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

Against Heterosexuality by Michael Hannon [abridged]

Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations... 

Michel Foucault, an unexpected ally, details the pedigree of sexual orientation in his History of Sexuality. Whereas “sodomy” had long identified a class of actions, suddenly for the first time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the term “homosexual” appeared alongside it...designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual.”...cementing these categories of hetero- and homosexuality in the popular imagination...Sexual orientation, then, is nothing more than a fragile social construct, and one constructed terribly recently. designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual.”

My own prediction is that we will see this binary thoroughly deconstructed within our lifetimes. But in my view, we proponents of Christian chastity should see the impending doom of the gay–straight divide not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity. More than that, I want to suggest that we should do our best to encourage the dissolution of orientation within our own subcultural spheres wherever possible...

Why NOT to pray and fast on Election Day

Yesterday I preached what was probably the hardest sermon of my ministry career.  I told my congregation that - while I am all for things like prayer and fasting - I think there are important reasons NOT to do so tomorrow, in attachment with election day.  That was a shocking comment, and not one I made lightly.  I attempted to explain it and would like to elaborate here.

The entire sermon was an attack on the ways we make an idol of politics.  My community is a military community and we, of all people, in our closeness to the activities of the state, are tempted in the direction of political idolatry.  I fear that I made too little of the anguish that my parishioners feel as they watch our country arrive at this new low point.  Many of them have given their lives in service to our nation, and the heartache that is their current portion is significant and warranted.  It was not my intention to make light of it.
But where that heartache means total despair, it reveals the presence of an idol.  This is what I find so alarming about the way American Christians are calling for prayers and fastings in association with the voting process.   On the very day when the impotence of our idol is being exposed, we still cling to it with our eyes tightly shut refusing to acknowledge the judgment and truth.  We can pray and fast and hope it ain't so.  But there it is.  Our politics cannot save us.  We are not going to vote ourselves out of this mess.

Politics is very limited institution, mostly negative in it's power of enforcement and authority.  Law brings guilt, as the Apostle says, not life.  To look for solutions or lifegiving power from a political swordbearer is to put our trust and hope in a prince, which Scripture famously warns against.  It is like giving a farmer a hundred plowed acres, but only allowing him to use pesticide and a machete while expecting a bumper crop.  These are tools of excision, not growth.

A call to fast and pray is usually regarded as a call to repent.  Yet, at the top of the list of the sins we need to repent of nationally, are our political idolatry and our childish hunt for quick fixes to profound problems.  Yet, paradoxically, connecting a call to pray and fast with a political election will mostly likely simply reinforce and perpetuate both of those sins!

Our nation is like a morbidly obese man who is seeking relief from a peddler of pills.  The problem is that his own living throughout the decades of his life is what is killing him, and no pill will cure him of his own behavior.
Furthermore, I fear that calling for prayer and fasting on the day of elections is like that obese man calling his family to pray and fast on the day of his doctor's examination.  But the damage has already been done.  He ought to call them to pray and fast as he is driving to the grocery store, or as he is looking to join the membership of a gym, or pulling into the parkinglot of a buffet.  On the morning of the doctor's exam, it is too late.  Abraham told Dives, your time is up.  You had your fun.  The season of prayer has come to an end.

And this gets at the point.  Civil Government is not intended to solve our problems.  So stop praying that God would use it in that way.  We need to repent of thinking that our social problems have political solutions.

If you want to pray and fast for our country on a level that matters and on the day that counts - pray and fast on the first day of Christian school year - and then on the first day of summer break.  Pray and fast when your children are baptized or when a church building is under construction or when a neighbor moves in next to you, or a nursing home closes.  Pray and fast during Advent, Lent, and Holy Week - and repent of your own sins with the same zeal that you bring to bear when discussing taxation policies, illegal immigration, or gun rights.

Further thoughts ...

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.

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.”

