Tag: Death to Life

No Place with What Was

“‘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

We get accustomed to the way things are. At times it feels like we’re in a groove; at others, it feels like we’re in a rut; in both there’s comfort. This comfort is built on knowing what’s coming, being able to predict what each day will look like. Our calendars and task-lists look the same from week to week, even when there’s a surprise event added or something expected subtracted. There’s a real comfort in the familiarity of the day to day.

One of the problems of this familiarity and comfort is that it can blind us to the new. A bigger problem is when this familiarity and comfort causes us to reject the new. When you have a system down, a routine established, it can be hard to see and receive something new, something disruptive, something that slices through that (either beloved or dreaded) monotony. To maintain our comfort, to keep moving in that groove, embedding down another layer of that rut, we will shut down and run from anything new that is trying to intervene because we see it as a threat. The something new will send our nervous systems into a frazzled state, propelling us to lurch and lunge backward to what was. Rather than finding ourselves curious (yet cautious) and intrigued (though skeptical), we raise our defenses against that which is breaking in and, In the meantime, try our best to swim back to comfortable and familiar shores.

However, God isn’t back there. God is ahead in the something new.

Jeremiah 31:27-34

Jeremiah exhorts the Judeans in exile to look forward. What was is going to be overthrown, pulled down, uprooted, destroyed; it has no place with what is to come in God coming to God’s people.[2] And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord (v28). Jeremiah promises God’s people that God will be close to them, so close that their tendencies to toward evil will become tendencies to good. All that was will be destroyed; God beckons Judah and Israel to look to the rising of the sun of a new day and onto new terrain, to build and plant anew.

Jeremiah then promises that retribution will fall on the one who sins. In those days they shall no longer say: “‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,’” (v29). No longer, says God, will one person’s sins be the downfall of the group; accountability will be placed on each person’s shoulders. But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge. The Judeans and Israelites are to look forward to the day that will come where only the guilty one will be punished rather than the group at the expense of the guilty one.[3] The accountability here becomes personal and individual; future exile is being excluded. Why? Because God will be closer than ever before.

Jeremiah then proclaims the coming of a new covenant and indicates there will be a break with the old one. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they…(v32). Something new is coming that will render each person responsible and dependent in their relationship with God. God does not say that the law of Moses (the one given in Exodus after the liberation from Egypt) will go away, but that God will put that law in each of their hearts.[4] But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people (v33). Keeping in mind that the law of Moses is a self-revelation of God, Jeremiah promises a time when God will be revealed in the heart of each of God’s people.[5] Thus God’s people will not be able to run or hide from God; they will—individually and corporately—know God intimately, being yoked to him by faith and love.

Jeremiah then says, No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more (v34). Jeremiah brings it back full circle to the comment above where every individual is held accountable for their own sins. Not only will each person be held responsible, but each person will be dependent on God’s mercy and forgiveness. Here, God is declaring that there is nothing that will divorce God from God’s people. Absolutely nothing. God is also indicating that there will be a time where sacrifices will no longer need to be made save the sacrifice of ourselves by faith working out in love. This is the basis of the new covenant that God promises to make with God’s people. And it is an everlasting covenant; one that no one can take away or break because it is being written on the heart of each person of Israel and Judah.[6] As God has been ever faithful in the promise to and covenant with Israel and Judah,[7] now Judah and Israel, by the indwelling spirit of God,[8] will be the ones who also keep the covenant and cling to the promise of God: I will be your God and you will be my people and we will be one. 

Conclusion

God desires to do new things. We desire to go backwards, to cling to what was, to grasp at the sand of shores we are most familiar with. But God’s love propels God toward us even as we are desperate to go back to what was. Even as we are actively swimming away from the current of God’s momentum forward, God yolks God’s self to us, so desperately in love with us as God is. God promises Judah and Israel that they will have God’s spirit with them, forever, in their hearts, that God’s self-revelation will be written on their hearts forever sealing their union; and nothing can pluck one of God’s people from God’s hand of promise.

For us, as Christians, this being sealed as God’s own is done through the life and work, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit. For us, this passage from Jeremiah points to the new covenant that comes in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. This new covenant is defined by faith, faith that clings to the promises of God, accounting to God that which is God’s: truthfulness and trustworthiness. In and by faith, the law of God—to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbors in the same—is written on our hearts. Our hearts become circumcised; formerly calcified, our hearts by faith, beat with a vim and vigor, signs of robust new creation and new life empowered by the Holy Spirit, signs of our representative incarnational presence, those who carry God with them in their heart and spirit.

We, ourselves, are new creations, born anew every morning by faith and God’s mercy. Therefore, we have no place with what was, the way back is barred, the comforting and familiar shores are forbidden to us. Daily, by faith and God’s mercy, we enter a divine journey into the new, faith whisking us into the dark clinging only to the light of the promise fulfilled in Christ. The new is nothing to run from, turn a blind eye toward, or reject; it is in the new and unfamiliar that the familiar and known voice of our God in Christ Jesus calls us. We are called to move forward into new life in union God, dependent on God’s mercy and forgiveness, leaning on our beloved, Christ, and comforted by the Comforter, even in the wake of chaos and unfamiliar. We are God’s people, and God is our God, forever.

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

[2] Marvin A. Sweeney, “Jeremiah,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 990. “The prophet’s depiction of the future employs the verbs uproot, pull down, overthrow, destroy, build, and plant from his call narrative in 1.10 to portray both the punishments and the restoration of the people.”

[3] Sweeney, “Jeremiah,” 990. Proverb quoted, “…to illustrate his view that only the guilty should be punished for their own sins…” it is future oriented for Jeremiah.

[4] Sweeney, “Jeremiah,” 991. Promise of New Covenant, “…here it refers to the restoration of Israel after the Babylonian exile and the reconstruction of the Temple. According to this passage, it is not the content of the new covenant which will be different, but how it is learned.”

[5] Sweeney, “Jeremiah,” 991. “God places the Teaching, i.e., the Torah, in the inmost being or heart of the people so that the covenant cannot be broken again. This idea is developed in later Lurianic kabbalah, which maintains that all persons have a divine spark within. Since it is so inscribed, there will be no need for the Torah to be taught.”

[6] Rabbi Dr. H. Freedman, Jeremiah: with Hebrew text and English Translation, ed. Rev. Dr. A Cohen. Soncino Books of the Bible. 6th Impression (London: Soncino Press, 1970), 211. “God will make a new covenant with Israel which, unlike the old, will be permanent, because it will be inscribed on their hearts. There is nothing here to suggest that the new covenant would differ in nature form the old. No new revelation is intended, nor was it needed. The prophet only makes the assertion that unlike the past, Israel will henceforth remain faithful to God, while He in turn will never reject him.”

[7] Freedman, Jeremiah, 212. “The implication is that God will be what He has always been in His relationship to Isreal; they, on the other hand, will now likewise permanently acknowledge Him and be His people. Permanence is the essence of the new covenant.”

[8] Freedman, Jeremiah, 211. “I will no longer be something external to them, but so deeply ingrained in their consciousness as to be part of them. This, indeed, is the aim of all religious teaching.”

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Like Paul and Peter

Psalm 23:3-4 Abba God revives my soul and guides me along right pathways for their Name’s sake. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Introduction

My favorite thing about the book of Acts, is the way the narrative camera focuses on the human beings left behind to participate in God’s mission of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation without Jesus by their side. As human as the Gospels can be, they still feel—to me—just outside of my experience in the world. As far as I know, I’ve not been—literally—summoned by Jesus to come follow him and leave my—literal—net behind. I’ve not witnessed with my own eyes the healing miracles and the awesome casting out of demons. I did not run and hide with fear on Good Friday, nor feel the warmth burn in my heart as Jesus taught me on the way in his resurrected state. I didn’t witness the ascension or suddenly speak in a foreign language (no matter how much my charismatic evangelical background wants to think I have). I am just an audience member from 2025, listening to these ancient stories mixed up with a healthy amount of faith and doubt, skeptical and hungry.

So, this is why I love acts. Watching Paul get knocked off his donkey and onto his donkey through the proclamation of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit—having his misdirection redirected—brings the story home. I too have needed to be knocked down a peg or two, put in my place, reminded of my creaturely status before the Creator. I have thought myself to be so right and on point that I was completely misdirected toward what God was doing and celebrated the tendency of the kingdom of humanity to perform acts of violence and needed to be redirected. Witnessing Peter’s rapid exposure to the new movements and actions of God made known first in Christ and made real in Peter’s heart through the power of the Holy Spirit, is something I can confess to, too. I, too, have been graciously, generously, and patiently reinstructed that all are in and none are out, relearned God’s merciful divine activity that extends beyond skin, sex, and superficial boundaries, (re)experienced (manifold times) the pathos of God for the Beloved, and have stumbled about while desperately trying to walk in this new way, talk with new words, love with a new heart, think with a new mind, and see through new lenses all crafted and created by a God who so loves the cosmos that God won’t spare Gods self to save it.

I read something somewhere that said the best way to explain the book of acts is to see it as the movement and activity of the Holy Spirit rather than of the disciples. Are they central to this story building in the book of Acts? Yes, they are. But they are not the only performers on the stage. The Holy Spirit takes up their role and whisks and moves these human forms, destroying notions of autonomy and free-will, taking them hither and tither, bringing them into contact with those whom they would never ever be in contact with, reducing them through exposure, and building them up through love and liberation into new life defined by the reign of God. Last week we received the story of Saul and his “conversion”; this week, we are exposed to Peter walking in the way of Jesus, doing the initial things that will become some of the hallmarks of what it means not only to be Christian, but also Church.

