Category Archives: Religion and theology

Pastoral subtext

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Of all of the workshops I attended at Calvin’s Worship Symposium this past January, my favorite was the one led by Craig Barnes, working out of material from his book The Pastor as Minor Poet:  Texts and Subtexts in the Pastoral Life.  I was glad, a week or so ago, to see the audio go up on the Symposium website; it’s from the Friday session, not the Saturday one which I attended, but that’s fine.  (Warning:  there are some glitches in the audio.)

The Rev. Dr. Barnes defines “subtext” this way:  “not the reality of what is said but the truth of what is meant”—the truth that lies beneath the surface, if you will.  There’s a lot in his talk, so I’m not going to try to post on all of it at once, because he looks at the movement from text to subtext in a few different (though connected) areas.

He starts off with the subtext of the pastor—the truths that lie beneath the surface of the pastoral life.  He uses the example of  the little Apostle Paul flannelgraph figure from his childhood Sunday school—worn from overuse, purple from Kool-Aid spilled on him, taped together after two kids, fighting over him, tore his head off—as a parable of sorts of how hard God can be on those he uses.

What I particularly appreciate about what he has to say here is that he sees meaning in this—which can be hard to do from the inside.  If the subtext of the call to be a pastor is, “You’re going to look purple and taped-together by your retirement party,” there’s a purpose to that:

That’s how you know how to do better ministry.  How could you possibly provide ministry to the subtext of people’s lives unless you knew about brokenness yourself? . . . God breaks apart his people by putting them into ministry, precisely so that they’ll be better pastors—if they respond well, as the invitation always is, if they respond well to that brokenness.

This is a profound truth about ministry, and one which has profound implications for every part of pastoral work and life (including, as he goes on to discuss, preaching).  One of the things I’ve been thinking about of late is how this fits together with Andrew Purves’ pastoral wisdom about the crucifixion of ministry, John Berntsen’s understanding that ministry must therefore necessarily be cross-shaped, and Steven Seamands’ insight that ministry is equally necessarily trinitarian in form; I have the sense that if you put all these concepts together, at the point where they cross, there’s something important about the nature of ministry and human brokenness, but I’m not quite sure what.

It seems clear that we must be broken if we are to minister—broken before God and before his people—and perhaps even that the awareness that we aren’t qualified to do the work is the first qualification we must have; it is, I think, the complete eversion of the kind of attitude Jared Wilson was talking about last week that sees pastoral ministry as a form of worldly achievement.  I think the key here is that ministry isn’t something we do, but rather a way that we live, and that in particular, it isn’t something we do to other people.

Instead, it seems to me that ministry is primarily a matter of identification—identifying with Christ, and particularly in his crucifixion, and with his people.  It requires the recognition that it is Christ who is qualified, it is Christ who is adequate, it is Christ who is capable; we aren’t any of those things, and it isn’t our job to be any of those things.  Our job is to be conduits of a sort, to be open to whatever God wants to do in us by his Holy Spirit, and to be open to our congregations to understand and identify with the subtext of their lives, the part they don’t want other people to see, so that Christ can exercise his ministry through us by the power of his Spirit.  It’s something we have to do to understand—it only makes sense when lived.

Reader’s guide: posts on faith

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Keeping faith in mind
Is it a choice between brains and belief? No.

A matter of trust
Do we really believe God knows and wants what’s best for us?

Thoughts on the nature of Christian faith
Flannery O’Connor was right: it’s harder to believe than not to.

For a 90° turn: meditation on faith and reason
Learning from St. Augustine.

Thought on belief
We’re wired to believe.

Statement of faith
Just because I believe in God doesn’t mean it came—or comes—easily.

The stubborn faithfulness of God
In the end, this is what really matters.

God’s specialty: life out of death

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“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord:
look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;
for he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him.
For the Lord comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places
and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.”

—Isaiah 51:1-3 (ESV)

There are a lot of folks in the church these days who are lamenting the state of American culture and saying pessimistic things about the future of this nation; I know this in part because there are days when I’m one of them.  I think, though, that we would do well to step back from that a bit and realize that while it certainly might well be all downhill from here for the USA, our pessimism on that point isn’t justified by our faith.  The unstated assumption behind that pessimism is that God can’t overcome the unrighteousness of Americans—and that just isn’t true.  On this point, we would do well to consider this passage from Isaiah, and think about it carefully.

