The Gospel According to Your Baptism ...

 

"The gospel is our power to know that the death and resurrection of Jesus actually accomplished our own death and our own resurrection.  Jesus did not die that I might live.  We say that as a wonderful shorthand, but taken by itself, it's not true.  Jesus did not die that I might live.  Jesus died so that I might die.  Jesus was buried so that I might be buried.  In Jesus, that's where I left all my guilt; all my shame; all my sins; buried there in that tomb two thousand years ago, abandoned.  And if I have died and been buried with Christ, that means I have been raised with Christ.  I am no longer beneath the domain of sin; beneath the tyranny of death.  I have been raised to new life in Him; with Him."

- Pastor Joe Carlson

A Meditation with both Palm Sunday and Good Friday in Mind ...

 

"My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this ... was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind."

- Miroslav Volf 

Exclusion and Embrace pgs. 303-304

A Communion Hymn Meditation: How Sweet and Aweful is the Place

In a few moments we’re going to sing together a favorite Isaac Watts hymn “How Sweet and Aweful is the Place.  It’s a hymn about this great parable –

He opens the first verse by describing the great and admire-able feast of Christ’s Kingdom – It is a feast that is sweet and full of awe … and one that displays the choicest foods from His stores.

And when we join together for that great feast, from our hearts, we will cry out to the Lord – “Why am I a guest?  Why did I hear Your voice inviting me here when so many others choose to starve outside?”

Watts gives us the correct answer.  The Lord replies – “The same sweet love that spread this feast drew you here.  Without it, you also would have refused and perished.”

So Watts finishes the hymn with a prayer for us to sing together.

And it is the application of this Kingdom parable.

After confessing that the only reason we’ve been invited into the Kingdom feast was the sweetness of God’s love toward us, we pray and ask Him to have compassion on the nations and to extend the call of His sweet love to all the earth.  We ask Him to constrain or draw strangers to their true home and to make His Word victorious, that it would triumph in our world.

The fact that unworthies such as we have been invited to Christ’s great banquet-feast fills us with longing to see all of His churches filled with people to join us in singing from our hearts with one voice the hymn of His redeeming grace.

Why did Israel receive the immeasurable blessings of the Covenant?  Why have we received the priceless blessings of the Kingdom?

Not because we earned it.  Not because God knew He’d get a good return on His investment.  In fact, as we’ll see – God-willing – later this season when we get to Lk 17, when we have done all we can, we will still have failed to return God any profit for what He spent on us.

By inviting us to His feast, Christ has been gracious to those who can never repay Him, just as He has called us to do.  And so the Father has exalted Him and will yet still reward Him at the consummation of all things – the resurrection of the just and the wedding feast of the Lamb.

Epiphany Prayer

Gracious Father,

Your Son is the desire of every nation. To Those who hunger for love, He is the Bridegroom rising like the morning sun;

To those who yearn for economic prosperity, He is the Creator who turns water to an overflow of finest wine;

To those in search of justice and righteousness, He is the King who brings the incomplete cleansing of the Law to its glorious fulfillment in grace;

To those who long for sacred purpose and devotion, He is the God Who calls many and when they have sacrificed all to come, He provides for them lavishly especially in the times when it appears that they have given up so much just to arrive at a dead 

end.

For those who long for social equity, He is the Lord Who blesses rulers and masters by drawing their servants closest to Himself, so that they are the only ones given to 

see His miracle as it is performed.

O Christ, You are the joy of man’s desiring; the One for Whom our hearts always 

hunger.

Even our sinful desires are just twisted impressions of the God-shaped void within us. And our hearts are always restless until they find their rest in You.

So shine the light of Your face upon us and bless us to draw us under the shadow of Your wing.

Set our feet to walk on Your path in Your steps, Lord Jesus, and fill us in our emptiness with your Holy Spirit. 

Amen.

Islam: Mirror of Christendom

An abridged essay by Dr Peter J Leithart; the full essay is available here.

“For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.”

—The Epistle of James, 1:23-24

Deep in the pit of hell, the pilgrim Dante came across Mohammed, walking with his torso split open from chin to groin.  The surprise in this scene is not the gruesomeness of Mohammed’s punishment, but the place where this scene occurs: the ninth Bolgia of Malebolgia, in the subcircle of hell reserved for schismatics. Mohammed is not among the idolaters or the pagans, but among sinners being punished for breaking off from the Christian Church, all of whom, appropriately enough, have their bodies rent as retribution for rending the body of Christ.

In treating Mohammed as a Christian schismatic, Dante was not inventing a new perspective (he rarely did), but presenting views widespread in his time. Many in the Western medieval world believed that Mohammed himself had apostatized from Christianity.  Centuries before Dante, John of Damascus (675-749) treated Islam in the final section of his treatise de Haeresibus, calling it the “heresy of the Ishmaelites.”

