for the family of Steven Curtis Chapman, and for the family of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy; and also, as always, please keep praying for Zimbabwe.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
Thoughts on the idolatry of relevance
Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously;
never have Christians been more irrelevant.—Os Guinness
It’s an important belief of those who believe in and make use of contemporary worship forms that the church must be aware of the world in its public worship; from this belief, they argue that worship must be “contemporary” and “relevant.” Unfortunately, these two words misfocus our discussions of worship. If we aim to be contemporary, we end by elevating the new above all else merely because it’s new; our interaction with the world around us grows shallow and unanchored, for we can offer little more than a Jesus-colored version of the existing culture. While this may well make people comfortable with us, it doesn’t give them any sense of the difference between worshiping in the presence of God and being one of the folks in the culture at large. Similarly, if our goal is to be relevant in our worship (which includes the sermon), then we will focus on what people want to hear and feel and meeting those desires rather than on reaching to their central need, which is for God.
This is not to say that the church shouldn’t be aware of the world, or try to understand the world, as if somehow striving to be irrelevant would be better; clearly, that isn’t the case. Rather, the problem is the assumption that “relevance” means being relevant to the world on its own terms, and that if our worship is to connect with the world, it must do so on the world’s terms. This is essentially an assumption that in the relationship between the church and the world, the world is the senior partner, and that we must defer to the culture around us as the arbiter of what works and why. This tends to produce a plastic, results-oriented view of worship, in which worship is to be judged by numbers and approval ratings—by outward signs, rather than by inward realities—and thus in which we understand our worship primarily in technical terms, as a human act which is primarily designed to meet measurable goals.
This would be well enough, if worship were in fact a human act about human realities, for then the details of our worship would be negotiable with the various voices of our culture. This view of worship rests on the assumption that worship is something which we initiate for our own purposes, which may include but are not limited to the desire to please God, and thus is something which we have both right and reason to manipulate as we please in order to achieve our own purposes.
The problem is, this assumption is false.
Worship isn’t something we initiate, it’s something to which God calls us out from our own purposes and activities, and which exists wholly apart from them; in the words of the Baptist pastor the Rev. Dr. Bruce Milne, “worship doesn’t begin with us at all, it begins with God.” Properly speaking, it also ends with God, and is about him at every point in between. That’s why, in the classical Christian understanding, worship always begins with Scripture, “because God takes the initiative and we respond.”
As already noted, this doesn’t mean that the church should conduct its worship in ignorance of the world, or without taking the world and its conditions into account; rather, it’s the reason why we need to be aware of the world, and the proper frame for that awareness. As the Catholic priest Fr. M. Francis Mannion, president of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, put it in a remarkable article in First Things, “The Church is—or should be—never more intensely aware of the city than when at worship. In liturgy, the Church is opened out to the world, and the world in all its dimensions is drawn into the act of worship.” Indeed, Fr. Mannion goes further, arguing that “The task of the liturgy is to symbolize and sacramentalize the liturgy of the heavenly city in the midst of the earthly city. . . . The public worship of the Christian community gathers up the liturgy of the human city, [and] gives expression to the religious yearnings of the human city.”
This is a viewpoint rooted in the ancient image of the two cities, the city of God and the city of this world, and the idea that the church is called to unite the two, bringing the heavenly city to earth and lifting the earthly city up to heaven. It’s on the basis of this understanding that the late Yale professor Fr. Aidan Kavanagh wrote, “What the liturgical assembly of Christian orthodoxy does is the world. Where the liturgical assembly does this is the public forum of the world’s radical business . . . When the liturgical assembly does this is the moment of the world’s rebirth—the eighth day of creation, the first day of the last and newest age.” This is an astonishing vision for the worship of the church; rather than casting the task of the worship planner and worship leader as tinkering up a version of Christian truth which those outside the church will find familiar and comfortable so that they can come in and be at ease, this sees that task as something far greater and far more challenging.
The church is to be aware of the world in its worship, not to seek to match its style or to attempt to be relevant to the world on its own terms, but in order to offer its true relevance: to show and tell the world those things with which it is not comfortable, because it has forgotten them. Rather than being a public echo of the world’s familiar business, we’re called to be “the public forum of the world’s radical business,” the place where the world is called back to the root of every matter, the source of every existence, to confront the God who made it; our worship, insofar as it meets needs, should be meeting needs which the culture does not see. Insofar as it’s about us at all, which is only secondarily, it should be building us up as the people of God to go out to serve him in the human city as agents of the city of God, and not for any other purpose.
