Justification by Faith: 3 Perspectives

I want to hypothesize that the basis for the opposing perspectives in the “Rob Bell debate” that has swept through evangelical Christianity lies in different understandings of the doctrine of justification by faith. The concept of justification by faith is developed throughout the Pauline epistles. The following two passages seem to capture it the best:

Romans 5:1-2
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

Ephesians 2:8-9
By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God–not the result of works, so that no one may boast.

To put in a nutshell, justification by faith means that we cannot earn “peace with God” through our efforts. Whatever the “faith” is that saves us, it is the “gift of God” rather than “the result of works.” But how can you believe something without making an effort to believe it? It would seem that there’s inherently an effort involved in having faith at least if it means making a decision of some sort. The different resolutions to this puzzle are the three major strands of evangelical Christian thought.

1) SINCERE PERSONAL DECISION-ISM
This is a term I would coin to describe the understanding of faith typically offered by Baptists and other proponents of human free will who think that God dishes out heaven and hell in response to whether or not we have made a “sincere personal decision” to follow Jesus. We have faith if we have responded to Christ’s atonement by “deciding” to accept His salvation. The problem with this perspective is that the “personal decision” becomes the work that “earns” salvation, which violates the principle of justification by faith.

2) PREDESTINED FAITH INSTILLED BY GOD
The Calvinist resolution of the puzzle of justification by faith is to say that God predestines our ability to have faith. The reason our faith is not itself a work is because God plants it in those who have been predestined to have it. God decides to damn or bless us based upon a decision God made before the beginning of time. This way of describing God is a stumbling block for many people but it does resolve the problem of justification by faith.

3) LIBERATION FROM SELF-JUSTIFICATION
The Wesleyan approach to this problem is to say that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross has more to do with persuading us that God loves us than persuading God that He should forgive us for our sins. We are justified by faith because faith in God’s mercy is what liberates us from the prison of self-justification, a state in which we seek in vain to earn God’s approval through our works. So faith is not a work because we’re not proving anything to God with our faith; instead we’re liberated from thinking that we have something to prove to God. As a Wesleyan, I would say that self-justification itself is hell because it inherently creates an irreconcilable separation from God. The purpose of the cross’s atonement is to break us free from self-justification so that we can enter into God’s holy presence without fearing or hating God.

I don’t think that “sincere personal decision-ism” can avoid the heresy of works-righteousness. While Calvinism seems doctrinally orthodox, I worry that it creates an unnecessary stumbling block by making God look like He “unfairly” rewards or punishes us for His own behavior. Though I recognize that God’s mode of existence as Creator is not analogous to ours as creature, I don’t think most people including myself can get our heads around that reality. The other problem I have with both Calvinism and “sincere personal decision-ism” is that they aren’t guarded enough against the real dangers of self-righteousness/self-justification, which is the miserable state of being that I think Christ’s justification saves us from.

The purpose of all doctrine is discipleship. Jesus says that what matters is our fruit. As 2 Timothy 3:16 says, all scripture’s purpose is for “training in righteousness.” Paul also tells Timothy in 2 Tim 2:23 to “have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies.” What matters about what we believe about salvation, heaven, hell, etc, is the impact it has on our Christian discipleship. Paul writes that “knowledge puffs up but love builds up.” If our theological debates serve the purpose of puffing ourselves up, then they are of Satan. If they serve the purpose of building the church and helping people get past their stumbling blocks, then they are fruitful.

This doesn’t mean that we jettison all controversial teaching so as to accommodate worldliness. What it does mean is that we shouldn’t be controversial just for the sake of feeling more hard-core in our beliefs than other believers. The time when it’s appropriate to be controversial is when discipleship would be compromised otherwise. That’s all for now.

Orthodoxy for the Sake of Orthopraxis

So for those of my facebook friends who don’t know, this week there’s a virtual “Rally to Restore Unity” being held by Christians on facebook and other places in response to some ferocious theological debate that has taken place on the Internet largely as a result of Rob Bell’s controversial new book Love Wins. The idea is that we as Christians ought to promote unity in the church rather than saying that anybody who disagrees with us isn’t a true Christian. I don’t endorse everything that’s being said by other people, but I do think it’s worth reexamining how the Bible actually defines heresy, which is actually not the way that we have tended to understand things as Protestants who splinter into a new denomination every time we disagree on a theological detail.

For most of Christianity’s history (pre-Reformation), heresy was more or less judged according to whether it created schism, or a splintering of the unity of the body of Christ. The reason that Marcionism, Gnosticism, Nestorianism, Arianism, Pelagianism, Donatism, Montanism (and a whole lot of other –isms you’ve never heard of) came to be seen as heresies is because they threatened the unity of the body of Christ and undermined the ability of Christians to work together as committed disciples.

The reason I make this point is because it’s not enough to be “Biblical” to avoid heresy. The Bible is a complex enough text that you can take bits and pieces out of context to justify a practice that goes completely against the spirit of the Bible. This is why Paul told the Corinthians that “the letter kills but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6), which was actually the verse that caused the great fourth-century Christian theologian Augustine to convert to Christianity after he had trouble taking certain Old Testament passages literally. Of course, some asinine people take this to the nihilistic extreme of saying that nothing in the Bible needs to be taken seriously if every verse can be misinterpreted. And then in response, others say that we must interpret everything literally or not at all.

The reality is that we have to make decisions about which passages get more weight than others when interpreting the Bible. If James says that “faith without works is dead” and Romans says that “we are justified by our faith and not by works,” then do we interpret James in the light of Romans or Romans in the light of James? (Personally I think that some days I need James and other days I need Romans; the fact that they seem to contradict is only a problem if I’m trying to come up with an airtight systematic doctrine that’s purer than everybody else’s.) This issue actually came up when I was helping a friend write a sermon this December. We had to decide how to read Peter’s statement in Acts 10:35 that God “accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.” If this is true, then it seems to clash with what Paul says in Romans about God only “accepting” those of us who are justified by our faith in Christ. So do we say that Peter can’t really mean what he’s literally saying or do we somehow hold Acts 10:35 and Romans 5 “in tension” with one another (whatever that means)?

In any case, my point is simply that we need a better litmus test with which to measure true or false Christian teaching than to just ask whether it’s derived in some way from something “Biblical.” The 2nd century Gnostics did all kinds of proof-texting from the Bible to support their heresy. In response, the bishop Irenaeus wrote that Biblical passages are like a set of mosaic tiles that can be rearranged to form different pictures according to how they are prioritized and privileged. He said that properly orthodox Christian teaching arranges the Biblical tiles to form a lamb, while the Gnostics were rearranging the same tiles to form a fox. If the same words can make a fox and a lamb, we need a litmus test that helps us read the Bible in such a way so that we see the lamb of God and not some fox of Satan. The Bible actually gives us several litmus tests to use. Each of them sets the boundaries of orthodoxy (right teaching) according to the needs of orthopraxis (right practice).

First of all and most prominently, we have Jesus’ claim that “all the law and the prophets hang on” the commandments to love God and love your neighbor. What does this mean? The way that Augustine interpreted it is to say that all scripture has the goal of leading its readers to fulfill these two commandments. Thus the way to know whether I am interpreting scripture correctly is whether it leads me to give myself more fully to God and my neighbor in love. Interestingly, the poster child Jesus gives for the second great commandment to love your neighbor was a Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), a man who was not simply a different race than Jesus’ audience of Jewish religious leaders, but someone whom they considered to be an absolute heretic because of the Samaritans’ religious mixture of Jewish and pagan beliefs.

