When Did We See You?

All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

Was it Mark Twain who said it wasn't the parts of the Bible he didn't understand that bothered him but rather the parts that he did understand? With a lot of the parables, I've had to wrestle with them to see what they wanted to say to me. This one speaks loud and clear -- far too clear for comfort.

The voice of the "accursed" is too familiar. "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?" This is our defense against the poor and the needy. We don't see them. We structure our lives in such a way as to keep them hidden. If we actually saw the stranger or the naked or the sick or the imprisoned, we'd be shamed into helping them. So, we keep them out of sight.

Even in charity we rarely see those we are proposing to help. We take out our checkbooks and write a big enough check to ease our conscience. But this can be just another way of hiding from those in need.

One of the most striking things about this parable is the fact that the "blessed" are surprised to hear the king's praise. There's nothing calculated in what they've done. It's simply the way they've lived. Their actions flowed from within, not to ease a discomfort, but as a natural outpouring.

I pray to be so blessed.

An Experiment

I started a second blog today. Not just because blogging is such great fun (though it is), but as a sort of experiment in media and genre.

My new blog (The Truth About the Trinity) is going to be, I hope, a sort of serial exploration of the doctrine of the Trinity with a collective end result that is not unlike a book on the topic. We'll see where it goes. If you have the interest, I'd be very happy to have some feedback as I go.

Risky Business

For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them

This parable is like an optical illusion. Is it a candlestick or two faces kissing? Is it a celebration of God's pleasure in his people or a severe warning? It depends on how you look at it.

It's an amazing thing that God has given us blessings and expects us to put them to work and bring an increase. And even if you having been sitting in the pews staring at your feet, it's a simple message. Go! Take chances! God wants you to!

There's not even a question of what would happen if one of the slaves had lost the master's money when trading. He "entrusted his property to them." Apparently he's willing to take that chance. The only rebuke comes from playing it safe.

But there's the flip side of the parable. Do you think the master would have been pleased if the first slave had put four of his talents in a low-interest bearing account and traded with just one? "Here master are your five talents and one and a quarter more."

To whom much has been given, much is expected. How much am I burying in a hole in the ground? This is where this parable made me think back to the parable of the wedding banquet. How seriously am I taking my calling? Do I have all my talents in the market?

I think I need to listen more to the other side of the parable. What am I waiting for?

The Bridesmaids

Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise.

I've always been fascinated by this parable. I've rarely had any idea what it meant, but I've always been fascinated. It's like a beautiful jewel that I just can't take my eyes off of.

Tonight it strikes me as being one of the "counting the cost" type of sayings. Am I prepared to go all the way as Jesus' disciple? How far am I willing to push the envelope? How seriously am I willing to take his call to take up my cross and follow him?

I'm reminded of Bonhoeffer. Cheap grace is producing a Church full of foolish bridesmaids. Sure, we'll go along and wait for the bridesgroom. It sounds like fun. But when the call comes, "Look! Here is the bridegroom!" Are we ready?

It's hard to imagine who the foolish bridesmaids are if you put this parable in a strictly eschatological context. If we imagine a final trumpet and the Son of Man coming in glory on the clouds, who wouldn't jump up and go?

But what if he comes another way. What if he comes in the distressing disguise of the poor, as Mother Theresa said? What if his coming actually costs me something -- my comfortable lifestyle, for instance?

Here's what I really hear in the parable. Whatever the parable means, it says that how I prepare now will determine whether or not I'll be ready later.

But they made light of it...

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.

This would be a nice, feel-good parable about a king who invites "both good and bad" to his son's wedding feast, except that the point of the parable doesn't allow such a happy reading.

All too often Christians have read this as a parable spoken against the Jews and announcing the passing of the kingdom to the gentiles. But surely we can't read it that way today.

Hear then the parable. "Again he sent other slaves, saying, '...Come to the wedding banquet.' But they made light of it and went away." Surely this is a picture of Christianity today. I don't mean our nominally Christian society and the way it is becoming secular. I also don't mean the people who show up at church most Sundays but don't really give it a lot of attention. I mean those of us (and I definitely need to include myself in this) who consider ourselves to be serious Christians.

They went away "one to his farm, another to his business." OK, so hopefully we're not beating and killing God's servants, but how many of us never prioritize our jobs over the kingdom of God?

I don't really know where the right path is here. Coming from the Lutheran tradition, I have a strong doctrine of vocation to draw on that tells me the my job can be part of the kingdom of God. But all too often I feel like that's just rhetoric to help me feel better about my life, to maintain the status quo. It has the feel of "the system" co-opting religion for its own purposes.

But beyond that, I know there are times when my focus is just on making a living, times when I have most definitely turned my focus away from the kingdom of God and gone about my business.

Honestly, I need to not be too hard on myself. If I find myself in this parable, I'm probably not in the first group that refused the invitation to the wedding feast. I probably belong to those ("both good and bad") who were found on the street and invited to the feast and who went when invited. But am I wearing a wedding robe?

John Henry Newman once said, "The aim of most men esteemed conscientious and religious, or who are what is called honourable, upright men, is, to all appearance, not how to please God, but how to please themselves without displeasing Him. I say confidently,—that is, if we may judge of men in general by what we see,—that they make this world the first object in their minds, and use religion as a corrective, a restraint, upon too much attachment to the world."

Guilty.

Control of the Vineyard

"Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard...

A lot is made of the risky images used to represent God in the parables Luke records, but the image in this parable from Matthew might be equally off-putting to Luke: a landowner. On the surface it seems like a safe choice. After all, "the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof." But in first century Palestine, the landowners were the upper class, the "haves", while the common people who did not own land often lived at their mercy. So immediately I would wonder, what kind of landowner is this going to be.

But the parable isn't about him (the landowner, God), it's about me, the tenant. The non-land-owning tenants are apparently looking for a leg up. When the owner sends for his produce, twice the tenants refuse to give it. Then when he sends his son, they kill the son, hoping to gain possession of the land.

This happens in Christianity. The Lord has prepared a vineyard for us, and he expects it to yield fruit. But we Christians too often are hungry for God's power and glory and not concerned about the fruit of the kingdom. If we can just eliminate the Son, the inheritence will be ours and we can use the kingdom as we like. We can proclaim proseprity in the name of God instead of love. We can proclaim power and triumph instead of humility and service. If only we can gain control of the kingdom of God, we can use it as we see fit.

One of the things inherent in this parable is that the tenants don't trust the landowner. They aren't satisfied that he will provide for them. Or at least, they want more than they think he will provide.

Lord, increase our faith.

An Open Letter To Brian McLaren

Hi Brian,

I just finished reading your book, A Generous Orthodoxy. I liked it a lot, and I think it will do a lot of good for Christians and the people we meet. Thanks for writing it. But I have to say, I was distressed by the lack of a chapter called "Why I Am Lutheran." So I thought I would write to you and tell you a little about why I am Lutheran to get you started with this chapter for the second edition (which is necessitated by this grievous omission).

It seems to me that Calvinists have a blind spot which prevents them from seeing Lutheranism. It's as if they think we're just eccentric Calvinists. This can be seen in the persistent use of the phrase "Luther and Calvin" -- something you don't hear often in Lutheran circles. I once heard an analogy that imagined Calvin and Luther cleaning out a cluttered dresser drawer. Calvin dumped everything out of the drawer and only put back the things he knew he needed. Luther removed everything he knew he didn't need and kept the rest. The result, of course, is quite different.

As it turns out, the "catholic" chapter was the one that seemed to me to be closest to Lutheranism (and, yes, I can imagine Lutherans inventing Mardi Gras -- we call it Oktoberfest). But Lutherans have a good bit to offer in our own right.

One of the great things Lutheranism has to offer to the Church at large is our rich theological tradition, beginning, of course, with Luther himself but also featuring such giants Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Schweitzer, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Tillich and continuing to the present day with the likes of Terrence Fretheim and George Lindbeck. No one will be a fan of all of these theologians, but that's just the point. We Lutherans place a high value on free inquiry (our strongly confessional branches notwithstanding).

A second thing that Lutherans bring to the table is our beautiful musical heritage. If we had no one in the stable but J.S. Bach, he alone would tower over all other traditions, but we do have more than that. Luther himself was something of a musician and gifted the Church with "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" while bringing hymns to a place of prominence in the life of Protestantism. This tradition has continued, and in the present day we have such geniuses as Marty Haugen carrying the torch.