The reason for this is that just as our worship is not primarily of or about ourselves, neither is it primarily of or about our present time; rather, in our worship we act by faith as theological time-travelers, bringing the eschatological future of Jesus’ return into the present age. In our worship, we stand before God in “the moment of the world’s rebirth—the eighth day of creation, the first day of the last and newest age,” participating in that moment in faith even as we continue to live in creation’s unfinished seventh day; our worship is the point at which that future and our present collide, in which the heavenly city is enacted in the midst of the earthly city.
To be “relevant” as the world understands relevance is to collapse that, to seek to worship only in the present time; it is thus to fail to worship in the sure and certain hope of the world’s rebirth, the time when Christ will return and the Alpha and Omega will make all things new at last. That’s why “relevant” churches tend to be all about this-worldly concerns like your paycheck, your sex life, and your golf game, seeking to help you do better what you’re already doing—they’ve lost the vision for anything greater, because they’re only worshiping in this world.
The church is called to be active in this world, yes, but in a very real sense, we’re called to worship in the next. As someone has said, we’re supposed to worship with bifocal vision, seeing both the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ—simultaneously. It’s only if we seek to do this that we’ll have the vision we need to have as the worshiping people of God; and at the same time, it’s only if we seek to do this, rather than to give the world a vision which it’s already prepared to accept, that we’ll be able to show it what it really needs to see.
Morning prayer
In the beginning, O God,
when the firm earth emerged from the waters of life
you saw that it was good.
The fertile ground was moist
the seed was strong
and earth’s profusion of colour and scent was born.
Awaken my senses this day
to the goodness that still stems from Eden.
Awaken my senses
to the goodness that can still spring forth
in me and in all that has life.
—J. Phillip Newell, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayer, 26.
What’s the rush?
He doesn’t look all that natural in front of a TV camera, and when he smiles, he tends to look as if he were doing an impression of Jack Nicholson playing the Joker, but John McCain has a good sense of humor for all that; he dropped by SNL recently for a brief bit on Weekend Update, encouraging Democrats to keep the primary contest going. Take a look:
This is noxious
My thanks to Pauline at Perennial Student for catching this. One of the more fun stories in recent years for those interested in the Constitution is the 27th Amendment, which was originally proposed as the 11th Amendment back in 1789; it wasn’t ratified at the time, but no deadline was set for ratification, so when a student at the University of Texas discovered it, the states were still able to consider it, and it was ultimately ratified in May 1992. The Amendment states,
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
The problem is, Congress is cheating, and the judiciary is letting them get away with it. Congress has continued to vote itself pay raises, it’s just called them COLAs (cost of living adjustments) instead, and the courts have refused to call them on it. Never mind that COLAs still “vary the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives,” the D.C. circuit of the Court of Appeals has ruled that the Amendment doesn’t apply to them—a flatly unreasonable and illogical reading of the text—and the Supreme Court has refused to hear any challenge to it.Why? Because Congress sets their pay. Congress can’t cut their pay, but only Congress can increase it. Our federal judiciary is letting Congress circumvent the Constitution and keep voting themselves pay raises to ensure they’ll keep raising the judges’ pay, too. In the larger scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal—but you know what? It’s still unconscionable.
Technical note
For those who may not have registered this, on those posts which have a “Read More” link at the bottom, that isn’t a link to the post page; rather, if you click on that, it will display the whole post right there in place on the main page of the blog. The guy who developed this calls it a “Peekaboo” link.
Thus, for instance, if you’re on the main page of the blog, you’ll see a “Read More” link just below this; if you click on it, you’ll see the rest of this sentence appear in place. Click on the “Summary only” link to return to the shorter display form.
Skeptical conversations, part V: The person and work of Jesus
Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-IV here.
A: So you believe Jesus was literally God, or part of God, or however you want to put it.
R: Yes, Jesus is God; specifically, the person of the Son. At the same time, he is a normal human male, with everything that means, except that his human nature was uncorrupted, unfallen. He is at one and the same time fully God and fully man.
