Category Archives: Religion and theology

Welcoming the Unacceptable

Posted on by | No Comments

(Luke 7:36-50)

The calling to preach the word of God is a series of opportunities to get yourself into trouble.  On the one hand, there is the recurring invitation from the Spirit of God to, as the late Representative John Lewis put it, “get into good trouble”; on the other, there are myriad chances to put your foot in your mouth and start chewing on your ankle.  This is one reason why the wise preacher goes forth only with much prayer, in a spirit of dependence.  Let’s pray.

 

As many of you know, we came to Indiana from Colorado, where I pastored a church in a small mountain resort community.  The church was pretty thin on the ground in the county, but I had a few colleagues whom I really appreciated.  One was Doug Stevenson, a New Zealander who had come to the US a few years before to pastor an independent congregation out in Kremmling, in the western part of the county.  One day, somewhat pensively, Doug told our pastors’ group his daughter was coming to visit from New Zealand.  He and his wife Ethel were eager to see her, but there was a complicating factor:  she was bringing her girlfriend along.  Unsure how to respond to the situation, he had reached out to a friend for guidance.  His friend listened, then told Doug to put a double bed in his daughter’s room, set everything up as nicely as he could, and leave chocolates on the pillows.  “Make your daughter welcome,” was the message, which meant making her girlfriend welcome too.

I learned at Regent to take hospitality seriously, both from the way the Regent community valued it and from my introduction to the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey, who taught me the great importance of hospitality in the world in which Jesus lived; but I still saw it primarily in practical terms, as one of the small graces in which and by which we’re called to live.  That conversation with Doug widened my perspective, because his friend wasn’t talking about hospitality as a practical response to human need but as a theological response to the human condition.Read more→

Neurodiversity and the church: exploratory thoughts

Posted on by | No Comments

As I noted briefly a few weeks ago, the church has a neurodiversity problem which it needs to address.  Those of us who are neurodivergent in one way or another face challenges both in corporate worship and in the discipleship programs of the church, but the typical congregation is unaware or dismissive of these challenges.   If you or your children have ADD, or are on the autism spectrum, or deal with dyslexia, or have other neurological/neurochemical processing issues that make you different from neurotypical folks, you’re most likely on your own.  What works for “everyone else” ought to work for you, and it’s up to you to make it work.

Part of the issue is that neurotypical people do not understand what it is to be neurodiverse—and usually don’t see any need to.  Neurodivergent conditions are defined from the outside by neurotypical people, and they are defined symptomatically.  Put another way, these conditions (and thus, by extension, those who have them) are defined as collections of behaviors which neurotypical people see as problems that need to be fixed.  In some cases, they are defined morally and condemned as willful misbehavior by people who refuse to believe the condition actually exists.Read more→

Read your own mail

Posted on by | No Comments

The perception of Christians in Western culture these days is growing increasingly negative, in large part because we are seen as focused on telling other people what to do and what not to do.  Regrettably, that view has some truth to it.  Regrettably, but not surprisingly; after all, we don’t cease to be sinners just because we start going to church.  Even the most Christlike people I have ever known were simul iustus et peccator, in Luther’s phrase, simultaneously saint and sinner.  The redeeming work of Jesus in our lives by the power of his Holy Spirit is the deepest reality of our hearts, but the reality of the sin in our hearts is very deep as well.

One of the effects of our sin is a proclivity to read our Bibles the wrong way ’round.Read more→

Truth is relational

Posted on by | No Comments

One of my daughters was walking around the other day wearing a shirt declaring, “Truth is a person.”  It is of course a riff on John 14:6, where Jesus declares, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except by me.”  It’s also a profoundly important statement, especially to our scientistic, propositionalist culture.

And yes, I did mean scientistic, not “scientific”—that our culture is shaped by the belief, summarized well by the physicist Ian Hutchinson, that “science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge.”  One problem with scientism as a philosophy (there are several) is that it produces a conflation of truth with fact.  Not only does this lead people to assume that “truth” and “opinion” are opposed categories (when the actual divide is between fact and opinion), it also encourages the belief that “truth” is merely a matter of asserting correct propositions.  As long as you have the right words in the right order, you’re speaking the truth.

This understanding of truth is inarguably correct in math and the hard sciences, in which a formula is equally correct regardless of who writes it, to whom, under what conditions, in what mood.  The further you get from the purity of mathematics, however, the more tenuous that understanding becomes; in speaking of the realities of the human heart, it collapses entirely.  Read more→

Mercy as justice

Posted on by | No Comments

Whoever keeps the whole law but fails at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.  For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.”  If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.  Speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty, for judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy.  Mercy triumphs over judgment.

—James 2:10-13

In human courts, mercy and justice seem clearly to be mutually opposed:  justice for the victims of crime means imposing punishments on criminals, and pleas for mercy are requests that those punishments be lessened (or not imposed at all).  At the same time, the operation of human justice consists of the rendering and enactment of judgments on crime and criminals.

