Tag: Church

Theodidacti by Prayer

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[1]

Introduction

“Thoughts and prayers.” Any day of the week, on any social media website you will see people sending “thoughts and prayers” into tragic situations—either global or local. The sentiment is kind and hints at “emotional solidarity.” As our world becomes increasingly more violent—violence seeming to be our primary form of communication—the sending of “thoughts and prayers” increases. What else can we do but say: hey, I’m praying for and thinking about you during this time. There’s nothing wrong with it.

Until there is. Typing (and speaking) “thoughts and prayer” to those who are suffering and grieving makes us feel like we’ve done something. To some extent, we have; we spoke to and someone’s pain. And even though that dopamine surge feels good, it doesn’t do anything for their pain, and it certainly doesn’t do anything to address the issue. Now, to be gentle here, many of us feel like we can’t do much to overhaul a violent, polarized, and death dealing atmosphere and landscape. Many of us may feel that God needs to step in and set it all straight. Some may feel that our socio-political activity has nothing to do with our faith and so, to be faithful, we opt out of action and lean in to prayer.

Is everything really that helpless and hopeless? I don’t think so. Without jettisoning our orientation toward “thoughts and prayers” we can (maybe!) see that our prayers and thoughts are just the beginning of our socio-political activity in the world to make this place better for our neighbor who is grieving because they have experienced its trauma firsthand. In other words, when we shift our perspective and see prayer as our first step and not our last (ditch) effort, we might find a way to push our activity beyond uttering “thoughts and prayers” and living it in the world to the wellbeing of the neighbor and to the glory of God.

1 Timothy 2:1-7

In Paul’s first letter to Timothy,[2] he begins with an exhortation to prayer (in all its forms), Therefore, first of all things I urge petitions, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings to be made on behalf of all people, on behalf of kings and all the ones being in authority so that we might pass time with a quiet and peaceable life in all piety and respectability (v1-2). Paul centers the life of prayer within the life of the believer. Why is this important[3] for Paul? A few reasons.

First, Paul understands that both Timothy and his flock will come under pressure not only from the opposition of the false teachers in Ephesus (who are antagonistic to Paul’s mission[4]), but that they will also come under fire by the local culture who will demand conformity to its status quo.[5] For Paul, prayer—the whole kit and kaboodle—will help to ground the believers and form and shape their lives, strengthening and uniting them together against these oppositional forces.

Second, the church, for Paul, is to be both missiological and present in their community (despite the opposition). Rather than being compliant to the surrounding socio-political realities by either playing nice through their “thoughts and prayers” for those others in their society[6] or living quietly off the radar bringing no attention to themselves by being good and obedient citizens,[7] Paul sees prayer as a feature of their corporate and private life of worship that will position these believers in the world by bringing the gospel in word and deed and serving their society by means of living out the gospel and it’s law of love.[8] This includes praying for all people; thus the believers cannot pick and choose subjecting themselves to an insular mindset.[9]

Third, prayer is to promote and provoke the believer in conformity to God’s will (which happens in the event of prayer) to be those who are Christ’s representatives and who participate in God’s mission in the world.[10] This means that as they pray for others and (especially) the rulers and those in authority they are praying for a specific outcome that will align with God’s mission in the world in which they participate. This is more than just nice thoughts and kind prayers for these leaders, it’s requesting God’s intervention by power of the Holy Spirit to change the hearts of these leaders and authorities.[11] The believers are to pray that their leaders are able to bring forth such a quiet and peaceable life, respectable and able to be godly; this is not that the believers are to live quietly while falling in with the demands of society and its leaders,[12] it’s about their being able to live according to the ethics of the reign of God within the kingdom of humanity with an eye to overhaul it where needed.[13],[14] This form of prayer, resulting in robust space to participate in God’s mission in the world to the glory of God and the well-being of the neighbor, is vital for the life and praxis of the church in the world and conforms to God’s will for the church’s life and praxis in the world.[15] This is doing church.

And fourth, thanksgiving helps to form those who recall God’s wonderful work in the world and in this way they find their hope in what God will do, giving assurance to their prayers that the God to whom they pray in the name of Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit is the same God who is oriented toward love, life, and liberation, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.[16]

Paul then affirms, This is good and acceptable in the presence of God our savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come into the knowledge of truth (vv3-4). Through prayer and thanksgiving, the believers become formed to the will and mission of God. In this way they can go into the world as Christ’s representatives and bring Christ (thus God) to those in their society.[17] Prayer is so closely linked to God’s mission of salvation that we can see that it’s crucial to the believer’s discipleship formation and causation. Through the humble posture of prayer, the will of the one who prays is conformed to the will of the one to whom they pray. As believers pray for God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven, they are also praying for their will not to be done and to be replaced with God’s will so that they can be active participants in God’s reign coming and God’s name being hallowed. As the believers in Ephesus are conformed to God’s will and move out and work in the world, God’s mission of salvation goes forward in and through them and truth (real truth) is knowable.

Paul then says, For God [is] one, and one mediator [between] God and humanity the person Christ Jesus, the one who gave himself [as a] ransom on behalf of all people, a testimony for the due season, into which I, I was placed [as a] herald and apostle—I speak the truth, I do not lie—a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth (vv5-7). According to Paul, all have access to God because God is one,[18] and this one God has a mediator who is Jesus Christ through whom all have access to God.[19] Jesus Christ is the one who liberated (all!) humanity from death by means of his death and resurrection. This is the good news and the very thing believers not only believe but through which they are conformed to God’s will and mission in the world. For Paul, the church is responsible[20] to this person, Jesus Christ, who identified with humanity in its plight; it is also for this person they are to be his representatives in the world and the foundation of their faith and love for God and for others.

Conclusion

[21]Dorothee Sölle’s and Fulbert Steffensky write, in Not Just Yes & Amen, “[God] stands on the side of life and especially on the side of those to whom life in its wholeness is denied and who do not reach the point of real living. He is not on the side of the rulers, the powerful, the rich, the affluent, the victorious. God takes sides with those who need him. He sides with the victims.”[22] Where God sides is the location—the starting point, the continuing point, and the end point—of Christian existence and praxis in the world toward the neighbor to the glory and in the will of God. Thus, Christians are exhorted by their life of Christ and by their own faith to dare to move beyond the deafening silence of “thoughts and prayers,” extend their voices and hands beyond the heartless “yes and amen,” and lay claim to the long dormant divine “No!” This is done not by the believer’s own strength or alone, but by and in the strength of Christ and in the witness of the community witnessing to Christ in the world.

In Romans 13:14, Paul exhorts his audience to “to put on [as clothes] the Lord Jesus Christ and do not allow the flesh provision toward inordinate desires.” Christians are to clothe themselves in Christ, to shed the cloaks and covers of the kingdom of humanity, to shrug off the mythologies of power and privilege peddled by church clerics and state councils aimed toward inoculating Christians against active participation in the world as Christ for the well-being and benefit of the neighbor. To put on Christ is to participate in Christ’s life in this world now as Christ did in his own witness to the love and will of God more than 2000 years ago. This exhortation is echoed in Philippians 2:5, “Let the same mind be in you that is in Christ Jesus…” The believer is to be clothed in and have the same mind as Christ. The inner and outer person is to be aligned to the image of Christ who witnessed to God’s life affirming and liberative love in the world for the oppressed, for the victims. To be as Christ, to be formed—inwardly and outwardly—to the image of Christ comes with comfort and liberty in God by faith, but it also comes with a great burden to be as Christ to the neighbor. As theodidacti[23] through prayer, Christians are summoned to hear the silent cry and to respond by joining the divine revolution of life, love, and liberation for the beloved. Beloved, we pray first, and then we act for the wellbeing of the neighbor and to the glory of God.

[1] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[2] I’m using traditional language for the author of this letter so I can just keep it simple for the audience. I am aware of the debates of authorship and dating.

[3] Towner, Timothy, 165. “If the church has discerned the mandate character of this letter, it understands that Timothy’s task is to ensure that these instructions be implemented.”

[4] Philip Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, TNICNT, ed. Gordon D. Fee (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 162. “The context throughout will continue to be that of false teaching and opposition to the Pauline missions.”

[5] Towner, Timothy, 162. “…the church will often still feel the presence of opponents and their teaching activities, and the latter will come up for specific treatment in several place…the local culture is also exerting pressure on community life in a way that causes Paul to intervene forcefully.”

[6] Towner, Timothy, 163. Misconception 1 needing to be addressed, “…the church has often understood the text to lay down a broad commission to pray for all people and for government leaders without really stipulating what direction such prayer ought to take. But the real concern, as close attention to the argument wills how, is for the prayer that supports the church’s universal mission to the world. That is, Paul urges Timothy to instruct the Ephesian church to reengage in an activity it had apparently been neglecting—prayer in support Paul’s own mandate to take the gospel to the whole world.”

[7] Towner, Timothy, 163. Misconception 2: “Dibelius saw this text as introducing the new shape that Christian existence took following the departure of the apostles and as a result of the disappointment over the delay of Christ’s return. In his estimation, prayer for all and for those in authority sought the goal of the quiet and peaceful life—that is, a Christian existence characterized by outward behavior conforming to secular notions of ‘good citizenship.’”

[8] Towner, Timothy, 163. Solution:  in Romans 23 (and 1 Peter 2) “There Paul lays down a theology of the church-world dialectical reality in which the church is to find itself in a position of missiological service to society.”

[9] Towner, Timothy, 167. For all people, “to counter a tendency toward insular thinking in the Ephesian Church brought on by an elitist outlook or theology.”

[10] Towner, Timothy, 165. “The theological interests and the universal theme reveal that the prayer practice Paul sought to reinstate in Ephesus had the evangelistic mission to the Gentiles as its target.”

[11] Towner, Timothy, 1623-164 “In our text with its specific evangelistic focus, it may be argued that the church’s commitment to acknowledge the secular power structure and society’s expectations is to be expressed in its payer for salvation and effective political leadership.”

[12] Towner, Timothy, 169. “The two terms (‘quiet and peaceful’) that initially describe this life express the Hellenistic ideal (conveyed variously) of a tranquil life free form the hassles of a turbulent society It is obvious enough that Paul envisions the state with God’ help, as being capable of ensuring the conditions that would make such a life possible.”

[13] Towner, Timothy, 169. “The next phrase, ‘in all godliness and holiness,’ describes this life’s character and observable shape. …Yet when the theological reshaping of these concepts is taken into account, it becomes clear that Paul had others aims—namely, to express the theology of a dynamic Christian ethics by means of the language of the day. This technique would of course ensure intelligibility. But Paul almost certainly intended also to reinvent the language and subvert alternative claims about the nature and source of godliness associated with politics and religious cults in the empire.”

[14] Towner, Timothy, 170. “Prayer for the tranquil setting is prayer for an ideal set of social circumstances in which Christians might give unfettered expression to their faith in observable living. This distinction allows us to place the second prayer (for leaders) into the missiological grid of the passage: the church is to pray for the salvation of ‘all,’ and it participates in that mission by making God present in society in its genuine expression of the new life for all to see.”

[15] Towner, Timothy, 177. “Thus Paul explains that prayer for the salvation of all people, and specific prayer for the effectiveness of the civic powers, conforms to the will of God. It is not simply an optional church practice that pleases God, but a practice as integral to the church’s life with God as was sacrifice in the time before Christ.”

[16] Towner, Timothy, 167. “…thanksgiving not only bolstered confidence by focusing reflection on God’s past responsiveness to petition, but also was an expression of confidence in anticipation of God’s future response…”

[17] Towner, Timothy, 179. “In the Ephesian context of false teaching Paul emphasize that salvation and adherence to the apostolic message are inseparable. God’s will is that all people will commit themselves in faith to the truth about Christ.”

[18] Towner, Timothy, 180.

[19] Towner, Timothy, 180.

[20] Towner, Timothy, 183. “Paul invites the church of Ephesus to view its own location within God’s redemptive story and its responsibilities in relation to the appearance of this ‘human.’”

[21] This portion is taken from my unpublished dissertation (University of Aberdeen, 2024), Leaving Heaven Behind: Paradoxical Identity as the Anchor of Dorothee Sölle’s Theology of Political Resistance.

[22] Soelle and Steffensky, Not Just Yes & Amen, 82.

[23] Martin Luther, Freedom of a Christian

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“The Life Giving Breath of the Church”

Psalm 104:34-35, 37  I will sing to Abba God as long as I live; I will praise my God while I have my being. May these words of mine please Abba God; I will rejoice in Abba God. Bless Abba God, O my soul. Hallelujah!

