Putting away the hose

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(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

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(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→

On honesty and lament

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This is one of my favorite worship songs.  I say that advisedly, knowing the reaction that statement will get from a lot of people:  “That’s not a worship song!  It doesn’t end with praise!”  In fact, according to an interview the men of Tenth Avenue North gave a few years ago, a lot of Christian-music stations refused to play this song for just that reason:  it doesn’t end with everything resolved and God having made everything good again.

But this is a worship song.  If you don’t believe me, just ask the Psalmist.

I’m thinking about this tonight because of a remarkable, powerful post:  When Lament Doesn’t Quickly Resolve into Trust, by a woman named Desiree Brown.Read more→

Kierkegaard on love of enemy

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When Christianity requires us to love our enemies, one might say in a certain sense that it had good reason to require this, for God would be loved, and (speaking merely in a human way) God is man’s most redoubtable enemy, your mortal enemy; He would that you should die, die unto the world, He hates precisely that in which you naturally have your life, to which you cling with all your joy in living.

The men who have entered into no relation with God enjoy now—frightful irony!—the privilege that God does not torment them in this life. No, it is only the men whom He loves, who have entered into relation with God, whose mortal enemy (speaking merely in a human way) God may be said to be—but for all that out of love.

But He is your mortal enemy. He Who is love would be loved by you. This signifies that you must die, die unto the world, for otherwise you cannot love Him. . . .

How dreadful (speaking merely in a human way) is God in His love, so dreadful it is (speaking merely in a human way) to be loved of God and to love God. In the declaration that God is love, the subordinate clause is, He is your mortal enemy.

———and here we are playing the game that we are all Christians, that all love God, whereas by God being love and by loving God we nowadays understand nothing else but the nauseating syrupy sweets in which falsehood’s witnesses to the truth are wont to deal.

(from Attack upon Christendom, 1854-55; trans. Walter Lowrie, 1944, 1968, alt.)

 

Photo © 2009 Arne List.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Sharing a little wisdom

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I recently joined hope*writers (hence the badge at the top of the sidebar); it has been a delight for a number of reasons, one of which is discovering some of the other writers on the site and their work.  The logical thing to do, then, is to pass some of that on.

Rachel Rains on unexpected seasons:  as our own unexpected season continues, I’m grateful for these words of encouragement.

Jun Shu, “For the Weary Hearts in Waiting”:  this piece of comfort fits well with the post above.  Apparently God really wants to drive this point home for me today.

Sarah Treanor, “Field of Dreams”:  I’m also grateful for Sarah’s reminder that we need support—and for the encouragement to seek that support.  (I also encourage you to check out her portfolio.  Be aware that the first collection, “still, life,” was part of her way of processing the death of her fiancé; the images are appropriately powerful, cathartic, and unsettling.)

A different understanding of divorce and adultery

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(This is a second excerpt from chapter 17 of my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount; the first excerpt is here.)

That the Pharisees confronting Jesus [in Matthew 19] don’t believe divorce to be sinful is clear from their belief that Moses commanded divorce.  Jesus shows them how far wrong they have gone, and how hard their hearts have become, by linking divorce to adultery.  He does the same in the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s instructive to put the two statements together.  Matthew 19:9 is straightforward:  “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”[1]  The man is the guilty party from start to finish.  If he divorces his wife unjustly, God will not grant his divorce.  Any remarriage on his part is adulterous because it defies the will and purpose of God in creating marriage in the first place.  God will not simply accede to our pretensions to set his work aside for our own selfish purposes.Read more→

Is that actually what the Law says?

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(As I noted yesterday, though I haven’t been posting here, I have been continuing to work on the Sermon on the Mount book; so while I’m getting other things spooled up, I’m going to start posting excerpts from the manuscript as well.  I’m not going to do them in any particular order, just as they occur to me.  First up:  the opening of chapter 17, “Our Law Is Too Small,” on Jesus’ words regarding divorce.)