Acts 9:36-43

We jump quite a bit forward in Acts 9. We move from Paul’s conversion to the beginning of Peter’s radical exposure to the law of God which is the law of love for all God’s beloved, transcending national and religious boundaries rather than creating them. Starting a bit earlier in the chapter than our lectionary suggests, we find Peter in Lydda, having been brought there by the Holy Spirit to the those who are called “living saints”.[1] By using the word “Saints” Luke highlights that the divide between the secular and the sacred is diminishing; every day regular people are indwelled with divine holiness, a holiness that will not fade away and creates a new way of being in the world as God’s vessels bringing divine life, love and liberation to others like themselves.[2] (This is very good news for regular people like you and me!) So, Peter is with these everyday saints, and he is there to heal a man who was paralyzed for 8 years. Through Peter, the Holy Spirit heals this man, and the story of his healing becomes a source for those in Lydda and the surrounding area (Sharon) to praise God and turn to Christ in faith (vv. 32-35).[3] In Lydda, Peter is doing as Jesus did: healing and liberating the oppressed and bringing glory to God.[4]

While Peter is in Lydda, over in Joppa there was a certain disciple by [the] name Tabitha, which [in Greek] is translated as Dorcas, she was full of good works, and she was doing acts of mercy. But it happened in those days she [became] sick and died; when she died, they washed her body, writes Luke, and they placed her body in an upper room (vv. 36-37). The saints of Joppa are grieved over this loss. Rightly so. Tabitha was a woman and a representative of Christ[5] in spaces too often neglected by both human and divine presence (read the prophets!). Not only is Luke elevating the role of women in the work of the gospel and in his narrative about the movement of the Holy Spirit (which should expose us in our own context),[6] he is also highlighting that losing this one who brings well-being to her neighbors and glory to God, leaves a massive gap in bringing God’s presence to those who need God’s presence the most: the widows…whom God cares about very much! So, the disciples having heard that Peter was in Lydda, and Lydda being close to Joppa, they sent two men [to Joppa] beseeching Peter, “Do not hesitate and pass through [and] come to us immediately!” (v. 38).

Peter’s response? Now, after rising Peter went to them (v.39a). Peter doesn’t waste a moment to help these saints over in Joppa who lost a beloved representative of Christ. Luke tells us more, After he arrived, they brought him up into the upper-room, and the widows stood by him weeping and showing [him] tunics and many cloaks Dorcas was making being with them (v.39b-c). These poor and too often neglected widows lose the one who cares for them, the one who made them feel seen and heard and loved; this is what Peter enters when he arrives.[7] But it’s more than comfort Peter is bringing. For Luke (and Peter) in this moment a massive (divinely inspired) statement is occuring: women matter, their works matter, their bodies matter.[8] Luke tells us, Now, after Peter cast everyone out [of the room], he also placed [his] knees [on the ground] and prayed, and turning to the body, he said, “Tabitha, rise!” And she does. Now her eyes opened, and after seeing Peter she sat up. Peter acts like Christ and commands the dead woman to rise. Those held captive to death (both Tabitha and the widows) are not held captive anymore; they’re liberated, by this regular person through the power of the Holy Spirit who works in them and through them to overturne the kingdom of humanity and establish the reign of God.[9] Just as the women were the first to hear of the resurrection of Christ from death, so too did a woman first experience the life out of death that is characteristic of the reign of God wrought by the Holy Spirit moving through regions bringing God glory![10] Luke tells us, Now, after giving her his hand he raised her, and after calling out [to] the saints and the widows, he presented her [to them] living. Now it became known throughout all of Joppa, and the many believed in the Lord. And the Holy Spirit is not only moving through acceptable regions but is breaking down false boundaries[11] originally demarcating clean and unclean: the glory of God and God’s divine mission to liberate the captives know no walls and barriers. Luke concludes, Now it happened [Peter] stayed a sufficient number of days in Joppa with a certain Simon the Tanner. Just like Paul, Peter is in the clutches of a God on the move, caught up in the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[12]

Conclusion

Peter and Paul present to us the two best examples of regular, human beings—like you and me—who are caught up in the transcending and unyielding resurrection life that starts with Christ and continues with his disciples by the power of the Holy Spirit. I think Peter and Paul are intimidating to us. I think it’s easier to ask WWJD rather than WWPD because their recorded actions bring the divine pathos down to our level. It’s safe when Jesus does something because we can kind of dismiss it: well…he’s like the Son of God…so… But when it’s the former know-it-all and the former fisherman, the flames of those actions burn close to our skin. Because, as it turns out, like Paul and Peter, we have skin in this game and this game participates in the divine passion for the cosmos. Peter, a regular guy, calls Tabitha into (new) life from death and liberates Aeneas from the captivity of being paralyzed; this puts us on the hook as we begin (again) to walk in the way of the ascended Jesus and the Spirit that is to come. Both Peter and Paul ask us to think about what it means to be Christian and to do Church. Beloved, like Peter and Paul, we, too, by and in Christ, get to bring love where there is indifference, liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death.

[1] Willie James Jennings, Acts, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2017), 99. “He is on the road and comes to Lydda to be among the living saints.”

[2] Jennings, Acts, 99. “Jesus is God drawing the everyday into holiness, into God’s own life. Everyday people are made holy in Christ. Everyday people are made holy by Christ, and this is a holiness that will last, not be episodic, and constitute a new space for living life and knowing ourselves.”

[3] Jennings, Acts, 99-100. “Once again a marvelous act, a touchable miracle, will turn people to the Lord (v. 35). This is repetition that illumines the inexhaustible riches of Gods love for the fragile creature and Gods desire to constantly touch us, hold us, and announce the victory over death. There is yet more for Peter in this journey as he is approached by two disciples form another city (Joppa) for the sake of one disciple who has died.”

[4] Jennings, Acts,99. “Peter returns to center stage and engages in a bit of wayfaring life, echoing again his history of following Jesus and doing as his savior had done.”

[5] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Tabitha’s life even in the fragments we gain in this story, hangs together beautifully as someone devoted to helping people, especially widows.”

[6] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Tabitha, the disciples of Jesus—Luke opens her story inside of Peter’s journey and in so doing makes a point more powerful for us in our time than probably for him in his time. Tabitha, a woman, is a disciple of Jesus. Whether this vignette is evidence of Luke’s positive view of women or not he has certainly gives us a plateau from which to view a new future in which men and women in Christ have a different way of seeing themselves—as disciples.”

[7] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Widows, that group of people vulnerable in ancient and current time, made vulnerable by death’s sting, have always been a special concern for God and here for Tabitha as well. …So the widows weep. They weep for her and maybe for themselves. We do not know if Tabitha was in fact one of them, but we do know that they claimed her as one of whare for them. Here glory joins strong grief because to lose someone who cares for the weak and vulnerable, whose life is turned toward making a difference in the world and who is making a difference, is a bitter loss. The widows have lost Tabitha and a disciple is gone. This is what Peter steps into in Joppa.”

[8] Jennings, Acts, 100. “Peter’s presence declares an unmistakable truth: women matter. This woman matters, and the works she does for widows matters to God. It matters so much that God will not allow death the last word. Others had been raised form the dead in the Gospels and in Luke’s Gospel…but this is different. This not a little girl or the brother of a friend of Jesus; this is a disciple raised from the dead. Tabitha is not finished in life or service.”

[9] Jennings, Acts, 100-101. “‘Tabitha, get up.’ Peter repeats Jesus. Tabitha is an activist who lives again in resurrection power. Her body has been quickened by the Spirit, and her eyes are opened again to see a new day. She has work to do and joy to give to the widows: you have not been abandoned, dear widows, God has heard your weeping and returned her to you.”

[10] Jennings, Acts, 101. “It is not accident that the first disciple to have this little tase of the resurrection isa woman, because it was a woman who gave birth to the resurrection. And Peter is there once again to see a miraculous sign point to faith’s direction—many who found out about this believe in the Lord (v. 42).”

[11] Jennings, Acts, 101. “The story, however, does not end there with Tabitha, because Peter stays in Joppa, and who he stays with points to an earth-shattering future.”

[12] Jennings, Acts, 101. “He stays with Simon, a tanner. Tanners worked with death flesh—the skin of animals and tanners were, theologically speaking, unclean. Few if any pious Jews would normally or easily stay with a tanner, but here was Peter with Somin the tanner. Peter is indeed moving from saints to saints, and soon he will find out just how far the generosity and mercy of a holy God reaches. Soon he will see just how far God will extend holy place and holy people. Peter is with a man who touches the unclean, and soon he will see God do the same.”

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Summoned out of Death and into Life

Psalm 30:1a-b,2-3 I will exalt you, God, because you have lifted me up… O Abba God, I cried out to you, and you restored me to health. You brought me up…from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.

Introduction

Have you ever been dead set that you were absolutely, positively, without any doubt, completely and totally, 100% right? Like, nothing was going to drag you from that throne of being right. Like, you knew you were right and then your knowing knew and then that knowing knew you were 100%, beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt right? Like, the level of right that makes you wager bets when you don’t like to wager bets ever. Like, that confidence bordering on smug arrogance type of knowing you’re right…

I’m sure you’ve never been there, but I’ve been there. Whether as a mom, a wife, a scholar, a priest there have been times where I’m certain I’ve got all those little knowing ducks in a row. I know this: this thing, this person, this concept, this best method, this ritual. But the reality is that everything I do know changes. Human beings don’t stay the same, they grow and change; concepts are always subject to change with new information and research; best methods change, it’s why parenting looks so different today than it did yesterday—same goes for any industry moving along with rapidly changing technology; even sacred rituals change, anyone here looking to head back into the catacombs to do church? In short, things change (animate and inanimate). When we are absolutely, positively convinced that we know we are right, everyone else will become wrong, and we will absolutely, positively promote death rather than life, indifference rather than love, captivity rather than liberation.

