Radical Followers

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In Teaching a Stone to Talk, in one of my favorite paragraphs ever written by anybody anywhere, Annie Dillard writes,

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

It’s in that spirit, I think, that we should come before this passage, because it’s at this point in the Gospel of John that things really start getting bumpy.  The gospels tell a story of increasing division between Jesus and the religious folk as they move from skeptical curiosity through entrenched opposition to murderous fury—a division that Jesus doesn’t desire but also doesn’t try to prevent.  In John, the major shift happens in chapters 9 through 11.  The healing of the blind man in chapter 9, as Deborah showed us two weeks ago, ups the ante for the Pharisees, making him a much more alarming threat to them than he had been.  The raising of Lazarus in chapter 11, which Tom will talk about in two weeks, brings the chief priests fully on board with the conviction that Jesus must be killed.  And in between?  In our passage this morning, we see Jesus put a wedge in the crack between himself and the Jewish leadership and bring the splitting maul down hard.

It’s important to be clear about something here:  there’s a difference between being a divisive figure and being a divider.  For dividers, turning people against each other is the point—it’s a means to an end, a tactic or strategy in the service of their agenda.  Think Lee Atwater, James Carville, Karl Rove.  Jesus didn’t desire division; he wasn’t dividing people in order to conquer them.  But anyone who stands strongly for truth will be a divisive figure, both loved and hated—and sometimes by the same people at the same time.  Dr. King was a divisive figure, because—like Jesus—he spoke truths that many people didn’t want to hear.  Great unifiers are great compromisers; and sometimes, as with the Constitution, they compromise not only their principles but their integrity for the sake of unity.

Jesus is the light of the world, and—as John makes very clear—light divides the world into those who love the light and those who love the darkness, just by existing.  Read more→

Starkindler

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(John 1:1-18)

There’s a story about a young pianist who was working on a piece by Bach.  After the recital, she said to her teacher, “Thank goodness we’ve finished Bach.”  Her teacher looked at her and said firmly, “My dear, one never finishes Bach.”  Christians have the tendency to approach the fundamental truths of our faith in this way, as if there comes a point where we can look at them and say, “I’ve learned this—I can move on to the next thing.”  The truth that we’re saved by God’s grace alone and we live by his grace alone, for instance, is something we need to keep coming back to and re-learning because the sinful part of us keeps pushing it out of our minds.

That’s one reason it’s a good thing we have those headings of the VSF creed up on the wall:  we need the continual reminder that God is bigger.  We do well to take that a bit further and remind ourselves that Jesus is bigger.  The universal temptation is to make God safe, and perhaps especially to make Jesus safe—or maybe it’s just especially easy to do with Jesus.  We think in comparisons, and so when we read the stories of Jesus as a human being, we try to fit him into our normal frame of reference.  Even if we believe he was fully God, we have no model anywhere in view for what that looks like, and so our natural tendency is to imagine Jesus as merely human.  John’s aim in beginning his gospel is to write about Jesus in a way that prevents that tendency from obscuring our view of the greatness and uniqueness of Jesus.

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In the Lord, for the Lord, from the Lord

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(Ephesians 5:17-33)

I love preaching on this passage.  That might sound a little strange, given the amount of ill feeling it generates in some parts of the church, but that’s actually why I love preaching on it.  There are some passages of Scripture that have gotten jammed up over the years in interpretations that don’t actually make sense—Jim Eisenbraun pointed me to another one this year, in Job 42—and it’s a joy and delight to be able to come along and say, “You keep using that passage.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  (Gotta keep the Princess Bride references going here.)  There are interpretations of Scripture which ought to be inconceivable that are widely assumed to be obviously true, and they need to be set right.

That’s what we’re dealing with in Ephesians 5.  It’s a widely-misused passage which illustrates two common pathologies of biblical interpretation.  One is the mindset which reads the Bible as an instruction manual from which we are to extract “biblical principles” to follow in our lives.  With that approach, the instant the brain sees the word “wives,” the mental guillotine drops and everything that follows is cut completely out of its context.  It’s as if Paul said, “OK, I’m done talking about all this grace and unity stuff; now I’m going to sit down and write you a rulebook on ‘how marriage is supposed to work.’”  That’s how it’s frequently read, as if it were a marriage manual that got mixed up with the letter and published by mistake.

If we’re going to take this passage seriously as Scripture, we can’t do that.  We need to understand it in context—both the context of the letter, in which it serves a purpose in Paul’s overall argument, and its historical and cultural context.  Ephesians wasn’t written five years ago by a youth pastor in Iowa, after all.  We need to ask ourselves how the Ephesians would have heard this passage, which was written to address their questions, concerns, and culture, not ours.  When we ignore the context of a passage, we almost always produce interpretations which serve the agenda of the interpreter rather than challenging it.  In this case, that has historically meant two profound errors:  first, the idea of absolute unilateral submission of wives to husbands—the husband is supposed to be the lord of the house; and second, a focus on wives rather than husbands despite the fact that Paul addresses eight verses to husbands and only three to wives.

