Tag: Jesus

Invigorating Gospel Proclamation

Tripp Fuller and “Jesus: Lord, Liar, Lunatic…or Awesome?”

If there was ever a book that captured the essence of Tripp Fuller, I imagine Jesus: Lord, Liar, Lunatic…or Awesome?* is it. I’ll be honest, I’ve not read all Fuller has written and so my claim may be a bit presumptuous. However, I’ve seen and listened to a number of his excellent interviews, and from what I can tell of his enthusiasm and energy in those encounters, it seems he’s remained true to himself in these pages. But it’s not merely himself that he communicates to the reader; such a result would defeat the purpose of the book. Rather, Fuller causes Jesus to jump off the page and into the reader’s lap in all his freaking awesome and zesty divine and human glory. Fuller reminded me, chapter after chapter, why I, too, love Jesus the Christ.

The book is broken into eight chapters and each chapter provides a really good intellectual engagement of the various aspects of Christology while making the reader chuckle and smile throughout. Fuller’s approach to discussing these conceptions is accessible to the average Christian. By that I mean, you don’t need a few master degrees and a PhD to discover the intricacies Fuller is presenting in his work. He has the knack of distilling heady concepts into accessible ideas that the reader is then encouraged to mull over and contemplate.

For instance, in chapter 4, Fuller explains the historicity of the gospels and the early church’s reception of these various stories about the Christ. He works in Tatian (!)–whom I just learned about this year–Quelle, Mark’s foundational relation to Luke and Matthew, and does a find job letting John stand on his own. He addresses the conflicts and tension between the gospels, but then by dispelling the fear of errancy, leaves the reader with a more robust conception of the text thus a better relationship to the text. I have to say that everything Fuller covered in this chapter could have taken place in my classroom with high school students; in fact, these discussion did happen and do happen. And I can firmly say: Tripp, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

One thing that I was most impressed by was not only his good representation of Luther’s theological impact in the reformation in just a few pages of chapter 5, but his consistent effort and commitment to being ethically minded. Every chapter gave the reader some sort of actual problem plaguing our society that Christians can and need to engage. Whether he’s advocating for the need for the church today to listen to the various voices of multiple people groups, or asking for concerted concern for the environment and our world, Fuller brings a demand to his reader: what will you do? This is a level of holy conviction that I think often goes missed in much preaching these days.

In the final chapter of the book, Fuller engages with a host of thinkers: Sobrino, Motlmann, Cobb, and Johnson (all of whom show up in substantial form in previous chapters). In doing this, he pulls together everything that comes before and pulls the various concepts discussed together to form a coherent end. On page 164, Fuller writes,

Moltmann developed a theology after Auschwitz, Sobrino is arguing for a theology in Auschwitz, recognizing the crucified people of our present global situation as Yahweh’s suffering servant. Theology’s job is not primarily to explain the world, but to unmask it.[1]

Yes, we as theologians and preachers and teachers must do better to use our platforms to unmask the world and point to where the problems are. We need to provide ample opportunity for an encounter with God in the event of faith for not only those who are suffering and oppressed but for those causing suffering and oppression. To quote Fuller,

The way forward for the church must move us toward the poor and the planet. The needed change is not simply instrumental, like changing lightbulbs, eating less meat, or carpooling. Humanity, and in particular those in power, need a conversion, an existential change, the cultivation of new desires. ..As we start to wake up to the tragedy surrounding us, the theological challenge will be continuing to risk thinking after Christ—to wager putting our present system and the privilege and perks it provides before the cross.[2]

In order for this type of substantive conversion and change to occur, Fuller makes mention that something else has to die (in order for there to be life, a death must first occur). This something else is what Fuller calls “therapeutic believing” and defines it as:

Therapeutic belief is about the existential shape of one’s faith and not (primarily) about its content. It begins by accepting the ‘as is’ structure of our world, church, and self and then asks how we can function better as individuals and how we can make our world a bit better than we found it. In doing so, it takes for granted the very world we received and ignores the kin-dom’s[3] challenge to religion, culture, and politics.[4]

One of the problems I have with some modern gospel proclamation is the use of the gospel to numb rather than to invigorate. There is a way to preach the gospel that ends with the person feeling at ease within themselves and blind to what is going on outside of them in the world. The gospel can become a rock under which believers can live and pretend they can’t see the pain and suffering of the world around them. The gospel can be proclaimed in a way that upholds the status quo rather than challenge it. There’s a significant difference between being soothed and being numbed, the former will result in substantiated selves and the former will still be beholden to the shackles that bind. We need to check our proclamation.

The gospel is the word of liberation that sets the hearer free from the controlling mythology of the day within the world, which traps the person in a relentless cycle of creation worship rather than Creator worship. To come into encounter with God in the event of faith, assisted by the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ crucified and raised, is to be propelled into the world as liberated and active and political creatures. There is no need to abstain from such activity for fear of trying to self-justify oneself, because justification happens only through faith in Christ. Activity then becomes just activity; but that activity matters horizontally as those who are silenced and oppressed and marginalized need people who have eyes to see their oppression and ears to hear their cries—we can’t see and hear anything if we’re numb to everything.

Fuller is right to call out the problems of therapeutic believing. From how St. Paul describes the work of the Holy Spirit that binds us together in a bloodline and fellow heirs with Christ, we can’t ignore when our fellow brothers and sisters suffer (we are in a family now). We aren’t afforded the comfort to look the other way to be only concerned with our own salvation. When you hurt, I hurt; only when you are free will I be free, too.

Tripp Fuller has written a very engaging and inspiring work. I’m better for reading it. I learned not only new things, but also found ways to rephrase some things I’ve said before. I recommend taking the time to read this book.

*I was encouraged to read this book after viewing this review from Dr. W. Travis McMaken: http://derevth.blogspot.com/2019/05/jesus-lord-liar-lunaticor-awesome-video.html

Tripp Fuller Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Jesus: Lord Liar, Lunatic…of Awesome? Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015.

 

[1] Fuller, 164. I did question the comparison between Moltmann and Sobrino, but I lack sufficient knowledge of Sobrino to push back.

[2] Ibid, 168.

[3] For why the “g” is dropped, chapter 3, p. 57ff explains Fuller’s reasoning.

[4] Fuller, 170.

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Moltmann in Brief

Stephen D. Morrison and “Jürgen Moltmann in Plain English”

Stephen D. Morrison has stumbled upon an excellent idea: distilling and synthesizing the corpus of intellectual material of notable and influential Christian theologians. As a teacher of theology and religion, I long for ways to get good and accessible theology into the hands of my students. Handing a student a volume from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics or one of Luther’s commentaries isn’t always feasible or advisable. Being a bit of a broody hen when it comes to my students and their theological education, I’m wary to send them off on their own to slog through one of these theologians. However, Morrison is a capable and humble guide and thorough.

 

Morrison does not twist the theologian to get them to say what he wants them to say. Rather, he carefully and thoughtfully organizes his book around their works, devoting a chapter to their major works while incorporating the other writing; this creates a smooth, fluid, and coherent representation of the theologian. He has a knack for creating before the reader’s eyes the living and breathing person that is the theologian under examination and consideration. She will feel as if she’s entered a casual conversation with Morrison and with the theologian she’s reading about. The project “Plain English Series” will prove to be fruitful for academics and lay-scholars alike. You are right, Morrison, it truly is a unique[1] project; I’m excited for more installments of the series to grace my bookshelves.

 

In this particular volume, Morrison looks at the work of one of my favorite theologians: Jürgen Moltmann. (I read Moltmann’s work when I need to take a break from my dissertation research.) Moltmann’s theology is paradoxically confrontational and pastoral; but I’d argue that’s the paradox of Jesus the Christ and the gospel proclamation of Him crucified. Moltmann is deeply cruciform and Christocentric in his approach to systematic theology, from his doctrine of creation, the eschatological hope, doctrine of the trinity, to ethics, etc. Morrison, in my opinion, captures these aspects splendidly; at times the reader will be left wondering if Morrison isn’t in conversation with Moltmann directly while writing. Moltmann’s goal is to bring life to his reader through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ; Morrison stays true to this.

 

Morrison begins with a biographical sketch of Moltmann and continues to structure the book by creating 10 sections each primarily focused on one of Moltmann’s works. Each section heavily draws from the work corresponding to it, as mentioned above. But Morrison is a good researcher and brings in other components of Moltmann’s material to bolster the deductions Morrison is making. Thus, Morrison’s explanations and conclusions are well grounded in Moltmann’s conceptions as they are articulated not only in one book but throughout the corpus of his work.

 

Interspersed between the chapters are these short excurses, or “Sidebars.” These sidebars range from further explanatory and instructional words about some of the conceptions of the corresponding chapters (“Peace with God” with “Theology of Hope,” “The Sacraments” with “The Church in the Power of the Spirit,” “Tritheism” with “The Trinity and the Kingdom” to mention a few) to challenges for the reader—challenges Morrison himself received while engaging with Moltmann’s work. These sidebars specifically are exactly what Moltmann would have his reader do: he would want her to turn her eye to the world to see where she and her church are failing to be proactive in the world on behalf of the oppressed and disenfranchised. He would want his reader to use his voice to proclaim the word of God crucified to bring true and radical freedom and liberation to those dying for lack of. In this way, Morrison exposes that he’s a good student of Moltmann; one from whom I can learn a lot.

