America’s Crisis Questions

John 18.28, 33, 36-38a:

   28 Then they took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover. 

   33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

   36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

   37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

   38 “What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

The question Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” is, I think, the second-most important question in the Bible, hence the second-most important question facing all humanity all the time. The most important question is the one Jesus asked his disciples one day on the road to Caesarea-Philippi: “Who do you say that I am?” Unless we answer that one rightly, we will never answer the second one fully. 

Pilate was a politician. He had already answered the first question – who is Jesus – by saying he had been told that Jesus was a pretender to the kingship of Judea. Jesus answered, “My kingship is not of this world,” which Pilate seemed to take as Jesus’ confession of some kind and, hearing Jesus’ explanation, simply waved it away as irrelevant. 

I think one lesson of this passage is that we should not let politicians define what truth is. 

That we as a nation have been allowing that for many, many years is not bearing good fruit for us as the election looms only two days away. It does not take a Nobel laureate to observe that America is not today a “United” States. So I will try to explore what we as disciples of Jesus Christ may do and say that promotes peace and exhibits the spirit of Christ in this tense time. 

I must say at the outset that there is a very high probability of violence following the election, perhaps starting Tuesday night, a matter that I wrote about on Oct. 30, quoting assessments by Foreign Policy, NBC News, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and the Biden administration's  Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The risk of lethal, destructive violence in our cities after election day is very real, though I pray God I am wrong. So what do we, who profess to follow Christ, do until then? 

 

I think our beginning point is to look in a mirror. Jesus said in Matthew 7, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he lamented,

The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent, or often vocal, sanction of things as they are.

This we must not do. America will not be better until Americans are better. In the 1830s, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and later wrote, “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” He attributed America’s goodness to its churches. While we should not ascribe too much goodness to our forebears of 180 years ago, we probably can agree that we will not “make America great again” unless we, not politicians, decide to make Americans good. 

And that, I think, relies on how we church people give answer in the way we live, what we do, and what we say to the two most important questions facing the country today: 

1. Who do we say Jesus is?

2. What is truth?

Today, I will address the second one. 

There is a scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark that makes my first point: 

"Archaeology is the search for facts, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Doctor Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall." 

Truth and fact are closely related, of course, but they are not the same thing. People rarely fight over facts. What they argue about is what the facts mean, what is the Truth that the facts indicate. Both sides have the same facts, but both arrive at a different "truth."  

Truth is important and so is truth's relationship to facts. Every one of us operates every day on what is known as the "correspondence theory" of truth. For example, when doctors make diagnoses, they correspond symptoms and test results to disorders, ailments, or diseases. So do mechanics when determining what makes the pinging noise under the hood of your car. In either case the decisions about health or auto repairs rely on a correspondence between certain facts and certain conclusions that are true, or most likely true. Correspondence of facts to truths means that some conclusions must be false. Falsehoods don't correspond to facts. 

But two other claims about what is truth are alive and well in America today. One is relativism, the notion that something can be "true for you" and another thing "true for me." We can each have our own personal truth regardless of facts. But relativism is tolerable only for trivial matters. You may love cauliflower while I despise it. "Cauliflower tastes good," is true for you and its opposite, "Cauliflower is awful," is true for me. And we're both right. But it does not matter. 

However, when the stakes of truth are significant, we all drop all pretense of relativism. Horace and Edna may be wallowing in relativism when it comes to cauliflower, but if Horace is a University of Tennessee graduate and Edna a University of Georgia graduate, and it's football season, well ... . 

This relativism has become today rooted in emotionalism, the insistence that truth is a consequence of how someone feels about a topic, and ensuing hostility toward anyone who crosses that line. A law professor wrote that it is increasingly difficult to teach classes about law relating to sexual crimes such as rape because of the emotional, hence hostile, reaction of students. Lucia Martinez, an English professor at Reed College, wrote, “I am intimidated by these students.” 

“I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues  up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman,” she wrote. “There is a serious problem here… and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts.”

Some people think that the truth of a statement is related to whether it "works." So a religion may be true for Horace if he sees some benefit to it, but false for Edna if she sees none. The danger of thinking truth is whatever works is that the perceived benefit might really be bad. "Cigarettes are good" works in the sense that many smokers report a soothing or relaxing sensation when they smoke, but the fact remains that cigarettes can kill. 

 

Vladimir Lenin refined the Marxist idea of Revolutionary Truth, which means that any claim that brought the Revolution closer or more successful was truth, even if it contradicted an earlier statement. Nazi propaganda was the same way. Surely nothing more need be said about that understanding except it is sadly alive and well in American politics today. 

 

Christian faith and practice rely on correspondence, not relativism or utility or the idea that truth is whatever supports our cause. On the first Easter morning, the women went to the tomb and observed certain facts: the stone was rolled away, the tomb was empty, they saw Jesus alive. So they told the disciples, "He is risen!"

  

Yet more than corresponding facts to truth is necessary. As the apostle James pointed out, even the demons know that Jesus rose from the dead, yet demons they remain. John Wesley admonished that we may affirm the truth of one, twenty or a hundred creeds and yet have no saving faith at all. 

 

Life throws us many ways for us to affirm what we think is true. But the majority of them do not challenge us to live transformed lives. Acknowledging propositions is one thing, probing what we believe and for what we will stand firm is quite another. How do we discern what we believe, whether in religion or politics or other endeavors? What we believe is crucial because what we believe impels what we do. Belief, like truth, should correspond to facts but in believing we seek not only to know what is true, but who and what we can trust. 

 

But there is such a thing as a moment of truth, when we have to confront what we trust and are compelled to decide how deeply we hold our beliefs.

Pilate told Jesus, "Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?" Such a bald statement of power would certainly have been a moment of truth for me. Jesus answered him, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above." It was not a diplomatic answer but a naked challenge to Pilate's power and authority. No one, Christian or not, can doubt that Jesus believed completely what he had claimed about himself and trusted that God would deliver.

 

Moments of truth are fraught with risk, forcing is the issue: What do we believe? Who do we trust? What shall we do? What shall we risk? What do we fear? What do we love? And I think that as a nation, those questions loom before us disciples of Jesus Christ this political season.

 

Bonnie Kristian, a columnist at Christianity Today, wrote before election day in 2020,

[Disciples] should proactively “seek peace and pursue it” (Ps. 34:14), but making peace is not a project that begins when battle lines are already drawn. Ideally, it begins in time to keep us from drawing them at all. The word Jesus uses for “peacemaker” in the Sermon on the Mount appears just once in the New Testament, but its [root words] show up together one other time, in James 3:18.

“Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness,” James says, and to be a peacemaker is to live with the “wisdom that comes from heaven” (v. 17). This wisdom rejects “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” which lead to “disorder and every evil practice.” It is “peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (vv. 14, 16–17). In worldly politics of animosity, selfishness, domination, disdain and rotten fruit, prejudice, and bad faith, that is the wisdom we need.

What do we believe, we Americans? Do we really believe that the truth is self-evident that all persons are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are properly instituted to secure these rights, as our Declaration of Independence says? Do we say that this declaration corresponds to facts about the nature of God and God's purposes in creation? Do we trust that this American experiment will endure and indeed expand?  

Yet even mounting apathy, dismissal, and indeed enmity toward the American idea is not my greatest fear. Revelation chapter two records the words of Christ as revealed to John: 

1 “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: . . . 2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate the wicked, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name and have not grown weary. 4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.” (Rev 2:1a-4)

Sometimes I wonder whether we American Christians often treat our religion as a mere commodity, to be swapped in or out of our lives according to what suits us at the time. Have we adopted religious relativism, where niceness and tolerance are prized more than truth and faithfulness? Has politics itself become America’s main religion? Could it be that Christ holds something against us, in spite of our good works, because we have forgotten that he is to be our first love? 

John 21 records Jesus and his disciples one morning not long before Jesus died. 

 15 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Feed my lambs." 16 A second time he said to him, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Tend my sheep." 17 He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep. 18 Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go." 19 ... And after this he said to him, "Follow me."

My greatest fear is that we will not feed or tend Christ's sheep, and that when he leads, we will not follow. I think that is why Jesus asked Peter three times whether he loved him. He was setting Peter up for a crisis moment when Peter would have to confront what he believed about Jesus and his love for him.

We all have the same challenge. So here are the things I try to remember in this political season:

1. Jesus does not endorse any candidate. To my fellow Christians who will vote this November I say: Vote for the candidate of your choice. Vote your conscience. Vote your convictions. But do not pretend for one second that it is even possible to vote the Gospel this Tuesday. 

2. My enduring purpose must be to glorify God, not politics or politicians.  

3. I must get the plank out of my own eye before I worry about the speck in others’. Am I promoting peaceful resolution and reconciliation, or am I part of the discord and anger engulfing our country today? 

4. Do I pray fairly and inclusively for all? I may not urge God to crush the other side of my political aisle! 

Finally, let us remember John Wesley’s advice to the people called Methodist in October 1774.

Let us pray both as citizens of America and of the Kingdom of God that we will hold fast to what is true and good. May we have courage, resolution, commitment, and wisdom as a nation, but especially as ones to whom Christ has said, "Follow me."

A link for FB readers.

If you are here by following the link I posted on my FB page on Oct. 31, concerning what we can expect after the election, no matter who get the most votes, then please click here to go to the actual essay, since FB's robots kicked it off when I posted to it directly because it was, they said, spam.

Post-election violence is coming

Several links here. I will excerpt from each, but I hope you will read them all. My prediction (and I am hardly a lone voice here) is that the time following the presidential election will see widespread violence in our country. Not necessarily on election day (though that is possible now seems certain, see second update at end) or immediately thereafter, but at minimum on and after Dec. 17, which is when the electoral college votes. 

That violence will follow next week seems almost certain to me, starting closely after the news media announce which candidate has gained 270 or more electoral college votes.

And most Americans agree: "Many expect post-election violence, most blame media."

“The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 51% of likely U.S. voters believe it’s likely there will be a violent reaction if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected, including 26% who say such a reaction is ‘very likely.’ However, 47% also think a violent reaction is likely if former President Donald Trump wins, including 23% who say violence is ‘very likely’ to follow a Trump victory,” said the survey analysis.

Which begs the question: "Could Civil War Erupt in America? The United States is now showing preconditions for political violence, scholars say. Here’s how it can prevent disaster." (Foreign Policy, paywalled):

... the U.S. Civil War was highly, highly unusual. Most civil wars look like insurgencies and guerrilla warfare and tend not to be fought by large armies. They are fought by small militias or paramilitary groups. And sometimes those groups are working together, and sometimes they’re actually competing against each other. And the reality is they don’t want to engage the government soldiers. They’re trying to avoid battles and avoid direct fights with the government because in most cases, governments are much, much more powerful than these ragtag groups of insurgents or militias. And so they tend to take the violence to civilians.

Terrorism is one of the main tools of 21st-century civil wars. Think about the IRA in Northern Ireland. By the definition of civil war, that was a civil war. But most Irish Catholics were not fighting. They called it the Troubles. This fight was by a minority of citizens on the ideological extreme.

One of the reasons why skeptics have said this can’t happen here again is because the model they’re using is the first Civil War. And that is true. That is never going to happen again here. Something different, however, could easily happen here.

How might it start? Well, the 2016 election's aftermath gives us a clue:

But anti-Trump or anti-Harris rioters are not the only snakes in the woods: "U.S. Adversaries Could Stoke Post-Election Unrest, Intel Report Warns. Iran and Russia may seek to foment violence after the vote, according to a newly declassified analysis."

U.S. adversaries are likely to try to undermine confidence in the outcome of the upcoming presidential election, stoke unrest, and boost their preferred candidates even after polls close on Nov. 5, according to a newly declassified assessment released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on Tuesday.

“Iran and Russia are probably willing to at least consider tactics that could foment or contribute to violent protests, and may threaten, or amplify threats of, physical violence,” according to the assessment, which was prepared on Oct. 8. 

The seven-page memorandum also says Tehran’s efforts to assassinate former President Donald Trump and other former U.S. officials are likely to persist after Election Day regardless of the result.  

In fact, FBI Director Christopher Wray has been warning of foreign terrorist threats inside the US for at least a year:

Foreign terrorists targeting US 'increasingly concerning': FBI director

Foreign adversaries and terrorist groups are sharpening their aim at the United States -- targeting cyber operations, security and "mafia-like" tactics in an "increasingly concerning" way, FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a speech on Tuesday.

At the American Bar Association luncheon in Washington, D.C., Wray said the agency is working to prevent a coordinated attack from terrorist groups such as ISIS-K, an affiliate of ISIS.