Introduction

Unintentionally and unwittingly our Christian talk (and God-talk) often sounds as if we’ve forgotten the role of the Spirit in our praxis and doxology (practice and worship). I’m sure many of us, including me, keep the Spirit tucked away back in the recesses of our mind, and we don’t feel like we’re forgetting anything or anyone. I mean, come on, we, Episcopalians, are good Trinitarian, Creedal Christians; we believe in all three persons of the God head. But I get the impression from others—including from myself—that we don’t often take the Holy Spirit—the divine Spirit of God, God in God’s self—seriously. Any form of the pastoral don’t forget about the power of the Spirit is met with yeah, yeah, yeah, the spirit…whatever. (The last part mentioned silently as we turn to continue to do things of our own mind and power.)

Liturgically, the feast day celebrating the arrival of God’s Spirit to dwell in sinner-saints pales in comparison to the way we celebrate Christmas and Easter. Maybe it’s because Pentecost lacks a precursory penitential period like Christmas and Easter; there’s no obvious demand to sit and wait like there is in Advent or an inspiration to fast like there is in Lent. Frankly, this Sunday feels like just another Sunday; once Easter hits, all the BIG feast days are done, now it’s time to relax… Don’t worry, I’m implicated here, too. I’m aware of my own slackened posture toward everything that follows Easter Sunday’s setting sun.

For the Christian Church, the Church doesn’t exist until the Spirit comes, until today. Christmas doesn’t cause it to exist; Easter builds the foundation for it but not the structure. Pentecost establishes the Church in both its seen and unseen expressions; the Spirit is the reason why the Church will never die even if it ceases to exist as it does today. The Spirit is at the core our Christian Identity, both individually and corporately. It is the Spirit who brings all of us together in sibling like unity while celebrating our radiant and beautiful differences is certainly divine work, as Paul says,

Romans 8:14-17

For whoever is guided/carried by the Spirit of God, these ones are sons [children] of God (v.14). Paul, addressing the Jewish and Gentile Christians in Roman, declares to both parties that anyone (“whoever”) has the divine Spirit of God is by default a child (“son”) of God. It is these ones who were indebted to the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of the flesh (clean/unclean; wise/foolish; free/slave), who are now indebted to the Spirit.[1] In this way, their obligations to and association with others must take on a different vibe: one informed by and structured on the unity created by the Holy Spirit. [2] Another way to say this is, Christian Romans—both Jew and Gentile—are dependent on the Holy Spirit for their identification with Christ and their union with God by faith and this makes them more than just a group of individuals; it makes them one body.

Paul goes further, though. It is the Spirit, according to Paul, that makes those who follow The Way of Christ, family. Thus, why Paul then says, For you did not receive a spirit of captivity again into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption by which we cry out, “Papa, Father!” (v. 15). The divine Spirit, who is the source of their identity as “Christ followers” and of their union with God, is the one who ensures that whoever is carried by the spirit, whoever is dependent on the Spirit can call God “Papa!” (By the Spirit, God becomes “Papa!” and is the one you run to in distress rather than flee because of fear.[3]) The theme of adoption Paul employs here carries with it the legal connotation familiar to the Roman society: a person who is not related to you by birth is designated as one’s heir.[4] According to Paul, and this will sound offensive to us[5] as it probably did to the Jewish Children of Israel, no one is a child of God by birth (creation) but only by adoption through the presence of the Holy Spirit,[6] …the same Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God (v. 16).

Does this mean that the “children of God” are only Christians, and it is these who are worthy of love, life, liberation?[7] The answer to that is “No.” Recalling v. 14, For whoever is guided/carried by the Spirit of God, these are sons/children of God, the “whoever” expands the definition, broadens the scope from those who look, act, are a certain way to whoever is so imbued with God’s Spirit and whoever thusly acts like children of God (cf. Romans 2).[8] Said in another way, those who love/anyone who loves those who and that which God loves are the children of God because to love as God loves is the result of the presence of God who is love.[9] Concurrently, Paul is talking to a community threatening division over identities,[10] to this Paul says, Stop it! You are all the children of God, no group more so than the other; we are all children of God who have this same Spirit affirming us and helping us all to cray out “Papa, Father!” (Αββα ὁ πατήρ being both Aramaic and Greek father addresses[11]). Thus, their obligations are to each other—no matter previous religious affiliation and sex (Paul switches from “sons” (υἱοί) to “children” (τέκνα) or other facets of identity[12]. If this, then, following John from last week, those outside of the church will know these ones follow Christ and encounter Christ thus God through the community in unity’s witness in the world by the power of the Spirit.[13]

Our passage ends with Paul saying, Now if children then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs of Christ, if we suffer together/are affected by the same thing so that also we might be glorified (v. 17). According to Paul, those who are guided/carried by the Spirit of God, are those who become children of God, who have God as their Abba, Parent, and are those who are joint-heirs with Christ. Heirs of what? Well, not heirs of the honor and glory and power offered by the kingdom of Humanity, but of suffering. What type of suffering? Well, the suffering that Christ suffered. Those who are children of God are siblings of Christ and if siblings than they will also speak and act in the world as Christ did and this brings suffering and not human defined glory and success. Why? Because Christ didn’t identify with the strong and powerful, but with the weak and powerless and this, by faith and the power of the Holy Spirit yoking us into the family of Christ and God, means that we identity with the least of these, too, as Christ did;[14] in this way, we do not create our own glory defined by the kingdom of humanity, but receive glory from God in the reign of God.[15] How the disciples of Christ, the Church, treat the most disenfranchised and oppressed of society, speaks to their identification with Christ and whether or not the Spirit is present in and among them.

Conclusion

Every Sunday, we say this about the Spirit:

We believe in God within us, 
the Holy Spirit burning with Pentecostal fire,
life-giving breath of the Church, 
Spirit of healing and forgiveness,
source of resurrection and of eternal life.

This is no small declaration. God dwells within us in the Spirit, who inflames our hearts and bodies to participate in God’s mission of the revolution of love, life, and liberation, the Spirit is the means by which we are healed and how forgiveness (both God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others) is worked out, and it is the Spirit that is credited with our daily resurrection and the the hope we carry of our bodily resurrection into eternal life at the time of death. The Spirit is the “life giving breath of the Church”; in other words, without the Spirit there is no Church. Our first reading highlights this point: Peter and those with him receive the Spirit and can now speak in different languages thus proclaiming the good news of God that is the incarnate word of Jesus the Christ. From here, the church begins to be a thing in the world, a place carved into time and space to make room for an encounter with God in the event of faith through Jesus preached and, by the power of the Spirit, Christ heard. It is by the Spirit that people, from anywhere and everywhere, can gather and be one as Christ and Abba God are one and be made into the representatives of Christ in the world (ref. John 17). It is by the Spirit that these people so gathered can grow into the likeness of Christ, to become those who can hear the leading of God’s will on earth as it is in heaven and follow the divine footsteps toward the beloved who are fighting to survive in any generation (ref. John 16). It is by the Holy Spirit that the ones so gathered can become the mature Christians of Ephesians who find themselves flexible in receiving and responding to God’s continuous self-disclosure even when it contradicts the kingdom of humanity (ref. Ephesians 4). And it is by the power of this Spirit of Love, that those who hear and gather can consider themselves to be God’s children, thus heirs with Christ of all that is of Abba God.

[1] Sarah Heaner Lancaster, Romans, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 139. “Although he does not explicitly state the further implication of no longer being debtors to the flesh, it is clear form what he has said previously that we are debtors instead to the spirit.”

[2] Lancaster, Romans, 139. “When we leave the law of sin and death to follow the law of Spirit and life, we exchange one set of obligations for another. Our new obligations are established not by a system of patronage but by being brothers and sisters in Christ, children of God. This relationship is what determines our responsibilities to one another.”

[3] LW 25:358. “For in the spirit of fear it is not possible to cry, for we can scarcely open our mouth or mumble. But faith expands the heart, the emotions, and the voice, but fear tightens up all these things and restricts them, as our experience amply testifies. Fear does not say Abba but rather it hates and flees form the Father as from an enemy and mutters against him as a tyrant. For those people who are in the spirit of fear and not int eh sprit of adoption do not taste how sweet he Lord is…but rather He appears to them as a harsh and hard, and int heir heart they call Him a virtual tyrant, although with the mouth they call Him Father…”

[4] Lancaster, Romans, 139. “To further stress the relationship of being brothers and sisters in Christ, Paul uses the image of adoption, a legal practice in roman society of designating someone who is not one’s physical offspring to be one’s heir.”

[5] Lancaster, Romans, 140. The modern conception of “children of God” based on our being all created as God’s children is not the image Paul has. “…Paul speaks of being children of God by adoption, not by creation. Although it does capture and expand concern about our obligations toward one another, this understanding of all humans as children of God does not help to understand what Paul means in these verses.”

[6] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “The status of child of God is not given to all humans simply by virtue of being human. It belongs specifically to those who have been led into this relationship by the Spriit.”

[7] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “The idea that ‘children of God’ is a more restricted group than all humans leads to the question about who belongs in that group.”

[8] Also building here from Dorothee Sölle’s conception that anyone who identifies with the least of these and meets their real, tangible, physical need are those who represent Christ to humanity. See her Christ the Representative.

[9] LW 25:358-359. Shifting from spirit of fear to spirit of love can only happen if “we have His spirit, so that in the same spirit we love the same things which He loves and hate the things which He hates in the same way that He does. For we cannot love those things which God loves unless we have the love and will and spirt which He has. …And those people are called godlike men and sons of God because they are led by the Spirit of God.”

[10] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “Paul is still addressing the whole community (‘you’ plural and ‘we’). His intent is not to break down community in competition over who is a child of God and who is not, but rather to underscore the new community we have when we are in Christ.”

[11] Lancaster, Romans, 142. “…Paul has included both the Aramaic and Greek forms of address to God. The inclusion of both languages makes sense in a community made up of Greek and Jewish followers of Jesus, and since both words indicate the adopted status of the ones who cry out, each group needs to recognize its common inheritance with the other. Because the word ‘heir’ calls to mind Paul’s discussion of inheritance regarding God’s promise to Abraham (4:13-14) the direct address to God in both Aramaic and Greek reinforces the common spiritual ancestry of the followers of Jesus, whether they may be Jew or Gentile. Neither group has a lesser place in the community, and they need to see and treat each other equally as brothers and sisters in Christ.”

[12] Lancaster, Romans, 141. Word play in Greek between huiothesias and huioi “The Greek wordplay between “sons” and “son-making” also calls to mind that in 8:3 Paul says God sent the Son into the world to deal with sin. Through Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, we come adopted sons and therefore join heirs with Christ. The masculine language in Greek has a purpose in connecting all these ideas, but Paul drops the masculine language in 8:16-17 to speak instead of ‘children’ (tekna). By shifting to language that is not gender -specific, Paul makes clear that women as well as men are heirs with Christ, thus breaking down on of the traditional hierarchical barriers between people in Romans society and opening the way to think of how other barriers are also overcome in Christ. Adoption makes the followers of Jesus kin to one another, brothers and siters in Christ, regardless of their place in society.”

[13] Lancaster, Romans, 141. “The presence of the Spirit in the gathering for worship leads the followers of Jesus to cry out to God as a parent, confirming that they are not slaves but children of God. Their allegiance to the dominion of the Spirit presents them with a new set of obligations—not obligations of slave to master but rather the obligations of joint heirs because of their common adopted status.”

[14] LW 25:356. “‘To be led by the Spirit of God’ is to put to death our flesh, that is, the old Adam, and to do it freely, promptly, and gladly, that is to despise and renounce all that is not God, even ourselves, and thus ‘not to fear death or the friends of death, the fierce race of penalties,’ and likes ‘to give up the empty pleasures of the world its corrupt and sordid prices,’ and freely to relinquish all good things and embrace evils in their place. This is not characteristic of our nature, but is a work of the Spirit of God in us.”

[15] Lancaster, Romans, 142. “Of course, the inheritance that joint heirs with Christ receive comes through being baptized into his death. Suffering comes before glory. Just as the son took on the vulnerability of weakness, which brings social shame, the joint-heirs with Christ must give up the mindset of the flesh that would seek glory in status and power and instead follow the Son’s example of accepting the suffering that accompanies weakness in order to gain a more secure glory. The passive ‘be glorified’ indicates that glory is not ours to be own, but rather it is God’s to give.”

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By This Word Alone

Psalm 138: 7, 8a, 9b-c: Though God be high, God cares for the lowly; God perceives the haughty from afar. Though we walk in the midst of trouble, you, Abba God, keep us safe; Abba God, your love endures for ever; do not abandon the works of your hands.