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Body-Building

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(Psalm 68; Ephesians 4:7-16)

To my way of thinking, this is one of the two hardest passages in Ephesians to preach.  The other is the one I’m preaching on next month.  I don’t mention that because I’m fishing for sympathy—I volunteered—but because there’s one point to be made about both of them; I’ll talk about that later.  In general, though, the challenges are quite different.  With Ephesians 5, the problem is the way the passage has been misused and abused through the centuries.  That one, you might call the “No, Paul isn’t who you think he is and he isn’t saying what they’ve told you he’s saying” sermon.  Here in Ephesians 4, the issue is with the text itself, and one you may have already seen:  does Paul even know how to read?  Compare the text of Psalm 68:18 with the way Paul quotes it, and you have reason to wonder.

To understand what’s going on here, we need to begin—as always—with the context.  Read more→

The Mystery of the Church

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(Ephesians 3)

OK, Tychicus, are you ready to start?  Listen, brother, I’m really sorry your hand cramped up so badly . . .  I have to admit, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a pen fall out of someone’s hand like that.  —But you’re better now?  Good.  Thank you.

Just let me put myself in the proper frame—  Yes, I’m going to take a minute to think about—well, I know we’re planning to send this around all the churches in the province of Asia, but “Asians” sounds strange, and the only church I really know is Ephesus; I’m just going to call them “Ephesians.”  If I can fix them in my mind’s eye, it will be like I’m talking directly to them.  You know that’s how I work.

No, I don’t want to sit down, I think better standing up.  —Something to lean against?  You’re right, I’m not feeling well; that might be a good idea.  —Though I think you’re just hoping if I walk less, I’ll talk less.

So . . .  where did you put the copy you made?  —Oh, right, I’m holding it.  Thank you.  Now, where were we? . . .  Hmmmm . . .  Tychicus, I never finished my prayer for the Ephesians—I must have forgotten I was writing a prayer, because I went off on a tangent.  It was a good tangent, but still . . .  I wonder why we didn’t catch that?  —You caught it?  Of course you did.  Why didn’t you tell me?  —Because it was a good tangent and you didn’t want to interrupt me?  Well, that’s something, anyway.

Still, I need to finish that prayer.  So, let’s see, where did I leave off—mutter mutter “no longer exiles and resident aliens, fellow citizens with the members of the house of God, built on the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus the cornerstone, being built by the Spirit into a temple for God.”  OK.  Ready?  Good.  Continuing:

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Whose Am I?

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(Ephesians 1:15-23; Hebrews 2:5-10)

How many of you recognize the name of Abraham Maslow?  For those who don’t, he was an American psychologist of the last century who was one of the founders of the discipline of humanistic psychology.  If you know his name, though, the first thing that comes to your mind probably isn’t “humanistic psychology,” it’s this:

Recently, Maslow’s hierarchy has been on my mind quite a bit.  For one thing, Sara is working her way through the online coursework for the Transition to Teaching program, and has discovered that the folks who developed the program are true believers in Maslow’s hierarchy who present it uncritically as the truth about human nature.  That’s the sort of presentation calculated to raise her hackles, so she’s been mounting a counterattack in the privacy of our home.

As it happens, she’s had a fair bit of material to hand for the purpose, beginning with the thing that first drew my attention back to Maslow—a remarkably efficient takedown of his hierarchy published a few months ago in Christianity Today.  Once Sara started me looking, I quickly discovered an avalanche of arguments against his work; one piece in Forbes declared, “Simple, orderly, intuitively sensible, cognitively appealing and offering order out of chaos, the hierarchy of needs has only one problem:  it is plain, flat, dead wrong.”

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Bigger than Our Fear

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(Romans 8)

I grew up in the Reformed Church in America.  For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s the Dutch version of Scottish Presbyterianism.  It’s a lot smaller in this country because there were far more Scottish immigrants than Dutch, but historically they’ve been different versions of the same basic thing:  Reformed theology and church government by elders.  Pastors are elders who take the primary responsibility for preaching and teaching.

Problem is, that word “Reformed” isn’t clear to many people nowadays.  What many don’t get—even in Reformed churches—is that the nub of Calvinism is very simple:  God is bigger.  Luther was driven to stand against the Roman church when he discovered the meaning of grace; Calvin’s great inspiration was a vision of the unimaginable sovereignty, glory, and goodness of God.  However much bigger and more wonderful you might stretch your understanding of God to be, he’s far, far bigger and more wonderful than you realize.  Everything else in Calvin’s thought flows from that.