"Foreign terrorists, including ISIS, al-Qaida and their adherents, have renewed calls for attacks against Jewish communities here in the United States and across the West in statements and propaganda," Wray said. "The foreign terrorist threat and the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, like the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia Concert Hall a couple weeks ago, is now increasingly concerning. Oct. 7 and the conflict that's followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come."

The warning comes as experts predict ISIS will try to carry out an attack on the United States.

"We should believe them when they say that. They're going to try to do it," retired Gen. Frank McKenzie told ABC News' "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatz last month.

Director Wray's Opening Statement to the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies:

When I sat here last year, I walked through how we were already in a heightened threat environment. Since then:

1. We’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole 'nother level after October 7;
2. We continue to see the cartels push fentanyl and other dangerous drugs into every corner of the country, claiming countless American lives;
3. We’ve seen a spate of ransomware and other cyberattacks impacting parts of our critical infrastructure and businesses large and small;
4. Violent crime, which reached alarming levels coming out of the pandemic, remains far too high and is impacting far too many communities; [and]
5. China continues its relentless efforts to steal our intellectual property and most valuable information.

And that’s just scratching the surface.

Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today.

There are many more such links. One question is: Will foreign operatives take advantage of homegrown post-election violence to carry out potentially devastating attacks, using homegrown violent actors as cover? Such attacks need not cause massive casualties to be devastating. Attacking our civil infrastructure such as power grids and transportation hubs would cause untold chaos. 

America is more divided now than ever, including the years leading up to the Civil War. The coming weeks or months will be critical in determining whether the inevitable post-election violence will accelerate this country's political and social dissolution, or whether Americans still have enough sense of national unity to overcome and rebuild. I personally am not optimistic.

Update: After VP Harris's speech at the Washington ellipse early this week, a pro-Hamas crowd demonstrated there, calling for intifada. Intifada is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising, or a resistance movement, according to Wikipedia, and has been the term used for many years to describe violence by Muslim Arabs against Jews and Israel generally. This image is a grab, the link to the video on X here here: https://x.com/TPostMillennial/status/1851427970189242510

Last summer, Richard Pollock wrote, "Palestinian Storm Troopers on the Potomac?" which seems now hardly to deserve the question mark. Well worth reading the whole essay. 

[Ryan] Mauro says the militants are trying to create an emotional and violent “new paradigm” that is part of an aggressive political “eco-system” designed to deliver harsh attacks against all Americans - Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews. 

“These aren’t just critics of Israel,” Mauro told me in an interview. “They’re not Republicans or Democrats. They’re not liberals. We really have to think of these groups as a new paradigm because they’re communists, anarchists, radical Islamicists and anti-Americans. It really sets them apart from the categories of people that we’re used to dealing with people like liberals and those demonstrating for women’s rights. No, this is separate. This is an eco-system that is against both political parties, against liberals and conservatives.”  ...

So Mauro warns one of the most troubling things about the Palestinian groups is their tendency toward aggressiveness, and eventually, violence.

He says of all American protest groups, the Palestinian organizations “are the most aggressive.”

“They’re not the type of people out there who are interested in positive, civil discourse that brings back healing and unity to the country. They’re terrible bomb throwers that like to cause conflict and they are ferociously anti-American too. That’s what’s often forgotten. Just as much as they hate Israel, they explicitly hate the United States and have actually called for the U.S. to no longer exist.”

Ryan Mauro "follows extremist groups for the nonprofit Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. Prior to his work at CRC, he served as the Director of Intelligence for the Clarion Project, a counter-extremism organization."

Richard Pollock was one of the founders of the New Left movement in the 1960s and served as it chief tactician (meaning he taught New Leftists how to riot, literally). As he says elsewhere, "For the hard Left, violence has been part of their political religion. I know, as I once was a hard Left activist as I was a roommate with Chicago 8 defendant Rennie Davis. I personally became friends with Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and hard-left lawyer Bill Kuntsler. I understand that political violence is part of the Left’s DNA."

Update, 1 Nov: Richard Pollock, yesterday: "Anti-Trump Protests Are Being Readied in the Nation's Capital - National Park Service Records Disclose Protest Plans."

Donald Trump’s opponents appear to be planning potentially violent demonstrations that could rock the nation’s capital if the former President should win the 2024 election.

This dark prospect emerges from current requests for demonstration permit I obtained from the National Park Service (NPS), the federal agency which regulates legal demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

NPS permit records show that nearly all the post-election and Inaugural Day permits have been filed by leftwing anti-Trump groups, including pro-Palestinian and “defend democracy” groups.

The applicants claim about 15,000 protesters could descend on Washington, D.C. on election night and up to 200,000 anti-Trump protests could arrive leading up to and including Inauguration Day, when the next President is sworn in.

Also, Portland, Ore., businesses are boarding up their windows (just as they are doing in D.C.) and expecting the worse. 

The Portland Police Bureau says it has received no specific threats, but it has extended shifts to cover for Portland's unique "peaceful" transfer of power. In other words: likely violence.

The PPB said it would not tolerate: 

• Impeding transportation by blocking streets and vehicular traffic. 
• Lighting fires and burning materials.
• Vandalizing and damaging property.
• Assaultive behavior.
• Unlawful weapons possession and/or use.

PPB Chief Bob Day told attendees of a presser, “Everybody’s talking about Portland. Everybody wants to know how we’re going to show up, how we’re going to be. I think this is our time.”

Portland is where two ballot drop boxes were broken into a few days ago, vandalized, and burned, where the still at-large arsonist left the messages including, "Free Gaza," and "Free Palestine," hardly the script of a rightwing Trump supporter.

Is God guilty?

Elie Wiesel survived Nazi concentration camps to become a renowned author and playwright. In his stage play of the Holocaust, “The Trial,” a man named Berish is a survivor of a persecution in which most Jews of the village of Shamgorod are taken out and killed by soldiers one day. Afterward, Berish and some surviving Jews put God on trial, with Berish acting as the prosecutor. 

He speaks as witness for all the slaughtered: “Let their premature, unjust deaths turn into an outcry so forceful that it will make the universe tremble with fear and remorse!” Berish’s play is interrupted by the news that the soldiers are about to return. A village priest offers to baptize Berish so he can truthfully claim to be Catholic. Berish refuses, saying, “My sons and my fathers perished without betraying their faith; I can do no less.” He insists that this decision does not suggest a reconciliation with God. “I lived as a Jew,” he exclaims, “and it is as a Jew that I shall die – and it is as a Jew that, with my last breath, I shall shout my protest to God! And because the end is near, I shall shout louder! Because the end is near, I’ll tell Him that He’s more guilty than ever!”