A: Like the Red Queen, I, too, can believe six impossible things before breakfast; or at any rate, I’ll be to that point soon. It seems to me you have two problems: first, if Jesus was one of the persons of God, and he was down on earth in a human body, what does that do to the unity of God? After all, as you’ve noted, to be human is to be limited, and to be God is to be unlimited. Which raises the second question: how is it remotely possible that Jesus could have been both divine and human?
R: The answer to your first question is that just because the Son became a human being does not mean that he was in any way separated from the Father and the Spirit; they were still united with him, and the relationships between the three were just as close as they had ever been. This is because he was fully God and did not become any less so in becoming human.
A: Which still leaves the second question: how could he truly have been both?
R: Again, this isn’t something that can be explained propositionally; but again, I think it can be illustrated analogically. For one thing, remember light, which has two seemingly incompatible natures, a wave-nature and a particle-nature—and yet from all we can tell, it is both at once. For another (since there’s a piano over there against the wall) there’s the illustration Jeremy Begbie, the Cambridge theologian and pianist, uses.
A: Theologian and pianist? That’s an odd combination.
R: Yeah, he’s on the faculty in theology—or was last I heard, anyway—and he’s also a Fellow of the Royal College of Music, I believe. Given that combination of interests, it makes sense that he likes to use music to help explain Christology (that’s the term for the doctrine of Christ): when I play a note on the piano, where is the note?
A: Where is the note? Wherever the sound waves are, I suppose; everywhere in the room, though not precisely all at once.
R: Okay, now let me play two notes. Where are they?
A: The same as before—everywhere in the room.
R: But you’ll notice, they occupy the same volume of space; neither one excludes the other, and in fact, when you play them together, they become something more than just two notes. They still are two distinct notes, but they are also a unity. It’s the same way with Jesus; he is both God and man, and his two natures were two distinct notes, but also a unity: they are not blended together like a sauce, nor are they merely stuck together like a sandwich. As the Belgic Confession puts it, “the person of the Son has been inseparably united and joined together with human nature, in such a way that there are not two Sons of God, nor two persons, but two natures united in a single person, with each nature retaining its own distinct properties.”
A: I don’t understand how that can be. How can you have someone who is both infinite and finite, both omniscient and limited in knowledge, both omnipresent and localized, both omnipotent and limited in strength? It doesn’t make sense.
R: I don’t have a good answer. Some thinkers draw from a passage in Philippians 2 where Paul says that Jesus emptied himself, became a man, and took the form of a servant, and they argue that the Son gave up various of his divine attributes when he became human; since the Greek word for “emptying” is kenosis, this is called the kenosis theory. One problem with that approach is that if Jesus did in fact give up some of his divine attributes, he would no longer be fully God; so others have argued that while on earth, he gave up the right to use his powers freely, retaining all his attributes but submitting himself in their use to the will of the Father. To take omniscience as an example, when it was the Father’s will, he drew on it—in prophesying, for example, or in judging the hearts of people who spoke to him—but when it was not, he limited himself to normal human capabilities.
The idea that Jesus reconciled his divinity and his humanity by limiting his exercise of his divine powers makes some sense to me, but there’s a problem with it. It isn’t merely that Jesus was both divine and human, he still is; those two natures were united in him, and he didn’t leave his humanity behind when he left the earth.
A: I noticed that you were saying “is,” not “was”; I was going to ask you if you believe that Jesus is still human.
R: Yes. The Belgic Confession says that his two natures are so united that they were not even separated by his death or his ascension. The Son of God still shares our humanity. Given that, it seems to me problematic to reconcile Jesus’ two natures by saying, if you will, that he made it work on earth by turning down the volume on the God knob—that’s only a temporary solution to the problem. It may well be a true answer, but it isn’t a sufficient answer. So in the end, I have to say that I don’t understand how Jesus Christ could be both fully God with all his attributes and fully human with all our limitations; but I believe that he was.
A: Why does it matter?