Christmas Prayer of Praise and Adoration

Christmas prayer adapted from Augustine:

All praise to You, O King of Heaven and earth, this Christmas Sunday

For the incarnation;
As Adam was brought forth from the uncursed soil,
so You were born of a virgin;

When man’s Maker was made man,

that He Who made the Milky Way, might nurse at His mother’s breast;

the Bread hunger,

the Fountain thirst,

the Light sleep,

the Way be a tired Traveler;

the Truth slandered by false witness,

the Teacher flogged,

the Foundation hung upon a wooden beam;

that Strength weaken;

that the Healer be wounded;

and Life die.

For these great mysteries and for beautiful gospel of peace
we give You thanks today and forever.

Amen.

Cultures cultivate. A culture is more like an ecosystem than like a supermarket. And human persons, as encultured creatures, are generally less like independent rationally choosing shoppers than like organisms whose environment predisposes a certain set of attitudes and actions.

Cultures cultivate. Not that our activities are absolutely determined by cultural influences. We are rational beings, not just instinctual beings. We can make choices that go against the conventions sustained around us. We can lean into the prevailing winds, but only if we know how to stand somewhere solid. Only if we are not being carried by the wind. We need to be able to imagine alternative ways of perceiving reality.

Cultures cultivate, so if we want to offset the influence of cultural systems that distort or misrepresent reality, we need more than good arguments that analyze the distortions. We need cultural alternatives that provide opportunities for participating in a different way of telling the story of human experience.

For example, counteracting the materialistic reductionism of our time requires practices that convey to our imaginations the coherent unity of matter and spirit. Challenging the assumptions that human beings are best understood and best treated by social structures as autonomous choosers whose choices provide meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe requires settings in which submission and obedience to some order of things that precedes our willing is known as a delight and a blessing.

Distorted institutions and practices can’t be confronted only by arguments. They require well-ordered practices and institutions. Resisting cultural confusion is more than a matter of thinkingoutside the box. We need to be able to intuit outside the box. And to encourage well-ordered intuitions to those under our care, especially our children — because cultures cultivate.

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

Psalm 23 a Modern Secularized Version

We will have no shepherd, and yet we shall not want …

By getting a competitive and marketable degree I have postured myself to lie down in the green pastures.

By attaining a certain socio-economic status I am able to reside beside the still waters,

I maintaining a generally law-abiding lifestyle I walk on the paths of practicing random acts of kindness from time to time for the sake of a tolerant coexistence,

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death with the help of my therapist I will fear no evil; my expansive healthcare benefits and the technical advances of medical researchers comfort me.

Thanks to modern biology, nutritional science, and economics – I have prepared a table for myself and my elected officials wield our military might to keep our enemies as far away as possible.

I’m able to take advantage of the convergence of Madison Avenue and Wallstreet so that my head is anointed with this season’s latest fashionable accessories, and inasmuch as I’m able to be savvy and tap into their lifegiving streams - my cup runneth over.

Surely material abundance and the right to make my own personal choices about truth and reality shall follow me all the days of my life and then afterward I will dwell in the house of bliss forever according to the details of my own preferred religion’s happy ending – unless of course there is no life after death in which case, I won’t.

"Widerstehe doch der Sünde: Stand strong against sin." BWV 54

Glenn Gould once said that Bach was the greatest architect of sound to ever live.  Here he takes us on a guided tour of Cantata 54.  Written to accompany the Lenten reading for "Oculi Sunday" from Ephesians 5.1-9.  As Gould notes, these are probably the words of our elder brother in the Faith, Johann, himself.  In it we hear and feel the swelling seduction of temptation along with the struggle and tension of dissonant chords, but then, through it all cuts the clear voice of the Spirit calling us to stand strong and overcome our enemy.

“Stand firm against all sinning, or its poison will possess you.. Those who commit sin are of the devil, for he has invented sin, but if one resists his vile shackles with true devotion, sin will straightaway take flight.”