There is evil in the world, and pain, and suffering. If God is not responsible, then who is? Is anyone?

The second-longest book in the Bible bears the name of a man named Job. Job was a wealthy and righteous man, said so by God himself in the opening verses. Yet with God’s permission, he was brought to ruin. All his property and his entire family were destroyed by storms and marauders. Then Job was afflicted with terrible diseases that broke his skin out in painful, cankerous sores. At first and for a long time afterward, Job refused to blame God for any of it, even though his wife told him he should "curse God and die." Some friends came and tried to explain his suffering to him. One said he was being punished for his sin, but Job correctly denies that he is sinful. Another says it is not Job's sin that is the cause of the calamity, but that God is trying to teach Job a lesson. But Job rebuts that notion by pointing out that there is no lesson so valuable that he would ever consider it worthwhile to learn at the expense of the deaths of his children and his own, personal suffering. All their attempts to explain Job’s plight have all the theological depth of a bumper sticker. Job doesn’t buy any of it. 

Finally, Job cannot cling to his old faith any longer. Sitting in ashes, clothed only in sackcloth, he challenges God to stand trial for mismanaging the world. Piety no longer makes any sense to Job. Chaos such as Job experienced afflicts not only Job, but the world at large, so God seems either inept or monstrous, and therefore should be feared, but not loved or worshiped. 

So Job bitterly, defiantly pressed his complaint about God to God: “Let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing” (Job 31:35). The task God faces in responding to Job is to make worship and piety sensible again.

God’s reply to Job begins in chapter 38 and continues through the end of chapter 41. Our reading today is just a taste. But is it a taste of a great banquet or of thin gruel? By the time one has read the first 37 chapters one has wallowed in Job’s misery. One has listened to Job’s self-righteous friends, with their turgid, repetitive explanations. Job’s conditions, the problems of human suffering, and the emptiness of easy explanations leave one famished for spiritual food and drink. So Job demands that God defend his governance of the world. Job has shed all his presuppositions about God. Nothing he thought he knew works anymore. 

Thomas Long wrote, “Because Job suffers so grievously and so irrationally, he is no longer permitted the luxury of an illusion. Every attempt at make-believe falls before the reality of empty places at his family table and the throbbing pain in his body. The only god Job can manufacture from his misery is a monster, and Job must decide whether to flee from this arbitrary and punitive god or to stand up boldly to see if there just might be another God not of his own making."

1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: 2 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3 Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. 

4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5 Who determined its measurements – surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone 7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? 

34 “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? 35 Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? 36 Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? 37 Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, 38 when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?

39 “Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, 40 when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? 41 Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food? 

Job 38:1-7, 34-41 

At first reading of God’s reply to Job, it seems God explains nothing, he just swaggers in, thumps the divine chest and throws his weight around, demanding who Job thinks he is. 

Back in chapter 9, Job had predicted this would happen. “If it is a matter of strength, he is mighty! . . . Even if I were innocent, my mouth would condemn me ...” (Job 9:19a, 20a). In effect, Job predicted that when God shows up, he will be a humbug, rather like the man behind the curtain whom Toto uncovered to Dorothy’s accusing stare. Taking God’s reply at face value, God says, “You’ve got a lot of gall to question the creator of the world! Be quiet! I’m God and you’re not.” 

Unless . . . 

Unless we observe two things. First, no one book of the Bible contains all of God’s revelations and thus no one book even asks all the questions, much less gives all the answers. In the rest of Scripture, God has more to say – and more importantly, to do – than he says to Job. Second, God’s reply to job is mostly poetic. It is visionary. God calls us to experience existence itself, not just ponder our misfortunes.

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” God demands. “Counsel” means the “planning of God in relation to his creation and includes what we understand by providence” (Gerhard von Rad). Job’s former world of familiar order and routine has disappeared. God knows that Job has accused him of creating a world lacking moral order, a world governed by darkened counsel. 

Job has considered only two possibilities: either God is just in ways that we like and understand, or creation is basically chaotic and not even God is what he should be. 

So God defends his design of the world. A rapid series of divine questions reveals to Job that he does not know the ways of God. There is a purpose in creation that God knows but Job does not. Job is right is rejecting his sinfulness as the cause of his suffering. He is right to reject his friends’ suggestions that he somehow deserves his suffering, but still, Job assumes too much. The whole of reality is far greater than Job can comprehend. Human understanding can never be more than very partial. In the midst of the realms of nature, there is order and wisdom – not a fixed order, nor even an obvious order, but a flexible order that demands patience and wonder. God’s questions humble Job because he cannot answer them, and they affirm the counsel of God. But one would have to be God to answer God’s questions, so what is being proved? That Job is not God? Job already knows that.

Yet by the end of God’s speech in chapter 41, we see that Job’s understanding is incomplete. Everything – even evil and suffering – are brought finally under God’s dominion.

Then Job answered the LORD: "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . . . therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." Job acknowledges that God’s power and dominion over creation are not fully comprehensible by him or any other human being. He has presumed too much.

There is another side to suffering and another side to presuming too much. The Gospel of Mark records that James and John went to Jesus one day and said, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you."

Jesus replied, "What is it you want me to do for you?"

And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory."

Talk about presumption! James and John decided to get a jump on the competition and jockeyed for favor early. Jesus was obviously a man who was going places, kingship, no less, so they wanted to be his prime minister and secretary of state.

Like Job, these disciples adopted a bargaining relationship with God. We’ll serve you, they basically said, but on the condition that your governance suits us. 

But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking." And he explained that to follow him means to endure what he would endure: you "must be able to drink the cup that I drink," he explained. If you wish to be great, you must be a servant and if you wish to be first you must be a slave to all. "For," Jesus explained, I came "not to be served but to serve," and "to give my life a ransom for many." So suffering and death are part of the cup of discipleship.

The suffering and death of Christ were obstacles to evangelizing the ancient world. How preposterous can it be to worship a God who died a political execution? What sort of God would or could let that happen? If the sufferings of Job call into question God’s governance of the world, how much more the sufferings of Jesus make us wonder whether God is really in control. If Job is able reasonably to imagine that God might be monstrous, what are we to think about a God who would permit his own Son to endure what Jesus did? If God really is in control, what kind of God is he? 

This question - not whether there is a god but what kind of God there is - is the central question of religious faith. It is also perhaps the most deeply personal question we can face because within it lie all our hopes and all our fears, all our doubts and all our longings, all our love and all our loneliness. 