Why and for Whom do we clap?

An incredible video snippet from David Gallo's TED talk "underwater astonishments", one of the top 10 most viewed TED talks of all time.

A simple question: Why did it end in spontaneous applause?  For Whom were these people clapping?  The octopus?  Gallo?  I think not.  Then for Whom? SomeOne else.

Romans 1.20.

God's Finger, My Forehead, and Her Intricate, Perfect Ears

[More than 10 years ago, in a seminary workshop outside of Greenville, SC, I heard a speaker read this passage.  Since then I've ruminated on it scores of times, though never remembering its author.  This morning, in a Ken Myers interview of Mary Eberstadt, I was delighted to hear it referred to again - with the author's name attached - Whittaker Chambers!  Enjoy.]

“It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss's apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear — those intricate, perfect ears.

The thought passed through my mind: 'No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature. They could have been created only by immense design.'

The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.”

- Whittaker Chambers, Introduction, Witness

Begbie, Music, and the Problem of Evil

Enjoy

[link: 5809909]

Art, Music, Creation, Difference, Violence, Harmony, and the Trinity

"Creation is the work of a dynamic, three-personed God and the members of the Trinity enjoy an eternal giving and receiving among one another. The doctrine of the Trinity informs us of both the personality and the dynamism of God - qualities that are suggested in the ancient term applied to the Trinity - perichoresis. It refers to the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity by extension perichoresis can be used to refer to God's relationship to the world whereby all things exist in him and through him; in him we live and move and have our being... why move?  Are we dancing when we have our being?
All of creation is somehow engaged in the life of the trinity is well.  John 17 in particular comes to mind where we read that in our growth in Christ God indwells us and we indwell Him.  So Father Son and Holy Spirit are dancing around each other and the Christian life is our entry into that dance.
Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart notes that while God was under no necessity to create, the act of creation flows out of the infinite love that's experienced by the members of the Trinity.  Hart writes:
"God's gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love.  Thus creation must be received before all else as a gift and beauty."

Book List [What I've been reading lately...]

You are what your mind eats ...

Bleeding-Heart Calvinism

My friend, pastor Joost Nixon, narrating his article - my favorite of all time.  Enjoy.

Wise Purity

"I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. So be wise as serpents and harmless as doves".

Christians often find it easy to be one or the other, but seldom both.  Without innocence, shrewdness become manipulative; without shrewdness, innocence becomes naivety.Though we face different crises and different problems to those of the first disciples, we still need that finely balanced character, reflecting so remarkably that of Jesus Himself.

- N.T. Wright

Jesus, Himself, led our small-group Bible study, and yet He was not known to us until the Breaking of Bread ...

Thank you to Uri Brito for posting this on his blog.  It is a collection of quotes from Albert Mohler's interview with theologian Stanley Hauerwas.  It fits perfectly into yesterday's sermon/Gospel passage - Lk 24: Returning to the Church and finding Christ in the breaking of bread.  [*Please note: the transcripts widely available online INCORRECTLY quote Hauerwas in the section below.  I've reviewed the audio and transcribed them accurately.*] Enjoy!

Mohler: When you look at American Christianity in general, and American Evangelicalism in particular, you appear to see a church that is looking less and less like the church.

Hauerwas: That’s true. I have great admiration for evangelicals for no other reason than they just bring such great energy to the faith and I admire that. But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship and I think that’s to get it exactly backwards: that the Christian faith is a mediated faith. It only comes through the witness of others as embodied in the church. So I should never trust my presumption that I know what my relationship with God is separate from how that is expressed through words and sacrament in the church. So evangelicals, I’m afraid, often times, with what appears to be very conservative religious convictions, make the church a secondary phenomenon to their assumed faith and I think that’s making it very hard to maintain disciplined congregations.

The Dangerous Gospel of Jesus Christ

*Pastor's warning! Please note: explicit language warning for the first minute of this video clip!*


While we were busy running around in Sandestin for our annual Family Conference, on the other side of the world [down under], the Festival of Dangerous Ideas was concluding in Sydney.  The highlight of my time in Sandestin was getting to host our Q&A with Douglas and Nancy Wilson.  This morning, Doug posted the link to the Q&A session from FODI, which features his friend and Christian apologist, Peter Hitchens [brother of the late, radical atheist, Christopher Hitchens].
2 things stood out to me.  The first was the clarity and provocative intrigue of Peter Hitchens' articulation of the gospel of Christ Jesus.  The second is the utter disdain of children among the rest of the panelists.  It is often said by Christian Pro-lifers that we are a culture that hates children.  At times that has struck my ears as harsh hyperbole.  But in this clip, the hatred and abandon couldn't be more obvious.