 

There was one sidebar, though, that didn’t measure up to the others in content, and it is with that sidebar I’ll contend with here. Near the end of chapter 5, “The Trinity and the Kingdom,” Morrison splendidly sums up Moltmann’s Christocentric and social approach to the doctrine of the trinity, “The Triuntiy of God is in their mutual indwelling and interpenetration; it is a unity not found in a hierarchal monarchy or a philosophical one subject, but unity in Tri-unity.”[2] And further explains a bit later, “Understanding the doctrine of God’s Triunity as the fellowship of person leads to rejecting hierarchy in the Church, the state, and in society. We should strive toward a community free from hierarchy and patriarchy, an open fellowship of equals.”[3] Morrison goes on to mention that Motlmann’s conception of the doctrine of the trinity works well and inherently advocates for feminism (as well as for Liberation Theology and Black Theology).[4]

 

Morrison took the right conclusive trajectory from Moltmann’s conception of the doctrine of the Trinity defined as perichoretic triunity. However, in the sidebar associated with this chapter, “Sidebar: God, His & Hers,” Morrison seems to miss an opportunity to put to work exactly what he sees occurring in Moltmann’s conception of the trinity as social force in the world dismantling hierarchies. In defense of feminism in church and theology, rather than quoting from Elisabeth Moltmann extensively (a known feminist theologian), Morrison leans heavily upon Jürgen to validate Elisabeth and the role of feminism in theology and church. Also, there is a lot of recourse to other male theologians to validate the maternal nature along with the paternal nature of God. Thus, the female voice is subordinated to the male one, and upholds rather than challenges the status quo of the hierarchy of patriarchy in church and theology. Feminism is valid because it’s valid in its own right and not because a host of men have seen the value of it.[5]

 

That Jürgen was influenced by Elisabeth (as the story initiating the sidebar indicates) is a beautiful thing, but should not be the basis by which we validate her theology or her feminism. Yet, starting the chapter with such a story[6] situates the reader to validate Elisabeth based on what Jürgen says. Elisabeth is a worthy theologian (Full stop). Considering the title of the sidebar is one of the titles of Elisabeth’s works, she herself can substantiate the validity of both her theology and feminism. A presentation of her work alone would have done well as the totality of the sidebar and placed the reader in a confrontation of having to decide for themselves.

 

Jürgen Moltmann in Plain English by Stephen D. Morrison is not only commendable but recommendable. I enjoyed the accessible tour and my able tour guide and fell in love with Moltmann all over again. We should not take for granted talented authors who can revive such love. I look forward to more installments of Morrison’s series, “In Plain English.”

Stephen D. Morrison’s Jürgen Moltmann in Plain English Columbus, OH: Beloved Publishing, 2018.

[1] Stephen D. Morrison Jürgen Motlamnn in Plain English “Introduction” p. vii.

[2] Ibid, 119.

[3] Ibid, 120.

[4] Ibid, 120.

[5] Especially with the dynamic of what Morrison refers to as “bitter feminists.” We must always remember that women have suffered deadly violence at the hands of men. When we categorically dismiss those who are angry, we will forget just how bad the violence is.

[6] Morrison, 126.

Posted on by laurenlarkin 6

An Intersection of Marx and Jesus

A (very) brief examination of the two through the book of James [by William Brien]

The following was written by a student of mine, William Brien, and I found the content quite insightful. As a caveat, Brien writes “I submit this piece with only a limited understanding of Marxism, therefore if I am panned for misconstruing it I yield my position to the experts.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Also, I’d like to add that these insights are merely those: insights. He is, “giving credit where credit is due.” He’s a true intellectual who does not have to profess allegiance to something in order to see what value it may offer. None of the following determines his religious or political inclinations.

Never in the history of humankind has a doctrine been so viciously contorted as that of Christianity. It has been used as justification for atrocities ranging from the Holocaust, to Apartheid, and even Jim Crow. The symbiotic relationship between Russia’s Orthodox Church and the Tsarist regime served as a bulwark of aristocratic rule amid the mass killing and famines of the early 20th century empire. Yet the egalitarianism promoted in the Christian scripture itself directly contradicts the oppressive status quo it has been used to preserve. The Epistle of James condemns the hypocrisy of elitism, saying,

If a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please,’ while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there,’ or, ‘Sit at my feet,’ have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?… Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? (2:2-6).

Perhaps the radical Marx could have found a friend in James. Indeed, the apostle’s contrast between the “dishonored” poor and the “rich who oppress” and “drag [the poor] into court” is very much reminiscent of The Communist Manifesto’s elite bourgeoisie guarding the means of production and subjugating the proletariat. The perpetuation of injustice, in accordance with this passage, is not the fulfillment of God’s plan, but a crude imitation designed to protect tyrannical authorities. Though these distortions led Marx to adopt a vehement opposition towards religion, ironically enough, the greed-filled class struggle which he proves to be the driver of socio-economic development towards socialism runs parallel to the greed and sin which drive the actions and thoughts of human beings as they work to become good Christians. It is the death of self-serving pursuit and the preservation of equality, whether through political and economic revolution or through compassion blind of class, which both doctrines wish to bring about.

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Who Do You Say That I am?

The Silence of Holy Saturday

If there was a day to feel the most human, I know not one better than the 24 hour period linking the event of death of Good Friday to the event of life of Resurrection Sunday.  Yet, I believe most of us rush through Saturday, not paying any attention to tension embedded in this day.

We know what happened: Jesus died on Friday and was raised on Sunday. Saturday is just the day I run those last minute errands, color eggs, plan for tomorrow’s dinner celebration, and lay out my “Easter best” outfit. My day to day productivity attempts to eclipse the possibility of eventful reflection. God can break through the clutter and cacophony of a regular day just as God can break through stone hard hearts and closed off minds. But if we are too immersed in the demands of our worlds and lives, we could miss the silence of Saturday; missing this silence and the very pregnant space-time pause, steals from the abundance of tomorrow, Easter Sunday. Might as well just be a celebration of the fertility of the Spring solstice.

In my opinion, Holy Saturday, the divine silence of this 24 hour period, is the center of the chiastic structure of massive event proportions. While everything feels normal here, nothing is actually normal. Everything is different but then none of it is. It’s the entire book of lamentations jammed into a day; it’s the moment between Adam and Eve stepping out of the Garden per divine decree and the settling in of the cherubim and seraphim who will forever prevent return. It’s the between of the walls of water dropping and drowning the Egyptian soldiers and the arrival at Mt. Sinai. It’s the deep dark of transition before Mary pushed Jesus into the world and held him to her breast. It’s the pain of Dinah after her rape and before her brothers find out; it’s the harrowing  moment between the last few breaths of the Levite’s concubine of Judges 19 and the door opening the next morning. This is where we are; it makes sense that we run through it.

There’s nothing easy about Holy Saturday. It’s filled with questions with no answers. It’s filled with crisis and confrontation. It’s filled with darkness no matter how bright the noon day sun shines. The demand of what in the hell just happened? weighs down on human skeletal structures, and there is no reprieve of an answer. This is loss; this is sorrow. Our bodies are forced into a conflict of feeling and thought: he was here, and now he’s not. The longing to touch him still courses through the nerve endings of the skin of my finger tips, but I cannot touch him anymore. The grief of desiring to lay lips on his that are now dead and gone, cold and lifeless. Substance was here and now it is seemingly vanished; the vacuum pulls my body into it: where I could not lie and sit and stand because he was there, I now can and that awareness of absence is crushing.

In the midst of this palpable heaviness that feels like divine silence, God isn’t actually speechless. The kerygma floats on the warm breeze: who do you say that I am? On Good Friday humanity answered with a conviction and judgment that ended in death. On Sunday, God will do the same but it will bring about life. But even if answers have been given, the question spoken long ago still demands an answer today; we aren’t off the hook because we’re being addressed today. And today, Saturday, the question haunts us as faith goes searching for her desire: what we knew and believed is being met with a radical upheaval of the unknowability of the future.

Today, law failed. Today, religion failed. Today, piety means nothing. Today, faith feels like a farce. Today, bodies long and hearts faint. Today, prophets only sigh. Today, love mourns. Today, grace feels beyond reach. Today, we are naked. Today, we are forced to be human, to reckon with what was and confront what will be. Today, we must wrestle with the demand of the eternal question in the divine address: who do you say that I am?

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Christ our Crisis

Luke 4:1-12 (Sermon)

I remember my first existential crisis. I was five and staring out of a window at a massive cornfield on the other side of the road from our house in Minnesota. My eyes focused on the window screen. As the cornfield blurred, I examined the screen. Then my eyes refocused again, but this time their focus was my nose. This broke my five-year-old brain. For the first time I was aware of what I considered to be a distinction between mind and body, and I felt my disembodiment. Lauren was in this particular body…but maybe I could’ve been in another body? Born to a different family? Living in a different house?

Cue the crisis.

I’m not alone here in existential crises. I’m happy assuming that many of you have had one or two or one once a week. An existential crisis occurs because something external has radically altered the way we see our existence, which challenges us and causes us to doubt the permanence of our existence. The crisis is the bright light that shines into the dark recesses of our existence and exposes the truth of who and what we are: dead person walking with no way to escape the things that plague sleep, that cause fear, that wake regret. No matter how much make-up we wear or what suite we put on, we are that person and that person we are.

Lent is a that which points us to our crisis. Lent is not a feel-good-about-yourself-because-you-gave-up-sugar-for-40-days event. To borrow and expand the apt imagery Rev. Montgomery employed on Ash Wednesday: Lent is cleaning house. It’s not merely straightening up the rooms that will be seen by your guest, but going under the bed, to the back of your closet, even into the attic and basement and dragging out those boxes where you keep the stuff you’d never want exposed by the light of day. Lent is to be a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of yourself, to quote the 4th step of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Without the crisis of the self in death, we have not the self in life; without Good Friday, there’s no Easter.

Cue the crisis.

Then Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was lead by the Spirit into the desert, in order to be tempted forty days by the Slanderer (devil). 4:1-2a

Our gospel reading from Luke forms a bridge between Jesus being baptized in the Jordan and the beginning of his ministry.[1] Thus, I’m picking up where I left you: in the Jordan with Jesus, with the one who stands in solidarity with God and with Humanity and who answers the divine question posed to humanity: whom will you follow and with whom will you stand?

Being filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus exits the Jordan and is ushered into the desert (the wilderness[2]), thus, steps into the solitude of a desolate wasteland. The focus is solely on him; this then becomes the locus of our eyes and the orientation of our ears. We are to look and listen, being quiet visitors because it’s not (primarily) about us, it’s (primarily) about Jesus, the assumed son of Joseph who is (and has been equipped to be) Jesus the Christ.[3] We watch as the battle wages in a realm that is cosmic in proportions[4] as the Slanderer takes on the Christ.[5] And this battle will establish in concrete terms what Jesus proclaimed in his baptism in the Jordan: I am for God; I stand with God.[6]

As in the Jordan and in this battle with the Slanderer in the wilderness, Jesus is not only Christ standing in solidarity with God but Jesus the Christ standing in solidarity with humanity—the overlap with Israel is no accident.[7] Where Israel failed, Jesus triumphs. Where Israel grieved the spirit after their baptismal event (crossing the ground of the Red Sea between two walls of water); Jesus follows the leading of the Spirit after his baptism event in the Jordan. Where Israel clamored and complained about hunger, Jesus resists the temptation to feed himself; where Israel spent 40 years, Jesus spends 40 nights; where Israel was God’s son disobedient, Jesus is God’s son obedient.[8]

The first generation of Israel, liberated from the captivity and bondage of Egypt’s oppression and enslavement, was sentenced to death for their disobedience, never to enter into the Promised Land. Jesus will enter the Promised Land, the presence of God, and establishes that he is the Promised Land: he is the Son with whom God is well pleased. And where this Son goes so too does the presence of God, for where he stands there established is holy ground. And as the presence of God does, so too will Jesus: illuminate and expose the people for who and what they are.