Acts 9:1-6

According to Luke, Saul enters the scene at the very beginning of chapter 8, right after the death of Stephen. Stephen the first deacon of the church and the first martyr of those who follow the way. He was condemned to death for preaching the gospel and exposing the Sanhedrin for what and who they were. Luke tells us in 8:1, And Saul was pleased with the destruction of [Stephen].  Saul then disappears from the narrative for the rest of chapter 8 only to resurface at the beginning of chapter 9.

At the beginning of chapter 9, Luke tells us, Now Saul, still breathing threats and killing the disciples of the Lord, approached the high priest and asked for letters from him to the synagogues in Damascus so that he might find certain people being of the way, men and also women, and after binding them he might lead them into Jerusalem (vv. 1-2). Not only did Saul approve of the death of a deacon proclaiming the liberative gospel to a people stuck in captivity, he also continued in hot pursuit of the people who, because of proclamations like Stephen’s, began following the way (the way of faith in Jesus the Christ, God’s son). These who followed the way, for Saul, were those who were no straying from God and God’s law, they were heretics and blasphemers, and this deserved nothing less than imprisonment and death. What Luke is painting for his audience is a picture of a devoted zealot of the law of God; Saul’s mission was to make sure no Israelite strayed from the right way, the one he knew, the one upheld by decades and centuries of tradition. Saul isn’t a deviant or miscreant; he is a killer as one who kills in the name of the law and has authority to do so. Saul is absolutely sold out that this one way, the way he knew, the way he had been trained in, the way he had been raised in and schooled in was the one and only way that God could and would work. According to Luke, Saul was willing do whatever it took to ensure that what is remains as is even if it means imprisoning and executing anyone who lives, believes, says, and does otherwise.[1]

According to Luke, Saul is closed in on himself and what he knows and believes to be true and right; he is, as Martin Luther would say, curved in on himself and violence thrives among people curved in on themselves, convinced of their own rightness and goodness, and devoted to their ideologies reinforcing their status quo which encourages their curved-in-ness.[2] Against this type of person, this one that Saul is, the disciples and followers of the way have absolutely no chance; their way of seeing the world and understand justice will collapse under the weight of Saul’s because there is no one stronger and more resistance to listening and seeing than the one who is curved in on himself.[3]

Saul, in being dead-set, absolutely and positively right is on a collision course with the reality of God—a God who is all about the interruption and disruption of the status-quo holding God’s beloved captive unto death.[4] Saul, the pursuer, is about to realize that he is the one being pursued.[5] Luke tells us, But while he was going near to Damascus, it happened that a light from heaven suddenly flashed around him like lightening, (v. 3). Saul collides—full steam—into God by way of his errant misconception of the world and of God’s activity of the world. Notice that the text does not tell us that Saul was eagerly searching for God because God was hidden and Saul couldn’t find God. Notice that the text tells us very plainly that God found Saul when Saul wasn’t looking for him. Saul was interrupted and disrupted on his way—stopped in his tracks by being tossed to the ground—and divinely readjusted and corrected and set on God’s way and on God’s track.[6]

Because of Saul’s encounter with God, he gains deep insight into who this God is. This is not the God of the cold tablets demanding blood sacrifice for disobedience or imprisonment for fracture. Rather, the God Saul encounters is a God who intimately knows the pain of those whom this God loves. And, Saul is not only disrupted and interrupted, but altogether unmade under the weight of a very intimate question:[7] and after he fell to the earth he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (v.4) Saul can’t answer the question because of the exposure: Saul isn’t absenting God from the pain and suffering he is causing; he’s directly hurting God, the one whom he thought he was protecting from offense and pain.[8] The only thing Saul can do is ask his own question in response to God’s question posed to him: And [Saul] said, “Who are you, Lord?” And [Jesus said], “I, I am Jesus whom you, you are persecuting…” (v.5). Saul is crushed under this divine revelation, in this divine encounter[9] with a God who resides in the flesh of Israel and not an abstract God hiding behind tablets.[10] Saul’s entire person and being, soul and body, mind and heart will be beckoned forth from that death and into the new life God has planned for him: being guided by the justice and rightness of God revealed through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and not according to his own conception of justice and rightness.[11]

Conclusion

Just as God felt the pain of the Israelites suffering under the oppression and violence and death of the government of Egypt, so too did God feel the pain of God’s beloved as Saul sought out and imprisoned and executed the followers of the way; just like in Easter, if you mess with God’ beloved you mess with God because nothing stands between God and God’s beloved, not even death and those who believe they have the power and authority to deal in it.[12]

When the women who entered the empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning, they were asked, why do you look for the living among the dead?I believe this morning, when Jesus asks Saul, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”, it is the exact same question. While the women were looking for the living among the dead, Saul was dealing out death where there was life. Both are stuck in an old way and order of understanding God in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Anyone can become stuck in death in one of two ways: passively by assuming God can’t do something new and actively by being convinced God would never do something beyond what you absolutely positively know to be right.

So, we are put on notice today by Luke’s words. It’s not about us being right and assuming we know what God is up to because of the way it’s been done for years and years. When we become dead set on being right, we will bring violence and death to others as we force them to comply and obey by dragging them into the prison of “our way or the highway”; this always will lead to sanctioning death. As we proceed through this Easter season, we are continually beckoned into that new life, new love, new liberation we received through the empty, unsealed tomb. Beloveds, we are of light, love, liberation, and life; let us live like we believe it.

[1] Jennings, Acts, 90. “Saul is a killer. We must never forget this act. He kills in the name of righteousness, and now he wants legal permission to do so. This is the person who travels the road to Damascus, one who has the authority to take life either through imprisonment or execution. No one is more dangerous than one with the power to take life and who already has mind and sight set on those who are a threat to a safe future.”

[2] Jennings, Acts, 91. “Such a person is a closed circle relying on the inner coherence of their logic. Their authority confirms their argument and their argument justifies heir actions and their actions reinforce the appropriateness of their authority. Violence, in order to be smooth, elegant, and seemingly natural, needs people who are closed circles.”

[3] Jennings, Acts, 90-91. “The disciples of the Lord, the women and men of the Way, have no chance against Saul. They have no argument and certainly no authority to thwart his zeal. They are diaspora betrayers of the faith who are a clear and present danger to Israel. This is how Sauls sees them his rationality demands his vision of justice.”

[4] Willie James Jennings, Ephesians, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2017), 90. “God disrupts the old order by interrupting lives. Luke has removed every temporal wall that might separate in our thinking the God who moved in ancient Israel from the God present in the world in Jesus from this God of untamable love. This is that same Holy One, and Saul too will fall into the hands of this desiring God.”

[5] Jennings, Acts, 91. “But what Saul doe not yet know is that the road to Damascus has changed. It is space now inhabited by the wayfaring Spirit of the Lord. Saul pursues, but he is being pursued.”

[6] Jennings, Acts, 91. “The long history of the church has turned the Damascus road into shorthand for a life-changing experience, and rightly so, because Saul, the closed circle, is broken open by God. Yes, a killer was confronted and stopped in his tracks, but equally powerful, the rationality for his murderous actions was shattered.”

[7] Jennings, Acts, 91. “There is no rationale for killing that remains intact in the presence of God. The power of this event almost overwhelms its textual witness. Luke is handling holy fire now. The question comes directly to Saul. This is a question too massive for him to handle because it is an intimate one.”

[8] Jennings, Acts, 91. “The question casts light on the currencies of death that we incessantly traffic in, and it has no good answer. The only good answer is to stop. But now this is God’s question. It belongs to God. It belongs with God. Hurt and pain and suffering have reached their final destination, the body of Jesus. Now the divine presence will be revealed to Saul, not simply divine revelation, but a new revelation.”

[9] Jennings, Acts, 92. “Saul turns form defending the name of the Lord to serving Jesus, and for this we will soon suffer. He has crossed that line that separates this faith from all others. He has heard the voice of a crucified God. There is a stark truth here in this conversation to poignant that we sometimes ignore its abiding effect on us. Saul experienced the Lord Jesus. He encountered him, and this made Saul vulnerable. Experiencing the Lord Jesus makes us vulnerable.”

[10] Jennings, Acts, 91-92. “The Lord has a name…This is the bridge that has been crossed in Israel. The Lord and Jesus are one. This is the revelation that now penetrates Saul’s being and will transform his identity. He turns from the abstract Lord to the concrete Jesus. A future beckons in the pivot from holy faith to holy flesh. …Saul moves from an abstract obedience to a concrete one, from the Lord he aims to please to the One who will direct him according to divine pleasure.”

[11] Jennings, Acts, 91-92. “Discipleship is principled direction taken flight by the Holy Spirit. It is the ‘you have hard it said, but I say to you’—the continued speaking of God bound up in disruption and redirections.”

[12] Jennings, Acts, 92-93. “Jesus is one with the bodies of those who have called on his name and followed in his way by the Spirit. Their pain and suffering is his very own. This too is scandal. This too is a crossed line. They mystery of God is found in human flesh, moving in and with the disciples who are a communion of suffering and witness to life Saul is meeting a God in Jesus who is no alien to time, but one who lives the everyday with us….Yet just as he confronted Saul, this God is no passive participant in the suffering of the faithful, but one who has reconciled the world and will bring all of us to the day of Jesus Christ. Saul has entered that new day.”

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“Rescued from Danger…Sealed for Thy Courts”: The Path of Easter!

Psalm 118: 14-16a Abba God is my strength and my song and has become my salvation. There is a sound of exultation and victory in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of Abba God has triumphed!

Introduction

Happy Easter! Christ is Risen!!

This morning, our calcified hearts prone to wander from God find rest in divine sealing made known in the unsealed, empty tomb. We who are enticed and attracted to the shiny bobbles and fluffy lures of the kingdom of humanity are now ushered into something truly new, truly beaming, truly spectacular, truly built of the divine, eternal, never tarnishing substance that is the love of God for you, the Beloved. This morning, despite our wandering, we come face to face with God in Christ, the one who lives and doesn’t die.

