Kezek came out of his room early this morning while I was preparing a sermon before he was really ready to wake up. I held him until he went back to sleep. As I was looking down at him, already lamenting the fact that I would not always be able to look down at him in this way, I was suddenly overcome with a surprising sense of my own hypocrisy, because I was confronted with the reality about what I was planning to say…

Preaching about suffering is not difficult, because the Gospel speaks of a suffering God who ends all suffering.

Preaching about judgment is not difficult, because the Gospel speaks of a crucified God who absorbs all judgment.

Preaching about repentance is not difficult, because the Gospel speaks on behalf of the God whose summons to repentance is a summons to grace.

In light of the Gospel, there is really only one thing in this world that is difficult to preach about. It is the goodness of God, because the goodness of God always comes as a summons for us to trust him entirely with our lives and with the lives of our loved ones more than we trust ourselves.

And there is nothing more difficult, or more necessary, than that.

“I believe but help my unbelief” (Mk. 9:24).

I didn’t realize when I became a youth pastor that my students would assume I was an expert in science. And yet, apart from questions of the heart, the most prominent questions I get asked have to do with the relationship between faith and science. How do we reconcile the creation account in the Bible with generally accepted theories in cosmology? How old is the earth? What about evolution–do I have to reject the theory of evolution to embrace faith in Jesus? 

I’m glad I live in 21st century America and not 1st century Rome. But as such, I can’t help but be suspicious of my own casual ideas about what the phrase “kingdom of God” actually means, or what the word “Lord” actually means for that matter. How does a mind like mine, nurtured as it has been in the entitlements of a democracy for which I am deeply thankful, become convinced that there is a truer Government established not by “We the people…” but by “I AM the way…”, not organized according to the unalienable God-given rights of equality and the pursuit of happiness but by “Not my will” and “Take up your cross”?

I guess if I am going to start thinking about this immensely important biblical theme, I should just go ahead and assume that the kingdom of God is as far from a human democracy as the word kingdom is from democracy and the word human is from God. I should probably assume that the kingdom of God is actually a kingdom and that it is actually God’s. But to begin there is a fearful prospect, because kingdoms only have one king and “God’s kingdom” has already settled on the apostrophe of its first word and the singularity of its second.

But, on the other hand, I suppose it is a hopeful prospect in the end, because I know that a kingdom organized according to “Not my will” and “Take up your cross” is the only kingdom where the blossoms of love can be protected from the towers of greed. Sadly, wars are required to achieve freedom in a fallen world, and I am thankful for those who have died to defend the freedom of this nation. But more sadly still, crosses are required to achieve love in a fallen world, and I am struggling to defend the love of this Kingdom by taking up my own.

But daily I will try, because I know that “Take up your cross” is the only thing that will protect my wife and my children from their husband’s and father’s bitter distaste for crosses and stubborn infatuation with thrones, from his immense capacity to take them to the altar of his freedom, praying “Not thy will!”, and walk away as though no blood has been spilled in those places he has failed to love–in those times when I am too proud to say I’m sorry, too busy to stop and listen, too lazy to go to the park, too bored to read it again, too idolatrous to sacrifice myself. Selfishness in the kingdom of God is high treason. Even its more subtle and pervasive forms–neglect, coldness, humorlessness, smugness, busyness–are a declaration to the universe that the apostrophe belongs to another name and the kingdom is divided.

Lord, help me to daily drag all my freedom with all its fleshy and unalienable rights up this tireless hill to that intersection, so that I might crucify it, in order that love can spill forth from my heart and into my home, my church, my community–to save my home, my church, and my community from my own tyrannical reign. Help me to believe that Jesus is really Lord in the way that God is really God and that I am really not.