R: It matters for a lot of reasons. For one thing, you might remember a song called “One of Us” that was a top hit around 1995 for Joan Osborne; the chorus asked this question: “What if God was one of us?/Just a slob like one of us?/Just a stranger on the bus/Trying to make His way home?” That question has an answer: God was one of us; the Son of God came down and took on everything that is involved in being human. He experienced our pains and our discomforts, our joys and our pleasures, our temptations and our struggles, our ups and our downs. He lived a fully human life, just like any of us, and that includes the full range of temptations; and the fact that he never gave in to any of them, and could not have, only means that he was tempted long past the point where we crumble and give in, making his struggles all the more agonizing.
That’s why Hebrews, which talks about Jesus as our high priest, says this: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Whatever we’re going through, he understands, because he’s been there himself.
A: Why the term “high priest”?
R: The high priest was the one who brought the petitions of the people to God, and he was the one responsible for the sacrifices; he was the only one allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, which he did once a year, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Jesus has now taken over these functions. He is our mediator, the one who brings our prayers to the Father and intervenes on our behalf; and he has completed and finished the sacrifices through his sacrifice of his own life. Once for all, he made atonement for all our sins when he died on the cross.
A: I have a problem with that. There was a piece in the paper not too long ago about a new book that raises some important questions about the doctrine of the atonement. If God is appeased by cruelty, if he would torture his son to appease his anger at sin—well, then he’s a child abuser, to be blunt, and you have a religion that sanctions violence and abuse.
R: That’s a common conclusion among feminist theologians; Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, the two who wrote that book, have been making that argument for a decade now, and they aren’t the only ones. I think, though, that their criticism comes because their theology lacks a proper understanding of the Trinity, and so they are misunderstanding the doctrine of the atonement.
Let me take a step back here and lay this doctrine out, and then come back to this point. First, the problem: evil is real and must be defeated; human sin is real and must be dealt with. Partly, this problem is legal in character, that there must be a penalty paid for our sin, and partly it is relational, that our sin has alienated us from God. The penalty due is death; blood must be shed to pay the price and to satisfy the wrath of God against sin. No lesser price is enough.
God chose to deal with evil by paying that price himself. The Father sent the Son to earth to live among us, and then to die in our place. Jesus was sentenced to death for having broken the law of God, though he was not guilty of any sin at all, and he went willingly to his execution. Because he was fully human, he went to the cross in solidarity with us, for us; because he was fully God, his self-sacrifice was of infinite value. Because he was both, he was the only one who could ever pay the necessary price for us. He took all the sin in the world on his back, and he paid the price for all of it; he took our place under the curse of the law, and took away the power of sin to condemn us. He bore our sentence of death and left us free, and then after three days he broke the power of death by rising from the dead, sealing his victory over Satan.
A: You can see why the objection to this arises.
R: Yes, but as I said, the objection arises because of an insufficiently trinitarian understanding. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross comes out of the relationships among the persons of the Trinity, and the whole Trinity is involved. As the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann has noted, this is not one member of the Trinity causing the suffering of another, as though the Father were standing aloof, using the Son as a whipping-boy; this is God intervening on our behalf, suffering for us, giving himself to pay the price for us. The Father sent the Son to the cross, but the Son went willingly; and remember, all three persons of the Trinity are interconnected, interwoven. The pain of the Son on the cross was shared by the Father and the Spirit.
A: How does this fit with the impassibility of God that you were talking about earlier?
R: You aren’t the only one to ask that question; the classical understanding of impassibility excludes the idea that God can suffer. Now, if that is the case, that brings you to the position that Christ experienced suffering and death only as man, not as God, and that is in fact what many if not all of those who hold to the classical position believe. There’s nothing necessarily problematic in saying that Jesus experienced some things as man and not as God, or vice versa; but it seems to me that to say that he suffered and died only as a man is fatal to the doctrine of the atonement, for it means that in the end, it was only a man who died—and that is not sufficient to save anyone. It also seems to me that the argument that God’s impassibility excludes the possibility of his suffering assumes that God is bound by our time stream in the same way we are; the argument really doesn’t follow otherwise, I think. If God is outside our time stream, then to say that he suffers is not necessarily to say that his suffering changes or lessens him, and there is no inevitable conflict.
A: But as I understand you, he came into our time stream as the man Jesus.
