A good friend (who is also a fine example of a sinner) serves as pastor to a congregation in Wisconsin (emphasis on the last syllable). The congregation began in 1988 and the building went up in 1990, without a basement.
On occasion he's preached an imaginative sermon in which he says he'd been stuck for what to do for a sermon and that he'd wandered through the church basement. He would say he'd encountered the ghost of Martin Luther down there, or found Noah's diary, or come upon an early-1960s piece of kid's Sunday school artwork (with a handwritten note from God attached). A nice bunch of clever dream sequences spun from whole cloth for the sake of delivering the gospel.
How careful we must be with the word we've been handed! My friend just got the news that a parishioner has left the congregation because, "He lied. There is no church basement."
If what comes from the preacher's mouth is not factual, does that make it untrue? Students in my New Testament course grapple with that question when dealing with four different gospels, with four different timelines, with four different points of view, and a Jesus who's almost four different people. "How do we know what's true, then?" they ask.
We so easily fall for the proposition that truth can be gleaned from facts. It's part of the air we breathe in this culture, from dissecting a frog in 7th grade science to the latest article in the journal Nature. We look for truth in facts, in the measurable, in the definable, in the tangible, and in what Paul in Corinthians calls the perishable.
But the preacher of the gospel calls that stuff mere stuff and in turn says what is truly true. It is a relational truth: Jesus Christ, true God and true human being has died and is risen...for you. We know it's true because this promise does something to sinners like us. It's true in its power to change absolutely everything.
Basement, shmasement, I say. You want truth? I'll give you truth: You are dead in your sin, bound and captive to yourself, to your own future and your own narrow life. Jesus Christ comes for you now. At this very moment he is wandering around the basement of your heart to create some new life there.
What? Your heart doesn't have an actual basement? Don't let that cardiac ultrasound fool you. It's there and Jesus has set up his resurrection carpentry shop in it. He is even now grabbing hold of whatever detritus he can find, whatever dust-covered antique hurt or bitterness lie in its corners, whatever bits of trash and rottenness he can find. And he's turning his surroundings there into an exact model of his own heart — with a basement swept clean and fit for eternity.
I'm a sinner who preaches. And I lie about all kinds of things, especially to myself. But I cannot lie about this. As Luther said in the Heidelberg Disputation, "A theologian of the cross sees something and calls it what it is." What the preacher sees is success and power that are truly facets of death and the grave. The gospel preacher sees the foolishness of the cross, the lie of imagination, and the disaster of death as a perfectly satisfied Christ shaping his materials into his risen form.
"When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.' 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?'" 1 Corinthians 15:54-55
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
Wonderful Remark
Here's Van Morrison's take on bad preaching in his song "Wonderful Remark":
How can you stand the silence
That pervades when we all cry?
How can you watch the violence
That erupts before your eyes?
You can't even grab a hold on
When we're hanging oh so loose.
You don't even listen to us
When we talk, it ain't no use.
Leave your thoughtlessness behind you,
Then you may begin to understand.
Clear the emptiness around you
With the waving of your hand
Chorus:
That was a wonderful remark.
I had my eyes closed in the dark.
I sighed a million sighs.
I told a million lies to myself.
Now, how can we listen to you
When we know that your talk is cheap?
How can we never question
Why we give more and you keep?
How can your empty laughter
Fill a room like ours with joy,
When you're only playing with us
Like a child does with a toy?
How can we ever feel the freedom
Or the flame lit by the spark?
How can we ever come out even
When reality is stark?
Chorus
Listen, how can you tell us something
Just to keep us hanging on
Something that just don't mean nothin'?
When we see you, you are gone.
Clinging to some other rainbow
While we're standing waiting outside in the cold
Telling us the same sad story
Knowing time is growing old
Touch your world up with some colour.
Dream you're swinging on a star.
Taste it first then add some flavour.
Now you know just who you are.
Chorus
How can you stand the silence
That pervades when we all cry?
How can you watch the violence
That erupts before your eyes?
You can't even grab a hold on
When we're hanging oh so loose.
You don't even listen to us
When we talk, it ain't no use.
Leave your thoughtlessness behind you,
Then you may begin to understand.
Clear the emptiness around you
With the waving of your hand
Chorus:
That was a wonderful remark.
I had my eyes closed in the dark.
I sighed a million sighs.
I told a million lies to myself.
Now, how can we listen to you
When we know that your talk is cheap?
How can we never question
Why we give more and you keep?
How can your empty laughter
Fill a room like ours with joy,
When you're only playing with us
Like a child does with a toy?
How can we ever feel the freedom
Or the flame lit by the spark?
How can we ever come out even
When reality is stark?
Chorus
Listen, how can you tell us something
Just to keep us hanging on
Something that just don't mean nothin'?
When we see you, you are gone.
