Monthly Archives: August 2009

What I still haven’t found

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I believe in the Kingdom Come,
Then all the colours will bleed into one,
Bleed into one;
But yes, I’m still running.
You broke the bonds,
You loosed the chains,
You carried the cross and
All my shame,
All my shame;
You know I believe it.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

—U2, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

I don’t want to get into the argument about what U2 themselves mean by this song. According to the Wikipedia article, “both Bono and Edge have . . . called it a gospel song on numerous occasions,” and I have no reason to doubt that; I’ve seen other sites assert that they have repeatedly called it a song of “spiritual yearning,” which seems obvious enough, though I’ve never seen any original source for either of these attributions. At the same time, reading around the ‘Net, it’s clear that a lot of U2 fans don’t want to believe that the song’s about anything of the sort, and they’re entitled to their own opinions.

My interest at the moment, though, is rather different; if you wanted to be technical, I suppose you could say that I’m setting aside questions of authorial intent and opting for a bit of reader-response criticism. To wit, it occurred to me as I was listening to this song on the way home Monday that whatever U2 means by this song, it serves quite well as an apt expression of our experience of the process of sanctification (or of mine, at least). I believe all those things, too—and yet I would have to confess that in some ways, at least, I too am still running. There are still areas where I resist what God desires to do in my life, and areas in which I follow him determinedly until the temptation gets too tempting, at which point I run off like any other dumb sheep convinced that the grass over there really must be tastier. (Only to find out when I get there, as always, that the “grass” is really only extra-long Astroturf.)

I believe it all, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for—not in God, but in me, and in my own life. I haven’t found the trust, the submission, the willingness to follow faithfully; I’ve found the peace of God, but not the contentment to rest in it, and the joy of God, but not the single-mindedness to stay in it, instead of jumping off to go check out other things to see if they might be better. I’ve found the beauty of the gospel and the glorious blessing of the grace of God, but not the ability to wholeheartedly trust that they are for me. I preach it, I preach it constantly, but I do so as much as anything because I know I need to hear it, because I haven’t found it in me to fully believe it. Not yet.

But by the grace of God, I know I will—not by my efforts, but by his gift. His grace doesn’t depend on me, one way or the other; and whether I can always fully believe it or not, I know he who promised is faithful, and will do it. And for that I give thanks.

Your Jesus is too safe

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It’s a great pleasure to participate in the blog tour for Jared Wilson’s book Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior—though I must confess that the term “blog tour” gives me an image of a truly strange-looking trolley rolling along the infobahn, dinging merrily away, with a disembodied voice gravely intoning, “Next stop . . .” None of which, of course, has anything to do with the book.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Jared Wilson as a blogger and blog correspondent (for lack of a better term) for a couple years now, I had the privilege of meeting him in person and spending a little time with him at GCNC this past April, and I consider him a friend. I like and respect him a great deal.

Truth behind full disclosure: none of that affects my review of his book. If anything, it’s the other way around—this book captures much of the reason why I like and respect Jared. When Ed Stetzer begins the foreword by declaring, “The pages you are about to read are an antidote,” he’s right; and it’s an antidote that far too much of the American church badly needs.

An antidote to what? To the legalistic no-gospel that fills so much of the American church—conservative as well as liberal; some of the worst offenders consider themselves “evangelical”—and our convenient, comfortable, sanitized, commoditized caricatures of Jesus, all precisely designed to meet our felt needs. As Jared says, our culture is plenty familiar with Postcard Jesus, Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Jesus, Hippie Jesus, Buddy Jesus, ATM Jesus, Role Model Jesus, and Therapeutic Jesus, and many Christians are thrilled when some famous person or other gives thanks to Grammy Award Speech Jesus; but the real Jesus, the Jesus we find in Scripture, is an altogether unfamiliar figure, because all too many churches aren’t preaching him. After all, he makes us uncomfortable, and he makes the world uncomfortable, and that’s no way to grow a church, now, is it?

To this kind of thinking, Jared offers his book as an antidote, driven by the love of Christ and the provocation of the Spirit of God. As he writes (239-40),

The passion of my life is the scandalous gospel of God’s amazing grace in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit cultivated this passion in me through the Scriptures, in which I see Jesus chastised and criticized for proclaiming the gospel by eating with sinners and giving himself to sinners. My encouragement to you—my call to you—is to partake of that gospel, to acknowledge and confess and believe that you are a sinner in need of God’s grace, and that Jesus Christ died and rose to manifest that grace to you, and that you can’t live without Jesus. You cannot do it.

