation”, he points to our insecure need for credentials and how Paul identifies with a shamefully crucified Lord. In “Cruciformity, Passivity, and Taking the Initiative”, explores some key areas where cruciform ministry might look differently than our current practice: preaching, church discipline, how we deal with “big sins”, and how to face and accept our limits. I found Gombis’ thoughts on our limits especially helpful: our ambitions and false motives have been nailed to the cross and so we are called to minister out of humility. In “Cruciform Ministry Postures”, Gombis helps us to see that the pastor’s role is not to “lead” in the ways we might normally understand that term, but to pay attention to what God—the Leader and Pastor of our churches—is doing.

If I have a complaint with Power in Weakness, it has to do with my own lack of clarity regarding chapter 4. I’m just not sure that the material’s placement in between Gombis’ discussion of Paul’s converted imagination in the second and third chapters and the ministry implications in the second half of the book was helpful to my own reading. It felt like a giant rock fell into the middle of the stream of the argument. To be clear, I value the content and believe it adds weight and depth to my own understanding of the why and how of ministry but I’m unclear about the placement.

That one complaint aside, I find this to be as helpful as anything I’ve read on biblical foundations for ministry. Want to know how to build a healthy and God-honoring ministry? Want to avoid the dangers of modern ministry? Want to minister out of an integrated, Jesus-centered life? Want your ministry to have a Jesus-sized impact (and not a consumerist, image-centered, or CEO-sized one)? I recommend starting here. Gombis has given us a useful guide for those ready to do the hard work of searching ourselves, submitting our hearts to a crucified Lord, and trusting God to raise the weak, dead, and sinful parts of ourselves. In a time and place where we are dealing with crisis after crisis of church mismanagement and leadership failure, Gombis has given us a deep and thoughtful path toward healing and wholeness, following Paul who follows Jesus.

Questions on the Trinity, Part 2

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 23:29:17 GMT

Some more thoughts on the Trinity

I apologize. This post got too long, so I've split it into two parts. Too many interesting and fun questions! Thanks for that! Here in part 2, I have three main questions: (1) looks at the Trinity and Heaven, (2) deals with the Trinity and Jesus' self-emptying, and (3) explores the questions of gender in the Trinity. In part 1, we looked at the the language of Trinity, the Spirit, and the relationships between persons of the Trinity. Thanks again for your questions!

1. Does/should the concept of the Trinity shape the way we think about heaven?

What an interesting question. I like the thought. I vote yes, that the Trinity can and should shape and form our pondering of heaven. Let’s explore together how that might be. And I’m really just wondering with you here—this isn’t something I’ve studied specifically—so I’ll walk through a few ways we might think about this, and then let you pick up the threads.

One note: “heaven” is a really broad topic, and there are lots of different ways that we talk about heaven: our experience of the world as within “the heavens”, heaven and earth as distinct but connected within creation, “heaven” as the place we go when we die, heaven and earth coming together for eternity, etc. I’m hoping to hold all of these together in my head as I answer, but I may confuse myself. I apologize if I confuse you, too.

(a) The first thing that comes to mind is the connection between heaven and earth. My intuition is that the final destiny of heaven and earth will mirror in some important ways the unity of God and humanity in Jesus. For now, we know from Scripture that heaven is all around us, that God is constantly speaking to us, that the divine is regularly breaking through our senses, that the Spirit is always moving and leading and hovering; but, in eternity, heaven and earth will be fully united and fully apparent, as God’s presence is clear to us in Jesus after the resurrection. After the resurrection, Jesus made it seem like heaven was already here, within our arms’ length, like we could just reach out and touch it. It is! And in eternity, heaven and earth will be fully united, so that “heaven” will not be separated from “earth”, but they will be one and the same, the way that Jesus unites God and humanity. Heaven won’t be something we reach out and touch, but a place into which we are fully integrated. In the same way, the persons of the Trinity won’t be elusive, or beyond our sight. Revelation indicates to us that “there is no more sun because God is the light”—God will be the light by which we see. Whatever the physics of light are in the New Creation (that’s another conversation…) God will be the source of light (we might put the Father in this role), the radiant one who walks with us (maybe the Son), and the light particles by which we see and experience the New Heavens and New Earth (the Spirit). I feel like we are already deep into speculation, so I’ll stop there, but let me try to sum up this thread: I suspect that the persons of the Trinity will fulfill and consummate the promise of earth as we experience it now in history, so that in the New Creation heaven and earth will be united as we will be united with the persons of the Trinity.

(b) A second thread we might consider is what thinking about the Trinity might teach us about the way heaven operates. An unnecessarily academic title to this section might be something like, “The Politics of Heaven, According to the Doctrine of the Trinity”. Actually, I like that; I’m sticking with it. So, what might the Trinity tell us about the politics of heaven? Well, first, it’s a monarchy. God is King. All authority rests in God. And maybe in God the Father. But, the Father has set the Son above everything. And the Father and Son glorify the Spirit while the Spirit glorifies the Son and Father. Each person is an individual self, while also being fully united with and seeking the glory of the others. So, all authority rests in the Father, but the Father gives that authority to the Son, who gives that authority to the Spirit, who gives glory and authority to the Son, who gives glory and authority to the Father, on and on forever. It’s like a shared kingship. And, we who are in Christ are invited into the intimacy and authority. There’s a sense in which the New Creation, where the People of the Lamb will rule with the Lamb, will be something we might call a “participatory monarchy”. We will participate in God’s rule of the New Heavens and New Earth. We won’t grasp for it; God will willingly give us authority and we will use it well and in ways that give glory to God. Because that’s how the Trinity operates.

(c) A third angle to ponder: how might we relate to the persons of the Trinity in heaven? The short answer is intimacy and love. The persons of the Trinity love one another. In fact, their love for one another defines what God is: God is Love. And in the New Creation, the Lamb (the Son) marries his faithful bride. We will enter into the fulfillment of intimacy and love with the persons of the Trinity.

In short, the Trinity teaches us that God’s purpose for creation is to unite heaven and earth, God and humanity, and to include humanity in the work of the Triune God: to rule creation with love and grace, to God’s glory. Thoughts? Does that start to give some ways of thinking about this question? Am I understanding this question as you intended it? What other thoughts have you had?

2. How does the Trinity relate to the “emptying” (kenosis) we read about in Philippians 2.

Unlike the previous question, this is something I’ve thought some about. So, bear with me. Short answer: I’m confident that when Jesus empties himself, the rest of the Trinity is being revealed and made present to the world. Self-emptying, humility, self-sacrifice for others—these are the ways that God enters into the world, they are God’s glory.

I’ve heard Philippians 2 used to say a couple different things about Jesus’ relationship to his divinity. Some teachers have said that Jesus emptied himself of his divinity, and so all the miracles he did are available to us also—he was just relying on the Holy Spirit in the same way that we can and was basically just human when he walked among us. Other teachers have said that Jesus emptied himself of his divinity and was separated from the Father while on the cross. His self-emptying actually created distance between persons of the Trinity.

I don’t think Paul is saying either of those things. I’ve hinted at this in other places on the blog , and I don’t mind going there again: I think Paul is arguing that Jesus emptied himself as a way of showing us what God is like. God is a self-emptying kind of God. So, when Jesus came to earth as a human, a servant, a criminal, a condemned criminal, he was making God uniquely present to us. When he died on the cross, God was powerfully there at the cross and in his death. The signs and wonders that occurred at his death (darkness, earthquake, dead people walking out of their tombs) are all indications of God’s power being unleashed. The tearing of the curtain in the Temple is a sign that God will not be contained in the Holy of Holies anymore. The centurion’s statement—“surely this man was the son of God!”—gives further evidence that we should see Jesus’ self-emptying and death in precisely this way. God is making the Trinity powerfully present when Jesus empties himself.

That help? Other thoughts, or ways of thinking about the question? Would love to interact on this with you.

3. Why such a focus on the maleness in the Trinity? Especially if we are all created in the image of God?

Yeah, this is a really interesting question. There was a related question in the Q&A, and I gave some thoughts and then I asked the questioner whether I had responded to what she was asking, and she said no. So, I don’t take for granted that I am understanding this question well. Please come back to me if this response isn’t helpful. (And that reminds me that I would benefit and learn from sitting down and discussing more with the person who asked that question in person.)

Short answer to this question is “I don’t know”. I have pondered this some, but others are doing far more interesting work on this question right now. I can give some initial thoughts and then point to some other resources that are wrestling with this.

Slightly longer answer: We refer to the first and second persons of the Trinity with masculine pronouns and titles because Scripture does. So an obvious question is why does Scripture use masculine language? There are a few ways we could proceed.

First, we could chalk it up to the fact that Scripture was written by men from patriarchal cultures and leave it at that. That fact is certainly true. Men wrote most, if not all, of what we have as the Bible, and they were consistently writing from cultures where men dominated women. I have a couple of questions about leaving it there: that still begs the question of why God decided to communicate with humanity through men from patriarchal cultures; and, it doesn’t really account for the importance and value of women and feminine portrayals of God in the Bible. The portrayal of God is primarily masculine, but there are central moments when the Bible uses feminine imagery to talk about God. It’s not just that men wanted to maintain power by showing God to be masculine, or some version of that. Men writing from patriarchal cultures also regularly saw God as acting in ways that it seemed most accurate to describe in feminine language, and they saw women as acting as the most clear and faithful images of God in the world. That’s not the whole story, but it’s not unimportant.

Second, we could argue that there is something about the human metaphor of “Father” and “Son” that get at something true about God that other metaphors just don’t. Again, that puts us in the realm of language and culture—for instance, we could ask why the “father” metaphor carries the kinds of meanings that Christians have traditionally associated with God, and whether that is necessary and intrinsic to the word itself, or whether that is all culturally loaded language. I guess I would say that this is not fully convincing, but I find it worth pondering—both for what it might say about God and for what it might say about human culture. For instance, does it matter whether God is Father or Mother? What difference does that make in our understanding of who God is? Does it matter whether the Lamb is the Bridegroom or the Bride? Why or why not?

Third, we could look more closely at some of those portrayals of God as feminine and explore how those complicate our picture of God as masculine. How much do they actually reshape our picture? Is it enough that we want to change our language?