Cue the crisis.

And he ate nothing during those days and when they had completed he was hungry. The slanderer said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone so that it may become bread. And Jesus answered him, “It is written that humanity will not live by bread alone. 4:2b-4

The first temptation is rather basic: the Slanderer plays off of Jesus’s hunger. Jesus, you need food, so, being the Son of God, just turn this stone into bread.[9] The Devil here is addressing a very basic human need: hunger. In his hunger, Jesus stands in solidarity with humanity in his flesh. He is hungry. Jesus’s answer doesn’t create a dichotomy between flesh and spirit; it’s not as if Jesus has suddenly become an airatarian or that he thinks that the flesh is bad and only needs spiritual food. He doesn’t. The picture is larger than that. Jesus’s hunger is a real and present need; however, it’s not only by bread that humanity is nourished, but primarily by the word of God. For forty days and forty nights Jesus existed in the wilderness with nothing but the word of God. [10] There was no manna this time; there was just the word of God.

Also, it’s the word of God that sustains the entire cosmos,[11] from the wheat that grows and is turned into the bread we eat to the heartbeat of the one whose hands made that bread. Everything is sustained by the all-powerful, creatio ex nihilo, word of God. This is Jesus’s claim. Drawing some sort of hierarchy between spirit and flesh would do disservice to the incarnation as a whole and negate the depth of the temptation.

Being hungry reminds us of our humanity and our utter and total dependence on something outside of ourselves to live. We don’t actually “earn” our own food; for without the one who prepares the food, we are up a creek without a paddle. We think we are “self-made,” and when God withdraws his sustaining word, we drop to the ground like flies mid flight. If the earth stops turning, you can neither run fast enough to budge it nor will you have the air to fill your lungs to do so. We believe the illusion that we’re autonomously functioning particles. And the dastardly thing is we perpetuate the illusion by repeatedly demanding others (less fortunate than ourselves) to function as such. We do not and cannot go it alone; how dare we ask others to do so.

Cue the crisis.

And the Slanderer lead Jesus and in a moment of time pointed out to him all the kingdoms of the inhabited earth, and he said to Jesus, “I will give to you the authority of all of this and the glory of these, for it has been handed over to me and to whom I wish I give it; therefore if you might worship in my presence, it will all be yours. And answering, Jesus said to him, “It is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and you will serve only him.” 4:5-8

In his letter to Theophilus, Luke already mentioned, in 2:1 and 3:1, that the “emperor” is the authority of the kingdoms of earth. Now, it’s the Slanderer who actually has authority.[12] Luke pulls back the veil: the kingdoms of humanity are under the authority of the Devil. On top of that, the Devil can offer these kingdoms to Jesus all he wants, but they’re only the Devil’s as a higher authority (God) delegates them to him.[13] Comically tragical.

Jesus’s answer is short and sweet: I worship God alone, and him only do I serve. And considering Jesus’s divine standing as the Son of God, these kingdoms are already his. But God does not work within Devil run systems and structures that work against God’s plan.[14] Just because these kingdoms will be and already are Jesus’s kingdoms does not mean that they are as they should be or that they’ll stay standing. In Christ, a new reign is being ushered in and it will look vastly different. What has been considered blessed (wealth, power, strength, popularity) will be flipped on its head.

‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.

‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

‘But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
‘Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.

‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. 6:20-26

Cue the crisis.

Then he brought Jesus into Jerusalem and placed him upon the edge of the temple and he, the Slanderer, said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written that he will command his angels concerning you in order to protect you and that by their hands they will carry you, lest you strike your foot against a stone.” And answering, Jesus said to him, “It is said and written that you will not put the Lord your God to the test.” 4:9-12

Jesus is brought to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and then is told, by the Slanderer, to test God. The Slanderer uses the “It is written” formula for himself. He uses Psalm 91 to try to recruit Jesus to his plan to test God. Here’s the portion of Psalm 91 in play,

Because you have made the Lord your refuge,
the Most High your dwelling place,
no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent.

For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. 91:9-12

Psalm 91 is not about testing God to see if God is faithful to God’s word. Rather, it’s about those who find their allegiance to God and are in God’s presence. It’s about obedience to God.[15] While Israel was courted by infidelity and succumbed to the temptation, Jesus won’t.[16]

But there’s more to the Psalm. Here are the next two verses:

You will tread on the lion and the adder,
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.
Those who love me, I will deliver;
I will protect those who know my name. 91:13-14

There’s divine rescue through suffering mentioned here and not merely from it.[17] Jesus calls the Slanderer out because it’s not about protecting his foot from striking a rock, but that that very foot will crush the head of the serpent prophesied long ago in Genesis 3:15. The Psalm the Devil uses is the Psalm of his demise. Jesus’s “Don’t put the Lord your God to the test” may as well be, “Check mate.” The Offspring of the Woman has been born and that Offspring is Jesus the Christ. Devil best run. And he does.

And when all the temptations finished, the Slanderer kept away from him until a point in time. 4:13

As the Slanderer flees until his next appointed time of engagement with the Christ, keep this in mind: Jesus will now go forth and begin his ministry by calling those who shouldn’t be called according to our standards, and engaging with those who are relegated to the fringes and margins of society. The world is about to be turned upside down.[18] Christ’s foot will step and strike the cornerstone of the kingdom of humanity, rendering it to dust because of dust it was made, and he will establish himself as the new cornerstone of the Reign of God—through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension.[19] Those in charge, those wielding power and authority for their own gain, those turning a blind eye to the poor and hungry, naked and homeless…they best run.

Cue the crisis.

In your encounter with God in the event of faith you become aware you are grafted into the story of Israel: the story of failure upon failure upon failure. This narrative moment in the gospel of Luke is hardwired to transcend time and space, confronting all whose eyes are turned and ears perked by the scene before them: Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, being tempted by the Slanderer and winning.

Witnessing this event, we are brought to the reality that we would not have won, that we would have succumbed to each and every one of those temptations, and would have given far more for far less. We are exposed for wanting. We would have conjured the bread from stone, we would’ve sought our own power and fame no matter the cost, we would’ve tested the Lord our God. And we do these things. Everyday.

Cue the crisis but don’t fear the crisis. According to this story: Christ is the crisis. And if Christ is the crisis, then he’s in the crisis—he’s with you in the thick of it. It’s the crisis that brings you to the fullness of your humanity—body, mind, and soul—because it’s in this crisis where you realize you need an other. Christ is the incarnate Word of God who sustains your very life, who is very God of very God worthy of your worship and obedience, who surpasses all testing because he’s the fulfillment of all promises. God dwells in your crisis as God dwells in the gallows, with the dry bones, with those who are dead in their trespasses because God’s righteousness is that which calls to life what is dead.

“A miracle happens, the miracle of miracles, that this impure being, impure in the midst of the pure creation, that this impure being is permitted to live. The annihilating encounter with God become for him a life-giving encounter…Death is taken away, the death which I bear in myself because of my contradiction, my impurity is covered by the encircling life-giving love to him who was the prey of death.”[20]

Cue the crisis because crisis is the heart of Lent, the heart of the Great Litany. Cue the crisis and throw yourself at the feet of God whose property is to always have mercy, and find life.

 

 

 

[1] Joel B. Green The Gospel of Luke TNICNT Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997. 191. “Luke 4:1-13 presents a number of key elements linking it, some almost subliminally, to surrounding material, helping to ensure its interpretation as a bridge scene moving Jesus from his endowment with the Spirit to his public ministry.”

[2] Karl Barth CD IV.1.59.260, “On the old view the wilderness was a place which, like the sea, had a close affinity with the underworld, a place which belonged in a particular sense to demons. It was to encounter there that He was led there and kept His fast there. For Him as the Son, the One in whom God was well pleased, this had to be the case. …His way will never be at a safe distance from the kingdom of darkness but will always be along its frontier and finally within that kingdom. But already at the outset it brings Him into confrontation and encounter with it.”

[3] Green 191, “He was baptized, the Spirit descended upon him he was the assumed son of Joseph-these all portray him in a passive mode. Now he becomes the deixic center, the one around whom the narrative and its actants are oriented, the one preparing to take the initiative (4:14-15) for which he has been equipped.”

[4] Green 192, Pericope is a clash of “cosmic proportions” the devil takes on Jesus, God’s son, who is full of the Holy Spirit, “This account thus exhibits the basic antithesis between the divine and the diabolic that will continue throughout Luke-Acts.”

[5] Green 191, Luke’s narrative emphasis lies on the presence of the Holy Spirit in Jesus, thus, “Empowered by the Spirit, Jesus is full of the Spirit, and inspired by the Spirit. His central, active role is therefore fundamentally as God’s agent, and it is this special relationship and its implications that lie at the root of Jesus’ identity in Luke-Acts. Not surprisingly then it is this that will be tested in the encounter between Jesus and the devil.”

[6] Green 191-2, “Luke 3:21-38 was in its own way integral to the demonstration of his competence indicating his possession of the requisite credentials, power, and authority to set forth on his mission. But these are not enough. They must be matched with Jesus’ positive response to God’s purpose. Hence here Jesus will signal his alignment with God’s will in a way that surpasses the evidence already provided by his display of submission to God at his baptism. In the OT and in subsequent Jewish tradition fidelity to God was proven in the midst of testing whether direct activity of the devil. In the present scene, the testing conducted by the devil seeks specifically to controvert Jesus’ role as Son of God either by disallowing the constraints of that relationship or by rejecting it outright.”