R: True. That is the mystery of the Incarnation, that the Second Person of the Triune God became human; and as a human being he wept and rejoiced, praised God and grew angry at those who fought him. He wrote himself into the story, if you will. The easy way to handle that is to say that all the messy human stuff, that was just Jesus’ human nature, and that is what those who deny that God suffered do; but in anything having to do with God, I am suspicious of answers I can fully understand, at least if they seem to leave problems behind. I am suspicious of collapsing the divine mystery into human rationality, because God is not fully comprehensible and any understanding of God which makes him so can only lessen him.
A: I can see that, I suppose. You certainly have enough mysteries lying about already.
R: True; but it seems to me, as I said, that any God big enough to truly be God is going to be too big to be humanly comprehensible, like a diamond with an infinite number of facets; we can’t possibly fit them all together out of our own wisdom and understanding. As such, I think it’s almost axiomatic that any theology which lacks mystery has sacrificed truth to comprehension at some point.
A: Though of course any theology anyone produces is going to be imperfect regardless.
R: Also true; that’s why humility is a virtue in theology no less than anywhere else. In any case, do you see the flaw in the feminist critique of the doctrine of the atonement?
A: I do. But I think it’s an understandable one.
R: I’ll grant that. Even leaving out the legitimate theological arguments, there is a lot of bad theology in the church, and I don’t doubt that some use the death of Christ on the cross in just the way that Brock and Parker see. But that doesn’t require changing our theology, only correcting those who abuse it.
At any rate, there are two other things to be said about the atonement. One is to define its results, which need to be described in several ways. First, Christ justified those who believe in him; to justify means to make righteous, to make right with God. In our own strength, we can’t stand before God’s just judgment, we can’t measure up to his standards, and so we stand condemned; but in taking the penalty for our sin on himself, Jesus gave us a new standing before God, and we have been declared righteous. Second, by his death Christ established a new covenant between us and God.
A: Covenant? I’m not familiar with the term.
R: A covenant is a solemn agreement—sometimes a negotiated agreement, sometimes unilaterally imposed on one party by the other—binding two parties together in a permanent defined relationship; each side makes specific promises and incurs specific obligations. Biblically speaking, for instance, marriage is a covenant, not merely a contract. Covenants are analogous to a contracts, but rather more serious and binding, and they tend to come with dire consequences attached for those who break them.
In any case, God has made several covenants with humanity throughout history, and in every case, he has been the one who has established the terms. Since the fall of Adam, each new covenant has built on the last, and each has been a covenant of grace—even the covenant established at Sinai, in which he gave Israel the Law. With Jesus’ death, he established a new and final covenant between God and his people, one which brought us into a new relationship with him.
A: A new relationship, legally speaking.
R: Yes, and more. Third, Christ liberated those who believe in him. He defeated sin, death and the Devil on the cross, taking away their power over us and breaking our slavery to sin; in paying the price for us, he redeemed us from slavery. Jesus gave us the freedom to choose to do the right and follow him, and thus to live as we were meant to live. Sin no longer rules us; rather, Jesus is Lord. Fourth, Christ did not merely free us from the power of death, he brought new life to those who believe in him; we are born again, spiritually, we have been adopted as children of the Father, and we have a new life with new power, which is the power of the Spirit of God living in us. We have been regenerated, made new people—not new and different, however. Rather, we have been reborn as the people we were created to be, and are thus more ourselves than ever before, though that process won’t be completed in this life.
One thing that I think you can see clearly from those four definitions is that they are all, in one way or another, relational language: through his death and resurrection, Christ brought about a new relationship between God and his people. This really speaks, I think, to the contemporary concern (at least among Generation X) with alienation; because it’s true, our sin alienates us from God, who is the source of life, and from our true selves, the people he created us to be—and, for that matter, from each other, as our sinfulness warps and breaks our relationships with each other. Jesus restored our relationship with God, he brought healing to our self-alienation, and in setting us free from sin he brings healing to our relationships with those around us.
Song of the Week
One of my very favorite songwriters is the Scottish folksinger Dougie MacLean; this isn’t his best-known song by any means (that would be “Caledonia”), but I think it’s the one I like best. This particular version benefits from the wonderful Kathy Mattea on backup vocals—they’re friends, and it was recorded during a joint studio session. (I’d wanted to post another video from the same session as well, of Mattea singing lead on Dougie’s song “Ready for the Storm,” but embedding is disabled on that one.)Turning Away
In darkness we do what we can;
In daylight we’re oblivion.