As much as it makes us squirm, Jesus seems to be telling us in the Good Samaritan story that the priest and Levite’s orthodoxy was inferior to the Samaritan’s heterodoxy because the Samaritan was the one who was able to show mercy (though it is also true that when Jesus interacts with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 under different circumstances, he critiques Samaritan beliefs and affirms the superiority of Jewish orthodoxy). There are certainly ways to abuse the litmus test of love. It’s perverse to say that because scripture is supposed to lead me to love my neighbor and God, then I can sidestep any Biblical passages that feel “unloving” to me because they’re uncomfortable. The only way to become a Christian disciple capable of real love is to have layers and layers of corrupt worldly socialization chiseled away from us by God largely through wrestling with uncomfortable Biblical passages.

Another litmus test comes in Paul’s first letter to Timothy. He tells Timothy that the problem with “false doctrines” is that they “promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work—which is by faith. The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Tim 1:4-5). Controversial speculation is the fruit of heresy; advancing God’s work is the fruit of orthodoxy. The goal of a pastor like Timothy should be to cultivate pure hearts, good consciences, and sincere faith. This means making decisions about what to share with which people at what time. When the Corinthians take Paul’s initial teachings out of context to engage in political power-play within their congregations, he explains that they have misused surface-level teachings which were appropriate to them as new believers by trying to make them into absolute norms: “I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it” (1 Corinthians 3:2).

The reason God didn’t write the Bible as a flat, static text whose passages offer obvious interpretations at first-glance is because He wasn’t looking to give us a soap-box from which to launch self-righteous tirades against other people. Instead He gave us a dynamic resource full of milk for some believers and solid food for others as the occasion dictates according to the purpose of “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). The reason that God breathed scripture is not to give us ammunition for winning theological cage matches with other Christian but to equip us for doing God’s work. Orthodoxy exists for the sake of orthopraxis.

Notice that I’m not saying there are no boundaries; what I’m saying is that the boundaries exist for a reason – to create dedicated Christian disciples who will work as a unified body to transform the world. Sometimes heretics undermine this purpose by coloring outside of the lines of the Biblical canon; sometimes they stay inside the lines but in a mischievous way that follows the letter but abuses the spirit of Biblical witness. And ironically it’s often the case that the Christians who are the most zealous grand inquisitors of others’ doctrinal shortcomings have been deeply compromised by worldly values themselves. If you have the need to prove something with your doctrinal “loyalty,” then perhaps you haven’t yet received the good news that Christ died to take away our need to prove anything.

A third litmus test that I’ve always found helpful are the fruits of the Spirit that Paul shares with the Galatians towards the end of his letter to them. Galatians is Paul’s angriest letter because some of the Galatian leaders were trying to force a whole slew of Jewish religious practices onto the Gentiles who had converted to Christianity. We have many Galatians in the church today who try to tell other believers which political party they need to vote for and what political issues they need to prioritize in order to be a true Christian. After Paul emphatically exhorts the Galatians not to put their trust in anything other than Christ, he gives them a concrete means of measuring whether they’re living by the Spirit or the flesh: “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal 5:22). Whenever our doctrine causes us to be less than kind, gentle, peaceful, loving, joyful, patient, faithful, and self-controlled, then that’s a pretty good indication that we’ve fallen for a heresy of some kind. An orthodox use of scripture will result in the Spirit’s fruits blossoming in our soul.

The test of orthodoxy is more than just asking whether we are being “Biblical.” Far more important is whether we create or remove stumbling blocks for people with whom God wants us to share His love, whether we get our kicks from force-feeding the toughest morsels of spiritual meat to new believers or prayerfully discern between giving them milk or solid food as thoughtful shepherds in imitation of our own Good Shepherd, whether we promote controversial speculation for the sake of our own power play or advance God’s work for the sake of the Kingdom, and whether we justify ourselves with our own doctrinal rightness or devote ourselves to unifying the body of people who are okay with being wrong since Jesus Christ is their only justification.

Salt and Light

Sermon for 2/5/2011
Text: Matthew 5:13-16

My son Matthew has given each member of our family “train names” from the Thomas the Train video series. His little brother Isaiah is Thomas’ best friend “Percy”; Mommy is “Emily,” a main female steam engine; and I’m “Salty,” an old diesel engine who works down at the docks and has a thick blue-collar British accent. I guess I can be a bit salty at times, but probably not in the way that Jesus had in mind. As for being a light to others, my former high school students might say that I was, but again not in the way Jesus was talking. They used to say, “Mr. Guyton! You should let us wear sunglasses ‘cause the way that light reflects off your head, it’s brighter than the sun in here!”

Salt and light. That’s what Jesus says that we are. But what did he have in mind? In our world of fast food French fries and electricity, there are few things that we take for granted more than salt and light. In fact, we’ve got too much salt and light. Doctors tell us to take the salt out of our diets to get our blood pressure down. We take camping trips to get out of the city where it’s dark enough to actually see the stars. Back in Jesus’ day, they didn’t have refrigerators, so one of the few ways they could keep their food from going bad was to cover it in salt. And they didn’t have light-switches, so you had to keep a steady supply of oil for your lamp or you wouldn’t be able to see what you were doing.

So what did salt and light represent to Jesus? Nobody can say for sure because Jesus never explained these symbols like he did with some of his parables. We do know that Jesus is telling His disciples that we have been given something to share with the world. I think that salt and light describe two ways that the gospel of God’s loving mercy transforms our lives. Just like salt gives food flavor and had the original purpose of preserving food in the time before refrigerators, salt can describe the meaning that our lives receive from the gospel, without which they go bad like a slab of meat covered in flies. Just like light shines in the darkness to show us our true surroundings, light could describe the truth revealed to us by the gospel, without which we remain lost in the darkness of sin.

Jesus lived in a simpler time, without the same kinds of distractions of our over-salted world. The world throws plenty of salt at us through the many options we are given to pack meaning into our lives. We have self-help books, yoga classes, and motivational speakers. We can sign our kids up for karate, sports teams, or art programs, all of which are supposed to help build their character. Of course, none of these activities are harmful unless we see them as a substitute for the flavor that God has given to our lives through the salt of His gospel.

How many of you are cooks? One of the errors that I always make as a cook is to add too many spices thinking that more is always better. The irony of flavoring food is that more is often less. If you put cumin and thyme and dill and rosemary and saffron and coriander and cilantro and basil all into the same dish in heaping amounts, you’re not going to end up with something very edible. Our lives lose God’s “saltiness” when the seasoning of His Word is overwhelmed by the clumps of worldly spices that we think we need to give our lives meaning. Salt is supposed to be the one ingredient that gives flavor to all the other flavors. If you make a soup or a dip of some kind and put all sorts of herbs into it but leave out the salt completely, it’s going to be bland.

God’s Word plays the same central role in our lives that salt plays in food. If our weekly routines and activities are rooted in a life of Christian discipleship shaped by God’s Word, then God will use even the most trivial parts of our daily routines to teach us lessons and give our lives meaning. If God’s salt is there, even something like washing dishes can become a prayerful activity rich in flavor. The way to stay “salty” means is to spend enough time in God’s Word that we recognize when God speaks to us in everyday moments.

When we are well-salted, then what would otherwise be unmeaningful, unrelated daily experiences are woven together into an ongoing conversation with God. Without God’s salt, we quickly overwhelm ourselves in a sea of busy-ness, adding events and commitments to compensate for a fundamental absence of flavor to our lives that we don’t recognize. Stepping out of the world’s confusing clutter of meanings and into the meaningful rhythm of God-centeredness is what the journey of Christian discipleship is about. God is not stingy with His salt but we’ve got to ask Him for it and keep on coming back for more!

As with salt, the world confuses us with a variety of lights that compete with the light of Christ. Some people get taken in by the neon lights like the rapper Jay-Z sings about in his song “New York.” They think that life’s truth is measured in the bling and extravagance of big city life. Other people take pleasure in the light that exposes hypocrisy and scandal among our society’s public figures. They think that the only purpose of bringing things into the light is to revel in the cynicism that nobody lives up to their ideals.