Introduction

Last week I referred to the reality that we have been exposed for having lost our voice in the world thus our place and relevance in the world because we’ve forsaken the message of Christ in word and deed and have traded our spiritual authority of the reign of God for the acceptance and amicability of the kingdom of humanity. In our pursuits for intellectual validity in an age ruled by the rational and reasonable, we’ve whittled down the gospel into something easily digestible as post-enlightenment, (now) post-modern, scientific, fact and data driven, educated people. Few people (if any) are currently running to the church for help or find themselves desperate to hear what the church will do or say. The church may be stepping in to help here and there, but being a “force to be reckoned with” in the temporal realm? Nah. The mainline non-denominational, big-box churches are already in the pocket of the rulers and authorities of the kingdom of humanity eager to uphold the status-quo and gain their bit of power and prestige. And the mainline denominational churches desperate to make traditional spirituality great again were seduced into the siren song of ambiguous statements of love to make sure they kept the few they had in the pews. And let us not forget the overwhelming amount of toxicity and violence that has come from the hand of those charged to do right and keep safe the beloved of God. So, fam, we’ve achieved exactly what we were desperate to avoid: we’ve lost relevance.

To find that relevance once again, we must return to the age-old yet intellectually awkward proclamation of Jesus Christ—the one who was crucified and raised by God, the one who sets the captives free by word and in deed, flips tables, yells at winds and waves, exposes people, calls the least of these his friends and family, and has absolutely no problem confronting rulers and spiritual leaders of all stripes and types in the kingdom of Humanity. And by getting in touch with this weird, pre-modern, mythologically laden message, find ourselves (re)oriented to God, faces brazen with God’s glory and presence. In returning to the proclamation we’ve been given, we will also step in under the gracious, merciful, beautiful, light yoke of God’s expectations for us as the church—love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly.

In other words, the foundation of the church is completely and totally dependent on the whacky and far-out stories of Jesus of Nazareth whom faith declares is the long-awaited Messiah of God and who is God—God of very God. It is precisely in and on these stories, these myths, where the church finds its unique identity to live and its concrete truth to speak into the world.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

For I make known again to you, siblings, the good news which I preached to you, and which you received, and in which you have stood, through which you are being saved by what words I preached to you if you holdfast, except if you believed at random. (1 Cor. 15: 1-2)

Paul gives us a clear and crisp definition of the “good news” on which, through which and by which the Church stands or falls and finds its unique identity and its concrete truth.[1] This is not some story that Paul came up with, but the very story that started the tradition of the church and will keep the church embedded as a force in the world for good and God’s glory and the wellbeing of the neighbor. Paul says clearly to the Corinthians, I am telling you all again, my siblings, the good news I (have already) announced to you (v. 1a-b). In other words, Paul is reminding the Corinthians of the word of God that is the good news that God has proclaimed and promised from the beginning of the cosmos. He’s keeping this story very straight and clear and expects the Corinthians not to veer—in any way—from this tradition they’ve received from him. Thus, why Paul then says, and which you received (in turn[2]) and in which you have stood, and through which you are being (and will be) saved by what words I preached to you (vv. 1c-2b). They must remain on course because it is the ground under their feet. According to Paul, it is important for the Corinthians to hold fast to this particular message and not one of their own or a hodge-podge from what he said. Otherwise in straying and believ[ing] incoherently[3] (v. 2c), the Corinthians are not on solid ground and are not being saved.

For I handed over to you first and foremost what I also received… (v. 3a-b). What is the message that Paul preached and handed over and received and the Corinthians are being exhorted to hold fast to and not stray from? Each part of the crazy and whack story about Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. That Christ died on behalf of our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he was seen by Cephas and then by the twelve[4] (vv. 3c-5). This is the good news, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον (the gospel) Paul referenced back in v. 1, this is what he received and handed over[5] and through which the Corinthians are being saved;[6] this message, not part of it, not the comfortable bits, not another rendition. And it’s this message and its coherent grasp that is the foundation and the means by which the Corinthians are coming into an encounter with God by faith through Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is by this message and this alone that Christian faith and identity have its foundation, substance, and truth.[7] For Paul, the way this all works out is more than dogmatic (forced) confession and adherence, but the truth and actuality of a personal confession that is born of experiencing the summoning to life out of death of this good news.[8]

Paul then tells the Corinthians that Jesus in his resurrected state was seen by more than 500 siblings once for all, many of whom many remain until now, though some fell asleep. Afterward, he was seen by James [Jesus’s brother[9]], then by the all the apostles (vv. 6-7). Affirming the actuality of Jesus’s resurrection, Paul then presses in on the reality of the theme of Corinthians 15: God is God[10] and it’s this God who is God who is the one who brings the dead to life by grace and promise.[11] Paul writes, Then lastly as if one miscarried he was seen by also me, for I, I am the least of the apostles, of whom I am not fit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God; but by the grace of God I am who I am, and the grace of God toward me has not become fruitless, but to a greater degree I worked harder of them all, but not I but the grace of God in me. Through Paul’s confession and witness, those who are stuck are liberated, those who are afflicted are comforted, those who are untimely born are reborn in time, and those who are dead are made alive. According to Paul (by confession and experience), it’s the unmerited grace of God that is the breath of new life. [12] Thus, if for Paul than for the Corinthians[13]—individually and as the community.[14] It’s the promise of God fulfilled in and through the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ that is the word of God that brings the dead to life,[15] gives authentic identity in the place of a sham identity, and replaces falsehood with truth.[16] It’s the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that is, according to Paul, the firm foundation of the church; [17] apart from this there’s nothing to stand on, nothing to substantiate, nothing of relevance for the Christian community, the Church. Every part of Corinth’s existence is by God or not at all.

Conclusion

When the church fails to adhere to this message, when it decides what parts are worthy, reasonable, and rational at the expense of the other parts it will lose itself. In that moment, as it steps out from under and out of God’s grace and God’s word, the very thing it fears will happen: the church will cease to be relevant. But, according to Paul, the Church, sits precariously balanced on the solid word of God found in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit; when the church stands on this word, proclaims this word, believes this word—as scary as that can be at times—the church finds itself square in the grace of God and supplied with God’s grace to carry on.[18] It is in adhering to this ancient claim that creates the timelessness of the church—it is the very essence of the invisible church, the ties that bind beyond human-made boundaries randomly drawn in the ground, beyond separations of generations of time, and beyond seemingly uncrossable expanses of space. It is this word that brings light where there is darkness, love where there is indifference, liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death. It is on and by this divine word—the word of Christ crucified and raised—and this word alone that the church is the church in the world to the well-being of the neighbor and to the glory of God.

[1] Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC, eds. I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 1169. “The cross…remains ‘the ground and criterion’ of Christian existence and Christian identity.”

[2] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1185. “The readers have in turn…received it. This is a happy rendering…to indicate transmission of a tradition for which the thrice-repeated καί is scarcely accidental.”

[3] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1186. “Here Paul envisages the possibility of such a superficial or confused appropriation of the gospel in which no coherent grasp of its logical or practical entailments for eschatology or for practical discipleship had been reached. Incoherent belief is different from believing in vain.”

[4] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1205. “…the twelve became a formal title for the corporate apostolic witness of those who had also followed Jesus during his earthly life, and who therefore underlined the continuity of witness to the One who was both crucified and raised.”

[5] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1185. “Paul declares the gospel as that which is not only revealed (cf. Galatians 1 and 2) but is also ‘both transmitted and received’ and therefore in principle constitutes ‘the premises of the audience’ which provide the foundation on the basis of which Paul will develop his argument about the resurrection of the dead.”

[6] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1184-1185. Both italics and bold are part of the original text; when my emphasis, it will be noted in the footnote. “We must understand the gospel in 15:1, therefore, to denote more than the message of the resurrection, but not less. It denotes the message of salvation; in vv. 3-4 Paul endorses the shared pre-Pauline tradition which both proclaims the death and resurrection of Christ and interprets it in terms of the saving and transforming power of the God as this receives explanation and intelligibility within the frame of reference provided by the [Old Testament] scriptures.”

[7] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1186. “Paul does, however, refer to a continuity of handing on and receiving which constitutes, in effect, an early creed which declares the absolute fundamentals of Christian faith and one which Christian identity (and the experience of salvation) is built.”

[8] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1188. “There is a very close relationship between the dimension of proclamation or kerygma which declares a gospel truth claim and the dimension of confession or self-involvement which declares a personal stake in what is asserted.”

[9] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1207-1208. “…we have independent evidence that. Paul clearly regards James the Lord’s brother as an apostle…’…Paul certainly indicates that he regarded James as an apostle.’ This anticipates the point that for Paul the term apostle is always wider than the Twelve.”

[10] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1169.

[11] hiselton, First Corinthians, 1169.

[12] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1208. “The emphasis lies in the undeserved grace of God…who chooses to give life and new creation to those reckoned as dead, or, in Paul’s case, both a miscarried, aborted foetuswhose stance had benhostileto Christ and to the new people of God.”

[13] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1213. “‘Ecumenicity’ is not the lowest common denominator in a miscellany of individual experiences. For Paul it is defined by the common kerygma of a shared, transmitted gospel tradition, anchored in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as ἐν πρώτοις.”

[14] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1194. “…the promise of God which remains steadfast…depends entirely on God’s sovereign will and gift of grace to give life to the dead…, who as the dead have no power to create or to resume life as God’s chosen community.”

[15] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1210. “Given Paul’s association of this encounter with the resurrected life as one of new creation…it seems most probably that Paul perceives himself as one who was unable to contribute anything to an encounter win which God’s sovereign grace was all, even to the extent to giving life to one who was humanly beyond all hope. This precisely reflects the theme of resurrection as God’s sovereign gift of life to the dead…”

[16] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1195. “…the transfer ‘from death to life’ thereby provides a new identity for a new community: God can ‘raise up’ children of Abraham from the stones….hence Paul uses this figure of the ‘nothingness’ of death to expound the establishing of the divine promise of life and identity  to the nothings, to the disinherited, to the Gentiles.”

[17] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1211. V. 10 “We come to the heart of Paul’s point Underserved, unmerited grace (χάρις) which springs from the free, sovereign love of God alone and becomes operative in human life not only determines Paul’s life and apostolic vocation but also characterizes all Christian existence, not least the promise of resurrection and the reality of the activity of Christ as Lord.”

[18] Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1212. “The emphasis on labor reminds us that difficulty and cost in Christian work, far from suggesting an absence of God’s grace, presupposes the gift of such grace to prosecute the work through all obstacles…The theme of grace in and through ‘weakness’ is one which Paul constantly urges to Corinth.”

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We’re Our Own Problem

1 Samuel 2:8a-b Abba God raises up the poor from the dust; Abba God lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.

Introduction

Our relationship with our ideologies will be the end of us.

I know that’s not the greatest way to begin a sermon in a place that should bring comfort, but it is the truthiest way I know how to begin. (This place is as much about comfort as it is about truth.) While I think there are good ideologies and worse ones, the reality is—and to quote last week’s sermon—we do this. There are ideas we have and ideals we strive for; then there is the calcification of those ideas and ideals that we turn into ideologies; we do this. They aren’t inherently embedded in the universe, waiting for our exploration and discovery. Let’s go on a thought journey: imagine earth making its way about the sun without humanity anywhere. In this image, what is happening on the face of the earth? Flora is flora-ing, fauna is fauna-ing, Things get warm, things get cold; things enter night while things enter day. Things are just going. Are animals fighting, sure. Are trees dying because of beetles, sure. But it’s all just going, organically, day in and day out.

At no point in that image is there a discussion about “good” and “evil”, of “progress” and “conserving”, of “individual” and “communal”, of “this” and “not that”. Why? Because we bring that stuff into the mix. To be clear, I’m not arguing for a human-less world; I very much enjoy my time here as a human, doing all my humany things. I’m also not arguing that those discussions, dialogues, and dialectics aren’t important; don’t forget, I’m a theologian and political ethicist, my academic career depends on such things be engaged with and vigorously. But what I want you to see is that part of being human is making and creating systems and structures  that reflect ourselves into the world, materializing what we hold most dear. Did you catch that emphasis? What WE hold most dear, how WE see the world, what WE think is best. Every philosophy, theology, ethical program, religious expression carries a certain amount of personal bias that then resonates with others experiencing the world. Every. One.