That is the sort of thing that ought to be the lifeblood of every Christian and the heartbeat of every church . . . and it isn’t. It isn’t because we don’t take our sin seriously enough, and we don’t take Jesus seriously enough. The purpose of this book is to change that, for those who have ears to hear.

To do this, Jared presents what he calls twelve portraits of Jesus, looking at Christ from twelve different angles, through a dozen different lenses. He considers:

  • Jesus the Promise
  • Jesus the Prophet
  • Jesus the Forgiver
  • Jesus the Man
  • Jesus the Shepherd
  • Jesus the Judge
  • Jesus the Redeemer
  • Jesus the King
  • Jesus the Sacrifice
  • Jesus the Provision
  • Jesus the Lord
  • Jesus the Savior

Some of these sound familiar to American ears, while others are quite strange (I can imagine readers asking “Jesus the Provision? What does he mean by that?”); but the truth is that even the familiar ones have been trimmed and tamed, made safe and non-threatening and altogether nice, in the teaching of far too much of the church in this culture. Not to put too fine a point on it, far too many of us in this country aren’t Christians at all but idolators, worshiping a Jesus of our own invention who is nicely tuned to tell us just what we want to hear. In response, Jared sets out to open our eyes to what it really means that Jesus was a fully human adult male, or that he is the King of Kings. In so doing, he will no doubt make a lot of folks very, very uncomfortable—but it’s a holy discomfort, the evidence of the Spirit of God at work.

In painting his portraits of Jesus, Jared draws heavily on Scripture, as he should; this is a book filled with biblical quotations, and not just single verses, but whole passages. Of course, there are plenty of books out there which quote a lot of Scripture and then proceed to misuse it, but that isn’t a problem here; one of the chief qualities of the book is its careful attention to what Scripture is actually saying, and its author’s clear determination to follow wherever the word of God leads and let the chips fall where they may. Rather than using the Bible to make his points, he has sought to place himself under the Bible and its authority, and thus to say only what it says.

This is not to say, however, that he has produced a book which is disconnected from life as we know it; quite the contrary. The academic foundation is clearly there, but this is no theoretical discussion; it is, rather, a profoundly practical book—or perhaps we might say, following G. K. Chesterton, that it is a profoundly unpractical book in all the right ways. Chesterton has one of his characters, the poet and painter Gabriel Gale, offer to help a man who has attempted suicide, explaining his offer with these words:

I am no good at practical things, and you have got beyond practical things.

What you want is an unpractical man. . . . What can practical men do here? Waste their practical time in running after the poor fellow and cutting him down from one pub sign after another? Waste their practical lives watching him day and night, to see that he doesn’t get hold of a rope or a razor? Do you call that practical? You can only forbid him to die. Can you persuade him to live? Believe me, that is where we come in. A man must have his head in the clouds and his wits wool-gathering in fairyland, before he can do anything so practical as that.

Chesterton was right: the practical counsels of this world can only forbid people to die (or, more ominously, order them to die); they cannot persuade people to live, much less tell them how. That is for unpractical people, for those who have given their lives over to the unpractical mendicant teacher from Nazareth, and in so doing have learned how to live; and to illustrate that, Jared offers a number of stories of just what that unpractical life looks like. Some, like the story of the Amish of Quarryville, PA who forgave the man who murdered their daughters, are widely known; others, like the story of his cousins Steve and LaVonne Jones and their son Colton (which, as a father of three, wrenched at my heart), are not. All bear witness to the truth that it’s only in the real Jesus Christ, not any of the more “practical” or “useful” versions of him that we invent, that we find real life.

The tone of this book is informal and conversational, at times snarky and sarcastic (though the bulk of that is to be found among its copious and entertaining footnotes), and occasionally slangy; some, at least of older generations, may find that off-putting at points. In general, however, I don’t think any but the most formal of readers will find it a true problem, while younger folks in particular will likely find the tone attractive and appealing. Taken as a whole, I believe the conversational tone is a benefit to the book, for a couple reasons.

One, it suits the author; I don’t have any way of knowing if attempting to write in a more formal style would have made him sound stuffy and pedantic, but writing in this vein makes it clear that he is anything but. That’s disarming, which is a good thing; given that he’s calling his readers to set aside our comfortable Jesuses for one who will challenge us and make us very uncomfortable with ourselves, the natural response from many will be to look for a reason to reject that call. Many will no doubt find reasons, but branding Jared as stuffy and out of touch won’t be one of them.