Intellectual and moral integrity require us to acknowledge the justice of Job’s complaint against God. Far from avoiding the issue by rote repetition of empty religious slogans, Job had the courage to take God seriously, as God, whose majesty and sovereignty over creation were real. The issue for Job was not whether God exists, but whether God is a cosmic bully at worst or incompetent at best. 

In the face of the plight of job and the history of our own world, what evidence is there that can persuade us not simply to fear God but to love and worship God as a saving God of compassion and grace and mercy?

The promises of God are many, wrote Paul. Redemption, reconciliation, recreation, resurrection. If we can imagine a better world than we have – and each of us can imagine one easily – then what is God doing to bring such a world about? What is the evidence that God is keeping his promises? For without such evidence, believing those promises is not a matter of faith, but of wishful thinking at best or blind stupidity at worst.

The answer, you will be unsurprised to hear me say, is Jesus Christ. “For no matter how many promises God has made,” wrote Paul, “they are "Yes" in Christ” (2 Cor 1:20a).

A passage from Hebrews tells us, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. . . .  and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. ...”

There is the assurance we find in the suffering of Christ: God himself stooped to suffer pain and death, just as we all do. 

Every complaint Job has is valid, but none of his complaints are the final say. For if Job and we want to doubt God because of the way the world treats us, then God in Christ answers, "It has treated me the same way." 

But the cruel and sometimes capricious world does not get the last word, either. "In this world you will have troubles," said Jesus, "but don’t worry: I have overcome the world." God gets the last word. Suffering and death are real but not final. The worst that the world could throw at Christ was defeated by his resurrection. 

There is an order to creation that we may not see very well. But there are some things we can see with blinding clarity. So we fix our eyes not merely on the here and now, but also the eternal purposes of God. For this world and all its troubles is temporary, but the purposes of God are eternal. “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith,” says Hebrews, “who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2). 

And so, someday, shall we.

Of M.I.C.E. and men (and women)

 I once went to an apologetics conference at Trevecca-Nazarene University in Nashville. Christian apologetics is the investigative, coherent and evidence-based defense of the claims of Christian faith. One of the speakers was named J. Warner Wallace. Mr. Wallace comes from a fully-atheist family. He is one of multiple generations of his family who have served the Los Angeles police department, working as a cold-case detective. It was his professional investigative skills that led him, a confirmed atheist at the time, to investigate the death and claimed resurrection of Jesus in order to prove that the story was nonsense. Instead, he found that the hard evidence of history firmly supported the proclamation that “Christ has died, Christ is risen.” He became a Christian and wrote a book called Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels. It’s worth your time and money.

One thing Wallace did was explain the investigative process and how evidence comes together to support or rebut certain conclusions. In explaining this process, using a real murder case he had solved, he said that there are three, and only three, motives for committing a crime. They are greed, lust, and pursuit of power. That’s it, he said, just those three and all motives criminals have fit somewhere in them. 

I found this interesting because it helps explain also why we sin. It does not explain everything about why we sin since Wallace’s three motives only from within the human person. But when we combine this explanation with an understanding of temptation, which comes from outside us, we have a pretty good overall understanding of the human tendency to sin against God and one another. And when temptation combines with built-in desire, watch out!

Think about this while hearing Joshua’s admonishment to the children of Israel after they had established tribal provinces in the Promised Land in Joshua 24.1-3, 14-25. 

Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel; and they presented themselves before God. 2And Joshua said to all the people, "Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Long ago your ancestors--Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor--lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. 3a Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many.

14"Now therefore revere the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. 15 Now if you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD." 

16Then the people answered, "Far be it from us that we should forsake the LORD to serve other gods; 17for it is the LORD our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight. He protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed; 18and the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God.”

23He said, "Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to the LORD, the God of Israel." 24The people said to Joshua, "The LORD our God we will serve, and him we will obey." 25So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem.

The people of Israel were not yet the strict monotheists they would become. Like all other people of the ancient Near East at the time, the ancient Israelites had a very ethnic concept of divine beings. Their God was Yahweh, as they called him in their language. But they didn't yet insist that only Yahweh existed. Other nations had other gods: the Egyptians had Ishtar, Horus, Anubis and many other gods, the Canaanites had Baal and Anat and others. The ancient Israelites did not think those other deities didn't exist. Those were the foreigners' gods and Yahweh was their God. The belief that only Yahweh existed took time to develop. 

That is why Joshua found it necessary to admonish the people that they must choose whom they would serve. He reminded them that their ancestors had worshiped other gods than Yahweh, and the people who still lived in the Promised Land, the Amorites, also worshiped other gods. 

He reminded the people of the liberty that Yahweh had given them in bringing them from Egypt and giving them their new homeland. But, said Joshua, the choice is yours. Serve Yahweh or something else. But they would serve someone so they must choose. There is no neutrality. "As for me and my household," concluded Joshua, "we will serve the Lord." 

Rarely is the choice between serving God or false idols presented to us as starkly as Joshua presented it. Usually the choices are presented subtly. 

Detective Wallace’s explanation of the motives of human criminality made me recall a conversation I had years ago with an officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He told me the secret of MICE. It was an acronym for the four main reasons an officer or diplomat of one of our nation's adversaries would defect. It stood for Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. Find the right way to press those buttons, he said, and the chances of recruiting a foreign official to serve the interests of the United States would be much improved.

Some people betray their country, he said, simply for money. Both the old Soviet Union and the United States, he said, were very successful in gaining defectors simply by paying them enough money. 

We can take it for granted that if spy agencies know people can be bought off by money, then the devil knows we can. I used to subscribe to a weekly email newsletter. One of them told of a chief executive officer of a large company who retired. At the retirement dinner he looked at all the young executives and said, “I know you want my job, and I’ll tell you how to get it. Last week my daughter was married, and as she walked down the aisle, I realized I did not know the name of her best friend, or the last book she read, or her favorite color. That’s the price I paid for this job. If you want to pay that price, you can have it.”

It is not true that whoever dies with the most toys wins. Whoever dies with the most toys just dies. Money itself is morally neutral. Money is a tool, that’s all. We can use it for good or for evil, or we can just trifle it away. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil,” says First Timothy 6. "No one can serve two masters," said Jesus, "for he will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth" (Mt. 6:24). We have to choose!

Ideology. 