Our hears so raw and clear
Are turning away, turning away from here.On the water we have walked
Like the fearless child;
What was fastened we’ve unlocked,
Revealing wondrous wild.
And in search of confirmation,
We have jumped into the fire
And scrambled with our burning feet
Through uncontrolled desire.ChorusThere’s a well upon the hill
From our ancient past,
Where an age is standing still,
Holding strong and fast.
And there’s those that try to tame it,
And to carve it into stone—
Ah, but words cannot extinguish it,
However hard they’re thrown.ChorusOn Loch Etive they have worked
With their highland dreams;
By Kilcrennan they have nourished
In the mountain streams.
And in searching for acceptance
They had given it away;
Only the children of their children
Know the price they had to pay.ChorusWords and music: Dougie MacLean
© 1991 Dunkeld Records
From the album Indigenous, by Dougie MacLean
Where Is Your Heart?
(Malachi 3:6-15; Matthew 6:19-24, 2 Corinthians 9:6-12)
It’s funny, the things that stick in the back of your mind. I remember, for in-stance, going to a sleepover for the birthday of one of my classmates, Robert Gelinas; it was maybe sixth grade, and I have no idea why I was invited. We weren’t friends particularly, and I really don’t know why I was there. I enjoyed it, though. I remember we watched a couple of movies—Fletch, and a Richard Pryor movie called Brewster’s Millions—and that we went out at some point; I want to say it was to Pizza Hut, but I wouldn’t swear to that. I remember that particularly, though, because it was as we were getting ready to leave that Mr. Gelinas made a point of telling me (and maybe one other kid) that there are three things you don’t talk about in public: religion, sex, and politics. Now, I can assure you I wouldn’t have been talking about sex, but back then I was just a trifle opinionated, and I think maybe he didn’t trust me on the other two, because he made it very clear they were off limits.
These days, you’re probably more likely to get away with talking about sex in public; religion and politics, maybe, but if you pick the wrong time, the results are likely to be a lot worse. My dad lost one of his oldest and dearest friends a couple years back when he unwisely forwarded an e-mail that was political in nature. But even as conten-tious as political conversations can be these days, I don’t think they’re the biggest no-no out there—that would be one Mr. Gelinas didn’t even mention: money. I’m not sure there’s any bigger taboo in our culture than asking someone how much money they make, except under certain conditions. With a lot of people, you’ll get a better response asking nosy questions about their sex life than you will prying into their finances.
This affects how the church does business, too; there are exceptions, churches and preachers that talk about money all the time, largely so they can ask people to give them more of it, but they only make the rest of us even more hesitant to talk about it. After all, it feels personal, and pushy, and we’d all really rather believe that the Good Church Budget Fairy comes along and leaves the money we need under the nearest cabbage, since there are plenty of other things that we’d far rather talk about; but as much as we might like to avoid talking about money, we can’t do that. We can’t do it for two reasons. The first would be what Carolyn and Gene have told you recently; by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it costs over $3500 just to pay for this service we’re having here this morning, when you figure in my salary package, and the salaries of everyone else who contributes, and the cost of having this building, and the cost of the bulletins and all the other materials we use, and we don’t take in anywhere near that much per week. Indeed, when you factor in the preschool and the other missions we support, we’d need to double our giving and more just to get to the point where we’re no longer burning principal on our endowment; to get to the point where our giving covered everything and we could begin using the interest on the endowment for new ministries, we’d have to triple our giving. Obviously, this is more than just a stewardship issue, it’s a growth issue—we need to draw in a fair bit more people to reach that point; but still, as a practical matter, we can’t avoid talking about money. We’re living on borrowed time as it is.
That aspect of things is Carolyn and Gene’s job to worry about, at least primarily, and you’re lucky to have them. My main concern this morning is the second reason we can’t avoid talking about money, which is that the Bible spends a fair bit of time talking about it, and for good reason. We spent a while earlier this year considering what it means to be the church, and part of what it means to be the church is that we’re all in this together, committed to each other in God and to what God is doing in and through us. If that’s a real commitment, if we’re really on board with that, then it’s not enough to stand and say the creed together, it’s not enough to stand and sing the words of our great hymns—we need to live out what we say we believe, and the way we use our money (and for that matter, our time, our abilities, and everything else God has given us) needs to reflect that. It’s not enough to say that Jesus is Lord—our bankbook needs to show it, too.