The problem is that we don’t see these ideologies as things we make, like tables and chairs. We see them as parts of us worth defending as if our lives depended on it. Here, three things happen, a). (individually) we lose ourselves to them (as in, they become a part of our personhood, being, and identity); b). (corporately) we lose the number one thing that makes us most human: relationships with others, with our kin and with our neighbor (as in, we will cling to ideologies harder than we will cling to each other because we have allowed them to define us more than our relationships); and c). because we have invested so much in these ideologies, we can’t let them be wrong because then we become bad (as in, we’ve succumbed to the false binary that right=good and wrong=bad). In other words, too close an identification with what we believe to be the way will mean that we lose others and in losing others we lose ourselves. In other, other words, we lose our humanity and let the very things we created have domination over us, and we are thrust back into captivity; our ideologies are none other than immaterial golden calves causing us to curve in on ourselves more and more, forsaking our neighbor, thus forsaking God. We will become so turned in on ourselves that we won’t even know God’s left the building.

Mark 13:1-8

And then, while they were leaving out of the temple, one of [Jesus’s] disciples says to Jesus, “Teacher, behold(!), how magnificent the enormous blocks of stone and how magnificent the sanctuary!!” And Jesus said to him, “See these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left stone upon stone, not one at all(!); all will be overthrown.”

Mark opens chapter thirteen with Jesus leaving the temple—the one he’s been in for a while teaching. This leaving functions in two ways: 1. it provides a conclusion to the teaching of the disciples that has been ongoing for chapters now; and 2. Jesus physically severs his connection with the temple (he’s not thrown out; he leaves as the “unquestioned winner in the contest”).[1] In other words, Mark sets up an important visual for his audience: God is leaving the building (recall Mk. 1:1).

As Jesus and his disciples are leaving the temple, one of them (who goes unnamed) marvels, to Jesus, about how magnificent the building is and the stones! “Teacher, behold(!), how magnificent the enormous blocks of stone and how magnificent the sanctuary!!” These structures were fantastically remarkable, the place you’d go if you’re touristing about Jerusalem. One scholar explains, the temple “occupied a platform of over 900 by 1, 500 feet, and the front of the temple building itself stood 150 feet tall and 150 feet wide, made of white stone, much of it covered with silver and gold”; don’t forget, his disciples aren’t city mice, they’re country mice[2]—what they witnessed firsthand as the sun played with the precious metals, stones, and cuts was truly marvelous and awe inspiring.[3] But even though a building is remarkable and speaks to the beautiful ingenuity of human minds and hands (and conjures horrifying images of the many oppressed bodies that were used to build it…), and even if it is dedicated to the most upright purposes, it doesn’t mean that somehow God is trapped therein, obligated to reside (forever) among the stone and precious metals.

So, Jesus says, “See these great buildings/sanctuaries? Not one stone here will be left stone upon stone, not one at all(!); all will be overthrown.” What the unnamed disciple saw as magnificent, Jesus sees as the cite of God’s revolution of love, life and liberation in the world. For Mark’s Jesus, there’s nothing of the temple that is glorifying to God;[4] rather, it’s a testament to human glory, and the leadership therein is dead set on their one way to do things, the one way that brings them the most power and the most glory (remember Mk. 12:38-44). Like the pharisees in other instances and the scribes just before this, this is nothing but a well decorated tomb of human made ideologies[5] destroying God’s beloved, oppressing them, tearing them apart, rendering them grist for the mill of the corrupted authority. As Jesus leaves the temple and promises its destruction, he emphasizes that the temple is going to be replaced with something new.[6]

Jesus then, according to Mark, goes to the Mount of Olives and sits down. It’s assumed he leaves the temple by the east gate. The imagery here would not have been lost on the original audience, but it might be lost on us. Mark is harkening back to the book of Ezekial and God’s abandonment of the temple through the east gate and resting on the mountain to the east of the city.[7] Thus, Mark positions Jesus going out of the east gate to the Mount of Olives and sitting down opposite the temple (a position of judgment).[8] According to Jesus, Jerusalem and the temple are no longer the primary focus of the divine government.[9] God has (definitely) left the building.

And the next part of our passage is Jesus’s cryptic reply to Peter’s question (on behalf of James, John, and Andrew) that speaks to “‘the end of the old order’.”[10] Peter asks, “Answer for us when these things will be, and what the sign [will be] whenever all these things will intend to be accomplished.” Jesus’s response is a (prophetic[11]) litany of various wars and skirmishes, lies and deceits, none of which are literal signs that are predictions; Jesus knows that his disciples will be prone to being misled by wars, rivalries between nations and kingdoms, and even by false messiahs.[12] Rather, these things will happen not because they are signaling something divine (the collapse of the temple) but because they are the fruit of humans being human; we cause wars, we intentionally deceive others, we allow our anthropocentric megalomania to dare to believe we can save ourselves (politically and spiritually). WE DO THIS! The collapse of the temple is because of human intoxication with itself; the temple will collapse under the weight of human made ideologies and God’s refusal to be held captive by them. As we said last week,Unless Abba God builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it. Unless Abba God  watches over the city, in vain the watcher keeps their vigil.

But Jesus doesn’t leave them without hope. For Jesus, part of the economy of the kingdom of God is that death precedes life, just as incredible trial and pain precede the birthing of new life.[13] The promised destruction of the temple is but one of those things that will liberate the people into something new [14] and the disciples need not get caught up in conspiracy theories and false messiahs[15]. They are to stay the course,[16] they will need to keep their head about them and refuse the temptation to be driven and controlled by cultic conspiracies. They must fix their eyes on something else, someone else who came to liberate them—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.[17] And it is this fixed focus on Jesus, the source of love, life, and liberation that the disciples will participate in liberating all of God’s beloved from captivity (to the temple, to religion, to philosophy, to theology, to dogma, to doctrine, to law, to themselves, to their power, privilege, and prestige) into real liberation that brings with it robust love (for God and for the neighbor), vibrant new life focused on pulling together and not apart, uplifting and not tearing down, listening and not dismissing. Here in, in this pulling together, in this community, in this solidarity within humanity is the temple to be found.

Conclusion

If you’re tempted to think this is a first century Palestinian problem, please think again.[18] The Church, the Christian Church, the American Christian Church is not the new temple; we are as at risk of turning this building into an empty tomb as our ancient siblings. The new temple will always be in Christ and where Christ goes; and it will be those who follow Christ (by faith and in action) who live within the new temple of the reign of God in Christ by the power of the Holy Sirit. It is these who will be with Christ who bring Christ to others and participate in God’s diving mission of the righteous revolution of love, life, and liberation.

So, for us here today, Beloved, we need liberation, we need interruption, we need to get our heads on straight. We must heed the words of Christ to his disciples and think clear and smart and always choose that which brings much love, that which produces the most life, and that which causes the greatest amount of liberation—about these we must also be adamant, these are our guiding ideas and ideals, these are our dives and motivations. If our ideologies cannot do that or have stopped, we must—must—choose love, life, and liberation over our ideologies…we don’t have a choice; God’s about to leave the building, if God hasn’t already left.

[1] R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, eds. I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 494. “…already in 12:1-12 and increasingly since 12:34…Jesus has taken the initiative, posing the next question himself (without receiving a reply) and going on to denounce the representatives of religious power and to overturn conventional values of importance an status. It is thus appropriate that the whole episode ends not with the authorities taking action against Jesus…but with Jesus now the unquestioned winner in the contest, himself severing the connection by leaving the temple and pronouncing its down fall.”

[2] France, Mark, 496. “The unnamed disciple’s admiration of the temple buildings would be typical of a Galilean visitor to Jerusalem.”

[3] William C. Placher, Mark, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 184-185. “It is understandable that Jesus’ disciples, mostly from the countryside, would have been impressed by the temple Herod had built. It occupied a platform of over 900 by 1,500 feet, and the front of the temple building itself stood 150 feet tall and 150 feet wide, made of white stone, much of it covered with silver and gold, by far the most impressive building any of them had seen, glowing int eh sunlight. Little wonder they were amazed by it all—and then little wonder at Jesus’ frustration that they had not yet understood his teaching that God was not present in him and not in the temple.”

[4] France, Mark, 496. “Splendid as the structure may be, its time is over.”

[5] France, Mark, 494. “The unnamed disciple’s superficial admiration for the magnificence of the buildings, contrasted with Jesus’ declaration of their ultimate bankruptcy, furnishes yet another example of the reorientation to the new perspective of the kingdom of God to which the disciples are committed but which they remain slow to grasp, and which Mark expects his readers to embrace.”

[6] France, Mark, 494. “The old structure of authority in which God’s relationship with his people has hitherto been focused, is due for replacement…As Mt. 12:6 has it, ‘Something greater than the temple is here’. The discourse which will follow in vv. 5-37 will fill out the nature of that ‘something greater’.”

[7] France, Mark, 494.

[8] France, Mark, 495. “Moreover, he goes from the temple onto the Mount of Olives (v. 3), presumably leaving by the east gate. it does not take a very profound knowledge of the Book of Ezekiel to recall the dramatic description of God’s abandonment of his temple as the chariot throe of God’s glory rises up from inside the temple, pauses at the east gate, and comes to rest on ‘the mountain east of the city’ (Ezk. 10:18-19; 11:22-23). So now again the divine presence is withdrawn from the temple, and it is left to its destruction.”

[9] France, Mark, 497-498. “The mutual hostility between Jesus and the Jerusalem establishment has now reached it culmination in Jesus’ open prediction of the destruction of the temple, with its powerful symbolism of the end of the existing order and the implication that something new is to take its place. This is to be a time of unprecedented upheaval in the life and leadership of the people of God. Jerusalem, and the temple which is the focus of its authority, is about to lose its central role in God’s economy. “the βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ, is to find a new focus.”

[10] France, Mark, 498.

[11] France, Mark, 508. “What we know from Josephus of the forty years or so between Jesus’ ministry and the destruction of the temple amply illustrates these warnings.”

[12] France, Mark, 508. “The disciples, and those who following them will read these words, are called to discernment and warned against the sort of superficial impressions of ‘fulfillment’ which have been the bane of students of apocalyptic and eschatological literature ever since. Sometimes false impressions are self-inflicted, as people naively read off from world events the ‘signs of the end’ (vv.7-8). Sometimes, however, they are deliberately fostered by those who have something to gain by working on the credulity of the faithful (vv. 5-6). Jesus’ disciples will be liable to both kinds of misinformation as they look for the fulfilment of his words about the destruction of the temple. They must be on their guard.”

[13] France, Mark,509. “There is a birth to be looked forward to, but the wars, earthquakes, and famines of vv. 7-8 show only that it is coming, not when it will come. Even to speak of a birth at all is perhaps to press the metaphor too far, in that such an expression as ὠδῖνες τοῦ θανάτου does not seem to envisage a birth, only pain; but as the discourses proceeds, we shall see that the coming destruction of the temple will bring with it a new beginning.”

[14] France, Mark, 509. “The answer given to the disciples’ questions in the first four verses of the discourse is thus a negative one, clearing away the natural tendency to look for signs of the temple’s destruction in the stirring and ominous events of the coming years, in the areas both of politics and of natural disaster. The disciples must not allow themselves to be misled. They will have enough to do to maintain their own witness to the truth through these difficult days…”

[15] France, Mark, 510. Those claiming to act in Jesus’s name, “So we must assume some meagre contextual guidance is that they were not so much claiming to act on Jesus’ authority as in fact aiming to usurp his place, not by claiming to be Jesus redivivus (surely too far-fetched a concept in this context) but by arrogating to themselves the role which was rightly his, that of Messiah…”

[16] France, Mark, 511. “The disciples are to be calm and not to jump to hasty conclusions.”

[17] Placher, Mark, 185. “They want to know what is going to happen, and Jesus says that many terrible things will happen (a safe bet in first-century Palestine), but that they should not jump to the conclusion that bad times announce the immediate end of the present age.”

[18] Placher, Mark, 185. “Christians in any period who see the end at hand need to remember that such predications came within a generation of Jesus’ death and have been coming, on and off, ever since.”

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Hearts Cleansed First

Psalm 45:1, 7  My heart is stirring with a noble song; let me recite what I have fashioned…my tongue shall be the pen of a skilled writer. Your throne, O God, endures for ever and ever, a scepter of righteousness is the scepter of your reign; you love righteousness and hate iniquity.

Introduction

We just finished discussing the text of the letter to the Ephesians where “alignment” of the inner and outer person was a core thread woven through. For the author of the letter of Ephesians, whom I refer to as Paul, the encounter with God in the event of faith rectifies and substantiates the inner person of the believer with God in the message of what Christ did in his life and death and resurrection, and which is sealed to the believer by the coming of the Holy Spirit. This “spiritual” reality is not enough for Paul, as if just being right with God on the inside is all that matters. According to the logic of Ephesians, for this inner reality to be a real thing it must be/come tangible and that means it must find expression in the temporal realm through the outer person, the body. Faith must (and wants to!) express itself through acts of love. (full stop) In other words, what is on the inside wants to find expression on the outside.