Ideology is another way to displace God. Ideology is a pernicious temptation because many ideologies have great similarities with religion. In fact, I wonder whether the slide from religion to ideology is a particular weakness for religious people. Over the past twenty centuries the Church has been admonished over and over not to turn Christian religion into an ideology. 

Political parties have ideologies, and Lord knows we have enough such ideology in America today to last us for decades to come. In fact, the entire idea of America began as an ideology. Being involved in politics is not a bad thing for Christians unless our loyalty to party is greater than to Christ. Political affiliation must never take priority over the way of the cross.  

Unfortunately, the whole concept of "church" itself can be an ideology, too. This is the special temptation of clergy, I think, to become so loyal and devoted to the institution of the church that we forget the church exists not for us, nor even for itself, but for the kingdom of God to do what God wants.

Compromise. 

We live in an imperfect world. Ideal solutions to issues we face as individuals or as the church are rarely going to be possible. We make compromises of one kind or another every day. We have to. But the necessity to compromise easily slides into a willingness to make excuses: I won't pray this morning because I'm running late, so I'll pray tonight. I can't pray tonight because I'm too tired. Compromises, excuses.

Compromises can be disastrous. A New York family bought a ranch out West to raise cattle. Friends asked if the ranch had a name. "Well," said the would-be cattleman, "I wanted to name it the Bar-J. My wife favored Suzy-Q, one son liked the Flying-W, and the other wanted the Lazy-Y. So we're calling it the Bar-J-Suzy-Q-Flying-W-Lazy-Y ranch." 

"How many cattle do you have?" the friends asked. 

“None,” said the New York man, "They didn’t live through the branding." 

Usually, though, compromises are the death of a thousand cuts, each small and insignificant on its own, but in total lethal to Christian character or ministry. Most sins we commit are compromises of one kind or another, but they are always for sound reasons, are they not? As author James Moore put it, “Yes, Lord, I have sinned, but I have several excellent excuses.” We should remember that there is no right reason to do a wrong thing. 

But the worst kind of compromise is this: Because we all sin, there is nothing the devil likes more than to try to convince us that our sins prohibit us from serving God. Have you ever thought, "I would pray, I would take Holy Communion, I would go to Bible study, I would participate in this ministry, but there's this sin in my life and I can't face God until I've stopped it." I've thought that and sometimes still do. It's a compromise all right, but it's a compromise with the devil. When we dwell on our sins instead of the One who takes them away, we've compromised ourselves out of God's service.

Paul wrote in Second Corinthians that he was prone toward unwarranted pride but that a “thorn in the flesh” tormented him too much to allow it. We do not know what this thorn was; speculations have ranged from physical disability to temptations of the fleshly kind or even a personal opponent. But we don’t know. He said he prayed over and over for this thorn to be removed but it was not. Finally, he realized that God’s grace was greater than this thorn and Christ’s power was made perfect in human weakness. So he learned to live with it because it was in his human weaknesses that Christ could be strongest. 

When we compromise with our sin, sin wins. I know exactly what my thorn in the flesh is and I have prayed much for it to vanish. Many have been the times when I thought it disqualify me from even attending church, much less preaching in it. But, like Paul I think, I have come to know that sin wins when we let it rule and nowhere is our defeat more decisive than when we let some sin make us withdraw from Christian service. That is not really a compromise; it is a surrender. So, as Paul wrote in Philippians, I want to serve Christ and so press on to reach the goal of the heavenly call of god in Christ Jesus. 

No thorn in the flesh may rightfully hinder us from serving our Lord because there is nothing in this life that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Ego. 

The DIA operative told me that successful diplomats or intelligence operatives can become so self-impressed that they defect to the other side just to play the game at a higher level. They try to “play” both sides. That’s a mindset that Joshua was denouncing: We can’t “play” God.  God knows everything about us. But it’s easy for us to think, “I have everything completely under control,” including where Christian devotion fits in. It’s easy to slide into thinking that the church is there to prop up the lifestyle we want to live rather than admit that a just and loving god has every right to take a wrecking ball to all of it for the sake of his kingdom. 

Paul admonished us in Philippians chapter 2, "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves." Jesus said, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." 

In Herman Melville's book, Moby Dick, the sailors go to a service at the Whalemen's Chapel before setting to sea. Preacher Mapple tells them, "All the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do - remember that - and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists."

And that is really the central issue: Do we decide to obey our fallen selves and yield to the temptations of money, ideology, compromise, and ego? Or do we say yes to God and accept his grace, mercies, and gifts? As Joshua put it, we have to choose. Let us choose widely!

A reflection on World Communion Sunday

John 15:1-8:

1 “I am the true grapevine, and my Father is the vine grower. 2 He takes away every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he cleanses it to make it bear more fruit. 3 You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.

4 Abide in me as I abide in you. A branch is not able to bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. 

5 I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 6 Whoever does not abide in me is cast out like a dried branch; such branches are gathered, cast into the fire, and burned.

7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

Around these parts when we hear the word, “vine,” we tend to think of either honeysuckle or ivy. In Jesus’s day the word vine would have evoked the image of the grapevine. Grapevines require intense cultivation. Left to itself, a grapevine becomes useless for bearing good fruit. Arborist and gardening author Lee Reich wrote, “Few garden sights are as sorry as an untended grapevine. Its branches become so tangled that sunlight and air no longer dry them readily, making the plant prone to disease. The grapes become difficult to harvest because they are out of reach.” 

Jesus used grapevines to explain his purpose in the world and the common life of those who follow him. His hearers understood vine as a metaphor for Israel and its people. Psalm 80 says, “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it, and it took root and filled the land. Watch over this vine, the root your right hand has planted, the son you have raised up for yourself” (Ps. 80:8-15, excerpts). The Jews understood themselves as a people of God, a vine, planted and cultivated by God. 

The biblical image of a vine conveys a deep sense of community and mutuality of the people with God and one another. The fruitfulness of the branches depends on their connection to the vine. 

“To live as the branches of the vine is to belong to an organic unity shaped by the love of Jesus, and individual branches join together to bear fruit, of living in a way that reveals us to be a community of Jesus’ disciples” (NIB). As branches of a vine, the church is a community of persons collectively known for their love for God, one another and the world at large. 

What makes us a Christian community is solely our relationship to God and Jesus. Our mark is how we love one another as Christ loves us. There is only one task, to bear fruit, and any branch can do that if it remains with Jesus.

To our modern ears, the image Jesus evokes of taking away fruitless branches and throwing them into the fire seems stern. Yet that is not what Jesus said. The fruitless branches of verse 2 are not the branches cast into the fire in verse six. 