Even when we decided to wander from God, to turn our backs, to forget the ancient and good story, to tread and tromp on everyone and everything, to estrange ourselves, to misjudge and prejudge others unto their condemnation, and even when we preferred acts of violence and death, God sought us and found us as we were wandering “from the fold of God”[1] and set us right. This morning, the exposure we felt on Friday becomes the warm light of the risen Son, bringing us into himself, into the lap of Abba God, and wrapping us up like newborn babes in the warm blanket of the Holy Spirit. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING stands between God and God’s beloved, not even death.

Today we’re a people set back on course, eyes lifted, faces turned, fleshy hearts thumping with divine love, hands and feet eager to spread the liberation we have received, and voices ready to call forth life even when all that surrounds us in the world is death. Today we become a people who dares to believe this crazy, far-out story because today become a people brought to life by this good and ancient word of God.

Luke 24:1-12

Now after the women were made full of fear they bowed their faces to the earth; [the two men in clothing shining like lightening] said to the women, “Why are you seeking the one who lives among the dead?” (Luke 24:5)

At the end of chapter 23, Luke mentions that the women—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary mother of James, and some other women (24:10a)—saw, from a distance, where Joseph of Arimathea placed Jesus’s body (v.55).[2] It’s these women who now take center stage in the reception of the good news that Jesus is raised. As the men fled, the women held their ground initially in the distance and now the first ones on the scene in Luke’s resurrection story.[3]

Having seen where Joseph placed Jesus’s body (23:55), and it being the first day of the week and still in the depths of early morning, these women went to the tomb bearing the spices they prepared on Friday night (v.1 and 23:56). Keeping in mind that they prepared spices on Friday night, these women are not examples of blind faith despite the facts; for them, as well as for the men, Jesus was dead—very dead. They planned to anoint his body,[4] which wasn’t done in the rush getting his body down from the cross and into a tomb before the sunset and curses arrived (cf. Dt 21:23).

Now, when they arrived at the tomb, they found the stone having been [mysteriously[5]] rolled away from the tomb (v.2). Curious to see what happened, the women entered the tomb. And after entering the tomb they did not find the body of Jesus (v. 3). Luke then writes, while the women were perplexed/in doubt about what had happened, behold! two men approached the women [dressed] in clothing shining like lightening (v.4). The women were confused, and now they became full of fear; upon being approached by two men in dazzling clothing, Luke tells us, they bowed their faces to the earth (5a). In other words, they suddenly dropped to the ground because they were full of terror. While this is a natural and biblical response to angelic visitors, it’s also a human reaction. These women came to anoint Jesus’s body, and not only is it missing (stolen, maybe?) but now two men show up and approach them (Are we in trouble? Are they going to harm us?). Luke does a marvelous job wedding together the spiritual and temporal realities of this story growing in dramatic tension.

Luke then writes that the two gleaming men said to the women, “why are you seeking the one who lives with the dead? He is not here but was raised” (v.5b-6a).For one moment, suspend your judgment and how well you know this story. Stay here with the women hearing, for the first time, that Jesus—whom they saw crucified on Friday and sealed up in a tomb—is not dead but alive because he is risen! Instantaneously, your world is turned upside down…again! As they looked at each other (now more in astonishment and less in fear) they begin the journey of faith as it dawns on them (in their hearts and minds) that death itself has a mortal weakness: God…Is it possible? Is  Jesus alive? Imagine the grief they carried giving birth to hope…hope daring to rise to life in the depths of a tomb meant for the hopelessness of death…

Then Luke tells us that the two men exhort them, remember what he spoke to you while he was still in galilee, saying it is necessary that the son of humanity be betrayed into the hands of sinful humanity and to be crucified and on the third day to be raised up.” And as the men remind them, these women remembered [Jesus’s] words and after returning from the tomb they announced[6] all these things to the twelve and to the all the remaining people (vv. 8-9). That which they hadn’t fully grasped they did as the celestial men spoke to them;[7] they heard,[8] they believed, and they went.[9] If there were ever three phrases that sum up good discipleship, these are they.[10] The women didn’t linger, tarry, hesitate, debate, and didn’t dismiss because this message didn’t align with their social, political, or religious status-quo. They ran home and immediately told the disciples what they heard. Good news arrives!

And then it’s dismissed. Luke informs us, [the women and their words] appeared before [the men] as if silly, idle nonsense; they were disbelieving the women (v.11). The good news the women brought falls flat at the feet of the men they told; [11] save one. Peter is the only who listened and is intrigued enough to run to the tomb, and after stooping to look he saw only the piece of fine linen and then he departed toward home marveling at what had happened (v.12). According to Luke, Peter not only denied Jesus but then didn’t tell the others that the women were correct; he just remained silent and amazed. [12]  Here, Luke draws purposeful attention to the faithfulness of the women who proclaimed the good news even when it sounded ludicrous.[13] They didn’t linger among the dead; inspired by faith,[14] they ran straight into (new) life, spreading the good news of the one who is living, the risen Jesus the Christ. In this moment filled with swelling divine life, the women were resistant to wandering. They ran toward the risen Christ boldly entering a new reality and order where death succumbs to life.[15]

Conclusion

For us who are prone to wander because we forsake and forget the way of the reign of God, this morning we are given Christ himself—all of him—so that we never forget or forsake the way. For us who are addicted to treading on and tromping about the land and on others, we have received a new way to walk in the world demonstrated by the running feet of the women: swift and sensitive, eager to bring good news rather than pain! For us who find ourselves estranged by our own doing and having become strangers to God, to our neighbor, to creation, and to ourselves we are beckoned out of the oppressive col of self-imposed tombs of isolation and are given a community with God, with others, with creation, and with ourselves built on and by the love of Christ. For us who know the pain of being caught in the captivity of misjudging and prejudging others according to our own human standards, we are refused that plumbline and, instead, we are given divine love, life, and liberation as our new metrics of good and right. For us who are drunk with violence and death, we receive what we do not deserve this morning: peace and life eternal.

This morning we’re given something completely new, completely different, completely strange to the kingdom of humanity. We are given life, love, and liberation. And while we benefit from this, we are given these things specifically so we can participate in God’s divine mission of the revolution of love, life and liberation in the world for the God’s beloved. We are refused the option of living as if we’ve not heard, seen, felt, tasted, smelled the good news. We are charged to take up the way of Christ and live as if the Cross isn’t the end of the story but the beginning. The women who were encountered in the empty tomb were charged to stop looking for the living among the dead; their lives were never ever the same.[16] So it is with us: our call to be disciples taking up their cross and follow Jesus isn’t gone, it’s the only way we have because the path we learned from the kingdom of humanity is forever blocked off.[17] This morning, we’re not the same as we were yesterday morning; this morning, we’ve encountered an empty tomb and heard the announcement from the celestial realm: he is not here he is risen! How could we ever live in the old way? Everything is now new.

Today, our willful and chaotic wandering collides with the steady path of Christ that is dangerous and not careful, that is risky and not safe, that is radical and not status quo, that will afflict and not always comfort.[18] Today we live under the weight of the question, Why are you seeking the one who lives among the dead? (v. 5). Go, Beloved, and live radically and wildly in the name of God and for the well-being of your neighbor and do so in a way that brings God glory and might get you in a little bit of good trouble. You’ve been summoned into life not death, into love and not indifference, into liberation and not captivity.

[1] Fom the hymn “Come Thou Fount”

[2] Justo L. Gonzalez, Luke, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 272. “In 23:55 Luke directed our attention to the women who were present at the burial, and now he continues telling us about the activities of these women once the Sabbath rest had passed.”

[3] Gonzalez, Luke, 272. “It is interesting to note that here again Luke will tell parallel but different stories about the women disciples and the men…These women have been present, but have remained mostly in the background of the story, even since Luke introduced them in 8:2-3. In the narrative of the passion and burial, even while others deny Jesus or flee, these women stand firm, although at a distance. Now they come to the foreground as the first witnesses to the resurrection.”

[4] Gonzalez, Luke, 272-273. “They, no less than the rest, believe that in the cross all has come to an end. It is time to return home to their more traditional lives. But before they do that, they must perform one least act of love for their dead Master: they must anoint his body.”

[5] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 837. “How was the stone removed? Luke’s account neglects such detail, for he wants to move quickly to the pivotal discovery of an empty tomb.”

[6] Gren, Luke, 838-839. “‘Luke underscores the faithfulness of their testimony by noting that they announced ‘all these things’—that is, what they had observed, what they had been told, and the new significance they attributed to Jesus’ passion and the absence of his corpse.”

[7] Green, Luke, 837-838. “These women come looking for Jesus, but they want to minister to him, and as they quickly discover, because they lack understanding, they are looking in the wrong place. The angels first admonish them, employing language that is reminiscent of Jesus’ rejoinder to the Sadducees in 20:38: God is not the God of the dead but of the living! That is, in spite of their devout intentions in coming to anoint Jesus’ body, these women have failed to grasp Jesus’ message about the resurrection and, thus, have not taken with appropriate gravity the power of God.”

[8] Gren, Luke, 838. “The antidote for this miscalculation is remembrance. The women are addressed as person who had themselves received Jesus’ teaching in Galilee, and the angel’s message fuses Jesus’ predictions during the Galilean phase of his ministry…Thus they are reminded that the career of the Son of Man blends the two motifs of suffering and vindication, and that in doing so he fulfills the divine will.”