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On the difference between judgment and discernment: A response to Mark Sandlin, Part II

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Over two and a half months ago, I began a series of posts in response to a blog post by Mark Sandlin (a liberal PC(USA) pastor) titled “At What Point Do We Get to Say Parts of Christianity Are No Longer Christian?”  Yes, this is the second in that series.  I truly did not intend to take that long to get back to this; life and other topics intervened.  I’m quite sure I’ll have the third up much more quickly than that, since I’ve already started working on it.  For now, though, go read Sandlin’s post and the first part of my response; I’ll still be here when you get back.

If you’ve done that, then I can take my positive comments on Sandlin’s post as read and go from there.  This is important because my first critical observation is actually implicit in my praise of his work.  Sandlin frames his subject in terms of judgment, and frets that identifying and calling out people who are using Christianity rather than practicing it (the distinction is his, and it’s a good one) is “judgmental” and “mean.”  My response, by contrast, is framed in terms of discernment, which is related but significantly different.  I believe there’s a category error lurking at the heart of Sandlin’s argument; it’s a subtle one, but important nonetheless.

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Fairy tales and trigger warnings

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Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already.  Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey.  What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.  The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.  What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.  Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

—G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909), XVII: “The Red Angel”

I thought of this quote as I read N. D. Wilson’s recent essay “Why I Write Scary Stories for Children.”  Wilson has much the same message, except that in his case, it comes as a product of his own experience as a parent.

I write violent stories. I write dark stories. I write them for my own children, and I write them for yours. And when the topic comes up with a radio host or a mom or a teacher in a hallway, the explanation is simple. Every kid in every classroom, every kid in a bunk bed frantically reading by flashlight, every latchkey kid and every helicoptered kid, every single mortal child is growing into a life story in a world full of dangers and beauties. Every one will have struggles and ultimately, every one will face death and loss.

There is absolutely a time and a place for The Pokey Little Puppy and Barnyard Dance, just like there’s a time and a place for footie pajamas. But as children grow, fear and danger and terror grow with them, courtesy of the world in which we live and the very real existence of shadows. The stories on which their imaginations feed should empower a courage and bravery stronger than whatever they are facing. And if what they are facing is truly and horribly awful (as is the case for too many kids), then fearless sacrificial friends walking their own fantastical (or realistic) dark roads to victory can be a very real inspiration and help. . . .

Overwhelmingly, in my own family and far beyond, the stories that land with the greatest impact are those where darkness, loss, and danger (emotional or physical) is a reality. But the goal isn’t to steer kids into stories of darkness and violence because those are the stories that grip readers. The goal is to put the darkness in its place.

Wilson tells the story of his oldest child, who at the age of 7 was given screaming nightmares by an illustration in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe of the vile creatures that served the White Witch.  Rather than trying to protect his son from his own imagination, he decided (with some trepidation) “to try [to] embolden his subconscious mind.”

I carried my son into my office and downloaded an old version of Quake—a first-person shooter video game with nasty, snarling aliens 10 times worse than anything drawn by Pauline. I put my son on my lap with his finger on the button that fired our pixelated shotgun, and we raced through the first level, blasting every monster and villain away. Then we high-fived, I pitched him a quick story about himself as a monster hunter, and then I prayed with him and tucked him back into bed. A bit bashfully, I admitted to my wife what I had just done—hoping I wouldn’t regret it.

I didn’t. The nightmare never shook him again.

We do no one any favors when we try to protect them from the darkness of this world.Read more→

The anti-sexism of Christianity

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There are a lot of historical arguments made to support the proposition that Christianity is bad.  Many of them are sheer, unmitigated tripe.  For instance, there’s the myth of the so-called “Dark Ages” in which, supposedly, the Church suppressed science and rational inquiry.  The truth is that the roots of modern science were firmly laid in the true Renaissance of the twelfth century—and that what’s commonly called “the Renaissance” was a reactionary movement that worked hard to unlearn all that medieval scientists had learned about the errors in Greco-Roman natural philosophy.  That doesn’t suit the agenda of anti-Christian polemicists, though, or the general chronological snobbery of our time.  It also doesn’t suit the triumphalist narrative of scientific history in which the work of science always advances, which has no room for the times when science regresses.

Another is the myth of the Crusades.  Yes, the Crusades happened (that much is no myth), but it’s a widespread myth that they were “brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world.”  In reality, they were a counteroffensive against Islamic expansionism.  Islamic armies invaded the Byzantine Empire in 634, southern Italy in 652, and the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) in 711, plus they sacked Rome in 846.  The First Crusade wasn’t until 1095.  There’s a lot more to be said here, and maybe I’ll write a full post on this at some point, but the Islamic world only remembered the Crusades for the victories of Saladin until Westerners brought the myth to them in the 19th century.

Yet another canard is the idea that Christianity is intrinsically sexist.  To support this idea and buttress their claim that contemporary Christianity is anti-woman, some argue that early Christianity was particularly oppressive to women.  This is perhaps the most indefensible myth of all, resting on nothing but chronological snobbery.  Read more→