‪#‎WeBelieveInOneLordJesusChrist‬
‪#‎ButHelpOurUnbelief‬

YOUTH MINISTRY IS A MISNOMER, or at least it has become one. Youth ministry has, I am learning, become synonymous with “fun and games at church,” for that silo in the church where entertainment and snacks are provided for kids until they mature enough to sit through a real worship service, until they are able to hear those disillusioning words that “Man does not live on snacks alone.” And while many youth ministers start out with great ambitions, determined to provide a theologically rich, spiritually saturated service grounded in Scripture and tradition, their ambitions are soon met with fidgety kids showing early signs of SPW (Smart Phone Withdraw) and parents who are concerned because their kids have left the service without being fed, that is, because there were no snacks. Soon enough, all those faithful ambitions get weighed down with the pressures of students and parents alike with the result that they eventually get watered down with powdered donuts and other such pleasantries in the name of meeting the felt-needs of the families.
The church has a fancy word for this—contextualization—but there is a razor thin line between contextualizing and compromising when it comes to church ministry, precisely because there is an infinite line between the felt-needs of human beings and their actual needs. After the feeding of the 5,000 the crowds “tried to make [Jesus] king by force” when he met their felt-need of hunger (Jn. 6:15), but Jesus ran away. For they had sought him “not because of the sign, but because [they] ate the loaves and had [their] fill” (Jn. 6:26). Besides, there’s another word for a person who is made a king by force. The lord of our desires, if he is simply that, is merely the slave of our desires. But Jesus did not come to be the lord of our desires; he came to be the Lord of our lives.

I am suspicious of the doctor who asks me what medicine I prefer after giving me the diagnosis, even more of a doctor who asks me what I think about the diagnosis, but I frankly will walk out of the doctor’s office if he tells me nothing’s wrong. I’m dying. I know it. I don’t want to admit it, but beneath this insatiable appetite for pain killers and distractions, there is a deeper, constant ache that nothing seems to totally numb, that I’m desperate to hold at the distance of distraction. The author of Ecclesiastes speaks of eternity in the human heart (Ecc. 3:11), but that eternity does not feel like the divine but like the abyss. Shakespeare said that “the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.” The demands of felt-needs are in such high and constant demand because of the reality of the futility of the supply. We suffer from infinite heartache in a finite world, and that truth is as close to us as the breath in our lungs, but its solution seems as far from us as the last breath in Adam’s lungs.

And though our people don’t want to admit it, they know its there, deep down at the center. I know it’s there and knew it was there well before I believed there was an adequate supply. What I needed from Church was not more distraction and beating around the un-burning bush. I needed fire.

“Please don’t give me a pill or a nice, helpful therapy session. I want something new. I don’t want to leave unchanged. I don’t want to leave numb. Open up my chest if you need to. Does anyone have a heart to spare? Is there anyone who would sacrifice that much for this need?”

That is what I really thought.

“Here, have some Doritos and a couple Vicodin. See you next Sunday.”

That is what I really got.

The difference between contextualizing and compromising in church ministry, I believe, is this: compromising seeks to make the Gospel relevant to people, while faithful contextualizing seeks to make people relevant to the Gospel; compromising speaks the language of the people, while contextualizing does the same but does so in order to teach the people a new language, to teach them Good News. Jesus goes to people as they are, but he doesn’t leave them as they are. Jesus came for the sick as a doctor, not a patient (Mk. 2:17); to the captives as a liberator, not an inmate (Lk. 4:18), to the sinner as a sanctifier, not as Barabbas, offering grace on the other side of repentance (Lk. 5:32), offering a pure heart to broken sinners, and he calls them to live in accord with their new DNA. He came to contextualize, to be sure, but not to compromise, to meet our deepest need, even at the expense of our surface needs. “He who is without sin cast the first stone.” Yes. But she who has sinned, “Go and sin no more” (Jn. 8:7-11).