[9] Gonzalez, Luke, 273. “The women do not see the resurrected Jesus. The two figures at the tomb (presumably angels) simply tell them that he has risen just as he had foretold, and they believe. Luke does not even say, as do Matthew and Mark (Matt. 28:7; Mrk 16:7), that they are instructed to tell the rest of the disciples (an injunction they follow in Matthew, but not in Mark). They simply hear the witness of the two men at the tomb, and apparently on their own initiative go and tell the others.”

[10] Gren, Luke, 838. Seim qtd in. “Their reception of the resurrection message ‘confirms their discipleship and the instruction they have received as disciples.’”

[11] Green, Luke, 839-840. “The gap between male and female disciples widens, as the faithful account of the women falls on the cynical and unbelieving ears of the men. Nothing more than useless chatter—this is how their announcement is evaluated and discarded. This can be explained in at least to aways. First, the earlier situation of the women disciples is being repeated int eh case of their male counterpart; failing to grasp Jesus’ teaching regarding his suffering and resurrection, they cannot make sense of the news share d with them. At the same time, however, Luke’s ‘all this’ (v 8) cannot but include the message they had received form the angels, so that the men were given access to the significance of recent events. The dismissive response of the men is therefore better explained with reference to the fact that those doing the reporting are women in a world biased against the admissibility of women as witnesses.” Peter’s response is all the more positive.

[12] Green, Luke, 840. Amazement is not faith nor does it hint at the eventual genuine faith. “Unlike the women, [Peter] returns home with no new message to share.”

[13] Gonzalez, Luke, 273. “The contrast is such that one cannot avoid the conclusion that it is purposeful, and that Luke is stressing the faith of these women who have traveled with Jesus from Galilee, and who were the only ones who remained true throughout the entire story of the betrayal. Even though the later course of church history, with its expectation of entirely male leadership, would lead us to think otherwise, it is they who bring the message of the resurrection to the eleven, and not vice versa.”

[14] Green, Luke, 836. “The Evangelist has repeatedly noted the incapacity of the disciples to grasp this truth…but now he signals a breakthrough on the part of the women. If the male disciples continue in their obtuseness, and thus lack of faith, at least Peter response to the witness of the women by going to the tomb. His behavior portends at last the possibility of a more full understanding of Jesus’ message on their part.”

[15] Gonzalez, Luke, 274. “The resurrection is not the continuation of the story. Nor is it just its happy ending. It is the beginning of a new story, of a new age in history.”

[16] Gonzalez, Luke, 276. “But the truth is that the resurrection of Jesus, and the dawning of the new with him, poses a threat to any who would rather continue living as if the cross were the end of the story. The women on their way to the tomb were planning to perform one last act of love for Jesus, and then would probably just return home to their former lives. Peter and the rest would eventually return to their boats, their nets, and the various occupations. But now the empty tomb opens new possibilities. Now there is no way back to the former life in Galilee. Even though Luke tells us that Peter simply went home after seeing the empty tomb, we will soon learn that this was not the end of it: Peter himself would eventually die on his own cross.”

[17] Gonzalez, Luke, 276. “The resurrection is a joyous event; but it also means that Jesus’ call for his disciples to take up their cross and follow him is still valid. The road to the old ways in Galilee is now barred. The resurrection of Jesus impels them forward to their own crosses, and indeed, we know that several of the disciples suffered violent death as the result of their following and proclaiming the Risen One.”

[18] Gonzalez, Luke, 276. “The full message of Easter is both of joy and of challenge. It is. The announcement of unequaled and final victory, and the call to radical, dangerous, and even painful discipleship.”

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“Prone to Wander”: Into the Tomb

Psalm 114:7-8 Tremble, O earth, at the presence of Abba God, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water.

Introduction

A day of silence. A day of eyes dampened with doubt, confusion, fear, anger, and even despair. It’s not just the women who cry; the men cry, too; no one is exempt from the overwhelming barrage of emotions that comes when hopes are dashed, expectations go up in flames, and faith feels shattered. The one whom they loved, the one whom they followed, the one whom they would die for—so they claimed—had been killed, and his body lay in a sealed tomb, guards flanking the massive stone. They didn’t even have time to prepare his body properly before the Sabbath moon rose gently in the sky reminding them that what was was no longer …

In the silence of that Sabbath, thoughts of what happened, how could this be, what was it all for, is this really it paraded about the minds of the disciples as they forced themselves to rest, no recourse to business of banal tasks to keep their minds occupied. They were stuck in this moment of death, like Jesus in that tomb. The extra layer for some (all?) is that they didn’t stick around, defend, follow Jesus all the way… They ran, denied, hid, betrayed. Their consciences were plagued with loss and confusion and burdened with the uncomforting, weighted-blanket of failure and guilt—heavier for some, lighter for others. These precious souls (no matter their guilt and failure, their denial and betrayal) had to endure the sun-down to sun-down plus a few more hours to receive the actual ending of the story. On this night, all those years ago, the disciples of Christ sighed, wiped away tears, and wondered what it was all about… Death, and all its children, held them hostage like Christ sealed in the tomb.

On this night, all those years ago, the disciples died with Christ. What they didn’t know was that the story wasn’t as over …

Romans 6:3-11[1]

In Romans 6, Paul anchors the silence of Saturday into the death of Good Friday and the life of Easter Sunday. For Paul, those who follow Christ follow him in the ways they speak and act and through deep identification with Christ even if it means going into the tomb with Christ on Good Friday. For Paul, this identification with Christ in Christ’s death is the key to the identification with Christ in his resurrected life. For Paul, this is how believers participate in the entirety of the Easter event, from beginning to end, from death into new life. In other words, our Romans passage is a clear distillation of what is happening as we transition from death to life through the silence of Saturday.

Paul begins with a question (v. 1) that he then (passionately) answers in v. 2: What therefore will we say? Should we persist in sin so that grace might superabound? Hell no! How can we who died to sin still live in it? In this portion, Paul addresses the new life believers have in Christ: this is absolutely not a continuation of what has gone before and is something completely new! There is a clean break between what was sealed up in the tomb with Christ on Good Friday, and the new life the believers step into on Easter Sunday Morning.

Because there is no continuation between what was by deeds of the flesh and what is now by faith in Christ, Paul feels compelled to ask the Romans, Or, do you not know that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? (v.3)Meaning, there’s a lie floating about that those who believe in Christ don’t suffer Christ’s fate, that we are exempted from that death. For Paul, while we weren’t nailed to the cross in literal terms, we do suffer a death like Christ’s, and this is actualized in our participation in the waters of baptism. (Being submerged under the water is to buried with Christ, to come up out of the water is to be raised with Christ.) For Paul, it is imperative that we take seriously the reality that we die like Christ; for Paul (and thus for us), THIS IS GOOD NEWS! Paul writes, Therefore, we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of Abba God, in this way we, we might also walk in the newness of life (v.4). Through what God did in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, death that leads to life is the only path for believers. What is ruled out? Death that leads to death. Why? Because those who journey through a death like Christ’s receive resurrection into new life that cannot die like Christ cannot die (and this new life is both internal and external, spiritual and temporal!).[2] Thus why Paul can then write, For if we have become united together with him in a death like his death, we will also [be united with him in his] resurrection (v. 5). We live unafraid of another death because we live eternally in and with Christ.

Paul continues to elaborate about this identification between the believer and Christ, Knowing that our old person was crucified together [with Christ] with the result that the body of sin is abolished, so that we are no longer a slave to sin, for the one who has died [with Christ] has been declared righteous from sin (vv. 6-7). Paul anchors the believer in the death of Christ so that their body of sin—not their existence as fleshy creatures, but their defective orientation resulting in sin thus death[3]—is put to death and this is liberation because it cannot weigh the believer down anymore. Another way to say this is that by virtue of identification with Christ in Christ’s death, sin and its consequence, death, are put to death.[4] What was ushered in by Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, has been put asunder by the death of death that is brought in and through Christ’s death and resurrection. And if this is the case, then with Paul we can say, And if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live together with him (v.8). Captivity itself is now held captive and the captives—the ones formerly held in captivity to sin and death—are liberated.[5]

Paul then writes, Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead no longer dies, death no longer rules over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God [always]. Thus you, you also consider yourselves to be dead to sin and only living to God in Christ Jesus. For those who follow Christ, to live is to live unbound by death, released from captivity, no longer controlled and threatened by sin. According to Paul, it’s not that believers now no longer sin; they do. Believers will miss the mark, they will shoot and not score, they will mean one thing and do another, they will harm, they will mar, they will wound. What Paul is getting at is that the believer—while still a sinner—is liberated from the effects of sin which is death. The believer—now declared righteous although a sinner still (simul iustus et peccator)—has died once and for all (like Christ) and never needs to die again to sin (though sin is going to happen).[6] In other words, the believer does not need to intentionally sin so that they can die again to sin and again be declared righteous. Doing so is unnecessary and declares the grace of God unnecessary (Hell no!), as if being made righteous can come by any other means apart from grace and faith in Christ.

Because Jesus died once for all, believers in union with Christ by faith will never really die (they will “fall asleep in Christ”) because death has met its own death, captivity its own captivity. [7],[8] Rather, like Christ, they will live by the grace of God and for the grace of God.[9] This is an eternal living because the believer—by faith and God’s grace—lives in Christ and Christ who is now the Lord of life is no longer subject to death and its lordship—thus, those who live in Christ have life eternal because Christ is now eternal even in his raised and ascended body.[10] Even when sin shows up in the believer’s life—and it will—this eternal living is not hindered or hampered. Rather—through easy access to forgiveness and absolution—the believer can get up, wipe the dust off, and try again to live the life that reflects their eternal life in Christ.[11] Here the spiritual can manifest in the temporal, the outer aligns with the inner, God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Conclusion

For the disciples, the deathly silence of Saturday was palpable. For (about) 36 hours, waiting for the Sabbath to pass, waiting for the dawn of second full day after Christ’s death, they died, each one of them died with Christ—in grief, loss, shock, doubt, hopelessness, helplessness. They despaired of themselves, they released all that they thought was, and they came to the absolute ends of themselves. And here, in their ignorance to the divine movements, amid their darkest doubt, their deepest despair, surrounded by a void of sound or word, God was about to usher them into a brand-new conception of what it means to live in Christ, to live in love, to live liberated from all that was. As the host of heaven held its breath and as the disciples cried, God was on the move raising the greatest gift for the cosmos: the fulfilment of God’s glorious promise, Jesus the Christ raised holding death itself captive to death.

