Mercy as justice

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

—James 2:10-13

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

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

Well, no.  No, they aren’t.Read more→

Christian idolatry

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

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

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

 

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

hope*links

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This week’s fruit from some of my fellow hope*writers:

Jennifer Riales reflects on the challenge of waiting on God

Jennifer Denney (good week for Jennifers, I guess) looks back on “two years of nomad-life” and the importance of living intentionally for what’s actually important

Amy Noel Green struggles with skepticism and the ways other Christians can be stumbling blocks for our faith (Instagram link provided in case the Facebook link doesn’t work)

There is none righteous; no, not one

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I linked a few days ago to Yolanda Lichty’s post on the mass grave of 215 First Nations children found on the grounds of the former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia; the day I posted, the bodies of 751 First Nations people, mostly children, were found on the site of another closed residential school, this one in Saskatchewan.  The story continues to be exposed—and not just in Canada; the US did much the same thing, and now the Department of the Interior is committed to finding out if it has its own graves crying out for justice.

 

Photo taken ca. 1920 by F. H. Kitto.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Consider the Source

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(Psalm 1)

This morning we’re starting a sermon series from the Psalms.  I say from the Psalms rather than on the Psalms because there are 150 of them and we don’t want to spend three years on this; but that very fact that there are 150 makes it a challenge to figure out where to look.  When starting anything, I tend to defer to the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who instructed the White Rabbit, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end:  then stop.”  But does that really matter here?  Stories have beginnings, and essays—like the ones our middle-school English teachers have to pound their students through—but the book of Psalms?

Thing is, though it doesn’t have the same sort of throughline as a story or an essay, the book of Psalms does have an introduction and a conclusion.  In fact, it has a two-part introduction—that’s why some ancient manuscripts of the Psalter combined the first two psalms into one.  Psalm 1 operates at the level of the individual, and then Psalm 2 speaks of the community of faith among the godless nations.  Both areas of focus are important throughout the book; but you can’t really do both in one sermon, so we’re just doing the first part this morning.Read more→

In my end is my beginning

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

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

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

Belated, but still appreciated

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

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

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

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

A little light for the journey

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It’s that time again—no, not for the Wheel of Morality, but to pass along the work of a few of my fellow hope*writers.

Jenn Whitmer argues that we need to ask better questions; in my friend Kent Denlinger’s terms, she’s making a good case for moving from condemnation to curiosity.

Jennifer Riales makes the point that if we are disciples of Jesus, we are missionaries wherever we go, and I love the way she describes it:  “Changing the World One Front Yard at a Time”.

Putting away the hose

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

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