We live in a world where light is the default. We’ve got electricity in our houses (usually). Our cars have headlights. Places where people walk have streetlights. In this kind of world, darkness is something we choose when it’s time to sleep or watch a movie. If light is the norm, the only type of light we really notice is a spotlight, which highlights one person to the exclusion of others. The spotlight is good when you feel like you’re special and other people need to know about it; and it’s bad when you’ve got something shameful to hide. When we understand God’s light to be a spotlight, we either run away from it, fearing its judgment, or we run into it for the wrong reason, thinking that Jesus’ command to “let your light shine before others” is his invitation to be a diva superstar.

For Jesus’ audience, stepping into the light would have meant neither being the center of attention nor facing public embarrassment. They lived in a time when darkness was the default. How often have you had to walk through a place that was pitch black in which you feared for your safety? Some of us have been in neighborhoods where safety was a legitimate fear, but I imagine for most of us, this experience is the exception rather than the norm. In places and times where darkness is a real danger, light means safety. Ironically, in our time, the bright lights that our world offers are themselves the place of danger. Stepping into the light of Jesus’ safety means stepping out of the world’s spotlights where we hide our shame and put on our best smiles for the cameras.

There are painful truths about our lives that can make us fear God’s light. As John 3:19 says, “[God’s] light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” But the primary truth that Jesus’ light exists to reveal is not the ugliness about ourselves that we try to hide but the beauty of God’s infinitely merciful love for us. It is through the light of that beautiful mercy that we are made into the light of the world, the fires in our hearts lit by the heart of the One who gave up His body to the world’s cross to make the world safe for us. When Jesus calls us the “light of the world,” he is not telling us to be bright or flashy. We are simply the windows through which Jesus can shine in what we do and how we love so that others will find their way to safety in God’s holy sanctuary. Letting our light shine is not about jumping into the spotlight but simply remembering that everything we do either invites other people into the light of God’s safety or pushes them away.

As metaphors, salt and light share one important thing in common – they exist for the sake of others. We don’t eat salt by itself any more than we stare at fluorescent light bulbs. Salt flavors other food; light helps us to see other things. In the same way, as salt and light, we do not exist to bring attention to ourselves. We point the way to the One who has seasoned our souls and fired up our hearts for the sake of sharing His mercy with the world, so that all might live in the intimacy with God that fills our lives with meaning and truth.

Going All In For Jesus

Sermon for 5/14/2011
Text: Acts 2:42-47

Five years ago, I had a rock band called the Junior Varsity Superheroes that was going to make it big. We had recorded a CD and got some reviews. We were gearing up for a CD release party in April of 2006. But in the midst of this excitement, we had some conflict. I wanted us to go all in, sending our press kit out to venues and festivals all over the country, with the goal of quitting our jobs and becoming full-time rock stars. But my bandmates saw the band as a fun hobby and a way to blow off some steam. So we held our CD release party and we were all set to play our first big out-of-town gig. Then three things happened. My son Matthew was born, our guitar player got transferred to Columbus, Ohio, and our bass player got into pharmacy school in Georgia. I had wanted to go all in for the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, but God knew that He had to close that door so I could go all in for something bigger than myself.

I share this story because we find ourselves in a season of graduation speeches that always seem to have the same thesis statement: go out and do something important that changes the world. Our culture has this assumption that changing the world and becoming somebody important are synonymous. But I want to suggest to you that they are actually a conflict of interest, because the world got to be the way that it is from millions of people trying to be important. The only way we can change the world is to give ourselves completely to the mission of the only One who can change it, to go all in for Jesus.

Our scripture reading for today is taken from Acts 2:42-47. It describes the first church in Jerusalem right after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension to heaven. Throughout the centuries, Christians have viewed the Jerusalem church as a model to which all every church should aspire.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

This is what the world looks like among a community that decides to go all in for Jesus. It’s a world filled with awe in which the signs and wonders of God are noticed and appreciated. It’s a world where people are devoted to learning all they can about God and spending quality time with each other. It’s a world where people share with one another and everyone has what they need. It’s a world where God is worshiped in word and deed. But notice also what is missing from this world. There are no rock stars. No individual is in the spotlight. Certainly the apostles were teaching, but they were simply fulfilling the role to which they had been called. All of the pronouns used in this scripture are plural – they, all, and everyone. Important things were happening, but nobody needed to be important.

It kind of reminds me of what’s been happening in this building this weekend. Nothing feels all that heroic about filling up baggies with dried food to send to other countries. It would be much more exciting if we got to be the ones who delivered the meals especially if it involved rappelling out of a helicopter or something like that. But somebody has to mix the baggies. It’s something that we can do right here where we are. And the cool thing about doing work like this is that God doesn’t just use it to change somebody else’s world; He uses it to change our world too, because doing unglamorous work teaches us how to be servants. This weekend, there have been many people who have taken care of lots of logistical details behind the scenes. But they didn’t give any speeches; they aren’t asking for any medals. What they have received is the gift of having a purpose by devoting themselves to God’s purpose.

One background hero who I wanted to mention is a woman who came last weekend for the Duffy House event here at church. I’d never seen her before so I don’t think she goes to our church. She saw me stuffing door-hangers so she told me to go do something else and she spent her whole day stuffing door-hangers as she greeted the guests and told them where to go. She probably did about 500. Because of her work, about half a dozen more people were able to participate in putting up the door-hangers that she stuffed, and then some of our neighbors who received these door-hangers were able to participate in God’s kingdom. That’s the way it works in the kingdom – God uses our intangible, unglamorous deeds not only to help people with concrete needs but also to expand His kingdom by creating opportunities for others to join in. But it only works if people are willing to put aside their need to be important and humbly take care of the task that God has put in front of them.

Another thing God does to change the world is to change our boundaries. In Acts 2, the Jerusalem church became God’s family by breaking bread together with people who had no blood relation with them. The concept of having a community potluck might not seem like a big deal to us now, but this was a huge shift in cultural values 2000 years ago. Poor people and rich people eating together? Jews and Gentiles? It never would have happened outside the body of Christ. Because they saw each other as one family, whenever anybody in that church had needs, people with property would sell some of it and give the proceeds to their brothers and sisters in need. It also says that they held their possessions in common, a radical step that would be way outside of our comfort zone today.

Now I don’t think this means that we’re supposed to sell all our houses and set up cots in the fellowship hall to form a squalid refugee camp here at the church. That would be poor stewardship of the resources that God has given us. But the fact that we have our own individual houses should not mean that our family is only the group of people who live between the walls of those houses. God has put us in the neighborhoods where we live and the offices where we work for a reason: to invite others to be a part of God’s family. The world changes when we look at other people not just as clients, colleagues, business partners, or target audiences but brothers and sisters who all share the same Father in heaven. To see ourselves primarily as belonging to God’s family doesn’t mean that we neglect our biological families; our household is our primary mission field; but the boundaries of God’s family must supersede the other boundaries that the world draws for us between rich and poor, citizen and immigrant, black and white, between what’s inside my gated community and the scary world outside of it. When we see others in the world as part of our own family, then we help people in need not to show them that we’re more responsible, mature, or better than they are, but simply because they’re our brothers and sisters.

If we see ourselves and the rest of humanity as members of God’s family, then our global household has a single Head. In Acts 2, all that the Jerusalem church did to build community and become one family revolved around a single purpose that they shared: to worship and glorify God. When we live to worship God, we enjoy His creation and each other for the right reason – not as objects to be exploited for the sake of our self-promotion but as gifts from a gracious Father that open our hearts to His love. The world gives us plenty to be cynical about, but when we look at the world through worshipful eyes, we see all the ways that God’s kingdom is at work. Going all in with our devotion to this kingdom is how we build a world in which everyone has a part to play and everyone’s needs are fulfilled.