Unfortunately, there are a couple factors which tend to work against that. The first is our false understanding of our money—a false understanding which is inherent in the fact that we call it our money to begin with. We look at the money in our accounts and think it belongs to us to use for our own purposes, and thus that whether or not we give to the church, and how much, is our own decision, to be made on the basis of whatever criteria seem appropriate to us. That view of money breeds a lack of trust in God, because if our money really does belong to us, then it’s entirely our responsibility to use it to provide for ourselves. We might talk about trusting God, and relying on God, but in the last analysis, in our bank balance we trust. If that’s so, then giving is a luxury, something we can choose to do once we’re sure we can afford it and know how much we’re going to spend on everything else; it’s simply one more option for our money, depending on what we want to do and how much we feel we can afford given the standard of living we want to maintain. It’s purely our choice, purely a matter of our own priorities.
To this idea, God says, “NO.” As we talked about three weeks ago, everything in this world belongs to him, even the clothes on our back—even our very bodies—because he made everything. It isn’t our money, it’s his—it isn’t our time, it’s his—they aren’t our abilities and talents, they’re his; indeed, everything we have isn’t ours, it’s God’s. Stop and think about that for a moment; let that sink in. Everything we have belongs to God. We aren’t owners, we’re stewards to whom God has entrusted his wealth, and in the end, we will have to give an account of what we’ve done with it. If we’re going to live lives pleasing to God, as individuals and as a people, we need to bear that fact in mind, and it needs to make a difference in what we do with our money.
Out of this truth flow three important points. First, giving isn’t optional. It isn’t up to us, it isn’t a matter of whether or not we want to, it isn’t something God would like us to do if we think we have a little room in the budget—God commands us to give. Indeed, the Old Testament law commanded the people of Israel to tithe, to give 10% of their income, to the temple—and that wasn’t supposed to be the limit of what they gave, but the minimum, which is why we have the phrase “tithes and offerings.” Again, this is based on the fact that all the world is God’s; he’s given his people everything they have, and he commands that they give back 10% of what he’s given them. To withhold some of that 10%, then, to give less than God had commanded, would be to refuse to give God what belongs to him—and that is nothing less than theft.
Now, does that mean that if we don’t tithe, we’re guilty of stealing from God? I don’t think so, since this commandment isn’t repeated in the New Testament, nor is Malachi’s language echoed anywhere. It’s hard to say for sure, since so many of the early Christians were either Jews or God-fearing Gentiles, and probably kept on tithing after converting to follow Christ; and we know from Acts that the first group of believers, in Jerusalem, gave far more than 10%, contributing great sums to the church for the sake of the poor and powerless among them. Still, if the early church had seen tithing as a requirement, I think we’d have something—perhaps in one of Paul’s letters—stressing the necessity of giving 10% of one’s income to the church; and that just isn’t there.
I wonder, though, if that isn’t the wrong question in a lot of ways. Saying, “Do we have to tithe, or can we get away with less?” isn’t the question of someone looking to honor God with their money—it’s the question of someone trying to justify giving as little as possible. It’s the question, we might say, of someone who doesn’t trust God enough to give freely and generously—who assumes that if they do, they’ll be poorer and worse off for it—and to that way of thinking, God says, “Try me.” Through Malachi, he tells his people, “Bring your full tithes, put me to the test; see if I don’t send rain to bless your crops, and keep back the bugs that destroy the fruit of your labors.” This isn’t an individual promise here, that if you, personally, tithe, God will make you rich; but if the nation as a whole will give God what he requires, he will bless the nation and everybody will have enough, without having to fight so hard to survive.
Then in 2 Corinthians, Paul takes this and develops it in a more individual direction. “You know how it works,” he says: “you reap what you sow. If you only sow a little seed, you only get a small harvest, but if you sow a great deal of seed, you reap a huge harvest.” Of course, with fruit, like olives, what you eat and what you plant are different parts of the fruit, but with grain, they’re one and the same; so there’s always the tension, especially in poor areas, between how much you eat and how much you sow back into the ground for next year. You can’t sow it all, obviously, or you’ll have nothing to eat this year; but if you eat too much of the harvest, then your harvest next year is guaranteed to be poor, because you can’t reap the benefits of seed you didn’t sow.