Returning to theology, I would highlight our crown jewel: the Theology of the Cross. Luther said, "The Cross alone is our theology." A theologian of the cross seeks to comprehend God through suffering and the cross. That is, we reject the easy path, the path of glory, in religion and seek to enter into the suffering of the world around us, knowing that God will meet us there. Lutheran pastor Daniel Erlander says it this way:

As we view the cross all of our human attempts to find [God] are exposed as illusions. We do not find God by...

• proving his existence by the wonder of nature or the power of logic.


• validating his presence by visible blessings.


• having a prescribed religious experience.


• earning divine love by our good works.


• building glorious religious institutions.


• reaching a high level of personal morality.


• saving ourselves through status, wealth, knowledge, consumption, chemicals, positive thinking, correct religious doctrine, self help groups, health foods or exercise plans.

We do not find God. God finds us - in our darkness, our pain, our emptiness, our loneliness, our weakness.

Moving on to brighter things, I am a Lutheran because of the Lutheran understanding of the Word of God. This is the one plug we got in A Generous Orthodoxy. The Anglican J.I. Packer wrote a book about the Bible called "God Has Spoken." Lutheran church historian Karlfield Froelich observes that if a Lutheran had written it it would have been called "God Is Speaking." Lutherans understand the Word of God as a living address that is active and powerful in the world. Luther once said that the Word of God reformed the Church while he slept or drank beer with his friends. "I did nothing," he said. "The Word did it all."

Lutherans have a multifaceted understanding of the Word of God that begins with Jesus Christ and continues to the ways he is made present in the world. As such, we see preaching as the Word of God (which I think is the way the New Testament uses the phrase), but the the words of absolution that follow confession are also the Word of God, as are the words that accompany the sacraments, and, of course, the Bible. But Lutherans often emphasize that the Bible is only the Word of God in as far as it makes Christ present to us. When it does not do that (because we are using it as a club with which to beat our opponents, for instance), it is not the Word of God.

Finally, and this could easily be listed first, I would emphasize the Lutheran understanding of baptism as God's promise and Christ's call. Baptism has the sort of central importance for Lutherans that the Eucharist does for Catholics. Through baptism we are incorporated in Christ and receive all of his benefits, including new life and salvation from sin, death and the power of the devil. We believe that we receive all these things because God has promised them to us and in baptism bestows them upon us. Baptism is like having the Gospel poured over your head. But Lutherans are also beginning to rediscover that in baptism, Christ lays hold of us. When we are baptized, we are called into mission, called to be followers of Christ. In baptism, we are sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever. We are Christians, and because of our baptism, we are called to live as Christians.

I could go on and talk about such things as Christ coming to us in the communion meal, about the priesthood of all believers, and about our recognition that we are at once sinners and saints, but I've probably said enough already.

So, once again I thank you, Brian, for your book A Generous Orthodoxy -- it is a wonderful contribution to the Christian faith -- and I look forward to an update when you also become Lutheran.

-Mel

Discipleship

A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' He answered, 'I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, 'I go, sir'; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?”

The meaning of this parable couldn't be clearer. Jesus asks, "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord' but don't do what I say?"

I think this is the biggest challenge that faces Christians. We're very good about talking the talk of the Christian life, but our record is much spottier when it comes to walking the walk.

I read somewhere (maybe it was Kurt Vonnegut) that men build churches to protect themselves from God. I think there's more truth to that than we'd like to admit, especially for Protestants. We Protestants cling to "the sweetness of the Gospel". It's our shelter, our comfort. It shields us from the pain of looking at the state of our souls.

But I noticed something a few years back. Catholics talk about "the Gospel" as if it included obeying Jesus' commandments too. Of course, as a good Lutheran I would shake my head disapproving and mutter something about them not properly dividing Law and Gospel.

Yet the more I read writers like Soren Kierkeaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and George Macdonald and Matthew and James and Paul (yes, Paul), I wonder if maybe it isn't we comfortably orthodox Lutherans who are missing something.

We talk a lot about faith and salvation. What does that salvation look like? My Lutheran blogging friend LutheranChik likes to ask "Saved for what?" That's a very important question, but I think we also need to ask "What's it like to be saved?" And I think the point of both questions is the same.

I'm not talking about morality. I'm not talking about a life free of sin. But I think there's a sweetness to obeying the call of Christ that is nothing less than the sweetness of the Gospel. And obeying that call is nothing less than faith.

Trouble with Co-workers

"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard."

He might say to us that the kingdom of heaven is like public transportation, though we would much rather it were like a house on a cul-de-sac.

I think all Christians run into other Christians whom we wish would give up the name. Maybe they don't live up to my standard of righteousness. Maybe they don't take their faith as seriously as I do. Maybe they don't understand grace as well as I do. Whatever the case, surely God isn't as happy with them as he is with me. But the fact of the matter is, we're all on this bus together.

Of course, objectively this is a very good thing. I'm not so bold as to think of myself as one of those hired early in the morning (after all, that would make me one of the grumblers in the parable!), but I have to admit that I do generally think of myself as if I were one of those hired at about nine o'clock, or surely by noon. Yet it is certain that there are other Christians who see me as one of those hired at five.

I'd like to be at the point where I am happy that God extends blessing everyone, and in general I really am. It's those particular people that give me trouble.

The Way An Emerald Is Green

I let myself get dragged into a debate about Trinitarian terminology this week. Well, OK, so I provoked the debate and didn't let it drop, but over the course of the discussion a really beautiful thought came to me. Who says nothing good comes of technical theological debates?

In the discussion the point came up that it is right to say Jesus is God, but not to say God is Jesus. So I was thinking about non-reflexive "is" statements. Naturally, I thought of "God is love" and "God is light". That led me to recall a quotation I really like from Simone Weil, "God is love the way an emerald is green." And there it was:

Jesus is God the way an emerald is green.

I'm not sure it works out cleanly as theology, but as a simile it's beautiful.

Pope Benedict XVI

As I write this, Joseph Ratzinger is preparing to celebrate his first Mass as Pope Benedict XVI.

Like a lot of people, I was hoping for an African or a Latin American Pope or at least a progressive European. Yet I'm not unhappy with the cardinal's decision. I think it may have been a wise choice. Whoever was to be Pope has some pretty big shoes to fill, and Ratzinger can handle the heat.

I saw an interview with Ratzinger on EWTN about a year ago, and it endeared him to me. One part of the interview sticks out in my memory. The interviewer asked him about rumors that he had considered retirement. Ratzinger answered:

Yes, I had desired to retire in 1991, 1996 and 2001 because I have studied the idea. I could write some books and return to my studies as Cardinal Martini did. So, it was my idea to do the same thing. But on the other hand, seeing the suffering Pope, I cannot say to the Pope, "I will retire. I will write my books." Seeing him, how he is giving himself, I have to continue.

In the heat of the recent election you might wonder if this was some kind of jab at Cardinal Martini, but when I heard it, I was certain that it was spoken from a servants' heart. If Pope Benedict XVI is not a tender soul, he had me fooled.

Earlier today, the new Pope said, "I am consoled by the fact that the Lord knows how to work and how to act, even with insufficient tools, and I especially trust in your prayers." More of us should have such faith.

May God bless Pope Benedict XVI, and through him bless the Church.

Moral Debt

"For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, "Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.' And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, "Pay what you owe.' Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, "Have patience with me, and I will pay you.' But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, "You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?' And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."

Why did the unforgiving servant demand payment from his fellow slave? Did he intend to make good on his promise to repay his own debt to the king? Was he the kind of person who strongly believes in the repayment of debts? He saw this slave who owed him money "as he went out" from his reckoning. Certainly the matter of his own debt couldn't yet have slipped his mind.

I don't think this is a picture of just personal forgiveness. I think it's about public morality. We live not under law but under grace. And yet we can't help acting as though we live under law. We have had our debt to the law wiped out, but we continue to plead with God, "Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything." Then when we see someone else who isn't meeting our standards, we are scandalized. We seize them and say, "Pay what you owe."