So the way to change the world is build the kingdom of God. It’s more than just doing nice things for people. Packing meals for hungry people, putting together school kits and medical kits and birthing kits are all an important part of this process, but only if we allow God to change us through what we’re doing. Though we can’t see God, He provides the most important ingredient in every mission project that we do, because what God does through all the objects that are organized, put into boxes, shipped to places far away, and shared with others is to make this process a means by which His love is shared with those who fill the boxes and those who open the boxes. If you didn’t get to be a part of changing the world this weekend, there will be many more opportunities. God is changing the world all the time. And when you want to help out, don’t feel like you need to do something important. Come to be changed; come to be shaped into God’s family; come to fall more deeply into love with God; because that’s the way the world gets changed, through the body of people who have decided to hold nothing back and go all in for Jesus.

Cut to the Heart

Sermon for 5/7/2011
Text: Acts 2:22-24, 36-41

How many of y’all like the band Bon Jovi? I know that some of you were probably in college when the song “Shot through the heart” came out. I was in third grade and I remember driving around with my uncle blaring his Bon Jovi tape through his neighborhood in south Texas. I could actually hit the high notes then. “Shot through the heart and you’re to blame; darling you give love a bad name!” I remember as a kid listening to this song, I thought Jon Bon Jovi was singing about getting shot with an actual gun. But then I had this ah-ha moment a few years ago where I figured out he’s talking about Cupid’s arrow!

It’s a strange phenomenon how we like for our hearts to be wounded. The Italian poet Francisco Petrarch invented the 14-line style of poetry that we know today as the sonnet to express the agony of falling in love with another man’s wife named Laura de Noves. What is interesting is that most of his poems have very little to do with Laura herself. Petrarch was in love with the agony of being shot through the heart. William Shakespeare took up the sonnet form two centuries later, although he added a layer of irony to it. Instead of simply pouring out his emotions, he makes fun of love poetry. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight; Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

There’s something amazing about having a crush on someone. I once wrote a song called PG-13 about the crush that I still have on my wife. But something also feels silly about it. The more deeply I learn to love, the more I feel silly writing a poem about it, because the words are always inadequate. Now I don’t want to hate on love poetry. How many poets do we have here? How many people are willing to call themselves romantics? Well, I’d like to make a contentious claim, so hear me out. I think the reason it feels good in such an agonizing way to get shot through the heart by Cupid is because what we really desire underneath the surface is to be cut to the heart by Christ.

Cut to the heart. It’s such a poignant phrase that hits me every time I read Acts 2. Peter has just given his first big sermon in Jerusalem, capping it off with a torpedo: “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” And when the people hear this, they’re cut to the heart. So they ask Peter, “What do we do?” Peter tells them to repent and get baptized and 3000 people come forward to be baptized. It’s every preacher’s dream to get a response like that. Now I realize that some of you might be saying, gosh, I can’t stand it when preachers guilt trip people into coming up to the altar. I grew up in a church where we had altar calls every Sunday after hearing about how sinful we were. I know that one of the things people like about coming to this church is that we don’t do that, but I wonder if we need to find a happy medium.

I can understand people who get beat up by life each week needing to come here for some words of encouragement and grace so they can pick themselves back up again. God wants us to know how much He loves us and forgives us and welcomes us into His presence. But if we never get convicted by anything we hear in church, if we never get cut to the heart, then how can we experience the repentance that brings us to our knees and results in the strange perfect freedom of giving our lives to Jesus Christ?

In English, repentance is often defined as “being sorry enough for a mistake not to do it again.” But it’s translated in the Bible from the Greek word metanoia, which means so much more than that! Metanoia means never being able to look at the world the same way again. It means having your world rocked to the point that it’s no longer recognizable. To have that radically transformative experience, you’ve got to face something that stops you in your tracks, something that cuts you to the heart. In the case of the apostle Paul, Jesus had to literally knock him off his horse and strike him blind so he could have the metanoia that made him the greatest missionary the world has ever known.

I don’t want to preach in such a way that you feel beat up when you leave here, but I’d love it if God could put something in my mouth that would stop you in your tracks, because every time God has stopped me in my tracks particularly when He’s called me out on my sin, I walk away feeling not beat up but liberated. There’s pain when my heart gets cut; but every time it happens, another chain falls away and I can follow my Savior a little more freely. I can’t preach the sermon Peter preached. The people he was preaching to were part of the crowd a few months earlier that had shouted for Jesus to be crucified when Pilate wanted to let him go. They had hurled insults and spat upon Him as He was stumbling His way to the hill called Calvary. They jeered and mocked as He hung up on the cross struggling to breathe. But that was two thousand years ago and you weren’t there.

So what do you need to hear to be cut to the heart so your old way of looking at the world can be shattered and replaced by the vision of God’s kingdom? Is there someone in your life who you need to admit that you’ve crucified whether it’s through gossip, rudeness, negligence, or some other form of disrespect? I was a jerk to people in my family at least half a dozen times in the past week. Or do you need to admit that you’re too proud of yourself? You haven’t hurt anybody in particular, but you’re just a little bit too in love with reading your brilliantly clever status updates on facebook (which would be my sin).

Maybe you don’t need to go looking for ways to be cut to the heart because life has already done that for you. You’ve had some setbacks; you’ve lost someone close to you; your mind has decided to make you depressed even though you don’t want to be that way. And now your old way of looking at the world doesn’t work anymore; you need a new reality. Part of owning that new reality is to call whatever has hurt you a blessing, as strange as that sounds, because whatever has made us empty has made room that the Holy Spirit can fill.

Let me tell you about the time when I was cut to the heart most deeply. Humor me if I’ve already shared this story. I went backpacking in Mexico in the summer of 1998 because it was cheap and I liked the beer. There was a revolution happening in the state of Chiapas, so being a wannabe anarchist punk, I rode a bus down to San Cristóbal de las Casas. There was a little girl about five years old walking around barefoot in the square of San Cristóbal selling dolls of the Zapatista rebel guerrillas for a peso apiece. She came up to me and said, “Cómpralo, señor, por favor, cómpralo!” which means “Buy it, sir, please buy it!” I don’t know how to explain what happened in that moment other than to say that God cut me to the heart. That night, I wrote in my journal, “I can never be a tourist again.” I got baptized when I was 7; I prayed Jesus back into my heart at Young Life camp in high school; but I became a disciple of Jesus Christ when God cut my heart through meeting that little girl in the square of San Cristóbal.

You don’t have to go somewhere far away to have your heart cut by Jesus. You just need to pay attention to the hurt that’s going on all around you and receive it as an opportunity to share Christ’s love which is actually how we experience His love for ourselves. Unless we let Jesus cut our hearts, we can walk through our whole lives as tourists who dabble in a little bit of everything but never give ourselves to anything. If church is just a place we go to feel pleasant, then all we’re doing here is dabbling. Don’t dabble. Repent. This means more than just admitting your mistakes and being sorry, though that’s a start. It means to stop putting up a front like you’ve got your life under control and let the Holy Spirit have its way with you. It might be a rush to drive through the countryside with your windows rolled down blasting Bon Jovi’s “Shot through the heart.” But that’s nothing like the joy you feel when you’ve been cut to the heart by Jesus and His love flows in and out of you as the Spirit carves you into a perfect vessel of God’s mercy.

Waiting is our Hope — Easter on Holy Saturday

Sermon for Holy Saturday, 4/23/2011
Text: Romans 8:18-28

How many of you know the musical “Bye Bye Birdie”? We performed it in middle school. One of the songs is called “Put on a happy face.” I used to sing it to my son Matthew as my personal coping mechanism whenever he used to cry as a toddler: “Gray skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face; brush off the clouds and cheer up, put on a happy face. Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy, it’s not your style; you’ll look so good that you’ll be glad ya’ decided to smile!” It’s kind of a good song for Easter; what do you think? Easter is here so it’s time to stop being sad – just put on a happy face! Isn’t that what Easter’s about? I’m not so sure…

How many of you have had friends who are a bit too sunny when you’re down in the dumps? And when you try to vent about your problems, they tell you to take off the gloomy mask of tragedy and pick out a pleasant outlook. Did you ever want to slap the smiles off of their faces? I’ve had friends like that. I’ve also found that holidays can be like insufferably cheery friends. It’s not okay to be sad on a special day because you bring others down, and nobody wants to hang out with a downer.