[7] Green 193, “The similarities are sufficient in scope and quantity to show that the narrator has drawn attention deliberately to Jesus in his representative role as Israel, God’s son.”

[8] Green 192, “Correlation to Israel’s testing in the wilderness:

  1. divine leading in the wilderness (Deut 8:2- cf. Luke 4:1);
  2. “forty” (Exod 16:35; Num 14:34; Deut 8:2, 4; cf. Luke 4:2);
  3. Israel as God’s son (e.g., Exod 4:22-23; cf. Luke 4:3, 9);
  4. the testing of Jesus is analogous to that experienced by Israel and the scriptural texts he cites derive from those events in which Israel was tested by God (Deuteronomy 6-8); and
  5. though Jesus was full of the Spirit and followed the Spirit’s guidance, Israel ‘rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit’ (Isa. 63:10)”

[9] Green 193, “These ingredients of ‘setting’ are in fact integral to the first test. Jesus’ fasting has resulted in his near starvation and this foregrounds an immediate need, the provision of food.”

[10] Karl Barth CD III.2.44.67, “It is only apparently the case that the Matthean text says less and is more reserved, as though in the phrase ‘not by bread alone’ Jesus had recognised that man does indeed live by bread too, but that he also needs the words proceeding from the mouth of God. For in this case the trite application that man has not only bodily but also spiritual needs is so obvious that the explication is a priori brought under suspicion. The fact is that during the forty days in the wilderness Jesus did not live by bread at all, but according to Mt. 42 He was an hungred, and yet in spite of His hunger He was still alive. Again, His answer to the tempter is a quotation from Deut. 83. But in this passage ‘living by bread’ is not one necessity to which ‘living by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’ is added as a second. On the contrary, the reference is to the miracle effected by the World of the Lord, which consisted in the fact that for forty years God led Israel through the desert, and that where there was no bread, and the people seemed likely to die of hunger, He nevertheless sustained them, namely, by the manna which neither they nor their fathers knew. It was in exactly the same way (except that now there was no question even of manna) that God sustained the hungering Jesus in the desert.”

[11] Karl Barth CD III.2.44.67, “This divine communication brings it about that He lives and is sustained, nourishing and quickening Him. Even the bread which, if He were not in the wilderness, He might sow, reap, grind and bake, or even purchase or steal, could not give him life as [humanity]. This is given Him by the almighty Word of God, whether he has bread or hungers in the wilderness.”; see also CD III.4.55.347

[12] Green 194, “At the outset it is worth noting two sources of irony present in Luke’s description of this setting. First we have been led to believe that ‘all the world’ was under the charge of the Roman emperor (2:1; 3-1)- Now however, in a way clearly parallel to the scenario painted in Revelation 13, we discover that the world of humanity actually ruled by the devil.”

[13] Green 195, “Whatever rule the devil exercises is that allowed him by God; he can only delegate to Jesus what has already been delegated to him. What Jesus is offered, then, is a shabby substitute for the divine sonship that is his by birth.”

[14] Green 194, “The perspective he thus outlines is fully at home with the language of reversal and portrayal of hostility characteristic of Luke 1-3, even if it goes beyond them in identifying the activity of those human and systemic agents that oppose God’s plan and God’s people as manifestations of diabolic rule.”

[15] Green 195, “Fundamentally the issue here is akin to that in the first test. Jesus is radically committed to one aim, God’s eschatological agenda; the devil has an alternative aim a competing agenda. He wants to recruit Jesus to participate in a test of the divine promises of Psalm 91. In doing so, the devil overlooks the critical reality that the psalm is addressed to those who through their fidelity to God reside in God’s presence; even in the psalm faithful obedience to God is the controlling need.

[16] Green 196, “Jesus does not the deny the promises of God the devil quotes at him but he “…does deny the suitability of their appropriation in this context. He recognizes the devil’s strategy as an attempt to deflect him from his single-minded commitment to loyalty and obedience in God’s service, and interprets the devil’s invitation as an encouragement to question God’s faithfulness. Israel had manifested its doubts by testing God. But Jesus refuses to do so (cf. Deut 6:16).”

[17] Green 196, “Moreover the devil fails to recognize an even deeper mystery known already to the believing community of which Luke is a part, that divine rescue may come through suffering and not only before (and from) them.”

[18] Of note, from W. Travis McMaken’s Our God Loves Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017). “Appendix 1: Must a Christian Be A Socialist (Helmut Gollwitzer 1972)” trans WTM. “The goal of the disciples’ service is a society that gives equality to their unequally endowed members and gives each member the chance for a cull unfolding of life: where the strong help the weak, where production stands in the service of all, where the social product is not siphoned off by a privileged minority so that only the modes t remainder is at the disposal of the others, a society that ensures appropriate regulation of freedom and of social co-determination for all, the development of social life for the common task and for rich purpose in life for all members of society.”

[19] Karl Barth IV.1.59.264, “We cannot ignore the negative form in which the righteousness of God appears in the event handed down in these passages. This is unavoidable, because we have to do with it in the wilderness, in the kingdom of demons, in the world unreconciled with God, and in conflict with that world. It is unavoidable because what we have here is a prefiguring of the passion. But in the passion, and in this prefiguring of it, the No of God is only the hard shell of the divine Yes, which in both cases is spoken in the righteous act of this one man. That this is the case is revealed at the conclusion of the accounts in Mark and Matthew by the mention of the angels who, when Satan had left Him, came and ministered unto Him. The great and glorious complement to this at the conclusion of the passion is the story of the resurrection.”

[20] Helmut Gollwitzer “Forgiveness are One” The Way to Life: Sermons in a Time of World Crisis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981). 43.

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A Unique Draw

Luke 6:20-23 (Homily)

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
    for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
(Luke 6:20-23)

I remember clearly the evening we had to break it to our boys that we were leaving Colorado to move here, to Louisiana, for me to take this job. The news of the move swung like a wrecking ball into their lives: everything they had previously known to be regular and normal was now flying through their atmosphere in scattered pieces and shards of what was.

As the news sunk in and the pieces and shards started to hit their ground, their eyes told us we were in for a full blown verbal assault: YOU’RE STUPID! I WISH I WAS NEVER BORN! I HATE YOU SO MUCH! I WISH YOU WERE NEVER BORN! And so on. Doors slammed, immense pain and hatred vented, tears shed, plea bargains offered, more doors slammed.

The pain of our boys hit us hard. Their words seemed endless; their physical anger appeared nearly unrestrainable. But what broke us most was neither their verbal attacks nor the physical tantrums, but that their hearts were broken. They fired their verbal shots, and we only nodded in agreement, “I know. I know, buddy….I know.” Silent nods.

And even though we knew we had to be the strong and steady ones in the equation, we couldn’t help but cry with them. I wiped away the warm tears that broke through to the surface and rolled down my cheeks. I cried because these human being, the ones that my body spent months growing and nourishing, these human beings were in pain and I couldn’t have any other response than to cry with them.

Their pain was my pain; their grief was my grief; their sorrow and mourning was my sorrow and mourning. The only thing I could do then, in that moment, was stand as close as possible and be present, creating space for them to let out the depths of their emotions and take as much of it as I could.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus said, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” How are those who weep to laugh? How are those who weep, blessed? Because in the thick of their pain and sorrow and grief, God is with them. Blessedness comes from the presence of God. And the radical aspect of God’s blessedness is that it comes to us not as we are clean, and tidy, and happy, but when we are at the bottom, in the lowness of life, when everything hurts emotionally, mentally, physically because life has dealt us its blows one more time.

Our God doesn’t shy away from the radical pain and hurt and suffering and sorrow and grief of the human life. Just the opposite.  “For [God] knows how we were made,” writes the Psalmist. “[God] remembers that we are dust.” Our God is a God “whose property is always have mercy,” to have mercy especially when and where all hope seems lost. And God’s mercy is expressed in that God entered into our humanity and suffered under that weight by being born, living, sorrowing, and suffering pain even death on the cross.

Our suffering and grief and mourning has a unique way of drawing us to this God who is love, who is not far off when we are at our saddest, our angriest, but who has come close—Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us!  Suffering has a unique way of drawing us to the Suffering God who suffered for us on the cross, who was raised from the dead, and who has declared that the suffering of this life will not last forever, that the suffering of this life does not have the final word, because God has conquered it. 

Your suffering, your sorrow, your grief, and your pain are not indicative that God has turned his face from you; He hasn’t, you have not been abandoned. It’s just the opposite: He loves you so very, very, very much; so much so he has laid down His life for you because he hears your cries, because God knows. And God’s not mad if you are ticked and angry, sad and grieved.

Any notion that you would bear any sort of curse for being upset with the trauma life can bring, is a lie. If I could bear the anger of my sons, how much more can God—the one whole loves the beloved fully and completely, better than any earthly mother and father—how much more can this God bear your pain and suffering and anger and grief?

Blessed are you who mourn because the God of the universe is with you, has taken on your plight. Blessed are you because there is no dark night of the soul that is too dark to cloak you from God’s eye; there is no pain so great that would cause Christ to just shrug his shoulders and yawn; there is no sorrow so deep that would cause your pain to be outside of God’s knowledge.

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:34-39).

Blessed are you who mourn, grief, sorrow, who are angry and upset, for God is present with you.

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Called

Luke 5:27-32 (Homily)

“After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up, left everything, and followed him.

Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:27-32).

There’s something about having your name called and such an event comes with a myriad of potential responses: total excitement or complete fear. I remember in high school, in college, and even in seminary, I would sit in the back of the class, quiet, listening and praying and hoping that the teacher would never, ever, ever, ever call on me. (I know, the irony that I’m not a teacher, in the front of the class, incessantly yammering on about ancient texts and dead theologians.)  I remember the panic when a professor in seminary decided he was going to start calling on people to answer his questions rather than wait for volunteers (a means to ensure everyone was doing the reading). I remember my heart stopping as his eyes met mine and I had yet to fully slip all the way under my desk. “Ms. Ellis, please explain to the class Calvin’s view of the response of the believer to God in faith…” Me: blank stare. I literally just stared at him. After an awkward silent stand off, he moved on to someone else.    

And then there’s the good moments when someone calls your name like when your best friend mentions your name or when that person, you know, that someone who you like says it, the person you like “like like,” like a lot. There are people who call your name and you feel warm and your head turns and you move toward them; and there are people who call your name and you shudder and you feel exposed and you want to hide.