The overarching story of Scripture gives us some key places to build a foundation for our understanding of God and humanity and masculinity and femininity: all human beings are made in God’s image, male and female each image God in unique and wonderful ways, God transcends male and female, a man’s maleness and a woman’s femaleness are each fearfully and wonderfully made and show something about God to the world. A human father is not more Godlike for being called by the title “father” but a woman and a man each present a good and valuable image of godliness by existing (and then also by revealing the characteristics of godliness—like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control).

Other people are exploring this question in interesting ways. Amy Peeler, in her new book Women and the Gender of God , challenges our assumptions about God’s maleness. Richard Briggs helpfully lays out the arguments around whether we should feel free to call God “Mother” as well as, or instead of, “Father” in an article for themelios magazine. Mallory Wyckoff’s God Is gives us a lot to think about and learn from when we are thinking about God. And the Catholic Church (check out #239) has argued for centuries that God is not male or female, but transcends both. Check out these resources and others—but please hear that I am not endorsing all they say. These are just thoughtful people trying to wrestle deeply with big questions. Listen and learn, and then let the Holy Spirit guide your own thinking and practice.

Does that help? Other questions or thoughts? I’d love to ponder together with you!

Questions on the Trinity, part 1

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 02:01:36 GMT

Some thoughts on your questions about the Trinity

I apologize. This post got too long, so I've split it into two parts. Too many interesting and fun questions! Thanks for that! Here in part 1, I have three main question blocks: (1) looks at our non-Trinitarian neighbors and how to think about the fact that the word "Trinity" is not in Scripture, (2) deals with some questions about the Holy Spirit, and (3) explores some aspects of the relationships between persons of the Trinity. In part 2 , we'll ponder the Trinity and heaven, the Trinity and Jesus' self-emptying, and gender in the Trinity. Thanks again for your questions!

1. I’ve been witnessing to JWs, who are anti Trinity. It’s helped me to see the Biblical problems that happen when Jesus and the HS are not accounted equal to God. And: If the Trinity is such an important doctrine, why isn’t the word “Trinity” anywhere in the Bible?

Thanks for sharing! I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on what problems you are finding in your discussion with some of our non-Trinitarian neighbors.

And on the word “Trinity” not being in the Bible: it feels like there’s a lot of directions to go with that. Let me say two quick-ish things and then I’m happy to chat more if that’s helpful. First, it’s very true that the word “Trinity” isn’t in the Bible, but the question remains whether the concept is. Other words not in the Bible, that we tend to think of as pretty important: “atonement”, “incarnation”, “Christianity”, “discipleship”, and so on. Those words don’t appear but the concepts certainly do. So, the choice before us is whether the Bible should limit our language, or whether we have the freedom from God to give language to ideas found in the Bible and elsewhere.

Second, this all relates to how we read the Bible and what the Bible is actually for. We can read the Bible as authoritative for our lives and yet read in several different ways. Some Christians read for the words and direct answers to all of our key questions (sometimes called a “biblicist” or “literalist” way of reading). The “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” slogan would fit in this camp. If it’s in the Bible, we agree and submit; if it’s not in the Bible, it must not be that important. This way of reading emerged after the Enlightenment in response to Bible scholarship that seemed to want to master the Bible and tear it apart. I love the attitude of wanting to follow after God! But I wonder if that’s how God intends for us to read His Word to us.

Another way of reading Scripture is to enter into the world that God is opening us up to and inviting us to join in. Scripture points us to realities beyond ourselves and beyond our senses. It draws us toward the deeper and more firm realities of the heavens, which will come down and unite with earth in the New Creation. It pulls us into the grand story that God is telling about Himself and humanity. It invites us into the great romance between the Lamb and his bride. It engages our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies and requires our imaginations to grow and develop alongside our brains so that we can be more whole people fully responding to the God who made and loves us.

There’s a lot more I could say about that—and if you want to grab coffee or beer and talk it through, I’d love that!—but for now let me just confirm what you already know and say that I tend to think God is inviting us to read Scripture the second way. In the first way of reading, God tells us what to think and do and we follow; in the second way, God is forming us into people more like Him. That fits more with the God I see in Scripture. So, the fact that the word “Trinity” doesn’t occur in the Bible doesn’t bother me, because I take the word to be a pretty good (though imperfect, like all of our words) description of an idea that I think is there. Is that helpful?

2. How do you hear the Spirit? And: I feel like we spend the most time studying/praying to/considering God and Jesus. How do we become more aware of the Holy Spirit in our walk? And: We call ‘the Father’ Yahweh or just God. We call ‘the Son’ Jesus. But ‘the (Holy) Spirit’ doesn’t have a revealed name. Is there a more personalized language?

These questions all center around the Holy Spirit. We had other Holy Spirit questions that we discussed in the in-person Q&A. This may be an important place for us to sit and wonder together! Holy Spirit, what are you inviting us into and how can we hear you well?

I’ll take the last question first: I’m not aware of more personalized language for the Spirit. In the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, there are other words that the writers use to describe the Spirit (Comforter/Counselor/Advocate, Presence of God, Spirit of Truth, etc) but none of them seem more personal. I tend to talk to the “Spirit” or “Holy Spirit”, but I’m curious if you have other ideas? How do you refer to God’s Spirit, or what have you seen or heard?

The other two questions are really similar, so I’ll answer them together. There are all kinds of ways to learn to listen to and be aware of the Spirit. I would suggest getting together with wise friends or meeting with a spiritual director (we have some at RCB, or others I can recommend!) if you’d like to learn more. In my experience, our listening and awareness of the Spirit centers around us giving our attention. The Spirit is always at work! When we pay attention, we get to see God’s movement. So, we might start by praying that we’d get to see what the Spirit is up to, and then keep our eyes open for the movement of the Spirit in our lives and the lives of those around us. That said, there are some ways that people have found helpful through church tradition. Some may be more helpful for you than others. These are the things I’ve found most helpful for me, and they all come down to giving my attention to the Spirit.

First, listening to the Spirit in Scripture. There are lots of ways to read Scripture, but one that has helped me learn to hear from the Spirit is Lectio Divina, which involves reading, meditating, praying, and then contemplating a passage of Scripture. It’s a good way to slow down and pay attention to what the Spirit might be saying to us in the moment.

Second, fasting. I have found that noticing and naming my appetites has helped me to distinguish their voices from the voice of the Spirit. Fasting has enabled me to notice my hunger and then realize that I don’t have to listen to it all the time, that I don’t live by bread alone. That realization has created space for me to listen to the Spirit’s invitations in new ways. And if I can add one little note here: fasting from food is helpful and valuable, but I suspect that fasting from screens and devices is probably just as big an ask for us. I have found that fasting from the internet or my phone regularly shapes my heart in significant ways.

Third, silence. When I slow myself down quiet my heart before God, I find myself drawn to God’s work around me. Silence helps me to notice myself and what God is doing in and around me. In silence, I sometimes notice my own emotions and heart longings; sometimes, I remember God’s activity through the previous day or week; other times, I can dream God’s dreams for my future or the future of others; sometimes, I just get to experience God’s love and grace for me. All of that is the work of the Spirit.

Fourth, noticing and praying for those around me. When I was in grad school, I often rode the bus into campus. On the bus, I would regularly notice those around me and then pray for them. Sometimes, the Spirit would give me a sense about a person—here’s what that person needs today, here’s how God is moving, etc—and very rarely (but sometimes) the Spirit would prompt me to move closer or start a conversation with a person I was praying for. This is a practice I’ve continued (though a bus is kind of an ideal place to practice this kind of noticing and praying, and I don’t ride the bus nearly as often as I used to). Noticing those around us and praying for them invites us to pay attention to the Spirit’s presence and work in others.

So, I suspect the Spirit is inviting us to pay attention—in Scripture, in our own appetites, in ourselves, and in others. Holy Spirit, help us to pay attention to You and Your presence and work!

3. You mentioned “the Father gave the Spirit to Jesus, so Jesus could send the Spirit to the people.” Didn’t Jesus ask the Father, and the Father sent the Spirit? And: Is the Trinity equal? If both the Spirit and Jesus ‘speak’ what the Father says, and ‘go’ when the Father sends, is there a ranking / authority present? And: If all parts of the Trinity are equally valuable, why do we focus more on Jesus?

Okay, there is a whole bunch here, on deep and controversial Trinitarian theology that goes back more than a thousand years and relates to several parts of the church, including (but not limited to): church authority and hierarchy, women and men in the church, the split between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, how we know what we know, etc. We can’t really get into all of that in a blog post (especially one that’s already this long). But I can point some directions and (once again!) invite you to more conversation.

That first question—“Didn’t Jesus ask the Father and the Father sent the Spirit?”—points to the theological split between the Western branches of the Church (Catholics and Protestants) and the Eastern branches (Eastern Orthodoxy). The West has generally argued that the “Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son”, while the East argues that the “Spirit proceeds from the Father”. I’m not sure our questioner was trying to get into that whole debate, but that’s part of the background to a full answer.

In my statement (“the Father gave the Spirit to Jesus, so Jesus could send the Spirit to the people”), I wasn’t trying to dive into all of that; I was just trying to say what I heard our passage say. I was working from Acts 2:32-33, which says that Jesus “received the promise of the Spirit from the Father” and then “poured out” the Spirit (or, possibly, the impact of the Spirit). Scripture gives several answers as to where the Spirit comes from, which makes sense to me when we are thinking about a God who transcends our understanding and being. For example, in John 14 (see 14:15), Jesus says that the Father will send the Spirit. And then in John 15-16 (see 15:26, 16:7), Jesus says that he will send the Spirit himself. As another example, the Spirit is usually called the “Holy Spirit” or “Spirit of God”, but there are also a few times that Scripture says “Spirit of Jesus” or “Spirit of the Lord”. Western theologians have tended to argue that both Father and Son send the Spirit and Eastern theologians have tended to argue that the Father really does the sending while the Son is asking for the Father to do the sending. I am happy to live in a whole bunch of uncertainty about that question: if God has sent us the Spirit, then I’m good with whatever paths God used (and I assume I wouldn’t really understand it all anyway).