Well tonight we’re celebrating Easter even though it’s not official till tomorrow morning. But it’s also Holy Saturday, the only full day that Jesus spent in the grave. This gives us a unique opportunity to let our celebration have a double-meaning. We know that Jesus has conquered death and won the final victory over Satan, but His kingdom is not yet fully established on Earth as it is in heaven. Theologians call this the “already but not yet” paradox of Christianity.

On the one hand, Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins and victory over death gives us the basis for having hope in the future and in whatever is beyond the future. As Christians, we live every day in the reality of Easter, in the hope that was established by Jesus’ resurrection from the grave. But we cannot let Easter make us think that God is done with the world and there’s no point in trying to make it a better place. We also live in Holy Saturday, in a day when the world is still fallen, when the king of the universe is still not recognized as Lord of all, when many people throughout the world still live in despair and shouldn’t be scolded for not feeling God’s presence in their lives.

Without Holy Saturday, Easter is a slap in the face to those whose lives have made it hard to say hallelujah. Without the solidarity of Jesus’ suffering and death, His resurrection is something for the happy people to dance to. Thus we should celebrate not only the resurrection of Jesus, but also the cross and even the grave of Jesus, because when we accept the combination of these three moments in one eternal reality, it helps us make peace with the fact that we’re still waiting for God to put a hallelujah in our hearts. As our scripture tonight, I picked Romans 8:18-28 in which Paul names and validates what it’s like to wait for God’s deliverance.

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Holy Saturday is about hope. We know what God has started because of the death and resurrection of His Son. It’s because God reached out to us in Christ that we are no longer tone-deaf to the groans of creation around us. The hope that we have in Jesus’ resurrection awakens us to our call to transform the world and thus is the beginning to the end of creation’s “bondage to decay.” God is gracious enough to let us take part in His abolition of decay and the establishment of His kingdom. That’s what the hope is for. What has the resurrection done to our lives if it doesn’t move us to change anything about the world around us?

By raising Jesus from the dead, God proved to the world that He has the power to make all things new. God can resurrect our spirits when we’ve been through tough times. God can resurrect our broken relationships with other people. God never stops resurrecting our unfair and dead world to draw it into His freedom and glory. But there’s a difference between interpreting the events of our lives on the basis of God’s hope and pretending like everything is already perfect. Hope and denial are utterly the opposite. Denial tries to slap a fake smile on a moment in which there’s nothing to smile about. Hope faces our sad moments with integrity knowing that we cannot hope “for what we already have.” Denial pretends that the future is under control. Hope doesn’t claim to know the future; it simply trusts that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” It often takes a lifetime to learn how to trust God like that, but Paul seems to be saying that impossible situations actually bless us by forcing us to hope.

I want to tell you a story about hope. I have spent a lot of time in the past week visiting the Trauma ICU at Fairfax hospital where Nick Franca is lying in bed on a ventilator fighting for his life. Nick’s girlfriend Kelly has taught me about hope. She’s been sitting by his side singing to him, praying for him, and rubbing his hand. I don’t think she’s in denial about the grim reality she faces. She’s just taking each moment at face value. When you see hope like that, it makes you want to fight tooth and nail against anyone or anything that would dare to snuff it out. Hope like that causes people to do heroic things. But it’s hard to get hope like that without staring straight into the face of despair. We do not hope when we’ve analyzed the circumstances and think that a positive outcome is likely. Hope only comes to us when we’re out of other options. We hope because we must!

To those of us who have never been put in a situation where all we have is hope, the fact that Jesus came back from the dead might mean something. It’s something we’re supposed to believe in – a concept, a doctrine, a pious-sounding thing to say. But to people who have to hope because they’re without other options, Jesus’ resurrection means everything. It means that God really can reverse the course of human events. It means that Nick Franca will walk and live and breathe in a body free of cancer whether that happens a month from now or when we all join our resurrected Savior in glory. It means that there will come a point in time when all of our tears will be dried and all things in creation are reconciled to the God whose love reigns over them.

When people live in this hope, they refuse to accept the ugly realities of a fallen world. They refuse to accept racism; they refuse to accept poverty; they refuse to accept dictatorships. When Wael Ghonim got a band of people together to protest the government in Tahrir Square in Cairo, he looked about as naïve as Noah building an ark in the desert. But then it rained. The hope made more hope and more hope and the floodgates couldn’t hold it back. Only God knows what will happen in Egypt and Syria and Libya and the rest of the Middle East. Only God knows all the twists that will take place in the story of His redemption of the world between now and the end of time. But one thing’s for sure: we can put our hope in God not because we know what’s going to happen but because God has raised our Savior from the dead. We live in Holy Saturday; it’s blasphemous to what hope means to deny that reality, but the more that we put our hope in the Lord who will deliver us, the more that we will see the Easter dawn of God’s kingdom pushing up over our horizon.

The Ridiculousness of the Donkey King

Sermon for Palm Sunday, 4/16/2011
Text: Matthew 21:1-11

So what kind of a king rides into his royal city on a donkey? A donkey is not exactly the most elegant of creatures. It’s hard to wrap our head around this reality because donkeys make us think petting zoos and petting zoos make us think “cute.” So here’s a picture. Now if Jesus was riding a donkey back then, what kind of a ride do you think he would he have today for his Jerusalem procession? Well he probably wouldn’t be in a limo. And he wouldn’t be in a Beamer. Or a Lamborghini. So what do you think it would be? Well I came up with three options. Let me show them to y’all and then we can vote. How about a Ford Pinto? Or an El Camino? Or a Yugo?! Which one do you think it would be?

I used to have an old beat-up Oldsmobile that I drove around the “hood” in east Durham, NC where I was working as a youth pastor. Y’all think y’all got hood in the Route 1 corridor? East Durham is the real hood. So it helped me feel safe to be in a junky car with the upholstery falling out as I was driving around visiting my youth. My kids called it the “low rider.” Sometimes when we went over railroad tracks too fast, I wasn’t sure the wheels were going to stay on. Well the Olds finally died and I got a hybrid Prius a few months ago.

I’m not sure Jesus would drive a Prius if He were around today. I know that Priuses are “green” and Jesus wants us to care about the Earth, but the fact is Jesus was a carpenter’s son from Nazareth who was born in an animal feeding trough. He didn’t get to jump between the hood and the suburbs like I do. His people were straight-up podunk, and Jesus’ donkey procession brings us back to an important question: why did God make His Word flesh among a podunk people?

God had a lot of better options for incarnating Himself. Why didn’t He go Greek for instance? The Greeks had a very rich intellectual culture at the time even though its heyday was a few centuries earlier. Jesus could have been a disciple of Plato and Aristotle who built on their ideas but became the greatest teacher of all. Then no scholar in the world would be able to question his wisdom, and atheism would have been proven wrong thousands of years ago. Why did Jesus waste his time with low-brow crowd-pleasers like healing paralytics and walking on water? If he hadn’t done all those miracles, then so many intellectually respectable people would be able to believe in him. Miracles are what people do in places like east Durham and the Route 1 Corridor, next to the pawn shop and the dirty movie store. If Jesus stuck to the intellectual high road, then the smart people could follow Him and the not-so-smart people would follow the smart people.