Clinging to some other rainbow
While we're standing waiting outside in the cold
Telling us the same sad story
Knowing time is growing old
Touch your world up with some colour.
Dream you're swinging on a star.
Taste it first then add some flavour.
Now you know just who you are.
Chorus
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Bless God's Name
“I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you, and praise your name forever and ever.” Psalm 145:1-2
This week Mary and I are celebrating our 18th wedding anniversary. Like any thoughtful, liberal couple in 1990 we faced the dilemma of names: Should Mary change her name? Should we become a hyphenate? Do just leave our names be? If so, then what happens when we have kids? If we hyphenate, what will happen if our children marry other hyphenates? Will they wind up with three hyphens? What about the generation after that?
Our solution was for us to be Joneses and to have Mary’s maiden name, Sundet, as a middle name for both of us. That she took my name as her own meant something to me, and still does. I’m not enough of an Old Testament scholar to say much about what the ancient Israelites meant when they sang of blessing God’s name. But I know Mary blessed my name and all the weight its personal and family histories carried. She set apart my name as a thing of honor and a handle to be cherished. She transformed the name which is me into the locus of her love.
Apart from faith given as a gift, what could possibly have drawn the Psalmist to honor and cherish the Lord’s name? The Psalmist’s song comes as no choice, nothing his will has conjured up from the depths, no option among many. Drawn to the bosom of God, the song is drawn forth. As the old gospel song says, “How can I keep from singing?”
The trust in such a one’s heart is formed from the outside in. Who knows what Mary ever saw in this doofus who noticed her wedding day zit before he noticed the beauty of her wedding dress? But her very being claimed me. I know I could not help but want her name and the name of her family as my own. That required paying a fee for a revised wedding license, but it was worth it.
This is what the Psalmist sings of. God’s name is the sharing of God’s own self: God’s justice and nearness, God’s watch over the downtrodden and destruction of the wicked, and, in the end, God’s very enfleshment in Jesus Christ forsaken and killed on the cross and raised on the third day. Such a name it is that the sinner can only say, “You, Lord, would let me, even me, bear your name?”
The name came to me first in a white clapboard church in Newell, SD, for than forty years ago as God started drowning and raising the baby and full-fledged sinner that was and is me. Eighteen of those forty-odd years I’ve enjoyed God’s name made manifest in a woman named Mary. If that’s the kind of God we have, then the Psalmist is right: “My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.
(Happy anniversary, MSJ!)
This week Mary and I are celebrating our 18th wedding anniversary. Like any thoughtful, liberal couple in 1990 we faced the dilemma of names: Should Mary change her name? Should we become a hyphenate? Do just leave our names be? If so, then what happens when we have kids? If we hyphenate, what will happen if our children marry other hyphenates? Will they wind up with three hyphens? What about the generation after that?
Our solution was for us to be Joneses and to have Mary’s maiden name, Sundet, as a middle name for both of us. That she took my name as her own meant something to me, and still does. I’m not enough of an Old Testament scholar to say much about what the ancient Israelites meant when they sang of blessing God’s name. But I know Mary blessed my name and all the weight its personal and family histories carried. She set apart my name as a thing of honor and a handle to be cherished. She transformed the name which is me into the locus of her love.
Apart from faith given as a gift, what could possibly have drawn the Psalmist to honor and cherish the Lord’s name? The Psalmist’s song comes as no choice, nothing his will has conjured up from the depths, no option among many. Drawn to the bosom of God, the song is drawn forth. As the old gospel song says, “How can I keep from singing?”
The trust in such a one’s heart is formed from the outside in. Who knows what Mary ever saw in this doofus who noticed her wedding day zit before he noticed the beauty of her wedding dress? But her very being claimed me. I know I could not help but want her name and the name of her family as my own. That required paying a fee for a revised wedding license, but it was worth it.
This is what the Psalmist sings of. God’s name is the sharing of God’s own self: God’s justice and nearness, God’s watch over the downtrodden and destruction of the wicked, and, in the end, God’s very enfleshment in Jesus Christ forsaken and killed on the cross and raised on the third day. Such a name it is that the sinner can only say, “You, Lord, would let me, even me, bear your name?”
The name came to me first in a white clapboard church in Newell, SD, for than forty years ago as God started drowning and raising the baby and full-fledged sinner that was and is me. Eighteen of those forty-odd years I’ve enjoyed God’s name made manifest in a woman named Mary. If that’s the kind of God we have, then the Psalmist is right: “My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.
(Happy anniversary, MSJ!)
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
By Grace Alone
This last weekend I preached at the 125th anniversary of the first congregation I served. Their theme for the anniversary year was "By Grace Alone." Of course that's one of the "alone" assertions that are attached to the Lutheran Reformation: Christ alone. Faith alone. Grace alone.