The second question, about the equality of the Trinity, is a doozy. There are loads of Church teachings on this question, with all kinds of implications for life and practice. The equality and/or hierarchy of the Trinity relates to church hierarchy, political structures, and—in our time—women in leadership. There are several ways that theologians deal with that question, but the foundation to the Church’s argument over time is that the three persons of the Trinity are fundamentally equal. The creeds and councils have all held equality among the persons, arguing that if one person holds authority over the others then it’s not really clear that the other persons can be called “truly God” (as the Nicene Creed refers to Jesus).

The discussions here get very long and very complex, but one summary that has helped me is to say that there is “order” within the Trinity but not “hierarchy” or “inequality”. The Father is the source of the Son and Spirit (and—see above—the Son might also be part source of the Spirit) but they are equal. Other language that you might see if you take a deep dive into these questions: “eternal generation of the Son” (an old, orthodox position; this blog has a helpful discussion for those interested); “eternal subordination of the Son” (what I would consider a new, heretical position, that may have been developed in order to subordinate women to men; here is a pretty technical discussion); “immanent” and “economic” Trinity (“immanent” referring to the Trinity in eternity, “economic” referring to the Trinity as God acts within creation); “economic subordination of the Son” (an old, orthodox idea that the Son submits to the Father while walking on earth). There’s so much here, if you want to take a deep dive. Roger Olson has thoughts, Alistair Roberts has a long series of posts (and, to be clear, I don’t agree with Roberts on his view of women in leadership, but he is thoughtful), Aimee Byrd has thoughts about how this has been applied to women in leadership, and many others have written a lot on this question.

My summary: there is order within the Trinity but not hierarchy, and certainly not inequality. If you want to talk more about that, I would love to discuss.

Last question here: why the focus on Jesus? Good question. I addressed this a bit in our Q&A time and I’m happy to discuss again here. Each person of the Trinity is equal and vital for our salvation, and yet our attention is on Jesus. Is that how things should be?

It seems to me that we should pay more attention to the Father and the Spirit. And, probably more attention to Jesus, also. I would love to practice a more fully Trinitarian Christianity. Let’s pray to the Father, watch and study the Father’s work in Scripture and creation and salvation history, pay attention to the Father’s creative work in people around us; let’s also pray to the Spirit, watch and study the Spirit’s work in Scripture and church and creation, pay attention to the Spirit’s creative work in people around us, listen to the Spirit’s leading and guidance in our lives (see Question 2 above).

And, Jesus is a focal point of our faith for very good reasons. God tells us that Jesus fulfills Scripture, gives meaning to history, and reveals God’s own presence in ways that no other person does. There are several passages we could look at to describe why we emphasize Jesus (John 1, Hebrews 1, Mark 1, Romans 1—a lot of New Testament first chapters talk a lot about Jesus, which may be a clue for us…), but Colossians 1 is a great one. Paul says that in Jesus, we have “redemption”, “forgiveness of sins”; Jesus is “image of the invisible God”, “firstborn of creation”, the one by/through/for whom “all things were created”, “before all things”, the one in whom “all things hold together”, “head of the body”, “firstborn of the dead”, God’s “fullness”. There is a lot of rich theology there, worth sitting with and meditating on. Feel free! But I just want to point to three things:

1. We know what we know in and through Jesus;

2. Jesus rules as Lord;

3. God makes Himself present to us, and brings us close to Him, in and through Jesus.

We know what we know about God, Scripture, ourselves, and the world because we pay attention to Jesus. It makes sense to me to center Jesus in our faith journeys and communities because paying attention to him helps us to know what God wants us to know. Also, Jesus is Lord, and so it makes sense to make our Lord the focal point of our meditation and worship. Finally, God has revealed Himself to us in uniquely powerful ways in Jesus, and we get to participate in God’s life by our participation in Jesus. This is one of the incredible benefits of following a fully-human/fully-God Lord. In Jesus, God is fully there, and so is humanity. We are sharing in and experiencing God the Father and God the Spirit as we live life in Jesus.

I feel like I’m just setting some direction there, but if I don’t stop myself, I’ll just go on forever. Point being, yes! Let’s talk more about the Father and the Spirit. And let’s also talk more about and follow after Jesus.

Thanks again for some great questions! And may the God who is Three-in-One bless and keep you.

Book Review of Color Courageous Discipleship

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 19:26:12 GMT

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In Color Courageous Discipleship: Follow Jesus, Dismantle Racism, and Build Beloved Community , Michelle Sanchez, Executive Director of Make and Deepen Disciples for our own Evangelical Covenant Church, has given us a resource for integrating two journeys that have often felt disconnected. For Christians who want to love and follow Jesus, personal discipleship and church community may take priority over the social or political work of fighting racism. I’m called to life in Jesus—what does battling America’s racist structures have to do with him? And while we might be able to come up with theological answers to that question, we can often struggle to make the battle against racism a priority when our need for healing and community are so deep. For Christians who hear the invitation for the church to get involved in the work for racial justice, standing up for justice can be in tension with the inner healing and spiritual formation that we all need. I’m doing Kingdom work—what does it matter if my relationship with Jesus is shallow or I’m stretched thin? We might know in concept that we ought to care about our formation, but the work is so important!

There are several resources available that point to the need for Jesus followers to care about justice and others that demonstrate how activists need deep inner work, but what Sanchez does in Color Courageous Discipleship helpfully gives us vision for how both work together. For American Christians living in this time and place, discipleship and the battle against racism cannot be separated. This is an integrated journey, with vision and resources that build on one another.

Sanchez structures the book in three parts, moving from invitation to practices. In Part One, she invites and offers vision for a journey with Jesus that sees antiracism as central, not an add-on. In Part Two, she deconstructs the old paradigm that separated discipleship and racial justice and presents us with a new paradigm that integrates the two. In Part Three, she gives practices and habits that shape us in this new integrated direction as Jesus-centered antiracists. Along the way, Sanchez helps us to redefine ideas that have gotten in our way: true Christian discipleship is not an individualist notion, where my relationship with Jesus is all that matters and I might understand social justice as work for politicians, or even as antithetical to the gospel; at the same time, redeemed antiracism is not a project for atheist activists, where my justice work involves deciding that Bible and church are inherently racist. Sanchez argues for a restored vision of antiracist discipleship, where both concepts are redeemed in the Kingdom of Jesus.

This kind of book might have been inaccessibly academic. It’s deeply researched, but not unapproachable. Sanchez is clear, accessible, and welcoming, which matches her gracious and hospitable personality. She gives hard truths gently. (I have a friend and colleague who we know as “the Velvet Hammer”, a label that would equally apply to Sanchez.) Let me give three examples of the way that Sanchez weaves serious reflection with hospitable writing: her scholarship, the interviews, and her personal sharing. First, the scholarship: she is interacting with the best and most serious scholarship in various fields—including discipleship, antiracism, biblical scholarship, spiritual formation, sociology, and literature on shame—to offer a vision for antiracist discipleship. She quotes Kendi and Tisby, Nouwen and Bonhoeffer, Wright and Rah. Color Courageous Discipleship has heft and depth. But her writing is so clear and welcoming that it never feels overwhelming. The title concept, “Color Courageous Discipleship”, fits within a long and ongoing scholarly tradition working toward racial reconciliation while being accessible. She wants to move us beyond the concept of colorblindness in our reconciliation work; “color courageous” casts vision in a clear way while standing within the broader conversation.

Second, the interviews at the end of each chapter bring in some of the best voices doing the best kind of integrated discipleship and justice work, national names and local pastors and denominational leaders. These interviews are helpful for demonstrating how well-known figures, like Esau McCaulley or Eugene Cho, fit with Sanchez’s vision and for introducing a broader audience to figures whose work is just as important but less well-known, like ECC denominational leader Greg Yee (Greg is the Superintendent of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the ECC, our denomination and conference; Greg is a great leader and a blessing of a human being). The interviews give us personal examples of what Sanchez is inviting us into—this is human and on-the-ground work.

Third, Sanchez shares her personal journey, sometimes very vulnerably. The story she shares at the beginning of chapter 2 (I’ll let you read it) told me that this book is not Sanchez scolding readers, or inviting us to a level she has reached but the rest of us can’t ever hope to. She is doing the work, too, and showing us resources and ways forward that have challenged and matured her. And the work God has done in her life is deep, and she hopes it will go deep in us.

I hope it’s obvious that I’m a fan. I think Sanchez is an incredibly gifted leader and has offered us a great gift with Color Courageous Discipleship . I hope that churches will use it for their discipleship pathways and will cultivate beloved community. We plan to read it together and discuss at RCB, looking for opportunities to orient our Jesus-following toward the Kingdom, where God produces integrated disciples who follow Jesus in overcoming ethnic division and reconciles divided people and communities. May our Lord, the Jewish carpenter killed by the oppressive empire in first-century Palestine, use Sanchez and her work to build his church into the beloved community that he wants us to become, for his glory and for the good of the world he loves!

Can God See Sin?

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 16:39:38 GMT

Some reflections on Habakkuk 1:13

Growing up in the Christian world, I heard and internalized the idea that God cannot tolerate sin. That idea is a basis for a lot of purity culture stuff and sin management ("don't cross the lines because then you'll put yourself into the realm of God's wrath"), for a lot of culture war stuff ("we have to fight against things in culture that might tarnish us with sin"), and for a lot of shame that many of us experienced and continue to deal with ("welp, crossed that line, now I'm no good"). I certainly lived with that concept floating around in my head: don't associate with those people, or listen to that music, or watch those movies, or do those actions because I might end up being tainted by sin. And when I did cross those lines (which I most certainly did), I understood myself to be beyond God's tolerance. The goal of the Christian life was to remain holy, and holiness means remaining pure and set apart from sin. Just like God.

In our last post, we looked at Romans 15 and how Jesus seems to enter into the full human experience, which would put him in a weird relationship with a God who cannot see or tolerate sin. So I wondered: is this a true way of talking about God? Does God really not see sin?

As I looked into arguments for that position, I saw repeated references to one passage: Habakkuk 1:13. This seems to be the hinge passage for this idea in all of Scripture--there are other places that can be interpreted to mean something similar, but Habakkuk 1 is the one place that it's clear. So let's take a look.