Two, the book’s tone serves to reinforce the point that its message is for all of us, and all of life. Following Christ isn’t just about doing formal things for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but it’s about how we’re supposed to live all the rest of the time, too; it has to do with cracks about old teen movies and popular fiction just as much as with the sorts of things we think of as “spiritual.”

The great risk Jared took with this book—one which he himself acknowledges—is that in looking at Jesus from twelve different perspectives, he might have “inadvertently propose[d] twelve different Jesuses, creating intellectual confusion where the purpose has been to enhance clarity.” I think, though, that he has avoided that quite successfully by tracing one strong theme through all twelve chapters: “the great unifying presence of the gospel.” This is the hub of which the twelve perspectives are spokes, as he lays out in the conclusion of the twelfth chapter (280):

The good news is that Jesus Christ is not just God with us, but he’s also God forus. For us, he is the promise of fulfillment, the prophet of truth, the forgiver of sins, the man of sorrows, the good shepherd, the righteous judge, the redeemer, the reigning king, the atoning sacrifice, the all-sufficient provision, the almighty God, and the rescuer of the lost. He is all these things and more, but none of this is good news if he is not also the Lord and the Savior of sinners in need of grace.

Today is the day of salvation. The kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe.

If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Jared Wilson has written a book that is full of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that shines the light of that gospel from every page, and that I believe will call many in this country to that gospel for the first time. It is a book for the reconversion of the church, and for the conversion of many who are outside the church because they’ve rejected our false Jesuses, not knowing that the real Jesus is someone altogether different. It’s a book we need to read, not because Jared is wonderful, but because Jesus is wonderful, and Jared is talking about Jesus. It is, in short, a book for which we can honestly say, “Thank you, God.”

Seen on a billboard

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along US 30 in rural Pennsylvania west of Pittsburgh—two-panel, comic-strip style, a slice of a conversation between two characters. One says to the other, “What do you mean, I can’t take a joke? I took you.” (The quote may not be completely exact in the first few words, but the rest stuck firmly in my brain.)

I wasn’t in a position to stop and look closely at the billboard, and the way the road was winding, I didn’t get a long look at it, so I have no idea who put it up, or why, or what their purpose was; whatever their reason, that’s an extraordinarily cruel line, in my humble opinion. It appears that what I saw is part of a larger campaign, because I saw a different two-panel comic-strip billboard in my rear-view mirror later on—I have no idea what it said, though, so it doesn’t bring me any closer to knowing what these billboards are about.

All of this has left me curious. I tried Googling the first billboard I saw, but with no result. Does anybody know anything about these billboards and their purpose?

Note on the past week

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If anyone wondered about the radio silence around here the last several days, you may be assured that I haven’t run out of things to say (not that anyone who knows me would consider that likely); rather, we were on vacation in Pennsylvania and found ourselves unexpectedly without Internet access for most of the week. I had the chance to spend time with dear friends, see Gettysburg for the first time, and go to the wedding of one good friend from college—and even, unexpectedly, to participate: the minister, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, invited all pastors present to come up and lay hands on the couple for the prayer of blessing. It was a wonderful moment in perhaps the best wedding I’ve ever seen. (I can’t speak for my own, though I love the pastors who married us dearly—I was too busy getting married to absorb much of what was going on.) Leaving my own wedding aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more joyful bride, or felt happier for a wedding couple.

I have to say, too, if there’s a template for what a truly gospel-driven wedding ceremony looks like, that had to be it, or pretty close. If you happen to be looking for a gospel-driven church in Pittsburgh, I can recommend Bellefield Presbyterian without question or hesitation; just from the wedding ceremony, I can say with complete assurance that the pastor there, the Rev. Dr. R. Geoffrey Brown, is a man of God who glories, delights, exults, revels in the gospel of Jesus Christ and proclaims it with deep joy and humility. He and his wife are also wonderful people—of that much I have no doubt, even from my brief contact with them. It was a true joy and blessing to be a part of that worshipping community this past Saturday.

The underlying problem

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Christians voiced anger and dismay Tuesday after a Bible, which was part of an exhibition inviting viewers to add their reflections, was defaced with offensive and foul-mouthed scrawl.

Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art has decided to put the Bible in a glass case after the exhibit, called Untitled 2009 and part of a show entitled Made In God’s Image, was vandalised.

Artist Jane Clarke, a minister at the Metropolitan Community Church, asked visitors to annotate the Bible with stories and reflections, as a way of making it more inclusive.

But visitors to the gallery took the invitation a bit further than she had anticipated. . . .

On the first page of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, someone had written: “I am Bi, Female and Proud. I want no god who is disappointed in this.”

It’s a pretty predictable story, really; Clarke appears to have been surprised by what happened, but that only shows her to be severely naive. She’s quoted as saying, “I had hoped that people would show respect for the Bible, for Christianity and indeed for the Gallery of Modern Art,” but that was never going to be the universal response, for reasons which the response I quoted above shows.

Most people, when they read the comment written on the first page of that Bible, will focus on sexuality; but the truth is, whatever you think of homosexuality and the biblical teaching about it, that’s not the most significant issue here. Whether this woman’s homosexual practices are sinful or not, her comment shows her to be guilty of a greater sin—indeed, the greatest of all sins—that of idolatry. She’s made it very clear what her real god is: her sexuality. All other claims on her allegiance are measured against that one; she’s willing to worship other gods as well, to add other deities to her personal pantheon, but only if they are content to serve her chief god.

And the Lord of creation, the God of the universe, won’t do that. He will never do that. He claims our absolute obedience and allegiance, and he will not share his glory with another—and that’s why so many people resist him. That’s the root of our objections to God, that he insists on being our only god, calling us to give up all competing loyalties and affections; and there are many who are unwilling to do so. If the church is going to reach out in any intelligent way, it has to start by realizing that fact. As Tim Keller says, we cannot effectively preach the gospel without naming and addressing the idols of our culture and our people.

HT: the Rev. Wayne Paul Barrett, who referenced this in his sermon yesterday at Delmont Presbyterian Church. (My apologies for initially failing to note this.)

Sin and pleasure

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One of the biggest lies the Devil sells us is that sinning brings pleasure. To be sure, it’s an effective lie, because it’s true in the short term—but the long term is a different story. The Devil’s aim isn’t to give us good things, but to deprive us of good things, or rather to talk us into depriving ourselves of good things. That might seem like a strange thing to say, when so many people’s idea of Christian living is “thou shalt not do anything fun”—but it’s the truth. Despite what some might think, God is the one who created pleasure, and he’s the one who wants you to live a really good life; Satan, by contrast, might use pleasure to get you hooked, but his ultimate goal is to deprive you of everything worth having. Just look at drug addiction—the real pleasure, the real fun, is all in the beginning; after a while, all that’s left is desperation, craving and need.

That’s the pattern of sin, and the pattern Satan wants to get people into—the minimum pleasure necessary for the maximum slavery; and whatever they might think themselves to be doing, even if they proclaim themselves agents of liberation, that’s ultimately the end that all the false teachers of this world serve. By contrast, the Christian faith calls us back to see the true goodness of God, and the true goodness of all that he made, through the deception and confusion of all this world’s counterfeit versions. He calls us to see the true goodness of marriage through the counterfeits of free love, hooking up, and whatever else this world can spin out there; to see the true goodness of food through all the ways we misuse it; to see the true goodness of all the things God has made through all the ways we abuse them. When we treat this as anything less than his good creation—whether by rejecting it, by worshiping it, or by treating it as merely something to exploit—we dishonor God, we distort his truth, and we do ourselves grievous harm.

(Adapted from “Led Astray”)

Accepted on a journey

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Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
She said, “No one, Lord.”
And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

—John 8:10-11 (ESV)

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

To another he said, “Follow me.”
But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.”
And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”
Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

—Luke 9:57-62 (ESV)

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.

—Luke 18:22-23 (ESV)

People like to talk about Christ accepting everybody and forget that the acceptance of Christ is not a thing that says to us, “I’m fine with you just the way you are; you just keep doing what you’re doing.” The acceptance of Christ, rather, says to us, “Go and sin no more.”

He says to us, “I love you just the way you are—but too much to let you stay that way.”

He says to us, “You’re all messed up, but I love you anyway; that’s why I’m going to change you from the inside out.”

He says to us, “Give up your life—give up your plans, your desires, your ideas of how things should be—and I’ll give you something better.”