Luke 5 is an interesting chapter because it’s primarily about Jesus calling to himself the people who will become his disciples. And when he calls them, the come. What’s really interesting to me is that Jesus doesn’t technically know these people he calls. When he gets into the boat with Simon Peter and tells him what to do with his net at the beginning of chapter 5, there’s no, “Hey, Pete, let’s go fishing…” There’s just: do this, do that, now, come follow me.” And Peter follows. In our text, there’s no, “Hey, Levi, what’s up…how are you? How’s mom?” There’s just: “‘Follow me.’” And, as Luke tells us, Levi “…got up, left everything, and followed him” (v. 28). It’s pretty amazing; just try getting someone to follow you who does not know you by only saying, “Follow me.” Chances are, the person you address will think you are flat out not quite right.

You turn and move immediately because the voice that has called your name loves you. When these people heard Jesus call their name, they heard the voice of love calling them; they heard the voice of God and their heads turned, and they moved toward God.

What’s really, really interesting to me is this: back in Genesis 3, there’s a moment after the fateful eating of the fruit when all things go to heck in a hand-basket, Adam and Eve realize they are naked and feel shame and humiliation, and they hide. Here’s the story,

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Gen 3:7-10).

In their newfound ability to determine what was good and evil for on their own, they decided that God’s voice; God’s call was not good. They hid when they heard God approach. Hoping and praying that God would not notice them, they ducked behind some trees. There’s a fear and trembling here when God calls the man and the woman out from behind the tree. They’re reluctant to step out into the open.

But when Jesus calls it seems this previous moment of Genesis 3 is being undone. Jesus calls the people, and the people come, they don’t hide, they don’t run, they turn and follow.  Jesus fulfilled the great promise of God to his people: I will be your God and you will be my people. They will be the people who turn and follow God when God calls, not the ones that hide and turn away.

But why this change? Why are the people dropping everything and following Jesus when Jesus calls? Because Jesus is the word made flesh, the love of God incarnate, the loving voice that sounded at the beginning of creation and called everything into existence: the stars, the sun and the moon, the land and the sea, and all of the animals, you and me. This is the voice that is calling these people in this moment, and don’t we know when love calls?

John tells us in his gospel, that Jesus says, “‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him’” (3:16-17). Where before Adam and Eve assumed that God’s presence and God’s call was going to expose unto condemnation and death, Jesus reveals that this divine presence, call, and exposure leads unto comfort and life. Jesus is the word of God that goes forth into the world causing what it desires: “Come and follow me” and the people do.

The one who called Simon Peter the fisherman and Levi the tax collector calls you. You are grafted into this story because Jesus’s call goes forth by the power of the Holy Spirit today: calling, beckoning, you into comfort, into love, into life. The one who spoke the cosmos into existence calls you, lovingly calls you who are the beloved of God. Hear the God of love call you, Beloved, and turn and follow and experience life beyond measure.

My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
    and come away;
for now the winter is past,
    the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
    the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
    is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
    and the vines are in blossom;
    they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
    and come away. (Song of Songs 2:10-13)

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Solidarity in the Jordan

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 (Sermon)

“Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his Name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” Amen  (Psalm 29:2)

According to the Enneagram, I’m a 5. When you look up the description of any type, there’s always one word that describes the type: 1s = reformers; 2 = helpers, etc.). 5s are “Investigators.” We are the “thinkers”, the “pontificators”, the ones who wax eloquently about everything (You’re welcome). We’re the people that make you mumble, overthink things much? We’re the type where Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is never what the therapist suggests.

A really fun (and endearing) thing about 5s in general is that we, without fail, think we’re exceptionally clever and always right. Always. And if you don’t agree with us, *shrug*, clearly you weren’t listening. The irony is hard to miss: I’m an ordained priest given the authority to preach and teach. I’m allowed to get in this elevated pulpit and tell you all my clever thoughts, and you are held captive in those pews (to leave now would be weird!). 

But I’m not supposed to.

I’m supposed to be intellectually humble and led by the Holy Spirit. It’s like putting a toddler in a room with a bunch of candy out in the open and then saying, but don’t eat any of it…mkay? Okay, Lauren, we’re going to ordain you, but don’t let any of it go to your head, even when it threatens to do so…which will be all of the time.

One of the main reasons I resisted being ordained was because I felt the potential for this hot mess. I was terrified to be ordained because I knew the mix had the potential to become a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious type of hot mess. In other words, a big bunch of NOPE. When told (repeatedly for years): you should be ordained; I replied (repeatedly for years): get behind me, Satan. No. Nope.

I feared what I knew I could become: more full of myself and more disconnected.

When the day came and I found myself getting ordained to the priesthood (and the walls of the Cathedral hadn’t caught on fire), I felt this fear with every heart-beat, with every breath: Good Lord, keep me…keep me from myself. So, when the time came for me to lie prostrate on the ground, I felt led to do something else. I knelt down. I reached behind my head, gripped the two big clips holding back all of my hair, and pulled them out. My hair unfurled, and I bent forward, forehead to the ground. My hair spread out around me. 

I pulled into my ordination the story of the sinful woman forgiven—the woman who uses her hair and expensive oil to anoint Jesus for his burial. While I was being ordained into the great commission to care for God’s people and to proclaim the Gospel, I wanted to remember who I am: forgiven. And I wanted to remember that my charge was to be for the people, for you with God.

I am one of you yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I never ever want to forget my solidarity with the very people I am here to minister to, to love, to comfort, and to care for in the name of God. You and I, we’re not very different: bone of bone, flesh of flesh, desperate for a love that always endures, and in need of the comforting word of reconciliation and absolution, in desperate need of Jesus. If I am different in any way it is not that I’ve been called further up and further out of the people, but further down and further in. And I share the crisis of judgment: will I follow the devices and desires of my own heart or will I follow Christ into and out of the waters of the Jordan?

You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you downGo tell that long tongue liar
Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler
The gambler
The back biter
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down[1]

And while the people were expecting and considering in their hearts concerning John, whether or not he was the Christ, John answer saying to all of them, “I baptize you [with] water; but the one who is mightier than I comes, of whom I am not worthy to untie the straps of his sandals; he will baptize you in with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing shovel is in his hand to cleanse thoroughly his threshing floor and to lead together the grain into his granary; but the chaff will burn up in unquenchable fire. (Luke 3:15-17)

In chapter three of the gospel of Luke, John has stirred up an “eschatological crisis”[2] among the people who came to him to be baptized in the Jordan. John declared to the people: judgment is coming and there is nowhere to run or hide! Just as the Old Testament ends with the judgment oracle in the book of Malachi, John opens his prophetic ministry with judgment. The people who hear are not only thrust under water in John’s baptism of repentance and water, but into an existential crisis: on whom will judgment fall? And the answer that dawns on their minds and in their hearts is: on us. All the people (the regular yous and mes and the tax collectors and the soldiers) rightly panic and ask: what should we do!?

John tells them what to do and in doing this incurs their private curiosity as they wonder if he is the Messiah because they don’t honestly know at this point;[3] it’s unclear and they are thrust further into existential crises and chaos. John senses their internal question and proclaims: no, I am a man—one of you—not the Christ. I have merely baptized you with water, cleaning only your outside.[4] But He who is mightier than I am is coming, and he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire and this will cleanse you to the core. The long awaited fulfillment of the promise spoken by the prophet Ezekiel comes, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (36:26). Where water can’t go, the Holy Spirit can; where water can only clean and make “new” the outside, the Spirit with fire can clean and make new the inside.[5]

John’s call to baptism with water and repentance sets the stage for the baptism that is to come with the Messiah.[6] As mentioned above, John has set the people into an eschatological crisis: judgment is coming. And all the people are forced to make a choice:[7] repent and be baptized with water thus be for God and purified by the baptism of fire and the holy spirit, sealed as Christ’s own forever, collected like grain in a granary; or, reject repentance and the baptism with water, thus reject and be against God, thus endure the fires of judgment of the baptism of the holy spirit and be burnt up like useless chaff.

A decision must be made at this juncture. What will you do? Asks, John. Will you be for God or against?

Well my goodness gracious let me tell you the news
My head’s been wet with the midnight dew
I’ve been down on bended knee talkin’ to the man from Galilee
He spoke to me in the voice so sweet
I thought I heard the shuffle of the angel’s feet
He called my name and my heart stood still
When he said, “John, go do my will!”

And when all the people were baptized and when Jesus had been baptized and while he was praying the heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form as a dove, and a voice from heaven came: you are my son, the beloved, in you I am well pleased. (Luke 3:21-22)

Jesus’s baptism is not the focus here in Luke’s account of Jesus’ baptism; rather, Luke’s focus is a bit more specific: the endowment of the Holy Spirit and God’s affirmation of Jesus as his son.[8] This affirmation is specifically placed at the end of the entire event. Luke’s ordering is intentional (as Luke is in his gospel): all the (regular) people are baptized first, then Jesus gets baptized, and then while Jesus is praying the heavens open up, the Holy Spirit descends, and God speaks. “’You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”

The ordering draws the ear of the hearer: The last to be baptized is the first of New Creation, of the New Order, who is the New Adam.

The Old Adam, the first of the Old Order and of the Old Creation was commissioned to care for the creation and to trust God. In Genesis 3, at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, both Adam and Eve are presented with a choice: will you be for God or for yourselves? Will you choose to define good and evil according to yourselves or follow with God’s definition of good and evil? And we know how this story ends: Adam and Eve opt for the fruit to make them wise. They choose to be for themselves. With this fateful choice—with the man and the woman he created—God was not well pleased.

Here in the waters of the Jordan with John, the choice is presented again: will you be for God or will you be for yourselves? Will you stand with God or with yourself? But this time it’s not just any old Adam answering, it’s Jesus, the son of God, who answers. Jesus enters the waters and stands among the people and is baptized by John, and he answers the divine question posed to humanity: I am for God; I stand with God.

But, again, this isn’t just any old Adam answering. It’s Jesus the Christ, the divine son with whom God is well pleased. Also, this divine son is also the son of humanity. Jesus of Nazareth who is the Christ stands in the Jordan praying after having been baptized and thus stands in total and complete solidarity with the very people he came to rescue. Like those who had come out to be baptized, to be about God, to be reoriented to God, so did Jesus.[9] But this is also God incarnate in solidarity with humanity; Jesus is for God and for them, the regular people who stand with him in the Jordan. Jesus is the answer to the divine question posed to humanity and is the divine proclamation that God is for humanity.