It’s not a pop-psych thing; it’s not a fad or a phase. It’s not “these kids these days!”, it’s a very important concept that must be revisited often in our lives as we grow and mature, change with new information, and after we deconstruct spiritually and intellectually, emotionally and physically. It’s such an important topic that God in Christ Jesus picks up this very concept and discusses it from a different perspective. This time, though, Jesus addresses the discrepancy between empty action toward God because of a heart that clings to human tradition.

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

The Pharisees and some of the scribes [from Jerusalem] questioned [Jesus], “Why do your disciples not walk according to the traditions of the priest, but eat bread with dirty hands? And [Jesus] said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as is has been written, ‘This people revere me with [their] lips but their heart keeps far off from me. In vain they worship me, teaching the teachings of the precepts of humanity.’ Leaving the commands of God, you hold fast the traditions of humanity.”

Mark opens chapter 7 with the local pharisees coming together with some of the scribes having arrived from Jerusalem.[1] Here we, the audience, are being introduced to the building crisis and intensifying controversy between Jesus and the established leadership of Israel.[2] Not just the local leadership is worried, but the larger leadership is worried; so Jerusalem dispatched a group of scribes to see about this Jesus and his claims and actions.[3] As the two groups (the Pharisees and Jerusalem scribes) come together they take notice that Jesus’s disciples eat bread with unclean hands—that is, unwashed. This small oversight on the part of the disciples sparks pharisaic and scribal attention because, as Mark parenthetically explains to us, for the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they might carefully wash [their] hands, holding fast to the tradition of the priest; and they do not eat unless they ritually wash themselves also from the market… According to Mark, there is a human-made[4] tradition demanding hands (and bodies from the market!) are thoroughly cleansed before consuming food. Even more, anything to do with food should be baptized (washed thoroughly): winecups, pitchers, copper vessels, and couches.The desire is to prevent something external and unclean from contaminating the person on the inside. So, seeing the disciples break such a tradition—running the risk of making themselves unclean—provokes the Pharisees and the scribes to question Jesus, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the traditions of the priests, but eat bread with unclean hands?” As Jesus is pulled into the crisis, this rather small oversight becomes a much bigger deal.[5]

The reason why this small oversight becomes significant is because it marks a very early departure of Jesus’s followers from the traditions of the priests, a departure which will become—over time—more radical.[6] Jesus takes hold of the conversation and moves it away from the banality of tradition-obedience and toward something much more significant: inner-person and outer-person alignment and obedience to God.[7] Jesus begins by calling them hypocrites and then quoting Isaiah, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as is has been written, ‘This people revere me with [their] lips but their heart keeps far off from me. In vain they worship me, teaching the teachings of the precepts of humanity.’ And then concludes, “Leaving the commands of God, you hold fast the traditions of humanity.” In other words, Jesus has turned (flipped?) the table on the Pharisees and Jerusalem scribes: it is not my disciples who have left the true tradition of reign of God; it is you who have left God as you cling to traditionalism of the kingdom of humanity.[8] According to Jesus, the existing leadership of the children of Israel have allowed God’s commands to slip away as they grabbed onto the traditions of humanity. They are the ones who are now caught in dissonance: they say they love God but their actions demonstrate that they love their own traditions more. Something is askew.

Then, according to our assigned text, Jesus turns to the crowd, and draws them into the discussion, leaving the Pharisees and Jerusalem scribes to their own thoughts, “Listen to me all [of you] and understand, nothing from outside of a person is able to make them unclean by entering into them. Rather, it is that which proceeds out of/is spoken by a person which makes the person unclean. Jesus addresses the crowd because what is at stake exceeds just washing one’s hands according to the traditions of human beings; what is at stake is one’s orientation toward God (inward) and, thus, one’s orientation toward the neighbor (outward).[9] Building from the Isaiah quotation, Jesus recenters the state of the inner person (the heart) as the most important thing, as the seat of what defiles or does not defile a person.[10] It’s not a dirty pitcher or dirty hands that makes one unclean, it’s what is produced from the heart and finds its way out that makes someone unclean. Thus, why Jesus then says, For it is from within the heart of the person that the bad reasonings bursts forth….all these wicked things burst forth from within and pollute the person. In other words, you can be as ritually pure according to tradition as you want—avoiding this or that thing, person, or deed—but if your heart is still far from God then none of it matters because you are still unclean and exposes that you’ve never been thoroughly washed (baptized), from head to toe. [11] You can say you are worshipping God and love God all you want, but your actions (toward your neighbor) will speak otherwise because what’s on the inside always wants to find expression on the outside. For Mark’s Jesus, clinging to traditionalisms in the name of God reveal the heart that is turned away from the neighbor because it cannot see the oppression and marginalization being imposed on the people who are just trying to live to the best of their ability. In other words, for Jesus, the Pharisees and the scribes from Jerusalem have forsaken the mission of the reign of God and have invested in the tyranny of the kingdom of humanity; God’s divine revolution of love, life, and liberation is being ignored (at best) and hindered (at worst).

Conclusion

According to Mark’s Jesus, our hearts must first be made right before we can begin to align the outer person with the inner person in a way that conforms with God’s will and the mission of the reign of God. Our hearts are repeatedly tempted to return to the ways of the kingdom of humanity, and we find ourselves lured to (re)draw lines of division between the “acceptable” and “unacceptable,” the “good” and the “bad,” the “clean” and the “unclean.”[12] (Remember, according to Ephesians, humans love a good dividing wall and God loves unity.) So, Mark’s Jesus is asking us—challenging us, inviting us[13]—to reevaluate and take stock of these tendencies and to align our bodily expressions to our faith, our auditory words to God’s Word residing in our hearts, to recenter in our lives and loves those who have been otherwise left out and oppressed by the dominant culture of the kingdom of humanity (people of color, queer people, indigenous people, people who are disabled, our elders, women, etc.). We must take a deep, hard look at the ways we’ve participated in forcing obedience to external conformity on those who look different from us, act different from us, and who walk through the world differently from us, and really see how we have refused to let them be who they are inside and out, how we have denied their bodies, their stories, and their religions in the world. Our histories expose that our hearts have been far from God—calcified, cold, and dead—even though we have convinced ourselves we acted and proclaimed in God’s will and name! We must take our inner and outer alignment seriously—for Jesus is speaking to us and not “them out there” who are getting it wrong according to our books. We must begin to realize we’ve conflated the goals of our human empire for the mission of the reign of God. And it is “We” because we are being addressed, those who claim to represent God by bearing Christ’s name into the world and those who claim to participate in God’s mission of divine revolution of life, love, and liberation in the world by the leading of the Spirit.

[1] R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, eds. I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 276. “…not the local scribal leadership but…a delegation ἀπὸ Ἱεροσολύμων.”

[2] France, Mark, 276. “With the beginning of chapter 7 we return to a situation of controversy and of teaching, the two closely woven together. Opposition and rejection have of course been recurrent themes in the Galilean ministry so far, but with this new pericope the tension between Jesus and the religious leadership rises to a new of mutual repudiation, and Jesus deliberately fuels the fire with a more radical pronouncement even than his controversial comments on the sabbath (vv. 15, 19).”

[3] France, Mark, 280. “The fact that in both instances they are described as having arrived …from Jerusalem probably indicates that they have come specially to investigate and/or to dispute with Jesus.”

[4] France, Mark, 280. “…it is the behaviour of Jesus’ disciples rather than his own actions which provides the point of dispute…The issue this time…is not one of obedience to the OT laws, but of rules subsequently developed in Pharisaic circles. While no doubt it could normally be expected that hands would be washed before a meal for hygienic reasons (since food was often taken from a common dish), the only hand washing required in the OT for purposes of ritual purity is that of priests before offering sacrifice…The extension o this principle to the eating of ordinary food and to Jewish people other than priests, was a matter of scribal development, and it is uncertain how far it had progressed by the time of Jesus.”

[5] France, Mark, 277. “While the issue raised by the scribes in v. 2 is at the relatively inoffensive level of ritual washing before meals (a matter on which Jews themselves held different views), by his pronouncement in v. 15 Jesus deliberately widens the discussion to include this ritual separation which constituted one of the ‘badges’ of Jewish national identity.”

[6] France, Mark, 277. The hand washing is smallish but ends up being the catalyst for the “stark polarisation of views which must pit Jesus’ new teaching irrevocably against current religious orthodoxy, and which will, in the fulness of time, lead the community of his followers outside the confines of traditional Judaism altogether.”

[7] France, Mark, 283. “Jesus’ response will therefore focus on this more fundamental issue of the relative authority of tradition as such as a guide to the will of God, rather than on the provenance of the particular tradition in question.”

[8] France, Mark, 285. “The basic charge is economically expressed by means of three contrasting pairs of words: ἀφέντες…κρατεῖτε; ἐντολὴν…παράδοσιν; θεοῦ…ἀνθρώπων. The fundamental contrast is the last—true religion is focused on God, not a merely human activity. What comes from God has the authoritative character of ἐντολή, which requires obedience; what comes from human authority is merely παράδοσις, which may or may not be of value in itself, but cannot have the same mandatory character. Yet they have held fast to the latter, while allowing the former to go by default.”

[9] France, Mark, 286. “Indeed, the Pharisees and scribes are not mentioned again; their accusation has been rebutted, and now Jesus takes the imitative in raising publicly a much more fundamental issue of purity which goes far beyond the limited question of the validity of the scribal rules for hand washing. No specific regulation is now in view, but rather the basic principle of defilement by means of external contacts which underlies all the purity laws of the To and of scribal tradition.”

[10] France, Mark, 291. “Unlike the things which do not defile because they do not make contact with the καρδία, the really defiling things are those which actually originate in the καρδία.”[10] The seat of thought and will

[11] William C. Placher, Mark, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 102. “The challenge is not to particular details of traditional purity laws but to the whole idea that ‘purity’ means keeping your distance from unclean persons, things, and types of food.”

[12] Placher, Mark, 103. “Worry about your own attitudes and behavior, not how you might look to others if they see you associating with the wrong people. There are no ‘wrong people’ when it comes to those Christians should care about.”

[13] Placher, Mark, 104. “Jesus invites us to let all our respectability be burned away so that nothing will distinguish us from the freaks and lunatics, and only thus to enter his reign.”

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The Paraclete Cometh

Psalm 104:34-37a 34 I will sing to Abba God as long as I live; I will praise my God while I have my being. May these words of mine please God; I will rejoice in Abba God. Bless God, O my soul!

Introduction

Last week, Jesus prayed for his disciples to have the fortitude to remain in the Word of God. Being not of the world but remaining in the world means that this fledgling community belonging to Christ needed to remember that their creation as this fledgling community was solely based and sustained on God’s Word proclaimed in and through Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, this one who is God. As Jesus prepares to leave his disciples, he knew that the hatred of the world toward this new community of God would try to eclipse the joy and confidence of these faithful. So, he prayed. He prayed that they would remain one as Jesus and God are one, because they are stronger together as a group, and the world loves to divide and conquer. He prayed for the sustaining of their identity, that they remember whose they are, because the world will do whatever it can to make the forget. He prayed for them to be protected in their new creation (new eyes, new ears, new words), because the world will try to steal from their new creation, forcing them to relinquish new eyes and ears, holding their proclamation hostage, demanding they forsake their divinely gifted life, love, and liberation.

Jesus knew they needed help. This little community—barely a smoldering wick—was about to be launched into the world to fend for themselves. They would be assaulted on every side because of who they were and what they said: they, like their Christ, were to become the locus of God’s revolutionary activity in the world; their message would echo Jesus’s, calling into question the kingdom of humanity, exposing the upside-down world, and proclaiming the words of the divine revolution in the world for the oppressed. Jesus knew they were sitting ducks and without God, they would not make it far because this community was not a community created by human strength so it could not be sustained by human strength. So, this community needed something bigger and stronger, something that is of the same substance as the word that not only called this community into being but also the entire cosmos.

Jesus prayed on behalf of the community, asking for God to show up. And God did.

Enter the Paraclete!

John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

“But I, I say to you the truth, it is profitable to you that I, I go away. For if I do not go away, the paraclete cannot come to you. But, if I go, I will send them to you. And coming, that one will convict the cosmos concerning sin and concerning justice and concerning judgment…I still have many things to say to you, but you are not able to bear them just now. But, whenever this one comes, the Spirit of Truth, they will guide you in every kind of truth, for they will not speak from themself, but as much as you listen they will bring back word to you. (Jn 16:7-8, 12-13)

The lectionary loops us back into John 15 after bringing us to John 17 last week. Thus, according to the logic of the lectionary, Jesus’s promise of the Spirit is the fulfillment of the prayer to God to protect, guide, and strengthen the disciples who will be left in the world. But the advent of the Spirit, the Paraclete, is more than just a helper for those who will be left by Jesus; they are the very foundation of the church, as we say in our creed every Sunday: the Spirit is the “life-giving breath of the church.” For it is through, with, and by the Spirit that the work and word of Christ started in the body of Jesus will transition to the work and word of the fledgling community, who is now transfigured into the body of Christ in the world in Christ’s absence.[1] It is by the Spirit of God, the Paraclete, that God’s will and mission in the world will continue to be made known to the beloved in and through the new community of God.