Zeitgeist as Fog not Wind

"We live in an age that keeps authoritative institutions, philosophies, and religions at arm's length, mixing and matching and analyzing them with a market-place mentality.

There is a fear of change, but who wouldn't be afraid of change?  St Augustine in The Confessions is a freshman in college and reads this book by Cicero that is a call to pursue wisdom for its own sake, so he says it changes his life and he goes after wisdom, but at the moment of his conversion, he looks back on the previous ten or twelve years and, although he set off to pursue wisdom, he realized that nothing really changed, because he didn't really want to be different.

It's scary.  Our habits whisper in our ear and tell us that without them we wouldn't be who we really are.  And Augustine says that in the end that's right.  We wouldn't be who we are.  Part of the genius of The Confessions is to affirm that the journey of faith really is a death to self; it is a really disjunctive and wrenching kind of transformation.  Who wouldn't be frightful in the face of that?"

R.R. Reno, author of "In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminishing Christianity"

Good Friday Devotional Prayer

Good Friday Prayer

Oh Christ, You are the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world. 

You were sent from Heaven through a virgin womb to be our manna in a barren desert.

You, Who were anointed with burial oil at Your birth and again at Holy Week when You walked through Jerusalem smelling of a spiced tomb. 

By the sweat of Your brow you labored to feed Your bride the bread of Your own flesh, great drops as of blood falling to the ground, crying out to God, not for vengeance, but mercy - Father, forgive them.

At the sound of Your coming judgment You did not hide, but welcomed those who sought You with torches and weapons.  You were driven out of the garden by their fiery swords. And on that day, You surely died for us.  

You became shamefully naked and were found in the middle of the trees.  

But by Your death, we were clothed from on high.

Now men may once again walk with their Lord in Paradise, as You promised the thief at Your side.

You took our place on the altar, as the ram whose horns were caught in the briars.  You took our curse upon Your head with a crown of thistles and thorns of iron pierced Your hands and feet. 
On the wooden cross, that sharp iron was redeemed as if to float in the flowing streams and we who were lost and sinking deep were drawn out and returned to You.
By Your cross our bitter waters have been made sweet.

You were suspended in midair, between Heaven and Earth, our bridge; the Mediator between God and men.

Blood and water flowed from the rock of Your split side and from the cursed labor pain of Your belly, the Church was born of water and blood; Your Bride from Your rib.

Our first father Adam failed to look after the woman You gave him, but You remembered Mary and made provision for her even as You died on that tree, where the centurion's eyes were opened to understand good and evil.

You were lifted up like Moses’ brass serpent, so that he and every fatal sinner might look to You and be healed.  And it is by Your blood in the sign of the cross on our door frames, that our judgment passes over us. 
Like Moses between Aaron and Hur on the hilltop and like Samson between the pillars, You stretched Your arms wide to sacrifice Yourself and deliver God's people, gaining us the victory.

At Golgotha, You tread upon the skull of death and under Your pierced heel the head of the serpent was crushed.

Precious Jesus, You have made the Cross to be our Tree of Life, blooming with the fruit of Your own body, which by glad faith, we take, eat, and live.
You have made every day Good Friday, for  every day we live in the blessed joy of Your bitter Passion and death, the remedy of our sin. 
So we join our hearts and voices in the angel song:

Worthy is the Lamb Who was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise, now and forevermore.

Amen.

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."

What is Worldliness?

“Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, think processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is that system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to their periphery any thought about God.

Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.”

–David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 29.

On "Givenness" ...