In Christ, heaven and earth have become one. Jesus is in solidarity with God in God’s mission to seek and save the lost[10] and with humanity in its plight.[11] The one who is the Beloved of God is the love that has come into the world to save the beloved whom God loves. Following Jesus in this moment:  to love others is to love God; to love God is to love others. There is no distinction between the two. Jesus does both in the moment he is baptized by John in the waters of the Jordan; thus we are confronted with the same crisis: whom will you follow? With whom will you stand?

Here in the Jordan, God’s solidarity with humanity and humanity’s solidarity with God is made tangible and manifest in the person and work of Christ. When the people hurt, God hurts. When the people suffer, God feels that suffering. When the oppressor oppresses God’s people, the beloved, God feels that oppression. When the Pharaoh in the beginning of Exodus enslaved and tormented the Israelites and the Israelites called out under the weight of immense suffering and oppression, God heard and God knew in an intimate way and God acted. When Saul reigned terror upon and persecuted the fledgling church, Jesus showed up: “’Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?… I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting’” (Acts 9:4-5). You can’t mess with God’s people and think God won’t notice and won’t act. Mess with the least of these; mess with him.

Well, you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What’s down in the dark will be brought to the light
You can run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down

Judgment has come to the world in the waters of the Jordan in the person of Jesus the Christ. Humanity is exposed for who and what they are and who and what they are not

“With His existence there will fall upon them in all its concreteness the decision, the divine and ultimate decision. What will become of them? How shall they stand?”[12] You stand implicated under this judgment in this crisis: whom will you follow? With whom will you stand?

More than you, those of us in leadership called and employed to be servants to the people of God, we stand doubly in crisis and doubly judged. Bishops, priests, and deacons of the church bear the burden of the millstone and the deepest part of the sea if we do not stand with the people thus follow God. Whom will I follow? And with whom will I stand? The answer must always be God and the people; my collar demands this.[13]

Christ came because God loved; he came to save us; to save the lost. He came to graft us into his story and to cause us to partake in his mission to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves, to love justice, mercy, and peace. He came to make us his brothers and sisters thus heirs with him. And if heirs then sons and daughters of God Almighty, the ones who make up the manifold children promised to Abraham in Genesis 12, the children who make up the nations blessed.

And we are the ones who rest in the fulfillment of the promise that the love of God will never ever be taken from them because the promised son of David, Jesus, sits forever on the throne. And our baptism with water and spirit is through which we are made participants in this story and where Jesus’s history becomes our history[14]–we with our histories are grafted into the history of Christ; where our activity in water baptism is paradoxically identical with the activity of God in the baptism of the spirit.[15]

While I pray you always stand with the One who stood with those people in the Jordan and pray you stand with the one who stands with you in your baptism, you are faced with the dilemma anew today and everyday. Being grafted into this story of Christ’s history by the event of faith in the encounter with God: whom will you follow? When the man comes around,[16] with whom will you stand?

[1] Johnny Cash “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”

[2] Joel Green “The Gospel of Luke” The New Internationl Commentary on the New Testament Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997. “John’s provocation of eschatological crisis (3:7-9) elicits two forms of questions from his audience. First, they inquire how they might ready themselves for impending judgment (3:10-14). Now, they query whether he is the Messiah.” 180.

[3] Green 180, “For them, the meaning of ‘Messiah’ is manifestly fluid at this point; hope is present but ill defined. They do not know if John and the anticipated messianic figure fit the same profile, and this allows John to begin the process of outlining what to expect of the Messiah. At the same time, he is able to identify his own relationship to the coming one. According to the narrator, John’s answer is to all the people- everyone receives the invitation to accept his baptism and receive the baptism “with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

[4] Green 180-1, “John addressed the people by characterizing the Messiah in comparison with himself…(1) The Messiah is superior to John in terms of status. John does not count himself worthy even to serve as the slave by removing the thong of his sandals.73 (2) John characterizes as the messenger or prophet who prepares the way for the coming one using language that echoes Mai 3:1’ 4:5, thus embracing the role anticipated for him in 1:17,76; 3:4-6. (3) John designates the Messiah as “more powerful’ than himself—a comparison that apparently resides in his superior status and above all in his mode of baptism. The character of John’s baptism has been articulated in 3:3-14 as repentance-baptism, a cleansing by which one’s life is oriented anew around the service of God…”

[5] Green 182, “…[John’s] his baptism forces a decision for or against repentance, and this prepares for the Messiah’s work (cf. Ezek 36:25-26).”

[6] Karl Barth CD IV.4 (53), “What took place according to their account is thus more than an independent and materially alien preface to the history of Jesus. As they see and present it, it is the prologue which opens and characterizes the whole of this history, setting it in motion here from both with a definite direction and towards a specific goal. The baptism of Jesus, as His baptism is in a sense the point of intersection of the divine change and the human decision. In the main character in the event who here enters upon His way, who, one might almost say, stands here at the beginning of His Christian life, the two aspects though plainly distinct, are directly one and the same. In this direct unity this person is the subject of the life-history which follows, the history of salvation lived out for all men. At this point however, the particular interest of the event is that it was the exemplary and imperative baptismal event. In this respect, too, it is a point of intersection. For here baptism with the Holy Ghost, which may be regarded as the epitome of the divine change effected on a man, meets baptism with water which represents here the first concrete step of the human decision which follows and corresponds to the divine change.”

[7] Green 182, “Although the image described here is generally taken to be that of winnowing—that is, tossing harvested grain into the air by way of allowing wind to separate the wheat from the chaff—the language John uses actually presumes that the process of winnowing has already been completed. Consequently, all that remains is to clear the threshing floor, and this is what John pictures. This means that John’s ministry of preparation is itself the winnowing, for his call to repentance set within his message of eschatological judgment required of people that they align themselves with or over against God’s justice. As a consequence, the role of the Messiah is portrayed as pronouncing or enacting judgment on the people on the basis of their response to John.”

[8] Green 185, “Luke is less interested in Jesus’ baptism as such, and more concerned with his endowment with the Spirit and God’s affirmation of his sonship.”

[9] Green 185, The three infinitive phrases in parallel, “The initial dependent clauses lead into the focal point of this pericope by stressing Jesus’ solidarity with those who had responded positively to John’s message- by participating in the ritual act of baptism, we may recall, they (he) communicated their (his) fundamental orientation around God’s purpose.”

[10] Green 187, “Working in concert with the endowment of the Holy Spirit, this divine affirmation presents in its most acute form Jesus’ role as God’s agent of redemption.…His mission and status are spelled out in relation to God and with reference to his purpose mission of redemption and establishes peace with justice in ways that flow determined by obedience to God’s purpose that the devil will test in 4:1-13.”

[11] Green 186, “Now however Jesus’ identity in relation to God and God’s redemptive project is proclaimed by God himself. Heaven itself has opened providing us with direct insight into God’s own view of things. That the voice of God agrees with those earlier voices (i.e., of Gabriel, Elizabeth, and the possible responses to Jesus. One can join Elizabeth, the angels, the narrator, an others who affirm Jesus’ exalted status an/or identity as God’s Son, or one can reject this evaluation and so pit oneself over against God.”

[12] Karl Barth CD IV.1 (217), But, of course this involves judging in the more obvious sense of the word, and therefore pardoning and sentencing. Thus the solemn question arises: Who will stand when the Son of God…into the world, when He calls the world and therefore all men (and every individual man) to render an account and to make answer for its condition? Quid sum miser tunc dicturus, quem patronum roguaturus, cum vix justus sit securus? All other men will be measured by the One who is man as they are under the same presuppositions and conditions. In His light, into which they are nolentes volentes betrayed by His being as a fellow-man, they will be shown for what they are and what they are not.

[13] Helmut Gollwitzer The Way to Life “What is this mission that makes him ready to let himself be sent thus into that which men can do to him? What is the mission of Jesus? To make men human, to make inhuman men human, brotherly, for the sake of God’s brotherliness, because inhumanity and unbrotherlines sis destroying all of us.” 21.

[14] Cf W. Travis McMaken The Sign of the Gospel “Barth’s discussion of Spirit baptism comprises a dialectical movement between two poles. One pole is God’s objective work of reconciliation in Christ and the other is the faithful and obedient human response to that work. Spirit baptism is where these two poles meet in a dynamic event of effectual call and free response. Barth’s discussion of this event draws upon and brings together many important strands in his theology, for here culminates the movement of the electing God’s divine grace as it reaches particular women and men among as elected in Jesus Christ. In this discussion, Barth walks the fine line between Christomonist and anthropomonist positions, neither creating the history of Jesus Christ as that which swallows the histories of human individuals, nor relegating Christ’s history to merely symbolic significance. Barth also does not denigrate the work of the Spirit or separate it from that of Christ. All of these things comprise a differentiated and ordered unity in Barth’s thought, aimed at grounding faithful human obedience on God’s grace in Jesus Christ.” 174

[15] Ibid, 174. “Spirit baptism comprises the awakening of faith that actualizes in one’s own life the active participation in Christ to which every individual is elected. This awakening demands and necessarily includes faithful and obedient human response. In the first instance, this response is faith itself. However, Barth argues that there is a paradigmatic way in which water baptism comprises this response. Water baptism constitutes the foundation of the Christian life precisely as such a paradigmatic response.”

[16] Johnny Cash “The Man Comes Around”

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Shema, O Israel!

Luke 8:19-21 (Homily)

The following is a Homily I delivered this morning to the student body of the private high school where I teach theology and religion.

Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.” But he said to them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” (Luke 8:19-21)

On Saturday, Robert Bowers opened up gunfire on Jews who were attending their Synagogue on the Sabbath, in Pittsburgh, PA. The attack was explicitly fueled by anti-Semitism, substantiated by white supremacy and nationalism, with a not-so-thinly-veiled vein of Christian Zionism. These Jews were gathered there, in their Synagogue, in their sanctuary to worship God, to rest (it was the Sabbath). To hear the Word of YWHW, their Lord, their God. They were there to be brought face to face with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they were there to hear the story of God’s activity and promises for and to them. They were there to receive life. Rather, that sanctuary, that rest, turned into chaos, fear, panic, and most grievous death.