Tonight, we move from death to life. This service dives in deep to the silence of Saturday, the despair of a missing messiah, the stripping away of hope. At the beginning, we are all stuck in our sin, set on a path toward death eternal, forever held captive by its threat and presence, stealing from us any sense of peace—for how can anyone really have peace if they are always scrambling away from and fighting against death and its fruits? But in the blink of an eye, God moved, the heavenly host exhaled, and we find ourselves shrouded in the mystery of Christ being raised from the dead to be for us the source, sustenance, and sustainment of divine life, love, and liberation for all people, the entire cosmos, forever and always. As those who are prone to wander, God has come in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit to be our new life marked by remembering and not forgetting, walking and not tromping, gathered and not estranged, accepting and not judging, peaceful and lifegiving and not violent and death-dealing. Today we are new creatures with a new life and a new way to walk in the world for the wellbeing of our neighbors and to the glory of God.

Hallelujah! Christ is Risen!

[1] All translations from Romans are mine unless otherwise noted

[2] LW 25:309. “For having put on our mortal flesh and dying only in it and rising only in it, now only in it He joins these things together for us, for in this flesh He became a sacrament for the inner man and an example for the outward man.”

[3] LW 25:313. “The term ‘old man’ describes what kind of person is born of Adam, not according to his nature but according to the defect of his nature. For his nature is good, but the defect is evil.”

[4] LW 25:310. “Eternal death is also twofold. The one kind is good, very good. It is the death of sin and the death of death, by which the soul is released and separated form sin and the body is separated rom corruption and through grace and glory is joined to the living God. This is death in the most proper sense of the word, for in all other forms of death something remains that is mixed with life but not in this kind of death, where there is the purest life alone, because it is eternal life. For to this kind of death alone belong in an absolute and perfect way the conditions of death, and in this death alone whatever dies perishes totally and into eternal nothingness, and nothing will ever return from this death because it truly dies an eternal death. This is the way sin dies; and likewise the sinner, when he is justified, because sin will not return again for all eternity…”

[5] LW 25:310. “This is the principle theme in scripture. For God has arranged to remove through Christ whatever the devil brought in through Adam. And it as the devil who brought in sin and death. Therefore God brought about the death of death and the sin of sin, the poison of poison, the captivity of captivity.”

[6] LW 25:314. “The meaning is that we must undergo this spiritual death only once. For whoever dies thus lives for all eternity. Therefore we must not return to our sin in order to die to sin again.”

[7] LW 25:311. “Because for death to be killed means that death will not return, and ‘to take captivity captive’ means that captivity will never return, a concept which cannot be expressed through an affirmative assertion.”

[8] LW 25:311. “For the entering into life can, and necessarily must, become a departure from life, but the ‘escape form death’ means to enter into a life which is without death.”

[9] LW 25:313. “Nor can he be freed of his perversity except by the grace of God…This is said not only because of the stubbornness of perverse people but particularly because of the extremely deep infection of this inherited weakness and original poison, by which a man seeks his own advantage even in God himself because of his love of concupiscence.”

[10] LW 25:315. “For just as the ray of the sun is eternal because the sun is eternal, so the spiritual life is eternal because Christ is eternal; for He is our life, and through faith He flows into us and remains in us by the rays of His grace. Therefore, just as Christ is eternal, so also the grace which flows out of Him is from His eternal nature. Furthermore, just because a man sins again his spiritual life does not die, but he turns his back on this life and dies, while this life remains eternal in Christ.”

[11] LW 25:315. “He has Christ, who dies no more; therefore he himself dies no more, but rather he lives with Christ forever. Hence also we are baptized only once, by which we gain the life of Christ, even though we often fall and rise again. For the life of Christ can be recovered again and again, but a person can enter upon it only once, just as a man who has never been rich can begin to get rich only once, although he can again and again lose and regain his wealth.”

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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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These Humble Waterpots

Psalm 36:5-7 5 Your love, O Abba God, reaches to the heavens, and your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the strong mountains, your justice like the great deep; you save both human and beast, O Abba God. How priceless is your love, O God! your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.

Introduction

I saw a meme recently that referred to January as a big MONDAY. Like, the whole month is just one Monday. Now, as someone who prefers Monday to Tuesday, I wasn’t displeased with this idea—though, it did make me consider if March or February was the big TUESDAY of the year… No matter my opinions on the meme or the days, the feeling holds. Think about it. We are two weeks out from many parties, festivities, celebrations, and feasts. We are more than two weeks out from opening presents and receiving cards and picture in the mail. We are two weeks into houses and business slowly removing their festive lights from public view. We are two weeks into feeling the lean and the austere as we pull back from the Christmas season back to the “normal” day in and day out. We’re two weeks into the cold feeling colder and the dark seeming darker.[1]

It feels like one big Monday.

Sometimes the temptation in the Monday (no matter how long or short it is) is to pull in and away, hide, and burrow in deeper under those duvets and comforters. There are times when this is exactly what we (I?) may need to do, but it can’t and shouldn’t be our only response to Mondays mondaying. Here’s why: because it’s in our lack, in our weak, in our exhaustion, in our want, in our empty, in our sad, in our “I can’t even” where God shows up. In the Mondayest Monday that ever Mondayed, God shows up. When we can’t, God can; when all that’s left is water, God brings wine.

John 2:1-11

Now Jesus says to them, “Fill the water pots full of water.” And they filled them up to the brim. Then he says to them, “Now draw water and bring [it] forth to the superintendent of the banquet.” And they brought [it] forth. And as the superintendent of the banquet tastes the water it has become wine! And he had not perceived from where it came… (Jn 2:7-9b)[2]

John brings us to a very familiar story; one we all know quite well: Jesus turning water into wine. While always an excellent argument about why wine is “okay,” there’s more to the story here than an argument for drinking and to why it’s included in our lectionary.[3] This story and its embedded miracle, are an “Epiphany” story and miracle.[4] While not all that original to the Christian narrative (there is some intersection with the legend of Dionysus[5]) the story features the revelation of the glory of God in Christ; the son of humanity Jesus Christ’s acceptance and revelation as the son of God. This one is no ordinary one, John is saying in this miracle story; both Jesus’s humanity and divinity are being exposed here by John.

The human part is designated by the story opening on Mary and Jesus and the disciples at a wedding in Cana (vv. 1-2)—a rather regular human affair. Noticing that the wine has fallen short (there’s no more), Mary, Jesus’s mother, brings this to Jesus’s attention, “They do not have wine,” she says to him (v. 3). And Jesus’s response is quite sharp and frank, “What [is it] to you and me, woman? My hour has not yet arrived” (v. 4) The tone is “stop bugging me,”[6] and, frankly, if there ever was a more real and human interaction between a mother and her eldest son, I know not of it. But Jesus’s use of “Woman” (γύναι) is unique here and places a certain distance between himself and Mary[7] exacerbating the tension that’s building toward the miracle as incredible. In other words, Jesus dismisses the request, but the story isn’t over.[8] Mary then dismisses Jesus’s curt reply and declaration that it’s not time for him to be public and pushed into the confrontation with the status-quo and the powers and rulers of the kingdom of humanity.[9] She tells the servants at the wedding banquet, “Whatever he might say to you, you do.” (v. 5). Mary’s aim, or, rather, John’s aim is to get Jesus to do a miracle.[10] And so the story moves on.

John tells us that there were six large waterpots appointed for purification rites according to the children of Israel; [these pots] holding two or three measures of 8.75 gallons (v. 6). (That is, max, 26.25 gallons per waterpot and thus, 157.5 gallons total.) Then John tells us, Jesus says to/commands [the servants], “Fill the waterpots full of water.” And they filled them up to the brim (v. 7). Then a second command, Jesus says to/commands [the servants], “Now draw water and bring [it] forth to the superintendent of the banquet.” And they brought [it] forth (v. 8). At this point the narrative shifts from Jesus and the servants to the superintendent of the banquet. John writes, Now as the superintendent of the banquet tastes the water, it had become wine(!), and he had not perceive from where it came. But those who have drawn the water had perceived (v.9-9c). John keeps the miracle relatively obscured, only the reading audience knows that Jesus did this miracle. Thus, for John, God’s divine activity is celebrated but cloaked. [11] God is glorified not by direct praise but by the concrete miracle of water turning into wine[12] in the midst of a people being made happy,[13] celebrating, and coming together;[14],[15]

John continues, And the superintendent of the banquet calls out to the bridegroom and says to him, “All people appoint the good wine first, and whenever [the people] were drunk with wine [appoints] the lesser; you, you keep the good wine until just now!” (vv. 9d-10). A miracle has occurred, the best wine is brought out last, and, according to John, this illuminates Jesus as the promised messiah[16] and that this event is just the first of the signs in Cana of Galilee that reveal Jesus glory and his status with God and among humanity (v. 11a). God’s glory is made known in and through Christ, and this is the goal and object of John’s material–specifically around the miracle stories. For John, there is no way to mistake it, Jesus is the son of God, the promised one, the long awaited Messiah, the one who reveals God in his flesh and God’s will through his words and deeds[17] and thus solicits faith from people—and his disciples believed in him (v. 11b). This is the point, to come into contact with the Holy One of Israel, to find oneself face to face with God in Christ and to believe, to receive grace and truth thus to be saved and rescued from one’s dead self unto a new alive self to be in the world for the neighbor, the beloved of God, to the glory of God just like Jesus. [18]

Conclusion

Jesus took six empty waterpots and some water and turned it all into a reason to continue the party. This is a real and true miracle. And John’s point is how this miracle, demonstrates Jesus’s divine glory, his relation and representation of God as God’s son. This is what Jesus does, he takes what is empty, fatigued, worn out, dead and renders it full, rested, fresh, and alive. While we could wax eloquently in defense of partying and celebrating with wine, now isn’t the time for that. The real thing to focus on is how Jesus can bring to life ordinary objects and send them into the world for the robust divine purpose of bringing God’s love, life, and liberation to the people.