All too often this is the public face of religion. Churches are full of forgiven sinners. Not former sinners whose past sins have been forgiven, but current sinners whose current sins are constantly forgiven. And yet we forget this, and so we pick out behaviors that we think are unacceptable, and we chase people out of the church if they don't fit our mold. Maybe they have long hair. Maybe they've been divorced. Maybe they don't share our sexual orientation. Maybe, on the other hand, they're more conservative than we are!

Whatever it is, we forget the terms on which we have peace with God, and we refuse to overlook the debt we believe our fellow human beings owe to us. (We might invoke the name of God, but let's be honest about whose interests we are really looking after.)

And here's where the parable really gets scary. "When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed." This is always how people get into trouble with God. In Genesis, God goes down to Sodom and Gommorah because of the outcry against them. In Exodus, God rises up against Pharoh because he hears the cries of his people. Generally, we don't need to fear God's wrath because of our impiety, but woe unto us when the cry of those we oppress reaches God.

This is certainly a challenge to our churches. The position of this parable in Matthew 18 puts it squarely on our collective eccliastical shoulders. But surely the movements of the churches are driven by individual actions.

May we all remember the terms of our peace with God and may we strive to live in such grace with one another.

Good Fish, Bad Fish

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad."

This parable gives me trouble. The eschatological ending (which I've omitted for the moment) doesn't square with my understanding of Jesus' preaching of the kingdom of God. I expect to find in every parable an application for the here-and-now.

Things start out well for me. The net is cast into the sea and catches fish of every kind. This I like. It speaks to me of the universal (catholic!) nature of the kingdom of God. We're sent into the world to offer our gifts indiscriminately.

But then "they" start sorting the fish, putting the "good" in a basket and throwing the "bad" out. What can this mean? Maybe it would help to go back for the ending.

"So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

This draws to mind Jesus' other story of a great sorting at the end of the age, in Matthew 25, when the sheep and the goats are separated based on how the have treated the naked, the hungry, the strangers and the imprisoned. Does that help?

Maybe a little.

It could be that I just don't want to hear this parable. It's a parable of judgment any way I slice it. If I think about the fishing scene, it's all too clear. You bring in the fish, but you don't want them all. I'd have to file this parable under the "many are called, but few are chosen" heading.

One thing that jumps out at me in this parable is the contrast between the fish that were caught ("every kind") and the way they were sorted ("good" and "bad"). The thing it says to me is that fish aren't kept for being the right "kind" nor tossed out for being the wrong kind. It's one of the uglier aspects of human nature that we seem to want to always draw lines dividing who's in from who's out, whether those lines be drawn across boundaries of race, religion or sexual orientation. We always like to know who constitutes "us".

But this parable gives the lie to that sort of thinking. The kingdom of God is like a net that catches fish of every kind. The New Testament tends to be concerned with breaking down the barrier between Jews and Gentiles. We Christians, having apparently forgotten the point altogether, went on to make a nearly identical line between Christians and non-Christians. And now we want to divide things according to who are the right kind of Christians.

Well this parable does indeed say that Christians should be concerned about being the right kind of Christian. "For they are not all Israel which are of Israel." In fact, that's where the link I drew to the parable of the sheep and the goats comes in.

The kingdom of God has gathered us all, like fish in a dragnet. Christ has called us, saying, "Follow me." Now, if we are truly to live in the kingdom of God, we must follow.

Investing in Pearls

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it."

A merchant! The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. For whatever reason, I've always thought of the pearl shopper in this parable as a collector. I mean, I've known that it says "merchant," but when I've thought about it, I've always thought that this was just a guy who really likes pearls and wants to possess the best one he can get. But merchants don't generally buy things just for the sake of having them. A merchant buys and sells, accumulating capital as he goes, but the merchant in this parable sells all he owns in order to buy this single pearl.

The merchant is risking everything on this one pearl. That's what the kingdom of God is like.

I've got kind of an intuitive grip there, and I feel like I'm about to make a breakthrough. So I sit here trying to think it through.... Is Christ the merchant and we're the pearl that is his only capital in the world? Are we supposed to be the merchant and the kingdom of God is the pearl we need to give up everything to obtain?

Then I found the sweet spot. It's not a big picture. It's a template. I've seen that a few times already in the parables before this, but I'm a slow learner. This parable is a pattern of what life in the kingdom of God is like. It's meant to be repeated over and over.

"Love one another as I have loved you," Christ commands. He loved us completely, self-sacrificially, holding nothing back. And as we are a part of the kingdom of God, we will love others in this way. He calls us to give ourselves completely for others, risking everything, knowing that they are of great value.

Religion and Politics

Like some bloggers more notable than myself, I have been reading Jim Wallis' book God's Politics lately. I'm about three quarters of the way through the book, and I would say I am in enthusiastic agreement with Wallis' positions.

Still, I'm not entirely sure I agree with his approach. Wallis suggests that we should confront politicians in the name of our religion and call them to act in accordance with Biblical principles. The book is full of anecdotes of Wallis himself doing just this.

But I wonder if that doesn't blunt the impact of his message. When a group of religious people present politicians with a mandate based on Biblical revelation, aren't they supplying the box in which the politicians can file away the appeal? That is, by presenting the message in this way, I think they leave the message open to at least these two attacks:

1. They're just religious people. They don't understand the complications of politics in the real world.


2. That's just their interpretation of the Bible. Other people of faith have different interpretations.

Wallis has many laudable ideas, not the least of which is the need to present a sound alternative along with our protest, but when he says, "You should do it this way because the Bible says so," I have to think he could do better.

Soren Kierkegaard once told a parable of a fire that broke out backstage in a theater, but the only person who knew about it was a clown already dressed for his performance. The clown ran out on stage to warn people about the fire, but they thought it was just part of his act. The more frantically the clown tried to warn them, the harder they laughed.

I'm afraid this is all too close an analogy to religious leaders calling for action from politicians on a religious basis. The politicians may use the language of religion to garner votes, but are they themselves really pursuaded by such language.

I wonder if it wouldn't be better to present our call to action as being based on self-evident truth.

Faith and Reason

Why do I have faith? Why am I a Christian? These should be easy questions to answer, right? After all, I've been through the process. I know where I've been. I ought to know how I got here.

The thing is, the reasons that I'm a Christian today are not the reasons that I was a Christian just a few years ago. As my faith has changed, grown I hope, my reasons for being a Christian have changed and, again I hope, grown.

When I look back at some of the reasons I would have given for being a Christian a few years ago, I don't find them very compelling, but they were enough for me then. More surprisingly, it is precisely my journey of faith that has led me to ask the questions that have caused me to reject my old asnwers.

PBS's Frontline had a show on John Paul II this week that included an outstanding exploration of the nature of faith.

Germaine Greer talked about how when she was 15 a nun led her through the philosophical proofs for the existence of God, and she wasn't impressed. The proofs were too full of holes, and shortly thereafter she rejected her faith. Then she went on to describe an incident years later on visiting a church in St. Petersburg.

The huge bass bell, this baritone bell spoke, and it was just an amazing sound. And I thought, "Yes! It's the beginning of Mass." And I flew in the door, and the choir was singing the processional for the Introit.

The physicality of the sound strikes you on the face like velvet hammers, and it's just unbelievable. And I just sort of stretched my throat and just stood there paralyzed. I couldn't move. And the choir sang the full diapason of the human voice, from the darkest bass tones to really floating high sopranos. It sounded to me like the craving of the human spirit for God and the total desolation that God is not palpable to me, even worse because God is not there.

So maybe Ms. Greer doesn't consider herself a person of faith, but she really understands faith. She gets it.

Novelist Robert Stone gave this testimony:

When I was about 15 or 16, for the usual rationalist reasons, I stopped believing, at that time under the impression that belief and faith were the same thing. I since understand that they are not the same thing, but I thought they were, and I stopped believing in all this stuff. And I felt tremendously liberated. And only somewhat later, only years later, did it come to me that half of my head was missing, that I had just cut myself off from a tremendously important part of myself that was no longer available.

So on first glance it might seem that 15 is a dangerous age for faith, but to those of us who have been down this road, we might remember that this isn't really separation but growth. At the time, we think it's separation, but woe to the believer who doesn't go through some form of this.

I saw an interview with Fr. Thomas Keating once where he talked about growing in faith. He said we go through a series of transitions where we have to abandon our previous ideas about what God is like, and it feels like we are turning our back on God, but we're really just moving past a god who never existed anyway except in our minds.