Another option Jesus had was to go Roman. Instead of being born in a barn because of the census decree of Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, he could have been born to Caesar Augustus. He would have had the bully pulpit from the time he was a boy. The crowds would have had to listen to him preach and they would hang on every word even if he rambled longer than Fidel Castro or Moammer Gadhafi. The Roman emperors had a tradition of calling themselves gods anyway and Jesus could have said, “Guess what? Y’all thought you had gods before. Well I actually am God.” If Jesus had been a Roman emperor, Rome could have conquered the whole world and brought all of its people into submission under the universe’s rightful King. Then the new Jerusalem would come down from the clouds, and the story of humanity would have reached its happy ending long ago.

So why did Jesus go podunk? Why did he grow up in a carpenter’s family? And why in the world did he ride into Jerusalem on a donkey? Somehow I suspect that if I walked up to Jesus and told him how utterly ridiculous it was for the king of the universe to ride a donkey instead of a chariot or at least a decent horse, then he would probably get a gleam in his eye and say, “Exactly!” Because Jesus is the king of ridiculousness. Now I don’t mean ridiculous without a purpose. Jesus’ ridiculousness has a purpose, because it make us do things that are ridiculous too.

Look at this story again. The donkey isn’t the only ridiculous thing in the picture. The Bible says that people took off their cloaks and put them down on the road so that this animal that had been walking in the road all of its life would have a softer place to walk. Now that’s ridiculous! Why in the world would you get your cloak dirty in order to protect an animal’s feet? There’s nothing practical about that. It’s kind of like that crazy woman we talked about a few weeks ago who wasted a year’s wages of expensive perfume by dumping it all over Jesus’ feet just to show her love for him. Ridiculous!

Or what about Zacchaeus? Y’all remember the story about the four foot ten tax collector who Jesus went to lunch with? Well like most tax collectors, Zacchaeus took a little cut for himself on top of the emperor’s money. It was a completely normal part of the economic system that made people groan but nobody tried to do anything about it. Well for some reason Zacchaeus was so moved by the fact that Jesus paid attention to him that he decided to do two very ridiculous things – he gave half of his money to the poor and paid back the people he had cheated four times what he owed them.

Many people did ridiculous things in response to Jesus. His disciples got up and left their jobs when he said come follow me. Crowds of people traveled miles to see him. People who had never walked before were running through the streets carrying their mats and shouting hallelujah. Kids ran up and started climbing on him even though he was a stranger and even though his disciples tried to stop them. You know, I really wish I could have been there to see what it was about his body language and the laughter in his eyes and the commanding but gentle tone in his voice that made the people in that street know that this was their Messiah.

He wasn’t a Greek philosopher babbling strange mysteries to a handful of intellectuals who had read all the prerequisites and taken all the right classes. He wasn’t a Roman emperor looking down from some tall chariot to all the masses, separated by legions of soldiers armed to the teeth. But somehow this carpenter’s son from Nazareth riding on the lowliest of mountable creatures was the Word of God made flesh and dwelling among us. And this beautifully ridiculous reality moved a whole mob of people to want to do something, anything to show him honor. They didn’t have any money but they did have the cloaks on their backs. So they put them on the ground, thinking what an honor to wear home a muddy footprint that the Messiah’s donkey put there. Ridiculous!

But there’s something beautiful about this kind of ridiculousness. If we allow ourselves to be infected by the spirit of this donkey-riding king, it’s more contagious than democracy in the Middle East. We become people who engage in random acts of kindness and pointlessly extravagant gestures of hospitality, even if they don’t make a dent in the national debt, even if we don’t get enough bang for our buck, even if it doesn’t help us win any arguments, even if all that we accomplish is to make a donkey’s toes a little less calloused and all that we get back is a dirty cloak to add to the laundry pile.

But when we let this donkey-rider be our king, we become the opposite of cynical, a basic change of heart that’s more important than having the answers to all the world’s problems. God can’t use us very well when we hide behind our practicality but he can use people who aren’t afraid to look ridiculous! So what about you? Are you willing to be ridiculous? Are you willing to treat people with ridiculous kindness especially when they’re being ugly? Are you willing to throw down the cloak off your back and make the ground a little softer for someone else to walk on? Well then be ridiculous! And maybe our savior’s donkey will put his footprint on your heart.

On the Cross but Never Abandoned

Walking in the Valley Lenten Series #4, 4/3/2011
Text: Psalm 22

When I was young and stupid, I used to argue with my wife about whether or not it was okay to leave my son in the car and run into a gas station to use the restroom. My wife would say this constitutes abandoning your child, even if the kid is taking a nap, even if you need to go to the bathroom really bad, even though there are five different buckles on the car-seat and there’s no sanitary place to put your sleeping child down in the bathroom. I never left my kids in the car, mostly because I worried some cop would bust me. So for better or worse, I’ve never abandoned my sons. Now our difficult sermon topic for today is: Did God abandon His Son?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? What do we do with these words that Jesus says on the cross? What kind of father would let his son die on a cross? What kind of father would demand that his son die on a cross? Perhaps these are irreverent questions to ask, but we need to have something to say to non-believers who feel that the cross makes God look like a bloodthirsty mob boss who cares more about getting paid back for the world’s sin than the life of His own son. I wrote my pastor four years ago to ask him if it was okay for me to go to seminary if I was struggling with the cross. He wrote back and told me that he was still struggling with it too. So let’s struggle together with this question: did God abandon His Son on the cross?

One of the main sources of our struggle with this question is a basic misconception of God that has developed in modern times. We picture God as a human being just like we are with arms and legs and a long white beard on a cloud somewhere. Since Genesis says that we are created in God’s image, we assume that God looks like us. When we hear Jesus call God “Father,” we picture a human body – maybe an enormous body that’s invisible and moves at the speed of light, but nevertheless a body that is either standing with us here or far away out there somewhere.

To some degree, the Italian painter Michelangelo did us a real disservice by painting God on the Sistine Chapel as a man with a beard in a cloud. That image has stuck. God tried to protect us against this confusion through the second commandment He gave the Israelites not to represent Him with any graven image. There are all kinds of metaphors used for God in the Bible – He’s referred to as a lion, an eagle, a whirlwind, and a still, small voice – but every time the Hebrew writers compared God to an aspect of His creation, they knew that they weren’t capturing God’s essence. They recognized that our Creator’s invisible qualities can only be described indirectly through analogies in His creation. God’s nature is indeed reflected through the humans made in His image, and Jesus was man and God at the same time, but that doesn’t make God a human.

So how does this change the question of whether God abandoned Jesus? If we imagine God with a human body, then we can picture Him walking away from Jesus, turning His back, or doing things that bodies do. But if God has no physical body and He’s instead the Creator from whom, through whom, and for whom all things exist, as we read in Romans 11:36, then God could not abandon anything in creation without it ceasing to exist.

God is infinitely intimately involved in every microscopic aspect of the universe. Every time two hydrogen atoms combine with one oxygen to form water, God is part of that process. Or at least that’s what it means to believe in a God through whom all things exist. Many atheists don’t believe in God because they object to the Disney cartoon God who sits on a cloud with a lightning bolt. Well, I don’t believe in that kind of God either. The point is that if God really is who the Bible claims Him to be, then He can never abandon anything in Creation. And here’s why that matters: when it feels like God is absent, it’s not because He’s abandoned us, but because we’ve lost our connection to Him.

We don’t have to believe that God is at work in every molecule. We can believe that what we see around us is the product of chaos or a loving Creator; either way, it’s a profession of faith – faith in chaos or faith in God. You can call a sunset nothing more than light photons refracted through atmospherical impurities, or you can see a beautiful work of art made by a loving Father who gets giddy about making moments that take our breath away. We can choose whether or not to see God in His Creation. Of course, if life were all sunsets and Sistine chapel ceilings, then it would be a lot easier to see God’s love all around us.

But our lives aren’t that way, at least not in Fairfax County. We feel poured out like water with our bones out of joint. Our hearts are like melted wax, and our tongues stick to our jaws. About 8 years ago, I couldn’t feel God at all in my life so I tried something called centering prayer. I sat in front of a candle, saying to God over and over again, “Lord, please clear a space for yourself in my heart.” I said it maybe 200 times in a row. I did this for several evenings without feeling much of anything. It took years for me to realize that the prayer had worked.