“Listen to me,” says the Lord. “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek me; listen and look.” He’s addressing the faithful remnant within Israel—the people who are still seeking God and pursuing his righteousness, who have neither turned their backs on him nor rejected his servant. These are the ones who are willing to trust God—but even for them, it’s hard.

Indeed, maybe for them it’s especially hard, despite their faith, because they see their people’s dire situation much more clearly than their more secular friends and relatives. They can see beyond Israel’s physical exile to their much deeper and more serious spiritual exile, the distance of the people’s hearts from God, and their consequent spiritual barrenness and deadness; they can see past the obvious difficulty of Israel’s deliverance to the real difficulty that underlies it, and so they worry—not that God is unable to deliver his people, or that he doesn’t care enough to do so, as other Israelites do, but that the faithlessness of their people will somehow sabotage everything in the end anyway. They trust God, but they know better than to trust his people.

To them, God says, “Listen to me: look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.” A quarry is not a place of life; nothing comes out of it but dead stone. This is an apt metaphor to describe Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of their people, for Sarah was barren, and both were far past childbearing age; even now, with our advanced technology, we don’t see 90-year-olds having children. When God says, “When I called Abraham, he was but one,” he’s not kidding; and yet, as God points out, “I blessed him and made him many.”

The very foundation story of the family that became the nation of Israel is a story of God bringing life out of barrenness and deadness; that sort of miraculous birth is at the core of their national identity. “Trust me even in this,” God is saying, “because I’ve done even this for my people before.” What is now a wasteland, he will make “like Eden”—and this doesn’t just mean physical life, but also spiritual life, for Eden isn’t merely a physical paradise, it’s the place before sin, and before the curse of God that fell on us because of our sin.

As such, we should think long and hard before concluding that anyone, or any nation, is too messed up and too spiritually dead for God to revive.  God spoke, and a 90-year-old woman had a baby; he spoke, and a virgin bore a son.  He spoke, and Jesus who had been crucified rose from the dead.  What can he not bring to life, if he decides to speak?

(Partially excerpted from “The Herald of Salvation”)

Thought on prayer and the routine

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Today was taken up with a trip down to Indianapolis.  On the way back, we saw two overturned semis—one by itself, one at the center of a multi-vehicle accident (in the lanes going the other direction) that had drawn upwards of a dozen emergency vehicles, all with lights going.  One of my daughters asked, after we passed the big one, why it had happened; I said I didn’t know, but the comment was made that probably someone hadn’t been paying attention.  There was a little red car, undamaged, stopped a short distance ahead of the accident, which made us wonder if perhaps that car had cut someone off or made a sudden move of some other sort, setting off a chain of events that made the semi swerve and overbalance, among other things—the sort of careless move that people make and get away with all the time, but this time at just the wrong moment to cause a tragedy.

We take so much for granted, most days.  We take for granted that we can drive wherever we need to go and get there and back safely—and if we don’t, people call us worrywarts.  We take for granted that we can do whatever it occurs to us to do and it will all be okay, and that if we’re a little careless, no harm will be done.  We may pray for God’s protection as we travel or do other things—I had asked for prayer Wednesday for traveling mercies for us—but we do so lightly, more in the spirit of “just in case” than with any sense that it’s actually important.  We take for granted that the routine and the mundane really is, of its essence, the routine and the mundane.

And it isn’t, as the folks involved in that accident were reminded, and as we were reminded, passing by in the other direction.  It isn’t at all.  There is always the possibility for the unexpected and the uncontrolled to intrude—and if, at any given point, that possibility may be quite low, it does build up after a while.  There’s always more out of our control than we like to admit, and more variables (many more) than we can possibly track, and far more ways that things can go wrong than there are ways they can go right.  We expect routine good fortune, take it for granted, and consider ourselves ill-used when we don’t get it, when we really ought to realize that even that much is a great gift, an act of God’s grace.  It is, truly, no small thing to pray for traveling mercies—and no small blessing when our request is granted.  Every such answer to prayer is a victory over the chaos in our world; and every such victory should be taken seriously as reason for gratitude.

A few tips of the hat

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We’re having some internet problems here—no connection at the church today at all, and a pretty poor one here at home—so I haven’t had much success with any online work; but I thought I might be able to get a relatively quick links post through.

Jared Wilson has a couple strong posts up, “The Kingdom is For Those Who Know How to Die” and “Faith, Hope, and Love is About Proximity to Jesus.” I’ve also been meaning to note his excerpt from Skye Jethani’s new book The Divine Commodity, which I think dovetails with my recent post on worship.