Robert Stone told the story on Frontline of being on an ocean expedition and seeing the beauty and the variety of life made him think that surely there must be some Providence behind it. Then he added: "And it tempted me to faith."

A lot of people would probably find this a pretty shoddy reason to believe in God. Stone himself might think so now. But he's captured something wonderful. We don't deduce the existence of God. We don't reason our way to faith. We're tempted to faith. God calls, and we can't help but answer.

That's why I'm a Christian.

Theology and Its Consequences

Thursday as I was driving to the MAX station to go to work, I happened to hear Alistair Begg preaching on the radio. The part of the sermon I heard was about the mystery of God's grace, and how all people are undeserving of this grace.

According to Begg, we all, because of our sin, deserve nothing but the wrath of God, and we should, by rights, expect the wrath of God in return for our actions. In response to the question of those who are lost, he replies that we shouldn't be surprised because we all deserve that fate. "The great mystery," says Begg, "is that any of us would ever be saved."

This is fairly standard confessional Calvinist rhetoric. But look at the social implications of this kind of theology. What are we to think of the lower class, the so-called criminal element, the undesirables of society? Classically, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Yes, that's what those people need -- the grace of God (read moral reform). They are "bad people" by nature. The only way out of their plight is for them to repent (with the help of the Holy Spirit and through the preaching of the word, of course) and turn from their current way of life. Drug addicts, prostitutes, street thugs -- they all suffer from moral, not socio-economic, problems. The poor don't need our help, they need a good stern lecture.

Does this sound familiar? If not, read this column.

But this is based on bad theology. It misses the entire point of the gospel. God is not angry with us. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Does God think of the lost as though they deserved nothing but wrath? Is this the same God who would leave the 99 sheep to find the one that is lost? Regardless of what we do or do not objectively deserve, God most definitely does not look at us that way.

If we imagine that the lost deserve God's wrath and receive it by God's choice, it's easier for us to justify our lack of compassion for the socially and economically disadvantaged, especially when they live in non-Christian parts of the world. God, by grace, will lift some out of their plight. The rest receive what they deserve.

But if instead our image of God is of one who cares obsessively for the lost, who would do anything for them, then surely we must be called to a different sort of action. What limit can there then be to what we must do to help our neighbor (in the universal sense) in need?

Hidden Treasure

"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field."

I've got a favorite interpretation of this parable that I came upon last year while studying the Gospel of Thomas. I'm sure I'm not the first person to read the parable this way, but this interpretation completely turned around the way I thought about this parable.

We, the people of God, are the treasure. It is Christ who found this treasure and sold all that he had to buy the field. Though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself. Someone has objected that we aren't treasure when Christ finds us, but we are in his eyes. That's precisely the Gospel.

There's something else here too that I heard tonight. When this person in this parable found the treasure, he hid it in the field. He could easily have carried it out of the field and kept all he owned, but he didn't. He hid it in the field. This is precisely the same image as the woman who hid the yeast in the three measures of flour. Christ finds us and hides us in the field and goes and buys the whole field.

Once again, what is our calling? We are yeast in the dough, treasure in the field, the light of the world. We are hidden in the world to change the world.

Hidden Yeast

He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."

This is one of my favorite parables. I just love the image. I also love what it says about the kingdom of God.

I'm convinced, mostly because of this parable, that God doesn't intend for the whole world to become Christian. I don't think it's necessary for the salvation of the world. Instead, Christians are the yeast that leavens the whole lump.

In fact, it's probably misleading to say "Christians" here. Western civilization has gone through many centuries when nearly everyone was Christian, at least in name, but what they accomplished isn't exactly something we'd want to write to the apostles about. Everyone was Christian, but not everyone was yeast. But to expect them all to have been yeast would be a fundamental misunderstanding of what the kingdom of God is like.

St. Francis of Assisi is a great example of someone who was yeast in the world. In his own time, St. Francis was light in a dark time, and even today his spiritual heirs, and there are many, continue to make a difference.

But St. Francis is just a very visible example. Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flower. Everyday, there are Christians leavening the world in ways that go unnoticed, maybe even in ways that they themselves don't notice.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that this parable immediately follows the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew's gospel. I don't have to be St. Francis to make a difference in the world. I don't have to be the talk of the Christian world. All I have to do is be faithful.

While Everybody Was Asleep...

Moving on to Matthew 13...

He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well."

One of the classic answers to the problem of evil is simply to point to free will. There's evil in the world because people are able to choose evil as well as good. But all problems in Christianity must ultimately become practical problems. Why is there evil? It doesn't matter, really. There is. A better question is, what are we going to do about it?

At first glance, this parable would seem to suggest that we shouldn't do anything about it. Let it go and God will sort it out. But there's more than that here. One thing that jumped out at me when I read this last night, something that I hadn't noticed before, was that the enemy came while everybody was sleeping.

A Jewish man on Beliefnet once related to me the story of a man who died and came before the throne of God. "It terrible down there," he said. "Wars, disease, hatred.... Why don't you do something?" God answered, "I did. I sent you."

We can't just attribute the presence of evil in the world to the free choice of others. We must also think about what we can do about it. And ultimately, all of us must do something. I could get on a soapbox here about any number of issues of social justice, and maybe I should, but the point is that we need to live our faith into the world.

This parable, I think, isn't about weeds among the wheat -- it's about wheat among the weeds. The Christian faith can't be about withdrawing into our churches and waiting for the Rapture. We're called into the world to make a difference. But the Christian faith also can't be about going out and condemning the world. We must go out and bear fruit.

To translate this parable into something that I, as a resident of American Suburbia, can relate to, I'd say the kingdom of God is a green lawn that was left untended until dandelions appeared. I know from experience that if you spray the dandelions with weed killer you get a big bare spot in your lawn. I'm told that if you nuture your lawn, the good grass will choke out the weeds.

That's what I think this parable is about.

The Mustard Seed

He also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

The first thing that strikes me about this parable is that it obviously comes under the heading of "the last will be first," but that doesn't help me much because that whole category of sayings gives me trouble. I always try to overthink them. So with this one I had to make a conscious step back and try to picture the parable.

The kingdom of God is like a seed which is sown and grows up into a large plant. Maybe it would help to know something about mustard plants. But, no, it's about the seed. The kingdom of God is like a seed that we sow and a wonderful plant comes forth. What kind of seed is it? It's the smallest of seeds (more or less).

A lot of Christians today are concerned about growing a big plant, and so we try to build a better seed. I want to live the life of a great saint or give a miraculous and compelling testimony or write powerful and widely-read blog. Whatever it is, I want to do something amazing, something beyond myself, something I know will make a huge impact.

But the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.

So what's the alternative? What's the tiny seed? Simple obedience. While I'm busy dreaming about the world-shaking impact I could have with my life of great faith, I'm leaving the simple things undone in my life. But I don't want to make this all negative. I'm not here to beat myself up. There's good news here, amazing news. The little I can do, simple faith, makes an enormous difference in the world. It lets the kingdom of God into the world.

The Earth Produces of Itself

He also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come."

"The earth produces of itself." I heard John Polkinghorne recently on Speaking of Faith talking about how the God has made creation capable of creating itself. Polkinghorne says, "God brings into being a universe; it has great potentialities, great possible fruitfulness, but creatures are allowed to explore and bring that fruitfulness to birth."

That's what this parable makes me think. Of course, creation isn't fruitful completely by itself. We plant the seed (the Word) and something amazing happens. This is the true beauty of the kingdom of God. As we take share the love of God with the people around us, new possibilities -- but not really new, just possibilities we hadn't seen before -- emerge. The world blooms around us, bringing forth the wonderful potential that God built into it.

The Sower

"Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold."

Where am I in this parable? The traditional interpretation says that I'm one of the soils, and I should try to be the good soil -- not that soil is able to choose what kind of soil it is! Still I've generally accepted the premise that I'm the soil, probably all the kinds of soil at different times in my life.

But today as I meditated on this parable a striking thought occurred to me. What if I'm not supposed to be the soil? What if I'm the sower? If the parable started, "The kingdom of God is like a sower who went out to sow..." I'd be certain of this interpretation, but even without that hint I think it's right. This parable isn't just a picture of Jesus' mission in the world -- it's a picture of what the kingdom of God is like, what are lives will be like when we're living the kingdom of God into the world.