Jesus—the Reconciler—must leave the disciples and return to God the Creator so that the Spirit of God—the Redeemer—can be sent into the world, specifically into the hearts of the disciples, to continue the work of God in the world. The work of the Spirit is to continue to reveal God in the world by means of the light of truth that is the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ.[2] In this way, God’s self-revelation and mission in the world is not cut short by Jesus’s bodily absence; through the Spirit rather than the incarnate Word, Jesus the Christ, does the Word and mission of God begin to transcend not only geographical boundaries (Acts 10 fulfilling Acts 1:8) but will also transcend chronological boundaries. By the sending of the Spirit, the Word of God will continue in the world, the light of truth will continue to illuminate hearts and minds from one era to another, in one context to a completely different one, through decades, centuries, and millennia.[3] It is through the witness of the Spirit in the lives of the disciples that witnesses back to Christ and thus forward to God[4] that is the continual fuel for the fire of divine revolution setting human hearts ablaze like match sticks—one by one.[5]

It is for this reason that Jesus both addresses the disciples’ impending grief (being left alone in the world in distress)[6] and exhorts them toward joy: even though they will grieve Jesus’s absence, feel fear and anxiety, they will be comforted by God’s Spirit, the Paraclete, who will usher them further into God’s truth and into God’s reality thus farther and deeper into God.[7] This is why Jesus turns the conversation toward what the Paraclete will do when they show up, because it is through the disciples (and through the church that will be born through their bodies and the Word of God) that the Paraclete will expose the world’s misconceptions of sin, justice, and judgment.[8] In this way and to quote Rudolf Bultmann, “The world is accused, and the Paraclete is the prosecutor.”[9] With the Paraclete set loose in the world through the disciples, human sin is exposed by divine righteousness,[10] human justice is brought to trial by divine justice, [11] and human judgment is found guilty by divine judgment.[12] Thus, God’s truth continues to be the light of the world from one era to another, within one context and then in another, living in one heart and at the same time in a completely different heart. The one word of God is always new in every moment as a word of revelation; it is not static doctrine, archaic dogma, suffocating fundamentalism, and deadly legalism. Rather, it is always a new living-word summoning the dead in their tombs into life in the world.[13]

Thus, Jesus can assure the disciples that even though he has much more to teach them, he will leave that to the Paraclete who will guide them (teach/lead) into every kind of truth further revealing Christ into the world, further instigating God’s divine revolution of life, love, and liberation in the world in pursuit of the God’s beloved. The Paraclete will not lead the disciples (those then and those now) to a static conception of God or into a conception of God so different there must be a break with this history set out through Christ, but into God’s self-disclosure made known in the revelation of God incarnate, Jesus.[14] In other words, divine truth will be revealed in every moment as the present moment—whatever/wherever—is revealed by the divine word and ushered into divine comfort by the Paraclete, who is the Spirit of Truth.[15] Starting first with the community—whatever/wherever—and billowing outward into the world.

Conclusion

Those first disciples lost their main, they lost Jesus whom they loved dearly—they staked their lives on this love of Christ, and then he left them. The distress they felt was real; it’s a distress that we feel today, feeling left/abandoned by God without Jesus to be here with us bodily. But the Paraclete remains in the world and always with the disciples of Christ, those who are thrust by faith into God and are dependent on God’s word. Our God is Triune, three persons one God; personal and close, at all times, in all eras. God is not dead, dear ones; God is alive, God is here, God is with us, and God is within us. Martin Luther writes about this portion of the Gospel of John, “Therefore God has been gracious to us and has given us a Comforter to counteract this spirit of terror—a Comforter, who, as God Himself, is much stronger with His comfort than the devil is with his terror.”[16] The one who lives in us and through us is the one who can bend space and time to become one spot and moment so that all time and all space is in this God of presence, revelation, and comfort.

Yet comfort only comes when God’s truth exposes and reveals us, the way we miss the mark, our decrepit ideas, broken systems, and violent ideologies. By the presence of the spirit—it’s conviction—we cannot pretend not to see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel. We do not have the luxury of undoing God’s summoning of us out from our tombs back at Easter. By the Spirit, the Paraclete, this humble community, bends its knees, confesses, and finds absolution by faith in Christ and union with God. Through the conviction and exposure of the Paraclete, divine comfort becomes true comfort—not the comfort of the world that is fleeting, comfort that lasts through thick and thin because it’s built out of the stuff of the infinite and not finite, of the eternal and not terminal, out of the substance of God and not the substance of humanity.

God’s Spirit of Truth, the Paraclete, the Prosecutor comes to bring God close to us through the light of truth to live with us and among us and in us, to work in and through us the divine revolution of God’s love, life, and liberation in the world. Today we rejoice because Christ’s joy is made complete in us through the sending of the Paraclete who binds us to God through Christ. We can let go of the rope and fall into God because God will show up because God never left us.

[1] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. GR Beasley-Murray, Gen Ed, RWN Hoare and JK Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 552. Originally published as, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 1966). “After Jesus’ departure, the situation on earth will remain unchanged in as much as the offence which Jesus’ work offered the world will not disappear. The witness, which till now he had borne to himself, will be taken over by the Paraclete, the Helper, whom he will send from the Father.”

[2] Bultmann, John, 553. “The ἀλθείας is for him the self-revelatory divine reality, and the function of the Spirit consists in bestowing revelation by continuing Jesus’ revelatory work, as is stated by the words μαρτυρήσει περὶ ἐμοῦ…”

[3] Bultmann, John, 553. “Jesus will send this Spirit from the Father, and from the Father he will come forth. This two-fold designation makes the reference to the idea of revelation certain’ even after Jesus’ departure, God’s revelation will be mediated through him: he it is, who sends the Spirit…who bears witness to him; but he does so in his unity with the Gather, who has made him Revealer; he sends the Spirit from the Father; the Spirit proceeds from the Father, just as it is said in 14.16 that the Father sends the Spirit at the son’s request, or in 14.26 that he sends him ‘in the name’ of the Son. All these expressions say the same thing.”

[4] Bultmann, John, 554. “Thus their being with him ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς has not come to an end with his farewell, but continues further; and this is the only basis on which their witness is possible. Their witness is not , therefore, a historical account of that which was, but—however much it is based on that which was—it is ‘repetition,’ ‘a calling to mind,’ in the light of their present relationship with. Him. In that case it is perfectly clear that their witness and that of the Spirit are identical.”

[5] Bultmann, John, 553-554. “The word μαρτυρήσει indicates that the Spirit is the power of the proclamation in the community, and this is made fully clear by the juxtaposition of the disciples’ witness and that of the Spirit: καὶ ὑμεῖς δὲ μαρτυρεῖτε (v. 27). For the witness borne by the disciples is not something secondary, running alongside the witness of the spirit.” And “Their preaching is to be a ‘repetition’ of his preaching, or a ‘calling to mind,’…” (554)

[6] Bultmann, John, 558. “They are not asking where he is going to—the answer would be: to the father, and that would solve their difficulty—but they are in λύπη because they are about to be left in their distress.”

[7] Bultmann, John, 558.

[8] Bultmann, John, 560-561. “Only in the word was Jesus the Revealer, and only in the word will he continue to be it; for the Paraclete, who is take his place, is the word. The word is very far from being a closed doctrine, or complex of statements, not on the other hand is it the historical account of Jesus’s life. It is the living word; that is, paradoxically, the word which is spoken by the community itself, for the Paraclete is the Spirt that is at work in the community.”

[9] Bultmann, John, 562.

[10] Bultmann, John, 563. “The world understands sin as revolt against its own standards an ideals, the things which give it security. But to shut oneself off from the revelation that calls all worldly security in question and opens up another security—that is real sin, in contrast to which all that used to be sinful was only temporary and passing.”

[11] Bultmann, John, 565. ‘For the world , this victory is just as much a κρυπτόν (7.4) as is the real nature of ἁμαρτία; as the world sees things, to suffer the wreckage of death means condemnation by God; the world can only see victory in what is visible. But the significance of the victory lies precisely in the overcoming of the visible by the invisible; this is why the world does not know that it is condemned, or that it is conquered. But this is what the Paraclete will show.”

[12] Bultmann, John, 565. “In each case the world thinks it possesses the criteria for this judgment in its concepts of ἁμαρτία and δικαιοσύνη. But as it deceived itself over the meaning of A and D, so too it fails to see that the χρίσις is already ensuing, that the prince of this world is already judged; i.e. it fails to see that it is itself already judged—condemned for holding on to itself, to it s own standards and ideals, to what can be seen.”

[13] Bultmann, John, 561. “For the word is at the same time spoken into a situation; i.e. it is spoken as the word of revelation against it. If therefore the community has any understanding of the word of revelation that brings it into being, it can and must know that it has always to interpret the word afresh and to speak it into its own present as the word that is always the same—that word that is the same because it is always new.”

[14] Bultmann, John, 575. “This means that the Spirits’ word is not something new, to be contrasted with what Jesus said, but that the Spirit only states the latter afresh. The Spirit will not bring new illumination, or disclose new mysteries; on the contrary, in the proclamation effected by him, the word that Jesus spoke continues to be efficacious.”

[15] Bultmann, John, 574. “If the Spirit is at work in the word that is proclaimed in the community, then this word gives faith the power to step out into the darkness of the future, because the future is always illumined afresh by the word. Faith will see the ‘truth’ in each case, i.e., it will always be certain of the God who is manifest in the word, precisely because it understands the present in the light of this word.”

[16] Martin Luther, “Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 14-16,” Luther’s Works, vol. 24, ed., Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1961), 291.

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Joining Our Voices to the Divine Symphony

Psalm 1:1a, 2-3 Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked…Their delight is in the law of Abba God, and they meditate on that law day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper.

Introduction

The church visible is a specific community of human beings with a specific summons in the world; and as the church invisible it is called to be in the world but not of the world because its fabric and substance is cultivated from and of divine spiritual essence. People both make and do not make the church. There is no church without the people (visible), but the church is not restricted to a certain group of people (invisible). Every church is called to participate as a locus of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation in the world and in this way the church visible partakes of the long surging presence of the church invisible. We as a visible church are yoked to the larger invisible church extending through time, and we find our place in this history as we are, where we are holding space for God to show up and work through us as a site of divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.

In this way, the church cannot find its comfort in the material realm, but rather it must find it in God through dependence on Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s from this posture that the church can bring comfort into the world. Thus, the metrics of success offered by the world fall flat when judging the church; it is not always the largest, the wealthiest, and the building with the most things that is the one most closely aligned to the reign of God. To be in the world and of the world is to relinquish the message of Christ for the message of the world and therein stifle the life-giving proclamation of Christ crucified and raised; a message that breaks in and interrupts the messages of the world. To sacrifice the message of Christ for an acceptable message according to the world is to sacrifice a true message of a substantial and enduring comfort for the saccharine and temporary comfort of the world.

But the church, which is built from the dust of the ground, is animated by and dependent on the breath of God, the Word of God, the Spirit of God found in the encounter with God in the event of faith in Christ. The church is to be in the world and not of the world because the world and its inhabitants need a good word, a new word, a word of love, life, and liberation, one they didn’t come up with themselves.

John 17:6-19

Jesus prayed…“I am no longer in the cosmos and they, they are in the cosmos, and I, I come to you. Holy Elder, take care of them in your name which you have given to me, so that they are one just as we [, we are one]. When I was with them I, I was taking care of them in your name which you have given to me, and I guarded [them] and not one of them was lost if not the son of destruction…I, I have given to them your word, and the cosmos detested them, because they are not of the cosmos just as I, I am not of the cosmos.” (Jn 17:11-12b, 14)

This is the “Farewell Prayer.” Here, Jesus prays for his disciples, the ones he called to himself and thus to God and the same ones he is leaving. Jesus called each one by name and ushered them into the reality of God; they have been given new eyes to see, new ears to hear and thus they are now no longer of the world even though they are in it. The goal of the prayer is to make sure that the disciples whom Jesus is leaving behind in the world will remain in the truth that is God’s self-disclosure revealed by Christ (vv. 17, 19), and not fall prey to the oppression and hatred of the world thus cease remaining in Christ to seek comfort in the world.[1]

A thread that runs through the prayer is “oneness.” This oneness is part of the truth of God revealed in Christ: Jesus and God are one thus those who encounter Jesus encounter God; where Jesus goes, God goes, too.[2] When Jesus called the disciples, God called them. When they followed Jesus, they followed God. In being so summoned and in following, they become the community whose beginning is not of the world but of God even if they are in it.[3] Through Christ they have come to know God and are thus taken out of the world because they are substantiated by the word of God incarnated in Christ whom they follow and from whom they received the word of God.[4] The disciples—the ones called to form this community—make up the community that is of Jesus thus of God and this belonging to Jesus is the unique source of the community and the unique essence of its presence in the cosmos. Thus, the community cannot be of the world because its source and foundation is not temporal but spiritual; it is literally born of the spiritual substance of the word of God that is Jesus Christ and is made to be God’s incarnate presence in the world but not of the world.[5] Therefore, to try to exist outside of this divine source and be in the world and of the world will render the fledgling community nothing but a social club.