Not to leave the rest of the Thinklings out, Philip has a good post on communicating the gospel, Bird makes a good point about repentance, and Bill asks an interesting question:  is the American church actually too macho?

I love Hap’s retelling of the story of Abigail.  If you’re not familiar with it, you can find the original in 1 Samuel 25.

Pauline Evans, to whom I haven’t linked in far too long, has a nifty little post up on the development of computers, and how the comparisons we use are in some ways quite misleading; she also has one up, I just discovered, on a couple children’s fantasy books that I think I’m going to need to read.  (This may follow nicely on our recent discovery in this household of Tamora Pierce.)

Debbie Berkley posted something last January that I’ve kept meaning to write about, reflecting on the uncertainty we face these days in the light of the wisdom of a fellow Christian from India:  “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”  Sage counsel, and certainly no less applicable now, two months on.

And, on the subject of politics (and specifically political dirty tricks), Andrew Breitbart has had some interesting things to say of late about the online war liberals are waging (and winning) against conservatives.  Barack Obama promised to elevate the tone of political discourse in this country, but you don’t have to be a Sarah Palin supporter to recognize that some of his followers didn’t get the memo.

This isn’t everyone I’d like to mention, but I’m only linking to pages I can actually pull up, and it’s pretty hit-and-miss at the moment.  Still, I’m glad to note these, and maybe I’ll do another one soon to highlight the ones that wouldn’t come up.

In defense of the church, part VI: We need each other

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Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

—Hebrews 10:19-25 (ESV)

On a nobler and more elevated note than the previous post . . .

I started doing this series over a year ago now, carried on for a while, and then some time last August, had my attention fixed firmly enough in another direction that I forgot completely about it.  (Gee, I wonder what could have done that?)  I don’t want to just let it go, though, because this is too important for that.

I’ve talked about various aspects of the church—the value of preaching, the realistic necessity of the institution, and so on—and about the fact that Jesus loves the church, whether we like it or not; I think it also needs to be said, as the authors of Hebrews do, that whether we like the church or not, we need it.  If we’re going to be faithful disciples of Christ, we need to be a part of the church, and we need to be involved.

Part of this is that, as David Wood argues, we need spiritual friendship in order to live as Christ calls us to live.  Not even Jesus tried to live the godly life on his own—he surrounded himself with good friends who went with him everywhere.  The Rev. Wood makes this point in the course of talking about the pastoral life and pastoral excellence, but if it’s more critical for pastors, that’s only because we serve as leaders and exemplars for the church; this is necessary for pastors because it’s necessary for all Christians if we’re actually going to live as Christians.

This is how God wired us:  for friendship, relationship, community, to lean on each other and depend on each other to be strong where and when we ourselves are weak.  We need others who know us well enough that they can help us see ourselves more clearly and accurately than we can through our own eyes, and whom we can trust to rebuke and correct us when we’re going awry.  And let’s face it, resisting temptation is a lot less fun in the moment than giving in to it; we need people whose company we enjoy with whom we can go find something else to do.  “Just say no” only works for so long—we need something better to which we can say “yes” instead.

This is well illustrated by an old story, which has been told in many variations, of a young man who was feeling spiritually dry and cold, and so went to see one of the great old saints of the church to seek advice.  He poured out his heart to the old saint, told him of his problem, and asked what he might do about the dryness and coldness of his spiritual life.  The old man didn’t say a word, but picked up the fireplace tongs and used them to reach into the fire and pluck out a coal, which he set on the hearth.  The coal immediately began to fade, first from bright cherry-red to dull red, to orange, and ultimately to black.  After a little while, the old saint leaned forward, picked up the coal with his hand, and tossed it back into the fire, where it was soon burning merrily once again.  The young man, with a thoughtful look on his face, thanked the old man and took his leave.

It’s not just about what we get out of being a part of the church, though—we also need the church for what we can give to it.  For our own growth, we need the opportunity to serve others as they serve us.  This helps us develop our gifts, stretching us to take risks and try new things.  More importantly, it draws us out of ourselves and teaches us to value and care for others.  We can’t become loving people without actually loving people—and the people who are the hardest to love are often the most important for us in that respect, for it’s in loving the unlovable that we come closest to Christ’s love for us.