So if I'm supposed to be the sower, what does this parable teach me? If I imagine myself as a sower, I'm probably going to be very careful with my seed. I'm going to watch where I sow. I'm going to make sure I only place seed on good ground where I know it will bring a good return. But Jesus says, "No! Sow your seed freely."

Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Give without expecting anything in return. Sow your seed everywhere you go. Some will fall on bad ground and nothing will come of it, but some will fall on good ground, maybe ground you didn't even realize was good, and it will produce thirty and sixty and a hundredfold!

Hear Then The Parable

I thought as an Easter devotion I'd work my way through the parables. My intention is not so much to study them as to hear them. I know my hearing will be clouded by my preconceptions, and certainly by the commentaries on the parables I've read in the past. I also know that I'll slip into intellectual analysis as I go. But my intention is simply to hear the parables and kind of groove on them. We'll see how it goes.

I'm starting with Mark 4:

Again he began to teach beside the sea. Such a very large crowd gathered around him that he got into a boat on the sea and sat there, while the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. He began to teach them many things in parables....

This is a fascinating image. People are crowding around Jesus, so he gets in a boat. Mark's gospel is full of accounts of Jesus and the disciples crossing the Sea of Galilee by boat, leaving crowds behind. The image here is particularly vivid. Jesus sits in the boat, near the shore, while a crowd of people stands on the shore listening to him.

I can picture myself there. The water presents a barrier that keeps me where I am, but it's a soft barrier. As I strain to hear, will I venture out into the water a little? Perhaps, but there's a limit to how far I can go. The water separates us. For me the water is a barrier, but not for Jesus. He's on the water.

But he's not going anywhere. He's staying near, teaching.

Choosing Our Battles Redux

(The following is an expansion of an earlier post. If it sounds familiar, that's why.)

"When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."
-Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun."
-Ecclesiastes 1:9

Things have changed a lot since Thoreau's day. America has abolished slavery, something which many Americans considered impractical in 1849 when Civil Disobedience was written. But old things have a habit of turning up in new ways. Today, a sixth of the population of the earth lives in extreme poverty, having less than a dollar a day with which to attempt to survive.

And once again while this grave injustice goes on, our country busies itself about an unrelated war. Now surely the war on Iraq is substantially different from the war on Mexico. Now we're fighting for "Iraqi freedom." Then we were fighting for the "liberation" of Texas. Maybe it's not that different after all.

The United States has now undertaken not just to be the refuge of liberty but the bearer of liberty to the whole world, but are we living up to this billing?

By one estimate, the U.S. will spend $500 billion dollars on miltary expenses this year. Meanwhile, we continue to fall well short of our 2002 promise (in the Monterry Consensus) to devote 0.7 percent of our GNP to foreign aid. We currently only meet about $16 billion dollars of a $70 billion dollar commitment.

In a recent poll conducted by MSNBC (thanks to Bob at I Am a Christian Too for the link), 90 percent of respondants said that churches should be involved in raising awareness about poverty. I can't imagine who the ten percent were who thought churches shouldn't be involved in this, but they were there.

I would have liked to have seen a follow-up question: how often is the issue of poverty raised in your church? My first reaction was to be critical of my own church. I don't hear the issue of poverty talked about a lot in my church. I certainly don't hear it from the pulpit. But then I thought about what is there.

My church has a food ministry to help the poor in our area. We've sent mission teams to help build a medical clinic in Africa. We regularly have Fair Trade items for sale in our narthex. The work is being done.

Then I thought, maybe the problem is with me. These things are going on. I know about them. I contribute to them financially regularly, and otherwise on occaission. But they don't jump out at me as what's going on in my church.

Then this train of thought reached out and grabbed hold of what I wrote recently about God's field. These things going on in my church are the result of Church happening. I'm even involved, though I didn't see it.

This is the way the Church works. The big institutions are a red herring. The real work gets done from ground swells on the inside. People like St. Francis of Assisi show up and draw people to themselves and together they change the world.



This, as I understand it, is also the Republican model of how social problems like poverty should be handled. People of faith will rise up in our nation and make things happen.

But this is where I want to tie this back to the military issue. Why do we have a national army? Why is our army fighting battles around the world? Is it not because it takes a central power to make something like this possible?

And this is why Democrats want to push social issues onto the government. Faith-based groups can provide islands of help. They can fight off the tide of death. But the governments of wealthy nations, can provide a solution. In a recent article in Time magazine (exceprted from The End of Poverty), economist Jeffrey Sachs outlined what it would take to end extreme poverty in the world by 2025. It's possible, but only if our governments are willing to commit to it.

And what will make our governments commit to it? This is where the ground swell and faith based movements come in. We, the people, must demand it. To quote Sachs, "Great social forces are the mere accumulation of individual actions." This isn't a liberal issue or a conservative issue. It's a justice issue. It's a moral values issue. People of faith must join together and demand that our government do the right thing, do justice.

Click here to see what you can do.

We can fight to end terrorism, or we can fight to end poverty. Will we choose our sense of security over our neighbor's survival?

God's Field

You are God's field, God's building. Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?
-1 Corinthians 3:9, 16

Literary merits aside, one of the great losses we suffer in moving away from the King James Version of the Bible is the loss of ability to distinguish between singular and plural "you." In the KJV, "thou" and "thee" are singular while "ye" and "you" are plural. In the verses above, it is ye that are God's field, ye that are God's building and you in whom God's Spirit dwells -- all plural.

I think a case could be made that modern American English doesn't have a plural form of "you" ("yous" and "y'all" aside). There's just no way to say it. Whenever we read "you," each of us naturally assumes it refers to himself or herself individually -- unless, of course, it's a negative statement in which case it refers to the other guy.

So we read the above and think, "Isn't that nice. I'm God's field. I'm God's building. God's Spirit dwells in me." But that completely misses the point of these passages. In fact, it's counter to the point.

I was a little surprised to find something of this tendency in my own thinking. I think I am generally very conscious of the Church as a mystical entity of which I am but a cell. When I think about ministry, I think Church, but I realized that when I think about the spiritual life, I think me -- as if it's just me and Jesus sitting in the corner talking about these things.

There's a place in Portland that bills itself as the world's smallest park. It perfectly illustrates the problem with this kind of thinking.



When I think about bearing fruit, I think about myself as a single plant which must produce (but I can do it since I have the Holy Spirit, right?). But this weekend as I read the words, "You are God's field," it dawned on me that that must be plural. And so it isn't just me that must bear fruit. We must bear fruit. And we can do that because the Holy Spirit dwells in us. And I don't think this means in each of us individually, except in a secondary way. I think it's more of an collective effect. almost in a Jungian sense. Which one of my brain cells had this idea? None of them, but also all of them. That's what I mean.

It draws me to Luke 17:21, the oft-quoted "the kingdom of God is within you." But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that that is a wrong translation and that the NRSV's "the kingdom of God is among you" is much better.

We are God's field. Together we will produce much fruit.

Christ Is Risen!

Bearing Burdens

I participated tonight in my congregation's prayer vigil. This is one of the most meaningful opportunities the church offers me each year. As I knelt in the sanctuary working through the various prayer requests people had filled out, I had a sense of being connected with these people and crying out with them before God. It is such an incredible blessing to be able to do this. And yet it is also draining.

There are so many people in my congregation right now suffering from cancer, it breaks my heart. It's been a difficult Lent for our church. I've known it from various prayer requests that have been circulating, and I can feel it in talking with people.

Tonight as I prayed I felt a real sense that I was bearing the burdens of our church family before God. It was a blessing to be able to do it, but I felt what an incredible weight it truly is. When I came home, I shared with my wife how it grieved me. Then I added, "At least we have prayer." What would life be like without prayer?

On this night, when we remember how Christ bears the sins and sorrows of the whole world, I am so very thankful. I would not be able to bear these burdens if I weren't able to turn them over to him.

"You Shall Never Wash My Feet"

My pastor came out to preach the sermon at tonight's service wearing only a T-shirt and a bath towel and carrying a bowl of water. "What did you expect," he asked, "a man in a white dress and a nine-foot necktie and a nice, polite sermon?" Meanwhile, I, sitting perilously close to the front, was terrified that he was going to call me up to wash my feet. I can only imagine how Peter and the disciples felt.