Giving, Paul says, is the same way. We need to remember, first, that God owns everything, including all that is ours to use, and thus that he is ultimately the one who gives us success in our labors, not we ourselves; and second, that not only is he able to bless us with all good things, he wants to do so. Thus Paul says in verse 8, “God is able to provide you with every kind of blessing in abundance, so that in every circumstance you may always have everything you need and still have ample resources for every kind of good work.” The word “blessing” here is the word kharis, the word “grace”; thus the blessings in view here aren’t only material but also spiritual. This isn’t a promise of material wealth, but it is a promise that those who give freely, generously and gladly to God will always have enough; and it’s a promise as well of all the spiritual blessings that make life good, and that empower us to do the good works God calls us to do.
Note again that “freely, generously and gladly” really does matter—how much we give matters, but so do why and how we give. Thus Paul tells the Corinthians, “If you really don’t want to give, or if you’re only giving under pressure or because you’re worried what others will think, then don’t; for it’s the cheerful and open-hearted giver that God loves.” The call is to give generously and gladly back to God from what he has given us, in gratitude for all the ways in which he has blessed us, believing that if we do so, he will continue to bless us and provide for all our needs. The key here is trust: are we willing to stake our lives on trust in God rather than trust in our own sweat and our own wits? That kind of trust, that kind of faith, is what God wants from us.
Finally, we need to understand our money the same way the farmer understands seed. Yes, we need to use some of it for food (and also clothing and shelter), but just as the basic purpose of seed is to be planted so that it can grow and produce a crop, so the basic purpose of money in this life is to be invested to produce treasure in the next, in the kingdom of God. This isn’t the investment plan the world recommends—the world, after all, wants things it can quantify, and the First National Bank of Heaven doesn’t send out bank statements, nor can one put a number and a label on the promises of God—but there are advantages; thus Jesus says, “Don’t store up your treasures on earth, where hurricanes, financial scandals, and stock market crashes can wipe them away, where floods can ruin them, or thieves can break in and steal them” (that’s a loose translation); “instead, store up your treasures in heaven, where they’re safe from all those things.” Our earthly investments might be quantifiable and might seem far more certain, but in truth, they are far more vulnerable to destruction; only God’s promises are truly secure.
Of course, giving to the church, in our community and around the world, is just a start; even if we tithe—as I believe we’re still called to do; Sara and I do—that doesn’t mean the other 90% of our income is ours to do with whatever we please, for it too belongs to God. Giving to the church is just the beginning of a biblical approach to money, one which involves making all our decisions—what we spend and where we spend it, what we invest and where we invest it, and so on—in light of the fact that it’s all God’s, and that in the end, we’ll have to turn all our books over to him for the audit of a lifetime.
So I would encourage you to start preparing for that audit: go home and take a look at your finances, and ask yourself if what you see there honors God. Does your giving honor God? Does it proclaim that you know that everything you have belongs to him, and that you trust him to provide for you—or does it say that you only give him the leftovers? How about your spending? Could you honestly say that the things you spend money on give honor to God and reflect his priorities, or would you have to admit that they don’t? If you have investments, are they investments which honor God and build up his kingdom, or is your money at work for other purposes? These are questions you need to ask seriously of yourselves, and which you need to answer honestly; and if the answers tell you that you need to make some changes, then I encourage you strongly to step out in faith, in trust, and make those changes, that you might be, that we all might be, faithful stewards of the great bounty God has given us.
Dawkins, analyzed
I’ve written on Dr. Richard Dawkins and the rest of the “new atheists” once or twice (or maybe three times, or even four), so I was interested to see Dr. John Stackhouse reflect on a recent appearance Dr. Dawkins gave at the University of British Columbia (UBC, pronounced “you-bys-sey”). His comments are in three parts, evaluating Dr. Dawkins as rhetor, ethicist, and mirror (of the style and flaws of a certain type of Christian apologist and preacher); he has some interesting things to say, especially regarding Dr. Dawkins’ encounter with West Coast vegetarianism.