So in the wake of his first successful mega-church plant, Jesus tells his 5,000 member church that they have to “eat [his] flesh and drink [his] blood, because [they] have no life in [them]” (Jn. 6:53). He thereby grows his 5,000 member mega-church down to twelve, those who recognize that he “has the words of eternal life,” which are of course predicated on the words of imminent death. Jesus would rather build his church on twelve people in hospice than a multitude in congress–those few on the narrow who discover life only through death, innocence only through guilt, the good news only through the bad news–than help the multitude create a comfortable deathbed on which to die peacefully in their sleep…and remain in their sleep.

As such, I believe it is necessary among all the other activities of youth ministry, all the fun and games and Frito Lays, to have a designated time and place that has an air alienness to it, a time and place that does not seek to provide a seamless transition between culture and church, which inadvertently communicates that there is no difference between culture and church, but rather seeks rather ostentatiously to emphasize the seam, to say and do and expect things that are not intelligible to culture precisely because they are only intelligible to the Gospel, precisely because culture cannot offer them. This is the appropriate context for revelation, for the living God to reveal himself ever and again as his Gospel is heard for what it is and what it is not, where it is heard as something like news, that is, unheard everywhere else, so that it can be Good News, which is indeed unheard everywhere else.

So shouldn’t our worship gatherings seek first and foremost not to be familiar ground but sacred ground? Shouldn’t we seek to create a sacred time and place, when and where we can rehearse life in light of the reality of the Gospel, where we worship like the saints in Revelation, where we share in the holy Eucharist, where we regularly sit under the authority of the Word of God in an unabashed acknowledgment that Jesus is our Lord, not our “homeboy;” a time and place where we say and do and expect things that are only intelligible if it is true that this world is God’s world and that God is none other than the one who has revealed himself in the crucified and risen Christ, who is present and active by his Spirit in communities that gather in his name (Mt. 18:20) and cooperate with his mission (Mt. 28:16-20)? What am I missing? Where are my blindspots? Why isn’t this normative, why not the expectation? I’m bothered by my own self-doubt here, so I really am looking for a good reason to think otherwise. And if there are none, then I think repentance is necessary, and we need to get on with preparing our worship gatherings something like wedding rehearsals, where the community of believers dramatizes the reality of heaven in anticipation of heaven, almost as though heaven has already begun to break into this world, because heaven has already begun to break into this world (Matthew, Mark, Luke , John, Acts).

“Exegesis is always a combination of taking and giving, of reading out and reading in. Thus exegesis, without which the norm cannot assert itself as the norm, entails the constant danger that the Bible will be taken prisoner by the Church, that its own life will be absorbed into the life of the Church, that its free power will be transformed into the authority of the Church, in short, that it will lose its character as the norm magisterially confronting the Church” (Barth, CD, I.1).

It is, for some, too late, carried away as they are in the river spewing forth into this world from the spring of better word than the seemingly rigid and unaccommodating word ‘Canon’, referring of course to that antiquated and seemingly shameful collection of books bound up into one bizarre corpus called “The Holy Bible.” Love is the new word; in fact, for so many (following, e.g., Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Peter Enns, etc.) love is the new Canon, the new criterion, that is, the new correcting norm of the book that is otherwise the Church’s only external and concrete authority, which then functions to strain out the of all the harsh words that are found in the Old (a la Enns) and in the End (a la Bell), while the Church enjoys this historically fleeting and privileged moment of idealism. The result is, at least, two-fold.

1.In the first case, love is no longer defined by the Word of God, quite the obverse. In fact, the Word of God, that evasive and uncapturable authority, becomes Clay, love its potter, and as such is able to take on whatever form its culture demands. Romans 5, then, the text that most explicitly and decisively states the form of God’s love and therefore the only legitimate quality of human love, the text which draws an infinite chasm between God and humankind as the necessary precondition for humankind to receive what is then called God’s love, becomes a text that is unintelligible, because for any man, woman or child to receive this particular love, every man woman and child must first be gathered up under the particular category ‘enemy.’ According to this text, God’s love is only understood when Jesus is understood behind enemy lines. The object of love is first the object of wrath, the reconciled first the rebel. Any lesser form of love cannot explain the bloody hands of a righteous God, nor can it command the clean hands of a self-righteous Church.