"I've tended to use 'givenness' in reflecting upon the given order that God has placed in creation, but creation also has a 'gift-quality' about it.  It's very existence doesn't need to be.
When I was in Sunday School as a kid, the first theological definition I can remember receiving was 'grace is unmerited favor'.  And we usually think of grace as coming after our sin, and yet the existence of all creation is an unmerited favor.  We didn't have to wait to sin to receive God's unmerited favor.
When we receive a great gift, we're delighted in the gift, but we're also delighted in the generosity of the Giver.  And so it is with the reception of a powerful work of art.
When I hear a thoughtful and attentive performance of a carefully crafted piece of music or when I watch a masterfully constructed film, I often have a sense of gratitude, not just to the performers or composer or director - but a gratitude to God as well; gratitude to live in a world where such joys are possible.
The gratitude that is felt by recipients of a gift typically resonates with the delight that is known by the Giver of the gift.  And that is a pattern built into creation."

- Ken Myers

The Perils of Exegetical Preaching

"The challenge for us who want to exegete the hair on a flea; we want to extract and reduce and deconstruct the rose and then tape it back together and pretend that it's a rose ... it's not!  You don't invite people into a morgue.  You invite them into a church to see a resurrection. You don't want to show them an autopsy on the text!"

- Dr Reg Grant, chair of Media Arts and Worship at Dallas Theological Seminary

Exodus & Wilderness

"In the end, it was a lot easier for God to get Israel out of Egypt than it was to get Egypt out of Israel.
The Passover and Exodus was about getting God's people out of Egypt.  The 40 years in the desert was about getting Egypt out of God's people."

- Pastor Alan Burrow

The Scope of Reformational Thinking

"We need to find 21st Century answers to 1st century questions, not 19th century answers to 16th century questions."

N.T. Wright

As we Protestants anticipate Reformation Sunday next week, this is a very helpful caution.  

Please don't think I [or Wright] am discounting Church history or historical theology or the Protestant Reformation.  Most definitely not!  This is simply a pointed exhortation addressing a very specific tendency among tidy-minded Reformed types in the Church today.  This is our temptation.

Why did the Reformers do what they did?  
Because they were like the men of Issachar who understood their times and what Israel should do.  
They went back to Scripture alone and held loosely to historical precedence where they felt the two clashed.  

Today, our temptation is to regard Reformational Confessions as semi-inerrant.
We are in danger of quoting the Reformers instead of following their example; to honor the letter and disregard the spirit of the Reformation.

But rather, we ought always to go and learn what these words mean:  Semper Reformanda.

Narnia and the 7 Deadly Sins ...

This Lenten season, I've been preaching a series of homilies on the 7 deadly sins.  Last week at the close of the service in which I had just preached on lust, a young boy from our congregation came up to me with a comment.  I am certain that he is still a bit too young to have understood much about the subject, but then he surprised [and delighted] me with this observation: "Pastor, if you really wanted to talk about lust, you should have talked about The Silver Chair.  That story teaches all about the sin of lust!"

It reminded me instantly of the [abridged] article below [although King argues for a different dominant sin in The Silver Chair].  I found it after hearing Rich Lusk reference Dr King's work which traces the 7 deadly sins through Lewis's 7 Narnia novels.  The full article can be found here.  Enjoy!

Narnia and the Seven Deadly Sins

Dr. Don W. King
Department of English 
Montreat College
© 1984 Don W. King 


Several years ago I discovered an interesting relationship between the seven deadly sins and C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.

The development of a list of seven especially damning sins is shadowy.  However, the list that came to be most influential in the church was developed by Gregory the Great (540-605) characterized by its Latin acronym, saligia: superbia (pride), avaritia (greed), luxuria (luxury, later lust), invidia (envy), gula (gluttony), ira (anger), and acedia (sloth).

William Langland's Piers Plowman, Dante's Divine Comedia, Chaucer's "The Parson's Tale," and Spenser's Faerie Queen all devote serious attention to these. It is not surprising then that Lewis knew them so well. Throughout The Allegory of Love Lewis refers to the seven deadly sins. In several other works he refers to specific sins on the list and in Poems he focuses an entire poem, "Deadly Sins," on each one.  It is my contention that he may either consciously or subconsciously have emphasized one of the seven deadly sins in each one of the seven Narnian books.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund personifies gluttony.