Verse two actually shows the patience and grace of God. Grapevines bear more fruit when they are elevated off the ground. In ancient Israel, modern wires and frames to hold the whole vine off the ground did not exist. There was no wire. Rope was expensive so dressers used rocks, which were plentiful, to hold the vines off the ground. So even the main trunk was only a few inches off the ground. 

Vines that grew from the main trunk often dropped to the ground. In the rainy season they either rotted or they took root themselves. Neither are fruitful. In the eight-month dry season they could dry out completely. Verse two says that fruitless branches are taken away but verse six does not say they are burned. It is the dried, dead branches that are burned. 

The word used for “taken away” also means “lifted up.” In ancient Israel, vine dressers liked new branches to form because larger vines produce more fruit. So they did not “take away” new branches that crawled on the ground, they elevated them off the ground with rocks. They lifted them up.

Jesus’ hearers knew that he meant that fruitless branches were lifted up off the ground, not that they were severed and thrown away, because they knew that was how vineyards were cultivated and made fruitful. They would have understood Jesus to say, “He lifts up every branch in me that bears no fruit.” Such branches are nurtured because they are still living and are still connected to the vine. They are cared for so that they may start to bear fruit. 

Vine dressers also prune – Jesus says “cleanse” because he is speaking spiritually – fruitful branches to enable the vine to produce fruit according to the dresser’s needs. Pruning sounds destructive, but it is actually creative. Pruners examine the plants to locate unwanted branches, imagining the plants without this or that branch, imagining how it will grow, seeing what needs to be done. Like a haircut, it's easy to take it off, hard to put back on, so pruners know when to quit.

God knows how to prune so that growth and fruit-bearing are enhanced. The problem is being the “prunee” is usually not very pleasant, either for pastors or congregations. It’s hard to see how losing something we thought we wanted or needed to have can make us better disciples. The status quo is too easy to cling too, even when we understand that God has better things in store.

But we bear fruit only when we submit to pruning. If we do not do that we do not abide in Christ. And that lead us to the sharp, serious warning of verse six: “Whoever does not abide in me is cast out like a dried branch; such branches are gathered, cast into the fire, and burned.”

A vine branch that does not abide in the main vine, or stay connected to it, is one that has stop receiving nourishment from the main vine and so dried up and died. Vine dressers try to prevent this, but if a branch does it, there is no solution except to tear it off and throw it away. The deadening can spread elsewhere. So vine dressers cut them off and in Jesus day they burned them as fuel. 

Jesus’ warning is one of the harshest in the New Testament. Individuals, congregations, or whole denominations can wander away from God, fail to abide in Christ, and suffer the grave consequences. Jesus’ words are matter of fact and severe. God is serious about the work of his church now and its salvation in eternity. God’s rescue of us from death was no halfway measure, and he accepts no half-hearted measures in return. 

A Methodist lady named Elaine Olsen watched a wrecking crew demolish three houses in North Carolina damaged by Hurricane Floyd so badly they couldn’t be occupied again. Two homes went down quickly. The crew moved to the third one. Elaine wrote, 

Vince and I walked around the house for one last glance. It was then that I saw them, the last and final living remnant from 104 Lower Street. Vines, clinging beautifully to the white brick chimney, reaching almost to the top. Moments later, the first blow came from the hammer.

I watched this flimsy structure wobble and fall into pieces. But the chimney with the vines took longer. It was the last to fall. It was as if those vines, encircling the chimney, provided protection of some sort. And as the blows crashed, I strained to see the green ropes as the chimney fell. The house was down. I went across the street to survey the remains.

Tears came, and through my blurred vision I spotted a most unusual gift, green, unbroken, dusty, yet somehow reaching far above the pile that was the end of this one-hundred-year-old memory. Life reaching forth, calling for notice. A garden of mercy amidst a pile of surrender. Hope springing to life in the middle of crucifixion. 

A vine. A journey. A weeping. A surrender. A springing forth. A resurrection. A promise to remain until the end, to fall alongside in the midst of the blows, to rise above the dust and bring forth the vibrancy of the green.

Sometimes it takes a demolition to see the green. Sometimes our brokenness brings such a death that all that remains is that Vine, forever alive, forever reaching, forever protecting. Reminding us that life issues forth from the surrender.

“May you sense the clinging of the vine,” Elaine concluded. “May you walk with Christ into that garden of surrender, remembering all the while” that life issues from ashes.( )

Pruning at the hand of God while we abide in the vine of Christ is a form of practice, perhaps, for the consummation of eternity. Death and the resurrection the Scriptures promise us are a logical extension of the pattern of our lives: the old passes away and the new is born. 

The difficulties we have in our cycles of being pruned and growing may come from our need to control the process. But we are amateurs. We don’t know how to do the job. So we prune and cut and pull and burn blindly. Yet we have to surrender to God’s cultivation to bear fruit, and we have to stay entangled with our brothers and sisters in faith to the vine, which is our life, our Savior. Apart from him we can do nothing. Connected to the vine, we bear good fruit. 

The right thing for us to be is a branch on the vine we know as Christ. We are a people who believe in our hearts that Jesus rose from the dead and we confess that Jesus is Lord, and so we have been grafted by God onto the vine of Christ. May it ever be so, and may we bear much fruit. 

The Myth of Christian Obligations

 Let me start with a short list of our privileges before dealing with obligations. Some of the privileges are:

·        We are adopted by God into his family

·        We are given God's favor without having to earn it.

·        The Holy Spirit is always with us and mediates us to God.

·        We are freed from sin and fear of death and so can move onto perfection in this life.

·        We receive the renewing and sustaining grace of God through the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion

·        We enjoy the fellowship of other Christians for the sustainment and improvement of our moral character and ability to do godly works.

There are many more. There is an old saying that that with great privileges come great responsibilities. The saying has been variously attributed to Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and others. But in fact, it was Voltaire who first wrote it, and the exact quote is a little different: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Maybe Jesus should get the credit, though, for he said in Luke 12.48, “To those whom much is given, much is required.”

With this in mind, are we who follow Christ encumbered by certain obligations? That is, once we have confessed Christ as risen Lord of our lives, are there certain requirements we must carry out if we are to be counted as Jesus’ disciples and granted eternal company with God and other saints? 

I submit that the answer is both yes and no. So bear with me and let me confuse the issue as only a seminary graduate can.