The new judgment, indeed the only judgment as such, is the judgment against un-love, which, whatever un-love actually is, it is usually identified when the Church calls sin what it is, because to use the word sin in the way the Bible uses the word sin would imply that the sinner is an enemy of God…and that-would be unloving. Thus, the confessional lines of the Church are dissolved and redrawn according to this new judgment, so that this new ‘church’ demands repentance only from those who have demanded repentance from all, and the Jesus of this church is necessary only for his example, albeit with great irony, not for his salvation. And a great division will continue to crystallize roughly along lines described as liberal and conservative, as the debate over what love actually is serves to self-preserve politicized, sectarian groups that call themselves “The” church and define themselves by what they are not, because what they are not is that damnable, unloving other group, which either cares nothing about the poor or nothing about the unborn, both of which would find salvation if they were willing to admit that both poor and unborn are included in that category of enemy.

2. What happens when we approach the Bible is now endearingly called a “conversation,” because it is something that happens between equals–coffee-talk with a friend, or self-talk with ‘my’ potential, not a confrontation first with a more powerful Enemy, which can only be heard as an address and responded to by surrender, and second with an Authority called Lord. Indeed, when the Bible is approached for conversation, it can no longer be heard at all, since there is None to stand opposite of me either to crush me or raise me up. There is only an inner-dialogue as I imagine the single line of footprints in the sand being His—the imaginary friend of Jesus whom I imagine carrying me, not giving me marching orders, who plans to give me harmless prosperity, not a self-denying cross. Besides, doesn’t the Lord invite us in this way: “Come let us reason together, says the Lord,” which is followed with such pleasant and accommodating images: “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be white like wool” (Isa. 1:18). Indeed, but for Israel, and therefore for us all, the images are neither of a scenic winter nor a tranquil pasture. The red and white contrasted in this verse is the stark contrast that marked the ground with the truth of the human condition in the winter pastures surrounding Stalingrad on Christmas day, 1942. It is a blazing white and the darkest red. To “reason together” with one’s Creator does not mean to work together toward a synthesis that leaves both parties happy, both parties compromised, and therefore both parties changed. It means what the following verse says: “If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be eaten by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Isa. 1:19).

It is not surprising that the world such as it is, a world that has insisted to be godless since the day it determined itself to name what is good and what is evil (Gen. 3), would find itself being swallowed up by the sword of its Maker, that the Creator would choose to un-create what in his creation had become un-creative, that is, self-destructive. The only thing that is surprising is that since the sword proved not to be a decisive enough means of achieving purification, not a persuasive enough means of inciting repentance; since condemning sinners did not eliminate sin; since destruction did not produce restoration; what is surprising is that God swallowed his own sword; that he “sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh as a sin offering to condemn sin—not the sinner—in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3). What is surprising is that the white and red became the divine flow of Holy Love. What is surprising is grace. And what grace means is that God allowed for the universal truth of human history—hate wins—to become a moment of truth from all eternity, so that the Lamb that was slain became the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8), and that this truth could become for all time what the John the Seer saw when he ‘heard’ the Word of God as the Word of God from all eternity, which finds good news only in judgment, divine love only in human hatred, reconciliation only in rebellion, beloved child only in depraved enemy, risen Lord only on a cross, the universal truth whose corollary is the universal command: Repent.

Revelation 14:6-13

“Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.”
Another angel, a second, followed, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality.”
And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.”
Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.
And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!”

Ken Ham represents creationism, not Genesis 1.

The biggest problem with this debate before it even starts is that the claims Ham makes about the age of the earth are simply not claims the Bible makes. No Israelite theologian writing in the second (or first for that matter) millennium BCE would have cared in the least about the modern scientific questions regarding the age of the earth. To use genealogies to that end is misleading on so many levels,[1] not least of which is the inherent endorsement of modern methods of apprehending truth, which are based on the modern assumptions about what truth is, despite the fact that those methods and those assumptions are built on the foundation of a naturalist/materialist worldview, which is a foundation floating on the ether of One gigantic metaphysical question mark. 