Jesus doesn’t call us to stay where and what we are because he’s not much of one for staying in one place; he calls us to follow. He calls us to a journey, and a relationship, and like any journey and any meaningful relationship, that means change. It means leaving things behind, and getting new things in return.

And yes, that includes the things of which we say, “God couldn’t possibly want me to give that up; he can’t possibly mean that I’m not allowed to do that.” In fact, it especially includes those things, because those—whether sinful in and of themselves or not—are the things in our lives that most interfere with his lordship: they are our idols. They are the things which which we must give over to him if we’re to follow him; clinging to them is nothing less than idolatry.

And yes, that includes our sexuality—and that means for all of us. He may give it back to us in pretty much the same form, or he may not; he’s been calling people to celibacy for a very long time, after all, for a great many reasons. But whether straight or gay, married or single, our sexuality absolutely must be surrendered to his lordship in our lives if we’re to follow Jesus faithfully; and that may very well mean accepting that we cannot do that which we most want to do, and which we’re most accustomed to doing.

And yes, that includes our money, and our careers, and our other family relationships, and our gifts and talents and aspirations, and all the other things that matter to us. He calls us to surrender to him everything of significance in our lives, to do with as he will. This is not the price of his acceptance, but its consequence; it’s what it means to be accepted by Jesus, because to be accepted by him is to be invited to go with him, to go where he’s going and do what he’s doing, instead of going where we want to go and doing what we want to do.

 

Take Care of Your Own

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(Psalm 94:1-15; 1 Timothy 5:3-16)

Our passage from 1 Timothy this morning is a complicated one; there’s a lot here that Paul is just assuming, because Timothy already knows exactly what’s going on in Ephesus—but we don’t, and so there’s disagreement as to the exact situation Paul was addressing. Two things are clear, and then from there we sort of have to figure it out for ourselves. First, the church in Ephesus was committed to supporting its widowed members financially. Second, the false teachers in Ephesus had had a lot of success among the younger widows in the congregation. That much we know; the rest is disputed.

For my part, let me give you my best understanding of what was going on here. It seems clear that there was some sort of formal roll of widows in the church who were supported by the congregation; and from the language Paul uses, it appears that the widows on this roll were expected to devote themselves to the work of the church, such as they were able, and especially to prayer. It seems likely from verse 12 that they made some sort of pledge that if the church provided for their needs, they would dedicate themselves to the church. Some commentators have even gone so far as to describe these widows as ordained officers of the church; that’s too strong a statement for the evidence we have, but it does seem clear that they were working right alongside the deacons in ministries of service, whether they were officially ordained to that work or not.

Now, I can’t be sure, but this might give us insight as to why the false teachers in Ephesus had such success recruiting younger widows. It sounds like priority for support was given to older widows in the congregation—as Paul is clear that it should be—both because the older widows who lacked family support were in greater need, and because they showed greater spiritual maturity and stability; the younger widows as a group were less mature, and also much likelier to remarry and thus to come off the list. This doesn’t mean that the Ephesian church didn’t provide for younger widows to ensure their needs were met—especially if they had children to support—but that they didn’t have the same status as the older widows, and that their support wasn’t as high a priority. I suspect that some of the younger widows resented this, and that the false teachers played on their resentment to win their support; thus Paul feels the need to point out the behavior of some of the younger widows (who were taking advantage of the help they were receiving to live irresponsibly) to reaffirm the church’s policy in this area.

Now, there are two threads running through this passage, and we don’t have time to address them both this morning. The first is Paul’s concern for the behavior of some of the younger widows, who are following the false teachers and in consequence are acting in ways that make the church look bad; we’ve talked about this to some extent in the last few weeks. The second is new in this passage, and so that’s where I’d like to focus our attention this morning, as we also see here Paul’s concern that the church in Ephesus do the best possible job of providing for and taking care of those in their midst who were in need. This concern follows quite logically on Paul’s instructions to Timothy, which we considered last week, to train himself in godliness and to lead the congregation to do the same: one of the ways in which we do so, one of the ways in which we grow spiritu-ally and bear witness to the truth of the gospel, is to take care of our own.

There are several points to note here. One, the first responsibility for widows in the church belonged to their families, if they had families to support them. Partly, this was for financial reasons, to enable the church to use its resources as effectively as possible; after all, the church in Ephesus probably wasn’t swimming with money. This is an issue we deal with as well, as we have money to use to meet people’s needs, but we don’t have enough to do everything for everyone—especially in the current economy; we have to think about how much we give, and to whom, and for what, to make sure we don’t just run through the money we have. It’s hard, since we don’t know what needs are going to come down the pike a week from now, or a month, or three months. That’s a tough call to have to make, to say, “We can do this much and no more”; to be able to do that consistently, you have to set up guidelines. For the early church, this was one of them, that the priority for church support went to widows who didn’t have families to support them.