Pastor could have ended the sermon right there, and I would have already been much blessed by it, but he went on to preach a wonderful sermon about how Maundy Thursday shows us that God gives us what we neither expected nor wanted and it turns out to bless us beyond what we could have hoped for.

What God Has Done

I wrote the weekly devotion for my church's e-mail newletter this week. As always, it was a blessing to me to do so -- very likely more of a blessing than it will be for those who read it. The same is generally true of this blog. I think what I wrote this week is worth sharing, so here it is.


It feels strange thinking about Easter during Holy Week. I feel like I'm jumping ahead. Shouldn't I think about the sobering events of Holy Week before moving on to the joy of Easter? You have to go through the cross to get to the resurrection. But as I was thinking about this, I remembered that it all belongs together: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday.... These aren't three events. They're one event, and that event is our exodus.

The Bible shows this in an amazing way. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, we are told that Jesus' last supper with his disciples was a Passover meal. This meal is overflowing with imagery and meaning. As Jews eat the Passover meal, they tell their story, beginning with Abraham, "a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt." They remember the oppression of their ancestors in Egypt. And they celebrate how God delivered them from bondage and oppression and made them into a great nation.

As Jesus shares this meal with the disciples, he draws all of this imagery into the sacred events about to transpire and infuses the story with even more meaning. In what was about to take place, God struck the decisive blow against the oppression and slavery of sin, death and the power of the devil in the world. And as he prepares for this, Jesus shares a meal with his disciples that will become the focal point for Christian community.

John's gospel also makes a strong connection between Jesus' last days and the Passover, but John emphasizes a different aspect, a more mystical aspect. John doesn't speak about the connection between the Last Supper and the Passover. John shows that Jesus himself is the Paschal Lamb. He records that Jesus was crucified "on the Day of Preparation for the Passover" (John 19:14) at the hour that the lambs were traditionally slaughtered.

This presents the fulfillment of what John the Baptist had said of Jesus at the beginning of the gospel, that he is "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." God delivered the Israelites from Egypt through death, the death of every firstborn in Egypt, of both man and beast. But God spared the Israelites from this death by having them mark their doorposts with the blood of a slaughtered lamb. Even so, though death ravages the world around us, God has marked the world with the blood of his Lamb. He has delivered us.

Having seen this, we should not be surprised by Easter. God has promised. He will do it. And I think that's what Easter is about. It is the great proclamation. God has done it! A couple of years ago at an Easter service we were singing "Say It Loud." When we came to the words "Tell the world what God has done," it clicked for me. I saw, no, I felt what Easter means. "Death has been swallowed up in victory!" (1 Co. 15:54) I wept.

God has done it. The world is changed. Life, true life, the life of God, has broken into the world. And now the Lord invites us to join with him as he renews the world from the inside out.

Say it loud. Say it strong. Tell the world what God has done!

The Best Christians

Luther says in his lectures on Romans:

Not the most learned who read much and write many books are the best Christians. But those are the best who with ready willingness do what they (the learned) teach from books. But the willing doers can do those things only if through the Holy Spirit they possess love. For this reason we must fear for our time, in which, thanks to the publication of many books, people indeed become very learned men, but also very unlearned Christians.

Choosing Our Battles

"When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."
-Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun."
-Ecclesiastes 1:9

Things have changed a lot since Thoreau's day. America has abolished slavery, something which many Americans considered impractical in 1849 when Civil Disobedience was written. But old things have a habit of turning up in new ways. Today, a sixth of the population of the earth lives in extreme poverty, having less than a dollar a day with which to attempt to survive.

And once again while this grave injustice goes on, our country busies itself about an unrelated war. Now surely the war on Iraq is substantially different from the war on Mexico. Now we're fighting for "Iraqi freedom." Then we were fighting for the "liberation" of Texas. Maybe it's not that different after all.

Today marks the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. By one estimate, the U.S. will spend $500 billion dollars on miltary expenses this year. Meanwhile, we continue to fall well short of our 2002 promise (in the Monterry Consensus) to devote 0.7 percent of our GNP to foreign aid. We currently only meet about $16 billion dollars of a $70 billion dollar commitment.

We can fight to end terrorism, or we can fight to end poverty. Will we choose our sense of security over our neighbor's survival?

Cheap Kindness

I noticed something unpleasant about myself today.

My wife's best friend (how do I say this?) lives a less materialistic lifestyle than my wife and I do. I know that probably sounds like a nice(?), but terribly condescending way, of saying she doesn't have as much money as we do, but it really is more than that. She has different priorities.

Sometimes this woman borrows my car while I'm at work (I take the train). It's the least I can do, right? Today, though, I saw just how "least" it is. When I got back to my car at the end of the day, I got frustrated by the fact that she always moves the seat. How petty is that?

So this is what I realized. I thought it was kind of me to let her use my car. Don't worry I have it in proportion. I knew it was just a small kindness. But I thought it was a kindness. And then after I overreacted about having to move the seat, I saw that I was only happy to do this to the extent that it didn't cost me anything. What kind of kindness is that?

What is this all about? I think I understand St. Augustine's reaction to stealing the pears.

Discipleship and Theosis

One of the great wonders of my life is that I go through periods where I can see that the Lord is trying to teach me something. I see it in the convergence of the same idea from several sources. I don't always know immediately what it is that he is teaching me, but I see enough to sit up and pay attention.

Right now, the idea of the presence of Christ in faith seems to be a channel for such teaching. I just read Tuomo Mannermaa's book, Christ Present in Faith, which was, of course, the seed. Then, no sooner has I started reading that book than I saw Dwight's posting (several weeks old by the time I came across it) on The Thinklings' blog suggesting that the same idea could be found in Bonhoeffer's Discipleship

Now this is no small piece of data because it marks the shift from a merely interesting theological idea to something of more direct use -- discipleship.

Then this week I was listening to George MacDonald's Getting to Know Jesus when to my great surprise, I found the same idea in MacDonald's sermon "Mirrors of Christ." And those familiar with MacDonald will no doubt know that I found it paired with discipleship once again.

In this sermon, MacDonald is preaching on 2 Corinthians 3:12-18:

Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness from glory to glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

Macdonald's key insight is that where this translation (and the translation he was using) says "reflecting", St. Paul really means something more like "mirroring" but "mirroring" in the phenomenological sense. That is, just as when you see a light in a mirror you see the light deep inside it, dwelling in the mirror, and so when we "mirror" the glory of Christ, it is because the light of Christ is inside us, shining out.

Now this is still a long leap from theosis, but bear with me and listen to some of the language he uses:

"The face of Jesus himself, as we behold Him dwelling in us, as light dwells in a mirror, is the spirit of Christ working in us and changing us 'from glory to glory' even by the Lord the Spirit."

"There is no doubt we shall reflect it, but you shall do better than reflect it. A man reflects it when he talks about it, but he is to be changed, he is to be transformed into the same image 'from glory to glory.' We become glorious by the presence of Christ dwelling in us and working in us until as He was in the world so we are in the world and are radiant with His light."

"I try to be honest but I know I cannot and never should be until [Christ] is absolutely supreme in me and until through His presence in my soul, I love my neighbor...even as Christ loved him."

"Let us open heart and soul to the divine presence of the Lord, the Spirit which works a change in men through His glory into a glory of their own which is His still and the same, originating from Him and yet theirs. Friends, we shall make no progress whatever until we set ourselves to do what Jesus Christ tells us."

"You will have what you call your plan of salvation. You will talk about the merits of Christ and the atonement of Christ, and you will do anything to set yourself to obey Christ -- anything but take the Living One himself. You are quite ready to take as much as anybody will give you about Him. Is it not with some of you all about Him and about Him while He Himself is not in you for you love the world and the things of the world?"

"Friends, be honest with yourselves. Are ye beholding the open face of Christ? Do you lie with your whole natures like a mirror for Him to fill with His radiance? Are you obeying Him? Is the will of God the glory of your being, or are you merely ferreting about in this world to get something to have?"

You can see in these latter quotes where all of this has been leading. If I understand MacDonald correctly, he is saying that the will is the avenue by which the presence of Christ comes into our lives -- namely by yielding our will to his will.