Finally, of course, the fact that the church needs us matters in and of itself, too.  God calls us to serve him, and part of that is participating in and serving his body, his people, the church.  Yes, this means setting aside some of what we want; it means making compromises, and putting other people ahead of ourselves.  This too, of course, is part of our spiritual growth, but it’s also the recognition that the call of God on our lives isn’t just about us, about fulfilling our needs and giving us what we want—it’s also about others, and how we can be of use to bless them.

Now, I’m not so foolish as to think that this will necessarily come easily; I’m a pastor, I know better.  But what I said in the first post in this series still holds true:

I don’t stay in the church because I have found it to be a wonderful place and a wonderful experience; taken all in all, I’ve found it quite uneven. Rather, I stay in the church as an act of faith that God meant what he said when he called us his people, his family, his body, and promised that not even the gates of Hell would prevail against us—and I say that as one who knows full well that those gates threaten us from within as well as from without. However ambivalent I may sometimes be, it remains true through all that Jesus loves the church, and died for her, and that we are called to follow his lead.

All of which is to say, as much as I understand the stones people throw at the church (having fired off a few myself at times), I do believe the church needs to be defended; and I say that not because I’m in the business, of the guild, as it were, but rather despite that fact. However badly we screw it up, as we often do, this is still something God has ordained, and it’s still important that we gather together in worship and fellowship and ministry. Yes, that means friction, which is unpleasant; but that friction is one of the things God uses to sand away our rough edges and polish our strengths. True community—where, as Kurt Vonnegut beautifully said, “the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured”—is not an easy thing, which is why far too many churches don’t try all that hard to create it; but for all that, it’s important for our well-being, and if we will commit to it, it’s a beautiful gift of God.

The problematic blessings of God

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Thus says the Lord God:
“Behold, I will lift up my hand to the nations,
and raise my signal to the peoples;
and they shall bring your sons in their bosom,
and your daughters shall be carried on their shoulders.
Kings shall be your foster fathers,
and their queens your nursing mothers.
With their faces to the ground they shall bow down to you,
and lick the dust of your feet.
Then you will know that I am the Lord;
those who wait for me shall not be put to shame.”—Isaiah 49:22-23 (ESV)The Jews get a lot of flak from many Christians for their failure to understand what God was trying to do and thus to fulfill the part in his plan. Now, obviously someone who believes as I do that Jesus is the promised Messiah is going to have a different take on that than someone who doesn’t; but without getting into comparative theology, I think it needs to be said that we should all be a lot humbler about such arguments. Many of us (perhaps most of us) have an unfortunate tendency to present our positions as if their truth is obvious, and should be obvious to those who disagree with us—meaning, of course, that we’re the noble ones who have the truth, and our opponents must be arguing for ignoble reasons. This is not only wrongheaded, it’s wrong-spirited.What’s more, in some cases, it’s also evidence of our own lack of self-knowledge and self-awareness; and this would be one of those. Consider this section of Isaiah (which is representative of other passages in the prophets): God is proposing to bless his people by bringing in the nations to join them. In order to accept this blessing, they need to do two things: one, they have to give up their national self-understanding—what we might, by analogy to the present day, call “Israelite exceptionalism”—and two, they have to welcome the other peoples of the world in.Now, to be sure, God isn’t asking Israel to take a secondary place; quite the contrary, the nations will honor them and bow before them in recognition of how much they owe the people of Israel. That said, remember, the nations are outsiders, and some of them are bitter enemies; he’s asking them to welcome strangers, rivals, and people who have hurt them badly into their land and into their people.  He’s asking them not only to forgive their enemies, but to adopt their enemies, to welcome former enemies into their home, to love them, and to trust them as family.That’s a challenge, if we’re honest.  If we really put ourselves into the story, it’s not necessarily all that obvious that it really qualifies as a blessing.  After all, we’re used to thinking of blessings as being for us, while the blessing Isaiah promises here is as much for the nations as it is for Israel; God blesses Israel in part so that they may bless the nations.  To recognize this as a real blessing, we need to understand that this is what the blessings of God look like—they really never are just for us.  We aren’t merely recipients of his blessings, we’re conduits.  That’s just how God works.God’s blessings often aren’t easy to receive.  Grace isn’t easy.  Love isn’t easy.  They come with challenges, asking us to do things that we don’t necessarily want to do.  I would venture to say that anyone who takes them lightly, who isn’t made at least a little uncomfortable by the blessings of God, doesn’t understand them as well as they should.  I’m certainly not saying that we should encourage anyone not to accept the grace of God; but if we find anyone reluctant to do so, we should understand that their reluctance is not altogether unreasonable.  God’s blessings are always best for us . . . but they’re often not what we think is best for us, and so we have to give up our own ideas of what’s best in order to accept them.  Doing so is itself a blessing—but we should never make the mistake of thinking that it’s an easy and obvious step.