Beyond the financial reason for this policy, though, is a deeper reason: it’s a religious duty, it’s our Christian obligation, to provide for family members in need, and especially if it should be our parents who are in need. You might think that’s strong language, but that’s exactly Paul’s language. It’s ironic in a way; Christianity was accused in its early days of undermining the family structure, since it called people to honor a higher authority than their parents (or, for that matter, the government). Here, Paul proves the falsehood of that charge, coming down hard on people within the church in Ephesus who were neglecting their responsibility to provide for their parents. People who don’t take care of their relatives, and especially their immediate family, Paul says, are worse than unbelievers—since after all, those outside the church at least accepted this responsibility, whatever else they got wrong; and in acting worse than the world, worse than those who have no faith in God, they have rejected their duty to God and effectively denied the faith. That’s how serious a thing it is to refuse to take care of those who have taken care of you, to whom you owe responsibility as your family.

Now, for those who don’t have children, grandchildren, or other family to support them—or whose family is outside the church and has rejected them—that responsibility passes to the congregation; and as we’ve noted, Paul spends a little time here on how this responsibility ought to be handled. One main consideration, of course, is financial, as the church should give the greatest help to those in the greatest need; that’s only logical. Along with that, however, Paul is concerned with the spiritual state of these widows, and their commitment to the church. This again was probably in part to focus the church on helping those who were truly its own, rather than having people drift into the church just to get help, with no real interest in being a part of the body of Christ; and if we’re right that widows on the list were expected to devote themselves as best as they were able to prayer and works of service, then it only makes sense to give priority to those who will take that commitment seriously, and who have demonstrated their concern for others.

The key in all this, once again, is that the church should embody and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ; and we see this concern here from three different angles. The first is that the church needs to focus its resources on that mission, that everything the church spends and everything it gives away should in some way further the work of Jesus in this world—as giving to those in need obviously does. Second, taking care of our own, providing for those to whom we’re related—whether by blood, or as brothers and sisters in Christ—is part of training ourselves in godliness, which we talked about last week; it’s part of our call as Christians to care for others before ourselves, and to put the love of Christ into practice in a meaningful way. After all, as Jesus told us, we can’t claim to love other people if we aren’t willing to give of what we have to help them. God brings us into relationship with others—through our family, through his body, the church, and by other means as well—and then he calls us to love each other, and part of that is taking care of each other; we cannot refuse to do so.

And third, we see here an abiding scriptural theme, God’s concern for the powerless, of whom the archetypal examples are the widow, the fatherless, the homeless foreigner, and the stranger. Under Roman law, these were people who had no rights, no ability to defend themselves, and no real opportunity to earn a living We see this all through the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, as God declares himself the God of the weak and the powerless, and condemns the evildoers who “kill the widow and the stranger, [and] murder the orphan.” Again and again, we have the affirmation—which Paul echoes in 1 Timothy—that God is a God of justice, and that those who exploit the poor and defenseless will be punished. The psalmist may ask, “How long shall the wicked exult?” but he does so in the certainty that the one who disciplines the nations will dig a pit for the wicked in the end. Those who build their mansions on the backs of the needy may prosper for a time, but not forever.

And in the end, though talk of God as a God of justice and judgment rings a harsh note, it’s important for us to remember that the judgment of God comes on those who do evil, on those who reject his ways; it’s important to remember that it’s rooted in his insistence on making right all that is wrong, and on his concern for the powerless—and that his concern includes us. The highest and greatest expression of this concern came in Christ, in his death and resurrection on our behalf, taking the punishment for our sin and paying the price that we were powerless to pay, winning for us the freedom we were powerless to win. In a sense, God’s greatest act of mercy was also his greatest act of justice. We worship a God who did not love from a distance, but came down to bear the weight of human need through humble service, and who calls us to do the same—to show his love not just in words, but in our actions, in care for those who are weak and needy and defenseless, and especially for those who are close to us. His love opens us to see the needs and burdens of those around us, and his compassion calls us to bear them in his name and for his sake, to share the gift of his self-sacrifice with others.