Key idea: "Friends, we shall make no progress whatever until we set ourselves to do what Jesus Christ tells us."

As St. Augustine says in his Confessions, "This was the sum of it: not to will what I willed but to will what you willed."

Or as Jesus says in John's gospel, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love."

Spiritual Running

We must remember that a thousand years is as but a day in the eyes of the Lord.

In his Lectures on Galatians, commenting on Gal. 5:7 ("You were running well."), Luther says:

To us, of course, it sems that everything is moving ahead slowly and with great difficulty; but what seems slow to us is rapid in the sight of God, and what hardly crawls for us runs swiftly for him. Likewise what is sorrow, sin and death in our eyes is joy, righteousness and life in the eyes of God for the sake of Christ, through whom we are made perfect.

How much spiritual progress have you made in the past 10 years? In God's eyes, it was accomplished in a few minutes. What we must do, we must do quickly for our time is short, but what God is doing is done without rush. Even our failures teach us, and when the Lord builds the house, no labor is in vain.

This thought gave me some solace as I looked back at how Lent has gone as compared to how I had hoped. Perhaps it will be of some comfort to you as well.

Palm Sunday

According to Matthew’s gospel, when Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, "the whole city was in turmoil, asking, 'Who is this?'" This always seems to be the question about Jesus, "Who is this?" No answer will quiet the question. Even we who follow him must continually ask ourselves, "Who is this?"

There's a tradition recorded in the ancient Jewish Talmud about the coming of the Messiah, seeking to reconcile the two prophetic traditions. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said, "If they are worthy, he will come 'with the clouds of heaven;' (Dan. 7:13) if they are unworthy he will come 'poor and riding upon a donkey.' (Zech. 9:9)" (Sanhedrin 98a). This is a favorite Talmudic saying among Christians because we associate both of these verses with the coming of the Messiah also, but have we learned anything?

First of all, as Christians we should know that it isn't because the Jewish people weren’t worthy that Jesus came "humble and mounted on a donkey." We know that it is instead simply because that's the kind of king Jesus is. "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me," he says, "for I am humble and gentle in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." The Jews missed him, we say, because they were looking for the wrong kind of Messiah – because they had the wrong ideas about power and glory.

But have we really learned anything? Many Christians today are anxiously awaiting Christ's "glorious appearing" – we long to see him "coming on the clouds of heaven." We say that the Jews did not recognize Christ because they were expecting a different kind of Messiah – they were fooled by his humility. Do we do better?

Jesus describes what it will be like when he returns in this way: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory…he will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.'"

We have prepared ourselves to see Christ when he comes in glory, but are we prepared to see him in the world today? Christ is all around us. He is there in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. All we need to do to see him is ask, "Who is this?"

Praying the Psalms

I visited Mount Angel Abbey today to hear Konrad Schaefer speak on the Psalms. I love Mount Angel Abbey, and their "Christian in the World" classes are exceptional. This one definitely did not disappoint.

The problem with a lot of current scholarship is that you hear it and then say to yourself, "That's very interesting," but then the next step isn't nearly obvious. The wonderful thing about these teaching sessions at Mount Angel is that the scholars take that next step and discuss why what they're telling you makes a difference for your spiritual life. But I'm a theology geek, so I'm taking what I heard today back to the "that's very interesting level." (Though I will also use what I learned.)

Among his opening advice, Fr. Schaefer said that as a good way into the Psalms you should pick a single psalm and meditate on it every day for a week or more until you are familiar enough with the psalm that you, in essence, become the poet -- the psalm is your prayer. Later, discussing the liturgical significance of the psalms, he said that the psalms are the prayers of the church. When we pray the psalms, we are praying with the Church and as a member of the Church.

Now these are both ideas that I've heard before, but today the two connected in my mind. I am the psalmist. The psalms are the prayers of the Church. You are the psalmist. The psalms are the prayers of the Church. Do you see how big that is?

My prayers, your prayers, aren't just mine and yours -- they are the Church's prayers. They're our prayers individually, each of us calling out of the depths to our God, but then they grow, and they become not just prayers that continue to be ours and the Church lets us toss in the bucket. Our prayers are the prayers of the Church. And the psalms are a vehicle for this amazing process.

Here's something else I connected it to -- Bonhoeffer says somewhere (in Life Together I think) that when we pray the psalms it isn't we who pray but rather Jesus prays the psalms through us. Now join that with the ideas above. My prayers, your prayers, are the prayers of the Church because as we live our lives, as we struggle, Christ is in us, struggling with us, and when we cry out to God, we are, each of us and collectively, crying out to God as Christ.

Praise the Lord O my soul.

Christ Present in Faith

I found out tonight that my church's adult education committee will, in fact, let me lead a class on anything I want. As of tonight, I'm on the schedule to lead a two week study on the new Finnish interpretation of Martin Luther's theology.

I've recently taken a hiatus from my journey through Fred Copleston's History of Philosophy in order to read Tuomo Mannermaa's Christ Present in Faith: Luther's View of Justification. It's quite a fascinating book.

The idea started when Dr. Mannermaa was asked to find a point of contact between Lutheran theology and Russian Orthodox theology. Now, it turns out that there is quite a lot of overlap to be found there, but for whatever reason, Dr. Mannermaa wanted to find contact specifically in the area of justification (probably because it is "the article on which the Church stands or falls"). And what he found was, that if you take Luther's words ontologically (for instance, when he says "in faith, Christ himself is present") you can discover throughout Luther's writings a harmony between his view of justification and the Orthodox view of theosis.

In the bit I was reading tonight Mannermaa was talking about the communicatio idiomatum (communication of attributes) that shows up frequently under various names in Luther's writings -- not the communicatio idiomatum between the two natures of Christ, but an analogous transfer of properties between Christ and Christians. This is the "happy exchange" taken to the nth degree. It's well agreed among Protestants that Christ took our sins on himself and we get his righteousness. But this isn't generally understood ontologically, which is the shift Mannermaa proposes. Christ is our righteousness!

Although Mannermaa doesn't cite this example in the book, the passage that jumped out in my mind is from Luther's later description of his "tower experience":

I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: "The righteousness of God is revealed in it, as it is written: 'He who through faith is righteous shall live.'" I began to understand that in this verse the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the righteousness of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive righteousness, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: "He who through faith is righteous shall live." All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

The classical Protestant understanding of "the righteousness of God" is that of imputed righteousness, so that in the above passage we might just as well read "the righteousness of God ... that by which God declares us righteous." But notice that the rest of the passage doesn't make any sense read that way. God doesn't declare us wise, or declare us strong, or declare us to have worked.... On the other hand, if you read this as Luther talking about a kind of communicatio idiomatum, it all falls into place!

Budget Morality

Two very different views on Bush's budget proposal are provided by Myron Magnet writing on opinionjournal.com and Jim Wallis on calltorenewal.org

Whatever his personal beliefs may be, Mr. Magnet is not burdened by representing a faith-based organization and so can apparently speak as he wishes. When I first saw this article, linked to with little comment from the OrthdoxyToday Blog I thought it must be a parody. Nobody really thinks that do they? But apparently they do.

Mr. Magnet says, "What's called for is the traditional American 'opportunity society,' as much a boon to the poor as to everyone else." I thought our country stopped telling Horatio Alger stories decades ago.

The theme of his article seems to be that the poor are poor simply because they don't want not to be. If you're poor, implies Magnet, it's your own fault, and we shouldn't further burden you with a welfare worker that might "try to persuade [you] that [your] plight stems from an unjust economy."

One of the readers who left feedback on the OrthodoxyToday site said, "Sometimes I think that Leftism amounts to no more than ignorance of economics." I'll plead guilty to that. I am basically ignorant of economics. What's more, I don't really care about economics. I do, however, care about people who are struggling to make a living, and I'm not convinced that this class of people is going away. Individuals may manage to lift themselves out of poverty -- maybe even because of opportunities created by policies that favor corporate America -- but the lower class itself isn't going anywhere.

Magnet says, "The War on Poverty rests on a false premise: that capitalism creates a permanent class of poor." This may be true. It might not be capitalism that creates the permanent class of poor. Nevertheless, there they are. What are we going to do about it? Extend some help, or give them a stern lecture?