Habakkuk was a prophet around 600 BC, near the end of the southern Kingdom of Judah. He saw a lot of evil in Judah, throughout the culture including the civil and religious authorities. He saw the end of Judah coming and he warned the nation that judgment was on its way. Chapter 1 starts with Habakkuk complaining to God that God seems to put up with a lot of sin in the nation. Why won't God deal with sin? Why does He continue to tolerate it? In verse 3, the prophet cries out, "Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?" God answers, in verses 5-11. His answer, to Habakkuk's dismay, is that God is going to judge the evil in Judah by bringing the even more evil and ruthless Babylonians to lay waste to the nation of Judah. Habakkuk responds with disbelief: the Lord is holy and eternal; how can He use the wicked to punish those who are slightly less wicked (1:12-2:1)? Chapter 2 is God's second response to Habakkuk, where he sets Habakkuk straight: God is still in charge, He has had His eyes on the state of the world and the ways that the wicked have done evil and violence and followed after idols, and He will judge evil and eliminate it in His timing.

In the context of Habakkuk's reply to God's idea of bringing the Babylonians against Judah, Habakkuk names his idea of God's character: "Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing" (1:13). Habakkuk is naming a reality that He believes to be true but that his experience is telling him feels false. Habakkuk knows that God is righteous and holy and will judge evil, but his experience of Judah--and then God's answer that He will judge Judah's evil with the even more evil Babylonians--tells him that God seems to look on a lot of evil and tolerate quite a lot of wrongdoing. Habakkuk ends his complaint in 2:1 in the place where God ends his response in 2:20 (and where Job ends his similar complaints): in silence and waiting. YHWH is not bound by our timing or our methods; He will use even evil people to fulfill His purposes.

Evil does not deter God from His purposes! I want to argue from the rest of Scripture that God does not participate in or cause evil, but God can redeem even sinful, evil events, ideas, and people to bring His good purposes about. The cross, of course, is the greatest and clearest example of this, where the evil of the world was concentrated on the Son of God and killed him, only for God to bring about total transformation of death and crucifixion so that evil is ultimately defeated. The cross is the great example, but this is a common thread throughout all of Scripture: God redeems human evil to bring about good things. God looks on a lot of sin and tolerates all kinds of wrongdoing, but ultimately undoes the evil and judges the wrongdoing in His love.

To summarize: Habakkuk writes this verse--"Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing"--because He sees God tolerating and watching so much evil and wrongdoing. God allows evil, but not forever. And God's final answer to evil is neither to tolerate it forever and let it win nor to simply obliterate evil or all that evil has touched, but to enter into the full human experience, including evil and its most devastating effect, death, so that He can defeat it once and for all. Jesus loves humanity so much that he takes on sin and death to overcome it. Rather than being tainted by sin, Jesus redeems what he touches. As Flannery O'Connor says (and my friend Dave reminded me): "the best way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin" (from her novel Wise Blood ).

Habakkuk is right about God's character: God works in ways that bring about the destruction of evil and sin. But we wrongly apply that truth about God's character when create a holiness codes or sin management strategies, especially when they lead to shame that keeps us from the One who can take us as we are and make us holy.

God and Sin

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 15:58:53 GMT

Exploring the ocean of God's love and grace

I love the Oregon Coast, where the Pacific Ocean confronts us with wildness and wonder. I have spent very little time around the Atlantic but Grace and I got to visit my sister and her family on the Georgia coast in January. It felt a little wrong to experience the sun rising instead of setting over the ocean, but the ocean itself felt the same: wild, uncontrollable, immense, complex, unmeasurable. A bit like God.

I preached on Romans 15 recently. As with any passage of Scripture, there were things that I had to leave out because there is just so much there. Digging into a passage to preach it feels like climbing out of a boat in the middle of the ocean and trying to hold onto some of the water to bring it back to show others; there’s just far too much there. One of the ocean currents that I pointed to in my preaching but didn’t reply get a chance to explore is the character of God in relation to sin as revealed in Romans (and in Paul’s theology in general, and in the New Testament, and in the Hebrew Scriptures—it’s kind of everywhere). I’d love to dive a little deeper and do a little more exploring with you here. We’re not really answering all possible questions—these are ocean waters, with more depth and breadth than we could explore in many lifetimes! But the water is wondrous and beautiful and the exploration itself is a joy.

The question I’ve been pondering is this: how does our holy God relate to human sin?

Now, that’s a question with whole traditions built around the various answers, with small and large books staking out positions and working through implications. Most theological boats worth their weight have explored these waters. Growing up in evangelical land and then emerging from seminary in an era where The Gospel Coalition was a key leader in evangelical theological and pastoral reflection, I got used to hearing that God is holy and therefore cannot look on or tolerate sin. The church struggles because we don’t take sin seriously enough. Even: “It has been said that God hates the sin and loves the sinner. But it’s the sinner God sends to hell not just the sin." The ways we understand God, hell, humanity, the cross and atonement, the church and its mission, sin, and ourselves are all wrapped together.

I have a bunch of disentangling to do; the Bible reveals a God who relates to sin differently than I thought. Romans 15 is one of several passages to reveal a thread that needs pulling at. Or, to stick with the ocean metaphor: Romans 15 shows a flash of color and beauty that looks like it might be worth exploring.

In Romans 15, Paul is bringing his great letter to its climax. Paul invites the members of the Roman church to bear with one another’s weaknesses, please one another instead of themselves, and to welcome or accept one another because God in Christ bears with human weaknesses, pleases others rather than himself, and welcomes and accepts people. We bear with one another because God bears with us. Romans is a long, complicated letter but that’s one way to sum up much of Paul’s argument.

I love the passage in general, but there’s also that thread or flash of color that draws me in and I want to explore: Jesus bears our weaknesses, pleases us and not himself, and welcomes us. He does this as we are and for the sake of those who do not yet confess him as Lord. It reminds me of Philippians 2:5-11, where Paul tells us that Jesus entered our human experience as God or even because he is God . (This will have to be another post, but lots of translations of Philippians 2:6 say “though he was God”, which we can’t rule out through the grammar but seems to be missing the whole point. The force of the passage suggests that “because he was God” is a better way to read it, and the grammar is just as good.) God’s purposes and character are best fulfilled by God's presence with, bearing with, pleasing, and welcoming sinners.

If God cannot tolerate or look on sin, then how does it work for Jesus to come to us as God in the middle of our sin? What does it mean for Jesus to be the second person of the Trinity, the “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3; NIV), to enter into sinful humanity, and even to suffer at the hands of sinners? As Paul says elsewhere in Romans, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

I know that the theological world I’m disentangling from has answers to all these questions. And I value the people who are coming up with and sharing those answers. The Gospel Coalition, and especially Tim Keller, has been important in my formation; I’m not trying to divide or discredit or anything. But I, personally, have found those answers constricting, unsatisfying, and incongruent with the whole of Scripture. To my soul, those answers feel like swimming in the pool that's on the ship's deck and calling it the ocean—they just don’t fit reality.

So, if you are interested in pulling at the threads with me—that is, with jumping into the water and exploring together—then follow along with the journey. Let me point out some of the directions I think we might go: I’m obsessed with the grammar and argument of Philippians 2:5-11, so I’d love to think about that with you; I’ve already looked at Jesus’ cry from the cross and Psalm 22 in this space, but we may take another look; it would be interesting to take a peak at hell and how God’s justice relates to God’s love; I think a discussion on Genesis 1-3 would be compelling; I’m in classes for ordination with the Covenant, and Covenant theology is way ahead of me on questions of God’s love and sin; it would be fun to explore God’s relationship to sin in the Hebrew Scriptures; let’s spend some time with Jesus and how he relates to sin and sinners; and I’m sure Revelation has something interesting to say about God and sin and justice.

In next week’s post, I think we’ll start with the passage that provides the key to the argument that God is too holy to look on sin: Habakkuk 1. There, Habakkuk tells YHWH, “your eyes are too pure to look on evil, you cannot tolerate wrongdoing” (Habakkuk 1:13). Should be fun.

In Christ,

Josh

Jesus in the Mess

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 04:48:47 GMT

Thoughts on Advent

Greg wrote a lovely reflection on Advent for The Center 's blog, and--like all of Greg's writing--I highly recommend it. He made me reflect on myself a bit. Toward the end of the post, he says: "I’m unprepared for Advent. I’m messy. And I’m beginning to believe that’s precisely what Advent is for— not to celebrate our preparedness, but to be the engine of our preparation. The gift of the incarnation can’t wait until our messes are solved, because the incarnation is the only thing in the world with the power to resolve the enormity of our collective human mess."

I absolutely agree. The incarnation is the only thing in the world with the power to solve any of our messes--our collective human mess, our individual messes, our family messes, the mess that sin makes of our lives. Greg invites us to welcome Jesus in the middle of the mess that is this season--the busyness, the competing pressures, the expectations and failures to meet them, the emotional and relational messes that we make.

Today was one of those days for me. I felt the mess of relational tensions and pressures plus my own failures to react with wisdom. Not unusual, maybe, but it feels messy. Not the kind of thing I want to invite Jesus into.

But the mess, as Greg reminds us, is exactly the place where Jesus shows up to remake us. Jesus is far less afraid of my mess than I am. I fear my mess in my own pride and shame; Jesus enters the mess and brings resurrection. Jesus touches the unclean and makes us clean. Jesus touches the broken and heals us. Jesus touches us in our sin and mess and death and makes us holy, redeems the mess, and brings us new life. Jesus doesn't avoid sinners or their sin--he joins himself to us and makes us new.

Take a look at Greg's post , and invite Jesus right into the mess, just as your are, with all the stuff you want to hide. He is the one with power to save.

Jesus, please come and be with me today, right in the middle of the tensions and holiday pressures and failures. Touch me today that I might be clean, healed, and used for your purposes and glory. There are things I don't understand, places I fail, and so many ways that I seem to cause more trouble than good. Take them all, join me in the mess, and make something beautiful out of it all.

All Saints Day!

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 16:16:34 GMT

Resources for Celebrating All Saints Day

All Saints Day is coming up! Here are some reminders about All Saints Day, why we celebrate it, plus a resource to help you celebrate the day.