When you don’t feel God’s presence, that’s the perfect time to worship Him. Worship is the flashlight God gives us to find Him in the darkness. God has never abandoned us, but our spiritual eyes must be trained to see Him. He’s like a radio signal always broadcasting His love through the air around us. If our radios are turned off, that doesn’t mean He’s gone. If we can’t hear Him through the static, that means we’re not tuned into His frequency. Worship is how we tune in. We praise God not just because of our blessings; we praise Him so that we can see His blessings in what we had previously considered the ugliness and boringness of our lives. People who worship God are more grateful than people who don’t not because they’re healthier, richer, or more successful, but because their worship has helped them to see a God who never abandons them in every aspect of a world whose riches mean nothing when they don’t reflect the love of their Creator.

Now here’s how all this connects to Jesus’ words on the cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? First of all, these aren’t just Jesus’ words. They’re the first line of a psalm that Jesus probably learned as a kid. The Jewish people recited this psalm as a way of worshiping God. It might seem strange to us to call such a confrontational question “worship,” but the way that Christians today equate worship with pretending to be peppy and upbeat and pleasant all the time would be bizarre to ancient Israel. True worship means being real with God, bringing our fears and our demons up to the altar to demand and receive God’s deliverance by faith. Though Jesus was the divine Son of God, the cross made Him feel enough out of tune with His Father that He had to cry out for God to tune Him back in.

So how does naming this about Jesus’ words on the cross make God’s perceived absence more bearable? Let me just say this. If Jesus had never showed His humanity on the cross, then the African slaves who wrote the spirituals that are the foundation for blues, gospel, rock, jazz, and every other genre of spiritual or secular music indigenous to America would have had no reason to sing to God as they worked the fields. Their churchgoing masters beat them, but they knew that Jesus was their brother and he’d suffered just like they did. And though their lives were often brutal, short, and tragic, it did not occur to them to question God’s existence because they needed to be His children. They needed to be reminded that they were humans when they were treated like animals. Worshiping God was the only thing they had in life to give them dignity and hope.

So let’s follow the example of those slaves who wrote the best praise music that’s ever been written. If your life has been ugly enough that you can’t see God anywhere, then worship Him anyway and defy the forces of darkness that are trying to keep you down whether it’s your job, an illness, family drama, or the state of our fallen world. If you ask God the very real and legitimate question that Jesus cried out, “Why have you forsaken me?” and you keep on asking that question until you get an answer, demanding an audience with the One who seems like He’s not even there, then one day God is going to show you how He’s been there all along and that moment will feel like a resurrection.

Betrayal and Self-Righteousness

Walking in the Valley Lenten Series #3, 3/26/2011
Text: Mark 14:1-11

During my sophomore year at UVA, I betrayed my school. Some of you may remember Steve Wojciechowski, the most hated point guard in Duke basketball history. In Wojo’s senior year, the Blue Devils came to play at UVA and I went to the game wearing a Duke sweatshirt. UVA was up by 1 with less than two seconds remaining. Wojo got the ball and dribbled it quickly down the court, but mysteriously the game clock didn’t start. When a UVA player saw that Wojo was about to score, he fouled him, and Wojo hit both free throws to win the game for Duke. I’ve never walked through an angrier mob of college frat-boys in my life. And I was wearing a Duke sweatshirt. Somehow I made it out alive.

I figured I needed some comic relief because betrayal is a very serious sin. It’s serious enough that in Dante’s epic poem about hell, the Inferno, traitors find themselves in the deepest circle of hell with Judas having the honor of spending eternity in the mouth of Satan. What makes betrayal sting so bad is that the one who hurts you is someone you trusted. Since we know how Judas turned out, we can only see him as a traitor, but up until he turned on Jesus, he was one of Jesus’ best friends. In fact, the gospel of John tells us that Jesus trusted him enough to let him hold onto the money. So why did he do what he did? Nobody can say for sure, but let’s take a look at how the gospel of Mark tells the story.

It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; for they said, ‘Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.’ While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her.

But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’ Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. When they heard it, they were greatly pleased, and promised to give him money. So he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.

Luke tells the story a little differently, but in Matthew, Mark, and John, Judas’ betrayal comes immediately after this scandalous incident that we might call “perfume-gate.” A woman does something that is plainly irresponsible not to mention socially inappropriate. It wasn’t just a waste of money. It was completely unfitting for a respectable rabbi to let an unrelated woman into his personal space. And Jesus had a habit of letting loose women into his personal space to rub oil on him and literally kiss his feet, just like the way Jesus let those country people bring their filthy children to him to be loved on. It was embarrassing and unbecoming of the brilliant rabbi Judas had decided to follow.

How many of y’all have ever had an eccentric boss who you had to cover for? I did once, and I ended up betraying him. Before I worked for him, I saw him giving speeches and got a larger-than-life impression of him in my head. When he became my boss, I learned that he was just a human being with habits and opinions that drove me crazy especially since I was responsible for managing how the public perceived our organization. After a few too many press conferences in which he went “off-message,” I quit my job and wrote a long email airing my grievances which got back to him and hurt him pretty badly.

I’m not sure what was going through Judas’ head, but I imagine that the perfume incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back after a long list of ways that Jesus had not lived up to Judas’ expectations. Not only had Jesus failed to be what Judas wanted him to be, but he had publicly shamed Judas and the other disciples for trying to keep scandalous people and their embarrassing behavior away from the rabbi. Now Judas could have made a different choice. He could have trusted that Jesus had a lesson to teach him in the way that he let these women pour perfume and oil all over him.

He could have wrestled through the discomfort and awkwardness he felt and allowed Jesus’ witness to transform him into a person who responded with gentleness when other people did socially inappropriate things out of the goodness of their hearts. But Judas didn’t trust Jesus as a teacher; he trusted his own assumptions about the cause that Jesus was supposed to represent. Jesus had betrayed Judas’ assumptions, so Judas felt justified betraying Jesus.

I realize that there are many different types of betrayal, but I suspect that some form of self-righteousness lies at the heart of every betrayal. To betray other people means deciding that they do not deserve my respect, whether it’s because they have wronged me in some way or because I feel entitled to do whatever feels good regardless of the consequences for other people. But the opposite of betrayal is not just following the rules of social relationships. If I’m just a rule-follower, then it’s far too easy for me to call fouls on other people that justify breaking the rules myself. Jesus broke the rules when he not only allowed this woman to pour perfume on him but when he rebuked his disciples for trying to protect him from scandal. And this was just too much for Judas.

Of course, Jesus didn’t break the rules just to break them; every time he violated the Sabbath; every time he committed a social faux pas; every time he let a sketchy woman into his personal space, he did so out of mercy. Mercy is the true opposite of betrayal, because when you’re merciful, you aren’t looking for excuses to stop respecting other people. Looking at others with the eyes of mercy means seeking to preserve their dignity, even if they do things that you could judge them for doing. Mercy is what Jesus was trying to model for Judas and the other disciples by how he reacted to the woman’s waste of perfume. It wasn’t that this woman had some clairvoyant sense that Jesus was about to be buried. As Jesus says it, “She did what she could.” That was all that mattered, so he honored the sincerity of her heart by describing her act as the best thing she could have done.

How many of y’all know somebody who sincerely tries to do the right thing but can’t seem to pull it off in a way that doesn’t create drama and alienate other people? Isn’t it tempting to gossip about people like that behind their backs? I know that I do. Well what if every time we did that, Jesus came into the room and took up for the person we were badmouthing, arguing why the very actions that disgusted us were the epitome of righteousness? How many times do you think Jesus could do that before we stormed off to the chief priests to hand him over?