One of the reader responses asks when you've heard a liberal utter the phrase "personal responsibility"? Well, I heard a funny bit about it on Garrison Keillor's show a while back. It's definitely been more recently than I heard a conservative say "living family income."

Dogma

Last week I bought a book on confessional Lutheran dogmatics. When my wife saw the title, she asked, "Isn't dogmatics a bad thing?" I explained that "being dogmatic" is generally a bad thing, but "dogmatics" as a field of study isn't. But then when I explained what it is (I can't remember the words I used), I had to admit that it did still sound kind of negative.

But last night this occurred to me. When you learn to play a musical instrument, one of the first things you have to do is master playing scales. And artists in training generally learn to master realism before moving on to abstract art. And I read once in an introduction to one of William Faulkner's novels that only great writers who are masters of grammar can really get away with breaking the rules the way Faulkner does.

Although I don't think I've heard this principle applied to theology, having interacted with many armchair theologians, the strength of the analogy is clear to me.

While thoughtful theology quite regularly requires us to release our tight grip on dogma, a theology that isn't rooted in the foundations of historic Christian tradition is apt to go quite far astray.

I suppose this is really what George Lindbeck is getting at in The Nature of Doctrine, but I had never made the connection before.

The Da Vinci Rant

OK, so I recently finished listening to The Da Vinci Code on CD. I put in a hold request at my local library over a year ago, but I was something like 49th in line, so I didn't get it until last week.

I'm not really sure on what basis to evaluate it. I don't often read mystery novels, so I'm not sure what people expect. If you're looking for a book where it is possible to solve the puzzles before the answers are revealed in the book, then I guess it's probably OK, although I was occaisionally appalled at how utterly oblivious the "experts" in the book were to some things that I thought were obvious. I was pretty sure I knew the "main" secret of the book by disc 5 of 13 and wasn't shaken when Langdon explicitly ruled it out as a possibility. Still, the story did suck me in.

The history is, of course, awful. I feel like I'm going to get branded as a fundamentalist for saying that, but I think it's an objective fact. Most appalling, of course, is the scene in Teabing's library where Teabing "unmasks" Christian orthodoxy while Langdon stands by and nods like an Ed McMahon bobblehead doll, both treating Sophie with unmasked condescension. The dynamics of the scene are quite realistic, as anyone who has been in the company of two or more academicians will know, but what they actually say borders on ridiculous.

I know this book is meant as fiction, and as such I am prepared to give it a lot of leeway, but even in a book of fiction when an Oxford-affiliated British Royal Historian speaks and a Harvard professor stands by nodding, the reader ought to be able to expect something that is at least reasonable.

About a year ago, I was on an airplane and I overheard two women in the seats next to me talking. One was reading The Da Vinci Code. The other said, "It's just fiction right." The first woman replied, "Yes, but it's very well researched." I think that about sums up the popular consensus. It doesn't matter that it's just fiction, Americans don't understand realistic fiction that way. I've actually heard someone talking about the "close vote" by which the Council of Nicea "approved Jesus' divinity" as if it were a fact, without making any reference to where they picked up this "fact."

Between listenings, I visited Dan Brown's web site, which has some pretty interesting stuff, by the way. One of the things I was most surprised to discover is that Brown considers himself a Christian. He says that the novel isn't anti-Christian in any way (which is basically true), and that he is very excited about the way it is stimulating people to examine the basis of their faith (which is a very good thing).

The thing is, if people "examine the basis of their faith" without any reliable guidance (and this book most certainly does not provide reliable guidance) then there is a very real danger that they'll end up in a worse state than they started out in. If the blind lead the blind, both fall into a pit.

I don't know anything about the personal faith of Dan Brown, so I'll use his fictional character Robert Langdon as an example. Langdon stands by nodding his agreement as Teabing makes the quite ridiculous claim that before the Council of Nicea Jesus followers' regarded him as "a mortal prophet... a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless." So I would presume that Langdon shares this belief that Jesus was just a man. And yet the book closes with Langdon praying at the feet of Mary Magdalene.

So, the objection which screams out to be spoken is, if Jesus was just a man, why on earth would it make any difference whatsoever whether his bloodline is preserved? I mean, if I somehow discovered that I was descended from Alexander the Great that would be very interesting to me personally, but it wouldn't in any way make me an important person. And, if Jesus does not incarnate the divine anything how does Mary Magdalene come to be the embodiment of the divine feminine???

And that kind of leads me to my next complaint. One of the Common Questions on Brown's web site begins with the statement, "This novel is very empowering to women." Now, I'm not a woman, so I'm supremely unqualified to say, but is it really? I mean, the female lead is a professional and occaisionally independent woman, but at other times she is the absolute stereotypical damsel in distress, and in the scene in Teabing's library she is a downright pile of jelly -- to say nothing of the fact that in the end there is innuendo to the effect that Langdon is going to bag her.

And then, as I heard Luke Timothy Johnson observe, there is the suggestion that Mary Magdalene might have been an important figure if she was Jesus' wife, but not if she were a prostitute (a position, incidentally, which is nearly always brought about by socio-economic misfortune rather than moral indecency). Is this guy Brown reading the same Bible I am?

Finally, an observation brought on by the fact that I am a geek....

King's College desparately needs a Google Search Appliance. According to the book, when Langdon and Neveu go to the King's College library and search the theological database for "LONDON, KNIGHT, POPE" the librarian could "feel the hum of the massive mainframe downstairs scanning data at a rate of 500 MB/sec." I performed the same search on Google, scanning the entire World Wide Web (certainly terabytes of data) and got back 328,000 results in three tenths of a second.

Heresy and Mystery

I was reading an article tonight on explorefaith.org about The Da Vinci Code (still more to come soon) by Rev. John Sewell, and it raised an interesting point on heresy.

It seems to have become rather trendy of late to make the observation that the word "heresy" is derived from a Greek word meaning "to choose". Quite often this observation is the beginning of a typically post-modern spiel about how one choice is just as good as another, and orthodoxy is only orthodox because those who made those choices came into power. So when Sewell made this observation I let out a sigh.

But I was pleasantly surprised. His point wasn't that one choice is as good as another. His point was that the choice comes from a desire for certainty and this desire for certainty is the real problem. Sewell says, "The heresy is to not be willing to live with the tension of the paradox, but rather to want reality easily understandable."

Mystery is the heart of Christian faith (and probably the heart of other faiths as well). When we grow weary of mystery and press on for precision and certainty, heresy is the only possible outcome.

“It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity.”
-Albert Einstein

Sewell sums up his point nicely, saying, "The fact that the church chose the way of paradox and ambiguity as the most authentic way to live in the mystery of God revealed in Christ is the most telling reason for the enduring power of its life and message."

Unorthodox Icons

I just got back from San Francisco. It's quite a city. As I mentioned previously, I worshipped at Grace Catherdral, having chosen that over such available alternatives as, I kid you not, St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church.

A Love Supreme

I saw St. John Coltrane from a cab as we drove by, but now, having looked into it more I'm kind of sorry I didn't check it out. It was one of a handful of oddities I saw during my trip.

Back at Grace Cathedral, I found icons of John Donne and Martin Luther King Jr. and an icon of Mary Magdalene that looks like it could be straight out of "The Da Vinci Code" (more on the latter soon). I've since discovered that these are some of the tamer icons written by artist Robert Lentz. Browse around the bridgebuilding.com and you'll find some things that could make all but the most syncretistic of Christians flinch.

I liked the King icon enough to pick up a copy. It does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of his message.

But the Golden Gate City wasn't all progressive Christianity. While I was there, I also visited the Haight. Visiting a shop after shop I found myself a pilgrim in an unholy land. Well...not unholy exactly...more like "spiritual but not religious". The shops are fully of religious artifacts from various eastern religions, incense and books on various mystical themes. In addition to the standard books on Zen and the like, I found books representing Sufism and Judaism, but, aside from the occaisional volume relating to Thomas Merton, Christianity was noticably lacking.

As I was standing outside The Gap at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (weep if you must)

Generation Gap

it occured to me that this area is ripe for a store representing the richness of Christian spirituality. It could offer the standard incense alongside icons, rosaries, Gregorian chant CDs and the like. Maybe a back room with frequent lectures on deep Christian themes.