"Missional" Living

"All the people of the Church [must] live their baptism in a missionary way... throughout the developed world today, every territory is mission territory; when you walk out the door of your house - and even before you walk out the door of your house - because Christian mission really does begin at home."

- George Weigel

ORA et LABORA

ORA et LABORA

Recently we’ve had the great privilege of coming together to consider our Lord’s teaching on the Kingdom, and how we are to picture it in our minds.  I say “picture it in our minds” because rather than presenting a lecture, He chose to start by drawing two pictures with words for His disciples and listeners.

The first picture was that of a tree – a great tree growing from a mustard seed.  The wording in the translation we heard in worship used the phrase “a grain of mustard seed”.  In this way, the translators link the idea of the seed with the word “grain” which helps us picture the scale of its size.  Wikipedia reports that the average mustard seed is 1-2mm in diameter.  This is also the size of a “course” grain of sand.  In other words, very, very tiny.

But this same tiny grain, although hidden underground for a time, will sprout to life and grow like a mighty tree, providing a home for the birds from all around. 

Or the leaven powder a woman hides inside the giant lump of dough, slowly fermenting the whole three measures [~60 lbs].

We’ve already considered together what this picture implies.  The Kingdom begins very small – with only a handful of believers and then is hidden underground.  Just like our Lord was hidden in the ground of a garden, His Church was driven underground at first, literally having to worship underground and in catacombs at times because of Roman persecution.  This situation is still taking place among Middle Eastern and Asian peoples, and so we continue to pray for the day when the Kingdom comes on earth and the great branches and leafy canopy fill the sky above our heads.

But faithful prayer is only half of the equation.  Our other duty is faithful work.

And this is reflected in the beautiful Latin phrase we’ve been given in Church History: Ora et Labora.

So I would like to remind you of it and ask you to continue to keep it before yourselves, especially in this green season of “ordinary time” and growth when we are starting back up into the school year and plowing forward once again into the rhythms of the year.  This is the time of summer slowly coming to a close and fall harvest work beginning. 

A dear pastor friend of mine from Niceville is fond of saying: “You cannot change the world, but sometimes God gives you a little piece.”  And he is right.  But how do we change even our little piece?  The answer is faithfulness – faithfulness in prayer and faithfulness in labor; lives lived in this duality of faithfulness among us and our children and our children’s children.  Covenental faithfulness.  Generational steadfastness.  Incremental advances.  This is how our Lord taught us to think about how His Kingdom would grow.  

There is a great poster I saw once on the internet, illustrated after the fashion of the British WW2 poster, it said: “Keep calm and Ora et Labora.”  These are our marching orders.  So go forth, praying and laboring.  The book of Ecclesiastes teaches us that much of our human work "under the sun" is vain because of the fall and curse.  But not all life is vanity and not all work is vain.  So do not grow weary in doing good work, but persevere, knowing that when you work in the Lord, your labor is not in vain [1 Cor 15.57-8] . 

DOMA & Gay "Marriage" - a Christian Evaluation Part 2

In the aftermath of the SCOTUS DOMA ruling, here are 7 points to help us understand why we are where we are and 7 things Christians should do about it.

1. Heterosexual couples destroyed the sanctity of marriage long before the gay rights movement hit the mainstream. "I have two dads, you know." This is what a young boy I know recently told me. His words struck me. I knew they were true. But I'd never thought of it ... like THAT before. His birth parents divorced while he was an infant [for what I believe were sound, Biblical reasons]. His mother went on to remarry a fine Christian man and so, like so many other boys around, he has "two dads". Today this trend continues, though now with the ruthless efficiency of eliminating the mother altogether. A long time ago, our society began to deliberately streamline the process by which a man or woman can dissolve the oath they had previously made before God, church, family, community, and state, to stay united until death.  And for decades, the process of oath-breaking has been made more and more convenient.  At this point in our history, "the sanctity of marriage" is a hollow-sounding string of words that used to mean something.

2. It was heterosexual promiscuity that paved the yellow-brick road on which gay rights activists now march.  What young people really mean when they say "Don't tell THEM what THEY can't do in THEIR bedroom" is "Don't tell ME what I can't do in MY bedroom".  This is what 'the pill' is all about. What we see today is the fruiting of seeds that were planted fifty years ago and have been faithfully watered and fertilized ever since. Pulling levers and pushing buttons isn't going to change that or stop what has been in motion for so long. But being faithful will... eventually. This is a bitter fruit, but the story is far from over.  As a society, we seem to have lost the ability to to make even the most basic moral judgments and distinctions.  Just open up your iTunes store and watch the scrolling "what's hot now" banner at the top.  By and large, we are daily consumers of the obscene.