The fact is that all of us are like Judas. Even though we weren’t there to betray Jesus 2000 years ago, we have all betrayed Jesus by how we’ve treated other people. Whenever we fail to show mercy to others, we disrespect the mercy that Jesus died to show us. But the good news is that Jesus is not keeping score. He knows that we too have been betrayed. Every one of us has been a victim of betrayal in some form or another, whether it was a misunderstanding, a slight, or an act of vicious cruelty. Some of us have very deep wounds that make it very difficult not to spend the rest of our lives lashing out at other people in bitterness.

Jesus can’t undo the wounds we have received from other people; all he can do is offer us his own wounded hands in solidarity and teach us how to transcend the endless cycle of betrayal by letting mercy have the last word. Mercy is the only antidote to betrayal, because when we accept Christ’s mercy, we can resist being defined and shaped by the betrayals we have suffered. Jesus did not let Judas’ betrayal define his relationship with Judas. He knew what was going to happen, but when he broke the bread and passed the cup in his last supper, he offered his body and blood to Judas no differently than the other eleven disciples just as he offered his body and blood on the cross for Judas’ sins along with the rest of humanity. Jesus died to liberate us from the ways that we have betrayed others and from the ways that we have been betrayed. We can share in his victory over betrayal if we live our lives in mercy as a grateful response to his mercy.

Fear & the Fixed Game of Following Jesus

Walking in the Valley Lenten Series #2, 3/19/2011
Text: Mark 14:32-42

One of my favorite books is Where the Wild Things Are. How many of you read that book when you were little? I remember my dad telling me after reading it that if I had scary monsters in my dreams, I should ask them to play with me and it really worked. Sometimes fears have simple solutions, but that isn’t always true. So what are you afraid of? How many people are afraid of monsters? How many people are afraid of the dark? How many of you are afraid of someone breaking into your home and hurting you or your family? Who’s afraid of making a fool of yourself? What about going to the doctor? How many of you are afraid of conflict?

One thing that every type of fear has in common is the dread of facing our lack of control. I’m afraid of burglars because I can’t control what they’ll do. If I bought a gun, I wouldn’t be afraid of burglars, but then my fear would shift to the fact that I can’t control what my sons might do with the gun. These past couple of months, I’ve had a pain in my stomach that’s made it hard to sleep. I was afraid to go to the doctor for a long time because I didn’t want to find out that something was growing inside of me. It was easier to pretend that I had the situation under control. Well I finally went this week and got a CT scan which came back clear. So I went to the store and got some heartburn medicine and I think that may have been the problem all along. So how many of y’all have a man in your life who would rather suffer quietly than admit that he’s not in control of a situation? I’m guilty.

Now there’s a way that this dread of our lack of control at the root of every fear is the basic hurdle we have to overcome to be ready to spend eternity with God. The default position that we start out with as humans is to think that the world revolves around us. All toddlers have to go through the traumatizing experience of learning that Mommy is not just a milk-cow and snuggle-mountain created for their convenience. My son Isaiah stopped nursing a year ago but he’s still fighting hard against the notion that his mommy exists for any purpose other than his needs.

To some degree, everyone graduates from the complete self-centeredness of a baby. But not entirely. As we grow, the form of our self-centeredness changes; it becomes the delusion of self-sufficiency. We no longer think that everyone else in the world exists to make us happy, but we find it important to believe that we are the masters of our own destinies. I may not be the center of attention for the whole universe, but there are things that are mine because I earned them and inside my castle, I am God. In this delusion, we try to deny that anything can happen to us beyond our control. We can keep up this front of denial as long as life plays along and does nothing to shatter it. But ultimately, nobody can avoid the absolute loss of control that is death and there is no ruder awakening than to spend a lifetime building a castle of self-sufficiency only to see it crumble to pieces at the very end.

What Jesus Christ has given us through His life, death, and resurrection is a safe way to let go of our delusions of self-sufficiency so that we can adjust to the reality that we’re not in control. Jesus makes it okay to admit that we don’t have our lives under control through renouncing control of His own life and even His own body to a horrible death on the cross. One aspect of Jesus’ journey to the cross is that it gives us a model for the right way to face fear.

So how does Jesus face fear? Is he calm about what he has to do? He says, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” That doesn’t sound calm. The gospel of Luke is very graphic about his physical condition, saying that “his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” He knows what His destiny is; He knows why He has to do it; and yet He asks His Father, “If it is possible, may this cup be taken away.” That sounds like fear to me. It sounds like Jesus really didn’t want to do what He had to do.

Of course somebody might try to be smart and say, “What’d he have to worry about? He’s the Son of God. Didn’t He know His Daddy was going to bring Him back?” The way one person put it was to say that Jesus was playing in a “fixed game,” where He knew what the final score was going to be before the game even got played. It’d be like Coach K pretending to be worried that Duke might not win the national championship when Kyrie Irving is back in the lineup. So is Jesus just playing along? Is He just acting? I know that some people can cry on cue, but I’ve never heard of anybody learning how to sweat bullets on cue. And just because Jesus trusted that His Father had Him covered didn’t mean that the cross wasn’t going to hurt.

Jesus could have pulled out of the situation. He had divine powers. He could have called down lightning or an army of angels or whatever He needed. But He didn’t, because despite the fact that He was afraid, He was absolutely committed to following His Father’s plan for saving humanity. And so at the end of His prayer, after He tests the waters to see if His Father will give Him an out, He says, “Not my will, but Thy will be done.” That little phrase encapsulates what it means to face our fear perfectly. Let’s practice saying that. Not my will, but Thy will be done. Remember how I said fear is about not being in control. Well facing our fear is about trusting the One who is in control and believing that whatever His will is, all will be well in the end.

The fact is that we’re playing in a “fixed game” ourselves. A lot is going to happen between now and the end of the game – we’re going to lose some friends and gain other ones, we’ll have career successes and disappointments, our kids will make us proud and embarrass us, people we love are going to leave this life before we’re ready, and one day we will reach the finish line ourselves. But what we can trust is that God is going to win the game, and if we trust in His plan, then whatever crosses stand between us and the finish line of our lives, we will join our resurrected savior in glory.

God doesn’t expect us to pretend like we’re not afraid. We can and should admit it whenever we are afraid just like Jesus Himself did, but we should also trust that God’s plan will achieve the final victory and hold onto the promise of Romans 8:28 “that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.” Now just to be clear, this promise is not some kind of underhanded hint that if we prove our love for God by putting lots of money in the offering plate or acting really passionate about the Bible, then God will stop bad and scary things from happening to us. But if we put our trust in God and hang onto the stubborn belief that He loves us through thick and thin, then He will help us find the good in the bad and scary things that do happen in the natural processes and human societies that constitute life.

The process of becoming a Christian disciple is learning how to really mean it when we say, “Not my will, but Thy will be done.” That’s hard to do! The first step is admitting that we are not in control. At first, it might be an act of discipline, but if we trust God enough to let Him transform our hearts, it will become an act of love. What we discover as we put our trust in God is that doing this makes life bearable as we face what we’re afraid of, whether it’s shame, loneliness, getting hurt, or getting sick. What makes it possible to walk through the valley of the shadow of death that every single one of us will face no matter how lucky we’ve been so far is knowing not just in our mind but in our heart and soul that God is with us.

Now I’ve been places in my life where hearing a preacher say that would do nothing for me. Words and ideas are little comfort to people facing fear. But God does better than words. Through Jesus Christ, He has made a vine for us to grow on and those of us who trust in Him are the branches that He uses to touch other peoples’ lives and help them get onto the vine. God has made us into a body so that He can use us to care for all of His children, whether they know Him or not. Trusting God is not just a private relationship that has nothing to do with other people; we trust in God by becoming the body of Christ, through which God provides a safe place for people to bring their fears and receive His love. Jesus faced fear, so that we could face our fears together as one body who say in one voice, “Not my will, but Thy will be done.”