In this day that phrase, "by grace alone," has often been viewed through an antinomian lens. We treat grace first and foremost as an attribute of the hidden God. It's understood as the nature of a God who operates only out of love and mercy (as if our human vision could ever get behind the veil and see the fullness of God's nature). We think, “Of course God is gracious. What kind of a loving God would be any other way? Of course, God accepts us as we are.” But God’s grace is nothing close to that.
Perhaps if we were able to remove ourselves from our electronic gadgets and gizmos, our prideful attempts at mastering life, our hubris in to manipulating our surroundings, we might come to understand the hidden God as a dangerous bet. Were we to do as our forebears as they washed and dressed their dead, nailed the planks for coffins, and lowered them into the earth, we might well see the limits of our own efforts and the horror of facing this so-call gracious God. With the psalmist we might point to the grass that lasts for a moment and then withers. Some gracious God!
When we speak of grace alone, the starting point is not how good and nice God is. It certainly isn’t something that calls us to say, “God is love. God is love. God is love,” over and over again to reassure ourselves that God might be well disposed toward us. Instead to speak of grace alone is to acknowledge first and foremost that I am truly and utterly incapable of solving the dilemma of my sin on my own. As Luther said in the Small Catechism, “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him.” Or as the confession in the old green hymnal said, “We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”
"By grace alone” is not a declaration about God, but a confession you make about yourself.“By grace alone” means that you’re incapable (no matter how you dress up your own sinful piggishness and slap lipstick on it). If you can't do it, it's left to that hidden God. As Luther advised, we would be well to run from that hidden God to the revealed God who, in Christ Jesus, actually makes a choice about you that you can count on.
The choice is this: God elects to take on whatever your sin can dole out, he chooses to take on flesh and bone and an execution on a cross, so that at last you might know fully and finally what your place is both here on this vale of life and death and in heaven itself. Christ Jesus takes on your sin, your inability and unwillingness to believe and trust God and gives you his own righteousness, purity and life. “By grace alone” means that there is truly no other option, no other way out.
Thus, to speak of grace alone is first to tell the truth, to confess your lack of trust, to pray, “I believe Lord, help thou my unbelief.” It is to ask God to move against you, against your nature and desire, your will to create your own future. “By grace alone” means to pray day-in-day-out that Christ Jesus your Lord would come to rescue you, that he would speak a word of mercy, that he would be forgiveness itself for a sinner like you.
In this day that phrase, "by grace alone," has often been viewed through an antinomian lens. We treat grace first and foremost as an attribute of the hidden God. It's understood as the nature of a God who operates only out of love and mercy (as if our human vision could ever get behind the veil and see the fullness of God's nature). We think, “Of course God is gracious. What kind of a loving God would be any other way? Of course, God accepts us as we are.” But God’s grace is nothing close to that.
Perhaps if we were able to remove ourselves from our electronic gadgets and gizmos, our prideful attempts at mastering life, our hubris in to manipulating our surroundings, we might come to understand the hidden God as a dangerous bet. Were we to do as our forebears as they washed and dressed their dead, nailed the planks for coffins, and lowered them into the earth, we might well see the limits of our own efforts and the horror of facing this so-call gracious God. With the psalmist we might point to the grass that lasts for a moment and then withers. Some gracious God!
When we speak of grace alone, the starting point is not how good and nice God is. It certainly isn’t something that calls us to say, “God is love. God is love. God is love,” over and over again to reassure ourselves that God might be well disposed toward us. Instead to speak of grace alone is to acknowledge first and foremost that I am truly and utterly incapable of solving the dilemma of my sin on my own. As Luther said in the Small Catechism, “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him.” Or as the confession in the old green hymnal said, “We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”
"By grace alone” is not a declaration about God, but a confession you make about yourself.“By grace alone” means that you’re incapable (no matter how you dress up your own sinful piggishness and slap lipstick on it). If you can't do it, it's left to that hidden God. As Luther advised, we would be well to run from that hidden God to the revealed God who, in Christ Jesus, actually makes a choice about you that you can count on.
The choice is this: God elects to take on whatever your sin can dole out, he chooses to take on flesh and bone and an execution on a cross, so that at last you might know fully and finally what your place is both here on this vale of life and death and in heaven itself. Christ Jesus takes on your sin, your inability and unwillingness to believe and trust God and gives you his own righteousness, purity and life. “By grace alone” means that there is truly no other option, no other way out.
Thus, to speak of grace alone is first to tell the truth, to confess your lack of trust, to pray, “I believe Lord, help thou my unbelief.” It is to ask God to move against you, against your nature and desire, your will to create your own future. “By grace alone” means to pray day-in-day-out that Christ Jesus your Lord would come to rescue you, that he would speak a word of mercy, that he would be forgiveness itself for a sinner like you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)