In any event, and to the chagrin of the modern reader, the reality of this world as such finds much more ‘natural’ expression in literature that allows overlap in the genres of history and poetry, so while not all the Bible is classified in the genre of poetry, even its most wooden historical accounts have a poetic texture (von Balthasar, Theological Aesthetics: Seeing the Form), inviting the readers to think beyond the surface layer of its world, so that they might begin to think beyond the surface layer of their own. Of course, that is a terrible prospect, because if the Word of God rises from the world of the Bible that has been rendered a tomb of history, He may very well reach into the tomb of my heart and speak a binding Word in my world today.

Genesis 1 does indeed make the most audacious of scientific claims, and its audacity is compounded by the fact that it intends to give no scientific proofs. Most of us common folk really don’t know the evidence well enough to argue how old the age of the earth is without appealing to our faith in a certain circle of elites (religious or not), but frankly I don’t think it really matters, because Genesis 1 (and everything that follows) was not written to sit under the interrogation of secular scientists or of nervous Christian scientists under the interrogation of secular scientists. The Bible in General was not designed to sit under any of our interrogation while we demand from it whatever answers we so desire, as though we know the right questions to ask to lead us to the Truth in the first place (there was a tree back in Gen. 2-3 that should at least give rise to the question of the legitimacy of our desires). Unless we allow the Word of God to shape our questions, it will never satisfy our answers, nor will we be ready to hear the questions of Its response that intend to shape us. In the words of Karl Barth, 

“What is there within the Bible?

“It is a dangerous question. We might do better not to come too near this burning bush. For we are sure to betray what is—behind us! The Bible gives to every man and every era such answers to your questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more: high and divine content if it is high and divine content that we seek; transitory and “historical” content, if transitory and “historical” content that we seek. Nothing whatever, if it is nothing whatever that we seek. The hungry are satisfied by it, and to the satisfied it is surfeiting before they have opened it. The question, “What is in the Bible?” has a mortifying way of converting itself into the opposing question, “Well, what are you looking for, and who are you, pray, who make bold to look?” 

Barth, Word of God & Word of Man

 

But to speak plainly, Genesis 1 simply cannot be understood for what it is trying to say, if it is read with the methods and aims of modern science. It should be heard in the way that a Hebrew slave would have heard it,[2] after spending 430 years enslaved in Egypt, whose prayers to the God of their forefathers had turned into empty groans into the void of the heavens (Exod. 1); but who one day went to fetch water from the Nile and discovered blood, after which it started raining frogs (not men, hallelujah), then a bunch of other inexplicable phenomena started happening–and on and on it goes until they find themselves on the other side of the Red Sea, no doubt asking themselves three fundamental questions (the three fundamental questions that give rise to all cultural form and formlessness, harmony and chaos, Mozart and Nickelback): 1. Who is God? 2. Who are we? 3. And what does the One have to do the ‘others’? 

Listen to Genesis 1 like that and then tell me what you hear when God says to these demoralized slaves (which is the fundamental state of all people in their sin) that they are essentially the culminative “very good” crown of his creation (Richter), made in the Creator God’s image, given dominion (slaves!), and blessed to multiply and subdue the earth–what kind of God is this generous?! Or you could just read it like a scientific textbook and get upset that secular institutions aren’t teaching your “Christian” cosmology contrived from your secularized interpretation of salvation history.