The limits of the merely human

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This from Ray Ortlund:

Everything man-made lets us down. Sooner or later, everything man-made reveals its hidden weaknesses. Only Christ will not fail. Only Christ does all things well. I don’t. You don’t. Christ does. Always. Infallibly. . . .Man-made things go boom. They cannot be trusted. Respected, yes. Honored, yes. But not trusted.The only unfailing object of our trust and hope is Christ himself. Theological systems have their uses, but also their limits. Christ, Christ, Christ—the risen, living, present Person of the Lord Jesus Christ who is right here right now and always will be, forever keeping his promises—only he has no limits, only he cannot disappoint.

Amen.  The wellspring of our thought must always be Christ; as theologians, we must always be biblical theologians first and foremost, and as preachers, we must be teaching our people to be biblical theologians, and the center and taproot of our biblical theology must always be hearing the voice of Christ and the word of the gospel in every part of Scripture.And it should be said, this applies to every aspect of life—to political systems, and politicians, for instance, no less than theological systems and theologians.  Even the best political systems, though they have their uses, have also their limits; even the best politicians have their weaknesses and will let us down.  We must seek to find and promote the best we can, systems and politicians alike, but always remembering that only Christ will not fail, only Christ has no limits, only Christ cannot disappoint . . . and the corollary, that there are many things that cannot be done well through political means and processes, but only by the body of Christ, whom he empowers for his purposes by his Holy Spirit.

What our gaffes reveal about our character

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The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart
his mouth speaks.—Luke 6:45 (ESV)Michael Kinsley somewhere defined a gaffe as “what happens when the spin breaks down.”  It’s a wry observation that captures a real truth about why gaffes matter:  because they reveal something about a given politician that said politician doesn’t want us to see.  They’re the places where the mask slips.  That may not always be true, and the real meaning of a particular gaffe may not always be the one that first comes to mind, but in general, these are meaningful moments that tell us more about our politicians than our politicians will usually tell us about themselves.The highest-profile gaffe of recent weeks, of course, is the president’s “Special Olympics” quip on The Tonight Show, which (much to the administration’s chagrin) turned out to be the rimshot heard ’round the world, despite the best efforts of his sycophants to wave it away as meaningless.  We know better than that, these days; we know gaffes are meaningful, and so by and large, we haven’t bought that line.  At the same time, though, what I haven’t seen is much thoughtful reflection on what Barack Obama’s gaffe does mean—most of the commentary has only been interested in its political significance (and on increasing or decreasing that significance, as it suits the one offering the comment).An exception to that is John Stackhouse’s recent post, probably because it’s not just about the president—it’s also a reflection on his own gaffes:

We have to cut each other a little slack: people under stress sometimes do inexplicable things, including making tasteless jokes or using inappropriate language.But I’m not inclined to let myself entirely off the hook, however forgiving I might feel toward President Obama or any other public figure. I recall the words of Jesus: “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).That joke came from somewhere. That word came from somewhere. . . .Yes, we live in a sarcastic and vulgar culture . . . It is part of the air we breathe and the toxins enter us whether we like them or not.Again, recognizing that kind of constant cultural influence should help me be more understanding and forgiving of others who screw up in public.Nonetheless, it is simply true that sometimes I really do mean what I say. Sigmund Freud was prone to overstatement, but there is more than a grain of truth in his dictum, “There is no such thing as a joke.” And as I search my heart for the attitudes expressed in this joke or that word choice, I confess I am sometimes dismayed at what I find. . . .Sometimes, alas, the way you really do think about things and the way you really do talk about things—that is, the way you think and talk when you think no one can hear or no one will be offended—really does come out in public.Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy.And may we attend to what we have inadvertently exposed in our gaffes. It’s good to get forgiveness. It’s better to get healed.

I believe we’re right to ask what the president’s wisecrack tells us about the abundance of his heart; but as we do so, we’d best not get too cocky; we’d best proceed with all due humility, and ask ourselves what we’d let slip about our own hearts if we were in his shoes.  And perhaps we’d also do well to bear in mind the counsel of the book of James:Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.—James 3:1 (ESV)