As I said at the beginning, it’s in our lack, in our weak, in our exhaustion, in our fatigue, in our want, in our empty, in our sad, in our “I can’t even” where God shows up. When we can’t God can. When all that’s left is water, God brings wine. When it all seems and appears to be nothing and gone and ready to be washed up and closed down, God shows up and reinvigorates that which is dead because that is what God does: God is the strength in our weakness because when we are weak and can’t God is strong and can. The radical thing is that God is glorified when, in spite of ourselves, God’s will, mission, and revolution of love life and liberation are not only participated in, but moved forward through us and our weakness by his soundness. We are the waterpots, we are the ones taken, filled, and made to be glorious instruments of belonging and God’s glory. Beloved, in this mega-Monday of a January, be assured God is still at work in and through you.

[1] I credit my son Quinn with giving me this idea that there is “December Winter” and “January Winter” and the two are very different.

[2] Translation mine unless otherwise noted

[3] Did you know that all three Epiphany 2s have a reading from John either first or second chapters according to our lectionary?

[4] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. GR Beasley-Murray, Gen Ed, RWN Hoare and JK Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 118-119. Originally published as, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 1966). “The source counted this as the first miracle. It is easy to see why it put it at the beginning of its collection; for it is an epiphany miracle…There can be no doubt that the story has been taken over form heathen legend and ascribed to Jesus. In fact the motif of the story, the changing of the water into wine, is a typical motif of the Dionysus legend.”

[5] See fn1

[6] Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, translated by Donald D. Walsh (Eugene: Wipf&Stock, 2010), 76. “I said that Jesus’ words—‘Why do you tell that to me?’—according to the latest biblical studies, are very strong words. In other parts of the Bible they always appear in lawsuits or when someone is being injured by someone else, and it’s something like our expression ‘Stop bugging me.’”

[7] Bultmann, John, 116. “The refusal is a rough one…What is surprising here is the form of address, γύναι, where one expects ‘Mother’. Even though it is not disrespectful or scornful, it sets a peculiar distance between Jesus and his mother.”

[8] Bultmann, John, 116. “The purpose of the preparation is precisely to bring out the character of the miracle as παράδοξον by raising the tension. This is done here, as elsewhere, by making Jesus at first refuse the request, but in such a way as to keep the expectation alive.”

[9] Cardenal, Solentiname, 77. “Carlos Alberto: ‘…By doing this he was already pushing himself into his public life, I mean, into struggle, and now he was going to be persecuted…I see that right after this in the following passage, Saint John already has Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple, and also talking about his death. So it’s clear that this miracle speeded things up.’”

[10] Bultmann, John, 116. “When the wine runs out, Jesus’ mother brings it to his notice; of course she does this with the aim of getting him to perform a miracle, as can be seen from Jesu’ answer v. 4, and as was also to be expected from the style of the miracle story, in which everything is related with an eye on the main point of the story and must be understood in relation to this point.”

[11] Bultmann, John, 118. “It is in accordance with the style of the miracle stories that the miraculous process itself is not described; the divine action remains a mystery.”

[12] Bultmann, John, 118. “As in other miracle stories, the greatness of what has happened is emphasised by a demonstration or acclamation by the public. Yet here the παράδοξον is not brought out by a generalized phrase, but by a concrete scene: the water had been turned into the most excellent wine!…This saying marks the end of the narrative proper: any further words would only detract from the effect.”

[13] Cardenal, Solentiname, 78. “Oscar: ‘It seems to me that the wine means joy, a party. To be happy. Enjoyment. Also love. He wanted to make us see that he was bringing enjoyment, happiness, a party.’”

[14] Cardenal, Solentiname, 78. “Olivia: ‘Joy. And also unity. Wine unites. He was coming to bring about unity among people. But liquor can separate too, and lead to quarrels, stabbings…’”

[15] Cardenal, Solentiname, 79. “Marcelino: ‘We see then that he was coming to bring unity and brotherhood among people. That’s the wine he brought. If there’s no brotherhood among people there’s no joy. Like a party where people are divided, where they don’t all share alike, it’s a party without joy….So  a society with quarrels, with social classes, can’t have a true banquet, a true party.’”

[16] Cardenal, Solentiname, 78-79. “The prophet Amos had said that when the Messiah came there would be great harvests of wheat and grapes, and that the hills would distill wine. Isaiah says that God was going to prepare a banquet for all the peoples, with very good meat and very good wines. And he had also prophesied about the Messiah, saying that “they would not be sad.” By the miracle Christ is making it clear that he is the promised Messiah.’”

[17] Bultmann, John, 120. “For here, as elsewhere, the Evangelist’s figurative language refers not to any particular gift brought by the Saviour Jesus, but to Jesus himself as the Revealer, as is true of the images of the living water, the bread of life  and the light, as well as of the shepherd and the vine; equally the wine refers not to any special gift, but to Jesus’ gift as a whole, to Jesus himself as the Revealer, as he is finally visible after the completion of his work.”

[18] Bultmann, John, 119. “For the Evangelist the meaning of the story is not contained simply in the miraculous event; this, or rather the narrative, is the symbol of something which occurs throughout the whole of Jesus’ ministry, that is, the revelation of the δόξα of Jesus. As understood by the Evangelist this is not the power of the miracle worker, but the divinity of Jesus as the Revealer, and it becomes visible for faith in the reception of χάρις and ἀλήθεια; his revelation of his δόξα is nothing more nor less than his revelation of the ὄνομα of the Father (17.6).”

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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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Emma Percy’s “What Clergy Do”

Emma Percy, What Clergy Do: Especially When it Looks like Nothing. London: SPCK, 2014.

Emma Percy’s What Clergy Do: Especially When it Looks like Nothing, brings the imagery of motherhood, the role of the parish priest, and “good enough” into dialogue. Every page felt like a good word reassuring that both my mothering and my priesting is “good enough” while reminding me that I cannot be all things to all people or can I mother and priest like all other people. Percy’s text highlights three important features of this human endeavor of priesthood inspired by God’s holy and gracious call: 1. The need to eradicate comparison and competitiveness; 2. Humble and substantial presence will carry one through the day in and day out; and 3. Neither care giving for children nor God’s beloved gathered in a parish is easy and comfortable. Overall, this text is a text that should be employed in seminary pastoral education classes due to its grammatical accessibility and practical application.

1. The need to eradicate comparison and competitiveness Percy’s bold approach to articulating concepts means that her sentences function as cleverly disguised scalpels. While reading I found myself intermittently getting frustrated and sometimes mad, feeling exposed and raw. Ugh! I’d say aloud This is all so much! How am I ever going to be good at this job! But that’s the point of the text (or at least one of the points I experienced). It’s not about being “good” or, rather, “the best…better than all the rest!” Percy exposed my persistent tendencies to intellectually and emotionally default to a competitive posture in the world of being a parish priest by which I would compare myself ruthlessly to other “more successful” and “killing it” priests. As a small parish pastor, I can lose myself in the deadly game of comparison that grows into competition; it is hard game to win when I feel dwarfed by the looming specter of failure always at my red, episcopal door. But yet, Percy’s constant refrain, “good enough” was a soothing balm to my exposed and raw situation; I can be “good enough” because it is God who works through me, it is about God’s good word in Christ Jesus, and because, at the end of the day, the Spirit is always with me and us as we—together as part of the body of Christ—bring God’s mission of the revolution of love, life, and liberation into the world. Percy’s text liberated me from myself to render me of (divine) use for my neighbor (both inside and outside the church).

2. Humble and substantial presence will carry one through the day-in and day-out Percy reminded me that even though removing myself from the game of comparison and competition is a good step, it can’t be the only step. Considering the scientific axiom, nature abhors a vacuum, the elimination of something demands filling that void with something substantial or anything could be sucked into that empty space. Here, Percy’s chapters provided me with access to what it looks like to come to terms with myself (who am I as a mom? As a Priest?) and then to be honest, really honest with myself—being willing to let the mythologies I present to the world and to my own mind about who and what I am and able to do be exposed by the light of truth and reality. In the theological world inspired by the reformational insights the Martin Luther, Percy asks her reader to “call a thing what it is” or, more pastorally, “to call yourself who you are” and then to work from that point. Being able to be honest with yourself is the first step of humble motherhood and priesthood. And in being honest, according to Percy, we will gain further access to the liberation of “Good enough” that bears the fruit of life, real, fleshy, messy, human-y life—the type of life that can go the distance because it gets back up when it falls, and it gets back down when it gets too high up. When we come to terms with who we are by being exposed by the cross of Christ, we are brought through that death into the new life of Christ’s resurrection. Percy’s text is founded on this gospel movement from and through death into the new life bathed in the light of Christ. Being a mom and being a priest is for the long haul, Percy points out, it is not easy to try to rush to a goal thus rendering all the people caught between you and the goal as the ground you are walking upon. Percy exhorts humble, substance filled, present tense being…for today we are good enough.