Footnotes

1. Genealogies after Genesis 12 are typically used to trace covenantal ancestral lines, which is why Abe’s, Isaac’s, and Jacob’s continue while Ishmael’s and Esau’s do not. But prior to Genesis 12 the genealogies still function to trace all people back to God (which is important for our later understanding of Christ as the ‘second Adam’, not the ‘second Abraham’; see Luke’s genealogy of Jesus, Lk. 3; cf. Rom. 5; 1 Cor. 15), which is in fact more of a statement about monotheism–Israel’s God is God of all, not some local deity among other deities–than it is about anything else.

2. Even if you hold to the Documentary Hypothesis or some totalizing historical reconstruction of the Pentateuch, the redaction is such that to give the literature its intended acoustic quality, it should be heard by the ears of a recently rescued nation of slaves (Deut. 1).

Christ on the Cross between the Two Thieves, Peter Paul Rubens (1577)

In all the polarizing responses coming out about the Duck Dynasty saga from Christians hunkering down in one ditch or another, it might be a good time to consider the fact that the ministry of Jesus, and therefore the ministry of the Church, begins with an indiscriminate command to all–“Repent!”–because Phil Robertson stands under the wrath of God in precisely the same way that the LGTB community stands under the wrath of God, in the way that Pope Francis and Tim Tennent and Billy Graham and Barack Obama all stand under the wrath of God, equidistant from the standard of righteousness by which alone they can be saved.

It is such a terrible prospect, indeed, that Jesus knew he could not make his way down the paths of a fragmented and compromised world pointing out groups and ethics and opinions and platforms–this ditch or that ditch–that might serve as an alternative for repentance. He pointed to himself and said, “Follow me,” down a path that will always, insofar as it is the one Jesus walked, take blows from both sides of the road from ditches ever in a holy war, both condemning the other for unrighteousness while unwittingly standing condemned before God in self-righteousness.

If the Church is going to find its center in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it is going to have to come to grips with the fact that repentance is not simply a departure from our most sinful categories, it is also a departure from our most righteous categories, and the expanse that is envisaged in the command to “Love your enemies” is never even a fraction of the expanse that God has condescended in his stubborn insistence in loving you, which means that even the most unloving and unrighteous among us, whether for you that means “bigots” or “gays,” are still love-worthy. And if we are going to be committed to truly hating sin and loving God, our way of calling bigots or gays to repentance—rather than spinelessly affirming one or the other, so as to not lose friends, even if it means falsely assuring them that God accepts them just as they are—is going to begin by dealing with the greatest sin of all, pride, and proceed to the other side of the ditch, into homes and lives and conversations, where the only common ground is, “No one is righteous, no not one,” the solution to which is not inviting the ‘other’ to your side, or telling them to remain in their own, but emerging from both sides to stand together in the middle of the road where the judgment of the world and the salvation of God come to an acute intersection, while the ditches on either side are swallowed up in flames.

So make sure if you are going to condemn either party involved in this debacle that it does not come across as though the other party, or you yourself for that matter, is not also condemned. And then be thankful that “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” and proceed in the ministry of the Church in declaring the only thing that matters–“Christ crucified!”–which is only intelligible to those who know they are under the same sentence (Lk. 23:40).

Never noticed something about the following Psalm.

“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!
My soul longs, yes faints for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.
Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young at your altars,
O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house,
ever singing your praise!”

~Psalm 84:1-4

What I’d never noticed is where it is that the sparrow and the swallow find a suitable place to make their nest, the safest place to “lay her young.” After searching high and low, they see the red-stained altar, the place where men take sparrows and swallows for the slaughter. But they see something more powerful, more beautiful and true of that place, because the altar only requires sacrifice when men approach. There is, indeed, no safer place in the world for the pure in heart. God does not delight in sacrifices (Ps. 40; 51; Heb. 10), in the broken bones of innocent animals. He delights in broken spirits, broken spirits and contrite hearts (Ps. 51). I guess, too, he delights in singing, as the song above suggests. In fact, David said that he “inhabits the praises of his people” (Ps. 22). So how much more does he delight when the praise of his creation inhabits his altar, bringing the joy of the morning song to the place that needs it most.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” ~Jesus