3. The black church is crucial in our culture wars. They have been the sleeping giant that has been roused in the recent cultural reversal of popular-level abortion views. They will be crucial in courageously speaking out to reject FALSE equivocations between civil rights struggles and the campaign to make sodomy a socially-acceptable sexual practice. One of my best friends in the world was born with very, very dark black skin.  His ethnic background is Nigerian.  He was black last year as a Ph.D. student in Seattle.  He is black today as an entrepreneur in Charleston.  He will die black.  None of this has the slightest thing to do with extraneous cultural influences or his own behavior and personal choice.  He is a black man, pure and simple.  To equate his blackness with another man's decision to engage in sodomy is false and wrong, and there is no amount of voice-raising or finger wagging that will change that fact.  But my voice here isn't the one that matters.  Those belong to my brothers of color, [many of whom are speaking out] such as Voddie Baucham, Thabiti Anyabwile, Ken Jones, Jemar Tisby, Philip Holmes, Reddit Andrews, Mike Campbell, Anthony Carter, LaCrae, Shai Linne, Curtis Allen, and others.

4.  Gay is cool.  Let's face it.  Well, perhaps it would be better to say it this way -  the gay cause is the cool side.  For the general public actually being gay is not the cool thing [see the horrifying long-term health statistics below], but it is most definitely cool to have gay friends.  It is cool to support them vocally and frequently.  It is cool to be passionate for their cause.  And the gay rights movement has found a way to morally tap into the fashion sense of the American public.  Many have wisely noted that in current public opinion, image trumps character.  The average Joe arrives at his ethical views in large part the same way he chooses his shoes, skinny jeans, and coffee brand.  Designer ethics is part of a designer lifestyle.  Pro-gay is chic and fashionable.  But as we've seen with fanny packs, disco, and eugenics, trends change and fashions - material and ideological - alter.

5.  This is an experiment - a cultural experiment.  I'll admit, I'mm an optimist, not a henny-penny kind of guy.  I probably wouldn't run around like my hair was on fire if my hair were actually on fire. And here is one of the reasons. This is an experiment. Will state-sanctioned gay marriage result in a happier, healthier society?  The answer is 'no'. This experiment is doomed to NOT work. Our great, great grandchildren will look back on this sort of thing and scratch their heads. You cannot rebel against a creational pattern as deep as gender and think things will just keep rolling forward. So stay faithful and keep on keepin' on. Roe was hardly the end of the abortion debate, and we are not even close to the end of this discussion either. There are plenty of people paying attention and taking notes. The numbers are being counted.

6. And this brings us to a separate societal trend which is set on a direct collision course with the Gay Rights Agenda: that of fully-socialized medicine. We've already heard it loudly suggested that lawmakers ban soft drinks because of this conflict.

Losing Church Kids - The Numbers

The results are in from a recent survey headed up by the Fixed Point Foundation about young adults who have left the faith and were willing to open up about why and how it happened.   Here is a summary of their findings compiled by my friend, Steven Wedgeworth:

1- They had attended church
2- The mission and message of their churches was vague
3-They felt their churches offered superficial answers to life's difficult questions
4- They expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously
5- Ages 14-17 were decisive
6- The decision to embrace unbelief was often an emotional one
7- The internet factored heavily into their conversion to atheism

Church the way it oughta be...

"Thank you for building a church that looks ... like a church."

- The most frequent comment from community members after the new construction of the new sanctuary of

Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church .

Other notes from my conversation w/ Pastor Booth:

Apologetics in Light of the Resurrection

"[Like Thomas], those who live in the world of the enlightenment will naturally ask, ‘but did it happen … and how do you know?’ And they must be encouraged to come with their questions.  The prim and proper Bartian would no doubt prefer it if Jesus had said to Thomas, ‘Go away and come back when you’ve got a better epistemology!’  But interestingly the story works the other way round.  Good historical answers are available just as Jesus could in fact be touched…

This is because the resurrection, if it means what the NT says it means, is not a creatio ex nihilo but a creatio ex vetere.  As in Romans 8 – just as the old ontology is swallowed up in the new: what is mortal being swallowed up,  not replaced with life but swallowed up in it -  so the old epistemology, quite properly, is transcended and therefore included in the new.  There is no complete disjunction.

The resurrection itself is not the abandoning of the old body and the emergence of a new one, but the raising to new life of the old one itself.

Think about this: the mark of the nails on the body of the risen Jesus are thus the sign that validates historical inquiry into the resurrection. The nail thrusts themselves, like the skepticism of the enlightenment, were meant to wound but now remain as evidence.  Go figure…

-Tom Wright