That there are such things as commandments of Christ is explicitly stated by Paul in Galatians 6.2: “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” As a former Pharisee, Paul did not use the word “law” lightly. He meant it was a requirement. Jesus himself spoke of a new covenant and new commandments. The longest description of judgment day in the New Testament is given in Matthew 25, where Jesus explains that the ones who thought themselves Christ-followers are rejected because,

“… I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

So, we can’t much deny that authority and a commanding voice that we should not ignore undergird a disciple’s life. And then we come to Luke 17.7-10, in which Jesus is teaching his disciples:    

7“Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? 8 Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? 9 Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? 10 So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’ ”

 This passage does not present “Jesus meek and mild.” This is a pretty tough Jesus speaking. This is not a Lord who would say, “I’m okay, you’re okay, can’t we all just get along?” He is speaking to his disciples and his words are direct. Does Jesus really consider us no better than his worthless slaves?

In fact, we should take Jesus’ words as great assurance, not threat. Here’s why.

Jesus risks comparing God to a taskmaster to drive home some basic truths about our relationship with God. We tend to think that if we behave a certain way, live a good, Christian life, that we deserve some reward from God. But that’s not true. There are benefits to living the Christian life, but they are not rewards. We have no right to expect rewards. To do so rejects grace as the basis of Christian living and replaces it with a bartering relationship. But grace is freely given and cannot be earned. We can’t earn “more grace” by living rightly.

We do not live together righteously as God requires. The disciples begged Jesus for more faith because they realized they couldn’t meet even the basic requirements from their own strength or merit. What Jesus points out is that kingdom living is God’s gift through faith but is also an act of the will by Christian disciples. God has already given us the faith we need. Jesus lays out the basic commands of the kingdom: don’t lead others astray; rebuke, repent, forgive, love God and neighbor. Living together as God commands rests on these things. And when we have done that, Jesus says, we have merely done the bare minimum, so don’t get all puffed up about it and expect God will reward us specially. After all, as Paul explains, we should understand that if we think we are meeting the standard of saving ourselves through what we do, then we don’t understand how high the standard really is. It is too high for human beings to meet.

Therefore, to imagine ourselves as slaves to Christ, as repugnant as that metaphor is, really is good news. We are not in a market economy with God. We don’t have to barter with God for grace. We cannot earn God’s grace. Grace is not a bonus check. God’s grace is always before us. It is through grace we are called to be God’s family, it is through grace we can be God’s family, and it is through grace that we will move on to Christian perfection together.

But it gets better, for Jesus did not think we were his slaves in the first place. He used that illustration, I think, to make us understand how spiritually empty our relationship with God would be if we were mere task performers, burdened with strict requirements of obedience. Elsewhere, Jesus states plainly he does not think of you and me as slaves, but as friends. Here is what Jesus told his disciples in John 15, shortly before he was crucified:

15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. … 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

What then shall we make of what Paul called the law of Christ? I would like to suggest that we should think of Christ’s commandments as liberating opportunities rather than mere commands. We should understand missions, ministries and services in Christ’s name as the means of freedom far greater than mere obligations.

The great myth or misconception about Christian obligations is that they are obligations. Jesus is not recruiting puppets, he seeks soul mates. We do not have a contract with God, we have a covenant sealed with his Son’s own blood. With that great privilege comes not great obligations, but the ability to live liberated from all that separates us from what God created us to be. As Paul wrote to the Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” We are liberated from the dictatorship of a personal autonomy unshaped by godliness or divine virtue. In contrast, wrote John Wesley, we are made alive as people who are washed and sanctified, “as well as justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.’ [1]

You are really changed [Wesley wrote]; you are not only accounted as righteous but actually made righteous. The inward power of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made you really, actually free from the power of sin and death. This is liberty, true gospel liberty, experienced by every believer: Not freedom from the law of God, or the works of God, but from the law of sin and the works of the devil. See that you stand fast in this real, not imaginary liberty, wherewith Christ has made you free. And take heed not to be entangled again in the yoke of that vile bondage to sin, from which you are now clean escaped.

For freedom Christ has set us free: free to love, free to live in joy and peace and patience. Free to be generous in all we have, free to be gentle with even those who offend us, free to control ourselves to live in ways to please God.

We enjoy privileges of receiving and liberty of giving. Privileges of receiving are the work of the Holy Spirit. Liberties of giving are what we do in return. We have the privilege of gathering for worship, for singing, for studying the Scriptures together. We can do most of these things privately as well. Wesley called them acts of piety. In these acts the Holy Spirit is the principal actor spiritually renew and restore us.

And we also have the freedom to carry out acts of mercy, done both on our own and in cooperation with other disciples. These are what we do to bring the good news by word or deed to one another and to those whom God seeks to bring into his family.

It matters to Jesus and it should matter to us how we think of him and our relationship to him, so here is why we can be assured we are friends of Jesus serving in love rather than slaves of God obeying in fear:

   Slaves try to do as little as they can to get by. Friends look for ways to help one another.

   Slaves try to avoid the master. Friends seek one another’s company.

   Slaves wait to be told. Friends volunteer.

   Slaves want to escape. Friends want to draw closer.

   Slaves serve the master out of fear. Friends serve one another out of love.

   Love is the key.

We are free to relate to one another the same way that God relates to us: in grace and mercy and love – especially love.

God is love, and any community following God must be love, also.

4 Love is patient, love is kind [says Paul]. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. (1 Cor 13:4-8)

I used to think it was a tossup whether the greatest privilege God gives us is to receive his love or to be empowered ourselves to love divinely. And then I realized there is no real difference because God both loves us and loves others through us.

The work that Christ does today he does with our arms. When we embrace the outcasted, the scorned and unloved, we hold them with Jesus’ arms. When we bear our neighbors’ troubles, we uplift them with Jesus’ hands. When we give food to the hungry, it is by Christ they are fed. When we welcome a stranger, we clasp his hand with the hand of Christ. When we carry clothes to the naked it is Jesus’ fingers which button their shirts. We heal the sick with Jesus’ hands and we visit the dying to embrace them to Christ’s own breast.

In Christ we accept our flaws and imperfections not because we condone them in ourselves, but because Jesus accepts us despite them. Therefore, we can boast in our shortcomings because Christ’s love is perfected through them.

There is no greater privilege, nor any greater freedom, nor any greater joy to be found in this life.

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[1] “A Blow at the Root,” http://ucmpage.org/articles/wesley_blow_at_root.html, slightly paraphrased