The power imbalance between men and women in first-century Jewish culture shows even more clearly when Jesus turns to address divorce.  He introduces the subject with the statement, “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’”[1]  The use of the word “also” acknowledges the close connection in subject matter between this quotation and his citation of the law against adultery in 5:27.  Unlike 5:27, however, the law cited here is not a commandment from God through Moses.  It’s inferred from the Torah, not taken from the Torah.  In this case, that makes all the difference in the world.Read more→

Tossing a few things out there

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The last while, obviously, has been a fallow period for me as blogging goes.  It hasn’t really been one for writing in general—among other things, I’ve been continuing to work on the Sermon on the Mount manuscript, which is now nineteen chapters in—but it means there are a lot of ideas rattling around in my brain that I haven’t taken the time or place to get down in print for exploration.  For the moment, then, I want to capture a few of them (as many as come to mind, anyway) to develop later.  These are undeveloped fragments—seeds of thought that have yet to yield a harvest.

  • Morality is fractal:  scale it up or scale it down, the patterns are the same.  For a great many people—all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time?—morality is whatever they figure they can get away with.  What’s the difference between someone cutting in the school pick-up line, or running a red light, or cheating the grocery store when using the self-checkout, on the one hand, and a politician lying to the media, or giving family members inside information and fake jobs, or trading favors with the rich and powerful?  Only one of scale.  It’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
  • Is racism systemic?  As someone trained in family systems theory, I have to say, “Of course it is,” because everything intra-human is systemic.  The real question is, if racism is systemic, what does that mean?  The one thing I can say with confidence is that it doesn’t mean what people assume it does.  In particular, it doesn’t mean the way to deal with racism is creating or changing a whole bunch of structures and rules.  That has its place, but while it would be overstating the point to say that structures don’t really matter . . . well, structures don’t really matter.  They’re important insofar as they amplify or restrict the functioning of human relational systems, but it’s those systems which truly matter.  Thinking about racism as actually systemic—as a thing which exists in relational systems as an expression and multiplier of the anxiety of those systems—is a lot harder than arguing about structures.  I don’t know where that thought leads, but I definitely want to follow it.
  • How can we in the church intentionally and intelligently do the work of discipleship and spiritual formation with various types of neurodivergent people?  I had an experience recently which opened my eyes to something I had somehow never seen:  my repeated failures at practicing some spiritual disciplines are at least in part because those spiritual disciplines were developed by and for neurotypical people.  My ADD brain responds to stimuli differently and has different feedback and reward systems than a neurotypical brain; someone on the autism spectrum, to take another example, operates in yet another way.  What would it look like to develop spiritual disciplines, or structures for spiritual formation, or tools for discipleship, for children of God with these and other types of neurodivergence?  What would it look like to take that seriously instead of assuming that what works for neurotypical folk ought to work just as well for us?

I know there are more things I’ve been pondering that I need to get out of my head where I can look them over and interact with them; whether I add them to this post or put up another one later, it’s time to start putting them down as I think of them so I can get to work.

 

Photo source unknown.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

Whom God Chose . . .

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(Romans 8:28-39)

Oh, the sun runs its course from the east to the west
With the best of our motives illumined,
Then it sinks with a sigh in the dusk of the heart
And our virtue lies worthless as rumor.

You can be what you like if you like what you are—
We reflect but the sum of our creeds;
But we don’t seem to seize on the tenets we hold,
And they slip through the sieve of our deeds.

When we see our mistakes, we ache with regret
And the pain makes a lasting impression,
But we are stoics at heart when the time is at hand
To beat our breasts and make a true confession.

Mark Heard for the win, as usual.  The poet laureate of the Christian struggle knew well that human beings are desperately in need of grace, because left to our own efforts and strength, even our best starts will not end well.  This is the problem that all human religions try to solve with rules and structures and authorities and consequences; but they cannot solve it, only lessen it, because none of those things can touch the heart.  Only God’s scandalous solution can do that.Read more→