Now, as the prayer goes on, the community so prayed for by Christ is to take up the mission of God in the world that was revealed in and through Jesus’s self-witness in the world; the community is, like it’s source and forebear, to call into question the things of the world, to challenge the domination of the kingdom of humanity.[6] This is the hardship for the disciples left behind by Jesus; they will be homeless in the world but by being thusly homeless they will find their home (their being and substance, their source) in God. Here, nothing of the world can comfort them or justify their existence; they are solely and completely dependent on the Word of God in Christ.[7] And in this way they are perpetually at risk for falling into the lure of the world, thus why Jesus prays for them. They must resist the urge, and they must abide in the vine.[8]

It is through remaining and abiding in and with the vine (ch. 15), clinging to the Word of God, and being recipients of the divine, life-giving sap that is the fulfillment of the joy of Christ that is made complete in the community left behind.[9] The holiness (the consecration, the sanctifying) of the community is found in ὁ λόγος ὁ σὸς ἀλήθείᾳ έστιν (v. 17b). The identity of the community in the world is formed by the word of God that is truth; thus, it is not defined by the word of the world that is not truth. Anything apart from this word, for this community, disempowers its presence and leads it astray from the source of its life and identity and renders it merely pruned kindling; the holy community cannot depend on anything but the word of God for its love, life, and liberation in the world for the world.[10] From here and only from here anchored in the Word of God, like Jesus, can the community of Christ take up God’s divine proclamation of life, mission of love, and revolution of liberation in the world.[11]

Conclusion

Our hope as the church visible today is not to forget the source of the life of the invisible church. Now is the time to push more into the Word of God, to recall and retell the stories of Christ and the radical divine action made known through him. It is in pressing into this identity as the holy community formed and founded on the radical proclamation of God’s Word incarnate that is how we find ourselves further in the world though never of it. To press into God and God’s word is not to go backwards to some archaic time or to cling to legalism or fundamentalism; this is death because God’s word is living and breathing, not something of a year now long gone (this is to live under the kingdom of humanity). To press into God’s word and God is to press into life and movement forward into something new, different, and something that can summon the world to look up and forward (this is to live under the reign of God).

As tempting as it may seem at times to jettison this ancient and rather whacky proclamation for one a bit more tolerable to the world, I assure you that is the surest way to forfeit our identity as the Christian church in the world and give up our seat in this history. Without the foundation of the Word of God in Christ, we no longer have a unique message to bring into the world and will just blend into the background of the world’s cacophony. We cannot depend on our doctrines and institutions, some claim to God’s law, or some static conception of God of another era; recourse to this language is just the same as the world’s language…it’s recourse to temporal things that have no part in establishing spiritual realities. It is to try to grasp at dust returned to dust.

Rather as part of this long-ago prayed for community, we must hear the divine summons, dare to let go of the rope, and fall deeper into God. We must let ourselves become consumed with God’s passion for the world, for the beloved. It’s in this full dependence on God and God’s word that brings us in line with God and begins to spark the flames of divine revolution in our midst; reformation (revolution) always starts in God’s church with God’s word. In this we can join our voices to the celestial symphony and demand life where there is death, love where there is indifference, and liberation where there is captivity in the name of Christ to the glory of God.

[1] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. GR Beasley-Murray, Gen Ed, RWN Hoare and JK Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 498. Originally published as, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 1966). “For the evangelist—and for the source too—the imparting of the name of God is not the transmitting of a secret, power-laden word, such as in the mysteries, or in the soul’s heavenward journey, or in magic, take effect by being spoken; rather it is the disclosure of God himself, the disclosure of the ἀλήθεια.”

[2] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 498. “In the work that Jesus does, God himself is at work, in him God himself is encountered.”

[3] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 498. “…by [the disciples’] faith they testify that their origin does not lie in the world, but that from the very beginning they were God’s possessions. As those who preserver God’s word, mediated through the Revealer, they form the community for which he prays.”

[4] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 499. “From this kind of faith grew the true knowledge, και ἔγνωσαν ἀληθῶς…, which in turn is the means whereby faith comes to itself, καὶ ἐπίστευσαν. For what is known and what is believed are in fact the same; ὅτι παρὰ σοῦ ἐξῆλθον and ὅτι σύ με ἀπέστειλας mean the same thing. And the meaning is this: to understand Jesus as the revealer and so to come to know God (v. 3). This therefore is the Christian community: a fellowship, which does not belong to the world, but is taken out of the world; one that owes its origin to God, and is established by the Revealer’s word, recognised as such in the light of the Passion. i.e.. in the light of rejection by the world; a fellowship, that is to say, which is established only by t the faith that recognises God in Jesus.”

[5] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 500. “The community belongs to God only in so far as it belongs to Jesus; i.e. it has its origin in eternity only in so far as it holds fast to its origin in the eschatological event that is accomplished in Jesus. To say that it belongs to Jesus is significant only in that it thereby belongs to God (τὰ ἐμὰ πάντα σά έστιν) that it belongs to God becomes a fact only in in that it belongs to Jesus (τὰ σὰ ἐμά).”

[6] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 501. “But what is he?  As the revealer of God he is the Judge of the world, through whom the world is called in question; and he has his δόξα in the community inasmuch as it too means judgement for the world, and that through it the world is called in question.”

[7] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 501. “His δόξα cannot be seen at the present time like the glory of a Messiah. There is no way of point to it in the world, except paradoxically, in that the community which is a stranger to the world is also an offence to it. Thus the community cannot prove itself to the world. Nor can its members comfort themselves in the things they possess…”

[8] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 502. “From what has gone before it is at once clear that the prayer for their protection is the prayer that the community which stands in the world be protected from falling back into the world’s hands, that it be kept pure in its unworldly existence.”

[9] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 506. “To say that this joy is to be shared by the disciples πεπληρωμένη, is to say, as in 15:11, that the joy they have already received through him will be brought to its culmination; the significance of turning to him in faith is found in the believer’s life becoming complete as eschatological existence.”

[10] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 509. “Marked off from the world, the community is to live in the world as holy community. But it can only enjoy this state of separation from the world in virtue of the revelation on which it is founded, which is nothing other than the word of God transmitted to it through Jesus. Hus its holiness is not due to its own quality, nor can it manufacture its differentiation from the world by itself, by its rite, its institution, or its particular way of lie; all this can only be a sign of its difference from the world, not a means of attaining it. [The community’s] holiness it therefore nothing permanent, like an inherited possession: holiness is only possible for the community by the continual realisation of tis world-annulling way of life, i.e.. by continual reference to the word that calls it out of the world, and to the truth that sets it free form the world.”

[11] Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 510. “The community has a task analogous to his, and rooted in it…But it does not take over this assault or the duty to win the world solely by embarking on missionary enterprises; it does so simply by its existence.”

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“A Hopeless Undertaking”

The following is a quote from Dorothee Sölle’s The Truth is Concrete (1969). It’s from the eleventh (and last) chapter, “Church outside the Church.” I bring this quote to light because it highlights Sölle’s prophetic witness and her keen insight. What she says here, I believe, applies to the C/church today. In 2024, we are in no better spot when it comes to desperate attempts to validate the C/church’s presence in the world. And the worst part, which I find well articulated here in Sölle’s words, is that the church prefers recourse to archaic structures and systems and useless assertions of power and demand, conformance and performance that seem to deny our technological and scientific advancements OR pretend that the human person is all fact and data, pure material truth without need of a reinvigoration of the retelling of our sacred myths (the enlightened and intellectual denominations (so proud) often jettison the very awkward message of the Christian sacred text and, thus, relinquish full interpretive control to the fundamentalist, rightist wing). Anyway, here are some words written about 55 years ago; enjoy and find within a summons to reconsider “Concrete Truth”:

“The main points in the structure are boundaries, danger, fear. The great enemy, the devil in ever new shape, is the world. The Church is always ready to forget that Christ has got the power over the dominions and that his victory is not just personal salvation of the individual but he has also changed the face of the world. We may remark in the last two hundred years that the situation of the Church has become more and more complicated, with the progress of secularization. She can no longer rely on the ancient pre-scientific fear-bound imaginations. She is losing her authority, her dominant position, she has become one power among many, and must therefore defend herself! She defends herself externally by virtue of claims to power which bear more or less weight according to the political situation. Internally she deals with her loss of authority by trying to preserve an outdated social structure. She proclaims that a part of the world, the past world, is unassailable and not subject to historical change. Then she bullies people to perform certain tasks which are made into conditions of membership of the Christian community. Somewhat unwillingly, she builds her walls and demands a way of life whose style and social norms and image are necessarily bourgeois. She demands, which is worse, the sort of community adherence which can no longer be expected, since people have less and less desire for this kind of thing. She demands, finally, that people should be interested in an ancient document, the Bible. These demands clearly constitute high walls. They are attempts to arrest the progress of secularization, at least in this area. It is a hopeless undertaking.”

p. 102-103
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“Buried in the Past; Captive to What Was”: Christian Limitation

Psalm 107:1, 21-22 Give thanks to God, for God is good, and God’s mercy endures for ever… Let them give thanks to God for God’s mercy and the wonders God does…Let them offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving and tell of Abba God’s acts with shouts of joy.

Introduction

We’ve spent the last few weeks looking outside at the global, national, and local socio-political tumult, chaos, and turmoil. There are many fires burning right now, and not enough water to put them all out. Some of these problems are so big that it feels like that save divine intervention itself, nothing will stop the death and destruction or ease the fear and anger and bring peace. Maybe God should start over again…*cue the thunder…

With all that is going around us, we can become so caught up with the tumult, chaos, and turmoil that we forget that there’s more here than meets the eye. We can become caught up in feeling helpless, hopeless, pointless, and absorbed by our limitations; we can’t make it better so why bother. It’s here we, a Christian church, forget the rock on which our identity is founded on. God. God The Creator, God the Reconciler, God the Redeemer; God who is the source of divine revolution of love and harbinger of liberation unto life. The same God who creates something out of nothing; God who resurrects the dead into life. It is this God who is fundamentally the source of our life spiritual (visible and invisible) and of our life corporate (spiritual and temporal).

Yet, it is this God we are so quick to jettison and abandon with saccharine desires to “keep the church” or “make the church relevant.” We would rather adhere to institutional order than be oriented toward this radical divine entity eager to flip the cosmos right side up. We grow embarrassed of our awkward proclamations and let the abusers, the power hungry, and the narcissists tell us what we will and will not say. We seem eager to remain silent when Jesus, God’s Word incarnate, is highjacked for violent purposes, baptizing war and genocide, oppression and alienation in the name of our Triune Abba God. We’d rather cling to the rope of the status quo and just fit in than dare to let go and fall into God, become radical, and go against the grain.

In refusing to let go of the rope we find ourselves dangling from provokes our spiritual and existential exhaustion. If you feel spiritually fatigued, this is why. All we want to do (and are trying to do) is climb back up the rope; what if we went back just a few years when things were “normal” and everyone was still here and things were going just fine, wouldn’t that be better than this? We don’t need or want rebirth, we think to ourselves. We just want our old church back. We want to go back to when it didn’t hurt so much to come to church, when decisions were easy, when we could quietly be this church gathered together. There’s a pit in our collective stomach that yells and screams: Go back! Run back to what was! Go back to that shore that was once comfort! Go back to not knowing, go back to when it was easier, go back to when things were better…I don’t care where, just go back to where it’s safe to just live…

Human beings have a hard time fighting against this lure and seduction of the romanticized past; the more we fight the more stuck we become. We are buried in the past, captive to what was.