 

One of the components of the Jewish liturgy said regularly, is something called the “Shema.” It’s considered a prayer of allegiance to God, a centerpiece of Jewish worship and prayer life. It’s the heart of the Law. The Shema, a prayer of the people of Israel, is from the Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 6. If you didn’t know, Deuteronomy is one of the first five books, the fifth in fact, of the beginning of the portion of our Christian bible that we refer to as the Old Testament. But for modern Jews, as it was for those Israelites way back when, this is not the Old Testament, but The Testament. And this prayer functions as the heart of the portion of what is considered the Torah, the Law, which make up the first five books of our Old Testament.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Dt 6:4-9)

“Shema, O Israel!” Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might…And do these things. The word “Shema” is translated as “Hear” in our text of Deuteronomy. But “hear” is not the fullest rendering of what Shema actually and truly means. To translate it rightly, we should say, “Hear and Obey” hear so deeply that you actually do what is commanded of you. Hear and obey. This hearing and doing is the mark of the Israelite. Hearing results in the fear of the Lord, which we know about in terms of faith, and fear or the Lord, faith, is that which is the foundation of our activity, our vibrant activity in the world as God’s image, God’s representatives and reflections in the world, having dominion and caring for the earth and for all who inhabit it. To hear and to do is to be the righteous one that Micah, the minor prophet of the Old Testament, looks for in the streets where he finds none that are righteous. Through Micah, the Lord proclaims to Israel that what is desired by God’s very heart are not sacrifices and burnt offerings, but love and humility and justice.

With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:6-8)

To do and be the good Israelite is to hear the word of God and to be so moved to act rightly and to do justice.

 

For Christians, Jesus is the embodiment of the Shema: he is the one who hears and does. He is the righteous Israelite who walks humbly with his God, does justice, loves kindness. He does the Law in full: Jesus loves God and loves his neighbor (the entire world). And in being the embodiment of these commands fulfills them. But we go very astray if we think “fulfillment” now means we are only to “think and pray” for those who suffer horrible atrocities such as this and all the other shootings and bombings and terror attacks in our country. We aren’t off such a hook. There’s a massive systemic problem that is infecting and has infected our country. And its names are legion: anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, and nationalism. And worst of all, American Christianity has seemed to tether itself to the last (thus also to the three former) and it’s not okay.

 

Our passage today is the stuff of a word that is hard. Jesus says, “‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’” There’s nothing easy about this text. There’s no way around what Christ says here and what is explicitly said: those who hear and do the will of God are those who are related to Christ, who are his brothers and his mother. Not “think” the will of God, not even “pray” the will of God. But “do” the will of God. And in saying these things, Jesus links those who follow him with those of Israel and binds them to the Shema back in Deuteronomy 6: Hear! Hear, O Israel… hear so well that you do. Christians are not off the hook, we might think we are, but we’re not. Saved by faith for good works. Not merely good doctrine but good practice.

 

Jesus died for our sins and rose for our justification, Paul explains to us in the book of Romans (4:25). But this wasn’t so that our eyes would remain blind to carnage or our ears to remain deaf to cries of the people. But as Jesus did throughout his ministry on earth and continues to do through the power of the Holy Spirit in the world: he opens our ears and restores our sight so we can hear and see clearly, so that we can call a thing what it is, so that we can face evil and address it, fight back without fear of what the future holds for that is held in Christ.

 

As a priest in the Episcopal tradition and a future doctor of the church, I cannot tolerate the violence and horror that is taking people hostage. I can no longer sit idle or turn a blind eye to the suffering of my fellow brothers and sisters at the hands of extremists and white supremacists. And I cannot tolerate a corrupted, debased, and distorted version of the gospel that is used to support and service such hatred, fear, and oppression. I can’t because the very spirit that lives in me is the very spirit of God and God hates those things. The Gospel of Jesus Christ crucified and raised from the dead and ascended into heaven is the stuff of the love of God for the world, of liberty for the captives, for the oppressed, for those who are weary and burdened and down trodden; to put it into service to do anything but these things is to lose the gospel altogether and to render Christ’s sacrifice for the world pointless. Thus, I cannot just watch, think comforting thoughts, and pray, I must proclaim. I must ask you to wake up, look around, and hear the cries of those who are suffering and hear the cries of those whose cries have been silenced.

 

A rabbi I follow on Twitter[1] wrote a piece for the Washington Post about the synagogue massacre. She writes,

In Judaism, when someone dies, we often say, “May their memory be for a blessing.” This time, it is all of our obligation to make it so. We must mourn and lament and grieve for the lives stolen from the world. We must rage at the baseless hatred and reckless lack of protections that made these senseless killings possible in the first place. And we must honor the memories of those who were murdered by fighting for a world that values every life — refugee and citizen, of every race and religion — and that creates cultures and policies that reflect those values.[2]

I can still speak out; you can still speak out. So we must.

 

 

 

 

[1] Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (Twitter: @TheRaDR)

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/28/victims-tree-life-synagogue-massacre-are-martyrs/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.04a7b3830002

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“Trees Planted by Streams of Water”

Proverbs 31, Mark 9:30-37: True Discipleship #LikeAGirl (Sermon)

Introduction

You either love her or hate her; but all of you are opinionated about her. She’s either revered as the ultimate example of womanhood or she is despised as nothing but oppressive idealism unattainable by human standards. In academic circles she’s rarely if ever the topic of conversation: she’s relegated to an inferior position; that’s just about woman’s work.

Personally, I’m fascinated by her, ever since becoming a Christian I’ve marveled over her. At multiple points in my life, I’ve tried to be her only to fail. I’ve meditated on and prayed through the poem multiple times. It is no surprise to hear that I wrote a 100 page thesis on her. My question leading up to writing my MDiv thesis was: Why? Why is she here?

In and through my intellectual digging, I discovered an answer I wasn’t expecting. Rather than being a checklist for the proper execution of womanhood and wifery or some abstract communication about the people of God, the Church, she is, from head to toe, the manifestation of hope. And not just hope in general, but hope specific. She is the hope of restoration: restoration of woman to God and the restoration of the relationship between men and women. And even more than those two things, she is the manifestation of hope for humanity: what it means to be a good disciple.

It is my contention that she is an expression of the hope for the reversal of the curse of Genesis 3. She is hope for the longed for reversal that is to be completed in the coming Messiah—the Messiah to whom all of the Old Testament points. It is my belief that she is the signpost on the way to through the metanarrative of scripture that points to what comes in Christ. She is the embodiment of the hope embedded in the protoevangelium (the first gospel promise) uttered way back when in Gen 3:15 when God cursed the snake: “I will put enmity between you and the woman,/and between your offspring and hers;/he will strike your head,/and you will strike his heel.”

She doesn’t just point to Genesis 3 when everything goes bad; but to Genesis 1 and 2 when everything was very good. The poem draws us back to the cool air of the garden, when woman walked alongside man and they communed together in the presence of God, as co-vice-regents of the earth. The Proverbs 31 Woman is fighting a battle, not just keeping house. The warfare imagery throughout the poem leads us, the reader, to see a woman, to see a person who is fighting against the chaos established by the fall. The Proverbs 31 Woman is pointing back to Eve and Adam, and at the same time pointing forward—through the chaos of the fall—to Christ—who is the very image of God his Father in his divine substance (God of very God) and of Mary his Mother in his humanity. When God walked the earth he carried her face into the world. The woman was not forgotten when God became man. To over emphasize the masculinity of Jesus the Christ at the expense of the femininity of the one whom he looked like, is to devolve into a very bad Christology and a malnourished and weak God-talk (theology). Let us talk rightly, for ourselves and because the children are listening.

V.10: “An excellent wife who can find?/She is far more precious than jewels.” The way this question is phrased in the original language expects a negative answer. Who can find this excellent wife? No one. She is so “rare” that jewels do not compare to her. Even if you could “find” her, you couldn’t afford her anyway! VV.11-12: “The heart of her husband trusts in her,/and he will have no lack of gain./12 She does him good, and not harm,/all the days of her life.” She is mature in age and in spirit. Their relationship has weathered the trials of the passing years; she is not young nor is she a newly wed. She operates in love towards her husband, just as in the New Testament those who are in Christ are encouraged to operate in love towards one another.[1] He knows that she loves him; there is no doubt, no worry, no wonder; he is confident in her love toward her. And in that he knows she loves him, his heart trusts in her. Much like a child trusts his mother.

V.13: “She seeks wool and flax,/and works with willing hands.” She can use a broad spectrum of materials to create things—she is capable, creative and astute. There is nothing wasteful about her handling of materials; everything is put to use in some way or another (v.13). V.14: “She is like the ships of the merchant;/she brings her food from afar.” She provides for her family. She’s not just making meals, she’s enjoying the bounty created by God and deemed enjoyable by Him.[2] She takes pleasure in the world just as God did and does; just as humanity did and should. V.15: “She rises while it is yet night/and provides food for her household/and portions for her maidens.” She is not given to too much sleep; she is not lazy. However, though she is diligent throughout her days, her work is not her lord (work is its proper place, under her dominion). She does not neglect her household—those who depend on her—for her own pleasures. Both men and women are to be active and care for others and not act like disinterested selfish slugabeds.[3] Oh, and by the way, she’s wealthy: she has servant girls! Even if this was about “works,” She does NOT bare that responsibility alone.

V.16: “She considers a field and buys it;/with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.” She has investment-like foresight. She re-invests; she does not earn gain for gain’s sake. Her very fruitfulness (prosperity) is evidence that she is sowing righteous seed in righteous soil and continually replants the fruits of her hand.[4] V.17: “She dresses herself with strength/and makes her arms strong.” Strength is one of her foremost qualities. Her arms are strong for the task…she is able to get things done, especially in ‘planting’ a vineyard. She is not afraid of hard work or of labor. [5] Meek and mild? Think again! Think: Princess Xena. Think: Wonder Woman: Think: Amazon. Think: Frontier Woman. Weaker sex, eh?