Given these realities, it’s no surprise that we assume God’s justice and mercy to be equally at odds.  Salvation through Jesus is often understood as God’s mercy overcoming his justice, and this understanding is presented as a straightforward reading of James 2:13b:  “Mercy triumphs over judgment.”  We may not even notice that it says judgment rather than justice—after all, aren’t they the same thing?

Well, no.  No, they aren’t.Read more→

Christian idolatry

Posted on by | No Comments

We like making life all about us (at least until things start going wrong).  That’s as true of believers as of anyone else, which means there is a constant pull to shrink our faith—to scale it to the size of our problems, our goals, and our perception of our own sin.  The only countermeasure to this pull is to keep refocusing ourselves on the bigness of God and the great sweep of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  As Mark Brouwer put it, “The Gospel is about reconciling people together, setting captives free, overcoming injustice, bringing healing to hurts . . . it’s not just getting our sins forgiven so that we can go to heaven when we die.”

Anything less than the true gospel can become an idol, because anything which is not the gospel can be made to be all about us, one way or another.  Even our salvation can become an idol; rather than being “the salvation which God gave me even though I don’t deserve it,” it can become “the salvation which belongs to me because I earned it.”  Instead of a reason for humility, it becomes a cause for pride.  Sadly, the world can see this clearly in the many professed Christians who carry themselves with a sense of moral and spiritual superiority.

The only countermeasure is for the church to continually refocus and recenter itself on the full gospel of Jesus Christ.  It’s only by making our churches all about the gospel that we can keep them free of the idolatries that will otherwise, inevitably, seep in.  Any other focus makes idolatry inevitable, because if we have the opportunity to make our faith all about us, we’ll take it.  Every time.

 

Gustave Doré, The Brazen Serpent, engraved by Alphonse François, 1883.

In my end is my beginning

Posted on by | No Comments

We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.  In my end is my beginning.

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “East Coker,” V.

If people know anything about 2 Corinthians, it’s probably the “thorn in the flesh” passage, 12:7-10.  On the one hand, there are all sorts of ideas as to what the thorn in the flesh was, and those sorts of speculative disagreements always generate interest.  On the other, this is where we get the oft-quoted idea that God’s power is perfected in weakness.  Unfortunately, however, I think the standard interpretation of this passage misses what’s actually going on.Read more→

Belated, but still appreciated

Posted on by | 2 Comments

This week beat me; there’s no two ways about it.  I won’t say I didn’t get anything done, but I had specific plans to write, and those didn’t get done; a blog post I started last Friday is still sitting as a draft, just to name one thing.

I also didn’t get my weekly hope*writers post up before this.  I thought about doing two weeks’ worth in one post, but decided against it—it seemed to me that doing so would de-emphasize the writers to whom I’m linking, and I don’t want to do that.

I love the way Katie Scott put this:  “God is predictable in His character and unexpected in His actions.”  It always delights me when someone captures something I’ve been trying to say better than I’ve managed to say it.

Yolanda Lichty grapples with a terrible story which is little-known outside of Canada (I’m familiar with it from my time at Regent) in her post “215 Is too Many: Confessions and Questions of a White Canadian Mennonite”—the story of the residential schools to which indigenous peoples were forced to send their children and the abuses that happened in those schools.  I commend Katie Scott’s post to you because it’s encouraging; I commend Yolanda Lichty’s to you as a point of entry into a hard story that needs to be heard.

Putting away the hose

Posted on by | No Comments

(This is another excerpt from my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount. This is the whole first chapter, so it’s a longer post—about 2700 words.)

For all that I might ever say about the Sermon on the Mount, the most important single point, and the nub of all the rest, is this:  The Sermon is gospel, not law.  It is the proclamation of the good news that Jesus came that we might have abundant life—which is not just more of the same life the world has to offer.  The life Jesus gives is wholly new because it comes from a source outside this world:  it’s the life of the kingdom of God.  It is life which both flows out of and creates a change of allegiance and citizenship.  To be a disciple of Jesus is to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, giving our allegiance to the Lord of the universe above any earthly flag and any human government or authority.  The Sermon on the Mount shows us what it means to live as citizens of heaven among the nations of this world.[1]Read more→

Erasing the comfort zone

Posted on by | No Comments

(This is the third excerpt from chapter 17 of my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount; the first two excerpts are here and here.)

It’s not easy to accept Jesus’ declaration that the pure in heart are blessed, but it’s possible to assent intellectually without letting it interfere with our daily lives.  It’s far harder to heed John Owen’s dictum, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you,”[1] and declare war on our sin out of a desire to be pure in heart; but though that’s a major spiritual commitment, it’s still one we usually make with unconscious caveats.  We assume there are limits to how far we can be expected to go in order to put sin to death in our lives.  We assume God is reasonable—on our terms, by our definition—in his expectations.

Jesus shatters those assumptions, because his demands aren’t reasonable at all.  In fact, they’re barbarically unreasonable.  He commands us to do whatever we have to do to overcome sin in our lives, no matter how much we expect it to hurt or how much we have to give up.  If we try to tell him he’s asking too much of us, he looks us right in the eyes and says, “No, I’m not.”  There are no exceptions, no loopholes, no limits, and no statute of limitations to his command.Read more→