The heroes that we celebrate become the examples that we follow. We celebrate all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons, some reasons better than others. So, it's worth asking: do we celebrate people because they look like Jesus?

Tuesday is All Saints' Day (or All Hallows'--"hallows" being an older word for "saints", making Monday All Hallows' Eve, shortened to Halloween) on the liturgical, or Church, calendar. We're excited to participate this year in this church holy day, where we remember those who have come before us and borne witness to the way of Jesus. All just as imperfect as you and me, these heroes of faith went before us in demonstrating faithfulness to our Lord.

We put together a wonderful little introduction to All Saints' Day for us (see link below ), with some practices and prayers that we can use for participating in this day that the Church has observed for over a thousand years. We invite you to take a look and try out some or all of these practices, and take time this week to remember and give praise to God for the community of faith and the heroes that point us to Jesus.

All Saints' Day Guide

World Communion Sunday!

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 18:52:37 GMT

Today is World Communion Sunday! Celebrate with us.

The first Sunday in October is World Communion Sunday in several Christian denominations. We are participating in our service today (REMINDER: the service starts at 3:00!) with shared bread. We have baked bread that we are sharing with several other local churches, and we will be praying for those churches in our services and Emmaus Groups.

I want to share just a little bit about why we think this kind of unity around Communion is important. Three key texts: John 17, Ephesians 2, and Revelation 5, In John 17, Jesus prayed for his followers to be one, just as he and the Father are one, "so that the world may know that You (the Father) sent me (Jesus)." In other words, Jesus taught us that our unity proves to the world that what he says about himself--that he comes from God. Our disunity and divisions signal that we are not sure if we believe that he is really God's Son.

In Ephesians 2, Paul argues that a key part of Jesus' work on the cross is to overcome natural divisions (such as those between Jew and Gentile). Jesus' blood is not only about saving us from sin but also meaningful for making one body out of those who are separated, Our unity reveals that we have become on new kind of humanity, a new city under the reign of Jesus the Lord.

And in Revelation 5, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders sing to Jesus the Lamb, "You are worthy...because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God." Jesus rules over a kingdom that welcomes and transcends all nations and natural dividing lines. Our unity around Jesus (rather than around our nations or ideologies) demonstrates that Jesus the Lamb really is worthy, and that we serve as priests within creation.

To close, here is our prayer from our Communion time today:

We pray the prayer that Jesus prayed to the Father for us, as recorded in John 17:

“Whose prayer was not for us alone, but also for those who will believe in Him through our message, that all of us may be one, Father, just as you are in Jesus and He is in You. May we also be in You so that the world may believe that You have sent the Son. Jesus has given us the glory that You gave to Him, that we might be one as You and the Son are one—Jesus in us and You in Jesus—so that we may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that You have sent the Son and have loved us even as You have loved Jesus.”

For our sake, for the sake of the world, and for Your own glory—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—unify us across our divisions.

Amen

We Are What We Eat

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 17:15:38 GMT

Some thoughts on Communion

This post is going to highlight some of the meaning of Communion. I realize that’s kind of backwards—Communion is not something that you know about and then do, it’s an action that we do together and discover the meaning as we do it. We don’t gain meaning from Communion by knowing about it but in the act of doing it. If it was about knowing, Jesus could have told us all the things he meant us to know, and then we wouldn’t have needed to do it. Instead, Jesus said, “Do this activity—eat bread and wine together when you gather in my name” and Paul added, “Do this as an act of remembrance that proclaim’s the Lord death until he comes again.”

Why Communion?

Communion has so much to it that I couldn’t possibly explore it in just one post. But, one key reminder: our vision at Resurrection Covenant Boise is to bear witness to Jesus. Communion is a sacrament hyper-focused on Jesus, and so we want to put it at the center of our time together as a community.

Jesus is the host of His table. This is his table, and he invites everyone to eat with him. Communion is not about my preferences, tastes, the seating arrangement that I would prefer, the people I want to eat with, the dividing lines that I want to draw, or the ways that I want to maintain power. Jesus invites people of every race, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, social, mental, physical ability, political parties, sexual orientation, relational status, orphans, widows, foreigners, the poor, etc. All who are willing to recognize the reality that Jesus is Lord are welcome at His table.

Not every part of the Christian life is equally accessible to all of us—even this post explaning Communion (in English, on a blog, written by me, with my ways of writing and thinking) will appeal to some of us more than others. For example, sermons can be a kind of consumerist exercise—they appeal to some kinds of people and not others, they are in one language and not others, they come from a preacher that some people resonate with, though others don’t. The same is true of our worship music, our prayers, and all other parts of our communal worship life.

Did you know that in lots of churches, the goal has been to appeal to one kind of consumer market in order to grow as quickly as possible? 60 years ago, Dr King lamented that our Sunday worship was divided by race; instead of working to overcome our divisions, we found ways to become even more divided. Our divisions now center on consumer preferences, not explicitly by race (though racial division is a not surprising result of consumerist church). There are several important books about just this idea—I recommend Paul Metzger’s Consuming Jesus and David Swanson’s Rediscipling the White Church to think more about that point.

Our goal here is to center communion so that the center of our communal life is something that welcomes all of us equally. We all eat, and all are welcome to eat at this table.

“My body, given for you”

When Jesus instituted this meal, He told us that we are eating His body, given for us. When we eat the bread, we take in the body of Christ so that we are being fed by Jesus’ body. He nourishes us, sustains us, forms us more and more into His likeness. We sacramentally participate in the life of Jesus when we receive Communion, so that His life might be lived out in us. As the saying goes, we are what we eat, and when we eat Jesus, we are becoming more like Him.

Another point about ingesting Christ’s body together: when we eat His body, we also become His body. The Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have developed this understanding of the Eucharist over the centuries, and I recommend some thoughtful Catholic and Orthodox thinkers here (Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism was especially helpful for me; you might also look at Augustine’s Sermon 227 , Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica , or Alexander Schmemann’s amazing For the Life of the World ). When we eat the body of Christ together, we are being formed into the body of Christ that goes out and lives Christ in the world, for the world.

In Communion with Jesus, we are also bound together with all of God’s people through all times and places—with people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation from the beginning of creation until now. All Christians have eaten this meal; when we take part, we are joining the feast that has been ongoing since the night that Jesus was betrayed.

“ This cup is the new covenant in my blood”

Jesus tells us that the bread is His body; similarly, the cup is His blood. Like an anniversary celebration celebrates the past wedding, this cup of the covenant participates in the future wedding feast that will consummate our unity with Jesus the Lamb in the New Jerusalem. The juice or wine helps us to participate first in the Passover, where God led the people out of Egypt; also in Jesus, who poured out his blood for us so that we might be free from the powers of sin and evil and death; and in the future wedding feast, where we will be united with Jesus for eternity. When we receive the cup together, we recommit to the covenant, and we receive Jesus’ commitment to us again.

Also, as His body nourishes us, so His blood sustains and forms us. His blood is running through our veins and empowering us to live a life of pouring ourselves out for others as He poured Himself out for us.

“We proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”

In this act, we are uniting ourselves with Jesus, we are binding ourselves to him, and we are proclaiming the Lord’s death. When we participate in Communion together, we are saying that the Lord died and rose again. We follow a Lord who died. He died for us and for all of humanity. Our Lord gave himself up for us.

We are also saying that this Lord—this Lord who died—is the kind of Lord who is truly Lord, and His Kingdom is the kind of Kingdom that is really good and true and beautiful in the world, that will stand in eternity. All lords and all empires and kingdoms will come to an end, but this Lord will sit on the throne forever, and His Kingdom will have no end. He will come again to consummate and fulfill His reign over a united heaven and earth.

Because we follow a Lord who poured Himself out for us, we are also saying that we want to die with Him so that we will rise with him. Jesus, the one who died, is Lord, his Kingdom will not end, and we want to follow him into death and resurrection.

I feel like that’s just a beginning—we could go on talking about what Communion means for a long time. But our goal is not to talk about it but to participate in it.

Jesus, thank You for giving up Yourself for our sakes, for offering Yourself for us for our nourishment, sustenance, and formation, for drawing us to Yourself and to one another in You, and for living out Your life in the world through us. We praise You as Lord!

Blessings,

Josh

Christian Nonviolence, part 2

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 20:44:06 GMT

More discussion around Christian Nonviolence

In this post, I continue the argument for Christian Nonviolence. In the previous post, I focused on Scripture and the early church. Here, I will argue that Christians are called to focus on our citizenship in the Kingdom of God and not in the nations of the world. Enjoy! And, as always, I welcome questions and pushback.

2. Christians are primarily citizens of the Kingdom of God, and not of the kingdoms of this world

My second major point is about citizenship: Christians are first and foremost citizens of the Kingdom of God, with Christ as our King. We are not primarily citizens of the USA or of Canada or of Indonesia or of China or any other nation. We are fellow citizens with Christians from China, from Iran, from Syria, from Albania, from Indonesia, from Palestine, from Russia, from every tribe and tongue and nation. We have more in common with them, including our citizenship, than we do with our neighbors who have rejected Christ. Our allegiance is not to the flag of the USA, nor to a style of government, nor to an economic system or theory. Our allegiance is to Christ and no other allegiance can or should equal that allegiance. Paul makes this point straightforwardly in Philippians (see 2:4-11, 3:20, among others), and Jesus makes that point throughout his ministry - he announces a Kingdom, places himself at the center of that Kingdom, and then inaugurates the Kingdom with his death. This is in political defiance to the Lordship of Caesar. It is true that Jesus’ Kingdom is “not of this world”, but what he means by this is that Jesus’ Kingdom is not “from” or “out of” this world. He will not establish it, maintain it, and increase it using the world’s violent methods. Instead it will grow by use of the deeper magic that works with the grain of creation - by suffering and death. The kingdoms of this world try to maintain control by violence - violence is at the heart of a government’s control over its citizens and at the heart of its defense of itself. Christ’s kingdom renounces violence and expands by suffering and death. And this is my third major point:

3. The weapons of the Kingdom of God are redemptive suffering and death, not violence and war

We have talked about this in the ministry of Jesus and in the New Testament, but it is also just historically true. God’s Kingdom advances when His people are suffering. The early church suffered persecutions and death, and the church grew so significantly that in 300 years Christianity went from being a small band of friends following a dead teacher to the majority religion of one of history’s great empires. By suffering violence rather than inflicting it. This is so true to the practice of the early church that Tertullian has been paraphrased as saying that the “blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church”. This is true today: while Christianity is on the decline in America and Europe, where Christians have been majorities and have not suffered, Christianity is rapidly increasing in China and in other places where Christians are persecuted, where being a Christian involves cost and suffering. China currently, by most estimates, has more Christians than any other country in the world. And not because of the Chinese Christians’ military successes. Suffering and death are the weapons that God chooses to use to advance the Kingdom. Inflicting violence does not serve His purposes, because that’s not how He created the world.