Numbers 21:4-9

And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

We find ourselves in the book of Numbers, the fourth book of Torah that “…recounts memorable events of the Israelite wandering from Sinai, God’s mountain, to the plains of Moab, just opposite the promised land.”[1] The Israelites are still liberated from Egypt, still murmuring and grumbling, and still following God and Moses through the wilderness.[2] Our particular passage falls in the middle unit of Numbers, titled, “The Generation-long March in the Desert from Sinai to Moab.”[3] And this particular unit about the “Generation-long March in the Desert” demonstrates Israel’s “recurring cycle of murmuring and rebellion against the authority of God and Moses, by individuals or by the community as a whole.”[4] This “murmuring and rebellion” isn’t solely restricted to the people following God and Moses, but includes leaders like Aaron and Miriam—Moses’ sibling; it also include Moses himself demonstrating disloyalty to God.[5] Yet, when the murmuring and rebellion threatens to reach a fever pitch and provoke God’s beloved back to captivity, God acts and acts swiftly (e.g. the Tribe of Korah and Numbers 16).[6]

In our story, we find the Israelites fed up (again! [7]) with spontaneously generating quail, this weird coriander substance, and a lack of water. “There is no bread and no water, and we have come to loath this miserable food,” (aka Manna[8]) (v.5b).[9] God’s response? Snakes on a plain! These “snakes” were poisonous serpents with a burning bite.[10] Rightly, the people—watching “many Israelites” die because of the bites of the serpents—hie themselves to Moses. We sinned against God; intercede for us! Moses—mercifully—intercedes for them. God resolves the issue. Using God’s instrument of punishment, God tells Moses to make a seraph symbol and mount it high on a standard (v. 8). Moses does so, casting one of these serpents in bronze,[11] mounting it on a standard. Anyone who was bitten and looked up at this bronze snake was healed (v. 9). Israel, amid their dilemma and plight, are exhorted to look up at God rather than down at themselves; [12] it is not the snake that heals them, it is their right orientation toward God who is their source of love, life, and liberation. Through this bronze serpent on a pole, they are summoned to remember that God calls them to look to God and to follow God even when it means missing those creature comforts of way back when and following God into the unknown and uncomfortable. God heals Israel as they turn to God; God liberates Israel when Israel follows God.

Conclusion

God is not stuck in the past; God is not captive to what was. God summons and coaxes forward God’s beloved—all creation, from the teensiest, weensiest critter to the biggest, ziggest beast; from the ones that live deep in the oceanic abyss to the ones residing on the peakiest of mountains. God woos the beloved forward, into something NEW, into something new and of God because backward is the stuff of humanity that has long ago expired, gone sour, become septic. Liberation for Israel is not a liberation to go backward, which is a return to captivity. Rather, Israel is liberated to step forward into the unknown, dared to fall into the void of faith and God, knowing that they cannot achieve this depth of liberation and life and love apart from God. They cannot leave God in the past as if God is no longer a necessary hypothesis. For this group of people, God is the beginning and the end of their life, love and liberation…no matter how banal the food has become and how boring the water from a rock.

Beloved in Christ, we are currently in a similar plight. We are surrounded by global tumult, national chaos, and local turmoil—vicious, deadly snakes, nipping at ankles. Now is not the time to jettison God and forsake God’s word. God desires to beckon us forward out of what we know, away from what was, and to lift our heads to God’s self. To forsake any portion of the proclamation of Christ will be the nail in the coffin of the Christian church. When we forget our source of life, love, and liberation we will hand the entire story over to those who are determined to use it to bring death and destruction. If we are dead set on going backward, clinging to our comforts and ease, we will be unable to lift our head to gaze upon God’s standard fixed upon the cross, because we will be too focused on ourselves. We will miss the One who can bring and guide us toward healing, peace, mercy, grace, and justice; we will sell our identity and existence as church for a few pieces of silver. We must let faith lead us to let go of the rope and fall into God, fall into the impossible so that God may bear through us God’s divine possibility. We must each gaze up at God’s standard and sing,

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.[13]

Beloved, God calls, may our ears perk up. God comforts, may our souls be soothed. God speaks, may our ears delight in comforting words. God comes, may we run to Abba God. God is doing a new thing in this man from Nazareth, Jesus, the beloved, in whom, by whom, and through whom we are being coaxed forward, released from the past and liberated from what was…

[1] Nili S. Fox, “Numbers,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 281.

[2] Fox, “Numbers,” 281. “Thus, Numbers continues the story begun in Exodus and continued in Leviticus of the escape from Egyptian servitude, the desert journey to Mount Sinai, the revelation at Sinai and giving of the law, and the building of the Tabernacle with instruction on its operation.”

[3] Fox, “Numbers,” 282.

[4] Fox, “Numbers,” 282.

[5] Fox, “Numbers,” 282.

[6] Fox, “Numbers,” 282.

[7] Fox, “Numbers,” 325. “Once again the people revolt against God and Moses.”

[8] Fox, “Numbers,” 326. “This miserable food refers to the manna.”

[9] Nili S. Fox, “Numbers,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 325. “This incident is the final recurrence of wilderness murmuring. Complaints again center around a lack of water and poor food.”

[10] Fox, “Numbers,” 326. “Seraph serpents, based on the verb, means ‘burning serpents,’ because of the poisonous bite.”

[11] Fox, “Numbers,” 325. A copper serpent more likely refers to one made of bronze, a copper-tin alloy.

[12] Fox, “Numbers,” 326. “Rabbinic interpreters were disturbed by the magical nature of this cure, and suggested that it was the glance of the afflicted to their father in heaven, rather than the snake, which effected the cure.”

[13] Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

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The Far God Brought Near

audio forthcoming….

Psalm 100:2, 4 Know this: God is God; God has made us, and we’re Abba God’s; we’re God’s people and the sheep of God’s pasture. God is good; God’s mercy is everlasting; and Abba God’s faithfulness endures from age to age.

Introduction

God lives at the end of infinity; God finds God’s home in the finite. God is the first movement; God is the last movement. God is immortal; but then God is mortal. God is beyond the stars; God is the very twinkle in the eye of the one who loves you. God is so far; but also? God is so near. God is here but only because God is not here, too. It’s hard to speak succinctly about God.

Dorothee Sölle refers to God as the “far-near God.” Grand-humble; royal-common; immaterial-material; here-there; far-near. These paradoxical statements keep God just in our grasp and just outside of it. To declare that God is “far” and only “far” is to objectify God and force God into a (far) corner thus (ironically) to make God small, figured out, caged, folded up like an origami God and stuck in a wallet. And we cannot render God strictly close as God is only near, never far. In this equation God becomes (logically) too small, no different than that voice in your head, your conscience, and ceases to be God because there is no distinction between your inner person and God—the confusion here becomes dastardly when one’s own wishes and desires are mistaken for God’s (acts of violence, narcissistic manipulation, etc.).

To speak of God is to speak in paradox, holding as one two statements appearing to be antithetical while seeing they deeply relate as one existing in the other. (Death in life, life in death.) Here is where the letter of Ephesians shines, for me. The language employed by the author of Ephesians plays with the stretchiness of paradox like the way a womb can expand to comfort and nourish the entire life held within its embrace.

Ephesians 1:15-23

On account of this I also heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and the love toward all the holy ones. I do not cease being thankful concerning you mentioning [you] when making my prayers, so that the God of the Lord Jesus Christ, the progenitor of glory, maybe give you a spirit of wisdom and a revelation in knowledge of God…[1]

Eph. 1:15-16

The author of Ephesians writes this section in single sentence,[2] peppered with small-big, near-far statements about God. The author commends the Ephesian Christians for their faith and that this faith leads them to love outwardly. Their inward faith renders them turned outward and not inward, toward their neighbors; smallness located in bigness. Then the author brings together their own thankfulness for the Ephesian Christians in tight correlation to their prayers to God. This gratitude for these Christians weaves its way into Paul’s prayers eliminating the distance between the two; nearness located in farness. Then the author brings to the fore that this God who is the source of glory is also the one who gives of God’s own spirit of wisdom to those who believer, granting them a revelation in knowledge of God. Something big in something small in something big. It is God in Christ in the Spirit that participates through Paul into the Ephesian Christians in the Church. [3] The big in the small and the small in the big; the far in the near and the near in the far.

…the eyes of your heart having been enlightened in order that you behold what hope there is of God’s calling, what wealth of God’s inheritance in the holy ones, and that which is beyond the greatness of God’s strength in us, the ones who believe according to the activity of God’s might of strength.

Eph. 1:18-19

Again, the author of Ephesians continues with these big-small, far-near statements. It’s the God who acted in Christ—way back when—who calls now; God’s far voice comes near, divine soundwaves beckoning down long hallways of history taking those who hear from any era into the Christ who lived and died and rose again as if that then was and is now. In this way God still acts now not as an historical event still working itself out, but as a current event in our lives; the far-near God, the historical-current God.

Better yet, it is the historical-current-future God speaking to God’s historical-current-future church, granting wisdom and knowledge of God’s self according to the context of the believers, as they are and where they are, as they all await their inheritance by their hope. [4] And this hope that lays hold of God’s historical promise currently spoken to them while trusting God will fulfill that promise in their future, is not only a sentiment. This hope informs and forms the Ephesian Christians’ praxis in the world (evidenced in their love for their neighbor mentioned at the outset).[5]

This God worked out in Christ by raising him from the dead and making him to sit on God’s righthand in the heavens high above all rule and authority and power and domain while being named above all names, not only in eternity but also in this coming one. And, God “subjected all things under his feet,” placing him as head above all things in the church. Wherever his body is there he is the fullness of all fulfilling.

Eph. 1:20-23

And here at the end of our passage, the bigness of God resides in the smallness of those who are called; the far God is near to the ecclesia, the called ones. Here, the church is in Christ by faith and yet this Christ is the one who fills the church.[6] The great Christ, the one who is above all powers and authorities and domains and names and who sits at the righthand of God is the same one who is present in the small church and shows up where this small, fragile, vulnerable, and humble body is by faith in the power of the holy Spirit, participating in his self-witness. The small church carries the big burden that is the light yoke of faith in Christ, bringing Christ and thus God with them in their praxis in the world by faith manifesting as love toward the neighbor.

Conclusion

God is the far-near God, the big-small God, the here-there God, the infinite-finite God. The largeness of God is also God’s intimate closeness, farness that is nearness, the immaterial that ends in the material; the divine that intersects with the human.

But what does this have to do with us? Well, we are wrapped up in this great big-smallness, this far-nearness. And we are not only wrapped up in it but brought further in to God to be closer to the neighbor, bringing this far-near, big-small God closer to those who have been deprived of access to God. This is the witness of the church in the world: God for us, God for you, God for me. We, the church, are called in our faith to be as Christ in the world bringing God’s love, life, and liberation to those who are trapped under the principalities and powers of kingdom of humanity.[7]

Beloved, Christ witnessed God into the world; after Christ ascended, the divine Holy Spirit came to make the church God’s witness of God in the world in Christ’s name as Christ’s body, bringing the world and its inhabitants into the manifold grace and mercy of God. We are called and inspired to bring the big God into the smallest recesses of the earth, into the hearts of those who are crying out because of oppression and marginalization. We are filled by Christ with Christ to bring the far God near to those who suffer under alienation and isolation. Because where the body of Christ goes, there Christ goes, there the far-near, big-small God goes.

[1] Translation mine unless otherwise noted

[2] Markus Barth, Ephesians, The Anchor Bible (Garden City: Double Day, 1974. 160. “…Eph 1:15-23 has the form of one long sentence.”

[3] Barth, Ephesians, 160. “The main agents are God, the Spirit, and the Messiah. The apostle, the saints, and the church are mentioned in tun.”

[4] Barth, Ephesians, 160. “Again, the action of God is not limited to the past. Rather the faith, prayer, and community of the saints are related to that God who is still pouring out his Spirit, increasing knowledge, proving his might over all power, filling the church and the world. The saints are still to attain to an heirdom which lies before them; their faith (and love) cannot be genuine unless it is a hope relying on God who has made a promise, gives hope, and will keep his word.”

[5] Barth, Ephesians, 163. “…’wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’ imparted by the Spirit are not limited to perception, learning, and theoretical insight, but show the wise man how to live. It is characteristic that knowledge cannot exist without growth and expansion. A knower remains a learner, and knowledge will always seek to give others a share in its contents.”

[6] Barth, Ephesians, 160. “Thus the end leads back to the beginning, a reference to the communion of saints. But while the saints were described at the beginning as being ‘in Christ,’ at the end Christ seems to be portrayed as the one who is filling them.”

[7] Barth, Ephesians, 176. “…the message of Ephesians is concerned less with the salvation of the individual soul than with the peace between man, his fellow man and God, i.e. less with private piety than with the social character s of the church and its mission to the world.”

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