V.18: “She perceives that her merchandise is profitable./Her lamp does not go out at night.” This is not about having a home-based business. This is creational language reminiscent of Genesis, “And God saw that it was good.”[6] She is a creature that was gifted to use her mind and her hands to make. And she uses this ability to purchase the oil for her lamp and keep a store of oil so that her lamp will not go out. She is, essentially, prepared with enough oil to provide light for a long time; she’s one of the wise virgins with a trimmed wick waiting for the Lord to return.[7] V.19: “She puts her hands to the distaff,/and her hands hold the spindle.” There’s more to the imagery here than sewing. What is the distaff and spindle imagery depicting? A valid definition for the Hebrew word translated as spindle is “district”.[8] She puts her hands to the district; she extends her hands and subdues the earth as the manifestation of one of the commands of God in the Garden (reversal of 3:16ff). [9]

V.20: “She opens her hand to the poor/and reaches out her hands to the needy.” She is caring for the poor and afflicted by “extending her hands” as was required by every Israelite (Deut. 15:11). She is the godly person for whom Micah seeks as he walks around the streets, for her hands stretch out and do “good” (7:1-7). She represents what it means to be truly human: caring for the disenfranchised; she is being used as what it means to love your neighbor as yourself;.[10] V.21-22: “She is not afraid of snow for her household,/for all her household are clothed in scarlet./She makes bed coverings for herself;/her clothing is fine linen and purple.” The poem covers many seasons, winter being one of them. The poem does not just cover this woman’s day, but this woman’s entire life. The reference to her household being clothed in scarlet is synonymous with her wealth; she is a wealthy woman and has clothed her household in good, warm clothing.

V.23: “Her husband is known in the gates/when he sits among the elders of the land.” Her husband sits among the elders so he is older, thus she is, too. Notice that there have been 12 verses since her husband has been mentioned. This woman is not defined by him and her service to him, but by her own qualities, V.24: “She makes linen garments and sells them;/she delivers sashes to the merchant.” She is aware that her deeds are worthy and, thus, she does not hesitate to capitalize on them. She is wise and can bring in her own income, which she uses to the benefit of her household.[11] V.25: “Strength and dignity are her clothing,/and she laughs at the time to come.” It is through her relationship with God, it is in her fear of the Lord (v.30) where these characteristics of strength and dignity are sourced. These characteristics are evident to everyone who meets her. V.26: “She opens her mouth with wisdom,/and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.” And her words back this up; they are described as wise. Her outward appearance and inward manner are one in the same; she is not a white-washed tomb. The state and orientation of her heart is righteous for what flows out of her is righteous. In Mark 7, Jesus explains it is what comes out of and not what goes into that defiles a person; our Proverbs 31 woman speaks wisdom and thus is wise and you can only be wise if you know God (according to the Hebrew and our own tradition). She knows Torah (rare); she knows and is known by God.

V.27: “She looks well to the ways of her household/and does not eat the bread of idleness.” V.28-29: “Her children rise up and call her blessed;/her husband also, and he praises her:/“Many women have done excellently,/but you surpass them all.” “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” is akin to the statement of the husband in the poem in Proverbs 31, “Many women have done well, But you surpass them all.”[12] V.30-31: “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,/but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised./Give her of the fruit of her hands,/and let her works praise her in the gates.” This is the key to the whole poem! It is her inner-beauty, her fear of the Lord that has been the eye-catching aspect of this woman from v.11 to v.30. Her strength and dignity come from her relationship with God; her wisdom, too, is of God (Prov. 1:7).

Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked,

nor lingered in the way of sinners,
nor sat in the seats of the scornful!

Their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and they meditate on his law day and night.

They are like trees planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither;
everything they do shall prosper. (Psalm 1:1-3)

The proverbs 31 woman is a glimpse of a restored Eve and a restored relationship of Eve to God; thus, a glimpse of the restoration of the relationship of woman to man.[13] But it’s not only about that. If we take the creation myth of Genesis 2 seriously, and see it primarily as a story about the creation of (thus the necessity of) community in likeness and difference (which is the extinguishing of loneliness), then what we see here, too, is the restoration of Humanity. The Proverbs 31 woman is clearly the embodiment of the ideal humanity yanked out of the chaos and myths of the world–a world broken by oppressive and deleterious systems of abuse in manifold forms–and placed into the Reign of God. Located in the reign of God in the event-encounter with God by faith in Christ alone. And this Reign of God is marked by love and kindness, by mercy and divine justice in restoration and reconciliation, in freedom for all or freedom for none, in the solidarity in suffering and pain and grief and sorrow, in the equality and mutuality in community that lives the very thing believed: that the dividing wall has been torn down, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male and female (Gal 3:28). To be truly human, to be the faithful disciple in the world, is to act as the Reign of God is; to act like the Proverbs 31 woman.

The remarkable thing about our readings today is not just the fact that we read the Proverbs 31 poem and that you happen to have in your midst a self-proclaimed P. 31 scholar (*wink), but that our Gospel passage, from Mark, works with the Proverbs reading. Jesus spends time explaining to his disciples what it means to be a good disciple (and the Gospel of Mark is directed at such a specific message): If anyone wishes to be first, he must be last and servant of all people (9:35, translation mine). He then (immediately) snags a small child and places that child in the midst of his cadre of disciples. Jesus lowers himself, puts his arms around the child and says this, Whoever receives one such as this child on the basis of my name, that person receives me; and whoever receives me, does not receive (only) me, but the one who sent me (v37, translation mine). Whoever receives into their arms, intimately, one such as this child receives me. Receives one such as this child. And I am relocated to when I reached for and held my first born son, just born; receive one such as this child. According to Jesus, to be and do the will of God is to love like a mother.

Even Paul, in the letter to the Ephesians uses mothering imagery to explain what agape love (divine love) looks like to the men/husbands in Ephesus. In a discussion about what mutual submission looks like, Paul shorthands a quick statement to the wives: each to their own husbands as unto the Lord. (Full Stop.) He then turns to the husbands: y’all best sit down for this…Paul begins. What do I mean by love and mutual submission the women get, but you don’t because you’ve never brought a child into the world. The washing imagery of 5:25-28 is less to do with “baptism” and everything to do with the washing of a child by the mother.

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”

A regular practice of mothers in the ancient Greco-Roman society was to forgo their own cleanliness in order to wash their child. Just like our own bodies betray us in gestation, so to do our brains in consistently choosing the well being of our child over our own. It’s why mothers do weird things (because they’re tired and they’re in love). The men would’ve washed themselves first, but the mother would’ve washed the baby first. This Paul uses as an example for the men, they would’ve seen it practiced in their own homes and boy would that message had been radical. Paul knew that women understood “mutual submission”; not only because they had to endure it socially and politically but also because they couldn’t deny it relationally (as a mom). They knew instinctively what that agape love was.

If you’ve ever wondered why the women are always getting “it” in the gospels, if you’ve ever wondered why the women seem to understand what and why Jesus came, you now have your answer: the activity of God for the world has not only paternal but also significant maternal power. And if you know agape love you recognize agape love.

Mark 15, the women watch Jesus die; they knew. Mark 7, the Syrophoenician woman; she knew. Mark 14, the woman who anoints Jesus in Bethany; she knew. Mark 5, the woman suffering from perpetual bleeding; she knew. John 4, the Samaritan woman at the well; she knew. Luke 10, Mary at Jesus’s feet; she knew. They all knew in the core of their being; they knew.

We see Jesus the man in his strong masculine form and forget that he’s God who is both male and female and thus embodies also the strength and dignity of the paradoxical gentleness and fierceness of the feminine. Both men and women, in Christ, justified by faith, are to receive and love all people unto the least, like a mother. It’s not reception as in tolerance; it’s life laying down neighbor love, the way a mother loves her child. Believe me, Jesus loves the whole world. He loves in the way that he bore the sins of the world just like a woman bears a child into it. In the same way she holds that child to her breast as she nurtures and sustains that child. In the same way a mother will lay her life down for her child no matter what the threat or possible destruction she herself will undergo.

Both men and women are encountered by God in the event of faith. Both men and women are called to be disciples of Christ marked by laying down of their lives and in bearing their crosses. Both men and women are brought unto death and into new life in Christ. Together.  Good news has come to the world in Christ Jesus this man who is God. And no longer bound to the systems and stories and lies of the world, believers are the ones who live into the world in a radical way; the one’s who know God and live as if they do. Today through the words of the poem of Proverbs 31 and in Jesus’s embracing a child, we are called to be the faithful witnesses of Christ in the world, to proclaim Christ crucified to the world in all that we say and in all that we do, and to love (radically) all people and the world as we have been loved (radically and unconditionally) by God. Let us love, let us love like a mother loves her child, love like the Proverbs 31 Woman, love like the women who knew, love #likeagirl.

[1] (1 Cor. 13; Eph. 5, Love your neighbor as yourself)

[2](DBI 297) “God not only provides, and provides abundantly for his creatures, but he also provides an immense variety of pleasurable flavors, textures, colors, shapes and smells, all of which indicate the joy and delight of the creator with his creation”

[3] (Prov. 6:6, 9; 10:26; 13:4; 15:19; 19:24; 20:4; 21:25; 22:13; 24:30)

[4] (v. 16; Gen. 1:28; Mt. 25:14-30).

[5] “Both the arm and the hand are biblical images of power….[and] can represent power in action, either good or evil” (DBI 43)

[6] (Gen. 1:10b, 12c, 18c, 20e, 25c, 31b)

[7] (Mt. 25:1-13)

[8] (Moore 25-30; BDB 813; cf. Nehemiah)

[9] (Gen. 1:24, Gen. 2:18)

[10] (Lev. 19:18; Mt. 22;39; Mk. 12:31; Lk. 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14)

[11] (Gen. 1:24, 28)

[12] “In order to understand what follows, we must turn at once to the final goal: ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,’ is the cry of man when God brings him the woman. This exclamation, the expression of a recognition, the proclamation of a choice and decision made by man—the first saying of man expressly recorded in the saga—is not just a kind of epilogue to the creation of the woman, and therefore the completion of man’s creation, but it is with this express saying of man that the latter reaches its goal…The whole story aims at this exclamation by man. In this, and this alone, the creative work of God reaches its goal, for only now has man really been given the necessary help designed by God” (CD III I.41.3 291).

[13] Erika Moore’s Exegesis paper, “The Domestic Warrior: An Exegesis of Proverbs 31:10-31”. 1994. (14).

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