When we support the wars of the nations, we might be helping to advance the causes of the nations (though advocates of nonviolence would be skeptical that the nations' interests are really being advanced, but maybe), but we are certainly not advancing the Kingdom of God. God’s Kingdom does not expand by nations going to war against one another. God can and does work redemptively in the middle of the evils of war, but when the church supports war, it works against God’s purposes and design. Again, part of the problem here is that we get mixed up about our citizenship. We say “our country” when we refer to the US, but that is the country of our sojourning, or our home in exile. Our home, our citizenship, our allegiances are in Christ.

We can and should seek the good of this country, as Jeremiah called the exiles in Babylon - not because Babylon was their home, or because Babylon was a worthy empire, but because God can expand His Kingdom through the influence of faithful exiles, as He did through Daniel. But, as Christians, we are not called to support any and every war that our nation, or home-in-exile, chooses to engage. Advocates of Christian nonviolence would say that we are called to oppose peacefully every war that the nation chooses. We should be a people of and for peace, and our Kingdom spans the globe. We are currently in exile, but one day we will celebrate the Wedding Feast of the Lamb altogether, as sisters and brothers, peacefully eating at the table of the Prince of Peace. And yet we are prepared to kill one another now? In “love”?

I realize--and I'm not trying to dismiss--good, thoughtful, faithful arguments for just war or other kinds of limited violence. And there are really valid questions we could and should ask about Christian Nonviolence. I'm happy to take up those questions if you are interested. As I said at the beginning of part 1, I'm not sure that I land solidly in the Christian Nonviolence camp. But I think the arguments are important to wrestle through for the sake of our discipleship. So, I hope this has been helpful to you as we consider how to follow Jesus in the world together.

Blessings,

Josh

Christian Nonviolence Resources

Torture and Eucharist, by William Cavanaugh (Wiley-Blackwell, 1998)

A Better Hope, by Stanley Hauerwas (Brazos, 2000)

After Christendom, by Stanley Hauerwas (Abingdon Press, 1991)

The Apostolic Tradition, by St. Hippolytus < http://www.bombaxo.com/hippolytus.html >

Fight, by Preston Sprinkle with Andrew Rillera (David C. Cook, 2013)

De Corona, by Tertullian < http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.iv.vi.i.html >

New Monasticism, by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (Brazos Press, 2008)

The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder (Eerdmans, 1994)

The War of the Lamb, by John Howard Yoder (Brazos Press, 2009)

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, by Martin Luther King, Jr (Beacon, 2010)

The Kingdom of God Is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy < https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/leo-tolstoy-the-kingdom-of-god-is-within-you >

Christian Nonviolence, part 1

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 20:41:45 GMT

Following the Matthew Intro sermon, an argument for Christian Nonviolence

In my sermon introducing the Gospel of Matthew on July 31, I made the claim that Matthew makes a pretty clear argument for Christian Nonviolence. I went on to say, in th e Q & A, that other parts of Scripture are not so clear about violence, and Christians can reasonably disagree. But, Matthew’s argument is pretty straightforward.

In the next couple of blog posts, I want to pick up on and expand the argument for Christian Nonviolence. I want to be clear about my perspective: I tend to lean toward Christian Nonviolence, but I am not a full-throated advocate, or some one who would be willing to judge sincere Christians who display courage, grace, and self-sacrifice in using violence in defense of others or for the sake of their nations. I think violence is a difficult theological question, and I would ask for grace for me and I hope to extend grace to you where we disagree.

I also think that Christian Nonviolence is an important position in church tradition and needs to have a place at the table of Christian views of war and justice. If we reject Nonviolence out of hand, then we are dismissing important and valuable tools for waging war against our true enemies. Anyway, here are excerpts from a talk I gave a few years ago at a seminar about Christians and War, at Cole Community Church in Boise. Enjoy! Let me know if you have questions or pushback. Finally, none of these ideas are original with me, so see the “Resources” at the end of the second post for more information and to see whose work (in addition to Jesus and the New Testament) influenced my thinking.

Let me start by outlining for you my argument - there are other ways of defending nonviolence, but this is the most compelling argument to me: (1) Christian Nonviolence is clearly spelled out in the New Testament, focuses on the example and person of Jesus, and was followed by the Early Church; (2) Christians are primarily citizens of the Kingdom of God, and not of the kingdoms of this world; (3) the weapons of the Kingdom of God are suffering and death, not violence and war - violence and war may serve the interests of the kingdoms of this world, but they do not serve the interests of God’s Kingdom.

1. Christian Nonviolence in Christ, in the New Testament, and in the early Church

There may be forms of pacifism that are idealistic, or pacifists who live in Airy-Fairy Land, where the trees grow lollipops, and it rains root beer, and we can solve every conflict with assertive speech and active listening - where if we just understood one another, then we’d never really have to fight. I have no doubt that those pacifists exist. That is not the position of Christian Nonviolence. That is not the position of Jesus or of the New Testament, nor the position of those passages that invite us to practice nonviolence. Jesus and the entire New Testament is exceptionally realist.

Jesus gave up His position at the right hand of the Father in order to come and deal with the problems of sin and evil once and for all. More than any other person in human history, Jesus has borne the weight of sin, dealt with the alienation, stared evil in the face, and died in an explicit confrontation with all the powers of evil. Jesus is aware of evil: he knows its depth, its weight, the damage it does, the ways it destroys societies, families, ways of life, individuals, etc. Jesus knows evil.

And Jesus’ position in the face of evil is to suffer violence rather than to inflict it. Jesus radically changes the terms of the conflict with evil by taking on violence inflicted by sinful persons and overseen by evil powers—he takes the death and violence and by doing so he defeats those powers. In Christ, suffering violence wins, and inflicting violence loses. The powers that cause violence on others end up doing damage to their own cause while the Kingdom of God advances by suffering. Christ wins in his death.

This idea is not new to us, but its full implications might be, so let’s sit here for a bit. First, Christ wins in his death because he pays the sacrifice for the rest of us and so he expands the Kingdom. Now we don’t have to be kept out of the Kingdom because of our sin. Justice is served, but not against those who had earned punishment. God gives of Himself so that the Kingdom can expand. Straightforward atonement theology.

Second, Christ wins in his death because he remains faithful to what God had called him to in the face of evil. Rather than resorting to evil to defeat evil, he entrusts himself to the Father and lets the Father determine the outcome. Christ submits himself to the Father, to the point of suffering and death, even death on a cross; and so, in the face of evil, Christ is the completely faithful one. This is a victory in the sense that evil does not cause Jesus to become evil; instead he remains righteous.

Third, Christ wins in his death because his death exposes evil for what it is. Evil is shown to be evil—Rome is not good, the Jewish leaders opposed to Jesus are not right, our sin that puts Jesus on the cross is not justified. We can’t pretend anymore. Our evil is exposed and shown to be evil. The veil is pulled back and because of the cross we know how deeply wretched we are: Rome is so evil that it mocks, tortures, and crucifies the Creator of the world; the Jewish leaders are so evil that they betray their own King and turn him over to a people who can and will violently kill him so that they can protect their own territory; we are so evil that we participate in their evil, and our evil is so heavy and destructive that it takes the Son of God Himself to bear the weight of it. In his suffering and death, Jesus wins because he shows that evil is really evil, which gives all of us at least a chance to repent.

Fourth (and this is the last point I’ll make here), Christ wins in his death because his death works with the way He and the Father created the world. Violence works against creation, suffering works with it. Yoder says that Christ’s death works “with the grain of the cosmos” - Jesus is both Lord and Word of the cosmos, so he ought to know. Creation was made by a God of self-giving Love, and God wrote His character into His creation, such that violence works against creation, while self-giving and suffering work with it. Lewis calls it the “deeper magic from before the dawn of time”. Violence works against this deeper magic, while suffering lets it loose. By trusting outcomes to God, we give space for God to do what God does—raise the dead! When we die in faithfulness, we allow God to work resurrection life. When we hold onto our lives, we lose them, but when we give up our lives for the sake of the Kingdom and trust God’s work, He raises us to new life. Creation works by this kind of self-giving, and so Christ wins in His death.

Again, Jesus faces evil and defeats it by suffering violence, not by inflicting it.

The New Testament uses Jesus as the great example of how to face evil. There are ever so many passages that we could use to talk about enduring suffering for the sake of the Kingdom - in James, Hebrews, Revelation, Acts, and on and on. I will look at two, and then tie in our 2 Corinthians teaching from 2013-2014.

1 Peter 2 compares the suffering of servants to the suffering of Christ, whose faithful suffering heals us. Christ did not respond in violence, His suffering brings healing, so the rest of us are called to suffer even in the face of violent oppressors. When evil is unjust, we are still called to suffering, not violence. Peter says that suffering “finds favor with God” (v 19), and that maybe by suffering the Christian community can cause their opposition to glorify God (v 12). Christ’s suffering is redemptive, and Peter suggests that the suffering of the Christian community can be used by God for redemptive purposes. It keeps the faithful sufferer in the right, it exposes the evil of the oppressors and gives opportunities for repentance, and it works with the way God created the world.