3. Neither caregiving for children nor God’s beloved gathered in a parish is easy and comfortable This speaks for itself. Percy’s book reveals the frank reality that parish life as well as home life isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t comfortable. I believe Percy exposes that our church structure has gone too far the way of corporate thinking. As a priest, I am called to support my people, to encourage them toward the liberative word of God that is Christ and to make time and space for them to be nourished by the presence of the Spirit in word and deed, in the pews and at the table. This is an inverted corporate structure; I am not a religious tyrant with everyone having to serve me or needing to placate my bloated (narcissistic?) ego. I serve my congregation by teaching, preaching, and leading worship (i.e. making space regularly for each beloved to come into an encounter with God in the event of faith); my congregation doesn’t serve me. I think we’ve too frequently gotten it wrong and have harmed one too many of God’s fold while we’ve been in pursuit of what feeds me most, what is best for me, what keeps me most comfortable. Here the fruit of liberation that is love that first loves us comes to the surface; we are to love others as we have been so loved by God, and, often, as God has loved us. Luther exhorted preachers to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Percy’s text, What Clergy Do, is that good word that rattles the cushy seat of the priest and wakes them up, summons them out of comfortability, and prepares and equips them for the hard work of “good enough.” And therein Percy, after afflicting the comfortable, comforts the afflicted like the excellent teacher, scholar, and pastor she is.

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Existential Anguish of the Christian Life

Psalm 48:1, 13 Great is Abba God, and highly to be praised; in the city of our God is his holy hill. This God is our God for ever and ever; Abba God shall be our guide for evermore.

Introduction

At times there are great highs in this Christian life, and then there are great lows. We see love come and then indifference; we see liberation come and then captivity; we see life come and then death. We are caught in what feels like a great tug-of-war between power eager to bring life, love, and liberation and power eager to eliminate it. To be in the world but not of the world is to have a foot in the temporal realm and in the spiritual realm, with neither feeling all that much like home while we are still here in the body. We will have joy, and we will have pain. At times our hearts will swell with gratitude; at others, they will deflate with despair.  But this is part of our Christian journey in the world and so is the anguish we feel at times when injustice seems to win over justice, war over peace, death over life. This anguish causes us to feel pointless and hopeless, purposeless and directionless. But it’s here, in this very real human weakness, where God summons us to step further into the void…

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Concerning this thing, I beseeched the Lord three times so that it might [take leave] from me. And he has spoken to me, “My grace suffices for you; for power is reaches perfection in weakness.” Therefore, I will gladly boast all the more in my weakness, so that the power of Christ may dwell upon me. That is why I am resolved in weakness, in insult, in constraint, in persecution, and great distress on behalf of Christ; for whenever I am weak, at that time I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:8-10)

Paul begins this portion of his letter to the Corinthians by telling them about a person who—fourteen years ago—was caught up in an ecstatic encounter with God, brought up to the third heaven and that this person then heard unutterable utterances which a person is not permitted to speak. Paul speaks as one who is not sure about the details of the event—whether in the body I have known not, or outside of the body I have known not; God has known—thus the reader/hearer is led to believe it is someone else of whom Paul is speaking. So, who is this person caught up into the presence of God?[1] Most likely it’s Paul. Paul is not one to practice futile self-boasting, so he phrases the story in the third person and avoids any notion that he is any different than the Corinthians.[2] In this way, Paul speaks about divine encounter that takes one to the peaks yet without creating a chasm between himself and his audience; he didn’t do this, [3] God did.[4] In other words, as other leaders are trying to lord their power over others,[5] Paul is just like his audience because there is no hierarchy among the believers, because in God’s reign hierarchies are destroyed—all are brought low in Christ’s death to be raised in Christ’s resurrection.

So, Paul refuses to boast in himself unless he’s speaking of his own weakness—on behalf of such a one I will boast, but on behalf of myself I will not boast except in weakness. His goal is to send all attention to God, to Jesus Christ, to the power of the divine Spirit. To boast of his own encounters with God would send the attention directly to himself and away from God;[6] people would focus on him, revere him, worship him, would elevate him above themselves and make him into something he isn’t.[7] This misallocation of reverence due God perpetuates the misuse of power, exacerbates the violence of hierarchies in the kingdom of humanity, and would detract from Paul’s message: depend fully on God and God’s word and love your neighbor to God’s glory. Paul wants the Corinthians to judge him not according to one off encounters with God but by his day in and day out living by and in accordance with the gospel and in this way glory remains with God and not with Paul.

With this we get to the main message of this pericope: for Christians our weakness is the intersection of the waning of human power and the waxing of divine power. Paul tells us, On which account so that I might not be raised up, a thorn for the flesh was given to me—a messenger of Satan—so that he might strike me with a fist so that I might not be lifted up. Paul confesses that he struggles with a recurring “thing” that is a thorn in his side,[8] it is this that keeps him humble especially since his petitions to the Lord to have it removed are met with, My grace is suffices for you; for power reaches perfection in weakness. If Paul could, he’d remove this “thing,” but he is fully dependent on God to work through this recurring and persistent weakness; he is reminded of his creaturely posture before God.

Many scholars speculate about what Paul’s thorn was—something physical,[9] a person, something mental—and while I will defer to their expertise on what the particular thing is, I’d like to draw a correlation to something a bit less literal, to a correlation between Paul and his thorn and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Based on what Paul has shared about being taken up into the presence of God and overhearing unutterable utterances, I believe Paul takes a share in the divine anguish for the world. His recurring thorn is those real moments where that anguish seizes him, where his heart breaks, where he pleads with God to take this cup from him, and God’s response is to usher him forward through his weakness to allow for God’s divine power to be made known through that weakness. While not one-to-one, this is not unlike Jesus’s presence before God in the garden pleading for this cup to pass, sweating blood, feeling the weight of the task before him, burdened by his share of existential anguish over the world and God’s beloved. Jesus was brought into this moment of weakness because of his love for humanity and the world and it would be that same love that would be the source of divine power summoning him out of the earth on Easter morning. And if for Jesus, then for Paul, too. Paul was raptured with God’s love not only for him but for the beloved of God, thus this love brought him to ultimate weakness, and it was at this point, too, where he threw himself upon God and that same love reached perfection through Paul.[10] It isn’t that Paul found strength in God’s love to muscle through. It’s that he died under the weight of that divine love for the world only to be made alive by that love; in this way, Christ’s grace is sufficient because God’s love is sufficient especially when it means bringing to life out of death.

Conclusion

As those who believe in Christ we share in Christ’s anguish over the world. The love that forsakes its own comfort, forgoes its own life to bring comfort and life to the object of love, the beloved. As those so caught up in this type of divine love, we will experience the thorn of existential anguish as we are forced to witness the world reject love, life, and liberation. Our hearts will break. Our hope will wane. Our strength will falter. But in these moments we must find recourse to drive ourselves further into God through prayer, to cling tighter to the Gospel of God (Jesus Christ the incarnate word), and to collapse into the presence of the divine Spirit. It is here at the end of love where love summons us back to life and brings us forward into the world to continue participating in God’s loving, life-giving, liberating mission in the world.

This existential anguish that is a part of our love of God and the world is an essential part of our being Christian. There is no loop whole making an easier way or some winding path around having these heavy feelings and experiences. We must walk through it, one step at a time. As weak clay vessels, we must walk, eyes wide open, ears tuned to God and to the cry of our neighbor, ready to use our hands and feet to summon forward God’s love, life, and liberation for the beloved to the glory of God. And when we can’t may we throw ourselves (once again) on the mercy and grace of God because God’s grace in Christ is sufficient for us because God’s love reaches perfection through the love that has rendered us weak.

[1] [1] Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, eds. I Howard Marshall and Donald A Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 840. “It is probable that this was Paul’s cosmology, so that when he says ἕως τρίτον οὐρανοῦ, ‘right up to the third heaven,’ he mans ‘into the presence of God.”

[2] Harris,  Second Corinthians, 835. The experience is about Paul, “…he was embarrassed at needing to engage in fruitless boasting (v.1) and found in this objectifying of his experience a convenient way of distancing himself from this necessary but futile boasting that in itself did not contribute to the common good …Again, this literary technique enabled him to avoid suggesting that he was in any sense. A special kind of Christian.”

[3] Harris, Second Corinthians, 837. “Paul’s ascent was not the result of a self-induced trance or any other form of psychological preparation.”

[4] Harris, Second Corinthians, 835. “From first to last the initiative lay with God.”

[5] Harris, Second Corinthians, 837. “…Paul’s purpose may have been to draw attention to his prolonged silence about the episode; it was only the present contest with his rivals, brought on by the Corinthians’’ disloyalty to him, that had forced him (cf. 12.1, 11) to break that silence and reluctantly mention his privileged ascent to heaven.”

[6] Harris, Second Corinthians, 847. “…he was not prepared to boast about himself, about the ‘extraordinary revelations’ given him (11:7), because that would detract from the Lord’s preeminence and would suggest his own distinctiveness and eminence as a Christian or as an apostle.”

[7] Harris, Second Corinthians, 848. “He had good reason to boast if that was his wish. But he repudiates that option of self-promotion so that the Corinthians should form an accurate estimation of him and his ministry—not an opinion based on his boasting but an assessment that relied on their own observation of his conduct and their own evaluation of his teaching…”

[8] Harris, Second Corinthians, 851. “The ‘thorn,’ … was a recurrent trial that could incapacitate and humiliate him at any time. Being both past and present, ‘weakness’ was integral to Paul’s experience.”

[9] Harris, Second Corinthians, 859. “The present writer believes that some kind of physical ailment…”

[10] Harris, Second Corinthians, 863. “But we should probably find a still broader reference in ἀσθένια, a reference to attitudinal weakness, the acknowledgment of one’s creatureliness and of one’s impotence to render effective service to God without his empowering.”

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