Perhaps the clearest statements for Christian Nonviolence in the New Testament are found in Jesus’ teaching, and most concentrated are in his Sermon on the Mount. “Don’t murder, or even call your brother a fool”; “don’t resist an evildoer, but turn the other cheek”; “if an opponent wants your shirt, give him your tunic also”; “if a soldier forces you to go one mile, go two”; “don’t just love your neighbor, but also love your enemy”. Against Augustine, whom I deeply respect and admire, Christian Nonviolence does not think that our love for enemies can be acted out in war. Again, Jesus showed us what love for enemies looks like when he prayed for forgiveness for his enemies while dying for them. By Augustine’s logic, and by the logic of fighting a Just War for love of enemies, Jesus should have prevented his enemies from killing him by killing them first so that they would not take on the guilt of killing the Son of God. Would that have been more loving than dying for them? Not according to Jesus, who says that the great act of love is to die for one’s friends. One implication is that it’s more loving to take on another’s guilt than to prevent them from incurring it.

So, Jesus and the New Testament clearly work from the perspective of Nonviolence. The early church certainly believed that the New Testament perspective was one of nonviolence, even when they finally put together a Just War perspective. Augustine, who defends Just War, does not think that Just War is the position of the New Testament—nonviolence clearly is. Augustine says that times have changed and that Christians need to articulate a perspective on war in his day, but nearly all theologians prior to Augustine very clearly opposed war. Christians were usually not allowed to serve in the Roman army, partly because a soldier typically had to worship the Roman gods, but also because it meant killing. Christian theologians like Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Hippolytus, and Cyprian all opposed Christians killing or going to war. Until Constantine, Christian theologians and bishops were almost universally opposed to killing and war. Nonviolence gets discarded or forgotten in the Christian tradition when the Christian’s citizenship gets confused. Which leads me to my second point (in the next post).

Blessings,

Josh

Psalm 22 and Jesus' Cry from the Cross

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 20:38:52 GMT

Looking at Jesus' cry from the cross and how God is faithful and present to Jesus

On the 3rd of July, I preached on Psalm 22, focusing on why Jesus quotes this Psalm as he cries out in pain from the cross, as described in Mark 15. I focused on two points: first, that Jesus understands and redeems our experiences of being forsaken by God; second, that God has not in fact forsaken Jesus and does not ever abandon us in our need. We really do feel that way, and I believe that Jesus really did feel like God had abandoned him. But God is with us, even (and maybe especially) when we feel most in need.

For the blog post today, I want to take up a relatively theological question about that scene and the idea of Jesus as forsaken by God. Some traditions argue that Jesus is forsaken because God cannot look on sin, and Jesus became sin in such a way that the Father had to turn his back on the Son at the cross. There are theological and practical arguments we could make about this, and I’m game to go there if you are interested, but this post will be focused on the biblical evidence for the idea that God abandoned Jesus on the cross.

Did God abandon Jesus at the cross? That is, does God ontologically forsake the human Jesus as Jesus dies, thereby causing a rift within the Trinity and abandoning the second person of the Triune God to hell from the time of the crucifixion until the resurrection? I’m not convinced.

First, scripturally, that would mean that God abandons faithful Israel at the moment when Israel demonstrates faithfulness in Jesus. This, to me (there could be other ways to see this, I recognize), means that God can and does abandon His faithful children even in their faithfulness. That would go against everything we know about God’s character from the Scriptures.

Second, the idea that God abandons Jesus at the cross comes from two (literally only two) verses in the Scriptures, and one of the two is developed from the other: Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34. they are essentially the same account (most scholars believe that Mark wrote first and then Matthew reworked and developed Mark’s account). In other words, the idea of God’s abandoning the Son is not a developed theme in the New Testament. There is no explanation of it in other places, such as a Pauline development of the theology of what it means that Jesus was forsaken by God. Instead, theological development on the cross emphasizes that there God made Himself available and known to humanity.

Third, the Gospel writers describe Jesus’ cry from the cross as part of their use of Psalm 22 in the passion narrative. Let’s work through how the Gospels use Psalm 22 as they describe Jesus’ death.

Each of the four gospel accounts quotes from Psalm 22 (Matthew 27:35, 46; Mark 15:24, 34; Luke 23:34; John 19:24). John is the most explicit, saying that the dividing of Jesus’ clothes is a fulfillment of the Scriptures, and then quoting Psalm 22:18. Psalm 22 is very clearly part of the thought-world of the writers when they describe Jesus’ death. So, what is that thought-world? What do the gospel writers have in mind?

Psalm 22 in outline:

1-2: “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?”
3-5: My ancestors trusted in you and were saved
6-8: But I am a worm and not a human (and therefore, unlike my ancestors, I am not worth saving)
9-11: But you made me, from the womb (and therefore, I’m not really a worm but an image-bearer of God); God be near me
12-18: My enemies are near; they surround me, they have pierced me, they are dividing my clothes
19-21: God, don’t be far from me, deliver me
22-31: I will praise you; the assembly will praise you; all the ends of the earth will turn to you–including the rich, poor, and all generations–who will say “He has done it!”

So: in Psalm 22, the Psalmist looks and feels forsaken, but the result is salvation that leads to universal–including all nations and all generations–praise of God. The Psalmist cries out in anguish but the result of the cry of anguish is the reminder that God is faithful. Anguish and praise go back-and-forth in the Psalm: forsakenness to reminder of God’s faithfulness to feelings of being undeserving to reminders of God’s creation to feeling surrounded to cry for God to be near to praise. It’s not an easy or straightforward Psalm that moves from lament to praise. Psalm 22 takes us through the the experience of struggle to get to praise. But the Psalmist finally gets to a universal and complete vision of praise. The end does not resolve with the resolution of the Psalmist’s immediate situation but with an eschatological and fulfilled vision, including all nations and generations. The Psalm moves from forsakenness to total shalom.

Verse 24 is key to that vision: “For he has not despised or scorned/ the suffering of the afflicted one;/ he has not hidden his face from him/ but has listened to his cry for help.” Despite the sense of alienation and abandonment that the Psalmist experiences, God has not in fact abandoned him. The “afflicted one” is, in reality, “not despised or scorned” nor is God’s “face” “hidden”. Instead, God “has listened to his cry”. (Just a note: the Hebrew term for “listen” always carries the weight of action with it; one cannot “listen” and not be moved to action. “Listen” might as well be translated “listen and obey”.) So, God is near to the afflicted one who suffers. Though a person might be afflicted and experience suffering, God is near, listening and acting on behalf of the sufferer.

Ok, if that’s the case, how might the gospel writers be understanding Jesus’ experience in light of Psalm 22?

I want to suggest that they are experiencing both the big theme of the Psalm and its details.

Again, the big theme is this: what looks and feels like forsakenness and defeat is actually the path to victory and faithfulness because of the nearness and presence of God.

I think it’s important to say this because it seems to me to fit with all of the gospel accounts’ and their understandings of Jesus’ death. Over and over, the Gospels tell us that Jesus’ crucifixion looks like a defeat but is actually victory; that it looks like Satan (through Rome) has won but this is where Satan loses; that it looks like God has rejected Jesus but He has actually vindicated him; that it looks like God is no longer faithful to Israel and His creation but His faithfulness is actually being demonstrated in Jesus.

Let’s look at the Gospel accounts and how they use Psalm 22. In Matthew and Mark, who record Jesus crying out “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?”, the texts say that Jesus cries out and then gives up his spirit. In both accounts, this is clearly a coronation scene and his death is the moment of his full enthronement, so that the centurion watches Jesus die and at that moment realizes that he is the Son of God. Indeed, this one is a divine king, and that is fully discernible as he dies.

In Luke, Jesus does not make this same cry. Instead, in his anguish, he is focused on others. Right before quoting from Psalm 22:18 (“they divided up his clothes by casting lots”, Luke 23:34), Luke describes Jesus as asking the Father to forgive. He also prophecies judgement on the people around him (which is likely a reference to the destruction of the Temple in AD 70), he gives mercy to a repentant criminal, and then–at the moment of his death–he testifies to the nearness and presence of the Father: “Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit.” And then, again, the centurion recognizes God’s hand as Jesus dies: “Surely this man was righteous.”

In John, where the quote from Psalm 22:18 is much more explicit and is set apart as fulfillment of Scripture (John 19:24), Jesus focuses on the women and the beloved disciple, then he is thirsty, then “it is finished” and he dies.

In Luke and John, there is no sense whatsoever of Jesus having been abandoned by the Father. Jesus is totally aware of accomplishing the will of the Father. Again, Luke has Jesus say, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”; and John has Jesus cry “it is finished.” The references to Psalm 22 in both accounts certainly indicate pain, anguish, struggle but not an ontological break in the Trinity. In these two accounts, you could even make the case that the Psalm 22 references are the clearest indications that Jesus was in serious pain. He does not cry out or express intense anguish in these two accounts. My intention is not to prioritize Luke and John over Matthew and Mark but to provide context for how the early church understood how Jesus experienced his death. Jesus felt anguish (certainly); Jesus may have even felt abandoned by the Father (that would be an understandable existential reality, given his suffering). But the gospel writers do not emphasize–they do not even consistently hint at–an ontological break within the Trinity. In fact, I would argue that they are more consistent in arguing that the Father was making Himself near to humanity and to Jesus as Jesus died. Put another way, the Father was making Himself near to humanity and to creation in and through the dying Jesus. The whole event speaks of the nearness and salvific action of God, not of the Father’s rejection of the Son.

So, for instance, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the veil or curtain in the Temple is torn in two. This indicates that God has broken out and is now present to all of His creation, not contained in a Temple. He is present and near to all of us!

Also, the centurion’s words in Matthew (“Surely this man was the Son of God!”), Mark (“Surely this man was the Son of God!”), and Luke (“Surely this was a righteous man!”) demonstrate that God has revealed Himself in Jesus’s death–He is here, showing Himself to the world!

The darkness (Matthew 27:45, Mark 15:33), the earthquake (Matthew 27:51, Luke 23:44), the breaking rocks (Matthew 27:51), and the tombs opening and the dead walking around (Matthew 27:52-53) all show that God has made Himself near. Some pastors have argued that these events show that creation is coming apart because the Trinity has been broken and the Father has turned His face away, but to argue that is to forget what it looks like when God shows up, in the Old and New Testaments (see, for example: Mt Sinai, the darkness at the Temple dedication, the prophecies about the Day of the Lord, creation’s undoing at the Lord’s appearances in Revelation, etc). When God shows up, crazy, supernatural events occur; at Jesus’ death, in a series of crazy, supernatural events, God is present and glorifying Himself in a clear and demonstrable way.

In the final analysis, it does not fit the gospel accounts to say that God the Father abandoned or forsook the Son at the cross. Jesus cries out in anguish, “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” but this cry quotes from Psalm 22, where the initial feeling of forsakenness leads to eschatological salvation. Jesus cries out as a way of expressing both his sense of anguish but also his faith in God’s ultimate victory. And this cry fits within the larger Gospel story that God is present and has come close to creation in Jesus. That is no less true at Jesus’ death than in his life.

Blessings,

Josh

Some Revelation Questions

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 19:33:09 GMT

Picking up some questions from our Q & A on Revelation 19

For this first blog post, I want to go back to a conversation we had in May. As part of our series through Mark, we ran into Jesus’ response to the Sadducees’ question about marriage and eternity in Mark 12. It seemed like an appropriate time to get into Revelation (ha! As you may know, I don’t need a reason to get into Revelation…).

So, our sermon for May 8 was Revelation 19:6-9, a celebration for the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. The big picture that I was trying to communicate is that we were made for Jesus—to love him, to become like him, and to have intimate union with him. Jesus wants us! So much that he gave up his place at God’s right hand in order to suffer that we might have life.

In Mark 12, Jesus tells the Sadducees that there will be a resurrection from the dead and that human marriage will not be a part of it. Revelation fills in the rest of the picture: human marriage does not exist after the resurrection because humanity will be married to Jesus! The fulfillment of marriage is the wedding that unites God and humanity, heaven and earth, Creator with creation. Human marriage anticipates that ultimate marriage but it doesn’t complete it. It’s a picture that helps us to participate but does not fulfill humanity, our faith in Jesus, or the ways that we were made. We will be most complete in our marriage to Christ.

There are a bunch of implications to this regarding marriage, singleness, and eternal life. Jesus undermines our focus on marriage—marriage is not eternal nor the only way to live our calling in this life. Singleness is also important in the Kingdom. And, singleness oriented to Jesus may participate more fully in the wedding feast of the Lamb than marriage does. Finally, the church in eternity will be a fully suitable partner for Jesus, our bridegroom. We will be everything that God made us to be, in and through God’s Spirit.

We had some great questions in the Q&A time, and I want to share some of those questions and answers with you; they are below. I’d love to have more conversation about some of these questions with you, and I may commission some friends to respond to some of these ideas on the blog. We’ll see what this blog becomes. In the meantime, may the Lord bless you!

Group Questions:

Who is “he” in verse 9 [Revelation 19:9]?

This is a textual question, which several translations (NIV, NET, NRSV, WEB) try to answer for us, suggesting that "he" is an angel. The Greek text is not actually clear. I said in the live Q&A that it was an angel--that was based on the fact that I was reading from the NIV. Several translations (NASB, ASV, KJV) are more accurate with the Greek in this verse and just say "he". But context does suggest pretty strongly that "he" is an angel (or some other being that's not God but a being that a human might worship) because John tries to worship him and he says don't worship me (see the next verse, 19:10).

How is it possible that the people of God sounded like many waters, thunder, and a crowd all in one? -Lucy Lingle

Great question, Lucy! We talked about this one, so I won't go into too much detail. I think the point that John is trying to make is this: the people of God are taking on characteristics of properly worshiping people (the crowd image), Jesus ("many waters" is language used to describe Jesus' voice earlier in Revelation, see 1:15 for example), and God (thunder is usually pointing us to God in Revelation). So, when we are most fully ourselves, living out our fullness as God made us, we will be fully human but bear the image of God to those around us. I'm so excited to live this way!

So, how does our marriage relate to or inform our faith? Is marriage holy? How?

Marriage is holy in the sense that it anticipates the final destiny of humanity. It is a signpost that points us to ways that God loves us in Jesus. And, of course, every single marriage falls short of the reality of God's love for us. A couple of idealized ways that marriage might act as a signpost: spouses experience deep intimacy in a context of committed relationship, married couples remain committed through difficult situations, married couples start to take on characteristics of each other through time. Also, married people will still experience loneliness. Last thing: as with singleness, marriages might be more or less oriented toward Jesus.

If human marriages anticipate our heavenly marriage to Jesus, what does singleness anticipate?

At the live discussion, I changed the language here from what singleness "anticipates" to the language of "participation". In my mind, marriage anticipates the wedding feast; but singles who orient their lives toward Jesus are actually participating in the wedding feast, ahead of the event. Like the Church when we receive Jesus' life and promise again in communion, singles who are Jesus-oriented bring his future promises into the present. They are living as though married to him already.

I wanted to bring that conversation back up again because I don't want to idealize singleness or singles, and at the same time I don't want to dismiss or relegate singleness to a status lesser than marriage. Singleness is an important status in Scripture and in church history, and singles might live out their experiences in ways that make intimacy with Jesus near to us.

How does one practice that type of intimacy with others in this life while maintaining healthy boundaries?

Practicing intimacy with one another makes us vulnerable and open to abuse. And yet, we were made for intimacy with God and one key way we experience joy and love now is through intimacy with others. How do we live in the middle of that tension? It’s a really great question, to which I have only less-than-satisfying answers. The short answer I gave in the live Q&A was not really satisfying to me (or others, I think), and I would love to think more about this with you all in community.

But here’s a start: Jesus did not start with boundaries or self-protection but love. In love, he poured himself out for our sakes. Now, he was able to pour himself in ways that we tend not to be able to, with a sense of self and identity, along with confidence in his origin, purpose, and end. As John 13 tells us, “knowing that the Father had given everything into his hands, and that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God” (John 13:3), Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. In its proper place, love is a function of an identity rooted and grounded in God. And healthy intimacy begins with that kind of love.

So, if you want intimacy, start with self-giving love. And then offer freedom to others (which is really just a part of self-giving love). Intimacy isn’t really possible when it’s demanded or the result of manipulation or control. And yet, so much of what we call and think of as “love” or “intimacy” is mixed up with our attempts to manipulate others to meet our own needs and desires. Jesus’ coming is the result of thousands of years of God allowing freedom to humanity, in the interest of God lovingly inviting us to choose intimacy with him. When we continued to reject God’s invitations, God sent his Son to win us over, not through manipulation but by freely giving up himself on our behalf. God never forces us to choose him; intimacy does not force itself on us.

And that’s where boundaries are necessary: we need some ability to keep our identities rooted in God’s love for us while navigating the mixed-motive world of human relationships. My dearest loves are tainted with self-interest and I’m constantly tempted toward manipulating even those that I love best. That’s true of basically all of us. We need some kind of boundary to be able to say to others that their manipulations and abuses are not welcome. I hope to build my boundaries on an identity rooted in God’s love for me, so that my boundaries can serve others and not just protect me. I think of Jesus in disputes with the religious leaders: he was sure of his identity, he argued without rejecting others’ humanity, he kept to his purpose, he did what he needed to do for what we might call “self-care”, and he was willing to give himself up all the way to death in pursuit of intimacy with us. I don’t recommend that for everyone, by the way, largely because many of us who might be willing to give ourselves up to death for others would be doing so as a kind of manipulation (“they’ll have to love me now…”) or self-rejection (“I’m not worthy of love anyway, so I should just take whatever abuse they give”). That was not Jesus’ way; he sought intimacy as a way of demonstrating who he was in love.

Last note, and then I’d love any feedback. One of the lessons of Revelation is that we will not achieve perfect intimacy before the great wedding feast of the Lamb. I am too broken and I am trying to love broken people. The hope, as I see it, is that we might pursue intimacy now as a way of preparing us to be people who have growing capacity for intimacy then. The best intimacy we experience now is only a shadow of the glorious intimacy we will have with God and others then. So, in some ways, God designs our deepest relationships to build in us a longing for what will be complete and magnificent with him when he sets all things right.

Thoughts?

Rapid Fire Questions:

Here are some other questions we didn’t have time for.

Do we continue to become more like Jesus when we're already at the wedding feast or are we all we're going to be at that point?

I don’t know. I suspect, based on Scripture and intuition, that we will continue to grow and mature and grow to deepen and integrate our love for Jesus in new ways, so that we become more like him. But that’s a guess.

It's hard to reconcile Jesus as both the bridegroom AND sibling or co-heir. How do we reconcile that so we can understand the church as the bride of Christ?

Yes, the imagery works in funny ways sometimes, eh? The way I reconcile it all is by thinking of them both as metaphors that obscure as much as they reveal. All language is like that, I’m afraid, except the Word himself. As metaphors, both the bridegroom image and the sibling image point us to deeper realities that we can’t express in much better ways. I believe that they will resolve in beautiful and meaningful ways at the wedding feast, but I don’t have clear language for resolving it all yet.

In the verse we read Matt 22:14 about the wedding banquet guests: “For many are called, but few are chosen." Who is it that is called and who are chosen?

I think the context of the parable suggests that the God is calling everyone. Everyone! In the immediate context, that refers to Jews and Gentiles, religious leaders and any old person (including good and evil!), important and unimportant. Everyone is called. I think Jesus is deliberately understating the number of those called—it’s not literally “many” but everybody. Most who are not chosen choose out; they didn’t even show up to the party. But others come and still get kicked out. Why? They aren’t being changed by the feast—they are refusing to wear wedding outfits (and I think we can assume that Jesus is signaling reality beyond the parable here: the “outfits” in question have actually been provided by the king, so to refuse the outfit is just an act of defiance). NT Wright says it helpfully: “God's kingdom is a kingdom in which love and justice and truth and mercy and holiness reign unhindered. They are the clothes you need to wear for the wedding. And if you refuse to put them on, you are saying you don't want to stay at the party.” (I think this is from Wright’s Matthew for Everyone but I haven’t been able to confirm.)

What acts of the saints constitute righteousness?

First, see the Wright quote in the above answer. The good deeds, or acts, of the saints that constitute righteousness are Kingdom acts—deeds of “love and justice and truth and mercy and holiness”. And then, I’d add that in the context of Revelation 19, the “acts of the saints” are good deeds that look like Jesus—acts of faithfulness to God in the middle of trial and persecution, acts of self-giving love, acts of worship that bear witness to what God is really like. May God clothe us all with such fine linen!

Blessings!

Josh

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